To Ramsay’s ears, Gerrit’s throaty accent made him sound as if he were speaking through a mouthful of sponge. It made “fucking” sound like even more of a debased activity than it was.
“Can I do something for you, Ramsay?” Gerrit asked, looking at him through heavy-lidded eyes. He always called him Ramsay, not Mr. Coker. Ramsay suspected that it marked him as a boy rather than a man, in Gerrit’s opinion.
Ramsay didn’t reply, but Gerrit moved from behind the bar, a languorous movement for such a big man, and made his way to the back of the club, where a red velvet curtain screened an alcoved doorway. A little sign said “Private” and Gerrit pushed his way through the curtain’s heavy folds. He didn’t need to glance behind him to know that a lamb-like Ramsay was following his big rolling buttocks.
Those patrons of the Sphinx enticed to peer behind the red velvet curtain beyond which Gerrit and Ramsay had disappeared might have imagined that an alluring domain—a harem or, indeed, the inner chamber of a pyramid—was to be found there. And indeed the antechambers in Tutankhamun’s tomb, with their haphazard piling of grave goods—Ramsay had seen the photographs—were not dissimilar to the back room of the Sphinx, except in the Sphinx the jumble was not composed of gilded couches and fans and the decayed remnants of royal chariots, but rather wooden beer crates and packing cases and the cleaning paraphernalia of mops, buckets, soaps and detergents, as well as their stock of tea and sugar for the staff. Food was not provided for the clientele—they consumed such vast amounts of alcohol and dope that they had no interest in eating.
Ramsay took a seat on an upturned empty wooden box with “Louis Roederer” stencilled on the side, his evening jacket slung carelessly on the handle of a mop. He rolled up the sleeve of his dress shirt to allow easy access to his vein for Gerrit’s silver syringe.
“Relax, Ramsay,” Gerrit said as the needle pierced his skin. Ramsay always felt vulnerable at this moment, but Gerrit tended to him gently, as if he were a patient, wielding the needle carefully as he penetrated the skin. “Just a little prick,” he said, much amused by himself. Ramsay flinched nonetheless and Gerrit said, “You’re such a girl, Ramsay.” He was so close that Ramsay could smell his breath on his slobber lips—onions and fish—and hear the flutter of his breath in his nostrils. Ramsay felt both uncomfortable and excited at this proximity. He never felt certain what Gerrit’s intentions towards him were.
Ramsay closed his eyes and imagined he was in an exotic opium den somewhere—not Limehouse, he had been to Limehouse, it had terrified him. Singapore, perhaps. Or Shanghai. Ramsay longed for travel and adventure. The romance of the Orient and the Levant—Baghdad, Marrakesh, Beirut, Aleppo. Cairo! Not the tawdry pastiche of the Sphinx, but the real city, ripe with stinking noise and colour.
Where did Gerrit live?, Ramsay wondered. He imagined something sordid—an attic room where Gerrit’s underclothes were drying on a clothes horse around a gas fire while a pot of acrid coffee brewed on the stove. An easel was set up in the room, holding an ugly, unfinished Cubist daub. Try as he might, Ramsay could see nothing in abstract art, although, if asked, he was enthusiastic about it, could mumble for hours about “the necessary truth of the self” and so on. He mostly kept his philistine thoughts to himself. He wished to be regarded as au courant by the world at large.
In Gerrit’s room, too, there would be the rumpled, soiled sheets of an unmade bed, perhaps Gerrit’s lover of the night still entwined in those sheets—a woman. Or perhaps a man. Ramsay started to have palpitations.
“There you go, my man,” Gerrit said suddenly, as briskly as a nurse who had finished her task and was no longer interested in it.
By the time Ramsay managed to prise his eyelids apart again Gerrit had disappeared, back to the world on the other side of the red velvet curtain.
Ramsay stood up—too quickly—and had to drop down again onto the crate to wait for the room to stop revolving.
Ramsay knew that Gerrit bought drugs in a Chinese restaurant on Regent Street, but when he went there to try to do the same, the waiters just smiled at him serenely, as if they were deaf, and brought out pork chop suey and “duck de Chine” and something gelatinous that Ramsay wasn’t even sure was food. He felt obliged to eat it all and hoped that when the bill was presented it might include at least a little paper packet of dope, but no, just a hefty reckoning and a stomachache. “That place is not for you, Ramsay,” Gerrit said afterwards, as if he were a child.