Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, page 17
O behaved as if he had just caught Boy doing something filthy, but was also clearly using the interview as an excuse to excite himself.
To all of his questions, Boy answered only Yes Sir or No; but O continued with the questions as if he had given full answers.
‘Now, Boy (he said it as if the master addressed all the boys in the school this way, not as if it was an especial or personal name), I want to talk to you about the Facts of Life. Do you know about all this?
‘Do you know what two people do when they go to bed together? They fuck, Boy, that’s what they do, there’s no need to be embarrassed about that word is there, Boy?
‘Did you know that men go to bed with each other too, Boy?
‘And do you know what those men actually do to each other in bed?’
Boy kept on answering just Yes or No. O handed him a photograph.
‘Have you ever kissed a man like that Boy?
‘How many men do you know like that? You do know men like that, don’t you?
‘Are you like that? Are you sure you’re like that? How do you know? What are you going to do about it?’
Boy thought, but didn’t say, Surely I’ve got through that stage? Surely I’ve grown out of that?
This interview ended in Boy and O having sex on the living-room floor.
The third charade featured Boy in the role of a straight soldier out looking for trade. They needed a woman to make sense of this scenario, so Stella sat on his knee in a skirt and made him drink lager and smoke
Benson and Hedges until he felt sick, saying, You come home with me, love, I’ll get you something to eat, you look as though you need something nice and warm inside you. Stella played it like some terrible old queen, in a terrible fake Lancashire accent, but Boy was very moved anyway. At the end of this evening, having seen him in uniform, O cut off all of Boy’s hair, clipped it right short except for the handful at the front, and that is how Boy wore his hair from then on.
Boy knew, while he was being taught all this, that he was very lucky. He would say to himself out loud, so as to reassure himself that it was worth being this frightened this much of the time, I’m so lucky, so lucky, so lucky. And he knew that the wedding was due once he’d got through this week.
On the fourth night Boy had to play at being what Stella referred to as a small town queen (‘And God, I should know,’ she said). This time they smoked Marlboro and drank milky instant coffee; Stella had the television on all evening too. She put cushions covered in green dralon with cat hairs on them on the sofa, and put a copy of Dance with a Stranger on the coffee table. She said: ‘Have you read that book? I’ve read it twice. It’s really brilliant that book.’
For this charade she streaked Boy’s new hairstyle with ash-blond highlights, and dressed him in tight ice-blue jeans, two thin gold chains and a gold bracelet. She also asked O to bite Boy’s neck so that he had two conspicuous bruises. The costume was easy; but it took two hours to practise the correct eye movements; the blatant but also frightened stare across the living room at O. Stella also made Boy practise the lines, ‘What do you do then?’ and ‘Where are you from then?’ over and over again. Referring to O, who was sitting watching the television, she said: ‘Don’t mind him, that’s my friend Tom, he’s a bit stoned. Been working all day, haven’t you, love? Tom’s a chef at the club.’
Then she said confidentially to Boy: ‘He says he’s straight, but it’s alright, he won’t mind. He’s used to it.’
Then, having arranged this previously with O, Stella made love to Boy on the sofa with O watching. All the time they were doing it Stella kept on whispering in Boy’s ear, keeping up a constant flow of comment, Oh yes, yes, saying, that’s wonderful, that feels wonderful, ooh, kiss me, kiss me, moaning, oh darling, darling.
When they’d finished Stella said to Boy: ‘You know, you should never laugh. In this game you have to respect either everyone or no one and it had better be everyone. D’you want another coffee?’
For the fifth night O had written an actual script, and had typed it out. Despite Stella’s help – she kept on suggesting different characters off the television that Boy could try doing – Boy could not get the voice right. This was the script:
Of course in those days we actually were rich. We used to buy the flowers first, and then think about who to give them to. I remember you used to arrive late, and there’d be so many flowers already you didn’t even ask anybody to put them in water, you just left them right there on the hall table and went up. One boy I knew, he had this marvellous place right on Eaton Square, he always had to have white flowers, anything else and he wouldn’t have it in the house, and everyone would vie to bring the strangest white flowers you’d ever seen, things you didn’t even know existed, I mean I wasn’t about to turn up with twenty white roses, was I, anyway, you’d walk in, there’d be so many flowers, flowers for ever, and I said, Darling, did somebody die? It was flowers for days, and the drink, and the boys, darling, Guardsmen on duty in every room …
Boy could not do this voice, because he did not know what to think of this man.
