by Paul Magrs
She took a step towards the bed. “Wait,” he said. “Hang on.”
“What is it?” Tears were beginning to roll down her face. I’ve got a complexion like a crab apple, she thought. How can Tom want me back when I look and feel like this? More tears ran in gratitude and dismay.
“We made each other very unhappy, Elsie,” he told her.
“Oh, Tom,” she said. “I was never unhappy with you.”
“No?”
“When you had your problems and everything, it got harder but...you were still the same person.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
There was another silence. Elsie felt like flinging herself on the bed.
“I’ve been going out of my mind, Tom. Someone’s been getting at me. Have you seen the state of the house? They’re destroying it all. They’re taking every bit of my life and smashing it up...”
He shrugged. “Do you know who’s doing it?”
She shook her head. “Oh, no. I wish I did. I thought...for a while…just for a bit, that…”
“Did you think it was me?”
Elsie nodded. “Only for a second.”
“Would I really destroy your home around you?”
“You weren’t well, Tom. You weren’t responsible.”
“Maybe not.” He sat on the bed. Then he was more like his own wiry, creaky self. “Come here, baby,” he said.
Elsie hesitated. “Has...has the Lord helped you back to your proper self?” she asked. Somehow if he went on about God she felt safe. He believed in goodness then and wouldn’t do any harm. He opened his arms to her.
“The Lord had nothing to do with it,” said Tom. “I found my own way back.”
She went to him then and figured that she’d have to trust whatever he’d made of himself. She locked herself in his embrace and felt him rustle with pleasure inside his dark’ clothes. She even felt a pang of desire.
“My old vampire,” she smiled. “My Dracula. Can we still get up to our old games?”
Tom smiled.
EIGHTEEN
I miss Penny. I miss the things she used to tell me.
The things she’d been up to! We’d sit up in her mam’s front room and divulge, all night. When I first met Penny, when I met her through Vince, I thought she was just a nice girl. But she’d been up to all sorts.
It was because of Penny I came up with my theory that everything teenage girls do, gay men in cities try to do ten years later.
Two weeks into my life in Edinburgh, this is my great discovery. I live in a flat in the New Town. Over restaurants, pubs and cybercafes I have found myself a tiny flat in a warehouse and from here I plan my new life. Everything that is going to happen to me.
And what will happen to me?
Another reason I need Penny here: to plan things, to talk things through.
I fling open the tall, dirty windows to see the city roofs. You can hear, but not quite see, the midnight fireworks in Princes Street Gardens. It’s summer and the place is awake all night.
Tonight it’s me — adolescent at twenty-four — leaving the house at midnight. Penny said she crept out to meet her boyfriend at night when she was still at the age of choosing O-levels. Snogging off, she called it, in gravel car parks, in playgrounds, in shady woods. From here I don’t have to sneak out. I’ve this whole flat to myself. In a way I do wish there was someone for me to creep past. Someone to put the lights on, shout out and stop me. And tell me I’m doing wrong, that I’m cheapening myself.
I leave the light on so you can see it from outside. In the early hours the flat will look occupied and be safe. My meagre possessions will be all right. I clang down the red fire escape, six flights. Surely my steps must disturb the people in the three flats below. They must know I’m up and down all night. They all work, keep regular hours. They must wonder what I get up to.
They let me in and it makes me feel special. It’s so easy, as if this is a place meant for me. All the bouncers are women, which is nice to see. All of them in black, in bomber jackets, each one nodding at me as I slip past into the bar. One’s wearing tight tartan trousers, blue and yellow; I’ve seen quite a few trendy Wendys wearing those and I think I must get some. But will I still be trim enough to fit inside little trousers like that?
I don’t know what I’m doing out on a Monday night, but it’s madness staying in, within those four walls. This is a city. I have to be out. As soon as I came here there was a voice I’d never heard before, telling me to make the best of it. Use it up. Waste it all. As if I had a limit on my time. And I reckon I do have a limit on my time, but I’m not certain what kind.
