X.

 

“‘Lo Megan.”

“You’ve been drinking,” she hissed. We were somewhere backstage in the Royal Albert Hall. I say “somewhere” because the undercroft of the Hall is vast, circular and symmetrical, and as such is completely baffling to a sop, such as I was then. Elmo, who held his drink far better, had sloped off to find his angel wings. (I was to be hidden in the vehicular nimbus, one of Heaven’s unsightly slaves, whereas he was to be one of its princes, winged and conspicuous.)  

“Only one beer,” I protested, though I felt positively marinated.

“Well there’s no time to change the cast – you’ll have to do as you are.”

I was on the verge of a retort, only I bit my tongue. This was not the best moment to argue and I was not in any case fit to do so. I asked if I might be permitted to use the toilet first, but Megan shook her head. There wasn’t time, she said. I retired to a quiet corner to change into my costume, which consisted of the trousers I was already wearing and a white cotton vest. Thus attired, I joined the rest of my team of galley slaves, whose task it would be to convey the float in its path around the stage. We had met once before at a brief rehearsal, though I had since forgotten their names. One, I believe, might have been called Jack, but which? Perhaps fittingly, all five of them were meek-looking fellows, shallow-chested and with hunched shoulders, who gazed at the floor even when you addressed them. I wondered if tyrannical girlfriends had impressed them into the role, or were they hoping to curry favour with any of the hundred or so nubile artistes who milled about in that enormous backstage area, sparingly and daringly dressed, chattering and singing to one another like exotic songbirds in an aviary. 

Presently, a hand-bell was rung and in the abrupt  ensuing silence an authoritative voice went up:

“Attention, please!” cried a young man. “Clouds one, three and five are to be manned. Angels, hauliers, if you belong to clouds one, three and five, make your way to the stage door now. Pauline, the lady with the clipboard, will direct you from there. The rest of you, stay where you are; you will be called to the stage door in five minutes. All right everyone – let’s get moving.”

There was a stampede and I was buffeted on all sides by dozens of pairs of goose-feather wings, the span of which their careless owners did not appreciate. We reached the stage door, were registered by one named Pauline, placed in order, and eventually ushered through the doorway itself. Immediately in front of us was Cloud One, manoeuvred such that we could clamber into it unseen by the guests, who were at that moment on the far side of the stage from us, about two- or three-hundred of them, chatting amongst themselves, sipping champagne and lending half an ear to the compère. He was in character as John Milton, ruffed and wigged, narrating excerpts of Paradise Lost in a wonderfully theatrical baritone. 

The float, which my team was to power, was framed like a large motorcar, with sides of canvas and card. The wheels were vulcanised rubber, and running parallel to each of the two axles, at chest height, were thick wooden struts, carefully sanded so as to be comfortably gripped. A further strut ran widthways in the space between the two axles. The six of we slaves, two abreast, took our places behind each strut. I was at the rear, partnered with a bashful mute whose limp black hair formed a curtain across his eyes. There were, I observed, hierarchies even in these lowly quarters, below deck, and he and I were third tier slaves, not to be trusted with the steering. This was the job of the first and second tier who, by varying the force applied to either left or right side of the struts, could affect a turning motion. The first tier had the advantage of a kind of windscreen – in fact a mere slit in the fabric – through which to observe the road ahead, and they could relay directional commands according to what they saw.  

I piped up: “Don’t suppose there’s time for me to pop to the toilet?”

 “Of course not!” scolded one of the first-tier navigators. “You should have gone before.”

“I know, but I’m afraid there wasn’t – “

“Shh! We’re about to move off.”

And so we were. The angels were loaded atop the float, as was clear from the shuffling sounds above our heads, and it was time to move on so that the cloud behind could be readied. At the signal from Pauline we all heaved simultaneously on the struts, and with a disconcerting creak, and a squeal of the tires, the vehicle set into a tortuous slow motion.

