2. SITTING

Rex’s car was blue.

In the hospital cafeteria there was a table with cutlery set out on it and it was all cheap and tinny cutlery and to Louis it all looked like heroin spoons.  Spoons were Rex, always burnt black on the underside where the lighter heated up the heroin.  Spoons meant loneliness, spoons meant he had lost Rex for another day, spoons meant mind-numbing boredom watching someone else’s mind go somewhere else he could not follow.  But now spoons were a connection to Rex and so they were special, they took him back to spoonville.  He had stolen the tinniest looking one and he fingered it now in his pocket, lovingly.

It was St. Mary’s where he had arrived in tee-shirt and boxers four years ago.  Cleaning up the flat he’d got one of Rex’s syringe needles jabbed in his thumb and his thumb ballooned up to three times its size with the impact.  He panicked, phoned his doctor; he’d come to St. Mary’s and sat in the Sexual Health clinic with the sexually diseased. 

And once he was there, with his huge thumb, the nurses had been so kind to him, so very very kind, that he kept breaking down.  He couldn’t stop crying and they found a little corner down a narrow hallway for him to sit in, away from everybody else, so nobody could see him crying.  He cried and cried and couldn’t stop.  It had been their kindness that upset him because he had been without kindness for so long.  But then he had to go back home and he and Rex had another fight and he could no longer stand the fights, the lack of money, being left with no food, and Rex never coming home.

 He took some of Rex’s illicit valium, just a few to help him sleep, then a few more when that didn’t work, then the whole lot, and then he went outside to look for Rex.  It didn’t make much sense.  The deli man found him in the kerb and called the police saying he was drunk; he had no shoes on then either.  It was Marina herself who was then only about 14 years old, the deli man’s daughter who had Williams Syndrome, she had sat next to Louis on the step for half an hour waiting for the ambulance, stroking his hair and telling him everything would be alright.  The next hour was a blank but he later read the notes that had been sent to his doctor:  At the hospital he had laid down in the waiting room and refused to move, and then he wandered off and they called the police and the police had brought him back to the hospital.  He had scratches on his leg which he had no idea how they got there.  He came back into himself in the police car, in between two policemen, with his hands cuffed behind him.  They wouldn’t release him from the cuffs to button his fly.

Three policemen had led him through ward afterward and Louis became obsessed with the idea that other patients, quietly lying there being ill in their beds, would think he had done something illegal because of the presence of the police.  He kept shouting out I’VE DONE NOTHING WRONG YOU FUCKING CUNTS, again and again.  Normally he never swore and would certainly never swear at the police.  In retrospect he was impressed by the policemen’s restraint; they never even told him to shut up.

And all the time in the hospital, all he could think was, “I must get home, Rex will be worried where I am”.  So that the moment the policemen turned their backs he made a jump for the door but promptly fell over.  The nurses were all whispering bad things about Rex.  They said that Louis sounded drunk but didn’t smell of drink.  They put him in the mental department with the drunks and the addicts and when he woke up he ran round and round the department trying to find a way out but all the doors were bolted.

When they finally let him go in the morning he walked miles home in his bare feet over crackling gravel and Rex was there at home, asleep, and had not even noticed him gone.   Half an hour later when Rex woke up he asked Louis to go out and get money, which he did, begged up twenty quid.  It wasn’t the end, it just carried on as before, exactly the same.

 

Louis was worn out.  He went to bed, feeling calm simply because he no longer had the energy to be distressed, dreading tomorrow morning and the feelings all starting up again.

Ian came into the bedroom and put an extra blanket on the bed.  He said, “He’s like a human cannonball – he’s already blown up your life once, now he’s blowing it up again and he’s not even here – and you’re still letting him do it”.

Louis mumbled, “He didn’t blow up my life”.  He thought, it was exciting - but even now he knew that it wasn’t, the anxiety had been unbearable, but knowing what he knew now he longed for that stress again because it was still better than this.  But he would need to have the stress of Rex while knowing exactly what now was like with the stress of no-Rex, and that wasn’t possible.  It was like the Little Mermaid who got her heart’s desire but sacrificed her tongue for it and could never tell the prince who she really was.  Why didn’t she just write a letter explaining it all?  Or was that part of the deal?  Can mermaids write at all?  It just wasn’t a realistic story.

Desire.  One had absolutely no control over it, it was like a wild bird scratching lines across the sky.  It did its own thing and you had to follow in its wake.

At the drug clinic he had said to Rex, “You’d show up on my tox screen”.

That whole time - but he couldn’t remember anything in order, it was all a frenetic miserable blur.  Everything he wrote down in his notebook was all back to front.  He tried to make a chart, with columns specifying each year, and then each month, and tried to fill it in that way, with all the different things that had happened with Rex, so he could see a page at a glance.  He had no ultimate aim in doing this.  Just trying to grasp what was what.

“All the things he did to you!  Listen to yourself!  I can’t stand you making him out to be some kind of holy angel”.

You didn’t know the Rex I knew.

“I know what you told me about him.  It’s you who told me he was a cunt”.

Ian had got into bed and attempted to snuggle up to Louis but he was still talking in this angry way which was the antithesis of all his snuggle body language.  Louis wanted to shut his eyes and not think about it anymore but it was difficult with these words stabbing the back of his neck.

Louis had told Ian that Rex was a cunt to make Ian feel good about himself.  It’s how one speaks about exes.  It’s the rule.

“So it was all lies, everything you told me?”

“It’s just different, he didn’t mean to do those things”.  Louis inched forward to the edge of the bed hoping Ian would not follow him but he did.

“I know what you told me - your life savings, he got through the whole lot in a month”.

“It taught me not to be greedy”.

“What did it teach you when he was thrashing you with the metal rod?”

He was off his head with drugs, he didn’t know what he was doing.  You can’t hate someone for that, it is an action of insanity.

Rex was paranoid with crack cocaine.  He had got it into his head that Louis was unfaithful.  Louis never knew how it had happened but somehow he confessed that he once found a local fire fighter good-looking – there had been a small fire in the Deli.  Every night for months Rex would come in and ask Louis about the fire fighter, what he had been thinking about him, what he wanted to do with him, if he had seen him again, how good-looking was he.  Louis had not thought of the fire fighter at all until Rex started questioning him, and then the anxiety of not thinking about the fire fighter had made him think of the fire fighter all the time.  Eventually Rex demanded that, since he was away so much (as if he was away from home on business), Louis should keep a daily diary of all the thoughts he had of the fire fighter, so that Rex could read it at leisure.  Louis had done this, because it was important to Rex.  Still Rex came home asking Louis incomprehensible questions about this infidelity, he never knew what the right answer was because he never knew exactly what the question was, and this enraged Rex still further.  Rex accepted that Louis had never “done” anything; but professed that this mental infidelity was as bad.  Finally, Rex decided that if Louis agreed to be tied naked to a table and thrashed, that would prove he was truly sorry, Rex would feel atoned for, and they could move on from the whole thing.  And, for the sake of this promised peace, Louis agreed to be tied to the table and thrashed.  But it wasn’t the end, it all carried on.  Rex never understood how absolutely Louis loved him and never thought of other men at all.

Rex who would not even hurt a fly, who politely ushered them out of the room with a tea towel, gently saying, “Off you go now”.

Ian, who did not know the full story of the thrashing because some of the details Louis could not bear anyone to know, Ian said, “If he was so nice to flies why couldn’t he be nice to you?”  But that was different.  Flies don’t expect anything from a relationship.

There were many times when Louis lent Rex the housing benefit money to get off drugs, big chunks of heroin with which he planned to stay at home and wean himself off it, little by little.  Louis ended up in rent arrears for over a thousand pounds and was threatened with eviction, he received notice from the landlord.

But it was hard, drug withdrawal is hard, it was an impossible battle, nobody knew how hard Rex tried.  He was an adult and he made his own choices but it’s never that simple.  For Ian the land was always black and white, and preferably flat.  Ian said if he loved you he wouldn’t lie steal hit you but he lied because I made it impossible for him to tell the truth.

Rex was a liar but I made it impossible for him to tell the truth, I always overreacted, he was scared of rejection.  Lies lies lies.  Of course he lied, I was so self-righteous and angry about the drugs he couldn’t face rejection so he lied, I’d give anything for him to lie to me again.

Ian was more sensible.

Rex just wanted to please me, he needed approval and I was always so angry with him, I wouldn’t take late calls, I asked him not to call late and he still did, but that’s the only time he was awake, he was trying to reach me.  I am suffering for that now.  Drugs took him away from me.  It is half past midnight and I would give anything for you to call me now.  It was bad enough being upset; it was even worse having to explain to Ian why he was upset and why he loved Rex so much.

I’d give anything – what does that even mean?  It’s just another lie we tell ourselves when it’s too late to give.

Louis sat up and started folding himself a cigarette.  But Ian had thrown the lighter away.

 

A week later there were two floods from upstairs, which ruined the remainder of Rex’s books.  Louis became hysterical at yet another loss and Ian went upstairs to complain even though he hated confrontations.

Nobody lived in the flat upstairs, it had been empty ever since Louis had lived there.

Water continued to streak down the walls.  They set up buckets and sponges and squeezed the water onto the window boxes, which didn’t need it.  Ian worried about the state of the floorboards and the mats.  He bought a huge roll of polystyrene to cover everything so the water damage was minimal.  Louis stopped caring about their possessions and had no concern about how damaged they became.  Ian put together a list for the landlord, adding sums, calculating reparation, but they had no insurance.

Plumbers and builders were called in by the house agent but none of them could find the source of the leak, although they didn’t look very hard.  The agent wanted the floorboards in the upstairs flat pulled up.  The workmen banged about testing this and that but nobody knew what they were looking for; it went on for days.

The noise drove Louis mad but he had worn out his feet with all the walking and he couldn’t face any more endless walks to nowhere, finding nothing and coming back to nothing.  The longer he walked the further and further away he was getting from Rex; he had no idea where he was going or where the destination was; there wasn’t one.

He said, “Why won’t they all fuck off and leave me alone”.

Ian was uncharacteristically calm.  “It’s not about you”, he said.

“I can’t stand it, bang bang bang, I don’t go round to their houses and start banging all the time”.

A new family moved into the flat directly below and they also crashed about all day and night – when some of them went to bed the others were up all night and vice versa.  Ian bought earplugs but they were agonising to insert.

Outside the house, to the side the house, in the one parking space, was a car with the wheels off.  The window was sealed up with cardboard and gaffer tape.  It was Rex’s car.

What’s the point of walking, I won’t find you out there.

Louis sat in the car and could still see all the workmen going in and out of the house but he could no longer hear them as clearly.  It was unsettling, this constant movement, but he dared not take his eyes off them, just in case – in case what?

His warm breath steamed up the front window; he huddled in his coat.  It was so cold.

Ian said, “Come indoors”.

Since Louis had let him confront the empty upstairs flat about the leak Ian felt that maybe Louis would appreciate him taking charge so he ordered him indoors but it wasn’t his real voice and it had no authority.  Louis ignored him.  Ian was desperate for everything to go back to normal.  Was he meant to sit out here in the cold and keep Louis company?  He went back indoors and brought Louis out a blanket, then went to work.

Louis felt oddly peaceful in the car with all the drama at a distance.  He threw Ian’s blanket over the back seat, contemptuously.  Ian had said, “Take the antidepressants” but that was only for his sake, not Louis’.  He didn’t want to be happy for Ian.  His grief was an inconvenience to Ian, that was all.  What was the difference anyway between street drugs and prescribed drugs?  You can’t denigrate one then take the other.  They are all mood altering.  Even coffee.  Even sugar.  We all run away in one direction or another.

He turned the key in the ignition.  Nothing happened.  Absolutely nothing.  Of course nothing happened, what did he expect?  Yet he had expected it to come back to life.  Not even the slightest tiniest bit of effort from the engine.  It was a disappointment but also a relief.  If he put his foot down he could drive away but to where?  There was nowhere.  He was stuck with the unbearable Here.

He sat there all night.  It was cold.  Ian would come back soon and go to bed; he couldn’t face him.  He wondered if this was how Rex felt after they had fought.  He had always concentrated on how he felt himself; he never considered how it would affect Rex.  He imagined Rex would blot it out with drugs.  He imagined Rex had no feelings left.

The car even smelt cold.

It was Rex’s car, which he had bought with some money he got for selling drugs to an Australian tourist.  The neighbours complained but it had never been towed away.

This was not the car Rex had driven down the motorway while nearly asleep, banging into the side barriers before being stopped by police at Holland Park.  It was not the car, either, in which he had driven them down to Cornwall and then had to come back to London the same night because the heroin he had been sold for the trip was faulty.  He was withdrawing at the sleeping stage and slept for four hours at a Tesco superstore.  Louis was so bored he nagged and nagged him to get going again.  When Rex finally did, he fell asleep at the wheel, sailed through a fence and into a field, crashing into a tree.  Rex’s airbag worked; Louis’ did not.  Strange time they had in hospital, Louis, semi-concussed, spending the night wandering round to Rex’s ward worried about his withdrawal pains, but Rex just carried on sleeping. 

This was the car they had camped in outside Camden Town Hall for three weeks.

It was a neat little Austin and it had been old when he bought it but in perfect condition with one very careful previous owner.  Within a month, however, it had been quite systematically destroyed by Rex’s oblivion to everything except drugs.

First the accelerator cable snapped.  While Rex was off getting parts to fix it the passenger window was smashed and while off sorting that out the car got clamped.  Or was it first that the radio aerial had snapped off and the wires to the radio had pulled away?  Later Rex pulled off the sunshield on the driver’s side.  Then there were weeks of slow deterioration, blood everywhere, filth everywhere, cigarette burns all over.  The boot wouldn't shut properly and the cords holding up the door of the boot got snapped.  The car was thirteen years old and in relatively good condition six weeks previously.  An old man then banged his own car into the left side leaving a dent and paint chipping off but Rex let him off because it was an accident and the man was old and upset.  Louis meanwhile taped polythene over the missing window, black polythene.  Then the driver’s door flew open while driving and smashed into a stationary car rendering it (Rex’s door) unable ever to properly shut again.  Rex had to hold it shut by twisting his seatbelt around it in some idiosyncratic way.  The pedal rubbers came off quite early on, and there was oil leaking.  The glove compartment wouldn’t click shut and the rear view mirror fell off.  Cans of coke spilled by other addicts, ash everywhere, burn holes, fag butts, a ton of leaflets, the shades broken down, everything ripped with impatience.  But Rex was still happy driving it because he said, “It's got a good engine”.

It had been like watching a well-preserved old man go on a bender with his great grandchildren.

Rex had destroyed so many things that were precious to Louis; he was a destroyer.  At the time Louis told himself that it was teaching him not to cling onto possessions but instead it made him more desperate to have them; no it didn’t, he gave up wanting them.

And yet Rex had an image of himself as a man who deeply valued things.

Louis had slashed the car tyres himself, to try to stop Rex going out.

He’d been punished for that; and Rex went out anyway.  Thieves stole the wheels.  Cherry blossom came down and when they turned the fan on it all blew inside like confetti.

 

Ian took the tube round to Mrs. Tors’ place even though it was only one stop; he wanted to arrive in style.  She had called him and asked him to visit.

