Funny how moments become stepping-stones . . . . . . how one thing leads to another , as one leap sparks a memory the floodgates open and spill.
It was a cold February, a few weeks before my birthday. There was still blackened snow-ice on the ground and piles of orange salt in the cul-de-sac where I lived. I was 12 years old and had fingerless gloves and socks with individual toes. It makes me laugh to think of that now. It was a saturday morning and I read the news with horror and excitement. Sid Vicious was dead. In all honesty, I didn’t like him much, his snarling mouth frightened me. But I knew someone who did. His name was Robert Sykes and he was the older brother of my friend Pen and the object of my devotion since I’d been about 8 years old.
I put eyeliner under my eyes . I wore cherry lip gloss and willed myself not to lick my lips. As I left the house that morning clutching the article, torn from the newspaper, I wanted to be older. I wanted to have straight shiny hair and full breasts like Pen. I wanted Robert to look at me like he did at the girls in the rec who wore tartan kilts over tight black trousers and backcombed their hair.
Age is a strange creature. It seems to pay no heed to time. Robert was 3 years older than me and yet when we were 8 and 11 there was no distance between us. We would lay in the fields to the back of the estate, before they built more houses. Once, he flattened a canoe shape into the grass and as I lay on my back he stood above me with a twisted stick for a pole and sang the advert, ”only the crumbliest, flakiest chocolate……tastes like chocolate never tasted before” as he pretended to pull a punt through the reeds. The sun was behind his head and he looked like a golden rod emanating rays of light.
To remember it seems like yesterday.
There were other times, always in fields it seems. Watching an arc of gold as he peed into rosebay willowherb, head back and laughing. I was mesmerised by the sight of his grubby hand holding his pale cock which seemed to be like a naked baby bird. There was no shyness. But at 12 and 15 the years had stretched. He was burgeoning sex and introspection. I was still a kids kiss-chase . I welcomed anything that narrowed that gap.
At his house we sat in the kitchen. He was the only one in, I’d woken him up. His eyes were puffy from sleep and his hair was pushed to one side, pillow stuck. He read the article solemnly while I watched him all over. His shoulders were hunched sharp, I saw their outline through the thin cloth of his T-shirt. Sheared off points as if a pair of wings had been cut away and his toes curled around the steel of the kitchen stool.
I knew he sniffed glue and I thought I could smell it about him. I’d seen him, in the woods with older boys. Lurching, a bow-legged underwater walking. He’d laughed when I’d asked him about it, said it made him see things . Blue hedgehogs and faces in the souls of feet. But you see things anyway he’d smiled. He was tender.
And this is the point where memory plays tricks, when it turns and runs away, laughing. Because for all the clarity of that moment, of Robert’s hunched pale frame, of the smell of glue, of the gallop in my heart towards him, I cannot remember how he reacted to the news. Did he shrug it off, did he swallow hard, did he swear and rage ? I simply cannot remember.
The closing scene. I remember the Sykes’ kitchen. Always cluttered with a formica table and a tin opener attached to the wall. Fugged up windows and the sweet smell of slowly decaying fruit . Robert stood up and took a pomegranate from a bowl on the table. He sliced its golden skin and handed me a half. I think it was only the second pomegranate I’d ever eaten. And then we sat, side by side, picking pips. Avoiding the earwax bitterness of yellow pith. We worked in silence savouring the full red beads. Sticky sweet fingers struggling until he found two safety pins and then we pricked in unison, forearms rubbing as we brought the seeds to our mouths.
Stepping stones and memories. Whenever I hear of Sid Vicious, I think of pomegranates in the kitchen and those first rushings of sexual love.
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You are not my mother I shrieked
Through taut glare and clenching.
The ink on the carpet was my stain.
She slapped my face with words -
A clean across wounding -
A Momus to my mum’s Eupheme. I sobbed
Knowing my mother lie broken and stitched
As her sister-witch took care not to mark me.
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Some nights I’m haunted by footsteps on Montmartre cobbles.
The skies back then were slopped out grey and chilled by the November winds. Alone on the steps was a good place to sit but after twenty empty minutes an old lady took my hand, raised me to my feet and pushed my face to the side, profile towards the cemetery. She stroked above the tangles in my hair and I’m sure she whispered Musidora before pulling out tiny silver scissors. As she clipped she breathed heavily and out of the corner of my eye I saw her elbows crane and fly. I have always loved the silhouette cutters of Montmartre. A species apart they inhabit a world of deep slopes and polished cobbles, of smokey bars and shadow theatres. They work the streets, plying their craft back to those dirty heady days when Suzanne Valadon walked her goat. When making art was a brotherhood.
It didn’t take her long, perhaps 90 seconds in all. She placed the black shadow onto a cream board and watched as I caught my breath. The day had already been too much for me but her inky black kirie gave me poise. It fixed me like a silver halide in the womb-red glow of a developing room. As I fumbled in my pockets she touched my wrist, ‘ c’est pratique’ she smiled.
Perhaps I am crazy. On days like this, I hear her words.
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I can never be rid of the fear that they don’t like me, that I’m not good enough. That I’m unfindable. That essentially I am alone and negligible. This is what I see as my under-the-table contagion. I am like a child, hiding under a table , cross-legged and watching the world, an uneasy observer. Yet inside my head I’m good and kind, I’m sex and lick and yield and kick. Inside I’m stretched-out fantastic, holding nataraja-asana with grace, and the flowers I grow are beautiful. Blew bice and verdant . But outside it’s freckles and frizz and an Owen Meany voice. It’s simper and kowtow and knocking the neb, Sir. I’ll replay situations until I am toe-curled and red-faced and mortified.
