London Triptych (19 page)

1895

This evening I went
for a walk around Piccadilly Circus and Soho for the last time. I’ve decided to leave London, and I wanted one more look at the old place. A thick smog had descended over the city like a shroud, a peculiar London smell of smoke and rain. The gas lamps hovered like jack-o’-lanterns. I made my way up Shaftesbury Avenue and into Wardour Street in the darkness of the badly lit thoroughfares. Several cafés flared with red gaslights, and as I passed them, I could feel the clouds of warm close air, reeking with tobacco and sour beer.

It was getting late and all the shops were shut except for the fish shops selling fried fish, mussels, and potatoes, throwing out a smell of dirt, grease, and hot oil, which mingled with the stench of the gutters and that of the cesspools in the middle of the streets. The mist was a fur that had grown on the still air like mould on bread, and I wore it like a coat, wrapped it around my shoulders as if I could take it with me anywhere. As I walked, I could barely see my hand in front of my face, but still they were out in force, all the painted, swishing boys peppering the fog with their jagged voices. I could hear them, even if I couldn’t see them.

“Like a baby’s arm it was, Doris, a baby’s arm holding an apple!”

“Christ, it’s colder than a witch’s titty out here.”

“Why not bugger off ’ome then, Mary?”

“She won’t budge. It’s the only time she has any luck, when they can’t see her face!”

Orange cigarette ends glowed and danced, and I could hear horses’ hooves nearby and stopped to avoid being run over. All of Soho was thronged with city life. I could hear drunken men rowing with their sluts and half-starved children singing obscene songs.

I made my way to one of my old haunts in Frith Street and was surprised to find it still open, so I stopped in for one for old times’ sake. I must have known every bastard in there, but not one of them returned my nod, and when the bar tart wouldn’t serve me I left in a temper, wanting desperately to punch someone. I’m glad I’m leaving tomorrow.

1954

I am losing him.
I know it. I have lost him. I have precipitated that which I most feared. It’s never enough, is it? You always have to grab for more, taking what isn’t yours and in the process losing what is.

I wanted a kiss.

I wanted him to kiss me.

Bloody fool.

This was something we never did. After that first time, sucking him had become a regular occurrence. Gore would get an erection and I would put down my drawing and sidle over. But today when he got hard, I didn’t stir. Didn’t respond on cue. Instead, I carried on drawing, sketching his phallus as rapidly as I could. Neither of us said anything, until he asked, “Don’t yer want to suck it, then?”

I paused, my mouth suddenly dry. Our eyes met.

“On one condition, Gore.”

“What?” he said warily.

“That you let me kiss you.”

He thought about it. If I had shocked him, he didn’t show it. His face was expressionless. His eyes held mine and I saw that familiar contempt grow. “All right,” he said.

I put down my drawing and shuffled over there as if I’d lost the use of my legs.

When I’d finished, with his sperm still fresh in my mouth, I raised my face to his and kissed him, pushing my tongue deep between his reluctant lips. And even though I could sense immediately that every cell in his body was recoiling in horror, I continued, exploring that sweet, sweet mouth. Perhaps I should have kissed him first, while he was still aroused, before his desire had been satiated. Perhaps then the added horror of tasting his own seed might not have contributed to that revulsion. Or perhaps I am repulsive, and would have provoked the same response even had I done so. That uncertainty is something I will have to live with, I suppose. But I know that I wanted to punish him for that repulsion, for not being able even to hide it. I wanted to make him suffer at our intimacy the way I suffered at its absence.

All his previous affection toward me scurried away, like a receding tide of bed lice when the sheet is pulled back. I knew straight away that things had changed. The air in the studio was not the same air. It stank of rejection, loneliness, and age.
My
rejection,
my
loneliness,
my
age. Foolish to think that the affection could ever have been equal or reciprocated. Foolish to think that I would be any different from any of the others. Except I wasn’t even paying; I wasn’t offering the one thing that would have made such an act bearable. Or not paying enough, at any rate. What I had done wasn’t included in the one pound I paid him. I could tell instantly that some boundary had been transgressed, some invisible mark overstepped. I had done something unforgivable.

I knew I’d probably never see him again.

He left, after some stilted, polite conversation over lunch. The usual spark was missing as we chatted, and we were barely able to meet each other’s gaze. Once I’d shut the front door on him, I went upstairs and sat in the studio, in the spot where we had kissed, and I masturbated, my hurried drawing of his erect penis by my side. I didn’t take my eyes off it. Even after reaching my climax, my gaze remained transfixed, and I didn’t move my head until the tears became too unbearable.

