The Sparsholt Affair

3

At the end of January he was rung up again by his old friend, originally Pat’s friend, Graham, who’d been keeping an eye on him post-bereavement. Graham was five or six years younger than Johnny and had never had a long-term partner himself: he was someone for whom ‘settling down’ represented a terrifying rejection of choice; even so, there was a hint of changed valency in the call, from one single man to another. Johnny pictured him as he spoke: bald, black-eyed, still fit, in a way he himself had never bothered to be, with the look, in his jeans and blue-checked short-sleeved shirt, of a schoolmaster spotted in the private depths of the holidays. He used the old language, over the phone, ‘Yeah, I got some good gear, wanna go out?’ – always parody, and said now with a sweet sense of absurdity half-masking his excitement. He was a civil servant doing something that Johnny had never grasped, a set of abstract terms; in the very moment he told you his job description you found yourself helplessly forgetting it. For twenty years he’d been a distant but a good friend, whose pleasure was in seeing you, with no hint of blame on either side for the time you hadn’t been in touch. It was a kind of trust, and Johnny knew, if he was going to do anything so silly, so much in defiance of his own loneliness, that Graham was the person to do it with.

They met for dinner in a noisy Clerkenwell eatery, cocktails first and then a bottle of Shiraz. Graham had forgotten Johnny was vegetarian, or perhaps thought, now Pat was gone, he would revert to common sense, or taste; Johnny made do with two starters, the drink going straight to his head. They talked about Pat for a while, but Johnny saw Graham looking beyond him now, with an amiable waning of patience; he talked instead about the Brazilian boy behind the bar, and a dazzling young couple two tables away who they worked out were going on to the club as well. One of them, late thirties perhaps, had the gay voice that survived through generations, the illusionless adenoidal whine and drag, just a far-off hint of Australia in the colour of the vowels. Why did he mind it now, when he’d heard it, been thinly amused and reassured by it, all his adult life? He felt somehow troubled by their beautiful necks and biceps and hair.

Graham leant forward, charming, demonic in the uplight of the candle, covered Johnny’s hand at the table and left in it the almost insensible presence of a twist of film, small (when he peeped at it) as the blue twisted paper of salt in a childhood packet of crisps. ‘Good stuff,’ said Graham: ‘well, put it away’ – perhaps unprepared for his innocence.

‘In my day,’ said Johnny, ‘it was pills.’

Graham looked for the waiter. ‘Yeah, this is better. Don’t take it all at once, for god’s sake. You’ve got seven or eight hits there.’

‘OK,’ said Johnny, ‘thanks very much.’ The sense of his trusting incompetence spread and he thought, when they’d paid the bill and got outside, he might just give the wrap back to Graham and put up his arm for a passing taxi. Graham would understand.

They walked for five minutes to the club, which wasn’t a building, just a roped-off doorway giving on to a lobby and a deep descending staircase. ‘You have no idea,’ said Graham, ‘what that doorway leads to.’ ‘Well, I have a bit,’ said Johnny. In the queue the mood was unexpectedly exciting, and Johnny didn’t mind waiting, adapting himself with a kind of shy watchfulness to the attitudes of the much younger men jiggling in front and massing, very quickly, behind. He caught their own reflections in the dark shop window beside them, two other people they were surprisingly connected to, Graham in his bomber-jacket, Johnny his old greatcoat, the collar turned up. He remembered the inexorable routine, new arrivals striding up or stepping out of taxis, squeals and kisses. Some of the men were sombre and subdued, saving themselves for a long and demanding night: it seemed something almost grim they put themselves through. He and Graham kept chatting quietly, but he felt a tightening in his gut, and was glad to be drunk already when the queue started moving forward. In the lobby a door opened and they heard the music from far inside stripped down by distance to a rapid menacing thump. They paid at a little window, £12, Johnny peering anxiously at the young ticket-seller, who smiled back and seemed unconcerned by his age; or was the smile too insistent, a hint of concern and amusement shown to the elderly? Immediately the ticket was taken from him and the back of his hand was stamped in black ink with an illegible emblem.

