Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, page 26
It’s beautiful; I can’t remember the last time I could properly use that word of a place instead of a person.
Mother
Mother wrote with very small, precise handwriting; economically, as if she meant every word she said. Boy said that it must be all those years of doing the books. Also she chose her postcards with great precision; she meant them, too. She took particular pleasure in postcards of ruins, especially ruined monuments. O and Boy received a postcard of a giant face from a monumental stone statue, its once handsome stone lips cracked open, the inscription across its forehead, which had once announced a heroic career of military exploits, now illegible, the giant stone curls of its hyacinthine hair now the nesting place of feral pigeons, that country’s commonest bird; then one of a classical garden in which the paths appeared to be made of raked gravel, but were, in fact (you couldn’t see this in the picture, but Mother explained this on the back of the card) made of tesserae in eighteen kinds of marble, glittering, costly fragments which had once composed a mosaic map of the known world, with the Emperor’s capital city in its centre, and, of course, many portraits of the Emperor, of whom no known statue or even portrait on a coin is now known; then one of the greatest castles ever built, its eight massive rings of walls preserved intact in the desert, preserved unscarred by war for five centuries because it was never manned, but left uninhabited the year of its completion when its wells mysteriously failed; and one of a fascist stadium with statues, where the heroic figures, contrived to look like marble, had crumbled and split, revealing the cheap iron armatures beneath the concrete of their straining thighs and ostentatiously upraised arms.
Though there was clearly a reason for this sequence of cards, it did not seem to mark the sights or resting places of a journey, like postcards from abroad are meant to. If there was a journey, it was untraceable from the clues provided; the locations of the ruined monuments on the front of the cards didn’t match the provenance of the postmarks on their backs. However, Mother clearly was on some kind of journey; all the cards had been sent from cities with major airports or railway stations.
Dear Boys, I’m fine, how are you? I had no idea it would be so easy to leave. Now I’m on an island quartered by alleyways, with flowering trees, staying in what seems to be half a palace … the men are so beautiful, such teeth, and everyone has black hair like ours, perhaps you two would feel at home, who knows, love,
Darlings; jasmine, vines, roses, bougainvillea, oleander, hibiscus, anemones, cedar, my love as always,
I am the woman without jewels, the minister without portfolio, the gigolo without a dictionary, a duchess stranded without her car. I wanted to send you a map with this place marked on it but cannot find one,
(This was written in a shaky script, as if it had been written on a moving train.)
Mother’s cards were all put in Boy’s box of papers, the original shoebox with the scarlet ribbon, though it was almost empty now after the ritual burning. The few letters and pictures which had survived had survived by accident (they had got stuck in the bottom of the box when he’d emptied it into the flames). Only the portrait of the soldier had been deliberately rescued, and O had done that.
Now when he got it out and looked at it Boy thought that the picture looked not so much like himself, but like a young and handsome version of the dead man, of his ‘Father’. For a while he kept it out of the box, on the chair by the bed, but face down, as if he didn’t want this man to see the two of them making love. Then after a while he turned it face up on the chair. Then he put it up on a shelf in the bedroom. And then he hung it on a wall in the spare room, the room that had been the old man’s room. Sometimes he’d stand in front of it before he went to bed, before he went to join O in bed, he’d look up at it and return its gaze and say, Goodnight, Father.
And even though Boy of course had O now to talk to in the evenings he would still sometimes go into their room and shut the bedroom door and get all of Mother’s postcards out of the box, and the surviving letters and photos too, and begin to lay them out like a game of patience, just like he used to. He might have said, I still want to see how it comes out. And when he had laid out his papers quietly in a circle around their bed, he would talk quietly to them; but whereas before it had always been questions, requests for advice, now he would often talk back to the people in the pictures or those whose names were on the letters, and to Mother too, via her postcards. He would lie there on the bed and tell them quietly about his life, not just asking questions now but telling them things, giving them all the details of a particular problem, or cataloguing all the events of a day from its beginning to its end. And at the end of his recital of the details of his life he would pause, and say to his papers and cards, Well, what do you think?
They got some of us queens round to help redecorate the flat, and we painted out the scorch marks in the hallway with white emulsion and got the last of the broken mirror and china up out of the cracks between the floorboards. And we had the radio on all the time, or one of O’s records, and I think that all this wasn’t just to do with redecorating the flat but also with somehow fumigating it with laughter and loud, passionate music. A couple of the boys, who were actually at that time a couple – but very young, very in love in a demonstrative sort of way, always showing off how much they fancied each other, you know how they are, with their matching moustaches, as if no one had ever done this before, as if they had invented love, as well as sex – well, this couple stayed on after the decorating was finished one night, and were snogging on the sofa while O and Boy were in the kitchen fixing dinner. And they got carried away (this is what I heard anyway), and when O came in with the food he asked them to carry on, and O and Boy watched while these two relative strangers (both of them were working out every other day and dancing every night, they were that sort, so they were quite into this exhibitionism, they thought they were so damned special having a handsome boyfriend), O asked them to carry on and O and Boy watched these two young men making love right there. I expect the boys thought that this was some kind of sexual perversion, that O and Boy liked to watch rather than do it themselves.
