3. LYING

A wish to die and a wish not to live are two completely different things, as if one might like a round of golf simply because one does not fancy a plate of chillies.  Louis thought that if he was going to die it wouldn’t really matter about his belongings but for some reason it did matter.  He wanted to tie up loose ends, he didn’t want strangers looking through his belongings when he was dead:  somehow this mattered.  He struggled to get rid of his belongings and he couldn’t understand why it was a struggle, then he had to admit that he didn’t really want to die and he was ashamed of his impulse towards life.  He couldn’t understand what it was that kept him wanting to be alive.  What was wrong with him?  He had nothing to live for.

It was not a proud moment.  He didn’t want to live yet he didn’t want to die either.  The body’s annoying will to life was a damn nuisance.  He wanted what he wanted and what he really wanted was to have the past back again but different, better.  He felt that what he wanted was the only thing that had any validity and because of that he had a right to want it.  It was completely logical. 

He appraised all the ways he could kill himself but couldn’t make a decision, it made him want to weep.  He could walk onto the motorway with his eyes shut.  But it was so irrevocable.  If he was dead that wouldn’t matter but since he was still alive it did.  He didn’t want to think anymore.  He didn’t want to be dead because he wanted to meet Rex again while they were still alive and had bodies.  But if they were both dead maybe that was like a double negative and would be just as good as if they were both alive.

Time was short.  Time was a boat taking him further and further away from the shore where Rex had last stood and where Louis could have touched him, if he had been there; the sea stretched out between them scattered with useless memories he couldn’t hold onto, bobbing on floating on the surface of the huge love he still had for Rex. 

I don’t want to turn around and you are just a tiny speck in the distance, standing there, never again moving forwards, the days keep flowing and I hate it, you’re stuck there on the 19^th of December, shrinking to nothing while my boat sails on without you.

 Ian said, “You haven’t left him behind, he’s not there, he’s not at the 19^th December, he’s left you behind”.

February and there is no way back to you.  You are not there anymore to go back to.  Even if I got off the train now there would be no way back to you.  Could I walk all that way back?  Are you still there?  Where had Rex gone?  Please wait for me darling, I don’t want to be here, I want to be with you, I should never have met Ian but I was so hungry for affection you were never there, I wanted a normal relationship but now I know what a normal relationship is and I don’t like it.

Louis missed the snow and he missed the slush and he longed for it all to start up again next year so that he could pretend it was still this year and he was nearer to Rex.

I am rudderless, nothing means anything without you in the world, aching emptiness, there is no point talking to anyone, they are not you, and they can’t bring you back.

And he knew that in the end Rex had been OK about him being with Ian but that made it worse, like he didn’t matter to Rex anymore, or that Rex was being selfless.

I need to know what you want me to do – live or die?

Everything is so banal now, so trite now.

Why am I still alive?  Why hasn’t this killed me?

I am just marking time until I can be with you again, I am no longer here, it is only temporary, everything is just an ache to be with you, please come for me soon.

The plumbers and builders had left, having achieved precisely nothing and given up, but then the leaks stopped of their own accord.  The builders said that the foundations were solid and there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the building and the roof was tight.  There was subsidence but there always had been.  Louis went back home.

Louis decided to wash and iron all his clothes so that Ian could take them straight to the charity shop when he found him dead, but the washing machine broke down as if it had folded its arms and refused to go on.  Louis hauled everything out and took it to the bath where he rinsed it through and squeezed it out, then hung it up but it was so heavy it pulled the shower railing down.

 

Louis’ mind had frozen everything in time like peat bodies that cannot survive their reintroduction into the sun.  But you come to the surface again and again in perfect condition – but is it really you?  I am in your past and we can meet together there but still unable to exist as once we did.

He tried to stop thinking of Rex because he didn’t want to get used to these thoughts like they were nothing special, he wanted the flashes to carry on blinding him.

Rex had never wanted a normal life with him, he always wanted to be somewhere else.  You just used me as a warm place to rest in, to get ready to go somewhere else again.

I was only a tiny part of your life when you were everything to me.

There were so many things you could have done, your passion for the sea, your love of travel, and you did nothing because of drugs.  Drugs were so monotonous – Louis had always been just on the outside, waiting, until it was over.

He said to Rex, “You’re so fucking boring, get some interests”, but Rex knew this, he was aware of all that he missed because of drugs.

When he was asleep he would sleep and Louis watched him and wanted to touch him but never did.  Was it even a relationship at all?

In one of his court statements Rex said – and it was written down in evidence – that he just used Louis’ place as a place to sleep, they were only flatmates.

Is that really how he saw it?  Rex was so physically beautiful – despite everything that drugs had done to him – was the relationship only what Louis felt?  Louis thought about the kissing – you don’t kiss a friend like that.  Do you? 

Rex kept meticulous files of his drawings and singed them with cigarette burns and heroin, tiny spray dots of heroin, he kept all of Louis’ angry notes saying WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU?  I HATE YOU.  He kept them all.  Those notes that would not be answered until Rex came home and saw them, by which time Louis knew where he was – but Louis had to scream somewhere and he only had the notepaper to listen.

Rex must have thought Louis hated him.  That’s inevitable when you tell someone you hate them.

Rex loved archways.  He liked ducking to go into a place, not reverently but as something a bit dodgy.  He liked hidden nooks and crannies.  They made him feel safe but also kept what he was doing secret.

Because Louis seemed unable to let it go, Emiko repeated the assurance that Rex loved him, as if it was within her authority to make that claim, but that’s what people said; it didn’t mean anything, it wasn’t a fact, it didn’t prove anything, she didn’t know.

She didn’t really know Rex, she hadn’t lived with him in the same way that Louis had.  She wasn’t Rex.

She also said, “He wouldn’t want you to suffer” but Louis thought that Rex would feel gratified that he was suffering in this way – not the pain of the suffering but the passion, to know just how much he truly meant to him.  He wouldn’t want his death to be nothing, although he always suspected it would be – the times he had not come home and Louis said, “I thought you were dead”, and Rex said, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you” – really believing it.

He tried so hard.  When Louis told him that he was happy with Ian, Rex said, “Don’t I make you happy?” the sweet vulnerability of which pierced Louis’ heart.  “I’ll take my shoes off”, when Louis wouldn’t let him in, he didn’t know why, the violence was over by then and he was happy to see him.

But it was too late by then.

After the meal on the boat Louis hadn’t attended, there was a further time that Rex asked him to come and see him and Louis said, “Maybe” - not no, said he would think about it.  He had no intention of thinking about it.  I have all the time in the world to think of it now.  It would have made you so happy and what would it have taken from me?  It was what Rex always said, “maybe”, meaning “no”.  I didn’t go.  You with your procrastination, in a minute, have a bath, I’m having a quick bath, I won’t be long.  Louis felt hysterical with the desire to have gone and seen him when he’d asked.

Rex tried so hard to get off drugs but he always tried in the same ways that had failed before, time and time again, your huge desire to be drug free, it was not enough.

Did I ever tell you that I knew how hard it was for you?  I didn’t know, nobody knows.

When Rex reduced his methadone intake Louis stopped praising and encouraging him because he’d heard it all so many times before, I didn’t encourage you, you tried so hard, fighting this thing, we always missed, all our misunderstandings and bad timings, we lost the capacity to talk, and it never did any good anyway.

I never visited you in hospital because I was scared of you asking for money again.

I didn’t phone you when you were ill – Emiko said, “Yes you did, you visited him in the hospital, I saw you left a note, he was outside smoking a joint with the porters, he was gutted he missed you”.  It sounded funny, “gutted”, it was one of Rex’s words.  He was always gutted about something, everything was a nightmare.  Louis came to dread the latter word but whenever Rex explained what the nightmare was it was never anything major but usually anything that stood in the way of immediate access to drugs.

I never went again.

I hate my life.

Louis said, “I don’t know if I love him or hate him”.

Emiko said, “You don’t hate him”.

He said, “I do”.  Sometimes.

“You’re just angry, it’s OK to be angry, he was a difficult person, he knew he was difficult to live with -”

But Louis said, “No he didn’t, he thought he was normal and I was difficult”.  He thought, I know it’s OK to be fucking angry.

She said, “He knew that – he understood what he did to you”.

But Rex always twisted things so that everyone else was to blame, nobody loved him enough, everyone let him down in the end – and Louis had been the same as everyone else because Rex’s standards were impossible.  But why impossible?  Don’t we all want to be loved like that?

Emiko said, “Only babies can demand unconditional love – the rest of us have to work for it”.  She had been reading one of Rex’s self-help books.  It was platitudes – it was in the magazines – Louis did love Rex unconditionally – he never stopped loving him, he just had to protect himself – and what good is love if you withhold it when it hurts you.

She was trying to be kind but she was very young.  Louis felt old.

 

At work Ian was cleaning along the main hallway and as he passed the residents’ rooms he could hear their snoring wheezing sounds, noises in sleep, as if frightening dreams were taking place, frail old noises of people who had nobody else to look after them and love them, who were too much trouble for any real people to look after and keep in their home, so had to pay for the fake love and attention which institutions provide.

Was this what would happen to him?  If Louis left him or stayed crazy?  He had nobody else.

Or was it Louis who would end up in a home because Ian couldn’t cope with him?  But Louis was odd; resilient.  He wouldn’t let that happen.

Sleeping in chairs like babies, reeking of piss.

 Ian would definitely end up in a home and there would be another cleaner just like him slinking around at night, gagging, cleaning up his shit and sick and listening to him wheezing.  He would be invisible like these old people with no hair, crying for their mothers, not moving from their chairs, like cats that just stay in the position they have slouched in, everything they had previously been in their lives an utter irrelevance.  The cycle of life.  Nobody cares where you have been or what you have done – why should they?  It is no good writing a jaunty little poem bragging about it.  It’s all over now.  Only in Ian’s case he had never really been young in the first place, or vital, or done anything worth doing, and now it was over - so at least he had nothing to lose, but that was worse than having actually had a real life to lose.  Just waste.

The old people sounded like Lulu wheezing in her sleep. 

 

Coral’s latest poster said, “You’re Tiny and You Just Don’t Matter”.  It was pushed into a corner of her hallway.   She told Louis that she was planning to go to Speakers’ Corner, very soon.

Two children crossing the road that morning had made her cry.  One because he was so cheerful and the other because she was so upset.  The little boy was at the age – four - where he was very hoppy skippy jumpy just walking from A to B.  The little girl was inconsolable because she wanted to place a stone on top of a whole heap of other stones she’d already put in her little dolls pushchair and her mother said, “You’ve got enough stones; put it down”.  These things matter.  Coral wanted to cover both children in sunshine and protect them from everything bad that would later come at them.  Children often made her weep; they were so emotional.  It wasn’t their fault.  They knew absolutely nothing, it was heartbreaking, they believed everything they were told and they were hurt all the time, they felt everything so deeply.

Louis said, “You’re the Catcher in the Rye”.

When she was Headmistress it had maddened her when parents who didn’t want to hear the truth tried to attack her by saying, “What do you know about bringing up children, you don’t have your own”, as if that excused them for their bad parenting.  Coral knew what it was like to be a child, having once been one, she knew what it was to be human, she knew how it affected her when people were impatient or rude to her.  Why should a child not feel that too? 

And other parents boasted, “You don’t know what it’s like until you have children, you don’t understand anything”, talking about this new overwhelming completely unselfish love that they had discovered, like we are all as dim and closed off as they are, people who only ever feel compassion once they have children and then only towards their own.

Coral said, “Having children does not open the floodgates of love and compassion and understanding; it makes you partial, that’s all.  And that’s dangerous”.   

She had not had children of her own because who would want to bring a child into a world like this?  It is like taking them on the ghost train at the funfair and leaving them on it, forever.  The dead are laughing, she said, they are well out of it, it’s those of us left behind you should be worrying about, edging around this enormous black hole that is our life.

 There were already too many people in the world who had nobody to love them – how was having more children meant to make things better?  At this point in history the biggest crime is surely to have a baby - the biggest cruelty - because you’re knowingly bringing them into a world of suffering.  People are selfish, they won’t stop breeding to save their own future.  Foxes control their breeding to suit their environment - where do people think all their precious descendants are going to live, what will they eat?  Science, which should be addressing the problem, only adds to it by helping infertile people have children.  We need infertility if we are going to survive as a species, we need gay people.  But it’s too late for that now.  The right to procreate shoves all other considerations out of the window.  People seem to think that if they want something passionately enough they must have it; maturity is about accepting that life’s not like that.  Dinosaurs are the most successful species ever - millions of years they survived in their environment.  We won’t make it that long - technology is killing us.  You don’t see a dinosaur fiddling about with a mobile phone, or sat at a computer, or queueing up at the fertility clinic.

These are the things she was thinking about when she was smiling at children and helping them across the road, giving them toffees.

 

Louis still had the tinny spoon in his pocket and it still made him cry.  That’s what he was now, a tinny spoon.

It was Ian’s birthday.  Despite a lifetime of disappointments Ian still looked forward to his birthday every year as if this time something truly magical would happen, like at Christmas, checking the newspaper headlines every morning in case peace had suddenly broken out all over the world, even though experience should have taught him that nothing ever did, except last year’s macaroons, which had to be thrown out in the end and even the birds and rats shunned them.

To his surprise Louis made him a card.  It was a card Louis already had but Ian didn’t know that.  Louis also gave him a huge box of macaroons.  The card was handmade, very simple and childlike and not up to standard, but handmade nevertheless.  And Ian liked the nod towards the previous year’s failing.  Ian thanked him profusely and Louis said, “Shut up”.

