Box Hill

by Adam Mars-Jones

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Box Hill

  BOX HILL

  Adam Mars-Jones’s books include the novels Pilcrow and Cedilla, part of a million-word sequence, and the monograph Noriko Smiling, about a classic Japanese film. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books.

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

  First published by Scribe 2020

  Copyright © Adam Mars-Jones 2020

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  9781922310101 (paperback edition)

  9781925938319 (ebook)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

  scribepublications.com.au

  This murky brew is for Leo, if he’ll have it ... bottoms up!

  Box Hill where the bikers go, on a Sunday. Box Hill near Leatherhead in Surrey — jewel of the North Downs, rising almost 400 feet sheer above the river (that’s the river Mole). A cliff densely covered with box and yew. It’s the steepness of the gradient means only box and yew can get a foothold. It could just as easily be called Yew Hill as Box Hill, except box trees are so much rarer.

  Box is the heaviest European wood. It doesn’t float. The roots were traditionally used for knife handles. Box trees are poisonous, same as yews. Only camels will eat the leaves, not because they’re immune but because they’re stupid, they don’t know what they’re doing. Box trees are used for mazes because the foliage is so dense, and they can be trained all the way down to the ground. A maze isn’t much cop if you can lie down on your belly, see where you are and wriggle out of it.

  The leaves of the box are ovate, entire, smooth, thick, coriaceous and dark green. I looked that up. It sounds like a poem you can’t quite get the sense out of.

  At Box Hill there’s downland grazed by sheep. A rich chalk flora. Orchids for those who know them when they see them. It’s a beauty spot overrun one day a week by motorcyclists and their beautiful machines. Bikes that whine, bikes that roar.

  The Sunday of my eighteenth birthday: 1975. I went to look at the bikes. Because life at home wasn’t much fun, just at that moment, with Mum in hospital and Dad being unlike himself. Because I was going to get a bike of my own, one day soon. Because I liked to look at the bikers. Because it was my birthday, and I didn’t need a reason.

  As far as riding my own machine, the closest I’d come to date was making the pilgrimage from Isleworth to Lewis Leathers in Great Portland Street, off Oxford Circus, to pick up a catalogue. Not very close. Tucked inside the catalogue was a leaflet telling you how to take your measurements for a one-piece suit. It had an outline of a human figure with arrows going this way and that, shoulder to wrist, inside leg.

  I didn’t think the one-piece suit idea was going to work. The outline didn’t look much like me. A jacket in a standard size, once I could even afford that, would be a better bet. It would cover me up, though even so I wasn’t sure. If it was big enough for me to get the zip done up over my tum, the sleeves would be much too long, and I’d be swimming inside the shoulders.

  I fell over him. I tripped and fell over him. When he told people about how we met, Ray always made that clear: Colin didn’t fall for me, he fell over me. Then he would continue the story with the bit that always made me uncomfortable. Ray would say, I took one look at him, and I saw what he really wanted.

  I didn’t think I knew what I wanted, and I’m still not sure why he chose me. I was never a looker. I never had a waist. But Ray was dead drop gorgeous, though people didn’t say that then. It wasn’t a phrase. I didn’t think Ray was dead drop gorgeous in 1975. I was still reading teen magazines, and in 1975 the word in my mind was the word that teenagers used then. Ray was tasty.

  I fell over him, just as he said. There’s a side of Box Hill I call the shorn side, near the panorama, where the grass is short and neat, and this was the other side, where the grass is shaggy and not so tidied up. He was sitting against a tree with his eyes shut — not that I saw him — and his big feet crossed in front of him. It was the feet I fell over, the size twelves.

  He was probably sleeping off a late night with a stomach full of fry-up from the café at the bottom of the hill, where everybody was wearing leather but nobody wore their leather as well as he did. He was so used to being looked at that he didn’t notice any more. It would have been just like him, the person I came to know, to sit there reading a book after he’d finished eating. Military history. Something about the ocean and its creatures. He’s the only person I’ve ever seen who could turn a page wearing leather gloves and not fumble.

  For heaven’s sake, the man could shuffle and deal a pack of cards without taking his gloves off — even if that was a party trick, something done for a bet with his poker club. Supple dress gloves, not his bike gloves. When he got off his machine, he’d pull off the stiff bike gloves and fold them in his helmet, then pull out the thin dress ones from his jacket pocket. A hundred to one those dress gloves were Mayfair jobs, made to measure, for his fingers to fit them so snugly, all the way to the tips.

  And in the moment between gloves, when his hands were naked, he would use the left one to sweep back the leading edge of his thick yellow hair in a single brisk gesture, much too decisive to seem like grooming. You could never think of that poised impatient movement of the hand as grooming, let alone preening. Hair that was never either lank or unruly, and never long enough at the front to count technically as a quiff.

  When people stared at him, Ray ignored them, but he wasn’t used to people paying no attention in the first place. When I woke him up by tripping over him, it stands to reason that I suffered more than he did from the upset of our meeting. I went sprawling and barked my knees, while the worst thing that happened to him was that one bike boot scuffed the other. From the way he scowled, though, that was serious enough. When I dusted myself off and sat up on my haunches, Ray was glaring down at me and snarling, ‘Why don’t you look where you’re fucking going?’

