Chapter 20 #4
The hotel was located on the bypass road on the outskirts of town.
Cal waited outside and smoked another cigarette while Innes went and checked in.
The smirr turned to rain and without a proper coat, he was soon soaked to the skin.
A short while later, Innes returned and beckoned for him to follow.
The student working the front desk barely raised her head as he squelched by.
The room was on the third floor directly opposite the lifts. The small space was dominated by two single beds. The wallpaper was covered in thistles and everything that could be tartan was tartan in case a guest should wake up and wonder which country they were in.
Now that he was here, he wasn’t quite sure how to behave.
He went to the bathroom and peed. When he saw himself in the mirror, he saw how bedraggled he looked.
He had bathed that morning, but he wet a washcloth and freshened himself, reaching inside his clothes, soaping between his legs then sniffing the cloth.
He repeated the action until the cloth smelt of nothing but soap.
When he re-emerged, Innes was sitting in the only armchair.
He was backlit by a crooked floor lamp and the shadow of his thick brow obscured his eyes.
“Are you drunk?” Cal asked. “I feel drunk.”
“A bit,” said Innes. “The sambuca was a bad idea.”
Cal found a packet of shortbread and tore it open. He ate the biscuit whole.
“Do you mind if I say my prayers?”
“Go ahead,” Cal said, his voice claggy with biscuit.
“I said mine in the car park.” He rummaged in his backpack while Innes sank to his knees at the side of the bed.
He found his shattered Walkman and a pair of small portable speakers which he set up on the bedside table.
He had a knotted carrier bag full of Memorex cassettes, labelled in a careful hand.
When the praying was finished he pressed play on the tape and the room filled with the sound of Nick Drake. The speakers were so tinny it sounded like he was singing in another room.
“I could buy you a CD player.” Innes was still kneeling by the bed.
“I like tapes. Some songs mean too much to lose.”
He was still unsure why they were here on the mainland.
He was so inexperienced, so clumsy with seduction and his nerves were rendering the wrong things too sharply.
He thought about taking the last of his mother’s temazepams. He tried to judge how much to take to level himself out, to be here enjoying this moment, not running around inside his head like it was a house with too many rooms, an anxious shut-in moving from window to window, fearing some vague, bad news.
Innes got up off his knees. “You can have either bed. Mind you, I do get up to pee in the night.”
Cal kicked off his rancid trainers. He put them in the bathroom, tucked under the sink, but when he came back into the room, he could smell his feet and worried that Innes could too.
There was a television in the corner. Innes rose to turn it on, but Cal asked him not to.
He didn’t want a distraction, or anything that would allow them to be elsewhere.
He wanted to hold them here, in this airless room, to keep their attention on one another and for whatever was to happen to happen.
He lifted the hem of his jumper. Squeezing it sent a trickle of water onto the carpet. “I don’t have a change of clothes.”
“That massive bag and no spare clothes?”
“Yeah. I only carry the important things in life: music and cans.”
Cal shed his jumper and then his T-shirt.
He peeled off his denims and removed his socks.
Innes went around the room as though they were a long-married couple, gathering the garments that Cal removed and hanging them over furniture to dry.
His socks were so sodden that they hit the radiator and clung there. The men laughed.
Innes took the drooping Aran and hung it over the bath to dry.
When he came back into the room, Cal was almost naked.
He had hooked his thumbs in his boxer-shorts and in one fluid motion he whipped off his underwear, balled them up, and used them to dry his armpits.
When he saw the shock on Innes’s face, he smiled. “Thought you had a brother.”
As Innes gathered up the rest of the discarded clothes, he tried not to look at him. But he did look. Cal saw that he did.
Cal rummaged in his bag and took out what looked like a ladies’ scarf.
It was the colour of a fading bruise, and it was so slinky, so shiny it poured between his hands.
It unfurled into a long column dress made up of tiny, intricate stitches.
“Look at this. I knitted it at college. I forgot it was in there . . .” He shook it out.
“It’s Italian silk. Oh mamma mia! Biagioli Modesto. They make the finest yarns.”
Innes had gone to the bathroom and returned with a small white towel.
