by Paul Magrs
I grow anxious when I’m ill. Not on my own account, particularly. I was short-tempered when Cameron was around, and he thought I was wallowing. But it wasn’t that. I fret about passing germs on. About passing anything on, anything I might have. And I think — I can’t help thinking — I’m a gay man with bleeding mouth sores. What am I expected to think?
Cameron tried to talk me out of this despondency. I’d never heard him talk so much before. I realised he was no great talker, the first time we slept together. “What shall we talk about?” he asked after sex. “I don’t know anything to talk about. I don’t know anything about you.”
He sleeps so deep. I sweat in bed beside him and watch him for hours. His white eyelashes.
He says he wants a proper computing job, wants to pass the driving test and his dad will buy him a car. I laughed, I thinking, oo-la-la! Boyfriend-with-a-car! Which is what Vince and I used to say, trying to get the other to learn to drive. Cameron said he’d drive me out to places, take me to Edinburgh zoo to see the penguins. He said it would be fun — fun! — if he did have these germs after spending days with me at my most infectious. Then we could be ill together. But I shudder at the thought. And he’s itchy, he says, which makes me think that either the bed, the settee or the living-room carpet has something nasty in it.
For Cameron I wasn’t perfect, though at first he thought I was. When I first wore tight tops and trousers, dancing at CC’s on Friday nights, all he saw was a body someone had taken to the gym to plump into shape. He thought my leopard spots were cosmetic. And it wasn’t until we undressed in my living room, strewing clothes all about the floor, that he saw how my calf muscle bulged and looked grotesque. So I wasn’t perfect for him. I was just good enough for those few weeks we had together. I would do.
I knew how important perfect bodies were to him. He told me about his weekly erotic successes, how each Saturday morning he would wake up and look at his bed partner and think to himself, Fuck! I managed to get to sleep with that!
In the end he found my body too cold. He always conplained that my fingers froze him. My skin was too cold. When I had my medical checkups it was a relief to see that my blood pressure was normal. His skin was warm and it felt like overly floury dough. You need cold hands, don’t you, to knead and ply floury dough? But when he said my hands were cold I felt shrugged off.
I took the bus one morning from the centre of the city and travelled for an hour through gloomy green country-side, up into the hills. We passed through a village called —believe it or not — Darkness. When I got to his house I was furious with him because he would hardly stir himself out of bed to talk to me. And my heart went out to him also because he was fuddled with sleep, after working till five, packing salads. He sat up in bed and fiddled with cassettes and CDs, playing only half of songs, chain-smoking irritably in the tiny, boyish bedroom.
His sister, the blow-job queen, had let me into their house. She was bony and pregnant, looking suspiciously at me as I stepped indoors. The dance music she played downstairs competed with that coming from Cameron’s bedroom. Their parents were at work.
I had arrived in a cab. I’d made the last stretch of my journey by cab to the small estate on the hill. The shapes of the houses and even the garden fences were exactly the same as in Phoenix Court. As we drove slowly round the pointlessly winding streets I got a pang of sadness, of missing Aycliffe, and for running out on Penny. It seems so much has happened to me since I was in Aycliffe. All the lives I’ve been involved with since then. And I thought, What am I running after this boy for? Travelling all this way to his house? Yet I had a surge of enthusiasm, seeing the white little box shapes of the houses. It was like being in Aycliffe, being on home ground, in a way, and I felt like I could deal with anything. A feeling I’ve not had much recently.
The cab driver said, “I know which one number ten is. It’s right at the top of the hill. I’ve been there before. They take taxis everywhere, that family.”
His house was white and pebble-dashed, the windows double-glazed, and they had built a car port onto it. When I told him it was very like Phoenix Court, Cameron sat up in bed and said, “But these aren’t council houses. This is a private estate. This is the posh end of town.”
He shuffled about restlessly, wouldn’t look me in the eye or talk about anything much. He was in the white T-shirt and shorts he’d slept in. That sleepy boy smell, his white hair all ruffled.
