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 Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It was not, alas, about the Cambridge second eight, but about rent-boys, blackmail and murder in Manhattan; Goldie was the gay police officer who got to buy the favours of the chief suspect, and seemed bound to fall in love with him before the sorry end. The book’s formula was to alternate blocks of fast, bloodthirsty action with exhaustive descriptions of sexual intercourse. Nigel, night-sighted in the pool’s subterranean gloom, had said it was a good one; but I resented its professional neatness and its priapic attempts to win me over. The trouble was that, as attempts, they were half-successful: something in me was pained and removed; but something else, subliterate, responded to the book’s bald graffiti. ‘Fuck me again, Goldie,’ the slender, pleading Juan Bautista would cry; and I thought, ‘Yeah, give it to him! Give it to him good ’n’ hard!’ As we slowed towards stops I looked around at the other passengers, wary slumpers and strap-hangers who never met each other’s eyes for more than a fraction of a second. Half-heartedly playing the game James and I used to play I tried to select which person in the carriage I would least object to having sex with. Occasionally the choice could be made difficult by the presence of too many scrumptious schoolboys or too many dusty-handed navvies. Normally, as now, the problem was to choose between that businessman, regular and suited but with a moody something about him, and the too-tall youth in the doorway giving off a tinny, high-hat patter from his headphones, and looking flightily around through a haze of Trouble for Men. It was James’s theory that everyone had about them some wrinkle at least of lovability, some peculiar and attractive thing—a theory which gained poignancy from the problems in applying it. Consoling and yet absurd, how the sexual imagination took such easy possession of the ungiving world. I was certainly not alone in this carriage in sliding my thoughts between the legs of other passengers. Desires, brutal or tender, silent but evolved, were in the shiftless air, and hung about each jaded traveller, whose life was not as good as it might have been. I remembered for some reason a little public lavatory in Winchester, a urinal and a couple of cubicles visited by bandy-legged old men going to the market and at night by ghostly fantasists who left their traces. It was up an alley where the College turned one of its high stone corners against the town—not a place for boys, for scholars, though I went there once or twice with an almost scholarly curiosity. The cistern filled for ever, the floor was slippery, there was no toilet paper, and between the cubicles a number of holes had been diligently bored, large enough only to spy through.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "So the soiling is the important part really?" "Oh, absolutely. And pubes. They up the price phenomenally. And there you do have to be a bit careful." "It seems to be very school-oriented." "Yes, it does at the moment—it may just be the rush of the rentree that's got so many of the perves on edge. There are older people too who have their following—some of them soil professionally; the cynical foul, I suppose you might call it." "It's all a revelation to me." "Isn't it? It's a kind of alchemy really. You take something of only slight practical value, but give it a magically arousing association, even if of a kind most people would consider revolting, and you're minting gold." And I had a hard-on myself at the grip of Luc's tight little knickers and feeling the hard-ons he must have had pushing against the very cotton that now constrained mine and his balls thoughtlessly snuggled there all day long. "I suppose you haven't met any of your customers." "It's all done by registered mail. They write of course, these great fantasies about porn-stars—some are illiterate, some are obviously the work of leading academics, they're rather like Henry James, they put all the rude words in inverted commas; some are always bragging about the size of their own equipment, which I don't believe. And then there's the phone. It's all new to me but I find I make quite a good phone-fraud: I work them up in a slightly grudging way, as though I might not let them have what they want so badly. As an opportunity for speaking stilted English to foreigners it beats conversation-classes any day, and the pay is far better." I glanced to my left and saw Frits, heavily alone with his book. "Don't look now," I said, "but I'm quite keen to avoid that person standing reading." Edie looked at once, and just happened to catch his eye as he was turning the page. "Well, I hope you're a Somerset Maugham fan," I said, as he came gratefully over and offered us another drink. Much later, in bed, an almost pre-adolescent clean cosiness except we must still have smelt of beer and smoke, Edie like one of the von Trapp children in pyjamas that looked to have been made out of old curtains, and me in brand new boxer-shorts, still with a lot of dress in them. The lamp was out and only a ghost of light showed her form between me and the window. The Spanish girls were at rest, only sometimes the loose purr of a car over the cobbles rose across the intervening houses; and at one o'clock Edie said she would be disturbed by the hours sounding from St Narcissus, which I no longer noticed. "I rather like Frits," she said drowsily. "It ought to be the Flemish for chips."