supplicium post mortem

When I write the phrase little chat, it is usually in upper case, Little Chat. I think you already know what that means. It is probably time I attribute the phrase to its originator. Mark first used, upper case, early in our correspondence, but I incorrectly remember hearing it first in a vignette he wrote for me.

Our email correspondence (until he moved to Gotham) stretches to almost a thousand emails each, almost all of them saved individually in txt files with names like “fmark232.txt” [the 232nd email from Mark to me] or “tomark33″ [my 33rd email to Mark]. As you can imagine, it’s hard to find a reference amongst all that, especially 15 years after the fact.

Tonight I was searching for the text of this Little Chat vignette, which I did using the Search function on my PC. It turned up many emails, and the first one I opened turned out to be the one in which he confessed that he loved me. I barely remember this email, but encountering it again absolutely slayed me. I won’t quote it. My eyes are still swollen.

I did eventually find Mark’s vignette and have posted it below as well as under the Stories tab. The scenario was Mark and Casey at the Lewises. This was an alternate reality to Home School, one we only played a few times. The idea was that Mark and Casey had run away from the Orphanage and had been found and adopted by the Perfect People (Dr. & Mrs. Lewis). I later (or was it earlier?) wrote a companion piece to his vignette, which I also posted under the Stories tab. After reading them both, I feel his is much better: more direct, less fussy and complicated, more spontaneous and full of heart. Looking at both scenarios from far away, I would say that we never lived or much played the letter of them, but the mood and heart of them were a constant feature of our life together, especially Mr. Prior’s life with Casey.

Without further ado, then, here is Mark’s piece, Wednesdays.

Wednesdays

by Mark Hastings

Sundays are for Regulars, for weekly cleaning.  Sundays are always spent together, at the Lewises.  Casey and Mark go to bed sore and peaceful and clean and warm.  Whole.  Sundays are a deep rich blue, the smell of dark polished wood, a full stomach and a feeling of belonging.

By Wednesday, that’s worn off a little.  Mr. Lewis is fond of saying, as he shaves on Wednesday morning, that Wednesday is the worst day of the week. Equidistant from the comfort of weekend.  Neither the residual freshness of Tuesday, or the slight anticipation of Thursday.  Nothing but acres of dullness.  Mrs. Lewis has Commitments on Wednesdays, so supper is usually something cold.  Mark and Casey both have School things that they hate. For Mark, it’s morning gym, ninety minutes of effort with the school Sergeant’s swagger stick flailing its response to slackness, and the inevitability of at least one vault-horse caning, ‘poer incurriger les otters’.   For Casey, double Latin in the afternoon with the psychotically sarcastic Mr. Whitworth, whose greatest pleasure is to decline irregular verbs in time with his strap-strokes, and who makes a virtue of leathering girls just as hard as boys.  Out in front of the class, but facing towards your peers so they are spared the worst witness of unprotected strapping, and can better concentrate on construe.

Mark has learned to avoid the Wednesday vault-horse, and Casey the mid-week strap, because on Wednesday evenings they have their “Little Chat”.

The children do the dishes after supper, while Mr. Lewis goes to his study, and Mrs. Lewis rests up.  There is a sense of anticipation, although it isn’t the edginess of Sunday, before the Regulars, because often a Little Chat is just that.  Even so, the dishes get done well, and quietly, on the whole, on Wednesdays.  Mark and Casey smarten themselves up, and jaunt carefully along the downstairs corridor to the study.  Sometimes Mrs. Lewis joins them, sometimes not.

Little Chats are lucky-dippy.  In the months since Casey’s arrival they have ranged from a particularly uncomfortable interview over a broken ornament (Casey), cleverly replaced on its shelf (Mark) and not discovered broken for some time afterwards (Mrs. Lewis), to a riotous game of Racing Demon in which Mr. Lewis was heard to swear when Casey stole his Ace of Spades, was sent to the corner by his family and threatened with a very hard whacking by Mark if he ever did it again.  On average, one or both of the Lewises feel that one or both of the children would benefit from a little additional discipline perhaps one week in two.

