Manchester Slingback Read online

  The guy’s voice had that fruit-rich bub-bub-bub of public schools and old dead queers. Jake couldn’t tell if the accent was genuine or affected. Maybe something the man borrowed one time on shore-leave and never returned? There was a merchant-navy tattoo on the back of his hand, a slurred dash among the liver spots. The same hand he used when he lit Fairy’s Sobranie Cocktail, Fairy reaching out with two flirtatious fingers, the cigarette twitching between them as he blew a smoky thank-you across the table.

  ‘My pleasure.’

  The man was a fixture in Good-Day’s. He had his own seat, his regular glass of gin, and his trademark wheeze that mixed emphysema and alcoholism into a kind of chuckle. Fairy laughed alongside in his hiccupping giggle. Sean just sat silently.

  ‘And where’s your other friend tonight?’

  Fairy said, ‘You mean Johnny? He’s in Berlin.’

  ‘Ah, Berlin.’

  Fairy was seventeen, short and disabled by problem hair and acne, but at least he was cheerful. Pretty-boy Sean always wore a spoilt, bored expression. Tonight he was using it to keep a distance between himself and the second guy, the one they called Corduroy Man; his voice the same rustled whisper corduroy makes between shrugging thighs.

  Jake was glad to go. Anyway, he needed to adjust his mascara ready for the night ahead.

  He was applying the final touches just as the drag act moved into her encore routine. Jake heard the opening chords, revved his eyelashes in time to the beat, and pulled a last stare. His face in the mirror was so white, the eyeliner came across like pure insolence. As he came swinging through the lavvy doors, he could believe the applause was for him. Not that it was… just it was a plausible scenario.

  He looked over to the bar and saw a long-necked queen, dressed in Carmen Miranda hat and platforms, standing on the bartop and working her stuff. Her patterned skirt was rucked at the front to show her legs and, as she sang, she swished it one-handed back and forth. It was her entire stage routine. There wasn’t enough room on the bartop for any elaborate choreography but this was ba-sic: just two steps to the left… hustle… two to the right… and shake times two. The song – Jake was guessing – was called Rui Ruiz: it had the exact same tune as Louie Louie. He had no idea where she found a salsa instrumental of the song but he knew Louie Louie had been covered more than a hundred times, the most covered track in the history of rock-and-roll. He had one by Iggy and the Stooges: tape not vinyl.

  Up on top of the bar, Queen Carmen looked like she was stomping the heads of the crowd, but she had a great voice: digging deep with a bass growl for the Oo-Ooh Bab-ee Now and turning the standard Yeah-Yeah-Yeah-Yeahs into apache whoops of Ay-Yay-Yay-Yay. Another thing in her favour, she kept the Hispanic lisp going the entire song.

  While Carmen was working, the bar staff at Good-Day’s got to take a pace back and relax. The only contractual stipulation, they had to smile and jig and generally provide backdrop camp until the act was over. This was a Thursday and, according to the schedule devised by Lady Good-Day, Thursday was guest-act night. The rest of the week the staff were the entertainment and had to pull lip-synchs and disco line-ups twice a night, every night. About a month back, Lady Good-Day asked Jake if he wanted a job.

  Jake laughed him out. ‘The rings you put your boys through, I think I’ll stick to hustling.’

  What Lady Good-Day said was, ‘How do you know what rings I put them through?’

  Carmen’s song ended with a Latinate flourish, something percussive which she underlined with everything she had: winks, twitches, hand flutters, crotch rotations.

  Jake turned away, glancing back to the gents. The blacked-out porthole in the door doubled as a mirror. It worked for Jake. He was eighteen, skinny and tall. Tonight, his hair was slicked back Berlin-style. He was wearing a dark suit to underline the look. In the barroom light, the suit looked nowhere near as worn as it had done in the charity shop.

  Good-Day’s was rammed and, once Queen Carmen got off the stage, there was an almighty rush for drinks. It was so bad even Good-Day herself was working, repeating every order in a voice like a klaxon, tagging obscenities to every line. Lady Good-Day was maybe forty-five, a truly fat guy with two fully-grown double chins and a baby on the go. Another reason Jake turned down his offer of work, Good-Day was a notorious grope. Gay or straight, everyone got the same offer: Blow Job or No Job. If it wasn’t an absolute condition of employment, Jake bet there were more who’d done it than admitted it. Lady Good-Day routinely claimed to have schlepped it up everyone in Manchester so no one could depend on him for the authentic figure.