On the huge square stairway going down the banging of the music grew louder and louder like a boring threat, the noise of other people’s pleasure. When they opened the door into the bar it came at them hard, the bright ping-ponging happiness of a tune on top, all warmed up, geared up, and bouncing fast, while he still had his coat on and wondered as they joined the queue for the coat check if he wanted to bounce at all. The medium of the club, three floors below ground, was an absolute darkness, on which multicoloured light played and darted incessantly, over the naked shoulders and handsome faces of the milling and gathering men. Johnny’s fear here was the sixteen-year-old’s again, that he would lose Graham, that his friend would make out with someone else, leaving him more lonely than ever in an alien crowd. He thought, for god’s sake, I’m a father, I’m on the committee of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, I own a large house in Fulham. He handed in his coat and scarf and big jersey and came away with his ticket and a little shiver past the huge ducted air-conditioning. And the truth was he had made a puzzled private attempt, back home, at looking sexy, a raid on his youthful self, old jeans shabby and tight, a faded T-shirt he’d screen-printed himself – a deniable effort but perhaps an appealing one. The two beautiful men from the restaurant came past and looked at them in the split-second misapprehension of their knowing each other, the twitch of a smile sliding at once to some worthier object – the smile deniable too. Graham marched him into the bar.

It was in the toilet stall, with his bottle of Corona and his twist of crystalline powder, that he saw himself most starkly, as if in a security camera, risky, ridiculous: what if he collapsed on the dance floor, and died? What would his father say, what would he tell his friends when the news appeared in the Telegraph? For a moment, above the narrow, black-walled cubicle, his father hovered like a genie. He wetted a finger, dipped it and licked it again, tiny granules bitter and authentic as he washed them down with two swigs of beer. He unbolted the door with unexpected firmness and relief, and went back to the bar.

He found Graham talking with a huge shirtless blond, formidable torso a swirl of tattoos, cogs and blades, Celtic but industrial, a legend on his chest in a font so fancy you had to work it out . . . If You Want You Can Do It: ah, well, thought Johnny. They were at different stages, Graham standing with his drink, a man at a party, the blond chewing, eyes dilated, touching him and stroking him. ‘Johnny, this is Billy,’ Graham said – Johnny found himself pulled in, kissed, held under Billy’s fondly protective left arm, his skin silky and warm, Johnny’s hand round his waist in lightly adhesive contact as he rocked to the music. ‘Having a good time?’ said Billy. ‘I’m starting to,’ said Johnny. Billy kissed him again and squeezed him – then shouted, reached out over Johnny’s head to another massive beauty going past, and in a moment he was off, pulled away by the other man, but leaning back to kiss Graham too – ‘Catch you later!’ before he was taken into the surge that was moving and building towards the dance floor beyond. ‘How do you know Billy?’ said Johnny. Graham smiled and shrugged – ‘Never seen him before,’ he said.

He felt tired as they waited, the music, which all the others seemed to know and love, demanding something impossible of him, and someone was looking at him over Graham’s shoulder, could it be a man he knew, a friend’s child? A friend’s grandchild . . . ? Not a sitter, he was sure of that. He went on past, turned and squinted at Johnny, said something to the boy with him, and hung around before coming back: ‘Hello, Mr Sparsholt!’ Johnny looked narrowly at him, skinny, posh boy, dark, borderline pretty, eyes chemically engorged. ‘It’s Tim! – you remember, I was going to marry Lucy . . .’ ‘Oh, Tim . . .’ said Johnny, then worked it out, as the boy shook his hand and kissed him on both cheeks. ‘It’s Mr Sparsholt!’ Tim said to his friend. It was what he had called him in the days when Johnny took Lucy to play with him, or he came round to the house to play with her. At the age of eight he proposed to Lucy, but at some point in the twenty years since then had clearly thought better of it. Now he had nothing on but shorts and trainers and was hand in hand with this restless young man already tugging him on towards the dance floor, who also had something tattooed on his chest like a necklace, in flowing script: Never A Failure Always A Lesson – well, that was great too. Johnny followed them with his eyes, explained to Graham who he was, and felt his feet slyly shifting and rocking, an effortless energy pulsing up his legs, his head nodding, right arm rising on invisible currents to part the air in time to the music. He knew he was a lightweight, when they’d gone out in the old days he’d danced all night on half a pill. This was much quicker than a pill, he felt it lift him and stagger him at the same time. But it was lovely, absurdly lovely, too lovely for the mere materials at hand, and so with its own fine filament of regret, though he couldn’t stop smiling. ‘Shall we dance?’ he said, and they threaded their way through to the edge of the floor, Graham shifting his shoulders, looking round, not up yet himself, but playing up to Johnny’s sudden bold gestures. It was fabulous to move without thinking, among all the others, accepted. Graham touched his arm, gave him chewing gum, a swig of his water. ‘That stuff’s all right, then!’ The big tune they all knew came back, held back, waited for, a countdown, open faces of the crowd turned towards the DJ in his booth, Johnny laughed and shook his head and his hand pointed skywards when it came.

