Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale

Copyright Anthony McDonald
©
2003 All rights reserved.

This edition Copyright Anchor Mill Publishing
©. 2014

Anchor Mill Publishing

404 Anchor Mill

7 Thread Street 

Paisley PA1 1JR

SCOTLAND 

[email protected]

First published 2003 by GayMen’s Press

Reprinted 2004 by Gay Men’s Press

Published 2006 by BIGfib Books

Artwork on cover Copyright © 2014 iStockphoto LP Pensive young Man.
The individual depicted in this artwork is a model. No inference in regard to his sexual orientation may be drawn from the content of the book.

For
Tony,
as
always

The
author
would
like
to
thank
Barry Creasy,
Olivier
Cuperlier,
Danielle
D’Hayer,
Yves
Le
Juen
and
Nicole
Michel.

ONE

A young sycamore, at a guess. Nearly black bark, straight, symmetrical branches, buds (opposing) precisely spaced along the twigs that reached out over his head, tight green bud-cases ready and waiting for spring to find its way to this deepest part of the wood. Its lowest branches were in reasonable reach, Adam thought, provided he made a pretty energetic leap for them. Now he sprang, caught hold of one branch, swung his body upwards and against the trunk. Grasping it as best he could with his denim-clad knees he lunged upwards at the next branch, a foot or so higher, thrusting the whole of his middle-section against the cold tree-bark as he did so. Here he paused and looked down at the narrow, weaving path he had just left.

A few yards ahead the path disappeared between evergreens but directly below him it snaked its way among the trees through a torn carpet of wood anemones.
The white windflowers, almost interlocking, and ruffled by an intermittent breeze, created a pattern of trembling star shapes and made the forest floor nearly as white as it had looked when the snow still clung on up here a month ago. Adam thought for a moment about Michael, the school-friend he had been to bed with, and then, for rather longer, about Sean, with whom he hadn’t.

As usual, once
Sean was involved it all happened very quickly. The sensation was like stepping into a hot shower and feeling its effect all along the skin, all down the nerves and veins like an electric current. Only this shower was an internal one; it went the other way round, from the inside out, but the aftershock, the glow and tingle of it, suffused his limbs in the same familiar way. Letting it happen like this – on automatic rather than on manual – took him back to how things had been two years or so ago when he had had rather less control over things. Sometimes, just for a change, he rather enjoyed not being in control and letting events take their course, just as they had done all that time ago in the gym at his school in England.

Adam
’s body relaxed, he let his knees unclamp themselves from the tree trunk, and for a moment he hung by his arms, swinging gently, his eyes taking in the magic carpet of green and white beneath him, the rest of his attention unfocused, his mind disengaged. Then he let go, dropping, all relaxed, allowing his legs to flex just sufficiently to take the impact shock on landing. But at the very instant he unhooked his fingers from the branches above him a figure materialised on the path between the evergreens and was stopped in its tracks just ahead of him by the time he reached the ground. Adam unbent his legs and rose to his full height.
‘Bonjour m’sieur,’
he said.

There was a hiatus while the two strangers looked each other up and down in mutual surprise.
The ‘monsieur’ which Adam had come out with in his initial confusion had perhaps been an excess of courtesy, he now felt. The person in front of him was a young man of medium height and build with a dark complexion and a head of tousled black hair. He was probably in his early twenties, Adam thought. It was an age group, older than his friends but younger than his teachers, with which Adam had little regular contact. This person might have been a student, only there was an unwoken, none too intelligent look about his eyes that made this improbable. The eyes were beautiful in themselves, though: brown and lustrous, and they rode on handsome cheekbones above a full and sensual mouth.

The stranger was dressed in a black or navy sweater that was a mess of holes, and a pair of frayed and mud-spattered trousers, also approximately black.
On his feet was a pair of decaying plimsolls that might themselves have once been black – or white.
‘Bonjour, p’tit-loup,’
he said.

‘
You’re new here,’ he went on, in a serious but unthreatening tone. Adam smiled involuntarily. The remark struck his ears as funny – as if the stranger belonged to some hitherto unsuspected woodland community: a lost tribe, perhaps, or a normally invisible population of elves.

