“Good morning,” Fran says. “I knew this would wake you.”
The kitchen smells delicious. His nose twitches.
He’s in bright-red pyjamas. He must have brought them with him. They don’t look cheap. His eyes are still half-closed. He looks rumpled and sweet. His hair — his fur, she corrects herself — lies every which way. He reaches for the coffee pot and smacks his lips at the gurgle and slosh of thick black coffee into his waiting mug.
“My father says when I was tiny I used to drink black coffee out of my baby bottle,” he says.
My, Fran thinks once more, what a deep, sexy little voice this young man has.
She comes to sit opposite and proffers her own mug. The spots on his hand on the coffee-jug handle, the spots all over his face, down his neck, on the V of tightly muscled chest peaking through his pyjamas…these spots are the colour of black coffee. Irregular rings, like dark-brown lipstick marks, all over his body.
Why, Fran! she thinks mischievously. You’re getting all sexy and silly over this boy child less than a third of your age. This visiting child who has entrusted himself to your care.
“Today,” Jep says, “will you take me to Newton Aycliffe?”
He says the name as if it is something fantastic. Something magical out of a book, like the Emerald Palace in the Land of Oz. Perhaps to him, that’s what it is. Names of unseen things can take on, through repeated tellings, a certain charm.
“Of course,” Fran tells him, finding that she is staring at his sharp, trimmed nails. His sleek, soot-rimmed ears.
“I feel like I know the place, you know. It’s the place I’m really from. We moved around so much when they were bringing me up...we never stuck any town for very long. But I always heard about Aycliffe. About Phoenix Court. I can’t wait to see it for myself.”
“You might be disappointed.” Suddenly, fiercely, Fran doesn’t want this boy to be disappointed.
“My dad used to say a place is what you make it,” he says, with a self-deprecating shrug.
“Which dad?”
“Both of them.”
Fran chuckles. “Well…”
Jep says, “Whatever it’s like in Phoenix Court, I’ll love seeing the place I come from.”
Fran walks to her wide picture window. From here, in this intense north-country light, you can almost see Aycliffe’s brown and silver buildings.
“Bonny lad...it’ll be a pleasure taking you to visit. I’ve not been back for years, you know.”
Jep gives her one of his uncertain smiles.
Then Fran starts slicing bread for her toaster. She puts the kettle on, then the radio, for an old-fashioned song. She’s enjoying this time with her new house guest. Breakfast with the bright, leopard-printed boy.
Me, having left my baby in the care of strangers, making my second trip to Twenty One, ‘Scotland’s Only Sauna Exclusively For Gay Gentlemen’. Making the best of my afternoon’s freedom, my baby with the posh couple upstairs, who have befriended us.
The eager, sopping quadrille performed by:
1) The muscled, beautiful boy who looks like he might be a sailor from the tall ships, which have been racing for the tourists down in the Leith docks. It is tall-ships weekend and the town is full of pantomime sailors in twos and threes in their pristine outfits.
2) The footballer. Pretty, too. He looked like a footballer. He had a footballer’s body. A footballer’s nonchalance in the sauna, slipping his towel open as if just to air his bollocks. I told him, as we sat on the bench, about my last visit here. “Ay, it’s a funny place,” he said. “Look at him over there, wearing shorts. Is he playing hard to get?” In here it smells of ginger biscuits and sperm.
3) The stick-thin boy, falling asleep in the jacuzzi, hugging his knees, blushing in the steam as the others sitting ring-a-ring-a-rosy tossed each other off.
4) Me.
The dark room, by tea-time, was full of standing bodies you could just about see. It was like that indefinable moment on a dance floor when someone has cleverly led the way and by the time the next fab song has come along, it’s swarming with bodies. The ice is broken.
Me and the footballer stood by the door, apart, watching the broad, white backs of the others. Noises of slippy lube and sweat, the creak of black pvc chairs. And, when I listened hard, there was music, like incidental music from a science-fiction film. The occasional discreeet cough.
The blond sailor stood by the potted palms and the spill of light. He let his towel drop with a thump and displayed one of those silly, huge, clublike cocks. He joined the group in the dark, in the middle of the room. Everyone clustered around him. He had twenty mouths on him. The footballer was joined by the thin boy. I could see them reach inside towels and bring each other out. The footballer glanced over his partner’s shoulder to give me an ironic look. Then he pushed his thin boy aside and joined the rest of them.
I went back to the sauna to sit on the warm wood in the orange light. A very thin, sick-looking clone was vigorously massaging the glistening front of a very fat man who lay along the bench. He slapped his great wobbling cock and balls around and a cluster of other punters stood by and watched, because there was nothing else to look at. Through the window I watched others in the jacuzzi, sitting poker-faced under the froth.
I hoped the upstairs people were taking care of Jep. The woman worked from home. She sold artworks and was doing a kind of apprenticeship. Just recently they had decided to make themselves known to me, though we knew each other by sight. Every time they went in or out of their flat they would stare through my front window and glass door. I felt they already knew all about my life, before they
