Authors: Alan Hollinghurst
He was silent, I’d have thought rather vain if I hadn’t felt his desperation. ‘Bad stuff,’ he said at last, firmly, but he wouldn’t reveal what. Then, with unconvincing interest, ‘So who are you going to be teaching English to?’
‘A couple of boys, to start with.’
‘Just two.’
‘Rather difficult boys.’ He nodded. ‘They’ve been in some sort of trouble,’ I assured him. ‘The older one looks very sexy.’
Rose gave a little snort. ‘I should have known that was your game.’
‘No, no. I can show you if you like.’ And it was true I had his papers on me, like a keepsake of a lover, of a contact, perhaps, whom I was yet to meet. I pulled the envelope from my inner pocket, and took out the folded sheet with the photo-booth image attached – Luc Altidore, 17, interests History, the Arts. It was spread on the damp counter, offered slightly anxiously to Rose, as though I were searching for this boy and thought he might recognise the picture and give me a lead. Surely no one could forget that pale mask, with the large dry lips and the hair falling forward and a mutinous blankness to the eyes in the camera’s flash, as if dissenting from his own beauty. I recalled distantly having taught him already in dreams, I had lived through the slow-burning hours of tuition face to face with him.
I had become less likeable to my companion, as if I had already gained power over the kid through the corrupt persuasions of literature.
‘I may have to do other work,’ I said. ‘I’ll need the cash. Besides, I don’t want to read books all day.’ I stroked his forearm, which I felt actually vibrate with the mastered desire to withdraw it.
‘Why not?’
I hesitated and said, ‘Books are a load of crap.’
‘You’re really wrong,’ he said fiercely. ‘You’re lucky. You’re a teacher. Books are your life.’ And he walked away from me, leaving me with nothing but the private and lonely satisfaction of my quotation, which perhaps proved his final point.
When I came back from the lav I saw him making for the exit, his arm round the shoulder of the suited bore I’d escaped from earlier, whose face was flushed and confused at his almost too sudden change of luck.
In the austere Town Museum I picked up Cherif, a Moroccan, but born in Paris and uncircumcised. I felt a little out of step among those chaste northern saints and inward-looking Virgins – there wasn’t one of them that welcomed you or held your gaze as the dark-eyed Italian gods and holy men so often did. Absurd, but I wanted a greeting, even across five hundred years. Here everyone looked down or away, in gestures of reproachful purity. The pious, unflattering portraits, too, of capped and wimpled worthies, were proudly abstinent. They drew respectful crowds of Sunday couples in rustling waterproofs (the day had made an uncertain start).
They were not to Cherif’s taste, however. He was mooching about, shaking his head and scratching his balls, in front of a hellish-paradisal Bosch. Later he told me he had cruised men there before: he didn’t know much about painting, but he knew the deeper drift of museum days, the art compulsion of the single man, reflections in the glass that screens some dark old martyrdom, the licence to loiter and appraise, the tempo of pursuit from room to room … I came alongside and we pointed in turn at the viler mutations in the Garden of Delights: the pig-bottomed lady, the slug gentleman, the whore with lobster claws. My friend pushed back the staid tweed cap which gave his brown features and dull black curls a touching air of displacement and grinned at me in a manner unclouded by questions of art history.
We wandered on past the sour sermons of still-lifes (the fly on the lemon, the perishable plenty) and across the hall into the deserted galleries where later pictures hung: waxen historical tableaux, brown cottage scenes, dusks of phosphor and violet, the Sphinxes and Athenas of the local Symbolists. And one of these did extend a troubled greeting – a woman with disordered red hair, ruby ear-rings, one breast uncovered: I stooped to read the printed title: ‘Edgard Orst: “Jadis Hérodias, quoi encore?’” To the badged butch lady-guard, who stepped from one room to the next to keep us in view, we must have seemed a couple tired of each other’s company, killing time, hoping that art might help us through a rainy Sunday, but finding ourselves as bored by the pictures as she was. Cherif caught my eye and I swallowed at the secret certainty of our plan.
