by Damian Barr
‘I get sausages and chips in Chinese gravy for my lunch if I work day shift.’
‘Is that right?’ says Johnny. ‘Ye like sausages, eh?’
He stares at my crotch. The doors are locked.
I ignore his question and babble on about the New Lotus. I like when families come in for birthdays. I turn my jealousy into extra good service and they tip me and Deirdre shows me how to hide tips in my socks. I tell him about the fish tank in the store room upstairs. It’s six foot long and the glass is green with algae and the water is so murky you can’t see in and there’s only one fish left and it’s the size of the tank. In another corner there’s a sort of altar that Mrs Weng keeps with a fat Buddha and a golden cat with a waving paw and tangerines spiked with smoking incense sticks. I tell him how the chefs are always losing money over dice. Once I nudged their table and changed the result and got chased and a massive shiny cleaver thrown at me. Johnny rolls his eyes. To keep him listening I tell him about the time I was stood there waiting for an order when I felt a draught and looked down and there was my knob sticking up over my belt – one of those hard-ons I get all the time for no reason. He’s interested again. I finish that story fast. ‘Nobody saw.’
‘So what school d’you go to then?’
I say nothing.
‘Ye don’t look like a Catholic so I’m saying Brannock High.’
I say nothing and tell him about my girlfriend Heather and he hangs his head over the steering wheel laughing. I talk and talk and he listens and listens and I barely stop for breath. He just listens and smiles and I like it when I make him laugh. He doesn’t try to kiss me which pleases and disappoints me. What’s wrong with me?
Every Wednesday night for the next month Johnny picks me up in the same place and we drive off to Strathclyde Park and talk. He doesn’t ask why I don’t let him pick me up at home because who would want their sixteen-year-old son getting picked up at midnight by an older man in a fast car? I tell him I’ve got to get back and he believes me even though I know nobody will miss me. I love that he thinks my life is normal. I wish he was better-looking. If I’m going to be caught being gay I’d like it to be with a man who’s handsome. I’m sure he wears mascara. Will I have to wear it too?
Johnny is full of tales. He says that a famous footballer goes straight from Ibrox to Bennett’s every Saturday night.
‘What’s Bennett’s?’
His pinkly shaved double-chin Jabbas with excitement. He smells of Joop! which he pronounces ‘jewp’. Chunky thighs flex in tight white jeans: fat people always have strong legs. He’s got a squint so he can keep one eye on me and another on the road. Lights flash through the sunroof, reflecting on his scalp through his already thinning hair.
‘What’s Bennett’s? What’s Bennett’s? Bennett’s is the scene, Princess.’
The scene.
He agrees to take me the following Friday.
‘Have ye never heard of ABBA?’ Johnny asks as we set off for Bennett’s, his voice veering into disbelief, feeding the steering wheel smoothly through fat fingers as he turns right on to the motorway.
‘Who?’ I ask, noting with relief the signs pointing to Glasgow. So he’s not taking me somewhere remote where in a few months I’ll be found in Lego-limb bits by a nice retired couple walking their retriever.
‘ABBA! Ye better get used to them.’ He turns them on and the song is ‘Dancing Queen’, young and sweet and only seventeen. Da dum, da dum, da dum. He thinks I’m twenty-one. I think he’s thirty-one.
I push myself back into the white leather seat as we hit 60 then 70. Nobody noticed me sneak out but my mum will miss me if I’m not there for school in the morning. She still gets us up for breakfast.
‘Don’t look so worried,’ he says, fisting us up to fifth gear. ‘My dad’s in the polis, we’ll not get done if we’re stopped.’ No murderer would admit that, would they? He glances over. ‘Oh they’re gonnae love you at Bennett’s.’
ABBA are facing their Waterloo cos Johnny stops the CD player and I’m impressed that he’s got one in his car. His driving is flawless as you’d expect for a driving instructor taught at seventeen by a policeman dad. Moving faster than you’d think for a fatty, he nips round to my side and opens the door, waving me out on to an imaginary red carpet. I could stay in the car, not get out, and tell him to take me home. He puts his hand out and I take it.
‘Welcome, Princess.’
The bouncer is brutal. His head is shaved so close the bristles could brush you to death. The slash-in-a-tomato mouth has never smiled and the sentry eyes stare dead-ahead. He stands with soldier-polished black Doc Martens planted shoulder-width apart that would be happier in your face.
