Shameless (4 page)

And that was when Martin spotted him—Christopher. He was right in the middle of the dance floor, waving his arms in time to the music and grinning all over his face. It was less than forty-eight hours since Martin had last seen him, but already he looked like a different person. He’d had his hair cut, which wasn’t such a surprise, and he appeared to be in the process of growing a goatee, which was. He was shirtless, which was a new development, and around his neck he wore a thick silver chain, which Martin had never seen before. And he looked happy, far happier than Martin had seen him look in ages, though of course he could recognize a chemically enhanced smile when he saw one. He didn’t recognize the man dancing next to him, though. He couldn’t see him clearly at first, but he was sure it wasn’t one of Christopher’s friends—at least no one that he had ever been introduced to. He was slightly shorter than Christopher, with black hair and a broad back. His vest was hanging from the back of his jeans, and as he turned around and moved into his line of vision, Martin saw that he had an amazing body—big arms, well-defined chest, washboard stomach, the works. Even in this room full of muscle Marys, he stood out. He must have been going to the gym every day for the past five years to get a body like that—not an easy thing to do when you had a job like Martin’s, a job that demands that you be at your desk from nine till five, five days a week, forty-seven weeks a year. . . .

Martin didn’t need a copy of
QX
to know who this dreamboat was—Marco! At that precise moment, he threw those big beautiful arms of his around Christopher and the two of them began necking like it was going out of fashion. Martin turned and lurched away from the dance floor, stumbled out of the club, and fell into the nearest taxi. It wasn’t until he was halfway across London that he asked the driver to stop the cab, stuck his head out the door, and began throwing up.

Three

O
n a good day,
Caroline was the first to admit that she spent more time and far more money on her personal appearance than was strictly necessary. As she often joked, she was every bit her own woman—there wasn’t one bit of her body she hadn’t refashioned in some way, shape or form, so the only person sharing any of the credit was the surgeon who performed her boob job.

But today was not a good day, and Caroline was not in the mood for jokes. What she was in the mood for was some serious pampering. Getting an appointment at Tony’s hadn’t been easy. It was Saturday after all, and Tony wasn’t just any old hairdresser. He was Tony of Belgravia, hairstylist to the stars. He had fingered more famous follicles than Elton John had hair plugs. People didn’t just come to Tony’s for a quick trim and blow-dry, they came for a brush with celebrity. This was why he could get away with charging such exorbitant prices, and why his appointment book was always full months in advance. Luckily for Caroline, there had been a late cancellation, and since she was one of Tony’s favored noncelebrity clients, he had graciously agreed to squeeze her in.

She was sitting with her damp hair wrapped in a towel, enjoying the reassuringly expensive aroma of Tony’s own-label hair products and flicking through a copy of
Vanity Fair
when her cell rang. Graham, she thought. About bloody time, too. She dived into her bag, flipped open the phone, and pressed it to her ear.

“Hello, dear, it’s your mother.”

Caroline stifled a groan. The last thing she needed today was one of her mother’s little lectures about the vast amounts she squandered at the hairdresser’s. This was one of the reasons Caroline had always felt far closer to her grandmother than she ever had to her mother. It was her grandmother who had first encouraged her to “make the best of herself” as she put it. And she certainly knew what she was talking about. She was in her seventies now, but she never left the house without a protective layer of makeup and a good strong coat of nail varnish. Clearly the glamour gene had skipped a generation because her mother couldn’t have been more different. Caroline had long since given up trying to justify her expenditure at the hairdresser’s to her mother. Try as she might, there was no point trying to explain the high cost of contemporary styling to a woman who had absolutely no concept of the vagaries of fashion, and who had worn her hair in the same casual style for the past thirty years. Besides, Caroline didn’t really want her mother to know that it was the kind of hairdresser’s where favored customers were treated to a line or two of cocaine with their double espresso.

“Hi, Mum. Yes, I’m fine. The thing is, I’m a bit tied up right now. Can I call you back later?”

There was a pause, and for a moment Caroline thought that she might actually have pulled it off. Then she heard that familiar wounded tone and knew that further resistance was useless. It didn’t matter how busy she was. There was an unspoken rule that any telephone conversation between Caroline and her mother should last a minimum of five minutes, and should contain reference to at least four of the following subjects—the cost of things today, the neighbors, the weather, Europe, the National Health Service, and the latest developments regarding the house that Caroline’s brother, Kevin, and his lovely wife, Louise, had bought just outside Coventry and were in the process of doing up before they started planning a family. This last topic of conversation had been a particular favorite of late, ever since Caroline had made the mistake of mentioning Graham and her mother had made the mistake of thinking another family wedding might soon be in the cards.

