Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [53]
“Frankie?”
Still she wouldn’t speak. He lifted his right hand and buried it in her hair. Cautiously, he caressed the place where her neck met the base of her skull, marveling at how fragile it felt. He was certain that this silent embrace was her way of telling him it was over. That she was finishing with him. It made him gasp, as if he had been slapped by a gust of sleet out of the hot summer sky. He pulled her head away. She lifted her face. He was baffled to see that her eyes were wet, yet she was smiling.
“What?” He failed to keep the anger, the vast disappointment, from his voice.
“You smell nice,” she said. “For a boy.”
Then at last she kissed him, more urgently than ever before. She lifted herself up on her knees, and her hands rose up to the nape of his neck. Her nails pressed into his skin, hurting.
He was convinced that this was their good-bye kiss, the parting embrace.
So when they broke apart, he blurted, “I love you, Frankie.”
It was a shameful and desperate declaration. They were like foreign words. He had never heard real people use them. He’d shocked himself. He needed her to say that she loved him, too. To cancel out, to pardon, what he’d said.
She didn’t.
Instead, she said, “We can’t go on like this.”
It was like something you heard on the telly. He lowered his head like King Charles I inviting the executioner’s ax.
Frankie leaned away from him, pushing stray hairs from her face.
She said, “D’you know the little lane between Borstead and Bratton Morley?”
He looked up at her gormlessly. “What?”
“Do you?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s a place where it goes through some woods. Skeyton Woods, they’re called. There’s a bridleway that goes off the lane. It’s got an old gate across it. Know where I mean?”
“Yeah. Frankie —”
A man’s voice called from dangerously close by, startling them. Frankie got to her feet, stooping to stay below the level of the raspberry canes.
“Meet me there tonight. Seven thirty. Okay?”
He nodded. Then she was gone.
Clem shoved his bike through the gateway and concealed it in a shallow ditch screened by bracken. He knew the place well, had known it all his life. He had a faint memory trace of walking in these woods with his mother when he was little. Before they’d moved to Borstead. For some reason the memory had a sad coloring to it.
A quarter of a mile or so from where he now stood, waiting, was the Dip, an old gravel pit overhung with trees. In the days before he’d become an outcast Grammargog, he’d been one of the Millfields Gang, who’d bike to the woods to play hectic daylong games of stalking and warfare there. Beyond the Dip, the bridleway forked. The left branch emerged, eventually, onto a farm track behind Bratton Manor. He assumed that Frankie would come from that direction. After an eternity of ten minutes, he could hardly resist the urge to set off to meet her, to get to her sooner. But she’d said the gateway. It seemed to him that his insides were actually vibrating with indecision. And the swelling fear that she would not come.
She wouldn’t, he realized; she’d never intended to. She’d planned this cruelty as a way of ending things between them, knowing that he’d be too hurt, too humiliated, ever to go near her again. This sudden, terrible certainty untethered his heart. He groaned aloud, and although he was alone, he felt shamed by the hot tears that blurred his vision. He took refuge in anger. At himself, for spoiling everything by saying he loved her. By getting serious. How could it get serious, seeing who he was and who she was? He’d scared her off. He cursed himself: You effing idiot, Ackroyd. He made himself curse her: Stuck-up bitch.
He’d go home. Sod it. In a minute. Definitely.
After a while, he heard a soft thudding and looked down the track. Christ, someone on a horse. He was about to duck back out of sight when he realized it was her. Bucking up and down in the saddle to the easy rhythm of the horse’s trot. A brown horse dappling bright then dark in the light slanting through the trees. Seeing Clem, it slowed, hesitated. He saw her urge it forward