On Thursday, they dressed Boy up as a black man. Stella made him up down to the bottom of the neck and up to the wrists and even made up his calves where they showed between the socks and suit trousers when he sat down. The costume was a shiny grey silk-mixture double-breasted suit, a seventy-two-pound cream silk shirt and a midnight-blue silk tie. A lizard skin strap on the watch; leather shoes and blue silk socks matching the tie. They made him take the trousers down; Stella made up his buttocks and his cock, and pushed it back into the pair of silk boxer shorts. She put three gold rings on each hand and gave him a bag of records bearing the label of a newly fashionable record store.
Of course Boy did not look like a black man at all. And neither O nor Stella had any precise ideas about how he should act or what he should say; but they took a polaroid of him anyway as they did with all these outfits.
All of these scenes were very private and we never knew about them until Stella spilt it all later (‘After all I did for that Boy,’ she said.) I think O knew that Stella would tell us all about it sooner or later; you see, that way he made sure that we were all party to Boy’s trials and humiliations, to his preparation for life in the city, their life. Boy knew as well, I think; he knew that when he next walked into The Bar we would all know, from Stella, just exactly what he had been through and what a fool he had made of himself for love (Well, that’s how Stella put it anyway). But you see O fixed it very nicely; Boy did it in private, but what he did in private was public knowledge.
As I said, this week of charades took place in O’s living room. The seventh night, however, did involve Boy in going out.
This last and hardest transformation required that Boy become a woman. Stella explained that she wasn’t quite sure what image to go for (she was lying; she knew exactly what she was doing, but was making Boy wait), but that she did know that she wanted to see Boy in a pair of sheer black tights, and perhaps her favourite silver charm bracelet. He took off all his clothes except his underwear and pulled on the tights, and put on the bracelet. ‘Terrible,’ said Stella.
‘“No, No, No,” they cried in unison,’ said Stella, ‘“Off with his hair!”’
Stella asked if he knew how to do it, and Boy badly wanted to say Yes, I can do it by myself, but what he said instead was No, so O and Stella put Boy in the bath of hot water they’d run for him, and Stella showed him how to use the razor properly, and then they sat on the side and talked, ignoring Boy, and Boy scraped and scraped until everything was smooth and the water was all red from where he’d cut himself on the backs of his knees and over the joints of his ankles and wrists. O sent Stella out of the bathroom. Boy stood up out of the bath of red water – he caught a glimpse of himself in the bathroom mirror, looking like a child again, hairless – and then like a child he stepped out of the bath and into the large white towel that O was holding up for him, and he let himself be wrapped and patted and powdered, and then and only then did O make him stand in front of the mirror and look at himself properly, a grown man with his lover standing behind him but looking just like a little boy, the forearms bare and pale, his belly, groin and thighs pure white again. O smiled at him in the mirror and lifted his hand and kissed it – Boy had even removed the hair from the backs of his hands and fingers.
Then O led Boy back into the living room where Stella had already smoked eight cigarettes and was listening, impatiently, to the Georgia Brown version of ‘As Long as He Needs Me’ for the fourth time in a row.
Stella did not consult Boy about what he wanted to wear; she’d already emptied her black binliner of drag out in a heap on the living room floor, and now she began to work fast, holding dresses up against Boy’s body, digging through the pile to find the right earrings, sticking pins into him in her haste (fast and furious, thought Boy), saying, turn round, lift your arms, keep them up, breathe in, bend over.
Stella knew what she was doing. The dressing up was in fact the easy bit; she made the best of Boy’s colouring and figure with expensive, fine black stockings and a cheap, short, tight, backless black dress from an Oxford Street store. High black shoes, red nails, red lips, pale powder, hair gelled right back like a shining skullcap, Stella’s best earrings and a quilted clutch bag for the cigarettes.
