A hillside in the remote countryside. Serge Gainsbourg sang Black Trombone on the iPhone. Charlie danced in his underwear. His hair formed a question mark on his head. He looked cute. I grabbed him from behind and he reached over and patted me on the head like a dog. Then he pissed into the wind and I got covered from behind.
“He was barely seventeen the first time it had happened, with that foolish Italian boy. He had naively fallen into the trap. It was all too good to be true and he was surprised when the boy demanded money, and kept demanding money. When he had no money left to give, the boy, true to his word, had gone to the police. Much to his shame and chagrin, he had been very publicly arrested in his father’s house in Wimpole Street, and every servant in the street had talked about it for a year and a day.”
The story of Charles Ferguson in ‘Fanny & Stella – The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England’ by Neil McKenna – 2013
I have the urge to write something shocking and disgraceful, but Baron Corvo appeared in my sleep and warned me that it might not be the best thing to do. “After all, I died a nobody, and now I am famous, not for my talent, but for being depraved.”
Baron Corvo (aka Frederick William Rolfe) (1860-1913)
The day started with a mystery that caused a problem. Charlie had done the laundry and I had been angry. It doesn’t matter how many times that you tell him to separate whites and colours, he refuses to do so. The result was that my white t-shirts came out pink yet again. When I challenged him about it, he sulked, and put the rest of the clothes away in silence.
And then we came to the black Calvin Klein briefs.
Charlie was putting them in my drawer and I pointed out that they didn’t belong to me. He held them between his fingers and examined them. “They are not mine either,” he decided. “They must be yours,” I replied. “They are definitely not mine.”
We stared at the underwear and waited for the other person to admit to owning them. But neither of us coughed up.
Charlie tossed them onto the bed.
“This poses a significant problem,” I decided. “If they don’t belong to either one of us, then whom do they belong to?”
“That is a very good question. Do they belong to someone who you have been sleeping with?”
“In your dreams,” I responded, but there was hesitancy in my voice. Charlie had the ability of making you feel guilty even when you were innocent, and this was one of those occasions. He pounced upon my uncertainty and decided that I had been sleeping with someone who had forgotten to take their underwear home with them.
“I can assure you that I haven’t slept with anyone. The only person that I’ve slept with is you, but even that’s debatable.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. I’m just a bit upset because I know that they are not mine, nor are they anybody else’s that I know of, so the finger of suspicion points squarely at you. Have you been sleeping with somebody behind my back?”
Charlie rubbed his hands through his hair in desperation. “Do not be disgusting. I have not been sleeping with anybody.”
“Was it one of those American Mormon boys who came knocking at the door? Did one of them come back when I was out?” It was a cheap shot. But a few days before, they had come bright-eyed and eager to save our souls. I’d politely turned them down and said to Charlie that it was inconceivable that every Mormon boy appeared to be cute.
When Charlie was hurt, his French accent became more pronounced. “I believe it when you say that you know nothing about them, but you must also understand that I have nothing to do with them either.”
“But whose are they?”
“I have no idea. But maybe they belonged to Levi who left them behind when he moved out.”
“But that was weeks ago,” I said.
“I guess that there is no other explanation.”
And that was where we left it. Black Calvin Klein underwear unclaimed.
He was once a boy who listened to punk rock. Sex Pistols. The Clash. The Damned. That was almost fifty years ago. Back then, if he’d rolled back half a century from the seventies, then he would have landed in the 1930s with a big war to come. Benny Goodman. Glenn Miller. Duke Ellington. The music was as far removed as he could ever have imagined. It brings us to now. The kids of 2025. Billie Eilish. Drake. Taylor Swift. His punk rock is as strange to them as the 1930s were to him.
The tide is advancing and the boy and girl appear oblivious. I worry that they will be stranded on the rocks, but it seems that they don’t care. The sharp edges cause discomfort for the girl in the swimsuit as she crawls over them. The boy sits looking at his phone. She gets to where she wants to be and the boy starts filming. When she does a headstand, I realise that this is for Tik Tok. I hope that she loses her balance, falls, and that there will be lots of blood. But she completes the manoeuvre and goes back to where the boy is scrutinising the video that might make her famous.