Later he was watching a man dancing with friends, the rightness and beauty of him first of all, the strain of his neck, the face tighter but longer from baldness, but yes it must be Mark, he beamed at him, and Mark saw him too, and came over smiling – shirt tucked in his belt, leather bands tight round his biceps, all the handsome maintained muscled of a fifty-year-old, and the single small tattoo of thirty years before on the left arm, just below the shoulder, a rose: Johnny rubbed it with his fingers, with the ball of his thumb, magical, testing it. It was more touching, and more pleasing, than he could say, and Mark, who had probably half-forgotten it himself, rolled his shoulder to peer at it, and peered at Johnny with his funny saucy smile. He pulled him in, Johnny glanced back for Graham, who nodded happily at him, Mark took both his hands and they were dancing together.

There were questions Johnny dropped before bothering to ask, had Mark stayed on the scene, needing it, loving it, these past twenty years, or was this a rare nostalgic venture for him too? Johnny knew the answer, Mark gripping his shoulder and making happy incoherent remarks: flashes of memory and facts about the people he was with and what he’d been doing earlier in the evening all mixed up without connexion: he was very high. And Johnny got the drift, he was touched and charmed by the rubbish Mark was saying. They danced with a third man, Max, in a leather harness, their arms round each other’s shoulders and waists, Max losing the rhythm as he got out his phone and tried to make sense of a text, and struggled for a minute or two, jaw working and pupils like dark pools, to send a reply – the phone was fertile with predictions as he thumbed the wrong keys. Johnny offered to help him, which was a joke in itself, but they got it off just as the friend he was texting, a tall black man clutching bottles of water and Lucozade, squeezed his way through the crowd beside them: Smirnofg and redbBull, it said. The black man was called Arnold, and made droll conversation with Johnny before someone else claimed him. All around them in the fluent glancing colours of the lights men half their age danced, shoulders rolling, hands rising and pointing; among them Johnny spotted here and there the bald and grizzled pillars of his own generation, and was troubled by them for a second, and then as quickly grateful that some looked older than him. After a bit, Mark pulled him into the amorous head-lock that signalled a wish to speak, and said again, ‘Who are you with?’ Johnny looked back, said, ‘Well, I came with Graham’ – and wondered as Mark’s fingers slid down his arm and interlocked with his own in a warm strong grasp if there was more to this question, some faint enduring thread through the great perspective of time that seemed to open up under the glittering archway of the club. He danced for a while with his hands on Mark’s shoulders, Mark holding him lightly round the waist with one arm, and smiling, at him, and over his head at Arnold, whom he reached out to with his other hand to bring him into the circle. Arnold kept his shirt on and had a nice ironical slant on the place and the people – it was hard to say if he was high himself or not. ‘How long have you known Mark?’ he said. ‘Thirty years!’ said Johnny. ‘Mm, I’ll have to ask him all about you,’ said Arnold. Johnny said, ‘How about you?’ nodding at Mark, who was smiling from far away in the tunnel of pleasure, though his hand was squeezing Johnny’s neck. Arnold raised three fingers, and then with one of his gracious ironical gestures lifted Mark’s other hand and showed their matching gold bands side by side.

Johnny needed the toilets, asked several people, he passed Graham in the bar talking to two other men – ‘Aren’t you dancing?’ – Graham hugged him and said, ‘We’ll join you in five!’ In the mirror as he queued he saw himself, astonished wide-eyed figure, pink-faced, grey thatch rustic among the sharp cuts and shaven heads of the young people sliding and barging past behind him, but there was nothing he could do about it now and giving himself a sexy smile which got an ‘All right?’ from the friendly Chinese boy pressing in beside him, he went to a place at the trough. A few minutes later he set off again at a strange wading swagger to find his friends.

