Free Call Me by P-P Hartnett Page B

Photo please. London only. You know the sort of thing. Sometimes it’s over thirty words but they still put it in. They changed the wording once, I suppose it was a bit risky what I wrote. They stuck in words like masculine, dominant and active instead. Have you seen the ones in QX? They’re wild.”
    He was dropping hints with smiling eyes and a tongue which kept his lips moist. Although his voice was croaking a craggy path towards manhood, deep down in a delicate part of himself somewhere he still wanted to be treated as sweetly as baby Jesus. (So easy to destroy.)
    He smiled, keeping in his secrets. Every inch was sixteen-year-old perfection, especially the neck: a vulnerable dip at the back, below the graduated hairline, tendons creating a kissable rift. A slender pale neck, delicate and pure, ideal for sacrificial strangulation. A pleasure to kiss while still warm.
    I’m sure every luxury had been lavished on that youth—breast feeding, circumcision, microscopes, scuba diving … Life expectancy was his one weak point. Someone, somewhere, would systematically make him disappear.
    When he drop-kicked the empty cider can into the Serpentine I felt my face tighten. Used to be a nice boy, not any more. Dizzy queenling.
    From the depths of his baggy cut-offs came a pack of Silk Cut. He smoked half a cigarette standing at the water’s edge with his back to me, pretending to have a serious think, tapping the ash more often than necessary. His buttocks were lifted and separated just the way I like them. But it was the shiny declivities behind his lightly tanned hairless knees which I zoomed in on, pale and smooth and obviously soft. Soft as the small of his back or the nape of his neck or the sides of his teenage chest, but not as soft as his insides.
    Returning to sit alongside me, knees touching, he continued stubbing out his cigarette on the bench between his legs long after it was extinguished, flinging the stub into the water, hitting the same spot my phlegm had splashed down earlier. At this second litter crime, worthy of a one hundred pound fine, I wanted a good fairy to drop a serviceable implement of torture into my hand. No fairy made my dream come true. Do they ever?
    Being a resourceful sort, I speedily improvised. In my head I hoisted his battered body over my right shoulder with choreographed ease, carrying it down to the water’s edge, lowering it carefully (arms flopping), maybe even saying something soothing while tugging the clothes off and wiping down the movable parts: stage directions to an intoxicating ritual. (The younger the body, the lighter it is. Convenient for disposal.)
    Pulling him by the ankles would have grazed his back, spoiling it. Carrying the shipwrecked, washed-up body to the bench, laying the pale flesh down, so passive, so controlled, cleansed and sublimely at peace in the last of the daylight, pale, so pale—practically porcelain. Smooth rose-petal skin stretched over those shapely legs, my fingers running over the surface like braille. Wet, he looked like polished stone. Kneeling in reverence, I was half annoyed that it had all been so fast, I’d missed out monitoring those dying, dimming eyes.
    The cider made me burp one of those silent baby burps.
    A medium-sized kitchen knife is an unusual item in a puncture repair kit, handy though. I emasculated him with one simple cut, stuffing his church-candle white prick-teasing dick up his arse, a long way up. A coroner would later note that inside the Reebok socks stuffed down the boy’s throat, a long way down, were his nipples, sliced off immediately after emasculation. You cannot hurt a corpse.
    Perhaps a muscle man with good gripping fingernails could, clutching a buttock in each hand, have ripped the arse then body apart like they do the yellow pages on tv. Imagine that parting of the flesh. Great telly. And this muscle man could say, in a voice close to yodelling, “You’ll have no more