by Geoff Ryman
‘I mean, do you suppose the Queen goes to the toilet in public? I’m being serious. There she is, waving to crowds and suddenly she gets caught short. Can she say, sorry everyone, I need a pit stop? Or does she just have to wait until she gets home?’
To a sixteen-year-old in the run-up to the Jubilee, this was scandalously original. Bottles began to walk in a clenched, constricted way and grunted in agony. ‘One is so pleased to be hyah.’
Michael laughed, partly with disbelief that someone real could suddenly start saying such things. He laughed with relief because he found Bottles reassuring. Daftness is not only funny but very slightly pitiable.
Michael’s laughter was constrained by fear, fear of being awkward or saying too much, and this constraint made it elegant. It was elegance that Bottles craved.
Both of them felt an irresistible tug of charm. Bottles suddenly put her arm through his.
‘You,’ Bottles announced, ‘are a Louise.’
Michael’s panic surfaced: how did she know? Had someone told her? If someone had told Bottles then maybe everybody knew.
She saw it and chuckled. ‘Don’t look so baffled,’ she said, and stroked the top of his brown and flawless hand. ‘Louise is a club. It’s run by the most wonderful Frenchwoman and she’s called Louise and so her club is too.’ She lapsed into fake American. ‘You wanna go?’
Michael beamed relief and friendship. ‘Absolutely, without fail, please.’ After all, he was the school’s official American, and Americans are never supposed to be afraid.
She got the message. He liked her. ‘Friday night OK with you?’
Michael offered, ‘Or Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday…’
‘Full social calendar, huh?’
‘I’m a hot date, but I can squeeze you in.’ Michael felt sophisticated, all of 22. ‘I’m generally pretty busy except for weekdays and weekends.’
‘Aw,’ she said and gave his hand a quick squeeze. ‘And you’re the nicest man in the year.’
At sixteen there is something irresistible about being called a man, especially by someone who has had some experience of them. And with whom, for some reason, you feel both safe and giddy at the same time.
So that Friday they went to the Club Louise in Soho.
Michael loved it. It was full of other daffy people, starting with Louise herself. She sat in a basement cubbyhole, greeting teenage visitors from Bromley as if they were French aristocrats. She took Bottle’s coat (long with a collar of black feathers that smelled of burnt sesame oil), and kissed her on both cheeks, and called her ‘ma chérie’ with a skeletal detachment.
Bottles looked a cool 25 let alone sixteen. She ordered champagne. A woman called Tami bubbled up to them, nipping someone else’s glass off a table en route. She held it up, empty, with a hungry grin. Tami wore black gloves with rings on the outside, something so chic it made Michael speechless with admiration.
Tami talked about American black music, how only American black music was worth listening to. Did he see Bowie at Wembley? Amazing, all done with just those brilliant white lights, everything black and white, and he just strolled out of this haze of light. ‘I got so excited, I nearly mussed my perm.’
Michael loved Station to Station. Drunk, emboldened by moral support, he went up to the DJ’s hidden booth and asked for his favourite track, ‘TVC15’. Instead of curling his lip in contempt as Michael expected, the DJ said, ‘Too right, mate.’
So up came ‘TVC15’, and Michael, out of sheer love, began to dance. This should have been terribly uncool. No one else was dancing.
But Michael was grinning like a monkey, and he had decided at the last minute to rent a tuxedo, onto which Bottles had pinned her earrings. Somehow that was just right. Suddenly, with an ungainly whoop, Bottles and most especially Tami joined him. That probably did it. An awful lot of people looking tough at tables were suddenly left behind as people started to dance.
Michael had trouble with conversation. He was always scared of running out of things to say. But dancing was inexhaustible, and he used dancing to communicate. He even did the terribly hippyish thing of linking arms, and got away with it. Station to Station kept coming back; people groaned and shouted when it was turned off, and Michael found himself in the centre of a circle of people who knew where the good time was.
