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NEIL BARTLETT was born in 1958. His first book was the ground-breaking queer study of Oscar Wilde, Who Was That Man?, published in 1988, and his other novels are Mr Clive and Mr Page (1996), Skin Lane (2007) and The Disappearance Boy (2014). His fiction has been shortlisted for the Costa and Whitbread Awards, and in 2014 he was nominated as Stonewall Author of the Year. In 2000, he was awarded an OBE for his work in the theatre as a director and playwright. www.neil-bartlett.com

Praise for Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall

‘Brilliant, beautiful, mischievous; few men can match Bartlett for the breadth of his exploration of gay sensibility’ Independent

‘Tender, brutal, explicit, erotic and moving … a fictional debut of staggering assurance and ability … Stands head-and-shoulders above any British or American gay novel to have appeared in several years’ Gay Times

‘Profoundly moving and enriching. Bartlett has achieved what is almost impossible: he has written a novel about successful, happy love’ Glasgow Herald

‘As good a novel as you are likely to read this year … A writer who can really change the way people think’ Literary Review

‘Exquisite … a moving and erotic love story’ Observer

‘Sexual, elegiac, imaginative and powerfully written’ Time Out

‘A triumph both in its execution and in its intent’ Sunday Times

Praise for Skin Lane

‘A cunningly narrated story in a totally original milieu. A tale of the unexpected’ Judges of the 2007 Costa Novel Award

‘Neil Bartlett is a protean polymath of a creator, ceaselessly inventing new artistic worlds – and then conquering them. Skin Lane is a fiendishly taught little psycho-shocker that recalls Simenon at his most hardboiled and Highsmith at her creepiest’ Will Self

‘Original, disturbing and … beautifully written, this is an always fascinating work’ Literary Review

‘A potent fable about the destructive power of lust and an unsettling psychological study in the manner of Patricia Highsmith’ Daily Telegraph

‘Charting the outer limits of desire and personal rejection with compassion, made all the more striking because of the unsparing clarity of Bartlett’s vision, Skin Lane pulls off the triple whammy of being shocking, sexy, and tenderly humane’ Metro

Praise for Mr Clive and Mr Page

‘A strange, yet perfectly poised tale of male sexual longing and violent fantasy, with a chilling whodunnit at its core’ Mail on Sunday

‘Neil Bartlett’s second novel establishes him among English fiction’s fiercest historians of gay male suffering’ Independent

‘A curious and original novel that is compulsively readable’ Observer

READY TO CATCH HIM SHOULD HE FALL

NEIL BARTLETT

images

First published in Great Britain in 1990 by Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

3 Holford Yard

Bevin Way

London

WC1X 9HD

www.serpentstail.com

First published in this Classics edition in 2017

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author

A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library

eISBN 978 1 78283 394 9

This book is dedicated to my grandmothers, Dorothy May Bartlett and Edna May Aston.

… it is a contradiction, an anomaly, an apparent impossibility; but it is a truth. I am glad to have it doubted, for in that circumstance I should find a sufficient assurance (if I wanted any) that it needed to be told.

Charles Dickens, from the preface to Oliver Twist, 1837

Contents

Preface: Nearly thirty years later …

SINGLE

The First Week

The First Month

Week Five

Six, Seven, and Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

The Last Week

COUPLE

Meeting

Exchanging Numbers

Courtship (1)

Courtship (2)

Sleeping Together

Engagement

Publishing the Banns

Robing the Bride

Marriage

Honeymoon

Setting up Home

Living Together

FAMILY

Nearly thirty years later…

I started work on this book in the summer of 1986, when I was twenty-eight.

At the time, I was living in a flat on the top floor of Grenada House, a so-called ‘hard to let’ council block on the Isle of Dogs in London. It was an extraordinary place to live, and an extraordinary time to live there. 1986 was before the glass and steel behemoths of the new financial district of Canary Wharf were even dreamt of, and prior to that redevelopment it was still just possible to trace – amidst the Isle’s run-down council estates, empty warehouses and derelict docks – some of the last surviving traces of the queer life which had once been such a feature of this strange, left-behind part of town. Charlie Brown’s, a pub notorious for having reputedly stayed open for the entire duration of the Blitz, was still standing at the dock gates, and in the extremely dodgy back bar there, and in the slightly more salubrious George IV over on Ida Street in Poplar – not to mention in the back steam room of the Crisp Street Market Turkish Baths – it was still possible to meet sea-queens who would share their stories of love, lust and survival in the old East End of the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s. I sometimes wonder if it was talking to these men made me start writing out my characters’ lives as if they were from some kind of half-mythologised history, one that mixed hard fragments of fact with the glorious possibilities of fiction – just like those queens did when they embroidered their stories after one drink too many.

