A Life Apart (15 page)

Luckily, he doesn’t have to stand in this position all the time, neck twisted, eyes strained. Because the toilets are underground, he can hear heavy footsteps descending; only then does he
get up from the toilet seat and move to his spyline swiftly to catch the man entering the toilets while he passes through that narrow ribbon of vision for a fleeting second. He’s cautious and
doesn’t want to lose the man during that split second so he rushes to the door as soon as he hears footsteps running down.

There are two staircases leading down to the two wide pissoirs, all brushed aluminium and falling jets of water, separated by a long length of mirrors with four washbasins and an open space off
which four cubicles open on either side. The cubicle Ritwik occupies, his favourite one, is an anomaly that disturbs this elegant symmetry; it is placed diagonally behind the two small cubicles
which open out from one side of the short wide corridor leading to the mirrors and sinks. There is no corresponding cubicle on the other side. If he draws a straight line through the middle of the
sinks and corridor, each half of the St. Giles public toilets almost becomes a mirror image of the other. Almost, because his cubicle, the biggest one, breaks this symmetry: it is like a stray,
careless note in a perfect fugue.

But he likes it best because it offers him a view of who’s coming in, who’s going out, without having to get out of the toilet and do all the ridiculous things to signal he was
really using the loo – flush, wait two seconds, open the door noisily, get out, head straight for the sinks, wash hands for a long time, shake hands, go to the dryers and spend another five
minutes there, pressing the ‘on’ button each time it stops, once, twice, three times, as if he is really drying his hands.

The hot air dispensers are a stale joke, a cliché: everyone in the trade knows that if the button is pressed more than two times the last thing that is happening is hand-drying. Yet it is
allowed, almost lovingly indulged, its loud, whirry drone providing a reassuring matrix of meaning to the game. It is so transparent a guise that it is not a guise any more but a tattered, old,
understood code. Ritwik loves it; the sound sends a little surge of camaraderie coursing through him: he knows he is in the company of familiar strangers.

The other reasons he prefers this particular cubicle to the others is because it is so roomy. There is space enough for someone to sleep in there comfortably in a sleeping bag. Three people
could fit inside without finding it a squish. This aspect is readily exploited as and when the opportunities and inclinations arise.

There is graffiti on the walls, the door, even some on the ceiling. Most of it seems to be written with marker pens, some with pencil or biro, and some etched and scratched on to the paint of
the metal door and the one metal wall with sharp objects. There are the usual ones: ‘For cock action call 865974’, ‘Any horny 18–21y old around looking for 9” cock
here every Friday and Saturday evening. Show hard at the urinals’, ‘8 in cock, cut, for sucking fucking Sunday afternoon. Genuine. Leave message below with date and time.’

There is one that can only be described as super-efficient: ‘I love to suck young juicy cocks and swallow your creamy spunk. Make date’. And then, below, five columns: name, age,
size, date, time. The writer has even taken the trouble of drawing vertical and horizontal lines, so the whole thing looks like a statistical table. There are two entries as well in the columns.
The age is always under twenty-one, the size never below seven inches. ‘Genuine’ seems to be a desirable quality: more than half the messages have that word as its final note.
Occasionally, they get cleaned or painted away but some are too stubbornly written with invincible ink, they just fade a bit. Soon others appear and before long it is thick with these urgent, hot
words again.

Every night he takes some time to read them: they ease him into the swing of things and even get him aroused. His favourite one is:

The changes to the sonnet are minimal and not especially clever but seeing it in that context reconfigures it for Ritwik in such a way that there is no other way to look at it
any longer but as a feverish request for a trinitarian gang-bang. The metaphors, the desire behind the writing, all seem to fall into place with such ease it is as if he has at last unlocked a room
to which he has been denied complete access for a long time. He laughs silently for some time at the aptness of the whole thing. He wonders if in his essay on the metaphysicals he could get away
with saying that the seventeenthcentury religious poet loiters with intent in his prayer closet, cruising god. The final three lines – ‘Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I / Except you
enthrall mee, never shall be free, / Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee’ – when they come, are exact and inevitable. Some marginalia have been added to the sonnet:
‘Doesn’t scan any more you poof wanker’ and ‘Posh turd burglar fuck off to your AIDS.’

