After Ted's Place

I do not have a problem with drink.

It’s some time during the second year of our what-may-or-may-not-be-a relationship. Summer, I’m listening to Radiohead’s Amnesiac. A lot. Knives Out. Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box.

The trip to Cambridge lies in my future, but it makes no difference. It was still to come, it’d already happened. Atwood is right. Time isn’t a line, but a dimension.

But I’m not moving faster than light, I’m not moving at all. I’m stuck, I’m on endless repeat. The CD is scratched. I’m a reasonable man, get off my case.

I do not have a problem with drink. But it’s mid-week, and I’ve travelled across London to see him. We’ve had dinner — he cooked it because he’s a good cook and while I can follow a recipe, I’m not — and we had wine and smoked a shitload of cigarettes because we’re just about still in our twenties and invincible. And then we go out.

We go to a bar, and then another bar, and then another, until most of the bars are closed or empty. And we don’t want to go home, because there’s no drink there, so we end up in ‘Ted’s Place.’

Neither of us have ever been to Ted’s Place before. It’s in West London, not far from where he lives. A tiny, dark space with a very late license and no clocks on the walls, and as well as the gay community it is a home for those who identify as trans, and ‘their admirers’.

We’re there because they’re serving alcohol when no one else is, but we chat to some of the regulars. It seems to be host to an older crowd tonight, and being relatively young, I guess, we are also relatively popular.

‘You like trannies?’ says one. The word is a slur now, but back then it wasn’t. Language changes, and he wasn’t being offensive.

He’s an older man, not trans himself. I can’t tell if he’s an admirer, or if this is just his local. He’s nice enough, though. He buys us drinks. Maybe he’s there for the same reason we are.

The person who at this point may or may not be my boyfriend flirts with him, but I don’t mind. One day I may be old too, I think. Who am I to begrudge a little contact with a hot young man in an underground bar at whatever-time-of-the-night-stroke-morning it is?

Besides, we have an open relationship, and — as I’ve been told repeatedly — this makes what he does none of my business.

Anyway, he might not even be my boyfriend. Or, at least, he might have been only in my head. Not in his.

I do not have a problem with drink. And yet the only thing I can remember about leaving the bar is that the sun was up, and when I wake an hour or two later the man is in bed with us and I have no idea what has happened.