London Triptych (10 page)

1998

Being in prison has
hardened me, it’s true. I realize now how much I needed it, because I thought I had it, but I didn’t, I didn’t know a thing about survival. I do now. You’ll no doubt want to know all about how I survived in here, what I’ve done to survive in a place like this. All I can say is, I did. I have.

I never wanted to need anyone, nor for anyone to need me. I thought it was best to travel light, never get too close. The lifestyle I chose for myself kept boredom at bay, but more importantly it kept intimacy at bay too. Everyone I knew was busy avoiding it: Edward with his twin beds, Lilli with her violent mood swings. Whoring diminished the chances of intimacy. I didn’t consider the sex I was having to be in any way intimate, and that was the way I liked it. I never had relationships, very rarely going past a one-night stand—certainly no more than twice. I had more intimacy with some of my regular clients, though it was a sham, for I told them nothing true about my life if I could help it, and yet I might end up knowing virtually everything about them. One of my earliest clients, soon after moving to London, was a black choreographer who asked in a plaintive voice as we began having sex, “Can I be your friend?” Inwardly, I recoiled in horror from his naked desperation, while outwardly I said, “Sure.” He paid me with a cheque that bounced and, remembering where he had told me he was rehearsing, I went around there and demanded cash. He was genuinely shocked to see me and gave me the money straight away. I never saw him again, and I always insisted on payment in cash from then on.

London made me, but it made me invisibly, like a roll of film that once developed reveals nothing more than an identical series of blanked or blurred over-exposures. I try to think back to when I first arrived, and I find myself holding onto pictures with my own face cut out, a resistance of memory that just leaves me guessing. My body feels as grubby as the notes for which it was exchanged, my heart as shopworn.

The hotels exist—I can take you there—where I stripped and revealed nothing real about myself, where I pressed my body into servicing a fraudulent intimacy that depleted my resources for real love. The affluent houses, the council flats, the restaurants and cinemas and parks, all can be found in any
A–Z
, if you care to look; but what went on there, and who I was, have been lost forever. The deaf man in jam-jar glasses whose hearing-aid screamed all through the comical sex we performed, who got me to piss on him in his muck-ringed bath, before fucking him with a dildo as he screamed, “Oh, you bastard, oh, you bastard,” with each thrust. The Hungarian hunchback who still lived with his mother at the age of fifty, and who fellated me so inexpertly I had to smack his head and snarl, “Watch the teeth!” The film distributor whose flat in Surrey Quays, all cream shag pile and mirrored wardrobe doors, was the place in which I experienced my first kiss with a client, an act which haunted my dreams for weeks afterward, bringing with it each time the acrid stench of his aftershave and the blunt stab of his rigid little tongue. Or the old hippie in Kensal Rise, who would be blindfolded in a chair when I arrived, door on the latch, and who would lick my boots till he came and then smoke a joint with me afterward. A man in Cricklewood wanted nothing more than to sit in a wornout old armchair in his garage masturbating through his trousers while I punched him repeatedly in the stomach as he yelled, “Harder!”

Like the bandages on the Invisible Man, I remove these stories to reveal nothing but a shocking absence.
My
absence. My words unravel and expose beneath their covering anonymous air, through which you can pass your hand. I am not here. These words can only explain how I disappeared completely, how I moved through this city like a ghost.

It is right that a man who turned away from his family should end up with no family. My mother’s death remains too abstract, and my own present too painful, for me to grieve. Although I’m sure I will. I know now that grief cannot be avoided. Not even by the most selfish.

I can see the sky getting lighter through the window. Inexorably.

1894

Today I helped Oscar
write one of his smutty books. He told me it’s a game he plays with some friends. He explained that they take it in turns to write a chapter and pass it on. Today he wrote his contribution with the script spread out across my bare arse. He read the filthy passages out to me as soon as he had written them and reached his hand around to see what reaction it had on me. If my rod wasn’t stiff, he crossed out what he’d written and started again. When I complimented him on a particular passage, I’m not ashamed to say that he claimed my own sweet arse had been his inspiration.

