Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, page 4
Although they were all very different (Boy spent a lot of time noticing the differences in their physiques, techniques, cars and living rooms), they were also all the same in one respect. Boy only ever went home with older men, men older than himself, men who had stories and careers and sometimes even families and children of their own. I’m always giving myself away, that was how he thought of it. Sometimes he thought that he needed to feel like a woman, a younger woman or at least The Other Woman; certainly he needed to feel like The Young Man. He especially liked to be taken to the home of a couple, to sleep securely between them if they’d let him, and then in the morning to ask them questions about their house, about the furniture which they’d chosen together. He was still amazed and fascinated by the fact of two men being together at all; he was almost overwhelmed by the idea of two men actually living together. He never ever thought that he might live in one of these houses; he always cast himself as the honoured young guest.
Only once in this period did he sleep with someone of his age, and on this occasion he chose someone who looked almost exactly like himself. On that night he watched himself in the mirror all night, and for the very first time he was the one who asked for things and who made things happen in the order that he wanted them to. He made his partner change roles and positions constantly, every few minutes, until they hardly knew which body was which, which was giving and which was taking. That night, because he could see himself, Boy thought about himself all night long.
In all of this Boy was trying very hard, so very hard that it was touching to watch. We all talked about him, of course; his name was now ‘The New Boy’, So how was The New Boy? we’d say. Sometimes we would even just refer to him as ‘The New’. Whenever he was shown a new sexual technique, he would use it the very next night on his new partner. Whenever a man smiled at him he smiled right back. If someone touched him from behind on a crowded Saturday night he would push himself back onto the anonymous hand, just like a cat would, without turning round to see who it was. And when he began to have the confidence to talk to us, he would have long discussions with people about films which he had never actually seen, but which he could pretend to have seen, since he made a point of reading all the reviews of the new films and musicals when he found out that that was what people liked to talk about on first meetings. You could say that he was doing all of this so that he’d end up behaving like one of us. He even began to sing along quietly when Gary played. He wanted so much to be one of us, you see. (Boy would never, of course, have used the word us at this time. And there’s lots of men won’t use the word us, still.) And of course sometimes during this apprenticeship Boy knew that what he really wanted was not to be taught to be one of us, not to be taught how to be a man at all, but to be reassured that he might somehow remain a boy forever. When he realised that arriving at The Bar meant he was still only just at the start of his wanderings or journey, he ached some nights to be told that he need go no farther than this.
One night (this was in the second week after he had arrived, and about nine or ten weeks before The Romance really began) the man who had driven him away from the Bar had done so in a big, warm, expensive, deep-seated car. He had played classical music on the stereo, which Boy had assured him he liked, and it was true; Boy had never heard music like this before and he thought it was wonderful, a sound as big, and as warm, and as expensive as the car; a sound as exciting as the sensation of being driven through the night by a stranger. It was a starry night that night, and by leaning against the cold window Boy could see the stars, not the stars of The Bar ceiling now, but the real ones. The man said: ‘I live a long way out of town,’ and Boy said, as he always said: ‘That’s alright.’
Soon they were driving almost through countryside, there were no street lamps any more; and Boy suddenly found himself saying, Stop the car. The man pulled the car into the long, wet grass by the roadside. He turned the lights and the music off, and because there was no other traffic on the almost-country road at three in the morning, there was complete silence. Boy wound down the window so that he could see the stars better, and then he made the man kiss him, right there.
Then they drove on, freezing, because Boy kept his window down so that he could see the stars. He tipped his seat back and zipped his jacket right up and he asked for the music to go on again, and he lay there in the dark with the music on, feeling warm in the middle of the freezing night, and he could feel himself smiling.
I want to be like this, he thought. I want to be like that… I want to be this, I want to be that. I want to be rich and handsome. I want to be a rich young man, if wealth is what it takes to buy this feeling; a young lord leaving the city after a night of riot … I want to be nineteen for ever. I want never to arrive. I want the dawn never to come. I want the stars never to fade. I want to have this man drive me in his car all night long, for us never to arrive anywhere … but if we should, then let the gates swing silently open, let there be a long gravel drive, let it be like when the young master comes home from school. Let the man lift me from the car still asleep and wrapped in a tartan blanket, let him lift me and carry me up the stairs to my bed, let him gently say, ‘We’re here’ … let him lay me down to sleep. Let him kiss me when I’m half asleep, kiss me once, and then again, and again, as if half wanting to wake me. Let him take his chauffeur’s cap off very slowly and say softly to me, ‘Oh, sir, I don’t never want to work for anyone else, never’; let him kneel by the side of the great bed, in the moonlight, and let him lean over to kiss me gently on the lips and to run his leather-gloved hand tenderly across my cheek, across my lips, through my hair, saying all the time, ‘Oh, sir, I’m here, sir, I’m right here, I’m right here by the bed; was you calling me, sir, did you call me?’
