She was just outside Number Eighty-two. It was a house her mother had warned her to keep clear of. A family of Asians lived on the ground floor-sleeping twelve to a bed, or so Mrs. Lennox had told Sharon’s mother-in conditions of criminal squalor. But despite its reputation, Number Eighty-two had been a disappointment all summer: until today. Today Sharon had seen peculiar comings and goings at the house. Some people had arrived in a big car and taken a sick-looking woman away with them. And now, as she idled at the hopscotch game, there was somebody at one of the middle floor windows, a big, shadowy figure, and he was beckoning to her.
Sharon was ten. It would be a year before her first period, and though she had an inkling of the matter between men and women from her half-sister, she thought it a ridiculous palaver. The boys who played football in the street were foulmouthed, grubby creatures; she could scarcely imagine ever pining for their affections.
But the alluring figure at the window was a male, and it found something in Sharon; it turned over a rock. Beneath were the first stirrings of lives that weren’t quite ready for the sun. They wriggled; they made her thin legs itch. It was to stop that itch that she disobeyed every prohibition on Number Eighty-two and slipped into the house when next the front door was opened, and up to where she knew the stranger to be.
“Hello?” she said, standing on the landing outside the room.
“You can come in,” the man said.
Sharon had never smelled death before, but she knew it instinctively: introductions were superfluous. She stood in the doorway and peered at the man. She could still run if she wanted to, she knew that too. She was made yet safer by the fact that he was tied to the bed. This she could see, though the room was dark. Her inquisitive mind found nothing odd in this; adults played games, the way children did.
“Put on the light,” the man suggested. She reached up for the switch beside the door and turned it on. The weak bulb lit the prisoner strangely; by it he looked sicker than anybody Sharon had ever set eyes on. He had obviously dragged the bed across the room to the window, and in so doing the ropes that tied him had bitten into his gray skin, so that shiny brown fluids-not quite like blood-covered his hands and trousers, and spattered the floor at his feet. Black blotches made his face, which was also shiny, piebald.
“Hello,” he said. His voice was warped, as though he was speaking out of a cheap radio. Its weirdness amused her.
“Hello,” she said back.
He gave her a lopsided grin, and the bulb caught the wetness of his eyes, which were so deep in his head she could scarcely make them out. But when they moved, as they did now, the skin around them fluttered.
“I’m sorry to call you away from your games,” he said.
She dawdled in the door, not quite certain whether to go or stay. “I shouldn’t really be here,” she teased.
“Oh . . .” he said, rolling his eyes up until all the whites showed. “Please don’t go.”
She thought he looked comical with his jacket all stained and his eyes rolling. “If Marilyn found out I’d been here-”
“Your sister, is that?”
“My mother. She’d hit me.”
The man looked doleful. “She shouldn’t do that,” he said.
“Well, she does.”
“That’s shameful,” he replied mournfully.
“Oh, she won’t find out,” Sharon reassured him. The man was more distressed by her talk of a beating than she’d intended. “Nobody knows I’m here.”
“Good,” he said. “I wouldn’t want any harm to come to you on my account.”
“Why are you all tied up?” she inquired. “Is it a game?”
“Yes. That’s all it is. Tell me, what’s your name?”
“Sharon.”
“You’re quite right, Sharon; it’s a game. Only I don’t want to play anymore. It’s started to hurt me. You can see.”
He raised his hands as far as he could, to show how the bindings bit. A diet of flies, disrupted from their laying, buzzed about his head.