Shameless

by Paul Burston

  Dylan must have been reading her mind, because at that precise moment, he took out his wallet and discreetly removed five twenty-pound notes. “Here’s the money for your dress,” he said, pressing the notes into her hand. “Now, provided you’re willing and you think it’s a fair deal, I’d like you to finish your drink and follow me into the toilets, where I propose to go down on you. What do you think?”

  Caroline felt the hairs on her neck stand on end. She couldn’t believe she was hearing this. She couldn’t believe that this man she had known since she was fifteen years old, this man she had long regarded as sweet and kind and just a little too soft for his own good, this man she would have been perfectly willing to sleep with tonight if it weren’t for the fear of breaking his heart again, that this man was actually offering to pay her to have sex with him. And more important, she couldn’t believe that the mere thought of this excited her as much as it did. It wasn’t even as if a hundred pounds amounted to a lot of money, not for someone in her position. But somehow the thought of it turned what promised to be an otherwise dull fuck into something rather dangerous and thrilling.

  “Well?” Dylan said. “What do you think?”

  Caroline casually slipped the money into her handbag, stood up, and drained her glass. “Well, Dylan,” she said. “I hope I don’t live to regret this. But I think you’ve got yourself a deal.”

  John was busy baking. As a rule, cooking wasn’t an activity he found enjoyable. In fact, he hated it. John was the kind of person who tuned in to Delia Smith’s How To Cook and marveled at her ability to boil an egg. Tea and toast was about as far as his culinary skills went. When he wasn’t faced with the promise of a tray of airline food, he tended to dine out or order takeout from the local Chinese.

  But then this wasn’t cooking in the usual sense. The oven was set at 250 degrees Celsius, which was the temperature Fernando had specified before going out to make his regular early evening drop-offs in the West End. He had been gone for just over an hour. Soon it would be time to remove the Pyrex bowl from the oven and allow its contents to cool before scraping the white residue onto a cool plate, grinding it into a fine powder, and then weighing it into little plastic bags with the scales Fernando kept for such occasions. But not just yet. Peering through the oven door, John could still see a trace of liquid in the bottom of the bowl. How much longer it would take for the remaining liquid to crystalize was anyone’s guess. One thing John had learned over the past few months was that there were no hard-and-fast rules about these things. Fernando was right. Cooking Ketamine was a complicated business, more an art than a science. Smiling to himself, John wondered what Delia would make of it.

  This was the first time Fernando had entrusted him with cooking the K, so naturally he was feeling a little apprehensive. He’d watched Fernando doing it dozens of times, and had helped with the weighing and the bagging up. But to be left in charge of the cooking felt like a real honor. It was a sign that their relationship had progressed to a different level. A new bond of trust had been established. And despite the slightly worrying overtones implicit in the fact that Fernando was currently out striking deals while he was at home slaving over a hot oven like a dutiful wife, John couldn’t help but feel a warm glow of contentment, the likes of which he had never experienced before. After years of sleeping around, and insisting that relationships were only for fools and lesbians, he was finally forced to admit that he was in love.

  Of course it helped that the object of his affection was a drug-dealing Brazilian with a body to die for, whose arrival in John’s life had made him the envy of all his friends. But there was more to it than that. The sex was the best he’d ever had, and after three months showed no sign of letting up, either in its intensity or its frequency. Fernando had a voracious sexual appetite, and not only when he was coked up to the eyeballs. Some nights they barely touched the stuff and still they were at it, hammer and tongs. And on those rare occasions when the coke did its worst and it was difficult to maintain an erection, help was always at hand in the form of Viagra, the illegal sale of which Fernando had recently added to his drug-dealing activities and which was proving every bit as popular at home as it was in the clubs. It was a wonder they hadn’t exhausted their curiosity in one another, the number of times they’d done it and the variety of positions they’d tried. Their sex life was like a porn movie—so much so that these days John rarely felt the need to watch porn at all.