Eight minutes and one gentle reminder about the cost of living later, Caroline said good-bye to her mother and finished off her coffee, though a part of her secretly wished it could have been the other way around. Caroline was very rarely lost for words. She had spent the best part of her adolescence locked away in her bedroom poring over the collected works of Oscar Wilde, so she usually had an answer for everything. For instance, if anyone dared to suggest that she had her priorities wrong, or that her obsession with looking good indicated that she was a little shallow, she was always quick off the mark: “Only shallow people don’t judge by appearances.” But when confronted with her mother’s quiet but persistent disapproval, Caroline’s usual defenses simply weren’t enough. Words failed her. Her mother knew her too well. She knew that behind those carefully selected phrases and that polished delivery was a girl who had grown up in a terraced house on a dead-end street in Swindon, a girl who had never been considered pretty as a child, and who still had moments, hours, even days, of self-doubt. For every minute she spent on the phone to her mother, Caroline could feel the years of grooming and self-improvement slipping away. By the end of a typical conversation, she was no longer a successful account executive who, despite having left school with virtually no qualifications, had studied hard and long to learn everything she needed to know about the world of advertising. She was a shy fifteen-year-old with a weight problem and a room full of books for comfort. And the worst part of all was knowing that her mother had a sideboard full of photographs to prove it. That was why parents never threw old school photos away. It had nothing to do with sentimentality. It was just another means of ensuring that you didn’t get ideas above your station, another way of keeping you in your place.

Just then an assistant appeared, advising her that Tony would be with her shortly. Caroline nodded as he picked up her empty coffee cup. He hovered meaningfully for a moment before asking whether madam would be requiring anything else in the way of refreshment. Recognizing this as her cue to pay a quick visit to the private room at the back, Caroline smiled and confirmed that a little of the usual wouldn’t go amiss. Damn her mother. Damn Graham. She was about to spend two hundred pounds of her hard-earned cash in a conscious effort to make herself more attractive, and nothing and nobody was going to spoil the experience. She stood up and followed the assistant to the back of the salon, reaching into her purse for her silver-plated cocaine straw as she went.

By the time Tony was running his expert fingers through her long blond tresses, Caroline was feeling much happier.

John was bored. He had spent the best part of the afternoon on-line, checking out the various gay chat rooms, and so far he hadn’t met anyone who took his fancy. Actually, that wasn’t strictly true. About half an hour ago, he’d had a fairly steamy conversation with someone by the name of “HotFitGuy,” who listed his hobbies as “computers, gym and sex with HOT, FIT and GOOD-LOOKING guys.” His on-screen profile contained a personal quote that suggested that, in addition to simply fancying himself, he also fancied himself as a bit of a philosopher—“If life is a waste of time, and time is a waste of life, why don’t we get together and waste ourselves? And above all, aim to be the best. Second place is the first loser.” John was quite taken by this, but unfortunately the profile omitted to mention a few important details. Only after a prolonged exchange did it finally emerge that “HotFitGuy” wasn’t quite as hot or as fit as he made out. In fact, he was pushing forty, balding and appeared to have spent the past twenty years pumping up his pectorals in order to distract attention from his expanding midriff.

Then there was “HornyStud.” His profile said that he was twenty-seven years old, six feet tall with brown eyes and dark hair, a thirty-two-inch waist, a forty-inch chest, sixteen-inch biceps and a seven-inch uncut cock. It listed his hobbies as “sex, men and more sex” and his occupation as “something manual.” It also contained a personal quote that read, “A Hard Man Is Nice to Find.” What it neglected to mention was that he was Asian. In fact, it was only when they swapped photos that this became apparent.

To say that John was disappointed would be an understatement. He hadn’t felt so let down since the day he discovered that the smooth, firm buttocks the new, gym-fit Robbie Williams was happy to expose on the cover of
Vogue
weren’t entirely his own work but had been touched up by someone in the art department. Of course John knew that on-screen profiles weren’t always entirely reliable and that people were prone to exaggerate. As he had soon discovered the first time he visited a gay chat room, there were lies, damned lies and chat-room statistics. It wasn’t a coincidence that almost everyone in the chat rooms had a thirty-two-inch waist and forty-inch chest, or that they all worked out regularly and had nice pecs and a firm arse (or “ass” as most people preferred to call it—masquerading as an American gay porn star was another popular pastime). John’s own profile was pretty close to the truth, although he did add an inch to his height and another to the length of his cock. He also claimed that he was a natural blond, rather than someone who spent a small fortune on highlights. And of course he didn’t actually tell people that he was an air steward. He’d heard enough cracks about “trolley dollies” to know better than that. Instead, he said that he worked as a security guard for an airline, which sounded far more butch without being a complete lie. There was an element of security involved in his job. He was just leaving out the bit about the trolley, that was all.