This is a true laboratory of the senses: all of them are stretched to their experiential limits – the eye at the door hinge; the ears pricked to catch footsteps entering or exiting, the
flush of the cistern, the hissing drum of a jet of urine hitting the metal pissoir, running water and gurgling sink, the slightest movement and shift of feet; the nose acclimatized to the acrid
bite of ammonia, disinfectant and sometimes the wafting stench of shit.

The way everything is registered on impeccably tuned keys of sight, sound and smell here, he could easily be a hunter in the wild; either that or a beast of prey, sensing out danger even in the
slightest change of wind direction.

There are infinite ways in which this game is played out, all set but all indeterminate at the same time. The unchanging basis for all, however, is the checking out of goods, an unillusioned
appraisal. The concept of ‘goods’ varies, of course.

A standard procedure for Ritwik is to stay inside his cubicle if the fleeting slit-view of a man entering the toilets does not appeal. If it does, he still remains locked in; after all, the man
could have come in for an innocent piss only. This is either confirmed or negated in the next few minutes by one or more of various signals – not exiting after the standard time taken for a
pee, washing hands at the sink for a long time (though this could be any other person in the toilets, but chances are it is the new arrival), that telling handdryer business, entering a cubicle
after
his piss and locking himself in . . . it is like a problem in logic: if p, then not q, but only after a finite set of conditions, ∑ {a, b, c . . . n}, has been satisfied.

And yet, and yet, it lacks the fixity of logic because the elements of the set to be satisfied have margins of uncertainty themselves. For example, how can entering a cubicle after a reasonable
time spent at the urinal be taken as a
certain
sign of cruising? But even if in these cases the laws of probability work to the advantage of the cruiser, everything could come down like a
house of cards if the final checking out doesn’t lead to the neat snuggling of two desires fitting each other like identical spoons.

Everything is predicated on that meeting. There are a number of ways leading to it:

1. Standing at the pissoir, his cock out, massaged to erection. He hides it and pretends he has just finished peeing, shaking the last dribble off it if some kosher pisser enters the toilet.
Sometimes he just buttons up and enters his cubicle. If it isn’t a genuine pisser, and he likes the look of the man, he stands there, making obvious what he’s doing. Chances of a hit on
this one: 50–50, 50 for his liking the man, 50 the other way around.

2. If the view from his spystrip really dazzles, and chances of this are low anyway, he rushes out after three or four seconds, making sure he has flushed noisily – just another casual
public toilet user emerging from a cubicle to wash and dry his hands zealously. Chances of the dazzling one being a cottager: low. Chances of that click of reciprocal desire: still lower.

3. On some occasions, 2 leads to 1, if he’s convinced the newcomer at the urinal is doing anything but urinating, or urinating AND.

4. Then there is the possibility of Ritwik’s favourite cubicle being occupied by someone else. In this event, which irritates him immensely, as if he has some proprietary right over that
one, he reluctantly confines himself to one of the smaller, inferior ones. Their disadvantages are many, not having a view being the most crippling; he has to depend solely on his ears then. But
there is one thing working for them: being adjacent to another cubicle, a possible pick-up might happen without having to go through 1, 2, and 3. After a while it becomes obvious why the man in the
next cubicle has entered it. Once that is confirmed, another little game of advancing feet, inch by inch, to the gap under the partition wall begins. Often this is preceded by noises, such as low
moaning, or letting out heavy breaths in an overdone I’m-really-horny way. Once the feet touch, at least one certainty has been established. This could be followed by notes written on loo
paper and passed on under the gap: ‘Do you have a place?’, usually, to start off with. Or just standing on the toilet seat and peeping over the wall into the next cubicle to see what
he’s letting himself in for. No. 4 is a more prolonged game with elements of a blind date to it. It’s more exciting, sometimes, than 2 or 3, or even 1.

