Chapter Eight: Empty Spaces (Part V)

Two days later he was standing on a hill, next to an abandoned radar post, looking out at the lighthouse of Muckle Flugga, and past the small hump of the isle of Out Stack, to the empty sea. He had reached the northernmost point of the British islands. This was the edge of the board.

Instead of permitting himself guiltier pleasures, Richard had spent the night playing chess with the boy.

“Chess isn’t really my game,” the boy had told Richard. “I prefer poker.” And in an attempt to joke, or perhaps to punish Richard for his earlier display of weakness, the boy had flashed him that wicked grin that he had stolen from a friend a mere week earlier, and added: “Strip poker.”

Richard refused to be baited. He made certain the boy knew all the rules, and explained to him about openings, and control of the board, about lines of influence, forks and skewers. Then they played.

The first time Richard tried to let the boy win.

The boy scowled.

“You bought my time. And body if you want it. But not…”

He searched for the right word.

“Not your integrity?” Richard suggested. “You’re right. I apologise.”

“Sheesh, you do that a lot, don’t you?”

“I suppose so.”

“Never apologise, never explain. Some bloke said that.”

“I don’t think I agree.”

“Of course you don’t. Are you gonna set it up again or not? And this time, bloody beat me if that’s how it goes.”

So they played again. At first they played while they talked. Richard told the boy that his mother had just died in a nursing home in Scotland. He had driven down to get the last piece of furniture she had owned, the roll desk. He was a veterinarian on the Shetland mainland. He admitted he’d dreamed of young men all his life but never had the courage to go through with it.

Really? the boy thought. And you think it was morals keeping you from going through with it with me?

The boy told him more embellishments to his story, but eventually the unbroken sequence of defeats turned him taciturn. Finally, instead of accepting his 6th or 7th checkmate, he simply took the king and moved it past the border of the board.

“No, Arik, that is against the rules.”

“Never been one much for keeping rules.”

“I know.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know what the reason was for you to leave your home on the promise of some guy on the internet, and maybe you really have been check mated. But your plan, finding happiness with some Ersatz father here, at the edge of the world, that is trying to cheat, isn’t it? Your version of trying to move your king over the edge of the board.”

“What if?” Sullen again, and this time it’s no act. “I’m here, ain’t I? All those rules people make up, they’re just excuses not to accept responsibility for their own lives. Any time I hear someone say, they have no choice I want to curbstomp them.”

“Yes, you are here, Arik. And where are you going from here? Where is that place beyond the edge?”

The boy was looking at it now, from the abandoned radar post. He had reached the ultima thule, the furthest North of the British Isles. Beyond the few last rocks was the open North Atlantic. If you went in a straight line from here, there would be nothing but open water until you reached the floating ice shelf at the North Pole.

Lerwick had been bad for him. The only actual town on the entire archipelago, and with its 17,000 inhabitants way too small for a single underage homeless thief to get bye. There had been no crowds to vanish in, no anonymity. The few hostels he could have afforded didn’t buy his stories and after he beat his retreat he didn’t dare even linger in the vicinity out of fear they might have informed the constabulary.

He hiked and hitched his way further north, onto Unst. He spent a night in the colourful bus stop at Baltasound. And now he made his way down from the hill, past the cliffs dotted white with Gannets and Puffins. When he reached the rocky beach, he stared out at the lighthouse. He tried to skip stones across the water, but the waves were choppy and every stone tumbled and sank.

He remembered the lion Groagramman from The Neverending Story, the second book he ever read. Graogramman and Bastian, the main character, had talked about wishes and dreams, and about travelling.

It is not enough to wish to leave a place, the lion had told the boy in the story. You need to know where you wish to go to.

Is this me taking the king over the edge, the boy thought as he made his first step into the cold salty water. Or is this me pretending I have no other choice?

The water flooded his boots. It crawled up his trouser legs. His penis and scrotum shrank away from the cold. When the choppy waves lapped against his belly button he gasped.

And then he saw the boat, tourists on their way back from the lighthouse. He thought he heard them laugh and shout. He was certain they had seen him, were pointing fingers.

