"You know, I'm trying to work this out. I've looked at this house, well, quite often. I never saw anything, and I used to wonder to myself what it was. You must imagine, in a very boring lesson. Of course, not like nowadays!" He turned with a grin. "It's all so long ago."
"Now, do you want some coffee?" I said. It was the thing you were always asked back for at university, if not for a smoke. I'd spent a hundred long nights on the edge of sleep, worried and exhausted by coffee. "Or a drink?" I thought he probably shouldn't have any more.
"Oh, drink, drink, drink," he said, swinging back towards me, knowingly reckless. He picked up Cherif’s cap from the table and perched it on his blond stack, a bit at a loss without a mirror. "Not exactly one," he tooted.
"Nor one." I went for the secret brandy, and was quite relieved to see most of it had gone. I was full of troubling punctilio, I thought I might be struck off for getting a pupil drunk. I remembered why Luc was here and not in the darkened school across the canal: the night on the ship, whisky and cards and who knew what else—we'd never talked about it. It came up in my dreams, a low scene lit like a Caravaggio by a single bolt of life-changing light. And did they fuck you? I needed the brandy. I was queasy from the sea-heave of lust.
I busied myself self-consciously with the tumblers, switched on the blow-heater—not that I felt cold. Luc dropped into the big armchair and sprawled, pulling the printed cotton throw off the bursting plush of the back and tipping Cherif’s cap forward over his eyes. For the first time since St Ernest I had a sense of his balls, held and slumped astride the seam of his jeans. I saw my phantom self kneeling and licking at the stretched cloth till it was soaked.
"Who was that very boring and awful old guy at the bar?" he said, taking an eager drink, his eyes rounding at the burn of it.
"Which particular boring and awful . . . as we left, you mean?" It had been Harold, pushing in critically amid spouts of pipe-smoke, seeing me snatching this delicious kid away when only the other day he had been envying me Cherif. I settled on the desk-chair opposite and started to tell Luc his story; it presented itself as a subject. Harold lived with Andy, a Filipino boy, a boy in his early forties, that is, whom you hardly ever saw. It was a sad affair—Harold had rescued him from service in Brussels, where he worked without a visa for a sadistic businessman. He was trapped all day in a big apartment-block with alarms. The only times he went out were to drive the businessman in his Mercedes, sometimes to pick him up late at night, when the businessman would abuse him or be sick in the car. He forced himself on Andy and made him cry and spanked him for hours until he bled.
I thought, why am I telling Luc this? But I'd never seen him pay such attention. Forget Wordsworth and the stolen boat. He swallowed more brandy. I went on to how Harold used to work in security on the building; he used to see Andy in the underground car-park vacking the sick out of the Merc. He took a shine to him. After a while Andy confided in him, and somehow they started to have an affair—they used the flat, it was all very easy. Harold was by all accounts a monstrous bore even then, but his kindness was a new thing for little Andy. Then one day the businessman found them together. It turned out he'd known about it for a long time. According to Harold he'd been videoing them at it for months. But he'd started to get jealous. He immediately arranged for Harold to be moved elsewhere, but that very night Harold and Andy eloped.
"My god!" laughed Luc, with the rough cold-end catch in his voice.
"The awful thing is that the whole situation has kind of reproduced itself. Andy stays at home while Harold goes out and smokes his pipe and eyes up young men. He says it's because Andy's still afraid to be caught, that the businessman is still after him. But that was years ago. I gather the truth is that Andy's kept home by force, he has to do the housework in the nude, he's actually tied up naked while Harold's out and about. But he's still devoted to Harold because he rescued him, and looks after him." I was inventing rather freely in the latter part of this.
"Maybe it's time someone rescued him again," said Luc carelessly.
"I don't think it's very likely." I remembered the one time I'd seen him—sallow and queeny, with a wandering rear-end. "Harold's at that time of life when he's terrified of not being young—he hasn't noticed young people don't have cravats or tuck their shirts into their underpants, he's always very pushy about not being pushed out."
