Chameleon

I originally started this blog to highlight my novel 'Chameleon' in the hope of attracting attention from would-be agents and publishers.  Not that it worked!  Things have changed somewhat since then, as I seem to blog about anything that interests me whether it's Kate Bush, or cinema, or interior design.  I have catholic tastes, as you can tell.  Time perhaps then to return to its original purpose.  Here is the first chapter of 'Chameleon'....

      The news came quickly - that is before it got into the media.  It was Monday evening - early on, about six - and I was alone in the flat waiting for Tom to return with a take-away – Chinese, I think – when the phone rang.  It was my mother.

      We exchanged the usual pleasantries, the usual platitudes, but I could tell from the tone of her voice and her hesitant sentences that something was wrong; I could even see her empty hand toying with the flex, twisting the beige plastic around her thin, dry fingers.

      “Alex,” she said after a pause that for her was a summoning up of strength.  “It’s Jason.  He’s been killed.  In a road accident.”

      Across the street the setting sun was gilding the windows and blushing the stucco.  Through the open window the sounds of London - passing traffic and voices and the ever-present hum of the city - flooded the sitting room in waves.

      “Alex?”  I became aware of my mother’s voice in my right ear.  “Alex, are you still there?”

      I murmured something, a response of sorts.  I really didn’t want to be bothered with her at that moment, what with her questions and her concern.  Not satisfied, she asked me is I was ‘all right’.  I gave her some feeble, clichéd answer I can’t recall now but which seemed to satisfy her.  Then, as if in response to my fears, as though she could for once read my mind, she told me what happened.

      “He was coming back from Stannington early Sunday morning with some friends.  They’d gone out for the evening, to a birthday party, I think.  I don’t know if you knew them?”

      She reeled off a trio of names, only two of whom I casually knew.  I didn’t care for his friends and avoided them.

      “Apparently Jason was in the front passenger seat.  His father said he didn’t stand a chance.  He was dead on the scene; it hit a telegraph pole.  I’m sorry.”

      A car, I thought, a car was fine.  It was a relief.

      “Mr Roberts came round this morning to tell us, on the way to the Coroners.  I was about to go shopping.  I do think it was good of Mr Roberts to think of you at time like this, don’t you agree?”

      “Jason and I were close,” I answered blandly, trying not to show the relief – a car, nothing would be said about that.

      “He was a good friend to you.”

      I agreed.

      We both let a long, awkward silence spool out between us like slack cable.  Eventually I asked her when the funeral was.

      “Mr Roberts said something about next Monday, a week today,” she answered cautiously.  “It depends when they release Jason’s body.  Anyway there’ll be a notice in Friday’s paper apparently.  I’ll check and phone you.”

      The entry phone rang.  As we said ‘goodbye’ I decided to go home on Friday. She sounded surprised, momentarily confused, by this, but the phone rang again - you could hear the impatience - and before she had time to gather her thoughts I apologised and hung up.

      It was Tom at the front door; he’d forgotten to take my keys with him.  I let him in and waited for him, pacing the length of the meagre, grey hall - Jason’s cold body being carried on a stretcher by two ambulance men, his face covered with a blanket – Tom’s footsteps echoed on the empty staircase - the ambulance drove off into the night, without lights or siren - there was no need, he was dead - my hand hung on the latch ready until Tom’s shadow appeared on the ribbed glass of the door.  I let him in.  He carried twin carrier bags of thick brown paper - there were Chinese characters scrawled on one of them in black felt tip, I remember - and he had a sheepish, embarrassed-looking home-boy grin that instantly evaporated when we spoke.  I can’t remember now what he did with the bags only that suddenly his hands were drawing me close into the dark, shadowy orbit of his body, and he was asking ‘what was wrong’.

      “I’ve just had my Mum on the phone,” I heard myself say.  “It’s this friend of mine.  Jason….you know, I’ve told you about him” I added after a pause that for me too was a summoning of strength, and then I quoted to him her bald statement of his death almost verbatim.  He murmured a few oddly hesitant words of consolation, the sort I’d heard before on TV, but then who does have the self-awareness to be eloquent at a moment like that?  And kissing me, and with his hand still on my shoulder, he led me through to the kitchen.

      It was a small, crowded sort of room; the air glutinous with heat.  There was washing up drying beside the sink.  Sunlight filtered through the Venetian blind dropping lines of powdery light on to the blue and cream floor.  The table itself was only half set, abandoned when the phone rang – knives and forks sat in a heap waiting to be assigned a place.  I fumbled blindly with the cutlery, trying to lay the table, but he stopped me.  Taking my hands in his sat me down and then quietly, without asking, he filled my plate and we began to eat.

       We were quiet at first – awkward really.  Outside though there was bird song, and children playing in back gardens.  I kept my head down over my plate intent only on the food, neither of us knowing how to deal with what had happened - until a little way into the meal Tom remembered the wine, his contribution to dinner, cooling in the fridge.  I watched him, as though from behind glass, as he uncorked the bottle and poured the wine.  He slid the glass across the uneven tabletop towards me, its pale contents swirling and glinting, and he flashed me the slightest of smiles.  I drank it down it like water but, like the food, the wine carried no pleasure, no taste.

      “I’ve never lost a friend,” he said.  “Or even a close family member for that matter, I guess I’ve been lucky in that respect.”

      “Me too,” I said.  “Until now.  I wasn’t prepared; but then I don’t suppose you ever can be.”

      Jason had sat at this table once - used these same knives, forks, spoons, just like Tom, just like all of my boyfriends had at some time.  The last time he was here, about six months ago now – one of the last times I ever saw him in fact - he stood by the window, drinking lager from a green bottle and looking like a premiership footballer - sharp suit and spiked hair, silver jewellery and mid-winter tan – the premature emblems of his success.  There was even a hint of foundation on his face.  He had been at a studio in Soho that afternoon doing some publicity shots, he said.  The press were already talking about him as the ‘next Beckham’.

      He took me out that night.  He talked incessantly in the taxi; he told me ‘life was good’.  We went to two bars and a restaurant, places that featured in the colour supplements, where he showed off his hard and gleaming sophistication.

      Tom pushed away his empty plate. “That wasn’t too bad” he said, stretching a little in his chair with satisfaction.  “Perhaps not the best I’ve ever eaten but not bad.  And you’re looking better for something to eat; you’ve regained your colour.  You looked so pale when I came back.  Soon as I saw I knew there was something wrong.”

      It was true.  Nourished by the food and relaxed by the wine I felt calmer; my hands had ceased their mild shaking.

      “It was a hell of a shock for you.”

      I agreed, but felt there was little more I could say.

      He drained the last of his wine before refilling both our glasses, muttering something about it being a crap day for both of us.  Another drink was what we deserved, he said: ‘and a further couple of bottles’.  And all the time as he spoke I played with the remaining food on my plate, drawing the last of the pale yellow rice up into a neat little pile with my fork.

      Tom stood up, scraping his chair over the lino, and began to clear away the dinner things.

      “I know that this isn’t really the time to ask, but I gotta go to Zurich in three weeks’ time.  There’s this pan-European conference.  It’s a three day job; Wednesday through Friday.  Thankfully I don’t have to give a presentation this time.  We could spend the weekend together.  Think about it.  I’ll pay; it’s not a problem.”

      He was scraping the leftovers into the bin, and I was wiping the table, when suddenly music started from below us - jazz, by the sound of it.  My neighbours were having a party.

