Desire

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Yeah . . . Yeah . . ."—a concentrating tongue peeped and havered. "Oh boy. Here comes Big Boy. Just look at that . . . Looks like they're going boating again." I squinted through, somehow convinced that without the binoculars I wouldn't be able to see a thing, though there of course Sibylle and Patrick were, encumbered with paddles and a bailer and boxy pink life-jackets. "Now where's your little friend, I wonder? He'll probably stay indoors to do his reading, and you won't see him at all, which will be your fault." I gave Matt a blow in the ribs—just like the boys fighting, I saw—and he cackled and said, "No, hold on, who do we have here?" And Luc was back again, awkward on the steps, as if unable to give help when it was expected of him. "If I was young . . . Luc," said Matt, "I'd be getting a bit jealous of Big Boy and the girl." When I got the glasses at last though, and caught the pair as they scuffed out on to the beach, there was an angry firmness about them. They looked unlikely to enjoy themselves. I took off my specs and twiddled the focus to my shorter sight. The lenses were powerful, ocean-sweepers proved perhaps in some war-time conning-tower, treasured later for their ability to capture shorebirds' markings and charming movements. The heavy casing was chipped, the leather was frayed and in the paint the name DHONDT was roughly scratched. Half an hour raced and drifted by before Luc appeared again. Then things began to unfold with a canny momentum of their own. He came on to the porch and I had the field-glasses on him: he was starlingly clean and close, palpable but also stylised in the flowing depthless picture-plane. When I shifted my position the picture twitched uncaringly to various greenery, a nodding sapling's top, and I had to run the glasses down and across in a worried blur to find him strolling over the lawn, just beneath me it seemed, like a figure in the flattened foreground of a Japanese print. I didn't dare open the blinds further, and the picture was hazily occluded above and below by the unfocused slats. They gave an edge of mystery to the brilliant image they framed.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He said, "My mother's going to bring some coffee," the voice light and mildly interrogative, the accent educated. Then I looked. He was lean and broad-shouldered in an old blue shirt; and I liked his big flattish backside as he walked past me, though his loose cotton trousers gave nothing else away. He was as tall as me (I could imagine him saying he was taller, and a laughing challenge, back to back). Did he understand that I was weighing and measuring him like this, or possibly envisage the tingle of desire that ran up my back when I saw his brown bare insteps between turn-up and low-cut moccasin? It was hard to know if something vain and mistrustful in his look was more than the ordinary wariness of a boy with his teacher, or of people starting cold at knowing each other. To me of course he wasn't quite new, though when he took his place on the far side of the table and waited for me to begin I could hardly keep from telling him how different he was from his picture, how much odder and better. In his father's generation his features might have been thought ugly or exaggerated, though now they had come into fashion and could be admitted as wonderful in their own way; he must have taken from his father the long nose and high cheekbones which gave him the air of a blond Aztec. His eyes were narrow and colourless—his mother's lost look given a new caution and sharpness; while his long mouth seemed burdened with involuntary expressiveness, the thick lips opening, when later I twisted a smile out of him, to show strong sexy canines and high gums. His upper lip was almost too heavy, a puckering outward curl, with no downward dimple in the fingermark beneath the nose, where it had a straight edge, as if finished off impatiently with a palette-knife. There was something engrossing, even slightly repellent, about the whole feature.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  As she talked I was increasingly drawn under by a current of recollection that her presence, and the lines from Gray, had obscurely triggered—the desert air of that summer of 1976, in which she and Geoffrey had somehow played a part, a memory of sexual loneliness, which would later pull so much I did into its own fierce patterns. I remembered the day after that first time with Dawn, coming downstairs with a kind of wary astonishment, feeling I'd been given access to a world that lay just on the other side of the parquet, the fridge, the radio, the piano declaiming in the sitting-room. I looked covertly at my family, wondering if they too were inhabitants of this thrilling dimension. Perhaps Charlie was; but his accounts of life with Lisanne seemed oddly to leave out any mention of it. I felt both irritable and supremely tolerant at the same time, sulkily looking over my mother's shopping-list, but then when I got outside, dancing to the baker's like a character in a musical comedy. It wouldn't have been an early start. Throughout my adolescent holidays I got up wastefully late, as though to make up for the austerity of school mornings, the wintry dressing in the dark. Sometimes it would be 11.30 or 12 before I came down for a cup of coffee and was warned off spoiling my lunch. They were hours of luxurious tedium in the half-light of the bedroom, reading for a bit, dozing in and out of songs coming from downstairs, Schone Mullerin all that summer, my father flagging and dissatisfied. I evolved fantastic sexual situations around boys at school, dropping off in the middle of them, then waking and putting them through some further fabulous depravity. My mother's weary, unwitting half-joke, "Are you getting up?", would be shouted from the hall, and I would reply with my comprehensive euphemism, "I'm just having a think."