1. WALKING

Signing a marriage certificate is rather like signing one’s name at the bottom of a direct debit form giving money to charity once a month; it bleeds one’s bank account slowly dry, year by year, until one finally remembers how one got duped into it and promptly cancels it.

Well, not quite.  But at least you can feel smug about having given some clapped-out beach donkeys a peaceful retirement.

Sitting on the floor in front of Hogarth’s Marriage a la Mode, Ian, 40, dark hair, gangly, eyes, nose, mouth, and Louis, 40, equally weedy, funny face, short cropped hair and with teeth he hated although they were nowhere near as bad as he thought.  Ian was wearing a neat two-tone mod suit, with a long black coat, and Louis hadn’t even ironed his shirt. 

 Ian needed to be that donkey.  Louis was a safe place but the door wasn’t bolted.  He had asked but Louis said it was a meaningless piece of paper.  Louis said they didn’t need it.  He said that while it was true that nobody could stand on their own two feet, marriage was a public admission of the fact.

For Ian, marriage would be a warm blanket enveloping just the two of them in a secret pact from which everyone else was barred entry.  He believed in fate and felt that Louis was his twin, the other half of the broken biscuit, but Louis didn’t feel the same way; he never ate biscuits.

Louis liked this set of paintings, not for the cynicism but because the people in it were like exquisitely drawn little puppets whose existence had only one purpose, to make this point, not real people with real lives.  There was so much going on in the pictures, everything meant something more than it seemed, the sceptical faces in the paintings on the wall, the dogs chained together, a woman with a squirrel, a broken sword, the horns on the statue.

 Ian couldn’t really see the point of art, especially old art, it just looked brown to him.  Even Louis, who loved all art, absolutely all of it, even he never made a very convincing case for the brown ones.  The trees were taller in the old days, nobody did trees like that anymore, but Ian couldn’t tell the difference between a Gainsborough or a Constable, not even a Turner, nor for that matter a van Gogh either, if he was perfectly honest.  The Poussins were a horrible colour, horrible pink and blue, didn’t go together, no harmony. 

 He didn’t mind clever art, like Escher for example, because at least it didn’t pretend to be reality and had involved a bit of thought.  The brown ones just depressed him.  And he hated the crowds in the National Gallery and could never understand why it was always so crowded since everybody else must secretly feel as he did.  But he kept coming back, partly to be with Louis, and partly because he thought that if he kept exposing himself to old art maybe something would eventually click and he’d start enjoying it, like olives, or green tea, and anyway it was warm in here and there was somewhere to sit down.  The crowds swarmed by but mostly just read the notes at the side of the pictures.  Sometimes he and Louis timed them and most people were gone in seconds, an endless stream of people looking at paintings for two seconds each.  They spent longer in the gift shop.  But so did he and Louis.

 If he threw a tin of paint over, say, that painting there, how long would it take the guard to hoist himself up out of his chair and come and nab him?  He could be miles away by the time they sprang into action.  Would an alarm go off?  Probably the lid of the tin would get stuck and it would take ages to inch it off with a blunt knife.  Rust never sleeps.

He and Louis often sat in art galleries talking nonsense like Peter Cook and Dudley Moore at the pub but Louis was pretending and Ian was just being himself. 

He knew it was all nonsense because they had once gone to a talk about a painter they hadn’t heard of called Alexander Reid and the picture on display looked exactly like a van Gogh painting, the style was almost a forgery, they whispered to each other.  But, they decided, not anywhere near as good as a real van Gogh - too brash.

The lecture began and they learned that Alexander Reid wasn’t a painter at all but an art dealer who was a friend of van Gogh – the forgery was a portrait of him by van Gogh.  And then it suddenly looked like a very good van Gogh indeed.

Some talks were interesting, some irritating and some only background noise to sleep to.  Ian slept a lot in art galleries.

Art was a futile attempt to pin something down and nothing can be pinned down in this way, it wriggles itself free.  Art tried to make the impermanent permanent but it was merely static so it was a lie.  It could not accept the fact of oblivion but we are already living in oblivion - which is why people have children or buy houses.  The arts, children and houses - all insecure people succumb to one or the other.

Art was overrated; it was an affectation. 

Only the natural world was real:  it moved and you couldn’t control it.  Wild birds still flew about – no amount of mechanisation put a stop to that.  They got poisoned and shot at and suchlike and there weren’t nearly as many of them as there used to be but even now they were warm little bundles of life in an otherwise controlled artificial world.  Nobody owned them.

The fat disgusting faces of vile idiot people slobbered past as Ian looked up at them, kicking him with their dusty feet, ugly and pimpled and talking nonsense just like he and Louis did.  He felt ill.  Everything looked like he was in a room of bendy mirrors.  It went all echoey.

Louis found peace within the lie; he understood its purpose. 

He got up with a murmur and said, “It’s OK, we can go now”, and walked off, checking through his rucksack for his bus pass.  Louis said, “Do you think it’ll be dry by the time we get home?”

 Ian had painted the flat peacock blue, to add a bit of vibrancy to their lives, but the smell made him queasy.

Leaving the gallery Louis always thought of the time he had run shrieking from Room 14 and the Adoration of the Kings.  Through Rooms 11 and 12, back through the central hall and down the steps to the front entrance,  screaming the words YOU FUCKING LIAR at a retreating figure he couldn’t catch up with, like in a cartoon, since the figure was high on crack cocaine and it was illogical how fast he could run, he moved with an agility that was quite phenomenal in one so replete with illegal substances, and it was Louis himself who’d been pounced on by an overweight curator and kept in a room till the police arrived.  A part of him still missed the excitement.

He suddenly realised that Ian was not beside him and had not answered his question.  Turning back, he saw that a crowd had gathered round where Ian was slumped forward, bent double on a bench, wheezing and crying out, “I’m going to die, I’m going to die!”  He was saying that he had a sharp pain across his chest and he was breathing shallowly; he was crying in an extremely pathetic manner.  

By now a woman was sitting next to him and holding his hand telling him to breathe slowly.  Wherever there is any sort of crisis there is always a bossy middle-aged woman nearby elbowing everyone else out of the way.  “Iiiinnnn ooooouuuutttttt”, she breathed with energy.

As Louis came closer someone in the crowd said, “I think he’s having a panic attack”.

The bossy woman told the crowd to go away, they were only making matters worse, but talking kindly to Ian, and Louis stood there like he was in the way, waiting for it all to be over.

 Ian said, “I want Louis”, and the woman reluctantly moved up to let Louis in.  She said, “Are you a doctor?”

Louis said, “Do you need a paper bag?”, but she told him crossly that that was only a gimmick, it was the breathing that was the thing, the breathing not the bag.

It took half an hour for Ian to calm down.  Louis longed to drift away with the rest of the crowd.  Ian thanked the in-out woman, she reluctantly let him go and he and Louis left the gallery.  Louis asked, “Shall we get a taxi?” but Ian wouldn’t hear of the expense.

 Ian wouldn’t get a bus or the tube either because he hated public transport because he hated the public, he always had someone sat next to him crunching crisps and apples in his ear. 

His legs were still wobbly and he and Louis had only walked as far as Leicester Square, but now he wanted to walk all the way home.

Piccadilly Circus was packed and a Spanish tourist politely asked the way to Trafaglar Square.  Louis said pointedly that the Norway Christmas tree was already lit up in Trafalgar Square, even though he himself couldn’t even pronounce Monaco properly, never mind make himself understood in Spanish.

They both walked in silence.  Eventually Ian said, “Are you angry with me?”  Louis said he wasn’t.

Nearly home and a young woman with jet black hair strode past them with a red and yellow parrot on her shoulder.  Ian didn’t notice because he was now moaning about how tired he was.  Louis swivelled round, touched Ian’s arm and said, “I’ll see you at home”.

“What’s up?”, “Nothing - I’ll see you soon, have a cup of tea and go to bed”.

Louis ran to catch up with the black-haired woman.  As she jogged along, the parrot’s claws were gripping onto her shoulder like clothes pegs on a washing line in a stiff breeze.  She also had a baby in a sling around her chest. 

Turning round she said, “Sorry, do I know you?”

She was wearing a rather jaunty trilby with a sprig of heather pinned to it.

“Is that Bonnie?”, Louis asked, nodding towards the parrot.

“Do you know her?”

“Is Rex in hospital again?”

“Don’t you know?  He died three weeks ago”, she said.

“Is he alright?”, said Louis.

“The cremation was on Tuesday”, she said.

Louis nodded.  She said it in such a contemptuous way as if he himself had lit the furnace.

He didn’t know what else to say so he said, “Thank you for telling me”.

She hurried on; he stood still.  It was very curious.  He didn’t feel anything.  He just felt nothing.  They were only words he had been expecting forever.  And yet he wanted to share it with someone.  But there was nobody to tell.  He walked on. 

And all the feet passed by with places to be, everyone’s feet but yours.

He called Rex’s number on his phone.  It said This Phone Is Switched Off.  He sent a message.  They hadn’t spoken for months.  He walked faster.  He still didn’t feel anything.

There was a shop and he went inside and there was Christmas music playing, mistletoe and wine, mistletoe and wine, logs on the fire and gifts on the tree, but pronounced giffs, giffs on the tree, giffs on the tree, on and on it jangled, like the glace cherry on top of a cake of shit.  Then suddenly there was a quiet minor landslide within him, his head began to pulsate and the numb areas began to flood with black and he gave a little scream, everything went under and introverted, inverted itself, you slipped from my fingers and I lost you, and he was holding Rex’s fingers over a cliff, by his fingertips, over the edge, with the sea below, and Rex silently slipped through his fingers and Louis wasn’t even aware they had still been holding hands so it didn’t happen like that at all and he said “oh”, and he tried to hold onto the hands to stop Rex falling and still he slipped through his fingertips but Louis kept holding on and he walked through the crowd with the Christmas music and he could hear a faint howling sound in his head, getting louder and louder, and a subtle emptiness in his stomach, and he held onto the fingertips.  He felt the body falling, falling in an endless fall and nothing to cushion the fall, but no end in sight, no impact, just falling.

Louis cried out no but it was too late.

I just want to speak with you.

He tried calling Rex’s number again and it was still switched off and he sent another message and then he went down the Grand Union to Paddington Basin.

The canal towpath was icy.

The Japanese woman was there, on Rex’s boat.  Her baby was asleep and Bonnie was silent.

“It is so sad”, she said, as if she had been expecting him.  She was looking at all of Rex’s things.

She had a key to Rex’s boat.  Why didn’t I have a key to his boat?

Rex hadn’t paid the moorage for six months and the waterways were threatening to take the boat as payment.  He had inherited the boat and the mooring from a man called Tilas who had nobody of his own and liked him that much.

“What are you going to do with all his things?”

“The council will come and take it all away”, she said.

Louis looked around at everything Rex owned.  “You can’t just throw it away”, he said.

“It is all emptied of him now”, she said, “It is hollow”.

It meant nothing to her now that Rex was gone, it was completely emptied of his presence, but it had to go somewhere and it was important to tie up loose ends.

To Louis it was not empty, it was full of Rex, bursting with him.  He saw Rex’s face in every single item, the smell of Rex, the mind of Rex, everything was drenched with Rex, every object was so much more than just itself.

Louis suggested that they take it all round to his own flat, all of it, have you got a car?

There was a wheelbarrow on the tow-path and they spent the rest of the evening removing Rex back to Louis’ flat, she loading the wheelbarrow and he wheeling it two miles to the flat.  It was cold and drizzly.  Ian slept through it all. 

Emiko went to a hardware store and got more black sacks.

Every item Louis touched and picked up and packed away had a memory attached to it, much of it he had given Rex himself, all of it was now damaged in some way, torn, ripped, folded, bloodstained, heroin splashes.  Lovely postcards Louis had sent him, even proper cards he had made, folded in half, frazzled.  Empty pots of vitamin pills - Emiko said, “I advised him of that, we went to the health shop and he stole seventy quid’s worth of stuff then expected me to carry it all home for him”.

When Rex had first moved into the boat she had gone with him to a garden centre where he had stolen a full set of steel saucepans and kitchen knives.  Nobody had challenged him as he left the store.

“I made him eat correctly”, she said, but Rex had always known how to eat correctly so Louis didn’t know why she was taking credit for it.

There were syringes but she said he had stopped since his foot.  They looked like fresh syringes.

Why wouldn’t you stop when you were with me. 

I wasn’t a gangrened foot.

So much of your life in the last two years I know nothing about and I can’t ask you now.

All the grubby little scraps of paper they carefully packed into the sacks, Rex’s to-do lists, people to pay, people to see, things to buy, screwed up, creased, burnt at the edges with cigarettes, his utility bills, credit card bills, a thick wad of business cards from people who had lent him money to get a train back to Nottingham, his medical records, his court records, his drug appointments, bailiff letters, leaflets about health cures, miracles cures for backs for hearts for kidneys, adverts for bigger boats, and Louis’ name was in all the lists, usually about two-thirds down, incessant scraps, desperate for the good clean future that he just couldn’t make happen.  There was a leaflet about insomnia that the doctor had given him and he had scribbled on the contraindications anagrams from all the longer words, but not always real words, insomnia, monia,  difficulty, dufty, sleeping, pinge, dreaming, anger.

The secrets of dead people are not the unknown affairs they had, the illegitimate children, or the millions in offshore banking accounts, but the leaflets they keep and why, the bank statements showing where they drew money in what shop, for £2.71 or £3.19.  It was oddly moving, the sheer banality of it.

Louis couldn’t throw away anything with Rex’s handwriting on it, any smear of blood.

Also here on the boat were the angry messages Louis had written him when they were together, Rex had kept everything, and it was excruciating for Louis to see again his own impotent frustrated rage but he packed these messages as reverently as all the rest because the memory was also pleasant because when he had written them Rex had still been there to receive them.

There was a half-eaten pineapple in the little fridge, drying up.  Some pleasures Rex could always defer.

Under a chair were his shoes worn to nothing with his soul imprinted in them; his feet were always in the front line of battle.  Your shoes need you inside them - what his feet had gone through, the inners bent up and rigid, all went in the bags, in the barrow, to the flat, everything was precious, every stub of cigarette, a small crack pipe which Louis pocketed like a saint’s relic.

Days on the streets with no socks, your feet bleeding, and you would plead with me to stay the night - yet you never spoke of how hard it was, how much pain you were in and how depressed you were (Rex saying, “I’m so unhappy”) - you were so unhappy.  Louis became slowly saturated again with Rex’s misery.

It was a searing pain in his gut to know that he had not been able to make Rex happy, had not been able to make his life easy.

Emiko suddenly laughed.

“When I met Ian -” Louis started.

“He never said anything”, she said, as if Rex spoke to her about everything.  Rex never much confided anything in anyone.

I wish I had been perfect, I wish I had been consistent in my love.

Louis’ arms ached from pushing the wheelbarrow.  In a cardboard box there were clothes which Louis had bought in charity shops with Rex’s blood all over them, pockets torn off impatiently, and all these were respectfully folded and went in the black sacks.

All his lighters, broken lighters, his big clumsy hands, Rex had enormous respect for anyone who could light a Swan Vesta without ripping the box to shreds.

The dressing gown with the cord tied into a tourniquet to get the veins up – that was like a happy memory now.

Nothing was binned – it was as if some secret of Rex might be hidden among all this rubbish that would provide the answer to everything, even though there was no question.

They worked in silence, even the baby slept on, and the parrot was quiet.

Emiko picked up a pair of holey gloves – “His poor hands”, she said.

In the Chapel of Rest, his poor red hands, red raw, bitten down nails, she had kissed them but she did not tell Louis this.  So cold, those hands.  They had been scrubbed so clean by the funeral people that they almost weren’t his hands anymore, which were always grimy, those hands forever busy, nervously twisting little bits of paper, rolling cigarettes, drawing doodles, making lists, chewing his nails at the front of the nail because he had run out of length, large rough hands, man’s hands.  His dead lips, dead red lips, no shy sweet smile, nothing.

To see him so still who was always so alive, talking talking, except when he was asleep for hours - being dead just wasn’t Rex‘s style.  She had touched the body gently to see if he would wake up – there are no unique responses to death; its inertia frightened her.

Nobody came into the room to disturb her.  She’d drawn some pictures of him lying there – she drew portraits in Leicester Square for money and was used to people fidgeting about – it was a pleasant change to have someone so still.  But when she was finished she wanted to share the picture with him and he wouldn’t open his eyes.

