Loving Monsters

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  The peripheral observer, meanwhile, has noted that the first client – the one whose clothes were on the writing table – might have been a middle-ranking Lebanese banker with stained underwear; the second any of the twenty-ish clerks from the pool at Anderson & Green; while the third is a quite dashing young Egyptian wearing a spruce uniform he recognises as that of the harbour police at Port Taufiq. It is easy to imagine this tall youth with the neat moustache doing the rounds in his motorboat, visiting each of the scarlet-painted buoys in the roads and opening their inspection hatches to see whether they have been used as drop-boxes for contraband. ‘Pusser’ Hammond has told him that this is one of the favoured smuggling techniques. Only a Port policeman who isn’t on the take would dream of opening the inspection hatches in full view out in the roads. Most take the buoys in tow and wait until they are safely inside the maintenance yards before opening them and stealing the loot. That is why the buoys in Port Taufiq are always freshly painted, ‘Pusser’ said. They are constantly in and out of the maintenance shop.

  This clean young officer is unquestionably a fine specimen of manhood, with his lithe body and unexpected concern for the girl’s pleasure. But Jayjay notices the girl always keeps her eyes averted, as she did for her first two clients, as though her thoughts are far away even as her body performs with intimate flexibility. Legs up, legs down, legs apart; up on knees and elbows, kneeling, spreading, tensing, relaxing. And always the eyes skewed off to one side. In between clients she had slipped on a blue peignoir and walked to the open window, looking out through the fake lace, down at the noisy street, up towards the stars, her hair falling back. Now her eyes seem blankly fixed on Jayjay’s own across the policeman’s glistening shoulder. Does she know he is watching? Is she aware of hollow walls and paying voyeurs? He jerks his head away from the crack, guilty and alarmed. What was the deal here? Was she knowingly performing for him as well as for her client?

  He becomes aware of a tickling between his ankles and trouserlegs, an irritation that has gradually pushed itself forward into his consciousness. The candle at his feet has dwindled to a standing flame in a pool of wax but it is enough to reveal that this fetid slot between the walls is alive with cockroaches. Bending down to prise the flame off the floor he notices that the brickwork beneath the spyhole where he has been pressing his body is encrusted with what look like dried snail trails, though some are fresh. His fingers dripping with scalding wax he retreats to the top of the stairs before the flame goes out and fumbles his way down towards the faint glow that marks the sacking-covered entrance.

  The old woman is still there. She points out through the doorway at a packing case with a lamp on it at which Mansur is drinking tea with several companions. ‘Shukran ya ‘aguz’, he murmurs awkwardly to her. Only when he is outside does he realise how stiflingly hot it was between the walls of that brick oven. He can feel sweat beginning to dry all over his body. Were he not almost certain that Mansur does not drink Jayjay might think he was in his cups, for he greets Jayjay like a son who has come through an initiation with flying colours, proudly encircling his waist with a thick arm and apparently explaining this European to his companions in rapid Arabic. Jayjay thinks he catches the words for ‘important’ and ‘ships’. He is numb with unfocused desire and accepts a glass of mint tea, then another, and finally a third.

  ‘Hot in there,’ says Mansur meaningly. ‘Did you like it?’

  ‘Pretty much,’Jayjay replies, inhibited by the presence of these robed strangers who doubtless know exactly where he has been and are expecting a roguish response.

  ‘Well, drink up, because you haven’t finished yet. What did I promise? That I will show you something you will like. If you are not yet sure, you must see something else. That girl, she’s beautiful, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, she is. In her way.’

  ‘Very hairy. She is Christian. She does everything.’

  Time passes. The same quarter of town but a different spyhole. The same cockroaches, the same sweat, a newly awakened longing. Instead of a brick wall some rough wood panelling with a plank wrenched out and a narrow view between two cobbled-in sheets of eroded three-ply. This time a far less genteel room, more a skimped cubicle hollowed out of a much larger space, a plywood pocket in what surely was once a sizeable drawing-room whose lost grandeur probably survives in dust-shrouded cornices and dadoes and curved bell handles now hidden behind the partitioning. Seventy years earlier this might have been the house chosen by Ferdinand de Lesseps and this the very room to which he returned exhausted each evening from the Canal diggings, a roll of plans beneath one arm, his frock coat marked with a wandering white tideline of dried sweat.