After they split up and Rex moved out, Louis had clawed his way up to sanity and this birthday, somehow, felt like then, a tenuous peace, tremulous with hope.  Then, the flat had been peaceful without Rex, Louis had no further expectations from him; he saw Rex at the tube station and Rex still asked him for money as if that’s all he was to him, a living breathing ATM.  Later Rex called round at the flat and Louis said, “Hello”, and Rex said, “Can I come in?”  “No, it’s very messy” (Ian was there).  Rex said, “I’ll take my shoes off”.  Louis said, “It’s messy” and had gone outside to talk to him instead.

The sanity he had achieved was a sham.  Again the humility of the words “I’ll take my shoes off” nearly killed him.  If he could take a pin and catch the tiny tail of that memory and draw it out through his ear, stamp it underfoot and lob it far away, squash it between his fingers so it would no longer come to bother him i am sorry sorry sorry sorry.

Louis had forgotten about last year’s macaroons, he saw the box in a shop, that was all.  Ian reminded him and they laughed about it until Ian said, “I’m glad you’re finally back to your old self”, when Louis knew it was all completely false, it was only a thin sheet of nothing flung over the gaping abyss.  He didn’t feel disloyal to Rex, he felt disloyal to himself.  This isn’t who I am anymore, I’m someone else now.  Why can’t he see that?  He loathed Ian for making him laugh and thinking it meant that everything was back to how it had been.  Louis took his hand away from Ian’s and Ian said, “Oh god, you’re doing it again” and Louis pretended that his hand itched, made up an excuse.  He said, “Stop second-guessing me.  You only ever see the negatives”.

Ian said, “You’re thinking of him again, aren’t you” - he tried so hard not to say it because he didn’t want an argument but he couldn’t help himself.  Louis said, “Of course I’m not – you’ve got to stop doing this”, but he thought, Can he read my mind?

Ian wanted to gouge out his own eyes, gouge out his eardrums with an ice pick, whatever that was.  Why couldn’t he hear properly?  Louis never lied, he said lying was like sleeping in a dirty bed full of stale crumbs.  Louis would leave him  if he didn’t get a grip; he was completely paranoid.

You can’t repair anything with cake.

 

To Ian’s equal surprise Mrs. Tors forgot his birthday completely, no card, no call, nothing.  Throughout his life he had always believed that this one day in the year united them, whatever else might be going on, she would always mark this significant day.  Next day still no card had arrived.  After a week with no probability of any card ever turning up and no possibility of blaming it on the postman Ian tried to be mature about it.  But he couldn’t pull that off.  So he weighed up the pros and cons of honesty then sent a message to Mrs. Tors carefully telling her that it had upset him, trembling, hating to be so needy, but wanting to give her a chance to repair things.

After he had sent the message it occurred to him that maybe she hadn’t forgotten at all and it was a deliberate snub.

Mrs. Tors apologised for the oversight and said she hoped he’d had a nice day and he felt a bit better.  He told her he’d gone out with Louis, that Louis had arranged a wonderful day for him, so that she should know that he mattered to someone and feel bad that it wasn’t her who had done this marvellous thing.  He hated being apologised to.  It made him feel like he had power.

But still no late card arrived to back up her apology, no written record of her unforgiveable lapse, no late gift, no offer to spoil him in any way, to take him out and compete with Louis, no attempt to substitute the love she never gave him.

He had been a cheap child for her to raise, since she had never been there.  No wonder she was so wealthy now and could afford bows and arrows and live in a boarding house.  No envelope full of cash arrived, which would have been a lovely substitute for love.

Recently, Ian had been waiting all his life for her to come back and now she was here she wasn’t worth the effort.  But he forced himself to behave as if her apology meant something, because he actually thought it did.

 

Louis went to see Coral with his sopping wet clothes after the washing machine broke down, and she put them in the spinner for him.  He said, “Where’s the telescope?”

She said she had sold it.  “I couldn’t see anything.  And I thought what’s the point?  Stars exist, whether I can see them or not, I don’t make a difference by seeing them”.

She said, “I have never had a propensity towards awe.  God the ineffable, can’t even say the name of god, or even the name of the name of god, that abject.  They’re just stars”.

Louis was upset and surprised to be upset, and angry that she had done this without consulting his feelings.

A part of him believed that a powerful enough telescope would enable him to see something in the ether that he could interpret as an afterlife, a shadow of Rex.

 

Ian had a terrible nightmare:  Mrs. Tors brought him round some shelves.

She brought shelves to the flat and she said, “I didn’t paint the walls magnolia and now look what has happened – bright yellow.  Yeuch”. 

Ian wondered if they were a late birthday present, although clearly not a very good one.

In the dream she had forgotten that she had forgotten his birthday, it was in the past now, she had dealt with it, said sorry and moved on.

 Ian couldn’t move on.  He was not a person who believed in the concept of forgiveness, which was as suspect to him as the meek shall inherit the earth.  It was too much of a struggle.  Someone does you wrong and you have to subjugate your hurt and forgive them for it.  While they get off scot free.  What do they care?  Nobody was worth that much effort, especially someone he hated who had hurt him.  It was easier to hate, and far more enjoyable.

The responsibility does not rest with the victim.  

I WAS RAPED BY SEVEN MEN AND FORGAVE THEM.  So what?  These seven men are still at large raping others who now have the added burden of trying to be magnanimous about it.

The only forgiveness that was worth considering was forgiveness that was begged for.  That at least displays some sort of regret and genuine sorrow.  Then again, if Pol Pot suddenly dropped to his knees and said, “I’m sorry, I was wrong”, it would be a bit too late.

Mrs. Tors had not begged Ian’s forgiveness for forgetting his birthday.  Nor had she ever begged his forgiveness for walking out on him as a child and not coming back.  Why not?  Why did it not mean anything to her?  When he was younger Ian had tried to convince himself that she never contacted him because of guilt, her guilt was so large that the word sorry was inadequate.  It reassured him to think of her great misery, and he longed to comfort her in it.  But the word sorry was never inadequate – he said it himself all the time and always meant it with deep and intense sincerely.  If he had done something wrong and felt guilty he had to talk about it or he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t live with himself.  He always wanted to be perfect.  What was going on with Louis was different, because they loved each other, but it was the same thing really and he felt bad about it.

Ian believed that a sincere apology from Mrs. Tors would need to be followed by a sincere attempt at atonement.  Words by themselves were not enough.  The situation with his mother had got so serious that he now needed her money, and lots of it.  She had plenty.  Money would be proof that she loved him because it was something that obviously meant a lot to her.  The cost of the scarf wool was negligible, and also rendered meaningless by the fact that she had told him the cost and made John do most of the work even though he was not skilled in the craft of knitting.  Was that meant to make him feel valued?  It made him feel like an expensive burden.

He didn’t want to forgive Mrs. Tors.  She didn’t deserve it.  He needed to know that she was sorry.  He needed to hear it, repeatedly – and he needed to be paid for it in cash, to put a value on it.  He could see that the scarf and the shelves – even though the shelves were only a dream and not really her doing, but symbolic, nevertheless, and she was responsible for the symbolism - and forgetting his birthday were not as serious as a seven man raping outfit or killing 2-3 million people but all the same it wasn’t nice when your mother leaves, just disappears, even if she is an old whore who makes you feel like crap, and never came back.  Despite the fact that he could now see that he didn’t like her and was glad she had not been part of his life, it hadn’t been like that before he got to know her.

Mrs. Tors was in the wrong and she stayed in the wrong.  And she didn’t even realise she was in the wrong, she thought she was behaving beautifully, giving him cheap shelving and a scarf that was the wrong colour.  She would be mystified if he forgave her.

 Ian needed to cling onto his pain because that felt like he mattered, like he valued himself, he was important, not an irrelevance.

Mrs. Tors needed to understand what she had done wrong and do something about it.  But she didn’t.  Ian wanted her attention.  He wanted her to look at him with love.  She looked at him with mockery.  She did absolutely nothing to atone for anything.

 Ian wanted to walk away but she wouldn’t even notice.  He wanted her to cry about it and beg him to come back.  He wanted to see her cry.  She had no self -awareness.  She always blamed him.  He wanted her tears to never dry up.

What did it matter if he was forty now and should be over it – he wasn’t over it, it didn’t change the fact she had walked out when he was 8 and it had affected his whole life.

He thought she would approve of the yellow paint since it was closer to magnolia but she said it was too bright, it was a lot to live up, it will make you feel inadequate and depressed.

 In the dream Ian wanted to say he didn’t want her shelves but his voice had gone, he had a cold and his voice was croaky.  He couldn’t even say No in his dreams, where there would be no consequences.

 Ian said he liked the yellow paint and he wasn’t depressed.

Mrs. Tors laid the shelves on the floor.

John, who was also in the dream but looked like Ian, said, “I told her you wouldn’t want them but she wouldn’t listen”.

“Of course he wants them”, she said.

 Ian liked bare walls and Louis had never shown a propensity towards the shelving market either.  Things on shelves dragged the eyes upwards to clutter – they liked their clutter in boxes, below the line of vision, not on display.  He liked the piles of boxes everywhere.  Louis had chucked some stuff out recently but that was only Rex’s stuff.

With everything in boxes Ian had the illusion that he could pack up at any moment and move half way across the world, which was really where he wanted to be right this minute, without fat tubby shorty Mrs. Tors peering up at him over her glasses like Mrs Tiggywinkle.

Not that he could lug the boxes with him but they could be stored more easily when they were already boxed up.

“I brought a selection”, she said, and Ian looked at all the pine shelves and the glass shelves and the formica shelves and he hated them all.  They all looked so new.  They didn’t blend in to the flat.  But he wondered if he could agree to accept the really expensive ones then take them back for a refund but when he managed to get a squint at the receipt he saw that she had paid by credit card.

All the shelves were in an 80 per cent off sale.  And she had got a free couple of rose bushes with her purchase.  She hadn’t brought the rose bushes with her.

Mrs. Tors said she had brought hammers and screws and rawl plugs because she was experienced at that sort of thing and he wasn’t.

 Ian couldn’t imagine what Louis would say if he got home to find shelves everywhere.

He felt like crying.  Why was life so difficult when it should be so easy.

Why couldn’t she have taken him out for lunch on his birthday, not force shelving arrangements on him a week later.

He said, “The walls are very friable”.

Then there was an astonishingly loud crash and the walls shook and he woke up.

He woke up sweating, initially relieved that the shelving situation wasn’t true but then disappointed that Mrs. Tors hadn’t really made an effort after all.

When he went outside to see what the crash was about, and found a tree crashed onto the side of the house, the first thing that went through his mind was, Maybe I won’t have to have the shelves now.

 

He also thought, Louis is never going to come home now, but Louis did come home because he wanted to see the damage.

The landlord came back from Devon and said, “Ah we’ve been expecting this.  It has been creaking for some time”.

Ian said, “Why didn’t you tell us, someone could have been killed”.

But everyone else in the house said Yes, the tree’s been dodgy for a long time, always creaking, but Ian and Louis never heard it and if that was the case why had nobody thought to put a splint on it?

A branch had smashed through the back of the deli and pasta came spilling out into the street.

For all that, only one flat was badly affected and the landlord didn’t want to make a big fuss about it, health and safety dragging on for years.  He proposed they all stay on free of charge till it was sorted out.  Louis and Ian were prepared to stay anyway.  Moving was such a hassle.

Scaffolders came and put up scaffolding and started sawing the tree, which Louis found oddly liberating.  The previous workmen had only dithered; the new workmen were men of action.  Rex’s car had been scooted out into the street by the force of the drop, and piranhas came at night and took everything off it that could be sold or traded.

Disaster is as magnetic as fame.  All the neighbours came out to survey the scene and offer their expert opinion, many Louis had never seen before.  Two weeks later they were ignoring him in the street again and calling him a poof behind his back.  Coral came round to look at the main trunk of the tree that was still leaning against the top storey of the house.

She felt sad to see a dead tree; it was coming up to the festival of Tu Bishvat and she should be planting trees, bringing new life.  She broke some bits off it and stuck them in rooting powder and put them in tubs of soil in her back garden on the spot where she had destroyed the greenhouse to make room for her observatory.

She wrote a new placard full of comforting things about the hereafter and god’s loving embrace, then wrote IT’S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.  Louis turned it to face the wall.  Then he picked up the card of Christian Elsie’s which contained all the comforting stuff that Coral had copied out.  Elsie’s cards were starting to make sense to Louis which half alerted him to the idea that maybe he should get himself sectioned.

Coral said, “Have you thought about when you would most like to die?”

She said that she herself had given the matter much thought and decided the perfect date to die was October the 17^th at 23.17, only it had to be a Thursday and October 17^th wasn’t on a Thursday every year.

A Monday would be second best but it was still nowhere near as good as Thursday.  “It’s really got to be Thursday and it’s got to be October and it’s got to be the 17^th”.  Thursday was far and away the most death-friendly day, she said.  Sunday doesn’t feel right, Saturday would be a nightmare.  Tuesday would be too early and Wednesday is as bad as Tuesday but worse, really, because if you had waited one more day you could have done it on a Thursday.  Friday was a ridiculous day to die.

Thursday was a nice quiet time of day like no other in the week.  Half past ten to eleven o’clock at night on Monday is meaningless and on a Saturday you wouldn’t even notice it.

October was top choice, dying in November or December would be awful, you wouldn’t want to do it in December, it’s impossible, and in April or June was laughable.  March was second choice.  She thought of March as ten o’clock in the morning and October as two o’clock in the afternoon, they sort of balanced each other out.

She told him that days of the week had their times too, everything had a personality.  Friday was 7 o’clock in the morning.

Louis didn’t really want to hear about her death wishes.  He lied that he had never given his death much thought but added that he always loved the letter B:  it was lovely and soft and friendly, and slightly worn round the edges.

Coral said she had never thought of letters before.

Louis said he liked Js and Rs too but not Ns or Cs.  He had trouble with Fs too; they were horribly gawky.

Coral said C was like a Wednesday.  Z was definitely Friday, common as muck.

She said that Thursday was Q, absolutely perfect.