Then came the hard part. Stella explained that it was one thing to drag up on stage and another to walk down the street as a woman. Stella made Boy walk up and down the living-room carpet for eighty minutes while she worked on his walk. In fact Boy was very good at this; but Stella insisted that he was doing it wrong, that he was trying too hard, that if he walked like that they’d spot him the minute he walked out of the door. After eighty minutes she said she’d had enough and put Boy to the test. She told him to sit on the sofa, and then took his handbag and put it on the mantelpiece over the gas fire. She took her Silk Cut and her lighter from her own bag, sat down opposite Boy and very elaborately went to light a cigarette. At the climax of her gesture, she very deliberately dropped her lighter. She stopped herself (a held arabesque of wrist, lips, raised cigarette and raised eyebrow) and looked at Boy. Boy got up from the sofa, walked calmly over to Stella and picked up the lighter, remembering to bend at the knees with his knees together. Then he murmured quietly, Can I help? and flicked the lighter. It did not work, of course; Stella had earlier secreted a dud copy of her usual lighter in her bag specifically for the purpose of playing out this scene with props. Stella continued to hold her arabesque with the cigarette, leaning forward and still expecting a flame. Boy kept his nerve; he smiled again, rose, turned, walked across the room, got his bag, opened his bag, got out a book of matches from a fashionable restaurant which Stella had put in there earlier, tore off a match, lit it (none of these things are easily done with red-painted nails, with a short skirt and with a permanent yet natural smile), crossed the room with the lighted match, bent down and finally lit Stella’s cigarette. She inhaled gratefully and thanked him sweetly. Then Boy rose, turned one last time and walked back across the room to the sofa, conspicuously displaying his back in the low cut of the dress. That was, after all, why Stella had chosen it.
‘Impressive,’ said Stella. ‘One last thing; sit down.’
Boy did as he was told.
Stella sent O out of the room and closed the door, and then very quietly, and with great bitterness, and at great length, she described being on a night bus with a friend and seeing a man pull out a screwdriver and use it like a knife, bringing it down and pushing it in for no apparent reason, just with pure crude hatred, saying, while he did so, You cunt, you cunt. Then she filled her lungs with a single deep, sudden breath and in that one breath she called Boy all the names she herself had ever been called, beginning you cunt, you bitch, you stupid fucking bitch, you stupid queen, do you know what I would like to do to you, you stupid fucking queen? She repeated all the foulest and most humiliating insults that men and women had ever thrown at her. When this was done Stella was white-faced and exhausted. She said, I’ve taught you everything I know. Then she kissed Boy on both cheeks like a sister and invited O back into the room. He had dressed up too; he was wearing black tie, and a fake diamond ear stud which he would never have worn normally, and aftershave too. Stella called them a cab and O took Boy to a nightclub in the West End, which was much too expensive for them to have attended normally. No one in the club said anything, not because they could not see that Boy was in fact a man and not a woman, but because this strange couple looked so glamorous and so apparently unafraid (this was of course not true) that no one challenged them. Boy remembered all of Stella’s patiently recited and rehearsed etiquette. Smile at everyone and anyone, drink very slowly but steadily, spirits only or champagne, accept gestures such as a hand placed on the naked small of your back as compliments even if they are meant as questions. If someone asks you, ‘Are you on your own?’ you do not say, ‘Actually I’m with my boyfriend,’ you say, ‘I am hoping to meet someone later,’ and smile, and then look at the floor.
All night, Boy could feel every inch of his body. The air on the small of his back – the unzipped, plunging back of the dress was so low that he could feel the air just touching the cleft at the top of his buttocks. He could feel the clasp of his string of pearls (Stella’s parting gift as they had got into the mini-cab) resting just above his atlas vertebra.
When they got home, Older got undressed quickly and went to bed; he said to Boy, curtly, Clean yourself up and come to bed. It took Boy half an hour to get his make up off, rubbing the mascara into a big grey ring around his eyes, having to use both grease and soap till his skin was raw. He felt all the particular pains that you feel after a night in drag; the calves of his legs ached, his face aching too from all the smiling, the cuts on his legs hurt, his feet were almost numb with pain from the shoes.
When he crawled into bed O was asleep with his back turned, like a husband or a man who has worked all week. It was four in the morning, and Boy understood that this was the end of this particular charade.
The next night there was no costume, and so Boy thought that his trials were over. Only later in the night did he understand that on this night, as an epilogue to the week of lessons, the costume was to be nakedness. When they were both undressed, O took Boy in his arms and laid him down on the bed, and deliberately laid him so that Boy was lying on his back. Then O lay down beside him and laid his head on Boy’s chest as if it was wide, and warm and furry – he snuggled up to him; he did, in fact, what Boy usually did. And then Boy heard him say, as if O’s deeper voice was somehow coming out of his own body, for O was copying exactly the posture in which Boy liked to lie on O’s chest after Boy had come and before they went to sleep, heard him say, ‘Take care of me now, you take care of me.’ And Boy understood then that their courtship was nearly concluded, that they were almost there now.
