by Francis King
I was amazed both by the livid purple colour of its circumcised head and by its size, so incommensurate with his puny stature.
He laughed. ‘ Don’t gape like that! You’ve seen lots of these before in the showers.’ He was right. But since he usually avoided taking the compulsory cold shower every morning, I had never seen his.
‘Go on! Give it a tug!’ Now he was half leaning against, and half lying on, a grassy bank behind him.
‘Certainly not!’
‘Then I’ll have to do it myself.’
Fascinated, I watched him, while pretending to be totally uninterested. His eyes were screwed up, his mouth parted, with a thread of saliva glistening in the late summer sunlight between the upper teeth and the lower ones. His breath came in gasps from the effort. All at once I felt my own cock harden.
‘Oh, oh, oh!’ The semen shot out, some landing on my shoe. He began to roar with laughter. ‘ That was terrific! Te-bloody-rrific!’ He rolled the r’s of the penultimate syllable in triumph.
‘Look what you’ve done to my shoe!’ I reached for a handful of grass, tore it from its roots and then bent over to wipe away what looked like a gob of phlegm.
Again I heard him roar with laughter. ‘ There’s nothing like a really good wank,’ he said. ‘But it would have been even better if you’d done it for me.’
Although then almost sixteen years old, I had never masturbated before in my life. But that night, lying in a state of extreme awareness which I found impossible to explain and which kept me awake while all the other boys in the dormitory were sleeping around me, I suddenly found that, unbidden, there came into my mind that image of Bob, half lying on, and half leaning against, the grassy bank behind him, his hand clutching his swollen cock. Perhaps I should try it? Clearly he had derived an intense, if brief, pleasure from the exercise.
Eventually, I got out of bed and, fearful of waking anyone, tiptoed on bare feet down the linoleum-covered passage to the lavatories, three in a row without any doors, at the far end of it. I squatted on the seat, dreading that someone, suddenly afflicted with diarrhoea, might rush down the passage and find me at what I was planning to do. I grasped my cock and began to rub it, at the same time shuffling through one image after another, in search of the right one. I thought of one of the maids, a girl who could not have been more than sixteen or seventeen and who had an excitingly feral odour as she leaned over one to put down or remove a plate; of Jessie Matthews, then not the dolorously overweight woman of later years but a pert gamine, whom I had seen during the previous holidays in The Midship Maid; of a photograph in a tattered copy of Men Only, lent to me by Bob, of a busty, blonde woman in a bathing costume, fondling her toes while seated on a rock. But distressingly my cock refused to stiffen, as it so often stiffened, without my volition, on other occasions. Then, unbidden, an image asserted itself, obliterating all the others. It was of a purple, circumcised cock, grasped in a hand on which the finger-nails were savagely gnawed to the quick; of shut eyes in a screwed-up face which seemed to express agony rather than an extreme of pleasure; of a thread of saliva between upper lip and lower. My cock all at once began to simmer and rise. There was no problem after that.
Chapter Ten
Dr Lazarides, who always looked as though he was in need of a shave and who had thick hair on the backs of his hands and sprouting up around the collar of the tight, white tunic which, summer or winter, he always wore when seeing his patients, looked at me quizzically. By then Noreen had already begun to turn the key in the lock that had for so long kept the Black Box sealed and I had become, as Dr Lazarides would put it, ‘surprisingly communicative’. He smiled, revealing his large, white, slightly protuberant teeth. ‘More than most people here, you pose a question to which I can really find no answer. I always hope that perhaps one day, you will provide the answer for me.’
‘Let me try. What is the question?’
‘Well, it’s really not so much about what you did as about what you are.’ He leaned towards me with a coaxing look on his face. ‘What made you what you are? Tell me, tell me.’
‘What makes anyone what he or she is?’
Ignoring my riposte, he persisted: ‘Did something happen – something seemingly trivial but all-important – during your babyhood or infancy or teens? Or was there some kind of diabolic possession? Or was there a genetic cause?’ Head on one side, he stared at me. ‘You’re such an intelligent man that you’ve probably put all those questions already to yourself.’