Some letters didn’t have days of the week at all but G was halfway between Tuesday and Wednesday; “It’s an orphan”, she said.

Louis thought maybe she meant hybrid but he didn’t correct her because she used to be a teacher and she probably knew what she was talking about.

Numbers too – Louis didn’t like 5s or 6s because he had trouble writing them nicely but they both agreed that 9s were good and 7s of course were wonderful.

Louis then realised he saw the days of the week as colours.  Monday is pale blue, Tuesday green, Wednesday red and yellow squares, Thursday pale grey, Friday black and white dots, Saturday a sort of mustard colour, Sunday white.  Coral attributed different colours to her own days but she got it wrong.

They had walked back to the fallen tree for more cuttings and as she was talking Coral was looking at the shards of broken branches and alighted on one large chunk in particular.

Coral says, “Very interesting, do you think I could have this piece please, it would make a super little stool”.  And the tree surgeons sawed her off a stool that looked like a sitting cat with its tail up.  Coral sandpapered the edges where they hadn’t sawn it neatly.

 

Ian started having waking dreams where they were evicted and all their belongings were thrown out in the street.  Not just his but Louis’ too, and people came and took it all away before he could get downstairs.  He had to find somewhere new to live and there was nowhere, everything was boarded up.  He wasn’t even asleep when this was happening, his mind just wandered off and before he came back he had nowhere to come home to.

Mrs. Tors came round on a visit after Ian sent her three messages but didn’t even notice the tree leaning on the house.  Ian tried to subtly draw her attention to it so she could worry about him living in an unstable environment, but she failed to cotton on.

 Ian had a cold and she didn’t sympathise about that either.  He sniffed very very loudly but couldn’t make himself heard.

After she had sat down making pleasantries for a couple of minutes she said, “Can I use the loo?”  It was a horrible word, loo, although apparently the upper classes loved it.  He was not keen on the prospect of her arse on his toilet seat but he had to say yes because how can you refuse anyone with lavatorial needs - he could hose down the seat after she’d gone.  And, to be fair, despite not being a good mother and usually borderline pissed, she did always look relatively clean.

When she came out she said, “Well, we better be going”, when they had only just got here.  She said to John, “Do you want the toilet?” like Ian was a public convenience.

John said to Ian, “Do you love Louis?” and Mrs. Tors pretended to stick her fingers down her throat.

She said, “He’s secretive, you won’t get anything out of him”.

 Ian said to John, “Yes I do”.  Then he added recklessly, “We’re planning to get married next year”, forgetting that he’d previously told them they were only thinking about it.

Mrs. Tors said, “Well he’s not in his right mind, is he”.  She had passed Louis outside the deli when he was talking to Marina and salvaging pasta.  He looked like he’d been crying and he was stuffing dried spaghetti in his pockets.

 Ian wanted to draw her attention to her own life partner, who wore a full Arsenal football kit, even though he was far too old to be picked for the team, and who said think instead of thing - “I don’t want anythink” - but it seemed like kicking the wrong man and he couldn’t do it.  His voice had gone.

She still had no birthday card for him, no lovely surprise.  The moment had passed.

 

In Leicester Square Emiko was between paying customers and filling her time revising auxiliary verbs in the past perfect tense, when Lulu’s father walked past.  It was the first time she’d seen him since she had told him she was pregnant.  He was with another woman and tried not to acknowledge her; they were admiring the dog and cat portraits, but Emiko said, “Hello”.  She was wearing a pair of Rex’s shoes and tried to hide her feet behind her canvases.  The other woman was heavily pregnant and Lulu’s father was playfully stroking her belly.  He said, “We’ve just had the scan”.  He didn’t attempt to explain who Emiko was.  Emiko hid Lulu from him, tried to sort of move the crib out of the way with her foot and stood up in front of it, Rex’s shoes fully visible.  He said, “It’s for real this time”, which he had once said to her.

She couldn’t understand what it was that she had ever seen in him.  His hair was dreadful.  She had been so lonely when she first came to England, and was susceptible to the lies men tell.  She thought they would stay together forever and have a wonderful life, he was so attentive.  But she was very young and didn’t understand how relationships work for men.  Her ignorance appalled her now.  She had brought a child into the world through her own stupidity, couldn’t see straight.  He had tarnished all men for her. 

And although she didn’t want him back it still irritated her that Lulu did not have him in her life and this new baby would.  Men should be better than they are. 

His girlfriend wanted her portrait done.  Emiko mapped out faces the same way she had been taught to map out a building and forever improved on the existing design.  She sat them down together and made them pose lovingly, and when she painted them she made the girlfriend look slightly Japanese, not in an obvious way that they would notice, but enough to satisfy herself.  He had a mole on his cheek in the same place as Lulu’s was and it was the only thing about him that she still found beautiful.

 

It was still very very cold and the bright yellow walls gave off no heat.  Louis came into the flat when Ian was getting ready for work, glancing out of the window at the fallen tree.

Ian turned to him, smiling, and Louis thought, I’ll be dead soon, you won’t be smiling then.

He smiled back; he could afford to smile now.

Ian turned up the songs on Radio Squelch and Louis heard I’ll Be There For You, I’ll Stand By You, and he thought, Not if your own ego gets in the way you won’t.  Nobody wrote songs admitting they were weak and fell to pieces in a crisis, nobody admits running away like a coward or making a bad situation worse (except maybe in blues songs, wallowing in it).

Will you still love me when I lose my mind?

I can’t cope with your problems tra la la la la.  Shut up shut shut up shut up.

Ian said tentatively, “I like this one”.

 Louis thought that Ian thought he was being there for him, just by being there.  But really Ian was just too lazy to walk away.

 Ian felt that Louis had floated out to sea and he couldn’t reach him anymore, he couldn’t swim.  He could still see Louis’ head bobbing above the waves but he was out of ear-shot.  He would only get Louis back if the world was flat and Louis got to the horizon and was forced to come back.

Louis had thought he was ‘there’ for Rex, just by being there.  He hadn’t known what else he could do.  It was Rex who did things and Louis who reacted to those things.  Louis’ mind went from one to the other, all the nice things, all the horrible things, yes he loved me, yes he was good, no he didn’t, he was bad, if he’d loved me he wouldn’t have done that, if he hadn’t loved me he wouldn’t have done this, like human relations are merely equations.  He didn’t know why it was so important to put these things into compartments.  He couldn’t even define what he meant by love.  It was just convenient shorthand that everyone understood.  It was only another label for an unbearable ache.  You make my heart sing.  

He looked through the notebook he’d started when he first heard Rex had died and wrote on the cover What I Should Have Done and Why I Didn’t.

He always brought me sandwiches if I was waiting for him – but those freezing cold nights in Euston station not wanting to leave him, waiting for drugs, how miserable Louis was, couldn’t sleep like that, whereas Rex could sleep anywhere, and he brought me sandwiches but I shouldn’t have been out with him, but it was my choice.

This on one side (sweetest smiles, beautiful letters), that on that side (taking all my money, leaving me without food for days, hitting me, not coming home).  But he was messed up, it wasn’t him doing those things, but that’s a cop-out, he’s a grown man, he has to take responsibility for his actions.  If he loved me he would have fought the drugs harder.  But it’s not so simple (always this).  He fought as hard as he could, who knows about the secret battles other people are engaged in.  But he could have fought harder.  Other people did it.  I wasn’t worth it.

But this was Louis own relentless standards of behaviour, which he didn’t even fulfil himself - how he treated Ian now - but then maybe he didn’t love Ian at all, but he was messed up himself and didn’t know what he felt about anything anymore.

Maybe other people judge love differently.

Did he or didn’t he love me?

Emiko got exasperated and said, “Of course he loved you”.  She was sick of the whole bloody topic.  Let him rest in peacefulness.  Then, “What does it matter, you weren’t even still together”.

“Think of all the really loving couples”, she went on, “Been together for years, in a really loving relationship – imagine what they go through when their husband dies”.

She believed like Ian that happy loving relationships going on for years really existed.  She had failed in her own but that was because she was weak.  Other people did it.

Louis thought, They had it easy, the loving couples, they were the lucky ones, they didn’t have all this unfinished business.  I never made my peace with you.  Maybe nobody ever does but I let chance after chance go by.   But he didn’t say this because he already felt like she was slighting him, it wasn’t an important relationship to her simply because it had ended.  Therefore to her it was inherently weak and not up to much.

Maybe losing you wouldn’t be so hard if I had ever had you in the first place.

Either you did love me or you didn’t, and if you did it would have been bigger than anything and overcome everything, and it didn’t so you couldn’t have.

He was succumbing, he knew, to the songs on Ian’s Radio Bleugh.   

Why did it matter?  Louis abhorred his own craving for love.  He needed to know that his love had not been wasted, it had to have meant something, been important in some way; he needed Rex to tell him this - nobody else could.  Louis needed his love to have existed or he didn’t exist himself.  He had to have been special to someone.  He needed Rex’s love for that.  He was special to Ian but that meant nothing:  Ian didn’t get out much; he had no real frame of reference.

He was obsessed with the fallacy of love overcoming everything, which walked hand in hand with his outrage that love didn’t do what it said on the tin.  He just couldn’t get past it.  He knew it was all bollocks and mocked those who believed it, yet he was adamant that it should be true.  He felt he had a right to feel cheated by something that had always lied to him.

Coral said, “What does it matter now anyway, he’s gone, it’s over, you’ve got Ian, you had Ian before all this, and you were happy”.

But had he been happy or was it all a charade?  Had he only thought he was happy because it was freedom from the hell Rex had put him through.  What the hell was happiness anyway, it was a childish concept.  Believing in happiness was like believing in god but at least you could pray to god and keep up the fantasy in a practical way with your hands pressed together.  Why did the word happy even exist, it was not a thing.   

It did matter, Rex’s love. 

It didn’t matter what Emiko said or Coral who never even knew Rex, like the Samaritans and the counsellor, nor Ian who hated him and was biased – nor even what he himself tried to surmise – none of them were Rex and none of them could speak for Rex, only Rex himself knew anything of what went on in his own head and why, and he wasn’t here to ask.

Who are you?  Are you the one who brought me cryptic crosswords home and wrote little love messages in the squares?  Bringing me sandwiches; the one who playfully said you’d vote Green for me – after we had split up and before I met Ian – if I kissed you? – not expecting the kiss you got when you did vote Green.  Or the one who tied me to a table and thrashed me for something I didn’t even do?  Rex had much later acknowledged that he was off his head, that it was the crack, but said too that it was also a part of who he was, and he never apologised.

Louis clung onto those sandwiches as the most precious gift he had ever received.

Emiko said, “He was always good to me, he was a good person.  We all make mistakes”.  She had bought some make up for Lulu’s birthmark and Lulu was protesting vigorously.  The flat was a convenient stopping off place on the way back to her boat but it had its downside in that she had to keep listening to Louis and Ian complaining about each other and talking about things that were wholly without meaning.

Louis thought, It wasn’t a mistake.  He didn’t forget to bring home the evening paper.

Emiko said, “I don’t want to hear it.  Nobody’s perfect.  I’m sure he never meant anything bad, whatever you say he did”.  Lulu’s father hadn’t bought the drawing she’d done in Leicester Square and she’d brought it home with her.

You helped drug addicts, why couldn’t you help me, why couldn’t you do that for me?  Why couldn’t you say sorry and take some of the responsibility?  I can’t integrate all these things you were.  Be black, be white, be anything but everything:  it’s too much.

You could have saved yourself, it is patronising to want to save you, what the hell kind of superhero do I think I am?

He picked up his notebook and on the cover he crossed out what he had written and instead wrote What I Didn’t Do and Wish I Had.

Wishes.  Ridiculous at his age.  Love, hate, happiness and wishes.  Is this what he was reduced to?

I could never trust you, you let me down too many times – but what right have I to expect anything from another human being?  Going through my wallet.  But what right had I to expect anything.  We will never make our peace now.

Emiko pinned up the portrait she had done of Lulu’s father and the mother of Lulu’s soon-to-be half brother or sister.  Louis was scribbling in his notebook.  She set a match to the paper and left.

 

The big tree had found its resting place but there was no peace for it.  Marina came with Coral to find more cat chairs but there were no other feline shapes.

“We could make guitars!” said Coral, finding a ukulele-shaped branch.

It had a lovely long neck and the round bit at the bottom had a hollow in it where it had rotted away.

“Do you have any training in woodwork or musical instruments?” Ian enquired.

“How hard can it be?”  There would be a book about it in the library.  They could buy guitar strings, they didn’t have to put them in the right place, that would make a more interesting sound.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” she asked Marina.

Louis watched their excitement.  She caught the look.

Coral said quietly, “Be thankful for the gift of life”, then felt bad about it and added gently, “His life was a beautiful gift”.  Louis gave her a little smile, not because he believed what she said, which was rubbish, but because she had tried and he felt immense pity for her.

 

Coral had not sold her telescope at all, she had given it to Marina, whose father installed it in her tree house, wobbling about, and she would sit up there at night and track the movements of the stars.  Her tree was next to the one that had fallen onto the house.  She sat there for hours, concentrating, running indoors to share all her finds with everyone who came into the shop.  She found Venus.  She had found the Plough, the North Star, the Bears Great and Little, Perseus, Andromeda, Cepheus and Cassiopeia, all without even using the telescope, and was ticking them off in the I-Spy book but had bought a much better book with her savings and read it slowly, fully absorbing it word by word.  Below Orion’s Belt she found the Orion Nebula, a luminous cloud of gas and dust with stars forming by the hundreds, and nearby, the Trapezium of four tight stars, and the Seven Sisters, which, she read, was called Subaru in Japanese.  The Pleiades star cluster had dozens of stars; astronomers estimated that the cluster had formed less than 100 million years ago; it was 400 light-years from Earth.  It sounded reachable.

