by Alan Keslian
The Newcastle visitors arrived on time on Friday afternoon, and as on their last visit created a rumpus in the hall by bolting for the table where the hotel register lay. They defaced a page and a half with comments such as: Open a whole year and still a virgin; I hope you’ve changed the sheets this time; and Full massage available in basement, cheap rates. In revenge, instead of showing them to their first floor-rooms I took them up to the second floor, stacked with furnishings from downstairs, and pretended they were to sleep there, only relenting after they began reorganising some of the clutter so they could get to the beds.
Later in a more sensible mood they asked how business was doing and about Darren, and one of the quietest of the group told me he had been offered a better job at his firm’s warehouse near Heathrow Airport and might be moving to London. He came down to the office while the others settled in upstairs wanting to talk about finding somewhere to live. I had a software package with detailed street maps and printed out some pages for areas near Heathrow, and accessed some internet sites advertising property for sale and to rent, showing him how much higher prices were in Chiswick and Richmond than in districts closer to the airport. He thought his employer would help with the cost of his move, but not with the cost of accommodation, and was worried that high prices would leave him worse off than he was in Newcastle. He was uncertain too about how he would fit in at the Heathrow warehouse.
I printed out several pages of property details for him, and for a few minutes we chatted about his firm. Then he said, ‘By the way, thanks for sending on to us that letter from the Chinese lad last year. I was the culprit who fobbed him off with a mini-cab firm’s telephone number. Bit of a mean trick, I admit. Can’t speak for the others, but with me it’s not just the sex. I really liked him. The others have been teasing me about it ever since. I would have written back to him if I’d known there was a prospect of me moving down here, but at the time there seemed no point in encouraging him. You can make your life a misery, pining away in Newcastle for someone who’s living down South. The others take the piss out of me for being too romantic. It is stupid, when you think about it.’
‘Don’t you have Chinese men in Newcastle?’
‘Yes, but none that are interested in me.’
‘When Cheung came to the hotel after your last visit I wasn’t sure who it was he wanted to get in touch with, but he was obviously smitten by one of you. He’s Darren’s boyfriend now, has been for quite a while.’
‘Missed my chance then.’
‘Seems like it.’
An e-mail from Southern France arrived with the disappointing information that Andrew, who the last time he rang had progressed as far as Tunisia, would not after all be back for the party. He was not a fan of e-mail, and must have persuaded someone at his hotel in France to send it for him.
On Saturday afternoon and evening we prepared the food, covered it, and laid it out in the dining room. We put out wine, spirits and cans of beer and cleared the few remaining furnishings from the lounge to make it ready for dancing. Breakables and my personal papers from downstairs were locked away or moved to the second floor for safety, making the basement rooms a quiet area for people to escape to or use as a route to the garden and fresh air.
Cheung took Darren off to visit one of his female cousins who made him look amazingly Chinese by dying his hair jet black and making up his face with mascara, eye shadow and gentle touches of colour. By seven o’clock everything in the hotel was ready and the four of us hung around in the kitchen waiting for the first guests to arrive. Fascinated by Darren’s changed appearance, Tom and I could not stop looking at him.
The Geordies came down wearing oriental-style straw hats in the shape of flattened cones, each of a different colour. This was a fairly minimal amount of fancy dress, but seeing all six of them together the effect was striking. When they saw Darren in his make-up, wearing his silk shirt, they could not resist the urge to touch him and he had to slip behind Tom and me to escape.
The first party guests came shortly after eight, and at around ten o’clock they were arriving in numbers. While Tom and I cooked the hot food, the Geordies, wanting to help, volunteered to answer the front door bell. Unfortunately they had not previously met most of the people on our list of guests and let everyone in. Tom and I tackled several little groups neither of us recognised who were helping themselves to food from the dining room, but the first lot claimed to be friends of Darren and Cheung from the club and the others said they had been invited by someone they knew at the Beckford Arms. The impression seemed to have gone around both places that everyone who turned up would be welcome.
A quick head count revealed that about seventy people were there, and more were arriving. To try to get the intruders to leave would probably have caused mayhem, and a lot of people had brought food or drink with them; rather than get into arguments about who had a valid invitation and who did not, we decided to do our best to cope with all comers.
The dining room, kitchen and lounge were soon congested and the din grew louder and louder as everyone competed to be heard over the voices of those around them. People standing in the hall were constantly being jostled this way and that by others who were passing through. We encouraged them to go downstairs where there was more space. By half past twelve more than a hundred people must have been present. Fortunately no more were arriving, and one or two who planned to be up the next morning had left. The food had all gone, and the manager of the garden centre volunteered to go to an all-night supermarket to buy more. Tom and I raided the hotel’s stocks of bacon and sausages, and when the bread, crisps and cheese from the supermarket arrived we put everything out on trays and were mobbed when we carried them through to the dining room.
