The Facts of Life (41 page)

‘Whatever,’ he said, mouth tight with irritation. ‘Just how often do you take someone home, ask them nothing about themselves, tell them nothing about
your
self, screw them like a whore then push them back on the street without even letting them stay the night!’

‘Quite often.’

‘How often?’

‘Look, what is this?’ Jamie protested. ‘I don’t need –’

‘How often do you do it?’

‘Two, maybe three times a week.’ Jamie shrugged but felt the gesture for the hollow bravado it was. ‘Sometimes more.’ He would not be made to feel guilty. Hundreds of men behaved as he did. Thousands. It was one of the liberties the Pride march had been set up to defend. Sam watched him for a moment, no longer angry, it seemed, just appalled.

‘Isn’t that a waste of energy?’ he asked. ‘Can’t be doing you much good.’

‘What does good have to do with it? It’s sexy. It’s fun.’

Sam’s timing of the brief pause before his disbelieving ‘Really?’ was devastating.

‘I don’t need this,’ Jamie said, pushing aside his lager and standing.

‘You’re right.’ Sam stood too and once again Jamie found himself towered over. ‘We’ve talked enough.’

‘But –’

‘Come on.’

Out on the street, Sam put a hand on his elbow and steered him back towards the river, then moved his arm to place it heavily across Jamie’s shoulders. For a moment, Jamie flinched, furious, afraid and embarrassed. People were looking at them. Then he relaxed slightly because he realised the situation was as out of his control as if he were being abducted at knife point. This was a man who could snap people’s arms. He returned the insolence of passers-by, his stare lent boldness by Sam’s height and force. Sam stopped unexpectedly at the corner flower stall.

‘I know we’ve already had a drink, but it’s not a real date unless you buy me flowers or chocolates,’ he said, with no discernible break in his gravity.

Jamie laughed, beyond embarrassment now.

‘What colour?’

‘Blue,’ Sam said, seriously. ‘To match my eyes.’ He turned to the bemused stall-holder, who was looking up at him as at some apparition, hands clutching nervously at his leather money-apron. ‘He’ll buy me some of those,’ he told him, pointing to some electric blue delphiniums with black hearts. ‘Three bunches.’

‘
Four
bunches,’ Jamie laughed. ‘I’ll buy four. No need to wrap them. Here.’

He thrust a note into the man’s hands, took the dripping bunches and offered them to Sam, who accepted them with a ghost of a courteous gesture.

As Jamie let him into his block once more, he felt Sam’s outspread hand on the tail of his spine. Urging him on, making second thoughts unthinkable, the hand felt hot through the fabric of his denim shirt. They made love again, more slowly than before, with the blinds still open to flood the sheets with evening sunshine off the river. This time it was Jamie who found himself naked while Sam was still dressed. As they kissed, Sam brought a hand up to his face, entering his mouth with fingers as well as tongue. He chewed the pads of Jamie’s thumbs, raised Jamie’s legs over his chest, pressing into his thighs and licked heavily at his heels and the soles of his feet. When they stopped, for a moment and, deeply breathing, looked one another in the eyes, it was as though Sam were seeing him, truly seeing him now, and Jamie had to turn his face aside as from a hot light. Sam irresistibly rolled him on to his side, on to his belly and, working his way down his back, nuzzled at his arse with nose, tongue then, wetly thrusting, with fingers.

Jamie stiffened.

‘I told you,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t.’

But Sam thrust in deeper, adding a third finger to the first two and Jamie found himself stretching out across the mattress, flattening himself away from the other’s inescapable touch.

‘You didn’t,’ Sam murmured, his breath suddenly hot in Jamie’s ear. ‘Now you do. Where d’you keep your stuff?’

And he fucked Jamie, who had only been fucked once before in his life, and had never forgotten or forgiven the man who had done it.

Sam fucked him watchfully, without abandon, so that Jamie felt at once ravished and, strangely, guarded from danger. When Jamie came, he cried out so loudly that Sam laid thick fingers across his mouth.

Despite himself, Jamie subsided into a kind of faint afterwards, a powerless state of hearing, feeling, near-sleep. Only the abrupt sound of the front door closing restored power to his body, and he opened his eyes to find himself alone on the bed with the shocking blue of the scattered delphiniums their bodies had crushed.

Alison’s secretary swung on his chair, a finger on the telephone’s muting button.

‘It’s your brother,’ he said laconically.

‘I’ll take it in there,’ she told him, walking back to her office.

In the seconds between leaving one desk and reaching the other, anger boiled up within her.

The morning after the concert, her good will towards Jamie had been smothered in hang-over and she had dropped her friendly resolve to call him for an air-clearing lunch. Sam had been missing for days and she was more than ever sure, from her brother’s continued silence, that it was somehow Jamie’s fault. But Jamie’s voice on the telephone sounded a faint imitation of his usual ebullient self, and her irritation was swept rudely aside by a fearful contraction in her gut.

‘I’ve got to talk to you,’ he said.

She agreed to meet him outside her office after work. She spent the rest of the day distracted from paying a querulous author his proper attention by the dread she had rarely dared entertain till now, that Jamie was going to tell her he had taken an HIV test.

She rehearsed in her mind what she would say if the news were bad, planned how they would make the magical best of whatever time was left him. She even astonished herself by deciding that, if he let her, she would abandon the office altogether, demoting herself to copy-editor status so that she could be with him when he became too sick to work. Perhaps he would leave work anyway, before the need arose, driven by a desire only to spend his time and precious energies on what was meaningful. She disliked the thought of him working in the City. She had retained from her years with the Beards a vestigial mistrust of the workings of money as fundamentally and infectiously damaging. Shamelessly, out of control, she projected and fantasised in exactly the pointless and harmful way she dissuaded callers to the helpline from doing. At around six, when she pushed through a crowd spewing out of the building’s revolving doors, and found him hunched on the steps, suit rumpled, tie askew, the new shadows beneath his eyes and the sallowness to his normally olive skin did nothing to dispel her fears.

