LONDON APPRENTICE

He woke alone in his single bed. Sounds of traffic carried from Holloway Road, and muffled voices rose from the street below his window. Gazing wide-eyed at the familiar damp stains and spidery cracks in the high ceiling, he summoned the energy to rouse his body from the cosy wrapping of sheets. Today he’d probably have to buy milk, bread, fruit, veg, the basics. He was down to his last few pairs of clean socks and underwear, so would need to visit the launderette before long. He pulled on yesterday’s underpants, nestled his erection in the waistband, the head protruding, then slipped a shirt on. In the kitchen, he boiled the kettle for tea. The couple of slices of wholemeal in the breadbin were probably his.

While he was toasting, his housemate Dennis walked in, bug-eyed and searching. ‘Don’t forget the rent’s due this week.’

Dennis, he suspected, was up to no good, might be fiddling the rent, creaming a portion off for himself. There was something amiss, anyway; he’d sensed it soon after moving in. And the rental contract was kept well under wraps. But what could be done? It was a shambolic house, and mercurial, and though there was good and bad in the arrangements, it was a place to live. He put suspicion out of his mind and spread margarine thickly on the toast, feeling Dennis’s eyes all over his arse. He turned round. ‘The rent, yes,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if I use a splash of your milk?’

Dennis nodded, then returned to his room and shut the door.

He wondered what went on in there. Dennis had said he was a musician, but no music ever came from behind the door. He sniffed the only carton of milk in the fridge. It was on the turn. He’d sort the rent out. He always managed to find the money when it was needed.

#

Inside the Angel tube station, vast cavernous interior, morning rush over, not too many people around, he clambered down and up the breathtakingly steep escalators, over and over, and enjoyed the sensation of plunging deep beneath the ground then resurfacing into the ticket hall. He’d been running at first, clanging the metal steps with abandon, but while hurtling down suddenly realised that one misstep, one slight miscalculation, could send him tumbling to the bottom. How easily everything would be over. So then he’d slowed his pace, walked the machines until breathless. Now he just rode them, holding firm to the handrail, and allowed himself to be carried in sweeping descents and ascents, mesmerised by the mechanical sounds and the rhythmic motion.

A public address announcement boomed through the air, plummy and resonant, asking for Inspector Sands to report to the control room. The announcement was repeated twice. A transport worker he’d encountered late one night in the gardens at Russell Square had told him that ‘Inspector Sands’ was code for a potential emergency. As the escalator plummeted once again he looked for signs of anybody or anything that might be a cause for alarm. He left the station when he noticed two assistants in the ticket hall regarding him with steely suspicion. Might he have been the perceived emergency?

#

The day was men-only at the Turkish baths on Ironmonger Row. It was quiet inside. He struck up a conversation in one of the hot rooms with the only other user, a man from Scotland who told of flying often into London on business. The nature of the business was not stated. The man described a drab existence, far from home: tedious nights in corporate hotels, packaged sandwiches and sour red wine for dinner in his room, the only company the television opposite the bed and the opening and closing of other room doors and constant clanking of the lifts. This, said the man, was why he visited the baths when he was in town. For friendship, and company. The man’s towel inched up his thigh as he spoke, revealing more of a pasty interior skin.

They sat quietly for a while. Then the man, puffing and huffing, wiping fluids from his brow, said he was going to shower and cool down, and left.

Now alone in the hot room, he shrouded his face with his towel and thought back to an incident a few weeks ago. He’d been cruising the fiction section in Foyles, but had attracted unwelcome attention from a stuffy member of staff who seemed wise to his game. Rattled, he’d left the bookshop, emerging right into the middle of a late afternoon summer downpour, so had taken shelter beneath the arch on Manette Street. A man came towards him from Greek Street, eased his pace, folded his umbrella, walked past a little then came back and found an adjacent spot under the arch. Slightly out of breath, the man frowned at the thundery skies; talking sideways, he asked if business was slow with the weather being so inclement. ‘Yes,’ he replied with a quick laugh, unable to read the man’s intentions clearly. The man appeared mature, yet not old, dressed in a youthful manner. More than that: his stature was upright and lithe. The man wasn’t laughing, though, and carried within his presence an air of multiple possibilities. ‘Yes,’ he said again, having had a moment to consider the man’s question in a more serious light, but still tentative, ‘business has been slow. With the weather.’

