London Triptych (7 page)

1954

Mother died first, in
January 1953, and in her absence my father expressed a grief far surpassing any love I’d seen him express toward her while she was alive. It unnerved me to see this usually taciturn and stoical man crumble into a pile of ash without her and hear him howling with grief. You don’t really know a person till you have seen how they grieve, till you have witnessed how they deal with loss. Or don’t deal with it, in my father’s case. He faded away as if the air that had sustained him had finally run out. As if he had relied on my mother to wind him up each morning and without her he simply unwound, stopped ticking like the grandfather clock in the nursery rhyme. It was a difficult time. He and I had never been close, but despite this distance between us I thought that at least I knew him, his foibles, his habits, his character: understood how he worked. I had predicted the usual stiff-upper-lipped response to Mother’s death. When he crawled inside that grief, when I found him prostrate on their bed eating her face powder, I was totally unprepared. I no longer recognized him as my father, and any attempt at communication was swiftly curtailed. He began talking nothing but gibberish. He attempted to take his own life more than once. On the family doctor’s advice, I checked him into a private asylum in Roehampton. I visited him a couple of times, but he no longer recognized me, and on one occasion attacked me, so I kept away. He was more of a stranger to me now than ever before. I was more alone than ever before. I realized that, however estranged we had been, my parents had provided something akin to structure in my life. Since Joan’s death I had visited more frequently and, though our conversation was awkward and rather stilted, it was a bond of sorts. In my own way, I miss them.

Within six months of Mother’s death, Father gave up the ghost too. He died of a broken heart, I suppose. So he really did have a heart, after all. That was the biggest shock, that hint of a passionate love beyond anything I might have expected of them. I was financially solvent without having to work. So I gave up my job, sold the house in Camden in which I’d been living since my parents retired, and moved into their house in Barnes in order to paint. But that isn’t it. That isn’t really why I gave up work. In my heart, I knew even before Mother died that this was what I would do. What their death did was to focus my dissatisfaction and spur me into action.

Sometimes, don’t you look at the world and wonder what kind of madhouse you’re living in? Have you ever felt, deep down, somewhere so hidden that you overlook it time and again, a pulse that taps out faint coded messages of distress? Don’t you hear a tiny, desperate voice pleading for salvation, for mercy, air to breathe, freedom, space to move? That’s all I did. I found somewhere quiet. Somewhere so quiet I could hear the SOS. I sat in a corner of Highgate Cemetery after my father’s funeral and I listened to the absence of sound, listened to it as it became punctured by birdsong. I sat down and let myself
become
that absence of sound, and be punctured in a similar manner. I swept aside all the voices and the clutter inside my head. The birdsong that punctuated that silence passed through me like light through dust, showing up all my crazy thoughts.

I imagined myself outside the world, imagined the world without me, the teeming threads of life that encircled me, the sorrows and joys of millions of other people, unknown stories, unknowable lives, all buzzing gently in the air around me. I pictured it all as if I had never existed, and nothing seemed different without me. The feeling of monumental insignificance that assaulted me at that moment was both horrifying and liberating. It made me realize that nothing really matters until you decide it does. I’d never allowed anything to matter to me, and I felt the loss enormously. I can’t say I felt any grief at my parents’ passing. As I said, they were virtually unknown to me. Having very few friends themselves, my parents knew almost nothing about friendship, other than sensing in it the danger of responsibility, perhaps. This sense of danger they passed on to me in the form of a knowledge I don’t think I ever truly questioned. My parents taught me how to absent myself. I’ve trawled my memory in search of something approaching a treasured memory of them, something that might prove their existence as other than ghostly apparitions. I can vaguely recall the smell of the perfume my mother wore and the sound of my father’s hacking cough. Or perhaps the time he taught me to shave, after years of watching him doing it at the same sink, performing the task with a curious tenderness and attention to detail that softened my heart with its vanity. But I didn’t feel any great sense of loss after they died. Not like with Joan. Not the loss of a person, more the loss of possibility. I knew what they wanted of me, and beyond that I knew nothing. I did what I was told to do, and with each acquiescence I lopped off another limb, until I had completely disappeared.

