by Liam Livings
“What for?”
“Too much. Too strong. My friend told me. It’s just… I’ve been wanting to be here with you now since I first saw you in the shop, and I’ve got so much to say I don’t know what to start with. I want to make up for all the lost time when we should have been doing stuff together but we kept missing each other.” He paused, taking a breath, then filling his mouth with a bit of poppadum.
“Why did you never just turn up to the nights I told you I was at?”
Before he could answer, the waiter brought our mains—a silver dish of sizzling bright-red chicken tikka masala and a black metal plate of sliced prawns in a yellow sauce, accompanied by enough rice to feed all the customers in all the restaurants on our side of Brick Lane. The waiter asked if we wanted anything else. I was tempted to say ‘just to get to the bottom of this little matter, and then maybe to see what Paul looks like naked’, but I simply smiled and shook my head.
The waiter gone, Paul continued, “I didn’t know you were. So if I turned up, told you I was there, just cos I knew you, it felt a bit…I dunno…too much. Too…serious. You know?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“But I always enjoyed our little chats. I used to look out for you every time the bell rang over the door. Sad, innit?”
“Not as sad as the time I spent an afternoon arranging on the counter all the films you’d mentioned were your classics and making sure I rented them myself—for free, of course, staff discount—so when you came back I could talk about them with you.”
“That’s well sweet. Wicked sweet, that is.” He smiled as he forked some food into his mouth. “No point us renting them again, then?”
“I didn’t say that. I’m sure we can make some arrangement. Do you live with your parents?”
He nodded. “Can’t afford anything else. Not on what the record shop pays me. You do too, don’t you?”
“Yep.” I shrugged. “Mum’s pretty cool, though.”
“What d’ya mean?”
“Everything, the clubbing—and I mean, everything about the clubbing. She’s the most liberal, not-arsed mum I could ever wish for. Sometimes I wish she’d be a bit more arsed, tell me off for something, like other kids’ parents. She cares about me. Wants me to take care of myself. It’s just she’s worried about different things than most parents. When I was at school, I used to listen in amazement to the stuff others got grounded and bollocked for. And me, it was carte blanche do whatever, as long as it didn’t hurt anyone else. Came home from school when I was fifteen or sixteen and Mum had a condom, a spliff and an E on the kitchen table. She sat me down, told me to make sure to wear the first, there’s a lot of it about at the moment.”
We shared a look that, with nothing, said everything.
I continued, “And she said if I was gonna smoke spliffs to stick to weed and avoid skunk cos she’d heard lots of bad shit about skunk and people totally losing it and going paranoid with too much. Finally, she said if I was gonna get into the disco biscuits—and to be honest, by then I was already pretty well into them, that’s the advantage or disadvantage of having older friends—I must drink plenty of water, avoid booze, and if I felt like curling up into a ball, that’s not good E and should be avoided. Don’t buy ’em in the clubs, she said too. Best off getting someone to trust and buy from them.”
“Your old dear said this to you?”
“Yep. Every word.”
“Wicked. How comes you’re not, like totally fucked up and always on it?”
“It’s like swearing,” I said as the waiter collected our dishes and offered us a dessert menu.
Paul shook his head, so I did the same, and the waiter disappeared.
Paul said, quietly, behind his hand, “I had an Indian pudding once. It was shit. Same when I went to Chinatown, some lie chi and fried banana crap. Never again. We could go to Soho and get something from one of the cafés on Old Compton Street. If you like. Otherwise, I’m not bothered. Unless you’ve gotta get back. Whatever you want. But just no pudding here for me, all right?”
“Noted. Understood, Paul doesn’t do pudding at Indian or Chinese restaurants.” I was looking forward to getting to know hundreds of little quirks and foibles like this about Paul.
We sat in silence, paid the bill—split fifty-fifty, no who did/didn’t have rice, I’ll pay, no, you pay rubbish; it was refreshingly simple. I allowed myself the briefest moment to hope the rest of Paul and Tom would be as simple too.