Now he heard the sauna door reopening. The Scottish businessman, returned, dripping wet, bringing the refreshing scent of cold water into the room.

He replaced his towel across his lap, but not before he allowed the man the opportunity for a lingering look. He smiled at the man: if it was friendship and company he was after, he might very well have stumbled across the right person.

‘What about you?’ the man asked, taking up a closer position on the bench, hitching his towel as he sat, newly confident. ‘Day off work?’

‘My rent’s due,’ he answered, ‘later this week.’ He touched the man’s leg and held his breath. Corporate skin. Cool and lonely, searching, moneyed skin.

#

On the way home he grabbed a six-pack at the off-licence near the station, then unbuttoned his shirt and ripped open a can as he strolled down Holloway Road towards the house. He had it in mind to lie in the sun on the grimy terrace out the back, under the kitchen window, to locate a patch of the tropics among the roof slates and television aerials. By the entrance to the house he spotted a group of youths, bikes and coats and belongings staking out a spread of territory. They fell silent and watchful at his approach.

The group’s youngest member, a scruffy pre-teen boy with spiked dirty-blond hair, declared, ostensibly to his friends, that one day he’d like to try being fucked up the arse. None of his cohort reacted, though they waited amid sizzles of expectation.

He ignored the boy’s outburst. Kept walking, unchanged pace, looking at anything but the youths, pretending not to have heard, or not to have cared. Nothing more was said or done. The tension fizzled, you could hear it, going the way of so many incidents that amount to nothing each day.

But he’d changed his mind about basking in the sun, aware the youths might somehow gain access to the terrace. He opened the windows of his room and, in shirt and underpants, watched the street, drinking one after another of the beers until they were gone and the afternoon had cooled into evening. With the softened light and early inebriation came some measure of ease and reassurance. The night ahead beckoned quietly.

#

A twilit dash across the field at the side of the houses. A shortcut to the shops. From out of the phone box near the shopping strip jumped a boy, maybe middle teens but it was difficult to tell. The boy made a noise low in his throat, like a growl, surely an attempt to elicit alarm.

He stepped back and away from the boy, a retreat, startled, perhaps a little unnerved.

The boy, laughing, delighted at his success, was alluring, dangerous, provocative, sure of himself and his actions, beyond his years.

Heart quickened, surprised at being shaken, and also relieved, though at what he couldn’t identify, he crossed the road to the corner shop, bought a small bottle of vodka and a ready meal.

On the way back he entered the recently vacated phone box, lifted the receiver, heard the purr of the dial tone. Upon the mouthpiece was the scent of the boy’s breath, sweet and smoky. He watched the traffic lights flicker from red to green to red again. He replaced the receiver. Then he changed his mind and decided to make the weekly call to his family, far away in the north, while he was still relatively clear-headed. These despatches from the capital’s frontline, as he saw it, followed a regular pattern. His mother said she’d been worrying about him. She asked about work, a job; how was he doing for money? He found himself staring at a sign above one of the shops: tax offices, first floor. He told her he’d found a position in a small accountancy firm nearby, full-time, doing routine but secure and adequately paid admin work. He was surprised at how glibly the story popped out.

Back at the field. The phone-box boy was sitting on the wall near the street. He was smoking; waiting for his dealer, perhaps, or a buyer or a friend. Or waiting to pick up some passing trade. Or just waiting. The boy let on, a nod, a cordial acknowledgement, no hard feelings, a faint smile released through the cigarette smoke. It was a mild night, and the boy had unzipped the front of his hooded top almost to his navel, revealing a bare torso.

