Jake took another pull at his beer and was sure he heard it speak to him: saying it fancied a walk around the room. Anyone asks, just tell them it’s the drink talking.
Jake headed for the Canal Street side of the bar, where the sliding windows had been pulled back, and settled among the drinkers that were standing half in, half out of the bar space. Thinking, Am I in with the out-crowd, or out with the in-crowd?
Looking at the groups passing up and down Canal Street, he got to check the youngsters, the students, the club types, the shrieking look-at-me’s and the disco-bunnies, all of them on the move. The Rembrandt was a kind of calm centre, something between an oasis and a viewing station. Or maybe a heritage site, a place that catered for the veterans. The age range seemed to be around thirty to fifty, which was where Jake was trying to position himself. As long as he could remain reflective, maybe he could keep on top of the buzzing in his head and his stomach. The beer was supposed to douse that feeling, though he knew for a fact it wasn’t working. Maybe it wasn’t the beer’s fault; he just wasn’t drinking it hard enough. He sank the bottle and headed on again.
*
Ten-fifteen, he was leaving the Castro. This was a cellar bar and as he reached the stairs, someone asked, ‘You going already?’
‘I’m already gone… howling at the moon and clawing at the gutter. Later days.’ He took the steps two at a time and even managed to trip as he reached the top.
These streets, this rigid Village grid like a downsized New York, he knew every grate, every manhole cover, even the distance in high-heeled feet from block to block. The only thing he didn’t know was all the stuff in between. It was like the whole site had been chic-bombed; call it a queer act of God. And on the Sixth Day he created fun fur and saw that it was so gooood, he just went right on interiorizing. Jake had the before-and-after pictures playing through his head. Even the old bars like the Union, New York New York, Dickens, Central Park, they all had the same born-again glint. Well, he couldn’t actually speak for Central Park, which still looked too desolate to bother with. Nor, yet, Good-Day’s, but it was next on his list. He was still on the nostalgia trip, tracing the new cartography onto the old circuitry. When he finished, it would be Hello, Good-Day… it was a promise.
There was a whole archaeology of connections, all waiting to be rediscovered. Starting at the Bus Station where Jake used to step on and off the York–Manchester coach until the day he decided that he might be a small-town boy, but it was time he claimed refugee status and got on the council waiting list for a flat in Hulme. Then, from the Bus Station, on to the Dickens where Fairy first got talking to him and persuaded him to try the Poly Disco. The same night, he was sure, he met Sean for the first time. A few weeks later, they got to know Johnny.
From there, take a round trip past Legends Nite Club, where he first bought a gramme off Paulo. And then it was either back to the Bus Station and take ten pounds as you pass Go which was roughly what Kevin Donnelly charged. Or shoot along Canal Street and the exact spot by the canal wall which, until yesterday, was the last place Jake had ever seen DC Green. There was a story to that, too.
*
He left Donnelly chewing the soul out of a chip and ran to head off Paulo, who was weaving in and out of the coach headlamps, back-lit like a fifty-foot transvestite in heels and blond wig. At first he thought Paulo hadn’t heard him shout, the noise of the coach engines too loud. He caught up with him at the corner of Chorlton and Bloom Street.
‘How do you move so fast in those?’ Jake was pointing at the shoes.
‘I was born to it,’ said Paulo. Then, lower, ‘It’s not a good night, Jake.’
‘You not got any speed?’
Paulo was looking up and down Chorlton Street, and Jake should have caught the anxiety. He would have, if he hadn’t drunk so much at David and Phil’s Christmas dinner party.
Paulo said, ‘Walk with me.’
They turned the corner into Canal Street. The whole length of the road, only one streetlamp seemed to be working. Paulo stopped by it, sitting on the edge of the canal wall and looking through his handbag. He came out with a fistful of wraps, saying: ‘How many do you want?’
‘Fuck, Paulo, I want it all.’ Jake wondered if his eyeballs were revolving, the cartoon speed-freak. ‘But I can’t afford it.’
‘How much you got?’
The answer, twenty pound he just got off Johnny, maybe as much as fifteen he had with him anyway. He said, ‘Twenty, maybe thirty, but then I’m broke for the whole weekend.’
