The Pyramid by William Golding

broken, heavily secreting gargoyle—he had struck those weaker blows with his left hand across the other weals.
    I cannot tell how long I stared at her without seeing her, both of us motionless and silent. I was eighteen and so was she, and I think my first sound was some kind of a laugh, a laugh of sheer incredulity. Then I could see her again, eyes and lips stuck on a white face, Stilbourne out of focus below and beyond her. I laughed again, out of incompetence, feeling lost, as if I or someone had come to a gap, a nothingness where it was not just that the rules were unknown but that they were non-existent. A slice of life.
    Keeping her eyes on me, watching me from the back of her head under the motionless plates, Evie put one hand up to her hair and gave a laugh that did not rearrange her face. Then she was silent, still watching me eye to eye, and the blood burst into her face. It was no ordinary blush, glow, suffusion. It tightened the glistening skin, swelled and immobilized the face, seemed to hold her mouth open. She spoke hoarsely, defensively, yet as compulsively as she had blushed.
    “I was sorry for ’im.”
    I looked away from her, down at the town. Made brighter by the shade under the alders, it was full of colour, and placid. I looked at our wall, the bathroom window, the window of the dispensary, our little garden—and there were my parents, standing side by side on the grass. I could see how my father stood, looking down at a flower bed, while my mother bent in her active way from the waist and picked among the flowers. They were too far off for me to recognize them by anything but their surroundings and their movements, my father a dark grey patch, my mother a light grey one. All at once, I had a tremendous feeling of thereness and hereness, of separate worlds, they and Imogen, clean in that coloured picture; here, this object, on an earth that smelt of decay, with picked bones and natural cruelty—life’s lavatory.
    The object was still staring at me and her face was white again. We had made so little movement, so little noise, that a blackbird came picking over the humus. It only had one leg, and was making do, flirting its tail sideways to keep its balance.
    Evie knelt up, and the blackbird fluttered out of sight.
    “Olly—”
    “Yeah?”
    “You won’t—”
    “Won’t what?”
    She sagged on her arms, looking down at the earth. She glanced up again, biting her lower lip so that a tiny stain of crimson appeared on each incisor.
    “I’ll do anything. Anything you want.”
    My heart gave a heavy leap and my flesh stirred. They were down there, the two grey patches and she was up here, life’s necessary, unspeakable object. I stared curiously at my slave.
    “How long? I mean—when did it start?”
    “When I was fifteen—”
    Unbelievably, a faint smile appeared under the make up, a faint smile in her white cheeks as if she were remembering something shymaking but good.
    “—off and on.”
    I reached out my hand but she flinched away.
    “No. Not today—I—I couldn’t!”
    She got carefully to her feet. I addressed her firmly.
    “Tomorrow then, after surgery. I’ll be waiting. Up here.”
    She shook herself, braced herself; and was Evie again. She even contrived to exhale a bit, and smile lopsidedly. Then she picked a path through the undergrowth and disappeared.
    I stayed where I was, among the growth and the smells, and stared at Stilbourne, that framed picture hanging on some wall or other.
    *
    At supper that night, my mother announced a plan.
    “You could get yourself tea, couldn’t you, Father? For you and Olly? Or perhaps Olly could—”
    My father looked up.
    “What? Why? When?”
    My mother’s spectacles flashed.
    “There now! You’ve neither of you been listening to a word I’ve said!”
    My father sheepishly composed himself into an attitude of attention.
    “All right, Mother. I was thinking. Yes. What was it?”
    “And his mind’s miles away! I must