Holding the Man Read online

  Should I risk it? ‘I think we compared dick sizes.’

  ‘Yeah. I remember that. Not poofters or anything?’

  ‘No.’

  He threw his butt into the far gutter, stood up and stretched.

  ‘Better get going. Got heaps of geography.’ I wandered off along the street, the street with only one house.

  I was very busy that day, reading the newspapers cover to cover, watching television, doing an exceptional amount of homework. Things I had put off for weeks toppled: my book report, counting my money jar, filling out my record-club membership. I was proud of how much I achieved but somewhere in my head was a nagging feeling. I didn’t seem tired at all, perhaps a little foggy but not tired. But the feeling stayed with me, even as I watched the Sunday night movie.

  ‘Tim, turn off the television.’ Mum, in her dressing-gown, was in the kitchen pouring Riesling from a cask. ‘What about your homework?’

  ‘Finished it hours ago.’

  She settled at the dining-table with her wine and her book, but didn’t read. She was going to sit watching me until I went to bed.

  I tried to change quietly in the dark so that I wouldn’t wake my younger brother Nicholas. I fell into bed thinking I would be dead to the world any minute, but all kinds of demons began to creep onto the ceiling above me. I didn’t know Kevin was gay. I hope no one can tell what we did. Wonder what it would be like to suck him off? To lick his balls. What we did was probably wrong but I liked what he did. It was like …

  I grabbed my cock. It didn’t feel the same as when Kevin had done it, so I reversed my hand as though he were holding me. I played with my knob and put the pillow on top of me so I could pretend it was him. He was the boy in the blue jocks. I was rubbing my cock against the pillow, trying not to make too much noise in case my brother heard me. It felt nice, weird, like hurtling down the corridor again. Does Kevin really forget what he did? Oh God, I’m gonna piss myself again. I can’t believe this.

  I bolted into the toilet. Jesus. What’s that? Claggy stuff was coming out of the head of my cock. I stood watching it spurt, mesmerised by its pulsing, dribbling. I stood in wonder at what had happened. In silence, reverent. Spoof! Sprog!

  I slipped back into bed and fell asleep before my head hit the pillow. I slept very deeply, the deepest in a long time.

  ‘Tim, Nicholas, quarter to eight,’ called my mum, the alarm clock. I leapt out of bed and into the shower, secure in the thought that I was a man, that I had sprogged. I bounced into the kitchen. Mum was sleepily squeezing oranges. ‘You’re very buoyant this morning.’

  ‘You can tell?’ I poured my Special K into the bowl. ‘I can be a father.’

  Mum was visibly shocked, motionless in mid-squeeze. ‘Who have you got pregnant?’

  I laughed. ‘No, I was … I had a wet dream last night.’

  She sighed and shook her head. ‘What makes you think I’d want to know that?’

  Because I wanted everyone to know I’d sprogged. I even announced it later to Joe McMahon, the brainiac of my year.

  ‘How do you know it was sperm? It was probably just pus,’ he sneered.

  ‘It was spoof.’

  ‘What a liar. Prove it.’ The gruff voice of Quin chipped in.

  ‘Oh sure, deadshit. Here? Now?’

  ‘Bring it in a jar. I’ll be able to tell you if it is or not.’

  Sanctuary

  Sanctuary.

  A head full of boys. Nipples. Armpits. Lips.

  Vaseline. Stroking. Tugging. Baby oil. Pulling. Dencorub.

  Surfers changing on the beach near the baths. The surfer with the amazing eyes asking me to help him out of his wetsuit.

  Rubbing the bed with my cock. On top of my pillow. Fucking a T-shirt.

  The boy in the blue jocks, his bush of pubes slowly revealed. His hardening cock trying to escape. Franco in the change-room shower.

  Sitting on the floor of the shower, the warm wet stream pulsing against my cock and balls. Trying to hold it back.

  Three billion people in the world. Someone else must be having sex right now. Or whacking off. Spoofing as I spoof.

  Stacker’s bush of black pubic hair. The Watermouth twins. A clothesline full of jocks.

  Coming again.

  A head full of boys.

  Nipples. Armpits. Lips.

  Sanctuary.

