Goodmans Hotel - 10. Chapter 10

By Monday morning well over twenty-four hours had passed since the Geordies had seen Darren dancing with a stranger at the club. Andrew’s accusatory words from the previous day, ‘You haven’t let him go off with them,’ came back into my mind again and again. Every time the ’phone rang I expected to hear his voice anxiously asking for news. During a lull in the morning’s activities, having got no answer from the extension in Darren’s room, I went upstairs in the unlikely hope that he might have crept back in the middle of the night and had not heard or was ignoring the call.

Of course he was not there. Guiltily I eased open the shallow top drawer of the chest of drawers where he kept personal papers. The biggest stack was correspondence from the ‘music club’ from which he sometimes bought records. There was also a bundle of assorted envelopes with handwritten addresses and Twyford postmarks, probably from his parents. They should have been the ones to worry about him being missing after a night out, not me. Nothing in the drawer was likely to reveal what had happened to him, and uncomfortable about prying into his papers I slid it shut.

Pointless speculation began to plague me. He was unlikely to have run away, abandoning his personal correspondence, a wardrobe full of clothes and his terrapins. He looked so young; what if the police had raided the club and were holding him, suspecting he was under age, or if he had become involved in some more serious offence? Yet they would have had to allow him to make a telephone call. Suppose he had been attacked, or badly injured in a road accident, perhaps even killed? How long was it sensible to wait before ringing the police and hospitals to ask about him?

In the next hour or so several people ?phoned to book rooms, and then Tom called to say he had dropped Andrew off at the hospital for an outpatient appointment; he had already contacted the burger bar and asked for Darren, saying he was a friend, and been told that Darren was due in but had not turned up. At Andrew’s insistence he was checking with me, although he did not doubt I would have let them know if the boy had come home. His call made me more anxious than ever, and after it, whenever anyone rang, I expected to hear a nurse or a policeman giving me bad news.

The cleaner was not in that day and the morning chores kept me busy, but my concentration was poor and I absent-mindedly threw some sheets over the second floor bannisters without looking, barely missing a guest on the stairs below. A few minutes later the ?phone rang again and to my relief I heard Darren’s voice, nervous and pleading: ‘Hello, Mark, it’s Darren.’

‘Where have you been?’

‘I’m at Turnpike Lane Underground station. I don’t think I’ve got enough money for the fare back.’

‘What happened to you?’

‘I’m sorry, I will tell you, something awful happened. Is it all right for me to come back?’

‘Yes. Get a taxi if you have to, I’ll pay for it. Are you okay? Andrew was so worried about you yesterday.’

‘Yes I’m okay, but could you ring my work to say I’m sick? I was supposed to go in this morning.’ He refused to put me to the expense of paying for a taxi, and had enough money for one bus fare which would get him as far as Housmans Hotel. To avoid him having to walk from there I rang the manager and arranged for him to lend Darren the Underground fare home.

I rang the burger palace with the old excuse for absence of an upset stomach. Andrew, presumably still at the hospital, was not answering his mobile ?phone and I left messages on it, at the garden centre and on his answering machine at Biddulph Mansions, then rang Tom, who insisted on coming straight over. When he arrived he had worked himself into a temper and was talking about ‘teaching that boy a lesson’. His annoyance was understandable, but we had yet to hear what had happened, and even if Darren was at fault sympathy and understanding were probably called for. Punishing him in some way for going missing might drive him away completely. ‘And that’s what you’ve come here to do, is it, teach him a lesson?’

‘Andrew’s got enough on his mind with the hospital. He’s been worried sick about him. He’s not going to get away with this.’

‘We don’t know what’s happened yet. Why don’t you leave it to me to sort this out? You coming in here making threats is not going to help.’

‘Don’t you accuse me of making fucking threats. What I said was teach him a lesson.’

‘What’s the difference?’ For perhaps a minute we stood looking at each other, afraid of the angry exchange developing into a serious row. To end the stand-off I softly proffered a single syllable which could not be interpreted as antagonistic: ‘Lunch?’

‘What?’

‘Should we have some lunch?’

‘All right. Thanks,’ he said with difficulty.