  This time no disenchanted girl condemned to her cell awaits the night’s random visitors. The room is empty. A naked lightbulb like a teardrop sheds more of an ochre glow than actual light. It shows the iron bedstead’s springs sagging beneath a blotched mattress as thin as a biscuit. A scant seven feet above the lino-covered floor the lank air retards the blades of the slowest ceiling fan he has ever seen. The room has nothing about it of either aftermath or anticipation. It is static and lost. Then the door opens unexpectedly and an Egyptian boy enters, dressed as for school in a grey shirt and white cotton trousers. He is maybe twelve, and there is a certain jauntiness about the way he walks in his thin-soled slippers. He is carrying a book. Into the room behind him comes a white man of about forty wearing gold-rimmed spectacles. He looks like a French provincial piano teacher. He has a resigned air and shoots a glance around the room which seems to confirm his mood.

  Why does the boy remind Jayjay of one of his contemporaries at Eltham College? Why does the man seem to resemble one of the College’s staff, and even the lino evoke that on the kitchen floor in Beechill Road, when none of them has any real similarity? Unbidden and without awkwardness the boy hops on to the bed and arranges himself primly on the iron hoop at its head, knees together, leaning back against the wall and opening the book on his lap as though following a script. He begins to read aloud in a husky boy’s voice, slowly and with difficulty, as if in class. The slippers fall with soft plops from his feet sticking backwards through the bars. On his cheek nearest Jayjay, just beside the ear, is a shadow of dark down. The book’s cover proclaims it as the Collected Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

  The blessed damozel leaned out

  From the gold bar of Heaven;

  Her eyes were deeper than the depth

  Of waters stilled at even …

  (although these are only approximately the words the boy speaks in his thick accent). There is no nervousness in his voice, only a touching suggestion of formality. The man kneels on the mattress before him, gazing up at his pupil with bitter supplication. His hands reach out as though finally obliged to intervene. They gently part the boy’s knees, caress his inner thighs, begin to unbutton the cotton trousers. The boy’s voice never falters but he does glance down when what the man is looking for is springily disclosed. He stops reading as they both regard what has been brought to light with differing shades of devotion. In both faces there is a hint of amazement that, for this moment at least, the entire world should have honed itself down to this single fine point of concentration. The planet beyond the window has ceased to exist. Almost with reverence for so sublime a banality the man slowly bows his head and the boy resumes his reading. Shortly afterwards he stumbles badly over a word, tilting the page towards the weak light and frowning.

  ‘Hersheemed,’ the man prompts; then, raising his head, more distinctly says: ‘“Herseemed.” It means, “It seemed to her.”’ He, too, has an un-English accent. Prickles of sweat glisten between the cropped grey hairs on his scalp.

  Herseemed she scarce had been a day

  One of God’s choristers …

  The scalp disappears as the boy rests the book on it as on a gently bobbing lectern. A few lines later he lets the volume fall to the bed. The blessed damozel has served her purpose; libido is ousting literature. He leans
back against the wall as again the hands reach upwards to unbutton his shirt and stray across his taut brown stomach. The boy’s arms are rigid at his sides, his hands grasping the iron bedstead as he slides his lower half a little forward. After a while he brings his thighs decisively together. Jayjay notices how closely he is watching, unlike the girl earlier with her averted eyes and apartness. He is intent. So clearly vigilant of his own sensations and their convergence, his downward gaze becomes almost contemplative as he reaches the moment for letting his hands fall to the back of his teacher’s head and pressing. His nails whiten with the firmness of his fingers. The man’s own eyes are closed. Jayjay, greedily tensed against quarter-inch plywood only inches away, is terrified the panel will act as a sounding-board and fill the room with the amplified pounding of his heart.

  Within minutes the teacher is buttoning up his own trousers and the boy is on hands and knees under the bed, retrieving his fallen slippers. The man picks up the Rossetti and smooths a crushed page before briefly slipping an arm around the boy’s shoulders as though this is the only part of their transaction that requires a rationed daring. The boy smiles at the man’s shirtfront. They both seem to have reached some small, amicable plateau, and it dawns on Jayjay that this might be a regular event between them. The man bestows cash as if it were pocket money rather than payment. Seconds later the room is empty once again.

