Fic: Thirteen (NC-17)
Thirteen
by minnow_53
Disclaimer: The HP characters belong to JK Rowling and various corporations.
Rating: NC-17
Pairings: Remus/Sirius, Remus/others.
Summary: Remus is with Sirius, but obsessed with young girls.
Genre: AU
Warnings: Where do I start? AU, chan, dub con/non con, het, demonising of a beloved HP character... This is far from being a fluffy R/S story, and some people could find it offensive.
Era: Continuous present. This means it’s set slightly outside the HP timescale, so don’t think rigid HP dates or scream at apparent anachronisms.
Britnote: English Year 8 is equivalent to American seventh grade.
I hardly need say that this is a work of total fiction, and the actions and feelings of the characters do not in any way reflect those of the author.
Thirteen
Seventeen, and Remus is in the art room, doing a portrait of a Year 8. Lara is twelve, a nondescript girl with scraped-back fair hair, so skinny that even the smallest size uniform looks enormous on her. She isn’t pretty. She really isn’t pretty, but there’s something about her, some quality.
‘I think this might work better if you don’t have a top on,’ Remus says. Only a teenager, but he’s already developed a deceptively mild manner. He doesn’t wear glasses, but looks as if he does. ‘Avuncular,’ the English teacher calls him jokingly, or Remus assumes he’s joking.
Lara obediently starts to unbutton her shirt, as Remus thought she would. She sees him as a real artist, doesn’t she? He’s considered to be gifted and talented at art, by far the best in the A-Level class. Everyone in school knows he had a painting accepted for the Summer Show at the Royal Academy last year, and his coursework so far has got almost full marks. Most of the girls would take off their shirts for him, no question. And Lara may not be a voluptuous pre-Raphaelite beauty, but she has been singled out to sit for Remus, and she’s transparently eager to live up to the honour.
The discarded shirt flutters to the floor, and Lara immediately snatches it up, as if to hold it against her, but she doesn’t. Remus tries not to stare at the pathetic excuse for a bra she’s wearing over her non-existent breasts, tries to seem nonchalant, as if he were seeing her strictly through an artist’s eye, but he’s finding it difficult to breathe and he can feel his palms sweating.
Remus likes boys. No, Remus likes one boy. He and Sirius Black have been going to Sirius’s after school almost every day for the past year: Sirius’s parents both work, unlike Remus’s mother, who is relentlessly present. During this time, he and Sirius have spent every available moment fucking, first on Sirius’s creaky single bed, and then, more boldly, in every room in the house, at the risk of being discovered by one or other of the Blacks’ phalanx of cleaners and housekeepers. Sirius enjoys the thought of getting one over on his mother.
So, Remus likes boys, and he’s certainly not sexually frustrated, and he doesn’t know why his hormones or whatever they are - he’s definitely not gifted and talented at biology - have recently been making him lust over a Year 8 in ill-fitting underwear.
‘I think your skirt too,’ he decrees, busying himself with charcoal, squinting round the easel, adding a few lines to the admittedly rather chaotic portrait of the little girl. Because that’s what she is. A little girl. Well, not so little. She’s at secondary school, isn’t she? In the big league. And she’s endured a whole year at the comprehensive already. It’s not a bad school, really, because it’s in a good area, and the richer parents jealously keep an eye out for it. Remus’ father and Sirius’s mother are both on the board of governors, and no doubt one of Lara’s parents is too.
Lara puts her skirt with her shirt over the back of a chair, then stands there, watching him expectantly. She’s wearing white knickers, knickers that fit snugly over her skinny hips; knickers that positively glow with cleanliness and wholesome virginity.
He’s been rehearsing this, has thought of little else since Lara agreed to pose for him, and he’s proud of the way he manages to say, as if it weren’t of any importance to him, ‘Lara, I wonder if you’d let me draw you in the nude. Like they do in art school.’ Art school, where he’s headed in just over a year, when the exams are over. He’s hoping to get a scholarship, but that’s in the future.
He tries not to show any relief as she dutifully unhooks her bra, to reveal two tiny pink nipples on a predictably flat chest that is, all the same, indubitably feminine, not like Sirius’s, or any of the boys Remus used to fumble with before he and Sirius got together. She hesitates, of course, before taking off her knickers, and Remus looks away, down at the smudgy ghost of a girl just sketched roughly on the paper. When he glances up again, she’s naked.
He’s a bit...disappointed, perhaps; nonplussed, even, if he used words like that, at the few coarse black hairs that mar her otherwise perfect body. He wasn’t expecting any hair; he’s been imagining her as a marble or alabaster statue, entirely smooth, fresh and untouched by puberty. Silly, because Sirius isn’t hairless, obviously, and he finds Sirius’s body the ultimate turn-on, can’t get enough of Sirius’s cock inside him, can’t, for that matter, get enough of entering Sirius, concentrating fiercely so as not to hurt him. He couldn’t bear to hurt Sirius. He’s in love with Sirius, after all, though he’ll barely even admit it to himself.
Lara waits patiently, arms at her sides, for Remus’s next instruction. He supposes she must be embarrassed by the hairs, and so is he, a bit. For a moment, he almost wishes he hadn’t started this. But at the same time, he’s really, really horny right now, and he’s reluctant to go over and arrange her limbs because it’ll probably be pretty damn obvious.
But then he reminds herself that she’s just a kid. Why, the straight boys in his form don’t even know Year 8 exists! Girlfriends need to be at least fourteen, and even that’s considered cradle-snatching. Lara won’t have a clue what’s going on with him. She wouldn’t even think of looking down there, would she?
Of course, not all the so-called kids are particularly innocent. At least one of the girls in Lara’s class already has a reputation for putting it about a bit: a tall, well-developed girl who could pass for much older. Remus knows nothing about periods and girl things and doesn’t want to, but he knows that Lara can hardly be called a baby. Or maybe he just knows how to clutch at straws.
‘Why don’t you stand against the window, with the light behind you?’ He leads her over, perfectly acquiescent.
‘Is that okay, Rem?’
He flinches at the childish diminutive. Her voice is soft and light, like her body.
‘Hang on.’
He takes her hands in his and contemplates her face. Now, here’s something he can do that’s totally above board. He reaches up and removes the scrunchy from her tight ponytail, allowing her hair to fall loose to her shoulders. The artist in him exults: the adolescent boy finds his erection so uncomfortable that he takes a step back.
‘I wish I had a brush with me.’ Lara combs through her hair with her fingers, fluffs it out a bit.
Remus gulps. ‘Just gotta go to the loo.’
Luckily, it’s only down the corridor, and he rushes into the cubicle, barely has time to unzip his trousers before he’s done, sticky come and charcoal all over his hands. He hasn’t been so turned on since he and Sirius lay on Sirius’s bed together for the first time, and he simply couldn’t wait. But he can’t pretend that he’s thinking of Sirius now.
Then, panic floods in. He’s left Lara in the art room butt-naked: what if the art master has come in? Not that he would, because this is a Thursday after school, and Remus, as a trusted student, has been given the key to the art-room to get on with this final piece of coursework. But even so, he’s relieved beyond measure to find her alone and apparently unbothered, She’s standing by the window, almost in shadow, thin, naked and tiny, and when Remus is once again behind the safety of his easel, she says conversationally, ‘I hope I’ll look nice. In the portrait, I mean.’
‘Yeah. You’ll look fine.’
He appraises the girl in front of the window with a cold, dispassionate eye and starts again to draw the portrait that will earn him such excellent marks and possibly seal his scholarship to St. Martin’s.
*
Twenty-five, and he has few scruples these days about consummation, about the feeling, the inimitable feeling of those little girls with their unused, untouched bodies.
Thirteen, he’s decided, is the perfect age. Twelve sounds, well, a bit young, especially to a man in his twenties: he’s not a teenager now, after all. Thirteen is older, is mature; it certainly doesn’t guarantee the flat chest and narrow hips of a child, but there are enough undeveloped thirteen-year olds to make it a worthwhile compromise.
Life hasn’t been as kind as it promised to be when he was seventeen. Perhaps he peaked too early, but since that wonderful start doors have closed to him. He sometimes wonders if it’s because he’s gay; he’s openly living with another man, but usually in the art world being different in some way is an advantage. And he’s not quite gay, is he? Not with his dirty little secret that even Sirius doesn’t know. Nobody knows. He goes by the adage ‘Don’t shit where you eat’, and so far Mr Lupin, art master, has been utterly blameless
Being gay has probably helped him secure his current job. His pupils are all girls, ranging from eleven to sixteen. When he teaches Year 8 - ah, well, isn’t that how it all began? - he’s in a state of constant arousal. He’s sometimes so turned on that he can’t stop glancing over at the earnest little Asian girl with her wonderful mane of black hair, her legs, like colts’ legs, so thin that he wonders how they support her.
In fact, Ana is probably more temptation that he can resist. She’s just about good enough to be singled out; she really can draw. And he’s always happy to give extra tuition after school to promising students.
He stands over her, holding her hand lightly as together they put lines on to paper. ‘Try to keep it light. If you press down, it destroys the fluidity.’
‘Is this right, Mr Lupin?’
‘Yes, that’s perfect.’
She likes to use inks, likes colourful pictures of girls in jewel-bright dresses, the sort of pictures produced by thirteen year-olds all over the planet. Her girls have blonde hair, are relentlessly pink and white, which bothers Remus, but the materials she draws are like the saris of her Indian forebears, bright greens and reds and blues, with vivid curls of scarlet sequin and edgings in bright yellow, done so skilfully that they look like gold.
‘I have to go,’ she says regretfully, at four-thirty. ‘My mum’s meeting me.’
Don’t they all say that? Remus laughs ruefully, and escorts her downstairs, to the school gates, where her mum is waiting in a bright red Peugeot people-carrier, blocking most of the bus lane. He unconsciously camps it up a bit as he leans in to the driver’s window to talk to her.
‘Ana is incredibly gifted, Mrs. Patel.’ His voice is suddenly an octave higher. ‘I’m wondering whether you’d allow her to have a few private lessons? At my home?’ His wrist dangles limply over the window. ‘My, er, partner will be there too, of course.’
Mrs. Patel relaxes. ‘How kind of you, Mr Lupin! I’m sure Ana would love to. How much do you charge?’
Remus, who hasn’t been thinking beyond Ana’s body in his house, on his bed - correction, on his and Sirius’s bed - says hastily, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it! Seeing pupils fulfil their promise is all the reward I need.’
It’s the wrong thing to say. Mrs. Patel frowns, probably offended by the implication that an Asian family would need charity, as if the shining new car doesn’t scream money.
‘But for private lessons I charge, oh, five pounds an hour,’ he adds, and she smiles again and says, ‘That’s very generous of you. Perhaps we could say Wednesdays? After school? I can pick Ana up at six.’
Remus’s heart is thumping as he goes to his own car, a Peugeot too but rather smaller and with a dent in the boot where he backed into a lamppost. It’s not quite as weathered as Columbo’s car, but it’s getting there. Remus likes it that way.
All the way home, he thinks, ‘Wednesday, Wednesday.’ Just a weekend and two days away. And Sirius will be out at work, as he always is, at his job in his father’s firm, importing wine and spirits. It’s a bad job for a man with a tendency to drink too much, just as Remus’s job is for a man who craves the flat, hairless bodies of little girls. Another thing they have in common, though Remus rarely allows himself thoughts like that.
