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I.
I hated him. I hated how he spent his quiet, inoffensive childhood alone in the back garden reading Venus in Furs and longing for a friend. How he’d been a “clever boy” whose high marks marred him like a dunce cap. How his untimely birth forced him into the awkward metamorphoses of two women he hardly considered sisters. Washing away clotted blood from the bathroom tiles. Peeking over book covers at shaking shoulders held still by his mother’s embrace. Sneezing as they kissed their fat grey cat. His sisters observed him as one might an ottoman or an empty vase. His parents, absorbed in nurturing their prolonged puberty, hardly looked at him at all. And thus, he began to regard his family with a disdainful indifference.
That’s not to say there wasn’t good in these years of solitude. One evening, fiddling with a pair of pruning shears crouched before the over-watered irises (I never understood why my mother wanted to sever something so beautiful and snatch it for herself), I found a dying starling between the leaves. Lugging it through the house by its bristled neck, I was met with an immediate and uncharacteristic clamor of voices, and hands reaching towards me. My mother loved it and my sisters tossed it in a shoebox. They coddled the thing, calling out “How is he?” upon coming home from school, petting it and feeding it my father’s fishing bait. I caught flashes of their rosy-cheeked grins between iridescent wing flaps and it made me smile. In some proud way, the bird became a part of me. That was, until (always, an until ) I crept downstairs for a glass of water and heard it singing, chirping out a tune my sister had banged out on the piano that day.
“Hello?” I whispered into the box.
The thing carried on singing discordantly and it even twitched its small head to avoid my gaze. It was buried beneath the night-moistened mulch right where I’d found it. I liked musing about it now and again, imagining I was speaking to a boy my age who cared enough to listen. I screwed my face into unfamiliar expressions like a private performance. Sometimes I really began to cry.
It wasn’t until my sisters–who, after the bird’s departure, turned back to their boys and their melancholy–flew off to university that hushed agitation began to arise behind closed doors. I listened, eye to the keyhole of my parents’ bathroom, as they spoke of me the way one might discuss the affairs of a deceased loved one.
“He doesn’t go outside. He doesn’t talk to us. He’s got difficulties.”
“He’s a shy boy. He’s busy with his studies. He’s done so well in school.”
They would sigh in the end, the consensus, always, to leave me be.
It became routine to linger in a cold puddle before the bathroom mirror. When I met my gaze, the eyes, blue and vacant behind the spectacles, prompted me to stare anywhere else. But the reflection of my penis, hanging useless between my thighs, was worse. Boys left and right were losing their virginities by then, but something within me repelled even the slightest glance from a girl (it was beside the point that I shrank from girls already, unable to think of them as anything but human). I blamed my virginity on my plain appearance, inherited from my father, and my mother’s country stutter.
Yet I was in no hurry–studying the semen floating in the toilet bowl felt far more pleasurable than the act itself. Whatever attached my mind to my body seemed to be absent. It was as though I was enshrouded in an exoskeleton and, for an entire term, I thought of myself as an incorporeal eye of consciousness trapped within my body and itching for release.
I would grip the sink basin until my knuckles turned from white to red, staring, staring, staring at the face of a pitiable creature. I felt I had gone mad, truly, and that no one noticed, any chance of compassion squandered by my lowly inclination for silence. In the reflection, my face morphed into horror, excitement, awe, exasperation before my eyes until one day, upon some miracle, I was greeted with the coy gaze of a stranger. He bore more resemblance to a hedonist than to my father and at that, his face erupted into dimpled delight.
I wasn’t just a good student anymore, I became a top scholar. There were no more parental pity parties, especially not after I announced in a giddy blurt that I finally had a girlfriend.
Stella O’Connell was taller than me and looked like my eldest sister. I waited at the stairwell by her maths class and, by the time the raucous flurry of descending students diminished into nothing more than faint laughter, I had won her over. Whether I had said something bold or slipped her a tenner I was unsure, standing dazed as she kissed my temple. But that lapse in memory hadn’t been the first so I never dwelled on it.
My parents were utterly enthralled when I brought her home for dinner. Something in their eyes made me think, for the first time since childhood, of warmth. Love. It disgusted me to the extent that I nearly felt like killing them. I hated them. Their blind faith made me sick. Yet I wanted beyond anything I had ever wanted in my life to prove it, something, anything, to them, to prove I was as human as I led on, and felt a twisting neediness that had me take her upstairs. We first had sex on my floor. Then against my rickety dresser. The sweat from her right thigh clung to the plastic slipcover of a Whitman collection. O hymen! O hymenee! When they weren’t slick with tongue and teeth, huffs of accomplished laughter escaped my lips. I only fell silent when something warm and wet burst from her in a spastic tremor that broke the spell.
“That was, that was,” Stella started, looking mortified.
“Did you like it?” I heard myself ask.
“Did you?”
Did I?
Eventually, I had to face the realization that I’d been too caught up in my triumph to recognize Stella as a ditz who had been passed around twice by my entire class. They finally saw me, the boys and girls, as someone more than a passing shadow—they saw me as a traitor. Stella moved to France. I, in clenched-jaw furies, began to ponder Oxford. I slept with pamphlets under my pillow, dreaming of white teeth and sprawling lawns and towers like the ones I’d read about, far, far away.
I planned for a great change. At Oxford, I would have friends. I would be invited to parties. I would get a girlfriend I’d finally be able to love.
