Six years. Remember the first time? Ignorant shit of a boy. I was the best, but to be fair, you did eventually realise that. Six years flirting. Six years wasted. All because you married that horse of a girl who never liked me. It ended badly. Tears tonight because you’re scared. I sympathised and looked incredibly sad. All the right moves. But really, my heart sang from the rooftops. My skinny petit pois…. ha ha!
Ten o’clock in the morning and I hoped that I wasn’t too late. I stood on the terrace and looked upon the narrow street, the wait tense, every figure a possibility, every person making my pulse leap, until I remembered the black dog, and the disappointment set in.
I was in my hiding place, and he wouldn’t know that I was there, the anticipation laced with secrecy, maybe even guilt. I was invisible, while he was exposed for everyone to see. What would happen if he looked up? Would he even notice me? What if I wasn’t the only watcher?
The minutes ticked by and I hoped that he would appear, and when he did, it would seem like the world was holding its breath. I waited for the boy with the black dog.
Urban adolescent. Prowling the streets. Catching stares. Bringing himself to orgasm and waiting for one that will be.
Colvey is number one and will die before he is properly a man. He is angry and suspicious of everyone. Wary of his enemies and more so of those who say they are friends. (Know what I mean bro?) Some will argue that this streak of uncertainty gives him an advantage, but one day he will meet the person that will plunge a knife into him and then knowing who to trust and who not to will be irrelevant. One thing I do know is that it will be the person he least suspected.
Angry with everyone. Controlling the uncontrollable. Respect from those who have no idea what it means. (Respect bro!)
Until then, Colvey must control this unruly band of boys – tearaways, petty thieves, and miscreants – who cannot muster up a brain between them, and who idolise him because they are afraid of the consequences if they don’t. Look around the city and you will see the tags on shitty walls, doors and metal shutters that protect empty shops in rundown streets. Our territory, our ground, our space.
Grooming. A word that has become part of modern society. A bad word. A careless word. Colvey might be accused of grooming kids to swell his ranks. But it is something he started when he was a small boy who shit his pants in school.
Provincial demon. Misery. Mayhem.
Keep your enemy close to you and let him do your dirty work.
Mason is number two and must wait. Living under a shadow that must surely fade. It is one thing knowing those who will cause you harm, another when that threat comes from within. Catch these hands. Colvey knows this. (You’re my best mate bro). The dance of Caesar and Brutus. Fake and be friend.
I watch. I see. Tattletale, snitch, informant, telltale, squealer. Colvey’s bitch. The one person he says he can trust. The one person who could bring him down if I wanted to. But that ain’t gonna happen because I’ll be a good number two.
Secrets and lies. Scrawny and slim. Wiry. The violent sex. “You want to know something?” Colvey lies next to me. “I ain’t gay bro. I like pussy. This is only bud sex.” ‘I ain’t a batty boy either,” I tell him. Colvey kisses me. “This is sheesh. Don’t tell anyone that I like bussin’ you bro.”
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.
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.
Sometimes, you have nothing to do except watch and think. It’s Tuesday afternoon, it’s overcast, and I’m sitting on a beach… I tap random thoughts into my phone… and later, it reads like a diary, but also conjures up memories of being a child when we had ‘news books’ in which we wrote any drivel that might have happened.
This is my drivel…
Megan tells me a story about Peran of Polruan, with his salty brown legs, who lives alone in an old fisherman’s cottage called The Buoy. Never a visitor. Not a word to anyone. The girls think he’s a Cornish Saint and want to have sex with him. Every morning he catches the river ferry and returns at teatime. Where does he go? What does he do? On summer evenings he reads on the doorstep. I’m intrigued, but I want to know more about the books that he reads.
***
I’m looking for a bit of phwoar on the beach. I want a handsome young guy who strips to his shorts and goes swimming. But on this cloudy Tuesday afternoon I’m blessed with old ladies in one-piece costumes who do sedate breast-strokes to the pontoon and back. Shortly after four o’clock, a blonde schoolboy appears and parks himself close by. His shirt is untucked and the school tie hangs loose around his neck. From his bag, he pulls out a copy of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and starts reading. He seems happy being with Ralph and Jack, and I wonder which one of them he’s sympathetic to.
