(no subject)

[sekritomg]

Continued from here.

“What’s the surprise, then?” Kyle asked Eric immediately.

 

We’d found him ensconced in a large booth near the back of Camp, an organdy curtain concealing the table from direct view. In front of him were six empty pints and one quarter-full, which I presumed he was working on. Eric drank Guinness, always preferring heavy stouts to just about almost anything else, pronouncing the rest of the alcoholic corpus ‘faggy.’ (I often wondered what exactly about whisky was so faggy.)

 

“Patience, Jew,” Eric growled. In a swift motion he swept up the pint and tipped the last of his beverage into his mouth. His size made it difficult for alcohol to affect him, but seven pints was a lot so early in the evening, even for Eric. “All will be revealed.”

 

“Well, move your monolithic arse over so the rest of us can have a seat, then.” Kyle began trying to shift Eric further into the booth, but moving him would have been a Herculean task.

 

He chuckled derisively at Kyle, and shook his head. “Pathetic,” he said. “You have absolutely no upper-arm strength.”

 

Butters and I looked at each other, knowing where this discourse was headed. On cue, Kyle roared back, “And you’re so morbidly obese your behind has got its own constituency!”

 

Eric did not miss a beat. “So I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before your bitch Jew mum moves in and runs for parliament!”

 

They had done this act solidly since their first meeting. The year or so during which they formalized their relationship had been no exception. Listening to it was exhausting. Whatever his personal accomplishments, Kyle could not resist the siren’s call of bantering with Eric. He wasn’t wrong; Eric was so enormously fat that the pursuit of inventing new ways to insult him about it had become boring about 10 years prior. When there is no more fun in concocting delicious metaphors to describe a man’s girth, you know things have become humorlessly dire. Part of me was quite glad to have fucked Eric long before he let himself go. Problematically, he was a man of appetites — and I do mean just about every appetite one could imagine. When school ended and he stopped rowing, he had no counter-balance for them, and everything just went to hell. About the time that Eric began bothering Kyle about the end of the affair with Christophe (“Actually, I think you’re one up this time, Jew — lord knows you’re too cheap to support an unemployed Frenchman”), Butters turned to me and said, “I really think I need a drink,” which was just about the best thing I’d heard him say all night.

 

“You’re not the only one,” I agreed.

 

“So, let’s get one, then?” he asked me, and I was about to drag him off toward the bar when a golden-haired young man who as almost certainly not old enough to be in a gay nightclub on a Saturday night shoved his way past us, holding two pints. He immediately caught Eric’s attention.

 

“Ah, yes,” Eric said warmly, gesturing at his lap for the blond boy. “Surprise, gentlemen.”

 

“Oi, Eric,” the boy said cheerily. He wedged his way onto Eric’s lap. I noticed that his feet were planted firmly on the floor, as if he were simply using Eric’s great thigh as a balance while he postured. When Eric just tensed his lips without answering, the boy shrugged and handed him one of the two beers. “Here’s a Guinness, love. I kept the change.” His words were mired in a very faint Irish lilt. “Who’s this lot?”

 

Taking the stout, eyes narrowed, Eric finally decided to answer him. “This lot are my friends,” he said, scanning Kyle, Miss B, and I as if we might suddenly decide to pull revolvers from our nonexistent holsters and gun him down. “Although lord knows I do hate them, and they’ll be lucky if I haven’t found better models by the morning.”

 

Butters lowered his eyes. “Oh.” He sniffed audibly. Little things like this, much as they were to be expected, sort of got to him. “Why, you know that isn’t a particularly nice thing to say, Eric.”

 

“I don’t give a bloody fuck,” he said. He took a sip of his pint and not-so-subtly snaked his free fingers into the blond boy’s shaggy hair. “Go suck a fat one, Butters, I mean it.”

 

“Well, I for one have been meaning to divest myself of you since I met you,” Kyle said imperiously, and about half a minute too late.

 

“So why don’t you do it, then? Make life a bit sunnier for the both of us, wouldn’t you, instead of piddling around here like Butters’ sissy bulldog?”

 

Butters struggled forth with, “Now, that’s crossing the line, Eric, I mean really…”

 

Sighing, I took a final look at the boy, who had against all odds managed to worm the fingers of one of his hands into Eric’s back pocket. He had a smug look on his face like he was quite proud of this whole position, and I don’t entirely mean the way his threadbare denim-clad arse was enthroned upon our friend’s knee. With his rosy lips carefully pressed into a subtle O-form, he looked at me, and for the moment our eyes locked I was thrown. His were blue, aquamarine-ish, the green invading his pupils much like it invaded Kyle’s. I managed to all but spout out, “And who’s this, then?”

