“See this? Make a wish!”
With considerable gentleness he put fresh incense in the censer and struck a match.
“I love these places –” he said.
He sat down and rubbed his hands.
“– but I’m bored with Hot and Sour.”
He stared away from the menu and up at the industrial ceiling, which had been lowered with yellow-painted slats. Through them you could still see wires, bitumen, ventilator boxes. A few faded strings ejected from some exhausted Christmas party-popper still hung up there, as if someone had flung noodles about in a claustrophobic fit or paddy.
“Let’s have some Bitter and Unfulfilled here!” he called to the waitress. “No. Wait a minute. I want Imitation Pine Board Soup, with a Loon Fung calendar.
“But it has to have copulating pandas on it.”
After that we began to drink Tsing Tao beer. Its packaging, he said, the pale grey ground and green, red and gold label, reminded him of something. He arranged several empty cans across the table between us and stared at them thoughtfully for some time, but nothing came of it. I don’t remember eating, though we ordered a lot of food. Later he transferred his obsession from the Tsing Tao label to the reflections of the street neon in the mirror behind the bar. SOHO. PEEP SHOW. They were red, greenish-yellow, a cold blue. A strobe flickered inside the door of the peep show. Six people had been in there in two minutes. Two of them had come out again almost immediately. “Fucking hell, sex, eh? Why do we bother?” Ashton looked at me. “I fucking hate it,” he said. Suddenly he stood up and addressed the people at the nearer tables. “Anyone who hates sex, stand up!” he tried to persuade them. “Fucking sex.” He laughed. “Fucking fucking,” he said. “Get it?” The waitresses began to move towards us.
But they had only come to bring the bill and offer him another beer. He smiled at them, moved his hands apart, palms forward, fingers spread.
“No thanks,” he said shyly.
“The bill’s in Chinese!” he shouted. He brandished it delightedly at the rest of the diners. “Hey!”
I agreed to drive him home. For the first few minutes he showed some interest in my car. At that time I had an Escort RS Turbo. But I didn’t drive it fast enough for him, and he was silent again until we were passing The Flying Dutchman in Camberwell. There, he asked in an irritable voice: “Another thing. Why is this pub always in the same place?” He lived on the other side of Peckham, where it nudges up against Dulwich. It took him some time to find the right street. “I’ve only just moved in.” I got him upstairs then consulted my watch. “I think I’d better sleep on your floor,” I said. But he had passed out. It seemed like a nice flat, although he hadn’t bought much furniture.
I woke late the next morning. Ten o’clock. Sleet was falling. A minicab driver had parked his Renault under the front window, switched its engine off, and turned up Capital Radio so that I could hear clearly a preview of a new track by the Psychedelic Furs. Every thirty seconds he leaned on his horn. At that, the woman who had called him leant out of a fourth floor window in one of the point blocks on the other side of the road and shrieked:
“Cammin dahn!”
Beep.
“Cammin dahn!”
Beep.
“Cammin dahn!”
Beep. Beep. Beep.
“Cammin dahn! Cammin dahn!”
At the back the flat overlooked a row of gardens. They were long and narrow and generally untended; so choked, some of them, with bramble, elder and buddleia stalks, that they reminded you of overgrown lanes between walls of sagging, sugary old brick. In the bleaker ones, you knew, a dog would trot restlessly all day between piles of household or builders’ rubbish, under a complex array of washing lines. Choe Ashton’s garden had once been kept in better order. There was a patio of black and white flagstones like a chess board, a few roses pruned savagely back to bare earth. The little pond was full of leaves. Suddenly I saw that there was a fox sniffing round the board fence at the bottom of the garden.
At first I thought it was some breed of cat I had never seen before: long-backed, reddish, brindling towards its hindquarters and long tail. It was moving a bit like a cat, sinuously and close to the ground. After a minute or two it found the pond and drank at length, looking up every so often, but too wet and tired, perhaps too ill to be wary or nervous.
