Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  Just as when an artist shows you a new view of something—as Matisse for example might show you a quality in an apple that you had never noticed before and from then on you are able to see that same quality in every apple you encounter—so I would from this second onwards be able forever to see beauty, real beauty, in familiar things all around me. Before this moment I may have thought a particular sunrise or hillside was stunning or attractive but after this moment I would be able to see beauty there. Absolute beauty.

  “What the fuck is going on?” said Jo, panting to keep up with me as I strode forwards.

  This apparition was now perhaps three ranks forward of me. I could see that he was shorter than average. He wore the same uniform as everyone else, but it was transformed, as even the air around him was transformed.

  “Don’t want to be late, do we?” I said.

  “You’re off your fucking trolley,” grunted Jo.

  If I could just hear the voice, maybe draw alongside and steal a look at the profile …

  Then I saw Maudsley just ahead of me, a Fircroft sixth former and a rugger colour, nudge his neighbour and I heard him say in a voice too loud to be borne.

  “D’you see that one, then? Fer-uck me! Herwow!” He shook his right hand backwards and forwards as if it had just been burned. “I mean get the buns on it …”

  My heart sank and the blood hammered in my ears.

  “Now what?” Jo was as patient as a man can get, but even he had limits. I had almost stopped again.

  “Nothing, sorry … nothing. Sorry, I just … nothing.”

  It was unbearable, unbearable to think of a great ape like Maudsley even so much as looking. I knew at once, in an instant churn of misery, that there would be others, others smitten by this thing, this vision, this impossibility. They would be cruder, they would be more obvious, their motives would be baser and, of course, of double-course they would be more attractive. They would be so much more attractive, so much more coordinated, so much more graceful, so much more seductive in their status and appeal. They would take my holy flame and extinguish it with thick thudding yellow wads of filthy spunk, snuff it to a hissing nothing in a hairy slimeball of lust. It was too terrible. They were looking at Sex. I knew they were, while I—I was looking at Beauty.

  “Now calm down, Stephen,” you are saying. “We know you’re a poof. We know too, because let’s face it, you’ve rubbed our bloody noses in it enough times, that you don’t deny sex, or the sex drive in you. Don’t kid us that this “holy flame” of yours was some kind of pure abstracted love with no erotic overtones.”

  I am telling you the feelings that ran through me and, painfully predictable and mimsy and effete and bloodless as they may seem, those were my feelings, arrived at in my head in less time than it takes for light to travel a yard. But I tell you another thing too with my hand on my heart and my fingers uncrossed. Although I was to develop, like every male, into an enthusiastic, ardent and committed masturbator, he was never once, nor ever has been, the subject of a masturbatory fantasy. Many times I tried to cast him in some scene I was directing for the erotic XXXX cinema in my head, but it always happened that some part of me banished him from the set, or else the very sight of him on screen in the coarse porn flick running in my mind had the effect of a gallon of cold water. Sex was to enter our lives, but he was never wank fodder, never.

  Jo Wood, a man of instinct and sense, knew that something was wrong and knew that it was something inward and strange, so he didn’t call me on the oddity of my behaviour as we walked along, boys now four deep between me and the revelation.

  We swarmed left and along the Chocolate Block, up the steps—I could see a grace in the upstride of his right leg that was entirely new to me, and I saw too Maudsley once more nudging his neighbour and heard the Kenneth Connor, under-the-breath “Phwoo-oo-oor …” that accompanied the nudge. We passed the old Victorian study block to our right and the library to our left and filed along the shining cobbles of the Magic Carpet that wound like a brown river through a field of dirty-pink asphalt until it reached the colonnade. The chapel bell tolled louder and louder in my head until I thought it might explode.

  I had to see where he would leave his briefcase. That much I had to see.

