Boxer, Beetle by Ned Beauman

any more than he could ever know for sure whether things like this still happened to men of Gittins’ age, or whether, on the contrary, everyone else in the world but him had got their fluids under control long before they even left school. Why couldn’t one just go to the doctor every month to have one’s semen, this irrational fluid, syringed off like the pus from a boil? Perhaps he could ask Gittins all this and then strangle him once he had received some useful answers. In fact, he thought, that was exactly what he would do if Gittins ever acknowledged this episode in any way. At just that moment Gittins shifted, and Erskine had to stop himself from leaping out of bed. Only when the birds began to sing outside did he fall back to sleep again, and as the barbed wire grew over him again like vines he realised that he had not been dreaming before about the crooked-toothed but handsome boy. He had been dreaming about the boy’s brother.
    Later that morning he woke up with an erection and could not bring himself to speak to or even look at Gittins, so they set off separately just as if they had argued again. Although they weren’t scheduled to start on the caves for another few days Erskine was tired of the forest, so he set off north towards the hills. Near a pond he accidentally trod on a frog and had to scrape his shoe clean with a stick.
    He’d been turning over stones at the mouth of a cave for about an hour when he heard someone coming up the gravel slope from the woods. He rose, assuming it was Gittins. But it was the boy.
    ‘What are you doing here?’ he said.
    The boy said something in Polish.
    ‘You followed me here.’
    The boy looked down at what Erskine was doing.
    ‘I’m sorry about yesterday. I didn’t mean to behave like that. I shouldn’t have been so rude to your brother.’
    The boy smiled.
    ‘And I forgot to ask if you wanted your tobacco tin back.’ Erskine took it out of his coat and held it out to the boy, but the boy shook his head, took Erskine’s sleeve as he had the day before, and led Erskine into the cave.
    Inside it smelt of bat guano and mould, not entirely unlike the disused cricket pavilion at school where one had sometimes gone to smoke a cigarette. The ground was rocky and uneven. Within a few yards they were in almost total darkness, and that was where the boy turned his back on Erskine, pulled down his trousers, and bent over. Erskine stood, paralysed, staring at the boy’s arse, at the tip of his long cock hanging between his legs.
    It was really happening. Everything around him suddenly felt so soft, a change in the texture of texture itself, so that even the rocks were flesh now; and it was because the unyielding world had yielded at last, yielded utterly, like a rabbit splayed open on a dissecting table, and he could see and touch whatever he wanted, could reach inside and squeeze the rabbit’s heart until it burst in his fist, and nobody could stop him. He couldn’t breathe. After a while the boy looked back at Erskine, and a small part of Erskine was disappointed to see the autocratic face of this anonymous Polish youth and not, impossibly, the face of Seth Roach. His reverie broken, he stepped forward and started to undo his belt. For a moment he wondered what this boy of fifteen or sixteen years old had already done or seen that had taught him to offer himself like this, and for another moment he wondered whether he’d have to pay the boy afterwards or whether this was a sort of freegift that came with the tobacco tin. But mostly he wondered if he had the right idea about what he was supposed to do. He was just reaching out to touch the boy’s goose-pimpled arse when he heard Gittins shout, ‘Erskine?’
    He looked up in panic. Gittins wouldn’t be able to see them from the mouth of the cave, so his first thought was just to keep quiet until Gittins moved on, but then he remembered that all his equipment was still lying around outside; there could be no doubt