We were eating in grim silence when Darren arrived, deep shadows under his eyes and a bruise on his left cheek. Tom put down his knife and fork, looked at him angrily, but said nothing.

‘What happened? Have you been fighting?’

‘No. I will tell you, but can I go and clean up first?’

‘All right. See you in twenty minutes, half an hour?’

He left the room. Across the table from me Tom was losing the struggle against his temper; under his shirt the shoulder and arm muscles were flexing as though his big hands were about to lash out, his physical strength becoming all too evident. I said, ‘We ought to let Andrew know he’s all right.’

This diversion worked momentarily. ‘He’s probably still at the hospital. You know how they keep you waiting at those clinics.’

‘I could leave another message at the Garden Centre in case he calls there first.’

He realised that the mention of Andrew was an attempt to divert him. He glared at me as, trying to appear innocent and unconcerned, I put another fork-full of food into my mouth. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll leave the boy to you, you can have him, if that’s what you want. I’m going.’

‘Don’t, please don’t.’

‘I might as well go back to work. Fuck you. I said you can have him, that’s what you want, isn’t it?’ He stood up and put on his coat. ‘Fucking bastards,’ he shouted to nobody in particular as he stomped out down the hall. This was the angriest I had ever seen him, yet despite the intensity of his feelings, he had been able to back off.

My immediate task was to find out from Darren where he had been for the past two nights, and fifteen minutes later I took a pot of coffee and his favourite snack, bacon sandwiches, up to his room. The shower was running as I passed the little bathroom under the roof and I went on up to sit and wait for him to emerge. He appeared after a few minutes, covering himself with a towel, and was drawn to the tray of food by the mouth watering smell. ‘Bacon sandwiches, thanks Mark, I’m starving.’

Uninhibited by my presence he threw the towel onto the bed and put on a pair of clean white underpants. I had seen him nearly naked before at the swimming baths; his calves were about as thick as Tom’s forearms, the flesh so scanty that the knobs and indentations of his bones were visible. As well as the bruise on his face he had another, bigger and more lurid, on his right upper arm. On his neck and stomach were half a dozen or more red scuffs and abrasions, which could have been caused by a fall or a fight. As a way of starting conversation I said: ‘I fed your terrapins. I hope they’re all right.’

He put down his sandwich and went over to them, turning his back to me and bending slightly over the tank to look at them.

‘They look fine,’ he said straightening up. ‘Thanks for feeding them. It’s time I cleaned them out.’

‘Coffee?’

‘Thanks.’ He took his mug, had another bite from the bacon sandwich, and began to dress.

‘Did someone hurt you?’

‘No, I fell over a table and banged my head. The bruise looks horrible, doesn’t it?’

‘You went back with someone?’

‘Yeah. I meant to come home straight after... I intended to come home yesterday, honestly.’

‘You’ve been away for two nights, we were worried. You don’t have to tell me what happened.’

‘I want to tell you. But it’s embarrassing.’

‘We’re friends, aren’t we? Come on, you can trust me.’

The Geordies, he said, having taken him into the club, were soon engaged with a group of young Chinese men and forgot him. For a while he simply stood against a wall and watched what was going on from the shadows, but seeing other men dancing on their own, or at least with nobody in particular, he summoned up the courage to join in. A man in his twenties looked across, smiled, and made his way over to him. They said hello, danced together for a while, went to the bar for drinks, chatted, then danced again.

A little later Darren offered to buy fresh drinks, but his new friend promised to get something much better than alcohol. He disappeared in the direction of the toilets for a few minutes and came back with some tablets. Darren paused and looked at me.

‘Did you take any?’

‘Only one.’

‘What was it?’

‘It was hard to tell in the lights of the disco. He told me they were speed... they looked sort of blue-grey. He said everyone was taking them. He worked as a courier with a holiday company and he said people partied all night on them, not only in London, but in Majorca and Ibiza, everywhere. He said at some places the so-called “straights” were really disgusting, much worse than gays ever were, got smashed out of their heads at beach parties, would do anything, strip off and do filthy things to each other with bottles while the others watched.’

‘He didn’t play any part in these goings-on himself, of course. What were our Newcastle friends doing while you were being offered drugs?’

