Untouchable Things (16 page)

Michael had excused himself and was standing near the French windows, rubbing his glasses on a handkerchief. He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes for a second.

“Yeah, talked to him a bit. Tall, dark, sexy little glasses too. Just up your street, I would have thought.”

Anna narrowed her eyes. “Hmm, I’m not sure I’m up his, if you see what I mean. Hard to make him out. Does something terribly worthy for a living. Made me feel quite superficial.”

“Surely not.” They shared a complicit laugh. José followed Michael’s gaze to a swirly grey-black sky. “Hey, you don’t fancy heading into town, do you?”

* * * * *

He leaves as the headache starts. Looking for his coat, he opens a door at the far end of the hall and walks in. A four-poster bed, beautifully made up, is lofting up from the middle of an immaculate room. A hotel room, you might say, but for the huge ceiling mirror glimmering above. Michael flinches like he’s been bitten, closes the door on his confusion and leaves less politely than he might.

Outside it is little better. Long, leafy streets speckled with BMW soft-tops stretch in every direction. An unnatural silence hangs over them, not the restful quiet of the countryside but the suffocation of city life with the damper pedal on. The canopy of trees overhead absorbs the sound of his footsteps, making him invisible, a ghost, nothing. He inhales hard, searching for oxygen in the humid air. Why does he feel so much more threatened here than amongst the muggers and joyriders of Finsbury Park? What is he afraid of – someone stepping out of a doorway and offering him a sherry?

He knows that what he is afraid of lies inside him, skulking like a nervous animal, and that something has made it skittish tonight.

He doesn’t want to give it wriggle room. He doesn’t want to taste its fetid breath in his mouth. He doesn’t want to watch the show. But tonight he may have no choice.

Scene 20

Your friend Anna Carmel tells me you didn’t realise that Seth Gardner was bisexual at first. Did it come as a shock, Mr Sanchez?

If the sudden rush of bile into his mouth means shock, then yes. If his legs no longer wanting to support him, the ground no longer wanting to support them, holds significance, then yes. If a casual wink from a face he thought he knew, a face tongue deep in a drunk woman, can bring tears to his eyes, then what do you think? It was a fucking gay bar and he still found a woman to snog.

Later, a text.
So now you know. Hope it doesn’t change anything.

It changed everything and nothing. It changed his understanding of Seth but didn’t change his feelings for him.

Next time they met he probed a bit; he’d known gay men who snogged women to throw a smokescreen over their sexuality. Seth evaded his questions for a while and then said quietly, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” José blushed. He knew Seth had never judged him for the way they met. Two piercing eyes were fixed on him.

“I like to fuck who I like to fuck. I don’t set limits on it the way you and everyone else does. Cocks and cunts, it’s all the same to me, only it’s not, of course, it’s infinite variety and I never get bored. I love a man’s tight butt and a woman’s fleshy arse. Rippling pecs one night, quivering tits the next. Is that so hard to understand? Do I need people like you telling me what I really want, who I really am?”

The laser beam of his gaze made José look down, ashamed. “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business anyway.”

Seth relaxed, reached for a cigarette. “Good. Glad we sorted that out. Bit of an old wound you scratched. Let’s go dancing.”

Were you angry with him?

Yes, at first. But how can you be angry with someone for what they are? What they are they can’t help. What they do, that’s another matter.

Scene 21

The boy with the bogbrush hair sits alone at the piano. Piles of sheet music, three stacked chairs, a metronome and a battered box of descant recorders supervise him. A clock he has never heard before ticks inside his head. The boy notices the cobwebs for the first time, adorning the eaves and crevices like insipid bunting. He inspects his shoes, their scuff marks, the place where the heel is starting to come away from the sole. He sees that the white keys are jaundiced, failing through age and lack of care. He can’t bring himself to play a note. He thinks of Mr Johnson and Mr Crane and their jokes, the tone of insinuation, the shame of hearing it all from behind stale, fraying curtains.

He lifts his head at the creak of the door and there he is, Mr Fleming, the light in his eyes that has become a fixture of their lessons, the spring in his step that the whole school has noticed.

