Making Beds in Brothels Read online

  Every surface is covered with thrift store tat: iridescent groups of china horses, a poorly-rendered resin model of the Houses of Parliament, and several oversized bonneted porcelain dolls in garish polyester outfits are propped up around the room.

  I have a memory of being a very young child, not long before my parents split, sitting at their feet on the parlour floor of one of my formidable Brock great aunts in her redbrick East Manchester terrace. Every surface, wall, ledge is covered with masses of ornaments, knick-knacks and photographs. A budgerigar in its cage hangs from the ceiling, chattering and screeching in the thick cigarette smoke. The impact and incoherence are not dissimilar.

  Behind the desk, amidst the chaos of the interior decoration and slumped low in a chair, is Veronica, receptionist and concierge. Veronica is the public face of the Trebor. Perhaps aged around forty-nine, though she could easily be ten years younger, or indeed older, Veronica bears some consideration. She is tall, overweight, and wears the faded uniform of a long-term festival goer: a dirty tie-dye smock over outsized harem pants with flipflops revealing brittle, fungal toenails.

  Her face blends into her neck in loose folds of skin. Her features are indistinct, eyes small and puffy, a few stained teeth remain in her tightly pursed mouth. Usually she wears a colourful but soiled scarf, tightly wrapped around the circumference of her head in a partial toque. Her congealed mass of hair falls out of the scarf to below her waist in a single massive dreadlock. She has threaded this fetid lump with coloured ribbons, bits of metallic string and other magpie-gleaned debris.

  Her perfume is her most memorable feature. It is mixture of patchouli, cannabis, stale sweat and the yeasty scent of body parts best not thought of; your nose knows of her presence long before your eyes, and her scent lingers long after her, meaning it inhabits the hotel as a second presence. You come across her odour in unexpected places; in the corridors, the ancient dangerous lift or the landings between the stairs. It was often a source of confusion as, although she presumably lived in the hotel somewhere, I have no recollection of ever seeing her, in my years of residence in the Trebor, anywhere else but behind the reception desk.

  In my mind’s eye I see her decades earlier, swaying drunkenly and feeling the effect of a hallucinogenic dissolving under her tongue. Veronica is at a party at the Troubadour, the famous folk music venue on the Brompton Road. She is slim, still youngish; the disappointments haven’t taken their full toll on her yet. She still speaks with enthusiasm of the revolution that she is still sure is around the corner. If only we could mobilise the women! she absentmindedly tells no one, propping herself up against the bar, over half the world’s population is female… a great army driven by the goddess. The things we could achieve! The bartender gives her a long look, shakes his head, turns away. He’s heard it all a thousand times before. On the small stage, Sandy Denny warbles, ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’; indeed, where did it go? Veronica doesn’t know. Shrugging, she stares vacantly into space, thinking “that bridge had been burned (burned out?) long before my arrival”.

  Time played tricks on you in the Trebor, it shifts uneasily; fractured, trapping you unaware. Sometimes I was uncertain of the day or month, even the year.

  Indistinctly, I hear Deborah whisper, “Adam…”

  I glance in the mirror over the tiny cracked sink in my room. I see a young and wide-eyed man-boy staring, confused back from the mirror. Other times, an older wearier version appears, the man of now, of bitter, spiteful experience. He peers back at that younger self with absolute pity and despair. The mirror shatters. My psyche breaks into infinite shards. Each facet of myself falls, breaking apart. I am no longer a single entity, but a being made up of countless choices, myriad possible outcomes: the split personality, schizoid refractions of the man who lives a life of masks, presenting so many versions of himself every day, that the real Adam risks being consumed by the personas he creates to make life tolerable.

  For a second, swept away in my reverie, I wonder if I am dead. I feel like a ghost, cursed to endlessly atone both for his own sins and the sins of others; to put right the wrongs that have been done, and air secrets long buried. Would I know if I was dead? How do we know which of us are restless spirits that seek to undo what has been done, to untangle the Gordian knot of our lives? Perhaps we living do not recognise these wandering souls for what they are. I sometimes question if I survived my childhood at all. Perhaps my bones were mouldering under some pervert’s floorboards and I am stuck in limbo, forced to relive everything, again and again.

