Neel Mukherjee - A Life Apart

Ritwik stopped going for about a week or so. During that time, he stayed up sleepless, worried nights, imagining attacks, assault and other unthinkables. Besides, there was the big question of market, supply and demand. Would anyone in his right mind go shopping for clothes at a grocery market? Where was the financial sense — and let there be no mistake, this is all and only about money, about the need to buy food and clothes, not about the more elusive search during his student years in public toilets — in walking the streets here of all places? He would have been better off walking Hampstead Heath or taking out an ad in Boyz or Thud .

Then, by that very logic, he decided in favour of the ‘Meat Mile’: surely, the only clothes shop in a grocery market would thrive and prosper. Monopoly, no competition, that sort of thing. As if in annoyance at its unintelligent dilution, bad economics later took its revenge. Ritwik hadn’t done well so far: three clients in three weeks. Sixty pounds in total. The money in the Kashmiri wooden box was dwindling; if things didn’t pick up, he was going to have to rethink everything.

The first was a dismal blow-job, his back against a dark wall on Gifford Street, his knees on wet grit, the man looking constantly over his shoulders and at one point even saying, ‘Hurry the fuck up, will you?’, as if his tardy tumescence was all Ritwik’s fault. An occasional train or two rumbled past behind him somewhere, shaking the wall. Ritwik had pushed his head back at the first signs of the man’s approaching orgasm and asked for the twenty pounds then. He had reasoned that if this infuriated the man, there was little he could do except zip up and walk away. It was only because they were out in the open that Ritwik didn’t feel threatened by any potential violence. It was fortunate the man had complied for it could so easily have taken another direction.

Then there was Frank, the man who looked like an insect with his fragile and overgrown head, wet mouth, and beady, non-human eyes, which reminded Ritwik of beetles; he couldn’t shake off thoughts of Gregor Samsa. Frank who had wept afterwards in his car parked on Boadicea Street, with its lights off and reeking of poppers, because his wife had left him for his business partner after twenty years of an impeccable marriage: he had come home and found them in bed together.

Ritwik felt bad taking the forty pounds from him and had tried to cover up both his hesitancy and shame by sniffing, coughing, rubbing the edges of his nostrils and saying, ‘God, those poppers were powerful, I think I may have burnt my nose. I’m going to have an awful headache soon,’ and then, ‘Thank you,’ to the rustle of crisp notes. Ritwik hadn’t known what to do, watching a grown-up man cry so helplessly with his trousers and boxer shorts still around his knees. He had asked an insensitive question — ‘Did you love her?’ — and then practically kicked himself for letting those words out when Frank had looked him in the eye and said simply, ‘Yes.’

Frank had asked for his number and, in relief and delight at the hope that at least one customer was possibly going to become a regular and save him that much trouble, Ritwik had given it him and added, ‘Call me anytime you want to meet up.’

But nothing had prepared him for the encounter with the builder-type man who called himself Greg and carried a big carrier bag in the boot of his white Ford Mondeo. He had stopped the car in a very ill-lit back street, got out and retrieved the bag from the boot. Ritwik had been so scared he had had trouble articulating the words, ‘What’s in that bag?’ Greg had asked him to strip completely naked and when Ritwik had refused he had said tersely, ‘Don’t think you’re going to make any money like this.’ The menace in his voice thickened the stale air in the car.

‘OK, but tell me first what’s in the bag.’

He brought out stilettos, a black nylon bra, transparent black panties and then gripped Ritwik’s hand. ‘I want you to take all your clothes off, put these on and walk outside.’

‘Walk outside? In the street?’ Ritwik’s eyes opened wide at the sheer audacity of the request.

‘Yeah.’ As if this were the most natural request in the world.

‘You must be joking.’

‘You want the money or not?’

‘Not at this risk.’

‘All right then, get out of the car,’ he said, starting the car to life.

‘Wait, what if I do it in the car?’ He had no idea why he was bargaining with this man.

Greg appeared to think for a few seconds. ‘OK, but you’ll have to move from the front to the back seat.’

Once at the back, Ritwik started taking his clothes off. For a moment he forgot that this was not a sex pickup but a money one, so he asked, ‘Aren’t you going to take your clothes off as well?’

‘What for?’ Ritwik had never imagined that so much derision could be packed into those two words.

The bra and panty were about three to four sizes too big for Ritwik’s body; he couldn’t fasten the bra, which flopped like a loose sail on his chest, while the underwear was kept only in place by Ritwik’s back pressed against the seat.

‘Now put the heels on.’ It was an order that had the glint of a knife blade hidden somewhere in the spaces between the words.

‘But you can’t see them like this, my feet will be. .’

Before Ritwik could finish, he barked out, ‘Do as you’re told. Put them on, lean back and stretch out your legs over the gearbox.’

The shoes were too big as well. At least, Ritwik just had to put them on, not hobble around in them and possibly break his ankle. As he wriggled and manouevred in the cramped space, he was suddenly seized by an intense curiosity to see himself in a mirror, wearing oversized women’s knickers and bra and wriggling around to stretch out his long, thin legs on to the front seat through the narrow gap between the driver and the passenger seats. But there was no light anywhere and even if there had been, he would hardly have been able to see anything in the sliver of the rearview mirror.

‘Turn around.’

‘What?’

‘Turn around. Lie on your tummy. Go on.’

Ritwik tried to do as he was ordered but the space was so limited that it was all awkward elbows, knees, shins, metal, leather. Without any warning, Greg got out of the car, moved into the back seat and wrenched Ritwik’s legs from the front to try and bundle him into a recumbent position stretched out over the back seats. Food aid sacks were usually handled like this, Ritwik thought. He let out a yelp as his arm got twisted in the process.

‘Shut up.’ There was an altogether different tone — saturated with hate — in Greg’s order now.

With one seamless movement of his strong arms, he had Ritwik crouching face down and knees bent on the seat. He unzipped his fly, bent down on his knees and attempted to mount Ritwik from behind, all the while trying to clamp his hands over Ritwik’s mouth. Ritwik struggled furiously to free himself and Greg kept hissing, ‘Stay fucking down or I’ll really hurt you.’ Ritwik managed to say, ‘No, no, condoms’, before turning himself on his back, using a split second’s let-up of pressure from the man’s arms. Greg was looming over him, his face twisted with hate and rage. He hit Ritwik twice; the confinement and awkward positions took away some of the impact of the blows but he could taste the salt-metal tang in his mouth immediately. As he lifted his arms to shield himself, his hands hit the glass of the window and caught the door lock. In a reflex action of survival, he pressed it and headbutted the door open, pushing his head out of the car.

The inverted world swung for a few seconds, the dull reddish night sky rimmed around with the tops of buildings. He pushed with his feet and tried to get his shoulders and torso out of the car. Once his hands were out in the open, he half turned on his waist, put his palms on the wet ground, and made an effort to crouch out. In the process, the stiletto heel caught Greg in his groin; with a sharp, loud ‘Fuck, fuck’, he pushed Ritwik out of the car with such force that his whole body fell out, contorted and heaped, arse on gritty road, elbows scraped, the bra hitched up on to his shoulders, and the lacy underwear now loosely tying his ankles.