Forbidden

When the sound of my footsteps reaches him, he veers off across the road, lengthening his stride still further. Even as I draw level with him, straining for breath, he raises his arm and knocks away my outstretched hand.

‘Just leave it, will you? Just go back and leave me the hell alone!’

‘Why?’ I shout back, gasping in icy air as the rain lances my hair and face with sharp, wet needles. ‘What on earth have I done that’s so awful? I crept up to surprise you. I wanted to tell you that Mum had come back and I’d cornered her into taking the kids to the cinema. When we started kissing, I just wanted to touch—’

‘D’you realize how fucking stupid that was? How dangerous? You can’t just suddenly do stuff like that!’

‘Lochie, I’m sorry. I thought we could at least touch each other. It doesn’t mean we would have gone any further—’

‘Oh, really? Well, you can forget your fucking fairy tale! Welcome to the real world!’ He turns briefly – long enough for me to make out a face mottled with fury. ‘If I hadn’t stopped it, d’you realize what would have happened? It’s not just disgusting, Maya, it’s fucking illegal!’

‘Lochie, that’s crazy! Just because we can’t have sex doesn’t mean we can’t touch each other and—’ I reach out for him but he shoves my arm away again. Abruptly he turns down the alley towards the cemetery, only to find a padlocked fence at the end. With nowhere to go, he still refuses to turn back towards me. Standing in the middle of the rain-soaked road, my hair whipping against my face, I watch him grab the wire-mesh fence, shake it dementedly, punch it with both hands, kick at it wildly.

‘You’re crazy, you know that?’ I scream at him, my fear suddenly replaced with anger. ‘Why would this have been such a big deal? How would this have been any different to what happened that time on the bed?’

He whirls round, crashing violently back into the fence. ‘Well, maybe that was a fucking mistake too! But at least – at least then one of us wasn’t half undressed! And I’d have never – I’d have never let it go any further—’

‘I wasn’t pla

He sags back against the netting suddenly, the fury dissipating into the night like the white breath from our mouths.

‘I can’t do this any more,’ he says, his voice hoarse and broken, and abruptly my anger is joined by a cold rush of fear. ‘It’s too painful, it’s too dangerous. I’m terrified – I’m just terrified of what we might end up doing.’

His despair feels almost tangible, draining the frozen air around us of every last shred of hope. I wrap my arms around myself and begin to shiver.

‘So what are you saying?’ My voice begins to rise. ‘If we can’t have sex, you’d rather we did nothing at all?’

‘I guess so.’ He stares at me, his green eyes suddenly hard in the lamplight. ‘Let’s face it, this is all pretty sick. Maybe the rest of the world’s right. Maybe we’re just a couple of fucked-up, emotionally disturbed teenagers who just—’

He breaks off, pushing himself away from the fence as I slowly back away from him, pain and horror rushing through me like liquid ice.

‘Maya, wait – I didn’t mean that.’ His expression changes abruptly and he approaches me cautiously with his arm outstretched as if I’m a wild animal, ready to flee. ‘I – I didn’t mean that. I – I’m not thinking straight. I got carried away. I need to calm down. Let’s just go somewhere and talk. Please . . .’

I shake my head and move in a wide arc around him, suddenly breaking away and hurling myself through a gap at the edge of the mesh.

Once inside, I turn into the bitter wind, heading up the darkened, cracked path, littered with the usual beer bottles, cigarette stubs and syringes. The glow of the streetlamps reaches me from a great distance, the sound of traffic fading to a distant murmur, the outlines of abandoned, broken gravestones nothing more than amorphous shapes in the dark. I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t. I trusted him. I try to make sense of what just happened, to process Lochan’s words without completely falling apart. To somehow accept that the magic of that one night when we first kissed and the afternoon in my room was, to him, simply a dreadful, perverted mistake, to be filed away at the back of our minds until we can eventually kid ourselves it never happened. I need to try to absorb Lochan’s true feelings about the situation – the feelings he has been hiding from me since this first started. And I need to work out how to survive this sudden revelation. But how can anything hurt so much? How can just those few words make me want to curl up and die?

‘Maya, come on.’ I hear his feet thudding on the path behind me and a scream begins to build in my throat. I have to be alone right now or I will lose my mind, I will.

‘You know I didn’t mean any of that stuff! I was just embarrassed that I – that I nearly . . . you know. I was just scared of my own feelings, of what we might have done!’ He looks frantic and wild. ‘Please, just come back to the house. The others will be back in a minute and they’ll be worried.’

The fact that he thinks he can appeal to my sense of duty shows how little he understands the effect of his earlier words, the violence of the emotions coursing through me.

He tries to grab my arm.

‘Get off me!’ I scream, my voice magnified in the silence of the cemetery.

He recoils as if he’s been shot, shielding his face from the hysteria in my voice. ‘Maya, just try to calm down,’ he begs me, his voice shaking. ‘If anyone hears us, they’ll—’

‘They’ll what?’ I interrupt aggressively, whipping round to face him.

‘They’ll think—’

‘Think what?’

‘They might think I’m attacking—’

‘Oh, it’s all about you!’ I scream at him, sobs threatening to explode in my throat. ‘This whole thing – it’s always been about you! What will people think? How will I look? How might I be judged? Whatever feelings once existed between us clearly mean nothing to you compared to your pathetic fear of other people’s narrow-minded, bigoted, parochial prejudices that you once despised but now adopt as your own!’

‘No!’ he yells desperately, launching himself after me as I start striding off again. ‘It’s not like that – it’s got nothing to do with that! Maya, please listen to me. You don’t understand! I just said those things because I feel like I’m going crazy: seeing you every day but never being able to – to hold you, to touch you when anyone else is around. I just want to take your hand, kiss you, hug you, without having to hide it all the time. All those little things every other couple just takes for granted! I want to be free to do them without being terrified that someone will catch us and force us apart, call the police, take the kids away, destroy everything. I can’t bear it, don’t you understand? I want you to be my girlfriend, I want us to be free—’

‘Fine!’ I scream, tears springing from my eyes. ‘If it’s all so sick and twisted, if it’s causing you so much grief, then you’re right, we should just end it, right here, right now! That way at least you won’t have to walk around with some awful guilty conscience, thinking how disgusting we are for having these feelings for each other!’ Frantic now to get away, I break into a stumbling run.

‘For chrissakes!’ he yells after me. ‘Didn’t you hear what I said? That’s the last thing I want!’

He tries to grab me again, tries to force me to slow down, but I can’t – I’m going to fall apart, break down in tears, and I refuse to have him or anyone else as my witness.

Spi