Love in Revolution Page 5

  I knew that if I moved, I’d hit her. If I hit her, I’d be in even more trouble. I swung my hand back.

  Then, before I had time to change my mind, I turned on my heel and ran through the school gates, out into the street.

  I kept on running, with my satchel bouncing on my back and the sweat starting to run down my face. I wiped my cheek and the smear of moisture that came off on my hand was dark grey. I was shaking. The taste of my breakfast came back into my throat, mixed with something bitter, like lemons.

  It was so hot. I almost turned on to the high street, from habit, and caught myself just in time. I didn’t want anyone to see me, not when I should’ve been at school. Instead I went back the way I’d come and ducked into an alleyway. It was cool in the shadows between garden walls. I kept running.

  And came out into the square in front of the church, in bright sunlight, so suddenly I was dazzled. The church was on my left, and to my right was the pello wall. I looked down and saw that I was standing on one of the painted lines.

  There were a couple of old men outside the bar, but no one else. Everything was quiet.

  I reached out and touched the pello wall with my hand, tracing the mortar between the stones. My fingers left faint inky traces. Then I sat down, with my back against the wall and my knees up, and after a while I started to cry.

  I don’t know how long I was there, but what made me stop crying, in the end, was the feeling that someone was watching me.

  I looked up. My eyes stung in the light, and I felt the last drops of water slide down my face. My hands, where I’d been covering my face, were wet, the lines on my palms picked out in black.

  At first I thought I’d been imagining it. The space in front of me was empty. I turned my head, looking from side to side. I was being watched; I could sense it, like something crawling up my spine.

  There was a brief movement in the shadows in the doorway of the church.

  Skizi.

  When she saw me looking she raised her arm and waved at me. There was something odd about the gesture, something a bit clumsy, as though she’d never done it before. Then she dropped back into a relaxed, balanced stillness, as if she was made of the same stone as the church. I wasn’t surprised I hadn’t seen her standing there. She was like a hunter, waiting.

  I stood up, wiped my face again and walked towards her. She had her hands in her pockets, like a boy. She met my gaze, as if no one had ever told her it was rude to stare, and only smiled when I got close.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’ Her tone was mocking, and she looked me up and down, taking in my crimson, ink-stained uniform. I felt my cheeks flare.

  ‘Shouldn’t you?’

  She grinned at me. I sniffed, squelchily, and shuffled my feet. I felt like a chocolate bar left in the sun, all sticky and oozing.

  ‘Are you being naughty?’ she said. ‘Did you escape?’

  As if rules were inherently amusing, I thought; like banana skins, left on the pavement. Things that happened to other people. I said, ‘Have you been watching me all along?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I wanted to tell her to go away, that it was none of her business, and what did she know about anything anyway? But I found myself saying, ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, but with a thoughtful edge to her voice, as if she was taking the question seriously, at least. She paused. ‘I watch lots of people. But you’re different. You notice I’m there.’

  I sniffed again, swallowing. My breath kept catching and snagging in my throat, like a stocking laddering itself.

  ‘I suppose I wanted you to notice me,’ she said, without any particular inflection. ‘It’s nice. It makes me feel like a person.’

  I laughed, without meaning to. It dislodged a fleck of snot from my nose. I wiped my face again, hurriedly, but Skizi didn’t seem to register it.

  She said, ‘Do you know you’ve got black stuff all over you?’

  ‘Black stuff? As if someone’s poured a bottle of ink over me?’ I said. ‘No, actually it had completely escaped my attention.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Well, you have. Look, on your skirt. And your face –’

  I laughed again, more easily. Skizi looked blank and narrowed her eyes at me. It occurred to me, with a strange shock, that maybe she didn’t know what sarcasm was.

  ‘Never mind,’ I said. I felt better, as if the world was suddenly bearable again. A faint breeze cooled the back of my neck. I was hungry. If I hurried, I could make it back to school in time for English, and then maybe no one would think to tell Mama I’d missed the first lesson . . . I said, ‘Listen, I have to go, but –’ I stopped. I wanted to thank her: but what for? For watching me? For being there? For making the world all right again? It would sound so stupid.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Back to school. I have to. I mean . . .’

