The words on the page were like a visitation from the devil. All the feelings of my mind and body rose in revolt against its words. For the whole of my life I had been surrounded by a wall of beautiful artifice. Yet from the moment I had first seen Justine my protective fortification had been toppling in pieces, one by one, around me. First the wall around the fortress, then the towers of the fortress itself, stones whole and broken, falling hundreds of feet down into the waiting grass. Dust motes were hanging in the air.
I looked again at the only words that had been capitalized on the closely written page: kill jack or justine dies. The abductor’s jealousy of Justine’s love for Jack was stuck between the barbed-wire of his other obscenities like a black paper flower. The words were only made of black print.
I blocked out the letter from my memory. However, over the next few days London’s violence seemed to intensify accordingly, become its very heartbeat. The tensions in the streets had been normalized by the words of the letter, become part of a larger pattern. Everywhere I now looked I saw the imagery of death. On television, in newspapers, in film. As if the imagery of the world had come up to meet my own private world.
FORTY-THREE
I arranged to meet Jack the following Saturday: he suggested Leicester Square. Arriving early, I was met by a seething mass of humanity which filled up the square with its noise and smells and gestures. The multicoloured lights and arching machinery of a fair had been erected in the square’s centre. Ferris wheels revolved high up in the sky to a discordant cacophony of musical tunes. People of all ages and colours, their faces strained by the need to have a good time, shoved violently around me. The crowd swallowed me up before I had time to escape: they had violent whims which pushed me any which way.
Jack was heading straight through the crowd towards me. He was conspicuous as if parting the sea. He seemed to have no difficulty in walking in a straight line through the crowd, as if the crowd were moulding itself to his intentions. In spite of his broad shoulders he was walking with the still head and lithe movements of a ballet dancer. Jack seemed to be full of these supple contradictions. As if his body couldn’t make up his mind about who he was, or perhaps it was because he himself didn’t care. Leaning over the shoulders of the crowd, he reached out his hand to me. I took it, reluctantly: his palm was cool and dry. He dragged me gently in the direction of a building which stood to the side of the square, fronted by stone steps. Climbing the steps, we stood above and apart from the crowd.
As we stood together in silence watching the crowd, it began to gently rain. Water trickled down Jack’s hair and over his face. I realized that in spite of his contradictions, there was something very specific about him: his sexuality. And as soon as I thought this, a sense of repulsion engulfed me. It repelled me to think of his body heaving over the pale ethereality of Justine.
The rain was stopping.
‘All’s fair in love and war,’ Jack said. Before I had time to resist he had seized my hand again and was dragging me back down into the crowd.
FORTY-FOUR
The nearer the centre of the square we drew, the deeper I felt we were travelling into an underworld of lost souls. The Ferris wheel was circling high up in the sky ahead of us, a bangle of sparkling light.
Jack stopped in front of the gun ring. It was a stall with a row of fluffy teddy bears and Barbie dolls standing in shadow at the back. The woman behind the stall had the callous shrivelled face of those who work for the entertainment of others. She had sold off all her joy long ago. She handed Jack a gun. Her smile was as yellow as a plastic duck.
Jack confidently picked up the gun, held it to his shoulder and took aim at a fluffy green teddy bear. He shot it between its plastic eyes and it slowly toppled over to one side.
‘Your turn,’ he said, smiling and handing the gun over to me.
‘I don’t know how to,’ I said.
Standing behind me, he placed the gun in the crook of my shoulder and altered my grip. I could feel his breath on the back of my neck.
‘Aim the barrel of the gun between the two points at its tip.’
Magically, the tip of the Barbie doll’s pert nose became centred in my view-finder.
‘Pull the trigger. Now,’ he said.
I fired and the Barbie doll fell off her perch on to the sawdust floor.
‘See, it’s easy when you know how,’ he said.
We began desultorily circulating the fair again. All the lights of the fair were in the primary colours: blues, yellows and reds, major not minor tones. But they couldn’t compete with the flesh-coloured light of London that constantly shines up in the sky, that is never shut off, that hovers over London like a halo. The fair lights are the lights of a toy lamp compared to the pervasive presence of the city light.
There are no stars in the sky of London any more. Like the fair, they couldn’t compete with the city. Instead of flashing in different colours to make an impression, the stars went out. London, with a huff and a puff, blew them all down.
‘You take life seriously, don’t you?’ Jack asked.
I was startled out of my introspection.
‘I don’t tell jokes, if that’s what you mean,’ I said.
‘Not exactly. I meant that you seem to be missing a sense of irony. You’re like the boiling frog.’
‘The boiling frog?’
‘It was a scientific experiment. If you put a frog in boiling water it jumps out again immediately. If you immerse a frog in cold water and gently heat it, it remains in the water until it boils to death. The frog just doesn’t notice what’s happening. That’s what you’re like with your seriousness. You are sitting happily immersed in your lack of irony. Not noticing that, imperceptibly, it’s boiling you alive.’
We were both sitting on painted horses waiting for them to begin circling. The Kinks were playing ‘You’ve Really Got Me’ over the loudspeakers. One of the painted eyes of my horse had been scratched out. My horse was on the inside of Jack’s and lagging slightly behind.
‘But, I could say the same about your lack of seriousness,’ I retaliated. ‘You treat life as one long shaggy dog story.’
‘At least being boiled to death by a running joke is more fun.’
‘Only if it’s a good one.’
The horses slowly started to revolve, going up and down to the music.
‘But don’t you see,’ Jack said, ‘that you can take life either way? And that either way is neither right nor wrong. If you treat life lightly or intensely it comes down to the same thing in the end. Death. So why not enjoy yourself in the meantime?’
The words ‘You’ve got me so I can’t sleep at night’ blocked out the rest of his words. I watched, feeling distant, his mouth opening and shutting like a goldfish in a plastic bowl.
FORTY-FIVE
The horses were going round faster and faster. I clutched on to the pink fibre of my horse’s mane which cut into my hands. London was passing me by in increasingly faster circles.
‘Perhaps we’re two different sides to the same coin. My frivolity and your intensity. The same selfish coin,’ Jack suggested.
‘That would be a turn up for the book.’
The horses were slowing down, London was coming to a standstill again. Jack’s curly hair was tousled. I tried to control my envy of his joie de vivre. No, we were not alike. I watched the lines at the corners of his eyes wrinkle up when he smiled, laughter lines.