  The PA popped as someone switched it back over to the juke-box. The first song out was Edwin Starr’s ‘Eye-To-Eye Contact’, coming up on the chorus. There was some singing along, bursts of the short staccato title-phrase from pockets around the bar, followed up with hand movements… I’m looking at you with a snapped salute that segued into a sly pointing gesture. Jake cast his eyes to the floor, anxious in case he was singled out by some old guy who had once spent a night buying his drinks and was now looking for a return on the outlay.

  Out in front of him, a couple of dancing men took a turn and spin, their shoulders moving up and down and their elbows sticking out like clipped wings.

  Jake swung around to their side and pushed into the crowd without melting, swaying at the waist as he walked because it felt like the only way to move in his suit. His navigation was set to the sound of Fairy’s hiccup laugh, so high and sharp it was wired to dental pain. Sean and Fairy were still in the corner booth, entertaining the same two men. When Jake was close enough to make out the gold band on the filter of Fairy’s Sobranie, he stopped and watched as the old emphysema guy made another great play of lighting it. It was an easy route through to Fairy: put him in the spotlight, even if it was nothing but the flame from a cheap Ronson, and the boy would follow you like a dog. The effort the old man put into it, he knew the score. So long as he stayed in character, Fairy would keep on dreaming this was something more than routine sleaze: it was jazz-age decadence and he was Sally Bowles. Fairy lived for every moment he got to see himself another way, even a second or so was pure pleasure. Missing the point that Sally Bowles was just another loser. Though maybe Jake was being unnecessary; maybe Fairy knew that much. Maybe that was the attraction.

  The Corduroy guy was maybe forty-five. Sean was still sat beside him, but was tilting away each time the man moved in. Two paces away now, Jake watched as the man leant forward and asked if Sean had ever been to the Lake District. ‘I was up Scafell Pike last weekend. Just incredible. You ever go walking?’

  Jake clamped his lips right on a smirk. He could imagine pale, skinny Sean struggling against nature, but only as some kind of cooked-up play scene, never for real. If the guy really wanted a Boy’s Own romance, he should have advertised. A seedy drag bar down the Village just wasn’t the place.

  Sean said, ‘No, and I don’t climb rocks or sail fucking boats either.’

  It finally shut the man up.

  Jake laughed. Not too loud, but he hit a lull and everyone heard him. Fairy, who was nothing but predictable, screamed first.

  ‘Get her, covered in slap and gagging for it.’

  Jake hated that high-pitched queen humour, and Fairy knew it. But the boy was already too drunk to scare with a look, so Jake forced a smile and said, ‘Okay, Fairy… Which one of these two is paying for it?’

  He nodded down to the ring of glasses on the table, every one of them three-quarters empty.

  The old guy said, ‘Allow me,’ holding a twenty out in a raw, eczema-eaten hand. ‘Would you mind?’

  Jake wavered, letting his lip curl into the same bored expression Sean was wearing. As he shrugged and leant over to take the note, he left the traces of a mild sulk hovering like a cigarette kiss.

  ‘So who’s having what?’

  Sean and Fairy asked for Grolsch, the outdoor queer wanted a pint and the old guy was a gin. Straight – definitely no tonic: he couldn’t use the st
uff. There was a full Schweppes bottle standing on the table by his JPS packet. Jake nodded okay, and turned into the crowd.

  Some arsehole had called ‘YMCA’ up on the jukebox… so how down are you feeling, young man? Jake slithered for the gaps as the crowd closed around him.

  At the bar, Lady Good-Day popped a couple of dimpled mitts on the bar top and threw Jake a wink.

  ‘Jakey, y’alri-ight, ducks? What’s your pleasure?’

  Good-Day always spoke in a mincing nasal drone, more marked when he was in his drag-wear, but it was just a matter of degree.

  Jake shook his head. ‘Nothing. I’m off.’

  He pushed at a side door and leapt out into the damp swirl of Manchester. No one at his table even saw him go.

