The Folding Star (56 page)

‘I think I really like you, Ed.’

‘Thanks very much.’ I took it as a compliment to me as well as to the person I’d invented, whom I found I’d started to rather fancy too. I wondered who my interlocutor was. I didn’t mind this phase of arch foreplay – my innocence of the whole system seemed to make me more genuine. ‘What’s your name, by the way?’

His breathing was – heavy: it was heavy breathing. I felt it wasn’t polite to show that I’d noticed. All the same, I pictured a person, perhaps no older than me, naked on a bed, in subdued light, somehow encumbered with clips and straps and probes, greased and hard but holding off the time-and-money-saving moment. I imagined I too was naked in his scenario. I took another mouthful of burger.

‘Have you got a big one, Ed?’

‘Mm. Mm.’ And when I’d cleared my throat: ‘Yeah, it’s huge. It’s like, a half-pounder.’

‘Oh Ed, that’s really wild … A big, big sausage.’

‘Well …’

‘Do you have it in your hand right now?’

‘Yep, I sure do. I can hardly get my hand round it. I’m lifting it up towards my lips …’

‘Oh,
man
’ (though it sounded like oh,
men
).

‘It’s kind of oozing stuff out of it!’

There was no immediate reply to this, so I carried on eating, faintly troubled by the priapic monster I’d so concisely evoked. He must have covered the mouthpiece – a residual modesty screened the final moments. Then he said, crouching right at my ear, ‘I love you, Ed.’ I didn’t know if I should respond with something similar; I could only think of ‘Well, I’m very fond of you, too’, but before I could say anything I heard the clunk of the receiver being dropped and saw it twirl on its flex, knocking a table-leg. Then the line was dead.

‘Who was that?’ said Matt as I hung up.

‘I don’t know.’ Now it was time to eat, please; and there was a surprising twinge of regret amongst my hunger for my new friend. I wondered if he’d get in touch again.

‘You were great,’ said Matt, stepping towards me through the clutter of the room.

‘It seemed to do the trick.’

‘Of course it did.’

‘I didn’t really say anything, though.’

‘Well, that’s what the trick is,’ said Matt, and gave me a horrible leer.

It seemed Matt was toying with the idea of a phone-sex line. He already had a couple of ansaphones on a separate number with tapes in them of American porn-stars giving true confessions. Occasionally throughout the evening as we sat watching football there would be the clatter of the tape starting, and a real American voice, turned right down low and sounding oddly fake to me, would drawl away, half-obliterated by the chanting in the stands and the raving of the commentators – ‘Hi, you’ve reached Chad Masters, I guess you’ve seen me around … yep, it’s one of the biggest … oh, boy … could you take all of that motherfucker? … like I had to every day when I was a kid …’It left me shivering and anxious, the night around me, it seemed, threaded like tracer fire by lines of anonymous lust. I squashed up uncomfortably with Matt in his chair and drank bottle after bottle of beer.

Later Matt got out a video; I supposed he was trying to arouse me or distract me. His business was pleasure and people paying for it: he couldn’t fathom those darker states of mind that were immune to titillation, or that took it somehow amiss. I groaned and thought I might weep if I had to watch people fucking.

‘Let’s just go to bed. Can I stay the night?’

‘Sure. I think you’ll be really interested in this though.’

‘I’m not one of your punters, darling.’ I was yawning and stumbling round.

Matt pressed the cassette into the machine. ‘It’s got someone you know in it. Someone who once made a big impression on you.’

‘I refuse to think,’ I said, my mind none the less thumbing through the torn catalogue of men I’d known or merely seen and felt for. ‘Anyway, I don’t have friends in that world.’ An unsteady card appeared on the screen, and a soundtrack of rock music came through fitfully.

‘This is just an amateur thing, made locally, no production values or proper editing – a lot of people like them better, when it’s boys they might know in real life, they’re getting very popular.’ I’d read about something similar at home, where men on a housing estate would gather to watch a video of one of them fucking one of the others’ daughters: I felt I was seeing my own fantasies held up to the distorting hetero mirror – how they liked the men beery and unshaven and the girls busty and young. I covered my face with my hands; then, when Matt had wandered to the kitchen, I reached for the remote control and fast-forwarded for ages.