I watched with my heart in my mouth, afraid to move even behind the window in case it saw me and ran off. Choe Ashton came into the room.
“Fucking hell,” he said. “Are you still here?”
“Sssh. There’s a fox in your garden.”
He stood beside me. As he watched, the fox moved into the middle of the overgrown lawn, pawing and sniffing at the earth. It yawned. I couldn’t see anything there it might eat. I wondered if it might have smelt another fox. It sat down suddenly and stared vaguely into the sleet.
“I can’t see anything.”
I stared at him.
“Choe, you must be blind – ”
He gripped my arm very hard, just above the elbow.
“That hurts,” I said.
“I can’t fucking see any fucking fox,” he said quietly.
We stood like that for thirty or forty seconds. In that time the fox went all round the lawn, not moving very fast, then crossed the low brick wall into the next garden, where it vanished among some elders, leafless laburnum bushes and apple trees.
“OK, Choe.”
People like Choe are like moths in a restaurant on a summer evening just as it gets dark. They bang from lamp to lamp then streak across the room in long flat wounded trajectories. We make a lot of their confusion but less of their rage. They dash themselves to pieces out of sheer need to be more than they are. It would have been better to leave him alone to do it, but I was already fascinated.
I phoned everyone who had been at the Dawes party. No one knew the whole story. But they all agreed he was older than he appeared and, careerwise at least, a bit of a wimp. He was from the north of England. He had taken one of the first really good media degrees—from East Sussex—but never followed it up. He did the odd design job for one of the smaller agencies that operate out of top rooms above Wardour Street. In addition, he had some film work, some advertising work. But who didn’t? The interesting thing was how he had filled his time until he appeared in Soho. After East Sussex he had moved back north and taken a job as a scaffolder, then joined a Manchester steeplejacking firm. He had worked in the massive stone quarries around Buxton, and out in the North Sea on the rigs. Returning to London obsessed with motorcycles, he had opened one of the first courier operations of the Thatcher boom. He never kept any job for long. Boredom came too easily to him. Anything hard and dangerous attracted him, and the stories I heard about him, true or not, would have filled a book. He told me some of them himself, later:
Stripping old render near the top of a thirty storey council high-rise in Glasgow, he found himself working from scaffolding fifty feet above a brick-net. These devices—essentially a few square feet of strong plastic netting stretched on a metal frame—are designed to catch dropped tools or bits of falling masonry. With a brick-net, you don’t need safety bunting or a spotter on the ground to protect unwary pedestrians. Ashton quickly became obsessed. He thought about the bricknet in his digs at night. (Everyone else was watching Prisoner in Cell Block H.) During the day everything that fell seemed to go down into it in slow motion. Things were slow in his life too. One cold windy Monday ten minutes before lunch, he took a sly look sideways at the other jacks working on the scaffolding. Then he screamed and jumped off, turning over twice in the air and landing flat on his back. The breath went out of him—boof! Everything in the net flew up into the air and fell down again on top of him—old mastic tubes, bits of window frame, half bricks.
“I’d forgotten that stuff,” he said with a grin.
“Were you injured?”
“I walked a bit stiff that week.”
“Was it worth it?”
> “It was a fucking trip.”
Later, induced by money to take a long-running steelworks job, he decided to commute to Rotherham from London on a Kawasaki 750 racer. Each working week began in the early hours of Monday morning, when, still wobbly from the excesses of the weekend, he pushed this overpowered bright green monster up the motorway at a hundred and fifty miles an hour in the dark. He was never caught, but quite soon he grew bored. So he taught himself to lie along the Kawa with his feet on the back pegs, wedge the throttle open with a broken matchstick so that he could take both hands off the handlebars and roll a joint in the tiny pocket of still air behind the fairing. At the right speed, he claimed, Kawasaki engineering was good enough to hold the machine on track.
“The idea,” he said, “is not to slow down.”
