The world is so full of a number of things,
I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.
- Robert Louis Stevenson

Monday 7 February 2011

Countdown: 4 - Flesh of Lost Summers (Part II)

I tried to apologize to Tariq, but he didn’t even hear me out. In the months that followed, ‘Nette got sicker, and sicker. There was that bad incident at the funeral. I turned twelve and failed my exit stage left. When they had me up and going again, I couldn’t stop hating, hating everything, hating myself. That May Day, on Heinrichplatz, was the first time I got into an open, physical fight with the rozzers, and the first time my mum had to collect me from the station. Around then my mates I also had our brief career as shoplifters.
My mum, so far overextended that she was crying herself to sleep every night, when she thought we wouldn’t hear her, sent me to my aunt for the summer. And to everyone’s surprise I sort of caught myself again, for a while.
It was in England that I met my boy #2. Colin F. was sixteen at the time, like my cousin Jane, and her best friend and confidant. He was blond, quiet, and had a shy smile that could flicker up and disappear at any moment, like a deer in a forest clearing. He was often at my aunt’s house that summer, and most importantly, he wanted me.
Not that he said anything, or made any move. How did I know? Well, it was partly how often he turned up in the door to a room I was in, or on the veranda when Alice and I were in the garden, and how he never seemed actually comfortable around me when we got within speaking distance. But more than that it was something in his eyes, some quality of eager openness and furtive closedness  at the same time. Or maybe it was just that I could smell his fear. After all, I knew all about that fear, didn’t I?
I tried not to tease him – at all. And I made the strange discovery that teasing was my main way of communicating with peeps. Any peeps. I hadn’t known that until then. But for Colin I made the exception. Even when Alice wanted to play some tricks on him and Jane, I made excuses, or distracted her with other ideas, and left him alone. I remembered ‘Nette, and Tariq, and tried to be less of a coward.
I didn’t throw myself at him either, of course. He probably would have run if I had. Outwardly I kept up the appearance of friendly indifference, but I relaxed around him. My body and my eyes, enough to let my desire become apparent.
The seduction of Colin was probably my first confidence job. Not that I would have been able to call it that back then. But I did seduce him. Not with lies, mind you, for all my practice that has never been my strong suit, but with the truth.
Lying is hard work. I know you do it, too, all the time. We all do. But have you ever made a study of how it is done? Have you ever stood in front of a mirror and tried to make your face and your body say something you didn’t believe?
As someone once observed, somewhere inside of us is this perfect mathematician. If someone gave you all that data describing an object moving in a curve through the vectors of impulse, gravity, inertia, resistance, and so on, how long would it take you to calculate it’s flight path? And yet, if someone tosses you an apple, you can catch it out of the air in a heartbeat.
Likewise body language is so hard to describe, and yet we all use and read it all the time without consciously thinking about it. It is only when we begin to lie on a regular basis that we have to learn that language by mind instead of by heart.
I now know what it was I did, back then. I opened my chest to him by keeping my arms at my sides or otherwise occupied just so they wouldn’t form a barrier between me an him. I kept my pelvis turn towards him, not sideways, the way we do to shield ourselves from possible blows. When he was in my back, I wouldn’t stiffen my neck, but bare it, inviting an attack. When he was close I would melt a little bit, so that my back and my bum and my legs would become this curve, this wave that asked for a hand to run along it.
I was a good liar, even then, but none of that was a lie. I seduced him with the simple truth, just showed him what I wanted. Why did I just call it a confidence job, then? Well, the essence of the confidence job isn’t that you lie to the mark. The essence is that you allow the mark to lie to himself. That you allow him to trick himself into believing that he could have something he desired for a price he could afford. That was the lie: That I would give something to him, and not just take.
Eventually Colin noticed. Oh, he never caught on to the fact that I was quite active in this. He believed it was all his own doing. But he lost some of his shyness around me, became more eager for my company. And when my aunt suggested my cousins should take me on a bike trip to Three Cliffs Bay in Wales – a three day tour each way – and spend a few nights camping there by the sea with me, Colin somehow ended up coming along. Unfortunately without any grown-ups along, Alice decided we would disregard the promise we had given my aunt, and she would sleep in a tent with Colin, while I would stay in the other with Jane. But I still got my wish.
