Harry Oldham is writing a novel based on his criminal and sordid past. To do so, he has returned to live at Park Hill, where he grew up, and the place that he once left behind. That was then and this is now, in which the old world collides with the new. (Parts 1 to 18 are available to read in the menu)
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous – Part 19
April 1984
When you look back over a life, there’s always a year that stands out. My annus mirabilis was 1984. Not that anything exceptional happened. But things were happy, and I was rolling in money.
It was also the year I turned eighteen.
Now I’m about to turn sixty, and it feels like a distant memory. Almost a life that belonged to someone else.
I remember one April night. The days were getting longer, and when darkness fell the sky above Park Hill was clear and moonlit, the air sharp with a chill. I leaned on the balcony rail and told myself something I had started to believe.
I was a male prostitute.
That didn’t bother me.
I thought about all the names people might have used to describe me. Queer. Faggot. Bender. Nancy boy. Shirt-lifter.
None of them applied.
Because I wasn’t any of those things.
I was straight.
Anyone could see it. I was a good-looking lad who could get any girl he wanted. That was obvious to everyone.
Especially Andy and Jack.
That year I’d become a bit of an enigma to them. I still hung around with them like I always had, but they didn’t know what I was really doing. None of us had jobs—we were living on the dole. Wasters, really. Nothing to do and nowhere to go. Boredom got us into trouble more often than not.
Our parents hated it.
But I didn’t care.
I didn’t need a job.
I always had money.
More than enough.
Andy and Jack couldn’t work it out. They didn’t understand how I could afford to go out most nights. What annoyed them even more was that I never invited them along.
We’d grown up together. We knew everything about each other.
Or at least they thought we did.
Andy took it the worst.
One night he punched me in the face. We were walking down the street when he suddenly turned and landed one on my chin. I charged at him and shoved him over a wall before Jack managed to drag us apart.
Later Andy said he didn’t know why he’d done it.
But I knew.
He could feel there was something about me he didn’t understand anymore.
Something I wasn’t telling him.
And there was Paolo.
I’d kept him away from Andy and Jack for a reason. If they ever met him, it would be game over.
Paolo was my work partner.
And because I kept telling myself I was straight, I hadn’t admitted something else.
He’d also become the person I cared about most.
Things had changed the year before. One side had been taken out… and those of us left were requisitioned by the survivors. Frank Smith had it all planned. Stage one complete. Now on to stage two of his masterplan.
The new world he dragged us into was worse than anything before.
But it paid.
Men didn’t just watch anymore—they wanted us. Big houses. Fancy mansions. Weekends filled with food, drink and sex.
A lot of sex.
And money.
So much bloody money we didn’t know what to do with it.
Sometimes it felt like we’d already sold everything there was to sell. Our innocence. Our dignity. Our bodies.
But every now and then we escaped from it.
One night Paolo curled up beside me in the back of a big Ford Granada and asked if he could stay at my place. His black curly hair brushed against my cheek, and I realised I liked it.
My parents were away visiting relatives in Skegness, and my younger brother Adam was off somewhere up north on a school trip.
There was no reason to say no.
Besides, I wanted him safe.
We got dropped off on Duke Street and walked in silence to my parents’ flat. Paolo had his coat wrapped tightly around him and a scarf pulled up around his neck so that he looked like one of those preppy American boys from the films.
I didn’t know much about the place where Paolo lived.
But when I opened the door to ours it smelt of burgers, chips and stale cigarettes.
I suddenly felt ashamed.
Paolo grabbed my hand like a frightened kid and let me pull him inside.
The flat was silent.
What we were doing felt wrong—but exciting at the same time. The same thrill I used to feel when the Geisha Boys broke into someone else’s place.
Except this time it was my home.
Paolo stayed close while I switched on the lights, hoping nothing embarrassing would reveal itself.
We were both bruised and exhausted. He asked if he could have a bath.
“I need to wash them off,” he said quietly.
The dirty old men.
I nodded.