Would they rescue him? Drag him from the water? Force life back into him the way the paramedics had done some three years earlier, his first failed attempt? He had never felt more helpless than when they took his death away from him.

For a while he stood in the sea, almost chest deep. In the swell of the cold water his body’s buoyancy made him sway drunkenly. Air bubbles still crawled up his legs from his boots and little folds in his jeans. The sheepskin lining of his jacket got heavy and pulled on his shoulders.

Where do I go from here?

All he knew was that he couldn’t turn around and go south. He suspected that he knew the reason why as well, if only he could be honest with himself. But he also knew that he couldn’t be.

When he had exchanged messages with Master Daddy Matt, his Online BDSM Daddy, just after he had begun this reckless walkabout, the man had told him “not to do anything stupid.”

Was this what he had meant?

Master Daddy Matt had once attempted suicide as well. But according to the way he told it, he had been rescued by an angel.

“It had been a glowing figure of pure light. When he touched me, I knew I would be okay. I called my friend John and he sent the paramedics.”

The boy thought back to the day he had tried. There had been no angel for him. He had seen no light. When Master Daddy Matt had talked about the angel, the boy had hoped it was a lie.

The boat had changed course. The tourists had stopped laughing. They were shouting at him now, waving their hands. The guide at the rudder was focused on the rocks just underneath the surface of the sea.

I hate you, the boy thought to his God. I hate you so much.

He turned around, waded back on land. Water spilled from his clothes. He didn’t even stop to pour out his boots. Feeling a bitter sense of shame he just ran from the Samaritans on the boat.

That night he returned to Lerwick. He had no particular plan. Perhaps he would try stealing again. Get caught. He had the romantic idea of reaching under his jacket when a police officer came for him. Of that OK Corral feeling, when he got to stare into a gun. Would Bev’s Swiss Army Knife be enough of a threat?

But instead he found a legal move to take his king off the board.

For a while.

Chapter Eight: Empty Spaces (Part IV)

They got out of the car. The man eyed the boy suspiciously, as if checking for loot, or possibly weapons.

“Who gave you that shiner?”

Again the boy checked for useful lies. Would ‘a father’ work in his favour? A boy’s father, or better a girl’s? He wasn’t sure, decided to play for time.

“Someone,” he said, layering on a little sulk. His instinct told him to look down, as if ashamed or lying.

“Someone you stole from?”

 “No!” he spat, and glared at the man, suddeny certain how to play it. He forced himself to think of the man who had hit him, to pump for anger and disgust. “He stole from me. We had agreed…” He bit off the rest of the sentence, looked away again.

“He had agreed, to…” he muttered.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the man adjust his belt, then wipe his brow, and he was certain he had him. But to make sure he let the silence become uncomfortable.

“Well,” the man said. “You can carry my bag.”

A short while later, they arrived at the man’s cabin: a small windowless room, the confined space thick with the hum and thrum of the ferry’s engines. The tiny, attached moulded plastic bathroom smelled of disinfectant. The boy put the bag down. The man sat down on the bed, looked up at the boy, then took off his glasses and began to polish them on his sweater. When he had put them back on, he said:

“My name is Richard. How should I call you?” and he put his hand out, as if he had forgotten how to introduce himself without doing so.

The boy waited just long enough to make Richard remember, then shook it – his palms were unpleasantly greasy – and said: “Ariel. Ariel Storm.”

He let go, stuffed his hands into his back pockets and looked down at the toes of his scuffed boots. “Um. Friends.” He looked over to the little neon light glowing over the headboard of the bed. “Friends call me Arik.”

For a while, neither said anything. Then Richard cleared his throat.

“Are you hungry, Arik?”

The boy nodded and they went to the restaurant. Richard asked him if he wanted a burger and fries, and then ordered the Viking Burger with cheese and bacon for the boy, while he had the haddock with chips and peas himself. He insisted on apple tart for both of them for desert.

