I’m not wild about his wardrobe, either. I wish there was a more exciting way of telling you it’s dull, but there isn’t: Declan Gunn’s wardrobe is dull. Two pairs of jeans, one black, one blue. The baggy charity shop strides to which I had recourse after my debut wankathon. Half a dozen t-shirts, a couple of woolly jumpers, a beige (!?) fleece, a greatcoat, a pair of brandless trainers and a pair of DM shoes. I look like a tramp. Doesn’t even own a suit. They’ve done this deliberately, to assault my dignity, to wound my much-talked-about pride. Gunn, needless to say after the extravagance of his unsellable and suicide-inspiring opus, A Grace of Storms, can’t afford new clothes, what with the first two books now out of print and his agent, Betsy Galvez, only ever seeing his name because he’s immediately after Guiseppe’s Pizzeria in her Rolodex. He should have stolen some money. Should’ve mugged a pensioner. Pensioners are loaded. Tartan shopping trolleys? Full of gold ingots. Why do you think they move so slowly? They die of hypothermia and no one mentions all the loot they’ve saved by never eating or turning the heating on. I love old people. Seven or eight decades of me whispering to them about all the faggots and coons (it turns out they fought for!) and by the time death comes calling they’re oozing malice and hawking-up spleen. The souls of old people are ten a penny in Hell. Honestly. We’ve got a slush-pile.
Gunn lives alone in a second-floor one-bedroom excouncil flat in Clerkenwell. One small bedroom, one small living room, a small kitchen and a small bathroom. (I looked for other adjectives.) Outside, a courtyard. The surrounding buildings go up six floors so Gunn’s place is starved of light. He had dreams of moving in with Violet. Violet didn’t. Violet had dreams of Gunn using the money from the sale of his then-in-progress masterpiece to tart the Clerkenwell place up and sell it so that they could move to Notting Hill. From the sale of his . . . Yes. There’s the rub. All things considered, I can’t honestly say I’m surprised our boy had settled on suicide. Some humans survive concentration camps, others are driven over the edge by a broken fingernail, a forgotten birthday, an unpayable phone bill. Gunn’s somewhere in-between. Somewhere in-between’s where I do much of my finest work.
His mother died of drink two years ago and left him the flat. Me, drink and loneliness, we finished Gunn’s mother off. Drink wolfed down her liver, me and loneliness gobbled up her heart. Liver and heart, my vital organs of choice. She didn’t come down, mind you. Must be cooling her heels in Purgatory. Last Rites. Gunn called in crapulous Father Mulvaney (sherry-breath, brogue blarney, red knuckles he couldn’t leave off cracking, and eczema; I’ll have his liver too, the old hypocrite) and that was me robbed of another tenant. There’s no justice, you know. Angela Gunn. I wanted her. Some souls – you can’t explain it – they’ve got quality written all over them. She had guilt over Gunn, having brought him dadless into the world (thought the fact that he nearly throttled himself with his own umbilical an indictment of her motherhood); but it wasn’t the guilt that did for her, it was the loneliness. A tawdry smattering of affairs with men vastly her inferior. Her disgust because she couldn’t leave the idea of a grand passion alone. In the small hours she’d observe them (after the grumpy wrestling, the loveless gymnastics) naked and sprawled as if taken down mid-crucifixion. Grimly, she’d force herself to absorb the unpleasant details: fatty shoulders; dirty nails; brittle hair; faded tattoos; pimples; stupidity; greed; hatred of women; pretentiousness; arrogance. In the small hours she’d sit bitter with tears and humming with drink and look down at his body, whoever he was, some Tony or Mike or Trevor or Doug, forcing her mouth into a rictus as the sordid replays ran in her head. The absurdity of it, she thought, this quest for the love of a man who was her equal. She loathed herself for it. She thought of her life (and herself) as a missed opportunity. Somewhere, back there, she had missed something. What was it? When was it? The worse horror beneath: that she hadn’t missed anything, that her life was merely the sum of her choices and that her choices had led her to this: another truncated encounter; the carcinogenic belief in the idea of a Great Love; clammy sex; loneliness in the small hours.
She had loved Gunn, but his education distanced them. She craved his visits then couldn’t bear that he was embarrassed by her malapropisms and too-young skirts. She was intelligent but inarticulate. Words betrayed her: beautiful butterflies in her mind; dead moths when she opened her mouth for their release into the world. Gunn knew all this. Went every time armed with the noblest filial intentions, then felt them evaporate when she talked of ‘broadening her horoscopes’. Her drinking was a spectral third with them, Gunn not quite taking it in. Knowing and hoping. (Jesus, you humans and your knowing; you humans and your hoping.) Her belief in his writing. Gunn suspected she prayed for it. She did. She prayed to God He’d find a publisher for her son’s book. Idiot ex-altar boy Gunn worried, then, that it wouldn’t feel like a clean achievement. Soiled by the Hand of God, so to speak.
But then liver failure, hospital, his avalanche of guilt and shame. Her only fifty-five, looking seventy. Mulvaney of the red raw scalp hadn’t seen her for three years, but they cut to the chase when he arrived, smelling of wet London and Cockburn’s Port. Gunn shuffled, miserable, by the bed. Holding her hand (for the first time in a long time) he discovered with a shock its onion skin and Saturnalian revel of veins. Horror because he remembered it soft and firm and smelling of Nivea. These were the memories that jumped him over the months after she died, heartless muggers bent on the redistribution of the mind’s buried wealth –
Bugger. You see what happens? I only mentioned the woman because I meant to tell you that’s how Gunn got the flat. Now my screen’s ambushed by maudlin guff.
Salutary should other demonic presences pass this way: manifestly you can’t squat in someone’s body without some of their life filtering through to yours. It’s been the toughest part of the whole trip, so far, accommodating Gunn’s leftovers; approximate omniscience notwithstanding, I never quite know which unfortunate tic or nasty habit of his I’m going to run into next. Couldn’t they have picked someone else? Some rock star with an entourage of sycophants? Some sheikh with a hooker habit? Some coke-fiend with a yacht? Anyone would’ve been better than this noncer with his objective correlatives and his Earl Grey and his sorry-ass bank balance.