On Chasing Brad Through Purgatory (11 page)

We knew hardly anything about Gertie's history. Gertie herself knew hardly anything about Gertie's history.

I went back inside. “Well you have to make the gesture,” remarked my colleague Bill—we called him Beanpole—who was in the kitchen beginning to prepare the evening meal. “Admittedly a bit token but now at least we can try to pretend we haven't seen.”

This was made a little difficult by the cries of another inmate who was standing at the window in the recreation room. Earlier I'd closed the window and pulled across the curtains but this bloke had drawn one of them back and was bawling his encouragement through the glass. “Go on Gertie! Attagirl! Doin' a gran' job. Mus' be comin' up to juice time.” When I strode over and—perennial spoilsport that I was—again pulled across the thin patterned curtain he stopped feeling himself up through the pocket of his trousers and said, “Got a cigarette yer fucker?”

“No Joey I don't smoke. You know I don't smoke.”

“Forget them cigarettes. Just ask 'im about fags,” advised a raucous voice from the further end of the ping-pong table. Alf and Ron were currently taking a breather.

I turned in some surprise. I hadn't thought there was anything about me that was camp.

“No offence,” added Alf. “Takes all sorts. You're a good bloke really. One o' the best,” he said to Ron who'd only come that afternoon.

All of which appeared to be a little beyond the present comprehension of old Joey. He
was
old: halfway through his eighties.

“Gimme a cigarette yer fucker.”

When I told him again that I hadn't got any he swung round and took an ineffectual swipe at me. It could have been half-playful but he lost his balance and fell. Thereupon he gave a ripsnorting fart and shat his pants and amid the resulting cheers and hoots of easy laughter a pool of urine spread across the mottled flooring.

“Oh God.” Joey was immensely fat. No way could I have raised him on my own. “Have you hurt yourself?”

And only that morning he had shown me with pride a snapshot taken in Blackpool immediately postwar. He had been lean and looked athletic. Handsome in a flash sort of way. You could guess he had a comb in his rear pocket; was always slicking back his Brylcreemed hair. A bosomy blonde in ankle-strapped high heels hung on possessively to his thickly muscled arm.

I called to Bill and another colleague supposedly on his break to help me lift him. There were two or three relatively young men in the room but though in their way amiable enough none appeared to have much idea of what was going on or what might be required of them. Besides. If anybody was about to strain his back all those poor sods already had far more than enough to contend with.

I said again, “Joey are you hurt?” And to my pair of workmates: “Should we telephone the doctor?”

“Yer should've given me a cigarette yer fucker. Look what yer'd'ave saved.” It was even with the glimmer of a smile of triumph that he glanced from me to the other two. “Haven't any of yer got one bleedin' cigarette among the three of yer? Talk about a load of fuckers!”

“
He's
all right,” said Alan. “Aren't you Joey? God but what a whiff! We'll get you to your feet and then we'll have to leave you in the capable hands of young Danny here who'll get you all spruced up for your supper.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Thank you so very much. Just the kind of treat I always dreamed of.”

“One of the perks of the profession,” called out Alf who was evidently keeping an eye on us. “You get to take Joey in the shower with you! You get to take Joey in the shower! No offence mind. We got to 'ave our little joke.”

In fact my own earlier little joke hadn't been entirely without basis. Hosing people down was a prominent feature of our work in the refuge. Because a hands-on approach was definitely not advocated; rubber-gloved or not. The cutting away and disposal of fouled-up clothing was already sufficiently stomach-turning.

After Joey I got George. (Beth, lucky thing, won Gertie.) The only way that I could get George to co-operate was to give him an ultimatum: “No shower no sausages!” And the damned thing was I'd have had to keep to that and then later cook him a fry-up. But thankfully this wasn't called for: first I hosed down the guy who had once walked along the promenade with an independent air and then I got the one who'd apparently lived in a house in Solihull which might now be worth a cool half-million; and I could honestly have cried at the drooping fat of the first and the premature aging of the second and the fact that both of them had lost the plot. I had a reasonable idea of what had happened to George; yet what on earth had happened to Joey? I had at one time asked him about his experiences in the war but I might just as well have asked what he remembered of being inside his mother's womb. It struck me now that if this were too often the way of things—and who ever had the slightest idea of what might lie ahead?—I was indeed quite lucky to have snuffed it young.