Her hijab was very tatty by now and had traipsed in the mud but she wouldn’t take it off so it could be washed.  She had spilled olive oil and red wine down it but it didn’t show.  She was extremely merry and friendly within the black cloth and nobody could understand why it appealed to her.

Marina’s father sold the damaged packs of pasta at half price.

 

Ian determined not to contact Mrs. Tors again.  He always called her and went round to hers and she only dropped in to see him when she had a full bladder.  He wanted her to wonder where he was and why he hadn’t been in touch.  And then be overjoyed that he was still alive and promise never to leave him again.

 He went out on his bike to see if he could ascertain, without being seen, if she was at the local pub.  On the way he crashed his bike.  He didn’t know how it happened, he seemed to have no control over the pedals.  His eyes seemed to be disintegrating daily.  He couldn’t see what was what, what was coming towards him or what was going away.

It was getting harder and harder, pedalling, as if he was always cycling uphill and he wasn’t.  Had they changed the altitude of the road?  It was so bad he decided to get off and push.  His legs were going round and round but nothing was happening.

He just sort of lost control of it again, nothing worked when he pressed the pedals and hand grips and the opposite kept happening of what was meant to be happening, neither brakes worked.  He skidded on the ice but managed to stay seated.  Then he went over to the kerb to settle himself and the muscles in his legs went and somehow his feet were in the wrong place and he just toppled over, gently toppled over – he could see that he was going to smack down onto his knees but there was nothing he could do to stop it.  He fell so hard he thought he was going to be sick, fell right on the pavement directly onto his knees, it was like slow-motion and he knew he was going to crash on his kneecaps and how much it would hurt before it happened and when it did happen it hurt even more and he had to bite back tears.  A passer-by woman with an empty pushchair helped him up and he sat on the pavement trying not to cry.  His knees were burning and he’d twisted his shoulder.

 The woman with the pushchair asked if he was alright and he tried to laugh.  His front wheel had buckled.

When she’d gone, he sat on the kerb and cried, it was such a shock – even after everything his bike had put him through he still thought of it as dependable simply because it hadn’t walked out on him yet.  But the bike was beyond repair, it would be cheaper to get a new one.

Most of all, Ian wanted to call Mrs. Tors and cry in her lap but knew that she had no lap worth crying into.  She would just tell him to pull himself together.  He keyed in her number then stopped it.  She would not come.   He wasn’t seven, it wasn’t a tricycle, she would not understand.  You could not go back.  If she did come he would not be able to cry in her lap.  He had lost the time for crying in someone’s lap, it would not come again.  She would laugh at him.  He knew that.  And he couldn’t laugh at himself because it was more than just falling off his bike but the bike would be all she would see.

But maybe she would be different this time.  He keyed in her number again.  But he knew that she would be the same and he threw the phone away.  Then he had to retrieve it from the leaves in the gutter and stumble home with his broken knees and his weak legs, pushing the useless bike.

The front wheel was buckled and he had trouble pushing it along but he did it anyway, even though it was useless.  He couldn’t abandon it in the middle of the street - that would be littering.

He dropped in at the doctors on the way home because he had an appointment about his hearing, he wasn’t hearing things right.  He locked his bike to a post outside and shuffled in, an hour early, but the receptionists did not notice.

In the waiting room he watched everyone else arrive and tap into the appointment arrivals board, craning to see which year of birth they pressed so that he could assess whether they looked better for their age than he did but an annoying woman kept bobbing about in his way and he pulled his shoulder trying to get a better view.  Nobody sympathised about his knees.  He was so weary that he fell asleep against the wall.

His trousers were ripped.  They were shimmery two-tone and his favourite pair.  The doctor checked his ears but did not ask about the trousers.  As a sop he said that Ian should go to have his blood tested and wrote out the form which he was to take to A and E.  Ian saw it for the sop it was but went anyway, left his bike outside the surgery and got a bus.  Nobody on the bus sympathised about his knees. 

At the hospital he tapped into the arrivals with his shirt pulled over his finger so it wouldn’t touch where so many other grubby fingers had touched before.  He rolled his sleeve up for the nurse.  She said, “You’re doing really well”.  He could hear other nurses in other cubicles telling their patients that they were doing really well.  Just for pushing up their sleeves.  He said, “I’m not six, I’m just sitting here”.  She smiled and stuck the needle in really hard.

 

The house was declared unsafe and about to be demolished and then Louis woke up.  They hadn’t been evicted, everything was OK.  The landlord was working around the damage, isolating it; life could go on as normal.  Nobody reported him to the council.

It meant more builders again with constant noise but Louis did not go back to the car.  He put in earplugs and, to help him out, Ian turned up Radio Sickly as loud as it would go.

When Ian was out at the Pharmacy Louis turned the radio off and decided to do something about the bright yellow walls.  It was like being blinded by daffodils and he couldn’t wear sunglasses indoors.  He flicked through some of his art books and the only colours he could cope with were Gwen John’s muted greys.   They were not colours of peace but rather of a passion that had been forcibly subdued, from within.  These greys had seen life and were taking a rest from it.  Not smoothly painted but with a coarse texture, depth, sad but accepting.  They had relinquished life voluntarily, it had not been taken away from them.  So he went to the paint shop and there were hundreds of greys all with different names and some were weedy and some were harsh and ugly but by a process of elimination he found a grey that suited his mood.  A nice soft grey which nevertheless had a melancholy.  The yellow was too demanding, nobody could be that happy all the time.  Pale dove grey like a dove’s wings.  What the hell had Ian been thinking.  The yellow was blistering in the moist damp flat and Louis scraped it all off, but left it uneven, then treated the bare plaster walls properly with a couple of coats of diluted paint.  Ian never thought of the fundamentals, he was too eager to get to the glossy finish.

The paint was such a lovely creamy shade of grey that Louis just wanted to lift up the pot and glug it all down.  Not gloss paint - that would be rather bitter.  But a nice drink of emulsion after your evening meal would go down a treat.

While Louis was waiting for the watery coat to dry, there was a tap at the window and a bird had flown at the glass, beak first.  It did this twice more before moving off.  Louis went outside and looked up at the window to see why the bird would do this, if there was a nest nearby.  In the bright crisp sunlight all he could see was the reflection on the window of the trees at the bottom of the yard.  The bird had turned now and found the real trees.  He wondered if it was Rex’s soul.  Rex would not be a parrot in a boat, he would be a free bird.  This little message pleased him greatly.  It would be just like Rex to brain himself against a window.

Back indoors, Louis painted over the walls that had dents in from the many battles he’d had with Rex, glass bottles thrown at the walls,  a heavy metal wrench, a fist punched.  He painted in a sort of crosshatching style, to give depth.  Birds don’t live for very long – what would happen to Rex’s soul then?  Would he have to keep hopping from bird to bird?  It seemed an exhausting way to spend eternity, forever moving house.  When would he attain seagullship?  Louis couldn’t see Rex tolerating the life of a house-sparrow for long.

When Ian saw what Louis had done, he was relieved.  The yellow had not made him happy but perhaps that was because it hadn’t had enough time to work its magic.  He didn’t like the grey, he missed the artificial daffodil high but at least Louis was joining in.  It was a home-building exercise.

He thought maybe they needed shelves.

 

Ian went down to Emiko’s boat to see if Louis was there, so he could compliment him on the paint-job, and also get away from the paint fumes.  Emiko needed someone to look after Lulu when she went for a job interview.

The rolling bridge was curled up and he watched it unfurl to let somebody walk across the canal.

Emiko was wearing a red paisley cravat and had cut her hair short and slicked it back with gel.  She said it was an office job and that was her idea of what people in offices wear.

 Ian said, “I’ll look after her, no problem”.

“Oh it’s OK.  I’ll ask Diane at the lock”.

Diane at the lock was a truly awful old woman whom even Ian, who wasn’t mad on children in general, would not trust with a child.  Why would Emiko entrust Lulu to her rather than to Ian?  She smoked a pipe, for one thing, and had a yellow streak up the middle of her hair as a result of the nicotine staining.  She could also swear in five different languages, and even though Lulu was currently too young to be able to translate, still she would pick up the negative vibe.

Ian said, “I can look after her.  I know how”.

Emiko said, “She’s used to children”.

Yes, because she is always throwing stones at them when they dig up her garden.

Ian wished he hadn’t offered; it was another stab wound in the heart; he should have known better.  He was competing with Rex again, who went to the antenatal classes and fell asleep.  How degrading was that.  Why wasn’t he good enough?  What was wrong with him?  Wasn’t he responsible?  Lulu liked him now, he smiled at her, she smiled back.  He had watched Emiko with her and knew exactly what to do but she wouldn’t leave her baby with him for one little hour.  It stung.  He tried to pretend she had misunderstood him, tried to make a joke of it.  She wasn’t his family.

Louis wasn’t his family either, he would never marry him, he should stop wanting it.  It was humiliating.

He felt angry that Louis wouldn’t marry him.

Mrs. Tors’ boyfriend Pete had used the word recently – he said humuliating, though.  What was he talking about?  Mrs. Tors had humuliated him.

Mrs. Tors hadn’t noticed that Ian hadn’t rung her for days.  He went into the pub where she was always sat with the boy John.

“Get some drinks in”, she called cheerily at him.  He got coffees, black.

She took a sip of hers and shuddered, “You put sugar in it”.

“It’s sugar”, he said, “Not cyanide”.  Nice idea, though - thanks.  From where does one procure cyanide?  He should investigate for the future.

She refused to drink anymore and went and got herself another rum concoction.

Mrs. Tors said, “How’s your friend - still loony?  I saw him one morning walking round the side of your house in shorts with wellington boots.  He said his ex had died.  What of, AIDS?”

Ian said, “He’s not my friend”, then, for a reason he couldn’t later fathom, he said, “We’re getting married in June”.

“Oh really?” she said, with a slight twinkle in her eyes like she knew he was lying,

He said, “We’ve booked to go abroad”.

He thought, I won’t invite you to this fictional wedding.  Unless you offer to pay for it.

Mrs. Tors said to John, “Maybe you can be bridesmaid, or ring bearer.  Whereabouts abroad?  We like travelling”

 Ian wished that Emiko was his mother, even though she didn’t trust him with her baby.  She was a good mother; if he were her child she’d treat him nicely.  Mrs. Tors hadn’t noticed that he was still limping from the bike accident.  He told her he didn’t know where abroad, Louis was planning a surprise for him.  He couldn’t believe that he was lying and it was so easy.

As an adolescent Ian had wanted to have Bertrand Russell as his father but had felt guilty for it because, although lacking in mental vitality, his father was a kind man who would have done anything for him, and ultimately Bertrand Russell might not have done anything, being busy with his activism and stuff.  He didn’t feel guilty towards Mrs. Tors about wishing Emiko were his mother, but next time he saw Emiko he felt uncomfortable with her.

Looking around the pub he thought that anyone seeing Mrs. Tors sitting there would probably think she was quite a nice woman, quite an ordinary woman albeit a bit of a lush.  Ian’s father was incapable of recognisng good bedlinen and sat watching afternoon TV every day and Ian had fantasised about a mother who had good taste and a brain.  His father always said she had to have the best but Ian could now see that this chiefly meant in alcoholic beverages.

He always went to see her, and he had fallen into the trap yet again.

She leaned across and tapped his arm.  “I’m only kidding, don’t be so sensitive.  You’ll find life very difficult if you go on like this”.

From now on he wouldn’t, he would wait for her to call him to ask how he was, she had his number.

 

Louis went to the canal again because he felt closer to Rex when there was water around.  Rex’s boat had gone and he completely panicked, knocking on all the barges and narrowboats until somehow told him it had gone for repair.  He had brought with him his one photograph that he’d found in the car of Rex attempting to smile and tried to establish if Rex had his arm around Louis but it was a close-up and he couldn’t.  Can’t we create our own little world, just you and me, go back to this photograph and stay in it safe forever and nobody else knows but me and you.  Come and be with me, cuddle up with me like you used to, I want you to love me again, please phone me, I need to speak with you, I need you to know how much I love you, I need you, I have nothing, absolutely nothing, please wait for me.

Can’t we go into this photo and turn a different corner - but it had always been the same corner, again and again, ending where we started.  Time is so frustrating, you can’t do anything with it.  You can’t step back and live there forever and Louis felt that if life meant anything you would be able to do that.  Can’t go back, can’t do anything differently, can’t edit the book, only death on the horizon, the past unreachable, death ahead.  Time is pointless; it changes nothing.

The present was a huge hole with no sides, impossible to get out of, floating dislocated in space, everything moving relentlessly towards oblivion, which is unimaginable.

This is why people work, shop, drink, fuck and watch TV:  the noise muffles the deep sigh of oblivion sat at the next table patiently waiting for its guests.

Time does not heal, it alters the misery, gives it a different shape, becomes familiar.  It is only a magician concerned with surface.

Louis didn’t want Rex’s absence to become familiar, he didn’t want to get used to Rex being dead, he didn’t want to accept it.  He rang Rex’s number, it didn’t ring, it was still switched off after all this time, there was still no connection; he rang it again and still it didn’t ring after all this time, he still expected it to ring – it was about time Rex picked up – he had been long enough asleep.  He should be getting up now, you can’t sleep forever, not even you.

All the times you called me and I could not answer, avoiding your calls, how did it come to that, so nervous of speaking with you, your anger, even over the phone.  Please send me another message.  He looked around to see if there were any birds about and then it occurred to him that he was thinking only in terms of souls being held by winged creatures, he was fashioning his desire romantically, like death must always have the poetry of flight, of air, although never something like a fruit-bat or a wasp, always soft and furry, never commonplace and real, he hadn’t considered that maybe Rex’s soul was trapped inside a frog or a stick insect or a hamster.  Or a biscuit.  Or even perhaps that he had no soul at all and he was just dead and there was nothing left of him, absolutely nothing.  That was too unbearable to entertain.  Therefore it could not possibly be a possibilty.

