Boy A

by Jonathan Trigell

  ‘What business, shipbuilding?’ Chris says. ‘She looks like she could carry a steel joist under each arm.’

  Jack laughs out loud, and then again silently, when he hears Chris describe himself as ‘in logistics’, to answer the wax-jacketed girl he has his arm around.

  But the humour is short-lived. Jack is suddenly struck with the sickness of his situation. Laughing at Chris for bending the truth in the hope of a pull, when Shell, the woman that he loves, knows nothing about him that’s true. Not even a name. It all comes down to nothing.

  The good mood vanishes. Jack tells Shell he thinks they should go home.

  ‘See you tomorrow, Bruiser.’ Chris winks.

  ‘Yeah, see you,’ Jack says. He waves goodbye to Steve the mechanic and Jed, and the two girls whose partially deflated armchairs they are carrying.

  Jack says he’s too tired to make love, when they get back to Shell’s. It’s the first time they haven’t had sex when they’ve been together since that first time. Shell’s brown-sugar eyes look hurt. Jack puts his arms around her and tells her that he loves her. He’s never said it before, except when he was on ecstasy, centuries ago. He means it too. He means it with a sadness that could swallow him if he let it.

  Jack’s restlessness contradicts his claim of exhaustion, but that is the least of the untruths that bother him. He can’t get comfortable on the mattress. He feels like he’s lying on his lies. They niggle at his skin like fleas, trap nerves in his spine, infest his mind. When eventually he does fall asleep it is shallow and disturbed. Full of bitter dreams that are almost thoughts, they are so clear. Thoughts about her. About Angela Milton. He wakes in the morning more weary than he went to bed.

  They’re running late. Shell seems pissed off. He doesn’t know if it’s because they’re stuck in rush-hour traffic, or because he didn’t have time to clean his boots; they’re dropping great lumps of dried mud on the Clio’s carpet. He’s trying not to move his feet, but Shell’s jerking the car around, in anger or a futile attempt to make up ground. They don’t speak when they get out. She kisses him, quite coldly, on the cheek, and tears off up to the office. Jack is left to trudge into the yard, leaving parts of a fireworks field in his wake.

  It’s another drab day at work. They pass a series of cardboard signs, tied to trees and lamp-posts, advising the world that Simon is twenty-one. Chris asks Jack what he did for his twenty-first, and Jack replies with a seemingly blithe trickle of lies, that turn out to pool around his feet for the rest of the journey.

  On the way back to base, Jack finds his stories are smeared across the windscreen with the fumes and the flies. They spoil everything he looks at. Even tainting his view of the moon-blue motorway markers, which point to ‘The North’, as if it were a destination in itself, as if it were attainable. And suddenly he realizes that this can’t go on. Maybe with Chris it can, at least for the moment. But not with Shell. If he loves her he has to tell her. Or what does love mean? And though he feels sick with the knowledge of what he has to do, for maybe the first time in his life he actually feels in control of the future.

  He strides into the office, barely noticing a look of disdain from Dave, who asks what he wants. He just wants to see her. Of course he won’t tell her now, but she’ll know something has changed. One glance at his face will show Shell his resolve. He’ll ask to come round tonight. He’ll bring some wine. No, not wine, she has to see that he’s telling her only because he loves her and trusts her so completely. And then they’ll talk until the morning, in a way that he’s never talked to anyone. He’s going to be completely open with her, and she’ll understand him, because this was meant to be; maybe this moment is the culmination of it all. Everything happens for a reason, that’s what Terry says.

  Dave says: ‘She’s ill. She’s gone home.’ His lip curls up as he touches the bulbous sticking plaster on his neck. ‘Now get out, and don’t come in here with your dirty boots on again. I’m not running a bloody escort agency.’

  Jack has a strange sense of relief that Shell is ill. He won’t tell her until she’s better, so that will give him maybe a couple of days to try and find the perfect words. How do you broach something like this? There is no thing like this. If Shell’s sick then that also explains why she seemed pissed off with him this morning. He whistles back to the van, and asks Chris if he minds dropping him off at her place.

  Jack wonders whether he should have bought some flowers or something as Chris pulls away. Too late.

