The Abduction of Ganymede

Gay Lynch

The male human is beautiful when his cheeks are still smooth, his body hairless, his head full-maned, his eyes clear, his manner shy and his belly flat.

Germaine Greer, The Boy

You rest your arm on the balustrade of the stairs leading to the railway concourse while checking your phone app for the platform number and departure time of the train to Freo. You hear the tapping of rubber shoes on the black filigreed metal steps, a whoosh of air that flaps like clothing or wings and smells of perspiration and fried food. Someone cannons into you from behind. As you fall, you half turn, to see a thin boy using his arm like a paddle in turbulent waters to shore you up against the rail. You gasp at his face. At the piece of red leather tied around his hairless neck; at the tatty lace scarf veering to one side during the collision. At his beauty.

His full lips tremble, his eyes dart across your face and away as if in terror of a commuter in a silk shirt calling a transit guard. Or the police. Panic travels across his soft childish face. You want to press your thumb against the cleft in his tilted chin, like the god who placed it there.

When he sees you swaying in the right direction, he retracts his arm and pulls his too-small, dirty-green jacket across his chest, sweeps his fingers through shaggy fronds of yellow hair as a girl his age might do, shakes a bracelet of threaded plastic seeds down his arm to his wrist. He looks about thirteen.

Next he splays two uncertain fingers in a V against his lips and gasps as if he’s been hurt before and he thinks you, not he, effected this collision, exposing him to danger. You feel his indecisive breath on your neck, before he leaps past you onto the platform. As he rounds a newsstand he swings back to look at you, his face pink and parchment-gold against the green of his collar, like an angel boy in the morning light.

Curving your hand round the flesh at your side, you draw in a sharp painful breath, registering an abrasion that may stain the only article of clothing remaining after a week of all-day conference-going and long boozy dinners. In fact, you had been wearing the shirt the previous night when, in the pursuit of knowledge and under the influence of Benedictine, you had kissed a postdoc not much younger than you in a taxi on its way to Miss Maud’s Swedish Hotel. Such irony that his semen had not so much flown like tap-water but damned up when he passed out – before you had chanced to read his three-line bio.

The swell of morning commuters nudges you forward, gathers you up and you surge along with them. Before you reach the row of carriages and step up into the third, you glance at the signed route: City West; West Leederville; Subiaco; Daglish; Shenton Park; Karrakata; Loch Street; Claremont; Swanbourne; Grant Street, Cottlesloe; Mosman; North Fremantle; Fremantle (18.7 km). You like trains – their tetchy engines, their hissing doors, the steep drop beneath the carriages to the rails, signalling your strange fear of jumping, not of falling. You push past a girl with earphones threaded through her spiky absinthe-coloured hair, playing a game on her phone and past a middle-aged man reading a Manga comic, to take the only empty seat, on a bench that runs between the luggage corral and the door.

At first you don’t notice the beautiful boy, clutching at vertical yellow poles to counteract the weight of his backpack; creeping past you like a Manna crab, heading towards the far wall of the carriage as if pursued by demons; sliding down the wall at the end of the carriage; hunkering down over his cracked running shoes. He doesn’t appear to notice you at all as he twirls the end of his lacy scarf. Well good.

You open Germaine Greer’s The Boy to a page of text, feeling like a paedophile. Then glance around to make sure that no-one observes you flicking past Proem with its disturbing elongated illustration, to a page comprising only text. ‘Adolescence is not a moment but a process. A male child becomes a boy when it starts but may not yet be a man when it finishes,’ Greer asserts. Surely it is different, as close to actra-fraternal as you can get, for an art academic to view a photograph showing a boy’s penis, compared to the way a voyeur might: dreaming of power? After all, you are about to meet a researcher in the field of Neoplatonic readings of the male nude – in more neutral circumstances. After the meeting you’ll go with him to a gallery that serves decent food and coffee, to renegotiate your criticism of his paper.

The boy on the floor begins to weep in a soft quiet way, using his sleeve to cover his face, but you can tell. Should you say something? It’s probably nothing to do with the small bump he gave you on the stairs. He cannot realise how vulnerable he looks, how much he invites undesirable attention. You sit up straighter, try to flick him a rueful smile as if to say ‘you’re alright … I’m alright … Cheer up,’ but he doesn’t appear to notice you at all. Not now or until he mowed you down. You cross your bare legs. Apart from the small abrasion and a fright, you have come to no harm. Sunshine warms the back of your neck through the window.

