Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, page 11
This same park was, that summer, made into one of the city’s big tourist attractions. The idea was that on certain nights it was turned into a kind of historical theme park, a recreation of the way things had been one hundred years ago, and everybody was invited to turn up in fancy dress. Boy and O went one night to see it, and this too troubled Boy. This night too made Boy wonder what kind of city he was living in, exactly.
When they entered the park the gas lights were coming on under the trees, and you could hear the noise of the crowd when you were still streets away, music from Jim Crows, nigger melodies, shouting Jew clothesmen over the top of everything, Italian Organ-boys, they’d got everything. The soldiers and the soldiers’ girls were the noisiest and brightest part of the crowd, all done up for the evening, following the military band on its way to the restored pagoda-like bandstand; half the crowd seemed to be in scarlet, which Boy liked. Hansom cabs, with drivers in full period costumes, drove around the perimeter of the park taking people from attraction to attraction. You paid your fare with a real antique silver sixpence – you had to exchange your modern notes at special stalls which were conveniently placed throughout the park. Boy was enjoying himself; he felt that it was all a bit like one of their party nights at The Bar. He was used to this kind of dressing up in the night.
But then something went badly wrong. Something was wrong; the crowd thickened, word went round that someone had been arrested for a misdemeanour, someone (some man, two men, in fact) was being taken to the park police station (that ridiculous folly disguised as a thatched cottage). As a crowd rapidly gathered to see this new and unexpected attraction Boy thought he saw four men from The Bar, men he knew, although not well enough to speak to. They had dressed up for an elaborate evening picnic in period style, two of them in violently coloured ‘fast’ check jackets, one with excessively curled blond hair and a low cut collar – this one was wearing rouge and powder, and had a bracelet of brilliants peeping from under his shirt cuff. As the crowd grew, they got quickly up from their picnic cloth, sensing that something was wrong. When they saw the two men and the policemen, they turned quickly away and began to gather up their picnic quickly and quietly; but they were caught in the crowd. One of them turned white with fear, dropped his cigarettes and just stood there. His friends didn’t dare to put an arm around his shoulder to hold him up. As the crowd began to turn ugly the four men separated without speaking, abandoned their picnic for the crowd to trample, and walked quickly away, splitting up into an inconspicuous pair and two singles and leaving the park by different gates. O and Boy, who were not in any kind of fancy dress, stayed in the crowd, or rather mob, for that is what it felt like now as people began to shout and push. They proceeded down the reconstruction of what was known as The Birdcage Walk. This was lined with flaring gas lamps and with gilded stakes, atop each of which was a tethered parrot or macaw from the Royal collection. The screams of the parrots began to mingle with the screams of the crowd – one fell from its perch and swung upside down on its chain with its wings open and head up, screaming with laughter – when Boy saw that he wanted to point it out to O, he wanted to tell him about how he had imagined a bird exactly like that as a sign of his own strange, unsettled feelings when they were together sometimes; but this was not the time for confidences, not in the middle of a crowd like this. For the crowd was really getting into the period spirit now; as the two men were escorted away, women in the crowd began spitting at them, they kicked up their skirts, they pulled the silver hatpins out of their elaborate bonnets while all the men laughed their approval, one woman screamed, ’E’ll ’ave to get his ’air cut regular now.
O took hold of Boy’s arm and firmly led him away from the scene. They stayed in the park until it was late, sitting on an elaborate reproduction cast-iron bench, smoking in silence. They had bought a packet of cigarettes which had been specially made for the theme park, nineteenth-century cigarettes, rich, cheap and unfiltered. They smoked steadily until they had finished the whole packet, as if they wanted to destroy or rather consume – not just throw away – their souvenir of this night, which was meant to have been a fantasy for everybody but for them had not been a fantasy at all.
When they went to go Boy said that he wanted to go back to his place alone that night, and when he got home he put the light on and got out his letters. Since meeting O he had begun to keep the letters which came every Tuesday in the shoe-box, with all the others. He began to re-read the last one he had received.
