Tag Archives: creative writing

The Boy Danced Naked Under the Apple Tree

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Naked – Charlie Marseille (2026)

The apples were nearly ripe. Red where the sun had kissed them too hard, green in the hollows of shade. Some were freckled, some split open already, pale flesh browning, bees drunk on the sugar. The smell hung low and thick. 

He didn’t decide to dance. It happened the way shivering happens. One bare foot scraped the ground, testing it. His shoulders rolled, stiff and then looser, like he was shrugging off something heavy. His arms lifted, awkward, elbows bent too sharply, wrists slack. He laughed under his breath at how stupid he must look, alone in a field with no one to see.

That was part of it. The not-being-seen.

But the boy danced naked under the apple tree.

My Head is Full of Random Shit

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*****

“Video Angelus internehilium et imortalis Even as we speak our hearts entwine. Senex et angelus video venestus caelum. Equiden lavare in meus vita empeteus Ah eeh ah eeh ah.”

*****

The boy who likes the excitement of fear.

“I worry about being thrown off the carousel in later life.” 

A skinny body and dirty pants.

*****

“He’s got it. Yeah, baby, he’s got it. I’m your Penis, I’m your fire. At your desire. Well, I’m your Penis, I’m your fire. At your desire.”

*****

Be careful who you choose because it can go wrong.

Is it that Bailey is still a virgin?

A shelter on a beach full of books.

A lake in an abandoned quarry.

Is it love that never quite reaches an orgasm?

A boy who turns up late is always popular.

Pasticcio.

The Organ of Lorenzini.

Short Story: What the Crowd Cannot Have

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The first time Brodie and Archie met was not under the best of circumstances.

It was a Friday afternoon beneath the Miller Theatre on West 51st Street. Brodie – hi-viz vest zipped to the throat – stood amid abandoned scaffolding, photographing stress fractures in the concrete. The air was dense with dust, old and mineral, as though the building itself were exhaling.

A figure emerged at the far end of the tunnel and walked towards him.

Brodie lowered the camera. He waited until the young man was close enough to see properly, then snapped, “What are you doing here? This is a restricted area. Turn around and go back the way you came.”

“I’m sorry,” the young man said. He spoke with an English accent, careful, almost courteous. “I didn’t realise. What was this tunnel used for?”

“The other side of that wall is backstage,” Brodie replied. “Probably for actors crossing beneath the stage. But there’s no time for questions. It’s unsafe down here. The roof could come down at any moment.”

It was an exaggeration. But saying it gave him a small, illicit thrill – authority borrowed from the place.

The young man hesitated. He had floppy brown hair, eyes dark and inquisitive despite the rebuke. “What are you doing?”

“I’m inspecting the structure,” Brodie said. “Everything looks glitzy up there. Down here it’s rot and age.” He paused. “You still haven’t explained why you’re trespassing.”

“I was just exploring.”

“Explore somewhere else.”

The young man’s shoulders dropped. As he turned, he fumbled the folder under his arm; papers spilled across the dusty floor.

“Shit – sorry. My script.”

Something softened in Brodie then, too late to retract the sharpness he’d already spent.

The second time they met was in the staffroom.

Brodie was entering notes on his laptop when the door burst open and a tide of people flooded in, loud with laughter, trailing the smell of coffee and citrus wipes. Lunch packs appeared: protein bars, yogurt, hummus, cut vegetables. Actors, Brodie thought, irritated beyond reason.

Michael wanted renovation proposals by Monday. Concentration felt impossible.

Then he saw him – the boy from the tunnel – laughing with the others, sleeves pushed up, script tucked under his arm as if it were a talisman.

Of course.

On their way out, the young man stopped at Brodie’s table. “I’m Archie,” he said, holding out his hand. His eyes lingered, dark and unguarded. “I think we got off on the wrong foot.”

Brodie hesitated, then took it. The contact was brief, oddly charged. “I’m Brodie. Forget about it. Just – stay out of the tunnel.”