Even at the Mykonos, I thought, Cherif, in his brown leather jerkin and working-man’s boots, might appear too rough and set on mischief to be admitted. But that was only British class pudeur – the receptionist nodded to him equably as the key was handed over. (And then I thought, perhaps Cherif had brought his custom here before; and wasn’t there something shrewd and cold-blooded about the desk-clerk himself, doubling and trebling as barman and hooverer of the TV lounge?)
The moment I had locked the door he was on to me, chewing and stuffing my mouth and knocking my glasses up skew-whiff over the top of my head. He was an animal, that great thing for someone else to be. A second or two later he was grinding one hand up and down on my bum and with the other guiding me down to rub his cock where it stood out hard and at an angle in his loose old jeans.
On the way from the Museum we had crossed a bridge above swans and the putter of an empty bâteau-mouche, the commentary running on regardless, when he had suddenly held out in his palm a little packet with a rubber’s squashed ring contour. I didn’t mind the wordless confirmation, but I turned my head away, too full of feeling for this boy, who had only been my friend for twenty minutes, who felt nothing for me but was so unhesitatingly himself, a little overweight, his upper lip and chin roughened already with shadow. Now he was sitting in my lap, riding on me with a certain urgent disregard – I swept my hands across his sleek and trusting back, and reached up to shoulders where muscles powerful from work gathered and dispersed. I was glad he couldn’t see me, gaping and heavy-hearted with praise for him.
We were on the end of the bed, and I hugged up close to look round his shoulder and into the full-length mirror. Our eyes met there, but he was a little bothered by that intimacy. Then, as I was climbing to the end, he got right off me and stood on the floor. I scrambled up too, confused for a moment by my own reflection in the glass, as if without my specs the image needed to be blinked back into focus, or as if a sixth sense revealed a face within my face, ghostly features caught in the very silvering of the mirror. Cherif took a half-step forward, and fell against the glass with flattened palms. A sequence of sounds emerged from it, or from a distance beyond it; and then for a couple of seconds we saw ourselves dematerialise and a perspective open up within – a shuttered room with stacks of chairs, lit from the side by an opening and closing door. Cherif was sighing and laughing quietly, and sat down again on the bed while I pulled on my trousers, hopping and treading on the legs.
I had been exploring the city rather fast and anxiously, referring on and off to a tourist map which omitted side-streets and alleys and showed the famous buildings in childishly out-of-scale drawings. Its poetic effect was to give me the shape of the town as a fifteenth-century engineer, expert in dikes and piles, might have shown it in plan to a ruling count: a mounted opal veined with waterways and suspended from the broad ribbon of the sea-canal. The industrial park, the post-war poor estates, the spent suburb of my first-night wanderings, were shown as fields, confirming the sense I had at every corner that the whole city aspired to be an artist’s impression.
It wasn’t a big town, and its great monuments, like the pinnacled elevations jostling on the map, were out of all proportion to the streets, courtyards and canals beneath them. The tapering, windowless monolith of the tower of St John’s and the ugly green spirelets with which a turn-of-the-century surveyor had capped the ancient tower of the Cathedral were mere satellites to the legendary altitudes of the Belfry. From far off, in Ostend, when we had cleared the cranes and the edge of town, these three appeared across the plain as a mysterious trinity, with the Belfry, growing epoch by epoch in battlemented stages towards its octagonal crown, the most doggedly heaven-storming of all.
Today the sky was low and the air fenlike and damp when I crossed the Grote Markt and saw the maestro of the famous carillon – a shovel-bearded young man in corduroy jacket and knee-breeches like a figure from some ingenious Flemish clock – unlock the gate and start to climb the two hundred stairs to his console in the clouds. Even in the Grote Markt, beneath the stepped gables of the best restaurants and the gilded angels who had paused on top of the Town Hall and raised their trumpets high over taxi-ranks and bus-stands, there was nothing happening. A few visitors wandered out of the glassed-in arcade of the Tourist Office, but the school holidays were almost over and the visitors were studious couples. A few women clambered with supermarket bags into one or other of the waiting buses that showed the names of outlying villages. Sometimes the silent tram came through. These were the days and weeks of a ceremonial square. And then the carillon banged out its lifeless rendering of a folksong or hymn.