Luc was quite amused by this, he liked to show himself un-shocked, and not being young was a lifetime away. He smiled self-confidently, sexily from under Cherif's tweedy peak. I blinked away the hint of parody. I thought I'd give him a minute or two and then firmly throw him out, with a quick cheek-kiss at the top of the stairs. Then I'd go into the bedroom and in some way break down. Already I felt an agony of regret rising inside me.
"I'm afraid it's gentlemen's again," he said, groping for the floor with his drink and surging out of the chair. I showed him where and he went in and slammed the door as if I might want to help. I came back into the room so as not to torture myself with hearing.
When he reappeared he had the stricken jokey look of someone battling with tension or the unsaid. He didn't meet my eye. I thought of the unfinished confessions of earlier, and how I didn't want to know more. He threw off the cap with a breathy laugh, wandered to where I was standing and put his arms round me in a loose hug.
"Bye, my dear," I said. It was a lovely gesture, but I almost wished he hadn't. My head in the crook of his arm, his head on my shoulder, face hidden from me. I raised a hand and ran it lightly, sorrowfully over his suede back. He seemed to want to draw it out, there was a charge of emotion I hadn't allowed for. I felt him press himself against me, nuzzle his chin more snugly at my collar in a final clinch, let out a mumbled sigh. I supposed he must know everything, it was his clumsy way of saying sorry, a rugger-faggoty brush-off from which I would have to break free any second. I felt his lips pressing, lifting, pressing on my neck.
I tried to say "Luc", it was just a swallow, a bubble. There was a shriek of laughter through the wall, a spasm of gabbling, the knock of some dropped object shaking the floor.
"What was that?" whispered Luc, chuckling, not nervous, standing back, but still holding me, putting both arms more comfortably round my neck, as I stood there, clutching him feebly, with little terrified sighs. He leant his forehead against mine, he was open-mouthed, too close to see. Slowly I shifted, power ran back into my arms—it was as if something had come into the room or something had gone out. We started to kiss.
Luc was asleep. I lay propped up beside him, thinking of later days in our affair, unguessed afternoons of sex, drives beside long canals, his cock curving out of his fly in the car, high-summer lulls when we lay like soldiers under Flanders willows and poplars, shirts off, watching clouds drift in the canal, his crude, obsessive demands.
I tiptoed out for a drink of water and came back gulping from the glass like a child. I thought he might have vanished, it seemed foolish to let him out of my sight; but there he was, a goldish blur. I half-stumbled on his clothes, and crouched to rifle them—but what did they matter when the boy himself was here? I found every fear answered and calmed by that luminous fact. He was lying in my bed, naked, sleeping—flat out. It was a trulmph. Tears slipped down my face, I didn't really know why—it felt like gratitude, but also they were the tears that register some deep displacement, a bereavement sending up its sudden choking wave. It struck me I must be mourning everything that came before—it was the desolate undertow of success.
When we had started to kiss it was what I wanted, he was warm and strong, our cocks, lying opposite ways in our jeans, rubbed and jolted off each other, we were going to fuck, but for a long while I just held him there in a hard, shocked grip. His tongue pushed into my mouth but I blocked it with my own: I felt my tongue was the tip of some passionate organ that was rooted deep inside me, so densely colled, so fiercely self-involved, so hardened to its own darkness and starvation that it reacted with a spasm of bewilderment to the free gift of wha
t it craved. He lifted off my glasses and looked at me as if he found me drolly beautiful. I brushed and moulded his face and neck with incredulous fingers, kissed his eyelids, his long nose, the soft burden of his upper lip. He was squeezing my cock already and still I thought I would be mad to let this happen. I thought once I started I would stifle him, frighten him with my dreadful unconditional needs. He would break away with a sickened laugh.
I was reckoning without his own madness. Of course it wasn't just mischief, he wasn't trying to trap me: he wanted fun, experience, anything wild—either you did it with him or you didn't. Somewhere out there was the person he loved, a boy or a girl, but for now he was making do; I felt I was getting the benefit of some stored-up passion intended for someone else, but brimming and spilling; and maybe he liked the switch of power in seducing an older man. It struck me it might even be a kink of his, that he'd done it before—there was the dream I'd had about him and Matt . . . I started pulling off his clothes in a turmoil of jealousy and pride.
