Yearn (12 page)

Looking up, he found that he had entered the narrow lanes of Soho; instinct had led him back to the streets of his childhood and his father's flat—or was it guilt? He checked his Rolex watch. It was too late to arrive at his father's door; the stall owner would most probably have fallen asleep on the couch by now, after a four-thirty morning start at the market. Eddy could envisage the sleeping bulk of him, a craggy silhouette against the back wall, snoring softly in front of
Match of the Day
or some such football reportage as the television blinked into the perpetually darkened lounge room. It would be cruel to wake him so late, and besides, Eddy hadn't seen him in over twelve months. Not wanting to dwell on the reasons why, the trader sauntered on farther into the warren of sex shops, upmarket delicatessens, boutiques, and gay pubs. The streets were alive with tourists, day-trippers, and the homosexual regulars as they window-shopped, ate at café tables set out on the narrow pavement, and hovered around the sex clubs.

But it was hard for Eddy to forget who he was and what he'd compromised as he pushed his way through the pedestrians. His stomach ached from the heavy English food he'd felt compelled to finish at dinner, and his head spun from the cognac and cigar he'd shared with Lord Harwood. He longed for a pint at his local pub but that was at least three city blocks away. As he walked past the comic book shops and the rubber fetish boutiques, memories from his childhood bubbled up, dancing like jeering skeletons against his conscience. What kind of self-made man was he if he had to lie about who he really was? How would he explain his not-actually-dead father to Cynthia? And what was going to happen if Lord Harwood actually did ask Professor Huntington-Blithe about him? How was he going to orchestrate the wedding to avoid a collision between his world and Cynthia's world? What kind of public humiliation and other unimaginably awkward moments awaited him? The education and history, that profound sense of entitlement that came from such an upbringing—you couldn't fake that forever. Sooner or later his past would catch up with him and he would be bound to be exposed.

No matter from which angle he examined the dilemma, Eddy couldn't see a way to resolve it without revealing his true background, and that, in Cynthia's family circles, would be both social suicide and the end of the engagement. Perhaps he should break it off now. He stopped walking, imagining the scenario, Cynthia's disbelief and shock, the hurt. It was intolerable. The trouble was he really did care for her. If only there had been some glamorous wisp of childhood achievement he could hold on to—a scholarship, an unexpected friendship with Princess Diana when she visited Berwick Street Market perhaps? Anything! But all he had were the long bouts of truancy and his early mercantile sensibility, none of which stood to win accolades from Lord Harwood no matter how much money he had in the bank.

He stepped off the curb and was almost run over by a speeding Jaguar. Suddenly his frustrations erupted. He ran after the limo, swearing and waving his fist in the air, just managing to thump the boot before it swung into a narrow lane. Gasping for breath, he doubled over, watched by a couple of amazed tourists. Now ashamed, he tried to saunter off casually, but his whole body was infused with anger. There was only one cure he knew of when he felt like this, one way of jolting him back into his own skin—a visit to a brothel. Sex did this to him, anonymous violent sex lacking emotion or expectation, just the clean morality of trade. And so, cheered by the idea, the metals dealer made his way to his favorite knocking shop on Old Compton Street.

 • • • 

Illuminated by a single Tiffany lamp, the receptionist, a defiantly resplendent transvestite on the wrong side of forty with a face like a veil of sorrow, looked up as the bell above the door rang. “Oh, evenin' Mr. Jenkins, “fraid your usual ain't in, got sick with the flu. But we got a new girl working who is very much to your taste. Does it all, bells and whistles, cocks and thistles,” she concluded in a flat monotone that excluded the possibility of irony. Suddenly animated, she tidied a lock of fuzzy red hair that had somehow escaped her tortured coiffure. “You interested, then?”

“You know me . . .” Eddy shrugged.

“I do indeed,” she replied without guile, “just give me a minute.” She picked up the telephone and turned her back to him. “I have a gentleman downstairs, partial to brunettes,” she said into the phone. “. . . Will do, dear.” She finished the conversation, then swung back to Eddy. “Room twenty-one, she's available now, same price.”

