Please

by Peter Wild

  ‘Sorrel…’

  ‘Go to sleep, Leo. I’ve got yoga in the morning and you have to collect the girls.’

  There Is a Light that Never Goes Out

  Helen Walsh

  The year was 1991. I was bunking school, killing time in one of the greasy spoons up near Piccadilly Station. A mob of young scals with baby fringes and glue-sniffing complexions pour in. Behind them, but clearly with them, is this waif in a Smiths T-shirt. He’s thirteenish and he’s unbearably pretty and he stands out against the other urchins in their shell suits and LA Fox trainers. I’m besotted, I can’t stop staring at him but only when he speaks do I realise it’s a girl. I think about her non-stop and I return to the café the same time each week in the hope that she might be there. About six months later I see her down on the canal with some of the urchins. She’s wearing the same T-shirt, the same ragged cardigan. I’m with my boyfriend at the time and he tells me that that’s where the rent boys hang. I’m fourteen years old and at this stage in my life I’m bang into acid house and ecstasy and up until now The Smiths’ clever conceits and gorgeous melodies are lost on me. Over that winter I buy all their albums and I fall headlong in love with them. I never see the girl on the canal again but ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’ will always remind me of her.

  Manchester, late November, 1989

  Mac is waiting in our usual spot down by the canal. He looks different, tired perhaps, his face heavier set and wizened against the gangrene haze of the underpass. I check my watch. Only half of its crap illuminous face flashes up. I’m early. I drop back in the shadows of the footbridge and wait.

  I’ve known him for nearly two and a half years, Mac. I’ve had sex with him over a hundred times and still I couldn’t tell you how old he is. Could easily be anything between forty and sixty. His face, his whole look, is timeless. He’ll be exactly the same when he’s seventy, no doubt: slim, full thatch of hair, same cathode-blue eyes, a hue so sharp you could nick yourself on them.

  He’s wearing a navy Duffer of St George’s parka, the toggles fastened right up to the throat; distressed denims and expensive training shoes. Forest Hills, I think. On anyone else it might look vulgar, ridiculous. But Mac? He just looks hip. Dangerous. And yet, in spite of the urban attire and the dead cool posturing-one foot cocked up against the wall and tugging on his joint like a fucking Hillbilly-he can’t help but radiate elegance. Effortlessly so. Mac hums of taste and style and the moneyed finesse of suburbia, and he cuts a queer figure among the soaks and scavengers dragged blinking and stumbling by the rising moon.

  This hundred-yard stretch of canal is a greasy netherworld of pimps and pushers and pariahs where the hamster wheel of sex and drugs is forever spinning. Even in the filthy scourge of January when the festive fever sweats itself dry and the dozen or so boys that work the Drive-In are slogging it out for a measly hand job with some whinnying foul-breathed suit, this little strip-or The Rack as its known to those who shop here-is always bustling. Always on heat.

  The Rack is the maze of backstreets that sits roughly between the Village and the Northern Quarter and is predominantly the haunt of Chicken. The predators who feast on us are getting younger and younger–my last john was barely eighteen–but then so is the Chicken. Rash, the new kid on the block, is nine and he’s by no means a novelty. I’m telling you, you ain’t worth fuck all this side of rentland if your voice has broken. The Rack is also where the cranked-up trannies tout their trade with their fat weeping lips and botched titties and, if you squint hard enough through the darkness to the other side of the canal, you’ll see Eugene, the bag-head amputee, stumping along on his crutches. The Rack is where the freaks show out. The Rack is where Mac came, all those years back, to find a freak like me.

  I’m surprised he’s showed, in all honesty. Since JT’s body was pulled from the canal last week, trade has been dead slow. Tentatively, it’s starting to pick up again, not that rentland feels any safer for it, mind. The sick fuck that battered JT, stuffed his anus with grit and sand and dumped him in the canal is still out there, roaming, stalking, possibly even slowing down right now on the other side of the carriageway, signalling with a double click of the beams for the young kid with the red Nike cap to get in. And I was half hoping Mac wouldn’t show, tell the truth. I’m a little tired myself, a little frayed round the edges. Heavy limbed. Skittering head. Coming down with some big mad lurgy. Man, you should’ve seen the grey furball I coughed up in the basin this morning. It was alive, I tell you! Prodded the hirsute bastard with the end of my toothbrush and it jumped up and socked me between the eyes. And it’s not like I really need the money. Since Richie blew himself up in his caravan crank kitchen out on the moors, I’ve been clear. I’ve been clear for five weeks now. Another five and I’ll be clear for good. I’m here out of force of habit. Comfort, company, you know, all the usual suspects. Tonight, though, I’m sick. Can only function. I need Mac to stick to the script.