 

“Oh.” Eric managed to put down his Guinness. “Yes, how rude of me. Gentlemen.” He paused for a moment, just to build on the irritation. This was a specialty of his, to be sure. “This is Kenneth. Say hello, dear.” With his free hand, he prodded Kenneth in the thigh.

 

“Hullo,” he said. “Kenny’s fine. I prefer it. And I’m sure you’re none of you as bad as Eric says.”

 

“Like fuck they’re not,” Eric grumbled. “The Jew in particular is especially horrid.”

 

“Which one is the Jew?” the boy asked, unguarded.

 

Eric heaved a sigh of great exhaustion, snatched up his glass again, and then said, “The one who looks Jewish,” as if it were that simple.

 

Kyle tensed. “Oh, that’s it,” he announced, throwing his hands up. “I’m off for a drink. You’re worse than Hitler, Eric, you know that, don’t you.”

 

“Keep reminding me,” Eric entreated.

 

“Come on, Stanley.” Kyle grabbed me by the wrist and tugged me toward the bar. For a moment it occurred to me that we were leaving Butters behind, and that he had wanted a drink, but I quickly forgot about it.

 

~

 

I ordered a whisky. It was not my Saturday evening regular, but my mood was too fragile to chance anything out of the ordinary comfort a stiff serving of whisky provided. It was a drink with a strong character, a stable sort of masculinity. I felt a little tipsy, and knew I was overthinking things. When Kyle ordered I gave the bartender a card to open a tab. It had already been a long night.

 

We stood there, stiff-lipped and not speaking for several minutes, even after we got our drinks. A dance floor of men with either more motivation or fewer cares than we had throbbed away before us. Every so often, a wayward limb jutted awkwardly out of the crowd. Kyle sighed in between sips, his eyes hooded and his posture rigid. I kept a hand on his lower back; I don’t know why. Most nights out we did not dance; dancing was primarily an engagement for the young, and although the vast majority of the Camp population was in our demographic, we were still at the peak of the acceptable range. Any older, and we would have had to have spend our nights out at a dingy piano bar or some café, kitsching it up like Quentin Crisp on some Shaftesbury corner, avoiding the annoyed glares of younger men who could only assume they’d never turn into us. Both Kyle and I were deeply afraid of this happening.

 

Out of nowhere, the pensive nowhere I was lost in, Kyle asked, “Well, what the fuck?”

 

“I don’t know.” I put my lips to the rim of my glass.

 

“It’s been years since Eric’s had anyone. Decades!”

 

“Perhaps he’s had a few, and he just hasn’t told us.”

 

“That’s complete rubbish. This is Eric we’re discussing. He can’t keep a thing to himself. He can barely resist getting Butters on the phone to describe the consistency of everything he eats and how much it cost. If he ever had a boy since school, he’d have mentioned it.”

 

I had to concede this to Kyle; Kyle did know Eric rather well. But, I had to remind myself, so did I. While Eric managed to retain some of his shapely sportsman physique, he hadn’t displayed any success in bedding lads. Certainly the thought of sleeping with him now would make anyone’s skin crawl.

 

“I simply do not understand,” Kyle concluded. “Help me figure this one out.”

 

“Let’s not waste our breath.” I gestured, in fact, to the boy himself, as he was headed right for us.

 

Kyle stiffened when approached, and I dropped my hand from his waist.

 

“Time for another drink,” the boy said. His words were far too chipper for the dim, smoky room, even if the soundtrack was generally danceable, with the Beat preaching caution overhead. Behind us I heard the bartender singing along, “Just hold my hand while I come to a decision on it,” but he didn’t have a very good voice, so I blocked it out. Needlessly, as it happened, because while Kyle glared at him, the boy asked for an IPA, which forced the bartender to stop singing.

 

“So,” the boy said after placing his order, and asking to put it on my tab, “Is this a typical night out in your circle?”

 

“Sure,” Kyle said, looking away.

 

“Well, no, not really.” I indicated our table. “We all begin drinking at Kyle’s flat. Usually Eric comes along. And usually he’s rather unaccompanied.”

 

“Oh.” The boy shrugged, and reached behind himself to take his pint from the bartender, who gave him a cushy wink. “Yeah,” he said after an initial sip. “He hasn’t mentioned anyone else, really.”

 

Kyle snorted. “Small wonder,” he said.

