The Rope-Swing Men

"They expect no payment"

Me

Content Warning:

Abuse references, strong sex

Transcript

The Rope-Swing Men

Down by the water, the pillar box never stopped talking, even at night. As well as the automated voice, which issued unceasingly from its unobstructed lips, there was a further novelty. The pillar box had on an item of brown knitwear, snugly fitted over its lid. Standing, legless and attached to the knitwear, were a small group of grinning knitted figures.     

I exchanged eye-contact with a dishevelled drunk who was loitering by the post-box. He was aware of the post-box, but looking past it, out towards the waves. The pillar box kept saying, over and over again, in its disarmingly positive tone of voice All donations go towards South-Western Hospice Care. Huzzah! and the drunk said, catching my eye:

“I hate that red gobshite”. (Though in his accent it sounded more like: “Oi ate thut rad gobshoite”).  

I laughed nervously and carried on towards the entrance of the hotel. The repeating sea sighed softly, endlessly, all the while…wave after wave after wave after wave.

I was abused in the public toilets of a seaside town when I was ten. For me, this incident complicated the sound of the sea. But it never extinguished its beauty. In spite of everything, I love the sound of the sea, that sighing, humungous lap, in all its whispering rush, its many and sibilant-voiced eternality. Its tender tumult.

I had a barber on my mind. For many years, his had been the only barbershop in the village where I still live. Then, one day, a Turkish barber’s opened in what was once a toyshop. The toys- stuffed animals and china dolls and ascended jack-in-the-boxes- all used to sit smiling in the uncurtained windows of the toyshop. They all disappeared one day, and the structure was leased to a Turk. Because the Turk’s haircuts were cheaper, and his opening hours were longer, and his way with customers was more pleasant, he soon become more popular than the original barber. Both their striped signs both twirled but they were not matched. The barber who had established his shop in the village before the Turk, twelve years before to be precise, became increasingly consumed by resentment and rage. He put a brick through the window of the Turkish barbershop, one dark day. A camera captured this offence and he was arrested and lost his lease. At first I wasn’t sure why I thought of this episode, I wasn’t sure what about my present situation suggested it to me. Then, I realised that it was the drunk, shambling about on the pavement with that poisoning bottle of lager in his veined brown hands, continuing to admonish the talking post-box even after I had left him alone and gone on my way. His degraded position, the pity of it, made me think of loss and failure and ire. For a while it seemed silly to think of anything else, as though to do so were a dereliction of duty. What duty? Intellectual or spiritual? What are we called to do about our fellow man?      

I noticed how loud and free the sound of the gulls here. Those hoarse, high squarks could not be called music, not even charitably. But I loved them. They too were complicated, perhaps even sullied, by my abuse. The gulls: their squarks. It is not due to any fortitude on my part that I never allowed these sounds to become sounds of terror, of trauma, of trigger. They kept their beauty, their blushes. Men have abused men close to sea-walls. I have abused men by sea-walls. I remember everything: and I remember the sea, the gulls. They are unchanged. Except now they are not so intensely listened to as I listened to them then. I walked on, then as now, now as then.

There was a small playground, incongruous and other-worldly. Swings, a swing basket, monkey bars, a roundabout, a see-saw. A big, grinning grasshopper on an iron spring. A horse on a pole, no legs. There was a girl, a fat, giddy girl, running from item to item. She’d seize upon one plaything avidly. Within seconds she’d grown tired of it, and was on to the next. She emitted a constant note, an unbroken whine of complaint. The man I took to be her father sat on a bench watching her, fixedly, with an intent sadness, and a seemingly infinite patience. When his daughter reached the see-saw she shot him a helpless look and he came over to her. He was very tender with her, in the way he spoke and moved. I walked on.             