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  His breathing was—heavy: it was heavy breathing. I felt it wasn't poute to show that I'd noticed. All the same, I pictured a person, perhaps no older than me, naked on a bed, in subdued light, somehow encumbered with clips and straps and probes, greased and hard but holding off the time-and-money-saving moment. I imagined I too was naked in his scenario. I took another mouthful of burger. "Have you got a big one, Ed?" "Mm. Mm." And when I'd cleared my throat: "Yeah, it's huge. It's like, a half-pounder." "Oh Ed, that's really wild . . . A big, big sausage." "Well . . ." "Do you have it in your hand right now?" "Yep, I sure do. I can hardly get my hand round it. I'm lifting it up towards my lips . . ." "Oh, man" (though it sounded like oh, men). "It's kind of oozing stuff out of it!" There was no immediate reply to this, so I carried on eating, faintly troubled by the priapic monster I'd so concisely evoked. He must have covered the mouthpiece—a residual modesty screened the final moments. Then he said, crouching right at my ear, "I love you, Ed." I didn't know if I should respond with something similar; I could only think of "Well, I'm very fond of you, too", but before I could say anything I heard the clunk of the receiver being dropped and saw it twirl on its flex, knocking a table-leg. Then the line was dead. "Who was that?" said Matt as I hung up. "I don't know." Now it was time to eat, please; and there was a surprising twinge of regret amongst my hunger for my new friend. I wondered if he'd get in touch again. "You were great," said Matt, stepping towards me through the clutter of the room. "It seemed to do the trick." "Of course it did." "I didn't really say anything, though." "Well, that's what the trick is," said Matt, and gave me a horrible leer.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  sinfully soft leather jeans. Bent over, this goddess stretched long golden arms sparkling with a thin film of sweat reaching over bouquets of flowers to retrieve her target. Choosing a wild rose a certain shade of pink so luminous it was almost fuchsia, she raised the flower to her face, allowing the silky petals to caress her nose. Satisfied, she cupped the bulb within the palm of her left hand, her long dainty fingers tenderly stroking the external smooth petals. I wasn’t exactly prepared for what she did next. With her right hand, sinking her long finger into the corolla of the flagrantly pink rose, she pene trated the bulb while her left hand squeezed the silky petals. In a split second, every conceivable part of me capable of be coming aroused was demanding some serious attention. Severely chiseled cheekbones cradled dark and sultry bed room eyes that were opened only halfway as if in a perpetual state of arousal. Her short, naturally bushy spirals were streaked in brown and gold hues. Her skin color, glistening in the sunlight, reminded me of Grandma’s hot buttered biscuits. Tall and thin, centuries of African royalty seemed embedded in her dignified posture. Full breasts were giving her ultra- tight T-shirt a hard time. Seemingly content with her selection that included the pink rose, she thrust the bunch at the farmer. I couldn’t believe her nerve. First, she assaulted me, then she molested a defenseless flower, then she jumped in front of me while in line. Strangely, instead of feeling angry, her aggression was turning me on. The farmer handed the roses back to her, wrapped simply in a thin sheet of tissue paper tied with sisal. My gullibility ex pected eye contact with her when instead, she slammed her entire body against me: breasts, thighs, mounds of Venus, all crashing together creating this confused exchange of energy so fast and hard it rattled me, making my head spin. The wind knocked from me, my orchids were tossed to the ground as “Leather Pants” marched on. “I think she likes you,” the farmer remarked, gathering my orchids and wrapping them for me. “I don’t think so. She practically knocked me over, ” I an swered, attempting to regain my coolness because my body was vibrating with both pain and pleasure while I watched her escape. “Well, she asked me to give this to you.” In his hand was the fateful molested rose. Lingering behind her at a safe but interested distance, I watched as she browsed through a few veggie stands before darting across the street and into the Coffee Shop, a trendy restaurant on the Square. Once inside, I didn’t see her. Where could she have disap peared to that quickly? With flower in hand, I followed my feminine instincts and went directly to the ladies’ room.