One night at the beginning of his break Danny went up to the fifth floor to have a wank in the Gents; it seemed too obvious to use the staff toilet, and the choice of floor was subliminally tipped by the attractive young banker who often worked late up there and might be glimpsed or smiled at or even run into in the mirrored seclusion of the Gents. After five days of soft-soled patrols Danny was alert as an Indian guide to the faintest tremor of sex. A superficial search of desk-drawers had confirmed his suspicions about two or three of the brokers and re-insurers. He grinned at their shared secret, and then at the image of himself in the windows, trapped above the dark City like a lonely volunteer for an experiment in deprivation: he noted he was grinding his teeth from sexual frustration; already he was masturbating up to three times a shift.
He sprang his dick admiringly from his uniform, and was just getting going when he heard the door of the gents open and swing shut and then a voice call out a tentative hello. He said nothing, and after a moment the newcomer went into a further cubicle and bolted the door. Danny couldn’t check on him, as the partitions came prudishly down to the floor – there was no opening for the quick bold contacts you could have in American rest-rooms. Still, he heard the knock of the seat-lid being closed, and just made out the rustle of paper and the hurried chopping noise of a plastic card on the china cistern; then a pause and a couple of sniffs; and then the chopping and sniffing repeated. Danny smiled – from amusement, and an unclear sense of power, as a kind of proxy-policeman, zipping himself stealthily back into his navy serge; and from reckless fellow-feeling, the pounce of hunger for a line or two – no, a whole night – of cocaine.
There was the sound of a flush, for authenticity, followed at once by Danny’s – he pictured the suspect’s alarm, and saw it too, in the man’s guilty search of the mirror as he stood vigorously washing his hands. Danny came up behind him and his mood was an oddly sexual mixture of strength and need, though it wasn’t the pretty banker standing there, it was an unlikely user, with glasses and a wedding-ring glutting through the slather of suds he was unconsciously working up – Danny saw the strains of the job and the marriage and the funny confidence of the coke being tested against them. He turned a tap on too, and smiled at the man in the mirror – he thought there was a certain friendly menace in his own bearing, with the blue epaulettes on his white shirt, but the tie left off, two buttons open. He made up a joke that had a nasty blandness of euphemism to it: “Who’d have expected snow on a night like this?”
The man covered his uncertainty with a deprecating frown – he clearly wasn’t much of a fighter, hiding out in the office after midnight on the pretext of a crucial phone-call or a report to write; he hoped to slip out of the door without saying a word. He was at the paper towel dispenser when Danny added innocently, “Though I love snow myself. I sometimes feel I can’t get enough of it.” At which the man said,
“Ah. I see. Well…” – and they started their improbable transaction. Danny imagined the man would give him some, but saw in a second how that friendly idea was also a kind of blackmail. He had the narrow envelope of his first week’s pay in his back pocket, and he was suddenly ready to spend sixty or seventy quid from it; he thought with slovenly affection of Alex’s longing to pay for him, his readiness to make up any shortfall. He put his money on the tiled surround. The little banker had taken out his wallet and fiddled a tiny oblong packet from an inner crease. Danny unfolded it and dipped in a finger to taste it, and rub a few grains on his gums. He looked into the mirror, as if it might enhance his connoisseurship, and saw his own white-shirted figure shockingly replicated, as though by another mirror in the shadows behind him – replicated and distorted. Martin was even more noiseless than he was.
Danny tidied everything away, with a rare deep blush, and a sense that they’d all agreed this was a bad idea. He put his money back in his pocket and did up one of his shirt-buttons. Martin went to the door and held it open. He said, “You’ve got five minutes to be changed and out of the building.” The muscles of his raised arm did their own impressive police work. Danny was silent and didn’t want to plead or make terms in front of the other man. “And you, sir, I would advise to be very careful.” Then Martin was gone.
“I was being careful,” said the man to the closing door, as annoyance quickly replaced fright.
Danny gave him a perhaps unallowed half-smile. “It was my fault,” he said. He did feel very foolish, and looked back on- his thuggish little “snow” jokes with a cringing reluctance to think he had made them. “Well, I’d better get going.”
The little banker in his suit, with his huge expendable income, and his worries quickly dissolving, said, “Look, I’m sorry about this.” Danny shrugged, half annoyed by his genial tone. The guy must be feeling really good, as the two huge lines of coke kicked in.
“My fault,” he said again; but as he turned away the man touched his arm and said,
“Why don’t you have this, if you’d like it. It might help, tonight at least. Really, I’m trying to stop it – this must be some sort of sign. Besides, I’ve got loads more,” he added incoherently. He laughed and offered Danny the doll’s-house letter again. “It’s tip-top stuff.”
So, with a halting eagerness, as though such an offer could only be a trick, he palmed the thing.
“All the best,” said the man, quite sentimentally, when they were in the corridor. He swung away towards his office, a hand across his mouth for the moment to hide the irrepressible smile.
It was 1.30 when Danny got out into the deserted street. He walked for a few yards and then turned and gave a jeer of defeat at the dark glass building with its random high-up squares of light. It was surprisingly chilly. In Leadenhall Street a lit taxi came sailing magically towards him, and he got into it, and saw he had to make a plan. It was too late, or too early, to go to Alex, and anyway he wasn’t in the mood for explanations. If he went home he would fidget morosely and feel sorry for himself. The decision hardly needed to be made, and he told the driver to go to Charing Cross Road. As they raced out through the plastic chicanes which constituted the “Ring of Steel” around the City he wished he could give the place some symbolic insult, like Becky Sharp throwing her Dictionary out of the carriage window. It had been an expulsion, but his mind would soon be working to turn it into a triumph, or at least into a providential moment of change. It was what Gordon had said to him, between, or even during, their bouts of excessively conversational sex: you had to embrace change. He saw Gordon bouncing up and down as though Danny were an exercise machine, and burbling on about God’s plan for the universe to show that he wasn’t out of breath. Poor Gordon! That was an affair that had never been likely to work, even if they had been lovers in Galilee in the first century AD. He chuckled noiselessly to himself at the thought of his real life, with its multiple choices and general freedom from censure, and saw that he felt better already. He would have a night of excess, and then the whole episode could be forgotten.
The Drop was packed when he arrived and he pushed his way through to the bar and ordered a large brandy and coke. It was important to be served by Heinrich, whom he’d had a brief intense fling with, and who always gave him back in change the whole amount he had just handed over in payment. As the coins slipped from hand to hand it was clear that neither of them could remember why they weren’t still together. Danny swung about a bit with his drink on the edge of the dance-floor, and leaned in at the little gate of the DJ’s desk to give him a kiss between the wires of his headphones. He exchanged nods and smiles with a few regulars, the older men he was sometimes so drawn to, and let his eyes run over what he called the usual strangers, young tourists who jammed these low brick cellars all summer long, and gave off such a heady mood of temporary trashiness. Then he went into the Gents and chopped some coke up crudely with a phone-card and snorted the biggest line he’d ever had, since it was free and he felt he’d earned it. He waited there for a moment or two, wondering impatiently how Martin had got on to him, what he hadn’t noticed. He thought he might have followed him for some sexual thing; maybe he should have offered himself to Martin. He pictured the scene, and gripped himself between the legs as the coke opened up his mind and sent its amusing surge of energy through his limbs. It was tip-top stuff. A bit speedy, maybe. He was going up more sharply than he’d expected -he was olympian, but alight. He wondered if he’d ever been randier. He burst out into the club with something between a laugh and a snarl.