On Wednesday, he drives Ana to the converted Victorian house where he and Sirius own the top-floor flat. It’s reached by a steep, outdoor staircase impossible to use in winter when it snows or is icy, but charming in May, with tendrils of creeper green around the iron banister. He motions her to go ahead of him, so he can watch those long legs climbing the steps, their thinness emphasised by her heavy shoes, the platform soles all the girls are wearing this year. He lets her get far enough ahead to catch a glimpse of pink, flowery knickers.
The flat itself is also charming, with sloping ceilings and doors set at odd angles. Remus leads Ana into the spare room with its skylight, which he uses as a studio. He’s planned this carefully: he’s debated taking her into the sitting room, but decided that he wants to keep the preliminaries as professional as possible. He’s bought, and hidden, a packet of condoms: he doesn’t want Sirius to get suspicious. Not that a thirteen year-old girl, his kind of virginal, childish thirteen year-old girl, would have any diseases, and he’s tested regularly enough to know that he doesn’t either. Still, he’s a cautious man.
‘D’you want something to drink, dear?’ Always the big, friendly smile, the fatherly pat on the shoulder. He’s filled the fridge with coke and orange juice, which he’ll need to explain to Sirius later. Well, Sirius shouldn’t object to him giving private lessons to a little girl, should he? Not on the face of it.
‘A cup of tea, please.’
Damn, he’ll have to drink the coke himself. Sirius never touches commercial fizzy drinks. ‘Coming up!’
He brings a tray with a teapot, two cups and a milk-jug into the studio, puts it down on the round table by the fireplace where he keeps his unopened paints and brushes. He draws up a wicker chair, and bows Ana into it, mock-gallant. Of course, he’s forgotten something, the sugar. Ana may not drink coke, but she takes sugar; lots of it. He watches, rather appalled, as she stirs in four spoonfuls. So much for that tiny, thin frame!
‘My parents don’t let me use sugar at home,’ Ana explains, obviously noticing his scrutiny. Remus is relieved, though really he has no right to be. He knows more about female biology now than he did at seventeen, knows that plump girls reach puberty early and start growing the hateful breasts and sprouting hair all over their bodies.
‘We’ll start by seeing how well you can do a simple self-portrait,’ Remus says. He’s been planning to allow her to doodle a bit on the blank canvas waiting on the easel, but the stairs, those legs... He’s not going to last out watching her in her very skimpy uniform, and these days, with this one especially, he wants, he really needs, to touch and feel and taste, not just to come and go at a distance.
He’s careful, he thinks, to put her at ease. ‘This is what they do in art school,’ he explains. ‘We call them life classes.’
The easel is angled so a child can stand there and see herself reflected full-length in the mirror on the wall, so she can draw herself without any clothes on, just like a real artist would, as Remus assures her. Oh, the mirror is nothing to do with his hobby; it was here when they bought the flat. It has other uses. He sometimes lets Sirius loose in the studio, which always ends up with a lot of rough, satisfying sex on the floor, on the carpet that he’s had laid simply so that he won’t be permanently covered in bruises.
Ana says, ‘Why do I have to take off my clothes?’ Her big, brown eyes are narrowed, and she looks sharp and suspicious, not pretty and childlike at all.
‘You don’t have to,’ Remus says lightly. ‘I just thought you were ready to paint like a professional. You know, when I was at college, we had life classes twice a week. Men on Tuesdays, women on Fridays. The idea is to learn anatomy, to draw the human body.’
The mention of men seems to calm her, but she’s not one of the most amenable ones. ‘How about I just take off my skirt and top?’
‘Fine. Then you can pretend you’re at the beach!’
It’s a totally inane response, but it works. Ana strips down to those flowery knickers and, unexpectedly, a vest. It’s a bit hot for a vest, actually, but the sight of it, the chaste garment clinging tantalisingly to Ana’s chest and stomach, makes Remus draw in his breath sharply.
Sirius wore a vest when he was at school. It was a big secret, and the main reason he wouldn’t undress in front of Remus for so long. ‘My mother makes me,’ he said defensively, the first time he removed his shirt. ‘I’d wear a t-shirt or nothing, but she buys them and checks I have one on in winter.’
The vest, not quite covering Sirius’s thin, muscular chest, had the same erotic effect on Remus as the glimpse of a slender ankle must have had on a straight Victorian man, but he didn’t let on. He doesn’t know, to this day, why he always has to be so secretive. Possibly because he has a lot to hide, and will soon have even more.
Ana positions herself behind the canvas, glances at her reflection, starts to draw. In the guise of teacher, Remus stands behind her, occasionally glancing to see how she’s doing. Not badly, actually. She really is very good: not quite the best in the class, certainly not as good as Mary Adams, with her rounded breasts and wide hips, but Remus isn’t about to offer Mary private lessons.
‘You all right with that pencil? It may be a bit harder than you’re used to.’ Remus stands directly behind her, guides her hand as usual, at the same time pressing his erection into her back. He just needs that bit of contact at this second, to touch her as intimately as he can with all his clothes on. Presumably Ana won’t even know what it is. As with the other girls, he simply wants to get as close to her as she’ll allow, fondle her, kiss her even. If she seems to enjoy it, he can, with a clear conscience, lead her to a soft surface, and take her virginity.
Ana is the first girl he’s brought to the flat, the first girl who’ll have the luxury of a bed or sofa. Normally, the process is anonymous, against an alley wall, perhaps in a field or wood, depending on how trusting the child is. Not that these are children, exactly. His girls are only three years away from the age of consent: so close, so close. How can there be anything wrong with loving them?
Ana turns round, but her eyes are panicked, and she’s shrinking away; far from ideal, this one. Remus improvises, trying to make sense to a child who enjoys drawing girls in pretty dresses, who likes to colour in right to the edge, concentrating fiercely on not going over the line.
‘I love you,’ he says, his voice a bit hoarse. He’s used those words once or twice before, of course. ‘You’re such a beautiful girl, and so talented.’
The word ‘love’ will work a certain magic on any girl over twelve, Remus has found. That’s when the silly creatures start their romantic dreams. Ana hasn’t ever, to his knowledge, drawn brides and wedding cakes, but perhaps she will in future. She looks up at him, enraptured, and stammers out, ‘Oh! I didn’t realise.’
He wonders how she sees him, as she makes the transition from teacher/father figure to potential boyfriend. He’s not bad-looking, he knows; Sirius thinks he’s beautiful, and is always nagging him to do a self-portrait, though he hasn’t got round to it yet. Other men, sometimes very tasty young boys, also seem to find some magnetism in him; but then, he’s natural with them. You have to be careful with the little girls, watch every step, every word, and it’s so tiring, but oh, the rewards when it works!
Her eyes are now bright, her pupils large as she gazes up at him, obviously forgetting her state of near-undress. ‘Mr Lupin, I don’t know what to say.’ She’s blushing, her dark skin rosy and the sight undoes him completely.
‘May I just kiss you?’ He keeps his voice pleading, but not whiny. He’ll kiss her anyway, whether she consents or not. He’ll fuck her anyway, whether she consents or not. There have been a couple of slightly ugly scenes, but he’s good at compartmentalising, at forgetting mistakes and moving on to the next thing. Most little girls are obedient, like Lara, whom he never actually touched. Some of the girls may be a bit younger than thirteen; those girls are easily scared, and he knows they’ll keep their mouths shut.
He puts his arms round Ana, and gently opens her mouth with his tongue. He strokes her like a cat, licks her neck, pulls up her vest to caress the nipples on her tiny chest.
‘You mustn’t tell anyone,’ he says, as he always does, when he draws away, contemplating her at arm’s length. Once it’s over, once that extraordinary, wild passion is fully exorcised, he feels tired, drained. He wants her to go away now: surely it’s nearly six, and her mother will be here to fetch her soon?
And if she seems to be crying, well, he defends himself, she’s old enough. She could have fought back, but she didn’t.
He dresses her himself, almost tenderly: the moment of lust is drained away, but he isn’t ungrateful for what she’s given him. He also wants to make sure none of her clothes are inside-out, nothing looks different from when she arrived here. He even finds a box of tissues to staunch the blood trickling down her legs.
‘I think I must have got my period,’ she says, a bit bemused, and he doesn’t correct her.
By the time her mother comes, Remus and Ana are ready and waiting at the foot of the stairs. Mrs. Patel smiles at him and gives him fifteen pounds in cash. ‘I’m so grateful, Mr Lupin! My father wanted to be a painter, but he had to go out to work. Such a big family, and they needed every penny! He’d be so proud to see his daughter succeed as an artist.’
Remus waves as they drive away.
But at six the next morning, when two police officers climb the pretty outdoor staircase with its tendrils of fresh, green shoots, and almost bang the door down, he realises that he’s probably made a fatal mistake here.
*
Twenty-six, and during the trial, he’s well aware how lucky he is that none of the other girls have come forward.
He’s lucky altogether; someone is obviously looking out for him.
‘Where’s the evidence?’ his council challenges, and the mother, Mrs Patel, admits, ‘Ana was distressed when I got her home. She insisted on having a bath at once.’
He thanks God daily for Sirius’s family connections and one of the best, most expensive barristers in Britain. ‘Paedophile’ is such an ugly word. He would never hurt a child, as he tells the court, in a tremulous voice. He wouldn’t do anything sexual with a little girl. He’s gay. They have only one child’s word for it, a romantic, dreamy child with a vivid imagination, or that’s how his barrister paints her. Compassion, that’s the key word. Compassion for a gifted teacher trying to help an exceptional student; compassion for a child with a crush, a child who appears so innocent, though she really isn’t. She’s not a virgin, by her own admission, and nobody’s going to be able to say for sure whose fault that is.
Favourable verdicts don’t come cheap, of course. His counsel says jovially, ‘Just try not to get caught in future, eh?’ then thumps Remus’s back, and presents him with a bill so enormous that Remus has to go to Sirius for help, because he’s between jobs at the moment, for obvious reasons. He and the school have mutually agreed to dispense with his services, and no other school will hire anyone with even a hint of something dicey in their police checks.
Remus feels sorry for himself, of course; it’s rough being on trial, and afterwards he hasn’t the energy to do more than mope around the house, not sure what his next move should be. But then, by yet another miracle, the doors that seemed so firmly closed suddenly open. In fact, the call comes in barely a week after the trial is over.
‘We’d like to offer you an exhibition.’
No explanation, no niceties, and Remus only fully understands when Sirius explains it to him. It seems that, perhaps via Sirius, he’s part of some wonderful gay network out there, extending itself beyond the call of duty to help one of its own who’s been falsely accused, in the most humiliating possible way for an openly gay man. The owner of the gallery doesn’t quite say, ‘Little girls? You poor sod! We’d all run a mile in the opposite direction!’ But Remus can imagine those words behind the ones he does say, and they warm him, make him believe that the trial and Ana were just a bad dream.
The exhibition opens on a warm July evening. The gallery, a white, open-plan space with more floor than wall, is in the King’s Road, busy with tourists and late-night shoppers. The Chinese restaurant next door is doing plenty of business, and the scent of sweet and sour sauce pervades the air.
Remus is, obviously, a fairly obscure artist, but he’s still flying high from the publicity generated by the trial. There are already a fair number of people drifting round looking at his work, even though, in time-honoured fashion, the white wine hasn’t been properly chilled.
Sirius refuses even to try it. ‘I’d sooner drink cat pee.’ He takes out his silver hipflask and has a swig of brandy, wiping his mouth when he’s finished, exhaling loudly.
