Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

It was faintly incredible too to have this oldest of pick-up questions put to me, though I suppose all techniques have their freshness and wit when one is very young. I span round with a welcoming grin. ‘No, sorry,’ I said.

He met my smile with a shy blue gaze. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘I ain’t got no fags.’

This could have been a calculated snub, expressed in the strange symbolic style of the streets. Still, I kept on grinning, to show I didn’t mind, and so perhaps to stir his worse contempt. He looked away, and I took in his appearance: tight old jeans, a blue T-shirt with a horizontal pink stripe running under the arms, baseball boots; a slender build, a roundish face touched with acne about the mouth, heavy dark blond hair, naturally oily, swinging forward like that of a Sixties model. I scuffed around in the dry, unmown grass beside him, my cock lurching into a hard-on which he could hardly fail to notice. His own genitals were pinched up tight in the crotch of his jeans, and he squeezed the swelling outline of his cock with the palm of his hand.

‘Live round ’ere, do you?’ he said, squinting up at me provocatively and sarcastically. I smiled again and shook my head. ‘Thought not,’ he said, looking away and snapping the stick up now in his hands. My uneasy imagination saw in this some covert allusion to ‘faggot’. Still, I was determined to have him. It was partly the insolent way he sat and spoke, his overvaluing of his own charms itself making him more sexy. But it was also his youth, and the boredom and randiness of the mid-teens, that got me going. It brought back to me the time, like the erotomaniac nights and days that Charles evoked in his diary, when life was all hanging about and fantasy. It was the mood of long car journeys through France with my mother map-reading for my father, whilst Philippa and I fought or slept in the back seat and I dreamt of men. Then we would arrive at some cathedral town and I would climb out of the car attempting to master an overwhelming erection. During the trip I was drawn compulsively to public lavatories where the drawings and graffiti confirmed my sex-obsessed but impractical view of things, their mystery heightened by repeated but incomprehensible words of argot. As our family group strolled through the square in the evening, dressed in beautiful light clothes, I would drag behind, my gaze searching out the bulging flies of the lads gathered round the war memorial, the clenching buttocks of the boys who slammed the pinball machines just inside the doorways of bars.

I didn’t have much time. ‘Do you?’ I said.

He stood up and began to wander off. ‘Eh?’

‘Live round here…’

‘What d’you think?’ he said. He had this tight, mean, logical talk, highly defensive and dull. I followed him, feeling more and more at a disadvantage-old, too, as people over twenty are to their juniors. He reached the low wall by the road, and turned round, stroking the outline of his quite big dick. Just along the street people were waiting at a bus-stop. It was no place for a scene. I came up close to him and put my hand on his shoulder, and he smiled in a way that for the first time revealed his nervousness.

‘Come on,’ I said, seizing this advantage. But immediately he closed down again; it was with studied shrewdness that he said:

‘How much money ’ave you got, then?’

I nodded my head and chuckled ironically-the only way was to behave like him. ‘Just enough for myself,’ I said.

‘ ’sthat so? Well you’ll need a lot more than that if you want a nice bit of bum round ’ere’-almost in a whisper, as if trying to keep the great bargain he was offering me a secret from the group at the bus-stop.

I’d had enough. I dropped my hand, half-turned and jumped over the wall. ‘Bye-bye,’ he called cheerily as I waited to cross the road-and chose a bad moment that meant I had to run; a van honked at me. I felt the boy’s absolutely unfriendly eyes on me, and annoyance and humiliation, and, as I turned up the road to the Club, conflicting urges to dismiss him as rubbish and to run back and pay whatever he wanted. I saw myself pissing over him, jamming my cock down his throat, forcing my fingers up his ass-disturbing images with which to enter a Boy’s Club. I resented his ability to resist me, and that I had no power over someone so young.

The Club building must formerly have been a Nonconformist chapel. The bulk of it was built of a rebarbative grey stone, with mean pointed windows; tacked on in front and at the side were modern extensions in red brick, with metal-framed windows (the frosted glass spoke of changing-rooms) and peeling white trim. It was, as Charles had said, a big night, and the lino-tiled hallway was full of family people-rather got up, I suspected: mothers with arms crossed anxiously under their bosoms, and fathers showing the suppressed pride of parents at a speech-day. Many youngsters were rushing about, and the sense of private occasion made me feel more than ever out of place. I went over to the glass-fronted NoBos and communed for a second with my reflection before scanning the lists of activities, notices about excursions, and team photographs, routinely seeking out the faces of pretty boys (of which there were several) and those inevitable glimpses of underwear up the rucked short-legs of seated footballers. Then, in the next frame, there was a larger notice, printed in an old-fashioned and distinguished way, announcing that on this very day, in contests of three rounds each, the London and Home Counties Boys’ Club Boxing Championship would be decided, and the winning team presented with ‘the Nantwich Cup’.

I felt how slow and incurious I had been now that I saw this evidence of Charles’s further influence and philanthropy. Of course he hadn’t sent me all this way merely to speak to the mysterious Shillibeer; I was amused and impressed that there was more to it, as well as getting the uneasy feeling that Charles was orchestrating his revelations with some expertise. I became convinced that when the line had gone dead two nights before it was a deliberate foreclosure on his part, and that back in the City he would now be nodding expectantly. Coming hard upon the grotesque and momentary episode in the churchyard it made me feel just a little out of control. I heard applause and a voice raised beyond the swinging green doors into the hall. I went in, trying to look as if I knew what to expect.

The ring was raised in the middle of the room, which still had its galleries on three sides, supported on thick wooden pillars. Seating rose in scaffolded tiers around the ring, leaving a kind of ambulatory under the galleries, through which I could walk almost unnoticed. Up above, too, the place was packed, and I hoped I would be allowed to drift around rather than getting penned in a seat for the evening. I loitered in one of the aisles, leaning against the stepped edge of the temporary arena. The man whose feet were by my elbow leant over and said, ‘You want a seat?’-making accommodating gestures and showing how he and his party could squeeze up. But I declined. The dinner-jacketed M C completed his announcement and stepped down, a balloon-bellied referee in white shirt and trousers that lacked any visible means of support squeezed between the ropes, and a few moments later the first couple of lads sprang into the ring.

There’s something about boxing which always moves me, although I know it is the lowest of sports, degrading the spectator as much as the fighter. For all its brutality, and the danger of those blows to the head, those upward twisting punches that are so tellingly called cuts and which tear the fronds of the brain known as the substantia nigra , an inner damage more terrible than that of pouchy, sewn-up eyes, mangled ears and flattened noses, it has about it a quality that I would not be the first to call noble.