“Can I smoke on deck, please,” the boy asked afterwards. Richard lectured him about health risks, but the boy could see how it made Richard both uncomfortable and happy to have him behave like a prisoner. He got his cigarette, and they talked about the stars. The boy pointed out Cassiopeia, and Richard showed him how to find Pegasus from there.

“It looks more like a kite with a tail, than a horse,” the boy said.

“True.” Richard looked at it for a while and cocked his head. “But it can still fly, can’t it?”

Richard watched the boy finish his smoke. Then he put a hand on the boy’s back: “Back inside, now.”

The boy knew he should shake it off angrily, it would fit the character better, but he felt too tired. They went back to the cabin. Richard guided the boy inside, and then locked the door from the inside, pocketing the key after a moment’s hesitation.

His voice shook slightly when he said: “Make yourself comfortable. I’ll be with you right away.” Then he went to the bathroom and closed the door behind him.

The boy stood uncertainly in the room. There was no sound from the bathroom. He sat down on the bed, opened his boots and kicked them off. Suddenly he felt embarrassment for the sour smell of sweat coming off him. Hastily he peeled off his socks, then his jeans, then his jacket and sweater. He bundled all of his clothes together and put them underneath his backpack in the corner by the door, farthest from the bed. Then he sat down on the bed, with his back against the wall, knees drawn up, blanket over the knees. And he closed his eyes and waited.

After a while he heard Richard flush and run the tap and then open the door.

Richard had undressed, too. He was wearing his unbuttoned shirt over a ribbed undershirt and grey retro boxers, and dark socks. He looked most naked without his glasses.

Richard came over to the bed in little steps, and sat down next to the boy. He put one hand onto the boy’s covered knee, looked at him. With his other hand he brushed the boy’s bruised cheek. Twice he wanted to say something, but failed. As if to release him, the boy let the blanket slide down, went to his knees and pulled his dirty white T-shirt over his head. Then he took Richard’s hand and placed it on his shoulder, as if to dance. He took the other one, but instead of placing it on his hip he tried to guide it between his legs.

Richard stood up.

“I am sorry…”

He disappeared again in the bathroom.

The boy waited for a while. Eventually he went over to his backpack, and got dressed. He took the dog eared copy of William Butler’s “The Butterfly Revolution” he had nicked from the Kirkwall hostel out of his pack, sat down with the back to the cabin door and started to read.

Eventually the bathroom door opened again.

Richard was dressed, too. The boy put his finger between the pages and dangled the book between his knees. Richard came over and sat down next to him.

“I am sorry.”

“It’s okay,” the boy said. “Do you want to try again?”

Richard shook his head, took off his glasses again and wiped them.

“I should never have even thought it. It was…”

“It’s really okay, Richard.”

“No,” Richard suddenly said fiercely. “It’s not.” And when the boy flinched, he added more quietly: “Not because…” He hesitated but then forced himself to say it. “Not because of the gay sex. But because you are a kid in trouble, and it was vile of me to even consider taking advantage of that.”

To his own astonishment the boy found himself smiling wanly, instead of bristling at the diminution. He patted Richard’s knee. I would deserve it, he thought. I would deserve so much worse. Why couldn’t you be a little bit less decent?

“So, what now? Want me to get out? I can make my way from here.”

Richard stared at the opposite wall for a while. Then he asked: “Do you play chess?”

Chapter Eight: Empty Spaces (Part I)

I've run away from a little old woman,
A little old man,
And I can run away from you, I can!

- The Gingerbread Boy (St. Nicholas Magazine, May 1875)

A fine drizzle hung like mist around the street lamps along the narrow road between the sea and the steep, washed-out slope of the land, when the boy strolled out of the darkness and walked up to the red-and-white barrier marking the entrance to the marshalling area for the Scrabster-Stromness ferry. He wore threadbare Jeans, a sheepskin-lined denim jacket, and scuffed and muddy oxblood boots. One of the shoe laces was black, the other was a bright neon orange. He had taken care to pick the hay from his clothes and from the dirty blond hair, and to wash the dust from his face, but there hadn’t been much he could do about the bruised cheek and the black eye, almost swollen shut, nor about his angry, closed-off expression.

