by James Lark
‘Really?’ asked Biddle. ‘Are there any people in particular who you feel might be inadvertently aiding and abetting Satan at the moment?’
‘I would not wish to mention individuals,’ she responded hastily.
‘Of course not.’
‘But there is a certain type of person which probably will not be of advantage to our congregation.’ She looked at the Reverend for some kind of recognition that he understood the type of person that she meant, but saw none. She sighed despairingly. ‘For example, there is a man—’ She stopped, unsure of how to describe him. ‘I would say he is – disreputable-looking,’ she finally concluded.
‘In what way?’ Biddle probed.
‘He has long hair and a beard. I know that unkempt hair is not wrong in itself, but –’ Sathan Petty-Saphon leant forward – ‘a demeanour like that can indicate a certain type.’
‘Really?’
‘I’m acutely aware of demeanours, Reverend Biddle,’ she added, pointedly. ‘The attire and appearance of a person can say a lot about them.’
‘Really?’ repeated Biddle, unsure what her loaded tone of voice was supposed to signify.
‘This fellow, for example, has a vaguely Jewish look.’ Reverend Biddle drew breath and she hastily continued, ‘not that there’s anything wrong with looking, or indeed being Jewish – no, it’s more to do what the expression on his face. As if he’s judging people.’
‘Sathan …’ Biddle began. ‘I can assure you that I shall keep my eyes well open for agents of Satan in the future. But I scarcely think I can start objecting to people simply on the grounds that they look a bit Jewish …’
Sathan Petty-Saphon sighed heavily and took another sip of her tea. As was so often the case, Reverend Biddle had entirely misunderstood what she had been saying.
It was over half an hour later when Gerard hurried out of his house like a scared rabbit. ‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ he fretted as he got into Reverend Biddle’s car. ‘My mother nearly changed her mind. I think she’s worried that you’re too young to be a proper vicar.’ He fumbled to pull on his seatbelt, then glanced at Biddle. That was when he got his first shock of the evening.
It wasn’t that Biddle’s clothes were inappropriate for a man of his age. Except … except what was his age? As far as Gerard could tell, he might be in his thirties, but equally Gerard supposed he could be in his forties. It seemed vaguely blasphemous to even consider the question – vicars didn’t have an age, did they? Weren’t they supposed to have eternal life?
In any case, to see a vicar attired in casual clothes – and not merely casual clothes, but going-out casual clothes – caught Gerard off guard. Especially as his immediate thought was that his vicar looked considerably more relaxed and fashionable than he did. Gone was the dog collar and the black clerical clothing Biddle wore around the house, in their place a fitted short-sleeved black shirt and jeans with fashionably wrinkled sections that showed they had certainly not been purchased from the budget clothing store Gerard’s mother shopped at.
Biddle was also looking with dismay at Gerard. He realised now that the time he had taken to get himself dressed for the occasion would have been much better spent on finding Gerard some new clothes. The boy looked awful – and something about his face made him look even more washed out and vulnerable than usual, though Biddle couldn’t quite put his finger on what.
But now was not the time to deal with that problem and neither was Biddle the person to deal with it. For the moment, it shouldn’t matter – gay clubs were dark enough to get away with many things, and in some ways it would be an advantage for Gerard to look a little out of the ordinary.
Biddle frowned. That, at least, had been the case the last time he had been in a gay club. But that was several years ago. Certainly, in its heyday the Columbino had been dark and the clientele were almost all a little out of the ordinary – things couldn’t have changed that much, surely?
They drove out of Little Collyweston in virtual silence. Gerard put on an impressive display of anxiety, screwing up and rubbing his eyes continually as if it was a compulsive nervous twitch. Biddle did his best to put the boy at ease, but every time he spoke he started to feel like a father – in a parental rather than a priestly sense. Furthermore, Gerard’s replies were so short that Biddle quickly ran out of ideas for light conversation. It was with a feeling of relief that he finally pulled up in Cogspool and confidently got out of the car ready to face whatever Different had to offer.
