Manchester Slingback

by Nicholas Blincoe

  Jake looked down the bleak corridor, curving away to their left with the granite sweep of the Crescent. The wind had blown the rain across the deck of the walkway, leaving only a ragged line, closest to the wall, still dry. Where Johnny was stood, leaning out over the parapet, the wind sprayed round his head.

  Jake motioned back to the open door of the flat. ‘Come on. We going to stand in the rain? I’ll go up and talk to him.’

  He led the way. At the door to the living-room, he held up a finger for Rebecca – give me one minute – and walked up the stairs ahead of Fairy and Johnny. At the closed door to Johnny’s room, he stopped and waited.

  ‘So he’s upset. You reckon someone should make some tea.’

  Johnny’s shoulders slumped. He said, ‘I’ll get it. Maybe I need a coffee.’

  He was dreaming. What were the chances of finding milk in the flat? And anyway, Jake had never even seen Johnny brew up before. Jake waited outside the bedroom for a moment longer, listening to Johnny’s feet drop on the stairs. At the foot of the stairs, he heard him say, ‘Anyone want to put the kettle on?’

  Fairy was shooting looks from Jake to the door. Jake sighed, said, ‘Okay,’ and pushed into the room.

  Kevin Donnelly was the shape under the duvet, a shallow heap across Johnny’s double mattress. The bottle of coloured Pernod stood at the foot, Jake moved it a few inches to the side and sat at the edge of the mattress. He nodded to Fairy, implying You take the other side.

  Fairy hunched over the figure, delicately drew the duvet back and said, ‘Y’alright?’

  Kevin Donnelly’s face came up – just as slapped and bitten as it always looked. There was a smudge under one of his eyes but no sign of fresh tears. The boy had pulled himself together, or pulled himself in. Something in the boy’s eyes was both accusatory and bitter. ‘I’m okay.’

  Jake was ready to brush it off as nonsense. If that was the way the boy wanted to play it, who wanted to get personal?

  Fairy said, ‘He was at Colchester Hall.’

  Jake knew the name: a care home close to Cheadle Hulme, Stockport.

  ‘Yeah, when?’

  Kevin was sitting up now, the duvet had fallen off his shoulders onto his lap. ‘I left a year back.’

  Fairy was saying that Donnelly had been on remand since then, but Jake wasn’t listening. He was looking at the pin-scrawled tattoos across Kevin’s arms and shoulders: spiders’ webs, the wavering square letters ‘MUFC’, fragments like ‘cut here’ followed by dotted lines, ‘skins forever’, ‘Madness’ and ‘kev kev kev’. All in biro-blue, almost the shade of the veins that spun across his arms and chest below the too white skin.

  Donnelly saw him looking, flinched and drew the duvet back onto his shoulders.

  ‘Colchester Hall,’ said Jake. He didn’t know what else to say. They’d met a few other boys who’d passed through the place… rentboys on the streets around the Bus Station and others trying to blag a drink in Good-Day’s. Counted besides the ones they knew, the ones who decided to make a career out of getting fucked over, how many others were spread around Manchester?

  Fairy said, ‘He was there three years. He should have been released earlier but his housemaster persuaded the social workers he needed more time, saying he was beginning to get through to him.’

  A line like that – a dry, dropped hint about the horror – always cropped up in a story about Colchester Hall. Every story so closely followed the same patter, Jake almost believed the place was fiction. If it was real, why had it never been busted? Then he’d meet someone else who’d been there and he’d get a new jag from the story, an edge that made him know it was real. Then he was left wondering, if a place like that existed, how could he be one of the few people who knew what happened there? It seemed impossible when he’d never even seen the place, couldn’t even say exactly where it was.

  Kevin Donnelly, chicken-wrapped in the duvet, said, ‘You do like men?’

  Fairy nodded, Yeah sure. Jake shrugged, noncommittal.

  Donnelly said, ‘This one master, he told me he could tell just by looking at me. That it was what I wanted, so in that way I was just like him. He told me I could stay in his room all the time, except when he needed it for another boy.’

  ‘He kept you in his room?’ Jake spat the words out. ‘What? Chained down?’

  ‘I wasn’t chained.’ Donnelly’s voice was quiet… but there was nothing simple in what he was saying.

