Vellum (23 page)

It was in our second week that we found each other in the same tutorial and found ourselves locked in a debate as fierce as it was foolish, pouring scorn upon each other's patently absurd ideas; and locked in each other's gaze, we gaped incredulously and shook our heads and let fly insults at each other till it seemed we were about to fight, and while the postgrad student tutor tried in vain to steer us back onto the actual topic, the full flow of ridicule flung back and forth between us was unbreachable and in all the vitriol of an argument more derision than discussion, all I kept thinking as I stared in his infuriating face was just how much I wanted to fuck him and how I could see, in his ferocious eyes, how he was thinking the same thing.

And later, after we walked out of the class still fighting, still flirting, after we sat for hour after hour in the campus cafeteria, drinking coffee, black and bitter in my case and frothed with milk, and sugary, for him (I watched, still talking, as he poured one, two, three, four sachets of sugar in), after discussing nothing of significance as if it was the most important matter in the world, and after we somehow walked together back to his room, not even noticing that we'd done so, we locked together physically and became students of each other's form and flux.

We studied the articulation of each other's jointed intricacies, the slant of a kiss, the turn of a neck, the roll of its nape down to the first corrugations of the vertebrae where fuzz of hair gives way to skin, the roll of that spine in contrapposto pose, raising a hip at one side to curve a torso so another's arm slips comfortably around the waist as if there's nowhere else that it was meant to be. I studied the nicking points of his horns and ears. I studied the impish emerald of his eyes, the oriental jade tones of his skin. He arched an eyebrow at the limber of my wings, and we stopped studying.

THE SUPPLIANTS

A woodprint caricature of a Gnome, dating from the Middle Ages, presented the perfect picture of a child-murderer and a plague carrier, the vestigial wings under his tunic making him look hunchbacked, a sackful of dead babies slung over his shoulder, a purse grasped in his hand. This was the image of the Gnome as graceless and crooked that inspired pogroms and persecution, and that the Nazis were to play upon so heavily during the early twentieth century. It was the image that gave the Crusaders an excuse to hone their skills while on their way to the Holy Land, purging cities of their local Gnomish populations. It was the Gnome as usurer, and as murderer and, of course, at its roots, it was the Gnome as killer of Christ.

Not that it mattered that Adonais was himself a Gnome. Medieval frescoes and altarpieces, icons and crucifixes had portrayed the Son of Jove as light-skinned and slender, the perfect Angelo-Satyr messiah, his wings spread wide upon the cross, his long horns lowered in his suffering. From its first advances toward the gentiles, through the Emperor Instantine's adoption of the faith, and the growth of the Church during the period of the Holy Rhyman Empire, Christianity had progressively distanced itself from its Gnomish roots, painting the disciples white instead of cobalt, and sliding blame away from the Rhymans and on to the Gnomes. The dead babies and the purse of the medieval Gnome were a reminder of the Slaughter of the Innocents ordered by an evil Gnomish King and of the thirty pieces of silver taken by the Gnome who betrayed Christ.

Tailors of fine clothes or moneylenders, jewelers or pawnbrokers—there were only a few professions open to the Gnomes of Elysse, and many of those were crafts or trades of peering eyes and pinching hands, of a back hunched over the intricate details of clockwork or bookkeeping, of fine manipulations and complex designs, almost as if the gentile cultures could accept the refugees only as absolute suppliants, submitting to symbolic roles of intrigue and avarice.

In the darkened lecture hall, there was a
click-whirr-clack
and the projected slide slid to the side, replaced on-screen by a more modern image, a black-and-white photograph of a Gnomish shopfront in Berlin in the 1930s, the window shattered, the words
Hobben raus
daubed on the door. I heard Puck, in the seat beside me, mutter a quiet and unfinished
“fucking…”
and all around the room the almost-silence of shifted positions and folded arms—of our retreat into uncomfortable indignance—was clear and solid.

OF DISTRACTION, OF ATTENTION, OF ATTRACTION

He looked over his shoulder, and I took the cigarette from his mouth between two fingers held up like a sixties peace sign, and turned my hand to place it against my own lips, take a deep slow draw of the tobacco smoke right down into my lungs to hold it there, and held my breath with eyes half-closed, with the aching bliss of a nicotine fiend on his first hit in all too many days. I placed the cigarette back between his lips and felt the slightest hint of a pout, just the suggestion of a kiss on my fingers, as I exhaled.

“Benedictions,” I said.

“Salutation,” he said. “I thought you'd quit.”

“I have. Those things'll kill you. Terrible habit.”

“Live fast, die young,” he said. “And leave a beautiful corpse.”

“Fuck that shit. I'm looking forward to being one of those crazy old farts who shouts at kids and whacks them on the heads with his walking stick. Great fun. So what are you drinking?” I asked as I slid up onto the leather cushion of the stool beside him at the bar. I slid a beermat toward me till it was half off the wooden counter and flipped it with a flick of the thumb, missed catching it between thumb and forefinger by the narrowest of margins and had to make a grab to snatch it before it fell to the floor.

“J.D. and Coke,” he said.

“You know, J.D. doesn't stand for James Dean. You…?”

His head cocked to one side, he peered over my shoulder to the door, with a look I recognized immediately, one of distraction, of attention, of attraction, and I shook my head with a wry smile because I knew him well enough. I looked behind me, following the arrow of his lust and clocked the two of them, forescruffs of blond hair stuck out from under matching Abercrombie & Fitch baseball caps; as WASP—as White, as Angelo-Satyr and as Protestant—as they come, and with their gold aquiline wings stuck out from gray Gap sweatshirts redolent of college boy more than white trash, they looked so clean-cut, square and straight, I didn't wonder that my Puck, always his own Puck, couldn't keep his eyes off them.

