London Triptych

by Kemp, Jonathan

  I took a cab to the Lord Barrymore. I was too drunk to be nervous, so I strolled in and ordered a drink. The landlord served me, and he remembered me from last time and asked how it had gone at the police station, or the ‘nick’, as he called it. I said it was all fine in the end, and asked if he’d seen Gore tonight. He didn’t know who I meant, and when I said it was the young man I’d been with last time he said, ‘Oh, you mean Gracie? She was in here earlier, but she’s gone now. God knows where. She’s a one.’ And he gave a dirty laugh. It seems he has female names for all the regulars. ‘She owe you money?’

  I assured him he didn’t.

  ‘Makes a change.’

  Just then, I heard a voice behind me say, ‘Hello, duckie. Mr Read, isn’t it?’

  I turned to find the old man we’d met last time. I said, ‘Hello, Jack.’

  ‘Couldn’t buy us a drink, could you, Mr Read? Only I’m nanti-handbag.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Flat broke. I’ll have a G&T, ta very much. A large one.’

  I got him the drink.

  ‘You’re a gent,’ he said, with a grin, before taking a slurp. I wondered how I could extricate myself without sounding impolite. I didn’t want to exchange small talk with him, I wanted to find Gore.

  ‘Looking for Gregory?’ he asked. I said I was. I’d got so used to calling him Gore that it was a shock to hear his real name.

  Jack gestured for me to follow him and we sat at a table. ‘He’s not here.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You’re in love with him, aren’t you?’

  I was taken aback, but I stuttered, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Poor bastard.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  He took another slurp of his drink. ‘Old men fall in love with whores all the time. You’re not the first, an’ you won’t be the last.’

  ‘But this is different.’

  ‘That’s what they all say.’

  ‘I’m not a client. I’m an artist. Gore models for me.’

  ‘Same difference, once love’s made an appearance. But as they say, there’s no fool like an old fool.’

  I didn’t need to be lectured. I didn’t want to hear what he had to say, however well-intentioned. I asked him if he knew where Gore was, and he said Gore had told him he was heading back home.

  ‘But who knows?’ he said. ‘The young are so capricious.’

  I left the pub and took a cab to King Street, just around the corner from Gore’s road. It was a quiet street, narrow and treeless. I scouted around for a public telephone and found one. I rang the house again and asked if Gore was at home. No, he wasn’t back yet. I walked back to King Street and found a pub and fortified my nerve with another gin and tonic. Back at his house I hung around in the shadows on the opposite side of the street, feeling like an incompetent spy. Scared that I might be arrested, wondering what on earth I thought I was doing there, what on earth I thought I would do when I saw him.

  It was a full moon, I remember. It crossed my mind that I’d gone insane, that the bone-white face studding the midnight-blue sky had hypnotised me and made me do this. That it was out of my hands now, my fate. This is how men lose their reason: for love, or desire. I’m not the first and I won’t be the last. There was nothing I could do but embrace this insanity. I pictured myself in a straitjacket, explaining my actions in a babble that made no sense, my voice a series of yelps and stutters, my speech reduced to total gibberish. I pictured myself behind bars, catching flies and swallowing them whole. Amongst the staff I will be known as the Flycatcher.

  At that moment Gore walked around the corner into the streetlight. I sensed him more than saw him, like the immediate presence of danger. I walked out from the shadows and into the moon’s blue, still not sure what on earth I intended to say. He froze momentarily then continued towards the house, towards me. He nodded in recognition and said calmly, ‘Wotcha?’

  ‘Is there somewhere we can go?’ I asked. ‘Somewhere we can talk?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said nonchalantly, as if nothing were amiss in my being here, requesting this. As if it were a regular occurrence.

  He turned around and walked back into King Street. I followed.

  He took me back to the pub I’d just been in. I’d been hoping for somewhere quieter. It was about half past nine, and people were sufficiently inebriated for there to be a loud level of noise: arguments, laughter, singing, shouting, all as impenetrable as the smoke hanging in the air. We managed to find a seat, and I bought a round of drinks. I made mine a double, and ordered two, knocking one back before I left the bar to return to Gore. I had no idea what I was going to say to him. No plan of action. No strategy. I simply knew I couldn’t just let him walk out of my life, although I think I must have also known that nothing was more likely to encourage him to leave than to do exactly what I was doing.