It was nearly four in the morning by now, and Boy was ready to sleep; not exhausted, but content, knowing that the night was perfect just the way it was. And in fact they never made it to the man’s house in the country that night, because Boy made him stop the car twice more. The first time, he asked the man to make love to him right there in the car, not to take him home yet but to do it to him there in the car. They did it, very slowly and tenderly, and then drove on again; and then Boy made him stop the second time, in a layby with the first lorry headlights going past, and the man took Boy’s cock in his mouth again, and masturbated Boy again so that he came a second time, and then they drove again. And by then it was nearly dawn, and this time, the fourth time, the man stopped the car without Boy saying anything. He just stopped the car on the top of a small hill, for they were right out in the country now. And they sat in the car with the windows down in the freezing dawn and they watched the distant city lights going out under the dawn at five in the morning, they sat there for a full half hour, looking, and thinking how beautiful the city looked at this time and at this distance … All the shame, the desertions, the exposures of their life there (this is what the man was thinking of as he sat silent by Boy’s side), all the slow hours and cruel thoughts and disappointments of the night.
And this half hour of sweet silence was the greatest pleasure that night, it was its crowning moment (Boy thought, this is as good as coming together), the precious moment from which Boy was to go home exhausted and almost jaded with pleasure, the moment to which all the overtures of the night had led.
When it was fully light the man said: ‘It’s no good, I have to go to work soon. Can I just drop you off?’
And so he drove Boy back to where he lived. They got there at half-past six in the morning. The man stopped the car for the fifth and last time, and there, right outside where Boy lived, they kissed, passionately, scandalously, because by now people were up and there was traffic passing, the first buses and freight lorries on the Commercial Road; people could have seen them. They said goodbye to each other and promised not to ignore each other the next time they met.
And when Boy got home to his bed he was too tired to sleep or to speak. He loved this end-of-the-night sensation of hardly being able to think, just feel. He slowly took off his clothes and the smell of the night with them, and stood there naked in the morning light by his bedroom window, and he smiled. Smiled to himself and just for himself. Boy thought that this had been in some ways the perfect night, the best that he had ever had since he’d arrived at The Bar. You see, sometimes Boy, like all of us, sometimes Boy just wanted to be taken care of without having done anything to deserve it. The way that sons always are, they way they always expect to be taken care of.
The bed that Boy climbed into that morning, knowing that he wouldn’t sleep, but wanting just to lie there a while, was on the twentieth floor of a council block right close by the river on the east side of the city. When he’d first arrived he had lived in a succession of bedsitting rooms on the west side, for which he had been charged extortionate rents by landlords who he never met; the third night after coming to The Bar for the first time he had slept with someone who knew of someone who had a spare room at a much more reasonable price, and Boy had moved in. The rent on this new place, like the rent on all the places he’d lived in since he arrived in the city, was paid for by the Social Security. And apart from that rent Boy hardly had any money. That was why he had walked everywhere on his early journeys; and now it was the main reason why he was so happy to eat the food which men prepared for him either before or after they had sex, to sit at their dining-room tables. He himself lived off fruit with sugar, yoghurt, cereals, eggs, instant coffee, and he often ate toast three times a day. So you see he was very happy, very flattered to be bought drinks in The Bar, and this life with hardly any money at all was why listening to other people’s classical music on their expensive sound systems was a real and true idea of luxury to him.
Because it was on the twentieth floor, the flat had an amazing daytime view of the great and glittering river; by night, it was the great towers of the financial district to the west that glittered.
Boy would sometimes sit staring at this view with a guide to the city open on his lap. He’d use it to identify and locate all the landmarks which he had stared up at during his exhausting explorations, now seen from a very different perspective; he knew the names of all the streets where the distant, anonymous towers of the banks and finance companies were sited, having worn himself out many times by walking along them, fascinated by the scenes glimpsed behind their mirrored, darkened or tinted glass windows and walls. Now he’d sit and stare at those same walls made transparent by all the lights left on at night. From his local library he got photocopies of the maps of his district for 1811, 1843 and 1871; he’d sit there and try to work out how the changes in the maps related to the view at night; where the darkness of rookeries, courts and tenements had been replaced with the darkness of lampless parks and public gardens. He worked out where The Bar was on his maps, and then checked this perspective against the actual view – from where he saw the city it looked like The Bar was right in the middle of it, not hidden away at all like it was on the map. He also got a copy of the underground railway map, and tried to trace that invisible geography over what he could actually see; he would even try and trace the map of the flightpaths of aeroplanes over the city, deciding which direction indicated which distant country. Boy thought he would like to see the city under heavy snow; then it would look like a real map, all in black and white, the river a thick black ribbon, or, if frozen as he knew it had once been, a clean white ribbon, the only space in the city without streets, names, lights or indeed owners.
The man who actually had the lease or paid the rent anyway on this flat was a man who worked sorting for the Post Office. Boy was his lodger, I suppose.