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  It was time to finish your dream the way I’d often wanted to, to be the one to take the place of whoever had begun to se duce you as you slept. I parted your labia with my lips and nose, tongue extended to stroke its way to your clit. At the taste of you my own cunt clenched, and I think I moaned against you as I found your hard sweet clit and fastened my lips around it, fingers still swirl-kneading the very bottom of your muscular cunt. Your hands abandoned your breasts and made a basket around the back of my head, holding me as I licked you, up and up and up against your clit, the motion I know will get you to come and come again if I keep at it, if I fight you after the first time when you try to push me away. Starving for the taste, the feel, the sound, the clinging grasping arch of you at orgasm, I battered your clit with my tongue, making no pretense at subtlety. Mashing my face against your soaked pussy, you ground against me with an agonized sound and I tried to lick faster, wishing my mouth into a blur of spit and muscle to please you.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Then something very strange began to happen—or perhaps it had really begun to happen much earlier on. Ch had walked back across the room, scuffing the plaster & rubbish that covered the floor where part of the ceiling had collapsed. Rainwater must have built up above it, & indeed the whole room, with the somewhat sepulchral effect of the stained glass, felt hideously damp & had that sad mouldy smell that must have meant the beginning of the end for the old Castle. I turned around myself & found Chancey looking at me in the queerest way, his glass stiffly held out in one hand at an angle, so that the contents were very slowly running out down the stem & dripping on to the floor. Outside I heard Eddie shouting ‘Charlie’ & then Tom’s boy saying ‘They’ve all gone, sir.’ There were whoops & whistles from the wood & Tim, presumably, tooting on his horn. I smiled quizzically at Chancey, wondering no end about the possibility of all this, though I didn’t really think I cd go through with it, & went back into the hall. The door was open, but the party had been cleared away, apart from a dozen empty Bollinger bottles which had been left where they had fallen. There was no one there. I went & sat in the old loving-chair, rather appalled by its hackneyed readiness for the occasion, & after a moment Ch came back in, & walked over with the same intent look on his face. As he sat down I noticed, as I hadn’t been able to help noticing earlier in the van, how terrific his private parts were, & now he was conspicuously more excited. As old Roly Carroll wd have said, ‘you cd see the copper’s ’elmet’. I looked at them coming towards me, & felt that frightful inner convulsion of lust, my heart in my mouth & blushing like a rose. The mud, too, spattered up his boots & over his white breeches as tight as a trapeze-artist’s, had some strangely unsettling effect on me. But as soon as he sat down he changed tack completely, & went on about his wretched family as if nothing had happened. How hard his father had worked, & what his mother had done to give him a good education, & how people like Eddie looked down on him because he had been to a school he’d never heard of, & how—& this was the unearned climax to his peroration, which went on for a good 5 minutes while I said nothing whatever—I was the only person who showed him any true consideration, & thought about his inner life. Now this fairly astonished me, as, without being callous, I had never for a moment imagined he had an inner life & frankly, the glimpse he had just afforded me of it was none too appealing. There is nothing worse than making a bid for someone’s body & getting their soul instead.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  When he next left the country—for France, quite soon, and then to winter in the desert villages around Cairo—he wd never return. It was a childish & theatrical moment, difficult to respond to seriously, & yet, like occasional lines in melodrama, mordantly moving & true. ‘I don’t want to die,’ he added. I was beginning to see why he did not attract drinking companions, & wondering whether we too might not be moving on, when he invited us all to go & hear the negro band at the Savoy: ‘It’s the most wonderful music there is,’ he said. So we knocked off the rest of the champagne at giddy speed, & lurched out into the street: I assumed we wd walk, but our author’s pedestrian performance was as wayward as his sessile one: it combined the futile caution of the drunkard with a true instinct for elegance—if of a somewhat decadent kind. With each step he rippled upwards, from foot to head, whilst appearing somehow to steer & balance himself with low-down oscillations of his hands: again I was reminded of wall-paintings in Egyptian tombs—there was so linear a quality to him. We hailed a cab in Piccadilly Circus & as he slumped into the smoky compartment beside me he exhaled his new resolve: ‘We must have the most heavenly talk about Africa.’ Phil agreed to come with me to visit Ronald Staines, and since we were at my flat I dressed him myself. I forbade him underwear, and forced him into an old pair of fawn cotton trousers which, tight on me, were anatomically revealing on him. The central seam cut up deeply between his balls, and his little cock was espaliered across the top of his left thigh. A loose, boyish, blue Aertex shirt set this off beautifully, and as I followed him downstairs I was thrilled at my affront to his shyness, and could hardly wait for the strapping I would give him when we got back. All along the pavement in the beating sunshine I kept letting my hands knock him, my fingertips trail over him as they swung. We crossed over Holland Park Avenue and were strolling north up Addison Avenue when there was the slap-slap of running sandalled feet behind us, and my little nephew Rupert was prancing along beside us. ‘Roops—this is a pleasure,’ I said. ‘Are you running off somewhere again?

