by Liam Livings
“Well, I’d say, let’s listen to that one first.” Any excuse to hang around while he told me about the latest tracks and then watch him gently lower the record onto the turntable, his face showing his pleasure at the slight crackle before the music started. We’d had the digital versus vinyl conversation at length. Oh yes, no fear…
“Have a bit of everything last night, did ya?” He opened his eyes wide and gave an exaggerated sniff.
I smiled, bobbing my head slightly. “Something like that.”
…but we’d never had the conversation where I told him I wanted to feel his white hands, with dark hairs on the back, grabbing me hard. No, we kept to music, records, club-speak. Probably because I assumed he wasn’t into boys…men. Couldn’t be. Obviously not.
Now, in my shop, he was taking the video cases filled with the right videos I’d collected from the filing system behind the counter, and he was waving at me, and he was telling me to have a good one, and he was walking to the door, and he was the other side of the door, and then he was gone.
I stared at the clock, watching the hour hand, willing it to go faster so I could leave, get home and sort out my set for the night, my first solo set at this new venue. It was the biggest venue I’d played. An old warehouse behind King’s Cross, a maze of rooms segmented off the aircraft-hangar-sized building, playing different types of music in each. I’d managed to get a thirty-minute set in the trance room—you know? The one full of people holding glow sticks in both hands, making big fish, little fish, cardboard box moves. That one.
***
At home, I wolfed down my dinner, apologised to Mum for not being able to stay and chat, ran upstairs into the shower, threw on some clothes—baggy silver combat trousers, white sleeveless T-shirt—and styled my hair into a dozen or so individual large spikes. But as I stood at the door with my record suitcase in my hand, she barred my exit.
“Where’s the fire, love?” Her foot tapped the ground.
Do I tell her about Paul and still not getting the guts to ask him outright if he’s a gayer? Or do I make my excuses, say I’ve got to rush to get set up, sort my set order and go over things with the venue first?
“How you getting there with all that lot?”
“Tube. It’s right next to the station. Easy life.”
“Yeah, and you get mugged round the back of King’s Cross. Full of druggies and prostitutes, that is. It was on the news the other week. And them needles, you got to be careful. There’s people running up to complete strangers in night clubs, injecting them with blood and leaving a little note written on a sticker saying ‘welcome to the happy world of HIV’. Terrible, it is. Saw it on the news.”
“Yeah, you said. A few times. A few places.”
“You taking care of yourself?”
I sighed. “I need to go, Mum. Can I go, please?” I slumped against the wall, the energy I’d had moments before leaving my body.
She unhooked her coat from the hanger and collected her keys from the tail of the green parrot that hung on the wall by the door. “I’m driving you.”
As we made our way from our green corner of Brockley through the traffic of South East London, she told me how she wasn’t happy with me travelling alone late at night.
“Not for no DJ job, not for nothing. You’re getting a cab home. Don’t care what your father says, I’m giving you the money. And if I find out you spent it on drink or a kebab, or drink and a couple of kebabs, I will personally kill you with my own two hands. Understand?”
She meant it. She’d given me murder a few times when I’d disobeyed what she’d asked me to do. Always in my best interest, but at the time, the sore head from her gold-ring-fingered slap didn’t feel quite so much in my best interest.
“This fella. The one at work,” I began, just sort of grabbing it like a stingy nettle of awkwardness.
“Works in the record shop?” She was chewing gum and staring straight ahead at the road.
“That’s the one. We get on. We do, we really get on. We have a laugh. He comes to my shop, we talk. I go to his shop, we talk. It’s great. We go to the same places. Same music, see. Never bumped into him yet, though. Small odds, I suppose. Anyway, I don’t know.”
“Don’t know what, love?” She pointed to the sign for King’s Cross. “Is this us?”
“Round the back.”
We were at the entrance of the warehouse, a large, grey, squat building made of black bricks and a corrugated iron roof.
She stopped the car and turned to face me. “I said, ‘Don’t know what?’”