‘No, I can’t say I have,’ I lied.
‘I increasingly have the feeling that nature and not nurture is the cause of most of the problems of most of the people here. But in your case can I be sure of that?’
Perhaps he should have been putting his questions to Bob, who in those days would from time to time pay me a visit in my incarceration. After all, it was for his work in the field of genetics that he was eventually to win his Nobel Prize.
About genetics, even as a schoolboy Bob would often hold forth to me. Why, I have often wondered, should that particular subject have so much interested him from so early an age? It was as though he had been predestined to make that, and nothing else, his work of a lifetime, just as it was as though another of my schoolmates, a Jewish boy, had been predestined to make the collection of butterflies his hobby of a lifetime, travelling the world in search of specimens (so I learned recently from a Sunday supplement) into old age.
Now, pondering all this in the darkening shop, I can for some reason once again hear Bob asking me: ‘Do you know what was the most important discovery in the history of genetic disorders?’
In answer to that question, as to so many of his questions, I shook my head.
‘The invention of the bicycle. Once ordinary people could easily travel outside their little villages to marry and fuck and reproduce themselves, there was much less chance of genetic disorders multiplying.’
The curious thing was that, though I had and still have no interest in science, I could listen fascinated as he talked in this way about alleles, mutation pressure, random genetic drift, recessive homozygotes and so forth. He himself, however, became totally bored, yawning, shifting restlessly in his chair, scratching his head or his chin, if I, pursuing my own particular obsession, in turn began to speak about such things as the hollowed knop-ribbed stem of a Verzelini goblet, of a necklace with beads of piqué, or of a baluster-bodied silver vase with hammered finish.
My precocious interest in antiques won me far less credit at Gladbury than his no less precocious interest in genetics. ‘ I’m afraid that academically he’s really rather dim,’ my then form-master, Mr Peppard, told Ma with good-humoured bluntness when she asked him how I was doing. Since he was handsome and young, she was in no way displeased. ‘Really that doesn’t surprise me at all. I was an awful dunce at school. I never managed to pass a single exam – not even my School Cert.’
About Bob, on the other hand, the masters were all grudgingly admiring. They knew already that one day he would be someone of whom Gladbury would be proud.
What none of them even guessed was that one day I would be someone of whom Gladbury would be ashamed.
Chapter Eleven
I have just sold a four-case lacquer inro which, strangely, I had totally forgotten that I had in my stock and which, even more strangely, I cannot ever remember having bought. An elderly, shabbily dressed man, with a high, stiff collar and a high greyish-green trilby hat, came into the shop and asked in a husky voice: ‘Do you mind if I have a dekko?’ Time-waster, I thought, wishing that I had the self-confidence to place on my door, like a colleague further down the street, a brusque notice: ‘No browsers’. Clearing his throat from time to time, he wandered from stand to stand and show-case to show-case. Then I saw that he was rummaging behind a pile of Staffordshire earthenware dishes, all of them dusty and many of them chipped. He brought out the inro and began to examine it. He looked across at me and smiled. Then he held it out to me as though proffering a gif
t. ‘Pretty,’ he said. On one side, in coloured togidashi, was a mandarin drake on a river bank, on the other side the mate of the drake swimming in the river. ‘Very pretty.’ I nodded. Then I took it from him and examined it, as though for the first time. ‘It’s signed ‘‘Kajikawa saku’’.’
‘And who is he when he’s at home?’
‘Well, the Kajikawa family extends over virtually the whole of the nineteenth century. But I’d place this piece at about 1860. But that’s only a hunch,’ I added.
‘Pretty. Very pretty,’ he repeated. ‘It might be just the thing.’ He did not specify for what purpose it might be just the thing. ‘What, er, price did you have in mind?’
When I told him, he gave a low whistle under his breath. ‘ Steep, steep,’ he muttered. ‘But it is pretty, very pretty. I rather think I’d better take it.’
