It was less traumatic for me than it was for some of the rest of them. Like I say, I’ve got plenty of experience of being arrested – you don’t do four years selling your body on the Dilly without getting to know your way round a police cell or two – and although it had been a while, I still knew the routine practically off by heart. It was a lot worse for some: Dex and Kelvin in particular got a double dose of the rough handling that the rest of us were treated to, plus a pantomime from the desk sergeant about not being able to understand either of their accents even though Dex is as Brummie as they come. And I saw Sonya in tears too – but then she had trouble to look forward to at home as well because, although she doesn’t like to admit it, her mum is a magistrate and a Tory councillor back home in Worcestershire.
For my part I managed to do what I always used to do in these situations and detach myself from it all. It helped that none of it came as a surprise to me like it did to the others. In the old days I used to get hauled in just as often for things I hadn’t done as things I actually had. I’d also had far harder punches from policemen than the one I’d got today (though I had to admit my shoulder was aching, not helped by the handcuffs preventing me from giving it a proper roll round in its socket as it felt like I needed to do). I even managed to successfully get myself in the line behind my new friend at the custody desk, which gave me the opportunity to check out an arse that turned out to be just as peachy as his face and – this is a particular thing of mine – the most gorgeous nape, a slender neck rising to hair that tapered into a perfectly-razored line which I could just imagine the feel of against my lips.
His name was Liam Delaney, he told the desk sergeant when his turn finally came. I rolled the syllables silently around my mouth, enjoying the taste of them. Occupation: student, Polytechnic of North London, although I was certain I’d never seen him around our campus before – I would definitely have remembered – so he must be over at Holloway Road. Current address in Kilburn, permanent address in Belfast, so I was (mostly) right about Irish. I didn’t get much more than that because at that point I was called forward to give my own details to another officer, but the fact there were so many of us played to my advantage: they had to double us up and the two of us ended up sharing a cell.
‘Hello again,’ he said with a grin as I was ushered in and the door slammed and locked behind me. It had been a close-run thing: I’d had to rush through the surrender of my possessions for fear of ending up banged up with Richie instead, who was likely to spend the hours ahead badgering me to stand for the union executive because he’d fallen out with the current postgrad rep. He’d been on at me about it for weeks, claiming she was a ‘total Tory’. Sandra was actually a perfectly nice American, about as anti-Reagan as they come, but she did oppose Richie’s plan to donate union funds directly to the striking miners rather than just whatever we could get by shaking buckets, so he was determined to get rid of her, and he had decided I was the man to help him, whether I wanted to or not.
‘Hi,’ I grinned sheepishly. ‘Sorry about all this. All you were trying to do was buy a paper!’
‘It’s not your fault. I knew what I was getting into when I came over to join the fun this morning. I’m Liam.’ He held out his arm towards me: I couldn’t help noticing how all the different muscles on it stood out beneath a corona of fine dark hairs. I’d been wrong about the yellow t-shirt: it turned out to be one I hadn’t seen before, with a couple of palm trees on it and the slogan For a Reagan-Free Caribbean.
I took his hand and shook it, over-conscious of how it felt in mine. ‘Tommy.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s not what you told them out there.’
‘Oh!’ So he’d been eavesdropping on me, too: that was interesting. ‘No, I’m Alex officially, but everyone calls me Tommy.’
He let go of my hand and shifted up to make room for me on the mattress-covered slab that was the only place to sit in the cell. ‘Why so?’
‘Oh, it’s just a nickname really.’ I settled down beside him, trying not to smirk at the thought that we had only met an hour or so ago, and we were already getting into bed together. ‘I started using it years ago, and it’s kind of stuck.’ I wasn’t about to tell him the full circumstances, but sharing a little couldn’t hurt. ‘I used to go by Tommy Wildeblood.’ I still did, sometimes.
He turned his head to face me, his brow crinkling in thought. ‘Why so?’
Our current surroundings felt like a sign, so I took a deep breath and plunged in. ‘Peter Wildeblood was a gay man who was arrested in the 1950s. He went to prison, and then he wrote a book about it. It was pretty important to me for a while.’
This was an understatement. I’d carried Wildeblood’s book Against The Law around with me for years when I was selling myself on the Dilly, keeping it close to my heart and consulting it for advice like my own personal I-Ching – with surprisingly effective results on occasion. My copy, liberated from my local library when I was just a kid, had long since got too tattered to accompany me any more, but it still had pride of place on my bookshelves back at my bedsit. ‘And it’s for Oscar Wilde a bit, too,’ I added, just to make sure he’d definitely got the message. It couldn’t hurt that Wilde was Irish – a fact I’d only become aware of embarrassingly late in my English degree.
‘Interesting.’ His impression was inscrutable. It wasn’t as if I’d been expecting him to shriek ‘me too!’ and throw his arms around me, but a bit of an indication either way would have been welcome. He hadn’t jumped off the mattress in disgust, at least.
‘So, I’ve not seen you around the Poly before?’ I ventured.
‘No, I’m over at Holloway Road,’ he confirmed. ‘And only part-time.’
‘Oh, right. What do you do in real life then?’
‘I work for the GLC. Grants department. They’re putting me through an accountancy course.’
Not exactly the sexiest option, but not enough to put me off him. And he got extra points for working for Ken Livingstone’s council. Ken was a bit of a hero as far as I was concerned: one of the only politicians who was willing to stand up for gay rights, and put his money – or at least the GLC’s money – where his mouth was, and he took a hell of a lot of stick for it. Just this week I’d been reading in Capital Gay about a big grant to Gay Switchboard, where some friends of mine volunteered. For all I knew, Liam had been the one doing the paperwork. I hoped so. It had already been written up in the other papers as yet another example of Ken’s support for the ‘Loony Left’: if that was the case, I was as proud to be a loony as I was to be a gay.
