Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, page 12
It only hurts me when I cry; I couldn’t ever tell you why!
My foot’s got no shoe on it, I’ve lost me stockings too;
I’ve sold me feather bonnet, And I don’t know what to do –
But my Boy he’s a Butcher, He smiles and says to me;
‘I’ll give you good fresh meat, Girl – I gets it all for free! –
OH! That won’t hurt you!
(That can’t hurt me!)
This won’t hurt you!
(Go on, hurt me!)
Does it hurt you?
(Does it hurt – ooooh!)
Does it hurt you,
Tell me please do! –
CHORUS:
Only when I cry, Johnny!
Only when I cry!
Only when I cry, Johnny!
Only when I cry!
Everybody off and change. Change Please!
Sleeping together
Boy had always slept like a child, exhausted from his walking or from his television or from being with some man. But now he found that he could not always sleep.
If he was at his own place, and suspected that he might wake, he would leave his photograph of the First World War soldier who looked like him out by his bed, as if it was a glass of water, something he might need in the night. He would place under it one or two pages torn from his favourite books, which he’d read immediately before sleeping, or even one of the letters from the box; if he woke he’d try to get back to sleep with his left arm outstretched and his left hand placed palm down on top of the small pile of paper. In the morning he would look to see if any of the print or images had been transferred to the palm of his hand. It was a bit like going to sleep touching your lover, with your hand just touching his thigh or back because you want to be sure he’s there.
If he was at O’s place, Boy always woke in the night, or rather was woken. This was because of O’s talking in his sleep. When this happened, Boy did not try to get back to sleep, but rather tried to stay awake, to listen.
When it first happened, Boy thought that his lover was having a recurring nightmare about being attacked or killed, because every night the dream seemed to end, in the same way, at four a.m., with O suddenly crying out, I want to live, I want to live, I want to live. Then Boy would hold him for a bit and he’d go quiet and sleep soundly.
But soon Boy realised that it could not be a single dream which was causing O to cry out. As O got used to having Boy there by his side, as if he felt that he knew him better and could talk to him more now, he began to talk more during the nights. Each night would still end with the same cry, but before it came Boy would lie awake and hear O’s voice range through several dreams as if it was moving across the dial of the radio. A murmured speech would be interrupted by some song lyrics, then O would say, Please, release me, let me go, or, Ev’ry night I dream just how good it used to be, ev’ry night imagine you are still here with me, every night it’s you I surely lack, every night I cry, oh Baby come on back, I want, I want, I want to I want to live…
As their courtship progressed, O’s nocturnal speeches to his lover grew longer. They did not seem to distress him; he would not thrash and groan as he spoke, but lie quietly on his back and, once the night’s main speech was in full flow, speak in a fast, level, calm voice. Sometimes he spoke in a way that reminded Boy of a programme he had once seen about spirit mediums; like a strange kind of ventriloquist. One night he spoke with a heavy Dutch or Belgian accent saying, Let’s be honest yes the best is over. I think, well, you’re thirty it’s half your life and for us the best half too. When you’re not twenty or twenty-five any more they keep on asking you where your wife is and that’s hard sometimes, I want to live, I want to, I want to live by myself but they ask you questions they ask you all the time where is your wife because everybody has one – then the speech just stopped, as if O was exhausted by the effort of his impersonation.