After he had left the shop, raising the high, greenish-grey trilby to me before passing out through the door, I tried to remember the provenance of the inro. Probably, I decided, I had bought it as one of a lot. But it was odd that, when the man had held it out to me, I had seemed to be seeing it for the first time.
Replacing the dislodged Staffordshire plates, I suddenly remembered another inro …
‘Oh, you’re not going to see him again, are you? You saw him last week.’
‘Not last week, the week before last. Ten days ago.’
‘I don’t know why you want to see him.’
‘Because he’s my father.’
‘A fat lot of use he’s been to you as a father!’
Ma lay out, in beach pyjamas, on a wicker chaiselongue in the garden of the Campden Hill Square house. The window of the drawing-room was open behind her, so that she could hear the Harry Roy orchestra blaring out from the wireless. I wondered how long it would be before either Sir Francis or Lady Bracey looked over the garden wall to complain. Each would usually begin in the same way: ‘Oh, Mrs Frost, I don’t in the least want to be a nuisance but I wonder if I might ask …’ On one occasion, truculently drunk, Mother had cut in: ‘No, you may not ask! You bloody well may not ask!’ Later, remorseful, she had sent me round with a note of apology – she had had a migraine at the time, the note explained in her huge, sprawling handwriting; migraines always put her in a filthy mood.
As always, I hated to displease her. Lying out there, with the late afternoon sunlight glinting on the short blonde hair which framed her small, triangular face, she looked like a petulant and unhappy child. I hated to see that Gordon’s bottle and the ice bucket on the low table beside her. I hated to see that cigarette between her nicotine-stained fingers or sticking out from a long amber holder. I wished for her sake that she could hear from Tim, much though I detested him.
‘Is there anything I can get you before I go?’
‘Well, I had hoped that you would play a few games of bezique with me. But never mind, never mind. If you have to see your father, then you have to see him.’
‘Don’t take it like that. I feel sorry for him.’
‘Don’t you ever feel sorry for me?’
‘Often, often.’
‘You don’t know what it’s like to be given the push. Without a word of explanation. Just like that. Life can be terribly cruel. For me, he was The One and Only. I knew that as soon as I set eyes on him. The One and Only.’
‘I know, I know.’ I went over to her, I put my hand on her shoulder. ‘But he’ll come back. You’ve had other quarrels, you’ve had worse quarrels and at the end …’ I wanted to continue: He has nowhere else to stay. This is too good a berth to give up just like that. How is he going to pay for a room? For food? For the clothes he so much loves?
‘That was before this man came on the scene.’
‘What man?’
‘What man? I don’t know his name, I just know he exists. He’s an American, and he’s staying at the Dorchester, and he’s just crazy about Tim. A rich old queen! I’ve spoken to him on the telephone – twice. But he gave no name and Tim refused to tell me.’
‘But Tim isn’t like – like that, is he?’
‘Who knows what Tim is like! He’ll do anything for cash.’
In the train out to Walthamstow I kept thinking: She ought to be happy, why isn’t she happy? At forty-seven, she was still attractive, she had just been left the house and some money, in fact a lot of money, by Aunt Bertha, she was aristocratic, bright, charming. What had gone wrong? Poor Ma, poor, poor Ma!
‘How is your mother?’ was Dad’s first question.
‘Oh, as usual,’ I replied. ‘Up and down.’
He sighed.
The room, at the top of the tall, narrow house, looked out over a graveyard. On that late summer afternoon, there were a number of garishly dressed women with prams in it, a group of them even squatting on gravestones while they chatted to each other. From time to time one heard the wailing of a child, eerily attenuated by the distance.
Despite the heat, Dad was in a thick tweed suit, woollen socks, woollen shirt in a Tattersall check, woollen tie. He seemed always to be cold, telling me to shut the window or light the gas-fire even in midsummer; and yet, at the same time, his face always looked flushed and damp and he always. smelled of stale sweat.
‘You don’t happen to have a fag on you?’ He held up an empty packet of Woodbines and then screwed it up in a fist. ‘Finito!’ Since he knew that I was forbidden to smoke both at home and at school, why did he suppose that I might have cigarettes on me? Oh, I should have brought him some, I should have brought him some!
