London Triptych

by Kemp, Jonathan

  She agreed to marry me with a tender glee. In our own way, we were happy. We knew that we enjoyed each other’s company, and she seemed relieved by my reluctance on our nights out to impose upon her any physical contact. Joan herself was fast approaching thirty, and when I think about her now I know that there must have been some unspoken acknowledgement which passed between us, a tacit agreement that our life together was to be little more than a convenience for which we were both truly grateful. Our marriage had about it the air of two people stranded on a desert island who, just at the point of accepting that they would never be rescued, spot a sail on the horizon. That isn’t to say it was devoid of love. Love and gratitude are not so far apart. It’s hard to underestimate the happiness that someone can bring to you when they do exactly what you need them to do. My parents were content, and pleasing them was really all I cared about in those days.

  No children, of course. We tried sexual intercourse only once, on our wedding night, but a barely veiled disgust on Joan’s part and a distinct lack of enthusiasm on mine left us reluctant to try again. It was a massive relief for both of us, I think, to discover that life was much easier that way. I’m fairly certain that Joan herself had certain lesbian tendencies. Over the years of our marriage there were one or two very close friendships with women. She would see an awful lot of one particular woman for a while and then it would end abruptly, without much explanation. I, for my part, masturbated occasionally, swiftly and guiltily, as if undergoing an unpleasant though necessary bodily function. Visions of men fuelled these sessions, images I had taken in the street and preserved like photographs in my memory: a coal delivery man stripped to the waist, blackened and shining in the sunlight; a bus conductor’s handsome smile; the bulge in the trousers of our office boy; the outline of a cock in the swimming trunks of a bather down by the Serpentine; the tanned and dark-haired forearms of a road-sweeper. I would roam the city, picking up these faces and crotches and limbs and storing them like treasure. Then I would spread them out before my mind’s eye, imagining all the terrible things I longed to do with these men. I was always assaulted afterwards by a horrible sense of shame. I thought myself a monster and yet could not do otherwise. It was my nature, that much I accepted. I had to learn to rise above it, that was all; had to discipline myself to channel my desires into these harmless pursuits. I had read too many newspaper accounts of men whose lives had been ruined by this inclination ever to risk being foolish enough to act upon my desires, to solicit from another man the acts to which I gave my imagination free rein in order that I might quench its appetite. I even prided myself on my restraint, like a fool who thinks himself virtuous for permanent fasting. Permanent fasting brings only death. I suppose I let my desire die.

  Joan was killed in June 1944, in an air raid. While I was posted to Hampshire, she had stayed in London, working as a secretary for British Intelligence. From her letters it was clear she loved the work. In losing her I lost the best friend I ever had. She and I would spend our evenings basking in the glow of each other’s company, listening to the radio, or reading. It was the closest I ever came to finding whatever it is I am looking for. She had few friends; I had none apart from her. After her death I became extremely lonely extremely quickly. I tried to make friends at work, but found it impossible. It was too late: I had been cast, or had cast myself, in the role of someone friendless and unapproachable, and, once a role has been cast, it’s difficult to play another part.

  I wish I’d been able to tell Joan that I loved her. But it was just something that we never said. Silly really, but even during the brief period we were apart, once I had been conscripted and was working in Hampshire, the almost daily letters we exchanged were always signed off with ‘Yours’, or ‘Sincerely yours’. There was always this peculiar formality that kept our emotions in check. Or maybe it was just me, and she simply conformed to what she perceived to be my wishes.

  I know my coldness all too well. I can sense it with Gore. I can feel myself stiffen in his presence, policing my every word and every gesture lest I give myself away. The result is a standoffishness I cannot seem to shake off. It’s as if there’s a glass wall between us, constructed by myself. I noticed it this morning when he was over here. He was joking about my not having any friends, and never going out, and said he would take me out if I liked. I paused, unsure what to say, and I could tell from the expression on his face that he was slightly insulted. He snapped, ‘Don’t do me any favours!’ and went into a bit of a sulk. I said that I’d love to go out with him but the damage was done: he had retreated, and my loneliness had scored another victory. After he left I took a stroll down by the river, watching the boats going by, each one representing a world that was going on without me. I have always felt that life was something other people do. I noticed, for the first time, as I strolled along the towpath, solitary men loitering. Since meeting Gore, I see the world differently, see it full of sexual possibility. I considered trying to engage one of the men in conversation, to see where it would lead, but lacked the courage.