  She’s not answering the door. He rings the bell again. He can hear its shrill echo in the still inside. There’s no sign of movement through the long linen-draped windows. He can see that the table where she places her bag and the hook where she hangs her keys are both empty. She must be at her mum’s or something, which makes for a long walk home. Still, he’s got plenty of thinking to do. He looks up at the sky. It looks like the rain should hold out for a while yet. And maybe a good march will knock the last of the muck from his shoes.

  S is for Sand.

  Sand Castles.

  It gets everywhere, the sand. In your shoes, in your food, in your bed, in your ears. Sometimes it feels to him like it migrates inside his head through his ears. He’ll poke a finger in and find the grains sliding further, grating as they go. How do they get out of there? They must go on to your brain. Glass is made out of sand, that’s how sharp it is. It gets to you after a while. It’s good to be out of Kuwait, he thinks, even if it’s only for a holiday. It’s good to get away from the sand.

  It’s still bloody hot though, worse really, with the humidity, and at least he’s got aircon in Kuwait. He leans back to feel the pillow against his neck, and watches the slowly mesmerizing ceiling fan thudding in its lazy circles. Tiredness overtakes him and he eases into sleep.

  He can feel the darkness when he wakes. It’s night-time. Good, that’s why he came. He showers in the white tiled bathroom, soaping the paunch that’s been growing through his forties. It’s still not as bad as some. He dresses in slacks and a plain short-sleeved shirt; smart but not over the top. It’s best not to look too wealthy. Not that he is, but the US dollars they get paid in Kuwait go a long way in Bangkok baht.

  ‘Tuk-tuk, Patpong,’ he says to the receptionist, using most of his Thai vocabulary, and emphasizing with an imaginary driving action.

  The man nods, says something to the boy that habitually sits in the corner and may or may not be his son. The boy gets up and runs to the end of the street, to hail one of the three-wheeled jalopies.

  He remembers when his own son was that age, not long before it all went wrong. Went more wrong, anyway. Wrong, wronger, wrongest. Adulthood was supposed to be a reward, wasn’t it, for people who’d had shitty childhoods? He supposed that had gone wrong for his son too. How could it not, after all that time in prison? You can’t lie in a bin without getting litter in your pockets.

  The tuk-tuk arrives at the hotel-guest-house, and struggles to turn around in the narrow lane. There are corrugated iron fences on either side of it. Not the most salubrious street in the city. He doesn’t know why he came back here really, just that it was where he’d stayed once before. He supposes it’s good enough: cheap and convenient. Basically clean or cleanly basic, depending on how you looked at it. At least you knew what you were getting, that’s what he always thought.

  The roads are full and fumy, even though it’s after ten o’clock. The tuk-tuk, painted a New York taxi-yellow, weaves through gaps that don’t look big enough for a bicycle. Its driver blots out the sound of the horns that blare at him by blowing his own almost continuously. Unnecessarily. It isn’t like they’re going far, and this passenger’s not in any sort of a hurry. He’s got all night.

  Pasty crowds mill around at the bottom of Patpong road, arguing with the stall-holders over pence or pfennigs or francs, for labels that they know are fakes and hill-tribe artefacts that they don’t. He works through them, sticking to the edges of the street, where bar doors beckon. Not just the doors, young T
hai touts stand outside, trying to draw him in.

  Beautiful girls, only beautiful girls. College girls. Clean girls. Special show. Special room. Special price. Thai massage, you try. Hey, English guy. You English guy?

  How do they know? he thinks. Dressed like a continental, with a tan like this, how do they know I’m a Brit? ‘Later, later,’ he proffers. He knows where he’s going, further up the street. Take a right and the drinks suddenly drop in price. He’s not just here to gawk at girls.

