Audio: Douglas Stuart reads.
Iwas ashamed of my glasses. They were the cheapest of government-subsidized frames, the type that poor pensioners wore, or middle-class students, when they wanted to appear ironic. The lenses were so thick that my green eyes looked jaundiced and only half the size they actually were. I never wore them when I should have. So I can’t quite picture the Solicitor’s face, but his car was black and German. It glided through the Glasgow smirr like a starling.
I waited for him outside Central Station, as his letter had instructed me to. It was another dreich day, and my stiff denims sucked up the damp from the pavement. The car was so new that the rain streamed off the coat of polisher’s wax. As I sat in the passenger seat, I had a peripheral sense that the man had an ordinary face, thin and forgettable. It was edged by a fresh haircut, short on the sides, feathered on the top. Without my glasses, everything was aura, and his aura was the color of liver paste.
The Solicitor had begun writing to me a few weeks earlier. He was among the first to respond to my lonely heart. He was more forthright than the others. His letters gave the impression of a man who cut across the grass, could not be bothered with the path. In his first letter he said we had to meet. He said he liked my description, was excited to see me. I reread my personal ad. Less than thirty words, the vaguest of outlines: slim boy, dark-haired, seventeen, likes music, good books. Yet he seemed so sure that I was the one he had been looking for.
Now here I was in his German car in the Glasgow rain. He told me he was thirty-eight and asked if I was hungry. Then he asked if I had told anyone where I was going. I shook my head, rain on the tip of my nose. I had told no one. I had no one to tell.
Ihad been living in the rented bedsit for a few months by then. My taciturn brother called it “that Paki woman’s home for lonely auld bastards.” But I loved it. It was the first time I had felt free to be myself.
Our mother had not been dead long. She was never cold in the grave, because we could not afford to bury her. Instead she was cremated at the expense of the Benefits Office, out at Daldowie Crematorium. The sober members of her A.A. chapter stood respectfully to the side. The other alcoholics shuffled around us, already inebriated at ten in the morning, or still drunk from the night before—it was hard to say. The old Catholics told me, over and over, that she was safe in the arms of God now. But why was it that she had to go to Him? Where were His arms when she lay mortal and suffering on the living-room carpet?
One of my mother’s drinking cronies, a needling terror of a woman, stumbled over to us. She joked that we had been brave to cremate our mother, that she was such an auld soak the flame might never go out. It’s hard to know the correct thing to say at a funeral. I could feel my brother’s hand on the back of my scrawny neck. He kneaded my vertebrae as if they were rosary beads. He pinched them in his muffled rage, his long fingers threatening to paralyze me, make me a cripple in my borrowed black suit.
After her cremation, the ghouls lingered. The news spread that we would not have a reception with an open bar—in fact, we would not have alcohol at all. There was a disgraceful wailing amongst the worst afflicted. We were told that it was tradition, as if it would be the shame of all Glasgow to burn our mother and not take a good drink to celebrate.
Even as a young woman my mother had always been a gallus thing: a chancer, gregarious, desirous of any shiny bauble. She was often too proud and generous to a fault. She trusted men she should not have, which left her with the constant shame of having been used. Toward the end she had a withered quality, somehow stuck in another time. But she had been a handsome woman, with her pronounced Donegal bone structure, glossy black hair always shellacked into a crown of neat ebony rosettes. She liked a fully painted face, even on the days she sat at home. Men loved her. Women grew to be exhausted by her.
No one who knew her could tell me when her taste for a “rare-tear”—the love of a good time—became the actual tearing of her. It is Glaswegian to like a good drink, to get blootered, pished, steamboats, absolutely fucking rat-arsed. When Thatcher took all the men’s jobs away—steel, coal, ships—there seemed little else to do between dole checks. Heavy drinking was hard to avoid—I watched her try—so when someone tipped over into alcoholism it was difficult to pinpoint the beginning of the end. But everyone agreed: her drinking worsened after my father left her. I never knew my father. The stories they tell about him are less tender.
