by Anna Legat
They had nothing to hide. All had been laid bare between them. A pang of jealously stung me and I had to remind myself it was me who had ended it with Tony.
‘I saw Rob. Met the kids,’ she told him.
‘And?’
‘The girl is obnoxious. The boy – bland. I didn’t speak to him, couldn’t be arsed.’ Having my children referred to in such derogatory terms hurt. Coming from my sister it hurt even more. It added to the deposits of resentment and wariness of her I had been accumulating at the back of my mind since we were children.
‘How are they taking it?’
‘In one word?’ She raised her right eyebrow. ‘Chaos.’
‘Did you see Georgie?’
‘In passing. Doesn’t look promising. The reality is: if she makes it, she’ll be a vegetable.’ I pretended not to hear it, not to take it to heart. Paula’s medical expertise was thankfully non-existent. It was more wishful thinking than a diagnosis. But every word she uttered hurt.
‘I …’ Tony sighed heavily.
‘Don’t tell me you miss her?’
‘Never mind. I have you,’ he grinned with a cheeky boy’s wink.
Gratified, Paula purred and put her hand on his knee. ‘You can have me if you ask nicely.’
‘You know I’m not in the habit of asking.’
It was at this point that I expected her to break into, ‘Then take me. Take me as I am.’ Oddly, she didn’t do that. Obviously her earlier rehearsal was not meant for Tony. Instead she said, ‘The police came by when I was there.’
‘Oh?’
‘They think it wasn’t an accident. They surmised that it was planned. They have the boy’s picture. Unclear, though.’
‘A boy? You can tell it was a boy?’
‘You can tell much more than that, I guess. If you know who to look for. Are you looking for a boy? Or for a girl?’ Ha! Here she was – back on form! You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Paula was Paula. To my immense satisfaction it turned out Tony was looking for neither. He told her he had to go: just like that – out of the blue.
By the time he got to the club, Tony was drunk. I had watched him drink alone at home. He would raise a glass to his reflection in the mirror and each time salute himself with a cheery ‘Fuck you’. He wasn’t a graceful drinker. He was drinking vodka, neat. The bottle stood on the table next to an ashtray and a packet of cigarettes. I never knew Tony to be a smoker, but he was a seasoned one. The way he held a cigarette reminded me of juvenile delinquents – he held it between his forefinger and thumb, cupped in his hand, and he sucked on it in gulps as if he was afraid of being caught.
Despite our sordid affair I had never been to Tony’s house. We had both kept our respective family nests off bounds so they wouldn’t be soiled. Except that his wasn’t a family nest. It was something altogether different. It was large and pretentious. It had wood-panelled walls and an impressive library filled with leather-bound tomes and first editions. In his bedroom he had a four-poster bed with a carved headboard. In the hallway there was a display cabinet full of pistols and weapons tucked away lovingly upon dark green damask. The sitting room boasted an oil portrait of a rather attractive woman in a ball gown with a sixties hairdo, and another one of Tony. The entire house gave the distinct impression of being a gentleman’s residence. It was so overcooked that I was convinced Tony was taking the piss out of himself. And by the time I finished nosing about his home, he was pretty pissed too. He pulled off his tie and undid the top button of his immaculately white shirt. Thus dishevelled (by Tony’s standards), he went to the garage and jumped into a magnificent MGA convertible. His white shirt went beautifully with its black leather seats.
Considering the amount of alcohol in his bloodstream, he drove better than most of us do sober. He parked two streets away from the club and covered the distance on foot. And there we were: in a seedy basement club oozing sex, depravity, and money. In other words: an urban gentlemen’s club.
Tony found a place by the bar and ordered a drink. For a while he watched a pole dancer, a well-endowed siren with an incredibly flexible spine. The music in the background was jazzy; the red lighting unashamedly brothel-esque.
A woman wearing a low-backed sequin dress planted herself next to Tony and asked him for a drink. I gathered she had to be at least £300 an hour and marvelled why on earth Tony would choose to pay for sex if he could have it free of charge with any woman he set his eyes on. The added value factor of potential venereal diseases must have played a part.
He ordered her a drink and – with a pleasant smile – told her to piss off. I felt reassured. Perhaps he was there for the music.
