Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

I sat by him on the bed and drummed my fingers on his belly. ‘I’m surprised you let him in,’ I said, ‘after all the never going out.’

‘He just kept ringing the bell, man. I stuck me head out the lav window, and there was this little nipper. He must a rung the bell ten times, fifteen times. So I thought, no ’arm in a little kid. So I went down. Very sure of ’imself, he was, come up ’ere, asked me who I was and that. Just a friend of Will’s, I said.’ He looked up into my eyes. ‘Anyway you come back after a bit.’

‘How’s your face feeling?’ I asked. ‘James says he’ll come tomorrow and take the stitches out-just the ends, apparently, and the rest all dissolves.’

‘Not too bad.’

I ran my hands over his soft half-open mauve lips. His tongue slid up and licked my fingers. I had certainly never fallen in love more inconveniently, and more and more I wanted it to end. Even when he spoke, in his basic, unimaginative way, I felt almost sick with desire and compassion for him. Indeed, the fact that he had not mastered speech, that he laboured towards saying the simplest things, that his vocal expressions were prompted only by the strength of his feelings, unlike the camp, exploitative, ironical control of my own speech, made me want him more.

Loving him was all interpretation, creative in its way. We barely used language at all to communicate: he sulked and thought I was putting him down if I made complicated remarks, and sometimes I felt numb at the compromise and self-suppression I submitted to. Yet beyond that it was all guesswork; we were thinking for two. The darkened air of the flat was full of the hints we made. The stupidity and the resentment were dreadful at times. But then in sex he lost his awkwardness. He showed his capacity to change as I rambled over him now with my fingertips and watched him glow and gulp with desire; his clothes seemed to shrivel off him and he lay there making his naked claim for the only certainty in his life. It wasn’t something learnt, I suspected, from the guys before me who’d picked him up and fucked him and fucked him around. It was a kind of gift for giving, and while he did whatever I wanted it emerged as the most important thing there was for him. It was all the harder, then, when the resentment returned and I longed for him to go.

After James had taken out Arthur’s stitches we took the Tube to the Corry together, leaving Arthur to do-whatever he did when I wasn’t there.

‘He watches telly most of the time, I think,’ I said.

‘Does he read or anything?’ James wanted to know.

‘He once asked me to buy him some War Picture Library comics, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it in our local newsagents.’

‘I can see it would sort ill with Apollo, Tatler and GQ -but I expect newsagents get used to the strangest combinations of taste. They have to look on patiently while kids thumb through Men Only and Penthouse and end up buying the Beano and the Bucks Fizz fan mag. I saw someone the other day buy the Spanking Times and the Amateur Yachtsman , for instance…’

‘That’s not so odd-and isn’t a spanker some sort of rope or something?’

‘A sail, I believe-as in the limerick which ends “haul up the top sheet and spanker”.’

The train moved a few yards out of Queensway station and then stopped abruptly. ‘Could you ever get into spanking?’ James asked in the selfconscious silence that ensued. I was obliged to live up to it.

‘Not in a serious way. I put our young friend over my knee from time to time, but…’ In fact, drunk one night and recalling an evening when I had been picked up by a Polish workman who got me to whip his ass with his thick leather belt, I had made Arthur half kneel, half lie over the corner of the bed and given him several strokes of my old webbing corps-belt from school. I knew he would have let me go on, but excited though I was I dropped it.

‘I just can’t see the point of it,’ complained James. ‘Does Arthur actually like it?’

‘I think he does rather. I mean it gives him a hard-on, and all that.’ The man beyond James looked up in a bothered way as the train started again. With James I often reverted to the flaunted deviancy we practised at Oxford, queening along the Cornmarket among the common people (as we more or less ironically called them), passing archly audible comments on boys from the town who took our fancy: ‘Quite go for that’, ‘Don’t think much of yours, dear’, ‘Get the buns on that’. James had worked up a cult of an overweight black youth, with a central gold tooth and a monstrous, lolling member.

‘What’s he really like?’ he asked, as we hammered into Lancaster Gate and the racket of the train spaced out and slowed. ‘I mean, is he a nice sort of person?’

‘He is, actually, very nice, I think.’ I felt entirely penned in by not being able to speak of all the things that made the set-up so strange, and which, depriving Arthur of initiative, made him a non-social being. ‘Very nice in bed, certainly.’

James and I both saw how crass this comment was. ‘But what happens when you go out? I assume you’ve tired of each other’s company sufficiently to go to the pub or the flicks or whatever.’

I longed to tell him, whom I could completely trust; but my trust to Arthur, enforced by the whole way I was living my life, had become an unbreakable code to me, that is to say a principle of honour as well as an enigma. I merely shrugged.

‘And that fight, for God’s sake.’

I shrugged again. Could he really believe the fight story? ‘It’s all pretty much a mystery to you, isn’t it?’ I said, both proud and pained at the unplanned and inexplicable way things stood. There was nothing I could adduce in evidence of Arthur’s charm. ‘Sometimes I just put my arms round his shoulder and burst into tears.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ was James’s comment.

At the Corry the mood was perverse. A few bull-necked mutants were hogging the weights, the room was crowded, and crossness was given voice to. Bradley was training for a contest the following week, and did so many presses that he lost count and, red-faced and shuddering, insisted on starting again. Others, who worked out for more trivial reasons, forced to stand around, lapsed from their normally passing and formal chat into extended conversations, like housewives with shopping waiting for a bus.

‘I know -well, that’s what she said.’

‘But have you seen her since?’

‘Only briefly, and then I couldn’t say anything, because of course you-know-who was in attendance.’

‘I really like her actually; from what I’ve seen of her, that is.’

It was the typical transsexual talk of the place, which had been confusing to me at first and which had thrown poor James into deep dejection when he innocently overheard a boy he had a crush on talking of his girlfriend. It was all a game, any man in the least attractive being dubbed a ‘she’ and only males too dire for such a conceit being left an unadorned ‘he’ or, occasionally, sinisterly, ‘mister’-as in the poisonous declaration ‘I trust you won’t be seeing Mister Elizabeth Arden again.’

‘You know that new girl behind the bar?’ one square-jawed athlete enquired of his bearded companion.

‘What, the blonde, you mean-no, she’s been there a while.’

‘ No , not her, no, the dark one with big tits.’

‘I’m not sure I’ve seen her. Nice, is she?’

It was conversation thrown out with a complex bravado, its artifice defiant as it was transparent. I half listened to it as I waited, and looked around at the dozens of bodies, squatting, lying, straining, muscles sliding to the surface in thick-veined upper arms, shoulders bending and pumping, the sturdiness of legs under pressure, the dark stains on singlets that adhered to the sweating channel of the back, the barely perceptible swing of cocks and balls in shorts and track-suits, with, permeating it all, the clank and thud of weights and the rank underarm essence of effort.