The more time passed the longer it was since Louis had last seen Rex and the more he missed him, the gap got wider, the hole got bigger, not smaller.

And still the body was falling, still it hadn’t hit the ground, still he had not allowed it to crash onto the rocks below and float peacefully out to sea.

He kept telling himself that Rex was behind him, becoming a tinier and tinier speck, but he didn’t believe it.  He tried to run back to the day Rex had died but he was on an escalator going forwards and no matter how fast he ran he couldn’t beat the movement of time.

Time made matters worse, not better.  It flounced on, not caring about everything that was left behind, trampling over all in its quest to move forward for movement’s sake.  Time was not wise, it did not use its time wisely, it was a steamroller, it was a child running for the sake of running although even children don’t do that, they run to get somewhere, no it was like a professional athlete running for running’s sake, just to show off, just to prove that it could do it.  Even athletes stopped and did other things between races and tried not to step on people as they passed.  Time never let you catch your breath, dragging us along pulling our arms right out of the sockets.  Sockets – strange word.

I miss you, please hear me, I hope you can hear me, what if you can’t, what if there is no life after death.  I need to say sorry and be heard, know that I am heard.  You don’t need it now.

Everyone spoke in annoying clichés but it was a survival tactic.  Rip away the cloak to the bare essentials and all that was left was blood and fangs and snarling.  You cannot live with that permanently on show in the corner of the room, like an open grave.  You need others around just to distract you from the naked horror of simply being alive.

I know why you used drugs, I want to die.

You are like a shadow on my lung.  I am better now but I will never be better now, everything is edged with darkness, you are the edging of darkness.

I want to physically hold you.

Nothing stays the same, there is no refuge, no safe place, the floor is water, you can’t get a grip, people disappear never to be seen again, you can never go back.

Wanting to go back and live inside one of those moments with Rex because however bad it had been at least Rex was still there and it was still exciting, even though it was boring, simply because of the person Rex was.

Time did not bend; and it should bend, it should allow us this.

Louis wanted to shred the photograph into narrow strips and throw it in the canal to float out to sea.  Let Rex go, let Rex move on.  But he couldn’t do it.  He sat on the wet grass for two and a half hours and he couldn’t do it.  He didn’t know where the sea was and even if the canal ended up there, which it probably didn’t.  Rex might end up going to Birmingham and back for all eternity; he’d no doubt get lodged in the Slough Basin.  You wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

 

Outside the pub, Mrs. Tors said that she and John were going to a book-signing but she didn’t invite Ian along, she left him standing there wondering which book it was.  Then a market researcher approached him and asked if he would like some pancakes.  It was paid work and would save him buying lunch so he agreed.

In the church hall sat many other people at computers, tapping the keys, silently eating pancakes.

Ian took his place and gave his details and was taken to a table to look at a pancake.  He wasn’t allowed to eat it.  Then he was led to a computer and tapped in some answers to questions relating to the appearance of the pancake. 

Then he raised his hand and a woman came over and brought him a small portion of another pancake.  She asked if he would like maple syrup, golden syrup or chocolate sauce.  He declined all.  He ate the pancake.  Then he had to answer some questions about the taste of the pancake.  Then he raised his hand and was led over to the table again and this time he looked at three pancakes, all clearly labelled with different numbers.  Then he sat at the computer again and answered some questions about the looks of the various pancakes, none of which he could remember since they were no longer in front of his eyes and he couldn’t remember what one was which number.

He raised his hand again and was brought three more numbered plates each with a small portion of pancake on it, which he ate.  Then he had to answer questions about these various pancakes.

For each pancake he had to grade it from one to ten on what it looked like, how dark, how light, how airy it was, how floppy, does it flop nicely, is it too rubbery, too sweet, is it salty enough, is it too greasy or too dry, its smell, too strong or not strong enough, its taste, its aftertaste, its resemblance to home-made pancakes, how thick or thin it was, or was it just right, and what is the ideal number of pancakes in a pack.  Ian began to get distressed because he wanted to fill in the questionnaire correctly but he couldn’t remember which pancake was which and what one tasted like what, and how much or just right.

All the pancakes were the same to him.

He clicked on the boxes randomly and, to begin with, it felt dishonest but then he got so carried away that when he got to the question about the ideal number of pancakes in a pack he wrote Fifty.  When he collected his three pounds on the way out he felt like it was the first day’s hard work he’d ever done in his life.

 

Emiko was not going for an office job but to Immigration Control to beg for her student visa to be extended.  She wanted a work permit.  She wanted to live here permanently.

She didn’t want to go back to Japan, she wanted to be here, where there was hope.  She wanted to go back, there was no hope here.  She didn’t want to be anywhere.  Hope wasn’t an issue.  There was nothing there and there was nothing here so what did it matter where she was.  There was nobody there for her anymore; they were all dead and she had their money and it was running out.  There was only Lulu and she was here. 

Lulu’s birthmark seemed to be fading.

She was surprised that Lulu’s father hadn’t come to see her on the boat.  She clung to the thought of him because there was nobody else.  She was a beautiful young woman but she had a baby and most of the men she met didn’t like babies.  She thought about him all the time, him knocking at the door and her answering graciously.  She was cross with herself for hiding Lulu from him as if she were ashamed of her, not protecting her from his eyes.  He would ask her forgiveness and say that he had been wrong and want to pick up where they’d left off and she would be noble and say, “What about the other girlfriend and her baby?” and he would say they meant nothing to him.  And it was gratifying, but also wrong.  She would turn him down and he would be devastated and go back to the other woman but she was only a substitute for what he’d had with Emiko and he would regret it for the rest of his life.  

But he didn’t come.  But he might, after he had thought it over.  There was always a chance.  He hadn’t said, “I never want to see you again”.  He hadn’t said, “Never contact me”.

Even after seeing him and being disappointed she wasn’t sure that she would turn him down.  She was weak.  She turned it over and over in her mind debating on what to do, and was indignant that he never came and she couldn’t put all her thinking to some purpose.

Why hadn’t he come?  What was wrong with her?  She knew there was nothing wrong with her, and it was him, the lies of men, but she also knew that there was something wrong with her; it was her loneliness.  It was a character flaw.  It seeped through everything like a black oily stain that everyone could see except her.  It was on her clothes, in her eyes, in the way she walked.  It cried out to everyone who passed her but she did not herself hear it; she was inured to the sound, like the hum of electricity in the background.  Rex had recognised it and he was not afraid of it because it was in him too.

The woman at Immigration was very nice, but she had a lot of complicated questions and each depended on the previous answer.  Emiko had done well on the Questionnaire about English life, but it was her own life that was causing problems, since she didn’t know what she wanted nor how to get it and what difference it would make if she stayed or left or what there was to go back to, or what there was to leave behind.  Emiko, who had breezed through the pancake tasting the day before, wished only pancakes were at stake.  “Where’s your baby?”  Emiko unfolded the birth certificate.  Rex had kindly registered himself as the father.

 

Coral was trying to make a banjo ukulele out of the tree branch, with a blunt chisel, and she and Marina were making up their own songs.  Coral was rewriting hymns without the god bits, as she thought music might attract people to her when she set up her stall.  Christian Elsie had sent her another card with a line from the Psalms:  “It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in Man”.  Coral had written it out in large lettering on another board and Marina had scrawled underneath, “I strongly disagree”.

Coral was feeling sorry for Judaism at the moment - she did have a great affection for it – it was not an aggressive religion like Islam or self-righteous like Christianity.  Islam wants to rule the world and makes active plans to do so, Christianity thinks it should be ruling the world if anyone had any sense, and constantly whines about it.  Old man Jude knows he never will but is still quietly waiting.  She missed all the festivals throughout the year, Jewish people liked to fill up time with prayer and ceremony and festivals and ritual; there was always something going on, something to look forward to. 

If it wasn’t for the god issue she would quite happily go to synagogue.  Judaism had to be invented as a kind of exclusive club; for safety.  She understood that.  And the food was always good, they were generous with food.  

Coral had toyed with Buddhism but what did the Buddha know, he was living in the countryside, he had money and walked away from it, and a wife.  How could you respect a man like that?  Buddhism, too, was full of rules and regulations, just like a real religion, and after the 613 commandments she’d had enough of being told what to do.  Buddhists also love their expensive statues and monuments carved with smug smiles, while people starve.  It is an ideal, that’s all, and like all ideals, once you get up close you see the cracks in the marble.

How do we get through?

Many Jewish people stopped believing in god after the holocaust but others thought they were being punished, European Jews punished for their liberal Judaism, for rejecting the Holy Land; it was a religion where you were always in the wrong and needed to be punished, the Jewish people became the suffering servant of Isaiah, collectively suffering for the sins of the world; they took responsibility for all the shit in the world.  But always trying to get back in god’s good books even though they’d done nothing wrong.  Some believe that god watches in pain as we commit atrocities but doesn’t step in because he loves us so much and respects our choices and doesn’t want to interfere - as if we humans are a homogenous lump and are all equally responsible for the atrocities and don’t need protecting from one another.  They claimed that god wept during the holocaust.  God is so transcendent that he cannot be held responsible.  That’s the point of omnipotence, nice work if you can get it.  Many did not lose faith in god, they lost faith in man.  Ask not where was god during the holocaust, but where was man?   

Well, he – and she - was hiding Jewish people in attics, he was giving them jobs in his factory, giving them false papers, smuggling out babies in suitcases from the Warsaw ghetto and distributing them among safe houses, hiding them in the woods of Greece, in Belgium smuggling them to safety, giving them illegal diplomatic visas, ferrying them from Denmark to Sweden in fishing boats, giving them Spanish passports, defying orders from the Japanese foreign ministry to continue stamping visas, refusing to hand over Albanian Jews and Finnish Jews to the Nazis, accepting into China 18,000 Jewish refugees.

The Nazis, meanwhile, were not trodden on by a huge foot emerging from the sky.

The Western wall.  Two grown men sitting in front of a wall, talking to it.  On chairs.  It was the chairs that did it for her.  They couldn’t even stand up on their own two feet.  They made themselves comfortable so they could talk to a wall, slipping little requests into the brickwork.  Things too sacred to be mocked.  It was just so terribly terribly sad.  Admittedly, she talked to herself all the time so she had no real cause to feel superior.

 

Ian hadn’t got in touch with Mrs. Tors for days and she hadn’t rung him to ask what was wrong.  She didn’t get in touch with him.  It was not nice ignoring someone and they didn’t notice.  But he was determined to sit it out and wait – she would get worried eventually if she didn’t see him.

To kill time and take his mind off it, he went back to the National Gallery to look at Hogarth’s etchings, to feel closer to Louis.

He got off the bus early because someone was drinking coffee next to him.  Walking down Oxford Street he thought, It’s not intelligent design, it’s barely evolution, there’s nothing like Oxford Street to ram home to you how small and unimportant you are, like mayflies hysterically enjoying their first and last day on earth, cramming in as much shopping as they can.

The fat disgusting faces of vile idiot people slobbering ugly and pimpled and talking crap slobbery lips crunching drooling apples and crisps right in your ear cracking pretzels between their teeth the only reason they are at the top of the food chain is because they have cattle prodders.

And there are so many of them you can’t avoid them littering the pavements with their presence.  And he was here too, adding to the horror, taking up space, spewing out waste.  As a child he had once tried to stop harming the earth by walking everywhere on tiptoes.

He went through Leicester square and saw Emiko sat there chatting to the dead-cat-and-dog man, who was holding Lulu, and he felt jealous.  She was wearing one of Rex’s shirts made into a dress – it was identical to a shirt Louis had.  He didn’t stop to speak to her.

The gallery was huge, two of them side by side, three if you count the Portrait gallery, all that space and money used on what is essentially useless, daubings of children, admittedly some of high skill, but it didn’t do anything practical, it didn’t end world poverty, or stop children being raped, and you couldn’t eat it, or even sit on it, like Coral and the tree seat.

The arts were a leech on the world - people got more upset at the desecration of ancient artefacts than they did about ethnic “cleansing”.

It was the soul’s yearning for beauty and order, the need for little chinks of light in a grey world, but how could that be important until every other need had been satisfied.  Artists were essentially like footballers, intrinsically useless and overpaid.

Ian had never studied the etchings before because Louis was always with him and he did enough studying for both of them; Ian could never understand the attraction.  But he studied them closely now.

Tiny little people, perfectly drawn, busy with their life.  But the people were not people, they were only tools to illustrate an idea.  He must have had models, Hogarth, real people sitting for him, but he was using them for his own ends, they had no personal individuality.  It was disrespectful.  And why did he mock the upper classes?  As if the poor made a better job of their marriages.  They might not marry for money but they were just as messed up in other ways.  Everyone made a mess of relationships in one way or another, it was unavoidable.  People are people – we are all difficult to live with.  The upper classes don’t have a monopoly on that.  But it’s not so scenic when poor people mess up.  Two dogs chained together.

 

When he got home the sewage drains had opened up.  The sewage system of the house was old and couldn’t cope and the drain at the front started overflowing.  It stank.  It was all seeping into the street.  Nobody else noticed; nobody had called for a plumber.  Ian rang the landlord but could get no answer.  He was out of the country.  The other tenants came home and they negotiated their way around the sewage as they had negotiated around the fallen tree.  It was nothing to them; they expected no more, or assumed that it was all in hand, and just got on with the rest of their lives.  Did they have no sense of smell?

 

Upstairs in her attic, Coral was practising her humanist songs with Marina.  They had found many interesting rhymes for oblivion which didn’t really rhyme, and then wrote a little comedy about Oblivion Leigh and Laurence Oblivious which seemed funny to Coral at the time, although rather silly later on, especially since Marina was only nineteen and had no idea whom they were lampooning.

Coral had given up on the ukulele guitar and fashioned the stump into a tea-tray.

She used it to serve Louis some toast.