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I fucked him across the armchair, his feet over his shoulders; I had to see his face and read what I was doing in his winces and gasps, his violent blush as I forced my cock in, the quick confusion of welcome and repulsion. I'd used up all the lube Cherif had left in the jar, but I saw tears slide from the corners of his eyes, his upper lip curled back in a gesture like anguish or goaded aggression. His hand flickered up against my chest to stay me or slow me. I was mad with love; and only half-aware, as the rhythm of the fuck took hold, of a deaf desire to hurt him, to watch a punishment inflicted and pay him back for what he'd done to me, the expense and humiliations of so many weeks. I saw the pleasure start up inside for him, as if he didn't expect it, his cock grew hard again in two seconds, his mouth slackened, but I made him flinch with steeper little thrusts. I was up on the chair, fucking him like a squaddy doing push-ups, ten, twenty, fifty . . . I had a dim sense of protest, postponed as if he wasn't quite sure, he was folded in two, powerless, the breath was pushed out of him, there was just the slicked and rubbered pumping of my cock in his arse, his little stoppered farts. His chest, his face, were smeared with sweat, but it was mine: the water poured off me like a boxer, my soaked hair fell forward and stung my eyes. And already it was about to end. I pushed myself back on to my feet, I came out of him for a moment and tugged him back by his haunches, his arsehole glittered and twitched and I thrust straight in, then held it gently, barely moving in the gulping shivery limbo just before the end. I had a high starlit sense of it as the best moment of my life. I stroked the inside of his thighs, stooped forward to lick and breathe the faint rubbery smell of his feet; took his cock out of his fist and worked it unyieldingly for him. I saw his balls clutch up, he said "No, No" and rode on to me as his thrown line of sperm soared into my face, my hair, and again, and then again. So I pushed over the edge myself—I made a grieving moan at the bitterness of it, craving the blessing of his gaze, though his eyes were oddly velled, fluttering and colourless like some Orst temptress's. Luc was perfectly friendly in bed, though he smiled more to reassure himself than to charm me. I was given the feeling I'd slightly overstepped the mark.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I wondered what form his passion for Sibylle took, what images enshrined it in his mind. He gave me a friendly greeting, as though I wasn't his teacher any more—an uncle, perhaps. He'd got used to having me around; it showed in his work, which was lazier but better. And as for me, I was charmed to be in their warm kitchen, stuffing my washing hurriedly into their capable machine, accepting an offer of coffee, all ready to be absorbed into these simple Saturday rhythms. "Will you be working on the picture?" Lilli asked. I hadn't planned to do anything of the kind—but if Paul wanted me to . . . It would be a few more hours away from Cherif. "I'm going to take Edward for a walk," he said. "There are some things I want to show him, my dear Lilli." And she smiled warily. We followed the curve of the streets at the town's edge. Paul had put on a dark hat, which gave him an adventurous look, almost a kind of glamour, with his mild pale dome eclipsed, and a subtle air of self-mockery too. I realised he was excited. "I don't have your splendid raven locks," he said. I strode alongside in the mood of suppressed annoyance that precedes being given a surprise. "That's the old Altidore house, by the way," he said, as we passed a long building with an arched entrance and tall gables of cut brick. It had the plaque of the regional water-board beside the door, and office lighting glowed inside the warped old windows; but high up there were gothic As in the brickwork. I tried not to show how immoderately interested in it I was. "When did they sell it?" It was a sudden troubling possibility that Luc had spent his early childhood there. But in fact his gambling grandfather had made the move to Long Street before the war. The Germans had used the house as a local headquarters, Paul said, and the fifteenth-century woodwork had been wantonly damaged before their departure. It was the first time I had heard him refer to the Occupation that must have hatched his own adolescence so darkly. A nice crew-cut soldier with the bulk of a body-builder came slowly striding towards us—as often happened in these empty streets I saw him some way off: there was time for interest and self-consciousness to quicken or be mastered as you approached each other, strangers crossed with a heightened sense of promise. He was wearing camouflage gear over a roll-necked jersey, the dappled trousers tucked into socks and boots—he looked fit, supple and compact. Charmingly he wore tortoise-shell glasses. Paul was talking about something and I found myself laughing exaggeratedly so as to make an impression of happy indifference on the young man; at the same time the laugh was a mask behind which I looked at him all the more keenly.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  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. I looked at him in a contemptuous way, I fear. There we were, side by side, gazing past each other, our elbows resting on the rail between us. ‘Enough of this,’ I said & clasped his hand in mine, our elbows wobbling on the rail as if we were Indian arm-wrestlers. Then suddenly he seemed to panic, & was hugging me boisterously. We clung to each other for some while, leaning over the little fence, which was less than comfortable. He said many extravagant things about me, most of which, on reflection, were apt enough, & which people don’t say to me sufficiently often … How amply misnamed is the loving-chair! I suggested we have a walk outside—partly because there was no refuge if anyone came back to look for us—so off we went, & he got going once again on how he thought Tim didn’t trust him, was it because he knew about his ‘real nature’, & so forth. I told him about Tim at school & what he had been like then, whatever censorious woman-chasing attitudes he took on now. ‘I must have buggered Tim Carswell at least 500 times,’ I said, calling up a random figure which can’t have been far from the truth. Poor old Chancey was fairly shattered at this. ‘I’ve missed out on my youth,’ he said, rather melodramatically.