 

By the point of our third lap of the stage, I confess I almost lost continence. My bladder was a glowing molten orb, searing my innards and weighing deep into my pelvis. I was practically doubled up with the strain, and at last – sensing I had just moments in which to act – I let go the handle, to the puzzled protests of my fellow slaves, and turned and burst through a split in the canvas chassis. Disoriented for a moment – as when a sportsman bursts into the light and noise of the arena – I then sprinted between clouds the twenty yards or so to the nearest stage exit, tore through it and stumbled down a flight of steps, near the bottom of which were the toilets. Meanwhile, of course, with one side of our cloud significantly depowered, the entire vehicle veered to the right and two startled angels – not Elmo, mercifully – actually tumbled from their celestial perch, let free their handfuls of confetti and landed on the floor with an audible thud. The foil confetti meanwhile, glittering and picturesque, formed up in their wake ‘like blossom scattered behind a falling apple’, according to one rather poetically-minded society reporter. The guests, who for the most part were not paying close attention, did not notice anything was seriously awry. The path that the vehicles were intended to take was deliberately meandering in any case, so as to represent the mysteries and unpredictability of The Divine. That the leading cloud should swerve erratically was, accordingly, no very great surprise, and as for the fallen angels these could be explained away quite easily as symbolic. Of course my sudden appearance, dashing across the stage, was peculiar, but being just one element of a vast display Paradise was by no means lost, if you will excuse the pun, and the performance was noted by that same society reporter, present in the audience, to have been ‘finely choreographed and wonderfully eccentric’. 

Megan, however, was spitting feathers.

“You complete and utter fool!” she hissed, each syllable dripping with poison. We were backstage by this point, in one of the larger changing rooms. Our phase of the entertainment was finished, and bustling around us were dozens and dozens of young men and women – jubilant and fabulously painted – tearing off their costumes, pulling on shirts and trousers and reassuming their former identities. I was slouched in a wooden chair feeling very sorry for myself: nauseous from the alcohol, dizzy with hunger and mortified for having let down Megan so publicly and in so absurd a manner.

“I’m truly sorry, Megan,” I said, “really –”

She cut me off: “I don’t want to hear it. You turned up late, and drunk, and then you ran off stage halfway through the performance for a toilet break? How are old are you again?”

“Well, sixteen, and – “

“I know! I know how old you are.  It was a rhetorical question!” she shrieked. “Do you know what that means? ‘Rhetorical’? And while we’re here, are there any other concepts I need to explain to you, such as the effects of alcohol on a human being?”

Now a few disconcerted faces were turned in our direction. Performers noted Megan’s face, red with anger, and mine, red with embarrassment. Megan, in turn, noted their curiosity, but did not quieten down – not, that is, until Elmo appeared beside her, or, more precisely, above her: the crown of her head barely reached his sternum, and when she noticed his looming there she jumped with fright, as though electrified. 

“Elmo! I didn’t see you there, which is odd because…well…But how are you? You were wonderful, by the way – such a performance. Divine.” She placed a tentative finger on his wrist, and withdrew it a moment later, joltingly.

Like his fellow archangels, Elmo had sprawled motionless on his throne throughout the entire show. He had had no speaking part, and nor was he required – like certain seraphim – to blow into a mock-trumpet. For all intents and purposes he had been part of the scenery, no more a performer than the vast cotton balls representing wisps of vapour, or indeed his throne. Presently he said nothing, but acknowledged Megan’s flattery with a barely perceptible nod of his head, and eventually, when the tension of his characteristic silence grew oppressive, she made an excuse and disappeared into the crowd. I saw he was carrying his angel wings, meticulously folded, in a large paper bag.

A far-off clash of cymbals and the ominous beating of a war-drum signalled the next performance had begun.

“The devils are up,” I muttered to myself, and then to Elmo: “Shall we find something to eat?”

We struck south, down Exhibition Road, and after a long walkdiscovered we had lost ourselves in a curving maze of residential streets. Terraced townhouses loomed above us on every side, some as many as five storeys high, and up ahead they veered this way and that, or stopped abruptly. One had only to remove the numbers nailed to each door, and chaos would ensue; no man could possibly find his way home in such a kaleidoscopic sprawl.

“We’ve been here before,” said Elmo, peering up at a flickering street-lamp. It did indeed look familiar.

“Well, we can’t have come full-circle; it was only a crescent.”

“Hm. Actually, I’m wrong.” Elmo took a step closer to the street-lamp. “It isn’t the same.” But he did not elaborate on whatever distinguishing feature he had noticed; it might have been a spider’s web dangling from a strut, or the tilt of the post itself. 

