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I do what he tells me to do I do with no thought for him, ever.
Beside me, on the floor, squashed, lies the tissue of last night’s masturbation, one squished tissue containing wet, cold seeds, all of them, crushed, on the floor, dead, like the fantasy which brought them to life, moving within me last night, lighting me up, illuminating me, but now lying inert on the floor, shroud-like, murdered by a single orgasm, one shot of come, several shots, ripping into tissue, and dying there, sticky and still, millions of seeds, transfixed by rigor mortis, soon to be laid to rest, in the ecstasy of orgasm all mown down, wrapped up, body-bagged, the tissue lying rumpled by itself on the floor, me crumpled and alone on my bed, come to a sticky end, for the thousandth time. Thomas, I cry out for you. Only give me your body and I shall live.
Need is not love is not beautiful. It comes in spurts ugly as rain. I lie curled up in a single room. Knees to shoulders. Arms under knees. Looking out left. Toward the door.
Hearing his scatter of sandals down the stairs. You will laugh at my life. You will sneer at my pain. Thomas, I want you. Again and again.
I, I wanted you, but you didn’t want me.
I, I needed you, but you didn’t need me.
Goodbye.
Alarm ring, clock tick, a luminous stare in grey flannel gloom. Ticktick, ticktick, and cold air wind-tunnels me shivering beneath the sheets pulled thin throat tight. Beneath the red bedspread. The hands move on in green glowing torture, pinching time. The blue curtains billow by the open window, rattle on their wooden rings. Ticktick, ticktick. It is time to rise. Yet again. Monotony. Fucking monotony. But it wouldn’t be if only . . . If only . . . Hearing his shout in the distance, at play with his friends . . . Time to get up. The day is a persistent offender.
He does what I tell him to do he does with no thought for me, ever.
Prep school. Be my guardian angel, Tom. Protect me from all these boys with their endless wants. Though he doesn’t look much like an angel now, with his inky fingers and the large irregular letters he forms that yearn to escape the page’s prison, the exercise-book in which his English preps accumulate; a fly doing drowsy battle with a windowpane; half-terms away in the low-star no-bar hotel abroad whose sole accommodation is the half-felt heart-felt bell-boy; pain at the thought and the thought of pain; hands that listlessly rise to answer wrongly irrelevant questions; Thomas with a mop of uncombed hair and a knowing smile; desks with a filigree of names and shame; Modigliani and Perugino, Murillo and Rose-Period Picasso, the same tired pictures on the same green walls; play tig in break and chase him, watch his socks fall down his slimline legs, hear him scream with glee; see the breath that hangs like white smoke in the air as though the boys themselves in their black-and-gold blazers were Autumn bonfires; games in the garden after school in the Summer where the pool is a glittering bath of sunlight and the day-boys are only allowed to bathe providing they agree to take everything off and dive into the water in their birthday-suits; Tom is hesitant, takes a sandal off, and then puts it straight back on again; the garden is alive with laughter as I stand at my window watching; tests on spelling and lots of sums; Botany, Biology, Boredom, The Bible; timetables, think of it, tables like traps laid for Time; school sounds float up to me, school sounds surround me; the classroom where I sit, chin resting on steeples of fingers, and watch: the twin moving circles fashioned by sixteen pairs of short trousers – ovals of love about thirty bare thighs – and two more, Thomas’s, Thomas’s legs, the slender length of them, his socks, as always, in accordion folds around his ankles; he sees me looking and quite deliberatel.............
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