He went into the bathroom and turned the hot tap full on. It ran loudly for a while before suddenly stopping.
“Harry?”
His voice echoed down the hall.
“Where are you? Come here.”
The door was unlocked. Paolo was sitting in the bath hugging his knees.
“Are you going to join me?”
I shook my head.
“Harry… I’d really like you to get in with me.”
So I undressed and climbed in.
It felt strange. We both knew every inch of each other’s bodies, but sitting there face to face suddenly felt awkward. I stretched my legs either side of him and he rested his elbow on my knee.
“The first time we met,” he said, “you hit me.”
I remembered.
“I didn’t know you, did I?”
“Would you ever hit me again?”
“No,” I said. “And now I’d hit anyone who hit you.”
Paolo smiled at that.
“I love you, Harry.”
I grimaced.
That was what Geisha Boys were supposed to do.
We slept together in my single bed that night. Nothing happened. He held me all night and I kept my arm around him. When he finally fell asleep, I rested my chin on his thick curly hair.
For a moment I felt something close to peace.
It didn’t last long.
The next day Andy called me a faggot.
He’d seen Paolo go into my flat.
“Who the fuck was that you took home?”
This time I hit him first.
I punched him so hard his nose burst and blood ran down his chin.
“You’re a cunt, Andy. That was my cousin.”
He didn’t believe a word of it.
“You’ve gone fucking weird,” he said.
Later Jack rang.
“Harry, you’ve busted Andy’s nose.”
“He called me a faggot,” I said. “And I ain’t no faggot, am I?”
“Nah,” Jack said. “I told him that. But he’s still pissed off with you.”
I couldn’t tell Jack the truth.
Mostly because I didn’t know it myself.
I wanted to say something else.
Do you remember Mr Johnson who taught us English? Let me tell you something, Jack. Last week he fucked me up the arse. Yeah. Our school teacher rammed me from behind.
But I ain’t no faggot.
But I couldn’t say that.
Could I?
I also remembered something else.
Years earlier we’d all been drunk at a party and ended up piled together on a sofa. We were messing around, laughing.
Then Andy and Jack kissed each other.
Properly.
Tongues and all.
That pissed me off. I stormed out and walked the streets for an hour because I was jealous.
But that didn’t mean anything.
Did it?
“A penny for your thoughts, love.”
I was sitting in June’s kitchen stirring a mug of tea far too many times.
“I’m a bit confused, June.”
“Is it Frank?” she asked.
“He’s the least of my problems.”
She smiled.
“So that means you’re thinking about Paolo.”
I gave her a look.
“Paolo’s a jewel,” she said. “And you, Harry, are a rough diamond. But when you put the two together something beautiful happens.”
“I ain’t queer, June.”
She didn’t argue.
“But you care about him,” she said gently. “And there’s a fine line between caring for someone and loving them.”
“It’s all a mess.”
“Is it?” she said softly. “I don’t see why.”
She leaned forward slightly.
“Paolo is a wonderful person. And I think—for the first time in your life—you’ve met someone who adores you exactly as you are.”
I looked down at my tea.
“Accept that,” she said. “Give him the chance.”
“And what happens then?”
June sighed.
“Harry… I don’t like what Frank’s doing to you both. I’ve told him so. But despite all that…”
She paused.
“I think something unexpected has happened.”
“What?”
“You’ve fallen in love with him.”
I laughed at that.
But June didn’t.
Frumpy old June—with a voice like an angel—had just told me the truth.
And I still wasn’t ready to hear it.
The thought had never even occurred to me. I genuinely just assumed he wasn’t interested. That was the simple explanation. I made a move, Oscar politely declined, and I retreated into my own embarrassment like a responsible adult.
But Alfie wouldn’t let it go.
“There’s a lot of energy around you,” he said. “It makes people feel exposed. They don’t always know how to handle it.”
I laughed it off at first. It sounded dramatic. But later I started replaying things.
