Page 30 of Rhymes with Metaphor

T en days before they were due to fly home, Joel mused to Reg that he wished they could be completely alone together.

Bethan had been a discreet but constant presence.

Reg found himself unable to deny Joel’s request. So, he sent Bethan on an all-expenses-paid holiday to Italy, Spain, and Portugal, not to return until the day after they’d left.

After they had seen her off and she’d hugged Joel and admonished Reg to look after the little one, Reg said to Joel. “What do you want to do?”

“I want to get drunk,” said Joel emphatically. “Really drunk.”

Reg ransacked the pantry and found a bottle of schnapps, a caddy of schnapps spoons, and a tin of smoked eel. He laid these out on the kitchen table. “If you’re going to get drunk, you should do so in the most civilized possible way.”

Reg demonstrated how to eat a piece of eel with his fingers and chase it with a ladle full of schnapps.

Joel ate a piece of eel and made a face.

“Keep trying,” said Reg. “It’s an acquired taste.”

“How many did you have to eat before you liked it?”

“I was born with acquired taste,” said Reg.

Joel persisted and finished half the tin of eel and a large quantity of schnapps.

Normally, Reg would have joined him imbibing schnapps—if he was with Martin, he certainly would have—but he felt responsible for Joel and cut himself off after a single ladleful.

Joel grew progressively impulsive and loud, slapping the table after each spoonful. Then he tired of the schnapps and wandered the kitchen. He found a bottle of Buckfast in the pantry and brandished it at Reg.

“I wouldn’t—” said Reg, but Joel had already necked the bottle.

Joel immediately looked like he was going to vomit. Then, he swallowed, grimaced, belched, and blinked several times. “I didn’t like that, Reg.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Let’s go to the pub,” said Joel.

So they did. At the pub, Joel ordered something “stringy” to drink. When the bartender stared at him, Joel said, “Shoot me with some whisky.” And made a finger gun at him.

Joel downed the shot and asked for another.

After the second one, Reg stopped him. “Wait. See how it hits you.”

“It’s not hitting me at all,” Joel slurred.

Fifteen minutes later, he could barely walk, and Reg had to hold him upright. “I think you’ve had enough.”

“One more for the road.”

Reg asked the bartender for a glass of water, which Reg made Joel drink before they went back to the house. Reg was practically carrying him by then.

They stopped midway across a stone bridge. Joel leaned over the parapet, staring into the water where reflections of the trees swayed, black against the grey. It was an isolating, dislocating feeling for Reg, being sober while Joel was this far gone.

“I remember,” said Joel slowly. “He used to buy a bag of cream mints, and he’d always give me the last one.”

“Who did?”

“My dad,” said Joel. He started sobbing.

Reg put his arm around him, and Joel threw up over the bridge.

“Sorry,” said Joel afterwards, wiping his mouth.

“It’s the Thames. It’s seen worse.”

Reg guided him back over the bridge, steering his weaving footsteps and curbing his wilder lurches, back to the house, where he was promptly sick into the lilies of the valley by the front door.

Reg held Joel’s forehead while Joel crouched, trembling and gasping.

“All finished?” said Reg.

Joel shook his head and was summarily sick again.

Reg got him upright and into the house where he was sick again in the hallway on the Victorian checkerboard tiles and dropped to his hands and knees, a lily of the valley clutched in his fist. Reg had to hold him up to stop him falling into it.

Joel coughed and spat. Reg looked at the cream-coloured foamy vomit on the black and white squares and.

..it was a supremely unsuitable time to be gripped by inspiration, but there it was.

He eased Joel onto his side safely clear of the mess, took the lily of the valley out of Joel’s hand, and hastily brushed words onto the tiles in Joel’s vomit.

An entire verse that left him as swiftly as Joel’s sick.

Joel lay on the floor, watching Reg and blinking with an uncanny, knowing stare. Reg felt guilty, like he was profiting off Joel’s misery, which, in a way, he was. He dropped the flower, hauled Joel to his feet, and got him upstairs to the bedroom.

“Lie down,” said Reg.

“I’ll lie down when the bed stops moving.”

Reg coaxed him onto his side where he lay, shivering in little bursts. Reg put a bucket on the floor beside the bed. Then he found his notebook and continued writing. He stayed awake watching over Joel while he wrote. Joel was sick twice more before he settled to sleep.

The next morning, Joel woke groaning.

“You’re alive,” said Reg. “That’s a good sign.”

