Dark Places Read Free

under her arms, her belly. ‘Albion, stop, I cannot bear it!’ she shrieked, and I heard the passion in her voice that made a lie of her words, and I would not have thought of stopping until the tears ran down her red blotched face, and her voice became reedy. Sated, crazed with pleasure, she sat doubled up over her crumpled pinafore, breathing hard, hunched over on her own pleasure.
    â€˜You love it, Kits,’ I whispered into her hot red ear. ‘You love it more than anything.’ Kristabel would shake her head—‘No, no, no’—and I would laugh at her game of pretending to hate it, and tickle more if I had energy to spare. She, the wanton, gasping and crying out, arching and writhing under my hands: it was her pleasantry to tell me it was no pleasure.

Two
    THERE WAS A particular smell of school that made my heart sink and my brain go slow as soon as I smelled it, of many boys packed together, of chalk, of forgotten food in the backs of desks: a smell of extinguishment. It was one of the top schools, as we were forever being reminded, and our fathers paid some of the top fees, but I could not seem to make the most of my advantages , as I was always being urged to do.
    How I envied the less blessed boys, at the despised government school: they said haitch when they meant aitch , and grasped their dinner-forks like spears. But they were not sent away three times a year to live among cold-eyed strangers. No amount of grammar, no number of gentlemanly ways with knife and fork, could be worth the dormitory, the chilly sharp edges on everything, the bells cutting the day up into bits, and the way there was no escape, for day after dreary day.
    Poor Mother did her best: in the holidays I gorged, and her cakes followed me to school: thick fruitcakes with paper around them, that I hoarded in my locker, and gobbled under the gaze of other boys whose mothers did not think to send them cake, and who did not warm to me more because I received cakes from home, even on those occasions when I handed slices out all round: they took the cake, but I was still Albion whom no one liked much.
    Father, although such a slapper of shoulders, and such a mocking poker of fat, believed that a boy should not be kept short, so there were plenty of humbugs and cream buns from the sweetshop across from the headmaster’s house. It was a comfort, among such a smell of chalk and of too many years of boiled potatoes in the air, to cram my mouth full of something sweet and crunch it, so that I could not hear the shouts and cries of boys developing team spirit out in the playground, and could imagine myself somewhere else altogether, somewhere warmer and lavender-scented. They were like a promise that home was still there, and that I would be returning to it before too long.
    The masters were mostly dust-coloured ageless men billowing along briskly in tattered gowns of which they were proud, with a vague way with boys such as myself who were neither bad nor good, neither quick nor slow, but simply the pudding-face in the third row, who could never remember how to find a square root no matter how many times he was told.
    There was another type of master, but I feared them even more than the ablative-construing and square-root querying ones: these were robust young ones, who had been seniors themselves only a few years before, who bullied us around outside, devising from week to week another way of making us stumble across paddocks, sweating our way over fences and down the sides of gullies, and generally suffering in various manly ways.
    These dreadful cross-country torments were considered suitable for the boys with chests , and so was a little slow cricket, but we were let off the worst of it, and did not have to mill around in mud trying to kick a slimy ball. But we still had to stand watching the ones who did, and pretend enthusiasm, and were despised as well, for being girly , not up to any rough-and-tumble.
    Nights were