After I left art school, father secured me the job with Frank Symonds’ firm, and my life fell into a pattern that provided a structure the way the bars of a prison provide a structure. Before long I got used to the fact that I’d never get out of it—resigned myself, I should say. Resigned from life. I have always been shy by nature, so I got on with my job as invisibly as I had got on with my studies. I had no friends; people thought I was strange because I was so distant. I found it impossible to get close to anyone. I rarely went out. Until I married Joan, I remained living at home. And I strung my life between the two poles of work and home, wearing tracks in the ground as I shuttled between them, like a shire horse ploughing a field. I never registered my own desires, but concentrated solely on fulfilling theirs. I denied myself, and a feeling of complete and utter grief overwhelms me when I think of the waste.

Gore was meant to come over today, but he rang just now to say he couldn’t make it. He has to visit his Cambridge don again. I never knew such jealousy before. It shames me.

1998

Edward knew everybody, it
seemed. Wherever we went, people flocked around him. Amongst his friends were plenty of artists, and I soon began to model for many of them. My world was changing and I with it. I knew nothing of restraint and let my desire lead me where it would. Within a couple of months of my arriving in London, Edward took me to a party in an old missionary chapel in Angel. August 1986.

As Lilli, Edward, and I arrived at the door, the air was static with all the frenzy and glamour of the Oscars. Lilli was decked out like a Las Vegas showgirl, a powder-pink feather boa wrapped around her like the ghost of a snake. A tiara bit its way through her platinum beehive like an angel’s dentures tackling candyfloss. Edward was dressed like Dolly Levi, complete with a stuffed bird spraying tail feathers from his massive black-and-white hat. In my black leather chaps and waistcoat and black sequin-covered Stetson, I was fit to ride in the devil’s rodeo.

As we entered, the first thing I saw was the DJ, dressed in a black lamé jacket, a studded leather dog collar around his neck, and huge red prosthetic devil’s horns rising from his temples. He was leading the crowd in waving their arms to “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Behind him, two enormous stained glass windows, depicting biblical scenes, spread out like angels’ wings. He supplied an endless flow of ’60s soundtracks and psychedelia, giving the entire proceedings the ultra-glamorous air of a film set, as did the larval lightshow dripping down the walls around us, amoeboid colour-forms coagulating above the throng like glass candle grenades popping. Silver lamé curtains ran the entire length of one of the walls, reflecting the lights like oil on a puddle. We made our way to the bar, which was constructed from scaffolding poles stretched out across another wall, covered in zebra-striped fabric; a crowd had gathered like lions around a fresh kill. Huge abstract paintings, the offspring of Wayward’s drug-addled imagination, adorned the walls. Everyone was dressed up, desperate to be seen. Some weren’t even dressed at all. One woman, naked as Eve, carried a shiny green apple with her all night, out of which one bite had been taken. A green-sequinned merkin gave her an iridescent fig leaf. A gigantic man in platform boots appeared, his powdered cleavage bursting out of the bodice of a red velvet crinoline dress, his bald white head strapped with an illuminated light bulb above each ear. An exaggerated red mouth took up half his face, split in the biggest slice-of-watermelon grin I’d ever seen, his manic eyes black as bruises and big as dinner plates. He danced like a drunken dervish, clumsily knocking into everyone, collapsing in a heap in an act of pure drama before picking himself up to continue the assault in another direction. One woman, dressed like a Brassaï tart—black beret, fishnets, tatty fox fur curled across her shoulder like a sleeping pet—sipped red wine as she sashayed to the music. A man was lying on his back in the middle of this dancing throng, kicking his legs in the air and waving his arms, his feet, encased in three-inch brothel-creepers, busy kicking anyone who got too close. He was wearing a pinstriped jacket inside out, with the word “Gucci” stitched in large white sequins down one arm, “Chanel” down the other. His vampire-white face with its enormous fuchsia eyes stared up at me as I leant over him and he roared with laughter. I roared back. Cybele, an elegantly tall strawberry-blonde transsexual, glided past, wearing a transparent black dress and nothing else, clutching a small black PVC handbag with one hand and the arm of the handsomest man I had ever seen with the other. Tall, broad, dark, and chisel-featured, he was sporting a tuxedo and shone like a film star. Their glamour was enough to take your breath away. Claudia, a pre-operative black transsexual, wearing buggy blue contact lenses, had wrapped a white fun-fur stole around her naked body and was teetering her way through the crowd on monumentally high Westwood heels. She was so well tucked you would swear she was a real woman, each step a painful reminder of the shameful biology fate had flung her way. Or maybe it was the shoes. The first time we’d met Claudia, she had come running up to us in a club yelling at Lilli, “Girl, you’re well tucked tonight.” Refusing to believe Lilli was a real woman, Claudia had proceeded to bombard Lilli with questions about the operation until Lilli had to get her pussy out to prove she wasn’t a trannie
.
Even then, Claudia just sucked her teeth and said, “Miss Thing, they sure make them motherfuckas look
real
nowadays!” Ma Baker had come dressed like a woman from a painting by Otto Dix, complete with an empty picture frame that he carried around in front of him all night. His best friend was decked out in a seventeenth-century hoop-skirted ballgown made completely out of Tesco carrier bags.

