London Triptych

LONDON TRIPTYCH

Copyright
©
2010 by
Jonathan Kemp

First North American edition:
2013

Published originally in Great
Britain by Myriad Editions

All rights reserved. No
part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a license from Access Copyright.

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Dellow, Hulton Archive (Getty Images)

Library and Archives Canada
Cataloguing in Publication:

Kemp, Jonathan, 1967-

        London triptych [electronic resource] / Jonathan
Kemp.

Electronic monograph in ePUB format.

Issued also in print format.

ISBN 978-1-55152-502-0

        I. Title.

PR6111.E526L66 2013          823’.92          C2012-906808-X

For George Cayford

A man’s very highest
moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life.

—
Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

1954

Another arrest reported in
the papers this morning. Some poor sod caught in a public toilet. Hardly a week goes by without one. Now, I can’t claim to know much about it, but it seems to me that when old men hang around public toilets while younger men are pissing, we aren’t out for a glimpse of cock, or even a grope. No, in truth what roots us to the spot is the most profound feeling of envy because we can’t piss like that any more. Respect, even. When you reach fifty, it trickles out.

He pisses like a horse. I can hear him through the whole house. A veritable Niagara. It’s not a big house—he calls it “the doll’s house,” to my chagrin. Tall as he is, he’s forever banging his head on my lampshades and doorjambs, as I totter behind him. He strides through my tiny rooms with such confidence and familiarity, as if it were a castle and he its prince, and I feel like the valet who can call nothing here my own.

He has so much life in him that it’s made me realize for the first time that I am old. And it’s not a feeling I’m happy with. Not at all. It’s not something I ruminated on and came to a calm decision about. Not something I’ve been refusing to accept and can no longer hold in abeyance. I simply looked at my face in the mirror and said aloud, “You are old.” It’s not even the exterior that made me gasp with horror—the grey hair, the lined face, the tarnished eyes. These things I know. I see them every day. I can live with looking old, just about. Or at least I could, until recently. But I have met a boy whose youth makes me feel ancient to the very core, ossified and pointless. That’s what made me smart.

When I first saw him, a month or so ago, I thought him quite the handsomest boy I’d seen in a long time. He wears his hair slicked into a quiff, and sports the general attire of what a newspaper last year nicknamed Teddy Boys. But when he removed his clothing I realized for the first time what I’d been missing in a model: someone who shines more when they are nude than when clothed. Skin with light trapped beneath it. Skin that looks complete, rather than exposed; that looks painted, full of colour and life, blood blue and flesh pink. Yellows, purples, whites. Tints I don’t know I could ever reproduce. Strangely, he seems more relaxed when naked, more himself, more at home in his flesh than in his clothes. And because of that you don’t really notice that he is naked.

His body is not exceptional, but he has tremendous definition, and a masculine grace that is best expressed by the word “noble,” if that doesn’t sound too grand. When he speaks, however, it is with the jagged edges of simplicity. And, while that is not without its charm, it is clear that the sophistication of his being is concentrated on the surface. All his grace lies there, beautiful and richly visible. Within is merely an embryonic soul, his speech suggesting nothing but the workings of a half-grown heart.

In the presence of such concentrated beauty, I feel inspired for the first time in eons: inspired to capture it in all its complexity and texture, all its pale beauty. I fill acres of paper with his crouched figure, his legs bent and twisted beyond recognition, his spine an abacus, a string of pearls arching impossibly as he nearly swallows himself like Ouroboros. The damp, dark caves of his armpits. The hairless plateau of his belly, tight and contoured. The planed edges of his muscular buttocks, carved to Hellenic perfection. If I placed my tongue there, I should expect them to be cold and hard as marble. The masculine sweep from his hairline to the right angle of his shoulder as fluid and mesmerising as any waterfall; the line of gravity that runs the length of his torso, from the hollow of his throat to the jewel of his navel, cruciformed by the stigmata of his nut-brown nipples blurred with hair; the pucker of his anus like a knot in a tree.

I can’t help but wonder what it must feel like to be so exposed to the gaze of another, to know that you are being stared at and scrutinized. We seem to be obsessed with doing everything in our power to deny or avoid the thorny question of the body unclothed, except perhaps in art. All we have now is shame, and fig leaves, and sniggering like schoolgirls. All we have is prudery. How then does this young man feel, spread out before me? How can he not feel shame? I wonder.

After he left today, I walked into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror, and it was then that I muttered like an incantation the words
You are old
, the second-person address granting a distance that in no way diminished the painful truth. His presence diminishes me. And it is more than feeling too old to interest him sexually, and more than wanting my own youth back again: I am racked with envy that I am not him. They say desire and identification are almost indistinguishable, but I never understood it till I saw him in all his luminescence—a thing I have certainly never possessed. I removed my clothes and stood naked before the mirror, something I haven’t done for at least forty years. It shocked me, suddenly, to reflect that at no point in my life, beyond that curiosity which adolescence precipitates, have I paid any attention to my body. I looked at my reflection, at my rounded, narrow shoulders with their tufts of grey hair, my rotund belly, my shrivelled privates, my stick-white legs, and I felt nothing but a deep, vertiginous sadness.