“Why couldn’t the Luftwaffe have flattened all this?” I muttered. “They’d have saved us a lot of hassle. Ah, look here!” On the corner of a silent junction ahead, quite out of place in its surroundings, was a dingy workmen’s café, half-filled with what looked like a party of miners. Each man wore a head-torch and bulky overalls. They were in fact railway labourers, awaiting their shift on the Underground. We slunk to a table beside them and ordered sandwiches and beers. The proprietor raised an eyebrow but in the end did not question my age. I think – but do not know – that in any case it is legal for a sixteen year-old to drink if the drink is ordered with a meal. Whether sandwiches constitute a meal is for the courts to decide; certainly these specimens were dwarfish and sparsely packed out, hardly constituting a meal. The labourers were drinking coffees, very black and strong-smelling, but one man, a tall wiry fellow with doleful eyes and bristly, sand-coloured hair, edged forward and asked me for a sip of beer. By the sounds of it he was a Cockney. At once I pushed the bottle to him across the table, and to see the way his eyes rolled when the amber-coloured liquid fell on his tongue, you would think he had imbibed some regenerative elixir. A broad, imbecilic smile stretched across his face, and his eyes opened wide. He stammered his thanks, and asked if he might have a further sip. I nodded. Predictably requests then came from his colleagues, emboldened by his conduct, but they eyed Elmo nervously all the while. He appeared quite detached from the situation, and not exactly welcoming. But nonetheless within a few minutes both our bottles were empty and I ordered another couple with what little money I had left. These too did not last, and I shuddered to think what lives were endangered by the not-quite-sober workmanship that night on the subterranean train lines.

After the café we went to a nearby pub, on the recommendation of the workers. It was almost deserted when we arrived, except for a table nearest to the bar. The table was small and oval-shaped, and around it were a half-dozen or so chairs with ornate, elongated backs, reaching high above the crowns of their occupants. And one such occupant, a portly, bespectacled gentleman with a thick and well-groomed moustache, looked up as we entered.

“Hey ho!” he cried out. “You’re one of the angels, surely?”

He gazed at Elmo with particular interest.

“Yes, I wouldn’t forget that face,” he said, and turning to his neighbour: “Margot, I tell you it’s him.”

Elmo looked away. I smiled emptily at the stranger, hoping the mood would not be ruined. I felt as if I were escorting a surly drunkard, desperately fending off provocations.

“You were at the ball?” I asked cordially, and the man nodded.

“We had to leave early because Margot here was tired.”

“Oh, do sit down Nigel,” muttered his companion, Margot, tugging on his unfettered shirt tails. He had risen to his feet and seemed intent on conversation. He batted her hand away.

“Don’t mind her,” said Nigel to me, winking conspiratorially. “She’s in a huff. I insisted on a quiet drink before bed. I told her we can’t go to bed before eleven on the night of the C.A.C. ball!” And then he chuckled heartily. I wondered how quiet the drink had been. Poor Margot.

Nigel insisted on paying for our beers, which we took to the other end of the pub and nursed in relative privacy. My headache had disappeared and into the void of my skull, billowing and groping like steam, came a gentle but unmistakeable euphoria.

“Do you think Megan is very angry with me?” I asked.

Elmo shrugged. “Hard to say. Probably.”

“Angry enough to…you know?” It was difficult to keep the hopefulness out of my voice.

“To what?”

“To…oh, never mind.” I swallowed a quarter of my beer in a single gulp. “Here’s to un-forgiveness, and new beginnings.”

“And new ends.”

“And to Florence.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

We clinked glasses, and downed the remainder, not for any particular reason other than to be done with it and move on.

Our next stop – even further south, close to the Embankment – was a real dive. It was the basement floor of a detached, cube-shaped building, the façade of which was peeling and the underlying plaster cracked along the entire width. We might have walked past without noticing at all, except that a basement window happened to be thrust open in those valuable few seconds. Floating up in the warm, putrid night air came clouds of thick tobacco smoke, and the sound of music. Cautiously we descended the iron stairwell, to about halfway down, and peered through the open window. It was a curious scene we beheld. Through half-closed shutters we saw a room, not much bigger than the living room of my house in Camberwell, and with a makeshift bar in the far right corner.

Adjacent, nearer to the window, was a Wurlitzer jukebox; the elegant, arching frontispiece was visibly dented, and the glass cover – a washed-out pastel yellow – was dim and fractured. Besides the barman there were six or seven customers, all male, and all better dressed than their surroundings demanded: tie-pins, sharp collars and starched bibs. One of their number, who looked to be a teenager about my age, danced gaily and by himself in the centre of the room, singing along with the Anderson sisters in a delicate, reedy voice. 

“This is more like it,” whispered Elmo, with a slight, sly grin.

“I don’t know. It seems pretty low-down.”