At two he was called to work and I had to go. He was nicer, sat himself on my knee, ruffled my hair. I realised I still wore sunglasses, even in his room with the curtains drawn. I told him, with a smile, that he was a little bastard. He opened his wardrobe to show me the clothes he’d bought with his wages. All Calvin Klein. He showed me a small stash of unlabelled videos; pirate hard-core porn from America. In them, you see everything, he said. They don’t fuck with condoms and you see it go in. The one fucking slaps the other guy’s ass to make him open wider. I paled, hearing this. I wondered why he was telling me. He even had on a bit of an American accent as he said it. But he still sounded Scots, even saying ‘ass’ and ‘guy’.
He showed me to the bus stop but, as we walked through the estate, kept a few paces ahead, as if we weren’t together. I felt ridiculous, tagging along. Not for years have I felt so daft, such a dangerously obvious queer. Cameron made me feel like that.
He explained that he wouldn’t be able to phone me, because his dad had put on the phone something called a ‘parental lock’.
I caught the bus and got talking to an old lady who was running into Edinburgh to buy headache pills. What they charged locally was a disgrace, she said. She would buy a bottle of three hundred in Edinburgh and that would keep her going. Only, at bingo, if word went round you had a status, this one has taken on a regular Tuesday-night sheen.
Usually you’re here until the Nolans are finished. It’s summer, so the place is open later. When you leave you find the East End lightening up. You cross Leith Walk, come down Queen Street and by the time you’re home at the red fire escape, it’s nearly daylight.
Tonight the Nolans have finished and you don’t go. More cheesy late-seventies disco hits come on, one after another, and the trendy faggots and dykes squeal and clap in recognition of each one. They come dressed up for Step Back night, in easy-listening clothes, velour, nylon and PVC. Everyone knows the playlist.
You stand at a corner of the dance floor to watch them dance to the Carpenters. You’re by the mirrors, which run with mist, and you watch how many of the dancers come to watch themselves, mime the words of songs at themselves. Or stand on the steps across the floor and stare, not at the dancers, but at their own reflections across the way. It’s like football terraces. A boy, who looks underage but probably isn’t, goes round the edges of the floor, collecting glasses which he stacks in the crook of one arm. When he has enough to take back to the bar, he puts them carefully down and dances for a few seconds by himself. He raises his arms right above his head, straightens his back, shuffles his feet ever so slightly. Then his hands paddle gently at the air, cup his chin, slide back up again. He swishes about in a kind of Madonna trance. You remember Cameron coming back to your flat the first time, freeing himself of his jeans and, in all earnestness, telling you how Madonna gave him the strength to find his queerness: “She teaches you that you have to be yourself. It’s all about expressing yourself.”
Once upon a time when you were be-yourself Andy, dress-you-up Andy, go-out-all-weekend and be-off-your-tits Andy, you’d have solemnly agreed with him. Now that lad collecting glasses and the vogueing he’s doing on his own just looks daft. Next to him is the mad bloke you see here every week. In his forties, stripped to the waist, high as a kite on hallucinogens, pounding the air with his fists. ‘On Top of the World’ is the song and you wonder what he’s hearing. He makes you want to say, It’s retro night. It’s meant to be fun, silly fun. Too many of them down here like to think it’s hardcore all the time. You suppose they’re down here every nig
ht.
Needing a piss again. It’s such a drag. Everyone will think you’re on drugs, the way you go traipsing back and forwards. On your way you catch sight of yourself, looking a state. Your newly grown hair is plastered to your forehead, your T-shirt is stuck to you. And that leg of yours is pounding something chronic; you’ve been dancing on it again. You remember your infant-school head-mistress, a terrifying woman like the prison governor on Within These Walls. She had a steel-blue perm that seemed huge over her body, which was petite apart from legs the width of tractor tyres. Your bad leg is almost as bad as that.
