There were lots of possible reasons for the way both sets of liaison, with Luke and with Julian, fizzled out. The toilet block wasn’t an ideal setting, but then nor was the Blue Dorm when Julian was trying to write his letter, and I was impersonating a perverse puppet who bossed people around and made them laugh. Nor was the music room, when Luke and I had played ‘Plaisir d’amour’ as a duet for lovers with a piano for our pimp and our alibi. Looking back, I have to acknowledge what those two scenes shared, a sort of blatancy that made me feel safe as well as excited. Perhaps anyone brought up without privacy is likely to turn into a voyeur or an exhibitionist or both.
I also had a growing preference when it came to the objects of my affection. Although Ben Nevin had left and my feelings about Raeburn were more mixed than they had once been, I had pretty much decided that boys weren’t what I wanted. I wanted a man, and I had my eyes on Mr Kirby the physics teacher. He had the right smell.
I had watched dogs smelling each other, and admired their unembarrassability. I longed to smell people, though not their bottoms particularly. Mr Kirby gave me a golden opportunity once. He was doing an experiment which needed careful watching, and while he was absorbed in the task I had a good old sniff. The lab window was very near and I didn’t dare lean over for too long. When I had returned to the vertical there was still no one visible through the window, and I thought I had got away with it.
At lunch-time that day, though, a boy called Philip Battersby came up and asked me if I thought Mr Kirby had a nice bottom. I said I hadn’t the least idea. He said, ‘Well you were certainly getting a good look at it in the lab this morning.’ I didn’t know what to say, and Philip made the most of this rare event. What would he have said if he had realised I was sniffing rather than peering? Mr Kirby smelled of Quink and cinnamon.
For ever in the minds of men
Mr Kirby had a side-line in astronomy. Patrick Moore of The Sky At Night came to deliver a talk with slides, and jolly good it was too. I remember that at one point he stamped on the floor twice, and then told us how far the universe had expanded in that second between his stamps. We were a good audience. Everyone went ‘Ooohh …!’ absolutely sincerely.
There was a little reception given for him after the talk. I’d read some of his space novels for boys and badly wanted to chat with him, but Patrick was only interested in Luke, who was laying on the charm and praising the space novels. Which I’d told him about in the first place. I didn’t get a look in, and nor did anyone else. On his way out Patrick Moore told Miss Willis that Luke had real promise as a novelist and she absolutely beamed. Little parcels arrived for Luke for some time after that, books, cards and bits of meteorite. Perhaps it was then that I began to get tired of the relentlessness of Luke’s overtures to the world at large. Luke Squires, novelist or con-man in the making.
I wasn’t going to miss the star-gazing evening Mr Kirby had arranged, even if the only star I was interested in was Mr Kirby himself. On a star-gazing evening the lights would be turned off in the classrooms, and over much of the rest of the school, to allow our night sight to develop. It was easy to slip away even for those with compromised mobility. There was an awful lot of lurking relative to the amount of actual astronomy. The few times I tried to join in with the proper, star-gazing part of the evening I couldn’t see a darned thing.
I had a rechargeable torch, rather a treasure when such things were very new. It may even have come from Ellisdons. They were nickel cadmium batteries, really very primitive. Their working life was not long. After a few weeks I had to keep charging it continuously, and even then it gave the dimmest possible glow.
I went into one of the classrooms and perched by the door in the Wrigley, beckoning Mr Kirby with my dim torch. I was a little glow-worm of desire, signalling with my feeble beam, to a physics teacher who was perhaps attuned to other wave-lengths of light, or wasn’t going to risk burning the wings of his flammable career. Come-hither looks don’t work well from a wheelchair, even to those with their night sight at its clearest, their antennæ fully unfurled. All you can do is waggle your eyebrows. Mr Kirby came a bit closer, but wouldn’t commit himself. Then he faded into the further darkness.
All the same, I was determined not to return to the dorm, no matter what happened. I wouldn’t willingly submit to curfew while my desires were in flood. I wheeled disconsolately into the new wing, ending up in the sixth-form common room. I wasn’t entitled to be there, since I wasn’t in the sixth form, though I could be invited in by someone who was, like Paul or Abadi. A certain amount of smoking went on. Now it was deserted.
I knew that before long I would be hearing my name called in exasperated tones. I had to give myself some sort of alibi, to explain without disgrace why at a late hour I was nowhere near my allotted sleeping-place. In the common room I simply stood up and fell back into a deep chair I couldn’t get out of. That was alibi enough and to spare. No one would question the likelihood of my miscalculating in this way, though for years I had known at a glance — it was a survival skill — whether a given step, door or chair was Johnable. I closed my eyes and waited in weary disgust for the search party. Instead I heard the whispering spokes of a distinctive wheelchair as it pulled in neatly next to the upholstered dungeon into which I had flung myself.
Luke Squires had found me, and in a position which I suppose cried out to be exploited. He lifted himself out of his chair and onto his knees. If I couldn’t get up from the chair, I could do no more than squirm while he infiltrated my Velcro. I said, ‘Go away!’ but it came out as an ineffectual mutter rather than the howl of outrage I intended. ‘Fat chance!’ he said. He gloated, very much in the manner of a villain in a penny dreadful. He gave a stage laugh and crooned, ‘Now I have you in my power!’ and stroked the bottom of his face, where the villain’s beard would be.
Oh well, I thought, why deny him his fun? Let him get on with it. At least something was happening. There ensued an oral act. Luke said afterwards, ‘You’re always good value, John. You can’t have wanked for a fortnight. I love the way the stuff banks up. I’ve never been able to wait longer than a week, but it’s worth it when you finally do it.’
I hadn’t actually been abstaining at all — but it was a ridiculous conversation to be having with the debaucher who’d just set my clock back to zero anyway. And that was the end of my sexual life at that special school for ordinarily delinquent boys, who couldn’t get into half as much trouble as they wanted to.
I was erotically stale-mated, with no adult taking the slightest bit of interest in me. Jimmy Kettle would be ashamed of me — 10 himself would disown me, for my lack of daring and imagination. My feebleness in tracking down the lyric quarry. I was also disappointed in Luke Squires. I could hardly pretend that I was his lyric quarry either, if that phrase meant anything at all. I was just a sort of human lolly for use in emergencies.
Jimmy Kettle was as full as ever of drive and determination (even if one of his strongest ambitions was still to fell himself with the savage axe blows of liquor). He told me that I was the only adult apart from him among the pupils of Vulcan, and that this could mean only one thing. I would go crazy if I stuck around. His opinion counted with me. Of all the fantasists at that address, Jimmy was far the most realistic.
He was writing a play of his own now, though he wouldn’t let anyone look at it. His pseudonym for the purpose was James Delaney. When he was satisfied with the play he would send a copy to 10, which wasn’t intended as any kind of career move. It was pure homage.