Looking anything but relieved, Gerard Feehan slowly got out of the passenger seat, screwing up his eyes and then opening them when he stepped out of the car as if the experience of walking on hard ground was a new one.
As they walked towards the club, Biddle wondered if he ought to give Gerard some advice on the best way to behave in the club. But he decided that this was, again, too much in the arena of the parent.
Though, not many fathers would take their sons on expeditions of this nature.
As Biddle had expected, the traditional neon sign indicated the entrance to their destination. (Cogspool was not a classy town and from the outside its clubs were virtually indistinguishable from sex shops.) A door led them to a dark staircase, which Gerard walked down as if venturing into the bowels of hell; there were no queues, so Biddle handed over payment for two people to a pretty figure with short, spiky hair and wearing combat trousers, who looked like a young man but might equally have been a lesbian. Biddle smiled happily and the boy/lesbian smiled back.
He realised that he had made an initial misjudgement as they entered the empty club. Of course they were far too early – a few figures sat hunched over tables, swigging dubious liquid from bottles, but otherwise the club was deserted. Biddle checked his watch. There were over two hours to go before the pubs were due to close.
Never mind. He bought drinks (insisting that Gerard’s cola ought to have a measure of vodka in it, to the boy’s apparent horror) and they sat at a table in awkward silence for two hours, Gerard rubbing his eyes anxiously and Biddle whistling tunes from the New English Hymnal in a vain attempt to dissipate the tension.
Gay clubs really had changed, Biddle thought to himself some time later, as he pushed his way into the scrummage for the bar (at first, this had felt impolite, but once he’d realised that queuing in an orderly manner tended to move him backwards, he had thrown himself into the competitive melee with gusto). The nightclub known on Thursday nights as Different had filled up with people at long last, but Biddle had been surprised by how un-different the clientele were.
He cast his mind back to nights at the Columbino. It had been a bold, exciting venue in which he had invariably looked out of place by virtue of his inconspicuousness. He would often be the only person not wearing make-up and his clothes were always shockingly normal in the midst of a dazzling and outrageous array of costumes. Quite what had appealed to him about it, he wasn’t sure, except that he had always felt that he could be himself in a way that he never quite was anywhere else. He would find walking around a supermarket a humiliating trial (though it was hard to say why), but in the Columbino he feared nothing. Also, it was the only club in which he’d ever managed to pick up (sometimes even fairly normal-looking) girls. This he put down to the fact that, amongst such an androgynous crowd, he was one of the few people clearly signposting his gender.
Also, lest he forgot, it was in the Columbino that God had called him to become a priest (though in moments of self-doubt he sometimes wondered if it had simply been the effect of what he was smoking at the time).
Since those days, he had grown in confidence and no longer found it such a trial walking around supermarkets. But it was sad to see that a gay club (this gay club, at least) was no longer the haven of insane ridiculousness that had once been available to him. Gay people were evidently less inventive individuals than they had been in his day. But for a few indecent activities in more tucked-away sections of the club, Biddle would have worried that he had come to the wrong p
lace altogether.
Finally managing to get himself noticed by the moody, acne-spotted girl behind the bar (seemingly the only person serving drinks in the whole club), Biddle bought a lemonade for himself and a vodka and coke for Feehan, giving the barmaid a wide smile as he handed over his money. She looked mildly taken aback to be smiled at, managing a confused smile back as Biddle turned and cheerfully pushed through the crowds, beaming at the youths throbbing around him. Though it was a less-spectacular scene than what he had experienced in his past, it was lovely to see everyone having such a good time. Having got through the tricky first bit, he now found he was enjoying the evening immensely.
Gerard Feehan was not. The club reminded him of a recurring nightmare from his early teens in which he had been abducted by aliens, itself derived from an episode of a science-fiction series he had watched before his mother had forbidden it (the ban was itself a result of the nightmare).