He thought he knew the way through the dense crowd that had taken over the bar and made intimate shouting colonies in every bay and niche of the underground space. There it was, for a long minute, the feared and lurking strain of loneliness – high as a lark and with no one to hold or even to talk to. It was like an ache in his arms. He waited and bought himself water, at the bar, no sign now of Graham. At the edge of the dance floor again he was moving with the music, peering casually round at people showing in flashes and shadows, as if in flowing water, barely noticing him. He couldn’t see Graham or Mark at all, just overlapping bald-headed men who in the recurrent split seconds of light proved not to be them. Now a dark-haired young man was pressed against him, saying something in his ear, and they moved hand in hand into the dancing crowd, the young man stepping back to protect a space for them and make a cute little act of dancing with Johnny – he thought for a moment he was teasing him. He was lean and large-eyed, with a long nose, and a smile which only faded as he lost himself in his trance, then came back as he looked at Johnny, and hugged up close with him as they danced. The music wasn’t so fast now, and around them other couples rubbed and bobbed, smiled out like nodding dogs at each other and their neighbours, all bathed in the same absurd ongoing surge of feeling. ‘What’s your name?’ his friend said – Johnny told him and saw it slide past him like a pulse of the lights. He came back to him, hesitated as before some difficult question, and said in his ear what sounded like, ‘I’m Zay,’ nodding at the fact and at the music as he stepped back, holding both Johnny’s hands. ‘Zay . . .’ said Johnny, grinning at his warmth and his grip. The boy came in close again, to clarify, paused, and said exactly what he’d said before – now he pulled Johnny’s forearm out straight and wrote with his finger ‘Z’, trailing back down his arm till they were holding hands again. ‘Z!’ One or two of the people around them seemed to know Z, and made remarks to him he laughed at if he heard them or not, or they merely squeezed his arm or neck with an outreached hand and told Johnny their names and squeezed and kissed him too. ‘What’s your name?’ – Johnny told them and saw Z listen to make sure. When they danced up close Johnny took unthinking possession of his body, in its damp black tank top, arms loose round the boy’s waist, fingertips tucked in the waistband of his jeans. It was beautiful in the thick of the dance floor to feel the silky hairs in the warm cleft of his arse, and of course though Z had a phone in one front pocket and a plastic bottle in the other he felt his half-excited sideways bulge rubbing and bumping against him, though nothing sexy was said or any suggestion even made that Z was aware of his own excitement; while Johnny was too full of E and perhaps, could it be?, too old to answer him so instinctually. He wanted to kiss Z but felt even here a delicacy, a decorum, in the crowds of people he didn’t know and Z did. Now the strong hand on his neck was Mark’s, with Arnold, still smart in his shirt, behind him, smiling slyly and raising an eyebrow – they were still here, it was all going on, this was how they did things, there wasn’t any question of anyone leaving. Johnny pulled Z to him, he didn’t want to lose him, and they all said hello, Mark moving the whole time, heavy and handsome, as he drew them in close to him and dabbed a little finger in a sachet he had, and stuck it in Johnny’s smiling mouth – he was only faintly concerned to ask what it was, so bitter that he screwed up his face and Z laughed and administered water. Arnold leaned in to Johnny and said, ‘Well, you’re all right then!’ and rocked back and carried on his minimal slightly parody dancing as Mark grinned and made up and down gestures with both hands as if fanning himself – he plucked at the bottom of Johnny’s T-shirt and twitched it up over his belly, while Johnny stared at him, wriggled and resisted and found in a moment he was bare-chested, arms up, hair tugged back, and then tucking his shirt with Z’s help into the belt of his jeans. The air of the fan wafting over him and the nudging oneness with all the other half-naked men was entrancing, a rebirth, he saw one or two glances drop over him curiously and peeped down at himself, not sure what he’d see, while Mark laid a strong absolving palm on his stomach. Still, Z wanted him more to himself, he didn’t care so much for these new friends who were much older friends than he was – Johnny made a comic mime of being yanked away, looked back over his shoulder, and it wasn’t goodbye, everyone was happy.

