Chris Cleave - Everyone Brave is Forgiven

He had wanted to write a note back to Simone but he had been ashamed. He didn’t know whether he likked, likede or lyked her, to, too or two. Instead he had slowed by her desk, just for a moment, when he came into class the next day. He had dared a glance at her, and she had responded with a smile so warm that he had almost forgotten himself and grinned back.

The light reddened. A lacewing touched down on his arm and he pinched its head and ate it. When he looked up, Simone was pushing her way through the long grass toward the center of the field. In her white shirt and black pinafore she strode between the thistles, making no effort at all to hide. His heart jumped. He hesitated, then rose above the foxgloves just high enough to catch her eye and beckon her over.

When she was safely in the cover of the field border he brushed a place clean for her on the dry moss.

“Show me behind your ears,” she said straight away.

He angled his head for her and she folded each ear forward to look behind it. “It’s not done by the sun, then. Or else you’d be paler here.”

“It’s the same all over.”

“Did you start off normal and go that color?”

“No. I was like this since I was born.”

She gave a sympathetic nod. “Then it’s your parents’ fault.”

“I don’t think—”

“Shh. Does it hurt?”

“Does what hurt?”

“Your skin.”

“No, it doesn’t hurt.”

“It doesn’t feel burned at all?”

“No.”

“I don’t mean like agony, like arrrrrgh! I mean like when you get too close to the fire and your hairs curl up and it’s sore.”

“It’s not sore.”

“And it’s your father who’s a cannibal?”

“He’s a musician.”

“Then it’s your mother?’

“She’s dead, but she was a singer.’

Simone folded her arms. “It has to be either the mother or the father.”

“Who what?”

“Who eats people. Otherwise the baby comes out white.”

He couldn’t think what to say. “We came from America.”

Simone looked skeptical. “And are all the others ignorant like you?”

“All the other what?”

“All the other coloreds.”

He shook his head. “I’ve always just been stupid.”

“I didn’t say stupid, I said ignorant.”

“Same thing.”

“Stupid is you can’t learn, ignorant is you haven’t learned yet.”

“Well, I’m stupid. You’ve seen when it’s my turn to read in class.”

“Why don’t you just sound out the letters?”

“They won’t stop for me. I don’t know how you make the letters still.”

“They just are still, stupid.”

“Not for me.”

She took his hand. “You’re shaking.”

“I am not.”

“Why are you shaking?”

“I’m scared. Aren’t you?”

She brought his hand back and looked at him so tenderly that his heart caught. “Why did they send you here on your own?”

He looked away. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Why don’t you go back to London?”

“When I write to my father he says I have to be patient.”

“So, you need to write a better letter.”

“Writing moves worse than reading. Like the words hate the pen.”

“I’ll write it down for you. Would you like me to do that?”

Zachary let his eyes drift out over the Back Acre. The sun had sunk below the rim of the valley now, and the shadow line was racing up its the eastern slope. He watched the blazing oaks cut down by the edge of darkness. He knew every animal on the hillside and how it moved: he learned fast, by careful sight. He knew the farmers’ bounds and the villagers’ feuds, constantly shifting. He stayed ahead of them, failing only when thought had to be halted and put into words, and the words immobilized on the page. He was incapable of understanding how things always moving were stilled: he was stupid.

Simone was tugging at his hand. “What would you say, if I could write it down for your father?”

“I’d say you were right. That I’m sad.”

She blinked. “Just that?”

He gave a worried look, anxious he’d said the wrong thing. She pulled his hand closer. “I like you. The others can say what they want.”

He dared a quick smile. She said, “Should I kiss you?”

He pulled his hand away. “No.”

“But why?”

“You don’t know what they’d do, the others.”

“I don’t care.”

He turned from her, his thoughts fluid, ranging across the darkening country. Every sound was enfolded in awareness, the running of the river, the cooing of the wood pigeons at roost, the crackling of sticks in the undergrowth nearby that must be a fox or a stoat beginning its evening round. He looked at Simone again, and in her face there was no anxiety, and it seemed to him that he should try to do what she asked.

He closed his eyes and moved his lips close to hers, and for a moment as she kissed him there was a stillness in his thoughts, and only the river ran, and only the sticks in the undergrowth cracked, louder now, rising almost into awareness but not wholly, because the kiss was his first and it was warm, and for a moment the sadness lifted and there was a stillness in him. Everything was still. And then a heavy flint caught him on the side of the head and he was stunned, and when he could see again there were more stones coming in through the dusk.

Simone was hit. Her tooth was knocked out and her eye was split wide and there was so much blood, and he wrapped his arms around her head to protect her but that only made the village children more furious. They were silent — and this was a terrible thing — they didn’t jeer or laugh, only sent stone after stone whipping in. The air hissed with riverbed flints. Simone began to scream.

The scream came again, and it was the long scream of the train’s whistle, and his eyes came wide open as he struggled up from sleep with his father’s hand on his arm.

“You all right, Zachary?”

He blinked. It was full daylight, with fields rushing past. A third-class compartment with four seats taken. Himself, his father, a woman writing a letter, a man reading the newspaper. On the back of the newspaper, on the funny page, Hitler in his boxer shorts: Let’s catch him with his Panzers down .

“Yes, I’m all right, I’m fine.”

“You were dreaming. It didn’t look like the best fun.”

Zachary blinked. Through the window, below a stand of beech on the top of a green hill, a doe crept out into barley.

“I’m fine.”

His father had a right eye that strayed while the left fixed you. When Zachary was little and asked why, his father used to say he was keeping one eye out for trouble. Their joke was to guess which one.

His father said, “I’m sorry I didn’t come for you sooner.”

“That’s all right.”

“They told us not to. They said to keep all the children where they were.”

“It’s fine.”

His father laced his fingers on top of Zachary’s head and stroked two thumbs along the lines of his eyebrows. It was something he’d always done, and for a moment Zachary felt that nothing had happened in between times. His mother hadn’t been lost, they’d never crossed the ocean, they’d never been pulled apart.

His father said, “Your old teacher warned me to fetch you home, back in the winter. I should have listened to her.”

“Miss North?’

“She said she was opening up that school again, and they couldn’t stop us bringing you home. But I thought she was trouble. And you know trouble is one thing for her, and another thing for us.”

“I understand.”

“But look at you. Your poor face.”

Zachary shrugged. “It doesn’t hurt. It looks worse.”