Little Chat discipline is always the same – slipper, paddle or hand, administered in traditional manner, across the knee of the parent in the clock-ticky quiet of Mr. Lewis’s study.  It’s very different from Regulars. Canes, birches, crops and straps are banned.  Punishments are measured in minutes, rather than strokes.  Usually either a Quin, being–as Casey might explain–five minutes, or a Dix, being ten.  Mark hates Dixes, with a passion, especially when they’re paddle, and administered by Mrs. Lewis. Casey has mixed feelings about the whacking, but she loves the closeness and warmth of Little Chats, the fire glowing orange while the wind blows white outside on winter Wednesdays.

So, Wednesdays are made red, a smell of incense, a little adventure, and fun.

Think you?

She locked the back door and heard the murmur of the television from the den. No voices, though, giving her hope, however faint, that the children were asleep. She tossed her coat across the table and kicked off her clogs.

“Hey.” Her husband appeared in the dining room arch, back lit from the den.

“Are the kids—”

“In bed,” he interrupted. “Asleep.”

“Wow. Did you drug ‘em?”

“I thought you’d be back by eight thirty.” His voice acquired that edge. She could tell he wouldn’t be babysitting again anytime soon.

“The train was delayed. We got stuck in the tunnel.”

He palmed the dimmer, and the chandelier blared alight. She squinted.

“The website didn’t say anything,” he said stiffly.

She shrugged. “I’m shattered. You coming to bed?” She asked, knowing that he wouldn’t. She asked for form’s sake, to maintain the illusion of civility. As she slouched past him, his hand snatched her above the elbow. “Hey!”

“You were with him, weren’t you?”

“Who?”

“You know who.  Wasn’t enough, I suppose, to flirt with him in the deli every day. To have drinks with him last Thursday from five to seven PM.”

“What the hell?”

“Oh, I don’t need to spy on you. Do you think everyone in this town doesn’t know everything. Do you think they wouldn’t tell me?”

“And what did the jungle drums report about tonight, then?” She wrenched her arm free, but still he blocked her path.

“I’m your husband. You owe me the truth at least.”

Something in his eyes, something she’d never seen before made her heart ricochet in her chest.

“What do you want to hear?”

“Everything.” He imprisoned her wrists in his hands. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt his palms there.

“Do you want to hear how he took my hand?”

“How? The little punk.”

She met his gaze. He released her wrists. She took one of his hands flat between both of hers, and then brushed one protruding finger against her lip. He inhaled.

“Did you let him kiss you?”

Again, the look she’d never seen. Jealousy, but something more. “I kissed him.”

“You what?”

She ran her hands up his arms, over his t-shirt, and into the line of his disheveled hair. Then she pulled his face down and kissed him—lips, breath, tongue, teeth—as they hadn’t kissed in—

“What else did he do, the bastard?”

She moved his hand under her blouse. “This.” The other hand she led round to the back of her skirt. “And this.”

He pulled her close, stiff against her. “What else? I could kill him.”

Some time later they went up to bed, exhausted, sore, sated. She felt a pang of guilt, but fleeting. He wouldn’t have minded about the truth, a drink too many with her college roommate after the play; but the illusory lover not only proved incandescent, but it also guaranteed he’d babysit again soon, willingly.

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What is Secret Saturday? This piece was a little different than my usual fare. I suppose you can decide whether the change was for the good or the bad! My wildcard, like Emma Jane’s, was tunnel.

Check out the other excellent writers joining in this week:

• Emma Jane – injecting a special verisimilitude to hers!

She first saw him on the stoop on her way out of the party. The streets were narrow, deserted, like London. The party had been tedious.

“Oh,” he said.

“Are you going up?” she asked.

He stood, flustered, grinding out a cigarette with his dress shoe. “I don’t think so.”

Her head spun, possibly from a sinus infection, possibly because he looked like a young Daniel Day-Lewis and sounded like a Public School boy once removed. “Can’t say I blame you.” She met his eye with uncharacteristic nerve and then stepped off the stoop into the blowing snow.

“You look like a schoolgirl,” he said with a slight smile. “Are you sure you’re old enough to be knocking about on your own?”

She didn’t move, but shoved her hands deep into her pockets. “Quite sure.” The wind cut through her tights and made her wish she was wearing trousers. “What’s your name?”

He turned up his collar and joined her in the street. “James. James Mercer.”

“That was the name of my third grade teacher.”

“Oh, yes?” He came alongside her and began to walk. “How old’s that, then?”

“Eight.”