At the same time as I was searching out stories of an indomitable queer past, I was also making forays into the narratives of contemporary gay London. My two favourite haunts were The Backstreet, the city’s first dedicated leather bar, which was just twenty minutes away from Grenada House up the Mile End Road, and The London Apprentice, a cheerfully notorious den of iniquity opposite Shoreditch Town Hall which somehow managed to combine the pleasures of club, bar and back-room within a single building. Further West, and usually on Saturday night, there was the aptly-named Heaven, which was the first room I ever walked into that contained a thousand other gay people, all of them strangers, and all of them dancing. My nights out were late, and in the 1980’s night buses were infrequent creatures; often as not, I would end up making the journey home to my bed on foot. It was on these long treks home through a deserted late-night city – sometimes accompanied, sometimes alone – that much of this novel was sketched in my head, and on my makeshift trestle-table desk on the top floor of Grenada House, in the ensuing hours before dawn, with the river whitening outside my window, that much of it was drafted.

Those nights out were inspiring – but the solitary walks home were foolish. London, in 1986, was not a safe place for a visibly gay man like my twenty-eight-year-old self to be out alone after dark – or even by daylight, for that matter. The cresting of the first wave of the British AIDS epidemic had been accompanied by an extraordinary outpouring of hostility towards us both in the media and on the streets, and although I was having the time of my life on those nights out, the atmosphere of vindictive violence which surrounds the characters of this novel reflects very closely the daily experience of myself, my friends and my lovers at the time I was writing it. The final assault in the book in particular is very closely based on one particularly surreal incident. when I had to run the gauntlet of a small crowd of hate-filled strangers just ten minutes away from my front door.

For all its story-telling, some of the book now reads to me like a personal eye-witness report on those years. My hero Boy’s flat in the book is my flat in Grenada House, no more and no less; the funeral parlour and newsagent that flank the bar where he gets picked up by O, the love of his life, did indeed stand side by side on the Commercial Road just as I describe them, and the men who bear witness to their glorious affair there are all more-or-less portraits of my own night-club acquaintances and pieces of trade – though their names are all borrowed from two of my favourite collector’s items in the pre-history of British gay fiction, Rodney Garland’s The Heart in Exile (1953) and the screenplay for the film Victim (1961). AIDS itself is never mentioned by name in the book, but (for me at least) it is there on every page – in the rattled buckets, in the safe sex advice, in the condoms, in the memorial candles which are held aloft in Trafalgar Square in the book’s finale. Most of all, it is there in the fierce tenderness with which all characters in the novel habitually – and without question – care for each other. That tenderness and care are, I think, the most important things that need remembering from those often-terrible years.

When the novel was first published, I received more than a few letters claiming to have identified the originals of both the bar at the centre of the story and of Mother, the woman who runs it. Though she has elements borrowed from several of the mother hens (of differing genders) who took my younger self under their sheltering, sequinnned and wisdom-spangled wings while I was out on the town in those years, she is in fact my own creation; and while her kingdom borrows details from just about every gay bar I ever walked into in all the different cities besides London that I spent time in while I worked on the novel – Ghent, Newcastle, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Toronto and Amsterdam – it is very deliberately not based on one place in particular. As it is for Boy in the novel, it is the bar my younger self dreamt of finding, the bar to end all bars, the one that could provide me with everything that I, hungry as I was to discover both my own self and my own culture, could ever need – be that hints on interior decoration, a working guide to sexual good manners, suggestions as to appropriate evening-wear – and love.

The book makes much play with the mingling of the past and the present, but there is of course one thing about it which is now very definitely history. That is its central premise, which is that a marriage between two men could only ever be a romantic fiction. Hard to believe as it may be for younger readers, only thirty years ago such a public partnership was a legal and social impossibility in this country, one that not even the most radical amongst us believed could ever be a reality, and one that could only be written about as it is here, as a heavily qualified fantasy, part of the mental and emotional dressing-up box of a largely hidden subculture’s rituals and inventions. In the absence of equal civil rights, marriage, for gay men, in 1986, was always ‘marriage’. However, ‘marriage’ is a ritual that has been dreamt of and played with by just about every queer subculture down the ages in this country, and if gay liberation has taught us only one thing, it is that all that dreaming and all those games were not a substitute for radical social change, but their fuel.

I am proud to have documented the mental furnishings of my younger self with such candour, and I hope the book will give younger readers at least a glimpse of the hopes and fears that characterised a chapter in our history which is now fast being forgotten. But lest any of them might think that this book was written as some kind of campaigning tract or documentary – than which nothing could be further than the truth – I would point out that although the legal context of our affections and desires may have been transformed (in this country at least), just exactly what love for another man might or should be is still a subject that requires daily reimagining, whether that love lasts for a kiss, a night or a lifetime. In that respect especially, I hope my story can still inspire and provoke.

