by Alan Clark
Ms Prada has asked me to examine the possibility that casual sexual encounters are, as she puts it, speed-bumps on the road to full emotional maturity. But as I surrendered to the furry, perfumed embrace, I reminded myself what crap that was. This was not an addiction. It was not demeaning, it was life-enhancing. Okay, so maybe you didn’t know, or care, what his name was, what his dreams were. Maybe it could be a bit mechanical, embarrassing even; but that was usually just before and after. During those central exhilarating minutes it could be ecstatic. There were no barriers or betrayals, no expectations or let-downs. I would be refuelled with confidence in myself and in the essential beauty of mankind. And I always offered to buy them a cup of coffee afterwards, even if praying they’d refuse. But during that short glorious fusion it would seem like the most potent communication I’d ever experienced. Yeah, yeah, Ms Prada, honesty on these pages, right? Yes, there were times, the bad days, when I did it for comfort, like some people buy Cadbury’s Creme Eggs. And yes I’d known other, deeper forms, a couple of times anyway, but they’d never worked out for me, so why hurt myself again? This would do.
And God, did this guy know what he was about. Though he’d dimmed the light in the tiny room I could see him properly at last. Arab. A bit older than I’d thought. Twenty-five even. Bit too athletic; all thrashing limbs and a running commentary. In loud porno-speak, he enunciated both the services he had to offer and those he hoped to receive. I felt obliged to answer, but I’m oddly inhibited with all that stuff. The rooms were separated by partitions, thin as Rolf Harris’s wobble-board, which didn’t even reach to the ceiling. I could clearly hear the progress of neighbouring encounters and presumably vice-versa. So when the Arab barked a demand that I give it to him doggy-style on the floor, I snapped ‘on all fours, bitch’ as quietly as possible without sacrificing the necessary authority. Nevertheless a familiar voice vaulted over the partition.
‘Rory Blaine, is that you in there?’
‘Jeremy?’
‘I thought it was you, you randy old sod. Listen, love, don’t you even think about that movement or you’ll be screaming on my table by Monday.’
Jeremy is the mechanic responsible for my bad-tempered back.
‘Oh, right then, Jeremy,’ was all I could think of to reply.
‘Lie flat out and let him get on top. He’s not too heavy is he?’
I looked down at the Arab who had shrunk back into a corner and did indeed look smaller than he had a minute ago.
‘Don’t think so.’
‘Remember, love, you might pass for thirty-something in this light, but your spine’s forty-five today. Hope you got my e-card.’
I turned back to the Arab, raised my eyebrows and scratched my head like Stan Laurel. The Arab gave a nervous smile, then reached out and turned the dimmer switch full up, flooding me in a pool of sickly yellowish light. The smile flinched. There was a long pause before he spoke.
‘Er, listen mate … look, gonna leave it.’
‘Leave it?
‘Yeah. Put it on hold for tonight.’ said the Arab. Another pause. I could hear his brain working. ‘Started feeling a bit shivery. Tickle in me throat too. Might be going down with the flu. Best not to pass it on, right?’
‘No big deal,’ I said. ‘Want to give me your mobile?’
‘Sorry mate. Got nicked yesterday. Bastards.’ By now, his fingers were on the door handle and his towel wrapped round him, tight as a second skin. ‘Maybe check you out in here again sometime.’
‘Sure,’ I said.
‘See you later.’
The Arab closed the door behind him. For a moment I stood still in my spotlight, then flicked the room back to near-darkness and sat down on the bench on which Issey Miyake still lingered. A new emotion had landed on my plate. I began toying with it but realized it was going to be too hard to swallow.
After a few minutes, I fled the sweaty cell and turned back towards the staircase. I wanted to grab somebody, anybody. But the corridors were deserted. Sweat and amyl still hung in the air, but it was like the Marie Celeste. I knew this maze like I knew the thread veins round my nostrils, but I suddenly lost all sense of direction. One turning was a dead end; another led me to a fire exit. I retraced my steps trying to find the staircase. I pushed at the half-open doors of cubicles, one after another. Empty. Empty. Empty. I started to feel a wee bit sick. I was half-running round a corner when I crashed into Jeremy, the osteopath.