Why does the pain extend and lace up your thigh muscles? Separate out the tense strands and maliciously pull on them as you move? All your joints are churlish and stiff. Your balls ache like someone’s grabbed them and your lower stomach is wound inside out. Occasionally it makes you want to throw up. Heading to the gents’ now, you realise that you are going to throw up. You promise yourself that when you have, you’ll go home. But that’s happened once before and you couldn’t manage the walk right away. Can’t get a taxi from the rank. Money’s running short. That time you sat on a scabby plush sofa upstairs and couldn’t move, couldn’t move. You imagined what would happen to you. Would they turn out all the lights and lock up after you? If you got locked in, by accident or otherwise, where would you crawl away to sleep? You couldn’t sleep on the scabby plush sofa upstairs, because there you are in full view of the street, through the wide windows. Once when you were here, a brick came through one of those windows. So you’d crawl yourself over behind the bar and sleep there, out of sight of Leith Walk and the traffic and late passers-by, no matter how sticky and foul the floor.
You crash into the toilets and of course it’s busy. There’s a queue at the long communal urinal. They queue to use it one at a time. Sometimes the punters here refuse to piss side by side. It’s funny what they’ll choose now and then to be coy about. You need the cubicle, the single cubicle and you thump against the door and slide a little down it. You get glared at by a bloke standing nearby. You must look really out of it. Just hope that the cubicle isn’t busy with a fucking couple. You need to be in now. If you could bend without increasing the pain you’d look under the door’s gap, see how many legs are inside.
Then you slump to the tiles, yelling out.
Someone kicked.
I came to on the floor of the toilets in CC’s. Piss everywhere. I still had the same pain, all up my bloated leg. I was half out of the cubicle and the queue had gathered round me. I had never fainted before in my life.
“He’s fuckin’ out of it,” someone decided, and the crowd started to disperse. The drumming at the urinal started up again and the traffic to and from the gents’ resumed.
“No, he’s ill,” said someone else. “He needs help or summat.”
And here was Cameron bending down and kneeling in front of me. “Andy,” he said, staring into my eyes. His eyes are Wedgwood blue. I’d forgotten how I’d missed seeing them. How grown-up he looked! As if he’d matured in the few weeks since we’d seen each other. His pale hair was fluffy with sweat.
“Hey,” I said.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asked, frowning. “What are you on?” He dragged me into the cubicle properly, for some privacy, and shut the door. By now the pain was building up again into another grand, crashing wave. I slipped into his arms and I was going to go again.
“It’s my leg,” I sobbed, falling against him, and I wanted him to cut it off. I knew he always carried a penknife. For self-protection, Cameron had told me. You always have to protect yourself.
“Your bad leg?” he asked, and manoeuvred me to sit on the toilet seat.
Cameron could make me laugh when I didn’t want to, or when I didn’t expect it. Once we sat on the settee and he said, “Look, we can kiss…but I’ve got responsibilities.”
I moved back. “What?”
He shrugged and inhaled sharply. “I’ve got a mug of tea and a fag on the go.” Then he tipped his tea all over himself, down his T-shirt and jeans, grinning, just so he’d have to pull them off.
Whenever we were together he stroked me and touched me all the time. He just held on, saying, “Is that all right? It’s allowed, isn’t it? Hey?”
He was doing this again the night in the toilets, with me fading in and out of consciousness. I threw up, missing the steel toilet bowl. He splashed water on my face and shouted to someone to call an ambulance. I told him not to. I didn’t want an ambulance. I wouldn’t go to hospital.
“What can I do? What can I do?” he shouted at me, gripping me by both shoulders, shaking me as I slid to the floor. “Tell me!” He slapped me hard to bring me round.
It was like I was going to burst apart. “Cut me, cut my jeans.”
He took out that sharp little knife and, asking no more questions, slit the seams of the left leg of my jeans. The calf muscle beneath was shiny and purple like a sausage in the pan.
He looked me in the face. “What’s happening to you?”
