by Alan Clark
‘Sure, but I think I’d survive. Not sure Marcus has, are you?’
‘Not in any meaningful way perhaps,’ said Vic. ‘I suppose that’s the risk of a long-term thing. Not being two totally separate people any more.’
‘Can’t quite imagine that, can you Victor?’
‘Oh yes I can imagine it toots. Never experienced it though; certainly not to the degree that Marcus has.’
‘Yeah, I feel sorry for him.’
‘Sorry for him?’ asked Vic, waving for another brandy. ‘Shouldn’t we envy him? Better to have loved and lost …’
‘Well he’s really paying the price now isn’t he?’ I said. ‘Is it worth it?’
‘I reckon Marcus would say that it was. What would you say? You’re the one who’s just entered a serious relationship, after all.’
‘I don’t know,’ I replied honestly. ‘Thirty years together, then half an hour at the crem with Celine Dion and that fucking song from Titanic. Followed by sausages on sticks, being hugged by people you’ve never met before, then home alone to your haunted house, as Marcus calls it. I’m not sure I could take being disembowelled like that.’
‘Maybe you need to become sure pretty damn quick.’
‘So you reckon it’s worth it then?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes, I’d risk it,’ said Vic ‘for the chance of the joy.’
I could see his eyelids beginning to droop as they often did at this time of the day, although Vic always looked like a man who’d had a good lunch even when he hadn’t. Well I’d risked it years ago back in Australia, when I’d been too young to realize that any risk was involved. Disaster. Now here I was having a final go with Faisal, for the chance of the joy. But I was still a bit hazy as to what that meant exactly. I just assumed it was something worth having, some Nirvana shimmering on the horizon, where life could be lived on a higher plane. Or was that just a load of bollocks?
‘Well let’s hope Marcus can lighten up a bit,’ I said eventually. ‘Are all the guys in that album of yours this stuffy Victor?’
‘Jeez toots, get real,’ he replied ‘Men well-heeled enough to afford our fees are likely to be sixty-five plus, hang out in places like this and take the Telegraph. They’re unlikely to moisturize, exfoliate or pay much attention to their nasal hair. They might even dribble slightly from one or more of their orifices. So if you’re banking on a house full of Tom Selleck lookalikes, you’re in for a disappointment. Marcus, bless him, is our template. Deal with it.’
Marcus returned and led us back downstairs to the floor of the atrium.
‘Thank you so much for coming to vet me,’ he said, shaking our hands briskly.
‘We’ll be honoured to have you, old buddy,’ said Vic, slapping his back and turning towards the cloakroom. But Marcus seemed reluctant to let us go before he was totally sure the judges had heard his plea.
‘The thing is, gentlemen, I think I’m in imminent danger of becoming a sad case,’ he said. ‘I spend my days watching dreadful TV programmes about grandmothers who run off with teenage boys or spunky women who don’t mind that their husbands wear their frocks. So I do hope you might take me in. Otherwise I shall be left sitting here rereading George Eliot, and Dorothea Brooke’s just not as much fun as she used to be.’
Their faces were like two podgy beetroots now; the sticky toffee pudding, the brandies, the heat. As Vic clasped his hand again, Marcus suddenly swooned. I grabbed for him a second too late and the three of us ended up on the mosaic floor in a vaguely indecent tangle. People came running. We got Marcus up onto a chair, took off his tie, opened his collar and fanned him with a copy of The Spectator. His eyes fluttered back into focus.
‘Take it easy Marcus. Breathe slowly and deeply,’ I said, giving him a sip of water.
Marcus’s hand flew to his throat.
‘Where’s my tie?’
‘You needed air. We took it off.’
‘In here? Good grief! Did the Lord Chancellor see?’
I glanced back up to the gallery where knots of coffee-drinkers were peering down on the unaccustomed commotion. The Lord Chancellor looked very concerned. Marcus’s eyes followed my gaze.
‘Oh my God, how could you?’ He moaned and fainted again.
*
Okay, this is as good a place as any. This is where I make the big confession. Ms Prada would be thrilled. Here we go. I don’t want to be a homosexual. Never did, never will. I’ve learned to accept it and I feel no guilt whatsoever because it wasn’t my fault. But if they ever invent the ‘straight’ pill, I’ll swallow it whole with a glass of champagne and shout ‘yippee!’ Sorry. I realize this is sad, pathetic and terminally uncool.