Archie smiled, chastened and amused all at once.

After that, Brodie thought about him more than he liked to admit.

He knew he could be abrupt, inflated by his own sense of usefulness. Actors irritated him on principle. But Archie – English, polite, quietly intense – had unsettled him.

Late one night, Brodie searched the Playbill bios. Archie was a rising star: television work, the National Theatre, lead roles in the West End, now a Broadway debut.

Impressive.

What Brodie didn’t know was that Archie had been searching too. He’d asked about the surveys, about the renovation. He found the company. He found Brodie’s photograph.

Hazel eyes. Skin warm-toned, as if lit from inside. A face shaped by movement rather than posing.

Tasty, Archie thought, surprised by his own boldness.

Two years later.

Archie slipped out of the Walter Kerr Theatre the moment the curtain fell on Chatterton. No shower. No linger. Wool coat, beanie, scarf pulled high. He moved fast, before the autograph hunters gathered.

Outside, Broadway surged and glittered – yellow cabs, steam vents, neon, voices colliding. It still thrilled him. It always did. A world away from Buckinghamshire.

At the apartment, Brodie checked the clock: 10:30. Any minute now.

The flowers were arranged just so. Archie liked flowers. Brodie liked that Archie liked them.

When the door opened, relief moved through him like a current.

Tea was requested. Always tea. Archie shed the night – coat, scarf, public self – and collapsed onto the sofa. He spoke about the show, about the line he’d missed. Brodie stroked his hair, grounding him.

Later, Fleet Foxes floated from the bathroom. Steam curled beneath the door.

Brodie knew the routine by heart. He would collect the clothes, note the forgotten boxers, breathe in the faint, intimate salt of them – something human beneath the polish. It embarrassed him how much that scent moved him.

Archie emerged clean and fragrant: Le Labo, Dior and mint. Blue silk pyjamas. He smiled like someone stepping into safety.

They ate together. They watched television under the blanket Archie’s grandmother had made. Archie pressed close, smaller than he seemed onstage, all softness and thoughtfulness and unspoken worry.

Sometimes Brodie felt the weight of what he was not allowed to be – unseen, untagged, absent from photographs. Invisible by design. But here, in this private room, their bodies fit without explanation. The most erotic moments were those that could not be shared publicly.

Brodie was Archie’s shelter. Archie was Brodie’s undoing.

Brodie had watched hundreds of videos of Archie on YouTube, moments in which he appeared entirely at ease – charming interviewers, holding eye contact, listening with an attentiveness that felt generous rather than rehearsed. 

His answers were always articulate, delivered with that unmistakable smile. But Brodie could see what others missed. 

The exposure beneath the polish. The small betrayals of nerves: the way Archie’s smile lingered a fraction too long; the absent-minded stroking of his own arm as he spoke; the slow, circular massaging of each finger; the hand lifting to his hair, not to adjust it, but to reassure himself it was still there. 

These gestures were invisible to the audience, but to Brodie they were intimate, almost confessional – proof that the confidence was something Archie stepped into, not something he owned.

Thomas Chatterton had been an ideal role for Archie. The eighteenth-century poet – celebrated as the marvellous boy for his precocious brilliance and dead at seventeen – had been reimagined as the subject of a hugely successful Broadway musical. 

In his twenties, Archie might once have been considered too old for the part, but his fine, boyish beauty dissolved any such doubt. Night after night, he stepped into Chatterton with such ease that the distinction between role and actor began to blur. 

To the audience, he seemed timeless, suspended in youth and promise. To Brodie, there was something quietly unsettling in this devotion – the way Archie gave himself over to a boy who never lived long enough to be disappointed by what came after.

When the movie ended, the future rose between them.

“Would you come to London?” Archie asked quietly.

Brodie had been waiting for this. “Yes. If you ask me to.”

Archie’s eyes filled. “You’ll have to share me.”