He buttoned the top of his coat. “You haven’t changed much, then.”

She glowered at the cobblestones. “Do you make a habit of chatting up girls in foreign cities and calling them immature?”

“Who says this is a foreign city?”

“Do you live here?”

He suppressed a smile. “Do you?”

She surveyed the empty street. “Listen,” she said, “it was great meeting you, James, but this is my train.” She gestured with her head to the red ball a block away.

“Closed, I wager.”

She inhaled and nodded: “Goodnight.” And strode quickly away from him.

“Wait. Please?”

She did not befriend strange men. She didn’t befriend strangers period. But his voice hit her chest somewhere like memory, as if she had known it, or would know it. She turned, but kept her distance. The snow swirled around him under the streetlamp.

“I’m an idiot,” he said. “Give me another chance.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Please.”

Her eyes stung, suddenly. She wasn’t feeling well. She belonged in bed, alone.

He craned his neck to see behind her. “Let me buy you a cup of coffee.”

“It’s too late for coffee.”

“Chocolate, then.” He nodded at some florescent light down the block. Her stomach growled. Her chin was going numb in the cold. She shrugged and then strode towards the coffee shop. He caught her up at the door, held it for her, and before she could unwrap herself, he’d ordered two hot chocolates and was hanging up her coat. She threw herself into a booth and placed her bag firmly beside her. He slipped into the seat across.

“Now,” he said, his voice more chocolaty than any chocolate possible, “what’s this all about?” His irises were green with flecks of brown in them. Her throat ached. Her eyes started streaming.

“That wasn’t my teacher’s name,” she sobbed.

He put his hands on the table, palms up, and smiled. “It isn’t mine, either.”

---

What is Secret Saturday? My wildcard, like Haron’s, was Third Grade Teacher.

It’s a thrill to have so many great writers joining in this first week. A big welcome to all of them. Check out their pieces!

• Haron
• Emma Jane
• Scarlett
• Nettagyrl

He watched her whirl about the apartment, in what he called her Tasmanian Devil state. There were so many things to do she couldn’t draw breath to count them, and there he sat on the bed, stripped down to boxer briefs, flicking channels between the baseball and Househunting Wales: Denbighshire.

“Come to bed,” he said gently, settling further into the pillows. She declined in a bugger-off tone and strode to the kitchen to initiate another task. The crockery on top of the fridge needed putting away. She dragged chair across tiles and climbed up with the ugly plate their neighbor had given them for their wedding.

Then, the chair was skidding out from under her and crashing to the floor, shattering the plate and slamming her knee against the counter. And he was there, lifting her from the scene of the accident and pointing to the dressing room: “Go.”

Tears threatening, she did as he said. After sweeping up the shards, he waited for her, then led her to bed. He resumed his spot and pulled her by the wrist to sit between his legs, her head against his chest like a pillow, his arms wrapped around her from behind, muscles like the statue of Youthful Hercules she’d seen at the museum, his lips brushing against her ear, her cheek, her neck, watching the sheep in Wales, running his fingers through her hair until everything wrong was right again and she could call off the archers, put down the stick, surrender.

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What is Flash Fiction Friday?

Read the other folks writing this week:

• Marie
• Rafi

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility. The motto of Peter Donne’s confessor when he entered the monastery, thirty-nine years old, hot-headed, clever, bereaved.

The Abbot at Lunsford had taken particular interest in him, as perhaps he ought, Peter being his nephew. He had persuaded Peter to come to Lunsford and then assigned him Barnabas for his confessor.

“He’s tried to harm himself,” the Abbot told Barnabas.

“With intent?”

“I fear.”

Barnabas intertwined his fingers and exhaled. “Will you permit the Norwich Discipline?”

The Abbot hesitated, a qualm for his nephew, but then nodded, recognizing what could be the only hope for his novice.

Days for Peter began an hour before anyone else rose. Barnabas woke him and supervised his milking of the cows. In that bleary-eyed hour, Barnabas exacted a kind of confession as he demanded an account of the night’s dreams. Confession and discernment of spirits, combined with milking—the ultimate monastic efficiency, Barnabas claimed.

“I saw her again,” Peter said one dark morning—his third month? thirteenth? what difference, really?

“Yes?”

“Her body warm and unclothed against me in our bed, soft, so alive…”

“Yes.”