***
It’s been a month since I had a cigarette. I realise this whilst standing on the quayside. Instead, I’ve been using my Pro Max Double Apple – 10K puffs. What might you get up to with ten thousand puffs? Behind me, a sour-faced woman moans to her husband that I’m vaping. I turn around and give her a deadly look and she tuts. There wouldn’t have been any remorse if I’d pushed her into the sea.
***
“The Tesco delivery is coming tomorrow morning,” says Megan. She makes it sound like this is the highlight of the week. It might well be. She’s changed a lot since moving down here. Where is the Megan I once knew? The girl who drank Aperol Spritz by the dozen and got her tits out afterwards. “That’s exciting, I look forward to it,” I reply. She gives me a wicked look. “I was hoping that you might stay in and wait for him. I think that you’ll be less sarcastic after you’ve seen the Tesco guy.”
***
I write at the kitchen table with the door open and ignore the wasps that fly in and buzz above my head. I’ve realised that they soon get bored and leave the same way that they came. Megan appreciates my eclectic music tastes and has recommended an album called Senza Estate by My Friend Dario. It plays on my laptop while the wasps gather around the Corn Flakes. One of the tracks is called Keep on Cruising which is calming and innocent, and far removed from the cruising that I’m used to.
Long live the King. The King is gone. I was the King but I am done. I had to go because the people didn’t respect the King anymore. The King was unable to control his desires. All those handsome Dukes, Counts, Barons and Earls. Now the King has nothing. The King must eat shit.
Matchstick Man doesn’t like the angel and talks to him like shit. “It’s like working with an infant,” he says. Matchstick Man gets jealous quickly. I wonder if he’s feeling insecure and threatened by the angel’s innocence. And he gets angry when I say that the infant might be annoying but is cute.
Alessio returned last night. I woke to find him standing in front of the window with the full moon behind him that made him glow turquoise.
“My friend, I have so much to tell you.”
“Is that really you, Alessio? The thing is, you are dead.”
I sat up in bed. Everything seemed real yet I knew it must be a dream. Alessio looked different. It was definitely him but he looked older and well groomed.
“Of course I am dead. There was no way I would have survived falling from such a great height and lived.”
Alessio stepped into the room but still had that strange glow about him.
“Why are you a funny colour?”
“Ah,” he said, “it is the colour of oro and is quite normal. It fades after a while.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Relax my friend. Don’t be frightened. I have something exciting to say. When we were young boys we were taught that God created this beautiful planet that spins. But I have found out something remarkable. The earth that you see from space looks to be one planet, but everything is not as it appears. To our eyes it appears as one, but that is not the case because there are really three worlds superimposed over one other..”
“Alessio. Wherever it is you have come from, I see that there is an abundance of drugs for you to take.”
“Hear me out. God was a multi-tasker and didn’t create one world, but created three – the past, the present, and the future. He was a genius. The reason that the earth spins is because it allows the past, present and future to rotate together. Sometimes each of the worlds moves faster, sometimes slower, but each spins unknown to the other, but occasionally they slip into each other and voila, you end up where you aren’t supposed to be. I am testimony to that. Right now I’m in a controlled time slip. I am a ghost standing before you, and you appear as a ghost to me.
“The exciting thing is that you are in the present and when you die you will cross over, and without knowing it, you will be reborn into the past or the future. It’s a potluck where you end up. When I died I moved into the future where I grew up to be a wonderful scientist, part of a secret AI team that discovered this amazing shit, and right now I’m part of an experiment that is communicating with the past, or should that be the present? I might not remember anything when I return, but, so far so good, I know why I’m here, and came knowing nothing about you, but immediately remembered who you were and everything that happened between us. Bad boys always recognise bad boys. How are you, by the way?”
“It’s a lot to take in,” I stuttered. “Does that mean there isn’t a heaven? Or hell for that matter?”
“On the contrary my friend. Heaven is where you might perceive hell to be. Three lifetimes and we all go to heaven. It’s a place that no living person can ever go to, but tomorrow, when the sun is high in the sky, think about why it is that the sun is so hot. It is what is behind that fiery facade where the answer to your question lies. And, by the way, there is no hell, and if there is, we’ve yet to discover it.”
“This is bizarre,” I told him. “This is the weirdest dream I’ve ever had.”
“Think of it as a dream if you like.” He looked at his hand. “My oro is almost gone so I must return. But remember what I’ve told you, and if you care to tell anyone then I am sure that they will think you are quite mad. Goodbye Lucio. It has been good to see you again.”
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 