  As I turned to return home, a pea-souper was gathering and descending, as thick and grey and heavy as my heart. I never used to mind spending so much time alone, but now, since Gore, I dread the long, empty hours between his visits. Especially at night, I find myself feeling increasingly restless. I pour myself a gin and tonic and listen to the radio, or read a book, but I can’t shake off this feeling that time is running out and I haven’t done anything with my life. This rage and frustration mounts, and it doesn’t go away until I have drunk enough gin to send me to sleep. Often I nod off in my chair, waking in the early hours cramped and aching, making my way upstairs and falling onto the bed still fully dressed. This is my life now.

  1998

  Edward Wayward was a kind of post-punk shaman, an Aleister Crowley for the club scene. His art, like his personality, was loud and colourful. The morning after I first met him, he dragged me out of bed screaming, ‘I didn’t show you the studio!’ He used the second bedroom as a studio, and I stood at its centre blinking as he spun me around and pointed at his work, clutching a sky-blue satin kimono around his skinny frame. Huge, garish canvases clashed and smashed their way into my consciousness like broad daylight. I thought they were dreadful but hadn’t the heart to tell him, so I said they were brilliant.

  As I got to know him, I discovered that he’d contradict almost everything anyone ever said to him, not necessarily because he thought the opposite, but because he hated to be seen to be agreeing with someone. He lived to be contrary. He had to be the one with the different view, the different take on life. It was all a pose, of course, but then he wasn’t the only one posing. There were plenty of us doing that. He used to say, ‘If you aren’t going to cause a stir when you enter a room, don’t bother. Stay at home and bore the cat.’

  He told me that a few weeks before he was born his mother dreamt she gave birth to a rabbit. When he arrived a month later, covered in a pelt of thick black hair from head to toe, she screamed till he was removed from her sight. She refused to have anything to do with this vile freak she’d produced, even when her mother-in-law assured her that his father had been just the same, and that the hair would moult within a fortnight, which it did. For those two weeks she couldn’t even be in the same house as Edward. He knew that he was a freak, but he grew to wear his monstrosity with pride. A very regal freak, he was.

  His father was a vicar, his mother a vicar’s wife, and he grew up in the remote suburbs of London, dressing up in skirts and frocks at every opportunity and lip-syncing to David Bowie, dreaming of escape. His one and only friend was a fat girl, Yvonne, who had stones and insults thrown at her every time she left the house because of the outrageous way she dressed. They would sit in her bedroom smoking Consulates, listening to Patti Smith’s Horses over and over, talking about London and the day they would live there.

  On the day he finished school for good he came home to find a packed suitcase in the hall and his parents standin
g there looking more morosely stern than ever. They’d had enough of him going out dressed up like someone from another planet and coming home late and wired, if at all. His father explained that now he was of legal age to leave home they expected him to do so, that afternoon. His mother wouldn’t meet his gaze, but gave him a hug with tears streaming down her face. They gave him an envelope stuffed with banknotes. He told me that he felt as if he’d been handed the keys to the city, and practically ran to the train station before they changed their minds, calling in on Yvonne to say goodbye. She hurriedly packed a case and left with him. So he knew all about finding your feet in the big smoke. They spent their first few nights sleeping rough. That, he said, was why he had let me stay. That was five years ago. (As for Yvonne, she returned home about a year after their arrival, after they fell out about something and nothing.)

