Manchester Slingback

by Nicholas Blincoe

  Donnelly didn’t seem to notice he was being curt. He listened to all Jake’s answers, nodding and saying: ‘Really, yeah really?’ Maybe this was as close as he ever got to an in-depth soul-baring session.

  Kevin’s turn: ‘I was living with a guy but he was a bit of a twat.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I don’t know what was up with him. He left, though.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Well, he was a twat.’

  Jake thought, so Kevin was one of those: the kind that hoped for something more than zero. When he was younger, Jake always thought the difference between men and women was you didn’t have to give a man the time of day. When the sex was over, you just got out of there. No reason to feel guilty that the ending was so abrupt. You never shared anything warmer than the heat of two pounding bodies. The idea that anyone could be looking for more than a brute connection, it made Jake’s skin crawl.

  Even now, he still believed there was only one difference between an unreformed homo and someone who’d made the transition. Women took a lot of time and effort; anyone who stayed with a woman had committed themselves to a long haul, and sacrificed the idea of being alone. It was his opinion, which probably meant it wasn’t worth squat. Jake had always found women alluring and attractive. Once he learnt to go slow and commit, he began to find them immediately and powerfully erotic also. Especially his wife.

  As they sat there trying to talk, Jake began to think two things. He was right about Kevin Donnelly: the man was so steeped in sadness he’d become deranged. But also – and this wasn’t exactly a revelation – Jake knew he himself was much closer to genuine psychosis than Donnelly would ever be. He couldn’t see any serious flaws in his analysis of love, homosexuality and commitment. But he believed Donnelly deserved something better than a life of pure shit, and that he shouldn’t have to change himself to get it.

  Anyway, Jake was a psycho. So what did he know?

  Kevin Donnelly said, ‘That night you and Johnny went to see the copper, what happened?‘

  Jake said, ‘We got caught.’

  He explained how they stayed too long. Johnny had the cassettes all neatly stacked and labelled, the VCR timer was set, and the explanatory note was taped to the television. And it was only then, in those last few moments, that Jake realized what Gary Halliday had done. He had bought Jake’s silence by implicating him.

  Donnelly listened, nodding. ‘It’s what he does. How do you think he got away with it all this time?’

  He didn’t believe Jake had got Johnny killed. The way he saw it, it was a no-fault tragedy; there was nothing to forgive. It was just a result of the principles Halliday used. That was Donnelly all over… still so fucked he was convinced his old housemaster operated on a different level.

  The truth was, Halliday almost got it wrong. He never thought Jake might be so stoned that he wouldn’t even notice he was being videoed.

  *

  After the street fight, when Halliday tossed his bloody billy-club across the dashboard, he should have taken a moment to lean over and look in Jake’s eyes. Jake had taken so much speed, he was nearer to pure psychosis than he’d ever been. He was so close he could taste it…

  …and what’s more, it was better than he’d dreamed.

  When Halliday said, You want to go somewhere, Jake told him: ‘Fucking drive.’

  They hit the roundabout on Kingsway, the streetlights ink-blotting into the night, Jake soaking it up in his wide-eyed frenzy. There was a half bottle of vodka in a bag at his feet. He didn’t bother to ask Halliday, he just drank it down. It wasn’t alcohol any more, nothing but perfumed water. As they passed under the tangle of the motorway junction, he drank it dry and tossed it in the back. Halliday told him not to worry: he had more back at the home, as much as Jake wanted. The motorway slipped away behind them, the new road was panned with flecks of moonlight, sieved out of the over-clinging trees. Halliday skidded the car to the left and his outstretched arm beeped at a pair of iron gates.

  The car circled round the house and parked out by a pair of tennis courts. Jake opened his door and slammed his feet to the tarmac, saying: ‘Where now, boss?’

  Halliday was using a fat key-chain on the door of a low white building. ‘You wait here, I’ll get some drinks and fix up a party.’

