by Patrick Gale
He was kept from despair by the salutary spectacle of other boys, often well into their second year, who had been cast forever beyond acceptance and were fair game even for new bugs like himself to tease. There was one with grotesquely protuberant ears who appeared to have given up washing, one who could easily be provoked to spectacular tantrums in which he actually stamped his feet and cried and a third, called Bollocks, because his balls had still not dropped, who babbled in a high-pitched voice about the consolations of Christianity even as one tore his essays and scattered his textbooks into muddy puddles. The one with the ears and sour smell was later diagnosed as a schizophrenic, but only once exposed to a society with marginally less appetite for aberration, in his first year at university.
Colin’s initiation came six weeks into his first term, on a Sunday night. Sundays were always a dangerous time. Envy was in the air, because some boys had been whisked out to lunch by their parents and a bogus holiday mood tended to curdle without warning. A few boys were still trying to finish their Saturday night essays but most were idle, bored and fractious, their dissatisfaction fuelled by a thorough perusal of that other world of luxuries and freedom paraded so unfeelingly through the Sunday colour supplements. It was the housemaster’s night off, which meant he was more thoroughly absent than usual, being interruptible only in extremis. A boy had once been blinded with a fencing foil on a Sunday night. Only last Sunday evening, the day room had taken on a nightmarish air when someone produced a set of darts stolen from the pub and began throwing them at people’s ankles for a laugh. Colin’s cousin had warned him about Sunday nights. Colin was duly lying low in his cubicle behind his irreproachable curtain, reading Balzac and trying not to be noticed. A fight with cartons of gone-off milk had flared and died. A game of table tennis was threatening to turn nasty. Someone was playing Dark Side of the Moon yet again, with the usual cluster of boys gathered religiously to mouth the lyrics and strum imaginary guitars. Any minute the youngest new bug would be called on to ring the bell for evening prayers. Only minutes lay between Balzac and the relative safety of a frosty bed.
It was a rogue attack, begun by Bollocks in an extravagant bid for acceptance by the crowd. Colin was startled as the other boy whisked back the curtain and yelped, ‘Do you accept Jesus as your personal saviour?’
A few boys jeered out of habit, mocking the squeaky voice and stutter but others simply gathered to watch.
‘I’m not sure,’ Colin admitted.
‘Do you accept Jesus as your personal saviour?’ Bollocks repeated and Colin decided to gamble on his superior status, as would-be initiate over pariah.
‘Why should I?’ he jeered. ‘Sp-sp-spastic features!’
For a moment it was uncertain which way the scene would turn, as Bollocks groped in his sports jacket for something, then he produced a can of lighter fuel, liberally anointed the curtain and pronounced, ‘Then, heretic, you fry.’
And he struck a match. Colin swore and shrank back into his cubicle as the air filled with the smoke and the irreproachable green was engulfed in flames. Then one of the third years, secure in his status as a useful football player and twenty-a-day smoker, decided that Bollocks was going too far. To loud cheers, he set off a fire extinguisher, dowsing the flames then turning the jet on the pariah. Seizing the moment, Colin dashed out to land a vigorous kick on Bollocks’s backside but he had misjudged the feelings of the crowd.
He was grabbed. His trousers and underpants were gleefully tugged down around his ankles and he was bent over the ping-pong table while his arse was given a stinging douche from what remained in the fire extinguisher. When that was no longer deemed amusing, hot, bony hands hoisted him into one of the large plastic dustbins and a saucer of meatily rancid butter was pressed down on his hair. When he tried to clear it off it was followed by a faceful of long-forgotten milk and something wet and nameless down the back of his shirt. Blinded and fighting back the urge to retch, Colin flailed out wildly in his effort to keep his balance, as his tormentors lifted the dustbin into the air. Once his eyes were sufficiently clear to see where they were carrying him, he froze and swore again. The walls above the cubicles were clad in handsome wooden panelling which reached twelve feet or more. The panelling was very thick — built like that, perhaps, to disguise pipe work — and it was possible to clamber around the room on the top of it. Colin and his dustbin were hoisted overhead and, with much cheering, balanced precariously where two sections of the panel pathway formed a corner. Then the bell rang for evening prayers and the room emptied as everyone raced up the corridor to kneel at their chairs in the dining room. Apathetic sixth-formers drifted through from their studies to follow them. Most ignored him. One blew a gobbet of chewing gum at him and another shouted some witticism in German which raised a knowing laugh.
