The Folding Star (47 page)

When we came to a wide bridge he jumped on to the wall, and walked hastily along its coping, arms stretched for balance. I’d seen younger kids doing it before, here and there, and wondered if I would jump into the icy water to save them if they slipped. The wall was broad enough, but I heard the scrape of his jeans as he set one foot directly in front of the other. How strong and beautiful his white legs were in the glare of an old rococo lamp with wrought-iron shells and other reminders of the not-so-distant sea. I didn’t know, but I thought he’d probably never ‘taken someone home’, the walk wasn’t crowded for him with curious precedents, it wasn’t the mock pick-up it was for me. I leant at the bridge’s apex; there was a hint of mist on the still canal. Then he came trotting back and steadied himself for an instant with a hand on the top of my head.

I was mentally searching my room, noticing things as a newcomer might. It was bleak and barely furnished – a loft, a fashionable space, Luc might think, and feel at home there, unaware of his own clothes lying newly laundered in the cupboards. I felt secure about that, I kept all the Luciana tidied away from Cherif – in fact the past two weeks had turned me into a humourless char, putting everything straight at once where Cherif had made himself at home. I wondered if the room was going to smell.

When we approached the house Luc fell back, as though having second thoughts, or thrown into a reverie by the sight of the white façade. I opened the wicket and looked round and after a moment he jogged up to me with a smile that seemed to deny his hesitation. ‘What a quite obscure place, Edward,’ he exclaimed. There was something camp, mischievous, about him that I hadn’t heard before; I hurried through into the yard with my face fixed and tormented. Of course he’d been drinking. It occurred to me he might be deliberately teasing me and tempting me into some bungled assault – I wasn’t sure I could carry on being pally like this any longer, without at last defying the force around him, like some enchantment in
The Magic Flute
, that froze my intentions in mid-air and padlocked my tongue. ‘Is
that
where you live?’ he said, looking up at the square of the Spanish girls’ window. I caught a strand of music and laughter.

He sprang lightly up the stairs behind me and stood with his hands in his jerkin pockets as I groped for the key. I was distinctly paranoid, I thought there was something quite
plain clothes
about him, almost leaning on me, sceptical, observant. Then I remembered he was only a teenager, and that he never noticed the same things as I did, certainly never noticed
me
. I flicked on the light and bustled obstructively round the room – just checking.

Luc ambled over to the window and peered into the dark; the room itself seemed to pass him by. I didn’t know what to say, my mouth was dry, my mind milling and jamming as if I had to deliver an important speech without notes. I watched him covertly, thinking he could see my reflection in the glass. But he pressed his hands around his face: his eyes were working on something farther off. ‘It’s my old school,’ he said, in a tone of puzzled recall. ‘Did you know you could see St Narcissus from here, Edward?’

‘Of course. I’m always being interrupted by the bells and boys pissing out of the window.’

‘Oh, you have to do that,’ he said abstractedly, straining to make out the dark gables against the sky. ‘That used to be my classroom. That big window on the second floor.’

But I stayed where I was, in the middle of the room, my hand in my pocket holding my cock, looking at his backside and his broad hunched shoulders. I was haunted by potential moves tonight – it was like trustless stoned nights at Cambridge, when I never knew if I’d just said something or was still planning to say it. I saw a phantom me, in the jerky, melting moves of a time-lapse film, going over to him, slipping an arm round his shoulder, hugging him and kissing him. I saw him turning with a raised hand, it could have been to hit or to … caress.

‘You know, I’m trying to work this out. I’ve looked at this house, well, quite often. I never saw anything, and I used to wonder to myself what it was. You must imagine, in a very boring lesson. Of course, not like nowadays!’ He turned with a grin. ‘It’s all so long ago.’

‘Now, do you want some coffee?’ I said. It was the thing you were always asked back for at university, if not for a smoke. I’d spent a hundred long nights on the edge of sleep, worried and exhausted by coffee. ‘Or a drink?’ I thought he probably shouldn’t have any more.

‘Oh, drink, drink, drink,’ he said, swinging back towards me, knowingly reckless. He picked up Cherif’s cap from the table and perched it on his blond stack, a bit at a loss without a mirror. ‘Not exactly one,’ he tooted.

