[Phoenix Court 03] - Could It Be Magic?

the duvet and we watched The Chart Show. He popped to the newsagent downstairs for crisps and sweets and magazines like Eva, That’s Life, Take a Break. Those magazines are full of real-life tragedies, and Cameron claims to be addicted to them. He came under the duvet with me on the living-room floor. With all the blinds up it felt like we were exposed to the back streets, high over the roofs. He stripped and we rolled all over the rough carpet, once almost knocking the telly over. He yells out in pleasure more than any other boy I’ve been with, and I love that. It’s as if everyone I slept with before was repressed. Men who keep quiet when they come, as if they’re scared of getting caught. Cameron just yelps and howls out loud. He says he doesn’t mind if he doesn’t come. Sometimes he finds it eludes him, and he’s happy to make the other bloke, as he puts it, “spurt all over”. He says, for him the fun isn’t in the spurting, it’s in the initial copping off. This makes me feel older than him. At twenty-four I feel I belong to a different generation to my lover. As if my practices — my loving to come on a lover’s chest and smear it into his skin — are already obsolete. Is Cameron part of a new breed who never need to climax? Who can just go on and on? And it strikes me that he fucks like he dances when he’s E’d out of his head. Endlessly and noisily and without satisfaction.

That Saturday night he fed me oven chips and Linda McCartney sausages and Diet Coke. Halfway through this meal he realised that I was trying hard to choke all this down. He had given me the crispiest and fizziest things in the world. My throat was red raw. I longed to go to the Scarlet Empress, to have — oh, I don’t know — tagliatelle and carbonara, pints of Guinness to ease my throat and pump me full of iron and goodness. He apologised for cooking me the wrong things. He says at home he never has to cook. His wicked stepmother does everything about the house. He says it’s like living in a show home. They have to pretend to be a show family. But his fifteen-year-old sister is the blow-job queen of the town, he says, with sardonic relish, and he is what he is. And he said that in gloomy triumph, as if the only way he could be proud of himself was as revenge.

I grow anxious when I’m ill. Not on my own account, particularly. I was short-tempered when Cameron was around, and he thought I was wallowing. But it wasn’t that. I fret about passing germs on. About passing anything on, anything I might have. And I think — I can’t help thinking — I’m a gay man with bleeding mouth sores. What am I expected to think?

Cameron tried to talk me out of this despondency. I’d never heard him talk so much before. I realised he was no great talker, the first time we slept together. “What shall we talk about?” he asked after sex. “I don’t know anything to talk about. I don’t know anything about you.”

He sleeps so deep. I sweat in bed beside him and watch him for hours. His white eyelashes.

He says he wants a proper computing job, wants to pass the driving test and his dad will buy him a car. I laughed, I thinking, oo-la-la! Boyfriend-with-a-car! Which is what Vince and I used to say, trying to get the other to learn to drive. Cameron said he’d drive me out to places, take me to Edinburgh zoo to see the penguins. He said it would be fun — fun! — if he did have these germs after spending days with me at my most infectious. Then we could be ill together. But I shudder at the thought. And he’s itchy, he says, which makes me think that either the bed, the settee or the living-room carpet has something nasty in it.

For Cameron I wasn’t perfect, though at first he thought I was. When I first wore tight tops and trousers, dancing at CC’s on Friday nights, all he saw was a body someone had taken to the gym to plump into shape. He thought my leopard spots were cosmetic. And it wasn’t until we undressed in my living room, strewing clothes all about the floor, that he saw how my calf muscle bulged and looked grotesque. So I wasn’t perfect for him. I was just good enough for those few weeks we had together. I would do.

I knew how important perfect bodies were to him. He told me about his weekly erotic successes, how each Saturday morning he would wake up and look at his bed partner and think to himself, Fuck! I managed to get to sleep with that!

In the end he found my body too cold. He always conplained that my fingers froze him. My skin was too cold. When I had my medical checkups it was a relief to see that my blood pressure was normal. His skin was warm and it felt like overly floury dough. You need cold hands, don’t you, to knead and ply floury dough? But when he said my hands were cold I felt shrugged off.

I took the bus one morning from the centre of the city and travelled for an hour through gloomy green country-side, up into the hills. We passed through a village called —believe it or not — Darkness. When I got to his house I was furious with him because he would hardly stir himself out of bed to talk to me. And my heart went out to him also because he was fuddled with sleep, after working till five, packing salads. He sat up in bed and fiddled with cassettes and CDs, playing only half of songs, chain-smoking irritably