3.
Francis opened his door after two rings, topless and barefoot in black ripped jeans. A muscular model, used to being adored, he was attracted to me because only I could make him feel nervous, although he seemed now to be in a state more heightened than that. The delay suggested he’d been distracted – and his girlfriend’s voice from beyond the hall confirmed it.
‘That’s him, isn’t it?’ she shouted.
He smirked at me, squinting, his thick lips slightly parted into a pout. This was his default expression – cocky and confrontational – like he’d just told me to undress and earn his attention. But I wore my default expression too – the wounded lost boy, who had suffered too much to be affected by anyone’s charms. He half-leaned in for a kiss, but decided against it, with his girlfriend so close – and instead tugged me inside.
‘Make yourself at home,’ he said with mock-courtesy.
Eva appeared in the kitchen doorway. Her face was painted white, with false lashes and thinned violet lips beneath hair stacked in rolls, some of which had dislodged. Tears had leaked mascara around her eyes. She wore stilettoes and a stiff silk kimono, and, on her fingers, talons dangled chains that swayed as she clawed the air.
‘Don’t fucking come near me, you’re evil!’ she shouted, as we came nearer.
She backed into the kitchen. Francis’ clasp on my upper arm tightened, and his close breath on my neck transferred his arousal to me.
‘She got here straight from set,’ he said.
‘Yes I came from set!’ she shouted. ‘Don’t talk like I’m not here.’
‘And what character are you playing now?’ I asked.
‘Don’t talk to me,’ she spat, edging round the kitchen island. ‘You’re fucking evil. You were playing me yesterday. But you left your account on.’
Francis released me, confused by this statement. I leaned into the fridge, thinking of thickets of fly-eating flowers – snapping at her words and swallowing them until they dissolved. Her words were not really her own, anyway, they were mine – or rather, they were the words I’d hoped she’d say, in this play that she was performing for us – which I’d designed.
‘You left your account on – and I’ve read every message you’ve sent to each other.’
‘What’s she saying?’ Francis asked.
‘You’re so fucked up!’ she shouted. ‘I knew you were cheating and you knew I wasn’t going to let that go, so you sent me Leander, didn’t you? And I thought here’s my consolation prize, a bit of relief…’
She tore open a drawer and threw a fork at my head. I ducked.
‘You let me be the sad drunk girl,’ she shouted at me, ‘looking for a rebound fuck, crying about my cheating boyfriend. You made yourself available, all innocent, making no moves, letting me do the drinking, letting me do the talking. You let me wonder what girl he was cheating on me with. But it was you!’
‘You never asked,’ I said.
She screamed in frustration.
‘What’s she saying?’ Francis asked again, drooping in horror into the countertop. ‘You fucked her?’
‘Don’t pull that shit with me!’ she shouted. ‘Don’t pretend anymore – I can’t deal with more pretending. You’re a faggot and I’m a fucking joke. You wanted to humiliate me. And you did! You probably told him to leave his account on!’
I smiled at the accuracy of her analysis, which was only incorrect in presuming Francis’ complicity in my scheme.
‘You’re being ridiculous,’ I said. ‘Nobody is that scheming. You wanted to fuck me, and I’m not exclusive, so why would I tell you about me and Francis? Why would I leave my account on on purpose?’
Francis deflated in shock. I slid to his side. Eva was operating within a tedious genre, but her costume suggested other worlds – and I imagined ancient aristocrats, gathered on a mountain during some solstice – princesses in robes so heavy they could barely lift their legs, and princes weeping openly – as an astronomer-priest, interpreting the arrangement of the stars above them – commanded them to impale themselves on their own swords.
‘I’m just telling her what she needs to hear to get rid of her,’ I whispered.
‘But why did you…?’
‘This is the only way she was going to give up.’
He tried to smile like he understood, like he was playing this game on the same level as me – but his hands were trembling.
‘You’re fucking disgusting!’ she shouted. ‘You just wanted to… you just wanted to break me, didn’t you? And it – it worked!’
