Shanghai Boy

by Stevan Eldred-Grigg

  ‘Professor,’ hisses Jay.

  The boy lifts the sheet and swiftly bends his body, his handsome head, towards me. He kisses me. A quick little buss on my lips, with his lips — and then he’s gone, he’s off the bed, he’s running away. The door slams behind his fleeing body.

  What the —? I’m dazed. I’m excited. I’m unhappy. What the fuck —? I get up and go to my own room, shut my door, lie down on my bed. The poor lad — can he have a crush on me? He’s so young and blooming, and I’m so wrinkled and old. Yet he must have a crush, obviously. Kids are always getting crushes on their teachers. How could I have been so slack as to miss the signs and not have taken care to fend him off? One of the things I’ve always been good at is drawing a clear line — in my own mind and the minds of my students — between friendliness on the one hand and bedroom eyes on the other.

  The door bursts open.

  Jay stands there, looking wet and wild.

  ‘As Karl Marx write,’ says the lad, ‘the chance is always falling on those who are prepared. We should make up our minds and get ready for the chance as we don’t know when it will come. My chance has come now.’

  ‘Your chance for what, Jay?’

  I know, of course, yet don’t want to know that I know.

  ‘When I am small kid I understand I am gay, but I don’t worry that is bad situation. I know I should act successfully this role in my world. I know I have happy life by my honest and kind. I know nothing is impossible to a willing heart. The word from the bottom of my heart is I want to have one night with you.’

  ‘Hey, we can’t — look, you’re a wonderful boy, but —’

  ‘I got butterfly in my tummy just thinking of it.’

  No need for him to say a word more about those flittering insects, since all the slim limbs of his lean body are trembling, his face is white, and his teeth are chattering.

  ‘Jay, it’s out of the question! Anyway, what makes you think I’m gay? I’ve got daughters.’

  ‘Do you like sex with guy?’

  ‘Well, yes. You’re too young, though. You’re just a boy.’

  ‘Maybe I am such a young boy, but I can give love to mature man.’

  ‘Jay, please let’s — I’m too old, you’re too young.’

  Now the beautiful guy has come to the side of the bed, his body shaking so hard I start to shiver myself. Bravely, he stares at me.

  ‘I think your thoughts is wrong,’ he snarls — it’s almost a snarl, it comes out with such fierceness. ‘Age, no problem.’

  ‘Look, let’s just —’

  ‘Age, no problem! Gender, no problem. Constellation, no problem. Body, sex, race, all no fucking problem. Feeling, you know! Feeling! That is everything.’

  He’s throwing off his clothes. I can’t believe this. The young man is stepping out of his jeans and tossing them away, and stripping off his white cotton briefs, and while trying hard not to let him know I’m looking, I look. He’s such a babe. His skin seems to glow. He’s so supple, in spite of his shivers. His cock — okay, I glance at a long floppy foreskin, richly filled by cock. Stop right there! Making myself lift my eyes, I check out his waist. Wow. I find myself wanting to kiss the skin on each flank at the spot where his waist comes to its narrowest above a tangle of black glossy curls.

  I grab hold of him, grab the boy around that waist, and pull him down onto the bed.

  I still can’t believe it — he’s so soft, so smooth.

  ‘Jay, look, I don’t want to — but —’

  ‘Take your clothes off.’

  ‘I’m not sure, I —’

  ‘Kiss me.’

  I kiss him, slowly. I find it hard to breathe.

  ‘Your lips are very warm and delicious,’ says the boy, also breathless. ‘I love your sexy body and powerful hands and legs — and now may I fuck you, Professor?’

  ‘Call me Manfred. Yes, okay — fuck me.’

  Afterwards we lie holding each other amidst the crumpled, rumpled, spunked, sticky, sweaty sheets.

  ‘Hey, how old are you, Jay? Twenty?’

  ‘Nineteen years old, Manfred.’

  Groan. He really is a kid. Nineteen years of age by Chinese reckoning is only eighteen by ours.

  ‘Jay, my younger daughter’s older than you.’

  He doesn’t seem to hear or care, but starts talking eagerly.

