The Nick of Time

by Francis King

  ‘Hello, Adrian. Long time, no see.’

  ‘Hello, Mac.’ Adrian raised a hand in perfunctory greeting and smiled. That was all. There had been a time when, in their early twenties and occupying desks next to each other in a City office, he and Mac had become the closest of friends on discovering that a love of Wagner was not the only thing that they had in common. But now they had parted ways: Mac sinking inexorably downward, until he had ended up in his present job as assistant in a small travel business south of the river, and Adrian soaring upwards, to the pinnacle of being boss of his own thriving software firm.

  As he strutted on, Adrian heard Mac say to his companion, an elderly man with a ferruled stick over one arm and a bristling yellow-grey moustache, known to everyone as the ‘Colonel’although in fact he was a florist: ‘That one’s got too big for her bootees.’

  Adrian bought himself a brandy, thrusting his way with an irritable ‘Excuse me, excuse me, please,’ through the crowd of people who impeded sales by taking up positions at the bar. Then, restlessly, smeared glass in hand, he zigzagged back and forth on a tour of inspection. A plump, wide-mouthed French regular, who obstinately pestered him and whom he always avoided or, if unsuccessful at doing that, rapidly brushed off, gave him a nervous smile. But he pretended not to see him. A rent boy with improbably blond hair raised his glass of beer: ‘ Cheers, Adrian. How’s tricks?’ Adrian suspected the creature of having stolen some cufflinks that had mysteriously gone missing. But it could have been one of the others, selected from ads in Gay Times, who had come to the house at about the same time. ‘ Hot,’ Adrian said. ‘I never like the heat.’

  As he roamed, he felt a mounting sexual hunger. Beautiful Siegfried – ‘ the Siegfried Idyll’ Adrian would call him – had returned to his family in Dusseldorf, his once remarkable physique blasted and eroded by that ghastly disease. Self-protective as always, Adrian had lost all wish or will to visit him there. Better to forget him – until, from time to time, consumed by guilt, he sent a cheque, a letter or a postcard. But however often he trekked back to some stinking, polluted feeding-place like this one and however ravenously he gorged on the flesh so readily available, that unappeasable hunger for a living ghost continued to gnaw at him. What the hell was he doing here? All at once Adrian succumbed to an overwhelming self-hatred, despair and ennui. But he knew that, if he returned to his immaculate flat, a lateral conversion of the first floors of two spacious houses, so different from the Clapham semi in which he had grown up, that hunger would only sink its teeth yet deeper into his entrails.

  Then, suddenly, Adrian saw him. ‘I knew at once, a coup de foudre,’ he would later say. It had been exactly the same with dear, dying Siegfried. Who said that lightning never struck twice? A zigzag of fire and one was blasted and scorched up. The man was leaning, with what looked like a gin and tonic in his hand, against the wall just beside the lavatory. Many of the rent boys stood there, so that they could swiftly follow any potential client through the door, if necessary to lay out their wares. Was he a rent boy? Adrian could not be sure. Rent boys did not usually have that still, self-assured, slightly contemptuous manner. A rent boy would have returned his glance, smiled, even perhaps have moved over to him.

  Heart hammering, Adrian went and stood against the wall beside the man.

  ‘Hot,’ he said. He put a hand under his collar and wriggled the fingers, then pulled a face and grinned.

  The man nodded and smiled.

  ‘Do you often come here?’

  The man shrugged. ‘Sometimes.’ From both his appearance and accent, Adrian guessed him to be a Pole or a Russian. Not his usual type, with those broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist and those large, strong hands, not at all. But he felt this overwhelming excitement, he did not know why.

  They began to talk; but as they did so, the man kept looking away from him, sideways or upwards, as though he was not interested and was merely being polite. Adrian asked him questions about himself but the answers gave little away. Albanian, a student, living in North London. That was about it. Adrian began to wonder if he was straight. Perhaps he had merely strayed into the pub, not knowing the kind that it was, and then had stayed on, either vaguely titillated or too lazy to move over to another.

  Eventually Adrian looked at his watch. The lights had dimmed twice. ‘Closing time. I could have done with another drink – and so no doubt could you. But it looks as if they’ve shut up shop.’

