‘Looks good,’ Dr Robert said. ‘Button it up.’
I did up the buttons and caught a glimpse of myself in a full-length tilting mirror. More than the shirt, or its awful peach colour, I saw how red my face was, coloured by my embarrassment.
‘Try it with the blue trousers. They’re the latest fashion. Hipsters they’re calling them, because they sit on the hips, two or three inches below the waist. Very sexy.’
I didn’t know what else to do, so I kicked off my shoes and dropped my jeans, aware all the time of his eyes on me. I avoided looking at him, and pulled on the pair of blue hipsters as fast as I could. But they were tight. So tight I could barely get them up over my thighs.
‘They don’t fit,’ I said. ‘They’re too tight.’
‘Nonsense. That’s the fashion, Jack. You need them to be tight. Show the girls what you’ve got when you’re up there onstage. Just like P. J. Proby.’ He grinned. ‘Without splitting them, of course. Here, let me give you a hand.’
He came round behind me, and grabbed the waistband to pull them half over my hips, until I was squeezed so tightly into the crotch that it was almost painful. He was very close, his aftershave nearly overpowering. His body pressed itself into the back of me, and I felt his hand come across to pull up the zip and then close around the bulge it contained.
I reacted instinctively and without thought, pulling away hard. ‘Get off!’
As I turned to face him he took a step towards me, and I swung a bunched fist at his face, connecting with the side of it, feeling his teeth through his cheek. He staggered back, half falling on to the bed, his hand at his mouth, blood on his fingers.
‘You little bastard!’
I wriggled out of the hipsters as fast as I could and pulled on my jeans, hopping on one leg, then the other, before falling backwards and dragging them all the way on as I lay on the carpet. I zipped up, grabbed my shoes and scrambled to my feet.
He was on his feet, too, by now. Breathing hard and glaring at me. He snatched a tissue from a box on the bedside cabinet and dabbed his mouth.
‘Unsophisticated little shit!’ he shouted at me. ‘This is the sixties. Time to experiment, little boy. Do things differently.’
My heart was hammering so hard I thought I might be in danger of breaking a rib or two. I ripped off the peach shirt and grabbed my T-shirt. And even through his anger and humiliation I could see him eyeing my body.
‘I’m sorry I hit you,’ I said. ‘But you’re going to have to find someone else to experiment with.’ And I hurried out of the room.
Even as I ran down the hall, pulling on my T-shirt, I heard him shouting after me from the bedroom.
‘You owe me, Jack. Remember? You all owe me.’
I started down the stairs and he raised his voice to a bellow, like an elephant trumpeting its anger.
‘Or maybe you’d rather be back on the street where I found you, with nothing more than the clothes you stand up in!’
In the downstairs hall I passed Simon Flet on his way in. He threw me his usual cursory glance of disdain.
And then something in my face must have sounded an alarm, because he stopped and called after me as I ran down the stairs to the basement. ‘What’s wrong?’
I didn’t reply until I got to the foot of the stairs and looked back to see his head turned up towards the first-floor landing. I raised my voice so that he would hear me. ‘Nothing.’
He glanced down at me very briefly before turning and taking the stairs to the first floor, two at a time.
I was startled to find Rachel in the basement sitting room, and stopped in my tracks. I am not sure what she was doing there, but she was just as startled to see me. We stood looking at each other during several long moments of uncomfortable silence. Then I saw a slightly quizzical look in those dark, dark eyes and her head canted a little to one side.
‘What’s wrong?’ An echo of Simon Flet.
I didn’t tell her. ‘Where is everyone?’
She shrugged. ‘I have no idea. At the hall probably.’
I lifted my jacket from the back of a chair and pulled it on. And we stood in more awkward silence.
I said, ‘See you around, then.’
But I didn’t move until she had nodded and turned away, and I ran back up the stairs to the ground floor. Then out into the glorious May morning, breathing hard and ready to weep, if I could have been sure that no one would see me.
II
I took the tube across town to Bethnal Green. In the weeks since our arrival in London, I had begun to get some kind of sense of the place. But only vaguely. I had spent so much time underground that I had only become familiar with those parts of the capital around the tube stations that I travelled to and from. Like some subterranean creature that pops its head up for a few minutes to get its bearings before plunging back down into the dark.
Like everyone else, I sat on the train lost in private thought, cocooned from the people around me by my very indifference to them.
They were the same thoughts I took with me as I walked through the leafy, littered streets of Bethnal Green in the spring sunshine. Dark, desperate thoughts.
I knew now that it had all been a big mistake. That the streets of London were not paved with gold, but with illusion. That no matter how far you run, the things you are trying to flee are there waiting for you when you arrive. Because you always take them with you.
In my desperation to escape I had done a dreadful thing. I had made a girl pregnant and taken a life. And the verse from Omar Khayyám that I had learned at school came back to me as my feet beat down on the warm asphalt. I am sure my English teacher, Mr Tolmie, would have been pleased to know that I not only remembered it but fully understood it now, perhaps for the very first time.
But, oh, how I wished it was possible.
There was no sign of the others when I got to the hall. One of the residents was up a ladder outside, nailing a board across a broken window. There was shattered glass all over the pavement, and the main door appeared to have been damaged somehow, split open in places, with jagged shards of wood lying around the entry. I recognized the resident as a man called Joseph.
‘What’s happened here, Joe?’
He interrupted his hammering and looked down at me. ‘Bunch of locals got drunk last night and attacked the hall when they came out of the pub. Threw stones at the windows and tried to break down the door with an axe. We were all locked inside. It was quite terrifying.’
There was no one around in the hall itself. Except for Alice. Thankfully, for once, she was covering her nakedness with a flimsy white gown and dancing around a long strip-painting that hung on the far wall. The paint, still wet where it had been freshly daubed on the paper, glistened in the sunlight that fell through arched windows on the south side. Music boomed out from the Dansette in the common room. The Kinks version of the Martha and the Vandellas hit ‘Dancing in the Street’.
‘Where are the boys?’ I asked her.
‘Haven’t a clue, darling.’ She pirouetted around me, dabbing the air with a long paint brush. ‘Dance with me.’
‘No thanks, Alice. Is Dr Walker around?’
I needed someone to talk to. Someone to give me a perspective, and I’d always felt a connection with JP, ever since discovering that we had both attended the Ommer School of Music.