Sometimes these speeches were so long and so coherent that Boy could not believe that O was actually asleep. Then he thought that maybe O really did want to talk to him, confess something to him, but could not for some reason say it to his face, by daylight, and so had rehearsed this elaborate act of talking in his sleep. He is saying what he really means, Boy thought. Declaring his true feelings, Boy thought. He would look carefully to see if his lover’s eyes were open in the dark (O kept a heavy drape over the window of his room, whereas Boy kept his window bare, he liked to see what kind of day it was as soon as he woke, and he liked especially to fall asleep looking at the stars or with the bright moon falling on his face.) But O’s eyes were not open; they were squeezed tight shut. He was lying on his back with his arms down by his sides, staring at the ceiling with his eyes closed, saying, I’ll get a towel. You know, you’re the first person I’ve had sex with since he left me. I don’t mind for me so much of course because I’m older but if I think about him in the arms of another man I’ll go crazy. I’ll kill him. I know I could kill him if I saw it because I’m taller than he is, and stronger. I knew he wanted to go, and I woke up and I followed him downstairs, he was dressed, with his things in my bag which he’d taken, we were both screaming, and I was pulling him and holding him, he got the door open and we just stood on the doorstep at seven in the morning screaming at each other, hitting each other, I wasn’t wearing any clothes. And there was a lot of blood. We woke everyone in the house and the landlady came in later and said please don’t let it happen again. She was in her dressing gown.
Everyone in the flats must have heard, I was screaming, but she came in her dressing gown, not her husband, he wouldn’t come in the flat while we were living there and she said I do understand dear and I thought that was nice. I went up to the hotel where he works, he told me never to go up there because they didn’t know, you see, and we just started crying together and the manager came into the kitchen and saw us and he lost his job. He told me he was at home but I called up and he wasn’t there, I called him where he lived and the girl who answered the phone went down to his room and said he wasn’t there and then at eleven I called again and he wasn’t there, so I went down to the club and I walk in and there he is with some friends and he won’t talk to me, everybody’s watching, he knows I don’t go to the club on a Tuesday so he thought I wouldn’t be there. He’s only young, he’s nineteen, and I’m the only man who’s had him since he got down here. He never goes down to the club like that on his own, never. Now I just want him back that’s all, I just want him back so we can live together, I want to live with him and have him here, I want to live with him, I want to live, I want to live, that’s his picture there he’s very cute with nothing on, he’s fabulous, what do you think?
Then it stopped, and O rolled over very quickly and wrapped Boy in his arms, very deeply asleep. His eyes were still squeezed shut, but not tight enough to have prevented the tears from coming out. His face shone in the dark and the tears dripped onto Boy’s cheeks as he held him. Boy thought about O’s cry, I want to live, I want to live, I want to live, and wondered if this time he should say something in the morning. Boy had once, before he had met O, gone home with a man who had cried like this all night. His lover had recently died and he wanted to talk, not have sex. As Boy felt O’s tears on his face, he remembered this other man, and wanted to see him again. As if O knew what he was thinking, he quietly whispered to Boy, I’m sorry for getting all emotional. Boy thought he was awake now, and acknowledging that he had been talking in his sleep; but then O said the line again, this time with a strong Newcastle accent, I’m sorry for getting all emotional. The only other time that happened to me was with George. I used to get all emotional with him, I remember one time oh god it was when we were on holiday he made me wait until it was sunset, he said I’ll take you out the night, and then we come into the square under this arch, the mist was coming in knee deep, and there were two boys singing under the arches and then we went up the tower to see the sunset, and he asked me what I thought, and I was blubbering, just standing there and blubbering, and all I could say was oh god its fab’lous, it’s fab’lous. Oh god it was fabulous. People must have thought I was off my face. I’m getting all teary tellin’ you about it now.
And then later, in the same voice, but more urgently, O whispered, Kiss us, kiss us please.
And then, later again,
Fuck us. Please fuck us. Please, I want to –
Then O had slept, and so had Boy too, eventually.
One night, having woken to find O lying silent asleep beside him, Boy talked to him out loud, and said, Do you really love me? At once O replied: I took them both out for a walk and I made him walk behind, I said, you, behind, your Father and I are going to talk business. And he says well, I don’t want him getting hurt, you know, mixed up with an older man. I said, look, the way I feel about your son, I know how I feel, I’d fucking kill for him, and he said, well if that’s the way you feel, that’s alright then, why didn’t you fucking say so, and I said less of the language, Father; and that’s it, I’ve been part of the family ever since. I see them most weekends. Every weekend really. And that’s how I want to live, I want to live – Boy wanted to know if this was an answer to his question. He wanted to know if these stories were meant in some way to be about O and himself. And he wanted to know whether O meant to tell him all this, or would be angry if he knew that he had.