Eddy handed over his credit card and began making his way to the staircase at the back of the narrow reception room. At the foot of the stairs he turned.

“Has she got a name, then?”

The receptionist glanced down at her narrow black tome. “Goes by the working name of Jezebel. Nice gal, no nonsense,” the receptionist added. “Real polite.”

The girl was sitting with her back to him on the clean single bed with the canopy of cheap Indian silk slung above it. Her long black hair reached halfway down her narrow back, which was encased in a black rubber corset, her hips curving out beneath it. She had that pale English skin he was partial to, and looked to be full-bodied. Eddy was old-fashioned in that way. He liked his women curvy, breasts and arse, something to bury yourself in. Secretly, he had never found Cynthia's fashionably bony physique sexy, as beautiful as she was. He stepped toward the girl; already he was hard with anticipation and his throat was dry. He was looking forward to the thumping violence of sex, to shaking off the restraint he'd maintained all that evening, through the humiliating dinner, through all the probing and questions, through the hee-haw of his own fake accent.

She swung around and he immediately lost his erection. They stared at each other. He froze, knowing she hadn't recognized him yet, while he would have known her anywhere, even in a black wig, rubber corset, and G-string, after all those years. And, my God, was she still beautiful, he noted ruefully.

“Eddy? Eddy Jenkins?” The voice was the same, maybe an octave lower but then it had been a good ten years since he'd seen her and she would have only been sixteen then.

“Janey. Janey Lewis,” he said, his accent reverting to its natural cockney. “A bit of a comedown, ain't it?” He gestured vaguely around the room and then regretted it as, to his surprise, a deep blush swept across her porcelain skin.

“You're not bloody wrong. Times are a little tight but you've got to make good wiv wot God gave yer, right?” She pulled the wig off and her naturally blond hair cascaded down her back. “They said you liked brunettes. . . .”

“I lied.” He grinned back, catching her awkwardness.

She pulled a black chiffon wrap over her shoulders. “But you look good. You good?”

“Good? I'm wicked.” He tried smiling again but now found he was too nervous. And besides, he didn't know whether to stay standing or sit; there was only space to sit beside her on the bed and that would be a commitment. He stayed standing.

“Got a fag?” she asked, nervous herself.

Eddy reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack that he only kept for emergencies. This was an emergency, he decided; in fact the whole evening was shaping up to be one of those nights where the unexpected transforms itself into the epic whether one wants it to or not, and an old survivor like him had no choice but to enjoy the ride. Fate. It was a bloody joker but he still didn't know whether to sit down beside her.

To his relief Janey took the cigarette and then patted the bed. He sank down beside her, painfully aware of the scent of her skin, the depth of her cleavage, the warmth emanating from her thigh brushing up against his own, and he was instantly reminded of the back of the school playground; the smell of hot tarmac and wood, fake tanning lotion and cheap cigarette smoke, the muggy London days when they huddled together for an illicit fag between classes. Memories rushed in—Janey aged fourteen dancing to his stereo, laughing, her school shirt clinging to her breasts; Janey applying lipstick to help them get into an X-rated movie at the Marble Arch Odeon; Janey waiting for him at the school gate after he was held in detention.

It had been unrequited love from the ages of twelve to sixteen, one of those crushingly tormented obsessions that, as a teenager, had kept him wrestling the night for far longer than he'd ever admitted to anyone. In fact, he concluded silently, not having Janey had made him the man he was today. He knew that now, but then who was that man, that ingratiating idiot, who'd just had dinner with Lord fucking Harwood? It certainly wasn't Eddy the ambitious teenager who'd once boasted to Janey that he would never ever be ashamed of his background, no matter how successful he became.

He glanced over; she'd never known how much he'd wanted her all those years ago. Why not? Why hadn't he ever told her? he wondered, marveling at the turn of fate that now placed him as the rich client and her—the indisputable and ruling queen of all his teenage wet dreams—as the whore.

“I don't know who to be more embarrassed for: you the sucker for paying for it or me the scrubber putting out.”

“I don't 'ave to pay for it, you know.” He couldn't help sounding defensive. She smiled and placed her hand on his knee.

