Carlton took the trumpet from its case, inserted the mouthpiece and made a few screeching blasts. There was no hint of a note let alone a tune but he was wearing a suit and looked good (‘a little like the young Miles Davis even,’ said Freddie).
When he had finished I picked up the trumpet and blew loud and tunelessly. Freddie meanwhile was sawing away at the cello and by the time Steranko got back from the bathroom Carlton was banging out random notes on the out-of-tune piano in the corner.
‘What a racket,’ Steranko said, rubbing his face with a towel.
‘It’s free-form, man,’ Carlton said. ‘Collective improvisation.’ Freddie and I sniggered; Steranko looked pissed off.
‘I’ve only been awake five minutes,’ he said.
‘How much do you want for the trumpet then,’ Carlton asked.
‘Twenty-five quid.’
‘Thirty,’ I said, gazumping Carlton.
‘Do I hear thirty-five?’ Steranko said, buttoning up his trousers.
‘You’ll never learn to play it,’ Carlton said.
‘Probably not but at least I’ll stop you getting it,’ I said.
‘You can have it,’ said Carlton, ‘and I bet in six months you still can’t play anything remotely resembling “My Funny Valentine”.’
‘I only want to play “The Last Post” anyway,’ I said. ‘Something to bring tears to my eyes.’
‘I bet a fiver you’ve given it up completely in a month,’ Carlton said.
‘You’re on,’ I said, extending my hand. ‘Shake.’
‘Two months,’ said Carlton extending his.
‘Actually now that you don’t want it I’m not sure I’ll even buy it,’ I said, withdrawing mine.
‘Jesus,’ said Steranko, putting a record on the turntable. ‘What a kid.’ A few moments later the clean, intelligent emotion of Jan Garbarek’s tenor filled the room. Audible landscapes formed and re-formed themselves around us. Morning music, mist melting in the sun.
‘It’s going to be a nice day,’ Carlton said.
We went down into the kitchen where Steranko stirred a saucepan of porridge. He made porridge perfectly and patiently and ate it every day regardless of the weather.
When it was ready he filled four bowls. Carlton dumped in a lot of brown sugar and then some more after he’d taken one mouthful. It was still too hot to eat. We blew on it. Carlton poured more sugar in.
We were all blowing on our porridge and taking gasped spoonfuls from round the edge. It felt like it was burning my stomach.
‘Beautiful,’ said Carlton when it had cooled down enough to eat.
‘You sure it’s sweet enough?’
When we’d finished Steranko chucked the bowls in the sink and we went back up to his room. While Steranko finished getting ready Carlton fiddled around with the cello.
‘Can you play this?’ he asked, leaning it back against the chair.
‘Not really,’ Steranko said. He reached for the cello, settled himself behind it, ran the bow across the strings a couple of times and then played what was recognisably the beginning of Bach’s first cello suite. Freddie, Carlton and I clapped.
‘That’s all I know,’ Steranko said, smiling.
Carlton had to call for Belinda but Steranko, Freddie and I arrived together at Foomie’s place. The party was already in full swing. Foomie smiled warmly at both Steranko and me and said how glad she was that we could come. We introduced her to Freddie and they said hello and smiled at each other. Foomie was in a black sleeveless dress. Her hair was piled up and tied in a bright scarf and she wore big gold earrings. She asked if we wanted some punch but the three of us, at exactly the same moment, all said ‘BEER’. The single perfectly synchronised syllable belched loudly into the room, followed quickly by three separate mumbles of ‘please’. I could feel myself blushing.
‘Help yourself,’ Foomie said, pointing to the neat stack of cans on a sturdy table. The doorbell rang and she went to answer it, leaving the three of us standing in an awkward huddle.
‘I think we really made an impression there,’ Freddie said.
‘What a start,’ Steranko said and then we just stood there, drinking fast and looking round. There was a lot to drink but there were a lot of people to drink it as well. I opened a second can. Soul records were playing in another room.
Steranko and Freddie drifted off. I stood in a corner, feigning intensity until Mary came over and handed me a joint. I remembered Mary from years ago when she would ask, wide-eyed, if Robert Mugabe was the fat one or the other one but in the last year she had suddenly got politics — it was like she’d received them in the post after a slight delay somewhere along the line. I liked Mary but her zest for arguing things through was sometimes a little wearying. After a film she always insisted that the sex scenes were pornographic, that the rape scene suggested that women liked being raped, that the husband’s slapping his wife endorsed violence against women and so on. She recounted arguments with people where they had said they weren’t interested in politics and she had responded by pointing out that everything is political. Her favourite expressions were ‘offensive’ and ‘ideologically unsound’. The latter she used so often that it was virtually a form of punctuation, occasionally reversing its meaning and using it as an indication of unqualified approval as in ‘ideologically sound’. Mostly, though, she preferred it in the negative mode when referring to buying Jaffa oranges, having service washes at the laundry or reading Martin Amis.
Now she was explaining to me how we were all bisexual really.
‘But I don’t want to sleep with men,’ I said.
‘How do you know you don’t?’
‘That’s a daft question: you might just as well ask me how I know I don’t want to eat concrete. I just don’t want to.’
‘That depends on how deeply you may have repressed the homosexual side of your character.’
‘I think I’d know by now if I had any homosexual inclinations.’
‘Not when you’re brought up in a culture that makes you think of homosexuality as abnormal, wrong.’
‘I still think I’d know by now.’
‘How do you feel about gay men?’
‘Fine.’
‘Are any of your friends gay?’
‘Not close friends really.’
‘Are you homophobic?’
‘No, I’ve just said: hardly any of my best friends are gay.’
‘What?’
‘Well all the time we’re told that every anti-Semite or racist starts by saying that some of his best friends are Jews or blacks or whatever. .’
‘Very funny.’
‘True too, actually. Almost all of my best friends are heterosexual.’
‘D’you ever hug your friends?’ (Talking with Mary I quite often had the impression that I was being vetted for membership of some obscure new men’s group.)
‘No.’
‘What if one of them needed comforting?’
‘Comforting and hugging aren’t the same thing. Personally, I’ve never really taken much comfort from being hugged.’
‘And what about kissing? When you meet women you know you kiss them. Why don’t you kiss the men you know?’
‘I don’t always kiss the women I know. Generally I prefer to shake hands with people. The handshake is one of the great conventions of civilised living. Kissing is something else altogether.’
‘In different cultures men kiss each other.’
‘But we’re in this culture. Men kissing each other in this culture is just an affectation.’
‘What about crying? D’you feel embarrassed about it? D’you think men shouldn’t cry?’
‘I prefer it when they don’t.’
‘When did you last cry?’
‘I can’t remember. Ages ago.’