Quickly, not wanting to let go of her for a second, he pulled it off, wishing he had bathed more carefully at home, for the smell of his armpits joined that of her shampoo and her skin in the close air of the car. He could see more and more, as if light were leaking from the patches of sky in the gaps between the trees, shedding glimmers into the woods, where faint noises were reviving and becoming less faint. He kissed her breasts, trying to be delicate, trying not to bite as the nipples grew hard, while she pressed into his ear a voice that seemed made up, enlarged and rehearsed, like something in the movies: “Owen, I used to take off my clothes in my room and walk around looking at myself in the mirror, wishing you could see me.”

“You’re beautiful—amazing,” he told her, meaning it, but, as if her voice had swabbed out his ears, he now heard other things, whispers and stirrings around them, on the other side of the glass and metal. From somewhere not too distant there was a hoot, an owl or possibly a signal from a murderous, demented gang that lived here in caves and came out at night. Suppose the car doesn’t start? he thought again. It often didn’t, in rainstorms, or on cold mornings, his father frantic, flooding the engine in his panic, so the wearying starter turned it over uncatching, cooga cooga. “Did you hear something?” Owen asked Elsie.

She had left her loafers on the gritty floor of the car and had risen up, bare now even to her feet, to kneel on the seat beside him, stroking his face as he tongued her breasts; even in his state of growing terror he marvelled, holding her tight, at the give of a girl’s waist, at the semi-liquid space below the ribs and then, behind, the downy hard plate at the base of the spine and the glassy globes of her buttocks, smooth into the cleavage, all of it unified like the silvery body of a fish, all so simple and true, the simple truth of her, alive in his arms. He heard the distant hoot again. Something rustled near the car tires. She felt his mouth losing interest in her nipple, and began to listen with him. Behind the skin between her breasts her heart was beating. “I don’t think so,” Elsie answered him, her voice losing its movie-screen largeness and becoming small, with a childish quaver.