As soon as the pressure of his body lessens a little, I wrench myself frantically from under him and crawl to the furthest corner.

‘Sorry, baby,’ he says and gives me a lop-sided smile. A flaming sensation is shooting spasmodically through me, paralysing me. Walt moves up close and runs his finger over the spot where he hurt me, tilting his head to one side and thoughtfully scratching the corner of his mouth with his other hand. Why is he smiling at me so compassionately, does he think I’m stupid or that I’m babyish? I hold my hands to my face, ashamed. The pain is like a knife slicing me in two.

‘Easy,’ I hear him say. ‘Easy, baby.’ When he pulls my hands away I see that he looks serious. He blinks his eyes and clears his throat. ‘Come over,’ he says and pouts his lips at me.

I hesitate. He brushes his hand over my eyes and keeps looking at me, his own eyes grey and clear. Suddenly I am crying.

‘Come.’

I put my lips to his mouth.

‘Sooo,’ he mumbles, drawing it out, ‘good boy.’

Then he lays his head between my legs as if he were going to sleep, his hair soft as rabbit fur against my skin. He touches my feet, my legs, then slowly and insistently he strokes my collapsed sex. I no longer move; just so long as everything stays calm and gentle and safe.

It happens without me, the unhurried straightening of my legs and the slow, embarrassing erection. I can do nothing to stop it, I do not look at it, just register numbly the jerking of my body under his hand.

I twist my hips round to try and screen the movements and find myself ludicrously exposed to his searching gaze. He closes his lips around the erect little shape and it vanishes into a sucking wetness.

He is going to bite, just the way he bit my arm: as soon as the thought occurs to me, it shrivels up, is gone, it’s all over.

‘Not good,’ he laughs. ‘Jerome baby.’

He draws thoughtfully on his cigarette and blows smoke into my face. Then he stubs the cigarette out on the floor, calmly and decisively. He takes hold of my chin like a dentist and presses on my jaws, puts the hard thing between my lips and pushes it in firmly.

‘Kiss me.’

It sounds loud and flat in the empty room. I clasp his legs tightly to withstand the lazy movement in and out. Then I resist no more. He has me under his control as he bends thrusting over me, while I perish in the spurting waves that cut off my breath and beat against my throat and the roof of my mouth. An opposing wave is rising in my stomach, a surf that breaks upwards at furious speed, and it is all I can do to force it back down.

The muscles of my throat contract, I gag and struggle for air. He pulls his body away and the thing slips out, suddenly slack and harmless. A sickly sweet taste seems to be sticking to my gullet with rubbery tentacles. I feel clammy and cold and shiver so violently that my whole body shakes.

Walt stretches out beside me and puts his arms and legs around me: a smell of iron, of warmth and sleep. I hear his soothing voice in my ear and with every breath his belly presses against mine. He is suddenly gentle again. I feel him putting his arms around my neck. Slowly, following his breathing, I calm down. Without being asked, I press my mouth to his neck.

I lie shut in between the wall and the protecting rampart that is his body. He has turned away from me and stopped moving. Is he asleep?

His back is a landscape, his shoulder-blades the hills, his skin a sloping field under which pale blue rivers flow. At the curve of his neck little glossy mouse-hairs grow in strangely symmetrical formations, a miniature display of toy armies on the march. The landscape and the armies move slowly with his breathing.

He is fond of me, that’s why he said, ‘I love you’.

His arm gropes backwards and pulls me closer. When I push up against his hips he makes a satisfied sound.

He picks up his watch from the floor, and takes a long look at the dial. Is it time, do we have to go? I wonder where he will be taking me; not back to Warns, anyway, that’s out of the question now, I’m sure of that. He turns over on to his back and smokes a cigarette, flicking ash into a neat pile on the floor.

My head is lying on his chest, his arm moving across me, from his mouth to the floor. The thing is lying limp and harmless on his belly, looking at me with its split eye: it is a silkworm, a docile roll of putty. Now and then Walt puts his hand over it. I study how he handles the thing and moves it about. A grown-up’s body is strange, different. It enthrals me and repels me.

