Last dance at the discot.., p.1
Last Dance at the Discotheque for Deviants, page 1
Paul David Gould is of mixed-race heritage and grew up on a council estate in Huddersfield. He studied Russian at the University of Birmingham, and spent four years in the former Soviet Union, where he made his start in journalism. His experiences of work, life and love in Russia have inspired Last Dance at the Discotheque for Deviants, his first novel. He works as a sub-editor on the Financial Times and lives with his husband in Brighton.
Contents
1 February 1993
2 Three years earlier
3 February 1993
4 Two years earlier
5 February 1993
6 February 1993
7 Eighteen months earlier
8 February 1993
9 Fourteen months earlier
10 February 1993
11 One year earlier
12 March 1993
13 March 1993
14 Six months earlier
15 March 1993
16 Three months earlier
17 March 1993
18 One month earlier
19 Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Supporters
For my beloved LAURENT,
with heartfelt gratitude for his support, patience and,
above all, for loving me enough to marry me
IN MEMORY
of my 1990s disco-going Moscow buddies
CHRIS GEHRING (murdered, 1997)
MARCUS MALABAD (deceased, 2020)
and ANDREJS ZAGARS (deceased, 2019),
who enabled my escape to Latvia
With special thanks to the following people for their generous support of this book
BOOKSHOP PATRONS
Dave Butko
Tom Dillon
Mark Gamble
Mrs Jay-Shelley Heathfield BaMA
Russell Mackintosh
Webster T. Mudge
Fr. Mulligan
Jervis Pereira
Melaney Pereira
Dino Sicoli
Mike Tomaino
Jaclyn Turner
Paul Turner
Tina Turner
PATRONS
Tony Aitman
Robert M Atwater
Debbie Elliott
Mike Griffiths
E Hall
Emilia Leese
Garry McQuinn
John Mitchinson
Tom Moody-Stuart
Jackie Morris
Matthew Newman
Elewa Otengi
Christoph Sander
Matthew Scott
Toni Smerdon
A NOTE ON RUSSIAN NAMES
All Russians have a middle name, a patronymic formed from their father’s first name – hence Ivanovich means ‘son of Ivan’, while Ivanovna means ‘daughter of Ivan’. Other patronymics include Mikhailovich, Sergeyevna, Borisovna and so on. When you use someone’s patronymic after their first name, it’s an expression of courtesy or of respect for their age or seniority. The tone is akin to addressing someone as ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’ (which in Russian are archaic words and almost never used, except sometimes for foreigners).
Russians also use diminutives of first names to indicate affection. Konstantin becomes Kostya; Dmitry/Dima; Galina/Galya. But younger people never address each other using patronymics, so characters in their twenties, such as Kostya and Dima, use only each other’s first names or diminutives. The older characters would expect to be addressed more formally (Tamara Borisovna, Stepan Mikhailovich, Galina Sergeyevna).
Pronunciation of Russian names:
Dima — DEE-ma
Oleg — al-YEG
Valery — val-YAIR-i
Borisovna — ba-REES-uv-na
Gennady — gi-NAH-di
Voronezh — va-RON-yesh
Igor — EE-gor
Kirill — ki-REEL
1
FEBRUARY 1993. Moscow
Dima
One week, three phone calls. That’s all it takes for him to realise he’ll never see his boyfriend again.
Wait … His ‘boyfriend’? Nah, make that his would-be boyfriend … Truth be told, he’d wanted to end it with Kostya, hadn’t he? And as for even referring to Kostya as his ‘boyfriend’, he’d prefer to say they’ve just been ‘seeing each other’. Goofing around, that’s all. Like he told him, last time they met, ‘Kostya, we live in Russia. Men can’t have boyfriends here.’
But this one week changes everything. Ending it with Kostya is no longer in his hands, only words snatched from his mouth to evaporate like breath in the freezing air. Just one short week in this long, long winter … It’s been months since the first snowfall, yet still Moscow’s sidewalks lie armour-plated with ice – ice now worn smooth by the feet of its shuffling, swaddled masses. And with no let-up in the blizzards laying siege to the city, fresh snow is piling up outside the window of the bedroom he’s rented these past two years.
