by Patrick Gale
Alone again, in a late tube train home, she watched a boy and girl who had remained standing even though the carriage was almost empty, so as to be able to lean against a glass partition and kiss. The wine began to have its usual depressive effect on her mood. She looked away and stared in the other direction. A much older couple, together some twenty-five or thirty years, she would guess, sat with great bags of shopping on their laps, intently discussing something. They were forever interrupting each other, their voices softly interleaving, the pacing of their phrases unconsciously worn to a perfect fit from years of proximity. Alison perceived a kind of deflated tenderness between them. The woman looked up and caught her staring, so she turned aside and read a short, dejected poem on a poster overhead, then fell to returning her reflection’s look of hollow-eyed reproach.
Like one admitting at last to middle age, or the need for more sensible hair, she realised she had become one of those women who spent so much free time with homosexual men that she uprooted herself from the possibility of any but a vicarious fulfilment. Now that she had stooped to pandering for her brother and a man she had wanted for herself, her past denials of the pathetic truth were futile. She thought of taking out her address book to prove that she had plenty of heterosexual male friends, but knew in advance they would all be either married, hopeless or dull. She could not stop working at the helpline – for better or worse, the people there were her intimates. Forcing herself to list the options left her, she came up with only two: to make a vow to accept every social opportunity that came her way, however unpromising, or to step off the romantic treadmill altogether and convince herself that she was spoilt for straight men and that her happiness did not depend on the unforeseeable arrival of that elusive He. Both options seemed equally tragic, but the second at least preserved her pride and self-rule. Appalled at the pattern her life had assumed, she toyed with the idea of asking someone to recommend a psychotherapist. Therapy, Cynthia was forever saying, was like the Tarot; best approached when one had a single, burning issue to resolve. Women who prefer men who prefer men seemed as hot an issue as any.
The first thing she noticed when she let herself in was the lingering smell of burnt toast, the second was Sam’s old coat, slung over the back of a kitchen chair. Music was coming from upstairs. Something bright, new and American her grandfather had given her, with a warning that it was banal, but which she liked playing as she drifted off to sleep. She found Sam flat out across the sofa, still dusty from the site, one arm thrown across his sleeping eyes against the glare from the lamp by which he had been reading. She stood watching him for a moment, wondering whether she was kind, or indeed right, to unleash on him the complications her brother would surely bring. Then she faded out the music, clicked off the lamp and retreated to her empty bed.
‘This is my bed,’ she told herself. ‘My comfortable bed. My bed which I am lucky to have all to myself.’
She lay there, hands hugged for comfort between her thighs, and wondered, as she had often caught herself wondering that summer, whether she wanted a child, a new job or an uncomplicated lover and whether the three were, by their very natures, mutually exclusive. Perhaps, she thought, as she drifted off to sleep, it would be wisest to leave the visit to a therapist until she could make up her mind.
41
The site lay on the eastern perimeter of the City or the western fringe of the East End – depending on one’s priorities – where banks and trading houses began to give way to lower-rent businesses and still lower-rent housing and the mixture of private and public domains was nicely reflected in a scattering of sinisterly stylish eighteenth century churches. The new hospital was rising from the derelict shells of a Victorian glue factory and a tannery, which had once added their distinctive stenches to the ripe London air. The design was clean and white, not so very different from the great new offices in Docklands. In order to help pay back some of the building costs, there was to be a shopping precinct under the hospital at street level, with restaurants and boutiques to tempt visitors away from their troubles and into debt. The ambulance and mortuary exits were to be placed considerately down a side street and the chimney outlet from the incinerator was cunningly designed so as to recycle valuable energy back into the heating system. The locals might have been grateful for the erection of this gleaming temple to health and commerce had two perfectly serviceable Victorian hospitals, admittedly without shopping precincts, not been closed down in the area the previous year. The same building contractor was due to move on to the older buildings once the new one was finished, to begin converting their unwieldy red-brick spaces into ‘novelty’ flat-office hybrids coyly dubbed ateliers.
