Mick watched in casual disbelief. He had never seen anything like it. Only in London, he thought, though he suspected this could not be literally true. He felt he should have been disgusted by the spectacle but there was something curiously tame and friendly about the erotic exchange. It had none of the passion or ferocity of good sex. The men were touching each other in a spirit of laddish co-operation, doing each other small but significant favours, like giving someone directions or giving them a light for their cigarette.
Nobody spoke, but a couple of men communicated well enough to take themselves into a cubicle, from which, after a moment, there came a fierce steady banging noise that didn’t conform to Muck’s idea of the sound sex should make. Elsewhere action had progressed from hand to mouth. The man next to Lawton, a bearded, enormously fat man in tennis gear, was leaning over and devouring Lawton’s cock. Lawton’s face showed enjoyment but in a watchful, detached, halfhearted sort of way. He was holding back, not wanting to submit entirely to the experience. He kept looking round the toilet, possibly keeping an eye out for intruders, but also as though he was on the lookout for a better, more interesting offer.
Then he caught Mick’s eye, caught him watching. Mick’s immediate reaction was to turn away but he forced himself to return the look. At first the expression on Lawton’s face seemed hostile rather than sexual, but that, apparently, was part of the game. After a while his mouth curved into a slight, apologetic smile, as though he was well aware of the absurdity of his situation, of this location, of the man now on his knees in front of him.
Suddenly he grabbed the man’s head as though clutching a football and pulled it hard towards him. He thrust his pelvis into the man’s face, and although these actions now indicated a degree of sexual abandon, his face remained more or less impassive and he kept looking at Mick throughout the whole episode.
When he’d finished Lawton ambled away leaving the fat man still on his knees, wiping his mouth. Someone swiftly moved in to take Lawton’s place. Lawton collected himself and walked over to the sinks. For a moment Mick thought his quarry was about to leave but, no, he remained there at the sinks and took an unnecessarily long time washing his hands, constantly looking up at the mirror to check out the continuing action behind him. There was plenty to entertain the most demanding voyeur. A young black man with a radical haircut and a thick cock was letting two grey-haired men take turns sucking him.
Lawton finished washing his hands. There was obviously not going to be a towel or hand drier in a place like this, so he stood shaking his hands, just a couple of feet away from Mick. They looked at each other again. Mick thought Lawton was about to speak, but instead he made a complicated, articulate sweep with his head that said he was leaving now and that he wanted Mick to come with him. Mick nodded. He let Lawton walk out of the toilet, then followed him, let him walk some twenty or thirty yards ahead until he took up position by the embankment railings and waited for Mick to catch up. Mick took his time but eventually sidled up to Lawton and asked, ‘You got a place?’
‘Yes,’ Lawton said a little hoarsely, a little awkwardly. ‘It’s not far.’
Mick said nothing more to indicate agreement, but Lawton started walking and Mick followed. After a while they fell into step, and although conversation was neither easy nor strictly necessary for what either of them had in mind, Lawton became surprisingly, nervously talkative.
‘You get all sorts in there,’ he said. ‘Talk about “Chance encounters in the illicit crypts of homosexual adventure.” Flags of all nations. We had a man in a kilt in there the other week. And a young chap with a ring through his cock. Can’t say I found it very attractive but it makes a change.’
He seemed to be waiting for Mick to respond, hold up his end of the conversation, but when Mick was silent Lawton continued, ‘Best thing, of course, is the married man. They’re in there with a mouthful of spunk, then half an hour later they’re home kissing their wives. I love that.’
He looked at Mick in a way that was more enquiring than accusatory. Was he suggesting that he thought Mick was a married man? If so, Mick didn’t mind. At least it proved that he didn’t look like a poof.
‘Do you work out?’ Lawton asked.
Mick shook his head.
‘But you’re a big lad. You must do something to get those biceps.’
Mick was finding this unsettling. He didn’t mind a bit of flattery, and he was quite proud of his body, but compliments from someone like Lawton weren’t what he was looking for. He was tempted to give him a good going over there and then. The place was deserted enough, but he decided to wait a little longer.