  The Wood Princess

  Brother Reynolds was late. Guys were up the front, pushing his desk to the front of the platform so that if he put any weight on it, it would fall. Mission achieved, we all sat down and tried to look cool as he marched in, followed by a boy called Billy, red in the face. Billy went straight to his desk without meeting anyone’s eye.

  ‘Apologies, tadpoles. Bill’s been in an incident this morning that involved the police.’ He’s been shoplifting again. ‘I asked his permission to tell you about it and he’s very generously agreed. Bill went to the toilet at the railway station this morning and while he was standing at the urinal, a businessman offered him five dollars –’

  ‘Two dollars, sir,’ Billy chipped in.

  ‘Two dollars, to put the man’s penis in his mouth.’ The room came alive with whispers. Fucken poofters. Devos. Should be shot. How sus.

  ‘Billy did exactly the right thing. He remained calm and said, “No thank you,” then went out to the main entrance and told the police, who arrested the man. I think what he did was very brave. Remember that you can’t always pick a homosexual, but should one approach you, remain calm and go and get the police. The policeman is your friend.’

  Wonder which railway station? I would have done it for him.

  ‘All right, this morning we’re going to look at a play called The Wood Princess, which is based on an old Hindu myth. Rankin, you read the part of the hunter. Conigrave, you can read the part of the princess.’ Instant death. He handed us copies of the play. A paper ball smacked into the back of my head. ‘Hi Princess,’ Quin whispered behind me.

  ‘Scene 13, at the riverbank,’ said Brother Reynolds.

  HUNTER: Why did you run away?

  PRINCESS: It is not right for -- [‘We can’t hear you, Conigrave.’] It is not right for you to approach me like this. We cannot be in love.

  HUNTER: I only want to provide for you, catch squirrels and build a home where we can play with our children.

  PRINCESS: You must go. I cannot tell you why.

  As I choked out each word, I could feel all chance of survival in the playground receding.

  Brother Reynolds thanked me and Rankin and asked us to read the whole thing for the class next week. Gee, can’t wait. The teacher’s desk fell with an almighty crash. Brother Reynolds was unfazed. ‘Andy, pick that up.’

  Within days, I was christened Princess, then Princess Tina and eventually Sue, which became my nickname for some time.

  A week later Rankin and I were coming to the end of the reading. My legs were wobbly, my hands so wet that the pages of the play were stained with sweat, and my face was on fire. I ploughed on.

  PRINCESS: Do not kneel before me. It is not punishment I desire. It is your love.

  We took our bows like real actors. The guys went spakko applauding. Brother Reynolds sat in silence, shocked, maybe even touched. He looked up and dismissed us with a wave. We were let out of class three minutes early.

  ‘Bit heavy on the makeup, don’t you reckon?’ It was Quin.

  ‘Wasn’t wearing any.’

  ‘Bullshit. You look like a girl.’ He walked away angrily across the quadrangle.

  I stood stunned. When I was a small boy, shopkeepers would sometimes call me little girl, but this was an outright attack. What have I done? He was so angry. I went into the toilets. I looked in the mirror. I saw my fringe falling into my eyes, the brown lines around them, my ruddy cheeks, my blood-red lips. I was flushed from acting in front of a hostile class. I did look like I was wearing makeup.

  As I walked out of the library after school I saw the gang hanging around the vera
ndah: Grant, Damien and Quin with Sandilands, a bear of a guy whose greatest trick was being able to slag into the air and catch it again in his mouth. I heard them boasting about the orgy they had been to on the weekend.

  ‘Three fingers, mate, I swear,’ Quin was boasting. ‘She was begging for it.’ What bull, no chick would let such a grot near her. They’re all bullshitting.

  Sandilands saw me. ‘Hey, Sue!’ Damien looked uncomfortable, almost embarrassed, as though he felt he should intervene but couldn’t. Sandilands put his arm around my neck. ‘Damien reckons you know a way into the tuckshop.’

  I led the way. The gang looked suspicious at any time. Today they looked like bank robbers. Telling them to try to act normal, I sidled over to the counter. Underneath was a half-door with a hinged section over it, like the one on Mr Ed. It was unlocked. Grant was salivating. I could see their minds ticking over. My nickname might be Sue but I was approved.

  That weekend, there we were: me, Damien, Grant, Sandilands. Four bandits in windcheaters scaling the walls of the school, crashing through the oleanders. I crept round to the front of the tuckshop. The concrete desert echoed. I had never seen it like this. Across the yard I could see a Jesuit whipped by the wind slowly opening his mouth to reveal fangs. It’s only an oleander, you dickhead.