Then he was alone. Gingerly he tried to stand but the dustbin rocked sickeningly and he dropped back to crouching in the garbage. If he fell he had no doubt he would break his neck, or at best crack his skull, on the grimy parquet floor. He pictured his funeral. There would be white lilies and the headmaster would speak damningly and at length, summoning his murderers by name and making them pray around the coffin. There would be mass expulsions, reported in the national press and a new, fiercely disciplinarian regime would be instituted. First-years would keep Colin’s name alive with tears of gratitude.
For the first time since his father had left him sitting on a trunk in Waterloo station six weeks before, Colin lowered his guard and allowed himself the luxury of homesick tears.
‘Oh for fuck’s sake!’
He blinked and looked over the rim of the dustbin. It was Hardy, one of the prefects and a senior officer in the school army corps. Tall, dark, terrifying, Hardy rarely spoke to his juniors, keeping discipline by the sheer authority of his presence. When he did speak, it tended to be with withering sarcasm.
‘Sorry, Hardy,’ Colin stammered, expecting to be punished for the wrongs done to him, which was the usual way.
‘Can’t you get down?’
‘I…I don’t think so.’
‘Well in Christ’s name stay still then.’
Hardy tossed the novel he had been carrying onto the ping-pong table then clambered over the cubicles below Colin and steadied the dustbin for him. ‘Go on. Get out.’
Hastily tugging up his underwear and trousers, Colin clambered out onto the ledge. Hardy dropped the dustbin to the floor, magnificently impervious to the mess he created. He jumped down after it. Colin followed more carefully. Hardy looked at him and wrinkled his nose.
‘You stink. Christ!’
‘Sorry, Hardy.’
‘Not your fault. What’s your name?’
‘Cowper.’
‘Well take a shower, Cowper. Now.’
‘But what about evening prayers?’
‘Oh sod those. Come on.’
Hardy led the way to the changing room and through it to the showers, where the air was still ripe with cigarette smoke. While Colin hastily undressed, Hardy set a shower running. As Colin slipped in past him, he shut the door behind them then he lent against the wall casually smoking while Colin washed himself in the blast of hot water. Rubbing his pale skin with soap, he became aware of bits of him that had been scraped or bruised in the attack. He looked around for a bottle of shampoo and began to wash the butter out of his hair.
‘It’ll need more than that,’ Hardy told him, tossing his cigarette stub into a puddle where it fizzled. ‘Here. Let me.’ He came to stand so close that the shower splashed onto his jeans and linen jacket leaving dark stains. Colin wondered if he was drunk.
‘Give,’ Hardy said and Colin passed him the shampoo. Hardy filled his palm with the dark green liquid and began to rub it into Colin’s scalp, brow furrowed with concentration.
At prep school, the assistant matrons — bored daughters of good families, marking time — used to let themselves into the bathrooms to wash one’s hair. They were breezily teasing about his coyness and it was all a
cutely embarrassing. This was quite different. Hardy had been at the pub and his breath was sour-sweet with beer and tobacco. Their hands had scratched busily at his scalp as though conquering an itch but Hardy’s hands moved slowly. His touch was no less firm but he used his fingertips instead of his nails. He reached round to the back of Colin’s head, while working fiercely at his temples with his thumbs. He was getting soaked. Colin felt wet denim against one of his thighs. He felt an overwhelming urge to pee and found, to his horror, that he was getting an erection. Desperate that Hardy shouldn’t see it, he tried his usual technique of taking deep breaths and imagining his hand being cut off with a breadknife.