Yes I know there’s never been a ‘better’ time to be gay. I know I’m not likely to be locked up or spat at in the street, unless I go on a mini-break to Belfast. In our shiny new Millennium, I’m not just tolerated, I’m chic. How many dinner parties in Putney have I been expected to liven-up as the token gay? At Blaine Rampling, it was one of the few things Thatcher’s children approved of, convinced it helped bring in business. So hip, so happening, so now.
But I still regard it as a duff card in the pack. This sort of thing wasn’t supposed to be on my CV. For Rory Blaine, scion of a shipping empire, it was supposed to be plain sailing from cradle to grave by way of Glenlyon School, Oxbridge, the Guards, the wedding, the patter of tiny feet and a fistful of non-executive directorships to see me out. Roughly what old Marcus Leigh had planned too I suppose. I just never imagined myself on the ‘outside’ of anything, I’m not the ‘oppressed minority’ type. Hey world, what I’ve got to offer you is worth having. Don’t you dare condemn me just because of what makes my willy go hard. Even worse, don’t positively discriminate in my favour. You can shove them both.
But the card was dealt, so I got on with playing it as best I could. I’ve never lied about it. I dragged myself on the requisite marches with the sandal-wearing types, which was not my scene at all. I once threw condoms at Mary Whitehouse. I got arrested for that. Maybe what worried me even more than being gay was the possibility of flunking it. If you have to be a poof, you might as well do it properly. And I’m pleased to report that Rory Blaine is now, without any doubt, an A-List gay. I give money to the right causes, I go to the right openings, I say all the right things. Except here of course, except now.
The other day I saw a man, half my age, walking ahead of me in the street, hand in hand with a wee boy. The kid said something; the man laughed and ruffled his hair. Suddenly I wanted to weep, then remembered that I couldn’t. Okay I know, pass the sick-bag. But I’ve always wanted kids; it must be amazing, illuminating your soul like a million-watt lightbulb. The only time I’ll be called ‘dad’ is by twinks with an older man fetish. How sad is that? Sure, the parent-child thing can go hideously wrong, but it would’ve been nice to have had the chance to fuck it up, that’s all. Take old Marcus Leigh. By now, he ought to have children of my age, grandchildren in their twenties, great-grandkids even, all lined up in relays, ready to carry him on their shoulders for the rest of his days. Instead his only companion is the ghost from the Piazza Navona.
However dysfunctional my straight friends might be, at all those dinner parties I’d nearly always absorbed some sense of calm anchorage. I’d tried telling myself how rigid the itinerary of the heterosexual life. All the milestones so mercilessly laid out; no chance to wander off the path, take the road less travelled. By thirty, thou shall have monogamy and a mortgage. By thirty-five, thou shall smell of nappies. By forty thou shall look like shite and only have sex once a year. How turgid compared to the uncharted thrills of the gay journey with only your instincts to guide you. But I’d never entirely bought all that. Ms Prada doesn’t either. She thinks that to mature properly people need those milestones, the generational yardsticks that children bring. And because most gays don’t have them we never quite grow up ourselves. We just keep on dancing and arguing about whether Lesley Garrett is a great diva or just a vulgar populist.
>
Anyway, I think it’s a bit too late to go chasing a lesbian with a turkey-baster. So just like Granny was the last of the Ashridges, I will be the last of the Blaines. The plug will be pulled on my prestigious gene pool and it will gurgle to extinction. It will not be business as usual as Granny had imagined. There will be no new portraits for the Gilded Hall. Oh well, hey ho. I’ve never given a fuck about the cause of sexual orientation. But whatever bit of bad wiring is responsible, it has lost me everything I cared about and brought me nothing I could value, unless of course Faisal manages to lift the curse. I don’t want to be a homosexual. There, I’ve said it again. But I will never say it aloud, not even to Ms Prada. It is my shame.
*
Tonight I took myself out on the town. Faisal had dashed down to Slough. At Khan’s Tools & Hardware, a two-litre can of Dulux Brilliant White Gloss had fallen from a shelf right onto his father’s skull. I’d hoped it might be curtains for the bigoted old shite, but Faisal had left within three minutes of his mother’s call; he worshipped his father.