  He slap-patted a bank of light switches, Jake walked through into a room strobing fluorescent white. The walls and floors were brilliantly tiled; in the centre of the room was a massage table, and to the side were showers. Jake threw his shirt onto a hook and started swaggering about the room, his back curved and his chest sticking out in a rock-n-roll bantam strut. He still had wraps and wraps of speed in the back pocket of his jeans. He pulled them out and returned to his discarded shirt to tuck a few in the top pocket. The rest he emptied onto the massage table and just lapped them up, tongue to the cool tile surface.

  He was walking through the jetting steam of the showers, every head turned to full blast, when Halliday returned. Jake heard him yell and came swinging out of the steam in hipster jeans and Cuban heels, hair swept back and white, bare chest still out proud.

  Halliday stepped to the side, saying: ‘This is Don Ford.’ A fat man in a bathrobe and unlaced shoes followed through the door and nodded hello.

  ‘And these are William, John and Stanley.’

  Three boys with slept-in eyes, rubbed red dry, standing in anoraks, with bare legs.

  Halliday tossed over a bottle of vodka. Jake grabbed it, snapped the cap, and took a hard drink. As his eyes refocused from alcohol-induced watering, he saw the three boys hang their anoraks on hooks. Underneath, nothing but swimming trunks.

  Halliday said, ‘In the shower, boys.’

  They trudged past Jake into the steam. In front of him, Don Ford was hanging up his bathrobe and slipping his shoes under the wall benches. His gut round and pendulous, a bubble of penis and balls hanging in its shadow. He slapped his hands together, ‘Me for a shower, too, I think.’

  Halliday took off his jacket and hung it on a hook. Next, his shirt, trousers and vest. He was also wearing swimming trunks. He sat down to unlace his shoes, smiling up at Jake. Jake held out the vodka bottle, but Halliday shook his head.

  ‘Come sit down.’ He slapped the bench.

  Jake sat, about head-height with the man. When Halliday leant in for a kiss, Jake moved in too. Halliday pushed straight forward with his tongue, prising jake open-mouthed, the invisible bristles of his beard now scouring like sandpaper. Halliday’s tongue never seemed to slacken. Jake wasn’t kissing back, just holding there, trying to breathe.

  When Halliday eventually pulled away, he said, ‘You get first dibs.’

  Jake followed his eyes. Don Ford was swinging out of the showers. Two of the boys were naked now and Ford’s erection was bouncing against the underside of his gut. Ford was leading one by the hand; he twirled him out and around so Jake could get an all-round view.

  Jake looked at them: three pairs of eyes. The first time, in how long, he’d seen anyone who didn’t want to shag him. Who didn’t want to be anywhere near him at all…

  Halliday was on his feet, hand inside a sports bag in the corner. He came up with a bottle of oil.

  ‘Have you chosen one, Jake? How about William?’

  He pointed to the only boy still wearing trunks. The oil bottle was open and he was pouring a liberal portion onto his palm. As he recapped the bottle and tossed it to Don Ford, he pushed his hand inside his swimming trunks and began massaging his penis. Jake watched it swell beneath the trunks. Halliday never lost his smile.

  Jake turned away.

  Don Ford slapped the bottom of the smallest boy, ‘Onto the table, laddie.’

  The boy shrugged away towards a corner, but Ford came after him – a firm hand on his arm to drag him over to the massage table.

  ‘Get up there, now. Or you’ll know about it.’

  The boy walked over and flopped forwards. His thin chest lay flat to the tiles, as bony and as f
ragile as porcelain. Don Ford walked forward, rubbing his hands in oil.

  Jake stood up, the bottle of vodka swaggering in his hand. ‘Get off the table, kid.’

  The boy turned his head around, looking towards Jake but not moving.

  Jake kept it slow and firm. ‘Get off the table. I go first.’ As he moved, he unbuttoned the top of his trousers and pulled the zip.

  The boy stood up. Jake turned and dropped to the table backwards, slithering out of his pants by arching his back then kicking them to the floor. He looked over to Don Ford. The man was surprised, but Jake gave him a grin: ‘You want it?’ And over his shoulder, ‘How about you, Halliday?’

  Halliday was still smiling. ‘Okay. Get widthways across the table – boy.’

