Playing Out Read online

  I remember one night with Emma sitting on the floor grasping Clara’s vast hand and squashing it, almost singing as she told her, ‘Oh, but Clara, I care, I care, I care about you so much.’

  Clara’s long hair was pulled into two poodle bunches, dyed fuchsia, and they seemed to have winched and contorted her face into a spiteful grimace. That chemical green, furred coat she wore was slumped across her shoulders like a blanket on an accident victim. And Clara was staring at me almost accusingly; ‘But do you care? Do you?’

  Those small, beady eyes squinted at me and I looked back.

  At that time, what I relied upon each morning to rid me of my fags-and-booze-induced headaches was my bare feet hitting the cold kitchen lino. It usually did the trick, but some mornings they nagged on. The day that Emma recommenced early-morning opera practice in the cellar was one of these.

  She’d only started again because our morning routines had been forcibly altered at my insistence. Until then she had brought me coffee and the post in bed. Sitting up and being pleased, I was often mildly shocked by her rather sinister innocence in unfolding my bedclothes and climbing in beside me for five minutes. I put a stop to that in the end and the opera began in earnest. As I told her, she’d thank me for it one day.

  This morning, though, as I fussed over the coffee-maker and slopped water over the side as I filled it, she appeared out of the cellar, banging its door hard behind her, and confronted me with a determinedly autonomous breeziness.

  ‘I need to know about The Tempest for a seminar today,’ she said, clutching to her chest a scarlet Mozart score.

  Watching my toast char gently, I told her all about Caliban, about monstrosity, about cursing in taught languages.

  Two nights before I’d been in my room with someone and, in the middle of the night, we were overtaken by a giggling fit which, thinking about it afterwards, I realised Emma must have heard.

  That evening she had held one of her dinner parties and when my new friend and I came home we found them eating Smarties from dessert bowls and stirring themselves to dull conversation.

  Emma walked in on my friend and me kissing in the kitchen and looked startled by us, so we just went to bed early. I admit now that I was making myself look a fool with him anyway. My flesh creeps to think of how I clung that weekend. Literally, the pair of us standing on the bridge as we went home that night. When it seemed risky and fun to snog in full view of town, neither side of the canal. How, unlocking the door and unmindful of being heard by those on the other side, I had told him I could really fall for him in a big, bad way. At the time he urged me to keep that to myself and in retrospect it wasn’t just to keep it private.

  Later Emma said, ‘Didn’t you even think about how I would feel, seeing you kissing in my kitchen?’

  In the middle of that night, though, after three, after Emma had seen her last guests off, after they had filled the house with black smoke from making popcorn and we had watched it seep under my door, we listened to Emma clump her platformed way up to bed, slam her door, and then we started to laugh.

  We imagined Emma’s dinner-party repartee. How she was having the builders in. She was going to have her hymen knocked through. A darling little archway affair.

  How she liked to have nice things around her. Living with a faggot was so convenient. She could do with two faggots, really; paint them green and stand them to attention either side of her darling archway.

  So we laughed and in the morning, around nine, Emma kicked open the door and brought us coffee. The room was overly bright because my friend had tugged the curtains closed and they hadn’t been secure enough. They were in a dusty heap on the floor and all the street, it seemed, could see into my room.

  We were squinting as we woke and before we knew where we were, Emma had left the coffee on our respective sides of the bed and whirled out again.

  We had slept without covers and I had found myself cupping his bollocks in my hand. An unconscious gesture I recall now with embarrassment, not because she would have seen it, but because he might remember it.

  He went on a late train that Sunday night, never came back.

  After an eleventh-hour shag I sat in the freezing station with a dribble of sperm tickling at my ankle, inching into my sock.

  In less than three hours, I thought, he’d be back with his real lover, in another town, in the sunken bath he’d described to me, with candles nicked from the nearby cathedral lit all around him.

  And, before he went, he talked about that commitment to the man with the sunken bath. I’d said something about no one’s commitment to me, the bitterness easing out.