‘They were there. They weren’t interested in me. They were too busy with Chinese and South-East Asian boys. Everyone down there was taking something.’

‘Not everyone. You can get a buzz from the music, the atmosphere, being with a crowd of people looking good and enjoying themselves. Anyway, so you went back to this courier man’s flat?’

‘Yeah. Not right away... everyone was having a great time, we danced and talked a bit more and – got a bit close. He asked me back to his flat, where he gave me this mug of Irish coffee that was really strong, but he’d put something in it.’ In the sludge at the bottom of the mug were the remains of two capsules. He challenged the man, but he immediately snatched the mug back and emptied the dregs down the sink. Darren was confused about what happened next. He could remember falling over and hitting his head on the table, and being helped into the bedroom where they had sex.

‘Was it full sex?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Did you take precautions?’ He looked down at the floor. ‘Did he use a condom?’

‘He had condoms. When I went back with him I didn’t know what he was like,’ he said, not looking at me.

‘Oh god.’ How could he have let a stranger take advantage of him like that? ‘It’s all right. You’re not to blame.’

He had slept, and woken in daylight, his head throbbing, his limbs shaking, his bruises and his back passage hurting. He found the man having breakfast in the kitchen, asked for directions to the nearest Underground station, but let himself be talked into waiting until his new acquaintance had washed and shaved and they could go together. The walk, however, ended not at the Underground station but at a nearby pub, where the courier said he had to go inside for a few minutes to meet some friends.

Darren felt ill and did not want more to drink, but followed obediently into the pub where he was told that what he needed was a ‘morning after special’, a concoction of tomato juice and spirits that helped stop his limbs shaking and made his stomach and head feel better. He sat quietly, bothered by the noise and the smoke-laden atmosphere, not thinking clearly. Confused and lacking will power he allowed himself to be taken back to the flat again along with several of the man’s friends.

For their Sunday dinner they ate triangles of tomato-stained pizza followed by chocolate biscuits, and then watched a film on television. They drank beer and smoked cannabis for some hours, listening to music when the film was over, until at around seven o’clock all but one of the courier’s friends left.

A couple of times he stood up intending to leave but let them talk him into staying on. They promised him they would be going out themselves soon, would take him to the train station, and to appear friendly asked him a few questions about himself, claiming to know people in the tourism industry and in television who could help him find work. Then the courier and one of his friends hauled Darren into the bedroom, drew the curtains and forced themselves on him.

‘Did you struggle, ask them to stop?’

‘They made me go with them, I didn’t want to. This friend of his wasn’t very clean.’

‘Did they force you to have sex?’

‘They didn’t threaten me with a knife or anything.’

Whatever his experience before that Saturday night, his innocence was gone now. ‘Are we talking about oral or anal sex here, Darren?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Which? Both?’

‘Yeah.’ When they had finished abusing him, drunk, drugged, and exhausted he rolled himself up tightly in one of the sheets and lay on the floor by the wall where he slept. The next morning, his body was sore and aching. He hunted around the room for his clothes, dressed, crept out and used the toilet. The courier was in the lounge watching television, and Darren ran past the room door, down the stairs and out into the street. A terrified old lady he stopped near the end of the road gave him directions to the Underground station. From there he rang me.

Since he had not been threatened, tied up or locked in the flat, what he had gone through sounded as though it fell short of kidnapping and rape. Certainly he had been taken advantage of, but he had not put up physical resistance. Slipping capsules into his coffee was a nasty trick, but he had no witnesses or evidence to prove it had happened. If he had not wanted to take part in later events, why had he not walked out, and why had he gone back to the flat a second time? However confused and unsure of himself he was, surely he could have slipped away from them in the pub, or run off in the street on the way back to the flat? ‘Do you want me to call the police?’

‘What for?’

‘What you’ve described sounds like you were drugged and raped. What if the next boy they pick up is even younger, the drugs and alcohol prove too much for him, and instead of bruises and a sore backside he ends up in hospital? You’re sure none of them hit you, held you down, used force on you, threatened to get you if you told on them?’

‘No. Nothing like that. What was I supposed to do? He seemed nice when we were in the club. How was I supposed to know what he was really like?’

