Elise remembers a snarl and a rush and the sound of my father’s head being slammed against the wall.
Then the electricity came on again: the sobering bathos of artificial light. Jack wasn’t moving. Rhys was sobbing over him, saying what have I done?
Elise told him to go and not come back. Ever.
Through his tears Rhys said, softly and quite slyly, ‘I did it for you. If you knew what he is, you wouldn’t stay with him another minute, Elise darling.’
Then apparently I came downstairs, grumbling and rubbing my eyes. I’d got a chest infection and conjunctivitis and there was a crust over my left eye, which wouldn’t open. Elise got a neighbour in to babysit me while she drove Jack to Casualty; he had concussion and stayed in overnight.
‘Do you remember any of that, Sebastian?’ she asked.
‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘Really? Perhaps you blanked it out?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘Quite. Well, a couple of days later,’ says Elise, ‘I heard Jack on the phone to – yes, you guessed it. Perhaps they needed the violence. Fed off it. When Jack went missing, I wondered. How could I not wonder?’
‘Do you still wonder?’
‘Frankly I’m past caring.’
Rhys would have desired any woman Jack had. And so it turned out, she says. Think of it this way: they didn’t so much want each other as want to be each other. Oh, it was nothing to do with me: don’t think I was flattered, I was just the muddle in the middle. Be straight with people, Elise tells me. Bring Jesse to meet me. Before it’s too late.
4
“Yeki-bood, yeki-nabood.” That’s how all Iranian stories, at least in the oral tradition, have begun, since as long as anyone remembers. “There was one, there wasn’t one,” as in “There was a person (once upon a time); but on the other hand, no, there was no one.”
Hooman Majd4
The nearer the train approaches to Jesse, the more I realise, not just that I can share all this with him, but that I need to. It’s my only hope. At last, let Jesse in. We’ve been sharing bed and board in my flat now for many months and yet Jesse has been in some cruel and wanton way locked out.
Whyever does he put up with me? What has he done to deserve me? Jesse practises the decencies, I the indecencies. My truant night walks, how foul they seem today. My mouth fills with queasy sweetness. All this slipperiness can be amended. Jesse is my family, nothing less. I knew that when I asked him for a civil partnership. It flashed upon me that he and I might adopt a child. This thought had sprung, it seemed, from nowhere: I’d never been aware of the least desire for children or been particularly comfortable in their company.
So I asked Jesse. Will you? Dearest, will you? Shall we?
Half an hour after I’d asked and he’d accepted – reluctantly, because he clearly comprehends me better than I understand myself – I’d done an unpardonable about-turn. The night walker had taken my place; the true-hearted lover had melted away.
The thought echoes back: ‘Don’t be like your father, Sebastian.’
What happened to you, Dad? I need to know.
Jack Messenger was shot or had his throat slit on the Turkish border with the Zagros Mountains, frozen into that desolation until the spring thaw revealed his corpse and he began to decompose in the sun. Predators cleaned up the evidence, scattering his remains until a new winter arrested his decay: over and over again. Like so many others he had fled Iran’s Revolution and was trying to slip over the border, to find his way to Istanbul. Thence to Alexandria or Malta. But where was Rhys Salvatore while all this was happening?
At Reading, a child’s voice says: Daddy?
Men and boys are standing in the aisle, on their way to a match, so I can’t immediately place the voice. Here it comes again: Daddy? It’s phrased as a query. I turn in my seat: a toddler in scarlet football strip is raising his arms to be picked up, waggling his fingers urgently.
Well, pick him up then. Don’t stand there talking goal scores. Pick him up.
*
Letting myself in, I lean against the door, thinking: At last, home, peace, groundedness. It’s a boundless relief. The Barbican architect built the walls of the apartments thick. You could kill someone in here and not be heard – or die and be forgotten. There are no audible neighbours – and often owners of these affluent pads reside elsewhere for most of the year. All we generally hear is the fizzing of water over the concrete cascade in the lake quadrangle, and the occasional plane.