I had been lucky to find a room in Missus B.’s bedsit. The Pakistani woman had been the only landlady willing to rent to a shook-looking boy who was still in high school. My older brother was a tradesman, and, being practical, he thought I should give up on education, as he had, as my mother had. He thought I would benefit from a living wage, an apprenticeship, a council flat, a girlfriend. It was good advice. But I knew I needed an education—I didn’t know why. Still, I felt that if I didn’t move toward something then I might disintegrate. My brother was my keeper. But after a time he could no longer afford to house me, clothe me, feed me, just for me to see where the adventure of education went.
My quiet brother had always been my protector and harbored me when my mother was at her worst. In his unassuming way, he had carried the mantle of my absent father when he was still a young man, far too hurt himself to care for a vulnerable boy. Later, when I told him I was gay, he was crushed. Living on a Glaswegian housing scheme and being gay was a death sentence. The year before my mother died, the P.Y.T., the Pollok Young Team, had tried to kill me. I was stopped in the middle of a busy street one afternoon. Eight boys bounced up and down on my skull. I was told they had lined up excitedly, as if it were a fairground ride. The old woman who intervened had thought they were torturing a stray dog. My brother felt that he had not done enough to make me normal. That he had not done enough to save me from myself.
I went to high school in the daytime, lost myself in Hardy, du Maurier, Donne. In the evenings and on weekends, I worked the cavernous aisles of a home-improvement superstore, cleaning up spilled paint, carrying patio furniture out to the long cars of middle-class families. Every Friday, I delivered a rent envelope filled with crumpled notes and loose coins. On my knees before Missus B.’s letter box, I breathed in the rich smell of chicken bubbling in garam masala, listened to women gossip in a pretty language I didn’t understand. Then I returned to the bedsit and locked myself in my room.
When the pubs reached barring time, and the old men who rented the rooms on either side of mine stumbled home drunk, I flinched awake in my bed. I listened to them miss the toilet as they pissed, collide with the hallway door that always stuck on the threadbare carpet. I felt euphoric relief. Relief that these alkies were not mine to save.
There were personal ads in the back pages of a youth magazine, a glossy that I devoured because the nights were too quiet and I could not afford the company of a television. Underneath the heterosexuals were the tentative notices for young gay men and women. There was nothing seedy about these lonely hearts—these were not the explicit offers I would trawl later in the free gay papers. This was the early nineties, long before the Internet, with its miles and miles of headless torsos, all hairless and strangely similar—there was nothing sexual here. It was a beacon for invisible youth. I was lonely. I had been lonely for a long time. These boys were lonely, too. This was why we were gathering here—beneath the straight people.
I sat cross-legged on the end of my single bed and summarized my pale, dull self in thirty words or less. The postal order would mean I had no bus fare, that I would have to walk to and from school for a week, but I didn’t care. I wrote the advert and lay back, feeling, for the first time in a long while, giddy with hope.
The young men who replied to me came from all over the country. Some of their letters tried too hard to be funny, and were caustic-sounding, masking awful hurt. Some presented a thin veneer of cockiness, as though this was just a laugh to them, yet here they were, sitting cross-legged in bedrooms, reaching out to strangers—same as me. Other letters were vulnerable, heartbreakingly tender. There was one from a boy who was younger than I was, a crofter’s son who lived in the remotest corner of the Scottish Highlands, not another soul for years and miles. He wrote as though he assumed he was not going to receive a reply; he asked me no questions, he didn’t hurry me to respond like all the others did. It read like a message in a bottle. I could picture him climbing the side of a munro—the type of majestic mountain they painted on tins of tourist shortbread—and calling out across the empty glen, yet to hear the echo.
