Becoming Nancy Read online

  ‘Shall I toss you off?’ she suggests, and she gets up and turns the key in the lock on my bedroom door.

  When she sits back down again I chew over the proposition at hand for a moment, and I decide, possibly recklessly, that having Abigail take a crack at pleasuring me in the comfort of my own bedroom mightn’t be such a shoddy notion. I mean, if I can handle that, then perhaps the recent trepidation I’ve had surrounding my sexuality might be unfounded after all. Perhaps I could like Abigail in the same way I like Maxie. Why not?

  ‘Oh, go on then,’ I say before I know it. ‘You’d best be nippy though, Chrissy’ll be out of the shower in a minute.’

  So away she goes. There’s a certain amount of fumbling at the outset, as the button on my Lois jeans can be a bit pernickety, but once Abigail negotiates that, things get going at a reasonably fair old pace. I’m pleased to report that my penis is quite credibly stiff – though I am intermittently glancing down at Abi’s discarded Jackie magazine, which, conveniently, has fallen open at a poster page featuring a shirtless Paul Michael Glaser. Just to be on the safe side.

  ‘You’re quite good at that, Abi,’ I say cheerily, sensing that there might be a result in a minute or two.

  ‘Shhh!’ she snaps. ‘I’m concentrating.’

  So I sit back, watching her salmony pink-painted fingers move up and down my cock – it’s fascinating, to be honest, and, as I say, she’s quite adept: not too hard, not too soft.

  ‘Have you done this before?’ I grunt.

  ‘Not really,’ she says, ‘but I secretly spied on someone doing it to my younger brother this summer when we went to our chalet in Leysdown, so I think I know what I’m doing.’

  ‘Oh!’ I say, intrigued, as she picks up speed. ‘Your younger brother’s in my year – who was wanking him off, then?’

  ‘My older brother,’ she says. And that’s what takes me over the falls.

  When Abigail and Chrissy eventually head off to locate Squirrel, I potter downstairs for a spot of post-coital veal and ham pie and some pop, and I’m not entirely sure how pleased with myself I’m supposed to be. I mean, on the one hand – if you’ll pardon the idiom – I had managed to bring about an agreeable finish to the proceedings upstairs with Abigail, but to be honest, I’m not altogether sure if my heart was really in it, let alone my undivided attention. I don’t think it answered any of my questions at all, if you want the truth. Bollocks! As I walk past the door of the lounge towards the kitchen, Aunt Val grabs me by the sleeve of my T-shirt.

  ‘Hey, you!’ she says. ‘You’ve still not told your mum and me about the play. You know I’m dying to hear all about it.’

  She was, as well. Mum’s younger sister has always pegged me as her golden-haired boy, and I in turn adore her. Along with my mother, my nan and my Aunt Val have been pretty much everything to me ever since I was little – especially after lung cancer had viciously snatched my grandad from us all. Mum relies on Aunt Val too – more, I think, than she knows – chiefly as an ally against my father, who is prone to griping and light bullying at the very best of times, and has a furious temper at the worst. Having her sister in such close proximity has always been, I feel, a safety net for my mum – for all of us, really – and my nan’s house a close-at-hand haven of calm and good cooking.

  Mum, it seems, is also on tenterhooks re my starring role in the school production, but Dad’s just lying on the settee with his shirt off, leafing through the Exchange & Mart, when I come into the lounge. At least they’ve all stopped bloody shouting at one another!

  ‘So,’ Mum says, smiling, ‘who are you playin’ then, love – Bill Sikes? Mr Bumble? I expect you’re too skinny for Mr Bumble, aren’t you? Ooh! The Artful Dodger!’

  Everyone is waiting. Even Eddie has glanced up from his paper now. I take a deep breath.

  ‘Nancy!’ I announce haughtily, and almost certainly ill-advisedly. ‘I’m playing Nancy.’

  Silence. Nobody speaks for what seems like a decade, and then Dad says, ‘Oh Jesus fucking H. Christ!’

  ‘Nancy?’ Mum repeats quietly, as if making completely certain she’s heard correctly.

  ‘Yeah.’

  More silence.

  ‘Well, I think you’ll be fuckin’ fabulous, darlin’,’ Aunt Val says finally.

  Then Mum breaks, and gives me a little smile.

  ‘Me too!’

  ‘Thanks!’ I say, quietly relieved. ‘You’ll have to make the costume, Mum. D’you mind?’

  ‘Course I’ll make it,’ she says. ‘I always do, don’t I? Just let me know the colour scheme. I’ve got some peacock taffeta left over from the frock I made your nan when she won the ladies’ darts trophy the year before last, will that be any good?’

  ‘I’m not sure Nancy would have worn taffeta, Mum,’ I laugh. ‘Mind you, she was a nineteenth-century singing whore, so I suppose anything’s possible.’

  I turn to look at Eddie, who, it has to be said, doesn’t appear best thrilled. Within seconds he’s off the sofa again and bellowing as per.

  ‘You shouldn’t fucking encourage him, you two,’ he screams at Mum and Val. ‘You’ll turn him into a right little poof! He’ll be a laughing stock. Nancy! Fucking Nancy! Why couldn’t he be bloody Fagin or the other little cunt with the top hat? I blame you, Kath. You took him to see too many fuckin’ Julie Andrews films when he was a kid – that’s his trouble.’

  It was always the same with Eddie. Whatever Chrissy and me did wrong, it was always Mum’s fault in the end.

  ‘Oh, cobblers, Eddie!’ Aunt Val snaps. ‘There’s no girls at his school – someone’s got to play the part, and he’s got the best voice. Take no notice, David.’

  But Eddie is on a roll, and they’re off again.

  ‘Why don’t you mind your own fuckin’ business for once in your life, Val. Is that too much to ask, eh? Is it?’

  And it’s time for me to slip quietly away once more.

  Up in my pop-star-wallpapered attic bedroom, I turn Debbie up so loud on my headphones I can scarcely hear myself think, let alone my dad’s incensed ranting.

  Debbie is singing a song about a man who is evidently sinking, hopelessly, in a sea of love, and I guess I can identify with that. I wilt on to my bed and pick at the woodchip paper that I’ve recently painted turquoise, and gaze up at a photograph of Agnetha and Anni-Frid from Abba that I’ve Blu-Tacked to the ceiling. Suddenly I am standing there in front of them, a warm but forceful wind almost knocking me over. There they are – right there – wearing white jumpsuits and clogs and standing beside a helicopter, as one might were one as famous and as rich as they purportedly are. I look down, and discover that I too am wearing a white jumpsuit, and matching white clogs, and I am now walking towards Agnetha and Anni-Frid who stand, glorious, beneath the rotating blades of the chopper, blonde and auburn hair fluttering in the slipstream. When I reach them they smile at me, but say nothing.

  ‘It’s all your fault,’ I tell them. ‘I should never have listened to you.’

  The girls stand either side of me and take one of my arms apiece, tenderly; and as the din of the helicopter engine subsides, they are humming softly – the first few bars of ‘Chiquitita’ – and I close my eyes. When I open them, I can hear the bongs from News at Ten coming from the lounge downstairs, but no more yelling, thank God; and then, suddenly, I can smell semen. Oh, Christ-on-a-bike: Abigail Henson! What was I fucking thinking?

  I finally get undressed and put on my pyjamas, climbing into bed early; I’m dog-tired. Well, it’s been a jam-packed day, what with one thing and another. I mean, I might well have fallen in love with one person, I had a very unexpected sexual skirmish with another, and I got the leading-lady role in the school musical, and just look where that got me! I consider, for a moment, what my grandad might have made of all this, and then my thoughts switch to Dad. I wonder whether his words will forever make me feel this bloody awful, and whether the taunts of Jason Lancaster will always follow me, stinging me – just like they always have.


  Five

  Rough Boys: a Naked History

  It’s always been the same for me, as far as Jason Lancaster and his clique were concerned. It had certainly been no picnic a few years earlier: particularly if in 1975 you were an eleven-year-old boy living in south-east London with a heavy fringe and a picture of Abba glued to your satchel. No, sir! There was a warped hierarchy in play even then, a junior pecking order in which, I confidently pressumed, I languished fairly far down. At the very top of this pre-pubescent social pile were the boys who rode skateboards in the Co-op car park, the boys who kicked footballs against the garages in the flats: the ones who swore, and smoked Rothmans at the bus stop. These were the boys who packed a punch – then and now, the same ones who name-called us across the street as we walked home from school. The rough boys, we called them; and they were all-powerful.

