I woke up in the middle of the night and the light boy was dancing around my bed. He comes often. No name. No face. A swirl of sparkly lights that moves from one side to the other. The electric boy blue who wants to be loved.
Jaymz had been missing for weeks. One minute he was there, and the next he wasn’t. People hadn’t noticed, at least not to start with, but after a couple of days the void was unavoidable. It was then that people began to speculate.
Emily, with her spotty face, was the first to realise, because she was secretly in love with him, and thought that he might have taken up with a girl. Bradley, the boy who claimed to have the biggest dick, claimed that Jaymz had been arrested. Then there was sweet and innocent Olivia, who worried that he might be lying injured in a hospital bed. Dav, which was short for Davion, pulled himself away from his iPhone, and said that Jaymz was dead in a ditch. Conor reckoned that he was delirious with pneumonia. I didn’t say anything.
It was a credit to Jaymz that people came up with such outlandish reasons for his disappearance.
The last time anybody saw him was on a freezing cold Wednesday night. He climbed the railings beside the Lagon and stared at the twinkly lights on the other side. Then he turned around and told us about the time he jumped fully clothed into the blackness of the river. There hadn’t been a reason to do so but had seemed like a good thing to do.
We got into the back of Conor’s old Bedford Dormobile and drove up to Belfast Castle with spectacular views over the city. We sat on a wall drinking cheap cider until it started to snow, and Conor worried that the camper van might not make it back down the winding slope. Jaymz laughed and said that anything would get to the bottom of the hill in snow. It might not get down in one piece, but it would certainly get there.
The snow got heavier and while Bradley and Dav made snowballs, we huddled in the cold. Emily told Jaymz that she loved the way he spelt his name, which was exactly what he wanted to hear. That’s me, cool by nature, he’d swaggered, forgetting that he’d once told me that his granda had chosen the name after an obscure disco singer. Emily, with her black greasy hair and spots, almost wet her knickers because Jaymz had spoken to her.
Jaymz was plastered, but always able to make everyone else seem drunker than he was. A casual observer might not notice the difference between the extrovert and the booze fighter, but at times like this he could be unpredictable. Like the time he was drunk and climbed a tall oak tree to swing from its branches before jumping twenty feet to the ground. He should have broken a leg or something, but he didn’t. And when he scaled tall scaffolding on Agincourt Avenue and hung upside down by the legs, he might easily have slipped to his death. But nothing bad ever happened to him.
Despite his background, Jaymz was an enigma, larger than life, happy, and oozing confidence. He was never one for words, had little knowledge about anything, but what he lacked from his pitiful upbringing, he made up with composure that gave him film star appeal. There were plenty who said it was arrogance, and the police hated him for it, but it wasn’t hard to see why we adored him, and as you’ve probably guessed, worshipped the ground that he walked on.
But on that chilly night, he did something quite extraordinary. To our astonishment, he took off all his clothes and stood bollock naked. There were no inhibitions, the embarrassment was ours, and then he slowly fell backwards into the snow, and stared at the sky. He turned milky white, whiter than the snow around him, goose pimples on his arms and legs, and shivered uncontrollably. With a defiant look on his face, Jaymz said nothing at all.
We laughed and cheered, not at him, because whatever he did was okay with us. And then, after laying in the snow for ten minutes, he stood up like he was rising from the dead, his body dripping wet. Bradley, who now had every right to claim the world’s biggest dick, collected Jaymz’ sodden clothes and helped him dress. Jaymz didn’t say a word, but smirked, and looked like he’d fallen into a trance. Maybe he did catch pneumonia that night, because after he slipped away into the darkness, none of us had seen him since.
Days turned into weeks and when Jaymz didn’t appear, Dav and Olivia went to his house at Cliftonville to find him. Dav looked worried when he reported back. His parents hadn’t seen Jaymz either, or weren’t the least bit concerned about his disappearance. The old man had swigged from a can of beer and cussed Jaymz for not looking after his XL Bully. His mother had shrugged her shoulders and carried on watching The Chase, something lost on Dav because she wasn’t the brightest, and he believed that Jaymz’ level of thickness came from her.
