Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (30 page)

‘
So they’ve let you stay here while they’re away?’

‘
More or less.’ Impossible just to leave his hand where it was for ever. He must either remove it or …. He ran it quickly, experimentally, up Frédéric’s smooth leg and into his shorts.

The experiment was finished as soon as begun.
Frédéric stepped briskly back a pace, though only one, and said,
‘Touche pas!’
Which was more or less the reaction that Adam might have expected.

‘
Yes,’ Adam continued as if nothing had happened. ‘They said he was to come any time and stay – and to bring me too (which was kind because they’ve never met me) only … only they don’t seem to be here.’ Adam made a pantomime of looking all around him as far as his confinement to the horizontal permitted. ‘I suppose you live round here, Frédéric?’ The boy nodded. ‘You don’t happen to know where they’ve gone, do you? The … Nounouliers.’

‘
Noirmoutiers. They’re in Lyon. One of their sons is marrying a girl there. A really big do, I heard. We’ve got all their dogs over at our place while they’re away. All except the little one, that is. Pépine goes everywhere with them. I’m surprised your friend didn’t know about the wedding.’

‘
Look,’ said Adam. ‘Why don’t you sit down if we’re going to talk?’

‘
Alright,’ said Frédéric doubtfully. ‘But not if you’re going to…’

‘
It’s OK, I won’t do anything. Not if you don’t want me too.’ He stopped. He had never heard himself talk like this. Yet the words had come automatically as if he had been born to say them. Was this the way adults negotiated their way through these situations with younger people? He had never seen himself in the role of predator before. He had always been able to imagine himself as the stolen child in the Erl-king scenario, even in the role of the bereft father (careful – he mustn’t think of that) but never as the Erl-king himself.

‘
What’s the matter?’ asked Frédéric. He had plonked himself down close to Adam on the grass, legs wide apart.

Damn it, thought
Adam. He must have started crying again and the kid had noticed before he had realised it himself. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘I drank too much wine last night, I think. That’s the effect it has the next day, sometimes.’

‘
C’est vrai?’
said Frédéric in wonder. ‘I never knew that before.’

Neither did
Adam, but it was his first experience of a hangover, after all. Did they normally make you so randy and tearful by turns? ‘To tell you the truth, it was the first time I’d really had too much. Maybe I’m not quite myself.’ For a second he wanted to blurt out:
Go to the police, I’m stuck here with a madman who keeps a shot-gun in his car. We both need help.
But he didn’t and the moment passed.

He returned to practicalities.
He needed to pee again, quite urgently, and had no idea what to do about it; the proximity of the boy, his recent attempt to grope him and his own nakedness had all conspired to give him a major hard-on which he was pressing firmly down into the cushions. Any move he made would startle Frédéric and embarrass himself. He made himself think about another practicality, one which was scarcely less pressing. ‘The Noirmoutiers. When are they coming back?’

‘
Day after tomorrow, in the afternoon. By the way, how did you and your friend get into the house?’

Adam felt suddenly as light as a bird.
Here was his salvation. Grown-ups were coming here in two days. People who knew Sylvain. People who could explain everything to the police and to Adam’s own parents and no harm done. Everything was going to be OK. Just wait till he could tell Sylvain … Though on second thoughts, maybe not. Sylvain’s ideas were becoming alarmingly unpredictable. He might change his plans and decide they had to drive on somewhere else. Better to sit it out and let the Noirmoutiers’ arrival come as a surprise. But anyway, everything was going to be all right. His face was alight with smiles as he remembered that the boy had asked him a question. ‘ How? Oh yes. Sylvain has his own key. He’s had it since he used to come here as a child. So he could let himself in any time.’ It was not only a monstrous lie, it was also highly improbable: nobody gave visiting children keys to their houses that they could then use for a lifetime. But it didn’t seem to matter. The boy accepted the explanation with a trustfulness that made Adam’s heart ache. ‘How old are you?’ he asked.