“No, it’s horrible. I will never eat smoked eels again.”

“No,” said Reg. “Nor will I.”

Joel lay back and shut his eyes. “Did you write a poem in my puke last night?”

“Afraid so. ...er. There’s a thought. I’d better...transcribe it.” Reg looked around the clutter of the room for his notebook and pen. “Will you be all right for a few minutes?”

Joel nodded.

Reg found the evidence of last night’s verse dried on the vestibule tile.

He managed to transcribe part of it, holding his breath all the while.

Afterward, Reg went to the kitchen to mix a concoction of water and electrolyte powder he’d bought on a trip to India.

He made Joel sit up in bed, put his arm around him, and held the bottle to Joel’s mouth while he took tiny sips.

He noticed Joel’s shirt was open and stained with vomit, so he helped Joel take it off and got him a clean one.

Later, he made Joel tea and toast, but Joel declared himself full after only a few bites.

So Reg mixed him another bottle of “magic water,” as Joel called it, and set it on the nightstand.

“Reg? Did I say anything last night?”

“Nothing coherent. You mentioned your father.”

“Oh,” said Joel quietly.

“Are you going to be sick again?”

“No.”

But Joel was spark out for the rest of the day, only getting up for the bathroom.

As evening came on, Joel said sadly, “I wasted a day.”

“Not wasted. You’ve discovered your limits with respect to alcohol,” said Reg. “And we still have a few days left.”

––––––––

D uring their final days in England, a heatwave hit, and the bushes turned silver in the haze.

Because he’d been underslept, underfed, and touch-starved for so long, Joel was desperate to make up for lost time, spending his days sleeping in and eating rich food, and swanning about the house and grounds naked.

And because it was so oppressively hot, and because Joel begged him to, Reg stripped too, and they sunbathed naked on the lawn in the shade of the trees, swam naked, and played naked croquet and naked badminton.

They ate lunch naked and dinner al fresco, also naked.

On one particularly hot afternoon when Joel was sprawled languorously in the grass, Reg put the cat bell on his stomach, where it remained unmoving for two hours.

The tension stringing his body taut for so long had been cut, leaving him loose and supple.

The words on Joel’s skin remained visible for days and Reg, watching Joel walk, would catch sight of part of the word cream or slipway and remember that night.

They surrendered themselves to hedonism.

Like Reg, Joel swanned around in a near-constant state of arousal, completely at ease in his body, graceful, confident, and relaxed.

He posed for Reg with phlegmatic composure, while Reg sketched and photographed him and hand-fed him pieces of fruit or had him nip pickled walnuts dipped in honey from a toasting fork, while Reg touched him and kissed him and teased him.

They entertained no visitors, so they enjoyed their encounters uninterrupted, whenever and wherever the mood took them, which was often, and everywhere, in the cobwebbed corner of the tennis hut, inside the house, in the hallway, on the stairs, in every room of the house, except Reg’s father’s bedroom.

Once only, Joel asked Reg, “Are you ready now?” But when Reg said, “Not yet.” Joel didn’t press the issue, though the unspoken question When? was always there.

Joel filled his Argyle notebook, and Reg bought him another with a plaid cover.

All around them was the scent of summer ending, and, naked as they were, they felt the sharp touch of approaching autumn.

“Do you own a proper winter coat?” said Reg.

“I have a winter jacket. Why?”

“Come along.” Reg took Joel up to the attic where his boyhood clothes were stored in trunks, and he found the fine navy blue wool coat he used to wear when he was thirteen. He held it open for Joel. “Your clothes are so ordinary, and you’re so not ordinary. Put it on.”

It fit like a glove.

“You shall have it,” said Reg. “It’ll keep you warm in the winter when we’re back in Canada.”

“I don’t want to go back,” said Joel. “Can’t we just stay here?”

“We can’t hide away indefinitely, cariad,” said Reg. “I have a thesis to defend.”

Reg slid the coat off and folded it carefully.

Joel looked at the words fading on his skin and remarked sadly, “It’s over, isn’t it?”

“Nearly,” said Reg, and, seeing Joel’s look of misery and feeling partly responsible, he added, “but if we must return to civilization, let’s be as uncivilized as possible beforehand.”

That afternoon, they pilfered the choicest items they could find from the larder, then they lay on the lawn, feeding each other sugared almonds and Turkish delight dipped in Belgian chocolate, and they tipped champagne between each other’s lips until they both got pleasantly giddy.

“Read me a story,” said Joel.

