London Triptych (6 page)

1998

Edward Wayward was a
kind of post-punk shaman, an Aleister Crowley for the club scene. His art, like his personality, was loud and colourful. The morning after I first met him, he dragged me out of bed screaming, “I didn’t show you the studio!” He used the second bedroom as a studio, and I stood at its centre blinking as he spun me around and pointed at his work, clutching a sky-blue satin kimono around his skinny frame. Huge, garish canvases clashed and smashed their way into my consciousness like broad daylight. I thought they were dreadful but hadn’t the heart to tell him, so I said they were brilliant.

As I got to know him, I discovered that he’d contradict almost everything anyone ever said to him, not necessarily because he thought the opposite, but because he hated to be seen to be agreeing with someone. He lived to be contrary. He had to be the one with the different view, the different take on life. It was all a pose, of course, but then he wasn’t the only one posing. There were plenty of us doing that. He used to say, “If you aren’t going to cause a stir when you enter a room, don’t bother. Stay at home and bore the cat.”

He told me that a few weeks before he was born his mother dreamt she gave birth to a rabbit. When he arrived a month later, covered in a pelt of thick black hair from head to toe, she screamed till he was removed from her sight. She refused to have anything to do with this vile freak she’d produced, even when her mother-in-law assured her that his father had been just the same, and that the hair would moult within a fortnight, which it did. For those two weeks she couldn’t even be in the same house as Edward. He knew that he was a freak, but he grew to wear his monstrosity with pride. A very regal freak, he was.

His father was a vicar, his mother a vicar’s wife, and he grew up in the remote suburbs of London, dressing up in skirts and frocks at every opportunity and lip-syncing to David Bowie, dreaming of escape. His one and only friend was a fat girl, Yvonne, who had stones and insults thrown at her every time she left the house because of the outrageous way she dressed. They would sit in her bedroom smoking Consulates, listening to Patti Smith’s
Horses
over and over, talking about London and the day they would live there.

On the day he finished school for good, he came home to find a packed suitcase in the hall and his parents standing there looking more morosely stern than ever. They’d had enough of him going out dressed up like someone from another planet and coming home late and wired, if at all. His father explained that now he was of legal age to leave home they expected him to do so, that afternoon. His mother wouldn’t meet his gaze, but gave him a hug with tears streaming down her face. They gave him an envelope stuffed with banknotes. He told me that he felt as if he’d been handed the keys to the city, and practically ran to the train station before they changed their minds, calling in on Yvonne to say goodbye. She hurriedly packed a case and left with him. So he knew all about finding your feet in the big smoke. They spent their first few nights sleeping rough. That, he said, was why he had let me stay. That was five years ago. (As for Yvonne, she returned home about a year after their arrival, after they fell out about something and nothing.)

I had moved to London hungry for one thing, striving toward one goal: to be stronger, more wicked, and more profound. With curiosity as my only map, I moved across the surface of this occluded world searching for a way in.

I traced around its borders with a torch, sniffing out a hole in the fence. The heartbeat I detected when I moved here was faint, but I followed its call and found those dark chambers, thanks to Edward. We found it in the clubs where the freaks hung out. All those others who were also desperate to escape the daylight. The drag queens, the druggies, the prostitutes, the good-time girls of either gender. Although escaping isn’t quite right. For in their flight they picked up the nearest objects, some of them quite everyday—cosmetics, for example, or clothes—and brandished them like weapons against anyone barring their way. In their midst I could breathe for the first time, speak for the first time, and share in a lust for all things rotten. When I found myself in a council flat in Belsize Park with a cocaine dealer known as Timmy Toots, snorting the white lines as quickly as he could cut them, and for free, I felt at home. When he proudly showed me his collection of guns, I smiled as if admiring family snapshots. When he showed me a photograph of his fourteen-year-old son and suggested I might like him, I began to fear for my life. For years, my desires were a question mark whose dark curve I followed, never knowing what I would find at the end. I certainly didn’t expect prison. Although in truth, even now—especially now—the inevitability is complete.

