Devil in Disguise (5 page)

When
Simon, living in the squat with his new anarchist friends, received the letter
telling him his mother had cancer, the stone of misery began to throb,
invigorated by the news and its potential. He had no difficulty in sitting by
his mother’s bed every day for three weeks, blowing his nose and wiping the
tears from his eyes.

‘He’s
heartbroken, poor boy,’ said the nurses to each other. ‘He must love his mother
to bits. Look at the state of him.’

Simon
wasn’t exactly indulging himself but he knew, deep down, that this crying and
carrying on was little to do with his dying mother. He felt it anyway, always
had, and now it was being fed, thriving like the cancer.

When
his mother eventually died — her last words to him were ‘Canada seems nice’ —
Simon stayed with his father for a week and was the star turn at the funeral,
breaking down as he read a Christina Rossetti poem, shaking hands and passing
around sandwiches with red eyes at the house afterwards.

‘Look
after each other,’ said the relatives, as they filed out later. ‘It’s just the
two of you now.’

The
next day, while his father sat in the lounge drinking a bottle of whisky, Simon
put his mother’s clothes into bin-liners and took them to the local charity
shop. When he got home, the whisky bottle was empty.

‘I’m
going to sell the house and move to a bungalow in Dorset,’ said his father, as
if he was announcing that he planned to take an overdose of paracetamol.

‘Okay,’
Simon said cheerily. ‘I’m going back home to London tomorrow. Keep in touch.’
And he left the next day, certain that he would never see his father again.

Simon returned to the
squat, his day job delivering parcels and his nights in the soft, dark
corridors of the theatre, armed with ice creams and ready change. One day he
was driving through New Cross when he saw a handsome denim-clad youth with a
rucksack flung over his shoulder entering an old Victorian public lavatory. On
impulse, he parked his van and followed him. Inside it was empty, apart from the
youth who, as Simon entered, was just zipping up his flies and moving from the
urinal to the sink to wash his big rugby-player’s hands.

Damn.
I’m too late, Simon thought, as he took his place at the now-vacated trough. He
stood there, nevertheless, looking encouragingly towards the boy, who was
wiping his hands dry on a paper towel. He was aware of Simon’s intense stare,
and took his time, carefully drying between each finger. Just before he left,
he turned and gave a knowing smile.

Disappointment
is all part of the game for a gay man on the cruise. But for Simon, the sad
sight of seeing such a beauty slip through his fingers amounted to heartache.
The pain spread down his arms and up his neck until an audible sob caught in
his throat. If only he’d got there quicker he might have been lucky. The boy
had appeared to know what he was after and had seemed almost amused. Who was
he? Should he follow him? Should he wait to see if the boy came back? All these
thoughts made Simon’s heart beat faster. He stood there, waiting, hoping for
the sound of footsteps, but hearing only the drone of traffic from New Cross
Road.

That
night as he lay on his mattress in the squat, fantasising obsessively about the
one that had got away, he remembered something. On the back of the boy’s
rucksack there had been a label. Simon closed his eyes and concentrated. Yes.
He could see it clearly now. It read ‘Goldsmiths College’.

By the
next morning he had decided his future. He drove to Goldsmiths and picked up an
application form. With his first-class A level results and agreeable
personality, he would surely be offered a place there. He chose English
literature as his subject, a kind of tribute to his mother, who had enjoyed a
good read.

And
then he met Molly.

As soon as Simon and Molly’s
lives intersected, the value of true friendship was suddenly revealed to him.
It was a revelation. His schoolmates had always bored him, however much they
sought his company, and he’d had neither the desire nor the opportunity to get
to know girls before, but Molly had a presence and allure that was both fun and
decidedly feminine. He was somewhat in awe for the first time in his life,
feeling that, in some obscure way, he had met his match. She was funny and
theatrical and could make a simple walk down the corridor into a memorable
experience. Molly, in turn, seemed to be drawn to his dangerous disregard for
other people’s opinions and his brooding, unpredictable personality. They spent
hours talking, mostly about themselves.

It was
a few weeks after they had first met at uni, and the pair of them were walking
through Greenwich Park on a chilly autumn afternoon, just as darkness was
beginning to fall.

‘What
makes you tick?’ asked Molly.

‘Misery,’
said Simon, without hesitation. ‘It’s my natural state.’

Molly
looked at him curiously. ‘Really? You don’t seem so miserable to me.’

‘That’s
because I’m happy at the moment, comparatively. Fate led me here, you see, to
be your friend. Thank goodness for lust.’

‘Eh?’
said Molly, puzzled.

Simon
told her about the denim-clad youth with his fateful rucksack and the encounter
in the lavatory. ‘Those few seconds in a public toilet where nothing much
happened but a smile had far-reaching consequences. But for that moment I would
not be at university and I would not have met you,’ he finished solemnly.

‘Well,’
Molly said. ‘Praise be for your thriving hormones.’

‘I
think the story rather vindicates my entire lifestyle,’ said Simon, grandly.

‘I’d
have been lost without you here,’ said Molly. ‘And the boy with the rucksack? Have
you seen him again?’

‘Not a
sniff. How annoying is that?’

‘Look
on the bright side. It gives you something to be miserable about.’

‘True.
Otherwise I’d have to go looking for someone else to moon over. I need a hit of
misery every morning the moment I wake up or I can’t function. It’s like snuff
to me. Do you think there’s something wrong with me? It’s not normal, is it?’

‘What’s
normal?’ asked Molly, questioning the question. ‘I think all intense feelings
should be regarded as precious.

How
clever of Molly, thought Simon, to put a positive spin on even the darkest of
thoughts.