‘He tricked you by putting drugs in your coffee. He’s going to get away with it unless we do something, isn’t he?’

‘Don’t call the police, please. They’ll call my parents.’

How would the police react, confronted with his story? The chances of proving a case against anyone were poor. Even if the men were found and questioned they would certainly deny doping the coffee and claim Darren agreed to the sex. Although a lot of the time he appeared very much a boy he was not under age.

‘Okay, let’s leave it at that for now. There’s quite a bit of work waiting for me downstairs. Will you be all right on your own for a while?’

‘Yeah, I’ll be fine.’

In the evening he rang the burger bar to say he was feeling better and arranged to go in to make up his hours. Tom called to apologise for losing his temper and for what he had said earlier.

‘An instance of bad boys getting all the attention and good boys resenting it? Don’t worry, it’s forgotten.’

‘You’re too easy on me. I was angry, all the worry about Andrew and Darren and everything, but I would never have hurt him, you know that. Shouldn’t have took it out on you.’

‘Strong feelings... it’s okay, really.’

Though Andrew rarely joined us in the pub since his illness, we arranged to meet him there that evening so I could tell him of Darren’s adventure without the interruptions inevitable at the hotel. He and Tom listened eagerly, and agreed with me that, there being no evidence of rape, contacting the police was not appropriate, in fact they seemed surprised the idea had occurred to me. Andrew had other thoughts about what we should do: ‘If he had been under age the police might have acted, they would have had a reasonable chance of getting a conviction. He’s back and he’s safe, that’s what matters. The next step is what we must concentrate on.’

Tom offered to go looking for the courier and ‘give him a fright’ if he found him. ‘That’s not a bad idea, but it isn’t what I had in mind. The boy’s future is what concerns me. However you may be right, someone ought to let the bastard know that boys like Darren may have friends who don’t like them being used as sex toys.’

This sounded dangerous to me. ‘Remember there was a group of them. We may end up being the ones who are given a fright.’

‘I’ll have some help with me. Someone has to try to stop the filthy bastard.’

‘You’re both right. If you go up there, Tom, you’ll have to back off if there is the slightest hint of danger. Anyway that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about. First, we should fix up for Darren to have a medical check. Since I’m so familiar with hospital routines these days I’ll make an appointment and take him to the clinic.

Second, we need to turn our minds to the long term, to improving his circumstances. That’s where the real problem lies. He’s bright, talented, but he’s in a dead end job, he’s drifting. Unless we do something about it, how long will it be before he lets himself be led into another sleazy mess? There are plenty of others like our friend from the club, and worse. We need to give the boy a sense of purpose in life, a reason for turning away from that sort of nonsense.’ He looked directly at me. ‘I know you have your hands full with the hotel at the moment, but the business will soon settle in, and you’re the one who can make a difference here.’

‘So this has become my problem now, has it?’

‘The fact is the boy relates to you, he looks up to you, he listens to what you have to say. That wretched job of his is half the problem. He ought to go back to his studies. We could get him into a college of some kind. I could take him on part-time at the garden centre, he has a real feel for horticulture. Look how well he’s done with the gardens and the container plants at the hotel. Even better, you could take him on. You would be able to fit his hours around attendance at a college much more easily. All that changing beds and vacuum cleaning you do, you should spend more time managing the business, taking a broad view of how it’s developing. Yes, that’s the answer, don’t worry about money, we’ll sort something out between us.’

I was annoyed by the way Andrew was planning a new role for me in Darren’s future. ‘Why me? You’re the one who befriended him, took him out to concerts and all sorts of places. I let him stay on at the hotel because you wanted me to.’

‘Don’t get angry with me, please. I’m asking too much of you. Let’s forget the whole business, it would be an imposition. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. This is what happens when heterosexuals breed irresponsibly, leaving others to cope with the problems of their offspring. We’ll talk about something else. Tom, what about that new ventilation equipment I want installing in the nursery. No desperate rush, but are you likely to be able to make a start in the next few weeks?’

