Androcoles by John Butler / Fiction / Untitled Books

"I had seen a famous photograph of London punks hanging out at this very spot, but on this night we were the picture - us and the homeless."

Androcoles by John Butler

Well before the mad rumours began swirling about; the ones about his wife walking out on him on Christmas morning and hauling their two kids with her back to County Antrim, Mr. Boyd was the teacher we feared above all others. He coached the Senior Seconds and taught Accounting with equal rigour and severity. Unlike the other teachers Mr. Boyd had no nickname, and when he turned his back to chalk up a fresh Suspense account, we stared in awe at the wire-wool croissant of hair that ran from ear to ear. With him thus engaged, chalk tip bashing relentlessly at the board, thick legs girded against the strain, jet black robe swaying at the shoulders like that of a count, no one blew wet paper balls from the empty chamber of a Bic biro, no one swapped seats to see if he noticed, and only one person held their lighter under Pavel Rayski's arse until he cried out in surprise.

- Aiiee!

It was Gavin Barber's lighter, held at the exact point where Rayski's bum flesh strained hardest against the limits of his too-tight slacks. Pavel was a unit, and a deadly skier, which, sadly for him, had little currency in Ireland, and none at all in school. Cecil heard and spun around, and with the swipe of a straight arm and the open side of a clenched fist, caught Rayski flush on the temple, sending him crashing to the ground. As the diplomat's son's lay moaning and cupping his ear with one hand, scorched rump with the other, Cecil resumed debits and credits with chalk. Rayski might have thought he'd been stung on the ass by a wasp and Gavin Barber said nothing, because unlike Polish downhill skiers, bullies know all about the dark arts of self-preservation.

After, while me and Ken smoked in the far corner of the jacks, Barber expertly clicked his fingers against the wheel of his black Zippo, surrounded by an audience of team-mates eager to hear what had gone down in Cecil's. They all gazed at the flame.

- Cecil's gone doolally. I have to go, but if you can, I'd get out of the London trip, pronto.

I looked at Ken but he kept his head down, tending to the blazing horn on his ash. Barber was going on the Economics trip? This was news to us. We only signed up once we had been assured by Birdie O'Hanlon that his name was not on the list - back then it hadn't been. The sound of retching floated over the stall door and we hung back over by the hand-driers, smoking and pretending not to listen in on the reconstruction, pretending also not to hear the sound of Rayski vomiting.

- So he straight-up punched Rayski?

Just as one of Barber's mates spoke, Ken tugged furiously on his smoke, with that habit of pinching the filter so tightly that it separated from the paper and burnt your lips.

- Ow. Fuck.

Ken grimaced and dropped his smoke in the stream of urine and Barber turned around.

- Mmmm. Not exactly. Fuck it, I need a volunteer.

Barber dragged Ken into the centre of the circle by the scruff of his neck, and forced him into a crouch at sitting level. Ken tried to complain, but all of Barber's mates were laughing at how mental he was. I did nothing because that was what school had taught me, and when it got to the hitting part, Barber didn't hold back, sending Ken tumbling head-first into the stinking porcelain wall, to a chorus of ooh's. The bell went for class, and moving off in his circle of friends, Barber mumbled something over his shoulder about not knowing his own strength.

Only after they had definitely gone, I picked Ken up. His hair was wet with piss and he dabbed at his lip with his jumper. It came away bloody. He was shaking.

- What the hell did I do?

- Wrong place wrong time.

The cubicle door opened and Pavel Rayski appeared, looking green. I'd forgotten all about him. Without acknowledgement, he went over to the sink and splashed water on his face.

Rayski was dour and kind of vain and we never really spoke to him. Watching him inspect himself in the mirror I was struck by how big he was. He definitely wouldn't have fallen in Cecil's class if that punch hadn't really caught him. Ken washed his face and hands at the sink beside Pavel, then pointed at his cut, bruised face ruefully, smiling at Pavel.

- I know just how you feel.

He tried out a rueful smile as if had been a harmless trick played on him by his friend Barber the incorrigible prankster. But the smile stopped way short of his eyes and for a brief moment it looked as though Ken might cry. Rayski's face curled into a sneer.

- Big difference. You are total pussy to let a boy do this.

He strode to the hand-drier, tugged hard on the circle of wet towel and wiped his meaty hands. Then he brushed by, heading for Geography.

*
- Drink, you devil worshipping faggots. It's 7 per cent.

The next time we met him Barber was holding a can of Holsten Pils out towards us on the Dublin to Holyhead ferry. We had gone up on deck to smoke, and the moment we saw him we turned to go back in without needing to communicate it to each other, but it was too late.

He shook the can. He didn't recall levelling Ken in the toilets that day, even though it had only been a few weeks before. Punching someone was far too quotidian an event for him to recall in any detail, let alone remember who that person was. Ken took the can and drank a decent enough amount then passed it on to me. I drank a little and couldn't help coughing.