  He had also cut down dramatically on the number of hours he spent on-line, cruising the gay chat rooms. True, he had enjoyed the odd encounter with “CuriousCute28.” In fact, over the past few months their little cybersex sessions had become a welcome distraction from the boredom of long afternoons, and one that John enjoyed with increasing regularity. But masturbating over your computer keyboard while some hunky straight fantasy figure sent you dirty messages didn’t really count as sex. And given that Fernando was the classic strong, silent type in every respect, John could hardly be blamed for getting off over an anonymous stranger whose way with words wasn’t so much a threat to his relationship as a complement to it. No, all things considered, John was satisfied that what he got up to in the privacy of an Internet chat room was nobody’s business but his own. And unless you counted one very minor indiscretion with a Cuban go-go boy during a stopover in Miami, he hadn’t had actual sexual contact with anyone other than Fernando in three whole months. Really, it was amazing what love could do.

  Not that he had mentioned the L word. Fernando was rarely given to outbursts of emotion. The exception was when he was at the point of orgasm and would sometimes mutter unintelligible things in Portuguese. But declarations of affection weren’t in his nature, and John knew better than to spoil things by coming on too strong. Besides, he didn’t need soppy talk to know that he was in a solid, loving relationship. It was enough that he was here right now, carefully grinding up the K, while the man he loved was out making money in preparation for tonight’s dance-and-drugs marathon.

  Smiling to himself, John put the latest dance compilation on the CD player and turned the volume up to full. Then he helped himself to a bump of K and waited for the familiar syrupy sense of being suspended in time, in a place quite like the one he had left, but at the same time strangely different. He was living the life he had always dreamed of, and loving every interminable second of it.

  Caroline left the Sanderson Hotel with a spring in her step and a warm glow in her groin. Hailing a black cab in Berners Street, she climbed in the back and instructed the driver to take her to Hampstead.

  “Off home already, love?” the driver asked. He was the kind of cabdriver she usually went out of her way to avoid—aged around the fifty mark, with greasy, nicotine-stained hair and one eye in the rearview mirror constantly scanning the backseat for the slightest glimpse of flesh. Paranoid that he could tell she wasn’t wearing any panties, or worse, that he knew exactly what she’d been doing for the past twenty minutes, Caroline squeezed her knees tighter together and stared purposefully out the window, hoping he’d get the message.

  He didn’t. “You off to a party or something, then, love? Only it seems a bit early to call it a night, a pretty girl like you.”

  “I’m going to my boyfriend’s house, actually,” Caroline replied, thinking off the top of her head. “Now if you don’t mind, I’m really not in the mood to chat.”

  This caused the eye in the mirror to narrow slightly, but the voice remained irrepressibly chirpy. “I don’t mind at all, love. I was just making conversation. If you’d rather I didn’t, that’s fine by me. After all, you’re paying.”

  Relieved at the prospect of a few minutes’ silence, Caroline sank back in the seat and cast her mind over this evening’s events. She couldn’t believe that she had let Dylan go down on her—in the toilet of all places. She had never had sex in a public place before. Of course she’d thought about it, many times in fact. But whenever she did, she tended to picture herself lying next to a stream or rolling around
on the beach with some hunk as the waves crashed around them—not squatting on the cistern in a hotel lavatory with Dylan’s face buried up her skirt, his penis poised to enter her and his hand ready to pull the flush and drown out the sound of her moans.

  Supposing they’d been caught, what would have happened then? There was a law against this sort of thing, surely? Would the police have been called? What would they have charged her with? And what would her mother say? She could just picture her face, hearing that her only daughter had been arrested for having sex in a hotel toilet. She could still recall the time her mother came to collect her from the police station when she was sixteen and had been caught shoplifting a bottle of body lotion from Woolworth’s. “We’ve got shares in Woolworth’s,” she’d said, her eyes brimming with shameful tears. “Stealing from them is like stealing from your own family!”