There comes a time in life when youth becomes just a word; a word whose meaning you almost feel impelled to look up in a dictionary, so strangely does it sit upon the tongue. I think it was Oscar Wilde—or was it George Bernard Shaw?—who said that youth is wasted on the young. And he was right. You look back on your own youth and view it with the eyes of another person, and it seems as foreign as another country, as distant as a star.

But sometimes, if you are lucky, you are allowed to view another’s youth up close and scrutinize the glory and the invincibility of that infallible state. Perhaps that is why people have children. And, by the same token, that must be why childless old men like myself feel it all the more brutally, and crave it in others. I cannot now recall what it felt like to be young. I suppose that is because I was too busy
being
young to think about it. Or perhaps because my youth does not in truth warrant recollection. But I must have been a youth, at some stage in my life, all things considered! Must have been in some sense flawless and innocent—but again these are words whose definition evades me. Photographs must supply some clue. Almost another face entirely stares back at me though, from the few I do possess, never having liked to have my picture taken. I see in them a stranger, whose ways and wiles I no longer recollect; whose passions and fears are irretrievable now.

Christ, and I’m only fifty-four.

This young man has awoken me not to the value of my own youth, but to its tarnished loss and frivolous and unforgivable waste. He is a free spirit, as free a spirit as I have ever known, whereas I have never felt free. So, while his presence is a source of joy, it is also a source of incredible pain, throwing into stark relief the woeful inadequacies of my life.

1998

This night is the
place from which I must move forward. I’m to be released tomorrow and resume my life, yet there are so many questions crowding my thoughts as I recall the events that led me here. When I walk out of here tomorrow morning, I would like to feel I’d left it all behind, but I brought it all in here with me, and I’ll take it with me when I go. The past has a crushing substance. I’m on a tightrope, high above the ground, assailed by fear and panic, no safety net beneath me. I daren’t look down and I daren’t look back. I don’t know what tomorrow looks like. But I need to try, at least, to understand. I need you, of all people, to understand me. It’s because of you, after all, that I ended up in prison. But one of the many lessons I learnt in here is that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

This is for you, Jake. I never told you much about my past during the brief time I knew you. One of the great things about our time together is how in-the-moment it all was, how little we actually shared about our lives outside of the here and now of our bodies together. Not that we didn’t speak, but somehow our childhoods, our pasts, never surfaced much as a topic of conversation. I’ve tried my best to erase mine, and not to have to speak of it to you was something I cherished. So this is for you, whether you read these words or not.

It’s for me too, of course, though for completely different reasons.

As children, my elder brother and I, together with a group of other kids, would play on a nearby railway track, by a tunnel through which goods trains would occasionally pass—great rusting hulks of metal following one another in single file. We played chicken, standing on the tracks for as long as we dared as the train hurtled toward us. I always won, was always the last one standing there as the train rammed its way nearer. Every time, the others would flee to the sides of the track, leaving me alone, my heart racing. I can still remember watching the front of the train darken as it passed from sunlight into the black mouth of the tunnel. Only then would I run to the sidings. This wasn’t an act of bravery. It took no courage on my part, because I didn’t care that the train might pulverize me. I just wanted the rush that came from imagining my flesh spread across the front of that train. Even then, at that age, I used danger as a way of escaping boredom.

Growing up, I wanted for nothing. I had any toy I desired. I had affection, security, I never went hungry, my parents never missed a birthday, never neglected or beat me. In fact, they gave every sign of loving me—or if they didn’t love me they certainly knew their duty and performed it well. They were good parents, and I was a good boy, an angel—never getting into trouble, never offending, always polite. Not because I wanted to be good, particularly, but because it was easier than doing anything else. Nothing existed for me—nothing real anyway. Fuelled by television, books and, most importantly, music, I constructed another place, a place I could value. In that tiny village I was cursed to endure, life was a thing with no value. The people around me seemed to live their lives like a person with one foot nailed to the floor, inscribing a perfect circle in the rotten earth and calling it home. Not only were the houses where we lived semi-detached, so were most of the lives. I longed to escape.

The lights have just been put out. I can hear my cellmate, Tony, beneath me, beginning to snore as he slides into sleep. Before long he’ll be snoring louder than a sow in labour, and I envy him that sweet release into oblivion. He’s from Hornchurch. In for stealing a car. He’s not been here long, and no real friendship has developed between us. I’ve struggled to find some common ground, but every conversation gets beached by our differences and our inability to communicate. I’ll probably never see him again. And I probably won’t sleep tonight. Too many memories crowding in, vying for attention.

As if that ever did any good, raking over the past.