When he glanced at me I knew I had failed some kind of test. Then he turned to the sea and we looked at each other. Could we go now? Should we? Ken grimaced as if to say "I don't know, do I?". I felt the box in my pocket.

- Hey, do you want a smoke, Gavin?

He looked at my pack, then grunted and took one. Ken shot me a look that told me he was jealous I'd got there first, and because it was a significant moment I let Ken take one of my smokes too. Gavin cupped his black Zippo with a huge raw hand and when we were lit, he drained the last of his Holsten and flung the can overboard. He burped deeply and spat, and we all stared at the water and smoked.

When Cecil materialised, he pushed right through us and looked under the bench beside us, then over the railings at the green churn of water. Our cigarettes were gone - just. He turned back, an odd smile playing around the corners of his mouth,

- The music men. And Master Barber. Getting some... air I take it?

- Yes sir.

If you'd told me a week before that even once on that trip I'd be relieved to see Cecil, I'd have laughed. As it was, the silence before had been unbearable. Cecil produced a clip board he had been holding behind his back. He looked down at the list, then up at Ken and I. It was odd to see him without his black robe.

- Some housekeeping. You gentlemen have selected your room-mates?

- Yeah, we're sharing. Us two. Ken Quinlan and Gerry Conroy. Sharing, with each other.

The way Ken pointed at me and at him made it abundantly clear who he meant and who he didn't, and maybe Cecil noticed the betrayal of his fear of Barber, or maybe it was arithmetic.
He tapped the clipboard with the pen and frowned.

- The rooms are triple for the most part, so let me see. Master Barber. You're happy to share with these two men?

I could feel my jaw drop as Barber just shrugged.

- Whatever.

- Whatever, Master Barber?

- Yes... sir.

- That is all, so. Enjoy the... fresh air gentlemen.

I still remember emerging from the tube into a low grey sky and our hotel looming; a Stalinist block on the edge of a roundabout in Elephant and Castle. The first excursion was to the Imperial War Museum, and our movements so regimented by Cecil that Ken and I were worried that we'd never get any free time. But on the second morning, after making a telephone call in a phone box at St. Paul's Cathedral during which sixty of us stood outside and watched him get very, very, angry indeed, Cecil gave us the rest of the morning to ourselves, and he and Birdie went off on their own. Everyone knew it had something to do with Cecil's wife and kids, and before Barber could find us and latch on, in the absence of any of his real friends, we slipped away.

London had a huge amount of street cleaning machines, but was still dirty. Wandering the narrow streets in misty rain, I wondered why it was so empty, then Ken reminded me it was a week-day after all. The population was squirreled away in hulking office buildings, balancing debit and credit. We found Carnaby Street and the spot on Wardour Street where the Marquee Club used to be. I bought "Physical Graffiti" with the original slide-out cover, where the letters of the album landed neatly in the windows of the tenement building on the front. Ken bought the Banana album with the original peel-back cover. He thought it was the Warhol original but I couldn't believe they'd have one of them for sale in HMV, new, and when he left his bags at our table in McDonalds and went to the toilets I inspected it and saw it was a Japanese copy. Still cool, though. And we smoked. They were currency, an identity, power. And who could have enough power?

*
Starlight Express was supposed to be this big thrill but was really ropey; loads of guys in tights flying around a kind of ramp on roller-skates, dancing to music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. On the last night, Birdie had made good on his promise to bring us to a West-End show but was powerless to stop us smoking and buying alcohol openly in the bar at halftime.

I saw him watching from over the far side of the room, and more than anything he seemed just sad. The poor guy - he just didn't have gravitas of Cecil. Afterwards, he kind of dropped the ball in terms of a head count, me and Ken slipped away, and Barber followed.

We brought some beers from a corner shop that never asked for I.D, and we carried our stash of cans down to the monument in the middle of Piccadilly. I had seen a famous photograph of London punks hanging out at this very spot, but on this night we were the picture - us and the homeless. I was making Barber laugh and for the first time I drank with something approaching hunger; began to understand how drunk was a desirable state. We looked cool in the neon glow. After, we began to wander through Soho, away from our tube station. We stumbled through narrow winding streets, past shops with plastic sheets torn into strips hanging over the doorway behind which were, Barber informed us, porno shops.

Two New Romantic men kissed. Figures emerged from doorways, unblinking, beckoning us towards them. It was seething and we were adults in the glow of this night.

Abruptly, Barber stepped into a sex shop and we followed, watching as he palmed over a tenner, seeming to know exactly what he was doing. From the tiny man in the baseball cap he received three tokens, winked at us, and disappeared into a booth. I looked around. Ken produced a fiver.

