The Folding Star (12 page)

I stayed crouching and randomly splashing in the shallows, exaggerating the bruise the woman’s kick had inflicted, and whining inwardly like a child who wants an excuse to go home. I moved around enough to bring any of the other men who were waiting or resting between laps into the welcoming circle of my close vision, but there was no one I knew, there was no one special, until at last I saw Matt and waved and gave a derisive, laddish shout. He stared for a moment, then turned his back on me as I roamed towards him and I had almost put my hand on his shoulder before I realised it wasn’t him. Then some kids came threshing past in the fury of a race and a fight mixed up together, and mixed up in their wake a further shout and rush, an arm from behind throttling me, thighs locked piggyback round my hips as I stumbled forward and under in a horrified welter.

When I struggled up, gasping and mad, the grip relaxed, he slipped off my back and turned me in his arms quite lover-like. ‘Matt, you stupid fucking cunt!’ He was dazzling with his hair flattened, the cheap flash of a sapphire ear-stud and his unapologetic sideways grin. I wanted to slap his face, but just held back as he said, ‘Did I frighten you?’ and splashed some snot off my upper lip. We were standing a few feet in from the end almost in an embrace; the pool was navel-high.

‘I’ve got to get out,’ I said. ‘My trunks keep coming down. Well, they’re not trunks, really – that’s the point …’ Matt was running a finger inside the sagging waistband, rubbing the back of his fist against the water-logged crotch. ‘For god’s sake, man. We’re not in the Bar Biff now.’ I made off towards the little ladder the timid and the oldsters used. But Matt was with me, creamily kicking across on his back, lean and effortless. When I got out and the water streamed from my pockets and turn-ups on to the poolside he didn’t laugh; he even hopped out too and walked with me to the exit: he had on weightless, silkily synthetic black shorts.

‘I’ll buy you a drink later,’ he said. ‘I’ve
got
to do my 2,000 metres.’

‘That sounds like quite a lot later. Okay, you know where I’ll be.’ He squeezed my upper arm before he turned, jogged back and up-ended without a splash into the rippling blue. He was interestingly white, as if he couldn’t be bothered with the vanity of tanning or had spent the hot late summer in some more worthwhile way than most of us. I was sorry to have passed up the chance of soaping his back.

The showers were functional and fierce, a yellow-tiled room with six fixed nozzles and high up in one wall a narrow strip of meshed window that could be tugged open at the top by a chain. I was amazed to pick up, through the crash of the water and the suck and wheeze of the drain, the putter of a boat’s engine and a brief reek of burnt fuel. A canal must lie just outside, perhaps lapping against the very walls of the bath.

‘Have a good swim?’ said a shampooing dad opposite, with the nice unintrusive openness of the people here.

‘I haven’t got the right clothes,’ I said and hurried to get out of my shorts.

‘You want some proper swimming-trunks,’ he said. The conversation was unlikely to soar, but we chattered on for a minute or two while I washed, about indoor as against sea bathing and about the Belgian beaches. He was very enthusiastic about Blankenberge, though what he praised in it, the crowds, the cheap food, set me against it. I stayed on for a while when he’d left, the hot water thrumming on my shoulders, then went to the doorway and screwed up my eyes to read the changing-room’s electric classroom clock. It was already ten past eight: seriously time for a drink.

I towelled myself down at the rubber-matted threshold of the showers, and I was largely dry when I heard a whoop and a couple of lads came splashing in through the footbath, a nicely curvy dark one and a skinny one with long fair hair twisted up in a knot like a girl. They ran straight into the showers and fell against opposite walls, panting and laughing at each other. Without hesitation I flung my towel aside and went back in, un-stoppering my conditioner bottle and preparing to wash my hair all over again.

I hadn’t seen them since that first evening at the Bar Biff, the hot little loudmouth and his friend, his lover, who now unknotted his hair and shook it over his shoulders as if he were Jane Byron herself; and it did give a scatter of glamour to his hollow-eyed face, still blurred by spots around the forehead and jaw. The dark boy, who wasn’t plump but would never perhaps be thin, was as hoarsely sexy as possible: I flickered a look from moment to moment over his square full-mouthed head, like a Roman street-boy’s, the soft black hairs on his upper lip – and one or two already on his broad-nippled chest – and down to the bow in the draw-string of his trunks, the string hanging and diverted across the neat sideways jut of his cock within the tight red fabric. Yet it was his scrawny friend, just beside me, who gave me again the feel of those lost months of self-discovery, the first possession of the rights of sex. The dark boy would always be sexy, even when he ate himself into middle age, and, who knew, into marriage and its infidelities; but the blond one – not blond even, but a sort of no-colour that took body in the wet – I saw as a common scrap irradiated by love and confidence. I remembered how the whole world changed, how you were suddenly inside the great luminous concourse of human happiness, and how you thought you would be there always – though now, fifteen years later, I found myself glancing myopically in from the limbo of baffled hopes and bad habits that was always ready and waiting just beyond.

