Charles Lambert - With a Zero at its Heart

In the showers after football, some boys wander around naked, some don’t. He’s one of the wary ones, who sit on the benches, easing their mud-caked shirts over their heads, pretending to tease out knots in the laces of their boots while the other boys, taller and bigger and stupid, strip off their kit and slap each other’s backs, then disappear into the steam. No one lets his eyes drift down to below the waist, where the mystery of them bobs and swells. He sits there, waiting to be told to strip, noticing which boy has hair, which not, wishing his own would hurry up and grow. Each body is strange to him, and frightening, his own most of all.

He has just been blown by an older man in a dark suit, with sunglasses, who spat his semen into a handkerchief, which he folded and put back into his pocket. The older man has now moved away from the bed and is sitting in an armchair across the room, one ankle resting on a knee, held by the hand that he’s used to stroke the erection, to briefly caress the belly, the eyes still hidden behind the glasses, his own trousers readjusted. He’s waiting for the next act, the part where the body he’s just known more intimately than anyone else has, ever, gets out of bed and dresses in front of him. He’s waiting for the final defloration.

He was thin for years, until he began to use a gym. He took up running, pounding out miles each week, his head filled with dreams of Marathon. He remade himself into something he might want to own, not only from within but from outside, an object worth having, possessing. This was the period of photographs in front of mirrors, when photographs had to be developed, and limits observed. He’s wearing shorts in them, underpants sometimes, a singlet in one or two. His face is hidden behind the camera, but that’s all right. His face isn’t part of the general effect he’s after. He’s cutting out what’s not required. What he’s after, at its heart, is ripped . As in out .

There’s a woman comedian he sees who talks about getting married and how she’s finally allowed to eat . It’s never that conscious – what is? – but love, when it comes, has a similar effect. The body he’s seen as mystery, and then as shame, and lastly as value, becomes a place in which they can both relax, a haven. They hold each other’s substance. When his father says he’s developing a belly, he’s briefly annoyed, but moves on. His father is the same weight he was when he was twenty. His mother has fought a constant battle with her waistline, as people say. He’ll be his own man, he decides, and his partner’s. He’ll eat what’s given him and be glad.

His parents bathed him as a child. His body was theirs, flesh of their flesh, he had no secrets. His vomit, his shit, his arms reaching out, shampoo in his eyes, his tears, his blood to be wiped off, his wounds to be healed, the goodnight kiss. And then came the parting, and his body spun off like a moon into some dark space they could only infer from that absence. And then, because the most natural form is the orbit, he finds himself holding his father’s hand and wiping his mouth and his arse, and his mother is a child in his arms, her trust, her willingness, her need in his like the meeting of a hook and eye.

They cycle out to a place about five miles from the village where the lane, little more than the width of a car, curves round to the right. At the side is the steeply sloping grass verge and, at the top of the verge, a metal fence. He hooks his bare legs round the lowest rung of the fence and lets himself down until he is dangling with his forehead no more than a foot from the soft summer tarmac of the road. The others sit along the top rail of the fence, waiting. Straining up, he can see the soles of their sandals. When the first car hurtles past him the rush of air is like an adult’s slap.

They stand around the pool in their winter clothes, scarves tucked into their woollens, their feet in wellingtons. The first child walks out onto the ice, and then the second. The pool, or pit as it’s known, is in a hollow, bare trees all round it. No one can see them, no one can hear them call. He joins the other two. Together they edge their way towards the centre of the pit. Beneath their feet, the ice is cloudy, irregular, less white than he’s expected, stripped branches trapped within it. He sees what looks like a harp, a doll, an uncle’s face, a deepness. With a rustle like fire, the crack comes running across the ice to greet them.

He is cycling home from school along the narrow lane when a car overtakes too close. He swerves into the verge. Some long dried grasses catch in the wheel and tangle among the spokes. Continuing to pedal, he bends down over the handlebars to disentangle them, tugging as the front wheel wobbles from side to side. The grasses hold. He reaches further in, as close to the spinning wheel as he can get. Before he knows it his hand is caught between spokes and fork and acts as a brake. He is thrown like a doll across and down and in front of his own bicycle, which tears at his back as his forehead skids along the road. Blood, blind.

She closes both eyes as soon as the bicycle begins to move at speed. She freewheels down the hill, the road the narrowest ribbon beneath her feet, a great rush and a darkness, a counting as far as she dares before she opens them. She is shaking with the wonder of her courage and the risk of it. Forty years later her son sits in a car at night, the lights turned off, and he is driven along a fen road, straight as a die, his eyes half-open, half-closed, by a woman whose eyes are entirely closed, and they are both laughing as hard as they can until she pulls up at the kerb and is sick into her lap.

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