The Right Man (16 page)

‘Oh,
yes. I’ve got several very regular gentlemen. They’re the best. Mostly married
men, you know.’

‘I’m
not used to this.’ By now I was lying naked on a towel on the bed and she was
tickling my thighs and balls. I was vaguely tumescent but hardly on the verge
of anything. A dustbin was blown over outside in the back yard and its clatter
made me start. She soothed me again with her stroking. She was working so hard,
I felt sorry for her. What kind of a client was I?

‘You’ve
got a very big one,’ she said. I laughed. I didn’t bother to say, ‘I bet you
say that to all the guys.’

‘I
should know,’ she said. ‘You could be a black man. It’s true what they say, you
know.’

‘Is it
really?’ I said, trying to be polite.

‘And I’ll
tell you another thing for free. The Chinese? Very small.’

‘But it’s
what they do with it, isn’t it? Well, so I’ve been told,’ I said.

‘Naaaaa,’
she said, and then, ‘You could come on my titties if you like.’ Over her
shoulder, the video came to an abrupt end and the screen hissed with snow and
crackle. She got up to turn it off and came back with a condom packet which she
tore open with her mouth.

Luckily
I was hard enough for the rubber to fit on and she unfolded it expertly to the
bottom, kneading me all the time like a cow’s udder. I needed to keep talking
and she didn’t seem to mind my questions, so I asked her how many clients she saw
in a week.

As she
wiped the condom with a tissue, she told me she had ten regulars, any number of
others and that she worked for several different agencies. I enquired how much
commission an agency would take, and was surprised to hear that sometimes it
was as much’ as fifty per cent. I’m obviously in the wrong business.

‘But
some girls I know, the really pretty ones, like, they can get a thousand pounds
a night.’

She
said she would give me her number before I left so that I could get in touch
again if I wanted to and she could avoid paying commission. I thanked her. For
a few seconds, she put her mouth around my cock, condom and all, but then
returned to kneading it.

‘Do you
feel like coming yet?’ she asked sweetly. I wanted to, if only to participate
fully and help her to feel that she was doing her job properly. I couldn’t find
an answer, though.

‘No
hurry,’ she said, and sitting back for a few moments, she offered me more vodka
and coke.

‘We’ve
got lots of time, you can relax with me.’ We both looked at our watches at the
same moment. We caught each other’s eye and laughed.

‘So you’ve
got a lot of pressure at work, have you?’

‘You
could say that,’ I replied.

The
chestnut tree outside was still struggling with the wind; bending and swaying,
its flexibility being tested to the limit. I’ve always liked trees, they cheer
me up. The absence of them from the Shaftesbury Avenue area is one of the main
drawbacks to working round there. There’s Soho Square, of course, that’s got
some ash, and the Soho church graveyard with its little trimmed hedges and
plane trees. I was brought up in the suburbs, you see, so although I’m pleased
that I got out of there and made it in the big city, as ‘twere, I do miss them.
It’s OK down in Fulham tree-wise, in fact, London is one of the most tree-ish
cities in the world. One of my earliest memories is of the noise of poplar
trees swishing in the wind around Adam’s Pond in Kingston. The myriad dark
leaves tinkling together as they flipped over in graceful waves to reveal their
pale undersides, as if they were being blow-dried by a massive hairdryer in
some giant-sized shampoo advertisement for lustrous hair. Very sensual. Because
trees are sexy, they just take a very long time getting round to it.

The
first so-called London plane tree, for example, was imported and planted in
Barnes in 1680, just one tree, and look at them now, the commonest tree all
over London. They’ve been at it for three hundred years. And they’re not so
hung up on gender roles as us humans either. Sometimes there’s male and female
trees, sure — like the two big ailanthus trees of heaven on either side of the
Fulham Road, the male growing achingly towards the female, ever closer each
year, only to be cut back to make room for double-decker buses — but sometimes,
like elm trees, females can go on replicating themselves for a few generations
until a seed of male elm arrives on the wind or in a piece of squirrel or bat
shit to stir up their genetic mix. Essential if they’re to adapt, evolve and
perpetuate themselves and avoid being overrun by other, more virulent strains
with quicker, randier ways of spreading themselves. I’ve often wondered how —
after being blown halfway across the country — the seeds and fruit and flowers
and pussy willow catkins of trees know when they’ve found the right opposite
number with whom to procreate and have lots of little saplings. There are no
shocking divorce rate figures to worry about with trees. Recently, it seemed as
if — despite our initial attraction — Liz was in fact deciduous, whilst I’d
turned out to be coniferous and our little Grace offshoot was to be one of
those mutations which gets eaten by a wandering deer before it gets to be one
foot high. I wonder, if men were like trees and every spring they all had a
massive communal wank into the sky — letting the wind blow their millions of
chances at immortality hither and thither —whether my Grace seed would have
found its way to Liz’s Grace bud or whether all the Grace-type buds would have
been reserved for pips from the genus Henderson, tall and mighty broadleafs
with big conkers in the autumn. Was me being with Liz just a mistake? A genetic
flirtation? Were we destined never to be broadcast? Never to enter the
Pocket
Users’ Guide to the Sex Lives of Trees and Shrubs of the British Isles?

