Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [119]
It was my Road to Damascus moment, that article. A revelation. I couldn’t do the foamy, heartfelt, swept-away-on-a-tsunami-of-conviction stuff. But someone who looked like me, behaved like me, dressed like me, had the same name as me, could. So I sat in the subway car, trying to become him, my impersonator. Checking that the cuffs of my stonewashed blue denim shirt came an inch below the cuffs of the sleeves of my gray Paul Smith jacket, that my black Peter Werth pants were free of lint, that there were no greasy streaks on my pale buckskin Timberland shoes. Looking sharp is important if, like me, you have the kind of face that can distress people.
“Come home,” she’d said. Home! Hadn’t she realized what an insane idea, what a ridiculous term that was? It had been years and years, a whole lifetime, since I’d thought of Norfolk as my home. Or anywhere else, for that matter. And I was glad of it. Home, for me, is a word with stifling, subterranean connotations: badgery burrows, premature burials, walls that edge closer when you’re not looking. Norfolk had squeezed me, exploded me, had fired me into the world like the shell from a gun. Did Frankie really think that I would, or could, reverse that trajectory and worm back into the dark breech called home? Absurd.
And her, her . . . project, was, well, deeply eccentric. Or actually mad. Time simply will not be turned backward. Things cannot be what they were. We can’t have our childhoods back, re-create those worlds. And even if she could, she’d never live to see it. Those pines at Franklins had been at least a hundred years old.
Sane people do not refuse to grow up.
I wondered if perhaps she was, in fact, crazy. Rich people often are.
I wondered what she might be worth. Several millions, presumably.
“I’m going to rebuild the barn.”
“Be my artist again.”
I squirmed in my seat, remembering my clumsy efforts at drawing her. The heavy-handed way I’d scribbled and scratched at her litheness, her lightness. If only I’d been as good then as I am now. Now I’d be able to do her body justice.
Get a grip, Ackroyd, I told myself. Fantastic Machines from Fantastic Movies. Focus!
Over the years I had, naturally, tried to imagine an older Frankie. To imagine her as ravaged by time as I was. I’d done it to bury her ghost. To banish her. I’d packed weight onto her hips and belly. Turned her hair gray. Thickened her ankles. Pulled support stockings onto her legs. Now, to complete this grotesquery, I could add a glass eye and a limp. Maybe a walking stick. Yes.
But it wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t take.
Instead, she swung her hair away, descending to a kiss.
Biting her lip, bare-breasted, kneeling over me.
Pulling me down, sand on her fingers, the sea heaping itself onto the beach with a sound like yes, yes.
She would stay young, sixteen, for ever. Unless I went back.
So I would call her, and say no. Yes, I would call her. Later, or maybe tomorrow.
“I’m strong, Clem, but I’m lonely.”
At least I hadn’t said, “So am I.”
The train whined to a halt. The doors opened. I’d lost track of where we were. It didn’t matter; the WTC, my stop, was the terminus. Peering through the press of bodies, I saw that we were at Chambers Street. Then the throb of the motor died. A tinny voice said something I couldn’t make out. PA announcements — at airports, railway stations, sports events — are among the things beyond the limits of my hearing. But the other passengers responded with the resigned truculence that New Yorkers specialize in and started to leave the train. Clearly, we were going no farther. I got to my feet.
Mass indecision took place. A great many people stood on the platform, thinking that there was a good chance that the