The funeral was out in the middle of nowhere, she got on a train that was so slow she could have towed it quicker between her teeth.  Emiko had missed her own mother’s funeral because she had a spot on the end of her nose and hadn’t wanted anyone in the family judging her, but she had to go to Rex’s.

At the Chapel of Rest she was let in by a woman who acted like she was showing potential buyers round a flat.

He was still beautiful.

Emiko had wanted to squeeze into the coffin next to him so he wouldn’t be alone, wrap her arms around him and keep him warm and safe, as he had done for her when she had most needed it.  She sat with him for two hours, feeding her baby, quietly reading the paper.  It was horrible to leave him and go across the town to the church and wait for him there, arriving to be burnt, like abandoning him to a fiery hell, alone.  It just seemed wrong that it was his funeral.  Sitting outside the chapel watching all the hearses slowly coming down a long long driveway, until finally she knew it was his hearse coming, slowly slowly it came, like doom arriving, the end of everything.  A car with the body of Rex in it, wanting to freeze the moment and stop it progressing any further, put it all in reverse, the car going backwards, speeding backwards, not coming here, not carrying that load, reverse reverse so everything hasn’t happened and none of this follows.

She told Louis it was a beautiful funeral.  She said he didn’t tell anyone he was ill, not this time, he knew he’d run out of chances.

Louis was still thinking about Rex’s feet and the last time he’d seen him, wanting to come indoors into the flat, just dropped round, saying, “I’ll take my shoes off”, all humble.  And Louis had said no.  They chatted for a while on the doorstep then Rex meekly walked away.  They hadn’t hugged.

The boat smelt so smoky it was like he was in the room with them.

Corpses of apples, grapes to sultanas.

 

Ian had gone straight to bed but he woke up when Louis wheeled the final load into the flat.  Louis took his coat off, sat down and looked at all the black bags.

 Ian came out and saw the huge pile of rubbish on the sofa, everywhere, four foot high in places, and a woman he’d never met.

Louis said, “It’s from the boat.  It’s Rex’s stuff”.

His voice had retreated to somewhere deep inside him, way way back, the words choked out.

 Ian said angrily, “He’s not moving in here”.

Louis started crying, thinking that Ian would hug him and comfort him.  It didn’t seem necessary to say that word.

 Ian couldn’t understand why he was crying.  He thought Louis would be happy that he was up out of bed and feeling better.

He said, “If you think we’re turning the flat into a shrine for that cunt”.

“Don’t call him that”.

“It’s you who told me he was a cunt.  It’s not your stuff, you weren’t together anymore.  Why’ve you taken it all, it’s not your responsibility.  Has that parrot shit here?”

Emiko had brought both the parrot and the baby to see Rex’s final resting place.  There was a large white stain on one of the binbags.

Ian said Rex was a devious little shit.  Ian respected animals so much that he wouldn’t eat them.  He respected their right to live and not be made into coats, tested on in laboratories or made to perform tricks.  It was an ethical decision – this was a violent world and one was either pro violence or anti violence and if you were anti violence then that included animals.  But the concept of pets was a mystery to him.  Who would want the trouble?  Just feeding and shitting, feeding and shitting.  And scratching themselves and bringing home fleas.  Animals’ arses, animals’ tongues.  Bits hanging off their arses.  Rough tongues.  Drool.

The parrot spread one of her wings right out as if to say See how beautiful I am.  Or possibly, my armpit itches with sweat.  Ian looked away and suppressed an urge to retch.  He said, “Well?”

Louis looked at the piles of Rex’s things – I don’t want your things I want you –

He couldn’t sit still; he got up and put his coat back on.

 Ian said, “Where are you going now?”

“Out”.

“Where?  It’s nearly midnight” – and to Louis’ retreating back – “You’re not leaving me here with all this crap”.

But he was gone.  Emiko sorted out her baby’s hat and got up and left too.

Ian kicked lightly at one pile of Rex’s belongings and it moved; one of the bags slid down.  He put it back where it had been and went to make himself some chamomile tea.

 

The faster Louis walked the closer everything came in on him.  Every single place he passed had the face of Rex, he was like a spider leaving misty webs everywhere to catch him.

He had not really thought about Rex at all for two years – death focuses the attention wonderfully.  He knew he had been ill but had not taken it seriously; Rex always seemed bullet-proof.  But that was a lie.  He had often been ill when they were together, his heart, his kidneys, his back.  Time in hospital again and again, and when he came home they lived on Forty Sips.  Rex took all the money for drugs but he had a repeat prescription for Forty Sips and that was what they lived on, until he was deemed well and that too was stopped.

It was very very cold tonight.  The first time he’d met Rex it had been windy.  He had noticed a man in the road flustering about picking up bank notes, and Louis and several other people went to help him, pressing the notes into his hands and pockets, twenties and fifties, it must have been thousands of pounds blowing around.

After everyone else had gone Louis said to him, “What are you, a pimp?”  And Rex had smiled, looked to left and right and said, “It’s not mine”.  He said, “Guy who dropped it, I shouted, I couldn’t make him hear me, and then people started helping me pick it up for him but he’s disappeared.  Fancy a drink?”

And they spent the rest of the day together, spending someone else’s money.  Talking talking talking.  Rex had that week emerged from a short stint in prison and was wearing oversized prison sweats, in a strange burgundy orange colour.  He was always such a mess - why was that so endearing?  Ian had to have everything clean and pressed.  He felt like Rex needed him but it was an illusion.

They had sat on a wall by the British Museum buying bags and bags of overpriced chestnuts because there were only 4 in a bag, so close that their legs touched and neither had pulled away, it just felt right.  Later on Rex was so tired he had slept with his head on Louis’ lap in Russell Square Gardens for over an hour.  When Louis finally woke him up, nearly midnight by then, Rex went into a phone box to light a cigarette out of the wind and Louis squashed in behind him and when they said goodbye Louis said, “I think you’re gorgeous”, backing away, stepping backwards as he spoke, as if for a quick getaway, to dodge a rejection, and Rex had sprung forward and hugged him tight, really like being enveloped by a bear, strange considering how wiry he was and not tall, strong for his size.  Except a real bear would bite your head off.

During that first afternoon Rex had begged a tiny tomato off an office worker eating a packed lunch under the Statue of Eros; he held it between thumb and forefinger and gently squeezed it until the flesh broke, smiling mischievously at Louis while he did it.

Louis walked now past all the places where he had shouted at Rex, the town hall, the library, market, post office, all-night shop, bus stop.  The cash machine where he had shrieked at him and called him a dirty little junkie, chased after him to throw his clothes at him and told him not to come home, how Rex just quietly walked away not wanting to attract attention.  And how Rex stayed away for weeks and when he finally did come home his feet were white and red with sores because he had been sleeping rough.  You told me not to come home.  I am so sorry.

All the cafes with the cups of coffee with 20 packets of sugar.

Louis had never been able to keep his mouth shut, just be kind, be calm, be tolerant.  Let it go – that’s the buzzword.  He would never bend.  He’d never seen a man cry before.

That first day when Rex slept on his lap, after about fifteen minutes, Louis had begun to get irritated and bored.  There were many times after that when he had been cruel – Rex would say in his cracked voice, “Please be nice to me”, or ask for a cuddle, and Louis would refuse.  So many terrible things he’d said, and how angry he always got when Rex just wouldn’t wake up - Louis couldn’t walk away and leave him in peace, he nagged and nagged.  How happy Rex always was when Louis was in a good mood.  Louis rang his number again so that Rex would pick up the phone and he could say sorry.  Sorry sorry sorry. 

Horrible things I did, nice things I didn’t do, you tried so hard.

So many times later on, after he met Ian, when Rex called him and he wouldn’t answer the phone.  Rex phoned him late one night after he got arrested, asking him to come to the police station for his keys, and Louis told him to fuck off and hung up on him.

 In prison Rex had queued up for an hour just to call him to let him know there was a vegetarian cookery programme on television, but by the time he got to the front of the queue the programme was over and Louis was out anyway, had his phone on silent, and hated cooking programmes but that wasn’t the point.

Now Rex would not answer the phone.

Louis had ignored his calls because of Ian but that wasn’t Ian’s fault, he made his own choice, but if he wasn’t with Ian he wouldn’t have had to ignore the calls - except he would have, he didn’t want to talk to Rex anymore.

He had known Rex was ill but had not phoned him.

It was astonishing to him now what an open wound Rex still was within him.

You are an open wound in my heart that will never heal.

I thought you had killed my love but here it still is, huge as ever, how did I not see it.

He had known Rex was ill but had not phoned him, he would never bend for Rex, he was sorry for that.  All the times he had said “no” killed him.

How did you stand it, me always complaining, I never stopped.

Louis had by now walked up and down Edgware Road and all the side streets as far as Marble Arch and there was nothing anywhere so he turned around and came home.

In the dark, in the lamplight, in the stillness, the scent of fires in other people’s homes, sweet memories of coming home late with you.  Such a strong feeling, so throbbingly alive.  It was like the weather was an exact replica of a time he had walked home with Rex, the whole air, the atmosphere became so alive with Rex, so crackling with electricity that he felt like he was five years ago and Rex was by his side, dawdling and looking at all the cars in the BMW showroom.

A man rolling a cigarette the way you do.

Louis went to bed.  Ian had left a note for him before he went to work the night shift:  “I’m sorry for what I said.  You’ll have no problems with me from now on”.

Louis couldn’t be still.

He turned the light out and he was alone in a huge black hole; he turned it back on again so his eyes had something to cling to on the way down.

 Ian hated the light on but he wasn’t here.

 Finally Louis slept for a couple of hours.

He awoke at 5am into the same black hole.  Rex was gone.

Emiko had given him a spare boat key when they were doing the wheelbarrow trips and hadn’t asked for it back.

He went back to the empty boat to clean the walls of all the fine brown sprays of heroin, got on his hands and knees and wiped away at the floors, every corner, still looking for the secret thing, as though a tiny speck of dust would magically expand and transform itself into Rex, five years ago, looking for Rex as if Rex had shrunk himself down into a tiny essence of himself, still findable, still somewhere, still here, who could somehow be brought back to his rightful shape and size.  He went round for hours peering closely at everything on the floor, scared of missing something.

You invited me here to cook me a meal and I never turned up.  You sent me a message saying everything was hot and ready and where was I?

Looking looking.

A letter had been delivered to the boat – seeing Rex’s name on the envelope lifted his spirits, like Rex still had a presence in the world so long as an envelope had his name on it - but it was only a bailiff’s letter.  Louis put it in his pocket.

Emiko came in and said, “What are you looking for?”   But he didn’t know.  “We haven’t missed anything”, she said.

She was carrying a footballer’s duffle bag with her baby’s essentials in it.  She asked if he wanted to come to Leicester Square with her but he didn’t.

Still looking for a sign, a message, he didn’t know what, to prove that Rex was still alive, and still loved him.  He could smell cigarettes and dried blood.  It was so cold in the boat but Rex’s body was always warm.

What his life had been like up to the point when he met Rex Louis could hardly remember now but he could remember it very well.  Rex was the first man who had stayed.  Which was strange when he so often didn’t come home, but still he had stayed.  They had pivoted around each other like dogs getting acquainted, nose to nose, interested but never quite trusting.  That was another lie.   

 

Back home at the flat Louis ignored the huge pile of Rex’s belongings and got out his little Rex box from under the bed, but couldn’t open it.  Flipped open the lid then shut it again.  There were some photos of Rex he had kept but they were all taped together after being ripped up in fight after fight – Rex looked unhappy in all of them, but trying to smile, he always tried to smile in photographs.

Louis looked at himself in the mirror.  He already looked different.  His face was so drained even his acne scars were no longer apparent.  That was nice.

 Ian came into the room and smiled.  He said, “You’ve still not said if you like the new paint”.

Louis, astonished, said, “Yes it’s fine”.

“You could be a bit more enthusiastic, I did it for you, you like the sea”.

That was Rex.

Ian said, “I’ve made tea”.

“I’m not hungry”.

 Ian had bought some things from the Italian deli downstairs which he knew Louis liked, tarts of rosemary and garlic, aubergine and spinach, toasted almonds which were so expensive they only ever bought them as presents, better than diamonds.

“It doesn’t work like that”, Louis said, like Ian was trying to buy peace.

“Well how does it work?  I said I was sorry.  You’ve got all his crap here, I’m not complaining, I understand that’s part of the grieving process.  It’s wrecked the look of the place, but I’m not complaining, you can’t get the full effect of the paint job with all this rubbish in the sight line”.

He couldn’t understand why, after all Rex had done to him, Louis was so bothered that he was dead.

Louis said, “I don’t want him dead!”

 Ian said, as gently as he could, which wasn’t very, “It doesn’t really matter what you want - he is”.

“I know he is!”  I can still want him not to be, Louis thought, I want to gouge out my own brain so I don’t have to think about it anymore, I want to go to sleep and not wake up.  How could he think nobody would care?  Rex coming home after weeks away and Louis saying, “My god I thought you were dead”, and Rex saying, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you”, not sarcastically, really meaning it, testing.

Ian said, “You’ve just got to accept it, and move on”.

Louis winced inside.  He kicked the Rex box back under the bed and made for the door.

Ian chased after him to apologise again, even though he didn’t know what he was apologising for, and to say the paint didn’t matter, trying to work out what he could say to make Louis feel better.  But Louis was too quick for him and he couldn’t figure out which direction he’d gone in.  He raced back indoors to write down his speech so he wouldn’t forget it.

You’ll have no problems with me from now on.

Louis running away with his baby grief, not yet old enough to stand on its own two feet.

 

That evening, stopping his bike at traffic lights on the way to work, Ian became aware of a short tubby woman at the bus stop who looked like a very tanned Miss Tiggywinkle and she was staring at him intently.

She had a ten year old boy standing solemnly at her side.

 Ian knew who she was because his father had told him he was the dead spit of her brother Alan and she was still recognisable from the wedding photos.  His father had kept these photographs by his bedside till he died.  She had Ian’s mouth and he had her eyes, which he had always hated.

He felt it wasn’t seemly to have to reveal himself to her; she should discover him; the onus was surely on her to resume contact:  she was the adult.  He nodded back at her, almost imperceptibly, against his will, and then realised she wasn’t staring at him at all but at a poster on the opposite side of the road advertising anti-ageing cream, with an 18 year old girl demonstrating its efficacy.

Suddenly she said, “Are you related to me?”

Then she said, “You’re the dead spit of my brother Alan.  Are you little Alfie?”

 Ian said, “I’m Ian”.  He didn’t ask who Alfie was.

“My Ian?” she said and stepped back to fully take him in, appraising him with a ruthless objectivity he didn’t much care for.

She said to the young boy, “It’s my Ian”.  And the young boy held out his hand to shake, saying “I’m John”, but without explaining who John was in relation to the moment in hand.

“How long has it been?” she mused, as if he were a cancer in remission.

Ever since you walked out when I was twelve and told me I could visit you on holidays, he thought, but said nothing because he didn’t want to seem needy.  He wasn’t needy.  He had never really noticed her gone, it had been a relief when she went and it was just him and his father, so much more peaceful without her.  But seeing her again woke up something in him that he hadn’t even known was there.  He could see his face in hers and it fascinated and repelled him.

“Shall we take him for a cup of tea?” ventured the boy John.

Ian had to be at work but he didn’t want to tell her where he worked but he also didn’t want to be late.  But if he said he couldn’t go for a cup of tea he would never see her again and he had no idea where to find her.  He wanted to say no because he wanted her to insist but he was afraid she wouldn’t insist so he followed them into the coffee lounge of a pub.

She asked him what he wanted.  He said, “Black coffee please no sugar decaf”.

Mrs. Tors looked at him in a mocking sort of way with a twinkle in her eye.

She said, “Have something stronger.  I’m having another rum and coke”.

But Ian was even more afraid of turning up drunk at work than he was of her laughing at him, although it was a close competition.  He again asked for black coffee, hoping she would admire his abstinence.

Mrs. Tors said that was no fun so she got him a cappuccino.

While she was at the bar Ian tried to surreptitiously call work to let them know he would be late but the boy John was sitting there staring at him.

Mrs. Tors came back with a tray and put a tiny drop of her rum into John’s coke.  Ian said, “You can’t do that” and she said, “Shut up do you want to get me arrested?”