  I returned with the drinks and sat down opposite him at a small round table.

  ‘Cheers,’ he said, offering his pint glass for me to chink. Bonhomie.

  I think I started to say something like, ‘About today –’ only he had already begun with, ‘I can only have the one. I’m off tomorrow, early, so I can’t stay long.’ My words were cut off brutally by the edge in his voice, and what I had been about to say now lay slain at my feet.

  ‘Off where?’ I stammered.

  ‘Dublin.’

  He took a sip of his beer, wiping off the moustache of froth with the back of his hand before saying, ‘I’ve a cousin there, reckons he can get me a job. I’ve had enough of London. I’ve got itchy feet. It’s the Romany blood in my veins, isn’t it?’

  ‘I believe Dublin to be a wonderful city.’ I hated myself even as the words were coming out.

  ‘That it is.’ He nodded. ‘Though it’s years since I’ve been.’

  ‘Might I write to you there?’ Had I no shame?

  ‘I can’t remember the address right now. I’ll write to you with it as soon as I can.’

  His eyes darted away from mine, breaking the promise even as it was being made. When did he decide this?

  ‘You didn’t mention anything today.’

  ‘I spoke to him on the telephone this morning. I was going to tell you this afternoon, only…’ He broke off. Only what? What words would he have chosen to describe what had happened? What version of events had he fabricated into his truth? How did he see it, how did he see me?

  ‘You don’t need to go. Not on account of… me.’

  ‘I was thinking of moving on anyway. Been here too long. You know how it is.’

  No, I don’t. I don’t know how it is. This city is my home. I could never think of leaving it. I have hardly ever left it. And it has never left me. But I nodded, as if I understood perfectly his sudden desire to get away from me.

  There was a long silence during which he sipped his beer and looked at the floor. I gulped my gin and tonic and looked at him. Or rather through him. I said, ‘You were just going to disappear, weren’t you? You weren’t going to let me know.’

  ‘Of course I was.’

  ‘I don’t believe you, Gore.’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘I don’t expect you to love me or anything. But, we get on, don’t we? It must mean something, what we have? Doesn’t it? Our friendship, doesn’t it mean –’

  ‘Forget it. It’s nothing to do with that.’ He drained his glass, and slammed it down. ‘Friendship,’ he said, mockingly. He stood up, pulling his jacket closed. ‘I’m off.’

  I recalled Billy, and how I’d banished him to the wasteland in a similar manner, cavalier, cruel, perhaps the only way such rejection can be executed – with honesty. Short, sharp, like an executioner’s axe. I thought about all the drawings I had done of Gore, like tiny ghosts, waiting back at home to haunt me. I thought about living for the rest of my life without seeing him again. I thought of my future without him in it, and all light drained from my vision. My future shrank to the size and colour of a full stop.

  I followed him out of th
e pub into the empty street. He turned around and told me to go home. I begged him to stop walking. He wouldn’t.

  I caught up with him, and he barked at me, ‘Fuck off! Leave me alone!’

  He shrugged me away, and, a trifle unsteady, I think I grabbed for him. He must have pushed me for I suddenly lost my balance completely. A bank of pain hit my body. I was on my hands and knees, howling after his retreating back, howling his name, lost to my grief. House lights were coming on, heads appearing from out of windows. I could hear someone screaming and wondered what they were screaming for. I then realised it was I who was screaming. Someone shouted for me to stop.

  I stopped.

