Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, page 5
The man didn’t usually comment, but this time, after a pause, pouring himself another cup, he said: ‘Oh, I’ve seen that one. We saw it together. She’s just got him out of prison after making all that money and going through all that shit for him, he finally comes home, and all he wants to do is watch the match on the telly, and all she can think of to say is (and here he mimicked a heavy filmstar accent which actually was nothing like the actress in the film at all, because the woman in the film is an ordinary, decent, hardworking woman), “Oh dahlink, I ’ave missed you so much,” and then the first thing she does after waiting for him to come home for seven fucking years is to leave the fucking gas on while she’s making his coffee, and then of course she’s so tense that she just can’t wait for a fag, she lights up, there you go; bang. Silly cunt. It’s not my idea of a happy ending. D’you want more tea? I think I might go out today after I’ve had my bath.’
And Boy thought, Oh, I see, he’s thinking about his lover. He’s thinking about how if his lover comes to live here, then that’s not how the story will end. That’s not what he thinks would or should happen, the day his lover finally arrives. The day his lover finally comes home from that other city.
Boy thought about this reaction to the film all day, but in the end he found it unsatisfactory, both as a form of interpretation and as a form of enjoyment. What worried him was that the man was somehow rejecting the film, announcing that he didn’t think life was really like that.
Just to see what it would feel like, Boy tried hard to copy this attitude during the film he watched the next afternoon. He tried hard not to admire or approve of the heroine, tried to imagine that life was not like that really. He argued with her silently, pointing out that by any normal standards she was doing all the wrong things and was allowing her story to end badly or wrongly. When her father was being stern with her, and she hid her face from the camera in the pillow on the morning before her wedding, he thought of all the arguments that he would have used to persuade her to get up and face the situation. When, in well-cut white satin and glycerine tears, she sobbed, Oh, but Daddy, I do love him, I do love him, he still tried to reason with her; but then when he saw her hitching up the satin and running across the lawn, throwing off the veil, scattering the astonished wedding guests as she ran, and when he saw her jumping into a truck, not caring that she was getting petrol stains all over her broderie anglaise, jumping into a truck and not with the man they all expected her to love, but with the one she really loves, and then driving off with him in a cheap pickup truck to a motel in Wisconsin, shouting out, Goodbye Father, Goodbye Father! as she goes; well, when he saw her doing that then Boy could not bring himself to disapprove. He said to himself, But I do think life’s like that.
And that night of course in The Bar we were all saying, Oh god, when she jumps into the truck, how fabulous was that, it just makes you want to cheer; and Boy thought again, Well, that is how life is, that is how I feel, that is how I feel when I’m leaving the bar with my husband for the night, my husband-to-be, that’s just what I think when I’m getting into his car, Goodbye Father, Goodbye. (Of course, Boy would never have used that word, husband, that’s my word. But then, I’m old-fashioned, I mean, we used to talk like that all the time. What word do you use then?) The next day Boy thought about the film again, and while he still felt very approving of the woman in the film, Boy knew that the man he lived with would have disapproved very much of her whole attitude and the whole way her story had been told, would probably not even have stayed to watch the end of the film. All Boy could think of to explain this was that the man was older than he was, and that he actually had a husband in a sort of way, and not just for one night or a few nights, and so that had to be why he felt differently about the films he watched. Boy never thought that anything on the television was ever about anything except his own life.
Boy had dreams in which he spent all his money and most of his time shopping for and carrying home bulbs, seed packets, leafless vines and small, bare-branched trees. In these dreams he would never use a basket for the shopping, but would cradle the roots and bulbs in his bare arms. Back home, he dreamt, he filled the whole flat with buckets of earth, even filled soup dishes and the kettle and the wineglasses with soil, and spent hours watering them and moving them carefully around every day, carrying them from room to room so that they would be struck in turn by whatever sunshine came in through the different windows at different times of the day, making sure they were kept warm. He would be deeply moved and encouraged, in his dreams, even by the smallest and most ordinary bud; his nostrils got raw and caked with fine dirt as he knelt down and sniffed and sniffed to try and catch the first smell of green life. His favourite word, the one that he heard again and again in these dreams, was spring.
Did Boy ever ask himself why he didn’t dream about men, when he got home from The Bar – why he had instead these strange dreams of shoots, bulbs and roots; roots kept in the dark, waiting to flower, needing a gardener’s attention? After all, if you had asked him, Boy would probably have said, for the first time in his life, yes, thank you, I am very happy.
Week five
Every night when he was in The Bar, Boy wore his black shoes. He had bought them when he arrived in the city, and they were the only shoes he owned. They were good value, because they were in a style that he could wear anywhere and they were strong enough for all his walking and kept his feet from being bruised on the city pavements, for when you walk as much and as far as Boy did at that time you can hurt your feet badly. These shoes had stood him in good stead.
They had come in a good strong box, which Boy had kept.
The box was always somewhere on the floor by his bed, and was tied up with a bow, as if it was a precious parcel or a gift intended for a special person; the bow was tied from a length of scarlet nylon ribbon which Boy had seen in the dustbin outside a florist’s, and had stolen, and taken home and ironed, having sensed at once that its splendid colour made it suitable for the tying up of this very special box.
