He paid his money at the cash register in the black-painted hole at the entrance to the Vauxhall club. Sitting there was a thin blonde, who drawled, ‘Thanks, darling,’ as she rubber-stamped the back of his wrist. He was wearing an old and comfortable pair of black boots, but everything else was new: a pair of white jeans, a black shirt, a silver chain. It was disco, it was even a little bit cheesy, but most of all it was rather slimming. He had told Richard that he was heading to Soho to do the bars, going out at the same time as them. He had, but had sat in a coffee bar reading a book. He didn’t want to get drunk. Then he had gone to a sex shop and bought a bottle of poppers, as suggested by Richard. Richard knew what he was talking about.
3.
But the nightclub was more or less empty. Of course, it was early still. The crowd would be gathering for a final drink or two in Soho’s bars, lying about in elegant flats like Richard’s, having a snort or two of cocaine, of ketamine, of whatever it was that they snorted. They would come after midnight, probably after one. He bought a drink and took it to a dark corner with a view of the entrance to the dance floor, which shook and echoed to the music. On the empty floor one man danced and twisted, his clothes eccentric, ill-assorted and miscellaneously frayed, like a farmer’s, his style erratic and uncontrolled. David watched him dance; as people came in, in twos and threes, rushing almost towards the floor, then halting like birds on a wire, inspecting the man who had taken charge of their dance floor, drawing back, holding their hands to their faces, speaking behind them discreetly though no one could have overheard them. Over the dance floor, at one end, a turret with the lit DJ in it; at the other a glass-fronted balcony, the VIP room.
The floor was not extensive, but David knew from his small experience that it would be big enough once filled. It seemed, however, unlikely ever to be filled. After half an hour, the wild-eyed and rustic dancer was still alone on the floor; around the edge, men were clustering, holding their drinks up to their mouths with both hands, giggling and pointing. To join this man on the dance floor, to be the second one there, was to admit yourself into his company, and no one, obviously, wanted to do that. The second man on the dance floor would, hours from now, be going home on his own. Little outbreaks of jive and bop were happening where they were standing, but it was nearly half past twelve when a man, an unmistakable star of this place, walked on and began to groove his hips; then another, then two more, then a whole group. The spell was broken, and the night began.
It took David another hour to join in: he wanted his presence to be diluted almost to the unnoticeable, and he wanted to slip into the company of a hundred men rather than twenty. He had once seen himself at a nightclub in a mirror, dancing; it had felt to him as if he were doing much what most of the other men were doing, but the horrifying glimpse of the bear-like wobble in the mirror permanently removed any illusion about that. He stepped from foot to foot now, smiling brightly, and actually someone smiled back, making room for him. This was not so bad.
Whether you could actually meet someone in these circumstances, however, he could not say. Once here, the limit of his ambition was to have something to tell Richard about in the morning. Thoughts of Richard reminded him of the hard little nubbins tucked into his waistband; he took the small bottle out and, with a certain amount of fumbling, unscrewed the top. He raised it to one nostril, then the other, then the first; dizziness and a sick feeling was all it produced, and he put it back into his waistband wondering only how long he needed to stay.
‘I love, love, love poppers,’ a voice was saying, in his ear. ‘Can I have a sniff off of your poppers?’
It was a small, neat, and very handsome man, dark eyebrows over dark, amused eyes; he had no top on, and he was muscular without being absurdly big. His chest had been shaved at some point, and David had a great urge to run his hands over the rough surface, to feel the texture of rough and smooth. Instead, he handed over the small bottle, and the man undid it, his eyes still on David, snorted once, twice, three times, screwed it up, popped it back in David’s waistband and, amazingly gave him a peck on the cheek.
That was Mauro.
‘Seems to have worked, then,’ Richard said the next day, over two plates of fish pie in the neighbourhood Sloaney pub, all brass and wood and glass. They were overlooking the little common at Parsons Green, the green that had once belonged to a parson, presumably. David was dodging his own reflection in the mirrors about the public bar; it was more frightening than usual. Richard looked offensively healthy, the appearance of someone who went to bed by one without drinking and got up to have a Sunday-morning run. David was not going to ask him how the film had been.
‘It sort of worked,’ David said cautiously. If it hadn’t worked, why would he have rolled up at nine in the morning, grinning, before giving Richard at the breakfast table a wave and staggering off into the spare room?
‘Well? Did you get his name? Was it worth it? Was it fantastic?’
David gathered himself. There was the taxi back, with Mauro and his friend—what was the friend called? There was the fumbling through bags and pockets for the key on the pavement of Clapham High Street, and finally through the door between shops—Mauro lived, it seemed, above a tanning salon. There had been the production of a wrap of paper, and David had accepted one line of drugs after another, feeling that sex might be at the end of this. The friend, worse for wear than either David or Mauro, had first stopped making sense, then stopped moving, then turned his head into the sofa, a cushion over his head, and started snoring.