      “Hell, we were meant to be going out this evening, weren’t we?  I’d forgotten all about it.  Alex, you still wanna go?”

      It was my night off – my first since Pride, two days before.  At the time I was continuing with my shifts at a bar in the village until I started my new job in an advertising agency in three weeks.  It was only to pay the rent and keep me in petrol.  We were planning to go to the party whose conversation now drifted intermittently up with the music, on the hot, still air, and then on to meet two of my flat mates - Jamie and Rob - at ‘The Yard’.

      “Sorry Tom, it doesn’t seem….how’s it put?….Appropriate.  It doesn’t seem appropriate.”  It was the sort of word my father used with his clients.

      Tom nodded and filled the sink to do the washing up.  He looked relieved, really.  He was looking rather tired.

      It was getting gloomy in the kitchen now.  I went over to the window, pulled up the blind and looked out over the back gardens: down there to my left were random flashes of white and colour between the dark leaves as guests moved about the party.  There was laughter, great peels of it, and Ella Fitzgerald singing ‘Mac the Knife’.  No, not really appropriate at all, I thought.

      The sun was edging down towards eye level, pale and dull in the dirt grey sky.  Perhaps there would be a storm.  Soon the sun would clip the roof of the terrace across the gardens and the evening steal up the wall and into the kitchen; it was already about, edging forward from its hiding places, creeping out over the gardens and smothering the lawns in its darkness.

      “My brothers and I had to take it in turns to do the washing up when we were younger.  It was one of those tasks Dad set us to make sure we earned our allowance.  It’s alright - it wasn’t as onerous as it sounds.  We had a dish washer.  All any of us had to do was load and unload it.  And press the right button.”

      He let the water out of the sink.  There was a sort of relief in the banality of his story.

      “It was one of those things he insisted upon,” he continued.  It was better for us, so he said.  He didn’t want the family affluence to go to our heads.”

      He was smiling a little as he spoke, showing those even, perfect teeth of his.  And I forgot Jason.

      Alone in the sitting room, while Tom made coffee, I remembered the photographs.  They lay unordered in a cardboard box (decorated with architectural prints and tiny gold stars) that sat out of the way of the sun on the chest of the drawers in my bedroom.

      “I thought you might want to see some pictures of Jason,” I said when Tom came into the room with the tray. 

      The ones I could remember were there, and several I had forgotten about.  Most of them were no good, not fit for the purpose; either Jason was too small in the frame, or out of focus.  But I knew there were about half a dozen that showed him in close up, and it was those I showed Tom as we sat on the sofa drinking coffee.  

      The two of them had never met, and I wanted in Tom handling something - something beyond mere cutlery - that Jason had touched to be some kind of physical link between them; a continuity, like a baton passed between athletes, that was neither just my body nor my memories.  It was a stupid idea really, a thin excuse to do something for my own benefit; I needed a fixative for my memories of Jason and some act of remembrance, I now understand, something almost penitential to appease my guilt for having forgotten him so easily.

      Five photographs - five meagre fragments of a life - without any order or meaning but for my interpretation; not enough for a stranger to construct a biography, but from them I could map out our friendship.

      “That’s him.” I said.

      Tom took a closer look; his body pressing close into mine as he did so, tilting the photo, and the others in turn, toward the window to catch the evening light.

      There was an immediacy to that first image that was startling and that I hadn’t quite got over since I found it.  Although it was really a portrait of us both – him and I standing together, a head and torso shot, his arm across my shoulder pulling me protectively into him - Jason dominated; his smile radiated out from the picture.  Stripped of the superfluous - he was wearing a bright orange shirt that hugged his hard, assertive body like it was his own skin, his hair was shaved down to almost nothing, a pair of sunglasses sat pushed up on to his forehead - he was looking directly at the camera cockily demanding attention, like some imagined East End wide boy.  And there was more; seeing this image after so long I detected something new, something proprietorial in his attitude to me, something challenging to the viewer, or perhaps, the photographer

      “He was a fine looking guy.  Where was it taken?” Tom asked.  “Pride?”

      I had to laugh.

      “It’s my parents’ back garden.  We were at one of their barbeques.  Mum and dad hold a couple each summer, just for family and friends.  They’re quite a social thing.  That guy in the white shirt - standing there to the right, over my shoulder – yes him.  That’s Scott, my brother.  My mum took it; that’s why it’s in focus.  I’m not much of a photographer, I’m afraid.”

      I handed Tom the next photo: “See what I mean”

      Dressed in a white cotton T-shirt and blue denims - ‘boot cut’, he always wore boot cut jeans - Jason sat alone on a bench in his back garden.  The details were out of focus; his grin smeared, his eyes dark impenetrable smudges, but it was just possible, even then, to detect that ease he had before the camera.

      Tom passed the image by.

      “This one here….his mum took this one.  She didn’t want it in the end so I had it.  That’s his Dad there, behind him.”

      The photo had been taken from several feet away and the two men, working together on Jason’s bike, were unaware of the camera.  Jason, in a pair of dirty grey overalls, was kneeling beside the engine; his father squatting beside him.

      “It must have been taken in January or early February as he had long hair then.”

      Tom became animated by the next photograph, at the sight of so much defined skin.  It was another summer photograph, taken, I think, within his garden.  It was a frugal body in that there was nothing superfluous to it; there was no fat and his skin, like that orange shirt, just sufficient for purpose.  It was a body fashioned for action, for speed, and like a well fashioned machine it possessed an austere, utilitarian beauty.

      “Hey, that’s some fine looking bod.”  And I caught a faint wistfulness in his voice.  He said more but by then I wasn’t listening.  I reckoned I knew every inch of that hard body, each hollow and crease.  It was my territory.  I had followed each vein standing out on his strong arms.  I knew where the scant hairs on his legs finally petered out at the top of his thighs and I knew the scars and blemishes that gave character to the anonymous smoothness of his skin – the scar on his right calf where he broke his leg, the pock mark on his stomach from chickenpox; his life documented on the soft, pliant parchment of his skin.  He was seldom without some scratch or bruise, some nick or scab.

      “About earlier.  I know it was short notice, but I’d really like it if you came over to Zurich for the weekend with me.  There’s this reception, (or is it a dance? – I don’t know), on Friday night.  For the wives - ‘partners’.  It sounds a real old time sorta thing, but I’d like you to be there with me.” 

      He had never asked to anything like that before, I mean nothing official.  His love so far had had only been declared in camera.

      And the final photograph: an evening not unlike this three years ago.  Jason stood bare chested, leaning against his bike soaking up the last rays of the dying sun.  We were in the woods above the town when I took it. It too was a Monday, but taken later on in the year, though the quality of light seemed just the same.  The sun glinted liquid on his black leather jeans.  There was that contented smile on his face; it was the end of that time when he claimed he had it all.

      Tom, though, wasn’t paying any attention, he had no interest in motorbikes or even leather at that moment; he was making plans for Zurich, for walks beside the Zurich See and dinners out together.  I turned the photograph over in my hand.

      “We can have fun….” Tom’s hand was on my thigh

      I understood it then.  What I was then experiencing was what I had felt that September evening nearly four years ago.  It was as though two maps one old, one new, had been superimposed upon each other and found to correspond.  It was that same sensation, that same sense of the past falling away from me, drifting out of range, beyond my grasp, falling away and becoming unknowable.

      “Alex….” And his hand was beneath my t-shirt, ploughing slowly through the dark hairs on my stomach.

