Shameless (17 page)

When he finally arrived home, half an hour later and with half a dozen imaginary phone numbers in his pocket, the front door was double locked, indicating that Neil had already left. He thought this was rather odd. Neil rarely left for work much before ten, and it was still only 8:15
A.M.
He let himself in quietly and gently tapped on Neil’s door. There was no answer, and when he opened the door, he could tell immediately that the bed hadn’t been slept in. Perhaps Neil had got lucky last night, too, Martin thought. It seemed a bit churlish not to be pleased for him, but he couldn’t help but feel a glimmer of disappointment. He was dying to give somebody the full blow-by-blow account of where he’d been and whom he’d been with, to share the tiniest details before they faded into the dim recesses of his memory, just as the glitter on Ben’s pillowcases would inevitably fade with time, whether he washed them regularly or not. Sharing it all with Neil would make it seem more real somehow, even if he did leave out the bit about the glitter and the eye makeup. Something told him that these weren’t the sorts of details Neil would find particularly inspiring—although if John ran true to form, it probably wouldn’t be very long before he heard about them anyway.

Closing the bedroom door behind him, he made his way into the kitchen and checked to see whether Neil had remembered to buy fresh milk. The fridge door was decorated with the kinds of campy magnets that were sold at popular gay shops such as American Retro in Old Compton Street. The magnets began appearing after Neil moved in, and in a few short months had multiplied to such an extent that these days the fridge door offered a comprehensive visual history of gay culture, from Michelangelo’s David complete with an entire gay wardrobe to more recent gay icons such as Judy Garland and Pee-wee Herman. Attached to the door with David’s leather shorts was a note in Neil’s handwriting. “Gone to collect Brian’s mum from Euston,” it read. “Sorry about crack in toilet. Have called plumber, who will come and fix it this evening. Told to turn water off. I’ll pay for repair of course. See you tonight.”

Martin ran into the bathroom. Sure enough, there was a large crack in the toilet through which the water had obviously leaked at some point, creating a large puddle before Neil managed to locate the stopcock and turn off the water supply. Suddenly Martin wished he had taken up Ben’s offer of a bath. Cursing the day he allowed Neil to move in, he stormed into his bedroom and packed a bag for the gym. If he was quick, he might just manage to squeeze in a shower before work.

Caroline’s relief at finding her computer switched off and no trace of her document anywhere on the system was short-lived. Initially she was simply grateful for the fact that she had managed to get to the office before anyone else arrived. Greeting the security guard with a cheery “Good morning,” she had flown through the reception and up the stairs before finally landing at her desk. Laying her briefcase on top of the pile of papers littering the surface, she restarted her computer and looked around quickly to ensure that her boss wasn’t about to spring out of his office or that Paula, Sophie and Tamsin weren’t lurking by the watercooler. As the computer hummed into life, she was fully expecting to see the evidence of last night’s ill-advised outpourings suddenly materialize before her eyes. When the screen came up blank, she was puzzled. Then, realizing that her computer hadn’t simply gone into sleep mode but had actually been shut down, she ran a search for her document and was surprised when nothing remotely resembling it was found. Oh well, she thought, at least if it had disappeared into cyberspace, there was no chance of it getting into the wrong hands.

Then she had a truly terrible thought. Apart from her boss, she was the last person to leave the office last night. The cleaners had been and gone, and neither they nor the security guard were authorized to touch the computers. So if she hadn’t closed the document, and she was pretty certain that she hadn’t, the only other explanation was that her boss had closed it for her before shutting down her computer. And since he was her boss, and he had caught her chopping coke at her desk, it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that he would have felt compelled to read what she had written. And if he had read it, it seemed highly probable that he would be feeling far less lenient about her little indiscretion. In fact, he had probably arrived at the conclusion that he was harboring a drug-addicted prostitute and was preparing to give her the sack the moment he walked through the door.

This was all Dylan’s fault, she thought. It was he who had insisted on paying her for sex. It was he who had suggested they meet at the Sanderson, and he who had waved her off in a taxi destined to stop at a traffic light just as Graham and his new girlfriend were passing by. It was he who had wound her up into such a state that she had gone to the Fridge and been molested by some pervert passing himself off as gay. It was he who had left her feeling so guilty and confused over Graham that she had sat down at her desk last night and written that bloody stupid letter to herself. It was he who had left that answering-machine message for her last night, adding to the stress she was already suffering and ensuring that she didn’t get a good night’s sleep. It was he who had created the situation she now found herself in, waiting in anguish for her boss to arrive and give her the sack. It was all his fault.

Well, he wasn’t going to get away with it. If nothing else, she wanted him to know exactly what he had done. She wanted him to take responsibility for all the damage he had caused. She wanted him to feel the full weight of her anger. Opening her briefcase, she pulled out her address book and searched for Dylan’s telephone number.