Boy, as I said, lived during the days on sugar, yoghurts, instant coffee and toast; then every evening the man would cook up a big casserole, one big casserole filled with fish and lots of potatoes, tinned sweetcorn, something like that, and they would eat that together in the kitchen every night at seven o’clock, before the man went off to work – he worked nights, you see. The other time that they used to sit down together was for a cup of tea or coffee at six in the morning, which was when the man got home, and often as not that was when Boy got home too. They’d sit in the kitchen with a pot of tea just after dawn, their very different labours finishing just as the rest of the city was going to work. Boy used to think, I suppose we both work nights, really, it’s no wonder we’re as tired as each other, we’ve been up working all night. Then the man would go to bed for the day, and Boy would stay up, dozing but mostly watching the television. The fact that he lived with someone who slept by day, and the fact that his own life, centred around The Bar, was more or less nocturnal, made it seem quite normal to Boy to always consider the life of the city around him from the perspective of the night. He never felt that he quite belonged to the life of the daylight hours.
This man Boy lived with went swimming every other day, kept the greying hair on his body clipped short with an electric razor, made a long phone call to a lover in another city every weekend, and kept a photograph of this lover visible in every room of the flat, even the bathroom, so that he was never out of his sight. Of course Boy had seen inside a lot of different men’s houses, but this was the first man’s life he had ever watched at such close quarters, the first time he had ever seen a man taking care of himself, the first time he had ever seen another man living day after day after day.
During the days, while the man slept, Boy would sleep a little himself, in a chair, in preparation for his nights at The Bar; but mostly he would stare out of the window at the city, or stare at the television. This sounds like an idle life, I know, but these long hours of staring were no more idle than Boy’s long journeys around the city on foot had been aimless. Boy looked through the glass of the living-room window, or at the glass of the television screen, with the same fierce attention that he had stared through the shop windows. If you had asked him, I suppose that he would not have been able to give a very convincing answer as to why he was walking, or looking, or watching in such an apparently random and obsessive fashion. He might have been tempted to say, It’s sort of a job by which he meant, it’s something that I have to do. The one thing he would never have said was I’m looking for someone.
None of the television which Boy watched for so many hours made sense in a conventional way, because he watched television as if it was one continuous programme. He watched a disgraced politician’s confession on a Wednesday; on the Thursday a party broadcast made no reference to his disgrace, but was followed on the news that night by edited highlights of his arrest. In the middle of this, Boy switched to a documentary made by a group of prostitutes which showed married men sitting nervously on the edges of beds in hotel rooms, sitting on neatly flowered bedspreads and having difficulty (they were embarrassed by the female camera crew) saying exactly what it was that they wanted to do for their thirty pounds. One man just sat there in silence, looking at the camera, grinning and folding and refolding his six fivers. Then Boy cut to a black and white film in which a good man comes back from the war in uniform and finds his wife hostessing a party in black satin with orchids, and he throws out her gin-drinking friends, and she says to them, laughing but then not laughing at all, My husband would like to be alone with me. He probably wants to hit me again. And then Boy cut back to the man on the bed, who was saying (actually it was a different man in a different room, Boy realised; the sofa and the quilted nylon counterpane were in a different colour in this room, though the man sitting there looked just like the last one), the man was saying I like your shoes, please take off your shoes; and Boy cut backwards and forwards between this man and the politician beginning to lose his self-control and saying I would just ask people to forgive me really and to forgive my wife as well. Boy watched all of this as if he was seeing fragments of one continuous and baffling programme.
He would sit there all day doing this, sleeping sometimes in his chair but never turning off, trying to make all these pieces of television fit together in some way. Sometimes the effort overwhelmed him and he failed and gave up. Watching the final scenes of Jean Harlow’s last film, the one shot after she had died, defeated him in this way. In these scenes an unknown actress, impersonating Harlow’s voice, speaks the lines with her back to the camera or with her face hidden by a wide-brimmed hat; at the sight of this, Boy simply got up and left the living room, left the end of the film unwatched and just sat in the kitchen with a pot of tea. Why, he thought, had they been unable to abandon the film, to leave it without an ending, as a memorial to her death? Why hadn’t they just put a notice up on the screen halfway through the scene she was shooting when she died, saying This has to stop somewhere? Why did the story have to be finished in such a bizarre way – Boy was suddenly overwhelmed with the thought of things never being allowed to end. The idea that one person was interchangeable with another suddenly appalled him. But he did not admit defeat to the extent of turning the television off; he simply left it on and went into another room.
The man used to say to him sometimes, when he saw him sat in front of the screen: ‘I don’t know how you can watch it like that. How can you concentrate?’
And Boy would say: ‘I can’t, that’s the reason; I can’t concentrate. That’s a good reason to practise, isn’t it?’
Sometimes, over their early morning cup of tea, Boy would tell the man about what he had watched, in the way that people often like to describe the highlights of their working day once they get back home to their partner. One morning he said (the man didn’t talk much during these early morning cups of tea, he was too tired, but he was happy to listen): ‘I watched a whole film through earlier, it was really good. There was this scene right at the end where the woman lights a cigarette after she’s left the gas on the cooker on and everything goes up in an explosion; and then in the very next advert there was a car driving through a field, and the whole field went up in a sheet of flame. And now every time I see an advert, or just anything, I expect things to explode.’