At one of the tables by the door I sit down with my drink. The walls are sickly orange and yellow, stuck with fliers: they put a stripper on in the basement every Sunday after lunch, and Tuesday nights are Step Back in Time nights. Tonight the music is the blandest of techno, stretching some normal song well beyond its limit. Its verses and choruses have burst apart with the strain. The few punters here are a mixed bunch. I try not to stare. After a week I still can’t get used to how ordinary they all seem to find coming to a gay pub. To me it’s a novelty. They’re popping in after work for a quick pint, or after midnight for last orders, or slinking in determinedly, looking for an easy lay.
And what do I look like? I haven’t made much of an effort dressing up. I came as I was. I’m sitting with my pint by the door and getting the draught from Leith Walk. Cooler tonight, which is a relief. Like the bloke at the new table, I’ve picked up copies of the Pink Paper and Boyz off the twin piles by the bar and I’m having a flick through. One’s full of rape stories and legislation, the other has pictures of soap stars and underwear. The man just by me seems to be a teacher type. I can see him look up and look around every time he turns his page, as if he’s invigilating.
The bar is long and not very crowded. Three members of staff swish up and down in tight T-shirts, waiting for the crush. One drinks coffee and talks to a smart Jewish man who has perched himself on a stool. He’s in a check suit and he looks like he’s got eyeliner on. He flashes an appraising look around the bar. I wish I’d come later, or not at all. I’ve pulled my shirt cuffs down almost to my knuckles and I’ve surprised myself doing it. I’ve covered up the shining, healthy black spots under my skin. When I move to lift up my glass, one will poke out and it makes me wonder: do I mind if anyone sees my leopard markings?
If asked, I would say I’d had them tattooed on. What I’d like to do is wear slinky little tops and shorts. Show off all these muscles I’ve been gaining in recent months. I can feel them yearn to expose themselves and have the sun touch them. They also ache with disuse. In the week or so I’ve been in this town, settling in and becoming used to not being in Aycliffe, I haven’t been to a gym. I haven’t found a suitable one yet. Everything’s so expensive. If you live in the city centre you’re expected to be loaded. And I’m having trouble even signing on. What I want is one of those books and invalid benefit. I want to go to the post office every week and get my fifty quid in hand, no bother, no signing. I could say I’ve had a breakdown. Show my spots. Look — psychosomatic! Or I could tell them the truth. That I think I’m going to have a child.
Oh, but they look at me sceptically enough anyway. The morning I went to queue for my forms — in a building across town that was just like my old school inside — I told them I moved away from Aycliffe to look for proper work. The feller looked at me as if he thought I’d come to their city, to live in the middle of it, among all the noise and the tremulous, rainy lights, to waste things. My life, my time, their money.
Yet even without going to the gym I feel great. I thought the moment I stopped lifting weights it would all sag. I’d run to fat. I’d turn to jelly. I thought I’d regret even starting it all in the first place. But here I am, harder than ever. My muscles tense up and bulge without my even trying. Just sitting here. Look at me, someone! Look at this, if this is what you’re wanting.
The teacher type looks ov
er, as if I’ve spoken aloud. I can’t even be sure I haven’t. I spend too much time on my own. He looks about thirty-odd. Thinks he’s cool as fuck. The man from C&A. I bet he’s got a bit put by. He’ll holiday in Italy and fly back with local ceramics. Slides his eyes away when I look back. Cheeky bastard! As if I was looking first. Looking over his glasses. Dressed sharp, a bit prissy. Maybe he’s a university teacher like Vince got himself. He can take me to Paris for New Year. I want someone to look after me. Someone older and more sensible.
He asks me, “Are people here always as chatty as this?”
He sounds shy, almost. I expected him to be cocky. So I’ll talk to him. I say I haven’t been here much, I don’t know how friendly or unfriendly they usually are. But when I came to this town, I expected people to be friendlier. He shoves up along the plush seating. I’m saying, you arrive on this scene, come out every night with all good intentions, all trusting of a good time, and there’s this apprenticeship. They won’t talk. Sitting by yourself with a pint and the papers, like old men in the pub Sunday afternoons. He laughs. When he asks if I want coffee, I ask him if his crockery comes from holidays in Italy, but he reckons Ikea.