‘Good time then, you old ram?’ said Jeremy with the usual shifty grin that made him look like a timeshare tout in Benidorm.
‘Where the hell is everyone?’ I said, trying to calm my breathing.
‘Upstairs for the new afternoon cabaret,’ said Jeremy. ‘Who’d have thought the post-Millennium gay community would still be dazzled by the sight of sequins? Drag or shag, it’s no contest. I just came back down for my tit clamps. You coming up, love?’
‘You lead on,’ I said, searching for my smile so I could graft it back on. But upstairs I turned for the locker room and got dressed. The old Chinese queen on the front desk wished me a nice evening on behalf of the management.
Outside, the April sunshine had given way to drizzle. I got into the Merc, and sat for a while watching the raindrops stipple the windscreen. Then I drove slowly west towards civilization. As I waited by the lights at Clerkenwell, I saw the Arab, mobile clamped to ear, heading into a gay bar. The numbness inside my head was dispelled by a red raw anger.
‘Fuck you!’ I yelled out of the window. The Arab turned, confused for a moment, then gave me a cheery two fingers.
‘Hey, what did you do in the war, Daddy?’ he shouted back.
Cars behind me were tooting. I wrenched the Merc half onto the pavement, leapt out and grabbed him by the lapels.
‘Listen to me, you wee shite. This Daddy was in a war once. About twenty-five years ago, when I was even younger than you. There weren’t many on our side at first; maybe just a few hundred here and there who stood up to be counted. And there were millions against us. David and Goliath. So we were really bloody brave, don’t you think? Some of us actually got killed too; beaten up, left in gutters to die. Others only lost their jobs, had their kids taken away or got chucked out by their loving families. So why do you think we went through all that? You going to tell me?’
The Arab shook his head, the sweat beading his brow along with the raindrops.
‘Because we wanted to know what it felt like to stand tall, not be cowed or scared any more. But it was also to make sure that kids like you wouldn’t have to go through the same crap one day.’
The Arab found his voice, though it was a bit strangulated as his feet were half off the ground.
‘So I’m supposed to build you a fuckin’ statue in Trafalgar Square?’
‘No, I don’t expect gratitude. Not from your self-centred wee generation. But if it hadn’t been for the likes of me, this bar wouldn’t exist, or that sauna or your financial advisers with their pretty pink mortgages. So I’ll live without your thanks, but I’m sure as hell not going to take any shite from a piece of gay-ghetto trash like you.’
The Arab looked me hard in the eye, curling one of the fat lips I’d been enjoying on my nipples only an hour ago.
‘That’s history, mate. It’s our time now. You’ve had yours. Get over it.’
I put him down before I killed him. This wasn’t completely beyond the bounds of possibility; Ms Prada had also urged me to attach her anger management module to our therapy structure but I’d turned it down. I’d been controlling my lousy temper all my life and I did so now. I twisted the car back onto the road and roared off. Then, for the second time that afternoon, I lost my bearings. I tore down unrecognized streets and got trapped in cul-de-sacs until I found myself on the Embankment.
It was raining quite hard now and blowing a gale, but I pulled in. I needed some fresh air. The odours of the Arab and of the room where he’d walked out on me were still in my nostrils. I walked along the river, trying to br
eathe deeply, trying to fumigate from my memory his expression as he’d turned up the light. But the dear old gastric reflux began to go into overdrive again, gnawing at my diaphragm in its familiar way. By Cleopatra’s Needle, I flung myself against the river wall and projected the contents of my stomach over the side. A shout came from far below. Still retching, I looked down and saw a wino sprawled on the steps that led to the water’s edge. There was vomit all down his front.
‘Christ, I’m sorry,’ I croaked. ‘I’ll buy you a new shirt.’
‘No worries man,’ said the wino, ‘that’s mine. Yours is there; all over Jonathan Livingston Seagull.’
Among the soggy flotsam of plastic coffee cups and take-away chicken boxes, a frantic bird was trying to flap its wings.