  I come down on to the towpath. There’s a slight gladdening of the heart as I draw level with him. The fact that he’s here, waiting for me, is testimony to much more than his wretchedness. Mac needs me, and boy does that feel lovely. Like a big fuck-off shot of temazzies. A couple of Chicken are sniffing around him, draughting hard and deep on the stench of his money that hovers around him like a halo. They’re wary, though, even the cocky Hulme half-caste sashaying his hungry black arse up and down the path. He’s itching for a fix, eager to blow the old don and convert his sterling into hard white rock, but Mac’s regality, his dead fucking calm–even with the filth crawling all over here last week–hacks through his drug daze and he flounders comically. He freezes, his face a staccato burst of terror and panic. And you can almost see the light bulbs popping behind his crazy black bug eyes:

  Is it him? Is that the one that done JT?

  The whites of his eyes are bulging now, the bang bang bang of his heart fracturing the night calm. He backs off, nervous, fades into a sly shadow. And I don’t know if I’m imagining this, because everything’s been dream-blurred since I spewed the crank, but behind Mac’s stubble moustache I think I see the corner of his mouth twitch up into a smirk. He knows what the lad is thinking and he’s half buzzing off it, he is.

  Before I introduce you to Mac I’m going to freeze-frame us for a moment and tell you about JT, the lad in the canal. But don’t be doing any crazy arithmetic and drawing some half-cocked conclusion from this, yeah? It wasn’t Mac. Hasn’t got it in him. How do I know? Nearly a thousand nights on the street, that’s how. So just banish the idea. I want to tell you about JT because the boy deserves some kind of eulogy. The press never ran his story, no mention, nothing. Not even the gay press. Those Stone bitches that run Village News, they shunted his story to Obituaries. Obituaries, can you fucking believe? JT was kidnapped and tortured and disposed of in the most hideous way and his memory, his whole fucking life, has been silenced. Denied. He was rentboy trash and he was better off dead.

  JT

  Jay Trab 1974–1989

  Used to work the Drive-In at the NCP. So called because the punters drive in, eye up the meat, place their order with the flash of a beam then seek out a slot in the car park and wait for the goods to be dispensed to their door. The system works well enough. The boys feel safe and so do the johns. I remember the first time I saw him, JT, this skinny Smiths kid, taking his place against the wall with all the whey-faced seasoned regulars. He made me stop and look and stare and smile. He had that dizzying combination of big lips and eyes with that Bambi-caught-in-the-headlamps kind of look, the ones that always seem to be shining on the edge of tears. His freckles were cartoon symmetrical, and so perfectly spaced apart they looked as though they’d been drawn on with the blunt nipple of an eyeliner. The vulnerability, the soft, clipped accent and the coy dimple smile with which he wooed his punters was a front, of course. Beneath the angelic veneer was a gutsy street urchin. His bony little fist could sit you on your arse in one solid uppercut and he carried a Stanley in
the lip of his Beetlecrushers that he was not afraid to use. I loved the way his features deceived, the way they made cold, heartless bastards limp with desire. Surgeons, barristers, politicians–they all went to bits over JT, and not even the hard men that fetched up from Mosside and Salford were invulnerable to his rapt, sensual sadness. You could see their eyes warring and it made me laugh–could never quite make out whether they wanted to fuck him or father him. JT was turning nineteen, twenty tricks a night. He’d been pissed on, smeared in shit, fisted to an inch of his life, burnt, battered and knifed and he still managed to affect the same fresh-faced humility of the new kid on the block. He was a fucking legend and he worked harder than anyone I knew. Didn’t do crank or rocks or any of the other shite that got peddled his way. Always played safe, no matter how much they were offering. He was savvy, man. He was going back to college. He’d packed away a little nest egg and was looking to call time on it all. He was getting himself a bedsit in Rusholme, on the curry mile, he said, and he was going to dine out every fucking night. Still can’t believe he’s gone. The night he was taken, he was working the Drive-In with Rash, the nine-year-old stowaway he’d taken under his wing. It was just the two of them and it was past one. Late for the Drive-In–even by Saturday night standards where business usually grinds to a halt around midnight. Rash says this car pulls up and signals to JT. Doesn’t recall anything distinctive about it. Says it was big and expensive, the kind of car that all the big city bruisers own, the kind that pulls in here all the time. Another punter materialises, flashes for Rash to get in, and when he re-emerges there’s no sign of JT–or his john. So Rash waits for him. Waits and waits. Goes back to the Molly house, perches on his sill and waits some more. A blast of cold cleans the night air, shocks it to daybreak. Rash is still looking out from his little watchtower and JT still ain’t come home.

