Page 27 of The Elements

Twelve hours after leaving the island, I boarded a ferry from Dublin to Holyhead, before hitching a ride to South Wales, where I found work on a farm cultivating a mixture of wheat and barley.

I’d worked with crops before so fitted in well, being suited to early starts and long days.

Eight of us lived in a house on the northeast corner of the land, two in each of the four bedrooms. My roommate was a boy named Buddha, a nickname he’d earned because he was fat and bald, despite being only a few years older than me.

He was involved in an on-off relationship with a Canadian girl, Joanna, who slept in the room opposite ours.

Buddha and I didn’t get on well. He’d had the room to himself for two months before my arrival and objected to my intrusion.

He was vulgar in his habits and spoke of women in ways that made me uncomfortable.

When he and Joanna wanted to have sex, he’d send me to sleep on the sofa downstairs, where the springs pressed into my back.

I protested once and a threat of violence followed, so I backed down.

I asked Joanna’s roommate whether I could use the spare bed in her room when it was empty, and she said no. I told her I was gay, so she didn’t have to worry about me making a pass at her, but she said she didn’t care about my sexuality, she just didn’t want to share with a boy.

“Don’t you like boys?” I asked her, and she said that was the problem, she liked boys too much, and that I wouldn’t be safe around her. I must have looked bewildered, as she burst out laughing and told me not to flatter myself.

Once I was settled, I wrote to Mam and Dad to reassure them that I was safe and had a job, but didn’t give them my address.

I did, however, share my new mobile number, and a few days later, the phone rang.

It was Dad, calling to tell me what a useless cunt I was, that I had it in me to be one of the great footballers of all time—better than Pelé, he said; better than Georgie Best—and that I was throwing it all away.

“But I don’t want to be a footballer,” I told him, for what must have been the thousandth time since I was a child. “I’m not even interested in watching it, let alone playing it.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” he roared. “You have a God-given talent that I would have killed for. Do you know how many trials I had when I was your age?”

“I know,” I said, for he’d told me often enough. Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, Newcastle. A long list of cities and towns he’d traveled to when he was a teenager in the hope of escaping his own father. But he didn’t have the skill that I did.

“I’d have given my left foot to have your talent,” he said.

“Wouldn’t have made you much of a footballer then, would it?” I replied, and he swore at me and demanded my address, which I refused.

“But a farm,” he said, exasperated. “If you wanted to work on a fuckin’ farm, you could have stayed here.”

“I don’t want to work on a farm,” I said. “It’s just somewhere to make money, that’s all. I want to be a painter.”

“You’re not going to be a fuckin’ painter!” he shouted.

“I am,” I said.

“Like a fuckin’…” like a fuckin’ queer,” he said.

I fell silent then. I wasn’t sure what the connection between art and homosexuality was in his mind, but they seemed to be closely aligned.

Of course, he’d never read a book in his life.

Or gone to the theater. Or watched a film that didn’t have explosions in it.

He would have thought it effete. He would have thought my using the word effete was effete, for that matter.

I felt like telling him the truth about me, just to make him even angrier, but worried that if he knew, he might march down the road to take out his fury on Cormac.

And I couldn’t risk Cormac telling him why I ran away the first time.

Or why I left forever a few months after that.

He started ranting then, so I ended the call and blocked his number. When I looked up, Buddha was standing in the doorway, staring at me.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“You’re crying,” he said, and I put my hands to my face. To my surprise, my cheeks were wet with tears.

“My dad,” I told him. “He scares me.”

He nodded and sat down on the bed next to me and I placed my head on his shoulder and he allowed it.

He put an arm around me and asked did I think he was working on this farm because he wanted to?

I’m running away from something too, he told me.

Not getting into it. Too long a story. Too fucked up.

But you’re not alone. So no more crying, all right?

You’re a bit of a twat, Evan, but you don’t get to cry around me.

If I have to, I’ll tickle you to make you smile again.

I couldn’t imagine anything more uncomfortable, so I dried my eyes, not wanting to test his resolve. We grew friendlier after that.

One Sunday afternoon, a game of football was arranged in the southwest field, five-a-side, temporary workers versus the farmer and his four sons.

The second-to-youngest son’s name was Harry, he was my age and had spent the summer working alongside us.

He talked relentlessly about the girlfriend he had in university, how beautiful she was and how they did it every night.

He was obsessive on the subject, making sure everyone knew.

I kissed him by the side of a barn one evening and he kissed me back, and the next day he pretended that I didn’t exist. I didn’t know any other way to play football than well, so we won 18–2 and I scored fourteen of those goals.

Harry was their goalkeeper, and he looked humiliated by the end of it.

The farmer took me aside afterward and asked me why I was working there and not as a professional footballer.

“It’s not for me,” I told him. “I don’t mind the odd game, but I don’t want to play for a living.”

“But you could make millions.”

I shrugged. I was fond of the farmer, but he was beginning to sound like my father.

Later that night, I glanced out my bedroom window and saw Harry standing by a tree, smoking a cigarette, looking up at me. I put my shoes on and went outside to join him and we made our way into one of the far fields where we were hidden by the trees.

The next day, he ignored me again. I didn’t much care.