5. Several people at the urinals. Sometimes this has what Ritwik calls the ‘honeypot effect’ – one or two cruising men at the urinals suddenly start attracting practically all
the cottagers in the St. Giles toilets until there is a row of men, cocks out, checking each other out, all heads tilted left or right, angled downwards, sometimes craning back to catch the eye of
someone at the pissoir across on the other side of the mirrors and sinks. It is a predictable set of movements, but of all the methods, this gives the most direct access to the goods. This is when
it becomes most transparently a marketplace: there is no pissing around, wasting time and acting out tired old moves; it is sharp, to the point and immediately effective. Or not, but in that case
at least the people involved are not left hanging on, thinking will he won’t he will he won’t he while doing some more hand-drying and pretend pissing and all that nonsense.

No. 5 is also unflinchingly frank: Ritwik knows quickly who wants him and who doesn’t. Rejection, however couched, even if it involves just tucking a penis in and moving away to a position
beside another person, is still rejection and potentially bruising. But it’s all part of the game, or the logic of the meat market: would a shopper buy maggoty meat out of kindness to the
poor lamb which had died or the butcher who didn’t have any better? Ritwik himself has learned, a bit too efficiently, to reject: it is best done swiftly otherwise he accuses himself of
leading them on and feels slightly guilty about it. Also very pleased, because someone fancies him. To be in the position of saying ‘no’ to someone and turning him down is one of the
greatest luxuries in life, he reckons. He has it here, sometimes.

There are the beginnings of a fraternity here among some of the regulars, of whom Ritwik has become one. He smiles at some of them, or nods and acknowledges their presence and some are glad of
this small social gesture. It’s not solidarity or anything, just a flickering registration of the commonality that brings them together underground. They don’t know each other’s
names, where they live, or indeed, where they disappear once they reach the upper world. They only exist for each other in this strip-lit netherworld.

Ritwik has had sex with a couple of these regulars. There’s Martin who works for British Rail, has short spiky hair and a goodnatured leer permanently stuck on his face. And the other man,
whose name he doesn’t know or hasn’t bothered to find out, who takes off all his clothes, every single stitch, and leaves his cubicle door wide open while playing with himself and
fingering his arsehole. He shuts it as soon as he hears new footsteps but if he thinks it’s safe he opens the door fully again.

There is no rivalry within this set of people; in fact, when a newcomer arrives and shows an interest in one of them, the rest, who know they are not fancied, egg on the lucky one. They keep
watch if the people they are familiar with are having sex in the open: it’s a give-and-take, this one – they get the pleasure of watching and in return they provide an early warning
service.

Sometimes they warn off each other from ‘time-wasters’, people who come and endlessly tease, hang around, show cock, peep, peer, lock themselves in cubicles for ages but ultimately
never pick up anyone. Just as ‘genuine’ is a high recommendation in this world, ‘time-waster’ is equally pejorative. Ritwik is glad to have the more experienced ones
dissuade him from running down such cul-de-sacs. It is, of course, a minor corollary of Sod’s Law that almost every ‘time-waster’ is gorgeous.

Ritwik also realizes, in slow stages, that his is a type of minority appeal, catering to the ‘special interest’ group rather than the mainstream, because of his nationality, looks,
skin colour. He keeps pushing the word ‘race’ away. The mainstream is blonde, white, young, slim. Or, more accurately, that is the desired mainstream. He doesn’t satisfy the
crucial first two although the last two can influence the swing cruisers.

One nameless man, to whose twoup two-down off the Woodstock Road he goes back one night from St. Giles, tells him how this world divides into two classes: the rice queens – men who fancy
Oriental guys – and the potato queens – men who have a thing for white British men. That puts him in a type of classificatory limbo, although for lack of a better taxonomy the latter
term will have to do. All in all, if the swing cottagers are taken into account, he doesn’t do too badly although it could be better, significantly better.