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I thought perhaps I should go and eat somewhere, but I ordered another beer first. They were quick and lightweight—You could have as many as you liked. I stretched and admitted how tired I was. I'd been up at dawn to leave, my mother speechlessly helping, unable to disguise her misery and anxiety as she drove me to the Dover train. I sympathised with her, and felt confirmed in the rightness of what I was doing. It was something I couldn't explain, although explanations were asked for. I had mumbled reluctantly about time running on, and about the job abroad being only temporary; but not about the darker sense of stepping already along the outward edge of youth, and looking back at those who were truly young with unwelcome eagerness and regret. Just in front of me was a boy with thick fair hair and a long rather mouthy face—it must be a local type. I saw that the older man he was with couldn't quite believe his luck and was clinging to it with clumsy determination while it lasted, though the boy himself appeared relaxed by his frequent caresses. I caught the boy's eye from time to time, while he carried on talking as if he couldn't see me. I found myself idly imagining our life together. A middle-aged man in a suit came and stood by me and started talking about his success in business; I was polite, as always, but he could probably tell I thought something wasn't right. He looked around a good deal and wanted seconding in his view of other people here; several times he backed into the pathway of kids who were going to the loo and then turned his apology into a hurried half-embrace. Sex was very firmly at the top of his agenda, but in some obscurely unflattering way he seemed not to regard me as a sexual possibility myself. He asked if I had any contact numbers. I said no, and then wondered what they would put you in contact with. I couldn't explain to him my odd sexual economy of the past few years, the fantasy-ridden continence, the sparse ration of intense and anonymous treats; I didn't know myself how it had come about. I wasn't sure I could expect much from my hotel, the Mykonos, which advertised in the English gay press. It had seemed the usual stuffy warren when I checked in, the tiny lounge sour and abandoned.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  My father brought me through it, reminded me how to clear my head and strike out with that impalpable falsity that actors need. As I looked down through the grey November light at wretched faces, I remembered him describing an audience and its expectations, the control of yourself you needed to control them. They wanted something from me that it was surprisingly in my power to give. "Speak out," he said. It was rather like on certain still nights, I had never told anyone, but I felt him stooping out of the dark continuum he was banished to and pressing about me with advice too stern to be strictly followed. Back in my seat I was quietly elated, almost expecting congratulations, and took a moment or two to adjust to the heavyheartedness around me. I'd shared a sympathetic smile with one of Dawn's sisters—all three were in the front row with their parents, two of them married to men who sat between them with the diplomatic dry-eyed look of outsiders. It was odd the role these women played in my sense of Dawn, odd that in my keenest memory of him I was absent and they were there—their family holiday, when he was just sixteen. It is some banal Mediterranean resort, the sand shuffled and rubbishy at the end of the day, the sea still and salivary, the four children tearing about, Ralph muscly in tight little trunks, his shoulders pink from the sun, lightly terrorising the girls, whom he keeps on kissing and pinching, picking up and throwing into the water. He is full of unfocused energy which finds issue all day long in teasing and chasing, broken by spells of lordly basking, when they rub creams into him and, hoping for a truce, bring him drinks. He is all potential. His sturdy little cock gets hard as he nestles in the sand, and he likes to surprise the girls with the jut of it; they are censorious about it, as they are about his four chest hairs, and as he is about their breasts. What a busty little group they are. The day cools and the girls trail in while he has a last swim—a long fast lap of crawl. Then I see him wait out there, treading slowly, breathing sharply, looking back at the land where the first lights have appeared. He kicks his legs apart and feels the cool water touch his grateful sphincter. No one ever knew, no one ever will know, so I have him thinking of me, back at Rough Common, thinking of him, waiting for him, reaching down, as I imagine him doing, to feel the quick undertow of possibility.