Ian looked at the cappuccino while Mrs. Tors talked with John about where they’d just been and where they were going tomorrow.  Suddenly she said to Ian, “Are you married yet?”

There are moments in life when the truth is utterly irrelevant.  Ian said, “We’re thinking about it, but I don’t talk about it, so please don’t say anything”.

She asked who on earth she would tell; she didn’t work for the Wall Street Journal.  She said she told her partner everything, but only him.  Ian did not want her and her partner discussing the fact that Louis wouldn’t marry him so he shut up.

Mrs. Tors primped herself up in her seat.  She said that her partner asked her to marry him every morning, it was very romantic, she said.  “I always say Not today”.

There was a pub quiz starting and Ian pretended to be interested in the questions so that he wouldn’t have to deal with any more of hers.  He disliked quizzes because it was only proving what you already knew and didn’t require any mental gymnastics, beyond recall.  He had good recall, although not for the sort of facts that were generally asked in quizzes.

“Pity we’re too late to join in”, she said, “I love a good quiz”.

Ian agreed it was a pity.  So she had a sharp brain, that was something.  He looked at the milky coffee again and thought about cows with mastitis wincing in pain, their calves gone and latte drinking morons in their place.  She was still talking with the boy John and there were no long enough gaps in their conversation for him to say goodbye.  He kept looking at his watch to see how late he was.  He would be on time tonight instead of the half hour early which he preferred.  He muttered, “I’m late for work”.

John asked him where he worked and Mrs. Tors said, “Work?  He doesn’t know the meaning of the word”.  Even though she had no experience of his character after the age of 12, Ian thought, Well it’s true, I have never been down a coal pit, or chopped wood, or even sat in an office for eight hours a day filing things, so he couldn’t say anything.  But he wanted to subtly inform her of all the worthwhile activities he did in the world, as a worthwhile human being who did nothing but good, despite not having much of a paypacket to show for it, but he couldn’t think of anything.  If he had trained as a scientist in Japan and worked in a power plant he could have sacrificed his life to control the nuclear meltdown, but then he wouldn’t be here now to tell her about it.  Except he’d read those scientists had to go incognito because everyone in Japan thought they were responsible for the melt-down in the first place.  He had never been good at chemistry.

Mrs. Tors had a smirk on her face as if she could read his mind.

Eventually the boy John asked her if they would still have time to get to the pantomime and Mrs. Tors said, “Yes, we can’t sit here all day.”

Ian said, “Are you living round here now?” and she said, “For a while”.  She said, “I can’t believe how much you look like Alan”.  She said it was fascinating.

As she was putting on her coat, Ian said – because she didn’t offer it - “Can you give me your address then?” so the boy John wrote it down, to practice his handwriting.  Ian wrote down his own address and phone number but hated himself for it because she should have asked.  But he couldn’t wait and risk her not asking and, even though he knew that if she didn’t ask then she wasn’t the mother he wanted, he still wanted her to be the mother he wanted her to be and maybe he could train her and she’d like him if she knew him better.  Then Mrs. Tors and the boy John went back to the bus-stop and jumped on a bus.

All in all Ian had to admit that it had been a pretty terrible meeting.  His heart was racing as he got into work two minutes late.  He had nobody to report to so it didn’t really matter but he cleaned twice as fast to catch up with his routine so that he could get back to Louis at the usual time.  The smell of piss and shit and ammonia hardly pierced his consciousness at all tonight.  He hoped she would call. 

 

Louis said, “Why’s she back?”

“I didn’t ask.  With any luck she’s coming home to die”.

Louis asked what they’d talked about but Ian didn’t know.  She had re-married twice since she’d left England; his father had been invited to both weddings.  She had mainly talked to the boy John but that was OK, they were just getting used to each other again.  She had kept looking at him.

Louis asked who the boy was but he didn’t know that either– neither of them had given any hint.

 Ian said, “You seem better”.

Louis said he was tired.  He bit his lip.  He felt bruised.  He kept looking in the mirror and could see the bruise on his face, in his eyes.  He looked so different.  Couldn’t Ian see it?  He was a completely different person now.  But he held all this back and then was angry for having to.  You seem better.  He had politely asked about Ian’s mother.  Ian didn’t ask about him, just made assumptions with no foundation.

He wanted to go to bed but Ian was going to bed and he had Smooch Radio on in there and Louis didn’t want to hear it.  They usually caught each other for a couple of hours when Ian came home and before Louis got up.

Ian said, “I said you’re looking better”, which was a compliment.

Louis said, “I’m going out”.

“But I’ve only just got in.  It’s 3am!  You’re trying to get away from me again!  What have I done wrong now?”

Louis scoured the countryside of his imagination and said, “I’m hungry and there’s no food here”.  There was always food in the cupboards.  They lived over a shop.

Ian said, “I love you”.

Louis tried to say, “I love you too”, which was the versicle and the response, but the words refused to be either pushed or dragged out.  They had scurried away to a tiny little cave in a back corner of his mind and were staying put in the dark, with their arms folded.

I can’t love him because you are no longer here, I miss you, I hate the pain he made me cause you.  I’m not better.

“It’s all wrong – you’re with me now, you weren’t even together anymore.  You left him.  You’ve got no right to be upset.  It’s bizarre”.

Louis said, “It doesn’t quite work like that”.  He didn’t know why he was suddenly an expert in how things work.

“Well how does it work?”

 Ian realised he was raising his voice and repeating himself and probably not helping matters but he couldn’t stop himself.  Louis had run out the door. 

 

Next night Ian was at work and Louis again woke up at 3am.  Blink.  Again pushed out of the plane with no parachute.  Rex was gone.  Gone gone gone.  He felt sick.  He felt like howling.  He started whimpering and it rose to howling. 

He ran around his head, howling, trying to grab at something in his mind to steady himself but could find nothing.  The enormity of the black hole of space was shocking.  There was absolutely nothing to hold onto.  He felt like he was crashing into the walls and the walls were an illusion and he was crashing into nothing.  It was dark outside.  It had been snowing.  He got up and pulled some more clothes on.  He ran around the flat still screaming in his head why why why why why why why.   He couldn’t find his shoes; he went outside.

It was black and the snow was silent and the world was enormous and there was nobody in it.  It was terrifying.

He needed to talk to someone, anyone, just a tiny shred of normality to cling onto.  There was not even a policecar about.  Some cars went by on their way to somewhere else miles away in a different world.

He wanted to talk to someone who cared about Rex but he didn’t know anyone, just be with someone, sit in a room with another human being.  Emiko was already sick of him.

He walked up the street looking at all the houses, looking for a light on somewhere.  The screaming was still in his head.

Number 16 had a light on upstairs, he knew them by sight, they’d recently had a baby and he had complimented them on its eyes two weeks ago, to be polite, even though it looked like W.H. Auden after a heavy night.

Louis pressed the bell and stood back so they could see him through the spy hole and not be alarmed by such an early caller.  He tried to smooth down his hair and wipe his eyes, do his shirt buttons up.

Nobody came down.  Maybe they had gone away for Christmas.  Maybe they’d taken the baby to California for plastic surgery.  Maybe the bell didn’t work.  He pressed the button again and stood there shuffling expectantly from foot to foot but nobody came.

He moved off, still whimpering.

There was a full house ablaze with light at the end of the road, at 101.  This was where Mrs. Meier lived, who was now a lollipop lady.  He supposed she must get up early for the zebra crossing.

He rang the bell, which was a complicated affair, and Coral Meier immediately answered the door with a mug of coffee in one hand and a roll-up between her teeth.  She saw his face, took him by one hand and brought him into her smoky kitchen, made him sit by the heater.  The kitchen was small and in one corner, taking up far too much room, some large placards faced the wall.  He wondered what was on them.  There was also a strange clicking noise going on.

Coral noticed him looking around.  “It’s the fridge”, she said.  “It’s like having a kangaroo in the room”.

She made him a cup of coffee and put some biscuits on the table, chattering endlessly about such inanities it soothed him.  She told him she couldn’t find her new thermal socks, they had cost her £15 for a pack of two and were really warm, really good quality, then suddenly she spotted them by the toaster and alighted upon them with joy and began pulling them on over the thin socks she was already wearing.

Then she sat down quietly opposite Louis and finished her drink.

She pointed out the faint shimmer of a snail trail on her kitchen mat.  She said, “It only comes out at night.  It always goes the same route.  I think it’s heading for the water dish for a drink”.

Louis imagined a slug the size of a haddock slithering across her floor but Mrs. Meier seemed to find it quite sweet.  She didn’t have a cat or dog, she just put the water bowl down for the slugs.

He couldn’t speak, he didn’t know where to begin, but suddenly he exclaimed, “My partner’s died!”   Mrs. Meier thought he meant Ian.

So they spoke about it for a little while, because she had known Rex when he’d lived in the street because he always talked to all the neighbours, and then about thermals again and snow and the baby at number 16 and a builder’s hard-hat which she had recently found on a skip and thought might come in handy, and when she had to leave at 7am in her high-visibility clothes clutching her lollipop Louis felt much better, almost human, the world was coming alive again, there were distractions, and she said, “Come again, come again”, and meant it.

Louis walked all day and went in and out of shops, with his head bursting with Rex – if someone had cut him open it would have been Rex that oozed out of him, that’s all he was made of, nothing of himself left at all.

He went back to the National Gallery to Room 14 and stood in front of the Adoration of the Kings and thought about the time when he and Rex were adoring kings, they loved the ridiculous long sleeves, the pointy foot and the whispering figures in the background.  Why was baby Jesus so often portrayed naked?  They were in a stable in December and child mortality was very high back then.  Jesus the baby-man, the man-baby, man’s face – nobody liked to think of him as a child back then, it was too demeaning.

The day that Rex had run away from him in the National Gallery he was high on crack - he had been looking at the paintings very very slowly, going up to them and inspecting them with wide staring eyes.  But he denied that’s why he’d spent two hours in the lavatories.  Louis just wanted him to admit the truth.  He could never let anything go.  Why wasn’t it enough just to know the truth, why did he have to make Rex humiliate himself?  After Louis had been pounced on, Rex had not waited for him; he had a crack-pipe in his pocket.

Louis looked at the painting and pretended that Rex was standing next to him.  He squinted his eyes so he could see Rex’s reflection in the glass.  And then he went home and all Rex’s things were still there and he couldn’t be in the same room so he went out again.

The very act of walking was a distraction, the movement made him feel like he was moving, like he was doing something practical, not getting away but getting closer.  And there would be fractions of moments, tiny splinters of time, when he actually felt normal.

He saw Rex ahead in that long black coat he had, the hand shielding a lighter over a roll-up, the slight sway in the walk, that little stumble in the distance.  He willed it to be Rex as if this might actually happen; if he concentrated hard enough the form would turn round and Rex would walk towards him with a shy smile and give him a mischievous wink.  The fact that this did not happen he blamed on his own feeble powers of concentration - it might be a very old Chinese man – and he kept trying again with other distant figures.  For he found that Rex was everywhere, there were hundreds of people everywhere who looked a tiny bit like Rex and he concentrated on each of them thinking they would magically transform into Rex, who was like nobody else he had ever met in his life.

He hoped that Rex would feel happy and special that this was the worst pain he had ever felt.

My life is a futile scream to be with you – but that’s what it was like when I was with you – you never came home.

He went into a grocers and the scent of pineapple choked him.  He bought one.

He found a used syringe in the street, and a wad of new wrapped syringes and citric acid and it was comforting, like Rex was talking to him; he put them in his rucksack.

He could understand now why Rex did the things he did, used drugs, spent hours chasing dealers, shooting up; it was this terrible agitation that nothing could still.  He knew what Rex was running from and why he needed something to distract him from it.

I want to die.

He knew what Rex didn’t want to think about, things he had done in his life, thought he had done, the terrible black hole of shame he could not bear to look into.

He wondered if Rex had been afraid at the end, when he was dying, if he was frightened when it was happening, if he felt alone, and he just could not bear it that Rex was gone and he could not ask him.  He would have given – what? – to have been there with him at the end to comfort him.  I have nothing worth giving.

Emiko said he was drugged up to the eyeballs at the end and it sounded funny the way she said it with her sweet voice but it was a non-sequitur; it didn’t follow that he wasn’t frightened.

Walking walking, so much time to fill, just to tire himself out so he might sleep.  Walking kept everything at bay and then he got home and the huge pile of Rex’s things was still there facing him each day and he tried to pick through the pile and move things around, sort things out, but he couldn’t make any decisions and he couldn’t get rid of anything.

And there were people everywhere, but sometimes in the early mornings he walked as far as Soho, all those times he spent with Rex stuck in town overnight - because he needed drugs and wouldn’t go home without them and wake up sick - everywhere in the West End reminds me of you, London is you, thoughts of him smoking roll-ups on the tube, striding through the carriages loudly chanting a Buddhist chant, Rex loved singing, very loud and vigorously, but badly, tone deaf, really quite awful for anyone within earshot, and London was quiet at this time and there were only the zombie walking dead chasing down drug dealers, the people who came out and took over the capital in the middle of the night, chasing down dealers in High Holborn, in the middle of the empty road, sleeping out overnight in winter trying to keep warm, off Tottenham Court Road, by the air vents, or down in Waterloo Station.

It helped to be moving but then he came home to nothing.

 Ian said, “It’s not nothing, I’m here”.

 Ian said, “Come and sit down”, and Louis said, “I can’t”, and Ian offered to massage his shoulders.  He said, “I have a strong back, I can carry whatever you put on me, it’s safe for you to say anything to me, you don’t have to censor yourself in front of me.  If I can do anything just tell me”.  He set up a chair in a tiny free space and motioned for Louis to sit on it, which he did.

Louis thought, He’s not here, but he was never here anyway and now he never will be.

Ian dug his thumbs in.  And Louis who could not now bear to be touched joked, “You can stop doing that for a start, you’re killing me!”

 Ian tipped the chair forward so Louis slid off it.  “See!  I try to be nice and you throw it back in my face”.

“You told me not to censor myself”.

 Ian said, “It’s been long enough now, can’t we move on?  Buck up, let’s move on, I want you back to your old self”.

Louis thought, It’s been a week, my grief bores you.

“It’s insulting”, said Ian.  “He treated you like crap”.

Not all the time.

That’s what you told me.

I edited it.

He was a crack-head cunt.

No he wasn’t.

“You need to hear this, Louis.  He didn’t deserve you.  Don’t start turning him into a hero, that’s not the person he was.  You know that”.

Your opinions are irrelevant, Louis thought, but didn’t dare say out loud.

Suddenly Ian said, “I miss you”, hoping that the poignancy of the statement would re-awaken something in Louis, make him feel wanted, and also that he would feel sorry for Ian himself and what he was putting him through with this rejection.

Louis said, “It’s been a week”.  He thought, it’s only a baby grief, it can’t yet stand on its own feet.  Was Ian completely stupid?  It seemed so.

Louis said,” I never stopped –“.

Ian cut in quickly.  “Be very careful what you say”. 

Then he kicked at the pile of Rex’s belongings and said, “You’ve got to sort this out, I can’t stand it any longer.  This is my home too”.  He had sponged off the parrot shit but the bags were all odd shapes, they didn’t sit well together, they weren’t stackable, they were in the way.

Louis pushed his way between Ian and the pile of Rex’s junk to protect it from his contempt.

 

Emiko came round and they gazed at the pile of Rex together.

Louis said, “How’s Bonnie?”

Emiko said she couldn’t keep her and Ian said, “We’re not taking it”.

She said birds have diseases and babies are vulnerable.  Ian told her it was rare and she should wear rubber gloves.

She was wearing a pair of Rex’s jeans, which she had cut down to shorts done up with one of his ties round the waist, and she had a pair of yellow woollen tights underneath.

Lulu was in a sling round her front and she was asleep, looking completely at peace amongst all the rubbish with a silly expression on her face.

 The only paternal instincts Ian had were for his bike.  Whenever he came back to it, wherever it was chained up, he spent minutes checking that nothing had been stolen, two wheels, one seat, pannier bags still intact, tyres unmolested, lights OK, like a parent checking a new-born for the requisite number of toes and fingers.  He tried not to look at the baby but wondered if it was healthy to sleep so much.

Emiko noticed him looking at Lulu and carefully pulled the baby blanket over a part of her face, but as if she was just being affectionate and motherly.  She didn’t want him to see the birthmark.

