by Max Schaefer
He rinsed my head and I examined myself in the mirror. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m bald.’
‘What did you expect? … And your nipples are hard.’ He tweaked one.
‘They’re frozen.’
‘So put your top on and make a cup of tea. I need a sit-down.’
It had been four years since I moved in here, soon after I came down from university. The radical nature of my agency in that period astonished me now: I had split with Justin — my first serious boyfriend, a year above me and the object of my parents’ increasing warmth — and in short order unilaterally announced that I was leaving home to rent a room from Philip, a decade my senior and a stranger to them. The official explanation for our acquaintance, that we’d got to talking in a bar, must have been odd enough, let alone the truth, of which neither Mum nor Dad had the technical facility to guess the specifics, but which, with the dial-up bills I was then amassing, they must have imagined in some tabloid version: he had been chatting me up on an IRC channel called #gay-selfpics.
So I didn’t always need the rented bed, yet my demand for it had been no mere misdirection: it was integral to the hazy but intensely felt notion of sex, politics and independence as inseparably related that was then driving me. My urgent need not only to have a room to which I could bring boys back at a rate optimistically conceived to exceed my parents’ tolerance, but for that room to be held in a queer space (Philip’s flat) where such tribute would be recognized, was part of the same new sense of my identity as something embedded in history and struggle that had made me susceptible to Philip’s online seduction. It wasn’t his older body that attracted me, nor the hilarious serial form in which he presented it, portioned and flattened against his office scanner, but what that body had seen and where it had been: the connection I made, touching it, to the OutRage! demos and art happenings of which his typed reminiscences so enthralled me. Philip had slept with Jarman, for fuck’s sake (don’t worry, was his cheekily presumptive rider, I was careful), and when, after our first IRL encounter at the Yard, where I drowned my timidity in alcopops, he took me back to the flat above the pub, I felt rooted in that same tradition.
Now, as then, his fridge was full of things I pass over in supermarkets: salad cream, carrot sticks, ‘wafer-sliced’ ham. On the door hung one of those novelty aprons — a gift, I hoped — that substitute the torso of Michelangelo’s David for the wearer’s. His elegant, scalloped little clump of pubes looked stuck on, like a fake moustache. I called, ‘Can I open these biscuits?’
Philip sat at his computer in running pants and a T-shirt, checking messages on three personals sites at once. He tested his tea gingerly, leaning his head towards the mug with his upper lip just above the liquid and sucking air across its surface so it rolled towards him in little waves. He winced, said, ‘Give that a minute to cool down,’ and frowned at my own mug, already a quarter empty.
‘Asbestos mouth,’ I said.
‘So I see. How are things with Adam?’
‘Good, thanks.’
‘Are you fucking other people yet?’
‘… We’re very modern.’
‘But maybe the haircut will get his attention.’
I ignored his smirk and pointed at the screen: ‘You’ve got a message.’
‘Wanna be used by my mixed race cock? Romantic sentiment, but I think not. You should join this one, you know. Lots of shaved heads on it.’
‘I did,’ I told him.
He gave me a look. ‘Quiet little bugger, aren’t you? What’s your profile?’
‘Bytvlight. One word. It’s the name of a song.’
‘Of course it is. Why not just call yourself ithinktoomuchtoshag?’
‘I thought it was … poetically suggestive.’
“‘Don’t click here” is what it suggests, sweetheart. But that’s a nice profile, besides the name. You’ll have to update it now: 24yo, swimmer’s build … zero crop! You’ll need new pics.’
‘I might not keep the crop.’
‘You should, it suits you.’ He reached for his tea, ‘Sometimes I think I’ve had everyone on here worth having.’
‘Can I check my messages if you’re done?’
I didn’t have any. I scrolled through the list of men online. Their faces stared back, variously smiling and scowling. Philip said, ‘That one’s holding in his stomach.’
‘How can you tell?’