One morning, having talked that night for over an hour, O said, ‘I want to … I dreamed that we lived together’; this was the only comment he ever made.
After one of these nights, by way of an explanation to himself of all this, Boy tore a page from one of his books and added it to the small pile by the bed. It was from the work of a writer who was known to have slept with men and so Boy thought that he must have written this passage after having similar trouble either with the nightmares of a partner (a boy he’d taken back to the expensive sheets of some grand hotel) or with his own nightmares and sleepless thoughts (when he knew it could only be days before they arrived at his door); Oh that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been fashioned anew in the darkness of our pleasure, a world in which the voices of the past would have little or no place, a world in which we might then live.
Then came a night when O began to talk while still awake. It happened at four in the morning, which is when he usually talked; but they were still awake, having made love all night, since O did not have to work the next day. As they lay next to each other on the bed, each staring at the ceiling, with the semen drying on them, O said, awake, but with his sleepwalking voice, I’m going to do up this apartment.
It was on a Friday night, when Boy had hoped that they might go out together to The Bar, for he wanted to parade his great happiness in front of all of us. But O had taken Boy to bed at six in the evening, not having said a world since he got home, and had been more violent, more lascivious than Boy had ever known him. I should say here that Boy never once wanted O to stop, and that he was used to sometimes being frightened by what O wanted to do, and by what he made Boy himself feel that he wanted to do, things he hadn’t ever known that he wanted to do. Boy had never expected to be in love with or to be made love to by anyone like O without being frightened.
When it was over, Boy lay on his back, and in the silence he started to imagine that he was a piece of driftwood on a beach, his ribs and other bones bleached and pounded by careless waves, left high and dry for the sun to whiten, ready to be picked up for their curious shape and taken home as treasures by an eager child. He lay on the bed like this for a long time, and Boy found himself even listening carefully to see if he could hear the tide going out, the waters receding.
Boy was getting used to such silences; he never assumed that something was wrong when O didn’t talk. It seemed to him that O only ever really talked in the night or when he was making love. That evening he had begun by slowly, clearly whispering more or less coherent plans for elaborate obscenities in Boy’s ear, commanding his attention there, in his ear and in his mind, just as his fingers, later in the night, demanded all of Boy’s concentration on the local sensation of a repeatedly stroked or shocked muscle or orifice (O had this way of making you forget everything except the part of you that he was working on, forget everything else, even which way up your body was, I remember feeling nothing except the instep of my foot at one point, and then, and I can remember this very distinctly still, the ring of muscle inside my arse opening very suddenly and sweetly, I know that’s how it’s always meant to happen or was meant to happen in those days, but it didn’t always, but that night, the one night that I had with O, which is a long time ago now, we were both younger, that night I remember thinking, oh my god, this is perfect, perfect, perfect.) Later in their love-making O had raved, thrown sentences at Boy which were obscene in their tone of voice but not their sense, barked orders that only made sense as orders because the mouth that shaped them looked so handsome and cruel, breathed insults which were received by Boy as something like tenderness because he could hear the tears in O’s voice at that point, You fucker, you fucker, you fucker. And so now when O, staring at the ceiling, said, I’m going to do up this apartment, Boy didn’t expect him to continue and make a speech of it; he thought everything had been said for that night; he expected his unexplained statement to just hang there like cigarette smoke. But O said, I want to live. I want to live, I want to live … I dreamed I lived with you, but it was somewhere grander than this. A prince should have a palace. I am fucking a prince and I want to fuck him in a palace.
Boy’s reaction to this was to turn to look to see if O was sleeping, talking in his sleep again. He saw O’s eyes shining in the dark, so he knew that he was still awake.