“Michael! Not like you to be sitting here quietly. What about a run of E major to get us going? Definitely an E major day!” Mr Fleming chuckles and pulls up a chair to sit next to him.

“Okay, sir.” The scale collapses into a fumble of fingers halfway down. “Sorry.” Michael bows his head.

Mr Fleming laughs nervously. “Not such an E major day, eh? Never mind, let’s try it again more slowly.”

After a third tangle with the scale, Mr Fleming leans over the keyboard to demonstrate. Michael sees chipped fingernails and long, black hairs on the back of pallid fingers. He twists slightly, away from the warm, sour breath brushing his face. The teacher speaks and Michael has to turn towards him, confronting constellations of scattered red pores joined by lined skin, inches from his face. Spectacle lenses flash and take the place of eyes. Michael is breathing through his mouth and hears nothing but he can feel. He feels the hand on his back, a gentle stroke. It’s the same hand that moves round to squeeze his thigh. His upper thigh.

Michael starts and pushes back the stool, jumps to his feet. “I – I’m sorry, sir, I don’t feel very well.” He faces the wall with his hands in his pockets as if he’s being punished, trying not to cry. Stifling intimacy throbs in his ears. Then a voice, different from normal, more a husky whisper.

“It’s all right, Michael, we’ll finish the lesson if you’re not feeling well. I’ll see you at choir practice on Thursday.”

A flash of the teacher’s haggard face leaving the room.

He has never known what to think, how to process what happened. Of all the badness surrounding it, the worst is that along with shock at the teacher’s touch, he had felt arousal. The part of him that had responded was the part of him he’d recently started touching, at night, when his brother was asleep. His dick, no longer just something to pee with, something that could shoot out another type of deposit, slimy and hot and shameful. Did Mr Fleming know? Was it some sort of test? A warning?

Of course he knew now that it wasn’t, but he still couldn’t be sure if Mr Fleming had been comforting him… or something more. Now he’s a teacher himself he sees the pure vulnerability of the kids, even the mouthy ones. How easy it would be to take advantage of that.

Things had changed between him and his teacher after that day. The teacher who had given him the gift of music, who had believed in him, nurtured him, helped him to rise like scum from the slurry of his youth to be skimmed off into university and a different life. It was not so much a bubble that burst as a balloon that started losing air, leaking trust and easiness until all that was left was a sad, shrivelled scrap. After O-Levels he defied the huffing and puffing of his parents and transferred to a nearby sixth-form college to do A-Levels. He came back in to collect his results, an A in music, of course. Mr Fleming came over to congratulate him. An awkward handshake, churn of feelings. He wanted to say sorry and he wanted to flee from the sadness he glimpsed behind the glasses. That was the last time he saw him.

It was his mother who’d written to tell him, during his second year at Nottingham. He was amazed to see her handwriting on a small brown envelope in his pigeon hole. The first time he’d ever had a letter from her. Inside was the
Yorkshire Post
cutting,
Local teacher found dead in home.
She’d written:

I know you liked him Michael and I thought you’d want to know. Apparently, he was dead for three weeks before anyone found him poor man. People are saying he was lonely and there’s talk of some kids picking on him though it was in the holidays so I don’t know. Me and your father are well and Mrs Butler across the road, well her daughter Shirley has just had a baby girl. She was in your class I think. I hope you are well. Love Mum.

At the time he’d ripped the letter into shreds and gone running, sopping with sweat and rain, until long after dark. In bed, next to the discarded fragments, the familiar mulch of anger, guilt and shame sucked him down, but this time he allowed himself to cry.

Scene 22

Were you worried about Seth Gardner after the dinner party, Miss Laurence?

Worried, disturbed, a strange feeling of impending doom. Like her mind had been taken over by a pack of demons, chuckling and chanting from
The Waste Land
to keep her awake. Even when she touched the edge of sleep they stabbed at her with little pitchforks, invading her dreams so that she woke gasping, over and over again. She saw Seth, his hooded eyes, heard his voice with its empty resonance and the tremor of something that frightened her. She’d rebuffed Jason’s advances pretty savagely and in the morning they fought. About Seth. She used his jealousy to beat him, knowing he had every right to it. They made up in the end, but she was glad when he left her earlier than usual on Sunday. She had a phone call to make.