The owner of the hotel was a smoker. Her face, with its fat puckered cheeks, tobacco-stained teeth, and steely eyes gazing out at the sea, was full of madness. As far as smoking laws permitted, she was a chain smoker. She was in the middle of this very activity when I arrived, clouding the threshold of her hotel with a lingering veil of cigarette smoke. She said she’d be in promptly, telling me to wait in the foyer. She was.

She was delighted to see me. Instantly. I knew right away that this was an almost un-stayed-in hotel. Indeed, it hadn’t been fully booked since 1979. The last night that more than half of its rooms had had guests in them was in the year 1999. At the desk, the owner informed me of all of this, proudly, grimly. The white, wan exterior was dated; the stained and smelly corridors, lift interior, and mostly empty lounge even more so. She looked at me with intense desire; after a few moments I stopped being afraid, and looked right back at her. It wasn’t hard to imagine how beautiful she might have been when she was young, younger. Say she was now fifty-six; at thirty-six she still might have been very beautiful.

The room-key changed hands, room 89, second floor. But before I had the chance to leave the reception area and carry my small, single case to the room I had been allocated, she asked me if I wanted a drink and I said I did. She led me to the bar and poured me a big glass of gin, more than a triple. I put my bag down in the bar area, on the seat of the empty stool beside the one I was sitting on.  

“I’ve only straight glasses I’m afraid,” she said. I preferred straight-glasses to the round-bottomed ones, and I told her as much. She smiled, poignantly, this little shattered, weary smile: I didn’t understand its provenance.     

I asked for ice but she said she had none. I did not expect sliced lemon or cucumber to follow. Tonic water was eventually produced. Fever Tree. I drank most of the gin neat as it turned out, and she watched me, girlishly eyeing my every slurp, leaning forward, propping up her head with both her hands planted firmly under her chin, her big, mad, sad, pentagenarian face fixed tightly upon my own. There was still a little gin remaining in the glass by the time she said she was off for a fag, another. She did not use the word “another”, she avoided it almost as though it were excised from her vocabulary. In fact, she spoke of the cigarette as though it were the first one, as though the two-hundred-thousand-thousand that had preceded it simply never were. The brain of the nicotine addict maintained this illusion indefinitely, I supposed. 

Before she left, (temporarily I hoped- though I didn’t really know why I should care either way), we had been having a secret, silent conversation. She had somehow conveyed, quite wordlessly, (and I had inferred), that any guest of this hotel was in some kind of trouble or despair. I was replying, using little more than looks and glances and a certain kind of silence, very deliberately and communicatively mustered, that I was not like the other guests, that I did not fit this mould. It wasn’t true of course. It was a lie making its journey across that silent channel, from me to her. But I am a good liar, it must be said. At least I think I am. No-one has ever helped me to discover otherwise.

She returned freshly doused in tobacco smell.

“Another drink?” she said. 

“No thank you,” I answered. “What do I owe you for this?” and I tapped on the rim of the glass with a fingernail.

“No charge,” she answered. “It’s on the house.”

I was both puzzled and delighted.

“On the house? Why?” I enquired.

“No reason,” she shrugged. “It just is. Men sometimes hang swings for children in woods, logs hanging from ropes. They expect no payment. Let me carry your case to your room.”

“That’s alright,” I said, quickly. “It’s only the one case. I’ll carry it. And please let me pay for the gin.”

“Forget about it,” she said. “Forget all about it.”

Her voice was younger and clearer than you would expect to look at her. It was touched with a little husk, a bit of clag at the back of the throat, but fairly focused and uncluttered. Her accent did not belong to this region, as the drunk’s did- whom I’d encountered by the talking post-box. Regarding the free gin, I insisted fruitlessly that I wouldn’t accept it free of charge and that I wanted to pay for it. But she was adamant; my pleas fell on deaf ears. Of course, it was the melancholy of this place, the quality of dilapidation and vacancy that pervaded it that made me so loath to accept a free drink. It was pity not principal behind my protests, and she knew it.

