“Those tourists can hear what you’re saying,” one of the entourage advises. (Not Kenneth Halliwell; though he is present, he wouldn’t bother trying to curb Joe even if he wanted to.)
“I mean for them to hear,” Joe booms. “They have no right to be occupying chairs reserved for decent sex perverts… He might bite a hole in the rug. It’s the writhing he does, you see, when my prick is up him, that might grievously damage the rug, and I can’t ask him to control his excitement. It wouldn’t be natural when you’re six inches up the bum, would it?”
The Americans pay for their coffee and move away, looking as if they’ve had it considerably more than six inches up the bum – dry.
“You shouldn’t drive people like that away,” says the sensitive queen. “The town needs tourists.”
Joe sneers. He has practised it in the mirror. “Not that kind, it doesn’t. This is our country, our town, our civilization. I want nothing to do with the civilization they made. Fuck them! They’ll sit and listen to buggers’ talk from me and drink their coffee and piss off.”
“It seems rather a strange joke,” offers another member of the entourage timidly.
“It isn’t a joke. There’s no such thing as a joke,” says the author of the most successful comedy now playing in London’s West End.
Leicester, 2 August 1967
Joe leaves his father’s small threadbare house and walks two miles up the road to an abandoned barn, where a man he met in town earlier that day is waiting for him. He is in his home town, which he mostly loathes, to see a production of his play Entertaining Mr Sloane and fulfil family obligations. Just now he has some obligations of his own to fulfil.
Joe often likes to have one-off trysts with ugly men, men he finds physically appalling, but this one is a beauty: tall and smoothly muscled, with brown curly hair that tumbles into bright blue eyes, a thick Scottish accent, an exceedingly clever pair of hands, and a big-headed, heavily veined cock.
In the late afternoon shafts of sunlight that filter through the barn’s patched roof, they take turns kneeling on the dusty floor and sucking each other to a fever pitch. Then Joe braces himself against the wall and lets that fat textured cock slide deep into his arse, opening himself to this stranger in a way that he never can to Kenneth – not any more, not ever again.
London, 8 August 1967
Conversation after the lights are out:
“Joe?”
“…”
“Joe?”
“What?”
“Why did you ask me if I’d kill you?”
“I don’t know what you’re on about.”
“Do you want to die, Joe?”
“Do I…?” A sudden bray of laughter. “Hell, no! You twit, why would I want to die?”
“Then why did you bring it up?”
“Hm…” Joe is already falling back asleep. “I suppose I just wondered whether you were that far gone.”
His breathing deepens, slows. Joe is lying on his left side, his face to the wall. The collage spreads above him like a fungus, its components indistinguishable in the street-lit dark. Kenneth sits up, slips out of bed, maybe planning to take a Nembutal, maybe just going to have a pee.
But he freezes at the sight on the bedside table: Joe’s open diary and, balanced atop it carelessly, as if flung there by accident, a claw hammer. Joe hung some pictures earlier in the day, so the hammer has every reason to be there. But the juxtaposition of objects hypnotizes Kenneth, draws him.
He extends his hand cautiously, as if he is afraid the hammer will disappear. Then it is in his palm, heavy, smooth wooden handle, a comfortable fit. He raises it.
“Joe?”
Slow breathing.
“Joe?”
I suppose I just wondered whether you were that far gone…
And the knowledge that he is that far gone, that Joe must know that or be blind, sweeps over Kenneth like a dark sea. All the years he has invested, his work, his talent, his whole existence subsumed by Joe. The infidelities lovingly recorded in the diaries, literally under Kenneth’s nose (the flat is only sixteen by eighteen feet). In that moment the dam overflows, the camel’s back breaks, the shit hits the fan, and life as Kenneth Halliwell knows it becomes intolerable.
Without allowing himself to think about it further, he lets the hammer fall.
Nine times.
The amount of blood on his collage is staggering. Even in the dark Kenneth can see that most of the cutout figures are spattered if not obscured entirely. The thing on the pillow is no longer Joe; it is like a physician’s model, an example of a ruined cranium. And yet he still imagines he can hear that slow breathing.
After undressing (Joe’s blood is sticky on his pajama top) and scrawling a brief, unremarkable note, Kenneth goes for the bottle of Nembutal and swallows twenty-two, washing them down with a tin of grapefruit juice. He is dead before his considerable bulk hits the floor.
Joe’s sheets, however, are still warm when the bodies are found the next morning.
London, 8 August 1996
“Harder! It’s not going in! Lean on it… Oh bloody fuck, Willem, get out of the way and let me do it!”
Clive shoulders his way up the narrow staircase and pushes Willem away from one end of a large sofa upholstered in royal purple velvet. The other end of this venerable piece is stuck fast in the doorway of the tiny flat. Clive leans against it and gives a mighty shove. Wiry muscles stand out on his neck and shoulders. Willem mutters something in Dutch.
“What?”
Willem points at a spot just below his navel. “What do you call it when the intestines come out?”
“Hernia? No, look, you push with your knees bent. Like this… Ugh!” The paint on the door frame surrenders several layers, and the sofa is in the flat.
Back outside, they struggle to get an antique steamer trunk full of Clive’s photography equipment up the granite steps of the stoop. The staircase looms above them. Everything seemed much lighter in Amsterdam, probably because they had two friends helping. Now that they are here, their possessions appear enormous and unmanageable.
A young man passing on the street stops to watch their efforts. Clive is annoyed until the man, who is distinctly rough-trade, says, “Need a bit o’ help wi’ that there?”
They accept too gratefully, and he asks for forty pounds. They bargain him down to thirty-five. A bargain it is, for they could not have done it alone. By the time their things are in the flat, they feel sufficiently comfortable with the young man to ask if he knows where to get weed in Islington. The young man exclaims that he lives right around the corner and knows a guy who had some good stuff coming in today. They pay him the thirty-five pounds, give him an additional twenty towards the weed, and say goodbye, half-expecting never to see him again.
Of course, they never do.
“Fucking London,” Clive grumbles over Indian takeaway that night. “Fucking welcome home. Forgot why I left, I did.”
On the verge of thirty, Clive has received glowing reviews for his art photography, but couldn’t get the lucrative portrait work he needed to live well in Amsterdam. He has decided that Dutch people don’t care for having their pictures taken nearly as much as the English do. Even Willem, in all his scruffy blond loveliness, is a lousy model, always fidgeting, wanting a cigarette, wanting a joint, saying he is cold. Willem is a writer (some of the time) and can work anywhere (or not), so they have decided to relocate to Clive’s home city. Willem is excited about the move; he is twenty-five and has never lived outside the Netherlands. Clive hopes it will be temporary.