‘
Fourteen,’ said Frédéric.

Just two years younger than himself.
Surely he had never been so innocent, so unworldly as this boy was, and certainly not at fourteen. Then, he hadn’t had his physique either, he thought with a futile twinge of jealousy. Had Frédéric stumbled on the skinny fourteen-year-old Adam trespassing in his neighbours’ garden instead of the relatively mature sixteen-year-old, he could probably have beaten him up had he felt so inclined. It was a sobering thought.

It couldn’t be put off any longer.
‘Look, you really must … I really have to …’ Adam got quickly up onto his knees, twisted round away from where Frédéric was sitting, and emptied his bladder explosively onto the grass. Quick to start but it took an age to finish, and Adam felt himself turning red with embarrassment and wondered if it showed from the rear. At long, long last Adam was able to spin back round and down, rearranging himself in his original discreet position.

Frédéric’s eyes looked as if they were on stalks.
And not only his eyes … as Adam observed when he glanced down at his shorts.
‘Merde,’
he said in a tone of mixed alarm and envy,
‘t’es gros.’

‘
You’re not so small yourself,
P’tit-loup
.’ It was the only possible answer, wasn’t it? But he was appalled to hear himself calling the boy by the endearment that Sylvain used with him. What was this kid doing to him? He wanted more than ever to reach out and catch him and then to … And then Sylvain would be coming back. At any moment. And with a shot-gun. No, that last bit was a silly thought. Too Hollywood by far. But still … With a supreme effort of will he clutched at a new subject. ‘Look, won’t you burn in this sun, with your complexion, I mean? I’ve got some stuff here if you want to …’

Frédéric seemed to think this was a good idea.
He took the tube of sun-cream when Adam held it out to him and started to rub it into his face, legs and arms. Adam toyed with the idea of offering to do this for him but decided against. He did have time to wonder, though, as he watched the boy anointing himself, what had brought him here in the first place, cycling into his absent neighbours’ garden when he should have been at school. He didn’t have to wonder long. Frédéric suddenly volunteered the information without being asked. ‘I wanted to come here because it’s quiet. I mean, I thought it would be. Instead of going to school. I do music.’

‘
You play an instrument?’

‘
Yes, but I mean I write it. Well, not exactly write it. I make it up in my head.’

‘
Sounds good,’ said Adam. ‘What sort of music.’

‘
That’s the problem. I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to be rock or anything like it. And it certainly isn’t jazz. Maybe it’s modern classical. It’s really weird, anyway. And if I try and play it, nobody likes it.’

‘
That could well be modern classical then,’ said Adam thoughtfully. ‘I know someone in Paris who writes that kind of thing. I’d give you his address if I …’ He broke off. Several thoughts had struck him simultaneously.

Frédéric had finished applying the sun-cream.
‘Do you want me to do you too, re-do you, I mean?’ He smiled cheerfully and held out the tube of cream.

‘
Why not?’ said Adam. Oh, what the hell, he thought, and rolled over onto his back.

Frédéric seemed taken aback to see Adam still in the same state of arousal as he had been a few minutes ago.
‘ That’s indecent,’ he protested, gamely trying to make a joke of it, but Adam could see the tent-pole going up in the boy’s shorts for a second time as he leant over Adam and started to spread the cool cream on his chest. A moment later Frédéric stopped and went rigid. A tremor ran through him and he drew in his breath, while a blush coloured up his face so deeply that you could hardly see the join between his forehead and his hair. Adam didn’t need to peer at his shorts to see what had happened, though he looked there anyway. They had got quite a soaking.

Frédéric scrambled backwards, crab-like, and sat back in his old position, giving Adam a look like that of a spaniel that has been surprised by a harsh word.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Adam. ‘Happens to everyone. You’ll dry in no time in this sun.’ It struck him that this had been a bit of a waste all round: the fun they might have shared, his momentary concern for the boy’s innocence, his scruples on account of Sylvain… All in vain. For a moment he thought of salvaging something for himself at least, by simply grabbing hold of Frédéric, pulling his shorts off and taking it from there, but he put the idea out of his mind.

