by Patrick Gale
He tried not to let it change the way he saw his parents however – it was far too weird to think of either of them, especially his father, in a sexual light – but at school, and in the streets to and from it, he began to find himself readily picturing certain people naked. The woman with red hair and huge breasts in the sweetshop. The man with tattoos down a hole in the pavement. Mr Jordan, his English teacher. It was incredibly distracting. He had never been the most focused student in the classroom but now his mind was an untrained puppy, chasing whatever it pleased. Suddenly the leering and jokes of the other boys began to make more sense rather than simply being alienating and frightening. He became aware that the handful of boys in his class who were boarders were having encounters almost every night, of an unromantic, competitive nature. There was much bragging about size, about quantity of jizz – a word he had often heard but never understood, and which he still wasn’t entirely sure how to spell. To his relief he found few of the other boys piqued his interest. One or two of the teachers, however, the younger ones like Mr Jordan, marking time at the school after university while they decided on a career, were another matter. Mr White, who taught French and rugby, had hairy forearms. Mr Skipwith, who taught maths rather frighteningly and football even more so, had a fascinatingly large Adam’s apple and a way of swinging his hips as he clacked aggressively with his chalk across the blackboard. Both wore daringly fashionable flared trousers rather than the drab suits worn by their older colleagues, and these were so mesmerizingly tight across the bottom and crotch that Eustace began to find himself reaching the midpoint of their lessons suddenly aware that he had been staring so intently he had taken in not a word they had been saying. And now that he had been shown, of course, he knew exactly what to do when he woke with an erection or when prolonged exposure to Mr Jordan’s broad chest brought him to boiling point.
He tried to bear Mr Payton’s proscriptions in mind and to confine his self-indulgence to once a day. He could not think of it as self-abuse, since it seemed to do no harm. If anything, it cleared his mind of clouds for a while, let him go back to thinking rationally about dates or numbers, declensions or the uses of the pluperfect. But he soon began to see the sense behind Mr Payton’s warning. Once was rarely enough. This was an appetite in which, far from taking the edge off one’s need, satisfaction seemed only to make it the keener. So he began to strike deals with himself in which two sessions a day were permissible if one only lay down for one of them and stood by the sink for the other. Self-indulgence in a school lavatory cubicle was more medicine than pleasure, he convinced himself, since the possibility of discovery made it so tense.
And with the convulsion this wrought in his life came the discovery that he had no control over his fantasies. The mind was unruly. He might lie down at night, chair silently wedged against doorknob in case, wad of loo paper carefully to hand and plan to think of some acceptable idol, like David Essex or Lee Majors, only to find quite the wrong person barging in on his decorously arranged scenario. Once or twice this was Louis but more often than not, and with volcanic results, it was Vernon.
He betrayed nothing, of course. When they met each day he was as studiedly offhand as usual, although privately he found he was now keenly aware of Vernon’s physicality, of his appealing, nutty smell, of the growing heft of him, of the roughness in his deepening voice. And Vernon, in turn, seemed as studiously careful around him. Just once, as they were strolling along the front, sweltering in their uniforms between bare-legged, bare-armed holidaymakers, Vernon nudged him, prompted by the approach of a dazzlingly pretty girl eating a 99, and asked, ‘So, are you succeeding as a teenager now on a regular basis?’
And Eustace had nudged him back and laughed and told him to shut up, but his scarlet face must have given Vernon all the answer he needed. Vernon had coughed and began to talk about Fanny Burney, whose immense novels he had just discovered, and whose name he enjoyed pronouncing with suggestive relish.
They still saw each other every school day, still tended to walk to the Fort or the Prince Consort Park shelter for long conversations about nothing much. And although Eustace still practised his cello regularly even though there now seemed nothing in particular to practise for, their encounter at the Fort must have made Vernon wary of stopping by to listen and watch. But perhaps it wasn’t that, Eustace considered. Perhaps it was just Vernon being sensitive to the disappointment of not being able to take up the music scholarship.
