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

architecture had known what he was doing) to his bedroom. And there, propped against his penguin mascot, was an envelope in Michael’s unmistakeable scrawl.
    Your new-found acquaintance sounds a total nutter and nerd. I can’t imagine anything less cool than some guy ponsing around a French forêt with his pants at half-mast. Except you. What did you think you were doing???
    Jiminy Cricket misses you though. I do try to keep him under control – but you know what he’s like.
    Terry scored with a girl (ugh!) last weekend. Or says he did. Another thing. Sam (a new guy who you don’t know) says he can get some dope for us all – if we all chip in a bit. Could be interesting, n’est-ce pas? Will let you know the outcome. (Not, of course, a reference to Jiminy Cricket.)
    The sheer slowness of the postal service gave a surreal quality to the communication. It had about it the aura of a message plucked from the sea in a bottle, or something from a vanished past time discovered in an attic trunk. Michael’s letter took it for granted that the first incident in the forest was an isolated one, unlikely to be repeated. Would Michael be imagining today, nearly a week after the date of his letter and four hundred miles to the north, that Adam had met the woodland creature again, that he had a name for him, and that they had more or less agreed another tryst? Or would Michael be thinking about Adam at all? Perhaps out of sight was out of mind. Perhaps he was actually busy arranging trysts of his own. And who was this Sam character after all?
    Adam ’s friendship with Michael went back to pre-teen, pre-sex days. They had come to each other’s attention as potential rivals in the classroom: two boys with the same habit of challenging their teachers with a mixture of bright questions and deliberately stupid ones that were asked just to provoke them; this had been an identity badge for both of them and they were not pleased, when they found themselves in the same class for the first time, at having to share it. This meant that the first thing that they found they had in common was a simple sense of mutual irritation. They had had the occasional ineffectual fistfight. But as their first year in school together progressed they found it made more sense for them to be friends than enemies. They discovered gradually that they had a few more positive things in common. They both liked books. They both had an interest in classical music. There was something else that made their relationship an easy one. Neither of them thought for a second that the other was physically attractive – still less beautiful.
    Adam knew something about physical attraction. There had been people on the television – young men in every case – whom, as a very small child, he had fantasised about to the point of believing that he actually shared his life with them (though always only one at a time). It made him embarrassed now even to think of it and he had never told anyone. There was a boy at his first school with wonderful eyelashes; they had snuggled up in bed together, exploring each other’s miniature nakedness, while sleeping over at each other’s houses. Then, when Adam was nine, Sean had entered his life like the morning sun to burn up all that had gone before.
    Sean was biggish and square-shouldered when Adam was small and skinny-ribbed. He had blue eyes like cornflowers and his blond hair was the cornfield itself: it was normally short but it turned wavy just before it was ready to be reaped. His skin was the pink and white of hedge-roses. He had a smile. He was older by a year than Adam was but, unlike most older boys, he was easy to approach and trusting, not disdainful and sarcastic. He had an easy self-confidence that was so secure that he never feared it might be punctured by association with his juniors. He never became a friend of Adam’s exactly. They just talked sometimes. The fantasies that Adam began to project upon him were a secret known