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I slid the key into the lock notch by notch and opened the door a fraction. There was no light on, though the last of the day still lingered and without yet going in I could see the room in the dressing-table mirror, Phil lying on the bed, the white of his underpants. He didn’t move as I came forward, silently closed the door, and stood at the end of the bed. His breathing was extremely slow and distant and he was clearly deeply asleep. He was lying face downwards, but slightly turned to one side, his left leg half-drawn up, his mouth squashed open on the pillow, his thighs apart but not widely apart, his ass slewed a little to the right. I wanted x-ray eyes for that, though the barrack-room modesty of his sleeping in his knickers was beautiful too. Beside the pillow, trapped under a slumberous arm, was Tom Jones—the fat, squashy Penguin redolent of O levels and essays on virtue. I could hardly bear to look at him any longer, and shook him roughly to wake him up, falling on him before he knew what was happening and bothering him with kisses. I hadn’t made love like I did then since I was a schoolboy. It was extraordinarily innocent, fervent and complete. By the time Phil had to get to work it had begun to rain, and after he had gone I lay in the dark with the window open and listened to it pattering on the leads. Falling asleep I slid briefly through a zone of luminous happiness, a vision as clear as summer—not the ominous clarity of Hampshire or Yorkshire summer but a kind of desert radiance where rocks and water and scrawny shade, lying by chance together, seemed divinely disposed and glowed in their changelessness. I more or less forced Phil, who did it with a certain comical reluctance, to take the following night off in exchange with Celso. Celso, it transpired, was anxious to have Friday off to treat his wife on her birthday—a musical and dinner and then, one assumed, some especially Spanish and honourable congress. I’d hoped for a high noon of sunbathing, back on the roof, but it was one of those close dark days when one can never get dry and longs for a thunderstorm that never comes. We went back to my flat and lounged about and I came on rather fierce about wanting sex several times, at which Phil showed at first a demure disbelief though clearly, when it came to it, he wanted it just as much himself. Later we went up to the Corry, which was unmomentous, no one seeming to have noticed that I had been away and the virulent strains of exercise going on much as normal.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I came back and started undressing. I was so completely accustomed to undressing in changing-rooms that the act had lost that charge which it had for me elsewhere. Still, I felt a small warm amorous hum as I pulled off my shoes, tugged down my jeans and caught Phil’s fleeting inspection of my cock. I stroked it with a single indolent gesture as if to set it free, and to present it to the boy who, with surely affected indifference, was sitting in front of me, pulling on his white ankle-socks. ‘How’s the hotel?’ I asked. ‘Oh, er, okay,’ he said, surprisingly unsurprised that I should know about it. ‘Hard work,’ he added. ‘What do you do in it?’ ‘In the hotel, you mean?’ ‘Indeed.’ ‘Oh. Everything, at one time or another. At the moment I’m waiting.’ ‘Mm, me too,’ I agreed. But he was clearly not a person that I could win over with collusive bad jokes. I feared for a second he might take it up literally; his ignoring it suggested that he had understood what I meant—but was incapable of indicating the fact. More silence followed, in which I felt that I had the upper hand. He was now standing and putting on his old-fashioned and manly white underpants. ‘Going to work out?’ he asked. It was his first unsolicited remark to me, and despite its consummate blandness it had the air of being the final fruit of a long internal quest for something to say. ‘That’s right: nothing heavy, you know.’ I was in shorts and singlet now, and tying up my white plimsolls. ‘I’m not aiming to have a beautiful physique like yours.’ Something masculine in him momentarily bridled, though the new pleasure of being called beautiful, which must have been the secret purpose of all his body-work, won over and he smiled with shy pride. ‘Do us a favour,’ he said. It was a moment at which a more experienced person could well have turned to admiration of my own, less ambitious, build. As I prepared to go off into the gym I asked him, ‘What hotel is it you work in, actually?’ He was prefacing every remark with ‘Oh’ as if unsure of the way statements might begin. ‘Oh … the Queensberry, yes.’ ‘Not far from here, then.’ I took my key from the lock. ‘No.’ ‘Well, see you.’ I was making off down the alley of lockers and would soon have been lost to his view, when he said: ‘Yeah, you ought to come over some time.’

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  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. At the other end of the bar, near the door, a man smiled at me quickly and sceptically, looked away, looked back. I stopped off by him for one more drink, offered him one, puzzling for a moment over my fold of high-denomination notes, the unfamiliar portraits of the makers of Belgian history. There was a dangerous quality to him, square-jawed, handsome, offering some unspecified challenge, spittle at the corner of his mouth. He could have been an off-duty soldier, nervily alone, counting on the power of his build and his close-cropped head. I felt the hollow burn of attraction in my stomach, but he didn't give away what he felt. We stood close together, both of us also looking past each other, so that I saw him against the movement of the men beyond him, an arm around a waist, fingers that lightly touched a cheek. The surly barman, jowelled and braceleted, pulled the beers and muttered something to my friend, whom I