I had been too focused on not humiliating myself to notice the details. The pause before he answered. The way he clenched his fists. The fact that he held eye contact just a second too long before looking away.
Alfie had noticed.
“There was interest,” he said carefully. “But when he realised it might actually become something real, he pulled back. Did you see him blush?”
I hadn’t. I’d been too busy overthinking my own tone of voice.
“He wasn’t rejecting you,” Alfie continued. “He was protecting himself.”
I don’t know. Maybe that’s giving him too much credit. Maybe it’s just a way of coping. But when I think about it now — the way he looked at me before he looked away — it didn’t feel cold. It felt cautious.
“He finds you intimidating,” Alfie added. “Magnetic. But intimidating.”
That word stuck.
Maybe he’s not distant. Maybe he’s careful.
And maybe — just maybe — the story isn’t over.
When you look at boys, do you really look – do you look in detail? People see Bradley and assume that beauty must imply intelligence. It doesn’t. The truth is, he’s a bit of a himbo. There’s a Yorkshire saying for people like that: “thick as pig shit.” And Bradley, I suppose, fits it perfectly. He smiles – handsome, devilish – with a guileless sense of wonder. But how long can I keep swallowing my frustration? Physical attraction fades quickly, and I realise the only role he can play is arm candy: a beautiful body, empty-headed, ornamental.
Hormonal Surge: Increased testosterone, fuelling restlessness and the need to discharge energy, sometimes through risky or boisterous play, mock fighting, and testing boundaries.
I wake and can hear music playing in the other room. It is an eighties song – Calling All the Heroes – and it is perfect. My first waking moments are defined by a song made before I was born. It will become a favourite. Whenever I hear it, I will recall the dream.
“I’m eighteen. Like I always am. There are twenty boys of a similar age. We don’t know each other, but we have bonded; something connects us, though I don’t know what it is. And now we are friends. Brothers who drink too much, laugh, and joke. We move from bar to bar until the group becomes fragmented, but still we keep bumping into one another — in different bars, on street corners, in dark streets – and each time we greet each other with high fives. I keep losing my coat that contains my mobile phone, but somebody in the group always finds it and saves it for me.”
What am I dreaming about?
Eighteen. Delayed or suspended adolescence. The moment just before categorisation -before ‘out’ or ‘not out’, before relationships are legible, before desire is policed or explained. A moment of pure potential, when attraction, friendship, and self-recognition have not yet been sorted into boxes. A group of boys I don’t know, where intimacy doesn’t have to announce itself as erotic to be real. Touch exists: high fives, a coded language, bodies moving together through night-time space, alcohol loosening edges, and the bond is felt rather than named.
These boys don’t posture. They don’t test me. They don’t ask who I was. They simply accept me. A world that perhaps never fully existed, but felt briefly possible.
The group breaks apart, but there is no need to cling because the bond reasserts itself naturally. “I still know you. You still know me.” I repeatedly lose my coat and my phone – yet I am never punished. I am held by others even when I am careless, distracted, or drifting. I don’t have to hold myself together perfectly. I’m not abandoned for losing my way. A fantasy of uncomplicated male belonging – one where youth, desire, friendship, and identity coexist without fracture or explanation.
The next part of the dream is important.
“There are ten of us staying in a hotel room. It is the only one available. We snack on almonds and slices of apple covered in salted caramel and maple sugar. Two double beds and a single mattress on the floor. When it comes to sleep, we must find space in one of the beds. I choose a double bed where four of us will squeeze together. I’m thrilled that the most handsome boy will sleep next to me. But at the last moment, he is taken. Another boy wants him to share the mattress on the floor, and I am devastated. The dream is never consummated.”
The hotel room matters. It is temporary, improvised, and not designed for this many bodies. I share a bed with four boys. The choice is telling. I don’t choose privacy, pairing, or exclusivity. I choose crowded intimacy – warmth, bodies, breath, limbs overlapping. Proximity without the exposure of being singled out. I am about to be close to the handsome boy without declaring him an object of desire, but he isn’t a person yet – he is a figure onto which desire might safely attach itself.