He rather liked train stations, except for all the people; train delays never bothered him because he enjoyed looking at all the wires and cables chunked together against the walls, lines parallel and crossed; it excited him visually like no painting ever did, the random colours, purple and black.  If he’d been a train driver it would have been a major distraction.

People get off a train and move sideways.

People get on a train and just stand there.

On the station platform he started idly thinking about the Greenwich meridian.  What if the Greenwich meridian ran right through the platform - would the trains going and coming run at different times?  How would you know if you were late?  It would be a complete headache.

As soon as he sat down a woman opposite him started eating an apple.  Crunching into the tight skin and slurping the juice, crunch slurp, crunch slurp.  The train was packed and there was nowhere to escape to.  Ian mentally calculated how long it took to eat an apple, kept his eyes down, thumbs in his ears, and sang Carpenters’ songs in his head.  When he looked up again, she was indeed no longer eating the apple – but now the man next to her was.  Were they just passing it down the carriage?

The train stopped in a tunnel for fifteen minutes and one by one everyone in the silent carriage ate apples.

He had written to both London Transport and the bus company asking them to ban noisy food where people have ears but they had so far not replied.  And noisy eaters were so brazen – he would never be so bold in someone else’s hearing.  The ‘I Am Here, I Matter’, no self doubt, no self awareness, crunch crunch bloody crunch slurp bleugh gulp gulp – slobbery lips crunching drooling apples and crisps right in your ear, cracking pretzels between their teeth; the only reason we are at the top of the food chain is because we have electric cattle prodders.  He could forgive a mugger more easily than a noisy eater cracking monkey nuts in his ears.   He would whimper, “Oh god!”, hoping to catch someone else’s eye as an ally who would agree with him but never could, nobody else ever noticed because they were all making so much noise themselves.  He fantasised about snatching away the crisps and stamping on them (quietly), his stomach would churn and he would have to leave the carriage, even if it meant standing up the whole way.

When he arrived at Mrs. Tors’ boarding house, she was out in the back yard practicing her archery, wrapped up in so many layers of white clothing that she looked like a very large golf ball, or a snowman.  Why do fat people wear white?  Presumably equal opportunities.  All that was missing was a little black pipe between her lips.

She had forgotten that she’d invited him.  The boy John was keeping a tally of her scores.  He asked Ian if he could shoot but firing arrows at a target was not something Ian had ever contemplated.

“So much more graceful than stabbing someone to death”, Mrs. Tors said.  “I could down a man at a hundred yards”.

But possibly not today, when she was quite clearly already squiffy.

She invited Ian to have a go.  She used an old-fashioned long-bow because it needed more muscular strength; she felt the recurve and compound bows were for wimps; and if she were ever in the wild and needed to shoot a bear to stay alive, it would be easier to fashion a long-bow out of the materials she assumed would be available in that scenario.  So it was better to get in as much practice with a long-bow as possible.

Ian aimed haphazardly and, to everyone’s surprise but mostly his own, got a bullseye.

Mrs. Tors was miffed.

“Beginners luck”, she said.

He took another shot and again got a bullseye, and then Mrs. Tors said it must be in his genes, but she wouldn’t play against him because she was fiercely competitive and didn’t like to lose.  The next shot she played was wildly off target.  Every shot Ian aimed hit the spot, something that had never happened in his life before.  Mrs. Tors was getting increasingly frustrated so he kept trying to miss the target as he didn’t want to see a grown woman cry but he still he couldn’t go wrong.  It was a complete mystery.

Finally she said, “I’ve had enough practise for one day”, and packed up her arrows.

Indoors, Mrs. Tors’ boyfriend Pete said nothing to Ian in greeting.  He didn’t on the surface look like he had any ambition either.  Perhaps she had resigned herself to the fact that she could only attract men who didn’t; they leeched off her own ambition.  Pete reminded Mrs. Tors that they had to be at the pub in half an hour for the quiz and the bus was going soon.

“We can’t drive anymore”, Pete told Ian, “Not since missus got stopped by the police.  She’s been banned”.  He himself had never learned to drive.

“Don’t tell everyone”, she said.  She explained that she could drive perfectly well after having a drink, her reflexes were spot on, she was no danger to anyone.  The police had it in for her because she was an independent woman.  It was a damned nuisance.

On the walk to the pub, Mrs. Tors offered Ian some pork scratchings.

He looked at the bag with the cartoon pig on it and could only see the intelligent little piglet the scratching had been sliced off.  With its tail docked and its teeth pulled out, he saw the piglet running squealing around the farm with rashers cut off its sides, bleeding, its mother crammed into a farrowing crate unable to move.

“It’s only a crisp”, she said and crunched it loud in his ear.

Ian heard the piglet squeal.

 

Ian’s hands were numb; he’d wake up in the morning and he couldn’t do anything with them.  At first he thought he’d laid on them in the night and he shook them out but soon they started going numb for no special reason, while he was pushing his bike or at work scrubbing sick off the carpet.

He went to the doctor again and the doctor asked him questions and said it could be this it could be that.  The doctor wrote to a specialist but Ian didn’t go to the appointment in case they decided to cut his hands off.  Even if they didn’t cut his hands off he might still lose them in hospital, the hygiene was a disgrace.  At least his hands still worked most of the time, it was just the awful tingling; if he had no hands at all he’d be crippled.

In the surgery he saw Emiko with Lulu but she looked away so as not to be seen, which made Ian go over to her anyway.  She said it was about Lulu’s birthmark.

She had on a man’s suit jacket, which dipped down off her narrow shoulders.

Lulu was asleep again and Ian wondered if Emiko was actually drugging her.  It seemed unbelievable to always be so peaceful.  He felt a great urge to pinch her little fat face and wake her up.

Ian said, “I hope they can do something; I’m sure she’s beautiful anyway”, because that’s what people want to hear about their children, and Emiko felt better that someone was taking her seriously.

 

Louis was sitting in the car staring out of the window and Coral came to visit him with Marina, who was still in full hijab.

“Should you be encouraging it?” he asked.

“She’s 20, she knows her own mind.”  Marina started pulling the wing mirror backwards and forwards to get a better look at herself.

“It’s just dressing up”, Coral went on.  “Nobody bats an eyelid when the Archbishop of Canterbury does it.  All little kids love fantasy land”.

She wedged herself into the back seat of the car.  “Her father calls me the only honest woman”, she said, “He trusts me”.

A Christian woman of her acquaintance had started sending her home-made cards, and Marina was collecting them in a plastic file.  She spread them out on the snow for Louis to see.

Home printing hoodwinks everyone into thinking they are a design expert.  All the cards had Coral’s name on the front and pictures of a pink heart embracing another pink heart.  “A prayer is a hug that blesses the heart, Coral” – Sister-in-the-Lord.  “Coral, may you have a beautiful day today” (several said that, it seemed to be a fallback phrase along with Know The Lord is Always With You) above a drawing of praying hands, always butterflies, winged things, mountains and water.  Never a shopping precinct or the city dump – the lord clearly did not hang out in such places.  Even though he could probably reach a lot more people there – so few of us have time to go to the mountains these days.

It was all quite sad, really.  The latest one had a message cautioning Coral that god’s first commandment was Thou shalt have no other gods but me.

Coral said, “By that statement, isn’t he acknowledging that there are other gods?”  He’s very jealous, she said, but people are like that when they know they don’t exist, it makes them insecure.

She said, “She thinks because I’ve gone against Judaism I’m ripe for the plucking.  She keeps talking about the orthological argument.”

The cards were covered in beads and glitter.  Coral had not folded any of them in half.  Marina adored them.

Louis bent out of the car and picked some of them up.  He said, “She’s very holy”.

“Yes”, said Coral, adding that she helped out at the shelter, took in homeless people, and gave all her money away, except what she kept for herself.

“She’s not doing it for them”, she went on, “she’s doing it for god, because that’s what she thinks god wants her to do.  She’s really just doing it for herself, to get on god’s good side.  She says they are smelly, she doesn’t actually care about them.  It is not love of humanity”.

 

Louis had bought a post-Christmas jasmine plant because Rex loved the smell and one small flower was open.  It filled the car with its heavy scent.

The reason he had got irritated and bored with Rex in Russell Square when he fell asleep on his lap was because they had spent most of the day chasing after drug dealers, with the money they’d found; and then Rex kept disappearing into public lavatories for hours, to shoot up or smoke crack-pipes, and that’s why he was so tired he slept on Louis’ lap – heroin, not affection.  The reason Louis had thrown Rex’s clothes at him at the bus-stop was because they had blood all over them from injecting, clothes that Louis had bought him and which Louis spent a long time trying to clean before taking them to a dry-cleaner who refused to touch them.  The reason Louis asked him not to come home was because crack made Rex paranoid and violent.  And because, whenever Rex did come home, he never stayed for long; only to sleep and then go out again and disappear for more weeks until Louis could not stand it anymore.

And the reason he had told Rex to fuck off on the phone after his arrest was because Rex was always phoning after arrests and expecting Louis to drop everything; and this time Louis had just had a bath and didn’t want to go out again in the cold; but he had gone out even so, because he felt so bad about telling him to fuck off; he went to the police-station and took Rex what he’d asked for.

The reason he had not gone to the boat for that meal was that Rex invited him for meals so often and was always very late, hours and hours late, or never turned up at all.

After Louis met Ian he eventually began answering Rex’s calls again.  Rex was so angry at first that Louis was scared to answer – he would drop the phone and run away, literally – he’d leave the flat and walk for hours too afraid to come home.  He was scared of Rex even over the phone - even his voice was terrifying, his presence.  Rex used to call him and say such terrible things to him for leaving that Louis shook and his stomach churned and he had to get away from the phone, he’d throw the phone down and run; even if Rex was being nice Louis’ heart would be racing with fear though he didn’t know why, the violence had stopped long before that.  He didn’t say terrible things about him leaving, it wasn’t that, it was the guilt, he spoke reasonably and made Louis feel disloyal for leaving.

But things eventually calmed down and Rex accepted that he was with Ian, and when he called Louis answered the call, still scared but feeling braver.  It was one time.  They said hello.  Then Rex said he had to put more credit on the phone.  When he was away doing that Louis switched his own phone off.   He didn’t know why.  It was too much.  Rex being nice was too much.   When he turned his phone on again Rex had left a message saying, “I went out in the rain to put credit on to talk to you and your phone was off”.  And Louis felt guilty and called him back but there was no answer because Rex had fallen asleep again.

And now I will never be able to reach you again, I burnt all your letters, your sweet grateful letters, because it was all lies, everything was lies and it kills me.  I wouldn’t let you in.

Before Rex, Louis had no experience of drugs.  It wasn’t something he had ever needed to know about.  The day they’d met, because he had no real clue what was going on, Rex had been off buying what he knew not, came back, moved off.  They were in an alley, Rex had his back to him and Louis bounced over all mischievous - and then saw that Rex was injecting himself.  He sat down on a step.  Rex finished what he was doing and then turned to Louis with concern.  He said, “You can ask me anything you want”.  Still Louis couldn’t speak.  He picked up a broken bottle and started tapping it gently against the wall, tap tap tap.  Finally he said, “I think it’s beneath you”.  That was all he could say.  It was like watching a thoroughbred racehorse defecate in public.  At that point he hadn’t even known Rex well, that was just the impression he got.

Fights about money by the cash machine because Rex took all his money and left him with none, no food either, and disappeared for a week, longer than a week.

Looking looking trying to reach you.

Why wouldn’t Rex stop the drugs, he had Louis, Louis would have helped him, Louis tried to help him many times, he could be patient, they could have had such a wonderful life together.

Neither of us could ever say what we really felt, couldn’t sit calmly and discuss what was happening, it was all so emotional and fraught and desperate.

The reason Louis had given Rex the razorblades was because Rex brought home a complete stranger for the night – not for sex, he wasn’t the type – but Rex owed the man money and was trying to placate him, offered him a share of his heroin stash and the promise of money in the morning.  That was why Louis couldn’t go with him in the ambulance, the other man was still sleeping in the kitchen and Louis was too timid to wake him up.  When the man finally did wake up they both got the bus to the hospital and along the way Louis found out how much Rex owed him – he then slipped off to get the money himself and surreptitiously handed it to Rex in his hospital bed so that he could give it to the man himself, not wanting Rex to feel humiliated, wanting him to be able to repay his debt with dignity.  That was more money Louis never got back and stopped expecting.

The razor blade fight had started because Rex wanted to give the man Louis’ radio, so he wouldn’t feel lonely.  They had left him to sleep in the kitchen, which Rex said was demeaning.  Louis fought back; it was a new radio he had saved up for.  Rex was unused to this and started screaming – really screaming, he could be quite terrifying – he said, “YOU MAKE ME WANT TO SLASH MY WRISTS”.  For some reason Louis happened to have razor blades in his hand – he was doing plant cuttings when they’d arrived – he quietly handed the blades to Rex and Rex immediately sliced it down his arm.

A few months later, the fight where Rex turned over the table with all the plant cuttings on it.  Louis had fled the flat and that’s what he came back to.  Little baby spider plants, ferns, palms, killed the lot. 

But now the jasmine in the car, having opened out only one more flower, died in the cold car.  Louis saw it dying and gave it more water, wrapped the blanket around it, breathed his warm breath on it, but it would not respond.

Coral asked now if she could have it for her compost bin but Louis hadn’t given up yet.

In the glove compartment Louis had put the envelope full of business cards that people had given Rex when they lent him money to get back to Nottingham, the details of where to send the money back to, all those people who trusted you to repay them and gave their home phone numbers, you in your grubby pin-striped suit smeared with blood and heroin, you’d never been to Nottingham.

The “to pay” lists I was never to reach the top of.  Rex’s bank statements were appalling.  When he first picked them up from the boat it had interested Louis to see all the places from which Rex had withdrawn money, ATMs and shops; now the constant overdrafts, repeated bank charges, all the large sums of money that inexplicably went IN, it was appalling.  And it was nothing to Rex, other people’s money.

 

Family was like money:  those who have it are complacent about it.

Emiko’s boat was not her own boat; she looked after it for friends.  They said she was family but they were not family.  Emiko valued her friends but they were not family and she found it condescending when they said she was family, as if she didn’t have any family of her own.  She didn’t anymore but that wasn’t the point.  You never need to say to your real family that they are family; they already know it.

They weren’t Lulu’s father. 

Emiko was no longer alone because of Lulu and she was still overwhelmed by the way the child looked at her and needed her and snuggled up to her and, when Lulu was sleeping, she missed her.

Nobody had any idea how absolutely isolated she was:  she had nobody, her whole family waved her goodbye at the airport, laughing and talking; she woke up thinking they were in the next room, she could still hear the echo of their voices, like the echo of an earthquake, and then silence, she saw her things around her and her mind settled and she knew where she was, everywhere was quiet, just the child breathing; she wanted to go back to sleep, she didn’t want to go back, there was nowhere to go back to.

The humility she felt because this child trusted her made her weep.  The only family she had was Lulu and she had let Lulu down because her father didn’t stay with them.  He was weak; it was Emiko’s fault.  She should have handled him differently.