  The main entrance to the chapel was like a sort of miniature of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.: Edward Thring sat sternly in a stern throne, his monstrous paternalist whiskers sternly set in white marble, not a boy that walked by him but the Reverend Edward stared through his soul and despised what he saw. We passed that entrance and headed for the colonnade. The colonnade was open on two sides and, on its two closed sides, notices, posters and announcements fluttered from green baize, attached by brass drawing pins. Headman’s noticeboard was first, white gnomic memoranda, then came others, Gestetnered Roneo-ed or handwritten, with their announcements of Corps Field Days (“the u/mentioned will muster at 1525 hrs …”) special matches of “Second Fifteen Possibles v. Third Fifteen Probables” (per-lease …), calls for volunteers to join a new Speleological Club that was being founded, “Apply Andrews, J. G. (M)” and other such dribbling toss that Fry, S. J. (F) found insupportably dull. The purpose of the colonnade that day, so far as I was concerned, was to leave my briefcase there before entering chapel and to see where he left his.

  It was a remarkable sight, on those days when one was late for chapel, to see the colonnade empty of humans, but with six hundred briefcases and a hundred duffle bags dumped at the feet of its columns or leaning against the base of its inner walls.

  You could tell he was a new boy. Just the way he checked others to see how they left their briefcases, as a shy girl at a disco might check how the other girls are dancing. He found a spot to leave his, brand new it was and of deep tan leather. I suddenly hated mine, which was black. I had thought black was cool, but now I knew I had to get a brown briefcase. I would make a point of wanting one for Christmas.

  “But darling, yours is almost brand new! And it cost the earth!”

  I’d cross that bridge when I came to it. For the moment, I must put my hideous black next to his glorious tan. Some boys had their initials classily branded into the leather or trashily attached with gold stick-on letters. He was standing by his as I approached, but facing the other way and scanning the crowd of boys approaching from other directions. Good God, would he always face the other way? I plonked my briefcase down by his with a loud but cheerful sigh, a sigh that seemed to say, “Heigh ho. Here we go. Another term. Tch! Blimey!”

  He turned.

  He turned towards me.

  “Excuse me …”

  A voice that … it was unbroken, but it had a huskiness to it that stopped it from piping in a childish squeak. If he sang, he would sing alto.

  “Help at all?” I found myself saying in the most cheerful, friendly, charming, relaxed and relaxing way those words have ever been said.

  And for the first time I looked into his eyes. They were blue, not light blue, but a darker blue. Not so dark as sapphire blue, not so bright as china blue. They were romantically blue. Lyrically blue. They swam and I swam in them.

  “I was wondering …” he said, “which is West Block?”

  This was, of course, his first day. His first day, and the first day of my life too.

  “Look behind you,” I said, finding time to marvel at the calm in my voice and the strength and the confidence that it carried. “Think Colditz. Think Lubyanka. Behold, West Block. Got a lesson there have you? First after chapel?”

  I watched how the hair at the back of his head fell and, as it stopped before reaching the collar, how it turned fractionally inwards and upwards in a way that made me think for an instant of a medieval boy king. Under it, a vee of lighter hairs herringboned up the hollow of his nape.

  “Oh Christ help me,” I croaked inwardly. “Christ Jesus help me.”

  He turned back and looked up at me once more. Yes, he was shorter than average, shorter, but not delicate. “And that’s the doo
r you go in, is it?” Such a delicious caramel huskiness rising from the throat.

  Let me not faint, I pleaded. Following the direction in which he pointed I nodded. Simply the act of his raising his arm caused something trapped within me to leap and pummel against the inside of my chest and beg to be let out.

  “Who’ve you got?” I asked.

  “Finch. J. S. Finch, is it?”

  “Aiee! French or German?”

  “French.”

  “Ah, I have him for German. Good luck, that’s all I can say …”

  “What’s he like?” I followed across his eyes the passage of a small cloud of doubt or fear and noted with joyness of joy that a smile from me at once dispelled it.

  “Naa, he’s okay. He shouts and he screams and he swears, but he’s okay. You’re in Redwood’s aren’t you?”

  “How do you know that?” Almost a hint of pertness in the speed and directness of the question. New boys would usually stutter with ers and urns and excuse me’s when asking something of an elder. But I liked this freshness. It fell short of cheek. It was just … direct. One human being to another. He wanted to know how I knew, and so he asked.