On the ground floor the air had become heavy with a complex and suffocating odour, a mixture of cooking smells, sweat, deodorants, cigarette smoke and a hint of cannabis. Going into the lounge to open a window I saw that a couple of dancers had lowered two of the big imitation Chinese pots from the hall over their heads and shoulders. My guess was that a couple of Cheung and Darren’s friends from the club were playing this prank. Unable to see where they were going they were inevitably bumping into one another and into others on the dance floor. The decorative surface of the pots was almost certain to be scratched, but even if I had to pay for them the sight of two enormous rose-on-white pots dancing together was probably worth the money.
After opening the window I noticed Darren standing beside the stereo equipment looking intently through the dancers to the back of the room. Following his gaze I saw Cheung and the Geordie who was thinking of moving down to London wrapped around each other. Darren saw me looking and hurried from the room. I followed him into the hall, down the basement stairs and out into the garden. The air was cool and fresh after the pungent smells of the house. Breathing deeply I walked down the path looking for him. The flower borders and the grass of the lawn were easily visible in the lights of the side street, but I could not see him anywhere. A sweet smell of oranges was coming from the white flowers of one of the shrubs he had planted. An area at the side of the garage lay in deep shade; was he hiding from me there in the gloom, wanting to be left alone?
The tinkle of breaking glass made me look back towards the house. Someone leant out of the kitchen window to look at the broken fragments of a wine glass on the concrete below, then turned back inside. I made my way over to pick up the shards. As I was about to go in to get a dustpan and brush I heard Darren’s voice coming from above me on the metal fire escape. ‘I’m up here.’ He hurried down the steps. ‘Well, you saw.’
Not sure how to respond, I said: ‘I wanted a breath of air. The room was so stuffy.’
‘We both saw who Cheung was having sex with.’
‘They weren’t “having sex”.’
‘I don’t care. He can have all six of them, if that’s what he wants.’
‘Things aren’t as bad as that. Maybe it’s my fault. I thought the Geordies would hel
p to liven up the party, I shouldn’t have let them book… ’
‘What are you talking about? You accepting a booking from the Geordies is not the problem. If you’re serious about someone, you don’t abandon them when you’re out together because you see someone else you fancy, do you? He’s not serious about me. He’s never introduced me to his parents, not even as a friend. We see each other here or at the club, never on his home territory.’
‘He helped us with all the decorations for the party. He got his cousin to make up your face. You need to make allowances, you have to give it a chance to come good.’
‘“Give it a chance to come good”, you’re starting to talk like Tom. It’s up to Cheung, isn’t it? You saw in the lounge how much he thinks of me.’
‘What do you want?’
‘What I can’t have. Let’s go back inside. This is a celebration of the hotel’s first year, remember? Many happy returns. Sincerely, I’m not being ironic, many well deserved happy returns.’
‘Thanks. Shame that Andrew’s not here.’
‘He wouldn’t have stayed long, not with the place packed out and all the noise.’
When we re-entered the house there was no sign of Cheung or the Geordie. Darren and I joined the dancers, but his energy made me feel lumbering, and when a friend nearer his age from the Beckford Arms came over I left them to dance together. A little later Tom found me putting empty bottles into a rubbish sack in the kitchen, and putting an arm around my shoulders said, ‘Come on, you’re wanted in the dining room.’
‘Trouble?’
‘No, but be ready for anything.’ We squeezed through the crush of people in the hall, and as we entered the room, which was dimly lit by a single table lamp, I was met by all six of the Geordies who were standing just inside the room. ‘Here you are at last, pet. We’ve a little treat for you.’
They switched the dining room lights full on. The remains of the food had been cleared away and the tables rearranged into a block in the centre. The party goers, rounded up by the Geordies, lined up in rows three deep at one side of the room, and when everyone had found a place two young men of about Darren’s age emerged from behind an improvised curtain at the far end, completely naked, each holding a roll of coloured paper. They began their performance by lodging the rolls of coloured paper between their buttocks and carefully setting light to the opposite ends with a cigarette lighter. Once the flames had caught they dropped the lighter and ran around the tables, flames and smoke trailing after them. They had to run fast enough to prevent the flames singing their flesh whilst maintaining a grip on the end of the roll of paper, but managed this feat without apparent difficulty. They laughed and called out to each other, ‘Help, my bum’s on fire.’
I was handed a bucket of water with which to chase after them, and I played my part as well as I could, splashing at their backs to put out the flames and occasionally flinging a few drops of water at people in the audience. The crowd cheered, whistled and shouted as cameras flashed all around us. After five or six circuits of the tables the boys slowed down, allowing me to catch them and extinguish the smouldering paper. We discarded the charred remnants and they embraced and caressed me, sandwiching me between them, while the audience clapped, whistled and called for an encore. Seeing Darren watching from the doorway, I broke away from them and pulled him into their embraces. After a few moments I waved Tom over, and we kissed and held each other, leaving the two boys with Darren.
After that climax the party slowly wound down. At half past three we began to ask people if they would like to share taxis home with other guests, and arranged cabs for those who did. Others took the hint that the time had come to leave, and by half past four less than a dozen determined revellers remained. We stopped the music. The garden centre manager volunteered to stay until the last of the hangers on departed, allowing Tom and me to go to bed, and we tiptoed up past the Geordies’ rooms to the second floor for a few hours’ sleep among the clutter of furniture, too exhausted to make love.
