Ghosting

by Jonathan Kemp

  When my father was a baby, his mother taped his ears back onto his head while he slept in his cot, in order to prevent them folding forward and sticking out permanently. Sometimes, it seemed to me as if that tape had never been removed, and it prevented him from hearing anything I said. Each morning the same routine: he’d slice twenty discs of banana onto his cereal, and if, after twenty, he had a stump of fruit left, he would look up forlornly, unsure what to do with the excess. My mother would hold out her hand for him to drop it into her cupped palm. If he were ever to articulate what he feels about life, I’m certain he would claim that habit is the only route to happiness, or at least success.

  My mother, in her own way, was equally taped down. Her overwhelming desire for an easy life rendered her incapable of contradicting anything he said. A more repressed human being I’ve yet to meet. She died three months after I was sent here. Cancer. I still haven’t cried about it. I’ve cried about lots of things, myself mostly, but not her. I’ve had one visitor. An old client, now more of a friend – Gregory. Over the past year or so he’s come here regularly, almost like my confessor. I told him I hadn’t kept in touch with my family at all, and he said I should write. I did, knowing they wouldn’t have moved address since I left. The first letter from my father told me about my mother.

  It didn’t occur to me at the time that I had any other option than to accept – or at least to give the appearance of accepting – their terms. From that point until I completed my O-levels two years later, I began a life of duplicity in order to survive. Lies became my way of cheating boredom, the portal I would crawl through to reach a world in which I could breathe.

  To the outside world – and, most importantly, to my parents – I was the perfect scholar. Though I hated the subjects they foisted upon me, I knew the secret to an easy life lay in doing well at school, for the time being at least. So I spent my days studying maths and economics, and I spent my nights with my friends – and they were not the sort of people of whom my parents would have approved. A schoolfriend of mine, Phil, was working at the time in a small bistro in a posh part of town, washing dishes from seven till midnight, seven nights a week. Under the pretext of working there I was able to stay out every night till late. Dad liked the idea that I was willing to work. In reality, far from spending my time elbow-deep in boiling suds and grease, I cycled each night to the local golf course, to meet a crowd with whom I could smoke and drink myself into oblivion. There was Spike, with his skinhead and boxer’s brawn, whose stepfather was forever in and out of prison and whose mother was too pissed to care what he got up to. Sometimes he would steal a car and drive us up to Saddleworth Moor. He was related to one of the victims of the murders that had taken place in the city in the mid-’60s, and he would take us to the spot he claimed the dead girl had been buried. Johnny, Spike’s cousin, had long hair and wore AC/DC T-shirts. His elder brother was a dealer and he always had what seemed like an endless supply of dope and acid. The lights of the city hummed the colour of radioactivity as we drove back home. Heather, Johnny’s girlfriend, was all shaggy hair and denim. They both head-banged along to the loud rock music that was played in the car. But Julie was my favourite. Julie never head-banged. Julie looked like Marilyn Monroe, or so we thought. She confided in me once that she was actually trying her best to look like Mike Monroe, from Hanoi Rocks, but no one seemed to care much. She wore her hair impeccably bleached and her skirts explicitly short, and was known as the village bike because she let most boys do pretty much anything with her. Most of the time, though, she was Spike’s girlfriend.

  I thought that only drugs or music could supply me with the transgressive thrill I sought. I never gave sex much thought. I had had a lacklustre and lustless grope with Julie one night before she and Spike started what my grandmother would quaintly call ‘courting’, but on the whole I knew even then that I preferred boys – knew that I would rather be kissing Spike. I hid this desire beneath a smog of drugs, claiming a cynical lack of interest in anything sexual, even though I imagined Spike naked and tied to my bed each time I masturbated. Spike and the others mockingly called me the Poet because books and the lyrics to songs – and the thoughts they inspired – were more important to me than trying to get laid. Whenever we got stoned they would all sink into torpor around me while I grew more and more animated by my own fucked-up monologue, till one of them would shout, ‘Hey, Poet, fuckin’ can it, will ya?’

  Then I discovered whoring.

  I wanted more than anything to leave this world behind, but not in order to destroy myself; only in order to find another world, one in which bodies glowed and danced like flames. Such a world is not found, however, but must be created anew each time we want to live in it. I know that much at least.

