by James Newman
“What did you do?”
“We sat on the sofa. We spoke about French literature, he had known Celine and Jean Genet. Had met the beats in Paris. We had drinks, and he tried to seduce me. I told him to back off and you know what the old goose did, he backed off. Offered me my old room back. The room that looked over the garden and onto the berry trees where the chaffinches fed in the morning. The birds would wake me through that open window. The old goose, George, that was his name, had books on ornifology – once I saw a crossbill feed on that tree.”
“A rare winter migrant.”
“Impressive, Joe, you know your birds. Anyway, things improved over time. Got me enrolled into university, George did. Took me on like a father, he would have occasion parties where women would sit naked and meditate and guys with long hair would read poetry standing on the coffee table. You see my childhood before this was terrible – am I talking too much?”
“Carry on.” Joe looked at the drinks cabinet and then headed toward it and poured himself a large one.
“My mother had a condition. A condition whereby she would make me sick to garner sympathy from practitioners in the medical profession.”
“Munchausen by proxy?”
“I’m surprised again, Joe.”
“I’ve read enough to cover the basics.”
“The Boy in the Window?”
“A fantastic book, Taylor. You should write another like it.”
“Well I plan to when Jimmy returns. I hadn’t, however, heard of the condition. Not until I moved into the old family home with my new homosexual father and his band of artist libertine friends. This is why you must bring Jimmy back to me, Joe, do you understand?”
Joe nodded. Walked towards the door, opened it. The rains had stopped if only for an hour or so. Outside in the street an old pinched-faced woman swept a tiled driveway. The type of driveway you could have eaten your dinner off. It wasn’t the floor she was sweeping. It was something else, something much deeper, more painful, something she could never clean, Joe figured. Either that or it was Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. His or hers, he couldn’t be sure. Both doomed. But there was a difference. This was his last chance. Perhaps she hadn’t gotten one; a chance, that was. Or perhaps she swept that chance away like the dirt on her tiled driveway.
Lost forever.
NIGHT-CLUBBING
A LUMP of charley in my sky rocket like the rock of Gibraltar and me walk into the club and order a couple of beers, the last line wearing off, light a Bensons, and get a bit of the buzz back. The Area – Railway arches, fucking railway arches, but the vibe is fine, John Digweed on the decks and I head off to the cubicle for a livener before returning back to the bar and hey fucking presto Danny’s got a couple of birds either side of him. They seem like rich gash and lapping up his one liners like the cunt’s spouting Yeats. But they’ll be interesting once they get to grips with the rock in my pocket and then it’s all plain sailing. Shooting the shit.
Bird calls herself Rose.
Rose.
Then it fucking hits me like a slug of lead from a twelve bore.
I say that with authority.
Jesus H. Christ.
“Are you okay,” she says.
“You don’t remember?” I say.
“Remember what?”
“The Rose Garden. We were eight or nine years old.”
“Oh. My. God,” she says in one of those posh accents. But it’s okay, I’ve come full circle. And the voice isn’t really annoying. It is Rose. “Jimmy!”
We embrace. What the fuck is that, embrace? We hold each other. Two fucked up kids on drugs holding each other and holding onto the memory of a long summer afternoon. Her hair is blonde, but cut short with a fringe that falls over her eyes. She is wearing a tank-top and she has a tattoo on her left shoulder. Ask her about it. Here’s a hint, boys. If a girl has a tattoo, you ask about it. You tell her you like it.
Telling a girl you like her tattoo is like telling her you dig her poetry or her herb garden. It’s telling her you like a choice that she has made. A bold daring choice that will stay with her forever. Tell a girl you like her eyes or her lips and her tits she will think you’re liking shit she had no decision about. Stick with the clothes, the tattoos, the make-up. The stuff they’ve thought about. The stuff they’ve decided to do.
Trick works a treat.
“It’s mandarin,” she says pointing to the Chinese pictorial. “For Rose.”
“Like the ducks Noah used to poach,” I say. “Regal-paddlers.” She laughs. Maybe she gets it. Maybe she doesn’t. But she laughs and when she does the room brightens up and the warm glow of chemicals bring us closer.
Closer than before.
“What happened to you?” She asks with a hint of concern and a healthy dose of curiosity.
“Taken into care. Left home. Hit the street and found myself bumping into beautiful strangers.”
“Strangers?”
“Well almost.”
“You didn’t say a word that day, Jimmy, but you didn’t need to.”
My heart sang, fucking swam with joy.
“You like it when I don’t talk?”
“Shhh,” she held my hand and there we sat at the table watching the dancers and the posers and the kids trying their hardest to be fashionable. I let her speak about the problems of having a rich daddy and how she quit university due to her party lifestyle. Well, I can live with that. She spoke about the shallowness of her friend’s obsessions and she spoke about the Rose Garden.
How it meant something.
She suggests we get up and dance. She pretends not to notice the limp. We sit back down and mong out on the coke and the MDMA that she has in her purse – look a little bit similar to the ones I had nicked but I let it slide.
