London Triptych (20 page)

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 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. Although 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. Although 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.” Afterward, 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 side 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 recognize 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.

But as London recedes behind me like a lover I’m leaving behind, I can’t stop thinking about what the bleedin’ hell I’m going to do when I get there. I don’t know a bloody soul there except Walter, and have no fuckin’ idea where to find him. I’ll start at the Post Office, I suppose; surely they have need of ’gram boys in Manchester. And failing that there’s always renting. There must still be men on this septic isle willing to press a shilling into a lad’s hand for the pleasure of tasting his flesh. And as I settle back into my seat, feeling less anxious about what’s in store for me, I call to mind a scene at Taylor’s when I hardly knew Oscar at all.

We were all in the parlour, with its shadowed and dusty grandeur, its worn and torn flock wallpaper and its worm-eaten furniture, which creaked and groaned under Oscar’s weight. Oscar always liked to sit with us, not like the other swells who would pick a boy before they’d finished their drink and often as not decline the drink altogether and simply go upstairs. Oscar would sit and talk for hours before choosing one or two of us to take upstairs. He seemed to enjoy chatting with us more than anything we ever did with our bodies, and he said he loved watching us. He said we were like panthers. Daft bleeder. Most of all, though, he loved to hear stories about what we got up to with the other clients, especially royalty and aristocracy, or anyone well-known. He loved hearing what they liked to do with us and as we got more and more smutty he would laugh even more and clap his hands with glee, like a child. As we joked and cursed he would laugh long and loud. Nothing was too vulgar for him. I remember him once saying to us, “My dear panthers, if only you were running this country, what a joyous place it would be. People would flock here from all over southern Europe to admire how we had managed by some Herculean effort to overcome the most adverse climate and produce a truly Latin temperament. If only we had a government of whores!”

“But we do,” said Charlie. “Didn’t you know, Mr Wilde, we
do
run this country.”

“For sure,” I added, “and isn’t this the Houses of Parliament you’re in right now?”

“It’s a little-known fact that no law is passed in this land,” continued Charlie, quite taken with the idea and running with it, “no department of state may function, no decision of national importance is ever made without our say-so. All the heads of state consult us; crowned princes defer to our greater wisdom; high court judges and law lords pick our brains on all important matters of state.”

And then Walter chipped in with, “Taylor’s not just
a
queen, sir, he’s
the
Queen.”

“Long live the Queen!” cheered Oscar, raising his cracked champagne flute, pinkie aloft, sweaty face split in a fat grin.

“I know no greater pleasure than being with those who are young, bright, happy, careless, and free,” he had said in court. “I do not like the sensible and I do not like the old.”

I look out of the window to watch dusk unfolding, trying not to think that he has a very different view right now.

1954

I spent the next
few days in my bed with a fever, sinking and surfacing, vanishing down long shadowed corridors of nightmares, corridors with walls that suddenly sprouted other doors, other corridors, and the floor dropped beneath my feet, or lifted me higher, or turned to liquid, or sand. I twisted inside sweat-stained sheets in temperatures that burned into a chill, a chill that ate at my bones and chewed through my nerves like wires, causing fires to erupt in my head. I heard voices calling me, taunting me, caressing me, chastising me. It felt, at times, as if someone had sneaked in and stolen all of my bones and my flesh lay there like a wet rag unable to move; at other times every bone in my body ached as if it had been put back in the wrong place. My eyeballs were pulled from their sockets and placed on the ceiling above me so I could view the wild thrashing of my fevered body below. For what seemed like an eternity I was gnawed by nausea, and crawled from my bed only to vomit into the white porcelain of the toilet bowl or empty my burning bowels. The rain had soaked down to my bones and floored me.

By the third day I felt well enough to go downstairs and make myself a cup of tea.

By the fourth day I felt as I had never felt before in my life. A horizon of possibility beckoned to me and a new fever gripped me: a fever to paint. After a quick wash and a hearty breakfast, I went straight to the studio. I’d been putting it off, I must admit, too preoccupied, I suppose, with other things—too busy thinking about Gore. Love (if that’s what it was) is a kind of sickness, clouding perception. I had become totally distracted.

But now, for the first time ever, I feel totally energized and focused to a point as hard and sharp as a cut diamond. I am filling the hollowness I feel with an enthusiasm quite unfamiliar to me. I know not at all where it might be leading me; I am simply placing one foot in front of the other, much like an infant beginning to walk, unsteady but resilient, half-blind but curious. Yesterday I felt like a man about to take an ice-cold plunge; today I feel that being in the water isn’t as bad as I’d imagined. I still have all the chaos within, but now I have the time to sift through to its hidden riches without worrying whether I should. I don’t know if love and creativity are compatible, nor whether this devastation is part of my fate. But I am strangely exhilarated by my grief. It’s liberated me, allowed me to experience things in a way I haven’t since I was a child. Everything seems peculiarly vivid, the daylight a sign—though as yet I don’t know of what exactly. Through the fog of my headache, I recall last week’s events, and already they seem a hundred years ago.

I am driven to give vent to those emotions in a way I never have been before. I feel such intensity I’m scared I might die of it, or I’m scared it might go, or I might not have it in me to express it adequately. My fear and my desire collide and I paint and paint hour after hour in a blur of rapid strokes as if my life depended upon it. Perhaps it does. I have these visions inside, visions of Gore’s flesh, glowing like a monstrance, drawing me like a spell. I need to get them out. Perhaps then I will be at peace. These strange, dark, distorted canvases have become some kind of abstract autobiography. Heaven knows what they say about me, but at least they say something. That, at least, is enough.

Each brush stroke charges me, and I don’t know if I am still inebriated with fever, but my blood sings to the paint, and the paint sings to my blood, and I have become the air that carries their voices back and forth. I cannot, must not stop now. Not for anything. Not with the fire in me now. I must paint, paint, paint.