This letter featured the phrase ‘those days’ several times (Of course what I would really like is the kind of garden that they had in those days, almost a small park, with perhaps a pond or lake, and definitely with some birds and all the old roses … of course in those days they did this all very differently, they had a very different attitude, it was all more gracious then, less pushing …) and when Boy read this, after what he had just seen, he suddenly found himself wanting to reply to one of these letters for the very first time. In fact he wanted to write two replies. The first would be full of kindness and would be carefully phrased, saying, actually I am very happy just at the moment, things are going very well for me here, because I have met… but the second letter would be so different that it would read as if written by a different person, it would say, He does this to me, he does that to me, he does it so much it hurts, he hurts me, he hurts me and I love it, I love it when we do that.
Boy planned sending both of these replies in the same envelope; both would be in the same handwriting; both would be signed, Boy, and they would both end with the same phrase.
They would both end, Goodnight, Father.
Courtship (2)
That summer of their courtship they were, as we said, ‘living together’, but with the accent on the first word, as in ‘those two are certainly living together …’ to indicate not that they were sharing the same premises (for they had not yet moved into the flat) but that they were indeed living together, living a fine life together, a life of quite scandalous promise and happiness. We talked about them all the time; we felt that their coupling was somehow different, that they were somehow, for the duration of that long summer, our mascots, our perfect pair, the sign of all our hopes. Each time they appeared in public we would note how well they looked, or how tired, and speculate on what made for such happiness, or what could be making a young man like Boy look so tired on a midweek evening, and especially we would speculate on when, oh when would O and his Boy declare themselves, and become a real couple and not just an affair, for we were all agreed that this was bound to happen. When, as Gary put it, would they be first heard or overheard to use the word ‘we’ in public when speaking of themselves.
We had no shortage of occasions for speculation; they appeared in public together several times a week that summer.
They had, as so many had at that time, a great hunger for entertainment.
Night after night they would dress at O’s place, which is where Boy kept most of his clothes now, dress elaborately and late and then set out for that part of town where all the theatres were. They never paid for these visits, because O would always time their arrival to coincide with the first interval, and no manager or usher ever queried the right of such a handsome and proud-profiled couple to pass unhindered to their seats. Besides, they were so well dressed, and a lot of those ushers were gay boys themselves. There always seemed to be two empty stalls seats in whatever theatre they attended (O liked them to sit where they could see everything) and O would lead his Boy confidently to them and they would take their seats and then sit there surrounded by people who all looked much like each other, reasonably happy and well-dressed and well-coupled people, would sit there invisible in the particular, comfortable darkness of a theatre whose tickets are expensive, a darkness smelling of chocolates, hair and expensive fabrics, fans, the fresh gilt of restored cherubs, velvet, even furs, real leathers, the perfume of wives, the heavy breath of sleeping husbands.
They themselves never ate chocolate, or ordered drinks, since they came out with only their bus fares in O’s pocket. Sometimes they felt that they had to go out every night of the week, sometimes O even wanted to see the same show three times in the same week, if work at the shop allowed him so many evenings off in one week. Boy always accompanied him, of course, and for days all day would be spent in bathing, resting and ironing so that even though they had few outfits in those days they would always be gorgeous, so handsome; as good to look at, in fact, as all those married people.
They never discussed what they saw. In fact, they hardly talked at all on those evenings; Boy was holding his breath with the effort of being beautiful (Boy himself would have said, with the effort of being as handsome as he is), and he knew that O preferred him to be silent in public anyway, very strange and well-bred; he wanted married women to look at them as they passed and ask themselves the question, What is their story?
During these days of preparation and these evenings of silence Boy felt in some way like an actor, saving himself all day for his role; taking care to speak very quietly or not at all so as to save his voice, rising late. Because he was always waiting, always waiting for O, he felt like an actor, or a lover.
