The Fields (28 page)

And besides, she says, it’s good to keep your mind off of you know what. She nods at this, as if agreeing with herself, before I have a chance to say anything back. I nod too. And then we sit for an age in awkward silence, while a gang of hopeful girls from Kerry bash away eagerly at the line of electronic typewriters that Aunty Grace has set up for them in the mid-morning sunshine.
I feel a bit of a spare tool when I get into Border Town on Friday evenings. Because I know that everyone’s been having the time of their lives all week, and having brilliant battles with the customers, and listening to amazing stories from Billy during staff beers about the woman who ordered the tomato, bacon and mozzarella salad without the bacon or mozzarella, or about the time that he scribbled ‘Tipping is not a village in China’ on the receipt of the tight-fisted guy who left nothing at all for the waiters.

But Billy’s the best. He clocks me immediately, and gives a little whoop of delight. He never makes me feel like I’m not one of the gang. And he’s real protective over me too, especially because we can talk all night about Jimmy and Bronski Beat. He’s hugely impressed that I know all the words to ‘Smalltown Boy’, and he even gets me to sing the entire song, without back-up, all five verses, in the staffroom one evening before Saturday shift. The staffroom is like our own private place, where no public can go, in the middle of all the madness. It’s right down at the back of the restaurant, through a lone bright-red door with a slim window of shatter-proof glass and a big Strictly No Entry sign on it. It leads out to a manky back street next to the stage door of the London Palladium, but it’s a special place in itself, with open lockers and wooden benches where you can sit down and have decent chats, and laughs, before the shift begins. And if you feel like it, you can sing too.

And this time it just happens, with everyone squeezed in and changing, that Trevor the manager’s watching and everything. And half the kitchen staff. And normally I wouldn’t do it, and would be far too embarrassed about my Aled Jonesy voice, but Billy’s so convincing and tells me that I sing exactly like Jimmy, that I go for it. I get a huge round of applause at the end from everyone, including Faizel, the strict Arab sous chef, who normally hates anything to do with anything other than his mother or God.

Later that night Janus, the tall blond barman with a huge bottom jaw, who’s from Denmark, corners me during staff beers and says, Come on, out with it, are you gay or aren’t you? Billy comes rushing in and tells him to shut his faggot mouth, and reminds him that I’m only a kid. After that I always get Billy’s tables, which drives Marco and Luca mad, because Billy’s the best tipper of all. And I clean them super-fast for him, without even waiting for the nod. Sometimes he’ll come blemming out of the kitchen, all panicked that the mains are on the way to a table of fifteen and he hasn’t even begun to clear the starters, and he’ll see that I’ve already cleared and set the entire table, right down to the steak knives and pancake holders. At which point, he’ll stroll back in and pinch my shoulders and call me a
dolly filly
, which is part of an ancient and secret language of the gays, and it means a good good child.

Billy has a boyfriend, who’s also gay, called Soz. Soz is from Turkey, where everyone’s really strict, and they chop off your fingers for picking your nose, so being gay is totally out of the question. He’s been in London for ever, and has worked his way up from the post room in a big City law firm to being his own man, and an accountant to boot. Billy makes loads of jokes about gay accountants that I don’t understand, except the ones about sticking your pencil in the sharpener and stuff like that. Soz is nice too, though not as nice as Billy. He’s quieter, for a start, and a bit fatter, and always looks a bit tired, like he’s been up all night, and up to no good. The stubble doesn’t help, which is super thick, and shaved in perfect straight lines all around his face, like Action Man. And he’s real gruff sometimes, when he comes in for a late-night Saturday drink. Just plonks himself down at a table near the bar, and growls at me to get Billy over to him pronto, and to get the first of his Long Island Iced Teas on the go. These are drinks that taste like Coca Cola but have loads of booze in them, and are secretly made by Janus and hidden
behind a box of straws at the service entrance of the bar for any of the waiting staff who are dead stressed and want to get a bit buzzy for the night. I never take one myself, because they’re too strong, and because Trevor says that he’ll fire anyone that he finds drinking on the job. But I happily bring them over, one after another, to Soz, who drinks them down like nobody’s business and then gives a big wave and a nod of thanks over to Janus, who waves back with a big twinkly grin because they know each other, and are friends through Billy, and through being gay.

