Young and Lovely
He was 29, old enough to know better, and decided that she was 17, old enough to get away with it. Whatever her age, she was young and lovely and she brought books to the dinner table. The dining room was where he’d first noticed her, and the books where the obsession began.
She had a different one every day. She was a fast reader, and a classy one. He’d watched her eyes sift through Capote and Byron already, and he’d seen her clutching a collection of Akhmatova at breakfast. Where her younger brother dabbled in testing electronic devices for entertainment, and Holly-and-Jade the inseparable harpies screeched interminably for his attention, she with her books was organic. She was no Lolita, accenting her behaviour for attention or concealing a gameplan of seduction; she was naive and unaware, and blind beyond literature. That was her charm.
To the uncharmed eye, she was part of the wallpaper; bland, plain, average. Her faults were manifold, but they were mere creases of youth to him that time and love would iron out, and were endearing in the meantime. She was not aesthetically perfect, but she was passable at least; enough to be his muse, but not enough to be coveted by others. He lived in his daydream of her, seeing in all the colours some element of her, and in the rose-strewn pattern of the carpet he saw her cheeks, flushed by the sun. This was not love, nor desire; it was a need.
Not a carnal need – the thoughts hadn’t escaped him, but they’d become wistful and delicate in her imaginary grasp. It was more the need for small pleasures. The thoughts of conversations impossible with anyone but a lover, kissing away the sunburn on her collarbones, having impromptu races through the mazy streets of a foreign town, her small mistakes as she fumbled her way out of adolescence. These things waltzed about on his conveyor belt imagination as he invented her, blemishing her with annoyances for the fun of unblemishing her. In dreams, he felt her wispy hair like feathers on his arm as she slumped on him, watched her bony pen-stained fingers massage the page as she turned it, and heated up at the languid blink of her eyes. Whenever he recalled these vertiginous dreams, he would feel giddy; as a result, he often felt giddy.
He stalked the labyrinthine mass of corridors for her. He glanced at her family over his dinner menu to see if they would divulge information by virtue of a tilt of the head, and lip-read until his head ached, and learned nothing. After three days under the stuffy influence of romantic obsession, he walked to the salad bar at precisely the right moment to hear the two syllables in her name softly chime together; a Newton’s Cradle of sound. Emma. “Emma…”. Like the novel. She was even more organic than he could have imagined. The salad tasted as sweet as pudding, after that.
He came closer in the daytime. The air was stifled by inertia and the relentless buzz of cicadas dancing across the whole Amalfi Coast, and the entire hotel had decamped to the outdoor pool area. He sought her there, among the blancmange bellies and smooth olive paint that the harpies had dyed themselves in, and found her family. He sat on a lounger two down from her – near enough to smell her biscuit-scent suntan lotion, far enough to admire her, beneath his sunglasses. She was coiled up, foetus-like, and glowing from a sunbeam; her strange divinity asphyxiated him briefly, and his head screamed platitudes for her. All his cares were choked, and mortgaged on hope, an aimless hope that involved their interaction in some way. A look, a smile, a conversation – any of these would simultaneously fulfil him and destroy his senses.
The world became slanted by extremes as he exalted in being near her. The pool’s edges razor-sharpened, the sun softened into white ether, the blue in the sky became a solid ceiling. He relearned the world through her, so near yet so far, as if the beauty of his image of her reflected upon everything surrounding him. Her short honey-shine legs, twitching and stretching, took him to places beyond heaven. He’d only gone to hell on seeing the harpies’ legs – long and bony, orange and smooth, flawless and boring – a hell crammed with image-conscious, insecure women who felt the curse of being blessed with looks and not personality. They strode towards the two empty loungers on his left-hand side, and soon began shrieking about incidents in London bars lest he find them daring through their emphasis on ‘getting trashed’, and consequently perceived them to be imbued with swathes of personality. But he was deaf until Emma yawned.
He pondered his own ludicrous obsession, and tried to make sense of it. There was nothing dignified or beautiful about obsession, and he knew it was creepy – he was a voyeur, a dreamer and a sick puppy. But there was something innately pushing him towards her, like the Earth had magnetised them. His head overheated with philosophy on love and life until he found himself torpedoing through the pool, faster than he’d ever swum before, spurred on by the vague notion of impressing her. Time broke down as he thrashed across the pool, time after time, until he noticed she had gone, and so had his chance.
Listlessly strolling across the upstairs veranda at half past nine instead of sampling limoncello, pizza and Italian women was not advertised in the holiday brochure. But the air was musky with sure-to-be-unfulfilled promise, and the sky and sea dark with possibility that there was something new or different there, like they could be all the colours of the rainbow under the night’s curtain. The town clanged occasionally with a joyful church bell chorus, echoing across the hills and hotels, a comforting hand of sound in the dark. And then, underneath that and the buzzing of restless insects, there was a barely audible sound of footsteps, pacing like a heartbeat across the terracotta tiles.