‘I can go round to the pub if you like.’
‘Later, later! Sit yourself down.’
There was only one armchair and he was in it, sprawled out, his feet, in their grubby gym shoes, resting on the gas-meter for which he would so often ask me for shillings. There was an upright chair but over it were draped pyjama trousers, a shirt, underpants. Eventually I sat on the edge of the wide, sagging brass bedstead. We looked at each other.
‘Have you been out at all?’
He shifted uneasily and sighed. ‘Not for a day or two. The nerves have been playing up again. I went out on Thursday, thought I’d toddle round to the pub, and when I was in the street, suddenly this awful panic overcame me. I really thought I was going to pass out, even kick the bucket. I’m not joking!’
I felt a terrible pity for him. I also felt a terrible rage. Like Ma in the past, I wanted to shout at him: ‘Why can’t you pull yourself together?’, totally failing to realise, as I realise all too well now, that not to be able to pull oneself together can be as incurable a disease as rabies or Aids.
‘Perhaps if you came out with me …’
‘Now?’ Even the idea filled him with panic. ‘Oh, no, dear boy, no, no! I couldn’t face it. Sorry.’
Dad’s had been a heroic war. But after the MC and the DSO there had followed the period in 1918 when he had been shut up in a Black Box of his own. Shell-shock, they had called it. Ma had told me how, at his worst, he would tremble as though with ague; wake up screaming; weep inconsolably for, literally, hours on end. ‘It was a hideous time. And your arrival on the scene hardly improved things. You were a mistake, of course, darling.’
‘So how is your mother?’ he asked again. ‘Is that nancy boy still hanging round her?’
‘Tim?’
‘Is that his name? The chorus-boy.’
‘He’s not a chorus-boy. He’s an actor. An out-of-work actor.’
‘What does your mother see in him?’
I shrugged. It was a question which I had often put to myself and been unable to answer.
‘I suppose he’s good-looking. And young. Your mother has this thing about youth. it’s because she’s so terrified of growing old. And so terrified of dying.’
‘She calls him The One and Only,’ I said.
He put his hands over his face. His left leg began to shake up and down with increasing agitation.
Fortunately at that moment there was a knock at the door. Then, without waiting for
an answer, good, vague, weary Mrs Pavlovsky put her head around it. ‘Sorry to disturb you both,’ she said in her thick Russian accent. Her cheek-bones high and her grey eyes slanting, her wide skirt reaching almost to her ankles, and a cloth tied over her head and under her chin, she looked like some babushka from the steppes. ‘I was wondering if you’d both like a cup of tea. I’ve just made some.’
‘Well, that’s very kind of you, Mrs Pavlovsky,’ Dad said. ‘Very kind of you indeed.’ After she had gone, he turned to me: ‘What time is it?’
‘Nearly five.’
‘Really? As late as that! Oh, then do put on the wireless. It’s at the right station. Just flick up the switch.’
‘You don’t want to listen to anything now. I’ve come to visit you.’
‘Just flick up the switch,’ he repeated irritably.
Reluctantly I did as he said; and at once a yapping voice in a foreign language – German, I quickly realised – filled the room.
‘Who is it?’
‘Who is it? Who is it? Don’t you know who that is? That’s the man who’s going to put paid to civilisation as we know it. That’s the man who’s going to be the death of us all. That’s Mr Hitler, Herr Hitler. You’ve heard of him, haven’t you?’ Mouth ajar, he stared at the Pye wireless set, its gleaming wooden front decorated with a sun, its rays spoke-like around it. He might have been staring at Hitler himself.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Dad! You can’t understand a word of that, can you?’
Now his huge, stricken eyes were fixed on me. ‘ I can understand the hate.’
‘You don’t have to listen to that gibberish to understand hate.’
‘It’s all going to happen again. Only this time it’s going to be even worse, far worse.’
I jumped up from my chair, strode over to the wireless and doused the yelping. ‘Sorry, Dad. Either we have that off or I go. I’m not going to sit here listening to something of which I can’t understand a single word.’