We passed a grim lounge with enormous windows. The green curtains, blanched white and powdery, were parted and bunched together either side of the window-panes. They were as tall as they were wide. Through the windows you could see the unpeopled promenade, the pillar box that had made such an impression on me, (and on the drunkard), and the long, broad, blue stretch, horizonward, of the calm water. Sitting quite still, in a seat it did not seem possible for her to leave without aid, was an old, white-haired woman. Her seat had been turned to face the windows. She gazed, endlessly, with ethereal patience, at the sea. No, not patience. Something unholier, with some quality more unpleasant than patience. The lounge had been empty when I arrived, and it would be empty whenever I passed it from that point on. But, for just a while, there was someone sitting in it.    

The owner of the hotel was equally adamant that she would accompany me to my room and carry my bag for me.

“People often get lost on their way to their room,” she said. 

I imagined the corridors haunted by presences. I imagined that lost, emaciated guests wandered the corridors. Perhaps they were the cause of the smell I smelt. The thought impressed itself, drew attention to itself with a kind of seriousness before dropping off the face of my conscious mind and into that void: Nonsense.

Then, quite enigmatically, the owner added: “Some have left here without ever having found it.” 

I presumed that she meant they had stayed in rooms other than those they’d been allocated. How did the keys they had been given at the reception desk work in the locks of doors they were never supposed to enter? I wondered but didn’t enquire. Either way, her hotel was temporarily rendered more sinister than sad.        

Confined in the elevator for the duration of its sluggish ascent, in that narrow and roving room, the smell of fags on the owner intensified. Present but not pinpointable, it was hard to tell where it emanated from: breath, flesh, or someplace deeper. It was as though her entire being had been dipped in tobacco, tobacco at its most essential and potent.

The lift reached the second floor. The arrival was announced by a ping but no automated voice sounding out the floor. The owner, still carrying my case, the handle grasped tightly in her fat little fist, led from behind, barking directions at me. We passed no-one as we wound the corridors to my room, room 89. It was indeed a labyrinthine network of passages, and the sign-posting was poor to boot; without the help of the owner I would have been hard pressed to locate it.

Reaching Room 89, she put the case on the floor and stood watching me as I took the key from my pocket and inserted it into the lock. It was a tricky door to unlock, and after watching me flounder for a while she nudged me gently aside, and quite fluently, quite easily opened it. I immediately forgot the trick she had employed, how the doorhandle came into proceedings, for example. The door opened on the room, I picked up my case, and entered it. The owner invited herself in and began describing its attributes and accoutrements. Everything she said was quite brilliantly useless, dead and futile information about the carpets and the curtains, the doors and the wall-paper. She was more animated than she had been, full of an enthusiasm of which you would never have thought her capable. This was a comfort, and so I bit my tongue, choosing to let her carry out her eccentric rituals without obstruction. We were both in the room, well beyond its threshold. It did feel like a violation of sorts. But as peeved and mystified as I was at her stubborn refusal to leave me alone, I was able to take in the room’s features with reasonable clarity of mind. It was a pleasant room. I was able to find that I liked it. The windows showed, blatant and huge, the two considerable expanses that so preoccupied my mind: above, the immodest majesty of the sky- stiller and more placid than what lay beneath: the dark, calm sea. Gulls broke the silence often enough that I stopped thinking of the place as silent. Very faintly, very distantly: if I strained to listen, I could hear the looping refrain of the talking post-box.

Directly below my window were intimate rather than epic scenes, scenes compact rather than expansive. There was a little walled courtyard, and what looked like the back of a pub, with a skip and stacked iron kegs. My hand softly journeyed up and down, up and down the misty white of the hanging curtains. Behind me, I heard the sound of the door shutting and I assumed the owner had gone, leaving me alone at last. I kept my eyes on what was outside the window, on what my view offered, as though I was afraid to turn around and see the empty room, the proof of my new and sudden loneliness. There was a little workshop beside the backyard of the pub. I heard the sound of someone filing furiously but couldn’t see where it was coming from. From the dark mouth of the workshop building, I supposed, which was a large wooden shed. One of the double doors was slightly ajar but I couldn’t see any of what was inside.    

