by Paul Mendez
“Yes, since Charles died,” he said, with no emotion. It had been five years. “I thought about getting a lodger for all of five minutes, if that.”
“It’s hard to know who might be able to fit in a house like this,” said Jesse, looking up at the antique bronze chandelier, surprisingly subtle and minimal compared to the opulence elsewhere in the room.
“That’s exactly it,” he said. “This is the home Charles and I made. I might not find someone who can appreciate it and be comfortable with all these things. Or, if I did, I wouldn’t want to live with someone who treated it like a museum; I’d want them to feel as if they lived somewhere homely, which it is, for me, but I can appreciate it might not be for everyone. Then I thought, if I was to live with someone else, then we would have to start again from scratch and build something together, but I’m far too old for all that now.”
“You’re not old,” said Jesse.
“Well, darling, that’s very sweet of you, but I honestly am.” He looked at Jesse and smiled. “Though this is a rather big house for an old man to live in by himself, it’s true.”
“How long have you lived here?”
He thought about it for a moment. “We moved here just after the ’87 election. I bet you weren’t even born, were you?”
“I was five,” said Jesse, who was used to people underestimating his age. “If I hadn’t been born before then, I’d have been underage when we met.”
“When did we meet?”
“The summer of 2002, when I first moved to London.”
“Christ, that long ago? It’s a pity we lost touch,” he said, happy to have brought up the fire adequately.
Jesse had never had a client like him again; nobody after Thurston showed him such compassion, or concern for his well-being. If it wasn’t for Thurston giving him the name and number for a sexual health clinic for escorts, where he was diagnosed and treated for gonorrhoea, chlamydia and non-specific urethritis, and told firmly that he should use a condom at all times, then it didn’t bear thinking about, as far as Jesse was concerned, where he’d be by now. Thurston, having guessed that Jesse wasn’t in absolutely perfect health, stopped the session, but instead of throwing him out like a spent rag, cuddled him, listened to him, told him he was charming, and that he hoped he would find someone nice to take care of him. They wanked together until they both came on their bellies, and lay half-asleep until a buzzer went off that meant Thurston had to attend to his partner. Thurston gave Jesse the money that had been agreed, plus a very generous tip, though there was something about the alacrity with which the door shut behind him before he’d even got to the end of the limestone-chipping driveway, that felt final.
“The house has changed quite a bit since then,” said Jesse. “You’ve redecorated.”
“You have a terrific memory,” said Thurston. “You were only here for an hour.”
“It made an impression on me,” said Jesse. “I’d never been in a house like this before. You used to have a painting at the top of the stairs, that really stuck with me. I still think about it sometimes. A naked black man holding a rose and the thorn pricking his hand, and blood rushing down his forearm.”
“I’ve still got it,” Thurston said.
Being with Thurston, writing into his past—and listening to Sugababes—was making Jesse nostalgic for his early London life. Everything seemed so much simpler in 2002. He thought of how lucky he was to still be here. How he would shake that nineteen-year-old clueless, reckless boy, now, for the sex he had, the drugs he took. But the first words Thurston said to him when they met up that evening were, You’ve hardly aged at all. “Can I see it?” Jesse said.
“Of course,” said Thurston, as he sprang up from his seat. Bella, hitherto restful, got under his feet as if in readiness for some unlikely late-evening exercise. “Out of the way, darling. Astonishing you should remember that,” he said, as he left the room, shadowed by Bella.
This house really is like a museum, Jesse thought, as he heard Thurston rummaging in the under-stairs cupboard. It sounded like he was leafing through old frames. He stacked paintings where others keep their vacuum cleaners, mops and buckets.
“Here it is,” Thurston said. “I’ve had it for years. But when I redecorated the stairs it didn’t seem to work there any more. It’s a pity, because I do love it.”
