The Folding Star Read Online Free PDF Page A

started a few months later, and was triggered especially by flowers. There was a sort of pride in his possession of these facts. He said that his father loved flowers, but had never had them in the house since. I asked, with what was clearly a suspicious sweetness, what it was his father did; and learned that he was the keeper of the little museum of Orst’s paintings, out on an edge of town I hadn’t visited, but where five or six old windmills had been renovated on top of a high dike. Marcel said firmly that he did not like Orst’s work.
    I drank quite a bit in my room, tippling through my litre of duty-free Cap and Badge, and went out about eleven to the Bar Biff, a club in the basement of a house right next to the Cathedral. The unwary or short-sighted pilgrim might easily have mistaken it for the entrance to the Crypt (10th Century) and the shrine of St Ernest. The street outside was almost deserted, with an occasional late walker or pair of denim-jacketed boys pausing to peer through the locked grilles of electrical shops. Warm, too, with a scent from the trees that seemed to insist again on a last frail summery possibility. I felt quite good in my leather jacket, charcoal 501s and tipped, tight-laced black Oxfords; nervous, but adrift and irresponsible.
    I’d seen the club extolled in a local listings magazine, and hovered with dismayed recognition over its central ‘portfolio’ of skinny lads in shorts and swimwear and reports on fabulous nights at discos: the flashlit shots of the two or three cutest boys there and the overweight barman with his arm round a peroxided stripling were indistinguishable from those in the British gay press recalling the great time had at Kid or Zoom! or Croydon’s ritzy Blue Fedora a desolate few weeks ago. Once inside the heavy sound-proofed door with its little wired judas I was in a place so familiar that I would not have been surprised to see my old friends Danny and Simon reaching through to lift drinks over the shoulders of those obstinately seated at the bar, or stalking and jumping around the tiny dance-floor. There was the same mad delusion of glamour, the same overpriced tawdriness, the same ditsy parochialism and sullen lardy queenery, and underneath it all the same urgency and defiance. We none of us wanted a palace: we liked this humming little hell-hole with its atrophied rules and characters, its ogres and mascots.
    Not that I could identify too completely. I was a newcomer, an unknown, a holidaymaker perhaps or shy débutant. A few heads turned, I thought, a few remarks were made. But as I got my bottle of expensively fashionable beer and wandered round I knew I hadn’t gone down a bomb: something hard and proud in me wanted to shine, something homey and self-effacing was relieved I didn’t. And of course your regulars don’t all look for novelty: maybe they’d like to score with some strange angelic beauty but they know that heavy truck-driver with brown teeth and a famous dick will give them what they’ve been waiting for all week. The older men in the corner look with envy at the youngsters, but with a kind of disillusion too.
    I leant against a mirrored pillar and kept my eye on a bunch of kids who hung around mocking and caressing each other, sipping quickly and shiftily at Cokes and beers and bopping about with a knowing coy beauty on the edge of the floor. They seemed more in their element than anyone in the dismal thin Euro-pop interspersed with tired, tired disco classics which to them perhaps still had point and exhilaration. Is it legal? I found myself wondering as I watched a muscly little lad in a string vest and baggy hitched-up jeans licking blond froth from the black down on his upper lip and holding forth hoarsely like a schoolyard gangster. He couldn’t be more than sixteen, surely? But that was okay here, unlike at home; it was the classical, commonplace good sense of Europe. I thought I’d never wanted anyone so much. I upset myself by