Out of the Woods - 5. Haircut

The house made me feel clumsy and slow. It made my mask slip. With it gone, I felt lighter and happier and so much more alive—no longer a slug on the ground but high above now, a fierce and soaring eagle. I’d grasp that slug in my talons and joyfully rip it apart; the entrails I’d drop far away from me in the ocean or over the great boughs of a forest, and I’d never see them again.

Until the next time I was stupid enough to bring someone home.

I didn’t stay with Chris long. I found, as I always did, that I no longer knew how to act around him now that he knew something personal about me; it was never anything concrete or noticeable but I could feel that faint, familiar pressure at the back of my head, like a small child tugging insistently at the fabric of my thoughts. I wanted to be free of it, to do whatever I wanted now that I was happily out of the house, and Chris was weighing me down.

I made my excuses and left.

But where should I go? I knew where I wanted to go, of course. I wanted to sit on his bed, immersed in him just as Chris had been immersed in me only half an hour before; I wanted to listen to him talk about the upcoming rugby game, inviting me to watch it with him, or just sit beside him as we watched Kill Bill, again. I wanted to have that same discussion with him we always had when we watched it, on the precise, point-by-point reasons for the obscene hotness of Uma Thurman. I wanted to sit beside him on the sofa, my thigh touching his, my hand almost touching his. I wanted to watch him through the corner of my eye as he watched Uma Thurman get sweaty and covered in blood.

But I couldn’t, of course. We had just had a dangerously intimate discussion—one that I wasn’t prepared for.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t ever discuss anything other than smalltalk with people: it was more that there had to be a script when it came to the personal details. There had to be a censor of sorts, pre-prepared by me beforehand. They could come close, so long as they went exactly where I wanted them to go.

I had always struggled to do that with Tom.

And so I sat in the car, strumming my fingers against the steering wheel, wondering what he was doing. When he texted me, I wasn’t all that surprised.

‘You are cordially invited to dinner. Arsehole. X’

I smiled. Of course I was invited to dinner. I texted Victoria so that she could tell our parents not to expect me, and before long I was stood on their doorstep, being greeted by an absurdly affectionate Mrs Harding.

‘Hello, Mrs Harding.’

‘Elijah, darling, come in!’ She hugged me and then pulled back, frowning suddenly. ‘Call me Claire.’

She did that every now and then, and I always agreed and then reverted immediately to ‘Mrs Harding’. If I didn’t it wouldn’t be all that long before she came to the mistaken conclusion that she had some sort of right to enquire about my feelings and emotional wellbeing. As it was the Hardings had some serious boundary issues.

Parents are all so predictable.

She led me in to the kitchen, chattering inanely, asking me about school and telling me how tired I looked. ‘It must have been a late night for you both,’ she said, as she slipped on her oven gloves. She checked the fish pie before turning to me and analysing the dark circles under my eyes. ‘What time did the two of you get to bed last night, Elijah? Chris is such a bad influence—I hope you weren’t playing games all night.’

Playing games? What were we, pre-school?

‘It wasn’t that late,’ I said solemnly. ‘We watched a film when we got back from the party, and then we went straight to bed.’

And not a drop of alcohol in sight.

‘You do look very tired, darling. Are you sleeping well?’

‘I’m sleeping fine, Mrs Harding. I’ve been blessed with a sickly complexion, that’s all.’

She laughed. ‘Sickly complexion,’ she snorted, kissing my cheek fondly. ‘There’s nothing wrong with your complexion—you’re like a fallen angel.’ She handed me a glass of water. ‘Now go tell Tom that dinner will be ready at seven.’

And there was that excitement, as I climbed the stairs; and I felt it growing as I walked the corridor; and I placed my hands on his door, knowing what lay beyond it, knowing that, for some reason, I felt more at home in that soon-to-be-revealed space than my own home—knowing that, in his room, I found that I was a brighter person, and happier, and ready to drift away.

‘I can hear you, you know,’ he teased through the door.

I kicked it open.

‘If your footprint is on the door you’ll wash it. I’ll make you—don’t think I won’t. I’ll fill up the bucket myself, and I’ll get out a tiny swimsuit and make you wear it. I’ll invite as many weird old men as I can find to leer at you.’

I grinned. ‘Sounds kinky.’

I stood in the doorway, watching as our smiles faded for a moment. I cleared my throat.

‘Listen, Tom—’

He patted the bed beside him and stared at me pointedly until I moved.

He was always doing that; he’d force intimacy on me, pull me out of my comfort zone until I had no other choice than to be real with him. I shifted onto the bed sheepishly and he slung an arm around my shoulder.

