“Sorry, not my style,” he said gruffly.
“Is smiling your style?” asked Christine, smiling herself.
“What’s that?” prompted Alex, who had been making rather a point of not smiling. Glad she’d noticed.
“I say you don’t smile much, do you?”
“Not a lot, no.”
“Why — have you got bad teeth?”
She’d find that out soon as he got his tongue down her throat, he reckoned. He was wondering whether it was too early yet to verbalise this thought when one of the two or three young men in jeans and bomber jackets sashayed over. “Good evening, Christine, and how’s Christine? Haven’t seen you in Madame Jo-Jo’s lately.”
“That’s because no one’s invited me,” pouted Christine.
The man half bowed to Alex. “Do you mind if I ask Christine to dance? We’re old friends.”
“Go ahead,” said Alex grudgingly. Actually he did mind, but since the bloke seemed to be gay he supposed no harm would come of it.
As the pair waltzed off around the tiny floor, if waltzing was what they were doing, he sipped cautiously from his plastic tumbler and took further stock of his surroundings.
On the other side of the dance floor, a youngish woman with long jet-black hair and, for this place, dressed rather quietly in a short corduroy skirt and white polo-necked jumper, was discreetly edging her way round towards the exit. Not so much edging, it seemed to Alex, as sidling. She stopped to clutch an errant ear-ring that was coming loose from its moorings, whereupon her eyes met, and locked with, Alex’s.
Oh, Christ. They were pleading. As eloquently as if they could speak aloud, the heavily mascara-daubed eyes were saying: “Please, Alex. Not a fookin word about this in South Higginshaw. Nobody up there knows and it’d kill me mam. And if word gets out at Butterfield’s Rhubarb Farms I’m done for. Please, kidder, I’m begging you.”
Having transmitted this visual SOS, Dave slunk out with long, ungainly strides unbecoming in his tight skirt and high heels. Stroll on. This really was one for the lads. It would be all right — nonner them knew Dave, so he wouldn’t be landing the poor bastard in the proverbial. And of course he would keep his gob shut over in South Higginshaw. After all, there were tales about Alex down in So-oh that Dave could spread, if he did but only know it.
No wonder he’d wanted Alex to keep out of Soho, though. Bang went that lift home. Dave would be too embarrassed to pick him up, for sure, and even if he did, Alex would be too embarrassed to sit next to him in the cab for two hundred miles. Buggeration. It was the coach, then, in the unlikely event of his having any money left. Or find his way to Nine Elms, New Covent Garden or whatever it was called, and cadge a lift from someone. There was bound to be a driver going north. Yeh yeh — fookin Dave. Oh, shite.
Alex let his gaze wander slowly around the room. The penny was dropping at last. He’d never been in a drag club before. Yeh yeh yeh yeh, they had one in Leeds, down by the canal, but he’d never been in it, and to the best of his knowledge he’d never met a cross-dresser. Till now. It was the square jawlines that were the giveaway, the only giveaway, in fact, because the way they were dolled up — they must have taken hours getting ready — you could never have told they were all blokes, even, now he looked at her, the dishy little waitress. Blokes, every wunner them. All but the two or three men in bomber jackets. Well, the men were blokes too, obviously, but they weren’t trying to pass themselves off as women.
And, in Christine’s case at least, succeeding, for as the bloke who really was a bloke escorted her from the dance floor to rejoin him, it was difficult to take it in that Christine was a bloke too. Square jawline. Otherwise she was a dead ringer for a lass. How stupid of him. This one was definitely not for the lads.
“I hadn’t realised this was a drag club,” said Alex with grotesque over-casualness as Christine sat down.
“It’s been known for some people to spend the whole evening here without realising,” said Christine carelessly. “Especially if Petra isn’t in.”
“Who’s Petra?”
Christine nodded towards the squint-eyed waiter in his white frilly blouse and chaste grey skirt, who by now had resumed his seat and was presumably gossiping to his former dancing partner, although apparently in conversation with an empty chair.
“Of course,” added Christine, “they find out sooner or later if they get to take one of the girls home.”
“Why, what happens then?” Alex felt emboldened to ask. He was disturbed to discover from the faint stirring in his loins that this line of enquiry rather thrilled him.
“I don’t know, you’d have to ask them,” said Christine archly.
Not that he would want any of this getting back to Leeds but it was strange how comfortable he still felt with Christine.
“So what’s your real name, Christine?” he asked easily and this time without forcing it.
“My real name’s Christine.”
“But you have another name, don’t you? I mean what do your folks call you?”
“My folks? They don’t know me.”
“All right, then, people at work, what name do you answer to when you’re wearing a suit? Christopher?” he hazarded, correctly.
Or not correctly. “Yes, but that’s not me, can’t you see that?”
Yeh yeh, he could see that, and he felt a sudden pang of — what was it? Sympathy? Pity? No, it wasn’t, it was lust plain and simple.
Well, starting with Jenny Wise, and then moving on to the bizarre world of Brendan Barton, and now all this, no one could say he wasn’t going right through the fookin card. Might as well, though. Blame Selby. And after that, forget it. Put it all down to a bad dream. Or a good one. Call it his kinky half-hour.
“I can see that, yes, Christine,” he said heavily, “but what I’m a bit puzzled about is — well, come to the point, just what is it that you get out of this dressing-up malarkey?”
“I think what you mean, my love, is what you are likely to get out of it?”
Perceptive little thing, wasn’t she? He? It? All right, yes. He’d no idea what was in store once they got back to Christine’s place, which was where they would presumably end up. Who did what and to whom? The mind boggled. But whatever it was, he was up for it. You only lived once.
Yeh yeh yeh, and then you died of blurry Aids. Get out of it while you can, Alex lad.
No need. Taking his hand and patting it soothingly as she spoke, Christine said: “I wish.”
“Come again?”
“Wishing’s what it’s all about, pet.”
“You mean you wish you were a woman?”
“I am a woman. But sometimes, owing to the quirks of nature, in men’s clothes.”
She’d lost Alex. What was she saying — that she’d had the operation? “I don’t understand.”
“We’re world-famous for not being understood, David.” He’d told her that was his name, in the belief that hers was Christine. Had he known there was another Dave on the premises when he came down here, he would have selected another.
“Let me tell you what you’re trying to ask, and then I’ll see if I can give you the answer.” He still found Christine’s — Christopher’s? — husky voice attractive, even though he now knew she was a bloke. If she still was a bloke, that was to say. Alex’s knowledge of the anatomical ins and outs of sex-change were vague to non-existent. “What you want to know is how I get my kicks, so’s you’ll know how you’re going to get your kicks if and when the time comes.”
“Something like that, yeh yeh,” said Alex in a shamed voice.