Sushi Central

by Alasdair Duncan

  151

  Me: I really like you.

  Anthony: I really like you too.

  Me: It would be cool to keep seeing you … I mean, if you’d be into that. I don’t know.

  Anthony: It might be.

  152

  Anthony looks at me for a few seconds then. In those few seconds I look back at him, at the angles of his face, at the way his features line up, and his expression is totally blank. In those few seconds I’m looking at him as he was in the photos. I realise that throughout tonight, throughout this conversation, and before that, last night, when we were at his house, and the club before that — the whole time Anthony has been like a blank page. He hasn’t told me anything about himself. Hasn’t even let anything slip. Hasn’t showed any emotion at all beyond …

  153

  Memory from last night: Anthony is saying my name. ‘Calvin.’

  154

  Anthony looks away and asks me if I’m ready to go, which I am, and it’s not until we’re standing on the street outside and we’re ducking into a side street and he’s kissing me that I think of it again, how blank he seems, how cold, not like a real person at all, but then there are more pressing things on my mind and I forget all about it.

  155

  Anthony and I have finished kissing for the time being. Even though his face is still very close to mine and I can feel his breath on me, smell him, and even though his hand is on the small of my back, the other in my hair, and mine are both around his waist, it is accepted that this is as far as it’s going to go for the time being. Which is cool. It’s fair enough. But it’s also disturbing, because say this hadn’t been far enough, say Anthony had wanted to go further, I would have let him, despite the fact that we’re in the city, in, like, a side street for fuck’s sake, where anyone at all could walk in on us, I would have let him do whatever he wanted to me.

  156

  It’s only eight. Eight on a Saturday night, way too early to do anything else. I follow Anthony into an arcade on the mall, a staircase leading down and down. It’s almost overwhelming in here, claustrophobic. The pulsing neon-bright lights and the laughing and the curses and the swell of electronic music all peak and subside and blend together and the result is a sensory assault. It’s really cool, in other words. Hundreds of young bodies, sweating, breathing together. Even with the aircon-ditioning, which is pumping full blast, making this low-pitched sort of hum you can hear over the top of all the other noises, it’s hot in here.

  The arcade is incredibly crowded. Groups of boys drift around between the machines, looking or trying to look threatening. An Asian guy dressed all in black is playing a game where you have to travel back in time and shoot at these samurai who attack you; I’m watching him from the corner of my eye, and he has this look on his face like he knows what he’s doing, except he keeps missing the samurai and they swarm and start to kill him and chop at him with their swords and the blood that comes out of his man looks pretty realistic. Two girls are standing by one of those machines with the claw that grabs the stuffed toys; they’re not playing it, and one of the girls, who is wearing a red dress and who looks kind of familiar, keeps looking across the room at a tall boy with a smirk on his face: He says something to his friends and they all laugh.

  Anthony is playing one of those Dance Dance Revolution!!! machines. The ones you feed money into and the whole thing lights up and music starts playing, a hundred-plus bpm, or so it seems, and there’s always a woman singing with an incredibly high, artificial voice and she’s always singing about love or butterflies or dancing or whatever. It’s incredibly loud, thundering, overwhelming, and you have to dance to it, which is to say, there are four little sensors and you’re meant to follow the directions the game gives you and jump on each one at a certain time. Forward/back/left/right, and various combinations of all four. The more you get right, the harder the dance steps and the more you have to jump around and the more people gather around you to watch.

  anthony’s feet: thump / thump / thump / thump / (silence) / thump / thump

  Anthony has a look of intense concentration on his face. He’s been dancing virtually nonstop for twenty minutes. He’s breathing deeply. His dark eyes narrow as he stares at the screen. I hear the sound of his breaths, the thudding of his feet as he dances. A droplet of sweat will run down the curve of his nose. It will stay there for a few seconds, shimmering, the blue and red and purple lights from all around refracting through it, and then it will fall, hit the floor, disappear. Every now and then another droplet of sweat will form and I’ll stare at it, hypnotised.

