‘I’m going through with it,’ he said. ‘Now fuck off, will you?’
Like I said: not a fair fight.
The hotel is filled with echoes, the ghostly resonance of torturous trysts and bad business. Deals, betrayals, cramped passions and sudden deaths – each room holds its after-image composite of the beings who’ve passed through. The hotel is a great London valve, through which the lifeblood of the city’s wealth – the planet’s wealth – has passed, now with dalliance, now in haste. Beauty and boredom form its unjudgemental mood. I’m at home there. I’m so . . . at home there.
Scale fucks with my head. Angelic scale with human head, human scale with angelic head – oy. You go dizzy. What does one do – having been immaterially present at the Divine ejaculation that brought matter into being – what does one do with . . . a daisy? How is consciousness – especially the troubled hybrid I’m walking around with at the moment – to reconcile these extremities? Having observed newborn galaxies tossed prodigally, milkily, into the void, having straddled event horizons and strolled bodilessly ’twixt time’s wrinkles and matter’s loops – how, exactly, am I to accommodate the crenulations of Harriet’s toenails? Am I to apprehend seconds and caraway seeds that have called aeons trifles and held gas-giants baubles fit for a Heavenly whore?
Apparently, yes. And don’t mistake me. If I sound confused it’s only the happy confusion of the roll-over jackpot winner, now that all his choices are choices between pleasures. I smile a lot, faced with these charming frictions. Memories of the measureless deflagrations of home mix now with the intimate passing of a pigeon’s shadow, or the precise dimensions of a full stop. Drugs or no, this gentle dissonance of cognition sends me through my time here in feisty bliss . . .
I’ve got fourteen scenes to write, I know, but how, may I ask, do you handle dreams?
To start with: sleep. How did I ever do without it? Actually not sleep itself, but falling asleep. How did I ever survive without this business of falling asleep? There are – Day Twelve (Heavens how time flies when you’re having fun) – all sorts of things I’m wondering how I ever got along without. Israeli vine tomatoes. Campo Viejo Rioja. Heroin. Burping. Bollinger. Cigarettes. The sting of aftershave. Cocaine. Orgasm. Lucifer Risings. The aroma of coffee. (Coffee justifies the existence of the word ‘aroma’.) There are, naturally, plenty of things I don’t know how you put up with – disc jockeys, hangnails, trapped wind, All Bran – but then I knew it was going to be a mixed bag.
Anyway sleep. Granted, the first time it took me I was caught off-guard: one minute it was evening and I was lying on Gunn’s bunk with crossed ankles and a warm feeling in my feet and shoulders – the next brilliant sunshine with yours truly truck-horned awake with pants-shitting suddenness and a miniature identity crisis bringing on the first-morning-in-a-foreign-hotel-reconstruct-your-own-history routine. I was so startled (another first) I shot out of Gunn’s bones and back, bodilessly, into the ether. That turned out (wearing, this business of things turning out) not to be a good idea. Pain – the pain – returned, instantly, bright and clamorous. (When I quit Gunn’s carcass at the end of the month, you know, that pain’s going to hurt like . . . You wouldn’t think, would you, it being only twelve days and all? I mean still no sweat or anything, but . . . well . . . damn, man. Ow, you know?) But sleep – falling asleep – I’ve got used to it. Easy to see why you lot go for it in such a big way, though why you choose to do it at night, the best part of the day, is a mystery to me.
But this dreaming – whoa. It was one of Gunn’s. (Yes, I’m afraid so: on top of the drab threads and tiny todge I’m saddled with a good deal of the subconscious fluff, too.) Now as you all know, other people’s dreams are superlatively boring unless you yourself are in them, so I won’t burden you with the details. (‘I had the most amazing dream last night,’ says Peter. ‘Was I in it?’ asks Jane? ‘No,’ says Peter. ‘Me and Skip were in this forest, you see, and . . .’ etc. Jane’s not listening – and who can blame her? Pretended interest in your partner’s dreams is one of the half-dozen glues holding the pitiful airfix of monogamy together.) It’s a dream Gunn’s only had once or twice before. An older, bearded man comes to take his mother to the pictures. It’s not a lover. (For the record, it’s a queen whose partner cancer’s recently chomped its way through, on whom Angela’s taken pity.) Wee Gunn knows it’s not a lover – but he can’t or won’t trust this old fruit. ‘I’m just your mother’s friend,’ the bewhiskered lips keep telling him. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of. I’m not taking her away from you. You can trust me. You know you can trust me.’ (But tight-shouldered Gunn’s a compact little thunderstorm. His face is piping hot and his chest is busy with naked feelings still waiting for their language hats and coats. His mother’s friend is sitting on the couch, Gunn standing in front of him holding in his left hand the new matchbox Mini Cooper in electric green with opening boot, bonnet and doors – the price of his mother’s company, he assumes. The babysitter is heating spaghetti hoops in the kitchen. Gunn hears the bhup then steady exhalation of the gas ring. With all his ineffectual might (when his mother’s back is turned for a final mirror check: beige mack, mauve chiffon scarf, coppery curls, green eyeshadow) he balls his sweaty fist and clocks Mr Harmless a wild hook in the bearded chops. He thinks, little Gunn, all ablaze with pride and shame, that something big, some paradigm shift must follow. But the man on the couch just grins, without lifting his palms from their rest on his kneecaps. ‘No need for that, my friend,’ he whispers, rising, ruffling Gunn’s warm hair. Then to Angela: ‘Your carriage awaits.’ Angela kisses our cheek and leaves a lipstick print. It’s a thing between them. He’s allowed to go to bed without washing it off. Her lips are warm and sticky. At the doorway she turns and blows him another kiss. The bearded man waves and winks. Gunn waves back as the corridor stretches and the doorway recedes, slowly. He waves, and smiles, and thinks: I hate you, I hate you, I hate you . . .
I was mumbling some untranslated version of this when I woke. Terribly hot and bothered. Had the Ritz’s costly linens all tangled around my legs. Struggled up into consciousness with a lot of undignified lurching and warbling. Then sat up puffing and blowing, astonished at the simple endurance of the waking world: the room, the braying traffic, the weather. Called down for a pot of Columbian full roast and a half-dozen wee snifters with a tender – I’m tempted to say humble – thankfulness that it was all still here. Incredible. And you lot have to deal with this sort of thing night after night. Must take some getting used to . . .
Out of mischief, really, I went to see Gunn’s agent, Betsy Galvez. Do you know, I’ve found it so difficult to stick to my fourteen scenes. This writing malarkey should come with a health warning: MAY CAUSE INCESSANT DEVIATION FROM ORIGINAL INTENTION. AND DROWSINESS. Obviously I’ve got a lot of the script down – the big scenes, so to speak, and Trent already thinks I’m God – but do you think I can stick to the task in hand? I turn on Gunn’s PC, I sit through the tedious powering-up, the brief arrival of Penelope’s gently smiling mug as his desktop wallpaper, and am forced to acknowledge the presence of an untitled file alongside ‘Lucifer Screenplay’ that’s been variously titled Some, Anyway, Last Words, Wherefore I Know Not, and Paradise Fucked, and which has thus far proven a terrible distraction from my contractual obligations. You know what’s in it, don’t you? You’ve been reading it, haven’t you? I wouldn’t mind if it was just the narrative version of the blockbusting movie – the ‘novelization’ as such things are barbarously called – but as you know, it’s worse than that. I seem to be continuously struggling against the temptation to write about Declan Gunn.