The handsome boy doesn’t reject me; he is summoned – pulled away by another boy. Desire is displaced, not denied. My devastation isn’t only about losing him. It is about losing the fantasy of being quietly chosen within the group. But the group has ruptured because somebody else’s desire has rearranged the night. My loss is intimate, quiet, internal – no one else even notices it happening – and so I do not follow. I do not compete. I do not protest. I absorb the loss silently.
I woke up.
Boys will be boys.
Different sorts.
Different morals.
Not fussed really.
I can do nice boys
I can do bad boys
I can do polite boys
I can do charming boys
I can do clever boys
I can do rough boys
I can do tough boys
I can do council boys
I can do rich boys
I can do student boys
I can do clean boys
I can do dirty boys
I can do skinny boys
I can do clean-cut boys
I can do athletic boys
I can do energetic boys
I can do adventurous boys
I can do sensitive boys
I can do confident boys
I can do caring boys
I can do unconventional boys
But I can’t do golden boys
A flicker of FOMO. A spoiled rich boy invites everyone to a birthday dinner, and I’m left out. I wasn’t meant to be there – and I wasn’t. Everyone’s buzzing, and no one gives a fuck whether I’m there or not. Still, life goes on. I grant myself a little grace, even if there isn’t much to give. Let them, I tell myself. Let them spend obscene amounts of money, drink too much, and throw it all up later. I’m in charge of my own happiness. I have a ‘wonder mind’. I buy prawn linguine, a tub of Ben & Jerry’s Chew Chew ice cream, and watch Fellini’s La Strada instead.
I got a message from David. The first I’d heard from him since our falling out in December. I hadn’t been expecting an apology and didn’t get one. I wasn’t even sure one was required. Some days I thought I might be the one who owed it. Still, the silence had broken, and that felt like something.
‘My boy turned forty this week and wanted to see where he was born. I took him to the Kapiʻolani Medical Center, where his mother gave birth to him. It wasn’t what he had in mind. But he stood straight, like the military taught him, and was too polite to tell me to go to hell. He was a Kamaʻāina — child of the land — but this wasn’t where he grew up.’
“What???” I replied.
David rang immediately.
I paused Heated Rivalry, which had literally just started. I hadn’t even got past the opening credits. Everyone had been talking about it, which was precisely why I’d been avoiding it. The same thing had happened with Adolescence. The louder the praise, the more stubbornly uninterested I became. But Heated Rivalry had the added incentive of steamy gay sex scenes — and I liked the idea that large audiences wanted that and were openly enjoying it. So fine. I’d given in. And then David called.
“It’s a paragraph I’ve just written,” he said. “I found a draft of something I wrote about Hawaii in the eighties. A good story’s been hiding in a drawer for forty years. It’s time to rewrite it. Update it.”
“Hawaii?”
“If memory serves, I based it on a Rolling Stone article about a teen suicide. But I think that was Kansas. Or somewhere like it. No idea why I chose Hawaii.”
“Suicide?”
“That only comes at the end.”
“Well,” I said, buying time, “I suppose there has to be a happy ending.”
“A suicide and a birth,” he said, as if that clarified things. “You get the opening now?”
I didn’t. Except that David was a successful writer, and it clearly made sense to him. Which, apparently, was enough.
“I think I know why I chose Hawaii,” he continued. “There was a film I saw. Big Wednesday. Surfing. Jan-Michael Vincent, Gary Busey. Semi-naked most of the time. Very young. Very hot.”
“Who?” My patience was thinning.
“Ah. Before your time. Though now that I think of it, that film was set in California.”
“Get to the point, David. The longer we talk, the longer I’m delayed from steamy gay sex. What’s the story actually about?”
“Whoa,” he laughed. “So you’ve sorted things out with Charlie. What did I tell you? You can’t keep a good man down.”
I froze. Had I really discussed my prolonged sexual drought with David?