  On the train as it pulled away he was reading the book I’d lent him. It came back a fortnight later in a brown envelope, without a letter, and Emma commiserated.

  The week after he went she had another meal and invited me too, to cheer me up. I’d been looking depressed, apparently, and had shouted at her when she burst a bag of sugar on the kitchen floor.

  Emma had been so shocked at my shouting that she ran to throw up, went out to buy two bottles of Bulgarian red and spent the rest of the night telling me about her father, how he’d forced her to the brink of suicide on numerous occasions.

  When she was home for some religious thing that year, she wrote to me and said she was, at that moment, sitting on her packed suitcase, cutting off clumps of her hair.

  ‘I am mutilating herself,’ she wrote, in her distress.

  To this meal she invited Simeon, who was directing Cabaret. He was pale with dyed black hair so dull it made his acne seem lustrous and healthy. He wore perfect white gloves and talked incessantly about Liza Minnelli. The girl he lived with, who looked uncannily like Liza Minnelli, was also there, discussing isolation with Clara on the settee.

  In the kitchen, stirring her chicken broth, Emma hummed ‘Maybe This Time’.

  Simeon did a long monologue, later that night, about coming out and being fucked over by an older man who locked him in a room for a week. Really, he could only face the world these days because of the friendship of the girls he had met since.

  I took the last of the Bulgarian red and watched as Emma and Clara took one gloved hand each and squeezed it, wringing their affection into him.

  I went to bed.

  Usually that meant whirling around, flat on my back, for an hour or more, until sleep slammed onto me like a lid. I would miss sex because it often filled that worrisome hour and prevented me from raking up each terrifying aspect the future liked to present.

  That night I heard a rustle under the door. When I switched on my light, I saw that Emma had sent me a note.

  She was confessing how much she cared for me. Said that we really had to talk. That she knew I was a man and that she wouldn’t shy away from ‘the physical act’.

  Even though, I was thinking, as I tried to sleep, stunned, even though her virginity was displayed and dusted off before each surprised visitor to our house, like an especially posh coffee table they were invited to admire.

  When I slept I dreamed I was pregnant.

  At teatime the next day I spent three hours being sensitive.

  I said I thought we were like brother and sister.

  That although, yes, I had and did sleep with women… no, I wouldn’t be doing so with her.

  I said that friends meant much more to me, as a rule, than lovers. I’d had that said to me a year before, and despised the person who said it. How easily it came to me now!

  When I think of this scene—explaining patiently to Emma, watching her tilt her cheekbones as if receiving successive glancing blows—I see us sitting in an odd location on the living-room floor. I have a good memory for locations, so it must be true. We were sitting where a door used to be, between front room and kitchen, the flowered curtain between pulled back. Emma sat on the kitchen lino and hugged her father’s Hoover.

  She gave me Lawrence’s poems for my birthday with a nice message about friendship. And invited Clara round for a meal to
celebrate my twenty-third.

  I bided my time, thinking that, just in the nick, somebody else would arrive to drag me out for an alternative. Somebody else would leave a man with his own house and a sunken bath. Somebody else would be catching a train, knowing it was my birthday.

  But Clara came and I heard Emma whisper to her on the doorstep the reason for tonight’s meal.

  By midnight Clara was sobbing on the settee; Emma was clutching her hand. Next year Clara had nobody to live with, her friends had all made other arrangements and she was consequently feeling—quite justifiably, I thought—isolated.

  Emma glanced at me as if asking, Can’t she stay here?

  As it happens she did stay that night.

  It got so late and Clara had been so upset, we decided that it would be a good thing for her to stay.

  It got so late because they were discussing their parts. Clara had been offered Sally Bowles—I was surprised, too—and to ease Emma’s rancour, she had been given Ophelia in Clara’s Hamlet.

  ‘Aren’t we incestuous?’ Clara grinned, her make-up smudged to frightening effect.