After spending nearly two hours in the bathroom that first afternoon, Edward swanned out wearing a white suit printed with enormous red roses, a leopard-print fez, full slap and Chanel No. 5. Lots of it. We spent the afternoon going around his favourite fabric shops in Soho where he bought yards of cheap garish fabrics. Everywhere we went people stared at him, open-mouthed, perplexed. He took me into a church off Leicester Square to show me a mural painted by Jean Cocteau. He took me for a drink in the Golden Lion and chatted to some rent boys who were friends of his. Toward the end of the day we called in on his friend Lilli, who worked in a sex shop on Old Compton Street. She was near the end of her shift so she bunked off early and the three of us went off to Pâtisserie Valerie for a coffee.

Lilli was Jayne Mansfield with tattoos. Platinum curls, cherry-red lips, with roses growing down the trellis of her arms. She wore a loose-fitting leopard-print vest top and a powder-blue pencil skirt with black fishnets and Westwood rocking horse shoes, her hair crowned with a black beret. She had a gold front tooth when nobody had gold front teeth. As well as working in the sex shop, she did porn movies and whoring and a bit of life modelling. She told us about posing for a camera club the previous evening, where they employed a bouncer to make sure nothing too risqué went on, but every time the bouncer went for a piss she would offer to give the photographers a “flash of pink” if they chucked her some extra money.

Lilli was Edie Sedgwick to Wayward’s Warhol. Fucked-up sexy rich girl. Her parents owned a castle somewhere. Lord and Lady Something-or-other. She was beautiful and sweet most of the time, but if she had too much to drink or too many drugs she would mutate into a psychopath, running across the tops of parked cars and jumping up and down on the roofs and bonnets in her massive Westwoods, screaming incomprehensibly at invisible demons. She was always getting into slanging matches, punching people, or worse. I saw her hurl a glass ashtray at a man in a club once because he said something she didn’t like. The ashtray cut his head open, and Edward and I had to get her out through the back door because the bouncers were after her blood.

She was hopelessly hooked on speed, and she regularly had horrendous come-downs. Countless times we had to talk her out of killing herself. She was a bizarre mix of absolute ferocity with absolute fragility. But given the right amount of drugs and alcohol she would shine, almost every night, from the chaos within. When she was dressed up in all her finery she was always being mistaken for a drag queen, always getting her tits or snatch out to prove her authentic womanhood. We met every evening in Valerie’s, recounting our days and planning our nights. Like the woman in the nursery rhyme, I shall have music wherever I go, for our laughter on those lost evenings chimes like bells on my fingers and toes. Even now.

One semi-regular at our coffee evenings was Alan Baker, or Alana as he liked to be known (or Ma Baker as he was known in his absence). When I was introduced to him he looked me up and down ostentatiously before turning to Edward and saying, “Well, someone’s certainly been answering
your
prayers!”

“Oh, God, no, nothing like that—God, no.” Edward screwed his face up in disgust and waved his hand as if to dispel a bad smell. I must have looked hurt, because he stroked my face and added, “Adorable though he is.” (Edward only liked them straight—and preferably rough as a dog’s dick, I was soon to discover. He had a changeable harem of builders and truckers and cab drivers who would come round occasionally, and I would be ushered out of the flat and told to stay away till evening so he could make as much noise as he wanted.)

Edward’s response made Alana think he stood a chance, and he wouldn’t take his eyes off me. I could decode that look all too well. Edward began reading out the personal ads in the gay press in silly voices, and Alana said, “Read the escorts.”

I asked, “What’s an escort?”

Alana looked at me pitifully, then said to Edward, “Oh, dear. H-B-D.”

Lilli turned to me to explain that H-B-D stood for Handsome But Dim.

“Child, how long have you been in the wicked city?” Alana asked.

“Less than twenty-four hours,” Edward replied for me, managing to make me feel even more infantile.

Alana took his cue. “So much to learn. Listen to Mother, little one, and start learning. An escort is a hooker. Rent-a-cock. Male for sale.” He made a sound like a mule. “He-whore, to use the vernacular.” He paused, before adding, with a salacious wink, “And what I wouldn’t give to find your number in there.”

I had already told Edward stories about my whoring back home, and he said to Alana straight away, “Well, you won’t have to wait too long, darling, I’m sure.”

I looked startled enough for Edward to say, “You’ve gotta earn your keep somehow, sweetheart. You’re eating me out of house and fucking home.”

