by Helen Walsh
Twelve
Vinnie steps off the bus, his heart booming. The sharp night air strips the lining from his lungs and squeezes like a fist round his trachea. He bangs hard on his inhaler, holds the magic gas down and pulls his raincoat tight round his shoulders. It’s numbingly cold. With blunt fingertips he rolls a cigarette and licks his lips at what lies ahead, all the pain and ugliness of earlier fading to nothing.
He’s early for Kenny – he couldn’t risk the later bus, tonight of all nights – so he stands back in the shadows of the city and watches the flickering sideshow come to life. He pulls up his collar and waits for the start of the biggest night of his life.
He watches a nervous young gay couple pick their way past a crew of football lads. Lads like these are as likely to hug them as headbutt them these days, but the weekend queers walk head down, a foot of space between them. Vinnie follows. They peel off down Sackville Street, cutting across the shank of wasteland littered with the tools of the trade: spent rubbers, empty wraps of speed and flyers for gay all-nighters. As the couple cross the humpback bridge, the space between them shrinks to nothing. All sense of guilt and fear is leached from their bodies as they hold hands and kick on. Vinnie perches his arse on the low wall, smiling as they go. A peroxide hooker takes him for a tramp. She opens up her palm and casts her loose change into his lap. ‘Ey-are, love. Get yoh-self a cuppoh, yeah?’
He grins to himself, reaches for his pouch. A brutal wind gets right under the loose folds of his raincoat. He rolls one, taps a little roach in, sparks up, plugs in his earphones and walks to the soundtrack of the Cure. Almost on autopilot, he finds himself drifting towards the red-light peripheries of the tenderloin. Wraiths dart and flit across the horizon like bats. Two of them stop and stare. They think he’s a John at first, then competition – new meat. He peels away from them and loops right round beyond Piccadilly Station, cutting along the black, unloved backstreets and onto Great Ancoats Street, then back towards the bus station. He spies a boy hunched over a cellophane cup in the window seat of the café. Thin and gaunt and pale as a ghost, Vinnie thinks it’s his boy at first, sitting out the cold until business picks up. He feels the usual jangle of fearful excitement, but he’s fine for honey. Enough for him and Kenny both.
Vinnie spots him straight away, stood outside the bar. He’s leaning back, tight arse against the window, effortlessly rough and sexy. He’s wearing a battered leather jacket, zipped right up. Vinnie stands back in the shadows and takes it all in. Even the way he shifts his weight from one foot to the other is gracefully muscular and sexual. Vinnie watches him and a slow tingling elation seeps through him as it comes to him that this boy is his.
Vinnie crosses the road. Kenny’s head is bent to his papers and tobacco and he doesn’t see Vinnie until he’s right in his face. He grins hugely and Vinnie melts into the pavement. But then, just as quickly, he feels that sudden stab of panic, penetrating then withdrawing. The thought that Kenny might not feel the same is too much to bear.
Kenny sparks his roll-up, and pushing the big swing door of the bar open with his back, bows him in. Vinnie doesn’t like it here. It may well be part of the Factory family but the loud and brutish clientele and the calculated minimalism of the decor make him uneasy. It isn’t how Vinnie imagined his first date. The place is all harsh lighting, low-slung leather couches and crome-finish bar stools. The entire length of the bar is studded with mean-looking black guys and their brassy white fuck-bits. Kenny’s quite at home, though. He shrugs off his leather and folds it up between his feet. Vinnie keeps his raincoat on, a tacit gesture of his disapproval. He cuts a peculiar figure with his wire-thin frame and fierce sloping fringe, but the homeboys are unfazed. The Dry Bar regulars have seen hundreds of Vinnie Fitzgeralds pass through – androgynous waifs and Curtis devotees clad in the lugubrious apparel of the poet-depressive.
It gets worse. The boy serving Kenny is beautiful, sickeningly so. He has eyes the colour of ripe limes and a neat bob of vinyl black hair. Vinnie is utterly unprepared for the jealousy gushing up from the pit of his bowels. It rocks him sideways. He barely has time to steady himself on the bar rail before Kenny turns round and fixes his eyes on him. ‘Vinnie. This is Rudy. Rudy, Vinnie.’