He looked around at the blur of lights and people, people dancing, people drinking, people kissing; the music pounded relentlessly in his head, mixing with the shouts and laughter and talking that surrounded him, pressed in on him … He screwed up his eyes, hoping for some respite, but the noise didn’t go away and the lights and movement remained in front of him, imprinted impossibly on his eyelids. He opened his eyes again and hardly noticed the difference. He rubbed them, nervously.
He glanced behind him and saw that the two intensely attractive boys he had hardly been able to peel his eyes away from earlier were now peeling the clothes from each other, ferociously tonguing as they showed off substantial amounts of ridged, muscular torso. The particularly good-looking boy, who was more or less underneath the other one, was showing the tiniest amount of nipple as his shirt was pushed further up his writhing torso by the boy on top of him (who was himself rather obscenely attractive).
Gerard gaped.
The good-looking boy on top noticed that he was being gaped at and Gerard quickly looked away, rubbing his eyes again, his embarrassment mingling with jealousy, fear and the tiniest hint of lust, for which he was already praying for forgiveness. Though he was no longer entirely sure whether or not he needed forgiveness for lust, something about which he wished the vicar’s omelette sermon had been a little clearer.
His persistent worry (and one which, if only he knew, had held him back for much of his life) was how embarrassed he would feel if Jesus himself was there. He knew that God could see everything from His lofty, bird’s-eye position in the heavens, and that was embarrassing enough in this situation; but the thought of Christ himself sitting in the club and observing him made Gerard break out into a cold sweat – which surely proved that there was something wrong, in his heart if not actually in the club itself. It was a small comfort that Jesus was not on earth to witness what he was doing, and even if Jesus was around, he certainly wouldn’t be frequenting such, seedy, immoral places …
As it happened, Jesus was nowhere near Different on this particular evening, though a Messaianic visit wasn’t nearly as unlikely as Gerard imagined – only a week earlier Jesus had been there, largely ignored by the clientele but finding a moment to have an enjoyable chat with the DJ. It was perhaps a shame that he hadn’t delayed his visit by seven days, because he would have been able to perform a miracle of some kind for Gerard, who had just discovered a new problem that seemed to require such an intervention.
Oblivious to this, Biddle had become engrossed in the activity on the dance floor, which he considered as disappointing as the clothes people were wearing. It could hardly be called dancing at all; a large body of people pressed together and jerking in time to the music had none of the panache of what he once might have attempted in a club, back in the day when clubs were packed with virtuosic physical demonstrations. (It was whilst he had been endeavouring to join in with this that God had clearly commanded him to become a priest; on that occasion it wasn’t just the Lord moving in mysterious ways.) He was almost tempted to pop onto the dance floor in this club (‘Different’, indeed!) and show these young folk a thing or two. But he constantly reminded himself that he was here – essentially – regrettably – as Gerard Feehan’s guardian. Not as a father, but perhaps as an older brother. It certainly would not be tactful or sympathetic to cause a scene by getting involved in what was going on. That was what Gerard was here to do.
Not that Biddle was having any success in persuading the boy to get involved. They had finally moved from their table so as not to look like a couple of old men chatting (or rather, not chatting) in the corner. (Biddle was very keen to remove any suggestion of their being a couple at all.) Thus they had gone from sitting in uncomfortable silence to standing in uncomfortable silence, Gerard watching the swaying, sweating mass of people and occasionally observing in open-mouthed discomfort some of the less subtle activities on the fringes, but showing little inclination to involve himself in either.
Well. There was only so much Biddle could be expected to do. Now his duty was clearly to keep Gerard plied with drinks and otherwise stay out of the way, in the hope that somehow the boy would become more integrated into the proceedings.
Biddle momentarily wondered if somebody as frigid as Gerard might well be justified in taking some drugs. He instantly repented of the thought, it being at best illegal in thrust.