Two weeks after the party a letter arrived from France with the news that Andrew’s travels had been curtailed by another subarachnoid haemorrhage. He had been admitted to hospital in Montpelier and, following treatment, transferred to the Grand Hotel de Luzenac in the Pyrenees, one of those French spa establishments that is a mixture of hotel, nursing home and medical centre.
When, on my fourth attempt, the staff allowed me to speak to him by ’phone, in a frail voice he told me he was feeling much better but was not fit to travel. The hotel had a fine conservatory where he spent much of the day, and he said he would love to see us if there was any possibility of our getting away.
Arranging cover at the hotel for a few days was not too difficult, but flights to Toulouse were fully booked and we had to fly to Marseille, where we would have to hire a car to drive to the Grand Hotel de Luzenac.
After we landed, going through the airport checks and picking up the car took over an hour and a half. I drove us out of the airport, but Tom was soon keen to experience the novelty of driving on the right and going anti-clockwise around roundabouts and took over the driving.
Our plan was to break the journey with an overnight stay in Montpelier, and on the way passed vineyards and shallow expanses of water where pink flamingoes waded. When we arrived we found a regional trade fair in progress and most of the hotels were full. The Tourist Information Office eventually located a large room with three beds in a hotel three kilometres from the centre, and we let ourselves be persuaded that three of us sharing a hotel room for one night would not be too great a hardship.
After freshening up we drove the three kilometres back into town, parked the car in an underground car park and joined the crowd strolling around, absorbing the atmosphere of Montpellier’s busy streets and admiring attractive well-made goods in shop windows. We sat down for a drink at a café with a great block of tables spreading out into the main square. Smartly dressed people, strolling or hurrying, made their way across in all directions, and we slipped briefly into a holiday mood. Neither Tom nor I wanted to abstain from alcohol that evening and in order to have aperitifs and drink wine with our meal we drove back to the hotel to eat.
Madame made a fuss about us not having reserved a table for dinner, having said nothing about the need to do so when we took the room. When I shrugged and said we would go back into town her attitude changed immediately and she showed us to one of two unoccupied tables at the far end of the restaurant. Another table remained vacant all evening; she must have been one of those people who enjoys being difficult.
Our waiter was an elegant young Latin type. Darren was keen to try out his school French, and asked me to confirm that it was right to say c’était trés bon to him when he took our plates away after the starter. Subsequently he said merci beaucoup at every opportunity, and the waiter began smiling and paying him unnecessary attention. We all had cheese after the main course, and after having hurriedly served Tom and me, he took great trouble over serving Darren, saying a little about each of the half dozen different cheeses available. Darren could not understand him and I had to translate, but they continued to smile at each other, hardly noticing Tom or me.
‘He’s gorgeous,’ Darren said when the waiter had finally served him.
‘Never mind “He’s gorgeous,” have you forgotten why we’re… ?’ I stopped short because Tom gripped my right leg forcibly just behind the knee, causing a sharp pain.
‘You be careful,’ he said to Darren softly. ‘We don’t want you catching no French diseases.’
‘I’m not stupid.’
There were more meaningful little smiles when the waiter returned with coffee. Strong though it was, Darren downed his in two gulps and left us to go to look at a map of France on the wall near the restaurant door. After a minute or two our waiter went over to him and began pointing to places on the map, casually resting a hand on his shoulder. ‘That’s my boy,’ Tom said.
‘He’s not your boy. You shouldn’t be encou
raging him. We’re supposed to be here to visit Andrew, not to sample the local talent.’
‘What about you leaving him with those two nude lads at the party?’
‘That was all part of their act. It didn’t lead to anything.’ ‘Let him have his chance. He ain’t got nobody now Cheung’s took up with that Geordie again.’
He was, of course, right. Darren must have been undergoing that torment of sexual frustration that comes from being suddenly deprived of a regular lover. He and the waiter arranged to meet after the restaurant closed at a café nearby called Le Sportif, and when he returned to the table to tell us where he was going all I could do was to repeat Tom’s advice to be careful, and to make sure he had enough money to pay for a couple of drinks.
Tom and I had beers in the hotel bar before going up to the room. After some rather uninspired sex, he fell asleep immediately, but I lay awake worrying about Darren. A couple of hours later he crept in and undressed, scarcely making a sound, while I pretended to be asleep. Over breakfast Tom was certain to ask him how he had got on, and I would sit there squirming with embarrassment, hoping Darren would answer as briefly and vaguely as possible, wanting to give him all kinds of advice about the dangers, muddle and disappointments of life, but having to keep my paternalistic thoughts to myself.
In the morning, to my relief, when Tom asked, ‘Get on all right last night?’ he answered ‘Okay,’ with a shy smile, and that was all that was said. After breakfast I telephoned the Grand Hotel de Luzenac to confirm that we were on our way. They left me holding the line for more than five minutes, then asked me to report to the medical reception desk at exactly two o’clock. Irritated at being required to keep to such a precise time I asked what would happen if we arrived on our visit after two, only to be told that we could visit at any time but an appointment had been made for us at two with a doctor who spoke very good English.