Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (6 page)

Stop dwelling on it, he told himself as crouched back down to a weeding position.
These things happen. Then his mother’s voice called to him across the garden. A letter had arrived for him that morning. She had put it in his room before going out herself. Had he found it? This was a perfect excuse, parent-sanctioned, for interrupting his work on the flowerbed and going indoors. Kicking off the boots he was wearing he skidded upstairs in his socks and round the sun-swept gallery (that professor of architecture had known what he was doing) to his bedroom. And there, propped against his penguin mascot, was an envelope in Michael’s unmistakeable scrawl.

Your new-found acquaintance sounds a total nutter and nerd.
I can’t imagine anything less cool than some guy ponsing around a French forêt with his pants at half-mast. Except you. What did you think you were doing???

Jiminy Cricket misses you though.
I do try to keep him under control – but you know what he’s like.

Terry
scored with a girl (ugh!) last weekend. Or says he did. Another thing. Sam (a new guy who you don’t know) says he can get some dope for us all – if we all chip in a bit. Could be interesting, n’est-ce pas? Will let you know the outcome. (Not, of course, a reference to Jiminy Cricket.)

The sheer slowness of the postal service gave a surreal quality to the communication.
It had about it the aura of a message plucked from the sea in a bottle, or something from a vanished past time discovered in an attic trunk. Michael’s letter took it for granted that the first incident in the forest was an isolated one, unlikely to be repeated. Would Michael be imagining today, nearly a week after the date of his letter and four hundred miles to the north, that Adam had met the woodland creature again, that he had a name for him, and that they had more or less agreed another tryst? Or would Michael be thinking about Adam at all? Perhaps out of sight was out of mind. Perhaps he was actually busy arranging trysts of his own. And who was this Sam character after all?

Adam
’s friendship with Michael went back to pre-teen, pre-sex days. They had come to each other’s attention as potential rivals in the classroom: two boys with the same habit of challenging their teachers with a mixture of bright questions and deliberately stupid ones that were asked just to provoke them; this had been an identity badge for both of them and they were not pleased, when they found themselves in the same class for the first time, at having to share it. This meant that the first thing that they found they had in common was a simple sense of mutual irritation. They had had the occasional ineffectual fistfight. But as their first year in school together progressed they found it made more sense for them to be friends than enemies. They discovered gradually that they had a few more positive things in common. They both liked books. They both had an interest in classical music. There was something else that made their relationship an easy one. Neither of them thought for a second that the other was physically attractive – still less beautiful.

Adam
knew something about physical attraction. There had been people on the television – young men in every case – whom, as a very small child, he had fantasised about to the point of believing that he actually shared his life with them (though always only one at a time). It made him embarrassed now even to think of it and he had never told anyone. There was a boy at his first school with wonderful eyelashes; they had snuggled up in bed together, exploring each other’s miniature nakedness, while sleeping over at each other’s houses. Then, when Adam was nine, Sean had entered his life like the morning sun to burn up all that had gone before.

Sean
was biggish and square-shouldered when Adam was small and skinny-ribbed. He had blue eyes like cornflowers and his blond hair was the cornfield itself: it was normally short but it turned wavy just before it was ready to be reaped. His skin was the pink and white of hedge-roses. He had a smile. He was older by a year than Adam was but, unlike most older boys, he was easy to approach and trusting, not disdainful and sarcastic. He had an easy self-confidence that was so secure that he never feared it might be punctured by association with his juniors. He never became a friend of Adam’s exactly. They just talked sometimes. The fantasies that Adam began to project upon him were a secret known only to Adam himself. A year later he left.

And a year after that, when Adam moved up to his big school, there was Sean again, neither surprised to see him nor especially pleased, but welcoming him with the same uncomplicated, generous, trusting smile.
It was more than enough for Adam that Sean, now beginning to show the promise of a manly physique to come, had not forgotten his name. Adam was soon in love with the older boy, with his looks, with the way he moved, the way he spoke. And several things were, perhaps mercifully, crystal clear to him at once. One was that Sean (who was actually growing to like Adam quite a lot) did not feel at all the same about Adam as he did about Sean. Secondly, to have said or done anything to show what he felt for Sean, whether to Sean himself or to anyone else, and no matter how guardedly, would have led to instant social crucifixion. This was connected to the third thing: Adam was perfectly certain by now that most of his male contemporaries felt no similar feeling for other boys. And if they did, then (
see under Secondly, above
) Adam was unlikely to find out.

Physical sex, though, was a different thing entirely.
It crept up on Adam by stealth. He had learnt as a quite small child how it all worked. It was all in books that any seven year-old could understand provided he was an energetic enough reader to start with. So he was well aware of where he had come from, and what his father had had to do to put him there in the first place, long before anyone thought it might be time to tell him. When he went to his big school he saw pairs of live frogs in the bio lab during February that were dedicated to no other purpose than copulation for the duration of a whole fortnight, as if to instil in the minds of the pupils a blueprint of the right way to go about things. Soon he was hearing about older boys who had actually had sex with girls – he couldn’t imagine in what circumstances – and later people would point, whispering, to the occasional foolish virgin whose folly had led to the most visible of indications that she was a virgin no longer.

Somehow he made no connection between any of this and the things that were happening to him.
It was in the gym lesson that he noticed them most. When he was given a choice of activity, something which happened most usually during the last ten minutes of the period, his preferences were usually not the slightly threatening beam (for though his sense of balance was not bad, he had a fear of falling and the distance to the ground seemed alarmingly large to someone of his small stature) nor the mat with its earthworm’s view of life, but rather the ropes or the wall-bars, both of which offered him a panorama of the rest of the gym’s occupants as antlike crawlers far below – a view of society he could not aspire to in any other situation. And high on either of these exercise facilities he was strangely untouched by any thought that he could possibly fall off. Perhaps it was the fact of being able to hold on with his hands.

