Loving Monsters (13 page)

*

Mansur leads the way through a butcher’s shop lit by a Primus pressure lamp. In the white actinic glare the few remaining chunks of unsold camel meat glitter with bluebottles. The small boy in a robe and round white skullcap who is supposed to keep the flies off with a whisk has fallen asleep. A milky gleam of eyeball shows beneath a half-closed lid; his cap is skewed to reveal patches of ringworm on his scalp the size of shillings. The evening hubbub of back-street Suez is a pervasive surround. There are people at the rear of the shop, people in the passage leading inwards into the warren that lies unsuspected from the street. They recognise Mansur, exchange greetings with him, glance with only brief curiosity at his European companion. These are courtyard regions of naphtha flames and candles, of limp piles of fodder with tethered goats standing amid pellets of dung. Children squeal, a wireless plays, feeble lights reveal dim tiers of balconies rising on all sides on which glow charcoal braziers and cigarette tips. Above it all the unexpected night sky is a rectangle of stars. The air enclosed by these steep buildings is heavy with cooking smells, excremental, alive. Jayjay experiences a not disagreeable sensation of being led out of his depth.

Mansur has explained everything. Jayjay has an hour. He must swear to be silent. Not a movement, all right? They reach a doorway where an old woman is sitting, deeply shawled, in a heap of robes. A paraffin lantern stands on a splintered deal table. The floor beside her is strewn with empty cardamom pods. Mansur greets her and as she looks up to return the greeting
the shawl falls away from her face to reveal the dark blue tattooes of tribal markings above her nose and beside each wrinkled eye. With one thin hand she twitches the shawl back across her chin in the token gesture of the Moslem woman who is touchingly too old to bother, while she thrusts the other out incongruously to reveal a watch with a foxed dial which she taps, glancing at both Jayjay and Mansur. Everything is agreed. Time is rationed. The woman gets to her feet and finds a stub of candle which she lights from the oil lamp and hands to Jayjay before leading the way over to one wall. Where the building’s front and side join, a hole eighteen inches wide and four feet high is disclosed behind a sheet of sacking which the woman holds aside for him. As he squeezes past her he smells the cardamom on her breath.

Having been briefed by Mansur he knows what to expect. The black slot he is in is between two walls, although it is unclear whether the outer one is completely false or merely that of the adjoining building. Unpointed cement has oozed from between the mud-coloured bricks on both sides and hardened into protruding tongues that catch at his clothes. After a few yards he finds rough stairs cobbled together out of more bricks and carefully climbs. The flame he carries illuminates very little beyond its own tiny dazzle. The cramped passage continues at the top of the stairs and here he notices a small source of light around which some bricks have been removed. Placing the candle on the floor he looks through this chink into another world. It is a room in bizarre contrast with his side of the wall, being furnished in a style he thinks of as Louis Farouk. There is a vague Frenchness about the lace curtains in the window, the chintzy wallpaper curling along its seams, the heavy carved wash-stand and the flounced pillows on the bed. The Egypt of her new king, on the other hand, is unmistakably represented by the two stiff chairs upholstered in gold velveteen and a writing table with heraldic legs, its surface protected by a rectangle of green American cloth. Clothes are heaped carelessly on it. Above the head of the bed is a lighting
fitment: two shaded bulbs springing from a riot of acanthus leaves done into a gilt plaster-of-Paris plaque. From the way light is falling on the bed Jayjay deduces that his own viewpoint must be from behind the acanthus spray of a similar light fitment along the wall beside the bed. Only an aperture thus ingeniously disguised could remain undetected so close to the protagonists of this stolen spectacle.