‘
I think I’d better go,’ said Frédéric flatly.

‘
Ouais
, perhaps.’

Frédéric got to his feet.

‘Just one thing …’ Adam delved into
Major Thompson
and carefully tore out the fly-leaf. Not only Céline’s address was written there but also her phone number. ‘Could you do something for me when you get home? Ring this number. Ask for Céline and tell her I’m OK. You needn’t tell her where I am. Best not to, in fact. Just that I’m alive and well and I’ll be home in two days. Can you do that?’

‘
Yes,’ said Frédéric agreeably enough, taking the paper. Then, with a refreshing open-mindedness in view of what had just happened, ‘Is she your girlfriend?’

‘
En quelque sorte,’
said Adam.

Frédéric turned, picked up his bike and pushed it across the lawn
– tick, tick, tick – to the corner of the house. From there he turned back. His mood seemed to have changed for he grinned and gave a childish wave, which Adam returned. ‘ It was nice to meet you,’ Adam said, as much to himself as to Frédéric. The boy disappeared round the corner of the house.

Adam got to his feet.
Sylvain would be back any minute. His friend. His kidnapper. His gaoler.
Son amant, son bien-aimé
. His lover, his beloved. He would pick some flowers for his return. And as he rummaged among the borders for purple honesty and sweet-pea, and at the garden’s edge for meadow-sweet and vetch, he imagined himself turning to confront the TV camera of his conscience with a half-snarl and a jabbing index finger and declaring for his own benefit and Sylvain’s: ‘I did
not
have sexual relations with that boy.’

Sylvain, on his return, was delighted with the flowers, and with the randy nakedness of the youth who presented them to him, and when Adam fished urgently into his lover’s shorts in search of very rapid gratification observed uncritically:
‘ That’s hangovers for you.
Ça chauffe
. It’s good to see you well again though.’

It was not until after some fairly energetic activity on the lawn that Adam inspected the results of Sylvain’s shopping trip.
Clearly another barbecue was planned. There were Toulouse sausages and lamb cutlets, tomatoes, red and green peppers, an aubergine, three baguettes (neither of them had eaten either breakfast or lunch) garlic and onions. This time it was Adam who took it upon himself to light the barbecue and it was he who, once it was going nicely, made the suggestion, albeit tentatively: ‘ What about opening a bottle of wine?’

‘A warm air mass moving northwards from France, bringing hot sunshine but also the risk of thunderstorms later.’ Sean liked to hear weather forecasts like that in early summer. The promise of heat brought the real summer closer, and the possibility of a storm prevented the outlook from being too tamely predictable. The inclusion of France as the provenance of the benign weather system among the details of the forecast immediately made him think of Adam, something that he did quite often anyway. He remembered with crystalline clarity the details of all the physical intimacies they had so unexpectedly shared less than a month ago. He remembered them with a sort of fascinated incredulity, rather than with recoil or even regret. He remembered with an even greater sense of disbelief that it was he, Sean, who had set them in train, but he could no longer see – if indeed he had ever been able to see – what had led up to it, where all that intensity of feeling and emotion had come from. It was as if he had somehow created a potent magical charm but then lost the formula and also forgotten what it had been intended to achieve in the first place. It had been an extraordinary week altogether, what with Michael getting off with that French boy, Christophe, on the last evening as well. He thought, but was not sure, that the two were keeping in touch, either by letter or e-mail.

Anyway, Adam was not too far from his thoughts this afternoon when the second lesson was interrupted by one of the school secretaries who said that the police wanted to talk to him for a few minutes as part of a routine enquiry.
Sean was taken to a small dim-windowed office where difficult interviews were known to take place, interviews with difficult pupils, with difficult parents … Sean had never been in here before; his misdemeanours had always been of a run-of-the-mill nature. He had never been
difficult
.