In addition to those larger hopes, I also have a very personal reason to be glad that this book is being re-published. In 1990, I dedicated Ready To Catch Him to my grandmothers, two people who I loved dearly but who I never had the chance to come out to, and with whom I consequently never had the chance to swap notes about how their narratives and rituals of love and marriage might compare to mine. I am happy to let that dedication stand, but now I would like to add another. In May 1989, this Boy met his O – and we’ve been together ever since. In March 2006, seventeen years later, we formalised our relationship in front of witnesses in a civil partnership ceremony – but ever since the day we met, what my younger self could only write as a future-imperfect fantasy, I have lived as a daily reality. So, nearly thirty years later, Mr. James Gardiner, my darling, it is only right and proper that this book is now dedicated to you too.

Neil Bartlett, 2017

Single

This is a picture which I took of him myself. He was so beautiful in those days – listen to me, those days, talking like it was all ancient history. It’s just that at the time it all seemed so beautiful and important, it was like some kind of historical event. History on legs, we used to say; a significant pair of legs, an important stomach, legendary … a classic of the genre. Historic. Well it was true, all of it.

I know that though I’ve shown you the photograph you still want me to describe him to you, this Boy of ours. What was he like, you say, and what you want to say is what was he really like then? Tell me something that no one else knows about him. Tell me something that will prove all of this. I understand; I mean, you want to know that someone isn’t just making the whole thing up when they talk about a man being that special to them. But what can I tell you? That ‘I knew the moment I saw him’? (People do say that about their men, more often than you’d think.) I could tell you that he had white skin, black eyes, and black hair, but you can see that from the photograph.

I could tell you that the eyes were so beautiful they could actually make you feel giddy when he suddenly looked up from the floor and straight at you.

That the white skin bruised easily (you could write your name on his back with your fingers, they said). And that the hair was black all over his body, a shiny, animal black, even on his back, at the base of his spine.

But then I don’t suppose that would be enough for you, and after all this is Boy’s story mostly, he is after all in a proper sense my hero, and you have to have this Boy clearly in your mind before we can proceed. The best I can say is that Boy looked something like, or had something like the feel of, Paul Newman when he’s playing the character christened Chance Wayne in that Tennessee Williams’ film. There’s a moment when he looks away from the camera and down at the floor and softly says, ‘Nobody’s young any more…’ Boy often made me think of that particular moment – it was the way he looked down. Except of course that Boy was young, really young. He was nineteen when he came to us.

When you see that film you want to say, God, he was perfect, and it was the same with Boy.

And you wanted to hit him sometimes and ask him if he knew what he was doing. He was so young some nights, I mean he looked so young and so quiet, and I was scared for him, you see, so scared that he’d get it wrong, that he’d waste himself. Sometimes when I was drunk and I’d see him standing there looking all quiet and black and white and gorgeous, waiting for someone to take him home, I’d get all teary and want to go up and slap him and shout in his face: How can you possibly understand what it means! You’re nineteen.

So he was young; but his body wasn’t smooth and gold, pure hard gold, which is what the woman says about the body that you see in that scene of the film. Boy’s was white, and furred with close dark hair from the root of his cock to the perfect black, flat fan on his chest, and at the base of his spine like I said. It was not golden; but it was precious. It was a perfect body. A perfected body, not an adolescent one, which was odd, because the rest of Boy was unfinished, and that’s what this whole thing is about.

And Boy was as handsome as Chance Wayne, and he smiled as easily. He could smile to order or smile for real, with real pleasure, and it came out just the same, it came out so beautiful that you were sure not to notice the difference. He moved as easily; and like Chance Wayne at the height of his beauty you, or I, would just, well, would just have died for him, stopped in our tracks for him, stopped the car for him, fallen silent if we saw him cross the street or across a crowded bar. Like Chance Wayne when you watch that scene in the film, he made you just want to wake up with him in the room, wake up with him in the bed beside you. You wanted to wake up with him right there in the room and to turn to him and quote the next line of the film right back at him, to whisper it to him, Make me almost believe that we are a pair of young lovers without any shame, and I don’t mean that in some tragedy-queen way, but in order to say of Boy that truly I do think that it is a beauty like his that makes it all worthwhile, and I do feel that if we are fighting for anything, and if I was asked in a questionnaire what it was I was fighting for (and believe me I do feel like I am fighting, more and more I think that), then I would answer, beauty. Beauty or whatever you call it that makes you feel that you have no shame any more, none left at all.

