Abomination by Paul Golding

Author:Paul Golding [Golding, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General
ISBN: 9781447210207
Google: FZ1rz1VrDZAC
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2011-08-18T14:00:00+00:00

Except, of course, that we didn’t. He went off without me. And those questions – Où es-tu? Que fais-tu? Est-ce que j’existe encore pour toi? – seemed to take me back, of all peculiar things, to my time with Mam’zelle, to our Eurovision chant, to that final couplet which had been mine to yell out, ten years earlier, in the bath: Et toi, et toi qui j’aimais, Qu’as-tu fait de toi? Qu’as-tu fait sans moi?/Et moi, moi qui t’ai perdu, Qu’ai-je fait de plus? Qu’ai-je fait de tant de bonheur? To which there was no possible answer other than to lie on my bed in Leviticus, and turn to my side, and face the wall which had been the waves and the beaches and the summers of my childhood, when I first delivered myself to Mr Wolfe’s inexplicable love. And then, I would try not to cry. Try to grow up.

*

Our year master, though he looked like a man of the cloth, was a mongrel. The church should have muzzled him. His temper, even concealed beneath the limp black wings of a clerical habit, was rabid. I took pains never to look at him directly, not just because he was unattractive – which he irredeemably was, being afflicted with colourless moles on his sallow cheeks, a snout for a nose, pointed ears, and perpetually grimy hair (often scraped across, in public, with a broken plastic comb which festered in a pocket at his backside) – but also because he seemed resentful of the unsolicited eyeball. You feared that even a sidelong glance from the wrong quarter might ignite his ferocity. He was intellectually pretentious, intellectually inadequate, and sexually (you sensed) hampered. I pictured his penis as salamanderish.

He liked to suggest, in the wry, roundabout way that priests sometimes have, that once upon a time he’d been a man of the world, oh yes, a bon viveur, and that there existed no beverage, or narcotic, or position in the (unexpurgated) Kamasutra which he hadn’t, at some point in his agnostic history, sampled. There was a whiff of Damascus about him; certainly he was a convert, a late one. He strutted about in scuffed old winkle-pickers, no longer black, closer to dusty charcoal now, with natty laces to the side – less, you suspected, as an act of sartorial penance than as if those pointed embarrassments, which wouldn’t have tempted even the lowlier among our domestics, attested to his spivvy past, to his days spent scooting through la dolce vita. He would, you felt, have known hookers biblically; but nor could you help feeling that those very hookers would have sniggered as he sauntered back into the cobbled penumbra. Getting it up wouldn’t have been his forte: his forte was lager; or, if he was lucky, middling brandy. He referred to his charges as lads, and was keener on the discussion of rugby tackles and skirt, as he called women, than ever on matters of doctrine, or conscience, never mind the business of loving.

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