* * *
Was it an hour later? Two hours? I don’t know. Time had ceased to mean anything. I was so smashed I’d peeled my T-shirt off and tucked it into my joggers—a skinny, translucent ginger boy among all the muscle Marys and leather bears.
“Here we go, lads!” Petey said, adding a “whoop, whoop” and a finger point. I grabbed his hand and dragged him towards the mysterious black vinyl curtain that led to the dark room.
“No, no, no. You’re not going in there. Are you even on PrEP, babes?” Petey said.
I marched on in. Inside it was inky black. The music pulsed through from the dance floor, but the sound was deadened, muffled. I blinked while my eyes adjusted.
“Seriously, though?” Petey said.
I looked at him, smiled, squeezed his hand, and let it go. I knocked back the last of my drink and threw the cup on the floor. A swarm of men huddled in front of me came into focus, their flesh a mass of swaying and writhing. I walked slowly over towards them, my legs feeling heavy, my brain foggy.
At the centre of the crowd of men, a muscled lad with a horse cock was getting a blow job from yet another guy in a mask pretending to be a dog. Did the RSPCA know about these people? I felt a hand on my arse, looked around, and followed the arm up to a shirtless guy with thick stubble and black curls that were slick with sweat. They tumbled across his face, and an image flashed into my mind: me trying to push Ludo’s ungovernable curls behind his ears, his blue eyes looking tenderly into mine.
The hand on my arse worked its way up to the back of my neck, and I realised I was staring into the brown eyes of the man whose hand was on me. He glanced down at his cock, which, I hadn’t realised, was hard, in his other hand, and leaking. His hand on my neck gripped tighter, the pressure an attempt to coax me to my knees.
I was wasted. I was hurting. I thought this was what I wanted. Confronted with it, however, it was the last thing I wanted. I shook my head, expecting the lad to be pissed off. My hands tightened into fists, ready to square up to him if I had to.
As it happened, he pulled a sad face, removed his hand, and whispered into my ear, “It’s a shame, because you’re very beautiful.” His accent was Spanish, I think. Wherever he came from, he understood consent. I thanked him, said goodbye, and went to sit down on the edge of a nearby box. Before my bum could touch the surface, a hand grabbed my arm.
“For Christ’s sake, don’t sit down in here,” Petey said. “God knows what you’ll sit in. You can catch super-gonorrhoea from the handrails, babes. Believe.” He yanked me up to my feet.
“I don’t feel well,” I said.
“OK, soldier. I think it’s time we took you home.”
I nodded. When Petey Boy was calling time on a night out, it was definitely time to go home.
It was time to go home, full stop.
Chapter58
Ludo
Aweek after he died, we laid Uncle Ben to rest. His funeral was a fittingly theatrical affair. Rachel Hoffman led the cast ofYentlin “Papa, Can You Hear Me?”—their soft, sweet voices filling the Central Synagogue London and leaving not a dry eye in the room. Wilhelmina Post told a few of the more legendary stories about Uncle Ben, which had everyone rolling in the aisles—like the time he accused Doris Day of peeing in his kettle (she hadn’t; she’d cleaned it with vinegar) and the time he was evicted from the House of Commons Strangers’ Bar after standing on a table and reciting his favourite party piece, Peter Sellers’s “Setting Fire to the Policeman.”
“The parliamentary police officer on duty had been happy to play along, right up until Benny started flicking lit matches at him,” Wilhelmina said.
Father, the consummate storyteller, did the eulogy.
“We are blessed to have had Ben Diamond in our lives at all,” he said. “History appeared always to have an appointment with Ben. In 1940, Ben’s parents, David and Ester, fled across Europe on foot, with five-year-old Ben and his ten-year-old sister, Ruth.”
Not a noise could be heard as father recounted the story of the Diamond family travelling at night, hiding in barns, fleeing when those barns were set alight by Nazis, and being smuggled across borders and through guard posts by a network of resistance volunteers until, finally, they arrived safely in England.
“David took up a professorship at the London School of Economics,” Father said. “And young Ben quickly discovered his passion for theatre. Starting with Punch and Judy shows in Covent Garden, before graduating to the West End shows of Shaftesbury Avenue and the theatre district, which would go on to become his life’s work.”
As Father told of Ben Diamond’s early career in newspapers, including several years editingStagebefore finally joining theSentinelin 1976, it occurred to me just how long Uncle Ben had been in his life too.
“It was my late father, Sir Percival Boche, then editor of theSentinel, who spotted Ben’s talent and poached him for the paper,” Father said. “While sitting in a dentist’s waiting room, he’d read one of Ben’s reviews in an old copy ofStageand laughed so hard he nearly swallowed his dentures. When my father got back to the office, he handed his secretary the review he’d torn out of the magazine and told her to arrange a meeting with the man who’d written it. Two nights later, my father and Ben dined at the Savoy. Ben had agreed to join theSentinelbefore they’d even finished the soup course. By dessert, he was an honorary member of our family.”
Father spoke about Michael, about the AIDS years in London and the terrible toll of the eighties and nineties on the communities Uncle Ben loved—the queer and the theatrical.
“Ben Diamond was the very best of men,” my father said, and there was a crack in his voice, like he might be showing actual human emotion. “He was the life of the party, the heart of any group of people, and the joy in any room. He was my lifelong friend. My confidant. The godfather to my son Ludovic. In some ways, he was a godfather to me, too, because he gave me the love my own father, brilliant as he was, could not. Ben Diamond was, quite simply, the best man I have ever known. And I miss him.”
Tears were streaming down my face, a balled tissue disintegrating in my hand under the weight of my grief. For the first time in my life, I was seeing my father as a person. Layered on top of everything else, it was more than I could bear.
“Let me leave you with the best piece of advice Ben ever gave me. He said, ‘If you feel something with all your heart, dear boy, go for it. God put it there so you couldn’t ignore it. So that with every heartbeat, you’d be reminded of it. To meet our destiny, we must follow our heart.’”
