Eirini Press
(epub: 978-0-9799989-6-6)
I.
Oh fuckandbolloxandpissandshit! My trousers—they’re ruined, totally ruined. There’s a bloody great hole in the knee. I can’t believe I’ve just done that; brand new suit, too—first time I’ve bloody well worn it. We’re not talking Tom Ford here, or even Hugo Boss—Marks and Spencer’s Italian Collection actually, and the cost hadn’t exactly broken the bank, but I fancied I looked the business in it.
How the bloody hell did it happen? Well, I know the answer to that, of course. I’m monumentally drunk, that’s how.
One moment I was at the top of the stairs outside Charing Cross Station, and the next I’m flying down them like a tap-dancer on acid, trying to stop myself from going into a dive; halfway down, I had one of those life-flashing-before-my-eyes moments. Just when I thought I might be winning, down I went, my arse rat-a-tat-tatting on the stairs, hurling my briefcase into the air at the same time. Anyway, I ended up stretched out along Villiers Street with the back of my jacket flipped over the top of my head and my lips French kissing the tarmac—and the tinkling sound I could hear from far away was various bits of my mobile scurrying down towards the Embankment.
I lost it for a bit, and when I came to, I was being propped up into a sitting position against a wall by three bright eyed young lads. Eastern Europeans—all high cheek bones, crew cuts and Primark jackets. One of them was making an attempt to dust me down, flicking at me with great big hands, while the other two went about collecting fragments of my mobile before putting them in the pocket of the jacket they’d just removed from the top of my head. My briefcase was fetched from the cobblestones above the stairs, and before I could say anything to stop them, my head was being tipped back and my new friends were administering a shot of tepid lager from a half empty can straight into my mouth—as though I needed any more, for Christ sake.
‘Is okay? Is okay?’ They were all patting my back at the same time.
‘Yes, yes. Is okay. Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you… Very sweet of you.’
I couldn’t wait for them to leave me alone, and they did quite soon, after pulling me to my feet and more patting on the back. Just for a tiny while, with the shock, I felt completely sober, and then horribly embarrassed, of course, with half of London looking on, including a whole load of laughing kids who were staring out at me from the windows of Pizza Hut. I’d put on a hell of a show for the end of their school outing. ‘Go to London early to see the Changing of the Guard, then on to a matinee of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for your first visit to a West End Theatre; afterwards sit in your favourite pizza restaurant and watch a drunk geezer rolling down a flight of stairs outside.’
Q
I’ve managed to make my way down here to the closed up flower stall outside Embankment Station, trying not to limp while looking for a semidark place where I can sit down and survey the damage. There’s a lot of acting going on because what I really want to do is have a bloody good rub of my elbow and give in a little to my quivering chin. Very gingerly, lowering my very sore bum onto an iron bollard, I prepare myself for the worst.
There’s no future in the trousers, I can see that immediately, so I’m delving around in the pocket of my jacket for my mobile, doing a breathy little whistle that is meant to convey a nonchalant attitude to whoever might be listening. I’m just praying that all the parts that have broken off might just click back together again like a kid’s Lego set, but now I’ve opened my hand, I can see an empty casing, a smashed screen, and a disconnected something that might be the battery. That means I’m going to be joining the queue at the Carphone Warehouse tomorrow morning.
I can’t bear that—the bloody pointless waste of time. Waiting in line and very ill-at-ease anyway because it’s just the sort of situation that makes me feel so inadequate—all those questions being fired at me that I really should know the answer to, about ‘SIM’ cards, ‘minutes carried over’, ‘predictive text’ and insurance policies I’ve not taken out because I was sure they were a bit of a con. It’s the same feeling of being out of my depth that I get around macho mechanics when taking the car in for a service, or those cocky lads that serve you at New Covent Garden. Last time I was there I caught sight of myself in a mirror performing a ludicrously unbelievable swagger holding a tray of geraniums. Didn’t fool anyone. Middle-class, middle-aged poof buying his bedding plants.
