London Triptych

by Kemp, Jonathan

  There’s no such thing as human nature. Nothing is hidden. It’s all on the surface if you can be bothered to look.

  1894

  Last night Taylor and Charlie and me went by omnibus to Soho and met this Mr Wilde in Kettner’s on Romilly Street. A supernatural glow came from the pink lampshades that sat like blushing angels at the centre of each white-winged table.

  We dined upstairs in one of the private rooms, and with us not being used to such grandeur Taylor showed me and Charlie what cutlery to use and I never spoke unless spoken to. I was introduced to Mr Wilde and his friend, who’s a real lord, apparently. And it was like meeting royalty at first, I was that nervous. That is, until I discovered Lord Muck is as rough as a navvy’s ball sack beneath that hoity-toity exterior. I smiled my biggest smile, put at ease by the desire in their eyes. By now I’d learnt to read the signs of hunger and bask in their heat.

  ‘Our little lad has pleasing manners,’ Mr Wilde said with a smile, holding my gaze till I broke it, spitefully. I was seated next to him and throughout the meal he would pull my ear or chuck me under the chin whenever I said something that made him laugh. I didn’t mind.

  Mr Wilde and Taylor and Lord Muck did most of the talking and they talked so fast it was the devil’s own job to keep up. And they talked about such peculiar things. At one point Taylor started to recount stories about who’d been to the house recently and at the mention of one name Mr Wilde arched an eyebrow and said, ‘He’s always in pursuit of the hirsute, that one; he couldn’t care less about the hairless.’

  ‘Though I hear he does no more than suck their yards,’ said Lord Muck before turning to call the waiter to order more champagne.

  ‘Whereas with you, dear Bosie,’ said Mr Wilde, ‘the onus is always on the anus.’

  ‘Now, now, Oscar,’ said the young lord, ‘judge not, lest ye be judged.’

  ‘Oh, I know I should be more Christian, but my tastes are far too catholic.’

  And on they went like that for hours.

  I’d never heard such talk before, all manner of things I’d never heard of. The usual punters talk, don’t get me wrong, Christ, some of them never shut up, but what bores they suddenly seemed in comparison. Mr Wilde talked of art and music, of passionate love and the stupidity of the ruling classes, and it was like another language. And yet all through the meal all I could think about was how fat and ugly he was and how I hoped, even though this young lord was stupid, that he was the one I had to do it with. He was slim and pretty, at least. I’ve got used to feigning joy in the presence of some of the ugliest bastards you’re ever likely to meet, don’t get me wrong, but still, if there’s the possibility of a nice face I know what I prefer.

  I focused on the way Mr Wilde’s chin shone with saliva and I told myself he was nothing but a fruity old sodomite and I’ve met plenty of them. Nothing special about this one, just thinks he’s clever is all, thinks he’s better than the rest of us, and he’s only a paddy, after all. He said, ‘I love London as Joan of Arc loved the pyre that canonised her; it will be the death and thus the making of me, at one and the same time.’

  ‘Saint Oscar,’ laughed Lord Muck.

  ‘The paradox made flesh.’

  ‘And you’ve got that in abundance,’ the lord said, pinching Paddy’s waist.

  He said, ‘Don’t you think London is like a drying pool of vomit at which pigeons are mindlessly pecking with no hope of nourishment? Coprophagy would be preferable – feeding straight from the rank fundament of the City. Each pallid citizen is just one more pigeon staking its claim on a morsel of bile, heedlessly shuttling from one side of this barnyard to the other.’

  The others laughed, Taylor and Lord Muck – even Charlie. All laughing, pissed as newts. But I didn’t find it funny at all, and I didn’t want to fawn all over him the way they were. It made me sick, especially the way he lapped it up.

  I found myself warming to the thought of sex as we got to the end of the meal. The champagne hadn’t stopped coming and my head was woozy, but my prick was standing and I knew from experience that Charlie was always up for it, and good at it too.