He returned the smile, but guarded, sober, careful. Had the top, he wondered, been unzipped earlier, at the phone box? As he walked away, he knew, could feel, that the boy was watching him.

He paced his room like a nervy kitten. Vodka in hand, he stood in the hallway and stared at the closed front door. An array of adventures was occurring outside, beyond that door. He was thinking not only about him down at the field, doing by now god knows what, but also of all the boys and all the people and all the fields throughout the vast city. So many elsewheres calling. Time slipping by, opportunities blooming then withering.

#

After the ready meal, a dazzling scintillation of choice lay before him. The underground toilets at Piccadilly tube station were a possibility: an historic venue, known and hackneyed, a favourite of the older queens and tourists and out-of-towners. Or Liverpool Street station, crawling with drunken City boys at the end of the working day, suited and loaded and horny, wound tight and determined to find release, whether violent or sexual or both.

But he ended up near the underground toilet block at Shoreditch. Passed by, passed back. He was putting on a show of innocence for an old boy he’d clocked leaning on the railings on the other side of the road. He’d never seen the man before, and probably never would again after today, yet for some reason it seemed important not to appear calculating. Down the stairs he went, pretending he’d just realised he was bursting for a piss.

It could have been any time of day in that chamber beneath the streets. It was crowded, as if there’d been a call-out over the East End rooftops. This was the place to be. An epicentre in a city of them. All within that tableau were there for the same thing, really, when you boiled it down. Maybe some had come in just to use the toilet or to freshen their faces of grime from the traffic fumes, and a few had stayed on, liking what they’d uncovered. Such surprises can often be found underground. There was safety or security or something like it in the air. A sense of solidarity in numbers.

He found a spot at the long urinal, gauged the spaces, not too close, not too far away. He unzipped his fly, pulled out his cock, looked ahead at the porcelain. His left leg started to judder with nervous anticipation. He flexed his foot to fix it. He leaned forward slightly and took a look along the line of men. He discounted the fellow to his immediate right: not his type, suited and stocky and red-faced and giving off a whiff of desperation and urgency. Probably married, over-mortgaged, middle or senior management, wife and kids and dog at home in suburban Essex or Kent.

The man at his immediate left at the end of the trough was right up his alley, and was so close he could feel the energy radiate from his flank. This one looked like a slight-framed manual worker. Scuffed and muddy heavy-duty work boots, canvas pants too big for him. A genuine outfit, though, not a costume. He’d popped in for a quickie on the way home. He was what you might call straight acting. There was a squelch of chewing gum, spearmint mingling into the scents of cum and piss and bleach. The man must have been aware of being assessed, but he stared forever at the porcelain, deliberately nonchalant, his hand poised on his picturesque penis, motionless save for the slow rhythm of his jaw.

And then a clatter, and the group began to scarper. He turned round to see a cleaner with a trolley of mops and buckets and cloths and liquids. Flies were zipped, cubicle doors closed and bolted, faucets turned on, the crowd scattering in a hurry to a regular straggle. The cleaner began to mop in great sweeping swipes, slow and steady.

Thwarted, he went back up the stairs, startled at the shock of night. He blinked, stood for a minute. The old man across the road was gone.

#

He was often drawn to the council estates and shabby rental properties and edgy public transport to the east. Here stretched beautifully dismal swathes of tower blocks and uniform lines of terraced houses, porridge concrete and reddish bricks fugged by decades of living. Smells of over-boiled cabbage and cheap roasts on desolate Sundays. Piles of clothes and bric-a-brac left out to rot in boxes and crates in overgrown weedy backyards. He would kick litter as he wandered and wondered at the dramas within the homes.

