Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, page 19
That first night, that honeymoon night of all nights, O gave his boy a real hard time. He gave him real dirt. He talked real dirty to him. He didn’t touch him too much at first. He made him bend over and spread his buttocks with both hands. He made him display the marks on his back, display his armpits, the soles of his feet and the roots of his hair; as if Boy was an animal and O was deciding whether to buy that animal or not. O made Boy pull back his eyelids, his lips and his foreskin. And all the time O kept on talking, talking very low so that Boy had to listen very hard even when he didn’t want to, didn’t quite want to hear what he was in fact hearing his lover say. It made him feel like they’d just met, like he was a boy again. He had to listen so hard, Boy found that he couldn’t think any longer about what he himself was doing, couldn’t keep up, couldn’t keep his balance, couldn’t keep his feet on the floor, couldn’t answer O’s quiet, incessant, persistent questions, questions in which he demanded to know the most humiliating details, questions about Boy’s body, about what he wanted, where he hurt, what he was thinking, what he really wanted to do next, couldn’t even think about which way up he was because O talked so low to him, talked so bad, said things you never heard one man say to another before, said, Baby, you hold onto yourself, baby don’t give yourself away, don’t give it away, don’t give up the ghost, don’t give me that shit, and then without stopping talking he took hold of Boy right down there real hard with both hands, one hand round his balls and three fingers up his arse and he pushed so hard that the two sets of fingers almost met through Boy’s skin and then he said, and this was the worst of all, he got so close to Boy’s ear that it was more like biting than whispering and he said, Do you like it like that, do you, do you want me to get you like that, do you want me to hold you like that, do you, do you want me to hold you, do you want me to take care of you then, will you let me put you in the bath? Can I give you the bottle, do you need the toilet, do you want me to do that, can I watch, can I watch you do it, can you do it for me, can I stand over you, can I stand by you, can I stand up for you, can I promise you I won’t die because you see you’re my Boy. You’re my boy, you’re my body, you’re my woman, you’re my pussy; you’re my dog with a bone, you’re my bruised and broken darling, you’re the song in my heart, you’re my sky at night, you’re my little brother, you’re my river through the city, you’re the bird in the bush, you’re my lover in my arms, you’re my daddy home from work. You’re my fucker, fucker, fucker, fucker, what are you?
Boy had got used to the idea that O’s mouth could do just what it wanted, could lick, open or bite him anywhere.
Since he had been covered in spittle, he didn’t see why he shouldn’t be covered in words as well.
When all that, the violence, was over, O and his Boy made love just like a married couple for the very first time. They did it with a tender concentration and a complete lack of fear that surprised them both given the way they had courted, the way they lived. They felt like they were doing it for the very first time, which they weren’t. They felt that it was extraordinary; but I would say myself that they looked just like several other hundreds of men in similar beds in that city and at that particular time.
Each was so eager to mark and use every muscle and joint of the other that neither looked up from the bed during their lovemaking. Neither of them looked up and saw, hovering over that white and isolated bed, or rather not hovering but crowding, pressing, stretching up on their toes some of them so that they could see, a crowd of fifty or sixty men. All of them were white-skinned and dark-eyed, like the lovers; and all of them, like the lovers, were naked. These were the ones who had come before, the men whom O and Boy never knew or had never even heard about, their witnesses and peers, the attendants and guests of honour at this ceremony, this great labour of love; the ones we forgot to invite. All of these men were quite still, and all of them smiled; all of them cast down their eyes to behold the slow-moving wonder on the bed.
Some were frankly fascinated, watching two handsome men engage in sexual practices which had not been current in their own century; their eyes opened wide. One older man’s eyes wrinkled in a great grin and then slowly brimmed over with two fat tears of admiration. The room was so full that those at the front of the crowd were pressed against the bed, and some even knelt at the edge of it; they appeared to have dropped to their knees like attendants in a painted Adoration.
One even held up both hands open-palmed, and his face, open-mouthed with delight at the beauty of what he saw, was lit gently from below by the single candle that O had placed in a saucer by the bed to light the scene.
Some of the men held hands, or seemed to be lovers themselves, for they stood pressing themselves against a thigh or the small of another man’s back, or just constantly, idly touched another’s hair or shoulders with the tenderness of habit.
Some were themselves sexually excited, perhaps by being in such a crowd, or perhaps by what they were watching. One young cock was upright, beating slowly against a black-furred stomach, until the four fingers and thumb of an older hand closed round it and held it still. The young man did not turn round to see whose hand it was; indeed no one looked round, looked away or talked; apart from these few, small, occasional, emblematic gestures of contact and love, the crowd was quite still, as still as the Kings and the Shepherds always are in such scenes, as still even as the Angels whose very draperies hang quiet and immobile in the night air for sheer wonder.
