My Heavenly Favourite by Lucas Rijneveld

Author:Lucas Rijneveld
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2024-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

23

I leaf endlessly through that summer and through my memories in search of where the crack in my life began. I pause at the moment when the carrion-eaters began to gather around me because something in me had begun to rot and ferment, I leaf further to the place where the sickening began, to the first symptoms of my longing for the child, to where the disability made itself felt while all those preceding years I’d been able to banish every little featherweight from my thoughts, but why oh why didn’t I do that with you, my sweet darling, my heavenly Putto, why did I walk with you through the funfair on the village square with a giant teddy bear under my arm, which I’d managed to fish out of the grab machine for you and which grinned at me so meanly it made me feel anxious, why was I hanging about with this child who walked beside me taking greedy licks at a big red sticky gobstopper while bursting into the odd skip and jump that was no longer the silly skipping of a carefree young creature, I’d ripped that carefreeness out from between your bones while I’d have liked nothing better than to preserve it, but you grew out of my clutches and into my heart’s desires, and I realised then that I’d never skipped as a little boy, I’d been born an adult and adults didn’t skip, they walked upright and in step, but with you, my prize animal, with you I did long to skip, you made me feel young, and I was certain things had been allowed to get this far because of my mother, she’d planted an insatiable longing in me, a permanent hurt that I tried to heal with you, hoping it would help me forget the cold years of my childhood, inside me there was a small needy boy who really wanted to play, who just wanted to have fun with you, but my suffocating lust got in the way; every time I smelled the soft sweet odour of your body I was transported to the far limits of my sanity, to my bliss, how could I resist? And you walked as you always did on the west side of my body, that was right, you felt, because then I saw you from your best angle, even though I thought immediately that you were beautiful from every angle, and I gripped the bear’s fur even tighter, it was boiling hot, much too hot to lug a big awkward stuffed animal like that about, but you’d pointed at it, wanting me to get that one in particular because he looked so lonely, you said, because loneliness at the fair was worse than anything else, here it was about profit and loss and the bear looked like he’d lost a lot, so that as you walked between the stalls and the rides you began to make an inventory of the losses you’d suffered over

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