Someone
must have come in from the street downstairs, because a draught rushed under
the door and made her shiver. I felt a twinge of cramp in my left foot. It was
OK, though, I’d left my socks on. There was a man’s voice on the stairs and
then a door slammed.

‘You
need a break,’ she said, pouring the last of the vodka into our funny glasses. ‘You’re
a very tense man and I should know, I’ve seen some very tense men.

‘I’m
missing my kid,’ I managed to say. ‘I don’t see enough of her and there doesn’t
seem to be a way around it all.’

‘Aaah,
you poor man. It’s very hard on men these days, isn’t it? They get a rough
deal, I think. I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t see my daughter. She’s
the only reason I do this. And my trips, ooh, I like my little trips.’

She
told me about her holidays in Tenerife and all the things she got up to when
drunk. She showed me her scars from gashes over twelve years old, inflicted by
her man in Leeds before she’d walked out on him taking only her daughter, a bin
bag of clothes and her Yorkshire terrier, Scraggy, who had now passed away, God
rest its soul.

‘He was
always telling me what to wear. “You’re not going out in that!” you know, that
sort of thing. He told me I was ugly, I was ugly, and after a while I looked in
a mirror and I
was
ugly. So I just upped and left, had enough.’ A
bitterness entered her voice momentarily when describing the father of her
child, but was blown away briskly by another gust of wind outside.

‘Still,
you’ve got to move on, haven’t you? Just draw a line in the sand, walk over it
and never look back.’ Second time I’d heard that recently.

‘I wish
I could do that,’ I said. Feeling sorry for us both now. I wished I had some
scars to show her, but all I have is a vaccination one on my left shoulder and
a mole removal one somewhere around my lower back.

By now,
we were lying squished together on the bed, quite cosily. The pressure on me to
perform seemed to have subsided. I was limp but it didn’t matter.

‘Does
this often happen to you? I mean, do lots of guys come in and sort of, not
actually … you know?’ I asked.

‘Oh,
yes,’ she said. ‘It takes all sorts, you know. Some of them just want to tell
you their problems. I’m like some therapist, really. There’s a lot of very
lonely people out there. I mean, you get some right psychos, you know, who want
to do horrible things to you, but we don’t like them. Soon sort them’ out. You’re
lonely, aren’t you?’

‘I don’t
have time to be lonely,’ I said.

‘Anyway,
we’re not just going to talk, are we? We’re going to be very naughty tonight.’

My
half-hour was nearly up, but for some reason, in the last five minutes I became
aroused and achieved an orgasm into the condom. I felt relieved that I had not
let her down. She wrote her number on a piece of card and I was on the street
in seconds with my collar turned up, looking for a cab.

There
were none, and wind-broken branches were strewn along the pavement. There was a
sharp, hot rain in the wind which buffeted me from the front and the back. I
was pissed now but the strength of the storm alone was enough to make me totter
like a drunkard. I kept walking, not really heeding in which direction. Small
broken branches and twigs from all the Conduit Street chestnuts were scuttling
along the ground like terrified crabs.

By now
I’d turned into Park Lane and the wind and sheet rain had not abated. The
traffic was minimal and there was nobody out walking. No one was this foolish.
There were massive branches strewn and blowing across the dual carriageway
here. Hyde Park, the other side of the road, looked a tangled mess. In the
morning, there would be big clearing-up to do before the rush hour.

