Sleight of Hand (26 page)

Feeling melancholy, I stride briskly to the end of the pier, look down into the swelling depths below and then, as the spots of rain intensify I march even faster back the other way.

When I reach Kemptown, I glance at my watch. It's just eight-o-clock, dinner time really, only – no doubt thanks to the donut – I'm no longer hungry.

As a time-wasting strategy, I head into my old haunt, Red Roaster, for a coffee.

Inside three people are sitting alone eating and reading newspapers. The atmosphere is quiet and studious, like a library.

I take a seat on one of the leather sofas and feeling a bit sad and a bit homesick, and even a little home
less
, I look out at the rainy street and sip my cappuccino as slowly as I can manage.

My brother Owen – now in Australia – used to have a house in Brighton, in fact I even lived there for a while with him after my accident. Red Roaster feels like a flashback to a previous life – I could almost imagine Owen or Tom appearing in the doorway now and smiling and joining me for coffee. I sit and remember the past and think about Owen on the other side of the world and Ricardo on the
other
side of the world and how much I miss them both, and how much I miss my father, and strangely even Tom. I think about this for a moment and then change my mind. No, Tom is definitely better an hour's drive away. If I hang around Tom too much I will end up sleeping with him, and that wouldn't do anyone any good.

In that instant, my life seems to me to be one huge fuck-up. A great, deep, dark cavern filled with fading memories of better times. I wonder how long it will be before Jenny vanishes into the same void – before Ricardo joins my army of exes.

Realising that I'm sinking into a melodramatic fug, I reach for a newspaper, determined to distract myself before it gets out of hand.

An hour later, having read the Guardian cover-to-cover I leave Red Roaster and head up Saint James' Street towards the Bulldog.

The rain has stopped but the streets are shiny and wet – the air temperature can't be that far above freezing. Winter is truly upon us, and I still don't even have a date by which I can imagine leaving.

Halfway up the hill, a queue for the cashpoint is blocking half of the path – a line of punters waiting for Friday night beer-tokens.

As I draw level with the bank, a girl appears from a side-street. She's in her late teens, and heavily
made up. She's wearing a pink puffa-jacket over a very short T-shirt that nowhere-near meets her low waisted jeans. Her diamanté belly-piercing twinkles in the orange light from the street lamp. My first thought is how cold she must be – truly a fashion victim.

She reaches the narrowest stretch of the pavement at exactly the same moment I do, but because she is holding three large paper shopping bags in her left hand, and has a big pink handbag wedged over her right arm, there isn't enough remaining room for me to get by without stepping into the road.

I glance behind me and see two buses heading up the hill, and so it is that we grind to a halt, face to face.

She's yacking into her mobile when her eyes focus on mine for the first time. “Yeah,” she says, “Yeah, yeah, I know, he's a prick.”

I wait for her to move the bags or even just turn sideways a little so that I can squeeze by, but she simply stands there, staring at me and talking into her phone.

I glance behind and see the first bus is now about twenty feet away, so stepping into the road is out of the question.

“I know,” she says into the phone. “Yeah, I know. Hang on a minute Mum can you?”

I shrug and smile at her and wait either for her to make the slightest effort so that we can pass, or for the bus to move on up the hill.

What happens instead, is that she says, “Yeah. Hold on a minute Mum, there's some cunt in front of me who won't fucking move.”

My mouth drops open in shock.

“What's your fucking problem?” she asks, addressing me directly now and pressing the phone against her chest, as if to protect her mother from this second round of expletives.

“None,” I say, perplexed. “None, except the width of your shopping bags.”

At this, she sighs and barges past, toppling me into the road. Luckily I stumble into the gutter during the gap between the passing of the two buses and am safely back on the pavement by the time the huge wing mirror of the second bus whistles past my ear.

I look down the hill to see her marching onwards but still looking back at me. “Fucking poof! Like it up the arse do you?” she shouts back at the top of her voice. “I'll bet you do. Fucking queer.” And then she quite calmly resumes her phone call. “Yeah Mum, some poof, anyway …”

“Nice,” a guy queuing for the cashpoint comments.