  A timeless fifteen minutes pass for Jayjay. This is something he hadn’t known about, except through dark allusions in popular newspapers. It comes as a complete revelation that it is so widespread and international an activity as to merit formal marketplace procedures. He has a vision of himself, seen from far overhead in the soft Egyptian night, as a mouse crouched in the world’s wainscoting. He is trapped, as he has been throughout this revelatory evening, between self-contempt and absorption. The self-contempt remains empty, theoretical; the engrossment embodies thrilling aspects of discovery as though he were at last making his way towards a place he was always destined to reach. It is akin to the feeling he experienced in his first week in Suez when the taste of fresh coriander ambushed him as at once alarmingly strange and nearly familiar, so instantly did he recognise it as a missing flavour which now, being identified, would become part of the rest of his life.

  The thin door opens again and into the room come two more Egyptian boys, this time rather older, both well-built student types of perhaps sixteen or seventeen. They have the faintly deracinated air of people whose conversation has just been interrupted. They sit on the bed, waiting. One yawns. And there, closing the door behind him and shooting the cheap bolt carefully into its socket, is Richards. Richards of the small moustache and the pale forearms he now exposes by removing his linen jacket as though shedding the burden of command and eager for time off. Old hand Richards, who hadn’t minded announcing that he set great store by first impressions and was not much for cockiness, has taken off his shoes and is padding towards the bed in cotton socks. The same Richards who Milo thought deserved to be sold as a slave to Arabians, Jayjay’s senior at Anderson & Green, takes from his pocket what looks like a small pot of face cream before allowing the youths to remove his trousers unceremoniously. The boys are displaying signs of a puppyish, self-centred enthusiasm that borders on contempt.

  And once again Jayjay cannot not watch. There is something about Richards’ body, something about the root-white torso with its brown extremities, that damps his own excitement; yet this is more than made up for by the rising of sheer glee. Oh, what hostages we unthinkingly hand over to fortune as we broadcast our pretensions! As we bray our little observations about manners and standards, what rods are being laid up in pickle for us – or, as in this case, in Pond’s cold cream! One after another the youths, who have removed only their shoes, punish Richards deeply and forcefully for being Richards: for being English, for being in Egypt, for being white, for being mibun. They are as indifferent to his initial pain as they are ruthless toward his eventual pleasure. Jayjay, impersonating his trinity of observers barely three feet away behind the panel, is intent on seeing everything and forgetting nothing even as a part of his brain is able to make certain plans and calculations. How beautifully, how thoroughly is Richards exploded! How timely this manner of delivering himself, crushed into rat-coloured ticking in a stifling plywood bordello by contemptuous youths still wearing their trousers, their buttocks bunching spasmodically beneath the thin material!

  *

  – Oh, it was wonderful at the beginning, before it went sour. Richards summoned me to his office the very next morning and started straight in about how right his first impressions invariably were, about how he’d known the moment he clapped eyes on me coming off the Orontes that I was not Anderson & Green material. ‘I have here’ (he said) ‘your time-sheet which shows you have consistently been absenting yourself from the office during work hours. It’s obvious you are in no way suited to a clerk’s job.’ ‘Absolutely correct, old man,’ I told him. ‘The moment I saw you on the quayside at Port Taufiq I thought, now there’s a fellow with a head on his shoulders. A true judge of character, or I’m a Dutchman. And I was spot-on. As you so brilliantly divine, I am not one of nature’s clerks. Since we’re in complete agreement about that, I suggest you bump me upstairs here as soon as you can and I’ll try my hand at a bit of directing. I rather fancy that quiet little office at the end of the corridor.’

  – I really did think for a moment his face would burst. Speech eventually found its way through the congestion. There was a good deal of stuff about insolent young puppies to be got rid of but eventually he reached his punchline about how I had a week’s salary due and a steerage berth back on the Orford at the end of the month and I would be well advised to stay out of his way until then. Oh, and a little bird had told him I had fraudulently acquired a Company badge to which I was most certainly not entitled as a raw apprentice, and he wanted it back right this instant.

