Yes, of course he loved her. She was grafted into the pattern. In the tenderest, most inextricable manner, through the pity and shame their daughter Sally evoked in him. Sally stood baffled between them, dipping her toes in rock pools of their complications. She was growing up, supposedly clearing the decks for complexities of her own. But how could she even start when all this had gone on before? Her own life before it really began was framed in deceit and misalliances. Her parameters were already set in a kind of intrigue; and she was meant to be innocent, surely. Sally’s jaded air suggested to Mark that she had a sense of her own inauthenticity; she was not a real child, not, in some way, ‘natural’ enough. As if she, too, felt she oughtn’t be here.
She reminded Mark of Tony.
Tony was somewhere on the edges, somehow unchanging. His integrity made Mark feel false, fickle, hypocritical.
How much had he changed? There was no way of telling. Tony was his yardstick, against which he once measured how much he had deviated from their shared ideal. The charter they drew up for their future lives was still sketched out in his head. Something about not compromising, not being bourgeois, not making money, settling down, selling out, or being shocked, and always being there for each other.
In 1970 they built up defences to guard against the threat of impingement on the single cell of their friendship. They made the agreement one October night, the Wednesday between their thirteenth birthdays. It was raining heavily as they sat on a bench in a park on their housing estate. Here they sat every night, at an age when anything outside of sport seems inappropriate and boring. Hanging around, they drew up a manifesto.
Over several nights they took a good look at each other, listed faults, failings, tendencies in themselves, and cauterised them firmly, scribbling in the back of a school jotter. They pressed the matter home with smudges of blood. There was a slight shiftiness to this moment of bonding. They were watching for the other’s truthfulness.
Is he as serious about this as I am? I bet he isn’t. I bet he’s pretending. See how far I’ll go. He’s just doing it to pass the time. He’s just doing it for a laugh, and he’ll tell everyone about it later.
They tested each other. They picked magic mushrooms and took fifty each. Tony’s mother working through the night sometimes in the hospital. They sat in opposite corners of Tony’s bedroom and narrowly watched each other’s hallucinations. Until morning their delusions filled up the empty air between them. Neither fell asleep, neither was sick, neither got scared.
They drank a bottle of vodka together, another night at Tony’s house.
By now it seems as if they were as alike as they ever could be. They had gauged each other meticulously and calibrated themselves to one another. It one developed a certain gesture, the other would copy it and soon the gestures they used seemed to have no single originator. Their language became incestuous, knotted up in its own idiosyncratic field of reference.
Tony, though, was the quieter, dark and brooding, broader and with beard-growth already at thirteen. Mark had his first skinhead, inspired by a Richard Allen book they had both read. One night Mark shaved Tony’s head to make them more alike.
“We’ll never have the same starting point,” Tony complained. “We can’t be identical twins. Even with my hair like this.” He sat in his mother’s living room on a newspaper, swamped in dark tatters of hair.
“It looks very nice, though,” Mark found himself saying.
“Nice?” Tony frowned. “I thought we said that was a bourgeois word.”
The vodka-charged air bristled between them. The discussion of their physical difference, avoided till now, had knocked a chink in their cell’s armour. It depressed them and made them aware of themselves as physical presences, potentially uncomfortable with each other. Changes must be made to the manifesto. They needed to appraise themselves in a new way. After the drink was finished, they were reduced to kneeling and measuring their cocks against each other, trying desperately not to touch. It was as hard to balance as it had been to make their erections appear to be in the cause of their science.
“Hold them together,” Mark said with a lucid, calm precision.
Tony looked at him oddly, and, with a slight tremble to his fingers, pressed the two shafts together.
“I’m taller, so we can’t measure properly.” He lowed himself, managing to pump Mark gently as he did so. “Too low.” He rose slowly, then down again.
“I’m a lot smaller, anyway,” Mark breathed.
“You might get bigger.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“If I do this.”
With a sublime nonchalance that won Mark’s heart for ever, Tony bent down to suck him off. Mark stared down the line of his back, the crest of soft shining hair rounding his thighs.
It was the first time this had cropped up. They listened to the noises Tony made as he set to work, trying not to laugh. So warm; Mark felt he was bleeding, especially when Tony’s teeth jagged on his foreskin.
The manifest redrew itself in lurid terms, terms that were never articulated except in the wordless press and rustle of that first time. A new language of tenderness was generated between them. Mark looked own at Tony’s head, absurd over Mark’s opened jeans. His whole body compromised like this, down on Mark as if in worship. Mark put his hands on Tony’s head to feel the new-cut hair. The feel of it thickened his cock, the world burgeoned beneath them, a sense of his own potential, as if this made everything suddenly possible. Words crept through his clenched teeth in a whole set of appendices to their original agreement.
He ran his fingers along Tony’s throat, the soft quiver underneath. Tony came up to kiss him, and they embraced this particular taboo with
