He feels his own body become as leaden and despondent as Walter’s and drags himself from the bed to his computer. Working will help. He double-clicks and the screens spark instantly back into the vivid life and joyful colour of his screensaver; the beaming figures of Marius Woolf and Leslie Cheung, posing on the red carpet, arms around each other. Leslie, dark-haired and slight, leans into Woolf, a hand placed on the heartthrob’s stomach. Woolf’s a good deal taller than Leslie and everything about him — his smile, his loosely abundant curls, the square shoulders and long limbs, his defined features — dazzles. And, oh, those amber eyes. At this point in his career, being photographed with an Asian megastar of Leslie’s magnitude, one of the first legends of Cantopop and an acclaimed movie actor, hadn’t done Woolf any harm at all.
Leslie was known to his legions of fans as Gor Gor — big brother — and, growing up, Jeffrey had thought of him as just that. In 2002, when this picture was taken, his greatest movie roles were some years behind him, though his popularity had remained undimmed, even after declaring during a huge concert that his boyfriend, Tong Tong, was his ‘most beloved’, second only to his mother. It had shocked many, delighted some, but affected few. Leslie was so adored that even this daring personal admission couldn’t harm him.
In their tuxedos and bow ties it’s Leslie and Marius who look like a couple, though they never were, and when this photo was taken, Woolf, then just twenty-one and a rising star, was years away from coming out himself. After he did, this very same image re-surfaced to do the rounds on websites and social media, in magazines, blogs and online forums, as retrospective proof that people knew it all along.
His posting of an It Gets Better video on YouTube, some months ago, had come as a shock, just like Leslie’s concert announcement had. Jeffrey watched over and over Woolf telling how, when he was at school, he witnessed the kind of bullying that drove him deep into the closet, then, voice cracking, relating the story of how he had even joined in the taunts directed at one particular kid who took his own life a year later.
“I have never before spoken,” he says, the prepared statement rustling in his trembling hands, “about the shame I feel at my complicity in that tragic, and unnecessary, death. I have a duty to tell the truth, in tribute to all those who have died, are still dying, as a result of such cruelty and prejudice. The truth is that, for as long as hatred was directed at others, I was grateful that it wasn’t directed at me. Now, if I could go back, I would stand between that bullied child and those who attacked him, rather than join in with them. I’d do my best to make him feel valued. But we can’t go back, only forward. So let’s all do that. Together.”
Jeffrey used to fantasise about Gor Gor singing at one of Walter’s famous birthday parties, but was always afraid to request it. He heard his father’s response without even asking the question: What! That faggot warbler?!
In Jeffrey’s mind, he and Leslie would get on so well they’d become inseparable; go to the movies together, hang out afterwards and go for food, take holidays by the ocean, borrow each other’s clothes and get on each other’s nerves, just like real brothers. But that chance had disappeared forever. Only a few months after these pictures of Leslie and Marius were taken, Gor Gor was dead.
On April first, 2003, Leslie was staying at the Mandarin Oriental hotel, down on the waterfront. Jeffrey had been a guest there himself exactly a year before, in the days when, as his father’s heir apparent, he accompanied him to business meetings, conferences and receptions. But the truth was that Jeffrey had no real interest in CantoCorp’s current activities or its future prospects.
Walter’s extraordinary wealth and burgeoning power had not brought him taste or vision, quite the contrary. The year before, Jeffrey had started to make digital art, which Walter didn’t care about at all, nor did he share his son’s interest in new creative technologies, that’s how short-sighted he was. The more time Jeffrey spent with his father, in his father’s vulgar, sleazy world, the more he could feel the pressure, the temptation, to betray his inner life, and the desires his father could never countenance.
At that time, one of Walter’s great business contacts and former drinking buddies, perhaps the closest thing he had to a friend, was a man named Cecil Chao. Just last year, Chao, a multi-billionaire property tycoon and the owner of the land on which the miraculous headquarters of CantoCorp stood, had gained some notoriety when he publicly offered five hundred million Hong Kong dollars to any man who could court and marry his lesbian daughter, Gigi.