It’s not only the trousers—I’ve trashed the jacket as well. Two of the buttons on the right cuff have disappeared, the third’s hanging by a thread, and the lining inside the arm has been ripped to pieces and is hanging out the end of the sleeve. I’m already busy working out a little scheme in my head to take the whole suit back to M&S in Oxford Street to complain about the quality and insist on a refund.
‘This garment has developed a fault, I’m afraid.’
‘Where, Sir?’
‘The buttons on the cuff have dropped off, and there’s a hole in the trousers.’
‘Ah yes, Sir, I see it. A big hole at the knee encrusted with dried blood, a bit of gravel and an old cigarette butt.’
Oh bugger and balls, that’s not going to work.
Q
Until the stranger appeared, it could have been just any one of hundreds of identical evenings at The Rainbow. I’d taken up my usual position in the downstairs bar, leaning against the wall at the far end, briefcase between my feet and jacket over my arm. I would have been holding not the first in a succession of enormous glasses of white wine in one hand while the fingers of the other fiddled with the change in my trouser pocket that was to provide me with the next. Two barely pubescent barmen with acres of Calvin Klein underpant showing above their jeans were manning the bar at the far end, failing to notice thirsty punters because they were too busy flirting with each other and jigging around to the Kylie and Madonna concert videos on the big screen in front of them.
Standing right next to me, Willy Whitehall—my name for him because he shrieks ‘civil servant’ in his pin-stripe suit, leather attaché case and tight black brogues—was already about to treat himself to what was probably his fourth or fifth glass of wine, the point in the evening at which he’s liable to launch into a serious discussion with the non-existent person standing next to him. Nick and Gerard, two laymen from Westminster Abbey, were at their allotted places at the bar, balancing their huge frames on the narrow stools, flirting with a young oriental guy with long black hair and a shirt knotted above his belly-button. The gents were already well into their second bottle of Chablis when I arrived. I’d given them a quick nod of acknowledgement—my way of saying ‘I’m not coming over this evening for a gossip about the dean…’ and then I’d settled down for a good long drinking session with no interruptions, lost in my own little dream world. Just the way I like it.
‘Ben? Ben Teasdale?’
Shit. Unsolicited company. The grinning face in front of me was only very vaguely familiar, and a name was absolutely out of the question.
‘Hello, there…’ I said, embarking on a desperate mental search through the alcoholic haze, whilst trying to organize my features into a look that might imply recognition. ‘Well I never! Fancy seeing you! How on earth are things?’
Bloody well caught out. I hate that.
My position in the downstairs bar at The Rainbow gives me a clear view of anyone coming down the stairs, and if it’s ever someone I know, their temporary disorientation in the dark usually allows me time to escape. It isn’t that I particularly mind being caught in alcoholic ‘flagrante delicto’—it’s just that drinking has recently become an intensely solitary pleasure. One’s company, two’s a crowd. S
o my concentration had slipped this evening. My eye was off the ball. However many I’d had was nicely hitting the spot, and the smiling face was bearing down on me before I had any chance of avoidance.
‘It’s Val,’ the stranger said, giving the lie to my facial efforts. A hand was extended.
‘Val Lorrimer?’
A great hurricane of names and faces blew past me as I tried to place his face in various parts of my life, starting in the recent past, before I was forced to delve farther and farther back into the mists of time. An acquaintance from another office? Someone who used to train at the YMCA? The former partner of an old friend? Christ, a dodgy one night stand from the early days? Even farther back, for God’s sake—University halls of residence? And then at last, memories stirring from about as far back as it’s possible to go…
‘My goodness,’ I said, ‘What an extraordinary memory you have!’
‘You haven’t changed!’ He was nodding his head in surprise as he pumped my hand slowly and deliberately, a huge grin on his face, ‘Totally recognisable!’
It was the name that had made sense to me first, followed by his features—first the dimple at the chin, then the two slightly wonky front teeth and the lopsided smile—pieces of a jigsaw being moved around before slipping into place, then the puzzle suddenly complete under the heavy disguise of the now receding hairline and furrowed laughter lines round the eyes.