The shows they saw never, of course, quite made sense, since they had always missed the first hour of whatever story there was. Boy guessed, and guessed correctly, that it did not matter much to O what it was that they watched, although he noticed that O avoided the family comedies and preferred tragedies, operas and farces, any genre in which the male characters are reduced or elevated to tears. Boy himself wanted shows full of loud music, expensive lighting, punishing dance routines executed by desperate and expert boys and girls, astonishing stages which rose and fell to reveal deep black spaces (Boy thought, That’s how my heart works) where moments earlier metal walls had risen, or staircases of coloured glass. But in every show they watched together their desires did coincide exactly at one point; what they both truly wanted (and they would sit together in silence, would travel all the way there in silence just waiting for this to happen) was for there to be a single moment, a very special moment, in which a woman would be caught in a spotlight, and would sing, well, would just sing her heart out, about what they never exactly cared, but they knew that it was for them, somehow, that she sang; for their condition. And they knew that it was for this moment that they had waited in silence each night, through the crowded streets, through the foyer and then silent amid the eager conversations before the second act curtain. It was this moment that they wanted, this moment when the woman turned and sang, sang for them, and they would sit there together in the dark and listen to her and let the tears come and let them roll down their faces and drip with no one to see them and no one to ask them why they needed this moment or what they were feeling.
Waiting for this moment, this moment whose arrival could never be guaranteed (because sometimes there was no song, or if there was, it was the wrong song, or the wrong singer), they would sit through as many as seven shows in a week. In the eighth week of their courtship and the tenth week of that especially hot summer – when all of the city, especially late at night and especially where we had gathered to flirt and sweat, seemed suspended in a state of strange anticipation – they watched many extraordinary things.
They watched shows in which a moaning chorus of giant gibbons took the curtain with their artificial and elongated limbs brushing the mirrored stage floor, each furred body topped by a tiny, human, sweating face. They watched women in cages hoisted aloft by bare-torsoed and grinning men; they watched shows in which entire cities slid mechanically to ruin, each yellow-lit skyscraper leaving a slick of blood in the snow as it went. On the Thursday night they watched the demolition of smoking barricades manned by child-actors (their small and exposed limbs making the fake timbers that fell on them seem larger than they really were) – the ruined streets swung up on wires to reveal an inexplicable black lake in which the reflections of artificial stars were made to shimmer by the waving hands of white-gloved and singing swimmers. On the hottest Friday of that year they sat, surrounded by women, through a musical in which sixty-year-old actresses sang the songs of forty years ago, and were wildly applauded for exposing the ruins of their voices. Their legs were still worth seeing, if not for their elegance then for their strength, braced on sequinned shoes, flashed from the sequinned sheaths or spangled gauze ballgowns that they wore. The audience seemed to know all the words of all the songs – Boy and O knew them too, from Gary’s repertoire at The Bar, but they did not mouth them under their breath as the others did, nor did they applaud at the end of each number. They were waiting. They were waiting for the moment when, at last, a single woman walked onto a stage suddenly cleared and darkened and bared (the scenery took flight in every direction), walked into a single light and stood there alone, in a dress as black as O’s eyes and with arms as strong and white as Boy’s. Just as Mother used to do when she was singing her song, the woman turned her exposed back to the audience for a moment, then with the violins she turned again, she turned and looked right at them and sang, sang her heart out, sang words no woman in her right mind would say.
On the seventh night the show which O had chosen did not give them what they wanted. On this, the final night of a week of silent and elaborate revels, the tears did not come. They sat and waited, as on the other nights, but on this night they had to leave the theatre unsatisfied. And it was on this night, Boy later told us, it was on this night that O had finally, in his own way, proposed. It was on this strange night that they declared themselves to each other – although it was not until later, you understand, that the engagement was made public, and publicly celebrated.
The show that night was an historical epic entitled By Night; or, The Dark Side of Our Great City. Its final number was a famous spectacle at that time; a reconstructed Victorian pantomime, in whose Transformation Scene ludicrously-winged fairies hung on wires above the smouldering jewels of a lime-lit diamond mine. The touch of a wand, a swing of Harlequin’s bat, and the jewels began to spit and sparkle in a display of synchronised fireworks. It was so beautiful that everyone, O and Boy as well, was jolted into applause. They stared and applauded as the sparks drifted upwards, applauded as one caught the gauze skirts of the fourteenth hanging fairy, applauded still as she hung there and burnt, twitching. They applauded out of simple shock as her hands tried to brush her skirt free of flames, as the glazed paper of her wings burnt especially brightly.