  Fairy was crying to reason with him, saying that tape was rape. ‘Or what about a teacher who forces himself on a girl, he can say she likes boys, so what? It still wouldn’t make sense.’

  ‘Most of the time, it was better in his room. Once he’d told everyone else I was a puff, I had them on my case. Kicking the shit out of me or fucking me…’

  Johnny walked in, holding two mugs and slurping the top off one of them. ‘You want a brew?’

  He held it out for Donnelly, who took it.

  Jake said, ‘What’s happening downstairs?’

  Johnny shrugged. ‘I’m wasted, man. I think they’re all still here.’ Turning to Donnelly, ‘Look, there’s no problem you being here. I wouldn’t have asked you, if there was. But I got to crash. You can take the settee or whatever, any way you like. But I got to get my head down.’

  Jake nodded vigorously, ‘Find yourself somewhere to kip. There’s no problem.’ He was on his feet now. ‘I got to get downstairs, you know…’ He gave another shrug. When he left, he was holding the bottle of Pernod.

  Jake detoured by the bathroom. Looking in the cabinet mirror, he saw his slicked-back hair had loosened. A shock of black swung over his forehead. He had to say he liked the effect. Looking down, he saw someone had left the bottle of poppers on top of the sink. He took two quick shots of Pernod then unscrewed the poppers’ cap and took a whiff of that. The amyl gave the last of the amphetamine a kick-start. He wasn’t laughing this time but he felt juiced up. The idea of flailing round the settee with Rebecca some more, wondering what she wanted from him or, worse, feeling guilty because he either wasn’t talking or wasn’t listening to her, he wasn’t up for that… a too-slow game for Billy the Whizz.

  The bathroom door pushed opened and Domino walked in, fresh out of his suspected diabetes stupor but still looking dazy-eyed. Jake stood there with a bottle in either hand and his face pounding red. He said, ‘Go ahead, mate.’

  Domino unzipped over the toilet and started peeing. After a second, Jake said, ‘Hutch up.’

  They stood either side of the bowl, plaiting golden streams as Jake felt his penis thicken in his fingers and watching Domino’s piece, jerking as it filled with blood. He stroked his own and popped his foreskin back over the bell-end. Domino did the same. As they shook together, Jake whispered, ‘Straight across the hall, the black door.’

  He let Domino go first, nodding directions from the shelter of the bathroom door. When he darted past the open door to Johnny’s bedroom, he saw they were all still there, drinking out of the mugs. He thought no one saw him.

  *

  He and Domino were unbuckled, facing each other with their trousers around their ankles. Jake had hold of Domino’s buttocks in both his hands and the boy’s shirt open. He bent him backwards so his mouth could reach to suck on his nipples.

  Fairy was stood in the doorway, looking in.

  ‘You twat, Jake.’

  ‘Get out, Fairy.’

  ‘What about Sean? What about the girl down there?’

  Jake unlocked Domino and took a step out of his trousers and a step towards Fairy at the doorway. ‘I don’t give a fuck. Get out.’ He had his fist curled, only at waist level, but he was raising it higher.

  Fairy backed out, shocked silent. Jake slammed the door behind him. When he turned, Domino had dropped to the bed and was beginning to unlace his Doc Marten’s.

  Chapter Seven

  DI Green was already on the platform, smoking the cigarette he had been waiting for since Stafford. Jake gathered his bag, his coat, he
lped the soap actress heft her suitcase down the train steps and onto a trolley. Green never lifted a hand. He stood looking at the woman as though he was still suspicious of her… she might turn out to know his ex-wife after all.

  As Jake joined him, Green stretched and straightened, pulling back from the sign he had been leaning against so Jake finally got to read it: MANCHESTER PICCADILLY. That was it, the moment the city chose to wake up and hit him between the eyes.

  ‘So, now I’m here,’ Jake said. ‘What do you expect me to do?’

  DI Green took another drag on his cigarette, letting the actress get a good head-start before he followed her towards the ticket gate. ‘Do? I don’t know. Just ask around, gather information and pass it on.’

  ‘Ask who? I don’t know anyone.‘

  ‘You just heard Donnelly died. You’re curious, appalled… so you’re digging up old acquaintances.’ Green didn’t seem to have either a plan or the patience to think of one. ‘Use your chuffing imagination. I mean, your whole life was play-acting, you should be able to make up some story.’