‘But it’s incredible that you remember me, Val,’ I’d shouted into his ear above the Justin Timberlake soundtrack, ‘We were just kids.’
‘Yea, but you were exceptional, Ben. Who the fuck wouldn’t remember you! You were everyone’s hero after what happened!’
I got away as soon as I could without being impolite—thirty minutes or so, but I can’t be sure. Time’s one of the first things to go wonky when you drink like I do. Before managing to leave, I’d earnestly asked him, while stealing impatient glances at my watch, all the right questions about how he’d spent his life. He’d told me of his childless marriage and the ten years passed as a solicitor in an old family practise in Tewkesbury, followed by a tortuous coming to terms with gayness, a difficult divorce, and the epiphany of a new life after flight to London. I’d placed my hand on his shoulder and squeezed empathetically at the story of his first adored lover who’d died in the epidemic of AIDS at the end of the eighties. He’d not been able to adjust to a lone gay life in the city and had returned to his roots and the very same job he’d left behind a few years before.
‘I pop back up to the bright lights every now and again just to remind myself that I’m still a sexual being, Ben. Nothing doing at all in Tewkesbury. They like to think they’re absolutely cool about it all at work—as long as there’s no mention. They don’t mind me being a poof as long as they think of me as being interested in nothing more threatening than the odd glass of sherry.’
Of course I remembered him. After a few minutes, it was as though his face hadn’t changed at all in forty years. In fact, as we were talking, the image of every one of those six boys that shared the dorm with me that extraordinary summer term began to knock at my consciousness. Closing my eyes now, I can see not only their individual faces and the beds they slept in, but also the colours in the tartan rugs we all unpacked from our trunks and laid across our beds at the beginning of every term. That last look over the shoulder back into the dorm as I left it early in the morning all those years ago is an indelible stain on my retina—like a press photographer’s flash that never stops blinding.
A gay Val Lorrimer makes perfect sense to me in hindsight, of course. Lanky, pigeon-chested Val, shy of the shower, terrified of games, adoring of Julie Andrews and preferring the company of his mother to that of his father. Not totally unlike yours truly, actually.
Just typical of me, though, that when he mentioned that it might be an idea to leave the bar and pop out to find somewhere quieter for a bite to eat and a ‘real chinwag’ about ‘that funny little school’, I bestowed upon him my usual well rehearsed lie which implied the existence of a brooding presence awaiting my return, somewhere south of the river, rolling pin in hand and finger pointing at the clock.
‘You’ve a lover, Ben?’ he said.
I nodded solemnly, half kidding myself that the absence of a spoken reply somehow diluted the falsehood.
It’s totally barmy that I do that. I don’t know why I always need to get away. I don’t know why I didn’t want to stay and explore further his proposition of casting me as a schoolboy hero. Why couldn’t I have invested just a little more of my time in little Val Lorrimer?
Except not so little Val Lorrimer these days. The puny figure of the boy has given way to one with a princely girth. As I’d lowered my ear to his mouth to catch an anecdote about coming out to his aged father, I’d noticed the suede jacket flapping open to reveal shirt buttons straining to hold a bulging waistline in check.
Perhaps that was it. Perhaps I feared the invite for a bite might lead to a suggestion of something a little stronger, and the idea of having to deliver an embarrassed rejection was just too much to bear. A deeply unappetizing image of two portly gentlemen rolling around on top of each other ‘for old time’s sake’ had sprung to mind—not the sort of fantasy I’d set out to enjoy at the beginning of my evening. In the cold reality of a sober morning, I’m going to be asking myself why on earth I flatter myself that ‘Lucky’ Lorrimer from school would have the slightest interest in flinging himself around with an ageing schoolmate, especially since, from the quickest of updates of his life, he seems to have a particular interest in—and to have enjoyed a modicum of success with—the much younger man.