Brodie pulled him closer. “I already do.”

The Patron Saint of Foolhardy Teenage Boys

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A solitary figure stands above Kinder Scout. He cannot be seen, yet he watches from afar. The darkness thickens over the peaks, and a westerly wind rises as if summoned from nothing, but neither deters him. This is not a place for the unprepared. The temperature will fall; the warmth of the day will slip away, unnoticed, into the stone.

As the figure observes the six boys pitching their tents, a quiet certainty settles within him: he is powerless. He cannot call out. He cannot warn them. Leaning on his stick, he endures the bitter air and waits, bound to witness how they will meet the night. Their laughter will thin, their bravado ebb, as loneliness takes hold. Escape will become a wish rather than a choice, and sleep the only surrender, each of them willing the morning to arrive.

When he is certain the boys have fallen into a restless, unhappy slumber, the figure moves. He steps softly across rock and scrub, listening, careful not to betray his presence. Only when he is satisfied that he will not frighten them does he pause to peer into each tent. There he sees them cocooned within their sleeping bags, clinging to one another, sharing the fragile warmth of slender, adolescent bodies against the cold.

At last, he chooses a broad, ancient rock and settles there, a silent sentinel. He remains, guarding their sleep, until the first pale glow of the new day begins to rise in the east.

David: A Good Story, Apparently

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“A swell so big and strong it will wipe clean everything before it.”

I got a message from David. The first I’d heard from him since our falling out in December. I hadn’t been expecting an apology and didn’t get one. I wasn’t even sure one was required. Some days I thought I might be the one who owed it. Still, the silence had broken, and that felt like something.

‘My boy turned forty this week and wanted to see where he was born. I took him to the Kapiʻolani Medical Center, where his mother gave birth to him. It wasn’t what he had in mind. But he stood straight, like the military taught him, and was too polite to tell me to go to hell. He was a Kamaʻāina — child of the land — but this wasn’t where he grew up.’

“What???” I replied.

David rang immediately.

I paused Heated Rivalry, which had literally just started. I hadn’t even got past the opening credits. Everyone had been talking about it, which was precisely why I’d been avoiding it. The same thing had happened with Adolescence. The louder the praise, the more stubbornly uninterested I became. But Heated Rivalry had the added incentive of steamy gay sex scenes — and I liked the idea that large audiences wanted that and were openly enjoying it. So fine. I’d given in. And then David called.

“It’s a paragraph I’ve just written,” he said. “I found a draft of something I wrote about Hawaii in the eighties. A good story’s been hiding in a drawer for forty years. It’s time to rewrite it. Update it.”

“Hawaii?”

“If memory serves, I based it on a Rolling Stone article about a teen suicide. But I think that was Kansas. Or somewhere like it. No idea why I chose Hawaii.”

“Suicide?”

“That only comes at the end.”

“Well,” I said, buying time, “I suppose there has to be a happy ending.”

“A suicide and a birth,” he said, as if that clarified things. “You get the opening now?”

I didn’t. Except that David was a successful writer, and it clearly made sense to him. Which, apparently, was enough.

“I think I know why I chose Hawaii,” he continued. “There was a film I saw. Big Wednesday. Surfing. Jan-Michael Vincent, Gary Busey. Semi-naked most of the time. Very young. Very hot.”

“Who?” My patience was thinning.

“Ah. Before your time. Though now that I think of it, that film was set in California.”

“Get to the point, David. The longer we talk, the longer I’m delayed from steamy gay sex. What’s the story actually about?”

“Whoa,” he laughed. “So you’ve sorted things out with Charlie. What did I tell you? You can’t keep a good man down.”

I froze. Had I really discussed my prolonged sexual drought with David?

“I’ll be brief,” he said. “It’s about jealousy. At least on one side. When three people are involved, somebody always loses.”

This was unexpected territory for him. David could spin a tight crime plot or disappear happily into a historical setting, but relationships were something he normally sidestepped entirely.

