by Max Schaefer
‘Oh.’ I shrugged. ‘Maybe you’re right.’
‘How are things with you two anyway?’
‘Good.’
She squinted at me.
‘No, they are.’ And it was true, I thought; what fallout there had been from our failed experiments had not lasted long. That we could not do together all we hoped had perhaps disappointed Adam, but affected not at all, it seemed, his broader commitment to me. He simply went out, every now and then, on one of his hook-ups, or to the skin night he still visited monthly, and if I had not yet made peace with that I was getting used to it. Besides, these days I often took the opportunity afforded by his excursions to expand my online communion with arealnazi.
We had exchanged several messages since my initial Hi, and true to the uncompromising stance of his profile he had told me almost nothing of himself while demanding ever more of me. In particular, this involved my sending him photographs of myself: full-body, face visible, in-postures of mounting, prescribed humiliation. The sheer inequitable riskiness of this (I had not so much as a cropped-torso shot in which to ground my idea of him) excited me more than anything had for a while. I told myself it was research, and indeed did ask him the odd question, though with limited success.
What does LOG stand for? I tried once.
where did u see that
On a tattoo.
After a pause: i never heard of that
Oh.
show me ur arse again
*
Victoria Park spread out on our left beyond a low fence. To the right, where the canal dropped abruptly in a lock, two old black men sat fishing, swapping laconicisms like a nascent sitcom.
I watched Adam step aside to let pass an old Asian man in a kufi, holding by the hand a young boy who was presumably his grandson. Doubtless I only imagined something anxious in the man’s look at Adam: he was far too neat a skinhead to carry much historical threat. But maybe the man was unusually alert: two weeks earlier a middle-aged Muslim had been beaten to death in Nottingham; there had been arson attacks on mosques and Asian homes, and thousands of death threats. Still, the press insisted on commending our restraint, and avoidance of some more drastic ‘backlash’. Another day spent not smashing a Muslim’s head in with a brick, you were rather encouraged to feel, another small achievement.
For the BNP this couldn’t have been better timed, coming as it did on the eve of Nick Griffin’s long-awaited race-hate trial with his protégé Mark Collett: one charge involved Griffin calling Islam ‘a wicked, vicious faith’. Within days of the bombs, leaflets had appeared with pictures of the exploded bus: ‘Maybe now’s the time to listen to the BNP.’ They urged their supporters not to victimize ‘moderate Muslims’, but those supporters could have been forgiven confusion when the party’s website simultaneously read: War has come to our city streets. Blood is flowing. The time for action has come. Words are not enough. Three days before our walk, Griffin and Collett had pleaded not guilty. It was hard to imagine how what had started a weak case could now possibly succeed.
So what tattoos do you have? I had asked.
ill show you when we meet
I had furnished my faceless correspondent with an extensive gallery of commissions by now, and recently, with my purchase of a webcam (whose sudden, parasitical crouch on my laptop screen Adam had let go unremarked), we had graduated to more immediate interaction. It was still an unequal exchange; arealnazi claimed to own neither camera nor microphone, and so I would speak to the lens and perform before it in counterpoint to his still-typed conversation and commands, at which, with my glasses (as he had taken to requiring) removed, I had to squint from a close distance.
A couple of weeks before our walk, I had been extricating myself from the awkward perch upon the dining table into which he had directed me when an intimate tickle made me jump. Recovering from my pratfall, I scooped up Sonny and kicked him from the room. When I looked at the screen it read: nice cat
I apologized with a mimed laugh, then watched the screen awkwardly until I saw movement again. Leaning forward and wrinkling my features I made out:
do u have pen
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I should imagine so. Any particular sort?’
marker pen
‘Hold on a sec.’ I walked off-screen to the kitchen, where I scrabbled in the drawers until I found a thick black number bought, though rarely used, for freezer containers. ‘Is this the kind of thing?’ I asked the webcam, and after a moment the non-sequitur came:
show me ur cock
I made the appropriate adjustments.
want u to draw swastika on it
‘You’re joking,’ I said, but it leaped disloyally.
fuck off and do it
‘It’s a permanent marker.’
u have 15 secs
It was something I could only achieve by ignoring, indeed by harnessing, the knowledge of how hard it would be to remove. Later, even after considerable abrasion, I kept myunderwear on with Adam for a day or so, relying on his apathy in the wake of his own activities. For a shift of gear, this transaction had impressed me considerably; as for where it was heading, I could only know if we met, something that arealnazi now regularly proffered, and I put off as flirtatiously, and apparently endlessly temporarily, as I could.
