Read Online The Folding Star by Alan Hollinghurst - Free Book Online
Authors: Alan Hollinghurst
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people stood talking in a weekend muddle of idleness and busyness. A nice-looking short dark boy, hands in the pockets of baggy blue corduroys, a guernsey round his shoulders, stepped backwards laughing just as Gus came up behind him. They both recoiled, the boy with momentarily delayed horror, Gus with the snarl of one who loathes above all to be touched; then silence and then a brown-toothed smile. He stepped forward, clutching with his left hand at the low, blackened crotch of his trousers. ‘I know all about little boys,’ he said, ‘I know all about cocks and cunts’ – so that the kid backed off and turned away fast, though with a mock-cheery shout to his companions. But Gus had already lost interest.
The indolent bunching of the shoppers, a parked van, the street corner with its hanging lamp and mutilated figure of St Anthony of Padua – all prevented me from seeing that broad-shouldered, strong-bottomed lad, and on impulse I followed him round the corner. He and his friends had cantered on for a bit, and it took me a moment to find them, stopped again under the iron and glass marquee of the theatre. There was my friend, and a taller fair boy beside him; beyond them, looking back at me, was a calm, wide-faced girl, hair cut in a shining bob. The shorter boy’s hand rested above the small of the taller one’s back, as if he had touched it lightly to reassure him or command his attention and then left it there in comfortable forgetfulness. It was a turning-point in my life, this second sighting of Luc. I knew at once how the shape of him lingered in me, like a bright image gleaming and floating on the sleepy retina: there was a kind of miserable excitement, a lurch of the heart. At the moment I recognised him and laid a hopeless claim to him, I knew I was observing him on the loose in a world that barely touched on mine: I had the clearest sense of his indifference, as he stood there with his back to me in a brown suede jerkin and white jeans, his back on which this appealing stranger was allowed to rest his hand, confident in some unguessed intimacy. Never love at first sight; but second sometimes – while I strode through the theatre colonnade, as if unaware of the three, and with a certain glamorous urgency bent on some objective beyond them, the singing echoes of my shoe-tips rang through a longer arched perspective, and seemed to summon up the skitterings of earlier loves setting out on their improbable journeys. The three had perhaps reached a natural pause in their conversation, though of course I thought their quite abrupt silence, when I was just by them but looking away at the long irrelevant announcements for
Henry VIII
and
La Siffleuse
, was virtually an act of aggression. I swept on stiffly to the Grote Markt, and crossed it as if they were still watching me, even following me. It was not till I got to the Tourist Office, went unhesitatingly inside and stood at a rack of cards, looking past it through the huge lettered window and found that they were nowhere to be seen, that I marvelled abjectly at how my sudden burst of feeling had wrongfooted me. I had lost the chance of an easy greeting, a display of the amiable equality of our dealings, a word or two with his beautiful friends. I could have put my arm around that broad suede back, just above the other one, and claimed the beginnings of a friendship just as intense. I plucked out postcards one after another and amassed them like a terrible hand at pontoon: the Belfry, the Belfry, a frozen canal, a mural from the Town Hall, painted by Edgard Orst.
I was in a dingy old bookshop, running my eye blindly over the stock, waiting for the storm in my head to pass: the place was a refuge, a bunker, insulated by its own dusty tedium and the bulkheads of paper and worn leather. I froze off the donnish assistant, who enquired as to my special interests and who may have thought I was a thief – I who had stolen nothing in my life. I worked my way into the
The indolent bunching of the shoppers, a parked van, the street corner with its hanging lamp and mutilated figure of St Anthony of Padua – all prevented me from seeing that broad-shouldered, strong-bottomed lad, and on impulse I followed him round the corner. He and his friends had cantered on for a bit, and it took me a moment to find them, stopped again under the iron and glass marquee of the theatre. There was my friend, and a taller fair boy beside him; beyond them, looking back at me, was a calm, wide-faced girl, hair cut in a shining bob. The shorter boy’s hand rested above the small of the taller one’s back, as if he had touched it lightly to reassure him or command his attention and then left it there in comfortable forgetfulness. It was a turning-point in my life, this second sighting of Luc. I knew at once how the shape of him lingered in me, like a bright image gleaming and floating on the sleepy retina: there was a kind of miserable excitement, a lurch of the heart. At the moment I recognised him and laid a hopeless claim to him, I knew I was observing him on the loose in a world that barely touched on mine: I had the clearest sense of his indifference, as he stood there with his back to me in a brown suede jerkin and white jeans, his back on which this appealing stranger was allowed to rest his hand, confident in some unguessed intimacy. Never love at first sight; but second sometimes – while I strode through the theatre colonnade, as if unaware of the three, and with a certain glamorous urgency bent on some objective beyond them, the singing echoes of my shoe-tips rang through a longer arched perspective, and seemed to summon up the skitterings of earlier loves setting out on their improbable journeys. The three had perhaps reached a natural pause in their conversation, though of course I thought their quite abrupt silence, when I was just by them but looking away at the long irrelevant announcements for
Henry VIII
and
La Siffleuse
, was virtually an act of aggression. I swept on stiffly to the Grote Markt, and crossed it as if they were still watching me, even following me. It was not till I got to the Tourist Office, went unhesitatingly inside and stood at a rack of cards, looking past it through the huge lettered window and found that they were nowhere to be seen, that I marvelled abjectly at how my sudden burst of feeling had wrongfooted me. I had lost the chance of an easy greeting, a display of the amiable equality of our dealings, a word or two with his beautiful friends. I could have put my arm around that broad suede back, just above the other one, and claimed the beginnings of a friendship just as intense. I plucked out postcards one after another and amassed them like a terrible hand at pontoon: the Belfry, the Belfry, a frozen canal, a mural from the Town Hall, painted by Edgard Orst.
I was in a dingy old bookshop, running my eye blindly over the stock, waiting for the storm in my head to pass: the place was a refuge, a bunker, insulated by its own dusty tedium and the bulkheads of paper and worn leather. I froze off the donnish assistant, who enquired as to my special interests and who may have thought I was a thief – I who had stolen nothing in my life. I worked my way into the
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