I remembered a note that Jaymz once wrote and was shocked to see that the scrawl belonged to that of a small child. “The soul has beem givem its owm ears to hear thigs the mimd does not umderstamd.”
His slip into obscurity wasn’t surprising to me. There were clues on social media that the others hadn’t noticed. While their own accounts contained dozens of photos of Jaymz and his misdemeanours, they failed to realise that he posted very little himself. His Facebook page only contained a couple of images. There was nothing on Instagram, X, or Tik Tok, and for somebody as extroverted as Jaymz this was strange.
I picked up on this anomaly during the summer and spent weeks looking for reasons why this might be. That was how I was. If I saw something that intrigued me then I’d go to great lengths to find out more. It was an obsession that made me think that I might have a form of OCD.
At first, I tried to find out whether Jaymz had secret accounts, but that got me nowhere. Then I set up fake accounts in case he was blocking people that knew him. I suspected that he’d cottoned on to my sleuthing because for a while he seemed overly friendly, as if he was testing me, but I put that down to my paranoia.
With no success, I started following Jaymz like a stalker. Except that I didn’t see myself as one. He had no idea, and it wasn’t my intention to make him feel uncomfortable. If I had, then Jaymz would have punched me hard in the face.
Whenever Jaymz said that he was going home, I made excuses and said that I was going home too. With this pretence I would walk in the opposite direction and double back after him. The first few times I lost him, and this was because he wasn’t going home at all. I discovered this after almost bumping into him as he walked back into the city.
He sloped along Wellington Place before disappearing in the streets. It was always the same story. I followed him several times, but he gave me the slip.
Sometimes I asked questions to find out what it was that he wasn’t telling us, and hoped that he might let something slip, but he never did. He would laugh and give the same cretinous responses. What do you want to know? I like Fontaines D.C. I have a tattoo on my arse. I once shagged a donkey. I piss the bed when I’m drunk. I’m a Catholic bastard. Haha! Always a joke.
This consuming passion stopped when I realised that I had become his stalker after all. What had I been hoping to achieve? If there was a hidden side to him then maybe it was because I had created it.
After that night, Jaymz never reappeared and melted away with the snow. Emily often talked about him and couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing him again. Conor told her to forget him. He’d shown everyone that he had a small dick and had always been a waste. She looked like she might cry.
Life was dull, as if a light had been switched off, but nobody reported him missing. Not his parents. Not his older brother who was in prison. Not his big sister with ten screaming kids. I thought about him occasionally, believing that if I did, then he would think about us too. But whether he thought about us or not, it didn’t matter, because nothing happened, he had gone.
Dav repeated his comment about Jaymz being dead in a ditch, and I thought it might be true. There were those who didn’t like his cockiness, a need to be centre of attention, and he might have rubbed them up the wrong way. Especially the kids around the Waterworks who weren’t afraid to inflict the severest form of punishment. Every time they pulled a body from the Lagon I waited to see if it was Jaymz, but it never was.
Eventually, we decided that Dav was right, that Jaymz was dead, and chose to remember him as we did that night, naked in the snow, never growing old. And then, in years to come, with bad eyes, poor hearing, and stumbling with walking sticks, we’d still be able to laugh about him.
Bleak January. A place that is appropriately called a Winter Garden. Full of absent people. I come and sit here everyday while I drink my takeaway coffee. I always take the lid off because drinking it through that tiny slot takes forever and makes coffee dribble down my chin.
‘Red socks’, sits on the bench opposite and looks handsome from a distance. But why is he wearing red socks? He’s deep in conversation with a Chinese girl who looks bored and takes sips from a bottle of Pepsi Max Lime that will be warm by the time she finishes it. I wonder what he’s saying to make her look so listless. Occasionally she looks over as if to say, “please swap places with me.”
Between us, a mouse keeps running between flower beds. Backwards and forwards it goes and nobody takes any notice. This is a brave mouse that likes living under exotic leaves but can’t decide which is the best. I hope that the Chinese girl might notice the mouse and scream loud enough to stop ‘‘Red Socks’ talking for a moment. But she fails to see it because she is on the verge of falling asleep.
