Loving Monsters (14 page)

Within minutes the teacher is buttoning up his own trousers and the boy is on hands and knees under the bed, retrieving his fallen slippers. The man picks up the Rossetti and smooths a crushed page before briefly slipping an arm around the boy’s shoulders as though this is the only part of their transaction that requires a rationed daring. The boy smiles at the man’s shirtfront. They both seem to have reached some small, amicable plateau, and it dawns on Jayjay that this might be a regular event between them. The man bestows cash as if it were pocket money rather than payment. Seconds later the room is empty once again.

A timeless fifteen minutes pass for Jayjay. This is something he hadn’t known about, except through dark allusions in popular newspapers. It comes as a complete revelation that it is so widespread and international an activity as to merit formal
marketplace procedures. He has a vision of himself, seen from far overhead in the soft Egyptian night, as a mouse crouched in the world’s wainscoting. He is trapped, as he has been throughout this revelatory evening, between self-contempt and absorption. The self-contempt remains empty, theoretical; the engrossment embodies thrilling aspects of discovery as though he were at last making his way towards a place he was always destined to reach. It is akin to the feeling he experienced in his first week in Suez when the taste of fresh coriander ambushed him as at once alarmingly strange and nearly familiar, so instantly did he recognise it as a missing flavour which now, being identified, would become part of the rest of his life.

The thin door opens again and into the room come two more Egyptian boys, this time rather older, both well-built student types of perhaps sixteen or seventeen. They have the faintly deracinated air of people whose conversation has just been interrupted. They sit on the bed, waiting. One yawns. And there, closing the door behind him and shooting the cheap bolt carefully into its socket, is Richards. Richards of the small moustache and the pale forearms he now exposes by removing his linen jacket as though shedding the burden of command and eager for time off. Old hand Richards, who hadn’t minded announcing that he set great store by first impressions and was not much for cockiness, has taken off his shoes and is padding towards the bed in cotton socks. The same Richards who Milo thought deserved to be sold as a slave to Arabians, Jayjay’s senior at Anderson & Green, takes from his pocket what looks like a small pot of face cream before allowing the youths to remove his trousers unceremoniously. The boys are displaying signs of a puppyish, self-centred enthusiasm that borders on contempt.

And once again Jayjay cannot
not
watch. There is something about Richards’ body, something about the root-white torso with its brown extremities, that damps his own excitement; yet this is more than made up for by the rising of sheer glee. Oh, what hostages we unthinkingly hand over to fortune as we broadcast
our pretensions! As we bray our little observations about manners and standards, what rods are being laid up in pickle for us – or, as in this case, in Pond’s cold cream! One after another the youths, who have removed only their shoes, punish Richards deeply and forcefully for being Richards: for being English, for being in Egypt, for being white, for being
mibun.
They are as indifferent to his initial pain as they are ruthless toward his eventual pleasure. Jayjay, impersonating his trinity of observers barely three feet away behind the panel, is intent on seeing everything and forgetting nothing even as a part of his brain is able to make certain plans and calculations. How beautifully, how thoroughly is Richards exploded! How timely this manner of delivering himself, crushed into rat-coloured ticking in a stifling plywood bordello by contemptuous youths still wearing their trousers, their buttocks bunching spasmodically beneath the thin material!

*

– Oh, it was wonderful at the beginning, before it went sour. Richards summoned me to his office the very next morning and started straight in about how right his first impressions invariably were, about how he’d known the moment he clapped eyes on me coming off the
Orontes
that I was not Anderson & Green material. ‘I have here’ (he said) ‘your time-sheet which shows you have consistently been absenting yourself from the office during work hours. It’s obvious you are in no way suited to a clerk’s job.’
‘
Absolutely correct, old man,’ I told him. ‘The moment I saw you on the quayside at Port Taufiq I thought, now
there’s
a fellow with a head on his shoulders. A true judge of character, or I’m a Dutchman. And I was spot-on. As you so brilliantly divine, I am not one of nature’s clerks. Since we’re in complete agreement about that, I suggest you bump me upstairs here as soon as you can and I’ll try my hand at a bit of directing. I rather fancy that quiet little office at the end of the corridor.’

– I really did think for a moment his face would burst. Speech eventually found its way through the congestion. There was a good deal of stuff about insolent young puppies to be got rid of
but eventually he reached his punchline about how I had a week’s salary due and a steerage berth back on the
Orford
at the end of the month and I would be well advised to stay out of his way until then. Oh, and a little bird had told him I had fraudulently acquired a Company badge to which I was most certainly not entitled as a raw apprentice, and he wanted it back right this instant.

