Shameless

by Paul Burston

  Although Neil regularly referred to Derek as his therapist, he was always at pains to point out that what Derek practiced wasn’t really therapy. “He doesn’t like the term ‘therapy,’” Neil explained to Martin one day. “He thinks it’s too clinical. His approach is more holistic.” Martin suspected that it was really Neil who felt uncomfortable with the term “therapy,” but going on what Neil had told him, he was forced to concede that Derek’s methods were a little unusual. As befitted a man with a fondness for orange walls and camomile tea, Derek talked a lot about “emotional clearing,” “codependency” and “relationship training.” He was a firm believer in the power of personal healing and actively promoted rebirthing as a means of cleansing body and spirit of negative energies. Neil had taken to rebirthing like a baby to the bottle. Each week he would leave the flat filled with remorse about the various chemical and sexual addictions he had given into at the weekend and head off to Derek’s flat for a spot of rebirthing. While Martin was the last person to criticize anyone for attempting to take control of their life in whatever way they saw fit, it did strike him as odd that each time Neil was reborn, he was reborn as the exact same person. Each Wednesday afternoon he would go to see Derek, and each Wednesday evening he would arrive home again, change into his leathers, and go to the Hoist.

  “Why don’t you come with me?” Neil asked when he walked into the living room this particular Wednesday evening.

  Martin, who was sitting on the sofa with a bowl of soup on his lap and his eyes glued to the television, barely looked up. London Tonight was about to show a report filmed at the Posh Spice party. Besides, he was still angry about the damage to the toilet, which, so he had discovered last night, had been caused by Neil sitting on it while trying to remove two fairly large steel ball bearings that he had inserted quite a long way up his anus in an attempt to improve his bowel control. Clearly this hadn’t worked, because a sudden fart had sent the steel balls shooting out of Neil’s backside like bullets and ricocheting off the toilet bowl, cracking the porcelain in the process. The toilet had since been fixed and Neil had paid for the repair, but the knowledge that he was sharing his flat with someone who thought that inserting ball bearings up his arse was a good idea still wasn’t sitting too happily with him. His mood wasn’t helped by the fact that he hadn’t heard from Ben, despite leaving three messages and going to great lengths to ensure that his own answering machine was in perfect working order and hadn’t mysteriously stopped recording messages just as he was on the verge of starting a new relationship.

  “It’s not really my scene, Neil,” he said, making no attempt to disguise the tone of mild disapproval in his voice.

  “You’re not still pissed off about the toilet, are you?” Neil asked. “Because if you are, it’s better to get it off your chest. Derek says that any negative energies we don’t express can turn inward and poison our whole being.”

  “I really don’t care what Derek says,” Martin snapped. “My being is perfectly fine, thank you. Now if you don’t mind, I’m trying to watch this.”

  “Is that the party where you met the cowboy?” Neil asked, ignoring Martin’s attempt to brush him off and joining him on the sofa.

  “Yes.”

  “And do I take it from your tone of voice that he hasn’t called?”

  “As a matter of fact, he hasn’t called yet, no.”

  “And how many messages have you left?”

  “Two. Maybe three.”

  “I see,” said Neil gravely.

  Martin turned to face him. “What do you see, Neil? Because right now all I can see is you doing your best to wind me up.”

  “Excuse me for showing an interest,” Neil said, rising from the sofa with an injured look. “I just thought a night out might help take your mind off him. Sorry if it came out wrong. I’ll try to remember to keep my suggestions to myself in the future.”

  Martin felt a sudden pang of guilt. “No, it’s me who should be saying sorry. I’m just disappointed he hasn’t called, that’s all. He seemed really nice. I liked him. I thought he felt the same way about me.”

  “Maybe he’s just busy,” Neil offered.

  Martin forced a smile. “Yes, and maybe he’s just like all the others.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he’s been tied up and he’ll call you tomorrow. In the meantime, the last thing you should be doing is sitting here on your own waiting for the phone to ring. It never rings when you watch it. Take it from one who knows.”

