Shameless (12 page)

Supposing they’d been caught, what would have happened then? There was a law against this sort of thing, surely? Would the police have been called? What would they have charged her with? And what would her mother say? She could just picture her face, hearing that her only daughter had been arrested for having sex in a hotel toilet. She could still recall the time her mother came to collect her from the police station when she was sixteen and had been caught shoplifting a bottle of body lotion from Woolworth’s. “We’ve got shares in Woolworth’s,” she’d said, her eyes brimming with shameful tears. “Stealing from them is like stealing from your own family!”

Maybe the police would have discovered that money had changed hands and then mistaken her for a prostitute. What would she have done? She’d have been given the sack, that much was certain. And without a job, she wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage, so she would inevitably lose her home, too. She’d be unemployed, homeless, and forced to choose between going back to Swindon to live with her mother or staying in London and making enough money to feed herself by selling her body on the streets. It was a terrible thought, but given the choice, she’d choose a life of prostitution over a slow death in Swindon any day.

Anyway, enough of this mental torture. She hadn’t been caught, she wasn’t a prostitute, and nobody was going to sack her and send her back to Swindon. She had simply indulged in a little sexual adventure with an old friend, and she had emerged from the experience emotionally unscathed, physically satiated, and a hundred pounds better off. Of course she didn’t need the money. But the fact that Dylan had insisted on giving it to her did help alleviate any guilt she might have felt about reopening old wounds. In a strange way, she would have been more ashamed of her behavior tonight had she not taken the money. And whatever else those five twenty-pound notes had come to represent, in Caroline’s mind they stood only for what she was going to buy with them—two grams of coke. That way, the evidence of tonight’s little escapade went straight up her nose, and there were no physical reminders.

Just then the cab came to a sudden halt at a set of traffic lights and she looked up. As the lights turned to green and the cab slowly pulled away, her eyes were drawn to a couple walking arm in arm about thirty yards ahead. She wasn’t sure why they caught her eye at first. Although they were facing her, it was too dark and they were too far away for her to distinguish their features. Even in silhouette the woman didn’t look remotely like anyone Caroline knew. Then, as they drew closer, the light from a streetlamp spilled over them, illuminating the woman’s pretty, elfin face and sending a sudden chill down Caroline’s spine. The man was Graham. And judging by the way he stopped to pull the woman to him and hugged her so tightly it looked as if her skinny body might break, he was very much heterosexual and very much in love.

Martin was beginning to feel anxious. Almost an hour had passed since he’d dropped his E, and nothing was happening. They were squeezed around a table in the café-bar at Love Muscle—John, Neil and himself, waiting for their drugs to come up and for Fernando to return from the toilets, where he usually found it safest to sell a few pills without attracting the attention of the club’s security staff.

Just to add to the strain of the situation, John had spent the past twenty minutes angling for compliments about his new engineered Levi’s jeans, which, fashionable as they might have been, did little to flatter his scrawny backside. Neil, whose own backside was looking rather pert in a pair of buttock-hugging blue combat trousers, had made no secret of the fact that he found John’s jeans unappealing. “It looks like your bum’s dropped,” he said when John offered his rear view for inspection. “And you know what they say. Men don’t make passes at boys with flat arses.”

And so it had been left to Martin to massage John’s ego and keep the peace as best he could. As the minutes ticked by and the tension mounted, he was coming to the conclusion that his best wasn’t quite good enough.

“I can’t feel anything,” Martin said suddenly, hoping to change the subject and perhaps gain some reassurance that he wasn’t the only one whose drugs weren’t working.

“Calm down,” said John. “Sometimes it takes a bit longer to work, that’s all. Don’t worry. Fernando wouldn’t sell you any crap.”

“He’s right, Martin,” Neil chipped in. “Fernando’s drugs are good. I’ve always said that, haven’t I, John? I’ve never bought any bad drugs from Fernando. Not once. She’s very reliable.”