A well-dressed black boy comes over and asks if he can sit beside me. I tell him that I don’t own the bench and make room. He introduces himself and I immediately forget his name because he is from Nigeria and it sounds strange. “This is a cool place,” he says, and I suspect that he might be trying to pick me up.
I ask him what he is doing in this country and he says he came to study. I wait for him to say that he is a wealthy Nigerian prince and that he wants to give me ten thousand pounds if I give him my bank details. Instead, he says that he is doing a thesis on his country. “What do I know about Nigeria?” I disappoint him and say that I’m the wrong person to ask because I’m half-witted. He gets up and leaves and I realise that I could have said that I thought that everyone in Nigeria was a prince who wanted to give money away to people who provided their bank details.
A young guy walks by with someone who I presume to be his girlfriend. He’s devilishly attractive and I instantly dislike her. I consider getting rid of her by being the first person to commit a murder inside this winter garden with an impatient mouse, a guy who wears red socks, the bored Chinese girl, and a Nigerian who could have been a prince but wasn’t.
When they pass, two scruffy fellows follow. One of them is explaining about a giant palm tree that almost touches the glass roof. About how the leaves die and form protection around the trunk. I find myself looking at the tree and speculate what will happen if it grows any higher because there isn’t much room left. The other guy looks uninterested like the Chinese girl did, and then I realise that she has disappeared with ‘Red Socks’ because their bench is empty.
A lad with blue tints in his hair comes and sits beside me. I look at all the empty benches and wonder why he’s chosen to sit on the same one as me. Once again, I think that someone might be trying to pick me up. He has a bad cough, as bad as the blue streaks in his hair. He notices me looking, says “Hi,” and I think that he will be good looking once he’s got rid of the blue streaks. The mouse runs across the floor again.
The lad makes conversation and sounds like a nutter because he says that he likes to choose a person walking in the street, any person, a random person, and follow them to see what they do and where they go. He’s not a stalker, he says, and I make my excuses and say that I must be going back to work.
The grey gloom of a rainy afternoon and the empty alleyway is depressing. Only the yellowish headlamp of an ancient Vespa ridden by Salvo the old greengrocer suggests that colour exists in monochrome surroundings. He drives through puddles and looks at us suspiciously.
Marco stands on the step and stares at nothing, because there is nothing there, but his face suggests something different.
“What do you see?”
“What do YOU see?” he challenges. I shrug my shoulders.
“I see sunshine and shadows,” he says. “The heat of a lazy afternoon. Tables and chairs. Miniature olive trees in pots. Young men and women sitting and talking.” He moves his gaze to the crumbling stucco wall. “There is a woman wearing sunglasses who holds a pen in her right hand with a notebook in front of her. There is something in the bag at her feet that holds a dark secret. But she doesn’t want to tell me anything. I want to tell her that from where I stand she is now dead.”
“What else can you see?” I ask.
“The woman opposite her, an old lady now, is reading the Memoirs of Jacques Casanova. The men wear sports jackets and baggy trousers and talk amongst themselves about football and fast cars – Alfa Romeos and Lancias – and the women they want to flirt with.
“Salvo the greengrocer is a young man, and he leans back on his chair, a Corriere della Sera sticking out of his pocket, and he is talking to a slender woman with long black hair and stiletto heels. She is ignoring him because she senses something but doesn’t know what it is.”
“Who is she?”
“This is your great grandmother and she is looking towards where you stand, but you are invisible to her because you haven’t been born. But she is troubled because something lies in wait that will cause distress to her family. She doesn’t know it yet, but your great grandfather, who sits before her, a philosopher amongst friends, with a violent temper, will kill the man he is talking to. Just like you did, Nido – her great grandson. It is the curse of your family. The curse of the Lombardos.”
Innocence came calling. What are you writing? I was writing about you, but didn’t say that, and it would have made no difference because it was never part of the plan.
Have you been sent by someone?
Have you come with a message?
Have you come to taunt me?
Have you come to kill me?
In the dark, I think only of sweat, tattoos, and dirty underwear. How erotic is that? The excitement before you destroy me.
Have you come with love?
Have you come with hate?
Have you come with both?
Have you come with nothing?
There is desire in the shadows. Hands everywhere, controlling, and satisfyingly rough. But there are unanswered questions. Do these hands belong to someone who wants me dead?
