CHAPTER SIX

Last night had started in typical Palace style. I was sitting on the fridge in the hall – don’t ask – just sitting there watching the world go by. Fag, glass, watch.

People come, people go, the fridge was a good place to hang out. The Palace equivalent of the water cooler.

A couple of characters came out of one of the rooms. Tonya and James. I love these two guys. They’re always on the look out, always game for it. Really I think the reason I liked them so much was cos I knew that they were a bit like me, part timers, not really part of the game. I don’t know how they ended up here, but they weren’t here for the long haul. Probably just hanging out till college starts or something.

Normally they play the club game, but tonight…. Tonight they looked special.

“How long have you been here?” I said to Tonya. I’d been there about six months and he’d been there longer than me. It’s funny. It sounded like I was asking about a prison sentence or something.

“Nah, I only came about a month or so before you. Sometimes it feels like forever but it feels like home, you know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean. You think you’ll know when enough is enough? When it’s time to stop the madness?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I think,” said James, “he means ‘What the fuck are we doing dressed up like this?’”

James had a point. Coming out of your room at The Palace was always a treat. You never quite knew what was going to happen. Tonya and James were sweet lads, an Aussie and a Brit. Both up for it, both nice boys on holiday. But James had a point.

They were trussed up in leather, in I don’t know, the sort of lederhosen you’d get in a sex shop if sex shops sold lederhosen. Maybe a Bavarian sex shop that catered for the S&M crowd. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the only kind of sex shop you got in Bavaria.

Why? What? Did it matter? I asked and they started telling me about how they were going to check out the gay bars cos they’d met some bloke who told them it was an easy way to make some dosh and… and… and…

Sometimes I didn’t know whether we were on Candid Camera or whether it was for real. Maybe it was one of those Japanese game shows where you had to undergo strange acts of sadism. There was that Clive James used to present called Endurance, I think. I used to write about them, thought they were rubbish, laughing at the funny foreigners. Curiously, I went from writing about them to appearing on one of them once. No, but really.