Al's Well

by Dark, Gregory

  You know that thing in movies? The big close-up … no, usually an over-the-shoulder shot, where the heroine is looking dotingly on her Adonis, and her eye-line is changing from one of his eyes to the other? Well, I used to think that was a device. You know, similar to the way that actors wiggle steering wheels when they drive cars in front of Back Projection screens, or whatever the technique is called.

  But it’s not. You gazed at me in exactly that way. And, in exactly that way too, I found myself gazing back at you. And a whole conversation flowed between us in those looks, a whole novel. No. Wrong. Not a conversation or a novel. Those are things of words. What flowed between us was outside the sphere of words. A piece of music, perhaps. An abstract painting. Words would have polluted that conversation, cheapened it. They would have given shape to the amorphous, would have restricted the all-embracingness of that look.

  We gazed at each other … oh, forever and a bit. For a time without time. And then … slowly, slowly … you closed your eyes and started to pull my head towards you, towards lips that were now hungry for kissing. And, then, just as our lips were about to meet, you tugged at my hair. Sharply, even painfully. And you looked into my eyes again. You gazed again into those eyes. You dived into them, splashed around in them, wallowed – an elephant in a mud-bath – in their warmth and balminess. You started to dance in them. As I in yours.

  And then we did kiss. Gently. So, so gently. Maybe still dancing in the other’s eyes. Our tongues just gently brushing the other’s. The top of my thumb lightly tracing a line from eyebrow to the side of your head. My right hand at my side holding your left hand. You squeezing that hand. Me returning that squeeze.

  So light, that kiss, so gentle. A butterfly’s wings of a kiss. Two mouths fluttering into one another. So light – so, so light; so, so gentle. And so sexy.

  Already I was getting aroused again. No, this wasn’t possible. This was not happening to me. This couldn’t be happening to me. This was something that didn’t happen to me. With Kelly I couldn’t manage it once.

  Again you broke away from that kiss. And again you held my head aloft, a bit (it felt) like a medieval axeman with a skull he’d just severed! And the lightness of our earlier ‘conversation’, the gentleness and delicacy, even the humour, all of that suddenly vanished. And there was grit there, steel. A certain ruthlessness, even a certain viciousness.

  With your eyes wide open you pulled my face again to yours. And you kissed me. Ruthlessly, even viciously. Your tongue was stabbing me, you were biting into me. You wanted it to hurt. You wanted me to hurt. As you wanted me to hurt you.

  You bit my lip. You were goading me, riling me. You shoved my face into your neck. “Bite me back, you bastard. Bite me back.”

  Anger gets you worked up. I kissed you back. Roughly. Bit into your lip. Nipped it, rather, as a crab might. You winced and bit me back. Now I wanted to hurt you too. Not badly. Just to rile you, as you had riled me. Just to get you worked up. There was sweat breaking out on both of our bodies. A drop was forming in the tiny cleft of your chin. I licked it off. Bit – nipped – into the cleft. My hands were on your hips, pressing on the pelvic bone, the thumbs massaging the flesh there.

  You didn’t like me nipping your chin. But you did. So much you liked it. I started nipping at your neck – a knitting pattern: kiss two, nip one; kiss two, lick one. Nip, nip, lick. Kiss. K-i-s-s.

  You were wriggling, trying to encourage my hands to explore more sensitive regions. But you, I was determined, were not about to come just yet. It wasn’t that orgasm would be premature just not of sufficient power. And I wanted it not to be an orgasm of Icelandic geysers or Australian white waters. You deserved an Aswan dam of an orgasm, a Niagara Falls. And for those, a certain delay is required. Grown-up orgasms demand we postpone gratification.

  No decorum now or niceness. You want me and you want release. There is nothing now more important or urgent than that release.

  And then?

  And then?

  Well, then, it was Berlioz’s ‘Symphonie Fantastique’ and to try to describe it would be akin to all the instruments of the orchestra playing their parts individually: the line for the clarinets, followed by that for the cellos, followed by the trumpets, then the timpani. It would be an abuse of the symphony – or symphonie –, a travesty. Like eating raw all the ingredients of a bouillabaisse. It is, the sex, symphonic – plenty of brass fanfares and cymbals crashing and violins playing, plenty of lyricism and andante movements, all building – as great music does – to a coda of an explosive dynamic, which is also very life-affirming. And the fusion that is the sex, that is, yes, fantastique.

  And then you freeze. You catch your breath. I try to kiss you. You stop me. I try to move my fingers. That you stop as well. You have still caught your breath and yet you catch your breath again. Your pelvis rises to acrobatic heights. There is a lifetime’s pause. Three, four, five, six.

  You thrust me from you. In one tantalising movement you divest yourself of me and pummel on my back. And then you jerk and thrash and shudder. You shiver, you grasp the pillow, you roll from side to side. You hit me. Hard. And then again. You pull your knees up. You catch your breath again. Seven, eight, nine …

  And then, my darling one, it does happen. The release arrives. And it is the storming of the Bastille, the relief of Mafeking. “Wow!” you pant, unable to vocalise more. “Wow!” That’s all you have the strength to say.

  And you are spent.

