The Enemy Within, page 3
I took his hand and shook it, over-conscious of how it felt in mine. ‘Tommy.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s not what you told them out there.’
‘Oh!’ So he’d been eavesdropping on me, too: that was interesting. ‘No, I’m Alex officially, but everyone calls me Tommy.’
He let go of my hand and shifted up to make room for me on the mattress-covered slab that was the only place to sit in the cell. ‘Why so?’
‘Oh, it’s just a nickname really.’ I settled down beside him, trying not to smirk at the thought that we had only met an hour or so ago, and we were already getting into bed together. ‘I started using it years ago, and it’s kind of stuck.’ I wasn’t about to tell him the full circumstances, but sharing a little couldn’t hurt. ‘I used to go by Tommy Wildeblood.’ I still did, sometimes.
He turned his head to face me, his brow crinkling in thought. ‘Why so?’
Our current surroundings felt like a sign, so I took a deep breath and plunged in. ‘Peter Wildeblood was a gay man who was arrested in the 1950s. He went to prison, and then he wrote a book about it. It was pretty important to me for a while.’
This was an understatement. I’d carried Wildeblood’s book Against The Law around with me for years when I was selling myself on the Dilly, keeping it close to my heart and consulting it for advice like my own personal I-Ching – with surprisingly effective results on occasion. My copy, liberated from my local library when I was just a kid, had long since got too tattered to accompany me any more, but it still had pride of place on my bookshelves back at my bedsit. ‘And it’s for Oscar Wilde a bit, too,’ I added, just to make sure he’d definitely got the message. It couldn’t hurt that Wilde was Irish – a fact I’d only become aware of embarrassingly late in my English degree.
‘Interesting.’ His impression was inscrutable. It wasn’t as if I’d been expecting him to shriek ‘me too!’ and throw his arms around me, but a bit of an indication either way would have been welcome. He hadn’t jumped off the mattress in disgust, at least.
‘So, I’ve not seen you around the Poly before?’ I ventured.
‘No, I’m over at Holloway Road,’ he confirmed. ‘And only part-time.’
‘Oh, right. What do you do in real life then?’
‘I work for the GLC. Grants department. They’re putting me through an accountancy course.’
Not exactly the sexiest option, but not enough to put me off him. And he got extra points for working for Ken Livingstone’s council. Ken was a bit of a hero as far as I was concerned: one of the only politicians who was willing to stand up for gay rights, and put his money – or at least the GLC’s money – where his mouth was, and he took a hell of a lot of stick for it. Just this week I’d been reading in Capital Gay about a big grant to Gay Switchboard, where some friends of mine volunteered. For all I knew, Liam had been the one doing the paperwork. I hoped so. It had already been written up in the other papers as yet another example of Ken’s support for the ‘Loony Left’: if that was the case, I was as proud to be a loony as I was to be a gay.
‘Cool place to work,’ I enthused.
He pulled a face. ‘Ach, it pays the bills.’
‘Literally,’ we both found ourselves saying together, and grinning at the weak joke.
‘So do you think you’ll manage to keep your job?’ I asked. Livingstone had been doing such a good job of opposing the government – a far better one than the wet blanket that was the national Labour party – that Mrs Thatcher had announced her intention to wipe out the GLC completely: she’d already followed Hitler’s example by cancelling next year’s elections, and was pushing through plans to get rid of the whole thing in a couple of years’ time. Maybe because they were scared she was going to go on to do the same thing to them, a few Tory MPs had found their spines and rebelled against the legislation: it was currently looking as if she might not be able to get it through after all.
‘Who knows?’ Liam let out a frustrated sigh. ‘We’re trying to get grants through as quickly as we can, just in case we turn up one morning and find the locks have been changed.’
‘D’you see much of him? Ken?’
‘Not so much. He comes to the Christmas party. But he’s off round the country a lot these days, campaigning against the abolition. It’s his sidekick, John McDonnell, who does a lot of the day-to-day stuff. He’s my boss – well, my boss’s boss. He’s a sound guy too; knows the score.’