Gigi Chao had already married her female partner in a civil ceremony, in Paris, and she’d shown class and restraint when responding to reporters, telling them that she still loved her father who, though misguided, she was sure was acting in her best interests. It was a level of magnanimity Jeffrey knew he couldn’t have shown, and he knew it as surely as he knew Cecil and Walter shared the same attitude.
All those years earlier, that long weekend at the Mandarin Oriental, hosted by a Qatari royal shamelessly trying to attract Walter’s business investment, was the last he and his father would spend away together.
The Mandarin wasn’t the most spectacular or beautiful hotel they ever stayed at but, walking through its main doors, Jeffrey had fallen immediately for the plush, understated elegance manifested before them, as if for them, and had wallowed in the smoked glass, dark marble, crystal and gold, milk chocolatey sensuality of the lobby. There had been the quiet unburdening of his overnight bag, which was nothing new of course, taken into the care of a graceful porter who was clean-cut and quietly authoritative — a Swiss, Jeffrey found out later — with glossy black hair slicked back and gently quiffed at the front above glittering blue eyes. He was comic book handsome and scrupulously polite.
During the short elevator ride up to his room Jeffrey stared at the back of the porter’s strong, freshly-clippered neck and was filled with an overwhelming urge to lick it. He had a vision of this man lifting him into his arms, transporting him to his suite, laying him out on the bed and unpacking him like luggage. At fourteen, it was Jeffrey’s first explicitly sexual fantasy and it terrified him.
He managed to tear his gaze away from the back of that neck, only to catch the eye of his father, who was staring at him, his mouth tightened into a firm, straight line.
That night, at dinner, Jeffrey had a terrible argument with Walter about his choice of food and Jeffrey left the table angrily and abruptly. Walter accused him afterwards of deliberately embarrassing him in front of the Qatari, though Jeffrey knew that was not what he was really angry about.
Twelve months later, Gor Gor’s shattered body was found on the sidewalk outside the same hotel. He’d thrown himself from the balcony of the luxury spa in the middle of the night. As soon as they’d heard the news, tearfully relayed during morning break by one of their teachers, Jeffrey and his classmates simply walked out of school and headed straight to the scene, as if compelled to gather at the site of a major disaster. A few of them wept the whole way there but Jeffrey, numbed, disbelieving, had been too shocked to cry and was sure they would arrive at the waterfront to find it was all a terrible mistake. Leslie would wave at them from the window of his hotel suite — “It wasn’t me!” he’d call out. “Go back to school! I love you all!”
That month of April, 2003, was the height of SARS — the respiratory virus spreading at terrifying speed throughout almost all of Asia — and the sight of everyone wearing surgical masks on the street, or on transport, in shopping malls and restaurants, created a vision of civilisation’s end.
At Jeffrey’s school they’d taken to customising their masks in an act of uncertain defiance by drawing grotesque noses and gruesome smiles on them, a nervous giggle in the face of death. On his own mask he’d drawn an enigmatic, gentle smile, copied from a painting that featured in his late mother’s book about Cézanne’s portraits of his wife.
When they finally got to the Mandarin, flowers were already laid in tribute, marking the spot on the sidewalk where
Gor Gor had been found. A crowd of teenage girls was wailing inconsolably. As he and his friends gathered round Jeffrey caught sight of his reflection in the hotel window and recoiled at how stupid and childish the coolly ironic cast of his surgical mask appeared. Here was death — Gor Gor’s death — and who were they to dare try and laugh at it? Without a second’s thought for the consequences, he pulled the mask from his face and threw it aside.
As the day went on the crowd swelled and the sidewalk filled with more plastic-wrapped bouquets. Some held white balloons in mourning, some lit heart-shaped candles and clutched at each other in stricken bewilderment, others taped posters and photos and drawings and paintings to the hotel window. Jeffrey recognised many of the stock images, no doubt pulled from bedroom walls. One in particular was a favourite of his own; Gor Gor singing into a microphone, head tilted upwards, eyes closed, bathed in shafts of orange and blue light.
