Snodgrass and Other Illusions - By Ian R. MacLeod Page 0,163
have noticed the wildness in her eyes beneath the clothes, the makeup. Rather than dodge the cars across the road, they waited for a big gap and walked slowly, sedately. The lights of Albee’s glowed out greet them. They opened the door to grownup laugher, the smell of smoke and grownup sweat. People nodded and smiled, they moved to let them through. Albee grinned at them from the bar, eager to please the way the teachers were at school when the headmaster came unexpectedly into class. He said Good Evening Sir and What’ll It Be? Bobby heard his own voice say something calm and easy in reply. He raked a stool back for May and she sat down, tucking her dress neatly under her thighs. He glanced around as drinks were served, half expecting the other grownups to float up from their chairs, to begin to fly. They’d been here after school a hundred times, but this was a different world.
It was the same on a dozen other nights, whenever they hit on an excuse that they had the nerve to use on their unquestioning parents. Albee’s, they found, was much further from the true heart of the grownup world than they’d imagined. They found hotel bars where real fountains tinkled and the drinks were served chilled on paper coasters that stuck to the bottom of the glass. There were loud pubs where you could hardly stand for the yellow-lit crush and getting served was an evening’s endeavour. There were restaurants where you were offered bowls brimming with crackers and salted nuts just to sit and read the crisply printed menus and say Well Thanks, But It Doesn’t Look As Though Our Friends Are Coming And The Baby Sitter You Know…Places they had seen day in and day out through their whole lives were changed by the darkness, the hot charge of car fumes, buzzing street lights, glittering smiles, the smell of perfume, changed beyond recognition to whispering palaces of crystal and velvet.
After changing at May’s house back into his sweatshirt and sneakers, Bobby would come home late, creeping down the hall in the bizarre ritual of pretending not to disturb his parents, whom he was certain would be listening open-eyed in the darkness from the first unavoidable creak of the front door. In the kitchen, he checked for new bottles of bitter milk. By the light of the open fridge door, he tipped the fluid down the sink, chased it away with a quick turn of the hot tap—which was quieter that the cold—and replaced it with a fresh mixture of spirit vinegar, lemon juice, milk and flour.
The summer holidays came. Bobby and May spent all their time together, evenings and days. Lying naked in the woods on the soft prickle of dry leaves, looking up at the green latticed sky. Bobby reached again towards May. He ran his hand down the curve of her belly. It was soft and sweet and hard, like an apple. Her breath quickened. He rolled onto his side, lowered his head to lick at her breasts. More than ever before, her nipples swelled amazingly to his tongue. But after a moment her back stiffened.
“Just kiss me here,” she said, “my mouth,” gently cupping his head in her hands and drawing it up. “Don’t suck at me today Bobby. I feel too tender.”
Bobby acquiesced to the wonderful sense of her around him, filling the sky and the woods. She’d been sensitive about some of the things he did before, often complaining about tenderness and pain a few days before she started her bleeding. But the bleeding hadn’t happened for weeks, months.
They still went out some nights, visiting the grownup places, living their unbelievable lie. Sometimes as he left the house, or coming back late with his head spinning from the drink and the things they’d done, Bobby would look up and see Mum’s face pale at the bedroom window. But he said nothing. And nothing was ever said. It was an elaborate dance, back to back, Mum and Dad displaying no knowledge or denial, each moment at the kitchen table and the rare occasions when he shared the lounge passing without question. A deception without deceit.
The places they went to changed. From the smart rooms lapped with deep carpets and chrome they glided on a downward flight path through urine-reeking doorways. This was where the young grownups went, people they recognised as kids from assembly at school just a few years before. Bars where