  ‘I am in love with you since I first see you. But I hide my symptom from you till today, the last day in the old world of no love and the first day in the new world of love. I am the apple of my family’s eye and never taste any bitterness before. I will never taste any bitterness now I have you. You are a man of knowledge, the man I will live for. The day I meet you, I notice your attractive look, especially the beautiful blue eyes. That pair of eyes! Kill me, your eyes!’

  Meanwhile here’s me looking into his eyes, and thinking hard, and not feeling happy.

  ‘Jay, we can’t — I don’t think — I mean, I think —’

  ‘Think what?’

  ‘You look like a movie star, that’s what I’m thinking. I’m thinking how strange it is to be in bed with someone who looks like a movie star.’

  He laughs happily.

  ‘My cousin is more movie star look.’

  Well, it’s true that the lad is gobsmackingly gorgeous, but he’s a schoolboy! The poor kid, the poor boy. He’s looking at me. He wants love, you can see it in his eyes. Two brown warm eyes looking at me trustingly. I feel an awful tenderness towards him, a kind of aching tenderness, a yearning, but — what am I damn well doing? Why am I letting myself be fucked by a boy of eighteen, for fuck’s sake? And where will the fucking end?

  Nowhere good, that’s for fucking sure!

  FEELING HUNGRY, I pop out in shorts and bare feet to the nearby shop and buy some yoghurt for my breakfast. Pines Beach has been baked dry and dusty. A hot northerly gale scorches through the treetops. Trees are bending, springing. The world feels very alive. Getting back inside my cottage with its creaky cane settees and wide salty windows, I find a message waiting on my answerphone.

  ‘Me here, just ringing with an update about Dad,’ booms the mighty mezzo. ‘Gastroenterology called to say he’s bleeding at his new stoma. We don’t really know what it means.’

  I press Delete. Carmen’s words, in a trice, are wiped away.

  I don’t want to think about my dreary dying old doddery dad right now. I want to go for a walk along the beach. Who wouldn’t rather go for a walk along the beach? Above all somebody like me, back home at my cottage, escaped from the cold crowds of China. Carmen and I flew home for a break two weeks ago. Over there, where it’s deep winter, those bundled-up crowds are bringing in their New Year. Here, it’s high summer. I scarf down yoghurt with oats and apples while listening to Schumann and reading André Schwarz-Bart. Afterwards, I slip on trainers and set off.

  The hot wind whistling across the sky.

  I toil in the heat over the soft passive weight of the dunes. I come out onto the open seashore. I feel sad, though I don’t know why. Nothing to do with Dad. Somehow it’s something to do with Pines Beach. Pines Beach seems a bit of a comedown after my having longed for it so strongly while in Shanghai. Sea hisses rhythmically and repetitively — monotonously — onto the sand. Somehow it seems not quite what it once was, before I went away. Now that I’ve been away it seems — well, a beach.

  Only a beach.

  A long, grey and windswept beach.

  As always, I set off at a smart pace southwards. Seashells are everywhere on the sand. As a little boy and as a grown man I’ve never wanted to know that all these riches, these thousands upon thousands of shells sown so wonderfully, mark nothing more than a vast graveyard. Always the knowledge has been shoved down, stowed in one of the greyest drawers of my grey matter, while drawers for storing the riotous, the hopeful, have dealt with the shells as shape, texture, colour, symbol, dream. A limey wrack has been made to seem not so much an ossuary for bleak bones — bleached skeletons — but as so
mething that formed geologically, like stones.

  Stopping at a wet spot, stooping to tie my laces more tightly, I glance at some little damp volcanoes.

  Well, that’s the way I thought about them when I was a boy. Tiny wet mounds spouting water. Tiny wet cones. I loved the thought, when I was a boy, that unlike a death-dealing volcano these cones spout life. Now my quick thought is that even a volcano, once its ash has settled, its lava cooled, its pumice eroded, will be found to have fed the land, to have breathed life in spite of its killing white heat. Which makes me think next of breasts, tits, paps of the women of our species, squirting not white heat but white milk — and briefly I feel wistful for the days when I was a lover of women, not boys, and could gnaw and suck away at those silky smooth mounds. Maybe my longing to drink white cum from a hard, yet teasingly soft cock is the same longing.

