Notes from an Exhibition (10 page)

The doorbell rang. Morwenna answered it and called up, ‘Petroc?’ before returning to the kitchen. There was laughter on the stairs and a gang of three girls and a boy burst into the room just as Petroc was tugging on some jeans with nothing underneath.

‘Rise and shine,’ one of the girls said with a leer. She was Bettany Sampson, older than Petroc, whom Hedley remembered from school as a notorious slut. But then these reputations tended to be built on wounded male pride. She seemed nice enough and very keen on Petroc at the moment. She flopped on the lower bunk with one friend while the other girl climbed on the top one and the boy started flicking through their CD collection. Hedley shut his sketchbook quickly in his drawer, which he kept locked as it held his American novels, and retreated to the kitchen to plague Morwenna in turn.

The cinema prided itself on being one of the oldest purpose-built ones in continuous use in the country. Sadly it had been obliged to woo dwindling audiences by subdividing its original auditorium into three and so had lost much of its architectural charm.

Whoever was placed on the afternoon shift had to hoover the foyer and, superficially, all three studios. This
was Hedley’s least favourite part of the job. With the house lights on to pick up the dirt patches and ice-cream wrappers, the rooms were particularly unlovely, their glamorous drapes revealed as cheap, their velvet seats as timeworn. There was a dreadful smell in the smallest studio that no amount of hoovering or fresh-air spray would remove, as though a dead animal had been tacked behind the stapled ruched fabric that masked the soundproofing or someone had died during a screening and not been discovered until their bodily juices had soaked into one of the seats. The perk of the job – the chance to watch each new film for nothing – quickly palled and he doubted the place would retain any magic for him if he returned as a paying customer.

To his surprise, however, he discovered that he enjoyed the part of the job that involved dealing with the public. He had always thought himself shy and awkward, a typical schoolmaster’s son, too well-spoken and obedient ever to fit in. Having a reason to speak to people, even if only to say, ‘Enjoy the film,’ or ‘Small, medium or jumbo?’ lent him confidence. People came there to be happy or to escape, which was infectious, and he found he wasn’t trying to roughen his accent, the way he usually did, but presented himself as a sort of genial host or cheerful young priest. He had a role – a reason to speak – and saw that people responded if he was mildly flirtatious, perhaps because having the ticket counter between him and them cut him off at the waist and desexed him as effectively as a silly uniform would have done.

When there was a children’s film on he enjoyed catching the eyes of exhausted mothers and teasing a smile out of
them. The men were harder, unless they were on their own when they could be surprisingly talkative. If they were handsome, he liked being extra helpful, warning them to sit near the back if the film was very loud or reminding them there was a licensed bar upstairs if it was very long and had no interval. There was a wistfulness to his encounters with the handsome ones because it was in the nature of cinemas, unlike pubs and bakeries, that few customers could be described as regular and – pensioners aside – none was likely to return within a week or so.

It being the Easter holidays, there were two children’s matinees showing the previous year’s Disney cartoon,
The
Black Cauldron
at one-thirty and
Young Sherlock Holmes
at two. Children always bought masses of sweets, drinks and ice-creams – the cinema’s chief source of income he was sure – so the displays and fridges all had to be restocked after each intake. Then he had nothing to do until the teatime screenings but sit behind his counter selling an occasional advance ticket and watching shoppers on Causewayhead pass the window. He was meant to sell ice-creams out of this window, which could slide back, but the management offered nothing that couldn’t be found more cheaply in the Co-Op and it wasn’t yet warm enough for ice-creams to appeal to anyone but a filmgoer. Besides, Hedley did little to encourage custom as he had encountered enough mannerless, sticky-coined brats for one afternoon. Because the window was small, people were too distracted by the film posters farther along the building to pay it much attention. No one thought to look in and he could stare with impunity.

A young man with a whippet on a rope appeared out of the crowd. He had on a suede sports jacket of a kind Hedley coveted and short hair, which was why it took him a second or two to recognize him as Troy Youngs. The last time he’d seen him, Troy still had big, New Romantic hair because he was emulating Simon le Bon on a tight budget. The new look was a great improvement. He tapped on the glass and Hedley slid the window back.

‘All right?’

‘Troy! How are you? Good jacket.’ Hedley was in work mode and forgot to blunt his enthusiasm and Troy was a bit startled.

