I moved in there and then.
1954
I should explain how I came to meet Gore, for I’m afraid that the impression I have given of my life is one of self-imposed exile, which is not far from the truth, but is not the absolute truth either. Once a month on a Friday afternoon for the past six months I’ve been attending a life drawing group run by Miss Wilkes, a large, exuberant woman with the kind of scatter-brain so characteristic of those members of the aristocracy who have fallen foul of the arts, or ‘living la vie de Bohème’, as she puts it. She’s a retired art teacher from one of the private girls’ schools in the Home Counties. And it shows. She treats us like schoolgirls. There are five of us, all middle-aged men or older, and all, I imagine, of the same persuasion as myself. Maurice calls everybody ‘dear’, and I’m convinced he wears rouge. Kenneth is a retired navigator from the Royal Navy, though how he ever navigated a ship is anyone’s guess. He’s late every single week, having got lost walking from the station to Miss Wilkes’ house, even though it’s less than a minute’s journey. He stands incredibly close to the male models during the tea break, cornering them so they can’t get away and then boring them with stories about his life at sea, poor things. (He completely loses interest when it’s a female model.) Malcolm is the most verbally explicit. He has a code for rating the standard of the male models’ backsides. The ones he likes best he calls Harrods. He does tiny, cramped watercolours – two squashed onto each page of his small sketchbook – and has a nasty habit of sucking on his paintbrush, which makes a repulsive sound and leaves him with a black tongue. Peter is like me, hardly says a word. We’ve chatted alone on occasion – though, as is the way with two shy people, it’s a bit like pulling teeth.
Every first Friday of the month, come hell or high water, the six of us gather in Miss Wilkes’ large cluttered house in Mortlake. Many of the surrounding houses were bombed during the war, but Miss Wilkes’ house, much like Miss Wilkes herself, stands defiantly upright amidst the rubble. We congregate in the spacious sitting room to draw from a live model. We have male and female models, though the male models are never completely naked, their genitals always tucked into white posing pouches. It might be art, but we don’t want to scandalise the community. I met Gore when he came to model for the group last month, and chatting alone with him during the tea break I found myself arranging for him to model for me privately. I have done this occasionally with models from the group, though none ever came more than once or twice. They can be terribly unreliable – sometimes not showing up at all. But Gore has been three times now and is always spot on time. I do hope he continues to come, because I find that the drawings he inspires are far superior to any others I have ever done. I feel I am on a journey with this – with him – and I like the look of where it’s going. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say I like where it’s been. I like the journey so far. I don’t know yet where, if anywhere, it is going. But if he were suddenly to stop coming I know I should be most annoyed. He has awoken something in me, something that, whilst unsettling in the extreme, is not entirely unpleasant.
I’ve been trying this past week, without success, to recall who it is that Gore reminds me of. For there is something familiar about him I cannot quite place. In the way that people sometimes do, he brings to mind another face, another person. And it finally came to me today, as I was drawing. Rather disconcertingly, Gore is the spitting image of a young man I met once thirty years ago, under the following circumstances. Since leaving art school at twenty-one, I had been working for three years at an advertising studio in Regent Street run by an acquaintance of my father’s – a man called Frank Symonds. On this particular occasion I had been assigned a job that involved drawing the male figure. I think it was a catalogue of some description, a men’s clothing catalogue, as I recall. During the briefing, Symonds told me he thought I should brush up on my figure drawing. That afternoon he asked me to stay behind after work, and once everyone had gone he explained that he had arranged for a model to come round whom I was to draw for a couple of hours while he did some paperwork. As he finished explaining this, the bell rang and he went to answer the door, coming back with a beautiful young man, whom he introduced as Trevor. Tall, broad-shouldered, with black hair and green, cheerful eyes. Symonds took us down to a store-room in the basement, where he’d set up some anglepoise lamps and some cushions, a white sheet thrown over them rather maladroitly. There was no heating, and the subterranean room was cold, but all the same my heart raced at the prospect of this boy disrobing before me. I felt no concern for his possible discomfort, I must admit. Symonds and the lad were clearly familiar, and they joked while Trevor removed his clothes. ‘I’ll try and locate a heater,’ Symonds said, ‘otherwise your shivering will be most distracting.’ Symonds looked at me and said, ‘Don’t worry, it gets bigger,’ and gave a wink before leaving. It was a side of him I had never seen before, slightly effeminate, slightly repulsive, in thrall to this boy in a way that I was too, I’ll admit, though I’d never have dared let another human being know what thoughts assailed me. Never.