‘No, it’s fine,’ he said. ‘It’s really fine.’

‘No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t fine at all. You talked about her all night before the party. It was shit of me to make a move when I knew you wanted her.’

He laughed. ‘Seriously, Laurence, it’s okay. Who was I kidding, anyway? I was never going to get with her—it wouldn’t be fair for you to avoid every girl I told you I fancied.’

I shook my head. Who was I kidding, anyway? Tom was the most attractive human being I’d ever seen. Even taking into account his unfortunate, crippling awkwardness in public, his unbearable goodness seemed to glow through his pores, embellishing his chiselled features and his green eyes and his perfectly sculpted abdominals. Tom could have any girl that he wanted.

Tom could have me any time he wanted.

‘Why do you do that?’ I said.

He frowned. ‘Do what?’

‘You’re fit. You know that, right? I mean, I’m just saying, you’re one of the hottest guys in school. It’s weird. Why do you always pretend you’re a he-troll?’

He blushed a deep, angry crimson. He took his arm off my shoulder. ‘I’m not pretending. It’s just—I just…’

He sighed.

He wasn’t pretending, I knew. He didn’t know how to pretend. Sometimes I would be struck by the sheer, overwhelming number of the differences between us, and how, really, we had very little in common—Tom did not know how to pretend where I pretended every day, every moment that I wasn’t sleeping. If he knew how to pretend he would never have been so awkward.

He was frowning minutely, his gaze down at his feet on the bed, his hands picking at his socks like a child. He had great hands—long fingered but masculine, bigger than mine but not ape-like. Everything about him was well-formed and perfect.

He was struggling with something, struggling to force something into coherence and out of his mouth. I could see it, a chaotic bundle of words, clinging to the tip of his tongue. I wanted to touch him so badly; to reach forward and place a hand on his torso, under his old worn T-shirt, and gently kiss his lips. I wanted to tell him that it would be okay, that he could say anything he wanted to me; that he never had to worry about me judging him.

I could never judge him.

He turned to me finally, frowning, and I knew that he’d given up the struggle.

‘What movie do you want to watch? We’ve got an hour or so until dinner.’

He pulled out The Royal Tenenbaums. He climbed onto the bed again and put his arm round me, pulling me into a quick hug and kissing the side of my head. ‘Don’t be such a twat all the time, okay?’ he said into my dark curls, fondly; and I shivered.

‘Okay.’

***

At seven o’clock Mr Harding appeared at the bedroom door. He directed a manly nod at me and informed us we were to make our way down for dinner.

‘Elijah,’ said Mrs Harding with a gentle hand on my shoulder, ‘could you be a dear and bring in the salad?’

‘Of course.’

‘And the ketchup,’ said Tom with a smile. ‘In the fridge.’ He puffed up his chest in his best Mr Harding impression, and said in a voice like God if God were a Yorkshireman, ‘There’s a good lad.’

Mr Harding laughed, a deep, rumbling thing, and Mrs Harding smiled. They said grace.

‘So,’ he said. ‘We never heard what happened with that Anna girl, son.’ He grinned. ‘Got any news for us?’

Tom didn’t even look up from his plate; his fork continued on its way to his mouth without a moment’s hesitation. He chewed and swallowed, and replied. ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘We barely even saw her.’

Mr Harding chuckled. ‘There’s plenty of fish in the sea.’ He winked at his wife, who was scowling.

‘They’re too young for all that—I’m too young for that. Don’t encourage them.’

Them. As if I was their child too.

A hurried glance and a momentary pause. And then—

‘What about you, Elijah? Anyone in your life we should know about?’

Inwardly I sighed. Anyone they should know about? I didn’t even tell my parents about my personal life—there was no way in hell I’d cheerfully discuss it with a pair of complete strangers. I shook my head, shovelled food into my mouth, and swallowed. ‘Nope. You know me Mr Harding. Too busy focusing on my studies.’

Tom snorted. ‘What studies, exactly?’

I glared at him. ‘Oh, you know. The ones that I beat you in. Every day.’

He laughed, his fork in the air. ‘Only because I let you.’

‘You sure about that?’

‘Sure as eggs is eggs.’

‘Sure as eggs is eggs?’

‘Surer than that, actually. Sometimes rocks look like eggs.’

Mr Harding said nothing but he watched me during our little interplay, chewing slowly and methodically. He was the sort of man who saw no need to rush things; he worked with all the inevitability of a glacier. He cut his food carefully, solidly, and he brought it up to his mouth with the same monumental quality that he did all other things—perhaps he wouldn’t say anything today, but he may well tomorrow. He would, he just would do it when he judged the timing to be right.