  I may have got the ‘fucking’ in the wrong place. He might have said, ‘Why don’t you fucking look where you’re going?’ It’s hard to be sure after all this time, but there was definitely a ‘fucking’ in it. I wasn’t used to being sworn at, and I know I flinched. I was scared but I didn’t run away — not that running has ever been a strong suit. One leg always trails behind when I try.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off him, that much is true, but who could have in my place? He was like a glossy catalogue illustration from Lewis Leathers, and I expect I looked like a tired window display from the Burton’s menswear shop, when they’ve tried lots of backdrops and lighting schemes and they still can’t make people want the merchandise. My flares were timid — yes it’s possible for flares to be timid. My brown leather jacket had exaggerated rounded lapels. Its zip was plastic rather than metal and it went straight down the middle, not at the sexy angle of the ones on bike jackets. Ray was six foot five and I was what I still am, five foot six. Even if I’d been taller I would have been at quite a disadvantage, looking up at a stranger scowling down.

  Except that, the way he always told it, it wasn’t his scowl I was looking at. But it was news to me when he said, ‘I get it. So this is what you’re interested in?’ His voice changed, it was menacing in a d
ifferent way. Menacing in a way that promised something. As much lazy as angry, now. I hadn’t even realised I wasn’t looking at his face. Not that it wasn’t a fine face, a strong face, a chiselled face. I just wasn’t looking at it.

  He was always a step ahead of me. Sometimes a whole flight of steps. Looking down on me from the top of a flight of steps, wearing no expression, just waiting to see if I had the courage to follow him. Sometimes ducking round the corner so I had to run to catch up, breathless and stumbling, afraid that if I lost sight of him it’d be for good.

  He was wearing one-piece leathers, and now he reached up to the neck, where there was a sort of lateral strap across the zip, fastened with a popper. He unsnapped it, and flicked it open with a finger. I watched, not really taking it in, as he slowly pulled the zip down all the way, down as far as it would go.

  If Ray was six foot five, then a zip running from his neck down to a point between his legs must have been about three feet long. A zip a yard long. A zip more than half as tall as I am. It made a sort of whirring noise. A purring noise. Ray had a trick to keep zips from sticking, though of course I didn’t know that then. Every week he would rub the stump of a candle along the zips of all his leathers. Oil doesn’t work so well on a zip. It has to be wax. Oil dries out but wax remains.

  The friction of the slide as it united or separated the chains of teeth would liquefy the wax, to form a lubricating layer. Ray’s zips always purred as he pulled them open or closed, maintaining an absolutely even pressure.

  When the slide of Ray’s zip passed his collarbone, I thought he would stop there and pull something out to show me — I didn’t know what: a crucifix, a locket with a picture of his wife. When the zip was approaching his navel, gliding through its film of invisible wax, I could only think he was reaching for a knife, and that I would stay there humbly crouching while he carved me up. As the panels of leather were freed to slide apart, the gliding zip slowly uncovered two narrow zones of sweat-dampened fur, one on his breastbone and one below his navel.

  I was sweating, too, with fear as well as the warmth of the day, but my sweat was no more than a waste product. His was a sheen on him, the finishing touch to beauty. A sort of elixir.

  Then when his zip reached the end of his track, I had to admit to myself that there was nothing else he could possibly be reaching for but what he brought out, his cock and balls. He reached in and tugged out his balls with the greatest care, arranging them like rare fruit on a bowl, a sculpture in a gallery window. I expect he wanted me to notice the sheer extent of his scrotum, and the plump cushion it provided for a cock that was lazily swollen without troubling itself to stand up just yet. Lolling and waiting, to see if there was something worth its time.

  I began to realise that Ray’s one-piece wasn’t quite like the one in the Lewis Leathers catalogue, where the zip stopped discreetly short, instead of going as Ray’s did right to the central seam of the crotch, to make possible just this frank presentation of himself. So one of the first things I learned from Ray was that there are other places to get specialised motorcycle clothes than Lewis Leathers in Great Portland Street, off Oxford Circus.

  If I had been more observant I would have noticed something else: that Ray’s one-piece had a double zip, so that it would have been perfectly possible for him to expose his parts by working a zip up from the bottom and not down from the top. This was a design element borrowed from arctic clothing, for the benefit of those who need to take a leak in extreme conditions, uncovering as little flesh as possible to frost and blizzard.

  It didn’t occur to me as I cowered hungrily in front of Ray that his unzipping had an element to it of ritual or of theatre. The absence of underwear announced not just experience but experience in the form that intoxicates. Not just experience but practice.

  I was frozen in place, as if I really was exposed to a blizzard without the protection of arctic clothing. I couldn’t move. I was very conscious of my own breathing, more dimly aware of the rural rustle nearby and the distant roaring of bikes. I knew now what I was expected to do, and I also knew that I wanted it, but I wasn’t actually able to make a move. I couldn’t do it. Not by myself.