It was the silence that followed that was most challenging. As I went round with my list of addresses the stillness of the town fused with my new suspicion of being watched, of something calculating in the mid-morning emptiness. I found myself coming back with relief to those two or three streets lined with ordinary shops, red flashes of special offers on sausage or coffee on the windows, outfitters and stationers cheerful with skirts, satchels and coloured pens for the
rentrée
. And among the rednosed Brueghel boys with bicycles there were others who looked bored and stylish and desirable. I found myself marvelling that they lived here.
I saw five rooms in all, but chose without hesitation. The others were such vessels of loneliness, or else too pinned and stifled with rules and considerations for someone who had finally left home. I had a horror of lying there, forbidden to smoke, listening to the cistern filling overhead. It was usually a housewife, garrulous and noncommittal, who would let me in and take me up, observing resentfully as I felt the bed or opened the hanging cupboard. In two of the houses other pallid lodgers were caught on their way between bedroom and lavatory and given a warning. I hardly saw Cherif as a welcome regular in such a place, or the romance of my new life unfurling under such surveillance.
The room I chose was so hidden away that it gave me the sensation of having entered, with dreamlike suddenness, into the secret inner life of the city. On the street it was a doctor’s establishment, a bare white house with a brass plate polished almost flat. At the side a gated passage led through into a shallow courtyard: the doctor’s residence backed on to a far older range of buildings – rough pink brick, steep roofs with the high-up doors and hoists of warehouse attics. Like a tiny Cambridge college, it had two stairways, one at either end, leading up to disused workshops, storerooms, and, on the second floor, two sets of rooms that were let. One had just been taken by some Spanish girls; the other, which was cheap but primitive, was mine; the old doctor (who still saw a few patients in his retirement) told me in French how pleased he was to have an Englishman there.
All down one side of the room ran unusually deep cupboards, each with an enamel number, and a door that shut with a boom. I could only occupy them all by putting underpants in one, shoes in two, jerseys in number three; when number four was opened my leather jacket was revealed like a historic vestment in a cathedral treasury, flanked by the monstrances of my special bottles and jars. Each shelf had been neatly lined with old newspaper, held in place by drawing-pins; I turned my head sideways to scan the time-silvered sports news and antique auto-tests. The facing wall was a wooden partition, rough with nail-holes and nail-heads hammered in, that made me wonder what had been stored here, what work had been done here, and when it had come to an end. It seemed an encouraging setting for my own projects, the bits of writing I was going to take up again. Behind the partition was the sleeping area, choked by a high iron bedstead in which three people could have slept abreast. Outside, at the head of the stairs, was a little washroom, with a sink and a fragment of mirror, and a rudimentary shower that dripped and left a rusty stain.
As soon as I was alone I set out my dictionaries, English, French and Dutch, and my notebooks and inks; I checked the crockery – two of everything, which seemed another good sign – and switched on the creaking electric plate. I’d persuaded myself it didn’t matter there was no heating – only a little blower that roared and ate electricity. I bounced on the bed and set its loose finials jingling.
At the front of my main room a leaded dormer looked down into the courtyard and across to the shuttered upper floor of the doctor’s house; but at the back there was a big sash-window. It looked westward, across to the mouldering apse of the church of St Narcissus; on the map the drawing of its singular brick tower and pointed lantern obliterated my house and the garden that lay between us. I heaved open the heavy frame and stared into the silence of the leafy space below. On the left was the ivy-covered height of the cinema’s blank back wall and on the right a canal in which the rotting water-door and tall barred windows of some ancient institutional building were reflected. The garden itself was not a churchyard, although the church presided over it and someone had chopped back the alder at its base and poisoned the creeper that still blackly covered its sunken outhouse or boiler-room. It was hard to imagine who – there seemed to be no door into the garden, and where the canal lay by the far wall of the church I could just make out fanned black spikes. The grass between the fruit trees had been scythed and left. Craning round I saw the blue ribbon of a toilet-roll thrown from a height and caught in the branches. And there was something I couldn’t quite see, a little stone figure of some kind, herm or saint, satyr or cupid, sheltered by leaves and ankle-deep in hay. I wanted to get down there, and then a moment later felt I would rather leave it unvisited for ever. The beauty of it lay not so much in itself as in its solitude, like any high-walled place in the middle of a town – deaf old widow’s garden or padlocked grave-ground of the Jews or Trinitarians.