- Jesus Ken. Serious?

I did the same, heart pounding. For our fives we got a single token each. Ken examined his.

- That's me broke now. Can you lend me tube fare?

But the tubes had stopped running and this was the world of men.

Inside, through a grimy Perspex window, a Chinese woman in a tiny bikini and high heels danced on a circular stage, and though you couldn't be seen from beyond the glass, I could tell there were guys across from me staring at her too - a circle of booths around the bare, red painted dance floor. The stripper was writhing around a pole, and began revealing a crudely tattooed breast, unsmiling all the while. I stared past her at the opaque window panels, a drone buzzing behind each, feeding from a blooming dark flower. Then my window went black.

Outside, when I noticed the man at the counter staring I went onto the street to wait for Ken and Barber, smoking in a doorway and trying to look like everyone had appeared to me previously. Then I saw Cecil, or heard him, to be more precise. My teacher was being thrown out of a club across the street by two burly Russian men, one of whom had him in a headlock, the other who had his trunk-like legs bound tightly within his arms. Cecil was red in the face and making a kind of wheezing noise like he was struggling for breath. Then he wriggled violently and kind of gurgled and I stepped towards him because I thought the guy with arms around his neck was going to kill him. As I came closer, the two men noticed me and shouted something in Russian, then dropped him from waist high onto the kerb, which was wet from the persistent drizzle of London.

When he heard his name he looked up in alarm. He tried to sit up but couldn't, because of his ribs. I tried to lift him and knew immediately that he would never be able to tell I had been drinking. I could see the yellow lights of a taxi, and hailed it. As it slowed to the kerb, Cecil put his arm around my shoulder, and I saw Barber and Ken come out of the doorway across the road. I didn't call over. The cab stopped but the driver didn't open the door.

- He's not gonna make a mess, is he?

- He's my teacher. I'm afraid we were mugged.

As we hoovered through the slick night, rounding finally onto the expanse of Regent Street, Cecil began regarding me with his head tilted back, as if he had never clapped eyes on me before. Something dawned on him and he tensed in horror, before another thought chased it away, his features relaxing once more. He lay back and closed his eyes, wheezing, a hand holding his ribs and the ink from a biro staining his shirt pocket. His forehead was red-raw and seeping, the knuckles on his right hand bled. The cab made a sharp right at Trafalgar Square and suddenly his head was on my lap and I couldn't touch any part of him to move it back.

Outside the hotel, Birdie was smoking, worried. Despite the trouble I was in, I was glad to see him. I had been watching the meter and I didn't have 30 pounds on me, nor upstairs in my room. I knocked on the window, and when he saw Cecil in my lap Birdie ran over. He paid the driver, lifted Cecil out and for a minute we stood in the night, under yellow lights, traffic howling past.

- He was in Soho. We were... I was in Soho...

Planes roared in the sky and in darkened rooms beneath them, boys slept, boys who would one day be men, like Cecil and Birdie. Like me.

- I have it from here. Go on.

Birdie sighed, holding his comrade and watching me go, and then he called me back once more. Once more he glanced at the rising stack of darkened rooms above him.

- We can, of course, forget this ever happened.

- Course, yeah.

That was a lie.

When Ken and Barber got back I had finished the last of my cigarettes. They piled in laughing, sharing a can of Holsten pils, and when they saw me they shouted far too loud.

- Where did you get to, you filthy dog?

- When my window went black I thought it was over, and I went outside for a smoke, to wait for you guys, and then... I thought I saw Ray Davies, so I followed him.

- The fuck is Ray Davis?

- Davies. Singer from the Kinks, Gavin.

Ken had chanced a shade of incredulity in his answer, even snatching the can from Barber.

- And was it?

I lowered my book onto my stomach.

- No, but by the time I found out, I was lost. Did your windows not go black?

- Not for ages!!!!!

Ken jumped on his bed, bouncing up and down. Barber grinned at him.

- We got about a half an hour for our tenners worth, didn't we Kennyboy?

- We certainly did Gavin, my man. She was only lovely.

Ken sighed deeply, smiling to himself. He didn't remember that I knew exactly how much money he had in the sex shop. Or maybe he lied to me about being broke. And I knew he wasn't half as drunk as he pretended to be, but I couldn't blame him for that either. They got undressed and put their lights out and every so often, the silence was punctuated by a giggle from one, a responding giggle from the other, and then the silence lengthened and became nothing but soft breathing and the sound of cars approaching a roundabout, yellow-white beams moving across our ceiling then falling off it and plunging down the walls, hunting darker nights beyond.

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John Butler's debut novel, The Tenderloin, is published by Picador

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Tuesday, 24 May, 2011

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Issue 44 / May 2012

"I had seen a famous photograph of London punks hanging out at this very spot, but on this night we were the picture - us and the homeless."