Alison had been joking when she suggested Jamie would have time to visit the site in his lunch hour, but he had contemplated doing so in all seriousness. He had spent the night in a fever of erotic anticipation, the morning in turmoil at his inability to focus on the urgent work in hand. He had forgotten, however, that it was his secretary’s birthday and had been forced to spend the lunch hour in liquid cheer with her and other colleagues. At last, at around four, he could bear it no longer and, pretending to have thrown up in the gents and be ‘not feeling too hot’, he sloped off early. He no longer needed Alison’s rudimentary map, having already compared it with the A to Z and scorched the relevant details onto his memory. It took him nearly twenty minutes to reach the place, weaving across streams of pre-rush hour traffic, diving crossly through slow-moving clots of fellow pedestrians. He was panting slightly when he arrived.
Jostled by shoppers and schoolchildren, he stood his ground beside a bus shelter and scanned the network of scaffolding. It was definitely worth a resounding ‘oooh’ – icons of hackneyed homoerotic fantasy were everywhere. Scantily clad in cut-away shorts and heavy boots, three labourers heaved a pre-constructed window frame into place. A fourth, on the level above, his thick arms ending in grotesque padded gloves, his barrel chest spattered with mortar, carried a concrete block as lightly as if it were styrofoam. There were so many men at work that he had to force his eyes to search the site systematically, one level, one section, at a time. He wished he were in jeans and an old tee-shirt. Dressed in his suit, he felt like the Dirk Bogarde character in Victim. He remembered, with disgust, a conversation at Sunday night’s Holland Park dinner party where his barrister host had rolled his eyes discussing the latest ‘piece of rough’ he claimed to have seduced. He tugged off his tie and rolled it into a pocket then slung his jacket over one shoulder. Now he felt like the Dirk Bogarde character on holiday.
At last he saw him. He had passed over him twice, not recognising him because he had shucked his coat and shirt, but his eye was suddenly drawn back to the grimy bandanna tied around Sam’s neck. As he watched, Sam stopped in his work beside a cement mixer to pull off the piece of scarlet cloth and wipe his face with it. He wasn’t tanned all over like the other builders – evidently it was rare for heat to overthrow his modesty – and once Jamie had spotted him, his paler skin made him easy to find again in the toing and froing high on the walkways that encompassed the bright, emerging walls. As Sam tied the bandanna back about his neck, he seemed to notice Jamie down on the pavement and froze for a moment. Jamie could wait no longer and raised an arm.
‘Hi!’ he shouted. ‘Sam! Hi!’
At this distance it was hard to gauge Sam’s expression but as his hands dropped back from his neck, he raised one of them in a kind of American Indian greeting, then glanced about him. Jamie tried to beckon him down to street level but Sam shook his head then pointed to the site office Portakabin and beckoned in turn. It was a test.
‘Very well,’ Jamie thought. As he began to cross the road, he glanced back up and saw that Sam had gone back to work.
‘I’ve come to see, er, Sam,’ he told the woman behind the rudimentary desk. She looked him up and down but betrayed no surprise. Her accent was breathily west-coast Irish. ‘You’ll need one of these, love,’ she said, handing him a yellow hard hat. ‘Sign the
book,’ she added, ‘and don’t keep him long.’
‘I won’t,’ he said. ‘But it’s quite urgent.’ As he signed, she slapped a yellow VISITOR sticker on his chest and consulted a grimy work book.
‘He’s on the fourth level,’ she said. ‘Out of the hut and use the lift. Stay by the gate when you get there, and I’ll call him over to you. Don’t get in anyone’s way and mind your back, for Jesus’ sake.’
‘I will,’ he grinned.
As he rode up in the rickety cage lift, her voice rang out over the Tannoy system.
‘Visitor for Sam. Visitor for Sam now.’