  1894

  The name’s Jack Rose, or Rosy Jack as the gents like to call me, on account of that soft pink bud nestling between me rosy arse cheeks. I’m a Maryanne, see, and gentlemen pays me handsomely to do things I should likely enough do for free, though the cash definitely helps, make no mistake. Steamers, we call ’em, the gents what come around; or swells or swanks: moneyed geezers, well-mannered, classy, not like the lowlife I knew before I started in this game. But they all, to a man, love that arse of mine, love watching it pucker and pout, the filthy bastards – love to poke it, finger it, sniff it, lick it, fill it, fuck it. And I love them to do it, I’m not ashamed to admit. But I love too the gifts and cash what they show their appreciation of my little rosy star with – my asterisk of flesh, my puckered pal. This hole of mine has turned out to be a right little golden goose.

  I don’t suppose boys are any different from girls in liking to take presents from those what are fond of us. There isn’t much wrong in gents showing their appreciation of the finer things in life with a trinket or a few shillings, is there now? I wasn’t the first and I doubt very much I’ll be the last, that much I do know. I know too that it is a harsh world, and harder still in this bloody shithole city of London I was pushed into. Fuckin’ impossible if the jaws of poverty hold you as they hold me ma and pa and the other seven miserable brats he sired. If that’s your lot you’d do well to keep your eyes shut and crawl right back into the cunt you came from, if only that was an option. Instead we open our eyes and crawl forward, lambs to the slaughter every last one of us. A smack on the arse and you’ve no bloody choice is the truth of the matter. Every day a fuckin’ battle. So if you can claw back a little happiness, a little pleasure, a little laughter and joy, it’s no crime. It’ll come as no surprise then when I confess that I feel like the king of the world when a coin is pressed into my palm after being pleasured. It’s bleedin’ hilarious to be making money so easily, isn’t it? And this line of work takes me places I’d never have seen otherwise, that’s for sure. When you have nothing to begin with you only stand to gain, and the way of life most rich gents take for granted seems to me to be the trappings of heaven itself. And the police are kind to me after their fashion. They shut their eyes for the most part – but then they’ve shut their eyes to worse than me and no mistake. The things I’ve seen in this town would make even old Queen Vic crack a smile.

  Odd the way I fell into the whole business, really. By accident, you might say. I certainly never planned it, but then again I don’t suppose anyone ever sets out to become a whore, do they? It was a bollock-numbing January in ’93 and I was several months past my fifteenth birthday, though I looked much younger. Skinny as a runt and no trace of a beard as yet, though I had sprouted a soft dark down on my privates which thrilled me. I was running telegrams. Fuckin’ awful, it was. Perhaps you’ve known it yourself, that horror when you realise all your time is being given over to others, all your thoughts are about day-to-day survival. Perhaps like me you’ve felt yourself chained to a fate you detest. I don’t know. Where I grew up, ugliness was the one and only reality; joy was unheard of except for the odd booze-up or street fight. I was working about fifteen hours a day running around in all weathers.

  I was bor
n and raised in Bethnal Green, a stinkin’ hole of a place with a cesspit the size of a small lake down the road from our home that filled the air with the stench of shit the whole time. We shared the house with three other families. We had no running water so going for a piss or a crap meant finding a space that hadn’t already been used – in or outside the house. We were all of us permanently sick and two of my sisters died before even learning to walk. My pa is a useless alcoholic crook. Never done a day’s work in his life. Robs to get his beer money and we never saw a penny of it. He’s violent and spiteful, too, to all of us. One day I came home to find my two little sisters, Millie and Flossie, crying something awful, and, when I could finally get some sense out of them, it seems Pa’d got them to pull on a piece of string threaded through a keyhole in the front door. ‘Pull it hard, girls,’ he’d said, so they did, eager to please their pa, not knowing that on the other side of the door the string was tied around the neck of a stray cat. He swung the door open to show them the poor strangled beast hanging there, dead by their own fair hands. That amused him no end. The cunt.