Rudy? How many white boys from Chorlton-cum-Hardy are called Rudy, for fuck’s sake? Phoney! Rudy unleashes a devastating drop-dead smile on him. Vinnie’s groin is already throbbing to the challenge. He nods, once, sparking up and giving nothing away.
‘Rudy’s studying philosophy at Manchester Poly…’
Kenny says this as though it’s the most romantic thing he’s ever heard, as though Rudy were the only beautiful boy in the world and philosophy the rare discipline of a privileged elite. Rudy rolls his eyes. ‘Uni, if you don’t mind, thank you. There is a difference!’
He unleashes the devastating smile again. He’s talking to Kenny, but he’s addressing Vinnie. There’s a warring sensation: he’s attracted to him, but he doesn’t like him. He can’t resist his charm, but he feels manipulated. And his whole act is such an act. For a moment, Vinnie is tempted to challenge him, see how much he really knows about philosophy, but as though sensing him sharpening his talons, Kenny puts a hand on his arm and diverts him. ‘How’s about you let Rene roll you a smoke?’
Rudy’s on it in a flash. He turns to Kenny. ‘Rene! Is that your handle? That’s sooo romantic!’ Vinnie is on the verge of walking out and heading off to his multi-storey car park, solo. There’s enough horse here to smack himself into oblivion. Rudy checks over his shoulder, ducks away and comes back with two cans shaped like missiles. ‘On me.’ He winks. He stands back and looks at them, smiling like a curator admiring two new paintings. ‘Rene. It’s so cool that you guys love that book.’
Vinnie’s dying to ask. He knows he can’t. He takes a hit on the Sapporo. For all its over-the-top styling, the flinty cold beer is delicious. Kenny catches Vinnie staring at him, narrows his eyes and winks at him over the rim of the can. Vinnie smiles back, nervous, unsure. He wants to slow things down, hold the moment in abeyance. Did Kenny really just wink at him? It’s always the same. He can never work out if he’s misreading the signals, or if Kenny’s misfiring. It’d be folly to try to push things on. If it’s going to happen between them, then that’s how it will be. It’ll just happen. But what if Kenny is as terrified as he is? Just say he’s playing possum, lying back in the shadows, waiting for some kind of sign from him? What if the moment passes them by? Carpe diem. He should make the move, seize the moment before it all moves on out of reach. But he can’t. He runs it over and over in his mind, and he just can’t picture how he’ll ask him. He finds himself drifting back to safer seas. ‘So, Kenny. Or should that be Rene?’
Kenny leans in to him. The contact sends Vinnie’s cock pulsing. ‘Thought you’d like that.’ He pokes a match into the eye of his rollie and tamps down the tobacco.
‘Yep. Love it.’
‘I knew you’d get it.’
Vinnie slaps his head and concedes defeat. He laughs. ‘Look. You’ve got me. I don’t get it …’
‘What don’t you get?’ He’s toying with him. Their faces are scintillatingly close.
‘Rene.’
Kenny jerks his head back. He’s wearing a mock-confused expression, as though he thinks Vinnie must be joking. Vinnie shrugs. He’s not joking.
‘Rene? The Thief’s Journal?’
‘Nope. Read it like, yonks ago … but Rene?’
Kenny’s disappointment is evident. ‘Rene’s the jailbird.’ He pauses, scorching Vinnie with his gaze. ‘The homosexual jailbird.’
The two lads stare at one another. It’s Vinnie who looks away first. Kenny jumps up, awkward.
‘I’ll get two more.’
Thirteen
Robbie pulls up outside the Irish Club. He sits there, staring at its bleak exterior. What had he expected of his journey back, today? He can’t even say the word. Home. He shuts his eyes and tries to think well of himself, but he can’t stan
d it. He can’t abide what he is, what he’s done, what he’s become. How had things come to such a pass? What did he want? He shudders again, and in asking the question of himself, starts to understand the answer. He’s a father, for fuck’s sake. He’d been a husband too, and a bad one at that – but he was still a father. The question ought to be what did they want, his kids – and what was he still able to do for them? And that, he truly couldn’t answer.