In the park, the evening sun cosseted the trees. A pair of boys in trackies approached the other way: they looked like brothers, perhaps thirteen and sixteen, pale skin elegiac in the advertising light. As they passed, the older one said from beneath his baseball cap: ‘It’s the best time to do it, ’cause you’re half asleep and not thinking about it.’ I turned at this, but as they walked away any potentially elucidating reply was quite inaudible. Sarah made a noise of delight and nudged me.
‘What?’
‘This. London. Ach, you take it for granted.’
‘You’ll be back here soon.’
‘I know. It’s why I’m smiling.’
‘I still can’t believe you have a job. And you’re Doctor Sarah now. I can’t do anything.’
‘You can! You could go on Mastermind. Specialist subject, Paki-bashing cocksuckers. Anyway, boyfriend beats job, so stop complaining.’
‘Yeah — how are things on that front?’
‘The usual desert. With the occasional slightly grubby oasis.’
‘That doesn’t sound so bad.’
‘It is when you’re thirty-one.’
‘Why?’
Sarah looked at me. We crossed the start of the Hertford Union Canal on to turf dry and patchy in the summer heat. With the paucity of trees, and the buildings across the canal low and industrial, it seemed that the city was being squashed flat under a sloping ceiling, and we would soon have to stoop.
‘You’re joking,’ I said,realizing.
‘Not really.’
‘I didn’t know you had a biological clock.’
She was silent for a moment, then pointed ahead of us. ‘You should talk to him,’ she said.
Adam was sitting on strip of lawn beside the water. As we approached he pulled a blade of grass from the ground next to him and rubbed it between his fingers. I sat down beside him. ‘Hey,’ he said.
‘So this’ — I checked the map I’d printed — ‘must be Mile End Park. Looks rather nice.’ It ran ahead of us as far as I could see.
‘Lots of green,’ said Adam.
‘It’s still new, I think. Put together out of little bits of land patched together quite slowly since the war. Used to be all buildings and bombsites. They only managed to finish it as one of the big millennium projects. All very eco.’
‘Half a century,’ he said, ‘to make a park?’
‘Things move slowly out here,’ said Sarah, who was standing over us. ‘I’m just going to go and … feed the birds.’ She wandered away on to the grass. I looked at my map again, and pointing over to Queen Mary College told Adam how it had, like the park, been assembled piecemeal from adjacent plots acquired over years. The largest had been a Sephardic bu
rial ground, purchased under a special act of Parliament. Most of its residents were disinterred in the mid-’70s and reburied, anticipating the ‘white flight’ of their living neighbours, in Brentwood, Essex; but 2,000 graves still occupied a lacuna in the middle of the campus, invisible from where we sat, but a stark prospect, presumably, for readers in the new library alongside. ‘The library was modelled on the old Reading Room of the British Museum. The London Psychogeographical Association says it’s the start of a powerful ley line used in the sacrifice of Ian Stuart.’
‘Scary,’ he said gently.
Dull green growths as big as we swayed beneath the surface of the canal, their shapes like ink dropped in water. Adam poked at them with a long twig. We sat like that, silently, for a while; I feigned hypnosis at the slow, subaqueous dance, and looked now and again to where, in the park, Sarah watched shirtless teenagers improvise around a football.
What would we do, I had asked arealnazi, if we met?
what ever i want to, he replied.