“Er, hello?” John snapped, sounding for all the world like a guest on
Ricki Lake.
“That’s my boyfriend you’re talking about. So we’ll have less of the ‘she’ if you don’t mind.”

“Sorry, I’m sure,” Neil said, nudging Martin to indicate that he really wasn’t sorry at all. “I didn’t mean anything by it, dear. We can all see that you’ve landed yourself a real man there.”

“Yes, well, you’re right about that,” John said sniffily. “I wish he’d hurry up, though. I saw one of those meathead bouncers go by a minute ago.”

Neil rolled his eyes. “He’ll be fine. Like I said, he’s a real man, your boyfriend. He can handle himself—and you, I’ll bet.”

John bristled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Easy, dear.” Neil smiled. “Everyone knows there’s only room for one man in every relationship. And you’ve already told us who wears the trousers in your house. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that you’re the one with your legs in the air. I don’t know why you’re getting so steamed up about it. Being a bottom is nothing to be ashamed of, provided your bottom is up to the job.”

John spoke through gritted teeth. “Not everyone conforms to your pathetic view of gay relationships, Neil. Not everyone chooses to be either a top or a bottom. Some of us pride ourselves on being versatile.”

Neil laughed. “You mean you’re a bossy bottom who holds her own legs in the air! Oh, hang on a minute. I think I can feel the E coming up now. I’ve got that butterfly feeling in my stomach. Oh yes. I can definitely feel it working.”

“Are you sure it’s not just your time of the month?” John asked, grinning menacingly.

“Very funny. No, I can definitely feel it. How about you, Martin?”

Martin frowned and shook his head. “I still can’t feel anything.”

“Right, well, I’m going to the toilet,” John said, jumping to his feet. “Why don’t you come with me, Martin? Neil can wait here in case Fernando comes back. You don’t mind, do you, Neil?” And with that, he turned and quickly walked away before Neil had time to raise any objections.

“It’s okay,” Neil said in reply to Martin’s quizzical look. “I’m happy to wait here. I could do with a break from that one anyway.”

Martin stood up from the table and hurried after John, finally catching up with him as they crossed the dance floor and entered the men’s toilets. It was still fairly early, but already a crowd had gathered. Topless men with pumped-up bodies and drugged-up eyes were standing at the urinals, frowning intently as they tried to pee or blatantly checking out each other’s equipment under the bright, unforgiving lights. Others had formed a queue for the stalls which, judging by the amount of water on the floor, were already feeling the strain of such heavy usage. A large group were congregated around the washbasins, pushing and shoving as they fought to refill their water bottles.

“I can’t see Fernando,” Martin said, looking around and feeling the first warm tingle of the E. “Do you think he’s okay?”

“I’m sure he’s fine,” John replied, grabbing Martin’s arm and steering him into a quiet corner. “He’s probably on his way back to the bar. So how are you feeling now?”

“Okay, I think.” Martin smiled, feeling the sudden rush of the E coursing through his veins.

“Well, I think we can do better than just okay,” John said. He took a tiny bottle of white powder from out of his trouser pocket and jammed it under Martin’s left nostril, pressing the right nostril shut with his other hand. “Now sniff hard.”

Martin sniffed and felt a burning sensation shoot up inside his nose. “Christ, that stings,” he said. “What is it, coke?”

“It’s a lot more fun than coke,” John grinned, fiddling with the top of the bottle before taking a quick sniff himself. “Just give it a few minutes and you’ll see. Welcome to the wonderful world of K.”