Had O or Boy looked up, they would have seen that some faces appeared in the crowd several times. Each time the face appeared, it appeared with a different body (a different physique or the same physique at a different age), the nakedness of the limbs set off by the hairstyles and accessories of different centuries – a seventeenth-century betrothal ring in which two chased silver hands clasped a chipped and crowned garnet heart; a badly-hennaed auburn wig, burnt by the curling tongs; a regulation moustache clipped by a Forces barber. One man, a sixty-year-old with white hair on his fat stomach and across his shoulders, was holding, wrapped in his huge arms, a smiling butcher’s assistant whose neck and chest were red and sore and covered with bites and bruises. The young man’s features were strangely like those of the older man, as if they were related – their hands were the same, too. The young man’s stomach was flat, and his eyes were not red and clouded like the ones that gazed over his shoulder. The whitehaired man was in fact holding his younger self in his arms, holding him tight; and the young man looked glad to be held.
When O and Boy had both come, and curled up together, and drifted apart and fallen asleep with no sheet to cover them, the candle was not extinguished, and seemed not to burn low or even gutter, but to burn for several hours more; and the crowd of men stayed quite still and silent around it, quite still; and all of them, all of them, smiling. In time a few, at the back of the crowd, seeing the sky beginning to lighten through the window and finding that they were not able to see the tableau the sleeping bodies made, did turn away and began to look around them, leafing through O’s unpacked collection of books just like you do when you’re alone in a strange apartment for the first time. The rest remained watching the lovers, watching them and watching over them on this, the first night of their marriage, so that anyone walking home late that night could have looked up at the bedroom window at four a.m., and seen an inexplicable sight: framed by a bedroom window on the fifth floor, lit by a single candle flame, a silent crowd of fifty or sixty smiling, naked men, pressed close together, fifty or sixty of them together in a single council flat bedroom.
In the morning the lovers did not notice that the clothes they had left lying on the bedroom floor had been walked on, rearranged, or that their jeans were slightly damp with dew. They were too busy clearing up after the party, too busy setting up their new home, too busy for such details. They knew nothing, nothing, nothing.
Years later they found a single baroque pearl which had dropped that night from a white-leaded ear, but they assumed it was a fake, and they put it in the dressing-up box with the rest of their spare jewellery.
Setting up home
Sunday
Dear Boy,
I’m happy to hear that you have found somewhere to live. I think it’s always a relief to know that you’ve got that kind of security. Have you considered buying the flat? You know I expect that everyone is entitled to purchase their own flat now, you should try and get the details. I’ve certainly never regretted taking out the mortgage when I did.
Life here continues much the same. I have just finished reading the book that you sent me, with much pleasure. What an extraordinary life the man had. I remember when I was a boy my own Father had a picture of him up in his study I think. He was very strict about his study, Mother was never allowed in there, not even to dust, he used to do it himself. Of course he was quite capable of cleaning for himself what with having been in the army. I remember the picture quite well, very dark but with a handsome scarlet jacket. Very handsome he was too when young.
Do you remember me ever telling you about my sister’s husband Geoff? I had a very sad letter two days ago telling me that he was dying of cancer. I don’t think I shall go to the funeral as I haven’t seen that side of the family for years. It will be so terrible for her to be on her own.
I am trying to cook for myself more as you suggested and am quite happily ‘looking after myself a bit more’ as you put it. The nights are drawing in now down here, and this will be the first frost tonight I think. There are still a lot of roses by the back door, ‘Ena Harkness’.
I am glad everything is going so well for you.
Goodnight, Father
Sunday
Are you lonely? You say that you’re not of course and I hope that it’s true. I certainly hope you’re not lonely, I hope you have people to look after you and to be close to you, as you get older you’ll understand this better though I expect you think it will never happen to you; I think it is a source of great sadness to see people grow old on their own. Sad and lonely. I bought one small tin of fish, a packet of bread and some milk and that cost me one pound thirty pence. I had an apple in the basket but I had to leave it, it was so embarrassing. I am not sure you realise just how difficult it is to manage on your own. I am on my own a lot of the time now.
Dear Boy,
There was a wonderful gardening programme last night (Saturday), did you see it I wonder. I thought of you of course.
There was an orchard of fifteen or seventeen of the old varieties, all different, quince and roses together all round the door, and a marvellous copper beech at least one hundred and fifty years old they said. There was a guided tour where they explained it all for you. Those were the days for that kind of thing; of course there aren’t the men with those kinds of skills now, nor the plants, you just can’t find them. Still it was lovely to see it and to be allowed to share in it, marvellous really that it’s still there for us all to share. I often wish I had more of a garden of my own. Something at least to look out on not just the television when I am here on my own so much.
‘Father’
(In all of these letters this man never asked Boy to visit him or suggested that he come and stay with Boy, not even at Christmas.)
They quickly got the flat furnished. The wedding was the last time that Mother was seen wearing the diamond; she got them a washing machine, a good bed, a fridge, a good television, the phone put in and a cooker. Her wedding gift to them, besides all these practical things, was a bedspread, a great scarlet and gold bedspread in real antique nineteenth-century, Venetian-style velvet brocade. Jewels need a setting, she said. You two stretched out on that will look, well… perfect. She set them up; I don’t know how she managed to get them into a flat so quickly, it wasn’t easy to do that then. And it was quite big too. Mother said, You need several rooms to love someone properly.