      And it had been there too, that very same sensation, when I stood in the hall earlier in the evening waiting for the broken rhythm of Tom’s boots, waiting in the silent, abstracted flat, in the stasis of shock, waiting for the present and the future to re-commence and come back into my consciousness; knowing something….something had slipped away from me.

      “I’ve waited all fucking day for this.”  Tom’s voice was thick and heavy.  “…for you….been horny all the time thinking about you…it’s what kept me going through all that shit….”

      The first time I took Tom up to my room, seven months ago now, I was slightly ashamed.  It was a typical student room: a little scruffy and with an air of impermanence that no matter how hard I tried – filling the room with things from my bedroom at my parents – I couldn’t quite dispel.  Books bowed the shelves of the inadequate bookcase; the carpet was beginning to fray by the door and the paint peel from the metal window frames.

      “It’s cooler by the window,” he said.  Tom, stripped to his white trunks, was sitting on the wide window sill, his big, round kneecaps drawn up to his chest and gazing out over the darkened back gardens.

      I walked over, handed him a glass of iced water, and joined him, cooling my face on the plate glass.

      “I used to do this as a kid; if it was too hot, or I couldn’t sleep.  I’d sit on the window sill in my bedroom and gaze out over the Bay – at the moonlight on the water, or the lights on the opposite shore.”  He took a sip of water.  “I did a lot of thinking sitting by the window as a teenager – as you can guess.”

      I stroked his leg. Tom had never spoken like this before; that great hinterland of his life before London was, until then, Terra Incognita. 

      “Mom once found me asleep sitting like this.  She nearly went mad, but when she told dad the next day he laughed and told her not to fuss – ‘if the boy falls the boy falls, he won’t come to any harm.  He won’t do it again.’  There’s a porch below my window with an almost flat roof, you couldn’t fall off it if you tried.  He didn’t want any of his boys ‘growing up sissy’.”

      He shrugged and turned back to the dark void of the gardens. Below us, at the party, the last guests were leaving.

      “I guess that’s why I took more risks than either Dan or Ryan.  (His brothers.)  It wasn’t enough for me to be just another jock, I had to do more; I went out on the Bay in all weathers, went climbing and scuba diving.  I needed to prove to them - and more importantly, I guess, to myself - that I was as tough, if not tougher than them.  In any case I liked all that sort of thing; I still do though I don’t get much opportunity.  I even considered a career in the military at one stage.”

      I thought of the large photograph on Tom’s desk of him and his family together in their garden.  A recent one, apparently, so he said, it had all the unreality of an advert from ‘Ralph Lauren’.  I couldn’t believe it was spontaneous as Tom claimed.  It all seemed far too posed, too contrived for that.  His parents sat together on a white painted bench with the family dog between them on the grass; their three large, smiling sons standing behind making a protective barrier between them and the granite grey sea behind.  Tom stood on the right, above his mother.  Tom’s mother in particular had that clean, easy going assurance of both money and looks.  They possessed an oddly homogenous quality, sharing the same dark hair and eyes, as though manufactured on a production line.  I was however constantly drawn back to it; by its obvious glamour - and its subtle mutability.  I could now pick out the sources of his features in his mother and father (he tended toward the latter); but over the weeks, while his family had remained static, Tom’s smile had grown less assured and more fragile.  Beyond that awkwardness he claimed he had in front of a camera and which I couldn’t quite believe in, there was a thoughtful, introspective quality to his coarse face that he didn’t share with the others and seemed to suggest a humanity that was alien to that family; and it was there now in front of me; in a face soften by the glancing light so that it lost some of its hardness.

      “I came out to Dad when we were out on the Bay,” Tom continued.  “Ryan and I were crewing for him – it was just before the autumn storms set in.  There were just the three of us in the boat and we were struggling hard, what with the wind against us, to get back to in port before the tide turned.  I was nearly eighteen – I’d just started the final grade; Ryan was home from College for the weekend.  I had been out to Mom for about a month by then and I really needed to tell him, I needed his approval.  If I had that then everything would be OK.  Only I knew I had to choose the right moment.  Dad’s this ‘no bull shit’ kinda guy.  He tells it as he sees it, only he doesn’t always think first.  I didn’t want him to say something stupid we’d both have regretted.  And that was the moment.  I knew he’d be too busy to say anything immediately – anything ‘stupid’ that is, so I told him.  He said nothing.  When we got into the marina at and were moored up he told me I had done a ‘fine job out there’.  And that was it.  That was his acceptance.”

      The conversation had reached a natural pause.  I stretched, stood up and began to undress, tossing my clothes wearily on to the chair with his.  He watched me – a vague benign sort of smile on his face – until I too was stripped to my underwear and he dropped to his feet and drew the curtain behind him.

      His hand reached out to me; there was none of the usual hesitation in him tonight – that baffling, sometimes frustrating hiatus as the nature of our intimacy changed between the emotional and the sexual.  He gripped my fingers as he pulled me close.  I slipped an arm about his soft, warm waist; I wasn’t looking for sex, only a deepening of intimacy - I wanted to bury myself in the nooks and crevices of that body and, like a hibernating animal find safety and rest, but if that was what he wanted….

      His skin was smooth, quiet flawless, there were no distinguishing marks except a small scar above his right knee; the tan applied quite evenly.  Unlike Jason’s body it communicated little of its past.  Beneath the skin the flesh was generous.  No fat - he was getting back into shape.  There was no six-pack, no sharply defined muscles, though there had been – I’d seen the photographs.  It was a body that had once been hard, like his face, and had now been softened by metropolitan affluence.  He now had a tendency to run to fat, he confessed, but there was a sturdy pioneer quality to him - a heavy, low centre of gravity body - selected over the centuries to withstand extremes of hard physical work and the North American climate.  Ideal, no doubt, for contact sports.

      I heard the last guests leaving and the faint clink of used plates and cutlery as they were tidied away.

      “He used to tell us that the three of us were different,” Tom said, in the mood to talk again.  “That we were something special, because we were his sons.  Of course we believed him, you do at that age.  I don’t s’pose when he told us we were different he had it in mind about one of us being a ‘goddam faggot’.”

      “You know Alex, I look back at my life then - hell, it’s only seven years ago – but I look back at those three or four years when I played for the school and sometimes….sometimes, you know, it’s as though that life belongs to another guy all together.  I was a pretty straight up and down sorta teenager from the provinces back then, I guess.  A jock.”  (It didn’t surprise me.)  “A real jock; I lived sport in those days - with a tight arse and a tighter stomach, and this fucking arrogant streak a mile wide I’d picked up from my father.  Ironic, I s’pose.  There were four or five of us from the ice hockey team who hung out together.  We were this little clique of guys and, God! did we fancy ourselves. You know, it was one of those moments in life when everything appears to be handed to you on a plate, and I took it.  We all did.  And yes there were times, when I found it expedient I guess, that I was as loud and as drunk as the next guy.”

      Unexpectedly he gave a snort of laughter and shook his head: “Sorry….just remembering some of the things we used to get up to, the guys and I.  There was this one guy at Prep School - shit! - did we take the piss out of him rotten, he was so fucking camp - a real queen.  Some of the guys really had it in for him.”

      I said nothing.  Down in the garden, one by one, somebody was extinguishing the garden flares.

      “When’s the funeral?” he asked.

      “Monday, I think,” I replied catching his eye.  “I’m going home Friday, though.”

      His hot, dry hands began to stroke my shoulders.