watched pretending not to hear. The boy reached out his hand for the glass and I glimpsed tattooed letters on his four fingers: R, O, S, E. He was quiet and tense, and didn't react with much interest to anything I said. I felt his attention searching for a focus in the crowd behind me; or he looked into his glass in the grip of some bitter memory. I asked if he was in the Navy, and he waved his marked hand dismissively, without saying yes or no. I began to wonder why I'd bothered with him. Then with a little smile that made me think it was all shyness, that the tenderness he sought involved some cost to his pride, he said, "So tell me what you do." I told him I was a teacher, I'd come out here to teach some boys English. This didn't thrill him, it only ever touched those who had liked being taught: I saw a kind of wariness in his eyes, as if he might have owed me an essay. "Do you come from London then?" "A bit south of there. You won't have heard of it. Well, it's called Rough Common."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  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. We egged each other on into a language world of our own. It was Graves who located and nourished my vein of pedantry, and together, like mad academicians, we established a complex of unwritten rules and forfeits, making even our Latinist house-master uneasy about entering our study. The discovery of French Classical drama was a major step: after a term with our A-level texts we were recycling alexandrines and spoke with a marked sense of the caesura. Graves was very taken with the précieux, plonkingly translated into English: anyone who offended him was said to have "soiled his glory", and it was rare for him to refer to his feet as anything but his "poor sufferers". This fitted well with our pained avoidance of monosyllables and abhorrence of abbreviations. In a school where a typical notice might read "All RHJ report to BOC at 3 for TP" we held out for old-fashioned queenery and unnecessary effort. One year for the whole of Lent there were fines for using the first person singular: at weekends I would run up on to the common shouting "I, I, I, I, I" like a madman with a terrible stammer.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Try me. "It's that very bad thing, where you are in love with somebody and think about them all the time but they are also your dear friend and you see them all the time too. But they are not in love with you. And every time you see them you feel more in love." "That is a bad sort of situation." "Sometimes I wanted to tell you in the lesson, but it is better to talk about books and current affairs." "Is that why you were so keen to go to Los Angeles in our last session? Well, you had a cold too." He slapped his hand on the counter. "I had a cold because I was out all night, standing in the rain under a certain person's window like a bloody idiot." "Your mother said you got it from her." It was too touching to think of him—the romantic semaphore of young love, the old courtly gestures, dreading to bring things to the point. I pictured us backing into each other, like rival serenaders in a comic opera. "My mother's like that, she always takes the blame." He smiled at me steadily: he seemed to find comfort in me. And my eyes were revelling gently over him. "The thing is, Edward, I fear I must certainly go to the gentlemen's." I hadn't a clue what he was talking about—it must be something like the dogs, or the wall. But he stood up and looked about and I understood and told him. I watched him wandering to the far end of the room, pushing his hair back, sweetly self-conscious under twenty pairs of eyes. I was blasted with lust. I thought why don't you just go on me, hose me down, unbutton my fly, slip your dick in and piss my pants. . . why don't You? I saw a voracious dark kid I had come across before" get up and follow him in. I wondered what Luc would think when he heard the clink of his foreskin-rings against the urinal's china cup. I caught the barman's eye and ordered another drink. I seemed to be virtually sober, I was drinking without noticing at least, it was rather like those trick-glasses where you tilt them to your lips and the liquid disappears. Did the boy want one too, he asked, perhaps impressed after all that I'd fought off the minders and rescued the star. I said yes, they were only light little beers, it would keep him a few moments longer before he shook hands and left for home. Matt came up and said quickly, "I don't know what you've done to Cherif. He's over at my place. I found him standing at the bus-stop crying like a baby." "Oh fuck, thank you, it's just . . . as you can see . . ."

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I distanced myself even as I was perversely drawn to stare at him, keen to pick up any absurd and memorable remarks. I finished my glass of wine and downed most of another while I looked at the handsome bearded St Laurence with his dinky little gridiron, and the St Stephen who crouched appealingly in a shaft of light while above him the shadowy form of an immense black whom I would have liked to meet held a stone aloft. St Peter was Ashley, who worked out at the Corry, but he was not seen to best advantage upside-down. The bell clacked frequently now and we early browsers became subsumed into the crowd of callers, who greeted each other, kissed, caught up on their news, walked backwards into other guests without apologising and generally, as if they were in a private house where such curiosity would have been unseemly, ignored the pictures. Those who had equipped themselves with a price list were forced into the crude necessity of asking the drinkers to move so as to get some distance on the martyrs or to squinny at the numbered labels. I took another drink and moved downstairs. Here there was a series of life-size nudes, in a sculptural Whitehaven style—martyrs only to the bench and the Nautilus machine—and a set of plates made to illustrate