When he downed his own drink, he edged towards a young man sitting in an obscure corner of the bar with his legs crossed. He was so young milk was dripping from his nose. He was wearing a tight T-shirt with a print that said: I don’t come cheap. Surely, I thought, Tony was going to ask the male prostitute where the toilets were. Tony liked women, I knew that for a fact.
‘Do you do home visits?’ Tony asked. The toilet was obviously the last thing on his mind.
‘For a price, and a taxi fare back here,’ the boy stretched. On close inspection I could tell he was wearing thick foundation and wasn’t yet shaving regularly. His eyelashes were elongated with black mascara. They reminded me of Emma, but I quickly banished that parallel from my mind. He batted his eyelashes. His pupils were huge.
‘Follow me. Keep a distance.’
Somehow I felt less resentful about seeing Tony with another man than I had when I first saw him with my own sister. That is not to say that I wasn’t shocked. All that crap about the laws of nature, abominations, and travesties crossed my mind as I watched those two, stark naked, indulging in an act of same-sex intercourse. To be accurate, Tony was indulging; the young man looked more like he was enduring. The roles of the dominant and the submissive were clearly delineated. To put it bluntly, Tony was doing all the fucking and the young man was putting up with it. Obviously for money and little else. Pleasure didn’t come into it for the poor bugger. I wondered if Tony had realised that or whether in his macho, egomaniac mind he believed he was doing the boy a sexual favour. It was hard to tell. Right through the act, just like in those days when he did it with me, his face showed no emotion. It was as if his mind was blanking out his actions. Tony was a sexual sphinx.
When he finished, he rolled off the boy’s backside and scrambled under the bed. The young man gazed after him with mild curiosity. He was also pulling on his trousers, struggling with his fly, tugging at it with shaky fingers. You could taste his discomfort: he was ashamed and wanted to cover his nakedness and forget all about it. Clearly, the young man wasn’t gay out of choice. There was probably a girlfriend somewhere in the back of his cupboard, a pretty thing kept in the dark about her man’s sources of income.
‘About the money,’ he said quietly, his earlier cockiness gone with the wind.
‘In a napkin holder on the table. In the kitchen.’
Tony returned with a whip. It was a just an ordinary horse riding whip, nothing kinky, and perhaps that’s why it sent a shiver down my spine. The young boy winced. ‘You didn’t say anything about –’
‘That’d spoil the fun, now, wouldn’t it?’
‘I don’t do that stuff. Keep the money,’ the boy was visibly scared. He was trying hurriedly to get his T-shirt on.
Tony towered over him in his masculinity and his unabashed nakedness. He passed the whip to the boy. ‘Hit me with it.’
The boy picked it up. He looked surprised. ‘What? Now?’ I, too, thought the whipping stuff came before, not after, the fornication. Some sort of deviant, back-to-front foreplay if old wives’ tales were anything to go by.
‘Now. You want to hit me, don’t you?’
The young man must have seen it all in his line of work, yet he was uncertain. There was something unconventional about the sequence of events here. He stared at Tony, calculating if hitting him, as he had asked, would
lead to retaliation, and then, how far the escalation of violence would go. The boy’s pupils were still dilated, making his eyes look as if there were huge holes in them.
‘Hit me, you twat! You know you want to. I fucked you and you didn’t want to be fucked. Even for the money … If your girl knew, she’d be sick. Hit me. Don’t be a wimp.’
Tony raised his hand and, defensively, the young man raised the whip. He struck. It got Tony on the forearm. He smiled.
‘Is that all you’ve got? I didn’t feel a thing.’
The boy struck again. And again. With each strike, he became more forceful. All his strength and all his anger went into punishing Tony. In the end, they both collapsed on the bed, spent.
A couple of hours later the young man got up. He listened to Tony’s breathing with his ear to his mouth. He examined the bruises on his back. There were a couple of deeper cuts, but mainly there were just angry red stripes. Strangely, there was no sign of any earlier scars. It had to be the first time for Tony. Quietly, the young man collected his socks and shoes and tiptoed barefoot out of the bedroom. He found the money folded neatly inside a napkin holder on the kitchen table. He counted the cash and put it in his trouser pocket. That was when he saw the watch. It was a gold Cartier with a brown leather strap, worth a good few thousand pounds. He put it on his wrist; admired it briefly against the light; took it off and placed it back on the table. He squatted to put on his socks and trainers. Before leaving, he stole another glance at the watch. It took him a few seconds to think about it. Chances were he would bump into Tony again, at the club. Still, the temptation was greater: he swiped the watch and put it into his pocket.