Have you got a disease?
Have you got a condom?
Have you got a knife?
Have you got other ways of killing me?
They will get you in the least expected way. Beware of Gabriele of Stadium, they said. He will exploit your weakness. He is the Angel of Death and brings only a glass full of piss and blood.
Lust shattered my guard.
Lust drowned my senses
Lust clouded my judgement.
Lust is the death of me.
The romantic Gypsy of Roma, who dances with a gun, and destroys hearts with the blade of Ardizzone, looks into my eyes. Is this the most addictive boy ever? Is this the saddest and perfect end? And after he slits my throat he will say to Alberto of Ostia that it was too easy.
The lady from Wollongong, New South Wales, once said that she would never forget what I did for her son. I paid eight hundred pounds and flew her son back to Australia. She cried when he turned up on the doorstep because she thought she would never see him again. That was twenty years ago. I turned up on your doorstep when it was raining, and when you opened the door I knew that you didn’t recognise me so I reintroduced myself because I needed a place to stay. You told me that you hadn’t a clue who I was and said that you’d call the police if I didn’t go away. I walked into the stormy night and accepted that I could not sink no further. When the demonic koala dropped from a tree and strangled me, I lay in that muddy puddle and thought about that eight hundred pounds which was now worth a million.
“Amidst the babble and the cackle,
A voice shouts loudest,
I am Romeo and you must come to me.
And I hear that voice,
I say, Verona, at last I am coming to thee.”
That moment was meant to be. A crackle of excitement that bubbled up and brought with it the unwatered lust of these desert years
The story so far. Harry Oldham is an author who has been encouraged to return to Sheffield and write about his past. A chance meeting with a stranger called Tom brings back memories of Paolo, ‘one of the most beautiful boys I’ve ever known.’ The other Geisha Boys, Andy and Jack, take a backseat as Harry recalls the first time he met him.
(Parts 1-7 are available to read in the menu)
Part 8
It was the night we became Geisha Boys. The night we ran through the streets of Sheffield, laughing, covered in someone else’s blood.
We ran towards our block and didn’t see the two guys getting out of the car. Andy and Jack ran ahead, while I was spitting blood, and out of breath.
I was grabbed from behind. I shouted to the lads, and they stopped dead in their tracks. They were my brothers, and they would help me. Except that they couldn’t. One of the guys waved a stick at them, a thick one, and warned them off.
“Keep on running you little turds. Because if you don’t, I’ll break your fucking heads.”
The boys hesitated but were powerless to help. They edged away, watching me, and disappeared up the stairs.
“Fuck! Don’t fucking leave me!”
The other guy held me tight. There was the faint aroma of Brut and petunia on him. The man with the cosh waited until Andy and Jack had disappeared and turned to me.
“Let’s get in the car.”
I was bundled into the back of a dark Vauxhall Chevette where there was somebody else. I tried the door handle to escape but it was locked and so thumped the back of the driver’s seat in frustration.
The two guys got in front. The guy with the cosh was driving. The other one, who smelt of Brut and petunia, wore a flat cap and donkey jacket and looked straight ahead.
“Good evening, Harry,” he said. “The luck we’re having tonight. Who’d have thought it? A brawl in a bar. The aggressors running towards Park Hill. We thought, it couldn’t be?”
The car moved off and the guy beside me was quiet. I caught glimpses of his black curly hair as we passed under streetlights, the orange aura highlighting his dark features.
“Harry, meet Paolo. He’s a fucking eyetie.”
We drove a short distance and pulled up on a road that looked over the city centre.
Frank Smith got out and opened the rear passenger door. “Out you get.” The lad called Paolo slid out and stretched. “You too Harry.”
He led us through a gap in a stone wall and sat us on a bench while he remained standing and looking like a council workman. The other one leant on the wall and lit a cigarette.
“Look at that view,” said Frank. “A big city with lots of people. Good ones and bad ones. We’re the good guys, but there are more bad guys than we’d like. Which side are you two on?”
Neither of us answered.