  The bar’s just like he remembers it. The tout outside shook his hand when he came in. Not through recognition, more in gratitude at such an easy customer, he supposes. He orders a six oz bottle of Mekong whisky, and a coke. This is what it’s all about. Half the price of just down the road; and they’re paying him to take it compared to the shady ex-pat drinking spots in Islamic bloody Kuwait. The bar surface is some sort of plastic, but dirt and dim lights have conspired to make it look more like wood than the manufacturers could ever have hoped for. The stools have seen better days too, battered bamboo legs and seats sunken with the strain of supporting a decade of bloated arseholes. He laughs to himself. At least he knows he’s an arsehole. He knows the girls don’t fancy him, and they aren’t even interested in him. He’ll pay for their company with every drink in these bars, and he’ll pay again when he has sex. They are prostitutes. It’s not just how they do it out here, an argument he’s heard time and again from punters who believe themselves to be culturally sensitive. They are prostitutes and he is an arsehole, and he’s not even doing the girls a favour, as some might tell themselves. Except maybe that they’d be doing it anyway, so a night with a man whose demands are not extreme, who tries to be gentle and kind, might be preferable to what they often get.

  The girls are dancing on a two-foot dais. Draping themselves around chrome poles, or tilting their hips, stroking the skin nearest their cheap swimsuits. Only the oldest ones look like they really want it, probably desperate to be kept on by the bar another couple of years. The youngest girls look nervous, but it’s to them his eyes keep returning, it’s for them that he keeps returning. Just to feel young again, one more time.

  He wonders whether his boy’s lost his virginity yet. He’s been out a few months now. Ugly little fuck would probably have to go to a whore as well, he thinks. And then he hates himself for thinking it. Takes a big slug of the Mekong without adding the coke. Feels the burn in his throat like it’s a punishment. Though he knows it’s not. The spreading warmth tells him it’s not. The boy didn’t look so ugly in the photo he sent anyway. His own dad hardly recognized him. Probably wouldn’t have without the letter. The photo and the letter have a shelf in his wardrobe back in Kuwait; a secret little shrine they share with some baby snaps, and two stubs from a cowboy film they once saw. He stacks shoeboxes in front of the shrine. Keeps it in the family. Away from the eyes of friends, who are round so rarely he sometimes considers whether it’s worth the rigmarole of them coming at all.

  There’s a game of Connect Four on the bar top; most of them have them. A little ruse to spare the girls from having to make conversation with men who probably wouldn’t have to come to Thailand for sex if they had anything much worth saying. He swings the trapdoor, so that the much-thumbed plastic counters clatter into their tray, like a junior fruit machine. A bored barman asks with eyes if he wants a game. He shakes his head and goes back to watching the girls, just an urge he had, just an urge.

  There aren’t that many punters in. All falang – foreigners, western men. Mostly groups of two or three, some alone like him. None alone quite like him.

  It’s hard to have a son, but not to know or ever see him. Harder because when he had a son, he only half believed he did. Always looking for traces that would tell him it was really his. Or looking for another face in Stonelee that matched the quisling in the cot. He’d been working on the oil rigs when she fell pregnant. They’d had a weekend together, made love once; it wasn’t impossible, just hadn’t seemed likely. All the riggers knew they were vulnerable; they joked about it. Then every so often someone would get a letter or a phone call, and they wouldn’t laugh any more.

  ‘Nature abhors a vacuum,’ she used to say.

  And he knew she was right, knew she should know. The nature of women abhors most of all. There’s more spaces in women than men, more places that need filling. Not just the obvious ones; it’s in their heads and their hearts. If you don’t fill them, someone else will. Money’s not enough; if you’re not offering something for those spaces, whatever else you do is worthless. That’s what the guys in the bar don’t realize. The gaps are not just in the Connect Four game.

  First time he had sex, it was with a whore. It was different in those days, everyone did it. Up in Newcastle with the boys, first jobs, almost their first pay-packets. All of them saying they weren’t virgins, all of them suspecting they all were. He mistook her professionalism for genuine interest, believed her when she said how handsome he was, when she said how she longed to feel his young body between her legs, after all the old, fat factory workers. He had tried to make her feel pleasure, excited by the moans his clumsy fingers extracted. The soft murmurs when his lips brushed upon nipples for the first time in sixteen years. He was lifted when he didn’t come, like he’d feared, in the moments after she effortlessly fed him inside. Proud when his calculated thrustings seemed to bring her to the very edge of the drop that he neared himself. He watched with growing joy the thrashing of her bottle-blond hair on the sweat-stained pillow. But, as the joy juddered through him, he caught her eye, and in that intimate instant he saw her relief that he was finished. She clung to him and groaned, grinding herself upwards against his body, but it was too late, he’d seen. He never went with a whore again. Well, not until he started coming to Thailand.