Walking back to the Tube station, he said, “We could go back to mine. If you like. The olds aren’t in. They’re never in. On holiday, working, something.”
“Chiswick, isn’t it?”
“They say Turnham Green, but yeah, Chiswick. Well remembered.”
The thought of the hour’s Tube journey out there wasn’t too appealing, and although I knew we both wanted to go further than the opportunity the restaurant had allowed us, I didn’t want to rush this. I wanted to take it slowly. I’d waited eleven months to get this far and didn’t want to spunk my relationship load too soon.
I looked at my watch. “I’ve got work tomorrow, and I was up early. So I think it’s best if I just, you know, get back to the delights of Brockley.” If I slept with him on this first date, I’d never see him again. I wanted more than a one-night thing. If Paul wanted to see me again—which I really wasn’t sure why he would—then I’d make us wait to sleep together.
“Me going out with a hard man from South East London. Who’d have thunk it?”
There was a bit of awkward hug, brief kiss on neck and longer hug moment, both of us conscious of where we were, then he said, “I want to hear more about this mother of yours. This swearing thing you started about.”
“Yeah. That’d be nice. Next time.”
“Next time.” He leaned forward, hugged me again and gave me a slightly lingering kiss on the cheek before pulling back and winking a big brash, winky-wink at me and treating me to his broad, cheeky grin.
We went through the ticket barriers and waited on opposite sides of the platform, him heading west, me heading east. As his train arrived, he made the phone motion with his right hand, then jumped on and disappeared in a dirty carriage of strangers, taking him back to West London to an empty house, with no parents.
What a stupid idiot I am. Why have I passed up a guaranteed shag for a hot cocoa and a debrief with Mum?
***
Our next date was the cinema in Leicester Square to see Basic Instinct, a film everyone had been talking about and saying was unmissable, especially for the Sharon Stone legs-crossing scene. It wasn’t a particularly ‘us’ sort of film, and understandably neither of us were remotely interested in seeing Sharon Stone’s lady parts, but we both agreed we had a lot of dating time to make up, so it felt right to go there rather than shout above the throbbing beat of music at some underground nightclub behind Waterloo station, or some other shit date.
We sat in silence at first as the film started, not knowing what to say about a man being killed by a woman with an ice pick in the throes of passion, but once we started holding hands, Paul leaned closer and murmured, “I dunno how they’re gonna top that.” I giggled slightly and was met with a loud ssshhhhh from behind us.
At the scene where Michael Douglas shoots two tourists on a massive I’m on cocaine and I think I’m the king of the world high, I couldn’t keep it inside any longer, since we’d both been passing minor critical comments to each other to this point. I laughed, loudly.
Paul put his hand on my mouth, shushing me. “We need to either shut up of ship out. Which is it to be?”
I stopped laughing, and turned resolutely back to the screen, holding Paul’s hand for the tense moments of what we’d managed to successfully reduce to an over-the-top farce with ice picks and hard-boiled detectives.
When Michael Douglas read the final pages of Sharon Stone’s book, I whispered to Paul, “I don’t give a monkey’s what happened to any of these vile characters. How d’you fancy a drink or some
thing?”
Not needing much persuasion, he immediately stood, and we left, to a chorus of “Get out the way!” and “What’s wrong?” as we giggled, climbing across seats and into the aisle.
In the cool air of evening, amid the crowds of tourists having photos taken, taking photos, buying tickets from theatre booths and generally milling about and wondering at London, we sat on a bench in the small grassed area in the middle of Leicester Square.
Paul offered me a cigarette, lit it, then lit one for himself and said, “Hype, eh? Same as always. Something’s meant to be everywhere, everyone says you’ve gotta see it, and you see it and it’s one big fat disappointment.” He inhaled deeply on his cigarette. “What a load of shit, eh?”
I nodded. “Where now?”
“Any-fucking-where. I read some flyers someone left in the shop this week—there’s a big housey, trancey night someplace down out the back of Paddington station. Looked good.”
I crinkled my nose. “Could do, but will we be able to talk?”
