Requiem (29 page)

'What was it?' she said.

'It was the
djinn
,
of course.'

'Is that what it looks like?'

‘I don't know how it looked to you. It takes
different forms for everyone.'

'But the
last thing I saw: was that what it really looks like?'

'I can't
tell you. Only you give it its form. All of its forms. Only you.'

'But if you
can make it appear like that, can you make it go away?'

'I can't
do that. I'm too much in love with my own
djinn
.'

She looked into his
eyes. She couldn't tell now if he was utterly crazed or wise beyond
understanding. Then she saw her own reflection in the pool, gazing back at her.

45

Whom had he gone to see
that day? The day Katie died, the day Katie had uprooted a tree, magnetized it,
charmed it out of the ground, conjured it out of the wind, prayed for it to
fall on her head, offered herself, martyred and sacrificed. He blamed her for
her death. She'd wanted it. Willed it. Made it happen. So he would pay the
penalty.

With whom
did he have an appointment that day? This was
Tobie's
signing-off question, uppermost in his mind as he made his way back to Sharon's
apartment that evening. Maybe he would have answered it too, if it hadn't been
for the little old Jewish
Gorgon's
certainty
about
herself. She knew it. She knew it instinctively, almost immediately; the way
people unconsciously home in on a wound, accidentally stroke a bruise or brush
against a cut you might be carrying. The dumpy, barrel-breasted, blue-rinse
witch
had
known,
and she hadn't even disguised it.

If it hadn't been for
her smugness, her self-satisfaction, the effortlessness of the woman in going
to the point, he might even have told her. But right now he wondered how he'd
even allowed himself to be talked into the thing. And what sort of a place was
it? What kind of therapy did they offer the inmates of the centre? All this
shit about letting anyone sit in on the session as you spilled your private
guts. That flake Christina. Why was he supposed to let a smack-head eavesdrop
on his grief? Why should he even have to sit in the same room as that kind of
piece of shit? Because the blue-rinse
darlink
Jewish mamma thought it was a nice liberal idea to get everyone to help
with the washing-up.

He was furious. His
fingernails dug into the palms of his hands as he stalked the arid streets in
the evening sunshine. Two young
Hasids
, beards tucked
into their necks, heard him talking to himself and glanced up as they passed.
He glowered back at them.

He wouldn't
tell her. He couldn't. For one thing she would tell Sharon. Neither of them
could possibly understand. They were women. They didn't have the capacity to
guess at what he was having to deal with. Their reactions would be predictable,
prefigured.

What did women know
about it? What gave women the moral right to make any judgement about the behaviour
of men and the depths of their desires? Ah, but they did know! At least on some
intuitive level, without knowing its force, they all knew how to provoke that
desire from an inadmissibly early age. Those girls at school, from the moment
they arrived on their first day, were already blushing with astonishment as
they sensed its latency. Senior schooling coincided with puberty; that was no
accident. By the second year they were learning how to control and direct its
sublime force. By the third year they were luxuriating in it, and after that
the apprenticeship to sexual power was over. It had all been tested out on
those poor-bastard adolescent boys, lagging behind in the maturity stakes but
with hormones boiling and bubbling and popping until they were hallucinating in
the classroom, like kids on spiked drinks at a teenage party. And all the
while, in the pink classroom clouds of unruly pheromones, the air whistling
with mismanaged signals, these poor dumb boy-
oxes
were expected to study!

Those
fourth-form girls, like Kelly - Kelly McGovern, with her bleeding-heart rose
motif and crisp white blouse, and provocative skirts, and immature legs
wobbling on heels. She knew how to stand an inch too close while he marked her
book; how to leave two buttons open at the top of her blouse so that in leaning
forward her white breast would quiver and how to glance back over her shoulder
with a nascent smile before returning to her seat, a smile acknowledging that
he'd dealt the correct or approved response, a smile suggesting, impossibly,
that she was manipulating him . . .

Yes, the
previous year there had been another teacher at the school, Mike Sands, able
and committed and with an eye to the hierarchical ladder, who had fallen that
way. Rumour of his affair with a fifth-former soon became an open secret. The
incredulity of the rest of the staff was translated into outright hostility,
and in the matter of a week he was transformed from popular and respected
colleague to staff-room pariah. The female staff seemed to take it personally,
speaking about it with bitterness, as if they had themselves been violated; the
male teachers added to that their contempt for his weakness, but their
occasional confused stabs at humour betrayed an agenda of hidden envy.

'The
poor man,' Katie had said when Tom told her about it. The poor man? Everyone
else had other words to describe him, but Katie was the only person from whom
he'd heard any expression of sympathy.

'Poor man? He's a shit,'
Tom had said. 'He abused his position. He took advantage. He deserves
everything he gets.' He'd heard his own voice keening.

'All he had to do,'
Katie said, 'was to leave her alone. That's all. But he couldn't. And he's
still falling.' Katie often surprised him by the things she said. 'It's sex,
isn't it? We can't deal with it. That's why our religions hate it so much. It
wants to save us from ourselves. If we don't have any certainties, we can't
trust ourselves.'

'It's a battle,' he'd
agreed.

'Is it?'

'Oh,
yes.' He'd tried to sound ironic, but she heard only the essential seriousness.

Mike Sands
offered his resignation before they fired him. Tom never heard whether he ever
got another teaching job after that. He was gone, but his name haunted the
staff room for a while. Then another term went by, and one morning Tom arrived
at school to find a set of preposterous accusations chalked on the blackboard.

It
wasn't true. It was all nonsense, and he'd sorted the matter, resolved it,
found the boy responsible and understood his obsessive jealousy over the
McGovern girl. He'd explained to the boy that he knew Kelly was experiencing a
teacher-crush. He'd been kind. He'd let the boy get off with a warning.