The reviews of the show reported (this was a clipping Boy long kept in his box of papers and would often read when O was out of the flat) that, in the original version of this scene, staged in a pantomime of 1867, thirteen women had burnt to death in front of an audience which included the Queen and four of the Royal Children. In fact, such incidents were common in those days. An eyewitness account of the deaths noted that the morning after Boxing Day there was already a queue of women at the stage door, frightened but hopeful. After all, all you had to do was hang on a wire and grin. It must have been terrible of course for those girls, and terrible for all the people watching, just sitting there watching, but it was a terrible job anyway. Terrible just having to hang there. Terrible.
Terrible money of course. The worst thing was if you were hanging up there and you felt a bit sick, and of course I did feel a bit sick, it was sickening, oh dear, when Jenny was three months gone oh fuck it was halfway through the hellmouth scene and that bloody woman was singing and up it all came, all down her dress and all over the stage, bread and beer and all nicely warmed up and all spilt all over Johnny in his devil outfit, but of course you mustn’t laugh because then the harness cuts into you when you jiggle up and down, oh and the worst, Jenny, the worst is when you come on, it’s terrible, there you are, hanging up there trying to keep still during the sea ballet, and you can feel the blood trickling down your sea-green, and you think, how are you going to get them home to wash them, because he checks your baskets when you leave because of course so many of the girls try and sell their other tights and then wear the same pair for the first three scenes, you can’t really tell if they’re yellow or red anyway under those flower-girl outfits (I hate that fucking scene, red cotton roses, red silk and red wax and you have to kick the skirt forwards and up with every step, I don’t know how those poor girls managed in those days when they had to do it all day for a living) and there you are hanging up there dripping blood, it went all the way down onto her shoe. The funny thing of course is having to grin all the time no matter what’s happening, that’s all he ever says, Smile Jenny, smile, and when you’re having a break, or after, you walk home, and it’s not the feet, it’s not the shoulders, it’s the face, your face hurts, your lips crack with all that smiling, smiling all night, and I’m so embarrassed about my teeth, it’s awful, I don’t mind showing my bits but I do like to keep my lips closed, if you know what I mean, though of course the costumes don’t half show off your legs (of course, that’s what they’re paying for). I get so hysterical if I see some Johnny I fancy, they think you can’t see them, there you are hanging on a wire with the footlights right up your fucking frock and you get all hot and you see him talking to his friends about you and you think Oh God, don’t let there be a damp patch, he can see everything from down there and all for fucking four and six, it’s hysterical really, but you mustn’t start laughing of course because if one of you kicks off that’s it there you all are up there laughing and jiggling and Jenny drops her wand and it just makes me want to piss. I never have pissed up there, but I’d like to. Imagine that, a bunch of fairies hanging up there, Fairy of Piss, Fairy of Shite, Fairy of Bleeding, Fairy Up-It-Comes, Fairy of Hysterical Laughter, Fairy Fairy, Fairy Cunt, Fairy Fairy-Fucker, and as the centrepiece, with tears of real crystal, ladies and gentlemen, The Fairy of Public Weeping, that would be something to see, imagine us all up there in a row, each with her gimmick, that would give them something to grin at. I’d like to see that on the programme tonight. Tonight a Foreign Country with all its Scenes and Features, and at the Grand Finale, the Fairies will weep, Fairy of Come-Dripping-Out, Fairy of Excuse-Me (that’s the new girl, she must be desperate for work!) and, on the lead wire, the Fairy of Dead Children, an entirely new feature: glycerine tears, a headdress of India Pearls and white Paris Sequins, her dress stitched entirely with teardrops and the chiffon hand-dampened with Rose Water by The Girls, and in her left hand the Tear Wand, that drips when you squeeze, it doesn’t half do your wrist, and we all sing:
