The Folding Star Read Online Free PDF Page B

glimpse of. Then Cherif was standing in front of us grinning and leaned close to embrace us both at the same time. His breath smelt of dope.
    I was cold to him and resisted his assumption that I would be pleased to see him. He ruffled my hair, and said with mock solemnity to Ty, ‘Bonsoir, M’sieur Mouchoir,’ and Ty laughingly but blushingly told him to piss off. ‘So you’ve met up with my friend M’sieur Mouchoir,’ he said to me; I supposed it was a tedious old joke to do with fashion and modelling – I merely shrugged. Cherif was nodding and chuckling and very slow. ‘How are you, my friend Edward?’ he asked.
    I gave an unimpressed smile and said, ‘I missed you the other night at Wanne’s bar.’
    ‘Oh, I can’t go there,’ he said, as if objecting to a suggestion I had made myself.
    ‘It wasn’t a very good idea to ask me to meet you there, then, was it?’
    Cherif was absolutely opaque, and I wondered for a moment if he was struggling to repair some real lapse of memory; but his crude survivor’s evasion proved he was not. ‘Why are men with glasses so sexy?’ he said. He looked to the handsome, I thought lens-wearing, Ty: ‘What do you think, Mouchoir?’ Ty merely shrugged in his turn.
    ‘I don’t like being made a fool of,’ I said, but I was already warming to Cherif’s hand moving gently on the small of my back and could see and feel the pleasure of going home with him just as certainly as I could envisage the meaningless and un-arousing performance I might have gone through with Ty.
    There was a period of semi-tactful adjustment, in which Ty’s smile did overtime to mask the indignity of having me literally snatched from his arms by someone he knew already and who mocked him in such a childish way. But I wasn’t at all sure why he had singled me out in the first place, or what feelings were hidden by his rather beautiful exterior. You’d think he would easily be able to score with some other person here – but it was true that none had approached him or greeted him in passing. He seemed to me suddenly isolated in his groomed preoccupation and from the moment Cherif arrived I was aware of his seeking out another partner – his own reflection in the nightclub’s smoky mirrors. It was, I sensed, a relationship deeper than the one he might have with me or any other dancer in the Bar Biff.

2
    Cherif thumped me awake next morning and excitedly told me to look out of the window. I was too slow, and missed the funny thing he wanted me to see. But a minute or two later as I was groping round and squirting a clown’s beard of shaving-foam on to my jaw he called me back to where he was standing in just his vest at the half-open shutter. He had his friendly crooked hard-on.
    Over to the right from one of the high barred windows of that institutional building which had so far remained silent and dark, three boys were peeing into the canal. They stood up on the windowsill, pressed against the bars, and directed their dying arcs up and out – presumably in a contest to see who could reach the furthest. I watched them finish and stand down whilst the shaving-foam thinned in an almost noiseless crepitation over my stubble. In a moment or two another trio took up their positions, we heard a command quite strictly barked inside, and the one on the left was away already. It must almost have been a false start. The other two followed a few seconds later, first in hesitant spurts and tinkles, but growing in confidence until for a while all three were at full cock, like a guard of honour. I don’t think any of them reached our side of the canal, but number one made the finest impression and had the greatest capacity: he was still going strong as the other two’s offerings dwindled and trailed home across the water and a breeze caught them and frayed their thinning plumes.
    I understood for the first time that this patched-up brick barracks of a place was the school of St Narcissus itself and that