He came back into the room with a large, heavy-looking mahogany frame, turned it around and showed Jesse. It looked different from how he remembered it, having idealised it over time and given it shapes and tones that it didn’t have before, but seeing it afresh, it had the same power over him, the imagined pain of stigmatisation in his hand. The nude’s dick lay thick across his groin, almost purple; his body in soft focus, a black male Ophelia. Blood coursed down his forearm from the centre of his palm. His other hand was tensed, clutching at air, yet his face was relaxed, as if in ecstasy, his lips thick and open, his eyebrows thick and naturally arched, his eyes blissfully closed. He looked more at ease than Jesse remembered him. Was he dead or alive? Twelve years before, he’d left without asking about it, having felt, somehow, as if it belonged to him, and he wanted to cover up its nakedness, as Noah’s son Ham had his brothers do to their father, only for Ham’s own sons to be cursed forever with black skin like the devil’s.
“It’s wonderful you remember it. I distinctly remember you standing and staring mesmerised at it, while I was trying to get you into my room,” said Thurston, laughing nervously. “Topically enough, it’s called Nude with Othello, Othello being the genus of rose, bred, incidentally, by David Austin in Wolverhampton. Charles and I bought it from a small group show at a gallery in Brixton sort of twenty, twenty-five years ago. I’ve tried to find out more about it but details are sketchy to say the least. It’s signed by an otherwise completely unknown artist called Robert Alonso.”
Chapter 4
AUGUST 13, 2016
Owen had brought a few cans down, and they stayed late at the picnic, until Gini began to tire and she and Surenna left in an Uber. Other friends of Gini’s had arrived, among them the art dealer Jermaine Porter, owner of the eponymous gallery on Atlantic Road, from whom Owen has bought work in the past. Jesse and Jermaine talked for a little while, Jermaine’s smile as wide and white as ever but with a detectable moue behind it, though Owen monopolised him for most of the hour he gave them and Jesse soon began to feel he was surplus to requirements, obliged to leave one conversation to enter the other. Gini and Surenna made enough small talk to shift the conversation into another sphere, even while Conroy’s speculation, and Jesse’s incredulousness, remained at the forefront of their minds. Jesse couldn’t help but feel a little annoyed by the way Owen turned away from him so that he and Jermaine sat mirrored on the kente blanket, with their legs folded into clamshells open to each other, one hand propped behind, the other dangling on their raised knee, both barefoot.
Elegant, black-skinned and angular, Jermaine had walked for Rick Owens as a teenager while studying for his degree in art history at the Courtauld. He is the sort of man who will retain high cheekbones and a twenty-nine-inch waist into his eighties. His father was a boxer who read law after a chronic back injury caused him to retire; he now works for the same company as Owen’s wife Anya, busily, and often thanklessly, advocating for young black men who would otherwise simply be thrown on the prison skip. His mother is the headteacher at the South London secondary school he went to, which could have been a source of bullying but Jermaine was above all that; he was good at football and athletics, never smoked or drank, went out with a posh blonde girl, dressed immaculately, DJed at house parties and cinched all his GCSEs. Nobody jacked Jermaine Porter for his camera, or called Mrs. Porter—who transformed the previously failing school’s fortunes financially and academically—a black bitch. Jesse had never owned a camera, but his school peers had frequently called his mother a black bitch. When he told Graham, hoping he would throw
his arms around him, again he said, for the thousandth time, Just ignore’em.
As Owen arrived, Conroy hurried away, saying he had work to do at home. It seemed he was convinced of his argument about Jesse being Robert Alonso’s son, and they swapped numbers and email addresses. He said he was going to get in touch with Glorie, Robert’s sister in Wolverhampton, to see if she knew anything. She had never mentioned, not that he could remember, Robert having fathered a child, but that did not mean that he hadn’t. Conroy, who has one teenage daughter from a previous relationship, pointed out that men of African descent have pranced up and down the land secretly scattering their seed for generations. Another friend of Gini’s, Akilah, an artist, grew up with her mother and big sister in a council flat in Streatham and rarely saw their father, who only occasionally invited himself back into their home and into their mother’s bed. It was only while he lay dying of prostate cancer at King’s College Hospital that he told Akilah—who had dutifully cared for him while her sister, a mother of two, struggled to complete her nursing degree—that they were two of nine children he’d fathered with seven women. Dat me know bout, anyway, he’d said. Those had been almost his last words. Gini, even, was one of six by three. Dat me know bout, anyway, she’d said, sucking her teeth.