The first day at Three Cliffs Bay Colin and I went for groceries at the the little camping site shop. It was rather crowded and while we queued Colin finally made his move, and stepped up close enough behind me that his crotch touched my bum. He did his best to make it seem accidental, for maximum deniability, and I carefully but unmistakably pushed my bum backwards and pressed lightly against his erection. Oh, the feeling of this undeniable proof of his desire. It send chills down my spine. To get the message across I once, very slightly, rotated my bum against him. He didn’t dare for more then, but when we went back to the girls, there was a new spring in his step.
Finally, finally, a whole day later, Alice declared she was going swimming and Jane went along. I said I would rather have a look at the little castle ruins up on the high shore, and Colin said he would come along with me.
The ruins, a single, crumbling wall and the remains of a gatehouse, were deserted. I went for the narrow chimney-like nook next to the gate, and pretended interest in climbing up inside there. Colin squeezed in with me, and pretended to help. I still think he was unaware how much I knew that this was only foreplay, the way he stood below me and put his hands on my hips, both of us wearing nothing but swimming shorts and trainers.
It was a bit chilly in the shade of that nook. We both had goose bumps when we embraces. The grass tickled my shins when I knelt down. His hands were wonderful in my hair, alternately gentle with restraint and then again helplessly demanding. And when I made myself swallow I thought: “I’m not a coward. I am a real faggot now. And I am not a coward.” But I was wrong.
I shivered, weak with relief, and a squeaking little laugh escaped my lips, a sound the Colin mistook for dismay. He hugged me and whispered he was sorry. Unable and unwilling to explain any of these complicated thoughts and feelings, I turned away from him to the walls of the ruined gatehouse, and said: “Well, are you going to help me up there? Maybe we can see Alice and Jane from the top.”
We stole a few such moment, Colin and I, but since we both tried to keep it secret from my cousins, opportunities were scant. We went back to Wotton-under-Edge, and it got even harder to find innocent pretexts for spending time alone together.
I didn’t want to return to Berlin. I didn’t want this summer to end, not just because of Colin, but also. As always, my time in Gloucestershire seemed to be time away from the real world, from my real life, from the real me. In England I could be someone I wouldn’t ever dare to be in Berlin. But I’d already forced one extension by crying my eyes out in my aunt’s lap, and with school about to start again I knew that my deportation couldn’t be stayed any longer.
I hope it was mostly the fear of my return to Berlin, to my mum, and my remaining siblings, and to our tiny flat that was still with too much echoing emptiness, that rode me that evening when Colin dragged me away behind the garage, and kissed me, hard and painful in his yearning.
“Rikki,” he whispered, and with a sudden dread I knew what was coming. “I…”
Panic welled up inside me, and hatred. In the half light filtering from my aunt’s kitchen through the oleander bushes I could see Colin’s tongue, pink and perfect, touch his upper front teeth, beginning to shape the one word I could not permit him to utter, the one that held promises I knew he wouldn’t be able to fulfil, the one that implied a betrayal too monstrous to allow.
Helpless, not knowing how to react, I headbutted him, hard, hard enough to crack his left upper incisor, cutting my own scalp on it. He stumbled back, and there was more astonishment than pain in his gaze, a stunned question, and I believe he still thought it must have been some accident, me stumbling forward, a silly mistake, ugly, but a shared experience we might soon laugh about.
Instead I punched him in his gut. Going down he knocked over a stack of empty terracotta flower pots, and they shattered on the tiled ground like a cluster bomb. Colin began to cry and pressed his hands in front of his bleeding mouth.
“If you need your cock sucked, you know where to find me,” I hissed, as my aunt and Alice came running around the corner to investigate the noise. Blood was trickling down my own face, from the cut of his tooth. I bent down lower, so that only Colin could hear me. “But don’t ever… kiss me again, you queer bastard.”
A week later, back in Berlin, I got a letter from Alice, informing me about Colin’s incisor. Neither I nor – as far as I know – he ever told anyone what happened back then.
I didn’t return to Wotton-under-Edge until those two weeks three years later that ended with me ditching the bus and following the fox into Westridge Woods. While I was at my aunts I met Colin once again. He’s now a student of law at the University in Cardiff, and like Tariq he, too, didn’t hear me out when I tried to apologize. He was too eager to apologize to me. It turned out that all these years he had been consumed with guilt. After me he foreswore homosexuality, became religious, and let his mum set him up with his wife and the mother of her future grandchildren.
That was the price I made him pay, for that first blowjob, that first confidence job. For my cowardice. Ah, who is keeping track any longer, huh?

