58 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020
to use something I’ve already paid for.”
Perhaps if he had said anything but
this I would have felt kinder toward
him. But I felt nothing for this English-
man. I sensed my father’s face settling
over my own. I was surely glowering.
I am not a prude. I have gone with
men when the opportunity came up—
because on the island the opportunity
so rarely did. I have allowed minicab
drivers to put their mouths on me when
I pretended not to have the fare. I once
fucked a lorry driver on the Barra ferry
even though it was bitterly cold in the
back of his refrigerated truck, and it
stunk of thawing cod. A creeler’s son
from Uist would lie with me on the
Sabbath, but only if I wore my sister’s
jumper, and pulled it up over my face
as though I’d been caught undressing.
I could stomach feeling dominated,
powerless in a sexual situation—but I
didn’t like to feel bought. I didn’t want
to feel owned.
William picked up the album with
a sigh. Then he rotated it once, flipped
it, and opened it to the back page. He
handed it to me. The quality of the pho-
tographs was different here but it was
certainly all the same young men (like
a game of Snap, I could match them to
the boys in the front). At the back the
photographs were all Polaroids, liberated
from the need for a chemist to develop
them. The young men were naked now.
They were kneeling or spread-eagled
on the bed—surprisingly submissive
poses for boys who looked like they car-
ried shanking knives. There
were a great number of
them on their backs, their
slender legs above their
heads, holding their feet in
the hook of their hands, not
unlike the way babies rock
themselves for comfort.
It was the color I noticed
first; how the untouched al-
abaster of their skin was
washed out by the cheap
flash, how their dark eyes sparkled up
at you. This pure whiteness was some-
how tainted by the pinkish-brownish
vein that runs from arsehole to scrotum.
The scowling boys were all smiling
as if he had commanded them to, but
smiling all the same. They were beau-
tiful. I felt myself start to swell. I wished
William weren’t watching me so.
William noticed the change in me.
He got up and stood beside me and
tapped a Polaroid. The young man was
lurid with a spray tan, the outline of his
absent underpants shone a ghostly
white. “I bought him a jeep, one of those
tiny soft-top Japanese ones. What an
awful neon-orange thing it was. Just
like him.” He laughed unkindly. “Stu-
pid thing.”
Was I a stupid thing? William moved
his hand to the small of my back. I
turned the page. There were no more
naked boys. He sensed my hesitation.
“I know a little game we could play.”
With his hands upon my shoulders
he guided me toward his bed, made me
sit down as though he were going to
deliver some particularly bad news. Then
he lifted each of my legs and swung
them up until I was lying back. With
the naked boys upon my chest, I watched
the airplanes blinking in the sky.
William produced a tartan blanket
from a mahogany kist. He threw it over
the lower half of me and arranged it
carefully as though he were merely tuck-
ing me in. The scratch of the lanolin
felt familiar to me; it made me miss my
mother. I lay there, as though I were
home sick from school. Then the little
man got onto all fours and very slowly
crawled underneath the blanket from
the bottom of the bed.
I tried to focus on the boys in the
photo album as he slithered under the
blanket. I felt his precise fingers at the
fly of my boxers. He was breathing in
deep, burrowing his face
into my groin, inhaling the
musk of me. Then his lips
were on my flesh. He was
filling his mouth with spit
for me. And all I could smell
was the Amalfi lemons at
his wrists.
If it was to happen, then
he would not take it from
me. I placed my hands on
William’s head, guiding his
rhythm. The blanket wrapped around
his skull and I held him tight. My
thumbs found his eye sockets. I hated
the sound of his greed.
When I was spent, William collapsed
onto me, his cheek hot upon my belly.
It was this small intimacy that both-
ered me most. I watched the planes
overhead and let him lie there awhile,counting backward from sixty, as though
a meter were running.
My mind was already worrying about
the next time. I didn’t want to see his
face emerge from beneath the blanket,
didn’t want him to look up at me with
affection or lust or his usual smugness.
It would be easier to say it through the
thick weave of the cloth, so I did. “I
like your company, William. But I don’t
want to do this again. I don’t like ye
like that.”
The Englishman coiled himself
around me and I wondered if he had
heard me. I patted his back as though he
were colicky. “William? Do ye hear me?”
He didn’t answer for a long time. But
I could feel his breathing slow. “I can
tell within the first four minutes, you
know. I can tell as soon as I meet a boy
how it will go. I’m not a fool.”L
ate on a Monday night it can take
as little as twenty-three minutes to
drive from Chiswick to Euston station.
William told me this was a personal
record. I sat with my plastic bags on
my lap. The waistband of my boxer
shorts was still damp with his spit and
my own mess.
We looked sickly under the bright
station lights, me sweaty with the south-
ern heat, him sallow with the memory
of his last trip to Dubrovnik. His fad-
ing tan was yellowish and I wondered
if he was liver-sick.
William bought me a ticket in the
sleeper car. I would have a whole cabin
to myself, he said. They would feed
me a warm breakfast in Edinburgh.
Then he said I should fill my pockets
with all the fresh fruit and vegetables
I could carry.
“We have fruit at home.”
He smiled and asked me where my
final destination was. He gave me a roll
of brown notes, for the bus from Glasgow
to Uig, and then the slow boat over to
the Western Isles. It was enough to
travel home and back many times over.
Perhaps that was his intent.
I took the wad of money, counted
only what I needed, and handed back
the rest. It was an obscene amount and
yet it was nothing to this man. He looked
as if he’d rather drop it on the tiles than
take it. I tucked it into the breast pocket
of the pajama top he was wearing un-
derneath his camel topcoat.