But, battered by taunts and menacing looks, the self-assured hubris keeping me afloat had deflated since I’d last looked at myself in the mirror. As the end of term progressed, I grew increasingly fearful that something was approaching, fast and out of my control, that would get in the way of my prospective freedom. My scholarship would be rescinded. I’d fall deathly ill. One of my parents would die in their sleep.
In the end, a measly essay nearly did me in.
Whether I had fumbled the dates in my planner or had been forced into an affair with my parents, I was never certain. It was a megalith of a paper worth a portion of my grade that gave me cold sweats. During class that morning, I bit my knuckles till my vision blurred. The instructor rattled on in typical fashion before the chalkboard. I practically bolted to his desk after class only to find that, despite pleading my case (my grandmother, dead for a decade, had passed) and, eventually lowering myself to begging–Please, sir, I’ll have it in by tomorrow. Please. You don’t understand I can’t–he said no.
I saw red trailing behind him on his lazy shuffle to the toilet.
Did he think I, the only student in the entire school worthy of a future, would accept no for an answer?
Standing at the third closest urinal, I studied his face. I knew he detested Thatcher. I witnessed how he never met the male students square in the face. He spoke with a limp sort of vocal fry, he had a well-groomed goatee, and he undid the three top buttons of his linen shirts during May. I was certain of this.
Someone shouted beyond the door. They pounded down the hall. Then it was just him and me and his pants zipper shattering the silence.
I’ve not sucked any teachers off. A single ripple in a lake of lies.
He let out a small breath like the moan of a ram when it was over, nothing more than a desperate animal. “You’re going to let it slide?” He stared at me, shaken. “You don’t want a case on your hands do you, sir?”
I let my parents hug me on the platform, stiff as a board and eager to forget Prescot. Each time I swallowed I still felt sparse drops of semen shooting down my throat and an enormous sense of power, one I imagined I’d unleash the moment I stepped onto campus. Up till then, all had gone according to plan.
II.
Oxford was like entering a kaleidoscope. Colorful crowds swarmed beneath ancient ornate arches. Towers glowed in the golden sun, as did blinged tracksuits and Livestrong bracelets. I often floated atop stairwells admiring the stone in the blue evening, soaking in the gradual bloom of unadulterated quiet as the cliques migrated to town after dinner. Peace settled in my stomach and I imagined that soon, I would be traipsing off with friends of my own.
But I still used my father’s hair gel and his brand of razor and wore his hand-me-down button-ups, and I still gave my answers in my mother’s garbled, monotonous lull. What I aspired to–the boy on the lawn who nearly saw me watching him–was something someone with my reflection could not reproduce. He wasn’t like the popular boys in Prescot, put to power through drive and violence. He smiled attentively at everyone around him like some sort of gentle king. I was sure that, for his entire life, he had been loved. And I was sure that his subjects had been seduced not by his kindness but by his sure-to-be handsome family name. He had floated through life like a bird riding the wind. I could hardly stand the injustice of it and by the time night fell and I’d meandered back to my room, a vicious undercurrent was buzzing through my veins. I wanted to tear him down a peg.
Until.
It was nearly Christmas and things were going reasonably well. I received high marks, dined on meals that beat my mother’s cooking, and formed a comfortable routine with Felix Catton. I watched him more than I slept or studied. He’d meet Farleigh in the courtyard after our tutorial together and they’d mull about the library–they were more studious than I imagined–or smoke a joint in the silent, secret realms only they could have discovered before heading to dinner and after dinner, King’s Arms or a party I hadn’t caught an invitation to. I had never managed to follow him to his room at night, always getting lost in the sprays of vodka and neon lights.
Someone had poured a pint down my shirt that night and I was staggering through shouts towards the exit, eager to escape before Felix arrived in fear he might notice me. I swung through the door, gasped a cold gulp of air, and managed to straighten in time to hold the door open for the sea of posh twats barrelling towards me like a battering ram. I recognized Farleigh first, then a familiar red jumper. Felix ducked his head as he walked past, murmuring his thanks in my direction.
I understood, then, what it was like. I had felt a flicker of his magnetism that set me sober enough to sit and wait for him on the curb until closing. Felix reeled around the corner holding onto Farleigh’s arm and looking rather cross.
“I’m bored of this place already… all these fake fucking people pretending to be human,” I heard, followed by Farleigh’s elongated, “Okay!”
For months, I’d been seeking a way to infiltrate Felix’s mind, to discover something more than what meets the eye, and I finally understood then that for the whole of Felix’s life, he had been begging to feel something other than contentment. I know him, I thought, grinning and practically skipping back to campus.
During this time, it was increasingly difficult to ignore the jagged stone in my shoe, a distractor that often allowed Felix to slip away never to be seen for days. Michael Gavey. I did not want Gavey to be my friend. My first friend, at that. I couldn’t bear it. After everything that led me to Oxford, I deserved more than a mathematical psychopath who thought himself a savant. Gavey knew he was a freak and he wore it on his sleeve in that haughty, freakish way that twisted up his inferiority and spat it back at the world. As if we actually wanted to talk to those vapid cunts. It made my skin crawl that our proximity might read to others as companionship.
Maybe I finally grew tired of Michael dragging me back down to the gutter I’d escaped from. Maybe it was the glimpse I’d finally caught of the tattoo on Felix’s inner forearm–carpe diem–that had not left my mind. Smiling to myself at the dinner table, I spent Christmas planning our first encounter.
“Oliver, Oliver, Oliver,” he said my name like he never wanted to forget it. I hadn’t expected much for pulling a thorn from a lion’s paw, certainly not the kisses to my ugly bulk of a bike helmet or his genuine brown eyes or a whiff of his aftershave up close.