Outside the bell rang again, calling first years to bed. There was a stampede of boys out in the corridor. Any minute someone might come in for a smoke. Smiling faintly, as at some private joke, Hardy pushed Colin’s head back into the water and began to comb away the lather with his fingers. Nothing would get rid of the erection. Panic seemed to be making things worse. Colin felt his cock actually brush against Hardy’s jeans. Hardy spotted it and chuckled.
‘What’s this, eh?’ He tapped at it experimentally with a huge, wet hand. Colin was mortified. He shut his eyes.
‘I…I’m sorry, Hardy.’
He tried to turn away but the older boy still had a hand on the back of his neck. Pummelling his back, the water seemed to be getting hotter.
‘For fuck’s sake, stop apologizing,’ Hardy told him. ‘Look at me.’
Colin opened his eyes just in time to find Hardy bending down to kiss him. He gave a little yelp then was silenced by a rough mouth against his and the extraordinary sensation of a tongue plunging between his lips to seek out his own. The hand that was on the back of his neck slipped down until an arm grasped him across the shoulder blades while another hand slipped between his legs and began to wank him, vigorously.
Colin had only learnt to toss himself off a few weeks before. The age at which such knowledge was acquired depended entirely on the company into which chance threw a boy. He had risen swiftly through his prep school hierarchy and so found himself, at the age when he might have learned, captain of a comparatively prepubescent dormitory and thus deprived of exemplary demonstrations. He was haunted by painful erections, and the occasional wet dream, and forced to join in the smutty bragging of his peers in the hope that many were as ignorant as he. It was inconceivable that one might ask even a close friend how to masturbate, so he suffered in silence. On graduating to public school, he was placed at last in a mixed-age dormitory and had to wait only weeks before being made a party to a guffawing discussion of comparative techniques. Left hand, right hand, underwater, upside down against a sheet — suddenly he had not only knowledge, but choice. His experience of induced orgasm was still novel, so experiencing it at the hands of another was, literally, staggering. After freezing with his hands at his sides for a few seconds, he found his knees buckling and flung his arms around Hardy as though teetering on a cliff edge. He wanted to piss. He wanted to come. He wanted to cry out and he wasn’t entirely sure he had not done all three by the time Hardy had done with him. Hardy took one last, long kiss then turned off the shower and held Colin’s sobbing face to his chest.
‘Well!’ he said softly, as though the whole thing had surprised him too. ‘Well, well.’
There were footsteps and chatter suddenly in the changing room and the door to the showers was flung open. Two fifth formers stood in the doorway, laughter dying in their throats. They stared for a moment. Colin tried to pull away but Hardy held him close.
‘Fuck off,’ he told them.
‘Sorry, Hardy,’ one of them said. ‘The lights were off and we didn’t —’
‘Just fuck off.’
‘Sorry, Hardy.’ They turned to go. Hardy called after them.
‘Gilks?’
‘Yes?’ One turned.
‘Leave your cigarettes on the step and we’ll say no more about it.’
‘Of course. Sorry, Hardy.’ Gilks left his cigarettes and closed the door quietly behind him.
‘Ignorant, nouveau-riche wankers,’ Hardy muttered and started to chuckle. Colin looked up at him uncertainly as his chuckle turned to full-chested laughter. How could he take this crisis so lightly? Surely they were doomed now? Hardy ruffled his hair.
‘What did you say your name was?’ he asked.
‘Cowper, Hardy.’
‘This isn’t quite a death camp. I meant your Christian name.’ He lent a sour emphasis to the epithet, as to an obscenity.
‘Oh. Sorry. It’s Colin.’
‘Colin,’ Hardy murmured to himself as though trying the name out. He tugged someone’s towel down off the hot pipes. ‘Colin Cowper.’ He wrapped it around Colin’s shoulders. ‘Well mine’s Lucas.’ He held out a hand and Colin obediently shook it. In the gloom he saw Hardy smile.
‘Um. Hello,’ Colin said.