How could I be sure I was safe?
you wont
And later, when I had thought to ask:
yeah i knew nicky
‘I’d like to come with you sometime,’ I told Adam, ‘to your skinhead night. If that’s OK.’
He looked up from the water and smiled.
After some time the current brought, brushing against the canal wall so it got stuck immediately before us, a floating polystyrene tray not quite a metre square: a moulded insert from the packaging of a TV or stereo. Into its raised edge cut stems of roses had been pressed, so the dying flowers, their reds and yellows still intense, formed a sagging perimeter. In clusters on the surface of this little raft lay bananas just beginning to go brown, a pair of oranges, dried slices of mango, perhaps, flat leaves, and bright round sweets; the whole was further strewn with flowers, and there were, now that I looked closely, even striped birthday-cake candles between the rose stems. ‘What is that,’ I said, ‘some Hindu thing?’
‘Guess so.’ Adam stood and nudged the vessel on with his foot. Then he held out his hand, and pulled me up.
A huge brick column, storeys high, streaked along its length with white like smeared chalk and marked at the base with graffiti tags, rose inexplicably from the ground where the park finally tailed off, like the chimney of some massive, now absent, factory. Directly behind it, and from this perspective far smaller, appeared the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf; with all of this I was looking up and not, at first, at,the man who now approached along the towpath: lurching, unbalanced, his head dangling from his neck, too drooped to see where he was going. I had been half aware, in my peripheral vision, of people clearing his trajectory, but properly registered him just as, tripping on uneven stone or in some private spasm, he pitched suddenly forward, hunching a little as he fell, and flopped into an unmoving heap ahead of us. He let out a moan, less of pain than of vatic foreboding, which continued, unvarying in pitch or volume, with just short breaks for breath. Sarah rushed forward and tried to uncurl the man from his huddle. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked him, and after too long a pause the man shouted, ‘Yeah yeah,’ and raised his head, revealing the shock of a face that glistened almost black with blood. He began to lift himself, pushing his heavy body off the ground so it swayed above the four points, too closely clustered, of his hands and feet. He managed a few seconds of this unlikely suspension, then collapsed again and was immediately still.
Sarah made a face at us. The moaning did not resume. Bystanders, pre-empted like me and Adam of involvement, watched from the perimeter. She shook the man and spoke loudly in his ear, and he stirred and resumed his struggle. ‘You’re bleeding,’ she told him, ‘quite a lot.’
‘I’m all right,’ the man yelled to the pavement against his face, somehow wobbling up again to teeter on his feet. He moved down the towpath like a latter-day leper, bent nearly over, improbably avoiding what seemed his inevitable keel into the water. ‘I’m all right,’ he kept shouting, warding people off. A patch of still-fresh blood the size of his face pooled like melted sorbet on the stone.
*
Philip had spoken salaciously of amateur strip night at the White Swan in Limehouse, where improbably young scally lads, thin and pliant as the stalks of plants, competed, or so he claimed, entirely for the money. The blacked-out corner pub certainly seemed to hold such promise as we approached: it could almost have been made of gingerbread. But as we neared it a man yelled something I couldn’t process, and assumed to be abuse: it was only later that I worked out what he had said, some minutes after we had paid three quid each, at the counter inside, to a big man in a polo shirt. I ordered drinks and we leaned against the bar watching the dance floor. The song was one I knew, ‘The Closest Thing to Crazy’: not the Katie Melua original, but a cover version shoehorned improbably into waltz time. The dancing couples’ movements were formal and precise.
‘I don’t see any teenage strippers,’ murmured Adam, and I put my face in my hands. ‘Sorry, folks, I ballsed up. That’s what the guy outside was saying: “Tea dance”. Clearly we didn’t look the type.’
But as the waltz ended and the spinning couples slowed like a fairground ride, it became clear there was no type. Some parted with kisses or hugs and others moved off together, but the DJ’s announcement of a Boston two-step brought nearly everyone back. In pairs, and one trio, they span in a huge circle, advancing and retreating with extraordinary, anachronistic grace. There followed a foxtrot, and then a line dance, with everyone clapping their hands, which finally drew a pot-bellied Indian man out of his wallflower hesitation.
