On Chasing Brad Through Purgatory (6 page)

“I could better understand it,” she said, “if I was being unfaithful too.” Her tone had lost its note of accusation; was fast developing into a whine. This was no big improvement. The drop that had been teetering at the tip of her nose now broke away from its anxiously awaiting replacement and, narrowly missing her nightgown, fell neatly between her plimsolls. “Come back to me,” she pleaded. “Let's try again to make it work.”

What was I to do? Where were all the members of staff? Sod the staff, where were all the patients?

Uncertainty was snatched away from me.

Again I wouldn't quite have used the word ‘improvement'.

“Oh,” she cried, “oh Christ! Oh James! I'm dying for a shit.”

I wildly looked about me. Sweet providence—there was a lavatory nearby; on board that midnight train to Georgia I simply hadn't noticed. “Back there!” I urged. “Look! See the sign?”

She nodded eagerly yet when I tried to pull away continued to hang on. “No, no. Come with me. I can't manage.”

“Then it's better if you go on,” I said. “I'll send a nurse.”

But she was already dragging me forward. “Don't want a nurse! Want you! Oh hurry James I can't hold on!” With her free hand she prodded at the parcel. “Oh drop that stupid thing! Yes I'll wash them for you! Just get me to the lav!”

I dropped the parcel, kicked it to one side. We were almost at the door. I had the feeling I could yet be saved. Some woman washing her hands or combing her hair or applying her lipstick? Yes! Somebody both capable and sympathetic who'd smilingly take charge.

Please.

The room was empty. There was only one cubicle. A notice hung from its door handle. Out of order. Nearest W.C.s attached to the Mary Llewellyn Jenkins ward. The cubicle itself was locked.

“Oh dear Lord!” It erupted from both of us, simultaneously.

“Washbasin!” she said. “Oh help me! Lift me up!” She was already hoicking up her nightdress. “Don't let me do it on the floor.”

I took her in my arms and lifted her—she was a greater weight than you'd have thought, I felt the strain in the small of my back—and while I held onto her tightly with one hand tried to keep clear the back of her nightie with the other. Between the two of us we had got her there none too soon. There was a vast bespattering explosion. The pitiful sliver of white soap in its slimy indentation was suddenly shot across with freckles. I felt something dribble down my arm. The smell was powerful to put it mildly. I watched her scrawny mottled legs dangling pathetically over the front of the basin, my arm firmly supporting her so that she didn't sink back into the depths of it; and I said with what I hoped was a nonchalant kind of smile, “There! Does that feel better?”

Yet now she was having a piss, an unexpectedly forceful piss, off which I saw the steam rise. Well count your blessings I told myself. At least this'll help to flush away the gunge.

Not help enough though. That became evident once I'd got her back on the floor. For a minute she just stood there holding up her nightgown, balance a bit uncertain, while I first turned on both taps (however there'd been more pressure in her piss than came from either of those taps or even from the two of them together) then held onto her again while I looked for ways of cleaning off the porcelain. I couldn't come up with any—I saw no kind of brush or sponge or cloth—other than through the direct use of my own right hand. Thankfully the main part of what had come out of her had been quite loose so beneath the sluggish flow of those unwilling taps I smeared my palm and fingers back and forth around the china creating a swirling brown pool that increasingly thinned and lost its density of colour. And left an accumulation of smallish lumps which had to be mashed against the plughole, a process that reminded me of kneading Plasticene or more recently bread dough: frustratingly a skill too late developed, for Brad as well as me. Now somewhat tight-lipped in the energetic employ of my fingertips—for the mashing had become a kind of sieving—I even forgot or else had grown oblivious to the evaporating stench. With both the plughole and the sink again made more or less respectable (and the soap; and my own hand—so far as that sliver without nailbrush could accomplish it) I then ran a deepish pool of warm water and hoisted my now more tractable, less talkative, companion back into her previous position, only this time with her knees pointed a little more towards the ceiling, while I soaped as well as I was able her bottom and vagina and the inside of her thighs, especially at the top. In the absence of any paper towels and feeling unequal for both our sakes to holding her up back and front in close enough proximity to the hot-air machine, even if it worked, I took out the white linen handkerchief with which Hermione had provided me (mightn't there be a good case and not solely on the grounds of economy for the issue of double-strength man-sized tissues; perhaps I ought to mention it?) and dried my new friend off in that rather inadequate fashion. “What's your name?” I asked while I worked at it.