I love you,
I love you,
I love you.
I shuddered replaying the memory over and over and over before bed that night. I wanted, suddenly, to feel Felix’s body convulse under mine like Stella’s had. I wanted to love him. I wanted him. And I knew, having toiled for it, I would get what I wanted.
Off the bat, he treated me as though I were an injured starling mere seconds from death. Beautiful, compassionate Felix who, on the surface, met my eyes when we spoke and put his hand on my shoulder, truly affected by my overplayed accent and my plain clothes. I knew though, that underneath he only probed for more out of pure self-gratification. My pauper act made him feel pity, which he had never truly felt in his life until he met me and thus took great interest in the feeling, an interest he confused with genuine care.
Was it, was it, was it, was it awful?
It wasn’t hard playing the poorest person at Oxford. I’d never been to the roughest parts of Liverpool–but neither had Felix, nor had he been anywhere else beside boarding school and his faraway castle. I could’ve told him my name was Oliver Twist and he’d have believed me.
And so I came to serve the king: I met him in the hallways and sat beside him at dinner. I fixed myself some new attire when Felix, a drunken, mumbling mess, called my style “atrocious.” I was sure he got a kick out of imagining my squalid living quarters and I was sure he would never turn up outside my door, but nonetheless, I kept my room bare and hid the books I’d brought from Prescot beneath my bed. When one of Felix’s friends noticed me in the courtyard, I squeezed my lips together until I felt my smile lines constrict and waited for the wave of Gavey bitterness to pass. They were a horrible waste on Felix, lazy and immature, and there was not a single wit among them aside from Farleigh.
If I was Felix’s charity case, Farleigh was his show pony. He was a performer out of sheer necessity, Oxford’s perfect amalgamation of America—everyone thought him, a lone face in the classroom, as the embodiment of civil liberties. Farleigh, dominating conversations and dressing in anachronism, put them at ease. I admit, I got off on the wrong foot with him. Tongue sharper than intended, hackles raised. I had worked for that first essay—I’d read fifty fucking books over the summer—and he’d appeared, masking his hangover in lip-service. We could have got on, two runts vying for a seat by the throne. We could have bonded over our friendly competition. If only.
Farleigh saw that I was more than a sick puppy. “And you’ve brought your adorable little shark again,” he said with a smile the second time I turned up with Felix at the library. “You know, I don’t think he’s going to last much longer holding his breath up here with the real people.”
“Farleigh… Behave.” I caught an untamed gleam in Felix’s eye, one I planned to use to my advantage someday, though by that time my intentions with Felix were growing muddled as I spun myself round in his web.
My grades slipped, and not on account of the parties or the drinking, but the afternoons in the library I’d spend picking apart his atrocious handwriting and writing in the margins of his essays.
“You’re brilliant, mate.”
“Just trying to help.”
“Always trying to help.” Farleigh pursed his lips at me, narrowing his eyes.
We carried on like this for months until a crisis arose–I stood before my dirty mirror wearing the blue polo I’d bought because of Felix, vision blurring, clenching my fists to quell my thundering heart. Aside from watching him with Annabel outside his window, I hadn’t seen him in three days. My chest heaved something pathetic. I stared at my cell phone for hours at my desk, debating dialing, debating whether or not the thrill of getting to know me had finally waned, debating whether I would be forced to do something reckless.
“You coming to King’s Arms later?” I asked nonchalantly after the second ring, gazing at the sunset past the courtyard as the pit in my stomach expanded.
His voice through the tinny speaker sounded deep and congested. “Can’t mate, I feel like death. I’ve caught a fucking cold or something. Next thing I know there’ll be word around of a mono outbreak and I’ll be forced to go back… home,” Felix trailed off.
“What was that?”
A second too long of silence. He cleared his throat away from the microphone. “Best of luck on your studies, Ollie. We’ll get a round soon, yeah?”
Felix always kept his door unlocked–who would want to smother a Catton in his sleep?–and I appeared outside his room carrying a Tupperware of steak and mash and a fork I’d slipped in my coat sleeve while Farleigh was making a scene at dinner. I had sat in Felix’s seat poking silently at my plate and remembering the way his smile shone in the warm, shadowy light until I could no longer stand the ache. I sighed. I turned the knob and stepped over the threshold into darkness. The room smelled like he had been festering in his own sweat and grease and when I breathed deeply, I wondered if I might be able to taste it. I set the food on his desk. Hiding beneath his blankets, Felix shifted towards me, pale-faced in the grey night, spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth. I sank to my knees before him. Felix’s hair was draped against the pillow in wet strands, his forehead clammy against my knuckles, and pimples were clustered along his jaw, and I wanted to feel his fresh stubble against my skin. Instead, I scooped up a pair of boxers from the foot of his bed and backed away into his desk chair. His eyelids fluttered.
I held the boxers, muted blue in the sliver of light through his window and wider than my forearm, before me in faint recognition. They were the same ones he had worn with Annabel. I fingered the inseams, then turned them inside out. Staining the crotch was a dry, chalky crust. I balled the boxers in my fist, shoved them towards my face, and inhaled the sweet staleness. Felix coughed from the bed. His eyes were half-lidded and aimed in my direction.
I swallowed hard. “Pick up after yourself, Felix.”
He squinted at me, a faceless figure in the shadows he would later attribute to a fever dream. “Just fucking,” he groaned in the fed-up way one might speak to a servant, “toss it in the bathroom.”