But to go to the trouble of measuring your biceps and then neglect to mention that you were Asian wasn’t just a minor oversight. It was a deliberate act of deception. John fired off a message that said “Sorry, not my type” and wondered whether it was worth amending his profile, making it clear that he wasn’t interested in Asians, then decided against it. He was pretty certain you weren’t allowed to say things like that anyhow. You could say that you were “straight acting” and would “like to meet similar.” You could say that you were interested in “real men” and not “queens.” You could specify “no fats or femmes.” You could even say that you were looking for “bareback” sex, or that you were “disease free and expect similar.” But you couldn’t say anything that would be considered offensive to ethnic minorities. Who invented these stupid rules anyway? One of Shane’s lot, probably. Well, it was easy to appear politically correct when you had exotic tastes. That was no justification for making everyone else feel guilty about theirs. Before long they’d be telling you not to specify that you liked blonds, on the grounds that it made you a Nazi.

There had been very little activity on John’s computer screen since then. Someone called “TryWaterSports” had sent him a couple of messages, accompanied by a photo of his erect cock, which left him in little doubt that “TryWaterSports” had the kind of face guaranteed to scare people off. A couple called “UsTwo4Fun” had tried to talk him into joining them for a threesome somewhere in Leytonstone, which might have been worth considering had the photo they sent been a bit clearer. As it was, John couldn’t tell if they were both as fit and beefy as they said, or simply fat and holding their stomachs in. Shortly afterward, he received several increasingly annoying messages from someone looking for a sex slave and offering a monthly salary of five hundred pounds for the successful applicant. John sent a message back to “MasterTom” informing him that he had a perfectly good job already and that he wasn’t remotely interested in playing silly games with some sad old leather queen.

He was about to shut down the computer and dig out a porn video when a message flashed up. “Hi,” it said. “How r u?”

John looked at the screen name—“CuriousCute28.” Interesting. He clicked open the profile. The guy described himself as straight and in a relationship, but looking for “discreet fun with other straight-acting lads.” John had met this type before. More often than not, they turned out to be the sort of screaming queens who thought a bit of sportswear was all it took to transform them from the bitchy window dressers they were into the butch manual laborers they fantasized about being fucked by. But there was something about this one that seemed genuine. Maybe it was the wording of the profile, or rather the lack of it. There was no name given for a start, which made the emphasis on discretion sound authentic. There were no detailed statistics, either, just a line that read “Tall, dark and told handsome.” A queen would have given himself away with a detailed description of his gym routine. And while most people in the chat rooms had spent hours pondering over a personal quote that summed up their attitude to life and made them sound like a really interesting person, this guy had left the quote box blank. This was a refreshing change. There were far too many people on the Internet claiming to “Live Life to the Max”—not an easy thing to do when you clearly spent half your life in front of a computer screen.

Yes, this was definitely one worth pursuing. John typed in a message reading “Nice profile,” added the word “mate” for good measure, and clicked on the reply box.

“You poor thing!” Caroline said, clutching Martin’s hand across the kitchen table. She cleared a space in front of her, reached into her handbag for her compact and the little Tiffany pouch containing a wrap of coke and her silver-plated cocaine straw, and proceeded to chop two fat lines. “Come on, this will soon perk you up.”

“Isn’t it a bit early for that?” Martin replied, pulling his hand away and pouring himself another cup of tea. It was barely an hour since Caroline had arrived, coked to the eyeballs and playing havoc with his entry phone. Somebody must have taken pity on her and let her into the building, because the next thing he knew she was hammering at his front door. He had stumbled out of bed in a daze, half thinking that the building must be on fire, but too hungover to even care. He’d had a terrible night—dreaming that Christopher had given him some dreadful venereal disease, and waking up at regular intervals to throw up. He still had that stale sickly taste in his mouth. And since when did Caroline start doing coke at five o’clock in the afternoon? He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen her so wired.

“He hasn’t even called,” he said. “Though after seeing him and his hooker looking so cozy together last night, I don’t care if I never hear from him again.”