He groans inwardly, gets out of the car, locks it, and braces himself. He’s been preparing himself for the inevitable here too; that, like almost every other pub this side of Orford, the Irish Club would have surrendered to the times. It’ll be just like the cheapo Doubles Bar in Blackpool, all the granddads zonked on Bells and tablets – or it’ll have gone under, closed down. But then he sees the name on the fascia, gleaming down from above the wind-battered doors – Helen O’Connor – and he tingles with a slender but wondrous hope. Maybe something lies within here after all. Maybe his beloved club will be just as he left it, just as it was. He takes down a deep gulp of breath and pushes through the doors, steeling himself.
Robbie stops and stares and drinks up the smell. Stew and malt and slough from the factories and the dead sweat of nicotine dripping from the ceiling – an elegiac, homely and ancient funk. It’s almost too much for him; one of those rare moments where the world unravels and reveals its stark simple truth and everything is lucid and fathomable. This is him. This is who he is.
It’s Helen who breaks the spell, slowly spins him back down to the tiled bar-room floor as she raises her brow and mock-eyes her watch. ‘Me mam’s still waiting on them fiddle players, Fitz.’
He grins, restrains the mad giddy urge to leapfrog the bar, pick her up and spin her round and round. She’s already pulling him a Guinness.
‘So you made it big time in Blackpool, you!’
She plants the Guinness on the bar – dark and soupy and swirling and perfect. Robbie stands back and watches, lets it settle to stone. She stands back from the bar, folds her freckled arms like a frame around her bust.
‘Still as modest as ever then?’ she laughs. ‘It’s OK. You don’t have to say a thing. Me mate Megan used to have a B&B just by the tower – said your name was all over the place, lit up in big yellow neon.’
Another pint down, he might have told her the truth – that for a while, an oh-so-fleeting while, Robbie Fitzgerald was King of the Prom. Had he fetched up there a decade earlier then he might not be living in a rented bedsit, soaking away his withered dreams in the dregs of Blackpool’s once-thriving live scene. But by the time Robbie arrived, not even the cabaret capital of the North was robust enough to resist the crush and swell of the stag dos that flocked there each weekend, demanding chart music, glitter balls and rave nights. He caught the last spume of a wave when the Palace took him on, and he rode it while he could. But all over Blackpool, stages were being pulled down to create more strobe-lit space for pissed-up head-the-balls to flail around in, and Robbie was too tired to fight for his throne.
He quit his Friday night residency at the Palace – sacked them before they sacked him – and settled for a little club off the South Pier, too far a stagger from the main drag to pull in anyone but the happy-hour pissheads and the brassy hens who shared his stale bed. Here was the truth, though – Robbie Fitzgerald was an Elvis impersonator. He was barely forty and already his best was behind him. But it was OK. He was making a living from the love of his life, dancing to his own tune. And the whiff of the Irish Sea air knifing through his bedroom window each morning was worth all the crumminess, just for that salty blast of freedom.
‘You still at the Palace?’
Robbie nods. His job is to give them what they want, and this is what Helen wants to hear. He’s ready to tell her more – the queues outside, the tearful fans, transported to the heartbreak hotel by the splintered beauty of his voice, the offers of gigs far and wide. He’s ready to tell Helen that, for a while, he made it. He got there, in the end. He’s going to tell her all about the sweet-sour smell of success, but a throng of dejected Wires fans spill in and that’s that. Helen is waylaid to the other end of the bar.
Robbie slinks through to the snug, takes his favourite fireside pew, the dust-mottled light calming his troubled soul. He rolls himself a smoke, pausing to sip on his Guinness and toast the belching smoke stacks, blasting their filth all over a mellow March sun. Only now does the sting of who he once was, what he had and what he lost, finally begin to soften and, with that, he’s able to reflect upon the searing pain of today.
In their innocence, their unity, their cheerful functionality, the grief his former family brought him is deeper, more caustic than ever before. The moment he’d peeled left onto Thelwall Lane and the matchstick figure of his little girl faded back to nothing in his rear-view mirror, Robbie pulled over and battled for breath. Great, reverberating tides of sorrow engulfed him. Vincent’s cool resentment – he’d done so well to keep it back, keep it down, but Robbie felt it with every carefully chosen reply, each courteous parry. He was a man now, Vincent, and already more of a man than Robbie could ever be. He had choices. He was in control of his own destiny.