“Jesus!”
I exclaim.

“Whitehawk trash,” he says.

“Whitehawk?”

“Council estate,” he says, nodding up the hill.

“Right,” I say, giving him a nod, and heading, less enthusiastically, onwards.

Inside the Bulldog, I order a pint of beer to calm my nerves and take a bar stool against the far wall.

A motley crew of clients are dotted around the place tonight. To the left of the bar, two guys are chatting up a younger third. All three look like their drug cocktails haven't been treating them too well. In fact their sunken complexions remind me of Jenny when she was on her initial chemo, and it suddenly strikes me that this is what these drugs are – chemotherapy
for life. Perhaps if they called it that instead of a “cocktail” it wouldn't seem quite so attractive to all the idiot condom-allergic youngsters.

At the rear of the bar, on the exact spot where I first spoke to Tom, a cute bearded guy in his thirties is flicking through a magazine. I fix a benevolent half-smile and watch him, but when he finally does look up at me he simply wrinkles his nose and turns away.
Ouch
.

The only other couple in the place are two twinky-twenties in the midst of an animated and theatrically public discussion about whether Diesel jeans are cut better than G-Star or not, so I reach for an abandoned free-sheet and start to flick through myself.

It's been a long time since I visited the scene and I ponder that I couldn't feel much less at-home if I were to go to a Mormon prayer meeting.

The door to the bar opens and the guy from the cashpoint appears. He nods at me and raises one eyebrow then heads straight for the bar. He's a fit-fifty, cute, balding, blue-eyed – a little over-built for my tastes but at least he has a friendly smile. Once he has paid for his drink he comes straight over to talk to me. “You survived the Whitehawk argy-bargy then,” he says.

“Only just,” I laugh. “She nearly pushed me under that bus.”

“Classy bird,” he says. “A proper little potty mouth.”

“She was on the phone to her
mum,”
I say, grinning at the
potty-mouth
. “Swearing like a trooper she was.”

“Nice,” he says.

“I'm just wondering where all that aggro comes from. I mean, straight into homophobia, like a reflex.”

The guy shrugs. “Living in a shit council estate with no money and no future and walking past a load of affluent poofs every day helps I expect.”

“You did
see
all her shopping bags?” I say.
“And
she was on an iPhone. She wasn't
that
skint.”

He laughs. “All on tick, I expect. She'll be up to her pierced navel in store-cards, out spending every Saturday in an attempt at shoring up her crumbling self-image.”

I push my lips out and nod to express how impressed I am. “Detailed analysis there,” I say.

He grins and holds out one hand. As we shake, he says, “Billy. Social worker to the great unwashed of Whitehawk.”

“Ah!” I exclaim. “I'm Mark. Good to meet you. That must be one tough job.”

I chat to Billy for nearly two hours. I realise that he's probably hitting on me so I quickly make clear that I have a boyfriend but he seems unfazed. Were I single, I'm pretty sure that I would end up in bed with Billy tonight – he's funny and clever and fit. Luckily, the fact that I have to drive back to Pevensey means that I can't get so drunk that I forget what I'm about.

At ten-thirty Billy glances at his phone. “I'm going over to Schwarz,” he says. “You fancy tagging along?”

“Schwarz?”

“The club below Legends.”

“The leather place?”

Billy shrugs. “You'll be OK with me,” he says, looking me up and down. “I know the doorman.”

I hadn't been referring to the dress code; I was thinking about the fact that what usually happens in a place like Schwarz isn't something I should be participating in.

“I'm sorry,” I say. “But … I don't … you know …”

“No, not really,” Billy says.
“What
don't you … you know?”

“Well, we're faithful. We don't play around.”

“A rare and splendid thing,” Billy says. “But I don't think you
have
to have sex in Schwarz. At least you didn't have to last time I was there.”

I laugh. “Right.”