  Me and Frances Bassey were fairly frequently the unfortunates who were singled out for sundry abuse by the rougher boys around and about East Dulwich and, in particular, the street I lived on, Chesterfield Street. I was generally ‘bender’ or ‘poofter’ as far as they were concerned – I could never quite grasp why – whereas Frances, more often than not, was nig-nog. Not especially inventive, I grant you, but these invectives, though deficient in originality, got the point across. Frances, my dearest friend and closest ally even then, was always far sharper than me. Once, during half-term, Gary Hoskin dared to shout ‘golliwog’ after her as she sauntered up the road with a Jubbly. Frances turned on her heel and without missing a beat warned Gary that her uncle was Idi Amin, President of Uganda, and that if he cussed her once more Idi would be around to fuck him up. I recall thinking at the time that this was a fairly savvy retort for a twelve-year-old, and I wished that I’d had the wherewithal to be even half as canny as Frances was; but I, typically, at the first sign of altercation, put my head down and ploughed on to the sanctuary of number twenty-two, mortified and completely unable to fathom why, of all people, these repugnant boys had singled me out as a queer.

  I suppose it has to be said, though, looking back, that I was never likely to garner a huge amount of street cred, what with my mum coming out at six thirty every weeknight into the tree-lined road where we all played, shrieking, ‘David, Crossroads is starting!’, particularly since none of the other kids my age, boys or girls, seemed to recognize the intrinsic wonder of soap operas in the way that I did. I followed, for instance, The Archers with my nan every single lunchtime in the school holidays, and adored the magnificent Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street. Most of all, though, I was absolutely and completely fanatical about the five-nights-a-week, continuing story of a family-run motel in the Midlands that was … Crossroads.

  ‘Let’s play at Crossroads!’ I would oft demand of Chrissy during the summer holidays, insisting that she play the part of Meg Richardson, the show’s formidable middle-aged matriarch and motel owner; while I would, more often than not, take the part of the alluring and, to my mind, glamorous waitress, Diane Parker – who was blonde and had astonishingly shiny hair. Our version of Crossroads was actually set in our father’s pigeon loft, and some of the episodes I concocted and directed there were, I felt, even more thrilling and nail-biting than the real thing. These included storylines involving multiple-car motorway pile-ups, stillborn children, and once – in a genius cross-procreation with my other favourite television show – Daleks invading the motel and exterminating all the guests in the dining room who had failed to use their silverware in the proper sequence. Chrissy and I dearly loved our own private Crossroads motel with its wooden hatches and its cooing, seed-pecking patrons, but it was a game I could never share with the other children on Chesterfield Street – and especially not with the rough boys. They surely wouldn’t have understood, and I’d have been cut down yet again.

  * * *

  I seemed to fare little better on the social scale in the cut-throat environment we light-heartedly called primary school. Boys like me, who fled from a football and winced at war games, dared not hobnob with the girls (much as I was drawn to them, in terms of the playground at least). This would merely antagonize and incite the more boorish soccer captains and would-be Lotharios amongst the boys, exposing their ineptitude and inability to relate in any way to the opposite sex outside of a hand up the skirt. Therefore, boys who fraternized with girls were themselves considered girls and would, at some juncture, get a decent kicking for it. My own wretched downfall in the classroom had come swiftly, and without warning, one rainy afternoon shortly before my eleventh birthday. Mrs O’Beng had set our class an essay, mapping out what career paths we thought we might like to follow when we eventually left school. She had then chosen a selection of the completed essays to read aloud to the class, including, rather unnecessarily, I felt, my submission, in which I’d expressed my fervent ambition to become Doctor Who’s assistant. There was no coming back from that, really. That’s where the downturn started, and the rise of the rough boys became evident. Even the happy-go-lucky Frances copped it more often than she’d have liked, despite her sustained and evident pluck. On more than one occasion at playtime, or as we’d wander along Lordship Lane with our swimming stuff, she’d sob silently, as one of those wretched boys would shout at us. Something along the lines of ‘Look at the gay Starr and his darkie girlfriend,’ it would be, or, if they couldn’t be bothered to cobble together an entire coherent insult, ‘Wog’ would ultimately suffice.