“Altogether low-down,” said Elmo, straightening and descending the last few steps. A fragile-looking basement door rested on its hinges and Elmo pulled it to. As in a parody of a Wild West movie, he entered the saloon and the music halted abruptly (this mechanical failure was, of course, coincidental) and the drinkers twisted their heads to discern the stranger, approaching through the gloom with his child-sized sidekick close behind.

“Can I help ye?” asked the bartender, following a momentary wordless standoff. I pegged him as a Dubliner; he spoke just like Philip, my neighbour, whose parents had come over a decade earlier to escape the Troubles, only to then endure the Blitz. When Elmo asked for a drink the bartender explained, in as few words as were grammatically possible, that this was not a public house, and that we would have to leave.

“Proi-vate house, see?” he grunted, and gestured to the sparse, unmatched and decrepit furniture. “My living room.”

“Some living room,” I said. “Why don’t you give us a drink then, as hospitality?” I would not have dared, were I sober, to parley with such impudence. In any case, I was almost paralytic with nerves.

“Can’t do it,” drawled the bartender. “Proi-vate house. Ye’ll have to go.”

“Oh, don’t be like that,” cried one of the drinkers from the sofa immediately behind us. He was a monstrously fat creature; hoarse-voiced, pillowed in surplus flesh and barely contained by his brown three-piece suit. His face, however, was open and kindly, and his eyes were a startling powder blue. He resembled a gigantic baby. “Jimmy,” he said, addressing the bartender, “they ain’t the coppers. If ye don’t serve them, ye’ll not make a shilling all bloody night!”

“Not with regulars like you, ye wretched miser,” scowled Jimmy, and his fat friend chortled delightedly. 

 

We ordered whiskies and took a seat on a bench next to the jukebox. The dark, smoke-filled room pitched slanted this way and that, but gently, almost amusingly. The young dancer kicked the machine close to where the glass screen had shattered, and after a second or two of squealing vinyl the Anderson Sisters track was taken up again. I saw he was bare-footed.

“Does that from time to time,” he explained, perceiving that I was watching him. He too had an Irish accent, and it melded gorgeously with his rather effeminate diction. I tried my hardest to smile.

“What have you got there, big lad?” he asked Elmo, pointing at the paper bag resting at his side. Bright white goose feathers were peeking out the top of it.

“Angel wings,” I said, for Elmo had made no signal he might reply. “He was playing Gabriel in a show.”

“Were you now?” said the boy still looking at Elmo. “God’s Own Messenger”. I was struck by his precocious, uncanny self-assurance, and wondered, was he older than he appeared? To my eyes he could not have been more than fifteen, or sixteen at a stretch. I studied him carelessly.

His slight frame, his narrow hips and jawline leant him a curious appeal – androgynous, I suppose – and I was reminded suddenly of Florence, upon whose recollection I suffered a pang of longing. Where was she now? In a much more heavenly place than this, I knew. Permitting a moment of self-pity, I wondered what had possessed me to become so drunk. I felt wretched and diseased; it was not the riotous inebriation, with the likes of Yevgeny, that I was used to. They were carefree evenings, but this unfortunate example struck me as being directionless, nihilistic and wrapped up in unglamorous vice.  

“Do you mind if I put them on?” asked Patrick, meanwhile, pointing at the bag, and to my immense surprise Elmo nodded. He reached into it and carefully extracted the wings, which were joined by coat-hanger wire and folded over one another. He handed it to Patrick. The young man, with equal care, unfolded them, located the straps and slid his arms inside. The wings of the archangels, made of canvas and cloth, were particularly intricate. According to Megan each pair had woven into them no fewer than two-hundred individual feathers. And since Elmo’s studio and tools were commandeered for their manufacture, it was agreed that he could keep his pair as a souvenir, though he was hardly famous for sentimentalism.

The remainder, several dozen pairs of wings, would disappear into the capacious costume trove of a drama school somewhere, for use in a future event. These particular wings, the pair Elmo had kept, were tailored for his considerable frame – in particular the great distance between his shoulders – and on Patrick they seemed comically oversized. But he was delighted nonetheless and presently, as one track died and another was taken up by the jukebox, he executed a nimble, startlingly graceful turn, en pointe. One or two of the other drinkers, who had been watching closely, snorted with derision.

After an hour or so the basement began to fill up with new arrivals, trickling in from the street in ones and twos, drably attired and bored-looking. From what little conversation could be overheard, I gathered the majority were Irish. A few paused a moment to stare at the feathered waif, strutting to and fro on the uncarpeted, dusty floor, like a rutting cock pheasant. He was in fact a very talented dancer. As yet another song drew to an end and silence descended, one stout, red-faced old man stepped from the crowd and abused him in the most obscene terms.

