I was the only person the two lovers could socialize with after hours. They couldn’t go to the Coach and Horses with the rest of the crew, but they had the same urge to drown a post-show adrenalin high in alcohol, so they went instead to the Colony Room, where nobody else from the show went, but where he had been a member for years. Often I was invited to go with them. Here everyone called him “Chalky,” and they knew his drink—whisky and ginger ale—and it was always sitting on the bar waiting for him when he arrived on the dot of ten forty-five. He loved that, and the stupid nickname, because it was a posh English habit to give stupid nicknames, and he was devoted to all things posh and English. I noticed he hardly ever talked of Kenya or Africa. One night I tried to ask him about his home but he became irritable: “Look, you kids, you grow up here, you think where I come from it’s all starving children and Live Aid or whatever the hell you think it is. Well, my father was a professor of economics, my mother is a government minister, I grew up in a very beautiful compound, thank you very much, with servants, a cook, a gardener . . .” He went on like this for a while and then returned to his preferred subject, the glory days of Soho. I felt embarrassed but also that he had deliberately misunderstood me: of course I knew his world existed—that kind of world exists everywhere. That wasn’t what I’d wanted to know.
His real allegiance was to the bar itself, which affection he struggled to translate to two girls who had barely heard of Francis Bacon and saw only a narrow, smoke-stained room, the lurid green walls and the crazed clutter—“Art shit,” Tracey called it—that took over every surface. To annoy her lover, Tracey liked to make a show of her ignorance, but though she tried to disguise it I suspected she was often interested in the long, digressive, drunken stories he told, about artists, actors and writers he had known, their lives and works, who they’d fucked and what they’d drunk or taken and how they’d died. When he went to the toilet or out to buy fags I sometimes caught her deep in contemplation of one nearby painting or another, following the movement, I thought, of the brush, looking intently, with that sharpness she brought to all things. And when Chalky staggered back in and resumed his subject, she’d roll her eyes but she was listening, I could tell. Chalky had known Bacon only a little, enough to raise a drink with, and they’d had a good friend in common, a young actor called Paul, a man of “great beauty, great personal charm,” the son of Ghanaians, who’d lived with his boyfriend, and Bacon, for a while, in a platonic triangle, down in Battersea. “And the thing you have to understand,” said Chalky (after a certain number of whiskies there were always these things we had to understand), “the thing you have to understand is that here, in Soho, at that time, there was no black, there was no white. Nothing so banal. It wasn’t like Brixton, no, here we were brothers, in art, in love”—he gave Tracey a squeeze—“in everything. Then Paul got that part in A Taste of Honey—we came here to celebrate it—and everyone was talking about it, and we felt like we were the center of the whole thing, swinging London, bohemian London, literary London, theatrical London, that this was our country, too, now. It was beautiful! I tell you, if London began and ended on Dean Street, all would be . . . happiness.”
Tracey wriggled off his lap back on to her own stool. “You’re a fucking pisshead,” she muttered, and the barman, overhearing what she’d said, laughed and told her: “’Fraid that’s a condition of membership round here, love . . .” Chalky turned to Tracey and kissed her sloppily: “Come, come, you wasp; i’ faith, you are too angry . . .” “Look what I’m dealing with!” cried Tracey, pulling him off her. Chalky had a fondness for dirge-like Shakespearean ballads, it drove Tracey up the green walls, in part because she was jealous of his beautiful voice but also because when Chalky started singing of willow trees and faithless shrews it was a reliable sign that he’d soon have to be half carried down that steep and rickety staircase, heaved into a cab and sent back to his white wife, his fare prepaid with money Tracey had lifted from his wallet, usually taking a bit more than was strictly required. But she was pragmatic, she only ended the night when she’d learned something. I believe she was trying to pick up what she’d missed this past three years and I’d gained: a free education.
? ? ?
The show was very well reviewed and in November, backstage, five minutes before curtain, we were gathered together and told, by the producers, that our run was to be extended, past its Christmas deadline and into the spring. The cast was delighted, and that night they took their delight out with them on stage. I stood in the wings, happy for them, too, but with my own secret news tucked up inside me, which I hadn’t yet told the management or Tracey. One of my applications had come through, finally: a production-assistant position, a paid internship, at the newly launched British version of YTV. The previous week I’d gone for an interview, hit it off with my interviewer, who told me, a little unprofessionally, I thought, given the queue of girls outside, that I had the job, there and then. It was only thirteen grand, but if I stayed at my father’s it was more than enough. I was happy and yet hesitant to tell Tracey, without really asking myself what was at the root of my hesitancy. The Hot Box Girls dashed past me, fresh from Make-up, and on to the stage, dressed as cats, with Adelaide front and center and Hot Box Girl Number One just to her left. They puffed up their chests provocatively, licked their paws, got a hold of their tails—one of which I had pinned on Tracey ten minutes before—crouched like kittens about to pounce, and started to sing, of mean “poppas” who, holding you too tightly, make you want to roam, and other, gentle strangers, who make you feel at home . . . It was always a riotous number, but that night it was a real sensation. From where I stood, with a clear view of the front row, I could see the undisguised lust in the eyes of the men, and how many of those eyes were drawn specifically to Tracey when they should have rightfully been on the woman playing Adelaide. Everyone else was eclipsed by the litheness of Tracey’s legs in that leotard, the pure vitality of her movements, truly cat-like, ultra-feminine in a mode I envied and could not hope to create in my own body no matter how many tails you stuck on me. There were thirteen women dancing in that number but only Tracey’s movements really mattered, and when she ran off stage with the rest and I told her how wonderfully she’d danced, she did not, like the other girls, second-guess me or ask for any repetition of the praise, she only said, “Yes, I know,” bent over, stripped and handed me her balled-up tights.
That night the cast celebrated at the Coach and Horses. Tracey and Chalky went with them and so did I, but we were used to the drunken and intimate intensity of the Colony Room—also to our own seats, and to hearing ourselves speak—and after about ten minutes of standing, screaming at the top of our voices and not getting served, Tracey wanted to leave. I thought she meant back to the Colony Room, with Chalky, to do as we usually did, so she and her lover could drink too much and go over their impossible situation: his wish to tell his wife, her determination that he would not, the complication of his children—who were around our age—and the possibility, dreaded by Chalky but unlikely I thought, that the papers might find out and make some kind of story of it. But when he went to the bathroom Tracey pulled me outside and said, “I don’t want to do him tonight”—I remember that “do”— “Let’s just go back to yours and get caned.”
It was about eleven thirty when we got to Kilburn. Tracey had rolled one on the train and now we smoked walking down the street, remembering the times we’d performed this same action down the same road aged twenty, fifteen, thirteen, twelve . . .
As we walked I told her my news. It sounded very glamorous, YTV, three letters from a world that had preoccupied us as teenagers, and I felt almost embarrassed to bring it up, obscenely lucky, as if I were about to be on the channel rather than filing its British post and brewing its British tea. Tracey stopped walking and took the joint from me.
“But you’re not going to leave right now? In the middle of a run?”
I shrugged and confessed: “Tuesday. Are you really fucked off?”