‘You’re being ridiculous,’ I said. ‘You chose to have sex with me.’
‘I know I fucking chose, but it wasn’t an informed choice! You’re evil. You’re… Am I that bad of a judge of character that I don’t… Look at me! When I found out,’ she turned back to Francis and started to cry. ‘I felt physically sick, because I still love you. I love you!’
I backed away from Francis to make him feel more exposed to Eva’s theatrics. Her voice had taken on a murky blue tone – and I thought of sea foam, lit by the kind of moon I’d only seen onscreen.
‘I’m not going to pretend,’ she said. ‘When you moved into this house, and… and I’m not putting all the blame on you, but when I asked if there was room for me and you said of course there was, I thought… I didn’t renew the contract on my flat – and I’m being thrown out next week. I’m going to be homeless and it’s because of… it’s because of me. It’s because, even when I knew you were cheating, part of me still thought you wanted to live with me and I was going to move in here… and… and now I have to find somewhere else and that’s so fucking stressful. Don’t you… Is this just funny to you?’
‘Eva,’ Francis said softly, moved by her anguish more than her anger. ‘This is – you’re over-acting.’
‘Yeah and I’m good at it! I’m good at it. And so are you. But somehow I’m the one who feels shit, I feel guilty, and why should I feel like this, why do you get to be happy and I don’t? Why do you —’
‘Eva, this ain’t how you talk,’ he said, exasperated by how effectively she was making him pity her. ‘You’re being like… a shit TV show.’
‘I’m a fucking amazing TV show. And you’re a faggot and I’m a fucking side-piece.’
‘I didn’t even know what —’
‘Oh you didn’t know?’ she shouted. ‘You didn’t know you were gay until… what? Until just now? I didn’t fucking know! And at the same time I’m scared, I’m scared you’ll never talk to me again – and I have this pattern of falling back to you even when you’ve fucked me over and I just… it’s pathetic! I know what I’m doing means we’ll never speak again, and that hurts me, because you made me happy. I loved you, even though you’re a bad person, I still love you, but I can’t keep wondering and worrying about what I am to you anymore!’
She laughed suddenly, as though enjoying her own B-movie performance – and then breathed in and reined her expression back to despair. I glimpsed my reflection in the mirror behind her and saw that pain had made me pallid. My body felt like a zoo in revolt – its animals twisting open their cages to rampage through the halls – killing the keepers, trying to find the main doors – but the main doors could never be unlocked – and so they were trapped still, under the vast dome of paraffin that I wore as my skin – and I remained silent. She turned to me.
‘And I liked you, Leander. I thought you were on my side, I thought you could get through to him – but you’ve already got through to him, further than me, and you have no remorse, no sympathy, nothing, you’re both just standing there laughing at me, and for some reason I’m sorry. I’m fucking sorry I wasted a year on you, I’m fucking sorry that you were the only thing that made me happy, that when my friends said “Oh, you’re glowing” that it was you, and all the time you were just thinking about fucking other men. Every morning I woke up waiting to hear from you and every night I went to bed thinking about you. And it was a lie.’
‘No it wer
en’t,’ Francis said. ‘This ain’t you.’
‘Don’t fucking do that, don’t try to dismiss me. You saying this isn’t me?’
She fumbled desperately in the drawer before her for a knife.
‘You saying this isn’t real?’ she shouted, and stabbed the knife into her wrist, screeching more in fury than in pain.
I laughed. Francis leapt towards her.
‘Eva, Eva! You’re being ridiculous.’
‘Get the fuck away from me!’ she screamed, slicing the air.
She threw the knife at his feet, flecking us with blood. He jumped back, the muscles of his torso rippling leanly with adrenaline. She ran down the corridor, pulled open the door with a final pantomime screech, and stumbled out into the evening – leaving the wind to slam it shut.
4.
I closed my eyes, exhaling, savouring the room’s tensions. In elevated states, my synaesthesia becomes more intrusive. And here, Eva’s half-fake hysteria lingered in the air with a taste like elderflower. I imagined licking the sugary rim of a bottle as cordial dribbled down my chin.
