The Liar

by Stephen Fry

  At first the days passed slowly, each transaction nerve-racking and remarkable, but soon the quiet pulse of routine quickened the days. The young can become accustomed to the greatest drudgeries, like potato-harvesting or schoolwork, with surprising speed. Prostitution had at least the advantage of variety.

  Adrian got on pretty well with the other rent-boys. Most of them were tougher and beefier than he was, skinheads with tattoos, braces and mean looks. They didn’t regard him as direct competition and sometimes they even recommended him.

  ‘Do you know of anyone less … chunky?’ a punter might ask.

  ‘You want to try Hugo, he’ll be doing The Times crossword down the Bar Italia this time of the morning. Flared jumbo cords and a blazer. Can’t miss him.’

  Adrian was intrigued by the fact that the most prosperous, pin-striped clients went for the rough trade, while the wilder, less respectable tricks wanted more lightly muscled boys like him. Opposite poles attracted. The Jacobs wanted hairy men and the Esaus wanted smooth. It meant that he more than most had to learn to spot the sadists and nutters who were on the lookout for a sex-slave. One of the last things Adrian wanted was to be chained up, flogged and urinated over.

  He liked to think that his rates were competitive but not insulting. A blow-job was ten quid to give, fifteen to receive. After a week he made up his mind to forbid anything up the anus. Some could take it and some couldn’t: Adrian decided that he belonged to the latter category. A couple of boys tried to convince him, as he hobbled down Coventry Street after a particularly heavy night complaining that his back passage felt like a wind-sock, that he would soon get used to it, but he resolved – financially disadvantageous as it might be – that his rear section was to be firmly labelled a no-poking compartment. This was a proviso he had to make clear to clients at the opening of negotiations: between the thighs was fine – the intercrural method was, after all, endorsed by no less an authoritative source than the Ancient Greeks themselves – but he was buggered if he was going to be buggered. As long as he could get it up he didn’t mind sodomising a client, but his own bronze eye was closed to all comers.

  When business was slack he and some of the others would mix with the journalists and professional Soho drinkers in the French House in Dean Street. Gaston, the implausibly named landlord, had no objection to their presence so long as they didn’t tout for custom there. The Golden Lion next door was for that. The regulars however – embittered painters and poets for whom the seventies were an unwelcome vacuum to be filled with vodka and argument – could be savagely impolite.

  ‘We don’t need your kind of filth in here,’ a radio producer, whose watery seed Adrian had spat out only the previous night, shouted one afternoon. ‘Get the fuck out!’

  ‘How ill-bred!’ Adrian had exclaimed as Gaston ejected the radio producer instead.

  Like Adrian, most of the boys were self-employed; one or two had ponces, but in general pimping was a feature of the more highly structured sister profession of female prostitution. The boys were free to come and go as they pleased, no one was going to tell them where they could set up their stall, no one was going to take a cut of their hard-earned cash. The cash did come in at a pleasing rate but Adrian found he had little to spend it on. Drink didn’t really appeal to him much and he was too afraid of drugs to be tempted to take so much as a single pill or a single puff of anything illegal. Every day he would walk to the post office behind St Martin’s-in-the-Field and deposit his earnings into an account he had opened under the name of Hugo Bullock. It was all building up rather nicely.

  Chickens worried him, though. These were the children of eleven, twelve and thirteen. Some were even younger. Adrian was no Mother Teresa and far too much of a coward to beg them to go home. They were tougher than he was and would have told him to get lost anyway. Besides, they had left their homes because life there was worse, in their eyes at least, than life on the streets. If there was one thing those children knew, it was where and when they were unhappy: there was no cloud of morality obscuring the clarity of their states of mind. They weren’t popular with the majority of rent-boys, however, because they attracted television documentaries, clean-up campaigns and police attention, all of which interfered with and militated against the free flow of trade. Their customers, known not unnaturally as chicken-hawks, were more nervous and cautious than Adrian’s brand of client, so the chickens would have to do much more of the running than he could ever have dared to do. They would spot when they were being eyed up and step boldly forward.