They painted everything white, so that the flat just had white walls and all these expensive appliances (Mother had bought stuff that was the best quality and would last. I wonder now, looking back, if she was already planning to leave, to leave all this behind in good running order, knowing they were provided for), it really did look like a show flat or a flat in an advert, or as if they were playing house. The model couple in the model flat, Boy at home all day with the appliances and O out to work.
They would come into The Bar splashed with paint from the decorating, grinning. Mother would say, We’re all here (she indicated her well-populated kingdom with a small, ritualised gesture of her beringed right hand, a gesture which indicated I am waving), any time you need our help, just call, we’re all here.
And again when they were leaving she placed her hand on O’s arm and looked at him and quietly said, Remember, Mother’s here, pick up the phone.
But they never called us for help with the decorating or indeed with anything.
O had mostly books, records and his own collection of films on video, and Boy had just his shoebox and his packing case full of letters; that was all they brought to their new home from their respective old ones.
Boy had told O about the letters, but it was only now that they lived together that O realised just how often they came; they started arriving at the new address the morning after the wedding. Sometimes they would come every day for a week; quite often there would be two or three letters in the same post. The envelopes were all re-used ones that had been torn open, readdressed and sealed with sellotape. When a letter arrived Boy would read it at once, and O noticed that he was always quiet for a bit then.
O had already talked to Mother about them, upstairs in her room, while she’d been putting her hair up in the oval mirror, with Billie and Bessie staring over her shoulder.
‘What do you think I should do then?’
‘You’re asking me for advice on how to keep a young man?’
I was wondering if I should try and stop them. I was thinking I could just stop them. Boy would probably be glad and not even talk about it. I could get up first and get them off the postman, or I could write to this Father and tell him to stop them.’
‘Darling,’ said Mother, twisting the last coil of hair up onto her head and taking a silver pin from the cut-glass vanity tray on the dressing table, ‘this so-called “Father” sounds like he would be quite capable of wrapping his next letter around a brick and delivering it personally. So long as he stays several postal districts or, better still, several counties away, so much the better. Listen to Mother; these Fathers are low-down and miserable fuckers to a man.’
There was a pause, and then O said what he had really wanted to say: ‘I don’t think he really can be his father.’
Mother did her lips. Then her eyebrows. When she was perfect, she looked at O in the mirror and said to him: ‘So if you want it to stop then fight him over it. All you have to do is imagine that the man who’s writing your Boy these letters is twenty-eight and gorgeous and I’m sure you’ll know exactly what to do about it. Get drunk again if you have to … After all,’ she said, as she adjusted the final silver pin, pushing it further in, ‘you’ve got everything to lose.’
Dear Boy,
I am as comfortable as I can be I suppose under the circumstances but sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be better if I was gone. I don’t mean the pain – Lord knows I am used to that by now and well able to stand it. But every time I turn on the television, all those men, well, it seems to me that I understand you people less and less, though as you know I do try. It seems to me there is no respect and no attempt to look after anything properly. Litter, divorce, strike, strike, divorce, litter; litter all over the lawns as I look out of my window and blowing into the flowerbeds, that’s all there is, and you know how much I like to still try and keep the garden in good shape.
Careless, that’s what I think when I see it all carrying on. Why don’t people care any more? After the war we all had such a clear sense that we were all working for something, trying to build something if you like, and when people got married then or got jobs it was for ever, you just tried to make a go of it. That’s it, people tried, they made a go of things, they stuck to it. Why can’t you do that? Why can’t you? Take a little pride in your own life. People used to really look after each other then you know.
I do try as you know to understand but it does upset me when I see people living how they do these days. It upsets me to think of you living like that. Forgive me for going on like this but I am your
‘Father’
P.S. It is still very warm down here, the bean flowers are still out which is extraordinary for this time of year. Sweet pea and honeysuckle, lovely.
This letter made Boy so angry that he stayed silent all day after reading it. Since Boy never replied to these letters, he had no real reason to expect that they would ever refer to O or congratulate him on his new life with O, or even mention it, how could they; the man who wrote them knew nothing of all that, nothing. But still Boy was angry, white with anger.
It was a mid-week evening, and when O got home Boy didn’t speak all the way through the dinner which he had prepared for them. At nine o’clock he got up and went to his cupboard in the bedroom and got out his shoebox and packing case and two bin liners (for the packing case had been full for some time now and Boy had started to keep the letters just in bin liners, there were so many of them). He brought them into the living room and he emptied them in a heap on the living-room floor in front of O and turned off the television. It was as if he was setting O a herculean version of the task which he set himself on the nights when he used to lay out his letters in a circle around his bed; to sort the papers into some sort of order, some sort of sense, some story. Except that now the collection of letters had grown from a small, precious, personal collection into what looked more like a heap of wastepaper, a litter, a waste and confusion of paper.