  After the meal we all took a hansom to the Savoy where Taylor waited in the bar downstairs while the four of us went upstairs to Mr Wilde’s room. All inhibitions were by now dissolved. Mr Wilde kept his clothes on while Charlie and me and the arrogant lord stripped off and got down to it. Christ, he’s a foulmouthed bugger, that Bosie – swears like a costermonger and has the manners of a farmer. Fuckin’ this and fuckin’ that. Worse than Pa. He got us both to suck on his member, and a big fucker it was too for such a skinny runt. While we sucked he played with our arses, pushing the neck of an empty champagne bottle as far up each of us as it would go, ramming it in till we squealed and gasped. Then we stood up on the bed while he sucked both of our members at the same time. Mr Wilde sat and watched from a chair by the window, his breeches undone, frigging himself at the sight of our debaucheries, making funny little noises all the while. We finished off with a human sandwich. Lottie was the filling, I was the bottom slice and Lord Muck was the top slice. We moved in perfect rhythm. like those clockwork toys you see in the windows at Whiteleys.

  As we were dressing Mr Wilde dropped a coin in each of our breast pockets and said, ‘Thank you, my cherubim,’ opening the door for us and dropping a curtsy like some chambermaid. Taylor was the cash-carrier and we didn’t normally see much of it, to be honest, till we got paid once a week. We knew it was no good telling him we’d been given no coin, for he’d only shake us by the ankles till the pennies dropped out if we didn’t hand them over.

  1954

  Mother died first, in January 1953, and in her absence my father expressed a grief far surpassing any love I’d seen him express towards her while she was alive. It unnerved me to see this usually taciturn and stoical man crumble into a pile of ash without her and hear him howling with grief. You don’t really know a person till you have seen how they grieve, till you have witnessed how they deal with loss. Or don’t deal with it, in my father’s case. He faded away as if the air that had sustained him had finally run out. As if he had relied on my mother to wind him up each morning and without her he simply unwound, stopped ticking like the grandfather clock in the nursery rhyme. It was a difficult time. He and I had never been close, but despite this distance between us I thought that at least I knew him, his foibles, his habits, his character: understood how he worked. I had predicted the usual stiff-upper-lipped response to Mother’s death. When he crawled inside that grief, when I found him prostrate on their bed eating her face powder, I was totally unprepared. I no longer recognised him as my father, and any attempt at communication was swiftly curtailed. He began talking nothing but gibberish. He attempted to take his own life more than once. On the family doctor’s advice, I checked him into a private asylum in Roehampton. I visited him a couple of times but he no longer recognised me, and on one occasion attacked me, so I kept away. He was more of a stranger to me now than ever before. I was more alone than ever before. I realised that, however estranged we had been, my parents had provided something akin to structure in my life. Since Joan’s death I had visited more frequently, and, although our conversation was awkward and rather stilted, it was a bond of sorts. In my own way, I miss them.

  Within six months of Mother’s death, Father gave up the ghost too. He died of a broken heart, I suppose. So he really did have a heart, after all. That was the biggest shock, that hint of a passionate love beyond anything I might have expected of them. I was financially solvent without having to work. So I gave up my job, sold the house in Camden in which I’d been living since my parents retired and moved into their house in Barnes in order to paint. But that isn’t it. That isn’t really why I gave up work. In my heart, I knew even before Mother died that this was what I would do. What their death did was to focus my dissatisfaction and spur me into action.

  Sometimes, don’t you look at the world and wonder what kind of madhouse you’re living in? Have you e
ver felt, deep down, somewhere so hidden that you overlook it time and again, a pulse that taps out faint coded messages of distress? Don’t you hear a tiny, desperate voice pleading for salvation, for mercy, air to breathe, freedom, space to move? That’s all I did. I found somewhere quiet. Somewhere so quiet I could hear the SOS. I sat in a corner of Highgate Cemetery after my father’s funeral and I listened to the absence of sound, listened to it as it became punctured by birdsong. I sat down and let myself become that absence of sound, and be punctured in a similar manner. I swept aside all the voices and the clutter inside my head. The birdsong that punctuated that silence passed through me like light through dust, showing up all my crazy thoughts.