Shit load of pills in the city.
Pills and bills.
Thrills and spills.
She leaned against me like a cat craving attention. Slender body, alert, upright, proportionate. Her nose was symmetrical and her mouth large, perhaps too large yet inviting, the mouth, that mouth, you wanted to listen to, kiss, believe in. She wore a red dress a size too small and her breasts ached to be free from it. Perhaps she had had a boob job, it’s never polite to ask. Last time we met we were kids. One thing was certain. Rose was now ripe, hanging, falling from the tree.
She weren’t the only one falling.
“So how’s business?”
“Import and export, Daddy calls it.”
“And Mummy,” I ask.
“She was exported years ago,” she glanced towards the dance floor. “I told you this before...”
I don’t push it. “Do you still live in...What was the name of the village?”
“You’ll laugh if I tell you?”
“I won’t. I promise.”
“Why’s that?”
“I’m homeless,” I say truthfully.
Technically I was. Hospital was the last residence.
“No, a big strong lad like you, homeless. I’m not having it.”
“Well, almost. But where do you live?”
“In a village.”
“What’s the name of it?”
“What?” She shouted over the music.
“What’s the name of the village?” I shouted back.
“Pratts Bottom,” she said.
I laughed.
She laughed,
The city laughed.
I remembered who her father was, but the danger seemed remote, inviting even.
“The Old Man’s out on business tonight, should be gone a few days,” she said.
“Well, Rose, my dear, lead the way.”
She did.
0X4
SO WE go upstairs her rooms on the fourth or fifth floor of this mansion and she had the floor to herself. Parents minted and too busy spending it to take a look at the beauty, real beauty, they’d produced. I’m so wired on the gear and the pills I forget where I am.
But then I become lost in a
painting, a Constable, I think, and then another, an expressionist, small, framed and signed by the original artist. A man who, being a Jew, was kept hidden in a cramped closet and brought paint and materials by close friends.
Runaway fathers, and dead mothers; moments like this were like velvet gloves, worn by a stranger, the hands of a blind beggar in a frozen East End gutter. A man couldn’t see his own luck but he could at least feel it. Lake poets rose to, and demanded more of, those velvet gloves and closeted artists and cursed the world for the frailty and brevity of their passing. Moments like these were why German Jews painted portraits of half-forgotten prostitutes inside closets under fear of persecution. Why babies learn to swim without being taught.
Or perhaps I had taken too much of the gear to keep a clean slant on the angle. No, conscious told me, he was right, usually, conscious, and he was just about to say something when she spoke. “Have one of these.” She hands me a pack of Valium, blues. “And one of these,” Viagra, purple.
I neck both.
She takes off her clothes, and man, it’s like every particle has been designed for the art of sex. I mean she’s had her lips done, her tits stand out silicon proud, her legs are long and curvy- you don’t buy those. Legs are legs. You know what I’m saying? Her parents made her. I think back to that Rose Garden. The Rose Garden made her. The loss of innocence. The A & A. She is perfect. No art gallery, library, no pornographic magazine or French art film had me prepared for what I was now seeing in front of my own eyes. She was perfect, large full breasts, hung slightly above a thin delicate waist and wide Godzilla-bearing hips. It couldn’t be real, it had to be a dream or perhaps an evil mustached man who drove a Bentley to his Hampsted practice and took beautiful women and made them more beautiful in return for cash. Yes, wait, that was it, there must have been a surgeon; a richly talented well mothered surgeon who took a golden retriever for walks near the river near his Suffolk mansion and made common Roses into rare Orchids. The type that flower that blooms only once every hundred years and when it did, by God, it was a miracle.. My mind was now mush or slush, or that and the valium had brought me out from a cocoon of doom into a tranquil garden where birds sang, butterflies flew and flowers bloomed once every hundred years. Such beauty must truly cost. How had she paid for it? I say.
“How did you pay for it?’”
“The body?”
“Yeah. The mind I can deal with later.”
“How did I pay for IT.”
“Yeah, the tits and the lips, baby, how’d happen.”
“You like it?”
“It’s perfect, fucking A. A&A”
“What does that mean?”
“Admiration and Attraction.”
“Is that all I am to you? A sex object?”
“Right now, yes. Before, no. But right now you are sex. We are not children anymore, Rose. A&A is the formula for love.”
She throws a pillow across the room at me. I use a forearm to deflect it.
She laughs, rolls over on the bed so that she is laying down on her front facing me. “A&A, hey? My father cut off my allowance when I dropped out of university. I went to work in one of the strip joints. You couldn’t believe the money they pay – just to, you know....A&A”
I did. Visited a few in the East End back when I was serving C. Strippers were often the most honest girls in town, especially with a gram of Charles inside their snozzle.
“Well I used the cash to make my body,” she pushed her tits together and smiled. “You like it?