  157

  We’re still in the arcade. The song that’s playing is loud and trashy. The kind you want to crawl inside. Saccharine. For the three and a half minutes that it plays — three and a half minutes of deceptively simple chord progression and bang bang bang — everything is going to be okay. Anthony and I are standing in a corner. It’s dark. His hand is on my waist. He is sweating a lot from that dance thing. He looks really hot, and …

  158

  Anthony: What do you want to do?

  Me: I don’t know.

  Anthony: Do you want to go out?

  Me: Not really.

  Anthony: Do you want to go back to my place?

  He’s been waiting to say that all night, and I’ve been waiting for him to say that all night, and he’s been waiting to hear my answer, which he already knows will be:

  Me: Okay.

  159

  Anthony: In a realistic sense, I know nothing about Anthony at this point. I know he’s good-looking. I know he’s a very good fuck. I suspect he might have let some guy take pictures of him while he was naked and on drugs and with Jeremy. That’s about it. I don’t know anything about him. He has told me nothing. He’s still more or less a blank canvas at this point. Which bothers me a little. It bothers me a lot, come to think of it.

  In the past when I’ve been with guys, it hasn’t really mattered how much I’ve known about them. Sometimes it’s actually better when you don’t know the guy that well. You don’t have to deal with his hopes/fears/anxieties etc, you deal with him strictly on a physical level, and the rest you can make up.

  Which is why the fact that Anthony is such a blank makes me so tense. His physical presence is still only as real to me as those pictures. I can hardly tell the two apart. Maybe he’s incredibly complex. Maybe there’s nothing there at all. But the fact remains, I don’t know who he is. Pretty, unattainable, pixellated boy on the net. Pretty, unattainable boy in real life. Figment of my imagination.

  I want to know something about Anthony. Anything at all — some detail that will make him human. Maybe that’s why I have been so obsessed by that one particular picture, the profile shot. Because it seemed to make him real. Showed signs of vulnerability or … something. Is this going to bother me? Yes. Is this going to stop me from going home with him?

  160

  Anthony’s room: Anthony stands by his bedroom window, staring out at the city lights, wearing only a pair of boxer shorts. I’m sitting on the floor, leaning against his bed with a joint in my hand, and the silence in here is weirdly suffocating. Anthony looks at me and I offer him the joint and I’m about to stand, to give it to him, but he shakes his head, no, and walks over to me, takes it from my hand. He takes several long, slow drags while I stand and begin pulling at his boxer shorts, clumsily, trying to slide them down his legs. I can’t quite manage it but he ends up doing it for me and then we’re kissing, so I guess it doesn’t matter that for the whole time leading up to this moment the look in his eyes hasn’t changed at all.

  161

  Cut ahead: It’s Monday morning. Early. I’m waking up in my own room and everything is grey and my head feels as though it’s stuffed with cotton wool. I’m not ready to deal with any of this. A weekend spent with Anthony and I’m not sure when I’ll be seeing him again or if he’s going to call me or if when we fucked on Saturday night it meant anything, or any more than it did when we fucke
d on Friday night. But more than anything I’m thinking of what happened after we fucked on Saturday night, but no, I don’t want to think about that.

  It was raining earlier and feels like it’s just about to rain again. Some leaves from a big tree outside my window have stuck to the glass. The colours in here are too bright and my Placebo poster seems to be melting off the wall. The sheets are twisted around my legs and I have to fight to get them off. When I stand up, the floorboards are cold and I shake a little as I make my way to the mirror. I’m wearing only boxer shorts; and my hair still looks okay, and I stare at myself for a long time and eventually I decide that I look pretty good. I’d probably fuck me. My school uniform is hanging on the door. It starts to rain outside.

  After a shower/change of clothes, I go downstairs to the kitchen. My mother is there. She’s sitting at the counter, wearing a white bathrobe. There is a glass of orange juice next to her, untouched. She hears me come in and she looks up. When she sees me her expression doesn’t change.

