Sandy was throwing a birthday party and Alison was in no mood to go. After six months in a wheelchair, her old journalist friend, Guy, whom she had barely seen since the Gay Pride march, had finally been swept away by an attack of MAI, a rare form of tuberculosis.
‘So typical,’ he had croaked mirthlessly, as she sat at his bedside in the ward Jamie had recently left. ‘We spend our lives trying to be different – eating and wearing things nobody else would dream of, decorating our houses in unheard of ways – and now what? Now we manage to be chic and rarefied even in death. TB? Nothing so du peuple! We even manage to suffer from the virus in different ways from each other. This is customised lurgy …’
He had died on Monday and was cremated on Thursday, too late for Sandy to cancel Saturday’s party.
‘It’s my birthday,’ she declared a few hours before, when Alison rang her ostensibly to discuss helpline rotas but actually to see whether she could find the courage to excuse herself from going. ‘And I shan’t have it turned into a wake. You dress up, girl, get yourself a lift so you can drink yourself stupid, and you party! And no black. Schwarz is absolutely verboten. The only black Guy would have allowed is underwear.’
By the time Bald Billy drove over from Greenwich to pick her up, Alison had tried on and rejected some five outfits. She answered the door to Billy in an old school suit of Jamie’s she had tarted up with a red silk scarf and a flashy diamanté clip.
‘Well? What do you think?’ she asked him warily, sensing he was about to pass judgement anyway. Billy’s window-dressing had won prizes. Tonight he had come out entirely in Hare Krishna orange. He had even found the time to dye some plimsolls tangerine.
‘No,’ he said after a moment’s consideration.
‘You no like? Tell me, Billy!’
‘You’re a girl, Alison. Wear that lot and you give out quite the wrong signals.’
‘I thought it was sort of Barbara Stanwyck.’
‘Precisely.’ Billy stole a mandarin from the fruitbowl and began peeling it.
‘Okay,’ Alison sighed. ‘Have we got time?’
He nodded.
‘Right,’ she said, returning to her bedroom and throwing off the suit. ‘I’m a girl. I’m a girl. Damn it, I am!’
She snatched up a little red dress with skinny shoulder straps, pulled it over her head and cinched in her waist with a black belt. Then she put on lipstick to match.
‘Lose the belt,’ Billy told her in the hall.
‘But –’
‘Simplicity is all and anyway it makes you look like a centaur from behind. But the dress is good.’ He stood back. ‘Here,’ he said, taking a heavy steel chain from his neck and fastening it round hers. ‘I’ve taken the chill off it for you. Now that looks fabulous!’
‘You’re sure? I feel like a fire extinguisher. Billy, can’t we stay in and watch TV? I’ll cook.’
Billy rejected one of her coats with a little mutter of shocked distaste and grabbed another one for her.
‘Do you know how long it took to get these shoes the right colour?’ he asked her wearily.
Sandy shared a big, battered house in the considerable shadow of Arsenal football stadium with three other women. She had bought it in her earning days as a solicitor and, now that she earned nothing, needed lodgers to help her pay the mortgage. The lodgers changed regularly, so, assuming they had friends, there was always a good chance of meeting new faces at Sandy’s parties. The fact that Alison usually found herself in the basement kitchen with the same old crowd, hiding from all the new people upstairs, did not stop her, even tonight, from entering the house with a certain sense of anticipation.
As a gesture to mourning, an old photograph of Guy puffing a drunken kiss at the camera over a birthday cake had been blown up to poster size and coloured, à la Warhol, with vibrant crayons. Glued on the hall wall above a table draped with a pseudo altar cloth and cluttered with Mexican prayer candles, it was already fluttering with tokens of remembrance people had pinned to it. There were red ribbons, inevitably, but also chocolate wrappers, a condom full of Smarties, a rubber snake, a pink carnation, a sombre polaroid snapshot taken during the picnic at the last Gay Pride, with Guy in his OUR DEATHS YOUR SHAME baseball cap, and a gaudy postcard of Plymouth Hoe.
Sandy ran out to greet them, a bottle in either hand, already in bare feet because she had been dancing.
‘Damn you!’ she shouted over the music, after duly admiring Billy’s plimsolls and snatching his exquisitely wrapped birthday parcel. ‘I wanted me to be the only one in a dress. Look at you!’
‘Ah but I’m a girl,’ Alison said.
‘I know, babe. I know!’