With my head in my hands and my limp prick still hanging out, I sobbed the bitterness away to make more room for my grief.

It took me a few hours to decide to go around to see him. It took me another hour and two double gin and tonics before I rang and spoke to his landlady, a Scottish woman who told me Gore wasn’t in. I drained my glass, grabbed my jacket and keys, and ran out of the door.

I took a cab to the Lord Barrymore. I was too drunk to be nervous, so I strolled in and ordered a drink. The landlord served me, and he remembered me from last time and asked how it had gone at the police station, or the “nick,” as he called it. I said it was all fine in the end, and asked if he’d seen Gore tonight. He didn’t know who I meant, and when I said it was the young man I’d been with last time he said, “Oh, you mean Gracie? She was in here earlier, but she’s gone now. God knows where. She’s a one.” And he gave a dirty laugh. It seems he has female names for all the regulars. “She owe you money?”

I assured him he didn’t.

“Makes a change.”

Just then, I heard a voice behind me say, “Hello, duckie. Mr Read, isn’t it?”

I turned to find the old man we’d met last time. I said, “Hello, Jack.”

“Couldn’t buy us a drink, could you, Mr Read? Only I’m nanti-handbag.”

“Sorry?”

“Flat broke. I’ll have a G and T, ta very much. A large one.”

I got him the drink.

“You’re a gent,” he said with a grin, before taking a slurp. I wondered how I could extricate myself without sounding impolite. I didn’t want to exchange small talk with him, I wanted to find Gore.

“Looking for Gregory?” he asked. I said I was. I’d got so used to calling him Gore that it was a shock to hear his real name.

Jack gestured for me to follow him and we sat at a table. “He’s not here.”

“I know.”

“You’re in love with him, aren’t you?”

I was taken aback, but I stuttered, “Yes.”

“Poor bastard.”

“Sorry?”

He took another slurp of his drink. “Old men fall in love with whores all the time. You’re not the first, an’ you won’t be the last.”

“But this is different.”

“That’s what they all say.”

“I’m not a client. I’m an artist. Gore models for me.”

“Same difference, once love’s made an appearance. But as they say, there’s no fool like an old fool.”

I didn’t need to be lectured. I didn’t want to hear what he had to say, however well-intentioned. I asked him if he knew where Gore was, and he said Gore had told him he was heading back home.

“But who knows?” he said. “The young are so capricious.”

I left the pub and took a cab to King Street, just around the corner from Gore’s road. It was a quiet street, narrow and treeless. I scouted around for a public telephone and found one. I rang the house again and asked if Gore was at home. No, he wasn’t back yet. I walked back to King Street and found a pub and fortified my nerve with another gin and tonic. Back at his house I hung around in the shadows on the opposite side of the street, feeling like an incompetent spy. Scared that I might be arrested, wondering what on earth I thought I was doing there, what on earth I thought I would do when I saw him.

It was a full moon, I remember. It crossed my mind that I’d gone insane, that the bone-white face studding the midnight-blue sky had hypnotized me and made me do this. That it was out of my hands now, my fate. This is how men lose their reason: for love, or desire. I’m not the first and I won’t be the last. There was nothing I could do but embrace this insanity. I pictured myself in a straitjacket, explaining my actions in a babble that made no sense, my voice a series of yelps and stutters, my speech reduced to total gibberish. I pictured myself behind bars, catching flies and swallowing them whole. Amongst the staff I will be known as the Flycatcher.

At that moment Gore walked around the corner into the street-light. I sensed him more than saw him, like the immediate presence of danger. I walked out from the shadows and into the moon’s blue, still not sure what on earth I intended to say. He froze momentarily then continued toward the house, toward me. He nodded in recognition and said calmly, “Wotcha?”

“Is there somewhere we can go?” I asked. “Somewhere we can talk?”

“Sure,” he said nonchalantly, as if nothing were amiss in my being here, requesting this. As if it were a regular occurrence.

He turned around and walked back into King Street. I followed.

He took me back to the pub I’d just been in. I’d been hoping for somewhere quieter. It was about half past nine, and people were sufficiently inebriated for there to be a loud level of noise: arguments, laughter, singing, shouting, all as impenetrable as the smoke hanging in the air. We managed to find a seat, and I bought a round of drinks. I made mine a double, and ordered two, knocking one back before I left the bar to return to Gore. I had no idea what I was going to say to him. No plan of action. No strategy. I simply knew I couldn’t just let him walk out of my life, though I think I must have also known that nothing was more likely to encourage him to leave than to do exactly what I was doing.

