Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [97]
The anger in his voice made Frankie cautious.
“I suppose so,” she said. “But the Bomb is different, isn’t it? It would be mad . . .”
“That’s what wars are, Frankie. Mad.”
She came back to him and sat down. Clem reached his right arm around her, and she put her head on his shoulder.
He said, “I heard on the wireless this morning that they reckon the Yanks will invade Cuba on Monday at the latest. P’raps even tomorrow.”
When she said nothing, he pulled his head back to look at her. There were tears trickling down each of her cheeks. He hadn’t wanted this. But perhaps it was good.
“I don’t want to die, Clem. Not yet.”
Ah.
“Don’t you? Why not?”
“It’s . . . it’s not fair.”
Clem laughed, a sound like a snort. “Fair? Nothun’s fair, as far as I can see. But if it did happen, you know, right now, boomf, it would be sort of nice, wouldn’t it? Well, not nice, but . . . we’d be together, wouldn’t we? It’d be a shame that we hadn’t . . . you know . . .”
She sat up straight and looked at him, her eyelashes pearled with tears.
“That could happen, couldn’t it? Any second. We wouldn’t know. We wouldn’t have time to do anything.”
“Thas right,” he said, sliding his hand under her sweater and onto her belly.
“Oh, God,” Frankie said, or sobbed. “Poor Marron. Poor, poor Marron. It’s nothing to do with him.”
Sod Marron, Clem thought, but he suffered the unwelcome image of the tethered horse evaporating into fire, its meat whirled, burning from its tall bones.
Frankie got to her feet.
“I’ve got to go and see him,” she said. “Make sure he’s all right. I’ll be back in a sec.”
So much for effing poetry, Clem thought. When it comes to girls, it loses out to horses every time. He took the cigs from his pocket and lit one. From somewhere behind him, a pheasant croaked a complaint about its vanishing habitat. After a while, he heard Frankie making her way back, her feet slushing the leaves.
“Give me a puff on that,” she said.
He looked over his shoulder. She was sitting on the stump of the wall, swinging her legs as though nothing mattered. He stood and went to her and gave her the cigarette.
“I know what the poem means,” she said. “I know why you wanted to read it to me.”
He said nothing, feeling suddenly and deeply ashamed and obvious.
“Do you want any more of this?”
“No.” He took the cigarette butt from her and threw it away.
“Come here.”
He went to her. She parted her legs and hooked her heels around the back of his thighs, pulling him against her.
With her mouth close to his ear, she said, “I want to do it with you, Clem. I want to Go All the Way. It would be stupid if we . . . well, you know.”
His heart and penis surged, but his mouth, for some crazy reason, said, “We don’t have to. It’s all right.”
What?
“No. We do have to. I absolutely refuse to die a virgin. It would just be too awful.”
“God, Frankie,” he mumbled, and tried to press himself up to her.
“No. Not now, Clem. Not here. I don’t like it here anymore.”
He died slightly.
She said, “When you think about, you know, us doing it, where are we?”
“What?”
“When you’re in bed. You must think about us having sex when you’re in bed, don’t you? I do. All the time.” She hugged him tighter to hide her shame. “It’s delicious, isn’t it? You know what I mean.”
He gaped, wide-eyed, over her shoulder at the surviving wintering trees.
“I sometimes think about doing it in the barn, which is nice. But mostly it’s always by the sea. Us doing it with the tide coming in, getting closer all the time. Is that mad, do you think?”
“I dunno. No. I think that’s nice.”
“Where’s the nearest beach from here, Clem?”
“What? Um, well, Hazeborough, I spose.”
“How far is that?”
He was nibbling the lobe of her ear, something she usually liked. “What?”
“How far is Hazeborough?”
“Christ, Frankie. I dunno. Eight miles, something like that.”
“So three-quarters of an hour on a bike?”
“More or less. Frankie . . .”
“Listen,” she said. “Tomorrow, tomorrow morning, Daddy’s driving Mummy to