‘Chill, man,’ said the wino. ‘I’ll piss on it in a minute. That’ll do the trick. Uric acid has a hundred applications. It’s what they use in Sketchley’s.’
‘Thank heavens, I thought I’d …’
‘Well, there you go man,’ smiled the wino. ‘Nothing’s ever as lousy as it seems, is it? However shitty your day, some little thing comes along to restore your faith in an essentially benevolent Providence.’
By the time I got back to Devonshire Street, it was getting dark. The flat was silent, apart from the delighted squeak of the cat as it wrapped itself pathetically around my ankles. I picked it up and sat with it on the sofa. It thought Christmas had come early, nuzzling its furry chin against mine. I really must get round to giving it a name.
I sat for a while in the dusk, watching the lights in the street come on, listening to the traffic and the fragments of other lives that floated up through the window; shouts, laughter, obscenities. In another hour or two, I’d step out there again, all dressed-up, and join the quite nice people I’d invited to The Ivy. I would kiss the cheeks, slap the backs, tell the jokes as they expected me to. Later, we’d all go up in the glass lift to the private members’ club for coffee and liqueurs. I called them my friends and they, I guess, called me theirs. It’s what we all do, isn’t it? Except I wasn’t really sure what it was supposed to mean, just how far it was supposed to go. Never been great at working that one out. Ms Prada says relationships are a major area I need to work on. Big news babe.
Today I’d become forty-five years old and been sexually rejected for the first time in my life. I felt fairly close to a major ‘Milton’ and I couldn’t let that happen, not tonight, not at The Ivy’s prices. But Ms Prada wasn’t the only therapy I was concealing from the world in which I moved. I, Rory Blaine, am a closet folk-singer of traditional Scottish songs. I didn’t claim that great a voice but I liked to think that what it lacked in finesse it made up for in feeling. I went and dragged my old guitar from its hiding place under the bed. The cat lolled on the arm of the sofa and patiently sat through Annie Laurie, Ae Fond Kiss and The Skye Boat Song. As I sang, I looked across at Miss Elspeth Wishart’s card, a predictably cheesy view of lochs and mountains. And somehow, after that, I felt a bit better.
It was almost dark in the flat now; only the distant wink of the washing machine reminding me that last night’s sheets were now cleansed from sin. I switched on my mobile and left a message for Ms Prada, asking if she could squeeze me in on Monday. Then I checked my voicemails, and lo the prophecy of the wino on the Embankment came to pass. There were ten of them. The first nine were birthday greetings of a coarse or consolatory nature. But the tenth was about to change everything.
TWO
Today I went to dig up Granny. It’s thirty years now since I buried the old bitch alive, way down deep with a stake through the heart. So it was with a certain queasiness that I found myself going to open the tomb armed only with a box of Belgian chocolates
Not that her Ladyship had exactly rested in peace. From time to time over the years, she’d reared up at me in the papers or on the box, each time more barking, each time more mocked. I’d always turn the page quickly or grab the remote but she’d still thrash around my consciousness for days. Sometimes I’d even go off my food, turn down invitations, stay in the flat, drink a bit too much. Then gradually she’d sink back into the oblivion to which I’d struggled to consign her and I’d be all right again. I’d sometimes wondered if my image ever materialized to her, but I doubted it. Her annihilation of me had been complete. Granny had never done anything by halves. She was infamous for it.
And now they said she might be dying for real; at ninety-five, a second stroke, a month after the first and a lot more severe. The nursing home had somehow tracked me down; I’m still next of kin, after all. I was quite sure the patient wouldn’t know I was coming. I could see a perfectly-pencilled eyebrow arch as if to say ‘what on earth for?’ As I drove through the gates, I asked myself the same question.
It was a Victorian toad of a house, crouching on the outskirts of Beaconsfield. How she must hate it after the beauty of Mount Royal. I felt a tickle of pleasure at the thought; amazing how long venom can stay in the blood. But as the ugly brick portico began to fill the windscreen, I fought the urge to turn the wheel and run. No, fuck it. Rory Blaine doesn’t run. Not this Rory Blaine anyway, the one my grandmother had never encountered and I realized I wanted her to meet that man, even just once. I accelerated towards the front door then braked pretentiously, sending a cloud of gravel-dust over a bed of plebeian geraniums. Faces appeared at a couple of windows. That’s right. Wake up. I’m here. I took the stone steps two at a time.