  I jerked my head in the direction of his duffle bag whose regulation navy blue was piped in a dusty, crushed-strawberry red. “Your House colours tell the story,” I said and, shifting my gaze further along, added, “See that one? Yellow piping. That’s Fircroft and that’s—”

  A juddering thump on my back. “Fry, you spawn of Satan, do you realise we’re in the same Latin set?”

  Gunn, from School House: fancied himself an intellectual and a wit. I despised him in that cordial way people will hate those who are too like themselves for comfort.

  “But I thought I was in the top Latin set!” I exclaimed in mock horror. “How come I’ve been demoted to the derrbrains?”

  Shit! He will hear that stupid insult and know it for what it is. He will think me arrogant. I half turned, but he had gone. I turned fully round, in time to see the last of him rounding the corner towards the rear entrance to the chapel.

  “In love are we? Where the hell did that pop up from?”

  “Who?”

  “Oh Jesus, Fry,” said Gunn grinning with hideous superiority. “For such a good liar, you’re a terrible liar.”

  In chapel, the boys sat in blocks arranged according to their House. Each term the Houses would move their position within the chapel. Fircroft this term were sitting near the back and Redwood’s were way up at the front. I found a place between Jo and Richard Fawcett and scanned the backs of heads until I found his. He sat between two boys, one brown-haired, the other blond like him. Both were taller. Yet I would have known. If I had seen him for the first time just then, twenty rows ahead, his golden head smaller in my field of view than a sixpenny bit, still I would have known.

  But what was his name? How was I ever going to find out his name? Suppose his name was somehow wrong? Suppose it was an average name like Richard or Simon or Mark or Robert or Nigel? That would be so dull. Suppose he were a Neil or a Kenneth or a Geoffrey, how could I bear that? Suppose, God help him, he were a Stephen? I always hated my name. Later on I was to be cheered up and resigned to it by James Joyce’s use of it for his hero, and by the thought of Stephen Tennant and Stephen Spender, but at the time I thought it a stupid, styleless name, a name that only a boy could have and rather an uninteresting boy at that.

  Then again he might have an obvious name, the sort of name that would make people giggle and think him a tart. He might be a Rupert or a Julian or a Crispin or a Tim or, Lord save us, a Miles, Giles or Piers.

  I thought of names that I could tolerate. Ben would be about all right, as would Charles or Thomas or James or William.

  Jonathan? Hm … Jonathan would be just about within the bounds. Nathan might be pushing it a bit though. Daniel and Samuel I could cope with and Peter, Christopher and George, but Paul was right out.

  Francis was not to be entertained for a second and Frederick was just too silly for words.

  Roderick, Alexander or Hugh might pass, if he was Scottish. Donald would be uninteresting, Hamish would be pushing it too far and Ian simply horrid.

  David? That would be acceptable, I decided. David I could live with.

  There again as Bertie Wooster had pointed out, some pretty rough work is pulled at the font sometimes, maybe his parents had had a rush of blood to the head and chosen Hilary or Vivian or Evelyn? Maybe there was some rich uncle to please and he had found himself baptised Everett, Warwick, Hadleigh or Poynton?

  Then there were the Grahams and Normans and Rodneys. Impossible.

  Justin, Damian and Tristram. No! A thousand times, no.

  But then again, as the sun streamed in through the window and lit his hair, blinding all other boys from sight, it seemed to me that he could transform any name and make it holy, just as he transformed and sanctified his uniform and his briefcase and duffle bag. Even if he were Dennis or Terry or Neville or Keith, somehow those names would rise above the commonplace. He could probably even do something to Gavin.

  The service passed in a blur of such speculation and, after we had sung the school hymn reserved for the first mornings of term—

  Rank by rank again we stand

  By the four winds gathered hither

  —the whole school developing sudden joyful rhotacisms for the first line so that wank by wank again we stood, I shuffled out with the others in prescribed order and, by the time I reached my briefcase, his was gone, gone to face the perils of Finch and French in West Block. When would I see him again? How could I see him again for more than a few fleeting seconds?