I expect they thought that since O and Boy had been living together for a while they no longer did it with each other and so liked to watch other people; I don’t expect they guessed that Boy was still younger than them, because what he had been through and his status as O’s partner made him seem an older man to them. I don’t expect that they realised that this wasn’t a sexual moment for O and Boy at all, but a tender one, that this was somehow and in a strange way a sort of housewarming to them, or a dedication of the hearth.
After they had gone, Boy said to O, What are we going to do with his room? Maybe we could put a note up somewhere or in the paper, if The Bar was still open of course we could just ask around. We should put a note up somewhere and find some boy who hasn’t got anywhere to live, you know how hard that is when you first get here. We could phone round and see if anyone needs somewhere to live. I don’t see why we should have an empty room and I don’t think it’s right we should. And we need the money. They did need the money; the cheques had stopped arriving. The very last one (and this was the very last time that they heard from Mother) came in an envelope with a postcard, a few notes on torn scraps of paper, and a photograph. The postcard was a very beautiful altarpiece from a museum, a Virgin and Child with St Joseph and Donor, with Joseph in scarlet and the donor (or is St Anne?) in a dress with a silver hem; she must have chosen it specially. And this was the message on the back:
Dear Boys, in haste. I need the money more than you do now. Do make sure that you get a job as soon as possible, Boy, so that you have two incomes; remember that money is the most important thing. I will get an address to you soon, as there are some things I need for people here, and some new books. I am starting a new library.
And this is what she had written on the scraps of paper also enclosed:
The Family – penetrates the interior – ’what country friends is this’ – love, Miss, Missie, Mademoiselle, M., Madam, Madame, Mother, Anne.
And the photograph, which I now have, is the last known image of Madame; a polaroid of her with a monkey. However, this is not the usual tourist picture – the monkey is not perched on her shoulder, and she is standing on the edge of some desert, not on a promenade. Madame has tied a kind of golden, silky scarf across her eyes; in her right hand she is holding, instead of the usual scales, her feathered evening bag, and it is bulging with paper money. She has no sword; on her left hand (both her arms are stretched out straight, just like the statue) is sitting the tiny, grinning monkey, showing its teeth and screaming with anger or some kind of laughter. Her pose is exactly that of the great golden statue which was seen to rock and sway in the storm on the night of O and Boy’s engagement. She has kicked off her shoes.
On the back of the photograph Madame has written, JUSTICE.
After that last picture of her, let me show you a final picture of these two.
You want to know, of course, what happened to them after Mother left. You want to know what happens next to these two. You recognise that what really matters is what happens when two people try to hold things together. You do not believe that love is enough, and you think that what happens after love (if you see what I mean), the practice and not just the principle of love, that is what matters. That is what you want to know how to do. That is what you want to see a picture of.
Here it is:
Boy looks slightly older, but O does not; his face will remain that of a man in his prime and pride of his life for some time, that fixed, stylish and indeed stylised beauty of The Older Man. He will always be handsome. And Boy will always be beautiful, I think. He spends the evening or night with a younger man sometimes now, a man younger than himself, a boy really; and these boys he chooses are always very excited to be chosen by such a beauty, and of course are even more flattered when someone like me tells them that they have been with half of such a famous couple, almost a legend or institution in our circle.
But for the purposes of this picture which I said I’d show you, there are just the two of them. They are not holding hands, they are not even looking lovingly at each other, I suppose because I want you to understand that this is no simple or obvious coupling. But they are very definitely together.
Boy has his shirt off. Someone who slept with Boy just recently told me that he now has a tattoo on his left breast, that is, over his heart. It is quite strange to have had that done at his age; it’s usually done when men are still trying to prove something. I will include that tattoo in the picture for you. When Boy is older that mark on his breast will assert a pride that the rest of his body will no longer justify. The blue lines will have spread under the skin of his breast as the pectoral muscles have fallen and flattened; but they will still spell the same word. And when some young man asks him why he had it done, I hope that Boy (we will still call him that) will say that he had it done as proof that he was once admired, and that though men may have lied to him, they did not lie about that. They admired and adored him, and left the marks of their teeth on every part of his body. I know there was one who would groan aloud at the touch of his hair. And more than all these infatuations, this body of his, this body of his belonged to another man (yes, I will use these words here, I will); the man who we all agreed was the handsomest man in town, the one love in whom all the others came to rest, the prince amongst men. And it was for him and at his request that Boy made this mark on his body, and not for any whimsical or ordinary contract but as a sign of his faith in the love of men, in the fact that it is indeed possible to choose a man, or men, and you be quiet now and sleep and don’t ask me any more questions.
