50 Reasons to Say Goodbye (6 page)

“I can't,” he says. “I have to go back, I've got a plane to catch tomorrow morning.”

My eyes widen. “
Tomorrow!
” I say. “I mean I knew … But you didn't say tomorrow!”

As I watch him dress, I try to get a handle on how I feel. The sex was so good I'm having trouble being objective.

He looks at me, strokes my chin, and kisses me. It seems a shame to end it there.

He says, “Don't worry.”

We swap numbers.

He says, “I'll call you tomorrow when I get home.”

From the balcony I watch him ride away. I raise my hand and he waves back.

I am happy for a while – I play some music, stare at
the moon, and smile.
“I will feel no guilt,”
I tell myself.
“Take the joy wherever it is to be found,”
I say.

Quite consciously I try to push the worries, the doubt away. But slowly the moment evaporates and I am left feeling emptied and dreadful.

I wake up feeling depressed and decide to call him to leave a cutesy message on his answer phone, but I've made an error writing down his phone number.

So I wait for him to call, all day, all week.

I try the number twice a day but it's always wrong.

Then after two weeks I wonder about the motorbike.
“If he flew from Paris, then where did the Harley come from?”

Only when friends arrive for their summer holidays a month later do I completely forget him.

I take them to Vence, half an hour from my apartment.

We choose a bar for lunch and we sit.

The Mediterranean sun beats down, prickling our skin despite the canopy.

A waiter appears in the doorway behind me. “Bonjour Monsieur-Dame,” he says. “Are you having lunch or just drinks?”

The voice is rich and smooth; I know it and turn. I say, “No!” I say, “Shit.”

“Ah Non!” he says. “Merde!”

Frederic grins at me as though this is funny. I shake my head at him –speechless. We move to another restaurant.

The party is heaving, maybe eighty people are milling, dancing, and drinking their way around the white-walled, loft apartment.

The difficult part is over; we have stood in the empty room, stared unnerved at the row of chairs along the lounge wall, remembered awful school discos, but now we have got through it – people have filled the space.

The music has crept up decibel by decibel to fill the air, and Yves' pure-alcohol-but-tastes-like-orange-juice punch has melted the taut edges around people's mouths into laughter and smiles.

I'm standing, swaying to the music – some eighties disco stuff remixed to sound happening – and Yves, our host, my French teacher, arrives, towing him behind, laying him eagerly at my feet.

“Mark, meet Pierre, my oldest school friend.” With this he winks at me and grooves into the midst of the dancers.

Pierre is good looking, in fact good looking enough that normally I would blush and clam up, but lubricated by a mixture of rum, gin, vodka, martini and orange juice I slip easily, and with pleasure, into the set-up. “Bonsoir,” I say.

He's small, maybe one metre seventy, dark Mediterranean skin, with spiky gelled-to-look-wild hair, a small goatee beard, big smile, white teeth, big silver hoops in each ear. He's wearing a fluorescent green shirt and frayed jeans.

“So you're Yves' Rosbeef student,” he grins. His accent is thick, slightly camp, very Niçois, filled with
laughter or mockery, I'm not sure which.

I smile. “And you've known Yves for hundreds of years then,” I say.

He nods. “My oldest froggy friend.” He steps in closer to me. “The first person I ever met in France.”

“I thought you were French,” I say.

He laughs. “No, Greek.” He winks at me. “And you know what they say about the Greeks.” A jiving blond woman bashes into his back, throws him against me – I catch him. When we separate, a mischievous, diabolical grin spreads across his face.

“So why did you and Yves never get it together?” he asks. “If you're as wonderful as he says you are?”

Yves is passing behind me carrying drinks to some new arrivals.

“Be careful how you answer,” Yves says. “Your life may just depend on it.”

“Because he's an arsehole,” I reply.

Pierre smiles and whisks a drink from Yves' hand as he passes. “You see,” he tells him, “I told you we'd get on fine, we already have something in common. We both think you're an arsehole.”

Yves laughs and boogies away with the drinks.