  Jake got in position, legs slightly bent, his chest to the table top. His bottom raised at one end, his head lolling over the other side. Halliday came up behind him, one hand on his back. What felt like a smooth, peach-sized nugget pressing at his arsehole. He was dead to pain; he was drunk and speeding and loose. Halliday pushed inside him to the bowels and started pumping. Jake groaned and pushed back, getting a thump across the top of his arse cheeks.

  In front of him, Don Ford – looking from Jake to a boy. As Jake caught his eye, he swelled over, took him by the side of his head and eased Jake’s mouth over his erection. Jake spluttered; the fat man had bathed his penis in aftershave. As Jake gagged for air, he managed to get out the word ‘Vodka’. Ford nodded, unscrewed the cap, and poured into Jake twisted-up mouth. Then he pushed his penis back into Jake’s throat.

  Backside and head, Jake just pushed back to the motion until he wasn’t anything but responsive meat. Inside his head, Iggy’s ‘Funhouse’ playing over and over, one loop: all night long.

  As Halliday yelled and slipped out from inside, with a last thrash across his buttocks, Don Ford moved to the rear. Jake lifted his head and saw Halliday walk over to the showers; he wasn’t smiling now. His face was bluster red; the man was trying to catch his breath. As he passed, Jake caught the eye of one of the boys. Just looking at him, more against him than for him. Jake thought: it was right. Don’t think I’m doing this to save you. He was doing it to himself. Even when it was fat Ford pounding up his hole, Jake wanted the senseless repetition, the waving sensation of looseness, the insensitive violence of it all.

  When Halliday stepped out of the shower, Jake caught his eye and swivelled his open mouth. Halliday nodded and walked over, lifting Jake’s head and pushing his half-formed penis to the back of Jake’s throat.

  By the time Ford had finished, sitting gasping for breath on the bench, almost dead from the exertion and the steaming heat of the showers, Halliday was erect again and working up into Jake’s behind.

  And maybe, somewhere along that night, as Jake proved he was inexhaustible, he remembered seeing the boy William holding a video camera and filming him. Was that real? Or something he imagined?

  After he showered quickly, dressed and started to leave, Halliday called him back, saying: ‘Don’t forget your bag.’ Jake said, ‘Yeah.’

  And, when he picked it up, there were four tapes instead of three. Jake never noticed. He just walked off, the ten miles into Manchester.

  Chapter Twenty

  Jake was in the call-box in Caldenstall, talking to directory enquiries. As the automatic voice read the numbers, be repeated them over and redialled immediately.

  ‘Mr John Pascal? I’m sorry to bother you. I wanted to look round the old chapel but the doors are locked. The minister gave me your number.’

  The voice on the other side, gruff and Yorkshire, a twinge of uncertainty. ‘Why’d she’ do that?’

  Jake hadn’t thought it would be a woman. He was careful to check the notice-board outside the chapel before he made the call, but nothing had suggested the minister’s sex.

  He said, ‘She was going somewhere, so she gave me the names of a couple of committee members.’

  Still suspicious. ‘She gave you my number?’

  Jake couldn’t imagine John Pascal getting on with a woman minister. He leapt for a possible formula. ‘She gave me a few but I don’t have a pen. Yours was the last so it was the only one I could remember. I hope it’s okay. If it’s inconvenient, maybe you can give me another name.’

  Pascal said, ‘Where are you, son?’

  ‘In a call-box outside…’ He paused to go through the motions of looking up at the sign outside the pub ‘…the Tup.’ It was a good job he’d looked; that only used to be its nickname, not its given name.

  ‘Okay, son; give me ten minutes. I’ll meet you at the chapel.’

  Jake hung the receiver, picked his mac off the shelf and stepped out of the box. There weren’t many people on the streets, though there were a lot more cars parked up and down the road than there used to be. Most of them were newish, the latest or next-to-latest letters on their registration plates. The whole village looked cleaned through, but in a too calculated way.

  He took the passageway back down to the chapel. The last time he was up here, it was after his mother died. He’d waited until he was very late, and then made an excuse about the trains. He deliberately missed the service, the burial, everything except one curled sandwich on a plate in his mother’s house.

  His relatives had believed him; they clucked around being sympathetic, saying, ‘Today of all days.’

