Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [106]
“Ta-daa!” she said.
Clem frowned at it. “What’s that?”
“A johnny.” She bit her lip. “Just in case the end of the world doesn’t happen.”
He lifted his gaze to her face. His mouth was hot and dry.
“Where’d you get it?”
“Does it matter?”
“You didn’t get it from Griffin’s, did you?”
“Lord, no. Are you nuts?”
When he continued to goggle at her, she put the thing in his hand and lay back on the coat sacrificially, closing her eyes.
“I pinched it from Daddy’s bedside cabinet, if you really must know.”
She pulled him down onto her.
“If you like, I’ll close my eyes when you’re ready to pop it on.”
We were hopeless, of course. Inept, frantic, silent, shamefully quick. How could we not be?
It’s one of life’s countless little cruelties that you never forget your first time. So instead of forgetting, we have to forgive ourselves, which is a far more difficult thing to do. I’ve never achieved it. But I guess that in my case there were special circumstances.
Anyway, we managed it, Frankie and I. She helped me, showed me what to do. And my response was to suspect her: how come she knew?
But what nearly ended it before it had begun, what almost deflated and unmanned me, was the grotesque fact that we were using one of Gerard Mortimer’s condoms. Even as her marvelous body gave way to me and let me in, I couldn’t help picturing her furious father’s moist mustache.
“Dunt drive into the square,” Ruth said. “Park round the back of the church.”
“I was going to,” George said.
He was tense with the anticipation of shame. He parked the Land Rover on Vicarage Street and followed Ruth through the kissing gate into the churchyard. She hurried past the gravestones and the church porch and out into the square, where she stopped, speechless, and put a hand to her bosom.
“Ruddy hell,” George said.
All sides of the square were now lined with people. It was quiet but not silent. A murmuration of onlookers. A voice rising and falling but not pausing. Ruth recognized her almost unrecognizable mother among the circle of robed figures and almost fainted.
“Oh, George,” she cried, and hid her flushed face against his shoulder.
Win’s slumped old breasts and belly and buttocks were clearly discernible through the thin white cotton. Her cropped gray head was lifted, and she was smiling bitterly at the sky with her eyes closed. Her mouth was working silently.
“Christ on a bike,” George said, and, as if in response, Police Constable Neville Newby cycled slowly into view.
P.C. Newby was a large man who believed his physique represented the weight of the law and therefore ate to sustain it. His uniform was not quite correctly buttoned, and he had the look of a man whose lengthy Sunday breakfast had been rudely interrupted. He dismounted, laboriously, outside Cubitt and Lark’s and propped his bicycle against a lamppost. He assessed the situation while removing his bicycle clips, then advanced upon the Brethren, who paid him no attention. He surveyed the circle slowly, nodding to announce that he recognized each of its members. He came full circle back to Hoseason.
“Enoch,” he said loudly. “Enoch, what in God’s name do yer think yer doin?”
Hoseason continued to read from the book.
“‘And he opened the pit of the abyss; and there went up a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.’”
“This wunt do at all, Enoch. Come along, man. I dunt want to hev to arrest you all.”
“‘And out of the smoke came forth locusts upon the earth; and power was given them, as the scorpions of the earth have power.’”
“Dunt you push yer luck, Enoch,” Newby barked, adjusting his helmet, “and dunt call me a scorpion. You take yer people away nice and decent and get yer clothes back on, and I wunt hev to call Norwich for a van to