  I prised the door open with my fingers, got inside as fast as I could and crawled across the floor to the back door. I undid the bolt. The others were pressing so hard on the door that it smashed into my hand, spraining a finger. Damien and Grant tumbled in on top of me.

  ‘Where’s Sandilands?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s keeping guard.’

  We were in Aladdin’s cave. Jupiter Bars. A box of Colvan Chips. Twisties. Chocolate frogs. I pushed my stuff out after the others, bolted the door behind them and crawled out the front and over the fence. We headed back to my place, trying to walk casually, as though we always carried entire boxes of lollies.

  We made it to the cubby-house in my backyard. An old beach kiosk, it had been many things to us as kids: a horror house; a comic club, and now a discotheque with foil walls, beanbags, a poster of Suzi Quatro, fluoro artwork, and red cellophane over the windows. Spinning torches hung from the roof. Most important of all was Mum and Dad’s old mono record-player that I’d painted yellow and covered in little foil stars.

  We crashed in to find my twelve-year-old sister Anna and her friend Therese sitting among clouds of strawberry incense, listening to Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain’.

  Caught, I stopped in the doorway but the others pushed past me. Anna was shocked by our booty. ‘Where’d you get all that stuff?’

  I ignored her and stashed the goods in the denim-covered chest.

  ‘School tuckshop,’ mumbled Sandilands with a mouth full of Jupiter Bar.

  ‘You guys are such dicks. If Mum catches on she’ll chuck a birko.’

  ‘Only if you dob.’

  ‘As if.’

  I saw Therese looking shyly at Damien. He was staring at her. He introduced himself and asked her name. Before she could answer I plonked myself down next to her and offered her some Cheezels. ‘This is my girlfriend Therese,’ I said.

  ‘Am not!’ She hit me.

  Damien lit a cigarette and bent down to the record-player and changed the record to Aqualung. We sat around talking about Janis Joplin’s Pearl, David Bowie’s Space Oddity and what a dick John Denver was. Living in the seventies.

  Damien put his cigarette out and walked outside without saying anything. Grant and Sandilands followed. I had an empty, hollow feeling. I became aware of the throbbing of my sprained finger.

  A few days later I was walking out through the gates when I saw Quin sitting on the low wall that formed the flowerbed. He asked how my maths exam had gone. I said I’d be lucky if I got a C.

  ‘Fair dinkum, Conigrave. You always play this game and then you top the class. It’s funny, school ending, don’t ya reckon? Here we are the older boys, but next year in senior school we’re the little fish again. Weird, that. And with two junior schools, suddenly we’re eight hundred boys in one school.’

  I asked if he was nervous about it. He shrugged but I could tell he was. His place in junior school had been clear. He was the stirrer, the ratbag. Who knew what things were going to be like next year? We asked each other about our holiday plans. He was trying for a job at the bowling alley.

  I said I was cleaning windows for the neighbours. ‘And then the folks have got a house down at Somers for January.’

  ‘Damien going with you?’

  ‘Don’t know what he’s doing. Do you want to come down for a coupla days, Quin?’

  ‘You can call me Bernard. Nuh. Folks wouldn’t let me.’ He was staring at his shoes as if to make sure they were clean. ‘Big school. Pretty scary.’ He wanted to say something. ‘I reckon you should stop this girl stuff. They’ll rip you to shreds up there. Nothing personal.’ He smiled and jumped to his feet. ‘Better kick off.’

  I watched him walk away. That was so weird.

  Chapter TWO

  John at a Distance

  Xavier College, the senior school, merged boys from two junior schools. It was in Kew, on the other side of Melbourne, a garden suburb all silver birches and manicured lawns. The days of leaving home ten minutes before school were over.

  Getting to school would now mean a walk to Brighton Beach station, a twenty-minute ride in a carriage full of smoking kids, changing trains at Richmond for another ten-minute ride crammed in with migrant shift-workers from the textile factories, and then running down a ramp to fight for a place on the Glenferrie tram. The tram was a microcosm of human survival. As one pulled up, we would climb over each other to claim a bit of runner-board and a grip on a handle. The conductors were so jammed in amongst the acne and athlete’s foot they couldn’t collect fares. We ended up making a profit; our fares became money for Redskins or Choo-choo bars.

