by Alex Preston
He had argued with Lee earlier that day. It was not a serious disagreement, just one of the small moments of friction that invigorated their relationship. He knew he had been staring at her too much in the library earlier. Perched behind his desk, he had been conjuring a daydream of exquisite beauty starring Lee against a deserted rocky beach and pine trees growing down to the sea. He stared at her and imagined her naked back pressed to the rough bark of the pine, her feet in the water and her arms stretched above her, her breasts falling forward as she dived in. She smiled at him the first few times she caught his eye, but then her expression grew increasingly irritated. A tall and aristocratic-looking student sitting next to Lee kept glancing at Mouse, whispering in her ear and then looking back at him with a frown. By this time Mouse was imagining Lee in the empty hall high above them in the tower of Senate House, her clothes scattered on the parquet floor, her hair falling down over her shoulders like Dulac’s Little Mermaid.
Lee had refused to have lunch with him and had disappeared towards the Brunswick Centre on the arm of her newly appointed protector. She didn’t come back that afternoon. After a sad sandwich in the staff cafeteria, Mouse went back to the library, found where the tall boy had been working and removed three pages of notes from his desk, folding them and placing them at the bottom of the bin as he made his way to the lift. He called ahead and booked his massage and then set out along the Euston Road.
As he lay on the bed with its sheet that was bobbled from too many washes, too many attempts to rinse out the oil and come and sweat, he felt the heaviness that had dogged his day lifting. He had been to a dinner party at the house of an older girl from the Course the night before. A girl who had once seemed to offer an escape from his obsession with Lee. Three years ago, he had taken her to the theatre, and then on to a bar, spending money he didn’t have getting her drunk. He had tried to kiss her in the taxi back west, and she laughed at him, told him that he was a dear pal, but she had a boyfriend, didn’t he know? Now the boyfriend had become a husband, the girl’s stomach strained against the material of her maternity dress, and her cheeks glowed every time she looked at her wealthy, successful mate. Mouse had played his part during dinner – the doting, unthreatening friend, laughing at her jokes and reaching out to touch the taut skin of her stomach to feel – there! – a kick. But he raged as he walked home, shouted prayers into the night sky, screamed at the desperate unfairness of it all.
The masseuse asked him to turn onto his back and he did so. He could see her looking at him, at the large belly that sat above his short, skinny legs, giving his body the appearance of a toffee apple abandoned on the bed. His cock stood straining, pulsing against the bulge of his stomach. She began to massage his feet, rubbing warm oil onto the hard pads of his soles.
He was worried about his friends. Lee was a constant concern, but now Marcus and Abby seemed argumentative, strung out. They rarely came to the pub after the Course. Dark pouches hung beneath Marcus’s eyes. The Retreat was like a beacon ahead. Only three more days and then they’d be together for the weekend, and all things would be well again. David had told him that the Retreat would be held at the Earl’s country house on the edge of the Cotswolds, Lancing Manor. Each year it was somewhere different, the exact location never revealed to the new members until the night before. Mouse thought back to the Retreats he had been on so far: some of the best days of his life. He didn’t know what he’d do without the Course.
The girl began to move her way up his body. First his calves; resting her arse on his foot, she ran her oiled fingers up one leg and then the next, kneading the muscle, moving her thumbs in circles around his knees. Then his thighs, which she pulled and stretched, making her way slowly up to the join of leg and groin, the fold of skin where his pubic hair started. She brushed his cock by accident and he felt it thrill.
*
Lee had discovered him. Three weeks into term and he had only left his room in college for lectures and meals. Sitting on his own in the wood-panelled dining hall under badly painted pictures of morally upright fellows, he would shovel the food into his mouth as quickly as he could, reading a novel to discourage any of the other outcasts from claiming him as one of their own. He watched the surrounding tables with bored scorn. Marcus’s voice was always the loudest, his laugh audible from the quadrangle below. Everyone knew Marcus. And Abby at his side, striking and statuesque, but Mouse could see her in fifteen years’ time when she’d be hulking and matronly. Daffy and all of the other laddish types who followed Marcus around were not the sort of people Mouse had come to university to meet. So he sat reading the novels of André Gide, with his blond hair flopping in front of his eyes, and left when his plate was clean.