Emiko observed that Rex had a lot of books, he liked reading.  But all the books were gifts from Louis who had thought that an interesting book would keep him indoors.  Settling down with a good book - but Rex was not a settler downer and he had never read any of them.  Books about sailing, Louis had thought that would satisfy him, he had found so many books on variants of sailing and boat building and diving and tropical fish, as if that would suffice and could combat drug addiction.

There were a couple of new books that Louis didn’t recognise – books on health, self-improvement books, magical cures for health, superplants that could cure everything; it made him feel strangely sad.  There was also a book on the Rothschilds which Rex had stolen as if it might contain some valuable information he wanted to know.  He could never keep money.  Louis gently stroked it as if it were Rex’s soul.

Louis was attached to all these books as if they represented a journey he and Rex had gone on but it had been his own journey and Rex never joined him.  They were all high quality books.  In his house boat Rex had put them in neat piles to make himself look like an avid reader and he had liked having them there.  Louis loved these books even though he had no interest in sailing himself, it was the joy of gift giving and the hopes he’d had for a quiet stable life with Rex.  He said to Emiko now, “Let’s get rid of them all” but Ian wanted to look at them - he said they looked interesting and he asked to keep a few of them but Louis said no, it wasn’t right, they were Rex’s; he wanted to take them to a charity shop Rex had liked because he knew that Rex had often stolen from this shop.

Emiko agreed he would have liked them going to charity but Louis knew that Rex was a very sentimental hoarder and he wouldn’t - why else the falling-apart shoes that he himself had given him, he wouldn’t give anything away, and he would probably expect Louis to respect that.  But they were not really Rex’s books, they were Louis’.  It was a terrible dilemma.

They looked through Rex’s clothes and Emiko said Rex had funny taste, they weren’t really his style, and Louis had bought these clothes too and he was attached to them in the same way he was attached to the books and what did she know, they were clothes Rex had asked for, to look respectable, they made him feel good about himself, but all of them were ripped now and had bloodstains on, heroin stains.  Emiko said she could make the shirts into dresses so Louis let her have them.

He kept the trousers for himself even though they were too small for him, he could lose weight and squeeze into them; he kept a leather coat too, the one Rex had been wearing when they met, although that too was now ripped and hardened.

Emiko said, “Could I have the kettle please?” and it was strange because why should she ask, none of it belonged to Louis, he had no authority, they were just in his flat, that was all.

The rest of the things they took bag by bag to the charity shop.

And Louis went out for coffee and didn’t come back until he knew Ian would be at work and then he went to bed and it had been a busy day and he felt normal.  He thought, Well that’s over with then.

He fell asleep till 3am and he had no dreams and when he woke up not only was Rex still gone but all his things were gone too.  I can’t feel you near me.  His head split open and he screamed.  He fumbled out of bed, got dressed and went to the Room With A View where he and Emiko had taken everything but it was seven hours till they opened.

It was very very cold.  Louis didn’t want to go home because Ian would be there soon.  He stamped his feet.  An all night supermarket was open so he went inside.  Assistants were quietly stacking the shelves as if nothing had happened.  There was no Christmas music playing, which was a relief.  He bought Rex’s brand of tobacco, the cheapest available, then went outside to roll a cigarette which broke his heart.  Rex was always so nice about his rolling skills even though he never had the knack but folded rather than rolled.  Once Louis had folded him a little box of twenty and written messages on each of them in felt-tipped pen and Rex didn’t want to smoke them.  Louis looked at the magazines in the newspaper aisle, all the sailing magazines, and was angry at Emiko and Ian for making him get rid of the books.

He went outside again and sheltered in a phone booth.  There was a notice to call the Samaritans so he did. 

Someone answered immediately.  Louis said, “My boyfriend’s dead”.  It was too complicated and long-winded to explain the true nature of the relationship dynamic.

He couldn’t believe anybody else was awake at this hour; the voice at the other end was like a kind of warmth and this patient voice listened as he babbled on about all the things he had done wrong to Rex, the time he had not let Rex through the door, the phone calls he never made, the phone calls he never answered, all the times he said no, and how loving Rex was, he had seen the innocent little boy in him.

The voice asked if he was feeling suicidal.  Alarmed that they would call the police on him, Louis said, “No” and tried to reassure them, as if they would care.  He wasn’t suicidal.  And yet, what was it?  He didn’t want to be alive.

Life was empty now, meaningless, there was nothing here for him.  He wanted to join with Rex again.  The world was empty and he himself was empty.  He no longer existed.

He said, “I just want him back.  I want it not to have happened”.

The voice said reasonably, gently, “But it has happened”.

Louis said, “I still want it not to have happened”.

Why couldn’t anyone understand this?

I don’t want you to be dead.

And he talked on and on and he felt a little better because there was someone listening.

After the call he had a cigarette then dialled the number again and another voice answered.  He couldn’t remember the name of the previous Samaritan and it frightened him, like he had lost something important, so this time he wrote down the new Samaritan’s name.

And he kept calling back to try to find the first voice so he could ask for his name again and write it down but it was always a different Samaritan branch and then he couldn’t even remember what part of the country the first one had said he was from anyway.

He said, “My boyfriend just died”.  And he told each Samaritan about all the things he had done wrong, all the things he never did, all the times he said no, the time he wouldn’t let Rex in even though Rex said, “I’ll take my shoes off”.  Those words continued to stab him.  Louis still said, “No, you can’t come in”.

He said, “I just want him not to be dead”.

And the voice gently said, “But he is dead”.

Louis did this four more times, with sweet voices in different towns, although not all of them were as nice as the first one whose name he had forgotten, and he had exactly the same conversation with all of them, and cried in exactly the same places, and they all asked if he was suicidal and he wrote down their names on a scrap of paper and then bought a little notebook to store them in more securely.  Then it started to get light again and he began to feel a bit better, there were more people around.

He went back into the supermarket and bought some of Rex’s favourite chocolate spread and scooped it out with his fingers like Rex did.

Finally it was five to ten and he went back to the Room With A View shop and still it wasn’t open.  He rapped on the door but there was nobody there.  He checked the opening times.

Then he looked at the news rack in the newsagent’s next door and saw that it was Sunday.

Back home he realised he had received no condolence cards.  His grief meant absolutely nothing to absolutely no-one.

 

Mrs. Tors called Ian and said she was coming round.  

Ian was sort of pleased but at the same time he thought it was a cheek, just inviting herself.  The way she had looked him up and down made him fear his home would get the same treatment.  He tried to tidy up in such a way that the blue walls were what caught the eye, not the objects in the room or the tatty furniture.

She turned up early with the boy John who had on a brand new coat and he showed Ian all the pockets and zips.  He wanted a second hand one, Mrs. Tors told Ian, but “I’m not having him in clothes someone else has had on”.

 Ian said it was very nice.  He said he’d had his own coat for ten years but she didn’t offer to buy him a brand new winter coat too.  She didn’t commend him on the way he clearly looked after his clothes, either.

She had muddy boots on.  Ian was horribly aware of the piss and shit that footwear brought indoors off the pavement and he said, as lightly as he could, “This is a shoeless house”, feebly indicating the place where shoes were kept in the hallway.  The boy John slipped his off immediately but Mrs. Tors tutted and just breezed in, sat in the most comfortable chair.  She looked frankly around the room.

She said, “Christ it’s cold in here, haven’t you got any heating?”

Ian explained that it was too expensive, they couldn’t afford it.  He said that they never got colds because all the bugs died.

“Put some heating on for god’s sake”, and she got up and turned the switch on the heater.  “Nobody can live like this”, she said.  She told him to stop wasting his money on non-essentials.  She said why didn’t he move somewhere cheaper but Louis had been here forever.

The remainder of Rex’s things, which Louis had been unable to get back from the charity shop and was buying back as and when they priced it up and put it on display, this had been packed into boxes in the bedroom, brown boxes which were suitably anonymous.

Louis was out.  Ian was alone, with no reinforcements.  She was half an hour earlier than she had said.  It might have been the light but she looked blurry to Ian.  He couldn’t work out if she was smiling or not.

Then, quite forcefully, she started listing all the shelving arrangements which she would make if she lived here, to free up the table and chairs and floors from all the books and stuff.  Move this around, put that there, tidy away the art materials.

 Ian said nothing.  It was rather like being stampeded by a herd of rutting interior designers.  He only realised how affronted he was much later in the day when he viewed his squashed and mangled corpse on the floor she had trodden over.  But after all it was only shelves. 

“Well aren’t you going to offer us refreshments?”

 He didn’t know why but Ian felt indignant that she had not only invited herself here without waiting to be asked and then criticised the décor, yet now he was expected to foot the bill for a teabag, boiling water and cake.

The boy John followed him into the kitchen and informed him that she had three sugars in her tea, but they only had agave syrup.  Ian asked about the boy John’s own beverage preferences and John politely asked for juice, but squash if juice was not available, and water if that wasn’t possible either.  Ian rather liked him.

Their cups all had brown stains on them because Louis never washed up properly, as did the spoons, so Ian spent some time scouring them with a bristle pad to get them white again and silver.  He had a headache and his eyesight was going funny, everything looked blurry.

Maybe he would need glasses, he had always wanted to wear glasses.

“Have you gone to India to pick the tea”, Mrs. Tors called out, as if it were an original remark, and then when he brought it in she gulped her tea down quickly without even appreciating how clean the cup was or the loveliness of the flower syrup.

The boy John said how delicious the juice was but that seemed unlikely because it was three days out of date.

Mrs. Tors picked up a sketch-pad and opened it to a drawing of Ian naked and put it down again.

She stood up to look out of the window over the backyard, which was filled with the shopkeeper’s junk.  “What a boring view”, she said.  It was an opinion Ian himself and Louis had often voiced but he thought it rude that she should say so.  He felt slighted, as if he himself were the view.  He said, “We like it”.  She looked around the room again but made no comment about the glorious peacock blue that Ian had painted it which, all things considered, he took as a compliment.

Everything still looked blurry, no matter how widely he opened his eyes.  Rubbing them made it worse but his headache had gone.

On the way out Mrs. Tors said, “There’s 10 litres of magnolia paint in my garage.  Next time I come we’ll get rid of this awful blue, it’s giving me a headache”.

Outside Emiko was walking past with Bonnie in a bird-cage she had just bought at the market, hooked over Lulu’s pushchair.  John stepped backwards, gritting his teeth and clenching his fists, face all white, but eyes fixed on the parrot, checking it out.  Mrs. Tors tried to drag him along, saying, “Dirty bird, dirty bird”, but he wouldn’t budge.  Emiko said, “She won’t hurt you”, and Mrs. Tors said, “That’s not strictly true”.  Bonnie walked up and down Emiko’s arm who said, “Would you like to give her a peanut?”  But John fled, dropping the peanut.

When they had all gone, Ian got on his bike and went for a ride just to feel free again.  He noticed that there were teethmarks on the handle grips, foxes were biting his bike again.

 

Louis tried to avoid going to sleep because he was terrified of waking up again because each fresh day was the same black hole of this enormous nothing, so he took some sleeping pills but they had no effect at all.  Waking up frightened with this unnameable fear everything was frightening there was no safe spot anywhere waking up was unbearable opening one’s eyes was unbearable.  There was nobody.

He rang the Samaritans again and said, “My boyfriend’s dead” and talked about all the horrible things he had done and how wonderful Rex was.  After about ten minutes the Samaritan tactfully wound the conversation down so Louis called another one and said exactly the same things.

Then he went back to the canal to look at Rex’s boat.  Parts of the canal were iced over.  He thought he would see Rex there.  The boat was already up for sale and he knocked on the little door fantasising about the relief he would feel when Rex emerged, with his hair all sticking up, nervously rolling a cigarette.

He watched the rolling bridge curl up to let some boats go past.

Somebody came over to tell him that nobody was there and who to contact about the sale, but Louis moved away, not wanting to hear.

He walked along the bank asking for Emiko but she was not there either.  He could see through her boat window the parrot Bonnie but no Emiko.  The bird was in a small cage now with rubber gloves draped over the top.  He watched Bonnie through the window for twenty minutes imagining that she too might transmogrify into Rex, or that she would at least throw out some sign that she knew where Rex was.  The parrot shuffled sideways up the twig, then back again.  She had always had the freedom of Rex’s boat but she did not leave the twig.  She clearly had nothing in common with Rex at all.

Rex had been given the parrot last year after his foot was amputated.  It was meant to cheer him up and take his mind off his empty boot.  But he failed to see the joke.  It wasn’t amusing.  He had lost a foot.  The parrot was messy, and grumpy, and he hadn’t wanted something else to take care of.  He did so only grudgingly because nobody would relieve him of the burden and it wasn’t the parrot’s fault.  Over the months they had formed a tolerance for each other although it never blossomed into real love.

 But on his own Rex liked to bounce ideas off the parrot and he sometimes talked to her in silly voices.  He loved words and would try out the longest words he knew, to see if she would copy him, repeating, for instance, the word transmogrification for hours on end, actually  hours.  And then he’d get paranoid and suddenly stop, going to all the windows to check that nobody was watching him.

He was not considered suitable for the expense of a new foot, because of his addiction; he couldn’t prove he was clean.  He missed his foot and it still hurt, and the crutches were awkward.  He had watched his foot go black, like it was not a part of himself, and then he just kept his socks on so that he wouldn’t have to see it.  It was numb.  He couldn’t feel anything at all so that helped – everyone else he knew with gangrene was in severe pain.

Rex was terrified of hospitals because of all the concomitant repercussions for his drug habit - not having any control over his usage with doctors and nurses watching his every move - and his foot was a long way from his eyes so he didn’t have to look at what was happening.  He rather liked the sweet smell of gangrene.  It was interesting - all the body tissue dying with the blood supply cut off.

Emiko dropped a pot on his foot – he felt nothing, and when she took off his sock, the black skin was flaking like a croissant.  “When did you last wash your feet!”  Then realised it was the foot, not dirt.  All swollen purple and black.  They both looked more closely and the build up of gases under skin had crackled the surface and in among the black skin were bleeding sores and blisters.  She bent down, the pus smelt terrible.

“My god - what have you done?”  And he just smiled sheepishly.  It did look bad.

He had known a good few people who had limbs amputated but even when she called for an ambulance he felt it was a lot of fuss over nothing – he wasn’t in pain.  Ran out of veins, got sloppy, good old femoral artery, wouldn’t let him down after all his other veins had given up the ghost.

She said, “Have you been doing your groin?”  He said that it was a bit tender but that was all.

The ambulance people said, “Can he get here on his own?”

Emiko called a cab and took him to hospital and they admitted him immediately, which made him feel special.   But he missed two operations because he was on the roof having a joint with the laundry staff.  He always found addicts wherever he went, sniffed them out like a pig finding truffles, he had an instinct for it.  The nurses brought methadone.

The morning after the operation he was very depressed.  He adapted well to crutches with his usual charisma – but he had wept with Emiko.

He didn’t want anyone visiting him but he didn’t want to be on his own.

Louis had visited him before the operation, with flowers.  They’d not seen each other for months but Rex had called him to tell him what had happened.  Louis walked into the ward, sat down on the bed and said, “You stupid cunt”.  It felt nice to be telling him off again in this friendly fashion.  Louis said it would an asset when he was out begging but Rex didn’t laugh.  Now Louis couldn’t understand why he’d thought that was funny, except he hadn’t, he just didn’t know what else to say and felt he was expected to say something chipper.  Rex always begged in smart suits because he was ashamed of his drug habit and thought a smart suit would throw people off the scent.  Louis said to him once, “You disgust me”.  Rex said, “I’ll never be able to go swimming again, I can never go in the sea again”.   He was embarrassed going out.  He said, “It’s a for life thing, it won’t grow back”.  Louis said, “It might”.

Afterwards people said to Rex, “How’s your foot?” and immediately took their shoes off to show him their feet as if he was now a trained podiatrist.  Anyone had a problem with their feet, off came the socks.  He’d been made to look at so many misshapen feet he almost became glad that he only had one of his own now.

Louis now wondered if you could swim when you were dead, was there water there, and would one still want the same things anyway?  I want to pivot eternally around this moment when you are still alive.

Lots of other people had arrived to see Rex for the last time with two feet and Louis felt he was in the way because Rex didn’t seem to care if he was there or not, so he left.

The doctors brought crutches and gave appointments for O.T. which he never kept.

And then they would only give him a false foot on the condition that he gave up drugs and they kept drugs testing him so they could see that he hadn’t.