 

Louis woke up and Rex was still gone forever and he again woke to a white world and it was still so cold.  He was sick of the snow, this white blanket over everything, it was so heavy.  It was no longer magical.  It suffocated everything.

He said, “I am sick of this fucking snow”.

Ian tapped on the car window and Louis kept pressing the wrong buttons to open the window, and none worked, then the windshield wipers suddenly went crazy; he couldn’t understand why when surely the battery had died by now.  It didn’t occur to him to wind the windows down by hand.

He gave up and shrugged his shoulders in apology.

Ian didn’t dare get into the car without being invited.  He stood there waiting.  Louis was silent.   Ian said, “What are you thinking?”  Louis said, “Nothing”.  Ian said, “That’s rubbish - why do people say that?  Nobody is ever thinking nothing; be honest”.  Louis said, “I suppose it’s a polite way of saying ‘fuck off I don’t want to talk to you about it’”.  Ian said, “OK, just don’t dress it up in something nice and furry like “nothing””.

Louis was reluctantly impressed with the word “furry”.

It was difficult talking through glass.  Ian said, “Why are you out here, are you trying to prepare me for when you leave?  You’re doing it like this because you think I won’t notice that you’re slowly moving away from me”.

Ian and Louis had met at a Fabian Society meeting and it had become a sort of blueprint for their relationship.  An old man giving a lecture – Louis loved lectures and went to all the free ones within walking distance, although he had misread the poster for this one and thought it was going to be about Faberge Eggs.  Ian was simply keeping out of the rain, needed to sit down, and was attracted by the promise of free biscuits and wine.  They had gravitated towards each other slowly.  There had been no revolution. 

Now Ian hardly dared speak for fear of causing offence with his phraseology –he thought that if he wrote a note then he might be able to circumvent any potential misunderstandings.  He planned in his mind exactly what he could write and all the possible meanings which the words would be subject to once out of his hands and in the real world – or whatever world that Louis was in at this moment.

He looked for some paper in his rucksack and could only find a leaflet for eco-friendly bleach that was blank on the back and he wrote Louis a message.  His hands were still going numb and he had to stop to shake them out a couple of times.  Louis sat there watching him through the glass.  Writing was so laborious, forming the letters fast enough to keep up with his thoughts before he forgot them.  He had already reached the stage in life when one no longer signs one’s name with a flourish but can only spare enough time and effort to scrawl little more than a straight line.  Even Ian, short as it was, was too long and more than he could manage, too many up and down strokes, but also, oddly, not long enough and his hand always stuttered over a further few lines that weren’t even necessary.  He was bored from forming the letters I-A-N so many times.  But now he couldn’t form other letters either.  It was all hard work.  He wanted to unload his brain onto the page and let the Louis pick out all the relevant bits.  But Louis clearly wasn’t in a sifting frame of mind.

What he wrote he had trouble re-reading back to himself but he felt that just made it more poignant; even if Louis couldn’t read the words he would understand what the scrawl signified and take pity on him.

He wrote, “OK it doesn’t matter if I liked him or not, what matters is that you are distressed.  If there is a tug of war going on in your head it’s OK I understand, it will work itself out, you can talk to me about it, say what you need to, there will be no more awkwardness from me, I promise”.  He was skeptical about writing this, as he hated making promises and then not being able to keep them.  He pushed it through the slit at the top of the window, where it got scrunched up, then smiled, waved and left.

Ian had also written, “I just want everything to go back to how perfect it was”.

He thought Louis would be moved but Louis was irked.  He felt that it was him who needed to talk and should be listened to.  It was him who should be writing all the pathetic letters.

Ian’s handwriting had got even worse, he could barely hold the pen straight.  Louis felt he should be moved but the spelling and handwriting irritated him, he mentally went through it with red biro and wrote “see me after class” at the bottom.

“I miss you I love you I’ll wait for you”.

Wait where?  For how long?  In the rain?  Indoors?  Quietly, invisibly?  Waiting just above his head, ready to drop.

Rex told him that he missed him after they split up and it upset him greatly – because he hadn’t missed Rex.  It had been a relief not to have to live that life any longer.

He missed the excitement but it wasn’t exciting at the time.

You kept disappearing.

Louis would go out searching for him.  He knew the places Rex used drugs and the routes of all the dealers, he knew where the other addicts stayed, he knew where Rex begged for money.  Sometimes he found him in the first place he looked, and sometimes it took hours, or he never found him at all.  He would get more and more distressed.  Rex’s phone would be dead by now.  Rex would see him approach and smile like it was normal, like he knew Louis would arrive.  And they would hug and it would be so wonderful to see him again – his distress melted away, Louis was never angry, just relieved to finally be close to him.  Then he would have to wait hours while Rex did whatever he did and that would start doing his head in again.  He thought now that he must have really hampered Rex’s freedom but Rex never complained, always got him sandwiches and coffee and made sure he was warm – anything except actually be with him like a normal person – he wasn’t capable of that.  Sometimes he was gone for weeks because he got arrested and went to jail or was in hospital with an abscess on a vein – sometimes he would write and ask Louis to visit but sometimes he never told Louis at all.

Louis felt bored now; Ian was so boring.

What was love, it was only need wrapped up in silver paper – made furry.

Louis didn’t want Ian to wait, he wanted him to go away.  But, at the same time, not go away.  Just stop talking and sit in the corner.  But saying the right thing, even though there was no right thing, and not saying nothing.

Ian thought they had a healthy relationship where they talked about things but Louis didn’t want a healthy relationship; he wanted Rex.  He was sick of talking about things.

He could see the back of Ian’s coat flapping in the wind with his favourite stripy shirt showing beneath.  Louis hated that shirt but he knew that if Ian died it would be the one thing above all else that he would keep – because Ian loved it and because Ian knew how much Louis hated it, but still wore it anyway.

The thought of Ian dead meant nothing, however, only his abandoned shirt.

 

Coral was getting more cards from Christian Elsie and they were getting flouncier and flouncier, with ribbon threaded through them, and the pastel colours were giving way to more impressionistic images.  The latest one contained a story about the HMS Glorious, which sank with the ships Ardent and Acasta with the loss of 1,515 lives.  Forty five men survived, one of whom said, “The good lord looked after me”, clearly dismissing the captain and crew of the actual Norwegian ship that saved them – and the fact that a simple pie chart would demonstrate that these statistics are nothing to write home about.  To believe that one is special enough to be saved by a merciful god that left 1,515 people to die - the sheer egotism involved is incredible.

Louis, who had gone to Coral’s to use the toilet, said, “It’s harassment; you should report her”.

“And say what?  A little old lady is wielding Jesus at me?”

Marina was cutting the cards up and arranging the bits into new pictures.  The ship story had some very exciting illustrations.  She got very involved in it, tongue poking out through clamped lips, trying to cut the edges neatly, glue in her fringe.

Louis flicked through some of the cards with their urgent messages about a loving god.  Look at all that god has given you, the glorious sun, the air, the food.  He read that the destitute were drawn to Jesus.  If the world god gave us is so wonderful why are there destitute people?  Myriads have found in Jesus the answer to all their woes – but why have they got woes if god had done his job properly.  He will lift you out of the wreckage of this doomed world, it said.  God who made the world in the first place, apparently.  Nothing like being proud of your achievements. 

Coral said, “How can anybody seriously believe in a loving god – we’re like abused children who cannot face the fact that our father is actually a fucked-up piece of shit”.

Louis said, “Maybe he hasn’t got time to be loving all the time”.  His job must be like painting the Forth Bridge, always someone wanting help and no time to get to them all immediately.  That’s why so many people die without having got to the front of the god-queue. 

Coral said, “He’s meant to be god, he can do whatever he wants”.

Louis said, “I suppose he spreads himself a bit thin”.

“Like the ozone layer”, said Coral.  “He’s either omnipotent or he’s not, he can’t chop and change as it suits him, they have to make up their minds”.

Louis read, “It is the temporary triumph of evil”.

“It’s a very long temporary.  They say he will eventually intervene – when?  When is eventually?  How bad does it have to get?”

Coral had a lot of junk mail building up on her table and that included the leaflet about the spiritualist church.

Louis reread it.  Particularly for you, it said.  But for Him your heart would have stopped beating long ago.

He read out some stuff about the afterlife and Coral said, “I can’t see it happening.  If god can’t get the living life sorted out he’s not going to put too much effort into the dead life – it’s not worth his trouble, we’re all too pissed off by then”.

Then she said, “Do you fancy going?”

“Doesn’t it go against what you believe in?”

She said that she didn’t believe in anything.  “None of that can touch me anymore.  It’s not like alcoholism where you can’t even have a tiny sip of booze before you’re back on it full time.  Being in the same room as forty Christians won’t have me on my knees praying.  I didn’t lose god like you lost Rex; I kicked him out”.  Then she had a bit of a ponder about whether you can kick something that isn’t there and decided it was part of her own brain that she had kicked out but that raised concerns about whether she might one day need that part for something entirely unrelated.

Louis had kicked Rex out.

He had respectfully put all of Rex’s things neatly outside the door, put the door on the safety chain and, when Rex returned, politely told him what he was doing and why – communicating clearly and firmly, but kindly, like it said in the self-help book about how to deal with people who have a negative influence on your life.

Rex had grabbed him by the throat through the gap in the door and, when Louis managed to pull away, had kicked viciously at the door, then went outside, found a large metal rod and proceeded to smash the door in.

As soon as he got inside and saw Louis frozen, backed into the corner, he said, “I don’t know why you’re pretending to be frightened, I’m not going to hurt you, but you know how I feel about home”.  When Louis didn’t answer but stood like a petrified tree Rex got angry and threw himself on him, biting into his skull.

Coral said it would be fun to go to the church and they should take notebooks to write it all down in case they got a message.

Louis didn’t really want to go with someone who was going to mock the whole experience.  It was serious.  He wanted to ask Rex if he was sorry and if he did love him after all.  But he didn’t want to go on his own and he couldn’t ask Ian.

 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that people attending a séance are desperate and ridiculous but there is nothing laughable about desperation, and credulity is really just another word for open-mindedness.  It was a tiny church, like an elaborate Nissan hut, and it was packed.  People were chatting among themselves like they were attending a social event, albeit a dance with the dead, and most of them looked reasonably normal.  Coral wanted to sit at the back to observe proceedings but Louis was worried that the spirits wouldn’t be able to see him at the back and the only two free seats together were right in the front row where they couldn’t whisper to each other.  So Coral settled in at the back sprawling her coat and bag everywhere.  Louis sat up very straight so he was visible above all the heads in front of him.  

There were plaques on the wall showing that the church had been set up with money from a man whose daughter had died when she was thirteen – passed over to the other side, in the spiritualist language.  Louis was OK with that.  He now understood all the euphemisms for death.  Dead is such a harsh unforgiving word, unsoftened by syllables.  There were also lots of bad paintings on the walls depicting Jesus at various stages of his life, mostly healing.  Louis wondered why they couldn’t get prints of good paintings – there were plenty of wonderful Caravaggios, say, or he was fond himself of Serbian Medieval art.  There was really no excuse for it.  Jesus doesn’t have to be drawn in an incompetent manner.  A print was no more expensive than a bad painting and it was easier on the eye so it paid for itself in the long run.

Coral had a long look round at all the people.  She said it was a little like a crèche.  You had to be kind to them because they didn’t know any better.  Atheists are brave because they are no longer clinging onto the skirts of childhood.  Louis said, “Ssssh!”

An old woman climbed onto the little raised stage and gave a trite reading from a pamphlet along the lines of love thy neighbour.  She was so old that her voice was all wavery and Louis thought she might keel over any minute (over to the other side) – but it was her moment in the sun and she was grabbing it for all she was worth – neat little grey bob – it was a humorous reading, apparently, and everyone laughed politely.  Louis wasn’t in the mood for hilarity.  Coral laughed but not in the same way that everyone else was laughing.

Then grey bob woman spoke about the needy.  She spoke about the poor and the homeless, the way such people talk of ‘blacks’ and ‘whites’ and ‘gays’, as though they are a homogenous block, not actual people at all, not individuals, just the poor or the homeless or black or white. 

She said, “We need to always keep in mind that god never tests anyone beyond what they are capable of bearing”.

Coral said to Louis, “His scales must be out of whack”.

Then they all had to sing interminable hymn after hymn, standing up, sitting down, standing up, sitting down, and Coral joined in loudly and Louis sat there thinking I want to die.   How Great Thou Art sang a capello because the pianist was in hospital with shingles (Louis imagined a huge woman being pebble-dashed) peculiarly tuneless and joyless and not in synch with one another, no hearts filled with joy, Jesus With a Lamp, then another hymn, Praise My Soul The King of Heaven, a high price to pay for a little message from the dead, long hymns with many verses and even more choruses.  The collection box came round even before he knew what he was paying for.  Fivers went in the box.  Louis contributed a fifty pence piece, since he wasn’t sure if he was going to get a message or how much it would be worth. And finally it got to the bit everyone had come for.

The medium was introduced and said yet another opening prayer, Heavenly father divine and great spirit we ask holy father that you fill our hearts with joy.  She had on a very low top, which filled some members’ hearts with more than joy, leaping in their trousers.  We ask, We ask, We ask, asking one hell of a lot, I ask for your love, your inspiration, Amen.  Lord’s Prayer, which everyone roughly knew.

Louis rejected the blessing – kept his eyes down - “I’m not here for that”.

The medium was short.  She said, “The way I work is they stand over there and come in in an orderly fashion waiting their turn”, which was quite reassuring to think that the dead still operated by the rules of common courtesy.

“Hm”, she went on, “There’s a lot of bereaved people here tonight.  Grief blocks the signals so they can’t communicate, they can’t get through.  Grief is like white noise to them”.

Which was perspicacious since nobody would be here if they weren’t bereaved.  Louis tried to calm down his own grief so it wouldn’t block Rex’s entrance.  If he was impatient with coat pockets he’d clearly prefer a smooth entry back from the beyond.

The medium said, “When you’re calm your loved one will alight on you like a butterfly, if you are quiet and still, like a butterfly”.

Louis knew he would never be still again.

She then addressed a woman behind them and said, “Do you have family around?” and the woman said yes so the medium said, “They’re telling me you feel alone, you have a lot of sorting out to do”.

Well he’s just died; of course she does.

Looking back, too much time to think, you need to go forward.

The woman said, “Yes”.

But Louis thought, “How?”  The medium offered no advice on how to go forward, no advice on what to do, there were no guidelines on what steps to take.

She said, “There’s a lot of love around you.  They are giving you a bunch of flowers”.

The medium turned round to the left to see who was coming towards her in an orderly fashion from the other side, then alighted like a butterfly on an innocuous looking man on the other side of the room and said, “You’ve had a rough time lately”.  She seemed quite sympathetic at first and then glibly advised the man to look at how he was contributing to prolonging his own misery.  The man passively accepted this but Louis was irritated.  During his worst times with Rex he had encountered similar views, usually related to enabling, espoused by people who had no knowledge of all the struggles he had experienced trying to end the relationship.  They said he colluded in it.  Collusion is just another buzzword.  Anything so that violent people don’t have to take responsibility for their violence.  He tried so hard to get away from Rex but he had nowhere to go and Rex wouldn’t leave him alone.  Rejection and refusal met with violence.  What was he meant to do?