The good time was him. Tami put all her rings on his fingers. They did a whip-round and bought another bottle of champagne, and Bottles, giggling, poured it over his head, like a ship being launched, knowing somehow that he wanted to stain those hired dressy clothes. At just the right moment she nipped him back to the table and stopped him drinking. She sat looking at him affectionately, introducing him to people. It was like having a mother who was truly cool.
The next day his real mother, bitter with disappointment and suspicion, said, ‘Did you take any drugs?’
‘No, Mom.’
‘Who were you with?’
‘A girl from school, Mom.’
‘You were drinking. You’re underage.’
His mother had a long pale face that had lost its prettiness quickly, lining in her thirties. Her hair was an unattractive orange pudding basin with its roots showing. Michael’s Mum looked worn, downtrodden, and utterly wrapped up in her own unhappiness. She looked like someone who had been deserted. She also looked like someone who was enduring it.
‘It’s not a good way to begin life, Michael, drinking in clubs.’
Reality was returning like a headache.
‘No, Mum.’
Her narrow face didn’t trust him, and didn’t trust itself. She didn’t know what to think. And gave her head a shake.
‘Your clothes are ruined. How can we turn them back into Moss Bros like that?’
‘They’re used to it, Mom. That’s why people hire gear.’
‘And they pay to have it cleaned and all. Do you have the money to pay for that or do you expect me to pay for it, Michael?’
Bottles gave him a call. ‘Hiya! How’s tricks?’
He didn’t know what tricks were. ‘Oh OK, but Mom’s on my case about the clothes.’
Bottles chuckled. ‘Fun costs, Michael. That’s how you know it’s been real fun and not TV.’
Michael thought of sports teams in California, and the coaches who all talked like General Patton. ‘No pain, no gain,’ he mimicked, calling them up.
‘No pain, no game,’ she corrected him. ‘So, are you man enough for another night out at Club Louise?’
Perhaps he wasn’t and that was the trouble. At the very least, he was scared that the magic wouldn’t work a second time. At the most, Michael was scared that she would make a pass at him. He was confused, confounded by sex. Her big breasts had allure, but Michael also knew already that his future did not lie with women. He just had a lot of trouble finally admitting that to himself.
It made him awkward. ‘Hi!’ he kept saying brightly, every time he saw her, and nothing else. He could think of nothing else to say. He sounded like a chipmunk and felt five years old.
Michael wanted his more normal friends to see how wise she was, so he trapped her into a lunch with them. The girls, particularly, were fashionable and elegant and calm and confident and virginal and enclosed within a social circle. One of them grew up to be a newsreader; another was now a big cheese at the British Museum. They eyed Bottles, who plainly had a rich future as a floozy. The future newsreader widened her eyes and stared fixedly at Michael and that meant: ‘What on earth are you doing with her and why have you brought her to our table?’
Ostentatiously, Bottles began to smoke in public in the school cafeteria. This was likely to get the whole table into trouble. The girls started to leave.
Bottles had no social circle, but promiscuously joked with anyone who would have her. Michael sat with her at these scattered tables surrounded by surly underachievers. His mouth ran away with him. He bragged to them about Club Louise. He knew it was a mistake, he could feel coolness slipping away, but he wanted everyone to
know that they had gone to a club. So he repeated every last incident of their evening out, like it was some big deal, and Bottles ground out her cigarette with impatience.
Eventually Michael stopped trying to spend lunchtime with her. It was too painful. He started to nod at her in corridors as they passed, feigning mild friendship.
He knew Bottles thought it was what always happened to her, that there was something about her that put people off. She was fed up being too old for her age. Gradually, they lost touch.
Michael saw Bottles a year later. He’d convinced a bunch of people in his biology class to go to Club Louise.
Louise still greeted visitors as if to a literary salon, but inside the atmosphere was different. Tami didn’t remember him. She went hard-faced and silent when greeted by this pale, stolid-looking nerd. ‘Hmm. Hmm,’ she said several times and pointedly moved on.