      “Do you want me to go with you?” he asked, his hot breath pouring out over my face, suffocating.  “To keep you company.  I can get Monday off.  It’s no problem; the fuckers owe me.  If you want.”  And then after a pause:  “Please.”  He sounded oddly childlike.

      I pulled my head back: “I’m sorry, but, well, I’d sooner go on my own, if that’s OK?”

      His fingers loosened their grip. 

      “It’s my parents,” I said hastily.  “They don’t want anyone to know I’m gay.  I’ve never taken any one home: it’s easier that way.  I can’t stand lying.  In any case Jason wasn’t out, unless something’s changed.  But I doubt it.  You see nobody knew about us,” I continued, tightening my hands about his.  “Not even our parents.  They never did.  How many months was it?”  I tried to work it out, but failed.  “Well, they never found out.  God knows how we managed, we were always at it,” I joked.  “We were lucky, I suppose.  I couldn’t go to the funeral with a stranger like that.  It wouldn’t be fair on Jason, or his parents, if people started gossiping about him now.”

      I could offer no further explanation beyond the cliché of: “It’s something I feel compelled to do on my own.”

      He was silent for a moment: “It’s OK,” he said finally.  “I understand.”  But he couldn’t disguise his disappointment.   It was minute or so before he resumed, and finished, undressing me, brushing his soft, plump hands against me.  My body was pumped and cut again after my finals – prepared for the summer, for lazing in Regent’s Park or Soho Square, or displaying on Compton St., or in a club.  Jason had even reformed my body in his own image.

      “So you like the idea of me being a jock?”  His voice was playful now, drawling, slowly caressing the words as they floated from his mouth on the thick air.  Already his hand was pushing deep into my pants.

      Suddenly his advances stopped.  There must have been something, a flinch or a shudder in my body; something reflexive, so slight I didn’t even notice.

      “I’m sorry,” I said.  “I can’t ….”

      We lay in the darkness under a single sheet, his hot body curled possessively about mine; his hands held at my chest.  I don’t how long we lay like that – ten minutes, maybe more, it was hard to tell.  Images of Jason replayed continuously in my mind, blending, merging, distorting, mutating….Jason in his orange shirt….Jason in his leathers….

      I shifted to ease the ache in my arm.  I felt his lips on my shoulder, and his hands began to trawl my body, looking for sex; his husky voice cajoling me.  I turned over and my hand sought his sagging cock, thick and yielding – the skin silky – like a half-inflated balloon, and in the blind dark he kissed my mouth. 

Designs

   I'm finding it hard to be creative at the moment.  I managed to wreck two pictures over the weekend when I couldn't leave well alone.  Family life - keeping an eye for two elderly and seriously ill relatives - saps all my strength.  The weather here doesn't help - what on earth happened to spring?  In an uncharitable mood I would liken the carer/cared-for relationship to be (almost) vampiric.  The whole thing, this stasis, while we wait for the inevitable, is deeply sad - depressing.  Literally.

   One of the projects on hold, on hold for far far too long, is a second novel.  (Working title: 'Somersby')  One of its aims is to champion English (if not British) Baroque architecture.  I have deep abiding love for the Baroque of these islands.  If Wren, Hawksmoor, Vanbrugh, Archer etc aren't enough I've invented another.  Here is one of his designs (mine obviously).  It is for a pavilion in an English Landscape Park.  Originally it stood in a great Baroque garden.  A Baroque Garden, like all the others (and there were many) that was swept away in the craze for 'The Landscape Park'  There are very few Baroque gardens left in Britain now - I can think of one: Wrest Park.  There is another in Yorkshire the name of which escapes me.  Anyway here is my pavilion. It's meant to have a French influence.

'It was the Pavilion at Haltham further up the valley – gold and cream beneath the dark trees in the eternally silent park – that had first introduced them to the work of Somersby.  It was a piece of confectionery, fully, ripe-ly Baroque.  A piece of scenery by Bibiena perhaps, as though it had dropped from the Court Theatre at Drottingholm.

            They were all eighteen on their first visit.  It was early September 1982 the final year of school, and the world, their immediate world, seemed good after a period of turmoil.  There were three of them in ‘Mildred’, Con’s car, including Michael, although he and Sophie had, for the first time, broken up.  Lady Alkborough herself showed them round, and afterwards gave them tea in the Adam Library.  It was one of the first fruits of Conrad’s reconciliation with his father; the direct result of Major Webb’s introduction to Conrad of the Shell Guides and the work of John Piper.  And there among the coquillage of the Pavilion, she, who had a vague, unfocused love of architecture, became a convert to the Baroque: Hawksmoor, Vanbrugh Archer, Gibbs, Talman and Somersby.  Charismatic, enigmatic Somersby.  The Adam Library held no pleasure for her.

            And after all of that it seemed natural to her to make Somersby the subject of her Phd.  It was a kindness, a restitution and a thank-you."

Then follows a spoof entry in 'Pevsner'

*          ‘And so to the Park.  The extensive Baroque Gardens depicted by Kiff, were swept away by Capability Brown in 1754.  Of the Garden structures by Somersby little remains, the most important survival being the Pavilion, c 1704.  This is of national importance, one of the most continentally Baroque buildings in the country of its date.  The Pavilion itself is single story with attic.  Three arcaded bays on N and S, each divided by coupled Doric columns – the columns of the centre piece on the N. side (garden side) being replaced, as it were, with herms supporting a curved pediment looking very Dietterlin-esque.  Had Somersby access to German pattern books?  Alas too little is known of Somersby to be sure.   Shorter single bay ‘ends’ plainer.  Iron stone walls with carved detail in Barnack stone, along with lively sculptural panels by Edward Pearce.  Interior of three groined bays, lavishly decorated with stucco and shells, very French, see slate and marble floor of Versailles quality.  Of the other structures by Somersby that made the gardens famous throughout the British Isles nothing remains except a pair of gargantuan gate piers.’

                                                Sir Nikolas Pevsner, ‘The Buildings of England’ Northamptonshire'

   One of the characters (Con) is lucky enough to have been raised in a much older manor house (below).  I have given it an enclosed garden with gazebos.  I admit that it's a bit of William Morris type fantasy.  But why not?

 The Higher roof in the centre represents the original Medieval hall of the house.  The door is the original porch, incorporated into a Jacobean gallery. (I doubt that that sort of thing actually occurred in that manner)  The great bay window in the middle is mainly the work of the great Victorian Goth, G E Street.  The family who live in this house have always been High Church.

Both of these drawings was done on A4 narrow feint paper - from 'refill pads'.  Nothing fancy.  I invariably prefer it when designing.



