Beauty

The boy did strange things to her.

He had made her his sister-confessor. The trouble was she did not know what she believed. So she heard his confession and didn't know what to say. And all the while, the boy did strange things to her.

He was in her dreams. She had only known him 6 weeks, and she could picture what he looked like - a picture image in her mind. All the people that she knew and loved, the man she'd lived with for 3 years, she could not picture what they looked like. They were just names, descriptions framed in words, and he was a bloody picture.

Because the boy did strange things to her.

He lay there now, asleep on his stomach, his dark hair curling into his neck, his fist curling into the pillow. She sat cross-legged, staring at the curtained window with its halo of late-morning light. He lay, the covers turned back, his naked body slender and long, his dark hair curly like a shock against the whiteness of the pillow. She sat, cross-legged like Buddha, looking round the edges of his body, unsettled by the strange things he did to her.

This room was not hers. She was glad about that. When she left it she would be able to leave the images of that night with it. She would not have to see them every day in his absence. Because, unless she made an effort to put herself in the places where she knew he would be, she was unlikely to see him again.

He had made her sore. Different size, different shape. She could feel the ghost of him still as she sat there cross-legged. The ghost of him and the hollowness simultaneous and symbiotic, the one feeding the other.

Where had this begun? How had she been cast in this rôle? Her skin smelled of cigarettes, though neither of them smoked. Her clothes lay crumpled in the middle of the floor. How far across the room and would he wake if she moved? She broke off a fingernail and stared at the ragged edges left behind. In the street beyond the window were sounds of people going about their lives. She was here in this Dublin bedroom with a boy she barely knew who moved her ways she had never been moved, who looked in her eyes and let her see the depths of the ocean. She shook her head. That was bullshit. She had to believe that that was bullshit otherwise she would end up as mad as him.

She reached for her bag. He stirred.

"I broke a nail," she said, but he was not awake.

An alarm was going off in the street. A car, she thought. She filed the nail she had broken, smoothed the ragged edges. He uncurled his fisted hand and laid it flat against her back, the thumb lying in the hollow of her spine. She did not look at him but continued filing her nails. She did not want to see the glint of his half opened eye; did not want to want him as she had wanted him last night. Because he had made her sore and the boy did strange things to her.

He turned onto his side and ran the back of his hand across her back. His index finger stroked the curve of her waist, the curve of her hip, the curve of her waist, up and down. The car alarm went silent and she could hear the sound of skin against skin. He leaned forward and kissed her on the hip, his hand gently lifting her arm away. His lips barely touched her skin, and he did strange things to her.

She put down the nail file and slowly lay down, letting him brush her body with his lips. Where he had made her sore he soothed her now with soundless words. She closed her eyes and let herself enjoy the strange things that happened with this boy.

"I am dying," he said, later, as they lay alongside each other staring at the ceiling and not smoking.

She did not reply. She tried to tell herself it made no difference to her.

She stared at the ceiling and a fat round tear trickled from the corner of her eye.

© J R Hargreaves 2002