Although in truth I still kept on forgetting that I
had
snuffed it young. Still kept on forgetting that I had snuffed it at all.

In the kitchen afterwards when it was little short of midnight Beth and Alan and I sat over a mug of hot chocolate. Beanpole had gone home; Alan himself should have knocked off nearly an hour ago. Beth said: “I think I've had about as much of all this as I can cope with. I've decided I'll be getting out soon. The moment they can find themselves some other idiot.”

“Don't blame you,” answered Alan. “Can't think what keeps any of us here longer than a single day.”

“Idealism,” said Beth. She was twenty-one; looked older. Round-faced, round-figured, with mousy hair already thinning. But in a way that would never have occurred to me before … me with my penchant for the instantly nice-looking … she herself was in fact nice-looking. It was easy to see how, almost without having to go to any effort, death would make her beautiful. “You really believe that you can change the world.”

“But you can,” I smiled, “you can! Just because you may be doing so only in exceedingly small ways doesn't mean it's any the less worthwhile.”

They looked at me, both of them, with an air of surprise. “Well who'd have thought it?” remarked Beth at last. “Pollyanna is alive and well!”

Amazingly I didn't bridle at the comment like I knew I would have done when I was younger. “I only wish I could be worthy of her!” I gave a mighty yawn. “But I know of course it's so easy just to say these things about improving the world piecemeal … Talk comes very cheap.”

“Though what you said was right. Oh I don't know. Maybe it's just because I'm tired right now. Not quite the best time for arriving at any important decision.”

There was a pause.

“With me,” said Alan, “it's a kind of penance. Used to think these people were the dregs of society. Never felt the least concern for any one of them.”

My eyes had been practically closing but I jerked them open with a sensation of near-shock.

Were there two of us here then?

I studied him more closely. He was a few years older than me; just turned thirty. Sandy-haired, snub-nosed, freckled. Shortish; stocky. By disposition jaunty.

“And what do you think now?” asked Beth.

“What do I think now? Oh that I was absolutely right. They are quite undeniably of course the dregs of our society.”

A moment went by. He laughed at our expressions.

“That was a joke you mutts. No. I feel that every day and in every way I'm becoming a little more saintly and understanding. With any luck at all—by the time I'm fifty—people will automatically throw up at the sight of me.”

“Yet you'll no doubt get to heaven a lot faster than the rest of us,” I said. “Well a lot faster than me anyhow. They'll probably think I need a crash course. A whole series of crash courses. Which could last practically for ever.” (Indeed, a blurry image flashed across my mind—an old lady in a hospital corridor?—but I couldn't get a grip on it. Neither then nor later.)

“Don't be daft,” he smiled.

But I knew from his lack of more significant reaction that he was just one of those good people who didn't keep procrastinating. Who'd got his priorities right. Who wouldn't need to go to jail.

And I suddenly wondered: is that what I'd been doing? Procrastinating? Had I banked on maybe having another fifty years before I needed to be made
too
uncomfortable by my priorities?

I would once have felt jealous of Alan. Intensely jealous. Been all scornful and disparaging.

I said: “I wish you'd shown your saintly qualities a little earlier then.
You
could have taken Joey into the shower.”

But surprisingly in fact I found I didn't really wish that at all. Not in the slightest.

13

I had just broken up with Jonathan. It was raining when I got off the No 16. The rain suited my mood but even so I didn't want to get too wet; I pretty much ran to the Quebec. Just as I got there this man was coming out. Our eyes met, my pulse rate quickened and I half thought about following him. But no—no way! To tell the truth he'd seemed a little down at heel and even with somebody who looked as he did I wasn't in the market for any one-night stand.

