“Wot do I call you, Janey or Jezebel?”
“Given the circumstances it might be easier if it was Jezebel.” She half-smiled a little sadly, then stubbed her cigarette out in the big glass ashtray that sat, along with a vibrator, a packet of condoms, KY jelly, and peppermints, on the bedside table.
“So wot would you like, big boy?”
Her long fingers reached for his fly and for a moment he was tempted. Just then the shadow of a forgotten night, buried because it was too painful, came flooding back, the night that had ended up crushing his adolescent hopes. Now all the colors, gestures, and emotions of his younger self lodged themselves firmly in the forefront of his mind. As if to bat away a moth, he waved his hand, but the memory would not be denied. He even remembered the date: 15 June 1998. Perhaps there was a way of exorcising it. He pushed Janey’s fingers away.
“There is something. . . .”
• • •
They stumbled out into the street, Janey now wearing a demure day dress over her lingerie, Eddy in his suit. He’d paid a hefty sum to retain the prostitute’s services overnight, and the receptionist hadn’t even arched her famous eyebrows as the two stepped out.
The first thing Eddy did was to lead Janey to the Comic Empire on Firth Street. It had been there for years and had been on the walk home from school. It was at the Comic Empire that Eddy had first got up the courage to speak to the twelve-year-old Janey. He’d seen her over at the Jackie magazine section, her school skirt hitched up ridiculously high, tottering on platform shoes. To Eddy the boy she was the embodiment of all his sexual fantasies as she pulled a length of chewing gum from between her lipsticked mouth to carefully arrange it over George Michael’s features, as seen on the cover of one of the magazines. He remembered her first words to him like it was yesterday: “Oi, wot you looking at?” delivered with what seemed like exactly the right degree of poise and panache. Later Janey had introduced him to the four other teenagers who made up the disparate gang she hung around with. Even now he remembered his intense disappointment when Sean, who towered over him, pushed forward to introduce himself as her boyfriend.
At the door Eddy looked up at the old neon sign, now blinking erratically. It hadn’t changed, and as they stepped into the shop he had the same rush of adrenaline he’d always experienced as a youth. The same old poster hung above the door as it had years earlier; the shop even had the same old paper smell, and it still displayed the same shelves piled up with editions of comic books, some dating as far back as the 1950s.
“Fantastic Four issue twenty-six,” Eddy whispered to Janey as the shopkeeper—who looked like a younger clone of the man who used to serve them—glanced up from a thick book.
“Done, and I’ll have the issue in which Wasp Woman betrays the Hulk wiv the “uman Torch, that’s a fair dare,” she whispered back, grinning like a ten-year-old. It was a game the gang used to play—the shoplifter’s challenge.
“Can I help you?” the shopkeeper asked, leaning forward.
“That’s all right, we’ll know what we want when we see it,” Eddy replied, and the two of them burst into laughter that made the shopkeeper conclude they were probably drunk day-trippers in to cruise the sex shops. Resigning himself to a no sale, he returned to his book.
Eddy watched Janey slip to the rear of the shop with professional ease. His mind flashed back to the first time he’d watched her shoplifting, nervous as hell, as he played guard for her, making sure the shopkeeper’s back was turned—the way she loosened her school blazer to slip the comic in, the teasing manner with which she let her fingers drift over the comics all carefully wrapped in cellophane, the tightness of her short school skirt over her arse. . . . The fear of being caught fused with her furtiveness in a way he found impossibly erotic and the whole scenario had featured in several of his adolescent wet dreams. He was finding it erotic now, recognizing the echo of the teenage thief in Janey’s careful circling of her prize. Five minutes later he realized he had to hurry with his own shoplifting.
Afterward they stood, hearts still thumping, grinning crazily at each other outside, Eddy with his issue hidden down his trousers, and Janey with her comic lodged between her armpit and the lining of her coat.
“As promised, issue forty-five—Wasp Woman does the ’uman Torch and the Hulk gets scorched.” He produced the issue with a triumphant flourish.
“And ’ere is the Fantastic Four issue twenty-six, still in its cellophane. We’re even. Wot next, Batman?”
Under the streetlamp he could now see the harshness of her life showing a little in her face, around the eyes, giving her beauty a knowing wisdom Cynthia didn’t and would probably never have, Eddy concluded, as he battled the impulse to kiss Janey. Not yet, not yet—the timing had to be perfect if there was to be an exorcism.
Eddy glanced down the street. It was past one in the morning and the revelers were now out in force. The damp night air was laced with a tinge of Blitz madness—the existential sensibility that life is very short when one is burning so brightly and at such speed.
