Little boy, full of excitement, runs down the hill, his parents far behind. His legs go faster than they can carry him and I fear he will fall. But he is too young to recognise danger and is safe for now. He heads to the sea, with its tiny cottages with smoking chimneys, fishing boats, and ice cream. His parents smile as he tries to hurry them along. This is a moment that this little boy may or may not remember. But when he is old, and his parents are long dead, he might sit where I am now, and watch other little boys doing the same as he did, and know that he had a wonderful childhood.
A baseball cap and a touch of peach fuzz on his chin. He sat at the bar and I saw flashes of flesh around his ankles. At that moment, he might have been the sexiest person in the world. But then he started talking to somebody who wasn’t there, and argued with somebody else who wasn’t there either. He didn’t say anything to me and I WAS there, but I was grateful for that.
Image: Staithes Harbour / North Yorkshire / delicto (2025)
We walked around Staithes Harbour while the tide was out and the sun went down and the boats ended up in the mud.
Charlie was in a reflective mood.
“We once visited Le Tréport and when the tide went out there was a dead body left behind. It was a man who had gone missing a few days before. The sad thing is that he had lost a boot, and I have always wondered where the other boot ended up because one boot was no use to anyone.”
It was a depressing story but a beautiful end to the day.
Charlie didn’t know it, but he turned heads at the beach today. I watched from a bench as he stripped down to his swim shorts and waded into the sea. For a guy who spends more time relaxing on his bed rather than putting in hours at the gym, he looked remarkably toned. His ancestral line is Mediterranean, and despite a Paris upbringing, he had the physique of his Marseilles cousins.
I was a solitary figure and had become the shadow in his life. Inseparable, comfortable, but never lovers in the truest sense. But I was pleased that he was attracting attention from females, and, dare I say it, a few jealous husbands and boyfriends. And yet, strangely, I also felt envious.
He shaded his eyes, scanned the promenade and waved. A few looked to see who had caught his attention and were disappointed that it was only me. I wanted to shout that Charlie was mine, only mine, and that I was proud of him, and that we shared a bed. But all that glitters is not gold.
The North Sea in April is bloody cold, but Charlie went full steam into the surf and threw himself into the water. His head broke the surface, and I could see that his teeth were chattering. I’d tried to tell him that the water would come as a shock, but he knew better, and would never admit to being wrong. He started swimming, long determined strokes, and completed two sweeps of the beach.
I contemplated that hypothermia might set in or that he might be out of his depth, but, after thirty minutes he swam back to shore, and pushing hard through the water, he reached dry land again. By now, I’d smoked several cigarettes and thrown the stone-cold remains of a takeaway coffee into a nearby rubbish bin.
Charlie dried himself on his towel and sat warming himself in the afternoon sun. Only now did he realise that people were looking, and it prompted him to put his tee-shirt on. He rested his arms on his knees and watched the world around him.
He was perhaps thinking about childhood holidays spent on the beach. He once told me that his family had rented a house every summer at Le Touquet-sur-Mer, and that he’d spent hours playing on the sands with his brother. I thought about Thomas, the older brother, and remembered that the tall boy had asked me to visit him in Paris, but not to bring Charlie along. My heart went out to Charlie, alone on the beach, who suspected that his older brother had an agenda, and was frightened that I might buy into it.
Shades of teen. We flicked through pages of photographs hoping to find one to use. The task had become tiresome because there were only so many images of scantily clad guys that you could absorb, and there was a risk that we might choose the wrong one. But we kept looking, thinking that the next page might reveal something better than the one before. “It is like watching gay porn,” said Charlie. “You start watching a video but move on to the next one because you think it will be more exciting but never is.” His reaction caught me by surprise. “This is hopeless,” he continued, snapping the photo album shut, “and why do they all seem to be called Luka?”
I walked into a room and found Sam Roberts smiling like he always did. I expected him to disappear, but he didn’t, and he gave me a big hug.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m always here, but you never see me,” he chuckled.
“I’ve not seen you for nearly 40 years.”
“Well, this week you’ve been thinking about me, and that’s a good reason to see you.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“But I also have something to tell you,” he added. “I want you to know that we never go away, and that means that you should never be sad.”
“Grandad, I’m not sad. In fact, I’m incredibly happy to see you.”
He was about to say something else but thought better of it. I could see that his figure was quickly fading, and there was only enough time for him to smile and wave, and in a flash, he had vanished.
Today, I thought about that dream after I received the telephone call to say that my dad had passed away.
Francisco said that I must see him perform while his circus was in town.
The last time I’d been to a circus there were galloping horses, lumbering elephants and ferocious lions. A bit like Mr Galliano’s Circus, written sixty years before, but there was still a connection.
This ‘new circus’ was different, a theatrical performance with circus skills, dance, music, and storytelling. And there were lots of clowns which made it difficult to pick him out. But he’d reserved a seat on the front row and knew exactly where I was sitting. I recognised his skinny frame when he bounced over in full clown regalia.
The boy with the big dick and a smudge of eczema on his left buttock stood before me and placed his hand where his heart should have been. Then he put something into the palm of my hand.
It was a ceramic egg with a clown’s face painted on it. I stared at it, unsure as to whether I should give it back or not, and then I saw that it was Francesco’s clown face on the egg.
When I looked up he’d gone, lost amidst the chaos, still fooling around, and not taking life seriously.
Two stories. Two boys. “The realisation came to him that a difficult and miserable age had begun for him, and he couldn’t imagine when it would end.” In 1945, Alberto Moravia was writing about puberty, moral dilemmas and sexual awakening. Agostino, the story of a 13-year-old boy’s adolescence and an obsession with bad boys on sunny beaches. I think back to that age, and, almost certainly, I might have been Agostino himself. And then there is Luka, a troubled boy, who appears in 1948’s Disobedience, who resists societal norms and expectations, and acts strangely. Only later did I read that this was supposed to be allegorical, and meant to highlight his refusal to serve in the Italian army during World WarTwo. I didn’t like Luca much, but there again, I had completely missed the point. I’m a dumbass!
All things considered, there is something perverse about this Sunday afternoon. But the sun shines and makes you do things that are out of the ordinary. And on this day you follow a stranger into the Oxfam shop and watch as he browses a secondhand copy of The Divine Beauty of Mathematics. You kid yourself that this isn’t wrong. Strange maybe, but when he bends over to put it back on the bottom shelf, and purposely shows you the crack of his arse, then everything about this is okay.
What is it with buying new notebooks? I see one that I like and end up putting it on the growing pile of unused ones, and I tell myself that one day I will put down all my thoughts and ideas until it is full, and resist the urge to start a new one. But it will never happen because there is something therapeutic about starting a new notebook. Those seductive pages that urge you to write something brilliant, but never actually get around to it.
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 