She looked at me uncertainly.

“You're not James are you?”

“No, I'm Danny.”

“My parents had a butler called Danny. Or was he the chauffeur? He may have been the chiropodist.”

This question exercised us as we made our way out of the small convenience. (Convenience?) At the last moment I noticed there were suspicious brown spots on the lino near the basin but I thought Damn it I've only got my handkerchief; don't the staff in this hospital do
anything
? Besides she needed shepherding, Katy needed shepherding (I'd asked again) back to the ward she'd wandered out of. During our brief walk I retrieved the castigated package and since it was difficult to manage in one hand left her to totter on unaided. Well no not really totter. Without any renewed offer to see to all my washing, not even a patently half-hearted one, she went on ahead at quite a spanking rate and disappeared around the proper door with only one further scrap of communication. “I think he was the chauffeur. He was always very kind to me. Gone but not forgotten. Wish I could remember his name.”

I called it after her but felt sure she hadn't heard.

Then I carried on to the Mary Llewellyn Jenkins ward and left the gowns with a sister who was sitting at her desk. I didn't regale her with my little spiel. I merely said, “For the hospital. We hope they'll come in handy. May I use your loo?” She gave me a nice smile, slightly bemused, said, “Thank you. Yes of course,” so I knew there was no way they could ever send me back to set
that
particular record straight.

But on my way out I may have bemused her further. “Oh could you tell Katy in the nextdoor ward her chauffeur's name was Danny? Perhaps you could write that down for her?”

Also on my way out I noticed for the first time the little room from which I'd escaped earlier. The door of it was closed. I had no wish at all to see inside.

Fortunately the johns attached to Mary Llewellyn Jenkins were as well-stocked as their brother john was lacking. There was even disinfectant! I smuggled out both this and a J-Cloth and dealt efficiently with the scouring of the basin and the removal of those brown spots from the lino. I then returned the bottle, binned the cloth and made good use of their large green bar of Lifebuoy—plus nailbrush! Gosh did I feel virtuous! During my blessedly unencumbered—and unconstricted—return to Pack Hill I thought Hey bugger me am I going to have a tale to pass on to Richard and Hermione when I put in my request for a surely justified exchange of handkerchief. (“Why what did you do with it?” Rather casually: “Oh … you know … just happened to dry an old lady's bottom. As you do.”) In the meanwhile it was Brad to whom I spoke. “So does that finally answer your question?”

For he had once asked me whether I could imagine looking after him in the most fundamental fashion if he ever happened to catch AIDS or anything else ultimately as incapacitating.

“No,” I'd replied. “So please don't include it on any list of things to aim for.”

“Then you're saying you don't love me sufficiently to wipe my bum?”

“Not true. What I'm saying is—simply—why do we have to cross our bridges? Of course I could easily enough just give you the answer you're wanting. But until one actually finds oneself in that position…? A bit like being tortured in the war. Sometimes I'm sure I'd have said ‘No—please—I'll tell you anything!' no matter how many thousands of lives might have depended on my keeping quiet. But then I think Well perhaps you can't ever be
quite
sure until the contingency arises. Maybe—somehow—from somewhere you do in fact manage to draw the strength. I hope so but I also hope—just as fervently—that I'll never have to find out.”

Brad hadn't been impressed. “I see. So you compare wiping my bum to being tortured by the Nazis?”

“Not entirely. But in either case I feel I'd have to close my eyes and think of England.”

“I'd wipe your bum like a shot.”

“Yes but you're older and wiser not to mention incredibly much nicer. However, just hold on until
I'm
a bit older and wiser and incredibly much nicer, then we can reopen the whole debate. In the meantime when I say I love you as I happen to be saying, you difficult old man, you'll know the sentiment is frightfully well considered; contains nothing of the glib.”