  ‘Calvin,’ she says.

  ‘Hey Mum.’

  ‘Would you like some breakfast?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I could … make you something.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Mum’s still looking at me. I look back at her. I’m not really sure what to say.

  ‘So … Where’s Dad today.’

  ‘He’s on call … At the hospital.’

  ‘Oh … Cool.’

  I start to fidget a bit. Mum offers to drive me to school. I thank her. Then without warning, she asks me if I’m seeing anyone, and it seems like a weird question for her to have come up with — and I fidget even more and tell her no.

  She has yesterday’s social pages open in front of her and there are all these pictures of people I don’t recognise at a benefit for childhood cancer or the launch of some new book or a book on childhood cancer or something. Mum points to a picture of a blonde girl and tells me that the girl is Caroline, the Harveys’ daughter, and I don’t know who the Harveys are and I’ve never seen this girl before in my life but I just nod and say oh, cool. Mum asks me if I remember Caroline and I tell her no and she tells me I must because Caroline’s mother is a friend of hers and I tell her I don’t know who this Caroline person is and she tells me I must, like I’d be lying about whether or not I know Caroline, and eventually I figure it’s not worth the effort so I nod and tell her that oh yeah, I do remember Caroline now (even though I’ve never fucking met anyone named Caroline). Mum asks me again if I have a girlfriend and I tell her no, then she asks me what about that Margot girl and I tell her I was never going out with Margot and she smiles at me conspiratorially and I really wish she’d stop. I’m tempted to tell her that Margot is the world’s biggest faghag, just to see the look on her face, but I don’t. Then Mum tells me I should be seeing a girl like Caroline and she points to the picture again and I take another look and that Caroline person, whoever she is, is holding a champagne glass and there’s a young guy standing with his arm around her, and he looks vaguely like someone I know but it doesn’t matter, and they’re both young and good-looking and wealthy, which is all that counts really, and they both have these dumb smiles. I start to wonder whether it would make Mum happy if she could have a picture of me with my arm around some girl, dumb smiles on both our faces, and the idea of it starts to depress me, and then Mum tells me that she and Dad were there too, at that particular benefit, but they didn’t get their photo taken, and she seems a little upset by this but she’s slurring her words so I think she’s probably taken a tranquilliser already this morning. She picks up her orange juice but doesn’t drink any of it. I decide to leave her to it.

  162

  I grab a pear from the fruit bowl and head to the living room. The carpet feels soft underfoot. I slump on one of the chairs and it feels comfortable and warm and I want to fall asleep again but I don’t. There are newspapers spread all over the coffee table. I choose one at random and flip through it, hoping there will be something at least partially interesting in there. I find an article about this certain British pop star who joined a boyband at sixteen and was exploited by his managers and then these naked photos of him from when he was, like, fourteen or something came out and he ended up a ‘teenage alcoholic who suffered from drug and sex addiction’ before returning with several hugely successful solo albums; apparently he still has feelings of confusion and isolation even though he’s young and good-looking and makes, like, heaps of money and probably gets to exploit lots of groupies himself. For a few seconds I entertain the idea of joining a boyband and being exploited and then turning into a teenage alcoholic who suffers from drug and sex addiction before returning with my own hugely successful solo albums, and it kind of appeals but I figure, well, I’m already a teenage alcoholic but the chances of my joining a boyband are pretty slim. Alongside the article there are several pictures of the certain British pop star — one of him on stage and one of him where, if you squint, it looks like he’s naked even though he’s really not — and I decide that if the situation were ever to arise, I’d definitely let him exploit me. I read the article through three times and I’m really tense and rocking back and forth by the end, though I’m not sure why exactly.