‘What? Oh. Thanks. Yeah, well, Wenn said you’d be here.’

Morwenna had a longstanding thing going with Troy’s even dodgier younger brother, Spencer. Never quite a relationship, never allowed utterly to peter out, it had its roots in her late teenage rebellion. He regarded her as posh arm-candy, something to set off his latest motor, she regarded him as a source of uncomplicated fun. She claimed he liked it that she had no romantic expectations but Hedley suspected the truth was that Spencer thought she was easy.

‘So how’s Kirsty? How’s grown-up married life?’

‘Didn’t work out,’ Troy said. ‘Didn’t happen, did it?’

‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

‘Yeah. Well. Women, Hed. What can you do? We’re having a bit of a party tomorrow night.’

‘Yeah?’

‘D’you fancy coming? Spencer asked Wenn and she said you were still around so …’

‘Yeah. Sure.’ Hedley remembered to be cool and not to ask what time and should he bring a bottle.

‘Cool.’ Troy didn’t smile. He never smiled. Not smiling was his thing. ‘See you then.’

‘Yeah. See you.’

Hedley shut the window. The cartoon, adverts and trailers were done for the two o’clock screening and the feature had started so Candy, the usherette, had returned to the foyer where she liked to perch on a stool, watch the passers-by and smoke, if the owner wasn’t around to see her.

‘Who was that?’ she asked. She hardly ever bothered speaking to him, having decided he was too stuck-up or too young or too gay to be worth noticing.

‘Troy Youngs,’ he said.

‘What? Spencer’s brother?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You known him long?’

‘Since we were kids. We were at school together. They give good parties.’ He felt himself rise a notch or two in Candy’s estimation and set about polishing the chrome ticket dispenser, enjoying giving her no more information and ignoring her for once. She had a mean little mouth like a rat trap and a prim way of stubbing out her cigarettes that implied she felt smoking Lambert & Butlers made her more interesting. Petroc, who was a mine of lowlife gossip because he had friends on the Treneere estate, said she had three children by three different men and was a notorious slapper in both senses.

Hedley wished he could ring Morwenna to gossip but he knew he couldn’t without being more honest than he
felt ready to be. Besides, the phone was set up for incoming calls only, which went straight through to an answering machine that enthused at tedious length through the week’s programmes. Then he remembered that Morwenna had set Troy up to ask him in person, when she could simply have passed on the invitation herself. Perhaps this was confirmation that she knew more than she was letting on.

She had started hanging around – she scorned to call it
going out
– with Spencer Youngs in her idle months before going up to LSE, when she was eighteen to Hedley’s sixteen. Usually he had picked her up in his car and taken her back to his father’s rundown farm but occasionally he had come into the house, every inch the unwelcome bad boy, and spent an hour or two in Morwenna’s room, where they played their music so loud Rachel would start thumping on the attic floor or would storm out to the studio or to visit Jack, raging that if Morwenna got pregnant and ended up on the Treneere estate instead of going to LSE, that was her affair.

There was no fireplace in Morwenna’s room so they’d invade Petroc’s and Hedley’s so as to smoke joints up the chimney. Spencer decided Hedley was cool because of this and got Morwenna to bring him with her to the next party at Bosviggan, which involved horrendously risky lies about visiting perfectly innocent friends who were actually on holiday in Brittany.

Which was how Hedley got to know Troy, who had actually left the school long before Hedley was old enough to notice him. Spencer’s big brother, an impressive five years older than Hedley, he was thin where Spencer was
stocky, and had rusty blonde hair, prominent cheekbones and a mouth like a line. He smiled so rarely that it was rumoured his teeth were as crooked as his hero’s, David Bowie. Despite the Duran Duran hair he was cultivating at the time, he looked like a sexy ferret. With astonishing bravery, possibly born of his Bowie fixation, he had let it be known he was bisexual. There was never any proof of this, nothing with a pulse, but there were no steady girlfriends either so the revelation, or rumour, effectively lent him a tantalizing odour of sophistication that went some way towards counteracting the squalid, borderline poverty in which the Youngs lived.

You couldn’t say Troy singled him out – he would never have done something so obvious – but Hedley rarely went to Bosviggan without Troy finding a minute or two alone with him, longer if people were drinking and inattentive. In his cool, interested-but-not-really way, he drew Hedley out and found out about him, about how he was different from his brothers but not precisely why. They talked about the pressures of family expectations, of the lack of privacy and of where they’d rather live than Penzance.