“If he’s, you know, into lads.” Since the hypodermics in night clubs, and all the guys who’d disappeared during the eighties, being gay wasn’t really as cool as it once had seemed. Saying you were gay to a lot of people meant AIDS. HIV. Death. That’s what being gay meant. And so a lot of us had sort of retreated back into our shells, taken the rainbow unicorn down a few notches. Down a lot of notches, actually. Not that I was really camp or flying around on my own unicorn. But little things about songs I liked from the seventies—Donna Summer, disco classics, that sort of thing—I kept that to myself. Unless you actually asked someone if they were, it was this shame thing, this sort of problem, like AIDS and HIV, people didn’t want to shout about anymore. Especially when you were at work.
Mum rapped her red nails on the steering wheel. “Love, you just gotta ask him if he wants to go for a drink. Simple as.”
“What if he thinks I’m just being friendly?”
“No one ever asked no one else for a drink cos they wanted to be their friend. Not deep down, they didn’t. They might be pretending to be their friend, but really, they want to get inside their knickers. Simple as.” She pointed to the bouncer who was waving outside the entrance. “I think you’re wanted, love. Better get off.” She tapped her cheek.
I kissed it. Simple as. Thing was, even if this Paul was gay, he’d never be interested in me anyway.
“What time you back?” she asked.
“Club closes at four, I think. My set’s earlier than that. But I dunno.”
She pressed some notes into my hand and said firmly, “Cab.”
I walked to the entrance of the building, half kicking myself for not being so straightforward with Paul and half shitting myself about tonight’s set, the crowd in the trance room, whether they’d enjoy what I played, whether they’d dance to what I played, whether I would be asked back again.
But as soon as I got behind the record decks, put my headphones on and started the first song—‘For An Angel’ by Paul Van Dyke—accompanied by a dance floor of people with hands raised above heads, some whooping and screaming as the strobe lights flashed in time with the 120 beats per minute, I knew I’d done the right thing, saying yes when I’d been offered this spot.
Of course, the half a speckled Mitsubishi I’d taken three-quarters of an hour before my set was also undeniably taking the edge off my nerves. I’d already told the previous DJ I loved him, as well as the coat-check woman and the man who’d shown me where to put my records. They weren’t fussed; it was par for the course in this place.
***
I stayed after my set, realising I was way too on it to just get a cab home straight away. I’d done it a few times before and ended up dancing in the kitchen to the beep of the oven when the time was up on some chips I’d fancied but unsurprisingly hadn’t wanted when I actually saw them cooked. Mum had arrived in the kitchen, arms folded and leaning against the door, asking me what time I called this, and what did I think this was, a frigging night club, before walking close up to my face, staring me in the eyes and saying, “Don’t think I don’t know. I wasn’t born yesterday. I was a child of the seventies, remember? Drinking too, were you?”
One of the early rules I’d heard from one of the clubbing old campaigners I’d met at an orbital party a few years ago was to stick to water and never mix alcohol and pills. That was where the wheels started to fall off and why everyone was constantly sucking on a bottle
of water as they threw shapes, danced, hugged and kissed everyone on the dance floor.
“Nope.” I’d said half proudly, half ashamedly to Mum.
“Make sure you don’t lose yourself. Plenty of people thought they’d discovered God or a higher state of being when actually a little bit of their brain had got left in a warehouse near the M25. Just make sure you keep a bit of yourself tethered, stuck to the ground. The real you, the Monday to Friday you. All right?”
I’d nodded.
She’d left me to it, a cold tray of chips and a still beeping oven as I made big fish, little fish, cardboard box shapes with my hands, eventually falling into a fitful sleep on the sofa.
Now, tonight—as the darkness left and the bright house lights filled the floor, revealing plastic pint glasses and bottles, bits of old glow stick and topless sweaty men with their arms round bra-on topless sweaty women, smeared make-up, wilted spikey hair and everyone looking for a familiar face who they could brave the journey home with or head to an afterparty—I wondered what the fuck to do to kill a few hours and get myself a bit straighter before going home.