I left Edward and Lilli and wandered off in search of adventure. In one room a four-foot television screen flickered with ’70s gay porn movies, while in another, black-and-white Super-8s projected chiaroscuro images of men and women fucking from some distant age earlier this century. They could have been my grandparents, or great-grandparents, linked to me by blood, by the chains of DNA. The fact that they weren’t made my connection with them more powerful, rooted as it was in the desire to fuck in front of a camera. In the cellar, a labyrinth of rooms: damp, brick-powdered walls, bare earth underfoot, the chill of a grave. In one room, a bunch of stoners sat around a campfire. One of them, wearing a purple wizard’s tunic, his bald head painted blue, cast some powder onto the flames, making them flare up in blue sparkling tongues as he recited an incantation: “In the beginning there was
fire!”
He was grandly shamanistic, and a little absurd. I’d wandered down there with a handsome American we’d met in the pub beforehand whose boyfriend we’d lost sight of upstairs. We moved on. One room was dark, the only entryway a wide hole gaping in the wall. As I poked my head through the darkened, blasted hole, the American said to me, “Climb in there, I’ll give you a blow job.”

Inside the room, there was a patch of light bleeding through the hole, and by its barren glow we discerned a thin, narrow mattress on the floor. I lay back as he unfastened my trousers and began to suck my dick, and all I remember now is that the pleasure derived almost completely from the situation itself, the location, the anonymity, the betrayal of the boyfriend upstairs. Selfishly, I came, his trousers still unzipped, his body untouched. He said he’d like to watch me suck off his boyfriend. The boyfriend didn’t appeal to me. I was more interested in the boyfriend never knowing or, if he did find out, being annoyed at being left out, rejected. Even then, I knew all about the power of betrayal.

As I was climbing out of the room, Edward appeared from nowhere. “There you are, duckie, we’ve been looking all over for you.” Behind him was a buxom woman with bright red ringlets, wrapped in a dress made of loosely coiled telephone cord and nothing else, and carrying a bright copper kettle, which served as a handbag. Clocking the guy behind me, Edward arched an eyebrow. He held up a packet of white powder and grinned at me. “Want some sweeties, little boy?” he said in a creepy voice. I nodded and followed, leaving the American to his own devices. I had never known such happiness. Sometimes I thought I might explode with the intensity of it.

It’s strange to recount all this, to tell all this to you, knowing that you will never hear it. There hasn’t been a single day in here that I haven’t thought about you, wondered what you’re doing, and if you ever think of me.

Just now, Tony got up to take a piss, and when he’d finished and turned around he had your face.

1894

Today began as regular
as any other day. Taylor woke us up prompt at half-eleven with a raucous rendition of some bawdy song. He knows loads. “Morgan Rattler” is his favourite, and it was that one he screeched out this morning: “First he niggled her then he tiggled her, then with his two balls he began for to batter her, at every thrust I thought she’d burst with the terrible size of his Morgan Rattler.”