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  tion, as a matter of fact. Not that she had any plan to actually touch this man. She was just curious. That was all. She wanted to understand how someone so ugly could also be so confident. She wanted to study him. Once inside he began to fondle her immediately, squeezing her breasts as if testing them for done ness. She pushed him away and laughed and said he’d gotten the wrong idea, would he like coffee? A drink? And wasn’t it warm for early May? He peeled off his shirt and threw it on the floor. Such hair! He was going to shed all over. Worse. Now he let his pants drop without ceremony, leaving his naked body exposed before her like a strange primordial land scape that had no relationship to sex as she knew it. She stood there, then, sun streaming through her kitchen window, and wondered how such an event could have hap pened to her, how she could find herself with such an ugly naked fat man in her kitchen. It had not been her plan. He was very fat. His great stomach, round and solid-looking, obscured any view of his cock. Then she saw it nestling there, his little manhood, so shy, pink, so painfully small even though it was fully erect, like a snail hiding beneath the shadow of his paunch. Possibly the sight of it awoke some maternal instinct in her, for when he took her hands and drew her to him, pushing her to her knees, she didn’t resist. How amazing, the audacity of it! He wasn’t ashamed of his tiny thing, he was actually expecting her to worship it! He was so small, so exposed, that in her confusion she felt a kind of tenderness toward this man. There was no help for her but to eat him. She may have felt pity. Then she realized at once that she could take both the cock and the pre cious balls into her mouth at once, that she could enjoy the whole salad at the same time. The knowledge swept away her curiosity, her pity. She gobbled him up. Even the taste of his stale urine excited her. For the first time in her life she could appreciate the downy skin, the pulse of cock against her lips, without fear of choking on meat and cum. She milked and milked his little snail until she felt him bucking in her mouth and the sting of semen on her tongue, and she felt herself come in return, right there, kneeling on the kitchen floor.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  When they can get one, I say. It might be a while. They don’t think your condition is urgent. Not urgent? she sputters. I can’t move. I can’t do anything. What do they consider urgent? Shhh, I say, rubbing the taut skin of her breasts, one hand to either side of where her legs rest in front of me. How do they feel? Pretty good, actually—she says, and then she sighs at the feeling as I caress the overtaxed skin. I gradually manage to get her panties down over her legs and off. I suppose that was to make me more comfortable too, she says wryly. I don’t say anything. I move her legs apart and begin to lick where her cunt is against her breasts, prying my tongue into the narrow space where they’re pressed together. She squeaks. What, you don’t like that? I ask. I press one hand into her breasts on either side to steady myself and go in again with my tongue, sliding it up along the sensitive skin of her breasts and then moving directly into her crotch. Poking my tongue in hard to overcome the pressure. She gasps. Hmm, this is tricky, I say aloud. My tongue is not quite long enough, given the position. Don’t go away, I can’t resist saying as I walk into the other room. I get our favorite silicone toy and some lube. Squeezing the dildo in my hands to warm it up, I go back into the living room. She can’t see me. I push hard and rock her forward, rolling her like a ball, so that her head tilts down and almost hits the floor. She stops herself with her hands. Hey! she says. Have you lost your mind? I walk around onto her side and pull her legs up into the air, away from her breasts. Now she almost looks like she’s doing a headstand—next to an earthball. I slide the lubed toy into her

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I started to tell Gerard about my father, and the records he had made, and about what it was like growing up in the house of a musician, the smell of starch, the hospital quiet, the cold suppers left under a cloth for his late return from a recital in Hove or an oratorio in Guildford Cathedral. Gerard was torn between friendly enthusiasm and condescension towards this unheard-of tenor with a repertoire descending from Handel and Mendelssohn through Balfe and John Bacchus Dykes to Oklahoma! and the occasional medley from Lennon and McCartney. He shook his head and said, "It's another world, isn't it?"—as if to marvel at my father's endurance and to remove himself, as a musician, from any taint of association. I would have gone on to point out that Lewis Manners had brought far more happiness into the world than the Ghezellen van der Musycke were ever likely to do and that moreover he could sing, but I was distracted by Cherif climbing on to a stool further down the bar and twirling the remains of a drink with a look of moody disaffection. Later I was talking to Matt. Matt was lean and pale, with slicked-back hair, and a cynical smile that never quite extended to the left side of his mouth. There was an affected calm to him; he looked at you with a glancing stare as if you had already come to an agreement. When I'd seen him here before he had been over-smart, and showed a spivvish self-consciousness about his cuffs and the creases in his flannels. I understood that he was something to do with computers, he was in the money, which explained his groomed composure among the transient youngsters of the bar and added to the static of sex and faithlessness he knew he gave off. Tonight he was in clean new denim and a Tom of Finland T-shirt: a bulging biker arm-locked another across the shallow dip of his chest. He listened closely but impassively to my pained gauche hints about Luc and Cherif, then put a hand on my shoulder and talked to me quietly. His conversation was flat and narrow, and whatever he said took on the feel of a double entendre. He made my back prickle and my chest feel hollow. He talked about "the best places to go": the best place was the Hermitage, some old gardens on the edge of town.