Later, when we’d bought more drinks and declined various invitations to dance, there was another waltz: the song ‘Once upon a Dream’ from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, which I had first seen with my family when I was two or three at the big cinema in St Martin’s Lane; I could still remember how it transported me. I tried to remind Sarah but she shook her head blankly. Yet personal though my reaction was, it was clear this was a big number for everybody, for to the few red and green spots that had so far illuminated the floor were added the thousand swirling particles into which the mirror ball exploded the lights now aimed at it, and which fell, in counter-movement to their circulation, across (among others):
— an elderly, big-eyed tranny in a plain skirt, with his own hair falling to his shoulders, whose thin-lipped mouth looked toothless until I saw him speak, who left the quite ancient woman he had been seated with, whom I assumed to be his mother, to take to the floor, as the song started, with a short man in his fifties, with gelled, dyed hair, a sly smile, and a hunchback;
— a tall man, with a big smile and spiky, receding hair, nimbly following his shorter, fatter partner, whose goatee and blue short-sleeved shirt convinced me for no good reason he was a train driver, the pair accelerating with breathtaking nimbleness into sudden sweeping arcs across the floor;
— a pair of lesbians, one comfortingly social-workerish in a red dress, another with a pigtail and glasses and a body like two balls separated vertically by a pole, holding each other slow and close;
— a man with a pencil moustache and Brylcreemed hair in full ballroom attire — black glittered shirt, tight trousers and special shoes — precisely leading a muscle Mary in a baseball cap and ripped-sleeved, red-checked shirt;
— a middle-aged Chinese man in a slinky, slutty transparent top with a heavy and perspiring partner of the same age in everyday work suit and glasses;
— and an amazing look-twice transvestite with perfectly bouffant hair, in gorgeous make-up and a pristine, elaborately detailed Gone with the Wind ballgown of staggering diameter, paired affectionately with an old gentleman dressed with beguilingly enigmatic intent: glasses, long white ponytail, vest and thin baby-blue bloomers that billowed around old-man legs gripped to just below the knee by white socks; who, like most of the others, was a remarkably good dancer, his work-shoed feet, as the music swelled, plotting a rapid exuberant pattern on the floor in dialogue with hers;
and I found myself, witnessing this secret rite, reaching, without looking for it or planning to, for Adam’s hand, and gripping it tight for moorage as a great swell of unanticipated, and perhaps later to be embarrassing but now unarguable and obvious and fully justified — no avoiding the word —joy came rushing to carry me.
The Craven Club
It is Thursday, 25 April 1985, a quarter-past seven in the evening, and it has just started to rain. Tony walks faster past identical black-railed Georgian houses. He stops at the door of one and is reaching for its bell when a voice behind him says, ‘Excuse me?’
At the foot of the steps is something thin and broken in a wheelchair. Behind it stands a man in his thirties with a poof moustache. He must be the one who spoke, because he now looks at Tony through the drizzle, taking in his tattoos and the patches on his jacket, and says quickly, ‘It’s nothing, sorry.’ Tony turns away, but before he can reach the bell again the one in the wheelchair calls his name.
His face looks hastily assembled, the skin rough, unevenly coloured, stretched too thin. He wears huge, medical spectacles, a patterned sweater, a baseball cap: all too big for him. ‘Tony?’ he says again.
Tony’s arms prickle with damp. He says: ‘I don’t …’
‘I wouldn’t recognize me neither.’ He smiles, good teeth splitting the surface. There is a patch on his lower cheek, towards his mouth, that looks like someone has taken sandpaper to it.
‘Ryan,’ he says. ‘Used to be mates with Dennis. You remember. What’s it been, ten years? More. You haven’t changed.’
Tony does remember: a ginger teenager, a particular shy smile in the front seat of a green convertible. He is not sure if he can see the smile’s echo now, or is just imagining it through the torrent of difference.