“I knew she was dead, that this was a visit from beyond the grave, but her arms wrapped around me so…”

“Did you make love?”

“Not this time. But…I asked her to use her magic eyes, to… bring something good to me. ‘You can’t want me to live my whole long life without you and alone,’ I said.”

“And now?” Barnabas asked. “Mind the bucket!”

Milk sloshed across the dairy floor. Peter winced, knowing his confessor’s answer to inattention at milking.

“We’ll deal with that later,” Barnabas said dryly. “For now, finish, please. Your report, and your cow.”

“There was a later part, in the refectory here. I had just arrived, with the boys.”

“Your boys, or the boys you used to teach?”

“A blending, I think. I was worried over what they would eat and was bustling about trying to find them what they’d like. Then the Abbot reached over my shoulder and dropped two pieces of toast on my plate. They were hot, hot enough to melt the butter between them, and it was toast with the kind of bread she used to make, the best bread, the best toast.”

“Perfect toast.”

“Yes. And I wanted to blub because of the toast, and because of the fact that he’d been watching me all along, when I’d been busy with the boys, and he’d taken it upon himself to drop on my plate–no word, no fuss–the perfect toast.”

Barnabas nodded but said no more until later that morning–after Matins, after morning work, after Peter’s particular exercises–when Peter stood before him in the confessional cell, struggling as usual with the submission his confessor requested. Barnabas waited, as usual, without speaking, without removing the birch from its bucket until Peter had prepared himself. When the time came, he applied it with the force of radical mercy, until the fight left, and a bit beyond.

After saying the absolution and allowing the novice to rearrange himself, Barnabas fished a tin from his habit, an incongruous, luridly colored object containing ginger pastilles. He opened it and held it out to Peter Donne, who seemed to regard it as a sinister trap.

“Go on,” Barnabas said.

Sweets of all kinds were forbidden at Lunsford, and almost every other indulgence forbidden to Peter under the Norwich Discipline.

“No, thank you.”

“You’re afraid, aren’t you? Afraid of what will happen if you have it.”

Peter braced himself to deny it, but then shrugged.

“You aren’t the author of your life,” his confessor said.

“No,” Peter replied, as if he were only just realizing it.

“Someone else is writing your book.”

Peter frowned as if he had received crushing news.

“Someone who watches you. Someone who, unbeknownst to you, has taken time to prepare perfect toast, from perfect bread, and to drop it on your plate.”

The novice fell back to his knees, tears pouring suddenly from his eyes: “Please, Father, change me. Make me a man who no longer asks to have her back.”

Barnabas rested a hand on Peter’s head. “He is changing you. Your book is being written, even now.”

“And what does it say, this page?”

“This page?” Barnabas placed the open tin on the kneeler. “So I did sit, and eat.”

---

What is Bookends?

This piece turned into a little back story about Father Donne from Keep Calm and Carry On, though a much younger version of the man.

Note: Bookends will be suspended for the month of November due to NaNoWriMo, as explained here.

Read other folks writing this week:

• PapaTomLA

He wasn’t a relative. He wasn’t her godfather. He wasn’t even her guardian, but she’d been sent to stay with him in his rambling, damp house on Galway Bay. She was to call him Professor, and he spent much of his time like the professor in the Narnia books, locked away pursuing unfathomable and possibly magical matters.

The Professor lived with an Irish Setter—mad, soppy, antic. They took long daily walks and expected her to accompany them. Over the Burren, along the shore, up Connemara hills, in rain, in sun, in gale they walked.

He had no patience for petty regulations of the modern world. He bought his meat from a butcher out of the back of his farm, not licensed, but extraordinarily fresh and good. His milk came from a neighbor’s cow, his eggs from chickens down the lane. The hysterical alarms of contemporary life—H1N1, salmonella, pedophiles, climate change—meant nothing to him.

He did insist on certain courtesies. When he entered the room, she was to stand. When granted admission to his study, she was to give a small bow, more appropriate to a German schoolboy, she thought, than to an orphaned American girl. And when something she said or did indicated to him, by whatever mysterious code, that she required discipline, he administered it after the method of his childhood, with a slipper across his knee, or a worn leather strap. It was better, he said, all of it. More healthy, more traditional, more human.

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What is Flash Fiction Friday?

