Page 29 of The Elements

He was quite up-front in the bar in Walthamstow, telling me exactly what he wanted to do to me, what he expected me to do to him in return, and for how long he would require my services.

His offer was three hundred pounds, five times more than remained in my bank account. I didn’t even think about saying no.

Rafe had an apartment close to London City Airport, with a view over the Thames near Woolwich Ferry.

The hallway was lined with books. I’d been fond of reading when I was growing up but hadn’t devoted much time to it since leaving the island.

Books were expensive, after all, and most of my money had been spent on canvases, paint, and brushes.

“Nice place,” I told him, meaning it. This was the type of apartment I had imagined myself living in when my artistic dreams still seemed achievable.

“It serves its purpose,” he said. “It’s just my bolt-hole, really.”

He could tell from the expression on my face that I didn’t know what that meant.

“A place to stay when I’m in London,” he explained. “The family home is elsewhere.”

“You’re married?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said. I glanced around and saw some framed photographs and walked toward them.

One showed him and his wife with their arms around each other in a place that I thought was St. Mark’s Square in Venice, smiling for the camera.

He had children too. Some daughters in tennis whites. A son in a football strip.

“More of a squash man, myself,” he said, noticing where I was looking. “You?”

“Me what?”

“Are you interested in sport?”

I shook my head and continued to study the room. An entire wall was filled with vinyl records, and I gravitated toward them, scanning them like objects in a museum. I had never held an actual record in my hands before but liked the feel of one when I took it down.

“Do you enjoy music?” asked Rafe, pouring us both a whiskey, and I took mine and sipped it slowly.

The glass was remarkably heavy. The difference between the rich and the poor, it occurred to me, was that, for the former, their glassware was just as expensive as the liquor they poured into it, while people like me were happy to drink out of cans, bottles, or plastic cups.

As the alcohol entered my bloodstream and mixed with the beer from earlier, I began to feel more relaxed, which I hadn’t in the taxi.

Traveling the twelve miles across London, I’d started to worry that I was making a mistake.

Maybe he would try to kill me when he got me home.

When we stopped at a traffic light, I’d even considered opening the door and jumping out, but the money was too alluring.

“Doesn’t everyone?” I asked, examining an old Prince album I’d plucked out.

“Tell me an artist you like,” he said, kicking off his shoes, and I noticed that he wore garish Kermit the Frog socks, the type that a man his age might think made him appear youthful and unconventional but just made him seem a little ridiculous.

I listed a few bands and singers that I listened to regularly, assuming he wouldn’t have heard of any of them, but, to my surprise, he strolled toward his collection and removed an album by the first group I had named, whose members were only a year or two older than me.

“I like this song particularly,” he said, removing the record from its sleeve and placing it on the turntable.

He dusted the black grooves with a small cloth before examining the needle and placing it gently upon the vinyl.

I liked the ceremony with which he did this, I respected it, and understood why a person might prefer to engage in such theater before the music began.

It was so much more civilized than the haphazard way in which I scrolled through songs on my phone, cutting each one off to switch to another whenever I grew bored.

By chance, he’d chosen a song that happened to be one of my favorites, and he smiled when he saw me move my head in time with the music.

As he watched me for a few moments, I experienced a sudden fear that he would ask me to dance for him, but thankfully this humiliation did not come to pass.

Instead, he simply placed his glass down on a side table and leaned forward to kiss me.

I had never kissed anyone as old as him before, nor had I ever wanted to, and found it a strange but not entirely disagreeable experience, although I didn’t care for the roughness of his skin.

When he placed his left hand on the back of my head and slipped his tongue into my mouth I wasn’t sure whether this was because he was worried that I might change my mind or because he liked the idea of being in control.

Despite not being particularly attracted to him, I found my body responding to his embrace.

It was arousing to know that he wanted me.

And there was a part of me that wanted to be here, to stay here, to be someone like him or someone with him.

“First things first,” I said, settling into my new role as I pulled away, and he nodded and reached for his wallet.

“Quite right,” he said, handing across six fifty-pound notes, which I counted quickly before slipping them into the back pocket of my jeans.

The moment I did so, the atmosphere changed.

He owned me now, for the agreed amount of time anyway, and wanted me to know it.

“Take your clothes off,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice as he dimmed the lights.

“The curtains,” I said, for the windows of his apartment looked out onto the river beyond, but also toward the windows of other buildings nearby. There was a strange, inconsistent blaze of lights reflecting above the water. I would have liked to have painted it.

“Don’t be disobedient, Evan,” he replied, frowning. “I said take your clothes off. Please do as you’re told.”

I glanced toward the hallway and wondered what he would do if I tried to leave.

But I didn’t test him. Whatever this was, whatever I was doing, I was content to see it through.

I had never known any power in my life before, but in this moment my youth and beauty had given me both and I had enough self-awareness to understand that neither would last forever.

I kicked off my trainers, pulled my T-shirt over my head, unbuckled my belt, and removed my jeans.

“Socks,” he said.

I took them off, and Rafe ordered me to sit on the sofa, where he took my feet in his hands, one by one, and examined them carefully, his fingers moving softly across my toes.

It felt absurd to me, vaguely embarrassing.

Of course, he had no idea of the things I could do with those feet.

When he released them, he instructed me to stand, and I closed my eyes as he removed my boxer shorts.

In that moment, I knew that the only way to go through with this was to separate my mind from its present location and allow it to remove itself to a different world entirely.

Rafe did the things he had said he would do, nothing more and nothing less.

He asked me to do the things that I had agreed to do, nothing more and nothing less.