‘
Not that new,’ said Adam. ‘I’ve lived here since September,’ adding – just in case the other might understand him to mean that he lived in the wood – ‘I mean in the village. In Courcelles.’

‘
What were you doing in the tree?’ asked the other with childlike simplicity.

‘
I like climbing trees,’ Adam answered with a more adult degree of circumspection.

‘
Me too. It’s nice up here in the wood
, n’est-ce pas?
’

Adam
thought this needed qualifying. ‘ It’s a little bleak still, though.’ He gestured around him. ‘No leaves on the trees or anything.’

The stranger approached him and turned him round with a light touch on the shoulder.
‘This way. I show you something.’ He led Adam a few metres back along the path then off the track into a coppice of young hazels; here the bareness of their twiggy surroundings was alleviated by a haze of grey-green pendant catkins which formed a sort of three-dimensional yet permeable curtain. After a few more seconds’ progress the curtain parted to reveal a clearing and there on the ground, blazing with a shocking yellow brightness against their sombre background, wild daffodils were suddenly visible in scattered clumps, as luminous and unexpected as sparks kicked up from the dead ashes of a woodman’s bonfire. ‘You see?’ said the stranger.

Adam
found himself unexpectedly moved by the sight but he was unable to find words to match the feeling – and no more so in English than in French. Instead he offered a soft whistle of appreciation. ‘I hadn’t seen them before today,’ he added, as if in explanation.

‘
You have a funny accent,’ observed the other, turning to face him.

‘
That’s because I’m not French,’ Adam said with some irritation. This was what young people always said to him when they first met him. Six months in France and still they said it: ‘You have a funny accent.’

‘
Ah?’ This was said in some surprise. ‘From where then?’

‘
Britain. England.’

The stranger made to sit down on the ground, motioning to Adam to do the same, and as he bent his legs towards a crouch Adam noticed with a frisson of lightning-bolt proportions that the other’s trousers gaped wide open, that he had no underwear, and that for a fleeting moment his sex was fully exposed, darkly lurking, like a bat at roost in a cave.
Adam froze, half-way to a sitting position, less surprised by the sight than shocked by the dizzying effect – powerful as an adrenalin rush – that it had on him. Adam didn’t know whether the man’s fly was permanently undone – broken or non-existent – or whether it had been surreptitiously opened in the course of their short walk together. He certainly hadn’t noticed anything amiss in that locality the first time they had stood and faced each other a minute or two ago; he would have remembered if he had.

A long-ingrained habit of politeness reminded
Adam that he was halfway to sitting down and that he needed to complete the action. By which time the apparition was no longer to be seen. Involuntarily Adam checked his own fly with his fingers the way men usually do when their attention is caught by that particular oversight on the part of someone else. And clearly the stranger’s attention was similarly focused because he said, ‘The front of your jeans is damp.’

Normally
Adam would have been mortified by such a comment, even from a close friend. But he found himself strangely unfazed, perhaps because of the stranger’s own sartorial carelessness.
‘ Et alors?’
he said. ‘Your fly is completely open. Did you know that?’

The other gave a wheezy chuckle, but neither his hand nor his eyes strayed to his own crotch.
‘ Why are your trousers wet?’ he persisted.

‘
I’d just had a piss,’ Adam lied, flashing a disarming smile. They were now sitting on the ground, facing each other.

‘
In a tree!’ The young man started to laugh, though not unkindly. ‘You climbed a tree to have a piss?’ He shook his head from side to side, laughing loudly now as if he couldn’t stop.

Adam
started to laugh too. ‘Well maybe not,’ he admitted. Then he experienced another frisson as the other moved one of his legs slightly and gave him another view of his most private member, no longer a roosting bat but a free-standing dusky obelisk. Adam made a move as if to get to his feet. ‘ Look, I have to go,’ he said.

The other ignored this but grasped the obelisk with his hand, which he then moved up and down, just once, in the most unsubtle of gestures.
‘C’était ça, n’est-ce pas?’
he said.

‘
Yes, OK, maybe,’ admitted Adam. Then boldly, because he was now excited again himself: ‘And you?’

