Authors: Jonathan Kemp
We were both in need of some sleep, so Gore took the couch and I took to my bed. Although I left my door open, he didn’t take the hint. Just as well, for we were woken in the early morning by an almighty banging on the front door.
1998
After the cemetery, nothing.
You left in the morning without offering any hope that we might meet again. There followed what seemed like weeks of deserted time, stretched out between the last sight of you and the next sight of you, dune upon dune of pointless space, waiting to be crawled across in the vain hope that your face might rise like an oasis as I scaled the summit. I busied myself, though nothing could bring me joy.
I cannot recall now how long until the next encounter—perhaps no more than a week. You pulled up outside on a motorbike, making enough noise to raise the dead. It was late at night. I was stoned and bored, waiting for the phone to ring, for the distraction of a client. I leant out of the window to see you looking up at me, visor up, holding out a spare helmet. I grabbed a jacket and ran down the three flights of stairs so fast I felt dizzy and breathless by the time I reached you. There are no words for what followed. I don’t know if you felt anything like what I felt that night, with my arms around your waist, my hands nestled in your denimed crotch, my legs sealed against yours, the heat between us bonding our surfaces like adhesive, like two pieces of a whole being mended. The aroma of your leather jacket. The click of our helmets like a clumsy attempt at a kiss. The night air tearing through us as we sped across the flyover and out of the city, leaving the earth behind us as we traced a flight path beyond the speed of light, slowing down time till we could taste each nanosecond as it passed through our lips. When we stopped and climbed off and removed our helmets, somewhere west of the city, I felt such a spin of adrenaline that, when you grabbed my face and kissed the mouth off me, I lost myself in that dissolving of reality that makes you believe that life after all might be worth something, if only it could last. We made love on Barnes Common and smoked a joint, talking about things I can no longer recall, things that made sense of the madness of our lives, if only temporarily. Things that pulled me further in.
“So I guess we’re fuck buddies, now, huh?” you said with that ironic tone of yours that I only now realize contained a distance I myself was trying to bridge. At the time I thought you craved a cleaving of the gap between us as much as I did.
“I never had a fuck buddy before,” I said, mirroring your tone, ever reluctant to let the real emotion show lest it not be reciprocated. “What are the rules?”
“There are no rules,” you said. “Rules are for people who have no imagination, who fear freedom.” I remained silent. “You and me, we’re free as birds.”
“Free to do what?” I asked.
“Whatever you want.”
On the way back, more than once I was assailed by a strong urge to loosen my grip on you and let the wind rip me from the bike and send me out into space, to a place from which I could never return. Somehow I knew that, whatever it was that existed between us, it could not be preserved, or could only be preserved if we were to collide with a tree or a truck and be crushed into an instant that could keep this love locked up tight forever, never to go stale. I wanted to be a child again, standing on a railway track, waiting for the impact of the train. You dropped me off outside my flat and roared off into the night.
We met again the next night. It was raining lightly. I walked past Price Check, crossed the road, past the Scala, toward the Bell, the place where it all began. I passed a man and a woman standing in front of a shop window, a huge reflective surface, in the crude glare of the streetlights. The drizzle shone like glass on the young man’s bare, hairless torso. She turned his gaze toward his image. His blue jeans were unbuttoned, the root of his cock visible in the gap. “Look at you,” she said. “Just look at you. You’re fuckin’ beautiful.” And he looked at himself. And smiled. A stupid, drunken, narcissistic smile.
I walked into the bar. Already stoned. Looked around but you weren’t there. I thought of the first time I walked in here, over nine years ago. Friendless and ignorant and nervous as hell. I thought of Edward, whom I hadn’t seen for years, other than the occasional fleeting chat in a club, or at a party; of Lilli, who’d burned too bright to last. I thought about my family, whom I hadn’t seen for nearly a decade. All the people from my life crowded around me, repeating like a mantra the one word: conform. Over and over, conform, conform,
conform
. I ordered a drink from a barman who wore the face of a man I had sex with a decade ago. The whole place was packed with everyone I’d ever fucked, all the inhabitants of my memory, repeating that word:
conform
. It curled up within the shell of my ear and slid to the pit of my heart. Shame and excitement, fear and desire, all staked their claim there. When it gets to the point when there is no memory, that’s where memory begins.