‘Well look at you. It’s so …’ Words failed Alison.
‘Like it?’ Sandy revolved on the spot to show off her incongruous blue satin ball gown. ‘Found it in Help the Aged. I’ve come as your mother, incidentally.’ Alison gave her a playful slap and received a kiss in return. ‘No Boys?’ Sandy asked.
Alison shook her head.
‘Nothing can winkle Jamie out of the fens so Sam’s gone up to join him there.’
‘Jamie sent me a card, though.’
‘You’re honoured. I never get one.’
Sandy was distracted by the arrival of a recent ex of hers, new girlfriend in tow. Bald Billy was already in the living room, showing off his plimsolls, so Alison slipped downstairs to the kitchen. The grimy basement had been transformed like the rest of the house by a quantity of candles burning in jam jars and flower pots. It would be quite in character for a Sandy party for the evening to end with someone spectacularly catching fire and having to be rushed to casualty. Someone nobody had ever liked much. Sure enough, the gang were all in the kitchen, eating the cocktail sausages and mustard dip that no-one could be bothered to pass around upstairs. Sean and Nick stood, shyly entwined, by the door, inseparable even before anyone had found time to get drunk and predatory. Guy’s widowed Buddy, Steve, looking incomplete without the wheelchair to push, was chatting to several colleagues from the helpline and Belgian Agnes. Belgian Agnes had brought along yet another man she had found at the Islamic Institute. He stared about him and clung to her as to a life raft. As Alison came in there were hugs all round because Guy’s funeral was still fresh in their minds and, without anyone saying as much, they all knew she was in need of hugging and suspected Jamie’s would be next.
Although she had made a point of still speaking to him every day and had sent him a couple of Red Cross parcels of magazines, books and chocolates, she had not seen Jamie since he left hospital. His departure to The Roundel had brought a temporary alleviation of pressure, allowing her to flex her spirit and check for sprains. She was shocked to find herself suffering a kind of revulsion with his sickness or, more accurately, a kind of dissatisfaction with its progress. Daring, now there was distance between them, to stand back mentally from their situation and examine her reactions, she found that his recovery had cheated her of something, and the long months ahead, months of checking he was still relatively well and of waiting for him to decline again, were a deadening prospect. Of course this reaction appalled her. She was grateful, truly, for his rescue from death’s jaws, which according to the doctors had been a very close thing. She prayed, moreover, with honest selfishness, that he might be spared for another year, two years even. His so nearly dying had been a kind of rehearsal. She saw that now. It gave them all a chance to test their love for him like so many unfinished ships in a dock.
What disturbed her most was her being forced to accept that his death, whenever it came, would not destroy her. She would survive. She had already found ways of coping. He had been close as a limb to her for as long as she could remember, but nobody died of amputation these days. With careful deployment of what fate left her, the healing stump might not even show too much. Like the sensible widow, she would make new friends who had never known what she had lost and would accept her as she was, brotherless. Brotherlessness; that, she knew now, would hurt. Sometimes she dared to hope that Sam might stay around, play a brotherly role, but most of the time she knew the hope was vain. In both senses. With Jamie gone, the tentative roots Sam had put down would be groundless and he would be swept away from her by the same mysterious urban current that had first washed him into her path.
Alison began to find the considerate tone of friends hard to bear. She extricated herself from Nick and Sean’s little pool of sweetness and, taking a washing-up bowl of crisps, went in search of oblivious strangers. She offered them to acrid solicitors who envied Sandy her freedom even as they decried her folly in giving up her legal career. She offered them to the lodgers, but found they were discussing the validity of the class struggle and moved on when one of them gave her a look that dismissed her as the Snack-bearing Bourgeoise from Hell. She offered them to some men downing quantities of fruit juice, flushed from dancing, then she realised the men were boys, young enough to have been brought by their parents. Finally she saw that the same man had put his hand in the crisp bowl in each group, and that he was still following her.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘You take them. You’re obviously hungry and they’re getting heavy,’ and she looked at him properly for the first time.
‘Hi,’ he said. He nodded slowly as though the mere fact of her speaking to him at last represented an opinion with which he was in fulsome agreement. ‘Bruce,’ he added.
She saw a long, Greek nose, dark eyes, and unkempt blond hair that looked almost yellow against his tan. Late twenties. Early thirties allowing for the candles’ flattery.
‘Alison,’ she said, not offering her hand because his were now full.