‘This place we’re going to,’ Lawton said, ‘it’s a little unusual.’
Mick immediately suspected the worst. He wondered what the hell Lawton had in mind, but he knew that he would have to find out.
‘I’m sort of a property developer,’ Lawton said. ‘I find old buildings with a bit of character, say a warehouse or small factory, occasionally an old church or chapel, and I convert them.’
Mick wondered why he was being told this. Where were they headed? An abandoned abattoir? A dungeon? A sewage works? They walked on, into a network of tight, riverside streets, an illogical conglomeration of new building-sites and ancient masonry, of arches and stairways, barred windows and fire escapes. Then suddenly they had arrived in front of a broad, ugly two-storey industrial building and Lawton said this was the place.
The building, possibly an old machine shop, had large areas of tall, metal-framed windows so that the walls were more glass than brick. There were areas that had been boarded up, other areas that had been patched with corrugated iron. Even if it was renovated out of all recognition, Mick still couldn’t imagine anyone in their right mind wanting to live in a place like this. He followed Lawton warily.
A flight of half a dozen steps led up to a pair of heavy steel doors. Lawton rattled his keys in the lock and opened one of the doors for them to enter. They walked into a massive unlit space that Lawton gradually illuminated with a series of spotlights suspended on metal cords.
The place looked both infinitely worked on and strangely unfinished. The walls had long expanses of unpainted plaster and yet pictures had been hung. Elsewhere metal struts and steel frames had been gleefully exposed, but the wooden floor was new, blond, clean and frosted. A couple of black and white pony skins were laid out at opposite ends of the space and a series of furniture pieces had been arranged as though in an art gallery. The furniture was wild and ugly and looked like it had been bolted together from lumps of concrete, driftwood, glass and scrap metal. The glass had shatter patterns running through it. All the metal had dangerously sharp edges. There was nothing else: no carpets, no curtains, no upholstery, no softness.
‘You live here?’ Mick asked.
‘Sometimes. It serves as a showroom too.’
‘Yeah?’
‘We sell the whole package, the apartment, the interior design, the furniture, the art.’
Mick stared at a strange metal hump at his feet and said, ‘Is that furniture or art?’
‘It’s both,’ Lawton said. ‘It’s a work of art that you happen to be able to sit on.’
Mick surveyed the space and couldn’t suppress a snigger.
‘People really want to live like this?’
‘Actually, yes,’ Lawton said frostily.
‘Only in London.’
‘No, not only in London. Also in New York, Barcelona, Milan. Anyway, I suspect neither of us is here for a chat about international design.’
Mick nodded agreement and Lawton slapped his hands together to show he meant business. It turned out that the metal hump was a kind of chest. Lawton opened the hinged lid to show Mick the contents, and Mick looked down on a mad selection of sex toys.
They were mostly dildos in all varieties, in pink and black, in rubber and metal and wood, from the slenderly boyish to the truly monstrous. Some were realistic, if insanely exaggerated, attempts to model the human pe
nis, complete with veins and sometimes even balls and retractable foreskins. Others were more abstract, more symbolic, in polished gold and silver. Some vibrated, some had studs and straps and rubber friction pads.
‘With a little encouragement I can accommodate any of these,’ Lawton said.
Mick looked at the largest of them, a gargantuan model with the girth of a beer can, and found himself impressed. He looked at the rest of the contents, at the butt plugs, dog collars, nipple clamps, whips, and a large tub of something called Sex Grease.
‘After that I’m ready for anything,’ Lawton said. ‘Fists, feet, anything that comes to hand really. You can use your imagination.’
He looked to Mick for some sort of reassurance or at least complicity. None was forthcoming and yet he found something encouraging in the solid, blank meanness of Mick’s face.
‘I like a bit of chat too,’ Lawton said. ‘You can call me any filthy name under the sun. But words are never quite enough. Sticks and stones. I have the capacity to take a great deal of punishment. And if I squeal a little, or even a lot, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m having a bad time. But I don’t need to gabble on like this, do I? I can tell you understand.’