In the
grassy central aisle of Park Lane, an old ash tree had fallen in its entirety,
impacting on the metal crash barrier and twisting it into nonsense. It lay half
on and half off the road, pointing away from me like a fallen Don Quixote.
Where the tree had stood was now an earthy crater some seven feet across,
churned up by the snapping roots. The massive upturned underside was exposed to
me, a round inferno of twisted limbs, a gorgon’s hairdo turned to stone, and at
its centre, the dark central avenue to the heartwood of the tree, like an
ancient and mythical vagina, a hole which had sucked up life from the ground
for two hundred years.

Back in
the hollow safety of Meard Street, as I tried to sleep, the wind still rang in
my ears like the aftermath of a rock concert.

FOUR

‘OH, Hi, GUY,
I thought you were one of Karen’s patients.’ Neil ushered me inside,
past the double downstairs room and up the stairs without any further
explanations as to why he was wearing a mauvy-pink frock, full make-up and
pendulous earrings.

I
followed him up the stairs of the rather grand house, past some portraits of
what I assumed must be the great and the good in the world of psychotherapy and
into his tiny attic room, which was a maze of piled books, stray paper and
unwashed coffee cups. There was a mattress on the floor with a rumpled sleeping
bag flopped across it. He still hadn’t shaved and there was a row of empty
vodka bottles along the windowsill. The rest of the house had seemed well kept,
bourgeois, even, but in here it was a poet’s den.

‘Shall
we go for a drink?’ he said.

‘Well,
it’s a bit early for me, but, sure, fine,’ I said, and then, ‘Love the outfit.
Do they go in for that sort of thing down your local?’

‘For
you, Guy, I’ll change.’ The frock came off to reveal purple silken French
knickers. He slung on a pair of waisted blue slacks which zipped up the side,
and a voluminous cream blouse with floppy wide lapels. The earrings stayed
where they were, dancing as he spoke. ‘It’s not really fair, is it? A woman can
go 0ut in anything she likes. She can wear a skirt, a suit, trousers if he
wants, make-up, no make-up, but if you’re a bloke …’ he was wiping his face
with an old tissue now, ‘… they just assume you must be a poof.’ Complete
weirdo more like, I thought, with two and a half weeks’ growth on your chin.
Still, he did seem to have had a bath. We must be grateful for mini-mercies.

I’d
never known Neil had TV leanings. That’s TV as in transvestite, not television.
I wish he’d told me, it could’ve been useful.

‘Also,
since Karen started her own therapy practice, she’s been using the downstairs
rooms as her clinic, and we get all these uptight neurots visiting through the
day. I’m supposed to keep in the background because they’re not meant to know
anything about the therapist’s home life, you know, in theory. So I just see if
I can’t fuck their brains a bit by wafting around in a dress at the top of the
stairs every now and again. It’s a laugh. Drives Karen mad.’

Client-led,
that’s what I am. That’s the basic principle behind my work. It was high time I
paid that visit to Neil. He was obviously going through a hard time, and there
must be something I could do about it. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the neat
physique of a Julian Clary, nor the vampish poise of an Eddie Izzard. He just
looked, well, garish, unhinged. His decline. must be my fault. I wasn’t looking
after him properly, too involved in my own stuff, no doubt. And besides, I
couldn’t face going back to the camp-bed room for another night and staring at
the phone. I couldn’t vizzog it. As far as my attitude to the state Neil was in
went, I’ve learned not to let anything judgemental so much as flicker across my
face. My opinion on literally anything is the least important part of the
equation. For example, I don’t even know any more whether I actually like
musicals or detest them — whether I prefer classical drama to soap opera. My
field of operation need only concern itself with what may or may not work — for
instance, I might have a client who can tap dance and sing, so I will be
excited by the latest five-person show looking for a theatre in the West End,
or I might have a method-trained serious young student of Acting with a capital
A, so I will be thrilled that the BBC are doing a season of studio-based
American drama. I do not prize one over the other. My personal taste jury went
out a long time ago, and stayed there. I am lucky in that my own likes and
dislikes do not really trouble me. It’s about people, and people change. Like
Jenny Thompson, for instance. Started out in agit prop and political theatre,
wouldn’t touch anything unless it was changing the world, done for charity or
written by David Hare. Now, eight years later, she’s writing diary pieces in
Metropolitan
magazine helping women with their sex lives, and doing stills sessions in
designer clothes for Sunday lifestyle sections. And good for her. So if Neil
wanted to grow a beard and wear a purple frock, my job was to follow wherever
he led, waiting only for the right moment to pop questions about possible bankability.