The leaky faucets raced each other in the bathroom, echoing against the tile. Fingers buzzing and with my back to the mirror, I brought his boxers to my mouth. I suckled like a child might a washcloth, straining my lips against the semen. Tasteless. Smooth on my tongue. Biting the linen and balling it in my fist, I imagined the spitty imprint against Felix’s cock before flinging the boxers into the empty sink, stumbling past his bed, and slamming his door behind me.
Each weekend after I pretended to preen for his friends, Felix got me drunk and took me back to his wreck of a room. I’d written a poem about him on the inside cover of a ratty book on rhetoric, breath shaking, the morning after our first night together (one spent standing at the foot of his bed smiling to myself about how he’d left Annabel and India in the dust). By then I’d been swept away. I liked to tell myself I was in control but, in truth, I was trapped in the majestic swell of Felix’s life like a twig in the rush of a wintertime river, along for the ride. I loved the excitement of it. I loved biting at his friends for their slow-witted opulence and I loved being the center of his attention. I stood taller next to Felix, no longer squashed down by the embarrassment of being a nobody, and I loved him for it. And he loved believing he’d truly rescued me from the depths of poverty. Nothing more.
The afternoon sun cascaded brilliantly through the open windows that day. I watched the light sift through his crimson curtains as they billowed in the breeze. We had been lounging in his room since morning after a breakfast of chocolates and ibuprofen and tap water and laughing at each other’s birthmarks, having awoken shirtless and drenched in sweat. Felix’s fingers shone pink in the sunlight, his leg hair golden. Time seemed to stand still as he strung together a mardy tune on his guitar sat on the edge of his bed. Me, on the stained red carpet below brushing his knee each time I took a drag of one of his cigarettes. I almost had a chance to wonder about anything other than the present moment before he knocked me out of my head, nudging me with his bare, radiant foot. This was often the case. Even alone, Felix consumed my every thought or dream.
“Yeah?” I said, languidly gazing at his strong toes. They were like those of a Trojan soldier. I knew he’d been stomping about the crumbs and lint in the carpet and I knew he hadn’t washed in days. Saliva pooled on my tongue. The more time we spent alone together, the more I wanted to taste him. I would settle onto my stomach and lick the salty sweat between his toes, his toenails scraping the roof of my mouth, or lap at his brown, calloused heel, his fingers strung in my hair, his breath quickening when I drifted my tongue along the soft, sensitive arch, his disgruntled sighs…
“Does that sound off to you?” Felix asked. The guitar reverberated faraway notes that had long since faded. I sat completely still, swishing my spit between my teeth, chest tightening.
“No, no, it sounds good. It always sounds good.” I felt myself flash my dimples at him.
“Thanks, mate.” He sighed, collapsing backwards onto the mattress with his feet still planted on the carpet. I watched his hand blindly graze my chin before squeezing my shoulder and disappearing above me, and heard him tap lightly on the strings in a restrained fit of agitation. “You know I,” he said, tossing his guitar to the side and settling back down. I had craned my neck to get a better view of him, hands folded on his chest, jaw jutting towards the ceiling, eyes hidden from view. He laid in silence for a moment before resurfacing, “I’m really glad I met you, Ol. You’re always… You’re always there for me and… I really appreciate it, and… I know I don’t tell you as much as I ought to. But. I really love you, mate.”
At this, I was snapped out of my reverie completely. My mouth grew dry, my eyes like those of a startled animal. Dizzyingly, Felix began to seem like a fully realized human being and it was like encountering him for the first time once more—he chose to care for me, truly care.
My performance had merely pushed us in the right direction, one out of my control. I found, sitting there lightheaded, that any agonizing desire to tear Felix down or take his place that had been slowly disintegrating over the past months, suddenly crumbled to dust. His confession relayed to me the one true thing I had sought for and had never been rewarded my entire life.
He loved me.
I doubted initially, coming from someone like Felix (for I hadn't truly known him then), that his conviction held any meaning. He had carried out the casual affair of loving and being loved his entire life. But Felix’s warm eyes touched something within me when he pulled me from the carpet and paraded me towards the door, his hands like a caress on my shoulders, and I, gradually, began to believe in the privilege it was to be loved by him.
But I didn’t love Felix, or so I led myself to believe, having been utterly alienated from the feeling. I could not articulate why my father had died for him. My only justification was that I needed to feel his eyes affixed once more on mine. A latent, unreachable part of me depended on the addictive giddiness of his presence, the same part that became wounded by the heightened sting of our separation. I couldn’t lose Felix for an entire summer. Felix couldn’t lose me for an entire summer. Thinking about him boarded up in a place he despised, submerged in privilege and flat familial love, and how he’d return to college inflated, unreachable, and as miserable as he was when I found him, sickened me.
My heart soared that night on the bridge. When I tossed my dad’s stone, which I imagined to embody my life back in Prescot, a meter’s length away, I released my former self. I threw away the detestable nobody I had been before Felix. We’d awakened the best in each other, I thought. And I would never, could never leave his side.
The following evening, I loitered in the halls of our accommodation, peering around the corner at Felix’s distant doorway. The whites of Annabel’s eyes shone as she stared up at Felix, hidden within his room, and my breath grew shallow at the possibility he might trade me for away and trap himself at Saltburn with her inane chatter and waxy lip gloss. I could do nothing but assure myself that I was observing the payoff of my efforts.
“Mummy is dying to meet the boy I’ve been seeing,” she was pleading.
“Maybe during Christmas,” he said. His fingers drummed against the doorframe, something of an unutterable apology.