Leather Chapter Part IV

The final section of the 'Leather Chapter'

     As he said he would, Jason was waiting at the road side when my father dropped me off at the gate to the airfield. The 250 was out of sight; “up on the runway.”
     I stared at him. I couldn’t help it. He stood strong and heavy like some monumental bronze, his leathers gleaming in the cold sharp light like washed coal. It was like the guys on his bedroom wall had sprung from the wall, only infinitely better. There was something gritty and hard, even ugly about him that bitter afternoon. Perhaps it was the sharp glittering beard. And there was the leather: I was stiff limbed and awkward, but Jason moved with athletic ease, the leather obediently creasing and folding at his joints and drawing tight about his muscles. Jason was the master of his leather.
     And that is what I really remember about that afternoon: Jason in his leathers. Little else, except the fear. The leather-bound remembrance of him stands like some great black basaltic intrusion in the landscape of my memory distorting, even crushing, everything else. Later visits to the airfield in the summer, when we went up there in the evenings for sex, came to supply the incidental details: the new steel gate, the rusting oil drums, the curving gravel track leading up through a short wooded valley, the rusting farm machinery in the undergrowth, the white flowers - cow parsley, briar, wild garlic. So that, soon after Jason’s death, when I first thought of that afternoon, it seemed to me as though it had happened in late spring or early summer.
     But as I write, odd fragments of the conversation, are recovered: “It’s not like being in a car with your mum and dad; all cocooned up against the weather with the stereo on – Radio 3 or 4 is it, mate?....This is different….This, mate, is real. It’s just you – or you and your mate holding you tight – inches from the tarmac. You see it tearing past below you. You feel every bump and pot-hole in your spine, and when you accelerate the pull of the wind as it tries to hold you back, but you go for it. You lean with all the curves; smell everything you pass. And then there’s the weather mate – you experience it all: rain or sun, hot or cold. It don’t bother me, mate as long I’m in the right gear….the whole thing’s fantastic, mate, bloody fantastic.”
     Up on the airfield a grey film of frost clung to the grass and the shattered concrete. It was a place of scrub and dereliction. The 250 was there, waiting patiently for us, at the edge of the runway.
     We were quite alone up there.
     “You look nervous mate,” he said, before he kissed me.  “Bricking it, are you?”
     “Yes, something like that,” I said. Did Jason feel as nervous as a ten year old when he came up here for the first time, I wondered.
     Beside the bike Jason gave his instructions: “It’s relatively simple mate. The most important thing is not to put your feet down until I park up the bike. Not before, mate. Not at junctions or at traffic lights. Ok? Just keep your feet off the road at all times.
     “I thought you could do with one of these.” He reached into his upturned lid and pulled out what looked like a single slip of black material, like a scarf or something, but I had a neck tube already. “I got them during the week. I bought us one each. Here.” He parted the fabric and handed me half. “I guess we should have bought them last weekend. It would have made more sense.”
     “What is it?”
     “It’s a hood mate, a balaclava helmet. It’ll help keep you warm.” I watched Jason pull his ‘hood’ over his head, and tuck the ‘neck’ into his collar.
     “Come here, mate.” I let Jason take the hood from me and slip it awkwardly over my head. Fear had cost me the use of my fingers and in any case it seemed right that he should finish what he had started.  “One day, mate, nobody will able to tell us apart.” Later he told me I had looked like Peter Lawford in ‘Danger Diabolik’, and I took that to be a compliment.
     I’m embarrassed now by the intense gut-aching fear I felt as, finally kitted up, I sat on the bike behind Jason and waited for him to turn the key, when it seems so natural now to get on a bike and ride. I ride in London traffic for fuck’s sake. I pass for a ‘right hard fucker’ among my friends, albeit they are a group of middle class queens. I obviously have a reputation of sorts to maintain, so it’s the sort of thing I only confess to when drunk but I was, I admit, shit scared.
     We rode up and down the runway a number of times with increasing speed; he was right, it was bloody fantastic, I found an exhilaration on the back of his bike that I never felt I had lacked before, the fear gave way to exhilaration, gave way to…. by the fifth run we were both thinking of something else.
     There was a derelict hut, something left over from the war, standing there amongst the young trees and the brambles as the far end of the runway. It had a flat concrete roof, grey concrete walls and metal framed windows. The rotting door was ajar - the paint peeling. I followed him inside. There was shattered glass on the floor among the dead leaves and moss and litter of cans and paper. It was almost warm there, out of the breeze. Steam rose from his mouth as the frail sun caught his face.
     We hardly spoke – there was a curious, fragile anonymity between us like a game – and then, after sperm had been spent over black leather and concrete, we rode back to his place, my hands clenching his sides.

Leather Chapter Part III

     So here it is...another instalment of 'Chameleon'