– ‘No, no,’ I said, ‘you’re being hasty, old man, as I’ll explain if you’d just listen for a moment.’ ‘Don’t you dare “old man” me, you saucy little sod,’ said Richards. ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘Gloves off. No more old men. Let’s talk about young men. Specifically, let’s talk about Ibrahim and Samih’ (for of course I’d identified them through Mansur). Bluster. Never heard of ’em. Nor of a pot of Pond’s cold cream, such as only last night helped blaze a trail its manufacturers probably never considered …? It’s true: shock really does make people change colour. I remember he walked to the window and stared out. He seemed about six inches shorter. ‘You rotten, rotten bastard,’ he said in pure Birmingham. It went right through me. In eighteen and a half years I had never felt so contaminated by something I’d done. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I promise you it was sheer bad luck I found out. I truly don’t give a fig about your private life, Richards. And what’s more, I hereby give you my word I shall never mention this again to a living soul: not to anyone, anywhere, ever. As far as I’m concerned, nothing leaves this room.’

– Actually, I was beginning to be quite frightened of what I’d done. In those days if such a story got out a man could be utterly ruined. A provincial fellow like Richards might go to any lengths to avoid exposure. It probably crossed his mind that here in Suez and with his knowledge of Arabic he could arrange to have me found floating somewhere out in the Red Sea, half eaten by sharks. Yet all I could think of was that he might kill himself, which was still the proper thing to do. I certainly didn’t want his blood on my conscience for the rest of my life. The odd thing was, now that by sheerest mischance I had him at my mercy I began to feel almost tender towards him. He looked so shrivelled. ‘I
suppose you want money, then‚’ he said dully. ‘I haven’t much, you know.’ ‘No, I don’t,’ I told him. ‘All I want is something you can quite easily arrange, and that’s merely for me to continue in this job for as long as it takes me to find something better. All you have to do is edit or tear up the time-sheets and give reasonably satisfied reports of my progress. I’m also going to hang on to that Company badge of mine. And that’s it.’

– In the circumstances, of course, I was asking practically nothing, as Richards knew perfectly well. Terrible scenarios of blackmail had no doubt been parading across his mental retinas, hotly pursued by equally dire remedies he might need to resort to. He looked at me almost fearfully. ‘Can I really believe that’s all?’ he asked, bitter as well as hopeful. ‘I swear it,’ I told him, and gave him my hand. In those days one still did that on solemn occasions. He took it as though it might bite and dropped it almost at once. ‘Did you, did you, er, actually
watch
…?’ he asked, and his eyes filled with tears. His vulnerability shocked me into a confession of my own. ‘Only for a bit. If it will make you feel any better, a similar thing happened to me a few days ago.’ ‘To
you
?
You mean, you were watched?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘just … well, what happened to you. The same. But only one person instead of two.’ I thought maybe I’d gone too far and it would prompt him to some tearful complicity which I really did not want. Richards and I had nothing whatsoever in common.
‘I
didn’t pay,’ I said with a touch of scorn. ‘It was more or less unavoidable. These things happen. Not something you will be mentioning to anyone, no doubt.’

– You know, anal intercourse is the most wonderful social catalyst: I really can’t recommend it too highly. Judiciously employed it can achieve remarkable things, and will do so for as long as a little shame still attaches to it. I suddenly had carte blanche to carry on drawing a salary in return for very little work while also being enabled to slip quietly into a more congenial world. All sorts of doors might be opened now that the entrance fee had been paid, while everybody had their reasons for keeping their lips sealed. These forms of social bargain are why one likes living in a
Mediterranean country, wouldn’t you agree? People in these parts understand them to a nicety. In fact they love them; and the subtler they are, the better. It gives even business relationships an intimacy and zing which I really miss in Anglo-Saxon climes with their desperate and ultimately futile insistence on having everything out in the open. In fact, I’m not sure Anglo-Saxons or Americans have any pride left these days. They’re just litigiously watchful for insults, which is not the same thing at all. Nor do they have any shame. They think anything they do is sanctioned by some sacred notion of individual rights or self-expression. But here in the Mediterranean a sense of shame and personal honour still exists, just, and the unspoken deal is that with a bit of care everyone can stand to gain unless you’ve badly wronged somebody or gone back on your word, in which case you’re dead meat and deservedly so. But as a way of parlaying all our little weaknesses up into bargaining chips the system works beautifully.

– So I went back to the Caramanli that afternoon feeling pretty satisfied even though residually caddish about having cut Richards down to size. He was a pompous toad who needed deflating, but the humiliation I had inflicted on him was unfortunately overkill. Anyway, I felt I now understood a few things about him: that perhaps he was pompous out of self-defence; that he had probably acquired his Arabic more for the pursuit of pleasure than as a career move; that it was doubtless no mystery why he’d elected to stay on in Suez when he could have moved up in A & G and gone back home. In short, one way and another I had learned quite a lot recently: at least enough to ensure that whatever happened now I would never be able to return to Eltham a virgin.

