It was as if Ray clicking his fingers up by that tree earlier on — an hour ago, maybe two — had paralysed my will. Perhaps he was a hypnotist. Perhaps that was what he did for a living. That was how he could just click his fingers and shut down some pathways in the brain, open a whole new lot up. Still, you can only be hypnotised if you let it happen. It can’t be done against your will. Anyway now, as I held on to him on the back of his bike, and not just because he told me to, part of me was like someone on stage at the end of a hypnotist’s show.
After the man with the eyes that look right through you clicks his fingers the second time, the people on stage wake up and realise that what they’ve been champing on with such relish is actually an onion and not an apple. The sweetness and the vileness fighting each other for a moment in the mouth and in the memory, before the sweetness goes for good.
Bits of my mind started to come alive again, and to connect up with other bits. One bit was still shouting to itself in horrified triumph, I sucked a man’s cock — real-life blow job — I sucked a cock and didn’t throw up! And another part of me was thinking that I didn’t have the first idea of where this stranger was taking me, or what would happen to me when I got there.
When we crossed the river at Kingston Ray turned left instead of carrying straight on to Isleworth. The air was cool and moist by the river. Even double-jacketed, I wasn’t any too warm and Ray must have been freezing, but he gave no sign.
Ray turned right after a couple of miles. It turned out he lived in Hampton, in a cul-de-sac off the High Street. The cul-de-sac was called Cardinals Paddock. No need to guess which cardinal — there’s not much inside a five-mile radius of Hampton Court that doesn’t trade on old Wolsey. As I climbed off the bike, stumbling on gravel, I could see a stretch of old wall with flowerbeds against it. For all I know, it was Cardinal Wolsey’s paddock, or what was left of it after five hundred years or so.
Like a fool I undid the strap without thinking, and pulled the helmet off without removing my glasses, so I mangled the stems a bit. I had to hold the specs against my head with one hand to stop them falling off. I felt even clumsier than usual, with the helmet in the other hand.
Ray held the front door for me and bounced up the stairs two at a time to his flat. I did my best to follow him, but I’ve always had one leg stronger than the other, so all I could do was two stairs then one, two then one. I was out of breath by the time I had reached the first floor, and my glasses were misted again now, as well as wonky. I put the helmet down.
When we were both inside he raised his hands to me, and I flinched back from him. Ted’s Viking helmet banged against the wall. I almost dropped it. I didn’t dare look down in case it had left a scuff mark on the wall, a stripe of beer and human hair.
Only that morning my gentle Dad had raised his hand to me, and it looked as if my birthday was going to be the day everyone got their blows in. Dad had slapped me, because of something I’d told him about my visit to the hospital with Joyce the day before. The ward sister had asked us to leave because we were making Mum laugh, and Dad got terribly angry when I told him about it. I just didn’t understand. I’d have been worried about Mum if we hadn’t been able to make her laugh. We didn’t say people ‘overreacted’ then, or else this would have been a classic case of a person overreacting. Me trying to cheer him up and Dad flying off the handle.
When Ray came towards me a second time with his hands raised, I’d already realised he wasn’t really going to strangle me. I was even able to think, Just my luck, he’s going to strangle me without going to the trouble of raping me first, which shows that I wasn’t really worried. Of course he was only grasping the lapels of his heavy jacket to peel it off me. Then he hung it carefully on a peg. There were leather jackets on the pegs next to it, so that I thought, How many people live here? It didn’t occur to me that anyone could own more than one leather jacket. When I took off my own naff leather jacket, he didn’t offer it the hospitality of a peg, and I didn’t blame him for that. It didn’t deserve any better than to lie on the floor.
When I flinched from Ray my glasses almost fell off my face, so he noticed there was a problem with them. He took them off to another room to do something about it. I stayed where I was, thinking that was safest. I could hear the clatter of a household drawer being opened, a gloved hand rummaging softly among tools.
I was stranded without my glasses, I needed a pee and I was starting to get hungry, and of course the moment Ray was out of the room I knew quite clearly that he meant me no good and that I had been mad to go with him. Nobody knew where I was.
In two minds. It’s a usual phrase, but it’s a rotten feeling when you spend half the time thinking one thing — I’m safe, this is fine — and then you switch to panic certainty, you’re done for and it’s all your fault. It was exhausting not being able to settle to one way of thinking.
Then Ray came back and fitted the repaired specs back on my face. He’d done something clever with pliers. He seemed perfectly calm. It stood to reason that if he was planning to do me harm he’d be more excited. He’d taken the bike gloves off to do the repair, and I tried not to look at his hands. I’d decided he must have birthmarks or scars on them, to keep them covered up so much of the time, but they were perfect strong pianist’s hands. Not that I know any pianists, it’s just something people say about fingers they like. Ray caught me looking and smiled at me with a bit of mockery, as if he knew what I’d been thinking. He even turned them over slowly in front of me, so I could get a good look from every angle. Ray’s smile was beautiful, but it made me uneasy. I couldn’t see what I had done to deserve it.
He asked me if there was anything I needed, and I managed to blurt out about needing a piss and something to eat. Something to nibble anyway. And Ray said: ‘Why don’t I show you where everything is, and you can look after yourself?’
It seems absurd now how few times I’d seen the inside of people’s houses up to that point — mainly my parents’ friends, and a few of Joyce’s. My older sister, Donna, she was older enough that she didn’t want her kid brother hanging around, and anyway she’d always been the type that wants to leave home as soon as she can and get stuck in to her own life.
I’d certainly never been inside a modern flat decorated in a modern way. I’d never seen windows that went down to the ground, for a start, so that the wall was mainly glass. I’d never seen spotlights in a private home, and Ray had spotlights in every room, including the bathroom. The lounge was dominated by an enormous black leather sofa with chrome armrests. It hardly seemed like a sofa at all, being so angular, or not my idea of a sofa: nothing round or bulgy about it. I knew people with record collections, I even called the few LPs I had myself ‘my record collection’, but I’d never seen a room with a whole wall of shelving which held as many records as books. Ray had a big reel-to-reel tape recorder, as well as a professional-looking record player with a perspex top, and a separate shelf of tapes in grey plastic cases.