Rainbow Milk

by Paul Mendez

  “What do you fancy listening to? Nothing Christmassy.”

  “What have you got?”

  “Anything you like. Do you like hip-hop? The Roots? Or is that too obvious?” He began to talk to himself. “Too obvious. Saint Etienne’s new album…?”

  “Did you see Donnie Darko?” said Jesse, as he watched Owen read down a list of track titles.

  “Yeah, top film.”

  “Do you remember the scene during the house party, when Donnie answered the door to Gretchen and took her upstairs to his room? What was that song?” And he hummed it.

  “ ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’?” Owen laughed.

  “Yeah, who’s that?”

  Owen gave Jesse a strange grin of unexpected brotherhood, then picked out several LPs from the front of the first box and presented them to Jesse on the coffee table—a white, a grey, a black and a blue.

  “This is the one with ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ on it,” he said, tapping a clean, trimmed nail on the grey sleeve printed with Substance in green and JOY DIVISION 1977–1980 in white. “This is a really good place to start if you’re looking to get a wider view of their best work. Well. All their work was their best work.”

  “How many albums did they release?”

  “Just two studio, then several posthumous compilations. I’ve got everything official.”

  “Posthumous?”

  Owen looked at Jesse, shook his head and laughed. “Hurry up with that spliff.”

  With great care, Owen unsheathed the vinyl from a black sleeve and placed it on the turntable, as Jesse licked the Rizla gum and smoothed the roll.

  “This is where you start. Merry Christmas.” They held up their glasses and drank. Owen sat down next to him as Jesse sparked up.

  Thin white jagged lines on a black background, like skin under a microscope. Jesse handled it as Owen had done, with a sense of deference. It was a piece of black card with only a little bit of writing on the back, the band name—JOY DIVISION—the album title—UNKNOWN PLEASURES—and underneath, FACT 10 • A FACTORY RECORDS PRODUCT. Even before the needle hit the disc, Jesse thought of his night with Fraser in the derelict flats, of the broken glass, rotting joints of window-surround, the cold, damp breezeblocks.

  Owen closed the blinds behind them, though it was only lunchtime. The sound emerging from the floor-based speakers was like nothing Jesse had ever heard. Plosive drums at the beginning, pumping like the heart of a black boy being chased into a dark tunnel by white thugs, and before he had time to understand what he was hearing they were joined by little black dots of bass, high then low, high then low. A studio effect, like a car sinking in a canal with the radio on, weaved in and out. Jesse felt transported to the deserted foundries and factories of his childhood before they were demolished, cleared away and replaced with car showrooms and supermarkets; the cavities in walls you could climb through to run around the dead, black, oily waste of a century of industrial heft. He missed that world, the sooty, subsiding streets of his ministerial territory, the snotty-nosed children running round dirty-faced kicking battered footballs.

  And then a man started singing in a low baritone, as reverberantly as the instruments around him. Jesse and Owen let their legs stretch out, their feet nestling in the rug underneath the coffee table. Jesse watched Owen blow a plume of smoke up towards the high ceiling above him and wondered what he was thinking. He wanted to ask who the singer was, but didn’t want to spoil the depth of engagement. He also wanted Owen to touch him, put a hand on his knee, make some sort of concession—even if he would then have to reject him—but he just passed the spliff back, sipped his champagne and closed his eyes, letting the beats pop in the air and flood the floor. Jesse closed his eyes too. I’ve got the spirit, lose the feeling, take the shock away. There was no chorus, just a guitar line, then a new verse. The weed went to his head and it was as black as blindness. The rhythm, extruded from drums, bass, guitar, studio effects and untrained baritone, was perfectly balanced, nothing louder than anything else yet everything distinctly audible. It sounded different from “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” but was a better match for his mood; there was light, but like the narrow beam of a headlamp in a mine shaft. A keyboard sound like the glow of white-hot metal. These were the echoes of his childhood; his mother might have been playing soul and R&B at home but this was the sound of the streets, the factories and warehouses, the canals, the ironworks, the steel works. Blood on your fingers, brought on by fear.

  He wondered how that man was spending Christmas. He hadn’t told Owen, and wondered how he would feel, whether he would want to protect him, whether he would take Jesse as his own and wish to avenge his honour; whether he would tell him he was just being silly and should grow some balls. What had that man done? Was it deliberate? It would take some audacity to come into a black man’s house—however young and naïve that black man was—and deliberately rip a hole in his rectum to transmit HIV, out of revenge, perhaps, for someone who looked like Jesse, maybe, who might have hurt him in the past. Perhaps, then, that man was simply lacking in self-consciousness, and had no idea of his strength. Perhaps, as Jesse often did, he had simply forgotten to trim his nails.

  Jesse settled the remaining half a spliff in the ashtray. He didn’t want to get any more stoned. He felt inspired. A breakdown sounded like fireworks, or an intergalactic war. Owen interlocked his fingers across his belly, closed his eyes and smiled, like a hospital patient on morphine. In between songs he would wake up and top up the champagne. Jesse could almost see blue and pink lasers flash before his eyes. He came from a place that remembered the sounds of steel and iron being hammered into shape, carried on air stifled by black smoke pouring from chimneys.

