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.

New Picture

     It must be at least I fortnight since I posted anything. I was hoping to post a review or two from those I wrote for a local, and now defunct, gay magazine - but I can't find them. I must have tidied the cd away. Life too has been getting in the way of blogging....here though in recompense is a painting of mine...Dennington in Suffolk