Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [108]
“Yeah,” he said. “You read me like a book, Frankie.”
“Or a poem.”
“Or a poem,” he agreed.
“Tell me you love me,” she said.
But before he could speak, she pressed two fingers onto his lips.
“Don’t say it if you don’t mean it. Don’t, honestly. Don’t say it just because we’ve, you know. Had sex.”
“I love you, Frankie.”
“More than before, or the same?”
“More.”
“Good,” she said, and lowered her head onto his chest.
He looked up at the colorless sky, where gulls drifted, scolding and mewling.
We’ve done it, he told himself. We’ve actually done it. Yes!
Yet what he felt was worryingly familiar and childish: something like getting caught stealing fruit from someone else’s garden.
They walked back along the beach, making silly dramas of dodging the slow overlaps of low surf.
She said, “We’ve never done this before.”
“I know that,” he said.
“No, not that. I mean, we’ve never walked anywhere holding hands. I really like it.”
Something, a slight catch in her voice, made him look at her. She was nearly crying.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey, c’mon, Frankie.”
They stopped, and he put his arms around her, awkwardly.
“Hey. Whassup?”
She sniffled into the folds of his jacket, shaking her head.
“I hate everything. I really do, actually. All I want is to be with you. Everything else is such absolute shit. So boring. D’you know what I wish?”
“What?”
“That the world would end right now. That Kennedy or thingy, the Communist, would blow us all up. I expect it would hurt. It would be ghastly for a minute or so. But then it would be all over. I wouldn’t have to go back to Mummy and Daddy and tell lies about where I’ve been and then think up more lies so I can meet you next time. I don’t want to do that anymore. I really don’t. I can’t bear it. It’s all so mucky.”
He thought, She’s ending it. Because I was no good.
Suddenly he was exhausted by the very thought of the long ride back. Sickened, as though he’d already smelled the warmed-up and congealed Sunday dinner waiting for him. As though he’d already tasted the lies that he, too, would tell.
Frankie seemed to have read his thoughts somehow.
“I don’t want to go home,” she said, so childishly, so innocently, that it made Clem laugh.
“I don’t,” she said more fiercely. “I can’t bear the thought of it.”
“Nor can’t I,” he said. “Come on. The tide’s coming in.”
When they could see the rooftops of Hazeborough hunched at the cliff top, they heard voices. Yells ripped meaningless by the wind and the surf. At some distance ahead of them, an ancient timber jetty sloped into the sea, sand and shingle banked up against it. Two — no, three — young boys, their shapes made indistinct by sea glitter, shouting and throwing stones. As he and Frankie drew nearer, Clem saw that the boys were not stoning the jetty but something close to it, half buried. Something rusty black and spherical with stumpy little legs.
Clem would never be sure if he’d recognized it in that last instant. Whether he’d yelled a warning just before everything stopped making sense, before all memory turned false. Before all that had been separate and different — sea and stones, wind and sand, his and Frankie’s place among them — erupted into the same thing: a silent roar with huge rough hands that picked him up and changed him terribly and threw him away. It all seemed to take a long, long time. Something was happening to his arms and legs and face, but those parts of him were far away, floating by themselves. He wondered where Frankie had gone, thinking that he should be looking after her, that she would be frightened.
Then something big thumped into his back and he was still.
Just before he went to sleep, he heard a pattern of sound: ssshh-tick-tock, ssshh-tick-tock. Like someone kind, a nurse perhaps, trying to persuade a clock to stop.
When he woke up, he was dreaming. His head was in a bubble through which he could see the empty sky. The bubble was the glass cab of a big machine, but nothing would obey the controls. He sent urgent blurred messages out to its limbs. After a while