For answer the young man simply withdrew his hand, leaving himself fully exposed to
Adam’s gaze. Scarcely in control of himself, and hardly believing what he was doing, Adam leaned slowly forward and took the stranger’s cock in his own hand. The size of it, perceived visually, was one thing; the feel of its size quite another. Accustomed to the modest proportions of Michael’s anatomy and his own only slightly more heavyweight equipment, he was struck by yet another lightning-shock. Then suddenly, as if another part of his psyche had caught up with him and seen what he was doing, he was overcome with horror and leapt to his feet like a startled deer. ‘ I really have to go.’

‘
Demain,’
said the other, quite matter-of-factly. Tomorrow
.
He remained seated on the ground, making no effort to detain Adam or even to touch him.

‘
Demain,’ said Adam hoarsely, looking down. He felt more than ever that he was two people struggling for control. Suddenly he reached down between the other’s legs and gave the standing penis a farewell squeeze, as if shaking a friend’s hand through a car window. Then he bolted.

His flight through the hazel saplings was necessarily less of a sprint than an urgent stumble, though his pace quickened when he regained the path.
Here, in his haste, he turned left instead of right, which meant he was running the wrong way – or at least the long way – home. After a minute or two his pace slowed to a walk. He now had to plough on for another quarter of an hour, round two right-hand bends and up a steepish track before he emerged from the stands of ash and hornbeam on the crest of the hill where the woods gave way abruptly to wide open country.

Just two meadows away the village lay below him, its bright new orange roofs (courtesy of an E.U. grant) standing out in sharp contrast to its ageless walls of grey stone.
As he looked, the huddle of barns and houses really did – however hard he tried to banish the twee image – cluster around the spire-capped church like chicks around a mother hen. Beyond, and some ten kilometres away, the top of the cathedral of Langres rode the horizon, showing its west front like a capital letter ‘H’ in a rather small point size. It actually stood on quite a spectacular shelf of rock, though that could not be seen from here: the scarp face was on the other side. Something else that could not be guessed from this vantage-point was the nature of the terrain. The plateau looked approximately flat. But Adam knew that you only had to cycle or walk a mile in any direction before you found yourself descending into deep, wooded ravines from which you then had to wind laboriously up. There were three such between here and Langres. But these apart, the land was high: one and a half thousand feet, a height that Adam, who had been to Paris, imagined most easily as one and a half Eiffel Towers.

He now turned right along the edge of the wood: a route which would bring him out into the lane that led downhill to the village and home.
In his eye-line now a water tower crowned the horizon just a mile or two away. It stood on a little rise not much higher than the one he walked on but of vastly greater symbolic significance. It was part of the watershed of France and western Europe – the meandering line that decided the fate of every drop that fell from the sky. On this side of the water tower the rainfall and all the streams it fed were destined for the English Channel or North Sea; beyond the tower the waters slid inexorably towards the Med. Just thinking about that destination caused Adam to see it in his mind: an eye of shining blue, glimpsed between hot hills, and a far cry from this upland hillside, still in winter colours on a blustery March afternoon.

Adam
busied his mind with these thoughts. He wanted not to think just yet about what had happened in the wood. He would think plenty about it in due course but he wanted to put a little space between the event and the self-scrutiny that must inevitably follow. He walked up to the log-splitter that stood at the edge of the field like a yellow-painted iron gibbet. It worked like a hybrid of guillotine and pneumatic pile driver, its blade a metre-long wedge of solid steel. At rest in its weedy corner this afternoon it wore the forlorn look that out of use farm machinery tends to favour. But for Adam it was not entirely without purpose. Propped against it, almost merging with its hydraulic pipes and levers, was his own battered bike, where he had left it: less conspicuous, fastened here, than if he had simply chained it to the field gate. He undid it, bumped it across the few remaining metres of pasture, lifted it over the gate, then scrambled after it in his turn. Here in the lane strange orchids flowered in the deep verge, their yellow blooms a high-rise of thrusting, sinister forked tongues. Nearby, giant forest ants were throwing up mounds of soil and tiny sticks, each hillock a whole metre across and half as high. Because of the incessant activity of the ants as well as their countless numbers, every twiggy building block of these miniature cities seemed in a state of perpetual motion. Adam watched them for a minute or so, then he climbed onto his two-wheeled steed and let it freewheel him down the hill.