I told him today as he lay with his head on my bare buttocks that I try and remember the funny things he says so I can use them for my own, but that I always forget them. He kissed my rump and said, “Jack, my dear boy, a sense of humour cannot be coutured; it has to be cultured, like a pearl.” And with that he buried his face between my cheeks as if he were diving for pearls, and we were off for a second coming.

He also likes to pen short lewd plays for me and the other boys to act out before a small select audience of his friends. They’re always hilariously debauched versions of classic plays whose titles he reworks.
’Tis a Pity He’s Not a Whore
and
He Stoops To Be Conquered
. Last time we performed one in French called
Nostalgie de la boue.
There weren’t many words in it, thankfully. I played the part of a bored and decadent aristocrat who seeks adventure with some stable boys. I asked him in bed afterward what the title meant and he said, “It means ‘a longing for filth,’ Jackie. Isn’t that the very essence of life?”

I love these performances. Oscar always insists on the authenticity of our costumes and dresses us up early in the afternoon in order to spend a couple of hours getting a photographer friend of his to take our likeness. He gave me one of himself yesterday. He wrote on it, “
To Jack, my favourite writing desk, O
.
W
.”

This afternoon, after he’d dropped the manuscript off at a bookshop in the Strand, he whisked me off in a hansom to a travelling circus in Smithfield.

“I’ve something to show you which might amuse you as it amused me, or disturb you forever and haunt your dreams. We shall see.”

I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that, but as always my curiosity got the better of me.

“What is it, Oscar?” I asked, “Where are we going?”

But he wouldn’t tell me. “Patience, pretty one, patience,” was all he would say.

During the entire journey he refused to tell me anything of where we were going, and when I saw that it was a circus I was ecstatic. I had always wanted to go to the circus but could never afford it—had only snatched brief glimpses by sneaking in, before being caught and hurled out. But then to my disappointment he marched me past the entrance to the big top and led me behind the giant circus tent to where there were stalls in rows selling all manner of things, gingerbreads and whelks. The air stank of straw and dung mixed with fish and tobacco, of sweat and burnt potatoes, and this mix of scents carried upon its back a cacophony of sounds. Mountebanks stood sentry outside each small tent shouting for attention, their voices cutting across each other in a storm of exaggerated claims, like gamblers raising their bets ever higher, shouting things like, “From darkest Africa,” “Ferocious as a tigress and captured in the forests of India,” “You will not believe your eyes, ladies and gentlemen: from our very own London town a specimen the likes of which ... ,” and so on. Gaudy placards displayed portraits of the tents’ inhabitants. Human freaks. There was the bearded lady, the human skeleton, Siamese twins, pinheads and dog-faced boys, dwarves and tattooed ladies. I’d heard of such things, but had never been to one. I had seen the drawings of the Elephant Man in the news-sheets but had imagined the pictures a fraud.

A hurdy-gurdy played somewhere, sinister in its cheerless monotony. Boys and girls laughed and screamed, women and men cried and swore, bells were rung, and applause from the Big Top cut through the sounds surrounding us. One by one, Oscar led me in and out of the tents, and as I observed the freaks he observed me, amused by my awe and horror. I saw a woman with three legs, the third growing atop her right thigh, hanging there smaller, thinner, useless. I saw a boy with thick, coarse fur covering his entire face, a woman with a black curly beard down to her waist, another with every inch of her flesh coloured with flowers and dragons and scrolls and mythical creatures, a beautiful mermaid curving down her back.

“Is a mermaid a woman with a fish’s tail or a fish with a woman’s torso?” Oscar quizzed me, and I couldn’t for the life of me come up with an answer.

I saw a hermaphrodite, half-man, half-woman, its breasts and penis on display.

“Tell me, Jack, what is the opposite sex for a hermaphrodite?” Oscar teased.

I saw two little girls, Sadie and Maisie, whose shaven skulls tapered to a point, accentuated by a tiny sprig of hair tied in a ribbon. I saw a fully grown man no taller than a child, his voice a squeak, and a girl whose skin was spotted like a leopard and who snarled and scratched the earth in her pen like a wild thing. I saw a boy with big pink lobster claws where his hands should be, scissoring them open and closed, open and closed, his face a mask of boredom. There was a human giant who towered above us, making even Oscar look small in comparison.