By eight o’clock, the gallery is packed with broad-minded patrons willing to buy Remus’s paintings and drawings at somewhat inflated prices, even though the pictures aren’t, critically speaking, his very best. There are two nude studies of Sirius, against rather surrealistic desert backgrounds: the backgrounds make Remus uneasy, for some reason, though he was happy enough while he was painting them. They’ve been hung in place of honour, where the viewers will see them as soon as they come in. Sirius is in high good humour when they’re the first to garner Sold stickers. ‘Who’re the lucky bastards who get to hang me on their wall?’ he asks gleefully, breaking both male and female hearts, no doubt, with his beautiful smile.
On the other walls, arranged so the offering doesn’t look too sparse, there are a few seascapes, painted at Sirius’s family’s weekend cottage in Norfolk, and some rather nice animal sketches, rabbits and a couple of dogs. But most of the pictures are of bridges, in London and elsewhere: Remus is a bit obsessed with bridges. He’s gratified that his favourite, a pen and ink drawing of the Clifton suspension bridge, has gone for nearly a thousand pounds.
Many of the best pictures, the real pictures, are at home, not hanging on the walls of his studio but stacked against them, face down. These show girls drawn from memory, occasionally from precious photos, long since burnt. Children naked from the waist up, their innocent eyes marginally bigger and wider than any real thirteen year-old’s eyes would be; children naked from the waist down, hairless pudenda, long, skinny colts’ legs, like Ana’s, budding little dolls with secret smiles, apparently caught just the second they’ve wiped the sperm from around their sweet, rosebud mouths. They perch on the wicker chair where Ana drank her sugary tea, gaze at themselves in the studio mirror, stand radiant in the sunshine pouring through the skylight. Sometimes, Remus is overwhelmed by the wealth of his own creation.
He’s also eternally grateful that the police didn’t have a search warrant the day they hauled him down to the station for questioning. By the time they got one, Sirius had packed up the contents of the studio, and they were stored at one of the wine warehouses. He and Remus have never spoken about them, of course; they were simply delivered back to the flat when the trial was over.
*
Thirty-two, and Remus has new interests. Sirius? Oh, Sirius is around, his drinking beginning to affect him, as Remus always feared it would. He’ll come home already half-cut, open a bottle of wine with dinner, offer Remus a glass and drink the rest. Every evening, he falls asleep in front of the television. His head has made a permanent imprint on one arm of the black leather sofa, and the other is scuffed by his shoes: Sirius doesn’t do mundane things like taking off shoes when he lies down.
Remus hardly registers Sirius’s occasional snore. He’s too busy trying to create a suitable space for himself on the dining table. Their sitting/dining room is a cross between an indoor garden and a jungle. Tall madonna lilies, little clusters of polyanthus, asparagus ferns, bloody plants everywhere. Remus likes them, but doesn’t know the names of half of them: Sirius is the gardener. And he doesn’t like them so much when they’re taking over half the flat.
Remus moves a superfluous vase of carnations and a few pots of African violets, then sits down with his back to Sirius in his own place at the dining table, and busies himself with his laptop computer, his latest love, his pride and joy. He spends every evening on the internet, the perfect place for a secretive man with things to hide. He can be anyone, anything he chooses. Chat rooms, forums, LiveJournal, MySpace, MSN, YIM... The web is buzzing with little girls, and Remus is the internet king.
‘Hi! I’m Daisy!’ he types. ‘I’m thirteen, and I get really pissed off with my mum sometimes.’
That’s just a start. Daisy acquires friends, baggage, a whole life. A nagging mother, an art teacher she has a crush on, a cat called Jasper. Her dad is dead. No, scratch that. Her parents are divorced, and she sees her dad every weekend.
‘Hi, Daisy! How are you doing?’
‘Fine! I’ve got to finish my homework in a minute, LOL!’
Sometimes, he has trouble following the language. Are things still ‘cool’? Or is that a totally uncool thing to say? But he watches and learns, can give the girls as good as he gets. And he can lurk, silent, refreshing the page, waiting for one of his own special friends to post.
‘I got some shoes and a skirt today! Picspam under the cut.’
Those are the best evenings, when he can click on the images of an adorable Lolita in her new clothes, or with her friends at a party, or posing for holiday snaps. Sometimes, the girls are cautious and don’t show their faces; more often they do. Of course, the world-wide web is exactly that, and many of those girls will never be within a thousand miles of him. But he can dream; and though he wouldn’t store anything remotely incriminating on his hard drive, the pictures remain available, just a click away.
He’ll even comment, start a conversation. ‘Those are amazing shoes! :D’
‘Thanx! :)’
By the end of a session, he’s often so carried away that he has to go and wank, before Sirius wakes up and staggers to bed to pass out again.
‘Sorry, guys! My mum says I must have my shower now. School tomorrow! *groans*
‘Okay! G’night, Daisy.’
Naturally, he lapses from time to time, because he simply can’t help it. But he’s cleverer these days. When Daisy sends a private e-mail to arrange a meeting with a girl who’s naive enough to believe that two internet pals are going to bond over a Caramel Macchiato at Starbucks, he covers his tracks well. The message goes out from an Internet café in the centre of London.
He arranges to meet her in her home town, scopes it out first as thoroughly as possible: all part of the fun. And it works like a charm, because here’s a pretty little blonde waiting for Daisy in the doorway of a chocolate shop in Chatham. With its brown and gold livery, its windows full of meltingly beautiful confectionary, Thorntons is by far the smartest facade in a high street featuring Poundland, Ethel Austin, and shabby seasonal shops. There’s a Virgin Records next door, though; obviously, he appreciates the irony.
He’s been standing outside Primark, diagonally opposite but at a suitable distance, watching her, watching her with his hopes as high as his cock, because damn, she’s hot. She’s the right age, thirteen, or so she says, but he would give her twelve, perhaps less. She’s so delightfully confident, so faux-knowing, in her high heels, her skimpy little skirt and crop top, revealing a midriff with a slightly rounded tummy, betraying her childishness. Oh, he likes thin, but that hint of a tummy, of residual baby fat, definitely does something for him.
‘Hello! Are you lost?’
She knows not to talk to strangers, or she should. But the meeting time is already half an hour past: he’s got that down to a fine art. Too soon, and they clam up. Much more, and they’ll cut their losses and go home.
‘Waiting for someone,’ she says, a bit sulky.
‘Daisy?’
‘Maybe.’
I’m Daisy’s dad,’ he says reassuringly. ‘She’s sprained her ankle, and couldn’t make it into town. I’ll give you a lift to the house, okay? D’you want an ice-cream to eat on the way?’
She says yes, of course, because everyone loves Thorntons ice-cream. She’s probably already imagining the meeting with Daisy, the gossip about their mutual internet friends. She might reflect that Daisy only sees her dad at the weekend, but he doesn’t think she’s that literal. While she’s licking her ice-cream, something he allows himself to get innocently turned on by, he starts leading her to the Great Lines above the town, a war memorial, fields fringed with woods, where it’s so easy to lay a girl gently on the grass and kiss and kiss her until you’re satisfied.
The blonde girl struggles away from him on the soft grass, and he doesn’t get anywhere near penetrating her, but it’s enough, nearly enough just to hold her close until he’s done, and then he’s only too glad to push her away, let her run for her life, sobbing. Her crop top is torn, one of the straps lost forever as she flees, and the heel of her ridiculous shoe has come off. As Remus watches, she pauses to remove both shoes, then sets off again, barefoot.
He suspects she’d get such a bollocking for meeting a stranger from the net that she won’t dare tell her parents. If she does, who’d be able to identify a kind, nondescript man, who lives at least fifty miles away from the scene of the crime, or non-crime? He gets a cab down to the station, and by the time the girl’s home, he’ll be back in his flat, cooking supper, waiting for Sirius to come in.
Later, he deletes every scrap, every possible trace of Daisy from various journals, forums and chat rooms, waits a few days to start again. Can’t risk the word getting out, can he?
During the boring week or so between a meeting and a new blog, he drives to the school where he used to teach - nobody could call him a coward - and parks his car a discreet distance from the gates, like a father doing the school run. It’s a different car now, a Honda Civic, purple, to underline his orientation. ‘I’m gay. I don’t do little girls, and I don’t want to do little girls,’ it proclaims.
Ana, of course, is no longer at the school; she’d be twenty now, by Remus’s reckoning, and is probably at university. Not art school; she was good, but not that good.
There’s never a shortage of thirteen year-old girls, of course, uniform skirts rolled up the second they’re through the gates, shirts pulled out of waistbands, hair let loose. They grow up too fast, but there are still a few children left in the world, and Remus can spot them, always, the girls who lag behind a bit, who stop to pick a flower growing between two paving stones, who haven’t yet lost their wonder at the world. Who haven’t yet lost the thin limbs, the tiny bones, who’re still unformed, waiting for someone like him to mould them.
He’ll sit there in his Honda, just watching, uncomfortably aware that he can always look but never touch. At these moments, he’s still bitterly resentful at Ana for losing him his job, curtailing his pleasures to such an extent. Even though he'll forget all about her when he’s on his laptop later, preparing his new persona - ‘Hi! My name’s Emily!’ - he's never quite managed to forgive her.
*
Thirty-six, and everything changes suddenly one January afternoon when Sirius brings his cousin Dora home for a drink. Remus comes in from one of his nebulous outings, and finds the two of them sitting in the kitchen, the warmest room in the house, with Sirius about to open a bottle of Bordeaux. It’s already dark out, and Remus closes the curtains and turns on the light, bustling around in a way he knows annoys Sirius - ‘You’re like a fucking parody of a gay guy, Remus’ - but he does like everything enclosed, safe.
He turns on the oven to help the recalcitrant radiators, though he can sense Sirius rolling his eyes.
‘Remus, stop sodding about. This is Dora. She’s just started work,’ he explains. He doesn’t need to tell Remus she’s a relative, a new family member of the family firm.
Remus smiles automatically, then does a double take. The girl in front of him looks like Sirius and she looks like one of his girls, his few and far-between girls, because children are more internet-savvy now, and he’s reduced almost entirely to his imagination. But that can’t be right: as far as Remus can recall, Dora would be about twenty-two. When they were at school, Sirius would sometimes look a bit shamefaced and say, ‘We can’t meet later. I have to baby-sit for my cousin.’
She must be suspended in time, this cousin: not very tall, undeveloped, with those legs, those coltish legs Remus dreams of, sometimes dreams until he’s sick, puking up loss and bile over the lavatory bowl, with tantalising images of a little girl walking up a flight of stone steps just in front of him.
Sirius is sober for once, and doesn’t pour himself a drink when he’s handed glasses of wine over to Remus and Dora. This evening, it’s Remus who gulps down his wine and pours another, then another, unable to take his eyes off the girl. Dora doesn’t drink much, he notes. She toys with the glass, sips a bit, and then asks, ‘Could I see the rest of the flat?’
‘Sure.’ Sirius is the avuncular one now, a hand at the small of Dora’s back as he manoeuvres her out of the kitchen. As soon as they’re gone, Remus feels compelled to pick up Dora’s almost untouched wine, to sniff it and lick the edge of the glass where her lips have been, before gulping it down and then, guiltily, replacing it with a fresh measure.
When she’s left, Remus blurts out, ‘But what’s wrong with her?’ He can’t believe this meeting is random. There has to be some reason, some malign charm that’s brought her here to him.