I returned with the drinks and sat down opposite him at a small round table.

“Cheers,” he said, offering his pint glass for me to chink. Bonhomie.

I think I started to say something like, “About today—”only he had already begun with, “I can only have the one. I’m off tomorrow, early, so I can’t stay long.” My words were cut off brutally by the edge in his voice, and what I had been about to say now lay slain at my feet.

“Off where?” I stammered.

“Dublin.”

He took a sip of his beer, wiping off the moustache of froth with the back of his hand before saying, “I’ve a cousin there, reckons he can get me a job. I’ve had enough of London. I’ve got itchy feet. It’s the Romany blood in my veins, isn’t it?”

“I believe Dublin to be a wonderful city.” I hated myself even as the words were coming out.

“That it is.” He nodded. “Although it’s years since I’ve been.”

“Might I write to you there?” Had I no shame?

“I can’t remember the address right now. I’ll write to you with it as soon as I can.”

His eyes darted away from mine, breaking the promise even as it was being made. When did he decide this?

“You didn’t mention anything today.”

“I spoke to him on the telephone this morning. I was going to tell you this afternoon, only …” He broke off. Only what? What words would he have chosen to describe what had happened? What version of events had he fabricated into his truth? How did he see it, how did he see
me
?

“You don’t need to go. Not on account of … me.”

“I was thinking of moving on anyway. Been here too long. You know how it is.”

No, I don’t. I don’t know how it is. This city is my home. I could never think of leaving it. I have hardly ever left it. And it has never left me. But I nodded, as if I understood perfectly his sudden desire to get away from me.

There was a long silence during which he sipped his beer and looked at the floor. I gulped my gin and tonic and looked at him. Or rather through him. I said, “You were just going to disappear, weren’t you? You weren’t going to let me know.”

“Of course I was.”

“I don’t believe you, Gore.”

“I
was
.”

“I don’t expect you to love me or anything. But, we get on, don’t we? It must mean something, what we have? Doesn’t it? Our friendship, doesn’t it mean—”

“Forget it. It’s nothing to do with that.” He drained his glass and slammed it down. “
Friendship,”
he said, mockingly. He stood up, pulling his jacket closed. “I’m off.”

I recalled Billy and how I’d banished him to the wasteland in a similar manner, cavalier, cruel, perhaps the only way such rejection can be executed—with honesty. Short, sharp, like an executioner’s axe. I thought about all the drawings I had done of Gore, like tiny ghosts, waiting back at home to haunt me. I thought about living for the rest of my life without seeing him again. I thought of my future without him in it, and all light drained from my vision. My future shrank to the size and colour of a full stop.

I followed him out of the pub into the empty street. He turned around and told me to go home. I begged him to stop walking. He wouldn’t.

I caught up with him, and he barked at me, “Fuck off! Leave me alone!”

He shrugged me away, and, a trifle unsteady, I think I grabbed for him. He must have pushed me for I suddenly lost my balance completely. A bank of pain hit my body.

I was on my hands and knees, howling after his retreating back, howling his name, lost to my grief. House lights were coming on, heads appearing from out of windows. I could hear someone screaming and wondered what they were screaming for. I then realized it was I who was screaming. Someone shouted for me to stop.

I stopped.

I managed to stand and looked in Gore’s direction. He was nowhere to be seen. I was disoriented. I turned around and started walking, my vision colliding with itself. I didn’t even think about hailing a cab. I just walked, head down, through the streets, across the bridge, making my way back to Barnes on unsteady feet. In the invisible city through which I walked that night, I don’t recall seeing a single soul. The rest of the human race, the
living
world, had slid into another dimension. I moved as if through water. I cried, and the rain that started gently to fall as I walked felt like an amplification of my sorrow. I cried till I felt better for having shed my grief. The rain became heavier and heavier as I walked, and by the time I reached home it felt as if my tears had soaked me entirely and washed me clean, and I was strangely joyous.
Reborn
, if that doesn’t sound ridiculous. Birth would be a moment of absolute panic if we but knew it consciously, our emergence into a world about which we know nothing, about which we have everything to learn. Thankfully, we have no consciousness of our lack of knowledge either. Along with everything else, that is something we must learn. Perhaps some of us never learn. But I felt something akin to that panic as I peeled off my sodden clothes, and it felt strangely good, because in that shivering moment of uncertainty lay the possibility of something else, some other life. I think I even laughed before collapsing onto my bed and passing out.