by Neil Gaiman
It broke me up, too. I dropped out after that—I wanted to get as far away from the city and that lifestyle as I could. I bought a small farm in Wales. I was happy there, too, with the sheep and the goats, and the cabbages. I’d probably be there today if it hadn’t been for her, and Penthouse.
I don’t know where it came from; one morning I went outside to find the magazine lying in the yard, in the mud, face-down. It was almost a year old. She wore no makeup, and was posed in what looked like a very high-class flat. For the first time I could see her pubic hair, or I could have if the photo hadn’t been artistically fuzzed, and just a fraction out of focus. She looked as if she were coming out of the mist.
Her name, it said, was Lesley. She was nineteen.
And after that I just couldn’t stay away any more. I sold the farm for a pittance, and came back to London in the last days of 1976.
I went on the dole, lived in a council flat in Victoria, got up at lunchtime, hit the pubs until they closed in the afternoons, read newspapers in the library until opening time, then pub-crawled until closing time. I lived off my dole money, and drank from my savings account.
I was thirty and I felt much older. I started living with an anonymous blonde punkette from Canada I met in a drinking club in Greek Street. She was the barmaid, and one night, after closing, she told me she’d just lost her digs, so I offered her the sofa at my place. She was only sixteen, it turned out, and she never got to sleep on the sofa. She had small, pomegranate breasts, a skull tattooed on her back, and a junior Bride of Frankenstein hairdo. She said she’d done everything, and believed in nothing. She would talk for hours about the way the world was moving toward a condition of anarchy, claimed that there was no hope, and no future; but she fucked like she’d just invented fucking. And I figured that was good.
She’d come to bed wearing nothing but a spiky black leather dog-collar, and masses of messy black eye-make-up. She spat sometimes, just gobbed on the pavement, when we were walking, which I hated, and she made me take her to the punk clubs, to watch her gob and swear and pogo. Then I really felt old. I liked some of the music, though: Peaches, stuff like that. And I saw the Sex Pistols play live. They were rotten.
Then the punkette walked out on me, claiming that I was a boring old fart and she took up with an extremely plump Arab princeling.
“I thought you didn’t believe in anything,” I called after her, as she climbed into the Roller he sent to collect her.
“I believe in £100 blowjobs, and mink sheets,” she called back, one hand playing with a strand of her Bride of Frankenstein hairdo. “And a gold vibrator. I believe in that.”
So she went away to an oil fortune and a new wardrobe, and I checked my savings and found I was dead broke—practically penniless. I was still sporadically buying Penthouse. My sixties soul was both deeply shocked and profoundly thrilled by the amount of flesh now on view. Nothing was left to the imagination, which, at the same time, attracted and repelled me.
Then, near the end of 1977, she was there again.
Her hair was multicoloured, my Charlotte, and her mouth was as crimson as if she’d been eating raspberries. She lay on satin sheets with a jewelled mask on her face and a hand between her legs, ecstatic, orgasmic, all I ever wanted: Charlotte.
She was appearing under the name of Titania, and was draped with peacock feathers. She worked, I was informed by the insectile black words that crept around her photographs, in an estate agent’s in the South. She liked sensitive, honest men. She was nineteen.
And, goddamnit, she looked nineteen. And I was broke, on the dole with just over a million others, and going nowhere.
I sold my record collection, and my books, all but four copies of Penthouse, and most of the furniture, and I bought myself a fairly good camera. Then I phoned all the photographers I’d known when I was in advertising, almost a decade before.
Most of them didn’t remember me, or they said they didn’t. And those that did, didn’t want an eager young assistant who wasn’t young any more and had no experience. But I kept trying, and eventually got hold of Harry Bleak, a silver-haired old boy, with his own studios in Crouch End and a posse of expensive little boyfriends.
I told him what I wanted. He didn’t even stop to think about it. “Be here in two hours.”
“No catches?”
“Two hours. No more.”
I was there.
For the first year I cleaned the studio, painted backdrops, and went out to the local shops and streets to beg, buy or borrow appropriate props. The next year he let me help with the lights, set up shots, waft smoke pellets and dry-ice around, and make the tea. I’m exaggerating—I only made the tea once; I make terrible tea. But I learned a hell of a lot about photography.
And suddenly it was 1981, and the world was newly romantic, and I was thirty-five and feeling every minute of it. Bleak told me to look after the studio for a few weeks, while he went off to Morocco for a month of well-earned debauchery.
She was in Penthouse that month. More coy and prim than before, waiting for me neatly between advertisements for stereos and scotch. She was called Dawn, but she was still my Charlotte, with nipples like beads of blood on her tanned breasts, dark, fuzzy thatch between forever legs, shot on location on a beach somewhere. She was only nineteen, said the text. Charlotte. Dawn.
Harry Bleak was killed travelling back from Morocco: a bus fell on him.
It’s not funny, really—he was on a car-ferry coming back from Calais, and he snuck down into the car-hold to get his cigars, which he’d left in the glove compartment of the Merc.