He refused to give money and Rex stole it, and when Louis had none he disappeared for days on end and got money by other means; Louis locked him out and Rex kicked the door down, and then attacked him.  It is a very simplistic way of looking at things, blaming people for what happens to them; we are not always responsible, we have limited control.  It is just another myth, like karma, or positive thinking.  

Like tough love, which is not love but the word allows people to be callous. 

Louis called the police and showed them the bite marks, which they photographed (Rex had stormed out with the rent money), and the bald patch of hair where Rex had dragged him around.  Then weeks later, when everything between them was calm again, (and Louis had shaved his head) the police came knocking to check up on things.  Rex answered the door, the police were not subtle, and then the police left - leaving Louis alone with a very angry Rex.

It wasn’t the violence that hurt Louis most, it was the absences, the lies and the relentless sleeping which killed everything.  Violence was meaningless, it was only the body.  But the absences and the constant sleeping cut into Louis’ head.  It was unbearable.

It took two years of therapy to finally end the relationship.  At the Sexual Health centre, when he couldn’t stop crying, they had asked if he would like to see the therapist.  At the beginning of therapy he couldn’t imagine life without Rex but by the end Rex had moved onto the boat.  They stayed friends.  Even then, he couldn’t let him go completely.  He now hated the therapist who had made him well enough to end the relationship.

The medium came to Coral because Coral was wearing bright yellow and spirits like cheerful colours.  Louis was annoyed with himself for wearing brown which the spirits couldn’t see.

The medium said, “They’re telling me you’re very intelligent, you’re a good listener”.

Coral roared.  Everyone thinks they are intelligent and a good listener.

“Your mother sends you a lot of love.  I see you skipping as a child and singing a lot”.

Coral had spent much of her childhood in leg-braces.

“She is giving you flowers”, said the medium, as if this were an original idea.  All of her messages to everyone involved someone giving them flowers at some point.  No ride in a hot air balloon, not even chocolate,  just flowers.  “You understand, you understand?” asked the medium.  “Could be a mother or a grandmother, I’m on the link”.

 Louis wrote it all down for later in case Coral forgot that her mother gave her flowers.

Then the medium alighted on a man who dithered a lot in his answers and seemed to know nothing about his dead relations at all, wasting time, and Louis watched the hour ticking away and his chance of a chat with Rex quickly disappearing.  She said, “They say you’re not taking your vitamin pills”, and Louis was horrified in case such intimate things about him were told in front of a hall of strangers.  He would feign ignorance. 

Three other people got messages; two of them seemed personal friends of the medium.  Louis and Coral should have sat at the front and not behind tall people with enormous heads and sticking up hair – how could Rex even see him?

At the end the medium said she was sorry not to get round to everyone.  Louis thought, You could have done, easily, if you’d given shorter messages and kept it snappy.  She said, “But the people I came to are the ones who need it most”.  By the end, nearly everyone in the church had received some sort of message except for Louis and an old woman in white who smelt of pee.

Even the dead didn’t want to talk to him.  Did they know he’d only put 50p in the tin and sneered at the art-work?

While everyone else was chatting with one another, Louis casually drifted over to the vicinity of the medium hoping that she would suddenly spot him and sense an aura around him, and give him the message that she hadn’t had time to give him when she was on stage, a late arrival who was at the back of the queue (Rex wasn’t into queues; Rex was never punctual).

But tea was being served and Coral insisted they get a cup as it had cost a quid in the collection tray and she wanted to get her money’s worth.  She said, “You didn’t get a message, you should have two cups of tea to get your money’s worth.  Where’s the bloody tea, oh here it is, but no biscuits, they said there’d be biscuits, I distinctly heard someone mention biscuits”.

She squirmed to the front of the tea table queue in a sinuous manner that didn’t look like she was pushing in.  “Ugh, it’s plastic milk.  Oh never mind.  I’ll drink it but I won’t enjoy it.  They said there would be biscuits - where are they?  I need them with my tea, to take away the taste of the plastic”.

Louis had coffee black.

“Oh here they are - better late than never.”

In a communal biscuit-tin situation Ian always advised, “Don’t take the ones in the middle because everyone’s hands have passed over them to get to the ones they want.  And go for the rich tea in the corner because nobody wants them, they’re boring, so they’re the only ones that will be germ free; always go for the ones in the corners, even if they’re broken”.  But Coral grabbed the ones she liked best, with fake jam.  She said, “It’s a dog eat dog world”.  Then she said they weren’t as good as the ones she had imagined last night.  Taste was such a fleeting sense, she explained, that sometimes instead of eating meals she preferred instead to conjure up a memory and enjoy food that way – ultimately there was no difference between that and a real experience; you were always left with nothing after it was over.  Last night she’d had curly fries, roast potatoes, potato croquettes, and mash – she knew the experience so well that her imagination was better than the true experience; she could make it last longer and avoided indigestion.

Louis had coffee, black.

 

 Ian woke up. 

Something had happened, some unspecified emergency, he had no phone, he ran outside to find a call box, he couldn’t find one that wasn’t out of order, his bike had a flat tyre but it wasn’t flat, then he had to go back for his rucksack.  This went on for over an hour and he was worried he would be too late, finally found a call box, went in, started dialling 999 and the dial stuck, he couldn’t move it round, or sometimes he got through but nobody could understand what he was saying because all the words were coming out wrong.  All Ian could remember was the feeling, the anxiety.

He knew it wasn’t about Louis because he had been having this dream all his life, long before he met Louis.  He woke up and there was no Louis, Louis was out in the car; he couldn’t bear it, it must be freezing out there, everything was drifting away and he had no idea what to do to stop the ice melting.  He missed the warm body in bed next to him.  He missed sex.  He trusted all would be well in the end but was he deluding himself - should he be doing something active?

He imagined Rex laughing his head off.

Louis said Rex never laughed.

In the park he saw two old men boxing, keeping fit.  Was that what he and Louis would be doing in their old age, and who was going to deck whom first?

 

The snow had melted in the rain and all the magic was gone and everything was grey again.  Grass was green again, but also grey.

Louis thought, I always loved kissing you.

You in the bath smiling across at me as I sit there to keep you company, your beautiful shyness, everything hurts, beautiful things you did.

Your little sweetnesses pierce my heart.

How much longer will you continue to break my heart?  You broke it every day and you are still doing it now but what a stupid phrase, empty phrase, it means nothing.  My heart is not broken or I would be dead.  I want to be with you, you always wanted to join in.  Everything reminds me of you -

The jasmine died.  Louis tried to revive it but nothing helped.  Nobody wanted to be with him. 

And then, rummaging around in the car, he found a photograph of him and Rex, he had no idea who had taken it or why, he’d had a camera for a while, before he had to sell it for drugs.

Both of them had their mouths clamped shut because both of them hated their teeth.  The methadone had rotted Rex’s teeth, he had to have thirteen taken out at the dentist, that was when he asked Louis to marry him, in the recovery room when he was high on the novocaine.

In the photo he looked so alive, so very very alive; photography was not a dead art at all; it contained movement.

I hate you for dying, why didn’t you look after yourself, you could have had such a wonderful life: sailing.

It didn’t make him any less gorgeous, the teeth, but added another dimension of kooky charm.

Louis’ own front teeth had been broken when he was eighteen and he’d had ugly caps replacing them ever since, his gums receded, all you could see was the black metal at the top, and he couldn’t have them replaced unless he paid.  Poverty does worse than starve; the poor do not deserve beautiful teeth.  Teeth are a great leveller.  But orthodontics is not. 

He’d moved to Hackney but was getting more social security at the previous bedsit in Kilburn because it had a higher rent so he didn’t report the change - also couldn’t face the hassle of more forms to fill in.  So each week he walked eight miles from Hackney over to Lisson Grove to sign on and then a few days later another eight mile walk to pick up the cheque; that’s how it was done then.  One time he got stopped by a policeman checking that he wasn’t a runaway, he looked young for his age.

At eighteen it is difficult to think ahead.  At the dole office, in the queue, it had been a hot day and he’d walked all that way in a heavy serge army overcoat, he was anaemic too, had a bad diet, and he fainted, broke his teeth on someone’s steel toecaps.  If he was religious he might think that was a punishment for cheating the system.  But he wasn’t so he didn’t.

At the Middlesex Hospital off Tottenham Court Road hospital he was seen by a young doctor with perfect American teeth and Louis had told him all about the walking and the giros.  When he was discharged the doctor gave him a white envelope.  Louis realised it would be money for food and thought it would be a five pound note.  He was astonished when he got outside and found that it was a twenty.

The following week he had taken back another white envelope to the Middlesex with a twenty pound note in it, but he couldn’t find the same doctor and he didn’t know his name.  He never went again.  He should have tried harder.  He wanted the doctor to know that it had meant something to him.  He still did.

Louis had never told Ian that his front teeth were not real, not his own.  It wasn’t important.

Marina from the deli came up to the car bringing him some halva from her father, handed it through the car window like she was handing him a golden egg, unwrapped it for him with discreet ceremony.  Halva tasted to Louis like solidified white spirits.

Louis said, “Thank you very much, that is very kind of you” and she beamed a smile that made him cry.  Later he hung it up for the birds to peck.  The halva, not Marina’s smile.  Her smile was more nutritious.

 

At work Ian was in Erin’s room because she’d had a major toilet incident and been moved temporarily to the induction room.  She had pictures of butterflies all over the walls, and last summer she had sat in her wheelchair watching dragonflies, like a young girl in the ’20s, it didn’t suit the body she now had.  Ian felt she should grow up and accept that that part of her life was over; didn’t she ever look in the mirror?  Tactfully, there were few mirrors in the care-home.  Had they just got used to the way they had aged because it happened so slowly they didn’t really notice it, or was it fading eyesight; perhaps nature is kind after all.

In his earphones tonight he was listening to Radio Sweetness and The Wind Beneath Your Wings was playing.  Not many people want to be the wind beneath someone else’s wings – and who indeed wants to be told that that’s all they are.  Not unique, not creative, no get up and go.  Just the cosy armchair to flop oneself into at the end of an exciting day.

Erin’s walls were blue like a summer day but it wasn’t white and airy and it wasn’t relaxing.  Ian realised that everything had gone wrong since he’d painted the flat blue.  It was oppressive; it was heavy; it was depressing; of course they were having problems.  It was not at all like the iridescent eye of a peacock’s feather, not on such a large expanse of wall.

Next morning he went back to the paint shop and reviewed all the colours available, spent three hours inspecting at all the different colours.  Blue still attracted him but now he’d lived with it he knew it was not a helpful colour.  He found himself slowly drawn towards the yellow section.  Light happy colours, taking the weight off, he would feel at ease in a sunny yellow room and it would lift Louis’ spirits and everything would go back to how it had been.  How could anyone feel down when surrounded by such joy?

But it would need a lot of it to cover the blue.

He bought ten litres to be going on with.

At home he gave it a good stir and already felt better, put down sheets, got out his masking tape, his wipes, his painting clothes, he opened all the windows and the cold sharp air shocked him.  He put on another two shirts.

Then he took some warm clothes out to Louis to tell him what he was doing but Louis was asleep and he didn’t want to disturb him; left them on the roof of the car weighted down with a couple of bricks.

As Ian painted, his headache came back and he had to keep stopping because his hands went numb every time he raised them above his head.  It was so annoying, very frustrating.  But he wanted the blue GONE – NOW.  He wanted the room sunny for when Louis returned, like a holiday in the sun - it would lift his mood and help him feel optimistic about the future, which is a big demand to make of a little colour but you have to believe in something.

That night all the paint started to blister off the cold and damp walls, went all flaky on the icy wet walls.

 

It was the new year and it was a year that Rex would never see.  Louis wanted to put the brakes on December 31^st, grind it to a halt, a full stop at the edge of the cliff; he didn’t want to start a fresh year without Rex in it.  He could hear fireworks exploding.  What was the big deal with new year’s?  What was everyone celebrating?  The misery that had just gone or the misery that was still to come?  Eager to turn over a new page when the new page was exactly the same as the old page.

Mrs. Tors invited Ian to Sunday lunch on new year’s day (even though it wasn’t Sunday) but only because he had asked her what she was doing on new year’s day and she couldn’t think up an excuse quick enough to exclude him.  When he arrived she said, “Oh I haven’t got anything veggie in” adding with a little laugh that she had forgotten what an awkward bugger he was.

He said, “That’s fine, I’ll just have the vegetables” but she said that was no good, “You’ve got to have a main”, so she sent him round to the shop with John, with a fiver, to find an alternative to animal flesh.  He put his coat back on and trailed off to the corner shop.  John was very interested in the selections but he had expensive taste because he was too young to understand the value of money.  All the luxury ready-meal veggie options were more than a fiver and all had cashew nuts in them but he refused to add any of his own money to the fiver since it was a meal out and he had been invited and it shouldn’t cost him anything.  So he got the cheapest thing there, which, quite frankly, looked horrible – he wasn’t a big fan of peppers.  All the stuff that was under a fiver looked like crap but he chose the cheapest, thinking she would be impressed by his economic skills and the fact that she would get plenty of change.

White rice with peppers.  He hated peppers.

When it was cooked and on the table Mrs. Tors made some sick noises and when Ian ignored her she said, “Ugh that smells horrible, I don’t know how you can eat that crap”.   His hands were still numb and he couldn’t hold the fork properly.

He looked at her own plate with the lump of white stuff that had once been a feathery winged bird and said, “Likewise”.  She dug in and he saw the chickens hanging upside down, still alive and flapping in terror, the machine cutting their throats in the wrong place for a slow painful death.

Out of loyalty to all the chickens, sheep, pigs and cows Ian said the pepper dish was delicious and tucked in with gusto.

The boy John pushed his own chicken wing around the plate and said, “They use this to fly”.

Mrs. Tors said, “Don’t you start.  I do love animals”, she concurred, “but I’m more concerned about the welfare of people”, as if it had to be one or the other and you couldn’t do both.  She said she did more than her fair share of helping people out and that was enough.  “Anyway”, she continued, “people have always eaten meat, you need the iron”.

 Ian didn’t have the energy to combat her because he always got over-emotional and ended up crying, and anyway it would be a waste of time, it was always a waste of time.

The animals wouldn’t be here if we weren’t eating them, someone had once told him, as if it was a privilege to be born to be tortured and killed, the mere fact of any kind of life at all being something valuable.

Mrs. Tors’ cat jumped onto the table while they were eating and she said in a friendly way, “Off with you – he never listens”.

 Ian suddenly stood up and shouted, “GET OFF THE TABLE” and clapped his hands so loudly they all jumped (except the cat).

“There’s no need to frighten him”, said Mrs. Tors.

She then put cream cakes on the table.

“I feel so guilty”, she said, “but it’s Sunday”, even though it wasn’t.

It’s sugar, you didn’t kill anyone.

After the meal Mrs. Tors and her boyfriend Pete and John put the plates on the floor for the cat to lick clean.  Pete then read the Daily Express and Mrs. Tors resumed her knitting.  John held the ball of wool.  All was silent except for the clack of the needles.

