Peter Carey - Collected Stories

He was impatient and in a hurry to settle things, and it was this haste which made his first choice such a bad one. For he turned to McGregor and said, “Tell me, Mac, do you ever see Masterton?”

It was only when he saw McGregor redden till his face was the bright crimson he had shown so readily at the age of twelve that he realized what he had said and how unacceptable the memory must be to McGregor. Masterton had been several years younger than McGregor, a blond boy with fine exquisite features, long lashes, and a prettiness of a type that is more commonly admired in females. McGregor had loved him hotly, chastely, with puzzled intensity. Their friendship had been one of those small, delightful scandals but one which had lasted longer than most. Turk had known all this but had never thought anything of it, had enjoyed it all, had watched the young lovers with the protective happiness of a parent. In his haste it had not occurred to him that McGregor might wish to forget it.

Nor had it occurred to him that talk of Masterton and McGregor might make Sangster and Davis more than a little uncomfortable. For they too had had their affairs of the heart and simpler more obvious releases of adolescent lust.

So they found themselves, all three, confronted with things they had no wish to remember. They did not wish to know that they had sucked the cocks of boys who had grown up to be married men or that they had loved other boys in the peculiarly intense way that the marketing director had loved Masterton.

Davis’s foot accidently touched Sangster’s leg and he withdrew it quickly as if stung.

Sangster, the newspaper proprietor, had no wish to remember that he had coated his cock with Vaseline hair tonic and slipped it gently into Davis, the surgeon’s, arse. Nor did Davis wish to remember the hot painful wonder of it, the shameful perplexing door of a world he had not known existed.

None of the young men who sat at this table with Turk Kershaw wanted to recall the euphemistic way they had come to proposition one another by saying “Let’s inspect the plumbing”, which was delightfully ambiguous for them and meant, on the simplest level, crawling beneath the locker rooms, the dark damp space beneath the floor where they made love from curiosity and Sunday boredom and hot adolescent need.

It had been another world, another time, with other rules.

Now in the Golden Nugget they experienced the fear of dreams where you walk naked into crowded churches.

They looked at Turk Kershaw and saw that he was, in spite of his obvious discomfort, smiling. There was a twinkle in his red eyes. And they knew that a hundred pieces of gossip and scandal were contained in that great domed head. He was ridiculous in his dirty old sportscoat. His sleeves were too short. His shirt was not properly ironed. He moved his hands in ways which were not conventionally masculine. If he had not been Turk Kershaw they would never have spoken to him. But there he was, sitting across the table, a glimmer of a smile betraying the dirty secrets he still carried with him. They looked at Turk Kershaw and could not forgive him for being their past.

5.

It was McGregor who was most angry with Turk. He had been made to look a fool and he could not forgive that. He had become the master of both the cudgel and the stiletto, using both of them with equal skill. He had learned the art of the lethal memo and knew how to maximize its effects: who to send copies to and how to list their names in orders both ingratiating and insulting. He had become an expert in detecting weaknesses and never hesitated to hit the weak spots when the moment was right. He had had his predecessor fired and he would be managing director within two years. He no longer remembered that it was Turk himself who had first shown him the benefits of intelligent analysis of your enemies’ weaknesses. It was Turk who had coached McGregor’s bullish bowling, and had made him look at each batsman as a separate problem. “Pick the weakness,” Turk had said, “everybody has a weak point. When you’ve found it, pound away at it.”

So now McGregor waited while the others played “remember when”. And when he was ready he took advantage of a natural pause in the conversation. He smiled at Turk and said, “Remember how you used to get the kids doing exercises in the morning, in front of your bedroom window?”

He drew blood. He watched with satisfaction as the colour came into Turk’s face. He reacted to the colour like a shark tasting blood in the water. He attacked politely, never once abandoning his perfect manners.

“Why did you get them to do it in front of your bedroom window? Frankly,” he smiled, “I find that curious.”

Turk watched him warily. He saw, out of the corner of his eye, Sangster grinning broadly. “I saw no reason to get out of bed simply because you lot couldn’t behave yourselves. The punishment was for you, not me.”

He looked at Davis. Davis looked away. He looked to Sangster. Was Sangster for him or against him? McGregor folded his arms and smiled complacently.

“Come on, Turk,” said Sangster, “you’ve got to admit, it’s a bit strange when you look at it. Lying in bed watching twelve-year-old boys doing their exercises. In their underwear.”

Even as they spoke they began to wonder if it wasn’t true. Was it possible that Turk Kershaw was an old queen? They watched for other clues now, although the thought itself shocked them. For now they remembered how Turk had wrestled with them at night when he had come round to put the lights out, how they had attempted, four or five at a time, to overpower him. They thought of themselves as boys wrestling with an old queen. They felt foolish and disgusted with themselves and it was finally Davis (you too, Davis, thought Turk) who said: “You used to like wrestling.”

Turk reddened again. He watched their smiling faces and detested them. He thought of their wives, whom he had seen in the social pages of Vogue, which he bought for just this reason. He saw the wives, one as beautiful as the next and almost identical in their style, each reduced to a charming doll in the small black and white photographs. While the men came to show the marks of character and experience on their faces, the women paid fortunes so that their experience and pain didn’t show, so they looked, each one, like people who had discovered nothing. And when, finally, their lives burst out through the treatments and the creams and showed on their faces they would feel it was the beginning of the end. He felt pity for the wives with their swimming-pool parties and charity balls and anger at their husbands, who displayed their deeds and emotions so proudly on their faces yet refused to allow their wives the same privilege.

“No,” he said slowly with a quietness they all remembered with not some little fear. “No, it was you who enjoyed the wrestling.” He watched them, one by one, saw their anger and apprehension, hesitated, and finally decided it wiser not to say the words that were already formed in his mind: your little dicks were stiff with excitement.

They paused then, aware of a new strength in him. They watched him carefully and found no weakness. The wound had closed.

Sangster had none of McGregor’s political sense. It had never been necessary for him to have any. So now he continued where the other held back. “Tell us,” he said, toying with his drink, “where you buried your dog.”

Turk looked at him with narrowed eyes. He felt Davis shift uneasily in his chair. “I buried the dog,” he said, “beneath the fig tree in the backyard of my house.” His head was perfectly clear now and he would not weep. He was vulnerable to pity or love but not to a crude bullying attack like that.

There was silence at the table then. At other tables the habitués of the Golden Nugget conducted their business, boasted, made assignations and confessions and went to the telephone to tell lies with complicated plots.