He said, “I wonder if I’ll ever find god” and she said, “It depends on what part of you is missing”.

He said, “I wish there was a god”.

“Don’t you go stupid on me”, she said.  Then she relented and, to appease him, said, “If there was a god it would either be evil or indifferent.  There is no other possibility”.

Louis fingered through some of Elsie’s Christian cards.  “It must be such a relief to be this certain of something.  I envy her”, he said.

 “It’s not certainty”, said Coral. 

Coral thought, If there was a god everyone in the world would speak the same language and be able to understand one another.  Elsie had written her a rather pointed poem – with a dash of Hebrew - about people hiding from god when Coral felt it was Elsie herself who was hiding from life and burying her face in god like a dog with its nose stuffed under a cushion down the sofa.  Most Christians tend to talk more about their church than about god or Jesus but Elsie was bi-polar.  For Coral, coming away from god was like waking up from being drugged.  Everything was now clean and bright and fresh and real.  She no longer had her crutch but found she could walk after all.

Everyone was living a lie but Louis didn’t know what the truth was.  He assumed there was a fundamental truth but then questioned even that.  Maybe they weren’t living a lie and that was their truth because they experienced things differently from him, but that was impossible, it is still a lie underneath.  Maybe that was their reality but probably not really as everyone still seemed fairly miserable underneath and if not when they were young and didn’t know any better then it usually caught up with them as they aged.

His truth was the only truth – he was a dictator.

He was as stupid as Ian – he had been warped for life by Hermann Hesse and the star boy – he still believed, despite all logic and evidence to the contrary, that if you really really wanted something, it would happen for you, we get what we want in the end.  What end?  We continue to pass the lie on to children because nobody wants to wake up, because being awake is unbearable.

Life is a series of soundbites that we use like rafts but which in reality have no buoyancy and are full of holes.

On the wall by the post office, some old hippy had written, in curly handwriting, ‘A butterfly flaps its wings in New Mexico and there is a hurricane in China’, possibly to indicate that our lives have consequence.  There were even scientists who believed this fairytale even though they qualified it by saying the effects may take some time.  What Louis mostly objected to was the word flap; it was so imprecise:  flapping suggested a hefty load of washing in the wind; butterflies’ wings are not meaty enough to flap – they gently sort of flitter – none of it rings true.  Underneath someone else had added, “fuck off”.  This was written in very neat handwriting on the corrugated fence. 

Outside Coral’s attic window were snails, two storeys up.  Why had they climbed this far, used so much energy to get here, what did they expect to find at the top, what instinct had driven them?  They can’t smell food, there is plenty down below, it is a delusion, they are off key, their inner maps don’t work.  It was not as if snails have an impulse towards tourism, climbing just for the view.  Yet here they were, upstairs, for no reason.  One always aspires upwards.

Louis was wearing a shirt of Rex’s and he pretended that Rex was in it with him, breathing down his neck.  He still had the crackpipe in the breast pocket and he took it out and fingered the smooth sides.

Why did Rex never come home?  Why did he keep the boat?  Why didn’t he move off down the canal.  Yet he kept the mooring and never took the boat out. 

Then he suddenly thought, It’s because I was nearby. 

This thought was quickly superseded.  Rex had had a nomadic childhood, his family travelled all the time; he kept the boat because of his fear of homelessness, somewhere permanent to go back to.

(Ian had asked Emiko why Rex hung around after the relationship was over and Emiko said he wanted to go down the canal to Birmingham but he couldn’t afford the fuel, it was his dream).

When he was with me he never come home.  He liked the luxury of knowing Louis was at home, waiting.  He just liked knowing things were there, in one place, waiting for him when he wanted them.  Then he had no need of it; he had it.

Louis buried his face in Rex’s leather jacket to capture the smell of him but the coat was mouldy now, the heat of him when he was in the car, white blotches of mould, a different smell altogether, Rex was a mould, that was all that was left of him.

When he left Coral’s he saw a young man in a doorway wrapped in a sleeping bag.  Louis said to Rex, “Are you alright?  Are you hungry?”

The man told him that he’d just eaten.

Then added, almost as an afterthought, that he was trying to raise a little bit of money.  Louis asked what for.  He wanted the man to admit that he needed heroin, wanted to get crack.  The man said, “For something to eat later on, for a new sleeping bag”.  A bed for the night.

Louis said, “I don’t care what you want the money for”, but the man didn’t change his story.  Why won’t you admit it?  You know and I know, so why not admit it?  The man had a mischievous shine in his eyes and long tangled hair.  Louis gave him a banknote.  He knew how wonderful it was to be given banknotes.

He lied because he couldn’t tell the truth, he said Louis was pure and he didn’t want to defile him, he was afraid of me, he was afraid of me knowing the truth and rejecting him.

I bet even Jesus got sick of walking on water.

He lied to avoid being lectured to.

He used drugs because it was unbearable being awake, it kept him occupied so he didn’t have to think; he didn’t want a normal life with me, he deferred all the nice things because he always wanted to have something to look forward to.  All he ever really craved was a comfortable bed.  And a crack pipe.  And a twist of heroin.

We had stopped talking, he slept all the time.  It was the only way he could avoid talking to me.

I failed you.  You couldn’t talk to me.  You were impossible but I failed you.

Louis felt very tired, absolutely weary of feeling.

The open grave in the corner of the room just wears you out.  And then you get used to is presence and start filling it with junk.

He now saw things from the outside but he had done that before, but this was from the outside of the outside.  Everything had a new kind of pointlessness, another level of nothing.  We are all dead.  Trying to hold onto anything was pointless; all going through the motions and him too, even now, couldn’t kill himself, as if anything mattered, all banal, him included, him especially.

He was boring and stupid, he had bad skin, no dress sense, no elegance, no beauty, no lightness or magic about him, no charisma, just a coward and a hypocrite.  Still scuttling back and forth to the cake shop to buy muffins and stamp down all these feelings, this emotion, the unfillable hole within him.

If everyone is living a lie and they are all stupid cunts, and they are, he was the biggest cunt of all, but that was his vanity again, got to be special, got to be the best, even in cuntdom.

He went into the park and threw the remainder of Coral’s toast, which he was still holding, to the birds, left the park, went back in again, nobody around, picked it up, wiped the grass off it and ate it.  He sat on a bench and watched the pulse in his arm move the skin up and down, fascinating and horrible, terrifying.  It did it with no request from him, not like his legs moving - what if it suddenly stopped?  He scratched a hole with a sharp stone in the crook of his arm where it was bluest, trying to reach this alien thing that belonged to him, like an unwanted child, cut through the skin, and could see the blue, but panicked, felt sorry for it, humbled by it, it plodded on oblivious, throb throb throb, little throb.

Two old men were sparring under the trees, with boxing gloves - they seemed to be enjoying it.  He watched them for some time, ducking and jabbing, beautifully in tune with each other.  Their faces were absolutely serious.

Then he saw Bonnie in a tree.  The parrot was being harassed by two noisy parakeets.  He was pleased that she had absconded from life in a cage but also concerned about how she might adapt in the wild; would her native impulses come through in this land of grey and drizzle?  The parakeets seemed to have the upper hand.  He had to admit, treacherously, that the parakeets were the more physically attractive birds.  Even the word parakeet was more appealing than parrot.

The star-boy side of his brain wondered if this was Rex on his journey towards the sea, but the open-grave side knew it was just a parrot in a tree.

Emiko had opened Bonnie’s cage and watched to see if she could get some sort of sign on what she should do about returning to Japan, because she had nobody else to ask.  Bonnie hadn’t moved for hours so Emiko had gone out and when she returned the cage was empty.  Bonnie had left no farewell letter.  Emiko had no idea how to interpret this desertion.

 

Three residents in the care home had died over the New Year but their beds were already filled with fresh old people who could no longer look after themselves.  Everything relating to the previous tenants was gone, just another interchangeable grey face in the chair, crying for its mother.  There is an endless queue for incontinence and debility.

Ian thought, If I want to get married before I die I’ll have to do something to make it happen.  He thought he should ask Louis every morning to marry him, but the words withered on his lips, partly because he couldn’t face an eternity of hearing the reply, “Not today” every morning.  And asking someone to marry you every morning was a form of bullying.  He didn’t want Louis to give in after years of being ground down with the words “Will you marry me?” and finally say “Yes” just for some peace and quiet, like a man admitting to a murder he didn’t do just to stop the police kicking his head in.  He wanted Louis to want it in his own mind of his own volition, not be brainwashed by Ian’s own need.  That would have no value, it wasn’t romantic at all.

He didn’t see Louis every morning anyway, he hardly saw him at all now even though he was back home; he was never in.  Not that Ian could blame him, the grey walls were so depressing.

The last time he had seen Mrs. Tors the boy John had found his first ladybird of the year and he wanted to keep it in a matchbox.  Ian told him that was cruel.  Mrs. Tors said, “You can talk”.   She said that when Ian was a boy he used to keep ladybirds and spiders in tictac boxes, when they went on holiday, to protect them from the farmers spraying the fields with poison.  But they died anyway.  At least a matchbox was made of paper and was breathable.  Ian had no recollection of ever going on holiday.  She clearly had many memories of him but none of them were favourable.  She had sent him birthday cards, occasionally, through the years, cheap nasty ones, and usually the same one, from a pack, never specially chosen.  He had kept a box with all three of them in it, until eventually he had thrown them away as meaningless.  Hope you’re alright.  Lots of love.  But sent via surface mail so it was months late.  It had been hard to throw them away and even now he regretted it.

Ian was the clean-up man.  That was his function in life.  Even the other cleaners left the worst jobs for him.  He signed himself in with a squiggle and looked back at all his previous squiggles; they were definitely becoming more minimalistic.  It could be the bleach fumes that were causing all his problems.  He had mentioned this to the doctor but the doctor said that anything you can buy in the shops is safe; it has to be or it wouldn’t be on sale.  One could query the absolute logic of this but it wouldn’t help.

He realised he liked setting things in order.  Tidying away papers, making space, making surfaces shine. 

But with Louis he couldn’t do this because Louis wasn’t the sort of mess that could be cleaned up with a mop and detergent.  He resisted all efforts to get him in order.  One had to hope that, over time, the wetness would evaporate and one would just be left with a hardened residue that could be scraped off with ease.

 

Coral decided that this Sunday she was ready to go to Hyde Park. 

Marina wanted to go with her but she wouldn’t get out of her hijab so Coral wouldn’t allow it, for her own protection.

She changed the “You are all going to die”, because some of the evangelicals had that one themselves.  But she wasn’t promising everlasting eternal life.  She made a new board saying, “No eternal life, no hell either, just worms”.  Some late snow fell but did not settle.  She slouched two miles down the Edgware Road with her snow-boots on, dragging her trolley loaded with her boards of doom.

It was a crispy morning in Hyde Park with thick frost but plenty of people around, all come to look at the clowns who think they have such important things to say that they must speak to complete strangers, as if the lives of strangers can be transformed by the words of lunatics.

As she was sorting herself out Coral looked at all the other boards of the evangelicals.  Everyone was trying to sell something; it was rather unseemly.  All so desperate to make other people see things the way they did.  They all looked ill.  It was an illness, this desperation to convert people.  Something was wrong in their brains but because they were ill they couldn’t see their illness – it was a symptom of the illness.

It was like someone with cancer trying to market cancer; they were all selling cancer.

It wasn’t even that they were lonely and needed company in their delusions, but that they believed they were normal and everyone else was lacking something.  They kept talking about the soul, and meaning, and going beneath the surface but that’s all there is, only the surface, there’s no depth and meaning, there’s only the surface.   It was ugly, this constant retail, constant marketing.  Doubt is the greatest thing we have.  Certainty is always an illusion; and it is a dead-end.  God was their dead-end.

Coral sat down and watched; didn’t unveil her boards.  I’m as bad they are.  But, rebelled her vanity, not quite.

She thought, If there was really a god there wouldn’t be all these religions, there would only be one, not all these personality cults born of the same two basic human wants - to have someone looking after us and for our lives to have meaning.  They don’t and there isn’t - there is only vanity.

But it was really none of her business; if that’s how people wanted to live that was their business.  Who was she?  We are all shouting because nobody is listening.

Sometimes people stopped at the evangelicals and these people always looked troubled.  God was a shelter from life but possibly no worse than any other refuge.   A woman came over to Coral and said, “Sanctimonious bitches”.  They pretend they would do anything for mankind, do so much good, but it isn’t real altruism, they’re doing it for god.  They’re not doing it for me.  This seemed to matter.  Coral had met Jews, Muslims and Christians – Jehovah’s Witnesses, Methodists, Quakers – and atheists.  Many of the religious lot were good people.  So were the atheists.  But the atheists didn’t make such a song and dance about it.

She had brought her road crossing lollipop with her, with the words, STOP CHILDREN, and a couple of her children, out with their parents, waved hello.

While she was having her flask of memory soup, which she had left on the kitchen table (it was rather salty) Marina turned up, in civvies, with Roquefort cheese from her father.  Coral tried it.  It was like eating a plate of mould.  Marina sat there for the rest of the afternoon telling anyone who would listen about the stars, waiting for it to get dark again.

When it did she looked at Coral, pointed to her billboards and waved towards the departing evangelicals.  “Sad people” she said.

 

Ian hated himself for it but he missed Mrs. Tors.  When he went to her regular pub she wasn’t there and nobody had seen her for a week, which was most unusual.   Ian was worried.  He went round to her lodging house and Pete with the white shoes answered the door.

“Oh she’s fine, she’s always fine”, he said, “She’s gone back to Oz”.

This felt like she had disappeared to the other side of the world, Ian gasped, caught himself, regained his balance and asked, “Is she coming back?”

“Who knows, the boy was homesick, she had to go back”.

Why didn’t she tell me?  Ian could not even ask this as he did not have the right and he feared the answer.