That shrill banshee voice of his, like some poor beast with its head stuck, dragged us out of our sleep by the hair and shook us awake. He went about the whole fuckin’ house caterwauling till we emerged from our beds cursing him. Worse for wear from the cheap gin we drank last night, and from general lack of sleep, we pleaded with him to stash it. It’s rare for us to tumble into bed much before sunrise and last night was no exception. Taylor has his own room, but we have to dab it up in one large room with dark blue walls and no carpet. There are two dilapidated double beds, their filthy mattresses spewing straw through various rips and holes, and we usually sleep two to one bed and three to the other, though we have to change partners from night to night so as not to encourage any alliances, though, of course, they form anyway. Once up, we washed together, each standing in a small tub of cold water and soaping his neighbour. Walter thought it hilarious to piss on us all as we stood there and rinse us down with his very own hot water. I gave him a sharp cuff round the ear, and he stopped that lark. A quick dry-off and then off downstairs to the kitchen.

Taylor was standing there, of course, by the door as usual, leaning slightly forward with his cheek turned out, waiting for us to plant a kiss on it as we entered and say, each in turn, “Morning, Mother.”

He loves that.

Even at that early hour he was already on the gin.

Only in the bitter winter months do we bother to dress for breakfast; in fine weather like today Taylor likes to watch us eating our porridge as naked as babes as he sits there smoking and babbling on and on about this swell and that, who was coming later, who’s been involved in what scandal or betrayal. It’s an entire one-man show every morning, better than anything you’ll see at the music halls, with a cast of thousands wandering in and out as he puts on voices and gestures and runs riot. It’s hysterical. We’re always telling him he should go on the stage. This morning, though, I was too addled to pay much attention.

After the dishes were done and the house cleaned up from last night, we wandered back upstairs and dressed. Then we gathered as usual in the parlour, ready for trade to commence.

By dusk I had already seen six swells. Taylor was raking it in.

The way it works is that Taylor lets them in and ushers them into the parlour, where Johnnycakes, if he’s free, asks them if he can get them a drink. Taylor thinks his American accent adds a certain exoticism to the place and it’s true, his deep purr makes you wanna fuck him just to hear him speak. The drink isn’t free, it’s all included in the thicker they give Taylor when they leave. Anyway, while they’re having a drink (if they have one, that is; some just take any boy available as soon as they walk in the door), they decide which boy they want out of those that are free, or if they want a lad already working then they will wait their turn. In that respect, it works much like a barber’s shop. The chat flows free on all manner of topics, though mostly here the gents like to talk about what we get up to. They like to talk filth. And we’re more than happy to oblige, regaling them with tales of our antics.

So today was much like any other until come midnight we get raided, don’t we? Pandemonium spreads through the house like a fire. I’m upstairs sucking a certain high official of the Church of England and he’s taking a fuckin’ age to spend and I’m getting bored and irritated when there’s a storm of banging on the bedroom door and next thing I know there are two crushers in the room and the churchman starts to spend and then like a shot he is hoisting up his trousers and I’m sitting on the bed laughing as he hops around the room with one leg caught in his strides and his jiss flying all over the place. The bluebottles just stand there, not sure what to do. They tell me we’ve been busted and they wait for me to dress and then escort me downstairs, where everyone else is gathered. There are about a dozen crushers all grinning like bedlamites. All the swells, of course, are allowed to go back to their homes and their wives. It’s only us they want. So we’re all loaded into their growler and driven to Holborn salt box. It seems that although I wanted to avoid a life of crime I’ve ended up inside anyway. Ah well, sod’s law always gets you in the end, ain’t that the truth?

Taylor was at his fiercest and foul-mouthed best as they bundled him into the van. It was worth it to watch the air turn blue around them. They’re a bunch of vicious, humourless bastards, though, who’d cosh you without a thought. In that sense they’re no different from the men I grew up with, only this lot think they’re better than the rest on account of that fuckin’ uniform they wear and the authority it brings. I hate the law.

We were all thrown in the holding cell, and it was already packed. It stank worse than a stable, with piss-soaked straw on the floor and the odd turd trodden in for good measure.

Add to that half a dozen unwashed, inebriated men. God knows how long they plan to keep us locked up. I’m due to see Mr Wilde later tonight, so I just hope we’re not in here long.