London Triptych (4 page)

1998

I wanted to live
in a city big enough to lose myself in, big enough to keep boredom at bay. I wanted to live in the spaces between buildings, to disappear. You can’t really do that, though, because each disappearance is also an appearance. No absence goes unnoticed for long. Not if you know where to look. I can’t now recall what it was I thought I had come to London to find, but I knew what I had left behind. Anything else had to be better than that, I told myself.

As I stepped off the train at Euston one night in June 1986, I entered a city in which I knew nobody and nobody knew me, and I could taste the anonymity like aluminium on my tongue. I licked myself clean. I had nowhere to stay. I was unutterably terrified. I sparked up a spliff and began walking down Euston Road, toward King’s Cross. With each step my shadow got lighter. I made my way to the Bell, which I had read about in a copy of
Gay Times
I’d bought at the station before getting on the train that afternoon, and had read furtively from cover to cover during the journey. I walked past the bar several times on the opposite side of the street, my stomach churning. I looked at the Thameslink station next to the Bell, and thought of that game on the train tracks as a child, of that stupid, willful determination not to run away like the others.

I crossed the road and pushed open the door.

I hadn’t really considered what the place might look like inside, but I hadn’t for a minute expected it to look like any other pub. I was expecting decadence, I think, and I got a shock. Young men and women stood around drinking. Music played. The only difference from any pub I had been in at home was that the people knew how to dress and the music was palatable. The Buzzcocks’ “Ever Fallen in Love” played as I sat there with a pint of lager, smoking a cigarette, withdrawing behind the clouds of smoke I was exhaling, and scanning the room. I watched their faces, the men and women who were there, while keeping a regular eye on the door for newcomers. I wanted to take in everything. I wanted to be somebody else, so I was. Where I grew up, it wasn’t possible to do this.

I sat alone, armed with the eye of an anthropologist and the heart of a beggar. I knew there must be someone who would take me home and give me a bed for the night. It was simply a process of discovering that person. I looked at each boy in turn. Already I knew what I could achieve. Still, it was new. A test. In those days, everything was a test to see how far this new me would go. I had only ever had sex with men I found repulsive in exchange for money. I didn’t know anything else. I was hungry to learn.

Only one person approached me all night. After I had been sitting there for hours, what can only be described as a flaming creature came over and sat next to me, blue hair spiking above a bizarrely made-up face. He wore a black lamé jacket over a tight yellow T-shirt, a tartan mini-skirt, and orange tights, his feet wrapped in purple platform boots with a silver ankle-star. He looked like something from another planet.

“Hello, what’s your name?” he asked, offering me a Consulate.

“David,” I said, taking one. That isn’t my name. It’s my brother’s name. I don’t know why my own name seemed so inadequate at that moment, or what I was trying to hide. Or who I was trying to become.

“I’m Edward,” he said, holding out a lighter in his bejewelled hand. I leant forward till the cigarette’s tip hit the flame, and inhaled, noticing that his black-varnished fingernails were chipped.

He launched into a monologue the majority of which I can no longer recall. He was an artist and a musician, and he organized clubs and gigs. He sang in a band called Hollywood Knee, who played hard-edged, cross-dressed covers of songs by ’60s girl groups. He proceeded to bombard me with questions. What music did I like? Did I like this, did I like that? Who were my favourite artists? What films had I seen, what books had I read? Initially I was barely able to string two words together, so shocked was I that such a person existed, but so glad that he was talking to me, this being who seemed to speak the same language as me. One of my own species. As a consequence of that shock, however, I responded with such monosyllabic answers that at one point he stopped, looking perplexed, and asked, “Were you a test tube baby?”

“Why?”

“I have friends who were some of the earliest test tube babies. You remind me of them. They never say a word.”

“I was grown on a wet flannel,” I said. “Besides, I can’t get a word in edgeways.”

He looked at me. He pulled on his cigarette, not taking his eyes off me. “This place is closing now, dear. Fancy going somewhere else?”

I guessed I had my bed for the night. “Sure.”

