Love Song to Lavender Menace by James Ley

Author:James Ley [Ley, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786823427
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2017-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

TWO

Dawn in Lavender Menace bookshop. LEWIS is taping shut a box. The second last one to be filled and sealed. There are now a very small number of books remaining on the shelves.

LEWIS takes a large, heavy book from a shelf, holds it up and then drops it on the floor.

LEWIS

The one o’clock gun only makes you shit yourself if you’ve got a guilty conscience. Where are you scuttling off to? Gay Headquarters? The bogs on Cathedral Lane? You’re telling yourself a story again. You took a long lunch because Sarah ordered a part for the hoover from John Lewis and you offered to pick it up. How helpful of you. Those hoover parts have seen all sorts in the bogs. The hoover could tell quite a story. It’s not the only one with excellent suction and a knack for getting into those hard-to-reach places. You break sweat as soon as you step onto Queen Street. But you don’t even flinch when the Portrait Gallery calls you a queer. You look ahead with a steely determination. Dirty wee poof it shouts along the street. Fucking Nancy. Shit-stabbing little shirt-lifter. You swallow, you hold your head up high and you take a deep breath. You catch your reflection in the window of the barbers. Who are you? Who would you be if you’d never met Sarah? And where would you be? In another country, unfettered by the mistakes of the past? Sometimes your personality comes out at work, and it surprises you. In the office, the occasional dark joke spills out your mouth and makes your colleagues laugh at first, and then wonder where that came from. And in those tiny moments you can breathe. But you’re holding your breath now on Broughton Street. You feel obscene. Like you think you would feel if you were dancing in a club with your top off, sweat running down your body as you move in between the bodies of the other men. In reality you’re just a man in a suit going to a bookshop on his lunch break. But you don’t even do that. You don’t go in. You don’t even fumble with the railings. You just watch yourself glide past. Like you didn’t notice it. Like it wasn’t even there. You stand in a leafy square, surrounded by Victorian townhouses. Fucking townhouses. Fucking Playfair. Fucking Victorian society bullshit. Fucking public toilets. Pushing gays underground for a century. Misery running down the tiles. Industrialised loneliness. Silent transactions. Vast neo-classical buildings filled with tiny Presbyterian minds. You want to turn back. You want to stand shoulder to shoulder with the young man you saw stacking the shelves. You want to be yourself like he is himself. You want to stand where he stands, knowing what he knows, holding in your hands what he holds in his.

GLEN enters. He’s wearing 80s office wear. The suit trousers are a little too neat and fit tight across the bum. He’s wearing a stripy shirt, braces and a tie.

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