When I opened my eyes, Francis was resting his elbows on the counter, his face in his hands. I was unsure of his response to what we’d just witnessed, until he raised his gaze to mine – and I read its desire.
‘Where’ve you been?’ He came to me. ‘You weren’t answering your phone...’
‘I’ll tell you…’ I began to lie, but he kissed me, his hand behind my neck, keeping me against him.
He pulled down his sweatpants and kicked them off over his feet. He tried to unzip my tracksuit top, but I didn’t want him to see the belt wounds beneath.
‘Forget that,’ I said.
He tugged down my trousers and boxers instead in the same motion. The stack of £50 notes fell out, scattering across the floor. I grinned. He grunted interrogatively.
‘I’ll tell you…’ I said, but he kissed me again, biting my lips until I tasted my blood on his tongue.
I associated Francis with the colour of wheat – and this colour grew again to dominance as we kissed. Depending on the stimuli, my secondary senses sometimes associated Francis with wheat’s texture, too, and its taste, and its rustling sound.
He turned me around. I lowered my face to the granite and he lowered with me, his chest pressed into the buckle welts along my back, his teeth at my ear, gasping nearly with laughter. His joy at my return was elevated by the evasion of his guilt for his girlfriend, and his jealousy at the revelation that I’d just slept with her. He was trying to repossess me, but the intensity of his arousal was due partly to the fear that I was beyond his control, even here.
Repeatedly, he tried to unwrap his hands from my stomach to unzip my top and have full access to my back – but I gripped onto his wrists, preventing the reveal of the whip lines by keeping his arms beneath me, as if I couldn’t bear to be released.
He came inside me, pushing me into the countertop edge, his mouth at my neck, sweat pricking where our thighs’ skin met.
He untensed, reaching around to finish me off, and said ‘I love you,’ which made me come too.
‘I love you,’ I said.
Obviously I didn’t love Francis, but these words marked the end of his seduction. I was aroused not so much by the fulfilment of my desire – to make the straight boy fall in love with me and admit he’s fallen in love with me, first, out loud, without prompting – but rather by the ease with which I had fulfilled that desire. I was aroused by the efficiency of my scheme – having premeditated every move that had led me here, and with no missteps! And now that his resistance was over, it was time to be cruel.
We hugged, and for a moment my mind left our heat – into a quicksilver that felt as close as I could come to peace.
He went to the sink to drink from the tap. I gathered my money from the floor and tucked it back into my boxers. The evening light tinted the granite the colour of elderberries.
‘Why you been ignoring me?’ he asked.
He splashed himself with water, smoothing his hands through his hair, his face lifted to the ceiling.
‘I had no money,’ I said. ‘And I was depressed… about you not telling Eva. That’s why I went home with her… It’s the only way I could get the situation to an end.’
‘You could of warned me.’
‘That would have made it worse. It didn’t mean anything. It was for you. And it worked.’
He sat down against the cupboard, pulling his sweatpants on as he shook the water out of his hair. I pulled mine on too and joined him, resting my head on his wet upper arm. He was not capable of argument, so had to accept my claim that I’d been doing him a favour by fucking his girlfriend. He couldn’t really believe that, but he had to try. Much of my pleasure came from making him lie to himself in this way.
‘What’s that money for?’ he asked.
‘I need new poems.’
He wanted to ask further, but was afraid of being hurt by the answer, or of me seeing that he was afraid.
‘Dawn said you’re moving,’ he said instead.
‘Yeah.’
‘So you don’t want to move in with me?’ he asked, with a playful indignity that failed to conceal his sincerity. ‘I got a big house now.’
‘I noticed. Did you hope you could rescue me?’ I teased.
He smiled, ashamed of his own affection. ‘Maybe. And we couldn’t do that in a hostel.’
‘We can at my new place. I don’t know if it’s going to last – it’s always unstable with Dawn. You probably will still have to rescue me.’