All the letters were handwritten, torn from notebooks, charming in their regional slang. Their scrawl rushed across the page, as if the words were burning out of them. Some letters were ten, twelve, twenty pages long, ink changing color as pens bled to excited deaths. The boys sent photographs of themselves, innocent time-stamped supa-snaps: holiday pictures with grandparents folded to the back, or photographs of them grinning in bedrooms whose walls were plastered with posters of Kylie Minogue, Madonna, “Cats,” the musical.
I laid all the letters out before me. It was hard to see the night sky from the middle of the leaden, sullen city. My mother had taken me to Saltcoats once, to the shingled coast. A man who was using her had rented a dented caravan so they could be farther from his wife. He would come on the weekend, but we would have the week to ourselves. On our first night alone, we sat outside the caravan as she smoked, and watched the stars peek through the heavy clouds. The letters felt like this to me. I would never reach these boys, never touch them, but they shone, bright in the northern sky. It was enough to know they were there.
Ihad shaved my face to meet the Solicitor—shaving was not something I had to do often. The gas meter in the shared bathroom was greedy, it gobbled all my coins and gave out only a basinful of tepid water. I slathered my face in white foam and took care not to cut myself. I was a slow developer, and at seventeen I was wan and skinny. My dark hair hung to my chin. I parted it in oily curtains, and wore it tucked behind my ears because it irritated the roary acne of my cheekbones. I felt as if I lived in black polyester trousers, only ever switching my school uniform for my work uniform. The rest of my clothes my mother had bought, dressing me like the man she would have wanted to marry.
The Solicitor drove me to the nicest restaurant I had ever been in. It sat in the shadow of the uplit cathedral and its fieldstone walls were whitewashed and as cold as a tomb. The starched tablecloths looked intimidatingly expensive and made me worry about the cost, but he seemed to sense this, and said almost immediately that I should eat what I wanted, that tonight our date would be on him.
It was the first real date I had been on; the one time before, at fourteen, I had tried to take a Protestant girl to the cinema, to be part of a brood of boys I was desperate to fly with. We had barely made it past the previews when she upped and sat in the row ahead of me, next to her friend, who was having her face chewed by a boy whose mother had melted iron marks into the sleeve of his nylon shell suit. Throughout the film she sucked on her ponytail and peered back at me in a curious way, as if she had a sense of something being wrong but could not say quite what.
It was clear the waiter thought I was the Solicitor’s son. The waiter was not much older than me. He had the refined accent of the university students who came to Glasgow and thought it a magical place, full of Gothic spires and the romance of rheumy diseases. But it was a city he could leave whenever he liked—and eventually he would, they all did. I didn’t wear my glasses to dinner, weak eyes were for old women, not young men, and I worried about squinting unattractively at the menu. I remember trying to pretend to read it as the waiter and the Solicitor stared at me, my empty eyes gliding back and forth in pantomime, and then, when the time came, I tried to appear nonchalant and ordered the exact same thing as my father, my date.
It was chicken. I don’t remember everything we talked about as we ate. I do remember the Solicitor did most of the talking, asking about high school, about my plans after school, and I was suddenly excited to realize that I didn’t know what my future was, only that it held something, finally, maybe. He kept saying, “Wow, you have your whole life ahead of you,” in a voice that sounded a little sad, but I couldn’t see if he was actually sad or not.
He asked me if I wanted wine—he wouldn’t drink because he was driving—and although I said no (I was fearful of alcohol), he took it as shyness. He ordered a glass of something deep and red that absorbed all the candlelight. He pushed it across the table toward me. I drank it even though I disliked the dank and foustie taste. I didn’t want to appear unsophisticated. He ordered another glass, and as it coated the roof of my mouth and stained my buck teeth I found myself relaxing. He said I had a funny smile, not bad, just gap-toothed and sweet. My brother said I was always too quick to smile—I still am—hobbled by my need to have everyone around me feel at ease, and think that I am doing O.K., even when I am not. I raised my hand to cover it.