Because I’d spent my childhood doing more or less exactly as I was told, it was assumed that I would continue to do so. On the night before I had to confirm my O-level options, my father mapped out the entire geography of my future. I was told what I would do with the rest of my life. And the flatness of the terrain he described made me despair. He wanted me to have a secure future. He wanted me to become an accountant, or at least “in business” at some level. Something secure, something steady and lucrative. My father, who was a bank manager, not just by profession but also by nature, spoke to me that night as if he were turning me down for a loan. The subjects I loved—art and English literature—were not considered at all, while the subjects I hated—mathematics and economics, physics and chemistry—were attached to me like shackles. I nodded as he spoke, and the narrowness of my future oppressed me.

When my father was a baby, his mother taped his ears back onto his head while he slept in his cot in order to prevent them folding forward and sticking out permanently.

Sometimes, it seemed to me as if that tape had never been removed, and it prevented him from hearing anything I said. Each morning the same routine: he’d slice twenty discs of banana onto his cereal, and if, after twenty, he had a stump of fruit left, he would look up forlornly, unsure what to do with the excess. My mother would hold out her hand for him to drop it into her cupped palm. If he were ever to articulate what he feels about life, I’m certain he would claim that habit is the only route to happiness, or at least success.

My mother, in her own way, was equally taped down. Her overwhelming desire for an easy life rendered her incapable of contradicting anything he said. A more repressed human being I’ve yet to meet. She died three months after I was sent here. Cancer. I still haven’t cried about it. I’ve cried about lots of things, myself mostly, but not her. I’ve had one visitor. An old client, now more of a friend—Gregory. Over the past year or so, he’s come here regularly, almost like my confessor. I told him I hadn’t kept in touch with my family at all, and he said I should write. I did, knowing they wouldn’t have moved address since I left. The first letter from my father told me about my mother.

It didn’t occur to me at the time that I had any other option than to accept—or at least to give the appearance of accepting—their terms. From that point until I completed my O-levels two years later, I began a life of duplicity in order to survive. Lies became my way of cheating boredom, the portal I would crawl through to reach a world in which I could breathe.

To the outside world—and, most importantly, to my parents—I was the perfect scholar. Although I hated the subjects they foisted upon me, I knew the secret to an easy life lay in doing well at school, for the time being at least. So I spent my days studying maths and economics, and I spent my nights with my friends—and they were not the sort of people of whom my parents would have approved.

A school friend of mine, Phil, was working at the time in a small bistro in a posh part of town, washing dishes from seven till midnight, seven nights a week. Under the pretext of working there, I was able to stay out every night till late. Dad liked the idea that I was willing to work. In reality, far from spending my time elbow-deep in boiling suds and grease, I cycled each night to the local golf course, to meet a crowd with whom I could smoke and drink myself into oblivion. There was Spike, with his skinhead and boxer’s brawn, whose stepfather was forever in and out of prison and whose mother was too pissed to care what he got up to. Sometimes he would steal a car and drive us up to Saddleworth Moor. He was related to one of the victims of the murders that had taken place in the city in the mid-’60s, and he would take us to the spot he claimed the dead girl had been buried. Johnny, Spike’s cousin, had long hair and wore AC/DC T-shirts. His elder brother was a dealer, and he always had what seemed like an endless supply of dope and acid. The lights of the city hummed the colour of radioactivity as we drove back home. Heather, Johnny’s girlfriend, was all shaggy hair and denim. They both head-banged along to the loud rock music that was played in the car. But Julie was my favourite. Julie never head-banged. Julie looked like Marilyn Monroe, or so we thought. She confided in me once that she was actually trying her best to look like
Mike
Monroe, from Hanoi Rocks, but no one seemed to care much. She wore her hair impeccably bleached and her skirts explicitly short, and was known as the village bike because she let most boys do pretty much anything with her. Most of the time, though, she was Spike’s girlfriend.

I thought that only drugs or music could supply me with the transgressive thrill I sought. I never gave sex much thought. I had had a lacklustre and lustless grope with Julie one night before she and Spike started what my grandmother would quaintly call “courting,” but on the whole I knew even then that I preferred boys—knew that I would rather be kissing Spike. I hid this desire beneath a smog of drugs, claiming a cynical lack of interest in anything sexual, even though I imagined Spike naked and tied to my bed each time I masturbated. Spike and the others mockingly called me the Poet because books and the lyrics to songs—and the thoughts they inspired—were more important to me than trying to get laid. Whenever we got stoned, they would all sink into torpor around me while I grew more and more animated by my own fucked-up monologue, till one of them would shout, “Hey, Poet, fuckin’
can
it, will ya?”

Then I discovered whoring.

I wanted more than anything to leave this world behind, but not in order to destroy myself; only in order to find another world, one in which bodies glowed and danced like flames. Such a world is not found, however, but must be created anew each time we want to live in it. I know that much at least.