I plot their escape route. There is no way up because there is a high wall built for William Rashleigh as the foundations for a marine villa. In recent times, the comedian Dawn French might have looked upon the boy and girl and thought the same as me, but she is long gone. There is only one way, and that is into the sea.
The boy takes his white t-shirt off. He wears a pair of long swim shorts and is pale and slender. He looks longingly into the sea, thrusts out his chest, and throws himself in, his black hair slick and wet, bobbing in the waves, and eventually swimming back to the rocks. If Dawn French was there, she might have shouted, “Get your shorts off skinny!” But, as I have said, she is gone.
All this time, the girl with the long blonde hair has been taking selfies, an obsession with likes and follows, and I decide that I don’t like her. Perhaps the boy took a swim to rid himself of the monotony and shallowness of it all. He will now have to pretend how wonderful her photos are.
They get dressed and gather up their belongings before jumping into the water and wading waist high towards the beach. I wish that she would stumble and fall beneath the waves. That would be very popular on Tik Tok.
I dined on slivers of Parmigiano Reggiano and a Banana Ice vape; the combination could be the meal of the damned. Later, I dreamt that Yungblud was dancing in front of me and singing ‘I luv ya, will ya marry me?’ Afterwards he sat cross-legged on my sofa wearing grubby boxers and white socks and nibbled on a pork pie. I told Charlie about my dream. “Not that little twerp from Doncaster,” he said in his French accent.
Annie Ernaux. ‘Les Années’ / ‘The Years’. Paris. 2008.
The bartender pours me a pint of Guinness. There is something exciting about him. The fantasy, service, and the desire are charged with a kind of unspoken drama, where connection and expression flourish.
He stands at the centre of this world: confident, attentive, just out of reach. There’s power in the dynamic where he’s part host, part performer, and part confessor. That mix of emotional availability and physical proximity is incredibly compelling.
He leaves the Guinness to settle and waits. It’s a subtle performance of masculinity, of beauty, and a flirtatious smirk. There’s a silent dialogue: who’s paying attention to whom? He represents a safe focal point for flirtation and fantasy. He’s someone I want to admire, talk to, maybe even imagine a story with, without needing it to be real. It’s an aesthetic moment as much as an emotional one.
He’s a kind of canvas – with a quiet understanding, a rescuer, a rebel, a secret crush. Each interaction, no matter how fleeting, is charged with possibility.
He starts pouring again, and I ask for a four-leaf clover on the top of the Guinness. When he hands me the drink, I see that he’s tried to draw one in the foam.
I think there’s something haunting and poetic to explore in this distance between us – the observer and the observed where we are both muse and mirror. That space between emotional hunger and aesthetic distance – that quiet pull toward someone who may never cross the line into intimacy.
I realise that he hasn’t drawn a four-leaf clover after all and can see that it is a penis instead. He leans over and whispers that only wankers draw a four-leaf clover. I take a sip, and he smiles, quietly calling me a cocksucker.
In March 1913, the destitute Frederick Rolfe left his small room at the Albergo Cavaletto in Venice and moved into the Palazzo Marcello where he shared a flat with another poverty-stricken Englishman named Thomas Pennefather Wade Brown. On the evening of October 25, they dined and each went to his bedroom. The next day Wade Brown found Rolfe lying fully dressed on his bed where he had fallen with a final heart seizure. On September 25, 1968, a 64-year old man, one-legged and wheelchair-bound and looking almost ninety, died of a stroke in his shabby room at Manhattan’s Sheraton Russell Hotel. His name was Cornell Woolrich. One day, when I am old, and have fallen on hard times, I shall seek out a seedy room in an insalubrious part of Rome where I will live on Peroni Nastro Azzurro and canned sardines, and try to recreate the deaths of these homosexual writers.
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 