Matt woke me with a shake and I sat up and frowned at a couple of men going at it dementedly, with the noiseless hysteria of an early motion picture. He took the remote, and abruptly slowed the film – I groaned at the artless dawdling of ordinary time, the wanton deferral.

Later there was a horrible bedroom where the light came back off silvery ‘abstract’ wallpaper, and two skinny boys who couldn’t get erections were doggedly sixty-nining. It must actually have been someone’s room, of course, probably the director’s if you could call him that – he would spend the night there, perhaps alone, after he had paid the boys their drug-money, less than they needed – the room glinted with bad faith. I said, ‘This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen.’ Above the bed a female saint, perhaps the Virgin herself, turned saucer eyes heavenwards. I pretended to sleep, and then slept.

Later still – a minute later? twenty minutes? – there was a young man lying face down on the bed, naked and pale, but bigger and stronger than most of the movie’s phantom crew. His legs were apart and you saw the dusk of hair on his balls; his face was buried in the pillows. The camera prowled down on him as a fly settled and walked about on his white arse. It flew off when the camera panned away to show the door halfopen and behind it a man standing – fortyish, bearded, overweight in a T-shirt. His jeans were round his knees – he was already wanking as he spied on the boy; he seemed genuinely into it, it was a new note in the film, something voluntary and felt and so in a way more difficult to watch.

‘That’s the guy who made the video,’ said Matt.

The boy was standing with his back to us, we saw him only from the shoulders down, whilst a pair of hairy hands mauled and probed his backside. Like everything in the film it went on for ever – you felt you could have flown to Athens or read
The Spoils of Poynton
in the time it took to change to something new. I was bewildered to think anyone could watch this for pleasure, it seemed to mock any thought of sexual happiness. Then at last we were round the front, where the man was kneeling, the boy’s limp cock in his mouth. He went at it and went at it; sometimes he took it in his hand and pistoned it into a semblance of life, but then it died again. We never saw the young man’s face, only the strong, lean body; but he began to generate a vague sense of apology, his hands reluctantly caressed his fellator’s thinning scalp, and lingered there long enough for us to see the skull charm of a ring that bit into his finger and the tattooed letters R, O, S, E.

At the end the older man shot off up Rose’s leg and you saw the milky drops hang and trickle among the thick hairs of his calf. Rose himself didn’t come, and the camera drifted off in a cliché pan to distance that went out of the open window. It was night now, and for a few seconds we saw from above the shadow and flare of a city, the walkway lights of high-rise housing echoed further off by the ribbons of light on ships in dock, and between them a network of streets, pulsating and nameless.

I felt the greatest reluctance to take my clothes off and hurried into bed in shirt and trousers. I pulled the blankets around me and when Matt got in, shivering and excited, I hugged him like an old wrestler, so that he could hardly breathe. By the time he had started snoring I was boiling hot and had to get out of bed to strip. I stood there wretchedly, eyes half-closed with fatigue, unbuttoning my shirt. As I fumbled with my jeans there was a clatter that made me jump and fall over, and a voice close behind me, intimate and unwelcome. ‘Hi, you’ve reached Chad Masters, I guess you’ve seen me around …’

I strolled across the empty arena of the Grote Markt and stood to admire, or at least acknowledge, its weathered self-acclaim. I felt alone, like a survivor in a city visited by a curse – and nervous about how long I could hope to carry on myself, pitted and limping as I was. I turned up the collar of Cherif’s coat and raised my head to scan the belfry, which seemed to curve and topple against fast-moving cloud. When I looked down I was giddy almost as if I’d been up there – it was steadying to hear my name called out.

I turned and there was Patrick coming quickly towards me, half-smiling, glancing away. There was something free and yet formal in our coming together at the centre of this great square, and I spread my arms to gesture at the scale of it, though he may have thought that I expected to embrace him. He was vividly conspicuous in a pink skiing-jacket over a green tartan shirt that as usual hung out at the front. I thought how good-looking he was, and then saw the disquiet and resolve of someone who brings bad news.

We shook hands and frowned and stamped as if waiting for others to turn up, the rest of the routed Three perhaps: I saw that Patrick and I only had a friend in common, we weren’t friends ourselves.

‘Do you want to go for a coffee?’ he said.