  *

  For twenty quid, Jake would drop his friends – count on it. He hit the Village, looking for possibilities, floating twenty pounds above the gutter. The attraction of Good-Day’s, it stood halfway between Chorlton Street Bus Station and the canal, at the heart of the Village. From where he stood, he could see most of it: a terrace of stooped-roofed buildings like a row of old farmhouses somehow dumped in the city and left to decay; the wide gutter of the canal and the semi-derelict mills that crouched above its banks; the overhang of the multi-storey car-park and, beneath it, the coaches pulling into the station in a tight bend, their headlights bleeding into the wet night. Tonight the Village was doused in drizzle that could have been chilling but wasn’t. This was mid-December, but the rain was nothing but a late autumn flush. All Jake needed was a blast of speed, just enough to readjust the aperture and turn the coaches’ dull beams into sharpened pinpricks. When he set out walking, he knew, whatever direction he took, he was never more than two minutes from the nearest gramme.

  Turning to face the multi-storey, he picked out a figure sheltering in the doorway to the pay-lobby. As he got closer, a car passed by and the figure snuck towards the light. Like a soft dissolve, a child’s face flickered by the door-jamb, and then faded. It was a rentboy’s move, showing out for the passing trade. If the car had slowed, the kid would have stepped out onto the pavement. By the time the driver circled the block, he would be waiting, ready to talk terms. Not that the boy played it right. There was too much diffidence in his manoeuvre, leaving too much guesswork for the punter. Jake recognized him but didn’t know his name. When Fairy first pointed him out, almost a month ago, he christened him Slappy. It fitted. He had the kind of looks that tempted rough handling. Jake got a helpless feeling whenever he saw him but mostly he just looked away. Tonight, while it was still early and the wet was an added disincentive, there was no one else around. Even the chip shop was empty, inside and out.

  Jake crossed the road to see what Slappy knew.

  The kid met him in the doorway, his bony face catching whatever light was around, his hair cut in a skinhead that made him seem even younger, like a refugee snapped during a louse scare. Though he was maybe sixteen, maybe seventeen. Any younger and he would have still been in care and Jake had seen him often enough to know he was no part-timer moonlighting from a home.

  ‘Anyone been around selling whizz?’

  The boy nodded. ‘I don’t know his name: the one who wears the white wig.’

  Jake knew. ‘Yeah? Paulo. Which way did he go?’

  Slappy pointed across the road towards the Rembrandt. ‘In there.’

  Jake nodded thanks. He was stepping out onto the road when the boy called him back.

  ‘Do you like Bowie?’

  Standing there, Jake felt that old helplessness settle on him. The question was so naked and needy, the kid must have been in solitary the day they were teaching social skills. And the worse thing, Jake did have opinions on Bowie, all of them bad. He was the original misfit: the only Bowie Boy with no time for Bowie the man. But he wasn’t going to stand in the street and pull his demolition routine. It was certain the boy didn’t want to hear it. He wasn’t looking to get shot down, he just wanted to belong.

  Jake just nodded and turned. Saying, ‘Later, mate,’ as he headed for the Rembrandt’s door.

  *

  There was no sign of Paulo, not even his peroxide wig above the crowd. The Rembrandt was reaching its mid-evening plateau, already medium rammed. Jake brushed a hand under his stray fringe and took another look, craning upwards for extra height. A voice to his left called him over.

  ‘Jake, hiya. You not going to let on?’

  Two girls were sat at a table, frisking the ice in their soft drinks with a couple of straws. Jake knew them both in a vague way but had only slept with one of them.

  ‘You going down Devilles later?’

  She was called Rebecca, lived in Bury or Prestwich and had a car. He thought she might be an art student, or doing her A-levels at sixth-form college.

  Jake nodded, ‘Yeah, I was thinking.’ He had the money now, at least. Though he could probably get Rebecca to pay his way, if he met up with her later.

  Her friend was called Debs. Both girls were twinned as Siouxie Sioux, with a mass of black back-combed hair above eyes Cleopatratized with a kohl stick.

  ‘What about the weekend? Are you going to Pips?’

  It was certain, although Jake pretended there was some doubt. He said, ‘I’m letting Johnny have the final say.’ He remembered now, Debs had her black-made eyes on Johnny. It was around November, she and Johnny had brushed shoulders in Pips, and towards the end of the night she had found him again and asked if he knew any parties. There were always parties but the problem was getting to any of them, which was how Johnny found out Rebecca had a car. He made her give a lift to all of them, Sean and Fairy as well. The four of them cramped in the back of a mini on the ride out to Flixton and the house of someone whose parents were away.

  Later, Jake had taken Rebecca upstairs to a polyester-draped room with a double bed, and assumed Johnny would do the same with her friend. A couple of hours later, Johnny came bursting into the room, saying they’d gotta run. He’d spent the night burgling the houses on the lower side of the street and wanted to get away before the neighbourhood woke up.