My boys didn’t actually wash or strip, just lounged around and laughed. After ten minutes or so their unembarrassed possession of the place was tiring me and I had washed so frequently and industriously that I began to feel like the victim of some traumatic guilt, who must wash and wash till his skin is chafed away … Then at last the fair one had finished, and hurried off into the changing-room – I couldn’t quite catch his remark. He had on knee-length trunks in phosphorescent orange, lime and mauve, nightmare colours from my own childhood that seemed to be fashionable all over again. His friend grinned in appreciation, in anticipation, but stayed behind. My heart stepped on the gas.

By now I was simply lolling under my jet, as if to get the maximum benefit after several unusually demanding hours of exercise. When I looked up, the boy smiled at me.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said in English. And then, stumped as to how to continue, went on in Flemish, ‘Could I borrow some of your shampoo, please sir?’ Seeing that I understood and held out the rather precious phial of Coward & Rattigan’s herbal haircare, he smiled broadly and came forward to receive it. If he had been one of my pupils I would have pointed out that what he borrowed he must expect in due course to repay.

He tilted out a greedy palmful and stood in the middle of the room, rubbing it into his shortish hair; then handed the bottle back and came in under the jet next to mine. Long drools of suds flooded down his easily muscled back.

‘Did you have a good swim, sir?’ he asked.

‘Yes, great, thanks. I feel quite tired after it.’

‘That’s when it does you most good. What did you do? Hundred lengths, sir?’

I could have done without all this ‘sir’ business; it made me feel like an old gent in the hands of a keen young hotel porter with his eye on a tip. I only wanted to appear his equal, almost his coeval, and he was calling me ‘sir’ every third word. I wondered for a moment if he had mistaken me for a master at his school. ‘Not quite that much,’ I said, ‘though I’d have liked to have done. My name’s Ed – Edward, by the way.’ He nodded, and jutted his face into the column of falling water. Then he stepped back, breathing in sharply two or three times and at long last toyed with his draw-string and tugged off his little red slip.

An odd thirty or forty seconds followed – me with a helpless and untouched hard-on, the boy quite clumsily doing some sort of improvised act, turning and bending under the shower, joining his hands behind his head to show off quick young biceps, sighing like someone simulating pleasure in a film. Thirty or so seconds before I understood. I was out of the shower in a moment, snatching up my towel and going at an angry stride through the changing-room, suddenly alert to my own nakedness, and abruptly shrunken by my sense of stupidity and loss.

I had picked a locker in an odd corner, an alcove almost. The fair boy, the skinny lover, was in there now, back turned, a towel over his shoulders. I must have said something – just a swimmer’s bark perhaps – and he twisted round with my wallet in his hands. Beside him the locker-door was open, my wet shorts still hanging from the pin of the key, revolving slowly and dripping on to the concrete floor.

He threw the wallet on to the bench as if it were distasteful to him, as if he had been tricked into picking it up in the street; and came round me quite fast, tossing his damp hair back off his face. He couldn’t have run far in the state he was in, but he might have headed back to the pool, where it would have been harder for a diffident foreigner to make a fuss. I’m sure he would have dodged me in some way, if his friend hadn’t come pounding along the alleyway of lockers and hanging coats, grim-faced but with a trace of chancy humour still in the eyebrows, ready in case the situation could be saved with a joke. I imagined a good deal of crap was about to be talked, and a lot of conning extenuation produced to block my path to a proper complaint or report. But my dark young decoy didn’t have to claim a part in this, he could have played ignorant, and when he came marching to his friend’s aid, his strong little cock bobbing, I was obscurely touched and confused in the midst of my anger.