Eleven

T
he wonderful
world of K.” The words were imprinted in Martin’s mind like the opening credits to a film as he trudged along behind John, back in the direction of the café-bar and the familiarity of Neil and the table where they had been sitting only minutes ago, but which now seemed like a distant memory. He had lost all concept of time from the moment the powder shot up his nose, so he wasn’t sure exactly when it had started, but something very peculiar was happening. The film was about to begin, and it felt as if a part of his brain was literally opening up to receive the picture. He could even visualize it, could actually see the process by which layers and layers of half-realized thoughts and disconnected ideas were physically unfolding and changing shape before regrouping into a new and unfamiliar pattern that, however strange it seemed at first, nevertheless made complete sense. It was a bit like watching someone skilled in the art of origami take a flat piece of paper and quickly fold it in ten different directions at once, until finally it wasn’t a flat piece of paper anymore but a paper swan. Only this particular origami demonstration was taking place inside his head, and it was happening in reverse. Folds were being lifted and edges smoothed out until suddenly the world was no longer three dimensional, but flat.

He giggled at the thought—the world was flat after all. Maybe if he wandered over to the edge, he would fall off. But where was the edge? He had no sense of distance, no way of gauging the physical space between himself and his immediate surroundings. He was like a partially sighted man feeling his way in the dark, vaguely aware of obstacles in his path but unable to determine their exact size or position. He walked into a pillar and held on to it with both hands. He stood there for a moment, trying to get his bearings. How far away was John? A few feet? A mile? He couldn’t tell. And the dance floor he was walking on—how far down was it? He had no idea. He was still standing upright, so presumably his feet must be on the floor. But there was none of the familiar feeling of walking, no sense of his feet making contact with anything solid. It was how he had always imagined it must feel to walk on the moon. He felt weightless, as if every muscle in his body was being pulled upward by some strange force of gravity. Maybe if he let go of the pillar he would just float up into the air, past the lighting rig and through the roof of the club and high into the sky above. Houston, we have a problem.

It was weird, this drug. It was like seeing everything from a completely different angle. The hands held out in front of him were attached to his arms, so presumably they must be his. But they didn’t feel like his hands. And the pillar they were clinging to—was it the same pillar or a different one? He wasn’t even sure which club he was in anymore. Was it the Fridge? Or had they left there already and gone to Crash? He couldn’t remember leaving, but then he couldn’t remember arriving, either, so who could say for sure? Maybe they had been beamed up by aliens, or had climbed into some kind of teleporter and been transported to another club, in another dimension. Anything was possible. Perhaps they were at Trade. At least that would explain why everything looked so unfamiliar. He took a good look around and eventually spotted a few faces in the crowd he recognized—not friends exactly, but faces you saw regularly enough when you were all part of the same gay-clubbing fraternity, faces that reassured you of your whereabouts, faces that told you where you belonged. He heaved a sigh of relief. It didn’t matter which club he was at so long as there were a few familiar faces, and something to hold on to.

And then everything shifted. Was it just a trick of the lights, or had the world suddenly changed color? Everything was tinged with a haze of red and green, just like in one of those 3-D movies from the ’50s, only flattened out, the way the film looked when you took your 3-D glasses off. Even the people were flat, like paper cutouts, or that moment in
Tom and Jerry
where Tom is crushed by a steamroller or an anvil lands on Jerry’s head. And those muscle boys dancing in front of him with their shirts hanging from the backs of their trousers—was it just his imagination, or had they mutated into giant peacocks? He stared at them and gradually the image sharpened, like a film coming into focus. Sure enough, there they were—giant peacocks puffing out their chests, resplendent with red and green feathers, shimmering under the disco lights. So this wasn’t
Tom and Jerry
after all—it was Disney’s
Alice in Wonderland
. And suddenly they weren’t peacocks anymore—they were flamingos. Any minute now, the Queen of Hearts would appear and they would all play a game of croquet.

