‘Poems. You don’t have to focus for long.’
‘Tell me one.’
He shoved me off his shoulder so that he could lean against mine, pressing his cheek into my cheek. He was warmer than me – and at his touch I thought of sapphires cut in sunlight.
‘I don’t have a good memory,’ I said. ‘But in my head… there’s bits of a poem by Wallace Stevens, if you want. Called “Esthétique du Mal”.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘The art of evil.’
‘Alright.’
I could feel his smile against my mouth. We breathed each other in, as I recited:
‘“The death of Satan was a tragedy
For the imagination…
The tragedy, however, may have begun,
Again, in the imagination’s new beginning,
In the yes of the realist spoken because he must
Say yes, spoken because under every no
Lay a passion for yes that had never been broken…”’
‘What’s it mean?’
‘There’s bits I’ve forgotten. But it means creativity is satanic because it is disobedient. Satan was the original artist. You aren’t satisfied with what’s already there, you add to it. Evil is necessary to living vividly. Tragedy is necessary to living vividly. But to develop an imagination, you must also be physical…’
‘I can be physical,’ he said, shifting forwards to stand up. ‘I got a present for you.’
The odour of semen lifted in the air. He walked towards his fruit bowl – and from a mound of satsumas, he pulled out a necklace. I laughed.
The whip wounds in my back were beginning to ache more finely – like filaments heating into a red ochre colour. I leaned into them with pleasure. They complimented the colour beneath them, that was always there – my ultramarine – the ultimate blue of my myalgia, the superlative blue – the deepest colour that’s still a colour before black.
Francis squatted in front of me, tensing his abs into greater prominence, and swung the necklace before my eyes.
‘Since you’re not buying nothing nice for yourself… I got you this,’ he said. ‘I mean I got it in a shoot for free, but I wanted to keep it for you, as a present. It’s more your thing, I don’t do necklaces. Even though you got a bit of money now, don’t you?’
‘It’s for the deposit on the flat,’ I said. ‘And I don’t think it’s going to last. It’s Dawn’s money – that’s why I was keeping it safe.’
He caught the necklace at the top of its arc, closed it in his fist for a moment, and then released it again to lower it over my head. The pendant was a winged key.
‘I liked the little key,’ he said. ‘I felt like it had meaning, you know? And you don’t need to worry about your flat cos you can stay with me, can’t you? You don’t need to be worrying about money, even though I don’t get it, I don’t get why you don’t just go out and make money. You’re clever, why don’t you just get a job?’
‘I’m too ill.’
‘You don’t look ill,’ he smiled, assuming my answer was a joke.
I wanted to say: You don’t see that part of me, I don’t show it – my brain misunderstands my muscles, so they ache like I’ve always got flu, or my mitochondria are fucked, so they can’t make enough energy, or I don’t know, I just know that I’m in pain, and I can hide it with heroin. But I need to hide it from you too, otherwise you’ll think differently of me. So I can’t tell you. I’ll never tell you.
Instead I said:
‘Well I don’t believe in jobs. Most of us could be doing whatever we wanted, while machines did the rest. But jobs keep being invented because we’re supposed to be employed to justify our right to exist. It’s a scam. Money doesn’t work like people say it works, and we’re kept unhappy and exhausted.’
‘But what would people do instead?’ he asked.
‘Evil,’ I said, standing up. ‘The vivid evil, of the imagination.’
‘Where you going?’
‘I have to go.’
‘Where? Why?’
‘We’re moving in today,’ I said. ‘I told you. I promised Dawn I’d be there for dinner.’
‘Shit, ok, but you’ve got to come to Lars Vasari later.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The exhibition, the photographs,’ he said. ‘I’m in most of the photos. I told you. You’re on the list.’
‘Can you text me the details?’ I moved towards the door.
He shadowed me uneasily, alarmed by the suddenness of my departure.
‘You’ve got to come,’ he said. ‘I want to show you to everyone. It’s in Mayfair.’
‘Ok, maybe.’
