We were trailing the sailor through the Italian Quarter. Press Gang Bang time a’ waiting. Compulsory Rent Boy Order. Hello, Cadet, you’ll have a rolling gait alright by the time we’ve started with you; bell-bottom trousers and no mistake. Then we were fallen in by a smear of football supporters, winners, losers, who knew, equally loud either the way; chanting out the fuck tribe litany; perfect smokescreen material for us, but the sailor picks up the vibrations and starts to hustle away, no fool he; picks out the signs like seeds from a pomegranate and spits them out again, not learned to swallow his medicine yet but learned to taste it no worries and he knows the taste of fear and aggression so he low-tails it up an alleyway, the coccyx-ducking scum, and we almost lose him, almost lose him in the gardy-loo overhanging mediaeval dust of the lives of the old and the poor in a town too moribund to eject them and too sedate to welcome them so yes we almost lose the sailor in this fog of dust and washing but he’s not got his street-legs yet and we do not lose him no sir we do not, we tug aboard his metaphorical bib-sail and hitch a ride to his destination never once opining to him by as much as a breath out of place that we were in any way shape or form anything but accidental fellow-travellers on his clumping passage to a gaudy door in an undilapidated square with a broken wellhead and we pass by on the self-same side as he knocks the three-knock cliché and we sprawl against the wellhead and observe the female party who answers the door whose eyes don’t meet ours but send their servant to tell us to make an appointment at her, not our convenience and this information all transmitted in the spanking of two eyelashes against two eyelashes.
Thus we are found in an al fresco dilemma. Do we effect egress to the property or do we wait for the sailor to fall out back through the gaudy door and then effect egress to his own particular property at our not inconsiderable leisure?
We wait. Smoke gets strained up from our diseased gums, spiralling in a nicotine-stained helix as the air gets colder and the wind gets its first teeth but we wait. The wait suggests that the sailor is a party with stamina and money though perhaps seeking to be parted from both before his shoddy reappearance through the gloss-stained door to end our wait.
The night thickens up. We wait. The door opens. Another woman. Younger. She beckons us in. We step over the welcome mat, over the word not on the street. The word is “Rubicon.”
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