Mothers and Sons (20 page)

He stood at the edge of the dancers sipping from a can of beer which Mick had handed him, aware that he was being watched by a tall, skinny, black-haired guy who was dancing to a beat of his own invention, pointing at the sky and then pointing at Fergus and smiling. He was glad that he had spent enough time among straight people to know that the dancer had taken Ecstasy; he was happy and was smiling to show this. It was not a come-on, even though it could seem like one; there was no sexual content in what he was doing. He was like a child. Fergus pointed his finger at him to the stark dull rhythm of the music and smiled back.

He noticed that his nose and chin were tingling with pins and needles as the Ecstasy made its way through his body with its message of support. He began to dance, with Mick and Alan and Conal dancing close by. He was pleased that they were beside him, but he felt no need to look at them or speak to them, or even smile at them. Whatever was happening now with the drugs and the night and the tinny piercing sounds as the tempo rose and the volume was turned up meant that he was wholly connected to them, a part of the group they had formed. He needed only to feel that connection and a rush of warmth would go through him and he hoped that he might stay like that until the dawn and maybe after the dawn into the next day.

When he and Mick had shared another tablet and drunk some water and smoked a joint together, the music, in all its apparent monotony, and then its almost imperceptible variations, began to interest Fergus, pull him towards it with a greater force than the faces or the bodies around him. He listened out for changes in tone and beat, following the track of the music with the cool energy which the night, as
it wore on, offered him. He kept close to the others and they to him. They pushed against each other sometimes in mock aggression, dancing in strange and suddenly invented harmonies, smiling at each other, or touching each other in reassurance, before stepping easily away, each of them dancing alone in the surging crowd.

Mick was in control, deciding when joints would be lit, more pills taken, beer sipped, water swigged, or when all four of them should retreat from the crowd, lie on their towels on the sand smoking, laughing, barely talking, knowing that there would be much more time to dance, and that this was a small respite which Mick thought they would need from the shifting beauty of the music and the dancers.

A
LL NIGHT
they moved around each other, as though they were guarding something deeply playful and wonderful that would disappear if they ceased to remain close. Fergus could feel the sand in his hair and embedded in the sweat down his back and in his trainers. Sometimes he felt tired, and then it seemed that the tiredness itself was impelling him, allowing him to sway with the music, and smile and close his eyes and hope that time was passing slowly, that this cocoon of energy had been left alone for the moment and could enclose him and keep him safe against the night.

It seemed hours later when Mick took him aside and made him move away from the lights and showed him the first stirrings of the dawn in the horizon over the sea. It resembled grey and white smoke in the distance, no redness or real sign of the sun. It looked more like fading light than
the break of day. They joined the dancers again for the last stretch under the frantically flickering lights.

As the first rays of sun hit the strand, the light remained grey and uneasy as though it were building up for a day of low clouds and rain. Shivering, they walked over to where they had left the pullovers and towels and began to swig from the tequila bottle. At first it tasted like poison.

‘This is rich in toxic energy,’ Fergus said. Alan fell down on the soft sand in laughter.

‘You sound like God the father, or Einstein,’ Conal said.

Mick was putting the towels into the holdall, and checking to make sure that they had left no litter.

‘I’ve got bad news,’ he said. ‘We’re going for a swim.’

‘Ah, Jesus!’ Alan said.

‘I’m on for it,’ Conal said, standing up and stretching. ‘Come on, Alan, it’ll make a man of you.’

He helped Alan to his feet.

‘I’ve no togs,’ Alan said.

‘And no clean underpants either, I bet.’

Mick handed Fergus the bottle of tequila, which they drank from as they walked away from the last ravers to a point at the far end of the cove, where there was nobody. Mick left down the holdall, took out a towel which he left on the sand and began to undress. He handed an Ecstasy tablet to Alan and Conal.

‘This will warm you up,’ he said.

He bit on another and handed half of it to Fergus, who was suddenly aware of Mick’s saliva on the jagged edge of the pill he put into his mouth, and sharply alert to the afterglow of the long hours when they had been sharing and touching and staying close. He stood on the strand
watching Mick until he was fully undressed, realizing with a gasp that he was going naked into the water.