For a while he loitered at the edge of the darkness and waited for check-in to begin. He tried to light a cigarette, but his lighter, a Zippo with the Tarot Death Card motive, was out of fuel.

When check-in began, he carefully observed the procedure from a distance. Just as the signs proclaimed, everybody, whether travelling with a car or on foot had to show a photo ID. The boy felt a slight annoyance at the terrorists, whose attacks 7 years earlier to the day had changed the world and made his form of travel so much harder.

The signs also proclaimed that no tickets were issued to unaccompanied minors under 16 years of age. Not that it makes much of a difference, he thought, I don’t own any legitimate ID anyway. And he doubted any kind of sob story could get him through here. After watching everything for a while he decided that he would easily get past the controls onto the marshalling area, with the terminal building, the long access road to the pier, and the passenger transit building. The problem would be the check points in the passenger transit building and the walkway up to the ferry.

He almost enjoyed the problem. It distracted him from other thoughts and memories. He briefly considered trying to swim to the ferry. The romantic commando style pleased him, but he quickly dismissed the idea as far beyond his abilities – the ferry would be much too tall from the surface of the water. He then considered trying to find someone a year or two older than himself with features similar enough to pass the picture check, and steal his ID. But there wasn’t anyone like that visible at the harbour. Also, he thought, such a person might easily notice the theft before the ferry arrived in Stromness and get the authorities to search for him. He didn’t fancy police officers searching the boat, cornering, and arresting him. And he had no intentions of going back South, to Thurso or beyond, to look for a suitable mark.

In the end, he thought his best chance would be to hide in one of the cars. He slunk undiscovered onto the large car park where the cars waited in neat queues for loading. Most passengers had gotten out, in spite of the chilly, damp weather. The sky had begun to grey in the East, and they were stretching their limbs, eating sandwiches and drinking hot beverages from thermoses, or using the toilets in the terminal building. The boy walked through the rows of cars as if belonging to one of them, and carefully considered his options.

He decided on a dark blue van. The driver, a burly man with a grim, ogerish face and a snake tattoo around his thick upper arm, locked the van with a remote and left for the terminal building. The boy peered through the windows. There were no other passengers inside, and several cardboard boxes had been stacked in the space behind the back seats. Careful to appear casual and unselfconscious, he took up position behind the rear doors, where he would be unobserved by the driver upon his return.

When the van beeped once and flashed its lights, and the doors unlocked with an audible clunk, he quickly opened the door, slipped in, closed it and crawled underneath the back seats. There, he figured, he would be invisible from the windows and from the front seats.

His stomach cramped with fear and excitement, as always when he had committed himself to a plan, and was now helplessly waiting whether it worked out or whether he would be caught. The van’s engine growled itself awake. The driver turned on the radio. Amy Winehouse’s hoarse, plaintive voice filled the space between them.

“So we are history, your shadow covers me, the sky above a blaze that only lovers see.”

Then the van jerked into motion, rolled slowly forward, rumbled over the ribbed metal ramp, and into the belly of the ship. When the driver killed the engine again, the boy had already braced his feet against the struts holding the seat, ready to push himself forward. As soon as he heard the door being opened, he shot out of his hiding place and to the rear door. Hoping the overall thundering, throbbing noises of the ship and the other cars would cover his exit, he opened the door, slipped out, ducked around the corner of the next car, straightened, and walked away casually.

On deck the peach and salmon glow on the Eastern horizon had faded back into the Prussian blue of a gloomy day. Two girls had taken advantage of the lull in the rain, and were standing by the guardrail, looking out at the emptiness of the open North Sea. They were chatting in fluent Gaelic, telling each other giggling gossip, when the bruised boy approached them.

They interrupted their conversation and eyed him curiously, but friendly. He struggled to ask his question.

“Can you tell me what this means in English?” He cleared his throat and blushed, trying to pronounce what he had been told, in halting whispers in the dark of the night five days before: “Hah Geul Ah-kum orsht.”

He had to repeat it twice. The girls giggled again.