They were going somewhere, Z leading him off through an arch into an area he hadn’t seen before . . . was this another dance floor? . . . different music, different crowd . . . he was completely at sea among the bargers and blockers, Z’s hot strong hand threaded tight with his own, and squeezing tighter, a spasm of protection, he wasn’t letting him go. In this room there were structures like beds laid out and though there wasn’t a space Z got them in there, against the wall, where they half sat, half lay with their arms round each other. Z was saying, ‘You been here before, right?’ and Johnny shook his head. ‘So where are you from?’ he said. ‘Me? Brazil!’ said Z, and looked round, ‘All these guys from Brazil!’ ‘Ah, yes . . .’ said Johnny; it was great to have gone underground into another country, a Little Brazil . . . ‘You been in Brazil?’ Johnny shook his head again, shifted and interlocked with him more closely: ‘Never been to South America.’ ‘You come,’ said Z, ‘you come with me.’ ‘Thank you,’ said Johnny, and laughed, which perhaps offended Z – he looked serious. ‘I think this guy know you,’ he said, and it took Johnny a minute to understand Graham was there – ‘I’m off!’ he said, kneeling and leaning in to kiss him and saying in his ear, ‘You’re all right then!’ and grasping Z’s right hand with his left. Johnny had a little twinge, even so: was Graham all right? – the old trouper going already – there was a hint that he’d lost his friend to Z, but a much stronger hint that this was exactly what he wanted. Johnny felt the bearable embarrassment of someone who’s been benignly looked after, his need acknowledged in being met. He watched Graham take the hand of a tall black man and melt with him into the shadow of the shuffling parade, and happy after all that his friend had made out Johnny curled up sideways, with Z’s right leg between his own. He was having a heavenly night, and only now thought of the things that had been stopping him, and in the twinge of last year’s grief, more a reflex or echo here than the thing itself, he snuggled in closer with Z and smiled into his foreign face in the inexplicable knowledge that he was his.

Z had his hand on Johnny’s neck, stared almost painfully: ‘I love your hair.’ ‘Oh, thank you . . .’ said Johnny, still allowing for teasing. He didn’t know Z at all, or what he thought was funny. Z pushed his hands through it, gently but greedily – ‘I love grey hair.’ He marvelled at it, he asked with his lips to his ear: ‘Is it natural?’ Johnny promised him it was. He closed his eyes as they kissed, holding each other tight, lips working together with a passion that he knew in another cool but painless moment he’d rarely known the like of with Pat (the rapturous possession of the lover’s mouth which the blind tongue described to the seeing mind) – perhaps he never had. When he dropped back and looked up he saw the other men round them, some watching with the tranced but unintrusive stares of the drugged at something private which flourished unexpectedly in this public place with complete security. He had his hand round Z under his little tank top and the feel of his warm skin was exquisite but still somehow not sexual. He felt he might stay in this heaven of perpetual foreplay, when Z lifted Johnny’s hand and pressed it instead between his legs. ‘You want to go in the toilets?’

‘I’m fine, thanks,’ said Johnny, stroking his neck, his thumb circling on the little rise behind his ear. But Z rubbed the captive hand against himself till Johnny with a certain bashful good manners as well as a marvellous surrender to the currents of the night scrambled up after him and they went off, a bit unsteadily at first among the crushed plastic bottles on the floor, to do some undisclosed thing in the lavs.

There was a queue, which Z cut in near the front of, behind some other Brazilians he knew, and stood introducing Johnny to the boys who were too off their faces to be much surprised or interested by him. They gabbled away in their own language. In a little defensive reflex, another passing few seconds of shyness, Johnny took out his phone, which was a puzzle to get into in his own addled state, with the mad old black queen who ran the room trailing up and down shouting, ‘Hurry up! Hurry up! No fuckin in the toilets!’ and banging on the closed doors, lively with voices on the other side, which opened here and there, now and then, to let two people out and another two or three in. He had two shots at entering his passcode. ‘Here we go!’ said Z, and Johnny went in with him, and felt a buzz in his palm – he had voicemail, and then he saw messages, which, chewing and grinning, he felt were both charming and ungraspably remote. Ivan . . . Pete G . . . Lucy had all texted him. Z pulled him forward and bolted the door against another man who was pressing to come in. Lucy had texted at 12.27, an unnoticed three hours ago. The letters were swollen and sugary and he had a sense of a joke and its warmth, though he didn’t quite get it . . . David who?

‘What is?’ said Z, angling his head.