He was rubbing it between his hands, tutting, disappointed by how cheap it was.
When he looked up, Cal was grinning as he slipped the silk dress over his head.
It stuck to his damp skin. He could have been any drunken young man, wandering the halls as part of a stag do, a college boy dressed as a French whore for a Halloween party. It took nothing from his masculinity.
“All that work and you’ll ruin it.”
The cloth was so delicate, Cal knew that Innes would be able to see his nipples through the stitches, the mound of his long cock.
He turned around so Innes could see the back.
The dress was so tight the closure would never meet.
There were a hundred pearl buttons down one side of the placket.
The opening strained across his buttocks.
“A hundred and thirty-four hours of work.”
Innes glanced at the dress then he looked away.
This young man was like a nephew to him, at the very least. He was his lover’s son.
Yet the lean, hard muscles pressing against the lace aroused him.
He couldn’t help it. He was shocked by the images that raced through his mind. “Please,” he said. “Don’t spoil it.”
Cal didn’t know if he meant the dress or the evening. He had hoped Innes would laugh and that the chill that had descended upon them would thaw. He slipped the straps off his shoulders. The dress pooled around his feet.
Innes was holding the towel like a patient attendant.
“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings earlier. I’m grateful my dad has such a good friend.”
He kicked the dress into the corner and decided he would leave it there for ever.
The song changed and Nick Drake began to sing about the end of the day, about the sun sinking into the sea.
Innes ran his hand along the towel’s bound edge.
Some of the stitches had frayed and he snapped the threads and discarded them.
He kept his gaze lowered as he walked round the bed and handed Cal the towel.
The towel was thin and scratchy, like it had dried too many bodies before. Cal worked slowly. “We should take your van money and buy two tickets to Spain.”
He paced the room as he dried himself. He wanted to give Innes a chance to watch him, to let the shy man look at his body without pretending not to.
So he turned to face the wall and feigned interest in the wallpaper.
The thistles were intertwined in a toile de Jouy, a pastoral scene of milkmaids herding geese through a gentle landscape.
“Ha!” he cried. “There’s wee squirrels in this pattern. ”
The towel travelled down his body, over the muscles of his stomach, the line of hair that ran from navel to groin, and then down, down between his legs.
He brushed his balls, tugged on his cock a little, and then he reached around and dried his buttocks.
He bent over slightly as if reading the instruction card the hotel had laminated to the desk.
“Did you ever go on holiday with Sorley? Ever stay in a place like this?” He asked the question to announce that he would turn to Innes and spare the man the embarrassment of being caught.
But when he turned, Innes was picking his thumbnail, and Cal regretted the warning because he couldn’t tell if Innes had been watching him or not.
“There was no money for hotels. But we’d go camping.”
Cal put his foot on the bed. He dried one leg and then the other, rubbing his thighs and calves until the hair raised with static.
He had never in his life bothered to dry between his toes, but he bent over now and took his time.
He hoped Innes was studying the long weaver’s muscles of his back, the square muscles of his arse, plump but firm from all the years on the hill.
“Innes, have you ever been in love?”
“That’s a very direct question.”
“I’m just filling the quiet.” He raked his hair back. “I asked my dad but he wouldn’t say.”
“He wouldn’t?” Innes made a long face. “Yes. I’ve been in love. Once.”
“Oh yeah?” Cal brightened. “Who was she and what happened?”
“It’s none of your business . . . and I had to stay in Falabay.”
“I just assumed . . . My dad never said . . . Does he know?”
Innes chuckled for some reason Cal couldn’t fathom.
“And you?” he asked. “What about young Isla?”
“What about her?”
“She’s a lovely girl.”
“Then don’t let me stand in your way.”
“Aidh—I’m old enough to be her grandfather.”
“Some girls love that.” He looked to Innes and caught his eye before Innes looked away. He tied the towel around his waist. “You used to give me the creeps,” he said, out of the blue.
“The creeps?”
“Yeah. When I was younger and we’d be at a gathering or at church or that, anytime I’d look up you were always watching me. Always. I could lay a bet on it.”
“You make me sound like a bad man,” he said, colouring slightly. “I-I wasn’t watching you. I was just . . . watching.”