Boy A (6 page)

‘Because I can see myself in them,’ Steve the mechanic finishes with a groan. ‘What about you, Jack? What’s yours?’

Words flounder about in Jack’s mind: half-remembered tales of ten pences and star thieves, labels and angels. But none of them come together to form anything repeatable. He feels flustered, and hoping it doesn’t show, decides to shoot somewhere near the truth.

‘I haven’t really used chat-up lines. I suppose I just try to seem genuine, seem interested in them.’ As he speaks he trails off, feeling the ridiculousness of his words.

Steve the mechanic shakes his head in wonder. Chris sucks in air between his teeth.

‘I told you, mate, didn’t I?’ Chris says to Steve the mechanic. ‘Our Dodger’s a sly one. You should have seen the way the White Whale was drooling into his pocket yesterday.’

Steve the mechanic laughs, still shaking his head. ‘That’s really dirty fighting, that, Jack. “Seem genuine, seem interested,” that’s low tactics. How’s anyone supposed to compete with that?’

‘Mind you,’ says Chris, ‘you want to stay away from that White Whale. I’m telling you, she’s got Penile Dementia, she’d swallow you up.’

‘We’d have to change your name from Dodger to Jonah,’ Steve the mechanic chips in.

Jack says nothing, he knows that he doesn’t ‘want to stay away’ from Michelle, he really doesn’t. In fact he wants to be just as close to her as it’s humanly possible to be.

He sees her in the next bar they visit. She’s wearing her
ultra-blond hair in a long ponytail. When she moves it seems to curl around her neck, like an animal, like a white furred fox. Most of the people from work are meeting up here. Chris and Steve the mechanic are engulfed in an ambush of clasped hands and welcomes. Jack feels insignificant: a moon orbiting around Chris. But he is conscious of some reflected glow: a couple of people say hi, or pat him on the shoulder. Michelle doesn’t notice their entrance. She and her friend Claire are talking to two slightly older men in suits. Their money stinks, from right across the room.

The drinks are starting to have an effect on Jack. A little of his nervousness is leaving him, although he still feels distinctly uneasy in the crush of so many people. When it’s his round he gets himself a pint of low alcohol lager, careful to place it so the other two both take a real one.

Even though his bladder feels bloated from the beer, his stomach knots each time he glances across the sea of heads in Michelle’s direction. She is still apparently unaware of his presence, but laughs explosively whenever the taller of the two men speaks. Jack needs the toilet, but he’s convinced that if he lets Michelle out of his sight she will fall for this suited stranger. Maybe she already has.

Conversations ebb and flow around him. Jack feels slightly dazed, catching no more than fragments. Nodding, trying to look as if he knows what’s going on.

‘The shark’s just a shark, right,’ he hears Chris say. ‘No one calls it Jaws. It doesn’t call itself Jaws. The film is called
Jaws
, the shark is just a fucking shark. So how can you say “I like the bit where Jaws bites the boat”?’

Jack is aware they’re talking about films. Even so the conversation strikes his slightly woozy brain as bizarre.

Jack has seen
Jaws
. Actually, he didn’t think much of it. When you’ve grown up in a shark tank you aren’t afraid of big fish. He is wary of them, but he knows where to stand, where to stroke, to avoid getting bitten.

‘
Apocalypse Now
,’ says someone, who may be one of the other Steves.

‘
Pretty Woman
,’ says a small dark-eyed girl hanging off his arm. Steve the mechanic makes gagging noises.

Jack laughs, but one eye is always on Michelle. He wishes he could just go over there and say hello, start talking to her. They’ve visibly divided up now. Claire is chatting to one of the men while Michelle is with the other. The tall one, the funny one. Maybe Michelle’s just helping Claire out, getting rid of the mate. Maybe she’s no real interest except in helping her friend. If only Jack’d been able to tell her that he liked her, or give her some sign. If only he wasn’t so unnerved by everything. Jack’s bladder is bursting.

There’s a long queue for the gents. Both the urinals are blocked. Jack has to wait, alone among strangers. His trainers, Terry’s gift, swim in half an inch of communal urine. The man behind keeps putting a hand on Jack’s arm to steady himself, just sober enough to realize that if he falls in here it’s all over.