Reg went upstairs and found a dark and unassuming book of erotica he’d been given by an admirer years ago, when he’d been young and entirely innocent.

He brought it outside and sat by a tree on the edge of the lawn, beckoning Joel to join him.

The grass was cool and soft and smelled of the baking earth and the sweet scent of vanilla from the flowers in the garden.

Reg leaned back against the trunk and Joel lay with his head in Reg’s lap, and Reg read to him from the book, stroking Joel’s hair.

Rather than lulling Joel to sleep, the book excited him, and when Reg finished reading the story, Joel jumped up and ran into the house.

He unhooked a shiny black mask from the wall of the main floor staircase and tore across the lawn holding the mask aloft while Reg chased him.

Joel donned the mask, leapt onto the rim of the fountain, and pranced along its rim in a weird, primal dance.

The sun gleamed on the edge of the mask and Joel’s pale skin.

Reg stared until he couldn’t stand it anymore, and he seized Joel, if only to prove that he was real, and pulled him off the rim of the fountain and onto the grass.

Reg almost succumbed to the temptation to fuck him there and then.

Joel twisted in his arms, and they wrestled until they were breathless, and Joel lay heaving.

Reg pulled the mask off and kissed him until the smile melted off Joel’s face, and his mouth grew harder, and Reg pinned him to the ground by his hips and busied himself opening Joel’s trousers and freeing his cock.

“I want you to fill up my mouth, right?” said Reg, and he went down on him.

Joel, already worked up, surged against him, making the most delicious sounds with increasing urgency, plunging his heels into the ground beside Reg’s head, thumping the grass with his palm.

“I’m going to come,” Joel gasped.

Reg raised his head a moment. “Don’t tell me. Tell the fucking universe.” And he enclosed Joel fully in his mouth and everything came spilling out: Words, gasps, yells, an unending stream of raw feeling, a tonsil-scorching scream.

Reg suckled him softly, and when Joel was done, he opened his mouth and spilled Joel’s pleasure into the grass beside him.

“Perhaps your seed will grow a Joel tree,” said Reg.

“Fuck,” Joel breathed, head back, the back of his hand balanced on his forehead. “Oh fuck. Oh fuckohfuckohfuck.”

Thunder rumbled in the distance.

“Let’s go in, cariad,” said Reg.

He got up, pulled Joel to his feet, loose-limbed and weak, and held Joel against him as they shambled to the house.

As he shut the door behind them, Joel leaned into him, resting his head in the hollow of Reg’s shoulder and hugged him.

“I don’t want to go home.” His voice was muffled against Reg’s chest.

“I know.” Reg held him gently. “But I need to defend. You don’t have to go. You can stay behind if you like. Bethan will look after you, and there’ll be no one here till my father comes back in October. You clearly love England.”

“You’re my England,” said Joel. “You’re my Wales.”

“Come and live with me, then. Unless you’d rather move in with your mother? Or your sister?”

“No. With you.”

“Well,” said Reg, feeling absurdly pleased.

“You don’t mind?”

“Joel, I’d mind if you weren’t with me.”

Rain hammered on the glass in the front door.

“Shit,” said Joel.

“What?”

“I left my clothes on the lawn.”

“So, they’ll get rained on. They’ve had much worse.”

“Thanks to you,” said Joel.

They both laughed quietly, sadly.

The next day as they stood on the drive waiting for their taxi, Joel looked lost. “I’m going to make sure I don’t forget anything,” he said, and he went inside.

He hadn’t come back when the taxi arrived, so Reg went in to look for him.

The house felt empty and bittersweet, like an orange with the flesh scooped out.

He found Joel in the library, in front of the window, pressing his fingertip against a mullioned pane, the green of the lawn and the trees lending it an emerald glow.

“What are you doing?” said Reg.

“Making sure I don’t forget.”

“Taxi’s here.”

“I don’t want anything to change,” said Joel.

“Everything changes. Unless you’re dead. Then everything stops changing.” Reg patted his pockets for his notebook.

Joel handed him his newest journal.

“That’s yours,” said Reg.

“You can use it for now. You can read it on the plane if you want.”

“Cariad, my darling, my sweetheart.” Reg drew Joel into a long kiss, curtailed by the bleat of the taxi’s horn.

They moved apart, Joel adjusting his clothes.

“We should have...this morning,” said Joel.

They hadn’t had time, having slept late after their night of indulgence.

“I know,” said Reg. “But we’ll have to be decent for a little—superficially, at least.”