Someone, who presumably hadn’t seen the visitor’s gender, let out a piercing wolf-whistle. Heart racing already, Jamie looked down at the stretching drop around him and felt his stomach fall away. The cage came to a halt with an abrupt lurch. He slid aside the safety barrier and stepped out, careful now not to look down through the planks that were supporting him over the void. There was no sign of Sam. Jamie waited a few minutes as he had been told to do, then saw that Sam was at the far end of the walkway, pointedly continuing to load cement blocks onto a hoist. Jamie called his name tentatively, then louder but his voice – now he even sounded like Dirk Bogarde – was drowned out by a sudden burst from a pneumatic pump or generator in the half-formed stairwell that plunged down to his right. Looking straight ahead, one hand groping along the horizontal scaffolding to his left, he walked gingerly over to join him.
‘Sam?’
Sweat shone on his back, darkening the V of coarse, dark hair that curved down into his jeans at the base of his spine. As he heaved another block, a web of muscles worked across his back and shoulders like wings beneath the skin, and a single mole seemed to dart back and forth on the edge of one of his shoulder blades. Wishing more than ever that he was dressed for the occasion, Jamie took another step forward.
‘Sam?’
Sam’s tone was icy.
‘What the fuck are you playing at?’ he said, continuing to load blocks, as though no-one were talking to him.
‘I came … I came to find you,’ Jamie blurted out.
‘Oh yeah? And how am I supposed to explain you away? A visit from my friendly local bank manager, maybe? A bloke asking me to move my BMW?’
Jamie had not thought of this, having seen the awkwardness only from his own viewpoint. He wished Sam would at least turn round to acknowledge him.
‘You could say I was one of the architects,’ he suggested weakly.
Sam withered him.
‘Yes. Well. The architects keep their ties on.’
Jamie looked wretchedly down at his feet, saw through the planks below and had to steady himself against a scaffolding upright.
‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘I’ll go away. Sorry.’
Now Sam looked over his shoulder. He raised an eyebrow, taking in Jamie’s incongruous clothes.
‘Like the hat,’ he said.
Jamie let out a snort of nervous laughter. Sam yelled up to the level above, ‘Okay! Take her up!’ and the hoist juddered into motion. He turned back to face Jamie, tugging off the bandanna again to wipe the gritty grime away from his eyes and brow. There was a flash of white dust across his hair which Jamie imagined brushing away with his fingertips. He suspected he was about to grovel. He was beyond caring.
‘You shouldn’t be up here,’ Sam muttered, glancing about him again. ‘It’s dangerous. Let’s get back over there.’ He gave Jamie a push back towards the lift barrier.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jamie repeated and realised he had never wanted anything so much as he wanted this man beside him, even if only for a single night. Even two feet away, he could smell him. Sitting, dazed, at his desk the morning after their fateful second encounter, he had caught a whiff of his musk lingering on the back of one of his hands, and had felt as naked in the spasm of desire it triggered as if Sam had just materialised beside his computer terminal in nothing but a smile and a hard hat.
‘So,’ Sam said, wilfully unhelpful. ‘What’s up? Is Alison okay?’
‘Yes. Yes, she’s fine.’ Jamie stammered with a twitch of irritation. ‘I saw her last night.’
‘Ah.’
Jamie knew he must speak now or never.
‘Sam, I … I was in the neighbourhood,’ how wrong that sounded, ‘and I remembered Alison had said this was where you worked.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes and … I wondered what you were doing this evening.’
Sam scratched the back of his neck, frowning. Surely he was doing this on purpose?
‘Well, I’ll knock off here at five then I suppose I’ll find a bite to eat and crash out.’
‘Sam, I’m asking you out.’
‘You are?’ He looked slightly amused at the idea. ‘Ask me again. I don’t think I caught it first time around.’
The lift arrived back at their level and two vast, slack-gutted men, one of them black, both stripped to the waist, came out and strode off down the walkway laughing at something. Jamie watched them, not daring to meet Sam’s eyes.
‘I’m asking you out. Will you come out with me?’ he said.
‘Okay.’
Jamie spun around, disbelieving. Sam was looking out over the site, pretending they weren’t talking, although one corner of his mouth had curled up, dimpling, mocking him. ‘I said okay,’ he said and laughed bitterly. ‘You’ve never had to ask before, have you? Jesus!’