Trevor stepped out of his undershorts and appeared before me in all his glory. I’d only ever seen the life models at art school, in their coy little posing pouches, like a handkerchief tied to a runaway’s stick. He didn’t seem at all shy about his body but stood there proudly, hands by his sides.
‘Where do you want me, mister?’
I found my mouth dry and had to swallow before replying. ‘Just stand over there to begin with,’ I muttered, pointing vaguely to a pool of light between the two lamps.
He stepped over to the spot and stood stock still, arms behind his back, legs slightly apart, feet firmly set on the floor, looking into the far left-hand corner behind me.
‘This do?’
‘Perfect,’ I said, sitting down and grabbing my paper and pencils with sweaty hands. Symonds came back, carrying a three-bar electric fire, which he plugged into a socket and aimed in Trevor’s direction. ‘This’ll ensure it doesn’t shrink to nothing, eh, lad?’ he chuckled, before turning to me. ‘Fine figure of a man, isn’t he? Such stature, such masculine grace. He should be cast in bronze, don’t you think?’ That wink again. The penny suddenly dropped that he knew all about me, could see right through whatever disguise I thought I wore, right down to the deepest recesses of my dampened desire. I felt myself blushing.
‘Yes,’ I said, looking down at the blank sheet on my knee, ‘perfect.’
‘Mmm, he most certainly is,’ Symonds drooled, staring openly at the young man’s genitals. ‘Anyway,’ he chirped, dragging his gaze away reluctantly, ‘you’ve got him for two hours so make the most of him. I’ll be upstairs should you need me. Be good.’ Then he was gone.
I don’t know whether those first drawings were any good. I’m sure they weren’t. I seem to remember spending long stretches of time just drinking in that body, my hand making random marks on the paper that bore little resemblance to the vision before me. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
At one point he got an erection and laughed an apology.
‘No, no, it’s fine, don’t worry about it,’ I said breathlessly, trying desperately to capture its likeness on paper.
After the two hours, he climbed back into his clothes and we walked silently upstairs. The three of us left the building and Symonds hailed a taxi into which he and Trevor clambered, and my imagination has reconstructed many times in the intervening years what they went off to do that night, always with the same mixture of jealousy and admiration. I went home and pored over the sketches I had made, my heart racing.
Every evening after work for the next two weeks Symonds would present me with a different boy, but it is Trevor’s ash-white body and crow-black hair, Trevor’s pale tan nipples and pale green eyes, that remain for me the indelible memory of that time. I never saw him again. I drew ten different young men in as many days, and yet only that first one registers with me now. The others, beautiful as they were, have faded in my mem
ory, so that Trevor’s has become the face and body I attribute to each of them. He has, I suppose, delineated my desire.
Symonds never made any reference to these boys, never told me how or where he found them, nor disclosed the precise nature of his relationship with them, yet he drooled after each and every one in my presence, and always disappeared with them afterwards into the shadowed interior of a black cab and off into the foggy darkness of a London night. And, far from reassuring me that there were others like me, instead the knowledge of Symonds’ true nature made me more resolute than ever to quell this thirst, not quench it; to stamp out this fire, not feed it.
There began my pact with solitude.
There began my road to hell.
Looking at Gore this morning, it was like looking back across the years and seeing Trevor once more, the same green eyes and boxer’s nose, the same angle of the shoulders, even the same pucker to the foreskin.