  You are so spent you cannot, to begin with, even look at me. You’re so spent even the sweat stops forming. You lie close to me, my head now cradled round your navel. You’re panting. Now a cough or two. You stroke my hair. You want to tell me that you love me. But the space has yet to open up between your pants.

  And I can hear your release. All the gurgles and whistles, the purrs from deep within you. I can smell your release – yet another perfume to the panoply already there. I can feel it now.

  There’s a chortle or two now between the pants. You’re stroking my cheeks. You tense your muscles, dig into the stamina, find the strength. You pull me to your mouth.

  We kiss. You can taste yourself on me. Another chortle, pants, a giggle. A naughty schoolgirl’s giggle. So much charm in that giggle, so much innocence and joiede-vie. Or joie-de-sex, at least.

  “It’s so easy,” you say, still panting, “at moments like this, saying ‘I love you’. But I do love you, Mike. I do …” And this time I stop you with a finger to your lips. I want you to enjoy this moment, and glory in it. You don’t need to talk. I’ll want to hear those words in seconds. I don’t need to in these seconds.

  Growing stiller now. “Wow!” still you’re saying. “Wow!”

  Yet stiller. You kiss me again. A gentle kiss. A loving kiss. A lingering and juicy kiss.

  “Come to me, honey,” you tell me. “Come to me, my darling man.”

  I need no second bidding.

  Chapter 7

  “Hi.”

  “How you doing?”

  “I just cleared Paris.”

  “I just left the Art Museum.”

  “That was very cultural.”

  “I wanted to see ‘The Scream’.”

  “Wasn’t it stolen?”

  “I wanted to see the hole, Mike, where ‘The Scream’ had been.”

  “Isn’t …?”

  “What?”

  “Well, isn’t a hole is a hole is a hole?”

  “How like a man. I thought it would be symbolic, Mike.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Are you being dense?”

  “Could be. I just cleared Paris.”

  “Am I being dense? Was that a non- … what’s the word?”

  “Sequitur?”

  “You couldn’t not have known that?”

  “Have you ever cleared Paris, Trove?”

  “Oh, only several hundred times.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Did Ionesco just write this conversation?”

  “You
’ve cleared Paris several hundred times. Clearing Paris has an effect on you. Like losing gravity or something.”

  “Or, Mike, like losing your marbles?”

  “Or something.”

  “There’s an ambiguity, isn’t there, about ‘The Scream’?”

  “Okay.”

  “Is he screaming or is he hearing a scream?”

  “Right.”

  “Is the scream one of pain, Mike, or of joy?”

  “Joy?”

  “Yes?”

  “You think there’s joy in that picture, Trove?”

  “There’s ambiguity, is what I’m saying.”

  “Joy?”

  “You’re not still driving, are you?”

  “I’m drinking a coffee to celebrate.”

  “You’re not the only one, Mike, who ever cleared Paris.”

  “It always feels like it.”

  “Right. I’m screaming, Mike.”

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t know whether from pain or joy.”

  “Could it be both?”

  “It is both. Of course it’s both. If it wasn’t both, Mike, there’d be no point to this whole conversation.”

  “Except to tell you I’d cleared Paris.”

  “And, see, the symbolism, Mike …”

  “Is that now there’s a hole where there used to be a scream.”

  “No-one likes a smart ass, hon.”

  “A shot in the dark, Trove.”

  “Only, see, the thing is, there’s two ‘Scream’s.”

  “There are?”

  “One at the Art Museum. The other at the Munch museum. The one at the Art Museum’s still there.”

  “And they’re both the original?”

  “How can they both be the original?”

  “That was sort of my question, Trove.”

  “Clearly one’s a fake.”

  “Right.”

  “Only no-one knows which.”

  “Which is symbolic too.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “I can only talk for myself, Trove.”

  “Of course.”

  “But, for me, there’s the symbolic …”

  “Yes?”

  “And the symbollocks.”

  “And this is symbollocks?”

  “I didn’t say that. It’s subjective, the judgement. It has to be. My symbollocks, Trove, are not your symbollocks.”

  “They’re subjective symbollocks, is what you’re trying to say.”

  “Or not.”

  “Nothing ambiguous right now, Mike, about the scream.”

  “No.”

  “I just want to yell.”

  “And I can sense that, Trove.”

  “Scream my head off.”

  “It’s because I just cleared Paris.”

  “I was trying to talk to you, Al.”

  “Mike.”

  “Shit, did I just call you Al?”

  “Slip of the tongue.”

  Shit, I’m sorry, hon.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Slip of the tongue. Couldn’t matter less.”

  “It’s real important – really important, Mike – that I can talk to you.”

  “I want you to talk to me.”

  “I can’t – I just cannot, Mike – sustain another relationship where we don’t talk. Or where I’m not listened to.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Of course it’s symbollocks, Mike. Of course it frigging is. But I needed to talk, Mike. About the scream inside me of pain, and that of joy – no, of torment and rapture. Look at the eyes of any Christ crucified. Take away the cross and the crown of thorns, are those not the eyes of a man in the throes of orgasm? Is there a correlation, is what I’m asking, between great pain and great pleasure?