He frequented lonely corners of Mile End, entranced by ghosts and history and otherness. The men were harder, more serious, mature, steeped in smoke and chemical fumes, with histories that had given them granite edges. The streets oozed a mildewed wisdom. This was a land of abandoned theatres, all-night grocery stores, caged off-licences and grubby takeaways, and of wide open roads. Cold and old, forgotten and beautifully crumbling. Working-class to the core, but the scourge of gentrification’s creep was tearing at the fabric in parts, threatening to rip gaping holes in the place years down the line. Here was a dingy pub, around for donkey’s years, where men in overcoats sat for hours over their pints, staring into the room or studying racing form or doing the crossword; two doors down, a cafe called Tisane sells fancy pastries and gourmet sandwiches, herbal teas and espresso coffees. For now, new and old lay in a precarious balance, the one not smothering the other.

He’d heard stories of noise and bother caused by local boys. He thought about this, and looked up at the hundreds of staring windows in the tower blocks. To him it was a beautiful scene, bathed in the special early evening glow of streetlights; serene, brooding. He crossed the car park and entered one of the buildings. A blended stench of yesterday’s urine with disinfectant and chalky cement. He took his time in these places, hovering longer than necessary outside lifts and locked doors, and staring up dim stairways towards the next landing. He touched the front of his jeans, traced the hardening outline of his erection, cupped his balls through the denim. The only sounds a faltering light buzzing in the stairwell, and his own breath coming short and shallow, and yet he was sure someone was listening from the landing. He waited, waited, sniffed loudly.

#

He drifted through the streets, ever the flaneur, and ended up at the London Apprentice. An old staple, the LA; an important stitch in the fabric of the city’s queer history, though the place wasn’t really his cup of tea: too many leather queens and moustached clones, and a touch too much of the dungeon about it. But that night it was an easy option, close at hand.

While waiting to order a drink, he met a boy from Hoxton. Gaunt, his hollow face carrying suggestions of form with class A drugs, and sexy. They tried to talk, but it was difficult over the music. ‘I want to show you off,’ said the boy, grabbing his hand and parading him up and down stairs, along one side of the dance floor then the other, and then sailing through the middle. The boy kissed him as they tried to keep a rhythm, and put on a show of grabbing his arse as if everyone in the place was watching them, as if anyone else cared.

They left the club and walked through stained concrete underpasses lit in smoky orange. The boy stopped to piss against a tunnel wall. He looked hungrily at the boy’s pale slim uncut penis. Soon his hands would be upon it, stroking, his lips around it, kissing and tasting.

They climbed several floors of a neon-lit tower block. The walls inside the flat were splashed and sprayed with slogans, graffiti, images. ‘Don’t say it looks like a squat,’ warned the boy. But it did, though not in a bad way.

He undressed, stood naked and hard, but it was cold so he got under the sheets on the camp bed. The sheets were greasy and stained and smelled of stale skin and hair. But the other wasn’t showing any sign of joining him, and instead sat at the table smoking and jittery like he was jonesing, and speaking once more of an ex-boyfriend he’d mentioned earlier in the club and again on the way here. His voice rose with indignation at the injustices of love gone wrong. Calling the ex a bastard, a cunt, a cunting bastard. The boy’s eyes rolled and widened, his words augmented by the lit cigarette swiping through the air.

Too aroused to give a toss and with no counsel to offer, he wanted the boy to get it all out of his system and pipe down and get his kit off, but there was no indication this would happen imminently. He interrupted the tirade, said he’d just remembered something.

The boy stopped speaking, perhaps stunned by the suddenness of the quiet tones.

He explained to the boy that he was meant to call a friend, one of the guys he shared with. This guy was like the mother of their house, always anxious for the others, and would be concerned if he didn’t hear from him soon. He took his watch out of his shoe and checked it for effect. ‘Christ, it’s late! I’m usually home by this time.’

The boy swallowed this whole, was tranquil again. ‘There’s a payphone right outside on the landing,’ he said, and gestured to the front door.

