Repeat It Today With Tears by Anne Peile Page B

intently as the short man that they called Diddy Dave demonstrated a balancing trick with drinking glasses and beer mats.
    ‘I don’t know, probably not.’
    ‘Look, you try and slide out to your room. I’ll see if I can persuade this lot to call it a night.’
    ‘Thomas,’ Ron called loudly, ‘don’t you go chatting up that right little raver over there, you know your mum wouldn’t like it.’ Then he protruded his lips into a pout and bent one hand over at the wrist in a gesture which was supposed to indicate effeminacy.
    ‘Go on,’ said Tommy to me.
    I managed to leave the gathering without attracting comment. In my room I put my pillow at the foot of the bed so that I could sleep by the open window and let the fresh night air lift the smoke smell out of my hair. Before I settled I made myself review in my head the component parts of the kidneys, lungs, heart and inner ear. Then, only when I was sure that I could repeat each feature without faltering, I allowed myself to think of Jack. How I had learned that when I was above him, even by the minutest of movements I could affect him. I was fascinated to see myself causing these changes in his man’s face, watchingfor it to tighten and grimace and for him to beseech me, on and on, until he had convulsed out all he had into me and his expression became smoothed again and he smiled for me. I believed then that it was all the power that I should ever need.
    Next day, in the long, hushed examination hall, I made a good job of the biology paper. I took far more care with diagrams and drawings now that I had sat for hours on the bed watching Jack at work. I saw him conjure small and meticulous acts of magic as he made a story appear upon the blank white page. His infinite patience and the steady, absorbed breathing intensified the quiet of the room, as did the stillness of the cat, sitting sentinel at his side. I thought that one day he would make a picture of himself at the table with the cat and in that picture he made he would be working upon the picture of himself, at the table with the cat.
    On the way to Chelsea the bus stopped at Battersea Garage to change drivers. I looked over the road at the dark prison yard walls of the Morgan Crucibles factory on the riverside. The widower father of a girl in my class had worked there but in the Christmas term he had died. The girl Joanne said that it was because of him being widowed, that he could not bear her mother being gone and so he had just given up, he had died of a broken heart. I found it most affecting; I told my mother but she said that it was impossible. ‘Nonsense, there’s no such thing as dying of a broken heart.’
    In bed that night my father made a remark that was supposed to be flippant and light-hearted but it filled me with such panic and terror that I thought I should lose my mind. It happened because I had perfected ways of touching him with such gentleness that when I began it he could hardly tell that my fingers were there at all. His body would incline to me as though by tropism but I would make him wait and keep my touchings assoft as breath. This prolongation could cause him to cry out in sounds that were quite primeval. If I had heard them anywhere else, merely as a bystander, I think I would probably have been afraid. Then, as he gave in and I had the warm stuff running out between my fingers I would kiss him as if our mouths were glued together. Afterwards he made the remark that so terrified me. He said, ‘Sometimes, with you, I think I must have died and gone to Heaven.’
    Perhaps I was overwrought from the exams. I sat up in the bed and the terror and alarm that seized me prevented me from breathing properly. My mother had told me that he was dead and for years I had believed it to be so. Then I had got him back. Now that he himself spoke of it, and it was presented to me again, I could see only the colour red, the inside eyelid colour and the ambulance blanket scarlet. And I could hear