The weirdly cushioned shock; the unstoppable chemicals dancing and smiling in his brain as his throat closed on the need to make a decision.

‘Bad news,’ Johnny said, but still in the intimate, confidential way, mouth to ear, of their earlier nonsense, his hand again unthinkingly round Z’s warm waist. He let Z take the phone and look at it. ‘Dad SOOOOO sorry about David XXXX Thinking of u.’ ‘My father,’ said Johnny. ‘I don’t know . . .’ Z noticed the voicemail, put the phone up to Johnny’s ear. It was a woman, and he could hear her with strange clarity, intimate but impersonal, with the roar of voices outside, the club music booming beyond and the mad old queen shouting, ‘Move along! Move along! No jiggy-jiggy in the toilets!’: ‘Hello Jonathan. Your father’s died. He was eighty-nine. I’m very sorry. I’ll try you again’ – a little finishing clatter, then, ‘It’s June, as you probably realized.’ He reached out for Pat, who was leaning in an archway beyond and a little above the wild crowd of strangers; but Pat had gone before, he felt the phrase, a further room of the club, far deeper and darker, an infinitude of people, with only those on the near edge, just over the threshold, fleetingly distinct before they merged into the mass.

They went back into the bar, Z a little preoccupied now; but he was unexpectedly wonderful. As they waited at the coat check Johnny squinted at the other texts, Pete Grey remote good news about an exhibition, Ivan on to it as if by telepathy, V sorry about your old man. Will call tomorrow IXX – of course, he would be writing the Telegraph obituary . . . and the thought that his father would be in the papers again seemed to heighten the crisis, which he saw massing and approaching, like a squadron of planes still lightless and soundless in the depth of the night. Surely no one else knew about it yet. Then he listened to June’s message again, hearing the hard reproof in it, and a sense of the future, which she, unlike Johnny, had long been giving thought to. They stumbled upstairs towards the entrance, the music from below in wafts here, through opened and closing doors, people coming in still, others going, going on, in the artificial madness of the night. From the outer doors, in front of them, the January night air, four in the morning, balm for a moment, then, as they stood confusedly, too cold for them, in their heightened warmth. The security, in black, stood around.

Z came out with him to where the taxis were. ‘You like I come?’ – and of course he was still off his face, he hadn’t had bad news himself, and all the energy and love of the drug still filled and absorbed him. ‘Oh, no – it’s all right.’ Z stood shivering in his T-shirt with an arm round Johnny under the greatcoat in which he stood hot and reeling and incapable as Z spoke to the security man and then the driver, not letting go of him. Then he said, ‘I come with,’ and went back in, while the security grew impatient and Johnny stood and watched for Z, unable to explain. In the back of the car they each had a sense of the crisis; Z sat looking ahead but holding Johnny’s hand. It was the hot unhesitating grip of the night, the unconscious oneness of feeling, floating very strangely for Johnny over the knowledge that something momentous and terrible was still waiting to be felt. He felt acutely thirsty, and the driver gave him a bottle of water – an old black man whose view of the wrecks he picked up all the time from the exits of clubs was hidden by dark glasses and laconic humour. ‘Had a good night, have we?’ Z didn’t treat the driver with much respect, and Johnny as a sixty-year-old very rarely in this world tried to show himself sober, while all Z’s kindness was kept for him. ‘Yeah, we get you home, yeah,’ said Z.

‘What a night,’ said Johnny, holding Z’s hand. ‘Thank you.’

And there they were, fifty quid later, in the kitchen, Z wandering into the studio. And why were they here? There was nothing to do, for four or five hours, till he could talk to people. Z came back, hugged him and put his head on his shoulder and then started kissing him. But they had a cup of tea, and then a Pepsi, which Z thought helped bring you down, and then just a toke on a tiny little joint Z had in his wallet. ‘I’ve got to go to Nuneaton tomorrow . . . today.’ It was a sentence lofted weakly against the dark north light of the studio. ‘My father’s died,’ said Johnny.

‘Yeah . . . is very sad,’ said Z, taking his hand. ‘Sad for you.’

Johnny stared at him, sadly enough. He said, ‘I’m going to have a shower,’ and went up to the bathroom not sure if he wanted Z to follow him. He was very glad when he did, he pulled the curtain round, Z stepped into his arms under the wide pan of the jet, Johnny gasping as he held him in the falling water.