Box Hill

by Adam Mars-Jones

  Anyway, Ray got me to revise my O-levels for a few minutes, and then he decided it was time for my sexual education to get advanced. He pulled me to my feet and half-dragged, half-lifted me across to the bed. If he’d told me where we were going, I could have made the short trip less awkwardly, but I suppose he wanted me a bit confused, to make me stumble as he used his strength to get me where I was meant to be.

  From the moment he shut the door of his flat behind us Ray hadn’t been communicating with me, in the way that people normally communicate. Small talk, big talk, talk that’s in between. He had hardly said a word. You could say, though, that he was teaching me a different, specialised way of communicating. Until now he had been gentle enough, without being exactly considerate. But now there was a change. There was none of the patience he had showed when he was using my mouth.

  He chucked me down on the bed. The body I had experienced as decisiveness and strength I now suffered as sheer weight and invasion. He pinned me down. And what had begun as a rough seduction ended as, well, rape. I’d said he could do anything with me. I know that. But some things can’t be consented to. Drunk or sober, no-one could agree to being opened up so fiercely. If he used any lubricant at all he was sparing with it, but I don’t think he did. I wasn’t even entitled to a smear of the candle-grease that his leathers benefited from. He didn’t let me adjust to the insult of his cock, or the rhythm of its hurting.

  At some stage I found there was a belt in my mouth. Ray didn’t mean it as a gag — if he’d wanted to silence me he was well able to do it. I bit down on the belt, but it didn’t exactly keep me quiet. Belt or no belt, I made a lot of noise. The next time I saw the dentist, it turned out I’d chipped a tooth, but that could have happened in a number of ways. Eating a peach and crunching the stone by mistake. Gnawing too greedily on the bones when Mum cooked lamb chops.

  At least he was quick — and I don’t think he was doing it for pleasure. He made me suffer, but he didn’t feed on my suffering. The way he had been earlier on was much more in character, implacable but not cruel. It’s just that I think this was a special occasion for him. For both of us.

  Of course there’s an unromantic part of me that still can’t accept how different he was when he was teaching me to suck cock, and it’s a part that whispers in my ear: If you had a set of teeth up your arse, he’d be gentle there too. But I think it was a sort of ceremony for him. He wasn’t doing it for fun, exactly. There was a reason. He was taking possession.

  I’d thought he was going to kill me with his cock, but when I found he hadn’t, after a while I started to cheer up, and to think it hadn’t been too bad, all in all. I’d never looked forward to being fucked, not ever. I’d thought it was all going to be much worse.

  Meanwhile Ray had other things in store for me. Before I was allowed to sleep I lost some virginities I didn’t even know I had. He had me doing things I’d never thought of doing, so I’d never thought of myself as someone who hadn’t done them. I licked a boot for the first time, I licked a man’s arse. I was far too surprised to feel any shame. It had never occurred to me that doing these things could be made to mean something.

  One thing I really appreciated about Ray’s way of doing things, that night and afterwards, was that he didn’t touch my cock or expect me to play with it. I was glad of that. I’m not a big boy down there, and there’s another thing, which is that my stiffies don’t turn up on any particular schedule. They show up when they want to, usually when there’s no-one around. If I’m shy as a whole person, then my cock is the shyest part of me by far, as well as the part of me that I’m shyest about. It was a relief that Ray treated my cock pretty much as if it didn’t exist.

  It sounds incredible, and maybe my memory isn’t up to scratch, but I seem to remember that Ray fucked me again before we slept. The second time may not have come so soon, I don’t see how it could have, but whenever it happened, he took his time and I enjoyed it. The pain had a rhythm and the rhythm was pleasure. Ray never hurt me again. The hurting and the kissing were both over by the end of that first night.

  When Ray had gone to sleep, it was already getting light and birds were singing. I could see the belt I’d bitten and the hanky that had covered my eyes on the pillow between us. Ray had black sheets and pillowcases, another thing I’d never seen. If I rolled the sheet down a bit I could also sneak a look at his midsection and compare it to mine. It was hard to believe that they were equivalent parts of similar creatures, from a strict anatomical point of view. The flat curve of his belly. I could even stroke it, softly. The beauty of his breathing and being alive. I could lull myself to sleep by counting the number of sit-ups that would work the miracle and turn my tummy into his, counting down from a billion.

  Ray’s willpower broke over me three times in twenty-four hours, in waves that overtook each other to spill relentlessly forward. At Box Hill he had taken the initiative, turning my stumble over his leg into the first step on a new path. Then he chose me to spend the night with him, he who could have had anyone. He who could have had anyone. And now when I woke up in Cardinals Paddock on Bank Holiday Monday, horribly sore but in my own way also horribly proud, proud even of the being sore, he had made more plans. He never told me his plans, but then he never told anyone his plans. His plans weren’t secret, they were only private.

  He’d made coffee and showered; now it was my turn. If I wanted to, I could imagine him looking at me while I slept, the same way I’d watched over him the night before. Except that when I tried to think of that, I could only imagine him shaking his head all over again, the way he had at Box Hill. Wondering if he should take a long walk and hope I’d do the decent thing, let myself out and make myself scarce.

  Ray had tidied away the belt and the hanky, the beer cans and the cup of tea I never got to drink. He waited until I’d drunk my coffee and taken my shower, and then he said he’d give me a ride home.

  I really wasn’t looking forward to confronting Dad. Mum being in hospital, his mind wasn’t really on me or he would never have lost his temper on my birthday morning, or if he did he would just have shouted at me and left it at that. Not that he was much of a shouter. I think we were both shocked that he had raised his hand to me, but I wasn’t going to pretend it hadn’t happened.

  Mum and Dad were a textbook perfect couple, except that people are always a little shocked by that sort of closeness in real life. They always saw eye to eye — that’s what we said, which was partly a joke because they were exactly the same height. They weren’t lovey-dovey, exactly, though they still held hands a lot, breaking off if people were watching. If the person watching was Joyce or me, they’d give each other a last squeeze, but still they’d stop holding hands. They weren’t broadcasting the success of their marriage, they just lived inside it.

  There’s a village with a quaint custom — there’s a prize of a side of bacon given every year to a married couple who haven’t had a single quarrel. It’s called the Dunmow flitch. Mum and Dad could have won that bacon year after year. They’d have got sick of bacon. They had every possible qualification. Well, apart from not living in Great Dunmow.

  They worked together, Dad being the pharmacist and Mum running the shop side of things. Before they had kids they lived over the shop, and then they moved, but only down the street, five doors away from the chemist’s.

  I don’t think Joyce and I ever thought Mum and Dad got married to have us. They got married to have each other. When I say ‘Joyce and I’, I don’t include Donna because it’s not the sort of conversation I can imagine having with her, that’s all. I’m sure that Donna and Joyce and I were planned — we weren’t accidental. But the marriage was the master plan. It took us a while to realise that other people’s parents weren’t like ours. Their anniversary was a big day for them, and they didn’t share it. On that day every year we would stay overnight with neighbours, even if Mum and Dad weren’t going away. So it made sense that Mum
being in hospital was going to turn Dad inside out.

  I thought if I got home late enough he’d be at the hospital, and when he got back I’d say I was just leaving to visit her, and then it would be evening by the time we had no alternative but to deal with each other. I tried to delay the moment that Ray and I set off on the bike from Hampton, but Ray wouldn’t take no for an answer. As I was beginning to understand, not taking no for an answer was pretty much his life’s work.

  Dad was just leaving. He was actually opening the door on his way out as I came up the path with the key in my hand. Dad looked blank for a moment, but he had the good grace to invite Ray in. Then the impulse to be hospitable stalled just inside the door. In this awful week for him, Dad’s social graces fell short of the front room, so that we just stood there awkwardly in the little hall.

  I suppose most dads would flinch if a six-and-a-half-foot biker came striding up their path, but that side of things didn’t seem to register with mine. Both my sisters had gone out with plenty of bikers, Donna had married one the year before and Joyce would tie the knot with the one she chose over Ted in 1976. Bikers are in our blood.

  Those were different times. Motorcycles were still poor man’s transport. They weren’t a big statement. Insurance hadn’t gone silly yet. Young men rode bikes till they married. Sometimes the bike lasted until there was a pram. Sometimes the bike and pram stared each other down for a few months, though the pram always won in the end.

  Plus Ray was an older man, but he wasn’t an older older man. He was what you would make up if you wanted an imaginary older brother for your only son. As best as I can work it out, he was in his late twenties.

  In my parents’ hallway Ray did the talking. He said: ‘Mr Smith, I’ve asked Colin to stay with me in Hampton for a few days. I think he needs a bit of room. Maybe you both do.’ Which stunned me. I didn’t remember saying anything to Ray about what was happening at home. Who knows? Maybe I talk in my sleep, only there isn’t usually somebody there to listen.

  Dad took it in his stride. It helped that Ray was well-spoken, without being snobby-posh. Back then every voice on the radio sounded a bit toffy, a bit far-back, even if they were people from all over who’d taken lessons to sound the same as each other. Most people still preferred the cultured voices on the radio to the sounds they made themselves.

  Dad was even relieved not to have to deal with me. In his mind, he was already at the hospital, he was already with Mum. And because of what Ray had said, we could both go to the hospital together, and not need to thrash things out. The pressure was off, suddenly. Ray said he’d pick me up at six — me and my toilet bag.

  So Dad’s mind wasn’t fully on me, which was a little bit painful, but if I’m honest the same went double the other way round. My mind wasn’t on Dad. Ray stood by the Norton as we pulled away in Dad’s car, and I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He didn’t wave, he didn’t smile. He didn’t do anything to make me worry he’d not turn up at the time he’d said.

  If I’d been paying more attention to my little Dad, I might have noticed how Mum’s illness was affecting him. I was too amazed by the changes in my own life to see that something fairly drastic was happening to him.

  Pharmacist or no pharmacist, Dad was inhibited about illness in women and women’s conditions, and the fact that Mum had just gone through what his generation called the change of life made him even more tight-lipped. I only learned what was the matter with Mum from Joyce, who had female grapevine privileges. The matter with Mum was cervical polyps, which were very likely to be benign — it was a hundred to one they meant her no harm — but they were taking no chances and running plenty of tests. Joyce wasn’t worried, she told me Mum wasn’t worried, so I didn’t worry, but either Dad was getting something to worry about from someone else or he was getting the whole thing out of proportion.

  His hair went white, not overnight, but over a fortnight — fifteen days to be exact — and this must have been a few days into the change. There was almost as much salt as pepper in his hair at this point, and in another ten days there would only be salt. No dark grains at all.

  Ray arrived at six, as he’d said he would, and I had my toilet bag ready. That day I moved in with Ray, the day after I’d met him. How’s that for changing your life in a hurry? But at the same time I never exactly moved out of Mum and Dad’s. I had two addresses, two very different ways of life, though the distance between them on the map was only small — five miles, if that. I didn’t become two people, but I suppose I did become a person whose life had two different sides to it.

  Of course at first I had a horribly strong feeling of being in Hampton on a trial basis. I thought I was on approval, and would be boxed up and sent back where I came from if I didn’t come up to scratch, though Ray never said anything to give that impression. I came up with that idea all by myself. It’s the sort of idea my mind spins out all the time.

  I tried to work out what my place in the household was, apart from the obvious. What do you do for the man who is everything? I tried to tidy up, until he told me not to, to leave everything as it was. Then I decided that the cooking must be my department, and he didn’t tell me any different, so I set myself to that. I struggled to put meals together, undecided between the plain and the fancy, fish fingers one day, my forlorn attempt at coq au vin the next, while Ray ate without comment, day after day. He cleaned his plate, but without passing judgment. I’d look up to him, trying not to read too much into his expression. It took me ages to relax.

  Maybe any two people, every two people, have one thing in common, one thing at the least, and I took my time to realise that this was where Ray was like my little Dad. He really didn’t care what he ate. He ate what was put in front of him. If there was a second similarity between that particular pair, though, I never found it.

  Apart from my difficulties in understanding how I fitted into it, Ray’s domestic life was entirely regular and orderly. On Saturday mornings he cleaned the bike; Saturday night was always poker night. The game convened in the members’ houses by rotation, so every six weeks or so Ray played host. He took me with him on club nights from the first, but I never got interested in the game — either the technicalities or its underlying psychology. It wasn’t a problem. Nobody minded if I brought along a book and read it quietly.

  Sundays there was always a bike run. The membership of Ray’s bike club was exactly the same as the membership of his poker club. You couldn’t ride with the bike club unless you played poker, and you couldn’t play poker unless you rode with the bike club. It was all the same fellows — Big Steve and Little Steve, Mark, Paul, Alan and the others. It’s just that for Saturday night and the poker game, bike riding wasn’t compulsory, the way it would have been for an actual bike club meeting.

  Alan was the odd man out. The others liked to act mean, but he sometimes seemed like the real thing, which isn’t so attractive. He didn’t wash. You could imagine him sleeping in his leathers — in fact, you couldn’t imagine anything else. There was a shine on all the others, on Ray, obviously, but also on the others. There was no shine on Alan.

  Ray may not have made the rules, but he seemed to be the one to enforce them. He was strict about drinking. Members could have one drink on a Saturday evening, and no more, if they were biking — so there was the loophole, if people really wanted to drink, that they didn’t have to bring their machines on a Saturday night.

  Ray himself always rode to the poker club meetings, and never even had the single drink his rules allowed. Only when he was the host at poker night, every couple of months, at home in Hampton, did he have a few carefully spaced tumblers of Scotch. I never saw him drunk.

  Bets on poker night tended to be modest. Maybe that was because some members were comfortably off, and some weren’t. The biker lifestyle made people’s differences less glaring, but it couldn’t be expected to make them disappear. There was no set maximum bet, but members
were expected to donate half of their winnings to the expense of food and drink. Any actual surplus subsidised the bike runs.

  The club made regular expeditions to Box Hill, but also to destinations further out, like Bath and Bristol, preferring to head west rather than cross London. The members came from Teddington and West Byfleet and Woking, from different walks of life, so that sometimes poker night took place in a large detached house, and sometimes we squeezed into a rather poky flat. If the weather was unusually cold and there was no central heating, Ray didn’t mind if I wore a few clothes.

  All the members of the club rode British bikes. BSAs, Triumphs, Nortons, Royal Enfields. There wasn’t an actual rule about that, but the peer pressure would have been pretty overwhelming. Most of them had kick-starts, though Ray was the only one who never seemed to need more than one kick, one authoritative nudge with his boot, to make the engine catch.

  The domestic bike industry was already dead in 1975, but the club hadn’t really noticed. There was still plenty of British iron on the roads. Nobody bought new, even if they had the money. People preferred to buy second hand, and they weren’t afraid of a bit of maintenance. Spare parts weren’t difficult to come by just yet.

  Ray was always at the front of the motorcade, if that’s the word. The stately rush of chrome in procession. He wasn’t an officer of the club, but then the club had no officers. He was just a natural leader. Lads on building sites and road works would often make the vroom-vroom gesture at us as we passed, the revving of an imaginary throttle, and sometimes, just sometimes, Ray would oblige. I noticed that the bikes in the pack behind me only ever played to the crowd by revving their engines if Ray had given the lead. These days even royalty acknowledges the cheers of well-wishers, but Ray showed no interest.

  Ray’s safety-mindedness meant that he wanted the bike club to spread out properly on the road, and not bunch together dangerously. What he actually said was: ‘I don’t want you berks breathing down my neck.’ In fact all that happened was that the other riders left Ray some space, and then they all bunched together a little distance behind him. Perhaps Ray wasn’t too annoyed by this, the way the club divided on the road into a charismatic outrider and a following pack. A thoroughbred pulling away from a field of also-rans. You couldn’t argue with that. He was the only one of the bunch who read a newspaper that didn’t print horoscopes.