Page 21 of Sunshine Boy

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Julian was out of this world. That gig had been something else entirely, and it was mostly due to the frontman’s brilliance. Rahul had matched him as best he could, but it was always Julian at the front and Rahul bringing up the lead. He had been floored by Julian’s otherworldly magnificence. The way he’d moved, the way he’d met Rahul bar for bar, note for note, every match a challenge, every sync a triumph. When they’d battled each other on that stage, he’d lost himself in Julian. He’d played to his demands, teased his desires, met him beat for beat. His body had been Julian’s, his every essence at his whim. He’d been an extension of him, another set of arms, a third leg. He’d let Julian play him like an instrument and he’d loved every Goddamned second of it. Now that they were off the stage, he missed it. He longed to be back there. He wanted Julian to use him all night long, to take from him what he needed, to never stop. God, Julian, don’t stop.

But it was over. The gig had ended. They were on the floor now, mingling with their fans. Their fans, can you believe it! People who loved them enough to stay after the show and meet them, buy their demo, try and shag them. Rahul was drunk on it before he’d even gotten wasted on pints courtesy of their admirers. They usually headed off to the Barber after their gigs to celebrate, but how could they resist the charming, attractive, young people who begged them to stay and who found everything they said fascinating? Rahul found himself speaking at length about the scat movement in jazz and they were listening. Not only listening, but they seemed interested, fascinated even. He caught Julian’s eye from across the bar, where he was sat surrounded by his own posse, all of them clinging just as tightly to his every word. They couldn’t help giggling at one another. This was the dream, wasn’t it? This was what musicians, pop stars, aspired to. This was what could go to their heads and make them believe they were gods instead of nearly homeless layabouts who couldn’t hold down proper jobs.

Somewhere in the upheaval of the evening, Julian and Rahul found themselves exiting the Mango at the same time, both of them clearly escaping their entourages. In the sobering chill of the February night air, they looked at each other and couldn’t help dissolving into helpless fits of amazed laughter. Julian produced two cigarettes and divided them between them. As he lit them with his battered old Zippo lighter, Rahul’s tipsy mind focused unfairly on the dark fan of his lashes over his sharp cheekbones. He was tatted out more so than usual tonight. His sequined jumpsuit was new, a different, fresher model than his usual, and over it he wore a flamingo-pink coat of soft ostrich feathers. He’d clearly been shopping recently, though where he’d gotten the money from was anyone’s guess as he’d been skint since the month began, complaining regularly about being unable to make his rent. That was the problem with Julian -- if he found a fiver in his pocket, he was bound to spend it on glittery tat before he did anything useful with it.

They hadn’t even finished lighting their cigarettes before they heard a vicious, catcalling whistle. They both turned to see a trio of oiks approaching, their swaying broadcasting their intoxication.

“Oi, lads,” the leader of them slurred, his shorn head glistening with the slow-falling drizzle. “Get a butcher’s of the poofter. Givin’ your AIDS to this Paki then, eh?”

The leader’s gang snickered unkindly as Rahul’s cheeks heated up. Any one of those words usually sent him into a spiralling panic attack. Altogether, they made him feel ashamed and dirty. Especially for Julian, whom he knew their cruel jibes were mostly aimed at. He burned with impotent rage and, worst of all, embarrassment.

But when he turned to Julian, he found the boy grinning ferally, staring down the hooligans with something akin to madness. “Yeah I’m a bloody poofter. I fuck men. I fuck women. I’m full of diseases. I’m an East End pigeon with one foot. I’m a punk rocker tube rat whose tail got chopped off in a train door. I eat syphilis for breakfast. I listen to the Buzzcocks, then go round and suck your dad off.”

Rahul was too busy gaping at Julian to react when the thug got up in Julian’s face, seething and sputtering with red cheeks. “The fuck you just say, you bloody bender?”

Without warning, Julian spat right in the lad’s eye. He recoiled as if poisoned and rubbed furiously at it, his goons surrounding him as if trying to come to his aid.