Then, there was a squeak and I finally turned around. The owner had shut the door but she had not left the room. The squeak was the sound the springs of the bed made when she sat down upon it. Her weight sank into the mattress, and she didn’t look at me. Her eyes and her mind were elsewhere. She was immovable, permanent, so stubborn that there did not seem a force in the world she could not withstand. And at last, with some relief, I felt sure of my being violated.

“What are you doing?” I asked her.

She didn’t answer.

“What are you doing?” I asked again.

“I don’t know,” she answered.

“Could you please leave my room?”.

“No”.

“Why?” 

“Because I’d like to tell you a story.”

“I’d like to be alone.”

“Please. Let me tell you this story. Then I’ll go.”

“Alright.”

“I miss being part of a family. I used to be part of a family, when my sons were young, when my husband was alive. One day we collected my father from the old people’s home, and we drove to a wood where we liked to walk. Windflowers, mighty oaks, everything. I never knew what things were called back then. Now I know all their names and I could even draw them for you. Anyway, there was me and there was my husband and there was my father and there was my two children. Wandering about, we came to a…a sort of…clearing. In this clearing there was something not so different from the rope swings that people hang in woodland areas for children. There was…something…something else, in this clearing. You know I always wondered who put up those rope-swings, those log-swings. I always wanted to catch someone in the act of building one. But they are an elusive species, the rope-swing men. You never see them. Anyway, I think…I think one of these rope-swing men got creative. In the clearing, there was a hanging platform. You know…an execution…scaffold, a scaffold. There was a platform, and a long beam with three nooses hanging down from it. We played hangman. Not the word-guessing game. We played a different game, a game of our own devising. We pretended to hang each other. In this strange pretend world, flower-surrounded, I hanged my husband and my husband hanged me; we hanged the children; and the children hanged their grandad. There were bluebells everywhere. I shall never forget the light. That slant. There were no trapdoors beneath the nooses, in the platform. It was all quite safe. The nooses hung child-height, over the platform. They could be adjusted so that the adults could put their necks into the loops without crouching. But there was no chance of anybody coming to harm. The inside of each noose was coated in a thin layer of foam so there was no chance of chafing, or rope burn. We enacted the hanging ritual- or rather- the ritual that comes before the act of execution. We all took turns being the hangman or hangwoman. Then the one who was to be hanged. Then someone new would be the notary, the official. Then the priest. Anyway…after a while we got bored of hanging each other, and we went on our way towards the sea. I used to love that part of the coastline. I still love coast, the edge, the outer extent of any landmass.”

Her hands had been folded in her lap while she told me this story. She looked very meek, her posture very apologetic. Now she unfolded her hands, and placed them by her sides on the bed sheet. She felt in her pockets for her cigarettes as though she intended to smoke. But she aborted this act, and retired her hands on the bedsheet, deciding she’d rather stay here, with me. The room was silent; for a while, the world was silent too, or seemed to be.

“Why are you here?” she asked me.                              

“What?” 

“Why are you here?”

“Here? In this hotel?”

“Yes.”

I did have a story. But I didn’t wish to tell it.

“Why should I tell you my story? You’d said you’d leave after you’d told your story.”

“It can be your way of paying for the drink I poured you.” 

I looked at the owner, seated on the bed. Her face was as mad and sad as ever. A little calmer perhaps than it had been. I began to speak.

“I have a husband but I’m not gay.” The owner of the hotel looked at me, intrigued, her eyes very wide and empty. I went on, daunted by her expression but trying not to show it: “I married him because he was and is the only person I’ve ever loved. I felt no sexual attraction to him. Only tenderness. I loved him for who he was and I wanted to be with him. I had no desire to fuck him, just a will…more than a will, a feeling of being almost commanded to live a quiet life with this man, as though it were willed of us. He was so sweet. He was slender, of slight build. He had the most beautiful Asiatic features, bright grinning smile, and glossy black hair…” I ceased.

