I turned around, delighted. ‘Yes! D’you know him?’
The newcomer looked considerably less pleased to see me than than I was him. He was an older guy, in his forties or fifties, with a wide face and close-cropped curly hair, wearing a corduroy jacket over an Aertex shirt. There was someone else behind him, much burlier, with longer, darker hair and a beard, in a black coat. I was sure I had never seen either of them before.
‘Take it into the back bar, fellas.’ It was the barman speaking: for some reason he sounded nervous. I turned towards him and clocked the old guy jumping up from his seat and making a beeline for the door of the pub. He had left half of his drink behind on the bar top. That was strange.
And then a heavy hand landed on my shoulder, and it was my turn to feel afraid.
‘You heard the man,’ the newcomer said, and he pulled me off the stool and shoved me roughly towards a door on the far side of the pub. I got the very firm impression it would be unwise not to follow his instructions. His arm still firmly on my shoulder, the three of us moved in procession through the door with its frosted panel. Numbly I took in the words Function Room etched into the glass. The space beyond was dark: thick curtains were closed and I only got a vague impression of stacks of chairs, tables and piled-up cardboard boxes crammed together as the three of us squeezed our way in. No one made any move to switch the lights on.
‘Right,’ said the curly-haired man, releasing me and lifting down a chair from one of the piles so he could make himself comfortable on the empty patch of carpet at the centre of the room. I stayed standing. The big man stopped just inside the doorway, blocking most of the light that came through the glass. I would have been a lot happier if I’d been able to keep both of them in sight at the same time, but the way they had positioned themselves – one in the middle of the room, and one in the doorway – that was impossible.
‘Who the fuck are you then?’ the man in the chair asked conversationally. His accent was very like Liam’s. Somehow that wasn’t comforting.
I tried to keep my voice steady. ‘What d’you mean?’ Three minutes ago I had been quietly having a drink and minding my own business. And three months ago I had been quietly getting on with my studies and blissfully unaware of the very existence of Liam Delaney, or this whole horrible world that existed just beyond my doorstep.
The seated man leaned forward and I flinched back, colliding painfully with the leg of an upturned chair behind me. ‘Who. The. Fuck. Are. You?’ he repeated, as if I was either deaf or an imbecile.
‘I’m just a friend of Liam’s,’ I said quaveringly. ‘I’ve been trying to get in contact with him. That’s all, and I…’
‘Are you a tout?’ he barked.
‘A what?’ I yelped, panicked. The two pints of Guinness were suddenly making their presence very definitely felt in my bladder.
‘A tout!’ he repeated.
‘I don’t know what that means!’ I said pleadingly.
The man in the chair gave an exasperated sigh. ‘Hit him,’ he said quietly.
Instinctively, I moved away from the direction I knew the blow must be coming from, which meant I took the punch on the side of the head rather than full in the face. It still made my ears sing, though. His duty done for now, the big man stepped calmly back into his position in front of the door and folded his arms.
‘Why are you going round asking questions about Delaney?’ asked the man in the chair, just as conversationally as before.
‘He’s a friend of mine!’ I croaked. ‘Just a friend. A friend.’ I’d taken so many beatings for my queerness over the years that part of me automatically assumed this was what this one must be about as well. ‘I just want to know what’s happened to him.’
‘Who says anything’s happened to him?’
‘I don’t know,’ I whimpered, feeling tears begin to well in my eyes and furiously trying to blink them back. ‘He just hasn’t been in touch and…I’m worried about him. We’re both students at the Poly. The Polytechnic of North London, just down the road. That’s how I know him.’
I sensed something passing between the two of them: an uneasiness. The man in the chair shifted position.
‘Bollicks. I still think you’re a tout.’
‘I don’t even know what that means!’ I protested again. ‘Honestly, I don’t.’
‘Search him.’
The big man stepped over to me again and grabbed a handful of my hair, yanking my head back while he pushed his other hand into each pocket of my denim jacket in turn. He found my wallet first, and tossed it over to his friend, who in turn took it over to one of the windows and twitched back the curtain just far enough to give him enough light to see the contents. He was careful not to let the sunlight reach his face. I tried desperately to recall the brief glance I had caught of him in the main bar of the pub: curly hair was all I could really remember. I hadn’t got a proper look at the guy who had punched me at all. Although I was close enough to him now, as he patted down my jeans pockets, to be able to tell you that he stank of raw tobacco and BO.
He had found something else in my pocket and pulled it out. ‘Here,’ he grunted, and threw it across to his companion at the window, who deftly caught it one-handed. For a second I couldn’t think what it was: and then I caught a glimpse of it as he held it up into the daylight. It was the badge I had bought back at the bookshop. I’d shoved it in there instead of putting it on straight away, because I always find the pins a bit fiddly to attach.
‘Huh.’ There was a grunt from the window. The curly-haired man palmed the badge, and I saw that he had pulled my NUS card out of my wallet and was looking at the photo of me on the front of it. It wasn’t the most flattering photo – I hadn’t been ready for it, and I’d chosen to pull the orange curtain across the booth for the backdrop, which turned out to be a really bad colour for me – but it was undeniably me, and it identified me definitively as a student at the Polytechnic of North London, all the way up to 1 September 1984. I can’t tell you how pleased I was that after all this time it had finally proved useful.
‘There’s a library card in there too,’ I gabbled. ‘Honestly, that’s how I know Liam – we were both at the Poly together; that’s all.’ I felt a bit like Peter denying Jesus, but this really wasn’t the time to make a stand for gay rights.
‘Huh,’ he said again, and let the curtain fall. The room seemed all the darker after that brief glimpse of light, and I sensed as much as saw the curly-haired man moving across the room until he was standing right in front of me. His friend still had a handful of my hair and was holding me upright with it.
‘If Delaney doesn’t want to be found, he doesn’t want to be found. Have you got that?’ said the curly-haired man, pulling open my jacket and shoving my wallet forcefully back into the inside pocket. ‘So you want to wind your neck in and stop asking after him, OK?’
‘But I…’
‘What did I just say?’ He spat the words right into my face.
‘OK!’ I yelped through gritted teeth.
He took the badge in his fingertips and brought it up to my forehead, pressing it hard into my skin like he was trying to brand me with it. ‘And if this means anything to you, you’ll keep your mouth shut about running into us too, right? That’s if you know what’s good for you.’
I nodded frantically, my eyes screwed shut. ‘Right. Yes. I will. I promise.’
‘Good.’ He let go the pressure on the badge, and it slipped down, bouncing off the bridge of my nose and dropping neatly into the palm of his other hand. He was still talking in the same, everyday conversational tone, despite being just inches away from my face. ‘We’re done here. For now.’ Now both his hands were busy somewhere down around my chest level, and I chanced a panicky look downwards, but all it was was him unclasping the pin on the badge and pushing it roughly through the denim of my jacket, where he clipped it closed with surprising delicacy. ‘Because if we have to have words with you again, you’re not going to be walking away next time. Because my boy here will break both your legs. Got it?’
‘Got it,’ I tried to say, but it only came out as a hoarse whisper.
‘We’re done,’ he muttered to his companion, who finally released my hair and shoved me hard, sending me reeling back into the pile of furniture behind me, which came crashing down. By the time I had regained my balance, I was on my own, and an unbolted door on the far side of the function room was hanging open, letting the summer sunshine and the roaring traffic on the Holloway Road both come streaming in to the dark interior – life going on as normal as if nothing had happened at all.