  I imagined myself outside the world, imagined the world without me, the teeming threads of life that encircled me, the sorrows and joys of millions of other people, unknown stories, unknowable lives, all buzzing gently in the air around me. I pictured it all as if I had never existed, and nothing seemed different without me. The feeling of monumental insignificance that assaulted me at that moment was both horrifying and liberating. It made me realise that nothing really matters until you decide it does. I’d never allowed anything to matter to me, and I felt the loss enormously. I can’t say I felt any grief at my parents’ passing. As I said, they were virtually unknown to me. Having very few friends themselves, my parents knew almost nothing about friendship, other than sensing in it the danger of responsibility, perhaps. This sense of danger they passed on to me in the form of a knowledge I don’t think I ever truly questioned. My parents taught me how to absent myself. I’ve trawled my memory in search of something approaching a treasured memory of them, something that might prove their existence as other than ghostly apparitions. I can vaguely recall the smell of the perfume my mother wore and the sound of my father’s hacking cough. Or perhaps the time he taught me to shave, after years of watching him doing it at the same sink, performing the task with a curious tenderness and attention to detail that softened my heart with its vanity. But I didn’t feel any great sense of loss after they died. Not like with Joan. Not the loss of a person, more the loss of possibility. I knew what they wanted of me, and beyond that I knew nothing. I did what I was told to do, and with each acquiescence I lopped off another limb, until I had completely disappeared.

  After I left art school, father secured me the job with Frank Symonds’ firm, and my life fell into a pattern that provided a structure the way the bars of a prison provide a structure. Before long I got used to the fact that I’d never get out of it – resigned myself, I should say. Resigned from life. I have always been shy by nature, so I got on with my job as invisibly as I had got on with my studies. I had no friends; people thought I was strange because I was so distant. I found it impossible to get close to anyone. I rarely went out. Until I married Joan, I remained living at home. And I strung my life between the two poles of work and home, wearing tracks in the ground as I shuttled between them, like a shire horse ploughing a field. I never registered my own desires, but concentrated solely on fulfilling theirs. I denied myself, and a feeling of complete and utter grief overwhelms me when I think of the waste.

  Gore was meant to come over today, but he rang just now to say he couldn’t make it. He has to visit his Cambridge don again. I never knew such jealousy before. It shames me.

  1998

  Edward knew everybody, it seemed. Wherever we went, people flocked around him. Amongst his friends were plenty of artists, and I soon began to model for many of them. My world was changing and I with it. I knew nothing of restraint, and let my desire lead me where it would. Within a couple of months of my arriving in London, Edward took me to a party in an old missionary chapel in Angel. August 1986.

  As Lilli, Edward and I arrived at the door, the air was static with all the frenzy and glamour of the Oscars. Lilli was decked out like a Las Vegas showgirl, a powder-pink feather boa wrapped around her like the ghost of a snake. A tiara bit its way through her platinum beehive like an angel’s dentures tackling candyfloss. Edward was dressed like Dolly Levi, complete with a stuffed bird spraying tail feathers from his massive black and white hat. In my black leather chaps and waistcoat and black sequin-covered Stetson, I was fit to ride in the devil’s rodeo.