At the next stop, more passengers exit than climb aboard. The boy remains crunched over his bag on the floor refusing eye contact. Why does he not pull himself together and take a seat? But he is not your responsibility, any more than the poststructuralist who fell asleep in your bed last night.

*

At Subiaco Station, two bare-chested youths of sixteen or so wait on the platform scrunching their white t-shirts in front of them. You know nothing more about Subiaco than last week’s television footage of transit guards beating unconscious pumped-up spectators from the nearby stadium. You see no resemblance between these two youths and AFL initiates. One drags behind the other in a khaki military-style jacket with epaulettes. One looks sleepy, the other nervy. Their torsos are pale and lean; their thigh muscles show little definition beneath denim jeans sagging at half-mast. Rocking against each other as they leap into the carriage, they manage to stay upright, their searchlight eyes tracking back and forth across the aisle, seeking anyone blocking their access, before they subside on the seat opposite you.

In the warmth of the carriage, the smaller one with a thin, pointy face – ratty would be too unkind for he is pretty in an unvarnished way – slumps on the seat, one arm draped across the rise of his belly, long slim fingers dangling, head nodding on his skinny chest. He elbows his mate in the ribs. ‘Kasimir. Kasi.’

The other starts, an aggrieved look on his face. ‘What the fuck?’ He dabs at a smear of blood from a mouth pleated with anxiety and wrings water out of his shirt onto the upholstery.

They confer.

‘I don’t give a fuck, Ethan,’ he says.

You can’t follow their conversation about not getting enough, and when it went in, and fantasy, but you know they aren’t talking about Harry Potter. That they’re off their faces on something. You glance uneasily around the carriage trying not to meet their eyes, still shielding the illustrations in Greer’s book with your hand.

The taller one, Kasi, stares directly at you. Holds your gaze in an aggressive way. You close the book. He has handsome Slavic features: strong dark eyebrows that meet across his long nose, deep-set brown eyes, a wide mouth and a fine curly hair sprouting at his throat. He has pushed decent imitation designer sunglasses into his dark hair.

Next, he stares across the space to your boy and points him out to his mate.

Prickles run down your spine.

‘If he looks at me that way again,’ says Ethan, sitting up, ‘I’ll ram his head through the window.’ He throws a brace of savage looks across the carriage. His bloodshot eyes roll before he subsides on the seat again.

Kasi replies, in a pleasant-enough tone, beating his oddly sensuous, long eyelashes. ‘Not before you tell him. Then, we’ll put him through the glass.’

You feel an urgent need to get away from both of them but, simultaneously, you want to manoeuvre yourself between them and the angel on the floor. You can’t sit and watch someone beat up a prepubescent kid.

Meanwhile, the beautiful boy refuses to lift his concentration from the patterns on the floor but his tears have stopped. Two wise but ineffectual moves.

You place your hands on your book and lean forward. You intend asking Kasi questions about the suburbs through which you’re passing, establishing yourself in a light and animated tone as a harmless tourist. Which you are.

He grunts and turns to face you.

‘Can you tell me about Claremont? From here, I can see a lot of trees. Are there places to moor your boat by the river?’ you ask.

‘It’s a rich suburb,’ he says ‘Next to Peppermint Grove. Where wankers live, often just the two of them with fourteen bedrooms and ten bathrooms. Stinking rich.’

‘Mining money?’

‘May…be.’

‘What about Swanbourne? Would you like to live there?’

‘How do you know I don’t?’ he replies, dragging his eyes away from the boy on the floor, to glare at you.

‘Do you?’ You smile, hoping to amend your mistake.

‘Watch this space.’

Station signs flash by. The Manga man alights at Cottesloe. Kasi begins to confide his backstory or at least one he thinks you will find appealing. He comes from Melbourne, didn’t like school, but Perth is okay. He sounds articulate. You decide he has a mother and a father who at some point showed an interest in him. You keep trying verbally to hold him at bay. Ask him questions that lead away from the school’s failure to keep him. What does he like doing best? Does he like music?

You get nothing back. He shrugs. Then recommends that you go to the Maritime Museum at Freo for the shipwrecks, and to be sure and eat at Fisherman’s Wharf.