Oh, but hang on. It was all changing again, blending back into some semblance of what it had been before. The muscle boys were boys again, only now they were dancing in slow motion. They looked almost as if they were suspended in treacle. And the music had stopped. All he could hear now was the sound of his heart beating and the laughter of the boys as they danced in time to his heartbeat. And the slower they danced, the slower his heartbeat became, until finally he was convinced that his heart was about to stop. Shit! It was getting scary now. His vision was reduced to a tiny circle, like the beginning of a Bond film or the view through one of those peepholes people put in their front doors for security. He could just make out the shape of John, disappearing into the distance. He tried to walk, but it was like walking waist deep in water, or running from the monster in a nightmare—two steps forward, one step back. He wanted to shout out, to tell John to wait for him, but he seemed to have lost the power of speech. His whole body felt numb. He turned around, searching frantically for a familiar face. He tried telling himself to stay calm, but it was no use. He panicked.

Suddenly he felt a hand on his shoulder. John’s disembodied voice bubbled into his ear. “There you are, daughter!” it said. “You had me worried for a minute. Come on, I think we’d better get you some sugar.”

It was 1:00
A.M.
and Caroline was lying in bed, studying the cracks in the ceiling. Since arriving home just over two hours ago, she had drunk the best part of a bottle of red wine and taken two herbal sleeping tablets and half a dozen melatonin in an attempt to knock herself out. But it was no use. Her body may have been ready for sleep but her mind certainly wasn’t and stubbornly refused to be tricked into a state of stupor by any amount of chemical inducements she pushed its way. Of course not all of the chemicals she had pumped into her body this evening were conducive to a good night’s sleep. The minute she walked through the door, she had Hoovered up the remains of her coke in one enormous, fat line. But needs must, and after the night she’d had tonight, Caroline’s need for an invigorating, confidence-boosting line of charlie was greater than it had been since . . . well, since she had walked into the Sanderson and Dylan spilled his drink down her dress. The reminder of that little mishap was now safely hanging in the wardrobe, awaiting a visit to the dry cleaner’s. The money was still in her handbag, awaiting a phone call to her coke dealer. As for the other physical reminders, they had been soothed away by a long soak in the bath. It was just a pity she couldn’t get Graham out of her system quite as easily.

How could she have got it so wrong? How could she have jumped to the conclusion that Graham was gay, and driven him into the arms of another woman? It was like a bad joke, too pathetic for words. Having gone over it in her head a dozen times in the last half hour, she was convinced that she would have felt better had she spotted him kissing another man. At least then she would have had the consolation of knowing that she’d been right all along, and that their relationship had no real future. Seeing him with that woman only reminded her of what she was missing, what she had been missing for the past three months, and what she needn’t have been missing at all if she had only known when to keep her big mouth shut. It was like being shown a glimpse of the future she and Graham could have had together, then seeing it snatched away. This was her punishment for being so stupid, and for ignoring the advice of her friends. Martin had told her she was jumping to conclusions when she let it slip that she suspected Graham was leading a double life. If only she had listened to him.

She looked at the bedside clock: 1:20
A.M.
Martin would be at Love Muscle or at the Fridge now—at least that was where he had said he was going when they spoke earlier this evening. He had invited her to join him, only she had made up some story about meeting up with an old girlfriend, fearing that he might have disapproved of her date with Dylan. Martin may be gay, and gay men may be reputed to have more sex with more people under a wider variety of circumstances than any other species on the planet, but there were still some things a girl didn’t even share with her best gay male friend, and calling up an old flame because she was dying for a fuck was one of them. Aside from anything else, it looked desperate, and desperate women generally didn’t go down too well with gay men, who preferred their female companions to have balls—in the figurative sense if not the literal (although judging by some of the drag acts Caroline had witnessed over the years, a pair of balls was all that was required for a talentless twat in a dress to inspire a level of devotion few biological women could hope to achieve if they spent the rest of their lives surrounded by gay men). She realized of course that there were probably a lot of gay men out there who felt just as desperate as she had felt today. But the difference was, when they were desperate for sex, they didn’t call up an ex-lover and reopen a can of worms that ought to have been sealed and properly disposed of years ago. They took the far more sensible option and went and found someone new and exciting to have sex with.