‘Last in is Charlie Haughey,’ Mick shouted as he neared the edge of the sea.

In the strange, inhospitable half-light, his body seemed oddly and powerfully awkward, his skin blotchy and white. Soon, Alan followed him, also naked, skinnier, shivering, dancing up and down to keep the cold at bay. Conal wore his underpants as he moved gingerly towards the water. Fergus slowly undressed, shivering too, watching as the others shrieked at the cold water, jumping to avoid each wave, until the look of them there began to interest him. Mick and Conal chose the same moment to dive under an incoming wave.

As soon as his feet touched the water, Fergus stepped back. He watched the other three cavorting further out, swimming with energy and abandon, letting themselves be pulled inwards by the waves, and then diving under as though the water itself were a refuge from the cold. This, he thought, as he wrapped his arms around his body to keep warm, and allowed his teeth to chatter, was going to be an ordeal, but he could not return to the strand and dress himself now; he would have to be brave and join the others, who showed no sign of coming back to dry land as they beckoned him not to be a baby.

He made himself think for a moment that he was nobody and nothing, that he had no feelings, that nothing could hurt him as he waded into the water. He crashed into a wave as it came towards him and then dived under it and did a breast stroke out towards his friends. His mother, he remembered, had always been so brave in the water, never
hesitating at the edge for a single second, always marching determinedly into the cold sea. She would not have been proud of him now, he thought, as he battled with the idea that he had wet himself enough and could run back quickly to the strand and dry himself. He dismissed the thought, tried to stay under the water and move blindly, thrashing about as much as he could to keep warm. When he reached his friends, they laughed and put their arms around him and then began an elaborate horseplay in the water which made him forget about the cold.

When Alan and Conal waded in towards the shore, Mick stayed behind with Fergus, who was oblivious enough now to the cold that he could spread his arms out and float, staring up at the sky growing lighter. Mick did not venture far from him, but after a while urged him to swim out further to a sandbank where the waves made no difference and it was easy to float and stand and float again. As they swam out they kept close and hit against each other casually a few times, but when they found the bank Fergus felt Mick touching him deliberately, putting his hand on him and keeping it there. Fergus felt his own cock stiffen. When Mick moved away he floated on his back, too happy in the water to care if Mick saw his erection, being certain that Mick would swim back towards him before long.

He did not even open his eyes when Mick swam in between his legs and, surfacing, held his cock, putting the other hand under him. When he tried to stand, he realized that Mick was holding him, trying to enter him with the index finger of his right hand, pushing and probing until he was deep inside. Fergus winced and put his arms around Mick’s neck, moving his mouth towards Mick’s until Mick
began to kiss him fiercely, biting his tongue and lips as he stood on the sandbank. When Fergus reached down, he could feel Mick’s cock, hard and rubbery in the water. He smiled, almost laughed, at the thought of how difficult it would be to suck a cock under water.

‘I have sort of wanted to do this,’ Mick said, ‘but just once. Is that all right?’

Fergus laughed and kissed him again. As Mick worked on his cock with his hand, he tried to ease a second finger into him and Fergus cried out but did not pull away. He spread his legs as wide as he could, letting the second finger into him slowly, breathing deeply so that he could open himself more. He held his two arms around Mick’s neck and put his head back, closing his eyes against the pain and the thrill it gave. In the half-light of morning he began to touch Mick’s face, feeling the bones, sensing the skull behind the skin and the flesh, the eye sockets, the cheekbones, the jawbone, the forehead, the inert solidity of teeth, the tongue that would dry up and rot so easily, the dead hair.