I wasn’t sure boredom was entirely the issue. Some form of exploration was taking place, as if Choe Ashton wanted to know the real limits of the world, not in the abstract but by experience. I grew used to identifying the common ground of these stories—the point at which they intersected—because there, I believed, I had found Choe’s myth of himself, and it was this myth that energized him. I was quite wrong. He was not going to let himself be seen so easily. But that didn’t become plain until later. Meanwhile, when I heard him say, “We’re sitting on the roof one dinner time, and suddenly I’ve poured lighter fuel on my overalls and set myself on fire,” I would nod sagely and think of Aleister Crowley’s friend Russell, discharged from the US Navy after he had shot up forty grains of medical-grade cocaine and tried to set fire to a piece of glass by willpower alone.
“I just did it to see what people would do,” Choe said. “They had to beat me out with their hands.”
In a broad fake Northern accent he added:
“I’m scared of nowt, me.” Then in a more normal voice: “Do you believe that?”
“I think I do,” I said, watching with some interest the moth on its flat, savage, wounded trajectory.
He gave me a look of contempt.
This didn’t prevent him from flirting all winter, slipping away—but never too far—between the sets of a comically complex personality: always waiting for me to catch up, or catch my breath.
Drunk in bars, he would suggest going to the first night of a photographic exhibition, a new production of Ionesco, ballet at the Royal Opera House: arrive on the night in some immaculate designer two-piece with baggy trousers and immense shoulder pads: and then say –
“I’ve got the Kawa parked round the corner.”
“I’m sure you have, Choe.”
“You don’t believe I came on it, do you?” And again, appealing to a foyer full of people who had arrived in BMWs:
“This fucker doesn’t believe I came on me bike!”
To see how far he would go, I took him to a dance version of Beauty and the Beast. He sat there quietly, entranced by the colour and movement, quite unconcerned by the awful costumes and Persil white sentimentality, until the interval. Then he said loudly: “It’s like the fucking fish tank at the dentist’s in here. Look at them!” He meant the audience, which, gorgeously dressed and vaguely smiling, had begun to come and go in the depopulated front stalls like moonlight gourami or neon tetras nosing among the silver bubbles of the oxygenator. Quiet, aimless, decorative, they had come, just like the dancers, to be seen.
“They’re a bit more self-conscious than fish, Choe.”
“Are they?”
He stood up.
“Let’s go and get some fucking beer. I’m bored with this.”
Two or three weeks later, having heard I liked Turgenev, he sent me an expensive old edition of Sketches from a Hunter’s Notebook, on the front endpapers of which he had written in his careful designer hand:
“Turgenev records how women posted flowers—pressed marguerites and immortelles—to the childmurderer Tropmann in the days before his execution. It was as if Tropmann were going to be ‘sent on before.’ Each small bouquet or floret was a confused memory of the pre-Christian plea ‘Intercede for us’ which accompanied the sacrifice of the king or his substitute. But more, it was a special plea: ‘Intercede for me.’ These notes, with their careful, complex folds, arrived from the suicide provinces—bare, empty coastal towns, agricultural plains, the suburbs of industrial cities. They had been loaded carefully into their envelopes by white hands whose patience was running out between their own fingers like water.”
I phoned him up.
“Choe, what a weird quote. Where did you find it?”
“I’m not stupid, you know,” he said, and put the phone down. He had written it himself. For two weeks he refused to speak to me, and in the end I won him round only by promising him I would go to the Tate and spend a whole afternoon with the Turners. He shivered his way down to the Embankment from Pimlico tube station to meet me. The sleeves of the French Connection jacket were pushed up to his elbows, to show off slim but powerful forearms tattooed with brilliantly coloured peacock feathers which fanned down the muscle to gently clasp his thin wrists.
“Like them? They’re new.”
“Like what, Choe?”
He laughed. I was learning. Inside the gallery, the Turners deliquesced into light: Procession of Boats with Distant Smoke, circa 1845; The Sun of Venice Going Down to Sea, 1843. He stood reverentially in front of them for a moment or two. Then the tattooed arms flashed, and he dragged me over to Pilate Washing his Hands.