“Felix…” Annabel looked sadder than I’d ever seen her.
“I,” Felix emerged in a rumpled polo, closing the door behind him, “have got to finish packing.” He led her to the stairwell and cupped her jaw. “We’ll chat over the summer, yeah?”
“I’m gonna miss you,” Annabel offered.
“I’ll miss you too,” he replied in an absent-minded sort of way, toeing the hardwood and looking at her with a gentle insistence that read Go home. And she did. Annabel was nothing more than another one of Felix’s mindless marionettes, her sneakers and sniffles clattering down the stairs. Pitiful. I smiled to myself.
Felix’s door was teasingly ajar. I rapped at the door frame, watching his eyes snap towards my shadow. Feigning shyness, I asked, “Can I come in?” before entering the sovereign bubble of his room (our room, really) for the last time.
“Ollie! Ollie, Ollie, Ollie! Fucking waited for you all day, mate!” Felix leapt from his bed, which had been stripped of its patterned blankets, with a bright smile. I was still entranced by his ability to alternate between soft cruelty and sharp compassion. He skirted between boxes and captured my shoulder in a friendly squeeze.
“Sorry, I was. Sorry,” I sounded forlorn. The room was barren in a way that made me queasy, his magazines and photographs shoved away, no socks or ties spilling from his dresser, his chair stationed neatly at his desk.
“Oh… I didn’t mean to nag, really. Are you alright?” His hand was still resting on my shoulder.
“Peaches and fucking cream.” This night, something had prompted me towards Felix’s embrace, some memory or feeling I had lost on the bridge.
“No, I’m being serious. What’s wrong, Ol? You know you can talk to me about anything.”
“I just been drinking, that’s all. Today’s my dad’s birthday and…”
“Ah… I’m so sorry, mate.” Felix pulled me towards the bed. It was instinctual at this point, to cry before Felix and be comforted, to dash fearlessly along the blurry line between fact and farce and conjure a performance that often shocked me in its genuineness. Inhaling, Felix started, “I’m also… Well, I’ve got to warn you, it’s about Saltburn…” I fixed my face up into something positively downtrodden. “I’ll tell you later, then.”
In a weighted silence on the edge of his bed, his arm was draped around my shoulders and his eyes were flitting around my face as they always did, searching for more cause for sympathy. I opened my mouth. Felix’s face drew closer.
“Last year’s I,” I slurred, exaggerating my accent, “I just stared at him pukin’ up cake, thinking he looked so, so old an’–‘cos he’s always treated me the same, I only existed to pick up after him an’ m’ mum, I was just trapped in this fucking nothin’ cycle ‘round and ‘round forever an’ he didn’t even notice me an’... I thought ‘cos he’s my dad he should love me an’ I should love him but I don’t think, for people like us, it’s ever been allowed… I don’t think… I think we’ll always just be… broken…”
“Don’t think about that,” he said. “Think about Saltburn.”
I peeked at Felix’s cupid’s bow beneath waterlogged lashes, his breath blowing like steam on my nose, our foreheads a whisper away. The warmth of his thigh seeped through his jeans. We were nearly hugging, moving closer and closer. Were I not drunk and he not sober, stunned and glassy-eyed, we might have kissed that night. I sniffed and licked my salty lips, wondering about Felix’s tongue and the surge of bedsprings as he’d fuck me into the bare mattress. I flinched. Anything in that moment would have sullied the blooming prospect of Saltburn. Though still far away and imperceptible in my mind, there we had designated days, weeks, months to one another like the eve of a honeymoon.
His eyebrow stud sliced at my temple as I wrenched myself away.
“Yeah,” I said, not meeting his gaze, “Saltburn.”
III.
I came to realize that at Saltburn, the way Felix felt for me could never, like Pamela’s death or Farleigh’s betrayal, be expressed in words. “They love you… Mum loves you… V loves you…” There were no more I love you’s. Lured in like all the others by the Catton’s careless attention, their gushing gossip, and their lavish laziness, I found myself mad with confusion–when I met Elspeth’s eyes, or Venetia’s, my relationship with Felix became forbidden and corruptible. And he noticed it, shrinking into himself at the dinner table each time I laughed at someone else’s ridiculousness. He built himself back up by making callous jokes and turning his nose. Saltburn activated a certain meanness in Felix. Worse, once his family got ahold of my tragedy and adored me for it, he was no longer swayed by my maudlin charm. Or was it that his life was now my life? Nonetheless, he became a stranger. We hardly talked anymore. The most I got were shifty glances and sideways smiles. I laid awake at night numb with worry, planning, planning, planning. I had to make him love me again.
Felix, being no different than Venetia and Farleigh (so I thought), needed someone to snap him from his sense of ease. Only then could I end our exhausting trial of cat and mouse. I knew how to get him back. His bare footsteps would echo down the corridor and I’d pull my trunks down just as he entered the bathroom. I hollowed my cheeks like I always had when I drank from his bottle. My eyes lingered on his chest or crotch or lips in the field until he reddened like a boy and shoved me away. Everything occurred by the mere coincidence that brought us together in the first place.
A strong draft drove his door ajar almost every day and I would sit, sperm curdling at the surface of the bath, rolling a cigarette in my pruney fingers waiting for him to find me, waiting for him to get it over with and give in to what we both wanted. He never did. Even after I’d clawed through Venetia and Farleigh, Felix wouldn’t touch me.