I hated that about him. How were you meant to counter when you had no idea when the attack would come?

‘What about that girl—Sophie?’ asked Mrs Harding.

The lack of subtlety was almost insulting. I shot a fierce glance at Tom, who blushed.

‘I wasn’t aware you knew about Sophie, Mrs Harding.’

She had the decency, at least, to look sheepish. ‘No, no, well—I don’t really know all that much except what Tom has told me… Mentioned, more like. Tom may have mentioned her name, once or twice.’ She placed fish pie onto her fork as if her life and the life of her family depended on it. ‘Do you like her?’

I reached for my drink. ‘She’s very nice.’

Tom helped himself to salad. ‘She’s very fit,’ he said bluntly.

Mrs Harding put down her utensils with a sharp clatter. ‘Tom! What have I taught you about objectifying women?’

He grimaced. ‘I’m not objectifying her. I’m just saying Sophie is very attractive. If I told you Elijah was fit you wouldn’t tell me I was objectifying him.’

Mr Harding was frowning. Slowly, he said, ‘If you told us Elijah was fit, son, I think we’d have other things to worry about.’

Huh.

The sounds of the utensils were getting on my nerves. All about me was tapping and clattering, jarring and scraping and shovelling. The noise of them chewing seemed too loud. I felt a headache growing.

I wondered, briefly, if I could rub my temples without them growing alarmed. I wondered if they would notice if I grew quiet. Fish pie is such a cloying, dense meal; I could feel it sliding slowly downwards, pulled by gravity and peristalsis and all manner of mechanical processes, to sit heavily in my stomach. I wondered how long I would have to throw it back up before I absorbed the calories. I wondered if they would hear from the bathroom.

I was broken out of my reverie by Mrs Harding laying a hand over mine.

‘Elijah, darling?’

‘Hmm?’

The sounds of cutlery had died.

‘Elijah, are you okay?’

Ugh. They were all so nice that they had stopped their eating, out of nothing more than concern, to enquire as to my wellbeing.

I generally dislike nice people on principle—there’s something, I’ve often thought, so pathetic about them. Even the word nice sounds rather weedy and limp. I would probably have described Jamie, so terrified that he cannot easily fasten the buttons on his shirt, as nice.

Sometimes I found myself feeling uncomfortable around the Hardings. They never noticed, of course, but sometimes I found myself thinking of how strange it was that they welcomed me into their home when I was so completely and utterly different from them. They were just such good people. Sometimes I’d sit there, at their dining table with them, and find myself resenting them for it. They didn’t treat me like I was some charity case, I knew—and if anything it should have been the other way round because nice people are pathetic, not me. I should have been the one to pity them—I was not pitiable. But sometimes, around them, I felt like I was, and I hated that feeling.

They were looking at me so fondly.

I smiled. ‘I’m fine. Just feeling a little off.’

I itched to leave. I couldn’t focus on my food, or on the conversation. I knew that, if I grew any more agitated, they’d begin to worry—and if they noticed all I’d be doing was confirming their suspicions. And I was not heading for a breakdown.

I stood up and made my way to the bathroom. I sat upon the seat and closed my eyes. They were just so unbearably good.

God, how I ached to get drunk.

I stared at the toilet and decided that I couldn’t possibly throw up without them hearing. Besides, vomiting is bad for your teeth, and I’d imagine the smell of it lingering about me for hours until I managed a shower. Even if I could feel the fish pie, a cancerous lump inside of me that I would soon absorb into myself, the physical manifestation of everything wrong and impure in the world—even if I longed to exorcise myself of it, even if only to prove that I could, it wasn’t worth it. I was proud of the fact that I had no fillings in my teeth: developing an eating disorder would quickly and efficiently put pay to that.

And there’s just something so pathetic about eating disorders, anyway.

I texted Tom from the bathroom and by the time I’d returned to the table he had told his parents we were going out tonight.

‘Tonight?’ said Mrs Harding in a worried tone. ‘But I thought Elijah felt unwell? And tonight’s a Thursday. Why don’t you go out tomorrow night? You’re welcome to stay here, Elijah.’

Tom shook his head. ‘We won’t be out for long, we’re just going to catch a movie or something. We’ll come straight back, I promise.’

I smiled. ‘I feel much better, Mrs Harding. It was the heat.’

‘Well, okay…’

Mr Harding said nothing.

