by Paul Burston
“Well, he’s a bit shy actually,” Martin said, suddenly noticing the coke crumbs falling out of David’s right nostril. “Why don’t we just sit down here and wait for him to come over? Then I’ll introduce you.”
“I wouldn’t mind a drink actually,” David said. “I’ll tell you what. You wander off to that beer tent over there and get us a couple of cans. I’ll go and find John, and Neil can wait here for Fernando. Then we can all have a nice drink together. How about that?”
“Well, I’m not sure about leaving my dad on his own,” Martin protested.
“He’s fine,” David replied. “I’m sure he can look after himself for a few minutes. Now, off you go.”
As he trudged off reluctantly in the direction of the beer tent, Martin felt the soothing effect of the dope evaporate from his body. In its place came the uneasy feeling that things were about to take a turn for the worse. This feeling intensified as he stood queuing for the best part of half an hour. By the time he returned, clutching four cans of warm Red Stripe, a full forty minutes had passed, and his stress levels were the highest they’d been since he first stepped foot out the door that morning. Where was his father? There was no sign of him anywhere. And what about the others, David and Neil? They had disappeared, too. And John? Where was John? Surely they hadn’t all just gone off and left him here on his own? He dropped the cans on the ground, stepped over a group of drug-fucked muscle boys sprawled on the grass giving one another head massages, and entered the Trade tent.
He spotted his father immediately He was dancing with his arms high in the air, stripped to the waist, drenched in sweat. Around his neck he wore a pink plastic whistle. Dancing around him were John, David, Neil and a handsome Latin-looking guy Martin had never seen before, but who, he presumed, must be Fernando. And judging by the look on all their faces, he assumed Fernando’s Ecstasy pills really were as good as John had said. His father’s eyes were practically out on stalks as he turned and caught sight of Martin standing in the entrance.
“C’mon, son!” he shouted joyfully, popping the whistle into his mouth and blowing furiously. “Get yourself over here and let the old man show you how it’s done!”
Martin stared in disbelief. It was one thing seeing his father stoned. After all, it was hardly the first time. But seeing him on E? That was a different story. What would it be next? Dressing up in drag? Fist fucking? He already knew that David found his father attractive. What if the E turned his father into a sex maniac? Would he be able to resist David’s advances? Would he want to?
“C’mon, Martin,” his father shouted again. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”
Martin paused. His father was right. He didn’t know what he was missing. But whatever it was, he had been missing out on it for a long time. He couldn’t remember the last time he had really let go, really lived for the moment. It was about time he had some fun. And what choice did he have, really? He could hardly abandon his father here with John and his friends. Anything could happen. And they did look extremely happy, all these people with their wide eyes and their waving arms. And it was Gay Pride after all. And he had just been through a painful breakup. And he was among friends, of sorts. . . .
Suddenly John was standing in front of him. His pupils were so enormous, Martin could barely tell what color his eyes were today. “Here you go,” he said, pressing a pill into Martin’s hand and grinning madly. “This is a present from me. Because I’m completely off my face. And because you’re my best friend. And even though I am off my face and I’m probably talking crap, I do love you. C’mon, take it. I want you to know what it feels like. It’s like the music is inside you. It’s like you’re part of something. And it’s like nothing else matters. Honestly, it’s the best feeling ever.”
For a moment, Martin looked back at John, trying to remember the last time he had been so affectionate, or talked like such a complete idiot. He looked across at his father, who was still blowing his pink whistle and gesturing at him to come over and join in. Then he popped the pill into his mouth and followed John to the spot where his father and the others were huddled in a sweaty embrace. For the next half hour, he felt nothing. He began to suspect that John may have given him an aspirin for a joke. Then he felt a strange tingle in the pit of his stomach, followed by a rise in his body temperature and a sudden, inexplicable urge to tell everyone within arm’s reach just how much he loved them. For the next few hours, Martin felt happier than he had ever felt in his life.
