Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [60]
He gripped the handlebars more tightly and swung the bike left at Black Cat corner.
The sky was as pink as melon flesh. The shadow of the old air-raid siren fell across the road, and he passed through it. His family, sitting in the false moonlight of the television, would be silently asking themselves where he was.
BEFORE HE MET Frankie, Clem’s ideas about sex were a greasy tangle woven from very unreliable materials: dirty rhymes and bawdy songs, smutty jokes, anatomically inaccurate drawings on lavatory walls, the lies of boastful older boys, the reported activities of someone’s sister. No adult, no one who’d actually had sex, had ever told him anything about it, except to expressly forbid masturbation and warn of its crippling consequences. He had joined sniggering huddles with other boys, talking dirty, but their imaginings, like his, lived in fingery darkness, like wood lice under a brick. (Goz usually excluded himself from these lubricious debates. If he spoke of sexual matters at all, he did so with a casual dismissiveness, as if he knew all about them but they were beyond the horizon of his interest.)
Naturally, Clem had spent countless hours trying to imagine what a naked girl might look like, but he lacked certain key items of information. In his fourth year at Newgate, a boy called Taplock had circulated (for sixpence a loan) a nudist magazine with the strangely irrelevant title Health and Efficiency. It featured black-and-white photographs of robust and plain young women engaged in wholesome outdoor activities, such as netball and gardening. None of them wore any clothes, but when Clem’s eyes zeroed in on the really important part of their anatomies, there was nothing there; their lower bellies tapered into a blur, a cloudy vacancy. He found this puzzling. Surely something so talked about, something for which there were so many forbidden names, must have some sort of substance.
(He had never heard, then, of doctoring photos with an airbrush. Later in life he would become an expert at it.)
Very occasionally, and with a warning glare, Jiffy would project painted nudes onto the art-room wall. During the Renaissance, it seemed, naked ladies were often to be found in the Italian countryside, sometimes in large numbers. Invariably, though, their Important Parts were obscured by wisps of gauzy stuff or annoying bits of foliage. Besides, Clem was not stirred by these women; they were a bit on the old side, and hefty-bottomed. Later, the class had looked at nudes by Picasso, but these were of no help at all.
Clem had, of course, studied the anatomical atlas kept on the top shelf of the art-room bookcase, paying particular attention to the chapter “The Reproductive Organs of the Female.” The cross-sectional drawing, all interfolding tubes and hollows, labeled in vaguely religious-sounding Latin, revealed nothing to him about the dark magic of sex. In fact, it made him think, queasily, of a slice through a crustacean or some other form of marine life. He wondered and worried about how his own increasingly restless reproductive organ could possibly get involved in this complex and messy-looking arrangement.
Then, in October 1960, when Clem was in his first term in the fifth form, Penguin Books was taken to court for publishing an “obscene” novel that was “likely to deprave and corrupt” anyone unfortunate enough to read it. It was a modest paperback, costing three shillings and sixpence, entitled Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The author was D. H. Lawrence, who had been dead for thirty years. It told the story of a supercharged love affair between Connie, the wife of a paralyzed