We walked back out of Leicester Square through the disintegrating crowds that were dwindling along Charing Cross Road. The music of the fair faintly echoed in the distance. I felt tired and oddly satisfied. It occurred to me that we had spent the day more like two lovers, than like two men who supposedly loved the same woman. We said goodbye at Trafalgar Square. Nelson’s column was lit up from far above us.
I put out my hand reluctantly to shake his hand. But Jack moved his face towards mine and abruptly kissed me hard on the mouth. The stubble on his chin felt coarse. His mouth tasted of alcohol, his lips were wet, his tongue just flickered. I stepped away violently from him but he was smiling.
‘Either way, it makes no difference,’ he said.
He turned and walked away.
I turned back home with a deep sense of triumph. Jack’s bisexuality was a weakness, a nebula. It rendered his identity inchoate. It was a secret that he had casually dropped onto the ground in front of me and which I could now pick up and nurse to the point of its suffocation.
FORTY-SIX
The floor is uneven, the narrow cavities in the rocky floor making it difficult to walk. But I can hear the faraway screams of a woman’s voice. The scream is of pure thin pain. A sound where language has become irrelevant, replaced by the body’s direct expression of agony. The nakedness of the sound arouses me. It pierces to the centre of my soul.
I turn the corner. Justine, naked, is chained to the black walls of rock. Her white flesh is bleeding as if someone has drawn a map of an unknown country, in red ink, on her body. The walls of the dungeon are sweating water, and I can smell the sweet stench of decaying flesh.
The abductor is bent down over her. I can make out from the movement of his back and the crack of a whiplash that he is whipping her. Justine’s face, which is turned in my direction, is contorted by need and desperation, wet with tears. Her face has concaved and her eyes have disappeared into a grimace of pain. But when she sees me her face lights up. She stretches out her arms towards me in supplication.
‘I’ve come to rescue you,’ I say to her.
On hearing me speak, the abductor straightens up, lets his whip drop to his side and turns around. He looks straight into my eyes. But I am looking back into my own eyes, the abductor has my face. He looks like an angel. I step back in fear, turn, run back through the passageway hearing his footsteps running behind me, the same arrhythmic limping, chasing me, knowing that if he is to catch up with me it means my death. For it is impossible that the two of us can co-exist in the same world.
FORTY-SEVEN
Over the following days the distinction between my identity and the abductor’s became less and less clearly defined. I began to feel almost as if he were my alter ego. He had captured Justine, was watching her, looking after her, loving her. He was carrying out the extreme point of my desire.
The thought of making Justine my slave began to preoccupy me. She would show utter sexual devotion, perform every sexual gratification or whim. I fantasized about the malleability of her body, her shifting position, her opening-mouth, her touching-hands, her wide-open legs that revealed the rose interior of her. I would keep her chained to the bed like a dog.
It was Jack who was the true monster, not the abductor. It was Jack who was incapable of passion. Jack was indifferent to Justine, worse, flippant about her. It was Jack who was the abuser of Justine, not the abductor who, because of the power of his love for Justine, could not help himself. The abductor shared with me an overwhelming passion for Justine. Jack, however, had retained total self-control. He was not made vulnerable by the power of his obsession. He was not one of us. How could his cursoriness compete with the concentration of our ardour? He was the one that should be punished. The realization had come suddenly but had crept over me with the inevitability of the truth.
FORTY-EIGHT
As I grow older, the fragility of life becomes real for the first time. The gap between life and death narrows to a slit. The effort of my life no longer concentrates on living but on preventing my life from being arbitrarily snatched away. Life is curled up in bed like a newborn baby. At any moment a strange woman can come in and seize it, choosing that baby simply because of the way the hair curls on its forehead. But there is a way in which I can gain control over life: by controlling death. I can choose when death will visit, instead of waiting for death to choose me.
When I phoned up Jack and asked him round to Kensington Gardens, I was choosing when Death would pay a visit. Soon I would be able to hold Jack’s life, as Juliette had held the starling, encircle his life with my thumb and forefinger, and be able to feel the pulsating of his heart beat against my palm.
Jack was no longer a man but a symbol. A symbol made flesh incarnate, the skin wrapped over his bones, the flesh that held his blood, the pulsing blood, all contributing to the bloodline that separated me from Justine. A symbol of the obstacle to winning her love. The superficiality of his nature, his promiscuous sensibility, were undeserving of Justine’s love. Her love, which by all the rights of Destiny, belonged to me. He was nothing but a common thief. I would not be killing him because of the abductor’s threat that if I didn’t I would never see Justine alive again. (I did not believe in this). I would kill Jack because, like the abductor, I could not bear to see him remain alive.
FORTY-NINE
When Jack entered the drawing-room at noon, he made no comment on the portrait of Justine hanging on the wall. Under his arm he carried a painting wrapped up in brown paper so that I could not see what it represented. He handed the parcel to me. I was struck yet again by the aura of his physical well-being. He was a painter, a creator, not like me, a collector. He had not been paralysed by the definition of what was art. I carefully unwrapped the painting and leant it against the sofa.
The painting was a grotesque meaningless jumble of different lines in clashing colours. The colours were in slurry dark shades of muted browns and greys. These were muddy, earthy colours, dirty and entrenched. Gashes of vulgar orange and lime peeped through the monstrous murkiness. The painting gave off an odour of sickly intimacy, a green stench.
‘You don’t like it?’ Jack asked. I could tell by his amused, patronizing tone, that his sense of confidence in his own talent was set as hard as concrete.
‘I don’t understand what it is about,’ I said. I was also surprised. Hadn’t Juliette told me that Jack was a literalist, a believer in the truth? How many more versions of the truth could I stand?
‘So you don’t think it’s a good likeness?’ Now I really felt that he was laughing at me.
‘That’s a portrait?’ I asked, flabbergasted.
‘Don’t you recognize her? I was painting from a photograph.’
He handed me a photograph which he had taken from his pocket. It was a Polaroid of Justine, naked, sitting in an obscene position. She had moles, in the star shape of the plough across her torso.
‘Did she know that photograph was being taken?’
‘Justine loves to have dirty photographs taken of her. Look at her – she’s posing.’
I thought of the photos I had found in Juliette’s flat. Was Justine somehow involved in the taking of them, rather than an innocent victim of Juliette’s jealous voyeurism? But this photographic image of Justine was not of the Justine I knew. This was a different vulgar Justine, a woman who exhibited her sexuality like a whore, a Justine that I would not believe in.