As I was daydreaming all of this, you arrived, to hand me a torch with which to banish these demons. Never thought this was possible, this tug-tug-tugging of the heart. A face I didn’t want to take my eyes from. That face can never, will never leave me. A face to light up my own. My piece of treasure. A nail to pierce the hands and feet.
Always be with me
, I thought to myself. Always be with me and always look this glad to see me.
I felt scared for the first time in years. I tasted danger when I looked at your face. I smelt the unknown. I wonder now how much of it showed. Wonder when it got too hot, when you felt the intensity become unbearable for the first time. When did it all become too much and you decide to chicken out? I certainly imagined at the time that I always kept it well hidden, how good it was to see you. Thought I was playing it cool—at least to begin with. I was used, of course, to performing in the opposite manner, feigning a pleasure I didn’t feel. Perhaps we always give the game away, despite ourselves, to spite ourselves. You bought a drink and sat down next to me, kissing me on the lips. You had just done a client and were glowing with after-sex. I wanted you. Still want you. Will always want you, perhaps. I felt a stab of jealousy. The air I breathed got thinner. It was a feeling that remained for the longest time indescribable. I dismissed it.
“How was your day?” you asked, and I told you, though I cannot recall what I said. Very little of that time remains with me that didn’t contain you. My life had long ceased to be memorable. I would never have admitted it at the time, but I was bored. My days had become an utterly pointless quest for cash and cock. The brief thrill of the cruise. Even sex rarely moved me any more, unless it involved you. The anticipation was more enjoyable than the actual thing. How many times during that period did I conjure your face to make myself cum?
After a couple of pints, we returned to my flat, and I lit a candle before climbing into the bed beside you. Several minutes into the sex, the room became suddenly illuminated with a dancing orange light—the candle had set fire to some newspapers in my room. You leapt up and used your T-shirt to beat out the flames, rendering it scorched and unwearable. You managed to stop the fire, but the wall was black and the room full of acrid smoke. I opened the window, coughing.
We pulled on our pants and left the flat, going upstairs onto the roof to get some fresh air. The familiar smog of London greeted us affectionately. Some of the residents from the other flats had planted little container gardens up there, but no one in our section had bothered. Ours was the slum end. There was one pot that served as the last resting place for a dried-up stump of a plant. There was a red British Rail bench. On one side of us the lights from the trains were moving in and out of King’s Cross station; on the other, the staccato architecture of St Pancras was silhouetted against a burgundy sky. I tried not to imagine what might have happened if we hadn’t spotted the fire in time. I didn’t want to think about that. I wanted to return to the moment, so I started to kiss you. We fucked standing up, both facing out onto the open city, your cock connecting us, our bodies welded with sweat, alone, together, facing what lay before us, like the figurehead of a ship about to sink.
There have been many times over the past eighteen months when I’ve lain here, thinking of the enormity of the city outside, of the expanse of life taking place in all those buildings scattered across the city, and of my tiny life here, in this cell. I have thought a lot about the outside, what it means to live outside. Outside the law, for example. Outside respectable society. About how difficult it can be to live there. I like these dark, vast hours, when most people are sleeping. During these hours, I feel I can breathe and think more freely, till my breath and my thoughts expand to fill the empty space left vacant by the sleepers. I’ve always loved the night; my blood responds to its call. As a teenager, I would slink out of the house as my parents and my brother slept and I would walk the empty streets feeling free and invisible. The occasional car would pass as I made my way to the railway embankment near our house. At night, the place was dense with silence. I might see a family of foxes emerge, watch the tiny cubs scrap and tumble in the starlight. And I would feel more alive than I ever did when the sun shone.
It seems so unfair that we can only have one life. So much remains uncharted. So we look for ways to erase reality to make it more manageable, to avoid the madness that comes with confronting raw multiplicity. But those familiar paths of fake reality hold their own harsh realities. I was forever in clap clinics, forever on antibiotics, forever warding off the bite of the comedown with the taste of something else, forever running from the black cloud of psychosis that I had seen descend on others. Forever losing myself. The life I thought I wanted had become as monotonous as that from which I thought I had escaped. Is that why I lost myself in you?