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Everybody's wild if they're given the chance," I announced, too pissed to care if I was right. "There's this place I used to go to when I was about, well, twenty or so, it was like a sauna, but just in someone's house—You'd never have known it was there, it didn't have a name or anything: people who went there called it Mr Croy's. though I must say there was never any sign of Mr Croy himself." The thought of those wild afternoons had me catching my breath to find I already had such epochs in me, and that I could look back through the drizzle of wasted time to arcadian clearings, remote and full of light and life. I stopped and called Matt back. "Just come down here a moment with me. I want to look at something." "Come on, man, it's fucking half past one." I took no notice, and doubled down the side lane that led into Long Street. It was only a quick couple of minutes and I was standing across the way from the tall house, gazing up reverently, like a young man in a Schubert song, at the sleeping beloved's window. Not that I knew which window was his. Curtains were closed at every one, and the discreet illumination of an old-fashioned lamp, highlighting the black shine of the front door, lost the upper floors to the night. Where I had been shy before, I gazed hungrily now, with anxious exhilaration, at each shadowed opening, up to the dim roofline and the stars that stood beyond. "What's this?" said Matt, coming up beside me. "In there, a beautiful seventeen-year-old boy is asleep." Matt shook his head. "Is that all we've come to see? Or do we get the seventeen-year-old boy as well?" "Please!" I grinned at the Altidore residence and somehow brought Luc to light in my mind, dreaming, lips parted, in near-darkness—pyjamas, for some reason, but the jacket unbuttoned and twisted under him, an arm across his stomach unconsciously repulsing the possessive duvet. I spoke to Matt for a while, incoherently, trying to bring him into my mood, but glad in the end that he wasn't drunk or romantic enough to get there, and that I possessed it unviolated. He had a hand round my waist, under my jacket where I was a bit fat above the belt; when a taxi came by the driver commented on us to his fare—and when they had gone the silence left me awkwardly alert to the noise we must have been making. I remembered nights at home woken by drunks, passing or stopping for half an hour outside our gate, loud and heedless with drink, sometimes women's wild recriminations . . . I pictured Luc stumbling, half-cross, half-curious, to tweak back the curtain, seeing us propped up and talking rubbish in the doorway opposite. Then Matt started undoing my fly. Chapter 6

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I towelled myself down at the rubber-matted threshold of the showers, and I was largely dry when I heard a whoop and a couple of lads came splashing in through the foot bath, a nicely curvy dark one and a skinny one with long fair hair twisted up in a knot like a girl. They ran straight into the showers and fell against opposite walls, panting and laughing at each other. Without hesitation I flung my towel aside and went back in, unstoppering my conditioner bottle and preparing to wash my hair all over again. I hadn't seen them since that first evening at the Bar Biff, the hot little loudmouth and his friend, his lover, who now unknotted his hair and shook it over his shoulders as if he were Jane Byron herself; and it did give a scatter of glamour to his hollow-eyed face, still blurred by spots around the forehead and jaw. The dark boy, who wasn't plump but would never perhaps be thin, was as hoarsely sexy as possible: I flickered a look from moment to moment over his square full-mouthed head, like a Roman street-boy's, the soft black hairs on his upper lip—and one or two already on his broad-nippled chest—and down to the bow in the draw-string of his trunks, the string hanging and diverted across the neat side ways jut of his cock within the tight red fabric. Yet it was his scrawny friend, just beside me, who gave me again the feel of those lost months of self-discovery, the first possession of the rights of sex. The dark boy would always be sexy, even when he ate himself into middle age, and, who knew, into marriage and its infidelities; but the blond one—not blond even, but a sort of no-colour that took body in the wet—I saw as a common scrap irradiated by love and confidence. I remembered how the whole world changed, how you were suddenly inside the great luminous concourse of human happiness, and how you thought you would be there always—though now, fifteen years later, I found myself glancing myopically in from the limbo of baffled hopes and bad habits that was always ready and waiting just beyond. My boys didn't actually wash or strip, just lounged around and laughed. After ten minutes or so their unembarrassed possession of the place was tiring me and I had washed so frequently and industriously that I began to feel like the victim of some traumatic guilt, who must wash and wash till his skin is chafed away . . . Then at last the fair one had finished, and hurried off into the changing-room—I couldn't quite catch his remark. He had on knee-length trunks in phosphorescent orange, lime and mauve, nightmare colours from my own childhood that seemed to be fashionable all over again. His friend grinned in appreciation, in anticipation, but stayed behind. My heart stepped on the gas.