  So Ray took pity on me. With one hand he shielded his cock, so as to put his balls on display even more prominently. With the other hand he clicked his fingers and nodded, once. The click of his fingers was muffled and made more subtly authoritative by his gloves.

  He was making things easy for me, finding a task that even an absolute beginner like me could hardly mess up. After I’d paid attention to his balls, he flipped his cock forward and clicked his fingers again. That second click of his fingers resounded in a space that was not the space around us. It resounded inside my head. I felt as if he had clicked his fingers in the deepest part of my thinking, producing a brain event like the one that triggers a fit. In people prone to fits.

  He was very patient with me. Whenever I choked, he let me recover with his gloved hand resting on my neck, before he pulled me forward again. If I’d seen any pornography at all in my life I might have realised that what was happening could only happen to the people in pornography. But I hadn’t, so it must really be happening.

  I gave no thought to the possibility of someone walking in on us in our shaggy glade. Perhaps Ray was equally forgetful, fully taken up with his sensations, biting his lip and so on, trying not to moan, but I don’t flatter myself. Pleasure didn’t make him moan. On special occasions, it’s true, a hoarse kind of shout burst out of him, but that’s not the same thing.

  The Ray I came to know would be fully aware of somebody coming near, however engrossed in pleasure he might seem to be. He was quite capable of keeping his eyes closed until a passer-by was too near to have any doubts about what was being done, then opening them, letting those dazzling blue eyes do their work while he drawled, ‘Do you mind? Can’t you see we’re busy?’ Then in a lower tone: some people have no manners.

  When he pulled back from me and started to zip himself up, he slipped his thumb behind the head of the zip to make sure of not catching any of the hairs on his groin and chest. There was no hurry in his movements, but then it took a lot to make him hurry. He might have heard somebody coming after all, and been wanting to spare me the embarrassment that bothered him so little. He almost seemed to seek it out, to show how little it meant to him.

  I didn’t know what was going on. I wondered if his stopping meant that I had passed some test. Or failed one. I didn’t know if it would be rude to pick stray hairs off my tongue. I hadn’t stood up since I had tripped over Ray in the first place, and though my knees were aching I wasn’t sure that my legs would carry me. I was dazed, half by what I had done and half by what Ray was. I might never have stood up if he hadn’t made it happen in the end, putting his hands under my arms and giving me a boost upwards until my legs remembered their business. I was amazed by how easily he did it. I’ve never been a lightweight. I hadn’t learned about his strength and fitness then — except that they were written all over him — his wrestling and martial arts.

  ‘I’m Ray,’ he said, resting his hands on my shoulders, and I was just about able to gasp out ‘Colin’. He was so much taller than me that I felt I’d been looking up at the same angle since the moment I’d laid eyes on him, even when I was connected to him by that angry tube of flesh. Even then, while I was trying to give him pleasure, in that tangle of anxious wanting, I was gazing crazily upwards in pubic darkness, wanting to look into his eyes.

  I was still shaky, and he was so solidly built that even with his hands resting on my shoulders he seemed to be pushing me down to the ground one more time. My knees buckled again, and we went through a ridiculous repetition of the previous manoeuvre — his hands moving instantly to my armpits to give support. Up, down. It was no longer my responsibility.

  For the first time he came close to smiling at me, even if it was a bleak sort of smile, and he asked with a shake of his hea
d, ‘What am I going to do with you?’

  I know there are some questions that don’t expect an answer, but I couldn’t let this be one of them. ‘Whatever you want.’ I wasn’t sure I’d managed to say it out loud so I said it again, just in case the first time was in my head, because this was my chance and I needed him to hear. ‘Whatever you want to do.’

  He said, ‘Is there someone you need to phone?’ He didn’t leave one of those meaningful pauses, the sort people in soap operas leave, to show that this is a significant moment. He came straight out with it. No hesitation. I still don’t understand how anyone could be so decisive. Ray just made up his mind there and then.

  I honestly didn’t get it. ‘What, now?’ I wasn’t playing hard to get. I can’t even imagine playing hard to get. I was just being slow, as usual.

  ‘To say you won’t be going to where you’re meant to be.’ For the first time I noticed that he had a leather jacket with him as well as his one-piece. It was rolled up against the tree as a manly sort of cushion. Now he picked it up and slung it over his shoulder, using his thumb as the hook from which it hung.

  Where I was meant to be, later on, was at home in Isleworth. My little Mum was in hospital and we didn’t yet know what was wrong with her. Dad was very upset about it, but I didn’t know if there was a medical reason for that. He always seemed embarrassed about questions of female health, which was mad seeing he was a pharmacist, but he was also eleven years older than Mum and a man of that generation. It was natural to him. Pharmacists aren’t doctors, they just have to be able to read doctors’ handwriting. They don’t deal directly with people’s bodies, and if they’re shy and retiring to start with there’s no necessary reason they can’t stay that way.

  Mum had only been in hospital a few days, but Dad had been rotten to live with since then. She ran the shop, worked the till, and dealt with most things apart from actually making up the prescriptions. But that wasn’t what was bothering him, the running of the shop.