Still expecting that O would go no further, that he would not in any way explain what he had said, Boy was already elaborating this fantasy in his own mind. He was already thinking, He wants us to live here together, that’s what he wants to tell me. That’s why we didn’t go out, I’ll help him with the decorating… we’ll work together and he’ll make love to me on dustsheets, with paint splashes on his hands and in his hair.
But O did go on to explain or at least expand on what he had said. And Boy was right to assume that, as O described it, the apartment was being done up as the scene of their future life together. That was what O was trying to talk to him about. As O made his fantastic proposals, Boy lay quietly there and listened, and incorporated himself into the fantasy. If not the naked centrepiece of this great room, sprawled open-legged on the warm and highly polished wood of the table which O described (he would gladly have taken that role), then Boy saw himself at least as a servant, dressed always to complement and complete the scheme of the room’s decoration, its discreet finishing touch, a living ornament amidst its expensive menagerie of carved, gilded and frescoed bodies. Boy swiftly imagined the cut, cloth and gilt embroidery of a livery that would both suit the room and show off his own body (a highbacked jacket over tight breeches). He hung a pearl from his ear, and placed himself, silent and expectant, in the shadows which a shaded lamp threw low across the velvet-damasked wall; he equipped himself with a chased silver tray, covered it with a freshly starched linen napkin, and balanced on it a single miniature cut-crystal glass of an expensive, exotic and amber-coloured liqueur, served, bizarrely but correctly chilled, like vodka, so that the crystal was clouded with drops of condensation in the heat of the room, warmed as well as lit by the fire of scented cedar logs. And there in the shadows in the corner of the room he waited, waited as long as he was required to, silently watching the bodies entwining by firelight (How many other seductions has he watched, this servant? How many other men has he seen stretched across these ebony chairs, these rare and costly rugs?), watching and waiting until his Lord and Master’s exertions over the sweating body of the amazed and intoxicated guest are temporarily over, when a single glance brings Boy swiftly to his place at his Master’s elbow, offering his Master’s guest (panting and bathed in sweat, half stunned by the evening’s rare wines and brutally passionate kisses) a reviving drink before their next bout of arduous lovemaking. Boy imagined his Master saying to him: No verbal commands will be necessary … A glance should suffice to tell you when I need you and for what. That is why I chose you for my household; you seem always to know what I want. Now retire to your place.
While Boy was thinking all this, what O actually said was, I’m going to do up this apartment. I’m going to sand the floor twice and bleach it and seal it. In the centre of the floor I shall have painted a copy of the mosaic panel from Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli representing the Ascent of Ganymede, all properly done in the correct seven coloured marbles, and lapis for his eyes. I’ll fix the bedroom window. The dado will be of seven different woods; and on the top of the dado will be a gilt rail, and on the rail will be perched a life-sized and perfectly realistic lion marmoset carved in white cherrywood; clutched in his left paw will be two stolen cherries carved in red mahogany; between his bared teeth of stained ivory the marmoset will be carrying a grape carved in ebony. Press this, and the staff will be summoned by a hidden electric bell. Above the dado I shall cover the walls with hammered and lacquered Spanish leather, and in the centre of each wall hang a grisaille panel depicting scenes from the lives of great men: Antinous drowned and perfect at the age of nineteen (I will commission the artist to make Antinous’s body a copy of yours, and no one will know this but me); Will Hughes playing the gilded boy mentioned by Piers Gaveston in Marlowe’s Edward the Second; Rimbaud in the house of glass which he built in Addis Ababa; Federico Garcia Lorca on his first night in New York; Robbie Ross lifting his hat to the passing prisoner in the corridor of the Old Bailey. Pendant to each of these scenes will be a naked male figure representing each of the seven virtues: Charity, Promiscuity, Generosity, Dignity, Honesty, Beauty and Courage.