Perhaps I wanted to protect the image he had of me as a young schoolboy hero and felt it was necessary to make a rapid exit to cut short his exposure to the reality of me as a tipsy lone drunk?
But I’m not being totally honest here, because it was probably nothing more than the need to protect my drinking time, not wanting to slow down and wait for a companion sipping at half the rate I’m used to when alone.
As soon as we’d properly completed our reintroduction, I’d insisted on buying a celebratory drink—and then another when my glass had idled empty far too long while I waited for him to catch up. Within a few minutes I was clocking his slight confusion as he noticed my glass was empty yet again, while the ice in his first gin and tonic—I’d insisted, against his protests, on getting him a double rather than the half pint he’d asked for—clinked impatiently in the tumbler in his hand and another, double again, sat on the ledge behind us, awaiting his attention.
‘Er, white wine, isn’t it?’ He’d hurried over to the bar and come back with a lone refill for me.
‘Not joining me?’ I said.
‘Christ, no, Ben. Actually, I’m not that big a drinker,’ he said, raising his tumbler to his lips and taking an unpractised gulp.
‘Your mobile, Ben. Give me your number. We simply must meet again soon,’ he responded when I finally managed to make it clear that I was right out of time and heading for deep trouble with someone at home who must have come across as having all the allure of a possessive Widow Twanky.
I changed the penultimate digit. Made it a ‘naught’ instead of an ‘eight’, slurring a vowel sound and sliding it to an end with an emphatic ‘t’. Eleven numbers, but useless with just the one out of place. An easy mistake for him to make, I assured myself, as he typed it into the mobile held close to his face, the blue-green light shining up into his eager eyes.
I gave him a bear hug. Quite genuine, too, with my hands moving up his back to stroke and pat not only in acknowledgement of our school days and shared sexuality, but also because I was smitten with a real sense of sadness for him. It seemed to me he’d struggled to put a brave face on a lonely and rather unfulfilled sort of a life. I winked at him and gave him a nudge in the direction of a blond college boy type who’d come into the bar while we’d been talking, impl
ying that yes, indeed, it was time for me to be off but that I was also standing in the way of the real purpose of his visit and must therefore hurry along and leave him alone to get on with it.
‘He’s looking at you,’ I lied. ‘He’s definitely looking at you…’
A common ruse of mine to allow for an exit. I can’t count the times when I’ve interrupted a lagging conversation to point out with an envious gleam that some drop dead gorgeous young thing was trying to catch an eye.
‘Are you sure?’ he said slowly, staring unashamedly and wide eyed in the young man’s direction.
‘Absolutely bloody certain. Two’s company, three’s a crowd! I’m off!’
‘Go get!’ I mouthed pantomimically as I reached the bottom of the stairs, ‘He’s waiting.’
Q
‘You funny fucked up old bastard,’ I said aloud to myself as I stopped halfway down the street. ‘What the bloody hell’s up with you?’
I nearly went back to say I did have my mobile on me after all so I’d better take his number too, and ‘I’ve phoned my better half to say I’ll be late—fuck the consequences—let’s catch that bite to eat after all.’ But I didn’t. The idea had been overridden, and I’d carried on down towards the Embankment to prepare for my impromptu circus act on the stairs.
I don’t suppose it mattered to Val Lorrimer one way or the other, though. Typical of me to invest him with a sense of rejection that I don’t suppose for a minute he was feeling. No doubt he stayed at the bar, battling with the unwanted gin and tonics and risking a smile or two at Blondie before deciding that Ben Teasdale was quite wrong and that the young chap wasn’t the slightest bit interested, but anyway, there were plenty more fish in the sea. Then he’d no doubt remind himself that he was up from Tewkesbury for the night to misbehave, and misbehave he bloody well would—after all, he hadn’t travelled over a hundred miles to spend the entire evening reminiscing with a barmy old school friend, however nice the re-making of an ancient acquaintance might be. And wasn’t it just great that Ben Teasdale had had the sense to know when to fuck off and leave him to it?
The House Martin Page 1