All Julian Crouch wanted to be was a rock and roll star.
His dad, George, was the entrepreneur — property and secondhand cars, mostly. He made all the money; married an ex-Miss UK when he was fifty-eight.
That was Julian’s mum, Cindy.
George had the rugged Brilliantine looks of a B-movie hero. George had a Soho tailor and wore handmade shoes. He claimed to have played cards with the Krays and exchanged Christmas cards with Nipper Reed. He drank whisky and smoked cigars and fucked Soho hookers and was apparently loved by all who ever set fucking eyes on him.
George was an old man by the time Julian went to the London College of Music, of which George volcanically disapproved. Julian and George barely exchanged a word for eleven years.
Julian was thirty when, in 1997, George had a fatal aneurysm on the toilet during a long weekend in Portugal. He was reading the Daily Mail, his dead hairy fists closed around it.
By then, Julian knew he’d never be a rock and roll star. He was too old. But his ambitions had shattered and reformed; he could still be a kind of Simon Napier Bell figure, a manager, a bon viveur, a club owner, an entrepreneur.
So he stepped in and took over the family business. The cars and the properties ticked along nicely, essentially looked after themselves. He left that side of it to his mum.
He moved into recording studios, nightclubs, dotcoms. And fair play, he made a fortune. In 1998, he invested in, then quickly sold, tookool. com, an online store and delivery service for funky urbanites.
Tookool’s primary attraction, its free delivery, also proved to be its undoing. It went bust in 2000. But by then, Julian had already sold it, making somewhere in the region of ten million pounds. Not much, as dotcom fortunes went, but not bad.
That was pretty much Julian’s entrepreneurial high point. Over the years, asset after asset turned to dust in his hands. The recording studio, Merciless Inc., failed to attract a single major artist and shut its doors in 2004. The nightclubs bumped along the bottom, did okay, never really caught on.
Julian married Natalie. She wasn’t a Miss UK and she never stopped traffic. She did, however, slow it on occasion.
Natalie’s divorcing him. Julian estimates that she’s about to cost him approximately two and a half thousand pounds per orgasm. Probably the first fifty orgasms were worth it. Probably not enough to fill a can of Red Bull.
Then Cindy died and the world economy fell over and the property empire began to subside beneath his feet.
There was a biblical metaphor in there somewhere, something about sand, but Julian had been too busy trying not to sink to look it up.
He’d been able to shrug off the failure of the nightclubs and the recording studio. His timing had been off, that was all.
The collapse of the property empire, however, was vertiginously alarming.
‘Capital,’ George had taught him, ‘is what you don’t spend.’
Julian’s capital was spent.
And now Lee Kidman and Barry Tonga stand dripping in his hallway, the hallway he is shortly to lose if he doesn’t sell that fucking terrace in Shoreditch to that flash fucking Russian from Moscow on fucking Thames.
Basically, they’re here to ask for their money. But Julian’s not really listening.
His eyes drift, as they often do, to Lee Kidman’s crotch. He finds himself contemplating the animal furled in there, that thick and lazy beast.
Julian is not by inclination homosexual, he’s seen Kidman perform in quite a few pornos, pornos of the British variety: middle-aged hookers pretending to be housewives, women who look like they’ve hastily trimmed their snatches with Bic disposables and no foam, ostensibly offered twenty-five quid for a fuck in the back of a van then — ha ha! — left stranded by the side of the road.
Julian recognizes these films for what they are, comforting fantasies of availability, they’re all whores in the end, blah blah blah. He doesn’t, in and of themselves, find them erotic or stimulating, not beyond the occasional animal twitch in his crotch for a pleasured moan or an animal groan, or a pale jiggling breast.
But Lee Kidman’s cock!
Lee Kidman doesn’t use a disposable Bic. He looks depilated and smooth as an Action Man. His cock is as thick as Julian’s wrist. Julian is fascinated by the laziness of it — the way it’s too big to point upwards. It just kind of dangles there. The women stuff it into whatever orifice like half a kilo of uncooked sausages.
Lee Kidman’s cock has started to insinuate itself into Julian’s dreams. It’s not like he wants to do anything with it, let alone have it inside him: the thought fills him with a shudder of biological terror — imagine trying to get that thing in your mouth!
And it takes Kidman so long to come. Although, to be fair, Julian expects it wouldn’t take as long with a man. But still.
Kidman is aware of Julian glancing at his crotch. There’s a kind of half-smile for it.
Julian says, ‘Is the old man still in the house?’
‘Yeah,’ says Kidman. ‘But that copper’s not hanging round any more. Which was the point.’
‘And you did it right? He got the message.’
‘He got the message.’
‘And there’ll be no comebacks?’
‘Nah.’
‘Because I don’t want to go to prison, Lee.’
Julian is terrified of prison. His therapist calls it cleisiophobia: the fear of being locked in an enclosed space. But it’s not that. It’s the fear of being locked in an enclosed space with men who have cocks like Lee Kidman.
‘Seriously,’ Julian says. ‘This is an old man living alone in a shitty little house. How hard can it be?’
Kidman and Tonga have the grace to look embarrassed.
Julian says, ‘I’m not giving you a fucking penny until you’ve got that old cunt out of my fucking house. Jesus Christ. You’re unbelievable. Coming round here with the job half done. Have some pride.’
Kidman gives him a mock-innocent look.
Barry Tonga just looks blank, stands there with his massive arms crossed, judging him. And Julian doesn’t like to be judged. It makes him uncomfortable.
He dreams of just getting out from under this shit, just getting on a plane and flying away.
He’s been thinking of moving to Thailand, perhaps opening a little bar. He can see himself in cut-off jeans and flip-flops, generally hanging out.
Of course, if Julian were to get into the Thai bar business, there’d be another tsunami and he’d be left with flotsam and jetsam.
But even that seems better than this: shitty London, shitty properties, shitty old people standing between him and liquidating assets. And the shitty fucking knowledge that George, his dad, would probably know exactly what to do.
Patrick has slept in the park. He’s done it before, when Henry’s in a mood.
It’s the largest open space in London. It’s like being in a different epoch. There are bogs and bracken, archaic oak trees. There are herds of red deer, a population of badgers, even parakeets: birds with incongruous, bright feathers and rosy red beaks.
Patrick walks back to the house. He brings a sack of rabbits for the dogs.
Before moving here, he and his dad lived all over. They even lived abroad for a while, he thinks, possibly in France. But it’s difficult to be sure. Patrick was very young and not permitted to speak to anybody but Henry.
They were long years but not unhappy; there was always so much to do. And there was just him and Henry; the blinding spotlight of Henry’s love, the cold light of Henry’s rage.
Now Patrick walks through the front door and there’s Henry in the living room. Patrick can almost smell his depression.
When Henry’s unhappy you can see the thing inside him, the twisted thing that Patrick thinks of as a demon. It’s ill-knit and crooked, full of hate and wrath.
Patrick lingers in the doorway, in case another beating is imminent. He says, ‘Dad, what’s wrong?’
Henry looks up. He’s not a big man and his hair is dark and neat. His eyes are all wrong.