Throughout the conversation I had been staring over Edward’s shoulder at a handsome man farther off, near the bar, who had caught my eye. Our eyes had met, but I had not known how to extricate myself from Edward, and didn’t really want to, and Handsome had eventually left with someone else, taking my gaze with him. I tried to imagine myself having sex with him, but my thoughts were diverted by Edward standing up quickly and saying, “Come on, then, heartface, let’s go.”

He led me to some den in Shoreditch, where transsexual prostitutes played pool and rent boys in tracksuits and baseball caps sat around smoking joints. One boy, in a leopard-print baseball cap worn back-to-front above eyes lit with mischief, was repeatedly shouting at one of the trannies, “How much, girlfriend?” to which Girlfriend’s increasingly annoyed response was, “Too much.” He continued to repeat the question until she threatened him with a pool cue. We walked past two middle-aged would-be gangsters playing cards in a fug of blue cigar smoke, up to the bar where a beer-bellied cabbie was sucking the face off one of the lady-boys. We were soon deep in conversation, and I told Edward things about my life I’d never told anyone before, stories of my escapades that I had kept locked inside. There’s nothing like a bent ear to dispel shyness. Stories erupted like smoke from my mouth and the trail they formed led straight to his flat in a council estate in Hackney.

In his hallway, one wall was lined with framed covers of old movie magazines—Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, and Bette Davis all stared down at us as we entered the front door—while the other wall was filled with the framed covers of pornographic gay magazines.
Inches
.
Honcho
.
Drummer
. We stepped into this corridor of tanned men and glamour girls and he led me to the lounge, where fun-fur rugs of every colour covered the floor like some Muppet-culling. The walls were furnished with silver moulded plastic, like the inside of Barbarella’s spaceship, which reflected the light emitting from the sleek ’60s lamp that hung from the ceiling. A white leather sofa rested against the far wall. Dominating the room, though, in front of the window, was a large Art Deco display case, inhabited by dozens of Barbie dolls, most still in their boxes. An army of smiling, vacant faces, like pretty corpses in glass coffins.

I assumed sex was almost inevitable. And though I didn’t want it, I was still disappointed when Edward said, “I don’t wanna fuck you, David. You’re not my type. But you can stay here. For a while. Till you find somewhere, find your feet.”

“Thanks.”

“Let me show you around.”

Above the kitchen door, right at the back of the hall and pinned back to form a curtain leading into it, hung two brightly sequinned dresses, one green, the other red. The light in the kitchen was already on, creating the effect of an empty stage. Once we stepped through the sequinned dresses curtaining the doorway, it was fairly plain and functional. The fridge and cupboard doors were completely collaged with postcards and pictures from magazines.

Edward’s bathroom was done out like a Vatican shipwreck. Statues of the Virgin Mary and cherubs holding seashell fonts fought for space with plastic lobsters and starfish. Above the sink was a golden bathroom cabinet with a ceramic fish perched on top. Above the toilet, a Tom of Finland drawing of a merman. From the top of the toilet seat an enormous cut-out goldfish with its mouth open stared up at you.

The bedroom was the dullest room in the entire flat, like a Whitby B&B circa 1962, complete with twin beds. I must have looked confused, because Edward said, “Oh, I can’t be doing with all that sharing-a-bed malarkey. Even when I do have someone stop over, which isn’t often, I always make them sleep on their own.” He kicked off his platform boots and collapsed onto the nearest bed with a dramatic sigh. “I can’t bear anyone close to me like that, clinging on,” he shuddered, “it’s abnormal.”

So I was here, in London.

Sharing a room with a fruitcake, but at least I was here.

1894

On my first morning
Taylor explained that, to begin with, I’d just practice with him or the other boys every morning, then rest for an hour or so to get my strength back, and then spend the night entertaining the gentlemen who visited. He said they always did it that way when a new boy arrived. I didn’t much like the idea of having to suck him again, nor did I imagine there to be much more to it than what I already knew, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Taylor has all sorts of implements and lotions for giving and receiving pleasure, and over the next few weeks he taught me how to use them all with absolute expertise. He made good whores of us, Taylor did. He calls it studying, what we did in the mornings. Well, I say mornings—we were never up much before midday, truth be told.

