Angie gathers a gaggle of fans. She is known here. As soon as we arrive, coming down the cellar steps, Angie leading the way in a floor-length shiny black PCV mac, we are surrounded. Fat Terrance, who claims to be half-Austrian, comes to sit beside her first. He wants to sing umpah-umpah songs again, he says, like they did a few weeks ago. They both know the same songs from their homeland. He beats a rapid time with his two big palms. His face is shiny and red and he swipes at it with a hanky. Before others join us, he talks earnestly about how he can make people have a nice time. He is like Angie, he tells her. He can be the bright spark in company. It’s all his brilliant facade, he tells us, as others sit round our table. My facade, he repeats, giving it a hard ‘c’.
Fat Terrance envies us and how we live in the middle of the city. He commutes from Falkirk each Friday night for his weekly excursion onto the gay scene. He says that when you have so little time you have to thrust yourself in on people, even when you don’t feel like it. “Because,” he goes, “all contact is about the eyes and you can’t do that on the phone or in writing, can you?” He’s looking at us dolefully and then, with one grand gesture, sweeps up all our empty glasses and dashes to the bar to buy us more pints. With all of Angie’s fellers around, I’m being bought loads of drinks.
A man with a tash who worked in Kentucky Fried Chicken was wearing a horrible shirt he proudly said had cost him a fiver in Debenhams. He sat taller than anyone else at our table on a very high stool. He clicked his fingers at the barman – his ex, he confided, tapping his nose raffishly – and had us more drinks brought. “But honey, I cannot let you,” said Angie. “For that money you earn hard plucking chickens!”
A burly man in leather sat by Angie. He told her she knew where he was if she wanted to take all of her clothes off later. Then he leaned across to tell me about his regular Amsterdam trips. “The bars with the dark rooms aren’t like they are here,” he said, sounding disgusted. “Over there they’re for real. It’s not two fuckin’ sad old bastards looking at each other across the room. I went to this one fuckin’ leather bar and this bloke wanted me to get in the fuckin’ cage with him. I said, ‘had away and fuck yersel’. Git away to fuck.’ He got in there with someone else and I watched them. That’s what I do over there. I like to go and see what’s going on.”
He slipped away from our party then, and came back ten minutes later, left again, came back. They all did that. Went to stand in different places, went downstairs. I had a look round the dark bar. All the rude, luminous murals. Skeletons with club-like cocks.
When I came back we’d been joined by Alan from Honduras. He was doing applied linguistics and wanting to write a manual on Scottish dialects for the folk back home. He was quiet, dark and twinkling.
“Oh, his eyes are beautiful,” said Fat Terrance later. “And he took a shine to you,” he told me. I said I thought he was genuine. We talked about the royal family and royal babies and I was camping it up something rotten, making then listen and laugh. I went into this whole routine about how I wanted to have a baby, like dykes can, and what I might do with a turkey baster. I said I’d love to have a baby.
“How we laughed!” Angie said. “We laughed and we laughed till the cows ran home!” Fat Terrance flings back his head and shrieks. While he’s laughing, his eyes are flicking nervously about the rest of the room. Then they sang their funny songs again. Angie did songs from Cabaret.
On our way across town we stopped for one in a drag bar.
Fat Terrance: “Oh, I couldn’t go for all that. Do you think that’s nice? Some of them are nice. They’re attractive boys underneath it all. But that one...oh, here. She looks like a clown. Or a monkey. A monkey made up like a clown.”
I was introduced to the transvestite manager. Held hands very delicately. We sat on the stage, under the lights, Angie creaking in her belted raincoat. I knocked over her pint and it pooled across the stage and soaked into the red plush curtains.
In Route 66 there was a French rugby team in. Fat Terrance said he didn’t like the look of them. “I won’t be going up Calton Hill tonight if that lot are up there,” he said with a shudder. “Goodness, you’d hear them coming, wouldn’t you?”
They were backslapping and doing the French national anthem. And was it just me, or were they singing ‘Wonderwall’ in French? Fat Terrance went for the nightbus. Angie stood outside, deciding whether to brave the crush inside CC’s or to taxi home.
“Listen, honey, I’ve had a lovely evening, the nicest evening, but now I must leave you.”
Off she tottered. I went to CC’s, bursting with a sudden enthusiasm, topped up with nine pints. I felt smart, dressed as a skinhead, boots and braces. I talked with the bouncer – the same one who wanted to throw out Cameron later.
“But what’s he done?” I asked the bouncer. For a ghastly moment I thought he was going to say Cameron was underage. And there I’d been in the yellow corridor outside the gents’, letting the boy stick his tongue in my mouth.
“He spilt beer all over the manageress,”