  ‘Do you? Why?’

  I looked at her, and for the first time she moved into the sunlight, so the golden skin over her cheekbones shone. I wondered, distantly, how I’d ever thought Ana Himyana was beautiful. Skizi’s hair was matted, falling over her forehead in thick strands of tawny brown, and I wanted to touch it. The neck of her shirt was open and outlined in grime and the dent at the base of her neck was gleaming with moisture.

  ‘Because . . .’ I said, and then laughed. Because of what Mama would say. Because it was the right thing to do. Because of the rules. I said, ‘No, you’re right. No reason.’

  We looked at each other, and the world seemed to turn a page: from dense black-and-white to an illustration, picked out in ochre and gold and red.

  Skizi said, ‘Do you want to come with me somewhere?’

  I blinked, blocking out the square and the sky. When I let them back in they were still there: still dazzling, still ruleless.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘All right. I’ll come with you.’

  She tipped her head back and grinned at me. With her hands in her pockets she looked like a boy again. ‘Aren’t you going to ask where?’

  ‘Would you tell me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So I won’t ask,’ I said.

  Her grin got wider. She had crooked teeth, and I could see a gap near the back where a molar was missing. She took hold of my wrist, as if it belonged to her, and pulled me out of the shade of the church. I stumbled after her, my satchel bouncing. We ran through the alleyway, left and then right, towards the river, but Skizi dragged me round another corner before we got to the bridge, through a network of passages I didn’t know. Then, in a blaze of heat, we came out into the open fields beyond the last house. The path up the hill was wide and baked hard and difficult to walk on in my school shoes. We slowed down, but Skizi kept her grip on my wrist, as if she’d forgotten about it.

  I was thirsty. I thought of the rust-tasting, warmish water that came out of the taps at school, and almost wished I was there. I swallowed, and Skizi glanced at me. She said, ‘Not far now,’ laughing at me, as if she’d heard what I was thinking. She pointed.

  In a dip on the slope was a hut, with the roof fallen in at one end and the walls crumbling at the corners. There was a sparse, sad-looking olive tree growing nearby. The land around the hut was deep with thin, dry grass and bits of stone. The Ibarras owned it, but they never bothered to come up the hill.

  Skizi let go of my wrist and ran the last few metres towards the hut. She ducked under the lowest branches of the mangy olive tree and swung herself round the door, which was wedged a little way open. I stood in the sun, not sure whether to follow her or stay where I was. After a few moments she came out again, with something in her hands; but she walked through the undergrowth to the other side of the hut, out of sight, without even looking at me. I waited. Up here there was a breeze, and the grass sighed like the sea. The sky was deep blue, almost turquoise.

  She came back into sight and made her way towards me, picking her way carefully round t
he stones as if she didn’t want to risk falling over. She held out her hands. She was holding a little handle-less teacup, filled with water. I took it, drank half, and gave it back. It was pretty, even though it was broken: thin, delicate china, with a border of cobalt and gold. When Skizi saw I’d left her some water, she smiled and drank it, raising the cup to me in a kind of toast.

  I said, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘There’s a well, just behind the hut,’ she said. ‘The water’s cool, even in summer.’

  ‘Do you live here?’

  She shrugged, but it wasn’t an answer. Without a word, she went into the hut again, shoving at the door with her shoulder. I waited until she looked round, and then saw from her expression that she was expecting me to follow her.

  In the first darkness, after the sunlight outside, I couldn’t see anything. There was just a strange, inside-outside smell of dust and crumbling stone and sheets that had been slept in for too long. Then, as my eyes adjusted, I saw that the hut was bigger than it looked from outside, and most of it was intact, apart from the roof. The floor was stone, and the walls were whitewashed, although they were peeling and stained with great irregular patches of soot. At the far end, under the surviving roof, there was a rectangular nest of blankets, and a few things set out neatly on a board balanced on two old tins. So she did live here; or at least sleep here sometimes.