  “No, you’re right,” Martin said, switching off the television, picking up his empty soup bowl, and disappearing into the kitchen, returning moments later with a peace offering in the shape of two large vodka and tonics. “I suppose I should go out,” he said, handing Neil a glass. “I don’t know about the Hoist, though. I’m really not into SM and leather and all that heavy stuff. Besides, I haven’t got the right clothes.”

  Sensing victory, Neil smiled. “Most of the guys who go to the Hoist aren’t into anything heavy. It’s not like Fist. You won’t see people pissing on each other or anything like that. It’s just a dress-code club, that’s all. And you needn’t worry about what to wear. You can borrow something of mine.”

  Nix was not a product Caroline had ever had cause to purchase before, and she sincerely hoped that it was one she would never have to ask for again. The Middle Eastern girl with the one eyebrow and the black head scarf serving behind the pharmacy counter at Boots couldn’t have looked more disapproving if she had asked for a home pregnancy kit and an extra large knitting needle. When Caroline tried to make light of the situation, joking that it was a teensy bit embarrassing to be suddenly infested with pubic lice at her age, there wasn’t so much as a glimmer of a smile. Maybe good little Middle Eastern girls saw crabs as a symbol of Western decadence, Caroline thought, rather like homosexuality or plucked eyebrows.

  Not that she regarded it as a laughing matter. On the contrary, the moment she put the phone down after talking to Dylan, she had been consumed by the urge to strip off all her clothes, pile them up on the floor, and set fire to them. Since she had been sitting at her desk at the time, this didn’t seem like a particularly advisable course of action. Instead, she had hotfooted it over to Boots, eager to take whatever steps were necessary to rid herself of Dylan’s little surprise gift as soon as possible. Never having contracted crabs before, she had no idea what to expect. She hadn’t even dared to peek inside her panties, for fear of what she might find. But the mere thought of the tiny bloodsucking creatures roaming freely around her nether regions was enough to make her skin crawl. It was bad enough picturing them nestled among her pubic hair, without imagining them wandering off like ants in search of fresh food supplies. She had heard reports of pubic lice spreading to people’s armpits and even eyebrows, which only served to confirm her faith in Nair and eyebrow tweezers. Never mind diamonds. Forget vibrators. When it came right down to it, depilatory products really were a girl’s best friend.

  The first thing she did when she arrived home the previous night was to take a shower. Then she opened the bottle of Nix and, following the instructions on the label, applied the first coat of milky solution to her poor itching body. The label said to leave the solution on for a full twenty-four hours before washing it off and following with a second application. For Caroline, it had been twenty-four hours of physical discomfort and mental torture. How could she be expected to sleep knowing that some parasite was literally feeding on her? All night long, she tossed and turned, convinced that her body was under attack by some alien life-form. In her nightmares, she was the unwilling protagonist in a David Cronenberg movie. She woke up several times during the night, half expecting to find that her fingernails had fallen out and that she was on the verge of sprouting wings, like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly. Getting ready for work this morning, she caught a faint whiff of the strange solution on her skin and wondered how long it could possibly be before someone at the office commented. Before leaving the flat, she sprayed herself with half a
bottle of her favorite perfume and popped the remaining half bottle into her briefcase for good measure. It must have worked, because nobody said a thing.

  And now it was that time again. Easing herself into the bath, she smothered her skin with Clinique foaming body wash and lay there for a good half hour, relishing the warmth and cleanliness of the water and resisting the temptation to explore her pubic area for evidence of dying parasites. She knew she was probably overreacting. She knew that, as venereal diseases went, crabs were child’s play. She also knew that, despite what some people might say, there was nothing immoral about contracting pubic lice, any more than there was something immoral about catching head lice as a kid. They were two very similar, naturally occurring parasites that happened to take up residence on different areas of the body, that was all. But she couldn’t help herself. She felt dirty. As far as she knew, nobody in her family had ever needed to seek treatment for any form of venereal disease, with the exception of her grandfather who had grown up on a farm in Ireland and who announced after his third brandy one horribly memorable Christmas afternoon that he had once caught crabs off a prize pig.