  I managed to stand, and looked in Gore’s direction. He was nowhere to be seen. I was disorientated. I turned around and started walking, my vision colliding with itself. I didn’t even think about hailing a cab. I just walked, head down, through the streets, across the bridge, making my way back to Barnes on unsteady feet. In the invisible city through which I walked that night, I don’t recall seeing a single soul. The rest of the human race, the living world, had slid into another dimension. I moved as if through water. I cried, and the rain that started gently to fall as I walked felt like an amplification of my sorrow. I cried till I felt better for having shed my grief. The rain became heavier and heavier as I walked, and by the time I reached home it felt as if my tears had soaked me entirely and washed me clean, and I was strangely joyous. Reborn, if that doesn’t sound ridiculous. Birth would be a moment of absolute panic if we but knew it consciously, our emergence into a world about which we know nothing, about which we have everything to learn. Thankfully, we have no consciousness of our lack of knowledge either. Along with everything else, that is something we must learn. Perhaps some of us never learn. But I felt something akin to that panic as I peeled off my sodden clothes, and it felt strangely good, because in that shivering moment of uncertainty lay the possibility of something else, some other life. I think I even laughed before collapsing onto my bed and passing out.

  1998

  I must have momentarily dozed off, sinking into a brief, but deep, sleep. And I dreamt of you, spinning like a distant star, with the night sky purpling behind you. We are on the roof, high above the city, and you are dancing like a dervish, foolish and fearless, teetering on the edge of a wall, above a drop that would kill were you to trip and fall. It’s a summer’s evening, which is strange because I never knew you in summer. The air is furred with heat, and music is throbbing its way across to us in steady waves from Bagley’s Warehouse, where, half an hour earlier, you pushed me against the sweating wall of the toilet cubicle and kissed me, crushing your mouth onto mine as the first rush of cocaine took effect (the taste of it is still in my throat). Within seconds we were fucking, right there, soundless and intense, making of our bodies a new depth of feeling, our pleasure spilling out in tiny, almost inaudible grunts of whispered, sighed and gasped delight. Quick, urgent, as if nothing else mattered. I suppose nothing else did.

  We left the club and walked back to mine, arms across each other’s shoulders, sweat cooling in the summer air. We stopped to give a prostitute a cigarette on the corner of my road. Then we climbed the stairs up to the roof, the city spread out before us in fluid constellations of light, like stars reflected in a river. The sky above us was dark and immense, St Pancras menacing behind us like some beast crouching in the shadows. You climbed up onto the flat roof of the stairwell, precariously close to the edge, and started to dance. I see stars around you and I fear for your life as you spin on the lip of the drop, but your eyes and your smile as they meet mine say it all.

  Love isn’t meant to stand still.

  Skin has a memory all of its own. Mnemonic flesh, store-room of all experience. Fingerprints stored, traces of lips indelible, epidermic recollections of the hands and lips and teeth that have marked it, surfacing to annihilate, barely visible, a palimpsest that will not, cannot forget, that cannot be erased, despite age and soap and usurpers, a Braille of recollections: the warm trickle of your piss still licking across a nipple, your spit still dampening my chin, your dried cum still cracking like plaster on my belly, pulling hairs exquisitely; your kisses still in my teeth; your tongue still feeding between my buttocks, crawling lower and lower. Your cock warm and heavy on my knee as you suck me. The hair on your belly crackling against my forehead as I suck you. The storm of you against my body, inside my body. Your hands in my hair. Your hot heat upon me. Because of you, my body is the site of miracles, and my skin remembers as fiercely as my heart tries to forget.

  It’s morning. I can hear the screws approaching, banging on the doors one by one to wake us up. The prison comes to life. Tony stirs in the bunk beneath me. I suppose some people would say this is the first day of the rest of my life, or something inane like that. Some people would talk about ‘closure’ or some such bullshit. A ‘window of opportunity’. Fuck that. I’m still in pain. I’m still angry. I still love you. Where’s the closure in that? I am locked inside this pain. Is that closure? I am broken.

  I think about Gregory, who is coming to meet me at eleven o’clock outside the prison gates, to drive me home – his home, not mine. I am homeless. I have lost everything. And we will drive back to Gregory’s home, where, above the mantelpiece in the living room, hangs a drawing of him as a young man. A drawing by some artist he modelled for and befriended in the mid-’50s, who had some success late in life. ‘I’ve hung in the Tate,’ he told me the first time I was there, and he showed me a catalogue of some exhibition of this guy’s work from the late ’50s. Three paintings. A triptych. London Triptych 1956. Oil on canvas. Each 950 x 735mm. Colin Read (1900–1975). None of the images is recognisably a young Gregory; they’re in all sorts of strange contortions and poses, the head tucked into the curlicues of his body. But he was clearly proud of them. I have since heard the story of that episode in his life, as I have heard, by now, most of his stories. He showed me a small, tatty black and white photograph of him as a young man, bequiffed and smiling, with his arm around an older man.