More people arrive, until all the rooms of his apartment are filled.

Pierre and I alternate between dancing (he dances well) and chatting (he's funny, witty, irreverent).

He tells me about his job, he works as a Minitel host.

Minitel is an exception Française, a sort of black and white, character only terminal dished out by France telecom since the sixties. It's a kind of pre-Internet with its main difference being that connection to services, similar to Internet sites, is billed per minute by France telecom at, depending on what your doing, more or less
exorbitant rates.

Pierre explains that he works on a Minitel dating server, the prehistoric equivalent of the Internet chat room. He's paid to look at people's CVs, work out what they're hoping to find, and then connect to the server pretending to be Mr (or Mrs) Right.

This explains to me why whenever I've tried the services, I have never managed to get a real date. It also explains why people here have such terrifying Minitel bills at the end of the month.

Pierre tells me that earlier this week he got confused while talking to a recently divorced school-teacher on one server, and a leather-clad gay masochist slave on another. The poor schoolteacher disconnected when Jennifer – the recently bereaved thirty-year-old woman he had been pretending to be – suddenly offered to tie him to the bedposts, put pegs on his nipples and stick a cucumber up his arse.

“The slave boy on the other hand didn't seem to mind at all when I asked him if he had ever thought of remarrying,” Pierre laughs.

“I never managed to get a date on any of those,” I tell him.

“People rarely do. You were probably chatting to me,” he laughs. “You know,” he continues, leaning in towards my ear. “I would
love
to take you home and put pegs on your nipples.”

I raise my hand to protect myself and grin at him in amazement. “Ouch!” I say.

He grabs my arm. “Come!” he says. “We can talk better outside.”

I pull my sweatshirt down to cover my stirring interest and follow him to the door. As we push out of the apartment, Pierre snatches a joint from a German woman sitting on the stairs. She says something to us in
German – something rude probably, but then German always sounds aggressive to me. We head down into the street.

I sit on a bollard. Above us, from an open window, we can hear the party thumping. Pierre hands me the joint; I take a drag.

He asks, “Do you live near here? Can we go to your place?”

I look up at him but his face seems distorted. It strikes me that it is an exceptionally hot evening. My face prickles and my mouth fills with a strange acidic taste. My teeth taste disgusting, my saliva seems electric.

Pierre crouches in front of me. “Are you OK? God! You're soaked!” he says.

Sweat is rolling down my face, dripping from my chin. My head flops forward. For some reason I am crying, tears dribbling from my eyes.

Pierre lifts my head so that I am looking at him. The joint drops to the floor, seemingly in slow motion, turning and spinning as it falls.

“You are so white,” he says.

“I don't feel …” I say.

And then it happens; it is instant and unexpected. The vomit squirts through my teeth. Pierre leaps back from me, but he's too late. His eyes look down at his shirtfront in horror, then up at me.

He says, “Jesus.”

I sleep until four in the afternoon.

When I awaken, I feel shaky and vague; I don't remember how I got home. There is a note on the table, it says, “Hope you feel better. Pierre.” It's followed by a phone number.

I eat a bowl of cold pasta from the fridge which I immediately throw up, then climb back into my bed where I sleep, non-stop, for another fifteen hours.

The next day I'm too embarrassed to call him and the day after that I actually feel too embarrassed that I didn't call him the day
before
, so I decide to try to forget the whole thing.

The following Saturday, Yves phones me, and adds me to his list of people who fell ill after smoking the joints supplied by the mysterious German woman.

“She killed the whole party,” he says. “Between those who smoked her shit and were ill, and those that carried them home, I lost half of the people who were here!”

I hang up and consider calling Pierre - consider telling him this as some kind of alibi, but as I move my hand over the phone, it rings.

“Hello,” he says. I can hear him smiling. “Are you better?”

“Yes, a bit,” I say.

“Yves tells me that you only vomit on your dates when you've been smoking heroin,” he says.

“Heroin?” I gasp.

“Uhuh!” he says. “Apparently so.”