It’s a room he’s always shared with Oleg, his ‘partner in crime’ – that being an English expression they’d picked up from bootleg pop videos. This one’s from that early 1980s song by Wham! that Oleg keeps playing. Last night, as the pair of them were getting ready to go out, they danced to it on the painted floorboards between their two single beds, and argued over which one of them looked more like George Michael and which of the British pop duo they most fancied.
Tonight though, Oleg’s gone out cruising without him; he’s not in the mood to hang around that seedy metro station again, trying to catch strangers’ eyes in pursuit of yet another one-night stand. Besides, it’s bothering him (uncool as it would be to admit it to Oleg) that Kostya hasn’t phoned. It’s been a couple of weeks since their showdown outside McDonald’s. At first, he felt sure Kostya was just sulking. Let him sulk, he thought, he’ll be on the phone soon enough, wanting to kiss and make up – I mean, the boy can hardly keep away from me.
Ever since they met at the end of October, Kostya has phoned him nearly every goddamn day, and begged to come and sleep over at least twice a week. Look, he’d told Kostya, he needed to ‘cool it’, but now – now that the phone calls have stopped – it comes as an affront. I’m the one who decides when I’ve finished with a guy, he thinks, not the other way around.
Still no call from Kostya. After a few days, he catches himself jumping up whenever the phone rings. But the calls are usually for Valery Ivanovich, the elderly widower who’s rented out his spare room to him and Oleg: calls from Valery’s daughter, reminding the old man how he has to move out, now he’s no longer fit to look after himself.
Only one call that week is for him. For a second, as he recognises Yuri’s voice down the phone, he thinks: forget Kostya, I’ve got Yuri. Tough, sexy Yuri, muscly and smouldering. OK, so Yuri can be a little controlling, he thinks, but he does look after me … This call, however, isn’t one of Yuri’s more ‘intimate’ summonses – it’s simply to remind Dima of the shoot he’ll be in that week and what gear he should wear for it.
The waiting becomes unbearable. He decides to phone. It’s been a while since he called; last time, though they’d never even met, he got such a frosty reception from Tamara Borisovna – God knows what Kostya’s mother could have against him, but in all the photos Kostya’s shown him she looks such a sour-faced prude. Anyway, since Oleg’s out, he’ll ask Kostya round tonight. Or suggest they go ice-skating in Gorky Park again. A little flirting, he thinks, and I’ll have Kostya eating out of my hand – I can pull any guy I want, so it shouldn’t be difficult.
He gets the answering machine. ‘You’ve reached Konstantin Krolikov and Tamara Borisovna Krolikova in Moscow. We can’t come to the phone, so please leave a message.’
Try to sound casual, he tells himself. ‘Hi, Kostya. Good evening, Tamara Borisovna. Dima here. Hey, Kostya, it’s been a while. How about getting together? Tonight even? Or this weekend? Let’s go ice-skating again – you liked that. How about it? Call me. Bye.’
No one phones back.
Two days later, when he calls the second time, the same. We can’t come to the phone … What? Why can’t they just say, ‘We’re not at home’? Or wait … what if they are at home but deliberately not answering? Maybe Kostya and his mum have one of those number display gadgets, like the one Yuri uses to screen incoming calls? Is Kostya avoiding him? So much for the boy he thought he had eating out of his hand …
I won’t have him ignoring me, he thinks – I know, I’ll conceal the number I’m calling from … And out he heads to the payphone down by the vodka kiosk. It’s dark on the street, the concrete of apartment blocks tinted yellow in the glow of street lamps. He looks up at the hundreds of windows, blind black squares by day, but now blazing with warmth as people hunker down with tea or vodka at their kitchen tables. Give it an hour, he thinks, and that’ll be me and Kostya. He’ll be round here in a flash, soon as I’ve called.
