Address Book Read online

  ADDRESS BOOK

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  ADDRESS BOOK

  Praise for ADDRESS BOOK

  Praise for Neil Bartlett

  ADDRESS BOOK | Neil Bartlett

  14 Yeomans Mews

  103 Cavendish Mansions

  103 Cavendish Mansions (again)

  72 Seaton Point

  203 Camden Road

  8 Hamlet Gardens

  40 Marine Parade

  A postscript;

  Acknowledgements

  SUPPORTERS

  Also from Inkandescent

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  by Justin David and Nathan Evans to shine a light on

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  Praise for ADDRESS BOOK

  ‘The rooms where we live out troubled, anxious lives are slovenly or crazy-clean, are as spacious as our desires and as cramped as our frustrations. As a man of the theatre, Neil Bartlett knows how to fill a bed-sit with love or malice, how to elevate a neighbour boy into a military saint, how to find in a dirty mattress a platform for redeeming passion. He is an all-seeing wizard.’

  EDMUND WHITE

  ‘Neil Bartlett’s astonishing novels have always seemed content to stand on the edge of the party, like the elegant gay uncle content to entertain and startle any who approach. With Address Book he sheds his jacket to get on down. This is a cleverly structured, funny then deeply moving novel about connections, sympathy and the traces left by our lives and loves. This is a novel for anyone who has ever mourned in silence, a book for anyone who has wondered about that well-dressed man next door but one.’

  PATRICK GALE

  ‘Neil Bartlett is a peerless chronicler of queer lives lived—past and present. Address Book is peopled with lovers, battlers, ghosts, penitents, adventurers, and optimists.

  We’re lucky to have this book.’

  NIVEN GOVINDEN

  Praise for Neil Bartlett

  ‘Bartlett is a pioneer on and off the page

  and we are lucky to have him telling our stories’

  DAMIAN BARR

  ‘Neil Bartlett can conjure up a world like no-one else.’

  S.J. WATSON

  Published by Inkandescent, 2021

  Text Copyright © 2021 Neil Bartlett

  Cover Design © 2021 Justin David

  Neil Bartlett has asserted his right under the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher assumes no responsibilities for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the information contained herein.

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-912620-12-8 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-912620-13-5 (ebook)

  www.inkandescent.co.uk

  ADDRESS BOOK

  Neil Bartlett

  ‘This was my bedroom.’

  ‘This? When?’

  ‘When I lived here.’

  HAROLD PINTER, The Room

  14 Yeomans Mews

  Tomorrow, everything will be different. There’ll be a brand-new care-team for me to head up—a brand new hospital whose corridors I’ll need to learn how to navigate—and yet another set of protocols for me to get familiar with I’m sure. But tonight, here I am; seated in the middle of my living-room floor, surrounded by boxes and files, still procrastinating over what to take with me and what to leave behind. It’s twenty past eleven, the moving van is booked for seven o’clock tomorrow morning—and here, between my fingers, is a small piece of thin blue paper.

  When it first slipped out from between the pages of my old address book, I had no idea what this piece of paper was. But then, as soon as I unfolded it, I remembered everything. His handwriting; his address, and all eleven digits of his phone-number.

  Arriving at the train-station, that Saturday morning.

  §

  Everything is quiet, and I’m fifteen.

  When I get to the ticket-hall, the tiles of the floor are still all wet and shining. I’m clearly going to be the first person to walk across them this morning, and so I stop for a moment to gather my nerve. While I stand there in the doorway, I can hear myself starting to mutter something under my breath; Andrew, I seem to be saying. My name is Andrew.

  I sound like I’m trying to convince myself of something.

  Or maybe I sound like an anaesthetist does, in the ICU, when they lean forward and ask you to please start counting backwards from twenty.

  When they want you to let go.

  Now, my feet are stepping forward; they are starting to make their way across a skin of evaporating water. And now, I can see my hands resting side by side on the shelf in front of the ticket-office window. What am I trying to say to the man behind the glass? Ah yes, of course; the name of my destination. The word I’ve been practising in my bedroom every night for the last two weeks. Twickenham, I say. Or at least, I try to say it—I try to heave the word up out of my throat at least twice, but for some reason it doesn’t want to move—and so I cough, and try again. I’d like a cheap day return, I say; A cheap day return, please, to—but at this point my throat closes up completely. The man behind the window leans forward, and he asks me to slow things down a bit. I do what I’m told—and that seems to work, because the next thing I can see is my fingers sliding a sequence of coins through the gap at the bottom of the glass, and the man’s fingers pushing my two cardboard train-tickets back towards me in return. I blush, say thank you—and then keep those two precious rectangles of cardboard squeezed tightly in my hand as I head back across the tiles and then turn left towards the ticket-barrier.

  The water’s mostly gone by now, I notice. I keep my head down, and avoid making eye-contact with the man at the barrier.