What had they done next on that momentous date? The night he planned to lose his virginity. For despite the precociousness of the other members of the gang, Eddy was still a virgin at sixteen. It wasn’t for lack of choice, but he’d decided years before that Janey was to be his first and once Eddy decided something, rational or otherwise, his tenacity drove him to achieve it. It was a character trait that was to serve him well later as a businessman. For a good couple of years the teenaged Eddy had joked and joined in with al
l the sexual innuendo of the other boys, pretending he knew everything and more. In truth all he knew he’d gleaned from his father’s well-stocked shelf of erotica and Playboy magazines—one of which featured his mother as centerfold of December 1981. Then, on the eve of his sixteenth birthday, he made a pledge—he had to have Janey or face the very real possibility of dying of sexual frustration. The young Eddy began to make plans.
He started rehearsing his first line, his first pass, over and over again, practicing on an old dressmaking mannequin his mother had abandoned when she left his father. He even rehearsed the awkward transition from friend to lover, or at least how he imagined it would be. He’d seen it all in his mind’s eye, played the night out so often it was now almost part of his memory before he’d even experienced it. He was so certain nothing would go wrong. How could it? He was in love—that all-consuming, shimmering kind of love that made you invincible, like Superman or his favorite Chelsea player, Ruud Gullit. All he needed now was a strategy to get rid of Janey’s constant entourage of boyfriend and best friend for one whole night.
He’d begun by saving the money he’d got working Saturdays at his father’s fish stall to buy Sean a ticket to a Premiership match at Wembley. After that he’d tricked Janey into thinking her best friend was going to come along on the date too, then at the last minute bought the best friend a ticket to see her favorite band. He had the whole night orchestrated, climaxing in his seduction of her alone—away from Sean, the confines of his father’s grimy lounge room and the ever-present television, away from all that kept them both ground down, unnoticed on the streets of London. They were going to soar, he imagined, on a carpet of both divine love and fantastically explicit dirty sex, having learned from his libertine father that there was no paradox between the two, unless you were a practicing Christian, in which case you were no fun at all. And then Janey was going to fall in love with him and they would run away and live on the top floor of the Savoy Hotel like the Arab millionaires whose cars he had sometimes washed. The sixteen-year-old Eddy was convinced of it, and he was ready, his heart and cock bursting for her.
Then came the pivotal moment, the moment he’d been waiting four whole years for, the moment when he finally had her alone, sitting by him on the damp grass in a place no one would disturb them, her bare leg actually touching his in a forest fire of excitement, his cock so hard in his jeans he was frightened of coming with just one touch. For a minute the air between them was suspended in glass, crystallized by expectation, and he knew if he was to kiss her it had to be then, at that moment—the silent tick of history turning over. But he hesitated, a sickly fear of rejection pinning his hands and arms to his sides, his heart suddenly pounding so forcefully he wondered if a plane hadn’t flown overhead. By the time he turned to Janey the opportunity had evaporated like so many other things in his life—his mother, a decent school uniform, a decent school, his father’s youth—and he’d stayed sitting there by her side, paralyzed by his own failure, hating himself for his cowardice. Oblivious, Janey had chatted on, sharing confessions she might have shared with a girlfriend or confidant, but certainly not with a potential lover. Eddy couldn’t look her in the eye for fear she would see his tears and his anger, so instead he’d stared at his knees and then at the scrubby London summer grass, his hopes now as small as an ant.
They’d spent the rest of the night walking the streets—dodging cops, sneaking around bouncers, stealing the cream from milk bottles on doorsteps, and nicking the morning papers. By the time London was gray with dawn, Eddy knew he’d lost her forever.
“You still wiv me, Eddy?” Janey’s adult voice jolted him out of his reverie.
“Funny how time shapes us.”
“Time? Eddy, we’re still young.” She checked her watch. “And there’s at least five hours to go, big boy.” She began walking him down toward Piccadilly. “Green Park, wasn’t it, Eddy?” she chuckled.
“So you remember that night?”
“I might, then again I might not,” she teased, leaving Eddy wondering. The gate was locked at the Piccadilly end of Green Park. After checking there were no police around, they climbed over the railings. Inside the grass glistened under the moonlight and the trees were magnanimous in their shelter. They walked barefoot, carrying their shoes, Eddy’s naked toes luxuriating in the soft grass. The trader hadn’t felt so calm and complete in years, so authentically himself. Nothing seemed to matter then, only the crisp damp smell of the leaves, the distant sound of traffic, the sudden warble of a blackbird.