He looked round for his charge. Feehan was still standing on his own in the corner, frozen in a statue-like position and apparently undertaking an intense study of the floor as if he was in some kind of trance. Biddle surveyed the boy with a feeling of despair, then walked towards him with what he hoped would be an encouraging smile.
Feehan looked up, but didn’t seem encouraged.
‘I’ve brought your drink,’ Biddle explained, holding out the vodka and coke, but Gerard didn’t take it. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Um … I’ve lost my contact lens,’ Gerard explained, a quaver in his voice.
That was why he looked so vulnerable and washed out – he wasn’t wearing glasses. ‘I didn’t know you wore contact lenses,’ Biddle commented with a smile.
‘I don’t. At least …’ Gerard squinted at the floor again. ‘I got them fitted today.’ He looked worriedly at Biddle. ‘They’re new.’
That explained all the nervous screwing up and rubbing of his eyes.
‘They were quite expensive,’ Gerard continued. ‘Mother would be …’ His voice was still unsteady and Biddle had a horrible feeling that he might be about to start crying.
‘Alright, yes, I understand,’ Biddle said hurriedly, putting the drinks on the nearest table and getting onto his knees.
‘Are you going to pray?’ asked Gerard.
‘I’m doing that already,’ Biddle told him (it was a lie, so he uttered a quick ‘for goodness’ sake Lord, I could do without this’ to fulfil his prayerful obligations as a man of the cloth). ‘I thought I might help you look for it at the same time.’
‘It’s small and … sort of see-through,’ Gerard informed him.
‘Where exactly did it come out?’
‘Um … well …’ Gerard made a wide gesture taking in all of the surrounding area. ‘Somewhere … um … around …’
‘Right.’ Biddle got up commandingly, reaching in his pocket and withdrawing a white piece of cardboard.
‘What’s that for?’ Gerard enquired, nervously.
‘Never underestimate the power of these,’ Biddle replied, doing up the top button of his shirt and putting on the dog collar. ‘It’s got me more than one free train journey.’ Biddle strode in the direction of the DJ, the crowd in front of him parting like the Red Sea as people noticed his dog collar, their eyes drawn to it as if it was exerting a hypnotic influence.
The DJ was a man called Gavin Elliott and he was having a shit evening. He always had a shit time at Different, because the last thing he wanted to stand and watch was a mass of attractive young gay men successfully pulling each other when he had been single for the best part of a decade. Even if he had been able to abandon h
is decks and throw himself onto the dance floor, he smoked too much and ate too much to fit comfortably into the vanity-driven scene in front of him. He was so depressed he’d been forced to sleep with his stalker last week, a man even less healthy than himself, who had taken some persuading to skip straight on to the sex and forgo a lengthy session on a home-karaoke machine. A home-karaoke machine! The only bright side was that Gavin didn’t own a bunny so no innocent animals were at risk.
And now there was some vicar approaching him, which was the last thing he needed. If there was anything Gavin Elliott hated even more than seeing attractive men pulling each other, it was God botherers; there was enough in the news to demonstrate irrefutably that the church was an evil influence, out of date and irrelevant, yet somehow it still exerted power over people like a giant parasite and it made Gavin want to throw things at the smug, self-satisfied ‘believers’ who seemed so damn happy about everything and so oblivious in the face of rationality. The grinning vicar approaching him made him feel sick – what gave him the right to tell people what to do, to grin at people in such a superior way? And what was he after? Did he want to do some kind of evangelistic speech over the sound system? Was he here to brainwash them all? Probably wanted to tell everyone they were sinners and that unless they repented of their perverted homosexual ways they were going to hell. God he hated Christians and everything they stood for.
(Ironically, Gavin Elliott had shared a conversation with the founder of Christianity only a week earlier whilst having a quick cigarette outside and it had been a high point of his week, though he had no idea that the man who had befriended him and sympathised with him was actually the personification of the thing he thought he hated.)
‘Hi, sorry to bother you,’ Andy Biddle discreetly whispered.