I used my wages to buy canvases, brushes, and paint supplies online and set myself up in a small, empty storehouse that the farmer wasn’t using and, over the course of about seven months, during the evenings, created a portfolio of work, more than two dozen paintings that I was proud of.

Some of the laborers came to look at them and made complimentary remarks, but I could tell they were baffled by what I was doing.

I didn’t paint landscapes or seascapes or people or animals.

My work was abstract. I liked geometric shapes.

I admired Kandinsky. And Mondrian. And Paul Klee.

The only thing that reappeared time and again in my work were images of soil, not the smooth, tilled land of the farm I was working on, but the rough, unplowed hills that led from the island port to my parents’ house.

I was reared in the mud and the dirt, and it showed up repeatedly on my canvases, even when I didn’t want it to.

But the earth is a part of me. The feel of it on my skin. The taste of it in my mouth.

When the season was over and it was time to leave the farm, I made my way to London, naively intending to live as an artist. I thought that if I could sell some of my work, then perhaps I could rent a studio in one of the cheaper parts of the city.

Somewhere I could shake the land out of my system and replace its ugliness with color, beauty, fine lines, and the wild ideas that roared through my head and often made no sense, not even to me.

Over time, I approached every gallery I could find and was rejected by all of them. Each one said the same thing, that I was not untalented but that there was no originality in what I had produced.

“You like Kandinsky, don’t you?” one gallerist asked, carefully examining the three canvases that I considered my best, stepping very close to them to study my brushwork and the places where the lines intersected.

“I do,” I said.

“And Mondrian.”

“Yes.”

“And Paul Klee.”

I nodded.

“I can tell,” he said, sounding half regretful, for he was kind and didn’t want to hurt me unnecessarily. He put a hand on my shoulder and gently massaged the muscle there. “And that’s the problem.”

“Should I go to college,” I asked, knowing I couldn’t afford it anyway, and he shook his head, telling me that I would be wasting my time.

“You must be born with the gift,” he said. “And I’m sorry, but you haven’t been. You’re young, Evan. You must find something else to do with your life. Trying to achieve the impossible will only bring you misery. And you will grow to hate art, as if it is your enemy.”

This broke my heart. But when I stood before the paintings that hung in the museums and galleries around London and compared them to my own, I knew that he was right. I was no artist. I was just good at painting. In the same way that my father was good at football but was no footballer.

I couldn’t allow myself to return to the island. Not because I was afraid to admit failure, but because I didn’t want to grow old with the eternal mud beneath my fingernails, dirt that would remain there stubbornly, no matter how hard I tried to wash it away.

But my money was running out. I wrote to the farmer, asking for my job back, and he said he was sorry, but he’d hired someone in my place.

I moved into a rented room in Dagenham, in a house that contained twelve decrepit bedrooms and a shared kitchen where the mice lived for free.

The other residents were mostly off their heads on drink and drugs.

My room had a single bed and a sink and there were only two showers on the third floor, which you came out of feeling dirtier than when you went in.

A woman older than my mother knocked on my door late one night demanding sex, saying I was the most beautiful boy she’d ever seen in her life.

I refused and she called me a faggot. She said if I didn’t fuck her, then she’d tell everyone in the house that I liked boys, and I told her she could do what she liked, what did I care, so she asked me whether I could lend her a cigarette instead, but I said I didn’t smoke, and she told me I was fucking useless and I should fuck off back to Ireland like the Fenian bastard I was.

And then one night, with only sixty pounds left to my name, I took the Tube to Walthamstow, to a pub I’d heard about but never visited before, hoping to find a boy my own age to talk to, someone who might take me home with him. For a warm body. For arms around me. For a hot shower.

But I was the youngest there by far. The old men who sat on stools by the bar, nursing tired gin and tonics, perked up briefly when I walked in.

I could have left but had nowhere else to go.

I ordered a beer and sat in a dark corner, underneath a poster for a film called La Cage aux Folles , sipping my drink while I tried to figure out what to do next with my life.

That’s when he approached me.

I could sense him as he made his way across the floor but didn’t look up, even as his footsteps grew louder, brogues tapping on the woodwork.

He didn’t look like the dinosaurs at the bar, although he was a good twenty-five years older than me.

His clothes were smart, and he had short graying hair and pale blue eyes.

Handsome, for his age. For any age. Sitting down opposite me, he lit a cigarette.

I glanced toward the barman, expecting him to intervene, to tell him that he couldn’t smoke in here, but he didn’t seem to care.

The man studied me carefully as he drew on it.

“I’m Rafe,” he said, reaching a hand across, and I shook it. He wore a gold signet ring on the little finger of his left hand.

“Evan,” I replied.

He raised my chin until I was looking him directly in the eye. We held each other’s gaze.

“Have you ever heard of Luchino Visconti?” he asked. I shook my head.

“You’re probably too young,” he said. “He made a very famous film—well, he made quite a few of them—but in one, there’s a boy.

A boy who becomes the obsession of an older man.

In the film, the part was played by a young actor who you won’t have heard of either, but for a time he was known as the most beautiful boy in the world. ”

I stared at him. I waited for him to continue, although I knew exactly what he was going to say.

“You could be his twin,” he told me.