“A long time ago this city was run by bad guys. Did you know they called it Little Chicago? It was full of gangsters who thought nothing about kicking the shit out of each other. Then there were the knives and the guns. These were gang wars, the Mooneys and the Garvins, and the police couldn’t control them.
“But somebody sorted it out. Percy Sillitoe was his name. If he’d failed, then life for every respectable citizen would have been hell, but he succeeded and ended up running MI5. Clever bloke. Did you know that I read history boys?”
It was a school lesson forced upon us. We looked at each other in bewilderment and didn’t know what to say.
“Oh yes, I like history. Did you know that it gets twisted? Sanitised. Let’s look at Percy Sillitoe. Hard, focused and determined. That’s what we read today, but he was a scheming bastard, who fought fire with fire.
“I like to think I’m a bit like him. If you did everything by the book, then we’d get nowhere. In years to come, everything will be touchy feely, and I hope I’m not around because justice will side with the villains. Fucking chaos.
“Some people think I’m a bent copper. That hurts. All I want to do is suss out the shit, and the only way is to play dirty. I always get what I want.”
Frank turned to us.
“It’s a bit like the gang wars. The only way to deal with today’s bad guys is to eliminate them. One by one. Are you with me?”
“What are you on about?” Paolo had spoken for the first time. His English was excellent but there was an unmistakable accent.
“I need your help. Both of you. Paolo, fucking eyetie, with your boyish looks. Harry, the bad boy with a big flaw running right through him. Do you know what that flaw is, Harry?”
“No,” I replied.
“It’s going to slap you in the face soon.”
Paolo looked at me, a fellow victim in this charade and his eyes showed fear. I didn’t know what to do. If he had looked closely, he would have seen that I was more terrified than he was.
“Kiss each other.”
What the fuck did Frank just say?
”Fucking kiss each other!” He stormed over and grabbed the backs of our heads. He forced them together until our noses almost touched, but we resisted, and Frank used his strength. Our faces brushed one another. Paolo’s skin was smooth with no sign of facial hair.
“Kiss goddammit!” Frank shouted. “Paolo, bender! You’ll enjoy it. Kiss the scabby shit.”
And Paolo did. A quick peck on the lips before forcing his tongue into my mouth. I couldn’t back away. He wrapped his tongue around mine and I had no choice but to do the same.
There was a flash of bright light, and I realised that the other copper had taken a photograph.
Frank released his grip. “That’s enough,” he laughed. “I knew you’d both enjoy it. Didn’t I say so Brian? He looked over to his colleague who acted as if nothing had happened . “You see Harry, your eyetie friend likes snogging lads, and I dare say that he finds you attractive. Isn’t that right Paolo?”
The Italian boy was mortified.
“A match made in heaven. Now that you’re better acquainted, I’m sure you’ll both help me.”
“I don’t understand,” said Paolo.
“Percy Sillitoe succeeded because he played both gangs against one another. A word in one ear, a word in the other. He didn’t do a thing. It was a set up. And when one gang thought they’d won. he went after them next and destroyed them too.
“These are the eighties, and there are perverts in this city, but as always, there is more than one player. Player One is getting pissed off with Player Two, and so Player One says to me, ‘get rid of these bastards!’ I say that it will cost them, but we work together, and Player Two disappears. Then I come down heavy on Player One, and he disappears too. Get it?”
I was angry. “What the fuck has it got to do with us? We aren’t doing anything for you?”
Frank stared me out.
“I think you’ll both help me.”
“Get fucked!”
“Do you really want your parents to see a photo that shows you going at it with another guy? Better still, what happens if it gets into the hands of your low-life friends? You won’t be able to show your face on Park Hill again.”
The guy called Brian laughed.
“And what will your eyetie parents think when they see that their beloved Catholic boy is really a depraved bender?”
I exchanged nervous glances with Paolo.
“I won’t offer you a lift home because you’ve both got a lot to talk about. Somebody will be in touch.”
The two coppers walked back to the car, but Frank shouted something before driving off. It sounded like, “If they’d have let me, I’d have caught the Yorkshire Ripper years ago.”
The scene: a bar. “You shouldn’t be in here,” says the young barman. “And why is that?” “Because you are a has-been.” I am stung, but remember a quote from many years ago. “Well,” I say. “At least I has been.”
