Free Like it Matters by David Cornwell Page A

favourites, this one in cream with handprints and stripes on its legs, like an Indian warhorse, and this other one that was going to be maroon with a turquoise mane and tail, and a big burned-orange sugar skull on its side.
    “So what do we do now?” I asked her.
    “We chip all the old paint off, then we paint the whole thing white. Like an undercoat.”
    “That doesn’t sound fun.”
    “Ja, it won’t be,” she said. “You have to work for the fun parts.”
    Just chipping the paint took the rest of the day—and it was kak work, maybe some of the worst I’ve ever done. It was so easy to hurt your hands with the scraper, and they’d bleed and then flakes of paint would get into the cuts and make them sting. And then you’d have to use the sandpaper, and the cuts would close up with dirt and your hands would throb and go red and start to look a bit unrecognisable. After an hour of it I told her to put her scraper down, her hands were too important, I’d do the rest.
    At about two o’clock I’d finished chipping all the horses and all the poles and some of the skirting at the bottom of the thing and I was lying flat on my back, with my hands dipped in ice-cream tubs full of water with some dish soap in it, my head in her lap, my eyelids red and warm in the sun—she’d been telling me about what was going on in the street but then she’d gone quiet and she’d put her fingers in my hair. I was nearly asleep
    When I heard her say, “Ah, Jesus”—
    And I felt her fingernails go into my scalp.
    I saw him as soon as I sat up. But it wasn’t like her dad was coming for us or anything like that, he looked busy with something out on the street. He had a black plastic bag with him. He was carrying it around like a sack.
    “What’s he doing?” I said.
    “Probably a poster run.”
    “Huh?”
    “Ja, check, he hasn’t seen us. Hide me,” she said, and she pulled me on top of her.
    We kissed for a while and then when we sat up again he was gone.
    “Please tell me,” I said.
    She giggled. “You know those abortion posters? Those back-alley things that say CLEAN and SAFE and PAINFREE all over them? He rips them down.”
    I said, “What about the ones for penis cream? Or the ones that can bring your wife back or get you a new job?”
    “They all come down,” she said. “It’s all witchcraft to him.”
    I finished the scraping that day, that night I passed out on my bed on the couch with my fucking plate of supper right there on my chest.
    I know that’s what happened, because when I knocked it all over in the middle of the night I woke Charlotte up. Even though she’d been asleep, when she came through to the lounge she was laughing. “I knew that was going to happen,” she said. We kissed and I put my sore hands on her ribcage, on the skin—
    Just that, because I didn’t want to try touch too much and ruin it again—
    But just that and I was embarrassingly hard, and I think we were both still half fucked up on sleep and I thought maybe at last something was going to happen
    But then she just broke it off and went back to the room, told me she’d help clean up the plate in the morning. I cleaned it up right then to save my hands from having to jack off, and then when I went back to the couch, till I fell asleep, I imagined her ribcage like this enormous river valley, soft folds, long curved hills, I was lying there in grass like breathing velvet in a breeze that smelled like her hair …
    The painting the next day was better because it didn’t hurt as much as the scraping, but it was more irritating in other ways.
    Duade joined in.
    And Charlotte was a Nazi about how smooth the undercoat had to be, which wouldn’t have actually been so much of a problem except the paint Duade got us was cheap, thin and grainy at the same time, and it’d clot along every groove and bubble in every crack and crevice, and when you tried to take some off you always took much more than you wanted to and then you’d