7 comments:

  1. not me...
    i was very hooked here with the familiarity of that landscape and everything - it's pretty and adept. i have 2 main problems; 1st - like a physical thing - I don't know what goes with what here - is it all the same story and follows on? or is it like - some more formless thing where we get a mass of different narratives and we can like - mix and match or - uh - not?
    2nd - your secondary characters are lacking some power - like they are sketched out foils for your narrator and seem to take form, like handy ghosts, in order for the narrator to make some reveal about himself, or 'learn' something. I don't really know if you're writing some memoir, or if it's a fictional piece, but either way, it becomes kind of allegorical and I don't know whether this is your intention.

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  2. Pretty, huh? Ouch, that was low, man. ^_^

    Can you be more specific where I am unclear and confusing? What goes with what where? It oughtn't be hard to fix.

    All of this, from Chapter One, is supposed to be one continuous text, which for now goes always 2 steps forward (the chapters) and then one backward (the countdown), but as the numbers suggest, at least the backward motion will cease with the next 3 such steps. As far as I can tell now, though, that will pretty much be the half-way mark of the entire tale.

    Allegorical, hmm. I see what you mean. Yeah, it is a problem. Beginning with the first question at the beginning of Chapter One, I am trying to backtrace something, and so I do pick specifically those encounters that seem to have something to do with my choices. And I'm probably too focused on that to allow those events the proper room to breathe and come alive. Hmm. Thanks a lot. I'll think about it and try to mend that.

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  3. oh - i rate 'pretty' a lot more than you then. take a compliment graciously huh?

    that was the most confusing dispelling of confusion EVER, but i kind of get it. i think. yes. i do. it's just continuous and i read from - like the beginning to the end. ok. duh - sorry.

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  4. @Changeling: You are right. I'm terribe at accepting compliments. I always either see them as hidden criticism, you know, sarcasm, or faint praise or so, or (and that is worse) I assume the other is dishonest and manipulative. That's the doom of the dishonest man - that he assumes so is everybody else. That's why they are so easy to cheat.
    Y_Y

    Say, can you tell me if this problem with the weak/allegorically-seeming 2ndary characters occurs only here, in this Chapter, or did it also happen before, Edinburgh, and the Highlands...?

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  5. I've spent several days catching up with this and I find it very interesting. I have learned a lot about the art and craft of being a thief. And it makes me realize what an uneventful and boring youth I had, but I don't think I would trade.

    Your writing is so interesting and illustrative that it's hard to stop reading once started. I've really enjoyed the journey so far. Though I've learned one thing: if I had an inclination before to befriend a young traveler, I will be twice cautious now.

    I will certainly be always a part of your audience as long as you keep writing and I have access to it. I wish you the best.

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  6. Thoroughly enjoyed the innocent-but-very-conscious play with the seduction story. The description of the body language felt a little too blatant or obvious or something but it's important for the tale. (Yea, that's an editing thing, don't worry about it now...)

    Man, you are pathological in your destructiveness to relationships!!!
    Reminds me of the saying, "Of course things end badly... otherwise they wouldn't end."

    No grace, eh? No "at least we had the summer," eh? Fits with the character so well and it's so exasperating... but you are making it endearing too...

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  7. @Brian: Why, thank you kindly. ^_^ You'll always be welcome, too.

    @Andrew: "pathological in your destructiveness" Yeah. Part of why I am writing this. Trying to find the roots and perhaps change, a bit.

    "No grace, eh?" Nope. None.

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