But there’s a subdued turbulence in the flat. My first thought is that some drunk has got in and is shambling about: Scottish, or pretending to be, and declamatory. Silence, then a burst of laughter, knocking noises. Fuddled, alarmed, I shed my coat and scarf and hang them on the stand. It’s as if my key has turned in the lock of the wrong flat.
I peer round the living room door. A figure lurches across the floor, beer bottle raised, spot-lit by a couple of lamps. An audience seated around three sides of the room turns towards me as I enter.
‘Faith!’ slobbers the alcoholic in a parody of a Glaswegian accent, toppling against me, waving his bottle in my face. ‘Here’s an equivocator! O, come in, equivocator!’
He performs a sweeping bow. Someone is rapping with his knuckles on the table. Who the hell are these?
‘Hey,’ says Jesse. ‘Seb, hi. Sit down a minute and let the porter finish. I’ll explain and introduce you.’
I slump down while the far-gone porter renounces his intention to usher through hell-gate those who’ve gone the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire. His Scots accent is as fake as they come but he seems genuinely drunk. Reaching the passage about the part played by drink in lechery, he produces a stuffed sock from between his legs and wags it in our faces.
‘They’re not doing the whole bloody play, are they?’ I whisper to Jesse.
‘Just a couple of scenes, don’t worry. You OK?’
Jesse’s friends, an all-male troupe engaged to play in the Barbican Theatre, go on singing for their supper. I can smell it in the oven, one of Jesse’s vegetarian casseroles, tender and succulent and herby, except that the appetite of a carnivore is incapable of appeasement from Jesse’s cooking. My palate’s always craving the something else that is lacking – the animal juices he abhors.
Yes, of course, I did know they were coming – and that Jesse’s designing the sets. I don’t think I recognise anyone. Only when Lady Macbeth informs us that she has given suck and knows how tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks her, cradling a remembered infant to her breast, do I fix my eyes on the actor – who speaks with such fondness that you can easily believe he once suckled offspring and felt distraught when the time came to wean them.
Twenty-odd years ago we’d all visited Justin at Manchester Royal Infirmary, carrying armfuls of flowers.
*
It’s a battle between goldfish and gulls, Justin says, which the gulls are bound to win. And he’s spied a heron swallowing a koi carp a foot long. What a gizzard! Elegant bird, mind, fantastic piece of engineering – and gorgeous fish those, like jewels. It’s fascinating, Justin says, to see a heron slowly stalk the fish and lower its head – he mimes the motion – and dart its beak to skewer the fish of choice. The speed of it! Apparently birds see everything more slowly than we do. What can you do? he asks. It’s nature, after all. It must cost the earth to keep replenishing the pond with fish to feast the birds of the air.
Jesse has gone across to the theatre with the director to work on the play’s design and lighting. What we need to say has not, by tacit agreement, been said. Perhaps this evening, after the dress rehearsal – for tomorrow I return to the conference.
‘You must have done rather well, Sebastian,’ Justin says. ‘To own such a pad, I mean. I saw you once on television. Inside some ancient tomb somewhere – setting the world right about jackals. Jackal gods. In the dark. Couldn’t see you very well. I was impressed. I thought to myself: well, he’s kept all his hair.’
‘And you! Very much so.’
‘The pony-tail suits you. Yes, I was sorry we lost touch. I’m not a great correspondent,’ he says, graciously taking the blame upon himself. ‘When I sit down to write a proper letter, I enjoy it. But Facebook has spoilt us for all that.’
Justin and I corresponded for several years and, as I tell him now, I kept all his letters. He has a gift for correspondence, making of small and inconsequent events memorable miniatures that he has elaborated and polished just for you. After the attack, Justin cocooned himself, unvisited, for some time, until his face was ready to emerge. The letter-writing made a kind of mask for him.
The last time I saw Justin was when his parents came for him. He’d not be staying on at Manchester. Well, he might return when he’d fully recovered. When, as he said, he’d been put back together again. But that was unlikely to be for a year or two – and by that time most of us would have moved on. And now, although no traces remain of the complex engineering Justin has undergone, he is not exactly as he had been. But then, who is?Justin doesn’t refer to the attack, at least not directly, so I make sure to keep clear of the subject. Unspoken, it looms between us. We make our way through the labyrinth of walkways past the ponds towards the Conservatory to contemplate the terrapins and finches and quails. A wedding is in progress.