  Anyway, as a little lad I knew about the tiny wet mounds, knew that beneath those small spouts were the living shellfish, but I wasn’t quite able to get my head around it since for us who walk on top of the sand, with our skulls in the sky, the world beneath is where we dig holes for our dead. The world of the shellfish grows the other way. The world below the sand is rich and nourishing, a world where you can live and feed and thrive — and then, in the fullness of shellfish years, die, upon which your white skeleton will be lifted by time and tide, or perhaps by the beak of a marauding bird, will be strewn on the surface of the sand, that place which for mammals is a place to be alive but which for a shellfish is grim, bald, bare, untoward.

  I walk for hours.

  Dad may well have bled to death by now.

  After coming to a crowd of swimmers and sunbathers, strutting, strung with scraps of bright lycra, I spin on my heels and head back north.

  The wet sand gleams blindingly in the sunshine. I watch a few gulls wheeling over the waves. Next, lowering my eyes, I pick out a pair of pied oystercatchers. Oystercatchers are often to be found in pairs. Walking northwards, squinting into the sun, I follow their firm, tight bodies. The two winged ones land on the sand, stalk on their sharp red feet, strike downwards with the sharp red skewer of their beaks. They’re plunging those blood-red bills into the sand, seeking shellfish.

  They catch sight of me coming. They take fright.

  Pee-peep.

  Beating their wings, they swoop forward into the wind.

  I’m peckish when I get back to the cottage, so I sling together some sandwiches and brew myself some powerful coffee. Gnawing and slurping, I go online to open my latest emails. A lot from China. Greetings from students, mostly, wishing me happy New Year. I send the same message back to them.

  I wonder about Dad.

  I surf a few websites looking for world news.

  Has he indeed bled to death?

  I feel empty, despite my mouthfuls of chewed and swallowed cheese and wholemeal, my cups of strong coffee. I feel lonely. Why not check out a chatroom? My mouse clicks, a room opens, and in a couple of ticks I find myself linked with Chatwoman.

  ‘Cheers, Big Ears!’ she says.

  ‘What do you reckon about Dad?’

  ‘Well, frankly, am feeling wracked with guilt.’

  ‘Wracked?’

  ‘If that’s a word.’

  ‘Racked with guilt. Wrack = stuff washed up onto a beach. Just been looking at same. Also just been feeling guilty myself. I take it you mean guilt about Dad?’

  ‘Yeah. Ooh but I didn’t know about wrack. We could turn it into a verb cause it kinda describes the feeling. Trash not wanted. Crap on sand.’

  ‘Where’s the old guy exactly? Hospital or Palm Grove?’

  ‘He was at the hospital for an hour or two, where they gave him the once-over in Gastroenterology. He’s now gone back to the farm for old farts.’

  ‘Okay, maybe I’d better go to town and check him out. Did you take a look at him in Gastroenterology?’

  ‘Ocular contact with Goatman? Ewwww! Don’t think there’s any need to go that far! Did however take pains to get oral reports from Gastroenterology. How do you feel about this latest blip in his terminal decline?’

  I wonder, briefly.

  ‘As always,’ I type. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking all morning about the things he did for me when I was a kid,’ says Carmen. ‘Trying to work out if I owe him anything.’

  ‘And what are your preliminary conclusions?’

  ‘To keep thinking about it in lieu of doing anything real,’ she types quickly.

  ‘Sounds good to me!’

  ‘Well, it’s a tried and true method in our family. How much longer are we going to have to waste our perfectly good brains fretting over this sort of stuff? What’s that old codger waiting for? Why hasn’t he shuffled off this mortal proverbial, kicked the proverbial, snuffed the proverbial, exited, left, passed over, pushed up daisies, gone to a better place — in his case not that hard — etc? Damn him!’

  Clicking off the computer, I look out one of the windows of my sun gallery. Too hot in here in summer. A window slightly warped, faintly blanched with its crust of windblown salt. I look at my washing. Shirts, jeans, have been pegged out on a line and now whip back and forth in the northerly. I listen to the whistle of the wind and the sounds of bushes and trees. Pines are sighing, cypresses threshing, willows flailing. Also I listen for the sounds of birds. I hear heron, stilt, crake.