I was impressed. Liam couldn’t be more than twenty-five or twenty-six, but he talked like a proper grown-up. Whereas I was pushing twenty-nine – practically a pensioner in gay years – and still a student. I’d finished my degree the year before (and got a first, thank you very much) – already a so-called ‘mature’ student with six years on most of my contemporaries. But I had taken one look at an unemployment figure north of three million and decided academia was probably the place to stick around for as long as possible. My course tutor had been only too delighted at the prospect of having me back. He pointed me in the direction of a couple of bursary funds that might be happy to take over Berkshire County Council’s job of paying me to do my favourite thing in the world and read books all day. And before I knew it I had another entire year of study stretching before me. I figured even Sir Keith Joseph couldn’t manage to abolish higher education in that time.
‘What about you?’ asked Liam. ‘What are you studying?’
‘Oh, English literature.’ Surrounded by people studying things like polymer science and social work, I always felt a bit apologetic when I talk about my own course. ‘Well, they call it English, but it covers a lot of Commonwealth authors too. And Irish ones,’ I added as an afterthought, before suddenly panicking that he was going to ask me which ones. I’d made it about a hundred pages into Ulysses before giving up on the grounds that nothing had actually happened yet. And I still refuse to believe anyone has ever actually read Finnegan’s Wake.
Instead, he decided to ask me something just as awkward. ‘So who are you studying at the moment?’
‘Shakespeare,’ I said lamely, adding ‘the problem plays,’ in the hope that made it better.
His forehead furrowed. ‘And which ones are those when they’re at home?’
‘All’s Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida.’
‘Troilus and who?’
‘Cressida. It’s about the Trojan War.’
He smirked. ‘No. You sure you’re not making these up? I’ve not heard of any of them.’
‘I wish I was!’ I’d chosen the topic for my postgrad diploma the previous term, and been slightly regretting it ever since.
‘Hamlet,’ Liam continued, his smile widening. ‘Now that’s a Shakespeare play, I’m sure of it. Macbeth. Julius Caesar. Shame they don’t let us have a pen and paper in here, you could be writing these down.’
I gave him a mock exasperated look. ‘Ha ha. Very funny. If you’re running short, there’s about fifteen Henry-the-something-or-others. Do I get to make jokes about your course too?’
He pushed himself back against the cell wall. ‘Ach, it’s accountancy; there’s nothing funny to say about it, believe me. How’s your back now? That was a powerful knock you took.’
I raised my hand up to my left shoulder. ‘Bit sore. Having my arms cuffed behind me didn’t help much.’ I tried to rotate my upper arm again, and winced as a sharp pain went through me.
‘You all right?’ Liam was looking at me, concerned.
‘Yeah. Yeah. I’ve had worse.’ I’d once had a policeman grind my face into the table in an interview room, and he was being quite friendly at the time, for him. ‘What about you? It looked like you got a bit of the same treatment.’
‘It’s no bother. Back home I’d have been risking a plastic bullet in the head.’
I laughed slightly too loudly at this, partly out of shock and partly to demonstrate how unshocked I was by it, and then winced again as another spasm went through my shoulder.
‘Here; turn around.’ Liam sketched a spiral in the air, indicating I should turn my back to him. ‘Go on, I’m not going to hurt you!’
I shifted around on the bed to face the bare breeze blocks, the thin mattress twisting beneath me, its rubber letting out a protesting squeak. I’d had to hand in my denim jacket at the desk, along with my haversack, everything in my pockets and the laces from my Dr Martens, and all I had on my top half was a thin cap-sleeve t-shirt. I felt suddenly self-conscious about my arms, and how much less muscular than his they were.
And then his hands spread across my shoulder blades and started to massage me, and I forgot about everything except for how good they felt.
‘How’s that?’ he asked me after a few electric seconds.
I made a noise that was somewhere between a gulp and a purr, and then, embarrassed, coughed a ‘really good, thanks.’ But even as I got the words out his fingertips stroked their way up all the way to my bare neck, and I wouldn’t have trusted myself to speak at all any more.