Nights, I had half a mind to thrust into his splayed, sleeping hand and watch tattooed stars shoot up and down my cock. Mornings, I writhed in my sheets half-expecting to find Felix beside me in bed. I walked to breakfast white-knuckled, swallowing down the hurt that blistered my eyes with tears, not understanding why Felix wouldn’t just put in the work to elevate our friendship. I ran around in circles debating his grip on my thigh or his kiss on my cheek or the warmth in his eyes until I could no longer look at him. Even still, I was sure my hope was not unwarranted.
“Most of the boys gave each other handies,” he’d said, telling me again about boarding school.
“I can tell.”
He had shot me a dodgy glance before darting his gaze to another girl. And I had learned to maintain a stable sense of expectation.
Everything shattered when my fingers scrabbled at the stuck door knob and Felix ended my habit of luxuriating in his pleasure like I had before his window at Oxford, soaking in his straining muscles and breathy moans and anticipating the day when I’d myself known. He locked me out.
I knew then that Felix had fallen into his fate, and of no choice of his own. Saltburn had set him on the path of least resistance, the path that would lead him to a beautiful wife and beautiful children and a life outside of my domain.
A heavy swell of hate churned in my stomach.
I stayed pressing my hard-on into the door until it hurt, until the hinges were creaking and the cold door handle stunned me soft again. I wiped my eyes. I imagined Felix sobbing into my arms and I felt suddenly a malevolent sense of calm. If I could get him to come to me as I had, we’d be equal once more.
It could not have been Elspeth or Sir James. They were too larger than life to conjure sufficient grief.
But poor Venetia was always tiptoeing along the tightrope of saliva that ran from her lips to the toilet bowl. I plotted nightly, abandoning my former pursuits, wound tight by my thoughts. I smiled less at the dinner table. I stayed silent. There would be nothing strange about finding Venetia in front of the toilet. Nothing more than an inevitable accident, they would think. The thought of Venetia, with her filthy teeth and bile-eroded nail polish, brought forth some latent compassion for my own sisters. If Felix rejected me, I would have married her and imposed upon her my unsightly family name and I would have tired of it and grown resentful and been driven mad by Felix’s hate. I decided she’d always have to die in the end.
I’d be doing her a favor, I told myself, and replaced the tears on my skin with the thought of Felix’s own.
Until, until, until. Prescot ruined it all. After the initial punch of mortification faded, Felix staring into the woman who wore my mother’s sickeningly pleasant face, it was as though I had leapt from my own body. I reached for Felix through a fog. Begging. Stooping as low as blatant honesty.
Nothing had made me cry quite like Felix had that day, not since that dead starling.
I found I could no longer recognize my reflection in his mirror. My plan had been shoved off kilter. He’d never trust me with Venetia gone. I thought about bringing the poison to my own lips. Felix would never forgive himself, but did it matter? My family had soiled him in the way, I was sure, he felt the Cattons had soiled me.
The eyes in the mirror were vacant. Dead. Felix’s love had been my only savior. I would try to fix it, I thought I could fix it, I thought I could win him back. But did I really, with the vial of poison nestled in my pocket all through the night?
Death did not truly exist at Saltburn. Pamela’s funeral felt as real as my dad’s–a disquieting abstraction that passed as clouds passed from the summer sun. Felix’s death felt the same at first. Until it didn’t.
I had done it because he needed me. He needed me. I was the one real thing he had ever truly wanted, his one real friend, and the loss of such a thing, if I left Saltburn, would break him. Felix would turn into the bitter heir he was destined to be and go on to live a miserable, unchallenged life as the king of a lonely castle. I tethered him to the real world, one of pain and envy and love. I set him free. He couldn’t exist without me. What’s more, I would have been trapped wondering for the rest of my life about the boys he’d find in seedy pubs, his wife’s orgasms, the gap in his son’s teeth.
I had done it because a life apart from Felix would have driven me mad.
I had done it because I hated my parents and he loved them, felt for them, and hated me. He hated me. He hated me, and, like his love for me, was too stupified by Saltburn to spit it out in words.
“Better?”
“Fuck you.”
“I think you should go to bed.”
It was too late for him not to hate me.
IV.
When it comes down to it, what I’d done during those fifteen years away from Saltburn had amounted to nothing compared to our time together.
I cut “sorry” from my vocabulary. I cleaned up my accent. Most of all, I feigned incompetence, What happened to Felix, yeah I heard, what an unfortunate accident. After a while, I started to believe it. My role in the matter. I’d gone back to Prescot for the summer–after all, I’d only known him for six months, why would he have invited me to Saltburn?
This absent-mindedness carried on until my last year at Oxford. What struck me like a bullet to the heart was when, long after Farleigh fled for America for good, I ran into our old tutor bumbling through the library and I remembered what he had said about him and Farleigh’s mother. Professor Ware understood what it had been like with Felix.
His hand was on my shoulder and he was saying, “... great, great loss. How are you coping?”
In the library, Felix and Farleigh had been speaking calmly and very vaguely about a war in some country that paled in comparison to Great Britain. Farleigh’s solution was socialism (his favorite topic). Felix was laughing. It must have been before my dad’s death had won Felix over again but, having been buried in my great grave of memories, I could no longer remember. I had stayed quiet, as I always did, waiting for Felix’s cue.
“Enough of that.” Felix turned away from Farleigh’s agitated hand gestures. He was bored already. “What are you reading?”
I peered at him over my spectacles, at his blue jumper speckled in sunlight. “Just… philosophy.”
“Do tell,” said Farleigh. His hatred for me had expanded during this time, for Felix and I had days prior walked in on him crying into his pillow to Alanis Morisette after some unnamed shadow of a person had broken his heart.
