I thought about Michael, slumped upstairs in his post-coital squalor. I was never given to retribution, but at that moment I felt like kicking him soundly where he lay. No one like me had been there to watch my lip tremble over him. I thoroughly resented the spectacle of the three of us as three squabbling ex-shags, even if I didn’t count. Especially when, really, he looked like a burglar’s dog.
Michael was stubborn, though. Stubborn and squalid as his principles. He found every situation difficult and language jammed in his throat in situations like these. Yet he was hard-bitten, uncompromising. He was a former teenage star who, when appearing on Blockbusters, had taken as his mascot a Cornish pasty and insisted on answering with the most inappropriate words imaginable. Four years on, that subversive glamour had not faded. Recently, during one of Esmé’s first nights in the house, we had watched his video of the show again. Esmé screamed with laughter at the sight of the seventeen-year-old Michael, with blond, already thinning hair, boyish without all his muscles, zapping the buzzer and shouting, ‘Gdansk’, ‘Thighs’, ‘Usurpation’ and ‘Copious’ in a strangely deep voice.
‘That was so funny I think I peed in my pants,’ Esmé gasped when it finished.
Michael frowned at her. He frowned as heavily as he had the night she explained how she and her family stole leftover food from the dumper trucks at the back of supermarkets and gift-wrapped each other rocks for Christmas. There were times when he seemed disgusted by her. But looking at Esmé now, disconsolate on the toilet seat and packing her make-up bag, I didn’t have the heart to tell her that.
Since, in the end, Michael was too upset and disturbed to leave the house, it was to be me, Jackey and Esmé going together to Butchers. ‘You can both be my fag hags,’ I said and it fell on the stony ground of the littered living room. Esmé went to phone for a taxi because I refused to walk across town in full make-up.
‘But you don’t look queer at all. You won’t get beaten up.’ Jackey passed me a hip flask. ‘At most you look like a butch lesbian in drag.’
I chewed on that for a while, until Esmé came back. The atmosphere between them was strained until they both found something to laugh at. Jackey said that they had to get to like each other, in case I copped off with someone that night and they ended up having to come home together. I submitted to this implausible pleasantry, glad that the ice had at least stopped smoking.
Then Jackey asked Esmé something about America, and Esmé told her something about America. Probably about things being bigger and less expensive than here. That was the usual drift.
‘Yes,’ Jackey said. ‘Of course, we’ve heard all this before. Paul used to go out with an American. A lovely boy. It only lasted a month. He’s in Colorado too, now, isn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ I said, tight-lipped.
‘It only lasted a month because his boyfriend had to go back after a year,’ Esmé put in, defending me.
‘It was tragic, really,’ Jackey agreed. ‘They only had four brief weeks.’
‘I’ve heard all about it. You were there, weren’t you?’
Jackey nodded solemnly. ‘They made such a lovely couple.’
‘And they were born on exactly the same day. I think there’s something… almost spiritual about that.’
‘The poor things!’ Jackey sighed. ‘And he’s not very happy in Colorado, you know. Taking drugs, the last we heard. I think he’s still missing him. And there was bugger all spiritual about it if you ask me.’
‘I wish I’d been here to see it. I’d like to see Paul happy. He deserves to be, doesn’t he?’
‘Oh, yes. He’s been unlucky in love.’
Mercifully the taxi horn honked out in the street. I stood up, monumentally pissed off. ‘Can we go now?’ I strode out to the car looking, presumably, like an exquisitely petulant corpse.
‘The Butchers, please,’ I commanded, climbing in, and refused to acknowledge the driver’s knowing wink.
The trouble started at the door. Jackey caused a fuss because she refused to say what she ‘identified as’ to the bouncer. I had already signed my name and number in the book and was squinting for a table into the low-ceilinged gloom.
‘You must understand my difficulty,’ the bouncer whined. ‘This is an exclusive club.’
‘What are you trying to say?’ Jackey reared up.
‘I mean, you don’t look like a lesbian—’
She quivered with righteous, politically shit-hot indignation. I stepped in with umbrage—‘She’s my guest!’—and dragged her in, over to the bar.
Esmé joined us, affronted because she hadn’t been in the slightest challenged as to the exhibition of her orientation. Jackey must have been a bit pissed already because she laughed in her face.
Esmé shot me a wounded glance. She must have thought I had spilled the beans about the bisexual butterfly bit. There was nothing to be done but to get massively drunk.
Then, when Esmé went crawling around the crowd’s periphery and did her performance-artiste-on-show dancing, I did spill the butterfly beans and Jackey laughed until she was sobbing into her beer.
‘Michael’s got his hands full there,’ she said. ‘Good. I hope she goes off and fucks some woman. It’ll serve him right.’
‘Hmm.’
‘The trouble is, I can’t help thinking we’ve got unfinished business, me and Michael.’
I couldn’t say too much about this. My own business with him had been fairly surreptitious; an open and shut case swift as the slamming of a well-sprung closet door.
‘We both invested so much in it. It was horrible. Two years of mental torture.’
‘I remember.’ I had been the one unloosening the thumbscrews, sawing holes in the iron maiden.
‘We were Will and Anna Brangwen in The Rainbow. It was all pounding essences and eking out kernels and when it wasn’t it was bloody boring. He’s a manic depressive and she’s welcome to him.’
‘That’s good to hear.’
We were having to shout over the noise of a remixed Doris Day. I didn’t
