He was popular in school, of course, because despite being a bookworm, he was good-looking, which somehow made the other boys want to be his friend, even if they didn’t quite understand why. The teachers liked him too – he was one of the students with whom they tried to ingratiate themselves – and he’d only found himself in trouble once, when it was discovered that he’d plagiarized a history essay from a book he borrowed from the local library, an offence that resulted in a week’s suspension. There were boys who wanted to know him better, to get closer to him, but he was essentially a loner and kept others at a distance. Until Henry arrived, that is.
Even now, thirty years later, he could still remember the moment when the boy walked through the classroom door for the first time, a few steps behind the headmaster, Dr Webster, to be introduced to his new classmates. He was tall and lean with brown hair that both fell into his eyes and stood up above his head. When he opened his mouth to tell the class his name and what had brought him to Harrogate, the room broke into uncontrollable laughter at his strong Northern Irish accent and Henry’s face had betrayed a mixture of anger, humiliation and confusion at how they mocked him. He looked around the room, disconcerted by this unruly and vaguely threatening group of strangers with whom he would be spending his days, until his eyes met Maurice’s, the only boy who wasn’t laughing. Maurice tilted his head a little, a sort of greeting, and Henry stared back, his tongue peeping out from between his lips, unable to look away.
They formed an alliance of sorts, spending time in each other’s houses after school and at weekends, and it was while they were in Maurice’s room one Saturday afternoon, listening to a Kate Bush cassette and discussing how much they both despised the school football captain, that Henry tried to kiss him. Kate was singing about Kashka from Baghdad, who lived in sin with another man, when he turned to his friend and pressed his lips against his own, his hand reaching up to press itself flat against the other boy’s shirt. Maurice had been expecting something of this sort to happen but was surprised that there had been no lead-up to the moment. He’d never been kissed before, had never made a pass at any girl or boy, nor had he ever felt any particular desire to do so. It was something he’d wondered about from time to time, this curious lack of interest in sex. In moments of experimentation, he’d looked at pornographic magazines but had found himself entirely unaroused by the tragic expressions on the girls’ faces as they spread their legs or pressed their breasts out towards the camera. In the school showers, after games, he’d surreptitiously examined the naked bodies of his classmates and felt no particular desire for them either. When he masturbated, it was solely for the pleasure of touching himself, for the trembling ecstasy of the orgasm, but it seemed unnecessary to him to share the experience with anyone else and he did not see the faces of others in his fantasies, only his own.
Now, however, with Henry pushing him back against the bed, he felt willing to investigate the moment a little in order to examine what effect an intimacy such as this might have on him. He could write about it afterwards, he thought, in a story. Most writers wrote about sex, didn’t they? Even those, like Forster, for whom carnality in their private lives seemed unimportant. One of his favourite writers, Aldous Huxley, had said that experience is not what happens to a man, it is what a man does with what happens to him, and this was surely an experience, the body of another fifteen-year-old-boy lying above his own, his tongue in his mouth, his unfamiliar erection pressing against his thigh through the fabric of his clothes.
‘What can I do?’ asked Henry, pulling away for a moment, his face red, his entire body pulsating with desire as he looked down at his friend with such longing in his eyes that Maurice began to realize just how much power he already had. ‘What will you let me do?’
‘Tell me about Belfast,’ he replied, and Henry pushed himself up on his elbows, frowning, uncertain that he’d heard him right.
‘What?’ he asked, running his hand down Maurice’s shirt and releasing it from his trousers, tentatively opening a couple of buttons, his palm against the boy’s navel and firmly muscled stomach.
‘Belfast,’ he repeated. ‘What was it like over there?’
Henry shook his head and leaned down to kiss him again, but Maurice pushed him away, sitting up on the bed and re-buttoning his shirt. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Tell me the stories. I’m interested. I want to know.’
And Henry, confused and disappointed, his body crackling with hormones, sat up and stared at the carpet, trembling in bewilderment. ‘What do you want to know?’ he asked.
‘Anything,’ said Maurice. ‘Did you ever see anyone get shot?’
Henry nodded. ‘Once,’ he said. ‘Outside a petrol station in Ardoyne.’
‘Tell me about it,’ whispered Maurice. ‘Tell me everything you saw and everything you heard and then I’ll let you do some more.’
And, of course, he did.
They were in Maurice’s house when it happened next, watching television, his parents having gone to Cardiff to visit a dying relative. Maurice was enjoying the tension as they sat together on the sofa and only when Henry reached across and took his hand did he feel a little unsettled at being the focus of so much obvious desire. Why don’t I feel the same way? he asked himself. Why don’t I feel it for anyone? Could there be a story there?
‘You’re so fuckin’ gorgeous,’ said Henry, leaning forward, and Maurice not only permitted himself to be kissed again but he kissed back, his tongue exploring his friend’s mouth, a new sensation that was neither unpleasant nor arousing. Soon, they were upstairs, lying on his bed, and again Henry asked what he was allowed to do. Sensing that he needed to allow the burning boy more freedom than last time, he shrugged and said, Anything you like, and Henry, with an expression that suggested he couldn’t quite believe his luck, unzipped Maurice’s trousers and took his cock into his mouth. Maurice closed his eyes and enjoyed the feeling but his mind wasn’t fully engaged with it. Would Henry tell him another story when he was finished or was this all a waste of time?
He came, and Henry looked up at him, smiling in delight, and Maurice smiled back, only mildly embarrassed. He could only imagine how ridiculous they looked.
‘My turn,’ said Henry, unbuckling his belt and pulling his trousers down.
Maurice looked at him and then stared at the boy’s cock, feeling no particular repulsion at the idea of sucking him but no great desire to do so either. He reached down and touched his penis tentatively, running his index finger along the shaft as Henry closed his eyes and groaned in pleasure.
‘Another story first,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll do it.’
And so it went on, week after week for almost two months, the two boys finding opportunities to be alone together when Henry could indulge his desires and Maurice could hear tales of the boy’s life before coming to England. His father, he revealed, had not been shot by the IRA as the boys in school believed. In fact, he’d died of nothing more imaginative than a heart attack, although he had, the boy claimed, been a member of the organization for many years and men in balaclavas had shown up at the funeral, acting as pallbearers as they carried the tricolour-adorned coffin to the grave. He talked about what it was like to hear shootings in the night, how a teenage boy from down the street had been kneecapped for an unexplained crime of which he had sworn his innocence, how a mother had gone missing after a visit to a local church, how a family had gone into hiding after becoming informers. It wasn’t to Maurice’s taste, most of it, but he wrote it all down and found a way to turn the boy’s disconnected memories into a coherent narrative. It seemed that all he had to do was continue to give Henry orgasms and his story would eventually be completed. It seemed like a worthwhile trade to him.