‘Cool place to work,’ I enthused.
He pulled a face. ‘Ach, it pays the bills.’
‘Literally,’ we both found ourselves saying together, and grinning at the weak joke.
‘So do you think you’ll manage to keep your job?’ I asked. Livingstone had been doing such a good job of opposing the government – a far better one than the wet blanket that was the national Labour party – that Mrs Thatcher had announced her intention to wipe out the GLC completely: she’d already followed Hitler’s example by cancelling next year’s elections, and was pushing through plans to get rid of the whole thing in a couple of years’ time. Maybe because they were scared she was going to go on to do the same thing to them, a few Tory MPs had found their spines and rebelled against the legislation: it was currently looking as if she might not be able to get it through after all.
‘Who knows?’ Liam let out a frustrated sigh. ‘We’re trying to get grants through as quickly as we can, just in case we turn up one morning and find the locks have been changed.’
‘D’you see much of him? Ken?’
‘Not so much. He comes to the Christmas party. But he’s off round the country a lot these days, campaigning against the abolition. It’s his sidekick, John McDonnell, who does a lot of the day-to-day stuff. He’s my boss – well, my boss’s boss. He’s a sound guy too; knows the score.’
I was impressed. Liam couldn’t be more than twenty-five or twenty-six, but he talked like a proper grown-up. Whereas I was pushing twenty-nine – practically a pensioner in gay years – and still a student. I’d finished my degree the year before (and got a first, thank you very much) – already a so-called ‘mature’ student with six years on most of my contemporaries. But I had taken one look at an unemployment figure north of three million and decided academia was probably the place to stick around for as long as possible. My course tutor had been only too delighted at the prospect of having me back. He pointed me in the direction of a couple of bursary funds that might be happy to take over Berkshire County Council’s job of paying me to do my favourite thing in the world and read books all day. And before I knew it I had another entire year of study stretching before me. I figured even Sir Keith Joseph couldn’t manage to abolish higher education in that time.
‘What about you?’ asked Liam. ‘What are you studying?’
‘Oh, English literature.’ Surrounded by people studying things like polymer science and social work, I always felt a bit apologetic when I talk about my own course. ‘Well, they call it English, but it covers a lot of Commonwealth authors too. And Irish ones,’ I added as an afterthought, before suddenly panicking that he was going to ask me which ones. I’d made it about a hundred pages into Ulysses before giving up on the grounds that nothing had actually happened yet. And I still refuse to believe anyone has ever actually read Finnegan’s Wake.
Instead, he decided to ask me something just as awkward. ‘So who are you studying at the moment?’
‘Shakespeare,’ I said lamely, adding ‘the problem plays,’ in the hope that made it better.
His forehead furrowed. ‘And which ones are those when they’re at home?’
‘All’s Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida.’
‘Troilus and who?’
‘Cressida. It’s about the Trojan War.’
He smirked. ‘No. You sure you’re not making these up? I’ve not heard of any of them.’
‘I wish I was!’ I’d chosen the topic for my postgrad diploma the previous term, and been slightly regretting it ever since.
‘Hamlet,’ Liam continued, his smile widening. ‘Now that’s a Shakespeare play, I’m sure of it. Macbeth. Julius Caesar. Shame they don’t let us have a pen and paper in here, you could be writing these down.’
I gave him a mock exasperated look. ‘Ha ha. Very funny. If you’re running short, there’s about fifteen Henry-the-something-or-others. Do I get to make jokes about your course too?’
He pushed himself back against the cell wall. ‘Ach, it’s accountancy; there’s nothing funny to say about it, believe me. How’s your back now? That was a powerful knock you took.’
I raised my hand up to my left shoulder. ‘Bit sore. Having my arms cuffed behind me didn’t help much.’ I tried to rotate my upper arm again, and winced as a sharp pain went through me.
‘You all right?’ Liam was looking at me, concerned.
‘Yeah. Yeah. I’ve had worse.’ I’d once had a policeman grind my face into the table in an interview room, and he was being quite friendly at the time, for him. ‘What about you? It looked like you got a bit of the same treatment.’
‘It’s no bother. Back home I’d have been risking a plastic bullet in the head.’
I laughed slightly too loudly at this, partly out of shock and partly to demonstrate how unshocked I was by it, and then winced again as another spasm went through my shoulder.
‘Here; turn around.’ Liam sketched a spiral in the air, indicating I should turn my back to him. ‘Go on, I’m not going to hurt you!’
I shifted around on the bed to face the bare breeze blocks, the thin mattress twisting beneath me, its rubber letting out a protesting squeak. I’d had to hand in my denim jacket at the desk, along with my haversack, everything in my pockets and the laces from my Dr Martens, and all I had on my top half was a thin cap-sleeve t-shirt. I felt suddenly self-conscious about my arms, and how much less muscular than his they were.
And then his hands spread across my shoulder blades and started to massage me, and I forgot about everything except for how good they felt.
‘How’s that?’ he asked me after a few electric seconds.
I made a noise that was somewhere between a gulp and a purr, and then, embarrassed, coughed a ‘really good, thanks.’ But even as I got the words out his fingertips stroked their way up all the way to my bare neck, and I wouldn’t have trusted myself to speak at all any more.
And in that moment I made a decision: that whether Liam Delaney was or wasn’t gay, at the very first opportunity that presented itself, I was not going to have sex with him.