In the next hour Jayjay watches the same girl with three different clients. She is about his own age, with large breasts and heavy dark hair – probably Greek, he thinks. He is rigid with embarrassment and excitement. Nothing in Eltham has prepared him for this, and neither have his most vivid imaginings accurately foreseen the effortless reality of what takes place beneath his fascinated gaze. In order to distract himself from his guilt at thieving these private scenes he splits into several observers. The first of these takes note of all sorts of peripheral detail about the room and its occupants: the way the light falls, the holes in socks. The same observer quite lucidly speculates about how he might never have guessed from their faces – had he glimpsed these entirely ordinary-looking people walking along Rue Colmar in plain daylight – that they lived another life after dark. Maybe everyone did, and it left no more discernible mark on their diurnal selves than eating dinner? A second observer is not speculative at all. He feels his entire being oozing through the aperture like ectoplasm in order to participate in the activities scarcely four feet away. Like an inflamed Tinkerbell he is everywhere, alighting briefly on this membrane and on that, flitting from breast to scrotum, from buttock to nape, committing everything to indelible memory. And above and behind these observers yet another presides who, despite Jayjay’s neophyte ignorance, recognises the isolation in these encounters. These are closed people transacting brief and urgent business. They are in no sense lovers. They are more like electrified globes, sealed fates that bump into one another, discharge themselves and leave behind a certain residue of sadness. It does occur to this observer that sadness might
always be attendant on the act, regardless of the absence or presence of love.

The peripheral observer, meanwhile, has noted that the first client – the one whose clothes were on the writing table – might have been a middle-ranking Lebanese banker with stained underwear; the second any of the twenty-ish clerks from the pool at Anderson & Green; while the third is a quite dashing young Egyptian wearing a spruce uniform he recognises as that of the harbour police at Port Taufiq. It is easy to imagine this tall youth with the neat moustache doing the rounds in his motorboat, visiting each of the scarlet-painted buoys in the roads and opening their inspection hatches to see whether they have been used as drop-boxes for contraband. ‘Pusser’ Hammond has told him that this is one of the favoured smuggling techniques. Only a Port policeman who isn’t on the take would dream of opening the inspection hatches in full view out in the roads. Most take the buoys in tow and wait until they are safely inside the maintenance yards before opening them and stealing the loot. That is why the buoys in Port Taufiq are always freshly painted, ‘Pusser’ said. They are constantly in and out of the maintenance shop.

This clean young officer is unquestionably a fine specimen of manhood, with his lithe body and unexpected concern for the girl’s pleasure. But Jayjay notices the girl always keeps her eyes averted, as she did for her first two clients, as though her thoughts are far away even as her body performs with intimate flexibility. Legs up, legs down, legs apart; up on knees and elbows, kneeling, spreading, tensing, relaxing. And always the eyes skewed off to one side. In between clients she had slipped on a blue peignoir and walked to the open window, looking out through the fake lace, down at the noisy street, up towards the stars, her hair falling back. Now her eyes seem blankly fixed on Jayjay’s own across the policeman’s glistening shoulder. Does she know he is watching? Is she aware of hollow walls and paying voyeurs? He jerks his head away from the crack, guilty and alarmed. What was the deal here? Was she knowingly performing for him as well as for her client?

He becomes aware of a tickling between his ankles and trouserlegs, an irritation that has gradually pushed itself forward into his consciousness. The candle at his feet has dwindled to a standing flame in a pool of wax but it is enough to reveal that this fetid slot between the walls is alive with cockroaches. Bending down to prise the flame off the floor he notices that the brickwork beneath the spyhole where he has been pressing his body is encrusted with what look like dried snail trails, though some are fresh. His fingers dripping with scalding wax he retreats to the top of the stairs before the flame goes out and fumbles his way down towards the faint glow that marks the sacking-covered entrance.

The old woman is still there. She points out through the doorway at a packing case with a lamp on it at which Mansur is drinking tea with several companions. ‘Shukran ya ‘aguz’, he murmurs awkwardly to her. Only when he is outside does he realise how stiflingly hot it was between the walls of that brick oven. He can feel sweat beginning to dry all over his body. Were he not almost certain that Mansur does not drink Jayjay might think he was in his cups, for he greets Jayjay like a son who has come through an initiation with flying colours, proudly encircling his waist with a thick arm and apparently explaining this European to his companions in rapid Arabic. Jayjay thinks he catches the words for ‘important’ and ‘ships’. He is numb with unfocused desire and accepts a glass of mint tea, then another, and finally a third.

‘Hot in there,’ says Mansur meaningly. ‘Did you like it?’

‘Pretty much,’Jayjay replies, inhibited by the presence of these robed strangers who doubtless know exactly where he has been and are expecting a roguish response.

‘Well, drink up, because you haven’t finished yet. What did I promise? That I will show you something you will like. If you are not yet sure, you must see something else. That girl, she’s beautiful, isn’t she?’

‘Yes. Yes, she is. In her way.’

