Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale (29 page)

The sun was settling into a cleft in the silhouetted hills of the Côte Chalonnaise.
Overhead the still sky was as intensely blue as a gas flame. Adam began to imagine that the fantasy he had dismissed as idiotic just a few days ago was somehow coming true: the fantasy in which Sylvain and he lived out their lives in pre-lapsarian contentment in nature’s garden, and he charmed the nightingales out from the trees with his cello. It was not so ridiculous, not so unattainable after all. For here he was – living it now.

Bread went on the barbecue.
Sylvain had found it in the freezer an hour or so ago and let it thaw in the sun. He turned the rabbit halves over and sprinkled the remains of the chopped thyme over the meat and the hissing shallots and over the embers too. A magical scent arose. With a final blaze of floodlighting the sun slipped between the hills and was gone, leaving the sky to its last blue half-hour of glory. Adam looked at Sylvain, wondering whether he understood him at all, or not. I love you,’ he said.

‘
I love you too.’ Sylvain gave him a perfunctory kiss. He was getting up to go in search of plates. He returned from the kitchen with a tray on which half the cutlery from the kitchen drawers seemed to be strewn in little heaps, together with salt and pepper and the remains of the bottle of wine. Adam had slipped down from his chair onto the warm grass and Sylvain joined him there. They ate the thyme-tasting rabbit in their fingers, picking it off the bone with their teeth, and mopping up the juices with the grilled bread. It was the first time they had ever shared a meal.

The anger and fear that Adam had felt on being kidnapped had vanished.
He recollected them dimly, like the emotions he had felt long ago in childhood’s foreign frames of reference. They started to feed each other with titbits of meat and bread, giggling when these went astray and fell down into t-shirts or behind waistbands. By the time the food was finished they were lying together in a tangled embrace. Adam tugged teasingly at Sylvain’s shorts.

Sylvain wriggled out of them without protest then removed his t-shirt too, and Adam did the same.
They gazed at each other’s nakedness, both half-aroused. There was no hurry. ‘Open another bottle,’ Adam commanded and Sylvain trotted off obediently towards the kitchen, taking the unused cutlery with him like a well-trained waiter, his bottom – which was slightly less tanned than the rest of him – wagging appealingly like a pale flag in the dusk.

Waiting for him to return, Adam lay back and looked up at the first emerging stars.
The grass felt cool now on his back while around him the sounds of evening were starting up. Crickets made ticking sounds like freewheeling bicycles, then the heavier beat of cicadas built up to an all-pervading throb. ‘Cicadian rhythm’ his father had jokingly called it once on a holiday in Spain…. He couldn’t think about his father just at present … Nightingales, though. There should be nightingales. But the time of year when you could hear them singing was all but past and, though he strained his ears, there were none to be heard just here. Instead, as if to mock him, a frog began to croak in some unseen nearby pond. It made Adam think of the Emperor’s confusion of the two sounds in the fairy story. The barbecue looked rather forlorn, silhouetted against the lighter western sky. But in the east a silver half-moon was rising.

Sylvain reappeared with a freshly opened bottle.
‘We’ll have a proper fire,’ he said. There was wood stacked against the shed where Sylvain had found the charcoal sack and together they built a fire at the edge of the lawn, where one had been before, both enjoying the novelty of carrying out such an activity stark naked. ‘Like Robinson Crusoe,’ Adam said.

They lit it easily, thanks to Sylvain’s care in placing the finest twigs, using the dying embers of the barbecue.
As the flames began to take hold, their spirits leaped with them and suddenly they found themselves doing an absurd dance together, jigging about, hands together, on the grass. They had to stop for laughing. Then they settled back on the ground again to drink their wine and contemplate each other under yet another change of lighting.

Suddenly Adam said:
‘ What’s that?’ He pointed to little gleams of light appearing among the grass. Their intensity waxed and waned as he looked at them. They rocked and wobbled slightly. Or was that just the wine?