I had come out in search of breakfast, but any appetite I had was obliterated by worry. We moved off towards an old café on the far side of the square, a place I thought might be too smart and hushed, but I lacked the will to suggest an alternative. ‘Have you heard from Luc?’ I said lightly.

‘Not for a week,’ he said, almost as though he didn’t know anything had happened.

‘Ah. I thought you might have done.’

‘No, I haven’t seen or heard from him since that night we all met in … the bar. I think you’re the last person to have actually seen him.’

I knew I was in very deep. I wondered at moments if I had murdered Luc and then wiped all memory of it – he was crouched rigid in one of my big cupboards, and the Spanish girls were picking up the smell. ‘Your friend Sibylle has spoken to him since, of course.’

Patrick shot me a glance that was oddly mournful. ‘Well, she may have done,’ he said, pushing open the door and giving me a shiver as we stepped into the warm. I sat down wondering why I went through life not knowing anything, never any the wiser; I seemed to be my pupils’ pupil.

‘You mean she was lying?’

Patrick flung himself down opposite, his chair at an angle – his arm sweeping the table. ‘No, I wouldn’t say that.’ He seemed to me reserved and proud and a little solemn with those early emotional upheavals adults are accused of not understanding. ‘She makes up shit,’ he said, like the bully he once was, and with the same hidden doubt.

I thought of her snooty theories about my friends – but wasn’t a certain premature decidedness allowed among the young? It was how they charmed and achieved – I was suddenly on her side. ‘Why would she make up that? I mean she borrowed your car, I think I’m right in saying, and drove all over the place on the strength of that phone-call – he told her to meet him at …wherever it was.’

‘No, you’re probably right …’ The waitress came and he left me to order; I was aware of him watching me. ‘I don’t know what you know about Luc,’ he said afterwards.

‘Um …’

‘Sibylle is madly in love with him,’ he shied away. ‘That is why she can become very rude – she always looks so cool, and so bloody beautiful, you don’t realise she is very worried underneath and says things she doesn’t mean. She’s trying to keep hold of him and keep him away from everyone else.’ He looked at me with the large brown eyes of an extrovert boy who is learning about the heart; I thought he would always be unafraid of its demons and would get what he wanted. ‘She thinks of you as a great threat.’

For a moment or two I believed I wasn’t reddening. ‘I’m just his teacher,’ I said, scratching my head in a spasm and feeling more generally compromised, as though Patrick had implied some sordid leering motive in my merely being with him now. I twisted and shrugged out of the hot coat. ‘Luc’s not in love with me, for heaven’s sake.’ I hadn’t put it quite so cleanly before, even to myself.

‘It might be better if he was,’ Patrick said, masking the riskiness of the words with a prudential frown.

We were silent for a minute or more, gazing towards the counter as if we were thinking about nothing in particular. I couldn’t tell yet what hostility the boy felt for me and began to suppose he didn’t know either, and expected no more than the gloomy comfort of a chat. ‘Can’t Luc sort of make a go of it with Sibylle?’ I deviously put out.

Patrick grunted mirthlessly. ‘I’m sure he’d like to’ – and held back, I felt, from saying more, as the milky coffees arrived. Then, ‘No, they’re very old friends.’

I sipped the warm froth with its hot undershock of liquid and was back for a few seconds in the stifling love-culture of the late teens, its thrilling new absolutes, the hormonal frenzy. ‘Forgive me if I’m too curious,’ I said with a smile. ‘I was under the impression – you remember one weekend you all three went down to I think it’s your parents’ house somewhere on the coast?’

Patrick looked at me warily. ‘We often do.’

‘It was quite recently. Luc told me afterwards it had just been you and him there – then later he let slip that Sibylle was with you too. I assumed he was … covering up for having been with her.’

Patrick was slightly impatient of this finical enquiry, I thought, and made no answer for a bit. ‘My friend Luc is very loyal,’ he said. ‘He was covering up, in fact, for Sibylle and me. We were, we were lovers then; as you say, quite recently. Well, the father of Sibylle is the Minister of Culture, and we cannot have any scandals. He thought Sibylle was staying with … some other friends.’ He picked up and set down his coffee-cup. ‘That was the weekend, in fact, when she suddenly decided she was in love with Luc and not with me. I remember I went out with her in a boat we have and she almost –’ he flopped his hand over backwards on the table.