But when I did, it turned out I was braver than I thought. I wasn’t like the man who slipped down there, too stupid to be parted from his ticket, my first day on the road. I was as unhesitating as that other jumper, the one who sailed right past the risk and landed on the far side of it, relieved, disappointed and with absolutely no idea what was going to happen next. I didn’t even break an ankle.
A couple of years ago I took my nephew Charlie up to London. Half-term treat. He was the baby that stopped Joyce from going on holiday in 1981, the pregnancy. But you can’t hold a grudge. Particularly as for a while yet he still thinks it’s cool to have an uncle that drives trains. We ended up in Whitehall, at Horse Guards. We’d spent the afternoon watching roller-skaters hurtling around in a theatre, pretending to be trains, and here was stillness. The Guards looked out from under their helmets as if the space was empty for miles in front of them, as if the other side of Whitehall was a white desert stretching far beyond the Thames. Charlie was fascinated, and seemed to want me to try and catch their eyes, by shouting or clapping or waving my arms, though he was reaching an age to be mortified if I had. He was at that stage when kids are trying to teach themselves to slouch and look surly, but he kept straightening up, watching the Horse Guards, his posture improving by leaps and bounds until he caught himself and forced himself to slouch all over again.
The Horse Guards reminded me of Ray, of course. Being ignored has always stirred me up somehow. I feel unworthy, naturally, but I’m also tuned up by it, as if a change was suddenly going to come over this handsome blank of a face that won’t look at me, and when it does I will respond immediately and without question. As if a man is only a man if he takes no notice of me.
You could say the Horse Guards reminded me of Ray. Or you could say Ray reminded me of the Horse Guards, as I saw them when it was me that was the schoolboy at half-term. How far do you have to go back to understand how something started? Maybe Ray was a substitute for something, but still. There was no substitute for Ray.
The Sound of Music was the show to see then, not Starlight Express, but it was always Whitehall and the Horse Guards. Charlie said he wanted to go to the London Dungeon, but I think that’s unhealthy, and anyway I told him London Bridge was too far from Victoria, where the show was. When I suggested the Horse Guards, and told him there were real horses, he brightened up.
In fact you could call today’s Horse Guards only rigid and unresponding by comparing them to the watching crowds who slouch and shuffle round them. If you look closely, you can see all sorts of little fidgets. The Horse Guards I remember as a schoolboy were fidget-proof, and you could really believe they were going to faint before they’d blink. Each one of them was a unit with no subordinate parts, and they would either sit on their horses unmoving or fall from the saddle as a single mass.
I’m not saying the old style was better, I’m just stating a fact, that a change has taken place. And it’s not particularly that I’m affected by the changes in me, now that I’m looking at a soldier who’s half my age and not twice as old as me. The Horse Guards used to look as if they were stone, and now they’re only fibreglass. A strong wind would blow them down. I don’t even regret the difference, it’s just that the whole ritual begins to look silly, now that soldiers can’t manage the discipline, that really mad level of self-control. Better to scrap it.
It’s a change of attitude. People don’t think it’s marvellous that the Queen sits so still on her horse for Trooping the Colour. It’s not just that she’s not a young woman any more, and that they wonder if her bottom is getting sore. They don’t think what they used to think, that as long as we can do pageantry better than anyone in the world we can hold our heads up. They think, Doesn’t she have something better to do on her birthday? Even if it is only her official one. We all know about her love of horses and her sense of duty, but if she had a birthday wish it might just be to Troop the Colour from the comfort of a golf cart.
It was a long time after Ray that I even tried to get back into the swim of things. The swim of sex. In a way it’s much simpler these day, what with the phone lines, but I can’t help feeling it’s still always going to be a bit hit-and-miss. One fellow I was talking to asked my weight, and when I told him what it was he said it wasn’t going to work, and hung up. Fair enough. But he obviously felt bad about it. He phoned up again and said he’d felt rotten about hanging up. Nice fellow. I told him not to worry, I’m used to it. I don’t even mind. Being pear-shaped is fine, but only if you’re a pear. Then I suggested maybe I could wear a T-shirt, cover up a bit. So he said, Good idea, we can try that. And we did, and it was fine. But there wasn’t that spark.
Not everyone is so straightforward, even on the phone when you can just hang up if things aren’t working. One man wanted me to visit him in Milton Keynes, gave me his mobile number and everything. Then when I’d got to the address he’d told me, it was a warehouse and his mobile was turned off. It wasn’t an expensive trip, thanks to the travel concessions that go with being on the road, but he wasn’t to know that. And it took five hours out of my life. One of these days he’ll switch his mobile phone on again, and I’ll give him a piece of my mind.
Another chap, ex-squaddie, had the strength in the legs that was bound to appeal to me. Years since I had a good squeeze. Only thing was, he called me names. Dog, pig, slave. I don’t like to be called names. Still, if he called again I expect I’d put up with it. Maybe drop a hint that it doesn’t do a lot for me. Less than nothing, really.
I’m not comfortable on my knees any more, for longer than a few minutes — I had an ulcerated leg a year ago, and it’s still not right. So I brought along some kneepads, not the biker sort but the ones decorators wear when they’re doing some sanding. So that my knees don’t let me down.
I’m bolder with my eyes since Ray. If there’s something in front of me that I like, I’ll look at it squarely. It may be a biker. If it is, he probably won’t be wearing the neon shades of leather that are the style now. It’s likely to be black. I’m old-fashioned that way, though I have a little bit of a soft spot for the green-and-white Kawasaki colours. And if the biker wearing the black leather says, ‘What are you looking at?’, I’ll just say, ‘If you don’t want me looking, wear something else.’ Not just in my head but out loud. It’s as simple as that.
If it’s not a biker, then it’s a sort of careless strength that speaks to me. It might be someone on a building site pushing a wheelbarrow, heading towards a plank balanced against a skip. He can’t hesitate if he’s going to get his load safely up the plank, but he doesn’t want the wheel to jar against the beginning of the plank. So what he does, the moment before he gets there he presses down hard from the shoulders. Just for a second, but it’s enough to compress the tyre. Then when he releases the pressure and it rebounds, the barrow bounces up onto the plank right on cue. I love to see that.
Ray was good to me — he was. He even kept the promise he made, without using words, the night we met. He didn’t fuck anyone else in those six years. Fucking meaning actually fucking. You could say he was faithful, and he was good to me. But I could never have loved someone who was only ever good to me. That was true before I met him and it’s still true now.