  I hear Deborah again, clearer this time, Adam, get a grip!, and immediately tug the strings of my mind tighter, drawing myself back into reality, hiding the scars and fractures of a consciousness battered, bruised, punctured and pierced. Smiling at myself, making sure the smile is reflected in my eyes, I successfully disguise the man beneath. Life continues.

  If Veronica shared that discordance, she didn’t share it with me. People get stuck in places like the Trebor. One day you are young, the party is in full swing, then you blink, and everyone has left, and you are forty-nine, working reception in a doss house.

  She sits like a great white Maharani, a silent Janus, only roused when I break one of the rules: “No guests after eleven Adam!” She points wearily to the white board with its list of regulations. Her accent is difficult to place, perhaps a hint of the Black Country, or perhaps the West?

  I was probably an irritant to her, as the young tend to be towards the older and strange. I am both older now, and certainly strange enough, to see myself through her eyes.

  I’m unsure what she would have made of me that first day. It’s probable she took one look and saw me for what I was. Lots of working boys kept a room at the Trebor. And besides us, other twilight people lived here, the female, trans and transvestite sex-workers; people who needed a place to get their heads down at a reasonable cost, no questions asked. Occasionally you would bump into them on the stairs, smeared make-up, heels in hands, coming home in the early hours.

  These were the ‘women’ who offered sensual opportunities in the advertisements that cluttered London’s phone boxes. They bore little relation to the glamourous photographs that promised a Hot Latin Babe! or Sexy Transsexual Nurse. These women were, older and hard-faced. The style of their heavy make-up originated in trends of their youth, decades earlier, and they had to be tough, their life was precarious. They were clinging on, only just a step up from the girls of Kenway Road.

  They would look at you blearily, pushing their meagre bosoms together, giving you a parody of a salacious come-on on the off chance that you might fancy a little ‘business’ a little ‘something extra’. “You’re barking up the wrong tree there, love,” I would laugh in reply. They’d shrug and shuffle off, back to their darkened rooms to sleep the day away.

  Veronica asked no questions about your length of stay or anything else as long as the bill was paid on time each week and you abided by the rules.

  Yet, recalling my time living at the Trebor among these tough people existing on the margins in the shifting unsettled and unwholesome environment of the Trebor itself, might lead you to believe I disliked it there. If the truth be told it was quite the opposite. My memory of those early days is of an intense, distilled sense of freedom.

  I had never had control over where I lived. After escaping my father and moving to Manchester, aged fourteen, I was placed in local authority care with ‘Mad Anne’. Anne had a different man home every other night. Then, at sixteen, there was the city homeless shelter at Downing Street, a square red brick building with dormer roof, long demolished. I was a small, vulnerable kid living with city down and outs; the insane, the hopeless. My abiding memory of that place was simply how scary it was. Then there was a tiny flat overlooking the park, shared with the guy with the harelip who robbed me blind, stealing my food and leaving me hungry for weeks at a time.

  There were angels too. Rachel of the warm heart and unlimited kindness, who cared so much for her st
rays, the four-legged and two-legged kind. She knew who I was, everything about me, and loved me still. Her home was a real home, albeit briefly. Rachel was and remains the finest Christian I ever met, and she claims no belief in God. There were other kindnesses extended to me, but the memories are illusionary after so long. Why is it one holds onto the bad experiences longer and with more clarity?

  So, to have my own space, even in a dirty run-down hotel, in a room little larger than the average bathroom, with a shared shower and toilet and a single hard bed, was at least a place I had chosen, and that airless little room high up in the Trebor represented to me the first gasp of freedom in an otherwise unbearable life. There was a small lock on the door, which kept all predators at bay, protecting me from what was beyond. I paid for that room myself. It was my space and from one week till the next, I could leave or stay as I saw fit.