And in that moment I made a decision: that whether Liam Delaney was or wasn’t gay, at the very first opportunity that presented itself, I was not going to have sex with him.
FOUR
It was a new policy I was trying out. For too long I’d been jumping into bed, and quite often not even waiting for a bed to be available, with any and every man I fancied. Which had made for a great deal of fun, and I hardly regretted a second of it, but the harsh fact was, it wasn’t getting me anywhere: like I say, I’m nearly twenty-nine.
I have tried. There was one guy I was sort of seeing for a while in the second year – Simon, star of the Drama Society, whose production of The Knight of the Burning Pestle I’d stage-managed during a brief and slightly half-hearted attempt to get myself more involved in student life. He was actually a really nice bloke, very good-looking and obviously up for something long-term, but fond of him as I was, I still found myself making excuses to get away and spend the night in my own bed. I told myself the same things I told him – that his hall of residence was too noisy and the single mattress not much more comfortable than the one I was sitting on right now – but I think he probably worked out before I did that my choosing to regularly schlep half-way across London in the early hours rather than, say, ever invite him to my place, meant we were never going to be love’s young dream.
Well, so what? I had figured, once he’d made his little scene at the closing-night party and pointedly got off with the girl playing Luce in front of me. It wasn’t like I was short of offers. A surprising number of students turned out to be heteroflexible after a few pints in the union bar, and those who weren’t could sometimes be persuaded it was their political duty to be. And when I got sick of them there was always The Bell and The Fallen Angel, where I spent much of my weekends and student grant, and they saw plenty of new faces arriving every year who didn’t know me from the old days.
But the feeling of not getting any younger had been hammered home since I had returned as a postgrad the previous September. All right, I’d always been a good few years senior to everyone else on my course, but I was lucky enough not to look it – the boyish looks that had kept my head above water on the Dilly seemed to be sticking around, at least for the moment. Having missed out on so much normal life first time around, I’d been quite happy to go with the flow and not act my age for a while. But when I came back to London that autumn expecting business as usual I found everything felt really different. While the three years of my BA, ranging over the whole of English literature from Chaucer right through to DH Lawrence, had tallied nicely with my unspoken life’s ambition of reading All The Books, it turned out that a PgDip was more about over-reading a very small number of books in particular, and that was a lot less fun.
An even bigger culture shock came at the first meeting of the Poly’s tiny Gay and Lesbian Society of the new year, when I’d sat listening to a nineteen-year-old first year enthusing at length about how Boy George staying at Number One for six weeks despite wearing a dress on Top of the Pops meant our struggle was all but over. I’d lost my rag and had a little rant about how the only way Boy George had made himself acceptable to the public was to pretend he’d rather have a cup of tea than have sex, and how, when the establishment was presented with gay men who looked like they actually enjoyed shagging – like Marc Almond – they still ran a mile. Just a few weeks later I thought my point was rather well demonstrated when the BBC banned Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Relax’, but by then the moment had long passed. At the time, the poor kid just looked so frightened I thought he was going to cry. Then I looked round at the other shocked faces and realised that, lesbians aside, he was the only person in the room I hadn’t already had sex with, and suddenly felt very old indeed.
So – time for a change. I was on the hunt for someone I could have an actual relationship with, or at least try out the concept for size. Not necessarily the full golden retriever and house in the suburbs – or whatever the homosexual equivalent might be: poodle and penthouse? – but something that lasted longer than a few weeks, a few days, or just a couple of messy minutes. And the last thing I wanted to do with someone with as much potential as Liam was spoil things by shagging him too early.