  ‘It’s just words, Frances,’ I would say in an attempt to console her. ‘They’re just fucking kids. It doesn’t actually mean anything.’

  ‘You don’t understand, David,’ she told me once. ‘It’s not just me. I hear people say those things to my mum and dad, too. Not children: grown-ups, saying those things to other grown-ups. It doesn’t get any better when you get older. You just wouldn’t understand.’

  And then she’d always turn around and stick two fingers up at whichever little tosspot had been hurling the abuse.

  ‘You’ve got big mouths and small dicks,’ she’d shout.

  And I don’t think I did really understand. Not then.

  On one sticky Saturday three years ago, when the men of Chesterfield Street had stripped to the waist to wash their Ford Capris, my nan and my Auntie Val had been off to the shops for a quarter of boiled bacon and some pearl barley, so I’d trotted along. As we passed number eight, there was Jason Lancaster, swinging on the gate of his untidy front garden. Jason had cultivated a deep loathing of me ever since I’d dressed his flock-haired, eagle-eyed Action Man up as Laura Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie when we were nine, so I tended to give him a fairly wide berth whenever possible. I remember I’d nestled myself snugly in between my nan and my Aunt Val as we walked past, secure in the knowledge that Jason would never dare commence his customary public haranguing of me while I was flanked by two redoubtable ladies such as these. No way! On this occasion, however, I was horribly mistaken.

  ‘Oh! Hello, ducky,’ he shouted in a macabre pantomime-dame tone as he spotted me. ‘You look very gay today.’

  I stopped in my tracks, the ugliness of what had happened swallowing me fast. I’d been used to this kind of remark, yes, but this was surely the first time that anyone in my family had witnessed it. What could they possibly think Jason Lancaster had meant by that remark? Were they appalled by some unspeakable realization about me? I suddenly felt as if the safe arms of my home life – a world in which I had always felt cosseted and loved – had been sullied in the most terrible and irreversible way: my grandmother and my mother’s sister had been exposed to all my hitherto private uncertainties and terrors in one split second. I have never forgotten the cringing and knotting of that defining moment: desperate to be noble and clever and composed, in truth I was just an unshielded little boy. I felt naked.

  Aunt Val, of course, had snapped back at Jason as quick as you like.

  ‘Get out of it, you snotty little fucker!’ she barked.

  ‘And tell your mother she needs to
wash them nets out, dirty bastard,’ Nan added matter-of-factly as Jason scuttled away. It was some paltry retribution, I suppose, but the damage had been well and truly done.

  That night when I got home I told Mum I didn’t want to watch Crossroads any more.

  The weird thing was, I didn’t even particularly understand what a poof was, or what a queer did to incite such disdain. If television was anything to go by, a lot of them seemed to host game shows, or were featured in situation comedies in fashionable clothes, and those ones seemed enormously popular as far as I could make out, so quite why being queer was considered so bloody god-awful I couldn’t fathom. On a chilly evening just before Christmas in 1975, though, things became a little less cloudy when I sat down with my mother and my Auntie Val to watch a new TV drama called The Naked Civil Servant. The turbulent life story of Quentin Crisp had been somewhat of a revelation to me, to say the least. Quite apart from the fact that this outrageous, fearless and, in my opinion, rather fantastic creature had been parading around London fifty years ago, wearing mascara, nail varnish, lipstick and attire that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the King’s Road in the present day, another significant part of the equation had also been filled in for me. Queers had sex with other men.

  ‘He was a very brave man,’ my Aunt Val had remarked as we all sat glued to this enthralling tale. ‘In those days, being a homosexual was illegal – you could get put in prison.’

  ‘Really?’ I’d said, sipping my R. Whites cream soda, not quite believing her. ‘Just for wearing a bit of make-up?’

  ‘Not so much that,’ Mum said, appearing a little uncomfortable. ‘But for doing it with another man; you could have certainly been banged up for that.’