Jesse thought back to the moment when he found that photograph hidden in a Kodak folder in a cupboard in the wall unit, a moment every exposure to Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy” would charm from the depths of his memory, even to the guilty fear in the pit of his stomach of being caught snooping.
He could remember the basic composition of the picture but not the details of the face; the more he tried to see the face in his mind the blurrier it became. It was of an open-shirted man, thin, dark and model-like, not unlike Jermaine, sitting on a floor with his back against a wall and one knee up, barefoot, looking up at a light source. If it was him, then that is all he has, an impressionistic memory of a photograph long since destroyed. If it was not him, then who was it? It wasn’t any of his uncles on his mother’s side, he knew that. Why else would she have kept a photograph, if it wasn’t of a lover? He could understand why she would have told him he had died when Jesse was two. Knowing his mother and her beliefs and attitudes, if this Robert Alonso was his father, then it would have been traumatic to her to discover that he also had sex with men. She might even have enjoyed his diagnosis with AIDS. Serve him right, she might have said, thickening her neck. He would have been dead to her. She would have cut him out like a cancer, killed him off, disfellowshipped him, told her son to forget about him, not that he’d ever been old enough to store any memories. He feels like the radio is on but he can’t hear BANG!
Smashing my face against the windowpane! Smashing my face against the windowpane! Smashing my face against the windowpane! Smashing my face against the windowpane!
They’re driving down a dual carriageway in almost-white light. There’s a car a little distance in front. He checks the passenger wing mirror. There’s a car quite a distance behind. They’re cruising quite comfortably in the left-hand lane. The hedges are rolling over Owen’s reflective aviators, and their environment is perfectly cool and quiet apart from the music playing. Owen listens mainly to classical, these days.
“Slept okay?”
“Did we hit something?”
They passed a decapitated deer on the roadside last time they drove out into the sticks. Owen laughs.
“Mahler 6.”
“What?”
“The second hammer blow. I’ve played you this before.”
“You turned it up especially though, didn’t you? You’re lucky I didn’t box you on the jaw.”
“Were you having a bad dream?”
“I’d somehow conflated this with that song by Fad Gadget about a wasp trying to nut its way out of a window.”
“ ‘Insecticide’?”
“That’s it.”
Owen laughs.
“You’re a strange man.”
They pass a billboard advertising a stately home available for weddings, featuring a smiling white gay male couple.
“Are you alright?”
“I’m perfectly relaxed,” Owen says. “We’re crossing Dedham Vale. Not long now.”
Jesse thinks about the customer he served yesterday, and wonders how this apparently outstandingly beautiful land—Constable country—could produce such wilful ignorance, but roads are roads. Cars are cars. The land in the country, as in the town, as in the city, is spoiled by cables, electricity pylons, STOP markings, road signs, brightened nevertheless by the yellows of wild cowslip. Hedges, where the last of the red campion and honeysuckle grow, block the views of the landscape—the occasional gap shows a field of dry hay bales or cleared ground through which lilac teasels have sprung. The hedges are in place so that the people who live there and get to enjoy the beauty every day don’t have to be subjected to a procession of random traffic.
He wonders what it might have been like for his Jamaican grandparents’ generation, coming to England for the first time, taking trains from Tilbury through England’s greenest hills, unaware that most of the people in the chocolate-box villages they were passing through would rather non-whites turned round and got the fuck back on their banana boat. How times change. On the day after the referendum, the first beautiful sunny day in London in what felt like weeks—regardless of the news—Surenna Chalise Bailey was told to go back to the jungle, you fat nigger bitch by some guy in a dirty white vest coming off the Tube train she was boarding at Stockwell on her way to the Barbican Library. She only heard him because she was listening to the quiet phase of Florence Beatrice Price’s Concerto for Piano in One Movement through her noise-cancelling Bose cans. She just got on the train, sat her arse down good in the end seat and dissolved him in her inner acid as she read Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. But she hasn’t forgotten. She expects it, now, from people who present themselves a certain way.