If she rang now, she could catch him before he left for work. She dialed the number and sat quietly fuming with the phone tucked under her ear as she waited for him to pick up. It was then that she spotted the memo sticking out from under her briefcase, with her boss’s signature written at the bottom. She pulled it out and began to read. “Dear Caroline,” it began. “I hope I made myself clear last night, and that the little matter we discussed is now closed. Also, I should advise you that shortly after you left the office, the computer system crashed due to a sudden power cut. I noticed that you were busy working on something, but I’m afraid it looks as though it may have been lost. If you would like some help trying to retrieve it, please let me know and I will ask one of the technical staff to come and assist you.”

Caroline couldn’t believe her luck. The document had disappeared! She was saved! She wasn’t about to be given the sack after all! Her moment of elation was suddenly interrupted by the sound of Dylan’s voice. “Hello?” he said. “Hello? Who is this? Look, I’m standing here in a wet towel, so this had better be good.”

Caroline’s first instinct was to hang up. Then, feeling a tiny pang of guilt for the way she had been cursing his name only moments ago, she relented. “Hi, Dylan,” she said. “It’s Caroline. I’m sorry to call so early.”

“That’s okay,” he replied. “So, you got my message?”

“Yes. I mean no. Well, sort of. You got cut off.”

There was a pause. “I see,” he said finally. “Well, there’s no easy way to say this, Caz, so I suppose I should just come out with it. The thing is, the reason I called was to tell you that I’ve just discovered I’ve got crabs.”

3

Crash

Sixteen

W
ednesday
was the day Neil went to see his therapist. Neil was one of those gay therapy junkies who spent far more time talking about his recovery program than he spent actually pursuing it, and in the short time that they had lived together, Martin had learned everything about Neil’s therapist that there was to know. Neil had been going to the same therapist ever since he and Brian had split up, and in almost three years he had never missed a single session. His therapist, Derek, was a gay man in his early forties with red hair and a friendly face covered in freckles. He was based in Euston, in a first-floor rent-controlled apartment with orange-painted walls and a view of the local recreation center that Neil sometimes found distracting. Dotted around the flat were a selection of religious icons and other artifacts that Derek had amassed during his many visits to Morocco. In place of a couch, his clients were invited to unwind in a wicker rocking chair while he sat nodding in a similar chair directly opposite. The few remaining items of furniture reflected the Moroccan theme. The first time Neil entered the flat, he was overwhelmed by the range of herbal teas on offer, and asphyxiated by the smell of incense.

Derek was a recovering alcoholic and drug user who had been clean and sober for fifteen years, and who specialized in helping gay men with similar problems to overcome their addictions and avoid what he described as “chaos living.” It was his belief that much of the excessive behavior witnessed on the gay scene could be attributed to the impact of AIDS and the pressures of living through an age of immense grief and deep sexual anxiety. In a previous life, he had been employed by one of the main AIDS organizations as an HIV counselor, helping people to come to terms with their diagnosis. These days, he preferred to work for himself. The majority of his clients were drawn from the club scene, where HIV was rarely discussed and where the heavy use of drugs and alcohol often went unchecked. His client list included a DJ who had become addicted to Ketamine and broke down whenever somebody left the dance floor during his set, and several club promoters who had developed serious cocaine habits thanks to all the freebies their security staff confiscated at the door before passing on to their employers. It was no coincidence that Derek tended to screen his calls on Tuesdays, the day when most of his clients would be experiencing their comedown from the weekend.

Neil had first heard about Derek from the transsexual who sold him his car, who woke up one Tuesday morning convinced that life wasn’t worth living, and would have taken an overdose there and then had she not traded her prescription-strength painkillers for a couple of E’s the night before. During his first couple of sessions, Neil was only prepared to discuss his breakup with Brian, but it wasn’t too long before he began opening up to Derek about the other sources of pain in his life. Chief among these was his relationship with his father, who had been fairly violent when Neil was a child, and who reacted to the news that his only son was a bum bandit by removing everything belonging to him from the house and building an enormous bonfire at the bottom of the garden. Neil had already left home by the time this happened, and had often wondered whether his absence was all that prevented him from being burned along with his old schoolbooks and the bed in which he had masturbated regularly as a teenager. His attempts to come to terms with his father’s actions weren’t much helped by his mother, whose main concern seemed to be that her husband shouldn’t have been building bonfires on a day when the neighbors had hung their washing out to dry. An unhappy marriage had long since driven her into the arms of the Catholic Church, where she had found the comfort she needed, but learned very little in the way of tolerance or understanding. When Neil, laughing nervously, first told his mother that he was gay, she sniffed and scolded him: “There’s nothing funny about a prolapsed rectum!”