As we shared dessert, the Solicitor leaned in, asked if he could do something. I nodded slowly, unsure of what to expect. He came toward me in the candlelight, and one of the most enduring pictures I have of his face is of his concentration as he reached behind my left ear and caressed my earlobe, as though he were tucking my hair behind it. I was rigid with inexperience. I saw him pull his hand away, and on his fingertips perched something white, like a small dove, as if he were a magician. My eyes were wide with wonder. But he wiped his hand on his napkin, snuffed the little dove and pressed it flat. I blinked as he laughed. I had sat through dinner with a glob of shaving cream on my neck, dangling just below my earlobe. I wanted so badly to run. To have the tapered candle topple and engulf me in its flame. But the man simply chuckled. He paid the bill and stood up abruptly.
Once we were outside, my upturned hand cupped some falling rain and I smeared it on my neck—a hoor’s bath, my mother would have called it. As we walked back to his car, the man must have felt my reluctance. I started to haver, my tongue loosened with wine, and I thanked him for dinner and made excuses about school in the morning. He walked ahead of me, whistling as though he had not heard. We reached the car and I spoke in the firmest voice I could manage. I said I’d walk home. But the German car flashed twice as he disabled the alarm, and as he turned to me he said, “Ach, but it’s early yet. Come. Meet my friends.”
He had not mentioned friends before and I had imagined him friendless, lonely like the men and boys in all the other letters I’d received. I didn’t want to meet these friends. He did not say who they were. I wanted to walk home, back to Missus B.’s bedsit, and lock myself inside. But it felt wrong to let him pay for my food and not go. Boys like me were raised with a profound shame at feeling beholden; we were taught that it was better to do without. The man opened the passenger door for me. I wiped the last of the shaving foam from my flushed neck. I smiled a smile I did not feel as my damp denims squeaked against the perforated leather.
Icould count on one hand the number of times I had been out of Glasgow. My entire universe was the housing scheme that I’d grown up on. If a place could not be reached on an orange corporation bus, then I had never been. He drove quickly, without telling me where we were going. I wanted to appear worldly, in control of myself, so I laid my throbbing head against the glass and squinted at the motorway signs for Edinburgh. Edinburgh! It was only forty miles away, and I had never been. I was scared, but underneath my fear I was buzzing. The traffic moved quickly at this time of night. The rain-dappled windscreen was a constellation of orange and red. The car settled into fifth gear, and the Solicitor put his hand on my leg. I liked it. I liked the possessiveness of it, how it weighted me down. I hadn’t realized how tired I was until his hand grasped me. I felt as if I had been found somehow. I watched the slower cars fall away.
We drove for an hour. I was disappointed that the housing estate we ended up at looked similar to the ones in Glasgow; boxy, brutalist buildings, thin windows that were always fogged with damp—if not outside, then inside. But it was unmistakable, I was far from home. There was sea salt in the air, and sleepless seagulls were birling in the darkness overhead. The Solicitor hurried between the buildings. It all looked the same to me, but he led me into an anonymous block of flats. We climbed to the top floor and he opened a plain door without knocking.
There were eight teen-age boys in the small living room, and two girls. They were crammed onto mismatched furniture, their long limbs so intertwined I couldn’t tell which limb belonged to which body. Two of the boys were bare-chested and sat with their arms locked around each other. Several bodies were strewn across the carpet, their heads resting on balled-up jumpers, necks bent as if they were broken. They were drinking filmy tea, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. The room was littered with greasy dinner plates and empty bottles of fortified wine; a roasting tray lay in the middle of the floor, and on it was the picked-over carcass of a small chicken. Every set of eyes was turned to the television, a late-night broadcast where the English presenters were drunk and swore and everything descended into anarchy. None of the young men were talking. They barely looked up as we entered the room. They greeted the Solicitor like he was nothing special.