‘
Les vers luisants,’
said Sylvain. Glow-worms. ‘Come and see.’ They explored the lawn again, planting their feet gingerly to avoid them landing on the tiny cold white flashes. ‘Look up and then look down again,’ said Sylvain. ‘What do you see?’ Looking up he saw the night sky studded with diamond lights, like the dark blue velvet in a jeweller’s display, then looking down it was as if he saw a looking-glass image of the same, as if the sky were mirrored in a lake. The movement of his head had made him dizzy and the glow-worms seemed to swim gently before his eyes. ‘You see,’ said Sylvain. ‘The glow-worms make a route-map of the stars.’

It no longer seemed absurd to Adam to share with Sylvain the thoughts he had abandoned as childish so few days ago.
So he mirrored back to him his lover’s dream of living in the woods, embellishing it with the details that had privately occurred to him – like playing the cello for the nightingales. ‘We’d never wear clothes,’ he said. ‘We’d find a country where it was always warm. If we needed money we’d do odd jobs around the local farms. We’d busk in village squares. I could play the cello. You could …’ The story of Our Lady’s Tumbler went stumbling through his mind. ‘…You could juggle.’ He had no idea whether Sylvain could juggle or not. It seemed an unimportant detail. Tonight, when glow-worms lit the roads to heaven, everything must be possible.

Sylvain reached out to him and caught his hands.
He walked them back to where their bonfire flared and warmed the air around, then drew him to the ground. He stroked his young lover’s shins and thighs, and brushed his neat tight ball-sack with his finger-ends. Adam thought for a second that there were important things that needed to be discussed tonight, things about his parents and about tomorrow. There would have to be decisions and some phone-calls. They couldn’t just hide out here for ever. But he didn’t want to bring those matters up just yet and so shatter a perfect evening in dragging it down to the mundane. Besides he was no longer sure how he was going to handle the task of persuading Sylvain what was the best thing to do. His mind would be clearer in the morning. Now, with an erection beginning to loom up out of the darkness below his belly, now was not the moment for all that. This was a timeless moment, one of life’s best – made to be enjoyed. It did cross his mind fleetingly, darkly, that this night with Sylvain, his first, might be the last one too.

They were in each other’s arms.
Sylvain had the bottle of olive oil in one hand – at what point had he sneaked it out of the kitchen? – and with the other was anointing Adam’s buttock-cleft and thighs. Adam had never felt more relaxed, he was floating on a cushion of wine and summer air, and he offered no resistance when Sylvain rolled him onto his back and lifted up his legs by the calves. Adam felt their weight supported on Sylvain’s shoulders and the next thing was Sylvain himself sliding smoothly into him and rendering their separate bodies one. Adam made a small snickering noise. This was so much better than the time before, in the pigsty, when Sylvain had been nervous and rough and his teeth had got chipped. Sylvain seemed in no great hurry but rode him with a rhythmic, sea-swell pulse, but when he came, and Adam felt his excitement inside himself, he gave voice to an explosive whoop of self-congratulation – something that he had not permitted himself on the previous occasion.

When he gently withdrew, Adam was sorry it was over.
He hadn’t touched himself all this time, though he had wanted to; he had been dreaming other plans. They poured and drank another glass of wine. Sylvain began to be agitated: there was a question on his mind. Sitting up he asked it, ‘Your blond English
mec
. Did he do that to you – what we just did?’

‘
No,’ said Adam truthfully. ‘But I did it to him.’

Sylvain sat thoughtfully for a moment, letting this sink in.
‘And the other boy?’

‘
Not with him. He’s the one I told you all about at Noidant once. We’ve always simply done the usual thing.’

Sylvain grasped Adam’s rigid cock.
‘Do it now with me.’ He lay back, spreading his brown legs slightly. Adam felt around for the oil bottle. He wanted to see them glisten in the firelight. ‘Go, go for it,’ Sylvain urged.

