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?”
“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.
I watch as his master unzips him and his pierced dick springs forth. I’m amazed that such a perfect porn-scene should be happening in such a mundane way, and barely out of sight of all those guys casually drinking their beer to my left.
As I watch, the master starts to squeeze his boy’s nipples and the boy himself masturbates frantically. I try to work out whether this is what people call sexual liberation, and therefore something we should be proud of, or man reverting to chimpanzee: our basest desires laid bare and an embarrassment to us all.
What I can’t deny is how arousing the scene is.
I watch the cliché porn-scene for a moment and start to feel seriously horny myself. There’s a reason, of course, why clichés are clichés, and the master ordering his more than willing boy around is intrinsically hot, especially when they are both so very, very pretty.
A hand slides over the bulge in my jeans and I look right to see Billy grinning at me. “They’re sexy aren’t they?” he says. He leans in and whispers in my ear, “I’ve had the little guy. He’s hot, don’t you think?”
“They both are,” I say, struggling to decide how to react to Billy who is right now pushing his hand down inside my jeans. How I should react of course is obvious enough, it’s just that it feels so good … I’m rapidly losing control of whatever part of my brain needs to say ‘no’ here.
Billy grabs my belt and I let him tug me further inside. He pushes me back against the wall next to the boy with the dog collar, and sinks to his knees to unbutton my fly.
Beside me the blond guy is crying out and wanking frantically as his master pummels his nipples. Daddy catches my eye and smiles dirtily, and removes one hand from his boy and slides it under my sweatshirt.
As Billy slips his lips around my dick, I’m momentarily lost in the moment, and it is heavenly. “Oh God,” I say.
I think, “Shit, now that really does count as sex,” and, “you can’t even say you were drunk.”
But then it is heavenly no more – his blow-job hurts more than any blow-job should. “Hey, be careful,” I say.
Daddy frowns at me and I open my mouth to say, “not you,” but then I can take Billy’s teeth on my dick no longer. “Ouch! Fuck!” I say, which regrettably causes Daddy to release my nipple and return his attention to his own partner, who, I note, is still frantically masturbating. He seems, in fact, to be having considerable trouble coming.
“Sorry,” I say, pushing Billy’s head away. “Sorry, but … this isn’t working for me.”
Billy stands and smiles and shrugs before wandering off into the shadows.
I button my fly and re-enter the bar. Having to refasten my belt with at least five people staring at me makes me feel as cheap as I ever have felt, and sensing that to top it all I am now blushing, I head directly for the exit.
As I climb the stairs, I have a final reassuring thought. That maybe if you don’t come, maybe then it doesn’t count as sex?
It is almost one a.m. when I get back to Pevensey Bay so Jenny has already gone to bed.
Wide awake, I creep upstairs and check the wall in the spare room which, despite the downpour, seems to have remained dry, then I return downstairs to sleep.
But I don’t sleep. Instead, I lie on one side and stare out at the almost full moon glimmering through the thinning layer of cloud and think about my evening, because what happened tonight doesn’t feel insignificant.
The reason for that, I decide, is that it is an omen – a glimpse of the future. Unless I make a determined effort to engineer it otherwise what will happen is that I will slowly forget Ricardo – it’s happening already – and then one night I will meet someone new and without ever really having decided it, my time with Ricardo will be over. It’s clearly not beyond the realms of possibility that I could slip back into a relationship with Tom.
The fact that neither of these scenarios strikes me as unappealing demonstrates how far down this path I have already gone.
As a mental exercise, I force myself to think about Ricardo. I force myself to remember what he looks like and what his body feels like next to me in bed. I think about his qualities and all the reasons I love him. And as I fall asleep, I reaffirm that letting this relationship slip into the void – when it came after all at such cost – is not what I want. It’s not what I want at all.
In the morning I half wake up as Jenny and Sarah, whispering loudly, slip out of the front door, but fall quickly back to sleep. It’s almost ten when they wake me up for the second time.
“I got all the stuff for a proper cooked breakfast,” Jenny says. “We even found you some veggie sausages. Pevensey has everything.”
“Sausages,” Sarah says, “sausages!”
She sounds like a talking dog that was on TV when I was a kid. Sausages was all it ever said.
“So how was Brighton?” Jenny asks, once breakfast is served. “Did you have a nice time?”
“Yeah,” I say. “It was good. I met a really nice guy called Billy and we spent all night chatting.”
“Billy,” Jenny says, as if trying the name out for suitability. “So? What’s he like? Billy.”
“Oh nothing, you know …” I stammer. “But, um, really interesting. He’s a social worker so he had lots of funny stories.”
“Right,” Jenny says. “But not your type, or … ?”
“Jenny!” I protest.
She shrugs. “I just thought it would be nice if you had a bit of fun,” she says.
“So now you think cheating is a good thing?”
“No, but it would be nice if you found someone who wasn’t ten thousand miles away,” she says. “That’s all I meant.”
“Five,” I say. “Five thousand.”
“OK, five.”
I frown and analyse this phrase as I eat my Quorn sausages. There is something so wrong about Jenny saying this to me but for a moment with my morning brain-fog I can’t work out what exactly the problem is. And then it comes to me. “He’s only five thousand miles away because I’m looking after you,” I think. It would seem too cruel to point that out to a woman with cancer, and so I attempt to look unruffled and change the subject instead.
“How was your evening?” I ask. “How was Tom’s mystery boyfriend?”
“Still a mystery, I’m afraid. He couldn’t come – work or something. So it was just the three of us.”
“Just me, Mummy and Tom,” Sarah says.
“Oh,” I say. “That’s a shame.”
“Yeah, I was looking forward to meeting him. I’m quite intrigued really. Tom seems very in love anyway, so that’s good. It’s lovely the way he has unexpectedly stumbled on a whole new chapter like that, don’t you think? It means there’s hope for the rest of us.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Did you see that the wall stayed dry?” I ask, rapidly changing the subject.
“Yes, I did! I checked it this morning.”
“It looks like my repair worked.”
“Yes. I thought I’d phone Susan today and ask her what colour she wants.”
“Just white again, hopefully,” I say.
“Well, it’s up to her really isn’t it?” Jenny says.