  Still, this time tomorrow she would be free of the shame and the itching and looking forward to dinner with Martin and the chance to absolve herself by sharing a joke or two with a trusted friend about some of the scrapes she had got herself into these past few days. In fact, if there was one positive note in all of this, it was the pleasure of knowing that, whatever nasty little surprise Dylan had given her, she had more than likely passed it on to the slippery Phil.

  The first time Martin had ever set foot inside a leather bar was in 1992. It was the year that Madonna kindly offered to teach the world how to fuck with her Sex book and Erotica album. Suddenly sadomasochism was all the rage as black leather outfits came out of the closet and were paraded around on Paris catwalks and daytime TV. John was never one to let a fashion craze pass him by, least of all when it met with the approval of the world’s most ambitious blonde, so naturally he insisted that he and Martin should give the West End a pass for a night and pay a visit to London’s most famous gay leather bar, the Coleherne, which as luck would have it was situated just around the corner from his flat in Earl’s Court. Martin had never shared John’s interest in fashion. Nor, for that matter, was he a particularly big fan of Madonna. However, he did have a more than passing interest in Tony Ward, who had last been seen cavorting with the pop queen in her “Justify My Love” video and whose lean, tightly muscled torso was exhibited to good effect in the Sex book, and so he agreed to go along with John’s plan. Of course he wasn’t seriously expecting to bump into Tony Ward on a wet Friday night in Earl’s Court. But since it was common knowledge that Madonna had found many of the models featured in her book by scouring New York’s leather bars, it seemed highly possible that there might be someone equally desirable just waiting to be discovered at the Coleherne.

  Or perhaps not. The first thing that struck Martin as he and John stepped into the Coleherne that night was the number of men there who bore an uncanny resemblance to his father. It wasn’t simply that many of them looked as though they might be the same age as his father. That he could cope with. It was the fact that they were dressed in the exact same biker’s garb his father had worn when Martin was a child, although he could tell just by looking that most of them had probably never ridden a motorbike in their lives. To say that this dampened his spirits somewhat would be putting it mildly. He felt as if he had wandered into strictly forbidden territory—not in the “Oh my, aren’t we all so queer and radical” sense, but in the “Oh, my God, I’ve just walked in on my parents having sex” sense. It was by far and away the most unsettling thing that had ever happened to him, so much so that when John suddenly drew his attention to a man with his penis poking out through a strategically placed hole in the front of his trousers, Martin experienced what could only be described as a panic attack of Freudian proportions.

  Compared to that ill-fated foray into the world of leather and latex, tonight’s visit to the Hoist wasn’t going too badly. Neil had been telling the truth. There was nothing here to suggest the kind of heavy sexual antics Martin associated with a full-on fetish club like Fist, where it was widely reported that no holds were barred and no holes were too small to take a well-greased arm if that happened to be the order of the day. So far, Martin had seen no evidence of people pissing on each other, no sign of anyone being fisted and, most important, nobody who looked too much like his father. Instead, he had watched a steady stream of men, mostly in their thirties and above, pour through the door and either position themselves at the bar, where they chatted idly about opera, or disappear into darkened corners, where no doubt there were other more serious pleasures to be had.

  “So what do you think of this place?” Neil asked. He had given his leathers a break tonight and was dressed head to toe in rubber. A black rubber biker’s jacket hung open to reveal a white rubber vest with a plunging neckline emphasizing the expanse of his large, shaved cleavage. A pair of black rubber shorts with a single white military stripe down each side reached down to his knees. Black boots with white laces came up to meet them, leaving an inch or two of calf muscle exposed. The whole ensemble was topped off with a rubber biker’s cap worn at a jaunty angle. The overall effect was to make him look strangely sexless, like a giant inflatable penguin.