 

“What’s the problem?” Kenny asked.

 

“You’re so young,” I marveled.

 

“And utterly gorgeous,” Kyle added. “What’s a gorgeous young lad like you doing with a fat old lump like Eric, anyway?”

 

“I’m not that young, and I’m not that gorgeous,” Kenny said, but he said it in the sort of way that told us he didn’t believe it. He coughed into his sleeve. “As for Eric…” He sighed. “Well, I like him. He’s got something … I don’t know what.” He paused. “Well, that, and he’s paying me.”

 

“Paying you?” I sputtered out. “Good god, of course. Of course, you’re too pretty not to be a prostitute, aren’t you?”

 

“Ha!” Kyle slapped me on the back. “I knew it! No one in their right mind would want to be trapped under all those rolls of fat. No one! Unless they were making money off of it!”

 

“Oh, I do like him,” he said, somewhat convincingly. “He’s cruel, but quite funny. And he’s very youthful. He’s like a madman. It’s exhilarating.”

 

“But—” I remembered I had to swallow my mouthful of drink before speaking, and did so. “But would you want to be with him if he weren’t paying you?”

 

He answered in a heartbeat: “Well, no, of course not.”

 

“Oh, this is too delicious.” Kyle reached up with his free hand to twist a curl of hair, and remembering he had none, pouted and decided to work on his drink. Kenny looked at him curiously. “What?” Kyle asked impatiently, between sips.

 

“Nothing.”

 

“Ah, so.” I was trying to be talkative. It is hard to continue on a conversation with someone you’ve just learned is being paid for sex and company by your very spiteful, very rotund friend. “How old are you?”

 

A moment passed before he answered, “I am 23.”

 

“Oh, right. Well, you know Eric will be 38 next month, of course.”

 

“Of course.” He nodded awkwardly.

 

“Where did you go to school?” I asked while he was in the middle of a gulp of lager.

 

He shook his head enthusiastically before swallowing. “No,” he gasped out, when he had an empty mouth. “I didn’t.”

 

Kyle chose this moment to jump back into the conversation. “Well, Eric read English with us at Oxford,” he announced. I had always found it fascinating that the only time Kyle was likely to offer praise to Eric (however indirectly) was when he was in the company of someone whom he seemed to think even lower than Eric. It was as if he were saying, Eric is about the worst human being I know, and yet you’re worse than he is, and should be ashamed. Congratulations. With a few more drinks in him, he might just start saying that. Only time would tell.

 

“Ah, didn’t know that,” Kenny said. He was either too stupid to know he was being insulted, or was purposefully choosing not to acknowledge it. “He really hasn’t told me much about himself, or any of you.” He heaved a sigh. He began to reach for his pocket and halted. It was an odd oasis of awkwardness in the desert of our conversation. Then he added, “Well, except that you’re together, of course. How long has it been?”

 

This made me choke on my whisky, and Kyle actually spit what he was drinking at the moment back into his pint. I felt my heart seizing, though, and I felt Kyle tense next to me.

 

“We certainly are not!” he exclaimed, so loud that even over the operatic old Genesis tune playing overhead, some tough-looking bloke at the bar next to him gave him a dirty look. Kyle noticed this and snapped out a very unconvincing, “Sod off!” before returning to our conversation. “Oh, he told you that, did he?” Kyle asked. “Well, that’s, that’s just fabulous.”

 

“So,” Kenny said. “It hasn’t been very long?”

 

“This is just ridiculous!”

 

I was still struggling to catch my breath.

 

Kyle kept on at it: “We are not together. We have not been together. I just ended a semi-domestic relationship, and Stanley’s no slouch either. I don’t know what game you’re playing, or more likely, what game he’s playing at, but I assure you, it’s not amusing to go around falsely assuming whatever you like about people!”

 

“Yes,” I wheezed. Obviously these surprise inquiries into my fictional relationship with Kyle were irritating my asthma. Moreover, Kyle’s reaction wasn’t exactly in line with my continuing fantasy that one day we might get together.

 

“Are you all right?” he asked me, finally noticing that I wasn’t breathing so easily.

 

“Fine,” I managed. Kyle set his drink down — it was almost empty, anyway — and took mine out of my hands.

 

“Here,” he said, beginning to rub slow circles on my back. “Is that all right, dearest?” I nodded, and he turned back to Kenny. “So you go back and tell Eric, your lover, or employer, or however he wants you to figure into his life, that it’s not funny, and he just barely avoided giving Stanley an asthma attack.”

