‘Of course, of course,’ he said in that rushed, cajoling tone, one eye on the clock and the other on the next topic of interest, as though wary of being caught out.
We talked about Roland Barthes or something or other for a bit, before Julian said, ‘Of course, what I’d like to do is photograph a bloke naked. That’s what I really need.’
I coloured again but couldn’t let the conversation drop. ‘I don’t know about that…’
‘Oh! I wasn’t asking you… I just meant…’ He floundered and my heart went out to him again, as it was tending to do. ‘Would you, though?’
I felt I had a dire body and, in my excited indecision, felt it sliding, like molten butter, into slabs about my feet. ‘We’d draw up a bargain,’ I said.
‘What for?’
‘I’ve got the same problem drawing. The next thing I need is a nude model, and I want a man. But who do you ask? How can you ask?’
We giggled in complicity.
‘But we understand each other… where we’re at… and our romantic friendship. It needn’t be a problem. Why don’t we pose for each other? Make it mutual?’
‘A mutual appreciation society.’ He smiled.
Held every Wednesday and Friday morning, we decided. And I would put the central heating on full blast, pull down the blinds in my tiny bedroom, switch on the lamps, get the Nyman CDs ready. We needed an atmosphere redolent with trust and artifice to see us through.
Into this warmth and conspiracy, Julian actually turned up that first Wednesday morning. He walked into my room ahead of me as we came up carrying our cups of tea. He wore the expression of a potential house buyer and looked down at my drawing book and pens, pencils slung as if nonchalantly on the bed. He turned to smile at this and carefully put his posh camera to one side. I switched the music on and sat on a chair, finding I couldn’t actually say anything now we were here.
He produced a very old hardback. ‘I’m afraid I’m sticking to the other condition. That I’m allowed to read while you draw, since it could go on some time.’
‘Fine,’ I nodded, and he tossed it onto my duvet and then shrugged his heavy jumper off over his head, fluffing up his hair as he emerged. His home-made shirt was rucked up; he tugged it and revealed a sparrow-thin torso which goose-fleshed over at first, its delicate nipples startled, on end. He was braced like a bird’s skeleton on the bed as he prepared to pose; milk-bottle white, fragile, a mass of shifting, fluent shades of cream and blue-grey. I judged and altered trapezoids, rhombuses of bones and shallow muscle and he carried his old book through all of these negotiations, keeping his eyes on the small print. He wrenched off shoes and socks, slinging them, followed by his trousers. Suddenly, he stood beside my bed in cotton undershorts and I had a moment of ontological doubt how he could be revealed so beautifully explicit to me by means other than an idealising imagination or the fervid mutual decision that we were about to fuck. Yet it was neither of these things and terribly, frustratingly realistic as he took down his pants and sprawled almost hairless and wan across the bed, the thick hooded nub of his cock slapping against his stomach and lolling under my nose.
There were so very few poses, it turned out. Sprawling contextless provides the average body with a limited amount of things to do. I interrupted his reading each quarter hour for something new.
He flipped about. ‘It’s cock or arsehole,’ he said, showing a streak of vulgarity I’d not heard before and more shocking, strangely, than his actions of that moment; belly down on the now-rumpled bed, raising his arse to display his pendulous prick, neat little balls.
My part of the bargain was to be naked too as I drew him; ready for the photos he wanted to take in the bathroom. We lay side by side and I scratched away at the page; each drawing had its lavish crest of pubic hair and his prick looking different each time. It seemed natural to both of us that what we really wanted represented was his face, his cock, the smooth chest and stomach between. When he looked at the progress made he was fascinated by what I’d made of his cock. ‘It looks like a little face!’ he said.
I undressed fearing that I’d get an erection, but I figured that, that being inevitable for both of us, we’d deal with it all right. I didn’t, however; hung limp and small alongside him. Julian appeared to cast the most cursory of glances.
But I stood against our half-plastered, dramatic bathroom walls and he closed in on my skin, the shadings of muscle, the sullen defiance of my cock and murmured lovingly at it all through his viewfinder. He shot his pictures still naked and when he leaned in to show me how things focused, how light was squeezed out, nonchalantly brought us into contact and I felt my dick slide wetly along his thigh with a trail of precum.
When I flipped through the drawings for Elsa over our next meal together—at my house this time—I noticed a shocking continuity for the first time. She had expressly asked to see them and, embarrassed, Julian and I said she could. She picked up on this certain feature immediately. Julian’s cock was bigger, more alert in each drawing. By the last, warmest, most faithful version, he was sprawled entirely safe and sleepy and drawn from waist level. So safe and guileless he lay, giving a thoughtlessly rude view of a vulnerable, puckered arsehole and his thick cock arched up his belly as if to drink from the well of his navel. It hadn’t struck me before but in this drawing his foreskin was drawn back of its own accord, to reveal a tender, blushing