But he couldn't help
looking at Kelly in a new way. Almost literally, she seemed overnight to have
acquired an aura about her, a vividness, a golden light. Her attentions began
to distract him, even to disturb him. When she dawdled at the end of his
lessons, always the last one to leave, he couldn't help but notice how her
haversack, slung from her shoulders, seemed to
ruck
the hem of her skirt, offering an extra expanse of thigh as she left the room.
And how on closing the door behind her, she always glanced back, to register
his gaze.

Jesus, he'd
thought, she's fifteen years old and she's pulling my strings.

One day Tom
had been boring himself, teaching comparative religions at the end of a tiring
session, and Kelly had approached him with a question.

'Why don't
we do the Song of Songs?'

The other
students filtered out of the classroom. She'd asked him about the Song of Songs
and he hadn't got a flicker of an answer. 'Pardon?'

'We've done
all this about Hindus and Muslims and Buddhists. Why can't we do the Song of
Songs?'

'It's
not a religion, Kelly. It's a book of the Old Testament. A marriage song.' He
pretended to hunt through his desk drawers for something he'd mislaid, so that
he didn't have to meet her eyes.

'I
know. My sister's boyfriend is at college; and he told me it's too mature for
RE teachers.'

'He
would, wouldn't he?' He looked up. She flicked her copper-coloured hair and
moistened her pink lips with her tongue. It was a totally unselfconscious act.
The dull electric light shone yellowy on her upturned face and on her lips.
'Wait,' he said, getting out of his chair hurriedly. 'I'll get you a copy and you
can take it home and read it.'

His keys
trembled in his hand as he unlocked the stockroom door. His only thought was to
give her a copy and get her out of the classroom. He couldn't stand to be alone
with her. He couldn't stand it.

Inside the
stockroom he felt out of danger, yet knew all the time she was just the other
side of the door. He flicked on the light and cast his eyes along the rows of
obsolete text-books. He looked for something with suitably large print and a
dry commentary, preferably toned down by depleted modern language, suitable for
a fifteen-year-old siren with a crush on her R E teacher.

He was
reaching for a shelf when the door opened and she came inside. Gently, slowly,
she closed the door behind her. She stood with her back to him, holding the
door handle. He had a hand on the shelf.

 'What
are you doing?'

She let go
of the handle and turned from the door. Her legs were crossed at the ankles,
and her hands were clasped lightly in front of her thighs. Her eyes were cast
down.

'It's not a
good idea,' he said, 'for you to be in here.' It came out in a whisper.

'Why?'

'Because it doesn't look good.'

'Why not?'

'Please go, Kelly.'

'I don't think you want me to. I think you
like me.'

'Yes. But it would be better if you went.
Really.'

He
knew then that he'd already said far too much. He'd admitted everything. All
he'd had to say was 'Get out,' and he hadn't. Now he felt paralysed. It was
coming from her. She radiated sexual tension, infecting him, transmitting it to
him. His arms seized. His fists clenched. He could smell her breath on the air
in the tiny store cupboard. He could almost taste it, sweet with desire, sour
with fear.

All male schoolteachers,
he knew, had entertained this stockroom fantasy. Many would deny it; very few
had-been faced with it. She kept her eyes averted as Tom, still leaning against
the bookshelf rows of school-issue Bibles, swallowed hard and tried to control
the rushing noise in his ears. His eyes fell on the gentle swell of her breast
underneath the bleeding rose. Her breathing was short, and he realized her
terror matched his own. He understood that they were both out of control. Then,
for the first time since entering the stockroom, her eyes met his. If she
hadn't, if she'd kept her eyes averted, the moment might have passed and they
would have been saved from themselves; but instead she looked up, squinted at
him, gold light like tiny barbed hooks in her eyes, and his hands were on her
waist and his tongue was pressed inside her mouth. They kissed for a long time,
locked. She almost let herself become limp in his arms, until the paralysis
drained from them.

'This can't happen,' he said. 'I don't
love you.'

'It's all right.'

'It's not all right. It's not. It's all
wrong.'

It
was like trying to stop a train by waving from the side of the track. She
remained utterly passive, gazing into his eyes as he unbuttoned her skirt and
tugged it down. She gasped as he hooked his thumbs into the band of her tights
and pants and drew them down to her ankles.

They
heard the classroom door open. They froze. There were footsteps. Her unblinking
wide eyes gazed into his. Someone opened a desk drawer and closed it again.
More footsteps. The classroom door opened and closed again.

'Wait,'
he said. The keys were still hanging on the other side of the stockroom door.
He reached around for them and locked the door from the inside. He scattered a
pile of exercise books from the seat of an old armchair. Pressing her into the
chair, he pulled off her shoes and the indecent knot of tights and knickers at
her ankles. She fumbled at his trousers. He led her hand to his already
engorged cock. .She held it lightly, tenderly.

He was on fire. The
smell of her confused his senses. He could taste her mood. Her desire for him
was a clear, sweet bell. There was a smell from her, a smell that made him
think of a fiery balsam. He heard words from far off:
A garden enclosed is my
sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.

She
shuddered again as he touched a finger inside her. He was surprised to find how
moist she was, and he suspected she was not a virgin. 'God. God.'

'It's all
right,' she said. 'I've done this before. It's all right.'

Jesus, now
she was coaching him! He kissed her again, and then he unbuttoned her blouse,
releasing her girlish white breasts from the unnecessary bra, kissing each in
turn. His kisses poured down her belly. He dearly wanted to push his tongue
inside her, but he didn't know the depth of her experience, didn't want to
frighten her or do something that might repel her.