  On my first day at Xavier I followed a stream of older boys in through the hurricane-wire gate. The other Kostka boys spotted some mates and I continued up the driveway by myself. A large grass quadrangle opened before me, shaded by lofty elms and flanked by two-storey red brick classrooms. At the far end was a large Victorian hall with huge windows and a slate roof.

  I walked up a set of stairs, pulling out my information sheet to find the Third Form master’s office. As I tried to make sense of the map, Damien came up behind me. ‘Hey, buddy,’ he whispered. I tried to smile but we were both uncomfortable. Neither of us had made contact over the holidays. ‘Well, here we are,’ Damien said awkwardly. ‘Good holidays?’

  ‘Not bad. You?’

  ‘Tops. Went surfing with Makka down at Lorne, hot-doggin’ chicks.’

  I found it hard to look at him and began to spot Kostka boys. The faces I didn’t know, Burke Hall boys, were different from ours. There seemed to be many more Italians and Greeks.

  ‘You’re in the A-stream, Latin and shit?’ Damien asked. I nodded. ‘Poor bastard. I’m in D-stream. Should be a real bludge. Don’t know if I’ll stick it out, but.’

  Makka arrived. He was always tanned because he spent his summers at Lorne, his winters at Falls Creek and his September holidays at Surfers Paradise. His long hair was forever blond. His voice was husky, though maybe that was a put-on. Perhaps he wanted us to believe he was Rod Stewart.

  ‘Was wondering where you got to, Dame.’ He calls you Dame? Doesn’t sound right. He whispered something to Damien, who squeezed my arm as they wandered off together.

  Grant and Sandilands came up. Then suddenly Quin was on my back yelling, ‘Jezza,’ pretending to take a spectacular mark. We shuffled our way through the throng to the noticeboards. Joe-the-brainiac saw us and called out across the heads of the others. ‘Welcome, comrades.’

  On the far side of the crush I noticed a boy. I saw the body of a man with an open, gentle face: such softness within that masculinity. He was beautiful, calm. I was transfixed.

  He wasn’t talking, just listen
ing to his friends with his hands in his pockets, smiling. What is it about his face? He became aware that I was looking at him and greeted me with a lift of his eyebrows. I returned the gesture and then looked away, pretending something had caught my attention. But I kept sneaking looks. It’s his eyelashes. They’re unbelievable.

  A stocky boy with long fuzzy hair and ruddy cheeks recognised Grant from a football game the previous winter and introduced his group. ‘Patrick Barrett, Vince Alliotti, Neil Garren, John Caleo.’ His name’s John, John Caleo. Italian, that explains the eyelashes.

  Grant introduced us. ‘Lex Sandilands, Bernard Quin, Tim Conigrave.’ We shook hands. I couldn’t bring myself to shake John Caleo’s hand.

  ‘You were ruck rover weren’t you?’ Grant asked John. He smiled and nodded.

  ‘Captain actually,’ someone chipped in, ‘but don’t tell him that. His head’s big enough.’ Captain of the prep-school footy team. How? ‘You guys play footy?’ We were unsure how to answer.

  ‘Firsts basketball,’ I said with as much dignity as I could muster.

  The bell for assembly went. I tried to keep up with our new friends, I wanted to watch him. Even from behind he was calm and beautiful.

  Suddenly we were in the hall, eight hundred boys in grey uniform with red and black stripes around the collars and cuffs and tops of socks. On the platform were six boys in sports blazers who turned out to be prefects, a number of Jesuits and lay staff, a tracksuited sportsmaster and a middle-aged woman – the librarian.

  The headmaster, Father Brennan, talked about the importance of leading a life in Christ, of loyalty to the school, of hard work and respect for those who wished to impart their knowledge to us. ‘And when you are in uniform,’ he reminded us, ‘you represent the school.’ We prayed, thanking our parents, our teachers, our religious leaders and the Father for this opportunity to improve ourselves.

  We were sent to our classrooms. Will he be in my class? He stopped at his locker and took out a folder, a tartan pencil-case and some textbooks. I walked past him, as though by accident. I grabbed my bag, still lumpy with books, from the top of the lockers and made my way to maths class. I took a desk and watched the door.