the Escape (2010) by Thirlwell Adam

Author:Thirlwell, Adam [Adam, Thirlwell,]
Format: epub
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
Published: 2011-01-14T19:07:31.718000+00:00

7

Haffner, however, only saw in Benjamin an exponent of the Law. He was constantly depressed by the cowl of seriousness with which Benjamin so often insulated himself: the easy tristesse of history which enticed him.

This judgement was true, in a way. Benjamin dearly wanted the reassuring safety of the righteous, the morally certain. But this was no reason, perhaps, to dislike him, to think that he was prim. He wanted order because he was so often overtaken by compulsions he could not understand.

His first craze was soccer. On the white gloss of his bedroom cupboards, whose moulding was painted dark blue, in imitation of the Tottenham Hotspur soccer strip, Benjamin had arranged stickers produced by Panini for the 1986 World Cup. His favourite stickers were the Brazilians - with their pineapple T-shirts, their one-word names (Socrates!), their impossible hair. Benjamin had arranged Brazil, and Paraguay, and England, gently overlapping, following the blue line of gloss along his cupboards.

Benjamin, in the youth of his youth, didn't have ripped-out pictures of film stars, or porn stars, on his ceiling. No nipples, or even bikinis, in black and white or colour, were visible in his room. True, he did possess one photocopy of a pornographic image. This picture had been given to him, as a special favour, by Ezekiel. A girl with thick, if indistinctly printed, nipples was raising a sailor-suit top towards her chin. A sailor's hat was cocked, coquettish, on her white-blonde permed hair. How innocent he was! In Benjamin's special dreams, he would touch her nipples, curiously - like tuning a radio. But this image was not public. He had simply tucked his pornographic possession, neatly folded, between pages 305 and 306 of his book which contained 1001 facts about the French Revolution, with its glossy laminated boards.

Instead of sex, Benjamin had crazes. There had been the soccer, then the drugs, and the hip hop, and the Buddhism. Then the Orthodox Jewishness. And now, finally, Benji had been disturbed by the true sexual furore - inspired by his Jewish and Algerian and French girl in Tel Aviv. With this girl, finally, Benjamin had lost his virginity. She was hairless between the legs, except for a black tuft, so that when he touched her all he felt was a slick softness. He nearly swooned. For this, thought Benji, was love.

It wasn't love, of course. Over various phone calls, Zeek tried to explain this to him. But Benji didn't care. Instead, he simply retreated into the burrow of his feelings. He told Zeek what he had not told her: that when he left her, the next morning, after they had slept together, in the taxi, he wrote in the dawn, on the back of a receipt, that this was true desire, a true passion. And passions were so rare.

This was why Benjamin was here, in the spa town. He needed an escape from the summer school, the regalia of his religion - and he needed to talk to the man who was his only authority when it came to women.

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