In the living room there was a small bookshelf, rather like the one Louis had always wanted, and Ian ran his eyes along the titles.  But they were only true life stories about abused children.  It was like she cared about all the children in the world except him.  Or maybe she just enjoyed reading about their misery.

He looked at the wool in her wool basket.

“I’m making John a jumper.  I’ll make you a scarf if you want”, she said, and asked him what was his favourite colour.  He said, “Anything drab”.

After the meal Ian left her a bottle of booze, which he couldn’t afford, as a thank you and she said, “Oh you, I’ll give you such a slap”.

Why couldn’t she simply say thank you?

Wines of distinction, she read from the label, “with the emphasis on stink”.

 

Running so early in the morning Coral began to notice the night sky and the stars; she had never before thought about it much - it was there and that was that; it had always oppressed her a little that the sky was up there at all - but now she thought that maybe she should learn to read the sky if she were to dismiss it with any authority, like she could do with the torah.  Coral had never been a sentimental woman and it all looked such a jumble up there but other people could apparently read it successfully, even people who were not really that bright in other ways, unless of course it was all a huge con and they were just pretending.

She told Louis, “I realise I know nothing about astronomy and I don’t like it.  I’m a grown woman, I should know these things”.

She got a book out of the junior library with Marina but it would have helped enormously if the constellations in the sky had had the same linking lines the diagrams in the book had.  But they didn’t; up there they were all free floating and doing their own thing.

Coral said to Louis, “Perhaps I should start with the moon, it’s nobbly, apparently, but you don’t see that from down here because of the distance so it looks smooth but it’s not.  And I should like to see the nobbles for myself.  Perhaps I’ll invest in a telescope”.

Louis said, “It’s an expense if you’re not going to keep it up”, but like a child Coral was convinced that she would, and she thought it would take Louis out of himself if he came to the telescope shop with her.

She said, “I will keep it up”.  He said, “I just meant if you don’t.  Give it a week or so and see if you still want one”.

But Coral didn’t want to wait a week or so when she could be learning important things now.

“I haven’t got time for all that”, she said, because it suddenly felt very urgent.  “Look at them -”, she said pointing at the stars, “How long is it going to take me to sort all that out?  I don’t mind study, I don’t expect to get it all in a day but I’m 63 now and I don’t know how much longer I’ve got to waste faffing about”.

In the shop in Covent Garden she said to the salesman that she “used to think it all so frightening and couldn’t bear to look at it, but now I just sort of trust it, it seems to know what it’s doing, on the whole”.

The salesman tried to catch Louis eye and smirk but Louis blanked him.

Coral narrowed it down to three telescopes she liked the look of and Marina, still in her hijab, chose the one she liked best.  The telescope was to be delivered a few days later, which was annoying, but the shop wanted the money now.

And that night Coral came to Louis’s car and while Louis slept she and Marina looked at the blackness with the junior book and after three hours Marina spotted Orion’s Belt.  It was a seminal moment and every evening for a week all Coral did was look at Orions’ Belt, impressed that she could recognise a tiny bit of skyscape.

She wanted to amend her placards to YOU ARE NOTHING, THERE IS NOBODY OUT THERE, LIVE WITH IT but Louis said that was no better than the original version.

“It’s all so petty”, she said. “Like schoolyard politics.  Catholics say only Catholics go to heaven, Muslims say only Muslims go to heaven.  My ten year olds had more sophisticated arguments than that.  If a Roman Catholic married a Muslim - who would win the fight, which family would control the wedding?”

“What does Judaism teach?” said Louis.

There isn’t a heaven, it’s just those stars out there.

 

Emiko woke Ian up again.

 Ian said, “He’s not here, he’s out, round the side, in the car”.

“I know, I saw him” she said.  “I’ve not come to see Louis, I came to see you”.

“What do you want?”  He tried to soften the words with the inflection of his voice.  The baby was sleeping peacefully.

Why would she want to see him?

She had a pair of men’s braces on, holding up her trousers.

“Just to see you”.

Suddenly Ian said, “Why is he doing this to me?”

“I don’t think it’s about you”, said Emiko.

This lazy put-down was too much.  “Of course it’s about me, I’m here, I exist.  We’re meant to be together.  It’s a rejection.  I don’t care how you dress it up”.

Emiko’s bladder was bursting.

She said, “Sorry, can you hold Lulu a sec please?”

 Ian felt greatly alarmed and started to mutter an excuse but she just thrust the child at him and bolted for the bathroom.  The baby didn’t wake.  She just lay there peacefully as if nothing had happened, giving twitchy little smiles as if she knew she was in safe hands.   Ian looked down at her and it suddenly took his breath away.  He had a child in his arms.  He thought he was going to cry but attributed it to the overwhelming sense of responsibility. 

He wanted Emiko to come back and comment on how Lulu was still so peaceful and that he must have a knack with babies; he imagined Emiko taking the baby back and Lulu waking up screaming.

Then Lulu woke up, saw the unfamiliar face above her and started to cry.

Ian still felt calm at the crying baby and felt that his calmness would ultimately soothe her, no matter how long it took, he didn’t mind.  He gently rocked the baby speaking low and quiet – she was his – for a few minutes this child was wholly his.

The baby kept crying but he knew that she would soothe eventually.

Emiko hurried back, doing up her braces.

“I’m OK”, said Ian, “she’s OK”, but Emiko laughed and quickly took the baby off him.

This upset Ian more than he wanted to admit.  He just hadn’t had enough time, she didn’t give him enough time to work some magic.  He could have soothed the baby with enough time.

Jolting her up and down like Emiko was now doing was only making things worse.

Lulu kept crying, which Ian found gratifying.

Then she suddenly quietened down because her mother was there or some other obscure reason and Ian felt a failure again.

So he put Radio Darling on really loudly and that made her start crying again.

 

Outside, Louis could hear the music and he knew it was Ian’s radio; Ian truly believed the songs related to real people.

Love Will Keep Us Together.

He had the radio on all day and it had warped his mind.

Radio Blandish.  Radio Paper-Over-The-Cracks. 

Ian thought that all the love songs were true stories, he thought forever was a real measure of time, always was possible and perfect was attainable.  He thought that he and Louis were perfect, Louis was perfect, even when faced daily with countless evidence to the contrary – arguments unsettled him, he thought it meant that everything was over.

Louis liked arguing with Ian just to see how far he could go, without ever really daring to go beyond what he could safely pull back from.

On Ian’s radio people always got through tough times and love conquered all.

Nobody with any sense believed this.  Love could not conquer anything.  It wasn’t an army.  Love was fragile and without muscle; you couldn’t trust your weight on it.  It was weakened by poverty, insecurity, addiction, grief.

Sometimes when Ian was talking he would quote the line of a song without realising he was doing it, thinking it was an original thought of his own, or as if it was valid proof for his argument.  It was endearing but it was not real.

The self-serving Just The Way You Are floated down from their flat to the car.

Louis sat there in the car and thought, Just like a straight man, although not like a man at all, just one pretending to be nice and still failing miserably.

Just the way you are.  What if she wants to develop?

He might not want clever conversation (he only wants his cock sucked) but what if she has a thirst for knowledge and a course at nightschool to improve her education and work prospects?  And wants an in-depth talk when she gets home about things that really matter rather than whose turn it is to put the rubbish out.

It was so condescending.  Ian didn’t love him the way he was because this was the way he was and all Ian was doing was fighting it.  Ian said he wanted him to be happy but Louis didn’t want to be happy.  Ian only wanted him to be happy because it was less hard work, not because he really cared about his well-being.

Likewise, My Funny Valentine – who is meant to be flattered by that?  Who wants that sung to them in a night sky of a thousand stars?  Nobody, that’s who.  He’s saying she’s ugly and stupid but I like you anyway – probably because it’s less hard work than the woman who went to nightschool, and if she’s ugly he won’t have to fight off lots of other blokes since she’s that ugly nobody else will have her, and she’ll be grateful for what she can get.  He’s a control freak and they’re always dangerous.  He gets to make all the decisions, with a stupid girlfriend who looks up to him and believes everything he says.

It’s not romantic.

Romantic is deluding yourself that your lover is beautiful and brilliant in the face of all hard evidence to the contrary.  It’s a delusion so it’s still crap but at least it’s romantic.

 

Workmen came to put up scaffolding to repair the leak on the roof they couldn’t find because it wasn’t there.  They said, “It’s up on the roof”.  Louis sat in the car and watched, with a plate of stale pastries Marina had given him.

The Landlord was upset because it was “all money”.

When Ian came out with a flask of soup, Louis said, “Why won’t they all fuck off and leave me alone”.   It was like having ants crawling all over his body, you brush one away and two more appear.

 Ian said, “It’s not about you, it needs to be done”.  He said, “I cleaned up the mess” but Louis already knew that because he had been in to use the lavatory when Ian was at the shops.

 Ian said, “I’ve re-painted over the blue, it’s nice and sunny now”.  He’d found out why the paint had blistered off and done it all again.

Louis smiled.

Those men were swarming everywhere with their hammers and boards and bitumen, like they could make everything OK again even though they had absolutely no idea what the problem was.  They had been doing this for weeks so they were clearly no good at their jobs.

Marina’s father was peeved because the scaffolding covered up his shop sign.

 Ian said, “They’re thorough”.

But Louis started timing their lunch breaks and the times when they went off to get extra parts that they should already have if they were efficient but inexplicably didn’t and had to go to the supply depot miles away even though there was a perfectly good hardware store down the street, and reasonable prices too.

Their fag breaks, their equipment breaks, their lunch breaks and tea breaks, amounted to over four hours a day.  Delay delay delay.

 Ian had written Louis another card, as if he were in hospital, to cheer him up and tell him to come indoors.  His handwriting was getting worse and worse.  Then Louis realised it was a Valentine’s card.  Ian had drawn an extremely wobbly heart.

 

Louis wanted to go back to the Spirit Church but he didn’t want to go with Coral.  He wanted some spiritual healing and he hoped the healer would give him a private message while she was doing it, free of charge.

That night he got to the church too early and had to stand out in the drizzle with the smokers.  They stubbed their fags into a bucket of sand that looked like the worst holiday ever.  It would need an impossibly good tourist campaign.

He was fourth in line and there were only four healers working tonight.

A serious-looking woman was selling crystals that had magical properties.  Louis touched some of the stones.  They were beautifully smooth and creamy – but he couldn’t comprehend how they would thin his blood or give him great hair.

There was the pee-lady in the long white nightdress and a Zimmer frame, and an annoying Australian.  Louis tried not to be judgemental and to think pure thoughts so the spirits could get through.  He tried not to grieve so it wouldn’t block the channels.

In the darkened healing room someone else was already lying down and Louis was instructed to climb onto the neighbouring bed.  He lay his head on the velvet cushion that many unwashed heads had laid on previously.  Then he thought about all those previous heads and their hair and dead skin and everything Ian would say if he were here, and he sat up again.

“Is there a problem?” his healer asked.  He looked so agitated at the thought of all the dead skin cells that she thought he was receiving spirit.

She said, “The dead don’t die, they look on and help”.

And Louis thought, She’s very sweet, she’s very sincere but she really hasn’t thought it through.  He wanted to ask if she could do healing on him while he was sitting in a chair but he didn’t want to offend her so he lay down again, with his hands cradling the back of his head like he was sunbathing.

She said, “Where do you need healing?”  He thought, “My heart”.  He said, “My head”.

He shut his eyes.  The music was soothing but the other people on the other beds were talking in loud stage whispers as if that rendered them silent.

And he lay there as the sweet little healer held her hands above him and he opened his eyes slightly to watch her.  She was absolutely serious.  It was humbling having all this selfless attention quietly centred on him, he felt he didn’t deserve it.  He hoped she would pick up the presence he hoped was hovering around him.  Hoovering around him.  He couldn’t concentrate on the love she was giving him because the Zimmer frame came into the room and made a lot of grunting noises hoisting herself onto a bed.

He shut his eyes and willed it to be over quickly so he could go home and cry.

Afterwards his healer said, “Any good?”  So he had to rate her, give feedback, be thankful.  There had been no word from Rex, no word from anyone even though Louis had a lot of dead relatives he thought would have been thrilled to see him.

Someone else came in the room and said, “Can I sit on the chair?” and the little healer said sweetly, “That’s fine”.

Outside Louis felt even more depressed and cried all the way back to the car.  Even dead people didn’t want to talk with him.  It made him question his whole life, his whole worth, why wasn’t he open enough, why didn’t they want him?  Was his life so boring they had nothing to say to him?  Was he so despicable?

He did feel strangely lighter though, until he got back to the car.  He crawled in and pulled the blanket over him.

 

Ian went back to the National Gallery to buy Louis a book, to give him something to think about that didn’t involve Rex.  Then he watched Emiko in Leicester Square.  Her drawings were pretty good, although a little blurry, but there was something angular about them that he liked.  She was singing.  Lulu was in the little crib and there were numerous people around dressed up like science fiction characters, or attempting to stand perfectly still, as if it was an achievement.

He sat there while she was drawing, very quietly, eating his lunch as discreetly as he could.  Then he showed her the book he’d bought Louis and she started turning over the pages with her charcoal fingertips.  It was an expensive book.  To be polite, to distract her while he gently inched the book out of her hands without her realising, he asked how Lulu was and if the parrot Bonnie was any trouble.

Emiko gripped onto the book.  She said, “Rex was a good person to me after Lulu’s dad left, he came to the ante natal classes with me”, fell asleep but at least he was there.  She had been proud that she’d had someone so handsome with her, unlike the men the other women had dragged along, all devoted husbands but ugly as hell.  Rex who looked at himself in the mirror and said, “The best you can say about my face is that it’s interesting”.

 Ian said, “He wasn’t good to Louis”.

Emiko said yes she knew that but he was sorry for it afterwards, as if she had discussed it with him at great length.

 Ian said, “He never told Louis sorry”.

But how could he find the words?  Ian asked if she wanted to use the gallery toilets so that he could look after Lulu but she said she’d just been.

She noticed that Ian didn’t bring her a sandwich.

 

Coral’s telescope arrived and she set it up but couldn’t see anything out of it.

Louis went round and had a look as if he knew anything at all about telescopes, which he didn’t.

He said, “Have you taken the lens cap off?”

“I’m not stupid”, Coral said, but slyly glanced over just in case.  “Of course it’s off”.  She pulled at the top to see if there was an additional secret inner lens cap which only astronomers were aware of.

Louis bent down and looked through the eye piece and wondered if Rex was floating around in the ether.  Louis had sold his binoculars for a fiver so Rex could get drugs.

“It still just looks like specks of glitter to me”, said Coral.  “I can’t see anything that looks like the book.  There’s the moon.  But that’s easy”.

Louis looked in the “I-Spy book of The Sky” where you could tick off all the things you had seen.  It said that all the stars turn around the North Star, which does not move.

Coral said, “The stars move?  I thought they were just glued in the same place.  What chance do I have if they keep moving about”.

The Plough was seven stars in the shape of a plough.  Louis said, “What does a plough look like?”  Coral didn’t know either, she’d grown up in the city and had no appreciable interest in agriculture.  They looked at the picture and tried to work out how you could use that to plough a field, and what ploughing actually was.   Then they looked at the sky to see if they could see it up there but it was difficult because the sky had no joining up lines to make it more immediately recognisable.

