At Swim, Two Boys

by Jamie O'Neill

the pulse of my heart.

“I used always have this notion of being watched, you see. Not by other people. It was myself was watching me. Another me, a different fellow altogether. He never liked me. The way I behaved used truly annoy him. And I was scared of him too. It made me nervous, knowing he was watching me the while.”

There was this other me watching. He was a much stronger person, this other fellow. He wasn’t frightened. And he was getting fed up now. He was really fed up waiting.”

It’s like that time in the water. I couldn’t think what I was doing different. But I was swimming and I was sure of my strength.

But I don’t know anybody else I could talk these things with. I used think I’d burst with all the words in my head. I can talk things now. I don’t know but it’s like we have a language together. It’s great with the swimming, but it’s better again with the talking.

along he never doubted, leastways he believed he knew, save he couldn’t see it back last summer, he was scared then, but he wasn’t scared now, he had longed for it to be this way, and how could it be any different, it was never a case of whether, only of when or who first, weren’t they made to be this way—

Don’t you know when you love someone you don’t need to do anything at all?” “You don’t?” “You just look in his eyes and smile.”

“I’m just thinking that would be pleasant. To be reading, say, out of a book, and you to come up and touch me—my neck, say, or my knee—and I’d carry on reading, I might let a smile, no more, wouldn’t lose my place on the page. It would be pleasant to come to that. We’d come so close, do you see, that I wouldn’t be surprised out of myself every time you touched.”