Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, page 8
If only Boy had known, there was lots more where that came from; there was lots of advice which Madame might have given him, but didn’t. When she was in her room, when The Bar was closed, she had a recurring fantasy in which Boy’s black hair was long enough to reach down to his waist. She would imagine calling him up to her room every night before he went home to bed with a man, and taking her silver hairbrush from her desk and brushing his hair out like a daughter’s, one hundred strokes every night. Madame imagined that while she was doing this to Boy she would tell him everything she knew, she would talk to him quietly each night whilst brushing his hair before bedtime. She would tell him where to place the pillow under your back, how to put on a condom for someone else, how to dry tears quickly, how not to be afraid, how to go down, how to let go of someone because it’s not the end of the world. How money is the most important thing. What to take with you when he leaves you.
She wanted to rehearse all her wisdom out loud to someone so that she could find out if she still believed it herself.
Eleven
We knew that something was about to happen. We knew that something was going on, because it was in this week that Madame changed her name.
She had in fact been referred to privately as ‘The Mother of Us All’ for some time. But now she announced that she wished this title to be publicly used. She made the announcement, of course, from the stage.
‘The recent change from Madam to Madame,’ she said, ‘though it has doubtless raised the tone and general tenor of proceedings in this low and benighted place, has not quite succeeded in erasing the traces of squalor and indeed sleaze which cling to that title in the popular or gutter imagination whenever it is applied to a hardworking woman. We are, after all, no longer in the Dark Ages. I am not, after all,’ she said, looking around her domain with a distinct smile, ‘running a house of ill repute, which is what I fear the present title of Madame seems to suggest, along with bead curtains, red velvet plush love seats, champagne buckets and other such fittings and accoutrements which are not our style at all these days. I should hate anyone to think that I am,’ she said, looking around her at us all and smiling again, ‘that I am in the business of catering exclusively for prostitutes, tarts, working girls, slags, bitches, cunts, whores, studs, pimps, rent boys, butches, nellies, queens, masseurs, escorts, one-night stands, ex-models, ex-policemen, ex-Armed Forces, ex-boxers, security guards, tennis instructors, so-called businessmen, tourists and those poor unfortunates who simply come here to pass the time and meanwhile do some shopping; oh, no, let it never be said!
Bearing this in mind, the title of Madame will no longer do. It is too redolent of rooms upstairs and days gone by. I have decided that as from tonight I will be reborn under a different star,’ and here she gestured upwards to the constellation over her head, ‘I will be rechristened, I will come down those stairs tomorrow night fresh to the world and glistening with a new name; from now on, you will kindly refer to me, both to my sainted face and behind my back, as Mother. Thank you, and Goodnight.’
And so from then on, when you left the Bar, it was ‘Goodnight, Mother’, ‘Goodnight, Mother’, from all the Boys.
The last week
In the final days before they met, Mother’s face began to harden when she sat and watched Boy and O, as if she was trying to push them together by sheer force of will power. Mother, she who had seen so much, wanted one last triumph; one final casting coup. When she spent all night every night watching her clientele, her boys, it was for this; she was waiting for her chosen ones, the last of her proteges, her perfect couple, her two to see her through the dark times. This time, she said under her breath, I want to see them fucking perfect. She added another scene to her fantasy of brushing out Boy’s long black hair. Now she had both men in her room upstairs; she had them standing naked before her. Taking in every inch of their bodies, she said, looking from one to the other, she said, in her famously well-timed drawl, That’s just how I want you. You two are so (pause) fucking (pause) perfect (drag on the cigarette). This fantasy was so vivid to her that she would even rehearse this line out loud, looking at herself in her mirror as she smoked the last cigarette of the night, after she’d taken her face off, after all the noise was over and we’d all gone home.
Maybe she felt that if she couldn’t do it now, she would never do it; maybe that was why her face hardened as she watched them, still apart, and imagined them, together.
And indeed she left it to the very last possible moment; she almost missed her chance.
Let me describe how it was, exactly.
The fact is, as he later told Boy, O almost quit The Bar that week. He almost gave up on us. It was on the Thursday, the very night before he met Boy. It didn’t show, of course; he showed very little, was always still and dark-eyed and dark-browed. The way he explained it to Boy, it was one of those moments of giving up, one of those moments when you throw away your still half-full packet of cigarettes as you walk home in the drizzle and you say out loud, Well, that is it, that is the last time. Or like the time when you say, right out loud, That’s it, I could have been at home sleeping.
All that we saw on that Thursday night was O going home on his own once more; though if we had watched closely we would have seen that he simply left his stool and did not say Goodnight, Mother. And we would have seen how her eyes followed him to the door.
But we didn’t see any of that; we didn’t notice that, as O later put it, his eyes weren’t just dark that night but almost blinded, blinded with grief. He did not know why he suddenly felt this way; he was not angry with himself, or with us, and he was not crying. It was just that suddenly he felt he could not look up, that he couldn’t, as he put it, either stand it any longer, or stand any longer. He left The Bar in a hurry, and with his eyes cast right down.