‘Know how to cook scrambled eggs?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. You can make me some tomorrow.’
So saying, Hardy sloped out of the shower room, his soaked clothes leaving a trail of water. He tugged another towel down in passing and walked out, rubbing roughly at his hair.
The next day there was no scandal. Although Gilks and his friend would certainly have told everyone about what they had seen there was no allusion either to the dustbin episode or to Colin having been found in Hardy’s embrace. Far from finding his initiation into house society compromised, Colin found himself suddenly, cosily in the ranks of the accepted. He was never teased or bullied again and, if any outsider threatened him, his elders in the house drew ranks to protect him. An intellectual as well as a sportsman, extravagantly hip yet not so rebellious as to damage the system he knocked, Hardy was a house hero. As his implicitly acknowledged little man, Colin attained an unofficial official position overnight, not unlike the pretty convict singled out as his cell mate by a respected murderer serving life. Awed, Bollocks paid for a new cubicle curtain in suitably pagan red velvet.
Hardy called Colin regularly to his bedsit in the prefect’s wing where, behind a locked door, their gasps and cries smothered by the guitars and serious lyrics of the latest concept albums, they had sex. Perhaps, even, made love. In retrospect, their bedplay was unadvanced, innocent even, consisting of no more than hour upon cheek-pinking hour of kissing culminating occasionally in rushed mutual masturbation. As the weeks progressed, however, the crude lovemaking was punctuated by moments of unbridled romance which, for Colin at least, would never be matched. Hardy acquired someone’s car for the evening and drove him to London for dinner. He borrowed a punt and took him for picnics on the river. He summoned him to deliciously transgressive moonlit trysts in the cricket pavilion — during one of which they took great pleasure in defiling the sacred grass of the cricket square. He introduced him to port, read him Cavafy, and once, when they were both drunk with regret at it being the last night of term, stole a key and led Colin up a spiral staircase to the roof of the chapel tower where they lay shivering, gazing up at the stars.
Looking back, from the years when he began a painful education in the difficult wooing of women, Colin realized that similar scenes could never be re-enacted with as much pleasure, however delicious his female partner, because with Lucas he had played the part of a girl; an old fashioned, politically incorrect, all-demanding girl. Within the ritualized, hermetic environment of the school, Lucas, too, had been able to play a role — that of the all-powerful hero — which would be ridiculously unsustainable in the world beyond the institution’s venerable confines.
As it was, the relationship had no reality beyond the school terms. In the holidays, each returned to his family which, in Lucas’s case, meant Iran, where his father worked for an oil company. Neither would have dreamed of corresponding. They saw each other for the last time a little over a year since their first encounter. Lucas won a scholarship to Cambridge and vanished into the glamour of a year off, honouring Colin with a brief succession of pos
tcards from the Mediterranean, which petered out somewhere in the Peloponnese. After that, Colin’s only sexual experiences at school were with his fist. He snubbed all approaches that were made. Lucas had lent him stature, protected him from the system. He had worried that, with Lucas gone, he would be vulnerable again but his fears were groundless. He remained safe, coloured by boys’ respect for the one who had gone, protected in absentia.
‘Colin? It is Colin, isn’t it?’
He had found him. Oh God, he had found him! Colin stood hurriedly, brushing his palms on his trousers before shaking hands.
‘Lucas!’
He felt fourteen again. Lucas still towered over him. His grip was firm as ever. His forearms were now wreathed in black hairs. He wore a chunky gold watch. He smelled of money.
‘What were you doing in here for fuck’s sake?’
‘I was just, er —’
Lucas grinned.
‘You were hiding. That’s okay. I was hiding too.’
They laughed. Lucas slapped him on the shoulder and held open the door to the corridor. His accent had acquired a touch of American, like a suntan. It suited him.
‘The old boys are a pretty grim bunch, huh?’
‘Yes,’ Colin agreed as, by unspoken assent, they headed for the stairs and the sunlight. ‘Ghastly.’
‘So what are you doing here?’