Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, page 2
And if you still can’t quite see him, and this is not your ideal Boy at all, then I’m sorry. Perhaps you think that Boy does not sound too beautiful to you, by which you mean he does not sound your type. Well, I have to say that much of the impact of this story depends upon your being able to see and think of Boy as beautiful, admirable and even adorable in the true senses of those difficult and dangerous but nonetheless precious and necessary words; I suggest therefore that you amend my descriptions of Boy and his lover – but I anticipate myself, that was not to be for several weeks yet; that ‘Great Romance of Our Times’, as it became known amongst us, had not yet begun, its theme tune had not yet been composed on Gary’s piano, its scenario was not yet subject of our daily gossip and speculation, we were not yet auditioning for a place in the credits – The Friend, The Admirer, Blond Man in Bar, Second Guest at Dinner Party. But do go back, and amend my description of Boy so that he is, is some way, if you see what I mean, your type. Make him fit the bill; imagine for him the attributes that you require. I don’t mean that you have to imagine him as your lover or prospective lover; this story does not require such strict identification, and I don’t see that any story does. After all, just look round any bar and you’ll see that everybody there, myself included (you too if it’s your kind of bar), has in their time been both The Boy and The Older Man, both Banker and Domestic, Ingenue and Other Woman, booted Prince and stirrup-holding Groom – but I don’t mean either that you should have complete licence to make him look just how you wish; I don’t want to think of anyone hearing this story and grinning and thinking of Boy as some permanently, conveniently smiling blue-eyed blond, because he was not that in any way and that is not what he meant to us. For instance, don’t make him shorter than you are, so that his eyes must always be looking up at you whenever you think of him. You might surprise yourself one night by wanting to feel his arm around your shoulder. You might want that to happen one night. And I would ask you, whatever changes you make, please keep him strong, as strong as he was. When I think about it I’m not sure it makes any important difference how you imagine he looks, I mean who am I to say whether this Boy you are seeing has blond hair or dark; but I am sure that it does matter what he means to you. Keep him strong, keep him young, and, whatever his colouring, keep him gorgeous. I apologise if this description of Boy sounds to you like some fantasy and not a real person, a real young man; and worse still, if this looks like a photograph from that kind of magazine which you wouldn’t even buy, let alone be seen reading in public, on public transport, for instance. But the truth is, if you had ever seen this young man, naked or clothed (and I have see him both, and halfway in between), then you would admit to the accuracy of what I’ve said. There are such men in this city, and even to see them, never mind to touch them or have them kiss you, or see them just before dawn, or to have them as one of your dear friends, is one of the great pleasures of our life, and it is commoner than most people think. In the part of town where I live I see strangers who I would call truly beautiful at least once a day.
Boy was truly beautiful, when he came to us. I can see him now standing there in the door.
I have this postcard depicting an allegorical figure of Strength. He is naked like a statue, with one knee bent and the other leg straight. He has strong, agile and indeed superb hands; in the palm of his raised, right hand he holds out to you a miniature city, complete with dome, bridges and towers, the freedom of which he is offering you and which he has promised to protect. Now place around the head of this statue angels; place in his left hand a sword; and light in his realistically enamelled eyes a welcome and a promise such as I had never, never in all my years seen. On this figure depends the rest of our story; it is on those white shoulders that all our hopes rest. He is the most beautiful of us all. It is at his feet that we throw ourselves like the bound figures which form the pedestal of this statue (one captive looks upward with adoring eyes). It is him who will attend our funerals; it is him who will be strong when we are not.
Actually, I am not sure that I was there on that night of his arrival, and I don’t claim to remember all the details or to have been as impressed by his appearance, framed in the doorway, as some people I drink with do; I think they just want to talk about their witnessing his first appearance that way – as if he was an angel or something extraordinary – because of what went on to happen later. But I don’t say that doesn’t make sense. I’m sure you have men you think of in that way too, people you see from a distance and you think they are angels, or at least heroes. I think that’s a proper feeling. But anyway, one day he found himself walking in our street, which was different to how it is now, because not only was The Bar there, which as you know is gone now, but also there were different kinds of people living in that part of town then. If someone was looking for The Bar in those days – because there was no name written up or sign for it, no lights at all, and not even a number on the door, Madame liked to keep it that way even when she didn’t have to any more – I mean when she opened up we may all have been in a sort of hiding, and not many people knew about The Bar and our life there, but it wasn’t that way later, and now you know we can have lights and advertising and you see boys queueing up outside every night, very public, and I like to see that – but in those days, in those days if somebody arranged to meet you for a date there, and it was their first time and they weren’t sure how to find us, you’d joke with them, and you’d say, well, first there is a wedding, and then there’s a death, and there’s the news, and then there’s us; meaning, first there’s the shop with the flowers, the real ones, and next door to that is the undertaker’s with the fake flowers in the window, china, all dusty; and then the newsagent’s and magazine shop, and then right next door to that is The Bar. You can’t miss it.
The first week
This is how he came to us.
