Authors: Jonathan Kemp
1998
After that night at
your place, losing and then finding the dope and having sex on the shingle, I didn’t hear from you for over a week. I tried your mobile a couple of times, but you never answered it. After the second message, I hadn’t the heart to leave another. I got on with my life, with this tension in my heart like a rock, this concentrated point of absence. Then I received a phone call from Harry. He wanted to make that video with you and me. That weekend. So we did it. Afterward, I’d assumed we’d go home together, but you said you had something to do and we parted after leaving Harry’s place. Later that night, after a joint, I rang your mobile.
“It was really good to see you again,” I said.
“Yeah, you too. So what you doin’?”
“Nothing. You?”
“Oh, I’ve got another job. Earl’s Court. I’m on my way.”
“Well, I won’t keep you.”
“Okay … listen, let’s get together again soon.”
“That’d be good.” (Too keen? Too non-committal?)
“Sure. I’ll call. See ya, David.”
“See you.”
Another week without a word. I live a different life now, with you in it, even though you’re not really in it. I roast on the coals, hating that your life is going on without me. I tell myself that it’s wrong to feel this way, right to keep people at arm’s length, as if they were a dangerous chemical. How can a whore fall in love with a whore?
Then, one Sunday afternoon, the sun shining, while I was walking home from Camden Town, a gleaming black BMW pulled up with you in it, smiling hello. You said you were driving out to Heathrow to deliver the car to someone. Asked if I fancied a ride. I climbed in. Once we reached the Hammersmith flyover you asked if I wanted to take the wheel, telling me what a great drive it was, but I said no. I just wanted to relax. I pushed one of the CDs I’d just bought into the player, and turned the music up loud so we didn’t have to speak. There were so many things I wanted to say to you, but the music, for now, was enough, the lightness I felt as London peeled off behind us like a skin we were shedding. That was enough, for now.
Once the car had been dropped off, we took the tube back into the West End for a drink, then back to yours for a smoke and a fuck. (See how language reduces complexity?)
Two weeks’ absence this time: a fold of time, a duration of pain, of which I have no memory now, no memory at all. Since I set eyes on you, I seem to have gone blind.
1895
We haven’t seen Sidney
since he turned his coat. Although I’m glad about it, and I couldn’t care less what happens to him, I’d’ve liked to have talked to him about why he did what he did. It’s just Charlie and me in the house now, and my first thought this morning on waking up next to Charlie was that I have to leave, I have to get out of this house. I can’t live here any longer. But it was Charlie’s turn in the dock, first thing, so we made our way over to the courtroom, mostly in silence, though we did both wonder aloud where Sidney might be.
Charlie’s always loved to perform, and today in the dock he put on a great show. I’d never before heard the story of how he and Taylor met, and it distracted me from my own feelings of guilt to listen to him tell it. He said that Taylor came up to him and his brother at the bar of the St James and bought them a drink, saying something about the tarts round the Dilly, something about how ridiculous it was for sensible men to waste their money on painted trash like that, and then he tells them they could make money in a certain way easily enough if they cared to, the dirty old goat. I nearly laughed out loud picturing him being so bold, and I started to admire his courage. But then I looked at him standing there in the dock looking so old and beaten and with Oscar next to him looking ill and wretched, and it suddenly sank in that it was all over, the party was over, for the two who threw the best were as good as dead and buried, and my heart sank and struggled like something held underwater and fighting for its life.
Charlie pulled no punches. He told them everything and seemed to gloat over the details. I was surprised when he said Oscar sodded him because Oscar never did that to me, and as far as I know he didn’t even like to do it. I felt a pang of jealousy considering whether Charlie was telling the truth or embellishing for the sake of it, for he is prone to that and would, I’ve no doubt, like nothing better than to say the word
sodomy
in a court of law. But maybe Oscar was sodding all and sundry but me. That never occurred to me before. Christ, my head is in pieces. And my fucking heart is on the floor. How could I ever go home again?
I walked as far as Whitechapel and found cheap lodgings in some filthy paddyken in Brick Lane, all sorts of wild thoughts flooding my head. This secret life I’ve been a part of is suddenly being talked about and written about. Regret, panic, and loneliness kept me awake for hours, listening to the noise of the city, the screams and shouts and commotion of a typical London night. Unable to sleep, I made my way to an alehouse in Aldgate and drank five beers as quickly as I could, listening in to everyone in there chattering about Oscar and reading out from the newspapers and talking about how sick and evil he is. Someone said he’d probably get the maximum sentence, and I suddenly felt wretched and had to leave, my head spinning from the beer and the thoughts assailing me. “That’ll wipe the smile off his fat Irish face,” someone said as I walked to the door, and everyone laughed and cheered.
I’ve never felt so alone in the world nor so fearful of the future. What will I do when my money runs out? How will I live, now that I’ve appeared in court for all the world to know my face and my deeds? And him—I can’t get his big face from my thoughts. What have I done? This question echoes around my head like a bell. What have I done to him?