Having stated at least some of the rules he began to unzip his leather jacket. Mick could see he was wearing nothing underneath, but at first his chest was in shadow, the flesh obscured. Then he turned so that light fell across his body and Mick saw that the skin of his torso was scored with weals, bruises, fresh livid grazes, and what looked like cigarette burns. Lawton stood there, pleased with himself, showing himself off. Instinctively Mick looked away, and Lawton was pleased again with the reaction, pleased that he was able to shock.
‘If you don’t like what you see,’ he said, ‘you can always rearrange it.’
Mick considered the offer. Lawton unbelted his jeans and pushed them down his thighs to reveal more of the same, more traces of previous encounters, previous users, as though a diagram of sick desire had been doodled on his flesh, turned into a map of scarred skin and torched nerve endings, a city of delicious pain. Even his cock looked bruised and knocked about, stretched and raw.
He kicked off his jeans but left the leather jacket round his shoulders, stood a few moments in Mick’s gaze. To Mick’s alarm, though not exactly surprise, Lawton reached for the tub of Sex Grease and started lubricating himself in readiness. He was extremely thorough, and when he’d finished he made a move towards Mick. It was an odd move, somewhere between a lunge and an embrace. In any other circumstances Mick would have found nothing remotely threatening in the action. Lawton was a queasy, feeble thing, scarcely worthy of Mick’s attention, and yet Mick did now feel threatened and so he lashed out. He was aware that there was something weak and effete about the punch he delivered to Lawton’s face, something emasculated and unconsidered. Lawton felt it too. He stopped in his tracks and he stood still, not unappreciative of being hit, but nevertheless moved to say, ‘You can do it a lot harder than that, I hope.’
His words were meant to be provocative and taunting, and Mick was duly provoked. He punched Lawton again, in the stomach this time, and the punch was delivered with much more strength and focus. Lawton doubled up and sank to his knees. His face showed that he enjoyed the blow, but Mick didn’t like it at all. Now that he was confronted with someone who wanted to soak up his anger and aggression, he felt uncomfortable, unbalanced. Besides, more crucially, he was having a lot of trouble believing that Lawton had raped Gabby.
‘Have you ever been married?’ he asked.
Even through his pain Lawton found it a laughable question. ‘What do you think I am?’
Mick didn’t tell him. He said, ‘You ever had sex with a woman?’
‘No. I’ve never put my cock in a tin of stale tuna fish either.’
‘What a foul thing to say.’
Mick considered hitting him again but he couldn’t link up the right muscles and synapses to make it happen. He wondered what Judy would think if she could see him now. Might she be watching him again? Would she want him to hit Lawton for having insulted her sex? Or would she disapprove of hitting such an obvious weakling? Perhaps, he thought, conscience was no more than this, the simple feeling of being watched, by God or by a half-Japanese bookshop assistant, someone who will judge you, hold you responsible, who might think less of you if they believed you were doing the wrong thing.
‘I think homosexuality’s really peculiar,’ said Mick. ‘I mean I can just about understand that two blokes might fall in love. Love is blind, et cetera. It’s a sort of inexplicable, abstract thing, and I can see how it might make you fall for a bloke. And if it did then I can see how you might want to be with that bloke, and maybe live together. And I can see why you might share a bed, and I can see you might put your arms around each other. But I really can’t see why you would suddenly want to have things shoved up your anus.’
Lawton looked at him sourly.
‘I mean, buggery’s a funny thing, isn’t it? Because some people would say that buggery degrades the person who gets buggered. And in that respect they might say it was like rape; the victim supposedly being the one who’s degraded. But I don’t think of it like that. The rapist is degraded just as much as the victim, and as far as I can see the one doing the buggering is humiliated every bit as much as the one being buggered.’
Lawton opened his mouth to say something but Mick wouldn’t let him speak.