‘Jinty!’ sing-songs Johnny, extending his hand to be kissed like the Queen.
What kind of a name is Jinty?
Instead of breaking it, the bouncer plants a courtly kiss on Johnny’s Claddagh ring.
‘Johnny, darlin’! Long time no see!’
All eyes are on me and a curious queue builds up behind us.
‘Ah’ve brought a wee chicken.’ Johnny points at me. I smile, trying to be casual but confident, and keep my buck teeth behind my lips.
‘Pouty!’ says Jinty and elbows me, knocking me into Johnny. ‘And what’s your date of birth, son?’
Before I can calculate an answer Johnny’s straight in with ‘20th June 1974. He’s eighteen.’
Jinty leans in for a closer look and laughs. The queue joins in.
Johnny turns on the guy behind him. ‘Shut it, queen!’
‘If you say so,’ says Jinty.
Johnny mwah-mwahs him on both cheeks without even bothering to check no one’s looking. Jinty pockets a folded note and waves us in.
‘Have fun, ladies!’
We’re buzzed in the door and check our coats.
‘Her bark’s worse than her bite.’
‘Whose?’
‘Big Jinty’s.’
My face says everything. ‘Her? Is she not a man?’
Shivering, but not because it’s cold, I follow Johnny up a dark staircase. The carpets are sticky and bass music is pounding. The tune gets clearer as we get close to the top. ‘It’s the rhythm of the night, yeah yeah . . .’ Johnny pulls me blinking up the last couple of stairs and pushes me in front of him through a pair of double doors.
This is the rhythm of the night.
I’d love to tell Mark about Bennett’s but he still ignores me whenever I try to talk to him. I’m bursting to tell him we’re not alone, there are others like us, a whole secret world in Glasgow, but whenever I try to talk to him he swishes past, leaving me swaying and smarting in his Lynx-scented wake. He actually minces but nobody notices. Maybe all this would make him stop. Johnny uses a whole new language. I’m a PRINCESS or a CHICKEN. Everything is DEAR or DARLIN’. His highest compliment is CAMP. He is SHE and normal people are HETTY BETTY. He doesn’t say GAY or HOMO he just say SHE’S ON.
Johnny turns up at school one lunchtime.
‘What is it?’ asks Heather. We’re in the physics lab on the top floor and I’m sure I’m going to get a B at best.
‘Nothing,’ I say, turning away from the window where I’ve spotted the big white car parked in the bus bay out front. It looks whiter and bigger than ever. I’m sure the whole school has seen it, knows my secret.
‘Liar,’ says Heather and goes to look. ‘What is it?’
‘See that car?’
‘Uh huh.’
Mr Viner interrupts our conversation. As good students we’re allowed to get away with a lot but staring out the window and gossiping when we should be at our desks tackling elastic collisions is taking the piss.
‘I’ll tell you later.’
The bell for lunchtime goes and I can’t decide what to say to Heather. What will work this time? What lies have I already told? What does she know? So I decide not to lie – I decide to tell her everything. It’s like confession without the Hail Marys. As usual, she listens quietly while I go
on and on. I make it clear I’ve not done anything with Johnny so I can always say I’m just experimenting if she reacts badly. We’re hiding in the computer studies room to be sure nobody else hears us. When I finally finish she says nothing. Her cheeks are pinker than usual. That’s it. I’ve lost her, my best friend, my only real friend. I’m alone.
Then Heather smiles and I think I always knew she would and I love her even more than I ever did and she says, ‘I knew it.’
Chapter 15
‘I was sick at heart. I could have resisted the opposition of opponents and potential rivals and even respected them for it; but what grieved me was the desertion of those I had always considered friends and allies and the weasel words whereby they had transmuted their betrayal into frank advice and concern for my fate.’
Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years
It can only be spunk. I steal glances at the glistening pearly glob on my sleeve, not wanting to draw attention. We’re taking turns reading out lines from Macbeth. It’s Act IV. We’re seventeen years old and about to sit our Higher exams but we still snigger when one boy has to read out a bit of Lady Macbeth’s part.
I can’t just lift my sleeve to my face for a closer inspection. That would get me looks. Holding Macbeth open on my desk with both hands I lower my face to the close-printed page as if I’m studying the footnotes, trying to get into the meaning. Once down there I catch the familiar ferny bleach and bananas tang. It must be a stray spray from my morning wank. Careless.