“Ah, no way. They're fucking jocks,” I said. “I mean, Christ Adonais, they look like fucking quarterbacks.”

“I like fucking quarterbacks,” said Puck.

He tracked them with a slow and certain swivel of the head, an open cruising, as they walked up to the bar and ordered their beers. Puck had no shame in his rapacity; if anything, he reveled in the hunt, whether as predator or prey, and I noted the set of certainty in jaw and brow, although his eyes instead of being narrowed were widened in a more vulnerable challenge. It was part lion, part gazelle, the slight parting of his lips, the almost-flare of nostrils as if he could draw them to him with his breath, gather them in a chemical line of scent of shower gel and sweat.

“Man, smell that testosterone,” he said, with relish.

CURTIUS, E., GRIECHISCHE GESCHICHTE (1857–67), VOL. 1, P. 4 1

“From Aeschylus, onward, we see the Prosian Empire portrayed as decadent, effeminate, soft with luxury in comparison to the young and dynamic Versid City-States, and this xenophobia was, it seems, the dominant view throughout Classical Verse. All the more remarkable, then, that the Versid writers of the Classical period continued to accept what for them was simply common knowledge, handed down from their forefathers, that the eldest of their cities—Augos, Thetes, Coronnus—were founded from Eglyph or Phonaesthia. It was only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that this view was challenged by historians and archaeologists because, as Ernst Curtius tells us…

It is inconceivable that Cunninites proper, who everywhere shyly retreated at the advance of the Hellions, especially when they came into contact with them, when far from their own homes; and who as a nation were despised by the Hellions to such a degree as to make the latter regard intermarriage with them in localities of mixed population, such as Solemnis or Cyphrus, as disgraceful; it is inconceivable, we repeat, that such Phonaesthians ever founded principalities among Hellionic populations.

A procession of thousands of soldiers in shining armor trooped, to a fanfare of glory, through stone columns rising to the skies as city-gates, carved with titanic Art Nouveau sphinxes that towered over the spectacle as, in the foreground, an emperor lounged on a balcony, ensconced among luxurious cushions and intricately patterned rugs while female slaves, bedecked in little more than jewelry and slender draperies of silk, fanned him with palm leaves and fed his corpulent majesty with fruits whose thick juices drooled over his double chin.

We sat in the darkness of the back row of the Film and Media Studies Lecture Hall as Griffiths's grand historical spectacular
Intolerance
flickered on the screen in front of us while Hobbsbaum talked, his lecture, as always, a chimera of media, of text and illustration, annotation and quotation—a
miscegenation,
he called it, this intertextual exegesis of history. Last week it had been
Birth of a Nation
and, as the white-robed Klansmen galloped on their steeds into a town overrun by rebel slaves intent on rape and murder, my mind had wandered and I'd noticed, for some strange reason, the elegant musculature of the horses in motion, the choreography of their wheeling in close formation round the corner of a wooden farmhouse, kicking up dust under their pounding hooves to mingle with the smoke of gunfire in the air. The ripple of ribbed muscle, sinew and tendon buff beneath their hides, the primal magnificence of the shiftings of their flesh.

And the ochres ran before the noble knights riding in billows of white.

SHARING ROOM AND SHARING SPACE

“Mine,” he called, launching himself past me with a bat of iridescent wings right in my face, and leaping for the bed beside the window, where he landed and rolled over with the spring of the mattress, flinging his limbs out star-shape partly to steady himself, partly to stretch his claim—and lay there on the duvet in smug challenge, a brat daring my opposition. I tossed my bag across the room onto the other bed and cocked a snoot at him, snorting in mock contempt.

“Fine, then. Women and children first. Shortarse.”

He threw a pillow at me and I sidestepped, caught it, spun and—

“Hey I'm nearly three foot tall ya fey—
oomf
!”

“Yeah. And you still throw like a girl,” I said.

He flicked the finger at me with a sneerish grin of spite—
yeah yeah, big tough guy, suck my cock—
and sneezed.

Later we sat in this new room, settling in to our new home and our new year of college just around the corner. We watched a sun-drenched Californian cop show where the hero kicked open a graffitied door and swung his gun round to a room of startled gang members in red leather jackets and bandannas, all Espritic but for the solitary, sharp-suited ochre man among them with his gold-capped teeth and gold rings, and the clear bags of white powder—smuggled in by migrant Pixian farmworkers whose families were, of course, held hostage back home by evil drug lords—and the suitcase full of money lying open on the table in front of him. The camera cut to a close shot as the ochre guy reached for his flick-knife, then snapped back to a close-up on the hero's face, his gun arm high and pointing out and past the frame.

“Don't even think about it,” he said.

Unpacking a cardboard box held under one arm, Puck filled the surface of the old wooden dresser that sat in one corner of the room with a ragbag assortment of toiletries and textbooks, with pristine bottles of scent and cans of hairspray, tubes of mousse or gel, packets of lube and pocketfuls of condoms, and with ragged yellowing books with dog-eared covers and broken spines, stinking of the dusty secondhand shops they were bought in. I rambled through the books, seeing what I had and didn't have, expected and didn't expect, then browsed his aftershave collection. A bottle.