A short blond boy, no more than eighteen, stood up and kissed the man. He stood on his tiptoes, and kissed him quickly on the mouth, already looking away, already bored. His hair was shorn in a Caesar cut, his fringe gelled against his forehead in the most perfect horizontal line. He studied me closely, then peered at the man, and chided him, “Ye’ll get the jail for that!” The Solicitor held his hands out to show he was free of guilt, to prove there was no trace of me on his palms. He gave the blond boy a plastic bag. It contained three bottles of Irish Baileys, which elicited a whoop of sincere delight. The Solicitor followed him into the kitchen. He left me standing by the door.
A skinny boy pushed himself into the far corner of the settee and beckoned me to sit down. His shoulder blades protruded as though they were the stubs of once powerful wings that had been removed. I sank between the strange bodies, embarrassed by my damp clothes as their warmth swallowed me. I tried to talk to them, introduce myself politely, but they ignored me. There was a sameness between us, they didn’t find me interesting enough to talk to, wanted nothing from me. A girl curled her tiny, dirty feet in my lap, and slowly their bodies absorbed me completely.
We sat, slack-jawed, and watched Nick Cave perform; he looked uncomfortable to be on such an awful television show. Eventually, the blond Caesar brought us mugs of instant coffee, made lukewarm and sickly with too much perfumed liqueur. The Solicitor was grinning, and I knew in that moment they had been kissing in the kitchen—perhaps more—and I was surprised to find myself feeling spurned. The man patted my knee, asked if I was all right, and I nodded, smiled, lied. He sat in an armchair and a young man rose from the floor. He was dressed in football shorts and a tracksuit top that bunched like a paper bag. The undersides of his white sport socks were grimy with dirt. He sprawled across the Solicitor’s lap and slurped his coffee; his inner thigh was as creamy as condensed milk. Several times the Solicitor bounced him, shoogled him as though they were on a country bus, father and son, but the young man only hissed, elbowed him to quit it, his heavy eyes never leaving the television. I watched the boys. All they seemed to want to do was watch the screen, drink their sweet liqueur, be mindless, or be without the burden of their bodies. I had a fear that I would be left there, discarded amongst these slack limbs, added to this strange collection.
When we were back in the Solicitor’s car, I asked him to take me home. It was after midnight, and we had lingered so long that I’d become twitchy, my left leg thrumming so badly that the wingless boy put his hand on it and pressed my heel to the floor till I was still.
The Solicitor turned on his heated seats. The sensation made me sleepy. As he drove, he hooked his hand on my inner thigh, pulled me closer to him. It was the first time a man had touched me sexually. His pinkie finger stroked against my balls, and he asked if they’d dropped yet. I rolled my eyes, pretended his question was juvenile, but really I didn’t know what he meant, where did balls drop to, why did he care? As he stroked my balls, he said he would take me home in the morning, east coast to west coast, early enough for school. I turned my face to the window. He said I should stay with him tonight. He said he had a big house.
His house faced out onto blackness. On the distant horizon was a cluster of faint street lights, a small town hunkered on the far side of the firth. The house was on a private road, set back from the water’s edge. It was the type of house where some rooms were always dark, big enough that a family could choose to live only in the rear, choose to face only the sunset. I had seen my mother sigh at houses like this from the top deck of an orange bus. It was the first house I had ever been in that did not have wardrobes, no three-piece set of veneered chipboard, that leaned precariously as the glue loosened in the dowels. This man kept his clothing behind a wall of sliding mirrors. There was nothing in his bedroom but a bed and an armchair and me.
He kissed me for a time, slowed me down, sped me up, told me to cover my teeth with my lips. I had a sense of being taught something important and it made me tense. My mind became needle-sharp, but my body felt muffled, my limbs someone else’s, dislocated from me. I was smiling as he guided me, criticized me. I became eager to please. And he said that was good. Said I could call him Dad—not Daddy, but Dad, like I needed driving to football practice.