Sirius isn’t fazed or offended. In fact, he laughs. ‘Damn it, you were certainly staring at her! She’s anorexic. She doesn’t throw up or anything. Just doesn’t eat.’
‘But why?’
Sirius sits down patiently. He still hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol this evening, and Remus is uncomfortably tipsy, on the verge of being drunk. ‘I don’t have a clue! She’s been like this for years. Actually, she’s been a lot worse. They’re hoping that access to alcohol will help. You know, if she drinks occasionally she’ll lose some of her control and eat too.’
‘But then she won’t be beautiful any more!’ Remus blurts out, the wine talking, of course.
Sirius frowns, and his whole face seems to droop. He’s getting old, Remus thinks, with a pang.
‘Remus. I know you never did anything to that girl. Well, I believe you. But those paintings of yours...people could take them the wrong way. And my aunt and uncle made it pretty clear that Dora’s my responsibility. You have to remember she’s a grown woman, even if she doesn’t look it. Even if she is so much younger than us.’
Remus feels his face going hot. ‘That girl was ages ago,’ he mumbles. ‘And the paintings. They’re just paintings.’
Sirius moves over, covers Remus’s mouth with his, and they’re silent for a long time. When they resurface, Sirius says, ‘I know. It’s okay.’
*
Thirty-seven, and there isn’t a moment he doesn’t want to be with her, touching her, inside her, staring at her uncannily childlike face with the Black family features, that familiar colouring, those high cheekbones.
He’s at her flat, the flat her parents bought her to show they trust her to be independent and not starve herself to death. It’s a tiny, modern box near the Barbican, and she sleeps on a futon in a white, otherwise empty, bedroom.
‘I really hope Sirius won’t be wondering where I am,’ he says, close to her in the dark. But of course, he will be, because the exhibition finished at ten and it’s now nearly midnight, and he simply can’t tear himself away.
‘Well, just make bloody sure you come up with a good lie,’ Dora snaps. ‘I’ll kill you if he finds about us. He’s my cousin, and I have to work with him.’
He knows he doesn’t satisfy her, or even please her. When she speaks, he regrets, briefly, the higher-pitched voices, the childish words of thirteen, like a lost paradise, like something he may never find his way back to again.
When he isn’t with Dora, he’s drawing her compulsively. He draws her the way he’s never really seen her, a little girl lying on a futon, a tiny, shadowy figure in a sea of white, gazing up at him adoringly, something that certainly won’t happen in real life. She’s naked, bony, tiny; vulnerable, even.
Sometimes, when Sirius is away on business, Dora comes to his and Sirius’s flat for lunch. That isn’t as staightforward an arrangement as it sounds.
‘Please,’ he’ll beg. ‘Otherwise I won’t see you for a whole week.’
‘Why would I want to see you?’ she asks. He thinks she really means it, that she really wants to know how she’s got embroiled in this.
‘Because you find me irresistible. Oh, come on, Dora. Please. Please.’
‘Oh, all right. But just to stop you nagging.’
He’s watching out for her from the sitting room window, and when she starts up the outside staircase, he’s already waiting for her at the door. She takes the steps two at a time, he notices, presumably to burn off calories.
There are no green tendrils now, but the creeper is red and yellow on this sunny autumn afternoon. She looks like a little girl running towards him, and his heart swells with something that could be love.
The dining table, cleared of laptop, plants and assorted paraphernalia, is already set for her, with a knife, fork and empty plate. Remus has put her in Sirius’s place. She always brings her own food, on the rare occasions she agrees to eat here. Today, it’s an apple and an ounce of cheese. She cuts the apple into thin slices, and the cheese into cubes, smaller and smaller, as if to make any lingering calories disappear altogether.
‘I thought cheese was fattening,’ Remus says.
‘I wouldn’t break my diet!’ She’s defiant, obviously reluctant to eat in front of him in the first place. ‘Not that it’s any of your business, Remus.’
‘You don’t want to put on weight.’ Hardly likely, when she doesn’t even eat enough to sustain life indefinitely. He likes to think it’s a novelty, when her parents and friends and doctors are begging her to eat, for someone to watch her arrange the cheese carefully in a circle and say, ‘Are you sure you really want that?’
‘Are you sure you don’t really want little boys?’ she jeers, trying to regain the advantage, snatching at the last slice of thinly-pared apple. ‘I mean, you want me to look like a boy.’
‘No! No, I want you just as you are.’
After lunch, he drags Dora to his and Sirius’s big bedroom overlooking the back garden, which is so unlike her sterile white one. Like the sitting-room, it’s full of plants. There are more ferns, in hanging baskets at both windows, an orchid that actually flowers twice a year on the chest of drawers, an original tiled fireplace filled with greenery, seedlings on the floor, on every surface. The wall is covered rather haphazardly with paintings, mainly Remus’s; the bed is huge, with shiny brass fittings. It’s supposed to be dangerous to sleep in a room full of plants, but Sirius says that’s rubbish, and neither of them are dead yet.
Remus closes the dark green curtains to block out the light: a complex operation, which always ends up with the ferns shedding seeds all over the woodblock floor. Sirius never draws curtains: it’s one of their constant battles.
‘I put the ferns there so you’ll just leave them open! I hate waking up in the dark,’ he always grumbles. ‘If you insist on curtains, you can sweep up the bloody seeds.’
But Remus is quite happy to sweep up seeds when Dora’s been here, because he so loves to look at her in the dim light. Like this, he can discern Sirius in her face while he fucks her, beside himself with the force of his need for her, stroking and licking that flat chest. Of course, he’s fully aware that all the time he’s clutching and moaning, she’s thinking about food and calories, her personal pornography. But he doesn’t care, as long as she’ll allow him to do what he wants with her body.
Oh, there are problems. She’s had boyfriends, and he’s far from the first. She lacks that all-important tightness. On the plus side, she compulsively removes any trace of bodily hair, in case it adds an ounce or two to her weight.
But when he mentions how much he likes her hairless body, she retorts, ‘You’re an idiot! Haven’t you heard of lanugo?’
Remus thinks it sounds like an illness or a pain in the joints; no, that’s lumbago. He’s disconcerted to find that it’s a thin down chronic anorexics grow over their bodies. ‘To keep warm,’ she informs him.
‘You’ll never have lanugo.’ He hates that word, can hardly get it out. ‘I’ll keep you warm,’ he promises, nestling into her, kissing every inch of her smooth, cold skin. ‘I’ll protect you.’ When he looks deeply into her grey eyes, Sirius’s eyes, he can almost imagine that he really means it.
*
Thirty-eight, and he’s been asked to the funeral, though he isn’t a member of the immediate family, and obviously Sirius has no idea what their relationship was.
‘This is just a fucking nightmare,’ Sirius says, red-eyed, hands shaking. His breakfast has consisted of half a bottle of whisky and eight or nine cigarettes. Remus sees quite clearly that if Sirius goes on like this, he’ll also be dead before another year is out.
It’s a good day for a funeral, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. The sleet began soon after they got up, and Remus worries that the steps will be impassable when he and Sirius come home. And the wind has been rising all night, moaning and howling round the house as if Dora’s ghost has returned to berate him. It would be a pitiable ghost; just four and a half stone, according to Sirius. ‘I still can’t bloody believe it. She was getting so much better, and then suddenly she just went downhill,’ he keeps saying.
It isn’t Remus’s fault, obviously. Dora has spent the past three weeks in hospital, refusing to eat, refusing to sign the consent to be drip-fed. He didn’t even go to see her. Why should he? They hardly knew each other, officially.
Sirius brought him regular bulletins. ‘She’s going to be tube-fed,’ he told him the day before yesterday. ‘She refused, of course, but they don’t need her consent at this stage. It’s not a pleasant procedure. They have to force the tube through her nose, down her throat and into her stomach.’
Remus's own stomach lurched and he felt his mouth filling with vomit, had to leave the room before Sirius could tell him any more.
It doesn’t matter anyway. She died before they even inserted the tube.
The church was built some time in the seventies, and feels more like one of Remus’s galleries, a white space with pine pews, a tiny round stained glass window, an abstract pattern of coloured glass, almost apologetic among the stark modern fittings. There are cheerful collages by the Sunday school children blu-tacked to one wall, and a couple of embroidered wall-hangings showing the Resurrection, but otherwise Jesus is notable by his absence; he doesn’t even feature on the tasteful wooden cross behind the altar.
The coffin, on a trestle at the front of the church, is white, like a child’s coffin, closed, of course, and heaped with flowers. Sirius has sent a holly wreath, because it’s so near Christmas, and it looks incongruously festive among the chrysanthemums and expensive out-of-season roses.
‘You were right,’ Sirius whispers as he and Remus sit down in a pew three rows from the front. ‘It isn’t really appropriate, is it? But Dora did love Christmas so!’ His eyes brim with tears and he mops them with a pristine white handkerchief.
The church is packed with various members of the Black and Tonks families, all in deepest mourning. ‘That’s her mother,’ Sirius hisses, pointing to a woman whose face is hidden by a veil.
‘But surely they were expecting it?’ Remus doesn’t want to be callous, but all this grief and weeping make him twitchy.
Sirius gives him a filthy look. ‘Nobody expects young women just to, just to die.’ Because of the amount of whisky he’s ingested, his words are particularly loud in the hushed space, and people turn to glare at him. Remus shrinks back against the pew, looking fixedly at the empty cross.
From the church, they go to the crematorium, six miles away. It strikes Remus as a stupid arrangement, having to travel from church to crematorium then back to someone’s house for the wake.
‘Why don’t they just bury her here?’
‘Remus, you’re being a real bugger today. Dora specifically requested that she should be cremated. She was very aware of the environment.’
Sirius’s voice wobbles again, and no doubt he’s relieved that he’s in one of the three official cars, while Remus has to get a lift from one of the more distant relatives.
The wind is practically a gale now, shaking the little Micra as it belts along the dual carriageway. ‘Poor Dora!’ says the mother, who’s also the driver. ‘She was my husband’s sister’s niece by marriage. Is that right, Barty dear?’
‘Something like that.’ Barty is thin and rather lugubrious, which, Remus feels, is fitting for the occasion.
He’s in the back, next to their young daughter. He hasn’t really had a chance even to look at her: she has an iPod plugged into her ear, and is singing along under her breath with some appropriately lugubrious emo band. ‘My friend died - yesterday.’ She’s slightly off-key, but has one of those childish voices that makes Remus sit up and take notice.
The car crunches to a halt on the gravel outside the crematorium. It’s just like a graveyard, and the rest of the mourners are already there, talking in soft voices or, in the case of Dora’s parents, weeping uncontrollably. The ceremony won’t start for another fifteen minutes, but though it’s freezing out here and the sleet has turned to snow, nobody seems to notice or care: perhaps they’re genuinely too sad to register the weather. Remus unfolds himself from the car and stretches, which is a relief, as he’s tall, and the Micra was cramped. The daughter stretches too, exaggeratedly, turns off her iPod without being asked, and stows it in the boot. Remus finally looks at her properly, smiles and says, ‘Well, at least you got a day off school.’
She smiles back. ‘I didn’t really know Dora. But it’s sad, isn’t it?’
Her hair is red and curly, and he sizes her up with an expert eye. Possibly a bit old for him, not quite as thin as he likes them, but she has an indefinable quality to her that makes his heart thump as he keeps his smile fixed for a moment too long.
‘I didn’t know Dora either,’ he replies. The mourners start to file into the crematorium but he lingers for a few more minutes, waiting for her walk in with her parents, slipping in just behind her to go and find Sirius.