David and Mauro looked at each other; God knew what nonsense they had been talking in the hours before. Mauro got up. ‘Don’t mind me,’ he said, and went into the bedroom next door. ‘I’ve not seen you there before,’ he began. ‘I go there with Susie. I work with Susie—did you see her? She was the girl wearing the green dress—she’s tall. She wants to be lesbian. Silly bitch.’ He went on chatting inconsequentially, popping in and out of the bedroom. Each time he came out, he had taken off some item of clothing; David, lying on the sofa, watched with pleasure as the small dark man came out, shirtless, shoeless, sockless, trouserless, artlessly chatting. At the end, he stood there in his clean white underpants, smiling, kind and thoughtful as a charity worker. Mauro raised his right arm above his head and pulled it over and down with his left fist. Naked, his lovely flourish of hair at the armpit like a bouquet, he yawned, scratched, turned his head from side to side and smiled in a watery way, not exactly at David. ‘It’s been gorgeous,’ he said. ‘Phone me some time.’
It took David a moment, but finally he was up on his feet, saying thank-you-for-having-me, and confusedly embracing Mauro. ‘Thank you, Mr Poppers,’ Mauro said. ‘You could take my number, if you wanted.’
‘You know,’ David said to Richard, in the pub in Parsons Green. ‘Yes, it really was. It was fantastic. I honestly didn’t have much in the way of hopes, and—’
‘That’s always the way it is,’ Richard said. ‘Are you going to see him again?’
David considered. In the answer, there lay so many innocent deceptions. There lay, too, the opportunity to suggest to Richard, and to how many other people, that he, David, was a real person; that there was no reason why he should not have a boyfriend, though he never had; that there was no reason why a beautiful, charming Italian called Mauro, who was a vision in his underpants, standing in a doorway at eight in the morning, could not elevate David’s dignity by choosing him to take to his bed. Of course, he had not done so, and would not do so. But with Mauro by his side, even just the once, if that could be contrived, they would look at him in a different light. They certainly would. And, after all, he was a real person.
‘He gave me his phone number,’ David said. ‘So I guess I am going to see him again.’
‘What an awful bore,’ Richard said admiringly.
4.
When David’s parents had told him that they were planning to move from St Albans, he initially didn’t take them at all seriously. He had g
ot into the habit of going round there once a week. His father had retired three years ago, with a small party for a few friends, neighbours and colleagues. Since then, David’s unadventurous failure to go beyond the town he had grown up in had taken on the dimensions of a moral decision. While his father was working, their relationship must have looked like one of dependency, an unwillingness by David to venture too far into the outside world. After his father’s retirement, the dependency didn’t exactly reverse overnight, as if at the flick of a switch; rather, it seemed to David as if the long inward tide of dependency had reached its neap point at some parent/infant equinox, and from this point, it would begin slowly to retreat, at first hardly marking a change in David’s life.
His parents lived in a neat brick detached house. Its blue front door was shaded by a porch with Swiss-style filigree wood effects. Around the porch in summer, honeysuckle bloomed, and sent its perfume into the dark little dining room at the front of the house. For David, the bashing out of a Clementi sonatina could always bring up the scent of honeysuckle; it was the scent of sitting inside, bored, at sixteen or eighteen, waiting for exam results and knowing that your future had now been decided, thinking of men seven times a minute. When he was small, the porch of his house had seemed extraordinarily pretty, like no other house in the road, like a house otherwise seen in pictures or on a jigsaw. In the same way, his mother, when dressed up to go out in silk scarf and pie-crust collar, had always seemed the prettiest of the mothers, and the nicest, quite different from anyone else’s. When she sang in a crowd of singers, at a Christmas carol service or concert, or the ringing metallic song of her shoes approaching in a school or hospital corridor, her noise seemed utterly distinguished, lovely, and quite unlike anyone else’s. David thought he was incredibly lucky and set apart until quite late in his adolescence.
The party was held in the church hall in his parents’ road. They were called community centres nowadays. Perhaps they—his parents—might really have held the party in their own home. But they were nervous, even of their own friends. Things got knocked over; people, even with the best intentions, took a drink or two and leant on a table that wasn’t meant to be leant on. So they had it in the community centre. It was not the most atmospheric place. The three of them went round earlier in the evening turning lights off here and there, trying to get anything resembling an atmosphere, but all they could achieve was a blue fluorescent glow in opposite corners and the rest plunged in gloom. And when the guests had arrived, as many as could be expected, it was seen that neither of his parents had really known how many people would be needed to fill even a medium-sized community centre. All the concern of the previous weeks, all the thinking of how to trim the guest list down to manageable proportions, proved in the event not necessary. The nicely dressed guests moved around in small groups, unbridgeably, resembling learning swimmers nervously forming islands in the shallow end. David was the youngest guest by a long way; his mother had asked him to feel free to bring someone if he would like, they would be very happy, whoever it was. But there was no one.
‘We don’t know what we’d do without David,’ his mother said. She was talking to the minister’s wife; whether in reality or just because of the peculiar and unsuccessful attempt at atmospheric lighting, both of them appeared to be dressed in almost the exact shade of turquoise. Neither seemed to have noticed this and, in fact, David’s mother’s dress had a best-dress, just-bought aspect, which the minister’s wife, Philippa—wasn’t it?—wasn’t emulating.