One thing Boy never said, the line of Newman’s he would never have used, was Don’t call me Boy. He loved to be called Boy. He smiled whenever the name was used. He loved it that we had christened him and he knew that he was special to us.

And if you still can’t quite see him, and this is not your ideal Boy at all, then I’m sorry. Perhaps you think that Boy does not sound too beautiful to you, by which you mean he does not sound your type. Well, I have to say that much of the impact of this story depends upon your being able to see and think of Boy as beautiful, admirable and even adorable in the true senses of those difficult and dangerous but nonetheless precious and necessary words; I suggest therefore that you amend my descriptions of Boy and his lover – but I anticipate myself, that was not to be for several weeks yet; that ‘Great Romance of Our Times’, as it became known amongst us, had not yet begun, its theme tune had not yet been composed on Gary’s piano, its scenario was not yet subject of our daily gossip and speculation, we were not yet auditioning for a place in the credits – The Friend, The Admirer, Blond Man in Bar, Second Guest at Dinner Party. But do go back, and amend my description of Boy so that he is, is some way, if you see what I mean, your type. Make him fit the bill; imagine for him the attributes that you require. I don’t mean that you have to imagine him as your lover or prospective lover; this story does not require such strict identification, and I don’t see that any story does. After all, just look round any bar and you’ll see that everybody there, myself included (you too if it’s your kind of bar), has in their time been both The Boy and The Older Man, both Banker and Domestic, Ingenue and Other Woman, booted Prince and stirrup-holding Groom – but I don’t mean either that you should have complete licence to make him look just how you wish; I don’t want to think of anyone hearing this story and grinning and thinking of Boy as some permanently, conveniently smiling blue-eyed blond, because he was not that in any way and that is not what he meant to us. For instance, don’t make him shorter than you are, so that his eyes must always be looking up at you whenever you think of him. You might surprise yourself one night by wanting to feel his arm around your shoulder. You might want that to happen one night. And I would ask you, whatever changes you make, please keep him strong, as strong as he was. When I think about it I’m not sure it makes any important difference how you imagine he looks, I mean who am I to say whether this Boy you are seeing has blond hair or dark; but I am sure that it does matter what he means to you. Keep him strong, keep him young, and, whatever his colouring, keep him gorgeous. I apologise if this description of Boy sounds to you like some fantasy and not a real person, a real young man; and worse still, if this looks like a photograph from that kind of magazine which you wouldn’t even buy, let alone be seen reading in public, on public transport, for instance. But the truth is, if you had ever seen this young man, naked or clothed (and I have see him both, and halfway in between), then you would admit to the accuracy of what I’ve said. There are such men in this city, and even to see them, never mind to touch them or have them kiss you, or see them just before dawn, or to have them as one of your dear friends, is one of the great pleasures of our life, and it is commoner than most people think. In the part of town where I live I see strangers who I would call truly beautiful at least once a day.

Boy was truly beautiful, when he came to us. I can see him now standing there in the door.

I have this postcard depicting an allegorical figure of Strength. He is naked like a statue, with one knee bent and the other leg straight. He has strong, agile and indeed superb hands; in the palm of his raised, right hand he holds out to you a miniature city, complete with dome, bridges and towers, the freedom of which he is offering you and which he has promised to protect. Now place around the head of this statue angels; place in his left hand a sword; and light in his realistically enamelled eyes a welcome and a promise such as I had never, never in all my years seen. On this figure depends the rest of our story; it is on those white shoulders that all our hopes rest. He is the most beautiful of us all. It is at his feet that we throw ourselves like the bound figures which form the pedestal of this statue (one captive looks upward with adoring eyes). It is him who will attend our funerals; it is him who will be strong when we are not.

Actually, I am not sure that I was there on that night of his arrival, and I don’t claim to remember all the details or to have been as impressed by his appearance, framed in the doorway, as some people I drink with do; I think they just want to talk about their witnessing his first appearance that way – as if he was an angel or something extraordinary – because of what went on to happen later. But I don’t say that doesn’t make sense. I’m sure you have men you think of in that way too, people you see from a distance and you think they are angels, or at least heroes. I think that’s a proper feeling. But anyway, one day he found himself walking in our street, which was different to how it is now, because not only was The Bar there, which as you know is gone now, but also there were different kinds of people living in that part of town then. If someone was looking for The Bar in those days – because there was no name written up or sign for it, no lights at all, and not even a number on the door, Madame liked to keep it that way even when she didn’t have to any more – I mean when she opened up we may all have been in a sort of hiding, and not many people knew about The Bar and our life there, but it wasn’t that way later, and now you know we can have lights and advertising and you see boys queueing up outside every night, very public, and I like to see that – but in those days, in those days if somebody arranged to meet you for a date there, and it was their first time and they weren’t sure how to find us, you’d joke with them, and you’d say, well, first there is a wedding, and then there’s a death, and there’s the news, and then there’s us; meaning, first there’s the shop with the flowers, the real ones, and next door to that is the undertaker’s with the fake flowers in the window, china, all dusty; and then the newsagent’s and magazine shop, and then right next door to that is The Bar. You can’t miss it.