After he undressed me, he left me lying on his bed while he went to the bathroom to get ready. He was gone a long time. Long enough that the blood drained from my cock, and I started to feel the chill of the house. At the bay window I cupped my hands around my eyes and stared out at the black sea, but my fingers left a greasy mark that worsened when I tried to wipe it away. I went to the mirrored doors and quietly slid one back in its tracks. It was the kind of detail that would have killed my mother, and I stood there in my faded boxer shorts, wanting to tell her how each shelf was finished with fine beaded woodwork, each edge delicately carved with a Greek key.
When he returned I was sitting on the bed, my knees curled to my chest. He apologized for taking longer than he thought, rubbed his distended belly, and laughed about how we’d eaten too much. He kissed me again, but now he tugged at me insistently, impatiently. He had a small dick and didn’t seem terribly interested in it. He pushed my hand away when I reached for him. He left his own flesh limp.
I was not prepared for the lonely expanse of his back; how he twisted away from me then, left me stranded and staring at that field of white, covered with tufts of hair. It looked like my old school shirt when I petted our dog, before my mother wrapped her hand in Sellotape and pulled the fur from the white cotton. I watched the Solicitor’s taut skin expand over his rib cage and the painful-looking knuckles of his spine. His face was cradled in his hands, and he braced himself on his elbows—it was the same way my mother cried on the carpet in the mornings after a bad blackout, penitent, pitiable. But then the man opened his narrow hips to me, he tilted his meatless buttocks for my pleasure. And all I wanted was to see his forgettable face.
Everything I had gleaned about gay sex was from snippets of the late-night programs that were broadcast after the government watershed: Genet’s prisoners, Derek Jarman’s “Caravaggio,” topless boys dancing in chat-line adverts. I loved the men’s-underwear pages in my mother’s Littlewoods catalogue, but they taught me nothing about sex. I had thought that two men moved in the same way a man and a woman might—like they did on “Dynasty.” I had thought sex was lying together, swooning in another’s arms, kissing as you rocked, fitting together easily.
I watched his rib cage expand with sighed impatience. He reached back and inserted a finger inside himself—pointing the way. I held my left elbow with my right hand, folded my arms to my chest. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to go home. He sighed again, houghed into his hand, and reached back toward me. His cupped palm was a lochan of spit and he smeared it on me, guided me into him.
I was inside him for a time, felt the mad pleasure of his tightness before I panicked and backed away. I slid out quickly, my face must have been ashen. Shouldn’t we be wearing condoms? I asked. I had seen MTV. It was in all the newspapers, even in the North. The man addressed me over the cliff of his shoulder—talked down to me in the same condescending way Mister Hughes explained polynomials and hypotenuses. He said it was all right because I was the one inside him. Then he bucked, presented himself again, and said it didn’t matter anyway. No one could be that unlucky their first time.
I didn’t cum, I didn’t dare, but he did. Eventually, the charm of my inexperience lost its appeal to him. He grew tired of my disjointed pounding; the harder he demanded I thrust, the further I was pushed from him, as my knees kept sliding away on the fine sheets. He turned over and finished himself onto his own stomach. He lay back, hairless legs splayed, his ankles on my shoulders, while I knelt over him as if I were praying.
In the morning, as the sun came over the firth, we had sex again, slower this time. His body buckled under mine, and he held me at the wrists as though he knew I wanted to pull away. I was muted by how little I felt for him, how much I disliked him, and yet I would have done anything he asked.
Afterward I was too intimidated by his matching, fluffy towels to use them. I showered and waited for my body to drip dry. The glare of his white kitchen hurt my eyes. The back wall opened onto his very own garden and as we stood at the counter I watched the bobbing birds, which he referred to as “my birds,” and I wondered then if some people could actually buy blue tits and chaffinches for their own pleasure.