How many useless knots I tie.
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When he hit her, it felt like a kiss. It was a song but it was also true. This wasn’t something she could talk about . Outside their bubble it would feel like a betrayal. But under an amber light in sheet twists and back arches, it was the sweetest thing.
He wasn’t a violent man. Childhood memories ran deep with him. At seven he had watched unnoticed as his uncle, a tall methodical man crushed a heavy bellied spider under his leather sole into a flagged stone floor. The image still appalled him. This was a different tyranny. It was flesh to flesh. It intoxicated him. The dark wanting look in her eyes spurred him on. Her submission caught him, weakened him , enslaved him to her. He wasn’t sure if it was love.
Weekends were like being in another country. The lie of the land was different, the light was altered. Anticipation flooded her and hardened him. Under a burrow of sheets with arms pinned and legs clutched she would barely whisper, ‘we are like animals’ and feral and thrusting he’d pant through tight lips and bared teeth , ‘we are animals’. It was then she knew it was something other than love.
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The man from 12 b eats his tea alone.
The nights are closing in now, it’s almost dark by 6 o’clock and he draws the curtains as the light becomes grainy outside. He feels safer that way. Held in his cocoon of a room surrounded by a clutter of stuff. It’s a small flat and the door opens straight from the street into his living room. The heavy stream of traffic blackens his window, sometimes kids coming home late and buzzing finger scrawl foul words and cartoon cocks. He hears them when he’s in bed and wonders that a piece of dirty thin glass can be such a powerful barrier. And a lure.
I see him twice a day on Saturdays. The first time is at 12.30 as he walks past, hair slicked and mouth smoking. His fingers glow at the nubs, stained by nicotine, saffron yellow and burnt umber. He always wears an old jacket. Harris Tweed with a ripped lining and a greasy collar. At 4.30 he passes again, homeward bound. His breath is beery and fagged and he walks differently, with a kowtowed slope, through rheumy eyes. He remembers coming home to the smell of cooking, to the sound of pan-clatter and radio-songs. To a time when the space he occupied was full of someone else. Now he comes back to a dank fridge and spilt-full ash trays. To a silence that has been waiting for him. There was a time when Saturdays meant dancing and girls in clean dresses with three-span waists. He’s not unhappy. In the pub, with the lights dimmed, he laughs side by side with the other day drinkers and bet makers. But at night , as the moors drink the dark at the end of the road and this small town rumbles in its sleep, he wonders just what happened.
..
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“What’s in a word ?” he asked. It was half past two in the morning, he was trying to get inside my head and I imagined strands of my hair inching towards his own, wrapping him like a vine.
“Words are like colours” I whispered. “They have their own hues and change according to the mouths they tumble from”. We lay there in silence with eyes closed. I wasn’t sure I could explain anymore.
I thought of plump swollen words or slimy viscous worded strands that leave the throat reluctantly in grief or anger. Words which sprinkle like glitter, bringing with them smiles and ridiculous moments of breath sucked away. I thought of sharp red-blue words to cut and cauterise and of my favourite; words eaten straight from anothers mouth- with no gap between- received before they can fall out into the world. In the dark I felt his mouth opening, mouthing full blown and softly, cunt , I caught and swallowed.
Cunt, a fleshy oyster of a word.
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‘I am fashioned out of perversity and there’s ribbons of lust amongst my hair.’
That’s how I introduced myself one stupid fanciful brimful night with the lights of Pigalle reflected in my eyes and the busy mix of exhaust fumes skirting around our ankles. I was drunk, of course. That’s the way he liked me best – the only way I liked myself.
He laughed and grabbed my hand.
The hotel room was as gloomy as we’d imagined. A beige brown concoction with the ghost of other lives ingrained in the walls. Deep reggae rumbled somewhere else sending the bed tingling and we opened the window to let the city in. Later that night the shower tray flooded and we mopped the floor naked and slippy with hotel towels smelling of laundries and bare wooden cupboards.
He was always a stranger to me, bringing with him the thrill of a first taste. As his fingers roamed my body I became twisted into something else, something away from myself. Seen through his eyes I was braver, funnier, lighter. He was a mirror who reflected all the right answers and consequently he was an addiction.
But above all else it was his name I loved. It flew from my mouth , the whole of it, first and second as I spent myself over and over again, or it clung to my lips , tongue tipping , delicate. Sometimes I wonder that had he been called John or Ben or anything else but his name, it would all have been so different.
Ok so. Shall I tell you how much I’d like to word wrap you sticky sweet and screaming ? Lick lick lick late night swollen and bandy toss damp hair into clumped flesh. Because you are whoreish, of that there is no doubt. If I scraped away the layers I’d find a boys amoral interior. We are simpler than the other girls , I’d laugh. No pontification, just blood lust action, sardine slippy ssssside be side on the bed and I’d provocatively accuse you through taut lips of p e n i s envy. Whispered, just like that. Hot breath swarming onto wet mouth steaming, a rush of prickling stinging welts. We’d laugh in snorts as I confess I’d like to try a dick on for size. Not because I want one forever. Not cold hard plastic but a real one. Just to be a man boy for a day and prove that it wasn’t gender man, it was what you are, what you like. We can’t box off so easily, we can’t try to explain it that way, that’s the way it just is, I’d sigh- we don’t need no god.
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love me
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He used to write
in two ways ( love me ! I cry )
the first time, meandering thoughts and
far fetched, stretched out climbs.
His second way ( love me,
I shout, for I need
to be loved ) – trickles secrets
as soft as the breeze .
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