a limited edition of John Gray’s Tombeau d’Oscar Wilde along with Stephen Devlin’s setting of the poem for tenor, string quartet and oboe d’a-more—a martyrdom with a whole teeming afterlife. The photographs were balletic and metaphorical, with a good deal of emphasis on the slim gilt soul aspect and a number of images, in Staines’s most typical style, crossed and half-obscured by the shadows of prison bars. I was following a line of the music—a sort of Mahler-and-French which came as close as sexless music could to being explicitly homosexual—when there was a nudge, and Aldo himself was standing beside me. He didn’t say anything, but announced himself in this physical way as some people do in clubs and bars, or as boys do abroad, when there is a language problem. I smirked at him and carried on reading, and he seemed happy to stand by. ‘Ronnie didn’t think you’d come,’ he said after a minute. ‘I’m a bit of a martyr myself,’ I said. ‘One day one of Ronnie’s little jeux d’esprit will finish me off altogether.’ ‘You don’t like the pictures?’ Aldo looked cast down. ‘Oh they’re all right. I like these ones here.’ We turned and ran our eyes over the plated athletes. ‘They aren’t martyrs, are they? I don’t like the martyrs so much—they’re just soft porn. You look very pretty in them … but I honestly prefer to have hard porn—or no porn at all.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  When we climbed to the floor above, which was the main floor of the hotel, we were treading for a few yards on patterned hotel carpet, and there were brass wall-lamps and prints of eighteenth-century London. Then we were in the service area again. We passed by the open door of a kind of rest-room: the curtains were drawn, and there was a semi-circle of once stylish wooden-armed easychairs, of the kind where the seat cushions collapse through the supporting rubber straps, and a television, in front of which a man in the hotel’s dark blue uniform was squatting. The air was dead with smoke and there were large, bar-room ashtrays on the floor, piled high with fag-ends. ‘Hi, Pino!’ said Phil. The man looked round; he had very curly dark hair, dull, handsome Spanish looks—about thirty years old. ‘Hey Phil! How you work this thing? Is not on.’ He slapped the sides of the cabinet with the palms of his hands, as though trying to revive a drunk. Then looking round again and seeing me, he got up. ‘Pino, this is Will. He’s just a friend of mine.’ We shook hands. ‘You a friend of Phil’s?’ he asked, as though to confirm what a good fellow I must be. ‘Phil is very nice boy. Is very very nice boy.’ He rocked about grinning and laughing at this, sliding a light punch at Phil’s chest and capering backwards. ‘Phil elp me this mornin with the bang.’ Though he was much Phil’s senior, he behaved like a child in his presence, and Phil, able at last to show me a place where he belonged, responded by showing how accustomed he was to this person I did not even know. ‘You helped him with the what?’ I asked. ‘The van. I’m teaching him to drive the hotel van. But you’re not much good, are you, Pino?’ Pino found this even more amusing. ‘He very nice boy,’ he repeated. It was hard to tell if he was crazy about him himself or merely recommending him to me. He sounded like someone trying to sell his sister to a tourist. ‘You have drink?’ he said. I glanced hastily at Phil, and said ‘Oh, er—no thanks,’ while Phil himself said, ‘Yes, we’re going to have a drink upstairs.’ My heart sank at the prospect of sitting in some stuffy hotel bar with the boy I was in love with and an imbecile Spanish waiter; I thought for a second that Phil must have chickened out of our encounter, and grabbed at the Spaniard as a chaperon. But Pino was suddenly solemn, and extended his hand again. ‘Very nice to meet you, Weel,’ he proclaimed. We shook hands once more. ‘I go to watch Call my Bloff. ’ As we left he resumed his persuasion on the television. ‘You fockin, fockin thing!’ he went on amiably. ‘That’s where we watch television,’ Phil said when we were outside.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "He's not queer, he's not queer," he kept saying excitedly. They shouldered into the bar just by where Edie was standing, so I slouched over. Shop was still sheltering Shattering with an arm round his back as if otherwise he might panic and run off, or else be pinched and spoiled by the inflamed clientele. I said to Edie, "This boy works in a fashion shop in town, you ought to meet him", and then told the boy how he had once fooled me into buying some deviant swimwear. Never having worked in a clothes shop, I imagined the staff must fondly remember everyone who went in. "You were wearing jodhpurs," I said, to seal it in his mind. He stuck a hand in his fine dark hair, widened his large dark eyes and then dubiously exclaimed, "Of course!" He was slight, mobile, playing on looking so young, unfairly eclipsed by the beauty of his friend. Edie passed me my glass and stood looking politely at the boys, who had half-turned away to catch the barman's eye and obviously thought our conversation was over. "I'm Edward, by the way," I said. The shop-boy looked back uncertainly. "Edward. Me Edward." I stuck out a hand. "Alejo," he said; and then compelled by Spanish courtesy: "This is my cousin Agustin, from Bilbao. He's not queer." "And this is my friend Edie from England. She's not queer either." Agustin looked terrifically cheered at this, and shook hands fervently with both of us. I held his gaze until his grin faded, he looked down and I let go of the fingers I was still absent-mindedly clutching. I felt almost sorry for him having to carry the responsibility for such deranging beauty through life. His short dark curly hair, his quick dark eyes, the slightly everted lips and the little lines made by his smiles, the small ears, the unblemished fineness of his skin set off at the neck by the upturned collar of pale old denim, all made one long to kiss him and fuck him. I was hollowed out with envy of the Spanish girls having him on the other side of my wall. I got Alejo talking with Edie. She said something about an embroidered black waistcoat he was wearing, and I saw her finger the work on it. He brought to mind her camp young friends of 1980 or so, her fellow-students at the Central School of Fashion, when she was my entree to London, to the West End, and we would all go drinking together in Soho, which waited on the other side of Oxford Street like a barrio of risky enticements. It was dear old New Romanticism then, the boys were growing pony-tails, dressing in braid and buckles, voluminous pants and sleeves; they were crazy about girls, they thought it was fabulous what you could do with them and a few yards of taffeta and ribbon. I was making reassuring conversation with Agustin.