  She was watching me through the dimness, as if she cared what I thought of it.

  I said, ‘Doesn’t it get cold, at ni–’

  I stopped, and took a step forward, staring at the wall. I’d thought they were stains, or burn marks, places where the whitewash had come off or gone black; but they weren’t. They were drawings.

  She must have done them with a stick of charcoal. They were rough, only sketches, some of them just a few lines. But they were . . . I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry again. Angel Corazon, darting across the pello court. The Bull, swinging his hand back like a man about to hit his wife. Teddy, holding his camera, trying to keep score and frowning with the effort.

  And me. It made me rock backwards, laughing with surprise. My own face, round and heavy-eyebrowed, recognisable at a glance but with a kind of beauty that I knew I didn’t have in real life. Martin, only a blurred shape behind me, but still – clearly – Martin . . .

  I put my hand up, wanting to touch one of the drawings, and then stopped myself. I still had ink on my fingers, but it wasn’t just that. I took a deep breath and stared, taking in the details. The flaking whitewash and the cracks on the surface of the wall showed through the charcoal, distorting the shape of Martin’s eye, leaving a dark patch on my neck like a scar.

  I said, ‘Did you . . . ?’

  Skizi nodded, once, her eyes on my face as if I’d caught her doing something illegal.

  ‘They’re beautiful.’

  She reached out and pressed the palm of her hand against the nearest picture.

  ‘Really,’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen anything like them.’

  There was a flash of something in her face, too fast for me to identify it, and then she turned away, hunching her shoulders and pushing her hands into her pockets. Her shirt rode up, showing a glimpse of her back; it glinted gold where a stray shaft of sunlight caught it. She said, ‘Thanks.’

  There was a silence. The breeze whistled and sang quietly in the roof.

  I took a deep breath, and let it out again slowly. ‘This man here, the one with the camera . . .’

  ‘The Englishman,’ she said, without turning round.

  ‘Yes. He . . . My brother wrote . . . He’s the editor of the Clarion and he published an article, saying that the Bull was bourgeois and –’

  ‘What does that mean? Bourgeois?’

  ‘Um . . . middle class and despicable,’ I said, and almost laughed, because how was I supposed to explain class struggle to a Zikindi? ‘It doesn’t matter, exactly . . . But the article was all in favour of overturning the old order, and starting a revolution, and all that, anyway, and – last night, the police came and they took him – they took Teddy away. They arrested him.’

  Skizi sat down on the makeshift bed, crossing her legs, and looked at me, listening.

  ‘It was probably my brother – Leon, he was there on Sunday, he wears glasses –’

  Without a word she nodded at another drawing on the far wall, one I hadn’t noticed: Leon, shirtless, his fist raised in the Communist salute.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was probably him who wrote the article. It’s his fault that Teddy got taken away.’

  There was another, longer silence: as if she was waiting, patiently, for me to get to the point.

  ‘He wears paisley pyjamas,’ I said. ‘Teddy does. They took him away in –’ For heaven’s sake, it was so stupid, to think of that . . . I tried to laugh and heard my voice crack. I couldn’t go on speaking.

  There was a movement behind me, and I felt warmish air on the back of my neck; but I had my hands over my face, pressing, as if I could push the tears back into my eyeballs. I felt the salt water run into my mouth.

  And then there were warm hands on my shoulders, so light I only knew they were there because of the sudden heat on my skin, making it prickle under my stiff school shirt. Skizi was standing behind me, very close. I could smell dust, and grass, and something spicy, like tar or woodsmoke.

  ‘Please stop crying,’ she said.

  I felt the tears dry up, as though the warmth of her hands had got into my body, burning the water away. But Skizi didn’t move.

  There was silence behind me: a listening, open silence.

  I said, swallowing, ‘It’s not fair. There are all these rules, and if you break them you get punished. But the rules aren’t fair.’

