by Max Schaefer
‘Yeah.’
‘And I need to make sure my boy’s dressed all right don’t I? I can’t have him dragging me down if we’re going to be hanging about together.’
‘Yeah.’
‘So. I just don’t like secrets is all.’
‘I should go in a minute anyway.’
For a moment neither of them says anything.
‘Here — do you want to go dancing tomorrow?’
‘What,’ Tony says, ‘another spade club?’
‘No nothing like the last place. You’ll enjoy this.’
*
And it is nothing like the last place. They take the bus to Camberwell, riding at the front of the top deck, one double seat each. (‘What about the others?’ asks Tony as they walk to the stop, and Dennis says, ‘Just us tonight.’) They lean back against the sides of the bus, facing each other, boots up on the seat, and nobody says anything when it fills up, not even the conductor.
Tony looks at Dennis across the aisle. He is gazing out of the front window as the bus moves on to Tower Bridge. By seven-thirty it has long turned dark and the thin moon has been and gone; behind Dennis’s profile the haze from the city lights dims somewhat above the river. As Dennis watches the road ahead, his expression blank and his mouth hanging slightly open, his boots are suddenly unconvincing. He looks vulnerable and a bit slow; you could beat him up, Tony thinks, without much trouble. His two front teeth dangle into the gap between his lips and for some reason he is swallowing repeatedly. Tony tears off part of his bus ticket and puts it in his mouth, chewing it into a ball and making it heavy with spit, then gobs it at Dennis, hitting him neatly on the cheek. Dennis gives a tiny spasm at the impact, then turns with an uncomprehending grin. ‘What was that for?’ he asks.
Tony says: ‘Sitting with your mouth open,’ and turns to look at the road. After a minute he registers a retaliatory flick, which he ignores.
The Union Tavern is on Camberwell New Road, a big building on a corner. The ground-floor windows are blacked out, but lights are visible upstairs. There is a short queue of skins waiting and you can hear the ska beat from inside.
A woman is taking money at the door, in her sixties, in a wig. She says to Tony: ‘How old are you then?’
‘Sixteen,’ he tells her.
‘Like French buggery you are. No drinking please love, eh?’
Inside it is all skins. There must be more than 200 of them.
Apart from a few hanging round the edges or buying drinks at the bar, everybody is dancing, facing the front, in strict lines. And they’re all white, or nearly so: Tony looks hard and thinks he has seen a Paki, but a smack from Dennis ends his reverie. ‘Come on,’ he says.
And then Dennis does an astonishing thing. He takes Tony’s hand in his and pulls him on to the dance floor. He does it with such ease that it’s not until he’s dragged him all the way into the line that Tony even notices what happened. It’s his body that responds first, the whole thing suddenly bracing itself of its own accord for whatever disaster will ensue, a big panicky swill of nausea splashing up from his stomach, sudden heat on the surface of his skin. He looks up at Dennis, tries to pull away, expecting to see belated realization, the same animal horror reflected, but Dennis just grins and begins to dance, and won’t let go. Tony feels his blood throb in the tight grip. He looks round anxiously but finds no reaction. People haven’t seen — or rather they haven’t cared. Seen, but not noticed.
The record has ended, and the rows of men are fallen nearly still, waiting for the next track. It begins with speech — Now I want all you skinheads to get up on your feet — and Tony recognizes it, an old one, and popular too, because the skins around are cheering and leaning slightly forward on their booted toes in anticipation, as if they will start sprinting. Buoyed on his ebbing flood of panic, Tony readies himself too, looking around him again as he does, and down the same row to his right he suddenly spots Ryan, the lad from Nigel’s car, who catches his eye and nods with a little nervous smile. Along the line in front, among endless slight variations in the pattern of braces meeting the waists of jeans, he sees in one gap two hands touching, and elsewhere fingers against the small of a back, and he feels Dennis, who has never let go of his hand, give it a squeeze, and the beat begins.
*
(Ryan leaves early and gets a cab to Piccadilly — a gamble, but not a bad one. He makes the Golden Lion in plenty of time and sits at the bar with a Scotch. Tuesday is not the busiest night but there are still a few boys around, some he recognizes, more he doesn’t, one that’s clearly new. They don’t offer you this at the Youth Employment; you find it by yourself when you’re on your own one night at the pinball machines and a man in a suit comes up and subs you a few games. You learn what it was about the way you were standing that made that happen, and you do it again. Like now: already someone’s next to him saying, ‘Would you like another drink?’
