Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

Phil must have seen them far more often than I had, but he seemed content to stand and watch. Their mesmerising, impersonal play was a relief. Then first one, and then another, in three downward jumps, was switched off. A painful feeling of emptiness and ordinariness came over me. I turned ruefully to Phil, and looked him up and down for several seconds. As we walked on I wondered if I shouldn’t have used the moment to put an arm around him, even to kiss him.

As we crossed the road to the hotel, though we both became more tense, there was a perceptible shift of power: we were entering his territory. ‘We’d better go round the back,’ he said. ‘We’re not supposed to be out front when we’re off duty.’

‘No, sure,’ I said; then enquired, ‘When are you back on duty again?’ If it was any moment now, it would alter the whole imaginary campaign.

‘Oh, from midnight,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’m here. I don’t live here, you see, but when you’re on night duty they give you a room. I’m on nights all this month.’

‘I see. Where do you live normally?’ I had a hunger to know these facts and to read things into them.

‘Oh, up in Kentish Town. There’s a staff house there-it’s known as the Embassy. Because of all the foreign staff,’ he explained needlessly.

We went along by the huge Edwardian façade of the hotel, and I glanced nervously up at its convulsed top stages: balconies, bows, gables, turrets, executed in a sickly mixture of orange brick and dully shining beige faience. Then we cut down a narrow street that sheared at an angle across the corner of the hotel site and revealed the undecorated plainness of its back parts.

Phil pulled open a door with a window in it, and we penetrated into a horrible area of store-rooms, rumbling boilers and stacked wicker laundry-baskets. It was like the subterraneous parts of the worst schools we used to play matches against. There were frequent fire doors which closed the corridor into hot, brightly lit sections. When we climbed to the floor above, which was the main floor of the hotel, we were treading for a few yards on patterned hotel carpet, and there were brass wall-lamps and prints of eighteenth-century London. Then we were in the service area again.

We passed by the open door of a kind of rest-room: the curtains were drawn, and there was a semi-circle of once stylish wooden-armed easychairs, of the kind where the seat cushions collapse through the supporting rubber straps, and a television, in front of which a man in the hotel’s dark blue uniform was squatting. The air was dead with smoke and there were large, bar-room ashtrays on the floor, piled high with fag-ends.

‘Hi, Pino!’ said Phil. The man looked round; he had very curly dark hair, dull, handsome Spanish looks-about thirty years old.

‘Hey Phil! How you work this thing? Is not on.’ He slapped the sides of the cabinet with the palms of his hands, as though trying to revive a drunk. Then looking round again and seeing me, he got up.

‘Pino, this is Will. He’s just a friend of mine.’ We shook hands.

‘You a friend of Phil’s?’ he asked, as though to confirm what a good fellow I must be. ‘Phil is very nice boy. Is very very nice boy.’ He rocked about grinning and laughing at this, sliding a light punch at Phil’s chest and capering backwards. ‘Phil elp me this mornin with the bang.’ Though he was much Phil’s senior, he behaved like a child in his presence, and Phil, able at last to show me a place where he belonged, responded by showing how accustomed he was to this person I did not even know.

‘You helped him with the what?’ I asked.

‘The van. I’m teaching him to drive the hotel van. But you’re not much good, are you, Pino?’

Pino found this even more amusing. ‘He very nice boy,’ he repeated. It was hard to tell if he was crazy about him himself or merely recommending him to me. He sounded like someone trying to sell his sister to a tourist. ‘You have drink?’ he said.

I glanced hastily at Phil, and said ‘Oh, er-no thanks,’ while Phil himself said, ‘Yes, we’re going to have a drink upstairs.’

My heart sank at the prospect of sitting in some stuffy hotel bar with the boy I was in love with and an imbecile Spanish waiter; I thought for a second that Phil must have chickened out of our encounter, and grabbed at the Spaniard as a chaperon. But Pino was suddenly solemn, and extended his hand again.

‘Very nice to meet you, Weel,’ he proclaimed. We shook hands once more. ‘I go to watch Call my Bloff. ’ As we left he resumed his persuasion on the television. ‘You fockin, fockin thing!’ he went on amiably.

‘That’s where we watch television,’ Phil said when we were outside. He led me onto a staircase and we climbed right to the top, perhaps eight floors up. We took the stairs two at a time, and all the while I had this wonderful ass in my face; I had a hard-on by the time we reached the first floor. The attic corridor was hot and low-ceilinged, with dormer windows wide open and the traffic noise from far below nostalgically audible. Phil persuaded a key from the tight front pocket of his cords, and let us into a small bedroom. ‘This is it,’ he said.

The room was furnished with a single bed, a bedside cupboard with a lamp, and a low cheap dressing-table with a mirror in which, standing, one could see only the region of one’s crotch; there was also a chair and a curtained-off hanging cupboard. I closed the door behind me and we both put our bags on the floor, side by side. The tension was terrific, and I could hear the rapid shushing of my pulse in my ear. I knew everything was up to me.

‘Well…’ I began, but at the same moment he turned away towards the window; his face was stiff with embarrassment and fear. He stood there, looking out.

The mood of delay snagged me temporarily. ‘Do you often entertain people here?’ I asked, the words coming out with a quite sarcastic edge.

‘Oh-er, no,’ he replied, half turning his head but still shyly concealing his face. I took the three or four steps it required to cross the room and stand beside and slightly behind him. Outside, beyond where the light from our window fell, there was a deep inner well. The roof in which these rooms were built dropped steeply away, and facing us across the void were other similar dormers, unlit, their windows open into shadowy stillness. Above the roofline the sky was amorously transformed by the pink glare of the London dusk.

I put my arm around Phil’s shoulder. He immediately began talking. ‘We can go on the roof,’ he said. ‘During the day the staff sunbathe up there. There’s a really good view.’

Nothing was going to get done unless I took command. Lifting my other hand I gripped his jaw, turned his head towards me and kissed him. Slowly, clumsily, as if being brought back to life, he swivelled round, put his arms around me and then held me extremely tight. I had wanted to kiss him for such a long time that I clung on, forcing my long, pointed tongue to the back of his throat; pulling out and biting his lips till I tasted the blood on my tongue. He was powerless and amazed. When I drew my head back a string of saliva swung between our mouths and I wiped it brutally from his chin. He had gone a deep, searching red.

I tugged out the bottom of his T-shirt and slid it up over his rhythmic stomach. The T-shirt was very tight, so I only pushed it into a roll under his armpits and stretched across his hard, jutting tits; I twisted his nipples between my thumb and forefinger and then, holding his eyes with a passionate stare that at once felt almost cruel, I grabbed at his crotch, fumbled and tore open his fly, and pulled down his trousers and underpants to his knees. Through all this he stood, arms away from his sides, impassive, like a child in a doctor’s surgery, or someone being measured for a suit. He made no gesture towards me, except by a curious, serious facial expression: this was what he’d heard about, this was what he wanted us to do.