End
by minnow_53
Disclaimer: The HP characters belong to JK Rowling and various corporations.
Rating: NC-17
Pairings: Remus/Sirius, Remus/others.
Summary: Remus is with Sirius, but obsessed with young girls.
Genre: AU
Warnings: Where do I start? AU, chan, dub con/non con, het, demonising of a beloved HP character... This is far from being a fluffy R/S story, and some people could find it offensive.
Era: Continuous present. This means it’s set slightly outside the HP timescale, so don’t think rigid HP dates or scream at apparent anachronisms.
Britnote: English Year 8 is equivalent to American seventh grade.
I hardly need say that this is a work of total fiction, and the actions and feelings of the characters do not in any way reflect those of the author.
Thirteen
Seventeen, and Remus is in the art room, doing a portrait of a Year 8. Lara is twelve, a nondescript girl with scraped-back fair hair, so skinny that even the smallest size uniform looks enormous on her. She isn’t pretty. She really isn’t pretty, but there’s something about her, some quality.
‘I think this might work better if you don’t have a top on,’ Remus says. Only a teenager, but he’s already developed a deceptively mild manner. He doesn’t wear glasses, but looks as if he does. ‘Avuncular,’ the English teacher calls him jokingly, or Remus assumes he’s joking.
Lara obediently starts to unbutton her shirt, as Remus thought she would. She sees him as a real artist, doesn’t she? He’s considered to be gifted and talented at art, by far the best in the A-Level class. Everyone in school knows he had a painting accepted for the Summer Show at the Royal Academy last year, and his coursework so far has got almost full marks. Most of the girls would take off their shirts for him, no question. And Lara may not be a voluptuous pre-Raphaelite beauty, but she has been singled out to sit for Remus, and she’s transparently eager to live up to the honour.
The discarded shirt flutters to the floor, and Lara immediately snatches it up, as if to hold it against her, but she doesn’t. Remus tries not to stare at the pathetic excuse for a bra she’s wearing over her non-existent breasts, tries to seem nonchalant, as if he were seeing her strictly through an artist’s eye, but he’s finding it difficult to breathe and he can feel his palms sweating.
Remus likes boys. No, Remus likes one boy. He and Sirius Black have been going to Sirius’s after school almost every day for the past year: Sirius’s parents both work, unlike Remus’s mother, who is relentlessly present. During this time, he and Sirius have spent every available moment fucking, first on Sirius’s creaky single bed, and then, more boldly, in every room in the house, at the risk of being discovered by one or other of the Blacks’ phalanx of cleaners and housekeepers. Sirius enjoys the thought of getting one over on his mother.
So, Remus likes boys, and he’s certainly not sexually frustrated, and he doesn’t know why his hormones or whatever they are - he’s definitely not gifted and talented at biology - have recently been making him lust over a Year 8 in ill-fitting underwear.
‘I think your skirt too,’ he decrees, busying himself with charcoal, squinting round the easel, adding a few lines to the admittedly rather chaotic portrait of the little girl. Because that’s what she is. A little girl. Well, not so little. She’s at secondary school, isn’t she? In the big league. And she’s endured a whole year at the comprehensive already. It’s not a bad school, really, because it’s in a good area, and the richer parents jealously keep an eye out for it. Remus’ father and Sirius’s mother are both on the board of governors, and no doubt one of Lara’s parents is too.
Lara puts her skirt with her shirt over the back of a chair, then stands there, watching him expectantly. She’s wearing white knickers, knickers that fit snugly over her skinny hips; knickers that positively glow with cleanliness and wholesome virginity.
He’s been rehearsing this, has thought of little else since Lara agreed to pose for him, and he’s proud of the way he manages to say, as if it weren’t of any importance to him, ‘Lara, I wonder if you’d let me draw you in the nude. Like they do in art school.’ Art school, where he’s headed in just over a year, when the exams are over. He’s hoping to get a scholarship, but that’s in the future.
He tries not to show any relief as she dutifully unhooks her bra, to reveal two tiny pink nipples on a predictably flat chest that is, all the same, indubitably feminine, not like Sirius’s, or any of the boys Remus used to fumble with before he and Sirius got together. She hesitates, of course, before taking off her knickers, and Remus looks away, down at the smudgy ghost of a girl just sketched roughly on the paper. When he glances up again, she’s naked.
He’s a bit...disappointed, perhaps; nonplussed, even, if he used words like that, at the few coarse black hairs that mar her otherwise perfect body. He wasn’t expecting any hair; he’s been imagining her as a marble or alabaster statue, entirely smooth, fresh and untouched by puberty. Silly, because Sirius isn’t hairless, obviously, and he finds Sirius’s body the ultimate turn-on, can’t get enough of Sirius’s cock inside him, can’t, for that matter, get enough of entering Sirius, concentrating fiercely so as not to hurt him. He couldn’t bear to hurt Sirius. He’s in love with Sirius, after all, though he’ll barely even admit it to himself.
Lara waits patiently, arms at her sides, for Remus’s next instruction. He supposes she must be embarrassed by the hairs, and so is he, a bit. For a moment, he almost wishes he hadn’t started this. But at the same time, he’s really, really horny right now, and he’s reluctant to go over and arrange her limbs because it’ll probably be pretty damn obvious.
But then he reminds herself that she’s just a kid. Why, the straight boys in his form don’t even know Year 8 exists! Girlfriends need to be at least fourteen, and even that’s considered cradle-snatching. Lara won’t have a clue what’s going on with him. She wouldn’t even think of looking down there, would she?
Of course, not all the so-called kids are particularly innocent. At least one of the girls in Lara’s class already has a reputation for putting it about a bit: a tall, well-developed girl who could pass for much older. Remus knows nothing about periods and girl things and doesn’t want to, but he knows that Lara can hardly be called a baby. Or maybe he just knows how to clutch at straws.
‘Why don’t you stand against the window, with the light behind you?’ He leads her over, perfectly acquiescent.
‘Is that okay, Rem?’
He flinches at the childish diminutive. Her voice is soft and light, like her body.
‘Hang on.’
He takes her hands in his and contemplates her face. Now, here’s something he can do that’s totally above board. He reaches up and removes the scrunchy from her tight ponytail, allowing her hair to fall loose to her shoulders. The artist in him exults: the adolescent boy finds his erection so uncomfortable that he takes a step back.
‘I wish I had a brush with me.’ Lara combs through her hair with her fingers, fluffs it out a bit.
Remus gulps. ‘Just gotta go to the loo.’
Luckily, it’s only down the corridor, and he rushes into the cubicle, barely has time to unzip his trousers before he’s done, sticky come and charcoal all over his hands. He hasn’t been so turned on since he and Sirius lay on Sirius’s bed together for the first time, and he simply couldn’t wait. But he can’t pretend that he’s thinking of Sirius now.
Then, panic floods in. He’s left Lara in the art room butt-naked: what if the art master has come in? Not that he would, because this is a Thursday after school, and Remus, as a trusted student, has been given the key to the art-room to get on with this final piece of coursework. But even so, he’s relieved beyond measure to find her alone and apparently unbothered, She’s standing by the window, almost in shadow, thin, naked and tiny, and when Remus is once again behind the safety of his easel, she says conversationally, ‘I hope I’ll look nice. In the portrait, I mean.’
‘Yeah. You’ll look fine.’
He appraises the girl in front of the window with a cold, dispassionate eye and starts again to draw the portrait that will earn him such excellent marks and possibly seal his scholarship to St. Martin’s.
*
Twenty-five, and he has few scruples these days about consummation, about the feeling, the inimitable feeling of those little girls with their unused, untouched bodies.
Thirteen, he’s decided, is the perfect age. Twelve sounds, well, a bit young, especially to a man in his twenties: he’s not a teenager now, after all. Thirteen is older, is mature; it certainly doesn’t guarantee the flat chest and narrow hips of a child, but there are enough undeveloped thirteen-year olds to make it a worthwhile compromise.
Life hasn’t been as kind as it promised to be when he was seventeen. Perhaps he peaked too early, but since that wonderful start doors have closed to him. He sometimes wonders if it’s because he’s gay; he’s openly living with another man, but usually in the art world being different in some way is an advantage. And he’s not quite gay, is he? Not with his dirty little secret that even Sirius doesn’t know. Nobody knows. He goes by the adage ‘Don’t shit where you eat’, and so far Mr Lupin, art master, has been utterly blameless
Being gay has probably helped him secure his current job. His pupils are all girls, ranging from eleven to sixteen. When he teaches Year 8 - ah, well, isn’t that how it all began? - he’s in a state of constant arousal. He’s sometimes so turned on that he can’t stop glancing over at the earnest little Asian girl with her wonderful mane of black hair, her legs, like colts’ legs, so thin that he wonders how they support her.
In fact, Ana is probably more temptation that he can resist. She’s just about good enough to be singled out; she really can draw. And he’s always happy to give extra tuition after school to promising students.
He stands over her, holding her hand lightly as together they put lines on to paper. ‘Try to keep it light. If you press down, it destroys the fluidity.’
‘Is this right, Mr Lupin?’
‘Yes, that’s perfect.’
She likes to use inks, likes colourful pictures of girls in jewel-bright dresses, the sort of pictures produced by thirteen year-olds all over the planet. Her girls have blonde hair, are relentlessly pink and white, which bothers Remus, but the materials she draws are like the saris of her Indian forebears, bright greens and reds and blues, with vivid curls of scarlet sequin and edgings in bright yellow, done so skilfully that they look like gold.
‘I have to go,’ she says regretfully, at four-thirty. ‘My mum’s meeting me.’
Don’t they all say that? Remus laughs ruefully, and escorts her downstairs, to the school gates, where her mum is waiting in a bright red Peugeot people-carrier, blocking most of the bus lane. He unconsciously camps it up a bit as he leans in to the driver’s window to talk to her.
‘Ana is incredibly gifted, Mrs. Patel.’ His voice is suddenly an octave higher. ‘I’m wondering whether you’d allow her to have a few private lessons? At my home?’ His wrist dangles limply over the window. ‘My, er, partner will be there too, of course.’
Mrs. Patel relaxes. ‘How kind of you, Mr Lupin! I’m sure Ana would love to. How much do you charge?’
Remus, who hasn’t been thinking beyond Ana’s body in his house, on his bed - correction, on his and Sirius’s bed - says hastily, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it! Seeing pupils fulfil their promise is all the reward I need.’
It’s the wrong thing to say. Mrs. Patel frowns, probably offended by the implication that an Asian family would need charity, as if the shining new car doesn’t scream money.
‘But for private lessons I charge, oh, five pounds an hour,’ he adds, and she smiles again and says, ‘That’s very generous of you. Perhaps we could say Wednesdays? After school? I can pick Ana up at six.’
Remus’s heart is thumping as he goes to his own car, a Peugeot too but rather smaller and with a dent in the boot where he backed into a lamppost. It’s not quite as weathered as Columbo’s car, but it’s getting there. Remus likes it that way.
All the way home, he thinks, ‘Wednesday, Wednesday.’ Just a weekend and two days away. And Sirius will be out at work, as he always is, at his job in his father’s firm, importing wine and spirits. It’s a bad job for a man with a tendency to drink too much, just as Remus’s job is for a man who craves the flat, hairless bodies of little girls. Another thing they have in common, though Remus rarely allows himself thoughts like that.