Soz is the one who asks me, out of the blue, if I’ll come over to dinner at theirs on a Sunday night in August. It’s just before the Friday shift starts, and he’s rushing out as I’m rushing in, and we clatter right into each other. He looks like fury, and I’d swear he’s going to hit me so I kind of duck and wince, but he only reaches down and pulls me to my feet and says that him and Billy have decided to go dinner party crazy and would love to have me over some night for a bite, and how does Sunday suit? I pause for a good few seconds, because dinner to me is a middle-of-the-day thing, with roast potatoes, gravy and everything, and the idea of having it at night-time, and with a party on top of it, seems a bit weird. But I trust Billy, so I say why not, and Soz smiles and says Fabulous, darling, and for the first time ever acts real girlie-like in front of me, and does a little bum wiggle as he spins around and disappears out the doors.

The dinner party, it turns out, is actually brilliant, and Billy and Soz couldn’t be any nicer if they tried. For a start they move the whole thing forward so that I can be dropped off and picked up by Aunty Grace, without making anyone miss too much sleep. They live in Earls Court, which isn’t, they say, too far away from Queen’s Park, but takes Aunty Grace forty-five minutes of effing and blinding through inch-by-inch traffic to get there. She’s dead suspicious, and she first has to have an epic phone conversation with Billy where she gives him the sob story about me and my dying dad and my mad girlfriend, about how she’s effectively my mam for now, and how she wouldn’t hear of it if I was to come home with even a hair out of place, and how in fact, she corrects herself, she’d hear of it one way or another, and there’d be hell to pay. Billy, from the other end, sounds like he’s being all charming, jokey and funny rude with Aunty Grace, and telling her that she’s got a wicked imagination and that fellas like him and Soz are good as church-mice, and normally get up to nothing more exciting than a bit of good nosh and a quick bop-about to Madonna.

Billy ends the conversation, smooth as eggs, by turning it all back on to Aunty Grace, and having a big chat about Grace’s
Angels. And it sounds like he’s telling her that she’s the best businesswoman in the world, to have come from where she’s from, and to have nonetheless built an empire of recruitment around her. Aunty Grace says that it wasn’t easy, and talks about pulling herself up by her bootstraps, and she wags her finger a lot while she’s talking. She eventually sits down firmly on the kitchen stool, and smiles quietly to herself, and looks like a woman who’s finally getting a prize for doing something lifelong and monumental, like raising war orphans, or nursing someone with a terminal disease.

Even so, on the night, Aunty Grace scrumples up around ten pieces of paper with her home phone number on them and shoves them in all of my pockets and whispers to me, as I leave the car, right in front of their flat, that I’m to make sure to remember to lock the toilet door each time I’m using it. I tell her not to be mad, but she says that she’s been around their sort for years, and she knows what they like, and that I’ve got three hours, tops, and if I’m not back down on the street by 11 p.m. she’s coming up herself to get me.

The dinner itself, as I say, is brilliant. And Soz, as well as being a gay accountant with Action Man stubble, is also an ace cook. We have lamb chops with little chef’s hats on them, and homemade chocolate brownies for dessert. And it’s not just me either. Billy and Soz have invited two of their best buddies, Roger and Jamie, around to share in what Billy predicts will be an evening of
fantabulosa dishes
! Roger immediately tells him that he’s awful when he says that, and looks down at me unsure and asks Billy, while using only the ancient language of the gays, if I’m an
omi palone
. Billy rolls his eyes and tells Roger he’s got a one-track mind, while Soz moves in behind me and tells me to ignore Roger, and says that all those sweaty men, with their big sticks and their balls, must’ve turned his head.

This is a joke, I find out later, about baseball. Because Roger
is American, and him and Jamie have been playing baseball all day in an amateur London weekend league organised by a load of working fellas called expats, who are mostly American, with some German and some Japanese too, and all united by their love of baseball. And even though Roger’s at least fifty, he’s dead competitive, and a bit of a home-run king, and doesn’t tell anyone at Sunday baseball that Jamie’s his boyfriend, just in case it distracts them from everything that’s going on in the strike zone.

Roger’s easily the oldest in the room, and with the wrinkly face and baldy head to prove it. But he’s also the chattiest, and is an even better storyteller than Billy. Roger sits at the head of the table and goes on for ages, telling me and the group at one and the same time about how he met Jamie, who’s a tiny little fella, and from Italy, and doesn’t speak much English but seems to be having the best time of anyone in the room because he can’t stop laughing. Roger, whose job was very important back in the day, and was all about importing and exporting, was on a business trip to Rome last year, when he found Jamie living rough on the streets and swallowing swords for a living down on the Piazza Cavour. At this point he says, No jokes please, ladies! But no one laughs, except Jamie, who’s in hysterics. Roger finishes this whole long and epic story about sweeping Jamie off the streets and cleaning him up, and getting him off the drugs and generally making him shipshape again for a new life in London, by his side. And then, at the very end of it he just bursts out laughing himself and says that he was only joking, and that he met Jamie in the bar of Hilton on Park Lane, because they were both at the same conference. At which point Jamie laughs even louder than before and says, through snatched breaths, over and over again, Same conference! Heeheehee! Same conference!