     “Well?” he asked as he effortlessly backed the car out of the drive and on to the road. “What did your Dad say to you then? I take it he did have a word with you – you could have cut the atmosphere there with a knife. Your mum didn’t look pleased to see me either? Blame me does she, mate?”
     “Something like that,” I said.
     It was now half past eight that evening and Jason and I were in his father’s BMW. It smelt of leather: grey leather on the seats, black leather on Jason – he was wearing his Christmas present again. We were on our way to Stannington. I was pleased to be out of the house.
Jason, I decided, was enjoying this, revelling in playing the ‘bad boy’ like he was Dean or Brando, or Montgomery Clift in some black and white fifties film. It was another role for him, one he perhaps long waited to play, another persona like a skin for him to adopt and slough at will. At lunch, because he knew he was safe, he had wound up my father by relating his accident at the end of the previous year’s racing season; and when he saw my mother squirm at the detail of the actual injury he added more just for the effect.
     In my mind there are two versions of the events of that afternoon when my father confronted me over the gloves. There are the events as I remember them, and there are the events as I presented them that evening to Jason. There isn’t much difference; only that as we drove up to the traffic lights in the Market Place I decided to withhold things – just small things - from him. I reckoned it was easier that way.
     My father wasted no time. As soon as we heard Jason close the backdoor behind him, and while we were still sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee, he started on me.
     “Well young man, are you going to tell your mother what Jason bought you for Christmas?”
     Innocuous enough, but it was asked with that quiet, measured way my father liked to reserve for family crises; what Scott called dad’s ‘solicitor’s voice’, the ‘SV’.
     My mother who was paying little attention, looked up from peeling the satsuma she had just taken from the bowl on the table. She smiled. “Something nice?” she asked.
     “A pair of leather gloves….”
     “That was very generous of him.”
     “….for when Jason gives me a pillion.”
     “I knew it,” she said eventually. “I just knew it. I knew this would happen as soon as you became friends with him, I knew this would happen. I told your father at the time, and he told me not to worry.”  She shot him a reproachful glance.       “He said you were far too sensible to do that. And yet here you are telling me this. Please Alex, please tell me you’re not going to do this. I’d wear myself away with the worry.”
     “I’m sorry, I can’t do that,” I replied quietly, forcing the reluctant words from my mouth.
     “You’re not seriously thinking of going on the back of one of those things with that boy?”
     “Yes,” I said, “yes, I am.”
     I told him the truth because for once I was angry enough; angry at the contempt with which he spat those two final words, that two word encapsulation of all that my father thought of Jason – ‘that boy’. ‘Those things’, ‘that boy’; it was more than just contempt it was almost superstitious, as though to use their proper names would somehow invoke their power as strange gods.
     He offered to loan Jason and I the car when ever we wanted, even to buy me my own car, but I didn’t want that. I wanted to sit behind Jason on his bike, for both of us to be dressed in leather, that’s what I wanted.
     “So, you’ve both talked about things before now, or is this something that boy has done under his own initiative, and that you’re happy enough to go along with?”
     “We’ve talked about it. Vaguely.  That Saturday I went round to look at his garden, well, he showed me his bikes too. I suppose we talked about it – me riding pillion, that is – then. And I suppose we may have talked about things before then.”
     “And the gloves? Did you talk about them then or before?”
     “I didn’t know anything about the gloves, not until I unwrapped them this morning; this isn’t some sort of conspiracy if that’s what you mean – well, not in that sort of way.”
     “Well, in what sort of way?”
     “He just offered to give me a pillion sometime, but that was only after I expressed an interest. That’s all. We didn’t make any definite plans.”
     “I take it the gloves fit?”
     “They fit very well.”
     “Then how did he know which size to buy?”
     “He guessed. He was just lucky, I suppose. He’s kept the receipt in case he had to change them.”
     “Well, there’s no need for you to feel obliged to him because of his generosity.”
     “I don’t,” I said. “This is something I want to do; something, in fact, that I’ve wanted to do for years. I suppose it was one of those reasons, like both us being into Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll, that I became friends with Jason.” I paused. “It’s something I decided years ago I was going to do eventually.”
     “I suppose that will include a bike of your own one day?”
     “Perhaps, I don’t know.”
     It was too much for my father.
     “Oh, for Heaven’s sake Alex see sense! Surely you must realise how very dangerous those things are.”
    Of course I did, in fact it frightened me, but I wasn’t going to let them know that. I couldn’t give them a weapon like that. Their victory would have been easy if I had.
"Anyway, didn’t Granddad have a bike?"
“That was nearly fifty years ago, Alex. It’s hardly relevant. The roads are far more dangerous these days, you know that. You must have seen the endless reports in the media - week after week there are stories about people getting killed and what’s worse, getting paralysed riding those things. I don’t want that happening to you.”
     He must have said other things too. I presume he did, but I can’t recall them now. I only remember now my wandering mind and my hand reaching out towards the fruit bowl.
     “Put that thing down, and concentrate!”
      Reluctantly I let the satsuma slip from my fingers and bounce petulantly on to the table.
     “That boy broke his leg last year, and you decide you’re still hungry. He could have been killed.” (“I didn’t fucking say that. I was nowhere near getting killed. Your dad knows nowt, mate,” Jason exclaimed that evening.) “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?” my father asked.
     I shrugged. “I still want to do it,” I said.
     There was nothing left to say, no room left for manoeuvre. My father and I just stared at each other.
     “Could I see the gloves? Please,” my mother asked
     “Sure.”
     When I stood up I found I was shaking.
     “Jason has a pair just the same,”      I explained when I handed them over to her. “That’s why he bought them for me, because he had got on really well with them.”
     My mother handled them carefully with a disdain she was all too obviously trying to hide.
     “They’re an interesting design…”
     “We’re not going to get you to change your mind, are we?”
     “No….no.”
     “….sort of organic and yet there’s something rather militaristic, if not combative about them. They look expensive.”
     “End of line, I think. I don’t know.” I spoke hurriedly, nervously - I was still shaking. “Jason bought them at a discount; Blanchard’s – that’s the bike shop in Medhamstead – they sponsor Jason, so he was able, he said, able to do a deal.”
     My mother placed the gloves on the table.
     “Well, young man, we can’t pretend to be happy about all of this, but you’re old enough to make your own decisions, we accept that. You’ve given us no choice. However I do think it’s highly reckless of you, if not irresponsible, even stupid, but neither I or your mother can tell you what to do anymore, as much as in this case we’d like to.” My father glanced over at the kitchen window. “Who’s this now? Just promise us you’ll think very carefully, and don’t allow yourself to be rushed into anything. Jason is an articulate young man.”
     The back door opened and closed.
     Eager to resolve it I readily agreed to his proposal.
     Scott came into the kitchen. He and Danny had been out to lunch at the Rugby Club. He was slightly drunk.
     “What’s this then?” he asked, “Family crisis? Any Coffee? Hey, neat gloves! Whose are those?”
     “Mine.” I said.
     He picked them up and looked them over and pronounced them cool. Scott was never convincing with his use of ‘cool’ or any other street slang. “Where’d you get from?”
     “Jason. They’re a Christmas present.”
     “Neat.”
     “Your brother wants to ride pillion,” said my father dismally.
Scott thought that was cool too.  “You ought to do it,” he continued, “You’ll enjoy it. It’s great fun.”
     “Scott, I don’t think that’s particularly helpful.”
     “You’ve ridden pillion? You didn’t tell me.”
     “You’re trying to stop him? And anyway didn’t Granddad…?”
     “I’ve been over that with your brother.” interrupted my father. “It’s not relevant. It was a long time ago and the roads were far safer.”
     “Why are you doing this?” Scott asked, eventually. “Why do the pair of you treat Alex differently? You didn’t try and stop me flying.”
     “They’ve always treated me differently,” I told Jason, “what with one thing and another. They denied it this afternoon, just like they’ve done before, but it’s true. They do treat us differently. They think I can’t cope or something.”
By then the car had reached the narrow wooded section of road beneath the golf course.
     “So you going to think about it,” Jason eventually asked. I wasn’t.  “Cos I thought we could go to Blanchard’s on Sat’day and get you your gear.”
     Fear returned, welling up from the floor of the car until it submerged me. It had been with me all day, since it invaded my bedroom, pushing its jealous way between Jason and me when he said: “I wanna be the one who turns you into a biker, mate.” It was oddly naïve of me really, but before that declaration I thought the gloves were just for sex, not biking.
      It was there at lunch, but my father said nothing, and it was there at tea and dinner, when the four of us had eaten in silence rather than start another argument; although by then it had become an argument solely between Scott and my father. It was there too in the Lounge Bar of the Angel Hotel amidst the panelling and the silver plate and the brass and the hunting prints. And it was there when, at nearly midnight, Jason and I drove home through a night that was appropriately leather black.
     Inside, the Roberts’ car was warm and comfortable. We had brought the affluent scent of the lounge bar with us. The radio, I remember, was on very low. I would have fallen asleep if it weren’t for the mix of fear and sexual attraction coursing around my body. Jason was talking about the bike again; he had talked of nothing else all evening, or so it seemed:
     “I want you out there with me Alex, (he hadn’t called me ‘mate’ all evening, and his accent, too, had disappeared), on the back of the bike, riding pillion. I know we could borrow a car whenever we like. In a way it’d be easier. But it’s not the same. You’ll understand once you’ve been out with me.” And, “I’ve got permission to use the old airstrip up at Gunby anytime I want, so I thought we could have a bit of practice up there first before I take you out on the road. I thought we could start sometime next month. I want to get you out there with me as soon as possible. The sooner we do the sooner we can go places together - give ourselves some space.”
     Jason was full of plans.
     “In the summer we could go away together on the weekends I’m not racing. There’s loads of places I want to go and see. I’ve a tent we could use; it sleeps two. I use it when I’m racing. We wouldn’t need to take much stuff; we can live in our leathers. The pair of us, mate, in gear the whole weekend. Yeah, the thought of that makes me horny too. (Jason began to talk dirty, before reverting to the subject) We could even go down to London for a couple of days, if you want, and stay in a hotel.”
     I said nothing, just stared out of the window. The fear was there too standing invisible but blank-eyed among the dark fields.
     This was all too quick. Way too quick. I hadn’t expected to go out on the bike just yet; it was something in my mind I had presumed to postpone to some future, unspecified date. The spring perhaps, when it was warmer. But if I had rejected it –the gloves, the leather, the bike - I would have what? I didn’t know. Rejected Jason? Not quite. It wouldn’t have ended the relationship, but its development would have been stunted. The thing, the relationship, would have been deformed. A thing without completeness.
     I looked at Jason, at the dark shape of him beside, but he was distant, concentrating on his driving.
     It had been there encasing my hands, the new me, the one I had fantasised about for over six years - I still couldn’t believe it, even if it was really something inevitable - condensed and realised in a pair of gloves. I had a pair of bike gloves. I held up my bare hands before me in the dark. The leather would follow soon. It had been there, finally graspable, concrete, and yet I had been, and perhaps still was on the cusp of rejecting it. It had partly been my father’s attitude that had propelled me into agreeing to this when the thought of it all terrified me and a different approach could easily have won him a victory.
At the time I couldn’t have explained this hesitation, not fully. It was something I didn’t wholly comprehend myself. If asked I would have said something about having to deal with my parents and the fear, that real intense fear of getting on the back of his bike that had repeatedly manifested itself throughout the day. They were real but partial, inadequate explanations for what I felt. There was something else, larger, darker, some other vague unease that had nothing to do with either riding pillion, or confronting my parents.
I understand it now.
Jason was asking me to move beyond my bedroom, my parents, the house and step permanently into his world - his perceptions, his image - a world that was never dull or ordinary, and in effect make a display of my sexuality, to sexualise my life and live like him in a state of perpetual sexual awareness and opportunity. It was like asking any one else to go around naked.
And suddenly, as the car swung around the roundabout on the bypass the whole thing - the leather, the bike - seemed repulsive. Sordid.
     “You’re quiet, mate,” he said, and reaching across when he should have been concentrating on his driving Jason found and took my hand. “It’ll be ok, mate. Honest.”