I think about all those men arrested and imprisoned for doing what I dare not bring myself to do, and in some strange way I envy them. If I myself actually had the courage to do it, I tell myself I shouldn’t at all mind a spell in prison, though I know in truth that my fear of the place is precisely what stops me.
1998
I wanted to live in a city big enough to lose myself in, big enough to keep boredom at bay. I wanted to live in the spaces between buildings, to disappear. You can’t really do that, though, because each disappearance is also an appearance. No absence goes unnoticed for long. Not if you know where to look. I can’t now recall what it was I thought I had come to London to find, but I knew what I had left behind. Anything else had to be better than that, I told myself.
As I stepped off the train at Euston one night in June 1986, I entered a city in which I knew nobody and nobody knew me, and I could taste the anonymity like aluminium on my tongue. I licked myself clean. I had nowhere to stay. I was unutterably terrified. I sparked up a spliff and began walking down Euston Road, towards King’s Cross. With each step my shadow got lighter. I made my way to the Bell, which I had read about in a copy of Gay Times I’d bought at the station before getting on the train that afternoon, and had read furtively from cover to cover during the journey. I walked past the bar several times on the opposite side of the street, my stomach churning. I looked at the Thameslink station next to the Bell, and thought of that game on the train tracks as a child, of that stupid, wilful determination not to run away like the others.
I crossed the road and pushed open the door.
I hadn’t really considered what the place might look like inside, but I hadn’t for a minute expected it to look like any other pub. I was expecting decadence, I think, and I got a shock. Young men and women stood around drinking. Music played. The only difference from any pub I had been in at home was that the people knew how to dress and the music was palatable. The Buzzcocks’ ‘Ever Fallen In Love’ played as I sat there with a pint of lager, smoking a cigarette, withdrawing behind the clouds of smoke I was exhaling, and scanning the room. I watched their faces, the men and women who were there, while keeping a regular eye on the door for newcomers. I wanted to take in everything. I wanted to be somebody else, so I was. Where I grew up, it wasn’t possible to do this.
I sat alone, armed with the eye of an anthropologist and the heart of a beggar. I knew there must be someone who would take me home and give me a bed for the night. It was simply a process of discovering that person. I looked at each boy in turn. Already I knew what I could achieve. Still, it was new. A test. In those days, everything was a test, to see how far this new me would go. I had only ever had sex with men I found repulsive in exchange for money. I didn’t know anything else. I was hungry to learn.
Only one person approached me all night. After I had been sitting there for hours, what can only be described as a flaming creature came over and sat next to me, blue hair spiking above a bizarrely made-up face. He wore a black lamé jacket over a tight yellow T-shirt, a tartan mini-skirt and orange tights, his feet wrapped in purple platform boots with a silver ankle-star. He looked like something from another planet.
‘Hello, what’s your name?’ he asked, offering me a Consulate.
‘David,’ I said, taking one. That isn’t my name. It’s my brother’s name. I don’t know why my own name seemed so inadequate at that moment, or what I was trying to hide. Or who I was trying to become.
‘I’m Edward,’ he said, holding out a lighter in his bejewelled hand. I leant forward till the cigarette’s tip hit the flame, and inhaled, noticing that his black-varnished fingernails were chipped.
He launched into a monologue the majority of which I can no longer recall. He was an artist, and a musician, and he organised clubs and gigs. He sang in a band called Hollywood Knee, who played hard-edged, cross-dressed covers of songs by ’60s girl groups. He proceeded to bombard me with questions. What music did I like? Did I like this, did I like that? Who were my favourite artists? What films had I seen, what books had I read? Initially I was barely able to string two words together, so shocked was I that such a person existed, but so glad that he was talking to me, this being who seemed to speak the same language as me. One of my own species. As a consequence of that shock, however, I responded with such monosyllabic answers that at one point he stopped, looking perplexed, and asked, ‘Were you a test tube baby?’
‘Why?’
‘I have friends who were some of the earliest test tube babies. You remind me of them. They never say a word.’
