Carnivore

by Jonathan Lyon

  Maybe my contradictions could not be resolved, but it seemed for the first time that I had another option besides revenge – perhaps because I had exhausted revenge; it seemed that a new type of confession was available to me, which might at least lessen a little the burden of those contradictions. Francis probably knew more of me than I suspected – but I wanted now to tell him everything, and then to become someone else – or at least understand ‘becoming’ in a different way. I didn’t want to ‘seem to be’ anyone before him – I wanted to forget the necessity of artifice completely, so that seeming and being were irrelevant – and that in his company, my mind simply was my body, and my act was simply the skin he was touching.

  Eva opened the door to us. She smiled in confusion at my police uniform, and hugged me over the threshold.

  ‘You look like you need a drink,’ she said.

  ‘I definitely do,’ Iris said. ‘Leander has outdone himself.’

  Eva led us down the hall to the kitchen.

  ‘Can we make mulled wine?’ I asked.

  ‘Sure. And I can cook you whatever you want as long as it’s this exact omelette,’ Eva pointed to a frying pan on the hob.

  ‘I hate omelettes.’ But as I said this, I remembered Dawn confusing the word ‘omelette’ for ‘oubliette’, and smiled. ‘Or maybe I like them.’

  ‘You can share it,’ Eva said, halving it across two plates. ‘And I’m only happy when I’m feeding you things you hate. If you upset me too much I’ll make you drink more rice milk – I got another carton just in case. And there’s spiced rum over there.’ She gestured towards a bottle beside the radiator. ‘It’s basically hot enough to be like that German version of mulled wine. You’re supposed to burn a sugar cube over it first. But you can do that in your imagination.’

  Iris poured the rum out to the midpoint of two large tea-mugs – and handed me mine with religious sobriety. We drained them in tandem, meeting each other’s eyes only as we slammed them emptied onto the granite.

  ‘What are you celebrating?’ Eva asked, alarmed by our speed.

  ‘He just burnt a building down,’ Iris said, coughing at the taste.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I helped a building realise its potential.’

  ‘What building?’ Eva asked.

  ‘My mother’s tomb.’

  ‘A bar in Brixton,’ Iris said.

  ‘It’s called the Rockway,’ I said. ‘And it asked me to burn it down.’

  ‘Why are you in a police uniform?’ Eva asked.

  ‘These were my robes,’ I said. ‘I wished to be disguised as authority.’

  ‘I need to sit down,’ Iris said.

  She picked up her plate and carried it the table, shaking her head. And as she sat down, she smiled at us – as if she were on a train instead of a chair, leaving to somewhere else, and shouted, ‘Long live decadence!’

  I laughed, although I didn’t understand the joke.

  ‘Congratulations on your first magazine cover,’ Eva said, leaning closer to me. ‘I’m dying with jealousy.’

  ‘It probably wasn’t worth what I had to do to get it,’ I said.

  ‘Is Iris still pretending to be furious? She loved it. And Amélie keeps saying “he’s perfect, he’s perfect.” She doesn’t give a shit about her laptop. She couldn’t be happier with you. She loved the magazine cover, she loved the police raid. Iris has been obsessively watching back the footage of you. You’ve saved us. And I’ve probably fallen in love with you as well, by the way, but I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘So you want me to be in more of the film?’ I asked, with faux-naïvety.

  ‘I require you to be in more of the film,’ she smiled. ‘You are the only person keeping things fun around here.’

  ‘You’re veering into hagiography...’

  ‘It’s the only way left to annoy you. But it’s true. I’ve spoken to Francis – we’re fine now. Everything’s fine. We needed it… we were stuck, it was pointless, I was in love with him, I still am, but he’s not and it’s pointless and now it’s over. I’m old enough to forgive him, and he’s young enough to… be discovering himself still. That’s a better way of doing it. My friend’s dad didn’t act on any of his desires for men until he was like forty-four – and then he went off-piste, wrecked his marriage, fucked up his kids, got into debt, tripled their mortgage till they were evicted, spent ten years crawling down a line of exploitative boyfriends half his age, and then died of a stroke alone in a B&B. Fuck that.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Always yield to your demon. The longer you wait the stronger it gets.’

