“Well, you’re not going out looking like that. Or rather, I’m not going out with you looking like that. Come on, you must have something in there that doesn’t make you look like Richard Nixon’s less fashionable younger brother.”
He marched past me and when he opened the door to my bedroom I felt panic course through my body, such as one might feel while inserting a faulty plug into a damaged socket. My mind scrambled as I tried to recall whether I had left anything incriminating on display in there. I prayed that my autumn 1972 edition of Modern Male, featuring a swarthy boxer on its cover wearing nothing but a pair of bright-red gloves, was safely locked away in the second drawer of my bedside locker, accompanied by the issue of Hombre that I’d ordered from a carefully worded advertisement on the back page of the Sunday World just after Christmas. I’d spent two weeks panicking over its arrival, fearing that some religious zealot with X-ray eyes from Dublin Airport Customs would seize the package and rip the degenerate publication from its wrapping before making an outraged phone call and sending the Gardaí to my door. And then there was the issue of Vim that I’d stolen from an adult shop masquerading as a Unionist meeting-place on a day trip to Belfast six months earlier. On the journey home, stopped at border control, I’d stuffed it down the back of my trousers but, luckily for me, the inspectors seemed content to confiscate two gross of condoms from an elderly grandmother who was disguising her bad intentions in a Legion of Mary outfit.
I’d planned on putting all these magazines into a paper bag the following morning and disposing of them in a dustbin a few streets from my flat, a final farewell to a way of life that I was leaving behind. Standing there now, afraid to move as my friend rummaged around my bedroom, I reasoned with myself that Julian would have no cause to open the locker, so I was probably safe. It was shirts and jeans he was looking for, after all, not the type of knick-knacks and trifles that were generally kept in such places. But still, there was something lingering at the back of my mind, some slight disquiet that I had not been as careful as I should have been, and it came back to me at the same moment that he appeared before me in the doorway, holding a magazine with such distaste that it might have been a soiled handkerchief or a used prophylactic.
“What the fuck is this, Cyril?” he asked, staring at me in bewilderment.
“What’s what?” I said, trying my best to sound innocent of all wrongdoing.
“Tomorrow’s Man,” he said, reciting the words printed across the cover. “The International Magazine of Body-Building. Don’t tell me you’ve taken that up, have you? Everyone knows that’s just for queers.”
I gave an enormous stretch, simulating fatigue in the hope that this might explain the pulsating redness that had come into my cheeks.
“I’ve been putting on a bit of weight lately,” I said. “I thought it might help me to lose it.”
“Where? On your eyebrows? Sure there’s not a pick on you, Cyril. If anything, you look malnourished.”
“Sorry, yes, that’s what I meant,” I told him. “I want to put weight on, that’s it. Some muscle. Lots of muscle. Lots and lots of muscle.”
“You just said that you wanted to lose it.”
“I got confused,” I said, shaking my head. “I can’t think clearly today at all.”
“Well, I suppose that’s understandable considering what’s happening tomorrow. Jesus, would you take a look at this fella,” he said, pointing to the muscle-bound youth adorning the front of the magazine wearing nothing but a green posing pouch, his hands behind his head as he flexed his muscles and stared off into the distance, apparently lost in thought. “Some mothers do ’ave ’em, am I right?”
I nodded, hoping that he would put the blasted thing away and return to the question of what I was going to wear, but he flicked through the pages instead, shaking his head and bursting out laughing at the specimens of masculinity that, if I was honest, were not entirely to my taste but who I appreciated for their willingness to disrobe for a camera.
“Do you remember Jasper Timson?” he asked.
“From school?” I asked, recalling the annoying boy from our year at school who played the piano accordion, was constantly trying to steal Julian away from me and over whom I’d nevertheless had the occasional wank.
“Yes. Well, he’s one of them.”
“One of what?” I asked innocently. “A swimmer?”
“No, a queer.”
“Get out of town,” I said, employing a line I’d heard recently in The French Connection.
“It’s true,” he told me. “He’s even got a boyfriend. They live together in Canada.”
“Christ,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. What, he just “had” a boyfriend and they just “lived together”? Could it really be that simple?
“Actually, I always knew that he was of them but I never told a soul,” said Julian.
“How did you know? Did he tell you?”
“Not in so many words. But he made a pass at me once.”
My eyes opened wide in disbelief. “Get. Out. Of. Town,” I repeated, pausing for effect between each word. “When? How? Why?”
“It was back when we were in third or fourth year, I can’t remember which. Someone had snuck a bottle of vodka into school and a few of us knocked it back after a maths exam. Do you not remember?”
“No,” I said, frowning. “I don’t think I was there.”
“Maybe you weren’t invited.”
“So what happened?” I asked, trying not to allow the semi-insult to wound me too deeply.
“Well, the pair of us were sitting on my bed,” he said. “Backs to the wall. We were pretty drunk and talking a load of old nonsense and the next thing I knew he’d leaned over and had his tongue halfway down my throat.”
“You are fucking kidding me,” I cried, appalled and excited all at once, the room spinning slightly as I tried to take this in. “And what did you do? Did you hit him?”
“Of course I didn’t hit him,” he said, frowning. “Why would I do that? I’m a peaceful guy, Cyril. You know that.”
“No, but—”
“I kissed him back, that’s what I did. It seemed like the polite thing to do at the time.”
“You did what?” I asked, wondering whether my head was about to spin around my shoulders in three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turns while my eyes popped from my head, like that little girl in The Exorcist.
“I kissed him back,” repeated Julian with a shrug. “I’d never done that before. With a boy, I mean. So I thought what the hell. Let’s see what it’s like. I’ll try anything once. When I was in Africa, I ate a crocodile steak.”
I stared at him, astonished and devastated at the same time. Julian Woodbead, the one boy with whom I’d been in love all my life and who had never shown the slightest romantic interest in me, had gone lips to lips with Jasper Timson, a boy whose greatest passion in life was playing the piano fucking accordion! In fact, I could remember walking in once to find the pair of them giggling away. It must have happened only a few minutes earlier. I sat down, anxious to hide the massive erection that had built in my trousers.