All he saw was the street under his feet; the escalator at the station suddenly yawning under him; the signs in yellow paint saying: ‘DANGER’.
I should say here that O was a grown man, a strong and handsome man. These were not the bad nerves of the lost or the young; O was well used to the life of the city at night. It is just that some days, and at some times, often in the early hours of the morning, sometimes this is what it feels like; sometimes it gets me too. It often gets me when I am in a high building or can look down over the city, or sometimes at a station when there is another journey to begin. Sometimes the tears come for no reason (by which phrase we mean that someone is not crying for a particular reason, for something or someone in particular, but that they are crying for everything). And when the tears come like that I think it is better to retreat, to go home, to go to sleep, to leave wherever you are and try to just sleep.
That was O’s instinct on this occasion. He was leaving, giving up, going home. Even though it was only ten o’clock.
He did not look up until he was right down in the station; and it was a sound that made him look up.
For some reason there was almost no one else there.
The poster at the end of the tunnel was so large and so perfectly lit that it seemed to O, looking up at it suddenly, that the tunnel did not end in a wall, in fact did not end at all, but led to the green fields of France. Green fields through which a road wound, not tiled like the tunnel floor but just as white (the deep white dust of chalk hills in August) so that the tunnel floor seemed to carry on and meander into this summer landscape. Across the perfect sky hung, inexplicably, the words ‘Don’t You Just Wish?’ There seemed to be some other words at the bottom of the landscape, but O could not make these out.
The sound that had made O look up came from a man who was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall of the tunnel, looking not much like a beggar, but just someone worn out; perhaps he had collapsed there and was resting. But he was singing; people only do that either if they are drunk or if they are trying to collect some money, in which case they will sing and sing all day, having no other means of getting it. So O decided that he looked like a beggar after all.
O also thought, because of the man’s posture, and the huge overcoat in which he was wrapped, that he looked like a queen in a tragedy which O had seen, who in a terrible moment of despair had sat down, not on a throne or on the marble palace steps, but just right there on the floor. She had gathered her robes around her, sunk to the ground and then had lifted her hand to her face (so painfully it looked as though her wrist was broken) with exactly the same gesture with which this man now covered his eyes.
O remembered that the line which had accompanied this action was O, intolerable.
O stopped to watch. And he was sure that the man was begging now, for he was holding out his other hand with the palm upwards; except that then O thought that maybe the gesture had another meaning, maybe the man was extending his hand in the hope that some passerby might take it, grasp it firmly and pull him to his feet.
He was singing quietly and hoarsely; unintelligibly. If he was begging, he seemed hardly to expect that anyone would give him money for making such a noise. It was almost as if he had chosen this quiet tunnel in a relatively quiet station so that he could sing to himself undisturbed, carry on singing without having to admit to himself that this was a hopeless task, that he wasn’t going to get anything.
O listened. As he listened he could smell the man; and he could hear that the song was almost turning into a sob. Sobbing and singing both come from the diaphragm.
He could see that the singer wasn’t especially old or badly dressed under the coat.
O stared, he didn’t know for how long, at him and his outstretched hand, wondering whether to grasp it, fill it with change, or knock it away; and then he looked up, because he heard his train coming and also because he felt the hot wind on his face. When he looked up he saw two other people in the tunnel with him. He looked up and he saw two people walking or appearing to walk away from him down the white road of the tunnel and out across the green hills. He had not heard them pass him; he had been too intent on watching the singer. The woman was in black stilettoes, walking slowly and evidently in pain – as if she had walked into the country in inappropriate shoes and was blistered and had a long way to go, as if this hot summer wind from the chalk hills was almost too much for her. And in each hand she had two heavy plastic carrier bags of shopping; they cut into her hands and threatened to split. They were evidently too heavy for her to carry. She put two of the bags down for a rest, and used her free hand to push her dyed black hair back from her eyes. Straggling behind her was a small child, about four or five, O couldn’t see what sex the child was. Without meaning to, O found himself staring at them too. The Mother waited for the straggling child to catch up with her, and then she bent down, shouted something to it right up close against its face, and then hit it hard across the face with the back of her right hand. The child sat down, more from surprise than the force of the blow; the woman picked up the shopping bags and walked on; she knew that she was in danger of missing the train now. She was shouting, Come on, fucking come on.
The bags were of that thinner kind of plastic they use for the bags that they give away at the supermarket, the free ones; and now one of the bags in her right hand split and she just stood there helpless to stop them as three cans fell out and rolled across the concrete. She was stuck there with the bags, she couldn’t leave them to go and pick the child up. All she could do was raise her voice higher, the train was coming in now, and she screamed at the child, screamed at him, Come on, Johnny, fucking come on.
The child didn’t move, and just sat there looking at her as if astonished.
And the child didn’t cry.
The woman stood there with the bags at her feet and said out loud, to no one, not to O, not to the child, not to the singer, just stood there and threw her head back and stood there, framed against the blue sky and green hills of France, with the train leaving now, she screamed out loud, over and over, Oh fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
And at that moment the man who was singing turned his song into the sob it had always almost been; the stretched note was broken by the efforts of his strained, knotted stomach into a series of high, senseless yelps. His begging hand was still outstretched but his other hand now fell from his face so that O could see his gasping mouth labouring with the hard, near-fainting breath of extreme grief. O was horrified to see that the man was actually crying.
