Box Hill

120 pages · Kindle · Fitzcarraldo Editions · March 2020

No Key, no grave

Colin Smith spends six years inside Ray's flat in Hampton without a key. He leaves by nine and returns after six. The mail is off limits. He sleeps on the floor unless Ray wants him in the bed. He does not know Ray's surname, his birthday or what he does during the hours when Colin is shut out.

Box Hill is a gay novel built through leather. BDSM gives Colin and Ray the visible grammar of the relationship. Adam Mars-Jones states that grammar, then pushes it into domestic space, family and grief. A sofa, a key, a bed, a name and finally a grave measure intimacy.

Ray gives Colin place without giving him possession. That is the governing structure. Colin lives in Hampton, but Hampton is never home. Home is Isleworth, where he has parents and a key. Ray's flat is colder and more exact. It gives him access on terms set by another man.

The book does not defend the arrangement or prosecute it. It stays inside it. Ray is absolute in the flat and scrupulous on the road. Colin kneels at his feet during poker nights, available to the other men between hands, his service governed by rules Ray never speaks aloud. Colin is shaped, limited and, in his own account, placed. He had "followership skills" ordinary life had no use for. Ray put them to use.

The plot is thin because Colin's mind is the structure. The voice moves by correction and belated recognition. Knowing Ray as biography is impossible, so Colin builds knowledge around absence. He knows the smell of Ray's sweat and the sound of his zips. The facts that would make Ray ordinary stay out of reach.

The voice carries the form. Colin in his forties is generous, self-deprecating, easily distracted. He doubles back. He corrects himself. He digresses through Princess Anne and decimalisation. The garrulous surface is method. For six years Colin was forbidden to ask the questions whose answers would have made his life with Ray legible. The talk arrives where the questions could not.

The first night is the book's most carefully built passage. Mars-Jones gives the lead-up its full length: the three-foot zip, the Lewis Leathers catalogue, the click of gloved fingers in a shaggy glade. Then the prose compresses. "What had begun as a rough seduction ended as, well, rape." The filler word does the indictment the narrator cannot. Two flat sentences follow: "I know that. But some things can't be consented to." Then the talk resumes. Violation and selection are fused on the page because they are fused in Colin's memory.

The system and its aftermath

Ray's authority works through objects. He blocks the sofa. He throws away Colin's scented toiletries. He withholds his birthday. He would rather show than explain. Colin learns the system by reading it.

Submission has rank. Colin does not want equality; he wants recognised place. Service may circulate. Possession does not.

The family material highlights the same question from another side. Colin's home is loving. He is not fleeing neglect. His father's later dependence on his mother shows attachment hardening into enclosure inside marriage. Ray's world is harsher, but the book links both through the same pressure: what one person needs from another can ossify into a system.

Colin grows. That is one reason the book resists a simple verdict. Ray teaches him sex. Colin teaches Ray to handle books properly.

Ray dies, but keeps command. After Ray, Colin finds work with London Transport and takes pride in it. The job gives him a place Ray does not control. By withholding the burial place, Ray denies Colin the final fact by which grief might settle. The missing key returns as the missing grave.

There is no fixed memorial. Near Box Hill, Colin finds a dog cemetery at a preserved country house: names, dates, inscriptions. He has none of that for Ray. He returns to Box Hill, the one site Ray cannot fully withhold. Even the site has shifted. The past remains, reassigned and renamed.

Colin is left with displaced evidence. No grave. No full name. No final possession. Only Box Hill, altered but still there, and the knowledge that people can care about anything.