  I had moved to London hungry for one thing, striving towards one goal: to be stronger, more wicked, and more profound. With curiosity as my only map, I moved across the surface of this occluded world searching for a way in. I traced around its borders with a torch, sniffing out a hole in the fence. The heartbeat I detected when I moved here was faint, but I followed its call and found those dark chambers, thanks to Edward. We found it in the clubs where the freaks hung out. All those others who were also desperate to escape the daylight. The drag queens, the druggies, the prostitutes, the good-time girls of either gender. Though escaping isn’t quite right. For in their flight they picked up the nearest objects, some of them quite everyday – cosmetics, for example, or clothes – and brandished them like weapons against anyone barring their way. In their midst I could breathe for the first time, speak for the first time, and share in a lust for all things rotten. When I found myself in a council flat in Belsize Park with a cocaine dealer known as Timmy Toots, snorting the white lines as quickly as he could cut them, and for free, I felt at home. When he proudly showed me his collection of guns, I smiled as if admiring family snapshots. When he showed me a photograph of his fourteen-year-old son and suggested I might like him, I began to fear for my life. For years, my desires were a question mark whose dark curve I followed, never knowing what I would find at the end. I certainly didn’t expect prison. Though in truth, even now – especially now – the inevitability is complete.

  After spending nearly two hours in the bathroom that first afternoon, Edward swanned out wearing a white suit printed with enormous red roses, a leopardprint fez, full slap and Chanel No.5. Lots of it. We spent the afternoon going around his favourite fabric shops in Soho where he bought yards of cheap garish fabrics. Everywhere we went people stared at him, open-mouthed, perplexed. He took me into a church off Leicester Square to show me a mural painted by Jean Cocteau. He took me for a drink in the Golden Lion and chatted to some rent boys who were friends of his. Towards the end of the day we called in on his friend Lilli, who worked in a sex shop on Old Compton Street. She was near the end of her shift so she bunked off early and the three of us went off to Pâtisserie Valerie for a coffee.

  Lilli was Jayne Mansfield with tattoos. Platinum curls, cherry-red lips, with roses growing down the trellis of her arms. She wore a loose-fitting leopardprint vest top and a powder-blue pencil skirt with black fishnets and Westwood rocking horse shoes, her hair crowned with a black beret. She had a gold front tooth when nobody had gold front teeth. As well as working in the sex shop she did porn movies and whoring and a bit of life modelling. She told us about posing for a camera club the previous evening, where they employed a bouncer to make sure nothing too risqué went on, but every time the bouncer went for a piss she would offer to give the photographers a ‘flash of pink’ if they chucked her some extra money.

  Lilli was Edie Sedgwick to Wayward’s Warhol. Fucked-up sexy rich girl. Her parents owned a castle somewhere. Lord and Lady Something-or-other. She was beautiful and sweet most of the time but if she had too much to drink or too many drugs she would mutate into a psychopath, running across the tops of parked cars and jumping up and down on the roofs and bonnets in her massive Westwoods, screaming incomprehensibly at invisible demons. She was always getting into slanging matches, punching people, or worse. I saw her hurl a glass ashtray at a man in a club once because he said something she didn’t like. The ashtray cut his head open, and Edward and I had to get her out through the back door because the bouncers were after her blood.

  She was hopelessly hooked on speed, and she regularly had horrendous comedowns. Countless times we had to talk her out of killing herself. She was a bizarre mix of absolute ferocity with absolute fragility. But given the right amount of drugs and alcohol she would shine, almost every night, from the chaos within. When she was dressed up in all her finery she was always being mistaken for a drag queen, always getting her tits or snatch out to prove her authentic womanhood. We met every evening in Valerie’s, recounting our days and planning our nights. Like the woman in the nursery rhyme, I shall have music wherever I go, for our laughter on those lost evenings chimes like bells on my fingers and toes. Even now.

  One semi-regular at our coffee evenings was Alan Baker, or Alana as he liked to be known (or Ma Baker as he was known in his absence). When I was introduced to him he looked me up and down ostentatiously before turning to Edward and saying, ‘Well, someone’s certainly been answering your prayers!’

  ‘Oh, God, no, nothing like that – God, no.’ Edward screwed his face up in disgust and waved his hand as if to dispel a bad smell. I must have looked hurt, because he stroked my face and added, ‘Adorable though he is.’ (Edward only liked them straight – and preferably rough as a dog’s dick, I was soon to discover. He had a changeable harem of builders and truckers and cab drivers who would come round occasionally, and I would be ushered out of the flat and told to stay away till evening so he could make as much noise as he wanted.)

  Edward’s response made Alana think he stood a chance, and he wouldn’t take his eyes off me. I could decode that look all too well. Edward began reading out the personal ads in the gay press in silly voices, and Alana said, ‘Read the escorts.’