  Jake could have said it wasn’t his whole life; he was only a kid at the time. He didn’t. Instead, he said, ‘How am I supposed to find these old acquaintances? It’s been fifteen-sixteen years.’

  ‘Yeah, so? Sixteen years is nothing.’

  ‘Not for you, but for the people I used to know…’

  It was something so obvious, even Green could have thought of it. In fact, had already thought of and even made into a joke.

  Jake said: ‘It’s the difference AIDS makes. Even if I could find anyone I used to know, how many of them do you think will be dead?’

  Fairy, for instance.

  Five years ago, Jake got a polite letter, redirected from the home of an aunty he didn’t remember having mentioned to anyone, let alone Fairy. The letter asked if he would like to drop by and pay a visit, although Fairy hadn’t actually written it – the letter explained that Fairy had already lost his sight. The tone was polite, distant, striving to be formal against what seemed to be a natural demotic strain, the signature bracketed with the words Si’s Friend. Fairy’s real name, Simon Hartley, was used three or four times in the letter, often enough to jar and eventually to strike a chord. Jake had never forgotten Fairy, only his real name. By the time he received the letter, Fairy was dead so Jake went to the funeral, instead. It wasn’t far away: Golders Green Crematorium. He learnt that Fairy had moved to London a couple of years before to take up the job of head stylist at a department-store salon. While he was standing around at the wake, Jake took a look at the photographs Fairy’s lover had dotted around their home. Remembering the frizz of thin reddish hair Fairy had at seventeen, Jake was surprised how normal the hair looked in the photos of the pushing-thirty Fairy. It was a romantic story in many ways, someone who had overcome personal handicaps to achieve excellence…

  The second Jake thought up the ‘personal handicap’ line, he felt guilty. It was just something that had come to him, in the hallway of this strange, overly-coupley Golders Green flat. Even as it flitted through his mind, he tried to excuse it as the kind of flip campery Fairy liked to use, something that could be churned over until it almost resembled stoicism. Then he felt worse because he no longer knew anything about Fairy or how he’d changed. That feeling passed as well. Fairy’s friends (Si’s friend’s friends) were a clutch of jolly, puddingy queens – though not particularly effeminate – and the flat was decked out with the kind of suburban reflex that might claim it was aiming for theatricality or irony, but really only wanted to settle into cosy homeliness. Though the flat was nice.

  *

  Jake was still standing in the hallway when he ran into Sean, stepping out of the bathroom with an eyebrow arched against the scented candles standing round the tub. There was a moment’s awkwardness: should they hug or shake… what? Jake stuck out his hand.

  Sean took it. ‘You look good.’

  Jake didn’t need to say, You too. Wearing a good suit, a truly beautiful shave and with his natural jet-black hair, Sean was smart and smart-looking, a winning combination. At the time he was a TV producer. Jake had seen his name once or twice, wafting through the credits of different TV programmes, but he was already on the verge of abandoning producing to run his own company.

  When he told Jake this, Jake said, ‘Good one. Make a million.’

  He said he would.

  Jake never got around to checking it out, but Sean probably had his million by now. Set against Fairy’s suburban queens, he came over as a very different lifestyle gay, rarer but still recognizable: someone who held on to his natural fastidiousness with such determination, it was now baked hard, dry and unbreakable. Jake knew Sean would apply it with a formal, ruthless cruelty to every aspect of his life. It was an English type, or an Anglo-type; any place where fastidiousness was treated with both suspicion and awe. It was a trait Jake had recognized in other successful men, if not at first hand, at least in news photos or TV reports; some politicians had it, also some film producers. Maybe Jake had something of it, too. Maybe not. Whatever was hard-baked inside himself, it felt more like meanness than carefulness. Still, he and Sean made a pair that afternoon. Standing around Fairy’s flat and avoiding drinking the sweet sherry.

  Sean had got to hear of Fairy’s illness by a similarly circuitous route, via a friend of a workmate of an ex-lover. It was long-winded but, still, Sean lucked out, if that’s the word: he managed to catch Fairy on his deathbed. The way Sean told it, Fairy was nothing but a bladderless mouse skeleton, shrunk into hospice bedware.