Ryan looks up. I don’t fancy you, he thinks, but then that’s how this works, so he says: ‘OK then, thanks.’ The man is some kind of Arab. He’s clean-shaven but the skin on his face carries the scars of some unspeakable ordeal, or perhaps just bad childhood acne. He has dressed to fit in, a black turtleneck under a rough tweed blazer, but his nervousness betrays him.
Ryan takes the fresh glass and says, ‘Cheers.’ Then he adds, as usual, ‘I’m not really into wasting time.’
‘No. Well. No, nor am I.’
‘So what is it you’re after?’
There’s a silence. Ryan puts his hand over the man’s, over the bar. He says, ‘It’s all right. You can say it.’
‘Well, I was — I mean, I’m looking. For some company.’
Ryan smiles. ‘Well there’s a surprise.’
Ryan says: ‘You want us to go somewhere private, right?’
The man nods.
‘Right. And what do you want us to do?’
The man looks at him.
Ryan says: ‘You want me to wank you off? You want a fuck?’
Overwhelmed, the man stares at a beer mat on the bar, breaching a thin spill of drink.
‘It’s all right,’ says Ryan. ‘It just goes to the price. What’s your name, anyway?’
‘I’d rather not …’
‘OK. OK. Well, you look like a Mustafa to me. Shall I call you Mustafa?’
‘If you want.’
‘Hello Mustafa. I’m Ryan. Pleased to meet you.’
Ryan extends his hand and the man, bewildered, shakes. ‘So now. We were saying. What do you want to do?’
A tremendous sigh. ‘I like … I suppose oral, I—’
‘You want me to suck you off? ’
Nothing.
‘You want to suck me?’
Mustafa’s eyes say yes.
‘Yeah, the thing is, Mustafa mate, that’s not really my cup of tea.’
This is what you do: you suggest their key desire is just a bit beyond the pale. But not that far beyond. And then you jack up the price.
‘I mean, normally I wouldn’t. But it’s quiet in here tonight, and you’ve got a nice smile haven’t you? When you let it out anyway — there you go! Look. What if we said a bit over the odds? Say eight quid?’
‘That’s a little more than …’ No matter how desperate, they invariably haggle. ‘Maybe four?’ says Mustafa. Of course they settle on six.
‘Where shall we go then? You got a hotel?’
‘I can’t.’ Meaning, Yes, but my wife’s there, waiting.
‘Don’t worry, I know a place. You’ll have to pay for the room though, all right?’ When the price is agreed you should get moving in case they bottle out.
In the taxi Ryan says, ‘Your English is good.’
‘I studied at Oxford.’
‘Fuck me. Well that explains it doesn’t it?’
The taxi driver mutters something that Ryan hears well enough. He says, ‘Mate. If you want your fucking fare you’ll keep quiet, all right? Or you can just let us out here, thank you.’
The dri
ver finishes the journey in silence. As they get out Ryan whispers, ‘Don’t tip him nothing.’
The hotel is small, a converted town house near Victoria, with a plastic illuminated sign. Ryan goes up the stairs first and holds the door open for Mustafa, who is visibly readying himself for the front desk. Ryan tells him, ‘It’s all right.’
He says to the woman, ‘We need a room. Me and my uncle,’ and to Mustafa: ‘It’s cash up front.’
They walk up the narrow staircase in silence. When Ryan opens the door, the twin beds, little cupboard and now-familiar wallpaper wash over him like a waiting flood and he is suddenly exhausted. He tells Mustafa: ‘Go on, I’ll just clean up a little bit.’ In the bathroom he digs the bag of pep pills from his pocket and swallows one. It won’t work fast enough, but still. He splashes cold water on his face, then undoes his Sta-Prest and washes his prick under the running tap. For this he has to stand on his toes. There’s no towel again, so he dries himself on his shirt.
Ryan strokes himself. There’s a trick to getting hard in this situation. You can’t ignore how old and ugly the bloke is so you have to use it. You need to see yourself, here, what you’re doing, what you’re about to do, for money, with this man.
In the bedroom, Mustafa is affecting an interest in the now-invisible view on to the dingy internal courtyard. Ryan lies back on one of the twin beds and says, gently, ‘What are you looking at?’