When I kiss him in his kitchen, a few streets away, high up over Broughton Place, he tastes of olives. He’s been chewing them thoughtfully as we’ve talked, waiting for the kettle. Everything in his kitchen looks barely used. On the windowsill there is a row of very large oranges. He chews olives quietly as he watches me unbutton my shirt to show off all my spots.
“They’re tattoos,” I tell him.
“They’re wild,” he says, making me cringe for a second. I’ve come out dressed like a schoolboy. Striped tie knotted too tight, white shirt hanging out. When we go to bed he’s put on an Enya CD and I can’t come. He strokes my legs again and again, lying the wrong way up in bed. He says, “How muscly your legs are!” and I’m pleased. He points out that my left calf muscle is more developed, and I tell him how observant he is. He smooths it and says, “This muscle is huge.” It’s very odd. I make him come twice and, on the second strike at four a.m., he’s fallen asleep. Enya’s on replay and I’m stuck with her wittering on till morning.
When I get home it’s almost nine o’clock. I pass the couple from upstairs on their way down the fire escape. Immaculate, off to work. We all say hello and I check the communal post box. Nothing for me.
I watch them leave the alleyway and then I get this pain in my swollen leg. I have to haul myself up the rest of the steps and lie down in the living room. I stare at the stretched muscle, and watch something stirring under the skin.
I’m thinking about things that cheer you up.
Last Christmas Penny bought a two-foot-tall singing Santa from one of the cheap shops downtown. A tenner, in a red felt coat that went down to his skinny ankles. When you lifted the coat up, you saw that his legs were transparent plastic. He hummed four different seasonal tunes at random, waving an electrically lit candle in his tiny hand.
It worked fine at first. Then, the day we decorated number sixteen for Christmas, I was upstairs and Penny was shouting to me. She sounded fed up. He’d broken. I came downstairs to look as she held Santa in her hands and I wanted to say, but didn’t, You know what you get when you buy from those cheap shops.
As she stared into his face he started humming again, all by himself, ‘We Three Kings of Orient Are’. Penny almost dropped him in surprise. I’ve watched her with those powers of hers: she’s not always sure she’s using them. She set Santa back down on the windowsill.
“Hasn’t he got a creepy-looking face?” I said, and he stopped dead once more. Never to go again.
I was going downtown that afternoon and Penny asked me to take Santa to get him changed for another. I said no — there was no way I’d carry that thing down the town. I said it reminded me of that bloody Chucky, the devil doll in Child’s Play III. I felt guilty, afterwards, about not changing Santa that afternoon, because when Penny took him herself the next day, they had all sold out. Maybe I’d have been in time.
“They were all faulty, probably,” I said, trying to make her feel better.
Penny scowled at me. I thought it was a real shame about her Santa, because when he was glowing, humming tunes, his candle lit up, she said that really cheered her up.
And what has made me feel better recently? What has been my consolation in Edinburgh?
Cameron did, at first. At the end of my first month here. He was around me for a week or two, a very blond boy from just out of town, who claimed to work in computers. He said he packed salads for Marks and Spencer, just part time for pocket money.
In the middle of one of the first nights he came back here, he said, “I think you’re like me. You’re a naturally happy person, aren’t you?” And I could have laughed in his face. I wanted to say, I’m really working at it. Can’t you see how much effort I’m putting in?
I’d met him off the train on Friday night. Waverley Station was mad with rugby fans dashing about drunk. They’d come, like my boy, for the weekend, and they wore tartan hats with fake ginger hair hanging out of the back. Cameron was the last one off the train, his white head bobbing through the crowd towards me. He was in last weekend’s outfit: the cream jeans and, hanging over them, the blue check shirt. Both items were Calvin Klein, he’d told me, and they both cost seventy pounds. Cameron bought all his clothes from Jennes, saving up week by week the money he made putting mayonnaise in the potato salad at the factory.
He came up to me and I thought, This is when I’m happy. When someone’s coming here just for me. He’d phoned me twice that night, making sure I’d come to meet him. Through the week we’d had hour-long chats at lunchtimes. He worked nights; lunchtimes found him alone in the family house and he told me he was sitting in the kitchen naked. He played dance CDs as we talked about nothing in particular. He said we’d dance to all this music when he came on Friday night.