  Jake said, ‘Well, he was a good friend. It’s my loss that I never saw anything of him.’

  Sean nodded. ‘Mine too.’

  ‘You remember the night I got off with Domino? I still feel guilty about that, not because he was your boyfriend… I mean, it’s not like I’m overjoyed by that aspect, but you do stuff like that when you’re young.’ Jake paused, feeling he’d made a bad start, but Sean just nodded him on; he understood. ‘What I do feel bad about, even now, was the look on Fairy’s face when he caught us in the bedroom and I threatened him. He couldn’t believe I could just turn on him like that. That I would beat him up.’

  ‘What can I say? You were a shit.’ Sean smiled, like it was something they shared. ‘But what were we – sixteen, seventeen?’

  ‘I was eighteen.’

  ‘Well, anyone with an ego, they’re always going to be a shit at eighteen.’

  ‘Anyone who’s an arsehole is a shit at that age,‘ Jake said. ‘Not that you were.’

  Sean waved it off. ‘But Johnny and Fairy definitely weren’t.’

  No, they weren’t. And now Fairy was also dead. Like Johnny was dead, more than a decade ago.

  There was a beat there. A pause while the air seeped out of the conversation bubble. Sean tried first to fill it.

  ‘Did they ever catch the guy who killed Johnny?’

  Jake shook his head.

  ‘What was it? Someone he picked up at Chorlton Street Bus Station?’

  Jake shrugged. He couldn’t say.

  ‘A psycho?’

  Jake said, ‘It would have to be, the state of Johnny’s body when the police found it.’

  *

  Back on this side of the tracks, DI Green finished his cigarette with a croak and an ounce of phlegm, and began to panda down the platform.

  Jake, walking beside him, tuned back to hear him spiel a justificatory line, saying: ‘Yeah, it’s been a while. A lot of the faces are dead… so why’d you think I need you? The police have changed, you know. We’re not still chasing the puffs with cattle prods and bibles like we did in John Pascal’s day. We got a gay liaison unit… even I have meetings with them, you believe that? I get to serve on a committee co-ordinating the Queer Up North party they run around the Village. I didn’t go fannying about round London because I got problems with puffs or with AIDS cases. I did it because I got problems with a specific case. This murder and the first one. And because of
your intimate ties to both of the deceased, I decided to go looking for you.’

  Johnny. Someone who never waited around to find the rumours of a gay plague were true. His body was found hacked and dumped on Caldenstall moor. And now Kevin Donnelly had gone the same way, it seemed the police were willing to reinvestigate. Or, what made it worse, all but willing. A sleazy old copper was ready to take a couple days off to reactivate an old snitch, and that seemed to be all. The end.

  Jake said, ‘You believe it’s linked, Johnny’s death with Kevin Donnelly’s?’

  Green shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You’re not willing to stick your fat fucking neck out.’

  Blandly, ‘Not particularly. Not at the moment.’

  Jake stopped him at the barrier, hissing so no passerby could hear, although he felt inclined to shout it out: ‘You couldn’t solve Johnny’s murder back then, you fat cunt. How you going to do it now?’

  DI Green was still nothing but bland, cop-like as he shrugged past Jake. ‘Things change. We got a handle on that whole kiddy-fucking party ring: all the evidence we need to put everyone away. There’s just the matter of loose ends.’

  ‘Is that what you’re calling it?’ Jake was right on Green’s tail. ‘Two murders.’

  Green rolled on towards the black-cab queue, holding up a hand as though, just this once, he might admit he’d edged over the acceptable border. ‘Just a figure of speech, son. And, whatever you call them, they’re still loose until they’re tied up… which is what I’m working on. Trying to decide how to do it, whether to tie them together or not. And how exactly I should bundle them up with this Colchester Hall business.’

  Here they were, edging towards a locale Jake couldn’t begin to recall without feeling sick, no matter how long ago it all happened. He was a pace behind Green as they stepped out of Piccadilly Station into the pale grey sunlight of Manchester. The sweep of the ramp that led up to the station entrance carried a shock of the familiar without seeming any less distant, a part of the un-nostalgic past. Take him, inter-citying to the crock at the end of the rail track, and he still wasn’t prepared. What he really wanted, he now realized, was for Green to spell it out. He’d been waiting all this time, steeling himself for something that had never come.