‘You a friend of the hostess?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I’m a girl.’
‘Oh. Thank God.’
He was American. Judging from the depth of his tan he was fresh from somewhere hotter than Finsbury Park.
‘Why haven’t I met you before?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know anyone here.’
‘No?’
‘I’m a friend of Abby’s. We arranged to meet here.’
‘Oh.’
‘But you guys haven’t met yet, I guess.’
‘Sorry. I wouldn’t know her from Adam.’ Sandy was passing. Alison broke off to catch at her sleeve. ‘Bruce wants to know if Abby’s here,’ she shouted.
‘Who?’ Sandy laughed.
‘Abby. I don’t know her either.’
Sandy turned to Bruce, glanced back at Alison then said, as she was drawn away again, ‘Stick with Alison. I’m sure she’s a much better lay.’
Alison felt herself grin foolishly.
‘With friends like her –’ she began. ‘Listen. Don’t you want to try phoning this Abby to see if she’s all right?’
What’s come over me? she thought as she spoke. Why must I treat everybody nowadays as if they’re in a state of incipient social trauma? The poor woman’s probably two-timing him with his best friend or skiving off for a quiet night in with the cat and a tin of chocolate brownies.
‘No,’ Bruce said, bringing his mouth close to her ear to be heard over the music. She felt the warmth of him. ‘But I would like to get somewhere quiet so we can talk properly.’
He steered her out through the crowd, then she led the way up to the landing where there was a sofa buried beneath discarded coats and yet another dangerous clutch of guttering candles. Clearing the coats onto the floor so they could sit, she uncovered a bottle of wine. Bruce opened it with a Swiss Army penknife and refilled their glasses. He had passed the crisps to someone else along the way.
‘Geeze this is so embarrassing,’ he said, after they had raised glasses and pulled simultaneous faces at the nastiness of the wine. ‘I feel like some lousy gate-crasher.’
‘That doesn’t matter. Sandy encourages gate-crashers, as long as they bring bottles. One of her best friends began life as a gate-crasher in this very house.’
‘You?’
She nodded.
‘My brother and I had just been to a terrible wedding. God, I hate weddings! Don’t you?’
He nodded. So far so good.
‘Anyway,’ she went on. ‘We were passing and the party was going with a swing and we were both pretty drunk so Jamie – that’s my brother – Jamie dragged me back to an off-licence and in we came, armed with bottles. I only found out afterwards he was after one of the blokes we’d just seen coming in here.’ Bruce laughed uncertainly. ‘He’s like that,’ she added. ‘Impulsive. I hate parties. I didn’t want to come out tonight in fact. I was all set to stay in with the cat and a tin of chocolate brownies. Actually I don’t have a cat but you get the idea.’
Christ! she thought. Doesn’t this harpy ever draw breath?
The trouble with straight men, she was remembering, was that unless they were lecherous bastards, they lacked small talk and, even the lecherous ones lacked finesse. Bald Billy, Sugary Sean, Nice Nick, even poor Guy, were never lost for an answer or a quip. Jamie didn’t even allow the painful taking of a blood sample to stem conversational flow.
What the hell, she thought. We’re both adults. We know what we want.
‘So this Abby, is she your fiancée, your mother or what?’ she demanded.
He displayed that phased slowness she found appealing in some Americans, a kind of daddish social clumsiness in the face of anything too witty or too blunt.
‘Er …’ He chuckled slowly, finally catching up with her. ‘Er. He was my old college roomie. His real name’s Peter. Peter Abrams.’
‘Oh. Oh! Well isn’t that nice.’
‘He’s a lawyer. I’m staying at his place. I only got here this morning and we still haven’t met up. He left a note for me about meeting at the party. He’s off to Japan tomorrow early so I guess we won’t meet after all.’
‘Are you sure you got the right party? I don’t think Sandy knows the kind of people who can afford to go to Japan.’
‘I’ve got his note.’ He dug in the pocket of his big check shirt. ‘Here.’
It was the wrong address.
‘He’ll be waiting for you over the road,’ she said.
‘Oh well.’ He shrugged, grinned, topped up her wine. ‘It sounded kinda quiet and tasteful over there, didn’t you think?’
‘I really didn’t notice.’
‘It was quiet.’ He assured her. ‘You won’t tell Sandy?’
‘Promise. But what do you care?’ She smiled and he smiled and suddenly his pretty face seemed several inches closer than it had been.