The next night we met in the West End. Meal at Pollo’s, drinks at the Edge, a cab back to your flat in Limehouse, during which you pointed out your favourite buildings or recounted stories about the history of the area. I think if I had to pick the first moment when I expressed to myself how much I had fallen in love, it would be then, when you talked excitedly about what you knew.
Your flat was enormous, with a balcony overlooking the river. I remember wondering to myself what you must think of my poky, untidy flat. The bathroom was painted black, with hundreds of silver stars covering the walls and ceiling. You showed me a table you made while studying furniture design when you were younger, a huge, kidney-shaped hunk of wood, and some strange but fascinating vases you had made recently. Your accent betrayed the fact that you grew up partly in America when you said
vayse
instead of
varze
.
I said that I thought they were beautiful, though I wasn’t really sure I meant it.
“Would you like one?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Here, have one, I want you to have one,” and you held out a green vase. “Matches your eyes,” you said with a smile. Why do I feel so unlike myself when I am near you?
Pointing to a small mirror on the table, upon which lay two fat lines of cocaine, you said, “Help yourself,” and I did. You came over and made short shrift of the other line, before dabbing your finger in the remaining dust and rubbing it against my gums, then kissing me. You lay back on the sofa and whispered, “Come here,” pulling me to you. I lay on top of you and we kissed for a long time, grinding our erections together through our jeans. You slid your right hand inside the back of my jeans. You said, “Let’s sit on the balcony—it’s beautiful out there at this time of night.”
So we stood up and you walked over to the open-plan kitchen and grabbed a bottle of red wine from the rack, scooping up two inverted wine glasses from the draining board. I remember wondering who else had been around here drinking wine with you, and how recently. You nodded down at the table as you passed it, saying, “Grab that box,” and continued on toward the glass doors leading outside. I picked it up and followed you out onto the balcony. The sky was a dark, dark blue. Starless and moonless. Across the water, a galaxy of orange-lit windows, blinking lights, strings of street lamps and the brazen beams of cars. This city is constructed of points of light, like a madrigal.
You opened the box and removed Rizlas and a pebble of hash. There are lots of ways to roll a joint. In my life, I have probably witnessed them all. But no one has ever rolled a joint the way you did. It was an art to rival origami, the way you ripped and licked your way through six small Rizlas. You handed it to me, and I set a flame to its magnificence.
You stood up quickly and said, “Let’s have some music. What do you fancy?”
“You,” I said, feeling like a prick immediately the word was out.
“Got any Radiohead?” I asked, to cover the word that hung there in the silence between us.
You disappeared indoors, returning as the first notes of
The Bends
crashed in. I handed you the joint. You were carrying a CD case, and I watched as you carefully cracked open the two parts of clear plastic to expose the hollow of its spine. There, like vertebrae, lay a row of white pills.
“I posted them over last time I was in L.A. You get the best ecstasy there.” You necked one and held another out for me to take. I closed my mouth around your fingertip and swallowed the pill. Across the river, two spotlights appeared in the black sky, their beams cutting across the darkness, and dancing, now close, now far apart, their diagonals dissecting my vision. The music intensified the sight.
Everything started to fragment.
You told me it was your mother’s flat. She’s English, your dead father Venezuelan. You didn’t have a flat in London. “I don’t like to feel tied down to one city,” you said, mysteriously. You told me that your mother, a professor of art history, was away, lecturing in the States. You told me that your younger brother died of AIDS four years earlier, just months after your father died of a heart attack. You recounted these details without any visible or audible emotion. I have no Great Tragedy to recount in return, only the uneventful blandness of my childhood. The fact that I haven’t seen my family in ten years doesn’t strike me as a Great Tragedy. I told you one or two stories about myself. You told me about the three months you spend each year in Venezuela, staying in your dead grandmother’s house, taking the purest cocaine and sleeping your way through the local boys. You told me about hanging out at a bus depot there, where they have showers for the drivers to freshen up before going home after a shift, recounting how you befriended the son of the depot manager, and how one day when the manager was absent and the son was in charge, you talked him into locking the door while the two of you and a few of the drivers stripped off and had sex in the showers. I wondered whether to believe a word of it, and concluded that it didn’t really matter.