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Bob likes to keep things neat. He's a good lad, at heart, and he's not fond of living in a shithole. He's seen too many junkie's dens and crack houses to want to slide too far in that direction.
One Two takes the piss about that. Typical gay boy, he says.
Bob points out that One Two's stylish bastard flat is an even bigger paean to the vagrancies of designer black ash furniture than his modest abode and One Two raises his fucking eyebrows and mouths "paean?"
"You and your 'pseudonym' and whatnot," Handsome Bob chides, "the rest of us have to eat a fucking dictionary for breakfast to keep up."
"You're supposed to be in love with me, not competin' with me," One Two complains, while Bob tries to find his trainers.
It's Bob's turn to raise his eyebrows. He points at One Two's smug fucking face. "No one said anything about being in love with you, you vain bastard, I just wanted to fuck you. Are you in love with everyone you fuck or something?"
One Two makes a grab for his finger and tells him to watch it.
The thing is, One Two probably is a little in love with every woman he beds. He plays the lad as much as he likes, but he's the most easily-infatuated man Bob's ever met (and he's scraped a few out of his bed on occasion; ex-public schoolboys who think they're smitten with a bit of rough and don't know he was nearly one of them). Mumbles and Bob once spent a whole drunk weekend taking the piss out of One Two in his absence, pretending to be Mr. & Mrs. Woman One Two Just Met and writing each other hideous poetry until Fred swore he didn't know them.
"You are," One Two says with confidence - some might say arrogance - as Bob makes a hash of tying his trainer laces.
"Nice of you to let me know," Bob says sarcastically.
"Visiting my mum --"
"Okay," Bob says, retying his laces. "One, I like Christine. I'm not a dickhead. She was having a shit time and you weren't around. Two, it's called being a mate." He tries to stare One Two down, but One Two is running on a line or two of Bolivian and his eyes are hard to focus on. They're going to be late, which is fine by Bob. "You know. Looking out for your mates."
"Mumbles wouldn't have."
"Mumbles is a selfish dick," Bob says cheerfully, getting the knot right. Mumbles is also a bloody liar, because Bob can recall at least five separate occasions when One Two was in the nick that Mumbles was down Christine's house with some of his mum's finest for her to try to keep down, but Mumbles is as bad as One Two when it comes to the Front.
“I’ll tell him you said that, shall I?” One Two threatens, pacing Bob’s tiny flat like a tiger. Or like a Scotsman with a couple of lines in him and a powerful need to go and throw some shapes at some pretty girls while Bob plays wingman.
“Why, too scared to give me a slap yourself?” Bob snickers, straightening up. “’Fraid the gay’ll rub off on you and send you off to Heaven looking for cock?”
“Bob,” One Two waves his finger at him in return. “If I was going to come down with cock fever – and I’m not - why the fuck would I go there? You fucking hate it.”
“It’s full of brain-dead twink dicks full of crystal and the music is an atrocity,” Bob agrees, dodging out of the way of a lazy, half-weight slap. He’s grown adept at dodging slaps from the Wild Bunch. Problem with being Bob is he can talk a big talk and swagger a good swagger and wear all the cocky, shaven-headed bravado he wants (and if he’s honest, most of that’s for getting blokes into bed as much as it is for fitting the mould), but he’s still not big enough, physically, to take a punch without falling down. Was it ever thus; maybe he’d stand more of a chance if he got into the gym, the way Mumbles and One Two had on their respective trips to the nick.
“Why would I go there when I could just get you to suck my knob?” One Two crows, triumphantly, and Bob jabs him in the side before darting away down the corridor, laughing. No bugle for him, just Becks; ever since he quit smoking, Bob’s been through with addictions, and he knows coke will keep him like a broody chav girl.
“Maybe you can suck mine,” Bob calls over his shoulder, slapping on the wall of the narrow passage for effect. It’s not the worst his neighbours have heard.
“Maybe fuck off,” One Two suggests, surging up behind him like a wave.
Bob is terrified of prison. He’s made light of how badly it scares him, but he’s sure they know. He’s a good lad from a good home, is Bob, and he knows full well that unless someone’s trying to stab One Two or Mumbles in the chest with something he’s also a chronic softy and much better at running than giving ‘em licks. That’s One Two’s job. That’s why he’s got the name. Bob is, as he likes to tell them when they’ll let him, a lover, not a fighter.