The first week

This is how he came to us.

Boy was walking down the street. Our street, though he didn’t know that yet. And his head was spinning from walking so far; he walked everywhere, and though he stopped to eat every day when he was on one of these journeys of his he did not I expect eat especially properly. He was worn out. Worn out with his own personal brand of window shopping; all that staring and never buying anything, all those shop windows, all those men to stare at and not dare follow, as if there was indeed a sheet of plate glass between him and them. And worn out with all that thinking, thinking all day with no one to talk to, and thinking because there was no one to talk to. No one whose advice he could ask. Some days he would follow a man, a man he’d just seen in the street, for minutes or for hours, thinking he would go up to him and ask him if he knew the way. I can remember doing that in my own time. Thinking that maybe this man was the right man, that maybe it was him I should ask him for directions, him who would take me home or wherever it was I was trying to get to. Boy was like that, he was hoping that somebody would take him to the place where everybody else was. Or at least tell him how to get there, or give him the money to get in when he did get there, or at least lend him a map with a cross marked on it, or give him an address.

But he never did ask any man for directions; he walked and he walked. In fact, when Boy first came to us he was at the point of exhaustion. This is partly I suppose what made us seem like a destination to him; he was in that simple sense ready to arrive, ready to get somewhere and rest there for the night.

When he arrived it was at a very particular time of day. The actual day’s business of shopping was over; for everybody else in the city it looked to Boy like it was time to go home, spent up and carrying bags full of things. The public world was closing down and everybody was going home; it was five o’clock. But for the kind of shopping that Boy was doing there was no five o’clock, there was no closing time.

To reach us, as I have said, Boy had to walk past three shops with windows. The first two were closed already, but Boy looked in the windows anyway; when he was out journeying the whole point was to stop and look at everything. The florist was closed, and they’d put the fresh stock away, so that when Boy looked in through the first window the flowers he saw were of silk; all artificial, but so good that they were better and fresher than the real thing, and certainly more expensive. Carefully arranged sprays and spires of sweet pea and mignonette, tiger lilies and lily of the valley, all in silk, wedding flowers with lots of ribbon in white and pink and pale blue, confetti colours. Next door Boy saw, laid out on the floor of a darkened and otherwise empty shop, a selection of flowers for graves. There were small clumps of purple china roses in the continental style, heavy and sharp enough to be used as weapons; wreaths of laurel, and hellebore flowers in white plastic with glittered stamens. Each arrangement had a blank label or card prominently attached to it. In the next window Boy saw a wall of magazines and papers (in eighteen different languages, including Turkish and black English), as carefully arranged as any display of flowers. This shop was still open, but Boy stayed outside, looking at the window display. In the top right-hand corner of the window was a single magazine whose cover displayed a naked man instead of a naked woman or a smiling mother. Boy stood outside the window and imagined the things he might see inside this magazine, should he ever take it down off the high shelf and open it, perhaps in the privacy of his room or perhaps right there on the street at five o’clock. He imagined small, cheaply staged pictures of sexual tortures involving ropes and wires – the kind of things which Boy had not yet done. He imagined a full-page, black and white photo of two bare-chested men (their chests shaved), photographed in daylight, walking down the street, gazing squarely at the camera, holding hands, one of them holding an Alsatian straining at a leather leash. He also imagined men photographed in colour, sprawled alone or holding each other, doing extraordinary things but in ordinary rooms, living rooms; doing things on sofas, on sheepskin rugs, stretched across a coffee table. He imagined the personal messages which appear in the back pages (usually on cheaper paper, and often coloured a dull pale yellow or pink) of such magazines, and he imagined writing replies to these messages, imagined exactly what he would say, even imagined meeting some of these men. And then (as he stood and stared through the window at the magazine) Boy imagined sleeping with these men, actually sleeping, sharing a bed with them for the night. And then Boy could imagine having a cup of coffee with them in the morning, but he couldn’t imagine anything else after that.

And now Boy was truly tired, end of the day tired, dog tired.