Read the other folks writing this week:

• Travis King
• Rafi

How did I know he loved me? I figured it from the second serious story he wrote for me, Jigsaw. I don’t believe I’ve ever shared this one; he said it was just for us. He wrote it before we met in person, sometime in July that summer. It imagined a school weekend, casey and mark with Mr. Penn, and it ended with the two of them putting the pieces together, working out that this was the real deal, life-mangling, life-restoring.

He was married. Jigsaw called the bluff on our ostensibly platonic friendship. My parents’ marriage had ended in divorce; I refused to be an Other Woman. I remember falling on my knees in my study, sobbing and imploring God to help, somehow. I was not religious at this point, so this impulse was as spontaneous as it was extraordinary. Here I was—here we were—being vivisected by this love, yet I did not want to help destroy anyone’s marriage. I had no idea what the near or distant future held, I only knew it was utterly insane to feel as though my entire existence—all 26 years of it—had been permanently rearranged by this Englishman I had never met face-to-face.

I remember the calm that came over me, not lessening the acute emotion, but muting it for a moment, and I remember the irrational certainty, like a rumbling in my stomach, that if I merely sat back and waited, doing nothing, all would be well, and all would be well, and all manner of means would be well…

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Arrgh…again, not quite fiction. And a topic that deserves much more thorough dealing. Half-way through writing it, I wanted to delete it and start again. However, I have this…attitude?…philosophy? that once something starts to write itself, one really ought not to give up on it, or censure it. In a way, those are the rules. I’m not sure I would stick with them in all circumstances, but I did today. Forgive any flippancy this 250-word treatment suggests. And please, if you can, refrain from drawing conclusions about me. I was, at that time, astoundingly naive.

What is Flash Fiction Friday?
Read the other folks writing this week:

• Marie - welcome!
• Graham
• Rafi
• Mija - welcome also!!
• PapaTomLA

“If things are good they’re not terrifying, are they?”

Marcus sighed. Vincent may have been his cousin, but he knew nothing about reality. Marcus wanted to fire back a cutting retort—You would say that given the way your parents hover like nervous dragonflies. He said nothing, however. Vincent had received enough jibes of that nature in his first—and last—disastrous term at Public School. His overwrought parents had dispatched him for the holidays to the house Marcus shared with their grandfather. Marcus, though six months younger than his cousin, had quickly deciphered the situation by eavesdropping on the servants: Vincent’s parents were enmeshed in legal difficulties. There was talk of Debt, Divorce.

“The really good things are always terrifying,” Marcus replied. “At least before you have them.”

“I never have terrifying things,” Vincent declared loftily. Marcus recalled his cousin’s obnoxious refusal to sample unfamiliar foods at the dinner table and decided a counter-irritant was in order.

“In that case,” Marcus said, heading for the door of their sitting room, “you’ll have to spend the hols holed up in here.”

“Grandfather told us quite clearly we weren’t to wander.”

Marcus flashed a grin. “Say hello to the ghosts, then. I’m off.”

He felt an immeasurable relief to hear Vincent’s footsteps clattering down the nursery corridor behind him.

Vincent gasped: “Is our room haunted?”

Marcus shrugged. “The most haunted room in the house.” Vincent looked as though he might burst into tears. Marcus ignored his fear and led him up staircases, down corridors, and into and out of shut-up rooms, where they played the rest of the morning.

At lunch, their grandfather questioned them: “Keeping out of trouble?”

“Yes, sir,” Marcus replied confidently.

Their grandfather narrowed his eyes. “You and I have yet to discuss your term reports, boy. I don’t recommend going for extras.”

“No, sir.” Marcus swallowed his soup serenely.

“Do not be under any illusions,” their grandfather said to Vincent. “My daughter may have wrapped you in cotton wool, but I most certainly will not.” Vincent blushed and looked hard-done-by. “There’s to be no more wasted food, for starters,” their grandfather continued. “You’ll eat what you’re given or go hungry the rest of the day.”

This approach was far too direct, Marcus could see, and served only to push Vincent into a stubborn realm of nausea. He ate no more of the lunch, and cloistered himself upstairs at tea-time. The next day Marcus redoubled his efforts, leading Vincent to some of the more thrilling corners of the house, peepholes, for instance, which revealed scullery maids bathing, or the stableboys exercising themselves whilst discussing the scullery maids. Marcus even contrived to position them to observe the stableboys’ punishment by the groom. Marcus hoped their stoicism unter the strap would provide inspiration for his cousin.