The music was terrible, like something recorded by amateurs in a bathtub. Michael asked for Station to Station and the DJ curled his lip. People sat glumly and defensively at tables, greeting only a very few people with effusive kissing on the cheeks that made plain to everyone else that they were not being kissed. People rolled their eyes as you passed, or said, ‘Get out of the bleeding way. Honestly, these stuck-up queens.’
Bottles came in and at first Michael didn’t recognize her. She’d cut her hair and wore thick make-up that made her look Egyptian. She was kissed into a table with gladsome cries of feigned elegance, and then they all fell into the same chill silence. A ferret-faced young man with dyed blond hair was giving a very hard time to some overly pretty old hippie who had cut his hair. In something like despair and panic the old hippie was trying to convince him of something. It was Malcolm and Johnny, and if that was the birth of punk, as far as Michael was concerned, you could keep it.
‘Everybody’s so bitchy,’ despaired a member of the biology class. She played cello in the school orchestra.
‘It used to be so nice. Really,’ said Michael.
Like a basilisk, Bottles looked stonily through him.
The next time Michael saw her was in the 1990s on TV. She looked like Mo Mowlam, and wore pantsuits and sensible middle-length hair and was a spokesperson for an Aids charity. She was on the breakfast show, convincing people to come forward to have an Aids test. ‘The main thing to remember is there’s now some point to having the test. If we catch it early enough, we know the drugs can work.’
Sensible, modulated, contact-lensed and TV-ready. This was not at all the Bottles he remembered. Old for her age back then, she had grown up even more.
Michael was aware that he had grown down. Overwork, tight scheduling, embittered sex: all of it had made him hurried and crabby.
And what would have happened to him if he had kept on dancing? The answer, watching Bottles, was suddenly clear. He would have become a vet. He would have been a vet because he would have been less ambitious, less self-denying. He would have been more himself. If he had kept on dancing, he and Bottles might have stayed friends and he would have gone on with the amateur acting and the animals.
I should have told my polished little social circle to get lost. They dropped me soon enough. When I needed help.
That had never bubbled to the surface of Michael’s conscious thought before, but it was true. The future newsreaders avoided him when he came back from California – they were not up to tending the wounded. Bottles had gone on to tend his dying friends.
Gosh, he missed her, now in this future he made for himself without any friends.
Bottles, honey, he thought. I need you. I’m sorry.
The air swirled, and Bottles bounded back into his life wearing a tank top and clunky shoes and long hair. ‘Babe!’ she cried, ‘Howya doin’?’
‘I’m OK, Bottles,’ said Michael, his voice warm. He was surprised by the flood of affection he felt for her.
They hugged and she pressed herself against him, and kissed him on both cheeks. Bottles said, ‘It’s good to see you. You know, it wasn’t such a rocking good time without you.’
He’d forgotten how everything she said was quotes, in someone else’s voice. He was touched by that now. Now she looked young and small and scared, but above all else, sweet.
Michael kissed her forehead. It was too much like child abuse otherwise. ‘God they were dumb not to make more of you in our school.’
‘Like I said, you were the nicest man in the year.’
‘There wasn’t much competition.’
‘No,’ she agreed lightly, and gave him a gentle little bat. She slipped out of his hug. ‘But you haven’t aged well. Too much science, love. I bet you went to university.’ There was scorn in her voice.
‘I did.’ He had to chuckle.
‘Ruined you for life. The trouble with being a swot is that you think you’re dedicated to something else, when really, you’re only dedicated to yourself.’
She turned back to him, appraising. ‘You’re … how old?’
He had to think. ‘I’m thirty-eight.’
Bottles did not say he didn’t look 38. ‘So … that makes it sometime in 1998. Gosh, did the world survive that long?’
‘It did, and so did you.’
She paused for a moment, considering. ‘Hmmm.’
Impulsively, she flung herself onto the sofa, but kept her shoes hanging over the edge of the sofa arm. She looked like something from a Roxy Music album cover.