It was inevitable, really, that I would pick up where I had left off. I didn’t want to get a job, and the dole could never provide enough money to live on. There was always a new club or a private viewing or a party or an opening to go to. And Edward was always broke. Pretty soon I was earning what to me seemed vast amounts of money—500 pounds a week, sometimes—which I was spending as rapidly as it appeared—on clothes, drugs, and going out every single night and partying till sunrise. I wrapped myself inside the moods and colours of this city. I licked it as if it were the white-powdered edge of a credit card. I learnt to move through it by following men. And by doing outcalls. There was one man who owned a lock-up in the arches on Pancras Road and who paid me to go around and whip him with chains as he lay face-down, naked, on a thin bare mattress on the floor. In the house of a dwarfish old queen in North Finchley, all scalloped curtains and violent clashing florals, I waited while he took his yapping pooch outside to lock it in the car. When he returned he informed me in a high-pitched clip that he wanted to watch me cum across a photograph of his father. In Willesden Green an old man of seventy-five would enquire after experiences of canings at school, and I would invent stories of having my buttocks exposed in front of the entire school and being whipped senseless. When he was sufficiently frenzied he would remove a slipper from his briefcase and use it to redden my behind. In a flat in Pimlico, a man wanted to be chased around the room whilst wearing fishnet stockings and whooping like a banshee. Every now and then I would have to rugby-tackle him to the floor (which made him shriek even louder) and then I would let him wriggle free and start the whole thing again. I regularly visited a man in Hammersmith whose flat was piled floor to ceiling with books, and who simply wanted me to do his ironing naked whilst he sat in another room doing paperwork; on one occasion, he got me to clean out the thick crust of limescale from his bath with spirit of salts, wearing nothing but a pair of pink marigolds. In a flat in Earl’s Court, I was fucking a client when his boyfriend walked in, having come back earlier than expected. He had a bottle of wine in his hand, which he immediately smashed against the doorjamb, running toward us with the jagged bottle neck raised above his head, shouting, “You fucking cunt!” We moved in time to avoid the glass, which tore into the pillow on which our heads had been lying. Feathers everywhere. I didn’t stick around to be paid. Another time, a man booked me to be his boyfriend’s birthday present. I had to go to a pub in Camberwell and pretend to pick him up, and then the three of us would go back to their flat for a threesome. The birthday boy was very drunk and very effeminate and disappeared into the bedroom the minute we arrived back at the house, whilst the other chopped out lines of coke on the Conran coffee table. After we had taken a line each he picked up a camcorder and handed it to me. He pulled a rubber sheet from underneath the sofa and unfolded it, laying it out flat and standing on it. Then he took his small and brutally circumcised cock out of his fly, spat into his hand, and started wanking furiously. At this point, the birthday boy glided back in, naked but for a square of chiffon, which he wafted around like Isadora Duncan with her scarf as he danced, lost to his own imaginings, lost in being someone else entirely. I saw all this in monochrome, through the viewfinder of the camcorder. Isadora swanned out again and I swung the camera around to catch the boyfriend coming in rapid jets that sprayed across the rubber sheet.

There’s no such thing as human nature. Nothing is hidden. It’s all on the surface, if you can be bothered to look.

1894

Last night Taylor and
Charlie and me went by omnibus to Soho and met this Mr Wilde in Kettner’s on Romilly Street. A supernatural glow came from the pink lampshades that sat like blushing angels at the centre of each white-winged table.

We dined upstairs in one of the private rooms, and with us not being used to such grandeur, Taylor showed me and Charlie what cutlery to use, and I never spoke unless spoken to. I was introduced to Mr Wilde and his friend, who’s a real lord, apparently. And it was like meeting royalty at first, I was that nervous. That is, until I discovered Lord Muck is as rough as a navvy’s ball sack beneath that hoity-toity exterior. I smiled my biggest smile, put at ease by the desire in their eyes. By now I’d learnt to read the signs of hunger and bask in their heat.

“Our little lad has pleasing manners,” Mr Wilde said with a smile, holding my gaze till I broke it, spitefully. I was seated next to him, and throughout the meal he would pull my ear or chuck me under the chin whenever I said something that made him laugh. I didn’t mind.