‘You really have got the luck of the devil, Dodger,’ says Chris, when Jack gets back. ‘The White Whale was just over here looking for you.’

‘Oh, really. Where is she?’

‘It’s all right. Don’t panic. You’re safe for the moment, she’s gone.’

‘Gone?’ says Jack, his teeth grinding with the strain of trying to seem relaxed.

‘Yeah, a whole bunch of them have gone to the club already. Steve the mechanic insisted we had one more here first. Bloody pikey’s at the bar, probably just wants to get his round in where it’s cheap.’

Jack looks over to where Michelle had been, and almost lets out a whoop when he sees that the two men in suits are still stood there.

One of the bouncers has a scar on his cheek like an action man. But there’s a brutal honesty about it that you don’t see on a plastic doll; this is not some ritualized duelling badge, it reminds Jack of prison faces, it talks about back alleys and broken bottles.

He doesn’t care. He is exuberant, and fast approaching drunk. Steve the mechanic, as if aware of Chris’s taunts of tightness, bought them a tequila each along with their pints. Jack can still feel a faint burn in his throat, even though it took ten minutes to walk to the club.

Just for an instant, before they go in, Jack looks up at the night sky and is struck by the unreality of it all. This feels like another world, another lifetime. A cool late summer’s breeze blows him the perfume of a beautiful black girl who’s one place in front. He’s with his friend Chris and his new friend Steve the mechanic. He has drunk tequila, and told people his favourite film; it’s
The Blues Brothers
. He didn’t know that until tonight. And inside this club, this wide-windowed warehouse, is the girl who maybe, just maybe, he could love. Jack is torn between bitterness, that he has been deprived of all this for so long, and feeling that this moment has made every other moment worth while.

It doesn’t occur to him that maybe he doesn’t deserve it.

Jack’s never heard music as loud as this. The base is vibrating his stomach. It’s shaking the floor, making his legs tremble. Or are they trembling anyway? His white shirt is the brightest thing around. It glows in the dark, with an eerie blue luminescence. Chris moves off straight away, twisting and winding, never taking his eyes from the bar. Jack and Steve the mechanic go after him. Following his breadcrumbs deep into the forest.

When they see Chris again, even he is struggling to get the barman’s attention. Jack has never seen so many women
in such a small area. These are not the same girls he has seen out before with Terry. They are not even the same as the girls that he has seen tonight. They are dressed purely for clubbing. What little they wear is designed to magnify, not to conceal. In fact the garments, all laces and lycra, are somehow more suggestive of nakedness than nakedness itself could ever be. They are closer to wrapping paper than clothing. Jack doesn’t know where to look. He is torn between gazing, mesmerized, and trying to look unfazed. Every turn of his head brings into view a new species: of legs, of lips, of breasts, of hips, of eyes, of thighs.

The girl who was in front of them in the queue alights next to him. Her closeness is painful. She catches his eye, and through the confidence of the beautiful forces him to look away. She laughs, though not unkindly, and turns to talk to her friend, about things of consequence to them.

There is no sign of Michelle, but the club is filled with corners and crevices. The whole of the dance floor is sunken in the centre, like a rave in the
Blue Peter
garden. People are dancing everywhere though, not just in the middle, but by the bars and the railings, and even as they move through the crowds. Three girls flick and grind their hips beside a pillar, beguiling Jack, taking him somewhere ancient and instinctive.

‘Girls that dance like they’re good in bed never are,’ Chris shouts in Jack’s ear, seeing where he gazes.

‘Chris is full of shit,’ Steve the mechanic shouts in his other ear.

Jack nods, to either or both, and drinks the bottle of beer that Chris handed him. Chris says something to Steve the mechanic and dissolves into the hot crowd, immediately lost in the mingle of short-distance travel.

‘Where’s he gone?’ Jack asks.

‘He’s gone to get something. It’s a surprise,’ Steve the mechanic tells him.