Although Neil regularly referred to Derek as his therapist, he was always at pains to point out that what Derek practiced wasn’t really therapy. “He doesn’t like the term ‘therapy,’” Neil explained to Martin one day. “He thinks it’s too clinical. His approach is more holistic.” Martin suspected that it was really Neil who felt uncomfortable with the term “therapy,” but going on what Neil had told him, he was forced to concede that Derek’s methods were a little unusual. As befitted a man with a fondness for orange walls and camomile tea, Derek talked a lot about “emotional clearing,” “codependency” and “relationship training.” He was a firm believer in the power of personal healing and actively promoted rebirthing as a means of cleansing body and spirit of negative energies. Neil had taken to rebirthing like a baby to the bottle. Each week he would leave the flat filled with remorse about the various chemical and sexual addictions he had given into at the weekend and head off to Derek’s flat for a spot of rebirthing. While Martin was the last person to criticize anyone for attempting to take control of their life in whatever way they saw fit, it did strike him as odd that each time Neil was reborn, he was reborn as the exact same person. Each Wednesday afternoon he would go to see Derek, and each Wednesday evening he would arrive home again, change into his leathers, and go to the Hoist.

“Why don’t you come with me?” Neil asked when he walked into the living room this particular Wednesday evening.

Martin, who was sitting on the sofa with a bowl of soup on his lap and his eyes glued to the television, barely looked up.
London Tonight
was about to show a report filmed at the Posh Spice party. Besides, he was still angry about the damage to the toilet, which, so he had discovered last night, had been caused by Neil sitting on it while trying to remove two fairly large steel ball bearings that he had inserted quite a long way up his anus in an attempt to improve his bowel control. Clearly this hadn’t worked, because a sudden fart had sent the steel balls shooting out of Neil’s backside like bullets and ricocheting off the toilet bowl, cracking the porcelain in the process. The toilet had since been fixed and Neil had paid for the repair, but the knowledge that he was sharing his flat with someone who thought that inserting ball bearings up his arse was a good idea still wasn’t sitting too happily with him. His mood wasn’t helped by the fact that he hadn’t heard from Ben, despite leaving three messages and going to great lengths to ensure that his own answering machine was in perfect working order and hadn’t mysteriously stopped recording messages just as he was on the verge of starting a new relationship.

“It’s not really my scene, Neil,” he said, making no attempt to disguise the tone of mild disapproval in his voice.

“You’re not still pissed off about the toilet, are you?” Neil asked. “Because if you are, it’s better to get it off your chest. Derek says that any negative energies we don’t express can turn inward and poison our whole being.”

“I really don’t care what Derek says,” Martin snapped. “My being is perfectly fine, thank you. Now if you don’t mind, I’m trying to watch this.”

“Is that the party where you met the cowboy?” Neil asked, ignoring Martin’s attempt to brush him off and joining him on the sofa.

“Yes.”

“And do I take it from your tone of voice that he hasn’t called?”

“As a matter of fact, he hasn’t called yet, no.”

“And how many messages have you left?”

“Two. Maybe three.”

“I see,” said Neil gravely.

Martin turned to face him. “What do you see, Neil? Because right now all I can see is you doing your best to wind me up.”

“Excuse me for showing an interest,” Neil said, rising from the sofa with an injured look. “I just thought a night out might help take your mind off him. Sorry if it came out wrong. I’ll try to remember to keep my suggestions to myself in the future.”

Martin felt a sudden pang of guilt. “No, it’s me who should be saying sorry. I’m just disappointed he hasn’t called, that’s all. He seemed really nice. I liked him. I thought he felt the same way about me.”

“Maybe he’s just busy,” Neil offered.

Martin forced a smile. “Yes, and maybe he’s just like all the others.”

“Maybe. Or maybe he’s been tied up and he’ll call you tomorrow. In the meantime, the last thing you should be doing is sitting here on your own waiting for the phone to ring. It never rings when you watch it. Take it from one who knows.”

“No, you’re right,” Martin said, switching off the television, picking up his empty soup bowl, and disappearing into the kitchen, returning moments later with a peace offering in the shape of two large vodka and tonics. “I suppose I should go out,” he said, handing Neil a glass. “I don’t know about the Hoist, though. I’m really not into SM and leather and all that heavy stuff. Besides, I haven’t got the right clothes.”

Sensing victory, Neil smiled. “Most of the guys who go to the Hoist aren’t into anything heavy. It’s not like Fist. You won’t see people pissing on each other or anything like that. It’s just a dress-code club, that’s all. And you needn’t worry about what to wear. You can borrow something of mine.”