‘I grew up happy, baby,’ she announced. ‘I’m fat and happy, and I never give Romford Comprehensive a moment’s thought. The secret was to leave London and go somewhere where they make their own fun. Two days after school finished I ran off to Scotland with a real creep. On the way back, the train stopped in Newcastle. I jumped off it at the last minute, just grabbed my bags, said “Sod off” and stayed in Newcastle. I waited in bars, stuff like that.’ Her voice went very small and quiet. ‘I was on the game for a while.’
Suddenly, there was a spliff in her hand. She looked around the living room, the wall-to-wall carpet, Phil’s paintings, his family’s furniture, and the bay window. ‘Posh,’ she said, with little interest. ‘Nothing much happens here, does it?’ And then she said, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. You’ve done well, Michael. You look so adult, like a kind of teddy bear.’
‘That doesn’t make sense.’
‘You look like an adult teddy bear, a Papa Bear.’
‘How did we screw up?’ he asked.
‘We didn’t.’
‘I mean, why didn’t we stay friends?’
‘Um. We were young and frightened and we fell in love in a kind of way and you weren’t ready for it.’
‘You know why we never did it?’
‘Because I moved like a bison on a trampoline?’ She had the habit of taking the piss out of herself. Her smile was crooked.
‘It’s true, you did, but I thought that was sexy. But I’m queer, and I wanted to tell you first, and I was … more scared than most of saying so.’
‘I knew that!’ she exclaimed.
‘You did?’ He smiled, embarrassed.
‘Of course I knew that, Babe. That’s why…’ It was just the teeniest bit difficult to say. ‘That’s why I felt safe around you. Both of us ran away from people because we thought we were ugly.’ Maybe Angels find it easier to say things than real people.
‘You ignored me in Club Louise.’
She sighed and shook her head. ‘You looked so naff. I mean you looked like one of nature’s born Radio Three listeners. And punk was all style, and you can only keep up a style by being mean. So I was mean. Forgive me?’
He nodded. ‘Yeah.’
‘Can we have sex just once?’
He settled in next to her, and sucked the dope in, and waited for it to buzz his brain. It never did, with him. Michael had marijuana impotency, too. But it produced a pleasant lazy atmosphere. She gave him a long lazy tobacco-and-peppermint kiss, and began to give his dick a rub.
‘There’s something else I have to te
ll you. I … I…’ Michael sagged with disappointment at himself. ‘Why can’t I say it? I hardly ever get it up.’
‘Hmm,’ she said, cosily in his arms. ‘That’s OK. I never have orgasms.’
‘What? You?’
She cradled him. ‘Mmm hmm.’
‘But you had all those men at school.’
‘Maybe that’s why, or maybe I was trying to prove to myself that there was nothing wrong. If there is anything wrong with not having orgasms.’
A pause. A beat. They both burst out laughing. ‘It’s fucking awful not having orgasms!’ Michael yelped.
She nodded. ‘I keep thinking I’m going to get there, I’m going to get there … and nothing fucking happens.’
‘At least you can fake it. I just sit there dangling.’
‘Hey, we’re famous. The Dysfunction Twins.’ She took another drag and said, ‘We could have lived together and had the same boyfriends.’
‘That sounds really good. We could have both disappointed them.’
‘We could have cried on each other’s shoulders and told the lot of them to go get screwed.’ Bottles and Michael casually held each other like lovers, old lovers who are eighty.
‘Men,’ said Michael. ‘They’re no good to live with.’
Bottles adopted the tone of a school-ma’am. ‘Never. Never live with a man.’
‘They belch,’ offered Michael.
‘They fart on the tube.’
‘They don’t wash up.’
‘Or they start to, make a big deal about how much they’re helping, and then bugger off before it’s finished.’
‘They get mad if you don’t call them, but they don’t even notice when they haven’t called you.’
‘They want you to take care of them and then they go and fuck some other cunt.’
‘Or arse.’
‘Give me another kiss.’
They smooched. It was a theatrical kiss, a kiss in quotes, a spotlit kiss. It made her giggle.
‘You’ve gone all butch,’ she said.
‘Me?’ That was a new one.
‘Yup. You used to be a little squit of a thing. Oh, very, very pretty, but I’d have been frightened of snapping you in two.’