And while we both performed our roles, buyer and seller, my mind returned to the island, where I walked the path through the village toward the school, greeting friends along the way and stopping to chat with one of my more considerate teachers, a man who had encouraged me in my artwork.

I knelt down to tie my laces outside the old pub, where Larry Mulshay asked after my mother.

I sat on the bench outside the new pub, where Tim Devlin told me he’d give me ten euros to clear all the leaves from the courtyard out the back.

I made my way up the hill toward the house in which I’d been reared and the farm I would reluctantly inherit someday.

I felt the earth beneath my fingernails, the fine dust secreted into the lines of my hands, as he pressed me against the window and muttered obscenities into my ears.

Perhaps he found this a turn-on, to speak in such a coarse way, but it did nothing for me.

If anything, I felt disappointed in him.

He had appeared so refined before, but now he just seemed like any other middle-aged man getting his kicks by trying to humiliate a boy.

I wanted to tell him that nothing he could say could have any emotional effect on me whatsoever.

I’d spent my life being humiliated by someone who was far better at it than him.

And still, despite all this, I didn’t regret being there. I wanted him too.

He leaned into me and covered my face with his left hand, and I inhaled the smell of him.

He must have sprayed cologne on his wrists before going out for the evening, something I’d never heard of anyone doing before.

I thought of Cormac, who’d been given a bottle of CK One the Christmas before I left, and how he’d worn it every day and I’d teased him for it even though I found the scent dizzying.

I thought of Harry, the farmer’s son in South Wales, and the way he’d spun me around against an old oak tree, pushing me into the bark, and the exquisite pain of the wood as it imprinted itself on the pale, hairless skin of my stomach when he fucked me.

When he finished, my knees had given out from beneath me and I’d collapsed onto the earth, content to fall asleep right there, with the dirt in my ears and the worms crawling over my face.

Bury me here, I had thought at the time.

Just bury me here. How many laborers had he fucked?

I wondered. How many had he told that, if they revealed his secret, they would lose their job.

I’m not like you , he’d insisted. I’m not a queer.

When it was over, when Rafe was finished, I asked whether I could use his shower and he looked at me as if I’d asked to borrow his car for the weekend.

“I’d prefer that you didn’t,” he said, glancing toward my clothes, which were scattered across the floor. He was done with me now and wanted me gone. Well, fuck this for a game of soldiers , I thought.

“Where is it?” I asked, turning around and walking toward the corridor, not waiting for an answer. “Down here?”

I found the bathroom without difficulty and enjoyed a long, hot shower, lathering myself with as much of his expensive shower gel as I could and exfoliating my face with a scrub that sat on the shower shelf.

Even the packaging looked like it cost more than he’d spent on me.

I hadn’t felt so dirty in a long time and wanted to scour my body of everything he’d left upon me.

Afterward, wrapping a towel around my waist, I examined myself in the mirror.

I was eighteen years old and perfect. I might not be able to sell my paintings, but I could sell myself.

When I returned to the living room, Rafe was fully dressed, and my clothes were gathered neatly in a pile.

“Feel better?” he asked.

“Much,” I said, stripping the towel away and dressing before him without an ounce of self-consciousness.

In my absence, he’d turned the television on, and it was showing an old black-and-white movie, although he’d muted the volume.

I recognized Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn.

These were the kind of films Mam had always enjoyed, and I wanted him to invite me to stay, to suggest that we watch the rest of the film together, for him to run his hands through my hair and put me to bed afterward in the spare room, to tuck me in.

To be my father, to be my kind father. For me to be his obedient son.

When I was dressed, I checked my back pocket to make sure that he hadn’t taken the money back while I was in the shower. He looked a little disappointed when he saw me do this.

“Now that’s beneath you,” he said, and, strangely, this was the first time all evening that I’d felt any sense of shame.

“Sorry,” I said. “I have low expectations of people.”

He shrugged, as if he shared my cynicism about human nature.

“There’s a pad of paper over there, by the occasional table,” he said, nodding toward the left corner of the room.

I glanced around. I had no clue what that phrase meant but walked toward a round marble table on a narrow stem, assuming this was what he was referring to.

“Write your phone number down,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

He picked up the Prince album that I’d left on an armchair and returned it to the shelf before taking the record he’d been playing from the turntable, holding it at eye level and gently blowing a speck of dust from it, then slid it carefully back inside its sleeve.

“You need money, I assume?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Then write your number down.”

“You want me to come back another night?”

“Oh no,” he said, shaking his head. “No, I never draw water from the same well twice. This was just… how shall I put it?… an audition.”

“An audition for what?”

“Just write your number down, Evan. Or don’t. It’s entirely up to you.”

I thought about it, then lifted the pen and pad of paper and did as he asked. Why not? I reasoned. I was foolish enough to think that I could remain in control.

“Good boy,” he said, smiling.

“How do I get home from here?” I asked as I made my way toward the door. “I don’t really know where I am.”

“Where do you live?” he asked, and I told him the general area. “The DLR to Canning Town,” he told me. “Then, I think, the District Line the rest of the way. Although you might want to check the map to be sure.”

“It’s late,” I said. “Dangerous out there. Bad men everywhere. All trying to take advantage of innocent young lads like me.”

He couldn’t help himself. He laughed.

“Quite the little operator, aren’t you?” he said, reaching for his wallet again and removing some notes before handing them to me. “Here. This should be enough for a taxi.”

“Thanks,” I said. We both knew I’d keep the money and just take the Tube. And it wasn’t the District Line the rest of the way, I had to change at West Ham. He obviously didn’t spend a lot of time on public transport.