Afterwards the wound would not heal properly and kept getting infected.

With Emiko he had talked about killing himself.

Louis wrote a Get Well card speculating about transplants from pigs, or horses, or even a panther but never sent it.  He was relieved now that he had not sent it but why didn’t he send something else instead, just something human and real, just saying, “Yes it is terrible.  I am here”.

He had grown tired of being compassionate towards all of Rex’s troubles, it had worn him out and he couldn’t exhume any more empathy – he had run out of platitudes and the truth was unspeakable.

All the time Louis knew that Rex knew he was terrified of saying the wrong thing.

It wasn’t funny.  And Rex would only worry about all the pigs with no feet, through no fault of their own.  It’s my own fault, it’s not fair to them.

Louis had not seen him again even though Rex had sent messages saying it would be good to see you.  Louis had replied, Maybe.  Ian had been upset that Louis was going to the hospital; he couldn’t understand why they were even still in contact, but Louis said why slam a door shut if you can leave it ajar?  Ian didn’t know what it was still ajar for; he wasn’t going in.  He said, “Please don’t hug him” – so Louis had not given Rex a goodbye hug, even though he had wanted to, and that was the last time he ever saw him.  But that wasn’t Ian’s fault, Louis made his own choice, but if he wasn’t with Ian he wouldn’t have had to worry about disrespecting him by hugging Rex.  But he would still worry because he was confused about what was acceptable and allowable between friends, if it was leading Rex on.

He always wanted to be closer to Rex, you never moved away from me, it was always exquisite to be in your arms.

I miss what we could have had, I was always angry with you because you were always somewhere else, you knew I would be waiting –.  

Suddenly Louis thought about what would happen to his own stuff if he died.  Would Ian throw it all out?  He hated clutter.

Had Rex missed that hug too, did he want to hug Louis and hadn’t dared, why didn’t they hug?  They always hugged.

I cannot bear you thinking I didn’t care about you.

Before he left the hospital Rex had asked to borrow £25.

Much later, when he saw Rex in the street on crutches, Rex said he felt like an old man.  He smiled but the methadone had rotted away his neat white wolf’s teeth.

Louis looked now at the parrot through the window and wondered if she missed Rex too.

He desperately wanted to speak to someone who cared about Rex as much as he did.  His mind created a list of other people and he scanned down it but nobody fitted that category, or if they did they were already dead.  3p Lee used to shoot up with Rex.  Rex said he’d got clean and put on weight.  He earned his name because when he begged for money he used to ask passers-by for 3p – “just 3 pence”.

Louis walked to King’s Cross to see him.  There was a complicated entry system on the block of flats but then someone arrived and he got into the building with them and up the stairs, knocked at the door, no answer, knocked again, he could hear rustling within.  He called through the letterbox, “Lee, it’s me, Louis, Rex’s friend”.  More rustling within.  Louis looked through the letter box and in the dark could see movement.

Eventually Lee opened the door.  He was not fat at all.  How long ago had Rex told him this?

He said gently, “Lee, do you remember me?”

3p was standing there in a dirty shirt and no trousers, slowly hopping from leg to leg, eyes blank and making a barely audible mumbling sound.

“It’s about Rex”, Louis said.

Lee looked ahead, making a low moaning noise, shifting from foot to foot.

Louis had a flashback to the last time he’d been here, Rex in a smart pinstripe suit, 3p skinny, topless, with a tie holding up his trousers and a heroin smut on his face.  They had spent four hours in the bathroom shooting up while Louis had sat outside reading a magazine, like in a doctor’s waiting room.  Rex used to go to his drug appointments in a suit while his key worker wore dirty jeans and never shaved.

All the people Rex tried to help, he would always help someone out in drug trouble.

3p was still staring ahead.  Louis said, “I’m sorry to bother you” then he backed away and pulled the front door shut.   On the walk here he had actually imagined himself having a pleasant chat with Lee about the old days. 

Outside in the hallway he wrote a note on the only scrap of paper he had, a shop receipt, giving his phone number, explaining what had happened to Rex as gently as he could in the small space available.  He pushed it through the letter-box.

Then he went to the post-office, wrote the same thing on the back of a leaflet, with a bit more detail, and used an envelope from the Passport pack to send it by post, so it would look official.

Three nights later 3p’s girlfriend called, at midnight.  “Lee wants to know what happened”, she said.  She said Rex had always spoken highly of Louis, thought the world of you – and this upset Louis even more, he didn’t deserve to be thought highly of, I should have done so much more.  “You did so much for him”, she said – like Rex was a charity case.  She said, “He was always talking about you”. 

Rex always said he had the patience of a card game but he didn’t.

He felt a fraud.  He felt even worse about letting Rex down when Rex’s illusions were so positive.  I wish I had been perfect.

Louis told her he had come to the flat and seen Lee.  She said, “Lee’s been drinking again”.  Louis didn’t dispute this.  It wasn’t drink he’d had.

 

Emiko was not on her boat; she had gone to see Louis but he was not there and she woke Ian up.  She wanted to know what had happened to Rex’s sketches.

Attempting to be helpful Ian suggested she wait for Louis and offered her tea even though he didn’t like her.  More tea, more socialising.  This was Louis’ friend so he supposed it balanced out the teabag Mrs. Tors had used earlier in the week.

They sat without speaking as she sipped the tea and Ian stared at the space above her head.

Her black-haired baby was in the sling around her chest, awake but making contented little noises which made Ian feel sick; and because he couldn’t understand his nausea he felt angry instead:  so comfortable and cosy and smug.  He switched on Radio Precious  to distract him from these noises but it somehow increased the silence and he could still hear the little noises anyway and had to turn up the radio louder and louder.  It was a bad reception because of the rain.  Still the little baby’s sucking noises continued.

Emiko caught Ian looking at Lulu’s birthmark again.  She was very upset.  She had gone to countless doctors but they all said it was nothing to worry about and nothing could be done, which was nonsense, she knew that, they said she was an obsessive mother but she only wanted the best for her child.

Ian said politely, “Excuse me one moment” and got up to go outside and scream into a towel.  But Emiko said, “Please ask Louis where the sketches are, I must be going now” and she beat him to the door.  She had drunk the tea down to the dregs.

 

Emiko went on her way to Leicester square to draw.  That’s how she had met Rex – he’d put a five pound note in her hat without even wanting his picture done, she sang out, “Thank you for your five pound note I love you”, in a very high voice and he’d gone and stolen her a sandwich.

Rex had a very good eye for sandwiches.

He himself ate like a snake.  The odd weekend where he would eat the equivalent of a small deer to stock up for all the time he spent on the streets chasing drugs with no money or time to eat.

She took him back to her boat and he loved it, he talked to everyone in the Basin as if he had known them all his life.  Mr Tilas left him his boat in his will.

When she got pregnant it was Rex who had encouraged her to have the baby; everyone else said no. 

The child had peacefully tolerated all of Ian’s crackling radio noises.

 

She set up her little seat in Leicester Square to draw tourists.

There was a lot of competition but she always drew people better than they looked in real life and that is what people wanted.  She was very popular.

She set herself up next to the man with the dog and cat pictures, he had a sideline drawing people’s dead pets, people loved it and said how lifelike they were.  They had photographs of the animals but they wanted paintings of the photographs, and they wanted paintings that looked as lifelike as the photographs were, so were barely distinguishable – but, still, the human touch made a strange difference, perhaps because the process of drawing took longer than the time to take a photograph, someone had to look at the animal for longer, so it meant more, it was part of the grieving process.

People said Emiko’s drawings were lifelike too but it wasn’t true because Emiko always improved on nature - people wanted to look like they looked in their fantasies not how they looked in the bathroom mirror first thing in the morning.

She checked on Lulu in the pushchair, wrapped up warmly, then pinned up some of her drawings of actresses on the side of her easel. 

People wandered by, looking at all the drawings, then wandered away again.  It was very cold.

Emiko stood up and began singing, “Come and have your picture drawn….What lovely eyes you have” at the top of her voice, and other nonsense.

A woman and her husband sat down.  Emiko gave him a shorter nose and straightened out the bump, put him in different clothes, gave the woman fuller hair, made them look better all round.  They were the first people ever to object and they refused to pay.  They actually liked the way they really looked.

 

Louis walked for miles every day and, as each day wore on, the distractions of walking helped him get used to the day and he felt a little better by evening, but then he dreaded going to sleep because each new morning it was the same thing again, waking up into the horror.  He slept for a few hours then woke up early again, always at three or four o’clock when it was still dark and there was nobody about, pushed out of the plane with no parachute.  Every morning he called the Samaritans one after another as if he were bent on utilising the whole force of volunteers, wrote down all their names and where they were from and what they said to him, then felt restless.  Went down the street and knocked on Mrs. Meier’s door.  No reply though all the lights were on.  He felt rejected.

Then he recognised the lanky figure in the dark slowly belabouring its way towards him from the other end of the road.  The nearer she got, the easier he could make out that she was attempting to run, with proper running shoes and a tracksuit circa 1972, hair tied back in an Alice band, not remotely out of breath on account of the painfully slow progress she was making but running correctly, very erect, albeit in slow motion, like a film demonstration for the terminally unfit.  She truly didn’t care what anybody thought of her anymore – couldn’t imagine that anyone would be thinking anything of her at all.  It was liberating to have finally reached the age where she was both hideous and invisible and accepting of both, but all possible spectators were invisible to her since she refused to wear her glasses.  She didn’t see them and she didn’t hear them; they didn’t matter.  In her head they were all cheering and full of admiration for the way she sailed past.

When she reached Louis she stopped and bent down to stretch.  Then got up and admitted there was no point.  She was not perspiring in the least.

She said,” I hate every second of it”.  When Louis asked why she did it she said it got her going in the mornings, that was all.   “Always do at least one thing you hate every day”, she said, “it’s character building.  No of course it’s not”.

Louis had no idea how she had ever become Headmistress of such a good school but maybe the fact she was ousted was proof of that.  The five Bettys had all petitioned against her, quite aggressively considering they had a combined age that was considerably more than their average IQ, but she hadn’t minded.  The Bettys said the school needed a Forward Thinking leader, not a Head who listened to everybody’s opinions – that was a sign of weakness.

After they ousted her as Head they fobbed her off as gym mistress, which job was vacant, even though she had no training in anything remotely sporty.  And out on the hockey field one evening, trying to make sense of the game and inventing her own rules which changed dependent on which mood she was in, she had a religious epiphany whilst watching worms mating.

Mating occurs on the surface, most often at night.  Earthworms are hermaphrodites.  The sexual organs are located in segments 9 to 15.  Earthworms have one or two pairs of testes contained within sacs.  The two or four pairs of seminal vesicles produce, store and release the sperm via the male pores.  Ovaries and oviducts in segment 13 release eggs via female pores on segment 14, while sperm is expelled from segment 15.  One or more pairs of spermathecae are present in segments 9 and 10 (depending on the species) which are internal sacs that receive and store sperm from the other worm during copulation.  As a result, segment 15 of one worm exudes sperm into segments 9 and 10 with its storage vesicles of its mate.  Some species use external spermatophores for sperm transfer.

Worms mating don’t even look at each other.  They exchange substances and they have five hearts.  Copulation and reproduction are separate processes in earthworms.  The mating pair overlap front ends ventrally and each exchanges sperm with the other.  The clitellum becomes reddish to pinkish in colour.  Some time after copulation, long after the worms have separated, the clitellum (behind the spermathecae) secretes material which forms a ring around the worm.  The worm then backs out of the ring, and as it does so, it injects its own eggs and the other worm's sperm into it.  As the worm slips out of the ring, the ends of the cocoon seal to form a vaguely lemon-shaped incubator (cocoon) in which the embryonic worms develop.  They emerge as small, but fully formed earthworms, but lack their sex structures, which develop in about 60 to 90 days.  They attain full size in about one year.  Several common earthworm species are mostly parthenogenetic, without fertilisation.

It was all too much faffing about.  It was complicated.  The hallmark of good design is simplicity.  Complexity is a result of trial and error.

This brought everything into question.  It seemed to her that only earthworms were responsible for being earthworms and if that was true then everything else was responsible for its own formation too.  It was presumptuous of god to take credit for it and if god had not done all this then god was pointless and if god was pointless then there could be no god, since the whole point of god was that god had a point.  To begin with Coral didn’t say anything at school because she was embarrassed for everyone who still believed and she didn’t want to humiliate them.  But she was never any good at keeping her mouth shut, especially in the middle of a game of hockey, and the Sarah Schenirer Day School had not been pleased.  The Sarah Schenirer Day School was entirely opposed to evolution and had in the past removed examination questions about evolution because it didn’t fit in with their beliefs.  Coral had brought up the earthworm revelation playfully to start with, assuming that everyone else secretly thought exactly as she did.  But it had all gone downhill from there.  She had genuinely thought they would have more of a sense of humour about it.  It wasn’t, after all, Catholicism or Islam.

The situation was presented to the Board of Governors and the Five Bettys again put the boot in and Coral was sacked, rather like a divorce case citing irreconcilable differences.  The papers were on her side but that was anti-Semitism so didn’t really count.

She still felt mortified about all the nonsense she had been feeding innocent schoolgirls, all the times she had said, “God be with you”, all the bible verses she had read out in Assembly.

Louis went indoors with her into the warm kitchen and Louis made cups of coffee while she got changed.  There was a birthday cake on the table.  It wasn’t her birthday but she had liked the look of the cake and got it anyway.  Louis took a slice; it was sickly.  “Don’t eat the cake, it’s disgusting”, she called out.

She asked how he was and he said, “Fine”.  He did feel fine now he was in her kitchen.

Louis said, “Don’t you miss religion?” and Coral said that at first it was odd without it, she had felt quite frightened and rudderless, she had wanted a purpose, going through the motions, but then she felt free, didn’t have to please anyone but herself, not tormented by ridiculous hope or having to twist her brain into knots to make sense of nonsense.  She said religion had only given her the illusion of security, of order, but since there is no security - and never had been - then in reality she had lost nothing.  Now it was like waking up to a fresh new day without fog, it was like growing up, wearing grown up shoes.

Louis said, “Don’t you miss knowing someone is there for you?”

“How can I when there was no one there to start with?”

She turned around some of the placards in the corner of the kitchen.

One said, You’re All Going To Die.  Another said, Everything Is Not Going To Be Alright.  Louis flinched.  It was a bit full-on this time of the morning.  A smaller one said, It’s All Lies.  That one was rather sweet, she’d coloured it in mauves and violets.  There was also a fresh batch of leaflets on the table with similar titles.

Coral told him how guilty she felt about brainwashing innocent girls and telling them things like “The destiny of Israel is in your hands” and she said this was her way of making it up to them:  the truth.  When she was fully prepared she was going to set up a stand in Speakers’ Corner with all the evangelists.

She had philosophy books everywhere; Louis picked one up.   He said, “I always wanted to get into philosophy.  Can you recommend anything?  Anything to help me?”

He picked up Tillich.  It was heavy, in both senses.

Coral said, “You should read Tillich but not until you’ve read Schelling.  But don’t read Schelling until you’ve read Jung and Hegel”.  Then she said, “What it all comes down to is don’t read any of it, it’s just words”.  Most of them were Christians anyway, she added.

Louis thought, “But words are all we have”.

She noticed Louis frowning at the Everything’s Not Going To Be Alright and said, “I don’t mean you.  I just mean in general”.  Then she said, “You must think I’m very tactless”.

Louis said, “I know everyone’s going to die, I just don’t want him to be dead”.

“That’s not what I mean”, she said

“Maybe you could just soften it a little”, Louis suggested, but Coral couldn’t work out how to do that.  A thing was true or it was not true.  There was a god or there wasn’t a god.  It wasn’t a matter of being soft or hard, just stating the truth.

Death wasn’t a tragedy to her, it was a natural process.  It happened, you grieved, you moved on.  So what?

Coral said, “Don’t eat that cake just because it’s there”.

On his way out Louis glanced up and saw a small figure sitting at the top of her stairs.  It was wearing full hijab.  It was quite disturbing.   Coral said, “It’s only Marina – from the Deli.  She’s colouring in my posters for me.  Her family knows”, she said, “I’m not making her do it”.  She added that Marina had chosen the hijab from a fancy dress store.  “There is no hell”, she said.