‘I was grown on a wet flannel,’ I said. ‘Besides, I can’t get a word in edgeways.’
He looked at me. He pulled on his cigarette, not taking his eyes off me. ‘This place is closing now, dear. Fancy going somewhere else?’
I guessed I had my bed for the night. ‘Sure.’
Throughout the conversation I had been staring over Edward’s shoulder at a handsome man further off, near the bar, who had caught my eye. Our eyes had met, but I had not known how to extricate myself from Edward, and didn’t really want to, and Handsome had eventually left, with someone else, taking my gaze with him. I tried to imagine myself having sex with him, but my thoughts were diverted by Edward standing up quickly and saying, ‘Come on, then, heartface, let’s go.’
He led me to some den in Shoreditch, where transsexual prostitutes played pool and rent boys in tracksuits and baseball caps sat around smoking joints. One boy, in a leopardprint baseball cap worn back-to-front above eyes lit with mischief, was repeatedly shouting at one of the trannies, ‘How much, girlfriend?’ to which Girlfriend’s increasingly annoyed response was, ‘Too much.’ He continued to repeat the question until she threatened him with a pool cue. We walked past two middle-aged would-be gangsters playing cards in a fug of blue cigar smoke, up to the bar where a beer-bellied cabbie was sucking the face off one of the ladyboys. We were soon deep in conversation and I told Edward things about my life I’d never told anyone before, stories of my escapades that I had kept locked inside. There’s nothing like a bent ear to dispel shyness. Stories erupted like smoke from my mouth and the trail they formed led straight to his flat in a council estate in Hackney.
In his hallway, one wall was lined with framed covers of old movie magazines – Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Bette Davis, all stared down at us as we entered the front door – while the other wall was filled with the framed covers of pornographic gay magazines. Inches. Honcho. Drummer. We stepped into this corridor of tanned men and glamour girls and he led me to the lounge, where fun-fur rugs of every colour covered the floor like some Muppet-culling. The walls were furnished with silver moulded plastic, like the inside of Barbarella’s spaceship, which reflected the light emitting from the sleek ’60s lamp that hung from the ceiling. A white leather sofa rested against the far wall. Dominating the room, though, in front of the window, was a large Art Deco display case, inhabited by dozens of Barbie dolls, most still in their boxes. An army of smiling, vacant faces, like pretty corpses in glass coffins.
&
nbsp; I assumed sex was almost inevitable. And although I didn’t want it, I was still disappointed when Edward said, ‘I don’t wanna fuck you, David. You’re not my type. But you can stay here. For a while. Till you find somewhere, find your feet.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Let me show you around.’
Above the kitchen door, right at the back of the hall, and pinned back to form a curtain leading into it, hung two brightly sequinned dresses, one green, the other red. The light in the kitchen was already on, creating the effect of an empty stage. Once we stepped through the sequinned dresses curtaining the doorway, it was fairly plain and functional. The fridge and cupboard doors were completely collaged with postcards and pictures from magazines.
Edward’s bathroom was done out like a Vatican shipwreck. Statues of the Virgin Mary and cherubs holding seashell fonts fought for space with plastic lobsters and starfish. Above the sink was a golden bathroom cabinet with a ceramic fish perched on top. Above the toilet, a Tom of Finland drawing of a merman. From the top of the toilet seat an enormous cut-out goldfish with its mouth open stared up at you.
The bedroom was the dullest room in the entire flat, like a Whitby B&B circa 1962, complete with twin beds. I must have looked confused, because Edward said, ‘Oh, I can’t be doing with all that sharing-a-bed malarkey. Even when I do have someone stop over, which isn’t often, I always make them sleep on their own.’ He kicked off his platform boots and collapsed onto the nearest bed with a dramatic sigh. ‘I can’t bear anyone close to me like that, clinging on,’ he shuddered, ‘it’s abnormal.’
So I was here, in London.
Sharing a room with a fruitcake, but at least I was here.
London Triptych Page 4