  I asked, ‘What’s an escort?’

  Alana looked at me pitifully, then said to Edward, ‘Oh, dear. H-B-D.’

  Lilli turned to me to explain that H-B-D stood for Handsome But Dim.

  ‘Child, how long have you been in the wicked city?’ Alana asked.

  ‘Less than twenty-four hours,’ Edward replied for me, managing to make me feel even more infantile.

  Alana took his cue. ‘So much to learn. Listen to Mother, little one, and start learning. An escort is a hooker. Rent-a-cock. Male for sale.’ He made a sound like a mule. ‘He-whore, to use the vernacular.’ He paused, before adding, with a salacious wink, ‘And what I wouldn’t give to find your number in there.’

  I had already told Edward stories about my whoring back home, and he said to Alana straight away, ‘Well, you won’t have to wait too long, darling, I’m sure.’

  I looked startled enough for Edward to say, ‘You’ve gotta earn your keep somehow, sweetheart. You’re eating me out of house and fucking home.’

  It was inevitable, really, that I would pick up where I had left off. I didn’t want to get a job, and the dole could never provide enough money to live on. There was always a new club, or a private view, or a party, or an opening to go to. And Edward was always broke. Pretty soon I was earning what to me seemed vast amounts of money – five hundred pounds a week, sometimes – which I was spending as rapidly as it appeared – on clothes, drugs and going out every single night and partying till sunrise. I wrapped myself inside the moods and colours of this city. I licked it as if it were the white-powdered edge of a credit card. I learnt to move through it by following men. And by doing outcalls. There was one man who owned a lock-up in the arches on Pancras Road and who paid me to go around and whip him with chains as he lay face-down, naked, on a thin bare mattress on the floor. In the house of a dwarfish old queen in North Finchley, all scalloped curtains and violent clashing florals, I waited while
he took his yapping pooch outside to lock it in the car. When he returned he informed me in a high-pitched clip that he wanted to watch me cum across a photograph of his father. In Willesden Green an old man of seventy-five would enquire after experiences of canings at school, and I would invent stories of having my buttocks exposed in front of the entire school and being whipped senseless. When he was sufficiently frenzied he would remove a slipper from his briefcase and use it to redden my behind. In a flat in Pimlico a man wanted to be chased around the room whilst wearing fishnet stockings and whooping like a banshee. Every now and then I would have to rugby-tackle him to the floor (which made him shriek even louder) and then I would let him wriggle free and start the whole thing again. I regularly visited a man in Hammersmith whose flat was piled floor to ceiling with books, and who simply wanted me to do his ironing naked whilst he sat in another room doing paperwork; on one occasion, he got me to clean out the thick crust of limescale from his bath with spirit of salts, wearing nothing but a pair of pink marigolds. In a flat in Earl’s Court, I was fucking a client when his boyfriend walked in, having come back earlier than expected. He had a bottle of wine in his hand, which he immediately smashed against the doorjamb, running towards us with the jagged bottle neck raised above his head, shouting, ‘You fucking cunt!’ We moved in time to avoid the glass, which tore into the pillow on which our heads had been lying. Feathers everywhere. I didn’t stick around to be paid. Another time, a man booked me to be his boyfriend’s birthday present. I had to go to a pub in Camberwell and pretend to pick him up, and then the three of us would go back to their flat for a threesome. The birthday boy was very drunk and very effeminate and disappeared into the bedroom the minute we arrived back at the house, whilst the other chopped out lines of coke on the Conran coffee table. After we had taken a line each he picked up a camcorder and handed it to me. He pulled a rubber sheet from underneath the sofa and unfolded it, laying it out flat and standing on it. Then he took his small and brutally circumcised cock out of his fly, spat into his hand, and started wanking furiously. At this point, the birthday boy glided back in, naked but for a square of chiffon, which he wafted around like Isadora Duncan with her scarf, as he danced, lost to his own imaginings, lost in being someone else entirely. I saw all this in monochrome, through the viewfinder of the camcorder. Isadora swanned out again and I swung the camera around to catch the boyfriend coming in rapid jets that sprayed across the rubber sheet.