“Who are you, again?”  White-shoe man took his glasses off, spat on them and polished them with the hem of his tee-shirt.

 Ian thought, Maybe she wants to make a clean breast of it, you only liked your dad anyway, that would be the sort of thing she would say, a clean breast.  She might come back, in summer.  It was so cold here now.  He should have come sooner.  Perhaps she thought he wouldn’t miss her and he only wanted her now his dad was gone. 

White shoe spit said, “Hang on, you might as well have these”.  He went inside and emerged with a quiver of arrows.  “I don’t want the bloody things, you might as well have them”, and he gave them to Ian who instinctively opened his arms to receive them like a bouquet of flowers.

He said, “Who’s Alfie?” but the door had already shut.

Outside by the bins the landlady said, “Such a lovely lady, a really kind lady.  He was knocking her about.  They owe thousands in rent.  I can’t get him out.  I don’t want any bad feeling”.

Ian thought, She couldn’t be bothered.  He also knew that she would never have got past customs at the airport with the arrows, but why had the white shoe man not pawned them and got some booze? 

 

When Ian came home he was still wearing his “I am OK” badge but now he had it pinned on upside down, perhaps so that he could read it himself. 

Louis had lost his keys and was sat on the doorstep.  The sewage was still bubbling up from the drain and everyone now accepted it as part of the landscape.  Louis thought, everyone grows up feeling like shit, we need these button badges just to get us from one day to the next, we need the soundbites.  He thought that it was normal to grow up feeling like shit because he had never personally met anybody who didn’t feel like shit.  From the day you are born someone is suffocating your spirit with a cushion.

However, he looked at Ian with his button badge and still thought he was pathetic.  Rex would never wear a button badge.  The concept of a self-concept was alien to him.  Then again, he was always so desperate for drugs he didn’t really have much energy left over for navel gazing.  It was his navel he was so desperate to get away from.

Indoors Ian began arranging the quiver of arrows in a large vase whilst humming, You Were Made For Me, that egocentric little song which doesn’t take into account the will of the other.  He said, “Are you coming to bed?”

Why do we love this person and not that person when in essence everyone is the same, feet, teeth, skin.  Passion was so strange.  One person drives you wild to the point of lunacy and someone else means nothing at all.  What is it?  Everyone has the same qualities in approximately the same degree.  We are all roughly the same in intelligence, we all have heads, most of us have arms.  Other people did not see your qualities as I did, and I thought nobody could miss seeing them.  Other people love other people.  It makes no sense.

The people who mean nothing at all to anybody. 

Some tiny tremor on a leaf sets up a response.  It is all about sensitivity to tiny tremors.

Blow up a photograph of a group of people, bigger and bigger, crop closer and closer so the pixels go blurry, and the people just become indistinguishable blobs, the edges disintegrate.  But even that is not wholly true.  There are nuances, microscopic giveaways.  But only if you know what you are looking for.

Louis knew that Ian was different and this was precisely because Ian was never satisfied with himself but at the same time was solely and always himself and always vulnerable, even though he didn’t realise it.  Ian was one of those people whom you don’t actually see physically, because of his strange personal charisma, but occasionally you did notice his face and, when you suddenly did, were surprised that that was all there was to it.  He was bigger than his face, in his very smallness.  Louis couldn’t put his finger on it.

His head hurt.  Love Hurts.  Love doesn’t hurt; it is a wonderful feeling.  What hurts is that nobody does what you want them to do.  Everyone has their own script.  And of course that’s OK, up to a point, to begin with; nobody wants to be with a toy, or a puppet, not really, unless you have a psychosis of some sort, a control issue.  But some unity would be nice.  We love people for what they are, not for what they do.  It hurts when they don’t do what we hope they will.  Which is love us back in a way we cannot love them.

Loving people for how they actually are, in reality, day to day, is impossible.

Louis wanted a twin but the thought was repellent and he was ashamed of it.

He wanted to be understood and loved for who he was but not do the same back.

If there really was a god, which there wasn’t, and if this non-existent god were really love, as many believers of the myth maintain, then it is really nothing to brag about.  Love causes as much misery as hatred does, probably more, because it promises more.  Unfulfilled promises are more painful than if you don’t expect anything to start with.  Yet another cliché.

When love was blue. 

Love is such a weird way to spend your time.

He dreamed he saw Rex and they hugged and it was so wonderful to see him again, so wonderful, and you wrapped me up in your arms and I know why I still love you and when he woke up he couldn’t remember if Rex was dead or alive and, if he was alive, why had he not spoken to him for such a long time and he must go there now and he woke up and Ian was there beside him and he knew that Rex was dead.

He looked across at the clock and the battery was dead, there were no digits lit up, and being confronted by its blank face was like moving mirrors, putting a mirror on a different wall and forgetting and still looking in that same place and there is only a blank wall staring back at you, only wall, like crashing down a cul de sac into a brick wall – you don’t exist, your frame of reference is suddenly gone.

Rex was not anywhere anymore.  The past isn’t there, it doesn’t exist.  It isn’t a room you can slip into when no one is looking.  There is no room.  Behind you is a sheer cliff face dipping down into nothing.

So why was the room so big?  You were there and I was with you and there was still hope that everything could be wonderful.  My hope.  My sad illusion, which kept me going.  The strength is that it was a real experience but, being gone, I can do with it whatever I choose:  it is the freedom to do this that is so huge; memory is the superpower – ironically because of its unreliability.

The daffodils were open and all their heads were drooped over in mourning, so full of woe they could not lift them to face the day; they did not look the same as they had looked last year, grief had robbed them of vitality, they were no longer so sure of the world.

Louis wanted to find a truth beyond all the clichés but his brain wasn’t good enough.  There was a small worm in there trying to burrow deep into the root of things but it met concrete very early on and was blunted; and the harder he tried all he could see was the nothing at the centre of everything.  It was like trying to clean coal.  All he found was cliché after cliché within cliché until you got to the central bald fact of life itself which every baby knows at the point of its bawling entry into the world.

He was sure something had to be at the root of everything but why should it be.

Death really happens and is irrevocable.  It was so obvious and so easy to say but impossible to grasp.

He had thought he was hardened to life, because of what Rex had done to him, but there had been this waiting for him all the time.  It was irrevocable and that was impossible to accept because it was too big to grasp.  We minimise death so we can hold it in our hand.  We tell ourselves poems.  We make up rituals.  We plant flowers and trees as if it actually means something.

Louis wasn’t ready to plant flowers, it was too late for that, too early, I don’t want flowers you can’t see them I want you.

He got up and found Ian’s watch on the side table, reliably ticking on.  He quietly put his shoes on, went outside, ended up by the post-office and the Butterfly comment.  As he walked down the street he could see all the other places where the same person had written “fuck off” – sometimes in response to an advertisement or a roadsign but sometimes just on its own, as a general comment on nothing in particular.

Time passes and it has still happened and you don’t return and it is all a lie but even now Louis was still waiting for something magical, left not with acceptance because he didn’t accept it, as if that would stop it being true.  He still imagined that Rex was in the boat, asleep.  The etherised patient on the table who will at some point wake up.

He went to the canal and could see the new owners moving about inside Rex’s boat and pretended that it was Rex in there, with friends.  Everywhere was muddy.

Life with the sound turned off.

He had lost his virginity, his innocence.  He was astonished that he had remained a virgin so long.  He’d lost it many times before.  Life can never be the same again.  Another cliché.

 

Ian went to ride his bike then remembered it was broken.  He couldn’t understand why he had dragged a broken bike home, why had he not left it in the street?  Did he think he could repair it when he had no skills in that area whatsoever.

The front wheel was buckled.  He thought of getting a new wheel but the brakes were shot too, and the chain was very worn.  It was all beyond repair, it would be cheaper to get a new one.

All the same he would miss this bike and he couldn’t afford a new one.  The outlay and the upkeep was something he had to really think about before he invested in another one and he resented the cost– and then it might be stolen or have bits taken off it or otherwise fall apart, or he might have another crash and was it really worth the hassle.  He could walk everywhere.

The recycle depot was at the bottom of a hill and at the top Ian sat on the bike to save his legs five minutes of walking, but it was a lumpy jagged ride downwards.  On the way down he rolled over a broken bottle of wine and his tyres glistened red.  In the recycle depot he laid his bike against a heap of other rusting bikes, very gently.  The bike would not be wasted but melted down and transformed into something else so it would live on in a different shape; he might even meet it again in a train or a wheelchair or a pair of scissors someone might stab him to death with.

He walked away then looked back over his shoulder and all the bikes were forlornly laid there, crippled, like a bicycle graveyard, he could hardly bear to leave his bike among all these other bikes who had done sterling service and then been tossed aside, like old dairy cows.  One day out in the rain and it would be a rusting geriatric like all the others.  They deserved a peaceful meadow somewhere in the countryside to live out their remaining days in ease.  

He went back to kiss his bike goodbye and to tell it that he would never forget it.  He bent for the kiss surreptitiously like he was really about to tie his laces, and reassured the bike of his overwhelming gratitude for the early days when it had behaved itself.

Then he pulled off a handlegrip as a memento; it still had the teethmarks from the foxcub.

 

Ian said to Louis, “How are you today?” and Louis looked at him suspiciously.  Ian repeated the question.  Louis said, “I’m alright thank you”.  Ian said “No you’re not”.

So Louis took the risk and told him how he really felt, hesitantly.  Every so often, while he was talking, Ian said, “Yes”.  It was very annoying.  In the end Louis asked him what he was doing and Ian said it was Active Listening.  “I’m showing that I’m listening”.  Louis said, “I don’t need active listening, I just need you to listen”.  “I’m showing you that I’m listening”.  “I’m not a client, you’re not a counsellor.  Just listen”.

“I am listening”.

“So why does it feel like you’re not really listening, only acting like you are”.

Ian felt exasperated but he put it down to the unreasonableness of grief.  He gave Louis a hug and made a cup of tea.  When he came out of the kitchen Louis was gone.

 

A letter came to the flat for Rex, another bailiff letter, he’d used Louis’ address again, and it was still so wonderful to see his name on the envelope, as if he himself had come back, still breaking the law somewhere.  But it was only a bailiff letter.  Louis did not open it but preserved it for Rex.

The only moments of happiness he had had in his life were those brief moments when he lost himself – his own absorption, his own interest, his own engagement in something quite separate from himself, his houseplants, his books, making pictures.  Even with love, the euphoria comes from the act of loving not of being loved.  It was a happiness to lose oneself, not to gain something for oneself; what counted was one’s own feeling, not the feelings of others.  But even that was a lie; the euphoria was selfish, it was self-contained, it fed off the other.  And anyway the euphoria faded and he wanted to receive. 

To take his mind off things he went through his books to find one that would be readable, plunge into somewhere else.  But he didn’t want to let go of Rex, and he couldn’t concentrate on anything except Rex.

He found a book that he had read twenty five years ago, when he was only fifteen, of which he could recollect nothing.

The other him had underlined words and sentences and whole passages in pencil and written comments in the margins, and it was like going back to meet his younger self, down a leafy little lane, who had at that time not endured this long in the world but who was already miserable and still somehow knew how things worked - who still felt and thought as he did now, liked and hated the same things, the same words, but had neater handwriting.

It was like a younger twin and Louis felt overwhelmed with pity for this young boy because he knew how isolated he had been, even then.  He had felt so out of step with the world and although he now knew that was what all young people feel, he felt it even now, today, at 40, even though he also knew that it was part of the human condition.  He had been so aware of the sadness in the world and also, like now, still felt contempt for it, because even now he could not distinguish between those who suffer and those who cause the suffering; both were Them.  And it had not got any easier with time – but somehow it got smoothed over, his life seemed smoother and blander to him, even though if he tested it against the facts he could see that this had not happened at all, the hysteria was always bubbling underneath.  It seemed smoother because he was used to it by now, even though he wasn’t, it was still a continuing shock to him.  It seemed smoother because he was more sophisticated – but he wasn’t, he was still gauche.  He was still stupid – but at least now he knew he was stupid – except he had known it then too, he just dealt with it better now, he could cover it up better now if only to himself.  Although everyone could see it.  It seemed smoother, maybe, merely because it was now; too close to view it clearly.

How had so little changed with him?  He was still the same person he had been then – wasn’t a person meant to develop and change?  And grow up?  The world had moved forward but he had stayed on the platform in the underground refusing to get on a train.  He was still wandering about in the dark.

He was still scared of boarding a train.

And yet he had of course moved on, on the surface, he’d got older and he wore better clothes that suited him better (did they?) and he knew more now but he had known a lot then and he still knew nothing, and he hated this progress, it was slimy, he longed for his roughness and gaucheness, he wanted to go back in the tunnel and sit with himself, reading this book twenty five years ago.  It was something passionate.  He had lost his passion.  Age wears passion differently.  It is less idealistic.  But not always.  Not really.  Not at all.  It gets tired.

Louis flicked ahead through the yellowy brown pages of the book.  He had loved Penguin classics – whenever he’d reached the end of one there were always reviews of other books that he had to try – classics of European literature.  Now he would regard it as a cheap marketing ploy, but now the books recommended were not so good and were always reviewed by friends of the author.

“... when the world overbrims the threshold of his eyes, its meaning lapped against him from within, in soundless waves.  He had drifted into the very heart of the world”.

The other him had queried the spelling of “threshold” and he checked it now in the dictionary to see whether it did in fact have two h’s side by side like withhold.  But it didn’t.

It was twenty five years since he had read this book – if he’d had a son then instead of reading a book, the boy would be twenty five now, fully grown up with ideas and thoughts of his own and life experiences.  What would he be like?   Louis tried to imagine someone calling him “dad”.  It felt odd; didn’t suit him.  He didn’t want it to suit him.  A real independent person.  Instead of which he had a twenty five year void during which he could not recall a single word from a book he’d read and loved.