Oh how I wish there really was a picture like that for me to give you, oh how I wish there was one final picture of them I could show you, some last kiss or concluding image, the three of them together would be best, or the two of them would do, a picture of them kissing or fucking or a real proper wedding picture, or a kiss bravely silhouetted against rising flames. I wish this last picture of them could be staged against the backdrop of some grand historical event. I have just read this book in which the terrible story of their fated romance comes to its stunning climax, played out against the flickering flames of the Siege of Krishnapur, and having read that I wish that Boy could look out from their fifth-floor balcony one night and see something like that, see this city once again in flames. Let it be a night with fire, let it be a night at least with fireworks, let it be a night with car horns, but not just a holiday, let it be the night of the sacking of the palace of John of Gaunt, when the looters in their pride and their fury cast a whole dinner service of solid gold into the dark river; let it be the night when the war was over and men kissed in the streets; let it be the night Franco died and the two Spanish queens I was with got drunk and started making out right there on the dinner table, let it be Riga, let it be Budapest, let it be Berlin, but let it be in our own country, right here in our city, this city, let it be a night to remember, a night to say, I was there. Let it be the night we raised a hundred thousand pounds, let it be the night they changed the law and we danced all night, spilling out of The Bar and dancing our way into the street, and nobody stopped us, let this be a night when the Strand and the Embankment are solid with people crying and cheering and cheering, cheering as Madame walks out into the arclights illuminating the makeshift stage in the middle of the square, as she walks into the lights, walking with a silver-headed cane now but still, just for old times’ sake, still wearing the silver beaded dress, those same old sequins blazing out under the arclights as if she was burning or shining, a very grand lady, and look, there are Boy and O helping her up the six steps and across the stage, this is the picture I’ve been looking for, this is the picture of the three of them together again, arm in arm on that historic night, and now everyone is going very quiet, for everybody knows that it is at least thirty years since she last sang; and her voice is cracked, and her breasts have gone and are sagging, but her hair is still defiantly raven black, and a great hush spreads over the crowd now, people begin to light the candles they have brought with them and to hold them up; and Madame steps forward just like she always used to, steps up to the microphone, and she puts her hand over her heart. And there is silence, you can hear the hush spreading through the crowd, and then she sings, or rather half speaks, the words which all we all know, the words we all knew and loved so well:
Your goodbyes.
Left me with eyes that cry,
How can I go on, dear, without you?
and from the great crowd comes rising the whispered chorus, a great, strong, slow, gentle sound, everyone now holding up a candle or just a hand or a photograph of a person who couldn’t be here tonight:
All of me,
Why not?
Take all of me;
Can’t you see?
I’m
No good,
Without you.
Boy wishes sometimes that there was a phone number for her.
He would often sing her song to himself when O was at work, mimicking her voice with considerable skill; but what he really wanted was to be able to pick up the phone and speak to her, or to hear her singing down the phone; or just to be able to play a tape of her singing it, All of me, take all of me.
That’s Boy’s song now; and that’s the song I’d choose, that’s the song I always ask Gary to play when I see him at the new place where he’s working now, I say, some music for the ending please, Gary, something to sweeten and elevate the ending of this story, something to celebrate the fact that they are still together, thank you, that’s it, and the last words of this story are Goodbye Boys. Goodbye Mother. Goodbye Father. Goodbye, and Thank you, Thank you and Goodnight.
Somehow, when I read … I never used to really believe what I read, but only thought it very strange, and a good deal too strange to be altogether true; though I never thought the man who wrote the book meant to tell lies.
Herman Melville, Redburn, 1849
This novel contains fragments from and reworkings of The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde, 1891), Hadrian The Seventh (Fr. Baron Corvo, 1904), Maurice (E.M. Forster, 1914), Our Lady of the Flowers (Jean Genet, 1943), The Heart in Exile (Rodney Garland, 1953) and the screenplay of the film Victim (Janet Green and John McCormick, 1961). The line ‘Buddy, will you take me home?’ is from Stephen Sondheim’s musical Follies. The novel entitled Lady Into Fox which Mother gave Boy to read was written by David Garnett and published in 1923. The lyrics of ‘All of Me’ were written by Simons and Mark (copyright Bourne and Company, New York, 1931) and are quoted by permission of Francis Day and Hunter Limited, London WC2H OEA and Marlong Music Corporation, New York.
Neil Bartlett, Ghent, Newcastle, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Toronto, Amsterdam, London, 1986–90.
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