  In Sainsbury’s that afternoon Emma had confided to me that she thought Clara had lesbian tendencies.

  ‘My God!’ I said, picking out mushrooms.

  ‘I don’t know how to handle it.’

  I tried not to laugh. I tossed the mushrooms into the trolley and dusted my hands down my jeans. ‘Handle what, exactly?’

  I once made the mistake of using the word ‘cunt’ in its literal sense in a conversation with Emma. In the kitchen where, at night, our wide window was like a mirror. Looking past me, she was pouting at herself and tilting those cheekbones and when I said ‘cunt’ she very nearly stopped sucking in her cheeks.

  When Clara stayed that night I agreed to take Emma’s room and lend them mine. Straitened on her self-assembled pine single bed, I heard them giggling. For a moment I thought they had actually decided to contribute to the lesbian continuum. I went for a pee and saw, through my opened door, that they were removing an Athena poster of a naked man from my wall. It had been there as a joke, really, that had played itself out.

  ‘We couldn’t sleep under that,’ Clara told me, balancing on my bed, rolling him up.

  The light came in brighter into Emma’s room and kept me awake all night. In the morning they had already gone, to begin sitting in on each other’s rehearsals.

  After I made my bed I found that my letters had been read and strewn across the floor, along with several items of my more androgynous clothing.

  There was fresh vomit in the bathroom and the coffee machine had been left ready to go, the morning’s post propped up beside it.

  Over breakfast I thought about what to cook that night and how to tell Emma we had to find new living arrangements. I have a good memory for situations, and most of those I have had and still remember are ones I am glad to have over and done with.

  The difficult thing about breaking up the happy home would be explaining it to our landlord, the dwarf, who thought he had us on lease for three years. Until, as he saw it, Emma became as big as Lulu. In his eyes stardom and long residency were linked. He took Lulu as his model and saw that sticking at a situation resulted in success. And Lulu had been a star for more years than either Emma or I had been alive.

  LAMINATING IDEAL MEN

  She’d never felt safe behind a desk and look! Here she was.

  She was running a gym, it was the job she’d always wanted, but the irony of it all, honestly! Behind a desk again, with the gym shipshape under her command, its rigging creaking in the salty breeze from the rowing machines and the step machines. Mid-morning saw her fiddling with a paperclip. The desk was empty apart from the phone and a little plant.

  Trish gave a covert glance across the reception area to check herself in the mirror behind the coffee things. Andrew liked to offer coffee to customers. They were meant to pay, really, and there was a sign up but, he said, let them think they’re getting something for nothing. They’ll remember and come back. What we want is a nice regular clientele in our pockets. Butter them up with coffee, with free goes on the sun beds, anything.

  She was checking her hair in the mirrored panels. It was a problem. Being in reception all day meant she did her own training at odd moments when they got slack. Sweating at intervals like that tended to make her hair go limp.

  ‘It looks fine.’ Helen was getting them two plastic cups of coffee. She bent to stir her sugar in, leaning over the wickerwork table. Some youth was poring over the bodybuilding magazines and Trish watched him stare at Helen’s body. She was all in Lycra again, a glossy indigo, and she looked just like one of those female body builders, one of the famous ones who still manage to be feminine, as they say. This physique of hers had crept up on Helen. She used to be plump, if anything, when she first started work here. Then—bang—one day she walks in in Lycra and she’s like this, all toned and fabulous. Behind her back Andrew had scowled. ‘That’s all on my time, that, I’ve paid for her bloody body.’

  ‘Your hair looks fine.’ Helen gave her the coffee. ‘Am I still making this too weak?’

  ‘I think you’ve got the hang of it.’

  ‘It’s different to instant.’ They sipped and Trish tested the potted plant on her desk for dust. Helen added, ‘It’s nice.’

  ‘I think I should talk to the cleaners.’

  Helen looked blank. ‘When do we have cleaners?’

  ‘First thing. Before you arrive.’

  ‘Do you know, I never thought about cleaners before. I suppose it stands to reason.’