‘Nor one.’ I went for the secret brandy, and was quite relieved to see most of it had gone. I was full of troubling punctilio, I thought I might be struck off for getting a pupil drunk. I remembered why Luc was here and not in the darkened school across the canal: the night on the ship, whisky and cards and who knew what else – we’d never talked about it. It came up in my dreams, a low scene lit like a Caravaggio by a single bolt of life-changing light. And did they fuck you? I needed the brandy. I was queasy from the sea-heave of lust.

I busied myself self-consciously with the tumblers, switched on the blow-heater – not that I felt cold. Luc dropped into the big armchair and sprawled, pulling the printed cotton throw off the bursting plush of the back and tipping Cherif’s cap forward over his eyes. For the first time since St Ernest I had a sense of his balls, held and slumped astride the seam of his jeans. I saw my phantom self kneeling and licking at the stretched cloth till it was soaked.

‘Who was that very boring and awful old guy at the bar?’ he said, taking an eager drink, his eyes rounding at the burn of it.

‘Which particular boring and awful … as we left, you mean?’ It had been Harold, pushing in critically amid spouts of pipe-smoke, seeing me snatching this delicious kid away when only the other day he had been envying me Cherif. I settled on the desk-chair opposite and started to tell Luc his story; it presented itself as a subject. Harold lived with Andy, a Filipino boy, a boy in his early forties, that is, whom you hardly ever saw. It was a sad affair – Harold had rescued him from service in Brussels, where he worked without a visa for a sadistic businessman. He was trapped all day in a big apartment-block with alarms. The only times he went out were to drive the businessman in his Mercedes, sometimes to pick him up late at night, when the businessman would abuse him or be sick in the car. He forced himself on Andy and made him cry and spanked him for hours until he bled.

I thought, why am I telling Luc this? But I’d never seen him pay such attention. Forget Wordsworth and the stolen boat. He swallowed more brandy. I went on to how Harold used to work in security on the building; he used to see Andy in the underground car-park vacking the sick out of the Merc. He took a shine to him. After a while Andy confided in him, and somehow they started to have an affair – they used the flat, it was all very easy. Harold was by all accounts a monstrous bore even then, but his kindness was a new thing for little Andy. Then one day the businessman found them together. It turned out he’d known about it for a long time. According to Harold he’d been videoing them at it for months. But he’d started to get jealous. He immediately arranged for Harold to be moved elsewhere, but that very night Harold and Andy eloped.

‘My god!’ laughed Luc, with the rough cold-end catch in his voice.

‘The awful thing is that the whole situation has kind of reproduced itself. Andy stays at home while Harold goes out and smokes his pipe and eyes up young men. He says it’s because Andy’s still afraid to be caught, that the businessman is still after him. But that was years ago. I gather the truth is that Andy’s kept home by force, he has to do the housework in the nude, he’s actually tied up naked while Harold’s out and about. But he’s still devoted to Harold because he rescued him, and looks after him.’ I was inventing rather freely in the latter part of this.

‘Maybe it’s time someone rescued him again,’ said Luc carelessly.

‘I don’t think it’s very likely.’ I remembered the one time I’d seen him – sallow and queeny, with a wandering rear-end. ‘Harold’s at that time of life when he’s terrified of not being young – he hasn’t noticed young people don’t have cravats or tuck their shirts into their underpants, he’s always very pushy about not being pushed out.’

Luc was quite amused by this, he liked to show himself unshocked, and not being young was a lifetime away. He smiled self-confidently, sexily from under Cherif’s tweedy peak. I blinked away the hint of parody. I thought I’d give him a minute or two and then firmly throw him out, with a quick cheek-kiss at the top of the stairs. Then I’d go into the bedroom and in some way break down. Already I felt an agony of regret rising inside me.

‘I’m afraid it’s gentlemen’s again,’ he said, groping for the floor with his drink and surging out of the chair. I showed him where and he went in and slammed the door as if I might want to help. I came back into the room so as not to torture myself with hearing.

When he reappeared he had the stricken jokey look of someone battling with tension or the unsaid. He didn’t meet my eye. I thought of the unfinished confessions of earlier, and how I didn’t want to know more. He threw off the cap with a breathy laugh, wandered to where I was standing and put his arms round me in a loose hug.

