The Pre-War House and Other Stories

Glory Hole

In the small hours, Peter wakes. He listens, wondering if his wife is in her bed yet or if she is still downstairs. On other nights, he has heard her laughing and has thought to himself that she never laughed like that before her brother arrived; or he has heard the guitar music the brother plays with his long fingernails; or he has been woken by the sound of the brother pissing like a racehorse in the bathroom.

The brother turned up with a guitar and an overnight bag more than a month ago. They used to have a spare room but Peter’s wife sleeps in there now so they put her brother in the lounge. It smells of him, of his unmade bed, his unwashed clothes.

Every evening, after dinner in the kitchen, Peter excuses himself from the table, leaving the two of them talking. The brother does not speak English. Neither did Peter’s wife when he first met her, in the canteen of the local college where she was taking a beginners’ class. She was attractive, friendly, keen, but there were months of canteen coffee and dates before they went back to her flat. He remembers her bedroom, her overwhelming perfume, her straddling him, seeming huge above him in the dark room. He did not know where to put his hands and wondered afterwards whether he had touched her at all.

Peter doesn’t understand a word they say, but if he asks his wife what they talk about she tells him.

‘You have holes in the walls of your public toilets.’

‘Holes?’

‘So that two people can have sex without seeing one another.’

‘Oh.’

‘A man can put himself through a hole and receive sex. But he doesn’t know who is on the other side. He hopes it is someone who will give him pleasure.’

Peter is always the first to go to bed and the first to get up in the morning. He potters about in the kitchen for hours until the brother appears wearing his bed sheet like a toga, greeting Peter with a warm hand on the back of his neck, or on the curve where his neck meets his shoulder, squeezing slightly, and Peter feels those long fingernails digging into his skin.

Peter is thinking of saying to his wife that maybe it’s time her brother was moving on.

‘You also have holes between the booths in your adult video stores.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Yes, you do. If you want to do something to the other man, you put your finger through the hole.’

‘Your finger?’

‘That’s how you invite him to put himself through. If he does, you can do something to him.’

Peter’s evening class was in creative writing, but he did not complete the course. His characters — who always seemed to be waiting for something, for a train, a phone call, a knock at the door, and to whom something was inevitably going to happen — made him anxious. He left these stories unfinished and hasn’t written since, although he has been thinking about trying again.

Someone is coming up the stairs. Peter could just stay where he is, warm in his bed, but he is getting out, slowly crossing the room in the dark, hesitating for a moment before opening the door.

Reaching the top of the stairs, turning to look when Peter’s bedroom door opens, is the brother. He is naked, scratching himself with those long fingernails which Peter feels on the back of his neck every morning, which he feels digging into his skin, even now.