‘Damian Barr, sit up!’ clips Mrs Kennedy in her snippiest ‘I expect better’ tone. I pretend to yawn and pass my sleeve by my face. Yes, it’s definitely spunk.
‘Bored, Damian?’ Mrs Kennedy enquires, her finger holding her place on the page, pointed but not painted nails stabbing a soliloquy.
Even though I’m part of her special set Mrs Kennedy must, as she’s explained, be seen to treat us all equally. She can’t have obvious favourites. In our evenings me and Heather sit mock exams and do our now-perfect Mrs Kennedy impressions but in class we must be pupils, not pets. When English is our last period we wait till everybody’s gone and walk with Mrs Kennedy to the tiny English department staff room. Smaller than us both, she trots to keep up. There we marvel at the individual coffee cups, each teacher has their own and through them we try to divine the secrets of the drinker. Only Mrs Kennedy uses a teacup and saucer but she is Head of Department. Dainty pink roses clamber round the rim but not too wildly. Paper folders suspended on hooks line the walls, a story for each pupil, their ending predicted in As and Bs and Cs. Shelves sag with copies of the standard texts. There is a Great Expectations with the improbable Pip and next to him is the unlucky Tess who never stops walking. I pick up a paperback of A Streetcar Named Desire and consider how Mary the Canary was basically Blanche: thick with make-up and lies. She’s gone now. My dad packed her bags a couple of months ago when she stayed out for a week after one of her gigs. The suitcases looked like a magician’s luggage, all sparkles and silk scarves and secrets. Maybe after all this he’ll finally take my mum back but no, he’s had enough of women, he says. I can still smell Mary in his house: Poison by Christian Dior.
I consider slipping Streetcar into my bag even though I’ve nicked one copy already. I put it back and feel virtuous instead. After I breeze through my Higher I will walk in here with my books to my chest, Degrassi Junior High-style, and take my place, maybe with my own mug. Even if it’s just me and Heather, Mrs Kennedy has committed to run the advanced CSYS class. Then we will say what we feel without being laughed at by a classroom of cretins. We will drink instant Nescafé then rinse our mugs and hang them on their own hooks over the sink. We will bring Tunnock’s Tea Cakes and insight.
For now, I’ve got to get this spunk off my sleeve before anybody spots it. If I wipe it on my trousers I know it’ll leave a shiny egg-whitey smear. It’ll be round the school in no time. The chances of getting caught are increasing every second. My only hope of avoiding a mega-slagging and historic shame is to get to the sink in the corner of class and rinse it off – it’s nearer than the toilets. I raise my hand.
‘Yes, what is it, Mr Barr?’
‘Miss, I –’ and I slap my right hand over my mouth, push myself up with my left and start retching. For good measure I puff my cheeks out.
Seats are pushed back from desks and the class inhales as one. Mrs Kennedy jumps up to her full four foot ten inches as I bolt across her classroom with both hands over my mouth, stick my head in the sink and boooooooak!
Breathing deeply between fake retches I pick up the faintly fireplace smell of the cracked cube of pink carbolic soap that will never ever run out. I turn the tap on and splash water over my sleeve, heaving dramatically so that no one will want to come and look over my shoulder. I stand up and slowly wipe my mouth on my sleeve then poke round the plug hole for non-existent chunks. Such a considerate boy. I’m so convincing I actually start to gag. Mrs Kennedy hovers a safe distance away.
‘Go and see the nurse,’ she says, flapping towards the door, not wanting to touch me. Maybe this fear of mess is why she and her beloved Harvey have never had children. I don’t need to be told twice. Out. Damned. Spot.
Down in sick bay Mrs Gordon, our school nurse and the member of staff with the biggest tache, is nowhere to be seen. I squeak across the lino and swoosh open the pea-green curtain round the bed hoping to catch her napping and then what? She’s not there. The Dettol air smells delicious. I bounce on the edge of the bed, which sits up as a proper hospital bed should. I kick my shoes off and slip in like sliding a Twix finger back in the packet, careful not to ruffle. My toes find the hospital corners. I could lie here for hours, days. I could live in this silent, antiseptic sanctuary. How long before anyone finds me? I’m sad to miss the rest of Mrs Kennedy’s class but nothing was worth the shame of getting caught with spunk on my sleeve. Heather knows I wasn’t really feeling sick but now I know I can tell her anything she’ll be appalled and amused in equal measure. We’ll roll around her bedroom floor screaming and her dad will burst in and tell us to be quiet and when he bangs the door shut we’ll weep hysterically into pillows. My secret is now our secret. And we’ve got another ally: Mark is back. Two has become three.