‘You’ve got to! You can’t wear that though.’
‘Ok.’ I opened the door.
Francis kissed me twice goodbye. The evening smelt of cold wrought iron and all the leaves that had fallen were stirring. I refused to reassure him with parting words. The sky was a deceitful blue, not far from ultramarine – but it wasn’t radiant enough, or resentful enough to be the same – and ultramarine’s pallor, like mine, required a pain that the evening didn’t have.
I knew Francis was watching me walk away as the streetlights turned me amber. There was a nearby bus that would take me to my new address, and to the pain relief I’d been promised. As I turned the corner, I took off his necklace and threw it in a bin.
5.
I didn’t know which buzzer to ring so I rang them all. Dawn answered like she’d been waiting at the intercom.
‘Who’s that? Is that Leander? You’re early.’
‘No I’m not,’ I said.
‘Who is it then?’
‘This is Leander, but I’m not early.’
‘Oh shut the fuck up and get inside.’
She buzzed me in.
‘Wait, what floor is it?’ I asked, but she’d already hung up.
I climbed the stairs in darkness, listening to the suppertime clatter through the walls. My muscles felt like diseased clay in a kiln, unmoulding in defiance of the heat. A star orbited my brain. Between the banisters of the third floor, a light shone. Dawn was waiting in one of its doorways, wine bottle in hand. She’d cleaned the blood of the crash off her face, but its wound was visible still through her hair – the colour of boiling plums.
‘You seem… deflated,’ I said.
‘What a nice way to greet your mother, you cheeky shit,’ she said. ‘How about, “Oh I never seen you look so elegant, you look like an English rose!”’
‘I’ve never seen you look elegant…’
‘Oi!’ She raised her hand to slap me. ‘You can’t come in till you give me a compliment.’
‘Ok, you do look quite… roseate.’
‘I don’t know what that means, but I know it’s not a fucking compliment, you runt. You’re not getting in with that.’
She stepped back and began closing the door.
‘Ok, sorry…’ I said. ‘I mean you look like a blossom of damask, twined with eglantine beneath a nightingale singing threnodies into a well.’
‘Better... but that didn’t end right, did it? You can do better than a well.’
‘Ugh… I’m hungry, please. Ok, you look like Cleopatra under opal noon-light in her roof garden, riding a glass dildo full of bees.’
‘Better… one more compliment and you get to enter the roof-garden,’ she opened the door wider, but kept her palm up in prohibition.
‘Ok, you look like an apricot-soft eclipse watched from a yacht shipping laudanum and labdanum across the Levant.’
‘Perfffffect – there you are my darling, come in, come in – welcome to our new home!’
She stepped aside, unbalanced – and as I entered, she fell onto me into a hug.
‘What you doing strutting in like that?’ she said. ‘Hug your mother properly!’
I put my arms around her and she rose to kiss me on the mouth. Her tongue was stale from cigarettes. I twitched away in disgust.
‘Are you high?’
I asked.
‘Don’t be stupid, I just had some of the red!’ She lifted the bottle up to my chest. ‘It’s the posh stuff. It costs twenty-five pound! Try it!’
She fed it to me with her head turned away. I tried to drink, but it spilled over my chin – so she tried to lick it off.
‘Ok, thanks,’ I said, pushing her away. ‘Tastes great. I’m hungry…’
‘Yeah, yeah, course – let me give you the tour.’
She ignored this second prompt for food and instead yanked me into a cramped shower room.
‘This is the spa,’ she said, flicking the switch beside her.
A light strip above us hummed into a glare. Her pupils were pinpricks in the mirror. And her expression – still sharp and handsome and untrusting – had a gentleness to it that was only there when she was high, and made her look like she wanted to be told lies.
‘You’re high,’ I said. ‘You started without me.’
‘No, darling, course not.’ She turned off the light. ‘I could never start without you.’
‘But you got some heroin?’
She twirled in evasion and pulled me back out into the living area.
‘This is the Napoleonic suite.’ She gestured to a double bed, a dining table, and our two suitcases between them.