Louis laughed with Coral but when he was on his own again he felt frightened.  All the ground was shifting from under him.  He was going to die.  Coral was going to die.  Bonnie was going to die, and Emiko, even Ian.  Well, Ian probably wouldn’t, not for a very long time, he was stubborn.  But everyone else would.  There was no safe place anywhere.  They were all doomed to oblivion.

A scream fell down the steps to the cellar within him, a long drawn out scream getting fainter and fainter.  It was horrible.

 

When Ian got to work that night the two care-workers on duty were finishing off a huge Chinese takeaway.

They had been given money to get takeaways for all the residents on their wing as a special treat but they said, “They don’t know what they’re eating so we got them pot noodles” and they had spent the rest on themselves, got fags and bottles of wine.  They had bought themselves a huge cheesecake and too, and offered Ian a slice but he refused.  They always tried to buy his silence this way but he was never going to speak anyway, not because he supported them but because he was scared of them, and anyway they deserved a few perks on this job.  They cleared away all the foil trays afterwards so nobody would know, then they offered Ian the last dreggy bit of wine.  He said he was working.  He never drank because it unsettled his stomach.

 He had worked at the home since his father had been taken there at the end of his life.  The stench of piss and shit and vomit had been so appalling that he could only sit with his father for ten minutes at a time before having to go outside for fresh air.  The nurses couldn’t smell it; they had developed an immunity.

When Ian complained to the manager she offered him a cleaning job.   He got on with the work and kept Snog Radio on his headphones to distract him from what he was actually doing.

The management had poems pinned up everywhere which an old lady had once left in her locker, describing her rich previous life which in truth was rather banal, to inform the staff that these were people inside the decaying flesh, but it was nonsense; it doesn’t matter what we have been, only what we are now.  Arthur who talked to himself all day long, Maria who would only eat minced meat, Simon who never stopped asking questions, Marie who won’t get out of bed.  They spent all day slumped in their chairs asleep or crying for their mothers.  He knew them by their biscuit breath and the long thin grey hair.  There was no beautiful Eurydice within the grey saggy flesh, the soft yellowing skin, no political heroes, they’d had jobs in factories, ordinary lives like everyone else, no shame there, it does not need glamourising. 

That first night working Ian fainted and they sent him home.  But it was only the ammonia.  It smelt like piss to him now, the association he had with bleach and detergent was shit and piss so that is what they smelt like to him now, even air freshener smelt like shit in his mind, the scent of lavender, for him now, evoked vomit.

His eyes were still blurry so the next morning he went to the doctor, and to the optician, and both said his eyes were fine:  no problems.

Emiko said to ask for a second opinion, get referred to a specialist. 

Mrs. Tors said it was all a fuss about nothing.

Louis was no help.  Ian missed him badly.  He was always on the phone to other people, crying, all through the night.  Ian tried not to interfere because he always got it wrong but it was hard.

 

Louis was still holding Rex’s fingers over the edge of the cliff, desperate to stop him sliding off the edge into the sea.  He was falling but Louis wouldn’t let him hit the ground and be carried away; he held his breath.

He had burned all of Rex’s letters when he met Ian because Ian was insecure.  He had nothing now, no photos, he had torn them all up.  There was still a big fat secret envelope full of Rex but he couldn’t face opening it.  He had burnt the letters because they were all lies, one day he had decided they were all lies and he was so angry he’d burnt them.  He had gone to the allotments and screwed up each letter one by one and burnt them all, a furious message to Rex which he never told him about.  He felt physically ill now with the horror of what he had done; many of the letters had been beautiful and full of thanks, sincere thanks, and poetry.  What he had done could not be undone.  If he had only thrown them away they might still be alive somewhere, somewhere in existence, bits of ink on a sheet of paper that Rex’s hands had put there, thinking of him briefly.  But burnt they were nowhere.

Rex always looked so unhappy in photos but tried smiling anyway, trying to smile, he always tried to smile in photographs.

What Louis had salvaged from the boat he would never burn, the shopping lists and to-do lists, people to repay lists – the same lists again and again with the same people to repay on every single list, over the years, who evidently were either not important enough to make it to the top of the list and get paid, or else once they’d been paid off were borrowed from again, which was more likely.  All your good intentions, all your hope for a healthy wonderful life, you tried so hard, you tried to make things right. 

Rex always arrived at feeding time, by instinct.  He ate like a snake.  Filling up for a year and his belly would bloat.  Then he would fall asleep.  And when he finally awoke two days later he would have to go out again for drugs.

Considering how much Rex loved home comforts Louis could never understand why he didn’t come home more often, but he was like a cat with several homes, or maybe he loved the comforts so much because he rarely stayed in one place long enough to enjoy them properly, he always had to be out feeding his habit.  It was exhausting for him.

Louis looked at his phone and willed Rex to call.  He keyed in his number again at midnight, when Rex usually woke up, but there was no answer.  Rex called late at night and Louis refused to answer, because it was unsociable.  He thought of one photograph he used to have and concentrated very hard, tried to climb inside the memory and live there, in that moment, forever.  Rex saying I’m so unhappy, Rex’s burnt corpse, and it was all Louis’ fault.

All the feet passing by and none of them were Rex’s.

Louis followed men who looked like the back of Rex and said please please please as hard as he could, thinking that if he said please hard enough, with enough sincerity, then Rex would not be dead and he could really go back in time, the man would turn around and it would be Rex five years ago, he felt it was actually possible to bend time, if only you tried hard enough.  Not saying please to god, saying it to death.  Not begging god, begging Rex.  Willing the man in your jacket to turn around and be you, or that man over there lighting a cigarette the way you do.  He squinted his eyes to maintain the illusion that it was Rex.

 Why did everything go so wrong?  We could have had so much.  We could have had that wonderful life.

Hermann Hesse was the first serious writer Louis ever read - Steppenwolf when he was 18 and Harry the man-wolf was 49 but he’d thought he understood it because even then he had wanted to die, in the way that adolescents sometimes luxuriate in the idea of death because they know little of it.  The ones who do know it do not luxuriate.  He was unhappy.  He had greedily read all of Hesse’s books and then one day had seen a photograph of him – smiling.  Louis had felt utterly betrayed.  The man was happy.  How then could he really know what he was writing about.  Louis had felt alone in the world again.  Smiling.  He later felt this was the wonder drug of Buddhism but even now he felt quite strongly that writers should never show their faces.

There was a boy who fell in love with a star, and dreamed of it and wanted to become one with it, but when he leapt off a cliff to join with it he fell to the ground because he hadn’t really believed he could do it.  When Louis was 18 he had believed with Hermann Hesse that if the boy had truly believed in a union with the star then it would have come true.  He had learned a lot since then.

Hermann Hesse clearly knew nothing about gravity, or the enormity of stars, for one thing, the relative disparity in sizes between boys and stars, like a tick falling in love with a dinosaur, it’s never going to happen, you can’t wrap your arms around a star, it is a physical impossibility.  It would swallow you up if you got too close or burn you out or whatever happens when you’re out in space anywhere near a star, which you couldn’t organise anyway unless you had billions of pounds, your own rocket and the OK from NASA.  It would take ages to get there and by the time you did then it would already be gone.  And anyway, it would kill you dead, outright.

Even as a metaphor it didn’t work, it was poetic claptrap.  As if simply wanting something passionately enough means you can achieve it.  The evidence of billions of miserable lives worldwide demonstrates that we don’t always get what we want no matter how hard we try and mostly we don’t even get what we need.  Being alive is far from nice.  No one explains this in sufficient detail to deter people from procreating.

It is bad poetry because it is a lie that parades as a possibility, and it is evil because it promotes hope where there is none; and can only lead to frustration and feelings of inadequacy.  This is what Louis used to say to Ian when Ian was listening to so-called love songs on Radio Honey.

If Louis threw himself onto Rex’s coffin at the moment it went into the flames – but he was too late for that.

Belief is not a magical incantation; the rules of logic still apply.  You cannot believe the unbelievable.  Millions of people do but they are ill; it doesn’t make the unbelievable true.  You cannot unite with a star.

But Louis now, today, strangely regressed to his gullibility as an 18 year old and thought that yes you could.  If you tried hard enough.  He could unite with his star.

He still knew it was a lie but he wanted so much for it not to be a lie that he believed it to be truth.  Rex was still out there and there was a magic porthole somewhere if he could only find it, and then they could connect again.  Louis longed so much to kiss him again, he wanted to open the door and Rex was there.

And he kept on calling the Samaritans every day and he told them about all the times he had said no, which tortured him, all the horrible things he did, throwing Rex’s stuff on the street and calling him a dirty little junkie, and he hated being awake, the days were so long and full of torture, he walked and walked but he always had to come back to the empty room and this silence which was unendurable.  And it doesn’t matter if other people say you are innocent and that you did nothing wrong; if you are guilty you know it and it doesn’t even make you a better person for being honest, because a genuine sense of guilt is torture.

And the Samaritans said, “You’ll feel better soon” but he didn’t want to feel better, he liked feeling this torture because it was a connection to Rex, I don’t want it to stop hurting because the hurt is you and it makes me feel closer to you, I don’t want to be separated from that pain, the pain is you, I don’t want to get through this because then I will leave you behind I want to die.

The Samaritans said, “Death is worse for those left behind” but it hadn’t been great for Rex either – he had missed out on the rest of his life.  One Samaritan said, “Maybe this was all the life he was meant to have and it was a complete life” – what shit.  But Louis didn’t say this out loud because he didn’t want to offend.  During his unhappy Hermann Hesse adolescent phase he had once called the Samaritans and somehow, he was never quite sure how, the roles got reversed and he ended up empathising with the counsellor about her terrible life – it hadn’t occurred to him to just hang up the phone.  Even Emiko said Rex is not in pain now, that’s the good thing, you wouldn’t want him to be in pain - as if that is how Louis wanted him back.  He had no monkey’s paw.  If he could have him back he’d have him well; if one part of the wish could come true so could the second.

Louis said, The sooner I’m dead the better I’ll like it, but he didn’t say it out loud in case they asked if he was suicidal again and put the police onto him.

And he kept writing everything down, feverishly writing down his whole five years with Rex, trying to get everything in the right order but it was difficult because it had all been so chaotic he couldn’t remember what happened when.  He wanted to remember and he wanted Rex to be remembered, he didn’t want him forgotten as if he had never lived you will not be forgotten.  His notebook filled up and he got another one and he wrote letters to Rex telling him how he felt (the dead can’t get enough of this), trying to get events in order, every single memory he had of Rex, and it was the most luxurious bliss to spend this time with Rex and lose himself in the past, the atmosphere of Rex, it was a way of holding onto Rex forever, like pen and paper has a miraculous fixative power, which in some ways of course it does, but it is only a shell, it is only paper, it has no form I want to kiss you again and I can’t, for when he emerged for air Rex was still gone and he was still alone.  It was wonderful to lose himself but when he looked up from the paper it was still today and you are still dead.  If I stop writing I am here on my own again in the silence waiting for you to come home I will die soon I just want to sit with you darling and rest my head against you and talk of all these things, it is agony, I cannot bear this world without you.

He rolled himself a clumsy cigarette and smoked out of the window like Rex used to.

Ian said, “You’re not the only person in his life – he had a family – he had people around him at the end.  You weren’t that important to him”.  Except of course he only said this when Louis was in another room.

 

On his way to work Ian again saw Mrs. Tors outside her local pub - she’d only been back a month and was already well settled into her old local after more than thirty years absence.  Ian had always lived here and he had no local.  She was still a bit of a blur to him because of this problem with his eyes but she had a very recognisable shape.  He chained up his bike and followed her.  The pub had a revolving door to get in and Mrs. Tors barged ahead.  The boy John followed her but Ian misjudged the movement and smacked his face in the side.

John said, “Oh I’m so sorry”, and Mrs. Tors said, “It’s not your fault, he’s clumsy, was always clumsy.  He couldn’t even walk a straight line without falling down a hole or tripping over something.  It was quite remarkable”.

He had got blood on a new white shirt.  It would dry and become impossible to remove.

The boy John said, “He’s bleeding” and suggested they call an ambulance.  Ian wanted to cry.  He went to the gents, which smelt like it had never encounter a gentleman in its life, and tried to tidy himself up and rearrange his face so that he looked normal.

Mrs. Tors ordered herself rum and got a coke for the boy John.  They clearly had a pub routine.  She asked Ian what he wanted.  He said tap water would do.  She said, “You’re not having tap water, think again.  Choose something stronger, be a man for once”.  He told her he had a bad stomach, which he did.

Ian ran through all the polite ways of refusal that usually worked in his head but she told him to shut up.  He compromised by asking for orange juice, figuring that was the cheapest, and not as babyish as the lemonade he would have preferred.  At least she always paid, that was something.  But he didn’t want to be a burden to her.  Except that he did - a burden she embraced happily.

While she was getting the drinks John kept looking at him and asking if he was alright and Ian wanted to shout Stop it stop it stop it but he couldn’t because John was only about eight and he meant well.  John said, “You’re still bleeding”.  Ian wiped his face with his shirt cuff and said, “No I’m not”.

Mrs Tors looked around complacently and sniffed deeply.  “I’m so glad they no longer allow cigarettes in pubs”, she said.  “Having a smoking section in a pub is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool”.  She was the sort of woman who always fanned herself vigorously in the company of smokers, to show her disapproval, which generally made them smoke harder in her direction.  Ian was interested in the way she seemed to have healthy sections of her body, like her lungs, but clearly had no such concern about her liver and kidneys, which must be absolutely pickled.

They watched the dart players and she snorted condescendingly.  John told Ian she played archery and that her nickname at the club was Dead Eye.  Ian couldn’t imagine her able to shoot anything straight, the amount of booze she put away.  She drove while drunk, too, convinced that she was infallible, a careful driver.  Her responses were spot on, she had a quick mind, she said.  She said that no one could tell she had been drinking.

Suddenly she asked, “How’s your friend?” 

“What friend?”

 “Lewis.”

“He’s not my friend, he’s my partner”.

“Well I hope he’s still your friend”, she said, not unreasonably.

His stomach really was bad and he had to go to the bathroom.  When he came back he lifted his orange juice to his mouth and swigged the last big gulp, so he could leave quickly.  Choked.  Mrs. Tors laughed.  She had added some of her rum to the glass.  Ian’s face reddened like a pomegranate, he felt sick, but mostly upset and humiliated.  She carried on laughing.  He wanted to be always dignified but she laughed and he couldn’t laugh with her because it was a terrible thing to do to someone.

The boy John looked gravely at him.  “You shouldn’t of done that”, he said, “he might have liver disease”.  He offered his own drink to Ian but that had rum in it as well.

To divert the conversation, the boy John told him that she had bought him a dog and it had to be spaded.

 Ian said, kindly, “It’s spayed, not spaded - you’re not hitting it on the head with a shovel”.  He had let “shouldn’t of” go but there was a limit.

Mrs. Tors said, “Leave him alone, it’s spaded, he can say spaded if he wants to”.

Ian wondered if she would ever defend him like that, to the point of rewriting the English language to fit his illiteracy.  She said, “Stop rubbing your eyes”.

Ian said he had to go to the optician but he didn’t have money for glasses.  She said, “Well don’t look at me, I haven’t got any money”.  She said, “Get yourself a job and then you won’t have to worry”.

 Ian hung his head and John said, “Are you tired, have you been working hard?”

Mrs. Tors said, “He wouldn’t know hard work if it hit him in the face with a SPADEd”.  She said, “You’re like your dad, always have been, no ambition.  Never went to after-school classes, no sports, nothing, just wanted to play with the girls – not like me, I took full advantage of my education”.

 

Christmas day was always a quiet day.  Every year Ian looked forward to it as if something miraculous and special would take place, though he didn’t know what, or even what he wanted to take place.  Nothing special had ever taken place before.  It was a holy day, even for the unholy; in England many of the unholy over a certain age had grown up among the holy rubble of a Jesus-loving society, Christmas still had holy connotations that they couldn’t quite shake off.  The miraculous birth, a hand reaching down from the sky and saying there there everything is going to be peachy.  There were fewer cars on the road and the major supermarkets were shut.

Ian said, not unkindly, “Buck up Louis, get back to your old self, we all need to move on, it is what it is”.  Ian thought he was being reasonable.  Louis sat on his irritation.  He could never bite his tongue with Rex but he could with Ian – what did that mean?  He thought, Ian likes Christmas, it’s not his fault.  He thought, it’s not Ian’s fault that he’s a little bit stupid.  He thought, It can’t be easy for him, Rex was my ex. 