You nod and while you think of more questions, you point out the unsettling sight of a black hawk, buffeted by wind, flying backwards past the train window.

He barely turns his head. Suddenly, apropos of nothing, he stands up – how can this happen while conversing with someone once adept at social discourse? – and with no further warning but a reflex fondling of his balls, launches himself across the carriage.

Your heart lurches.

The beautiful boy looks up from examining the minute striations on the palms of his hands: life lines, ancient scars. You think, after all, he can’t be more than twelve.

But his potential aggressor has your full attention. His hair is unfashionably spiked and glitters with some kind of stale fruity gel that you smell as he passes. He wants you to watch. Perhaps to intervene and stop him. You, rupturing his performance will delight him. It will cause a scene. He will draw out the moment before he acts. You know this and you will not rattle his cage.

Kasi drops on his haunches to whisper into the boy’s ear. Through his spiky hair you notice scars like evidence of lightning strikes on the back of his scalp. Hairdressers should be compelled to notify authorities. The boy turns his head to the window, doesn’t speak. His skin shines with perspiration. The older boy weighs up his seeming passivity. Perhaps he is warning the kid to keep away from his friend Ethan – knows his work – wants to save him from chemical violence.

You glance uneasily around the carriage. You think of the shape of a body in a shattered window, on a train travelling at speed. The damage to the boy’s beautiful skin when flung by angry young gods.

Kasi retreats to his seat and begins flexing his skinny arms. They look quite white in the sunlight, with their smattering of black moles.

You resume your burble with less confidence. He pretends an avuncular politeness beyond his years – the little shit has made his point and you should treat him with respect – relaxed, leaning back in his seat, left ankle crossed across his right knee. So erratic. Earlier, you could not help but like the positive aspects of his personality. His intelligence. His certain acceptance that an educated fellow-commuter will play this game with him. Could he mean well, after all? Your ignorance about Perth pleases him, you know this, as he points out landmarks, tells you he will help you find the Fremantle Arts Centre, once the Claremont Mental Hospital, when you arrive.

Intermittently the boy on the floor lifts his head and sniffs the air around him like quarry or like someone selling something. The train carriage has lost any hope of being a neutral space. In either case, who among the passengers, deep in books, tapping on keyboards, chatting on their phones, massaging leather bags, will defend him? None, you surmise and he knows it although people often surprise you in crises. What looks like suturing thread but is probably acrylic cotton holds parts of his worn, green coat together. In his disguised agitation he has snapped a section apart revealing only the golden curves of his immature chest. He tugs the lapels together and attempts the difficult feat of disappearing into the floor.

Get off at the next stop, you send by telekinesis. Don’t stand up until the last possible moment. Then run.

*

The train brakes at Mosman and a grey-skirted schoolgirl jumps on, taking the seat beside you. Instead of wearing her ribboned straw hat she holds it against her blue blazer; no doubt a hangable offence. You will her to be quiet.

Kasi appears immediately drawn to her and deftly restarts your conversation in an effort to show his best side. Now that is charitable.

An ostensibly respectable adult talking to the boy upsets the girl’s radar and she gives him eye contact. She should not. She should keep her head down.

He becomes excited again, leaning forward from his bench seat, baring his rickety teeth in our general direction. You imagine his mind discarding and ticking points that he thinks will interest the schoolgirl. Nothing too personal. He tells you again which road you should take when you disembark at Freo. He asks her if she likes to study.

The schoolgirl has scraped her hair back from her forehead and pinned service badges on her lapels; she is an advertisement for the values education offered at her expensive school. She wants to help and she begins to chip in on your tourist conversation with the boy. You are gracious and try to steer the conversation away from him but it is too late.

Her voice is sweet, refined and pleasant. Friendly.

He is not unattractive with his wide crooked smile, his eagerness to engage. But unpredictable.

He speaks more slowly. Moves smoothly into an anecdote about his stay in a Melbourne hospital. There was nothing physically wrong with him, he says. They’d locked him up and pumped him full of drugs for nothing. He’d had to do a heap of tests. More details slide into place. Although he doesn’t say so, it is clear he has been detained for three weeks by mental health provisions.

