He knelt down and took the flimsy hoop, still warm from the girl’s head. Tracy raised the bottle of Drambuie to her mouth. A bubble of air slipped between her lips and the glass rim and rose slowly through the dense brown liquid. She held the bottle out to Steve. The boy shook his head.
‘Go on! You got to start sometime.’
He took the bottle and their fingers touched for a moment. He tilted it to his mouth, as she had done. The rim was wet, and when the liqueur trickled down his throat, sweet and hot and perfumed, he imagined that he was tasting her saliva. Her body was terrifyingly close to his. All he had to do was reach out and touch her.
‘Where are the others?’ he asked, handing back the bottle.
‘Out looking for a place to stay. Can’t stop here now, can we?’
Tracy’s was not a successful face, which was one reason why Steve liked it. Some faces were like television; there was nothing to do except sit and look at them. But Tracy’s was a d-i-y face. You needed to spend time on it, but it gave you a great sense of satisfaction and achievement. Without make-up, her features looked as raw, vulnerable and unglamorous to Steve as his own. He had never looked at her from so close before. He knew at once that it would be useless to try to hide anything from her. This came as a great relief.
Tracy pressed a button on the Walkman and music abruptly exploded inside Steve’s head. He watched as she started packing her clothes into crumpled plastic bags. The music made her every gesture seem special and significant, like a film. When the song was over, Steve took the earphones off.
‘When we leaving?’ he asked.
‘Later on. This place’ll be gone tomorrow. Funny, isn’t it?’
Although she was only a few yards away, Steve had the feeling that they were separated by an enormous distance.
‘Can I have a bit more of that stuff?’ he asked, to bring her back.
Tracy turned to him, grinning.
‘Can’t get enough once you get started, can you?’
She came and knelt beside him and they both drank. When Tracy started to get up again, she lost her balance and reached for the boy’s shoulder to steady herself. That pushed him over too, and they fell over together on the mattress. The next moment something wet and warm happened to Steve’s face. By the time he realized that Tracy was kissing him, she had finished. She leaned back, staring up at the ceiling. Her face was still only inches from his, yet this distance seemed even more achingly unbridgeable than the one which had separated them earlier. Miniature music leaked from the earphones abandoned on the mattress beside them, mixed in with the hollow booming of the wind in the chimney. Tracy’s hair had started to grow out from the roots again in its natural mousy colour, as though the spell that had temporarily transformed her into a glamorous witch was slowly wearing off.
‘So anyway, what’s this you’ve been getting up to?’ she asked.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Shopping for some old fucker and that.’
She groped for the bottle and had another swig.
‘Well, he can’t get out of the house,’ Steve explained.
‘What, crippled, is he?’
Steve shook his head, then tapped it with two fingers. ‘Bit mental. He lives in this big house, in this one room downstairs, all full of stuff. But he won’t go outside, see? Thinks somebody’s going to do him.’
‘Fuck.’
Tracy sounded impressed.
‘He won’t even open the door, only to me,’ Steve bragged. ‘I got to ring the bell in a special way, otherwise he won’t come.’
‘How do you mean, special?’
‘Like this.’
He tapped out the rhythm on the floor. Tracy yawned.
‘Sounds a right loony.’
She lay staring up at the ceiling for a while. Then she rolled up and leaned over the boy, flicking her tongue around the whorls of his ear. Steve started and quivered in her grasp, moaning with surprise and pleasure. His throat was dry and his heart pounding. He wished that this had never started, and that it would never end. He twisted round to face her, reached out and placed his hands on her ribs. He could feel the underside of her breasts pressing against the base of his thumbs. This was just as he had imagined it in the stories he used to tell himself: the stotters gone, Tracy come to him, the warmth and the cuddles. Was it possible to make things happen by imagining them, by telling stories about them?
‘So where does he keep it all?’ Tracy asked, putting the earphones back on her head and adjusting the volume. Steve blinked at her.
‘What?’
There was a long pause before she answered.
‘The money he gives you for the shopping and that. If he don’t ever go out, he must have it stashed away somewhere.’
Steve felt it would be a shame to ruin the good impression he seemed to be making by admitting that he didn’t know the answer to this question.
‘It’s in this big trunk upstairs,’ he said, remembering his improved version of the old man’s story.
‘Get out,’ Tracy murmured.
Oddly enough, the fact that Steve knew his story wasn’t true only increased his resentment at not being believed.
‘It is! I’ve been up there! I’ve seen it! There’s this old trunk full of gold and jewels and stuff, in a big room up at the top of the house.’
Tracy said nothing. Her eyes were closed and her body twitched in time to a music only she could hear. Steve assumed that she had already forgotten what they had been talking about. He had grown used to the fact that the stotters’ attention span lasted only a few moments.
‘Where the fuck those wankers got to?’ she remarked at last, turning off the Walkman. ‘We got to get out of here, find somewhere to live! They’ll pull this place down around us if we stay.’
Mistaking this for a joke, Steve laughed. Tracy twisted indignantly out of his grasp and sat up.
‘They fucking
Steve felt as though half his body had been torn away. He had lost her. But how could he have guessed that she would still be worrying about things like that after what had just happened? Couldn’t she feel the amazing power generated by their closeness, the energy that set the air between them humming and crackling like high- voltage electricity? This stuff too, he sensed, could light and heat your life, and kill you.
‘Here, what about this old geezer?’ Tracy demanded suddenly. ‘We could stay there! Where’s he live?’
Steve didn’t know what to say. What she was suggesting was unthinkable, of course, out of the question. But how could he explain that?
‘Where’s he live?’ Tracy repeated urgently.
Steve shrugged.
‘Long way off.’
‘Where?’
‘Other side of the main road.’
‘By the Esso?’
‘Other way.’
‘What, by Tesco’s?’
‘You know the park? Round there.’
‘That’s where Debbie lives!’ the girl exclaimed triumphantly. ‘She’d be just round the corner.’
‘Who’s Debbie?’
‘Paxton Grove, that’s where Debbie lives, her and the baby. It’s all council, most of it. Is that it?’
‘Sort of.’
‘What do you mean, sort of? Don’t you even know the name of the street?’