The weather was rough, and a tourist bus (belonging, I read in the papers, and was told at length by a tearful boyfriend, to a shopping co-op in Wigan) hadn’t been chained down properly. Harry was crushed against the side of his silver Mercedes.
He had always kept that car spotless.
When the will was read I discovered that the old bastard had left me his studio. I cried myself to sleep that night, got stinking drunk for a week, and then opened for business.
Things happened between then and now. I got married. It lasted three weeks, then we called it a day. I guess I’m not the marrying type. I got beaten up by a drunken Glaswegian on a train, late one night, and the other passengers pretended it wasn’t happening. I bought a couple of terrapins and a tank, put them in the flat over the studio, and called them Rodney and Kevin. I became a fairly good photographer. I did calendars, advertising, fashion and glamour work, little kids and big stars: the works.
And, one spring day in 1985, I met Charlotte.
I was alone in the studio on a Thursday morning, unshaven and barefoot. It was a free day, and I was going to spend it cleaning the place and reading the papers. I had left the studio doors open, letting the fresh air in to replace the stink of cigarettes and spilled wine of the shoot the night before, when a woman’s voice said, “Bleak Photographic?”
“That’s right”’ I said, not turning around, “but Bleak’s dead. I run the place now.”
“I want to model for you,” she said.
I turned around. She was about five foot six, with honey-coloured hair, olive-green eyes, a smile like cold water in the desert.
“Charlotte?”
She tilted her head to one side. “If you like. Do you want to take my picture?”
I nodded dumbly. Plugged in the umbrellas, stood her up against a bare brick wall, and shot off a couple of test polaroids. No special makeup, no set, just a few lights, a Hasselblad, and the most beautiful girl in my world.
After a while she began to take off her clothes. I did not ask her to. I don’t remember saying anything to her. She undressed and I carried on taking photographs.
She knew it all. How to pose, to preen, to stare. Silently she flirted with the camera, and with me standing behind it, moving around her, clicking away. I don’t remember stopping for anything, but I must have changed films, because I wound up with a dozen rolls at the end of the day.
I suppose you think that after the pictures were taken, I made love with her. Now, I’d be a liar if I said I’ve never screwed models in my time, and, for that matter, some of them have screwed me. But I didn’t touch her. She was my dream; and if you touch a dream it vanishes, like a soap bubble.
And anyway, I simply couldn’t touch her.
“How old are you?” I asked her just before she left, when she was pulling on her coat and picking up her bag.
“Nineteen,” she told me without looking round, and then she was out the door.
She didn’t say good-bye.
I sent the photos to Penthouse. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to send them. Two days later I got a call from the Art Editor. “Loved the girl! Real face-of-the-Eighties stuff. What are her vital statistics?”
“Her name is Charlotte,” I told him. “She’s nineteen.”
And now I’m thirty-nine, and one day I’ll be fifty, and she’ll still be nineteen. But someone else will be taking the photographs.
Rachel, my dancer, married an architect.
The blond punkette from Canada runs a multinational fashion chain. I do some photographic work for her from time to time. Her hair’s cut short, and there’s a smudge of grey in it, and she’s a lesbian these days. She told me she’s still got the mink sheets, but she made up the bit about the gold vibrator.
My ex-wife married a nice bloke who owns two video rental shops, and they moved to Slough. They have twin boys.
I don’t know what happened to the maid.
And Charlotte?
In Greece, the philosophers are debating, Socrates is drinking hemlock, and she’s posing for a sculpture of Erato, muse of light poetry and lovers, and she’s nineteen.
In Crete she’s oiling her breasts, and she’s jumping bulls in the ring while King Minos applauds, and someone’s painting her likeness on a wine-jar, and she’s nineteen.
In 2065 she’s stretched out on the revolving floor of a holographic photographer, who records her as an erotic dream in Living Sensolove, imprisons the sight and sound and the very smell of her in a tiny diamond matrix. She’s only nineteen.
And a caveman outlines Charlotte with a burnt stick on the wall of the temple cave, filling in the shape and texture of her with earths and berry-dyes. Nineteen.
Charlotte is there, in all places, all times, sliding through our fantasies, a girl forever.
I want her so much it makes me hurt sometimes. That’s when I take down the photographs of her, and just look at them for a while, wondering why I didn’t try to touch her, why I wouldn’t really even speak to her when she was there, and never coming up with an answer that I could understand.
That’s why I’ve written this all down, I suppose.
This morning I noticed yet another grey hair at my temple. Charlotte is nineteen. Somewhere.
POST-MORTEM ON OUR LOVE
I’ve been dissecting all the letters that you sent me,
slicing through them looking for the real you
cutting through the fat and gristle of each tortuous epistle
trying to work out what to do
I’ve laid the presents that you gave me out upon the floor
A book with pages missing, and a bottle, and a glove.
Now outside it’s chilly autumn, I’m conducting a post-mortem
On our love.
I’m conducting a post-mortem on our love.
An autopsy to find out what went wrong.
I know it died.
I just don’t know how, or why.
Maybe its heart stopped.