“Oh, leave off granddad,” the young man replied, quite unfazed. I had a feeling the two had met before. Perhaps it was not their first altercation, and it did not seem to be entirely sincere.

“Another dram?” asked Elmo, half an eye on Patrick’s performance, but I shook my head. I felt full to bursting, and the various drinks were merging in my stomach, blending into some noxious tonic.  

“I’ve had enough for now, Elmo,” I said. “I’ll wait, at least until I feel my toes again.”

Elmo grunted and went up to the bar, hustling his way to the front of the queue. It was odd that despite his conspicuousness, in that crowd he did not look like a giant among men. Rather, it was those crowded around him who resembled dwarfs – stunted, stout creatures, like Neanderthal throwbacks, shuffling about the waist of an evolutionary pinnacle. I was marvelling at the illusion, and probably with a vacant, doe-eyed expression, when the dancing boy sauntered over, hips undulating, weight on his toes, heels not touching the floor. He reached me, but did not take a seat for his wings would not permit it.  

“I’m Patrick by the way,” he said. I nodded.

“Is that right?” I said. I had not meant to sound hostile, but his appearance – and most of all his sensual, coquettish postures – were unsettling, and I felt wary of him, almost intuitively. I had met his type before at parties, normally Mathilde’s, and found them to be pretty harmless, but behind me was more than a decade’s habituation to the prejudice of my age. I remember in my first month at Dulwich, when we were still too young to grasp the meaning of the word, for the ‘offence’ of voyeurism Percy was beaten in the showers after a P.E. lesson, and quite savagely. The mob of students, some armed with cricket stumps, remained unclothed as they meted out the sentence, which wrapped up the event in a farcical overtone, although at the time it was horrifying to witness. Poor Percy. How, I ask, could you perceive voyeurism in a shower filled with twenty or more young boys, without cubicles or dividing curtains? The accusation was ludicrous, but from then on we showered facing the wall. Deviation from the norm, however minor, was intolerable, and perhaps predictably it was Percy who became, over time, the most bigoted of anyone. 

“Your friend,” said Patrick, nodding sideways to the bar, “of the Herculean frame – are you two close?” He had to speak loudly to be heard above the growing noise, in which even the jukebox drowned.

“Close? How d’you mean?”

“Oh, you know. Inseparable. Intimate. Knowing one another, biblically.”

I grasped his meaning at last, and shook my head. “Not like that.”

“But he is…?”

“I really couldn’t say. Look, what’s it to you?”

“Oh, just curious,” he replied. “Just wanted to be sure I wasn’t stepping on any toes, if you get my meaning. Quite a specimen though, your friend, wouldn’t you say?”

I shrugged. Truthfully, I was far too drunk to properly affect indifference. But if Patrick thought me rude, or flippant, he did not show it. Out of genuine curiosity I asked him who he was, and how he had come to be dancing alone in such a grotty place at this.

“Now, now,” he wagged his finger playfully. “It isn’t half bad. There’s a whole gang of us regulars, mostly bog-Irish, and there’s a tight-knit feel to the place. It’s a real community.”

“But why’s it underground?”

“Well, I don’t know about that. If I had to guess, I’d say these are…er…unlicensed premises, or at least not fully licensed,” he said, adding: “it’s a grey area, in my expert legal opinion.”

“A speakeasy?”

“You could say that. But catering to a narrow demographic.”

“Irish?”

“Irish queens,” said Patrick, in a stage whisper. He then giggled inexplicably. “Pink shamrocks. But you knew that, surely? It’s why you came.”

“We were just in the neighbourhood.”

“Oh, you mean you just happened by?” A teasing, sceptical eyebrow curved and crested. “A very likely tale, friend”

“We’re on our way home,” I said, though I had no idea what Elmo’s longer term plans entailed. Did he intend to return to Montpelier Square, to his sisters and his gruesome stepfather, or back to the chilly squat? Either way, for his own good he had to be away from that pit. An Irish pub, catering to pansies? It was altogether too ridiculous. Did Elmo have a nose for obscure subsections of depravity? But Patrick was telling the truth, of course. There were no women on the premises, which was not odd in itself for many venues cater just to one sex, but at least one or two men here – with fresh eyes I now perceived them – were carelessly tactile: a hand around a waist here; a chin upon a shoulder there.