Luc naked—apart from his white briefs. His hard cock had a vein in it so thick that it showed in contour through the stretched cotton. I turned him round in my hands, kissed the back of his neck, stood away from him a moment as I undid my cuffs, glancing down at his legs, where the summer tanlines still palely showed. I thought, I mustn't say I love you, though they were the only words I had in my head. He looked back, swung slowly round, swallowing, wondering; there was a mastered shyness in his face, his movements had the seductive blur of drink, the sureness heightened by delay. He took my cock in his hand for a stroke or two, then hugged me again—I was kissing him adoringly, gasping a bit crazily as I worked at his mouth, confusing him; calming him too with my hands across his back, tranced arcs falling gently to his waistband—my fingers slid firmly under and he caught his breath as I furrowed through. He curled against me, then started pushing at his pants to get them down.
Luc's cock—with that fat little rope of blue-grey vein that ran out along its broad back and then curved capriciously under, the tight foreskin, still with a tang of moisture under it—I kissed it and licked his blond-wisped balls just briefly, in acknowledgment, whilst his hands went softly through my hair. I stumbled him back a couple of times till he bumped the chair, he didn't quite know what was going on—he raised his foot on to the arm and I slid beneath and twisted round with my face in his arse. It was bolder and more beautiful than I expected, the flare of it as he leant forward to play clumsily with my cock. I stroked his pucker with a knuckle, longing to lick—I breathed on it, sort of whistled as if cooling something. It had a pretty, spoilt expression, a puzzled pout. I kissed all around it, decoyed my tongue all down his raised thigh, came back and tried it with a licked thumb. There was a kind of pride in him as well as me; he would take whatever I gave him. I felt for a second or two the strict obligations of the teacher's role, then doubted, as my thumb slipped in to the first, then the second knuckle, whilst he complained and jacked his cock fiercely in his hand, if he had anything left to learn.
I fucked him across the armchair, his feet over his shoulders; I had to see his face and read what I was doing in his winces and gasps, his violent blush as I forced my cock in, the quick confusion of welcome and repulsion. I'd used up all the lube Cherif had left in the jar, but I saw tears slide from the corners of his eyes, his upper lip curled back in a gesture like anguish or goaded aggression. His hand flickered up against my chest to stay me or slow me. I was mad with love; and only half-aware, as the rhythm of the fuck took hold, of a deaf desire to hurt him, to watch a punishment inflicted and pay him back for what he'd done to me, the expense and humiliations of so many weeks. I saw the pleasure start up inside for him, as if he didn't expect it, his cock grew hard again in two seconds, his mouth slackened, but I made him flinch with steeper little thrusts.
I was up on the chair, fucking him like a squaddy doing push-ups, ten, twenty, fifty . . . I had a dim sense of protest, postponed as if he wasn't quite sure, he was folded in two, powerless, the breath was pushed out of him, there was just the slicked and rubbered pumping of my cock in his arse, his little stoppered farts. His chest, his face, were smeared with sweat, but it was mine: the water poured off me like a boxer, my soaked hair fell forward and stung my eyes.
And already it was about to end. I pushed myself back on to my feet, I came out of him for a moment and tugged him back by his haunches, his arsehole glittered and twitched and I thrust straight in, then held it gently, barely moving in the gulping shivery limbo just before the end. I had a high starlit sense of it as the best moment of my life. I stroked the inside of his thighs, stooped forward to lick and breathe the faint rubbery smell of his feet; took his cock out of his fist and worked it unyieldingly for him. I saw his balls clutch up, he said "No, No" and rode on to me as his thrown line of sperm soared into my face, my hair, and again, and then again. So I pushed over the edge myself—I made a grieving moan at the bitterness of it, craving the blessing of his gaze, though his eyes were oddly velled, fluttering and colourless like some Orst temptress's.
Luc was perfectly friendly in bed, though he smiled more to reassure himself than to charm me. I was given the feeling I'd slightly overstepped the mark. I was sweet to him, our heads together on the pillow, though I tried not to crowd him and torment him. I laid an arm carelessly over his warm stomach. I wanted to hold him, he was everything to me. His eyes were closed, but he would never sleep when his heart was speeding so.
"Are you all right, darling?"