However, he'd clearly thought I looked interesting as well, because he'd turned around and re-entered the bar. Within a minute we were swapping names.

“I'm Brad Overton,” he said.

“Danny Casement.”

As we shook hands something intangible about the glance he directed at my face prompted me to say, “We haven't met before have we?” In a place like the Quebec although I'd only been there a handful of times previously such a thing was perfectly possible. Or it could have been at some other gay bar. In Soho perhaps. “I know that sounds a bit corny.”

“No not at all. But if we had met I'm sure that I'd remember.”

“Me too. Ridiculous I asked.”

“What'll you have to drink?”

“Oh that's kind of you. I think … a Scotch.”

He ordered two. In response to the barman's usual query he said, “Oh—Grant's, that's fine,” then asked me if I wanted water. We went and sat on one of those crescent-shaped sofa-things and had it to ourselves—the pub wasn't busy. Shirley Bassey who was always something of a favourite with us gays was singing ‘My Way'. Happily they'd got her toned down a bit.

I said, “Cheers! Thanks,” and clinked my glass against his. “So if we've never before met, at least one of us doesn't come here all that often.”

“This is only—I think—my third time.”

“Snap!”

The phrase went through my mind
Third time lucky?
(because Jonathan himself had happened on the second occasion) but I impatiently dismissed it. His appearance wasn't exactly shabby but he didn't look as though he took much pride in it. His blue-checked shirt was crumpled; his hair gave the impression that he patronized the cheapest barber in town. Which was a shame because it was good hair. Equally—I liked what the open top button of that unironed shirt revealed.

“In fact,” he told me, “I'm still quite new to the gay scene.”

“Mm?”

“I was married for almost twenty years,” he said. “My wife and I have only recently split up.”

“Twenty years? It must have been a good marriage?”

“I think so. Hope so. And we have a daughter whom we both love.”

“Was it—just tell me to shut up if I'm being too personal—was it the sex part that went wrong?”

“Not principally. Naturally I'd always known I was bisexual but done everything I could to suppress the gay side”—he shrugged—“until when the marriage was over it all came back with a startling whoosh and is now doing its very damnedest to make up for lost time.”

He pulled a face and picked up his drink from the table in front of us.

“No it was far more a question of money. Hélène who'd always been incredibly supportive just got tired of being poor. Quite suddenly. ‘You live on a diet of pure hope,' she screamed, ‘and if I ever hear again
It's going to be all right we'll somehow muddle through
I think I shall go mad. End up either in Holloway or Broadmoor. Life sentence for homicide!'”

“Justifiable homicide,” I smiled. “Oh I'm sorry, perhaps I shouldn't have said that. But I can see her point of view.”

“So could everybody else.” He again made a grimace mainly expressive of self-mockery. “For twenty years or more I'd had a succession of crap jobs—never a career—because the only career I was ever interested in proved to be frustratingly elusive.”

We'd finished our drinks.

“Same again?” I asked.

“Yes. Same again,” he said. There was something mildly weird about the emphasis he seemed to lay upon those words. I liked him but—well it was difficult to analyze—was it simply that he came across as needy? That he was confiding in me too fully and too fast? (Though I knew I'd been displaying interest.) Or possibly it wasn't so much the things he was telling me as just a feeling I had about him: due maybe to a certain intensity that showed in his expression—indeed in the whole of his body language. And was it this which had made me think of neediness? And which now told me to be wary?

Very probably.

Yet physically the man was undeniably attractive. Mega-attractive. Dress him more stylishly, take steps to rectify that haircut and he'd have the sort of looks that could have got him out to Hollywood. From what he'd told me he had to be at least forty; but in my own view men only really came into their own when they hit forty.

And there was something too about his face—I mean other than the fact that it was handsome. Something innately appealing; something that reached out to me. Trustworthy? Vulnerable? In some strange way it made me feel …