  As we entered, the first thing I saw was the DJ, dressed in a black lamé jacket, a studded leather dog collar around his neck and huge red prosthetic devil’s horns rising from his temples. He was leading the crowd in waving their arms to ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’. Behind him, two enormous stained glass windows, depicting biblical scenes, spread out like angels’ wings. He supplied an endless flow of ’60s soundtracks and psychedelia, giving the entire proceedings the ultra-glamorous air of a film set, as did the larval lightshow dripping down the walls around us, amoeboid colour-forms coagulating above the throng like glass candle grenades popping. Silver lamé curtains ran the entire length of one of the walls, reflecting the lights like oil on a puddle. We made our way to the bar, which was constructed from scaffolding poles stretched out across another wall, covered in zebra-striped fabric; a crowd had gathered like lions around a fresh kill. Huge abstract paintings, the offspring of Wayward’s drug-addled imagination, adorned the walls. Everyone was dressed up, desperate to be seen. Some weren’t even dressed at all. One woman, naked as Eve, carried a shiny green apple with her all night, out of which one bite had been taken. A green-sequinned merkin gave her an iridescent fig leaf. A gigantic man in platform boots appeared, his powdered cleavage bursting out of the bodice of a red velvet crinoline dress, his bald white head strapped with an illuminated light bulb above each ear. An exaggerated red mouth took up half his face, split in the biggest slice-of-watermelon grin I’d ever seen, his manic eyes black as bruises and big as dinner-plates. He danced like a drunken dervish, clumsily knocking into everyone, collapsing in a heap in an act of pure drama before picking himself up to continue the assault in another direction. One woman, dressed like a Brassaï tart – black beret, fishnets, tatty fox fur curled across her shoulder like a sleeping pet – sipped red wine as she sashayed to the music. A man was lying on his back in the middle of this dancing throng, kicking his legs in the air and waving his arms, his feet, encased in three-inch brothel-creepers, busy kicking anyone who got too close. He was wearing a pinstriped jacket inside out, with the word Gucci stitched in large white sequins down one arm, Chanel down the other. His vampire-white face with its enormous fuchsia eyes stared up at me as I leant over him and he roared with laughter. I roared back. Cybele, an elegantly tall strawberry-blonde transsexual, glided past, wearing a transparent black dress and nothing else, clutching a small black PVC handbag with one hand and the arm of the handsomest man I had ever seen with the other. Tall, broad, dark and chisel-featured, he was sporting a tuxedo and shone like a film star. Their glamour was enough to take your breath away. Claudia, a pre-operative black transsexual, wearing buggy blue contact lenses, had wrapped a white fun-fur stole around her naked body and was teetering her way through the crowd on monumentally high Westwood heels. She was so well tucked you would swear she was a real woman, each step a painful reminder of the shameful biology fate had flung her way. Or maybe it was the shoes. The first time we’d met Claudia, she had come running up to us in a club yelling at Lilli, ‘Girl, you’re well tucked tonight.’ Refusing to believe Lilli was a real woman, Claudia had proceeded to bombard Lilli with questions about the operation until Lilli had to get her pussy out to prove she wasn’t a trannie. Even then, Claudia just sucked her teeth and said, ‘Miss Thing, they sure make them motherfuckas look real nowadays!’ Ma Baker had come dressed like a woman from a painting by Otto Dix, complete with an empty picture frame that he carried around in front of him all night. His best friend was decked out in a 17th-century hoop-skirted ballgown made completely out of Tesco carrier bags.

  I left Edward and Lilli and wandered off in search of adventure. In one room a four-foot television screen flickered with ’70s gay porn movies, while, in another, black-and-white Super-8s project
ed chiaroscuro images of men and women fucking from some distant age earlier this century. They could be my grandparents, or great-grandparents, linked to me by blood, by the chains of DNA. The fact that they weren’t made my connection with them more powerful, rooted as it was in the desire to fuck in front of a camera. In the cellar, a labyrinth of rooms: damp, brick-powdered walls, bare earth underfoot, the chill of a grave. In one room, a bunch of stoners sat around a campfire. One of them, wearing a purple wizard’s tunic, his bald head painted blue, cast some powder onto the flames, making them flare up in blue sparkling tongues as he recited an incantation: ‘In the beginning there was fire!’ He was grandly shamanistic, and a little absurd. I’d wandered down there with a handsome American we’d met in the pub beforehand whose boyfriend we’d lost sight of upstairs. We moved on. One room was dark, the only entryway a wide hole gaping in the wall. As I poked my head through the darkened, blasted hole, the American said to me, ‘Climb in there, I’ll give you a blow job.’