  The man finished his beer and slowly walked over to a table to set down his glass. Was he now going to move off, out of the pub and out of his life, Adrian wondered with dread. He hurried after him. ‘I say …’ He had heard people – builders whom he had tried to chat up, youths whom he had stopped in a genuine desire to be directed somewhere – imitate that accent of his. It was not the accent he had once possessed; but people like that group in the club earlier that evening assumed that it was, so perfectly had he honed it.

  The man turned. He did not seem surprised. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why don’t you come back to my place for a drink? Only five minutes walk from here.’

  The man considered, pulling down the corners of his mouth, his forehead furrowed. He might have been about to make some momentous decision. ‘OK.’ Offhand. As though he were doing this stranger a favour.

  Out in the street, Adrian said ‘I don’t know your name.’

  The man said nothing.

  ‘I’m Adrian. Adrian,’ he repeated. ‘What should I call you?’

  ‘Call me – Mehmet.’

  It was odd that totally unsuccessful sex could also, paradoxically, be highly successful. At least for him. He was like a climber obsessed with making an ascent that he knew, in his heart, he would never achieve. Back and back the climber went, doggedly renewing the effort. But the night began to fall, the peak moved farther and farther away from him as he strained to get nearer to it. It would be boring – yes, actually boring, he from time to time secretly and ashamedly acknowledged to himself – if all that striving eventually came to its end and there he was, on top of the mountain, looking down instead of looking up.

  Siegfried was the only person who, amazingly, had ever loved him – though innumerable people had had sex with him, a few out of kindness or pity or because, at the end of a party, they were drunk, but most because they expected some return either at once in cash or later in a favour. He was exasperated and even sometimes tormented by Siegfried’s passion for him. Early in the morning, he would be awakened by a whoop, and that naked, sunburned body would leap on to him. ‘Oh, Siggy! I want to go on sleeping. Please. Please!’, he would plead with Siegfried, usually in vain, to get out of his bed, just as so often after Siegfried’s departure he would plead, usually also in vain, with men far less attractive and charming to get into it.

  There was no protest when, heart thudding, Adrian at last summoned up the courage to move, at a crouch, from his armchair to the sofa on which Mehmet was sitting, legs wide apart (was he doing that deliberately?) to reveal his ample crotch. Nor was there any protest when, with the caution of someone trying to pick up a feral cat, Adrian slipped an arm round his shoulders. Tentatively Adrian squeezed a bicep. ‘You’re very beautiful, you know.’

  Mehmet’s only response was to raise his glass of gin and tonic and sip reflectively from it.

  Emboldened, Adrian shifted uncomfortably and then tried to insert a hand through Mehmet’s open-necked shirt. Unfazed, Mehmet took hold of the wrist and gently but firmly removed the hand. But Adrian could see, with joy, that he was getting an erection.

  ‘It’s a long, long time since I saw anyone as beautiful as you in that dreadful pub. You were the only beautiful person there. As soon as I saw you, I knew.’ He had said the same trite things to so many other men. But this time he meant them.

  Mehmet remained impassive.

  ‘Shall we go into the bedroom?’

  Silently, still with the erection bulging in his tight jeans, Mehmet got up, put down his glass and took out
a cigarette.

  ‘You don’t want that now, do you?’ Adrian was fussy about passive smoking and had not cared for it when, earlier, Mehmet had lit up.

  Mehmet put the unlit cigarette down on the table.

  Nervously Adrian chattered away, as they began to take off their clothes – he had just been on a business trip to Japan, he had bought that kimono, that one over there for himself, also a wonderful little gadget, very simple, he would show it to Mehmet later, it crushed garlic without leaving all that gunge choked in it afterwards – but Mehmet might have been deaf, so little reaction did he show as he slowly took off one garment after another and then carefully arranged them over a chair. Everything was spotless, there was no sign of sweat. That embarrassed Adrian, who, because of nervousness, had been sweating even more since their arrival in the flat than in the club and the pub.