The lobby was deserted, sickly with the smell of lilacs and beeswax. I slammed a bell on a table. From here, I could see into a cavernous lounge with tall windows overlooking the garden. Around its perimeter were twenty or so identical winged chairs, positioned at snooty intervals from each other, facing into the centre of the room. They were occupied by wisps of people, most in tweeds or twinsets, but some in dressing-gowns and attached to drips on metal poles that stood behind them like flunkeys. Nobody was talking. You could almost hear the pulses, faint and feeble though they were.
A surly Welsh nurse appeared, smelling of the cigarette I’d clearly interrupted. She summoned my grandmother’s doctor, a youngish guy with a tired smile and a clipboard.
‘She’s quite a girl, isn’t she?’ he grinned. ‘That last attack would have finished most folk her age, but Sibyl’s still in the ring.’
‘But I thought she was at death’s door?’ I said.
‘Only for a day or two,’ he replied, swallowing a yawn. ‘Maybe she wasn’t sure of the welcome she’d receive. I never imagined that one day I’d be trying to save Lady Sibyl Blaine. I’m a good Guardian reader, you see.’
In some distant swampy corner of my brain, a primeval loyalty stirred and I stared him out till his cheeks flushed.
‘Sorry, no offence,’ he said, burying the blush in his notes. ‘Anyway, another attack would almost certainly see the Grim Reaper win the bout. Her Alzheimer’s has accelerated quite rapidly too. She may or may not know you. When did you last see her?’
‘Thirty years ago,’ I said
‘Gosh. Shame her speech is so badly affected then,’ he replied with a wee grimace of fake empathy, ‘I guess you’ve got a lot to talk about.’
He led me down a long corridor of identical doorways till we reached one bearing a wee card with ‘Sibyl’ hand-written in ornate script. God help them if she ever clocked that. He gave me a limp-lettuce handshake and scurried away.
Centuries ago, I’d so often stood outside my grandmother’s rooms at Mount Royal, waiting for the ‘come’ without which it had been strictly forbidden to enter. The word had been a reliable weather forecast; usually bright and breezy but sometimes, for no accountable reason, heavy with a likelihood of thunder later. Now, as I raised my hand to knock, three decades shrank into seconds and I began to feel Rory Blaine haemorrhaging away into the pretty pink carpet. But today, there was no answer. The Welsh nurse zooming past barked to go right in and flung the door wide for me. Oh fuck.
It was sepulchral in the big room, as if she wer
e already dead. The curtains were drawn against the daylight and the atmosphere was clammy with decay. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, the ghost-white hospital bed materialized like a ship in the night, a Flying Dutchman of tubing and monitors.
Ms Prada had instructed me to write down here what I was experiencing. She knew all about Granny. I’d called this morning and told her I’d been summoned. She’d given a wee gasp of satisfaction, like you do when you finally crack the last clue in the crossword. We’d booked an extra session for tomorrow.
I shuffled towards the bed a few steps at a time. No need to rush after all these years. Jesus, what a tiny creature she’d become; harmless now, innocent even. Safe inside the railings, she was a grotesque parody of a baby in a cot; the fuzz of hair still gold, the powder-white skin, the lips painted in a rosy bow. But the mouth was toothless and twisted sharply to one side. Her prosthetic leg was propped beside the bed, absurdly, as if she might suddenly fancy a stroll. Her hands lay on the sheet, brown and shrivelled as two dead leaves. My own gripped the side of the bed, knuckles white as the railings. Sorry, Ms Prada, I’m not sure I can write down what I felt. I didn’t know what it was. I still don’t really. Probably some messy mixture of pity and pain, of love and loathing. Whatever. Maybe some perspective might crash in later, apologizing for its late arrival. But it hasn’t got here yet.