“Well, wasn’t that a stroke of luck?” sang Patrick, meanwhile, in answer to my explanation. “Yes, I am a lucky boy. We don’t get many new faces here, as you can probably tell.” He pointed his thumb at some of older clientele, including the gnarled man who had abused him earlier.

At this point Elmo returned with a single glass of whisky, and sat down.

“We haven’t been introduced properly,” said Patrick to Elmo, offering his hand and his name, adding: “But my friends call me Paddy.”

“How do you do, Patrick?” replied Elmo, presenting a limp hand to be shaken, which Patrick grasped but did not shake. “I’m Elmo.”

“You can’t be local with a name like that,” simpered Patrick and then, seeing Elmo wasn’t baited, he changed tack altogether, arriving straight at the point. “Why don’t we – all three of us – go around the corner to my flat. It’s a bit gloomy down here tonight.”

“It’s a basement,” I said. “It’s always going to be gloomy.”

Patrick turned to me, and the hint of a contemptuous smile appeared and vanished from his features.

“This is ‘the Fisher King’,” he said. “A private public house, open to the Irish diaspora and, of course – “, he stole a glance back at Elmo, “ – to archangels who happen to be passing by. Tonight it is gloomy, granted. I can only recommend you visit on a Saturday night.” (It was then a Friday.)

Eventually Elmo sighed. “Alright then, let’s get out of here.” He swallowed the remainder of his whiskey and slammed the glass down on the table. Patrick detached himself from the wings and folded them back into the bag. A few of the regulars leered at him as we made our way out, and I overheard a few obscene put-downs, which Patrick ignored.  

 

‘Around the corner’ had been an exaggeration. Patrick’s flat (or rather his cousin’s flat, unoccupied for the time-being) was almost a mile away, in a southerly direction. I was gratified, but barely, that we were drawing ever closer to Camberwell: my homeward journey would be less arduous. Rather like Patrick’s beloved Fisher King, the flat was situated on the basement floor of a shabby townhouse. Ugly, evergreen creepers had worked their way along the guttering; the aerial roots jutted either side like the limbs on some grotesque, gigantic millipede. Sundry refuse – chicken bones, vegetable peelings and the like – was scattered on the pavement outside; the work of rats or foxes, probably, feasting in the upturned bins. 

Downstairs, the flat itself was marginally more presentable. The carpet in the hallway was new, or at least freshly cleaned, and it padded pleasantly underfoot. The dappled wallpaper meanwhile was peeling in places. In the living room Elmo was shown to the sofa, over which a tartan rug had been thrown to cover the holes. I was directed to a wooden chair by the window. A set of iron bars, and not to mention a thick layer of grime on the glass pane itself, were as effective as any curtains in blocking the view of the pavement outside. The streetlight on the pavement appeared as a dim, distant beacon, as on the peak of a hill. The room itself was decorated half-heartedly: a cheaply framed print of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, a potted plant, a variety of ornately bound French encyclopaedias. I wondered, what was the owner’s profession? Meanwhile his cousin, who had left us temporarily to fetch “refreshment”, returned from the kitchen, heralded by an old Dixieland jazz record from an unseen gramophone. I recognised the tune as one of my father’s favourites.

“Some wine,” he announced gaily, flourishing a pair of half-filled tumblers. He then darted away a second time to fetch the bottle, and his own glass. I attempted some arithmetic – how many beers and whiskeys and wines had I consumed already that evening? Sherry at lunch, beers after lunch, whiskeys after the show…The precise summation defied me, blurred as it had been through the marbled, grimy glaze of a tankard. Patrick returned. His lips, I noticed, were vividly scarlet. Had they been that way in the pub? I could not remember.

Without so much of a glance at me, he walked straight to the sofa and took a seat. “So,” he murmured, looking intently at Elmo. “Tell me what you do. Tell me all your favourite things. You must be a sportsman. I’m a prop forward myself.” His tone was light-hearted, jocular, but his eyes were focused and his creeping hands were steady. I was not a part of his game, and I looked on in silence and discomfort from the side lines. Was I expected to make my excuses and leave? It was nearly midnight, according to the clock on the mantelpiece, and I had no money. Could I ask to borrow a taxi fare? I decided to wait and watch for an opportunity to interrupt. I felt quite unwell, and had long since given up on diverting Elmo.

