The Liar [calibre]

'Get away!'

'Well, I will be.'

Bullock's mother stood in the doorway and eyed him suspiciously. He supposed his hair was rather long.

'I'm a friend of William's. From school.'

'He's in Australia. It's his year off before going to Oxford.'

'Oh yes, of course. I just . . . wondered, you know. Not to worry. Happened to be passing.'

'I'll tell him you called if he rings. Are you staying in London?'

'Yes, in Piccadilly.'

'Piccadilly?'

What was wrong with that?

'Well, you know, more just off.'

The pin-ball machines in Piccadilly had more sensitive tilt mechanisms than those he was used to in Gloucester, and he wasn't getting many replays. At this rate he wouldn't be able to afford to carry on for more than an hour.

A man in a blue suit came down behind him and put down a fifty-pence piece.

'It's yours,' said Adrian, smacking the flipper buttons in frustration as his last silver ball rolled out of play. 'That was my last. I just can't seem to get the hang of the bloody thing.'

'No, no, no,' said the man in the blue suit, 'the fifty is for you. Have another go.'

Adrian turned in surprise.

'Well, that's awfully kind . . . are you sure?'

'Yes indeed.'

The fifty was soon used up.

'Come and have a drink,' said the man. 'I know a bar just round the corner.'

They left the chimes and buzzes and intense, haunted concentration of the amusement arcade and walked up Old Compton Street and into a small pub in a side street. The barman didn't question Adrian's age, which was an unusual relief.

'Haven't seen you before. Always good to meet a new face. Yes, indeed.'

'I'd've thought everyone was a stranger in London,' said Adrian. 'I mean, it's mostly tourists round here, isn't it?'

'Oh, I don't know,' said the man. 'You'd be surprised. It's a village really.'

'Do you often play pin-ball?'

'Me? No. Got an office up the Charing Cross Road. I just like to look in most evenings on my way home. Yes, indeed.'

'Right.'

'I thought you were a girl at first with your hair and . . .everything.'

Adrian blushed. He didn't like to be reminded how long beard growth was in coming.

'No offence. I like it... it suits you.'

'Thanks'

'Yes indeed. Yes indeedy-do.'

Adrian made a note, somewhere in the back of his mind, to get a haircut the next day.

'You sound a bit public school to me. Am I right?'

Adrian nodded.

'Harrow,' he said. He thought it a safe bet.

'Harrow, you say? Harrow! Dear me, I think you're going to be a bit of a hit. Yes indeed. You got anywhere to stay?'

'Well . . .'

'You can put up with me, if you like. It's just a small flat in Brewer Street, but it's local.'

'It's terribly kind of you . . . I'm looking for a job, you see.'

That's how simple it had been. One day a lazy student, the next a busy prostitute.

'Thing is, Hugo,' said Don, 'soon as I clapped eyes on you I thought, "That's not rent, that's the real thing." I've been around the Dilly for fifteen years and I can spot 'em, indeedy-dumplings, I can. Now I'm sorry to say that I won't fancy you next week. Unplucked chicken is my speciality and I'll be bored stiff with you Thursday. Bored limp, more like. Hur, hur! But you cut your hair a bit - not too much - keep your Harrovian accent fit and you'll be clearing two ton a week. Yes indeed.'

'Two ton?'

'Two hundred, sunshine.'

'But what do I have to do?'

And Don told him. There were two principal amusement arcades, there was the Meat Rack, which was an iron pedestrian grille outside Play land, the more active of the arcades, and there was the Piccadilly Underground itself.

'But you want to watch that. Crawling with the law.'

Don wasn't a pimp. He worked at a perfectly respectable music publishing house in Denmark Street. Adrian paid him thirty pounds a week which covered his own accommodation and the use of the flat for tricks during the day. At night it was up to the tricks to provide the venue.

'Just don't start chewing gum, shooting horse or looking streetwise, that's all.'