Nix was not a product Caroline had ever had cause to purchase before, and she sincerely hoped that it was one she would never have to ask for again. The Middle Eastern girl with the one eyebrow and the black head scarf serving behind the pharmacy counter at Boots couldn’t have looked more disapproving if she had asked for a home pregnancy kit and an extra large knitting needle. When Caroline tried to make light of the situation, joking that it was a teensy bit embarrassing to be suddenly infested with pubic lice at her age, there wasn’t so much as a glimmer of a smile. Maybe good little Middle Eastern girls saw crabs as a symbol of Western decadence, Caroline thought, rather like homosexuality or plucked eyebrows.

Not that she regarded it as a laughing matter. On the contrary, the moment she put the phone down after talking to Dylan, she had been consumed by the urge to strip off all her clothes, pile them up on the floor, and set fire to them. Since she had been sitting at her desk at the time, this didn’t seem like a particularly advisable course of action. Instead, she had hotfooted it over to Boots, eager to take whatever steps were necessary to rid herself of Dylan’s little surprise gift as soon as possible. Never having contracted crabs before, she had no idea what to expect. She hadn’t even dared to peek inside her panties, for fear of what she might find. But the mere thought of the tiny bloodsucking creatures roaming freely around her nether regions was enough to make her skin crawl. It was bad enough picturing them nestled among her pubic hair, without imagining them wandering off like ants in search of fresh food supplies. She had heard reports of pubic lice spreading to people’s armpits and even eyebrows, which only served to confirm her faith in Nair and eyebrow tweezers. Never mind diamonds. Forget vibrators. When it came right down to it, depilatory products really were a girl’s best friend.

The first thing she did when she arrived home the previous night was to take a shower. Then she opened the bottle of Nix and, following the instructions on the label, applied the first coat of milky solution to her poor itching body. The label said to leave the solution on for a full twenty-four hours before washing it off and following with a second application. For Caroline, it had been twenty-four hours of physical discomfort and mental torture. How could she be expected to sleep knowing that some parasite was literally feeding on her? All night long, she tossed and turned, convinced that her body was under attack by some alien life-form. In her nightmares, she was the unwilling protagonist in a David Cronenberg movie. She woke up several times during the night, half expecting to find that her fingernails had fallen out and that she was on the verge of sprouting wings, like Jeff Goldblum in
The Fly
. Getting ready for work this morning, she caught a faint whiff of the strange solution on her skin and wondered how long it could possibly be before someone at the office commented. Before leaving the flat, she sprayed herself with half a bottle of her favorite perfume and popped the remaining half bottle into her briefcase for good measure. It must have worked, because nobody said a thing.

And now it was that time again. Easing herself into the bath, she smothered her skin with Clinique foaming body wash and lay there for a good half hour, relishing the warmth and cleanliness of the water and resisting the temptation to explore her pubic area for evidence of dying parasites. She knew she was probably overreacting. She knew that, as venereal diseases went, crabs were child’s play. She also knew that, despite what some people might say, there was nothing immoral about contracting pubic lice, any more than there was something immoral about catching head lice as a kid. They were two very similar, naturally occurring parasites that happened to take up residence on different areas of the body, that was all. But she couldn’t help herself. She felt dirty. As far as she knew, nobody in her family had ever needed to seek treatment for any form of venereal disease, with the exception of her grandfather who had grown up on a farm in Ireland and who announced after his third brandy one horribly memorable Christmas afternoon that he had once caught crabs off a prize pig.

Still, this time tomorrow she would be free of the shame and the itching and looking forward to dinner with Martin and the chance to absolve herself by sharing a joke or two with a trusted friend about some of the scrapes she had got herself into these past few days. In fact, if there was one positive note in all of this, it was the pleasure of knowing that, whatever nasty little surprise Dylan had given her, she had more than likely passed it on to the slippery Phil.

The first time Martin had ever set foot inside a leather bar was in 1992. It was the year that Madonna kindly offered to teach the world how to fuck with her
Sex
book and
Erotica
album. Suddenly sadomasochism was all the rage as black leather outfits came out of the closet and were paraded around on Paris catwalks and daytime TV. John was never one to let a fashion craze pass him by, least of all when it met with the approval of the world’s most ambitious blonde, so naturally he insisted that he and Martin should give the West End a pass for a night and pay a visit to London’s most famous gay leather bar, the Coleherne, which as luck would have it was situated just around the corner from his flat in Earl’s Court. Martin had never shared John’s interest in fashion. Nor, for that matter, was he a particularly big fan of Madonna. However, he did have a more than passing interest in Tony Ward, who had last been seen cavorting with the pop queen in her “Justify My Love” video and whose lean, tightly muscled torso was exhibited to good effect in the
Sex
book, and so he agreed to go along with John’s plan. Of course he wasn’t seriously expecting to bump into Tony Ward on a wet Friday night in Earl’s Court. But since it was common knowledge that Madonna had found many of the models featured in her book by scouring New York’s leather bars, it seemed highly possible that there might be someone equally desirable just waiting to be discovered at the Coleherne.