He keeps his warm woolly cap pulled down tight over his ears, but once inside the phone box, as he removes his gloves to dial, his fingers shrivel in the cold. His breath mists up the inside of the booth, blurring his view of the line for vodka outside: men with red faces and missing teeth who swear and spit and stomp their boots in the snow. The queue lengthens, creeping towards the payphone. They look to him like bomzhy, homeless rough sleepers.
This time, the dialling tone gives way to the sound of a phone being picked up at the other end. His frozen fingers force a fifteen-kopeck coin into the slot.
The voice that answers is barely a
‘Allo? Tamara Borisovna?’
Silence down the phone.
‘Allo?’ he persists. ‘Tamara Borisovna? Can you hear me? It’s Konstantin’s friend Dmitry, I’m calling from—’
Still a whisper: ‘Who?’
‘Dmitry. A friend of Konstantin. We’ve spoken on the phone before—’
‘Dmitry?’ She sounds dazed. ‘Kakoy Dmitry?’ What Dmitry?
He glances at the lengthening line for vodka. The booze-addled bomzhy are shuffling closer, rowdier by the second. ‘We’ve never met, Tamara Borisovna, but me and Kostya—’
‘Kostya? Oh, Kostya, Kostya … my Kostya …’
Her voice caves in – like it’s fighting for breath or something – and all he can hear, crackling down the line, is a sort of heaving, distant and strangled. He covers his other ear, trying to block out the howling of the wind and the ruckus in the vodka queue.
‘Tamara Borisovna, I don’t understand. Is something wrong?’
He catches another voice in the background, in the same room – not Kostya’s voice but a woman’s voice – and before he knows it this other woman, whoever she is, has grabbed the phone.
‘Young man,’ she says, abruptly loud and clear, ‘this is no time to be calling. Leave Tamara Borisovna in peace and don’t phone here again.’
She hangs up. The dead tone drills into his ear. Slowly, disbelievingly, he lets his hand, now numb with cold and still clamped to the receiver, drop limp and frozen to his side.
Tamara Borisovna
They were told to be at Paveletsky Station two hours before their overnight train. That’s how long it could take, she seems to remember hearing, for them to go over all the paperwork and to be sure of an appropriate space in the baggage car. In the end, the inspection took a cursory twenty minutes, and for most of those two hours the inspector’s office remained closed. For ‘technical reasons’, it said.
So she and Galina simply had to wait, choked by the stench of damp and train fumes, perched on the trunk she’d never properly unpacked during her time in Moscow. She sits in a daze, numb and stupefied at the indifference of the comings and goings brushing past her, of the voices echoing across the public address system. Every half-hour, Galina scuttles over to the station buffet, fetching cups of acrid black tea for her to warm her hands on.
Night has fallen by the time they’re ready for boarding. The platform is covered with patches of snow and ice. She forces herself to watch as two railway porters approach, wheeling what looks like a wooden crate. ‘Make way!’ the porters call in their quaint sing-song cry of ‘do-RO-gu! do-RO-gu!’, a call that disperses the crowd of fur hats and padded winter coats huddled alongside the waiting train. People do make way, thankfully. They don’t stare, not too much. In the dark, that wooden box could pass for almost any other cargo.
She buries her face in Galina’s shoulder. Thank God for her dear old friend rushing up to Moscow to be with her. That old saying, It’s times like these you find out who your friends are, keeps circling round her head. She wishes she could stop thinking it. Not that she isn’t grateful, rather that her gratitude brings none of the solace offered by that circling homily. The sobs come. Quietly this time, not like earlier. Galina’s so strong now, she thinks, it’s years since she went through this herself. Another wretched adage comes to mind – Time’s a great healer. No one’s said that to her yet. But then she’s hardly spoken these past few days.
More fur hats and quilted coats bustle past, people dragging suitcases, some of them on sledges, people puffing out steam as if imitating the trains. In their hurry to board, they pay her no attention, she’s invisible. Lucky them, she thinks. Oh, to be one of them, to be anyone but her. By now the two porters are reversing out of the baggage car, their cart empty, the fragile cargo loaded, along with her trunk, inside that windowless space.