“Maybe your face,” Bob sing-songs, diving out of the door before One Two can slap him. He hangs onto the door, swings back behind it like a ten-year-old, and slams it after One Two as he comes out, flashing every one of his wonky fucking teeth and the nub of his chewing gum in a smile that had better be fucking devilish. Anyone else and he’d say maybe your mum, but with One Two – even if he never acknowledges it – that’s poor taste.
“Maybe fuck yourself,” One Two says with mock-sternness. He tramps on down the passage to the lifts and Bob calls him a cunt. If he has to spend all night facilitating One Two getting his rocks off in some silly bird he’ll fall a little in love with by the morning, he wants something back out of it. Like the bird’s boyfriend.
He says as much when they’re in the lift.
One Two says, “Bob, you are a slag.”
“That’s not very nice,” Bob says with a pretence at hurt feelings.
“Neither are you, you dirty bugger,” One Two laughs, trying to slap him again. Bob dodges his hand, side-steps behind him, and slaps him on the arse.
It might – might – be a step too far. One Two tenses up unnaturally, and for a second Bob wonders if he’s about to lose a friend and gain a head injury, if he’s misjudged where the humour lies. If he’s going to end up like that Jodi Dobrowski kid or his mate’s ex in California, where they only found his bottom jaw two days later.
But it’s One Two, and One Two might be uncomfortable but he’s not a complete dick. He relaxes and swats over his shoulder at Bob. “That’s not for you, Bob, you bastard, keep your hands off my arse.”
“Can’t help myself,” Bob giggles, pushing his luck. “Look at the size of it, One Two, that’s got its own gravitational field.”
“You need to get out more,” One Two snorts, thumping him in the arm while he’s distracted. It’s going to bruise. One Two might be pulling his punches but it’s still not enough.
“Nah,” Bob says, as the lift doors open, “I need to stop wanking over Brian Cox.”
“Dirty bugger.”
The main difference between straight singles bars and gay bars is that there’s a bit more variation in the deodorant, Bob thinks, drowning in Lynx Chocolate or whatever the fuck they’ve brought out this month. It’s supposed to be a classier place than the “Ben Sherman-shirt-wearing chav cunts” frequent – Bob points out that he only recently graduated from Fred Perry from Ben Sherman himself this last year or two – but the stink of date rape’s finest accompaniment is as thick as the smoke used to be.
There aren’t many more differences. The lighting’s ugly, the music is all bass with some stupid bird intoning something monotonous over the top, the drinks menu is basically the same, and it’s not like anyone’s going to go mental on him for being a “poof”. They’re not that far from Soho. And Bob, when he can be bothered, plays straight just fine. It’s just he can’t be fucked with that any more, he’s finished with hiding.
It’s not like you can’t pick up in a straight bar, anyway. Just because the bar’s not specifically gay doesn’t mean there aren’t guys in it who’re looking.
One Two is trying to dance with a woman in a pink spangly top with eyelashes that could hold off a hurricane and hair that’s possibly been sprayed on. Bob feels like cheering for her when she puts her inch-long nails against his chest and tilts her lips towards his and says loudly in the lull of the song, “Fuck off, yeah?”
It’s not that he wants to see One Two crash and burn repeatedly while he’s licking bone, it’s just that – Bob watches him dance up to another woman, this one a black girl with butterfly clips in her natural hair who was so profoundly out of One Two’s league that Sober One Two would be appalled – it’s funny watching him go down in flames, and he’s sick of the coke voice.
Of course, sometimes "love" is when you're endlessly exasperated by someone and think they're generally an idiot, but would risk a bullet in the face for them; if this is the case, then Bob's "in love" with One Two, and Mumbles, and his stupid sister, and his less stupid cousin, and probably Archy and Johnny on the days when he's not terrified of them and faintly envious.
“How long have we got, d’you think?” Mumbles asks, putting his hand down on Bob’s shoulder for the sole purpose of making Bob jump. “Oh, and don’t peel the label off your bottle, you sadcase, you look like you’re about to burst into tears.”
“Suck my dick,” Bob says, waving his middle finger as close to Mumbles’ face as he can get without being bitten.
“Later. How many ‘no’s so far?”
Bob raises two more fingers to join the middle one. “I think this one’s going to be the tipping point.”