Vernon’s birthday was approaching. It was a quietly manly custom between them that they observed one another’s birthday but ignored the more vulgarized feasts of Christmas and Easter. For the past two years they had honoured one another’s passions, Vernon giving Eustace records of the Haydn and Boccherini cello concertos and Eustace giving Vernon paperbacks of Armadale and Felix Holt . But this year he decided to be bold.
He knew that boys his age often loitered in the magazine section of Smith’s – he had seen them – reading magazines they would never be sold, tucked into a copy of something innocuous about model trains or warfare, having stepped a yard or two to the left or right of where they had dared to tweak the magazine down. The Smith’s staff didn’t seem to mind – at least they never intervened unless there was an attempt to steal something – and there were always a few grown men doing exactly the same so perhaps it was an accepted pattern of male behaviour, something their fathers did as well, but in other towns, perhaps. But to have grasped such a magazine himself and queued at the counter with it then handed it to the woman behind the till was quite unthinkable. In any case she would probably refuse to sell it to him, whatever story he told her. Most boys at St Chad’s relied on the scraps of pornography hidden in time-honoured spots and mysteriously refreshed from time to time. But they were, quite literally, filthy, so long used and abused that merely to handle them was to feel a sense of pollution.
In the heart of the most touristy part of the town, where everything, even buildings, felt provisional, entirely geared towards rapid moneymaking not stability or elegance, was a corner shop so lurid he would never normally have entered even in an emergency. It sold tobacco, lettered rock, sweets, holiday postcards – including the ones with rude jokes illustrated by scarlet-cheeked, big-busted women and sweating, ferrety men. It also sold newspapers and magazines. It was known that the teenage girls employed there on a weekend heedlessly sold cigarettes to children.
Even so, Eustace prepared as for a commando raid. First he went to Smith’s, where he bought a large brown envelope, a birthday card with Monet haystacks on it and a roll of wrapping paper. And, with beating heart, he swiftly lunged between the men crowding the shelves to check the price of the magazine he had settled on. Then he headed to the corner shop, checked that one of the girls, not the thick-armed owner, was on duty and walked in. As always the place was crowded but with trippers, not locals, nobody who would know him. As it happened, the girl was taking a telephone call as she served, so her mind was at the other end of the grubby, curly flex and barely on the job. She certainly wasn’t engaging customers in conversation. Even so, he waited until there was no queue before seizing a copy of Mayfair and darting forward with exactly the right money – more than he would have thought it possible to spend on a magazine. She took his cash without meeting his eye, making encouraging, ‘go-on’ noises to whoever was on the other end of the phone call and, without asking, thrust his purchase into a striped plastic bag. He bundled it in turn into the new brown envelope inside his Smith’s bag before heading home to privacy.
Had he needed confirmation that his circuitry was differently wired to that of other boys, the pictures provided it in abundance. Or rather, his lack of response to them did. He read the magazine with great care, as it was a present, and looked at every single page. The women in it were selected, he saw, to offer a range of appeals, from haughty to cheap, blonde to ginger, pert to ripe. He gazed, appalled and inquisitive, but felt not the slightest stirring and found his eye lingering not on parted skin or curl
ing hair but extraneous details, lacy underwear, shiny high heels, a macramé potholder he would have liked in his own room.
He began to feel that telltale tightening in chest and Y-fronts only when he passed beyond the pictures and reached a section never retained among the grubby fragments in the loo cubicles or changing room at school. It wasn’t a letters page exactly, although it was entirely words and purported to be written by readers. It was a series of confessions – he suspected entirely fictional – sent in by women and men driven by guilt or an odd kind of generosity to unburden themselves. They told of passionate, shameless encounters in train compartments, hotel rooms, airplanes and a department store changing room – a lack of domesticity, a giddy sense of transience seemed integral to the narrative thrill – in which the narrators had sex with men or women or men and women whose need for immediate satisfaction overruled any sense of risk or decency or normality. They were utterly compelling, he found. And it was because, unlike the pictures, they involved the imagination. And men. He read every one and it was some time before he felt able carefully to fold the magazine away in wrapping paper and leave his room again.