At lunch time Louis called the Samaritans four times in the bathroom until he felt a bit more normal, then he went back to Ian and attempted to smile, which was lifting above his weight.  He’d said to one of the Samaritans, “I just want to be with him” and she said “But he isn’t anywhere”, as if that was a fact, and he said, “I don’t want to be anywhere”.  And, to placate Ian, he tried to be happy, tried very hard to be jolly, and Ian didn’t see that it was just an act, a huge effort to be cheerful and Ian bought it.  Louis said, “Anyway how are you, how’s the situation with your mother?”

Ian had bought some cream soda, which was Rex’s favourite drink – he drank nothing stronger. It seemed to Louis like a thoughtless soft drink to buy.

When Ian was in the kitchen sorting out the food Louis looked at the wad of Rex’s drawings that he’d taken from the boat.  Page after page of Rex’s drawings, which Rex never valued and Louis had gathered together, scruffy pages like all his papers, torn, with blood and heroin splashes and cigarette burn marks and tea cup rings, which increased their authenticity; many of them Louis had watched him draw, very fast, oddly assured, even the wobbly lines had a sort of integrity that was wholly Rex’s. 

The drawings were all of buildings, rooms beyond rooms, house plans, garden plans, plants, birds and countries, whole new countries he had designed, but no people.  Rooms accessible only by the room in front, where nobody noticed the door, deeper and deeper going round and round and biting its own tail, the magical room with nothing in it, garden full of elixir and panacea, he gave the plants names of words he liked but didn’t know the meaning of, like the orthopaedia bird with two tails and a plume like a Shetland pony. 

Rex loved archways with birds attached to the trellis who were content to stay there and flowers which flew about, birds that were ballerinas and low arches you had to duck under with reverence, designs for houses, gardens, countries, inventing new trees new flowers new birds, all with a leaky biro (he preferred the leaky ones) on graph paper.  Louis could never throw away anything with Rex’s handwriting on.

He had drawn a house for Louis once, in their very own country, since they were both kings, of a sort, and needed their own country.  It was juvenile and had seemed so at the time.  Louis’ house was flat, but Rex’s had stairs leading all over the place on different levels, stairs leading nowhere, narrow rickety staircases and Louis’ house was flat, it was just one room, that’s how he saw Louis.  He always said Louis was just one room but managed to make it sound like a compliment, which it wasn’t.  That particular drawing had been ripped up long ago; Louis had kept the pieces for a while but then he let them go.  He felt the surge of horror again at what could not be undone.  Someone had thought about him long enough to decide what sort of house he was. 

 Ian said Rex’s trees were not real trees, you can’t trust them, they’re impossible trees.  They didn’t look so good to Louis now either which made him feel even more sad and made him defend Rex even more strongly, trying to find meaning in them.

Emiko, who’d studied architecture, had tried to teach Rex perspective once but she said he was not an attentive student.  She told him, “You need to understand the rules before you can throw them away” but he just laughed, he didn’t care.  That’s why his drawings never really worked for her, they lacked integrity.

Ian had got a special cake in, even though Louis hated cakes, had defrosted it specially so it would be ready for Christmas morning.  Got it out of the fridge with much ceremony.  He wanted everything to be absolutely perfect.  Louis politely said, “Wow”.  Ian tried to cut it with a plastic knife but it wasn’t fully defrosted and was still hard and the knife bent.  To show enthusiasm, Louis took a spoon and scooped some of the cream off the top for a pre-taster.  Ian was annoyed.  He told him off and not in a friendly way.

“I just wanted a taster”.

“Why can’t you wait?  I want to serve it to you properly”.  If he served it and it was perfect then everything would go back to normal, their relationship would go back to normal and none of this would have happened.

Louis joked that the cake would have melted by the time the plastic knife did its job but Ian was not amused:  he wanted to do it properly.

This upset Louis a lot.  He had been playful, he didn’t mean to be impatient or greedy, Ian should be flattered he was eager to taste it when he knew he hated cakes so much.

Once the cake was properly cut Louis received his slice but all the fake joy had gone out of it.  But Ian was smiling now so he had to play along.  He ate the cake then he went to the bathroom to be sick; he didn’t want anything of Ian’s inside him.

In the bathroom he started howling and stuffed a towel in his mouth.  He looked at himself in the mirror; he didn’t look any different.

Twenty minutes later when Ian knocked at the door, concerned, he put on a breezy voice and said he was fine.  Ian heard him cry even though he made no sound, he wanted to hold him but could not.  And then when Louis came out he just did it, his arms did it, he put his arms around Louis but Louis said he was going for a walk.

Ian said, “I’m sorry.  It was only a cake”.

Louis did not want any more sorry.  If he was truly sorry then he would stop doing things he had to apologise for.  And if he kept doing the same things then he should stop saying sorry.  It was only a cake.

Ian felt like a bomb disposal expert with no expertise, the timer was counting down and there was nothing he could do to prevent the explosion but somewhere in his head there was a voice telling him, “Don’t worry”, that at the last second, one second to go, Louis would stop it going off, just flick a switch and everyone would be safe.  But there was no visual time display to tell him how long he had got left.  Perhaps it had already blown up in his face and he’d missed the signs, not noticed, this was the devastation.  Something had blown up.  Louis seemed oblivious of the time factor, he had no sense of urgency.  Ian would just have to play it by ear.

He felt like he was running about all over the place when he was not moving at all, it was Louis moving, the ice was melting and he was drifting away. 

He knew he should stay still and wait but he couldn’t relax, it was too important, it was happening now, secretaries were running up and downstairs in his head looking for a solution, trying to find the right file which was stored god knows where which had the information about what to do – when he already knew the solution but just couldn’t do it.

He hated Rex so much it made him physically ill.  He couldn’t believe the power he still had and he wasn’t even here.

And he knew that Louis’ smile was false in order to console him and that was worse, he should be consoling Louis but he couldn’t, he couldn’t lie.

He hated Rex more than he loved Louis.

He just wanted everything to get back to normal.

Louis was in the hallway putting on three coats, one on top of the other.  Ian stood in front of the door and said nicely, “Never mind about me, how about you?”

Louis said, “I feel like shit” and that made Ian angry again.  Why couldn’t he say he was OK?  Ian said, “My mother’s a bitch”.  Louis said, “OK”.

Louis said, “I have supported you with all your problems for four years and I’ve had troubles for three weeks and you’ve had enough.  If you don’t want to know how I truly am then don’t ask”.  He felt bloated and stiff wearing three coats and couldn’t get his arms in his pockets.

“Because I can’t help, I get frustrated.  You know what I’m like”.

“That doesn’t help me”.

 Ian said, “I can’t do anything right”.

Louis said, “You do nothing!  Stop whining.  The focus is off you and you hate it.  I can’t talk to you because your ego always gets in the way”.  He tried to bend down to put his boots on but it was difficult with all the coatage he was carrying.  He slipped them on and put his foot against the wall to tie them up.

It was nice to know where Ian was in his hour of need:  looking after himself.

Louis had tried to be jolly and soldier on as for a child but Ian was not a child – sulky, bad tempered, expecting Louis to be chirpy and fix things, and I can’t do it, so I try to shut up about Rex and then I am silent and you don’t like that either.  I am trapped.  It is me who can’t do anything right.  I want to be on my own.

Ian thought, You’ve got double yellow lines painted all over you.  It seemed such a wonderful line that it was a huge sacrifice not to say it, but he didn’t dare to make the word flesh.  He considered storming out but there was not enough room to flounce when he was already so close to the door, and since Louis was going out too it would not have the desired effect; they would jostle on the stairs to see who could get out first.

He said, “Let’s go away – in the new year.  Not somewhere far, just a break”.  Louis thought of them stuck together all the time in Southend with no possibility of escape.  He said no, he didn’t really feel like it.  He used the word “really” as a sop.

It was incredibly unnerving having this intense conversation when they were standing directly in front of each other and looking into each other’s eyes.  It was the sort of conversation which should be had from a distance, or at the breakfast table with a newspaper to hide behind.  He couldn’t leave because that would mean pushing past Ian who was still strategically placed in front of the door.  Louis thought of the window but he lacked agility in the three coats.

Ian said, “We were so happy”, and Louis thought no we weren’t, it was fake, only this is real.

Then Ian said, “I’m only trying to help”.  He added, “Do you think we should call it a day?” 

Louis was appalled, but also impressed.  “You don’t help, you make things worse.  I’ve had this for four weeks and you want to leave”.

“You don’t want me here, everything I do is wrong”.  He said, “I feel rejected” because he and Louis had always spoken about how they felt, he said, “I’m putting so much effort into doing the right thing or trying to avoid doing the wrong thing and I still can’t do it, I can’t get it right and it’s draining me”.

“Stop whining.  It’s not all about you.  Oh forget it.  If you don’t want to know how I am DON’T ASK”.  He wondered why he had said “I’ve had this” as if it was a disease.

Ian thought, Why does he keep repeating himself?  He was annoyed with himself, both because he couldn’t help and he couldn’t make himself understood; he couldn’t eliminate the image of Rex in Louis’ mind, he couldn’t make Louis see sense.

They were just standing there talking at each other; it was decidedly odd.  They’d never done this before.

Ian had picked up a bereavement leaflet at the doctors, he said, “I don’t know how this grief thing works”.  He said, “It would have helped to go to the funeral, to say goodbye”.

I can say goodbye any time.  I don’t want to say goodbye, it isn’t over yet.

Ian said, and he was embarrassed about saying it but couldn’t re-phrase it to make himself sound less of a princess, “I feel like there’s three of us in this relationship”.

Louis thought, There always was, you just didn’t know it.  Neither did I.

Ian was angry that he couldn’t make the situation right and Louis knew this. 

Louis said, “I try to avoid the subject because I don’t want to upset you, I’m trying to protect you, I try to keep it to myself but you keep asking me about it and I can’t lie.  I’m trying to keep it in – that’s what I thought I was doing, I thought you couldn’t see it, it’s very wearing, keep smiling, push it underfoot”.

But Ian already knew this.  Louis said, “I’m going for a little walk.  Don’t worry, I’ll be back”.  Ian moved to one side and let him waddle through the door in all the coats they owned.

When Louis was out walking he kept noticing puddles where the snow had melted on the pavements with the heat of passing feet.  Three wet patches he observed today, on slopes, spilt drinks and dog piss, and each time the flow went not directly down but across and down, aiming for the kerb.  He found this baffling.  Perhaps he did not fully understand gravity.  On a slope, where the liquid was on a slope, he noticed that it didn’t dribble down to the bottom of the slope, following gravity, where he supposed gravity was, it just sort of went down a bit and then went sideways and stopped.  He thought, That’s what I’m like.  I have not fallen straight either, just locked sideways on a ledge.  Most of us fall this way.  A true fall requires more effort, more determination.  Why am I not dead?  He couldn’t understand how he felt so terrible but he hadn’t gone directly down, not directly down, but had gone down sideways and stopped.  He was the trickle of the puddle on the slope.

Christmas was over.  The snow continued, the pavements were icy.  There was ice inside the window.  Everything was muffled with snow, suffocated with it.  It was crisp and cold but it had gone on too long and was stagnant.

In Coral’s kitchen he could see light.  But he couldn’t face her placards.

 

Emiko again went round to see Louis and again he was out.  Ian let her in reluctantly. “He’s out.  I don’t know where”.

She had on a pair of men’s brogues, tiny little doll’s shoes.

She had brought Bonnie with her, for the fresh air.  She told Ian that she had got the rubber gloves and was careful.

 Ian had no interest in this - she knew he didn’t like birds and shouldn’t have brought her.  The parrot started walking down her arm.  This made Ian nervous about where she was headed next.  He folded his arms behind his back so they did not resemble perches.  He dragged out some words which he hoped were polite, not realising that it was courtesy that encouraged Emiko to stay. 

The parrot suddenly jumped on the table and moved sideways towards Ian, cocking its head at him.

Beside Ian’s general revulsion for any creature that had bodily functions, animals gave him the creeps because he never knew what they were thinking.  He regarded them as a gifted species and felt embarrassed before them, so avoided them where he could.  He always felt they were judging him as if he were a pathetic loser.

Bonnie looked Ian up and down in much the same way as his mother did.  And then turned her back on him, ditto.

Lulu was asleep but woke up whimpering for Emiko’s breast.

“Do you mind?”  Emiko turned away from Ian and began to feed the baby.

 Ian refused to leave his own room but went to the window and could hear the noisy suckling.

The parrot looked across at him as if he were a voyeur.

He turned on Radio True Love and hopped back and forth between channels pretending that was what he had been doing before Emiko arrived; he got terribly involved in it, as if he were an engineer.

Eventually the baby finished and Emiko asked him how Louis was getting on.

 Ian said he didn’t know.

Then she asked how he was, which nobody ever did.  Was it a trap?  She only asked as an afterthought.

He said he was OK.  She said he didn’t sound OK. 

Lulu had settled down to sleep again.  Nice life.  Wake up, food on tap, fall asleep, nobody expects anything of you.  The parrot was still staring at him as if waiting for him to express an opinion that was worthless.  Ian didn’t have anything to say which would impress a parrot so he said nothing.  The parrot kept nodding its head, taking it all in.

Then, because she showed no signs of leaving (he had been cooking and the kitchen was still warm and it was so cold on her boat) Ian offered her a coffee, because she looked tired and it can’t be nice having a baby hanging off your tits all day.

She said, “I have been to doctors about it, you know, but they won’t do anything till she is older”.

“Why, what’s wrong with her?”

“The birthmark”.

“What birthmark?”

“You are always looking at it”.

But Ian had no idea what she was talking about.  He had never looked at the child.

He went and looked now.  “Where is it?”  

“There”.

“Where?  Oh that little freckle.  It’s not a birthmark”.

But Emiko knew her own child and she knew it was a hideous birthmark.  Lulu could use make up when she was older but Emiko couldn’t do that to a baby so she had to cover her up with blankets, risking asphyxiation.  She was concerned about how Lulu would deal with it when she was older, being talked about and laughed at.  It would be better to have it cut off now so the scar would have faded by the time she reached that age.  But the doctor was being obstructive.

Ian said he had to go out.  Emiko asked if she could wait for Louis.

He went out on his bike through the slush on the road and went the wrong way, eyes still blurry no matter how wide he opened them, and then he got something in his eye and couldn’t get it out, sticking a finger in his eye, couldn’t get it out, couldn’t see where he was going, took a wrong turning and ended up somewhere he didn’t recognise, little side roads he had never seen before.

In the gutter there was an empty crisp packet, following him; he tried to cycle faster and the empty crisp packet speeded up, he slowed down and the crisp packet slowed down, he couldn’t shake it off, this rattling-in-the wind crisp packet.  It sounded comical when he told Louis about it later but it filled him with dread.

 

Death like love unhinges us, we have no defences against either; both compromise reason.

When Ian got home that night Louis was holding Rex’s shoes with his head bent over them to capture the scent of Rex; they were saturated with Rex; he lifted them to his face and tried to absorb Rex through the leather.

 Ian said, “What the fuck are you doing now?”

 Louis looked up at him at him like a wild animal insane with starvation.

Ian said, “He was an ordinary person, they’re not the shoes of Abraham fucking Lincoln”.

Louis had been smoking Rex’s tobacco and the flat stank.  He left apple cores around so it felt like Rex was here, Rex calling them apple corpses, or they’d tried to see how long a grape would take to become a raisin.  Ian wouldn’t understand, he thought, as if it were some magical poetic moment beyond the grasp of lesser mortals, especially ones who appreciated cleanliness and order as Ian did.

 Ian hoovered it all up.  He was very insensitive in that way.

The clothes Louis wore of Rex’s already fitted him better since he had stopped eating.  Most of the pockets were ripped to rags, Rex was impatient with clothes and their access to whatever he needed immediately.  Louis found the rips comforting, Rex’s hands had been there, so it was sort of like they were touching each other, through the fabric, through time.

 Ian said, “Why are you turning into him?  Are you going to be shooting up next?”

He took the cigarette out of Louis’ mouth, opened a window and threw it outside, in a decisive gesture.

It landed on the window sill, Louis went to grab it.  Ian reached out and flicked it off.

Louis raced downstairs to retrieve it.

Later he fell asleep with the packet of tobacco in his hand and when he woke up only twenty minutes had passed.  No lights anywhere; nobody.  Ian was at work.  The same huge pit opened up with him in the middle of it.