The second week they roamed beyond the grounds and into the district where they met with Marcus’s friend, Jasper, and Jasper’s delicious sister Susan. Whenever Vincent showed signs of wanting to stay behind, Marcus embroidered his accounts of ghosts. Vincent’s interest in them never waned, and in fact grew faintly ravenous.

One afternoon pelting rain confined them indoors. Marcus began to recount another imagined other-worldly encounter. Vincent interrupted and pointed to a small cupboard behind the settee.

“That’s where the noises come from. The ghosts.” Vincent reported this information with a good deal more enthusiasm than Marcus previously would have thought possible.

Marcus grinned: “Let’s turf ‘em out, then!” Vincent joined with enthusiasm, and soon they’d coated themselves in dust, emptied the cupboard, and uncovered a hidden door. Vincent wrenched it open and crawled, heedless, inside.

A mighty crash followed. Marcus peered into the darkness and soon found himself flailing down a tin shaft and landing painfully some distance below.

“You, too?” said his grandfather’s voice as Marcus felt his grandfather’s powerful arm hauling him to his feet. He blinked and tried to breathe. They had landed somehow in the library and now stood, filthy, before him. He raised a hand to silence them: “No explanation necessary. If you’ll be so good as to fetch the cane, Marcus, you know where it lives, I shall dust your jackets for you.”

Vincent emerged from his caning considerably more confident than Marcus had seen him. He grew to love their grandfather’s house, and spoke of it enthusiastically at school, where he joined Marcus the following term.

“It was the sort of house that you never seem to come to the end of,” Vincent would recount, “And it was full of unexpected places.”

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What is Bookends?

Sorry about the late posting this week. I’ve been catching up on some sleep…

Also writing this week, PapaTomLA–check out his story.

Here is a story from the archives, as a Lol Day prize. On many levels it is cringe-inducing for me, but I think, towards the end, it gets at the huge force that had me and M in its grips. Keep in mind we had been corresponding for just about three weeks when I wrote it. I had no idea I was in love with him, or he with me; and I don’t think I was able to see it even after writing this story. Now, our fates appear glaringly obvious to me, as if writing can tell us things we can’t see with our minds.

I wrote Vice as revenge for the first story Mark wrote me, The Benefit of the Doubt here. Also mentioned is Mark’s story The Fishing Trip, discussed here. Dixon and Tremlett are his friends in The Fishing Trip, Mr. “Big Tim” Harrison is Housemaster in question, and Dr. Malcolm Headmaster.

This is yet another story written before I had ever experienced the cane or any RL play. Trivia: it appears that this is where I acquire my middle name, ha ha!

Vice

© Casey Morgan 1995

1.

MI6 was getting good. After months of failure, they’d finally begun to crack the Finnish anonymous remailer and thus zero in on some chief offenders in their own green and pleasant. A stray pervo in Birmingham, a hoard of terrorists in London, some Wilde imitators at Oxford. But even Morley, who headed the investigation, was surprised to unearth a user at the School. He was familiar with the place. And he knew the master in charge of its computer systems. So, rather than file the appropriate reports, he got on the train and paid a personal visit, in hopes of resolving the situation on the qt.

Mr. Harrison–housemaster and English scholar–was a man of many talents. After his former student had left him, he went directly to the Media Centre. In no time he had traced the account in question: Mark Hastings. Well, who else would it be? So it was that after Vth form English, Big Tim loped across the playing fields to Dr. Malcolm’s house.

“I might have know it.”

“It would seem he’s quite an accomplished documentarian,” Tim added. “I took the liberty of photocopying one or two examples.”

He dropped on the desk something called ‘The Fishing Trip.’

“And this particularly vulgar waste of good paper…”

‘The Benefit of the Doubt’ fell beside its sibling. The remainder had been tucked away in Mr. Harrison’s very secure filing cabinets.

“I suppose he must be summoned, formal interview and the rest of it.” Dr. Malcolm sounded weary. Ever since booking his summer holiday to Tangier, this all too human headmaster had been having difficulty concentrating. In particular, he was fed up with Mark Hastings and was running out of resources to meet him creatively.