  Maybe the police would have discovered that money had changed hands and then mistaken her for a prostitute. What would she have done? She’d have been given the sack, that much was certain. And without a job, she wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage, so she would inevitably lose her home, too. She’d be unemployed, homeless, and forced to choose between going back to Swindon to live with her mother or staying in London and making enough money to feed herself by selling her body on the streets. It was a terrible thought, but given the choice, she’d choose a life of prostitution over a slow death in Swindon any day.

  Anyway, enough of this mental torture. She hadn’t been caught, she wasn’t a prostitute, and nobody was going to sack her and send her back to Swindon. She had simply indulged in a little sexual adventure with an old friend, and she had emerged from the experience emotionally unscathed, physically satiated, and a hundred pounds better off. Of course she didn’t need the money. But the fact that Dylan had insisted on giving it to her did help alleviate any guilt she might have felt about reopening old wounds. In a strange way, she would have been more ashamed of her behavior tonight had she not taken the money. And whatever else those five twenty-pound notes had come to represent, in Caroline’s mind they stood only for what she was going to buy with them—two grams of coke. That way, the evidence of tonight’s little escapade went straight up her nose, and there were no physical reminders.

  Just then the cab came to a sudden halt at a set of traffic lights and she looked up. As the lights turned to green and the cab slowly pulled away, her eyes were drawn to a couple walking arm in arm about thirty yards ahead. She wasn’t sure why they caught her eye at first. Although they were facing her, it was too dark and they were too far away for her to distinguish their features. Even in silhouette the woman didn’t look remotely like anyone Caroline knew. Then, as they drew closer, the light from a streetlamp spilled over them, illuminating the woman’s pretty, elfin face and sending a sudden chill down Caroline’s spine. The man was Graham. And judging by the way he stopped to pull the woman to him and hugged her so tightly it looked as if her skinny body might break, he was very much heterosexual and very much in love.

  Martin was beginning to feel anxious. Almost an hour had passed since he’d dropped his E, and nothing was happening. They were squeezed around a table in the café-bar at Love Muscle—John, Neil and himself, waiting for their drugs to come up and for Fernando to return from the toilets, where he usually found it safest to sell a few pills without attracting the attention of the club’s security staff.

  Just to add to the strain of the situation, John had spent the past twenty minutes angling for compliments about his new engineered Levi’s jeans, which, fashionable as they might have been, did little to flatter his scrawny backside. Neil, whose own backside was looking rather pert in a pair of buttock-hugging blue combat trousers, had made no secret of the fact that he found John’s jeans unappealing. “It looks like your bum’s dropped,” he said when John offered his rear view for inspection. “And you know what they say. Men don’t make passes at boys with flat arses.”

  And so it had been left to Martin to massage John’s ego and keep the peace as best he could. As the minutes ticked by and the tension mounted, he was coming to the conclusion that his best wasn’t quite good enough.

  “I can’t feel anything,” Martin said suddenly, hoping to change the subject and perhaps gain some reassurance that he wasn’t the only one whose drugs weren’t working.

  “Calm down,” said John. “Sometimes it takes a bit longer to work, that’s all. Don’t worry. Fernando wouldn’t sell you any crap.”

  “He’s right, Martin,” Neil chipped in. “Fernando’s drugs are good. I’ve always said that, haven’t I, John? I’ve never bought any bad drugs from Fernando. Not once. She’s very reliable.”

  “Er, hello?” John snapped, sounding for all the world like a guest on Ricki Lake. “That’s my boyfriend you’re talking about. So we’ll have less of the ‘she’ if you don’t mind.”

  “Sorry, I’m sure,” Neil said, nudging Martin to indicate that he really wasn’t sorry at all. “I didn’t mean anything by it, dear. We can all see that you’ve landed yourself a real man there.”

  “Yes, well, you’re right about that,” John said sniffily. “I wish he’d hurry up, though. I saw one of those meathead bouncers go by a minute ago.”

  Neil rolled his eyes. “He’ll be fine. Like I said, he’s a real man, your boyfriend. He can handle himself—and you, I’ll bet.”