Vic was in bed with a migraine and anyway for the last fortnight I’d spent nearly every waking moment in his company. He’d been right about Marcus Leigh being the template. Day after day, I’d been living in a melanin-free world inspecting a line-up of eminently respectable, grey-haired gentlemen. After lunch at the Reform, I’d sat through tea at the Athenaeum and dinner at the Garrick. I’d visited so many gracious apartments in Mayfair and Belgravia that when we’d travelled out to Fulham, it’d felt like slumming. The most fun had been when a retired Cambridge don had answered the door dressed like Alistair Sim as the head-mistress of St Trinians. He’d wanted to be open with us right from the start he’d said; we’d have to take him or leave him. We’d not quite decided yet.
But tonight I really needed to get out of Mount Royal, to get away briefly from this thing that I’d allowed to take over my life. And La Ronde was this year’s ‘kewl’ bar. I’d been too busy to get to the opening but I didn’t want to start losing touch. I’d no intention of trying to pull. With one bizarre exception, of which more later, I’d been faithful to Faisal since the night I’d tied him to that balcony in Paris. Monogamy was fine, really it was. I just wanted to check the place out. I’d scarcely been into Soho in months and certainly not to anywhere gay. Faisal never wanted to go on the scene. I’d once frogmarched him to a club but his utter boredom had shrouded both of us in a pall of peevishness. He’d had one Diet Coke and refused point blank to dance, not even to Abba. We’d been home by midnight.
‘Why on earth do you and I need places like that now?’ he’d demanded as he’d brewed the herbal tea he always took to bed.
At the door of La Ronde the bouncer greeted me like a long-lost brother. I knew him from other clubs he’d worked at. He was a Muscle Mary; emphasis on the latter word.
‘And where have we been all this time?’ he asked, kissing me on both cheeks. ‘It’s just like Dolly Levi returning to the Harmonia Gardens Restaurant.’
The interior was the shape of a huge drum. On the ground level was a dance floor and bar; above it, three tiers of pillared galleries connected to each other by teeny spiral staircases. The galleries were furnished with fake Baroque sofas and big gilt-framed mirrors hung at crazy angles on the curving walls. The mirror glass was made of some material that distorted reflections; faces, bodies, colours and lights were twisted into weird, almost frightening shapes. It was all achingly hip, but of course just the same as any other bar I’d been in during the last twenty-five years. The sets, the costumes, the hairdos changed, but the script never varied. Yet these were the stages where metropolitan gay men were programmed to perform. Whatever other parts you played in your life, however brilliantly you played them, it was against this backdrop that you’d be reviewed by your peers as a bona fide homosexual.
Sorry to stretch the metaphor, but Rory Blaine’s appearances on such stages had always been a triumphant success. From my debut in the late Seventies, my appeal had been simple; I’d appeared to have stumbled into the wrong play. Back then, they couldn’t quite believe I was gay. Even in the first heady years of liberation, it had still been a sub-culture whose icons were Quentin Crisp, Julian and Sandy and drag acts in grubby pubs. But I’d personified what most of them imagined they’d failed to be. Despite the golden locks, I’d been what old Quentin had once called The Great Dark Man, the unattainable possessor of unforced masculinity. But I was in fact attainable; disgracefully so. And in that fashion, giving away little pieces of myself like fragments of the true cross, I’d passed some of the best years of my life. It’d been a far cry from how Miss Elspeth Wishart had hoped her boys from Glenlyon School would behave.
‘You’re chipping away at your very soul,’ she’d say when any of us wandered from the simple clear Calvinist road she’d been determined we should follow. And boy, had I chipped.
I got a beer and cruised the galleries. I saw three or four faces I recognized but nobody said hello. I’d long since forgotten their names but, oddly, I could still remember wee glimpses I’d had into their real lives, their lives away from places like this. I remembered suburban flats, hideous wallpaper, tropical fish, dishes in the sink. I remembered bathroom cabinets which I’d checked out, as I always did, to see if they had gum problems or fungal infections. Once or twice I’d discovered such a suspicious regiment of pill-bottles that I’d faked a sudden headache and got the hell out of there. Otherwise, for a couple of hours, we’d hopped off the world together, then we’d travelled onwards. A bientôt. Hasta luego. See you later.