“Hello?” The voice was abrupt, irritable even. She knew immediately she’d made a mistake.

“Oh, hi Seth, it’s Rebecca.”

“Rebecca, hi.” His voice stayed level, registering neither surprise nor pleasure.

“I was just ringing to thank you for a great night on Friday.”

“Not at all. I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

“Felt a bit rough yesterday, though.” Now she sounded like a teenager.

“Then you didn’t drink enough to spend the day in a comatose stupor like me. Much the best solution. Before you know it, it’s Sunday.”

She laughed, relieved at his arch tone. “I’ll remember that. So, what are you up to today?”

“Oh, nothing much, hanging out really, as they say over the pond. What about you?”

“Same. Jason’s just gone so I’ve got a bit of time to myself.”

“Ah.” There was a pause. “And how are things there?” Rebecca had the feeling that he didn’t really want to ask but felt he should.

“Oh, you know – a bit up and down. We had a nice brunch today, though.” She rushed on, not wanting him to think she’d phoned for a whinge. “I would have phoned yesterday but didn’t have the chance. I just wanted to check you were okay – you know, after Friday.” She picked at something sticky embedded in the carpet and held her breath.

“Sorry?”

So he was going to make this difficult. “It’s just, you seemed a bit – quiet – at one point, and I just wondered if you were all right.”

“Ah. To be honest my memory of the evening is a little hazy. I’d probably been deprived of the power of speech by too much whisky. That does happen to me sometimes.”

“Oh, well that would explain it.” She made her tone bright. It sounded like there was a male voice in the background.

“Look, I’ll let you get on with your Sunday – I just wanted to say thanks, really.”

“Okay, well hope to see you soon. I’ll let you know about the next group.”

“Great, see you then.”

His end clicked before hers did. She sat with her head between her knees for a minute before thumping the carpet until the side of her hand was red. The dull thuds faded into emptiness as hours till bedtime gaped ahead of her. Jason might be home already. She picked up the phone again and dialled his number.

Scene 23

So Mr Gardner denied that anything had been wrong when he had you all over to dinner.

Yes. But he did talk to me in the end.

Rebecca’s phone pinged in her pocket as she leant over the photocopier. A text from Anna.
drinks thurs 7pm bar retro piccadilly. Ax
Getting a text from anyone other than Jason was still a novelty. She typed
cool see you there. Rx
then changed it to
great
, then back to
cool
and sent it. At least there was something to look forward to this week. Would Seth be there? She wasn’t sure if she wanted him to see him or not. Moments from their excruciating phone call plagued her, popping up like leering little imps to ruin her tea break or spoil the taste of her Marks and Spencer’s ready meal.

In her lunch hour she rang Leah, who knew where all the trendiest bars were.

“Bar Retro – yeah, it’s just off Piccadilly – what’s that little street called?” They caught up on what they’d been doing, agreed they must get the cast together again for drinks.

“Hey, have you seen that school friend again? The yummy one.”

Rebecca cleared her throat. “Oh – no, not recently.”

“Well, do put a word in for me. He’s not going along to Bar Retro, is he? I might find myself just passing.”

Rebecca mouthed an expletive. “Sorry, love, it’s a different crowd.”

She arrived at 7.30 and was glad she’d waited. Anna and José had just arrived. Apparently there’d been some sort of drama with a client. She let them whitter on about it, smiling and saying ‘shit’ and ‘thank God’ at appropriate moments. Then they wanted to hear about the filming and when she’d be on telly. Anna was warming to her more and more, and she already felt like she’d known José for years. The three of them sank a bottle of wine in fifteen minutes, by which time Michael had arrived. Rebecca asked casually if anyone else was coming.

“Seth might join us later if he’s not got lucky. Charles and Catherine are at some recital at the Wigmore Hall.”

Rebecca noticed Michael’s face tighten. Did he have something for Catherine? Out of the whole group she’d talked to him and Catherine least. As he was sitting next to her she decided to rectify that.