BY JAMES BEMBRIDGE

It’s 11:30 am, the telephone is calling for attention again. Of what and with whom I did last night, I can remember not a sodding thing.

I reach with trembling hands for the whisky. After nights of drink, I feel the need to pour another just before negotiating with the mirror, and, as I do, I tell myself I can’t live on like this. This life I lead can be nothing else but short. It feels like all the ills of the world have at once set upon me: the poverty, the pallor of the skin, the blood-bleary eyes – and just what, and in whose name, do I need back hair for?

Between a socialite and an alcoholic, there is only the thinnest line, and where it lies, the alcohol blurs. Enough of it! Get behind thee, parties, strip clubs and screwed out sluts. It’s time to take my liver on a sabbatical, attend church and assume a less grumpy demeanour.

Right then, who the bloody hell is this calling?

‘Yes, what is it?’

‘Hiya James.’

I gather by the girlish, shrieking tones that this is Jake.

‘Jake. Your voice is always so pleasing to the ear. How can I help?’

‘Well, Jaaaames…’

Here we go, the more innocent his voice, the more foul his ask.

‘I was wondering if you’d accompany me to the Pleasuredrome.’

A hacking fit then seizes me, spewing spit, phlegm, blood and what’s what before I calm myself enough to shout, ‘What do you take me for, man!? I’m a…’

An open Word document titled ‘Do Lesbians Exist Outside of Porn?’ stares at me from the laptop screen and stops me short of saying ‘serious writer’.

‘Oh, come on, James. It will be fun. And it will be good research for the book.’

Ah, yes, the book.

The book, still 500 pages thick with untrodden snow. The book stranded by every obstacle life puts in my way. It was to be called Lost Boys and would document prostitutes in print as Toulouse-Lautrec had in paint. The products of broken homes, cursed by their young beauty to the oldest trade. An appeal to wickedness and a manifesto of immorality. It would inspire frantic praise from every bribable critic and act as a gob of spit to all those prefectorial turds of editors who think my writing too obscene for print.

But ‘would’ has long replaced ‘will’. These lost boys are so lost that in my two years in Soho, I’ve yet to unearth a single one.

Jake has returned hope to me though. For should these unfortunate souls exist, then where else but somewhere so morally deformed, so needing of God’s smite, as the Pleasuredrome?

I raise the whisky bottle to the air and curse at him to whom I feel my failure is owed.

Give me not salvation, God; give me dark monsters and blinding misery; give me some of those lovely cherubs of yours so I may trim their wings and befoul their cheeks. Those lost boys of yours have been alluding me for now, but I’ll find them. I’ll find them in the Pleasuredrome!

The next day, 12:30 pm. Who the hell goes out for chance sexual encounters at lunchtime on a Wednesday? Getting through security was a harsher bugger than one would likely ever encounter inside. Still, Jake and I are here now, stripped, towelled and firmly curious.

I’m surprised to hear from Jake that between these sodomites, these devil’s concubines, there exists a kind of ‘etiquette’. If, in the private rooms, a door is ajar, then it is to be taken as an invitation to do the deed with whoever is behind it.

I have told Jake that this is a deed I shall not fulfil. All I want is stories from young men with which to exploit them. To Jake, I leave all the horrid rest of it. The story, I always tell myself, is what matters; the subjects are mere casualties.

In the hallway of the private rooms, there is but one door ajar. Behind it, the dim shape of a figure in suggestive repose. The thought of the Pleasuredrome suddenly seems very distant from the reality of being there. Being behind glass, which, though misted, doesn’t disguise that the man on the other side is horribly thin. 

I nerve myself to open the door only for all nerve to leave me when I do. ‘What manner of man is this, or what manner of creature is it in the semblance of man?’ Jonathan Harker asked of Dracula. I ask myself the same of this creature. Something wizened and deathly pale. Sunken sockets in place of eyes. Hairs sprouting from the nipples like the legs of dead spiders. His neck a knot of loose skin upon which hangs a dull gold chain – bought perhaps when the man was in his youth and worn now as some grim memento of it. All my body but my penis stiffens as I hear the noise of his towel loosen and see below those skull-like eyes of his there play the most terrible smile.

To hell with abstinence. What writer ever owed success to abstinence? I escape to the bar and order a whisky to lessen the dread of what I’ve just seen. ‘Straight!’ I hiss, now wishing violently that I were.

‘We could try the darkroom,’ Jake suggests as he sips from some limp-wristed cocktail. 

‘Jake, if creatures like the one from that room can exist in the light, then who’s to say what waits for us in the dark?’

I try to reason my fear of the man from the private room, for he was but a man. I suppose in that old man, I saw man’s oldest fear. A kind of dreadful memento mori. Surely to be kissed by him would be to be mauled by mortality.

The hope of getting research for the book has now faded into mere vapour, and all I want is to have nothing to do with here. I stare gloomily into my whisky, imagining God’s laughter at what must be the final proof of my failure. Then, when looking into the mirror behind the bar, I see what it is he might be laughing at and can’t help but join Him. 

In the mirror, I find what I had so long sought: a lost boy.

James Bembridge is Deputy Editor of Country Squire Magazine.