  ‘That’s Colin,’ he said.

  ‘Were you and he lovers?’ I asked.

  He paused, before shaking his head and taking back the photo and placing it back on the mantelpiece, and I had the feeling the question had thrown him somewhere he didn’t want to go.

  The first time we met he explained the scenario he wanted with me. I was to pose nude while he drew me but at some point I was to get a hard-on. Then he was to suck me off. While he was sucking me, I sneaked a look at the picture he had been drawing of me, and was astonished to see a simple stick man, no better than a child’s. Though I’m not exactly sure what else I was expecting.

  I’ve grown very fond of Gregory. I don’t know how it will work out, us living together, but I can imagine a worse situation, certainly. He hadn’t been a client of mine for a while at the time I was sentenced, so I don’t imagine he’ll expect sex. Though if he were to, I know that’s one way I can repay him. I’ve learnt that much. His kindness is more than I feel I deserve. Who knows what his motivations are? Perhaps he’s lonely. Perhaps he’s fallen in love with me. I’m just grateful for somewhere to stay.

  As I watch Tony get up and grunt his good morning while he pisses, I think about the holding cell beneath the Old Bailey, that tiny room in which I stood with seven others that morning before my trial. I had no idea what was in store for me. All I felt was that my immediate future had been stolen. It seems, now, like a lifetime ago, and I feel, strangely, as close to you as ever. Perhaps these words have done that – kept you close. Four of the seven men in there with me had come straight from prison, on remand. One of them had just been given fifteen years for armed robbery. He sat there, in the corner, sobbing. I read the graffiti on the walls. ‘If you get out of here take my advice be good.’ Afterwards, we were led single-file outside to the sweatboxes, where each of us stood up in his own box, so small that I was in agony the entire journey to Wandsworth, shifting my weight from s
ide to side, my chin nearly touching my chest.

  I think about that first night in prison. In a room with three other men. I’d never in my life been so terrified. But once I started to talk to them I found that they were easy to get on with, not scary at all. I didn’t tell anyone I was gay, but I guess I didn’t have to. It didn’t take long before I was being hit on, made to do things. You once told me that I looked as if I was always up for it. As a whore, that was an advantage; in here, I’m not so sure. Even if I’d been straight they would’ve come for me, I guess. I discovered pretty quickly what a high premium I had, and was adopted by a series of seriously dangerous men. None of whom I’ll ever see again. I’ve done as much whoring in here as I did outside. In here it was all about survival. If I wasn’t HIV-positive before, I undoubtedly am now. I’m so underweight right now that you’d hardly recognise me, but that might be the shit food. I can’t wait for my first decent meal.

  I think about you. Where you are now. Whether I’ll see you again. What I’d say if I did. What lies before you is my past. This is for you, Jake, to make of what you will. There may be a logic to it yet, though I have failed so far to find it. And as I climb out of bed and begin to dress, anxious about the freedom that is soon to be mine, I remember the time I told you that you were amazing and you replied, ‘No I’m not. I’m mean.’ Should I have taken that as a warning? Should I have stayed away?

  Love isn’t meant to stand still.

  1895

  Oscar always said he preferred women with a past and men with a future. From now on, I’m going to try to live without either. I’m on a train rattling its smoky way to Manchester. I don’t know for sure why I chose that city but it seemed as good a place as any to start a new life. Perhaps I’ll bump into Walter there. All I know is I can’t live in London any more.

  This morning I went to see my ma and give her some money, and tell her I’m leaving. She said, ‘Are you in trouble, Jack?’ It seems she hasn’t heard a thing about the trials, thank God. I said I was just visiting a friend. Gave her and the little ones a hug and left.