2
Muscle
Nine
It was incredible, Martin thought, how your life could turn around in just three months. Now that he had upped his gym routine to four visits a week, and his aerobic workouts to thirty minutes a session, he found that he had plenty of time for philosophizing. Sweating away on the StairMaster this particular Saturday afternoon, glancing appreciatively at his trim, Nike-clad reflection in the mirror opposite, he let his mind wander, happily taking stock of all the positive changes that had taken place since Gay Pride.
For one thing, he had a new roommate. John’s friend Neil wouldn’t have been the obvious choice, but Neil had been pretty desperate for somewhere to live when the reputedly “vile opera queen” who owned the flat he had called home for the past two years suddenly decided to sell up and move to San Francisco.
“It’s bad enough that she only gave me a month’s notice,” Neil had complained at the time. “But San Francisco? Some queens have no imagination. Someone should have told her it’s not the ’70s anymore and San Fran is nothing like Tales of the City. More like Tales from the Crypt.”
So Martin relented and invited Neil to move into the spare room. To begin with, he wasn’t convinced that this had been such a good idea. Neil’s habit of using female pronouns when referring to other gay men was even more irritating than John’s. At least with John, Martin didn’t have to listen to it morning, noon and night. And ideally he would have preferred to share with someone who kept similar hours to himself. Neil worked as a waiter at one of the gay cafés in Soho, but seemed to spend most of his time in the flat, talking on the telephone, watching daytime soap operas or playing music so loudly that the straight couple in the flat above were constantly banging on the ceiling to complain. On the Saturday when Neil moved in, he managed to annoy every other resident in the building by blocking the entrance hall with his belongings for the best part of the day. He then made matters worse by knocking on every door and accusing people of stealing a CD rack he swore he had left in the hall that morning, but which he later remembered belonged to the vile opera queen and was more than likely being used to store opera CDs in San Francisco.
On the other hand, Neil did have an impressive CD collection, large enough to fill a dozen CD racks, and mainly comprised of dance compilations with cover shots of half-naked hunks, the soundtracks to every film and television series featuring a gay storyline and the complete back catalogs of every remotely “gay” artist. His video collection was equally large, covering everything from classic Ab Fab to the latest hard-core American porn. He was also the proud owner of a handsome three-seater leather sofa, a wide-screen digital television with built-in video player, a state-of-the-art hi-fi, a laptop computer, a juice extractor, a water filter, a humidifier, an ionizer, an exercise bike and enough skin care and grooming products to open a small beauty salon.
Neil also had a Ford Escort (purchased secondhand from a preoperative transsexual who needed a quick sale to pay for her boob job) and an ex-boyfriend called Brian for whom he seemed to do an inordinate amount of fetching and carrying, whether it involved collecting relatives from airports or driving over late at night to help diffuse a situation with a casual pickup who refused to leave or administer advice on which service to call when a pipe burst or the washing machine stopped working. Earlier this afternoon, Neil had driven Brian to Ikea to pick out some new kitchen cabinets. Martin suspected that Neil was still deeply in love with Brian, despite the fact that they had broken up almost thr
ee years ago when he came home early from work one evening and found Brian in bed with the gay couple from across the road. Whether it was the trauma of the breakup that first drove Neil to act out his sadomasochistic fantasies at some of London’s heavier SM clubs, Martin couldn’t say for certain. But he couldn’t help noticing that, like a lot of gay men who spent much of their spare time suspended in a sling or lying in a bathtub full of urine, Neil tended to wear the wounded expression of a homosexual twice his age. John’s take on all of this was typically acerbic. “I don’t know what the problem is with SM queens,” he said, sniffing when Martin raised the subject. “If they want to know what pain is, why can’t they just listen to Barbra Streisand’s Guilty album like everybody else?” Neil’s sexual practices aside, the real wonder was that his leisure pursuits hadn’t led to any real physical harm, given his insistence on driving to and from the various fleshpots he frequented on a weekly basis, never once allowing the fact that he was driving to curb the amount of drinks and drugs he consumed.