And Ellie. The sheer, unbidden beauty of his gap-toothed kid; still in braces yet already a heart-stopping young woman. Every time he said goodbye, he died a little. Sheila though – she was so cold now, so careful; putting her best foot forward for the kids but clearly immune to the man she’d once loved. She’d rid herself of him. It was there in the way she bid him farewell as he left the house. She’d looked at him, just for a second, in the eye, clamped her lips tight together and, with a subtle nod of her head, she let him go. That was it, over. She’d cut him loose.
He sips his pint and watches the fire dance down to embers. He can’t move himself to throw more coal on. Outside, street lights flicker to life as the earth spins away from the sun. Robbie sips his Guinness and with each mouthful, he lets the truth in, too – lets it burn deep through the buffer of the drink. Sheila and Robbie. Him and her.
‘You and me. We should do it, you know.’
The cinnamon girl in an all-white estate. He should never have let it get so far. Susheela. His first love. His last.
Fourteen
Vinnie starts to sink. All that blind, purple hope of this last week bleeding into Manchester’s rank gutters. He’s sure he’s got this right – Kenny came on to him; he didn’t bite and now he’s gone the other way. His beautiful boy has taken his ball back in, and he doubts he’ll ask him to play again. So immersed in these thoughts is Vinnie that it takes him a while to clock that Kenny is no longer by his side. He spins round, panicked, and sees him standing by the canal, the wind rippling his reflection across its moon-drenched surface. He looks agonisingly beautiful. Vinnie walks towards him, and thinks that this time he’ll just put his arms around him and kiss him. But Kenny steps forward to meet him, eyes troubled. ‘Vinnie, I don’t wanna go home just yet.’ He says it like a child who’s accustomed to being told no.
Vinnie hunches himself up against the cold, trying to stop his teeth from chattering. ‘OK? Where d’you wanna go? You say.’ Vinnie can’t keep those last embers of hope out of his voice.
Kenny searches his face with a long, questioning look. He’s struggling to put it into words. ‘Cake and ale, Vin.’
‘Yeah. I got the pun.’
‘But did you, like?’
The two of them are facing each other, inches apart, their breath gusting like dry ice in the cold night air.
‘I dunno. You tell me.’
‘That’s what we used to call ’em inside. Cake.’
Now he sees. Now he’s starting to get it.
Kenny drops his gaze to the floor as though the shame is too much to bear. Just as quickly he’s back though, pleading at Vinnie with his eyes. ‘I want to go where you go.’ He doesn’t blink. ‘I know where you go.’ Vinnie gulps hard. Kenny turns away, but continues. ‘That night, yeah? The other week when I met your pals? I foll
owed you.’
He’s facing the other way, looking out over the canal. Vinnie thinks back to the night, cutting through Queer Street, the strange sensation prickling his neck. So he wasn’t imagining it.
‘I know where you went, Vinnie. I want you to take me. Take me with you.’
He’s crushed that Kenny might not want his love. Yet he will settle for an affair of a different sort. There’s no one he would rather shoot honey with than Kenny.
They climb the stairway in silence. The tang of urine and vomit hangs heavy in the air. They reach the top floor. Kenny’s face is clotted with fear and confusion. ‘They don’t do it here, do they?’
‘Where else can they do it? It’s hardly a spectator sport, is it?’ Vinnie laughs and pushes open the door. Kenny follows him out onto the frozen rooftop, huddled up against the wind.
‘Dorian Grey. Where the fuck are you taking me?’
Vinnie grins. ‘Thought you said you followed me.’
‘I didn’t come this far. Where’s everyone else?’
Vinnie isn’t listening. He steps over to the edge. ‘Come and see this sky. Fuck, but that’s beautiful.’ He tilts his head right back until he’s almost toppling over, staring out at the paintbrush spray of tiny, scintillating stars. ‘You can see the edge of the world from here,’ Vinnie says. He points to the distant skyline where the lights and urban commotion suddenly fall away, swallowed up by a black slap of nothingness. They stay there, still, staring at the trembling energy of the city, their shoulders barely touching.
‘If we stay out long enough, we might see Pluto.’
Vinnie squats down on the floor, starts to pull gear from his raincoat’s pockets. Kenny’s mouth drops wide open. ‘Jeez! Vinnie! Fuck’s sake, man. What’s all this?’