Mustafa looks up. He says, ‘It’s quite nice, the way the light…’ and tails off, gesturing.
It’s not that you want to hurry them but they tend to need encouragement. Ryan says, ‘Oh yeah? The way the light?’ He reopens the fly he just fastened, unveils his prepared erection. ‘Come here then,’ he says. ‘Hey. Mustafa go. Mustafa cock. Eh?’
The room is paid for the night, and when this is finished and the man has returned to his posh hotel in Paddington, Ryan will sleep here, in clean sheets on the unused bed. He will stand under the hot shower and wash with the soap they provide, and then he will sleep. They’ve given up asking back home. He tells them: ‘When I’m out, I’m out.’ He will wake early, and he will be alone, and it will be to the sound of traffic, smart cars ferrying men to important jobs, not his father’s industrious farts in the bathroom. He will have another shower, under water that will still be hot and stay that way until he turns it off. Because there are no towels he will pull the sheet from the mattress and leave it tangled on the soaking floor. Then he will walk down the stairs, leave the key on the desk, and out, slap into the middle of the fucking city, the fucking middle of it. Taking his time amid lawyers and businessmen, he will stroll down to St James’s Park, crisp grass in the watery light. There’s a small café on the other side where he will buy tea and a bacon roll, perhaps two. He will cross into the square and sit on a bench and have his breakfast before the Houses of Parliament.)
Voice of Britain
A crowd had gathered by the knee-high fence that separated the path from the bank of the lake. ‘What’s going on?’ asked Sarah, so we headed down the slope to see.
It turned out to be a pelican trying to swallow: its caricaturally expressive neck swayed and stretched over its squat body, which padded gingerly beneath with small balancing movements like a unicyclist’s wheel. Every few seconds the bird would face skywards and open and close its long, pale beak, and its gullet, massively distended, would ripple and shake. ‘It’s eating a fucking pigeon,’ Sarah said.
She was right; the pelican’s movements were not merely its own. Its struggling victim violently embossed the skin of its throat: you could see the arc of a wing, then a beak straining to puncture. The pelican seemed not so much panicked as frustrated. It gulped adamantly away, and now and again compressed its bulging neck, pulling its head tight against its body, as if it could force the pigeon down with its chin.
I said, ‘I didn’t know they did that.’
Sarah grimaced. ‘I don’t think they do. Let’s go.’
We rounded the lake, past the flowerbeds and menacing fairytale cottage, and crossed into Parliament Square, where police in bright yellow jackets, friendlier than the riot gear I had expected, chatted by concrete barriers.
‘Christ, it’s cold,’ Sarah said. She wore a heavy knitted coat in white and red, which in this weather matched her cheeks, and a woollen hat with earflaps. Over breakfast in Valerie, the waitress had heard us discussing the march, and handed us a couple of Danish pastries as we left. ‘On the house,’ she had said. ‘I’d go myself if I could afford the time off.’
On the Embankment we both stopped in the same involuntary moment.
‘Fuck me.’
Sarah asked: ‘What time is it?’
‘Eleven-fifteen.’
‘It doesn’t kick off till half-twelve.’
The view through the far distance was thick with people. A huge crowd massed backwards from the starting point under Hungerford Bridge. Jesus! I texted Philip: Like this at your end too? We followed the waiting line, past coaches parked nose to tail, as it curved away from the river, and took our place at the end, just clear of a glut of smug Lib Dems holding yellow party placards. Someone was distributing no war signs on behalf of the Mirror: we declined and took instead a couple of the most common, don’t attack iraq and not in my name. All of a sudden Sarah shoved hers at me, muttering, ‘Hold this,’ and shot up the side of the queue. I saw her approach a bearded, studenty guy: a bit crusty for me, but very much her type. She said something, leaned in for his reply, threw her head back laughing. I thought, again, how obvious people were. Now he was digging out his fags and groping for a lighter. She came back with a grin and a new placard: stop this bloody war.
‘I’ve got yours here,’ I said.
She made a charade of furtiveness, sliding her eyes crazily and talking from the corner of her mouth so her cigarette wiggled: ‘Ditch it.’
I looked at its replacement. ‘Socialist Worker?’
‘Come on, he’s gorgeous. I could do with a bit of radical.’
‘Slag,’ I pronounced.
‘You’re one to talk. Let me see your palm.’