“Wis she a bonnie lass?” one girl asked.

Helpless the boy shrugged, their reaction already confirming what he had been most afraid of. When she told him, he thanked her, blushing even worse.

After two hours the ferry docked in Stromness. He just walked off together with the other foot passengers. Nobody challenged him, and he disappeared in the narrow, steep alleys.

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

He didn’t release my arms. He just sat on me, leaned forward, holding the weight of his upper body on his outstretched arms, and allowed for the world to collapse inward and dissolve in that lasting, coppery kiss.

Once, he bit my lip, and our blood began to mingle. I trembled with my whole body.

What did I feel? Relief. Waves, and waves of relief. They welled up inside me like a flash flood, filling the lightless caves, and flushed all the dust, lose shale, and guano of past disappointment, rejection, and doubts away. They kept rising, those waves of relief, until I was certain they would spill out as tears, finally free again, but it was giggles instead, bubbly, pealing, as if my insides had been carbonated.

And there was lust. So much more, and so much more raw, than there had been with anyone else. The way his knees dug painfully into my wrists, the way my lip throbbed and burned, the taste of the blood, and of the tobacco on his spit. The way he just wouldn’t break the kiss, even when I started giggling. The way his tongue patiently, savouring, explored the inside of my mouth. The way his breath flowed from his nose past my cheeks alternately cool in and hot out, evenly, unhurried.

After a while, still without breaking the kiss, and without lifting his knees from my arms, he put his socked feet together, put the toes between my thighs and pushed them apart. He brought his feet further up until he was sitting on his heels and his spans were pushing hard into my crotch. He wriggled his toes ever so slightly against my bum, and I could feel his lips form a smile against mine when I groaned.

His tongue was still in my mouth and our combined saliva and blood was running down my cheeks and chin and into my nose. He kept kissing me while I helplessly humped my crotch upward against his feet. He kissed me allthorugh that most uncomfortable and strenuous form of masturbation, until I filled my shorts.

Only then did he sit up and look down at me. He wiped his mouth once, with the back of his hand, smearing the blood and giving him a terrible, wolfish expression. He just looked at me questioningly. I looked up, dizzy and uncertain what he was expecting.

“Well, Tavi?”

“Thank you…?” I hazarded, my voice hoarse.

“Thank you what?”

“Thank you, Sir?”

“Is that a question, Tavi?”

And there was the last uprising of relief. There still weren’t any tears, but If elt it pour out of me, out of every pore and orifice, wash over me, until I was shivering, the way one does at the end of a long piss. I relaxed, and I smiled, without any reservation, and said with utter conviction and sincerity:

“Thank you, Sir.”

And I was rewarded with that strange smile of his that only sat in the corners of his eyes.

In the following weeks, Hendrik expected me to continue studying hard and reaching all the goals he had set for me. And if we spent less time on my studies while together, he expected me to make up for that in my own time. But to be honest, he never expected more of me than I could deliver, if I really put my back into it.

It was probably the strangest relationship I ever had with someone, way stranger than with Ponyboy or even with that cold bitch that would end up shooting me 2 ½ years later. There was sex, of course, but even that was, I dunno…

I was required to cum onc, but only once, each time we met, and it was always the last thing we did, before going our separate ways. And it was always and only by me humping his feet and creaming my undies. Usually he would sit on a chair or the edge of his bed, and I would kneel before him, my hands on his thighs, and do my business. Afterwards he sort of lost interest in me until next time.

And he… well, take the time he took my cherry. This was how it went: He asked me if I’d ever been fucked before. I said, honestly, that I’d played around, you know, with some things, like carrots, and stuff. I’d even done it a few times on cam for dirty old men getting off on it. But no other person had entered me there. For a afew days he didn’t mention it again and I was sort of disappointed, and then he told me to get permission from my mum to go camping with him for a night the next weekend.

For his 18th birthday, just one or two weeks or so before, he’d gotten his driver’s licence and a used fire-engine red BMW Funduro. That Friday he was waiting for me in the yard behind the tenement building his rents were living, next to his bike. He took my backpack with my sleeping bag and change of clothes and everything and just stuffed it into the narrow gap behind the concrete shed that housed the bins. There was a load of other trash there.