“Oh I know that, Eddy, 'andsome bastard like you. I should be paying you.”

At which they both burst into laughter and, for the first time in months, Eddy relaxed into his own skin.

“Eh, do you remember that time we played truant to go and see that reggae band play?” she asked him.

“And you almost started a race riot by flirting wiv the lead singer?”

“Yeah, well, Sean was a right jealous bastard.”

Sean had been Janey's official boyfriend, a big oaf of a seventeen-year-old, but what he lacked in intelligence he made up for in blinding loyalty. Irish and inclined to violence, he was extremely possessive, although in truth Janey did what she wanted with whom she wanted, with the long-suffering Sean in tow. “Perhaps that was why I never declared myself,” Eddy thought as he furtively scanned Janey's chiseled profile, the long thick eyelashes batting her cheeks, the round green eyes and disproportionally full mouth that, set against her heart-shaped face, looked as if it had been stolen from another, larger-faced woman. He knew it had been fear of rejection that had stopped him from declaring his infatuation, for to be rejected by Janey would have meant being rejected by all that he aspired to at sixteen, and, at the time, he could not afford the humiliation or the disillusionment. “So maybe my reticence has paid off,” he rationalized silently. “After all, I might have married Janey and be slumming it in a council flat with three kids by now.”

Nevertheless, now that he was here, in a position to be able to pay for her affections, it was not the same. If he paid he would never know if she really wanted him or just his money. And as he looked at her—those green eyes that were always a curious mixture of intelligence and tentativeness, the unspoken life of poverty they'd shared, those narrow pale shoulders crying out to be defended—he was filled with an overwhelming yearning to have her and, more than that, to be wanted by her; that night-wrestling, sweat-drenched obsessive love had never entirely disappeared, it had just lain dormant all these years, like some bloody great hidden iceberg waiting to smash into his life. Now frightened of betraying his emotions, he tried to sound casual.

“Wot do I call you, Janey or Jezebel?”

“Given the circumstances it might be easier if it was Jezebel.” She half-smiled a little sadly, then stubbed her cigarette out in the big glass ashtray that sat, along with a vibrator, a packet of condoms, KY jelly, and peppermints, on the bedside table.

“So wot would you like, big boy?”

Her long fingers reached for his fly and for a moment he was tempted. Just then the shadow of a forgotten night, buried because it was too painful, came flooding back, the night that had ended up crushing his adolescent hopes. Now all the colors, gestures, and emotions of his younger self lodged themselves firmly in the forefront of his mind. As if to bat away a moth, he waved his hand, but the memory would not be denied. He even remembered the date: 15 June 1998. Perhaps there was a way of exorcising it. He pushed Janey's fingers away.

“There is something. . . .”

 • • • 

They stumbled out into the street, Janey now wearing a demure day dress over her lingerie, Eddy in his suit. He'd paid a hefty sum to retain the prostitute's services overnight, and the receptionist hadn't even arched her famous eyebrows as the two stepped out.

The first thing Eddy did was to lead Janey to the Comic Empire on Firth Street. It had been there for years and had been on the walk home from school. It was at the Comic Empire that Eddy had first got up the courage to speak to the twelve-year-old Janey. He'd seen her over at the
Jackie
magazine section, her school skirt hitched up ridiculously high, tottering on platform shoes. To Eddy the boy she was the embodiment of all his sexual fantasies as she pulled a length of chewing gum from between her lipsticked mouth to carefully arrange it over George Michael's features, as seen on the cover of one of the magazines. He remembered her first words to him like it was yesterday: “Oi, wot you looking at?” delivered with what seemed like exactly the right degree of poise and panache. Later Janey had introduced him to the four other teenagers who made up the disparate gang she hung around with. Even now he remembered his intense disappointment when Sean, who towered over him, pushed forward to introduce himself as her boyfriend.

At the door Eddy looked up at the old neon sign, now blinking erratically. It hadn't changed, and as they stepped into the shop he had the same rush of adrenaline he'd always experienced as a youth. The same old poster hung above the door as it had years earlier; the shop even had the same old paper smell, and it still displayed the same shelves piled up with editions of comic books, some dating as far back as the 1950s.