We have wine too, which is a first for me. I have tasted it
before, in the concoctions at parties that you’d collect at the end of the night, mixed with the dregs of gin and vodka, and you’d have a sip that would make you want to retch but get you buzzy enough to dance to the hoolie section of the hoolie. But this is different. This is a full glass of red wine, ruby red, sitting there in front of me, like a real person, in a wine glass, with no rush, and no need to slug it all down because someone might see me and tell my mam that I was shaming the family. In fact, it’s the complete opposite here, because whenever I’ve barely a sip taken out of the glass Soz whizzes over to my shoulder and fills it right up to the brim again.

I totally lose track of how many sips I’ve had, but I know the evening’s going well because at one point Roger gets everyone to listen as he calls me his Celtic companion, and asks me to tell him my story. I’ve been sandwiched in between Roger and Jamie all night. This is, says Billy, to stop them gossiping like a pair of dizzy
riah shushers
, but I’ve mainly been listening to Roger tell me about anything and everything to do with his life. He started with the easy stuff, about baseball, and about all the London galleries that he’d brought Jamie to in the past twelve months, and how he was educating this little Italian brute in the cultured ways of the English and the sporting ways of the Americans. At which point Jamie peeked his head round my shoulder, gave Roger a nice firm puck in the shoulder, and burst out laughing again, saying, Little brute! Heeheehee! Little brute!

By the time the chocolate brownies arrive, however, Roger’s gone all serious. He’s telling me about his bastard dad, and his childhood in upstate New York, and how there are two types of gays in this world – those that are born gay, and those that are turned gay by someone else, which is a bit like being a vampire, or a Jedi from
Star Wars
. The ‘someone else’ who turned him to the gay side, as it happened, he says, was his bastard dad. A bastard rapist who ruined every night of his childhood until he
found a way, when he was barely a teenager, to break free, and flee for good, into the waiting arms of the big city. Just like you, he says, giving me a wink as he does.

I’ve had buckets of wine at this stage, so I tell him that I’m not gay myself, but that I know a gay man back in Dublin. Although, I say, straightaway correcting myself, he’s actually more of a rapist than a gay man. A bit like your dad, I suppose. Roger looks hugely hurt for a second, as if it was OK for him to say rude things about his dad, but not someone like me. He runs a hand slowly over his smooth bald head, and then grabs his glass and thwacks it with a fork and asks me, in front of everyone, to tell the table my story.

This creates a bit of a weird atmosphere, and Billy tells Roger to leave me alone. Soz snaps at Billy, and tells him not to be such a mother hen, and joins sides with Roger, saying that he wants to hear my story too. The effect is immediate on me, and it’s like someone instantly turns me upside down and empties all the red wine out of my body, and I sober up. I take ages, but when I see that I’m not wriggling out of this, I eventually choke out the words, Well, I’m from Dublin. This gets a huge round of applause and cheering, and Roger does an impression of someone going flying backwards off his chair due to the sheer excitement from hearing such a sizzling piece of info. And, I say, after another age, calling up the one detail that’s never far from my mind, I have a girlfriend, and she’s not very well. Everyone goes Booo at this, and throws crumpled-up paper napkins at me. And Soz says, Rubbish! Tell us your real story!

I look over Billy’s shoulder, and think about dashing for the door, but either the remains of the red wine, or something about the kindness in Billy’s eyes brings me back to myself. Inside I say, Feck it, and I think about confession back home, and how Mam always says that confession works the best when you don’t know the priest that well, and how Maisie O’Mally would drive
halfway round the whole city of Dublin in order to find a faraway church in godforsaken nowheresville with a priest that she’d only visit just this once in her life and never again if she ever had anything really serious to tell. So I look around the room at the lads, and I know that this kind of thing is totally up their streets, and even though I feel mad with nerves at the prospect, I close my eyes for the night that’s in it, take a deep breath and give it a go.

