Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [36]
I have always found libraries sexual places. I cannot say why exactly. Perhaps it is because there are so many other people sitting around quietly, and it is a good place to people-watch, and because it is often easier to spend time dreaming up imaginary romances with people just a few desks away from you, who seem so reachable, than to return to the second chapter of a five-hundred-page volume. Perhaps it is because all that studying makes me feel hungry, and that hunger turns to another type of hunger. Perhaps it is because all that silence seems so peculiar and suggestive. Or perhaps it’s because of the warmth inside libraries, a warmth which makes so many people fall asleep, sprawled on top of tolerant sentences. Perhaps it’s simply watching those people in the intimacy of sleep, which generally they do under covers, behind closed doors, that now I feel I’ve been given a privileged view of something so private, something that lovers see. In any case, in the library, perhaps simply because of the great exciting mounds of knowledge, I can feel myself warming up. And I enjoyed particularly warm feelings inside the map room, viewing and stroking the colourful surfaces of so many countries, and looking across from our desk to other people, particularly to a certain fair-haired boy, perhaps a year or two younger than Irva and me, who we’d always find somewhere in the library studying maps or guidebooks. But perhaps these sexual feelings of mine had nothing to do with the library at all, perhaps these feelings were just because of the changes that were then going through us, and not only in me but in Irva too, in fact in everyone in our classroom.
THE FEMALES GREW interested first, the males caught up after a while. And many of the males foolishly chose to fall in love with Kersty Plint (whose breasts were the first to arrive, and what full breasts they were), and how she would make them regret it. And we noticed that her many companions now began, more urgently than before, to ape Kersty (in a similar way, I suppose, to how Irva aped me). These girls began to wear their school uniform in the same slovenly way that she did, to laugh as she laughed. When Kersty wore lipstick, they hurriedly bought lipstick; when Kersty arrived one morning with her ears pierced her companions would rush out that afternoon to perforate theirs as well; when Kersty was seen kissing a boy in the school yard, they would hurriedly find themselves an agreeing male and thrust their lips upon his; when Kersty split up with her boyfriend, their boyfriends were summarily dismissed. But these Kersty duplicates were inexact copies with half identities, blurred reflections.
Parts of this new experience were perhaps less new to us than to our classmates. We had practised our first kisses on each other so many years ago, we knew each other under the school uniform so perfectly already. Now with what fascination did we watch each other’s bodies changing. We pressed ourselves against each other in scientific comparisons. How extraordinary was this progression of Irva and me. Our nipples decided to enlarge themselves. Beneath them small inexact copies of Prospect Hill began to grow. Our long, thin forms became a fraction more rounded. We began to collect a few hairs between our legs and then more and more, and under our arms as well. Our voices decided they were immature and altered themselves accordingly (but not in the comical way that happened with the males). The upheavals in our bodies made us doubly awkward,