“It feels a bit left-field,” I said. “And why go back to something written that long ago?”

“It was shite,” he said cheerfully. “I never read past the first page after I shoved it in a drawer. My first novel came out ten years later — my style had changed completely by then. But time’s counting down. It feels like unfinished business. I want to turn it into something wonderful.”

“How old were you when you wrote it?”

“Let’s see… I started it in 1984, so I’d have been twenty. Finished it the year after. That’s why the characters were that age.” He paused. “It’ll read like I’m reliving myself.” Then, suddenly: “Goddammit. I remember now. I’d just read Michener’s Hawaii. That’s why. Oahu, specifically. And Magnum P.I. was on television.”

I thought about my own life. Whether anything I’d written would still exist in forty years. Whether I’d ever be considered established, in any meaningful sense. I’d been carrying an idea for a book for years, but inertia kept winning. Instead, I scraped a living writing about country houses and cities. It all felt increasingly dull. Stranger still, it occurred to me that David must have written that early draft on a typewriter — a genuinely painful way to work, as far as I was concerned.

He said he had to go.

“By the way,” he added, “I’ve finished the Isherwood biography on Kindle. It ended rather abruptly. One moment he was alive, the next he was gone. Dead. But I won’t mention it again. You seem sensitive about that.”

I restarted Heated Rivalry. Two seconds later, my phone buzzed.

‘Forgot to say. I’m going for a drink with a young man — a student — only nineteen. Just out of nappies, really. Don’t tell Josh, but of all people, I thought you’d like to know. 😏’

That Moment: Boy in the Black Hoodie

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Scally Boy – Charlie Marseille (2026)

Four guys are waiting for a haircut. One hides inside a black hoodie so that all I can see is the tip of his nose. I call him a ‘scally boy’ – someone with edge, rawness, no inhibition; danger; lower social class. People only see what they must see: confidence, arrogance, hardness. They fail to see his vulnerability, his ignorance of those who might exploit him, and his lack of ambition.

When it is his turn, he stands and takes his hoodie off—but he gets it wrong. As he pulls it over his head, his T-shirt comes with it and he is left half-naked. He corrects things quickly, but it is too late. I have already processed every inch of him: the pale skin, the smoothness, the flat stomach, the black hairs showing above his waistband, the tattoo on his arm that says Adam.

Such a shame, I think, because he is primed for one thing only—a girl. His masculinity, the expectation, the understanding that anything else will not do. The girl will fall in love with Adam, but what he feels about her will not matter. He will have done what is expected and will display her like a trophy before discarding her for another.

Adam catches my eye and snarls, “Do you like what you see, faggot?”

Hot Tap Hustle for the Horny

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Image – Darkness Drops

Pablo thrusts his hands beneath the hot tap. He rubs them together in a frantic, almost self-destructive rhythm as the water climbs from warm to blistering. Anyone else would flinch, recoil — but he holds himself there, jaw locked, letting the scalding cascade engulf him in a cloud of bitter, furious steam.

The faces and bodies of the men he aches for seem to drift through that fog, circling him, pressing close. You can tell when the moment is nearing: the tightening of his calves, the subtle clench of his arse, the way he grinds himself against the cold lip of the sink. It is sharp, electric — his own strange ritual, the pink-hands-and-hot-water orgasm — that edge where pain dissolves into an ecstatic, trembling pleasure.

But the release he chases always slips from him. It teases, then vanishes.

When the heat becomes unbearable, he finally twists the tap off. His head drops. He turns, shoulders hunched, his shorts soaked and clinging to him. He won’t meet my eye; shame clouds the air between us. This little masochistic kitchen-sink drama — he believes it reveals too much.