Well, I say, there was this priest back home. Everyone cheers at this. Soz says, Now we’re cookin! And Roger leans in very close. I say that the priest gave me a rude book once, and then I stop. My leg is twitching again, real fast like. I can feel the energy bubbling up inside me. I have to shut my mouth tight, coz I swear I’m going to start speaking in tongues. And the book, I say. And my dad, I say. And the camping. And Saidhbh. And Saidhbh.

I’m suddenly pouring sweat, and these are the only words I can get out. Little short sharp barks. All my strength goes into holding my jaw wire-shut, because I don’t want to freak everyone to Jaysus. If I let go, I have no idea what sort of gibberish could come spewing forth. And for a moment I’m completely stuck, with my mouth stretched wide in this madly frozen grin, and my panicking eyes staring out around at four increasingly confused faces.

Deano says that it’s all about energy control. He says that if the School of Astral Sciences has taught him anything it’s that we are all energetic beings who are constantly absorbing power from the Earth’s core, and that if we have a block inside us, or if we don’t let it out, we build up energetic steam, like a human pressure cooker, that can become monumental in strength if properly directed. And if we don’t explode it all out away from us we’ll end up re-directing the energy around the insides of our bodies and giving ourselves cancer and terminal illnesses. I wonder if that’s what happened to Dad. Was he blocked because of a life
spent selling office furniture and paying for six kids when all he really wanted to do was hang out and tell breastfeeding jokes with Mam? Or did he just get cancer?

Either way, Roger and the boys are not impressed with my rubbish story and sudden stutter. Soz slowly pushes his chair back, and stands up on the spot. He says, returned to gruff man mode, that he’s had enough of this shit, and rips off his shirt. Oh yes, he then says, beaming at the others, it’s that time of night! Jamie too leaps up in his seat and gives a whoop of excitement, just as Roger unbuckles his belt and lets his trousers drop to the floor, revealing a pair of navy-blue baseball shorts. Holiday time! he says staring over at Billy, who looks in my direction and gives me an apologetic shrug. Soz reaches down behind the table and fiddles with the stereo. The hiss from the speakers tells me that he’s gone full volume, for the benefit of us lot, and all of Earls Court.

Ignoring me completely, all four men march into the middle of the sitting room, which is the same as the dining room and the telly room and the kitchen, because it’s all one flat, so they move to a part of the carpet that’s furthest away from both the couch and the table. The ceiling light goes down, and Billy puts on a side light that has a red bulb that makes the room look all ace and disco-y. Madonna suddenly blares. She’s singing ‘Holiday’. The men dance. They do dead professional,
Top of the Pops
style moves. I watch for ages, right through ‘Dress You Up’ and ‘Into the Groove’, without making a move. Just watching, and smiling, and feeling relieved about the fact that we’ve stopped telling stories. By the time ‘Borderline’ comes on I get up and join them on the floor. I copy some of their moves, but mostly I throw in my own special shapes, from the Gary bedroom days. They love this, and they do a lot of woo-woos, even once making a little circle around me while I do my stuff in the centre. I do a bit of mock-acting-dancing too, so when Madonna sings that it’s the
borderline, and that she feels like she’s going to lose her mind, I hold my hands to either side of my head and pretend that I’m pulling my hair out. For the slower bits of the song I make it interesting by doing some of the high kicks that Madonna does in the video.

When ‘Lucky Star’ comes on we break up into groups. Me and Billy do face to face, while Soz, Roger and Jamie form into a little dancing triangle. Me and Billy hold hands too, but in a jokey way, like the way aunties and uncles dance with kids at hoolies, or like he’s the disco-king instructor and he’s showing me what to do with my arms, when to pull, when to push, and when to wave them around in giant alternating circles. And while all this is happening, and while Madonna is singing about watching the very first star that makes everything all right, Billy leans into my ear, still dancing and bopping and wiggling my hands, and shouts full blast, like you do in a real-life disco, So this priest, yeah?! He diddled you, yeah?!

I don’t stop bopping either, but I nod like mad, making sure, nonetheless, to keep my nods in time with the beat of ‘Lucky Star’. It’s my way of saying, yes, yes, God and Jesus, yes, but through the power of disco nods rather than words. Billy doesn’t ask anything else. He just shakes his head, side to side, still to the beat, makes his eyes go slitty in anger, and then mouths the word, wanker. We dance in silence until the end of the song, and then ‘Burning Up’ comes on. Billy gives my hands a right squeeze, followed by a huge arm swoosh left and right, and then he spins me sideways, right into Soz, Roger and Jamie’s triangle, which is where I remain for the rest of the bop.