‘You can sleep with me if you want, but I thought you’d prefer your own wing. No need to share anymore, we’re living the high life!’ She pulled me towards a door beside the bed and opened it onto a tiny room with a single floor mattress and a lamp without a shade.
‘I actually love it,’ I said.
‘I knew you would, darling, you love that depressing garret shit. You can finally live your dream of being a consumptive Russian aristocrat in an attic. Isn’t that what you said? It’s almost an omelette. No – what’s worse than an omelette?’
‘Nothing, I hate omelettes. Unless you mean oubliette?’
‘Exactly sweetheart, it’s the perfect oubliette for you. I knew you’d love it. I done right didn’t I? I sorted us out! Just you and me, fucking finally… But let me finish the grand tour,’ she prodded me towards a small square kitchen through an arch beside the dining table. ‘And so – here is the Michelin-starred restaurant.’
‘And have you managed to create any Michelin-starred food?’
‘Not yet, we only just fucking moved in!’
‘But you promised me a banquet.’
‘Oh I know I did, didn’t I, darling, but there’s never enough time. Sorry sweetheart, I’ll make it another night.’
‘That’s not like you. You were so keen on proving your culinary abilities earlier.’
‘I was just showing off,’ she said, with mixture of sarcasm and self-pity. ‘I wanted you to be impressed. I was making it up! Can’t we focus on the positives – we got our own fucking palace! We can dance in our own living room. No more fucking noise restrictions. No more fascists. No more locked-in syndrome.’
‘This definitely used to be a council flat,’ I said, choosing to change the subject. ‘And now it’s being rented out by parasites like your boyfriend. Landlords should be outlawed and hunted down for sport and shot.’
She sashayed to a song that only she could hear, swigging from the bottle.
‘Aren’t you going to say that your boyfriend shouldn’t be hunted down for sport and shot?’ I asked. ‘You’re not defending him as vigorously as you were earlier.’
‘Oh leave it out, Leander. Can’t you just enjoy the view? Life is about to happen to us!’ But she said her catchphrase with no conviction.
‘There’ll be a revolution soon,’ I said.
‘And who’s going to control the houses?’
‘A computer.’
‘And then?’ she asked, still sashaying. ‘Are you going to be the emperor?’
I closed my eyes until I saw myself in a courtyard somewhere near the Earth’s meridian – cool under silk canopies, as a harem of men had their necks slit open by a harem of women. The men kissed me as they bled out, willingly giving themselves to my rejuvenation – and then the women, with their last screams, praised me as I set fire to their tents. My palace was overrun by beasts – boars and stags and wolves and crocodiles – in a havoc more beautiful than the havoc of the stars.
‘The earth has no way out other than to become invisible,’ I said, ‘in us who with a part of our natures partake of the invisible.’
‘The fuck does that mean? You doing a quote?’
‘Yeah, Rilke said that. He was a poet.’
‘Course he was. Fucking useless answer to “How are we going have houses?” You can’t put the earth inside you and start eating the invisible.’
‘I felt like saying it,’ I said. ‘And you seem pretty happy to be making me eat the invisible. Did you really not get any food with my money?’
‘Babe, the money ran out.’
‘First you say you didn’t have time to make food, and now you’re saying you didn’t have the money. Which is it?’
‘What’s this – a police interview? There weren’t neither. I said the wrong thing. Whatever, I been trying my best…’
‘You didn’t try anything.’
‘What the fuck do you know? I tried everything… I didn’t know everything. I never realised that…’ She stopped and looked out of the window.
My pain removed me from the room for a moment – and I imagined myself as an emperor again – again with a palace of beasts and slain lovers – and I wondered what would happen if one of my lovers survived, an accidental immortal, and came back to worship me with a whip, as I’d been worshiped earlier today. This immortal would promise me love, perhaps – a love like a warren of underground caves, in which stalactites had been broken off and arranged in rings by some inhuman tribe for the worship of some inhuman god – like me or my lover. But if our love could only end in death – how would we, as immortals, die? By becoming each other, of course – by seeking a desire that exceeds music, and so forces us out of the dance.