“If we go to a quiet room. There’s three or four rooms of different music and some bar bits between the dance rooms, which don’t have music playing. You’ll still hear it, but it’s not loud, like in the other rooms.”
“Or we could go Soho so I could snog your face off. Cos that’s what I’ve been wanting to do all week. Every night we’ve spoken on the phone, I’ve wanted to jump in a cab and come round yours just to see you, to kiss your face.” I stared into his eyes. I was obviously getting better at being more forthright about what I wanted. He’d not made me feel as small as I thought I was. Yet. Mind you, I reminded myself, it had taken the ex a few months to work up to full-on piss-taking, bullying and verbal abuse. And it had taken me almost a year to leave him. That proves how useless I really am! Shaking that thought from my mind, I concentrated on Paul, now standing in front of me, and my increasing desire to have sex with him.
Up to that point, we’d managed a quick fumble a while after we started seeing each other; he’d come to one of my nights at a small club in Brixton. The Fridge, cos it’s, like, so cool. Too Cool for Skool, the flyers said. It was a bouncy, housey crowd, who all liked to get completely bouncy and chemically enhanced as soon as they arrived, if not before. Slinky Simon joked they handed disco biscuits out with tickets, but they didn’t.
Anyway, we’d met there, and after my set, when he’d come up to the DJ booth and told me how much of a wicked time he’d had dancing and dancing until he thought his heart would burst out of his chest, he pulled me towards him, leaned across the booth and snogged my face off for what seemed like an age, until the next DJ asked if we were all right and did we need a room and could he start his set now?
We’d danced together, gradually taking our clothes off until, both topless with sweat pouring down our chests and a sheen of glitter across Paul’s, we’d ended up in the gents’, in a cubicle, necking Paul’s last pill with a bottle I’d been refilling with tap water throughout the night, and he’d kissed me.
We’d got a bit more involved, even though someone had been banging on the door for us to get a move on, and he’d reached into my underpants, and I’d reached into his, squeezing him, trying to expand and respond to our kissing, which we’d been doing for so long we both had stubble rash. The great, really sexy stubble rash you get when you’re so into a guy you don’t want to stop kissing him, not for anything, and the next morning you’re proud of the stubble rash cos it shows how much into the other guy you were. That sort of stubble rash.
Anyway, we wanted to whip each other out in the cubicle and give each other a go, but unfortunately, at that late stage of the evening, both of us were very much the worse for wear and although not quite completely banjaxed, we were certainly flying pretty high, we hadn’t suitably responded enough to get anything much going. So we’d pushed ourselves back in our underpants, laughed, shrugged and left the cubicle to dance until the club closed.
Now, I said, “Let’s get pissed. Like, really pissed. What you working tomorrow?” Alcohol always helped me feel more confident.
“Sunday, closed. You?”
“Late. Midday till close.” I paused, a glint in my eyes at a plan hatched. “Ready?”
***
We were on the third round of pints in a Soho bar, laughing at everything and anything, banging our hands on the table as we told jokes, stories, and generally being fucking hilarious together.
It was wonderful. I chuckled to myself.
“What?” Paul chinked his pint glass with mine.
“Nothing. Silly.”
“Come on. You’ve seen my ecstasy-shrivelled cock, I think we’re beyond silly, don’t you?”
“It’s just… You know how you think things should be, how you think it’s going to turn out, and somehow you stop and it’s nothing like that?”
“That…is life.”
“Like, if someone had told me I’d finish school and carry on in the video rental place I’d worked when I was at college, I’d have laughed. But you know what? I don’t mind it, now I’m doing it.”
“And you’ve got your DJing. Don’t forget that.”
“It’s nothing.” I waved it away.
“It’s not nothing. It’s wicked. Wish I’d done something like it.”
“You could. Why not? You know the tracks. You’re like an encyclopaedia of music. Every time I come in, you know who’s new, who’s old, what’s classic, what’s going up, what the clubs were playing—everything. That’s wicked.”