  Debs asked where Johnny had been hiding; she hadn’t seen him in a month.

  ‘Still in Berlin. He’s back tomorrow.’

  ‘You got to make him come to Pips.’ She held out a packet of cigarettes. Jake took one.

  ‘I’ll tell him.’ Before he walked away, he said, ‘Maybe see you later in Devilles.’

  The clientele in the Rembrandt was pretty much a pick-and-mix of the Good-Day’s crowd. If there was a difference, it was that the Rembrandt gave powder-room to a few-plus trannies – Jake didn’t know why. If he had to guess, he would say Good—Day operated a subtle queen-dissuasion policy because, with his looks, the guy couldn’t be desperate for competition. Good-Day was one end of the beauty scale. And right at the other end there was Paulo…

  Jake felt a pull on his shoulder and turned. Paulo caught him with a wink, a sure blush-maker.

  ‘Jake, hiya.’

  The way Paulo was dressed, he was a self-made wonder-slut; tight black pedal-pushers and an off-the-shoulder top that showed off his half-caste cocoa skin. And, set above it all, the shock of white hair. Paulo was pure Manchester but claimed to be Latin-American: like the white wig, the ‘-o’ was nothing but an affectation.

  ‘Paulo, I was looking for you.’

  ‘You were looking for me?’ Paulo sucked on his teeth, making a tut sound like the negative-image of a kiss. His eyes cast towards Rebecca and Debs. ‘I thought you were too busy scouting out those horrors.’

  Jake gave him the wide-on innocent look, like Paulo was making an honest observation. ‘Is it my fault everyone’s gagging for me?’

  ‘Like you don’t encourage it. Your problem, you want to decide which side you’re playing for.’

  Jake shrugged. ‘As long as I’m in demand.’

  ‘Well a word of advice, honey. You gonna walk around giving everyone puppy-dog eyes, you want to think about waterproof mascara.’
>
  ‘I tried. It gets under my contacts.’ Jake angled for a reflection off the pub’s window. ‘You saying I got panda eyes?’

  ‘You look like a tart that’s been pissed on.’

  ‘Please, Paulo. I’m a fucking customer. Show some respect.’

  Paulo grinned. ‘Oh, business?’

  Wherever it came from, Paulo always had the best speed: crazy white crystals of amphetamine sulphate. There was a rumour it was manufactured locally: Jake didn’t know or care, so long as he had money to pay for it. He followed Paulo’s patented butt-swing over to the telephone, giving it just a shade less hip movement, himself. While Paulo picked the receiver off the wall, Jake dumped some change on the top of the box: the twenty he’d stolen from Fairy’s elderly friend tucked underneath. Paulo turned, giving another kissy tut, and made like he was picking a thread off Jake’s shoulder. No one saw the real move, the way the wrap flicked out of his fingers and disappeared into the hankie pocket of Jake’s suit. A moment later, Paulo took the note and slipped a tenner – the change – alongside the coins. The last thing he did was hang up the receiver.

  Jake was laughing. ‘No reply?’

  ‘Don’t take the piss. I don’t want to get barred from this place as well.’

  ‘Is it right you got barred from Good-Day’s?’

  ‘I tell you, I barred myself. That fat cow gives me the fucking creeps. I get through the door, I can smell her salivating.’

  Jake was wondering whether to go to the bar, or at least make the offer. Turning it over: how long could he make the tenner last?

  Paulo saved him by asking first. ‘Just so it doesn’t look too obvious you only stopped by for the pharmaceuticals.’

  Jake was going for a Bacardi and Coke.

  Paulo said, ‘Me too. Thanks, honey.’

  Jake took another look at the note. Then shrugged and turned for the bar. It was the moment the sirens started.

  By the time Jake joined the crush at the pavement, the whole side of Good-Day’s was lit up with blue strobes. Outside the pub doors, a line of police formed a cordon, stopping anyone who hadn’t already run from getting out onto the street. Jake knew Sean and Fairy were both under-age. He hoped they made a getaway. From where he stood, he couldn’t see a thing. He started worming for the front of the crowd. Only as he broke through at the front, he realized they weren’t raiding Good-Day’s at all. He watched as a pair of cops came trotting round a corner carrying a two-man battering ram and saw they were heading for the Zipper Store.