By lunchtime, groups of younger girls had begun arriving, all in their pleated, navy-blue school pinafores and little white gloves. They clung to each other and cried into their masks, piled up stuffed toys, threaded heart-wrenching letters they’d scrawled amongst the flowers. The news crews couldn’t get enough, flitting round them, seeking out the most hysterical to thrust camera lenses in their faces, inducing them to howl and gabble on live TV. Jeffrey felt he was watching a movie in which the schoolgirls, with their screwed up eyes and silly masks formed a crowd of extras performing clumsy studies of anguish, while, on the perimeter, straining to get a better view, were spectators — office workers, shop assistants, waiters and motorbike couriers — who had come, not to pay their respects, but out of curiosity; tourists of mourning.
As dusk came, the sidewalk played host to a vigil; the lighting of more candles, the singing of Leslie’s hits, wailing and crying. Instead of connecting with those who loved Gor Gor as much as he did, who were as grief-stricken as he was, Jeffrey felt increasingly separate. There were a few other boys like him there, but Jeffrey didn’t speak to them. He felt exposed by their presence, in danger of infection, not from SARS, but from the germs of emotions, with the filthy mess of what they, and he, were.
The back of that hotel porter’s neck had flashed across his vision. Jeffrey could taste the salt there, smell the faint lemony cologne the man had been wearing and which he now wore. He wondered if the porter had carried Gor Gor’s bags too and flushed cold with envy. He couldn’t stand these stupid feelings, couldn’t bear the thought of revealing them.
He’d asked one of his classmates if she had a spare mask, and with a tearful nod she took one from her satchel. He pulled it from its plastic wrapping and looped the elastic over his ears. It was perfectly blank, the ideal protective shield for everything.
Now, as the ten-year anniversary of Gor Gor’s death approaches, Jeffrey has woken every night for the past week. Every night he has gone to his window, from which he can see the Mandarin Oriental, and considered the time taken to drop from hotel balcony to sidewalk — surely just a few seconds, but long enough to change your mind, long enough to try to swim back up through the thin night air before it merges with the infinite darkness.
Every night he has visualised Gor Gor reaching up towards Jeffrey as he falls, and has stretched out his own hand towards him. Maybe Leslie, who always did things with such a sense of beauty, had believed that to fly to his death would be an elegant swallow dive through the cool city air. But there can have been no way to disguise the effect of the impact; there was surely nothing beautiful about that.
Every night he has chosen to hear Together We Journeyed Through Life, the song that most captures his mood. He selects it from his playlist. He has been thinking about his latest piece — his own floral ‘Tribute to Gor Gor’, who sings now over the swirling violins: “In my days of emptiness, questioning the meaning of life, you were there…”
It will be Jeffrey’s most ambitious artwork to date, breath-taking in its digital realism and refinement. He will make people believe they can smell the flowers, though vaguely, faintly, as he vaguely remembers the smell of flowers himself. “With courage we faced the challenge of life…”
They’ll reach out to take them from inside the screen, as he reaches out now to touch the image of Leslie’s smiling face. “If there is chance for me to live again, I hope to meet you in the journey of life…”
Jeffrey will connect with all those who still miss Gor Gor as he misses him, and remind everyone that he still lives on in their hearts, through his music and his films.
“Thank you for sticking by me in the stormiest days, and keeping me company in this journey of life.”
At least these flowers will never spoil.
Jeffrey sings with him, “Our separation is transitory. I can only hope that through the fire of my love I live on in your heart,” until the music fades.
Joel, New York — 2006
It was only just after seven and Joel was one of the first to arrive. From the sidewalk, he stared through the gallery’s huge industrial glass frontage and into the space. At the very least he felt out of his depth at these things and, at worst, totally antagonistic towards them; the way the crowd eyed each other warily, the thinly-veiled, competitive edge to the conversation, the practical impossibility of any meaningful interaction with the art they were meant to be looking at. There’d be some hard negotiating to do with himself if he was going to get through the evening, but he’d promised Christa. She was his very good friend and had worked flat out to put this thing together.
