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.”
A pair of well-worn sneakers, tied to bars with greasy laces, fingered by the grubby hands of a bad boy, just hanging there. A pair of cheap sneakers blowing in the wind. And yet, I can’t stop looking at them. Worn by a cute deadbeat with dirty feet. It’s a kink, a fetish, a desire to lust after.
Image: Les amitiés particulières (1964). Directed by Jean Delannoy
It was the last night of our short seaside holiday and Charlie decided that it would be a good idea to stream a movie. He spent well over an hour flicking through Netflix and Prime Video until my patience finally ran out.
“Charlie, we will soon have spent as long looking for a movie than it would to watch one.” He stopped flicking. “Then I shall choose this one, and if you do not like it, I shall not be held responsible,” he said petulantly.
The movie he chose was in black and white and called This Special Friendship. It soon became apparent that it was old (1964), and in French, which delighted Charlie, but the English subtitles would soon annoy him, while I would be annoyed with Charlie for moaning about them.
“It is called Les amitiés particulières, which means ‘special friendships’, but the English cannot translate it correctly,” he told me. “The synopsis is simple. It is set in the rigid atmosphere of a Jesuit boarding school and is a tender relationship between a 14-year-old upperclassman and a 12-year-old boy, who is the object of his desire.” Charlie’s expertise had come after consulting his iPhone.
The movie seemed harmless enough, and because it was made in the 1960s was tame when compared to boy-love movies of today, but after only a few minutes Charlie tutted with disdain. “The character of Georges is supposed to be 14 years old,” he said, “but he looks like he is older than me.” I later found out that the actor, Francis Lacombrade, according to one source, had been 21, but others stated that he had been 17.
Charlie’s derision intensified when the object of his desire appeared for the first time. He was a small cupid-faced boy carrying a lamb which we presumed was meant to be the symbolism of Jesus Christ as the Lamb of God. “Bordel de merde! Please tell me that this boy isn’t going to be his lover.” His fears proved to be correct, and I agreed that the age difference was disturbing.
He was called Alexandre, who turned out to be a bit of a cock-tease for Georges, but the romance mainly involved love letters passed between the two of them. The relationship is destroyed by a priest’s will to protect them from homosexuality. “We know why he did that,” said Charlie knowingly. “That priest wanted his wicked way with the little boy.” That wasn’t the case, but there were no happy endings, because heartbroken Alexandre jumped to his death from a moving train.
“The movie was good,” Charlie said afterwards, “but I found it troubling.” I agreed and began my own internet search to see what people thought about it. I was surprised to find that modern-day audiences seem unperturbed by the subject matter but could see that the Catholic Church had tried unsuccessfully to get it banned on its release.
Charlie disappeared into the kitchen while I fell down a rabbit hole as I dug deeper into the movie’s background. When he returned with two mugs of tea I told him my findings.
“I’ve found things that might upset you even more.”
“What do you mean?”
“The movie is based on a book written by a French author called Roger Peyrefitte and is said to be autobiographical because he had a similar romance, and the younger boy committed suicide.” My pronunciation was poor, and it came out as Pay-ri-fit.
Charlie corrected me. “Pey-ri-fee.” He stretched on the leather sofa and mulled over my new-found knowledge.
“But there is more,” I said, scrolling down the page of a French literary site. “Peyrefitte visited the movie set and fell in love with a 12-year-old boy who played a small part as a choir boy. They had a relationship, and the boy became his personal secretary and was eventually adopted by him.”
“It is Greek love,” Charlie frowned. “Erastes and Eromenos. What happened to them?”
“The boy was called Alain-Philippe Malagnac d’Argens de Villèle.” My English pronunciation left a lot to be desired, but Charlie looked at me as though I had said something significant.
“Alain-Philippe Malagnac?”
“I suppose so.”
“It cannot be the same person,” he cried, “but my father once knew somebody with that name.”
I continued reading.
“Malagnac became proprietor of Le Club Colony in Paris and briefly managed French singer Sylvie Vertan but it almost bankrupted Peyrefitte and forced him to sell artworks and erotic antiques.”
“The Alaine-Philippe Malagnac that my father knew was married to Amanda Leah, who he believes to really be a man, but a gay icon. He died in a fire near the Alpilles Mountains.”
I saved my pièce de résistance until last.
“Malagnac married Amanda Lear in 1979. She was close friends with Salvador Dali, who disapproved of the marriage.”
Charlie smiled triumphantly. “That is incredible. I cannot wait to tell my father, but what shall I say?” He began fiddling inside his shorts, something he tended to do when he mulled things over. At last, he came to a decision. “I will not say anything because he will become worried that I might also be seduced by an older man.”
I smiled. “I think it is most likely to be the other way around.”
Image: Les amitiés particulières (1964). Directed by Jean Delannoy
There are things that people don’t know about you. And if they did, it’s unlikely that they would believe it.
The council house scruffs who think you are fucking cool in your Hoodrich gear. You talk to them like shit, and they are so thick, that even though they are scared, they think it is only a game.
But I know why you treat them so badly and keep them in their place.
I know your dark secret.
It is something that you don’t want them to know, and if they did, you know that you are finished.
Charlie had been watching movies on TV and hadn’t gone to bed until three o’clock in the morning. This was normal, but he wasn’t used to me waking him up six hours later. I reminded him that he was due to meet Leon at ten for his photo shoot. Only the top of his head could be seen from under the covers and his hair stuck up at all angles. He was barely communicative and answered with strange little noises that sounded kind of cute.
Ten minutes later I had to tell him again that he had to get up. “It’s like trying to sleep in the Gare du Nord,” he moaned. There was then a frantic rush to shower and make himself look beautiful, not helped by the fact that in this rented holiday cottage the bathroom was downstairs while his clothes were upstairs.
I stayed out of the way and flicked through an old antiques magazine that was at least ten years old. Things appeared to be going well because when Charlie was in a good mood he would start singing Jacques Brel songs in French and I could hear the words to La Chanson de Jacky through the floorboards that had wide gaps between them.
“Même si on m’appelle Antonio Que je brûle mes derniers feux En échange de quelques cadeaux Madame, oh madame, je fais ce que je peux.”
Leon had arranged to meet Charlie outside Dolly’s Vintage Tea Room, but I’d been warned to stay away. He reasoned that my presence would cause him embarrassment. My day was going to be spent wandering around this small fishing village while trying not to spend money that I didn’t have.
“This is going to be interesting,” Charlie said as he drank the remains of his tea (white with two sweeteners). “Leon takes photographs of different subjects, but his speciality is taking pictures of dead birds and the occasional dead rat.
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 