  Now, I’m out in some sunlight—and finally starting to breathe properly. I find a bench, lean myself back against a patch of already-warm brick wall, and discover that my shirt—my best shirt—is already starting to stick to my back. I look away to my right. Down the tracks, I begin to see a dot, shaking in the heat.

  I want this dot to hurry up.

  I want it to burst into being a train, and save me.

  I know what day of the week this is, because my schoolboy trips up to London were always on a Saturday, even during the holidays. And if I was still fifteen, then the heat that’s making my shirt stick to my back already must be happening on the morning of the first or second Saturday of August, 1974. All of that, from one small piece of pale-blue paper.

  §

  I’d actually met John two weeks earlier, in the gents toilets that used to be down a sharply turning flight of stairs just opposite platform nine at Waterloo Station. We’d both been washing our hands, and the first thing that I can remember catching my eye about him was his long and sun-tanned fingers. They were so very brown, you see, and they loo
ked so strong. Also, there was his ring. It was a gold ring, on his left-hand little finger, with a small black stone in it. As I stared, that sharp black eye had started staring right back at me, as if it somehow already knew what my fifteen-year-old self was after.

  The hands stopped moving—and before I could look away, it was John himself who was making eye-contact. He used the mirror to do it, the one they had running in a strip along the top of the washbasins—and he somehow managed to arrange all of the angles so that our eyes met exactly. And it wasn’t a question, the way John looked at me; it was a statement.

  I felt a kick, somewhere down between my legs—and then I can remember John keeping his eyes locked onto mine, and smiling at me as he shook the water off his hands. And that shocked me, because smiling wasn’t what I was used to on these occasions; I felt my face starting to redden—I was a terrible blusher, at fifteen—and then I just sort of stood there, I think, with my own hands dripping uselessly into the washbasin. The muscles in my throat, of course, were starting to knot themselves right up again.

  A persistent and involuntary cricopharyngeal spasm, I would label that contraction of my throat-muscles now.

  John turned his back. And then, he dried his hands—and left, closing the door to the gents behind him.

  As it happened, there was no one else around; no one, to make me feel that I had to hurry with my next move. I dried my hands for a bit—the towel was useless, I remember, all hot and stiff and unhelpful when you pulled it down to try and find a clean bit—and then—well, then I expect I went back to the basins and soaped and washed my hands all over again. That was my usual routine; I would have been hoping, you see, that the door John had closed behind him was somehow going to swing back open all by itself, and that this older man with his suit and gold ring would just walk back in and make everything happen. Make everything happen, without my ever having to be responsible for what any of it looked or felt like.

  However, on this occasion, the older man didn’t. The door stayed shut, no matter how many times I glanced up in the mirror or pulled down at the towel.

  And so—eventually—I must have given up, because the next thing I can remember is my fifteen-year-old self standing out on the station concourse, just by the top of those stairs. There were eyes and hands absolutely everywhere, up there—all moving about in different directions—and I suppose I must have been staring at as many of their owners as I could, while at the same time trying to make sure that my searching didn’t look too obvious. However, no matter how hard I stared, I still couldn’t make a single one of these hurrying faces or pairs of hands belong to the person I was looking for.

  And then I found him. He was the only still figure in that entire, heaving place—and he was standing directly under the famous Waterloo clock, with his back fully turned again, and his hands clasped neatly behind him.

  Those beautiful, sun-tanned hands.

  That heavy, slow-moving clock.

  And now, of course, I wonder what John can have possibly been thinking. I wonder what on earth can have been going through his twenty-nine-year-old mind as he placed himself right in the middle of all that chaos and waited to find out if I’d followed him. I mean, he must have known how old I was, because there’s no mistaking fifteen-year-old skin, is there? And, like I say, this was happening in 1974, so if any single one of those hurrying people had realised what was going on between the two of us, then their reactions would more than likely have been as ugly as they would have been swift. If—that is—they had been able to read what was written in blood across my teenaged face, as I stood there and stared at John’s back, and his hands, and breathlessly willed him to turn around and find me.

  Was he thinking of walking away, I wonder? Of giving up, and just getting back to work?

  Was he hard, too?

  I stood there for quite a long time, I think. And then—then, John did turn around. And despite the crowds, he somehow repeated that extraordinary trick he had of being able to hook his eyes directly into yours. He smiled, even more broadly than before, and the next thing I can remember happening is that I made my way towards him in an absolutely straight line. Which is impossible, given how crowded the station was that lunchtime—but honestly, that’s how I remember it happening. I can even see myself doing it; I can see myself, walking towards John across the concourse, and as I watch my face being reeled in by his it’s somehow as if everybody in the crowd has been magically instructed to get out of my way. It feels as if it is John himself—John, and his steady smile—who are making this extraordinary thing happen.

  It feels as if everybody else there, suddenly isn’t quite there at all.

  It feels as if he’s made me invisible.