He was an attractive creature, Patrick, I decided, very much so: indeterminate, lithe as a nymph, lusty as a satyr, and evidently quick-witted. But what was Elmo’s response to his flirtations? Nothing but a slight, sideways smile, and occasionally a single syllable by way of response. I remember thinking how odd it was, given Elmo’s apparent disinterest, that he had agreed to come here in the first place. It was a mediocre South London apartment, and grimy as the Fisher King had been, in terms of atmosphere it was – relative to this place – like some Hispanic city square in the roiling heat of a Mardi Gras pageant. 

But besides that I do not recall a great deal of the ensuing conversation (not that I was invited to participate), for after only fifteen minutes or so I began to feel very ill. My surroundings, having pitched unsteadily for four hours, now bucked and rolled in every conceivable axis. The jazz music accelerated and decelerated, and seemed to loop back on itself every couple of bars. A throbbing nausea worked up through my chest.

“Excuse…excuse me Paddy,” I grunted. He looked up at me, wide-eyed and expectant. “Where’s the bathroom?”

“Out the door,” he pointed towards the kitchen. “Go left and left again. Are you alright?”

I arose and staggered away in the direction he had indicated, passed through a white door, reaching the bathroom by some miracle and vomiting precipitously into the open toilet. The suddenness, the violence of it was breath-taking, and I could feel the vessels in my eyes strain from the pressure. After several retches, once my stomach was totally evacuated and I had pulled the toilet chain, I slumped against the bathroom wall and wiped my forehead, which dripped with cool sweat.

“Hell,” I rasped, spitting and spluttering. “Oh hell.”

More than anything I was tired; I longed to close my eyes and sleep, but for fear of choking I kept myself awake and alert. First I needed to get home, and away from Patrick and his peculiar seduction. I concentrated on the sound of the music; I traced through half-closed eyes the faded arabesques and curlicues which patterned the bath-tiles opposite. A shower curtain, stained and folded concertina-style, was draped over the sink, unattached from its rails on the ceiling and apparently discarded. I focused on its cloying mildew scent – anything but to drift into unconsciousness on a stranger’s bathroom floor. 

In hindsight it is obvious what had happened. The regurgitated wine, still visible in the toilet basin despite the flush, was altogether the wrong colour: a translucent reddish-brown, like ripe, pale madeira. I am certain Patrick had mixed something into my drink in order to incapacitate me, to send me to sleep, but I daresay he had not imagined it would work so quickly or indeed so violently. He may not have been a practised potion-maker, which is understandable. He was perhaps unused to hangers-on spoiling his evenings. What had been the magic ingredient – barbiturates? No. They are anticonvulsants. Laudanum? Maybe.

(I knew more about that sort of thing than a boy of my age should. Dr Benson, a chemistry master at Dulwich – and also my form tutor – had served at Passchendaele with the Royal Army Medical Corps, attached to the Royal Berkshire Regiment. He was about sixty or sixty-five by the time he taught me, and was famous with his pupils for his wandering mind and utter disregard for the syllabus, and for that reason I knew – besides the order of the Battle of Delville Wood – the names and properties of virtually all known sedatives and analgesic – that is, pain-killing – opioids.)

In some ways it is fortunate my body reacted how it had. But for my stomach turning inside out, much more of the sinister compound would have dissolved into my bloodstream. As it happened, I was able to retain consciousness and even a semblance of control, and after a short time the dreadful iciness of the floor tiles had me back on my feet, albeit unsteadily.

Neurons fired, muscles throbbed and vessels pumped reassuringly. Ten minutes later, with a relatively clearer head and sturdier limbs I groped my way back to the kitchen, and from there to the living room. En route, however, within touching distance of the last doorway, a terrible cry went up in the room ahead of me, less of abject pain than of shock. But it was cut short – smothered – by another sound, like the heavy slap of a rolling pin into a lump of dough. And there it was again, that sickening ‘slap’, and there again a second later. Sensing an urgency I rushed through the door, into the living room, temporarily blinded by the lights. Patrick was curled up in the corner of the sofa, shielding his head and body with his hands, cowering and wailing. Elmo was poised over him with fists clenched, raining blow after pulverising blow, each with his full weight behind it. His eyes were fixed and his movements rhythmic, almost trance-like. After the ninth or tenth clout, Patrick stopped wailing and the only sounds he made were curious, almost cartoonish squeals as the air was forced from his lungs. Somehow, this noise was worse than his crying.

I lurched forward, grabbing hold of Elmo’s left arm and attempting to wrench him away. Of course, this had no effect. Elmo paused a moment, straightened up, and with the careless ease of a colossus swatting away a fly, he cast me backwards. I was thrown off my feet, tripping on the coffee table and somersaulting over it, landing in a heap of newspapers. My stomach still ached from vomiting, and my head ached with the strain of panic.