On Wednesday, he drives Ana to the converted Victorian house where he and Sirius own the top-floor flat. It’s reached by a steep, outdoor staircase impossible to use in winter when it snows or is icy, but charming in May, with tendrils of creeper green around the iron banister. He motions her to go ahead of him, so he can watch those long legs climbing the steps, their thinness emphasised by her heavy shoes, the platform soles all the girls are wearing this year. He lets her get far enough ahead to catch a glimpse of pink, flowery knickers.
The flat itself is also charming, with sloping ceilings and doors set at odd angles. Remus leads Ana into the spare room with its skylight, which he uses as a studio. He’s planned this carefully: he’s debated taking her into the sitting room, but decided that he wants to keep the preliminaries as professional as possible. He’s bought, and hidden, a packet of condoms: he doesn’t want Sirius to get suspicious. Not that a thirteen year-old girl, his kind of virginal, childish thirteen year-old girl, would have any diseases, and he’s tested regularly enough to know that he doesn’t either. Still, he’s a cautious man.
‘D’you want something to drink, dear?’ Always the big, friendly smile, the fatherly pat on the shoulder. He’s filled the fridge with coke and orange juice, which he’ll need to explain to Sirius later. Well, Sirius shouldn’t object to him giving private lessons to a little girl, should he? Not on the face of it.
‘A cup of tea, please.’
Damn, he’ll have to drink the coke himself. Sirius never touches commercial fizzy drinks. ‘Coming up!’
He brings a tray with a teapot, two cups and a milk-jug into the studio, puts it down on the round table by the fireplace where he keeps his unopened paints and brushes. He draws up a wicker chair, and bows Ana into it, mock-gallant. Of course, he’s forgotten something, the sugar. Ana may not drink coke, but she takes sugar; lots of it. He watches, rather appalled, as she stirs in four spoonfuls. So much for that tiny, thin frame!
‘My parents don’t let me use sugar at home,’ Ana explains, obviously noticing his scrutiny. Remus is relieved, though really he has no right to be. He knows more about female biology now than he did at seventeen, knows that plump girls reach puberty early and start growing the hateful breasts and sprouting hair all over their bodies.
‘We’ll start by seeing how well you can do a simple self-portrait,’ Remus says. He’s been planning to allow her to doodle a bit on the blank canvas waiting on the easel, but the stairs, those legs... He’s not going to last out watching her in her very skimpy uniform, and these days, with this one especially, he wants, he really needs, to touch and feel and taste, not just to come and go at a distance.
He’s careful, he thinks, to put her at ease. ‘This is what they do in art school,’ he explains. ‘We call them life classes.’
The easel is angled so a child can stand there and see herself reflected full-length in the mirror on the wall, so she can draw herself without any clothes on, just like a real artist would, as Remus assures her. Oh, the mirror is nothing to do with his hobby; it was here when they bought the flat. It has other uses. He sometimes lets Sirius loose in the studio, which always ends up with a lot of rough, satisfying sex on the floor, on the carpet that he’s had laid simply so that he won’t be permanently covered in bruises.
Ana says, ‘Why do I have to take off my clothes?’ Her big, brown eyes are narrowed, and she looks sharp and suspicious, not pretty and childlike at all.
‘You don’t have to,’ Remus says lightly. ‘I just thought you were ready to paint like a professional. You know, when I was at college, we had life classes twice a week. Men on Tuesdays, women on Fridays. The idea is to learn anatomy, to draw the human body.’
The mention of men seems to calm her, but she’s not one of the most amenable ones. ‘How about I just take off my skirt and top?’
‘Fine. Then you can pretend you’re at the beach!’
It’s a totally inane response, but it works. Ana strips down to those flowery knickers and, unexpectedly, a vest. It’s a bit hot for a vest, actually, but the sight of it, the chaste garment clinging tantalisingly to Ana’s chest and stomach, makes Remus draw in his breath sharply.
Sirius wore a vest when he was at school. It was a big secret, and the main reason he wouldn’t undress in front of Remus for so long. ‘My mother makes me,’ he said defensively, the first time he removed his shirt. ‘I’d wear a t-shirt or nothing, but she buys them and checks I have one on in winter.’
The vest, not quite covering Sirius’s thin, muscular chest, had the same erotic effect on Remus as the glimpse of a slender ankle must have had on a straight Victorian man, but he didn’t let on. He doesn’t know, to this day, why he always has to be so secretive. Possibly because he has a lot to hide, and will soon have even more.
Ana positions herself behind the canvas, glances at her reflection, starts to draw. In the guise of teacher, Remus stands behind her, occasionally glancing to see how she’s doing. Not badly, actually. She really is very good: not quite the best in the class, certainly not as good as Mary Adams, with her rounded breasts and wide hips, but Remus isn’t about to offer Mary private lessons.
‘You all right with that pencil? It may be a bit harder than you’re used to.’ Remus stands directly behind her, guides her hand as usual, at the same time pressing his erection into her back. He just needs that bit of contact at this second, to touch her as intimately as he can with all his clothes on. Presumably Ana won’t even know what it is. As with the other girls, he simply wants to get as close to her as she’ll allow, fondle her, kiss her even. If she seems to enjoy it, he can, with a clear conscience, lead her to a soft surface, and take her virginity.
Ana is the first girl he’s brought to the flat, the first girl who’ll have the luxury of a bed or sofa. Normally, the process is anonymous, against an alley wall, perhaps in a field or wood, depending on how trusting the child is. Not that these are children, exactly. His girls are only three years away from the age of consent: so close, so close. How can there be anything wrong with loving them?
Ana turns round, but her eyes are panicked, and she’s shrinking away; far from ideal, this one. Remus improvises, trying to make sense to a child who enjoys drawing girls in pretty dresses, who likes to colour in right to the edge, concentrating fiercely on not going over the line.
‘I love you,’ he says, his voice a bit hoarse. He’s used those words once or twice before, of course. ‘You’re such a beautiful girl, and so talented.’
The word ‘love’ will work a certain magic on any girl over twelve, Remus has found. That’s when the silly creatures start their romantic dreams. Ana hasn’t ever, to his knowledge, drawn brides and wedding cakes, but perhaps she will in future. She looks up at him, enraptured, and stammers out, ‘Oh! I didn’t realise.’
He wonders how she sees him, as she makes the transition from teacher/father figure to potential boyfriend. He’s not bad-looking, he knows; Sirius thinks he’s beautiful, and is always nagging him to do a self-portrait, though he hasn’t got round to it yet. Other men, sometimes very tasty young boys, also seem to find some magnetism in him; but then, he’s natural with them. You have to be careful with the little girls, watch every step, every word, and it’s so tiring, but oh, the rewards when it works!
Her eyes are now bright, her pupils large as she gazes up at him, obviously forgetting her state of near-undress. ‘Mr Lupin, I don’t know what to say.’ She’s blushing, her dark skin rosy and the sight undoes him completely.
‘May I just kiss you?’ He keeps his voice pleading, but not whiny. He’ll kiss her anyway, whether she consents or not. He’ll fuck her anyway, whether she consents or not. There have been a couple of slightly ugly scenes, but he’s good at compartmentalising, at forgetting mistakes and moving on to the next thing. Most little girls are obedient, like Lara, whom he never actually touched. Some of the girls may be a bit younger than thirteen; those girls are easily scared, and he knows they’ll keep their mouths shut.
He puts his arms round Ana, and gently opens her mouth with his tongue. He strokes her like a cat, licks her neck, pulls up her vest to caress the nipples on her tiny chest.
‘You mustn’t tell anyone,’ he says, as he always does, when he draws away, contemplating her at arm’s length. Once it’s over, once that extraordinary, wild passion is fully exorcised, he feels tired, drained. He wants her to go away now: surely it’s nearly six, and her mother will be here to fetch her soon?
And if she seems to be crying, well, he defends himself, she’s old enough. She could have fought back, but she didn’t.
He dresses her himself, almost tenderly: the moment of lust is drained away, but he isn’t ungrateful for what she’s given him. He also wants to make sure none of her clothes are inside-out, nothing looks different from when she arrived here. He even finds a box of tissues to staunch the blood trickling down her legs.
‘I think I must have got my period,’ she says, a bit bemused, and he doesn’t correct her.
By the time her mother comes, Remus and Ana are ready and waiting at the foot of the stairs. Mrs. Patel smiles at him and gives him fifteen pounds in cash. ‘I’m so grateful, Mr Lupin! My father wanted to be a painter, but he had to go out to work. Such a big family, and they needed every penny! He’d be so proud to see his daughter succeed as an artist.’
Remus waves as they drive away.
But at six the next morning, when two police officers climb the pretty outdoor staircase with its tendrils of fresh, green shoots, and almost bang the door down, he realises that he’s probably made a fatal mistake here.
*
Twenty-six, and during the trial, he’s well aware how lucky he is that none of the other girls have come forward.
He’s lucky altogether; someone is obviously looking out for him.
‘Where’s the evidence?’ his council challenges, and the mother, Mrs Patel, admits, ‘Ana was distressed when I got her home. She insisted on having a bath at once.’
He thanks God daily for Sirius’s family connections and one of the best, most expensive barristers in Britain. ‘Paedophile’ is such an ugly word. He would never hurt a child, as he tells the court, in a tremulous voice. He wouldn’t do anything sexual with a little girl. He’s gay. They have only one child’s word for it, a romantic, dreamy child with a vivid imagination, or that’s how his barrister paints her. Compassion, that’s the key word. Compassion for a gifted teacher trying to help an exceptional student; compassion for a child with a crush, a child who appears so innocent, though she really isn’t. She’s not a virgin, by her own admission, and nobody’s going to be able to say for sure whose fault that is.
Favourable verdicts don’t come cheap, of course. His counsel says jovially, ‘Just try not to get caught in future, eh?’ then thumps Remus’s back, and presents him with a bill so enormous that Remus has to go to Sirius for help, because he’s between jobs at the moment, for obvious reasons. He and the school have mutually agreed to dispense with his services, and no other school will hire anyone with even a hint of something dicey in their police checks.
Remus feels sorry for himself, of course; it’s rough being on trial, and afterwards he hasn’t the energy to do more than mope around the house, not sure what his next move should be. But then, by yet another miracle, the doors that seemed so firmly closed suddenly open. In fact, the call comes in barely a week after the trial is over.
‘We’d like to offer you an exhibition.’
No explanation, no niceties, and Remus only fully understands when Sirius explains it to him. It seems that, perhaps via Sirius, he’s part of some wonderful gay network out there, extending itself beyond the call of duty to help one of its own who’s been falsely accused, in the most humiliating possible way for an openly gay man. The owner of the gallery doesn’t quite say, ‘Little girls? You poor sod! We’d all run a mile in the opposite direction!’ But Remus can imagine those words behind the ones he does say, and they warm him, make him believe that the trial and Ana were just a bad dream.
The exhibition opens on a warm July evening. The gallery, a white, open-plan space with more floor than wall, is in the King’s Road, busy with tourists and late-night shoppers. The Chinese restaurant next door is doing plenty of business, and the scent of sweet and sour sauce pervades the air.
Remus is, obviously, a fairly obscure artist, but he’s still flying high from the publicity generated by the trial. There are already a fair number of people drifting round looking at his work, even though, in time-honoured fashion, the white wine hasn’t been properly chilled.
Sirius refuses even to try it. ‘I’d sooner drink cat pee.’ He takes out his silver hipflask and has a swig of brandy, wiping his mouth when he’s finished, exhaling loudly.