“Yeah, baby.” The C, E, V, D,
“I figured if he weren’t going to help me, then I could help myself. It’s amazing how stupid men are with money.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. Almost said ‘Baby’ again but stopped myself. She stood up from the bed and then sat on the sofa opposite me and her long red fingernails travelled down. She started flicking herself. “You like it when I do this?”
I didn’t know what to say. Said:
“What do you think about, when you’re doing it?”
“All kinds of stuff. Crazy shit. You know, once I was on a bus, going to school, the bus was packed and this man came up behind me. You know what he did?”
“No.”
“He rubbed it up against me. He was, you know, excited, through his trousers, onto my back I could feel it, hard, rubbing against me.”
“What did you do?”
She kept playing with herself, eyes now closed. “I liked it. He kept rubbing that thing against me and then he stopped because he must of, you know...”
I did.
She opened her eyes. “Take off your clothes. I want to see you do it too.”
I played the game.
“That’s great. Now close your eyes.”
“Why?”
“I want to see you dream.”
There was no need to.
“Hmmmm.”
She kept flicking herself and she said, “Now, come inside me – I want it inside me.”
I stood and took the four steps. She opened herself and I entered.
She began to moan and I knew I was in a trap.
A trap I couldn’t escape from. A trap that I couldn’t visit more than a month at a time but a trap all the same. Some women were crazy and the crazy ones were better than the sane ones at night at least. The trouble a man had was he couldn’t stay with a crazy one without going crazy and a sane one bored him crazy. It was a trap, with no way out. So it’s a choice of a quick glorious painless death or a sow painful decent into a death of boredom. Freud called the orgasm the little death. He may have had a theory there. Things were much simpler as a child. The danger made it simpler. There were only a few who could switch it off now and again.
“You know why I had to quit working there?”
“I think you’ll tell me.”
“One day he walked in.”
“Who?” I asked
“Who do think?” she replied with a wicked smile
THE RETURN
JOE HATED airports.
Last time he’d waited in departures he’d decided to forget the flight and stay in the city. This time it was different. He had the five thousand in his account and withdrew enough for half a dozen glasses of wine and something that resembled a sandwich. His Samsonite was packed with four changes of clothes and a package that his better instincts told him was a gamble. An ounce of junk hidden inside a hollowed out copy of a hardback novel.
The novel?
Crime and Punishment.
The truth was he was still chipping away and the London street value of that was enough to start a new life somewhere. Or else it might buy him some security.
He had a few drinks after checking in and boarding pass in hand waited his turn at the immigration queue.
The hair on the back of his head stood on end. His stomach knotted, hands clammy. Stood behind a caravan of Arabs and felt a little safer.
As he approached the x-ray machine, he took off his shoes. Took his cheap Nokia and wallet from his bag and put them in the plastic tray along with the Samsonite.
Walked through the x-ray machine. No bells no alarms no whistles. The crowd in front were being body searched. The airport official, about twenty-five, spotty, was talking to a colleague as his Samsonite went through the x-ray machine. He watched the image, could make out the rectangular image of the book and the pouch inside. Head turned. Heart hammered. She turned back around to watch the screen but the bag was through. The Arab in front of him was having his bag searched.
Joe picked up his bag and wallet and hurried towards the exit. And then he heard a voice.
“Wait!”
He spun around. An airport guard in a tight fitting uniform, forty-something, face like a gorilla, held up a hand and pointed at him “You!” he said and then pointed at Joe’s feet. He looked down. The guard smiled and eyed Joe suspiciously. “You forget wear shoes,” he said.
Joe looked down.
The guard was right.
&
nbsp; Shoeless.
The guard walked over to the plastic tray and picked up Joe’s suede brothel creepers. Lifted them up and inspected them.
“Why you in big hurry?”
“It’s my son,” Joe blurted. “He’s waiting for me on the other side.
The guard smiled and handed him the shoes.
The laces took forever to tie. All the time the guard looking over him. Another guard had joined him now. They shared a joke together.
Joe could understand the joke but he didn’t smile. He tied his shoes and thanked the guard.
Walking through the exit and into the departures. Duty free shopping arcade smell of designer perfume. Joe felt a huge wave of relief. His heart began to slow down to something resembling a normal rhythm.
He walked past a shop selling electrical goods and thought about James Hale with his smart phone, GPS, said under his breath.
Wanker.
Chose a white iPhone and paid the woman the money. She opened the box to check it worked and showed him a few tricks the phone could perform.
Felt like a child at Christmas.
Hit a bar and ordered a quick succession of gin and tonics. It would be a few gin and tonics on the flight, a sleep, and then the fresh October air of Heathrow airport. The tube to London. The City Lodge next to the square mile and a telephone call. The most difficult call he would have to make.
THE LIONS MOUTH
BYRON UNLOCKED the front door and stepped inside. First thing he noticed was Rose’s coat on the coat stand in the hall.
Home for once.
He called out her name and began to climb the stairs slowly, his club foot swinging behind and then in front of him like an awkward burden.