Then suddenly Louis exclaimed, “Look, look - like on page two”.  Rex had shown him this when they went down to Cornwall one weekend with a huge lump of heroin he’d bought with Louis’ housing benefit, planning to wean himself off heroin in a fortnight but used the lot in one night.

It was Orion’s Belt, three little stars in a straight line.  Coral said, “We’ve already ticked that one off.  With our bare eyes”.  But she looked at it for several minutes because it made her feel knowledgeable.  Louis thought Rex was sending him a message by making him able to recognise Orion’s Belt but didn’t know what the message was  – belts had not played a significant part in their relationship.

She asked if Louis had been back to the church and he said no.

Coral said she wanted to go again.

Louis couldn’t understand why, if she was just going to mock it all.

But he couldn’t say no because she was always so kind to him so they went again on Sunday.  The more he went to this church the more likely that word would get around on the other side that he was a regular -  Rex would get to hear about it and know where he was if he had anything he wanted to impart.

More interminable hymns, exactly the same ones as last time. 

People in the seats behind him were whispering during the reading.  One said that her deceased mother had touched her on the shoulder, “I know it was her”, and Louis couldn’t understand why Rex didn’t touch him on the shoulder.  He sat very still so that he would feel it if he did.  He itched a bit.  Maybe that was it.  Maybe contact with the other side was itchy.

The speaker on the stage said, “If you pray and really mean it then god will help you”.

Coral whispered, “What about all the mothers in the majority world, praying for food to feed their babies.  Don’t they really mean it?  What are they doing wrong?”

The speaker said, “Angels are helping us all the time” but that didn’t make sense either unless they only chose to help people who don’t really need it, like bankers and MPs.  She said, “Hope opens doors, opens pathways”, and nor did that make sense, it just wasn’t logical.  But Louis thought that perhaps he was hoping all wrong and if he got more expert practice at it then it would start working – learning any new skill is like this, so why not something as important as hope.  The average man in the street might hope all the time but maybe he was doing it in an amateurish sort of way.  Louis hoped he would receive more pointers on how to do it right.

Today’s medium said the way she worked was not a queueing system but that she just got a feeling in her stomach.  “Very scientific”, said Coral.  The medium said that spirit do learn in the spirit world and sometimes they want to apologise.  She spoke a lot about open doors and pathways and not going back, let go of the past, it’s OK to cry.  Always nice to be given permission.

It was an unusually cold day with a mad splash of hail so hardly anyone had turned up at the church and the medium said, “We’ll try to get through as many as possible”.  And she did – instead of concentrating for fifteen minutes on one person, or someone she knew, which the other medium had done, the feeling in her stomach obligingly skipped about all over the hall.

Apparently a man in spirit was taking his glasses on and off.  Someone else had passed with a chest condition and she could see the oxygen mask.  Can you understand that?  Fifteenth of March, with a five day period either side.  Why couldn’t they give the exact date?  Second of May. 

You’ve been looking at photographs and going down Memory Lane.

A Cul-de-Sac called Regret.

Someone had died, his wife had a lot of sorting out to do.

Someone gave her a bunch of flowers.

“He’s moved on to a better place”, said the medium.

Louis thought, I don’t want you to move on to a better place, I want you here with me, and how do they know it’s a better place anyway but then again anything has to be better than this or does it, maybe it is worse, feeling so far away from everything familiar and not being able to go swimming.

Coral got another message from her mother, they even got her mother’s name right, which was impressive as her name was Pretoria.

“She’s giving you flowers for upliftment, there’s a lot of love all around you”.

Why wasn’t there any love around Louis, what was he doing wrong?  Coral didn’t need flowers or upliftment, she was already perfectly happy, she had a telescope.  She was fine, she didn’t need angels.  She was cynical, too, so why was she getting a message and not Louis.  Could they detect his underlying desperation and sneered at it?

Everyone got messages – a man who could make money but not hold onto it, Louis’ own birthdate was mentioned, the name Ian, but all for other people, not for him.

The only two people the medium missed were Louis and the woman who smelled like pee.  Louis wondered if he smelt like pee too and that’s why the spirits were avoiding him, because he hadn’t made sufficient effort to meet them, with extra hygiene precautions.  He hadn’t had a wash for weeks.  Today he had worn a bright orange jumper, to attract their attention, but maybe they thought it was too garish, that he was too much of an attention-seeker.  It was so difficult to find a balance.  He wouldn’t sit so close to the pee lady next time, she clearly had bad vibes.

A man with a flute played, “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” even though Christmas was long gone, and Louis wanted to die but he was sat at the front so he couldn’t leave.

And then there was yet another long hymn to sing and no reward to look forward to; the reward had already been dished out to other people and Louis sat down and didn’t even mime the words.

When Coral was waiting for her cup of tea Louis looked in one of the spirit magazines and there was a long article about ink messages – drop some coloured ink (were there non-coloured inks?) into a glass of water, let it swirl around, read the message.

On the way home Louis shook off Coral’s suggestion to go and get the cheap food on the reduced counter in the supermarket, and when she’d gone he went back to the supermarket for ink and a jar.  They didn’t sell ink so he got food colouring instead, blue for the sea.  Back in the car he gave it a try but the jar was too small, the food colouring didn’t swirl.  It was also quite dark with only a faint beam of light from a street-lamp.  Louis peered into the jar for twenty minutes getting increasingly frustrated at not being able to read anything.  He blamed the fact of not getting a message on his own impatience.  The food dye didn’t swirl properly, it just dissipated.  He strained his ears to listen, not knowing what it sounded like when the dead spoke.

Why wouldn’t Rex talk to him?  Why wouldn’t he say sorry?  Why had Rex taken all his money, wasn’t he even sorry about that?  Didn’t he have nothing to say at all?  Or was he ashamed?  He must be settled in over the other side by now, why couldn’t he offer Louis a bit of comfort?  Did I mean so little to you?  Always so selfish. 

And then Louis remembered how ill he’d been and in how much pain and he hoped he could swim on the other side and enjoy the sunshine but why couldn’t he say sorry too?

Ten thousand pounds that Louis’ mother had left him when she died, which she had saved over her entire life, Louis was frugal, never used it.  Rex had gone through the lot in a fortnight.  Not just Louis’ life savings but every week he would take money, borrow money, say he’d buy a big lump of heroin and come off it, wean himself off it gradually with the security of knowing he didn’t have to go out and beg it up, say he would get enough money for them to go away to the seaside and it never happened, he always fell asleep, he always took all the heroin on the first day because it was there, could never make it last, and he did this month after month, taking Louis’ money, and it always went wrong.  If he hadn’t already spent Louis’ ten thousand on drugs Louis would have used it to start him in rehab.

For a whole summer Rex asked Louis to wake him up early so he could go out and get enough money for drugs before he started withdrawing.  Louis obediently woke him up early but Rex would not budge; Louis kept nagging like Rex had told him to but still he wouldn’t get up.  Then Louis lost his temper and Rex got violent and started slamming Louis’ head against the wall.  This happened many times.  The next time Rex asked to be woken up, Louis said, “No, I’m not going to do that again” and Rex said he was not supportive, not a true partner, not a team.

Why do we continue to repeat what has already failed again and again?  Why couldn’t Rex step back and see the pattern and try something else?  Why would he never listen to Louis who saw the pattern because it cost him so much?  But was obliged to keep going on with the farce anyway.

You survived in your own way and that was all that mattered, regardless of the quality of the survival.

He took my money and left me with nothing, no money, no food, and not come back for days, weeks, not phone, he’d take the rent money so that Louis, whose name the flat was in, was given eviction warnings, took his wallet that had been his father’s, which Louis hadn’t wanted to lend him, kept saying no but Rex went on and on and on until Louis gave in, and then he lost it in Soho and didn’t even admit it until Louis asked, then said, “You let me have it” as if it was Louis’ own fault, which it was, he knew what would happen and he still gave in.

Why wouldn’t you help me?  You helped drug addicts, why couldn’t you help me, why couldn’t you do that for me?

 Cyclamen were flowering on a little patch of earth by the rubbish bins.  Whatever else is going on in winter, the modesty of cyclamen quietly putting up their exquisite flowers of pink and white and blue, despite the frost the cold the rain, every year just doing their stuff, i am here.

Louis sat in a coffee bar and people quietly brought him food as if there was nothing wrong, quietly bringing me food, because I have paid for it.

And all the time, spring got closer and Louis dreaded spring and the arrival of the daffodils.  The birds were already twittering in the mornings, the world misses you, the buds on the trees hurt me, you were not ready to die.  Louis dreaded the arrival of daffodils, such a masculine flower thrusting itself up and opening with such a loud fanfare:  I AM HERE.

Rex had brought him daffodils.  He picked them all from the roadside.

He didn’t come home even when they were loving each other, and when he eventually arrived he would say, “I was thinking of you the whole time and wanting to come home”, which wasn’t true because he must have been asleep most of the time, and Louis knew it wasn’t true.  What good did it do him, being thought about?  He couldn’t hold it in his hands.  He didn’t want to be the wind beneath Rex’s wings, he wanted to be with him.

 Rex was terrified of being without drugs, the horrendous sweats, the stomach pains, being sick, diarrhoea.  It upset him when Louis didn’t want him in the bed because of the sweating.  Whenever Rex came home they had rows because Louis knew he would go away again soon and Rex could never understand what that felt like, to be left behind.  Except he did, in a different way.

One Christmas he didn’t make it home at all, fell asleep in a hotel toilet; one birthday he got home five minutes to midnight, delighted with himself.

When Rex was sick, Louis had gone to the station and begged up the price of a snowball, which was excruciating, lying to innocent people about why he wanted their money.  Found dealers selling both, but they didn’t know him and sold him chewing gum.  Why couldn’t Rex be satisfied with just heroin, why did it always have to be both?

He had taken drugs to Rex in prison, his mouth so full of drugs he couldn’t close it, Brixton, Pentonville, Wandsworth.  He didn’t have to, it was his choice, but it wasn’t really a choice at all.  Louis always felt he had no choice; love leaves you no choice.  Love.  It was fear.

Why did you do all this to me?  I wanted us to have a happy life.  Why did you make me leave you?  Make my life so unbearable I had to leave you?  And still not say sorry, even now?  I wanted you to come home with me, would that have been so unbearable for you, to spend time with me?  Why did you let me go hungry?  Was I so unreasonable to want you with me?

Rex had never wanted a normal life with him.  Why was Louis so obsessed with the wonderful life they could have had?  It was only Louis that craved it.  A wonderful life was never a possibility.

 Ian said it was an abusive relationship as if Louis didn’t know that, but it wasn’t, it’s not that simple.  Rex behaved in the only way he could.  I know what kind of relationship it was, I don’t need you telling me.

Leaving the church a car had blasted by with Slush Radio on, the philosophical lie - What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger.  That’s alright then.  The darkness makes the sun shine all the brighter.  Oh really.  The dark is dark and the sun is the sun and that is all.  Pain hurts.  Whatever doesn’t kill us leaves a permanent weakness, ready to crack next time there’s the least pressure.  It creates a fault line and that’s how earthquakes start.  Nothing grows on a scar.

 

Going to work Ian ran into Mrs. Tors again and the boy John coming home from a pantomime.  John had his expensive coat on.  Mrs. Tors looked at Ian and said, “Nine pm and he’s only just got up!”

 Ian deeply resented that she always made these negative assumptions about him when she knew nothing at all of his life because she never asked; she didn’t know what he had or hadn’t done in his life or why he couldn’t do it, but he refused to correct her because he was her son and she should respect him without knowing anything about him.  But why should she have any respect for him?  He was pathetic.

She never seemed pleased to see him, never hugged him.  She always had a twinkle in her eye when she saw him but it was like she was trying to think up some comical comment at his expense.

Next day Mrs. Tors dropped by at the flat with the boy John and the first tub of magnolia paint, which she had found in a shed at the back of her B & B.

She sniffed when she saw the yellow walls.

“Why”, she said, “Why?  You knew I had all this magnolia.  You’ll have to do it again, you’ll never be able to live with that colour.  It’s alright on holiday but not on a day to day basis”.

 Ian said sorry.

If she had brought the magnolia last week he could have used it as an undercoat to blank out the blue instead of wasting all that money on the yellow.

He said, “Maybe I could have it for the bedroom?” to placate her.

But Mrs. Tors said no, it was for the living room.  “John, you’ll have to carry it all the way home again”.

Mrs. Tors waved towards the window and said, “What’s he doing out there?  Professor Jobless.  You don’t have to put up with it”.  She said, “You should go out and sleep with someone else, you’re within your rights”.  She said, “He’s not the only lamp-post in the street”, but Ian never felt sexual when he was angry or upset and anyway what sort of way to behave is that, have sex with other people when your partner is having a mental breakdown, is that what she did, and what did she mean about lamp-posts, like he was a dog claiming his territory, or did she just mean he could put up his Lost notices wherever he wanted.  What was the use of that.  He knew what was lost and he knew where it was.

But it was still kind of nice to have her support even if she talked rubbish.

Louis had been unable to work for years.  Ian told her that Louis was learning to drive and getting the feel of the gearstick.

Mrs. Tors said, “That’s patent nonsense; there’s no wheels on the thing”.

Ian yawned, he had not got much sleep last night worrying about her visit.

“Only just got up!  It’s 12 o’clock.  See what I told you, John.  Lazy!”

She said, “Lazy bones”, trying to make it sound friendly and fun.

John said he liked the yellow, it was nice and sunny and could he have his room yellow please.

Mrs. Tors said, “Not on a day-to-day basis.  You’re only eight, of course you like it but it’s not a colour for the mature individual.  That’s why your room is magnolia, I’m trying to cultivate good taste in you”.

They had been to the chip shop on the way here and she parked herself down on the sofa and unwrapped the packages, calling for plates and forks, laying out the pieces of battered cod. 

Ian said he would just have some chips.  His voice sounded strange to him, whispery, like it was coming from a long way back within him, as if it had retreated somewhere safe and didn’t want to come out again.  What if he went dumb, he would have to write everything down, that would be such a hassle with his terrible handwriting, and he would always have to ensure that he had a pen and paper on him – where would he keep it?  Pens leaked and paper stuck together and went hard if you got caught in the rain.

Mrs. Tors said, “Are you still vegetarian?” as if it was a disorder that should have cleared up by now, like Louis’ grief.  She said fish isn’t meat, “I know plenty of vegetarians who eat fish”, like sealife had been reclassified as a vegetable.  She waved a piece of battered cod in front of his eyes in a wavy swimming motion.  Ian saw the cod suffocating in a net with its eyes popping out and its swim bladder bursting as it was hauled out of the sea, gutted while it was still alive.

She said to John, “He got upset over lambs when he was five and found out what that lump of brown stuff was on his plate.  Said he would never eat animals again.  Next week I caught him eating a fish cake.  Said he didn’t realise it was an animal”.  Ian thought about the lambs bleating as they were torn from their mothers and the mothers bleating after them.

Mrs. Tors grabbed John’s beef saveloy and dangled it in front of Ian’s face, provocatively, as if it would tempt him, laughing, as a gentle bullock with huge liquid eyes looked at him over a hedge.

