Call Me (9 page)

He was dropping hints with smiling eyes and a tongue which kept his lips moist. Although his voice was croaking a craggy path towards manhood, deep down in a delicate part of himself somewhere he still wanted to be treated as sweetly as baby Jesus. (So easy to destroy.)

He smiled, keeping in his secrets. Every inch was sixteen-year-old perfection, especially the neck: a vulnerable dip at the back, below the graduated hairline, tendons creating a kissable rift. A slender pale neck, delicate and pure, ideal for sacrificial strangulation. A pleasure to kiss while still warm.

I'm sure every luxury had been lavished on that youth—breast feeding, circumcision, microscopes, scuba diving … Life expectancy was his one weak point. Someone, somewhere, would systematically make him disappear.

When he drop-kicked the empty cider can into the Serpentine I felt my face tighten. Used to be a nice boy, not any more. Dizzy queenling.

From the depths of his baggy cut-offs came a pack of Silk Cut. He smoked half a cigarette standing at the water's edge with his back to me, pretending to have a serious think, tapping the ash more often than necessary. His buttocks were lifted and separated just the way I like them. But it was the shiny declivities behind his lightly tanned hairless knees which I zoomed in on, pale and smooth and obviously soft. Soft as the small of his back or the nape of his neck or the sides of his teenage chest, but not as soft as his insides.

Returning to sit alongside me, knees touching, he continued stubbing out his cigarette on the bench between his legs long after it was extinguished, flinging the stub into the water, hitting the same spot my phlegm had splashed down earlier. At this second litter crime, worthy of a one hundred pound fine, I wanted a good fairy to drop a serviceable implement of torture into my hand. No fairy made my dream come true. Do they ever?

Being a resourceful sort, I speedily improvised. In my head I hoisted his battered body over my right shoulder with choreographed ease, carrying it down to the water's edge, lowering it carefully (arms flopping), maybe even saying something soothing while tugging the clothes off and wiping down the movable parts: stage directions to an intoxicating ritual. (The younger the body, the lighter it is. Convenient for disposal.)

Pulling him by the ankles would have grazed his back, spoiling it.
Carrying
the shipwrecked, washed-up body to the bench, laying the pale flesh down, so passive, so controlled, cleansed and sublimely at peace in the last of the daylight, pale, so pale—practically porcelain. Smooth rose-petal skin stretched over those shapely legs, my fingers running over the surface like braille. Wet, he looked like polished stone. Kneeling in reverence, I was half annoyed that it had all been so fast, I'd missed out monitoring those dying, dimming eyes.

The cider made me burp one of those silent baby burps.

A medium-sized kitchen knife is an unusual item in a puncture repair kit, handy though. I emasculated him with one simple cut, stuffing his church-candle white prick-teasing dick up his arse, a long way up. A coroner would later note that inside the Reebok socks stuffed down the boy's throat, a long way down, were his nipples, sliced off immediately after emasculation. You cannot hurt a corpse.

Perhaps a muscle man with good gripping fingernails could, clutching a buttock in each hand, have ripped the arse then body apart like they do the yellow pages on tv. Imagine that parting of the flesh. Great telly. And this muscle man could say, in a voice close to yodelling, “You'll have no more troubles now, squire” like a
Lassie
film hero giving a helping hand in some dark valley.

When he asked what my flat was like I was thinking that his beautiful empty head would make a cute addition to the Peter Pan statue, mounted sideways on the flute. How children's book sections would swell after the tabloid fuss, with readers searching out the Barry book.

I added three to the last digit when giving him my number.

I had to get real, had to resist. Hands off.
Jailbait.
And not worth it. He said he'd phone me later, from his bed. He said this smiling, as the dropped cigarette was caught on an undercurrent and gently pulled under. Then he winked. I just smiled back saying, “Do that.”

It was too dark to wear my glasses as I took the cycle route beneath the stretch of trees towards Speakers Corner, passing the barracks ever so slowly. I realised I was drunk on one can of cider. I'd hardly had a thing to eat all day. Not like me at all.

*   *   *

While Allan was getting a wrong number, I was playing Minor, Seventh and Minor-Seventh chords in the
SINGLE FINGER
mode (Cm-C7-Cm7), forgetting about myself for a while, lost in the easy manipulations.