  John bristled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Easy, dear.” Neil smiled. “Everyone knows there’s only room for one man in every relationship. And you’ve already told us who wears the trousers in your house. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that you’re the one with your legs in the air. I don’t know why you’re getting so steamed up about it. Being a bottom is nothing to be ashamed of, provided your bottom is up to the job.”

  John spoke through gritted teeth. “Not everyone conforms to your pathetic view of gay relationships, Neil. Not everyone chooses to be either a top or a bottom. Some of us pride ourselves on being versatile.”

  Neil laughed. “You mean you’re a bossy bottom who holds her own legs in the air! Oh, hang on a minute. I think I can feel the E coming up now. I’ve got that butterfly feeling in my stomach. Oh yes. I can definitely feel it working.”

  “Are you sure it’s not just your time of the month?” John asked, grinning menacingly.

  “Very funny. No, I can definitely feel it. How about you, Martin?”

  Martin frowned and shook his head. “I still can’t feel anything.”

  “Right, well, I’m going to the toilet,” John said, jumping to his feet. “Why don’t you come with me, Martin? Neil can wait here in case Fernando comes back. You don’t mind, do you, Neil?” And with that, he turned and quickly walked away before Neil had time to raise any objections.

  “It’s okay,” Neil said in reply to Martin’s quizzical look. “I’m happy to wait here. I could do with a break from that one anyway.”

  Martin stood up from the table and hurried after John, finally catching up with him as they crossed the dance floor and entered the men’s toilets. It was still fairly early, but already a crowd had gathered. Topless men with pumped-up bodies and drugged-up eyes were standing at the urinals, frowning intently as they tried to pee or blatantly checking out each other’s equipment under the bright, unforgiving lights. Others had formed a queue for the stalls which, judging by the amount of water on the floor, were already feeling the strain of such heavy usage. A large group were congregated around the washbasins, pushing and shoving as they fought to refill their water bottles.

  “I can’t see Fernando,” Martin said, looking around and feeling the first warm tingle of the E. “Do you think he’s okay?”

  “I’m sure he’s fine,” John replied, grabbing Martin’s arm and steering him into a quiet corner. “He’s probably on his way back to the bar. So how are you feeling now?”

  “Okay, I think.” Martin smiled, feeling the sudden rush of the E coursing through his veins.

  “Well, I
think we can do better than just okay,” John said. He took a tiny bottle of white powder from out of his trouser pocket and jammed it under Martin’s left nostril, pressing the right nostril shut with his other hand. “Now sniff hard.”

  Martin sniffed and felt a burning sensation shoot up inside his nose. “Christ, that stings,” he said. “What is it, coke?”

  “It’s a lot more fun than coke,” John grinned, fiddling with the top of the bottle before taking a quick sniff himself. “Just give it a few minutes and you’ll see. Welcome to the wonderful world of K.”

  Eleven

  The wonderful world of K.” The words were imprinted in Martin’s mind like the opening credits to a film as he trudged along behind John, back in the direction of the café-bar and the familiarity of Neil and the table where they had been sitting only minutes ago, but which now seemed like a distant memory. He had lost all concept of time from the moment the powder shot up his nose, so he wasn’t sure exactly when it had started, but something very peculiar was happening. The film was about to begin, and it felt as if a part of his brain was literally opening up to receive the picture. He could even visualize it, could actually see the process by which layers and layers of half-realized thoughts and disconnected ideas were physically unfolding and changing shape before regrouping into a new and unfamiliar pattern that, however strange it seemed at first, nevertheless made complete sense. It was a bit like watching someone skilled in the art of origami take a flat piece of paper and quickly fold it in ten different directions at once, until finally it wasn’t a flat piece of paper anymore but a paper swan. Only this particular origami demonstration was taking place inside his head, and it was happening in reverse. Folds were being lifted and edges smoothed out until suddenly the world was no longer three dimensional, but flat.