  Adrian decided that it was the most thrilling body he had ever seen – even more thrilling than Siegfried’s before it became etiolated from that ghastly disease. Mehmet lay out on his back on the king-size monogrammed linen sheet, his arms behind his head and his eyes turned up to the ceiling. His face was absolutely still; but for the open eyes, he might have been asleep. The cock was erect.

  ‘He suffered me to do what I wanted – or something of what I wanted,’ Adrian later told Igor, the former Russian ballet-dancer who looked after his country cottage for him and who once, briefly and unsuccessfully, had been his lover. But suffer wasn’t the right word. He didn’t suffer him. He was merely indifferent. When Adrian kissed him on the cheek, the forehead and the chest, he responded with nothing more than a tiny sigh. When, full of trepidation, Adrian attempted to kiss him on the mouth, Mehmet abruptly turned his head aside. ‘No.’ The monosyllable conveyed no indignation, anger or disgust. It merely conveyed: That’s it, no more.

  But how extraordinary the conclusion had been! ‘Do you remember,’ Adrian later said to Igor, ‘that there was once a best-seller with the title The Rains Came?’ Of course Igor did not remember. ‘Well, that’s how it was. A storm, a deluge, a tempest.’

  He had to see this man again. But how was he to ensure that? He did not even know if he were a rent boy or not. If he were, then he would only return if he now received a generous payment. But if he were not, he might well be insulted if money were offered, and therefore vanish forever. Often in the past, Adrian had said to a pickup ‘Is this a cash transaction? It’s better if there’s no misunderstanding’ – only, since he was so physically unappealing, to be told that it was. But somehow he could not bring himself to say that to Mehmet.

  Eventually, while Mehmet was having a shower – what an age he was taking! – Adrian got out the pearl cufflinks, in a small black box, that he had been given by the boss of the Japanese firm with which he had just done business in Kobe. They were real pearls, not artificial ones, the man’s pretty, simpering secretary had told him, no doubt on her boss’s instruction, when the Japanese had glided out of the room to take a telephone call in private.

  Mehmet returned from the shower, his wiry, closely cropped hair and his eyebrows glistening with water. A towel was wrapped round his waist. Adrian went to him and tried to take him in his arms, but Mehmet gently pushed him to one side, as a policeman might push aside an onlooker in order to make way for the passage of some VIP, crossed to the chair and reached for his vest.

  Adrian picked up the little black box, went over to Mehmet, and clicked it open. ‘ For you. A thank-you present.’

  Mehmet stared down at the cufflinks, with the same indifference that he had shown during their lovemaking. Then he put out a hand, palm upwards, and Adrian laid the box on it.

  ‘They’re real. From Japan. I brought them back from a recent trip.’ It was a silly present, he thought. Probably Mehmet never wore the sort of shirt that needed cufflinks. But, of course, he could always flog them if he wanted. They must be valuable, if the girl had been truthful about their being real.

  Mehmet put the box into his pocket. ‘Thank you.’

  The perfunctoriness of it filled Adrian not with annoyance but with excitement. ‘I’ve enjoyed our time together, oh, so much, so much!’ As Adrian gazed at Mehmet in adoration, the handsome, sulky face was little more than a blur to him. That was because he had deliberately not put his varifocal glasses back on again. He hated men in glasses and he hated himself in them.

  ‘I go.’

  ‘You’re welcome to stay the night. It’s so late.’

  ‘No, I go.’

  ‘Then I’ll give you the money for a taxi. Please. I insist!’ he added, even though Mehmet had made no demur. From his wallet Adrian produced a twenty-pound note. ‘I hope that will cover it.’ Ridiculous, he thought, of course it will.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Would you like me to ring for a cab?’

  Mehmet shook his head. ‘ No. Thank you. Many cabs in the street.’

  At the front door, with its steel shutter and innumerable bolts and locks – he had once been burgled by someone to whom he had recklessly given duplicate keys – Adrian said: ‘How do I get in touch with you?’

  ‘Give me telephone number, please. I will ring.’

  Adrian went into the sitting-room and got one of his cards from his desk. ‘That’s me,’ he said. ‘But it’s better to ring me here, before half-past eight in the morning or in the evening, not at the office. This is the number here.’ He pointed. Last year there had been some embarrassing calls to the office from someone to whom he had given the brush-off. ‘Be sure it’s this one you ring. OK?’