  He beats Ma all the time. She always puts up a fight but she always comes off worst, poor cow. He’s a big fucker. I got good at cleaning her up afterwards. We were scared shitless, the little ones crying and screaming every time he was around. I’ll never understand why Ma married him in the first place. I asked her once and all she said was, ‘He used to treat me like gold.’ Sure, it’s good to be treated like gold, but I can hardly believe that ole bastard even knows how. She’s deaf in one ear after he thought it a lark to smash two cupboard doors closed on her head one day.

  It was all Ma could do to feed us proper once a week, let alone once a day. Then at the age of fourteen a stroke of luck landed me a job as a messenger for the Post Office in Charing Cross. True, I was delivering grams in storm and snow, frozen to the bone, miserable as sin and tired as a dog. But being a thick bastard I considered myself fuckin’ lucky. All my friends, my elder brothers too, had turned to crime, for where we lived it was steal or starve. I come from a fine line of criminals – though not very good ones. Pa was always behind bars. If we ever needed to find him, we knew he’d be in the pub or in the clink. But for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to do it. My one and only joy was handing my wages to Ma once a week and seeing her face light up from the glow of the coins, both of us knowing I’d earned them honestly. But I was soon to discover another much greater source of both money and pleasure, a way of life that would show me things beyond that narrow horizon of poverty and survival.

  Strangely enough, I never thought it a crime, becoming a renter.

  Praise for London Triptych

  ‘An ambitious work in which Kemp aims to give voice to the voiceless. Fast-moving and sharply written.’

  Guardian

  ‘A thoroughly absorbing and pacy read. A fresh angle on gay life and on the oldest profession.’

  Time Out

  ‘Astonishingly textured prose and wonderfully defined narrative voices. I recognised the characters immediately and wanted to follow them.’

  Joanne Harris

  ‘An interestingly equivocal and quietly questioning debut.’

  Financial Times

  ‘London itself, in its relentless indifference, is as powerful a presence here as the three gay men whose lives it absorbs.’

  Times Literary Supplement

  ‘A thought-provoking enquiry into what changes in gay men’s lives as the decades pass – and what doesn’t. As the connections and reflections across the years reveal themselves, this is a book that will make you think – and make you feel.’

  Neil Bartlett

  ‘By turns explicit and energetic, Kemp’s forceful prose uncompromisingly draws the reader in.’

  Metro

  ‘Every now and again a new voice appears, someone whose stories speak to us on many levels. This first novel by Jonathan Kemp is one of those books. I didn’t want this excellent book to end.’

  Gscene

  ‘Above all, this is a story about the power of feeling and the hope and beauty that can be found in even the darkest places.’

  Dissident Musings

  ‘Kemp’s language is beautiful, his characters carefully drawn and the dialogue engaging. The narratives overlap and are all the more moving for their subtlety. A touching and engrossing read.’

  Attitude

  ‘What an amazing book. This is the best gay novel to be published in many years. It is literary fiction at its best.’

  Clayton Littlewood

  ‘London Triptych might find itself nestled between other works of gay historical fiction on the bookshop shelves, but its central theme – freedom and the pursuit of it – is universal.’

  Hackney Citizen

  ‘There is a deceptively relaxed quality to Kemp’s writing that is disarming, bewitching and, to be honest, more than a little sexy.’

  Polari

  ‘Kemp has achieved what few writers ever will: a work that stands alone as a heartbreaking love letter not only to a vast and fascinating place, but also to the lives within that serve as its beating heart.’

  gaydarnation

  About the Author

  Jonathan Kemp was born in Manchester. He now lives in London, where he teaches creative writing, literature and queer theory at Birkbeck, University of London. His debut novel, London Triptych, won the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. He is also the author of Twentysix.

  Also by Jonathan Kemp

  London Triptych

  Twentysix

  Copyright

  First edition published in 2015

  This ebook edition published in 2015 by

  Myriad Editions

  59 Lansdowne Place

  Brighton BN3 1FL

  www.myriadeditions.com

  Copyright © Jonathan Kemp 2015

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  ISBN (pbk): 978–0–9562515–6–5

  ISBN (ebk): 978–1–908434–07–4

  Designed and typeset in Palatino

  by Linda McQueen, London

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