  ‘Lend us ten p for the machine, mister.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Right. There you are.’

  ‘Second thoughts, Dad, let’s go away from here.’

  It was unsettling to think of them being the same age as Cartwright. Cartwright would be sixteen going on seventeen now of course, but the Cartwright he would always know was thirteen going on fourteen. The chickens leant up against the Meat Rack pushing their tightly denimed bums against the rails when, if only the stork had dropped them down a different chimney, they could have been clothed in white flannels, driving the ball past extra cover for four runs or wrestling with ablative absolutes in panelled classrooms. If there was an accurate means of measuring happiness, with electrodes or chemicals, Adrian wondered if the schoolboy would prove to be happier than the rent-boy. Would he feel less exploited, less shat upon? Adrian himself felt freer than he ever had, but he had never been sure that he was representative.

  After three weeks he decided to take advantage of his flexible hours and spend five days at Lord’s watching Thompson and Lillee tear the heart out of the English batting in the second Test. He arrived at the Grace Gate early and walked round to the back to see if he could get a glimpse of the players warming up in the nets.

  As he made his way past the Stewards’ Offices and the members’ stands he thought he caught a glimpse of a familiar figure striding towards him. He turned and started to walk in the opposite direction.

  ‘Adrian! My God, Adrian!’

  He quickened his step, but found himself blocked by the incoming tide of spectators.

  ‘Adrian!’

  ‘Oh, hello, Uncle David.’ Adrian smiled weakly up into the thunderous face of his mother’s brother.

  ‘Where the hell have you been this last month?’

  ‘Oh, you know …’

  ‘Have you been in touch with your mother and father yet?’

  ‘Well … I have been meaning to write.’

  Uncle David grabbed him by the arm.

  ‘You come along with me, young man. Sick with worry your mother’s been. Sick. How you could have dared …’

  Adrian had the lowering experience of being publicly dragged into the MCC offices like an errant schoolboy, which he supposed was by and large what he was.

  ‘Morning, David, caught a yobbo have you?’ someone called as he was pulled up the steps.

  ‘I certainly have!’

  They bumped into a tall blond man in a blazer coming the other way who smiled at them.

  ‘Morning, Sir David,’ he said.

  ‘Morning, Tony, best of luck.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said the tall man and walked on. Adrian stopped dead as it suddenly dawned on him who it had been.

  ‘That was Tony Greig!’

  ‘Well who did you expect to see here, you idiot? Ilie Nastase? This way.’

  They had reached a small office whose walls were covered with prints of heroes from the Golden Age of cricket. Uncle David closed the door and pushed Adrian into a chair.

  ‘Now then. Tell me where you are living.’

  ‘Muswell Hill.’

  ‘Address?’

  ‘Fourteen Endicott Gardens.’

  ‘Whose house is that?’

  ‘It’s a bed and breakfast place.’

  ‘Do you have a job?’

  Adrian nodded.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I’m working in the West End.’ The ‘in’ was redundant, but Uncle David was unlikely
to be impressed by the truth.

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘It’s a theatrical agency in Denmark Street. I make the coffee, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Right. There’s a pen, there’s paper. I want you to write down the address in Muswell Hill and the address in Denmark Street. Then you are to write a letter to your parents. Have you any idea what you’ve put them through? They went to the police, for God’s sake! What the hell was it all about, Adrian?’

  Here he was in another study, in another chair, facing another angry man and being asked another set of impossible questions. ‘Why do you do this sort of thing?’ ‘Why can’t you concentrate?’ ‘Why can’t you behave like everyone else?’ ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  Adrian knew that if he answered ‘I don’t know’ in a sulky voice, Uncle David would, like dozens before him, snort and bang the table and shout back, ‘What do you mean, you don’t know? You must know. Answer me!’

  Adrian stared at the carpet.

  ‘Well?’ asked Uncle David.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Adrian said sulkily.

  ‘What do you mean, you don’t know? You must know. Answer me!’

  ‘I was unhappy.’

  ‘Unhappy? Well why couldn’t you have told someone? Can you imagine how your mother felt when you didn’t come home? When no one knew where you were? That’s unhappy for you. Can you imagine it? No, of course you can’t.’