Andrew had steered the conversation exactly as he wanted. Having successfully planted the idea in my mind that Darren should work at the hotel, he had given the appearance of backing away from it by saying, ‘Let’s forget the whole business.’ We both knew that it was anything but forgotten. He had already begun to soften my resistance by holding out the prospect of delegating some of the hotel chores to Darren. Soon he would inveigle Tom into helping his cause, and gentle persistent pressure from the two of them would wear me down.

Tom persuaded his older brother to join him on a trip to Turnpike Lane to confront the men who had taken advantage of Darren. His brother was a thick set man with cropped hair who could intimidate with a concentrated look of hostility, his eyes glaring and his lips tightly set. On Tuesday they set off in one of the Ferns and Foliage vans, collecting Darren after his early shift in the burger bar, to drive up to the house where he had been molested. From the passenger seat he watched the two brothers go to the entrance, ring the bell and thump the door. There was no answer from the upstairs flat, and all they learned from the couple on the ground floor was that the occupant spent a lot of his time away. Tom said they were looking for a boy who had gone missing, and that they would keep coming back until they got some answers.

They went on to the pub Darren had been taken to, where they ordered a coke for him and pints of beer for themselves. They asked the barman if he knew a courier for a holiday company who did the Spanish resorts. He shrugged, ‘This is not what you’d call a regulars’ pub, we do a lot of passing trade.’ Tom’s brother leaned over the bar and beckoned him closer. ‘Reason we’re looking is he’s been taking advantage of under age boys, know what I mean.’ He stared menacingly, waiting for an answer. Darren sat nearby on a bar stool with his coke. He told me afterwards he felt too embarrassed to move, and desperately wished the fire alarm would go off or something else would happen to bring the excruciating scene to an end.

Unnerved by the intense hostile stare, the barman said edgily, ‘Can’t help yo,u mate, there are a few regulars, but so far as I know none of them works as a courier. Most of them keep their selves to their selves. This is a busy pub evenings and weekends, you get all sorts. I hope you find him. He’ll be barred from here if we know who he is, you can be sure of that.’

Customers at three of the pub tables were subjected to the same growled questions by Tom and his brother, not from any expectation that they would admit to anything, but in the hope that word of the visit would get back to the culprits. The brothers left the pub looking as though they would throw a punch at the smallest provocation. Whether word of this performance ever did reach those it was intended for we never found out. To Darren’s great relief, and mine, there were no further trips to Turnpike Lane.

At the hotel out of politeness I asked Tom’s brother if he wanted to stay for dinner, but he refused saying plausibly there would be a meal waiting for him at home. I saw him to the front door, and before leaving he fixed me with his unsettling gaze and said tauntingly: ‘I hope you’re the one who’s the woman, and not him.’ Giving me no chance to respond he turned quickly and walked briskly down the path, not seeing my angry grimace.

Furious, I told Tom what he’d said. ‘You shouldn’t take no notice of him. He’s a piss-taker, always has been.’

‘I suppose you can’t pick who you have as a brother.’

‘He didn’t intend to be insulting, he wouldn’t understand a remark like that was going to cause offence. He thinks he’s funny. Take no notice of him. He ain’t worth it.’

The more important activity following Darren’s ordeal was to coax him back into the education system. Lizetta occasionally arranged courses for new recruits to my old firm, and was the obvious person to ask about his chances of a place in college. We met for long lunches together every month or so, usually in busy moderately priced restaurants in town. When I mentioned Darren she immediately wanted to know what he had been studying at school, an obvious question but one that had somehow not occurred to me. Reproachfully she said, ‘People find it a struggle to get back into education once they’ve dropped out. Does he want this badly enough to keep it up for a year or more? If you want me to help him things will have to be gone into properly.’

She suggested I bring him along to lunch so she could meet him. Andrew had been encouraging him to think about a career and, predictably, had suggested horticulture. When I told him about Lizetta he brought down some of his old school work to show me, neat life-like drawings of fungi and painstakingly detailed illustrations of plant cell structures. His teacher had given him good marks for the work. ‘You really are interested in plants, aren’t you? You haven’t got all your old school work up there, have you?’

‘No. Biology was my best subject. Most of my school work is still at home in Twyford, if they haven’t thrown it all out.’