‘Why’d you want to live with her? I don’t get it. She’ll steal from you and lie about everything.’
‘That’s what I like.’
In the pause, I admired the muscles I rested on – and thought of the thousands of pulls-ups that had formed them – the trapezius of his neck and the sphere of his shoulders, and the extra muscles of his upper arm that knotted around bicep and tricep, and the wide vascular forearm that ended in a tattoo – ‘SE5’ – his childhood postcode. He had another tattoo on his torso, under his arm, under me – ‘LET GO’, written in gothic script, in some early claim to masculinity that almost contradicted itself. I lifted my wrist to his in comparison – my veins were violet-blue, my skin ghostly and dotted with moles, and my hair was like feldspar in late afternoon light – while his veins were copper-green, his skin darker and unmarked and nearly hairless – smoothed by the coconut oil he lathered into it at night, and which made his hard muscles feel soft when I kissed them. I kissed them.
‘What happens with Eva then?’ he asked.
‘What you mean?’ I asked. ‘You’re a carnivore now, the kill is done. The more indifferent you are, the more she’ll love you.’
‘A carnivore!’ he laughed. ‘Fuck off! What’s that again?’
‘It’s from Latin – it means flesh-eater. The Greek version is sarcophagus – but that means coffin. So Greek flesh-eating tends towards death – while Latin flesh-eating goes the other way – towards life, towards sex.’
‘And which way do you go?’
I smiled back. ‘Both ways – I want to be a Greek and Latin flesh-eater – the demon of Europe’s worst fever-dreams – the answering scream of a generation fucked over by a whole millennium.’
‘And what about me?’
‘Well you just started, you’re still an entry-level Latin carnivore. But look what you did to Eva – you were talking about love – love is an old carnivorous urge – but it isn’t positive, it’s destructive – it’s meant to rip you away from your old mate with enough force to overwhelm habit and convenience – so you choose a new one. Me. That’s all this was. Flesh feeding on flesh. But these urges can warp, in some of us – become more irresistible, more flattened out, and spread beyond the systems of love…’
‘That’s not what love feels like to me.’
‘That’s because you haven’t learned how to feel.’
He laughed. ‘If I hadn’t met you I’d be so bore
d.’
‘Same.’
‘No, it’s true,’ he said. ‘Before I met you I was stuck. I mean before I did modelling I was proper stuck in South London. It was like there was a border around me. I wouldn’t go past it. It felt like you had to get a visa and like vaccinations to go to North London – it was so far away to me. It was all local girls and boys, that was it – and I couldn’t leave, really – and then with modelling I got to travel the world, non-stop travelling the world, meeting new people every day – and it was good, really good, getting different people’s aspects on life. I really respect modelling for that, cos it opens my eyes. But I was still stuck before you.’
I nudged my head against his to keep him talking.
‘When I got scouted,’ he said, ‘I did my first job for a gay magazine – and I didn’t really know what to think. I get up, I go on the job, it’s pretty good – it’s just fashion really. But a few weeks after that, when it gets released, I ain’t got a clue it’s a gay magazine – and all my friends want to see it ’cos it’s my first time – and I’m telling them “Go out and get your own copy, go on, show your mum” – all that, you know. And they see it’s a gay magazine and I get ripped!’ He laughed. ‘I swear! But that’s life, you know… I became a bit of a gay icon, and I never knew I’d want to do that myself. I mean if a gay man didn’t like me, I’d feel bad about myself, like I weren’t wanted, you know, I should feel like I’m wanted by both sexes. All sexes. I get people coming right up to me saying I want to fuck you, that kind of thing happens all the time… But I never thought it would actually happen with men, until you… Your world is so much bigger than mine.’
‘My world is tiny. I’ve never travelled, I’ve just read about it.’
He kissed me.
‘I ain’t got the focus for that,’ he said, leaning back. ‘You got the focus. You should tell me what to read. What should I read?’
Carnivore Page 3