‘Bye, my dear,’ I said. It was a lovely gesture, but I almost wished he hadn’t. My head in the crook of his arm, his head on my shoulder, face hidden from me. I raised a hand and ran it lightly, sorrowfully over his suede back. He seemed to want to draw it out, there was a charge of emotion I hadn’t allowed for. I felt him press himself against me, nuzzle his chin more snugly at my collar in a final clinch, let out a mumbled sigh. I supposed he must know everything, it was his clumsy way of saying sorry, a rugger-faggoty brush-off from which I would have to break free any second. I felt his lips pressing, lifting, pressing on my neck.

I tried to say ‘Luc’, it was just a swallow, a bubble. There was a shriek of laughter through the wall, a spasm of gabbling, the knock of some dropped object shaking the floor.

‘What was that?’ whispered Luc, chuckling, not nervous, standing back, but still holding me, putting both arms more comfortably round my neck, as I stood there, clutching him feebly, with little terrified sighs. He leant his forehead against mine, he was open-mouthed, too close to see. Slowly I shifted, power ran back into my arms – it was as if something had come into the room or something had gone out. We started to kiss.

Luc was asleep. I lay propped up beside him, thinking of later days in our affair, unguessed afternoons of sex, drives beside long canals, his cock curving out of his fly in the car, high-summer lulls when we lay like soldiers under Flanders willows and poplars, shirts off, watching clouds drift in the canal, his crude, obsessive demands.

I tiptoed out for a drink of water and came back gulping from the glass like a child. I thought he might have vanished, it seemed foolish to let him out of my sight; but there he was, a goldish blur. I half-stumbled on his clothes, and crouched to rifle them – but what did they matter when the boy himself was here? I found every fear answered and calmed by that luminous fact. He was lying in my bed, naked, sleeping – flat out. It was a triumph. Tears slipped down my face, I didn’t really know why – it felt like gratitude, but also they were the tears that register some deep displacement, a bereavement sending up its sudden choking wave. It struck me I must be mourning everything that came before – it was the desolate undertow of success.

When we had started to kiss it was what I wanted, he was warm and strong, our cocks, lying opposite ways in our jeans, rubbed and jolted off each other, we were going to fuck, but for a long while I just held him there in a hard, shocked grip. His tongue pushed into my mouth but I blocked it with my own: I felt my tongue was the tip of some passionate organ that was rooted deep inside me, so densely coiled, so fiercely self-involved, so hardened to its own darkness and starvation that it reacted with a spasm of bewilderment to the free gift of what it craved. He lifted off my glasses and looked at me as if he found me drolly beautiful. I brushed and moulded his face and neck with incredulous fingers, kissed his eyelids, his long nose, the soft burden of his upper lip. He was squeezing my cock already and still I thought I would be mad to let this happen. I thought once I started I would stifle him, frighten him with my dreadful unconditional needs. He would break away with a sickened laugh.

I was reckoning without his own madness. Of course it wasn’t just mischief, he wasn’t trying to trap me: he wanted fun, experience, anything wild – either you did it with him or you didn’t. Somewhere out there was the person he loved, a boy or a girl, but for now he was making do; I felt I was getting the benefit of some stored-up passion intended for someone else, but brimming and spilling; and maybe he liked the switch of power in seducing an older man. It struck me it might even be a kink of his, that he’d done it before – there was the dream I’d had about him and Matt … I started pulling off his clothes in a turmoil of jealousy and pride.

Luc naked – apart from his white briefs. His hard cock had a vein in it so thick that it showed in contour through the stretched cotton. I turned him round in my hands, kissed the back of his neck, stood away from him a moment as I undid my cuffs, glancing down at his legs, where the summer tan-lines still palely showed. I thought, I mustn’t say I love you, though they were the only words I had in my head. He looked back, swung slowly round, swallowing, wondering; there was a mastered shyness in his face, his movements had the seductive blur of drink, the sureness heightened by delay. He took my cock in his hand for a stroke or two, then hugged me again – I was kissing him adoringly, gasping a bit crazily as I worked at his mouth, confusing him; calming him too with my hands across his back, tranced arcs falling gently to his waistband – my fingers slid firmly under and he caught his breath as I furrowed through. He curled against me, then started pushing at his pants to get them down.