He rolled his eyes. We’d never lost our master/apprentice dynamic around sexual literacy, my development in which had been, in part, his agenda in offering me the room. He’d expanded my arsenal: a technology pioneer from the days of Prestel, Philip was the first person I knew with broadband at home, an expensive cable connection on which I soon graduated from legacy Unix protocols to the ‘dating’ sites then swelling with network benefits. But I couldn’t learn his most important lesson, which was never to chat too much: more often than not I’d ask too many questions of my latest interlocutor and uncover the feet of clay — some political or grammatical atrocity — that made the hook-up for which I’d been gunning quite unthinkable. My success rate thus never approached my bullish projections, or what Philip, with his frankly ropier toolset, was achieving down the corridor. ‘Sweetheart,’ he would tell me when I jealously remarked on his ability to overlook the vacuous Weltanschauungen blotting otherwise beautiful youths, ‘you’re hardly reading the fucking books on the mantelpiece when you’re et-cetering the fire.’ Now he stood up and stretched. ‘I’m off again next week, by the way.’
‘Where to?’
Philip was a journalist on Panorama, and one of the more peculiar facets of being friends with him was the remote possibility of his violent death in some far-flung arena. He had been to Iraq twice: before the war, and during it.
‘Zimbabwe.’
‘Oh.’ I shrugged. It was almost disappointing.
‘If we can get in, that is.’
‘Check out this guy,’ I said. On screen a lawyer in Primrose Hill was proposing, with a confident smirk, that the reader meet him from his morning jog and lick his sweat off. ‘To be clear, I will expect you to lick me clean from head to toe: balls, cracky pits … Bet you his first draft started, For the avoidance of doubt.’
A man in his sixties wished to emphasize the importance of bonding on an emotional and intellectual level as well as a sexual one, and in addition allowing mystic facets to manifest.
A social worker from Peckham, two years older than me, peered anxiously into his webcam sporting a leather dog collar, double chin and gold-rimmed spectacles. He enumerated his ‘likes’: Röyksopp, pasta, Spurs, ‘Sex in the City’.
I asked Philip:‘What’s WP?’
‘Where?’
‘Is it like watersports or something?’
The skin was in his late twenties, in braces, combats and knee-length, highly polished boots. Other photographs, in black and white, showed him without the clothes. He was looking to meet other skins for a drink and a laugh, and the occasional chat about art and politics. He concluded: No WP.
Philip told me: ‘It’s white power.’
‘Like neo-nazis?’
‘Yeah.’
‘But why would he need to … specify?’
He peered at the screen. ‘It’s the laces.’
‘On his boots?’
‘They’re white. Usually means nazi. He must just like the look of them, silly sod.’
I clicked through the photos. The skin grinned, then pouted; put his hands behind his head and in front of his crotch. The colour saturated, desaturated again.
I said, ‘But it’s a gay website.’
‘So?’ He leaned across me and switched off the monitor; spun my chair, lifted my chin to face him. ‘It must be very interesting on your planet,’ he said.
‘Fuck off.’
‘Look at you.’ He rubbed his knuckles on my scalp. ‘Little bootboy.’ .
I nudged the tip of my forefinger into his belly button.
Philip said: ‘You’ve never e
ven heard of Martin Webster, have you?’
‘Who?’
‘Jesus help me,’ he sighed. ‘Youth.’
He removed his glasses, then mine, and laid them both on the monitor. He pulled his T-shirt off and chucked it to the sofa, pressing my head against his stomach, with its thick, ticklish hair. He reached for my right hand and guided it to his crotch. ‘How about Nicky Crane?’ he said.
I had stayed with Philip for more than a year. In the end he asked me to find another place because of my strained relationship with the teenager he was then seeing, and with whom, he announced, he had fallen in love. When I dropped off my keys, around lunchtime on the Sunday before New Year, they were both embarked on a molehill of coke. The next few times I saw Philip the boy was ostentatiously not around, and I impressed myself with the sympathy I realized when, on Valentine’s of all days, he disappeared for good, and took Philip’s laptop with him.