And after all this dressing up was truly over, the next time they went out to The Bar, O said to Boy, Which outfit do you prefer? Or would you rather go just as yourself tonight?
When they did come back to The Bar, when they finally returned to the stage after this strange week in the dressing room, I asked Stella how it had gone. I wondered why they had been so private about it. Oh, she said, the bride mustn’t he seen in her dress, it’s unlucky. And I wondered why she’d given Boy such a hard time.
‘Oh I’m not sorry for that one. Not sorry at all darling.’ Stella pulled excessively hard on her Silk Cut. ‘She makes me cross sometimes, that one.’
I waited for the explanation of this remark; when Stella got cross you knew it was going to come out anyway. Stella was not someone to whom you said, How are you feeling? When Stella was feeling, she told you about it. This was the explanation:
‘You remember that boy I was seeing last year. That’s what I mean. It was the same with him. Firstly he was the best thing since sliced bread and he knew it. Secondly…’
Stella stubbed out her Silk Cut unnecessarily and angrily and lit another one straight away.
‘Secondly, you know when it was cabaret night and he did “Strangers in the Night” with Gary, I said to myself, wouldn’t you fucking know it, he can sing too. The body of Death and he can sing too. The body of Death. Montgomery Fucking Clift in a white fucking dinner jacket. And he’s clever. I thought to myself, that one won’t stay long; he’ll be off with someone with money. You’ll see. He won’t stay long in a place like this. You see someone with arms and a chest like that, and thighs, he was built like a fucking footballer, and you think – oh …’
Stella took a deep drag on her cigarette.
‘… oh he was so good in bed, girl. D’you know he used to make me think he was a sailor.’
I asked Stella, why a sailor in particular?
‘Oh, you know … girl in every port. No really, it was his eyes that got me. Eyes as blue as the ocean and there was I all ready to take a cruise, a proper sea queen, packed my frocks for that one I did, ticket booked, first class, all ready to strip off and dive in the pool I was. Eyes like a fucking swimming pool. It wasn’t just sex with him and me you know. You know what I mean?’
Of course I knew what Stella meant.
‘Still makes me mad,’ said Stella.
‘Mad about the Boy, listen to me,’ said Stella.
‘But what about these two, Stella, do you think these two will last?’
‘I don’t want to think about it.’
‘Well, you should think about it, you should, it does happen you know.’
‘Always the bridesmaid and never the fucking bride,’ said Stella.
Story of my fucking life, girl.
And if you, hearing the details, if you also are wondering why she had given Boy such a hard time, and why O had let her or even apparently paid her to (after all, you may ask, did Boy really need such a testing or strengthening time? He was after all nineteen and it was not as if he had just left home the week before …) Well, you have to remember how strange the times were. Dangerous, looking back, although I don’t remember anyone using that word at the time. You have to remember that we lived in a city in which, according to the latest figures, 63 per cent of the population did not think that people like us should exist. (These figures were of course all disputed.) 72 per cent of the population did not think that we should be allowed to express affection in public, although there was some disagreement amongst the researchers as to whether the word ‘express’ referred to the holding of hands, the exchange of glances, the exchanging of rings, the falling of tired head on a less tired shoulder, the shouted words, ‘I love you, I love you, My heart is a rose!’ (once heard echoing along a subway platform late at night), oral sex up against the railings, or simply one man standing on the doorstep and saying, ‘Goodbye, take care and I’ll see you on Tuesday then,’ while the other man walks away into the uncrowded (at 8.20 a.m.) suburban street. 82 per cent did not think that the names of men like us, or rather, ‘men like that’ should be read out at school assemblies, especially those involving younger children. 42 per cent didn’t even want to think about it. 32 per cent did not know what techniques they used when they were in bed together, but would have liked to watch if it could be arranged. 51 per cent said that honestly they would prefer it if they could simply vanish, just not be there. 27 per cent said they would have brought the knife down themselves, even on friends, colleagues and sons, but I have to say that I myself don’t really believe that this question was asked, or if it was asked they just made up these responses, I do not believe it, I think that’s just a way of selling papers to include that sort of detail in a story. You, of course, living in a rather different time or in different countries, will find all this hard to credit now, everything they went through, it all seems so elaborate, but anyway you get the point which is that O only had Boy’s best interest at heart when he was training him like this. I’ve always loved those adverts that say, Strict Tuition Given.