It was the other way round from the way Sean had presented himself to him.
The oil would be the key to everything, he told himself, and applied it plentifully. ‘That’s cold,’ Sylvain said. But then it was no more difficult than before. Easier, in fact. Slowed down by wine he felt more in control, like when he played the Beethoven with Gary for the second time. The pleasure was intense, and the climax, when it came – not too quickly just for once – felt powerful and steady, like a slowly spreading wave along the shore. They lay still, just as they were, for some minutes afterwards, neither of them willing to move, neither of them quite daring to believe exactly what had just happened. It was as if they could only prove it to themselves by remaining where they were.

In the end Adam didn’t exactly withdraw himself at all; diminishing dimensions completed most of that process for him.
He rolled sideways and lay back. ‘Was I OK?’

Sylvain reached out a hand and touched his cheek.
‘
Eh, ben, oui, mon petit.
It was great.
Tu sais?
Sometimes there’s a first time for the older person too.’ Then he got up to put more wood on the fire.

A third bottle of wine must have appeared at some point.
They still had full glasses at their elbows. They began to talk nonsense together while the moon progressed slowly across the sky, its peaceful shadows roaming over the lawn like caressing fingers. At one point an owl hooted loudly from a tree just feet away, and it was a lovely pretext to jump into each other’s arms in exaggerated surprise. The last thing Adam would remember of that night was stroking the swirl of hairs between Sylvain’s navel and his bobbing cock and saying they reminded him of the fuzzy complex of notes on the final page of the full score of Elgar’s cello concerto … and Sylvain’s soft low chuckle of a laugh.

When Adam had finally talked himself to sleep and lay flat on his back, purring, on the grass, Sylvain sat looking at him in wonder for some minutes.
Then he kissed his boy’s face tenderly before lifting him bodily and carrying him, not without the occasional stagger, into the house and upstairs to bed.

FIFTEEN

When
Adam awoke he hardly knew who he was, let alone where. Bright sunshine streamed in through shutters that had been weakly shoved half-open. The cavities of his skull seemed to be full of something having the consistency and the weight of mercury, and just as poisonous. When he tried to move an arm, that seemed to be full of mercury too. He was so thirsty that he could scarcely move his tongue, while the inside of his mouth and his throat burnt like the hot sand of a litter-strewn beach. His nose told him that he had been sick over the bed.

A naked and almost pale-faced Sylvain appeared beside him with a glass of something.
He leaned over him. ‘Drink this. It has aspirin in.’ Adam drank it down in noisy, desperate gulps and was promptly sick again. On the floor this time.

Yesterday came back to him in little ripples of memory, like the first intimations of an incoming tide.
They grew to a huge, frightening, swell. He had to phone his parents. Their present state of anxiety, terror maybe, was well beyond the power of his imagination to guess at. He tried to sit up. His stomach convulsed and tried painfully to expel what wasn’t there. He leaned over and retched, dryly. Agonisingly. He slumped back under the fouled duvet. He shut his eyes. ‘I want to die,’ he whispered. Tears began to ooze from under his closed lids. They ran in separate streams along the sides of his nose and over his temples as if competing to find the quickest way down to the pillow. Despite his closed eyes he still seemed to see Sylvain standing over him, a look of concern pinching up his usually serene face.

‘
Keep drinking water. I’m coming right back. With mops and cloths.’

Adam
thought about embarking on a tantrum: telling Sylvain to go to hell and locking the bedroom door against him. But even to think of such energetic activities made his head throb as if it were bursting, and caused a red colour to swim in front of his tight-shut eyes. Instead he smiled feebly and whispered, ‘Thanks’, and to his huge surprise he felt marginally improved.

Adam
was ill all the morning and into the afternoon. He heard Sylvain clean up the room around him, but without speaking, stirring or opening his eyes. He would make his real thanks later. Then Sylvain set out cushions for him on a shady area of lawn, found his shorts for him, and took his hand on the walk downstairs. Each new kindness, every tender caress, provoked in Adam a new overflow of silent tears. But he was not so completely self-absorbed as to fail to see and wonder at the change in Sylvain. Over the last few days he had lost that dreamy, half-awake look that had so struck Adam at their first meeting. His eyes seemed bright, not only in the physical sense of being lustrous, as they always had been, but in the meaning of indicating intelligence as well. They shone these days with sense as well as sensibility. Adam wondered whether love alone had brought about that change or if there was also something else. Sylvain was practical too. He was proving a good nurse and kept forcing Adam to drink glasses of water all through the morning. ‘ It was my fault,’ he said. ‘ Let you drink too much. Gave you no water with it, after a hot day. If it’s any consolation, though, I’ve got a bit of a
gueule de
bois
too.’ He tapped his forehead and grinned sheepishly as he said this. But every time Sylvain left him on his own, and Adam’s thoughts strayed towards his parents again, his stomach would gather itself into a knot once more and try unsatisfactorily to expel the thought with the only, excruciating, trick it knew.

By the middle of the afternoon Sylvain felt confident enough of Adam’s recovery to leave him while he drove into the nearest town
– which he said was called Givry – to do some shopping. He told Adam that it would be better if he went alone: not only would shopping be something of a torture for Adam in his present state of fragility, but there was the probability that they were being searched for by now – they might even have become an item on the national news – and the two of them together might arouse suspicion in a way that Sylvain alone would not. Sylvain laid all this out before Adam in a level-headed kind of way, as if the two of them had run away together, not as if their roles were that of kidnapper and victim respectively. Adam was getting used to seeing the situation from both points of view. One moment he was the imperilled abductee, the next he was the willing party to an elopement, holed up somewhere along the road to Gretna Green. Sometimes he saw both aspects simultaneously. Though when Sylvain said at one point: ‘We’ll keep ahead of them, and if they do catch up with us we’ll show them a thing or two,
non
?’ he feared for his friend’s grasp on reality and only answered with a noncommittal grunt.

When Sylvain had gone,
Adam fetched his backpack out into the garden. As it had been packed for school, not for an overnight stay, it did not contain most of the things that might have been really useful, like a toothbrush or a change of underwear. But he did find two handy items when he rummaged through it. There was a tube of sun-protection cream, and there was a book. He rubbed the cream all over himself, even experimentally removing his shorts and applying the cool emulsion to places that had never been so treated before. He felt safe enough then to drag his cushions out from the shade into the leafy sunlight of the middle of the lawn. Then he embarked on the book. It was an old one that Céline had lent him months ago and that he had never got round to reading. Called
Les Carnets du Major William Marmaduke Thompson
, it cast a humorous eye over the differences between the British and the French takes on life. Although many of the incidental details had a dated feel about them, in most respects Adam felt that the book’s author, a Monsieur Pierre Daninos, had captured his own experiences and observations to the letter, and before long he was being surprised into audible giggles of appreciative recognition. Céline must have had the book for years. Inside it, on the flyleaf, the unformed handwriting of a much younger Céline had written:
Ce livre appartient à
… followed by her full name and whole address including France and the European Union. At least the book took his mind off the perplexing knots of the predicament in which he found himself, and off the presumed agonies of his parents. He could not imagine, now that nearly twenty-four hours had passed, what he could possibly say to them if by some magic it were suddenly to become possible to phone them.

From time to time he got up and walked over to irrigate the vegetable plots
– the direct if delayed result of all the water Sylvain had forced him to drink during the morning – then he would lie down again and resume his sunbathing and his book, alternating a cheekily face-down position with an even more impertinent full-frontal. Perhaps it was just as well that he was face down when he heard the cricket start up. The insect was startlingly audible, probably because it was the hottest part of the afternoon and all the birds and frogs had fallen silent. But then it got louder, came nearer and stopped. And Adam had to look up then, realising that it was not a cricket but a bicycle.

Adam was looking into the eyes of a boy, perhaps a couple of years younger than himself, who had just pushed his bike round the corner of the farmhouse and who now stood holding it, frozen into total immobility by the sight of the naked sunbather who was lying on the grass just in front of him, and regarding him over the edge of a hardback book with equal astonishment.
And thus they remained for a full minute.

He was a nice looking boy,
Adam thought, although his appearance was highly unusual for one from the southern half of France. He wasn’t wearing very much: just a skimpy pair of white gym-shorts like the ones Adam had recently abandoned, plimsolls with no socks, and a loose, short-sleeved green top. His skin was astonishingly white, although freckled in places, the eyes in his cheerful round face were brown, and his hair was a mass of deep auburn curls like brushes made of copper wire. He had a nicely chunky pair of legs, like a gymnast’s. They reminded Adam of Sean’s legs, though in miniature, but were quite unlike his own, which were gradually developing the lean muscularity of a sprint runner’s.

Adam
considered the pros and cons of challenging him. If the boy were simply trespassing he would not know that Adam had no right to be there either. But if he had good reason to be there, then there was a strong chance he knew that Adam shouldn’t be. Then it struck him, with a great lightening of the spirit, that neither of them had the right to be there. It was a Tuesday afternoon in term-time and they should both have been at school. So they could deal on an equal footing. The same thoughts must have passed through the other’s mind at the same speed and led to the same conclusion, because at the same instant they each gave way to a burst of relieved laughter.

‘
What’s your name?’ Adam asked.

‘
Frédéric,’ said the boy. ‘What’s yours?’

‘
I’m Adam.’

‘
You have a funny accent.’

Adam
sighed. ‘Because I’m not French. I’m British.’

‘
So is one of my grannies,’ said the boy. ‘She’s Scottish.’

That explained the complexion then.
‘Interesting,’ said Adam. ‘I’m only English myself – which is maybe less interesting.’

‘
I don’t see why.’ The boy seemed to want to be friends. He pushed his bike over the grass – tick, tick, tick – to where Adam lay, rooted by modesty to his cushions, and stood right over him. Adam had to twist his head to squint up at him. And saw with a shock that quite unwittingly the boy was displaying himself with rather less modesty. He found that he had a view, straight up one leg of his shorts, of the boy’s stubby cock which peeped out over a neatly sculpted pair of accessories about the size of mirabelle plums. He was just sprouting his first soft growth of hair, wispy and pale as thistledown.

Quite unaware of the impression he was making on the English visitor the boy prattled on.
‘Where do you come from then?’

‘
In England? … Oh, you wouldn’t have heard of it. In France I live in Langres.’

‘
Londres?’

‘
No, Langres. Sorry about my funny accent. The Plateau de Langres. Where the water comes from. And the cheese.’

This clearly made sense.
The boy said, ‘That’s a long way. What are you doing here?’

Be careful,
Adam told himself. Don’t be put off guard by a pretty view. ‘Do you have television?’ he asked.

‘
Yes,’ said the boy.‘Why?’

‘
Anything about Langres on the news today? About people from Langres?’

‘
Don’t know,’ said the boy innocently. ‘I don’t watch the news.’

Disappointment was mingled with
Adam’s relief at this. He had rather fancied being a TV news item. There were so many things he wanted to ask … so many opportunities seemed to be presented by the boy’s – what was his name? – by Frédéric’s arrival. So many opportunities … and so many dangers. He tried to put his concerns into some kind of order. ‘Do you have a mobile?’ he asked, though there seemed to be little chance that he did have. There was hardly anywhere the scantily dressed kid could put one. Still that distracting view up his shorts. Adam could hardly think straight. Did no-one wear underpants any more?

‘
A mobile phone? No. Next birthday, maybe.’ (And when would that be? November. Did Adam need one now? No, not really. Just a passing thought.)

By way of an experiment, as if he had just coaxed a wild creature to feed from his hand and was trying a further step,
Adam stretched out a hand and placed it on the boy’s leg, just below the knee. Frédéric showed no sign of surprise or readiness for flight. ‘I suppose you’re a friend of the Noirmoutiers,’ he said affably.

‘
Yes, of course.’ (The who?) ‘ Well, actually, they’re friends of my friend.’ Frédéric looked quickly around the garden ‘ My friend Sylvain.’ Might as well give him his real name. The boy hadn’t heard about them from the television, and unnecessary lies always led to complications. ‘He’s not here. He’s gone into Givry to do some shopping.’