He smiled at me using his word for the first time. “I don’t push myself, I suppose.”
“Why not?”
“I knew you were gonna ask that. I dunno. I don’t wanna say it’s Mum and Dad. I don’t wanna be one of those poor little rich kids who blames his parents for everything that’s wrong with his life. Poor me, and my private school, monthly allowance funded life. I must be crying to the cashpoint every time I get the money.”
This, was all news to me. I’d known his parents were well off, but none of the rest. It must have been the alcohol loosening things up for him, and now I knew he really was out of my league. I sat in silence, sipping the last of my pint, willing him to continue. This was what I’d wanted for our date, not some stupid Hollywood blockbuster film with ice picks and a no-knickers heroin.
“Anyway, we’re not talking about me, we’re talking about you—how it’s not what you think it will be or something. You’re much more interesting than me.”
“I’m so not.”
“You are, you know. With your liberal parents and your DJing and your plan. I don’t have a plan. I don’t need a plan. That’s the thing about parents like mine—you don’t need a plan.” He shook his head. “I said I’m not whingeing about them. And here I am, whingeing about them.”
We sat in silence for a few moments. I pointed to our empty glasses, already feeling pretty pissed, but not sure where the evening was going to take us.
“More is good. Three pints is great, four’s gonna be brilliant, and five’s gonna be—”
“Wicked?”
“Bloody right, wicked.”
I returned with another round and told him about how I’d thought our dates should be all like in the films—dinner and then drinks, and then a film, and then a kiss at the doorstep, and then, and then… But now I was here, with him in the pub, just being, with no film playing in my head I felt we should be living up to, I was having the most fun we’d had together so far.
“Me too,” he said, with that wink and that smile.
And when he said that, with the wink and the smile, I knew I was in so much trouble with this man, that I’d follow him, do anything that sounded fun with him, that I was jumping onto the Ferris wheel of our relationship while he sat in the booth, reaching out for me to take his hand. And we’d soar into the sky, high above everyone else milling around at the fairground, because I knew instinctively Paul would be my very own fairground of fun.
CHAPTER 4
I STA
RTED HAVING Paul in the DJ booth with me. It was now DJ Tom plus one.
It was after one of these DJ Tom plus one nights a few weeks later that we jumped into a cab back to Paul’s in Chiswick, both babbling about how well it had gone.
“I could feel the waves from the dancers when I picked the songs. It was like a bolt of energy from the clubbers.” Paul held my hand, massaging it gently in the back of the cab.
“I was absorbing the energy from the dance floor, from the booth, I could feel it, and that translated into the mix of what I played next.”
“Wicked,” he said with his smile-grin.
“Did you see how it went down when Slinky Simon dropped a beat?”
He shook his head. “No fucking mercy for a dropped beat. Well bad.” He leant forward and kissed me. “You know we got the house to ourselves tonight?”
I nodded. He’d mentioned it a few times—earlier that day, during the set, and as we’d left the club when I’d complained of feeling a bit tired and he’d said there was no place for being tired, not yet.
We’d been kissing and cuddling like horny teenagers whenever we were together in the club but hadn’t had the opportunity to go any further. Yet. Paul said he wanted it to be perfect. Magic. Wicked.
We’d arrived. He paid the cab driver, thanked him and led me through the wide wood-and-stained-glass door of the sprawling three-storey Victorian detached house, just off Turnham Green itself, in the rich heartlands of Chiswick, nowhere near the rough Acton bits.
He danced me into the kitchen, sat me at the breakfast bar and made us tea. He swooped past, kissed me, lingering for just long enough, then disappeared into the living room where he remained for a while. He shouted for me to stay there with the tea and feel free to smoke if I wanted.
“You sure?” The kitchen all looked so immaculate, so ‘Ideal Homes Exhibition’, with its shiny black work surfaces, shiny metal oven, microwave, fridge, freezer, hob. The bin had opened when Paul waved his hand in front of it, magically, just like that. It was like some sort of a Dalek stood in the corner, waiting to consume the family’s rubbish.