His sister, the blow-job queen, had let me into their house. She was bony and pregnant, looking suspiciously at me as I stepped indoors. The dance music she played downstairs competed with that coming from Cameron’s bedroom. Their parents were at work.
I had arrived in a cab. I’d made the last stretch of my journey by cab to the small estate on the hill. The shapes of the houses and even the garden fences were exactly the same as in Phoenix Court. As we drove slowly round the pointlessly winding streets I got a pang of sadness, of missing Aycliffe, and for running out on Penny. It seems so much has happened to me since I was in Aycliffe. All the lives I’ve been involved with since then. And I thought, What am I running after this boy for? Travelling all this way to his house? Yet I had a surge of enthusiasm, seeing the white little box shapes of the houses. It was like being in Aycliffe, being on home ground, in a way, and I felt like I could deal with anything. A feeling I’ve not had much recently.
The cab driver said, “I know which one number ten is. It’s right at the top of the hill. I’ve been there before. They take taxis everywhere, that family.”
His house was white and pebble-dashed, the windows double-glazed, and they had built a car port onto it. When I told him it was very like Phoenix Court, Cameron sat up in bed and said, “But these aren’t council houses. This is a private estate. This is the posh end of town.”
He shuffled about restlessly, wouldn’t look me in the eye or talk about anything much. He was in the white T-shirt and shorts he’d slept in. That sleepy boy smell, his white hair all ruffled.
At two he was called to work and I had to go. He was nicer, sat himself on my knee, ruffled my hair. I realised I still wore sunglasses, even in his room with the curtains drawn. I told him, with a smile, that he was a little bastard. He opened his wardrobe to show me the clothes he’d bought with his wages. All Calvin Klein. He showed me a small stash of unlabelled videos; pirate hard-core porn from America. In them, you see everything, he said. They don’t fuck with condoms and you see it go in. The one fucking slaps the other guy’s ass to make him open wider. I paled, hearing this. I wondered why he was telling me. He even had on a bit of an American accent as he said it. But he still sounded Scots, even saying ‘ass’ and ‘guy’.
He showed me to the bus stop but, as we walked through the estate, kept a few paces ahead, as if we weren’t together. I felt ridiculous, tagging along. Not for years have I felt so daft, such a dangerously obvious queer. Cameron made me feel like that.
He explained that he wouldn’t be able to phone me, because his dad had put on the phone something called a ‘parental lock’.
I caught the bus and got talking to an old lady who was running into Edinburgh to buy headache pills. What they charged locally was a disgrace, she said. She would buy a bottle of three hundred in Edinburgh and that would keep her going. Only, at bingo, if word went round you had a status, this one has taken on a regular Tuesday-night sheen.
Usually you’re here until the Nolans are finished. It’s summer, so the place is open later. When you leave you find the East End lightening up. You cross Leith Walk, come down Queen Street and by the time you’re home at the red fire escape, it’s nearly daylight.
Tonight the Nolans have finished and you don’t go. More cheesy late-seventies disco hits come on, one after another, and the trendy faggots and dykes squeal and clap in recognition of each one. They come dressed up for Step Back night, in easy-listening clothes, velour, nylon and PVC. Everyone knows the playlist.
You stand at a corner of the dance floor to watch them dance to the Carpenters. You’re by the mirrors, which run with mist, and you watch how many of the dancers come to watch themselves, mime the words of songs at themselves. Or stand on the steps across the floor and stare, not at the dancers, but at their own reflections across the way. It’s like football terraces. A boy, who looks underage but probably isn’t, goes round the edges of the floor, collecting glasses which he stacks in the crook of one arm. When he has enough to take back to the bar, he puts them carefully down and dances for a few seconds by himself. He raises his arms right above his head, straightens his back, shuffles his feet ever so slightly. Then his hands paddle gently at the air, cup his chin, slide back up again. He swishes about in a kind of Madonna trance. You remember Cameron coming back to your flat the first time, freeing himself of his jeans and, in all earnestness, telling you how Madonna gave him the strength to find his queerness: “She teaches you that you have to be yourself. It’s all about expressing yourself.”
Once upon a time when you were be-yourself Andy, dress-you-up Andy, go-out-all-weekend and be-off-your-tits Andy, you’d have solemnly agreed with him. Now that lad collecting glasses and the vogueing he’s doing on his own just looks daft. Next to him is the mad bloke you see here every week. In his forties, stripped to the waist, high as a kite on hallucinogens, pounding the air with his fists. ‘On Top of the World’ is the song and you wonder what he’s hearing. He makes you want to say, It’s retro night. It’s meant to be fun, silly fun. Too many of them down here like to think it’s hardcore all the time. You