‘So – I gather you and Jesse are not hitched?’ he says. ‘Legally civil-partnered?’
‘No. Not that we haven’t spoken about it. But. Well. What about you?’
‘Likewise. Not quite grown up yet, to be honest. Hoping to, of course. One day. Just, not yet, O Lord, not yet.’
‘I know the feeling.’
‘Yes, I noticed,’ he says and laughs. ‘You are a wanderer.’
‘Oh, thanks very much! I didn’t think it showed.’ What has Jesse told him – or told them? Or is it just that his nose detects a moral smell coming from me?
‘No offence. Takes one to see one, eh, Sebastian? Jesse is a lovely guy though. People think they can mess him about, don’t they? They learn differently.’
Still smarting, I don’t ask how he knows this. But he tells me anyway. A younger member of the troupe was at primary school with Jesse, who was in charge of the form guinea pig. This guinea pig enjoyed the happiest life of any known rodent. It ate only the best salad, from Jesse’s mum’s kitchen – and grew plump and sleek. Jesse would communicate with it in a language of whistlings and purrings and swore it was the most intelligent of pets. When he caught someone teasing it, he knocked the kid down. How come I don’t know this, about the guinea pig, about people messing quiet Jesse about?
‘And what happened to the guinea pig?’
‘Nothing. He kept it safe. Well, I suppose it died in the end of old age.’
We come to a standstill. I think: I do not fully know Jesse, although I break bread with him every day. I stare at Justin.
‘What?’ Justin’s hand goes to his cheek in a defensive gesture, as if some fissure might have opened in the armour of his loveliness.
‘No. Nothing. Sorry. I was just thinking about … bread. And trust.’
My mother once remarked that they had a phrase in the Middle East: we are bound by bread and salt. I think that was it. This was the one bond you could not betray and that could never fail you. The bond of bread and salt forms the bedrock of reciprocal human relationships, on which all trust rests. Forfeit that, and all is lost. I say none of this and yet it seems that Justin hears it, or the gist of it.
‘Trust is something I learned that day, Sebastian,’ he says, breaking the silence. ‘Oddly enough. The violence of the world and its hate: how you can’t rely on the world from moment to moment to stay peaceful – and yet you have to, don’t you? Otherwise you couldn’t go on. And the kindness of strangers. Not quite an antidote.’
*
‘My dear,’ said Jesse fondly. It’s the old Jesse, temperate, forgiving: the attentive person with the gift for listening, both to what is said and to what’s withheld. But then he says, ‘If I’m honest, I don’t know what’s to be gained by talking.’
I try to tell him about my stalker. And about Elise. How she invites him to come and see her.
Jesse’s having none of it. ‘I’m not sure if I can any more, Seb. I feel – just – drained. I can’t tell you how tired I feel. All I want to do is sleep.’
The sleeves of Jesse’s cream pullover are rolled up. He sits beside me on the edge of the bed, bent double, elbows propped on his knees. He doesn’t look at me. I lay my palm on the inside of his arm, where the pale veins fork, and stroke the intimate skin. It comforts me to touch him. He removes his arm and shakes the sleeve back down as if my touch had riled him. He shivers. With a great yawn, he ruffles his hair with both hands.
There’s nothing conspicuously attractive about Jesse – except everything. Bread and salt, I think. And the mad idea sweeps over me – not for the first time – that if I could have had someone’s baby, it would have been Jesse’s, and all would be well. Or if he could have had mine. The biological absurdity of this idea doesn’t really strike me. I’ve felt it before, fleetingly, as we lay in a loose hug half asleep at the end of a tired day.
‘Jesse, I’m so sorry,’ I say.
‘You always are, I do believe you when you say so, I really do. But it’s pointless. Don’t start. Not now.’
‘What do you mean, don’t start?’
‘Look, sorry, I’m just – really tired. I’ve never been so tired in my life. I need to sleep. And don’t wake me up in the night, for God’s sake.’
‘Jesse.’
‘I mean it, Sebastian!’ he bursts out. ‘I’ve had enough of all that. Enough.’
