Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [51]
“A what?”
“Giles calls them rubber johnnies, actually, which is rather vulgar, but never mind. The proper term is a sheath. Like what you keep a knife in.”
She peeled the packet open and plucked out a brownish, flaccid, circular object the size of a large coin. The girls goggled at it. Its very presence in Saint Ethelburger’s was like one of Satan’s horny toenails appearing on the chapel altar during Mass. Just to be on the safe side, Teresa crossed herself, twice, rapidly.
To Frankie, it looked like a thin, greasy toffee.
After a pause she said, “How does it work, Maddie?”
“How does it work?”
“Yes.”
“Dear God, ma chérie. Giles puts it on his thingy, of course.”
“His willy?”
“Of course his willy, you goose. What did you think? His foot?”
Frankie studied the limp object. By now she knew a good deal about Giles’s fabled willy, but she couldn’t imagine how the two things might fit together. Maddie read the blankness in her gaze and sighed theatrically.
“Lord love us and save us,” she said, and cast her eyes around the room. They came to rest on the hair brush on Frankie’s bedside cabinet.
“Pass us that.”
Frankie did so. Maddie eased the French letter onto the end of the brush’s handle, where it hung, drooping. She circled its thick rim with her thumb and forefinger and slid it, unfurling it, up to where the handle widened.
The three other girls stared at the result. The oily johnny hung slackly from the brush, with its little nose aimed at the floor.
Maddie sensed their disappointment.
“It’s not like that on an actual willy, of course,” she said.
A couple of months later, Frankie sulked through her O-level exams. The last one was Latin, and as soon as it was over, she went back to the dorm, where she tore off the hateful uniform and cut it to shreds with a pair of scissors she’d pinched from the sewing room for the purpose. Then she dressed in proper clothes. There was no way she was going to lug her heavy suitcase, so she packed a few things into her sports bag. She walked unhurriedly past the chapel, whence came the reedy uncertain sound of Junior hymn practice, and down the drive. To her surprise — and slight disappointment — no one tried to stop her. She shinnied over the locked gates and marched through light drizzle up to the main road, where she hitched a lift in a butcher’s van. She cadged a cigarette from the driver and without much difficulty charmed him into taking her to Cambridge station. At Norwich she phoned her mother from a call box. Nicole was dismayed, though not surprised; she’d already had a call from Saint Ethelburger’s. Sister Benedicta had made it plain that Françoise’s return would be neither expected nor welcome.
Her father ranted at her, of course. She endured it more or less silently. He sentenced her to hard labor, which is how she came to be working in the strawberry fields. And how she came to test Maddie’s snogging technique on awkward but absolutely gorgeous Clem Ackroyd.
FOR WEEKS, SOFT fruits gave them cover. After strawberries, there were gooseberries, black currants, raspberries. Frankie worked her sentence, weighing and loading, stacking the stained empty punnets. And at every opportunity, at increasingly risky opportunities, she would excuse herself through a gap in a hedge, slip into the shade of a tree, amble behind a trailer, to be with Clem. They kissed avidly, clumsily, not knowing what to do with their sticky, juice-stained hands. They did not talk much; they were short of time, and breath. When they did speak, death often cropped up.
“I was dying for that.”
“God, my father would kill me if he knew I was . . .”
“My dad’d skin me alive . . .”
“Wouldn’t it be delicious to die like this?”
At first it was a game; it was a hazardous mischief. But not for long. They each soon found the hot days shrinking into the stolen minutes — ten, fifteen at most — when they were together. Other time became numb.
Clem trembled, waiting in hiding for her. Shook physically. He found these moments hard to bear because it