We put on our coats and left; we didn’t take the car. We were only going across the road to Toby’s house, the older son of Tom’s neighbours who I’d arranged to occasionally sell us his alcohol. From there we’d head to the park or something.

‘So, what was that all about?’

I frowned. ‘What?’

‘You know what. That little freak out at the table.’

‘I did not freak out at the table.’

He snorted. ‘Okay.’

We walked in silence to Toby’s, picked up a few beers, and began walking again. Something about the rhythmic passage of the streetlights overhead cleared my head.

‘Do you think they noticed?’

He laughed. ‘A little.’

‘But I wasn’t that bad. It was just a little freak out.’

He slung an arm round me to make sure I couldn’t get away; I tensed. ‘Why did you freak out at all?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I think you do.’

‘I said, I don’t know.’

‘You did say that. But you’re lying.’

A pause.

Should I? Surely not. And yet…

I sighed. ‘I need a haircut.’

He didn’t understand the significance of it. He thought I was changing the subject; he sighed and removed his arm, stepping away from me to ensure that I hadn’t somehow managed to miss his disappointment. He didn’t understand that I was telling him something important, and I couldn’t blame him, after all—why should he ever connect the two? What rational person has multiple bad days, frayed nerves, a pattern of self-destructive thoughts and a string of freak-outs simply because they know that, at some point in the near future, they need a haircut?

And I’d only told him because I knew he wouldn’t understand. I’d only told him because I knew, and got a thrill out of it, that he wouldn’t take me seriously—that somehow I was deceiving him whilst at the same time telling him the truth.

‘You know,’ he said suddenly, ‘I really shouldn’t have let you leave if you weren’t going to tell me what the matter was.’

‘It’s too late now.’

‘No. We could still go back.’

I rolled my eyes.

‘Why are you pushing this? I’m having a bad day. Shut the fuck up and let’s just get drunk already.’

‘I’m not getting drunk, and neither are you. We’ve got school tomorrow and we were drunk yesterday.’

We did get drunk. Not horribly, catatonically drunk, but drunk nonetheless. We sat in the copse, not far from the now quiet road, obscured by a thin veil of trees; we sat and shivered and drank until our shivering stopped.

We drank until Tom forgot about my odd behaviour at the dinner table and until I was able to pretend it had never happened. I always loved getting drunk together, just the two of us—I always loved getting drunk with Tom more than anyone else because I loved to watch him transform, slowly, as the flush reached his cheeks, into this wild, cheerful, uninhibited thing. He laughed so freely when he was alone with me anyway but he laughed constantly when we were drunk—and it was this gorgeous, pathetic little giggle, not his usual throaty chuckle.

God, he was gorgeous. He was so naturally full of nervous inhibitions but they all fell away with alcohol. When he got drunk he got free.

We talked such crap. We talked about everything and nothing at all, meaningless stuff. I loved every precious minute of it. At one point it started to rain, heavily, and within moments we were soaked through and freezing; but it was hilarious. Under the trees the sound grew to a thunderous roaring as the droplets slapped the dying leaves above and pummelled the ground; and suddenly we were surrounded by leaves, slick and falling.

‘It’s like being in the jungle,’ said Tom with a wide and joyful smile.

I rolled my eyes. It wasn’t anything like being in a jungle. It was bloody freezing. But I was only rolling my eyes because I was meant to—really I just wanted to kiss him.

He turned to me suddenly, his lips poised to speak. The lamplight played off his cheekbones and the side of his nose but his expression was perfectly serious. ‘Elijah…’

He stopped.

He was trying to say something, something important. Despite myself, I felt my heart beat faster. There was no way, I knew—there was no way. I had resigned myself to that fact years ago. Nothing ever came from fancying your straight best friend.

And yet… He was frowning, small frowns; they flittered across his face as he tried to say it. They flittered like moonlight over the ocean. As he tried to summon the courage—as he tried to consider, through the heavy veil of alcohol, whether or not he should say it at all, whether it was a good idea—he was frowning. His free palm opened and closed helplessly and the one around the beer bottle clenched and unclenched about the rim. Say it, I thought, helplessly; I imagined forcing his mouth open with a hand, forcing my way in, forcing until his jaw cracked and reaching down far enough to grasp the words where they hid at the back of his throat.

‘Elijah,’ he began again, and shook his head.

He couldn’t be about to say what I hoped he’d say—he couldn’t. Tom was horribly straight; he wasn’t even sexually ambiguous, not even curious, not even slightly interested. He was so straight that I don’t think it had ever occurred to him that there might be another way to be.