Mumbles leans over his shoulders as if inspecting the goods. “You think she is going to say yes to him?” he asks, incredulous. He smells of Hugo Bosss something or other so strongly that he almost blots out the Lynx miasma of the bar. “Bob, you wouldn’t convince a bloody alien. Look at her, look at him, then actually look at him without your balls getting in your judgement.”
With this, Mumbles gives him a friendly slap in the back of the head, and proceeds to use Bob’s scalp as a table. Bob turns his head violently a couple of times, trying to dislodge the cold base of the bottle, but in truth it is kind of pleasant. It’s not like the bar’s air conditioning is up to much.
“Do you know how I know she’s not going home with him, Bob?” Mumbles asks, rubbing the bottle lazily back and forth on top of Bob’s head in a way that, were he drunker or on pills, would have him in transports of ecstasy.
“I do not, Mumbles,” Bob says with exaggerated care and his arms folded. He tips his head back until Mumbles’ beer is balancing on his forehead. “Why not enlighten me.”
“Because, Rrrrrobert—“
“Oh fuck you.”
“Later. Because, Bob,” Mumbles says, making an obscenely laboured meal out of both of the Bs in Bob’s name, “she is coming home with me.”
“Is that a fact?”
“It is. It is a fact.”
Bob raises his eyebrows until the base of Mumbles’ beer is pushed to his hairline by the wrinkles in his forehead, and meets Mumbles’ eye. “Do you not think you should try talking to her, then?” He leaves his mouth hanging open after the final word.
Mumbles swats at his face, Bob is ready for him and ducks: unfortunately his position doesn’t really lend itself to acrobatics, and as he ducks one of the Lynx-coated wankers knocks into him. Bob loses his balance, and Mumbles makes a grab for the back of his shirt to stop him falling; the beer flops over in Mumbles’ hand, and cascades down over Bob’s shirt as if it was just waiting for this chance.
“Well, I was going to,” Mumbles says with a put-upon sigh, flicking beer from his fingertips – Bob doesn’t see what he’s fussing about, he’s the one who’s covered from hairline to waist in fucking pissy Corona because Mumbles won’t drink normal beer like a normal person – and some of it hits the guys standing around them, but no one’s going to start a fight with someone who looks like Mumbles. “I was going to talk to her, but now I look like I’m your bloody carer –“
“Maybe she gets off on public-spirited men of good works,” Bob suggests, trying to wring beer out of the front of his shirt. At least it’s not his shirt. One Two can bitch to him about it later, but there’s an upside to Bob only owning sweatshirts and denim, and that’s getting to ruin someone else’s clothes when One Two gets it into his head that they need a lad’s night out.
Bob knows where he is with bar fights. They’ve had a few. He knows to front as much as he can but leave the hard work to Mumbles and One Two, unless things get really nasty. And it has to be Mumbles or One Two because, well. Cookie’s as useless as Bob, if not more, and Fred seems harmless right up until he shanks someone and Bob doesn’t ever want to be in that kind of fight, thank you.
There are some angry looks and someone tells Mumbles to watch what he’s fucking doing, and Mumbles shouts “piss off”, and everything settles.
“Where’s he gone?” Mumbles asks, looking over Bob’s head.
“I told you he was going to –“ Bob begins, dripping shitty recycled beer onto the floor as another wanker jostles him.
“Oh no, there he is,” Mumbles says happily. “Now if you hadn’t spilled my beer, Bob, I could have a pleasant evening watching One Two have his romantic advances foiled by every single lady in here. You clumsy sod.” He doesn’t seem especially put out, and when someone smacks into his back, pitching him forwards, he only mutters, “Oi, watch it.”
Bob points out that Mumbles’ beer looks better on him, in much the same way that One Two’s shirt does, the way that everything does. He’s jostled closer to Mumbles by the shrinking personal space in the bar: some pub nearby must have let out, and there’s an influx of sweatier, drunker patrons.
“Not all of us are blessed with your fucking good looks,” Mumbles says, taking Bob’s mostly-finished beer out of his hand and finishing it. “What are you drinking? You’re supposed to be a man of taste and sophistication.”
“I’m supposed to be a man who takes dicks up his arse,” Bob corrects. “No one said anything about class.”