I lie in sick bay staring at the pock-marked ceiling tiles wondering if they’re asbestos and consider another wank. The fact that Mrs Gordon’s mother goes to chapel with Granny Mac is enough to put me off. Tight between the sheets, I let my mind wander to my favourite books.
Catcher in the Rye with its pale yellow cover, the handwritten title scrawled and confidently underlined by a teenage hand still excited to have traded up to pen from pencil. I’ve folded every other page for future reference, underlined every other line with a note, usually with an exclamation: ‘Sarcastic!’, ‘Satirical!’ and, best of all, the newly discovered ‘IRONIC!’. With piercing insight on page seven I observe that ‘use of the first person makes things more emotive’. Soon after I’m clutching my pearls at Holden’s ‘vulgar language!’. Holden is ‘contemptuous!’ of Mr Spencer who fails him in history: ‘It is all right with me if you flunk me though as I am flunking everything except English anyway.’ Imagine having the courage, or luxury, of failure. If I don’t get good grades I’m stuck here. For ever. ‘I am quite illiterate but I read a lot’ elicits from me an ‘OXYMORONIC!’. Delighted to be able to use another of the terms Mrs Kennedy has taught us. I pay no attention to the second-last line: ‘Don’t ever tell anybody anything.’ Like Holden I rise above all that ‘flitty’ gay kind of behaviour, or try to, because shouldn’t books be better than people? On the title page I write ‘Moral decay’. Holden’s? Mine?
Since Johnny turned up at school in his big white car I am ‘out’ to Heather. ‘Out’ is a new expression and we love using it. I feel relief when I see her now. Whenever someone calls me ‘Gay Bar’, Heather and I trade looks. It would blow their tiny minds if they knew I went to an actual gay club and danced with actual gays. I want to tell them al
l about the scene, make them feel shut out of a world they don’t know exists. At this point standing up in the foyer and admitting that I am what I am would really be a technicality. Letting Mary the Canary dress me up as Alexis Colby for the school sponsored walk in my second year was something of a give-away. I arrived at school in full rouge, fake eyelashes and curled hair. At lunchtime I changed out of my uniform into a lacy black two-piece suit with pencil skirt and shoulder-pads then tottered three miles round the reservoir at Strathclyde Park, my toes crushing into the front, slipping and sliding in Mary’s tights, her gusset munching at me. Heather held my hand all the way. I still feel a phoney. ‘I feel sorry for Holden. He is just SUCH a damaged individual,’ I write at the end of chapter ten, my biro exhausted by empathy.
The Color Purple is another set text I’ve practically memorised. It brought Mark back to me. Me and Heather were sitting in the English staff room waiting for Mrs Kennedy when I decided to look in my file hanging on the wall. It was unexpectedly heavy. Inside was a book. I opened it and immediately recognised Mark’s bubbly girly handwriting: ‘To my best friend and my greatest inspiration. Make-da-da. “You and me us never part”. I love you, Damian Barr.’ The promise Nettie makes to Miss Celie before their stepfather banishes her! He loves me! I showed Heather and she just shrugged, remembering the milkshake on her legs.
‘See! He wrote this! I told you!’
That lunchtime I walk over to Mark, with the book in my hand, and he doesn’t walk away, doesn’t laugh at me, just smiles. Hair still perfect Jason Donovan curtains but skin barely scarred by acne. Compared to my lankiness he’s short and tight – flick-flacks across the foyer and swims every weekend but he’s stopped running, stopped competing. He’s gone from an A to a C at best, from the athletic track to smokers’ corner. His studliness is legendary after he got caught doing that housewife when her husband came home early from work. He wore his black eye like a medal. He is unassailably cool. Though Miss Harris did say she’d seen him in the library lately but never when I’m on duty with my date stamp and ink pad. I’ve been following what he reads on his record card. It’s smarter than the stuff he gets a couple of classes below me where he shouldn’t be.
