“But he’s got a tail!” the woman from upstairs cried at last, when they dared to bring up the subject. They had waited till I referred to Jep’s strangeness, his spots and his pointy teeth. They waited as if they couldn’t believe their own eyes.
“Only a very short tail,” I said. “But isn’t it slinky and marvellous?”
And the next time they came down to visit, they were less nervy and she could even bring herself to pick Jep up. My heart hammered away in my chest as I watched this. Jep, the little traitor, curled into her arms and nuzzled her expensive cardigan. I wondered if he was thinking — with all the instinct he could muster — of reaching up for her nipple. She had large, plump breasts, the young woman from upstairs.
Even now, sitting in the sauna — of course I haven’t told the upstairs people where I go on my afternoons away from Jep — even now I worry that she is sitting in her flat, breast-feeding my baby.
“But how was he born?” they ask me.
And I won’t tell them.
Simply, this is my child. And, being nice middle-class children, they are only too happy to help. I am so obviously in need.
It’s like bumping into Santa Claus in the queer sauna. That’s what I think. Did I tell you that story yet? I told Sandra that story when we were drunk. Sandra’s the woman from upstairs. I took her to the pub one night, leaving Jep with her feller. “Leave the kids together,” she said and laughed, as we scattered off down the fire escape. Drunk, I told her about the queer sauna and how I bumped into Santa Claus. She laughed and laughed. “But you can’t fuck Santa!” she said, and made heads turn. “You can’t, it’s sacrilegious!” And I told her that of course I hadn’t fucked Santa, though he offered himself. I think Sandra might be all right, actually, I told her about some of my life to see what she’d say, and she took it all in her stride. She asked if she could come out some night, some daft, reckless, copping-off night. She says sex with her partner, with David, has gone downhill. He likes Fantasy Football, the X-Files, Oasis, Irvine Welsh. He’s a man’s man, she shrugs.
I was telling her then that the sauna has homely prints on its walls. Landscapes, puppies and donkeys, as in your parents’ house. It plays retro songs upstairs in the locker rooms, which could be the locker rooms to any health-and-fitness place. In the lounge they congregate at about seven thirty to watch Coronation Street. People keep trying to make things homely. Everything tries to make itself homely, that’s what I decide. It pushes itself into your life and then, suddenly, it’s a part of your life. When I try to talk this over with Sandra – who was at college, she did art, she’ll know – I seem to be talking about watching the telly with a load of blokes, all sitting round in their towels. Sometimes the only time you hear them speak is to turn to a fellow watcher and comment on events in the Street. I sat there one day and thought, sex bonds faggots less than Coronation Street does.
Sandra loves Corrie, and Santa and her partner, David. She tells me about these things. She lived in a large house with her six brothers and two sisters. “Though we weren’t very well off, we were very comfortable. I remember my childhood as happy and idyllic. That isn’t a very trendy thing to say, is it?” She looks at me glumly. She has hair bleached trendily gold, leaving a streak of black at the roots. She wears a silver polyester blouse, blue satin hipsters. She has a leopardskin bag with her, which she seems to have covered with her leather jacket, out of tact, I suppose. “I shou1dn’t go on about a perfect childhood,” she smiles, “because that isn’t very pc. You’re meant to have something wrong with you, especially if you want to get on in life. But I can’t suddenly start saying my father abused all his children, can I? Can I? It wasn’t true. He shouted, but no more than any normal man.”
I wonder why she’s going on like this. “All my friends have something deeply wrong with them,” she’s saying. “Sometimes, being as normal as this, I feel left out.” She’s telling me it’s all right for me to be as wacked out as she thinks I am. She must think I’ve an awful lot wrong with me. It wasn’t until now that I thought of it as wrong. I’ll have to put a stop to her. She’ll make me worse than ever. I’ll tell her some more stories to make her hair stand on end. She liked the ones so far.
And we walked home through the dark canyons of Thistle Street. All the restaurants are shut, the windows are dark.
“Shall we go for a walk?” he asked and outside it was misty. The two paths to