“Well,” I licked my lips and skimmed the page I hadn’t turned since they’d started talking. “Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and—"
Felix interrupted me. “Christ, mate, what have they got you reading?” His eyes were wide, aghast, and guarded.
“Fromm.” I pointed the cover towards him.
“Now he,” Farleigh swiped the book from my hands, flipping through the pages, “was a socialist.”
“Christ. Mum would die if she read that. She’s always going on about how I love too much .” Felix’s breath hitched upon a sudden inhale, eyes flickering to me, then to Farleigh, and back to me. Once again, he had disclosed more than he intended. I’d always had that effect on him. I listened. I truly cared. He’d needed me.
He’d needed me.
“It’s like falling down an endless tunnel,” a disembodied voice said in my old accent. “Lost forever.”
Professor Ware recommended me to a psychiatrist.
I spent the last summer month of 2007 in a London flat I’d bought with Sir James’ money. I had tanned considerably at Saltburn, which Felix had often marveled at, but there, my skin bruised like a ghoul’s. I scarred my knuckles shattering every mirror I could see myself in. Felix was like an itch in my throat I could never shake. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t stand it. I planned on sneaking onto the property with a shovel so I could bring him back.
I’d already pocketed Felix’s wristbands on my way out. I laid naked on the unfurnished hardwood and wrapped them around my cock and balls and sobbed until my eyes gave out from the weight of my tears. I would dig for him, I thought, but the prospect of being caught and arrested and facing permanent separation stopped me short.
On my last night at Oxford, I sat on the bridge clasping and unclasping Felix’s cigarette case and inching my gaze away from the rippling water to my dad’s rock. Elspeth’s scream of terror ricocheted through my head, screeching and mechanical like a wind-up toy. When I plummeted into the water, I found I could hardly feel it, nor could I feel the weight of soaking clothes or the strange looks as I wandered to town. It was like that night at Saltburn. The hours slowed until the only sensation was the stone settling in my stomach.
Clubs invited me into a veil of smoke. Floundering along to faraway music and neon blindness, I threw myself against strangers who recognized me as friends. I didn’t know them. I didn’t know anyone. They filled me with alcohol or sperm and sent me on my way, reeling out into the night, vomiting up poison and striking up beatings in back alleys.
I could find no one who could hurt me quite like Felix had.
Some days I traipsed through life like I was Felix. I sat on the Tube with his MP3 player, flinching at The Killers or Crystal Castles or The Skallywags and staring as my outstretched palms were replaced with his own. I parted my hair like he did and wore his wristbands and his aftershave. I mimicked his voice in conversation. But Felix had intricacies that I, try as I might, could never emulate. His wild, soulful eyes, for one.
One night, when I was dialing his old number on my new cellphone, I heard him.
“Oliver.” He said it in his voice, not mine, “Grow up.”
I left the house.
I found jobs. I found girls. I found tall men who made me breathe funny.
V.
Then the fateful day came when Sir James’ death broke the bindings of our agreement and released me from the empty nothingness that was becoming my life.
“Have you been happy?”
I was reminded of what it was like to long for something. Not for Felix or Saltburn or Elspeth herself, but something greater, perhaps the pursuit of a feeling: hope.
“Not really. You?”
She recognized true anguish in my eyes like she had at Saltburn and I recognized the phantom flicker of someone else’s reflection in the glass behind her. I knew then that I was on the right path. I hadn’t made a mistake. I had known what I was doing all along.
“The coast is clear now, isn’t it?”
I entered a fit of unhampered glee. I pranced around for months on end basking in it. Each day alone at Saltburn emphasized the sheer magnitude of my success–it was like forcing myself on a girl for the first time, receiving top marks, watching Venetia pick at my food, spreading the warm palmful up Farleigh’s chest, reading about Sir James in the paper. Pure satisfaction. I was free, freer than I had ever been, to do as I pleased. I could hardly contain myself. After I sent them, Duncan, the footmen, the maids, all away for good, I massaged my semen into Henry VIII’s mattress as if to mark my territory.
I enjoyed cooking my own meals, preparing my eggs the way I liked them. I leafed through every book in every library and eventually moved on to excavating the wine cellar. Drunken temptation drew me into Felix’s room, left untouched since his death, and I began wandering the grounds in nothing more than his blue v-neck, exhilarated by the faint smell of him and the cold draft between my thighs. A lone bird would soar across the flat blue sky into thin air. Only the murmuring rustle of leaves could be heard for miles.
Life was good again.
Slowly, the scent of sour meat began emanating from secret doors and mold gathered around the unlocked windows. Bugs skittered across the dirty floor. I coughed dust, a small sound at Saltburn, an insignificant echo to the faraway rooms. Elspeth’s shrieks cut through in the dark, overgrown maze. Winged cadavers floated in the pond. I stopped leaving the castle.
As Saltburn fell to ruin, the gloom I had pushed into the depths of my soul slowly spilled over.
I heard voices at night, trembling in the king’s bed with the curtains drawn.
You have nothing to do with him,
with us,
with here.
Nothing at all.
My footsteps thudded like heartbeats throughout the halls even when I paused to retch bloody bile into nearby vases (the Palissey plates were no exception). I awoke chest-deep in the lake wearing Sir James’ suit of armor one day. Another, I opened my eyes to a forty-foot drop, one of Venetia’s nightgowns billowing against my legs on the roof.