‘I’m a light sleeper,’ Tony was at the bottom of the stairs in the hallway. He was wearing a dressing gown.
‘Sorry I woke you up. I found the money, thanks.’
‘Do you want to call a taxi?’
‘No, I’ll walk. Keep the money and walk.’
‘Very prudent of you … before you go, I was wondering if you’d like to see my pistol collection.’
‘Not into guns, sorry.’
‘Nevertheless, I’ll show you.’ Tony put his arm around the boy. On the face of it, it was a friendly gesture, but in reality it wasn’t friendly at all. It was an order. The boy was marched to the display cabinet. Tony took a key out of a small wooden box and opened the cabinet. He picked up a pair of identical pistols and passed them both to the boy who held them awkwardly as if they were about to go off. ‘My favourite: a pair of 20-bore Bohemian flint pistols. Mid-eighteenth century. Just look at the side-plates. Can you see? Amazing scene – cavalrymen in combat. If they could tell a story, what story would they tell?’ Tony marvelled. ‘Look at the craftsmanship. They don’t make things like that any more. Be careful!’ he relieved the boy of the weapons and placed them back in the display case. ‘I paid over ten thousand pounds for them. An excellent investment. And this one here,’ he passed another gun to the poor bugger, ‘is a Parabellum POW Krieghoff, German, 1937. I love this one here, Makarov, Russian … what’s special about it is that it is the silenced version. You wouldn’t hear the shot, just a “puff”. Want to hold it? It isn’t loaded.’
The boy took it.
‘Now to this one,’ Tony was holding a pretty ordinary and modern-looking gun. He cocked it. ‘I won’t let you have this one because this one is loaded. I got it from a client of mine. Nasty piece of work, but he was grateful and wanted to show his gratitude … Never know when it may come in handy,’ he said. It isn’t licensed. Officially it doesn’t exist. If I used it, it couldn’t be traced back to me or anyone else.’ He was pointing the gun at the boy’s stomach. ‘If I shot you with this gun and dumped your body somewhere quiet, no one would be any wiser … so why don’t we start again? So we can be friends … we’ll go back to the kitchen and you’ll put on the table something that you found there that doesn’t belong to you. Does that sound like a deal?’
The young man nodded slowly. He reached into his pocket and took out the watch. He passed it to Tony.
‘No. On the table. That’s where you found it, correct?’
They went to the kitchen. The boy did as he was told. Tony picked up the watch, looked at it and placed it back on the table. Sliding his unlicensed gun into his dressing-gown pocket, he sat down and bid the youth to do the same. The young man complied.
‘That’s better,’ Tony smiled. He offered the boy a cigarette from his packet on the table, but the boy declined.
‘I don’t smoke, sorry.’
‘Mind if I do?’
The boy shook his head. Tony lit a cigarette. ‘Would you believe me if I told you I was just like you? My mother died when I was eighteen. Cancer. Single parent. She was an artist, free spirit. No husband. No means, you know the kind? Adorable, really!’ Tony took a sip of vodka from the bottle and passed the bottle to the young man. ‘Drink.’ The youth did. Tony watched him put the bottle down on the table. ‘I was just about to start my first year, reading Law. Whoring myself was the easiest way of getting by. I had the grooming, just didn’t have the money to go with it.’
Tony! A rent boy! Well, it shouldn’t surprise me that much. After all, in our profession we always sell ourselves to the highest bidder. For Tony it must’ve been a natural progression.
‘So you see, my man, I was just like you …’ He drilled the boy with a steely gaze. ‘I imagine you have a life outside the club?’
‘I’m doing Psychology.’
‘Psychology? Wow! Girlfriend?’
‘Yes.’
‘I knew you weren’t queer. None of us is. Just a means to an end.’ Tony stubbed his cigarette. ‘Except that, unlike you, I didn’t go around thieving from my clients. I was grateful to them. They put me through a Law degree. And they were grateful to me too: for being discreet. We’re good friends now. They helped me. I helped them. We still help each other. It’s a small world out there … did you really think I wouldn’t find you?’