  Maybe you are not aware how difficult it was for there to be any real social congress between boys of different years in the same House. For there to be friendships between boys in different Houses … well, he might as well have lived on the moon.

  I looked towards the West Block and Finch’s form room with a sigh, picked up my horrid, horrid black briefcase and headed for double English.

  As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;

  They undo us for their sport.

  Thus I oh-so wittily misquoted that morning. Stokes was gracious enough to smile, merely pointing out that I had played merry hell with Shakespeare’s scansion. I replied tardy that “to the gods” was bad scansion already, delivering eleven syllables and mucking up an iamb. I offered the opinion that Shakespeare had been too cowardly to write the metrically perfect:

  As flies to wanton boys are we to God;

  He kills us for his sport.

  —to which Stokes correctly replied that to singularise God, aside from courting disaster from the censor, destroying the pagan atmosphere of the play and the whole line of Gloucester’s thought, would also weaken the image by mismatching with the plural “boys”—or would I have Shakespeare ruin the rhythm again with

  As flies to a wanton boy are we to God

  —is that what I wanted? Besides, it was perfectly possible for an actor to say “to the” as if the words had but one syllable.

  I conceded that maybe old Shakespeare had known what he was up to after all, and on we moved, leaving me to my thoughts.

  Where would he go for morning break? The Upper Buttery or the Lower? Would someone have told him about Lanchberrys’ exceedingly fine cream slices?

  I made my way there, scanning every fair-haired head as I went.

  Fate can be kind to lovers, in her cruel, careless way. As far as the gods are concerned we are indeed as flies to wanton boys. They put us under a magnifying glass, laugh if the sun focuses its rays through the lens and burns us up with a pop; they stamp on us, squash us, swat us and collect us together in jars to be fed to favoured reptiles.

  I saw him moving down the steps towards the entrance to the Lower Buttery. He was talking to a boy from his House. A boy I knew! Nick Osborne was in my German set, a creep I had always thought, but suddenly I decided that he was my best friend.

  I forced my way down, no
t caring whom I pushed aside, not hearing the oaths, not feeling the kicks and thumps that came in riposte.

  “Osborne!” I called.

  He turned. They both turned. “Oh, Fry,” said Osborne. “My brother,” he added, lazily flapping a hand towards the divinity.

  His brother. His brother! His-brother-his-brother-his-brother.

  “Hello,” I said, with just such a casual but polite air as one might employ when being introduced to the insignificant little brother of any friend. “Oh,” I went on, “weren’t you the one who had Finch this morning?”

  He nodded with a shy smile. He seemed pleased that I could have remembered him out of so many.

  “Oh, Finch,” said Nick. “I was telling Matthew not to mind him.”

  Matthew then.

  Matthew Osborne. Matthew Osborne. M.O. Mine Own. My Only, Miraculous One, Magical Object.

  Matthew. Of course it was Matthew, I knew that. What else could it have been? Ridiculous to have speculated on the possibility of any other name. Matthew. It had always been Matthew.

  “Anyway,” Nick went on. “This is the Lower Buttery. We have to stay this side. Only fifth and sixth formers go behind that screen. See you, Fry,” he threw over his shoulder, leading his brother through the crowd.

  Such progress so fast.

  Nick Osborne’s brother.

  Now. Regroup. Think. Think, man, think.

  What do we like about Nick Osborne?

  Not much. He’s clever. We concede that. But he’s sporty. Very, very, sporty. We don’t like sportiness.

  What were his hobbies? How was I going to get him to be a friend? I could be as close to Nick as I liked, he was in the same year, besides he was not especially attractive, no one would talk.

  Hang on. How could they possibly be brothers?

  Nick was nearly as tall as me: he had to shave once a week. He was dark-haired, greasy haired. Not ugly, not ugly at all, but surely not of the same parentage?