  Sometimes I would just sit and watch the sun in the leaves of the plane trees below the windows. I would buy a sandwich or piece of fruit from the corner shop and watch TV in the evenings, on the ancient monitor, and do nothing but lie on my back watching a horsefly dance along the cracks in the ceiling, perfectly satisfied. In all my years in London this was my place of choice, only going to other places when I could no longer afford the rent.

  The first eighteen years of my life felt as if I had been locked up, like a bad dream, and I was now free. I had never experienced such a feeling of freedom before and it was intoxicating, better than any drug. This room, these four walls, represented for me at that time, pure liberty.

  Nostalgia for that time, as I relate this, is so powerful as to be uncomfortable. It grips my chest. Of all the emotions, nostalgia is the most painful for me. I know now what the years would have had in store for me, the illusions that would have been shattered, battles that would be won and lost. I would do it all again, in a moment, just to experience for a second the pure sense of freedom that I felt in my first weeks at the Trebor Hotel.

  Chapter 14

  I often walked in Brompton Cemetery, the vast necropolis just a short walk from the Trebor. You enter through a stone triumphal arch that leads into a long and stately avenue of mature lime trees. To your immediate left after you enter, buried beneath a Celtic cross carved with a female saint, is the grave of the formidable suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst. She offers all those who pass a silent benediction. Pankhurst was a fellow Mancunian. I acknowledge her every time I pass, as we are fellow exiles.

  Grandiose mausoleums of the great and good competed for my attention. Angels stand sentinel each side of a gothic sepulchre, one raising her eyes and shamelessly greeting the viewer with her gaze, while her partner looks demurely down at her feet.

  As you walk past the memorials, you catch sight of a great neo-classical rotunda in the distance, this draws your curiosity and you walk more quickly. Suddenly you leave the avenue of limes and are caught slightly breathless, finding yourself in a great classical arcaded amphitheatre, its stone glowing gold in the sun. It feels disarmingly like an outdoor cathedral. Beneath these magnificent arcades are catacombs, coffins walled in individual loculi. You can walk down the ramps that run below ground, if you like, and peer through the great bronze doors, each guarded by a massive inverted lamp, around which great serpents’ coil.

  The space is packed with marble crosses, angels and other late Victorian and Edwardian funerary monuments, and the effect is overwhelming. A statue stands above one grave, a beautiful woman in Grecian dress, her hair in a loose chignon. She wears a jewelled bracelet and sandals, a rose forever held between her delicate fingers, held protectively against her heart. Carved on the stone is her name, Blanche Roosevelt, Marchesa d’Alligri. She was the first American woman to sing on stage at Covent Garden, and the mistress of Guy de Maupassant, the great French naturalist author whose worked focused on the denouements (outcomes) of his protagonists. She died, aged forty-four, after being thrown from her carriage. Judging by the beauty and expense of her memorial, she was deeply mourned. As we part I glance back at her, and her slight smile is so welcoming, so tender, that for a moment I think she will step down from her plinth and offer me a stony embrace.

  On glorious sunny afternoons it was possible to feel that I was in Italy. Among the myrtle trees and cedars, it felt like a fantasy Mediterranean landscape. A huge grey granite Egyptian pylon stands amongst a grove of Cyprus trees. A monumental stone lion rests its gargantuan head on massive paws, guarding steps that lead onto a wooded terrace. These wide terraces, pathways and colonnades were designed as delightful places to stroll. And I love to walk. I needed this, a place I could wander and allow my imagination to do its work, to remove myself from less attractive facets of my life, to heal for a while.

  This is where the gays of Earl’s Court promenade; the men living in small gardenless flats or studios, who pour onto the wide boulevards of the cemetery at the first sign of sun. It is crawling with men of every type. Beautiful tall, manicured and wealthy-looking Italian men, expensively dressed, gesticulating extravagantly as they talk loudly into their mobile phones. Muscular leather daddies in check shirts stalk the pathways checking each other out, and elegant Thai house boys, who work in the local hotels and restaurants and add a touch of exoticism with their colourful sarongs.