It was Troy who, casually, and saying, ‘Don’t bother to give it back as I won’t read it again,’ passed him a battered copy of
Dancer from the Dance
, which he claimed a
bloke on a train
had given him.

It was gay. Completely, undeniably, lock-it-in-a-drawer gay.

Hedley would have been hard-pressed to summarize the plot even when the book was fresh in his mind, as it seemed to be nearly all parties and nightclubs, but it conjured up another world, a drug-fuelled, hedonistic sub
world of New York where a shifting crowd of men fellin lust and danced and wore wonderful clothes and occasionallyfell deeply in love. It could have been designedto instil a yearning for big city life in provincial closetcasestoo timid even to land a kitchen porter’s job in anItalian hotel. And probably was.

Because of the terrible holiday on the Gower Peninsula, he didn’t have a chance to talk to Troy about the book for weeks and when he did, Troy was maddeningly vague and unfocused beyond dismissing it with a shrug and saying, ‘Yeah, well, but it was all a bit gay, wasn’t it?’ So that Hedley wondered if perhaps he was astonishingly stupid and had read the book with little understanding and passed it on with even less of the significance the gesture might have had.

But then, because Morwenna was off sofa-surfing with Spencer somewhere and wasn’t around to see, he accepted some girl’s offer of a toke on her joint one night, found after a few stoned minutes that the girl had wandered off to dance and been replaced by Troy, and it all came splurging out.

With hindsight this was probably exactly how Troy’s being bisexual had become such an open secret. They had not talked for long, because the police turned up soon afterwards to complain about the noise and Morwenna had insisted they leave but Hedley had said enough to wake worrying that Troy would now tell the world. Or at least Spencer, who would tell Morwenna.

Nothing was said, however, and when he was next up there he found Troy was now all questions. So what was it like, actually being gay? How did it feel? What was he
going to do about it, since he wasn’t, you know, just bisexual like Troy? They were questions that struck to the heart of Hedley’s teenage frustration and insecurity.

But then, once he was drunk enough to deny all knowledge later, Troy said, ‘You could kiss me. If you like. Just to see how it feels, you know?’ And they had gone out, minutes apart, to the biggest of the empty barns, stumbling on God knows what in the darkness, and kissed and kissed. No talking, no groping – Hedley didn’t dare without encouragement – just kissing. Then some people had come out into the yard from the house and Troy had got nervous and slipped away.

It happened three times more, again in the barn, now with no more preamble from Troy than a muttered, ‘You … you know?’ and a minute inclination of his sexy ferret face towards the back door.

Hedley would go home, walking as often as not, cheeks on fire from Troy’s stubble, more worried that he reeked of Troy’s Blue Stratos than that anyone might smell dope or beer on him, but exhilarated in a way that had nothing to do with the man he had been kissing and everything to do with the possibilities of a future that seemed a little bit nearer.

Then Morwenna had gone up to LSE and Antony, in a hideously embarrassing little exchange on the stairs, said, ‘I don’t want you spending time up at Bosviggan any more without Wenn to keep an eye on you.’

And a few days later, Petroc let slip as they walked to school that Kirsty Spiers, the big sister of one of his mates, had got engaged to Troy Youngs and how her family were dead against it as they had hopes for her but it was going
to happen anyway. And then Morwenna had decided she was in love with someone in London and had hardly come home at all for a while.

The audience from the one o’clock screening came out, bringing with it a great gust of pent-up sugar and excitement and stale air scented with artificial fruit. Hedley smiled blandly in case anyone looked his way while Candy sat on, legs twined tightly around her stool as though it was rats not children surging past her. She then smacked on a single rubber glove and slipped off to walk around the studio just emptied and throw the worst of the litter into a bin liner. Hedley followed the last of the children out and propped the doors open to draw in some fresh air off the street then retreated behind his counter. Candy came back to the foyer, slung her half-full bin liner into a cavity behind the freezer then stood just outside the doors where she smoked a cigarette, watching the late shoppers with alternating expressions of scorn and blank incuriosity that showed exactly how she must have looked at Petroc’s age, three children and three fathers ago. She squished the butt with a neat swivel of a toe then resumed her station on her stool.