Sweat was running down his face too. Was I generating heat that fierce? The pain reached up to twist my guts. It came in wave after wave and I wished I could pass out and just stay there. “You’ll have to cut me open,” I said, and thought about asking whether the blade of his knife was clean. He stuck it into my leg.
It just felt cool. Almost a relief. It took one jab of his knife and that whole shiny, bloated muscle slid open. it burst end to end to show a plush red interior.
A very white creature nestled there. It was curled into a sac of pale yellow flesh, folded inside the rich meat. Cameron drew back at the sight of it. It was no larger than the width of one palm. You couldn’t even see its face.
“Take it,” I said.
There was blood everywhere. My ruptured leg was still pumping blood out onto the tiles. Perhaps now I did need an ambulance. My pain had lessened. A different sort was starting up. I just wanted Cameron to take up my child.
“I can’t touch that,” he said, and flung his knife into the corner of the cubicle.
I looked at my child. I looked at Cameron and at the blood soaking down, filling my shoes. I had a brief, mad image of him rifling for change, going to the condom machine and emptying it. Making himself protective gloves with which to touch my child.
In the end, I took up the tiny body and pulled it out of the space in which it had lodged itself. It came away like a pit from a peach. The muscle and sinew seemed to suck itself back into one piece, but as I held the child up to my breast, held it up so I could see his face, I knew that I had a gaping wound still. But a very ordinary wound. One that might be inflicted by a penknife in a toilet cubicle. And I had my child, too. He set up a thin, mewling cry. His eyes wouldn’t open, they were stuck with yellow, crusted mucus. He was a boy, I could see that much, and covered with fur.
Cameron had gone. He had fled.
NINETEEN
They were taking up the paving stones in the precinct again. What was that for? In the morning the slabs were laid aside, revealing pale squares of sand. Nothing was put around the holes to warn you. What about blind people? They’d be straight down one of those shallow holes, breaking their legs. Elsie thought those gaps looked like scabs someone couldn’t resist picking, and how odd to see the soil under the precinct, reminding you that shops hadn’t always been here.
Mind, the shops used to be a lot better. Everything was closing. Monday morning Elsie was cross because they’d shut the last wool shop. Without warning, with Elsie halfway through her latest thing, the shop had gone. Its windows were Windolened out. What had become of the three old women who sat by their gas fire? The scratched glass counters, the musty, woolly smell? More importantly, what had happened to the six balls of pink four-ply set aside for Elsie on the shelf? What had become of her account? She had loved the routine of popping in whenever she needed a new ball, seeing one of the old dears go off to fetch it from the crinkly cellophane packet where it was kept with its fellows. Elsie couldn
’t believe all that had gone, over a weekend, with no warning. A whole way of life had vanished. Already it seemed an old-fashioned way to carry on.
“Boyes still sell wool,” said Big Sue when they bumped into each other outside Boots a few minutes later. “In the upstairs bit. But you have to buy all you need at once.”
Elsie tutted. She bet that she’d never get the same wool again and she’d have to pull out all she’d already knitted. What a waste! Knitting was an effort nowadays. She found it hard to concentrate.
“Isn’t that Eric from over by you?” Elsie nodded to an old man at the Barclays cashpoint.
“It is. I didn’t want to say hello to him while he was at the cashpoint. You can’t interrupt someone doing their pin.”
“Is that hair of his dyed, do you think?”
Big Sue laughed. “It’s pink! Of course it’s dyed.”
Elsie thought that was a bit cruel. She felt sorry for old Eric, who’d done his garden up beautifully. His seemed to be the biggest garden on the whole estate and he’d spent years working on it. A skinny old feller, out pruning things and digging with no shirt on. Elsie had been fascinated by his very pink old man’s nipples hanging on his chest. He’d not done so much in the last year, he wasn’t looking well, and the garden had slipped back. Someone had got in and ruined his rockery. Elsie supposed he’d have taken that hard. Just as she had.