“And you know what they say,” Billy continues. “It doesn't matter where you get your appetite as long as you eat at home.”

I laugh again. “I like that,” I say. “Yes, very good.”

“So?” Billy asks, downing the dregs of his pint and pulling on his jacket.

I shrug. “Oh, what the hell,” I say. “Just don't let me do anything I might regret.”

Schwarz feels like any other bar – initially at least. It's redder, and darker, and the music has more base than the Bulldog. It's actually considerably busier too and the thirty or so guys here cover the full spectrum from clean-shaven youngsters to bearded granddads.

The only thing most of them have in common is the bar's imposed dress code: shiny boots and leather jeans abound.

Billy and I head straight for the bar. “So are you into the whole leather thing?” he asks once we have paid for our bottles of beer.

“Not like some of
these
guys,” I say. “I mean, I've never bought a leather
tie
for example … Or leather underwear … But I've nothing against it. Which is ironic.”

“Ironic?”

“Well, yeah … I'm vegetarian.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Well, I eat fish, so …”

“But you wouldn't want underwear made of fish, would you?” he says, restraining a smirk. “They'd be all smelly.”

I laugh. “Exactly. Leather's much better.”

“Well, I rather like it myself,” he says, stroking the sleeve of his own jacket. “I think it's very sensual.”

“Yeah,” I agree. “I have been known to dabble … I had a motorbike for many years which is always a good excuse for wearing a bit of cow-hide.”

“Hum, biker, nice,” he says, then swigs at his beer. “And your bloke?”

“Yes?”

“He a biker too?”

“No,” I say.

Billy looks disappointed, so I add, “He was a fireman though, when I met him. He had the shiniest boots in town.”

“Hum,” Billy says again. “Biker gets off with fireman. Now there's an image to wank over. …” His final words are lost in the music – a remix of Unkle's
Reign
getting louder by the second.

“Eh?”

“I said that's
hot,”
Billy shouts. “I'm into uniforms too.”

“Right,” I say. “I love this track.”

“Yeah,” he says, disinterestedly. “It's a good one. I'm, um, off for a wander down yonder. You want to join me?”

“No, I'll stay here,” I say.

He winks at me and turns and crosses the room, vanishing behind a partition.

Because I feel self conscious without him, I drink my beer over-quickly, and then remember that I can't order another one without going over the limit for driving. I feel even more self conscious once the barman whisks the empty bottle away. In the old days, of course, that's what smoking was for – a displacement activity, a way to occupy flailing hands.

Because I'm feeling awkward but also because I'm intrigued, and partly even to avoid the cloying glances of the guy with the new-romantic flop-top beside me, I follow Billy's path across the room and position myself against the first partition where back-room meets bar.

In the depths, out of sight, I can hear someone groaning.

A guy with a shaved head and a goatee enters and positions himself beside me, raising one knee and leaning against the wall. He's wearing leather jeans and a t-shirt which he quickly removes and stuffs into his rear pocket. His chest is muscled and furry, with just a hint of beer belly – made to measure in order to test my endurance, the bastard.

I glance at him and he nods towards the interior and then turns and vanishes, assuming that I will now follow. In a very Bill Clinton kind of way, I stand and argue with myself about what exactly constitutes sex, what I could maybe get away with that
wouldn't
count as cheating.

Sadly, what I
would
like to do with him clearly falls beyond the remit, and so I sigh and stay put, noting a vague butterfly sensation in my stomach that I once naively believed meant
love
. I just hope Ricardo appreciates my sacrifice.

A text-book scene happens before my eyes: a tall fit-fifties rather Village People leather man leads his younger “boy” past me on the end of a dog-lead. The older guy is wearing high-top boots, leather jeans and shirt. The younger guy is short, blond, and has porn movie pecs and a washboard stomach. He's wearing nothing but a black leather posing pouch, chaps and a thick dog-collar.

The older guy pushes him against the first interior wall and says, “OK, boy,
now
you can come.”

“Thank-you sir,” he replies in a foreign accent.