‘David’s your son, isn’t he?’ Philippa was saying; her plump, attractive face held the generous and interested expression that was probably a prerequisite for the job. Or perhaps she was just generous and interested by nature.
Catherine made a birdlike, darting gesture, seizing David by his sleeve as he was passing. ‘You’ve met our son?’ she said.
‘I’m not sure that I have,’ Philippa said.
‘I don’t know what we would do without him,’ Catherine said. ‘We’re so lucky to have him near us. We really depend on him.’
Philippa smiled, and with a small shock, David realized how it was to be from now on. For some years, his mother had been saying exactly this thing, that she had no idea what they would do without him, and while his father had been working, it had been clear to everyone what the intention behind the sentiment was. The son, clinging to his mother’s girdle-straps, unable to venture more than a mile from his mummy’s home, might look like the heavily dependent one; these sentiments attempted to cover it up by reversing the situation. But with the retirement of his father, what his mother had said was starting to become true. Not now; not tomorrow; but in years to come, they would depend on him, and when his mother said such a thing at his father’s retirement party, the wives of Methodist ministers seemed to think that it might have some truth in it.
‘May I refresh your glass, Philippa?’ David said.
‘Well, that’s very nice of you,’ Philippa said, and David felt like an adult, talking to adults.
5.
It was unsatisfactory, of course it was. But David believed that his having chosen to live in his flat, one of six in a converted Victorian house just behind the cathedral close and less than a mile from the Swiss-filigreed porch and the parental villa, looked to the outside world not like a sad capitulation to inevitability of a fat and fearful would-be cocksucker, but the decision of a man who knew his duties in life. Whether with self-loathing or with a sense of having got away with it in the eyes of the general public, David could see his awful job, his undistinguished flat, his decision to live in this location rather than do what everyone else did and leave home and its influences would continue more or less until one of them dropped dead.
He had thought nothing of it when his mother and father said they wouldn’t be having Saturday lunch with him as usual; they were paying a visit over the weekend to his father’s old secretary. He had no memory of this secretary; he had never really listened to much his father said about his workplace. These days, in fact, when he went round for his Saturday lunch, he let his father have his Grandstand, or whatever it was called these days, and sat with him in companionable silence. Conversation would only break out when his mother came in, fetching tureens or ladles—she liked to make a proper lunch out of it, often taking the opportunity of his regular but occasional visits to experiment with cooking, something which, during the week, his father would never permit with a good grace.
‘Don’t forget,’ his mother said, standing in the doorway with his father’s apron on—it was an ancient laminated apron showing a stripper’s body with real tassels at the nipples, supposed to be for men at barbecues, and funny, but appropriated by either of them when cooking needed doing, and on his mother not funny or supposed to be, but a mournful reminder of age. ‘Don’t forget we’re not here next weekend.’
‘Why? Where are you going?’
‘I thought your dad had told you—we’re off for a weekend in Devon. Didn’t you tell him, Alec? I thought I heard you telling him.’
‘I told him,’ Alec said. ‘Are you watching this?’
David didn’t see for a moment that his father was talking to him. He took his eyes off the television—he hadn’t realized he was watching it at all, let alone with the degree of randy absorption that he was devoting to it. It was a segment about men’s gymnastics, and David blushed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I thought we had the sport on for you.’
‘Load of rubbish,’ Alec said. ‘Catherine—I meant to ask—if we’re going down on Thursday, have you got anyone to cover your Friday-morning shift at the cathedral?’
‘It’s all arranged,’ his mother said, talking of her volunteering commitment at the cathedral’s charity gift shop.
David’s regular week was thrown out of kilter by his parents going down to stay with his father’s old workmate and her husband in Devon, in a town called Cockering. He didn’t quite like it. He often groaned about his Saturday lunches, giving his parents some ad
vice about this and that, asking them politely about their small-scale retirement activities and the awful friends they had seen. But, in fact, he had sometimes had to stop himself from walking the half-mile or so to their house on nights during the week. It wasn’t loneliness, or an inability to cook, or really love for his parents. It was usually not being able to stand the sight of the chaos of his flat, and thinking with real longing of his parents’ clean and warm house, just enough things in it, not too many, not too bleakly empty; nothing on the floor, and the laundry basket never more than half full before being emptied and dealt with, rather than, for instance, spilling its contents up the bathroom passage, across the kitchen, even across the hallway, into the sitting room and the bedroom. It was always like that in David’s flat; it had long ago reached the point where he couldn’t envisage asking a cleaner to come in to deal with it, and had not asked anyone, even his parents, to visit for some years. You could always drop in at his parents’ house, though he did not; and so he missed them that Saturday.
They’d had a nice time, she said. What had they done? Oh, talking about old times, and they went to the pub. Yes, they’d really had a nice time. It was so pretty down there—picture-postcard pretty. But very sleepy, and the Devon people, they seemed a little slow. Something guarded, something reticent in her tone struck David over the telephone line, and he wondered about their weekend. ‘She’s very nice,’ his father said. ‘I always had a soft spot for her. We were always great pals. Ted’s perfectly all right, too…’
King of the Badgers Page 17