  Mehmet looked down at the card. Then he read out the name of the firm.

  ‘I think that you are big man?’

  ‘Not all that big. A big fish in a small pond, let us say. No Bill Gates.’ Adrian gave a nervous laugh. ‘ What about your number? Might I have that?’

  ‘Better I ring you.’

  ‘You won’t forget? Promise?’

  Mehmet merely shook his head. Did that mean that he would not forget or that he would not promise?

  ‘Thank you, Mehmet.’ Adrian stood on tiptoe to kiss him goodbye on the cheek. But Mehmet again turned away his head.

  For five days Adrian waited for a call. He would delay leaving the flat in the morning, sometimes for so long that he was obliged to take a taxi to his office instead of the Central Line; and in the evening, as soon as he had entered the flat, he would at once race over to the answering machine and switch it on. What an idiot he had been not to pay Mehmet! That was it, of course. He would not have wanted a present of pearl cufflinks and he would not have known where to go to sell them. Or perhaps he was not really gay and had merely acquiesced because he wished to have an experience new to him. That had been the case with a Japanese university student picked up in Ueno Park, who, after some clumsy sex, had told him with demure politeness: ‘Thank you, sir. I enjoy. But I think I prefer lady.’

  Then at long last, after he had leapt out of his morning bath to rush to the telephone, there was that deep, vibrant voice. ‘Adrian?’

  ‘Yes.’ He felt as if he were suffocating with joy. ‘Oh, I’m so glad you’ve rung.’

  Mehmet might have been fixing an appointment with the dentist. How about that evening? he asked. Adrian had a dinner engagement, with two rich, elderly fag hags with whom he played canasta, but he said Oh, yes, that evening would be fine. Would Mehmet like to go to the East India Club with him? ‘ It might amuse you,’ he said.

  Mehmet said that that was OK, but he did not know if he could find his way to the club, since he did not know the West End all that well. Would Adrian please meet him outside the cinema at Piccadilly Circus? Which cinema? It took some time for them to get the cinema identified. Just as he was about to ring off, Adrian shouted down the line ‘Oh, by the way, don’t forget to wear a tie. They won’t let you in without a tie.’ The first time that he had invited Siegfried to the club had been terribly embarrassing. Siegfried had turned up dressed far more smartly than any else there; but it was a smartne
ss of another time from theirs and he was wearing no tie. Having rightly said that he couldn’t possibly wear the grease-spotted tie offered to him by the porter over an Armani sweater, he had angrily marched out, followed by an embarrassed Adrian, who had then taken him to a small and extremely expensive French restaurant around the comer.

  It was a relief to find Mehmet impeccably dressed; and his behaviour was no less impeccable. Dinner over, Adrian wondered how soon he could decently suggest a return to the flat. He felt as if he were, quite literally, bursting for sex. If he did not do something quickly, the explosion would cover the walls around them with semen.

  But when he at last made the suggestion, Mehmet shook his head. ‘ Sorry. Tonight I must get home not late.’

  ‘Oh. Is someone expecting you?’ Adrian could not resist asking the question. He was insatiably inquisitive about the lives of even the most casual of pickups.

  Mehmet nodded.

  ‘Your wife? Or a girlfriend?’ It always added to the excitement for him if one or the other existed.

  Mehmet merely shook his head. No wife, no girlfriend? He was being maddeningly non-committal.

  ‘Oh, dear. This is disappointing. Most disappointing. I’d so much hoped …’

  On the steps of the club Mehmet said: ‘Sorry, Adrian. I forget money. Can you – can you lend me?’

  ‘Of course!’ But a cat’s paw of annoyance briefly raked through him. He was generous when he wanted something or someone. But, as he often said, he didn’t like to chuck money about and he hated to be taken for a ride. ‘Will that be enough?’ Again it was a twenty-pound note.

  ‘Thank you.’ Mehmet stuffed the note into the breast-pocket of his charcoal-grey jacket.

  Adrian had expected that together they would walk down the steps and hail the taxi. But Mehmet was racing off, as though late for an appointment.

  ‘Ring me!’ Adrian shouted after him. ‘Ring me soon!’