His father, before he turned to religion, used to take him on walks in the countryside and had taught him about the wildlife in hedgerows and ponds, and from an early age he had helped in the garden and on the family allotment. He had built on this knowledge in class. Knowing he was still in touch with his parents from the letters in the drawer in his room, I asked if he was thinking of going back to collect the rest of his things. ‘My sister will collect some stuff for me, what’s the point in me going back? All they’re interested in is banging tambourines for Jesus.’

‘They’re your mum and dad. You ought to go back to see them sometime.’ Our discussion was interrupted by the sound of the reception bell. In the hall was one of the Chinese men the Geordies had brought back with them to the hotel. Cheung was about Darren’s age, very cute with a small slightly upturned nose. One of them had given him a Newcastle telephone number, but when he tried it he found it was the number of a mini-cab firm. He wanted me to give him the correct number or an address.

The mini-cab number may have been given deliberately to fool him into thinking more than a night’s sex was on offer; if a boyfriend, or even a wife, answered a ’phone call or opened a letter from him serious problems might ensue. When I refused, he looked so unhappy that I agreed to forward a letter for him, on the assumption that the redhead, to whom I had sent confirmation of the booking, would pass it on to whoever in his party was so sorely missed after one night of love. I sat my visitor down at the kitchen table with writing paper and an envelope from the office.

Darren remembered Cheung from the club and made him a mug of tea, which he drank while writing several pages in a close regular hand. When the letter was finished they chatted for a while in the hall until Darren had to go to work, and they left the hotel together.

The redhead rang me a few days later to thank me for forwarding the letter, but said that although they would be happy to see any of the Chinese boys again the next time they came down to London it would be unfair to encourage them to expect anything more than another one night stand. The ’phone number, he said, must have been a misunderstanding of some sort; they did use one particular cab firm regularly, and perhaps Cheung had seen the number written down somewhere and wrongly assumed it was a home number.

He claimed that none of them would have tried to mislead by giving the impression of wanting to keep in touch. He also asked after Darren, and I said he had had a terrible time with someone who picked him up, and that he had been in real danger, but had managed to escape without coming to permanent harm.

‘We were all worried about him on the train home. He’s a clever lad, he’ll learn how to look after himself. We’ve all got ourselves into dodgy situations when we were younger. I’m sorry if we let you down there.’

That chance meeting at the hotel was the beginning of a relationship between Darren and Cheung. A couple of weeks later they arrived together at the Beckford Arms on a Friday night. I was late, having been delayed by unexpected arrivals at the hotel, and found them laughing and joking with Tom at the bar. We all returned together and Darren took Cheung up to his room, the first time, to my knowledge, he had taken a lover up with him. Perhaps, after all, some good might have come from his visit to the Geordies’ favourite club.

Following Darren’s weekend escapade in Tottenham, for a few weeks life at the hotel settled reassuringly into steady profitable business. Goodmans Hotel had, so far, escaped any of the horrors of which my friend at Housmans Hotel had warned me; there had been no fraudulent payments, nobody had suffered a heart attack, there had been no fights and no vandalism. Then one morning a guest on the first floor came looking for me in the kitchen to complain he had been woken by a disturbance in the room above. He said someone up there must have gone berserk. There had been an almighty crash, followed by scraping sounds and thuds and bangs that went on for half an hour or more. The noise stopped eventually and he went back to sleep.

I leapt up the stairs to the second floor, fearing that taking in two men who had arrived without a booking had been a dreadful mistake. The door to their room was ajar. A loud knock produced no response, and when I tried to push it open it would not move. Lifting it up by the handle with difficulty I eased it open inch by inch. A toilet stink hit me as I entered the room. The upper hinge had been wrenched away from the door frame, and carefully leaning the door against the wall I turned around to face a scene of devastation.

The twin beds had been thrown onto their sides and the mattresses and bedding were strewn higgledy-piggledy across the floor. The dressing table was leaning acutely, its once square angles now grossly distorted, the drawers tossed about the room, the mirror broken, half of it lying in pieces on the floor. The television lay face down, the tube shattered and the back dashed into splinters; the kettle, tea and coffee- making things had been flung down on top of it.