‘What for?’
‘Depends.’ She frowned and held my hand at face level, turning it in the light. ‘Hairs mean too much wanking. Rash means you’ve got the syph.’
‘Fuck off.’ I pulled away, but she gripped tighter: ‘Rash and hairs! Score.’
This was still new for both of us. Growing up, we were close enough, but without the conspiratorial bond some siblings claim. Things had changed when her Cambridge reserve gave way to a quite different graduate studenthood. In her Edinburgh room, where tampon boxes lay in shameless chaos with her books, she had casually handed me a spliff, a gesture whose novelty we both let go unspoken. This coincided with my own self-reinvention after college, so when, on her subsequent trip to London, we got, for the first time, properly drunk together, I found myself encouraged by her endless yucky digressions on the human body — she was becoming a parasitologist, not a doctor, but it opened the same door — to confess, all of a sudden, my recent, virgin, treatment for the clap. Sexuality had been long acknowledged between us, but sex itself barely discussed, and Sarah was so delighted by my proffered gonorrhoea that insinuating a perpetual, scandalous susceptibility in me to venereal disease became her running joke. Even now she was forever diagnosing me with God-knows-what, based on the most spurious symptoms. I could not scratch myself without her crying, ‘Crabs!’, and suspected her of wasting hours online in the pursuit of ever more recherché conditions to accuse me of. She had even begun to make them up — unless there really is a hepatitis F.
My text to Philip had not gone out: the network was overloaded. I was still trying to send it when Sarah nudged me: ‘Looks like we’re starting.’ It was not yet twelve but whistles and drums were building; the crowd ahead unpacked in stages.
As I hoisted my sign my mobile buzzed. It was Philip on Gower Street saying Were off! — so both ends were starting early.
We saw more m
archers heading along the South Bank: Sarah bounced her placard up and down at them, and somebody seemed to answer. She grinned and took my hand. Her excitement was catching; looking around, I realized it was not just the scale of the event that was affecting, but how staggeringly inclusive it was: the protest might have been cast by an ad agency, pushing soft drinks or mortgages. There were the predictable socialists and Muslim groups — who had after all arranged the thing — but church groups too, and country folk in Barbours, and everywhere the very young and very old. I pointed to an ancient couple behind us, he in veteran’s uniform and medals stiffly holding a no war sign (its Mirror logo torn off), she very properly dressed in ankle-length skirt, cardigan and padded jacket, with a purple placard that read freedom for Palestine. Ahead, Sarah’s beardy friend and his associates had started a chant — ‘Who let the dogs out? Bush! Blair! Sharon!’ — in which some of us joined while others stayed resolutely mute, uncertain of its desirability or just self-conscious. Before we broke up I had visited Justin at MIT, where his professor had inveigled us into demonstrating against the resumption of capital punishment. We had tramped in tiny circles outside the state legislature, led by her in a rhyming chorus — ‘No death penalty here in Mass.! / Keep your bill, we won’t let it pass!’ — which sounded hopeless in our English accents. Later, collecting signatures for a petition, my only success was with older, white Cambridge liberals: I was taken aback at the lack of interest from younger blacks, whom I had neither the guts nor the statistics to lecture on the racial inequities of judicial killing in their country.
We joined in the chant of ‘Blair out’ by the Commons, and resumed it outside Downing Street, where Sarah’s knot of socialists had managed to delay. Emerging from Haymarket, I looked for the huge window over the Criterion that marked the boardroom of the management consultancy where I’d had my token interview after college. ‘How much,’ they had asked, ‘should someone pay for all the tea in China?’ What might I now have, if I’d got the job? A mortgage; a boyfriend; subtle opinions about PFI. In Piccadilly Circus the northern tributary joined us with cheers and whistles. We fought though to the space by the doughnut shop where Philip, as promised, waited with two friends. I recognized Mike from his jacket photograph. I had read his last-but-one novel on Philip’s recommendation and thought I hadn’t quite understood it, but was rather awed by its manifest darkness. The other guy I hadn’t seen before. He was my age, and a skinhead — not by mere dint of his haircut, but in full attire, combat jacket and trousers tucked into knee-high lace-up boots. The combined effect of these was undermined by his shy smile when Philip introduced us: ‘Adam, James.’ I shook hands with him, and then Mike, but decided not to mention I had read his book.