Boy was walking down the street. Our street, though he didn’t know that yet. And his head was spinning from walking so far; he walked everywhere, and though he stopped to eat every day when he was on one of these journeys of his he did not I expect eat especially properly. He was worn out. Worn out with his own personal brand of window shopping; all that staring and never buying anything, all those shop windows, all those men to stare at and not dare follow, as if there was indeed a sheet of plate glass between him and them. And worn out with all that thinking, thinking all day with no one to talk to, and thinking because there was no one to talk to. No one whose advice he could ask. Some days he would follow a man, a man he’d just seen in the street, for minutes or for hours, thinking he would go up to him and ask him if he knew the way. I can remember doing that in my own time. Thinking that maybe this man was the right man, that maybe it was him I should ask him for directions, him who would take me home or wherever it was I was trying to get to. Boy was like that, he was hoping that somebody would take him to the place where everybody else was. Or at least tell him how to get there, or give him the money to get in when he did get there, or at least lend him a map with a cross marked on it, or give him an address.
But he never did ask any man for directions; he walked and he walked. In fact, when Boy first came to us he was at the point of exhaustion. This is partly I suppose what made us seem like a destination to him; he was in that simple sense ready to arrive, ready to get somewhere and rest there for the night.
When he arrived it was at a very particular time of day. The actual day’s business of shopping was over; for everybody else in the city it looked to Boy like it was time to go home, spent up and carrying bags full of things. The public world was closing down and everybody was going home; it was five o’clock. But for the kind of shopping that Boy was doing there was no five o’clock, there was no closing time.
To reach us, as I have said, Boy had to walk past three shops with windows. The first two were closed already, but Boy looked in the windows anyway; when he was out journeying the whole point was to stop and look at everything. The florist was closed, and they’d put the fresh stock away, so that when Boy looked in through the first window the flowers he saw were of silk; all artificial, but so good that they were better and fresher than the real thing, and certainly more expensive. Carefully arranged sprays and spires of sweet pea and mignonette, tiger lilies and lily of the valley, all in silk, wedding flowers with lots of ribbon in white and pink and pale blue, confetti colours. Next door Boy saw, laid out on the floor of a darkened and otherwise empty shop, a selection of flowers for graves. There were small clumps of purple china roses in the continental style, heavy and sharp enough to be used as weapons; wreaths of laurel, and hellebore flowers in white plastic with glittered stamens. Each arrangement had a blank label or card prominently attached to it. In the next window Boy saw a wall of magazines and papers (in eighteen different languages, including Turkish and black English), as carefully arranged as any display of flowers. This shop was still open, but Boy stayed outside, looking at the window display. In the top right-hand corner of the window was a single magazine whose cover displayed a naked man instead of a naked woman or a smiling mother. Boy stood outside the window and imagined the things he might see inside this magazine, should he ever take it down off the high shelf and open it, perhaps in the privacy of his room or perhaps right there on the street at five o’clock. He imagined small, cheaply staged pictures of sexual tortures involving ropes and wires – the kind of things which Boy had not yet done. He imagined a full-page, black and white photo of two bare-chested men (their chests shaved), photographed in daylight, walking down the street, gazing squarely at the camera, holding hands, one of them holding an Alsatian straining at a leather leash. He also imagined men photographed in colour, sprawled alone or holding each other, doing extraordinary things but in ordinary rooms, living rooms; doing things on sofas, on sheepskin rugs, stretched across a coffee table. He imagined the personal messages which appear in the back pages (usually on cheaper paper, and often coloured a dull pale yellow or pink) of such magazines, and he imagined writing replies to these messages, imagined exactly what he would say, even imagined meeting some of these men. And then (as he stood and stared through the window at the magazine) Boy imagined sleeping with these men, actually sleeping, sharing a bed with them for the night. And then Boy could imagine having a cup of coffee with them in the morning, but he couldn’t imagine anything else after that.
And now Boy was truly tired, end of the day tired, dog tired.
He wished that the geography of the city was different. Often at this time of day, when he felt the day’s journey should be ending or reaching a destination, but knowing that it was not, knowing that what he was looking for probably happened after everybody else had gone home, he wished that he could end his days walking at the edge of a sea or a lake so big that you couldn’t see its other shore. He wanted very much to walk out onto a pier – those constructions built so that people who have come to the sea to get away from their place of work can, for a moment, almost leave their working life behind, can go to the very edge of their week’s holiday and then dream of going further. Constructions built so that people who cannot afford to leave or sail away can feel that they are almost leaving. Boy would have been happiest to stand on the end of a pier from which big ships, real proper ocean ships, embarked; but he would have settled for just an ordinary pier, a small one – so long as it was big enough for him to walk away from the city, into the wind, turn his back on everything and stand there looking west at an empty sea, or a far horizon, and think about America, or somewhere.
And next door to the window full of magazines was not a window, but a black door.
Over the doorway was a small plaque. It said, In this house (and the ceramic of the plaque had broken and the name was missing) stayed on his first visit to the city, and it was here that he wrote the opening pages of his greatest work. There was no name painted up over the door. We just left it blank most of the time, because The Bar was always changing its name. It’s had about ten or twelve names since I’ve been going there, though some of them were just for one night, just for a party or celebration, and even then the name was never written up anywhere, you just had to know that tonight it was The Lily Pond, or The Jewel Box, The Gigolo, The Hustler, The Place (no, I think that was somewhere else), Grave Charges (I loved that one) – or The You Know You Like It, I remember that year especially. Just now we didn’t have any name for it at all, and it was just The Bar, like it always was, the bar.