“Nobody will take it. You can get it out when we get back. Now take of your pants und briefs.”

“Here?”

He just looked at me impatiently. He hated when I questioned his commands. I looked around in the yard. We were alone. Half hidden behind the bin shed I opened my belt and dropped my shorts. I stepped out of them without removing my trainers, and then slid down my briefs. (He had forbidden me to wear boxers any more. Only tight slips were allowed.)

He took the briefs and had me put on my shorts again. When I had rebuckled the belt, he stuffed the briefs in my mouth. Then he put the sextra helmet he had sitting on the seat of the bike onto my head. Turned out he had spray-painted the visor opaque from within. When he had shoved it onto me, I was gagged and blind.

He sat down on the bike and started the engine. Then he had me climb onto the seat behind him and off we went.

I have no idea where exactly he took me, but according to my watch it was about a three hour ride, first through the city, then on the highway, then country roads that got increasingly bumpy, and finally completely off-road. For me this ride, mouth dry, jaws aching, in darkness, the noise of the wind and the engine blasting everything from the world except the feel of his cool, slick, leather-clad torso against my chest and the naked arms I had slung around him, lasted forever. In some ways it hasn’t even ended yet. Maybe it never will.

Once we arrived, he had me climb off and took my by the hand. Still blind and dumb he guided me through some underbrush, down a slope, and into a thicket of reeds. The ground got marshy, and then I stepped into cold water. Hendrik just lead me on. I could hear him splash through the water next to me. With nothing to hold onto but his hand, I walked on. The water reached my knees, my hip, my chest, and then we were swimming, me still with the helmet, his hand still my lifeline. A few minutes later, there was again muddy ground under my feet, it got shallower, and he was leading me up another slope.

Wordlessly he had made me sit down, back to a tree, and tied my wrists behind it. Then he busied himself with a fire. Only when he was done, he removed the helmet and the gag. We were on a small wooded island, in a small, swampy lake, surrounded by a coniferous forest. There was a tent he must have had waiting for us. Over the fire he was boiling water in a tin pot. When it was done, he made tea and fed it to me from a tine cup. It was too hot and burned my tongue. He didn’t stop forcing it into me. The clothes, mine and his own bike leathers, he just let dry on our bodies.

So, when he eventually untied me, and we snogged, and rolled down back into the shallow, muddy waters of the lake, and he took me with my head half submerged, it was really only that one other thing, that happened that weekend. The ride, the tea, the blind swim, and the island, and later, spending the night – tied up again – in his arms, those were what it had all been about.

Or there was thing with the clothing. First it was the boxers, but then he gave me a bunch of old underwear and socks from his little sister, Solveig, to wear instead of my own. And finally he made me give him my hi-top Chucks and gave me a pair of Solveig’s worn, low, pale yellow Keds instead. When I balked, he just gave me this strange look. Not dominating, you understand, he never brow-beat me. It was just this mild contempt, like a dare. Like, aren’t you even man enough to be able to wear a girl’s clothes without getting frightened. And so I did. And you know what. I felt good about it. I felt proud.

The worst, and the best, he demanded of me, was without a doubt the night in the woods.

In late July he had told me to stop wanking. My only relief would be those sessions with him. Of course there wasn’t really any way for him to know if I complied, though I think he knew he could trust me to keep my word. Being faithful made me much too happy and proud to do anything else.

“But,” he said, “when I have to trust you, I need you to prove that you also trust me. Really trust me. Do you think you can do that, Tavi?”

What do you think I answered to that?

So one evening he again put me into that helmet and drove me deep into some woods. When he removed the helmet and showed me what he had prepared, I grew very faint, and very afraid. At the bottom of a small hollow he had dug a grave, a neat, oblong rectangular hole into the forest ground. The spade and the axe he had used still leaned to a large oak tree nearby.

He knelt down next to me, lit a fag, and handed it to me.