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  There was a lot of metal on him—the buckled jacket-sleeves, the thick chatelaine of keys at a belt-loop, the belt's own leaden buckle, rivets in the jeans. As I straightened up he ran his hand vaguely over my face, a nicotined finger sour under my nose; then over my chest and stomach, soothing, noncommittal. I felt his head in turn, stroked behind an ear and pulled a lobe where three, four, rings clustered, and a further screwed stud. The hair was sleek and flat to the skull, and as he put his arms round me and hugged up close I traced it to a double rubber band and a silky foot of pony-tail. It was nice and warm being in there with him. Even so I wasn't very keen on him; among my sighs and mutters I let out a great yawn over his shoulder, converting its final paroxysm into a shuddering, half-biting kiss of his manacled ear. I tried to imagine he was someone else, as he pulled out my dick—which was a bit sullen, a bit killjoy, wanted to be asleep—and as I duly prised out his own rather pushy, anonymous, straight-up little number. Suppose he was Matt, or even Gerard . . . but I was growing used to the night, began to make out the dark oval of his face against the deeper darkness beyond, and when he rubbed against me, felt the chopped whiskers of a mustache. He knew I was holding back and out of friendliness or pure insensitivity he went at it the harder: there was a quick little ritual of groans, "Oh yeah . . . oh yeah . . . oh yeah . . . " and he shot off heavily up the front of my shirt. I closed my eyes. He hung on me for a while in hot-breathed recovery, and then returned to work on me. It was with a sense of conscious sacrilege that at last I admitted the idea of Luc. It was Luc standing behind me, his spent dick stiffening already between my legs, Luc's strong young hand firmly, almost over-fiercely, jerking me off, set on giving me pleasure, thrilled to do so: Luc who cupped his other hand to catch the warm splodge when it came. I twisted slowly in his arms, the night wind carried a phrase or two of angelic tenorino Stevie Wonder on the crest of the forest's darker blind roar, the long grass ran and whispered, it was a rhythm of a runner's waterproofed legs whistling against each other, and the ambush of a flashlight a foot or two away. There we were—two men, drunk, ungainly, our spunk on each other's hands and clothes, and him looking at me with amusement while I winced and turned away.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Then, with unconvincing interest, "So who are you going to be teaching English to?" "A couple of boys, to start with." "Just two." "Rather difficult boys." He nodded. "They've been in some sort of trouble," I assured him. "The older one looks very sexy." Rose gave a little snort. "I should have known that was your game." "No, no. I can show you if you like." And it was true I had his papers on me, like a keepsake of a lover, of a contact, perhaps, whom I was yet to meet. I pulled the envelope from my inner pocket, and took out the folded sheet with the photo-booth image attached—Luc Altidore, 17, interests History, the Arts. It was spread on the damp counter, offered slightly anxiously to Rose, as though I were searching for this boy and thought he might recognise the picture and give me a lead. Surely no one could forget that pale mask, with the large dry lips and the hair falling forward and a mutinous blankness to the eyes in the camera's flash, as if dissenting from his own beauty. I recalled distantly having taught him already in dreams, I had lived through the slow-burning hours of tuition face to face with him. I had become less likeable to my companion, as if I had already gained power over the kid through the corrupt persuasions of literature. "I may have to do other work," I said. "I'll need the cash. Besides, I don't want to read books all day." I stroked his forearm, which I felt actually vibrate with the mastered desire to withdraw it. "Why not?" I hesitated and said, "Books are a load of crap." "You're really wrong," he said fiercely. "You're lucky. You're a teacher. Books are your life." And he walked away from me, leaving me with nothing but the private and lonely satisfaction of my quotation, which perhaps proved his final point. When I came back from the lav I saw him making for the exit, his arm round the shoulder of the suited bore I'd escaped from earlier, whose face was flushed and confused at his almost too sudden change of luck. In the austere Town Museum I picked up Cherif, a Moroccan, but born in Paris and uncircumcised. I felt a little out of step among those chaste northern saints and inward-looking Virgins—there wasn't one of them that welcomed you or held your gaze as the dark-eyed Italian gods and holy men so often did. Absurd, but I wanted a greeting, even across five hundred years. Here everyone looked down or away, in gestures of reproachful purity. The pious, unflattering portraits, too, of capped and wimpled worthies, were proudly abstinent. They drew respectful crowds of Sunday couples in rustling waterproofs (the day had made an uncertain start). They were not to Cherif’s taste, however.