At first the days passed slowly, each transaction nerve-racking and remarkable, but soon the quiet pulse of routine quickened the days. The young can become accustomed to the greatest drudgeries, like potato-harvesting or schoolwork, with surprising speed. Prostitution had at least the advantage of variety.

Adrian got on pretty well with the other rent-boys. Most of them were tougher and beefier than he was, skinheads with tattoos, braces and mean looks. They didn't regard him as direct competition and sometimes they even recommended him.

'Do you know of anyone less . . . chunky?' a punter might ask.

'You want to try Hugo, he'll be doing the Times crossword down the Bar Italia this time of the morning. Flared jumbo cords and a blazer. Can't miss him.'

Adrian was intrigued by the fact that the most prosperous, pin-striped clients went for the rough trade, while the wilder, less respectable tricks wanted more lightly muscled boys like him. Opposite poles attracted. The Jacobs wanted hairy men and the Esaus wanted smooth. It meant that he more than most had to learn to spot the sadists and nutters who were on the lookout for a sex-slave. One of the last things Adrian wanted was to be chained up, flogged and urinated over.

He liked to think that his rates were competitive but not insulting. A blow-job was ten quid to give, fifteen to receive. After a week he made up his mind to forbid anything up the anus. Some could take it and some couldn't: Adrian decided that he belonged to the latter category. A couple of boys tried to convince him, as he hobbled down Coventry Street after a particularly heavy night complaining that his back passage felt like a windsock, that he would soon get used to it, but he resolved - financially disadvantageous as it might be - that his rear section was to be firmly labelled a no-poking compartment. This was a proviso he had to make clear to clients at the opening of negotiations: between the thighs was fine - the intercrural method was, after all, endorsed by no less an authoritative source than the Ancient Greeks themselves - but he was buggered if he was going to be buggered. As long as he could get it up he didn't mind sodomising a client, but his own bronze eye was closed to all comers.

When business was slack he and some of the others would mix with the journalists and professional Soho drinkers in the French House in Dean Street. Gaston, the implausibly named landlord, had no objection to their presence so long as they didn't tout for custom there. The Golden Lion next door was for that. The regulars however - embittered painters and poets for whom the seventies were an unwelcome vacuum to be filled with vodka and argument - could be savagely impolite.

'We don't need your kind of filth in here,' a radio producer, whose watery seed Adrian had spat out only the previous night, shouted one afternoon. 'Get the fuck out!'

'How ill-bred!' Adrian had exclaimed as Gaston ejected the radio producer instead.

Like Adrian, most of the boys were self-employed; one or two had ponces, but in general pimping was a feature of the more highly structured sister profession of female prostitution. The boys were free to come and go as they pleased, no one was going to tell them where they could set up their stall, no one was going to take a cut of their hard-earned cash. The cash did come in at a pleasing rate but Adrian found he had little to spend it on. Drink didn't really appeal to him much and he was too afraid of drugs to be tempted to take so much as a single pill or a single puff of anything illegal. Every day he would walk to the post office behind St Martin's-in-the-Field and deposit his earnings into an account he had opened under the name of Hugo Bullock. It was all building up rather nicely.

Chickens worried him, though. These were the children of eleven, twelve and thirteen. Some were even younger. Adrian was no Mother Teresa and far too much of a coward to beg them to go home. They were tougher than he was and would have told him to get lost anyway. Besides, they had left their homes because life there was worse, in their eyes at least, than life on the streets. If there was one thing those children knew, it was where and when they were unhappy: there was no cloud of morality obscuring the clarity of their states of mind. They weren't popular with the majority of rent-boys, however, because they attracted television documentaries, clean-up campaigns and police attention, all of which interfered with and militated against the free flow of trade. Their customers, known not unnaturally as chickenhawks, were more nervous and cautious than Adrian's brand of client, so the chickens would have to do much more of the running than he could ever have dared to do. They would spot when they were being eyed up and step boldly forward.