*
It would’ve cost a week’s wages to get a compartment to themselves, so she and Galina end up sharing with two young men in their twenties, about Kostya’s age. Mercifully, the boys – malchiki, Galina calls them, being all motherly and taking charge – cease their honking and sniggering as soon as she pokes her head in. Thank God they’ve quietened down, she thinks. Still, the boys show the proper respect, giving up the more comfortable lower berths and stepping into the corridor to let the women change out of their street clothes.
She doesn’t bother though: this custom of changing into pyjamas and slippers on night trains is all well and good for going on holiday or for visiting loved ones. But not this trip. As Galina hangs up their coats, she sits by the window, twisting her hat in her hands. The radio babbles away. Funny how the radio’s always on in these trains, turned down low, like the lighting. She feels Galina slide up beside her and touch her arm. She stares outside, confronted with her reflection staring back at her, eyes downcast, cheeks pale and lined under limp, dark hair that she was once proud to call ‘curly’; hair that now straggles past her face.
Snow is falling. It looks like ashes drifting earthwards, fluttering in the lights of the railway yard. From unseen loudspeakers, departures and destinations are barked out like orders in a prison camp – destinations far from Moscow, places that are dull and provincial but less intimidating. Places with ties, like her own hometown, twelve hours south of here. The train jolts into motion: another step on this unbearable journey, and another wave of sobbing brims up inside her. Not here, she thinks, not in public. But she can’t stop herself. Let it all out, she’d told Galina all those years ago.
The door slides open. She sees the two boys, about to come back in. They freeze at the sight of her, a woman old enough to be their mother, convulsed and sobbing. Let them see me, she thinks, what do I care? Apologising, the boys retreat back into the corridor.
Jamie
There’s always some busybody telling him how his coat’s too thin for a Russian winter, and bloody hell, they wouldn’t be wrong – not today. Mind you, this was his own bright idea, so here he is, freezing his balls off, stood outside the Moscow Conservatory on a February afternoon. A few yards away, beneath the statue of Tchaikovsky, he sees bunches of flowers, frozen in the snow. That’d be a good sign, he thinks, folk still coming to leave flowers when it’s minus fifteen.
He’s chosen a day marking the centenary of Tchaikovsky’s death and can see by the pile of flowers spilling well beyond the base of the statue how much the Russians revere their beloved great composer. So it’s gonna take a hell of a nerve to go up to total strangers and ask them the kind of questions he has in mind …
His Russian is good, they tell him, good enough to turn on the charm. And he’s got his spiel worked out: ‘Excuse me, may I bother you a minute? – Izvinitye, vas mozhno na minutku?’ followed by: ‘I see you’re laying flowers in honour of Tchaikovsky … Ah, yes, of course, the centenary … So tragic, his early death …’
And then his killer question: ‘If Tchaikovsky were alive today, d’you think people would be more accepting of his homosexuality?’
He came up with it himself, this idea for a story (story, he reminds himself: don’t call it an ‘article’ if you wanna be a proper journalist) about Russians’ primitive attitudes towards homosexuality. There’s even a gay ‘scene’ of sorts in Moscow these days, but it’s tiny and underground, hidden away out of fear. Which makes him sometimes wonder why the hell he came back to Russia instead of staying put in England. Still, his pitch had gone down well with his editor: ‘Sounds like a great story,’ Bernie said, before sending Jamie out to canvass opinion on the street.
First up, a housewife: two shopping bags and a headscarf tied under her chin. He waits until she’s laid her bouquet and picked up her bags again. For a minute, his charm works, and she fairly gushes with pride: ‘Tchaikovsky? Oh, we worship Tchaikovsky!’
But when he poses his ‘killer question’, her smile vanishes. ‘A gomoseksualist? Why must you soil his name with that filth? You foreigners! No respect for our culture.’ And with that, she’s off, stupid cow, shouting back over her shoulder how ‘shameless’ he is.
Next, some old codger in an overcoat and wolfskin hat. The same questions and a similar response – ‘Homosexuals? Perverts! Ought to be castrated’ – only this time, the old git actually spits in the snow near his feet before storming off.