“This is more your style”, she said, “Bet you can’t resist”.

 Ian said, “That’s very childish” and she laughed harder.

She was at least a foot shorter than Ian.  He could swat her like a fly.

 

Louis went to have a private reading at the church, paid his money, took a ticket for 3.20pm.

 Ian saw him getting out of the car and asked where he was going.

He said, “What if you do get a message, what relevance does it have?  What does it matter what dead people say?”

Louis said, “They know everything”.

“How?”

“They can see into the future when they’re dead.  I know it sounds silly but it’s true”.  He added, “The dead don’t die, they look on and help”.

 Ian said, “No they don’t, they’re dead, it’s not logical.  If they helped us then nobody would ever have anything go wrong in their life again because dead people would be helping them out but that’s not true, everyone’s life is shit”.  He thought, If it was true my dad would be looking out for me now and Mrs. Tors would be a good mother.

Louis said, “Oh I can’t explain it, it’s complicated”, like it was advanced calculus.  “It means something, that’s all, I need to go”.

Ian asked if he could go with him but he was wearing his black coat so Louis said no. 

 

At the church, all the others sat around chatting like it was normal.

Someone was selling crystal-balls.

Louis still couldn’t see that it was a social event, he had always hated groups.

When he went to pay he could see a list of the five mediums available but he didn’t know any of their names.  He listened to what other people were saying about them but was unsure if he could trust their judgement because their standards might be lower than his own.  They might be quite content with, “Prayers work”.  The man taking the money said, “Look at the colours on the cards and see which one you are drawn to”, red, blue, yellow, green or white.  But Louis didn’t know.  White was peaceful but it was also empty, red was vibrant but aggressive, green was ambivalent too, and yellow and blue were just like home and he didn’t want to be there.  He didn’t like any of the colours, they were all too obvious.  It didn’t bother him that he was making such a big deal of it, it seemed to be a life-changingly important decision, and it was essential to make the right choice but that was impossible with his lack of knowledge.  He shut his eyes and let his hands find a card, then was disappointed with the result.  

He sat in the busy hall for 40 minutes waiting for his time-slot, trying to still his mind, and then the medium was late calling him in.

The medium had a banal face and she said, “Pick one of these stones”.  More choices.  It was hard work.  Tiny tiny little polished stones.  He chose the green one but didn’t want to; he liked them all, and hated them all too and felt it was all rather silly.  But absolutely crucial at the same time.

She said, “It will calm you right down.  You can keep it afterwards”, so he was getting something for his money, which made him feel guilty.  More negative emotions that would put off dead people from talking to him. 

The medium shut her eyes and concentrated and then said, “There’s been many tears but after the rain the sun comes out”. 

Louis said, “I’m not sure about that”.

“Oh yes”, she said.  “Then the flowers blossom again.  They tell me you’ve been looking though a lot of old photos”.  And he hadn’t because he didn’t have any but symbolically he supposed he had so he said, “Yes I have”, and then felt bad because it was an inaccuracy.

It’s a difficult road ahead, you need to be positive, move forward, don’t look back, choices to make.

It was like a horoscope.  Were they all like this or had he just got medium-lite?

He thought, But what does Rex have to say to me?  He needed something specific.  He needed her to say, “Oh I have Rex here, he says he put you through hell and he’s extremely sorry for everything he did, and he loves you.  Also he knows that you love him too and he has forgiven you for calling him a junkie and not letting him in even though he offered to take off his shoes”.

But the banalities continued and Louis began to stiffen.  He could get this from the Samaritans and they were free.

“There’s a lot of love around you”, she said.

“No there isn’t”, Louis said.

She said, “You’ve got a lot of sorting out to do”.

Like anyone after a death.

She said that he should talk to those he wanted to commune with.

And Louis said, “But that’s why I’m here paying you money”.

“Who exactly is it you want to talk to?”

Louis suddenly felt too shy to speak Rex’s name, and he didn’t want to give anything away either; he wanted her to work for her twelve quid.  And he had a curious feeling that he didn’t want to bother Rex if Rex didn’t want to come to talk to him of his own free will.  It was just like years ago waiting for Rex to wake up and having to creep about in case he disturbed his sleep.

Why didn’t Rex know that Louis wanted to speak to him?  Surely he would know that; it was obvious.  Why wouldn’t he come without being asked?  What was he doing?  Was he busy?  Was he out swimming?  Was he still asleep?  Was his leg playing him up?  How long would he have to be dead before it recovered and he got some movement back?  Everybody else’s dead ones came at the drop of a hat but not Rex. 

Louis said, “My partner”.

The medium frowned in brief concentration then immediately said, “Ah, here she is!” all joyful.  The medium said, “She’s giving you a bunch of flowers”.

What was it with dead people always giving bunches of flowers?  Can’t they be a bit more imaginative?  Nobody ever said which specific type of flowers they were – do they all choose the same ones so that it is a waste of time saying what they are?  Are they roses or carnations or dandelions or thistles?   If you were a donkey that would at least mean something special to you and nobody else.  Couldn’t they find a more unique way to express their love and concern or do they lose all individuality once they are dead, personality just evaporates - or are people generally lacking in new ideas regardless of their status as to being dead or alive?

Wouldn’t Rex hold out a spoon, or a piece of silver foil?  Or a blood-stained shirt sleeve?  Maybe he was in fact doing so and the medium was blinded by the shimmer and only saw flowers.  Rex could offer jasmine but, technically, that didn’t come in a bunch.

The medium said, “My, she was a pretty woman, she loved dressing up”.

Louis thought, Well Rex did like his suits.

“Lovely long blonde hair, she was so upset when it all fell out”.

The medium was so finely tuned into the ether she didn’t even have gaydar.

Then she said, “I’m sensing a lot of resistance”.

Louis said, “I don’t trust you”.

To his surprise, she said, “I don’t trust you either”, which hurt.  But then she was not a counsellor who was trained to accept any kind of rudeness.

“You can get your money back if you’re not satisfied”, she said, sulkily.

Louis thought about it but that would be like admitting failure so when the bell rang and his time was over he left the church without speaking to anyone.

Outside he howled.  Nobody wanted him.  At least he had the tiny green stone in his pocket, something to show for the money – but, pound for pound, very very little.

You don’t need me now, you needed me then, your loneliness, I never helped.

Back in the car Louis put some more food colouring in a larger glass jar and tried to read the swirls.

But the jar was still too small, it was too dark, his eyesight was bad, he couldn’t concentrate.

 Ian came out with a cup of tea.  “What are you doing?”

Louis felt embarrassed to be caught doing such a thing and tried to explain logically in a quiet voice Ian wouldn’t hear.

Ian said, “You probably need coloured oil”, he said, “or ink.  Do you want me to get some from indoors?”

Louis said, “No”.  He said, “Thank you”.

 Ian was wearing a button badge on his coat lapel.  It read, “I am OK”.

I never said you weren’t. 

Ian had been at the bottle marked Positive Thinking again.  It was everywhere.  The buzzword was self-empowerment with all its self-accepting platitudes and its resistance to any kind of criticism, a resistance against genuine self-improvement because that, after all, takes thought and effort and humility.  Slogans and posters about fallibility and self-acceptance, I am flawed, love me as I am.  I am doing my best – even when it is nowhere good enough.  I make mistakes.  But proudly.  I am human.  That excuses everything.  Anything to feel good about one’s weaknesses but no desire to be better.  Aggressively defensively boringly reducing the complexity of being alive, the complexity of human relationships, to the simple and banal and, of course, the rude:  feel good by putting down anyone who disagrees with you.

It is superficial and glib and it parades as enlightenment, it parades as meaningful, but it is cheap, it is just a banner over the heart, it is not the heart.  It is not vulnerability, which has value, it is a mockery of vulnerability because it takes pride in its weakness.  Saying, “I make mistakes” not as a painful confession of vulnerability but in defiance.  We have lost a sense of the value of vulnerability; no one has the courage to be vulnerable anymore because true vulnerability opens us up to pain. 

Positive thinking would not approve of why Louis still loved Rex despite everything he had done to him and hated him for it at the same time and it was not the same thing at all nor the opposite thing and why he wanted to go back. 

The fashion is for going forwards; looking back is seen as brooding, self-pitying and indulgent, and utterly pointless.  It is pointless to want the impossible.  But it isn’t or there would be no forward movement at all.  The past is important:  everything is built upon what went before.  What harm does it do to want to live there?

The energy to be positive was more than Louis possessed; he was in severe debit.  Negativity is important.  History’s great complainers are the ones who get things done.  Not that Louis wanted to get anything done.  He wanted to stop time completely from doing anything.  “We are all amazing”.  Most of the people he saw every day were bland and forgettable, just like he was, they had no special qualities, no spark.  Most of us don’t.  Get over it.  Nobody is looking at you, nobody is interested.

He was the trickle of the puddle on the slope.

All you can really do is shut your mouth and shuffle along, we will all be dead soon anyway.

Ian knew that Louis was trying to reach Rex with his jar of water.  He had nobody else dead that he wanted to talk to.  He had never wanted to talk to the dead before.

He was pleased he’d offered to get the oil and ink even though they didn’t have any at home and he had no idea where he would have got it from had Louis wanted some, but he was also afraid that his encouragement would make everything even worse.

Louis had accepted the tea.

He knew that Louis only had a very small head and if Rex was filling it then Ian would be elbowed out.  There wasn’t room for both of them in there.  Louis couldn’t juggle people.  It was all or nothing.  He himself had never been the all.

He knew that he loved Louis more than Louis loved him, he had always known that, and although it wasn’t a competition it would have been nice to be equal.  Louis was like Mrs. Tors in this respect.  He felt Louis was just biding his time and found Ian hard work.  Ian needed him, and Louis didn’t.  It wasn’t a mutually dependent relationship.  Louis could walk away.  He wouldn’t but he could.  He would if someone better came along.  But he wouldn’t.  He feared change – Ian had that in his favour.

He was cruel sometimes but he wasn’t, Ian couldn’t think of any examples.

 

Emiko had started talking to Bonnie just like Rex had done but she didn’t find it as much fun as he had.  Her family now consisted of her and Lulu and a parrot she had to approach with rubber gloves.  But there are people who find it easier to talk to themselves when there is an animal present, and Bonnie helped her mull things over.  In some ways, the parrot was rather like god in that Emiko could ruminate and come to her own conclusions and then believe it was Bonnie who had put the idea into her head.  The bird was her sage.  They were three women together, abandoned.  She wondered if Bonnie missed Rex and if she was disappointed with the level of conversation she got with Emiko, in Japanese.  Rex was a master of voices and Emiko only had her own.  Bonnie never looked at Emiko during these conversations but always kept her eyes on Lulu.

 

Louis went to Coral’s to get a glass of water as he could see that Ian was home and couldn’t face having to pretend he was normal.  All her lights were on.  Coral’s kitchen was uncharacteristically tidy but Coral herself was not.  Coral said, “I had an unusual spurt of energy yesterday”, and she showed him through the curtain to the back garden.  “See!”

Louis didn’t.  “I demolished the old greenhouse.  It was much harder work than I thought it would be.”

She told him she had then awoken in the middle of the night aching all over.  “My first thought was that I’d contracted polio.  Followed quickly by the thought that I hadn’t washed up and whoever found me dead would tell people this awful fact so I got up and tidied the kitchen.  I was amazed when I saw it this morning.”

She was going to build an observatory on the space where the greenhouse had been but it would need to be high up so she was considering getting a spiral staircase from architectural salvage.

Coral had advanced at an astonishing rate through her astronomy book but had still only managed to pick out the moon.  It was pretty impressive, even so – so bleak, so beautiful, she felt she could look at it forever.  She cast her eyes along the thousands of impact craters and the dark lunar seas, vast lava plains that had formed billions of years ago.  At certain times the sunlight came in at a low slant and the shadows stood out more starkly.

She showed Louis through the telescope.  It frightened him.

 Marina read Coral’s books on astronomy much more slowly than Coral did and for this reason she took in every word.  She quoted from Sky & Telescope in her hoarse little voice, “Be patient.  Much of what the universe has to offer is subtle, our night vision sees almost everything as shades of grey”.  But the planets were bright and easy to find.  It was she who found Venus after the sun had set, dazzlingly bright, a small but brilliant round dot.  Week by week it came closer to Earth, growing larger and changing to a crescent shape.  She found Jupiter in the southeast, with its cloud belts and moons named for Galileo, who discovered them from Italy in 1610, dancing around Jupiter like mischievous children, sometimes ducking out of view, hidden in shadow.  Coral didn’t believe that Jupiter was only a gas giant with no solid surface.

Suddenly Marina asked Louis about the scar on his cheek, touching it with a motherly concern.  He pulled away.

To Coral he said, “Rex hit me but he was off his head, it wasn’t really his fault, I used to goad him.  It drove me mad that he never got up, he spent the whole time sleeping, I asked for it, it was better than nothing”.

Rex would come home and sleep then he’d wake up and go out again.

I used to throw things at him to wake him up.  When he was asleep, just to get his attention.

He chased me and hit me.

I just wanted him to stay home. But he was off his head, it was the drugs, they make you violent.

Coral said, “He didn’t have to use drugs”, but Louis had seen Rex trying to get clean, again and again, he just couldn’t do it.  The withdrawals were horrendous.  Rex did have to use drugs.

“I don’t know why he was always drawing houses, he never wanted to come home, maybe I was the wrong kind of house, my windows were all shut”.

He heard what he was saying.  Coral didn’t comment so he hoped he hadn’t said it out loud.

How could he have done all this if he’d loved me?  But people do terrible things, it has nothing to do with love, it was ten years ago, why should it still matter?

I just wanted your attention, I wanted you to be ordinary but if you’d been ordinary I wouldn’t have wanted you. 

Louis had never stopped loving Rex even though he had cut it off at the root.  Instead he had tried putting himself first, like the self-help advises – Rex was never going to put him first.  Why should he need to be first?  Why had they never been equal?  Why did it matter?

Marina was watching him attentively.

In Coral’s garden he stood with her amongst all the debris from the wrecked greenhouse, desiccated plants, dry earth, shattered glass, slugs.  From such places we view the stars as though they give our life meaning.

 

Ian could hear rats in the walls and under the floorboards.

At first he thought he was imagining it but he wasn’t, they were there every evening and he hadn’t noticed them before because he was usually at work at night or fell asleep as soon as he got in or just had Radio Mush on loudly.

He had lived in places with mice before, they were so quick you couldn’t catch them and they could hide in any small place because they were built of crumbs.  If you had an infestation of hedgehogs, say, (or armadillos) they would curl up and you could simply pick them up and transfer them, snowball-like, to a heap of leaves outside.  Hedgehogs at least had the respect to freeze in terror; mice and rats were cocky.

Rats didn’t curl up into a picturesque, poignant little ball.

It was partly their arrogance that Ian objected to.  Rats do not enter a house by stealth, like a burglar.  They enter boldly, like landowners.  They have no awareness of tenancy laws and just breeze in whenever they feel like it.  If you catch them in the act they might run away but not because they acknowledge your greater right to be there.  They also have no apparent awareness of basic lavatorial etiquette.