‘He’s really sexy,’ Adam said over my shoulder.
‘Do you think so?’
The Strength thru Oi! album cover was the first picture of Nicky Crane I found online. Behind his wildly foreshortened boot, its vast sole aimed straight at the viewer, Nicky loomed shirtless: clenched fists raised, one warning finger extended, bearing a Neanderthal scowl. He was muscled, but hardly trim: his stomach oozed slightly over the tight waist of his jeans. It would be some weeks before I moved on from Google to the British Library; longer before I abandoned my latest TV job to pursue Nicky full-time.
‘Christ, yes. Sexy as fuck.’
Adam’s investment in the skin aesthetic hadn’t dimmed. He could still, sometimes, bring me up short: pitching up five minutes late outside the cinema, I would spot him at once — his high bold head, his combats, tall laced boots, and the crowd around him merely vague, like water lapping a rock — and with a little rush of pride I would walk up and claim him. It still astonished me that someone could actually dress like that: could walk into the street, their job, with such overwhelming certitude. I was anxious with signs and symbols, and would prevaricate: might toy, say, with jackets in military styles, but never clothes mistakable for real uniform. Even Philip’s shearing had used clippers, not a razor. Adam seemed unburdened by my constant, paralysing awareness of the interpretability of things. ‘I can’t help what people think,’ he would say when I probed the issue. ‘That’s their problem.’
When I had shown him my new haircut, I’d been nervous but excited. I hadn’t told him I was going to get it done. I worried he might laugh, as at a teenager pretending to a scant moustache — but imagined other consequences too: like my induction, at Adam’s hands, into the look entire. He might take me to Camden market to buy boots, teach me to lace and polish them. I couldn’t seriously picture myself in such a get-up, but the fantasy was powerful. Weighty things, to change your appearance for your lover, for your lover to request it.
And Philip’s barb, that my cropped hair was a bid for Adam’s attention, had not been entirely wide of the mark. It could feel vertiginous, the lightness of Adam’s embrace. True, when he had first made clear he would not be expected to stop having sex with other people, I’d been happy to assent. After the febrile intensity of my college relationships, little orgies of overwrought performativity, and the fitful staccato that followed, it had felt rather thrillingly adult, like sliding into the spa pool at the gym. But while I was discreet in my own exploitation of our agreement, Adam approached it as candidly as he dressed. Brushing my teeth at his place I would spot a condom, say, knotted like a reminder in the bathroom bin; or later, as his explorations became more dogged, find thin lines on his buttocks, in fading red. Such artefacts signified no betrayal, but their concreteness winded me.
The marks I found on him looked like rebukes, too, for what we failed to do together, for which he had to go elsewhere. Early on we had gone through a phase of dirty emails in which Adam, encouraged by his further poking at my black bookshelf, had laid out in detail certain aspirations. Tilting my screen from my colleagues’ sightlines, I responded with enthusiasm, and on the tube to his place for our next date felt hefty with momentum. But as we acknowledged, never verbally but in mutual disengagement from the idea over the weeks that followed, it didn’t work. Later I wondered if the identification I had felt reading Adam’s outlined scenarios had been with a role other than the one he had cast me in. In writing and reading there’s a fluidity of perspective that real life doesn’t easily afford.
Adam put his finger to my screen and traced Nicky’s bare torso.
‘Who is he, anyway?’
‘I think,’ I said, ‘he might be my subject.’
Blackheath
If your mates ask, tell them you’re off for a dirty weekend.
Basic survival course, survival school, Moreland, Cumbria
sample programme: arrival Intro, issue of kit — day 1 Lectures in the theory of survival, demonstrations of techniques — day 2 Practical work: shelter-building, fire-lighting, skinning, trapping, cooking, navigation, edible plants and fungi — day 3 Continued exercises, debrief, issue of additional kit and instructions for final exercise — day 4+5 Put knowledge to real use in more remote exercise area. Farewell dinner, certificates.