  “Yeah, it’s okay,” Martin replied, still getting used to the feel of Neil’s leather chaps, which made his packet look enormous but rubbed the insides of his thighs, leaving him barely capable of walking and terrified of running in case he crushed his testicles in the process. He wondered how he would cope in the event of a fire. Come to think of it, a fire in a place like this would be a total disaster. The venue was housed in a converted railway arch that left few avenues for escape. He could just picture the fire brigade breaking down the doors and scratching their heads as they tried to identify individual bodies from one solid mass of molten black gunk. He looked around for the fire exits and was relieved to see that there was one only a few feet away.

  “Those chaps look really great on you,” Neil said. “A lot of guys you see wearing them don’t carry them off properly. But you fill them out really well.”

  “A bit too well, I think,” Martin joked. “I can barely move.”

  “Oh, they’ll soon loosen up,” Neil said. “That’s the great thing about leather. It stretches. Not like rubber, which is hell to get into every time, even if it is worth it in the end.”

  Martin could certainly vouch for the first half of this statement, even if he couldn’t quite bring himself to endorse the second. Before leaving the flat tonight, he had experienced the dubious pleasure of assisting Neil as he levered himself into his rubber vest—an item of clothing that ought to have come with detailed instructions and a health warning, and which if handled incorrectly was quite capable of dislocating an arm. The whole procedure, which involved half a container of talcum powder and a lot of tugging, had taken almost half an hour. And that wasn’t all. Then there was the added bother of spraying the vest with a special silicone spray to bring up the shine, all of which convinced Martin that rubber was not a look he would be experimenting with anytime soon.

  “It’s my round,” Neil announced. “What will it be? Another pint?”

  While Neil walked over to the bar and waited to be served, Martin stood quietly fingering the tops of his chaps and surveying the room for someone to take his mind off Ben, if only for the next few minutes. He was focused on a pretty blond boy with a bare chest leaning against a pillar at the far end of the room when suddenly his view was obstructed by a man dressed in full leather, with what appeared to be a gas mask covering his entire face. As Martin leaned sideways to get a better view of the half-naked blond boy, the man in the gas mask slowly turned to face him. Then, just as Martin was thinking things couldn’t get any more surreal, the man walked over and stood directly in front of him, his masked face only inches from Martin’s own. Martin
half expected him to say something like “Take me to your leader.” But he didn’t. He just stood there, breathing deeply through his gas mask, before slowly extending a leather-gloved hand.

  Martin stared at the shiny black hand held out to him, nervously wondering if this silent, strangely formal greeting was part of some sadomasochistic ritual to which he wasn’t accustomed, and which carried with it an unspoken agreement to engage in sexual acts the likes of which he could barely begin to imagine. Then he stared at the gas mask, trying to decipher the face behind the glass and seeing nothing but his own worried expression reflected back at him. He was about to move away when a muffled voice echoed from behind the mask.

  “Uhum,” it said. “Uhumm hmm?”

  “What?” Martin replied. “I can’t hear you.”

  Seeming slightly agitated, the man shook his head and repeated his series of unintelligible grunts before reaching up and lifting the mask away from his mouth. “Hello,” a now vaguely familiar voice said. “How are you?”

  Martin frowned. “I’m sorry. Do I know you?”

  “It’s me,” the man said, lifting his mask up until finally Martin could make out the lower half of his face. “It’s me, Matthew!”

  Suddenly recognizing the man in the gas mask as the same man who had given him a blow job the last time he visited a sex club, Martin blushed and wondered if Matthew made a habit out of this kind of thing. “Sorry,” he said, shaking the gloved hand and trying to avoid looking at the gas mask. “I didn’t recognize you.”

  Matthew laughed. “You look different, too. I didn’t know you were into all of this.”

  “I’m not,” Martin said quickly. “I’m just here with a friend.”

  “Pity,” Matthew replied, and readjusted his gas mask. “Oh, well. Nice seeing you again.” And with that, he turned and walked away.