‘What happened?’ I asked, returning to the present. ‘You went to see Gibbon and…’
‘Stop calling him that!’
‘What did you do?’
‘I got you some bread,’ she laughed, amused again, and twirled towards the kitchen.
There, she retrieved a plastic-wrapped loaf of sliced bread. ‘You can make a toast sandwich!’ she said. ‘A slice of toast between two slices of bread. Dinner for champions! I used to eat it in the war.’
I laughed too, delighted by her erratic mood, its bleak imagery, and how casually she had betrayed my trust.
The walls of the apartment were painted two shades of cream, as though the painters had run out of one shade a third of the way along the wall and continued with another a few shades warmer – and as I stared at the line where the colours changed, my brain bent the contrast into a flavour – close to soy sauce – and I was hungry.
‘I might actually do that,’ I said.
I took the loaf from her hands, impatiently tore off its plastic, and slotted a slice into the toaster. There were no plates in the cupboard, so I placed the outer slices on the counter. I checked the fridge for butter, but it wasn’t switched on.
‘You’re avoiding all my questions,’ I said. ‘Did you get any heroin?’
‘Not yet, not yet, I’ve not managed to accomplish everything, I’m sorry,’ she giggled, drinking again from her bottle.
The diameter of her pupils belied her denials – she must have been high all afternoon.
‘You don’t look sorry.’
‘I’ll get it, I’ll get it baby, I promised you – and I don’t break my promises. Just sometimes I delay them. Kimber asked us to meet down the Rockway later. He wants to meet you. He’ll have some for us then, for sure.’
‘I’m going to a gallery tonight,’ I said.
‘Why? Is Francis going to be there? Ah are you going to a gallery with Francis? What happened with him – oh sweetheart I forgot to ask. How’d it all go? I’m sorry I wa
s so caught up in my hectic business-orientated lifestyle,’ she cackled in self-derision. ‘I forgot your love woes. Did you say sorry to him? Did he forgive you?’
‘Stop changing the subject. Where’s my money? What’s wrong with Kimber? Why aren’t you rhapsodising about him like you were earlier? What happened?’
‘He was just busy. He was stressed. He weren’t as happy about everything as I thought he’d be.’
‘Everything?’
She sighed against the table, finally retiring her jovial façade. She held up her head and shook it – and drank again, swallowing emphatically as if to swallow words she didn’t want to say and tears she didn’t want to show.
‘I think he’s jealous of you,’ she said eventually.
‘So? I paid the deposit. Does he want to get rid of me?’
‘No, no, of course,’ she slurred. ‘I know you did, he knows you did. You’re my number one, sweetie, I can’t leave you, course I won’t, I promised to be your mother.’
The toast popped up. I placed it between the two untoasted slices and gazed awhile in satisfaction at this assault on the history of cuisine, contemplating the distance between the first makers of bread and me – and then bit into it. Though dry, the bread was sweet, and the toast between it a satisfying contrast. This sad meta-sandwich would suffice as a meal for now.
‘This is pretty good,’ I smiled, spilling crumbs.
She didn’t smile back. Instead, my display of positivity seemed to push her further into despondency.
‘What if I made a mistake, Leander? What if I done this wrong?’
‘You haven’t,’ I mumbled between chews, moving towards her in reassurance. ‘We couldn’t have continued in a hostel – you were right, you were looking out for me. Your impulsive uprooting was necessary. And you didn’t uproot us from much. A homeless hostel is never going to be a home. We can make this a home. I’m grateful.’
‘No,’ she began crying. ‘Don’t try to be nice to me, I can’t take it, I need you to sulk – I need to be the one reassuring you. When you try it, it sounds so fake. This was a mistake weren’t it? I’m a mistake. I’m bad for you.’
‘Is this about the money?’ I asked. ‘I don’t care, I made it in an hour. I can make it again. And I’ve still got some.’
Carnivore Page 4