He dragged his head around to see a vision of perfection in mediocrity, awkward with heavy teenage limbs, veiled in a long dress, eyeline cemented to him and lips drawn in a wonky line of no fixed emotion. Each held the other’s gaze until she unglued that gauche lip-line to make it real…
“It’s nice, innit?” He froze. “I’m Ems. Been here a week, leaving Sunday. You’ve been here since Monday, right? Hadn’t seen you before then. Seen you ever since, though.”
“Yeeeah…” He said it in an awful, strangulated voice.
“Dunno if you saw me. I was pretending to read these shit books my mum thinks I should read – she thinks I can actually read that quickly, what a mong! I hate reading. Not much else to do here though, except talk to my family, and who wants that? At least books make me look smart to other people. But you’re the only interesting-looking person here. Great swimming earlier, by the way. Tried to talk to those other girls, the blonde ones, but they were such bitches. …Are you ok?”
“Yeeeah…” Déjà vu. “Err, fine, fine, just fine.”
“Well… tell me about yourself! Name, age, everything. Oh, I’m 20, by the way. Great age, really – old enough for anything, young enough to get away with it. I’m from West Sussex. It’s a bit crap, but… Yeah, tell me about yourself!”
“I’m…” God, what was- “Alex. 29. North London. Not really much to tell.” She clapped her hands, and grabbed his.
“I love London! I want to live there. Do you have a girlfriend?” Her eyes grew intense. His palm sweated under her clammy, just-passed-adolescence hand.
“…No. Not had one for a while. Why are you-”
“Fuck me.”
What?
“Seriously. You’re by yourself, I’m bored as fuck, I’ve seen you, you look frustrated, like you’re not getting any back home, and maybe-”
“Emma!” Her mother. In the doorway. Emma dropped his hand as though it were illegal to touch another’s skin in the presence of a parent, and, with a wink, whispered “Maybe tomorrow night?” before attempting an insouciant walk back to her mother, who immediately began to berate her for talking to strangers.
He stood there, shaken, face like a man punched by his dream. Perspiring, agitated, terrified. He started to cohere his thoughts, almost running to his room; when he got there, he slammed the door, locked it and sat on the floor, hiding behind his bed and taking refuge with the minibar’s whisky supply.
She was all wrong.
Where to begin…? The accent. It had to be the accent; the first moment he knew she was wrong was when she started speaking. She was supposed to be more articulate, more like a BBC broadcaster. Not cursed with a slightly common South-East accent.
The forwardness. He’d envisioned her as shy and naive, only growing to have unvoiced intentions towards him when he’d brought them out of her through lingering looks. She’d never order him to fuck her. Not at first, anyway.
The childishness… the clumsy brattishness was more immature than he could have foreseen. Weren’t men supposed to be the immature ones? Not here; she was a well-formed 12-year-old, complete with the schemes, like the books… he ached as he recalled her dismissal of literature, of everything except him. He wanted to be the shallow, primal one. He wanted her to be his cultured wallflower.
As he considered these things, an eager fist pounded on the door. He blacked out.
“Where are you?”
“Taxi back to the airport,” he mumbled, slightly nauseous as the taxi driver bolted around hairpin bends by the blue, blue sea. Vesuvius stared him down across the bay.
“I thought your conference was meant to last for another three days?”
“Scott got caught up in something bigger, with the American office. Had to fly over to New York. So I’m heading home.” The whisky had been a bad idea.
“Make any friends out there?” The whole trip had been a bad idea.
“You know the answer’s no.” He paused. “No need to sound so accusatory. You know you’re the only one for me.” At least he hadn’t lied to Emma-the-harpy about not having a girlfriend. It may have only been a technicality, but Laura was his wife. In all her uncultured, maternal, judgemental, ex-harpy glory…
“Mmm.” There was a good reason for her uncertain reply. “Hannah and Charlie miss you.”
“I miss them.” No, he didn’t. He loved them, but they annoyed him. In a few days he would have missed them, but right now he was still fed up of their crying and shitting and screaming. They were two thirds of the reason he’d booked the trip in the first place. The other third was Laura. Questions, accusations, impositions… never a hint of trust… he sometimes wished he fulfilled her evident betrayal fantasies.
“Anyway, I’ve got to bathe Charlie. Have a safe flight. I love you.”
He was glad she brusquely rang off before he could parrot the phrase. He wasn’t sure if he would have meant it any longer.