By eight o’clock, the gallery is packed with broad-minded patrons willing to buy Remus’s paintings and drawings at somewhat inflated prices, even though the pictures aren’t, critically speaking, his very best. There are two nude studies of Sirius, against rather surrealistic desert backgrounds: the backgrounds make Remus uneasy, for some reason, though he was happy enough while he was painting them. They’ve been hung in place of honour, where the viewers will see them as soon as they come in. Sirius is in high good humour when they’re the first to garner Sold stickers. ‘Who’re the lucky bastards who get to hang me on their wall?’ he asks gleefully, breaking both male and female hearts, no doubt, with his beautiful smile.
On the other walls, arranged so the offering doesn’t look too sparse, there are a few seascapes, painted at Sirius’s family’s weekend cottage in Norfolk, and some rather nice animal sketches, rabbits and a couple of dogs. But most of the pictures are of bridges, in London and elsewhere: Remus is a bit obsessed with bridges. He’s gratified that his favourite, a pen and ink drawing of the Clifton suspension bridge, has gone for nearly a thousand pounds.
Many of the best pictures, the real pictures, are at home, not hanging on the walls of his studio but stacked against them, face down. These show girls drawn from memory, occasionally from precious photos, long since burnt. Children naked from the waist up, their innocent eyes marginally bigger and wider than any real thirteen year-old’s eyes would be; children naked from the waist down, hairless pudenda, long, skinny colts’ legs, like Ana’s, budding little dolls with secret smiles, apparently caught just the second they’ve wiped the sperm from around their sweet, rosebud mouths. They perch on the wicker chair where Ana drank her sugary tea, gaze at themselves in the studio mirror, stand radiant in the sunshine pouring through the skylight. Sometimes, Remus is overwhelmed by the wealth of his own creation.
He’s also eternally grateful that the police didn’t have a search warrant the day they hauled him down to the station for questioning. By the time they got one, Sirius had packed up the contents of the studio, and they were stored at one of the wine warehouses. He and Remus have never spoken about them, of course; they were simply delivered back to the flat when the trial was over.
*
Thirty-two, and Remus has new interests. Sirius? Oh, Sirius is around, his drinking beginning to affect him, as Remus always feared it would. He’ll come home already half-cut, open a bottle of wine with dinner, offer Remus a glass and drink the rest. Every evening, he falls asleep in front of the television. His head has made a permanent imprint on one arm of the black leather sofa, and the other is scuffed by his shoes: Sirius doesn’t do mundane things like taking off shoes when he lies down.
Remus hardly registers Sirius’s occasional snore. He’s too busy trying to create a suitable space for himself on the dining table. Their sitting/dining room is a cross between an indoor garden and a jungle. Tall madonna lilies, little clusters of polyanthus, asparagus ferns, bloody plants everywhere. Remus likes them, but doesn’t know the names of half of them: Sirius is the gardener. And he doesn’t like them so much when they’re taking over half the flat.
Remus moves a superfluous vase of carnations and a few pots of African violets, then sits down with his back to Sirius in his own place at the dining table, and busies himself with his laptop computer, his latest love, his pride and joy. He spends every evening on the internet, the perfect place for a secretive man with things to hide. He can be anyone, anything he chooses. Chat rooms, forums, LiveJournal, MySpace, MSN, YIM... The web is buzzing with little girls, and Remus is the internet king.
‘Hi! I’m Daisy!’ he types. ‘I’m thirteen, and I get really pissed off with my mum sometimes.’
That’s just a start. Daisy acquires friends, baggage, a whole life. A nagging mother, an art teacher she has a crush on, a cat called Jasper. Her dad is dead. No, scratch that. Her parents are divorced, and she sees her dad every weekend.
‘Hi, Daisy! How are you doing?’
‘Fine! I’ve got to finish my homework in a minute, LOL!’
Sometimes, he has trouble following the language. Are things still ‘cool’? Or is that a totally uncool thing to say? But he watches and learns, can give the girls as good as he gets. And he can lurk, silent, refreshing the page, waiting for one of his own special friends to post.
‘I got some shoes and a skirt today! Picspam under the cut.’
Those are the best evenings, when he can click on the images of an adorable Lolita in her new clothes, or with her friends at a party, or posing for holiday snaps. Sometimes, the girls are cautious and don’t show their faces; more often they do. Of course, the world-wide web is exactly that, and many of those girls will never be within a thousand miles of him. But he can dream; and though he wouldn’t store anything remotely incriminating on his hard drive, the pictures remain available, just a click away.
He’ll even comment, start a conversation. ‘Those are amazing shoes! :D’
‘Thanx! :)’
By the end of a session, he’s often so carried away that he has to go and wank, before Sirius wakes up and staggers to bed to pass out again.
‘Sorry, guys! My mum says I must have my shower now. School tomorrow! *groans*
‘Okay! G’night, Daisy.’
Naturally, he lapses from time to time, because he simply can’t help it. But he’s cleverer these days. When Daisy sends a private e-mail to arrange a meeting with a girl who’s naive enough to believe that two internet pals are going to bond over a Caramel Macchiato at Starbucks, he covers his tracks well. The message goes out from an Internet café in the centre of London.
He arranges to meet her in her home town, scopes it out first as thoroughly as possible: all part of the fun. And it works like a charm, because here’s a pretty little blonde waiting for Daisy in the doorway of a chocolate shop in Chatham. With its brown and gold livery, its windows full of meltingly beautiful confectionary, Thorntons is by far the smartest facade in a high street featuring Poundland, Ethel Austin, and shabby seasonal shops. There’s a Virgin Records next door, though; obviously, he appreciates the irony.
He’s been standing outside Primark, diagonally opposite but at a suitable distance, watching her, watching her with his hopes as high as his cock, because damn, she’s hot. She’s the right age, thirteen, or so she says, but he would give her twelve, perhaps less. She’s so delightfully confident, so faux-knowing, in her high heels, her skimpy little skirt and crop top, revealing a midriff with a slightly rounded tummy, betraying her childishness. Oh, he likes thin, but that hint of a tummy, of residual baby fat, definitely does something for him.
‘Hello! Are you lost?’
She knows not to talk to strangers, or she should. But the meeting time is already half an hour past: he’s got that down to a fine art. Too soon, and they clam up. Much more, and they’ll cut their losses and go home.
‘Waiting for someone,’ she says, a bit sulky.
‘Daisy?’
‘Maybe.’
I’m Daisy’s dad,’ he says reassuringly. ‘She’s sprained her ankle, and couldn’t make it into town. I’ll give you a lift to the house, okay? D’you want an ice-cream to eat on the way?’
She says yes, of course, because everyone loves Thorntons ice-cream. She’s probably already imagining the meeting with Daisy, the gossip about their mutual internet friends. She might reflect that Daisy only sees her dad at the weekend, but he doesn’t think she’s that literal. While she’s licking her ice-cream, something he allows himself to get innocently turned on by, he starts leading her to the Great Lines above the town, a war memorial, fields fringed with woods, where it’s so easy to lay a girl gently on the grass and kiss and kiss her until you’re satisfied.
The blonde girl struggles away from him on the soft grass, and he doesn’t get anywhere near penetrating her, but it’s enough, nearly enough just to hold her close until he’s done, and then he’s only too glad to push her away, let her run for her life, sobbing. Her crop top is torn, one of the straps lost forever as she flees, and the heel of her ridiculous shoe has come off. As Remus watches, she pauses to remove both shoes, then sets off again, barefoot.
He suspects she’d get such a bollocking for meeting a stranger from the net that she won’t dare tell her parents. If she does, who’d be able to identify a kind, nondescript man, who lives at least fifty miles away from the scene of the crime, or non-crime? He gets a cab down to the station, and by the time the girl’s home, he’ll be back in his flat, cooking supper, waiting for Sirius to come in.
Later, he deletes every scrap, every possible trace of Daisy from various journals, forums and chat rooms, waits a few days to start again. Can’t risk the word getting out, can he?
During the boring week or so between a meeting and a new blog, he drives to the school where he used to teach - nobody could call him a coward - and parks his car a discreet distance from the gates, like a father doing the school run. It’s a different car now, a Honda Civic, purple, to underline his orientation. ‘I’m gay. I don’t do little girls, and I don’t want to do little girls,’ it proclaims.
Ana, of course, is no longer at the school; she’d be twenty now, by Remus’s reckoning, and is probably at university. Not art school; she was good, but not that good.
There’s never a shortage of thirteen year-old girls, of course, uniform skirts rolled up the second they’re through the gates, shirts pulled out of waistbands, hair let loose. They grow up too fast, but there are still a few children left in the world, and Remus can spot them, always, the girls who lag behind a bit, who stop to pick a flower growing between two paving stones, who haven’t yet lost their wonder at the world. Who haven’t yet lost the thin limbs, the tiny bones, who’re still unformed, waiting for someone like him to mould them.
He’ll sit there in his Honda, just watching, uncomfortably aware that he can always look but never touch. At these moments, he’s still bitterly resentful at Ana for losing him his job, curtailing his pleasures to such an extent. Even though he'll forget all about her when he’s on his laptop later, preparing his new persona - ‘Hi! My name’s Emily!’ - he's never quite managed to forgive her.
*
Thirty-six, and everything changes suddenly one January afternoon when Sirius brings his cousin Dora home for a drink. Remus comes in from one of his nebulous outings, and finds the two of them sitting in the kitchen, the warmest room in the house, with Sirius about to open a bottle of Bordeaux. It’s already dark out, and Remus closes the curtains and turns on the light, bustling around in a way he knows annoys Sirius - ‘You’re like a fucking parody of a gay guy, Remus’ - but he does like everything enclosed, safe.
He turns on the oven to help the recalcitrant radiators, though he can sense Sirius rolling his eyes.
‘Remus, stop sodding about. This is Dora. She’s just started work,’ he explains. He doesn’t need to tell Remus she’s a relative, a new family member of the family firm.
Remus smiles automatically, then does a double take. The girl in front of him looks like Sirius and she looks like one of his girls, his few and far-between girls, because children are more internet-savvy now, and he’s reduced almost entirely to his imagination. But that can’t be right: as far as Remus can recall, Dora would be about twenty-two. When they were at school, Sirius would sometimes look a bit shamefaced and say, ‘We can’t meet later. I have to baby-sit for my cousin.’
She must be suspended in time, this cousin: not very tall, undeveloped, with those legs, those coltish legs Remus dreams of, sometimes dreams until he’s sick, puking up loss and bile over the lavatory bowl, with tantalising images of a little girl walking up a flight of stone steps just in front of him.
Sirius is sober for once, and doesn’t pour himself a drink when he’s handed glasses of wine over to Remus and Dora. This evening, it’s Remus who gulps down his wine and pours another, then another, unable to take his eyes off the girl. Dora doesn’t drink much, he notes. She toys with the glass, sips a bit, and then asks, ‘Could I see the rest of the flat?’
‘Sure.’ Sirius is the avuncular one now, a hand at the small of Dora’s back as he manoeuvres her out of the kitchen. As soon as they’re gone, Remus feels compelled to pick up Dora’s almost untouched wine, to sniff it and lick the edge of the glass where her lips have been, before gulping it down and then, guiltily, replacing it with a fresh measure.
When she’s left, Remus blurts out, ‘But what’s wrong with her?’ He can’t believe this meeting is random. There has to be some reason, some malign charm that’s brought her here to him.
Sirius isn’t fazed or offended. In fact, he laughs. ‘Damn it, you were certainly staring at her! She’s anorexic. She doesn’t throw up or anything. Just doesn’t eat.’