*   *   *

Like a fool, I was up and waiting for the postman. I was sitting naked on the sofa, watching breakfast tv with the sound down low, listening out for the familiar flap of the letter-box. I'd been frustrated by the lack of mail at eight thirty, wondering if he had been delayed by the rain. Before deciding to make some tea and watch telly for a bit, I just stood there, staring at the letter-box, then peeping through the spyhole.

A tv presenter I didn't like the look of was reeling off percentages with a smile on her made-up face.

“…and another survey of four hundred lesbian and gay teenagers revealed that thirty eight per cent felt isolated, thirty two per cent had been verbally abused, nineteen percent had been physically abused and…”

I gave the presenter a good middle finger when I heard the heavy plain brown envelope finally drop, switching the BBC bitch to a blank screen.

More mail, more dreams. My fascination with stationery and handwriting had gone. I just wanted to see those pictures and feel the longing.

Hi!/Hi there/Wow!/Sir/Dear Sir/Master/Dear……/Dear Whoever/You're the answer to a cocksucker's dream/Bike Boy/Dear Bike Boy/HI MATE!/Dear Boyz advertiser/Good Morning/
TRY THIS FELLA!
/Feeling horny?/I hope you're not a time waster…

I skimmed through the letters like someone conducting market research. The repetition of desire was boring. I had no compassion for these people playing the contact game. My personality had evaporated, had been filed away incorrectly or mislaid for a while. I didn't feel like me.

Seven floors down a line of grey-haired company types in navy blue business suits walked along the Goswell Road like schoolchildren in a crocodile.

*   *   *

Thursday again.

I'd lost interest in the Bike Boy replies which pumped my way. The joke wasn't funny any more. I no longer set my alarm to read it all avidly upon arrival. Enclosed photographs were not returned in the stamped addressed envelopes provided, but formed a spreading collage above the kitchen sink. A herd staring forward.

I unboxed some of Ray's things, searching out his smell in the blackwatch tartan of his Aero Star jacket. Going through his old records, a photograph slipped out from between a Kraftwerk and a Joy Division sleeve. A 10×8 of him in a tweed coat with a question mark badge, neither of which I'd ever seen, a not so bad print on fibre paper. Only the coat was in focus. Ray's face was a blur. He must have moved at the last moment. Maybe he'd been shaking his head, not wanting to have his photo taken. Strangely, the background had been carefully cut away, body mounted on white card. Ray, with a fluffy kind of suede-head look. Sexy. (Who took that picture? Where? When?) It was a Ray I'd never met, handsome and full of life. Ray, part pushy bastard with a head full of awkward questions and a pocketful of Rizlas, part slave to the rhythm. Complete opposites—bound to get on. I'd never been aware enough of what I stood to lose. Cock, tongue, the smell of him. His laugh. Not savoured enough. That smell, once all over my body—then only deep in the mattress, his clothes. The paintings he threw together in an hour, the measurements pencilled on the back of picture frames he'd built out of salvaged wood. His cooking. Ray. It was nice when I reached over to touch him and he was there, night after night. Nothing casual. Ray and me. Together.

I put the picture back where I found it.

*   *   *

Unplugging the phone for a week intensified the silence in the flat. I'd eaten the cupboards bare. I faced a mirror for the first time in a long while to shave and make my surfaces presentable to shoppers and staff at Sainsbury's. Unbrushed teeth were starting to fur. I didn't like my hair at all and a shave became the first bath in days and a good hairwash.

Just as I was locking my bike up next to the
Big Issue
man, rain came down in heavy drops from invisible clouds. The weather forecast had said dry with sunny spells.

More than anything else I felt stupid. Behind my placid face was an aching head with hysteric sobs on cue but never released, a matter-of-fact feeling that I was about to implode, bursting blood, splashing the check-out girl.

Back at the flat I opened the morning mail. Faces smiled up at me from photographs in parks, bedrooms, shower units, final days of a trip somewhere sunny. I spread them out over the living-room floor like tarot cards.