‘What do you think ?’
‘Yeah it looks interesting.’
It is Sunday, 20 April 1980. Dave folds the flyer into neat quarters and returns it to his pocket. He says: ‘Members of the hardcore British Movement are believed to have gone to ground in the woods around the capital. These men are known to be highly experienced and could well be armed. As society collapses into civil war, communists and blacks now fear for their safety.’
Tony says: ‘We look like a couple of fucking monkeys.’
‘We look like waiters.’
‘We do as well. We’ll get asked for drinks all night.’
It is particularly true of Tony. He has ironed his white shirt with too much starch and it sits on him like stilted grammar. Dave’s shirt is red, and he has not tucked it into his trousers. It makes him look, thinks Tony, even younger. Waiting in the hallway while Tony locks his door, he bounces on the balls of his feet and at one point mimes a dramatic kick: ‘Goal!’
Tony says: ‘We’ve got time to walk. Don’t want to be early,’ and they set off towards the common. The low sun makes silhouettes of the trees, flaring their edges. Dave says, ‘If you’re ever interrogated and they bring out a big file with your name on it, all stuffed with papers, bursting at the seams and that, you’ve got to remember there’s probably nothing in it. That’s an old trick, that one. Just shrug and say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And if they say they know what you done, they don’t, or they wouldn’t be asking.’
Dave has been reading a resistance manual. He tells Tony: ‘You’ve got to keep everything clean all the time. Weapons, uniform. Shave every morning no matter what. Check your gun every night and clean the magazine. And never tell lies in battle. You can exaggerate to your girlfriend after but if you do it in battle your mates could end up killed.’ He lobs an imaginary grenade in the direction of the sports ground.
Tony says: ‘Have you got one?’
‘What?’
‘A girlfriend.’
‘Yeah sort of between them right now. How about you?’
‘I can’t understand women.’
‘What gets me is those white slags hanging round the discos chasing after niggers. Fucking disgusting.’
‘Reckon there’ll be a disco tonight?’
Dave laughs. ‘Bit of Blondie.’
The streets grant each other a respectful distance as Charlton gives way to Blackheath. ‘Nice round here isn’t it?’ mutters Dave.
When they pass a phone box, he asks: ‘How are we doing for time?’
‘It’s a party. There’s no deadline as such.’
‘OK for a couple of calls? I’ve been carrying this around all week.’ He produces another sheet, this one a newsletter.
Tony says: ‘Go for it.’
Tony looks down the quiet street. ‘Hello good evening,’ says Dave. ‘May I speak to Mr Wintour please?’ A young woman with a pram emerges from a side road, waits with exaggerated care to cross. ‘Yeah well you listen to me you commie bastard. You’ve been spreading your red filth round that school for long enough and your time’s up, are you listening? We’re not having scum like you brainwashing our kids no more so consider this your last fucking warning. We know where you live and …’ Dave trails off. ‘Fucking hung up on me,’ he grins at Tony. ‘Cunt. Oh well, he’s not getting off that easily.’
He dials again. ‘Now he’s not picking up. These people have — You’re fucking dead mate,’ he tells the handset. ‘You look over your fucking shoulder because we … shit. Well I think he got the message. Do you want a go?’
Tony scans the page. ‘They’ve got the editor of Searchlight here.’
‘Oh yeah go on.’
‘It’s 021, I’ll be out of time before I start. Hang about. There’s a commie Jew who’s the new president of the National Union of Students — oh, they don’t give his number. Some lesbian in Leeds. Half these people are in Leeds. Community Levy for Alternative Projects. Donated fifty quid to something called Women Working with Girls. I bet you fucking do darling.’
‘Just pick one. It don’t matter too much.’
‘OK here we are. The Friends of Blair Peach Committee. And she’s in ANAL too … Ring ring. Go on, be in.’
A voice says, ‘Jill Atkinson.’