He wished that the geography of the city was different. Often at this time of day, when he felt the day’s journey should be ending or reaching a destination, but knowing that it was not, knowing that what he was looking for probably happened after everybody else had gone home, he wished that he could end his days walking at the edge of a sea or a lake so big that you couldn’t see its other shore. He wanted very much to walk out onto a pier – those constructions built so that people who have come to the sea to get away from their place of work can, for a moment, almost leave their working life behind, can go to the very edge of their week’s holiday and then dream of going further. Constructions built so that people who cannot afford to leave or sail away can feel that they are almost leaving. Boy would have been happiest to stand on the end of a pier from which big ships, real proper ocean ships, embarked; but he would have settled for just an ordinary pier, a small one – so long as it was big enough for him to walk away from the city, into the wind, turn his back on everything and stand there looking west at an empty sea, or a far horizon, and think about America, or somewhere.

And next door to the window full of magazines was not a window, but a black door.

Over the doorway was a small plaque. It said, In this house (and the ceramic of the plaque had broken and the name was missing) stayed on his first visit to the city, and it was here that he wrote the opening pages of his greatest work. There was no name painted up over the door. We just left it blank most of the time, because The Bar was always changing its name. It’s had about ten or twelve names since I’ve been going there, though some of them were just for one night, just for a party or celebration, and even then the name was never written up anywhere, you just had to know that tonight it was The Lily Pond, or The Jewel Box, The Gigolo, The Hustler, The Place (no, I think that was somewhere else), Grave Charges (I loved that one) – or The You Know You Like It, I remember that year especially. Just now we didn’t have any name for it at all, and it was just The Bar, like it always was, the bar.

There were three bells by the side of the door, and these did have names written by them. It was as if these were the names of tenants or people who lived upstairs, but in fact no one lived upstairs except Madame. The bells didn’t work and I don’t know who put the names there, they’ve just always been there. The first bell was labelled San Francisco; the second El Dorado; and the third Timbuctoo. Underneath the third bell someone had also written, using a biro on the paint of the wall, ETIOPHIA. Also there was a cluster of messages on small adhesive labels, like the ones Boy had seen stuck in phone boxes near the railway station, and he bent down to look and read all of these. They said: ‘Big, strong man gives sense of direction in life’ ‘Boy seeks Angel of Death’ ‘Blond boy seeks older man with Fast Car for mutually satisfactory crash’. One of these labels or messages was dated, and it said, ‘Thursday afternoon August 12th, Kevin Come back Darling’.

This doorway also had a display of flowers arranged behind glass. On the wall to the right of the door was a small illuminated case with the label ‘Appearing this week’, and below that a selection of coloured photographs was pinned to a board covered in cheap red plush. The pictures, however, didn’t seem to be of artistes of any kind; they were just of anonymous, handsome young men, the sort of photographs that Boy had seen in barber’s windows showing the kinds of haircut you could get. The colours were a bit faded and it looked like no one had rearranged or replaced the pictures in the case for some time.

The door was shut, locked in fact. Boy could see the scuff marks around the doorhandle where other men (Boy knew it couldn’t be people, he just knew it was men) had opened and closed it. On the black paint of the door was chalked a message: eleven o’clock.

The street was empty. Boy had an erection. He promised himself that he would come back later no matter how tired he was.

I can see that people must have thought we were being very mysterious then, that we were a bit of a mystery, that The Bar was a very strange place; but it never seemed that way to us. To us, it was as normal as home.

And because it was so normal to us, it is very strange now trying to describe it to you. Giving an account of it like this makes me feel as though you’re asking me to account for it, explain it for you. Explain our lives there – as if they needed explaining, and the whole point was that when you walked in the door of The Bar you knew you didn’t have to explain anything to anyone who was there, not anyone.

Our lives there were promiscuous, I can say that for a start. And though that was where I felt most private often, it was a very private place, you see, even at its busiest, and it was busy, I mean it wasn’t small and quiet, I don’t want you to think that, it was very public. A very public kind of life. ‘Promiscuous, public and semi-professional’, it said in one of Madame’s books about the lives of the great courtesans, and I think that’s about it. Some of us were great courtesans very definitely, certainly Stella sitting on her stool at the bar, you’d think she was in pearls the way she sat there. But even the less dedicated of us, public and semi-professional, I think you could say that of us all really. And I will say that myself I was very promiscuous sexually, I will say that because I think a lot of people want to leave that out of the story, well, not me thank you very much.