  “And that’s symbollocks too, Mike. Because that’s not what I’m feeling at all. I’m not feeling these things as hypotheses, not as theories. These screams within me, Mike, they’re real beings. Their own entities. Probably their own masters. It doesn’t matter about correlations, any of that other crap. What does matter, Mike – what does matter – is that there are all these frigging screams and I honestly don’t know which emotion attaches to which scream and I don’t know which are the real screams and which are the fakes. I don’t even know, Mike, where the holes are where the screams used to be. And I’d love to make light of it all, trivialise it into a sort of vapid nothingness. But, know what? I can’t, Michael. And you know why I can’t? Because I’m so full of fucking screams that I’m being deafened by them. Yeah, and silenced by them too. … Say something, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Right.”

  “Je-sus!”

  “This is not a phone conversation, Trove. Me in some motorway caff, you outside the Art Museum.”

  “I’ve moved to outside the university now.”

  “This is not a phone conversation. I need to see your eyes, need to be able to hold you, take your hands, cuddle you – maybe even row with you. This is not, honey, a phone conversation.”

  “You called me ‘honey’ again.”

  “I call you ‘honey’ a lot these days.”

  “Yes, you do, Mike, and no, it’s not. A phone conversation.”

  “We need to talk. And about all of this.”

  “Only trouble is, I see you and all I want to do is make love.”

  “Interesting use of the word ‘trouble’.”

  “I haven’t talked, Mike. Not really talked. Not for a lot of years. Not within a relationship.”

  “No.”

  “Will you talk with me?”

  “I need to tell you one thing.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “How do you know what I’m going to say?”

  “If it’s one thing you need to tell me, it can only be one thing.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m not ready, Mike.”

  “I l- …”

  “No, don’t say it. Please don’t say it.”

  “I cherish you, Trove.”

  “And that’s like so much better?”

  “I have needs too, honey. I needed to tell you that. Need to.”

  “So, now you’ve said it.”

  “I have to go to Calais now.”

  “I know.”

  “Does any symbolism attach to ferries?”

  “Like so much, they’re all cliché.”

  “I cherish you, Trove.”

  “Please don’t, Mike. I’m not kidding here. Please don’t.”

  +++

  Maison d’arrêt de Toulouse-Seysses. 11th April 06

  Dear Mom and Dad:

  I know you’re really upset. More than upset. Enormously upset. Upsetissimo! (No, really, I’m not making light of it.) You’ve every right to be. I’m not for a second suggesting otherwise. I’ve let you down, I know. Let the whole family down. Let myself down. The neighbours, I know, will be having a field day. And all I can say is sorry. I am so, so, so sorry.

  And, I suppose, some irony attaches itself to that. It’s God punishing me, as you would say, Mom. It was a constant bone of contention between Trove and me, a running battle: I was always going on at her about sorrying too much. Now it’s me doing the sorrying and I’m not sorrying enough.

  I’m not because I can’t.

  It is not possible for me to. However many times I sorried, it wouldn’t be enough.Not by several universes. There aren’t the sorrys in the world that would be enough.

  I don’t offer any excuses. There aren’t any. There aren’t even any reasons. It happened. I’m real sorry it happened. Really, really sorry, you can have no idea. But happen it did. And now consequences have to be paid. And suffered.

  The shame is that, in the final analysis, it’s not me paying or suffering. Not really. For all its awfulness, there is also a certain safety in prison. A certain insulation. It keeps the world away from us just as much as it keeps us away from the world.

  There’s an irony in that too. God, how many times have you heard me ra
il that the whole legal system, it’s so centrally flawed? To think, I used to say, that there is some kind of line that can be drawn and on the one side of that line there is right, and on the other wrong. It was idiotic, I used to say. Simplistic to the point of being crass, and crass to the point of being cruel.

  And it is cruel. And crass, and idiotic.

  But the dividing line is not idiotic.

  I was so totally wrong. About that as about so many other things. So totally and completely wrong. There is just such a line. And on the one side of it there is wrong. Our only mistake is thinking that on the other side of that line there is right.

  What I did was wrong. No question. I accept that without question. But what I didn’t do, that was also wrong. And what I failed to do. So many wrongs. So many. They say, don’t they, that two wrongs don’t make a right. How many wrongs, I wonder, does it take to make a right?

  I do want to be your son. That might take some time. I know that. But time, that would appear to be a commodity I’m just about to get plenty of!

  Try to forgive me.

  Al

  +++

  “How’s Nottingham?”

  “Troveless. Oslo?”

  “I was going to come and visit you.”

  “‘Going to’, Trove, means not any more.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not coming to visit me?”

  “No.”

  “I’m really sorry to hear that.”

  I’m really sorry to say it, Mike.”

  “I was looking forward to seeing you again.”

  “That’s the second bit of bad news.”

  “Second bit?”

  “Mike, you won’t be seeing me any more. … Say something.”

  “There’s a man, Trove …”

  “I don’t need …”

  “There’s a man sitting in the electric chair. Ten thousand volts have just passed through him. You want him to say something?”

  “I understand you being mad.”

  “Well, that’s very understandable of you, Trove.”

  “It’s a com – …”