‘You have the most amazing eyes,’ he told her.
‘Oh phooey.’
‘You do. Sorry. You don’t like compliments.’ He looked down at his glass, drank some more. His lips were wine-darkened, eminently kissable. He grinned. ‘But you do, you know. Amazing ones.’
When did he start chatting her up? No-one had chatted her up in years. Not even the editorial assistant, and he had nursed an ulterior motive. It felt delightful. English men just stopped talking and pounced, however confusing and violent a subject change the pouncing constituted. The approach was one of stealthy surprise-taking; talk to her about politics, your rent rebate, motorway toll systems, then, just when her eyes are glazing over, pounce.
‘Sorry,’ he was saying. ‘Does this sort of thing make you mad?’
‘Not at all.’
‘If I feel something I just come right out and say it. It saves time. I’m not very good at English reserve.’
‘It’s all a con.’
‘What is?’
‘English reserve,’ she told him. ‘We fuck like ferrets given the chance.’
‘Really?’ He rounded his big eyes and leaned fractionally towards her. ‘You’ll have to forgive me,’ he said. ‘I’m kinda jet-lagged. I’m still out on Planet TWA.’
‘You look fine from down here,’ she said, feeling his breath on her cheek.
‘How about closer to?’ he asked.
‘Well …’ She felt her heart race like a schoolgirl’s. This was wildly irresponsible. She should go downstairs and mingle with the grown-ups. ‘You’ve got wine stains on your lip,’ she told him.’
‘Where?’
‘Just … there.’ She touched his upper lip with her forefinger, exposing expensive teeth and a big, stirring tongue. He kissed her finger then the palm of her hand then, so slowly she felt steam should be hissing from her ears, he cupped her face in his hands and kissed her on the mouth. Comprehensively.
Pouring them both the remains of the nasty wine, he hummed along to the song booming out of the living room below them, perkily confident, now he knew that she wanted what he wanted. A queue had begun to form outside the bathroom and Alison felt the landing sofa was fast losing its appeal.
‘Do you like dancing?’ she asked. ‘I love this song too.’
‘I can think of other things I’d rather do,’ he said slowly.
‘Oh?’ She smiled. He was hers for the taking.
‘We could go back to Abby’s place,’ he said. ‘But he’ll be there later and I don’t know about you but I like to make a lot of noise when I come.’
‘Oh lord,’ she said. ‘Well I live way out in Bow. I’d hate you to go off the boil before we got there.’
‘No danger of that,’ he said, running a teasing finger under a shoulder strap on her dress and across her collar bone. ‘Do you have anything planned for tomorrow?’
‘I thought perhaps a day in bed.’
‘Oh. Well good.’
They retrieved their coats from the pile and headed for the street. They kissed so heavily in the back of the taxi home that she found herself letting Bruce pay for it while she loitered on the pavement, shifty and exposed in the lamplight and the cab-driver’s gaze. As she was fumbling on the doorstep for her key and Bruce was fumbling for her, the Vicar and his lodger got out of their battered Saab.
‘Good evening to you, Miss Pepper,’ he called out, mockingly, as she dropped her keys in the dark and Bruce stooped to her ankles to retrieve them.
‘Rot in hell,’ she called amiably back and took the couple’s laughter as a benediction.
Bruce kissed her again once they were inside the hall. The new bony coldness of him excited her and she led him urgently to the bedroom – no dishonest footling around with cafetières or whisky. They fell to lovemaking with the self-conscious athleticism of film actors performing a sex scene, neither daring, by a momentary gesture or out of place smile, to deny the vital reality of what was taking place. They tugged one another’s clothes off with stern concentration. She pushed his face back on to the mattress by his hair and bit at his neck. He rolled her off him and pinned her hands at her side to work gravely at her nipples with mouth, nose, stubbled cheek. She slid down beneath him to rub her face in the mustiness of his heavy balls. Manhandling her like a dead thing, he swung her up on to her knees and, clasping her from behind with an arm across her neck, slid his other hand between the cheeks of her arse and down between her legs to cup the lips of her aching vagina in a hot, slightly trembling palm. He was firm and smooth and she liked the weightiness of him about her, wanted it to crush her into untroubled silence.
When he reached for the light, she grasped his hand back, pulled his mouth on to hers before he could protest.
‘Rubbers,’ he managed to hiss in her ear at last. ‘Do you have any?’