“You can say no, Tavi. I won’t tell you what will happen. I’m not telling you it will be okay. I’ll just ask you to trust me. If you don’t, we go back bow. But you and me, it will be over. It’s your choice.”

I looked at him. It was one of the few times he was flushed, too. He, too, was breathing hard. In his eyes burned a fire, a strange, wild desire. He really, really wanted this. But he left the choice to me. Only, of course, it wasn’t a choice. I wasn’t going to be a coward. I couldn’t. So I nodded.

“Say it, Tavi.”

I had to think about that for a second, but then I got it.

“I trust you… Sir.”

He gave me one of his smiles, strained by his dark desire. He tied my wrists behind my back. Then he had me climb in the hole and lie down. One side of the hole wasn’t vertical, but sloped, like a bathtub. I had to lie with back on the slope, facing up. He tied my legs, too. And then he began to fill the gave with the dark, damp earth, all the way until my face, staring straight up, was more or less flush with the ground, a pale oval in the middle of the forest floor.

Last he scattered leaves and twigs and lose earth over the whole area. I blinked some dust away and blew some leaves from my mouth and nose, but I must have been practically invisible even from only a couple of meters away.

“Can you breathe, Tavi?” he asked.

I tried. It was harder than normal, but I thought it wouldn’t be a problem. I tried to smile, in spite of the terror, and whispered: “Yes… Sir.”

He nodded, gathered up the spade and axe, got onto his bike, and drove away. I heard the engine recede and fade into the wind in the treetops.

I don’t think there are words to describe that night. The unbearable fear, the loneliness, the sounds of the nature around me. I watched the last light fade from the little sky above me. The dark crowns of the oaks and pines and maple trees standing high above me like giants merged with the night until only a few pinpricks of starlight remained here and there. Insects crawled over my face. Mosquitoes discovered me early. I must have fed thousands that night.

I honestly didn’t know if he would come back. And a part of me totally got off on that idea, that he had left me there to die. Even when I started to call for help. Even when I started to beg.

At some point I pissed myself, turning the earth around my crotch to mud. At some point a group of wild pigs moved past pretty close. Ever since reading Clive Barker’s Pig Blood Blues, and later Thomas Harris’s Hannibal, I had been fascinated by the idea of getting eaten by a pig. I was certain, they would discover me and eat the face of my skull. I couldn’t even see them, just heard them moving and grunting and snuffling in the darkness. Eventually the went away.

Time stretched, like taffy, and fragmented. I realised that breathing was getting harder. I was running out of energy to push away the earth pressing against my chest, and lying on tied arms didn’t make things easier. I don’t know if I really could have suffocated that way, but at the time, it felt that it was happening, right then. The feeling grew more and more intense, until sheer physical panic took over. I screamed and yelled and begged. I struggled, but all I managed was to wear myself out even more. I had loosened the earth around my head enough so I could turn it a few centimetres to either side, or lift it a little bit, but doing that was so strenuous I had to let it sink back after a few seconds.

At some time it rained for a while, big drops hitting me in my face. I could feel the wetness seep down through the earth, making it even heavier and breathing even harder. The dripping of the drops from the leaves continued for a long time after the rain itself had stopped, distorting all sounds even further.

I sometimes thought I heard people, or steps, or a suppressed cough. Sometimes I was afraid and ashamed, sometimes I screamed for help. The sounds always drowned in the sounds of the nightly forest, leaving me uncertain if I had just imagined them.

When morning finally came, and I lifted my head and tried to look around, I could see a figure from the corner of my eyes, sitting hunched against a tree on top of the slight rise encircling the hollow I was in the centre of. I was near delirious at the time, and exhausted beyond anything I had ever experienced. I was convinced that the hunched figure was Death, incarnate, waiting for me to give up my last breath. And I was certain I would do so soon. Each breath was a gasp, flat, and I felt very dizzy and faint. The world had ceased to be more than a vague scribble on a paper-thin sheet of experience. Underneath was only that void I had already encountered once, on my 12th birthday.