I can hear his voice in my head, saying, “Morality makes a prisoner of men, makes men cruel and vicious, for behind the pretence of morality lurks the bitter heart of a life blighted, and often as not the most moralistic are the most cruel, for their sense of loss makes them hack at you with bladed words until your own life is as limbless and immobile as theirs. If you can live without morality then you are truly free.” Yet I’ve lived without morality, and I’ve never felt less free.
1954
There were no repercussions
from the law, but things between Gore and me have changed. He still comes over, but something within me has begun to resent him. I still desire him, but I find I cannot bear the sight of him. I have hardened, and dread his arrival, when once I longed to see him. His cocky, jokey demeanour irritates me now. On more than one occasion recently I have come very close to slapping the money down and demanding his services, longing to treat him like the whore he is.
It all started going wrong when I discovered that I painted Gore better from memory than I did from real life. I was working on the triptych this morning, and I suddenly realized that the drawings I did of him in his absence were so much better than those I did when he was there in front of me. I have committed every line, every plane of that flesh to memory, so that, when it was spread before me, my eye got bored while my hand traced out its contours almost without looking at him. Worse than that, I found myself getting irritated by his presence because it was ruining my art; his real flesh got in the way of the iridescent memory that guided my brush. The more I thought about the irritation his presence was starting to cause, the more I tried to hide it, and the more I discovered that all I wanted to do was put aside my paper and explore that body with my tongue, trace its outlines not with charcoal or lead but with my mouth, my hands, my penis. There is nothing I can do with this desire. It rises up within me, clawing for supremacy, and I feel weaker and weaker with every passing day, less able to conquer it, and less willing. It needs some release, and that makes me fearful and brave in equal measure. I no longer know who I am. All I can think about is Gore’s body and the process of replicating it on canvas.
1998
One night, after too
much drink and too many drugs, I took a cab over to the flat in Limehouse. Knowing nothing of what I’m worth, I rang the bell. There was no response. I crossed the road and sat in a darkened doorway. Two hours and countless cigarettes later, a black cab pulled up and you clambered out with another man, laughing. You unlocked the front door and the two of you tumbled into the flat like acrobats, oblivious to my presence, oblivious to my pain. I sat there, smoking, recalling all the times you’d put two cigarettes in your mouth and lit them both before passing one to me. And then, with no star to guide me, I walked all the way back to King’s Cross, telling myself that what we call love is nothing but a misguided notion of salvation, a rescue fantasy so wildly unreal that desertion, betrayal, and suffering are the only way out of the delusion. I resolved never to see you again.
You had pegged me out in the sun like a hide to dry.
I looked for my self, but it was nowhere to be seen.
The next day—but why am I telling you this? what am I hoping to achieve?—the next day I visited you. You weren’t dressed. It was about three p.m. You came to the door with your lower half wrapped in a duvet. It suddenly occurred to me that perhaps he was still here, the other man, and I panicked. You stepped back to let me in, pressing the duvet down to make room for me to pass. As I walked through, I felt like a condemned man who knows he must go to the scaffold and yet begins to tremble on seeing it.
You kissed me. Said it was good to see me. Offered me a cup of coffee. I accepted. You dropped the duvet and poured out two cups. You stood there naked. I sat down and you brought the coffee over. And it all seemed so normal, so domestic, I wanted to scream. I watched you. Watched your cock swing as you walked toward me, plagued by visions of you and him.
“Gorgeous day, huh?” You nodded toward the sunlit window.
“Yeah. What’s left of it.”
“Yeah. Pretty late night.” A grin pushed onto your face.
“Fun?”
“No—I was stuck in hospital for hours. I was with a friend of mine who’s epileptic and he had a fit and I had to take him to hospital. Didn’t get in till early this morning.”
“How is he?”
“He’s fine now. Freaked me out though. Never seen him fit before.”
So I’d become someone you lie to. Perhaps I had always been that. At least I knew where I stood, I told myself.
You came over to where I was sitting. You had a semi-erection. It was at eye level, and as you ran a hand through my hair you said, “Fuck, am I pleased to see you, man. I’ve been horny all morning.” Knowing no shame, feeling no desire, I took you in my mouth. You tasted of someone else. You held my head in your hands, thrusting forward, saying, “It’s all yours, man, it’s all yours,” but I knew that it wasn’t all mine. It never was and never will be all mine. I was a fool for thinking that it could be. You’d never said those words to me before, and I wondered if you had said them to him last night or whether he’d said them to you. Where did you learn them? Why was I thinking like this?
Afterward, you rolled a joint and we lay there naked, smoking it. Even though I knew it was pointless, I asked you what I meant to you. I still had so much to learn. You passed me the joint and I sucked on it as if I might suck back the words.
“You’re cool—you know I think you’re cool. What we have is cool. What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know.”