“For Christ’s sake, stop!” I was on my back reaching out to him, imploring uselessly. Even in the half-light I could see as his fist withdraw – readying to plunge again like a piston-head into its chamber – that it was spattered with blood. I took a hold of the spilt wine glass on the carpet beside me, and flung it as hard as I could. It span in the air, scarlet dregs arced outward, and through some utter fluke the glass struck Elmo’s temple and shattered. Not in a hundred attempts could I have duplicated the feat. The damage was limited and superficial – a single, minute laceration – but it caused him to stop dead, and perhaps it brought him to his senses. He turned to look at me and his face, also liberally sprinkled with Patrick’s blood, was a picture of calmness. It was terrifying. Not a single muscle twitched, and his eyelids hung lazily, half-descended.

“Oh, Elmo. What have you done?” I said, and began to cry, half from exhaustion and half from distress. Meanwhile Patrick began to make strangled, gargling sounds, from deep in his throat, and I realised that he too was crying. It came as an immense relief, if not actually a cause for celebration, for it meant that he was alive. His delicate body had somehow survived the onslaught, although, as I saw when I had clambered to my feet, he was in a very bad way. A bloody rivulet coursed from both nostrils and ran straight into his open mouth, where its sprayed and simmered with his breathing, like a crimson geyser in its pre-eruption froth. I thought I heard – though cannot have; it was my imagination – the sound of broken incisors rattling about his tonsils.  His eyes were swollen, as was the flesh around his cheekbones, and he had a weeping cut above his right brow. I had seen my fair share of rough-and-tumble, in the school playground and in the streets. I had even thrown a punch or two, in anger or self-defence; I had drawn blood and bled in turn. But nothing compared to the sight of Patrick when Elmo had seen to him. I recalled the memory of a photograph in a newspaper from many years before, which had startled me almost as much. It depicted the mangled features of a Primo Carnera victim, published the morning after one his heavyweight title defences. I don’t remember which (given my age at the time, it was presumably one of his last). My father showed me the photograph after breakfast one Sunday morning, but covertly, for my mother had insisted the newspaper be thrown out precisely to avoid the children seeing it.

“Here, son,” he had whispered, through a wide, lurid grin, proffering with tobacco-stained fingers the crumpled broadsheet like a winning lottery token. “Feast your eyes on that mess.”

I felt quite faint. The wounded pugilist was photographed with his head against the canvas, his bloodied lips parted and his tongue lolling uselessly between. His eyes were closed, purplish and swollen. Why, I wondered, had nobody tried to help him? Why had the reporter simply peered through his lens, and flashed the bulb?

As for poor Patrick, in the end we left him. There was not a telephone in the house with which to summon a doctor, and Patrick had been incommunicative, perhaps deliberately. His airways had cleared and he was sobbing gently to himself as I milled about the room in a panic, unmoved from his place on the blood-stained sofa. Elmo had wanted to rouse a neighbour, but I dissented. By this point perhaps quarter of an hour had elapsed since the violence.

Heightened passions had receded, adrenalin had ebbed away, and I was suddenly very clearheaded. We could not, I reasoned, alert the police or the ambulance service, or anyone in fact. I was not guilty of anything besides underage drinking, but all the same I could not afford my parents learning what had happened. As if our binge was not enough, there was also the Irish bar, men-only, and very grubby indeed. Who would believe we had stumbled into it unknowingly? Patrick was an habitué, well-known if not well-liked, and word of our being there with him was sure to emerge, somehow. The hint of impropriety alone was damning. I thought of my poor mother, burning with shame. The neighbourhood gossips would surely catch wind of it. And my father, too, would be appalled. If not disowned outright, I could look forward to being belted to within inches of my life. And Ruth and Katie, what would they think of their old brother, gallivanting about in such places, and in such company? I could not risk their knowing.

“Leave him be,” I called to Elmo, who was in the kitchen fashioning an cold-pack from a tea towel. “He’ll live. Let’s just put some distance between us.”

Outside the house, Elmo and I parted ways. He had become unaccountably sullen in the preceding minutes, muttered something about “needing to see a fellow”, and he stalked off in such a way and at such a speed that it was clear to me I should not follow. He passed beyond the reach of a streetlight at a crossroads some way off, and darkness fell from his shoulders, cloaking him, swallowing him up.