He holds out both hands to me, pulls me up from the mattress and gives a meaningful laugh. But I don’t laugh back. I don’t understand his laughter: why, what is there to laugh about?

I stand close to him and feel his skin, warm and shifting like sand in the sun. When I move my hand over the little curly hairs, I wonder if he understands that I am giving him a guarded caress. Persuasively he thrusts his body against mine, so that we move together to the window. He pulls it open. The air that falls over us is crisp and smells of dry leaves. The cooing of a pigeon breaks off abruptly and I hear hurried rustling and clumsy fluttering in the branches.

Walt bends over me and looks out. It is motionless and still and yet the trees are full of chirping sounds. He rubs his body against my back, first imperceptibly and then more obviously, but I pretend to be looking out undisturbed as if I feel nothing: if I don’t notice anything then nothing will happen. The car is parked by the side of the house, large and lumbering, like a watchdog waiting patiently for his master to finish his business and to come back to him. The movements behind my back continue. It is as if the thing were an intruder, another person standing between Walt and me, an obstinate bore conducting his affairs with no reference to us. I rest my chin on my arm and look at the trees: how tiresome grown-ups can be.

‘Let’s go.’

He stands big and strong by the basin and shamelessly fingers the thing with soapy hands. He has no secrets from me and behaves as if everything were normal. I get dressed and wait patiently for him to lace up his boots. What now?

I can’t go back home: if somebody has undressed you and done things with you, then you belong to him, that’s how it is with grown-ups; you’ve been singled out, it means he wants you.

On the ground floor, just when I think we are finally leaving, Walt suddenly becomes very busy, fetching tins from a crate and carrying them to the car. I sit in the front of the car and listen to him walking about in the house, shutting the window upstairs and locking the door. Then he is sitting beside me, leaning back. Now I shall know what is going to happen, where we are going.

He smokes.

His cheek gleams in the light, I can see his nostrils quiver as if he were smelling trouble. Every so often he blows smoke in my direction by way of making conversation. The cigarette is taking an exasperaringly long time to grow smaller.

Now I want him to put his arm around me, so that I can smell his nearness. The sudden longing carves painfully through my insides. I wait for him to pull me towards him so that I can lean into the folds of his clothes.

He flips the butt outside and starts the engine.

Evening creeps soundlessly over the land. When I look out of the tent I can see the twilight slowly shrouding the distant trees and farmsteads.

I am sitting in the middle of a groundsheet and hardly dare move or touch anything, not the sleeping-bag rolled up beside the laced-up green bag at the head of the tent, nor the magazines with the colour photographs on top of the small pile of folded clothes, nor the two mess-tins, the pocket torch or the small bits and pieces drawn up in strict formation along the sides of the tent. My eyes have examined them all dozens of times now. I have taken it all in and fixed it in my memory: this is where he lives, this is his home and these are his possessions. Everything is confined inside this small square around me, the shapes that I see turning greyer and greyer until they blend with the fading cloth of the tent.

I can hear voices in the distance, violently flaring up and then dying away again, and music from a radio. A little while ago I had smelled food and heard the familiar sounds that go with a meal: the clatter of pans, the irregular clicking of cutlery and people talking with full mouths. I had not moved and had listened holding my breath until I grew giddy trying to distinguish that one voice. Could I possibly hear it from so far away, would it reach me over such a distance?

But the conversations remained a jumbled skein of sound to which I could put neither figure or features, no matter how hard I listened. The smell of the food does not disturb me, because all the time he has been away – an hour, one and a half hours or more? – I have felt no hunger, nor have I minded the chill that has invaded the tent with the night air.

Will this be my life from now on, in tents, cars and deserted houses, waiting for him to return? Will I, as now, always have to gaze out aimlessly and bored, dreaming my life away, apathetic and without a will of my own? And will I be travelling with him from one country to the next, making war and celebrating liberations and sleeping inside this little square? Then it will be my tent, my kit-bag and one of the mess tins will perhaps be mine alone.

Do I really want that, to leave Laaxum for good, to forget Amsterdam, live inside this canvas house? But why not? Even if it is small in here, it is well laid out and private, a protected existence like a rabbit’s in a hutch.