Although the magazine was securely wrapped and even had the shop’s plastic bag under the wrapping to be doubly secure, he did not like to risk taking it to school where a crowd might gather and boys insist Vernon open it there and then. He hid it carefully under his mattress – he had been changing his own sheets for some time now – and casually suggested Vernon come back with him for birthday tea.
One of the few good points about living in an old people’s home was that there was always cake to be had at teatime. His mother was out, happily, so there was no call to socialize and they could raid Mrs Fowler’s cake tin and take mugs of tea upstairs.
His mother had been out a great deal since the music scholarship exam. She seemed to have embarked on a period of self-improvement, taking herself off to Bristol to see exhibitions or matinées of the kind of subtitled films that made his father fidget. And when not absent, she often seemed distracted by books borrowed from Carla. Her predominant mood had become scattily sweet and her punishing headaches, rare, so nobody minded the absences.
That afternoon his father was out as well, probably filling the car to its roof with loo paper and latex gloves at the Cash and Carry. Even so, discreetly pulling open his sock drawer to block the bedroom door from being opened would be less likely to unsettle Vernon, he decided, than resorting to his usual chair-beneath-doorknob solution.
They sat on the bed, sipped their tea, and Vernon dutifully laughed as he opened his card. But his bloody hell on opening his present was sincere and gratifying. His slightly adenoidal breathing thickened as he began to turn the pages. Eustace sat beside him, catching the Sunday roast scent of him. Since the photographs had aroused Eustace so little, he was interested to see their effect on his friend. Was it breasts that caught his eye? Faces?
‘Bloody hell,’ Vernon muttered again, flicking back for a second look at a giddy blonde in a rose-pink negligée and suspenders. Eustace nudged him playfully. Vernon glanced up. ‘Thanks, Stash,’ he said. ‘This is . . . bloody hell.’ He pushed a hand down the front of his trousers to rearrange himself.
‘Show me,’ Eustace said. ‘What . . . Who do you like the best?’
‘This one,’ Vernon said. ‘Her. Look. I mean Christ, Stash. Look at her!’
He had flicked back again to the rose-pink blonde. Eustace made a show of looking at her, too, but she seemed utterly ordinary to him. A little sharp-faced and cheap. He could imagine her as a Saturday girl in the very shop where he had bought her. Looking at her, he could think of nothing they would find to talk about. Except Vernon, of course.
He wants me so much and I just can’t handle it, he imagined her telling him. You know?
Believe me, I know , he told her.
Help me, she told him. Take him off my hands . . .
Eustace took the magazine from Vernon and flicked to the back, to find the confessions again. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Just imagine this is about her. With you.’
And, keeping his voice as low and calm as he could, he slowly read the confession in which a shy but eager-to-learn nurse found herself trapped in a lift late at night with a handsome and powerfully equipped junior doctor wearing very little under his scrubs. As he’d hoped, Vernon couldn’t help but unzip himself and he read on through a second story, about a bored housewife and a randy plumber until, with a hoarse curse, Vernon was done.
Then, rather than ask him if he wanted the favour returned, Vernon muttered, ‘Your turn now,’ and shifted so that he sat tightly behind Eustace, a thigh hot against each of his. ‘Easier to do it right-handed this way,’ he murmured as he unzipped Eustace and returned the favour. He restrained him tightly with his left arm when Eustace made a move to finish on his own, which made it all the more exciting, and continued to hold his chest until his panting had subsided.
Just as before, there was no acknowledgement from Vernon of what they had just done. Eustace felt slightly faint and must have closed his eyes because, when he became aware again, Vernon was over at the bedroom sink, washing and drying his hands.
‘Thanks for this,’ was all he said, picking up the magazine as Eustace tidied himself up, unpleasantly hot in the face. ‘But could I keep it here, maybe? I’m not sure about carrying it home.’
Eustace was about to say there was an envelope and plastic bag then realized that the magazine gave a good pretext for a return visit. ‘Of course,’ he said, taking it from him and lifting the mattress to hide it. ‘You can, er, come and look at it whenever you like.’