Nobody else in the house could hear them but they all had ear problems and had the TV on very loudly all the time.  Louis didn’t care.

Marina’s father who owned the deli downstairs said Ian must be imagining it but that was because he didn’t want to be closed down and lose money.  The scratching padding noises drove Ian mad.  It was like something gnawing into his skull, trotting about throughout his brain.  Marina’s father said, “You are vegetarian, let them live” - as if they were a food option.

Ian called the rat man in.

The rat man was friendly and he opened some drain covers, found what he called a dry run and put down some poison.

 Ian said, “Will they eat all that?”  It was a huge portion.

It looked like a lot to get through but the rat man said they would enjoy it.

 Ian said, “Won’t they get suspicious at the sudden superabundance of food?”  He thought, They’ll avoid it, they’ll know it’s a trap.  He began attributing to the rats a Cambridge education and a career at the Kremlin.

 After the rat man had left, Ian couldn’t bear the notion of these superintelligent Mensa creatures having protracted long drawn out agonizing deaths, even if they were disgusting and spread disease, and this thought haunted him more than the gnawing in the walls did.  So he went out and scooped up all the poison and binned it.

By now he had started itching and he wondered if it was an allergic reaction to vermin.  It was like an itch from inside and he couldn’t get at it.

He went to the doctor and the doctor now seemed to roll his eyes whenever Ian entered his surgery.  The doctor asked a few questions and looked at Ian’s scratch marks and said it was nothing.  But he gave him some antihistamine tablets.  Ian felt the doctor was fobbing him off so when he got outside he threw the prescription away.

Emiko was outside with Lulu.  Ian asked her if she wanted to use the surgery toilet so he could hold Lulu again.  But she said she had an appointment.  The baby was awake today and she looked at Ian with her undiscriminating eyes and didn’t seem annoyed at his presence.  He said, “Hello, Lulu”.

When Emiko had gone into the surgery Ian went through the bin and fished out the prescription.

 

Louis had gone to see Emiko just as she was going out.

He was very very tired.

Emiko said he could wait for her if he liked, and she let him inside.

He wanted to be with someone Rex knew so he waited.

The parrot Bonnie was still there.

He looked at her for a while.  Her colours had no subtlety, no taste, it was like she had been painted by a four year old:  bright red, bright blue, bright yellow.  He felt sorry for her for being so garish, then felt guilty for feeling superior to a parrot.  He wondered if the bird was really rather shy and would prefer to be the colour of a common sparrow and blend into the background.  We’re not all exhibitionists.  Or was she proud of her coat?  It was difficult to tell.  She was clearly in the wrong country.  An English winter was no place for a parrot.  He opened the cage and lifted her onto the back of a chair.

Louis said to the parrot, “What’s it all about then?” as if really expecting an answer.  But even the bird wouldn’t talk to him.

Bonnie looked at him and cocked her head but there was no real recognition.  Louis didn’t feel particularly understood.  He made some more remarks and still got no response.  The parrot had suffered more social intercourse in the last few weeks than many of us have to endure in a lifetime.  Louis looked deep into the parrot’s eyes in case he could see Rex’s reflection from the past.  He squinted and could see Rex quite clearly, he really could.

He found a pen and started writing some notes in his little notebook and Bonnie sidled up to him on the arm of the chair and took the pen out of his hand.  He started again and every time he did so the bird gently removed the pen as if to stop his frantic scribbling.  She also did this with nuts and screws, if you happened to be involved in some DIY, and Louis knew this.  But part of him wondered if the parrot was housing Rex’s soul and was trying to tell him something.  Her utter silence suggested great depth.  Was Rex saying, through the bird, that Louis should stop living in the past?  But Rex had lived in the past himself so it probably wasn’t that.  It probably wasn’t anything.  He told himself he was being silly but no more silly than going to the church, and no less desperate.  The parrot might have something equally valid to tell him.  The church had given him nothing.

Louis didn’t want to stop living in the past, it was the only place he liked.  Perhaps the parrot was saying LOOK AT ME but she wasn’t, it wasn’t done for attention.  Really look at me.

The bird flapped out her feathers and settled down again.  If she flew off would that be a sign?  But what would it mean?  He needed Bonnie to actually vocalise something clearly that would be beyond misinterpretation.  But even words were open to misinterpretation so that might not help either.  A sign for what?  Was Rex inside the parrot?  If he plucked away the feathers would Rex be sitting there within and complaining, “Hm, I’m chilly now”.

There was no guidebook for this sort of thing; you were left entirely in the dark.  No wonder people ended up believing the bible and the koran and the torah, hoping someone else knows whatever the hell is going on.

Louis knew it all meant nothing.  But he wanted it to mean something.  He didn’t want to know it all meant nothing, he didn’t want the awareness.  Animals don’t know.  Why do we have to know everything?

Emiko had some Japanese magazines on the floor and Louis found an English one among them and looked up his horoscope.  The prediction seemed oddly relevant until he noticed the date – three years ago.  But he’d probably been going through a similar sort of thing then too, doubt, loss and misery.

Suddenly there was a fumbling at the door and he really thought it was Rex – his heart leapt within him with genuine joy, it was a real feeling.  But it was only Emiko.  She didn’t say hello, she said, “Ian misses you, how you once were”.

She took off her coat and she had on a man’s tailored waistcoat, in pinstripes, which rather suited her.

She said, “People don’t know what to say, that’s all”.

She thought, Why can’t they just sort themselves out?  Neither of them ever asked how she was and they both knew she was alone with Lulu – Rex had insisted on her telling him every detail of her life and had offered to go and track Lulu’s father down.  But it was nice to have someone there waiting for her so she offered him coffee.

Ian’s birthday was coming up.  Last year, in homage to Ian’s love of macaroons, Louis had attempted to make some – all the preparations he’d made, found a simple recipe and gathered all the ingredients, fiddled about for hours, and the results were terrible, truly awful, just slopped on the plate in weak greens and blues and pinks, and so sickly sweet, he had added the eggs at the wrong stage, all at once, but wonderful nevertheless, even though, at the same time, really horrible.  Ian had dispatched the lot and pretended he didn’t feel sick.

Louis thought, I spend half my life trying to put myself in other people’s shoes to try to work out what they’re thinking and feeling, and it’s very wearing.

He said to Emiko, “He just misses being the centre of attention.  I can’t keep being jolly and soldiering on for his sake” even though being jolly and soldiering on had never been part of his repertoire.  He said, “I can’t fix things”.

Emiko said, “Rex said you could.  Rex said you were a magician”

This was another blade through the heart, a thin thin very sharp skewer that would draw out his heart on a tiny hook as if it were a kebab, brown and shrivelled, nobody would want it and it would be dropped in a bin full of cigarette butts.  It was far too late to be a magician.  Why did he never tell me?  Nobody to call, I am all alone and so far away from you, everyone is going to die.  Louis could not bear that Rex had thought him a magician, he was such a fraud, Rex was so sweet trusting and innocent and he wanted to tear his own head off so he wouldn’t have to think anymore.  

Emiko said she had to feed Lulu.  She nodded towards the door.

 

On the way back to the car, Louis looked in on 3p Lee but he still wouldn’t open the door.

Then Mrs. Etvart passed him with Ray, and they both said, “Hi Louis”, but he didn’t recognise the man – then suddenly realised it was because Ray was smiling and had put on three stone.  Louis used to see him when he went to pick up Rex’s methadone script those times Rex couldn’t get out of bed, he could never get to his appointment on time, others managed it, just, but not Rex, and Louis used to get so anxious that they would ban him and he’d be without methadone and spend even more time on the street, so anxious that he would go himself and tell the key worker Rex was too ill.  The only time Rex had been punctual was when Louis put all the clocks in the flat forward by three hours.  He only got away with that once.  Rex always wore a suit and his keyworker was in jeans with a teeshirt and a scruffy beard.

Louis used to see Ray there, at the clinic, a skinny man who never looked anyone in the eye.

Mrs. Etvart, who was thirty years older than Ray, had put him up in her spare room, for some strange reason, they had an unfathomable friendship.

Ray went into a newsagents to get some cigarettes and Mrs. Etvart said to Louis, “You didn’t recognise him, did you?  It took me four years but we got there in the end.  I paid off all his fines, I went to court with him, went to hospital with him.  He says I saved his life.  Even his mother couldn’t do that”.

She looked horribly smug.  She was a reflexologist at the hospital and liked doing the feet of homeless people for free.  In the early days, she offered to do Rex’s feet.  Rex had been out for days in synthetic shoes and no socks and he courteously told her thank you but no thanks.  He didn’t trust her anyway.  But she had gone on and on about it, assuring him that she was very good at her job, so that in the end, to be polite, he let her do it.  He relinquished his feet and let her get on with it.  Afterwards she had whispered to Louis how badly his feet had smelt.  “Very stinky” were the words she had used.

When Ray came out with his cigarette papers he confirmed what she had said about the life-saving.  He said, “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for this one”.

Louis said, “That’s great”.  Mrs. Etvart said, “Where is Rex?”  Louis said, “He’s gone”. 

Ray recoiled from all forms of physical contact so Louis did what Rex used to do and held out his hand to shake goodbye, to see what would happen.

Ray had seen this coming and was busying his hands rolling his cigarette.

She didn’t cure him of that then, thought Louis.

“I’ve got to go”, he said.

Mrs. Etvart said, “Keep your chin up”.

What was the point of telling Louis she had saved Ray’s life?  Why couldn’t he save Rex’s life?  Why hadn’t his love been enough?  She could do it, why couldn’t Louis, what was he lacking?  Why wouldn’t Rex let himself be saved?  If Louis had been important to him wouldn’t he have done everything he could to get well so they could have a good life together?  Rex didn’t care at all.  He would rather spend all their money getting high than be with him.  Other people faced their devils and beat them.  Why wouldn’t Rex?  She didn’t even love Ray, they were only friends.  What did she have that he didn’t?  He wasn’t a magician.

Getting off drugs was hard but other people managed it, even this straggly weed of a man, why couldn’t you?  Other people did it.

 Ian had said, “You think you’re something special don’t you; he didn’t want to be saved”.

Saved.  Stranded on a rock in the middle of the sea, in a storm.  He liked the sea.  Did he?  He never sent up a distress flare.

Even Emiko got Rex to take vitamins.

Love was utterly useless.  It wasn’t a social worker.  That wasn’t its job – it had no job, it’s like flowers, they make the world smell better but they have no real function.  All it was was an emotion with good press.  A flea dressed up as a peacock dressed up as a tiger.

I couldn’t save you.  She saved Ray but I couldn’t save you.  Saving people is so patronising, like my life is better than yours and I know what’s what.  How things work.  I couldn’t save you because I was on my own rock crying out for a rescue helicopter.

“Keep your chin up” – a close relative of “Cheer up it might never happen”.

Louis was wearing Rex’s old leather jacket, what was left of it, with the lining ripped out and the pockets ripped in impatience.  It no longer smelt of Rex, just a faint whiff of mould.

You never loved me.  I wasn’t a magician.

 

Mrs. Tors gave Ian the scarf she had knitted for him.

It was horrible.  It wasn’t the colour he had asked for and it was evidently a rush job.  There were many dropped stitches, and inexplicably gained stitches, so that it wasn’t even at the edges, but rather like a meandering river.  Although not a very long one.  But it was still a nice thought, the first thing she had ever done for him.  Her hands had touched this scarf, she had been thinking of him while she was knitting it.  Ian overdid the thanks.

She told him that the boy John had helped out, she was teaching him knitting and this was his first project.  So Ian thanked John too.

“I had a nightmare getting the colour you wanted”, she said.   “You’re so awkward”.  Evidently her wool shop did not stock anything “drab”.  So she had got the first thing she saw, which was pink and green speckles.  Your type of thing.  Then she told him how expensive it had been, so he had to wear it.  He said it was lovely.

On his way home from work, Louis was in the car and Ian asked him if he was warm enough and he gave him the scarf.  Louis accepted it from him.

Ian surreptitiously tried to open the back door of the car wondering why he had never tried it before, just to sit in there with Louis.  He didn’t want to be told no or asked to leave, he didn’t want to sit in the back he wanted to sit next to him, but he was scared of what Louis would say.  The door wouldn’t budge anyway.  He pretended he was just polishing the handle.

He said, “See you later”, and carried on standing there.  He had written Louis another little explanatory note but his hands were worse than ever and he couldn’t read it himself now; he was ashamed of what Louis might say.  He stood there waiting for a signal about what to do, some imperceptible movement from Louis that would mean he was open or closed to communication.

There were lots of little fruit flies in the car – every time Louis killed one then two more appeared; he felt so alone, killing flies who had done nobody any harm.  He did not enjoy life.  Where were they all coming from?  He swatted out like a cat.

 Ian watched him.  Just batting the air.  It was very disturbing.

Louis longed to be on a bus that took him far away from everywhere he wanted to be.

He remembered a painting and the feeling it had given him without remembering the painting itself, the image was lost and only his feelings remained.  Was he the centre of the universe?  Happiness was fake, his previous happiness with Ian was fake, only misery was real.  Light things were not real.  He wasn’t made for happiness, it didn’t suit him, it had been a struggle.  Had it?  One always knows one is going to land eventually, and that the impact will hurt.  He and Ian had not been happy but there had been an absence of terror – that was all.

It was so late tonight that the birds were twittering in readiness for another day.

Spring was getting closer and closer, it was already tapping on the edges of the world.  Louis told Rex that the world missed him, as if he had a right to speak for the world, he didn’t want to face spring without him, he didn’t want to move on.  The terrible daffodils would be out with their cheerful trumpets deafening the world in fake joy.  Put on your easter bonnet and smile smile smile your troubles away.

I don’t want another season to come and take me even further away from you.

The sooner I am dead the better I will like it.

I had to protect myself against loving you.

He should get rid of all his belongings and go to meet Rex face to face, sort it all out once and for all, what was in Rex’s mind, do you love me don’t you what were you playing at, was I a magician or a doss house were you good or bad or neither or both?

He didn’t want messages from Rex, he wanted Rex.

Should he sort his things out himself or leave it for Ian?  If he did it himself Ian might suspect what he was up to and try to stop him.  He didn’t want to come to terms with Rex gone, he wanted Rex not to be gone.

Messages from spiritualists were too vague.  He needed to speak to Rex directly.  Rex was more reliable now he was dead – if Louis got over to the other side maybe it would be easier to find him, and maybe now that Rex had nothing left to lose he would have the courage to be honest, and they could talk.

 He glanced up and saw Ian standing there.  Ian said, “I love you, I’d lay down my life for you”.

Louis said, “But you’re never going to have to.  It’s just a meaningless phrase.  I’m asking you to be a little patient with me, that’s all, and you can’t even do that”.

 Ian said he was trying.  “But you know my insecurities”.

It was about Ian again.  Even when you tell me you love me it is still just about you.

He said, “I don’t want you to lay down your life for me.  You don’t value your life anyway”.

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

Louis’ own hurt was so huge that everything else should just shut its whining mouth.  He didn’t care about Ian’s insecurities, or anything about Ian at all.

If he handed Ian a razor blade he would not slice down his arm.

Louis did not have any razor blades with which to test the hypothesis.