By the time he was thirteen
Adam was conscious of new sensations in his cock and adjacent muscles which he experienced with particular intensity whenever he hoisted himself towards the top of the bars or ropes. The ropes in particular. He did not have a name for the feeling but he found that it drew him with ever more urgency, as the weeks passed, to scale the heights of twisted hemp. At the same time his muscles seemed increasingly able to cope with the demands that his more and more energetic scrambles made on them. Then one day – and this was the first time he had really made it to the top, and proved it to himself by bumping his head on the ceiling, while his hands no longer grasped rope but the cold metal of the hooks and eyes that fastened his support to the joist that was buried in the smooth plaster – he came face to face with Michael in the identical position at the top of the next-door rope. He said, with pseudo-suavity, ‘ What brings you here?’ but Michael just looked back at him with a glazed look that Adam didn’t recognise and which somehow, inexplicably, he found slightly shocking. So Adam stared at Michael in his turn. If anything Michael was even smaller and scrawnier than he, but he appeared strangely transformed by his present surroundings and the physical effort of having reached them. His slight muscles were actually individually visible, defined for the first time and standing out on arms and legs. The upward haul against the rope had caused his white shorts to ride so far up his legs that there seemed scarcely room to hide anything in the gathering of the material at his crotch. His thighs were longer than Adam had ever noticed and they disappeared most provocatively into the leg-holes of his shorts at just the last possible moment. Another centimetre and …

Adam
had forgotten for a second or two the increasing tension in his own nether region. Suddenly his attention was forced back to it. He felt his imprisoned cock swell and thicken as it never had before. He thought for a mad, panicked moment that he was going to piss himself before he had time to scramble back down to the ground, then realised that there was no time to do anything at all. He gasped and nearly let go of his handhold in surprise, only just finding the presence of mind among the sudden sublime chaos of body and feelings to hold on even tighter. Michael had registered the gasp and was now staring at him open-mouthed. The thought fled through Adam’s mind that his own face was just now registering the same glazed, slack-jawed look that he had seen on Michael’s only seconds before. A pulse of unprecedented strength and painful, delightful, intensity, hammered in his cock for a second or two then died out. Horrified, Adam began to register that he was wet. Fifteen feet above the ground he felt horribly exposed. Everybody would see, perhaps already had. ‘ Got to go. …Slash,’ he burbled, barely coherent, to Michael, then shinned recklessly fast down the ropes and ran pell-mell to the nearest washroom. Pulling down his shorts in a rush he was relieved to discover that he was only a little bit wet and that it hardly showed from the outside. He was startled by the unprecedented thickness of his semi-slouching organ. But when he tried to urinate he was equally surprised to find that nothing would come out.

When he was able to reflect a little more calmly on what had happened at the top of the ropes he became increasingly certain that whatever urge had propelled him higher and higher up the ropes over the previous weeks, Michael had found his way up there under the same compulsion.
And whatever it was that had overtaken him when he finally got there had been experienced by Michael too. Maybe, Adam thought suddenly with a quick jealous pang, not for the first time. He knew then, in one of those bleak moments of adult certainty that he was beginning to experience more and more often, that his friendship with Michael would never be the same again.

For a couple of days that expanded to the proportions of months in his mind
Adam avoided Michael’s company altogether, managing to avoid eye contact as if by chance when their paths unavoidably crossed. He felt no animosity towards his friend, just a fathomless gulf of awkwardness; they had experienced something together but whether it was a happy or a shameful secret he could not be sure. He had no idea what he could say next time they spoke.

But eventually it was time for gym again and, towards the end of the session,
Adam caught sight of Michael beginning to swarm up one of the ropes. He quickly noticed, with something like satisfaction, that the adjacent rope was not in use and so available for his own purposes, then, feigning nonchalance, sauntered across the floor to it and started on up. He felt as if he were flying, the way one flew in dreams, without effort or exertion. How was this possible, he wondered? The tough, gruelling climb of the last few months had been transformed somehow into a gravity-defying ascent. A moment later and he was crouched at the limit of the climb, his head pressed against the ceiling. He was face to face with Michael. Who shyly grinned at him. He saw Michael move his crotch infinitesimally up and into the rope that parted his legs. Then it happened. And Adam knew that it was for both of them. Simultaneous. And he knew that Michael knew too. He grinned back.

It was no more than two days later that
Michael came up to Adam at the end of school and said: ‘ Come for a walk?’

Adam
was excitedly self-conscious as they walked out of the front gates together. They had never been together outside school, having different sets of friends. He hoped nobody was watching them but at the same time wished the eyes of the whole school might be on their backs. No way would he look round to check.

The walk was a short one.
They exchanged one or two safeish confidences about themselves, then split and went their separate ways home. The following day they talked about sex, though not especially candidly, taking care to stick to the impersonal formulae of ‘some people say …’ and so on. But the third day, by mutual but unstated agreement, they took a different route.

It led them to the edge of town where ramshackle sheds half stood, half tumbled beside disused railway sidings.
Adam did not think, observing the other’s half-hesitating demeanour, that Michael knew his way around the buildings any better than he did. They explored and stumbled, excitedly, together. They were in one of the rotting sheds. A smell of earth and weeds hung heavily, but broad shafts of sunlight came slanting through in place of many missing planks and panels.