“Do you think he’s all in proportion?” I said.

Then Oscar said, tipping me a wink, “I wonder how much it would cost to find out.” He offered the giant ten shillings, and without wasting any time he had whipped out the biggest I ever saw. He said that for an extra five shillings we could hold it, so Oscar paid up and we took the heft of it in our hands. It started to grow, but we heard some other people entering the tent and the giant had to put it away and we left.

In the next tent we saw a hunchback, almost folded double, buckling under the weight of his burden. Oscar told me that the French consider hunchbacks to be angels whose wings have yet to hatch and they touch the hump for good luck. I placed my hand on it, expecting soft, feathery turnings beneath, but nothing stirred. Next were two boys joined at the hip, their torsos springing from the same waist, sharing everything from the navel down, though their upper halves branched off to form two separate individuals. I wondered what it’s like to live like that, to feel so divided within one body. As we left Oscar turned to me and said, “You know, Jack, there are those who would have the likes of you and me exhibited in such a show as that—those for whom our love is a monstrous thing, a grotesquery to be mocked and spat at and rejected from the human world. Such people are the enemy; they believe only in what can be seen with the naked eye, never thinking for themselves nor imagining anything other than what they can see and comprehend. They have the imagination of cattle. Never forget, you are a freak in this world the minute you think for yourself, the moment you act on desires not deemed worthy of this shoddy herd. Take pride in that.”

I looked at him, not really grasping what he was saying, hearing only the words “our love,” though trying hard to look as if I understood. “And never forget that the role of the freak is to sustain the illusion that such a thing as normality even exists in this world. Yet we know better, don’t we, my friend? We know that the role of the paradox, be it one of flesh or word, is to reveal the anomalies that parade as truth, to declare the freaks as the true rulers of the earth.”

And then, hailing a cab, he said, “I hope you enjoyed our little excursion. Now I, for one, am ravenous. Let’s eat, then fuck.” He never fucked, he didn’t like to fuck, though he loves to use the word, he says, because it tastes so good in the mouth.

As we rode back to Taylor’s place he carried on talking. I was amazed at first that he bothers to talk in such a way in front of me, for he must have known I was incapable of understanding the most of it, but I think he uses me to rehearse, like an actor, for the evening to come, when he dines with and entertains important people. In front of me he’s just trying out his speeches, trying out his words, but I don’t mind; in fact it’s like watching someone perform on a stage, truth be told.

“There is a way of living that’s completely outside the law; there’s a world in which you can do whatever you want, a world of no laws but those of the body, no government but that provided by your appetites. You can be free, free to pursue any desire, acquire any knowledge. It’s the most terrifying place to live. It’s dangerously beautiful, this way of life, dangerous the way only beauty can be, that is, blindly refusing to see the full extent of the danger.”

This is the kind of thing he comes out with all the time, and it’s both fascinating and irritating in equal parts.

The thing is, I’ve never met anyone before who I wanted to
be
. I’ve met people who made me laugh, people who impressed me, but the majority I try my hardest to be unlike.

I reckon most for fools or hypocrites, just like Taylor said I would, but never before have I looked at another’s life and thought, that’s exactly what I’d like to be. Would like to be but know I never could be.

When it’s just the two of us, on those occasions when Lord Muck isn’t around, Oscar seems so much happier, and I am too. It feels different somehow, less sordid, less like a financial transaction. And though part of me likes the adoration, still, when I’m alone I find myself vowing never to let him make me feel that way again, cursing myself for my sentimental weakness.

1954

I was carted off
to boarding school at such a preposterously young age that I cannot now recall anything about my life before that, try as I might. Fleeting scenes of ambrosia, paradise lost, Eden before the fall, that kind of thing. An innocent brightness before the descent of darkness, like a last glimpse of sun from the edge of a cloud as it sinks out of sight. Boarding school is not a place for children. Indeed, one is actively discouraged from being a child the minute one arrives. One must replace joy with discipline, freedom with submission, and curiosity with a deadened obedience to umpteen rules and regulations, facts and figures. It is a painful process, growing up by force, becoming an adult at the age of six, becoming a “little man,” as they called us. How we became little men, though, was through a brutalisation of the highest order. If you weren’t willing or able to beat others into submission, you were beaten into submission yourself. I was weak by nature and physically small for my age and so it was my lot to suffer during my time there, caught as I was between the barbarity of the staff and the decadence of the older boys. I think now that I and the other weak boys were punished for not conforming, or for not being able to conform. I never breathed a word of it to my parents and, of course, my experience of boarding school made me long to conform even more, rather than the reverse. I used to pray every night for God to kill me, or save me. When he did neither, I became an atheist. Since that time I’ve never once doubted the non-existence of God.