And yet my pulse was racing; my head span from other things than drunkenness. I hoped, even though I’d forced myself not to hope for so long; I was too hopeful to be angry at myself for my own pathetic reaction.

He shook his head.

‘Oh, for god’s sake just say it already!’

He blinked. ‘I really like Sophie.’

Ah.

A sensation worked its way up through my body; it wasn’t unexpected, but I almost didn’t recognise it as a sob. In my stupor I was still bitter, still bitter and suddenly lonely and battered as if by a gale; I found myself thinking, stupidly, Sophie who?

And then—Oh. Sophie. Evidence, I supposed, for how little she meant to me.

I already knew that. He’d never hidden his interest in her.

‘It’s okay,’ he was saying, ‘I—I know she’s off limits. Not that I could, anyway—not when she’s got you. I know that it doesn’t mean anything… And it doesn’t mean anything, nothing at all, okay? It’s okay. I just—I just wanted you to know. You deserve to know. You’re my best friend, and I would never do anything…’

I deserved to know. Did that mean he deserved to know about how I felt? Did that mean I should feel obliged to tell him that I loved him?

Fancied him—I did not love him. I didn’t love people, period.

He was still talking, filling the spaces I made with nonsense and repetitions. I let him. I needed a moment to beat and squeeze the thoughts in my head into more appropriate forms.

‘It’s fine,’ I said; and I was so proud of myself that it sounded sincere.

More than that—I was triumphant. I was triumphant that it didn’t matter what I felt, or what I thought—I had complete control.

‘It’s fine, don’t worry about it. It’s understandable—Sophie’s hot, right? It’s fine.’

I watched a smile spread over his face, languidly because of the alcohol, like oil over water. I watched him deflate as he exhaled his nerves; they blew away with the steaming billows of his breath. ‘It doesn’t change anything,’ he said.

‘It doesn’t change anything,’ I agreed.

He squeezed my shoulder. ‘You’re the best, Elli.’

Elli. He rarely called me that. I was glad of it—whenever he did I felt like I’d burst into tears.

***

Another broken night’s sleep. I woke the next day in a fog, to a faint sound that whispered at me from downstairs. It dragged me to waking. There was that feeling, a raw, grating in the depth of my stomach, a raw, grating in the back of my mind. If it had a taste it would be metallic and sour, and somehow jarring; it tugged somewhere, insistently, amorphous, and there was a whiff about it of nausea. I found myself nervous and straining, as I always did, to hear what it was she was saying.

So many years of my childhood were spent with my ear to my closed door, straining to hear what she said about me, that the slightest distant murmur of her voice could throw me awake.

Mother, speaking, somewhere downstairs.

Why hadn’t I taken Tom up on his offer to sleep over?

I groaned and glanced at the clock: a quarter to six, as it was every day. I turned over and tried to ignore her. The same with a quarter to eight. Half an hour until school and I turned over and tried to drift back to sleep.

At eight o’clock, when the house had grown quiet again, I got up and showered. I considered bunking off—even though I was not hungover, I was meant to be, technically, which was almost enough of an excuse. Each month I would give myself one day in which I would decide, never planned, to go somewhere else instead of school. Hoarwood House, Newsham Park, a wander down the winding streets of York… The school’s attendance policy usually required some sort of written letter—not necessarily from a parent, now that I was a sixth former—but their administration was so terrible they weren’t capable of mustering the organisational skills required for following up my absences.

In the end I decided to go to school. It was a Friday, after all.

I wondered if Tom would expect us to talk about yesterday’s revelation.

How stupid I was for ever worrying about Anna!

But Tom wasn’t at school that day, and so I didn’t go to maths. Mr Wilton was too incompetent to ever report me for it—why make an enemy of the quieter students when there are a horde of enemies, of nasty little monsters, waiting for you at the back of the classroom? Maths was a wicked, wicked subject, anyway—it hated me. It hated me, and I hated it, because I hated anything that defied my sense of control and the supremacy of my own cleverness.

I spent that hour in the art department; the sixth formers’ art room was almost empty. It was filled with tiny, three-walled booths, each of those walls covered with art of varying quality. It was almost comical: the art was terrible at the left, where Harry Stanley and his bad-boy, jock-dropout friends loitered; and it was brilliant at the right, where the sensitive, quiet and alternative boys huddled together as if for structural support.

At first I thought it was empty and I stood there at the entrance, inhaling that familiar smell, a melody of dust and turpentine and Indian ink. There was a quality to the light in the room was the so calming and utterly peaceful: without the boisterous banter of Harry Stanley’s friends it was hard to imagine that the place would allow such a noise within its walls.

