A man who was using her had rented a dented caravan so they could be farther from his wife. I saw him pull his hand away, and on his fingertips perched something white, like a small dove, as if he were a magician. It was the kind of detail that would have killed my mother, and I stood there in my faded boxer shorts, wanting to tell her how each shelf was finished with fine beaded woodwork, each edge delicately carved with a Greek key.When he returned I was sitting on the bed, my knees curled to my chest.
I laid my head on the desk and thought about all the unanswered lonely hearts. It contained three bottles of Irish Baileys, which elicited a whoop of sincere delight. I used my knuckle to push my glasses up my long nose, and watched them ink themselves for love. His pinkie finger stroked against my balls, and he asked if they’d dropped yet. He kissed me again, but now he tugged at me insistently, impatiently. I nodded slowly, unsure of what to expect. I blinked as he laughed. Enter your e-mail address The other alcoholics shuffled around us, already inebriated at ten in the morning, or still drunk from the night before—it was hard to say. I had seen my mother sigh at houses like this from the top deck of an orange bus.
The news spread that we would not have a reception with an open bar—in fact, we would not have alcohol at all. I wanted to tell my brother.
I had sat through dinner with a glob of shaving cream on my neck, dangling just below my earlobe. The Solicitor followed him into the kitchen. This man kept his clothing behind a wall of sliding mirrors.
If a place could not be reached on an orange corporation bus, then I had never been.
It was the first house I had ever been in that did not have wardrobes, no three-piece set of veneered chipboard, that leaned precariously as the glue loosened in the dowels. He had a small dick and didn’t seem terribly interested in it. But as we pulled up before Missus B.’s bedsit it was already midmorning and he was unhurried, unconcerned. I didn’t wear my glasses to dinner, weak eyes were for old women, not young men, and I worried about squinting unattractively at the menu. We climbed to the top floor and he opened a plain door without knocking.There were eight teen-age boys in the small living room, and two girls.
I wiped the last of the shaving foam from my flushed neck. I smiled a smile I did not feel as my damp denims squeaked against the perforated leather.I could count on one hand the number of times I had been out of Glasgow. In the evenings and on weekends, I worked the cavernous aisles of a home-improvement superstore, cleaning up spilled paint, carrying patio furniture out to the long cars of middle-class families. Said I could call him Dad—not Daddy, but Dad, like I needed driving to football practice.After he undressed me, he left me lying on his bed while he went to the bathroom to get ready. When Thatcher took all the men’s jobs away—steel, coal, ships—there seemed little else to do between dole checks.
The Solicitor was grinning, and I knew in that moment they had been kissing in the kitchen—perhaps more—and I was surprised to find myself feeling spurned. He kept saying, “Wow, you have your whole life ahead of you,” in a voice that sounded a little sad, but I couldn’t see if he was actually sad or not.He asked me if I wanted wine—he wouldn’t drink because he was driving—and although I said no (I was fearful of alcohol), he took it as shyness. Women grew to be exhausted by her.No one who knew her could tell me when her taste for a “rare-tear”—the love of a good time—became the actual tearing of her. He drove quickly, without telling me where we were going. Men loved her. The lenses were so thick that my green eyes looked jaundiced and only half the size they actually were. Your story “ Found Wanting,” which takes place in the early nineteen-nineties, is about a seventeen-year-old Glaswegian boy who has placed a lonely-hearts ad in … I wanted to go home. “Sorry I haven’t written sooner. He lay back, hairless legs splayed, his ankles on my shoulders, while I knelt over him as if I were praying.In the morning, as the sun came over the firth, we had sex again, slower this time.
I loved the men’s-underwear pages in my mother’s Littlewoods catalogue, but they taught me nothing about sex.