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Farleigh was born from spite. Farleigh was born lonely.
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When he was ten, Farleigh's father took him on a trip downstate. His father, cold when he was sober and an inferno by his fifth drink, rarely went out of his way to spend quality time with either Farleigh or his mother. He remembers being scared to hope, and pathetically excited at the possibility of attention. By the time they were packed and ready to leave, his mother had hidden behind her red bottle and refused to join them. The fight that followed lasted on the longer side of an hour, and Farleigh spent the majority of it crouched behind a wall, just out of sight. The train ride had been tense. The attention that Farleigh so sinfully prayed for was instead directed out the window of their booth.
Farleigh, alone in a Manhattan hotel room, wondered what his father was doing so late into the night. He considered running away, repacking his duffel bag and finding a new family in the city. His mom said it was dangerous, here. Sometimes Farleigh would glance at the New York City News, playing quietly on the living room TV, and see pictures of people like him. How could it be dangerous to find a new family here, if all the dangerous people were lonely, too?
Last semester, his friends had told him that there were other people like him, downstate. Dark, or with girly faces and girly voices. Farleigh's best friend Jakey had whispered across the lunch table, like smoke above a glassy lake, that people like Farleigh died downstate. They died from a disease worse than cancer, and Jakey swore that it was their own fault for getting sick.
"My dad said it's like smokers. If they were just more careful, they wouldn't get sick. But they're... dumb, I guess. Dumb and dirty. My mom said the reason they get sick is because God hates them, but it's all about making the right choices." Farleigh thought about the empty Camel packs he would shovel off his mom's yellowing bedside table. Farleigh thought about the news; those pictures of people that looked more like him then Jakey. He thinks about whether God would kill him, someday.
His train of thought ended when his father clattered his way back into the hotel, knocking away the glass of water that Farleigh had learned to hand him when he was clumsy and hot headed. Farleigh remembers the bruise on his wrist, the way his father had yanked him from the bathroom sink to throw up his more-than-five drinks. Everywhere must be dangerous.
When he gets back to their house upstate, his parents fight again. The beginning and the ending, and Farleigh somehow sandwiched between the two. They ask each other how they can afford everything that comes with Farleigh, the money and time. His mom would cry and beg for better choices, because Farleigh wouldn't survive normal school. Not when he looks like that. Not when he acts like that.
Farleigh was born dirty.
.
----
Farleigh is 19, and he now knows that people never really grow up.
He learns how to be cruel, otherwise he would spend hours wishing he really did run away. Not that the cashmere and cocaine isn't delightful. Not that he would sacrifice any of this glory for a pre-teen pipe dream. Perhaps the hardest part is knowing that it isn't hard, wrapping his body in fabulous clothing and making tacky posh comments on Daisy Jone's hair today. He remembers the sneakers he was never allowed to wear to private school, the loafers that he used to pry off his feet with so much disdain that he once dented the wall with their pointed toes (His father had boxed him in the ear, that night).
It's money. It's slamming doors and restocked liquor cabinets. It's five drinks, then six, then ten, then bruises small enough to mean nothing. It's running away from the weight of too many zeroes and not enough kindness. It's struggling to find your mom's face when you look at yourself in the mirror. It's stupidly romanticizing what the air outside of a plastic box would taste like. It's affording a stack of Camel packs that the maid shovels off your bedside table for you. It's begging your uncle to pay off your mom's cell service. It's never calling her, anyway. It's wondering where home is, if home could be the backseat of a car instead of a maze of rooms.
Farleigh was never good at anything except putting on a show. There are so many ways to get what you want, he had realized. Maybe his mom could've been proud of him, if he wanted happiness like her. No, Farleigh learned that sometimes, being a bad sort of person offered what he was starved of. He just couldn't stop the show, the mess of himself. The days in secondary school when he would wear eyeliner so someone far too old would smudge it across his eyelids.
He remembers Jakey and middle school history classes, the trail of bodies that followed the kind of sin that Farleigh indulged in compulsively. To have a hand gripping his arm and twisting into his mess of hair, to find peace in the darkness of shadows that stretched all the way from New York. Being queer wasn't as much of a crime, among the rich. Farleigh found new ways to be dirty, anyway. He needed to be stripped raw like a wire if he was expected to shine as brilliantly among a crowd of blues and blonds and ivory and pink.
He's 19, and he found new ways in which he was worse than the rest, and 19 when he found better ways to be different.
Farleigh was born, perhaps for the worst.
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Farleigh is 20 when he meets Oliver.
God, does he hate white boys. Socially inept, crass, boring white boys that sat at the bottom of the barrel until they went belly up and someone scooped them into their arms. Felix is a notorious scooper. Farleigh was 6 when he met Felix on a brief trip to England, and he's no less pathetically desperate for Felix's approval then he was then. He'd like to convince himself that Felix is a means to a social end, but really, it's money. It's never running empty. It's piercing your eyebrow and still looking delicate. It's towering over a crowd and slapping asses and barking out laughter and still being loved like a kid. It's taking any hit offered to you and, somehow, never waking up to campus social media pages calling you trashy. It's eyes, so many eyes, following your every move. It's fucking into every girl on campus because it almost fills the void inside you, and somehow, never being called a slut. It's an imposing, magnetic field that makes you jealous and desperate and insecure. It's wishing that someone so good could love someone like you.
And those eyes are on Oliver, with more familial love then Farleigh has seen directed at him since he started doing lines of cocaine at every party. Since the TA saw Farleigh going down on Professor Gladden in his office. Since Farleigh went home to New York last summer and came back to Saltburn with bruises so small that they disappeared behind the mass of hickeys and bite marks. Since the mess became a little too explosive, and Felix decided he'd rather not stain his Prada.