“I’ll be brief,” he said. “It’s about jealousy. At least on one side. When three people are involved, somebody always loses.”
This was unexpected territory for him. David could spin a tight crime plot or disappear happily into a historical setting, but relationships were something he normally sidestepped entirely.
“It feels a bit left-field,” I said. “And why go back to something written that long ago?”
“It was shite,” he said cheerfully. “I never read past the first page after I shoved it in a drawer. My first novel came out ten years later — my style had changed completely by then. But time’s counting down. It feels like unfinished business. I want to turn it into something wonderful.”
“How old were you when you wrote it?”
“Let’s see… I started it in 1984, so I’d have been twenty. Finished it the year after. That’s why the characters were that age.” He paused. “It’ll read like I’m reliving myself.” Then, suddenly: “Goddammit. I remember now. I’d just read Michener’s Hawaii. That’s why. Oahu, specifically. And Magnum P.I. was on television.”
I thought about my own life. Whether anything I’d written would still exist in forty years. Whether I’d ever be considered established, in any meaningful sense. I’d been carrying an idea for a book for years, but inertia kept winning. Instead, I scraped a living writing about country houses and cities. It all felt increasingly dull. Stranger still, it occurred to me that David must have written that early draft on a typewriter — a genuinely painful way to work, as far as I was concerned.
He said he had to go.
“By the way,” he added, “I’ve finished the Isherwood biography on Kindle. It ended rather abruptly. One moment he was alive, the next he was gone. Dead. But I won’t mention it again. You seem sensitive about that.”
I restarted Heated Rivalry. Two seconds later, my phone buzzed.
‘Forgot to say. I’m going for a drink with a young man — a student — only nineteen. Just out of nappies, really. Don’t tell Josh, but of all people, I thought you’d like to know. 😏’
Four guys are waiting for a haircut. One hides inside a black hoodie so that all I can see is the tip of his nose. I call him a ‘scally boy’ – someone with edge, rawness, no inhibition; danger; lower social class. People only see what they must see: confidence, arrogance, hardness. They fail to see his vulnerability, his ignorance of those who might exploit him, and his lack of ambition.
When it is his turn, he stands and takes his hoodie off—but he gets it wrong. As he pulls it over his head, his T-shirt comes with it and he is left half-naked. He corrects things quickly, but it is too late. I have already processed every inch of him: the pale skin, the smoothness, the flat stomach, the black hairs showing above his waistband, the tattoo on his arm that says Adam.
Such a shame, I think, because he is primed for one thing only—a girl. His masculinity, the expectation, the understanding that anything else will not do. The girl will fall in love with Adam, but what he feels about her will not matter. He will have done what is expected and will display her like a trophy before discarding her for another.
Adam catches my eye and snarls, “Do you like what you see, faggot?”
Charlie didn’t go to Paris for Christmas. A family dispute—best addressed through absence—kept him away. Instead, he stayed with a cousin in Woodstock, near Blenheim Palace: an improbable place for pleasure. I was content with the opposite arrangement. Christmas alone. Eating, drinking, letting Netflix decide what mattered.
On Christmas Eve, I dreamed he climbed into bed and lay on top of me. His naked body was warm, yielding, unmistakably real. He kissed me. A faint musk rose from his skin—intimate, animal—stirring every sense at once. At last, I thought, this is the closeness.
I woke up with the sensation intact. The dream clung to me through Christmas morning, vivid enough to unsettle. I searched for an explanation and learned that smell can infiltrate dreams, especially when memory and desire are involved. Olfactory dreaming, they called it. Cologne was the usual example.
In the nineteenth century, a French physician, Alfred Maury, described inducing such dreams by getting his assistant to place eau de Cologne beneath his nose while he slept. On waking, Maury claimed to have dreamt of Cairo, of the perfumer Farina’s workshop, of adventures set loose by scent alone.
I hadn’t smelt Cologne. What lingered with me was the smell of a boy. And with it, a quieter truth: Charlie and I had never moved beyond kissing.