  He’s found two days later, washed up among the flotsam down by the locks, his dead, gutted body mummified in chip-shop wrappers, spent rubbers and junky paraphernalia. Not even a mention–one measly fucking sentence.

  Jay Trab. 1974–1989.

  Sleep easy, little angel.

  I forge down the steps and on to the towpath, wending my way through the evening snarl of wraiths and monsters. Mac stands out, slouched and mellow, mugging oblivion to it all. Every now and again, though, he’ll shift position, scan and scatter the furtive shadows nipping at his ankles. But as I draw close I register the little coal of anxiety in his eyes, the tight rectum of his mouth loosen and then tighten around his cigarette. He smiles. A double-edged smile. And that slight gladdening of the heart, it pinches down to nothing. As we walk along the path, I feel him pull back a fraction and rake his blue-burn all over me. My stomach sinks and hardens to a stone as I catch him in a sidelong glance, taking in the flesh-filled contours of my body. We climb the steps and peel left towards the back of the station where his car is parked. As he’s wrestling with the key in the lock he appraises me across the roof of the car, a hot little flare of disgust scorching the icy air between us.

  You look different, he says. Meaning, you’ve put on weight. His voice is bare and stripped of emotion but his eyes give colour to what he’s thinking.

  I leave the revelation dangling for a moment, and then I say, so is that a good or a bad thing?

  He says nothing, just shrugs and nods for me to get in the car.

  It’s been coming for a while. Ever since I kicked the crank. A slow and steady softening of the flesh. Creeping out in all the wrong places. My denims so tight you can see the swollen outline of my genitals. October 10, my seventeenth birthday, I filled a B-cup for the first time in my life. I looked in the mirror, looked deep and hard at myself, and I vowed to: Go for a run. Use the dumb-bells. STOP EATING SHIT. I went for a run. I hammered the dumb-bells so hard that I couldn’t so much as lever a fork to my mouth. I starved. Binged. Rammed my fingers down my throat till blood vessels spattered my cheeks and my heart punched up through my mouth. My denims granted me some reprieve and loosened their grip around my waist. My hip jowls shrank down to nothing and so did my tits. But there was nothing I could do to correct the broadening pelvis, the dimples that flecked my thighs. All this starving and running and lifting was pretty fucking pointless. It was going to take a fuck of a lot more than a six-pack and a tight arse to stave off the inevitable pull of biology. You see, physically, there ain’t that much difference between the pubescent male and female, but once your hormones gather momentum, once your body starts ripening and revolting against what nature intended, you have to make a choice. Some of the trans kids on the Rack are shooting test. They got the deep voices and the facial hair and all the fat from their tits slowly migrating south to their stomachs. And I’ve thought about it, sure. Still jerk off about going all the way. The scrag of my neck stands on end when I imagine how it would feel–the round, smooth density of my surgically constructed balls pulling on my surgically constructed penis. But, by and large, I’m at ease with my anatomy. Half buzz off my girl’s body, the way it rubs up against my boy’s brain, challenging, defying, denouncing. I’m like a smorgasbord of different gender cues. A chromosomal riddle. I can invent and reinvent myself. And I love my clit. Love it when a straight john figures me out and becomes hopelessly aroused, reaches down and slips a finger inside and feels out for the lurch of his cock straining against my cunt wall. I love my downy man rectum. My weather-lashed hands and my thick yoke of shoulder muscle. I love the soft strip of skin between my tits. I love this skewed take on gender, I do. Mac, though, he doesn’t like ambiguity, not where X and Y is concerned. He never ever uses my cunt. Won’t go near me when I’m on. The stench of bad blood–iron and salt and yeast seeping up from my boxers–appals him. When we have sex, I lie face down, always face down.