I stood on the topmost gallery and looked down on the dancers. The body-heat rose and hit you in the face. It was like looking into a cauldron seething with gorgeous grubs, slithering around each other, high as kites on fuck-knows-what. Apart from booze, I don’t do drugs. Never understood why anyone would want to lose control. Give me a man who sticks to three pints of Guinness and stops while he can still get it up.
The ghetto stereotypes were all there: the skin-deep machismo of the leather men who probably worked in the fabric department of John Lewis, the pot-bellied bears with their beards and tats, the shaven-headed, anorexic waifs, the screamers in eye-liner. Every one of them instantly flagged their sexuality to the world and his wife without embarrassment, defiant in their right to be respected. And wasn’t that exactly what my lot had battled for? Why should I be jealous of that? Fuck it. I still deserved a place here. I’d earned it.
I got another Becks, went downstairs and shoe-horned myself onto the dance-floor. Honky-Tonk Women rose from the grave. I made eye contact with a circle of scally lads and gave them my Jagger. They grinned at first but melted away one by one till I was dancing alone. I saw them regroup on the far side of the floor. Christ, why on earth had I come here? I’d been eyed by a couple of obvious renters, but otherwise hardly a glance. I spotted a couple more faces I knew, still on the prowl, just that wee bit older. They had a curious quality for me now, ghostly almost, though not like Marcus Leigh’s precious dead Italian boy. These were worthless ghosts. Once we might have offered each other something, but none of us had bothered to search for it. It hadn’t been the name of the game. Anyway, at that point, I’d not been willing to play any other.
But hey, I’d come out unscathed right? I did have a relationship now and with a decent man, who trailed youth and beauty behind him like a fur. I had my trophy, the evidence of my continuing appeal. Why, as Faisal had asked, didn’t I just walk out of places like this forever? Why go on clinging to the carousel? Would it really be that awful to let go? Mightn’t it just conceivably be a glorious release? At exactly what point did the Great Dark Man turn into the Sad Old Fucker? I’d feared it had happened that day in the sauna when the Arab kid turned up the light. But maybe that had been a false alarm. Maybe it was just tonight, a minute ago, as I strutted my ageing stuff like a demented chicken? Or perhaps I could hang on till next year or even the year after that? I’d always prided myself that I would know.
; I bought the one beer too many and sat at the bar. Near me was a boy I’d already noticed a few times. Most people had. A broad, strong olive-skinned face with full lips and a flattened nose beneath a mop of tousled hair. No more than eighteen. Straight out of Caravaggio. But he sat alone, the handsome face blank, the body tensed, feet perched on the highest rung on the bar stool, knees drawn up against the chest, foetal almost. He’d thrown up an invisible wall that everybody could see, so they’d left him in there. Mostly he just contemplated the depths of his drink but occasionally his eyes would dart around for a moment before retreating again. On one such expedition they caught mine and stayed there. At first I felt the reflexive surge of vanity. The Great Dark Man lived. But as we looked at each other, I realized it wasn’t attraction I could read in his eyes but curiosity. Then suddenly he untangled himself from the stool and vanished into the crowd.
I headed for the exit via the loos. The urinals were crowded. I hated peeing in gay bogs. I could never manage it unless I stared at the porcelain and conjured up some deeply unerotic image. Like Glenda Jackson stark naked in that old Ken Russell movie about Tchaikovsky. I was just focussing on Glenda when a gruff voice murmured in my ear.
‘Shame to waste that mate.’
A big leather guy beside me had pushed an empty half-pint beer mug under my cock. Oh what the hell. The management had hung one of their distorting mirrors in here too and I watched my warped reflection pissing into the beer mug, chipping away at my very soul.
‘Cheers mate,’ he said.
‘Cheers,’ I said.
Outside, a sharp spring wind made me realize I’d overdone the booze. As I walked back to the Merc, I saw the Caravaggio boy standing under a lamp post smoking a fag with tears running down his cheeks. He turned his head away.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
‘Yes thank you. I do not have problem,’ he replied. The accent was Mediterranean, maybe even Italian after all.