Leather Chapter Part II

     I thought that instead of posting another random section of 'Chameleon' I would continue the 'Leather Chapter'. I hope you like it

     It was a Saturday afternoon, the middle of January. Outside the sun was shining. I was standing in front of the tall mirror in my parents’ bedroom, and I was encased in Leather, my first set of bike leathers - the real ‘hard shit’: boots, jeans, jacket, gloves. I had it all. The whole thing - helmet and thermal underwear included.
     I had done this every day that week; stood there like Narcissus watching my reflection, studying intently the leather and its relationship to my body. Within minutes of my parents leaving the house for work I had gone upstairs in the silence to satisfy my craving, stripped myself of my clothes, and pulled on my new, intractable skin. It was heavy, stiff with armour, under its demand I moved differently to normal; and black, the sort of black that sucked into it the light and trapped it, the sort of black that wouldn’t fade with sunlight or repeated washing.
     I walked around the house, noting with immense satisfaction the masculine weight - the authority - leather and boots gave my steps. I made myself a coffee, watched TV, ate lunch, and all the time Leather never allowed me to forget its presence.
     Most of my time, however, was spent before my parent’s mirror. I returned time and time again throughout the day. And then after a while, after I had studied myself in the mirror for sometime I went to the bathroom, and I wanked. I wanked a lot that week.
     Just as important I was becoming like Jason, and I really wanted to be him, then. We both wanted to be like each other – in a physical way, I mean. In his sexier moments Jason talked about us having the same body so we could share the same clothes, almost as though we could swap identity. I had even let my hair grow.
     But to Jason, however, this stage in my realisation was unsatisfactory; he complained that the Leather just wasn’t tight enough for him: “Mate, you really will have to start going to the gym and work on those thighs,” he said. But I was satisfied.
     Jason had controlled this whole process. He had brought me to this point. For Jason it was a straightforward process of transformation, of ‘turning’ or ‘making’ me into a biker in which  he was the protagonist, setting the paradigms and controlling the direction and progress of change. He was my dealer, the encourager of my own addiction and the controller of both supply and demand. He was, to stretch the metaphor, both pimp and whore who could dampen and heighten my need at will.
     Perhaps it was simple vanity that made him misunderstand a more complex procedure as mere transformation. This wasn’t a process of addition. I didn’t merely assume an externally determined form, though there was a strong element of that, or add another facet to my personality. Nothing was added. This was a realisation, a revelation, an externalisation - I used all three words interchangeably - of the man I knew myself to be, or rather wished to be. It was the completion of my self, by the adoption of new, self-made identity. What Jason did was give me access to a world, the concrete form, language, and expression that seemed impossibly remote. It was as if some sort of unspoken bargain had been struck between us, where our desires, for both ourselves and each other, coincided.
     That first week in Leather was a forerunner of my present life. I live in, and with, leather for days on end, travelling to lectures and tutorials on my bike, and then in the evening going to clubs like The Hoist and then sleeping in my leathers. And then there are fallow weeks, the weeks in between that inevitably follow, when I never put it, or even go out on the bike.
     After three years I am aware, to continue Jason’s drugs analogy, of the effect of long term use. I have undergone a process, a transaction of sorts of mind and body. I have grown into the Leather, just as I have grown into my muscle, so that in some way we two have merged. I noticed this process first in Jason during the summer of 1996 when he seemed to be permanently encased in Leather, what with his racing and riding to work everyday; and later I saw it in myself when moving to London I immersed myself in Leather and the leather scene. Just like Jason that summer I walk now out of Leather just as I walk when encased, my public identity too outside of Leather is now largely my Leather identity. But concurrently my body has subtly changed the Leather, softening it and moulding it to my flesh and the bone, as with time and use it slowly, reluctantly, made its submission.
     That, however, was in the future.
     That Saturday afternoon the pattern of my first week in leather was altered. I stood in front of the mirror, still with the same fascination and delight, but I was not alone in the house: I was waiting for my father to finish  his lunch, waiting anxiously for the lift to the abandoned WW II airfield up on the heath at Gunby for my first pillion, waiting, more importantly, to see Jason in his leathers. It was my epiphany – only its association made me reluctant to use the word – the day I walked out in my leathers for the first time.
     I paced up and down in anticipation, striding from one room to another, zipping and unzipping my jacket. Restless. Muscles tight. Picking up and putting down gloves and lid, moving them from chair to bed, bed to chair; sometimes standing at the top of the stairs, sometimes standing at the window; other times watching in the mirror.
     I’d had the leathers exactly a week by then; it  was a week since Jason and I, in his father’s BMW, drove over to Blanchard’s in Medhamstead to get my new skin and where he used his influence and charm to win me a small additional discount on the sale price and a mug of instant coffee in the back of the shop with the manager.
     I looked at my watch with impatience: we were going to be late.
     My parents hated the sight of them. It was as much aesthetics and snobbery as fear for my safety. But the leather, I reckoned, didn’t care. Leather is an indifferent thing. “I see you’re serious about riding pillion, then?” my father asked that evening when I returned home. “I thought you said you’d think about it, Alex.” We were in the kitchen – my parents, Jason and me. It was dark outside and raining, and I was showing off my leathers, boots and helmet; empty boxes and bags were scattered over the tiles. It was too obvious a question to demand an answer. I had lied.
     “I suppose you’ll want a bike next,” he added.
Jason was standing next to me, I remember.
     “When I can afford it,” I answered, realising that I cared more about not disappointing Jason than I did my parents. Perhaps if he had not been there I would have lied; I don’t know. I see now that in those early days of our relationship I merely substituted pleasing one set of people for pleasing just one person, Jason. Fear was the real motivator. I feared loosing him, nothing was achievable without him I thought, and it was under the weight of this great fear that all other terrors were conquered until, without realising it, the great fear itself fell to me like a besieged citadel.
     “Alex, you know very well how dangerous those things are. We’ve been through this.”
     “I’ll look after him, Mr Caythorpe.” And the assertion was there, somewhere in the tone of his voice. It was unmistakable: ‘It’s my turn now’.
     “I don’t doubt it, Jason, but it’s the other road users I’m worried about.”
     This whole process – this progressive transformation - had taken just over a fortnight by then; two weeks in which my life had drawn in on itself again as I attempted to avoid my parents at all times other than that was necessary. I wanted no more confrontation. My days became a series of pinch points of anxiety, just as they had before Jason. There had, however, been no real confrontation between us after the arrival of the gloves; no arguments or shouting, just an awkward, grinding silence that I likened to the slow grinding of a glacier, and an avoidance of the issue.