Two inverted ‘V’s of damp on the wall and dark patches on the carpet showed where the men had urinated. The light fittings, broken and torn away, were hanging by their wires. In spray paint on the wall, above where the heads of the beds had been, was the outline of a giant erect male organ with the obscenity ‘SHIT SHAGGERS’ scrawled in thick marker-pen below it.

The major cause of the stench lay in the tangle of crumpled bedding on the floor. They had defecated on the white cotton of my sheets. With the room’s en suite toilet a few yards away, the action demonstrated real malice. The mess on my bedding appalled me more than all the other damage. As I opened the windows to let out the stink the braided curtains seemed to hang with chaste disapproval over the devastation below.

The perpetrators of this outrage had doubtless made their escape before the house stirred. The prospect of cleaning up what they had left in the sheet made me nauseous. I stood at the window for several minutes inhaling fresh air, watching the boughs of the street’s plane trees swaying in the breeze. In the hotel downstairs activity would be continuing as usual; the cook and waiter would be busy with breakfasts, and people checking out that morning would be asking for their bills. If I went down to normality now the smell and the mess in the room would be waiting to be dealt with, and would be constantly on my mind.

With no rubber gloves to hand I gingerly lifted up the soiled bedding, keeping my fingers clear of its repulsive contents, and manoeuvred the faeces towards the toilet. After flushing the excreta away and putting the soiled linen into black plastic sacks, I washed my hands, flushed the toilet a second time and washed my hands again, hoping to make doubly certain that every last trace of the filth had gone. On leaving the room I carefully edged the door closed, hiding the devastation from other guests who might pass.

I called the police, and during a lull in breakfast activity took the part-time cook and waiter up to see the damage. Sharing the horror with them helped me a little, but at ten-thirty they went off duty leaving me on my own. Darren had left for an early shift at the hamburger dive, the cleaner was not due in that day, and there was no answer to my ’phone calls to Tom or Andrew.

I apologised to the guests who had heard the disturbance, saying this was the first time there had been any trouble and that the hotel was normally very quiet. Fortunately none of them made a fuss. When everyone had gone, various hotel duties kept me occupied for a time, but after putting the last of the breakfast dishes into the dishwasher I sat miserably in the bay window of the dining room waiting for the police, wishing merciless vengeance on the pair who had vandalised my room.

People hardly ever come to the hotel without having made a booking, but expensive bags and new leather jackets gave the impression that the two men had money. My little dial-up unit for checking credit cards had cleared the one they proffered as valid. Nothing about them made me suspicious. The police would no doubt check and discover that the credit card had been stolen, and that the names and addresses they gave were false. A few hundred pounds’ worth of damage was unlikely to merit much of an investigation. Like the men who had abused Darren, they would go unpunished, free to gloat over their actions.

Two officers arrived an hour and a half later, a man and a woman. They spent about twenty minutes in the hotel examining the wreckage and making a few notes. Having a police car outside and officers in the hotel was not likely to encourage business, and at first they put me on edge by looking at the rack of leaflets and cards for gay clubs and organisations in the hall. The female officer asked with what looked to be a forced smile how many people had been staying last night, and if the hotel guests were exclusively male. At first I feared prejudice and was expecting hostile questions about the nature of the business, but she reassured me by saying that the hotel was in the right area, in easy reach of quite a few gay pubs and clubs.

The male officer used his radio to check the credit card number and the address the two vandals had given, and minutes later received confirmation that they were fraudulent. They asked me not to clean any glass surfaces, cups or similar objects until the fingerprint specialist had come, and said they would send me a letter with an incident number for my insurers as proof that the crime had been reported.

After the police left, the prospect of going back up to the vandalised room for a fourth time that day was too unpleasant. The best thing would have been for me to have gone out for an hour to walk in the park or do some shopping, but as the fingerprint expert was on his way I had to wait in. As the cleaner was off duty his chores fell to me, but unable to face doing the rooms I moped around in the kitchen.

The fingerprint specialist arrived shortly before mid-day with his little case of equipment, but he found no prints that could definitely be identified as belonging to the wreckers. Presumably thinking already of another more important case, as he was leaving he asked if any cars had been stolen in the area recently, giving me the impression there was little chance of my pair of vandals ever being caught.