There’s an eyeball in a bottle staring sadly at the morgue
There’s a white line on the sidewalk silhouetting where it fell
In the dark I am inspecting all the angles of trajectory
Of Hell.
Was it suicide, or murder, or an accident, or what?
Though I cut and slice and saw and hack it won’t come back to life
And I’m severing the label of each organ on the table
With a knife . . .
I’m conducting a post-mortem on our love.
An autopsy to find out what went wrong.
I know it died.
I just don’t know how, or why.
Maybe its heart stopped.
BEING AN EXPERIMENT UPON STRICTLY SCIENTIFIC LINES
ASSISTED BY UNWINS LTD, WINE MERCHANTS (UCKFIELD)
IT STRUCK me last night, after a couple of drinks, that I’d never heard of anyone experimentally testing the precise effects alcohol has on a creative writer.
I have in front of me a large bottle of scotch, a small bucket of ice, and a number of glasses. Also a typewriter, and some paper. All this in the spirit of purest scientific enquiry.
My plan is this: I will drink whilst writing. Thus, we will discover whether, for example, alcohol really does enhance one’s creativity; or whether, as some have claimed (with, I suspect, scant evidence), it causes a writer to become maudlin, aggressive, rambling, and to lose his or her sense of modesty, decency and restraint.
Quiet, please. I am about to pour—and consume—my first drink.
(Drink number one.)
There.
Does booze make one more loquacious? Funnier? More intelligent? What is the relationship between alcohol and art? And what was it that poet said? You know, what’s-his-name, rhymes with Heathcote Williams, made tents. Tip of my tongue. Omar Khayyam. “I often wonder what the vintner buys, one-half so precious as the stuff he sells . . .” Sheer poetry.
Excuse me.
(Drink number two.)
The word whisky, of course, comes from the Gaelic uisge-a-bagh, meaning water of life.
I wonder how many great works of literature have been created due to alcohol.
I wonder how many great works of literature have been held up due to people having put their Tippex down and not being able to find it for ten minutes until eventually it turned up right in front of them all the time.
I wonder why my glass is empty. Excuse me.
(Drink number three)
Where was I? Oh yes. Alcohol. Writing.
I don’t know why people say that drinking makes you aggressive. Writers are not an aggressive bunch. We’re actually meek and mild and polite. Even when we’ve been drinking. Especially when we’ve been drinking.
I don’t know what kind of numbskulled, guacamole-brained, gutless wimps would accuse writers of being aggressive. If they want to say that kind of stuff to me I’ll be ready.
Drawn fucking typewriters at dawn.
Course they’d never show up. They got no bottle.
I got a bottle, which is oddly enough half-empty. And speaking as an impartial observer, the contents has haved no discernable effect on my writing whatsoever.
(Drink number five.)
Many writers such as for example myself have the TV on while working, because it is an educational instrument of great worth.
You can learn a lot from the television.
Omar Khayyam was on the other day, no, hold on, it was the other one, Heathcliff Williams, anyway he was on TV going on about big grey buggers, long noses, flappy ears, not hippos, the other ones, elephants, anyway, he was saying that the average ejaculate of an elephant would feed an ant-hill for a year.
Which is impressive I suppose, but I keep feeling sorry for the ants. Just think about it.
I mean, somewhere around March some little ant is going to say “Oh no. Not elephant spunk again!”
“Eat your ejaculate, dear. Furnished by pulsing elephant testicles, that was. Full of vitamins and protein.”
“But we bin eatin it since January! I’m sick of it. Can’t we go and chomp leaves, or milk one of those little sticky buggers, climb all over your roses, you know. Things. Wossnames. Aphids.”
And the other one says, “I’ll have you know there’s ants in hills not far from here that’d be very grateful for nice plate of elephant come.”
Poor little wossnames.
I’ll drink to them.
(Drink number seven. Or jus’ possibly drink six. Hang on. I’ll count the empty glasses.
Right. Drink five. Said it was drink five. Right.)
S’funny cos I have noticed along with many other great writers like Omar Williams and Heathcote Khayyam and people, how ones powers of inspiration start increasing practically exponentiallially under the influence.
Jus had this great idea fr a novel. No, s wunnerfl idea. Lissn. This bloke, right, some bloke, jus like this guy sort of bloke youd meet inna pub, good bloke always stans his roun, anyway, he meets this woman, an . . .
damlostit.
No, anyway, sagreat idea, cos he, um. Sjust like um Romeo an Thing, you know, exzcept he’s in advertising, and she, I dunno, dyes her hair or somethng, dusn’t mattr, anyWay . . . In the en they all live happily ever aftedr, sgonna b fuckig great you lissen, sellafuckin film rights anyday that calls for another drunk.
(Drink numbers six seven and eight well finish the bottle atuqaly.)
Whuwuz I?
Effec of drinkin on literry creativitity, thasswot.
Strrific.
Feel so bloody creative.
Feel absolutley cretive . . .
Actully feel a bit sick.
Escuse me.
Gotr escuse mysel.
Bak inaa minut.
o god.