It had been bedtime and I remembered only too well the tussle which had followed on from these remarks. “And you have the cheek to call
me
ornery!” I told him now. I laughed and felt exuberant and broke into a run and felt free and wondered what he might be doing at this moment and whether I was filling his thoughts as much as he was filling mine; and as I came to a standstill and wiped the sweat off my face and blew my nose I thought about the possibility of my very shortly catching up with him and launching myself into his arms—and I felt almost unbelievably happy. (Actually it didn't even occur to me that I had blown my nose on an already damp handkerchief; damper than just my sweat alone should have made it. And in retrospect I think I feel glad that this hadn't occurred to me. Poor Katy.) Indeed I could hardly recall a time when I'd felt happier. Not even when he and I had first got together; and that would have taken quite a fair amount of beating.

8

The pub was called The City of Quebec. It was in a quiet turning off Oxford Street close to Marble Arch. Not simply a gay pub but a known meeting place for older men attracted to younger ones and vice versa. Brad confessed himself bewildered. “I just don't see why young guys should fancy men old enough to be their dads. The other way around of course—no mystery. But in your own case you've still got a father, a father whom apparently you get on well with. So tell me where the attraction lies. I mean in general; I promise I'm not fishing.”

I truly couldn't enlighten him.

“You may as well ask why I'm gay as why I go for older men. Or why alone in all my family I'm into westerns and musicals and like vegetable marrow.”

“Fair enough,” he'd said. “Mine then not to reason why. Mine merely to appreciate and feel happy.”

Not that I'd ever viewed Brad as old. When we had met I was twenty-four, he forty-three, but I'd never been the kind of adolescent who thought you were virtually past it at thirty and completely washed up at forty. Besides not only did Brad look fighting fit and youthful, there were men at the Quebec who were well into their seventies, even some who were almost certainly over eighty (not for nothing was the place indulgently referred to as The Elephants' Graveyard), men who even at that age, perplexingly, still attracted lascivious attention and by no means just from the over-fifties … or indeed perhaps not at all from the over-fifties; a seventysomething with the arm of a thirtysomething draped lovingly around his shoulders was assuredly no uncommon sight even if sometimes—to Brad every bit as much as me—it could begin to verge on the distasteful. But Brad looked like a positive youngster in that sort of assembly and for the two of us to find ourselves drawn to one another wouldn't have seemed in the least unnatural to any of the pub's countless patrons.

I had only been to the Quebec a couple of times and no way would I have gone that evening if I hadn't just survived the final breakup with my current boyfriend. “Well okay I'll show him!” I'd thought. “Plenty of other good fish in the sea.” But sitting on the top deck of the No 16 staring out a bit unappreciatively, even blindly, at the charms of Kilburn High Road—I was en route from my bedsit near Cricklewood Broadway—I had no high hopes that the couple of hours ahead were going in any way to lighten my depression; and I very seriously considered dismounting at the next stop and getting drunk at a pub much closer to home. In short it was only my inherent meanness, the fact that I'd already paid my fare, which all too probably prevented me; I was at that time stacking shelves in a supermarket and needing to be careful with my cash, despite a determinedly forgiving and not ungenerous set of parents. So I stayed on the bus and thought bloody hell what a life and what a total mess I'd made of it and sodding bloody Jonathan could just bloody well sod off and take a running jump. But I was close to crying by this stage so I did try to concentrate at least a little on the life that was being lived in Kilburn.

And in Maida Vale. And along the rest of the Edgware Road. About which not even remotely had it crossed my mind, in primary school in the Midlands, on my first hearing of this noble thoroughfare—and being induced to draw a Roman regiment marching up it stick-limbed to the north—that it would one day provide me with a bus route (southwards) to The City of Quebec. I suppose I couldn't claim to be a prescient child. But now I wondered bleakly if the percentage of gays in Roman times would have been roughly the same as it was today and vaguely envied them their massed ranks; although on the other hand it had never once occurred to me, and surely never would, to sign on in any of Her Majesty's armed forces.