“Tom, you coming round mine after?” Slinky Simon—the DJ who’d played after me—asked.
I held my jacket in front of my chest, my heart rate having almost returned to a normal rate. Tempting as it sounded, Sunday morning would soon bleed into Sunday afternoon and inevitably Sunday evening when, with my body empty of anything more nutritious than a Marlboro Light or some Juicy Fruit chewing gum, and with my energy and serotonin levels thoroughly exhausted without any chemical aid to mask this, I would have to make my way across London from the location of the afterparty, back to Mum and Dad’s terraced Victorian house in Brockley, South East London. Mum would ask me if I was working tomorrow, and I’d nod, and she’d tut and I’d go to bed with a comedown the size of Lewisham, Greenwich and Bromley combined, threatening to crush my soul and existence.
I shook my head at Slinky Simon. “Soz. I’ve got work. Need my beauty sleep.”
“When you working, Tom mate?”
“Monday.”
He made a waving, dismissive motion with his hands. “That’s a whole day away. Don’t be worrying about that just yet. Come with me. Follow me and you’ll love it. Trust me.”
As far as DJing advice, getting me into that club or anything in that vein, I did trust Slinky Simon implicitly. But as far as me following him and being able to function in any way approaching a human being on Monday morning, I trusted him as far as I could have thrown him. And he was about twice my size, with very large, very high platform trainers.
I shrugged. “I’m empty. Nothing left. Can’t go on.” This, I knew, was a dangerous strategy, as admitting I was out of drugs could result in two outcomes:
1) end of conversation as the other person was out, too, or…
2) a cry of that not being a problem and he had plenty more, and it would be all good.
Slinky Simon grabbed my hand, pulled it towards his groin and squeezed it, where I felt a small lumpy mass with lots of smaller bumps on it. He wasn’t coming on to me, not that he didn’t know I was that way. He just wasn’t into all that. He liked women and their bodies and the support, and the way they made sense to him too much to, you know, go gay. No, he was making me squeeze the bag of pills he was hiding in his underpants.
I held onto the wall, the wobbles and jelly legs from before returning. I needed to keep myself tethered to something, and if I followed Slinky Simon to his, I’d come well and truly untethered.
“Maybe next time.” I waved, and before he could say anything else, I was gone, out into the cool, pale sun of Sunday morning. The bit of Sunday morning that no one except nightclubbers and central London refuse-collecting services ever sees. The bit of Sunday morning that’s before even those mad people who get up at seven o’clock even at the weekend.
This was my favourite part of the day, after a night out shouting, chatting, dancing, loving it all, as you jumped onto a night bus—or a day bus sometimes if it was late enough—and floated on the remnants of the high from before, all the way back to a womb-like bed, with one last cigarette and a hot, sweet milky mug of tea.
I arrived home, followed my usual post-clubbing ritual: pint of water, tea, cigarette out the front of the house as everyone else was starting to rise for the day, then showered, closed the complete blackout specially requested from Mum curtains, climbed into bed, and slept.
***
Later that day, when I’d had enough sleep I could string a sentence together but no longer felt floaty and disassociated from the world as it was being presented before me, I walked into the kitchen where Mum was making one of her legendary roasts. I sat on the chair and let out a long, dramatic sigh.
“No sympathy from me. I’m telling you. None.” She paused. “If you want a cuppa, you can make me one too.”
I put the kettle on and assembled the mugs and bits for our tea.
“Auntie Luella rang. Said she’d sent you a letter and hadn’t heard back from you. I asked if she wanted to talk to Dad, on the off-chance she’d have anything to chat to her brother about, but she said no, she wanted to check if you was all right. I said you was, but you was busy.”
“Thanks.” I’d been meaning to reply to that letter for weeks. I usually wrote to her every few months, making up for not visiting her in the last few years. I enjoyed reading her long, newsy letters and knew she loved hearing about whatever I was up to.