I had my first-ever cup of freshly brewed coffee and pre-sliced fruit for breakfast. I used the teaspoon he provided, and he immediately washed it and set it back next to my cup. I disliked the bitter coffee, so I heaped in more sugar, and again he rose, washed the spoon, dried it, and set it back on my saucer. I started to use the spoon to amuse myself, take sugar I didn’t want, and each time I watched him wash it and return it to my saucer. I wanted to tell my brother. I could never tell my brother. The coffee grew too sweet, I let it get cold.
He gently stroked the back of my hand as he drove me west. I couldn’t bear it. The bright morning sunshine was soon blanketed by the fleecy Glasgow sky. I asked him about his “friends”—who were the young men we had met, how did he know them? He arched one fair eyebrow and said they were “the Chickens.” He’d met them working the Leith waterfront, selling themselves. Then he huffed in disbelief, said it was wild that they did that, considering that some of them weren’t even bent. As the Solicitor stroked my hand, he explained that Wednesday nights were held sacred. “Family night,” the Chickens called it, a time to gather, eat a roast dinner, rest their bodies.
I remember being stuck in traffic, certain I would be late for school as the Solicitor played with the zipper on my blue denims. I thought, Shouldn’t he be at work—wouldn’t he be in trouble for not punching his time card? But as we pulled up before Missus B.’s bedsit it was already midmorning and he was unhurried, unconcerned. As he scowled up at the blackened sandstone, I finally had my chance to squint at the side of his face. I didn’t know any other people lucky enough to own themselves entirely.
I arrived late to school, smelling of another man’s soap. At lunchtime, I barricaded myself in the art department. I hid among the moldering taxidermy and picked orange cheese from a floury white roll. A charm of third-year girls were being held inside for detention—their hell was my harbor. They were making beaded bracelets for boys they fancied, an idea they had bastardized from the American teen-agers on our televisions. They were weaving red, white, and royal blue; proudly sectarian, Protestant colors. Despite the aggressive hues, it was still unmistakably jewelry, and no boy in Glasgow could wear it without fear of swift violence. But the girls seemed happy and were unusually focussed.
All morning I had been listless, more than simply tired from the night before. I tossed my half-eaten lunch in the bin. There was a dull ache in my sharp hip bones, a pain from where I had battered myself against the man for his pleasure. I would use this pain to excuse myself early, I thought, go back to my single room, and sleep before the evening shift. I was sorry I had come to school—it seemed suddenly childish to cling to books. I was a man now. I had a pain in my hips that said so.
Someone had stabbed out the eyes of the taxidermized grouse. The jewellers on the other side of the classroom had their heads bowed, their hushed talk was full of confession, punctuated with filthy shrieks. They had abandoned their beads and were decorating one another’s arms with blue Biro ink, gouging the names of their beloveds into their flesh. Soon their forearms resembled those of merchant seamen. I used my knuckle to push my glasses up my long nose, and watched them ink themselves for love. I was jealous.
As I had climbed out of the German car, the Solicitor asked me what I would say if people asked where I had been last night and I had shrugged. I laid my head on the desk and thought about all the unanswered lonely hearts. The Solicitor had shoved in line, he had spoiled them for me.
I watched the girls blowing on their forearms, drying the ink before they rolled their shirtsleeves back in place. I could see that they had made a mess of it. That they had misspelled several names. But what did it matter? They would lick at the names they didn’t want to wear. It would all wash away.
As I watched the girls, I thought about the crofter’s son, the young Highlander who wrote as though he were unworthy of an answer. I had never replied to his letter. His sadness seemed to multiply my own. I had never been able to face it.
It was heartless of me. I scalded with fresh shame and sat for a long time coating my left palm in layers of craft glue. Eventually, I sat up straight at the vandalized desk. I tore a page from my homework book and pushed the pink nib down on my multi-selector pen.
“Hallo, Gregor,” I wrote, without knowing what might come next. “Sorry I haven’t written sooner. I’ll tell youse why later. But first, tell us more about your mountain. Can you climb over it? What’s the nicest thing you can see from the top?” ♦
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