Winner Write Queer London 2008, Short Story Category - Two Sides Of The Boy

By Philip Tang

“I cry every time.”

“Every time?”

“Yes.”

“Even when you’re ecstatic?”

“Yeah.”

“Even if you’re with a man?”

He smudges a hand across his damp eyes and looks around before whispering, “No, maybe not with a man.” On the word man, his eyes are vivid with the white light I’ve seen in kleptomaniacs and priests.

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Stop talking. Of course.” He starts shaking and rubbing his palms on his jeans so hard he might take the blue off.

“Are you scared?”

“No, it’s my back-to-front emotions again. I’m excited. I’ve got nothing to lose.”

We march through the door of the Knave of Clubs with one of us with nothing to lose. Black might not seem like a colour to most, but as we make our entrance, our black hair radiates like polished worry beads.

“Two beers, please, sir.” Hiep says.

He’s too polite. I don’t want to apologise for being here.

The barman doesn’t understand. Hiep’s Vietnamese clips and swallows are too much for him and he reacts with a relay of looks around the room. I follow with my eyes and it occurs to me that these—men—are—all— homosexuals: three fellows with moustaches against the wall, two skinny boys in flares wiggling against the pool table, a group of grandfathers with shaved heads.

Hiep starts laughing. First it’s just a cough of the stuff. Then it’s like the sound of water hitting chip-fat. All eyes are blunt on us.

The barman tilts his head at me, as if I am shorter than him.

“Two beers.”

Hiep and I take our drinks to the corner where the dark is thickest, to shade our teensy-weensy Oriental eyes.

“Stop laughing,” I say through my teeth.

“I told you,” he says. “They come out topsy-turvy.”

Hiep says these words in English to show me he can be understood. He has only been here six months. He tells me he started somewhere rural called Worse- Than-Being-in-Viet-Nam-on-Trent. He ran away and lives in a derelict factory behind Kingsland Road with skinny pigeons.

“It’s fine. All fine. Drink your beer and it’ll all be fine.”

“This is fantastic,” he says, but scrunches his big body into a boulder.

I don’t know how to read his mangled emotions; I don’t know if when we met he enjoyed it, or if he just likes my bed because there’s no pigeon shit.

We drink our beers and then have another. It only takes two pints for us to flush red but I don’t care anymore. One of the grandfathers starts talking and laughing loudly, turning to us as if we were part of the conversation.

“Well, who cares about Rock anyhow? I prefer my boys sweeter.”

He twirls the air like a Vietnamese opera singer. I wonder if he’ll get up to sing, and as if reading my mind, he stands and staggers towards us. The carpet between us is worn bare and stretches on forever as he walks over. I would prefer not to see his old face. I would prefer to be in a cinema in Sai Gon. Fumbly, hands and mouths accidentally against each other, like Marmite in the margarine. He looks like Mr Blind-in-One-Eye who comes into the chip shop and orders fish with tomato sauce.

I turn to Hiep for guidance. He is taller and more muscular than me and we all look to these people for help when we’re in trouble. But Hiep is frowning at the grandfather so I know inside he must be jumping up and down like a whore on a banker’s bed.

“Can I sit down?”

“Yet, o’course,” Hiep says with his accent cutting into the words.

I don’t believe the grandfather’s Queen Elizabeth politeness. He has his hands piously clasped on the Formica table before Hiep even finishes speaking. Then comes the question. The one that lets me bodyshift into his eyes for a second.

“Where are you from?”

I blush, and through the grandfather’s eyes I now look twice as drunk and like a child. Hiep blushes too, but his voice is clear and steady through the grandfather’s blue cigarette smoke.

“Viet Nam. You know?”

“Naturellement. Naturellement. And how did you get here?”

“Airplay.”

“An aeroplane? Indeed? All that way from Vietnam? Not a boat?”

“No, from Hong Kong. No boat.”

“What about from Vietnam to Hong Kong? A boat?”

“Yet. Yet. Very-very small boat.”

“Well, you are very handsome. Do you understand?”

All three of us are struck by a Star Trek freeze ray. Men are singing along to Last Dance from a back room we haven’t seen yet. I wonder if my eyes will get to see it or if they will dry up into scotched eggs from not blinking.

The grandfather doesn’t blink at Hiep either. He sees: half exotic tiger and half boxer. Which half depends on whether the grandfather looks up or down. Hiep’s thick throat swallows the moment.

“Well, nice to meet you both. I have a show to perform, but I’ll come see you after. What were your names?”

“Hiep.”

“Enchanté, Hiep, I’m John. And you are?”

His hand is doughy and smells of talc and charity shops. He’s wearing a gold ring. I say nothing. He doesn’t want to know my name anyhow and his is obviously fake. He probably has a wife at home, too, though in the same country, in the same house.

Hiep chokes back tears for the next ten minutes. I am hypnotised by his welled-up eyes versus his thick chest. I can look at him and see the boy, then the man, then the boy. At that moment I realise that it is being able to see this that makes me homosexual.

“He’s incredible, isn’t he?” Hiep says.

“Who? The old man? Are you crazy?”

“You don’t like him?”

“I don’t even understand why we’re here.”

“Because you like men and you won’t be able to when Linh comes.”

“Be quiet. Don’t say her name. She’ll see this place if you call her name here.”

“You’ll have to choose.” He’s drunk. One side of his mouth pulls up, then the other.

“That man, that lover with moth-ball breath, you can do better.”