Tom came over at lunchtime as soon as he picked up my message, and ran ahead of me up the stairs to see the damage. The earlier overpowering stench had gone, but even with the windows open the room smelt of urine. He carefully inspected the wreckage, asking rhetorically several times, ‘How on earth could anyone do something like this?’ He hugged me protectively and said, ‘You must feel as if you’ve been punched in the face. If I get hold of them I’ll tie them to the back of the van and drag them round the streets.’

Although the room looked a complete wreck, he thought most things could probably be repaired or replaced reasonably quickly, and pointed out that the effects could have been worse if they had ripped out bathroom fittings and caused a flood, or smashed the windows or knocked holes in the partition walls. He suggested fixing the things that could be done quickly first, and then when he had worked for about an hour would break for a cup of tea and assess what remained to be done.

Leaving him to repair the damage, I found the energy to make a start on the hotel rooms, having to skimp because there was so little of the day left. After an energetic hour I went down to the kitchen, switched on the kettle and put some raspberries with vanilla ice-cream into three little glass dishes.

When Darren came back from work he joined Tom and me for this little treat, after which we all went up to the vandalised room. It already looked much better than before. Tom had removed the pieces of broken mirror and righted the dressing table so that its angles were square again. He had put the beds back in place and rehung the door. The remaining obvious signs of damage were the graffiti, still obscenely prominent, and a light fitting which was too twisted out of shape to repair. He had removed the broken television to a cupboard on the landing.

‘I’ll paint over that obscenity on the wall, but I’m not sure what to do about the carpet.’

‘I suppose I’ll have throw it out.’

Darren offered to try to clean it. ‘It’s only a bit of weewee. If we get it down into the garden, I’ll give it a good hosing down and use carpet shampoo on it. You shouldn’t have to throw it away.’

‘You’re an expert on cleaning carpets now are you?’ I asked. ‘How long do you think it’s going to take to dry?’

‘It’s worth trying.’

He and Tom rolled it up while I went for two black plastic sacks to put over the ends so they would be able to carry it without getting urine on their clothes. On my way back to the room I noticed the window on the stairs was open. ‘I hope you’re not intending to put it out through there.’

‘No, of course we’re not. We wanted some fresh air.’

They slid the bags into place and began to manoeuvre the carpet down the first flight of steps, Tom going first, having to walk down backwards. Darren followed him looking as though he might collapse under the weight. Seeing him struggle I tried to help by supporting the middle. When Tom reached the open window he said: ‘Right, one, two, three, now!’

He heaved his end up and out, while Darren ran towards me shouting, ‘Look out Mark.’ Tom energetically shoved the carpet through the window until the force of gravity took over and it plummeted out of sight, hitting the ground with a loud thud. I looked down at the two of them in exasperation as they leaned out to see how it had landed.

‘Yeah, wow!’

Tom turned to look at me. ‘Wonder how that happened,’ he said in mock innocence.

‘What if it hit something, or someone, on the way down?’

‘I made sure the area was clear before we let it go. If we pushed hard enough it was bound to fall clear of the house. It’s flattened a bit of grass on the lawn, that’s all.’

Darren ran off down the stairs, and we watched him unroll the carpet onto the concrete outside the kitchen. He uncoiled the garden hose and began drenching it thoroughly. In the room Tom showed me where he had glued together the split wood of the door frame, explaining that he had used longer screws than before to make sure the hinges would hold. Then he tested the door to show that it would open and close properly. ‘You try it,’ he suggested.

I stepped forward, turned the handle, opened the door wide, then gently shut it again, letting my hand rest on the handle. ‘Seems to be okay.’ He was standing directly behind me, very close, smelling faintly of aftershave or cologne. He reached forward and put his hand over mine, pressing downwards until the latch clicked; in concert we opened and closed the door again. Our shoulders touched, and the side of his chin brushed against my cheek as he leaned against me. I turned round in his arms to see that his face, like mine, was full of smiles. There was something we could do together to purge the room of the desecration it had suffered. We locked the door in case Darren came upstairs looking for us.