‘Thanks. Well, I’d better be off.’
Eustace’s father must have returned from the Cash and Carry. Eustace heard Vernon making conversation with him beyond the bend in the stairs, him sounding entirely innocent and calling his father ‘sir’.
A discreet pattern emerged during the remaining weeks of term. He and Vernon would have their usual after-school stroll to the Fort or the shelter but once a week Vernon would say something like, ‘I haven’t heard your cello in a while,’ and say so boldly, in front of other boys. And that meant that they walked back to Eustace’s room instead. He always began by watching Vernon look at the magazine then he would read one of the stories and then Vernon would either play with himself or have Eustace do it. He was always polite about offering to finish Eustace off next but, mysteriously, because he wanted it more than ever, Eustace felt compelled occasionally to shrug and say,
‘No thanks,’ or ‘next time, maybe.’
It was as though he needed to prove he had more self-control than his friend, although he felt he actually had less. And guilt at having used the cello as a pretext for the meetings would drive him to practise furiously in the hour or two that followed each encounter.
When his left hand was in second or third position, near his nose, he would catch musky reminders off it of what they had been about.
CHAPTER TWELVE
His last term at St Chad’s drew to a close strangely. He was left to his own devices for hours on end while some of his classmates sat Common Entrance and others were whisked off to various single-minded public schools for scholarship exams or interviews. Rather than spend the time reading in the library, he asked for permission to bring his cello into school to practise, which was granted once it was ascertained that there was a practice room sufficiently isolated from the gym and school hall for the sounds he made not to disturb those working on exam papers. He set himself to learning as much as he could of the second Bach suite.
Vernon and the rest of A3, who were going on to Broadelm or comprehensives further afield, continued with ordinary lessons, though these were, Vernon said, largely pointless, but it did not seem to have occurred to Dr Figgis to have Eustace join them. He was, it seemed, a case apart, an anomaly, possibly even an embarrassment. It was good to work at something he loved in a school environment. He kept to school timetables, had breaks when the others broke for lun
ch or recreation. There was Sports Day, as usual, in which he and Vernon did their usual obligatory minimum, running a few races badly and tripping on some hurdles. There was the traditional Excursions Day, when they were all parcelled off into coaches, seemingly at random, to spend the day with harassed teachers at tourist attractions. Eustace got Windsor Safari Park, Vernon, a trip to a factory that made footballs. Then there was the usual interminable prizegiving ceremony, with prizes handed out by a television actor famous for a show children weren’t allowed to watch.
Utterly unexpectedly, Eustace found himself awarded a record token for Outstanding Effort put into Pursuing a Hobby . There were cheers when he stumbled, blushing, up to the stage to receive it, a shout of Hobby! led by Vernon, and boys who never spoke to him actually clapped him on the back as he returned to his seat. It was as though, for ten minutes at the longed-for end of his time in the school, he became bewilderingly popular. His parents weren’t there to see, not knowing he was to receive anything; it would never have occurred to him to ask them.
He walked home with Vernon via the town record shop, where he spent the token at once on the boxed set of Casals playing the Bach suites. There was a more recent recording by Paul Tortelier and Vernon lobbied for this, having recently watched Tortelier on television, but the Casals was better. Carla had told him.
‘No, no,’ he told Vernon, repeating her criticism because he liked the sound of it. ‘His approach is too romantic. Casals’ approach is cleaner, less obviously winning.’
It was his first boxed set. Having glimpsed what seemed like a whole wall of them at the house in Clifton, he fantasized that one day he, too, would have shelf after shelf of the things, along with an up-and-down light over his kitchen table and a walk-in wardrobe or dressing room with very calm, tidy shelves. His bedroom record player was a discard of his parents, very much mono, very much a Dansette but, as he had earnestly said to Vernon once, pre-empting a sneer, ‘Carla Gold says serious musicians don’t really bother with stereo systems; for them, records are just that, an aide-mémoire not a substitute . . .’