One evening, scurrying across the quad after dinner, he saw a girl watching him from a window high in the wide blank wall of the college’s main building. He recognised her vaguely. She was friends with Marcus and his crowd. Her face looked young and lost as she peered out into the misty air. The face disappeared into darkness and Mouse climbed the spiral staircase to his own room, the smallest room in college. His clothes were still in his suitcase, perched at the foot of his bed. Books were everywhere, reaching in perilous piles towards the ceiling, three deep on the windowsill, filling the drawers of his dresser. He opened the window and stared out across the college lawn towards the parks. Only a small desk lamp lit the room behind him and he felt somehow powerful up there in his cupboard of a room, looking down over the world.
He watched people walking back to their rooms after dinner, heard brief snatches of conversation. Then there was a knock on his door. Mouse panicked for a moment, stared around his room and thrust handfuls of dirty socks and boxer shorts into drawers, stuffing them between tightly packed books. When he opened the door he saw the girl who had been watching him from the high window earlier. He stepped forward and tried to pull the door closed behind him to block her view inside. She placed one hand on the door frame. She wore a hooded sweatshirt and tracksuit bottoms, scuffed trainers on her feet.
‘Can I come in? You’re Alastair, right?’ Her voice was deep and cool.
Mouse looked behind him and sucked his stomach in as she squeezed past him.
‘Wow, this room is tiny. Bad luck. My name is Lee, by the way.’
She took off her shoes and sat down on his bed, lifting his suitcase onto the floor. He saw her eyes scanning the piles of books. She reached over and picked up a tattered copy of The Wind in the Willows.
‘Oh, I love this. I had forgotten how much I did, but then I read it over the summer. It’s magic.’
Mouse’s eyes bulged even more. He sat down in his desk chair, knocking a pile of books over as he swung round to face her. They were only a foot apart and Mouse could smell her shampoo.
‘Do you really like it? I think it’s a serious work. I mean really very spiritual. It’s my favourite. I read it when I can’t sleep.’
Lee looked around the room. Treasure Island lay open on top of a copy of Eugénie Grandet, The Famous Five rubbed shoulders with La Vie mode d’emploi, Struwwelpeter with Les Fleurs du mal.
‘What are you studying?’ she asked.
‘French.’
‘So why all the kids’ books?’
Mouse blew his fringe upwards and spun a pencil on his desk.
‘I’ve always taken them with me. My dad is in the army and we travelled around a lot when I was young. I just got used to having my books around me. All I have to do is read the beginning of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and I feel . . . I don’t know, safe. It’s a wee bit sad, I suppose, but no worse than television.’
She set down The Wind in the Willows on top of the Bible that lay beside his bed. She took off her jumper; her singlet rode up as she lifted it, revealing a flat white stomach. Mouse tried not to look at the softness of her breasts under the vest, the black bra straps on her shoulders. She leaned over suddenly and, very close, breathed a question at him. He felt a flutter of panic, felt time slowing, making
the air around them heavy.
‘What’s your accent? Where are you from?’
She stroked his flushed, fleshy cheek with cold fingers. He spoke quickly, stumbling on his words.
‘I’m from Scotland. Well, I grew up in Germany and then came back over here when I was thirteen. We were in Shropshire for a wee while and then my dad was posted to Barry, outside of Dundee. It’s where his family are from. I don’t really know what my accent is. I try to make it as ordinary as possible. It’s just how I speak, you know?’
With the light cutting along her cheek, he thought she was very beautiful. He could see fading summer freckles across her forehead, lying like stars along her arms. He noticed that she wore different-coloured earrings in her ears. He wondered if she knew that they didn’t match. Her tracksuit bottoms were frayed around the heel. He felt suddenly ashamed of his body, the way his stomach pushed out beneath his T-shirt, his goggling eyes.