OK, if we want to get psychological about it, even I had realised it was probably to do with the years I’d spent working the Dilly. Having sex for money doesn’t exactly endear you to the men who are paying: you want to get the job done and be out of there as quick as possible, and if that’s what you get used to at an early age it kind of sticks. It was a very long time since I got out of the game – over eight years before – and my sex life had been strictly for my own pleasure ever since, give or take a couple of pity fucks I liked to class as charity work, but nevertheless I’d found it hard to kick the habit. Even with guys I really fancied, I found myself thinking about how best to extract myself from the situation before the tissues were even dry. If I’m totally honest – and this is getting way, way further into lie-on-the-couch-and-tell-me-about-your-childhood territory than I like – I think I lost not just interest in, but respect for, men as soon as they’d had sex with me. Plus there were other things to think about by then: like everyone else, I’d watched the documentary the previous year about the new disease that was spreading like wildfire through gay men in San Francisco and New York. The footage of men reduced to living skeletons, their skin horribly disfigured, parasites eating away at their guts, had stuck with me. I knew there had only been a handful of cases over here so far – Capital Gay kept a running total in a little column in the back pages – but it had been enough to do what I previously thought was impossible and make me moderate my sexual behaviour: I had started point-blank refusing to have sex with any Americans. If it had been any other country I’d have called myself a racist.
Obviously that wasn’t going to be a risk with Liam. But I wasn’t about to screw things up with him. He was way too good to waste on a quick bit of wham, bam, thank you man. If I was going to do him, I was going to do him properly.
And, please God, it had to happen. I closed my eyes, and all I could see were those big brown eyes, and those big full lips – so kissable. The hard prison bed beneath us and the close walls of the cell flew away under the touch of his fingertips all over my back and shoulders. I was practically melting. It was taking every ounce of self-control I had not to just lean back into him and whisper ‘take me right now’.
A line from the play I’m doing my extended essay on, Measure for Measure, kept running through my head as his hands roamed across me: ‘Ever till now/When men were fond, I smiled, and wondered how.’ Admittedly it comes from the mouth of Angelo, a self-loathing puritan who has just decided he wants to rape a nun, and he ends up shagging someone else by mistake and then begging to be put to death, but I refused to take that as a bad omen. Things tend to work out like that in Shakespeare slightly more often than they do than in real life.
Just as I thought I wouldn’t be able to hold myself back, or rather forward, for a second longer, a loud clunk echoed through the cell and we both pulled ourselves apart like we’d been scalded as the door began to swing open. One of the custody officers, the one that had signed Liam in, was standing in the doorway. ‘C’mon, you two. You’re free to go,’ he told us.
‘What, just like that?’ asked Liam, jumping up from the bed. I took a bit longer to stand up. There were certain adjustments I had to make first.
‘Yep,’ confirmed the sergeant. ‘You’re not being charged with anything.’
‘Too right we’re not!’ snapped Liam, suddenly ebullient. ‘Because the only ones doing any assaulting were youse lot. I’ve a good mind to –’
‘Leave it, Liam,’ I said quietly, giving a warning tug to the back of his t-shirt. If we were getting a free pass, there was no point in fucking things up now. Sure, it wasn’t fair for us to have been locked up at all, but then, whoever said life was?
Thankfully, his protests subsided into no more than a low growl as he stalked past the sergeant and out of the cell. I gave him an apologetic, but hardly heartfelt, smile as I followed. ‘Are you letting everyone else go, too?’
‘Oh no.’ The sergeant’s grey moustache and bunch of keys put me in mind of Mr McKay in Porridge. ‘We’ve got seven of your mates being charged with obstruction, and defying a court injunction. You two, fortunately for you, were on the wrong side of the road at the time, and we’ve got witnesses to say so, so you get to piss off.’ He set off up the corridor back towards the custody desk.
‘Us three. There were three of us,’ I pointed out, looking around for Dexter. But there was nothing but locked cell doors to be seen.
By the time I caught up with them, Liam was already at the desk collecting his belongings. The police had detached all the badges from his bomber jacket: he made an admirable point of standing there and making them watch him pin every single one back on again. Keep GLC working for London, then I Won’t Die for Maggie: Stop Cruise Missiles, and Coal Not Dole all went on, followed by a couple I hadn’t seen before: a Troops Out one with England and Scotland topped off with a policeman’s riot helmet and truncheon to threaten a cowering Ireland, and an unusually well-drawn one of three bearded men with the message running in a circular band around the edge: Support Irish Political Prisoners: H-Block & Armagh Committee.