That Moment: A good rave, on a good night

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Surrender – Charlie Marseilles

The music starts, and it feels like heat rising under my skin. I move without thinking — a slow, trembling rhythm that begins in my ribs and spills outward. My shirt clings, half open, heavy with sweat. Each breath feels like it’s carving light through me, and I let it. There’s no audience, just the sound of air, the pulse of my own heartbeat echoing through the floor.

The world shrinks to the movement of my spine, the slip of fabric, the catch of breath. My body feels thin, electric, fragile — like something lit from within. I close my eyes and lean into the rhythm until it blurs the edges of everything. There’s a strange kind of pleasure in it: the way exhaustion burns into something tender, almost holy. I don’t know if I’m dancing or dissolving.

When the music fades, I’m still trembling. The air is warm against my skin, every breath thick and slow. I can taste salt on my lips. For a moment, I stay there — suspended in the quiet — before the world comes back into focus. My body is mine again, but it feels changed, like it’s remembered something it shouldn’t have.

Charlie: The Rumour of Possibility

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He is completely unaware and does not expect to be photographed at all – Charlie Marseiiles

There is a game that Charlie likes to play. I blame the streak of melodramatic French in him — he can’t help speculating about everyone. We ducked into a bright little coffee shop to escape the damp, heavy air outside. Amid the hiss of the coffee machine, steamy windows, damp clothes and the sweet smell of pastries, Charlie zeroed in on a guy sitting alone, scrolling on his phone, blissfully unaware he’d become the latest target of Charlie’s imagination.

“What is he looking at? Who is he messaging?” Charlie whispered while we waited for our takeaway. I’d heard these questions a hundred times, and I hardly had the energy to answer anymore. His curiosity could tip into something nosy, even a bit rude, and I’d told him more than once that it bordered on prying. Still… I had to admit, despite my protests, it was often weirdly entertaining.

And he was already off. “It’s all very mysterious, but I’ve got a theory,” he said, eyes locked on the boy with the coffee. “He is telling someone he woke up without a care in the world… until a man in the street annoyed him. So he punched him — once — and killed him. And now that boy over there is a murderer.”

Sometimes I wondered whether he was just trying to make me laugh, or if there was something darker in the way he saw people. I glanced at the poor guy and found myself, just for a moment, considering whether Charlie’s wild theory wasn’t entirely impossible.

What remains for Harry Oldham when the glow fades?

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Harry Oldham is writing a novel based on his criminal and sordid past. To do so, he has returned to live at Park Hill, where he grew up, and the place that he once left behind. That was then and this is now, in which the old world collides with the new. (Parts 1 to 17 are available to read in the menu)

Perfectly Hard and Glamorous – Part 18

October 2025
There was a paperback of Saturday Night Fever published in 1977 by H. B. Gilmour. I read it when I was twelve. If I remember right, the novel said that Tony Manero looked like a young Al Pacino. In the film that came first, a girl he kissed on the dance floor gasped, “Ohh, I just kissed Al Pacino!”

I hadn’t a clue who Pacino was, only that he must’ve been something to look at. “Pacino! Attica! Attica! Attica!”

Decades later, Pacino published his autobiography at eighty-four. Everyone knows who he is now. It’s a decent book—above average—and I doubt he wrote it himself, but I’ll gladly be proved wrong. He writes beautifully about the part of life most people avoid thinking about: the last act, when the runway ahead is shorter than the one behind, as David Foster once put it.

Compared to Pacino, I’m still young. But sixty looms, and yes—I care a fuck. Quite a lot, actually.

I looked in the bathroom mirror and flinched. The face staring back didn’t belong to me. Wrinkles, dull skin, cheeks softening with age. Not the face of an eighteen-year-old; the face of an old man.

That night I dreamt of Andy, Jack, and me—partying by the Cholera Monument. Summer, though the skies were leaden. We were drunk, a boom box blaring New Musik. Rain began to fall, but we didn’t care. We danced, the drops sliding down our fresh, young faces. “It’s raining so hard now / Can’t seem to find a shore…”

We stripped to our boxers, soaked and clinging, leaping like fools. Paolo watched from under a tree, the outsider at the edge of a brotherhood. I wanted him to join us, but he stayed still, afraid.