  Beyond a pewter mug at his Christening, a Bible at his Confirmation, a copy of Wisden every birthday and regular bluff shoulder-clapping and by-Christ-you’ve-grown-ing, Uncle David hadn’t taken his sponsorial duties to Adrian with any spectacular seriousness, and it was unsettling to see him now glaring and breathing heavily down his nostrils as if he had been personally affronted by his godson’s flight. Adrian didn’t think he’d earned the right to look that angry.

  ‘I just felt I had to get away.’

  ‘I dare say. But to be so underhand, so … sly. To sneak away without saying a word. That was the act of a coward and a rotter. You’ll write that letter.’

  Uncle David left the room, locking the door behind him. Adrian sighed and turned to the desk. He noticed a silver letter-opener on the desk in the shape of a cricket bat. He held it to the light and saw the engraved signature of Donald Bradman running obliquely across the splice. Adrian slipped it into the inside pocket of his blazer and settled down to write.

  Under a Portrait of Prince Ranjitsinhji,

  A funny little office near the Long Room,

  Lord’s Cricket Ground,

  June 1975

  Dear Mother and Father,

  I’m so sorry I ran away without saying goodbye. Uncle David tells me that you have been worrying about me, not too much I hope.

  I’m living in a Bed and Breakfast place in 14 Endicott Gardens, Highgate, and I have a job in a theatrical agency called Leon Bright’s, 59 Denmark Street, WC2. I’m a sort of messenger and office-boy, but it’s a good job and I hope to rent a flat soon.

  I am well and happy and truly sorry if I have upset you. I will write soon and at length to explain why I felt I had to leave. Please try and forgive

  Your doting son

  Adrian

  PS I met the new England Captain, Tony Greig, today.

  Twenty minutes later, Uncle David returned and read it through.

  ‘I suppose that will do. Leave it with me and I’ll see that it’s posted.’

  He looked Adrian up and down.

  ‘If you looked halfway decent I’d invite you to watch from the Members’ Stand.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘Come tomorrow wearing a tie and I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘That’s awfully kind. I’d love to.’

  ‘They give you days off to watch cricket, do they? From this place in Denmark Street? Just like that?’

  ‘Like the Foreign Office, you mean?’

  ‘Fair point, you cheeky little rat. And get your hair cut. You look like a tart.’

  ‘Heavens! Do I?’

  Adrian did not return to Lord’s the next day, nor any of the other days. Instead he had gone back to work and found time to hang around the Tottenham Court Road catching Tony Greig’s ninety-six and Lillee’s maddening seventy-three on the banks of televisions in the electrical appliance shop windows.

  The risk of meeting people he knew was acute. He remembered how Dr Watson in the first Sherlock Holmes story had described Piccadilly Circus as a great cesspool into which every idler and lounger of the Empire was irresistibly drained. It seemed now that as the Empire had dwindled in size, so the strength of the Circus’s pull had grown. Britain was a draining bath and Piccadilly, its plug-hole, now seemed almost audibly to gurgle as it sucked in the last few gallons of waste.

  It was part of Adrian’s job, in the centre of the whirlpool, to scrutinise every face that eddied past. Innocent passers-by tended not to meet the glances of strangers, so he usually found himself able to turn away in time if there was someone he knew in the area.

  One rainy afternoon, however, about a fortnight after the meeting with his Uncle David, while sheltering in a favourite pitch under the columns of Swan and Edgar, touting for business, he caught sight of Dr Meddlar, without his dog collar but unmistakable nevertheless, coming up the steps from the Underground.

  Term must be over, Adrian thought as he concealed himself behind a pillar.

  He watched Meddlar look left and right before crossing over to Boots the Chemists under the neon signs. Greg and Mark, a couple of skinheads that Adrian knew, were going about their unlawful business there, and he was amazed to see Meddlar stop and talk to one of them. He was trying to look casual, but to Adrian’s knowing eye it was perfectly clear that formal discussions were taking place.

  Hopping through the traffic, Adrian approached from behind.

