“We could go and see her if you liked,” Cliff said.
They found a bar instead.
Whenever Cliff comes City he wants to know about the gay scene. It’s funny but I can never be bothered, really. It’s the same old thing wherever you god. Smell of poppers, dance music, old fellas sitting round.
It’s not something I’m used to but Cliff likes it and so I go.
This bar we’re in, Friday teatime, is like a barn and filling up already. I’m forty-one and sitting in a bar where the only words in the song they’re playing that I can make out are, ‘Tie me up’. If I wasn’t in a frock, would I look like the other, older men here?
Cliff has a theory about me and gay bars. If he believed in it, he wouldn’t bring me to another one, but he does anyway. He says they are the places I look less real. Is it because of strobe lighting? My make-up looks put on with a shovel. Once he said I had this mask on. When he said it my face could barely move. My eyes felt like holes cut into an egg shell. My clothes feel over-dressy, but that’s not me trying to look smart, me trying to outshine. It’s me sending up the idea of wearing women’s clothes. That’s what it looks like when you put me here. That’s what, I think, Cliff ’s trying to say. Here, everyone can tell I’m a man.
No one has to look twice. Of course I’m going to hate a place like that. The scene unwomans me.
The room this time is small. When they open the window for more air the noise of the rain is too fierce. It bounces off the glass and soaks into the golden, velvety curtains.
Liz lies her slimmer, paler body over her lover’s and wriggles herself as if into him. His cool knees press against her sides and how secure she feels. Her palms rest flat on his stomach. So hard, like a carapace, like the red, cooked shell of a lobster. Imagine sliding your lover under the grill.
And what else did he say — that expert — about cooking a lobster?
She stirs, wondering what to do with him next. Their eyes lock over his body and they pause. Seconds creep by.
He said you have to keep their claws still with elastic bands, or they’ll cut you to ribbons. They’ll nip your vitals off. And here is Cliff, flat on the mattress, trussed up with the belts from both their dressing gowns. His wrists are bound and lashed to the door handle of the en suite bathroom. How he loves to be beyond control like this.
Liz looks him over, gives the smooth, rosy skin of his rib cage a cautious lick. She savours the bouquet of their mingled smells and pulls both their cocks together in one hand.
She’s almost delirious with tiredness because once again they’ve been awake most of the night. In hotel rooms and B&Bs they’ve taken to watching late movies, one after another. Tonight in this fuggy Glasgow hotel room they’ve seen Queen Christina. Garbo dressing in a velvet Robin Hood suit in snowy old Russia, being a pretend boy to woo a Spanish nobleman. Playing Cesario to his perplexed — until he sees her breasts — Orsino.
As they make love Liz thinks about the film. She looks far away. Cliff has noticed that this is what she’s like, in the seconds before she comes. When she does, her sperm shoots past him, falls on the pillow case with a loud crackle in his ear. Cliff comes at the exact same moment she does. He always does. Somehow, like spies, they’ve managed to get themselves synchronized.
He lies quiet and waits for Liz either to untie him or wipe him off. He feels covered, as if someone has painted him with the stuff. Jackson Poilocked, he rests with Liz’s slight weight keeping him down. He stares at her thin chest and torso. The plump nipples and the odd swelling of her pectorals, almost like an adolescent girl. As if Liz’s gender is changing course through sheer force of will. He knows she is off the hormone treatment. Liz stares down at him, with one fingertip smearing sperm into his hairy stomach, like Nivea.
I dream sometimes when I have sex, she thinks. that’s not to say I get bored and make things up to pass the time. Nor does it mean I’ve fallen asleep and these are real dreams. And I don’t exactly mean those all-too-brief flashes of utopian insight you might get on the way to coming with someone. I don’t exactly mean that, but it’s similar. It’s just funny, what goes round your head when you’re making love.
I saw Cliff in red and gold soldier’s braid, in a horrid woodland, banging on a tree under which he knew a witch lived. She had a home tiled in black and white, well below the stinking forest floor, its roof tangled in tree roots. She showed Cliff the three dogs guarding the three pots of treasure — gold, silver and copper. And the dogs had eyes in ascending sizes; eyes the size of dinner plates, of cartwheels, of round towers. I thought, how does she fit such vastly-eyed hounds in her underground home?
As Cliff thought about stealing the treasure and winding up with the beautiful princess — which was me, of course — I was coming to the realization that it was The Tinder Box, the story I was thinking of.
Cliff took both of us in his hands to make us come; seeding up, making the red tender flesh inside the skin appear, then disappear. Now you see it, now you don’t.
I saw the nude princess strapped to the back of the dog with the biggest eyes. Baying at the yellow moon, he pelted through the streets of the city; obeying the soldier, his new master. And no one from the princess’s family