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Comme des crosses à leurs mains fortes Ils heurtent l'auvent et la porte Derrière qui l'horloge est morte; Et les adolescents amers S'en vont avec eux vers la Mer! Henri de Régnier Contents 1 Museum Days Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 2 UNDER WOODS Chapter 14 3 A MERRY GOOSE HUNT Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 A Note on the Author By the Same Author 1 Museum Days Chapter 1 A man was waiting already on the narrow island of the tramstop, and I asked him falteringly about the routes. He explained politely, in detail, as if it were quite an interest of his; but I didn't take it in. I was charmed by his grey eyes and unnecessary smile, and the flecks of white paint on his nose and his dark-blond hair. I nodded and smiled back, and he fell into a nice pensiveness, hands in pockets, looking out down the empty street. I decided I would follow him. The tram made its noiseless approach, headlamps on although the sky was still bright: the No 3, the Circular. We clambered up the steps together, I sought his help with the ticket-franking machine, which pinged as though I had won a prize. He swung into the seat behind me, and I felt his casual presence there as we trundled from stop to stop past churches and canals; when he whistled a little tune his breath stirred the hairs on the back of my neck. I thought, these are the evening routines which will soon be mine, the tug of an unknown suburb, or a bar, or a lover. I turned to ask him a further question I'd been nurturing, but it was just at the moment the tram seemed to lose its current and came to rest. A Young woman was waiting, smoking, and gave a contented wave. My friend jumped off and trotted her away under his arm, whilst the doors folded to with a sigh. I went on out, beyond the Stock Markets, hardly noticing, wondering what it was I had expected. For two or three stops I had the car to myself; I sensed the driver's puzzlement, and stared determinedly through the window at the featureless district we were passing through; then I panicked and rang the bell. When the tram moved off I found myself alone, and knew suddenly, as I had not done at the station or the hotel, that I had arrived in a strange city, in another country. Part of me shrank from the simple change of place.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Later I walked round the house, and peered in at a couple of places where the shutters were broken, but my own head cut out the light I needed to see by. Upstairs at the back was an old-fashioned sunroom, with a view that must clear the dunes through wide salt-bleared windows, at each of which a pale Venetian blind was lowered and closed. On the hard standing below, a small sailing-boat lay upside-down on bricks; I twisted my head to read the blistered freehand lettering: L'Allegro, and wondered idly if its sister-vessel was laid up next door. Perhaps Luc was half-heartedly caulking it right now. My heart raced when I heard footsteps coming up behind: it was Matt, hair still wet from swimming (though quilled and looped a bit by the breeze), and sand drying in the dark hairs on his calves. "You've been ages," I said. "couldn't you find them? Perhaps they're all in the house." "No, I found them." He half-turned from me, pushed down his waistband and pissed fiercely into the bushes; then stood for a while slapping his dick in his palm as a doctor smacks a vein he wants to rise; then with a snarl of regret stuffed the stiff thing back so that it jutted awkwardly and then slowly slumped. I was hungry to know what had happened, and also just plain hungry. It was high lunchtime. "Shall we go up to that bar and get something to eat?" "Yeah, you go," he said. "I had a beer and a sandwich on the beach." "Oh. Well, thanks for bringing me some." He strolled off a pace or two and stood with hands on hips looking up at the house. "I'll tell you something," he said. "That boy is wild." A shot of pain and acclamation went through me. "Well, I told You," I pointed out. "I told you he was a golden dream made solid flesh." "No, not the golden dream one," he said. "Well, he's okay, he's a bit skinny, a bit weird . . . those lips? No, the other kid, Patrick." Matt looked at me and shook his head. "I'll tell you something, that boy has got a whopper. A total fucking monster between his legs." "How do you know?" "Man, you only have to be a hundred yards away to see that. He's running round in these little swimming-things, he's got this big fat strong arse sticking out the back and this unbelievable package out front. The whole beach was just, like, fixated on it." Matt gripped himself between the legs and shivered. "I'm glad you've enjoyed yourself," I said tartly but truthfully too. The lesson was working. "I'd like to see him myself. What was Luc wearing?" "What? Oh, sort of trousers, like sailing trousers, long trousers but short." "He wasn't swimming in long trousers?" "He was reading a book." Oh, my obedient Luc, taking my instructions so simply to heart. "Are they still out there?"

