“I bet you’d like that, queerboy, Queenie, bet you’d like that, wouldn’t you, eh?” He looked at me, and I saw a lethal kind of understanding in his gray eyes. “Queenie,” he repeated, with a nasty snigger, and then the wind changed and the sun came out and he was Leon again, talking about a concert he was planning to see; about Francesca’s hair and how it caught the light; a record he had bought; Francesca’s legs and how long they were; the new Bond movie. For a time I could almost believe he really had been joking; then I remembered the chilly intelligence in his eyes and wondered uneasily how I had given myself away.
I should have put an end to it right there and then. I knew that it wasn’t going to get any better. But I was helpless; irrational; torn. Something in me still believed that I could turn him round; that everything could be as it was before. I had to believe it; it was the only speck of hope on my otherwise bleak horizon. Besides, he needed me. He wouldn’t see Francesca again until Christmas at least. That gave me five months. Five months to cure him of his obsession, to draw the poison that had infected our comfortable fellowship.
Oh, I had to indulge him. More than was good for him, I suppose. However, there’s nothing quite so vicious as a lover, unless you count the terminally ill, with whom they share many unpleasant characteristics. Both are selfish; withdrawn; manipulative; unstable; reserving all their sweetness for the loved one (or themselves) and turning on their friends like rabid dogs. That was Leon; and yet I treasured him more than ever, now that he finally shared my suffering.
There is a perverse satisfaction in picking at a scab. Lovers do it all the time; seeking out the most intense sources of pain and indulging them, sacrificing themselves again and again for the sake of the loved object with a dogged stupidity that poets have often mistaken for selflessness. With Leon, it was talking about Francesca. With me, it was listening to him. After a while it grew unbearable—love, like cancer, tends to dominate the life of the sufferer so fully that they lose the ability to conduct a conversation on any other subject (so numbingly dull for the listener)—and I found myself trying with increasing desperation to find ways of breaking through the tedium of Leon’s obsession.
“I dare you.” That was me, standing outside the record shop. “Go on, I dare you. That is, if you’ve still got the balls.”
He looked at me, surprised, then looked beyond me into the shop. Something crossed his face—a shadow, perhaps, of pleasures past. Then he grinned, and I now thought I saw a faint reflection of the old, careless, loveless Leon in his gray eyes.
“You talking to me?” he said.
And so we played—the one game this new Leon still accepted to play. And with the game, the Treatment began; unpleasant, even brutish, perhaps, but necessary, just as aggressive chemotherapy can be used to attack cancers. And there was plenty of aggression in both of us; it was simply a question of turning it outward rather than in.
We began with theft. Small things first: records; books; clothes that we dumped in our little hideout in the woods behind St. Oswald’s. The Treatment turned to stronger fare. We graffitied walls and smashed bus shelters. We threw stones at passing cars; pushed over gravestones in the old churchyard; shouted obscenities at elderly dog-walkers who entered our domain. During that fortnight I veered between utter wretchedness and overwhelming joy; we were together again, Butch and Sundance—and for minutes at a time Francesca was forgotten; the thrill of her eclipsed by a stronger, more dangerous rush.
But it never lasted. My treatment was good for the symptoms, not the cause, and I discovered to my chagrin that my patient needed increasingly stronger doses of excitement if he was to respond at all. More and more often it fell to me to think of new things to do, and I found myself struggling to imagine newer and more outrageous exploits for the two of us to perform.
“Record shop?”
“Nah.”
“Graveyard?”
“Banal.”
“Bandstand?”
“Done it.” It was true; the night before, we had broken into the municipal park and smashed every seat on the town bandstand as well as the little railings that surrounded it. I’d felt bad doing it; remembered going into the park with my mother when I was very small; the summer smells of cut grass and hot dogs and candyfloss; the sound of the colliery band. I remembered Sharon Snyde sitting in one of those blue plastic chairs, smoking a cigarette, while I marched up and down going pom-pom-pom on an invisible drum, and for a second I felt horribly lost. That was me aged six; that was when I still had a mother who smelled of cigarettes and Cinnabar, and there was nothing braver and more splendid than a town bandstand in summer, and only bad people smashed things up.
“What’s up, Pinchbeck?” It was already late; in the moonlight Leon’s face was slick and dark and knowing. “Had enough already?”
I had. More than enough. But I couldn’t tell Leon; it was my Treatment, after all.
“Come on,” he’d urged. “Think of it as a lesson in taste.”
I had, and my retaliation had been swift. Leon had ordered me to demolish the bandstand; I reciprocated by daring him to tie tin cans to the exhausts of all the cars parked outside the police station. Our stakes escalated; our outrages grew increasingly complicated, even surreal (a row of dead pigeons tied to the railings of the public park; a series of colorful murals on the side of the Methodist church); we defaced walls, broke windows, and frightened small children from one end of town to the other. Only one place remained.
“St. Oswald’s.”
“No way.” So far we had avoided the school grounds—barring a little artistic self-expression on the walls of the Games Pavilion. My thirteenth birthday was days away, and with it approached my mysterious and long-anticipated surprise. My father played it cool, but I could tell he was making an effort. He was dry; he had started exercising; the house was immaculate and his face had developed a hard, dry grin that reflected nothing of what was going on inside. He looked like Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter; a fat Clint, in any case, but with that same slitty-eyed air of concentration on some eventual, apocalyptic showdown. I approved—it showed resolution—and I didn’t want to blow it all now over some idiotic stunt.
“Come on, Pinchbeck. Fac ut vivas. Live a little.”
“What’s the point?” It wouldn’t do to seem too reluctant; Leon would think I was afraid to take the dare. “We’ve done St. Oswald’s a million times.”
“Not this.” His eyes were shining. “I dare you—I dare you to climb to the top of the Chapel roof.” Then he smiled at me, and at that point I saw the man he might have been; his subversive charm; his irrepressible humor. It struck me like a fist, my love for him; the single pure emotion of all my complicated, grubby adolescence. It occurred to me then that if he had asked me to jump from the Chapel roof, I would probably have said yes.
“The roof?”
He nodded.
I was almost laughing. “All right, I will,” I said. “I’ll bring you back a souvenir.”
“No need,” he said. “I’ll get it myself. What?” Seeing my surprise. “You don’t think I’d let you go up there on your own, do you?”
6
St Oswald’s Grammar School for Boys