Unburied memories crept up on me in every waking moment. I recalled with a start my last words to Felix, I don’t care what you think anymore, and I wanted to fling myself from the balcony and observe my broken body like I’d done Felix’s. The reality of it, him laying there like a sleeping fallen angel, was unbearable.
Something was missing, I realized in sober silences. I had no one left to yearn for. Felix’s absence prevented me from ever finding true solace at Saltburn. Without Felix, the place was rejecting me, it hated me, it wanted me dead.
Carpe fucking diem. I dug for him.
Under the full moon, the sound of the shovel scraping along the stone path sliced at my ears on the way to the cemetery, and when I finally beheld Felix’s grave, naked as I’d been the day of his funeral, sprouts of grass like sparse feathers had grown in the topsoil. I glanced sideways at the plastic flowers lining the other headstones. Elsebeth, Sir James, and poor, poor Venetia, as skin and bones as she’d always hoped to be down there in the dirt. In due time, I might have had it in me to bring them all back. But for now, I burrowed into the hard, packed dirt and strained what little muscle I had left hoisting Felix’s coffin through mist and mud. Fog had enshrouded the courtyard by the time I returned. I toppled blindly over a lawn chair by the pond and vomited into the scummy water.
“You’re doing a really rotten job at taking care of yourself, Ollie.”
I whipped around like a dog chasing its own tail and stood over an uncovered coffin staring me in the face. Ragged breaths filled my ears. I slammed it shut, frightened by the bony grey thing inside, and dragged it into Felix’s room.
At some point, a storm had severed the electricity, leaving me to stumble along with a lantern even in the daytime (I kept the curtains shut tight, afraid the sun might weather Felix’s corpse). I was making my way back from the cellar with an uncorked bottle and held my nose as I entered the swarm of flies in the kitchen. In the firelight, they were like buzzing snow. I shivered from within the bundle of Felix’s robe at a distant figure, one I attributed to swallowing the remainder of Farleigh’s confiscated stash.
“You look tired.”
“You look dead,” I said wryly. He didn’t. In fact, I could hardly see him in the dark, that is to say, if he was even there at all. Malnourished and swimming in alcohol, this would not be the first time my mind had played tricks on me. I shouldered past him, wherever he was.
Pissing in the bathtub, I caught my gaunt, sallow face in the shattered mirror. My ribs were like door handles, the skin stretched thin and vascular. In a sudden wave of nausea, I spilled to the floor and knocked my skull against the tub. My vision swam.
Was this what Venetia had wanted, sticking her fingers down her throat?
I opened my eyes.
The lantern light flickered from the floor, illuminating brief glimpses of Felix’s things–his CDs, his posters, his piles of dirty clothes–and I heard a choking sound. I felt for my neck. I saw my feet kicking against the edge of Felix’s bed as if to run away without me. Something hard had lodged itself in my throat… and was attached to my closed fist. I pulled. I yanked at it with all my might and when I retrieved it, I raised the thing to my weak, teary eyes, my fingers dripping shiny saliva.
I had been gagging on a smooth, slender bone, one belonging to someone’s forearm.
“You fucking freak,” Felix said. His laughter came from a shadow in the corner of the room.
In a rapid-heartbeat crawl, I flung myself backwards across the bed, holding out the bone as if to ward him away.
“Oliver.” His fingers drummed at the wall behind him. Breath seized in my lungs and my blood went frozen. Clear as day, it was Felix. He emerged radiant in the dim light, glowing beneath his untied robe, still beautiful as the day I left him. I looked down at my naked body nestled in his sheets. The bone had fallen somewhere in between my legs.
“Oliver… You can’t ignore me forever.” He crossed his arms at the foot of the bed with a recognizable expression of lofty annoyance. And his eyes… his eyes…
I whimpered, burying my face in my hands. “No, no, no, I. I can’t stand it. I can’t. What have I done? What have I done?” Hollow-voiced. Incoherent. Hyperventilating into the darkness of my palms.
“Do you know how much I fucking missed you, Ol?” I heard him draw nearer. “Why did you leave me? Why?”
“You’re not real!” I let out a wretched groan like a hog’s squeal into a cluster of sheets, still hiding from him. The mattress shifted. Then suffocation by silence. When I finally opened my eyes, Felix was on top of me. Nose to nose. Tears gleamed in his eyes and I felt the sudden urge to apologize for something, something… But I had forgotten what.
“I shouldn’t have made you go.” Felix cupped my jaw and I felt the warmth of his blood beneath his fingertips. I knew then that he was real. I had truly brought him back.
Any ounce of trepidation evaporated, replaced by a slow trickle of uninhibited desire. It was as though nothing had changed since my first round at Saltburn.
“What are you going to do to make up for it?” someone said in the sultry croon I had left behind all those years ago.
Without another word, he parted my thighs. I was suddenly myself again, overcome by self-consciousness as his fingers brushed my unbathed, grimy skin, and wanted to push him away until I felt Felix’s hands teasing my inert cock. My muscles clenched. I bit my knuckles at the sting of it, him shoving himself inside me. Felix smelled different, as though his skin had been perfumed by kerosene, but with each warm thrust, my senses grew dimmer and dimmer. I could do nothing but clutch my lower lip between my teeth, scarcely breathing, and blink at him.
It was like I was back in his room at Oxford, his forehead on mine. He stroked my face in the rising heat. I gasped into his mouth, longing for it, but he turned away. Felix had grown unpredictable in all our years apart, or had he always been? I felt the dull snap of the fractured bone inside me and saw, beyond his tousled hair, the lantern sending wild flames soaring up the curtains.
Then his lips pressed hard into mine.
“Better?”