  163

  Flashback to Saturday night: Just before we smoked that joint, before we fucked. Anthony has left the room, assured me he’ll be right back. His house is in Windsor, way up on a hill, and I can walk to the window and see an ocean of lights, and beyond that, not far away, the city, rising up like something out of a dream. The lights all run together and then apart again and it’s beautiful, like, really beautiful, but the more I look at it, the colder I start to feel and the more I wish he’d get back already so I wouldn’t be here all alone. I walk away from the window, sit down on his bed, which is unmade and smells kind of sweaty, although not in a bad way, not exactly, and it seems as though he’s been gone for a really long time, and I’m aching for him to get back.

  I want him so badly at this point it’s like I physically can’t wait for him to get back. I get up from the bed and walk around, looking at Anthony’s things, trying to, I don’t know, learn more about him from the things in here — a poster on the wall for a movie I haven’t seen; a computer, switched on; a stereo, switched off, with some CDs scattered beside it. I take a quick look through the CDs: Massive Attack, a bunch of trance and trip-hop compilations — I guess that pretty much sums up his taste in music — and seeing them makes me feel better in a weird sort of a way.

  164

  I’m drawn back to the computer. The dull glow of the screen is the only light in the room, and there’s something tantalising about it. Other people’s computers are always interesting. There is an IRC chat window open; must be from earlier today, one that Anthony obviously didn’t bother to close before he went out.

  I shouldn’t read it. But, y’know.

  I walk over to the door, listen very carefully to make sure he’s not coming. I hear a tap turning on and off in a distant part of the house. Hear the pipes. Seems so much louder in the dark. I figure I’m safe.

  I reach for the mouse; scroll back up to the top. Hope he doesn’t come back. Read what’s on the screen. And it’s like …

  165

  Ši©k boÿ: tony … haven’t seen you online in a while.

  toNy: I’ve had you on invisible. I was avoiding you.

  Ši©k boÿ: very funny

  toNy: I’m not kidding.

  Ši©k boÿ: fuck you

  toNy: already done it

  Ši©k boÿ: you offering to do it again?

  toNy: haha

  Ši©k boÿ: … so. I saw you out last night.

  toNy: where at?

  Ši©k boÿ: where do you always go?

  toNy: right

  Ši©k boÿ: saw you out on the terrace.

  toNy: right. I didn’t see you there.

  Ši©k boÿ: … I was avoiding you.

  toNy: hahar />
  Ši©k boÿ: I was only there for a little bit. there’s this guy I used to go out with who was obsessed with me … he was stalking me practically, he showed up and I was with my boyfriend and neither of us felt like sticking around after that.

  toNy: who was the guy?

  Ši©k boÿ: you remember Laurent?

  toNy: not really

  Ši©k boÿ: he was this uni student from france or something. he used to do the weirdest shit. follow me around. anyway, doesn’t matter.

  Ši©k boÿ: anyway, I was going to talk to you, but you seemed kind of … preoccupied.

  toNy: occupied. yeah.

  Ši©k boÿ: ..so who -was- that guy you were with?

  toNy: I don’t know. some guy. met him at a party.

  Ši©k boÿ: he was pretty cute.

  toNy: I guess

  Ši©k boÿ: so are you seeing him or something?

  toNy: nah.

  Ši©kboÿ: … mmm, interesting. you hook up with him?

  toNy: might have

  Ši©k boÿ: I was just interested.

  Ši©k boÿ: so ‘might have’ means …

  toNy: yeah, we did.

  Ši©k boÿ: … and?

  toNy: and yeah. we went back to my place. he was a pretty decent fuck.

  Ši©k boÿ: cute

  toNy: I think he’s the clingy type though. I mean. he seemed to be getting kind of attached. you know. it’s always kind of boring when that happens.

  Ši©k boÿ: you seeing him again?

  toNy: seeing him tonight

  Ši©k boÿ: boyfriend?

  toNy: probably not

  Ši©k boÿ: so … well …

  toNy: well

  toNy: are you … stocked up at the moment?

  Ši©k boÿ: yeah

  Ši©k boÿ: how many do you want?

  toNy: probably just four. how much?