I swallow hard. Flush to the roots of my hair. My voice comes out small. ‘All what?’
‘All the stuff we pretend not to know about, we pretend isn’t happening. It used to hurt me. Appal me. I used to think it was my fault. It’s beginning to bore me.’
‘You don’t sound like you,’ I mumble. What I don’t add is that he actually sounds rather like me. Taking hold of the reins at last, resisting, controlling. I’ve never thought how much that unique ability to listen, the exceptional empathy of the man, might have cost Jesse. And how much temptation it has offered me, not only to take him for granted, but to trample all over him.
Without reply, Jesse lies back, turns on his side and falls fast asleep, just as he is, fully clothed. When I ease off his shoes, he hardly stirs. I inch in beside him. It’s the first time in our life together that I don’t dare reach out to him. Has something happened while I was away to put iron in Jesse’s soul? But what? Is there someone else?
Sleep doesn’t come. I lie in the lee of Jesse’s breathing. It comes like sea-waves, in a hushed rhythm, steady and remote. A respiring tranquillity, over there, in which I long to take shelter.
In the early hours I give up on sleep and stand at the bedroom window, lifting a slat in the blind to peer out: there’s what they used to call a bomber’s moon. In the milky brightness, I can make out St Giles Cripplegate, where Foxe and Frobisher and Milton are sleeping. The pond holds the moon quite still. What is all this fuss I’ve been making about the past, when it comes to it? Even my father is old history, stale and unsustaining. Rhys Salvatore is nothing to me. Only my mother and Jesse have any call upon my heart. The lumber of my obsessions is tomb furniture: viscera preserved in a canopic jar. I have allowed my parents’ world a mortuary persistence.
When I turn from the window, Jesse is awake.
‘Off on one of your jaunts?’ he asks. ‘Don’t let me hinder you.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘No, of course not.’ I perch on his side of the bed. My ulterior mind dives to the questions: how does he know, how long has he known and what precisely does he know? Or think he knows. ‘I’m going nowhere, Jesse. Can’t sleep. I thought I might smoke a joint.’
‘OK.’
‘Have your sleep out, love,’ I say. ‘Sorry to wake you. We can talk in the morning.’
I make hot chocolate and root out some ginger biscuits. Jesse rolls the joint, puffs and holds, passing it across between finger and thumb. Perhaps hash will soften his sardonic turn of mind. I’ve bruised him so badly. I’ve made a habit of reaching in and roughly handling Jesse’s heart. Why? Because I could. Not once but countless times. Now his grief, so long constrained, is in process of turning rancorous – and anger will free him. Justin’s words echo: ‘People think they can mess him about.’ A clear warning.
‘Jesse, could I say something? I know it solves nothing. But I do – just – love you.’ I’m hardly able to look him in the face. ‘As I have never loved anyone before. In my life. Please, please – dear, darling Jesse – would you at least believe that? – if you believe nothing else.’
He takes another drag, clasping it deep in his lungs and blowing out a thin stream of smoke. I feel him falter. Then he tells me.
The night before I left for Wales he heard me get up and dress, as he’d done before. He watched through his eyelashes as I picked up my trainers and tiptoed to the door. It wasn’t new. Always before, he’d let it happen. He’d exercised restraint and given me the benefit of the doubt. As soon as I closed the front door, he threw on a tracksuit and followed.
‘I can still hardly believe, Sebs, I can’t – that you’d behave like that. To me. To yourself. Even though I half knew. But half knowing isn’t the same as seeing with your own eyes. As I followed you, you seemed like another animal. You looked smaller. You even walked differently.’
My palms sweat. I’ll stop. On my honour it will never happen again.
He makes no effort to disguise his cynicism. Honour? I’d have felt just the same in Jesse’s position. Any person of average intelligence would sneer at the clichés I find myself coming out with. I swig back my chocolate. He hasn’t touched his. I stop myself asking him if he’d like a biscuit. I go blurting on. I’ve no idea why I behaved like that. Well, I do have some idea, but there’s no excuse for it, none in the world. So I won’t try to explain. It is, in some horrible way, mechanical.
Equivocator Page 6