rolled off her tongue as easily as marbles: too many goodbyes to be said to schoolfriends; too many shopping trips to Plymouth for pillows and sheets and shoes; too many scripts to be read in the solitude of the attic, where my splashing couldn’t soak the pages, and my sulking couldn’t distract her study.
And oh how I sulked. I sulked with the same determination with which she ignored me. Because I couldn’t play alone any more. I was a cowboy with no Indian, a Wendy with no Pan. I would sit in my own room and curse, pray for a plague of locusts or frogs, make pacts with shadowy figures I conjured up in my own netherworld of self-pity. Until I was forced to admit our days of Hansel and Gretel were over. And that’s when I turned to Tom. He became my partner in crime, my faithful sidekick, and I his. Though I hoped, prayed, I would be more. Then one night we rowed back late from the village and collapsed side by side in the boathouse, too heavy-limbed and lazy to make it any further than the creek.
Even now I still feel the heft of the boards beneath my back, the sheet clinging to my sweat-sticky body, the perfect proximity of him.
“Are you awake, Evie?” he said.
“No,” I replied.
He laughed, then. “Me neither.”
“I’m hot,” I said, cursing myself for stating the obvious. For not being able to articulate what I really wanted to tell him.
“I’m hot, too,” he echoed.
And then it happened. He went first: stripped off his T-shirt and shorts. And though it was dark, and he was no more than a silhouette, a shadow, I knew he was naked. And, though I’d seen him like that so many times before as children, this, this was different. This meant something else.
“Your turn,” he said.
And, with the sound of my heart pounding in my chest, and his breath quickening, I peeled off my clothes until only my white knickers remained in their pathetic, virginal glory. They should be black, I remember thinking, or lacy. I should have borrowed some of Bea’s.
But Tom didn’t notice. Or didn’t care. Because then, there, on the floor of the boathouse, the same floor we’d played Peter Pan on, played pirates on, he kissed me.
The rest is a jumble of images – ones I have had to imagine, conjure from the darkness that shrouded us: my hands on his chest, his back; his moving down my legs, then up again; my knickers pulled aside. Then my hand pushing his away, panic slowly taking hold: that I can’t do this. That I’m not like Bea. I’m not Bea.
“It’s OK,” he says. “It’s fine.”
But it isn’t.
We lay in silence until sleep took him, and then, before the clock struck twelve, I ran away from the shame of it. Not of what happened, but what didn’t. That I couldn’t go through with it after all. That I was the child he always thought of me as.
I awoke the next day to an afternoon so blistering I had no choice but to swim. I will tell him, I thought, as I pulled on my bathing suit. I will tell him that I’m sorry, that I love him, that I do want him, I do. And he will understand. Of course he will.
So convinced was I of the absolute truth of this that I didn’t think to wonder whether he wanted me too.
But then I heard it, that laughter, a peal of applause scattering through the trees, then his, lower, wine-sodden, then silence. A silence that urged me on as strongly as it told me to go back. Because when I emerged from the woods to seek its source, I saw it was a silence borne of a kiss.
That was the last time either of us came here.
I slide the rusting lock from its housing, and step from a world where everything is in flux into one in which nothing has changed.
For there is the table and chairs. There are the red-checked curtains; the gingham faded now in the sun, but still bright, still sending out its cheery welcome. The camp bed unfolded, waiting for weary occupants, its rickety legs bowed on one side from where Bea tried to use it as a trampoline.
My chest tightens, and I feel
And oh how I sulked. I sulked with the same determination with which she ignored me. Because I couldn’t play alone any more. I was a cowboy with no Indian, a Wendy with no Pan. I would sit in my own room and curse, pray for a plague of locusts or frogs, make pacts with shadowy figures I conjured up in my own netherworld of self-pity. Until I was forced to admit our days of Hansel and Gretel were over. And that’s when I turned to Tom. He became my partner in crime, my faithful sidekick, and I his. Though I hoped, prayed, I would be more. Then one night we rowed back late from the village and collapsed side by side in the boathouse, too heavy-limbed and lazy to make it any further than the creek.
Even now I still feel the heft of the boards beneath my back, the sheet clinging to my sweat-sticky body, the perfect proximity of him.
“Are you awake, Evie?” he said.
“No,” I replied.
He laughed, then. “Me neither.”
“I’m hot,” I said, cursing myself for stating the obvious. For not being able to articulate what I really wanted to tell him.
“I’m hot, too,” he echoed.
And then it happened. He went first: stripped off his T-shirt and shorts. And though it was dark, and he was no more than a silhouette, a shadow, I knew he was naked. And, though I’d seen him like that so many times before as children, this, this was different. This meant something else.
“Your turn,” he said.
And, with the sound of my heart pounding in my chest, and his breath quickening, I peeled off my clothes until only my white knickers remained in their pathetic, virginal glory. They should be black, I remember thinking, or lacy. I should have borrowed some of Bea’s.
But Tom didn’t notice. Or didn’t care. Because then, there, on the floor of the boathouse, the same floor we’d played Peter Pan on, played pirates on, he kissed me.
The rest is a jumble of images – ones I have had to imagine, conjure from the darkness that shrouded us: my hands on his chest, his back; his moving down my legs, then up again; my knickers pulled aside. Then my hand pushing his away, panic slowly taking hold: that I can’t do this. That I’m not like Bea. I’m not Bea.
“It’s OK,” he says. “It’s fine.”
But it isn’t.
We lay in silence until sleep took him, and then, before the clock struck twelve, I ran away from the shame of it. Not of what happened, but what didn’t. That I couldn’t go through with it after all. That I was the child he always thought of me as.
I awoke the next day to an afternoon so blistering I had no choice but to swim. I will tell him, I thought, as I pulled on my bathing suit. I will tell him that I’m sorry, that I love him, that I do want him, I do. And he will understand. Of course he will.
So convinced was I of the absolute truth of this that I didn’t think to wonder whether he wanted me too.
But then I heard it, that laughter, a peal of applause scattering through the trees, then his, lower, wine-sodden, then silence. A silence that urged me on as strongly as it told me to go back. Because when I emerged from the woods to seek its source, I saw it was a silence borne of a kiss.
That was the last time either of us came here.
I slide the rusting lock from its housing, and step from a world where everything is in flux into one in which nothing has changed.
For there is the table and chairs. There are the red-checked curtains; the gingham faded now in the sun, but still bright, still sending out its cheery welcome. The camp bed unfolded, waiting for weary occupants, its rickety legs bowed on one side from where Bea tried to use it as a trampoline.
My chest tightens, and I feel
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