“I love you,” he had said then, too pleadingly to have meant anything.* * *I looked at the clay tea cup in front of me and turned it round and round with my thumb and forefinger. Tea drinking was an ancient tradition, dating back to the time when men had long goatees and wispy eyebrows. I looked at my own hands and imagined mottles forming. I imagined the bones wrapping skin tighter around them like old men huddling in from the cold. I realised that the harder I tried to keep my hand still, the more it trembled.
He started, “I know a lot of your friends are going out with all the young… studs.” I wanted to laugh at how he kept using the word. “And I know sometimes you don’t like being seen with me.”
“We’ve gone through this already.”
“Tell me you won’t leave me.”
“I can’t make those kinds of promises.” I finally looked up to meet his face, and I gazed boldly, at the onslaught of lines around his eyes, his thinning, black-dyed hair, the hinged lines at the sides of his lips. “I’m too young.”
He frowned again, and then turned the stove off. I was startled, as if all this time everything I had said needed the hissing sound of the flame.
“How can you say this to me?”
“I’m sorry. I’m just tired. Of Mahler. And teahouses. And sitting in your car. I’m tired.”
“I could pay for your driving lessons.”
“I don’t want to drive. I want to start walking. On my own.”
He scrunched up his eyes and shook his head slowly as if assembling his words before he would release them. But what came out was a scramble of phrases, a blathering, and for a moment I remembered how in brief stolen moments I had allowed him to smudge the line between pity and love.
“I always think of you, at the office. I think of how lucky I am, to have you – I look out at the sky – and I’m not afraid of it turning grey. The night starts smelling like you, on my answering machine there is only your voice and when I have dreams they’re the colour of your skin. You know? When I’m with you I gain back my old rhythms, I start to forget. At my age the last thing you want is to remember. When I’m with you I forget that I’m supposed to be 50.”
I turned away when I caught sight of another teardrop falling against the bark of the tabletop. I called out for the bill and leafed through my own wallet for the money I had saved up all week for this one tea session. I placed the money on a tray and looked at the man who removed the tea set, the tea leaves dark and soggy. I looked at him longer than a boy should, and let my eyes trail the way his legs took tentative strides away from our table, away from the mess he had cleared, all the way until he was out of sight.
“I knew this would happen one day. I knew it wouldn’t last.” He was trying his best to keep his voice from trembling.
He was about to drive me home when I told him to take a detour back to his place. I wanted to take back my things, books and magazines, underwear. I wanted to start all over again.* * *When I walked into his room I started collecting my things, from under the desk, from the shelves, the rattling drawers. I found an Economics assignment I thought I had lost, and a fantasy novel that I didn’t finish. It was placed between two of his books, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and How to Make Friends and Influence People, a corner still carefully dogeared. I wondered if he had picked up my book to read it one day, in an effort to find out what “boys my age” were reading. The spine was wrinkled and I knew he had; I was much more careful with my books. I went to the window to look out at the car park below, and tried to see if I could recognise which tree it was that I saw on the day my life took a turning. But I couldn’t. Rows of rain trees, their leaflets folded as if to protect them from the night. Ants trickling like red sap down their trunks. The street lamps bulbous with their amber glow and the burnt husks of winged ants.
I removed my clothes and sat on his bed, with his pillow propped between my thighs. Then I folded my clothes neatly because they seemed to look so out of place in the well-kept room. It was cold but I stayed that way for a while, trying not to shiver. He came in five minutes later, his eyes raw.
“Hey,” I said. “You never showed me that thing you said you bought. The one that makes things melt fast.”
He crawled onto the bed and tried to fix his eyes on me. He placed his palms on my knees. They were as cold as ice.
“I want you to promise that you’ll never do that to me again. Did you know how I felt driving you all the way back? I could have just turned the steering wheel and we wouldn’t have ended up here.”
I just kept silent and smiled at him. It was a smile to show him how tired I was, how late it was, a well-worn smile excavated from