But, very strange it must have seemed, certainly the first time you walked in. For instance you had to know the names, the cast list. On a good night you’d have Ron Ackroyd; Terry and Bobby (and Bobby’s Mother); Sandy and Eddie; Big Janet (she was always in); That Awful Hugh Hapsley; Teddy, Tiny, Leaf, Minty, Winter; Madge, also known as The Troll; Miss Public House; and, of course, Mr Mortimer. Stella I’ve mentioned; Stella I was her full title, she would be sitting at the bar, and then later, Stella II would be sitting there beside her. I shan’t be telling you all about these men, but it does give you some idea, the way we were, the chorus, the bit players in this romance which is what I really want to tell you about.

And there was the way of talking, as well. Nobody talked like that all the time, of course, but you have to imagine what sort of an evening it was when all these things were said, what was really being talked about when we talked like that.

Stella (to Noel, who looked like an air steward, but wasn’t): ‘Will you do us a favour? Come over ’ere and sit on my face and go to sleep.’

Stella again: ‘Good evening, Sean. Remember what I told you; the first lesson’s free.’

Sandy and Eddie at two in the morning, surveying the evening’s crowd and explaining who was who to a newcomer: ‘You see that one in the white vest, that’s his affair in the denim. They’ve been together for fourteen years, they met at school. And you tell me, how fabulous is that.’

Sandy, at three in the morning, watching Boy: ‘If I was built like that I wouldn’t wait until three o’clock to take my shirt off.’

(pause with music)

‘In fact I don’t think I’d even wear a shirt.’

(longer pause)

Eddie, lighting a cigarette: ‘I wouldn’t even buy shirts.’

Greta – Greta was a cook. She used to show you a collection of photographs which she kept in her wallet as if they were family photographs, but in fact these pictures were all pictures of men’s cocks, she used to make them stop on the way home at the photo booth in the entrance to the station, she’d make them stand on the stool with their trousers down, she never got caught – Greta, on seeing me leave with an especially handsome man: ‘I hope you’re on the pill.’

Miss Public House: ‘I can’t stand any more trouble.’ Now this was a line from a film, and he was always using it. He’d be talking to some man all evening, they’d be getting on very well indeed as far as we could all see, but then Miss P would still be there alone when the lights went on, and the man would have gone. And he was never especially unhappy about it, and I rather admired that really. I think Miss P had a real point; you do have to know when you just can’t stand any more trouble, not tonight anyway.

When I very deliberately try and remember it like this I know I end up remembering it and describing it being like a bar scene in a musical, where everyone that the camera pans past is a very definite character, and they’re all so eager when the camera is on them, clapping and laughing and tapping their feet to the music so convincingly. Well, that was how we were; playing our scene for all it was worth. People criticise this style and say it’s all a lie, they take one quick look in through the door and they say that we are all acting madly to conceal some great sadness from ourselves. All I can say is, I think they must never have spent a night in The Bar if they think that, or never a good night. I want to say to them, when they talk like that, Well, where do you go in the evenings? Playing like we played wasn’t lying at all, it was nothing to do with lying.

What did you expect us to do? Sit around and be depressed? Madame always had a little stage set up there at the end, and I remember thinking at the time, well, seven nights in a week and seven different acts, it’s one way of dealing with the situation. One night there was a little backdrop of a painted garden, and in front of it two new boys were doing a strip routine to the original ‘Let’s Stay Together’; but then they got carried away and ended up just leaning against the wall together, leaning up against the painted flowerbeds and the little painted bridge, just kissing and making love right there, for at least forty minutes, nobody minded. It was lovely just watching them, you see. And the next night the backdrop was ‘A Night in Spain’, and there was Stella II, it was his very first night, all done up in black and gold lace with an underskirt of violent red, a red Elizabeth the First wig for some reason and a real red rose, it was sensational, and it was his first night too, Stella II doing ‘Te Amo’ till the tears ran down his face. And there was the original Stella up on her stool not being able to believe what she was seeing, going mental, screaming, That’s my sister, it’s my long-lost fucking sister. And all that in one week, it must have been one of Madame’s special amateur talent weeks I suppose.

As a background to all this, The Bar was basically black inside. Black was always fashionable with us. Whether it was being referred to that week as The Tea Room, The Oasis or The Hole (I liked that one too), it was always basically night inside, A Good Night Out; not black as jewellers’ velvet exactly, except on a good night, but always when you stepped in off the street it was truly night inside, a night dark enough to dream in and on which to meet strangers, whatever the variations on where and when this particular night had fallen. (One time we did scrape the black paint off the windows at the back and we served tea and pastries in the afternoon and had no music, but that wasn’t a great success with us. We would rather have gone somewhere else if that was what we wanted; it wasn’t quite right somehow and so we painted the windows up again.) Against the black walls there were of course changes in fashion, changes of music, changes in drink; for instance, for a couple of years you could get little liqueur glasses of violently alcoholic black coffee with pyramids of whipped cream on top after one of the bar staff had come back from an affair with a real sailor (or so he said anyway) in some German port, Germany somewhere. And sometimes Madame would just decide that we all needed a change and there’d be paint ordered and people would come in during the day and work for a couple of days and the whole place would be done out for a party or a festival. And suddenly we’d all be in Amsterdam or Paris or something like somebody’s idea of America for the evening, or else it would still be our own dear city, but from very definitely another era, all striped Regency wallpaper and framed Angus McBean photographs of Vivien Leigh; or another time there’d be nothing but opera on the sound system for a whole week; there’d be complaints of course but Madame would say, I’m just trying to give you boys an education, and Gary at least would be very happy. But then it would go back to the usual music, the old pictures would go up again and it would be back to the black paintwork.

