Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [96]
She blew out smoke, flicked ash, and turned her wet, depthless eyes upon him.
“Did it? Why?”
He had not expected her to ask.
“I . . . I dunno. It just did.”
“I expect it’s a love poem, is it?” She put an ironic, throaty emphasis on the two words.
“Sort of.”
She said, “We didn’t do much poetry at Saint Ethel’s. The sisters thought it was sinful. My friend Maddie knew one called ‘Eskimo Nell’ by heart. Her boyfriend taught her it. It was absolutely filthy.”
This was not going quite the way that Clem had planned.
He said, “There are some quite rude bits in this one, actually.”
“Are there? Oh, good! Let’s finish our ciggies, then you can read it to me.”
His heart snagged. He’d imagined her reading it to herself, then looking up at him, aglow with revelation and impatient readiness.
“Yeah,” he said. “All right.”
Frankie flicked the end of her cigarette into the wet ferns and turned herself so that she was leaning against his left side. She closed her eyes.
“Go on, then,” she said. “I’m listening.”
He began, his voice clogged at first by embarrassment, then with a touch more certainty.
“Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime
We would sit down and think which way
To walk and pass our long love’s day.”
When he reached the line about adoring each breast, Frankie giggled but did not open her eyes. He struggled on.
“But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.”
Clem paused meaningfully. And it seemed that Frankie had understood. She opened her eyes and stared out at the desolate landscape that their fathers had created.
She said, “They’re going to bulldoze this bit, too. All the way back to the road, George says.”
Clem couldn’t bear the way she used his father’s first name. The familiarity in it, and therefore a kind of forgiveness. What was more, it was intolerable, outrageous, that his father could, and did, talk to her when he could not.
He’d gone bitter, so he hardly knew how to react when she reached her hand up to his face and said, “We’ll find somewhere else, won’t we? Or we’ll run away. Don’t be sad, Clem. It was a nice poem, by the way.”
“That’s not the end. There’s quite a bit more.”
“Is there?”
She kissed him, then resettled herself. “Go on, then.”
“. . . then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honor turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.”
“It doesn’t say that,” she said, laughing. “You made that up.”
“No, I didn’t. Read it yourself if you like.”
“Worms?” Frankie said, doing a little shudder. “That’s horrid, actually. I know it happens when you’re dead and everything. But yuck! It’s a bit sick, isn’t it? Is that why you like it?”
“No. I think it’s . . .”
He was miles from any appropriate adjective. Irrefutable might have served, but he couldn’t come up with it.
“Let me read the rest of it,” he said.
He mangled his way to the end of the ode. He left a pregnant pause. His underpants were charged with poetical desire. He made his move a second too late. She had stood up.
She walked away from him and folded her arms and looked out at the brown crusts of land between her and her home. Her dark hair danced sideways in the wind, baring her neck, exposing the dark little whisper in the valley of her nape.
She said, “Is there going to be a war, Clem?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Probably.”
“Daddy says there won’t be. He says it’s all a sort of bluff. He says the Russians are taking the mickey; no one’s going to blow the world up over a stupid little place like Cuba.”
“It’s not about Cuba.”
She turned back to him.
“Isn’t it? What’s it about, then, Clem? You’re so much cleverer than I am.”
He said, “It’s about weapons. No one’s ever had ’em and not used ’em. Like, a long time ago, someone invented the bow and arrow. Some caveman or somethun. But he didn’t go up to the other cavemen and say, ‘I’ve invented this thing that’ll kill you, so do what I say.’ What he did was shoot some poor bugger through the guts and then say, ‘Thas what I