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  It may sound odd but I liked the hint of pretence, it was a relief from his coltish openheartedness, even if I was the one to be exploited. "All right, I'll get you a coat," I said, knocking back the rest of my drink and handing him the empty glass. Alejo's shop was still open, though you wouldn't have known it from the shady discretion of the front, which gave it the air of a sex-shop or a turf-accountant. Cherif followed me hesitantly into the spotlit hallway, puzzled as I had been by the chic absence of stock. One could have, it seemed, a hanky, or a rubberised vest, or a single green shoe. Alejo himself was loitering at the counter, languidly folding a shirt. He looked captivating in racing silks and olive velvet breeches. "Hola, Alejo!" I called out gittishly, but it was enough to make him look and remember me. "Hello," he said, trotting forwards and kissing me Spanish-style on both cheeks. "This is my friend Cherif, he's feeling the cold, he wants an overcoat." They shook hands, and Alejo walked round him a couple of times appreciatively before leading him through the mirror that was a swing-door into the busy grotto of the shop. I followed on, warmed by my new role as patron, but also reaching down for a certain prudence, like a parent at a school outfitters. Through the speakers came Doris Day singing "Buttons and Bows". "Rudi, can you go on the till," he said to a little blond in braces; "I'll look after this one." Rudi whispered something and glanced across the room as he went out. "Trouble in number three," Alejo explained cryptically, and ran straight on with "Your friend is fabulous" "Do you like him?" I said, looking at Cherif as he walked along and shyly felt the sleeves of a rack of coats; maybe we could come to an arrangement. "Where did you find him? Are there any more?" "There must be some fairly similar. In the Town Museum, actually, looking at a picture of Heaven and Hell." "Well, I know which one you got!" I stroked my chin consideringly. "After the coat I'm going to interest him in some other things." And he sprang off to guide him, a hand confidentially round his upper arm, almost resting his cheek on his shoulder. I wandered about for a minute, idly flicking through the clothes on the rails. There were a lot of idiosyncratic items of a kind you'd never wear but that a colour-blind trendster might carry off at a party or club; there was plenty of leather, with weirder cuts and zips than my own dear old jacket; and there was a strong vein of Englishry, Tattersall checks and thunder-and-lightning tweeds.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Chapter 3 Saturday, and a late start—waking in the usual cosy surge of memories and fantasies, the fantasies lacking in focus. It wouldn't quite work with Luc, I recalled a lad or two I'd seen about in the street, then hustled Cherif in quickly for the close. I took a shower, maddened by the sudden shrinking of the supply, spinning the hot tap and getting nothing but a feeble rope of cold. I stood out on the floor, leaning in through the curtain to test it. Then there was a far-off whining and knocking from the cistern in the roof, and the hot came thrashing back in an instant devilry of steam. Of course! It was my new neighbours at work, their shower had some kind of priority over mine, they could draw my water off and leave me shivering with annoyance. I mopped my little mirror clean and peered into it. It was absurdly small—it would almost have gone in a handbag; my face was cropped by its edges and looked rather good in it, I thought, like the features of any biker in the classic frame of his helmet. I swept my thick black hair around—my best feature, which people sometimes thought was dyed if they hadn't seen my forearms or bare legs. I imagined Luc might quite admire it, and see the claim it made for my being romantic and young. He ought to see it in this mirror, which left out all the rest of me. I thought of Cherif, with his comforting extra poundage, how he seemed to like all of me, and had no inkling of my steady disappointment at how I'd turned out and was likely to stay—never having looked fabulous in a swimsuit, caught in other people's photographs with a certain undeniable burliness. While my hair was still wet I combed it back, and it lay appealingly where I left it. It appealed to me, that is to say, though perhaps to other people it was the tell-tale feature of my self-delusion. I went for a wander through the cluster of ancient buildings which formed the still religious heart of the old town—the Cathedral, the Bishop's Palace, the low dormered quadrangle of the Hospital—and out into the alleyways behind the Museum, to find that it was the day of the animal market.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  And really his invalidish look touched me in a new way. He was pale, sore-eyed, bothered by his cold but perhaps finding something luxurious in his achy passivity, in the enormous woolly, chequered neckscarf and baggy old corduroys he was slumming in; he was more glamorous for looking shitty, like Garbo playing a tramp. His hair was dark and greasy and stood in thick furrows when he ran his hand through it. "Don't come near me," he said humourlessly as he pulled out a chair at the far end of the table from where I had left my music-case. "All right," I agreed with a pained laugh. "So what does your L stand for?" he said, with a nod at the gilt-stamped initials on the black leather. "It's not my L," I said. "It was my father's bag for his music, I think I told you he was a singer. I've just brought it back with me from England." My mother had suggested, with some emotion, that I might like to use it. "Edward Lewis Manners. ELM, a kind of tree we don't have any more in England, thanks to some beetles from Holland." "So you don't have a middle name?" "Yes, I do actually." There was a pause. "Is it a secret?" "Yes. No, don't be silly. It's, it's Tarquin, in