An hour later we are in a restaurant eating pizza together. He's as I remember him, witty and cute. “Not a very good start really,” I say.

“The I-Ching calls this kind of thing,
Difficulty at the beginning leads to supreme success
,” he replies.

“
Umh
,” I think, “
he reads the I-Ching
.” I always like a bit of mysticism in a man.

Our knees touch under the table and his physical proximity arouses me. He regales me again with new tales of dialogue from his strange job, tells me he has spent most of the morning talking to a nymphomaniac dominatrix whose husband doesn't know and wouldn't understand.

In the afternoon he chatted to a husband whose wife has lost all interest in sex and who as a result is looking for a mistress to try, “the things his wife would never understand.” We laugh wondering if maybe the two are married.

We drink a lot of wine with the meal, but I'm careful to stop before I get drunk, terrified of throwing up a second time.

I have a hard-on beneath the table; I can't wait to get back to the apartment and see where all of this will go, how the story will unfold. I like him, I fancy him, and something intrigues me about the strange little twinkle in his eye – something to do with his eye contact lasting just a fraction longer than normal, as if asking an unspoken question, trying to spot something within me. I offer him a cup of tea at my place.

He giggles. “You English and your tea,” he laughs.

We walk the three blocks to my apartment. The
streets are Monday-night empty. As we walk, the sexual tension between us strikes me as unbearable.

I consider kissing him in a doorway, but I wait.

We chase up the stairs to the apartment and burst, laughing for no reason, into my kitchen. Pierre closes the door with his arse, and stands passively leaning against it, waiting.

I throw the keys on the countertop and kiss him.

He doesn't want my tongue in his mouth, nor his in mine, so we are reduced to a strange non-sexual pecking.

He pulls my t-shirt off; I unbutton his beige shirt. I spot a pierced nipple and pull back the shirt to examine it more closely.

He laughs. “Did you never see one before?”

I shrug. “No, not in the flesh.”

“So?” he asks.

I touch it tenderly. “Does it hurt? I mean, is it sensitive?”

He pulls on the ring. “Not at all, you see …”

I pull on it. “So that doesn't hurt.”

Pierre stares into my eyes. “Not at all,” he says quietly, his pupils dilating. “It's what they're for.”

I grin. “They?”

I undo the remaining shirt buttons revealing two more identical rings on his other nipple and his belly button.

“Wow,” I say.

Five rings, one in each ear, one in each nipple and one through his belly button. I stand back and look at him leaning against the door.

“So you like them?” he asks.

I nod. “Yeah, very sexy,” I say.

I'm actually not sure; he looks a bit like a Christmas tree. I move back in and pull on both nipples simultaneously.

Pierre half closes his eyes – he looks drugged, he groans. I unbutton his jeans, and with a strange sense of foreboding slide them down. His dick is large, half hard, weighed down by a huge chrome ring through the head, at least three centimetres in diameter.

“Awww, Jesus!” I say, “Now that one
must
hurt.”

Pierre smiles placidly, slips a finger through the ring and yanks his dick from side to side. “Not at all,” he says.

I crouch down to examine it more closely. “But you can't put a condom on.”

He shrugs. “I don't need to, I don't fuck.”

“Can you suck it?”

“Is this a biology class?”

I stand up again. “Sorry, I just don't know, I mean I never …”

Pierre pushes me back down. “No, I can't suck it,” he says. “But you can.”

I try. The heavy ring bangs against my rear teeth; it feels as though they might chip. The contact with my fillings gives me little electric shocks – like aluminium paper on chocolate, it's horrible. I give up and stand, try to push him to his knees, but he resists.

“I don't suck,” he says.

I pull him through to the bedroom; push him onto the bed. He folds his arms behind his head, watches me remove my trainers, shuck my jeans.

I lie on top of him, rub my body against his hairy chest, feel his piercings against my body. He remains immobile.

I slide a hand between his legs. He doesn't move to help or hinder access.

I slide a finger against his anus; he removes a hand from behind his head to stop me.