  ‘Why, Dr Meddlar!’ he cried, slapping him bon-homously on the back.

  Meddlar spun round.

  ‘Healey!’

  ‘My dear old Chaplain, how simply splendid to see you!’ Adrian shook him warmly by the hand. ‘But let me give you a piece of advice – verb sap as we used to say at the dear old school – if they’re asking more than a tenner for you to suck their cocks, you’re being ripped off.’

  Meddlar went white and stepped backwards off the kerb.

  ‘You’re leaving?’ Adrian was disappointed. ‘Oh, if you must. But any time you’re in need of rough sex let me know and I’ll fix you up with something. But as the man said in Casablanca, “Beware, there are vultures everywhere. Everywhere, vultures.”’

  Meddlar disappeared into a mess of spray and car horns.

  ‘Remember the Green Cross Code,’ Adrian called after him. ‘Because I won’t be there when you cross the road.’

  The skinheads were not pleased.

  ‘You bastard, Hugo! We were about to score.’

  ‘I’ll pay you in full, my dears,’ said Adrian. ‘It was worth it. Meanwhile let me stand you both a Fanta in the Wimpy. There’s no action going on in this bloody rain.’

  They sat by the window, automatically scanning the crowds that blurred past.

  ‘Why did he call you “Healey”?’ asked Greg. ‘I thought your name was Bullock?’

  ‘Healey was my nickname,’ said Adrian. ‘I used to do impressions of Denis Healey the politician, you see. It sort of stuck.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘What a silly billy,’ Adrian added, by way of proof.

  ‘That’s just like him!’

  ‘Well, it’s just like Mike Yarwood anyway.’

  ‘And that guy really was a vicar?’

  ‘School Chaplain, on my life.’

  ‘Bloody hell. He was asking Terry and me if we’d tie him up. And him a bleeding Collar.’

  ‘“I struck the board and cried No More!” said Adrian, folding his hands in prayer.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘George Herbert. A poem called “The Collar”. It must have passed you by somehow. �
��Have I no garlands gay? All blasted? All wasted? Not so my heart: but there is fruit, and thou hast hands.”’

  ‘Oh. Right. Yeah.’

  ‘You were the garlands gay, the fruit. And his hands were about to lay themselves on you, I suspect. He must have forgotten how it ends. “At every word, Methought I heard one calling, Child! And I replied, My Lord.’”

  ‘You don’t half rabbit, do you?’

  ‘It’s a splendid poem, you’d love it. I can sprint down to Hatchards and buy a copy if you’d like.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Yes, well, there is that side to it too, of course.’ Adrian conceded. ‘Now, if you’ll forgive me, I’ve got to nip next door to Boots and get myself some more lotion for the old crabs.’

  About two months later he was picked up by an actor.

  ‘I know you,’ Adrian said, as they sat back in the taxi.

  The actor took off his sunglasses.

  ‘Christ!’ Adrian giggled. ‘You’re –’

  ‘Just call me Guy,’ said the actor. ‘It’s my real name.’

  A famous trick! Adrian thought to himself. I’ve turned a famous trick!

  He stayed the night, something he had been warned against. Guy had woken him up with smoked salmon and scrambled eggs and a kiss.

  ‘I couldn’t believe you were trade, honey,’ he said. ‘I saw you walk from Playland to the Dilly and I couldn’t fucking believe it.’

  ‘Oh well,’ said Adrian modestly, ‘I haven’t been at it long.’

  ‘And Hugo, too! My favourite name. It’s always been my favourite name.’

  ‘One does one’s best.’

  ‘Will you stay with me, Hugo baby?’

  The invitation couldn’t have come at a better time for Adrian. Three days before he had caught sight of himself in the mirror of the Regent Palace Hotel cloakroom and been shocked to see the face of a whore looking back at him.

  He didn’t know how or why he had changed, but he had. Only the tiniest amount of bumfluff grew on his chin and when he shaved it off he was still as smooth as a ten-year-old. His hair was shorter, but not coiffured or poncey. His jeans were tight, but no tighter than any student’s. Yet the face had screamed ‘Rent’.