Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

With a car I was able to seek it out, and to take myself to places where wickedness might be found. Someone mentioned that there was a disreputable pub in Windsor, ‘louche’ if not positively queer, but without further details I couldn’t find the sins I sought. I had to rely on instinct. It helped if I imagined there were three of us looking for what the world might offer, loitering and looking sidelong at promising strangers (to the extent the neck allowed) in the hope that they might look sidelong back at us. Federico García Lorca, Boyde Ashlar and me. We should really have brought Tennessee Williams along, for a bit of humour and common sense, but we didn’t think of that. There just wasn’t room enough in the Mini.

In a cartoon my two escorts would have perched on my shoulders, one with a halo on his head, the other with horns, arguing the case variously for risk-taking and the straight-and-narrow. In reality Lorca and Ashlar were both on the horny side, and they spoke with a single voice. Ashlar even had a little shoulder-perching devil-angel of his own, the effeminate friend always ready to murmur, ‘You’ve gone all cock-eyed, dear.’ Everything conspired to push me towards bravery and the outrageous.

Only a few months after I passed my test I took the Mini down a side alley in Marlow. It was the louchest place I could find, though I had only the dimmest notion of what I was looking for. I knew that there should be light but not too much of it, preferably coming from the side. There should be a suggestion of neglect or dereliction but also of waiting for something. The picture would be completed by a figure in shadow with a cigarette. Smoke swallowed and then breathed out. Weight being shifted from leg to leg with a sound that only woodland creatures, and I myself, could hear.

The lane was promising. And there he was — a figure under the trees at the end, exaggeratedly at his ease. There seems to be a deep instinct that tells us if an unreadable figure, a figure in silhouette, is smiling. The man came up to the car without hesitation, all business, almost before I had parked, and opened the door. He got in. The Mini’s suspension lurched, and so did my heart. Would it manage to keep beating, during what must follow?

For all the encouragement my demons had given me, of course, they left me in the lurch when I needed them most. Boyde and Federico had scarpered. Cowards! After all their bold talk.

The stranger parked himself on the seat next to me. Where else was he going to go? In a Mini intimacy is the only option. His cologne was strong, the smell of his cigarette was stronger. He was chewing gum as well as smoking. I could smell that too.

At first I didn’t look at him directly, but I thought that I’d made rather a brilliant catch. He reached over with his hand and gave my hair a ruffle, which was exciting if perhaps a little too much an uncle’s action, a liberty but also a dead end. The ruffling hand passed my field of vision on its return journey. The skin tone was darker than mine. There were follicles. There was dark hair on the dark wrist. My heart was going like mad, now that I had achieved what had taken so long to bring about. I had brought something uncontrollable into my life, something swarthy, to sit beside me in the car and turn life upside down. When I shifted awkwardly round to return the smile in the passenger seat, I found it belonged to Granny’s pet waiter from the Compleat Angler.

The brain is a standardised organ. My brain was like the Mini I was sitting in, marginally adapted to my circumstances but little different from every other brain. It went on producing the standard responses. That evening my brain supplied me with the most foolish possible thought. Perhaps he doesn’t recognise me . The staff in my mental press office could come up with no better bulletin than that to paper over the cracks. They should be fired. They should all be fired, and they could forget about references.

Of course he recognised me. Of course he recognised me! He might not remember my name, but he knew me all right. I didn’t drive into the dining room at the Compleat Angler at the wheel of the Mini, but that didn’t mean I was in disguise now. He had known who I was long before I recognised him, and the ruffling of my hair had been indulgent but the opposite of the touch I wanted.

He’d only got into the car for a chance to talk about old times, the splendours and miseries of the waiting life. I felt I could tell him a thing or two about that — the waiting life. ‘I see all sorts at the Angler, believe me,’ he said, ‘and your grandmother is absolutely special. A one-of-a-kind sort of lady. ¿When will she come to see me again? ¿To make her little road across the plate?’ His Spanishness was beginning to grate on me, and it was mortifying that I couldn’t command enough vocab to communicate usefully. ‘¡When you next speak to your fantastic grandmother, you must ask her to come to the restaurant again soon so we can play our games and have some fun!’

To rob and murder you

Up to that point it had never occurred to me that waiters could feel anything but contempt for those they served. It was actually rather unbearable that everything turned out to revolve around Granny, in Marlow and the wider world. She’d paid for the car, and perhaps if I asked her nicely she’d pay for her special waiter to come home with me, to be nice to me the way Mr Thatcher’s lady friend was nice to him. I didn’t want that.

I made a supreme effort and said nothing. I tried to nail my tongue into a corner of my mouth, to stop myself from prattling. I wanted to be excused for a moment from my life’s long charm offensive. I wanted this man to reach over across to me without being wooed, teased or hypnotised. I hadn’t concentrated on the inside of my mouth so fiercely since the game of Teeth, way back in my early days of immobility, when I imagined living inside my own mouth, wandering through the stalagmites and stalactites set in the smooth pink rock. I was determined not to blurt out some winning wheedle.

I gave him the Cow Eyes, more for form’s sake than anything else, just in case there was a chance of turning the encounter in a new direction. The silence in the car began to seem oppressive. Then he shifted and said rather sourly, ‘You know, I had your number from the word go, from the first time you ate at my table. Absolutely had your number. And all I can say is — good luck!’

Silence had failed and speech must have its turn. ‘What is your name?’ I asked, wanting to make him stay. ‘ ¿Cómo se llama Usted? ’ I’d have asked him whether he didn’t prefer black-tobacco Ducados to bland blond English smokes, but I couldn’t muster the vocabulary.

‘My name is whatever you like,’ he said, between chews on the gum and drags on the cigarette. ‘Waiter — You There — Gar song — Boy.’ Granny didn’t know his name, but for some reason that was all right. I was the one who had to stand in for the hotel’s whole patronising clientele. Granny was fun and I wasn’t. Against such judgements there is no appeal. On the whole I’d have preferred it if he’d just wished me fucked by an octopus. The amiable old multiple-violation-by-gastropod routine.

He took out his chewing gum and pressed it against the dashboard with his thumb. Then he was out of the car, joined a few moments later by another man, who materialised out of the shadows of the louchest lane in Marlow.

It was a setback, undoubtedly. No questing hero minds the odd failure. It’s just that there are many reasons for a sexy waiter to climb into your Mini in a dark lane, reasons good and bad. He may want to kiss you, he may want to rob you and murder you, he may want to listen to your garbled rendering of homoerotic Spanish poetry. Any or all of the above — just so long as he doesn’t want to talk about your grandmother. That’s too much to bear. That’s the pink limit.