“Well aren’t you a poet,” Mumbles snorts, dropping the empty bottle onto the nearest, overcrowded table without apology. “Oooooh, down in flames.”
“Four?” Bob asks, trying to peer over the heads of the clientele to find One Two on a dancefloor the size of a postage stamp.
“Five,” Mumbles corrects. “Lovely Hair brushed him off, then Tattooed Arm smacked him when he came for her. Tasty right hook.”
Bob can’t see around the throng, and curses himself for a shortarse. “We should tell him no one likes him when he’s like this,” he mutters, trying not to stand on tip-toes like a total twat.
“What, and then he’d actually pull,” Mumbles says with another of his smirks. “We can’t have that.”
“What’s wrong with One Two pulling?” Bob asks, backed into Mumbles by a stumbling drunk. “Whoops. You pull. I pull. If he doesn’t get laid soon he’s going to explode and cover us in backed-up semen. Then we’ll get chucked out of the Speeler forever.”
“Speaking of,” Mumbles says, throwing an unexpected arm around Bob’s waist from behind to yank him out of the way as some drunk cunt dressed as a parrot careens into the side of them. “What were you planning on doing once Casanova over there dips his end in someone?”
Bob shrugs. “Go home, find a fuck on Grindr.”
He can’t see Mumbles’ expression, but he can imagine it because he’s seen it before when he talks about this. It should look faintly disgusted, like he’s said he’s going to spend the evening taking a dump that could scuttle the HMS Belfast.
“Bob, you really are a tart,” Mumbles says, disapprovingly. “And before you start, I ain’t into seeing that jiggling twat on the dancefloor stick it in everyone willy-nilly either. You’re both going to end up at the bloody clinic having your knobs scraped.”
Mumbles’ cousin – and god knows he seems to have an unending supply of relatives against Bob’s none – works at the sexual health clinic in Euston. Mumbles has already stridently expressed a desire for none of his mates to ever, ever go and take their “nasty, crusty dicks” to Rhonda, although Bob’s never been able to work out why it’s worse if they’re people he knows rather than strangers. Rhonda’s a nurse, she’s seen it all already.
“Fucking hell, you’re worse than me mum,” says Bob, who hasn’t spoken to his own mother in getting on for twelve years. “Calm down, will you.” It does occur to him that Mumbles still hasn’t let him go, but with the crush of bodies and the bass vibrating through his spine and the surprisingly comforting solidity of Mumbles behind him he’s not in a hurry to point it out. It’s not like he can just jump away and give Mumbles back his hetero bubble.
“So don’t fuck off home and pick up some nasty bastard from one of those websites,” Mumbles says, and he sounds as if he’s forcing casual now. “Come back with me, instead. Bring Straight Panic back there along as well.”
“And what, turn down a guaranteed shag so I can sit around watching fucking Top Gear on Dave with you and One Two again?” Bob snorts, reaching for Mumbles hand to pull it off his stomach. Mumbles is stroking his belly with the side of his thumb, and Bob’s annoyed because it feels nice, like the start of something, but it’s the sort of something that won’t fucking go anywhere.
“Come round. See what happens,” says Mumbles, too close to Bob’s ear.
“I know what’s going to happen, One Two’s going to spend all fucking night bitching about not pulling and then he’s going to shout at Jeremy Clarkson,” Bob mutters, “and you’re going to make me eat that fucking spiced stuff and then I’m going to shit myself inside out all week.”
“Stop making excuses,” Mumbles says, flexing his thumb against Bob’s stomach.
“Because if I lean back right fucking now against your cock you’re not going to fucking lose it and break my head open,” Bob says evenly. He puts his hand over Mumbles’. His is a good bit smaller, and his pinky’s fucked – one of the other reasons he knows to stay out of the way in bar fights: that’s what happens when he doesn’t – and he means to move Mumbles but there’s nowhere to move him to.
“Yeah, because unlike Straight Panic I’ve thought about this,” Mumbles says, apparently oblivious to the fact they’re crammed together into an increasingly overheated bar and surrounded by the kind of angry straight ballbags who leave YouTube comments.
“So why’s he coming, then?”
“Do you really want to abandon your mate in a place like this?” Mumbles says. “Anyway, just because he’s too much of a sensitive flower pussy idiot to think about it too much doesn’t mean he doesn’t know what he wants, either.”