I stopped talking because the owner of the hotel accosted and assaulted me in a very abrupt manner. She ensnared me in a hug, tight and sudden and tobacco-redolent, and she kissed me on the lips, seeking out my tongue with a tongue of her own that tasted, unsurprisingly, of cigarettes. The taste was so vile that I wanted to cry out, and spit the taste out of my mouth into her mad, sad, fifty-something year-old-face. Of course, I couldn’t, or wouldn’t. She let my mouth go and I breathed breathlessly, free and panting with gratitude. Having yielded orally, she conquered me manually, clasping my crotch area in her right hand while her left arm lay looped around my shoulders. Engulfed in the tense, purposeful hold of her hand, my penis grew quickly hard and pushed, once fully erect, at the boundary of my underpants and trousers. She was clearly aware of this change but not as delighted by it as one might hope. My erection filled the satsuma-sized grasp within which my genitals were cupped. Then, with deft, determined hands, she undid my belt and my button, and my zip, parted my trousers, and stole into my pants. She wasn’t sure what to do at first, what to cling onto. She brushed my punctual erection but did not clasp it. Instead, she went lower, down towards the seat, where gravity itself might be located. My scrotum had tightened with excitement, and the testicles had risen up like ballons to a ceiling. She fought my frightened scrotum, dug out the two ovular globes, and held them, sure of their shape, in the right of her harmful, humid hands.

I was petrified and repulsed and aroused. I have, at last, come to an acceptance of the fact that it is my lot in life, this life, to bear, to swallow, to handle and to hold this unpleasant cocktail of emotions. 

“Your balls are full of sperm,” the hotel owner said. Her voice was not taught by our intimacy to become sultry or sensual. It remained the same, a matter-of-fact report. 

“Thank you,” I said. 

“I can feel it,” she said. “I can feel how full you are of life and pain and sadness and sperm and woe. You feel…thirty-six.”

“Pardon?”

“Thirty-six years of age. That’s how old you feel.”

“I’m twenty-eight,” I said. I was proud and then embarrassed that she thought me eight years older than my real age. 

“Twenty-eight.” She echoed it again. “Twenty-eight. Just a baby.” My testicles remained in her hand. She tightened her grip. She did not bestow equal tension upon them, in their dual hanging being, my righthand testicle absorbed a much tighter squeeze than the left. I did, after a few moments, cry out. The cry was a soft and involuntary shard of song, formed of three rising notes. The genitals generate strange music.   

“You’re hurting me”. I said. For some reason, my imagination was startled into activity. All this I imagined, but sensed starkly, as though it were really there, as though I were there: I heard a man sweeping leaves, I heard the sounds they made, and I saw the leaves, in their russet array of rags, shepherded under the rake. I did not think of my former abuse, close, just as this abuse was, to the sea. Which sea? Which town was it even in? I did not think of my former abuse, maritime, then as now: I didn’t and then I did. I thought of it, I pictured it. I recalled that, in contrast to the present, my former abuser did not smell of tobacco. He did not approve of smoking, of smokers. I remember him telling me that. He abused me in a bathroom; he esteemed cleanliness, took comfort in being close to soap and water and tissue paper.

“Lie back with me,” the hotel owner said. “Lay your head upon my breasts.”

I did. Her hand remained lodged in my trousers, in my underpants.

“Will you let go off my testicles.” I said. It was a question and I was curious as to the answer. But I did not say it with an enquiring intonation. 

“You always speak so formally. Your words reveal nothing.” Her hand began to slacken. “Actually, that’s not true. Your words reveal how little you wish to reveal, that you’re trying not to reveal anything”.

“Yes,” I said. I found myself in inadvertent agreement with her. My erection began to dwindle, I felt the slackening, the falling softness, how it formed a physiological unison with the relaxation of the woman’s hand. 