‘What are you doing here? I mean, I’m glad you came over, but I didn’t think people like you mixed with people like me. Why aren’t you out with Abby and Marcus?’
She drew back a little and smiled at him.
‘I saw you at dinner the other night and I thought you looked nice. I don’t want to hang out with just those people. I want to meet people like you. I think we could be friends.’
‘Well I don’t. I didn’t ask you to come over. I just want to get on with my work. All of the other students in my tutorials have spent every holiday since they were kids in France. They worked in Paris on their gap years, have pretentious parents who insist on French at the dinner table once a week, you know? I’m at a disadvantage from the start and so I am going to need to work really hard to keep up. I think you’re grand, Lee, and I’m pleased to have met you, but maybe you should go. I can’t really deal with this now.’
She looked at him with a frown, knitting her eyebrows together, then pulled back the duvet and slipped into his bed. He watched her wriggle like a fish for a moment and then saw the tracksuit trousers slither slowly to the floor.
‘Will you read me a story, Alastair?’
‘Um . . . OK. Call me Mouse. People call me Mouse.’
So he opened The Wind in the Willows, took a deep breath, and began to read.
‘The Willow-Wren was twittering his thin little song, hidden himself in the dark selvedge of the river bank. Though it was past ten o’clock at night, the sky still clung to and retained some lingering skirts of light . . .’
Lee slept in his bed that night. She wore one of his T-shirts and they lay in the close darkness hugging, talking in whispered voices. He massaged her thin back with his thumbs, feeling the closeness of the bones under her skin. She let him kiss her lips, but kept them tightly closed when he tried to move his tongue inside. He was also allowed to feel her breasts and her arse through her clothes, but she pushed him away when he tried to slip his hands under the waistband of her pants. Neither of them slept, and when the sun rose he sat on the windowsill reading aloud from The Wind in the Willows again. She lay back with her eyes closed, smiling.
*
It was the closest he had come to something sexual with Lee. And it was why he went for these massages. He had enough self-knowledge to realise that it was in pursuit of those early nights with Lee that he went to the tall Georgian house in Marylebone. He slid back to the present, away from memory, as the girl massaging him started to apply oil to her naked body. Her breasts shimmered, her stomach glistened. She began to chant.
‘Om, shanti, om . . .’
Pressing her breasts together, she slid over his body, rubbing herself against him, all of the slippery warmth of her vibrating with her chanting. He began to intone the mantra and allowed his mind to empty entirely, felt the world centre on his groin. She moved faster, flinging her body over his; she was panting. Mouse’s voice rose to a wail as he came hot shots over his own belly, over hers. She mopped at herself with a towel and then handed him some tissues. In the aftermath he felt empty. His breath came tightly into his chest, escaping with a high wheeze. The girl dressed in the mirror and then left the room. Mouse made his way out into the afternoon. He was carrying his drumsticks.
He decided to walk down to the church. He wasn’t due there for another few hours and the massages always filled him with a strange energy. He couldn’t go more than once a month, though. The emotional and financial expense precluded it. He always felt a heady sense of guilt afterwards. He nurtured it, enjoyed it as one can enjoy any pain that is rare and self-inflicted. It helped to give shape to his time at the Course knowing what it was like to sin.
He dived through the underpass at Marble Arch and came out into the north-eastern corner of Hyde Park. It had been a cut-glass autumn day, the leaves threw a multicoloured net over damp grass. Now with the light fading over them, two boys flew a kite which was silhouetted against the rich blue of the western sky. He watched the kite shudder for a moment in the high air, whip in the wind and then crash to earth. He walked along the avenue of trees down towards Knightsbridge, imagining those who once rode alongside him, Victorian ladies with their bodies hot under stiff-collared clothes perching side-saddle as gentlemen with enormous sculpted moustaches raised their hats and bowed. Mouse ran up the hillock upon which Achilles was perched and placed his hand on the cold bronze of the statue’s calf. Then along the south side of the park, past the rose gardens and the last dying games of football, until he came out by the lake.