“This fucker though! It can’t have been painted by the same man!”
He looked at me almost plaintively.
“Can it?”
Formless, decaying faces. Light somehow dripping itself apart to reveal its own opposite.
“It looks like an Ensor.”
“It looks like a fucking Emil Nolde. Let’s go to the zoo.”
“What?”
He consulted his watch. “There’s still plenty of daylight left,” he said. “Let’s go to the zoo.” On the way out he pulled me over to John Singer Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. “Isn’t that fucking brilliant?” And, as I turned my head up to the painting, “No, not that, you fucking dickhead, the title. Isn’t that the most brilliant title in the world? I always come here to read it.”
Regents Park. Winter. Trees like fan coral. Squirrel monkeys with fur a distinct shade of green scatter and run for their houses, squeaking with one high pitched voice. A strange, far-off, ululating call—lyrical but animalistic—goes out from the zoo as if something is signalling. Choe took me straight to its source: lar gibbons. “My favourite fucking animal.” These sad, creamy-coloured little things, with their dark eyes and curved arthritic hands, live in a long tall cage shaped like a sailing vessel. Inside, concrete blocks and hutches give the effect of deck and bridge fittings. The tallest of these is at the prow, where you can often see one gibbon on its own, crouched staring into the distance past the rhino house.
“Just look at them!” Choe said.
He showed me how they fold up when not in use, the curve of their hands and arms fitting exactly into the curve of their thigh. Knees under their chins they sit hunched in the last bit of winter sun, picking over a pile of lettuce leaves; or swing through the rigging of their vessel with a kind of absent-minded agility. They send out their call, aching and musical. It is raw speech, the speech of desires that can never be fulfilled, only suffered.
“Aren’t they perfect?”
We watched them companionably for a few minutes.
“See the way they move?” Choe said suddenly. Then:
“When someone loves you, you feel this whole marvellous confidence in yourself. In your body, I mean.”
I said nothing. I couldn’t think how the two ideas were linked. He had turned his back on the cage and was staring angrily away into the park, where in the distance some children were running and shouting happily. He was inviting me to laugh at him. When I didn’t, he relaxed.
“You feel good in it,” he said. “For once it isn’t just some bag of shit that
carries you around. I – ”
“Is that why you’re trying to kill yourself, Choe?”
He stared at me.
“For fuck’s sake,” he said wearily.
Behind us the lar gibbons steered their long strange ship into the wind with an enormous effort of will. A small plaque mounted on the wire netting of the cage explained: “the very loud call is used to tell other gibbons the limit of its territory, especially in the mornings.” I thought that was a pity.
In the spring he gave up his job with the agency and went offshore.
“I need some money,” he said. “The rigs are the place for that. Besides, I like the helicopter ditching course.”
He wanted to take the Kawa round Europe that summer.
“You need dosh to pay the speeding tickets.” He thought for a moment. “I like Europe.”
And then, as if trying to sum up an entire continent:
“I once jumped over a dog in Switzerland. It was just lying in the middle of the road asleep. I was doing a hundred and ten. Bloke behind me saw it too late and ran it over.”
He was away for two or three months, but he hadn’t forgotten anything. Whatever it was he wanted me for remained as important to him as it had been when he singled me out at the Dawes party. He came back at the height of summer and knocked at my door in Camden, wearing Levi 620s, brand new 16-hole DMs, a black sleeveless T shirt which had faded to a perfect fusty green, and a single gold earring. We walked up between the market stalls to Camden Lock, where he sat in the sunshine blinking at the old curved bridge which lifts the towpath over the canal. His arms had been baked brown in Provence and Chamonix, but the peacock feathers still rioted down them, purple, green and electric blue, a surf of eyes; and on his upper left arm one tiny perfect rose had appeared, flushed and pink.
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