Dark Places Read Free Page A

the worst; the days were not much fun, but at least no one gave you time to think, or to feel. I lay in my bed, hearing Chester Junior snuffling in his sleep beside me, and some other boy having a dream about his dog: ‘Fetch! Go fetch, Blackie!’
    I lay under the coarse cold sheet, with no possibility of arms around me, and felt a fear like no other, a fear that squeezed cold tears out from under my tight-shut eyelids. ‘I cannot bear it, I cannot,’ I tried to tell that fear, but it would not leave me, but froze my heart with its emptiness, left me sucked dry and shivering, a dead leaf in the wind. I lay very still and tried to resist that nagging fear, like a flow of cold water, that was never far from me, the fear that this was what life was, for ever and ever until you died: being locked up within yourself, all alone, having to pretend all the time, every minute, that you were absolutely perfectly all right.
    In fact, I was far from being all right. I was ashamed of my large-knuckled red hands, ashamed of the way my voice was by turns squeaky and rumbling, ashamed of the blemishes on my face which no amount of scrubbing seemed to remove: I loathed my coarse boy’s body and my coarse boy’s clumsiness.
    More than anything that could be seen, though, I was ashamed of certain alarming mysteries of which I dared speak to no one. What were those dreams from which I awoke stifling and gasping, with my nightshirt strangely soiled? And what went on within my trousers at times, so that they were caused to bulge out as if there were a grapefruit in there?
    I knew that I knew nothing, but there were other boys, bold boys with cold eyes, who knew. There was Morrison, for example. He was a boy none of us would have invited home for the holidays, for he tended to say anythink when excited, and it was rumoured that his father had made his pile in tallow. It was obvious that Morrison had not had as sheltered an upbringing as the rest of us: Morrison was one of the knowing type of boy.
    We gathered around Morrison in the glum corner behind the bike-shed, where a sharp smell of burning rubbish always filled the air from the incinerator smouldering there, and Morrison told us what he knew about females.
    Their titties hung down to their waists, he said, so they had to strap them up, and he brought an engraving of some primitive wrinkled female in Africa to prove it. Some, he assured us, had dugs so long they could toss them over their shoulders or knot them together. Down there , Morrison told us, whispering hoarsely so we all had to strain forward to hear, women had a gaping slit like a mouth. There was nothing there, he said, only a lack, a gap, a hole where any proper normal person had a thing you could hold in your hand. What was more, the lips of this unimaginable mouth drooped: ‘I have seen the lips hang down just about to their knees,’ Morrison claimed. ‘The old ones, you know, the old ones like your Mums.’
    There was silence behind the bike-shed at this, as each boy thought of his mother and this frightful hidden thing about her. Morrison sniffed—he was an adenoidal boy who sniffed day and night, winter and summer, and even one of the best schools had not succeeded in getting him to use his handkerchief—Morrison did not care, for his mother had died when he was little, but we other boys would never look at our mothers with the same eyes again.
    â€˜What’s the difference between the Jenolan Caves and an old woman?’ he asked, but spared us trying to answer: ‘The Town Hall wouldn’t fit in Jenolan Caves!’ He told us of the way women could take hold of a man’s organ with this hole and refuse to let go, strangling a man’s manhood while he struggled in her grip. And were there teeth? Listening to Morrison, we were not quite sure. I thought of my sister, Kristabel of the mocking eyes, and was struck with the likelihood of what Morrison was telling us.