  ‘Except – in your case, you must yield to your angel. Me and Iris have decided that you’re secretly a sweetheart – and it’s time for you to come out the closet.’

  ‘Ugh. Can I not keep some of my secrets to myself?’

  ‘No. Now go upstairs and win back my boyfriend. He needs it. I can’t do it. It’s your turn to be the angel. Love him till he feels normal again.’

  She lifted her chin like a ballet dancer, lengthening further her long neck – and I kissed it – and it still had the afterscent of her lily of the valley perfume.

  ‘You used to think I was a paradox,’ I complained as I kissed her.

  ‘Aw, you still are, don’t worry. But a paradox doesn’t have to be an ambiguity. Sometimes – in art and life, and the art of life – ambiguity is essential. But sometimes it’s cowardly. Choosing can be more difficult than implying. And you claim to prefer difficulty. So go upstairs and let everything be true, rather than nothing. Give in to your affection.’

  ‘I was going to anyway,’ I said sullenly.

  She kissed me, smiling, and shoved me into the hall. ‘Go.’

  I obeyed. The walls and carpets were a swamp of carmine-red mud – in which, I could feel, hippopotamuses were hiding. I ran upstairs, afraid of being sucked under – and knocked on Francis’ door.

  ‘It’s me,’ I said.

  There was a shuffling in reply. I entered. The prick of an incense stick burnt through the darkness – and I imagined its tendrils assembling into a bdellium tree above me – which wept in a sunlight that I couldn’t see, as its perfume was adulterated by lesser perfumes – and its branches grew white spots shaped like fingernails – and these fingernails all pointed at me – like I was the adulterer.

  ‘Wake up,’ I said, stumbling towards Francis’ bedside.

  He moaned, rolling away from me – releasing the bloom of a fever into the incense. I shook his shoulder.

  ‘Francis!’ I said. ‘Francis.’

  He elbowed me away – but then suddenly pushed himself up against the headboard, fully awake.

  ‘I was just pretending,’ he said.

  I smiled, tiredly, unable to answer, perhaps about to cry – and handed him the bag of satsumas.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s an elixir,’ I said. ‘A hero has to return from his journey with an elixir. Eat it and you’ll be cured.’

  ‘What’s in it though?’

  ‘It’s either a satsuma or a tangerine or a clementine or a mandarin or an unshu mikan or a Christmas orange.’

  ‘Relax.’

  I smiled again, trying to summon the courage to speak to him properly. His silhouette picked out a satsuma and began to unpeel it. I took off my riot cop jacket.

  ‘I wanted to say… sorry,’ I said, forcing this out uncomfortably. ‘I’m sorry. Everything I’ve done was… wrong. I wanted to tell you – everything about me. The… I was trying to act like I was strong. But you were right – I’m disgusting.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ he said, biting into a sliver of satsuma. ‘I mean I meant it, but I didn’t mean – I mean you was disgusting – you was covered in sick and white shit and there was blood everywhere. But you’re alright now. I don’t need to hear it. You’re alright. I’m alright.’

  ‘They said you were ill.’

  ‘Not with you here.’

  ‘I don’t…’ To my surprise, I was
crying. ‘You should be angry. I’m not ready for you to be kind to me. I’m… I fucked it up. You saw me… you saw what I’m like and you… I’m a psychopath – you can’t love that.’

  ‘Ah, shut up. Shut the fuck up. You sound like you’re trying to convince yourself, but it’s not working. Just sit down.’ He pulled me onto the bed beside to him. ‘Everything that happened – that weren’t you – I know what’s you. You got me out of there. This is you here, right here.’

  I pulled away.

  ‘I don’t know how to be here, I’m never here.’

  He pulled me back against him. ‘What you mean?’

  ‘Everything feels like it’s separate from me,’ I said, slowly, trying to confess. ‘Like I’m living inside my own memoirs. I can’t get in to the present – I’m watching myself after it’s happened even when it’s happening. The only time I ever felt like I was living in the present tense was after I died on your doorstep.’