The woman had left the bags and O saw she was walking back to the child, he heard her heels, but O did not stay to see what she did to the child (and so he did not see her pick the child up in her arms and hold him tight); he turned quickly, and left the station as fast as he could.
Like the three kings in the story, O went home another way, feeling that in some way he had just been warned about something.
He got himself back to his flat and he turned the lights on in every room. He stood in the middle of the living room and took off all his clothes, leaving them on the floor where they fell; then he inspected his naked body, front, back and sides, in the full-length mirror that he had on his living-room wall. This was a variation on the routine he would put himself through every time after a man he had just slept with had left the flat; he would check his body for scratches, bruises and teeth marks. On this night he did not then go straight to bed. He walked into the brightly-lit kitchen, opened the fridge, took out a bottle of pure water and opened it. He ran a glass under the kitchen tap, then returned to the living room and, looking at himself in the full-length mirror all the while, stood there naked, shaking violently as if with cold, and poured himself and drank three glasses of water without stopping. Then he put the bottle and the wet glass down on the floor, walked into the bathroom and turned both the taps in the bath on full. Then he walked into his bedroom and sat on the edge of his bed with his head bowed while the bath filled, breathing deeply. While he waited for the bath to fill he went through the whole scene again in his head and congratulated himself for staying so calm. He began to speak out loud over the sound of the copious running water; he congratulated himself for not crying in public, he congratulated himself for not getting hurt, for not letting himself be assaulted on the way home, for not letting anyone corner him or get him down on the floor or up against a wall but for keeping walking instead. Then he went back to the bathroom and turned off the taps. He waited until the surface of the water in the bath became quite still, like a pool, like a swimming pool before the very first swimmer enters it early in the morning, and then with one quick move climbed in and lay right under the water with his eyes closed. The water had in fact run cold from both taps because O had not had the heating on that evening, but he did not notice. He held his breath under the water; then climbed out again (leaving the bath full) and walked dripping back into his bedroom. There he crawled naked and dripping and wet-haired into his bed and pulled the sheets and the duvet tight around him. He was not cold, because his body, despite the water, was burning and almost feverish. He went quickly to sleep with the lights still all on, his body hot and rigid, curled up into a tight ball, and his eyes screwed up tight.
O did not talk in his sleep that night; all his dreams were silent films about shooting people. He had his own gun and he killed four men and two women, shot people for looking at him, never mind saying anything, shot them like on television, with no blood, no noise and no justice.
The next day, which was the Friday, O didn’t work and he didn’t eat; he woke up late, stayed in bed until it was dark, got up at nine and dressed in his white shirt just like always and he went to The Bar looking for his heart’s desire one very last time, and that was the night that he met Boy.
Of course I didn’t know at the time that this was to have been O’s last night in The Bar; and I knew that it wasn’t Boy’s first visit to The Bar, I mean he did not see O the very day he walked in, their eyes did not meet across the bar on that very first night. But let me say here that that was just how it looked to me at the time; that there was a nice logic to it, that Boy’s beginning matched O’s ending, that Boy’s first night was O’s last, or it certainly would have been his last if Boy had not fallen into his arms.
They were not expecting anything is what I’m trying to say. It was an insignificant moment, no one there would have thought that it was to be the first movement in such a great drama, not only for them but also for those watching.
And if it was so insignificant then why can I still see that first kiss even now? Why am I still able to describe it? Why are they so special to me, these two, why do I remember that one kiss out of all the other romances I knew about there in that place on that particular Friday evening, why do I remember it, do I actually remember it all or just want to?
This is how it happened. They didn’t chat each other up, because Boy still didn’t know what to say half the time, and O didn’t want to say anything, not any more, he had said too much to too many men. It was three or four a.m. and the music was very slow; and usually at that time Boy would have gone, or have found someone, or have been found by someone. But on this night he was making one last move through the crowded bar, and at that exact moment O was making his way to the door. And they passed. And because the Bar was still crowded for some reason they were literally pushed together. And the contact turned into an embrace without either of them looking at the other or talking, they just put their arms around each other. And began to dance; the embrace turned into a dance. There was no kissing yet, though Boy did at once lay his head on O’s shoulder. And then O placed his right hand in the small of Boy’s back and put his left hand up behind Boy’s head and he kissed him right there and then. That was the start of it.
No one noticed, or seemed to notice. There was after all nothing remarkable about seeing two men kiss in that way at that time of the night. But I looked at Mother as they were kissing and she had seen all right. She must have been watching because she smiled, or rather tried not to smile too obviously – she tried to conceal her pleasure in witnessing the beginning of her triumph by pressing her lips together, but the smile came out anyway. And I was watching them, and I got an erection I remember. I could just imagine how that felt. I love it when they put their hand right there and you can feel their fingers in your hair and pressing into the top of the back of your neck. I’ve always liked men who kiss like that. It’s dead romantic.
