Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [69]
“It is beautiful, my own boy genius,” she said.
He tried to turn to face her, but she clasped her fingers together on his chest and held him still.
“Don’t move yet,” she whispered.
She didn’t want him to see that her eyes were wet.
He had captured her. He had taken from her the safety of believing that he was less than her. That penultimate barrier was down.
She said, “Can I keep it?”
Later, when she undressed for her bath, she saw the prints and smears his blackened fingers had left upon her.
IN ALL, HE made five drawings of her. The best one, in his opinion, was of her naked back.
He asked her to sit facing the window, cross-legged, with her hands in her lap.
She said, “I’m cold.”
“Wait,” Clem said. He lit the remains of three candles glued by their own wax on to a short plank of wood, then closed the shutters.
“Is that all right?”
“As long as you’re quick.”
He’d added five sticks of pastel to his kit. He used one to yellow the central area of the paper into candlelight. Her right side was slightly uplit from the open doorway, and he chalked the curve of it, highlighting the shoulder blade, marveling at the swell of her hips. As always, he blacked out everything surrounding her, then, with a soft pencil, devoted himself to the delicacy of her flesh. Again, he made her a glowing abstraction. He could hardly see what he was doing, but that didn’t matter. Drawing her had become an act of love, of seduction. A ritual.
He showed her his work, disowning it.
Still studying it, she sighed and dragged him down onto her. Parting for him. Letting him do almost everything.
Pulling away at the last fevered moment because —
“We mustn’t. I can’t. . . . You know I . . .”
He rolled onto his back. She watched his chest rise and fall to his quickened breathing.
“Clem?”
“Yeah. I know. Sorry.”
“You’re not angry, are you?”
“No.”
“You are.”
He turned his face to hers, touched it with the backs of his fingers.
“I’m not. I love you, Frankie. It don’t matter.”
“It does, actually.” She bit her lip. “It’s not that I . . .”
“I know. It’s all right.”
Then everything diminished. Clem went back to school. The autumn evenings dwindled and chilled. Now they had only weekends and could not rely on those.
They lost the second to savage rain.
He sat through classes a lummox.
“Ackroyd? Ackroyd!”
“Sir?”
Tash Harmsworth was glaring at him.
“You are, I believe, reading the part of the Fool?”
“Sir.”
“King Lear’s Fool is a jester, a wit, not an idiot. Therefore it is not necessary for you to adopt the facial expression of a demented sheep. It is, however, necessary that you read the lines aloud.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
Goz slid a helpful finger onto the page.
Clem cleared his throat, if not his mind.
“‘Dost thou know the difference, my boy, between a bitter fool and a sweet fool?’”
On the morning of the third Friday of term, he knew that he couldn’t get through the day. It had been eleven days since he’d been with her. The effort of hiding his dejection, let alone his anguished tumescence, from his parents was exhausting him. He was terribly afraid that if he did not regularly tend the fire of Frankie’s love, it would go out. Eleven days! Ashes, ashes. He wanted to be alone to grieve.
At the corner of Norwich Road, he said, “Goz, wait a minute.”
Goz braked and came back.
“What?”
“I’m gorna skive off for the day.”
“And why is that, comrade?”
“I just am.”
Goz cocked his head.
“Art thou meeting thine own true love, where a ‘willow grows aslant a brook’?”
It was a morning of shifting drizzle. They both wore the awful and compulsory school raincoats.
“There’s no need to take the piss. Anyway, no.”
“Anything you want me to say, if they ask?”
Clem shrugged. “I dunno. I don’t care. Whatever you like.”
“Right. Please, sir, when I called for Ackroyd, there was a cross crudely painted on the front door. I assumed