The schoolgirl seems curiously unaware of his sense of thwarted entitlement, or is scrupulously polite. ‘I quite like tests,’ the girl says. Perhaps she acts deliberately obtuse. Is she passive aggressive?

Momentarily, he switches his attention back to the boy on the floor, who places his head in his hands. Kasi reminds you of your dog, toying with two mice … letting one limp away a certain distance but keeping an eye on it as he bats the second one with his paw.

‘Well done,’ he says, his attention returning to the schoolgirl. ‘To do so well at exams. I hope you like university. Not for me. I couldn’t concentrate at school. I was smart and everything but …’

You turn your head away to the window. You want to take the girl’s hand and apologise. Don’t talk to him. Really. I misled you.

To your great relief, the girl rises and reaches for the strap, leaving you to focus on the cherub-faced boy on the floor. He is dragging small change from his jacket pocket, cupping his hand to count the coins, perhaps to see if he has a sufficient number to buy food or a bottle of water.

Kasi and the schoolgirl continue chatting until the next stop where she gets off.

He stares at her legs as she alights. ‘Nice girl.’ He waves to her. ‘I can take you to the Maritime Museum if you want,’ he says inviting you back into the conversation.

‘Oh, thank you,’ you say.

He points it out in the distance, layered wings of silvery-white on the point, rather like the Sydney Opera House.

‘I should find both places, I think.’ How will you shake him off? ‘Perhaps you could give me directions.’

‘Really nice girl.’

‘Sweet.’

‘She was a bit suspicious of me,’ he adds.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Yes, she was.’

‘Well, you can’t blame her in a way.’

He prickles up.

You lost his trust.

‘Do you mean my tattoo?’

You shake your head. It is small, as far as tattoos go; you hadn’t noticed it on his scrawny shoulder.

He clenches his fists. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, some boys don’t have a good track-record with girls. Not everyone is kind and polite like you.’

‘Yeah. That’s right.’

‘She has to keep herself safe,’ you say.

He nods. His friend sprawls looking half-alive, throws out a fruity cough that makes him nurse his chest with one hand.

You look away, scan the carriage for fascinating details. The boy on the floor remains motionless. Perhaps he is frozen, in terror. Resignation.

Before the last stop you try to ease out of the conversation, watch the beautiful boy stand up and move to the middle door to exit at Fremantle. Two passengers queue behind him, preparing to alight. When the train screeches to a stop Kasimir and Ethan swing out of their seats and into the aisle – in no great hurry but close enough to reach around and touch him – once more gripping their damp, scrunched tee shirts against their crotches, as they shoulder their way up behind him. Ethan sniffs and coughs into his tee shirt. You stand, fingers searching your tote bag for your phone. Who should you call? The postdoc? He shouldn’t be far away? A transit guard? Haven’t seen one. One hand on the strap you edge forward.

They swing away on the balls of their feet following the boy, who has his head down trying to weave around disembarking passengers as he trudges forward through the railway turnstile. He hides behind a curtain of hair that has flopped into his face.

Before they reach the roadside, Kasi lunges forward to hiss something in the boy’s ear and takes hold of his arm. And as if to dismiss you, he spins around so that you are face to face again and calls out, ‘turn right here and follow the next street to the water.’

You nod and thank him. Even from a distance, you hear his mate grumbling, only compos enough to fling hostile looks about him.

The first blow falls. In your struggle to reach the boy you drop Greer’s book. ‘Stop it,’ you cry. ‘He’s my nephew.’ You call on your inchoate friendship. ‘Please. Kasi…mir.’

He releases him, punishing his arm with one last thump, and turns towards you as if you’ve betrayed him. ‘Why didn’t you say so, you dumb bitch?’

His friend shambles forward, stepping over a bedraggled black bird facedown in the gutter, a stream of blood trickling from beneath its beak. Poor kite.

You seize your newly adopted nephew, slinging your arm around his slight shoulders. He tries to shrug you off. You decide to reschedule your date with the young academic until you’ve clarified your thinking about Rembrandt’s transmogrification of Michelangelo’s famous drawing of a beautiful boy. You tug the boy through the graceful 100-year-old station archway, into the twenty-first century, towards the esplanade and a feed of fish and chips. Glancing back, you see them, Kasimir and Ethan, giving you the finger before turning in the opposite direction.

Breaking Beauty