The sexual indignities I had to endure at the hands of the older boys were made even more unbearable by the fact that, for the most part, I took a shameful delight in them. I even looked forward to some of the encounters, had crushes on some of those older boys, though none ever showed me a scrap of affection.

The only thing about becoming an adult that I rushed toward with open arms was that I would no longer suffer the brutality of school and could blot the experience from my memory, along with my desires. Life seemed so much easier for adults. In many ways, I was much more capable of conforming to the accepted behaviour of middle-class adults, though I say that with absolutely no feeling of pride whatsoever. I’ve always been too frightened to do anything else. My timidity shames me all the more since I met Gore.

Sis ut videris
was our school motto. “Be as you seem.” No pretence, no airs, no affectations. We would become good, solid, bourgeois men, reliable, capable, honest, and true. Masculine. Transparent.
Be as you seem
. Ah, but we seemed, and still do, so much less than we really are or might be. Right down to marrying Joan, I did exactly as expected. I moved placidly within the narrow parameters set down during my childhood. I never once questioned whether anything lay beyond, never dared articulate my own desires or ambitions. My only outlet from this prison has been art, though until recently I was never anything other than an observer. Once I’d left art school, outside of work I never picked up a pencil, let alone a brush. Although I still visited galleries voraciously, I no longer thought to sketch those paintings that moved me the way I had when I was young, let alone attempt to create my own. I had locked away my joy in creating art when I began working. And yet now I cannot stop, producing countless sketches, good sketches, and finding myself itching to work in oils. For the first time in I don’t know how long—perhaps ever—I feel exhilarated.

This morning I finally began to prepare for a large oil painting of Gore. I haven’t worked in oils for years, not since my art school days. The smell of the paints took me back instantly to a time when I was still able to dream of my life as an artist. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on preliminary sketches. A year ago I would never have believed that I would ever paint again.

I stretched the canvas myself, relying only on memory, and am quite proud of the results. After over thirty years I could still remember each stage of the process. When I touched the coarse fabric, the past contracted into an instant and I was full of youth and optimism and I felt a pang of pity for that young man I was and wished that I could speak to him now and tell him to follow his dream. In this life, dreams are all we have to remind us of who we really are or should be. How different my life would have been if I’d been strong enough to defy everyone in the pursuit of freedom. How difficult life is without the freedom to discover who you are meant to be. I refuse to believe I was meant to be so unhappy. Making that canvas this morning felt like an act of rebellion and, in choosing to portray a beautiful man in my painting, I feel another sense of vertigo. Freedom is always vertiginous, just like desire.

When you work as a designer you spend all your time pleasing others, those clients upon whose patronage you rely. It is, I suppose, a form of prostitution. You work hard at keeping them happy, doing what they want, at the expense of your own creativity. There is little scope for making
yourself
happy. Your happiness defers to that of another. The artist is as far away from this position as possible: the artist spends all his time and energy making himself happy. I please myself now. There is no one to tell me what to do, and that is quite frightening. Freedom is always frightening; that’s why most people choose not to be free. I wouldn’t say I’m any exception, but with these new paintings I’m planning, I feel as if I have no choice. I either paint what I see, the way I see it, or I don’t bother.

I’ve been thinking a lot about freedom since reading yesterday the outcome of the Montagu case. He has been given twelve months, whilst Wildeblood and Pitt-Rivers each received eighteen. Harsh sentences, I thought, though I’ve read of other men recently who have been handed seven years’ imprisonment for such activities. I worry about Gore. It’s a miracle he hasn’t been caught. Judging from the papers, the police must be everywhere. I wish there were some way to change the way the world sees us.