Already
there was an understanding and acceptance between them that neither had ever
felt before. During the first few weeks they had been busy laughing and
impressing each other with their wit and style. Now, having established that
they were on the same wavelength, brothers and sisters in arms, they trusted
each other to know their innermost secrets and fears. Molly had mentioned that
she’d spent her childhood in a children’s home, but Simon hadn’t pressed his
new friend for more information. ‘What was it like?’ he asked now. ‘Growing up
in a home with no family?’

Molly
stared out over the green parkland and thought. Then she spoke —
matter-of-factly and without a hint of tragedy. ‘Not as bad as it sounds. I had
a happy childhood, I’d say. They did their best. I was fed and clothed and I
had loads of friends. It was all I ever knew. There was no abuse, if that’s
what you were wondering. It was all very proper. Sometimes you’d get close to
the workers there but they’d have to back off. They weren’t really allowed to
be properly tactile. Against the rules. I was always a needy child. As if
that’s a bad thing at six years of age.’

‘Why
weren’t you adopted?’ asked Simon.

‘They
did try, but I had this idea in my mind that my mother would come back for me
one day. Every few months, prospective parents would come and leer at me as if
I was a leg of lamb in the butcher’s window, but I was having none of it. I did
my best to put them off. I pulled ugly faces, swore like a trooper, developed
sudden bouts of incontinence. I even bit one woman who kept stroking my hair as
if I was a doll. But some folks were so desperate they still wanted me. They’d
have taken home a rabid ferret. When the social workers asked me if I’d like to
go and live with a couple in their posh gaff in Chester, where they could be my
new mummy and daddy, I said, “No,” most emphatically.’

‘They
didn’t make you?’

‘They
couldn’t. I’d have run away. I spent a few weeks with foster-parents
occasionally, but I saw to it that I was sent back to the home. To me, those
foster-homes were a holiday, nothing permanent.’

‘I
longed to be adopted,’ said Simon, imagining the glamour of auditioning new
parents, perusing their bank statements and asking if they had a swimming-pool.

‘I
didn’t. I was staying put in case my mother wanted me.’

‘And
did she?’

Molly’s
voice went very low and quiet. ‘No, as it happens.’

‘Do you
know who she was?’ asked Simon, gently.

‘I
remember her,’ said Molly, with the first echo of sadness in her voice. ‘People
thought I wouldn’t because I was so young when I went into care, but my
memories from before then are a lot more vivid than people assume. When you’re
five, you take in a great deal. She was called Susan, and she had brown hair.
She cried a lot. Screamed when they took me away. I can still hear her howling
my name as they bundled me down the stairs and into a car. Two policewomen were
holding her back, gripping her wrists.’

‘Why,
though? Why did they take you from her?’

‘That I
don’t know. I was hungry all the time. I remember that. She obviously wasn’t
coping. A five-year-old’s memory, vivid as it is, doesn’t really deal in facts,
just feelings and emotions. I don’t know if it was drugs or what. I was at risk,
that was all the authorities needed to know, so they took me away.’

They
sat on a bench high on Greenwich Hill, looking down at the elegant white
pillars of the old Royal Naval College.

‘And
your father?’ asked Simon, his ears freezing in the frosty air.

‘That’s
a complete blank,’ said Molly. ‘He doesn’t feature at all in my memory. There’s
a whole scenario that I made up when I was about thirteen to comfort myself. I
decided that my mother worked in a flower shop and he was a married man who
came in every Friday on his way home from work to buy roses for his wife. They
fell in love and began an illicit affair, and she got pregnant with me but
didn’t tell him. To stop his wife suspecting, he still came in every Friday for
her roses, and my mother, in her jealous misery, would press her hands into the
thorns and smear the stems with her blood. Because there were other people in
the shop they had to remain civil and polite, but they gave each other sad, passionate
looks as she rang the till and handed him his change. Then he left the shop
and, because he was crying, stepped into the road, right under the wheels of a
bus.’

‘How
terribly tragic!’ exclaimed Simon.

‘Yes,
it was,’ agreed Molly. ‘Then, of course, I was born. Just imagine. It was 1978.
Susan was an unmarried, not to say broken-hearted mother, struggling to cope
with her grief, and it all became too much for her.’

‘Did
she take to drink?’ asked Simon, caught up in the drama of the story.

‘Worse
than that. Drugs.’

‘No!’
said Simon, horrified.

‘I’m
afraid so.’

‘It was
the only way to numb the pain, I expect,’ concluded Simon.

‘That’s
what I told myself,’ said Molly, turning her bright eyes on her new friend. Her
tone changed to plain and brutal. ‘On the other hand she might have been a
common prostitute and my father some sweaty car mechanic.’

‘I
think it was quite different. Your father was a visiting Hollywood star with a
penchant for sordid sex in a lay-by,’ said Simon, countering her dejection with
some flighty energy. ‘After a hard day’s filming at Pinewood your soon-to-be
father indulged himself with a spot of kerb crawling … He was stunned by your
mother’s beauty and paid an extra flyer to take his pleasure without the
protection of a condom. Stardom’s in your genes!’

Molly
laughed. ‘So my mum
was
a prostitute, not a flower-seller?’

‘No,’ Simon
said hastily. ‘She was a beautiful girl down on her luck, who couldn’t resist
the power of your father’s fame and sex appeal.’

‘Well,
that would never happen.’

‘Why
not? It’s just as likely as your story. Why shouldn’t it?’

Molly
looked thoughtful, then beamed at him. ‘You’re right. Thank you, Si. Somehow
you’ve just made the world a better place for me to live in.’

‘It’s a
great pleasure,’ said Simon, taking Molly’s gloved hand and giving it a
squeeze. ‘Any time you’re feeling sad about the world just come and see me.
I’ll confirm your worst fears.’

‘You
can turn sweaty car mechanics into film stars,’ said Molly.

‘It’s a
gift,’ agreed Simon, with a shrug.