Plunging in, the pleasing stink of fresh paint was the first thing he sensed, plus it was freezing, the air-conditioning set far too high for so few people. Still, they’d all be glad of it later on. He pulled his coat around him as a shiver passed through his body.
There was a trestle table filled with tubs of iced water that were loaded with beer cans and bottle of white wine. He waded across the room and swiped a beer, wiping the dripping can on the thigh of his jeans. He cracked the can open and took a heavy gulp. The cold fizz caught his back teeth and throat, making him cough up beer and he wiped it from his chin. No one seemed to notice.
Should he do a circuit of the work now? Or wait for someone he knew to arrive and he could then gauge how he should be responding to the art? He jiggled on the spot before heading straight back outside for a smoke.
He shook a cigarette loose from its red Marlboro carton, pulled it out between his teeth and lit up. Joel only ever smoked in the evenings and the first deep drag always knocked him sideways; heart quickening, fingers trembling, a wobble in his legs, sensations he liked because they took him to the edge of those sensations and knocked the edge off certain others. Beer and smokes were armour and shield in this kind of situation.
He should just finish this beer and he’d be ready to dive back in. He lit a second cigarette from the one he’d almost finished and sucked hard. Jesus, that was good. A stream of people had started to arrive now and the place was gradually filling up.
Christa was inside, talking intensely to some girl who had her back to him. She spotted Joel through the window and waved, still talking all the while, about him now, he guessed, because of the way her gaze shifted between Joel and her companion. Great. Joel and Christa had fucked once, maybe twice, when they were sophomores. She’d decided they should just be friends, wise girl. Now, she was trying to get in on the art scene, cultivate some makers, generate a curatorial profile and a name for herself. Well, good for her.
He crushed the glowing stub of his cigarette underfoot and patted his back pocket. If beer and smokes were defences, his notebook and pen were his weapons and tonight he’d come fully armed. His strategy was to ask for subject matter for poems. It was a good conversational opener, though he had some notion of how limiting it was, given the few places he hung out and the fact he barely spoke to anyone over thirty, or who did anything useful for that matter. And it could really throw people. They’d go from being these super confident assholes to acting like they’d been given a
hard word at spelling bee and he relished that small, conquering moment. He took a last glug of beer. Time for another.
The heavy tubular door handle already felt familiar to him this second time of entering. As he pushed, the satisfying action, moving through his shoulders and torso, the heft of the glass as it swung away from him, meant the surface tension had been broken, at least for now. He cruised through the low drone of semi-serious chatter and the taste of cool, conditioned, fresh-paint-tainted air (he liked that phrase, he should make a note).
He waved at Christa but, rather than approach her directly, zeroed in on the beers and grabbed a couple more. As he approached, Christa nodded and smiled so the girl she was talking to turned to face him. Just as with his first cigarette of the evening, Joel was knocked sideways.
Christa took his hand, pulled his attention away, and leaned in for a kiss. “Joel?”
“Hey, doll,” he said, and smooched her loudly on the neck. She was wearing a strange jumpsuit thing, emerald green, with a wide yellow belt and matching yellow high heels. She’d put her abundant, strawberry-blonde curls up, which Joel had never seen her do before, and it didn’t suit her. “You look great,” he said.
“Thanks, hon. I’m exhausted.”
He handed her the beer. “I got you this.”
Christa held it at arm’s length, between forefinger and thumb, like it was radioactive. “I’d better not. Not until after I’ve made my little speech.” She made a silent scream face and they both laughed. “Here, you take it,” she said, tapping her friend’s arm. Joel watched her take the can from Christa and press it against her temple with a tight smile. She had not yet spoken.
“Soph,” Christa said, “this is the Joel I was just telling you about. Our inky-assed scribbler of verse. Joel, this is Sophie. You’d better watch out for this one.”
Shadow Is a Colour as Light Is Page 7