When the song ended, our clothes were a sodden heap. We grinned, knowing this moment could never happen again. Paolo walked over, still fully dressed, and looked me up and down. Do you like what you see, Paolo?

He shook his head. When he finally spoke, I wished he hadn’t. “Harry, what are you doing? What happened to your body? Old men don’t behave like this.”

I woke to a shadow in the doorway. “Harry, you okay?”

Tom. He came and sat on the edge of the bed. “I think you were dreaming. You started shouting.”

“What did I say?”

“I don’t know, but you woke me up.”

“Fuck.”

“What were you dreaming about?”

I’d read that dreams fade fast because they live in the same part of the brain that controls movement—crowded out the moment we start to stir. But I remembered this one. And I blamed Al Pacino.

“What time is it?” I asked. “When did you get here?”

“Four a.m. After midnight, maybe. You didn’t hear me come in.”

“At least you haven’t lost your key yet. I take it you’ve finished your drug dealing for the night.”

He rolled his eyes. “Harry, I told you—what you don’t know won’t hurt you.”

Tom had mellowed since I met him two years ago. Back then he’d have clenched his fists and spat, “What the fuck’s it got to do with you?” Now twenty, he was as much a part of the flat as I was. He drifted in and out, sometimes gone for days, then suddenly asleep on the sofa when I woke.

Why I let him into my life, I’ve asked myself a hundred times. Just not tonight. Tonight, I was glad of him.

He lay back, staring at the ceiling. I went to piss. When I came back, he’d slid up beside me, hands behind his head.

“What are you doing?”

“I’ve never really been in your bedroom before.”

“Liar.” I’d made it clear it was off-limits, but I knew he’d snooped when I wasn’t around.

“Why did you become a writer?”

“Ah, the loneliest job in the world.” I hesitated, then answered.

“One night—a year before I left school—my parents came home from an open evening. Same story every year: teachers saying how useless I was. But that night, my mum came into my room looking excited. She said, ‘Mr Green, your English teacher, thinks you’ve got imagination if you put your mind to it. He said if you used better, longer words, you might pull through.’ My dad, standing behind her, added, ‘I told Mr Green he needs to speak properly first… but it’s a start.’ That was the only bit of hope they brought home.”

“Is that when you started writing?”

“Didn’t mean anything then. But in the early nineties, when I was broke, I had this client—older guy, fat—wanted me to piss on him. Easy money. We were lying on a wet plastic sheet in a hotel bed, talking. He worked for a publisher. Said I could make money writing about life as a London rent boy. I didn’t, of course—it sounded like work—but he told me to keep notes. Can you imagine?”

“And did you?”

“Not at first. Then one day I nicked a pack of exercise books from WH Smith and started jotting things down. Faces, nights, bits of talk. Eventually I began adding fiction, and that’s probably when I realised I could be a writer.”

My first book came out when I was in my forties. Nothing to do with rent boys. I’d drafted that novel, but no one wanted it—too sordid, too shallow, they said. One editor told me to try something else. So I wrote a formulaic thriller about a teacher investigating a missing student. I hated every minute of it, but it sold.

Tom turned toward me, and I braced for a jab. Instead, he said, “Maybe it’s time to revisit that old story. Nothing you write could shock anyone now. Might even fit with the book you’re working on.”

He hadn’t read any of my new work, not since that first night. My return to Sheffield and Park Hill had been interesting, if not productive. The book was two years late, my agent losing patience. Still—Tom had a point. I hadn’t thought about including the London years.

“There was a book published in the nineteenth century,” I said. “The Sins of the Cities of the Plain. No one knows who wrote it—some say a young rent boy named Jack Saul. It’s pretty explicit. I lived a life that echoed its pages once, long ago, when I was young… and now I’m not.”