Would their grandparents’ generation have fallen in love with England right away? If so, how long would it have taken for the honeymoon to end? He’s read Andrea Levy’s Small Island and Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, which told him more than any documentary ever could or any family member ever had. He knows they’ve forced themselves to forget those early days. He misses his grandmother, his family on his mother’s side. He misses her dutchpot, her ackee and saltfish with fry dumplin, her currygoat and rice, her Saturday oxtail soup. The smells of the gravies, the oil she cooked the saltfish in with bacon, salt, pepper, onion and garlic. Gini’s food’s great but she’s vegan. Her child will never know.
He reaches over to squeeze Owen’s thigh, and Owen folds his hand over Jesse’s, soft and warm, a writer’s hand. Perhaps, after all this time, he couldn’t feel safer, in a stately old BMW 523i SE—the classic, complete with roulette-dish alloys—on a country road, with the man he loves. He would love to have a mother he could introduce his everything to, as other people take for granted.
That photograph was the end between them. He wishes he had kept his nose out of her business; maybe, eventually, she would have shared it with him, if he’d given her the time she needed. Perhaps that would never have happened, and if so, that would have been her prerogative. They had fought over the photograph, and it had been torn in half. It is gone forever. All he has now are maybes, speculations, and he can’t even ask her. They have not spoken one word to each other since he left home at nineteen. Fourteen years. She has not tried to call him once. He’d called the house. Hannah, the littlest sister who probably didn’t remember him at all, answered and she went to fetch her dad. Graham came on the phone and said, Allo, like it was the gas board or something. Oh, he said when Jesse said, Hello, Graham. Dad. It’s Jesse. A silence passed and Jesse asked him how he was. Fine. We’m all fine. He waited for a how are you in return, which didn’t come. He should’ve waited longer. It had been ten years. Shamed the motherfu
cker—ha!—into caring, even fakely. “Is Mum there?” No, she’s out on field service. Maybe give her a ring in the week if you wanna talk to her. Another silence passed. Alright…Graham said. Not alright as in, “are you alright?,” but alright…in a downward-inflecting tone, in the sense Brummies and people from the Black Country use it, to say “are we done here?” or “fuck off, then.” Jehovah’s Witnesses. “I just thought I’d call to see how you were,” Jesse said. Right, came the response. Well, I’ll tell your mom you rang, then. Alright, then. Bye now.
“I need a piss,” Jesse says.
Owen checks the map on his phone, stuck on the windscreen with a suction cup.
“There’s a petrol station in a few miles. I could do with a coffee, too. Shouldn’t have drunk last night.”
They stop to pee and buy water and black Americanos. Jesse gasps when he reads Melania’s blizzard of WhatsApp fragments. She got drunk after work, went back to Ben’s flat and he fucked her without a condom all night. Babes oh my God he’s so amazing though, she says. I can feel him in my toes. He’s already gone to work, and she’s rolling around naked on his sheets, smelling him, until she has to go in for four o’clock.
* * *
—
Nicholas St. John grew up in Richmond with his mother and sister. His father Randall was the sort of travel writer who never came home. They descend from old landowning money, and so have always just done whatever they wanted. His mother Daphne was, according to Owen, very much a Joan Crawford type, alcohol-dependent, and emotionally disturbed, having never dealt with the fact that she was raped repeatedly as a child by an uncle. It was a relief to Nick to be sent, at eight, to a boarding school, then public school, before walking into Trinity College, Cambridge; his sister, frequently and indiscreetly described by Nick as my stupid sister Caroline, was left to live with her mother’s bouts of clinical depression. Nick took Owen under his wing at Cambridge, and they have remained close. Owen always insisted he was straight but Nick always knew Owen wasn’t. Nick always had boyfriends, and if anything, Owen saw Nick’s sexual recklessness as consistent with his upper-class privilege, which made Owen himself more determined to stay real and responsible, and apparently therefore straight.