Paulo said, ‘Hold out your hand.’ He cupped his hand above Jake’s, palmed what looked like ten wraps into it.
Jake didn’t get it at all. Paulo just said, ‘Sorry.’
That exact moment, the road lit up ahead of them, pinning their shadows to the canal wall. Jake hadn’t even heard the car engine. He turned, found himself looking at a fat man, waddling out of the beams of his Vauxhall Cavalier. If he couldn’t recognize the walk, he knew DC Green’s voice well enough already.
‘Nice one, Paul, my son.’ Green threw Paulo a salute. Paulo took it with a shrug, said ‘Sorry’ again and started walking away. It seemed that, out of the three of them, only Jake didn’t know his moves.
Green said, ‘You reckon I search you, I’m going to get me a haul?’
Jake looked off to his left, a whole empty length of street ending in Piccadilly Gardens.
‘Don’t even think about running. If I have to go chasing you round in my fucking car, I swear I’ll run you over first.’ Green was only three yards away, close enough for Jake to get the full benefit of his smile.
Jake stuffed the wraps into his pocket. He said, ‘DC Green, I believe I’ve got information that might be of interest to you.’
‘That a fact? It’s got to be my lucky night.’
Chapter Twelve
Saturday was a cruise. Jake was high on a day’s gossip, high on the night’s possibilities, high on drugs, on beauty and clothes. It took him a sweet, short seven hours to put together the outfit he was going to wear to Pips that night. It was specialist work but no chore. Jake finished shopping only because the shops closed around him. Now he was alone, zigzagging through the high-rise towers along Spring Gardens, feeling kind of ditzy. He had maybe three hours sleep in the bag since the previous night; three hours or less, ending in an amphetamine wake-up call. No wonder he was feeling a little attenuated; it was a miracle he managed to make any shopping decisions at all. Right now he couldn’t decide whether to head back to the flat or just kill time hanging out.
He crossed Mosley Street by the City Art Gallery, sped through Chinatown and descended into the Village. Among the polythene store bags in his hand, the heaviest held a new shirt and a bottle of Coca-Cola with most of the Coke poured away and the space filled with Bacardi. When he hit the bar at Good-Day’s, he had a no-lose plan. Either he could scav his drinks or he could serve himself under the table.
Good-Day was serving in male civvies, keeping the first slow hour of the evening ticking over. When the night traffic really started and his staff took over, he would run upstairs and change.
He wasn’t fooled by Jake’s request for straight Coke.
‘I’m supposed to believe you’ll make it last all night while you’re pouring refills out of your own bottle?’
Jake waved a hand round the bar. ‘Then tell one of these old puffs to buy me a drink.’
An early-evening regular was standing close enough to hear. He said, ‘Give my young friend whatever he likes.’ The man had a mock-Etonian voice, clipped to the fruit and the gin.
Jake got his Bacardi and Coke. He carried on sitting at the bar out of politeness, listening to the guy speak.
‘I’m a refugee in these parts… the pace of life, alas, too much in my preferred climes…’
It wasn’t like Jake was concentrating. All day, he’d made regular speed drops as he skipped from changing-room to changing-room across the city. In the mirror behind Good-Day’s bar, his r
eflection was pared down to two wide eyeballs set in a sulphate stare.
The old man clicked for another two drinks, letting Good-Day take the money from a pile of change he’d left dumped on the bar-top.
‘…this was in the Colony Room of which you’ve no doubt heard? Darling Francis was rolling, positively steaming, when he met us that night. The other guests I now forget, but for the unwanted presence of Fatty Farson, refusing good vodka because he claimed – accurately as I was unfortunate enough to discover – that he could not be held responsible for his behaviour when vodka became an added factor to his usual diet.’
The man was a recognizable type, clinically boring to an exact standard. Maybe he shared his Soho stories with all the others like him, working on a time-share basis: tonight you can have the Francis & Me story; tomorrow it’s all mine. Jake’s glass was empty and he was ready to move on. As he stood, Good-Day waved him to a quiet corner at the far end of the bar.
‘Someone was looking for you.’
Jake thought: DC Green. He stammered, ‘Who?’
Good-Day said, ‘Gary Halliday.’