The figure got up. It was Hendrik, holding his father’s hunting rifle. He stretched, brushed some leaves from his legs, and walked away. Half an hour later, I heard his motorcycle approach. He dug me up, untied me, gently took off my clothes, helped me into a fresh tracksuit, and lifted me onto his bike. I was shivering all over and could hardly hold onto him. He was very careful as he drove back.

At his place – his rents were away, like almost always – he ran me a hot bath. He washed me gently, with a soft washcloth, and some scented bubble bath.

“Were you there the whole night?” I asked, still barely able to use my voice. I kept trying to touch him, to hold onto him. Even when he left the room only for a few seconds, I felt like crying out to him like a baby.

His face remained serious when he didn’t answer. He only kissed me, the softest kiss of all the ones he ever gave me. There was no smile in his face, no praise. I don’t have a word for what was there, but it was worth to me even more than the night he carried me off the football pitch.

***

Why didn’t it last?

I don’t know, really. There wasn’t any one thing. He tried a lot of things. He played with pain, made me bleed. He also tried to find the point where my revulsion would best my need to rise to any challenge. He never found my limits. And that began to bring him to his.

He made me get my second tat, and even paid for it: Out of the money I had paid him. When my mum discovered it, she blew her top, as she had with the first one. Of course I neither told her who had done it, nor that it had been Hendrik’s idea. But even so, he was very careful not to mark me too much, cutting, or beating, and not to get me sick. Not for my sake, I am certain, but to avoid attention.

He began to abuse his girlfriend. He made me watch them, tied up in his wardrobe, or even in the large drawer under his bed where he kept his duvet and pillow during the day, as they made out. I was there when he defloured her, telling her he loved her all through. He made me go on picnics and stuff with them, selling me as this social case he had taken on to keep me off the street. He upped that eventually by telling her I was queer and getting her to talk to me girl to girl about blokes. The talks were double torturous for me, having to keep everything that mattered about my sex life – namely him - out of it, while suffering through her own humiliation that remained invisible to her.

None of that really stopped what I felt for him, but it began to fade. On our last meeting he made me dress in her clothes and pretend to be her, or some mock transvestite version of her, while he screwed me. I don’t know what he was after that day. I tried hard, but he never finished.

We lay next to each other, not touching, when I said:

“Can’t we come out?”

“Hm?” He turned his face towards me, brushed my long hair from mine. (He had forbidden me to cut my hair.)

“I don’t care if you stay together with her, and really, I am sure she wouldn’t mind about me. I mean, she must half know anyway, and she’ll suffer far worse for you. So will I. I just don’t wanna stay hidden anymore.”

After all the many challenges he had given me, all of which I had passed with at best a brief hesitation, this was the first serious one I had given him.

He blew softly on my sweaty face. Then he shrugged.

“You can go anytime.”

He didn’t call me Tavi. I felt hollow and tired and disgusted with myself. I got up, took off her clothes. Naked I was marked by him all over in a thousand small ways, masked by my usual bruises and scrapes, but I could have counted and identified every single nick and prick and scar he had left on me.

He watched me get dressed and walk out. He never said a word.

I didn’t call him again, after that. And he didn’t call me. We met at football training, but there we had always pretended that there wasn’t anything between us, so we just continued that act. It was hard at first, but it quickly got easier. And when I shaved my head and began wanking again, I knew it was over.

I think I could have forgiven him everything, except cowardice. It wasn’t that he didn’t admit to me, it was that he let himself be held back by fear, the fear of what others would think of him.

The real kicker, of course, wasn’t his failure. The kicker came, when at night, in the loneliness of that tiny room I had once shared with ‘Nette, I talked to her ghost, the way I often did. And I told her about Hendrik, and how pissed off I was at him. And her ghost, dry and far away, asked me, why not being a coward was so important to me.

“Because of what you taught me,” I said.

I felt her wistful smile, the one only ghosts can wear, because to them everything is past, is lost, is both precious and no longer important. And in her smile I read the bitter truth: I was afraid of failing her. I was afraid of being weak. I was afraid of being afraid.

Nothing had changed.

I was still a coward.