I never knew there was so much to learn about the art of love. Taylor taught me every trick of the trade in the weeks after I arrived. He has a series of brass cocks of bigger and bigger sizes. We started on the smallest and worked our way up to the largest, which he has nicknamed Moby-Dick. It’s the size of a blacksmith’s forearm, but it didn’t take long before I was able to wriggle my way onto its oiled girth without so much as wincing. As for taking it in the mouth, though, I never got beyond the ten inches of solid brass he called Priapus. Taylor brags about one boy he tutored who managed to swallow Moby-Dick all the way to the base, though none of us believes him. Taylor dabs his eye as he tells us the story, swearing it’s no word of a lie.

“And then the ungrateful little cunt ran off with a priest!”

You could say he takes his work too seriously. “Knowing how to suck cock properly, may I remind you,” he always says, “is a very useful skill to have. It’s gotten me out of many a fuckin’ scrape, that’s for sure.”

Taylor hasn’t just taught me the pleasurable but the practical too, like how to milk a man’s cock to see if he’s got the glim before you let it anywhere near you, though that’s hardly failsafe. When Ackerboy came down with it recently, Taylor made him drink some rank-smelling concoction made out of gin and chicory and God alone knows what else three times a day for five days on the trot, and demoted him to strictly non-sexual duties for the duration. Taylor told us that some people claimed fucking a virgin would cure you, though he’s never seen proof of it and besides, as he said, slurping on his gin, “Where the fuck would you find a virgin in this city?” He showed me how to wash out my arse with a funnel and a bucket of water so I’m clean and shitless and ready to be fucked. He says he wants us to provide something the gents can get nowhere else.

“You’re the élite, you are,” he tells us every evening before we start work. “You are the crown jewels of Christendom. Those syphilitic she-skirts down the Dilly don’t know a dog’s arse about giving pleasure, not like you boys. Never forget, my dears, that you are angels dressed as handsome devils. Now bugger off and earn your keep!”

And I found that it wasn’t so bad. Despite the stench of them, they aren’t bad men, on the whole. Just hardened and nervous and often very grateful for the little pleasure we give them.

I spent yesterday morning with a young French aristocrat who visits us every time he’s in London. He only ever wants to sit and masturbate while watching two rats tear each other to pieces in front of him. He sends a telegram in advance so we can catch the rats, though there’s never any shortage of them in this city. And we have to keep them separate and starving until his arrival so that they are hungry enough to tear each other’s throats out when thrown together. This Frog gets so excited he squeals like a pig as he comes. And it goes everywhere.

Then, in the afternoon, I met a regular swell on a certain platform at St Pancras station, and together we boarded a train. It’s the same every time. We have to have a carriage all to ourselves, and I am not to speak at all during the journey. All he wants me to do is to sit opposite him and, at a certain point in the journey, I have to lean across and draw a line on his cheek with the piece of blue chalk he handed to me before we boarded the train. At this point he ejaculates with a slight gasp and twitch, and then we continue in silence until the next stop. I get out and leave him in the carriage and hop on the next train back to London.

When I got back I hardly had time to rest before another regular turned up. This gent likes to take me out to Epping Forest by horse-drawn carriage and once we’ve found a secluded patch I strip down to my birthday suit and just run around as he watches me. After he has spent I get dressed and we climb back into the carriage and return to the city. One of my most regular visitors—a peer of the realm, no less—arrives every night at the stroke of seven without fail, barring Christmas Day. All he wants me to do is to stand naked before him with my backside a foot away from his face. It was a bit strange at first, but I’m used to it now.

“I want to breathe you,” he whispers, frigging away. “How I love the smell of you.” He never lays a finger on me. He simply kneels there making little sniffing sounds, followed by tiny gasps, as if he can only breathe this way, gasping those words over and over. “I love the smell of you. I love the smell of you.” I let slip a fart once by mistake (I couldn’t help it), and I thought he would be cross. But instead he came straight away, most violently across the backs of my legs, making more noise than ever. So that became a regular occurrence, the farting. I was learning.