The bass is making Bob’s eyeballs wobble.
Mumbles raises his other hand and waves it over everyone’s heads in the general direction of the bar. He mimes a phone with his fingers. One of the bar staff nods, and Mumbles gives him the thumbs up. It’s easier to get a taxi when word’s spread thinly about that you’re associated with Johnny Quid.
“Now,” Mumbles says, rubbing his thumb against Bob’s stomach again. “Do you want to wait outside, or do you want to watch One Two going for gold on Strictly Going To Fall Arse Over Tit In A Minute?”
“I can’t see him,” Bob points out. It’s not a conclusive answer – he doesn’t want to leave One Two to get into a fight with someone’s boyfriend, or more accurately doesn’t want to leave One Two and One Two’s coke to get into a fight no one wants – but it’s edging towards ‘why don’t we all wait outside’.
“Well,” says Mumbles, craning his head – Bob can feel him lifting onto tip-toe, even, which Mumbles doesn’t care about because Mumbles doesn’t look like a teenager with a fake beard the way Bob does – and peering out at the tiny, packed dancefloor, “he’s putting his best movies on a girl who looks like … bargain basement Natalie Portman in Closer. Same wig.”
“Reckon he’s in there?” Bob asks, and it’s at that moment that he realises he is, to all intents and purposes, holding Mumbles’ hand like a fucking girl.
“I reckon he might be,” Mumbles says, sounding impressed. “Now the question is, do you actually want him to pull?”
Bob considers this. He’s had about one and three quarter beers. He is aggravatingly sober. One Two’s coke is going to start wearing off soon, unless he goes for a top-up. He hated Closer and resents Cookie for ever recommending it.
“No.”
“Didn’t think so,” Mumbles says, and Bob tips his head back enough to see the return of the smirk. “OI, ONE TWO.”
His voice carries. It’s a credit to Mumbles that, despite the moniker, when he wants to be heard he can make himself fucking heard. Half the bar turns to stare at him.
“ONE TWO.”
“I’m –“ One Two shouts back, annoyed, his hand – Bob cranes his head around suddenly stationary figures at the edge of the tiny dancefloor. “—busy.”
“We’re leaving,” Mumbles shouts.
“Busy –“ One Two repeats, mugging so painfully that he means to fuck this girl that he nearly smacks her in the face in the process.
“Leaving,” Mumbles repeats.
“Taxi,” Bob hears, from the door.
“Taxi,” repeats the barman Mumbles waved at earlier. The firm’s probably just around the corner.
“Leaving,” Mumbles says, a final time. He grabs Bob by the wrist without warning, and begins wrestling his way to the door. The customers try to get out of his way, but it’s rammed in here, and some of them are too drunk to understand what’s happening, and even travelling in the wake of Mumbles, Bob’s still shoved and whipped about like a fish on a line. How the fuck One Two is going to get through he doesn’t know and, like a shot, doesn’t fucking care.
The door, which seems an impossibly long way at first, spits them out onto the busy pavement. Mumbles pokes his head into the taxi window to put the location into the TomTom, since the driver looks like he’s been in England five minutes and spent most of them refusing to learn a word of the language.
“He’s not bringing that bloody woman back to my flat,” says Mumbles, pulling Bob bodily into the back of the taxi with him. He leans back out of the door. “Oi, One Two. Are you coming or not?”
After a long moment where the taxi driver is clearly impatient to be out of there as much as the bouncers are impatient for him to be going, One Two stumbles out of the bar in his dancing shoes, brushing down his shirt with so much cocky impatience that it’s a shock the police don’t just descend from the sky to nick him for being a cokey twat.
“What’s going on?” One Two pants, stumbling into the taxi and pulling the door shut behind him. “Where’re we going?”
“Havin’ a threesome,” Mumbles says, with great authority. It’s the first Bob’s heard about One Two being involved, and he’s willing to guess it’s the first One Two’s heard about it.
“I just left that wee pink-haired girl –“ One Two protests, pointing over his shoulder as the taxi jerks away from the curb. “Threesome with who?”
Mumbles only raises his eyebrows in reply.
Bob says, “You’re not serious about this.”
Mumbles puts his hand on Bob’s cock through his jeans. “No, but I am going to fuck your mouth, so stop whinging and get used to the idea.”