An Unused Passage

This passage, had it been used, would have appeared towards the end of Chapter 14. Jim, one of the boys of the title, has been down the back of the pier – it’s nighttime – there he’s met a soldier. I didn’t want to go too deeply into that encounter, so instead I thought to try it this way. If you read on, you’ll find that MacMurrough, an older character, is reading in bed a piece of 18th century pornography, which roughly follows Jim’s experience. Dick, by the way, is a personification of MacMurrough’s libido. The style follows John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), or Fanny Hill as we better know it. Why in the end didn’t I use it? Too intrusive perhaps. Changes too much the mood. But the labour it cost to get it even half-right ...

Presently then, after divers pleasantries, the like of my asking what time stood it by his cock for my own stood at midnight, and making all the signals commonly attendant on these amorous parleys; and the boy’s replying with shakings of his head and fingerings of his fringe, and the accompanying of these coynesses with frequent blushings, expressive the more of a bashful curiousness than pudency in the round; presently then, rising from my seat beside, and seizing the lad by his shoulders, with a gentle compulsion, I turn him about, and all the one go, my hands descending and reaching from behind for the purpose, attend that bulwark of youth’s defence, the buttons on the boy his breeches.

But the lad proved his own undoing, for in seeking to dissuade these brusk attentions, his fingers fumbled the buttons loose; the bastion breached, and no support in evidence, the cloath retreats to the knee; a scheme which, it must be owned, the cold of the season imperfectly favoured. He shivers, he shakes, but redress he spurns to seek; the rather doth my stripling sigh, a long-breathed heart-fetched plaint, when searching through his linen, I discover and now draw out his secret joy. A veritable stick, thin and long, near to be brittle so rigorous its stand, untried and unschooled, yet pulsing with a docile thirst for knowledge. Upon this plaything, then, I wantoned the while, nor can I doubt but my flattering caresses consoled the lad in his sighs.

My satisfaction fixed in point of the van, I soon left off these polite joys, and steeled myself to an inspection of the rear; wherefore the tail of his shirt, which hereto had waved a flag of surrender, I tucked inside his coat, revealing then those fleshy mounds whose furrow running between presents, for some at least, and not least I, a type of the more agreeable ruts of life. Incumbered, I suppose, by his breeches below and the embarrassing advances behind, the boy staggers to my will; he bends to the wall till his head must rest on his former seat, his hands cradling underneath, wherefrom he looks, in no small astonishment, as I could see, upon his member, which never behind in the availing of a liberty, as all its class, yet blinked a pink-tipped eye at him.

The pale-complexioned rump with touches, squeezes, pressures, my hands explored, till, my fingers slipping in the smooth track and spreading the flesh to its utmost extension, they palpably discovered that mark, if not of his sex, undeniably of his use. A dewy rose it seemed to me, that long had budded, yet durst not bloom, a demur presently to be rectified; and in its blooming, the lad’s deflowering.

To this purpose I unbuttoned, much assisted by the agent within, when out it sprang, the pride of any honest man and nature’s masterpiece, in all its pomp and state; and taking delight to slap this sinew upon the pliant posteriors, I ran it playfully once or twice along the crack. Which, and the like fooleries, rather relieved the lad than offended, he believing perhaps that the predicated ordeal, which nature presumed, yet in proportion of parts she scarce had provided for (or so it might seem, from an inward knowledge of the one and an awed if awkward recognisance of the other), might yet be circumvented. Yet all good things must come to an end, and so it was, when after working my member once or twice in a compound of spittle and its own exudation, smiling the while upon its ivory sway (as might a duelist on some favoured pistol) before giving it two or three shakes, by way of brandishing it, the tender hostilities I made ready to commence.

With the one hand, then, waisting my playmate, and lifting him a little, with the other I guided the principle of my pleasure to the main spot, where rather pulling the boy to me than thrusting myself, I insinuated its tip into the quick itself.

And there it lodged. My minion, feeling as yet but the lenient smarts of thwarted ingress, exspires a breath and his tautened limbs relax a something; nor was he beyond congratulating himself, while his member flapped and waved before him, on his obtaining, with such small inconvenience, so maidenly an introduction to the manly sex. Of which innocence he is instantly undeceived, when, drawing first, I lunge and forcibly through the portals propel. He gasps, he jerks, he strains; there is no retreat; his youthful athletics I gamely restrain. The funadamental fact disproves the disbelieving sense: his penentration deepens as deepens my own: the gate is gained, the passage clear. Now moans the boy and gently writhes while up the callow rump my white-cloaked red-capped blue-twined victor struts.

Nor did these moans diminish upon my reaching for his plaything in front, a popgun to that battery behind, but stiff yet and serviceable too, as readily was shewn by a shake coming on, hotly pursued by plentiful spillings, which traced their milken arc to his inverted, and somewhat prejudiced, gape.

Wherefore was I at liberty to concenter my devoirs on the more urgent task behind. Softly, then, to this purpose –

– Enough, said MacMurrough.

– But we haven’t finished, said Dick.

– Enough, MacMurrough repeated. He took the book from Dick’s grudging grasp, closed it. The Adventures of a Gentleman Jock, read the cover. Or, Fanny Hill Corrected. On the table beside he laid the volume. Did his aunt know she kept such enchiridia in her library?

– We haven’t finished the passage, Dick complained.

MacMurrough snuffed the candle lamp. He said, The fit comes on with the usual symptoms. They hitch their unmentionables and part. There. How else does it ever end?

He lay down on the pillows. There was something ultimately unwholesome about pornography, beyond any moral censure. Tedious progress from fuck to fuck: it left one gorged but unsatisfied. The book did not tell, but he should have liked to learn, what happened the boy after. Was he troubled, was he thrilled? Was this the opening to a new world, or the closing round of the world about him? Because it is a kind of birth, one’s first encounter. How did he take to this new life, or did he shrug it off as it never had been? He sighed, and supposed one read French novels for such information, not English smut under Parisian imprint.

Dick was wide awake still under the covers, brooding over unspilt milk, but MacMurrough drifted toward sleep. Sleep came unfolding its dreams, and he saw the boy at the Forty Foot diving slowly to the sea.

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