  ‘Why do you think the place always smells of Mr Sheen?’

  ‘That’s it! That's the smell. I’ve been trying weeks to work that out.’

  ‘Mm. That’s what it is. Mr Sheen.’

  ‘Funny, isn’t it? Once you’ve found out what a smell is that’s really bugged you, then you smell it everywhere after that. I think smell is a really evocative sense, don’t you?’

  My God, it’s true, thought Trish. I smell furniture polish wherever I go.

  She had a small daughter, just about to go to school, reading aloud already, mind. Her knick-knacks, breakables and ornaments had been stowed away for a few years now. Used to her home environment being safely clutterless, unfussy, she compensated by polishing surfaces till she could see her own face, smoothing the rounded corners as if everything were chrome.

  I’m a furniture-polish fetishist, she thought miserably. And only a couple of days ago she’d been worried about not doing her share in the house. Dave, her bloke, spent more time at home and most chores fell to him. That’s all I do, really: run home from the gym at the end of the day and whizz a duster over everything in sight. That’s my contribution.

  And she thought about making love with Dave. Last night’s accusation that she somehow inspected him during the process still nagged at her. It was true that Dave had let himself go, though. He had slackened. But do I really seem as if I’m checking him over, even then? My God, he’s alert and wary of my professional eye. Am I really that bad? Now she was imputing a cynicism to his every gesture made recently in her direction. When she licked him all over, from head to foot. Christ, now it seemed even to her that she’d been dusting him. Giving him the once over with Mr Sheen. Licking him back into shape. Poor Dave!

  Native Americans they call them now, but we’d know them more properly as Red Indians. Teepees, arrows, peace pipes, all that. Well, apparently they’re topping themselves all over the place. The men, anyway, the young men, since they’re not in tribes or in the wilds any more, they feel they have no fixed role. They’ve nothing to do. They don’t feel like men.

  Dave was home watching morning TV. He liked to watch the debates and that, keep his mind occupied, abreast of the issues. Morning TV coincided almost exactly with playgroup over at the council community shack.

  And that bloke with Nirvana; shot himself. An icon for a generation, they reckoned, though Dave had never heard of him ti
ll he was in the paper. Said he was one of the Blank Generation, whom Dave hadn’t heard of either, but it turned out he was part of it too because he was under thirty. On the telly they said; roleless, overqualified, depressed. Mind, Dave he had nowt for qualifications and he had no job either.

  He was a wonderful father.

  When Trish came in bursting with energy and gleaming with aromatic oils each evening, she kissed his forehead. ‘You’re a wonderful father!’ The news would be on. Dave could never quite follow what went on in Bosnia. It was as if even wars conspired to block him out. He’d followed the Gulf War avidly and had even felt a real part of it. Doors were closing all about him these days.

  Adverts. After the break, a phone-in on modern-day masculinity. Dave didn’t like phone-ins; if it became heated they cut the caller off. Time to pick the bairn up.

  ‘Pully push-downs?’

  They were standing in front of one of the machines and Trish was showing a prospective member round each thing. At moments like these she was proud of all they had accomplished here. All these machines painted gleaming white, glinting chrome as they worked, the sweet tang of oil, of Mr Sheen. This whole place had been storage space for Fine Fare and Andrew had snapped it up. Useless, it had seemed; shelled out and grim. Almost like magic, they had given it form and function.

  The prospective member shrugged. ‘That’s what the bloke at my old gym called them.’

  ‘We have different names for different things at different gyms.’

  ‘Does that cause problems?’

  ‘No, because bodies stay the same. Now, have you been bringing the bar down to your chest or to the back of your neck so that you can hear the bones cracking?’

  He gulped. ‘My neck.’

  ‘That’s totally wrong. God, there are some real cowboys about! What you should be doing—otherwise you’ll do your back in good—is…’

  She was in the saddle, demonstrating and talking at the same time when Andrew went sailing past in his silver shell suit.