Mr Wilde and Taylor and Lord Muck did most of the talking and they talked so fast it was the devil’s own job to keep up. And they talked about such peculiar things. At one point Taylor started to recount stories about who’d been to the house recently and at the mention of one name Mr Wilde arched an eyebrow and said,
“He’s
always in pursuit of the hirsute, that one; he couldn’t care less about the hairless.”

“Although I hear he does no more than suck their yards,” said Lord Muck before turning to call the waiter to order more champagne.

“Whereas with you, dear Bosie,” said Mr Wilde, “the onus is always on the anus.”

“Now, now, Oscar,” said the young lord, “judge not, lest ye be judged.”

“Oh, I know I should be more Christian, but my tastes are far too catholic.”

And on they went like that for hours.

I’d never heard such talk before, all manner of things I’d never heard of. The usual punters talk, don’t get me wrong, Christ, some of them never shut up, but what bores they suddenly seemed in comparison. Mr Wilde talked of art and music, of passionate love and the stupidity of the ruling classes, and it was like another language. And yet, all through the meal, all I could think about was how fat and ugly he was and how I hoped, even though this young lord was stupid, that he was the one I had to do it with. He was slim and pretty, at least. I’ve got used to feigning joy in the presence of some of the ugliest bastards you’re ever likely to meet, don’t get me wrong, but still, if there’s the possibility of a nice face, I know what I prefer.

I focused on the way Mr Wilde’s chin shone with saliva and I told myself he was nothing but a fruity old sodomite and I’ve met plenty of them. Nothing special about this one, just thinks he’s clever is all, thinks he’s better than the rest of us, and he’s only a paddy, after all. He said, “I love London as Joan of Arc loved the pyre that canonised her; it will be the death and thus the making of me, at one and the same time.”

“Saint Oscar,” laughed Lord Muck.

“The paradox made flesh.”

“And you’ve got that in abundance,” the lord said, pinching Paddy’s waist.

He said, “Don’t you think London is like a drying pool of vomit at which pigeons are mindlessly pecking with no hope of nourishment? Coprophagy would be preferable—feeding straight from the rank fundament of the City. Each pallid citizen is just one more pigeon staking its claim on a morsel of bile, heedlessly shuttling from one side of this barnyard to the other.”

The others laughed, Taylor and Lord Muck—even Charlie. All laughing, pissed as newts. But I didn’t find it funny at all, and I didn’t want to fawn all over him the way they were. It made me sick, especially the way he lapped it up.

I found myself warming to the thought of sex as we got to the end of the meal. The champagne hadn’t stopped coming and my head was woozy, but my prick was standing and I knew from experience that Charlie was always up for it, and good at it too.

After the meal, we all took a hansom to the Savoy where Taylor waited in the bar downstairs while the four of us went upstairs to Mr Wilde’s room. All inhibitions were by now dissolved. Mr Wilde kept his clothes on while Charlie and me and the arrogant lord stripped off and got down to it. Christ, he’s a foul-mouthed bugger, that Bosie—swears like a costermonger and has the manners of a farmer. Fuckin’ this and fuckin’ that. Worse than Pa. He got us both to suck on his member, and a big fucker it was too for such a skinny runt. While we sucked he played with our arses, pushing the neck of an empty champagne bottle as far up each of us as it would go, ramming it in till we squealed and gasped. Then we stood up on the bed while he sucked both of our members at the same time. Mr Wilde sat and watched from a chair by the window, his breeches undone, frigging himself at the sight of our debaucheries, making funny little noises all the while. We finished off with a human sandwich. Lottie was the filling, I was the bottom slice, and Lord Muck was the top slice. We moved in perfect rhythm. like those clockwork toys you see in the windows at Whiteleys.

As we were dressing, Mr Wilde dropped a coin in each of our breast pockets and said, “Thank you, my cherubim,” opening the door for us and dropping a curtsy like some chambermaid. Taylor was the cash-carrier and we didn’t normally see much of it, to be honest, till we got paid once a week. We knew it was no good telling him we’d been given no coin, for he’d only shake us by the ankles till the pennies dropped out if we didn’t hand them over.