“I’m gonna fuckin’ kill ya!” the harassed hooligan cried out. The three of them assembled, fists raised, and Rahul knew from experience what came next. A thorough beating. Julian obviously came to the same conclusion, because he grabbed Rahul by the elbow and legged it.

They ran for blocks, the thugs on their heels. Even in cumbersome platform boots it was hard to forget that Julian had been in the football club. Rahul was wheezing as Julian’s long, toned legs carried them past street after street. They turned a sharp corner and Julian dragged them into a narrow alley between shops. He shoved Rahul against the brick wall and put a cool, soft hand over his mouth.

They held their breaths. The only sound Rahul could hear was the pounding of his heart in his ears. Not a second had gone by before the gang barrelled past the entrance to the alley, hollering about how they were going to murder that bleeding poofter and his Paki mate. The sound of their boots against the pavement and their indignant exclamations faded into the night.

Even after their echoes had long dissolved into the darkness, Rahul and Julian still stood perfectly still, tensed and poised for flight. As the minutes ticked by, Julian finally released Rahul, though he wasn’t able to go far. The alleyway they had ensconced themselves in was hardly four feet wide. Even with his flamingo-pink back pressed against the opposite wall, Julian was still close enough for Rahul to feel the waft of his laboured breaths. They held each other’s gaze for a single moment, a moment filled with the same electricity that banded them together on stage. And then they burst out laughing.

They laughed long and hard until tears streamed down their cheeks and their ribs protested.

“Did you see the looks on their faces?” Julian wheezed.

“You’re mental, did you know that?” Rahul managed to get out.

“I reckon it was the Buzzcocks that did it,” Julian said, clutching his laughter-wracked stomach.

“Fuck the Buzzcocks, that was all you! You were bloody magnificent!” Rahul exclaimed, grabbing Julian’s narrow shoulders in his hands and shaking him. He couldn’t explain in that moment how deeply he admired and loved Julian. Just then, there was simply no other person in the world who was as tremendous, as brave, as gorgeous. He tried to express that sentiment in the way he shook him, in the squeeze of fingers into the softness of his new coat, in the way he looked into Julian’s twinkling eyes.

The laughter between them died like the last rays of evening sunlight. Suddenly, they were just two young men standing in front of one another, too close to be just friends, too far to be lovers, looking at each other with an intensity that couldn’t be so easily explained away. Rahul focused incongruously on the way Julian’s mascara had streaked down one of his cheeks. He couldn’t let go of Julian’s shoulders. His stomach twisted as he recognized the heat that emanated off of the young man’s slender body, warming him in the cold of the dying winter. Julian swayed in his grip, leaning ever so subtly forwards. Is this what happened before a kiss? Neither one of them was drunk enough for it. It would never hold up under their unspoken set of rules. Rahul swallowed, his saliva thick in his throat. If he kissed Julian right now, would Julian pull away? If he told him he loved him, still loved him, had never stopped loving him no matter how hard he’d tried, no matter how much he’d convinced himself he loved Henri instead, would Julian remember? Would he hold it over him? Would he care? Would he let Rahul push him back against that brick wall and ravish his mouth?

“I should go,” Julian slurred, stumbling away, though a sly smirk still played on his feline lips.

“You all right to get home?” Rahul asked, earnest concern pushing aside any sinful thoughts.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” Julian waved his concern away like flies in the air. “I’ve gotten myself home in worse states than this.”

“That’s not as comforting as you’d think.”

“Rahul.”

“Mm?”

“I’ll see you tomorrow, yeah?”

Rahul had nearly forgotten. His heart sped up anew, fantasies of pressing Julian up against the wall of the alley still fresh in his mind. “Y-yeah. Tomorrow. I’ll see you then.”

“Not if I see you first.” Julian walked backwards, maintaining eye contact even as his heel caught in a gap between the pavement.

“That doesn’t make any sense, Jules.”