He stood next to his girlfriend and I couldn’t help looking at him. Discreetly like. But Matchstick Man had clocked me and looked at me like I’d done something incredibly bad. I wanted to shout, “Fuck you, Matchstick Man, you had your chance!” Instead, I went bright red and looked at my phone where an app nudged a virtual taxi nearer towards me. Sometimes thinking about it is better than doing it.
A twinkle of imagination. A scattering of angel dust. The glow of the pedalo boy, with gorgeous dark legs and dirty underwear, who stared into the sun and saw the shadow of an indecent stranger.
Saturday slaughter. Pumped up courage. Vodka fuelled Valkyries. Vanilla Valentines. Red Hot Chilli Poppers. Up and down. Cock teasers. Blonde bullshitters. Fag filled fags. Sweaty sex toys. Blue Adonis in Disco Cop. Twink paradise. Twink hell . Be damned by Twinkdom. Boys to men. Romeo, Romeo, Where the fuck are you Romeo? Smooth skinned sluts. Spray tan twiglets. Ba lamb babies. If you could read my mind, love. What a tale my thoughts could tell. Just like an old time movie. A movie that plays every Saturday. The boy shouts louder and louder. What’s he gonna look like with a chimney on him? Up and Down. An ecstasy-stained erotic dream. Screaming queens and disco lights. Screaming queens and fist fights. Shy guys and sly guys. Sugar daddies and fairy cakes. I need you. I want you. I can’t have you. No matter how hard I try, you keep pushing me aside, and I can’t break through. Listen to me. I can’t see through the smoke. There’s no talking to you. The Vengabus is coming. And everybody’s jumping. But you’re not coming. Do you believe in life after love? I can feel something inside me say, I really don’t think you’re strong enough. Robin Hood and his band of boyfriend thieves. Cry babies. Jelly babies. Dolly mixtures. Sun up. Slow down. Come down. Vamos a jugar en el sol. Todos los días son días de fiesta. Vamos a jugar en el sol. Todos los días son días de fiesta. Sex in a Ford Fiesta. Sexy, everything about you so sexy.
Respect. That’s what it all comes down to. Respect one another and don’t be a shit about it. That’s what I’ll tell a police officer if I get caught. It isn’t likely to happen, because they know about me, and don’t have the inclination to do anything about it. They respect me, and I respect them. That’s why they look the other way. After all, our ways and means are basically the same, and I do things that they’d like to do, but aren’t able to.
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.
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.
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.
A crowded city bar. Night.
ALEX, a tall dark guy, drinks beer and sits opposite MARK, who is absorbed with his mobile phone. MARK drinks from a bottle of vodka.
*****
ALEX: Why are you always on your phone whenever we go out together?
MARK: It is because you make me drink too much and I get drunk.
ALEX: That doesn’t explain why you ignore me.
MARK: That is not technically true.
ALEX: But you are on your phone now and the only reason that you’re talking to me is because I’ve asked you a question.
MARK: Was I ignoring you earlier in the evening?
ALEX: No, you were good fun then. But now it seems that I’m boring you.
MARK: That was before it got dark.
ALEX: You’re not making any sense.
MARK: It is simple. I spend days in the sun thinking about what to write and getting nowhere. The moon rises over the horizon and I become evil and inspirational. A few minutes is all it takes.
ALEX: I don’t understand.
MARK: I’m a writer who writes best at night.
ALEX: Then spare me the embarrassment of sitting in silence.
MARK: You are an extremely important part of the process, but you don’t realise that.
ALEX: What are you writing on your phone?
MARK: Something amazing.
ALEX: Would you care to show me?
MARK: No, I can’t do that. I need time to rewrite and edit it, and I can only do that in the daytime. Otherwise, people will think I’m a bad writer.
ALEX: I give up.
MARK: Keep talking. I’m listening. I call my notes the Penis Monologues but somebody already used that title.
ALEX: Penis Monologues?
MARK: My phone is full of notes. Observations. Conversations. Ideas. I turn them into something wonderful. Right now I have a menace energy that comes when I drink vodka by itself. I get so drunk and the craziest thoughts bounce between my ears and then I write brilliant things… over and over again. Vodka is my best friend.
ALEX: Where do I come into it?
MARK: This conversation. It might end up in a book, a short story, or maybe an entry in my secret diary. I don’t ignore you, because you are an important part of the Penis Monologues.
I woke up in the middle of the night and the light boy was dancing around my bed. He comes often. No name. No face. A swirl of sparkly lights that moves from one side to the other. The electric boy blue who wants to be loved.
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 