Dreadful. He’s tried caution. Steers clear of poetry on the Underground, with its things of beauty being joys for ever and cycle clips removed in awkward reverence. He’s invariably undone. Once a laryngitic busker’s mechanical yet strangely desperate version of ‘Wish You Were Here’. Once (oh please) a speech by Tony Blair. It’s not the self-congratulatory comfort of mere sentimentality. More a queer surge of bowel and soul, a twist or wrench of feeling as liable to have him hurling his dinner as breaking his heart. Whatever it is it messes him up – and I don’t balk at telling you that it messed me up, too, good and proper there by old Angie’s rotting remains.
Debilitating, that’s what. Had to go and sort myself out with a quadruple Jameson’s in a nearby Knave of Cups. (I mean how do you bear it, this being suddenly overcome by feeling? Isn’t it just an almighty jumping Jesus Christing drag?) I felt mighty peculiar afterwards, when the Irish had kicked-in. Faint, you might say. And yet, I must confess, not wholly dreadful. There was, it must be admitted (must it? Well, yes, perhaps it must . . .) a slight . . . a sort of . . . How is one to put this? An internal breathability. A space around the alarmed heart. The feeling that someone, somewhere (I know, I know, I know) was quietly, simply, without a concealed agenda, telling me that it was all right, that stillness would come, that peace is purchased in the currency of loss . . .
At which point (having called for another Jameson’s family of four, sparked-up a Silk Cut, sneezed, and cracked my knuckles), I found myself laughing, to myself, at what an unpredictable wheeze this caper was turning out to be.
Took me an awfully long time to get home. I seemed to think it a terrific hoot to take buses and tubes at random. Hardly surprising, I suppose, that I ended up in the arms of a nineteen-year-old young-man-of-the-night in the anonymous yet surprisingly trim and lavender-scented boudoir above Vivid Videos, just off Gray’s Inn Road – though, having rather foolishly succumbed to the honeyed tongue of a hallucinogens salesman not an hour before, I can’t be absolutely sure of the location.
I had . . . paused at King’s Cross. Intriguing to see one of my little urban kernels of vice (and misery, and regret, and shame, and guilt, and violence, and greed, and hatred, and rage, and confusion) from the other side, so to speak, from down on the ground. Theory in practice. The abstracted boffin down among the engine-room grunts. My brothers were busy in the ether, I knew, the ticklish temptations and purred prompts; I was a bit taken aback, however, at being able to see them, flowing around the multitudes in gorgeous streams – until I realised that I was in fact hallucinating. Extraordinary, let me repeat, to see the fruits of our labours from the material end. Normally, you understand, my brothers and I ‘see’ only the spiritual correlates of physical actions, not the physical actions themselves. There’s an entire realm (again ‘realm’ is very misleading, but it’s the best you’ve got) in which the spiritual dynamics of this mortal coil have their home. We know when an operation’s been a success, of course – not because we see the bodies but because we feel the effects (the rips, the rucks) in the fabric of the spiritual realm.
I had paused, as I say, at King’s Cross, leaning against a lamp-post with what must have been an expression of near obscene carnal happiness, when young Lewis had caught my eye, I his, and with an exchange of raised eyebrows and a couple of smirks, passed from the vulgarity of his price list to the charm of the room above the shop.
Slender lad. Elfin eyes of yellowish hazel; bones and lips that must have passed through the Caribbean at some stage, though his skin was barely the darkness of a Pret-à-Manger latte. Delicate (and slightly grimy on closer inspection) hands with long and pearly fingernails, and a dark dong of surprising proportions for one so otherwise slightly built. Talented, too, from what I can recall, though for all the impact his attentions had on Gunn’s treacherous member he might as well have been reciting the Highway Code. Oh those drugs. Cockroaches by the hundred hurrying out from the legs of my discarded trousers; the curtains’ burgundy roses morphing into tiny, sack-carrying dwarves; my hand the size of a double bed; a stadium of whispers; hot flushes; me expelling geysers of nonsense that did nothing for Lewis’s peace of mind. Worst of all (don’t relax too deeply, Monsieur Gunn, I’ll right this wrong before I go!), a penis that might as well have been a Brillo pad for all the sensitivity it retained.
