London Triptych by Jonathan Kemp Read Free Book Online Page B

with a dramatic sigh. “I can’t bear anyone close to me like that, clinging on,” he shuddered, “it’s abnormal.”
    So I was here, in London.
    Sharing a room with a fruitcake, but at least I was here.

1894

    On my first morning Taylor explained that, to begin with, I’d just practice with him or the other boys every morning, then rest for an hour or so to get my strength back, and then spend the night entertaining the gentlemen who visited. He said they always did it that way when a new boy arrived. I didn’t much like the idea of having to suck him again, nor did I imagine there to be much more to it than what I already knew, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Taylor has all sorts of implements and lotions for giving and receiving pleasure, and over the next few weeks he taught me how to use them all with absolute expertise. He made good whores of us, Taylor did. He calls it studying, what we did in the mornings. Well, I say mornings—we were never up much before midday, truth be told.
    I never knew there was so much to learn about the art of love. Taylor taught me every trick of the trade in the weeks after I arrived. He has a series of brass cocks of bigger and bigger sizes. We started on the smallest and worked our way up to the largest, which he has nicknamed Moby-Dick. It’s the size of a blacksmith’s forearm, but it didn’t take long before I was able to wriggle my way onto its oiled girth without so much as wincing. As for taking it in the mouth, though, I never got beyond the ten inches of solid brass he called Priapus. Taylor brags about one boy he tutored who managed to swallow Moby-Dick all the way to the base, though none of us believes him. Taylor dabs his eye as he tells us the story, swearing it’s no word of a lie.
    “And then the ungrateful little cunt ran off with a priest!”
    You could say he takes his work too seriously. “Knowing how to suck cock properly, may I remind you,” he always says, “is a very useful skill to have. It’s gotten me out of many a fuckin’ scrape, that’s for sure.”
    Taylor hasn’t just taught me the pleasurable but the practical too, like how to milk a man’s cock to see if he’s got the glim before you let it anywhere near you, though that’s hardly failsafe. When Ackerboy came down with it recently, Taylor made him drink some rank-smelling concoction made out of gin and chicory and God alone knows what else three times a day for five days on the trot, and demoted him to strictly non-sexual duties for the duration. Taylor told us that some people claimed fucking a virgin would cure you, though he’s never seen proof of it and besides, as he said, slurping on his gin, “Where the fuck would you find a virgin in this city?” He showed me how to wash out my arse with a funnel and a bucket of water so I’m clean and shitless and ready to be fucked. He says he wants us to provide something the gents can get nowhere else.
    “You’re the élite, you are,” he tells us every evening before we start work. “You are the crown jewels of Christendom. Those syphilitic she-skirts down the Dilly don’t know a dog’s arse about giving pleasure, not like you boys. Never forget, my dears, that you are angels dressed as handsome devils. Now bugger off and earn your keep!”
    And I found that it wasn’t so bad. Despite the stench of them, they aren’t bad men, on the whole. Just hardened and nervous and often very grateful for the little pleasure we give them.
    I spent yesterday morning with a young French aristocrat who visits us every time he’s in London. He only ever wants to sit and masturbate while watching two rats tear each other to pieces in front of him. He sends a telegram in advance so we can catch the rats, though there’s never any shortage of them in this city. And we have to keep them separate and starving until his arrival so that they are hungry enough to tear each other’s throats out when thrown together. This Frog gets so excited