     Just days after he played me his favourite porn video, when, it seems now, he had established the final paradigm he wished me to follow, Jason inaugurated this process. He came round to my house the Friday after Christmas Day. I hadn’t seen him for nearly a week. It was nearly lunchtime and there was a smell of cooking in the house and condensation on the windows.
     He was wearing leather – not yet his bike leathers, it seemed even then as though I had to earn that privilege - but a pair of glossy black gloves and a smooth black jacket, with black buttons, that creaked gently as he moved and was cold beneath my fingers. He was like an image from a magazine.
     “You like it then, mate?” he asked. It was one of those rhetorical questions of his that didn’t warrant an answer. Of course I liked it; the leather was smooth, supple, flawless, and cut frugally close to his body; even though Jason quantified it as ‘soft shit’ it made my balls clench up tight with pleasure as soon as I had opened the front door to him. “It’s a Christmas present from m’mum and dad.” Jason flashed the black silk lining, revealing the logo of some Italian designer on the inside pocket.
      Around his mouth and chin was a thick trace of stubble, like a scumble of paint. Jason had started to grow a beard.
     “I came round yesterday afternoon,” he said stepping into the hall. “I was walking Sam, but you weren’t in.”
     “Yeah, sorry about that,” I said. “We were over at my Grandparents in Northford. It’s a bit of a Boxing Day tradition.”
     “Well, I was bored out my brain, mate. I only took the dog for a walk to get out of the house. And to see you. I was going to ask if you wanted to go out for a drink somewhere. The thought of staying in for one more bloody night watching the box was doing my head in. We could go out tonight if you want. I thought we could take my dad’s car over to Stannington and have a drink in the ‘Angel’, if you fancy it.” He didn’t wait for an answer but held up the white plastic carrier-bag he had in his right hand. “I brought you your present, mate. Happy Christmas!”
     Upstairs Jason dropped the bag onto the bed, reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a spring of plastic mistletoe.
     “Happy Christmas, mate! Don’t I get a kiss?”
Sitting on the bed we exchanged small, hard parcels of brightly coloured paper and ribbon that concealed nothing either expensive or lavish; there was no mention of love on the tags. There was nothing, we agreed the fortnight before Christmas, that would draw attention to ourselves; a 1997 desk diary (bound in faux black leather) and a second-hand biography of Giacomo Agostini, the Italian road racer. It was a lucky, charity shop find made in Stannington the Monday before Christmas.
     “I’ve been looking for this for years, mate,” he said, but in his hands the damaged cover and the yellowing pages seemed an inadequate, embarrassing expression of what I felt for him at that moment. “Agostini was so bloody cool, you know. He had this style about him.” Jason, still in his gleaming leather, showed me a black and white photograph that I had already seen. “That’s him at the Italian Grand Prix,” he explained. “He was 500cc World Champion for seven years between 1966 and 1972, and again in 1975.” Jason had a head for that sort of statistic. “Cheers for that mate.”
     He closed the book and laid it beside him on the bed. I offered him a drink, my father, I reckoned, was bound to have opened a bottle of red by then. I thought that if I went down stairs now I could ask if Jason could stay for lunch, then he wouldn’t have to leave.
     “We’re not finished yet, mate. I’ve got something else in the bag for you.”
     “Something else?”
     “Another present, mate,” he announced. “I know we agree we wouldn’t do this, but….”
Jason gave up on the explanation - it really wasn’t worth the effort - and handed me a misshapen, scruffy, vaguely oblong sort of parcel of gold ribbon and scarlet foil, saying: “I guess this is your proper present, Al. Sorry about the wrapping, mate. I made a right mess of that.” This time the scrawled message on the tag mentioned ‘love’. I tugged it from the ribbon, and tucked it into my trouser pocket. It was something I decided to keep.
     Jason went on about wrapping the present: “It were gone midnight Christmas Eve when I did it,” he continued in those words or something similar, “and I was pretty well pissed by then. But then I suppose I’d been drinking on and off for nearly six hours at that point.”
     My next memory is of the intense, visceral surge of excitement barrelling through my body at the first sight of what was under the foil. Leather! It was like an electric shock. Leather! My hands shook as they clumsily, greedily tore away the last of the wrapping. Leather! Jason had given me a pair of leather gloves – bike gloves. I didn’t quite believe it. After all we had agreed he had given me these bike gloves. These expensive bloody bike gloves!
     “You do like them, don’t you?” he asked. He was grinning, but his body was tense and alert for my answer.
     I had to catch my breath before I could speak. “Of course I like them. I love them! They’re fantastic! Absolutely fantastic! Thank you. Thank you so much.” And then all these other words tumbled from my lips, tripping over themselves in their excitement. And as I spoke I glimpsed the book upon the bed. It was now more inadequate than ever.
     “I love them Jason, but you shouldn’t have spent so much on me. I can’t afford to buy you anything as good…..”
     “It’s alright, mate. I got them in the sale, if you want to know. Less than half price. A right bargain. Go on Al, put them on mate!” he urged. “Let’s see you in them.”
     He watched intently as I obeyed his instructions. “They fit all right?” he asked. “They should be your size; if they’re not I can get them changed. I had to guess really. If they don’t, it’s ok mate. I’ve kept the receipt.”
     There was no need for a receipt, the gloves fitted perfectly. The backs of the gloves were padded in parallel ridges, and each knuckle encrusted with a fat barnacle of black plastic armour. A black zip ran from the wrist the length of the narrow gauntlet and there was a thick Velcro strap of white and red leather at the wrist. I pulled the straps as tight as possible and flexed my fingers.
     I stood up and walked over to the mirror.
     “My first leather,” I said studying my gloves in the glass. Soon, I thought, the leather would cover not just my hands but my entire body.
     “I thought it would be,” he answered standing up and walking over. “I reckoned, you know, it was up to me to get you started with your gear, mate. I’ve got a pair just the same. I were in town of Christmas Eve having a drink with some mates from work, and I was on the way to the pub when I passed Blanchard’s, the bike shop in Eastgate, (and no mate, before you ask, I weren’t drunk by then), and I saw them in the window and I thought of you.” He slipped his arms about my waist and kissed my neck.    “You’re still up for it, aren’t you mate?”
     I nodded.
     "That’s great, ’cos I wanna be the one who turns you into a biker, mate. That’s my job, you see. To make you who you really are.”
     No, I thought, you’re going to turn me into you. And the thought thrilled me. I was going to be Jason.
     “I want you out there with me mate, on the back of the bike,” he continued, his voice little more than a murmur as though he was asking for sex. And I kissed him.
     “I want to see you in leather next time,” he said. “I want….”
     There was a creak on the stairs. “Shit!” I quickly yanked off the gloves. There was a knock at the door. It was my father.
     “Oh, you’re both in here. Hello Jason. We thought it was you. I hope you had a good Christmas. We wondered if you would like to stay for lunch. It’s only soup and left over turkey I’m afraid.” Jason accepted. “Good. It’ll be about half and hour. What’s that in your hand, Alex?” my father asked. “Gloves?”
     “They’re a present from Jason….”
     “….for when I give Alex a pillion.”
     Silence.
     “They’re nice and padded Mr Caythorpe. It can get a bit cold out there this time of year.”
     “Yes, I suppose it must Jason.”
     My father backed out of the room, eyes intent on the gloves.