  I’m going to stop for a minute now. I’m going to put this piece of paper safely back between the pages of my address book, and then I’m going to pour myself a glass of wine.

  If I can remember which of these boxes I’ve packed my wine-glasses in, that is.

  §

  Damn. My phone says it’s ten past midnight already.

  §

  We’re standing about two feet apart now, and we’re face to face. All of the Waterloo people are still busy walking and talking everywhere around us, but still, none of them seem to be taking any notice. I think I can remember trying to smile myself, at this point, like an actual adult. Or at least like my idea of one. John and I swap names—and I suddenly realise that I’ve never done this before. None of the other men I’ve met has ever made me admit that the boy doing the staring and the boy with my name are the same person. My throat snaps shut; no wonder then that it’s now John who does all the rest of the talking. He’s working just across the road from the station, he tells me, in a church just over the way—and he uses the church’s name as if I ought to have heard of it. I haven’t, of course, but I nod anyway. And then John says it’s a shame, because he only has a quick break for lunch, today, and so he can’t stop or do anything just now. And I nod again, because I know what he means when he says that, because I’ve done plenty of things with men in public toilets before—but at the same time, I don’t really know what he means at all; I mean, I don’t know where this is going, or what he wants me to say—and so next, there’s quite a long pause in our conversation. And then—right out there under that ridiculous great hanging clock that they still have at Waterloo, the one that still always looks to me as if it’s about to come crashing down and start killing people—yes, right out there in the middle of the main concourse at Waterloo Station, right in the midst of all of those hurrying people, this handsome, sun-tanned and considerably older-than-me young man says again that he thinks it’s a shame he’s working just now, but that another time, he’d like to be able to invite me back to his house.

  And that stops everything.

  Because I really don’t know what that sentence means.

  Because where I come from, that’s not what houses are for.

  My throat stays closed. John doesn’t say anything either, but then—almost as if he’s realised it’s now or never, and that I might be about to lose my nerve—he reaches inside his jacket. He produces a little black notebook, and a fountain pen—the book has soft leather covers, I notice, like skin, and the pages all have gilt edges—and then John licks his finger, and finds an empty page, and he starts to ink something across the pale blue paper in four separate lines. The strokes of his pen are hard, and fast, and exact—and now, as I watch him do that again, after all these years, I notice that he’s writing down all of his details for me exactly like a Junior Doctor writes out a prescription. I mean, with that specific kind of haste which isn’t actually hasty or careless at all.

  The kind of haste where every word matters.

  John puts his pen away, and tears out the page from his book. He checks that the ink is dry, folds the page in half, and holds it out towards me. He’s put his phone number at the bottom, he says, and sure, I can hear myself saying, I’ll try and call you tomorrow.

>   What kind of fifteen-year-old agrees to go home with someone he’s never met before?

  A fifteen-year-old who’s ready.

  §

  Phone boxes always smelt terrible. They stank of sweat, of piss—of cigarette-smoke—of all the other people who’d ever been in there before you. Also, the doors had this unnerving habit of swinging silently shut, like they wanted to trap you.

  I’d laid my bike down in a patch of long grass—I’d cycled to a phone box that was right across town, and so was nearly out in the countryside—and now I was inside, and already breathing hard, and getting myself all ready for the call with a stack of ten-pence pieces. I had my piece of blue paper there with me, naturally, and had already got it unfolded and propped up next to the coins. I’d long since memorised everything that was on it, but I still wanted the strokes of John’s handwriting there in plain sight.

  For the cycle-ride, I remember, I’d hidden the piece of paper down the side of one of my socks.

  I dialled his number—a different hole for each number, you had to use—and then, at the very last minute, just as I was struggling to get my ten pence piece into the slot in time, I remember feeling as if my fingers had suddenly become somebody else’s. I remember smelling some previous caller’s breath on the receiver, and hearing my own breath coming back down the line at me like surf. I remember thinking: are you supposed to say your name, in case he doesn’t remember who you are? And then, quite naturally and calmly, John took over.

  Just let me check, he said.

  Yes, he said; it looks like the weekend after next should be fine.

  Do I really remember his voice unknotting my larynx at that point—or is that just what’s happening to me now?

  I can certainly remember John’s instructions. I suppose that’s because of how clearly he delivered them, like it was going to be the simplest thing in the world for me to leave my address after breakfast and then arrive at his by lunchtime. Oh, it’s easy—he said—you just get on your usual train for London, but hop off at Clapham Junction. Once you’re there—he said—look up on the departure boards for anything that’s going west marked Twickenham—and don’t worry about the train’s final destination—he said—just look out for that one name. Twickenham trains run all the time—he said—and once you’re on one all you have to do is sit tight and count to seven. First there’s Putney, and then Barnes, then Mortlake; there’s Richmond, then North Sheen, then St. Margaret’s. And then—hey presto—there’s me. Come straight out of the station, turn left, and I’ll be parked just across the road. Okay?