“This isn’t love. It’s just a ladder. Labour camps, then Blah-on-blah, then London, and now this man.”

“And me?”

His face is incandescent with emotions. He sways, trying to stumble upon the right face for his feelings. “What? You have a wife.”

I should just stand and go. I call Hiep my boyfriend in my mind, though the truth is, I only met him three-and-a-bit weeks ago. But who doesn’t round up? I came to London for a ladder too, for me and Linh. But I could smell something else here from Hong Kong. Under-the-bridge deep breaths, hairy against smooth chests, urinal cakes.

I stand. There are no ties. My last “boyfriend” and I were as bright as aluminium foil, then gone. Fri Sat Sun.

Hiep drags me back down. I sit there and wait for him. His eyes blink like a strobe. He stands, shakes out his arms, drops to the chair again. He sobs quietly then pounds a fist on the table and our beers bleed across it; I order more and return. He fumbles for my thigh; I clasp his hands. He cackles, snorts, puzzles, gasps and goes cross-eyed while I make a show of sipping my drink. Finally, he’s quiet.

The grandfather reappears, with makeup at the seams of his face. “Hip!”

Hiep stands to greet him and I walk out towards the unknowing eyes of Bethnal Green.

“Sorry,” I say.

“Sorry,” Hiep says without looking up.

That should be the end of it. The cold air in my flat has a ringing sound. But in the early morning, Hiep squeezes onto the mattress beside me and buries his warm limbs into mine. I’m aware that I should hold onto the feeling because in a moment the alarm clock will go off and it’ll be over. I’ll think back to him and he’ll be blurry.

Later, after work, as I make my way back from Mr Greek’s Chip Shop, I imagine Hiep on the bus from Mr Turkish’s Clothes Factory, but when I get home the flat is empty.

A month later Linh arrives. She ends every day by writing numbers in a book and then kissing me on the forehead. She used to be a banker and before that a teacher, which in Viet Nam, like everywhere else, means watching the pennies.

She doesn’t just bring soft skin and malty perfume, she carries the vegetable smell of Hong Kong and the pressure to earn more pounds an hour. And my blind spot to men: I turn them to my peripheral vision the way Linh does beggars. I no longer see men spilling onto Columbia Road on Sunday morning; I don’t notice them when I take a piss at King’s Cross Station.

But I do see somebody there one day. Months later. At the back of my mind I was probably waiting to see him, on his way to work. Flecks of brown catch in his eyes under the globes.

“Hiep.”

“Oh, hello. Hi.” He looks greyer. “That Vietnamese girl outside, is that Linh?”

“How are you?”

We talk about nothing and the icy weather. As if we’ve just met again here. His face is mute. He takes a long breath on a cigarette. Then I ask him about the grandfather. He starts laughing, cackling, as if he has held on till this moment to let it all out. He can’t control his shaking and the cigarette slips into the urinal. He tells me through giggles that the grandfather was cruel but won’t tell me how.

“The worst part was that he was just a pensioner,” he says. “An empty-fisted old man.”

Hiep has spent the last month hiding from him. He draws air to say something else but it won’t come. I look to the door to where Linh is waiting. Every breath is timed.

“But also,” Hiep bites his smile down. “He has seen where you work.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The grandfather. He told me a woman meets you at the shop. That he could tell her about you, if I run.”

I don’t know what to say. Linh. I look to the curled corner-tiles of the wall. They look at me with silent sorrow that says they’ve not been able to help any of the other lives they’ve seen crumbling under this yellow light. Linh is waiting out there, monitoring the numbers on her watch. She counts out the day on that thing. A thing that knows about living. She knows how many times the hands will go round before she asks me to have a baby. It won’t be a request.

“I’ve missed you,” Hiep says.

I can hear the trains rumbling underneath us, taking away some other part of my life. Hiep is clinging to me as he drowns and I can’t help but utter it.

“I miss you, too,” I say.

He starts to whimper and my skin prickles. His fists grab my shoulders and we stumble into a cubicle. His eyes begin flickering. I close mine and everything has a blurry feeling. Then come hurried breaths. Then pleasure and we fly. We are high and light and young and we laugh and frown as easily as the air through us. I sense all his moods the exact moment they reach him and they come out the right way round. It feels like an hour of this. Finally we drift back down, our skin and hair glowing as we sway backwards. We are in the cubicle again. Toilet yellowed where it drips. We are lost for a moment. The place is no longer empty. There are men making their own decisions at the urinals. Hiep leans towards me and hesitates, but I pull him in for a hug — two boys standing in a box in our country but far away — and he starts to cry. So do I.

Linh’s voice is yelling in Vietnamese, saying, “Are you there? It’s been six minutes.”

Hiep is still. All his energy is focused on drinking me in through his eyes, yet I’m being pulled towards the exit. I want him to instruct me what to do. I should know his feelings, though I look to him biting his lip and he is as familiar and distant to me as my childhood.

But he knows exactly what I’m thinking. “Have you ever lost something accidentally but on purpose?” he says with his lips tickling my ear. “Or held a glass and secretly hoped to drop it just to see it break?”

The floor is wet and its smell sharpens my mind. I’ve made my decision. I’m not doing it for him or her. I peer out towards the doorway by the men at the basins who dry and wash and dry their hands. Hiep is still waiting.

“Come here tomorrow,” I tell him. “And every day.”

I don’t do it for reason or spite. I do it because I am sick of having something to lose.

I go. I catch his grin, and hope he means it.