But then I heard a lone, invisible figure shift in his seat, and I knew without having to move that it was Jamie. Who else would spend his free periods hidden away where nobody could find him?

‘Hey,’ I said into the hazy air. I heard Jamie jump. I wandered over to find his booth.

He was pretty good at art, in fact—I couldn’t say I was all that surprised. Fingers like his must have been good at all manner of things.

He looked up at me with his wide, fawn-like eyes, his fingers clutching the pencil until his knuckles went white. A tongue flickered at his bottom lip, and he said, tentatively, ‘Hey.’

‘You’ve got a free now?’

‘Yes.’

I nodded. I weighed briefly the benefits and drawbacks of moving to my own booth before instigating a conversation with him—would I be able to get more out of him if he was lulled by the fact that he couldn’t see me? Or would I need to be there, to trap him under my gaze, if I were to force anything out of his mouth?

I couldn’t be bothered to expend that much energy. I went and sat at my booth.

God, I was having a bad day.

‘So how did it go with your sushi date?’

I felt him freeze up instantly. I didn’t even need to turn around to see how tense his back had grown. ‘Fine,’ he said, after a long moment of silence to reconfirm we were the only ones there.

A pause. And then—

‘I haven’t seen him again.’

I almost left it there; sometimes, silence is all that’s required to make them talk.

Make a space, and wait for them to stumble into it.

But not Jamie. If Jamie had his way Jamie would have said nothing for all eternity.

‘It’s a shame,’ I said. ‘He seemed nice.’

Nothing.

‘I was wondering about something. I thought you might, initially, but I’ve changed my mind—I don’t think you do after all.’ I picked up a piece of charcoal and began to draw. ‘When you first arrived you kept looking at me, over and over; it was annoying, really, because every time I caught you you’d look away, but too slowly. You were pretty obvious about it, actually. That was how I knew you were gay before I’d even spoken to you. I knew you were gay long before I saw you at the sushi bar.’

He sat perfectly still.

‘So at first I thought you might, but now I think you don’t. You don’t, do you?’

I turned around to watch his back knowing that, from the perfect stillness of it, he knew what I was asking, and that he’d never turn to meet me. ‘You don’t fancy me.’

Nothing; and then, slowly, he shook his head.

I wasn’t surprised. Until he got over whatever crippling fear held him Jamie would always fall for a very distinct type—a type that I would never be. It was, I knew, a form of rejection, and even though I had no interest in him at all I knew that normally I would have been crippled by it, crippled and reeling and utterly non-functional until I had rationalised and suppressed it and shoved it away.

Generally my tactic is thus: I’m a type. I may not be the flamboyant, giggling, girlish and embellished type like Will Wright but I am, nevertheless, a delicate-looking guy. People may call me handsome just as they may call me hot, but they are still, if not mistaken, then using a misleading term—I’ll never be handsome in the all-American, strapping way that Tom is. My bones, I know, are so fragile that my barely-pubescent cousins can easily wrap their fingers around my wrists. Not that I’ve seen them in years.

It doesn’t bother me; I quite like it. I’ve found that it rarely makes a difference with girls—girls, more than gay boys, seem to have difficulty differentiating between the physically and sexually attractive in the male sex. But with boys…

Jamie would never like me because Jamie, in an ideal world, would pick Harry Stanley as his lover. Harry, who could fuck him to within an inch of his existence—Harry, who could protect him and keep him safe. Since it looks like, for all intents and purposes, a particularly strong wind might well blow me over, no guy is going to look to me for protection. It’s the stronger guys that tend to find me attractive.

Even so, I still felt that unease; that slow, turning, nauseous feeling in my stomach. The only thing preventing me from taking his rejection badly was the fact that I could tell myself—and know it to be true—that Jamie had been watching me all through that first art lesson because, even though he didn’t find me sexually attractive, he still could not help but acknowledge that I was unusually physically attractive.

I still had to tell myself that it didn’t matter, that I didn’t care—that I didn’t even like Jamie as a person, never mind as a body.

I pushed it all far away from me; I was having a bad day, I told myself. I was having a bad day. It was fine—bad days happened. Perhaps I’d get my hair cut that evening, and everything would get better.

But Jamie wouldn’t get better so easily, though—not for a long time. I watched him without really realising that I was doing so, simply because I faced his direction; gradually my vision began to shift as I stopped looking inwards; gradually things began to sharpen, movements began to be noted, stillness began to be noted. I was watching his back as it did nothing, nothing at all—the dust moved within the hazy shafts of light, seeming almost to spell out words; papers taped onto booth walls murmured in the faint eddying movements of the air; out of the window trees swayed and clouds drifted, birds moved across the pale sky.