Jake didn’t know the name. ‘What did he want?’
‘I don’t know. That beat-up kid who hangs around the Coach Station sent him here.’
‘Kevin Donnelly sent him?’ It was one of Good-Day’s peculiarities not to notice what the boys at the Coach Station were doing there. Maybe it was delicacy. Perhaps the idea of buying what he wanted, so close to his own door, took all the fun out of coercing his own staff into providing the same services.
Good-Day said, ‘I think it was something to do with videos.’
‘Oh, right.’ Jake got it now. ‘That’s nothing to do with me. He wants to speak to Johnny.’
‘He asked for you both.’
Jake shrugged. That was Donnelly’s fault if it was true. He said, ‘Nothing to do with me.’
‘Yeah, well, watch out.’ The warning came from nowhere. Backed up with a free drink, it was a stone shock.
Good-Day must have read the surprise. As he put the glass down in front of Jake, he said, ‘Just take care.’
*
The TV adverts for Pips Discotheque always ended with the words ‘Behind the Cathedral’, rolled out in the drawl of a late-nite American DJ. There was something about the words and the tone, the spin of passé cool following on a clunking description, that should have sounded preposterous. The result, though, whenever anyone mentioned Pips was that the words ‘Behind the Cathedral’ seeped through too, as a subliminal coda. The Victorian gothic cathedral and, behind it, in the catacombs beneath the Corn Exchange, a nightclub filled with neo-gothic Siouxsie girls and Berlin-age Bowie boys.
Jake arrived around ten-thirty, ready for anything but still not dressed. He headed for the toilets on the lowest of five floors at different levels. These were the largest ones in the club, but it was still a squeeze to get by all the boys at the mirror. When Jake found an empty cubicle, he left the door swinging open so he could keep up with the chat.
Someone shouted over, ‘Hey, Jake, you had any problems getting in?’
Jake recognized the voice: Stevie, a nineteen-year-old hairdresser from Rochdale. He shouted back, ‘No.’ The bouncers were always sweet with him… not sweet sweet; they just nodded and stood aside when he rolled to the front of the queue, and said, ‘Alright.’
‘They were bitches with me. I came in a kilt and they said they were stopping men from wearing dresses. I said, It’s not a fucking dress’ – he gave the word an emphatic hiss – ‘but they wouldn’t budge.’
‘What happened.’
‘Oh, I came with Louise, you know her, and she suggested we swap; I wear her trousers, she wears my kilt and we change back once we get inside. Only, she’s got these big butch hips so the kilt doesn’t fit. We’re struggling inside her car. I’m trying to be all discreet and she’s slapping around saying, “It’s too tight, it’s too right.” I’m going, “Hold your breath in, dear.” It’s no good. I don’t know what to do. Anyway… luckily… she has this tartan dog blanket in the car, so she wraps that around her and I wear her trousers.’
‘You got in, then.’
‘We got in, yeah. After standing in line for about half an hour with her smelling like a dog and whining that she’s itching…’ He did a whole number on her list of complaints; you had to imagine the pain Louise put him through. ‘… then once we get inside and I tell her I left the kilt back in the car, she gets even worse. She’s going like we have to change NOW. And she expects me to wear the dog blanket. I tell her, “No fucking way. It’s your dog. You wear the fucking blanket. What do you think I am?”’
Jake was laughing. ‘Where is she now?’
‘Oh, don’t ask. On the warpath, so if you see her, don’t tell her where I am.’
Jake was wearing his new clothes. He took a sly drink from his Coke and Bacardi bottle and teetered out of the cubicle – let everyone see him and weep: a soft velvet blouse in black, flowing sleeves and strap-like lacing at the front, tied loose to show his bony white chest, tight mock-croc hipsters skinned from a black-and-grey faux crocodile, and high, high Cuban heels.
Hairdresser Stevie said, ‘Oh, very rock-and-roll.’
‘I don’t know. I think it’s more louche and dissolute.’
Someone else suggested: ‘A rock-and-roll vampire.’
Jake compromised on that, and asked Stevie if he could borrow his hairspray.
‘Take it. I get it free.’
