When he answered, Yulian’s voice was a man’s again. She hadn’t noticed the slow transition, but now she did.
Thick and dark, that voice, as he said, ‘I’ve read it. All girls of your age desire not to be innocent.’
His hand fell on her belly, lingered over her navel, slipped down and crept under the band of her knickers. She stopped him there, trapping his hand with her own. ‘No, Yulian. You can’t.’
‘Can’t?’ the word came in a gulp, choking. ‘Why?’
‘Because you’re right. I am innocent. But also because it’s the wrong time.’
‘Time?’ he was trembling again.
She pushed him away, sighed abruptly and said, ‘Oh, Yulian – I’m bleeding!’
‘Bleed – ?’ He rolled away from her, snatched himself to his feet. Startled, she stared at him standing there. He shivered as if in a fever.
‘Bleeding, yes,’ she said. ‘It’s perfectly natural, you know.’
There was no pallor in his face now: it was red with blood, burning like a drunkard’s face, with his eyes narrow slits dark as knife slashes. ‘Bleeding!’ this time he managed to choke the word out whole. He reached out his arms towards her, hands hooked like claws, and for a moment she thought he would attack her. She could see his nostrils flaring, a nervous tic tugging the corner of his mouth.
For the first time she felt afraid, felt something of his strangeness. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘It happens every month . . .’
His eyes opened up a little. Their pupils seemed flecked with scarlet. A trick of the light. ‘Ah! Ah – bleeding!’ he said, as though only just understanding her meaning. ‘Oh, yes . . .’ Then he reeled, turned away, went a little unsteadily down the steps and was gone. Then Helen had heard the puppy’s wild yelp of joy (it had been stopped by the steps, which it couldn’t climb)
and its whining and barking fading as it followed Yulian back to the house. And finally she started to breathe again.
‘Yulian!’ she’d called after him then. ‘Your sunglasses, your hat!’ But if he heard, he didn’t bother to answer.
She wasn’t able to find him for the rest of the day, but then she hadn’t really looked for him. And because she had her pride – and also because he had failed to seek her out – she hadn’t much bothered with him for the rest of their holiday. Perhaps it had been for the best; for she had been innocent, after all. She wouldn’t have known what to do, not two years ago.
But when she thought of him, she still remembered his hand burning on her flesh. And now, going back to Devon with the countryside speeding by outside the car, she found herself wondering if there was still straw in the hayloft . . .
George, too, had his secret thoughts about Yulian. Anne could say what she liked but she couldn’t change that. He was weird, that lad, and weird in several directions. It wasn’t only the creeping-Jesus aspect that irritated George, though certainly the youth’s furtive ways were annoying enough. But he was sick, too. Not mental, maybe not even sick in his body, just generally sick. To look at him sometimes, to catch him unawares with a side-glance, was to look at a cockroach surprised by a switched-on light, or a jellyfish steaming away, stranded on the beach when the tide goes out. You could almost sense something seething in him. But if it wasn’t mental or physical, and yet encompassed both, then what the hell was it?
Hard to explain. Maybe it was both mind and body -and soul too? Except George wasn’t much of a one for believing in souls. He didn’t disbelieve, but he would like
evidence. He’d probably be praying when he died, just in case, but until then . . .
As for what Anne had said about Yulian at school: well, it was true, as far as it went. He had taken all of his exams early, and passed every one of them, but that wasn’t why he’d left early. George had a draughtsman, Ian Jones, working for him in his London office, and Jones had a young son in the same school. Anne would hear none of it, of course not, but the stories had been wild. Yulian had ‘seduced’ a male teacher, a half-way-gone gay he’d somehow switched on. Once over the top, the fellow had apparently turned into a raver, trying to roger every male thing that moved. He’d blamed Yulian. That was one thing. And then: