7
It’s the afternoon of the boat race. His father wants them to watch it together, but he goes upstairs and lies on his bed. After a while, he opens his fly and reaches in, stroking himself until he’s hard. He carries on stroking and something strange happens, like soft white feathers pushing to come out. For a moment, he thinks he’s about to pee, to burst with pee, and will flood the bed, but then he’s moaning and he has some white stuff on his belly. He’s so excited he runs downstairs. He wants to tell his mother, but his father catches him in the hall, and he has time to reconsider. You missed a grand race, his father says.
8
He’s in the common room, between classes. One of the boys is being picked on by a group of other boys for being cocky. He keeps his head down, he doesn’t want to get involved. He’s had his eye on the boy for some time. Short blondish hair, solidly built. He’s never spoken to him, but he has had a dream in which the boy’s dick looks like honey and a piece of polished wood all at once, and he is stroking it. When they wrestle him to the ground, his shirt comes out of the waistband and his torso arches back, bare-bellied, taut. The whole world and his heart are blinded by the light of the boy’s white skin.
9
He buys Health & Efficiency from a newsagent’s where he isn’t known. He cuts out his favourite images of men and sticks them into last year’s Stoke Arts Festival programme, alongside the underwear pages from out-of-date catalogues, a photograph of Kevin Keegan, shirtless, running across an empty field, a smaller photograph, scissored from the paper, of the dark one from Starsky & Hutch dressed up as Houdini, wearing chains around his neck and wrists, and not much else. He’s hiding a new copy of H&E in his satchel the day his mother tells him about a piece of pig’s liver in some friend’s fridge, so riddled with cancer it wrapped itself around the milk. For the protein, she adds darkly.
10
He’s sitting in the back of the car, reading Brideshead Revisited when he hears the thwack of a leather ball against a bat. He glances up. His father is driving through a village and he sees a game of cricket being played. He hates cricket, but he has a vision of waiting beneath a tree, a willow tree perhaps, with a hamper of sandwiches and champagne, and his friend is walking towards him, his bat beneath his arm, his cheeks flushed. He flops onto the picnic rug and his hair falls into his eyes as he reaches across, his hand barely brushing the knee of his friend, his lips slightly parted, his words the merest whisper. And so they come.
1
They’re driving home from the Isle of Wight. He’s never crossed the sea before and, although he knows the Isle of Wight is part of England, it’s as though he’s been abroad. His father has the radio on. Today’s the World Cup final and England is playing, but, maybe because he still feels foreign, he’s secretly siding with Germany. His father is getting excited, his sister is playing with crayons and paper, his mother is talking about finding somewhere to eat. He closes his eyes. They stayed in the Hotel Metropole and had a room with a balcony overlooking the sea. He made friends with a boy from London. When England wins, he shrugs. He knows he’ll go abroad again.
2
His first time in London his father takes him because he has work to do there. They go by train, the longest journey he’s made that isn’t in a car. He sits by the window and stares at the world, wondering what London will be like. When they arrive, his father takes him to Madame Tussaud’s. Years later, he remembers nothing of this, nothing of the waxworks or the chamber of horrors, only the train ride, which never seemed to end, and then the long wait outside the Planetarium, because his father had said he wouldn’t be long. But he is, and when he finally arrives there’s no time left to see anything, and his father keeps saying, I’m sorry.
3
They borrow a car and drive until early light, then sleep for half-an-hour in a Cornish lay-by. They have an ounce of dope and a two-man tent in the boot. They’re turned away from an empty campsite, but find an abandoned field and pitch their tent, then smoke large quantities of dope. Each night two of them take the tent and the third sleeps in the car. Neither option is less uncomfortable than the other. On the last night, in a pub, he has a friendship-shaking argument with one of the other two about the value of risk. Later, he walks to the edge of the cliff and sees a harp embedded in the rock. He climbs down towards it.
4
They sit on their rucksacks in a lay-by in Harris. It is Sunday and all the cars are driving into the town they are trying to leave, for church. They have used trains, coaches, other people’s cars, a ferry and their feet to get here and the only book he still has left to read is Don Juan. They stand up and start to walk across a wilderness that reminds him of that canvas by Holman Hunt, of the scapegoat crowned in red. Last night the wind blew fat from their chip-shop haggis in horizontal ribbons. This morning they have eaten nothing because there can be no cooked breakfast on the day of rest. It is probably about to rain.
5
The first flight he ever takes is to Milan. It is a charter flight; some of the seats face backwards, like a train, an arrangement he will never see again. The food is dreadful but exciting; the drink is free and plentiful. He has a sick bag, which he folds and slides into his pocket when no one is looking. He stands in the bathroom, too cramped to turn, and flushes the lavatory experimentally to see what will happen, if some bright hole will open up in the plane itself. He stares through the window and wonders if what he sees are the Alps or some artful film projected onto the walls of a hangar as big as the world.
6
A friend tells him a story about a train journey she made with her boyfriend. It’s a compartment train, with seats that pull out into beds. They’re sharing the compartment with a Greek man, on holiday in Italy. They pull the seats out and settle to sleep, his friend in the middle. She can’t sleep; she can feel the heat of the two men’s bodies each side of her. When her boyfriend starts to snore, the Greek man turns and touches her breast. She lies there, silent, willing him on. He rolls on top of her and they fuck as the train heads south. It was wonderful, she says. I’ll never forget the smell of him, like honey and thyme.
7
The taxi picks them up in a square so full of cicadas they can barely hear each other speak. The taxi driver thinks they’re both Italian, and they don’t correct him. In heavily-accented but fluent English, he talks to them about women, how Scandinavian women have cleaner private parts than women in Greece. He wants to know what women in Italy are like ‘down there’. They’re vague. He has a Swedish mistress he tells them, she comes each summer. She is very clean ‘down there’. The following day they see him with a woman who is clearly his wife. He spots them, turns away. There are cicadas here too. They are tired of pretending. They’d like to be at home.
8
They stop for the night on Route 66, in a motel that claims to be the oldest motel in Williams. That morning they’d brunched in T-shirts outside a place near Phoenix. Now they are sitting inside a run-down room with snow banked up outside the door. They have eaten rib-eye steak and baked potatoes in a restaurant with a life-sized plaster cow outside the door. The bathroom has rusty water and the bed dips in the middle. They lie there, breathing slowly in the high thin freezing air, thinking of their lives and what has brought them here. Three rooms down, their dear friend and companion on the trip, a single woman, sits fully dressed all night, facing the door.
9
He is in a bar with a blind made of faded plastic strips at the door to keep out flies. The blind’s knotted back on itself, so that one or two flies penetrate the semi-darkness to buzz around the scuffed plastic dome protecting the last third of a crumbling sponge cake. There is no other food; it’s far too hot to eat. The light outside the bar is intense. A dog of indeterminate breed is lying halfway beneath one of the three zinc-topped tables squeezed under the shelter of the station eaves, each with its plastic ashtray advertising Crodino. The barman, a middle-aged man in pressed black trousers and a vest, has all the inf
ormation he will ever need.
10
They have planned a fortnight in Paris, but his mother falls ill and they come back to England to be with her. They are in Cologne when his father’s health fails, and they find a flight home. They are sitting in the bar of their hotel in Madrid when his partner’s father is taken to hospital. They are holidaying in the valley of the shadow of death. They cancel everything to be with his mother and travel becomes what it once had been, when he was a child and there was nothing beyond the walls of the house, and within it everything, a weight and a lightness, miraculous as the weight of metal in the infinite lightness of the air.
1
Sometimes he wakes up at night and his arm has gone dead. He lifts it with his working hand and moves it across his body like a Geiger counter. He lets it rest on his stomach and his chest, his legs and face. He lets it touch his lips to see what it feels like to be touched in this way. He strokes his balls, then bends the senseless fingers around his penis, already hard, to learn about the body from outside, to see what it must be like to be held by someone else, who is not dead, as his arm is, but alive to him and to his needs. He wishes his arm would stay dead for ever.
2
He wakes up in his own bed but the weight of the blankets is too much for him and he can’t move. He calls out for his mother. The next thing he knows he’s in his parents’ bed and the doctor is poking him, tapping his knees and ankles with a metal hammer, asking him what he feels and if it hurts. Nothing, he says, and no. He’s looking at the ceiling, the central light, the lampshade the colour of skin, the fringe around its bottom, the crack that runs from one corner of the room to the other. He is given enormous pills to take. His mother holds his hand. Can you still feel me? she wants to know.
3
They’re standing in a line in the corridor outside the infirmary. They’re in their underpants, the girls are somewhere else. It’s cold and some of them are shivering. He has goose pimples on his arms. The back of the boy in front of him has a birthmark the shape of a strawberry, with a single hair growing out from the heart of it. He wonders if the boy knows. Some boys have nicer underpants than others. The boys go into the room in groups of three and leave from another door further down the corridor. They don’t look back. He’s been told there’s a nurse inside, who’ll touch his balls and ask him to cough, but he doesn’t believe it.
4
His uncle and aunt from Australia are staying with them. It’s summer, which means it’s winter where they come from, his uncle tells him a hundred times. He has a loud voice and large rough hands. The boy can tell his mother doesn’t like him, and he doesn’t like him either. His wife is fat and sad, she doesn’t know where to put herself. She’s wearing flowery dresses that are too tight round the waist. One morning, as he’s walking past the breakfast table, his uncle grabs him by the elbow and twists him round to face away from them all. Just look at the size of that arse, he says. He’s more like a girl than a bloody boy.
5
He is standing in front of his mother’s mirror in his parents’ bedroom. It’s another house, the house with the piano and the cowboy wallpaper. His room doesn’t have a mirror this big, so he’s sneaked in here from the bathroom with only a towel wrapped round him. He’ll say he heard a noise if anyone comes. His heart is beating hard in his chest. He’s thin, bony even, his arms are like stalks. He drops the towel to the floor and stares at this alien being before him. He watches the belly-button moving in and out as he breathes. He tucks his penis and balls between his legs and imagines what it must be like to be a girl.
6
In the showers after football, some boys wander around naked, some don’t. He’s one of the wary ones, who sit on the benches, easing their mud-caked shirts over their heads, pretending to tease out knots in the laces of their boots while the other boys, taller and bigger and stupid, strip off their kit and slap each other’s backs, then disappear into the steam. No one lets his eyes drift down to below the waist, where the mystery of them bobs and swells. He sits there, waiting to be told to strip, noticing which boy has hair, which not, wishing his own would hurry up and grow. Each body is strange to him, and frightening, his own most of all.
7
He has just been blown by an older man in a dark suit, with sunglasses, who spat his semen into a handkerchief, which he folded and put back into his pocket. The older man has now moved away from the bed and is sitting in an armchair across the room, one ankle resting on a knee, held by the hand that he’s used to stroke the erection, to briefly caress the belly, the eyes still hidden behind the glasses, his own trousers readjusted. He’s waiting for the next act, the part where the body he’s just known more intimately than anyone else has, ever, gets out of bed and dresses in front of him. He’s waiting for the final defloration.
8
He was thin for years, until he began to use a gym. He took up running, pounding out miles each week, his head filled with dreams of Marathon. He remade himself into something he might want to own, not only from within but from outside, an object worth having, possessing. This was the period of photographs in front of mirrors, when photographs had to be developed, and limits observed. He’s wearing shorts in them, underpants sometimes, a singlet in one or two. His face is hidden behind the camera, but that’s all right. His face isn’t part of the general effect he’s after. He’s cutting out what’s not required. What he’s after, at its heart, is ripped. As in out.
9
There’s a woman comedian he sees who talks about getting married and how she’s finally allowed to eat. It’s never that conscious – what is? – but love, when it comes, has a similar effect. The body he’s seen as mystery, and then as shame, and lastly as value, becomes a place in which they can both relax, a haven. They hold each other’s substance. When his father says he’s developing a belly, he’s briefly annoyed, but moves on. His father is the same weight he was when he was twenty. His mother has fought a constant battle with her waistline, as people say. He’ll be his own man, he decides, and his partner’s. He’ll eat what’s given him and be glad.
10
His parents bathed him as a child. His body was theirs, flesh of their flesh, he had no secrets. His vomit, his shit, his arms reaching out, shampoo in his eyes, his tears, his blood to be wiped off, his wounds to be healed, the goodnight kiss. And then came the parting, and his body spun off like a moon into some dark space they could only infer from that absence. And then, because the most natural form is the orbit, he finds himself holding his father’s hand and wiping his mouth and his arse, and his mother is a child in his arms, her trust, her willingness, her need in his like the meeting of a hook and eye.
1
They cycle out to a place about five miles from the village where the lane, little more than the width of a car, curves round to the right. At the side is the steeply sloping grass verge and, at the top of the verge, a metal fence. He hooks his bare legs round the lowest rung of the fence and lets himself down until he is dangling with his forehead no more than a foot from the soft summer tarmac of the road. The others sit along the top rail of the fence, waiting. Straining up, he can see the soles of their sandals. When the first car hurtles past him the rush of air is like an adult’s slap.
2
They stand around the pool in their winter clothes, scarves tucked into their woollens, their feet in wellingtons. The first child walks out onto the ice, and then the second. The pool, or pit as it’s known, is in a hollow, bare trees all round it. No one can see them, no one can hear them call. He joins the other two. Together they edge their way towards the centre of the pit. Beneath their feet, the ice is cloudy, irregular, less white than he’s expected, stripped branches trapped within it. He sees what looks like a harp, a doll, an uncle’s face, a deepness. With a rustle like fire, the crack comes running across the ice to greet them.
3
He is cycling home from school along the narrow lane when a car overtakes too close. He swerves into t
he verge. Some long dried grasses catch in the wheel and tangle among the spokes. Continuing to pedal, he bends down over the handlebars to disentangle them, tugging as the front wheel wobbles from side to side. The grasses hold. He reaches further in, as close to the spinning wheel as he can get. Before he knows it his hand is caught between spokes and fork and acts as a brake. He is thrown like a doll across and down and in front of his own bicycle, which tears at his back as his forehead skids along the road. Blood, blind.
With a Zero at its Heart Page 2