Caroline threw back the covers, hauled herself out of bed, and padded into the darkened living room, stubbing her toe on her handbag as she fumbled for the light switch. She yelped with pain and hopped over to the sofa, gripping her toe and cursing the fact that every handbag she came into contact with tonight seemed intent on causing her injury. The little Tiffany pouch was where she had left it, lying flat on the glass coffee table. Empty, it reminded her of a man’s scrotum after sex—no longer plump and full of promise, but limp and sagging, a shadow of its former self. The only difference was, in her experience men’s scrotums had a habit of refilling themselves, sometimes in as little as twenty minutes. It was a pity Tiffany hadn’t come up with a pouch that could do the same. Still, maybe there was a bit of coke she had missed, an old wrap from another night, a line or two she had put aside in case of an emergency. She picked up her handbag and emptied its contents onto the table. There were no old wraps, no emergency lines, no coke crumbs mysteriously concealed in a fold in the lining. Instead, there were the usual items of makeup, plus the evidence of this evening’s transaction—a damp pair of panties and five crisp twenty-pound notes.

It was too late to call her dealer now. Even coke dealers had to sleep sometime, though how they ever managed it with so much coke in the house was something she would never understand, just as she would never understand people who did one line of coke in an evening and insisted that it was enough. Still, all was not lost. It wasn’t that late, and she obviously wasn’t about to fall asleep anytime soon, so she might as well go out and have a good time, preferably where there was a chance that she might bump into a few friends and maybe even a dealer or two. Nobody need know what she had been up to this evening. Desperate she may have been, but with a bit of makeup and the right bra, Caroline knew she could impress those gay boys as much as any drag queen.

She picked up the phone and dialed the number for Martin’s cell. A woman’s automated voice told her that the phone she was calling was switched off. She hesitated for a moment. Then she replaced the handset before lifting it up again and ordering a cab to take her to the Fridge.

With the help of a large glass of Coca-Cola, a large line of cocaine and a few well-chosen words from John, Martin had emerged from his K hole and was now dancing happily in the middle of a group of muscle boys, stripped to the waist and high on his second E of the night and the remnants of whatever other substances were still coursing through his veins. He hadn’t seen John and the others for quite some time, and had no idea where they were, but that hardly seemed to matter. One of the boys smiled at him, and he smiled back in what he hoped was a friendly yet casual manner, fearing that looking too eager would scare his admirer off. It must have worked, because the next thing he knew the boy was dancing right up close to him and was whispering in his ear.

“What was that?” Martin asked. “I couldn’t quite hear you.”

“I said, do you like my body?”

Martin looked down at the boy’s smooth, muscular torso and nodded his head. “Yes,” he said. “It’s very nice.”

The boy grinned and leaned in even closer, till his groin was barely an inch away from Martin’s own. For a moment, it looked as if a smooch might be in the cards. Then the boy turned and pointed toward another muscle boy with an equally smooth, equally muscular torso dancing a few feet away. “What about him?” he said. “Is my body better than his?”

Martin wondered if he had heard correctly. “It’s very nice,” he said again, hoping that this would satisfy his new friend and avoid any embarrassment.

It didn’t. The boy scowled. “But you think his is better.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Yeah, well, it was nice meeting you.” And with that, the boy stomped off and disappeared into the crowd.

Martin considered running after him, then thought better of it. Someone that vain and that fiercely competitive could only mean trouble, and he was having a perfectly nice time where he was. He was surrounded by beautiful boys, more beautiful boys than he had ever seen before. He was in the ideal spot. What possible reason could he have for moving away? Still, there was always the possibility that the other boys had witnessed what had just happened and had decided that he wasn’t someone worth knowing. Things like that went on all the time in gay clubs. If people in a gay bar or a gay club saw you being rejected, they didn’t feel sorry for you. At best, they felt that there must be some good reason for it. At worst, they derived some perverse pleasure from your public humiliation and couldn’t wait for an opportunity to reject you, too. All things considered, it was probably time for a change of scenery.