‘Has he taken anything, sir?’ he asked, a hand on my shoulder, looking at the rifled locker. The ‘sir’ had a different sarcasm now, like a policeman’s. I stepped forward and snatched up the unbuttoned bill-fold. There had been little enough in it, anyway. ‘I haven’t got any money, you stupid bastard,’ I blurted out. ‘You’ve really picked the wrong person.’ I knew I’d come out with a few hundred francs for drinks and perhaps a sandwich or a pickled egg. There was nothing there now.

‘I didn’t take anything,’ said the thief, with a brief insulted smile. I stared in silence, my hand stuck out. ‘It was like that when I came along.’ His friend moved close to him as if to whisper something through his hair, slid two fingers into his waistband and tweaked out the money, the two shiny leaves with their High Renaissance portrait, my survival-kit. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ the boy said, bewildered, thinking himself betrayed. But I had a hunch that the other was a better criminal than his accomplice, who had taken so long and been so miserably caught. ‘Here’s the money, Edward,’ he said. ‘Listen, I’m really sorry about this.’ I fumbled with my towel and fixed it round me like a skirt. I was more wounded by my own idiocy than by the tawdry little crime, and raised my voice to cover my shame.

‘That’s all very well,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid I shall have to report this. You just
can’t
…’

‘Hold on, Edward,’ said the boy, looking around him to assess the damage my outburst might be doing and perhaps to make sure that he had no audience for the rest of his act. Again the hand on the shoulder, and this time the side of his body pressed lightly against mine. ‘Sit down a minute, you know …’

‘There’s no point in sitting down,’ I snapped. And then, ‘Oh shit, where’s my watch?’ – my dear father’s gold watch with the stop-hand that had slyly timed many a
Messiah
and
Gerontius
… I rummaged in the locker, grateful at least that I had caught the offender and that that above all could be saved. But it was still there, rolled in my sock in the toe of a shoe. I turned round almost panting at the waves of pain and apprehension these kids were so wantonly inflicting on me. At the same time I was aware of not speaking in my own voice, of being betrayed by anger into routine threats and dead formulae. The skinny boy muttered ‘Mark’, but Mark stared at him and then slowly sat down; and there was something about that slowed pressing together of the slatted pine bench and the boy’s naked bottom, maybe something calculated, maybe not, the momentary heightening of his nakedness by contact with the inanimate, hard world, the fore-image too of the faintly flushed stripes the slats would leave when he stood, as if after some delicate accurate thrashing, that tilted the balance for him. I sat down in turn and so after a moment did the other boy, opposite us and wary. He shivered slightly and hunched the towel around him.

Mark looked me straight in the eyes and reddened as he said, ‘I’ll do anything you like, Edward.’

Telling Matt the story as we hurried in the early hours from the bar towards his flat, I had trouble conveying the keenness of the dilemma, this particular boy sitting naked beside me, breathing through his mouth into my face, his wet hair releasing sudden trickles down his neck, and making fabulous proposals that I had grumpily to reject. ‘You should have brought him back here,’ said Matt. ‘We could have taken turns with him.’ He gave his short nagging laugh, that always sounded bitter or unmeant. ‘Yeah, we could have fucked him at the same time. You ever do that?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘but not since I was a kid myself …’ He looked at me admiringly in the street-lamp’s masking glow.

‘You’re really wild,’ he said.

‘Everybody’s wild if they’re given the chance,’ I announced, too pissed to care if I was right. ‘There’s this place I used to go to when I was about, well, twenty or so, it was like a sauna, but just in someone’s house – you’d never have known it was there, it didn’t have a name or anything: people who went there called it Mr Croy’s. Though I must say there was never any sign of Mr Croy himself.’ The thought of those wild afternoons had me catching my breath to find I already had such epochs in me, and that I could look back through the drizzle of wasted time to arcadian clearings, remote and full of light and life.

I stopped and called Matt back. ‘Just come down here a moment with me. I want to look at something.’

‘Come on, man, it’s fucking half past one.’

I took no notice, and doubled down the side lane that led into Long Street. It was only a quick couple of minutes and I was standing across the way from the tall house, gazing up reverently, like a young man in a Schubert song, at the sleeping beloved’s window. Not that I knew which window was his. Curtains were closed at every one, and the discreet illumination of an old-fashioned lamp, highlighting the black shine of the front door, lost the upper floors to the night. Where I had been shy before, I gazed hungrily now, with anxious exhilaration, at each shadowed opening, up to the dim roofline and the stars that stood beyond.