  It is these instants which change your view of the world; little moments when you can see into someone else. A few times, when he’s been drinking, he’s had those instants with himself. Drunkenly remembered half truths, or half-remembered truths, that seem to alter everything. Would it have all been different if he hadn’t been a rigger? If he’d known the boy was his from the start? Would it have made him want to play football with his son like other dads? Would that have made his son like football? Would football have made him friends? Would friends have stood up for him, stopped him being bullied, stopped him making friends with that other boy?

  Once, he asked, would it be better if his son was the murdered one?

  Time for the show. The dancers get down and make their way out of the room. Into the little suites out back. He’s been in one of them before. ‘Suites for my sweet, sugar for my honey, your perfect kiss thrills me so.’ That had been their song. Later. There’s plenty of time for melancholy. Get a drink in first, before the show starts. He asks the barman for another bottle of Mekong. He’s hardly dented the coke.

  One of the older girls returns to the stage. She’s long since a woman actually, beneath the make-up. She doesn’t have any knickers on now, just a yellow bikini top, and her bush is shaved into one finger-thick line. She lowers herself on to a bottle of coke that sits on the stage, and drains the dark syrup inside her. A gravity-defying act of suction. Depravity-defining. How low can you go?

  He’s seen lower. Down in Phuket, in the South; middle-aged Americans, Dutch, Brits, Swedes, South Africans, men who have more in common with each other than anyone from their home countries. Their arms openly wrapped around eight-year-old boys. Not their sons. Though some do try and adopt. Some are no worse than the real parents perhaps. Here in Bangkok they buy boys and girls from the countryside. Set them up in one-room concrete cells; mattress and a sink, and a string of visitors each day. Paying off the pimp for what he paid out to their parents. Premium prices for the under-twelves and the uninfected. He’s not one of the ignorant tourists. He knows what goes on. Understands, in many ways, these girls in the bars are the lucky ones. But he knows he’s still an arsehole.

  She’s walking around now, holding
the bottle, showing its emptiness, like a sandy-skinned, glassy-eyed Debbie McGee. She squats again, and the receptacle fills up. Not a drop runs over the side on to the painted stage. Holding the bottle aloft, itself modelled after a lady they say, she strolls to the end of the dais, as if promenading on a pier.

  Hartlepool pier. The two of them, side by side in the rain. Her wearing his coat. Both with sand in their hair. He had something to ask her. She kissed him yes.

  The audience is clapping. Three fat Aussies cheer. He takes another drink of his whisky. Suddenly the coke is less enticing. A waiter lifts his arm up to the stage, to help the woman down. As if, though knickerless, she is still so much of a lady that she can’t drop two feet on her own. Or maybe it’s just because the punishing heels she wears would twist her ankles, make her worthless. ‘Hobbling’, that’s what they used to do to slaves that tried to escape: break their ankles, and set them crooked, so they could never run again. The girls can’t run anyway. Not just because of their shoes. To escape you need somewhere to run to.

  His boy was always running. He never realized till the trial that his son had hardly been to school in months. Why couldn’t he have asked for help from his father? A father should have known, that’s why. A father should have known. But he wasn’t even sure he was the father. Kept that bitterness locked inside him all those years, like a parasite in his entrails, feeding off shit.

  He remembers the day he realized. Looking into his son’s eyes, he saw an instant of his own dad, and it was obvious, indisputable, the boy was his. Stumbling over words that didn’t fit, shuffling best shoes in wet grass, he knew this was his son, his flesh and blood, and it was all too late. Too late to tell her he was wrong, to apologize for suspecting her of a thing she’d never even known he suspected. And too late to hold his son and tell him that he loved him. Really tell him. Tell him so he knew it was meant. The space between them was only a pace, but it was too far. Too much had gone before. He wanted to turn time upside down, to force back what had trickled through, to give his boy an empty chamber in which he could begin again. But he didn’t know how to do any of those things. Instead he shook his hand. Watched him climb into a hearse with someone else. And ran.