*
Those first few weeks with Lee were bright in his mind. When it had all seemed ahead of him, when it had promised so much. He wasn’t to know that he wouldn’t get any further, that her coldness was something more than the initial prudishness of a sensitive teenage girl. They spent all of their time together during that wonderful autumn, and it felt to Mouse that he lived under two skies: the natural sky above and the artificial sky that Lee cast over him. Mouse carried her books to the English faculty and left her with a lip-kiss at the door before running to his own lectures. They’d walk to dinner together and then sit and smoke cigarettes until it was time to go to the pub, or to Marcus’s room to hang out with Abby and the others. Marcus had the biggest room in college and there was always booze and often drugs on offer. Mouse didn’t mind that Lee described him as her discovery, presented him to the others with a note of possession in her voice. He wanted to be owned by her.
They were generous with him. For his nineteenth birthday Marcus and Abby bought him an early edition of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe inscribed to him with their love. Lee gave him a golden signet ring and had an invented coat of arms engraved upon it. She placed it upon Mouse’s finger as they lay in bed the night of his birthday. He held it to the light, looked at the engraving of a turret with what he thought was a mouse rampant atop it. He laid his hand down on the bulge of his bare stomach and saw the ring shimmer, then placed it gently over Lee’s left breast. They slept in the same bed for the first term. She said she was lonely in her room alone. She would let him take his clothes off and press himself against her, sighing with pleasure as he ran his hands over her flannel pyjamas, circled her nipples through the soft cloth, ground his groin against her thighs. But still she wouldn’t let him go any further; she kept her pants on under her pyjamas, and threatened to leave when he insisted too vehemently.
Lee had asked Mouse along to the Course one night in December. A freezing wind nudged them along the wide high street as they walked out after supper. Lee wore a coat with a sandy fur collar and clung hard to Mouse’s arm as they reached the dark quadrangle of the graduate college. They had made their way into the dimly lit chapel where candles flickered above carved wooden choir stalls and chairs were set out in a circle on the ornate mosaic floor. Mouse sat and watched Lee, contributing little to the conversation. When they sang he mouthed the words silently, preferring to listen to Lee’s rich, low voice rising to fill the small chapel. When they came out into a night made suddenly bright with snow, breathlessly cold, she had turned t
o him, eyes streaming.
‘So what did you think?’
‘I thought it was brilliant,’ he replied. ‘Really moving.’
‘Do you think you’d like to come again? I’d love it if you would.’
He thought for a moment. ‘I’ll give it a try. I’ve been thinking for a wee while that I needed something new, some way of negotiating life. Life just seems . . . it seems unfair at a very deep level. Not just the inequalities in society, but the way that the most successful people also seem to be the most awful. Something isn’t right with the world and I need a way of dealing with it. I’m not sure that this is it, but if you believe in it, I’ll come with you.’
‘I saw a Bible in your room.’
‘I’ve been trying to read it a little bit every night. It’s a cultural document, you know? It all makes a bit more sense now.’
At the next service, a guest speaker had stood in the centre of the circle of chairs and fixed each of them in turn with his pale eyes. His sandy hair was flecked with grey and he wore a white shirt, chinos and a blue blazer. Mouse thought he looked like a banker. But when he spoke, the small chapel came alive. He had talked about the emptiness of modern life, the way that everything had lost meaning in a world cheapened by consumerism and sex. He marched up and down the room as he spoke, slamming his fist into his hand for emphasis, and Mouse, who hadn’t been to church since his mum took him to Christmas services as a child, was hooked. He and Lee had gone to the pub with the speaker afterwards. His name was David Nightingale.
*
A bicycle screeched to a halt behind Mouse. He dropped his drumsticks and scrabbled in the gutter to retrieve them.
‘Watch where the fuck you’re going!’