Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [67]
There were other drawings, hidden drawings, that he would slit his own throat rather than show her.
On Saturdays he’d tell Ruth that he was going to the matinee at the Regal and afterward he was going to muck about with Goz. On his way home, fizzing from his day with Frankie, he’d stop at a phone box and call Goz, who’d tell him what to say. There’d been a cartoon, an episode of Flash Gordon, another cartoon, then the main feature: a Western starring Alan Ladd. Goz always went to the matinee. It was the nearest he got to religious observance. The petty vendettas in the stalls, the ostentatious flirting behind him, the lobbing of chewed sweets out of the dark, never distracted him. His recall of films was perfect.
Clem got bored, listening to the recitation.
“Orright, comrade. Got that. Ta.”
He and Frankie discovered each other because now they could spare the time to talk. They found each other equally astonishing, their ways of life equally unimaginable, exotic. School was common ground, though; the horrors of Newgate and Saint Ethelburger’s were interchangeable. They worked themselves into ecstasies of giggling, fantasizing about the sexual predilections of nuns and schoolmasters.
“You’re clever, though, Clem. I could never do A levels.”
“’Course you could.”
“No, honestly. What would be the point, anyway?”
This troubled him. It had never occurred to him to question the purpose of education. It was, obviously, a means of escape. A way into a different life. He chewed on one of Frankie’s sandwiches while it dawned on him that she probably wasn’t looking for, didn’t need, a flight from whom and what she was.
“What’s in this?” he asked her.
“Smoked salmon. Do you like it?”
“It’s orright.”
She’d filched a flagon of cider from the pantry on her way out to the stables. They’d drunk half of it. They were both a little high. She took another swig.
“What’ll you do after art school? Will you starve in a garret, painting things too brilliant for anyone to appreciate until after you’re dead?”
He laughed, although he didn’t know what a garret was.
“Shouldn’t think so.”
She looked at him very seriously, resting her head on her hand.
“We’ll run away,” she said. “We’ll live in Paris. It’ll be okay because I speak French, but we’ll be terribly poor and have to live on bread and wine and tangerines. I’ll be your model. You’ll paint me over and over again. Then a rich gallery owner will discover you, and you’ll be fabulously successful and famous.”
(Frankie had once read a slightly racy novel in which these things happened. She left out the last bit, when the model ran off with the rich man, leaving the artist to paint her, obsessively, from memory, until he died of heartbreak.)
“Isn’t that a simply gorgeous idea? Let’s do it, Clem.”
“Yeah. Okay, that’s what we’ll do.”
“I mean it. Promise me that’s what we’ll do.”
“Frankie . . .”
“Apart from anything else, it means you could spend all day looking at me in the nude. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
His throat tightened. They’d reached the underwear stage of their courtship. Feeling each other in the gloom was one thing, though. Gazing frankly at each other was another. They’d tacitly avoided it. He’d turn away from her to pull his jeans up while she rebuttoned her blouse.
“I want you to draw me,” she said now.
“No.”
“Why not?”
He turned away from her. “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged. The way the muscles worked in his narrow back delighted her.
“I want you to. Clem. Please.”
“I ent . . . I’m not much good at that sort of thing.”
She put her arm around him and pressed the side of her face against his skin, but he remained tense, withdrawn from her.
“Clem? Clem, what?”
“You’re too beautiful. I draw you all the time, but it never really look, looks, like you. I’m not good enough.”
“Yes, you are. It’s because you’ve been doing it from memory.”
It had been a silly dare, a whim, but now she found herself wanting, needing, him to do it. To gaze at her, to study her.
And in the end he yielded, as she’d known he would.
He crawled over to his bag and took out