Water drips on to Jack’s forehead, condensed sweat from
the ceiling. Some of the blokes on the floor have got their shirts off; they’re coated in a sheen that reflects the colliding kaleidoscopes of light. Most of the dancers seem to be doing their own thing. A few around the edges dance in pairs or small groups, but those in the thick appear almost oblivious to people around them. There are no formalities, no rules; no two people are dancing the same way; except for the few who move the least, who look as though they would rather not be dancing at all. Jack knows that he would be one of these: uncertain, wary of humiliation, marking himself because of this.

Jack has never danced. Not just never in public, never at all. No school discos, no family weddings, no parties, no clubs, no front rooms, no miming in front of the bathroom mirror. Never. Jack is not even sure that he could dance as well as the few foot-lifting marginals. How could he? Where would he begin?

One cluster fascinates him. They stand half on the steps that lead down to the sunken circle. Their hands and fingers move rapidly, but out of time, too fast even for the DJ’s raging BPMs. When the strobe starts the cluster’s movements stop altogether, or at least it seems that way to Jack. They just appear in position. Like a series of strange still photographs. It is only when one gives a thumbs up that Jack realizes. Not dancing but signing. They are all deaf. A club within the club. Where the conversation-killing music makes their disability an advantage. Jack wonders if they can still feel the base up their spines, like he can.

Then he spots her: Michelle is down there, dancing with Claire and the small dark-eyed girl and a couple of the lads. He watches her easy movements, she isn’t an amazing dancer, not like the hip grinders, but she is effortless, unencumbered. She has an unpractised grace that makes the tiny girl beside her seem almost ungainly. Maybe feeling his eyes on her, Michelle looks around to meet them; her
ponytail wafts down to her shoulder like a feather boa. She smiles at him and waves him down. For a moment Jack sees himself striding down there, strutting – no, slinking – like John Travolta. He sees the crowd parting slightly to let him pass, waiting, anticipating his moves. But Jack has no moves, and the vision sinks away from him. He shakes his head at Michelle, trying to keep up his smile and mouths ‘maybe later’, which he doubts she gets from that distance.

Michelle keeps dancing, but facing his way. She is wearing a black dress that shows miles of her milk-gum breasts. Jack can feel his pulse in his throat.

‘She wants you bad, my friend,’ says Steve the mechanic. Jack had almost forgotten he was there. ‘If you want to go there, then go there. Don’t pay too much attention to Chris. Yeah, he’ll probably rag you for a couple of days, but that’s life: you know what they say about fat girls and mopeds. But that Michelle’s a good lass. Brainy, too, there’s more to her than meets the eye.’

Chris comes back, face split with a grin like a grapefruit, before Jack can find out what ‘fat girls and mopeds’ is supposed to mean.

‘D’you get them?’ Steve the mechanic asks.

Chris nods. ‘I’m out of beer though. Come on, Dodger, your round.’

Jack heads off to the bar. This is starting to be a very expensive night. Does it always cost this much to go out? Five or six hours ago he was the richest he’d ever been in his life. Now he seems to have drunk a big chunk of that wad.

He’s a little unstable on his feet as well; but despite the strangeness of everything, he’s more at ease than he can ever remember being. He’s spent the last seven years in a state of permanent tension, looking for clues as to who’s going to kick off, screening his words for fear of being stained a nonce, watching for where to sit and when to shit and waiting to breathe. Now he feels relaxed. Maybe it’s the
drink, but he’s suddenly sure that no one’s going to rumble him. It’s all going to be all right.

He has a problem finding Chris and Steve the mechanic, when he gets back to where they were. But he spots them a wave away, where they’ve secured a high round table. Chris leans on it with accomplished nonchalance.

‘Cheers, Dodger,’ he says, relieving Jack of a bottle of Bud. ‘Now open your mouth and close your eyes. I’ve got a present for you.’

Certainly alcohol is a big player, but there’s more than this, maybe it’s trust in Chris. Maybe Jack’s just used to obeying orders. Whatever the reason, he does what he’s told. He feels a lump on his tongue, which tastes somewhere between salt and sulphur, and when he’s told to swallow it, he takes a swig of Bud and it slips away.