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  In my third year at Stonewell Dawn started to appear on the little train. His family had moved to a village a couple of stops further down the line from Rough Common. He would put his bike in the guard's van, or sometimes just stand with it across the end of the carriage; he was fiercely attached to it. When we arrived at the school he would slip past the straggle of boys on foot with a quick ratcheting of the gears, head lowered, buttocks hoisted on the narrow perch of the seat. One Friday evening he took an empty place by me as we clattered through the leafy sprawl of suburbs homewards and we talked briefly of the merits of the different French masters. He was rather put out to learn that I and Van Oss, a tall pretty boy in the Lower Sixth, also had Dutch lessons from one of the French masters' wives. He couldn't see the point of that. Squashed up by him on the dusty moquette I got a bone-hard erection, though I'm not sure I put it down specifically to him. Any physical contact at that time was arousing, there was nothing you could do about it. But that may have been the moment when it began. Graves and I had stuck together; indeed, Graves and Manners had become an established schooltime partnership, like a famous textbook or a make of biscuits. Being nicer, weaker and more sociable than Graves, I was aware of an occasional disadvantage in the coupling. I'd have to disown him sometimes for the sake of the late-night hash and rock parties in one of the Raleigh rebels' studies; and the return engagements tended to be flops, with Graves coming back unexpectedly, full of sarcasm and envy, and making us listen to Vaughan Williams. Even so, he was my habit, and he couldn't be broken.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  On the way from the Museum we had crossed a bridge above swans and the putter of an empty bâteau-mouche, the commentary running on regardless, when he had suddenly held out in his palm a little packet with a rubber's squashed ring contour. I didn't mind the wordless confirmation, but I turned my head away, too full of feeling for this boy, who had only been my friend for twenty minutes, who felt nothing for me but was so unhesitatingly himself, a little overweight, his upper lip and chin roughened already with shadow. Now he was sitting in my lap, riding on me with a certain urgent disregard—I swept my hands across his sleek and trusting back, and reached up to shoulders where muscles powerful from work gathered and dispersed. I was glad he couldn't see me, gaping and heavy-hearted with praise for him. We were on the end of the bed, and I hugged up close to look round his shoulder and into the full-length mirror. Our eyes met there, but he was a little bothered by that intimacy. Then, as I was climbing to the end, he got right off me and stood on the floor. I scrambled up too, confused for a moment by my own reflection in the glass, as if without my specs the image needed to be blinked back into focus, or as if a sixth sense revealed a face within my face, ghostly features caught in the very silvering of the mirror. Cherif took a half-step forward, and fell against the glass with flattened palms. A sequence of sounds emerged from it, or from a distance beyond it; and then for a couple of seconds we saw ourselves dematerialise and a perspective open up within—a shuttered room with stacks of chairs, lit from the side by an opening and closing door. Cherif was sighing and laughing quietly, and sat down again on the bed while I pulled on my trousers, hopping and treading on the legs. I had been exploring the city rather fast and anxiously, referring on and off to a tourist map which omitted side-streets and alleys and showed the famous buildings in childishly out-of-scale drawings. Its poetic effect was to give me the shape of the town as a fifteenth-century engineer, expert in dikes and piles, might have shown it in plan to a ruling count: a mounted opal veined with waterways and suspended from the broad ribbon of the sea-canal. The industrial park, the post-war poor estates, the spent suburb of my first-night wanderings, were shown as fields, confirming the sense I had at every corner that the whole city aspired to be an artist's impression.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Mrs Altidore came out of the dining-room. "I can't have you in here," she said, frowning at us in turn and giving me at least a feeling of being linked with Luc in some wonderful delinquency. Luc himself was gaping and shrugging exaggeratedly, gently taking a rise out of her panic and its thin veil of disdain. If I hadn't been there she might have raised her voice or given him a harmless hit on the upper arm. She stooped and snatched up a small rug and shooed us towards the stairs with it. "Take Edward Manners up to your room, darling, and let Rosa and me get on." "But . . ."—Luc was beginning some further broad objections, just coloured, I thought, with a real unwillingness to have me up there. I thought for a flash of Julien Rostand's room, out at the coast, the protocols of an adult-free zone—"Prive, Danger de Mort". I looked down, pained by the situation, a hot sick stripe of excitement in my chest. We were both perhaps fixing on the same embarrassments—the unmade bed, and where I would sit, the helpless revelations of childhood that a young man's bedroom always makes, his sudden consciousness of them. When he saw that it was inevitable he loped up the stairs, two, sometimes three, at a time, leaving me gesturing to his mother and then turning to follow. There was a hint of spurning and unmarrying in the way he sprang on ahead, it was no companionable face-to-bum ascent. We had never walked up a flight of stairs together before. On the first-floor landing I hesitated, and walked on into a room—twin beds, dried flowers, pale sunlight scalloped through lacy curtains over silver counterpanes, the guest-room mausoleum. Time was muted there, the empty months extended, and close by Luc was growing, bounding up and down the stairs all day past this half-open door. He was calling out, hesitating on the turn of the banister above. As I came up he gave me a tense smirk of reluctant welcome.