Someone, inevitably, had to puncture the theory. A psychiatrist dismissed the idea entirely. You don’t smell the coffee and wake up, she insisted. You wake up, then you smell the coffee.
I abandoned science and let Spotify take over. It suggested an album by Wolfgang Tillmans, which surprised me. I’d known him only as a photographer. The music turned out to be a sound work made for an exhibition—joy and heartbreak threading through collapse and repair.
I first encountered Tillmans years earlier through a Pet Shop Boys video composed almost entirely of mice living on the London Underground. Ever since, I’d found myself scanning platforms, tunnels, tracks—without success. A memory surfaced: my friend Stephen once worked on a four-hour Tillmans sound installation of It’s a Sin. He now despises the song completely.
Christmas dinner was an indulgence of sorts: cold baked beans eaten straight from the tin. I spent an hour scrolling through films before accepting, once again, that choosing outlasts watching. I downloaded the Christopher Isherwood biography David had recommended—the one that never seems to end—and fell asleep within pages.
When I woke, the room had darkened. Charlie had messaged: Will be home tonight at about eight x.
Transport on Christmas Day was nonexistent, yet somehow he’d convinced his cousin to drive him 130 miles. When Charlie arrived, I asked where his cousin was.
“Gone back,” he said.
“You didn’t invite him in?”
“It’s Christmas. He’ll want to be home.”
“And petrol money?”
He hesitated. “I didn’t think of that.”
Our former lodger once called Charlie a “me, me, me person.” Another friend was less generous and called him an asshole. Perhaps it was cultural. Perhaps it was simply him. Charlie struggled to imagine himself from the outside. I told myself it wasn’t malice. Just a narrow field of vision.
Despite the journey, he looked fresh, handsome. He smiled; I mirrored it. I considered mentioning the dream, then decided against it.
“Why come back early?”
“I shouldn’t have left you alone,” he said, without pause. “It’s Christmas.”
While he dropped his bag in the bedroom, I switched on the tree lights. We exchanged gifts a day early.
His were faultlessly chosen: Salò on Blu-ray, Sargent, Ramón Novarro, Edmund White, a glossy Igor Mattio photography book. Then he disappeared into the studio and returned with a canvas. He turned it around.
It was me.
He’d painted me sitting, relaxed, looking beyond the frame—as if caught somewhere warmer, lighter. My eyes were generous. My mouth was kind. Around my neck he’d included a thin silver chain, a birthday gift I wore only on rare occasions. The detail felt deliberate, almost intimate.
“I painted while you were writing,” he said. “I hope you like it.”
I had never been seen like that before. Not by anyone. I felt exposed, and cherished.
“I don’t know what to say,” I told him.
“One day,” he said lightly, “when you’re old—célèbre—people will say, painted by his French lover.’”
Charlie went to shower. Alone, I recognised a flicker of shame. I’d suspected his absence was a ruse. I’d rehearsed disappointment, punished him silently for not being who I wanted. The dream—so tender, so convincing—had fed that instinct. Sex can exist without love; love can exist without sex. The phrase circled uselessly.
Still, it would be nice.
There it was again. That reflex. The mind’s preference for negativity over positivity.
Charlie returned wearing only grey jogging bottoms and a Santa hat. He stretched out beside me on the sofa, smelling faintly of crushed mandarins, and rested his head in my lap.
“A Christmas film,” he murmured. “Something cosy.”
I stroked his stomach as we watched The Holdovers: a misaligned teacher, a sharp-tongued cook, a boy full of grievance. By the end credits, Charlie was asleep.
I didn’t move. I was afraid that motion would undo everything. His weight, his warmth, the faint citrus on his skin—it felt provisional, like something borrowed. The room held its breath.
I loved him then with a sudden, almost painful tenderness. Not the urge to claim, but to preserve. To keep the moment intact, untouched by language or expectation.
I stayed exactly where I was.
And waited to see whether stillness could last.
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 