‘What?’
‘Condoms.’
‘Oh yes. I think so. In the drawer.’
Again he fumbled. Something fell over.
‘It’s no good. I can’t do it in the dark,’ he said.
Blinking in the sudden light, she watched him tug open the little drawer and find a foil packet. Something chilled her in the way he paused to check the thing’s use-by date. Something chilled her too in the way he worked his cock with his fist while she opened the packet for him. Protected now, he turned out the light, kissed her again and entered her. Now, however, she found she could only lie there beneath him, inert. He continued to thrust away at her for several minutes, maintaining the sex scene script single-handed as best he could, but it took two to sustain the passionate illusion and he slid to a halt, still throbbing inside her.
‘What’s up?’ he asked, stroking her cheek. ‘Did I say something wrong? Was it the light? Listen. I can’t see you now. You can’t see me. I could be anybody. Get that? I could be anybody fucking you here.’ She had to hand him marks for effort.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s not you. It’s me.’
‘Hey,’ he breathed. ‘Ssh. It’s okay. When you’re ready, okay?’
He slipped out of her, held her close, stroked her breasts, her abdomen, her thighs. Breathing heavily, his hair brushing her stomach, he did his best to excite her, instead, with his fingers. His relentless massage of her clitoris, however, was somehow too educated, evoking all too vividly the impatient instructions of other women, and after a while she could not help but brush his hand aside. Undeterred, only concerned, he pulled the duvet up around them and held her in his arms.
‘Is there someone else?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she said, furious at herself for the way her mind filled with images of Sam and Jamie. ‘In a way. Yes. Sorry. It’s this guy I know. He –’
‘Yes?’
‘He’s got sick.’
‘Hey, I’m sorry.’
‘Hey,’ she echoed spitefully. ‘It’s AIDS.’
She couldn’t resist it. Now it was his turn to freeze up; she knew he would assume that the ‘guy’ in question was an ex of hers.
‘Wow,’ he said and she fancied she heard the little rustle as his dick shrivelled into retreat, sloughing off its condom like an old skin. ‘It’s weird, you know,’ he went on after a shocked interval. ‘Because I’m from the Bay Area, right, where there are one fuck of a lot of cases, and still I don’t know anybody who’s got it.’
‘Who does your hair?’ she asked. ‘A nun?’
‘Geeze!’ he nudged her. ‘Honestly!’ He was genuinely shocked at her irreverence – not for the Church or liberal etiquette but for mortality. She felt him grope between his legs for the derelict condom and drop it over the side of the bed. ‘Hey,’ he asked. ‘I brought Abby over some dope-best Californian sensamilla – and it’s still stuffed in the heel of my shoe. Would you like a joint?’
‘You mean this is the alternative?’
‘You never give up, do you?’
‘Believe me,’ she promised him, ‘I’ve given up. Yes. A joint would be most satisfactory. Let’s go the whole hog and light a candle while we’re at it.’
She lit a candle while he rolled two joints. She observed him in the softer light and realised he was really very sexy.
‘One each?’ she gasped.
‘Why not? I’m not going to get around to seeing Abby anyway.’
Coming on top of the cheap wine and interrupted coitus, the dope took swift and powerful effect. She laughed uncontrollably, as did he, as the bed seemed to float off the floor. Munching handfuls of Natural Crunch with freeze dried strawberry hunks straight from the box, they soon had one another convulsed over recitals of Bad Sex They Had Known, each seeking to outdo the other with stories which, in truth, were sadder than they were funny. Then she reached the point where she was so stoned she couldn’t speak and he went upstairs to put on some music. He made the big mistake of putting on the Barber violin concerto, thus enabling her to round off a perfectly horrible evening by crying all over him. She cried about Jamie, and about all the men she had known who had died already and about all the men and, all too probably, women she was sure would die before she reached forty. One by one she cremated the party guests until only Belgian Agnes was keeping her sad company shovelling all the ash.
Whether he stayed the night, whether he slept even, after such a ghastly lullaby, she had no idea. He was gone when she woke on Sunday morning. There was a note on the kitchen table.
‘Remember,’ it said, ‘There is nothing so bad that Positive Thinking cannot heal. Be cool. Stay well. Bruce.’
She had no address, no telephone number, no surname, not even an inkling of what he did while managing to live in San Francisco and remain untouched by the epidemic around him. Jamie would be proud of her.