But Jamie was still very still.

What had happened to him? What had he done—what had someone else done to him—to make him be that way? I didn’t believe anyone really escaped their past perfectly, that anyone lived perfectly in their present, in no way compromised by their own little history, but Jamie’s was such a huge part of his every moment that I couldn’t help but wonder what it was.

I couldn’t help but wonder why no one had tried to fix him yet.

Because people love to fix people—they love it. There’s nothing quite so rewarding as that feeling, that delicious happy warmth that a person gets when they’ve fixed someone.

It’s selfish really, because it’s not about the victim at all. It’s about self-validation.

I couldn’t be bothered with it.

Besides, grandpa was coming over later.

***

And there he was, sitting at the kitchen table: the man in the black and white photograph. You’d never know that he was a bastard just by looking at him—he was such a sad thing, broken and crippled and sagging.

I’d always been quite fond of him.

His face broke into a smile when he saw me, and he looked so happy. I leaned down to kiss his cheek and he said, ‘There’s my Elijah. There’s my beautiful boy.’

It was important to him that, of all of his grandchildren, I was the most attractive—it was why I was his favourite. It never mattered how I fared in exams, or what achievements I collected in life, because all he ever congratulated me on was my face.

I sat next to him at the table and told him that I would be applying to universities in the next few weeks—Oxford, Edinburgh, Durham, UCL, St Andrews: the best in the country. By way of reply, he told me I was gorgeous.

Victoria came and went, claiming homework. Mum stayed with us at the kitchen table. She said very little throughout the exchange but I could hear her grinding her teeth, and I could hear the profanities she whispered at him in her head—she hated her father. One of the reasons I had never gotten on well with my mother was because of the principle of it: I could not be her favourite on principle, because I was the favourite of all of her relatives.

There was this game that I used to play with them. I’d pit them against each other just to watch them fight. It was great—I loved it. Sadly, grandpa wasn’t up to it anymore.

But it was so easy. All I need do was turn to grandpa, all innocence and smiles, and suggest that he stay for dinner.

“We haven’t anything planned yet,” I’d say, smiling apologetically. “But I’m sure that dad will rustle something up…”

And I’d wait. One. Two. Three. Four.

Generally, I wouldn’t have to wait more than five.

And he would turn to my mother. Furious.

“What kind of wife are you being—what kind of mother? What kind of example are you setting for your children when your husband returns from work only to start working here?”

And mum would be screaming, blotchy and red, too angry to sit down. She would stand over him with her snarl and her contorted face, and even though they were arguing about my mother’s lack of role within the traditional domestic sphere they weren’t really arguing about that, not really: really my mother was screaming because my grandfather had screamed, constantly, when my mother was young; because he had been volatile and aggressive and his children had been terrified of him, and because my mother had been smothered, never allowed a life, and too meek to argue back then. ‘You were a crap father,’ she was saying; ‘You were a crap father and I hated you.’

And he wasn’t really shouting about my mother’s lacklustre culinary skills either: really, he was saying, ‘I was angry. I was angry because my life hadn’t turned out how I’d hoped. And my children have made me sorry for it a thousand times over.’

I would generally leave them to it. It was only fun for so long. They’d forget about my role in it completely; I would wander off to my room, still absently listening; knowing that, in my own way, I was making them pay.

But, since grandma had died, he hadn’t been anywhere near as inclined to take the bait. In fact he had grown dull.

Unable to stand my mother’s angry glare, I made my way up to my room.

I stood before the mirror; on a whim I stripped down to my underwear. It was a stalling tactic, I knew: without my top I’d be more likely to focus on my body than my face. I’d move onto my face eventually, of course, but the hope was that by the time I did I’d have mustered more control over myself.

Slender. Long and slender. People are always shocked when I remind them that I am, in fact, almost exactly six foot. My bones are thin and fragile, the curve of my collarbone pronounced and delicate, the lines of my shoulders graceful. The hint of pectorals, the hint of abdominals, a fine dusting of soft hair on my chest, a thin trail of it on my torso, leading downwards to that secret V-shaped crease, partly covered by the line of my underwear. The tight, supple muscles in my arms. Pale skin without colour, translucent enough that the blue veins could be traced on my shoulder and at my groin. Soft, soft skin, draped over muscle and ribs. I studied it all as long as I could but I’d never been so preoccupied by my body as I was my face—it was covered, you see, perpetually hidden behind clothes.