  – ‘No, no,’ I said, ‘you’re being hasty, old man, as I’ll explain if you’d just listen for a moment.’ ‘Don’t you dare “old man” me, you saucy little sod,’ said Richards. ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘Gloves off. No more old men. Let’s talk about young men. Specifically, let’s talk about Ibrahim and Samih’ (for of course I’d identified them through Mansur). Bluster. Never heard of ’em. Nor of a pot of Pond’s cold cream, such as only last night helped blaze a trail its manufacturers probably never considered …? It’s true: shock really does make people change colour. I remember he walked to the window and stared out. He seemed about six inches shorter. ‘You rotten, rotten bastard,’ he said in pure Birmingham. It went right through me. In eighteen and a half years I had never felt so contaminated by something I’d done. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I promise you it was sheer bad luck I found out. I truly don’t give a fig about your private life, Richards. And what’s more, I hereby give you my word I shall never mention this again to a living soul: not to anyone, anywhere, ever. As far as I’m concerned, nothing leaves this room.’

  – Actually, I was beginning to be quite frightened of what I’d done. In those days if such a story got out a man could be utterly ruined. A provincial fellow like Richards might go to any lengths to avoid exposure. It probably crossed his mind that here in Suez and with his knowledge of Arabic he could arrange to have me found floating somewhere out in the Red Sea, half eaten by sharks. Yet all I could think of was that he might kill himself, which was still the proper thing to do. I certainly didn’t want his blood on my conscience for the rest of my life. The odd thing was, now that by sheerest mischance I had him at my mercy I began to feel almost tender towards him. He looked so shrivelled. ‘I suppose you want money, then‚’ he said dully. ‘I haven’t much, you know.’ ‘No, I don’t,’ I told him. ‘All I want is something you can quite easily arrange, and that’s merely for me to continue in this job for as long as it takes me to find something better. All you have to do is edit or tear up the time-sheets and give reasonably satisfied reports of my progress. I’m a
lso going to hang on to that Company badge of mine. And that’s it.’

  – In the circumstances, of course, I was asking practically nothing, as Richards knew perfectly well. Terrible scenarios of blackmail had no doubt been parading across his mental retinas, hotly pursued by equally dire remedies he might need to resort to. He looked at me almost fearfully. ‘Can I really believe that’s all?’ he asked, bitter as well as hopeful. ‘I swear it,’ I told him, and gave him my hand. In those days one still did that on solemn occasions. He took it as though it might bite and dropped it almost at once. ‘Did you, did you, er, actually watch …?’ he asked, and his eyes filled with tears. His vulnerability shocked me into a confession of my own. ‘Only for a bit. If it will make you feel any better, a similar thing happened to me a few days ago.’ ‘To you? You mean, you were watched?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘just … well, what happened to you. The same. But only one person instead of two.’ I thought maybe I’d gone too far and it would prompt him to some tearful complicity which I really did not want. Richards and I had nothing whatsoever in common. ‘I didn’t pay,’ I said with a touch of scorn. ‘It was more or less unavoidable. These things happen. Not something you will be mentioning to anyone, no doubt.’

  – You know, anal intercourse is the most wonderful social catalyst: I really can’t recommend it too highly. Judiciously employed it can achieve remarkable things, and will do so for as long as a little shame still attaches to it. I suddenly had carte blanche to carry on drawing a salary in return for very little work while also being enabled to slip quietly into a more congenial world. All sorts of doors might be opened now that the entrance fee had been paid, while everybody had their reasons for keeping their lips sealed. These forms of social bargain are why one likes living in a Mediterranean country, wouldn’t you agree? People in these parts understand them to a nicety. In fact they love them; and the subtler they are, the better. It gives even business relationships an intimacy and zing which I really miss in Anglo-Saxon climes with their desperate and ultimately futile insistence on having everything out in the open. In fact, I’m not sure Anglo-Saxons or Americans have any pride left these days. They’re just litigiously watchful for insults, which is not the same thing at all. Nor do they have any shame. They think anything they do is sanctioned by some sacred notion of individual rights or self-expression. But here in the Mediterranean a sense of shame and personal honour still exists, just, and the unspoken deal is that with a bit of care everyone can stand to gain unless you’ve badly wronged somebody or gone back on your word, in which case you’re dead meat and deservedly so. But as a way of parlaying all our little weaknesses up into bargaining chips the system works beautifully.