  Owen silently got up to turn the disc over, and still, Jesse asked no questions, just rolled another spliff. The first song on the other side he could imagine Beyoncé dancing to, in a Josephine Baker banana skirt, shaking her wild corkscrew curls. It almost sounded like maracas at the start of each bar, but of course, was too smooth and refined to actually be. Jesse imagined stopping by a chainmaking forge, the men in oily dungarees and boiler suits all dropping their hammers at once as they stopped work for their eleven o’clock blowjobs. He started to feel paranoid that this would be the music of his death, that this would be the last album he would ever hear before he died.

  He closed his eyes and allowed the music to print images on the back of his eyelids. Derelict foundries; shopping trolleys in the algae-covered canals; the gas tank; the disused railway lines choked with stinging nettles, a dustbin for screwed-up, spunked-in porn; the fences with signs up saying danger of death electricity keep out. Nobody on those planes, when they boarded, knew that they were going to die in a terrorist attack. None of them knew that they were going to die together that morning. He imagined what it might have been like inside the South Tower, on impact, to stand and watch a whole aircraft approach the window, and the unbelievable explosion of fire and glass, though there was no time to convey the experience for posterity. Unknown Pleasures ended with the echoed sound of broken glass.

  Owen lifted off the needle when its circling at the end of the record became unbearable, and switched off the turntable. No other music known to Jesse could follow it; time needed to pass while its energy dissipated. There was only a dribble of champagne left, which he tipped into his flute before crunching the bottle back into the ice bucket upside down. Jesse still had most of a glass left. Owen retook his seat heavily.

  “So, what did you think?”

  Jesse had nothing to say about it. He thought that what he wanted to say about it, about the silly little Black Country and its crushed industries, would be of no interest to Owen at all. So he looked for other references. “I’ve never heard anything like it.”

  “What’s the closest thing?”

  Jesse thought of those afternoons listening to albums with Fraser in his bedroom, when he was
supposed to be on the ministry. “Reminds me a bit of Blur’s 13.”

  “My wife and I met at a Blur gig,” Owen said. Jesse thought Owen was laughing at him. Owen spoke to the ceiling, as if he was on a psychiatrist’s couch, and Jesse watched his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down with each syllable. He had never noticed how long Owen’s eyelashes were, before. “They played at the Corn Exchange in the summer of ’94. We’d both just broken up with other people and were near each other in the crowd, dancing with our friends, one of whom was mutual and introduced us. And then they played ‘Girls and Boys’ and the whole place went crazy.”

  Jesse didn’t mind Owen talking, but he wished he hadn’t mentioned Blur when Joy Division were still in his head. Blur reminded him too much of Fraser and his brothers; of the boys at school during the Britpop craze. Of being fifteen, and wanting to be like them, wanting to be considered one of them, but not being one of them. Of his fear of getting an erection in the changing rooms as the few boys who did have big dicks walked around swinging. Of going to the barber and being given a trim that made him look like his hair had been sprayed on with a stencil. He feared he’d be bullied at school for looking like Frank Sidebottom, the big-eyed, brown, sphere-headed comedy character, so when he got home he scalped his head bloodily in the shower with one of his father’s razors. He hated himself that much, already—not himself, but his blackness. As he stood on the stairs, the sight of his scalp sprung tears to his mother’s eyes; she shut the front room door in his face. He had to take two weeks off school while all the chunks he’d dug out from his scalp pussed up and scabbed over. She considered sending him to see a doctor. He wished now that she had. They might have taken him away from her and sent him to live with people who knew how to raise children with unconditional love.

  “She was so gorgeous. Clever. She looked like a model and was reading law. Sorry, I’m stoned. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.” Owen had been talking all the while Jesse had drifted away.

  “It’s alright,” said Jesse.

  Owen, still resting his head on the back of the sofa, turned to look at him, tenderly, in the eyes, then down at his mouth, then back into his eyes, and smiled. Jesse thought that if he didn’t cry, he would be downplaying his own feelings, his personal trauma, in front of someone who seemed to possess empathy, in a world devoid of this quality, but that if he did, he would betray himself for being weak and effeminate and unable to look after himself, or to live without his parents.

  “Did you always know, when you were younger, that you were gay?” he asked Owen, unexpectedly even to himself, after a silence. Owen nodded, gravely.

  “I always knew I liked boys, yeah,” he said, in a low, quiet, confidential voice that vibrated in the settee back. “Someone’s sexuality doesn’t change halfway through their life. Everyone’s born at some point on the continuum, and it’s up to them how truthful they want to be to themselves.”

  “So you’re bisexual, then?”

  Owen got up—before Jesse could ask him not to—to pluck down a slim volume, which he handed to Jesse. “Thom Gunn, The Passages of Joy. This was the first book of poetry I ever bought myself, when I was fifteen,” Owen said. “He and this young fella…”—he took down another, this time Wilfred Owen’s Collected Poems—“are the reasons I became a poet.” He sat back down, facing Jesse, with a foot up under the other thigh.

  “Anything to do with the name?” Jesse asked, of Wilfred Owen.