Basically, you see, The Bar was always the same. It could be relied on.

And whatever else the decor was or the show was that night, whatever city we were all supposed to be in, one thing that was always the same and that Madame never got rid of was the ceiling. The design of the ceiling at The Bar was very wonderful. She’d had it inlaid with a hundred, several hundred small white fairy-lights, and it gave the effect of a real fantastic night sky, especially on a good night. I always loved that. The bulbs weren’t just scattered, but were arranged in the correct patterns – so that if you looked up you could see (if you knew which star was which), up there amongst all the dragons, bulls and poisonous scuttlers of the Heavens, right in the centre you could see the constellation which I always thought of as being our special one, a solitary man walking with his faithful dog, the high summer constellation of Orion, the Hunter, stretched and striding above us. But I never knew what all the other stars meant, just that one constellation. I didn’t know the full map. Gary would sometimes see me staring up at them, and he’d say, You know, it’s no good trying to read the stars up there … the only real stars here tonight are those two making out on the dance floor. Well, I for one am shocked, Gary would always say.

On certain nights, when things got very late and very heavy, Madame would go to bed and leave us to it there under the stars. And of course the door was shut then, and there’d be just seven or eight of us left on the dance floor. There would always have been a few men who had been dancing bare-chested all the evening, dancing with the fierce attention of the tango, or the apache; these were the ones who stayed on late. And now they would be dancing, as we said, dancing right down, with the elegance and economy of movement that only exhaustion brings, the careful and expert moves that only come at that particular time in the morning. The music by now would sound so fractured and sophisticated that only they, the real dedicated dancers, could still hear its rhythm. They were evidently hearing something different from the rest of us now, for we would watch them slow-dance to the fastest beat, and then, on the next record, see them execute perfect and elaborate improvised arabesques, all fast footwork and impassioned arms, in the gaps of a slow blues. And sometimes, towards dawn, the music would be at full blast and there would be hardly any movement at all, nothing left except maybe just one couple kissing – and yet that looked like dancing too. There was something about it that was scandalous. Two men kissing to music under the stars … or Little David, the barman, would bring out his famous white gauze and feather fans and send them gliding across his sweating chest and face (you don’t see this any more these days) – as if the secret thoughts that were normally hidden behind that odd smile in his eyes had escaped and taken flight; as if, I used to think, it was magic, as if some oddly attractive boy had unbuttoned his flies for you and brought out not a fat red cock but a blinking, blinded, delicate, fluttering magician’s dove, releasing it into the roof of the dark theatre to fly crazily over your astonished head … and above all this was that ceiling of shining stars. And on a good night the stars would seem to brighten; if you looked up it was like a clear winter’s night in the city, one of those nights when you find yourself on a dark street, one without streetlamps, and for once you can see that the stars have different colours; they are like still fireworks.

This moment is very private and is rarely if ever seen by outsiders, not even glimpsed through a window.

And then the lights all came on, and it would be like the hardest-to-bear dawn ever.

What else can I tell you about our nights there? Yes, you could have sex there, in the toilets, but only according to certain rules. I should say, really, that you could live just how you wanted there, according to certain rules. But the point was, they were our own rules.

And so it was into all of this that Boy made his entrance.

At the moment of Boy’s arrival, at the very moment that he was standing there framed in our doorway, hesitating (which makes such a good entrance, though Boy wasn’t doing it deliberately), at that same time on that same first evening there was a terrible attack on one of the men from The Bar.

It’s odd that I should remember that now, because I didn’t connect the two incidents at the time. I heard about the first one pretty soon, the next night in fact, because everyone I knew was talking about the arrival of the new beauty. The second I didn’t hear about for four days and even then not from a friend but from the free paper which used to be given away in the bars once a week in those days. The details were all there; they’d used a knife, and they brought it down on his face four times. It was strange then, all these things were happening, and the thing was, sometimes you didn’t hear about them until much later, even if it was someone you were used to seeing all the time.