The world inside her escalated.
She emptied, she overflowed.
If anything, in the months to come, there were a few last stands of reliable life—as our mother was punished with those treatments. She’d been opened up and shut back tight, like a car on the side of the highway. You know that sound, when you slam the front down, when you’ve just got the bloody thing running again, and pray for a few more miles?
Each day was like that ignition.
We ran till we stalled again.
* * *
—
One of the best examples of living that way was made quite early in January; the middle of the Christmas holidays:
The gift and glory of lust.
Yes, lust.
In later years there might have been the naked excitement and pure idiocy of Bachelor Party, but in that early period of Penny’s decline were the beginnings of boyhood depravity.
Perversions or living completely?
It depends which way you look at it.
Regardless, it was the hottest day of summer so far, like a harbinger of things to come. (Clay liked the word harbinger, from his formidable teacher at school, who was full to the brim with vocab. While other teachers kept strictly to the curriculum, this one—the brilliant Mr. Berwick—would no sooner walk into class than test them on words they simply had an obligation to know:
Harbinger.
Abominable.
Excruciating. Luggage.
Luggage was a great word, for being so perfect for what you did with it; you lugged.)
* * *
—
But yes, anyway, not long into January, the sun was high, and achingly hot. The racing quarter was searing. The distant traffic hummed to them. It turned casually the other way.
Henry was in the newsagent’s, up on Poseidon Road, just down from Tippler Lane, and when he came back out triumphantly, he dragged Clay into the alley. He looked left and right, and said it.
“Here.” A giant whisper. He pulled the Playboy from under his T-shirt. “Get a load of this.”
He handed him the magazine, and opened it to the middle, where the fold went across her body—and she was hard and soft, and pointed and amazing, in all the perfect places. She looked positively thrilled with her hips.
“Pretty great, huh?”
Clay looked down, of course he did, and he knew all this—he was ten years old, with three older brothers; he’d seen naked women on a computer screen—but here was totally different. It was stealing and nudity combined, on glossy printed paper. (As Henry said, “This is the life!”) Clay trembled amongst the glee of it, and weirdly, he read her name. He smiled, looked closer, and asked:
“Is her last name really January?”
Inside, his heart beat big, and Henry Dunbar grinned.
“Of course,” he said, “you bet.”
* * *