“Write back, will you, love? She asked if you were coming out to see her this year, like you used to. I said I didn’t know, with your job and that.”
“I will. I’ll ask for time off and I’ll fly to New York and see her. It’ll be great. Just like it used to be.”
“A letter would do,” Mum said.
“The problem is, cos I’m so busy doing lots of interesting things, I don’t have much time to write to Luella and tell her about them. Pretty ironic, don’t you think?”
“A short letter. Couple of pages’ll do. Anyway, I said I’d ask. So that was me, asking.” Mum smiled. “So, last night, did you cab it home?”
Did I get a cab home? Hmmm, good question. I didn’t one hundred percent remember what had happened to my suitcase of records, but I had confidence in myself that I’d not got too banjaxed last night to have left it in the club, on a night bus, in Trafalgar Square at the bus stop…
“Hang on.” I ran upstairs, and relief flooded through my body when I saw my record-filled suitcase behind the door. I rifled through my combat trousers pockets, all eight of them, and found no money. I must have got a cab. As I arrived back in the kitchen, I said, “Yes.”
“Well, why’ve you got a face like a bloody slapped arse? Go well, did it? This set of yours?”
“It did, as it goes. Yeah. Very well, actually. Hands in the air, shouting, people asking for more. Good set. Slinky Simon’s asked me back. So…” I shrugged.
Mum pointed to the now boiling kettle. “Tea.”
I made the tea.
Mum said, “Slinky Simon, eh? Well, what’s up, then?”
I busied myself with the tea-making part of the day, concentrating hard while I thought about what to say about the Paul situation. I handed her a mug and took mine to sit back at the table. “He weren’t there last night. Said he might be. But he weren’t. Said we’d maybe bump into each other. We never do, see.”
“I see.” She tapped the ash off her cigarette into the flamenco-dancer ashtray, put the fag back in her mouth and resumed peeling the carrots, with her back to me.
“I was gonna go to his shop next week, casual like. Say I was stocking up on some new tunes, and tell him how it went last night. Casual like. And see if he wanted to come see me next time I’m back there. Slinky Simon said I could put him on the guest list. No bother. But I don’t want him to think I’m too much, too datey, too going out, too boyfriendy. He might have a girlfriend and a little baby for all I know.” Another protracted sigh escaped my lungs and filled the air of
the kitchen, mixing among the steam and cooking smells and Mum’s wafting smoke.
Mum sat next to me and offered me one of her cigarettes.
“Smoking inside?” This was a rarity, me being allowed to smoke indoors. Something was definitely on the horizon here; I could feel it in my waters.
She nodded, lit it, along with another for herself. “There’s no good all this ‘see you at my night, when I’m doing my set’ bollocks. That doesn’t say you want to get to know him. That says you know him a bit and if you bump into him, that’s good, but otherwise you’re not arsed.”
“But I am arsed, Mum. I really am arsed.” And rest assured, I’d had quite a few in-depth thoughts about how much I was arsed about Paul, whether he was straight or not. But that wasn’t for sharing with Mum now.
“Fuck’s sake, Tom love, it’s no wonder you can’t get yourself a boyfriend. You’re not trying hard enough. I know you don’t like just going to the gay clubs, you want to have a wider circle. You don’t want to ghettoise yourself. But bugger me backwards, love, you’re a lot more likely to meet a boy who likes boys at one of them places than one of these. And if not, then you’ll just have to bloody well ask him to go for a drink. You and this Paul. A drink. If he’s all vague and can’t come and runs off like a cat when it thinks it’s going to the vet, you’ll have your answer—he’s into girls, women, females…you know what I mean. And wham-wham-bam, thank you Paul, onto the next one. I can’t stand all this fannying about you’re doing, moping over him. How long you been talking to him, talking to me about talking to him? How long’s it been, couple of months?”
To my shame, I worked it out on my fingers and very quietly said, “Eleven months.”
“How many times have you seen him at your work?”
More counting on fingers. “At least twenty times.”