‘I have,’ Jamie lied.
‘Naa. Never.’
‘I …’ Jamie’s defences were down. He had no shame. If Alison could see me now, he thought.
‘But we’ve got to do it properly,’ Sam went on.
‘Of course,’ Jamie blurted, not sure what he meant precisely but willing, at that moment, to agree to anything, anything in the conceivable repertoire of pleasures.
It turned out that Sam’s requirements were endearingly conventional. As befitted a first, proper date, they met for dinner, then went dancing. Dinner was relatively easy, although Sam favoured a mouth-blistering Bengali curry, one mouthful of which left Jamie wondering if he would ever kiss, much less taste, again. As they ate, he watched his intake of Indian beer, wary of loosening his tongue and starting to prattle. Sam hardly spoke at first. He was obviously hungry, ordering with swift impatience and concentrating on the food once the dishes began to arrive. Jamie caught his eye now and then and smiled foolishly, to which Sam responded with shyly raised eyebrows and a diversionary offer of more naan or cooling raita. The restaurant was bustling and noisy with chatter and the sinuous wail of Bombay pop.
‘So what are the people you work with like?’ Jamie asked at last.
‘All right,’ said Sam. ‘They’re just blokes. You know.’
‘Do you talk?’
‘Not much. We don’t all take our breaks at the same time. But yeah. We talk. Go to the canteen. Eat a bit. Read a paper. You know. I’m not really a builder.’
‘I remember you saying. ‘You trained as a fitter.’
‘Yeah. Naval fitter. Devonport dockyards. My dad worked there too and my granddad.’
‘Is your dad still alive?’
‘Yeah. And my mum and my brother.’ Sam frowned. ‘At least, I think so. We don’t talk much now. It’s been a while.’
Jamie watched him dab up some sauce with a last piece of naan.
‘Ali and I don’t know who our father is, or even if we share the same one,’ he said.
‘Yeah. She said.’ Sam licked scarlet juices from his fingers. ‘Well I had a dad and a mum and I lived in a house and went to a school and had holidays at Torbay every year and I used to watch Blue Peter and Jackanory and I wanted to be a painter or a market gardener when I grew up.’
‘Why are your telling me all this?’ Jamie asked, perplexed at his hectoring manner.
‘So you can see I’m just a bloke, not some fantasy of yours.’ Sam looked up with searing directness. ‘I know what your lot are like. Plumber. Garage attendant. Trucker. Construction worker. It�
��s all just another fantasy. It’s got nothing to do with me.’
‘What do you mean, “my” lot?’ Jamie asked, defensive lest his thoughts had betrayed themselves.
‘You know,’ Sam said impatiently.
‘I’m no more a typical faggot than you’re a builder,’ Jamie insisted.
‘You go out to bars and pick people up,’ Sam said, lowering his tone. ‘You said so yourself.’
‘Oh. And straight men don’t do that? I was talking about stereo-types. I hate disco music, I have no eye for interior design and ever since I first saw The Wizard of Oz I’ve found Judy Garland plain sinister.’
‘But you don’t play rugger or anything, do you?’
‘What is this? Some kind of contest?’ Jamie protested, half laughing at the absurdity of Sam’s questions, but threatened nonetheless. ‘Look. You don’t have to prove anything. You already went to bed with me, remember? Twice. You obviously weren’t used to it, but you still knew what you were doing.’
Sam scowled as a waiter came to take away their dishes, then his expression softened.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You’re right. Sorry. I’m new to all this, that’s all.’
‘Well so am I.’
‘No you’re not.’
‘Sam, I’m new to this!’ Jamie indicated the two of them, the restaurant. ‘I’m new to dating.’
Sam grinned suddenly then looked away. Watching the people at the neighbouring table pulling on their coats, he said, from the corner of his mouth. ‘Well you’re not doing badly for a beginner. Come on. Get some coffee then we’re going dancing. I’ve heard of somewhere that’s meant to be good.’