In the box Boy kept a few books and a lot of letters; apart from his clothes these were about the only things he had in the flat that were his own. The letters were written on several different kinds and colours of paper, airmail paper, headed notepaper from hotels in several different cities. Each was in an envelope; the envelopes all bore Boy’s name, and the addresses of the twelve different places in which Boy had briefly lived since he had arrived in the city, before he had managed to get this place where he was resident now. There were, however, no stamps on the envelopes and no postmarks. Some of the letters were in ballpoint, some in a big fat lazy hand in heavy black ink, only twenty-six words on the page, some typed (some well-typed, some mis-typed); but despite these differences, each letter began with the same phrase: My Dear Boy. The letters were all signed with different names, each in a different handwriting. Some appeared to be from famous historical figures; the signatures on these were Oscar, John A, Edmund, Edward Morgan, James. Others were signed with names of characters, either characters from films or works of fiction, or the kind of people that you meet in our kind of life in our kind of city, and they’re so large, or so strong, or so infamous, that you say of them, She’s a real character. These letters were signed Carla, Bette, Yvonne, Rose-Marie; one (on airmail paper and from an American city) was signed Love from all the Family, beneath which were four signatures: Mom, Dad, Eugenia and Auntie B. There was a set of letters tied up in a bundle with a violet silk ribbon and all written in the same ridiculous and now-faded violet ink; they were scented with old make-up (each one bore at the bottom of its last page a lipstick kiss in Nuits de Paris) and were on expensive and indeed pretentious notepaper as thin as an onion skin. These were all signed Fanny. They formed a sequence, dated from 1903 to 1927, detailing the changing fashions of that period – My dear, we never showed our legs like that. Might have got more trade if we did I suppose. The letters from 1915–18 were missing.
These letters were full of details of make-up, hair and gossip; advice on how to make the best of oneself when just beginning one’s career.
Some of the other letters in the box (the typed ones) were much less elegant, and seemed to have come from strangers; they contained advice of a different sort, instructions about where to get sex and how much to pay for it if necessary, often these were just plain filth like I’d like to do this to you and then I’d like to do that to you, be at the top of the park in your grey school trousers and I’ll show you what a real man can do for you. I’ll make you listen to the sound of your own voice saying, Yes, please, I want you to do it. ‘I’ll get you on your knees. I’ll get you so you won’t even recognise your own body but after we’ve done it you’ll be grateful to me that I made you do it and you’ll enjoy it and you’ll get better at it and one day you’ll thank me for doing this to you.
In some of the envelopes in Boy’s shoebox were photographs. Some of these were old portraits that Boy had bought in a street market early on a Sunday morning, wing collars and moustaches printed in sepia; some were cut from pornographic magazines or bodybuilding magazines (in colour); some were cut from newspapers (these in black and white). On the back or across the front of these photographs were signatures duplicated from the letters; John Addington Symonds, Baron Corvo, Robbie Ross, for Boy with kindest regards from Reggie Turner. There had been no attempt to make these signatures credible; the words ‘for my Dear and especial Boy, with affectionate regards from Mr Arthur Bloxam’ appeared across a faded nineteenth-century portrait; but they also appeared scrawled lavishly across a portrait of an eighteen-year-old boxer torn from the sports pages of a recent newspaper. A reproduction of the famous 1886 Sarony portrait of Oscar Wilde in New York had fuck you anytime, Denny written across it. A commercially produced greetings card, with a colour photograph of a handsome and well-muscled man blindfolded and tied to a pillar, had clumsily printed across it: You made me love you.
The photograph that Boy looked at most often and which he sometimes even left out of the box and kept on the floor beside his bed as he slept was one that looked like a photograph of Boy himself. It had the same dark hair, the same white skin and the same extraordinarily inviting eyes. But the face was framed by the stiff collar and strange beribboned cap that the Foot Regiment of the Scots Guards wore in 1915. The portrait had been taken against a painted canvas studio backdrop depicting a road winding across chalk hills beneath a summer sky; the stage property milestone against which the soldier had been posed, leaning, bore the inscription: to France. Many such photos were taken in 1915 and kept by wives, girlfriends and lovers as mementos of the men who went to Flanders. I never did find out if this was in fact some relation of Boy’s, his Grandfather perhaps, or whether the resemblance between the now-dead soldier and Boy was merely a coincidence. If it was, I don’t know why he kept it or what exactly it meant to him.
The box also contained letters which were hardly letters at all; small unsigned notes on pieces of paper torn from notebooks or the backs of envelopes. These just said, Darling, I’ll see you tonight, or Darling, it’s going to be alright, really it’s going to be alright, everything is going to be alright, everything is going to be alright.
On the rare nights that he was not in The Bar Boy would lay out all these papers in a circle on the floor around his bed (he had this affectation of keeping his bed, a mattress on the floor, in the centre of his small but almost empty room). He laid them out like they were a pack of cards spread out around him for a game of patience. He’d lie on his bed at three or four in the morning just looking at them with rapt concentration, not reading them, just laying them out, changing which one was next to which, as if determining some sequence or some relationship between the writers. He was making couples, choosing partners, arranging meetings in a cafe where they could all talk, all those men who never had had the chance to meet.
