Trespass Read Online Free PDF Page B

dear,’ she would say. ‘The way you love the Muncaster.’
    And he would smile and suggest another show tune, so that she wouldn’t see that he was giggling at the way she, who had come to England from South Africa and still spoke with an accent which flattened vowels and slid numberless sounds in strange and embarrassing directions, used the word ‘dear’.
    Anthony thought that Lal would have understood his longing to be a boy again. In the last fifteen years of her own life, he’d observed her thoughts returning quite frequently to Hermanus, where her parents had owned a villa within sight of the sea and where, in the South African summer, meals had been served by black servants (‘houseboys’) on a fifty-foot verandah. She told Anthony that she’d grown to love England, her adopted country, ‘but part of me stays South African, you know? I can remember African stars. I can remember being smaller than a Canna lily.’
    Anthony sat on at his desk as a slow twilight descended over Chelsea, and glared at his address book. He wondered whether, tonight, he was going to be brave enough to call one of the ‘boys’. Without enthusiasm, he turned the pages of the book, reading names and telephone numbers: Micky, Josh, Barry, Enzo, Dave . . .
    They challenged him. Hungry, vigorous, wild, they were all, he felt, more alive than he’d ever been. The last one to visit his bed had been the Italian, Enzo, with solemn eyes and a lovely pout. He’d worn an expensive shirt, but his shoes had been dusty and down-at-heel. He’d showed off his cock, presented it for admiration, ropey and big in his hands, as though offering it at auction.
    Then, whispering in Anthony’s ear, the boy had begun a stream of dirty talk, a continuous, low accompaniment of smut. Anthony had listened and watched. The light in his bedroom was doused to dull amber and the body of the boy appeared smooth and golden, exactly what Anthony liked, the buttocks fat, almost womanish.
    His arms went round Enzo. He touched his nipples, stroked his chest. He began to feel it, the first choke of desire, but then the damned monologue drifted into Italian and now had no meaning for Anthony, just became irritating, and he told Enzo to stop talking, but the boy didn’t stop, he was a dirty-talk diva, a smut-salesman and he was keeping on going.
    The things we do . . .
    The desperate things . . .
    Enzo lay on the bed. Anthony knelt. He still wasn’t hard. But he thought the fat buttocks might do it, if he concentrated on them, stroked and kneaded them, parted the flesh . . . But no, really and truly what he wanted to do, suddenly, was to slap them. Wound the Italian boy. Wound himself. Because it seemed so base, so pitiful, this getting of boys – just to prove that he was still alive as a man. It was ridiculous. He’d moved away from the bed, tugged on his robe, told Enzo to get up and leave. Paid the promised cash, stuffing it into the pocket of Enzo’s leather jacket and the boy went out, sulky and offended. Anthony had sat in his kitchen for a long time, had sat without moving, listening to the hum of the fridge, to the traffic on the road, aware that he felt nothing; nothing except rage.
    Now, he laid the address book aside. The thought of a boy – any boy – in his bed made him feel tired. His body was having difficulty enough with mundane, everyday things. The base of his spine ached from sitting all day at the back of the shop. To walk as far as Knightsbridge made his feet sore. His sight was deteriorating so fast, he could hardly read his own price tags, even with his glasses on. So why on earth did he imagine that it could suddenly be overwhelmed by ecstasy or caught unawares by love?
    He imagined it because, somehow, he had to find the means to go on, to persist. And what better thing to furnish the future than love of some kind?
    Anthony rubbed his eyes, poured himself a tumbler of dry sherry and began to gulp it. He got up and walked