How Neil managed to finance this kind of lifestyle on his meager salary, and could still afford to see a therapist once a week, Martin couldn’t quite work out. But the fact that he always paid his rent on time, and was more than happy to share the benefits of his various appliances with his new roommate, soon persuaded Martin that living with him might not be such a bad idea after all. Besides, Neil was really quite nice once you got to know him. True, he could be a bit moody at times. Tuesdays tended to be the worst, when he was coming down from the excesses of the weekend. And yes, he did have a habit of bringing pieces of trade back at all hours of the night and having noisy sex. On a couple of occasions, he had even given out his address to people he’d met at some club or other and told them to call round if they fancied a shag later, resulting in Martin being rudely awakened at 5:00 A.M. and answering the door to some drug-fucked queen looking for a bed for the night, or what was left of it. On the other hand, Neil did have many fine qualities. Once a fortnight, he dragged himself out of bed early on a Sunday morning and drove to the offices of a charity in Kentish Town where he helped deliver meals on wheels to people with HIV and AIDS. What’s more, he was clean and tidy, and he did his share of the washing up, which was more than could be said for Christopher. In all the time that they had lived together, Martin couldn’t recall a single occasion when Christopher had lifted so much as a finger to help with the housework. And as John said, at least with Neil you knew exactly what you were getting. Try finding a roommate through Gay Switchboard or one of the accommodation agencies and for all you knew you could be sharing a bathroom with the next Jeffrey Dahmer.
It was partly thanks to Neil, as well as John’s ongoing relationship with Fernando, that Martin’s social life had changed so dramatically. With Neil’s financial contribution to the flat, and Fernando’s enviable connections in gay clubland, weekends that were once spent holed up at home worrying over bills were now an endless social whirl of guest lists, VIP areas, free-drinks tickets and chance encounters with new and interesting people. Thanks to Fernando, he had even made it through the hallowed doors to Heaven’s Departure Lounge, although on balance he was forced to agree with John’s assessment that the bar attracted the kind of people he would happily cross a crowded dance floor in order to avoid. Not that this bothered Martin in the slightest. For years he’d felt as if he was on the outside looking in. Now finally he was in the midst of the action and on nodding terms with some of the gay scene’s key players.
Martin had lost count of the number of minor celebrities he had rubbed shoulders with over the past few months—the DJ who once shared a squat with Boy George; the drag queen from Detroit who fronted every cross-dressing talent contest on Channel 5; the club promoter with the high-priced education who careered around in head-to-foot Vivienne Westwood, feeding coke to anyone willing to tell him how wonderful he was; the door whore who once modeled for a famous fashion designer and whose face was never missing from the pages of the gay free sheets; the French photographer who fancied himself as the next Herb Ritts and took moody black-and-white photographs of moody black, white and Brazilian men in their underwear; the porn star who spent two months a year on the film sets of LA, where he punished eager young pups with his famously large appendage, and the rest of his time working the arty circles of London, where he presented a more sensitive front by reciting his poetry; the camp comedian who seldom smiled and could usually be found slumped in a corner at whichever club happened to be fashionable or wherever there was a steady supply of Ketamine. It was all a far cry from the life Martin used to know—so much so, that, some Monday mornings, he could hardly wait to get into work and tell the girls in the design department all about his latest adventure. Their weekends were so dull in comparison, they never failed to be impressed.
They were beginning to comment, too, on the changes in his body. All those weeks of careful dieting and hours of painful effort at the gym were finally beginning to pay off. He had a flat stomach, a firm chest and biceps that showed even when he was wearing long sleeves.
“You’d best watch out, Martin,” Melanie had said teasingly one morning during a coffee break. “You’re starting to look like that bloke from the diet Coke ad. You know what us liberated women are like. Flash a bit more muscle and, before you know it, we’ll be tearing your clothes off.”
