With a Zero at its Heart. Charles Lambert
and his chest, his legs and face. He lets it touch his lips to see what it feels like to be touched in this way. He strokes his balls, then bends the senseless fingers around his penis, already hard, to learn about the body from outside, to see what it must be like to be held by someone else, who is not dead, as his arm is, but alive to him and to his needs. He wishes his arm would stay dead for ever.
2
He wakes up in his own bed but the weight of the blankets is too much for him and he can’t move. He calls out for his mother. The next thing he knows he’s in his parents’ bed and the doctor is poking him, tapping his knees and ankles with a metal hammer, asking him what he feels and if it hurts. Nothing, he says, and no. He’s looking at the ceiling, the central light, the lampshade the colour of skin, the fringe around its bottom, the crack that runs from one corner of the room to the other. He is given enormous pills to take. His mother holds his hand. Can you still feel me? she wants to know.
3
They’re standing in a line in the corridor outside the infirmary. They’re in their underpants, the girls are somewhere else. It’s cold and some of them are shivering. He has goose pimples on his arms. The back of the boy in front of him has a birthmark the shape of a strawberry, with a single hair growing out from the heart of it. He wonders if the boy knows. Some boys have nicer underpants than others. The boys go into the room in groups of three and leave from another door further down the corridor. They don’t look back. He’s been told there’s a nurse inside, who’ll touch his balls and ask him to cough, but he doesn’t believe it.
4
His uncle and aunt from Australia are staying with them. It’s summer, which means it’s winter where they come from, his uncle tells him a hundred times. He has a loud voice and large rough hands. The boy can tell his mother doesn’t like him, and he doesn’t like him either. His wife is fat and sad, she doesn’t know where to put herself. She’s wearing flowery dresses that are too tight round the waist. One morning, as he’s walking past the breakfast table, his uncle grabs him by the elbow and twists him round to face away from them all. Just look at the size of that arse, he says. He’s more like a girl than a bloody boy.
5
He is standing in front of his mother’s mirror in his parents’ bedroom. It’s another house, the house with the piano and the cowboy wallpaper. His room doesn’t have a mirror this big, so he’s sneaked in here from the bathroom with only a towel wrapped round him. He’ll say he heard a noise if anyone comes. His heart is beating hard in his chest. He’s thin, bony even, his arms are like stalks. He drops the towel to the floor and stares at this alien being before him. He watches the belly-button moving in and out as he breathes. He tucks his penis and balls between his legs and imagines what it must be like to be a girl.
6
In the showers after football, some boys wander around naked, some don’t. He’s one of the wary ones, who sit on the benches, easing their mud-caked shirts over their heads, pretending to tease out knots in the laces of their boots while the other boys, taller and bigger and stupid, strip off their kit and slap each other’s backs, then disappear into the steam. No one lets his eyes drift down to below the waist, where the mystery of them bobs and swells. He sits there, waiting to be told to strip, noticing which boy has hair, which not, wishing his own would hurry up and grow. Each body is strange to him, and frightening, his own most of all.
7
He has just been blown by an older man in a dark suit, with sunglasses, who spat his semen into a handkerchief, which he folded and put back into his pocket. The older man has now moved away from the bed and is sitting in an armchair across the room, one ankle resting on a knee, held by the hand that he’s used to stroke the erection, to briefly caress the belly, the eyes still hidden behind the glasses, his own trousers readjusted. He’s waiting for the next act, the part where the body he’s just known more intimately than anyone else has, ever, gets out of bed and dresses in front of him. He’s waiting for the final defloration.
8
He was thin for years, until he began to use a gym. He took up running, pounding out miles each week, his head filled with dreams of Marathon. He remade himself into something he might want to own, not only from within but from outside, an object worth having, possessing. This was the period of photographs in front of mirrors, when photographs had to be developed, and limits observed. He’s wearing shorts in them, underpants sometimes, a singlet in one or two. His face is hidden behind the camera, but that’s all right. His face isn’t part of the general effect he’s after. He’s cutting out what’s not required. What he’s after, at its heart, is ripped. As in out.
9
There’s a woman comedian he sees who talks about getting married and how she’s finally allowed to eat. It’s never that conscious – what is? – but love, when it comes, has a similar effect. The body he’s seen as mystery, and then as shame, and lastly as value, becomes a place in which they can both relax, a haven. They hold each other’s substance. When his father says he’s developing a belly, he’s briefly annoyed, but moves on. His father is the same weight he was when he was twenty. His mother has fought a constant battle with her waistline, as people say. He’ll be his own man, he decides, and his partner’s. He’ll eat what’s given him and be glad.
10
His parents bathed him as a child. His body was theirs, flesh of their flesh, he had no secrets. His vomit, his shit, his arms reaching out, shampoo in his eyes, his tears, his blood to be wiped off, his wounds to be healed, the goodnight kiss. And then came the parting, and his body spun off like a moon into some dark space they could only infer from that absence. And then, because the most natural form is the orbit, he finds himself holding his father’s hand and wiping his mouth and his arse, and his mother is a child in his arms, her trust, her willingness, her need in his like the meeting of a hook and eye.
1
They cycle out to a place about five miles from the village where the lane, little more than the width of a car, curves round to the right. At the side is the steeply sloping grass verge and, at the top of the verge, a metal fence. He hooks his bare legs round the lowest rung of the fence and lets himself down until he is dangling with his forehead no more than a foot from the soft summer tarmac of the road. The others sit along the top rail of the fence, waiting. Straining up, he can see the soles of their sandals. When the first car hurtles past him the rush of air is like an adult’s slap.
2
They stand around the pool in their winter clothes, scarves tucked into their woollens, their feet in wellingtons. The first child walks out onto the ice, and then the second. The pool, or pit as it’s known, is in a hollow, bare trees all round it. No one can see them, no one can hear them call. He joins the other two. Together they edge their way towards the centre of the pit. Beneath their feet, the ice is cloudy, irregular, less white than he’s expected, stripped branches trapped within it. He sees what looks like a harp, a doll, an uncle’s face, a deepness. With a rustle like fire, the crack comes running across the ice to greet them.
3
He is cycling home from school along the narrow lane when a car overtakes too close. He swerves into the verge. Some long dried grasses catch in the wheel and tangle among the spokes. Continuing to pedal,