  ‘Fuck that. You’re buying into this shit too much. You’re not in a memoir. You’re not in a film, you’re not in a book. You’re here.’ He nudged me. ‘See?’

  ‘Ok,’ I said.

  He shifted to the right so I could climb in beside him.

  ‘Tell me then,’ he laughed. ‘Let it out for once. What ain’t you been telling me? When did this start?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  I was intimidated by how straightforward we were being, but happy too – to be near him, to be listening. His words had the assurance of a shower of rain in May – and I imagined it washing over a field of wheat around us.

  ‘The thing you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘The feeling of not being here. When did that start?’

  I stared into the darkness above us until the air turned ultramarine – as though the colour was gathering up my myalgia outside my body, beyond the heroin’s defences – together waiting to be let back in.

  ‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘Always. It got worse when my myalgia got worse – in puberty.’

  ‘What’s that? Myalgia?’

  ‘It’s pain – from a disease I’ve had for a decade. It’s a constant pointless incurable muscle pain that blurs everything – it blurs days together, blurs the borders of your body, blurs your sense of yourself. You can’t concentrate, you can’t remember, you can’t sleep – or if you sleep, you wake up worse. It broke me, and then I had to keep on going anyway. And that made me cruel, probably. I wanted to make other people feel what I had to feel… and I wanted… I dunno. Chronic pain isn’t interesting – people can’t relate to it.’

  ‘What? You ain’t told me this before. Why you ain’t told me this before?’ he asked – louder. ‘You been like this for – you had… myalgia for a decade?’

  ‘I didn’t know you’d… believe me. And I didn’t want you to pity me – I didn’t want you to think I was… weak.’

  ‘What did you just say?’ He was nearly shouting. ‘What did you say? That’s the stupidest shit I ever heard out your mouth. What the fuck you on about?’ He hit me in frustration. ‘You was ill for ten years and you ain’t told me before? You been in pain the whole time?’

  ‘I don’t tell people – because you can’t see it, can you, I don’t look that bad – it’s invisible. Or… I kind of tell people – in a different way – that’s how I… dealt with it. I thought, maybe if I made it into a metaphor... I could be understood. Everyone knows what a bad guy is. So I thought maybe if I told myself I was the villain – I could take back control from what was wrong with me. Being ill is so passive, and sickness and evil are so easily linked, so… “Carnivore” sounds better than “boy with unnamed chronic illness”, doesn’t it?’ I laughed unhappily. ‘But I realised – when I was on your doorstep, and you weren’t there – carnivores don’t have control either. They’re bound to their condition, like I’ve always been, they can’t control it.’

  ‘Ah, shut up. Stop it. You’re not a carnivore. You was joking when you was telling me about them. And now you’re believing yourself! It means flesh-eater, yeah? So that’s what your disease is, it sounds like – hurting you, eating you away – that’s the carnivore, not you.’

  I paused. ‘Fuck, Francis, you actually are quite clever.’

  He hit me again. I grinned.

  ‘I always thought I was the cleverest person I knew,’ I said. ‘It’s stupid, I need to grow out of it. But yeah maybe, maybe the disease can be the carnivore, not me, not us – it leaves no bite marks, but it’s eating me alive.’

  ‘But can it get better?’ His concern still struggled with his anger. ‘I can’t believe you ain’t… You should of said. I should know. You’re a fucking weasel for that. It ain’t – this ain’t about pitying you – it’s about… I’m supposed to be a support, you know? I want to be. It don’t make you weak, it makes you – well,’ he laughed, ‘I mean it does make you weak probably, for your body and your mind yeah – but not your… I dunno, not your… not you.’

  I grinned wider, and was pleased he couldn’t see it in the darkness. ‘It made me me,’ I said, forcing myself to sound glum, hiding my joy at his words. ‘For hours and months and years in bed – I had to go into myself alone – it taught me the world until the world was transparent and I could see through it and fly above it – because being in this much pain, being ill forever, with the years an amnesiac blur behind me, feels like flying – over London’s skyscrapers, reflecting the infected sky, in a sunset the colour of nectarines… I feel it all, hyper-keenly – but at a remove, synaesthetically – like I’m buzzing, at the wrong frequency to everyone else.’

