“Great,” said Alex. He’d seen the club’s name fly-posted over derelict shops and on switch-boxes at traffic-lights, and would recognise its logo of an exploding castle. If it had truly been his night he would never have thought of going there. But he kept to his deepening sense that he must put his trust in Danny, who had been sent by the magic of coincidence to take care of him. And he loved dancing, even if he hadn’t done it much in the past ten years; when he imagined bopping around it was to a song called “Let’s Hear It for the Boy,” which he knew had been the big hit of summer 84. Sometimes he walked past the queue of a club after a dinner in the West End, saw people keyed-up in front of the ropes, and felt his own inhibitions like forces in the air, dark columns of crushing barometric pressure.
While they waited for coffee Danny went to the loo. Alex watched his swinging shirt-tail as he sauntered between the tables where suited older men and their glossily coiffed women were expensively stuffing themselves. He found there was something sexy after all in having come to this starchy place, where he and Danny struck a note of casual deviance. Then he watched him coming back, the unemphasised beauty of his strong young body in the bright baggy clothes, the mixture in his face of natural eagerness and moody self-possession. Alex thought to himself, “This isn’t going to happen,” and at once offset the idea with a resolution that he would simply get what fun he could from it. The mechanism of disappointment in him was rapid and supple with use.
The coffee came, and Danny sat back, turning the little cup with outstretched fingers. “Have you ever done E?” he said, and gave him an amiably calculating look.
Alex said, “No,” firmly and quietly, perhaps primly. “No, I’m a narcotics virgin, really”; he might as well own up, and indeed he wasn’t ashamed of this, though his choice of words seemed to hint at the need for a deflowering.
“Nothing?” said Danny, with kindly incredulity. “Never?”
Alex pondered. “Well, you had to smoke dope at school. But it never did much for me – I stopped when I grew up.”
“Ouch,” whispered Danny. “You know what I mean.”
“Didn’t you and Justin do drugs?”
“Justin has a horror of drugs – if you don’t count alcohol, of course.” Alex paused, still unsure if he should talk about the foibles and phobias of someone he loved and who now stood in a nameless relation – uncle, stepmother – to Danny himself. “He had a bad trip on acid once, when he was a student. He looked in a mirror and his face was all made of animals. He never took anything after that.”
“Very Arcimboldo,” said Danny.
Alex was looking ahead, down an avenue of easy-going criminality, with busy shadows between the wide-spaced pools of light. He was pliant and emotional with drink, and said humbly, “You’d have to look after me.”
Apparently Dave, a friend of Dobbin’s, was the man they had to find. When they were out in the street, Danny recovered his air of bossiness and mystery, like a prefect in the school of pleasure. He conferred on the mobile for a minute, then led the way through a couple of alleys, with people pissing and snogging in them, and out into another busy street, bright with restaurants and cafes, and crowds of drunks threading among the stalled traffic. Alex looked up at the narrow strip of night sky, a pinkish grey, any stars smothered by the glare of the district. Then he found Danny had doubled back abruptly and darted in through the door of a shop; Alex followed him as the strings of the bead curtain swung into his face.
Dave sat among the shiny flesh-colours of shrink-wrapped pornography and rubber sex-aids like a big black deity in a garish little shrine. He had the jaw and the firm weight of a boxer, but his hair was dyed, like blond astrakhan, and his voice was jaded and high as he tried to hustle a punter into buying a video. “Yeah, you’ll like it. There’s a bit of leather in it. It’s got older guys. You don’t like that? Well, it’s got plenty of young guys too. It’s got everything really…” He winked at Danny as the man, with a briefcase under his arm and perhaps a train to catch, squinted hotly at the TV screen on which an extract was playing. “Can I help you?” he said to Alex, as if dealing with a notorious browser. Alex jumped and clung to Danny’s arm.
“We’re together!”
He felt compromised being here, he found pornography depressing, and the glimpse of the video, in which a man was rolling a condom on, was a flustering anticipation of what he hoped himself to be doing in a few hours’ time. He stepped back and wandered round, insofar as wandering was possible, coming face to face with the raring phallus at every turn, like a surreal sequence in a fifties thriller: there was no escape from his depravity. He picked up a magazine called Big Latin Dicks, a title more blunt than exotic; penes magni, he thought, and for some reason found himself imagining the men who printed it, perhaps as equably as if it were Homes and Gardens, and the men who put it together (“What does your dad do, by the way?” “He’s the deputy editor of Big Latin Dicks. I thought everyone knew that.”)
Now they were alone and Dave and Danny were talking coolly about doves, pyramids and bulldogs. Alex wasn’t innocent to this of course, and found it had an anxious-making glamour. Dave stood about in the shop, in his tight pin-stripe jeans. “I had Tony Betteridge MP in again tonight,” he said.
“What was he after?”
“Oh the usual. I sold him this piss video, that’s his thing, We Aim to Please it’s called, great title. He said, “I’ve had this video before.” I said, “I thought you were into recycling.” ”
Alex sort of got it, and actually that was one of Justin’s preoccupations that he never went along with. He wondered if Robin was more obliging. “I didn’t know he was gay,” he said.
“I ought to have photos of them outside, the MPs and that. What do you call it…‘by appointment.’”
“Testimonials,” said Danny.
“So what was it?” Dave asked, with a seller’s confident return to the subject of mutual interest. Danny took Alex aside and muttered,
“Have you got sixty quid?”
Alex paused. “I can get it.”
He slipped out of the shop and hurried up the street, already half-expecting to be jumped by the drug-squad, and possibly the vice boys too.
He paid off the taxi outside the club, and kept close to Danny as they strode past the hundreds of people queuing. At the crowd barrier Danny leant over and kissed the bomber-jacketed security guy on the lips, a few jeering fondnesses were exchanged, and that was all it took – the barrier was pushed back and they walked through, a ripple of nods and calls going over their heads from echelon to echelon of bouncers and greeters to signal their exemption and desirability. Inside the door a beautiful black woman as tall as Alex said “Hello darling” in a chocolatey baritone.
They were moving at once in the element of music, the earth-tremor bass and penetrating shimmer of high metallic noise. Alex checked his jacket, and as he stepped down with Danny on to the edge of the immense dance-floor, swept by brilliant unpredictable stabs of light, a shiver of recognition ran up him from his heels to his scalp, where it lingered and then gently dropped downwards again through his shoulders and spine. On the wall behind him was a sign saying “Dangerously Loud Music.” Alex was shocked and laughing at the sound. Crowds of men were moving in blurred inexhaustible unison with it. Others, in tiny shorts and lace-up boots, danced alone on platforms above the heads of the crowd, some strutting like strippers, others sprinting on the spot with a flickering semaphore of the arms. And all around the floor, and trailing away into other unguessed spaces, there was an endless jostling parade of half-naked men, faces glowing with happiness and lust. Alex howled “Do you want a drink?” into Danny’s ear.