Free The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh Page B

black-painted
    cave, walls lined by racks half filled with lolling albums. The counter was far forward, maximum storage minimum display,
    no room for browsers. An arch behind the counter was
    screened by a fringed, plastic red, white and blue curtain, the kind common to butcher’s shops; beyond it the glow of a
    computer screen. Pornography’s new frontier. A sign by the
    counter read, We have thousands of items in stock not on display. If you don’t see what you’re looking for - ask. Above the records, shelves of videos. I slid one out …featuring real girls from Glasgow. Why not Real Girls from Rio? Taut, tanned buttocks
    losing out to the Pilsbury Dough cellulite of the girl next
    door. It cheered me to think that given a choice the average Scottish pervert wanted to wank to the robust Scottish girl in the street. Then I wondered if all straight men liked these bigbusted, well-fed young women, or if it was just the perverts.
    The thought depressed me again.
    The curtain parted. A young boy in a khaki shirt stood
    regarding The from the archway, the fringes draped round his shoulders like a patriotic veil. Youth wrapped in the flag of the Empire. He was handsome. Dark like the black Irish,
    saturnine. Shoulder-length hair, sensitive mouth, pale-blue
    eyes, translucent and impossible.
     
    I was too old to call it love at first sight, but I had all the symptoms. People have died for love, they have lied and cheated and parted from those who loved them in turn. Love has
    slammed doors on fortunes, made bad men from heroes and
    heroes from libertines. Love has corrupted, cured, depraved
    and perverted. It is the remedy, the melody, the poison and the pain. The appetite, the antidote, the fever and the flavour. L
    Kills. Love Cures. Love is a bloody menace. Oh, but;, while it lasts. The world faltered on its axis, then re customary gyration, a place of improved possibi’
     
    `Can I be of some assistance?’ His tone didn’t fit the look or the venue.
    I smiled, wondering if my face was changing, taking on a lupine stretch. Beware the wolfinan. `My name’s Rilke. I have an
    appointment.)
     
    ‘My name’s Derek. Who’s your appointment with?
    He made eye contact, raising his eyebrows slightly. Was he
    flirting with me? I felt the old stirring in the groin but all that showed was I wanted him.
    The straights think that we have some kind of radar, that
    there are signals we give off, a mode of dress, style of
    conversation. `Dear boy’ said Francis, fingering his green carnation and smoothing the lapels of his bespoke suit, `tell me, do you have many Judy Garland CDs?’ Well, of course there is a place for that, but it’s never been part of my technique. I prefer a more straightforward approach. What hinders me is the old question: is he queer? I saw this boy and wanted to take him by the
    hand, lead him out into the street to my room, any room, and strip him naked.
    `Is your appointment with anyone in particular??
    ‘Just ask around in the back, son. There’ll be someone
    there who wants to speak to me.’
    I glanced through the stock while I waited. It’s a common
    emotion, a distaste for sex that doesn’t turn you on. It was too much for me, the lushness of the images. Bigbusted, largebottomed women bent forward grasping their bosoms, legs
    stiff, rears raised like stretching cats’, glossed lips slightly parted, as if this was the most erotic moment of their lives.
    For all I knew, it was.
    I wondered if there was anyone I knew featured in Real Girls from Glasgow. I left the videos and picked up a magazine. The
    same girls-next-door, this time legs splayed in alarming
    Technicolor. I was peering through my magnifying glass,
    trying to discern whether the images had been tinted, when I heard the voice from the telephone.
    `You have to be careful where you put the staples in some
    of these.’
     
    He came forward to greet me, hand outstretched. A
    thin man in his fifties, about five eight, white hair