Free Satan Wants Me by Robert Irwin

expecting Granville. He had walked over from the Opera House, after a performance of Idomeneo . He and Felton started to discuss how my education should be taken in hand, talking about me as if I were not present. I was to attend operas on a regular basis. Also the theatre …
    At length Felton turned back to me,
    ‘Tomorrow afternoon, if it does not get in the way of your researches, Granville will take you to Savile Row and get you fitted for a dinner jacket.’
    ‘I could also take him to Trumpers and get his hair cut,’ volunteered Granville.
    ‘Oh Granville, no! Peter’s hair is beautiful. It makes him look like a cavalier – Rupert of the Rhine perhaps. No, I have always loved long hair on men – so delightfully boho!’
    Granville, intensely apologetic, turned to me. He feared that he might have hurt my feelings. He was accustomed to regard a visit to Trumpers as a treat. Granville’s own hair is not so short. It is thick and curly. Like Cosmic, Granville has a gypsy-ish air about him, but he is an older and cannier gypsy and his movements are smooth and controlled, not Cosmically wild.
    Over coffee we argued over music – opera at first, but then, as the conversation drifted, I was astonished to learn that Granville was a fan of the Beach Boys and the Grateful Dead. However, he has no time for British groups, even though some of them patronise his shop. Granville was asking about Sally and why she no longer came to the lectures, when Felton broke in and asked,
    ‘How much have you told Sally about the inner work of the Lodge?’
    ‘Nothing much. But it is not secret, is it?’
    ‘Oh, secrecy is vulgar,’ replied Felton. ‘We are not schoolboys engaged in some surreptitiously illicit activity, such as puffing on the weed behind the cycle shed.’
    ‘Even so, there is such a thing as the discretion which is part of good manners,’ added Granville.
    And with that, the evening broke up. I could not taste the wine properly because of my cold. However, it occurs to me that my cold, unsensational though it seems, might well be an illness of initiation, like Hans Castorp’s TB in The Magic Mountain or those strange fevers that shamans get prior to becoming shamans. Being ill may be a kind of rite de passage into a new life.
Thursday, May 25
    Am I a latent homosexual? If I am a latent one how would I know? It seems to me that I exist only in my face, mouth and a little bit of the top front part of the skull. The rest of me is a complete mystery to me – a dark continent full of exotic horrors.
    I returned to studying the children in the playground, but now it is as if I have become the eyes of Dr Felton. As if he is using me to watch these children. Why is he so interested in them? I do not think that the children like me very much. Every now and again one of them looks up from its play and scowls at me. For sure, it is my gloomy humour this morning, but there now seems to me to be something sinister in the play of these little urchins. It is not play at all, but a series of secret messages, coded in the gyrations of their arms and legs, and directed at the adult world. Their games are deliberate parodies of what adults do – going out to work, marrying and dying. Above all dying. ‘Here comes a chopper to chop off your head!’ These kids have one message, only one message, and that is that I and my generation will die before they do. The dangerous thing about small children is that they are still close to the void from which they have so recently emerged. They remember what it is like not to have existed.
    I left my place on the wall and headed back to my pad. Sally turned up a few minutes later and we headed off to the cinema as arranged, but then we got into an argument. Sally had wanted to see Elvira Madigan , but I am not fond of foreign films and I wanted to see The Devil Rides Out , which was playing at the Electric in Portobello Road. I won the argument. I wish I had not. I grooved on the film,