‘I don’t think this is going to work, you dear beautiful boy,’ I heard myself saying, as if from a great distance, after forty minutes of fruitless fondling. ‘No reflection on your . . . your fitness for the task in hand, I hope you understand?’
‘Yeah well there’s no fuckin’ refund, babe,’ my companion replied, surprising me, somewhat, with the speed of his shift from cheeky mincer to no-dice businessman.
‘Delightful,’ I said. ‘Just the tack that’s likely to get your darling head cracked open one of these days – although not by me, of course.’ Not that it hadn’t occurred to me, especially given the sudden appearance of an enormous twin-headed battleaxe propped up against the mantelpiece, looking very much the part with both its edges sporting coagulated blood and the odd wisp of human hair. Lewis, meanwhile, got dressed as if the drawing on of each garment expressed a distinct and unique contempt. I was wondering how to reach the battleaxe – given the howling and bottomless chasm that had just opened in the floor between myself and the mantelpiece – when the door opened and a meaty-headed man with a very black beard and very blue eyes entered. He surveyed the scene with his knuckles on his hips and his chest thrust out – not entirely unlike the posture of a pantomime dame – an expression of mildly displeased boredom on his face.
‘Oh yeah?’ he said, rather non sequiturially, I thought, to no one in particular. ‘Oh yeah? Oh yeah? Oh yeah?’
It was taking me an age to shake those damned devil’s coach-horses from the legs of Gunn’s jeans, distracted, as I was, by the regularly rising urge to vomit and by the erratic flight of the room’s previously unnoticed white hot bats that whizzed hither and thither weaving a cat’s cradle of phosphorescence around the three of us.
‘Yeah, well, Gordon okayed it, babe,’ Lewis said.
‘Oh yeah?’ the bearded man repeated.
‘I do think, old sport –’ I began.
‘And you, sunshine, can fuck right off out of it,’ he said.
Well that tickled me beyond reason, I must say. Having finally managed to get Gunn’s de-bugged jeans and shoes back on, I staggered over to where our hirsute observer stood with both eyebrows raised and both lips joined in a curled expression of distaste.
‘I’d leave it, babe, if I were you,’ Lewis murmured.
Wisely, as it turned out, though I took no notice at the time. (I mean there’s no surer recipe for getting me to do something than the one warning me not to . . .) Besides, for hours – days, actually – a part of me had been busy decoding the body’s potential, its unreleased violence and bottled energy. Crystal clear that a good punch-up now and again would’ve done our Declan the world of good. Would probably have staved off suicide. (It’s shocking, really, this neglect of violence, your oft’ fatal ignorance of its therapeutic heft.) No chance of it with him living in his carcass, obviously, what with him being yellower than a canary in custard – strangely, specifically terrified of having his teeth knocked out (strangely, I mean, given what all else might happen to him in a brawclass="underline" spleen ruptured, kneecaps smashed, eyes gouged out, fingers broken, eardrums punctured, goolies crunched, nipples torn off and so on) – but it was all still available to me, the pent potential, its lively aesthetics of blows, gnashings, kicks, butts, throttlings, forkings and swipes – and I do quite clearly remember thinking how joyful his body was going to feel, how much it was going to thank me for finally releasing its stoppered talent into the world . . . I do quite clearly remember a fantasy vision of myself, post-fisticuffs, floating in a seratonin haze (I think I was reclining in a vast red leather armchair, actually, in this image), just before the guy with the beard took umbrage at my hands on his lapels and headbutted me with astonishing speed and accuracy, sending me – with similar speed and inevitable accuracy – down onto my buttocks, which, whether by his design or otherwise, turned out to be the perfect position for my face to receive his kneecap, a bit of down-to-earth physics with all the subtlety of a cannon-ball landing in a rum baba. I’m assuming, given the bruises, given this body’s new collection of aches and pains, that other things were done to me after that. Assumption is required, since an unequivocal blackness swallowed my consciousness a split second beyond impact, and did not regurgitate it until several hours later, when I found myself quite comfortably wedged between a recycling bin and a mountain of shredded paper in an alley at the back of the shop. Fleeced, I believe, is your word. Stiffed. Done over. Fucked. Teach me, I suppose, to walk around drunk and on drugs with 1,500 pounds sterling in my pockets. Nice team, those two, Lewis and his guy. I made a mental note to find out which of the boys is working with them and give him a raise . . .