He had lost so many people over the years, friends he thought he would know forever, and they had slipped away and he didn’t know anything of their lives now, they had vanished forever.  It made him really panicky like he did not have a true hold on the world.  What had happened to all these people?

At the back of the book, in the inside of the back cover, he had written in pen, and dated it:

“Regents park.  4 goslings snuggled up ag. each other, one stretches leg out, tucks it back in.  Another stretches one leg out, pulls it in, then they’re all stretching their legs but still snuggled up half (one over 2) asleep.  The first one gets restless, wanders off, notices man on other side throwing bread so plunges in & starts paddling over there for dear life”.

He remembered the goslings.

He found a book about tropical fish he had given Rex and started cutting out the colourful fish.  Then he glued them on a piece of blue crinkled tissue paper, took them outside and, because he didn’t know what else to do with it, he set it on fire and watched the flames quickly increase then die out again as if it was nothing, not even worth the effort, and the smoke, the tiny black pieces floated away.  Just black, no colour.

I have to endure the rest of my life without you in it.

Louis wrote in his notebook, “yesterday was terrible.  In the evening I felt better.  I thought I was all cried out, I thought I had no more grief left in me, I thought I’d done it all.

I keep crying and still my heart hasn’t broken – why am I still alive?

I am broken in other places.

Today is terrible again.  It all starts up again from scratch.

I cannot believe I will never see you again.

I feel so alone.

Phone me, send me a message.  I want to kiss you again”.

He expected his heart to literally break up like a ginger biscuit as a way of demonstrating exactly how upset he was; or the valves to come loose, the pump to stop working.  He wanted more birds to come and tap on his window.  He wanted them to have Rex’s voice and his way of walking.  He wanted them to have Rex’s face.  He wanted Rex to tap on the window.

So much was still a muddle – memory was a way of holding onto him but that was a delusion:  he was gone.

Wearing Rex’s clothes made him feel closer to Rex but it was a delusion.  He was gone.

I loved you so much.  You were impossible but you had so much poetry in you.  Ian is like a school essay. 

At the age of eleven a geography tutor had asked his schoolclass to look at a map of the London Underground and draw one train-line from it.

Louis had immediately seen that the circle line was the simplest, involving the least amount of work, and had quickly drawn it, assuming that everyone else would do likewise.  But nobody else did – they tackled the Northern or Piccadilly lines, really complicated routes, and Louis just looked lazy.  He had only drawn a circle.

Rex at eleven would have made up a completely new line all of his own.

 Ian would have felt overwhelmed by the choice and doodled a train driver’s cap instead, in great detail.

Anything you said or did made a poem.  In hospital scooping up mashed potato with your bare hands, running across the dewy grass into the mist, dainty colour.

And you were so breathtakingly beautiful to me, those eyes almost like a woman’s, the full lips, luscious lips, the strong jaw and your rough hands with the chewed fingernails, his arms a mass of sores where he had been biting off some childhood tattoos – Louis loved those tattoos and tried to stop him doing it - his arms were no longer smooth, the scars had dented the skin like a relief map.  I could never get tired of looking at you.

You stole from me.  You abandoned me. 

I told you that you’d killed my love and neither of us believed it.

You wore me out.

Love was horrible; being subjugated by an emotion which had no coherent argument in its favour.  Hate didn’t exist, it was always something else dressed up in a suit of armour.  Anger was pointless.  It wasn’t even anger.  He was only angry because it was too painful to love.  He only loved because it was too painful to live with this hate. 

He didn’t want all the bad stuff to have happened but it had happened and he didn’t know how to absorb it into his conception of love.  The image of Rex’s sweetness bobbed up to the surface again and again.  But it was always followed by the shadow.  They came in rotation and the two Rexes cancelled each other out.

I don’t know who you are.

Coral said, regarding the issue of the two Rexes, “Give him a break - why can’t he be both”, like it was an abstract conundrum on a gameshow.  But he couldn’t be both, he was too extreme, it had to be one or the other.  “Or neither”, she said.  It can’t be neither.  It was a fairytale and people were either good or bad.  That’s how it worked.  Louis wished he could stop talking about it.

He used drugs simply because it was a nice feeling.

No human being can compete with that.

I failed you.  You were impossible but I failed you.

Love is never as strong as you think it is.

People do terrible things to people they love, it doesn’t negate the love, we are weak and we’re fallible.  We put ourselves first, we take things out on others.  He was fallible.

But that was another cliché, everything was cliches.

It didn’t matter what Rex had done - what Louis had to live with was what he himself had done, hadn’t done.  He hadn’t been perfect either, and that was equally impossible to live with.  It doesn’t matter what you did, it’s what I did that I have to live with.

Somehow he managed to separate what Rex had done from who he was.  He was weak, he was fallible.  So was Louis, sometimes, maybe, but Louis was not fallible, he should know better.  We are weak.

You were worth everything.

He said, “I love you”, and then he cried.

 

 Ian behind him in the bed heard his breathing change and longed to reach out and hold him but he did not stir.  He shrank from intruding.  He thought, I have to step back, I have to let him do this his way.  He doesn’t want me.  I have to respect his decision to do this his own way.

But Louis was so miserable and he could not bear it.  And he thought, surely it’s better to reach out and be pushed away, better to make a mistake, than do nothing.  It’s better to try and to get it wrong.  Better to communicate something.  Isn’t it?  He had no idea.  He kept getting it wrong.

He put his arm round Louis and Louis froze, but he kept it there.

Louis knew clearly that if it were Ian dead now he would be mourning for Ian and be angry with Rex for being Rex.  Why was that?

Would he?

He hadn’t thought much about Rex for two years and now he could think of nothing else – was it just sentimentality?  What was it?  Two years ago Rex had still been around, he wasn’t lost forever, he was still in the world.  Louis had let him go.  Or so he’d thought.

Did it mean he shouldn’t be with either of them and wait for the perfect one?  He was worse than Ian and his Radio Lie.  Perfect.

At least Ian really believed in perfection.  Louis knew it was a nonsense but he still couldn’t cope with imperfection.

What was perfection anyway?  It was only what Ian wanted; it was subjective.

It wasn’t an absolute.  It wasn’t a blueprint.  It was merely what Ian needed.

Everything was second best - did everyone settle, was that what growing up was all about?  How do people love others as they are without wanting them to be something else?

Even Ian wanted him to be something else even though he insisted everything was perfect, always said it was perfect even when it wasn’t, that’s what the perfection fantasies were about:  shutting one’s eyes to reality.  When you’re wearing a blindfold everything looks perfect.

That’s why there is so much fiction in the world, nobody lets reality be reality, everyone wants what they want and nobody gets it because other people get in the way by being so wilfully and annoyingly individual.

We are social beings who get on one another’s tits.

Louis did want a twin. 

Maybe he should learn to meditate.

If he had a lobotomy perhaps he could placidly accept whatever came his way and love people whatever they were like.

He felt Ian’s arm around him and missed the illusion of closeness they had once had.  What had that been?  The way the mind deludes itself for the greater gain of self-gratification, sex, self-affirmation, someone to share the black hole with.

 Ian was complete.  His skin held him in.  Inside the skin he was just mush but it could never seep out.  You cannot truly enter another person, there are walls everywhere that keep you out.

Rex slept so very much and Louis always missed him but Ian never slept so his sleep now was a relief.   Where does anyone go?   And it is alone, we sleep alone, there is no intimacy in sleep.

You can never experience another person’s life force, their propeller, their will, what motivates them, you can never truly know them.

Other people are not a means, they are an end in themselves; their settings are different from our own.

We are led on by want, but if the want is satisfied it stagnates into boredom so we need to keep wanting to keep us going; the misery of unfulfilled wanting is what keeps us alive, one’s hunger drives one on.  Being alive is about need, not satisfaction.

What the hell was he talking about?

One of the worst things about grief is that it does quieten down.  Louis’ madness was calmer than it had been four weeks ago; not much, but it was less.  He had quieter moments now.

Things go back to normal – but not normal.

It doesn’t get easier, it changes.

He had never asked Emiko how Rex had died – he didn’t want to know.  Couldn’t bear to think of all the flies and beetles gnawing away at him, or burnt and there was nothing left but a box of gravel.

He imagined Rex gone out swimming one night in the dirty canal, feeling tired, falling asleep, imagined him saying, “See!  I didn’t die of drugs!”  Knew he was ill and got drunk, fell asleep in the water, swimming.

Louis’ wasn’t the hand Rex reached out for but he took responsibility for it anyway.

Maybe he drowned in the bath or got infected in hospital.  He was alone.  Maybe he didn’t even notice it happening.

Why did she call Lulu Lulu?  Had Rex suggested the name?

Or did it mean nothing?  Do I feel nothing?

If he no longer exists then he is no longer suffering.  But no longer capable of pleasure either.  If he is existing on another plane it is probably quite nice but he can’t feel it in the same way as if he was here.  Maybe it feels better but how can it if you are so far away?

The house was creaking around them, the fallen tree had moved little by little and stopped, it had done its work.  On the stumps, tiny little buds of new growth were trying to grow, then the frost killed them.

Ian was OK.  Was that good enough?  Ian never lied.  He didn’t steal.  He wanted Louis to be happy.  Could you call it love if it was only about the awful things someone didn’t do?

He wasn’t sure about Ian.   But he had always been absolutely sure of his feelings for Rex and he had been wrong and that hadn’t got him anywhere, not that he had to get anywhere but it would be nice to be happy in the place you were.  That stupid baby word again.  Now he wasn’t sure about anybody, especially himself.  He was not perfect.

Why was he not instinctively drawn to what was good for him, what is positive; how advanced is a mind that continues to seek out old patterns, old parasitic twins, to relive some terrible thing as if the result will be different this time, parasitic twins who gnawed at him and depleted his blood, Rex with his lump of heroin.

Rex had been an answer for Louis that he didn’t seek or want and hadn’t helped; Rex’s sadness was Louis’ own.

Should he hang himself or should he sit it out with Ian?  He was too gutless to do anything definite.  He could spend days with Ian and private time alone in his head with Rex when Ian was at work.  He felt guilty towards Ian about Rex and he felt guilty towards Rex about Ian.

This is what grown up relationships were all about:  never being able to be honest, living a lie.  Would it be so terrible living a lie?  Louis always said whatever came into his head, like a child.  Growing up was about keeping things in and letting out thoughts selectively.  Grow up and shut up.  Keep things to himself.  Show a little tact.  It would be kinder to lie.

 Ian didn’t want to know the truth anyway, he couldn’t cope with it.  I have to face the fact that I am with someone who never really wants to know who I actually am because he can’t handle the truth.

He didn’t have to share everything he thought and felt with Ian.  But what was the point of being together if you couldn’t do that?  If you don’t have the freedom to be completely honest?  He might as well be with anyone off the street. 

It felt sneaky.

He kept his false teeth in a jar under the bed – Ian still did not know that his teeth were not real.  That hadn’t harmed their relationship; if anything it enhanced it.

Louis did not have the courage to walk away – he didn’t know why but he didn’t.  He had walked away from Rex and that had been a mistake.

It felt strange, keeping things inside, maybe he would explode, or maybe he would find he actually had plenty of room in his head and he would feel calm.  It was ridiculous being honest.  People spoke of compartments, maybe he could erect some sort of filing system in his head, with a secret drawer for Rex.

Nobody had a right to know everything about another, he could withdraw into himself and decide what he wanted to let out and what to retain.  His thoughts of Rex were private, he didn’t have to burden Ian with those thoughts, they were never going to be realised in reality because Rex was dead.  Even so, he disliked having this secret; how can you be close to someone when you’re lying.  Rex still lying about money three months before he died, pretending he had none.

Ian wouldn’t understand and it was none of his business.

He couldn’t convey what he felt anyway because he didn’t know, his aloneness, his inability to convey even a tenth of what he was, what he felt, what he thought, because he didn’t even know himself.  The things he did know he couldn’t say out loud because Ian would take offence, because it was offensive.  It was true and it didn’t mean offence, only the truth, whatever that was, it shifted quite a lot.

The problem with honesty is that it involves a lot of talking and you can afford the time when you’re young but as you get older you need to economise your energy.  Old people can’t be bothered with explanations because it only makes everything ten times worse anyway.  People don’t hear what you’re saying.  They repeat it back to you and it will be a different thing entirely from how it left your lips; their mind has already altered it into something they can relate to.  People can’t read, nobody can read.  We only read what we want to see.  It’s a survival tactic. 

Louis wanted to be with someone with whom he could enjoy a free flow of thought but that was not possible between humans.  Feelings get hurt.

He wanted to be able to tell Ian all that Rex meant to him, and that Ian would still want to be here, but he couldn’t.  He didn’t care if Ian left anyway but he did care.

 

Ian’s arm was aching because it was in an uncomfortable position that he couldn’t maintain for long but he dare not remove it.  Was Louis OK with his arm around him or was he asleep and hadn’t noticed?  Suddenly, he didn’t know why, he thought of Neville Chamberlain agreeing to peace, he thought of the Munich agreement of 1938, peace for our time, go home and get a nice quiet sleep.

He didn’t know why.  It was Mr. Chamberlain’s joy at acquiring peace, and Hitler’s lies, signing for a quiet life and Hitler going ahead and doing what he planned anyway.  Hitler getting into bed with Russia and then pulling the knife out from under the pillow; made a treaty promising to carve up Europe between them when really he was planning to bring them down.  War was utterly exhausting.  Europe wasn’t theirs to slice up.  He and Louis were not superpowers, only people.  That was a relief.  He would hold onto that.

Louis had not mentioned Rex for over a week.  It was fading away.

He had got over it, was getting over it.

It was nearly over.

Ian’s arm held on tighter.  Louis allowed him to do this.

 

ENDS

Author Biography:

The author did not go to any good schools, has not had an interesting life and doesn’t live anywhere nice.