Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale by Anthony McDonald Read Free Book Online Page A

winter ordeal by frost. In a few days seeds would go in: beans and peas, radishes, Swiss chard and – improbably – lettuces. The growing season here, though short, was fast, and the present run of warm sunny days would soon turn to real heat.
    A very low, crumbling stone wall divided the garden from the pasture beyond. Scrubby blackthorn, white with blossom at this season, straggled across it and grew from its widening fissures. The combination of stone and thorn, though easy enough for Adam to scramble over – even if he sustained a few scratches in the process – was just sufficient to deter all but the most hell-bent hoofed animal from ambling into the garden.
    As a result of some quite complex negotiations in which cash played a significant part, Adam found himself hand-weeding the beds just inside this boundary wall one afternoon after school. Every time he stood up to straighten his back he found himself staring across it, over the pasture and towards the dark woods beyond. And concealed in those woods lay, almost unbelievably, the ravines, the winding paths, the cliffs and streams of last Sunday’s escapade with Fox. From this vantage point the whole landscape of that adventure was invisible and subterranean, an almost perfect metaphor for the event itself. Adam remembered his walk back up the valley with Fox, alternately in single file and abreast as the terrain permitted, with Fox occasionally laying an arm lightly across Adam’s shoulder and he thinking doggedly how you had to keep these things in perspective and not let them faze you. He wasn’t too surprised at how quickly and uncontrollably he had come once Fox had embraced him: it was seven months since he had had any sexual contact with another person (he didn’t count what had happened at Christmas) and in any case he was only sixteen, an age when you were hardly expected to have an older person’s self-control. But Fox’s similar suddenness had given him pause; it had more of the fourteen-year-old’s gaucheness about it than of the precision-timing of the experienced seducer, and he had wondered whether Fox was perhaps himself a newcomer to the experience of sex with other people. Adam turned this over in his mind for a few moments and came to the comforting conclusion that in either case, Fox being sexually experienced or not, that precipitate ejaculation reflected quite flatteringly on himself.
    Arriving at the log-path and the handrail where they had met, Adam had almost expected to find the construction swept away in a sort of Rousseauesque sermon from nature that illustrated the saying: there is no going back. He had been perversely almost disappointed to find the crossing still intact and had bumped his safely retrieved bicycle over it with nearly deliberate roughness. Fox’s bike lay hidden on the other side and they pushed on up the last steep stretch of the track, through bushes, butterflies and orchids, together but in silence. Arriving on the public road at last, Fox looked quickly, though not nervously, about him and said: ‘ Next Sunday, same place?’ in the tone of voice of someone who doesn’t expect an answer. Then he mounted his bike and pedalled off in the opposite direction from the one that Adam would be going in. Adam watched him for a moment or two, expecting him to turn back and maybe wave, but he did not. Then Adam got on his own bike and rode slowly home. Half a week had passed since then and he had not seen Fox again.
    Stop dwelling on it, he told himself as crouched back down to a weeding position. These things happen. Then his mother’s voice called to him across the garden. A letter had arrived for him that morning. She had put it in his room before going out herself. Had he found it? This was a perfect excuse, parent-sanctioned, for interrupting his work on the flowerbed and going indoors. Kicking off the boots he was wearing he skidded upstairs in his socks and round the sun-swept gallery (that professor of