My eyes travelled up from my navel of their own accord, pulled inevitably as if by a perversion of gravity. Along the curves of my collarbone, up the lines of my neck.

I looked pale. That was fine—I didn’t mind that so much. I always looked pale beyond September. I tan well during the summer but it quickly fades to a sallow, vaguely olive tone, almost translucent—Victoria has it too, and hates it, but it never really bothered me. Tired and ill tend to suit me.

But after last night’s sleep my eyes looked swollen, the tender, purple crescent appearing bruised and puffy. Beneath the lilac skin a tracery of green veins could be seen, fragile and delicate. I had been biting my lips all day, leaving them red and raw—and I had been pulling off skin layers of skin as I went, absently, and in the mirror my lips glared now accusingly back at me, butchered, bloody and crusted and chapped.

It wasn’t necessarily a bad look. I never minded looking vulnerable—vulnerable was attractive and endearing—but this was too specific, as if it had been written on my skin. I looked sad and lonely.

I spent my life trying to hide those things, and my face goes and betrays me.

My handsome face. Was I handsome? Was I even as beautiful as I thought? Sometimes I would look at myself, examine the shape of my lips and the contours of my cheekbones until they seemed to lose all meaning, reduced to displaced floating forms, and suddenly I’d find myself unable to find anything attractive about them at all. I’d remember the countless times I’d been told—the countless times I’d been called beautiful, gorgeous, handsome, the words issuing in my mind from various headless mouths, their faces irrelevant—and I’d feel utterly sick. Sometimes I’d feel strongly that they were wrong—that somehow, everyone was wrong, that I was in fact secretly very plain, that somehow, they’d all just missed it. How could they be so wrong?

Was that possible? Could they all be mistaken about me?

Once I used to be scared of everything, and the only time I ever felt safe was when I caught a glimpse of my face in the mirror.

I couldn’t even look at my hair—I decided right then that I would cut it that afternoon. That, even though I hated her, my mother was right. I’d drive into town and cut it because, if I did and I liked the result, then the fog I was in would dissipate. The unease of the last few days would disappear. Everything would get better again for about a month or so.

I was climbing into the car when Sophie rang, asking whether I wanted to meet up.

I almost said no outright.

After all, the barber’s was just something that I had to do on my own and I knew that having her there, though a vaguely cute, date-ish sort of thing to do for a normal person, was guaranteed to end in disaster for me.

I stood, phone to my ear, one leg in the car; I couldn’t think. I knew, vaguely, that there was a decision to be made—to be made immediately because Sophie was still on the phone, still babbling inanely in my ear. But I couldn’t force any semblance of order on the tumbling chaos of words in my head. Things seemed to slow down to that languid, timeless quality of nightmares.

What should I do?

What to do, what to do, what to do, what should I do?

What should I do?

‘Elijah!’

‘What?’

‘Are you coming or not?’

Fuck. ‘Of course I’m coming.’

I ran back inside and fetched a spare top, flung it into the passenger’s seat of my car, and agreed I’d go to the barber’s first and then drive straight to Sophie’s, wash my hair and change there, and then we’d go out.

Provided, of course, I didn’t have a miniature breakdown at the sight of my newly lopped locks. If that should happen, I’d feign illness and worry about the fallout later.

I tended to alternate between many different barbers because I found that, whether or not my last cut was a good one, the memory of the whole ordeal was still too raw after only a couple of months for me to just walk casually back in again. So I had a vague circuit of about six different barbers, none of whom ever remembered me because I frequented them so infrequently.

Once I was there I could never decide what was worse: having to wait behind a small queue of people who got there first, or finding the place empty and being told, as if it was a good thing, that I could step right up. Did I want time to prepare myself, or would I rather go all in guns blazing? Jump right in at the deep end? Because sitting in a chair to one side, trying to read a very old magazine without actually touching it because it seemed to have somehow…absorbed hair, or something, from the atmosphere, as if via osmosis—sitting there was a terrifying thing for me. I found it difficult to believe it wasn’t a terrifying thing for everyone. Watching someone else get their hair chopped off, knowing you’re next… It was like watching someone else get their head chopped off, knowing you’re next.

When people touched my head it made me want to throw up.

But walking right in and sitting down in that chair, the chair by the mirror, where you are ritualistically prepared with a black gown and a towel round your neck, and your hair sprayed by an ominous bottle—apparently only water—and the scissors, looming above you, and the electric razor, staring at you from its place on the counter, and the mirror…

Well, that had to be worse, right?

I left the barber’s in a daze and wandered back to my car.