  ‘So how did you… get through school then? What did you…’ He still sounded shocked.

  Beneath my layers, my sweat had formed a film – so as I answered, I undressed – removing first the riot cop under-jacket, then Francis’ two sweatshirts, then his shirt.

  ‘That’s what my last headmistress asked when I left,’ I said. ‘I changed schools twice, and then I left forever. I told her school felt like a garlic crusher – where you put in the garlic and press out all the flavour through a grid until only the dry dead strands are left behind. And I was the strands.’

  ‘What’d she say to that?’

  ‘She gave me quite good advice actually.’ I pulled off my last top. ‘She said – you’re angry – you should use your anger, don’t waste it – use it.’ I rested back into him, my bare arm against his chest. ‘But I didn’t listen. I wasted it. And now look where I am.’

  ‘Hey!’ he elbowed me indignantly. ‘Yeah – fucking look where you are! You’re with me! You’ve made it up to the top!’

  I laughed, but stayed still, not yet ready to respond to his touch. I wanted to say that living off disability benefits and hate and heroin and sex work didn’t feel like living at the top – but that kind of wry remark didn’t seem to suit me any more – and my mouth refused to say it. So instead I asked, ‘What about your school?’

  ‘School was shit,’ he said. ‘I only cared about fucking around. It was a waste of time. When you’re talking about books they sound alright – but the books we had in our lessons was a fucking disaster. I seen scam emails trying to get my bank details that are better written than those fucking exam poems. My dad dropped out when he was sixteen so he didn’t care if I did. And my mum weren’t around, was she? We just went to the park and got drunk or got high. And then I got scouted to model, so it was fine. Don’t need to read for that, do I?’ he laughed, slightly bitterly.

  I removed my socks – and wriggled out of the riot cop trousers, and then out of Francis’ tracksuit bottoms – until, for the first time in a long time, I was no longer in any uniform.

  ‘You stayed in school longer than me,’ I said. ‘I tried to study on my own – I went to the library – first because I was homeless and it was warm, and then I just went to read. I found books that weren’t as shit as the ones we had to do at school. I grew up in them – and in hospitals – that was my friends. That was it, for years. Stories were the only
things that stretched me out.’

  Francis squirmed from his sitting position, pulling me with him, until we were lying, naked, our heads turned towards each other on the pillow.

  ‘I liked history,’ he said after a pause.

  I turned my body inwards to his. ‘Which bit?’

  ‘They only teach you the Second World War, don’t they? We did that every year for ten years.’

  ‘It’s the only time the English weren’t the main bad guys.’

  ‘But I liked some of it.’

  ‘Which part?’

  ‘I liked when they was sleeping in their horses,’ he said. ‘It was on a lake – it was Germans in Russia, maybe, and they had to escape and it was frozen so they had to kill their horses and cut out their stomachs and eat them and sleep inside them to get warm.’

  ‘Oh that old trick. They did it in Napoleon’s wars as well, but it was with French soldiers. Basically never try to invade Russia. You’ll end up inside a horse.’

  ‘I’ll try to remember that.’

  ‘Actually… you’re the second person that’s talked to me about horses today,’ I said suspiciously. ‘I was with a policewoman who said she cooked them. And I was speaking to Dawn about horses as well – I said being crushed by a horse was a good metaphor for… being crushed.’

  He laughed. ‘That does make some sense.’

  ‘There are good novels about the Second World War.’

  ‘Yeah? What’s the top ten?’

  He said this to annoy me – so I hit him. ‘Top-ten lists are for boys with erectile dysfunction.’

  ‘Ok but say one,’ he said, his mouth closer to mine.

  His skin smelt of peppermint – perhaps from an aftershave, since he was newly-shaved – so I kissed it.

  ‘How about… The Notebook by Ágota Kristóf?’ I said. ‘It’s about two brothers in the Second World War. Kind of an evil fairy tale. I like books that feel like they’re poisoning you as you read them. At the end they trick their father into walking onto a minefield – so that he explodes, clearing the way for them. And they say, “Yes, there is a way to get across the frontier: it’s to make someone else go first.”’