– Thereafter Richards fades. We kept each other’s smutty little secret and within a few months he’d been posted elsewhere. But when I was in Cairo years later I discovered he’d served with distinction as a Desert Rat and was decorated for bravery not long before he was killed at Bir Hakeim. Summer 1942, that would have been. I expect he’s buried at Tobruk. Poor Richards. He may have been dive-bombed by a Stuka but I think he died of shadows.

– Yet that still wasn’t quite the end of that momentous evening’s voyeurism. A week or two afterwards in Shari‘ Ataqa I idly noticed some schoolkids coming towards me along the pavement, all wearing English-style striped cotton blazers. And there in the middle was the boy I’d seen through a hole in a wall reading Rossetti. I was absolutely amazed. It was unmistakably him (how could I be mistaken?) but he looked so much smaller. Judging by the way his ankles showed below his trouser-cuffs he was just beginning his growth spurt, but even so he seemed to have shrunk. I must have been staring as they came level, their heads so much lower than my own, for he broke off a lively conversation with his friends to glance a bit frowningly at me as they passed. Haughty? Not exactly; but I was sadly aware of being no part of his universe, shut out of his circle. I couldn’t match the reality of what I’d seen in that room with what I was meeting on the street. I was left feeling slightly injured: that he ought at least to have greeted me with a blush or some other bashful acknowledgement of how well I knew him. Technically, of course, we were total strangers. Yet I would quite truthfully have been able to tell him: ‘I know what your cock looks like. I know the expression on your face when you come: something even you don’t know.’ But how can one say that to a stranger, let alone to a child?

– Ah, intimate knowledge gained without the requisite intimacy. Is that what it feels like to be a spy? A doctor? A priest? Privacy invaded in the pursuit of knowledge. Part of a voyeur’s armoury. Part of a poet’s, too, as well as an impostor’s. –

*

For some time now I had been aware of becoming drawn into Jayjay’s history at a level which occasionally disturbed me: faint but clear evidence that someone else’s narrative can set up tensions as it meshes with one’s own. I suppose this is inevitable when engaging with a living subject. (The dead can generally be dealt with by means of a comfortable tone that treats them indulgently or humorously or with more or less admiration.) The living have all sorts of juts and barbs on which one’s pride may snag and be
wounded. Or else, as in Jayjay’s case, they confront one too forcibly with the less satisfactory aspects of one’s own character. Also, there are no coincidences. Biographers and their subjects sniff one another out as much subliminally as by conscious design. He had read my books, I was intrigued by him. Our psyches had caught wind of each other’s pheromones, and knowing this was both piquant and a source of unease.

I now felt I knew exactly the sort of young man he had been. It was a type I myself would have found intimidating, even something of a reproach, had I met him then. No matter how sensitive and impressionable he might have been, with how good an eye and ear for childhood’s scenery (if rather less so for Eltham’s human inhabitants), I do not believe Jayjay was subtly reinventing his teenaged persona to make him sound maturer, more decisive, less insecure than he actually had been. I think he really was that self-confident at eighteen and a half, away for the first time in his life from family and friends, walking the streets of Suez with a worldly eye open to the main chance and greedy for details, precocious with a certain brisk beadiness. Some of us remain children longer than others. Compared to Jayjay I had been a baby at that age, drifting somnolently from one safe haven of hallowed walls, which was my public school, into another afforded by an Oxford college. There was no real break between these venerable institutions. They were simply stages in a seamless process claiming to bestow a manly independence of mind even as it infantilised us into conformity. At eighteen and a half I had never been to a public political meeting and flirted with socialism, still less had I ever watched a Greek prostitute turning tricks in a Suez flop-house. I would have found those tropical positionings and glum transactions threatening. And the difference between us extended beyond matters of passive experience into resourcefulness of behaviour. Even had I acquired the sort of hold over someone that Jayjay had over the luckless Richards, I would never have dared capitalise on it in a way that so adroitly served the interests of both parties, any more than I would have had the nerve to court the
company of brigands running illegal rackets in the Middle East. And as for paying the price he claimed to have paid (and I’m quite sure did pay) for entrance into their seamy world, I do not believe I would have been capable of his unruffled mixture of abandon and pragmatism. What for me would have been an ordeal seemed to have been a transient event for Jayjay, one to which he alluded almost casually. But there again, a gulf of sixty years might so divorce a distant trauma from the present as to endow his remembered self with the urbane disguise of a lifelong sophisticate.