“Ever since Hastings came here, he’s done nothing, it seems, but try to get himself beaten.” Tim looked at his friend obliquely.

“Hmm.” Dr. Malcolm stuffed his pipe between his teeth and bit hard. “Perhaps he hasn’t received a sufficiently strong dose.”

“Hmm.” Irony and understatement seethed on the carpet between them, though to an eavesdropper, the words would have fallen flat. These two men understood one another perfectly.

“I believe,” Dr. Malcolm murmured at last, “I know just the thing. Something to ensure he won’t be rushing back for more.”

read the rest of the story here

A blind agitation is manly and uttermost. That is what his sister told him. She said it as a type of explanation when she played Beethoven. They were twins and were supposed to understand everything about one another, but sometimes lately he only pretended to know what she meant. Certainly, her fingers flew across the piano in agitation without her having to look at them, and the sheer nerve required was certainly manly; but uttermost? He felt he ought to look the word out in a dictionary, but dictionaries invariably left him more confused and stupid than when he started. They made his head hurt.

He longed, ardently, to be manly and uttermost, and to have her declare him so. At school they called him Lolly, for reasons too complex to explain to anyone outside St. Albert’s College, Nairobi. The nickname conveyed neither scorn nor approval, but he disliked it. Lolly was not manly. Lolly was not uttermost.

Unlike most boys at his school, he did not adore Games, which would have made him manly enough for his nine years. He didn’t dislike exercise per se, like the pudgy pariahs, nor did he thrive upon books, like the fey. He liked music when his sister played it, but he had no capacity for it himself. He liked the sea in Mombasa where they had lived before. He liked the animals and insects he hunted below his mother’s plantings. He liked to make believe, with others or alone. He liked doing what he had been forbidden to do. The prospect of punishment did not reduce his pleasure at transgression, but if he could do it without being caught, bliss.

You were not supposed to play with your willy in the swimming baths at school. You were certainly not supposed to reach over and play with someone else’s, no matter how much a neighbor’s willy might demand touching as they bathed naked in the cold, murky water. Jude was twelve, a Fifth Year. Jude had a magnificent smile and an astonishing willy. On Wednesday morning, in the month of March, in the year of our Lord 1926, Jude reached through the swimming bath and took hold of his willy.

He stopped treading water and grabbed hold of the edge. Other boys splashed around them. Jude blinked, lashes long, and rubbed a hand up and down his shaft. Jude smiled. It was the first time anyone else had touched his willy; the utter audacity made Lolly’s blood rush and his willy stiffen. When Jude smiled at him—conspiratorial, knowing, fancying him, him in particular amongst the others—it was enough to induce him to break every rule, violate every law ever written, punishment be damned.

Jude’s name was frequently read out after breakfast, and Lolly had seen him emerge from Dr. Steele’s study without signs of blubbing. Jude pulled his foreskin all the way back and laughed. Lolly closed his eyes momentarily and imagined Jude, standing up after one of Steele’s sixers, lashes long, knowing smile, manly, uttermost. As if he understood, Jude rubbed faster, until a warmth and blind agitation flooded him, the freckles standing out across Jude’s nose, laughter in his throat.

Jude invited him to his burrow, way up by the trees where only the elite of the Fifth Year made their burrows. Boys Lolly’s age could expect to be kicked before they approached Long Ditch, and to have their noses bloodied if they dared cross it. Lolly did approach, recalling warmness in the cold swimming baths. When challenged, he pronounced the phrase Jude had told him to say. The sentry permitted his crossing and directed him up behind the Eucalyptus trees. Upon arrival at the hut itself, he was set upon, blindfolded, and dragged inside. When released, he beheld their inner sanctum: musky, thick with cigarette smoke, Jude and his friends ranged in a circle, neckties around heads, Indian style.

“You know how to play Devil’s Hunt?” Jude asked him—challenge, warning, test.

“Of course I bloody do,” he lied.

Someone tossed a pile of cards at his feet. He met Jude’s gaze, un-knotted his tie, and bound it like theirs around his head. Jude’s eyes smiled like they had in the swimming baths. Lolly sat down Indian style, turning a steely gaze upon Jude’s friends. Outside, serene; inside, a blind agitation. He gathered some of the cards together and shuffled them.

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• PapaTomLA