His eyes were so blue. They fixed on me in my long black coat I’d bought cheap for the cooler nights. “Oh no,” he said, swinging by me, “that doesn’t suit you at all.” He passed me a bottle of Stella. He’d opened one for himself and lit a cigarette the moment he’d stepped onto the platform. “Come on then!” he said. “We’re going to yours!”
And that’s what cheers me up now. Someone who will drag me bodily into their nights out.
This is the patisserie in Stockbridge. Everything is painted
yellow and there is a sunflower motif. Look at how dear everything is. The waitress has recommended guava juice.
My new GP down here at the Stockbridge surgery says I’ve got tonsils like nothing on earth, black and ulcerated. I’ve spent a few days in flushes and burning up, waking each morning with my teeth black and my mouth full of fresh blood. The doctor even thinks the thing at the back of my throat is bleeding.
Tactfully he never mentioned my leopard spots. He looked in my mouth, nowhere else.
For days now I’ve been lying down in the afternoon, needing that extra rest. I thought I was just being lazy. I was just making it up. And you think about it and think about it and you can’t remember what normal felt like. But that plunger of blood taken out of my arm this afternoon has set the seal on my having a real ailment. I’ve fretted for days and in the miserable, early hours, I’ve tried to decide what to do. Get myself seen to. Get a doctor.
My guava juice has arrived in a tall clear glass. It looks just like bloody piss.
Someone told me they had sex with a feller and, when they were really going for it, they snapped his cock right back. It bent and sprang back again. He couldn’t touch it for days. The next morning he pissed blood. I’ve been getting that feeling, too, like a kicking in the balls. Spreading up from my swollen left calf muscle, the pain nuzzling at my groin. That horribly swollen leg was something else I didn’t let the doctor look at, or comment on.
Poor Cameron, visiting me this last weekend. I wasn’t at my best or my most inviting. I lay on the settee and shivered and swea
ted. He held me as we watched videos. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Cabaret, Escape from the Planet of the Apes. Before he knew me, he would come into town on the train after work each Friday and go straight to the bars, not returning to his family home till Sunday. He was always so sure of going home with someone. I feel he’s been tamed, having him here on the settee, apparently content not to go out at all. As if being in the middle of the town and with me is enough for him.
So we were having less sex, too. On Saturday afternoon I lay under the duvet and we watched The Chart Show. He popped to the newsagent downstairs for crisps and sweets and magazines like Eva, That’s Life, Take a Break. Those magazines are full of real-life tragedies, and Cameron claims to be addicted to them. He came under the duvet with me on the living-room floor. With all the blinds up it felt like we were exposed to the back streets, high over the roofs. He stripped and we rolled all over the rough carpet, once almost knocking the telly over. He yells out in pleasure more than any other boy I’ve been with, and I love that. It’s as if everyone I slept with before was repressed. Men who keep quiet when they come, as if they’re scared of getting caught. Cameron just yelps and howls out loud. He says he doesn’t mind if he doesn’t come. Sometimes he finds it eludes him, and he’s happy to make the other bloke, as he puts it, “spurt all over”. He says, for him the fun isn’t in the spurting, it’s in the initial copping off. This makes me feel older than him. At twenty-four I feel I belong to a different generation to my lover. As if my practices — my loving to come on a lover’s chest and smear it into his skin — are already obsolete. Is Cameron part of a new breed who never need to climax? Who can just go on and on? And it strikes me that he fucks like he dances when he’s E’d out of his head. Endlessly and noisily and without satisfaction.
That Saturday night he fed me oven chips and Linda McCartney sausages and Diet Coke. Halfway through this meal he realised that I was trying hard to choke all this down. He had given me the crispiest and fizziest things in the world. My throat was red raw. I longed to go to the Scarlet Empress, to have — oh, I don’t know — tagliatelle and carbonara, pints of Guinness to ease my throat and pump me full of iron and goodness. He apologised for cooking me the wrong things. He says at home he never has to cook. His wicked stepmother does everything about the house. He says it’s like living in a show home. They have to pretend to be a show family. But his fifteen-year-old sister is the blow-job queen of the town, he says, with sardonic relish, and he is what he is. And he said that in gloomy triumph, as if the only way he could be proud of himself was as revenge.
