Ramsay took a seat on an upturned empty wooden box with “Louis Roederer” stencilled on the side, his evening jacket slung carelessly on the handle of a mop. He rolled up the sleeve of his dress shirt to allow easy access to his vein for Gerrit’s silver syringe.
“Relax, Ramsay,” Gerrit said as the needle pierced his skin. Ramsay always felt vulnerable at this moment, but Gerrit tended to him gently, as if he were a patient, wielding the needle carefully as he penetrated the skin. “Just a little prick,” he said, much amused by himself. Ramsay flinched nonetheless and Gerrit said, “You’re such a girl, Ramsay.” He was so close that Ramsay could smell his breath on his slobber lips—onions and fish—and hear the flutter of his breath in his nostrils. Ramsay felt both uncomfortable and excited at this proximity. He never felt certain what Gerrit’s intentions towards him were.
Ramsay closed his eyes and imagined he was in an exotic opium den somewhere—not Limehouse, he had been to Limehouse, it had terrified him. Singapore, perhaps. Or Shanghai. Ramsay longed for travel and adventure. The romance of the Orient and the Levant—Baghdad, Marrakesh, Beirut, Aleppo. Cairo! Not the tawdry pastiche of the Sphinx, but the real city, ripe with stinking noise and colour.
Where did Gerrit live?, Ramsay wondered. He imagined something sordid—an attic room where Gerrit’s underclothes were drying on a clothes horse around a gas fire while a pot of acrid coffee brewed on the stove. An easel was set up in the room, holding an ugly, unfinished Cubist daub. Try as he might, Ramsay could see nothing in abstract art, although, if asked, he was enthusiastic about it, could mumble for hours about “the necessary truth of the self” and so on. He mostly kept his philistine thoughts to himself. He wished to be regarded as au courant by the world at large.
In Gerrit’s room, too, there would be the rumpled, soiled sheets of an unmade bed, perhaps Gerrit’s lover of the night still entwined in those sheets—a woman. Or perhaps a man. Ramsay started to have palpitations.
“There you go, my man,” Gerrit said suddenly, as briskly as a nurse who had finished her task and was no longer interested in it.
By the time Ramsay managed to prise his eyelids apart again Gerrit had disappeared, back to the world on the other side of the red velvet curtain.
Ramsay stood up—too quickly—and had to drop down again onto the crate to wait for the room to stop revolving.
Ramsay knew that Gerrit bought drugs in a Chinese restaurant on Regent Street, but when he went there to try to do the same, the waiters just smiled at him serenely, as if they were deaf, and brought out pork chop suey and “duck de Chine” and something gelatinous that Ramsay wasn’t even sure was food. He felt obliged to eat it all and hoped that when the bill was presented it might include at least a little paper packet of dope, but no, just a hefty reckoning and a stomachache. “That place is not for you, Ramsay,” Gerrit said afterwards, as if he were a child.
Before Gerrit, before Tutankhamun’s tomb was opened, before even Ramsay’s lungs were exiled to Switzerland—when he was still at school, in fact—he used to visit Madame Nicolaides in her cellar café in Bateman Street, where she offered cocaine injections at ten shillings a time. For an extra two shillings she would teach you how to inject yourself, but Ramsay was too squeamish to take charge of the needle. Later, Madame Nicolaides moved to the other side of the park from their home in Hanover Terrace and started up her business again from her house. It was mainly nicely brought-up girls who slipped in and out of her Regent’s Park Road drawing room.
Ramsay had much preferred the safety of Madame Nicolaides’ drawing room with its rugs and lamps and deep sofas to being here in the storeroom of the Sphinx. It had been like dutifully visiting a rather curmudgeonly aunt. Once, she had served him tea and cake—something called bougatsa, which was really a custard tart with a foreign name.
Ramsay remained sitting with his eyes closed, head in hands, waiting for his heartbeat to slow. When he eventually opened his eyes again, he spotted something that looked like the heel of a shoe, lodged between two beer crates. He stood up slowly and shifted the crate. It was a shoe, the silver-sandal type that most of the dance hostesses wore. What had one of the girls been doing back here that had resulted in the loss of a shoe? He couldn’t help but imagine Gerrit pumping his stoker’s body against one of the sylph-like girls, up against a wall of beer crates.
Ramsay left the storeroom, shoe in hand, looking for its owner, and found the band already taking their seats and tuning up and the dance hostesses trailing in, chatting nineteen to the dozen, their carmined lips still fresh, their face powder not yet caked into the tired lines of their faces. They were like new blooms that would be drooping, their colours faded, by the end of the evening. (Excellent image, Ramsay thought. He would probably forget it, though.) “Evening, Mr. Coker…Evening Mr. Coker,” they chirped. Ramsay murmured something in reply. He held up the shoe and one of them said, “Oh, look, it’s Prince Charming.”
“I thought perhaps one of you ladies dropped it,” he said, but none of them claimed it.
The Glaswegian manager appeared out of nowhere and said, “Is there something else, Mr. Coker? We’re all set up here.”
They were all eager to be rid of him. Why don’t you fuck off, you fucking posh fucker still echoed painfully in his brain.
A thump on his shoulders indicated Gerrit, fez in place, ready for the evening’s festivities. “Drink this, my man,” he said, handing Ramsay a glass of water. “And I’ll take that,” he said, removing the shoe still clutched in Ramsay’s hand.
Pinoli’s
Edith, under the weather though she was, had a tryst with her lover. They were possibly the least romantic pair ever to grace the inside of Pinoli’s restaurant in Wardour Street.
It was still early, but Pinoli’s was bustling as usual. You would think he would prefer to keep to the shadows, but he liked crowded, busy places. He was brazen that way. Edith presumed it would be his downfall one day. And yet it was often the brazen who survived and the meek who went under, wasn’t it? Edith was not meek but she was in danger of going under.
“You’ve done something to your hair,” he said. Was that a compliment? Flattery was always oblique with him. Edith was rarely eulogized by any member of the male sex. “Betty and Shirley got the looks,” Nellie said, “you got the brains. You take after me in that respect. You should be thankful.” Betty and Shirley had got scholarships to Cambridge, Edith reminded her mother. “And look how stupid it made them,” Nellie said.
Edith’s appetite was “in her boots,” she had reported to him when she joined him at the table. He was currently eating his way through the three-shilling table d’h?te. He had just finished a plate of filets de hareng à la meunière, while Edith had sipped briefly on a crème chasseur soup that had only increased her desire to retch. She regarded his herrings with distaste—all those tiny bones waiting to catch you out. She had choked on a fishbone as a child when they were still living in Edinburgh. She had no idea what kind of fish it was, but a herring seemed like a prime suspect to her. Nellie had turned her upside down and shaken her like a piggy bank. To no avail. The bone was eventually dislodged by a nurse in the Hospital for Sick Children. It was the shaking that Edith remembered, not the fishbone. Her lover had moved on to dessert, demolishing a bombe pralinée.
“What’s up with you?”