  When I met him I was fourteen, a late developer. And then I got into the crank and, even though my periods came and my tits started to bud, I was still skinny as hell, my arse and legs taut like a pullet’s. I fooled him at first just like I fooled all the others. We’d go to the end of the canal. I’d suck him off. Occasionally, he’d fuck me in the arse. And then, one night, he asked if I’d go back to his house. I had no choice but to come clean. I put his hand between my legs, let him feel my scrotum-less crotch. He reeled back and, for a moment, I thought he might hit me. I asked him if he still wanted me. He nodded, his eyes giving out a little charge of self-loathing. That night was the best sex we ever had.

  So Mac has hitherto been complicit in this duplicity, but only up to the point where my body is able to deceive him. The soft cushion of fat that now veils my hips and has plumped up my arse disgusts him. I’m almost a woman now, and it’s only a matter of time before he calls time on our trysts and trades me in for Chicken. He slips on the blindfold, softly removes a stray swatch of fringe that has become trapped between my eyes and the felt. We sit silently for several minutes while Mac struggles to start the engine of his old green Jag.

  You should get that fan belt looked at, I say.

  I feel him smile for a moment and the tightness in my tummy relents a little. He snaps on the radio. Kills the possibility of further conversation. I do my thing of tracing the route for a while, giving up as I always do just past the Wilmslow turn-off. Dunno what he does here–whether he doubles back on himself or doesn’t come off at all, just slows right down on the hard shoulder–but the red herring screws me every time. In the distance I hear an ambulance siren singing. And then the deadweight of suburbia creeping up on us like some malevolent fog.

  We’re twisting and weaving through the empty lanes now and I know this last stretch of journey off pat. Two more lefts and a sharp right and we’ll be pulling into his drive.

  The only meaningful conversation I’ve ever had with Mac–the only time we’ve ever pared back the husk of our stilted business banter–was that first drive back to his house. It was Christmas Eve and the city was bouncing. He asked how it was that a nice kid like me had ended up here, working the Rack.

  Ta
lk me through it, he said. Shouldn’t you be wrapped up in bed or something waiting for Mum and Dad to go to sleep so you can go sneak a look at your presents?

  I used to get asked this all the time when I first started working the Rack, and how I chose to answer would be entirely contingent on how much crank I’d blown. If I was loaded, I’d ream off the most hideous shit and occasionally the punter would be struck with pity or shame and he’d slap me my fee and scarper. But, more often than not, he’d slap me, tell me to shut the fuck up and get on with it. With Mac it was different. I wanted to tell him the truth. I looked up to him, I guess. I liked what his eyes told me-they were cool and resigned and yet they were by no means cold, they were still open to possibility. And to me, there was something pleasing in that contradiction, something I saw replicated in my own eyes. Moreover, I was honest with Mac because he didn’t reject me. He knew what I was and still he desired me. I told him:

  Thirteen was a difficult year for me. While most of the other kids on the estate were coming of age-getting whacked out of their minds on gas and glue-my own rite of passage was played out in the steamy neurosis of the bathroom mirror as I came of gender, made the slow, painful transition from Nicole to Cole. Mum drank heavily.

  It’s not normal, she’d scream, her red freckled arms plunged elbow deep in greasy black dishwater.

  I left home, the eve of my fourteenth birthday. I could see the mottled delineation of Mum in the bathroom as I thumbed a lift from the carriageway down below and, as I pulled off in the swish, souped-up car of some Asian homeboy, I finger-waved her goodbye. Just outside Manchester he swerved hard right into some industrial wasteland and asked me to suck him off. I looked him flush between the eyes and told him, no-not for nothing. He tossed a fiver in my lap, told me he’d double it if I saw him proper. It was the first time I’d felt a penis, the first time I’d felt the coarse down of a man’s thigh, and I was sick with desire and envy. I fought hard to suppress a gag reflex as he blew right into my lungs. I felt clumsy and foolish, but when I got out of the car he handed me the rest of my fee and asked me if I was looking for regular work.