Free Juggling the Stars by Tim Parks

any more.
    Morris watched the coloured dresses shifting in the steadily slanting light across the square. If the mother didn’t want Massimina to see the letter, why hadn’t she simply destroyed it? A far more sensible line.
    â€˜So, what are you going to do?’
    'I'm not going back, that’s all. Not to spend all summer studying for exams, and with Mamma not allowing me to see anybody. I wasn’t made to do exams.’
    In about five minutes she would change her mind, Morris thought. After all, she had never even slept in a different bed from her mother. He waited, watching as she dabbed the tears away from her round, faintly freckled face. The prettiness of the camellia coloured skin was coming back now. Extraordinarily smooth skin when you compared it, for example, with Gregorio’s. Or any boy’s over fifteen. And that was something Morris always looked for in girls and that never failed to fascinate him when he found it. Simply as an extraordinary fact, that skin could be so smooth, life seem so fresh.
    â€˜What were you made for then?’ he asked.
    Fair question. Not at all cynical.
    She looked into his eyes and her bottom lip puckered out into a childish dimpled smile.
    â€œMaybe for you, Morrees.’

    After Morris’s last lesson, Massimina was waiting at the bus stop as she had promised. Hoist with his own petard, was the way he saw it. There was no point in courting the girl outside her family’s approval. He had no taste for it at all. And particularly he had no desire to start some kind of awful affair that could only end in disaster. He had written that letter to get
himself into
her family, not to get
her out
of it. The difference was neither academic nor subtle.
    â€˜I should really take you straight home.’ That should win some approval. ‘Come on, let’s find a taxi.’
    â€˜No, Morri,’ and quite impetuously she threw her arms around him.'I'm not going back.’
    At which precise moment, Stan wobbled past. Stopping his bike under a lamp across the street, his face was a wide bearded grin.
    â€˜Hey man, you made up your mind about Turkey yet? We’re off in a week now.’
    Massimina pulled away.
    'You can always bring your friend,’ Stan laughed. ‘Drop in and tell us as soon as you can.’ A bus swept between them and Stan disappeared.

7
    It was seeing her together with the money, so much money, that brought the idea into his head. He had been explaining, quite reasonably, in the plain light of another day, that simply from the financial point of view she couldn’t possibly stay, when she unzipped the red tracksuit top just three or four inches and, reaching inside, produced after a few seconds of fiddling a small wad of notes that must have been hidden in her bra.
    â€˜I took out all my life savings yesterday. I've got loads of money, enough for a couple of months anyway. And after that they won’t be able to do anything about it anyway, will they? I mean, in cases like that they have to let you marry because of thinking you’ve been to bed together.’
    Morris’s mouth, which had been open wide to speak, snapped shut.
    â€˜And anyway, I’m eighteen in August.’
    Well, they definitely had not been to bed together. In fact the evening had passed rather well. Massimina had made up a cold salad, laid and cleared the table and then taken a bath, re-appearing afterwards in the tracksuit, but without, Morris noticed, a shade unnerved, her bra. Her breasts were larger and heavier than he had imagined, and indeed than anybody would have imagined, given her slim body. He stayed sitting at the kitchen table where she was safely opposite and for conversation, to fill the time, he simply asked her questions, as he had always done at the bar after lessons waiting for the bus, and she chattered happily in reply: Bobo did this and that, he had got off his military service by getting a doctor friend of