Sometimes he would lay out in a row the seven or eight letters from the seven or eight men who he would most like to meet and talk to when he got to heaven. He knew of course that he never could meet them, but he wanted so badly to talk to them that he would get out their letters and pictures from his box of papers and talk quietly to them anyway.
Boy did not keep in this box the letters that arrived once a week at his flat, regularly, on a Tuesday morning, letters which also began ‘Dear Boy’ or ‘My Dear Boy’, but which were all signed ‘Father’. Boy did not throw these letters away; he kept them all, and indeed read them not only on the day that they arrived but again and again during the week before the arrival of the next one, but he did not keep these letters in his box, and he did not reply to them either.
Six, seven and eight
The Bar was not just a place, but also a person; The Bar was Madame. Madame was there every night, she was The Bar and she was also the reason why so many of us went there all the time.
Madame had not always been Madame. I have seen photographs of her (looking, it must be admitted, not much younger than she did at the time in which this story is set), across which she has signed herself ‘Mademoiselle’, and sometimes ‘Miss’. In the days when it was briefly fashionable to be seen around with black people she had also been known as ‘Missy’, and she’d had a black lover then. And, since you asked, she once went for a policeman with her stilettoes as he tried to bundle a black man into a car outside a dance hall on the bottom of the Tottenham Court Road (derogatory remarks in that department were still more likely to earn a black eye than a black look in The Bar). That was after the war; during the war itself she had been known as just M, wherever she went. I think she must have seen a lot of things at that time which had made her the way she was, seen things in the blackout and in the underground stations. You still hear about it; the women fighting like cats to stay together, the couples making love in the park and up against walls; the uniform boys in the arms of the Soho queens, the Americans in Piccadilly. And she’d come out of all that and she’d opened her bar, at a time when there were hardly any. She had her reasons, is what I’m saying.
It was in memory of those days that she had given The Bar its first and now largely forgotten name, Babylon. And then after that it was The Mandrake Studios (I know the man who’s still got the nameplate, a brass nameplate it was, very discreet, like a private doctor’s). The very first film that ever had a room full of homosexuals and no one else, that was the name of the place where that scene took place, you see. And that was the film with the scene of the boy coming into the bar that I said I thought of when I saw Boy coming in sometimes.
Once or twice I have heard her begin to tell the story of those days to some young man, but then halfway through a sentence she would go white with anger, knock back her gin and go silent. Don’t talk to me about what it was like in those days, she would say. The truth is, she would say, I’m still looking forward to life beginning.
After all that, she’d been just ‘Madam’ for a while, which might have indicated that she was getting older or grander, except that she always looked just the same, never any older. That Madam, Gary used to say, she’s been forty for as long as we’ve known her. And she clearly intended to stay that way.
And then at a certain point she felt, and we felt, that Madam wasn’t quite enough; and so just now, anyway, she was known as Madame, and no one in The Bar ever addressed her as anything else.
Madame was our constant; against the fact that she never changed her style or her outfit (it was always the same dress, every night) you could measure the changes in all the other faces and bodies that you spent the night scrutinising – faces subtly altered by a recent bitterness or passion, a body sagging under the pressure of losing a partner or made alert by the proximity of a new or potential one. In the centre of all these changes, supervising them and sitting straight-backed above them on her high stool, was always Madame, the central figure in the composition of whatever new tableaux we rearranged ourselves into. Madame, with Madame’s Waterford crystal tumbler always just at the same place on the bar; Madame, in position, on guard, ruling the night. Do you know what that meant, and means, to have someone who was there every night like that? Sometimes I wonder that she didn’t collapse under the sheer weight of how much we needed her, of how unreasonably we all admired and needed her.
When she had opened The Bar, Madame had kept up the costume in which she’d worked when she was just an entertainer in other people’s places – she’d worked in them all. It was this outfit which made her age so hard to determine. The dress (the dress, because as I said she wore it every night) was full length. It left her back and her strong arms bare (she powdered her arms white) and it was close-fitting everywhere, showing off her large hips and her large breasts. It was white, very classic, with lots of silver in the brocade and lots of sequins and real crystal beading. The effect was very Palladium, very 1957, I used to think. But I’ve seen pictures of Holiday in a beaded sheath just like that, taken well before the war, and publicity shots of some of those French singers or chanteuses coming down staircases in just the same sort of thing even earlier in the century. Crystal beading, brilliants, feathers – or plumes, really – that was the look: Madame often wore feathers in one way or another, a marabou-trimmed cape, or a fan, a real osprey if she was feeling very upmarket. One hundred and fifty years of glamour sitting on a stool right before your very eyes, that’s what she was. And the face didn’t date either. Madame’s hair was dead black, scraped back like a dancer’s in the daytime and at night done up in coils with big silver pins. Every night she greased her face, whited everything out and redrew it just as she had always done; a heavy coat of pale powder, black mascara, black eyeliner, heavily pencilled black eyebrows, and then, finally, her famous scarlet lips, always perfect, always done in the same shade, Rouge Extreme. It never changed.