‘Sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.’
‘You have to learn quickly in this profession or sooner or later your arse will wash up on a beach somewhere around Weston-super-Mare. Do you understand?’
‘I think I do.’
‘You have a name?’
‘Etienne.’
‘Etienne, huh? Stage name, then. Your real name must be something like Jack or Sam. Etienne will do for me. Etienne is a nice courtesan’s name: pliable, gentle …’
‘I want to get out of this business. I don’t want to do this.’
‘The sooner you learn to do it well, the sooner you can get out of doing it,’ Tony smiled. He slid his Cartier across the table, to the boy. ‘Take it. And next time, just ask nicely. Don’t accept less than three grand for it.’
The boy looked, incredulous.
‘Take it, I said. It’s a gift – we’re friends. Take it and get out.’
Rob and Mark took it in turns to sit by my bedside. I was glad of their company. It was a refreshing change after Tony, as if I had crossed from Purgatory back into the land of the living. You would think that hospital wasn’t quite the place to live life to the fullest considering that most of its residents were half-dead already, but Tony was dead through and through. He was the Devil incarnate, if you believed in such things. The thought that there had been a time when I consorted with him filled me with dread. I had never really known the man; I hadn’t known I was playing with fire. I was relieved it was over. Rob and Mark, sitting by my bedside, were my guarantee of sanity. I still had a family: a loving husband and two amazing kids. Nothing was lost. I just had to get my arse into gear, and get better. I had so much to live for.
‘How is she?’ Mark asked.
‘No change.’
‘Did you speak to the doctor?’
‘He hasn’t got much to say. They’ll do a MRI scan on Monday. They’ll know something then.’
‘You look like shit. Go home, Dad. Get some sleep. I’ll sit here for a bit.’
&n
bsp; ‘I think I’ll go back to work tomorrow. This waiting is doing my head in.’
I stayed with Mark. I couldn’t help noticing that he had put on a fresh T-shirt which said: Drab and proud of it. He also smelled of cologne and was clean-shaven. Gel-set, his fringe was stiffened into flamboyant rigor mortis. I realised he was hoping for a fix of Chi. The nurse that walked in was anything but Chi. She was middle-aged and plain, not too tall, not too short, not too skinny and not too fat – the sort of non-entity you could only describe in negatives. Mark glanced at her, hopefully at first, then instantly deflated. She went on with my chart updates; Mark took out his mobile. It came to life with a ding-dong. Unlike Chi, this nurse didn’t tell him to switch it off. He checked for messages. There weren’t any. He typed one to Charlotte: Soz 4 being an rs. C u swn? X
The nurse had left. Mark watched her close the door behind her. He made sure his message had gone. He stared at his silent mobile and kept on waking it each time it went to sleep. ‘What was I thinking?’ he asked me. I wished I knew and could tell him. I was ecstatic he talked to me. Someone did at last. Recently, people tended to talk about me rather than to me.
At last the telephone whooshed in a message. It was from Charlotte: Cum now silly X
I wasn’t sure which kind of cum she had in mind, but Mark was in the know. He keyed in: On my way X
To me he said, ‘See you, Mum!’
Charlotte’s mother opened the door. She was all smiles, smelled of talcum powder, and wore fresh lipstick: it shone like a dung beetle’s backside.
‘Mark! Come in! Char’s upstairs.’
Mark was taken aback. It was close to midnight, yet the house was lit from head to toe and Mrs Palmer looked fresh as a daisy. ‘I hope it’s not too late. Maybe I should come back tomorrow.’
‘Don’t be silly! Come in. We’re practically family!’
She led him to the sitting room where Mr Palmer sat stiffly, pretending to be reading a newspaper. I knew he was only pretending because his reading glasses were on top of his head.
‘Steve, look who’s here!’
Feigning surprise, Mr Palmer got to his feet, shook Mark’s hand and patted him on the back, mumbling his delight. There was a white toothpaste ring around his lips. ‘We were just about to …’ He gazed helplessly at his wife. She smiled a full-toothed smile. ‘Tea?’