Mick was not masturbating him now, but putting all his concentration into his two fingers, moving them in and out roughly. Fergus touched Mick’s cock, his hips, his back, his balls; then he began to direct his energy, all of it, all of his drug-lined grief and pure excitement, into taking Mick’s tongue in his mouth, holding it there, offering his tongue in return, tasting his friend’s saliva, his breath, his feral self. He realized that neither of them wanted to ejaculate; it would, somehow, be a defeat, the end of something, but neither could they decide to stop, even though both of
them were shivering with the cold. Fergus became slowly aware that Alan and Conal were standing on the strand watching them. When finally the water became too cold for them and they began to wade in towards the shore, the other two turned away nonchalantly.

B
Y THE TIME
they were all dressed and ready to walk back towards the car, the day had dawned. They passed the organizers taking the machinery of the previous night asunder, working with speed and efficiency.

‘How do they make their money?’ Alan asked.

‘They make it on other nights,’ Mick said, ‘but they do this out of love.’

Mick had to reverse the car without any passengers so that the wheels would not get stuck in the sand. When he had the car turned, Fergus sat in the front passenger seat and the two others in the back. They rocked silently along the lane, the brambles on each side laden with blackberries. Fergus remembered some road out of his town, empty of traffic with tall trees in the distance, and each of them, his brothers and sisters and his mother, with a colander or an old saucepan gathering blackberries from the bushes in the ditches, his mother the most assiduous, the busiest, filling colander after colander into the red bucket in the back seat of the old Morris Minor.

As they made their way from a side road towards the main Dublin road, Fergus realized that he could not face the day alone. He was not sleepy, although he was tired; he was, more than anything, restless and excited. The taste
from Mick’s mouth, the weight of him in the water, the feel of his skin, the sense of his excitement, had allied themselves now with the remnants of the drugs and the tequila to make him want Mick again, want him alone in a bedroom, with clean sheets and a closed door. He regretted that he had not come off in the sea, and was sorry too that he had not made Mick come off with him. Their sperm mingling with the salt water and the slime and the sand would have put an end to his yearnings, for a time at least. He knew that his house was the first stop as they entered the city; he wished he could turn to Mick, without the two in the back overhearing, and ask him to stay with him for a while.

When Alan asked Mick to stop the car, announcing that he was going to be sick, and Mick pulled in on the hard shoulder of the dual carriageway, they watched him without comment as he heaved and vomited, listening calmly to the retching sounds. Fergus thought then that it might be a good moment to mention to Mick that he could not go home alone.

‘Conal, why don’t you go and help him?’ he asked.

‘He always pukes,’ Conal said. ‘It’s genetic, he says. There’s nothing I can do for him. He’s a wimp. His father and mother were wimps too. Or so he says, anyway.’

‘Did they go to raves?’ Mick asked.

‘Whatever it was in their day,’ Conal replied. ‘Dances, I suppose, or hops.’

Alan, much chastened and very pale, got back into the car. Since there was no traffic, Fergus knew that he would be home in half an hour. He would have no chance now to tell Mick what he wanted. He could try later on the phone, but this would be a day when Mick might not
answer the phone. His own desperate need might have abated by then in any case, become dull sadness and disappointment.

His small house, when he came in the door, seemed to have been hollowed out from something, the air inside it felt trapped, specially filtered to a sort of thinness. The sun was shining through the front window so he went immediately to close the curtains, creating the pretence that it was still the early morning. He thought of putting music on the CD player, but no music would please him now, just as alcohol would not help and sleep would not come. He felt then that he could walk a hundred miles if he had somewhere to go, some clear destination. He was afraid of nothing now save that this feeling would never fade. His heart was beating in immense dissatisfaction at how life was; the echo of the music in his ears and the aftershine of the flashing lights in his eyes were still with him. He felt as though he had been brushed by the wings of some sharp knowledge, some exquisite and mysterious emotion almost equal to the events of the past week. He lay on the sofa, dazed and beaten by his failure to grasp what had been offered to him, and fell into a stupor rather than a sleep.

He did not know how much time had passed when someone banged the knocker on the front door. His bones ached as he went automatically to answer it. He had forgotten what he had wanted so badly in the car, but as soon as he saw Mick, who looked as though he had gone home and showered and changed his clothes, he remembered. Mick had a bag of groceries in his hand.