Oliver is invited to Saltburn. Uncle is discussing ceramics and art history with Oliver. Aunty is gossiping with Oliver over classes of aged red wine.
Farleigh is realizing that he's sacrificed too much of himself. Because Oliver's family is somehow more fucked than Farleigh's, but Oliver is a fish floating belly up while Farleigh's calls to his mom go straight to the dial tone.
Because Farleigh was born wrong, and it's not just on the outside, anymore.
----
Farleigh has never felt dirtier than the morning he wakes up after Oliver straddled him in his sleep.
He fights with his aunt and uncle about something he never did, and then sits alone in the field for hours. He thinks about all the times his body was used by himself and by others. He wonders whether they all got more from him then he got from them. He thinks about how suffocating it felt to burn with hatred, paralyzed by every mistake he's ever made. He thinks about his body, frozen, doing what it always has when someone wants him.
Farleigh wants to go to New York City. Farleigh wants to go to New York City, where his father would hopefully kill him. Farleigh hopes that when he dies, he ends up on the New York City News.
Farleigh wishes he was never born.
----
When Felix dies, when he's forced to leave, Farleigh considers spending what little money he has for himself on a plane ticket to the USA.
He doesn't. He goes to London. He finds a job at an Italian deli and spends three long months couch-surfing (with significant amounts of transactional sex, involved). He's not happy; he doesn't think he ever will be.
And then there's a regular, at the deli, named Samuel. Samuel, with an American accent and a head full of long, thick locs. Samuel, with a gap between his two front teeth and a thick septum ring in his nose. Samuel, with chunky rings and chains that he wears with soft sweaters and worn jeans. Samuel, who bids goodbye every Tuesday and Thursday with "Don't go far, Farleigh."
And then he has money for his own one-room flat, and he feels a little less scared every time he goes to sleep (Even when, some nights, he wakes up to the phantom feeling of strong thighs bracketing his squirming legs).
And then he's picking nervously at his nails while his face says I want you, because his boss tells him there's a possibility that he'll have to be laid off. Farleigh feels his mouth moving, feels the right corner of his mouth quirking, hears his voice saying, "I have other skills, besides making Muffalettas," teasing, confident, suggestive. Adriano is staring at him, confused, before something like alarm settles on his face. Adri steps forward quickly, stopping almost immediately when Farleigh's back straightens out instinctively.
"'Leigh, don't take offense to this, because you're absolutely an attractive bloke. But Jesus fucking Christ, absolutely not. Don't ever say that shit to me again. Jesus, kid. Jesus." And he's huffing, running a barely shaking hand through his hair. And he's reaching towards Farleigh's shoulder before yanking him into a firm hug. "I like you around here, and I'ma do what I can to keep you on the roster. You're funny as all hell, the costumers like you, the other employees like you--you do good work. Don't--God. My skin is crawling, dude."
And then Samuel is bringing Farleigh a lone hydrangea, it's stem a little bent from his tight grip. Samual invites him for dinner at his flat, tells Farleigh to dress nice "but not too nice." He's invited in by Sam and the smell of simmering pasta sauce, a giggle and "Since you're definitely not sick of Italian yet, right?" Farleigh eats and talks and laughs, then picks at the cuffs of his slacks through the first hour of Fifty First Dates.
Because how do you tell the only real crush you've had that you're wrong? There isn't just something wrong; everything is. How do you tell someone that you don't know how this sort of thing works if you're not giving and giving and giving and then finally, selfishly, taking what you can get? How do you tell someone that there are shadows, stretching across land and ocean, that you still hide in? How do you tell someone that you look nothing like your mom, nothing like Felix, nothing like Venetia, nothing like Oliver? That you're lonely? That you only like this body when someone is touching it, or you're too strung out to feel it?
How do you tell someone that you hated and loved a gave and stole, and now they're dead?
Farleigh's mom still won't call him. He stopped trying to call her. He never stopped wishing that someone killed him years ago.
He doesn't realize he's crying until Samuel is pausing the movie.
"Hey, hey. What's up? This movie isn't that sad, Farleigh." And he says it like summer, like nude sunbathing in a soft bed of grass, like swimming in warm water. Farleigh doesn't know where he went, if he was ever really here. "Farleigh?" Sam says, gentle.
"I..." Farleigh starts, unwilling to reach up and wipe up the mess he's made of his face. "I've never done this. I don't think I should've."
Sam looks briefly hurt, before something unreadable crosses his face. "What do you mean?"
"I'm not good." Is all Farleigh says, eyes glued to his socked feet. "I'm greedy. Kind of a whore. Probably an addict. I'm pretty sure half of my close family were all systematically murdered in a scheme to swindle their inheritance. I think I could've stopped him from killing my best friends. My dad is a loser, and my mom is a soulless bitch."
Sam is quiet, for a moment, before he reaches for the remote. "C'mere, can I put my arm around you for the rest of the movie? We'll talk more, I promise. But I think you should just... let yourself feel the moment, for a bit. Don't worry about me; I already told you," and he's grinning, as he finishes, "don't go far, Farleigh."
----
Farleigh is 40 and happier than he ever thought he could be. He sees things about the estate, sometimes, on the news. Him and Sam check back in on the USA sometimes, they've visited Sam's family annually since their first date. Farleigh still sees kids like him, on the news. He'll never really stop wondering. He'll never stop waking up from nightmares.
Sam is there to kiss his sweaty forehead, when he wakes up again.