She hugged him tightly and, for once, he did not pull back but crumpled onto her. He looked dreadful. His breath smelled sour, as though he had drunk too much coffee or had forgotten to brush his teeth.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I need a drink. Where isn’t too vile around here?’

She led him to a wine bar, bought them a bottle she could ill afford and sat beside him at a dark corner table.

‘So,’ she said. ‘Hit me with it.’

He breathed out heavily, gouging at drops of candle wax with a neglected fingernail.

‘I haven’t seen Sam in days,’ he said. ‘He hasn’t rung or anything.’

This pole-axed her. Seeing that he was not ill after all, or not seriously, her fear for Jamie was displaced by the shock of how strong her feelings still were for Sam. The defences she had built against her desire for him were brittle, intellectual constructs, projections of will – not an emotional reality. She had been a fool, and now was hoist on the petard of her own feigned disinterest and assumed nobility. The chorus from one of Miriam’s favourite Joni Mitchell songs jingled through her head –
Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone
? She glanced back at Jamie, whose dishevelment was so gallingly fetching. Her anger at his selfishness returned with new vigour.

No more Good Child
, she thought, telling him, ‘You got me all worried just to tell me that?’

‘What?’ he blinked like one just roused from a doze. ‘Why were you worried?’

‘Never mind. Why should
I
know where he is?’

‘He lives with you, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Sometimes.’ She poured herself a generous top-up, resenting, now, that she had paid. She might as well enjoy her own bounty, she thought. ‘He lives by his agenda, I live by mine,’ she added, determined not to let his crestfallen act sway her from rigour. ‘So. What happened? You jumped him and he turned out not to be jumpable? Don’t tell me you’ve finally failed to seduce a straight?’

‘Alison he isn’t straight and he isn’t gay.’

‘He’s confused, then,’ she snapped.

‘He’s just himself. He just does what he feels like doing at the time.’

‘Since when were you an authority?’ she demanded. ‘I thought you’d hardly seen him.’

‘Why are you being so hard on me?’

‘Me? Hard?’

‘I’m sorry. I owe you an apology, don’t I?’

‘You owe me two,’ she said, curtly. ‘At least.’

‘I’m sorry about the concert.’

‘Don’t apologise to me, apologise to Grandpa. I had a great time. It was fun to have him to myself for once. We had a good evening. The new piece was great. I think. You know how it is with me and music. But I liked it. Then he bought me dinner. But he was hurt at you not coming. I’m sure he was. Ring him up. Better still, drive down and
visit
him for once.’

‘Yes, yes all right,’ he said hastily. ‘I will.’

‘He really cares for you, you know, and you’re always so off-hand with him.’

‘I’m not.’

‘You
are
, Jamie.’

‘Well he … He doesn’t like the way I’ve turned out.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I just do,’ he said.

‘How can you be sure if you’ve never discussed it with him?’

‘Spare me. You may have dragged me on a Pride march but I’m still English and I’m male. We don’t talk about these things …’ Jamie faltered. ‘About Sam …’ He faltered again. Alison glowered at him.

‘You
did
seduce him, didn’t you?’

Jamie nodded. He began a reflex-reaction sheepish grin, then thought better of it.

‘You little bastard!’ she cried out. ‘He probably thought he was just coming back to your place for a couple of beers.’

‘He knew exactly why he was coming back.’

‘Oh I’m sure.’

‘He did. You’ve got to believe me. It was his idea. He’s sort of innocent, but he knows exactly what he wants.’

She regarded her brother coolly over her wine glass. He was shaken. He was actually talking, and with interest, about someone other than himself.

‘And he wanted
you
?’ she asked.

‘Apparently.’

‘I’d guessed, actually,’ she lied dispassionately. ‘When he first saw you …’

‘He followed me. I’d had enough of the crowds and he just came after me. Promise you won’t laugh.’

‘I’m sure I won’t.’

Jamie poured himself some more wine, gulped it, poured some more.

‘That isn’t water,’ she told him.

‘What do I owe you?’

‘Don’t be silly.’ A Good Child, even in her rage, she suppressed the impulse to snatch the wallet he proffered so casually.

‘It didn’t work out too well,’ he went on. ‘I dunno. You know how I am.’

‘I do,’ she prompted.

‘So I let him go –’

‘Kicked him out.’

‘Okay, so I kicked him out on the Saturday night, assuming that was it, that he’d got the message that I didn’t want to take it any further. Then he turned up on my doorstep just as I was leaving for the concert on Monday.’

‘Oh my God!’ She felt spiteful laughter bubble up within her, all the more tart for his wounded expression.

‘You said you wouldn’t laugh,’ he protested.

‘You dropped him but he refused to be dropped then he came back for seconds so that he could
drop you
,’ she said in triumph.

‘That’s not quite it.’

‘That’s
exactly
it.’

‘It’s not funny, Alison! Honestly. I haven’t been able to think about anything else. I keep catching myself staring out of the window or waiting for the phone to ring.’

‘So it’s
you
who’s been calling my number and leaving no message.’

‘I thought he might be there.’

‘Well he isn’t. He hasn’t been there since he left the house with me for the march on Saturday. God only knows where he is. His hostel probably.’

‘Shit. Where’s that, then?’

‘Search me.’

‘I really want to see him.’

‘Evidently the feeling’s not mutual.’

‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’

‘It does have a certain pleasing irony,’ she confessed. ‘The biter bit.’

‘Bitch.’

‘Now now. You stole my beau, remember?’