He smelt the brown blood on a raggy old shirt of Rex’s.

How many times did he have to say I miss you before Rex returned to him?  The desire to see him was so intense it was a physical pain.  He could not bear being so far away from him.  The words I miss you were tiny and could not convey just how unbearable it was.  It was absolutely unendurable:  you being dead is unendurable. 

 Ian was at work so he started screaming again, not having to hold it in.

Then he went outside, screaming across the black hole to Rex.  He thought that if he looked distressed enough somebody, some magical stranger, would take him aside and lead him to where Rex was hiding.

Once he had given Rex razorblades.  He didn’t now recall what they had been arguing about.  Rex said, “You make me want to slash my wrists!” and Louis, who was doing some plant cuttings, handed him the pack of blades.

Rex sliced down his arm, blood gushed, it had truly gushed like a fountain; Louis got worried and rang for an ambulance; they said, “Keep your arm held up”.

Louis didn’t go in the ambulance with him.  The blood had stained the pale green rug and it was also in the stainless steel sink, where it coagulated in rubbery clots.  Louis did not wash it away.  He felt very sad.

Now he had no shoes on and he couldn’t feel the snowy pavement.  Cars motored down the road.  Rex never answered the phone, he was always asleep, it drove Louis mad, never awake, came home to sleep and when he woke up he went out.  The endless sleeping drove him mad but he would give anything now for Rex to be lying asleep in the bed next to him, or on the sofa, waiting at home.

In the park, after a short game of badminton which Louis had no idea how he had talked him into, Rex had laid down on the grass and wouldn’t wake up and Louis, bored of prodding him, had gone home.  Two hours later when he went back to the park Rex was blistering from sunburn on his leg, where his trouser leg had scrunched up. 

Louis said I’m so sorry for everything but saying it out loud was not enough.  One of the Samaritans told him to write it all down, like that was a new idea, but that wasn’t enough either; he wanted Rex to hear him, and he wanted to know that Rex could hear him.

I would never bend for you, I am sorry for everything I would never do anything to make your life easier, I always thought of myself I am so sorry so sorry so sorry.

I cannot bear knowing that you will never come back I cannot bear you to die I just cannot bear it people telling me it will get easier.  Every day was so unbearably long, so much time to kill, he couldn’t keep it at bay indefinitely; he was just ticking off the days until he could be with Rex again and hold him in his arms, your poor drug-punctured arms, the tracks of scars all up your arms, following the veins.   

He said Can you hear me, come and talk to me come to me in a dream so we can be together again, I long to be in your arms again.  And he got a sick feeling in his stomach and thought it meant that Rex was on his way; felt unsettled like he was waiting for something that was about to arrive.

Don’t you want me anymore?  But Rex never came.

It is so cold and empty here without you, I long to be in your arms again.

In the hospital, were you frightened and alone, had you had enough, were you lonely in the boat.  What is it like when you know you are going to die.  He didn’t tell anyone, he faced it alone.  I think you had had enough.  Why didn’t you tell anyone this time, you knew this was it.

Louis longed to hold him and comfort him, to save him.  I let you down.  I want to have been there at the end, all your loneliness, I never helped, I only made things worse I abandoned you I failed the test I let you down.

The Samaritan said Rex let himself down.  But Louis knew that he himself had let Rex down because Rex once said that Louis only gave him material things, he gave him books, he gave him clothes, he gave him food, but he would never help him in the way he needed.

The Samaritans said that he was a mature man in control of his own destiny but he wasn’t.  He had been desperate to be free of his addictions and had tried again and again and nobody knew how hard that was.

Louis needed Rex to know how much he loved him; it was important that he knew.  He rang the Samaritans and nobody answered.  He thought, They know it’s me, even they don’t want to speak to me now, even they’re fed up with me (he had called the wrong number).

They can’t bring you back anyway, they can’t change anything.

He wanted a safe harbour, something to cling to but there was nothing, he was stuck on his own.  All the cars sailed by in another world that was warm and full of love.

Darling please don’t be dead I don’t want you to be dead I can’t stand it please stop being dead I can’t never see you again I want you to love me again I just want to be with you.  I should have known how ill you were I should have known how unhappy you were.

You kept telling me.

Why didn’t I take it seriously.  Why didn’t I see this coming?

Louis hated Ian.  I should never have met Ian, not until Rex was OK.

He wanted to go home and find Rex on the other side of the door, lying asleep like a pile of dead leaves blown into a corner by the wind like he did when he lost his key, but Rex was not there and he could no longer bear to look.

Outside with no shoes and no coat he looked at the inconvenient snow and thought how Rex would delight in it, he would want to be one with the snow, rolling in it and eating it.

Louis should really get rid of all his things so that Ian would have less to deal with when he was gone, he couldn’t stand the thought of people looking at his things.

He rang the Samaritans again.  It had started to irritate him that they kept asking if he was suicidal.  What did that matter?  If he was suicidal he would just do it.  They said sometimes people like to be talking to someone while they do it. 

It would have been easier if he was suicidal because they only took you really seriously if you were past the turmoil and ready to die.  But it wasn’t the worst thing that could happen.

After the call he pressed the number again but stopped it.  They couldn’t give him what he wanted.

They said, “We all do the best we can at the time” but that didn’t help when he would give anything to have done something else.

Not even Coral’s light was on in the street.

He needed someone and there was no one.  Why didn’t people get up?  It was 4am – that’s not night, it’s early morning, he just had to be with someone, had to talk to someone about Rex but there was no one.

He screamed I lost everything please come back I need you it tortured me when you went away I’m sorry for everything, I am sorry, I love you I miss you so much, why won’t you hear me.

He went back home but couldn’t go indoors; he ran round the back yard howling begging Rex to come home, I’ll let you in this time, this time I’ll know and we’ll talk and everything will be fine.

 Ian was back from work early and missed Louis by seconds but he heard sounds and looking out of the kitchen window he saw Louis below running round in the snow.  He didn’t know what to do.  He wanted to get him indoors, put some shoes on him, warm him up with a soft towel but he kept doing the wrong thing so he didn’t dare.  He felt angry with Rex that Louis was doing this.

It was usually Louis who took charge in a crisis.  Now that Louis was the crisis they had nobody in charge.

He wanted to say, “Look at yourself!  Get your act together, pull yourself together”.  He opened the window and shouted down, “Come inside, it’s freezing”.  Louis didn’t feel the cold.  What did he care if it was freezing.  He moved off with no shoes.  Ian assumed he was coming indoors so he went to bed and waited.

Louis stumbled up to the Harrow Road, walking along howling, trying to hold the howl in, clinging to street lamps.  It was still dark, everything was frightening, nothing was stable, the occasional car bumbled along on the other side of the world through the slush I remember the warmth of your body, always so warm like a holiday in the sun yours was a body I loved a face I loved you I loved.  He went into another phone kiosk and started to call the Samaritans but realised it was useless and put the receiver down again. 

He didn’t want to talk to the Samaritans, he wanted to talk to Rex.  Coral was out and he didn’t want to talk to her about finding joy in a purposeless universe.  There was nobody.  He didn’t want to explain why he loved Rex so much, he didn’t want to explain and justify things and say Rex wasn’t like they thought he was even though they had never met him and said he was demanding.  A lot of the Samaritans said he was demanding.  Louis didn’t want to make himself understood, he wanted to be understood.  They said you must forgive yourself, but I didn’t wrong me I wronged you.  He didn’t want their bland reassurances, that wasn’t what he needed.  He didn’t want to be told that he had done fine when he knew he hadn’t.  There was no comfort, they couldn’t comfort him, he just wanted Rex back, not glib statements about grief.

Instead he called the police.  They arrived fifteen minutes later and took him to St Mary’s hospital.

The police were kind and talked gently to him and Louis felt a little better being in the car even though they were in the other world.  He babbled on and he wrote down their names in his notebook.  At the hospital they waited with him until he could be seen by a doctor.  This took over an hour.

Accident and Emergency was Rex’s turf.  The atmosphere in the hospital very early morning was like all the times he had been to A and E with Rex, St Thomas’s, UCH in the Euston Road, St Mary’s, the Middlesex, when Rex didn’t want to go home without any drugs and needed a breather, sometimes when he overdosed, the razor blade incident, the time his back went, or using the toilets to shoot up in peace and quiet.  It was a happy memory now, waiting for Rex to shoot up, but how impatient he had always been when it was happening in reality.  Why was that, what was the hurry?  Rex could always sleep through the long tedious hours until morning but Louis was wide awake and bored out of his skull.

It was oddly comforting, this atmosphere, and it made him feel closer to Rex as if some ethereal part of him lingered still in hospitals everywhere.

The nurses put him in a booth all on his own and he could hear the little noises of life around him through the thin curtain.  The doctor didn’t stay long; he said a psychologist would be coming soon but that took hours too and the hospital started waking up and Louis started to lose the Rex feeling.  It became boring and then irritating.  But he calmed down a little because there were more people around and he was no longer alone with the black hole.

He wanted to go home but he also wanted help and he was afraid that if he left now he would lose the opportunity of some real help that would bring Rex back to him.

Other people walked around and he felt like a ghost none of them could see, he was not a part of their world any longer.

The psychologist hadn’t come into work because of the snow.  The student psychologist offered Louis a bed in the psychiatric unit but he said no.  That wasn’t what he wanted, although a part of him was tempted.  But how would he find Rex if he was locked up in here.  She was so earnest and she was wearing horrible glasses.

As they sat there, Louis thought Please be with me, everything is frightening, and he imagined that he could see Rex behind him, to the left, in the mirror, messing about, mocking the student.

She looked like a geography teacher.  He couldn’t imagine opening up to her and letting her delve into his private life; she had very large spectacles; many people have to wear glasses but why do they make such horrible frames?  Surely cheap doesn’t have to lack style so utterly.  Nobody could pull that look off.  Should he hand in an essay?  He wrote her name in his notebook, along with a physical description in case he needed to avoid her later on.  She was also wearing jeans, presumably to soften the geography look.  And she had a slight lisp.

She was too old for jeans.  They were neatly pressed.

It seemed an odd line of work to go into, talking, when you have a speech impediment.  He admired her balls, but still –

She said, “How are you feeling?” and he tried to say but she interrupted him with the counselling book response, paraphrasing him and nodding her head thoughtfully.  He thought, I know what I said.  He didn’t feel she had heard him, only that she was studying him, perhaps for the geography exam.

He didn’t want to talk to her, trying to make himself understood, but he felt sorry for the lisp and the horrible glasses and the pressed jeans so he made an attempt.  Even none of the Samaritans had lisps.  That wasn’t their fault.

She said that it takes time to come to terms with death and he said he didn’t want to come to terms with it; he wanted Rex not to be dead.

She offered him pills and said, “They will lift your spirits” but he didn’t want his spirits lifted; if this was how he felt then this was how he wanted to feel, he didn’t want to be separated from Rex.  The pills were not magic, they could not reverse time. 

She said, “You have to take them for a year” but he wasn’t likely to be around for a year.  She said, “Make an appointment to come back in a month”.  He thought, I’ll be dead by then.  She said, “What is it you want?”

Louis said, “I want you to turn back time and make this not be happening”.

This she would not do for him.  She said, “That’s impossible”.  He said nevertheless that was what he wanted.  They all say, “How can I help you” but when you tell them they say they can’t; what’s the point, then, of asking.  Each time someone asked he thought maybe this is the person who can do it.

She said Rex sounded like a very demanding man.

He wasn’t demanding he was desperate.

You did what you could.

But not enough.

And Louis wrote everything down in his notebook even though it wasn’t helpful, because maybe he was missing something that he would see when his mind was clearer.  He wrote down the names of the police who picked him up and he wrote down the name of the laundry boy who offered to get him a coffee but only if he gave him a fiver.  He wrote down the name of the psychologist even though she was an unfeeling idiot.

He wanted it all on record.

He said, “I don’t like your face”, which wasn’t a thing he would ordinarily say to someone but he wanted to test how calmly she would take it.  It was her job, after all.

And then she stopped talking and gave him some silence to use instead and that was worse.

Louis said, “I can sit in silence on my own”.  Suddenly he felt all wrong, all panicky, said, “Oh my god I’ve got to go”, and he got up and left.

She said, “Please come back”.

But he couldn’t get out of the door and she was quickly advancing on him.  She said, “You have to press the button to the left” but Louis’ mind had gone blank and he didn’t know what was left and what was right.  She got right next to him and pressed the button on the left and the door opened.

He walked out into the snow wearing a pair of shoes the laundry boy gave him for free but they were full of holes and he called for a taxi.

The taxi driver had a new car which he wanted to show off, the leather seats and mahogany fitments, it was an old car and only 74 still in the country, 15 years old, I use Mr Pledge to keep the seats clean.

Unfortunately he did not keep himself clean and Louis opened the window for fresh air but the taxi driver asked him not to do that as it played havoc with his sciatica but he was impressed by the sound system in his car.  “It’s old but listen to the quality”- and kept flicking through song after song, he liked country and western, he kept saying you’ll know this one, you’ll know this one, but Louis never did.  Louis wanted only to sit there and think, he was not in the mood for a quiz; he felt very dimwitted because he could think of none of the answers, his brain wouldn’t work quick enough for the speedy changing of songs.

Then the car got stuck at traffic lights and Louis’ money ran out so he paid up and walked the rest of the way home.  The man was still yelling song titles out of the window.

Louis wrote down the experience in his notebook as he walked along but already he couldn’t remember the make of the car.  He remembered Rex’s car.

His took off the holey shoes and his feet were all blistered and that made him happy because Rex always had blistered feet.

Maybe it was a sign.  One of the fortnights Rex didn’t come home, when Louis finally managed to track him down, Rex said, “You told me not to come back”.  His feet were stuck inside his shoes with no socks, white and numb and blistered.  He had blood all over his shirt and a black eye.  He had been sleeping in a phone box in Soho.  Louis bought him some cake and they drank cream soda.  Rex smelled of pee.  Louis said, “I was angry, I didn’t mean it” – how could he possibly have thought he’d meant it?  Come on let’s go home.

But Rex had to get drugs to take home first, for the morning; he swapped jackets with Louis and begged up some money and stole Louis an interesting sandwich while he waited, two hours to find a dealer, four hours in a toilet shooting up.  In the end Rex told him to go home and he would catch him up.  It took another week before he came back – but Louis felt happy at the memory because Rex was happier.

Louis didn’t call the Samaritans on the walk back to the flat because they were useless.  Talking to people purged him briefly but it didn’t help, it was only a short-term fix.  Nobody could help because nobody could make it not have happened.  It had happened.  Nothing could un-dead Rex.

What’s the point - they are not you.

Louis didn’t want to learn to live with it, he wanted it not to have happened and he wanted to hit out because there was nothing he could do to stop it from happening; it had already happened.

Death made him painfully aware of his impotence.  In any other situation he at least had the illusion of control, a chance for change, however tiny.  Death stripped him of even that illusion.  There was no chance.  He couldn’t change it.  But when had he ever changed anything anyway?  As if anything he had ever wanted in his life had happened, however sincerely and passionately he had tried.  All the times he had begged Rex to come home, begging him to come to bed.  The Winter’s Tale is a fantasy.  The story of Lazarus is nonsense.  The story of Jesus and the resurrection is utter crap.  The boy could never join with the star.

He felt utterly worn out and he thought maybe he would be able to sleep for longer than twenty minutes.

When he got home there was a pile of junk mail on the table.  More leaflets, including a flyer from a chiropodist saying, “Why Suffer Painful Tired Feet - when professional help is just a phone call away.  Visit our modern surgery or we will visit you at home”.

It sounded like a threat.  They had wheelchair access.  Louis’ feet hurt.

And some college courses for the Christmas season –‘Sew your Christmas Present List’, ‘Making Christmas Angels in Felt’, ‘Christmas Mini Tag Album’, and ‘Getting to Know your Sewing Machine’ – one two hour session each.  Also, ‘Welsh for Improvers’ and ‘Folk, fiddle, flute and mandolin’, none of which enticed him.  There was also a pamphlet from the Spiritualist Mission, or S and M as Ian had underlined.  Rex always appreciated a good leaflet.

 Ian heard him come in and said, “Oh thank god you’re alright” and tried to hug him.

This irritated Louis.  If he cared so much, why was here and not out looking for him.