 

“Terribly sorry,” he said with a shrug. “How horrible for whichever of you likes the other one more!” And then, with the drink I bought him in hand, he left, presumably to head back to the table.

 

“Really!” Kyle huffed. He was still rubbing my back.

 

“I’m fine.”

 

“No, you’re not, you’re wheezing all over the place.”

 

“I went swimming today,” I explained.

 

“Well,” Kyle said. I loved the shade of pink his cheeks turned when he was frustrated. “I keep telling you the swimming’s no good, dear. Look at what it’s doing to you. The slightest implication that we might be together sets off your asthma.”

 

“Really,” I tried to assure him. “I am fine. I was just caught off guard. By any number of things.” I added.

 

“Oh, right, of course. And while we’re on the subject? That boy is not 23.”

 

“I know. I suppose the question shouldn’t now be, ‘How old is he,’ but rather, ‘Is that lad even legal?’”

 

It was a question neither of us could answer at the moment.

 

After ordering new drinks, we decided to head back to the table. Out of the corner of my eye, I spied old Clyde, and, just my luck, he was chatting with Craig — and that towheaded excuse for a date he kept cropping up with lately. I groaned, hoping Kyle wouldn’t even notice that Clyde was at Camp.

 

He just asked me, “Is it really all that horrible, the idea that we might be together?”

 

I didn’t know what to say. So I said, “Look, old Clyde’s here.”

 

Kyle shook with slight disgust. “Remember what I asked you? I mean it, Stanley. Please keep me away from him.”

 

“Of course.”

 

The moment we got to the table, Eric announced, “We’ve decided we’d like some cocaine now,” like he was ordering a round of drinks or a plate of sandwiches or something. It was refreshing, though, that he tended to dispose of all euphemisms and slang terms and just cut to the punch, letting ‘cocaine’ roll off his tongue as if it weren’t illegal (or expensive).

 

“Who, you and your eight stomachs?” Kyle asked, slipping into the booth.

 

“No,” Eric growled. “Myself and Kenneth and Butters.”

 

“Oh, I’m quite all right, thank you, no drugs for me tonight,” Butters said.

 

“Shut it, Butters.”

 

I slipped into the booth beside Kyle.

 

“Well, I’m looking forward to getting to know you all,” Kenny announced awkwardly.

 

Eric rolled his eyes and snorted. “The Jew is a depressive size queen, Butters used to impersonate Marianne Faithfull until his boyfriend was murdered, and Stanley fancies himself the next Waugh, but his work reads like the instructions for applying a rubber.” He took a great gulp of his drink, consuming a third of the pint in one chug. “There,” he huffed, wiping his lips. “I just explained everything to you. That should have saved you a few hours.”

 

“You all seem so interesting,” Kenny said with a laugh.

 

Butters stuck up his hand as if he were in a lecture. “I was a period piece, really,” he explained. “I did a mean Julie Driscoll ‘Season of the Witch,’ actually, and—”

 

“That’s enough, Butters. He doesn’t care about your storied drag career.”

 

“What do you do now?” Kenny asked, ignoring Eric, who sighed and rolled his eyes and looked off in the distance as he couldn’t be bothered. “Oh, and I’m dreadfully sorry about your boyfriend.”

 

“Oh.” Butters blushed. “It’s fine, he was … well, it’s been a bit since then. I work in a bookstore now.”

 

“Oh, all right, fancy that.” Kenny answered with all the disinterest of someone who obviously did not read. I took this as a cue to talk about myself.

 

“Eric’s got one thing off, though,” I said jovially. “Rubber instructions are more interesting than anything I’ve written.”

 

“I shouldn’t say that,” said Kyle. “I’ve got no interest in using a rubber, and I rather like your writing.”

 

Now I blushed. “That’s kind of you to lie for me, darling.”

 

“Oh, now, I do mean it.”

 

“And that’s what I adore about you.”

 

Kyle blew me a kiss over his cider, which he proceeded to sip from.

 

“They’re always doing this faggy stuff,” Eric announced, turning to Kenny. “It’s sickening, isn’t it?”

 

“I wouldn’t say that,” Kenny said with a smile. I had half a mind to say something about Eric’s apparent claim that Kyle and I were an item, but decided against it. Perhaps with Kyle sitting next to me getting into the details of how we weren’t would have been too painful. In any case, I cleared my throat disruptively, and felt Kyle’s thigh shaking against mine. Maybe he was nervous about all the things we were dancing around.

Continued here.