Martin had feigned shock at the time, but secretly he was thrilled. This wasn’t the sort of compliment he was likely to get from other gay men, at least none that he knew. Neither John nor Neil had been moved to comment on his new, improved physique. This was hardly surprising. They were generally too busy bickering with one another or comparing their own chest sizes to be remotely interested in his. Still, it was nice that somebody had noticed. In fact, it was the Saturday after Melanie complimented him on his muscles that Martin found the confidence to take his shirt off in a club for the first time.
Despite this, there was one aspect of his busy social life that he didn’t share with the girls from work, and that was the number of men he had slept with over the past couple of months. There were enough gay stereotypes floating around the office as it was, without him fueling further speculation about the sex life of the promiscuous homosexual. The truth was, he had dragged quite a few people back to his flat recently, each time hoping to fill the void left by Christopher, but somehow never quite succeeding. There was the tattooed, muscle-bound makeup artist he met one night at Crash, who once did Margaret Thatcher’s makeup and who carried a note in his back pocket stating that, in the event of his sudden death from a drug overdose, he wanted the world to know that he had died happy and didn’t want to be turned into another poster campaign. There was the tax inspector he picked up at Coco Latté, who had the softest skin Martin had ever felt but who turned out to have a boyfriend and some rather extreme views concerning underage sex and capital punishment. There was the Canadian he met during a rare visit to a gay sauna, who later revealed that he was an escort and claimed to have slept with all the prettiest boys in Hollywood. There was the shop assistant he met one Friday night at G.A.Y., who came back and stayed for the entire weekend before suddenly announcing on Sunday evening that, much as he liked Martin, he was really holding out for a boyfriend with a place in the country.
The strange thing was, considering how often he went clubbing these days, he hadn’t once seen Christopher. Of course that was one of the great things about living in London—the gay scene was so big, you weren’t always encountering ex-boyfriends. It wasn’t like Cardiff, where the gay scene amounted to a handful of bars and clubs and you were condemned to bump into the same people every night. On the other hand, bumping into Christopher now might not be such a bad idea. At least that way he would be able to see what he was missing.
Caroline hadn’t had sex for three months. Three months! Any longer, and she would qualify for disability benefits. There had to be a law against this kind of thing, or at the very least compensation for all those smart, attractive career women
out there who, against all odds, simply weren’t getting any. It was past lunchtime and she was still wrapped in her dressing gown, nibbling halfheartedly at a cheese and tomato sandwich and flicking through an old copy of Cosmopolitan. She couldn’t remember the last time she had gone so long without a good fuck. And to make matters worse, there was no promise of a good fuck in the immediate future. A bad fuck she could get anytime, anywhere. She only had to walk into a bar and men started undressing her with their eyes. She didn’t mind this at all. It was just that, nine times out of ten, such men promised far more than they ever delivered. Their eyes were invariably bigger than what lay beneath their bellies. It was at times like this that she really missed Graham.
Their relationship was well and truly over. She knew that. It was hardly surprising really, bearing in mind that she had effectively outed him in front of two of his closest friends. As Martin said at the time, publicly accusing your boyfriend of being a closeted homosexual wasn’t in quite the same league as falling out over who washed the dishes or whose turn it was to sleep on the damp patch. The memory of that night at Jeremy and Pip’s still haunted her. What possessed her to say those things? She would have blamed it on the coke, but she hadn’t seen so much as a crumb that evening. It was one of the promises she regularly made to Graham whenever they socialized together as a couple—no drugs before dinner. Claiming to have broken that promise would only have added to his sense of betrayal. The truth was, she wasn’t even that drunk when the accusation sprang from her lips. It just sort of came out, if that wasn’t too literal a phrase. She still couldn’t say exactly why. A mixture of things, probably—frustration, anger, his secretiveness, her insecurity. She knew it wasn’t the best way to tackle a problem. Getting back at someone you loved by using other people as an audience was cheap and cowardly, not to mention embarrassing for all concerned. How could she have stooped so low?