My usual cropping of photographs for the sick joke collage growing like a mould above my kitchen sink turned into a hacking mutilation for one young man named Ben. His chest, pectorals, waist and thighs were perfect—I cut off his ugly head in a snip, mid neck. Hairy forearms were chopped off at the elbows, legs just above the knees. I ate dull flowers of popcorn, getting very hard.

Coming into an ankle sock I realised my hair could do with more than a wash and dab of gel. I needed another haircut, something closer to the scalp. I turned up at Rox, without an appointment. Shaun gave me a variety of smiles and a number two at the back and sides, leaving the top only inches long, gelled tilting forward at a precipitous angle. I looked like your average London faggot. (Wahey!) The haircut drew attention away from my eyes, vulnerable to detection in the cleanshaven mask.

*   *   *

Before opening the envelope, brown and plain as ever, I stared and stared at a scribble which went round and round in a big blue loop over the second-class stamp. I wondered who'd put it there, what significance it might hold. Opening the envelope I lazily wondered what the people I went to school with had ended up doing. What had become of those boys I was crushed alongside in organised, memorised rows? Philip Blackmore, Dennis Burke, Christopher George.

Counting the envelopes, only nine, totalling up in my head, fifty eight replies, I thought of my polyester postman. I'd come to recognise the sound of his feet catching grit with a lazy shuffle, the dragging gait he'd probably been chastised for as a child. I resolved to bleach both lift and stairs in silent thanks for his deliveries which had brought a break from being me. Once I did jury service at the Old Bailey, on a rape case for two days. The incident had occurred on a staircase just like mine. Her screams had gone unheard.

No photos that week, so I added the blue biro looped stamp to the bottom right of the collage, like a giant full stop. Looking at the collage I realised I'd forgotten all their names, their normal names. Names you'd hear paged at an airport, names which sign school reports, names of husbands and missing sons. Maybe one or two figure in Spotlight or Debrett. Maybe a few that will crop up in a cellar one day, some rubbish dump or drain, recognisable only through dental records. I scanned the letters with an unvarying pulse then binned them.

Kenneth Williams dragged a rare laugh from me, camping it up on the afternoon film as I sifted through past Bike Boy replies. Men named Stan, Anthony and Costas were all tuned in to the same channel. Existers of London, united by the same pathetic B-movie. Their particulars entered into my diary I binned the lot, returning to my seat by the window to watch lights pop on over London as the sky darkened early.

*   *   *

The day was hot and grey. Windless. The glare in the sky cast no shadows. In the small tree-lined street of desirable residences of six to seven floors lived an obese sissy named Stan, one of the maybes. Towering up beside me as I cycled lazily, these were just the kind of buildings to gladden the hearts of the Royal Family and visitors from abroad. The day I cycled down that respectable street, it had a Sunday lunch stink to it. Well-wiped neo-Georgian windows reflected my brand new false self gliding by. For a moment I really enjoyed the way I was inhabiting my body.

Recognising the confident, rounded shapes of his below the buzzer for flat F, I waited for another door to open, welcoming me in. About to ring the bell a third time, half suspecting a practical joke at my expense, I heard the weight of another Bike Boy enthusiast plonking down the stairs.

My pulse thudded steadily and deeply as I switched into Bike Boy mode. As a Yale catch began to turn, I half-removed my Erasure teeshirt. Holding my stomach in, shoulders back, legs apart, moving from flaccid to semi-erect with the theatrics, my first impressions were ready for delivery when the door opened. Arms raised upwards, armpits and torso exposed, otherwise beheaded.

Through the thin white cotton teeshirt I could see the eyes in his sizeable face paying full attention to the lycra shorts. The silence of concentration made me smile. Then the situation made me start to laugh. The air felt cool when I'd finished my tease, exposing my cheerful-seeming face within a metre of his.

“Beautiful day, isn't it?” my other voice said straight into his eyes, like a regular delivery boy.

Far worse than the greying wild guitar-string hair slipping through his string vest, more horrible than the dyed boomerang moustache and tight little black shorts, were his nipples. Poking through the aforesaid string vest, they resembled those pinky bits you get in uncooked mince meat. They protruded proudly from D-cup breasts with an above average rate of juggleosity; a body guaranteed to empty public swimming pools. An ideal specimen to tick off as another human experience.