The Folding Star Read Free

thought, perhaps Cherif had brought his custom here before; and wasn’t there something shrewd and cold-blooded about the desk-clerk himself, doubling and trebling as barman and hooverer of the TV lounge?)
    The moment I had locked the door he was on to me, chewing and stuffing my mouth and knocking my glasses up skew-whiff over the top of my head. He was an animal, that great thing for someone else to be. A second or two later he was grinding one hand up and down on my bum and with the other guiding me down to rub his cock where it stood out hard and at an angle in his loose old jeans.
    On the way from the Museum we had crossed a bridge above swans and the putter of an empty bâteau-mouche, the commentary running on regardless, when he had suddenly held out in his palm a little packet with a rubber’s squashed ring contour. I didn’t mind the wordless confirmation, but I turned my head away, too full of feeling for this boy, who had only been my friend for twenty minutes, who felt nothing for me but was so unhesitatingly himself, a little overweight, his upper lip and chin roughened already with shadow. Now he was sitting in my lap, riding on me with a certain urgent disregard – I swept my hands across his sleek and trusting back, and reached up to shoulders where muscles powerful from work gathered and dispersed. I was glad he couldn’t see me, gaping and heavy-hearted with praise for him.
    We were on the end of the bed, and I hugged up close to look round his shoulder and into the full-length mirror. Our eyes met there, but he was a little bothered by that intimacy. Then, as I was climbing to the end, he got right off me and stood on the floor. I scrambled up too, confused for a moment by my own reflection in the glass, as if without my specs the image needed to be blinked back into focus, or as if a sixth sense revealed a face within my face, ghostly features caught in the very silvering of the mirror. Cherif took a half-step forward, and fell against the glass with flattened palms. A sequence of sounds emerged from it, or from a distance beyond it; and then for a couple of seconds we saw ourselves dematerialise and a perspective open up within – a shuttered room with stacks of chairs, lit from the side by an opening and closing door. Cherif was sighing and laughing quietly, and sat down again on the bed while I pulled on my trousers, hopping and treading on the legs.
    I had been exploring the city rather fast and anxiously, referring on and off to a tourist map which omitted side-streets and alleys and showed the famous buildings in childishly out-of-scale drawings. Its poetic effect was to give me the shape of the town as a fifteenth-century engineer, expert in dikes and piles, might have shown it in plan to a ruling count: a mounted opal veined with waterways and suspended from the broad ribbon of the sea-canal. The industrial park, the post-war poor estates, the spent suburb of my first-night wanderings, were shown as fields, confirming the sense I had at every corner that the whole city aspired to be an artist’s impression.
    It wasn’t a big town, and its great monuments, like the pinnacled elevations jostling on the map, were out of all proportion to the streets, courtyards and canals beneath them. The tapering, windowless monolith of the tower of St John’s and the ugly green spirelets with which a turn-of-the-century surveyor had capped the ancient tower of the Cathedral were mere satellites to the legendary altitudes of the Belfry. From far off, in Ostend, when we had cleared the cranes and the edge of town, these three appeared across the plain as a mysterious trinity, with the Belfry, growing epoch by epoch in battlemented stages towards its octagonal crown, the most doggedly heaven-storming of all.
    Today the sky was low and the air fenlike and damp when I crossed the Grote Markt and saw the maestro of the famous carillon – a shovel-bearded young man in corduroy jacket and knee-breeches like a