  “He was born on the Wirral as well, just like me. Also coincidental is the fact that my surname’s Gunning,” he said, proudly tapping a finger on the name Thom Gunn.

  “Mine’s McCarthy.” Jesse held out a hand, which Owen shook solidly.

  “There’s already at least one McCarthy in poetry,” Owen winked. “You’ll have to come up with another name.”

  Hearing it from someone else’s—an actual writer’s—mouth, made Jesse realise how silly the idea of him leaving a name in literature sounded. “So what about this made you a poet?” he asked of the Thom Gunn.

  “ ‘Elegy,’ Passages of Joy’s opening poem, was published before the AIDS crisis, but as so much of his later work lamented the consequent loss of gay life, it smelled of prophecy, to me, especially after my English teacher died.” He took a long puff of the spliff, took it down, breathed out through his nostrils and gave it back to Jesse, whose mouth had drained at the mention of AIDS; he took a gulp of champagne. “It didn’t seem possible someone we knew could ever get it; glamorous gays in London or New York or San Francisco—where Thom still lives—got AIDS, not us lads whose dads worked for Unilever and whose granddads fought at the Somme. It wasn’t supposed to come to the Wirral, but my English teacher, who I sort of idolised and who’d encouraged me to write, got sick that summer.”

  Jesse thought Owen might tear up, and the first thing he thought of was how privileged he would feel.

  “There was no one like him,” Owen said. “He cropped his hair like a skinhead from the docks, but was a grammar school teacher into fin-de-siècle poetry and painting. He took us to the Lady Lever Gallery and contextualised the work there in a way that blew our minds. He wore leather trousers to work, with a regular shirt, tie and suit jacket. Being frowned upon by other teachers made him the ultimate hero to us. He was the first teacher I ever thought might have a sexual life outside—and maybe even inside—work. But as I was studying for my O-Levels, trying to spend as much time with him as possible, something in his constitution changed. He replaced the leather trousers with those that came with the suit jacket—sort of desexualising himself. He grew his hair, started wearing glasses, and was always slim, but he lost some weight, and developed this dreadful cough. I think I was the only student he told that he was HIV-positive.” Here, he turned to look at Jesse, which made Jesse in turn wonder whether Owen knew, whether it was obvious to him, what he was going through. “Very few people went to see him in hospital. I did, in secret, because rumours spread among the parents. He was being branded a paedophile, though no one could prove that he’d actually been involved with any of the students. My dad told me that if I kept contact with him I wouldn’t be allowed back in the house.” Owen seemed as if he was deconstructing a recent event, not something that happened sixteen years ago. “There was nothing the doctors could do except prescribe those reactive early drugs, and run countless degrading tests. Those guys were guinea pigs. He got pneumonia, and Kaposi’s sarcoma. Classic case.” Turning his head, he saw Jesse’s questioning expression. “It was a terrifying skin condition. You came out in lesions. Some guys tried to hide it with make-up, which only made them more conspicuous. I tried not to show him how upsetting I found his appearance. He told me it was alright, that he knew how bad he looked. I think he wanted me to cry out, for someone to just be honest with him.” Owen paused, perhaps to swallow back tears. Jesse relit and handed him back the spliff, which he seemed cheered by, as if he had forgotten about it, and he took a deep pull, that made a burning sound as if the lit end had been pressed into someone’s flesh. “Because of what I witnessed, I convinced myself that that death would be inevitable if I had sex with men. But I knew I couldn’t die of poetry.” He laughed unconvincingly at his own joke. Jesse indulged him. “Have you ever known anyone die of AIDS?” Owen asked him.

  Jesse kept his composure, swallowed, kept eye contact with Owen and shook his head. Owen turned his gaze back to the ceiling, then after a silence, suddenly sat up.

  “Are you hungry?”

  Jesse didn’t suffer from the munchies after smoking weed like other people did, but he had gone to bed without dinner the night before, and hadn’t eaten anything more than a couple of heavily buttered slices of toast at a time for several days. He nodded.

  “You can peel the spuds,” Owen said, implying that he was going to share his food with Jesse. “I’ll open another bottle of champagne.”

  “Alright,” said Jesse, shyly. H
e felt a little heavy-eyed, but truly happy with it being just the two of them, sharing a rare day in which time meant nothing. “I like hearing you talk,” he told Owen.

  “You’ll let me know if I’m too depressing,” said Owen, getting up and leaving with the ice bucket and his flute. “Let’s do it, then.”

  As Owen left the room, Jesse read the second verse of “Elegy”: Even the terror / of leaving life like that / better than the terror / of being unable to handle it.

  Chapter 2

  He had refused to work as a kitchen porter at Gilbert’s, and walked out without taking the gloves. He hadn’t moved to London for that, and showed how he felt by ripping his apron off in front of the customers and throwing it over the bar as he left the restaurant. The room went quiet and everyone saw. He didn’t look back. Left his uniform on the locker room floor; washed and ironed his trousers back at the hostel, took them and the shoes back to Topman, who gave him a credit voucher with a year to spend. He didn’t care that he wouldn’t be paid for the shift-and-a-half he’d worked.