“The way you say “testicles”. It’s so hard for you, isn’t it? You find it so hard to say “balls”, will you let go of my balls?”

I said nothing. 

“Pant,” she said. “Pant like a dog.”

“Why?”

“Act as if you just made love to me. Breathe fast and deep. I’ll do the same.”

She breathed, creaking, wheezing, smoke-scented breaths. As instructed, I mustered a few post-coital pants.

“There…” she said. Then again, an echo: “There…good boy.” She said nothing for a while. Then: “Tell me about your husband”.

I regretted mentioning him and found myself suddenly avid for the silence.  

“I shouldn’t have married him. It was a mistake. I thought I could love him more perfectly than most people love. I couldn’t. When we separated, he went back to his parents’ house. I’m not sure how long he intended to stay. They looked happy, he and his parents. How do I know this? Because I’d stand outside the house, watching them. They’d watch TV in the evenings, the bright flash of the images flickered on their faces. They looked very holy, lit like that, while outside was gloom and dimness. I’d stand there whole nights at a time sometimes. I’d stand outside the front door, breathing. Sometimes I’d enter the house, through the open back-door. I’d stand in corridors, on the landing, in the darkness. I’d stand outside my husband’s room, where he was sleeping. I’d stand outside the door to my husband’s room, breathing, able to hear my breaths in the quiet night, smelling my own breath when the wood of the door gave it back to me. I never pressed my nose to the glass, to the windows. They were never aware of my presence.”

The wind changed and the rattle of the glass in the window frames got entangled with a windy moan. The breath of the wind, outside, sounded a great clamour. Inside, we were affected, myself and the owner of this hotel, in our strange embrace. I noted, silently, the eerie, hostile beauty of the wind. I felt myself begin to grow used to the way the hotel owner smelt. 

I felt strange feelings as time passed. From time to time, the hotel owner would kiss my cheek, and I would lie still like a board, or human but etherized as though the bed were an operating table. I began to feel disarmingly distant from her, though I was close enough to discern the frail, nearly non-existent tremble of her pulse. On my cheek, her kisses dried. For some reason I thought of the shining trails left by slugs and snails; how, when it rains, those private, moist populations will slowly crawl from their hiding-places and announce their glum, mysterious presence in the world.                                  

Night was beginning to fall. One felt it in the world: how full of change the sky, the air. One felt a keenness, cold and passionate. One sensed the change of regime: one dominion subsiding, another taking its place. The waves were tireless and perfect. And their many was met in the round oneness of the sea, their madness immured in a giant single sanity, the patient and endless sea, sibilant and lulling with the voice of god.

I drifted in and out of consciousness. It was night when I woke up and found, much to my surprise for the first few frightened seconds of my reawakening, that we were still attached, the hotel owner and I, like two mating molluscs. The sea! Shhhh. Ssssss. Then her voice sounded, out of the night. I sensed no movement of her lips. It was as though the voice belonged to the air, disembodied, bodiless.

“Do you know how long it’s been?”

Silence.

“Do you know how long it’s been?” Her way of speaking was unchanged by the silence between the two iterations. 

“Since?” I enquired, reluctantly, softly, wearily. 

“Since I went this long without having a fag?”

I didn’t know. I presumed she didn’t either, quite correctly.

“I need to go now,” she said. 

She got up, and began to go.

“Can I shut the door behind you?” I asked.

Her face was vague and sad in the blue darkness of the room. Her eyes shone like the pearls found in the shells of oysters. The wind again. The shine of her eyes was like a painful point of light, a thing of great beauty, empathetic and deserving of empathy and arresting, reaching up from her depths and shining out of her ugliness.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry to have troubled you.”

She went and I shut the door behind her. I listened, avidly, for her footsteps, for those soft thuds of departure in the corridor. I heard nothing. I heard nothing until I heard something, until I learned how to hear it. She was still there, remained there a long while. I could hear her breathing.