All this underneath the launderette! And Poundstretcher!
Wendy was enchanted by the thought of all this beneath her feet. Gloomy dripping caverns full of naked men, beneath the black and white tiled lino. They weren’t specific nude men she saw, just an undifferentiated mass of male flesh. Nobody she would have to talk to.
She stared out at Leith Walk: the push chairs getting shunted past, the dogs, the granddames, the pensioners and pissheads. She wondered if they knew what was going on beneath their feet: the underground men.
Belinda had gone back to talking about the surgical implements with which she had been examined. “They were spotless, mind.”
The man from next door was pulling up to Astrid’s bench a hamper full of—he flung open to lid to reveal—soiled and dampened towels. Astrid winked at Wendy. “Tom and I do a roaring trade from the gentlemen who wish to take off their clothes and sit in the heat of our shared basement.” The man in the vest top and tracksuit bottoms smiled at Wendy.
“It must be nice,” said Wendy. “Lolling about down there.”
Tom grinned. “Spending languorous summer afternoons in the hot timeless dark of someone else’s cellar. Forget your cares!”
Astrid said, “Doesn’t he talk funny!”
“It would be like being a mushroom,” said Wendy, and made Tom laugh.
On Friday night I decided I would take Colin along with me for support. He didn’t have any other plans. I wasn’t about to go and meet a man I hardly knew without back-up. I wanted to know what Colin thought of him.
Colin didn’t know what to wear. He tried on a few outfits and they all looked much the same. Different T shirts to hang off his skinny frame. Three pairs of immaculate, probably new jeans, in navy, white and black, to be winched in tight around his waist. I sat on the end of his bed and watched him try things on and I was amazed by his waist. He made me feel colossal. I could fit his waist between the span of my two hands. He jumped out of one outfit, into the next, into another, like jumping through hoops, revealing between each one his pale boy’s body, his white Calvin Klein’s.
In the end he settled on a green T shirt and, in the pub round the corner, he tipped the first drink of the night over his white jeans. That night we spilled more alcohol down the pair of us than either of us drank. It was the night of wasted booze. We were nervous.
We walked up from the Royal Circus. I was in a T shirt and jeans, too. It was too hot a night to go dressing up and clarting on and I wasn’t sure, anyway, if I was that serious about making an impression on David. Dress retro, he’d said. Whatever that meant. The club he’d suggested was a monthly one, that moved venue each time and played old-fashioned music: tunes from twenty year old adverts and TV shows. The whole point of this, Colin warned me, was that it was an...ironic disco. You danced between inverted commas to easy-listening music.
“And I’m not sure if it’s really on at the Assembly Rooms,” he said. “I think your boyfriend’s got it wrong.” Colin was peeved because of the gin stained down his crotch.
We had cocktails in a piano bar on Frederick Street. A horrible pianist sang Stevie Wonder songs at us. This was a street full of restaurants and we struggled through a well-fed crowd and smells of garlic, ginger and spices. I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast time, when all the talk of bowel problems had put me off.
Colin was right. The Assembly Rooms on George Street were silent. The windows at the front of that imposing building were dark. No David.
We saw a poster that said the club had been moved at the last minute to a marquee on Princes Street.
“We’re already an hour late,” I said. “Let’s just go home.”
“No way!” said Colin. “I want to get a look at your fella.”
“He’s probably seen this is empty and gone home,” I said feebly.
“He can read the signs as well as we can. Come on!”
David was phoning Aunty Anne. He’d been in the marquee tent on Princes Street since the start of the evening. Aunty Anne said that it sounded hellish at his end of the phone.
“Wendy’s gone to the Assembly Rooms,” Anne shouted to this voice who said he was David. She was dubious about giving out information like this.
“I got the venue wrong,” said David. He was crushed into a corner of the bar. The club was far too full. He doubted that Wendy would get in now, even if she’d found the place.
“Well,” said Aunty Anne. “It looks as if you’ve spoiled her evening.”
The phone went dead. David put the receiver back.
Everyone around him seemed to be in gaggles, all of them wearing ludicrous, outmoded outfits. They must have raided Oxfam: the men had groomed and smarmed themselves into lounge lizards from Martini adverts. Many of the women had come in evening gowns and gloves up to their elbows with fingers so tight they could barely bend at the knuckles. There was a great many feather boas.
David drank alone at the bar, unsure if he should stay. He could feel the slightly dizzying effect of the speed starting up, but that might have been the noise level, crackling against his eardrums. He imagined granules of speed tootling through his veins...off to who knows where. His brain, maybe, dissolving and busying along.
Being here wasn’t the same experience when you were alone. It wasn’t the sort of place where you came to cruise around. He had come dressed in a plum velvet smoking