  Okay, get going. Out the door. Jump into my rental car.

  Let’s go to Palm Grove.

  Palm Grove Senior Care Centre is a solar system of sunny bungalows in orbit around a central hospital which itself looks like a very big bungalow. Always, all his life, my dad has lived in sunny bungalows. Palm Grove is brand spanking new. Windows are wide and shiny. Walls are buff brick. Outer bungalows are for old folk who can look after themselves with no need for nursing, while the inner hospital, according to a posted map of the complex, is a central facility for those needing care. Dad lives in the central facility.

  No right turn says a painted sign.

  Apartments open by way of glass doors onto wide carparks whose glossy blacktop has been scored by parallel lines and dashes, sharply painted in white and yellow. Staked shrubs, pruned cherry trees flank the black tarmac. My car and I crawl forward with safe slowness. Glass glistens listlessly. Lawns have been newly scalped. Roses have been ruthlessly deadheaded. My hands steer my wheels to a stop. I jump from the car gingerly. I slip into my dad’s room by way of an unlocked glass door opening from his little courtyard with its picnic table. Always he’s disliked locking doors. The old bloke proves to be fast asleep.

  Knackered, no doubt, by the flap earlier today.

  Poor fellow.

  I sit. I look at him. His veiny worn arms, whose worms of weary blood still slowly wind over chalky bones, lie limp on stiff white linen. Two rows of teeth are grinning inside a cup. The teeth are blindingly white. Nothing else on or about my dad seems to be a clean colour. Everything else is pinkish blotchy brown or greyish scurfy pink or brownish grimy red or — only those teeth, not his, not him.

  Loathsome old man.

  Die, bastard!

  Dad has been fitted with a peg tube for feeding and drinking and for getting his doses of drug. Peg is an acronym for percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy. A hose of flexible plastic — like a slender garden hose for watering roses which will then want deadheading — it burrows into his stomach by way of a hole stabbed through the skin and tendon of the abdominal wall. Doctors stuck it into him two weeks ago. How do doctors do it? Well, a general surgeon and gastroenterologist working together will drive a long thin needle from outside the body into the stomach. A wire is passed into the needle from the outside, and then is drawn through the stomach and out the mouth. The tapered tip of a peg tube is attached to the wire. The surgeon drags the wire back down the throat and through the stomach, and as that happens the peg tube is pulled down too. A soft round plug stops it in the stomach. One day then needs to be spent in recovery. Afterwards, liquids can be inj
ected several times a day by syringe.

  The job of getting grub or drugs down that tube isn’t easy. I know because I’ve watched my dad do it. One day he won’t be able to do it himself any longer, and the nurses will have to start squirting the stuff into him. One day, a bit further down the track, they’ll plug him into a morphine drip. They’ll do that for him when he asks.

  ‘Beware the morphine drip,’ was what Carmen said to me the other day. ‘The morphine drip will be the beginning of the end.’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘The morphine drip kills the patient.’

  ‘So why should we beware? That’s what we want, isn’t it? Dad dead?’

  ‘Oops, course we do! Sorry, slip of tongue, force of habit. Hippocratic oath and all that.’

  I sit stranded inside the small white room with the old, withered, sightless, wordless semi-corpse. Dad doesn’t wake, let alone look — or speak. After an hour or so I clear out.

  At the cottage once more, kicking off my trainers, I grab a bottle of mineral water and go online to open more emails. Yippee! Today’s letter has turned up. A letter from Jay. My boy sends me emails daily.

  What does he say, my Shanghai boy?

  ‘I always think of our relationship and our future. Will I lose u eventually? Read all of your emails many times and very sad. Miss u and all of ur body. Wanna touch ur body and hold u on the bed. Write soon! Wanna get ur email hurrily! U know I still remember that the last time we make love, I lie down and u look at my eyes, and kiss my nipples and my chest. I like ur face, so handsome, and ur hair, so soft. U know at that moment I fall in love with u again and again. I wait for u here in cold China. No snowing today, but the wind is very cold! But ur love makes me warm!!!!!! I am honor to know u and get ur passionate love. Are u my lover? Are u my heart?? I love u forever, forever.’