I made the mistake recently of saying that he could touch me if it pleased him to, and he was most offended. He said, “Good lord, no
.
I am far too ugly ever to touch such a thing of beauty.” He said that he would be certain to adulterate my beauty immediately should his hand touch my flesh and that he was worried lest even his breath got too close to the perfection of me and threatened to sully it.

I’ve been here eighteen months now and, believe me, I reckon I’ve just about seen it all.

The other boys who live here are all a year or two older than me and all beautiful and corrupt as pirates. There’s Charlie Carter, alias Lottie. He hails from the East End, like myself, Stepney or somewhere like that, though I think from his voice that he’s had some schooling. He’s blond and pink, a rosy glow to his white, white skin that gets pinker with shame—though he never truly shows any, if I’m honest with you. His hair is white as an angel’s, his body hairless as marble; and the end of his cock is as red as his nipples.

And there’s Sidney Acker, alias Ackerboy, a South London lad with raven-black hair and eyes like jet, the left one a touch lazy, giving him the most charming squint. He has the biggest and most impressive yard out of all of us. I took a shine to him straight away, bewitched by his sleepy black eyes and their impossibly long lashes. He’s known as Ackerboy on account of him being the most popular with the swells and making Taylor the most ackers.

Then there’s Walter Flowers, alias Princess Pea, who is from up north, Manchester way, and who always makes us laugh with the way he talks and the phrases he has. It’s like another language at times, blunt and crude and fuckin’ funny. I never knew him to take anything seriously, always laughing and cracking jokes and making us roar.

Finally, there’s John Maynard, alias Johnnycakes, a tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed Yank, with a face like the sun and a voice like buttered sunbeams. He tells us such stories of New York that I have a dream to visit the place some day.

Taylor himself likes the men well enough and will trawl Hyde Park at nightfall in search of cock. He’s spent many a night in the cells in Marble Arch after being caught in the bushes sucking some guardsman. He is partial to a bit of uniform, the guards especially. He claims to have spent his youth in the Royal Fusiliers, but it’s hard to believe, him being so womanly. He also claims his father was a rich cocoa manufacturer who died when he was twelve and left him a fortune that he frittered away. He spends hours hanging round Albert Gate, or will tramp across town to a particular barracks, his favourite being South Kensington. He’ll travel miles, for sure, and will on occasion drag them back—all the Queen’s men. And then he gets them to thrash nine bells out of him. His particular taste is for pain, which is foreign to me, though I can do it for a price.

I never go in for that malarkey unless I have to, preferring a quick frig or maybe a suck, but most of the gents do insist on putting it in me, either their fingers or their tongues or their pricks. And we get all sorts of pricks in here—bankers, peers, lords, members of parliament, members of the National Liberal Club. They all of them pay us frequent visits. Royalty, once or twice, even. We’re popular, we are, and no mistake. It’s the life of Riley compared to what I was used to. I consider myself truly lucky—one of the blessed, as Taylor himself promised.

And Taylor makes a small fortune out of us here. We work long hours, though truth be told it never really feels like work. It’s just like one long party. The sex is mostly boring after doing it for this long, but I fuckin’ love the rides in Hyde Park, high tea at the Ritz, champagne at the Café Royal. I take my ma the flowers that gents offer me, and the little trinkets and gifts, and she loves them. Once a week I go back home to hand over my wages. I’m able to give her much more now, lying about more and more promotions at the Post Office. She’s so proud of me I haven’t the heart to tell her the truth. What good would it do, anyhow? Things at home are still the same. Pa’s drinking more than ever. It breaks my heart to leave. Making my way back to Taylor’s always feels like travelling into another country.

Taylor was in a right flap when I got back from visiting Ma this afternoon, telling me to make sure I looked my best, saying that we were going somewhere special to meet someone special. “Make yourself pretty,” he said. “Mr Wilde likes nice clean boys.” I had no idea who he was going on about, but I must’ve done something right ’cos since I came downstairs after a scrub and decked out in my best suit, hair brushed and parted, he hasn’t stopped beaming and pinching my cheeks, his pupils the size of guineas. “Beautiful,” he keeps saying as we climb into the cab, me and him and Charlie, “bloomin’ beautiful! Mr Wilde’s gonna fuckin’
love
you!”

I’ve never seen him so excited.