Jake borrowed a comb too. As Stevie was leaving, he asked if Sean was around yet. Jake didn’t know… the last time he’d seen Scan, the boy was even madder at being left stranded in Oldham in suburban homo hell than he had been over the Domino episode.
‘I won’t tell Louise about you, you don’t tell Sean about me.’
‘Oooh, it’s like that. Don’t worry, if I find Sean, I won’t be talking about you.’
Jake hustled himself a little room at the mirror and started back-combing his hair, holding it up with toxic sheets of extra-firm-hold spray. He darkened his eyebrows with a kohl pencil and whitened his face with a pale foundation. After a last swift side-step into a cubicle for a drink and a snort, Jake came swaggering out of the toilets, just another gothic wreck.
There were five dance-floors in Pips, each with a different theme and not all of them dedicated to gothics, romantics, queer boys, glamour pusses, starlets, cross-dressers, or whatever Jake’s group looked like that week. In descending order, there was the Roxy Room, the Bowie Room, the Electro Room, the Perry Room and, finally, Floor Five – the only one without a name and without its own regulars. As Jake came out of the toilet, the DJ there was experimenting with a glam rock sound, playing ‘Ballroom Blitz’ by the Sweet but no one was dancing to it. Jake passed by.
He met Domino on the stairs to the Perry Room. The first thing Domino asked was whether he’d seen Sean.
Jake twitched annoyance. ‘Everyone’s asking. I haven’t seen him.’
Domino said, ‘No, I meant have you seen him. He’s up there.’ A hand pointing upwards. ‘He’s turned into a Perry; got the Lacoste sweater, the jumbo cords, everything.’
Jake scooted up the steps, Domino turning to follow. ‘You see him?’
Jake shook his head.
‘Over there by the pillar.’
Jake squinted against the lights. The room was already full and nearly everyone wearing cord jeans, Pepe or Lee, in either burgundy or tan. The look was finished off with matching golf sweaters and Italian loafers. Everyone looked so utterly similar, it took a while before he picked out Sean. Then he saw him, stepping around to the Gap Band in the weird Perry dance… a kind of forward/backward strut.
‘Jesus Christ! Where’d he get those clothes?’
Domino shrugged, ‘You seen his chain?’
Jake had seen it. A gold chain that flickered around the crew neck of his sweater.
Domino said, ‘Any second, he’s going to turn around. I’m off.’
&nbs
p; As he disappeared back down the steps, Sean did turn, sweeping his long Perry fringe out of his eyes as he glanced over. Jake waved him over, too curious about the transformation to worry about how much Sean hated him today.
As Sean stepped off the dance-floor, Jake said, ‘What’s happened to you?’
‘Nothing. I just got fed up with the music down there.’ He jerked his head off to the side, over towards the Bowie and Roxy Rooms.
‘What’s with the clothes?’
‘And I got fed up with looking like a queer boy.’
‘You are a queer boy.’
Sean swept his huge fringe back again. His hair was fresh cut and the soft curtain of his Perry flick covered half his face; the back was trimmed to a neat comma at the nape of neck. He said, ‘You’re queer. I’m gay.’
Jake looked out on the Perry boys and girls, all in boyish cords, a few still wearing the Fred Perry shirts that were fashionable earlier in the year but most in Lacoste or Tacchini sweaters. ‘You think they’re going to be impressed by the difference.’
Sean grinned, ‘I’m doing okay. And at least they’ve got better taste in music.’
An Earth, Wind and Fire track was starting. Before Sean danced away he said, ‘I’m moving out, too. I’ve got a place in Flixton.’
It figured, him and his brand-new flick in Flixton. Sean lifted his hand, palm up, and snapped the fingers smartly down in the Perry-boy wave, ‘See yah.’
Jake waved back, ‘Yeah, see you mate.’
He dropped down the shallow steps into the Electro Room where they were playing ‘The Model’ by Kraftwerk. The Bowie Room was through the next archway and, as Jake entered, he saw Fairy by the bar, wearing silk pyjamas with an embroidery of a Chinese dragon on the back. Fairy had worn the outfit once before. Jake had said then that it was ludicrous, but Fairy claimed there was some special Bowie significance to it. Jake couldn’t imagine what, he’d never seen Bowie wear anything remotely like it.
Manchester Slingback Page 12