‘But why?’
Sirius sits down patiently. He still hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol this evening, and Remus is uncomfortably tipsy, on the verge of being drunk. ‘I don’t have a clue! She’s been like this for years. Actually, she’s been a lot worse. They’re hoping that access to alcohol will help. You know, if she drinks occasionally she’ll lose some of her control and eat too.’
‘But then she won’t be beautiful any more!’ Remus blurts out, the wine talking, of course.
Sirius frowns, and his whole face seems to droop. He’s getting old, Remus thinks, with a pang.
‘Remus. I know you never did anything to that girl. Well, I believe you. But those paintings of yours...people could take them the wrong way. And my aunt and uncle made it pretty clear that Dora’s my responsibility. You have to remember she’s a grown woman, even if she doesn’t look it. Even if she is so much younger than us.’
Remus feels his face going hot. ‘That girl was ages ago,’ he mumbles. ‘And the paintings. They’re just paintings.’
Sirius moves over, covers Remus’s mouth with his, and they’re silent for a long time. When they resurface, Sirius says, ‘I know. It’s okay.’
*
Thirty-seven, and there isn’t a moment he doesn’t want to be with her, touching her, inside her, staring at her uncannily childlike face with the Black family features, that familiar colouring, those high cheekbones.
He’s at her flat, the flat her parents bought her to show they trust her to be independent and not starve herself to death. It’s a tiny, modern box near the Barbican, and she sleeps on a futon in a white, otherwise empty, bedroom.
‘I really hope Sirius won’t be wondering where I am,’ he says, close to her in the dark. But of course, he will be, because the exhibition finished at ten and it’s now nearly midnight, and he simply can’t tear himself away.
‘Well, just make bloody sure you come up with a good lie,’ Dora snaps. ‘I’ll kill you if he finds about us. He’s my cousin, and I have to work with him.’
He knows he doesn’t satisfy her, or even please her. When she speaks, he regrets, briefly, the higher-pitched voices, the childish words of thirteen, like a lost paradise, like something he may never find his way back to again.
When he isn’t with Dora, he’s drawing her compulsively. He draws her the way he’s never really seen her, a little girl lying on a futon, a tiny, shadowy figure in a sea of white, gazing up at him adoringly, something that certainly won’t happen in real life. She’s naked, bony, tiny; vulnerable, even.
Sometimes, when Sirius is away on business, Dora comes to his and Sirius’s flat for lunch. That isn’t as staightforward an arrangement as it sounds.
‘Please,’ he’ll beg. ‘Otherwise I won’t see you for a whole week.’
‘Why would I want to see you?’ she asks. He thinks she really means it, that she really wants to know how she’s got embroiled in this.
‘Because you find me irresistible. Oh, come on, Dora. Please. Please.’
‘Oh, all right. But just to stop you nagging.’
He’s watching out for her from the sitting room window, and when she starts up the outside staircase, he’s already waiting for her at the door. She takes the steps two at a time, he notices, presumably to burn off calories.
There are no green tendrils now, but the creeper is red and yellow on this sunny autumn afternoon. She looks like a little girl running towards him, and his heart swells with something that could be love.
The dining table, cleared of laptop, plants and assorted paraphernalia, is already set for her, with a knife, fork and empty plate. Remus has put her in Sirius’s place. She always brings her own food, on the rare occasions she agrees to eat here. Today, it’s an apple and an ounce of cheese. She cuts the apple into thin slices, and the cheese into cubes, smaller and smaller, as if to make any lingering calories disappear altogether.
‘I thought cheese was fattening,’ Remus says.
‘I wouldn’t break my diet!’ She’s defiant, obviously reluctant to eat in front of him in the first place. ‘Not that it’s any of your business, Remus.’
‘You don’t want to put on weight.’ Hardly likely, when she doesn’t even eat enough to sustain life indefinitely. He likes to think it’s a novelty, when her parents and friends and doctors are begging her to eat, for someone to watch her arrange the cheese carefully in a circle and say, ‘Are you sure you really want that?’
‘Are you sure you don’t really want little boys?’ she jeers, trying to regain the advantage, snatching at the last slice of thinly-pared apple. ‘I mean, you want me to look like a boy.’
‘No! No, I want you just as you are.’
After lunch, he drags Dora to his and Sirius’s big bedroom overlooking the back garden, which is so unlike her sterile white one. Like the sitting-room, it’s full of plants. There are more ferns, in hanging baskets at both windows, an orchid that actually flowers twice a year on the chest of drawers, an original tiled fireplace filled with greenery, seedlings on the floor, on every surface. The wall is covered rather haphazardly with paintings, mainly Remus’s; the bed is huge, with shiny brass fittings. It’s supposed to be dangerous to sleep in a room full of plants, but Sirius says that’s rubbish, and neither of them are dead yet.
Remus closes the dark green curtains to block out the light: a complex operation, which always ends up with the ferns shedding seeds all over the woodblock floor. Sirius never draws curtains: it’s one of their constant battles.
‘I put the ferns there so you’ll just leave them open! I hate waking up in the dark,’ he always grumbles. ‘If you insist on curtains, you can sweep up the bloody seeds.’
But Remus is quite happy to sweep up seeds when Dora’s been here, because he so loves to look at her in the dim light. Like this, he can discern Sirius in her face while he fucks her, beside himself with the force of his need for her, stroking and licking that flat chest. Of course, he’s fully aware that all the time he’s clutching and moaning, she’s thinking about food and calories, her personal pornography. But he doesn’t care, as long as she’ll allow him to do what he wants with her body.
Oh, there are problems. She’s had boyfriends, and he’s far from the first. She lacks that all-important tightness. On the plus side, she compulsively removes any trace of bodily hair, in case it adds an ounce or two to her weight.
But when he mentions how much he likes her hairless body, she retorts, ‘You’re an idiot! Haven’t you heard of lanugo?’
Remus thinks it sounds like an illness or a pain in the joints; no, that’s lumbago. He’s disconcerted to find that it’s a thin down chronic anorexics grow over their bodies. ‘To keep warm,’ she informs him.
‘You’ll never have lanugo.’ He hates that word, can hardly get it out. ‘I’ll keep you warm,’ he promises, nestling into her, kissing every inch of her smooth, cold skin. ‘I’ll protect you.’ When he looks deeply into her grey eyes, Sirius’s eyes, he can almost imagine that he really means it.
*
Thirty-eight, and he’s been asked to the funeral, though he isn’t a member of the immediate family, and obviously Sirius has no idea what their relationship was.
‘This is just a fucking nightmare,’ Sirius says, red-eyed, hands shaking. His breakfast has consisted of half a bottle of whisky and eight or nine cigarettes. Remus sees quite clearly that if Sirius goes on like this, he’ll also be dead before another year is out.
It’s a good day for a funeral, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. The sleet began soon after they got up, and Remus worries that the steps will be impassable when he and Sirius come home. And the wind has been rising all night, moaning and howling round the house as if Dora’s ghost has returned to berate him. It would be a pitiable ghost; just four and a half stone, according to Sirius. ‘I still can’t bloody believe it. She was getting so much better, and then suddenly she just went downhill,’ he keeps saying.
It isn’t Remus’s fault, obviously. Dora has spent the past three weeks in hospital, refusing to eat, refusing to sign the consent to be drip-fed. He didn’t even go to see her. Why should he? They hardly knew each other, officially.
Sirius brought him regular bulletins. ‘She’s going to be tube-fed,’ he told him the day before yesterday. ‘She refused, of course, but they don’t need her consent at this stage. It’s not a pleasant procedure. They have to force the tube through her nose, down her throat and into her stomach.’
Remus's own stomach lurched and he felt his mouth filling with vomit, had to leave the room before Sirius could tell him any more.
It doesn’t matter anyway. She died before they even inserted the tube.
The church was built some time in the seventies, and feels more like one of Remus’s galleries, a white space with pine pews, a tiny round stained glass window, an abstract pattern of coloured glass, almost apologetic among the stark modern fittings. There are cheerful collages by the Sunday school children blu-tacked to one wall, and a couple of embroidered wall-hangings showing the Resurrection, but otherwise Jesus is notable by his absence; he doesn’t even feature on the tasteful wooden cross behind the altar.
The coffin, on a trestle at the front of the church, is white, like a child’s coffin, closed, of course, and heaped with flowers. Sirius has sent a holly wreath, because it’s so near Christmas, and it looks incongruously festive among the chrysanthemums and expensive out-of-season roses.
‘You were right,’ Sirius whispers as he and Remus sit down in a pew three rows from the front. ‘It isn’t really appropriate, is it? But Dora did love Christmas so!’ His eyes brim with tears and he mops them with a pristine white handkerchief.
The church is packed with various members of the Black and Tonks families, all in deepest mourning. ‘That’s her mother,’ Sirius hisses, pointing to a woman whose face is hidden by a veil.
‘But surely they were expecting it?’ Remus doesn’t want to be callous, but all this grief and weeping make him twitchy.
Sirius gives him a filthy look. ‘Nobody expects young women just to, just to die.’ Because of the amount of whisky he’s ingested, his words are particularly loud in the hushed space, and people turn to glare at him. Remus shrinks back against the pew, looking fixedly at the empty cross.
From the church, they go to the crematorium, six miles away. It strikes Remus as a stupid arrangement, having to travel from church to crematorium then back to someone’s house for the wake.
‘Why don’t they just bury her here?’
‘Remus, you’re being a real bugger today. Dora specifically requested that she should be cremated. She was very aware of the environment.’
Sirius’s voice wobbles again, and no doubt he’s relieved that he’s in one of the three official cars, while Remus has to get a lift from one of the more distant relatives.
The wind is practically a gale now, shaking the little Micra as it belts along the dual carriageway. ‘Poor Dora!’ says the mother, who’s also the driver. ‘She was my husband’s sister’s niece by marriage. Is that right, Barty dear?’
‘Something like that.’ Barty is thin and rather lugubrious, which, Remus feels, is fitting for the occasion.
He’s in the back, next to their young daughter. He hasn’t really had a chance even to look at her: she has an iPod plugged into her ear, and is singing along under her breath with some appropriately lugubrious emo band. ‘My friend died - yesterday.’ She’s slightly off-key, but has one of those childish voices that makes Remus sit up and take notice.
The car crunches to a halt on the gravel outside the crematorium. It’s just like a graveyard, and the rest of the mourners are already there, talking in soft voices or, in the case of Dora’s parents, weeping uncontrollably. The ceremony won’t start for another fifteen minutes, but though it’s freezing out here and the sleet has turned to snow, nobody seems to notice or care: perhaps they’re genuinely too sad to register the weather. Remus unfolds himself from the car and stretches, which is a relief, as he’s tall, and the Micra was cramped. The daughter stretches too, exaggeratedly, turns off her iPod without being asked, and stows it in the boot. Remus finally looks at her properly, smiles and says, ‘Well, at least you got a day off school.’
She smiles back. ‘I didn’t really know Dora. But it’s sad, isn’t it?’
Her hair is red and curly, and he sizes her up with an expert eye. Possibly a bit old for him, not quite as thin as he likes them, but she has an indefinable quality to her that makes his heart thump as he keeps his smile fixed for a moment too long.
‘I didn’t know Dora either,’ he replies. The mourners start to file into the crematorium but he lingers for a few more minutes, waiting for her walk in with her parents, slipping in just behind her to go and find Sirius.
End