  ‘You should be able to sue those bastards in British Rail.’

  He nodded. He should, yeah.

  He couldn’t have gone into the chapel. Not after the night of Johnny’s murder, when he crawled under the banners in the cupboard at the back of the wardrobe.

  The next day he stepped out to see the sun cracking open the heavy roof of clouds, throwing spot-beams onto the snow that covered everything. That special kind of light that he’d never seen anywhere but in the Pennines. The celestial light, a light sabre of promise. That day it was a sick joke.

  Today there was no snow, but the sun was always there, ready to pull its trick in the clouds. Looking south from the chapel, transporter beams hit the earth and recoiled in pillars to the sky. Jake grimaced and shivered. He took another look at the board in front of the church. The board looked old, with its weathered wood, but it was nowhere near as old as the chapel itself. Across the top it said: Jericho Chapel, Caldenstall. In its centre, an old poster flapping at its corner read ‘Jesus Is Lord’ and ‘If You Assume, It Makes An Ass Out Of U And Me’. The words were printed in black across the harsh, fluorescent violet paper. Right at the bottom of the board, in hand-painted letter, the minister’s name was given with her initials. Her telephone number was written underneath, and Jake realized it had a Halifax code. She wasn’t even local.

  He turned and walked to the edge of the chapel, where it overhung the hillside. The hill fell away, right under his nose, two hundred feet or more to the valley bottom. The grass there was richer and greener, and the hill was crossed with dry-stone walls. The hills on the opposite side of the valley mirrored the same arrangement. And, clustered at the bottom, a rival town stretching either side of the shallow river ford. Actually, it wasn’t much of a town. It was just larger, with better shops. And more life.

  Jake looked back up the car-park. John Pascal was coming through the alleyway. Jake let his eyes just slide past the man and on towards the hilltops, doing nothing that suggested he recognized the older man.

  Pascal crossed in his direction, stopping a few yards from the old wooden doors. ‘Are you the lad who wants to look around the chapel?’

  Jake nodded and walked towards him. The man was around sixty, robust and unstooped, but maybe florid. His size and colour couldn’t have anything to do with drink; it had to be home cooking and the fresh hill winds.

  Jake held out his hand. ‘James Osterburg.’

  Pascal didn’t meet it. He just tossed a key over and Jake converted his handshake to an open mitt. The key was heavy and looked too new to work on the door, but it was the right size and turned easily. Ja
ke pushed the doors open and stood back. Pascal nodded that he should go through.

  Jericho Chapel was unusual. A tourist might want to look at it. It was built as a hexagon, with the preacher’s pulpit and the altar set against two of the chapel’s six inner walls. The pews fanned out around two main aisles like slices of cake, their sharp ends pointing towards the pulpit and the brassy tubes of the organ, which rose like a crown from the gallery above the altar. Choir stalls and extra seats spread out from the organ pipes to complete the circle above Jake’s head. To the left of the door, underneath the gallery, a closed-off space formed the vestry and, beyond, the committee’s meeting room.

  Jake walked down the main aisle towards the pulpit, but stopped halfway to look up at the roof and the windows around the gallery.

  Pascal said, ‘What’s your interest in the chapel?’

  Jake said, ‘Architectural.’

  ‘So when was this place built?’

  Jake smiled. ‘I thought you’d tell me. It’s eighteenth-century, George the Something.’

  ‘The Second. Built during the Evangelical revival, though there was a Congregationalist community here long before… at least from the 1690s.’ Pascal said the words semi-automatically, if not from practice at least from familiarity. ‘Are you a church member?’

  Jake shook his head. ‘My grandmother, I think. Or Methodist.’

  ‘Wesley preached here, 1780. We’ve always been a friend to other dissenters: independent but liberal.’

  Jake circled round the altar. ‘Yes? What size is the congregation now?’

  ‘About six.’ Pascal said it flatly. He’d followed Jake as far as the centre of chapel. Now he watched as Jake moved into the shadows of the gallery.

  ‘Six?’

  ‘The minister holds a service once a month. The rest of the time we have to travel to her – over in Halifax. You spoke to her, didn’t you?’