I told you about the previous night, and I felt unhinged, like a stalker, or as if I was confessing to a murder. I sensed immediately that it was the wrong thing to have said. Hadn’t I learnt by now that the truth is always the wrong thing to say? I used to be so good at lying—when it didn’t matter. You made an honest man of me.
You sat there burning the hairs on your legs with the tip of the joint as I spoke. When I’d finished, you looked up at me and said, “I’m a whore, David. You’re a whore. It’s in our nature. Do you want me to say I’m sorry? I’m sorry I lied to you? Yeah, I picked someone up, I fucked him. Big deal. That’s what I do. I assume that’s what you do. I’m not in the market for a relationship. I didn’t think you were. We have fun, don’t we? Isn’t that enough?”
“I’m sorry. I have no right.”
“Monogamy doesn’t work. Love doesn’t work, wouldn’t work. Not for us. I don’t want a boyfriend.”
“Fine.”
You handed me the joint. Its taste offered comfort.
“It’s like those tapes and CDs over there.” You gestured to an untidy pile by the stereo. “One day, I know I need to sort them out, tidy them up, put them in the right cases, in some kind of order. But I keep putting it off.”
I struggled to pick up the meaning of this analogy, though I nodded as if the greatest truth were being delivered.
“This isn’t about me, you don’t really know me. It’s about you. Maybe you’ve been on the game too long.”
I realized I hadn’t spoken for a long time, and worried that you might think you were breaking my heart. You were breaking my heart. I smiled, though I wore it like a battle scar.
“You’re gorgeous and sexy, and I love it when we fuck. You’re a fantastic fuck.” And with those words I was dismissed, I knew my place, and it was not there.
“Listen, I’m off to Amsterdam tomorrow, pick up some cars. Why don’t you come? I need another driver. It’ll be fun.”
With those words you rescued me from the hell into which you had just cast me.
With these words the end began.
1895
It was an endless
three weeks from the second trial, when the jury couldn’t reach a verdict, to this final one, and I’ve hardly slept for fear of the nightmares that descend the minute I do, like an incubus sitting on my chest and sucking my blood. Dreams in which the hounds are after me, and as I run from them gold coins are falling from my pockets and I want to stop and pick them up, but I know that if I do the dogs will get me, and I’m woken by the snap of their jaws, covered in sweat and shivering. I keep recalling that fourth day of the second trial, when he started on about the intellectual purity of the love between an older man and a younger, jabbering on about Plato and Shakespeare. Many of the crowd started applauding, but I knew for a fact that when he placed his tongue on my prick he wasn’t bloody well thinking of Plato.
This afternoon, when the judge read out the verdict of guilty and then the sentence, two years’ hard labour, I thought I was gonna start crying. I felt like I was falling. Once, when I was out in the countryside with a client who liked to do it in the open air, we got stuck in a narrow lane filled with horse-riders on a hunt, a sea of dogs yapping madly around us. It was terrifying. In that courtroom today, the air hung heavy like the stench of that hunt, the crowds baying for blood like those hounds. It wasn’t meant to be that way at all, and I’ve been a bloody fuckin’ fool to think it could have been otherwise. Blinded by my own rage. They wanted him, hounding their quarry to exhaustion.
I knew that for Oscar hard labour would be as good as the hangman’s noose. Even Taylor, who got the same, would have a hard time of it. The crowd’s glee made me want to throw up, though I heard some cry, “Shame.” Their petty victory made me weep and my role in it made me want to die. I sat in the balcony of the courtroom and wished it was me going to gaol.
Charlie and me left the Old Bailey and the streets outside were full of people cheering like it was a bloomin’ coronation or something. A gaggle of whores were singing and dancing, linking arms and hitching their skirts up from the mud as they jigged with glee. Those girls have been slagging us off for ages, complaining that their trade was sparse because we had pilfered their clients. I suppose there always has to be someone to pay the price. As we passed them I heard one of them yelling, “’E’ll ’ave ’is ’air cut regular now!” Charlie, who was beside me, laughed at that.
I pushed past them and walked away from Charlie without a word, off toward my lodgings, taking shanks’s pony, as Walter called it. I’m free to walk away, a free man. Although I never felt less free, truth be told.
With my shame dragging behind me like a ball and chain, I can walk away. But to where? I know I can’t stay here, not now my name’s been in the paper. I won’t be able to get work anywhere, and I can’t go back to whoring. And my thirty pieces of silver have nearly run out.
I sit here. It is midnight. The moon outside is half closed, like a sleepy eye. I stare at it, imagining his face, his big white moon-face. How large it seemed close up, filling my field of vision like a planet or a god. I picture how scared he looked when the verdict was read out this afternoon. He didn’t look so grand and important then, as the Old Bailey erupted in cheers and applause. I thought I’d feel a sense of victory, I must admit, seeing him broken like that, but I feel nothing but a bottomless sorrow.