  I could imagine Skizi’s expression, the look that said she didn’t play by the rules, she was Zikindi, she was outside all that. For a second I felt pure, blazing envy, eclipsing everything else.

  Then I turned round. She took a step back, but she stayed facing me, only a little way away. In the sunlight coming from the fallen-in roof, one of her eyes was pale jade green; the other, on the shaded side of her face, was like slate. We stood there, looking at each other, until I wasn’t sure if I’d said something I didn’t mean to.

  Her eyes creased at the corners, although she didn’t exactly smile. She said, ‘Don’t worry about the rules,’ and glanced sideways, at the picture of Angel. I thought about him playing – perfectly, fluking every shot, except that you couldn’t fluke every shot . . . She’d told him not to play by the rules either. And then he’d won.

  She put her hand out. My plait had fallen over one shoulder, and she ran a finger down the strands of hair. She did it gently, but the nerves in my scalp sang with electricity.

  Then, suddenly, she grinned. ‘I’m hungry,’ she said, reaching for my satchel. ‘Do you have a packed lunch?’

  We sat in the sun to eat, bathing our feet in a trough of well-water. I wriggled my toes and compared my bare feet to Skizi’s (darker, cleaner, uglier). We ate my sandwiches and drank my orange squash, and Skizi unwrapped my chocolate biscuit and ate all of it before I noticed.

  Then we lay back. The sun was directly overhead, heating my eyelids and cheeks as though I was blushing. I heard Skizi rooting in my satchel, but we’d eaten everything, and after a while she gave up. She lay down next to me, and her sleeve brushed mine. I could smell her, grassy and spicy, like a plant.

  I thought about the pictures on the walls of the hut – Angel, Leon, Teddy – and in my mind’s eye they began to move, until I was watching Angel play the Bull all over again, except this time I was the referee, and I could make up the rules as I went . . . And I was just on the edge of realising something, of answering my own question . . .

  I woke up, with a jerk. I opened my eyes and Skizi was there, watching me.

  For a moment, heavy with sleep, I thought I knew what my dream had been telling me. Skizi’s face was dim, her head outlined by the sun, and the shadow gave a kind of sof
tness to her features, the gold darkened to bronze, her eyes the colour of moss. A spike of hair hung over her forehead. Her mouth was wet. Something turned over in my stomach. I stayed still, and so did she.

  Then I felt a kind of panic wash over me, the way I had before, with Ana: if I let myself, I’d do something stupid . . .

  I stumbled to my feet, grabbed my satchel and my shoes and socks and jumper, and struggled away down the rutted path, not looking back. All the time I was expecting her to call after me, or at least ask me where I was going; but she didn’t.

  I stopped after a little while to put my shoes back on. I looked back, but she’d gone inside the hut, or out of sight.

  So I must have been imagining it, when I thought I heard her laugh.

  Four

  I got back to my form room just as the register was being called for afternoon school. I’d never lied to anyone at school before, but it was easier than I’d thought to say I’d been ill; Sister David only raised an eyebrow and told me to get a glass of water if I felt faint.

  I went through the rest of the day in a kind of dream, half ashamed and half excited. I was furious with myself, and strangely shaken, as if I’d come close to some kind of accident; but there was still some magic clinging to everything. The whole world was tinted gold, blazing with sunlight at the edges. After the final bell had gone, Miren followed me through the gates, juggling her exercise books because I hadn’t waited for her to put them into her satchel. She said, ‘So where did you go? Why won’t you talk about it? Is it a secret?’

  I thought about what she’d say if I told her, the look that she’d have on her face when she said, ‘Zikindi?’ and then, ‘But . . . why?’ And when I couldn’t explain, she’d draw away, as if I was infectious, and she’d never be quite the same again.

  I said, ‘No, it’s not a secret, Miren. I just went and sat in the shade because I felt sick.’

  ‘And you know you’ve got something black all down your front, don’t you? And Ana Himyana was looking at you all the way through algebra –’