  And of course, the buffed and polished male prostitutes, tanning out the dark circles and blemishes. Absorbing the vitamins that they lack from their largely nocturnal habits. They parade themselves, topless in pairs or groups, gossiping, laughing. One calls shrilly, “Its Prada, dahling!” as he flashes his expensive black satchel to an admiring friend. It’s the only public green space in the locality, and like the animals of the Serengeti are drawn to any available water supply, coming together in communal need and unusual familiarity, the lack of any other open space draws all these divergent types here. And, naturally, there are shenanigans in the shrubberies. Brief friendships are made that end in frantic couplings among the laurels.

  It’s mid-spring, and I am having my constitutional. I often walk the paths for a few hours for exercise in the mornings, before my shift began. It is beautiful, there are naturalised anemones and narcissi blooming among the tombs. The grass is coming in green and lush and the trees have the freshest green leaves, almost blue–green in the sunlight. I settle myself on a large flat sandstone tomb whose deeply-carved calligraphy informs me that this is the resting place of Edith, a member of the Gunter family. The Gunter’s were famous for developing the squares and streets Earl’s Court for the newly wealthy London middle-class during the nineteenth century. Several streets were named for the family, including an Edith Grove.

  Taking my breakfast, a sandwich and fruit, from my bag, I lie back to rest, covering my eyes with my hand and seeing the sunlight and sky between my fingers. I’m about to close my eyes, when I notice the fine feathery leaves of wild asparagus coming through the green of the grass. If you didn’t know what you were looking at you wouldn’t recognise it as a relation of the delicious vegetable, its fronds looking more like dill or a type of fern. The leaves move in the slight breeze, a splash of jade against the deep green, fleetingly producing the effect of a Japanese watercolour.

  As I rest, the sun warming my face, it dawns on me that what I am looking at may be a survivor from the days when this cemetery and the surrounding area were the market gardens and farms that supplied London with fruit and vegetables. Or is it the wild asparagus native to the south-west of Britain? That this plant has tenaciously clung on to this spot, in some forgotten crack, a living relic from the time when Earl’s Court was open fields and swallows flew overhead and the cuckoo called in the woods. That for all the changes in the world, for the changes in its environment, it has persevered.

  For many years the cemetery was regularly mown, carefully tended, weeds excluded. A team of gardeners actively fought to keep the wilderness at bay. Now, the cemetery was allowed to return to the natural heathland that existed long before human encroachment. It seemed possible that some of the old wor
ld, something fragile, pure, started to thrive again, renewing itself each spring, getting stronger and gradually reasserting itself.

  This proved a powerful metaphor of hope for me. That somehow, no matter what happened around us, however terrible things may seem, it was essential I didn’t lose myself, I couldn’t allow myself to be consumed by my demons. I had to preserve at all costs something, if just a speck, of my own personality, of my humanity, some spark of goodness, no matter how tiny, in the hope that one day things would improve and given the right conditions, I might start to grow, to flourish again. In death there is life, in death remains hope, hope to me was a tiny green shoot found among the stones of an ancient cemetery, a fragile possibility that things would one day get better.

  Chapter 15

  Right now, I needed to eat. Eating healthily was a preoccupation. It was wasn’t easy to eat well as, obviously, I had no kitchen, and the temptation was to live off junk food. This inevitably impacted badly on my weight and health, so I ate a lot of pre-prepared salad bowls and fruit from the supermarket, and every day tried to eat a decent meal from one of the reasonable walk-in restaurants that could be found dotted along Earl’s Court Road. They usually offered a prix fixe menu of soup or salad, then duck in orange sauce with fried potatoes, or grilled lamb chops and green beans, for under ten pounds.

  Streetwise was housed in a beautiful Italianate townhouse built on the magnificent half-moon of Eardley Crescent. A blue plaque informed me Hattie Jacques, the British comedienne, had owned a house here. I had grown up watching her in the re-runs of the Carry On franchise on TV on Saturday mornings, usually playing some harassed but kind-hearted matron or long-suffering wife.