but he goes upstairs and lies on his bed. After a while, he opens his fly and reaches in, stroking himself until he’s hard. He carries on stroking and something strange happens, like soft white feathers pushing to come out. For a moment, he thinks he’s about to pee, to burst with pee, and will flood the bed, but then he’s moaning and he has some white stuff on his belly. He’s so excited he runs downstairs. He wants to tell his mother, but his father catches him in the hall, and he has time to reconsider. You missed a grand race, his father says.
8
He’s in the common room, between classes. One of the boys is being picked on by a group of other boys for being cocky. He keeps his head down, he doesn’t want to get involved. He’s had his eye on the boy for some time. Short blondish hair, solidly built. He’s never spoken to him, but he has had a dream in which the boy’s dick looks like honey and a piece of polished wood all at once, and he is stroking it. When they wrestle him to the ground, his shirt comes out of the waistband and his torso arches back, bare-bellied, taut. The whole world and his heart are blinded by the light of the boy’s white skin.
9
He buys Health & Efficiency from a newsagent’s where he isn’t known. He cuts out his favourite images of men and sticks them into last year’s Stoke Arts Festival programme, alongside the underwear pages from out-of-date catalogues, a photograph of Kevin Keegan, shirtless, running across an empty field, a smaller photograph, scissored from the paper, of the dark one from Starsky & Hutch dressed up as Houdini, wearing chains around his neck and wrists, and not much else. He’s hiding a new copy of H&E in his satchel the day his mother tells him about a piece of pig’s liver in some friend’s fridge, so riddled with cancer it wrapped itself around the milk. For the protein, she adds darkly.
10
He’s sitting in the back of the car, reading Brideshead Revisited when he hears the thwack of a leather ball against a bat. He glances up. His father is driving through a village and he sees a game of cricket being played. He hates cricket, but he has a vision of waiting beneath a tree, a willow tree perhaps, with a hamper of sandwiches and champagne, and his friend is walking towards him, his bat beneath his arm, his cheeks flushed. He flops onto the picnic rug and his hair falls into his eyes as he reaches across, his hand barely brushing the knee of his friend, his lips slightly parted, his words the merest whisper. And so they come.
1
They’re driving home from the Isle of Wight. He’s never crossed the sea before and, although he knows the Isle of Wight is part of England, it’s as though he’s been abroad. His father has the radio on. Today’s the World Cup final and England is playing, but, maybe because he still feels foreign, he’s secretly siding with Germany. His father is getting excited, his sister is playing with crayons and paper, his mother is talking about finding somewhere to eat. He closes his eyes. They stayed in the Hotel Metropole and had a room with a balcony overlooking the sea. He made friends with a boy from London. When England wins, he shrugs. He knows he’ll go abroad again.
2
His first time in London his father takes him because he has work to do there. They go by train, the longest journey he’s made that isn’t in a car. He sits by the window and stares at the world, wondering what London will be like. When they arrive, his father takes him to Madame Tussaud’s. Years later, he remembers nothing of this, nothing of the waxworks or the chamber of horrors, only the train ride, which never seemed to end, and then the long wait outside the Planetarium, because his father had said he wouldn’t be long. But he is, and when he finally arrives there’s no time left to see anything, and his father keeps saying, I’m sorry.
3
They borrow a car and drive until early light, then sleep for half-an-hour in a Cornish lay-by. They have an ounce of dope and a two-man tent in the boot. They’re turned away from an empty campsite, but find an abandoned field and pitch their tent, then smoke large quantities of dope. Each night two of them take the tent and the third sleeps in the car. Neither option is less uncomfortable than the other. On the last night, in a pub, he has a friendship-shaking argument with one of the other two about the value of risk. Later, he walks to the edge of the cliff and sees a harp embedded in the rock. He climbs down towards it.
4
They sit on their rucksacks in a lay-by in Harris. It is Sunday and all the cars are driving into the town they are trying to leave, for church. They have used trains, coaches, other people’s cars, a ferry and their feet to get here and the only book he still has left to read is Don Juan. They stand up and start to walk across a wilderness that reminds him of that canvas by Holman Hunt, of the scapegoat crowned in red. Last night the wind blew fat from their chip-shop haggis in horizontal ribbons. This morning they have eaten nothing because there can be no cooked breakfast on the day of rest. It is probably about to rain.
5
The first flight he ever takes is to Milan. It is a charter flight; some of the seats face backwards, like a train, an arrangement he will never see again. The food is dreadful but exciting; the drink is free and plentiful. He has a sick bag, which he folds and slides into his pocket when no one is looking. He stands in the bathroom, too cramped to turn, and flushes the lavatory experimentally to see what will happen, if some bright hole will open up in the plane itself. He stares through the window and wonders if what he sees are the Alps or some artful film projected onto the walls of a hangar as big as the world.
6
A friend tells him a story about a train journey she made with her boyfriend. It’s a compartment train, with seats that pull out into beds. They’re sharing the compartment with a Greek man, on holiday in Italy. They pull the seats out and settle to sleep, his friend in the middle. She can’t sleep; she can feel the heat of the two men’s bodies each side of her. When her boyfriend starts to snore, the Greek man turns and touches her breast. She lies there, silent, willing him on. He rolls on top of her and they fuck as the train heads south. It was wonderful, she says. I’ll never forget the smell of him, like honey and thyme.
7
The taxi picks them up in a square so full of cicadas they can barely hear each other speak. The taxi driver thinks they’re both Italian, and they don’t correct him. In heavily-accented but fluent English, he talks to them about women, how Scandinavian women have cleaner private parts than women in Greece. He wants to know what women in Italy are like ‘down there’. They’re vague. He has a Swedish mistress he tells them, she comes each summer. She is very clean ‘down there’. The following day they see him with a woman who is clearly his wife. He spots them, turns away. There are cicadas here too. They are tired of pretending. They’d like to be at home.
8
They stop for the night on Route 66, in a motel that claims to be the oldest motel in Williams. That morning they’d brunched in T-shirts outside a place near Phoenix. Now they are sitting inside a