‘Very hairy. She is Christian. She does everything.’

Time passes. The same quarter of town but a different spyhole. The same cockroaches, the same sweat, a newly awakened longing. Instead of a brick wall some rough wood panelling with a plank wrenched out and a narrow view between two cobbled-in sheets of eroded three-ply. This time a far less genteel room, more a skimped cubicle hollowed out of a much larger space, a plywood pocket in what surely was once a sizeable drawing-room whose lost grandeur probably survives in dust-shrouded cornices and dadoes and curved bell handles now hidden behind the partitioning. Seventy years earlier this might have been the house chosen by Ferdinand de Lesseps and this the very room to which he returned exhausted each evening from the Canal diggings, a roll of plans beneath one arm, his frock coat marked with a wandering white tideline of dried sweat.

This time no disenchanted girl condemned to her cell awaits the night’s random visitors. The room is empty. A naked lightbulb like a teardrop sheds more of an ochre glow than actual light. It shows the iron bedstead’s springs sagging beneath a blotched mattress as thin as a biscuit. A scant seven feet above the lino-covered floor the lank air retards the blades of the slowest ceiling fan he has ever seen. The room has nothing about it of either aftermath or anticipation. It is static and lost. Then the door opens unexpectedly and an Egyptian boy enters, dressed as for school in a grey shirt and white cotton trousers. He is maybe twelve, and there is a certain jauntiness about the way he walks in his thin-soled slippers. He is carrying a book. Into the room behind him comes a white man of about forty wearing gold-rimmed spectacles. He looks like a French provincial piano teacher. He has a resigned air and shoots a glance around the room which seems to confirm his mood.

Why does the boy remind Jayjay of one of his contemporaries at Eltham College? Why does the man seem to resemble one of the College’s staff, and even the lino evoke that on the kitchen floor in Beechill Road, when none of them has any real similarity? Unbidden and without awkwardness the boy hops on to the bed
and arranges himself primly on the iron hoop at its head, knees together, leaning back against the wall and opening the book on his lap as though following a script. He begins to read aloud in a husky boy’s voice, slowly and with difficulty, as if in class. The slippers fall with soft plops from his feet sticking backwards through the bars. On his cheek nearest Jayjay, just beside the ear, is a shadow of dark down. The book’s cover proclaims it as the
Collected Poems
of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

(although these are only approximately the words the boy speaks in his thick accent). There is no nervousness in his voice, only a touching suggestion of formality. The man kneels on the mattress before him, gazing up at his pupil with bitter supplication. His hands reach out as though finally obliged to intervene. They gently part the boy’s knees, caress his inner thighs, begin to unbutton the cotton trousers. The boy’s voice never falters but he does glance down when what the man is looking for is springily disclosed. He stops reading as they both regard what has been brought to light with differing shades of devotion. In both faces there is a hint of amazement that, for this moment at least, the entire world should have honed itself down to this single fine point of concentration. The planet beyond the window has ceased to exist. Almost with reverence for so sublime a banality the man slowly bows his head and the boy resumes his reading. Shortly afterwards he stumbles badly over a word, tilting the page towards the weak light and frowning.

‘Hersheemed,’ the man prompts; then, raising his head, more distinctly says: ‘“Herseemed.” It means, “It seemed to her.”’ He, too, has an un-English accent. Prickles of sweat glisten between the cropped grey hairs on his scalp.

The scalp disappears as the boy rests the book on it as on a gently bobbing lectern. A few lines later he lets the volume fall to the bed. The blessed damozel has served her purpose; libido is ousting literature. He leans back against the wall as again the hands reach upwards to unbutton his shirt and stray across his taut brown stomach. The boy’s arms are rigid at his sides, his hands grasping the iron bedstead as he slides his lower half a little forward. After a while he brings his thighs decisively together. Jayjay notices how closely he is watching, unlike the girl earlier with her averted eyes and apartness. He is intent. So clearly vigilant of his own sensations and their convergence, his downward gaze becomes almost contemplative as he reaches the moment for letting his hands fall to the back of his teacher’s head and pressing. His nails whiten with the firmness of his fingers. The man’s own eyes are closed. Jayjay, greedily tensed against quarter-inch plywood only inches away, is terrified the panel will act as a sounding-board and fill the room with the amplified pounding of his heart.