fact. I always think it sounds like a horse," I added hysterically. "I'm quite pleased I don't have a middle name," said Luc. Mrs Altidore tumbled in with my coffee and a lemony drink for her son. He hunched over it sniffing, cross and negative. "LA stands for Los Angeles," he said. "It also stands for Library Association." I knew everything it stood for, not all of it repeatable to LA himself. "I'd like to go to Los Angeles." "I don't think you'd like it when you got there," I warned him, "it's extremely violent and the air's poisonous." "It's also a long way away." "I'm not sure that's necessarily in its favour." "Oh, I think it is," he said, nodding and staring past me out of the window. I undid my case in the chilly silence that followed. He'd exposed me to his anger before, and it scared me, mortified me, even though I knew I was not its object, merely the listener who was there when it chanced to be expressed. There was something mad and unsocialised in it. "Let's not talk about the William Wordsworth today," he said, as I opened the book. "Okay." "I'm not ready to talk about it yet." So he hadn't looked at it, I thought. "I'm not quite well, you know, we can just talk." "Okay." Sure, whatever you like. I started looking for an uncontentious subject, as he sniffed the vapour from his mug; but I was clueless with unhappiness. "So you have had to go back to England?" "I'm afraid so."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He turned his head a fraction, but not so as to look right at me, and the moon glinted on round glasses. He was a black kid—by the generous extension I gave to that term year by year—perhaps in his early twenties; he was perched on the bench's back with his feet on the seat; I made out a woolly hat rolled down and a puffy waistcoat over other dark clothes. We stayed as we were for a while, sharing the unusual view and its mood of stillness and oblivion. "Amazing night, isn't it?" I said lightly, just for form. "Yeah," he said; and hopped down from the bench as though about to clear off, because I'd spoilt it for him. "Nippy." Was it? I'd drunk too much to notice—but, yes, our breath made smoke. He'd probably been up here for ages, too; thinking something through. It took me a while to realise he was holding out a hand towards me. "Feel that," he said indignantly. I clutched it, it was cold and felt chapped; held it for a queer moment longer, only now seeing the point, and he squeezed my fingers back. He let out a sigh and pulled himself towards me in a kind of dance-step, and then we were hugging—he smelt nice, some ordinary girl's fragrance. We kissed sulkily, with a minor clash of spectacles. I decided I was into this, and fumbled around his waist; his intake of breath as my own wintry hands touched his skin. The bubbled waistcoat made him look bigger than he was, but he had a round, hairyish backside and when I groped through the tangle of undone shirt-front and lolling belt-buckle I felt the start of something beautiful in his rough crotch-hair and had to tug it out, thickening and obstructing itself, from its prison down a tight jean-leg. I could barely make it out in the night between us, while he pressed against me, rubbing at my fly, kissing me with surprising fervour all over my face, his tongue slipping over my glasses and smearing the lenses. He was all stoked up, in a way I couldn't quite match but marvelled at, and at the chance that brought me here on this November night, which was otherwise a cold prospect for both of us.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  One felt how this corner of Town has seen so much of that kind of thing. Across the road in the monumental mason’s showroom, the angels hovered with outstretched wings and lilies in their hands: they seemed to reproach us mutely through the plate-glass windows—or perhaps they cast some benediction over us. Inside the Café there was an unreal, subaqueous atmosphere, early lights burning though it was still hot & bright outside, & layers of smoke drifting above the marble tables. I hadn’t been there since I was an undergraduate & it seemed as unlikely to me now as then that England cd have come up with somewhere so thoroughly democratic, where I, a Lord after all, might share a table with a bookmaker. Actually it excites a rather corrupt & non-democratic emotion in me—of the daring ‘chic’ of slumming it. I think Sandy feels this less, & goes there as a bohemian & for the fun. It was fun, too, & we drank champagne and smoked Turkish cigarettes & sprawled on the benches. Eddy St Lyon was there with an actorish young man & winked at us hugely across the room; he has aged extraordinarily & looks ripe with corruption & self-abuse. At the next table some roughish characters were playing dominoes, a thick-set older man, a kind of foreman with his gang. S. was clearly somewhat preoccupied with one of them, eighteen or so, with grubby, sun-bleached hair & broad features: there was something both delicate & brutal about him, with dark stains spreading from the armpits of his shirt & preternaturally powerful, dirty hands that showed a surprising refinement when he pushed the dominoes out, or raised his beer-glass to his lips. When the glass was empty, S. reached over and half-filled it with champagne. The boy smiled candidly, revealing a broad gap in his front upper teeth which made me swallow & tingle with lust, & the ‘foreman’ looked across with pride and gratitude, as if we had somehow helped the boy with his education. When their game was over, S. told the youth that he wanted to draw him, & they arranged a time & shook hands on a price; I began to see how the mixed nature of the clientele worked to everyone’s advantage. After this Sandy rather basked in his own savoir-faire , & we ordered another bottle of champagne. I had noticed a solitary figure sitting across the room, also drinking freely, even heavily. He was slender, & beautifully dressed, of indeterminate age but clearly older than he wanted to be.