There were three bells by the side of the door, and these did have names written by them. It was as if these were the names of tenants or people who lived upstairs, but in fact no one lived upstairs except Madame. The bells didn’t work and I don’t know who put the names there, they’ve just always been there. The first bell was labelled San Francisco; the second El Dorado; and the third Timbuctoo. Underneath the third bell someone had also written, using a biro on the paint of the wall, ETIOPHIA. Also there was a cluster of messages on small adhesive labels, like the ones Boy had seen stuck in phone boxes near the railway station, and he bent down to look and read all of these. They said: ‘Big, strong man gives sense of direction in life’ ‘Boy seeks Angel of Death’ ‘Blond boy seeks older man with Fast Car for mutually satisfactory crash’. One of these labels or messages was dated, and it said, ‘Thursday afternoon August 12th, Kevin Come back Darling’.
This doorway also had a display of flowers arranged behind glass. On the wall to the right of the door was a small illuminated case with the label ‘Appearing this week’, and below that a selection of coloured photographs was pinned to a board covered in cheap red plush. The pictures, however, didn’t seem to be of artistes of any kind; they were just of anonymous, handsome young men, the sort of photographs that Boy had seen in barber’s windows showing the kinds of haircut you could get. The colours were a bit faded and it looked like no one had rearranged or replaced the pictures in the case for some time.
The door was shut, locked in fact. Boy could see the scuff marks around the doorhandle where other men (Boy knew it couldn’t be people, he just knew it was men) had opened and closed it. On the black paint of the door was chalked a message: eleven o’clock.
The street was empty. Boy had an erection. He promised himself that he would come back later no matter how tired he was.
I can see that people must have thought we were being very mysterious then, that we were a bit of a mystery, that The Bar was a very strange place; but it never seemed that way to us. To us, it was as normal as home.
And because it was so normal to us, it is very strange now trying to describe it to you. Giving an account of it like this makes me feel as though you’re asking me to account for it, explain it for you. Explain our lives there – as if they needed explaining, and the whole point was that when you walked in the door of The Bar you knew you didn’t have to explain anything to anyone who was there, not anyone.
Our lives there were promiscuous, I can say that for a start. And though that was where I felt most private often, it was a very private place, you see, even at its busiest, and it was busy, I mean it wasn’t small and quiet, I don’t want you to think that, it was very public. A very public kind of life. ‘Promiscuous, public and semi-professional’, it said in one of Madame’s books about the lives of the great courtesans, and I think that’s about it. Some of us were great courtesans very definitely, certainly Stella sitting on her stool at the bar, you’d think she was in pearls the way she sat there. But even the less dedicated of us, public and semi-professional, I think you could say that of us all really. And I will say that myself I was very promiscuous sexually, I will say that because I think a lot of people want to leave that out of the story, well, not me thank you very much.
But, very strange it must have seemed, certainly the first time you walked in. For instance you had to know the names, the cast list. On a good night you’d have Ron Ackroyd; Terry and Bobby (and Bobby’s Mother); Sandy and Eddie; Big Janet (she was always in); That Awful Hugh Hapsley; Teddy, Tiny, Leaf, Minty, Winter; Madge, also known as The Troll; Miss Public House; and, of course, Mr Mortimer. Stella I’ve mentioned; Stella I was her full title, she would be sitting at the bar, and then later, Stella II would be sitting there beside her. I shan’t be telling you all about these men, but it does give you some idea, the way we were, the chorus, the bit players in this romance which is what I really want to tell you about.
And there was the way of talking, as well. Nobody talked like that all the time, of course, but you have to imagine what sort of an evening it was when all these things were said, what was really being talked about when we talked like that.
Stella (to Noel, who looked like an air steward, but wasn’t): ‘Will you do us a favour? Come over ’ere and sit on my face and go to sleep.’
Stella again: ‘Good evening, Sean. Remember what I told you; the first lesson’s free.’
Sandy and Eddie at two in the morning, surveying the evening’s crowd and explaining who was who to a newcomer: ‘You see that one in the white vest, that’s his affair in the denim. They’ve been together for fourteen years, they met at school. And you tell me, how fabulous is that.’
Sandy, at three in the morning, watching Boy: ‘If I was built like that I wouldn’t wait until three o’clock to take my shirt off.’
(pause with music)
‘In fact I don’t think I’d even wear a shirt.’
(longer pause)
Eddie, lighting a cigarette: ‘I wouldn’t even buy shirts.’
Greta – Greta was a cook. She used to show you a collection of photographs which she kept in her wallet as if they were family photographs, but in fact these pictures were all pictures of men’s cocks, she used to make them stop on the way home at the photo booth in the entrance to the station, she’d make them stand on the stool with their trousers down, she never got caught – Greta, on seeing me leave with an especially handsome man: ‘I hope you’re on the pill.’