‘I know what you’re going to say,’ Mick said. ‘You’re going to say that some people like being degraded. Now that’s a tough one.’
‘Oh dear,’ Lawton said. ‘I suspect you’re going to be a bit of a disappointment to me, aren’t you?’
‘You don’t know the half of it,’ Mick said, and he walked away from Lawton and prowled around the room in search of a telephone. He found one. It was surprisingly plain and orthodox given the location, and he tapped in Gabby’s number. The phone rang a dozen times before it was answered.
‘Oh, Mick,’ she said, startled. ‘Hello. I was just on my way out.’
She could hardly be so very surprised that he was ringing her, yet she sounded astonished, as though he was a long-lost boyfriend calling from Australia after years of absence.
‘Going anywhere nice?’ he asked.
‘Just work,’ she said, and he could tell at once she was lying.
‘Then I’ll not keep you,’ he said. ‘But before you go, I’ve just got a couple more questions to ask you.’
‘Not again,’ Gabby said, and she let out a fake, weary, overstated sigh that accused him of being thick and tiresome, but Mick wasn’t going to fall for it.
‘These guys who raped you,’ he said. ‘Was one of them a skinny little guy, cropped grey hair, moustache, say fifty years old?’
‘Possibly,’ she said angrily.
‘You’re not telling me you don’t remember.’
‘No, I’m not telling you that.’
‘And maybe he was a little bit camp-looking,’ Mick continued.
‘Camp?’
‘You know, like a homosexual.’
‘I know what camp means, all right? Look, this man raped me.’
‘Yeah, well, maybe he was having a night off from being a homosexual.’
‘Are you trying to make some sick joke?’
‘It’s no joke. It’s just that I’ve got him here and—’
‘You’ve got him where?’
‘Here. We’re in his flat. It’s a right fun house. He’s on his knees, just spitting distance away, and you know, I’ve hit him a couple of times and that’s gone fairly well, but I’m not all that sure I’m doing the right thing. You see he really doesn’t fit the bill as your typical rapist.’
‘He was on the list, wasn’t he?’
‘Yeah, but couldn’t the list be wrong?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘OK then, but just to make me feel better, just to put my mind at rest, I was wondering if maybe you’d like to have a word with him,
see if you recognize the voice.’
‘You want me to talk to him?’ she yelled. ‘Are you out of your fuckin’ mind?’
‘OK, sorry, I can see why you wouldn’t want to talk to him.’ Mick was trying hard to sound sane and reasonable, and was well aware he was neither of those things. ‘So how about this, since he’s the last one on the list, I thought maybe you’d have some special requests, some special punishments you’d like me to hand out to him, because this is your big chance. He’s game for anything this boy, and actually he’s got some scars you’d be bound to recognize, and I thought you could listen in while I get to work, get the full flavour of the event.’
‘What’s the matter with you, Mick? Have you snapped or what?’
‘Not me,’ Mick said, making a great effort to hold himself in check, to prove her wrong. But he didn’t find it easy to keep this whole performance together, and part of him suspected she was right. Something had snapped, or at least been stretched permanently out of shape. It would have been easy enough to scream down the phone at Gabby, easier still to work out his frustrations on the poor wretch who was kneeling a couple of yards away just waiting for some more punishment. Nevertheless he spoke calmly into the phone.
‘I have some doubts, Gabby,’ he said. ‘I have some doubts about this list of yours. I have doubts about what went on with you and these six men. I have serious doubts about whether I’ve been doing the right thing here in London. I think maybe you think I’m an idiot, or maybe somebody else does. One thing I’m sure of, if this guy here raped you then I’m a …’
He didn’t get to finish the sentence. What he’d said had made a big impact down the end of the line in Sheffield. It had caused a transformation. Gabby was suddenly very talkative, very concerned, very eager to be nice to him, to smooth his feathers. He could hear a whole flurry of tender coercion coming from her, and although he wasn’t listening very closely he heard her say something about love. He covered the mouthpiece and said to Lawton, ‘Bring your arse over here.’
Bleeding London Page 28