And so he re-dressed, pocketing his watch discreetly rather than fumbling with the strap. He picked up his bag, hoped that wouldn’t arouse any suspicions. Once outside, clear of the flat, relieved to have found the front door hadn’t been locked – because that could happen; you never knew who you were going to run into – he raced all the way down the stairs, not thinking, not stopping to look back in wonder at what the boy was calling after him.

#

The streets were balmy and quiet. When he reached Old Street he peeled off his jeans and rolled them into his backpack and carried on walking in shirt, trainers and underwear. Further along he sat on a low brick wall bordering one of the rundown office blocks. He found an unopened packet of Embassy cigarettes in his bag. He unwrapped the pack and lit a cigarette, and considered the night.

A police car slowed down, so he fixed his eyes with benign distraction, steady and unhurried, and he could feel the coppers weighing him up, could sense the decisions they were coming to in the confines of their vehicle: shall we talk to this one, or leave him, let him get on with whatever he’s doing at this time of night? The police viewed things in small and unimaginative ways. The car hovered as if about to stop, then sped up and drove off. Perhaps they’d been interrupted by their radio. Or were circling the block to check on him again. He’d still be there if they did, on the wall, and surely that would go some way towards satisfying them that he had nothing to hide.

He lit a second cigarette. He wasn’t doing anything wrong, anyway. There were no laws proscribing the wearing of certain items of clothing in public. Underwear, outerwear, they were labels, it was all arbitrary. The law itself was arbitrary. Less than thirty years ago, he’d have been done for having sex with another man.

But what if the police came back? This time they might reach different conclusions. They might be bored and in search of a diversion. He’d heard stories. He doubted they’d be up for an intellectual debate. Was it worth the risk?

He was startled by shouting to his left, followed by howling laughter. Three drag queens were ambling along Old Street. High, boisterous, but contained within their own activity. ‘Hello, love,’ the nearest one said to him quietly, breaking out of the group dynamic as they passed him at the wall. He smiled back, and something light and airy filled his heart. Off they went in a cloud of flamboyance.

He lit a third cigarette, and tried letting his mind become blank. But this was difficult. Always difficult. Instead he was carried to a memory, of another time he’d felt a welcome surge in his heart. A few weeks ago. Or was it months? He’d shaved his hair, painted his nails red, lined his eyes, worn a pair of orange hotpants he’d found at a charity shop off Regent Street. Doused in Eau d’Hadrien, he’d gone into the West End, had danced and cavorted at Fruit Machine. At dawn on the way home, hungry, he’d been drawn to Smithfield. He sat at a table by himself in the old market pub, surrounded by workers in bloodied aprons, and had egg and chips and a pint of Guinness. At an adjacent table, a couple of hefty butchers had shown a brief interest when his food was brought over. The younger one told him enough of those breakfasts would put hairs on his chest. He offered the man a chip, and it was accepted with a quick nod, picked daintily from the pile and lifted between a thick finger and thumb, then eaten with refinement. He’d been delighted by this surprising clutch of delicacies tripping across the butcher’s burly frame. The second, the elder, and gruffer, said no to a chip, then, ‘You’re a blast from the past.’ ‘The clothes?’ he asked the man. ‘The lot,’ he replied, a smile suddenly splitting his face wide open. An affable observation, without judgement or disdain.

Now, the voices of the drag queens faded to nothing. The patrol car hadn’t reappeared. He hoisted his bag onto his back and carried on vaguely homeward, smoking as he walked, a jaunt in his step.

#

In the grounds of the estates near his house he spied two men beneath the spreading branches of a tree, pants round their ankles, lower bodies glowing in the dawn light, fucking in full view of any residents who might be awake at that hour. Nightclub spill-outs, probably. He stopped to watch, and they noticed him and carried on without any acknowledgement or shying off or any attempt at including him. At first they reminded him of dogs, getting on with it, unconstrained by social mores. But then he felt like the dog himself, dismissed, shunted aside, made seedy and irrelevant, and he turned sulky. Miserable, this; utterly miserable. He skulked off home to familiar emptiness and dust and stillness, his disappointment a quick deep falling.