"Mmm." Another slow smile, a pat on my protecting arm.
"It's a jolly good job you came into the bar this evening." A pause, in which he sighed and swallowed. "I mean, it's not as if you often do."
"No." It struck me that if I hadn't been there he could have ended up with someone else; perhaps on other nights he had—it made me feel sick.
"Had you ever been in the Cassette before?"
"We had a bet," he said, with a smirk. So it was just a dare, I thought there'd been a certain bravado to him . . . "About whether you'd be in there."
"Oh . . . " I couldn't tell if that made me a fool or a dangerous dark horse. "And who thought I would be?"
"They did. I thought you might be, but I didn't know. I said not. I thought I'd won, because I didn't see you in there, but then you came up to talk to us." Did it quite figure? I caught their cryptic exchange of looks again, saw the thread of mockery glint again in the story of the evening. Still, he had stayed for me, and I had triumphed. I had obliterated Patrick and Sibylle. "They think you've got a crunch on me," he said.
"And why would they think that?" I asked lightly and then wished I hadn't.
But he was too clever to answer, or too kind. He turned towards me, saw my confusion and kissed me on the cheek. Well—even if he was of their opinion, it clearly didn't trouble him. Even, I thought, if he's just using me, slumming it with me here, it's happiness, it's a fucking miracle. I ran my hand over him and between his legs. He was hard again, and so was I. I half-rolled on to him and he lounged round me like a cat, drawing up a leg, a heel that rubbed along my thigh and rested roughly and electrifyingly in the crack of my arse. I thought "scratch bottom" and smiled at him and to myself but I didn't explain; it felt both a comfort and a sadness to live so much more than him in the world of metaphors and puns. He gently pushed me off, saying "Not now", though he left an arm limply over me, our calves were crossed. I wondered if he felt the transgressive thrill of a man's hairy legs against his own.
While he slept I kept watch over him—a smooth shoulder, the little pool of the clavicle, his neck, his extraordinary face, his hair muddled and pushed back. His lips were parted and dry, and I felt anxiously that I should wet them from a flask or with a soaked rag. It seemed mad to have him here and not be making love to him over and over, but I was consecrated to his repose: my mood became oddly chivalric. I remembered the old Altidorean legend—not as far as I knew espoused by Luc—which made him a direct descendant of the Virgin Mary, ad
mittedly in her later, post-virginal phase. I'd known from early on that he had something unearthly about him—it was all more than likely. I lay back dazzled by his mere companionship, the trust he put in me to see him through the night. I thought of Ty's little agenda: get rid of Cherif—for the moment that seemed to be done, my thoughts didn't even track him as far as Matt's and whatever they were doing there; find the best in Rex Stout—I perhaps hadn't followed that to the letter, I'd been a lout; tell Luc you love him, or you will never have peace with yourself. So I said it into the air, not loud enough to wake him—I hardly heard it myself over the blow-heater's rattle and rumble next door, that might have been a ferry's trembling engines, heard from a cabin on a night crossing.
I dreamt I had met a young man by the seaside. We went for long, energetic, rather tense walks, away from the sea and through a derelict industrial estate. I was very keen on him; he had curly dark hair and blue eyes and was astonishingly strong. He ripped a steel door off a windowless, bunker-like building, just to show me what he could do. I was exhilarated. I was too shy to ask, but I hoped he would do other such tricks. We sat down on a dusty doorstep, there was no one around, and he tugged his shirt off to show me his chest muscles and his biceps. I was calling him Luc, though I was almost certain that wasn't his name, and he took a slow, calculating moment or two to react to it. "Yes, I'm Luc," he said; "of course I am." And he lobbed a breeze-block through a window across the street as though to prove it.
Luc stirred against me—the shattered glass's rhythmic tinkling was St Narcissus striking three. He sighed and burbled but seemed not to wake, or if he did he pretended sleep. I eased on to an elbow and studied his face. I could just make out, under the veined and silvery eyelids, the rapid osculations of the eyes that mean dreaming, or in a waking person the secretive reflex when a wish is glimpsed and then denied. I wondered what townscape he was rambling through and who he fell in with in that luminous world of his own invention, that no one but him would ever see and that he himself would prodigally forget.
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