I had to keep the car inside a line I was drawing in my mind – a line that arrowed towards Francis. I wasn’t able to consider him as a person, but as a place. My thoughts were my present senses entirely, crackling like wings lit by lightning. I drove without time, concentrating entirely on the line – along the route I’d taken two days before, when Dawn had been with me – through Wandsworth, towards his home, my home, our home. I knew he had to be home.
All the red double-decker buses had been deranged by the blizzard into seeming bright orange – and I saw them as huge wheeled persimmons, carrying opossums and monkeys instead of people – and they were all screaming for my attention.
But my attention never wavered from line that led to Francis – although that line ended unwisely, in a wall. The bumper crumpled as I turned into the bricks of his street. My head snapped forwards into awareness of my body. A wing-mirror cracked, the engine halted. I was hurled out of the car by my own heartbeat – my heart hovering, ivy, in the air before me, tugging me onwards on a leash of its ventricles. It tugged irregularly – and I stumbled after it towards Francis’ doorstep.
The doorbell found my fingers and as it rang I felt like I was waking up again, with the same bell I’d woken to hours ago – and as it rang, I remembered who I was and who I’d been in the hours since, and tears I hadn’t known for decades began to form in my eyes.
I cried, remorseful, and I rang, but there were no footsteps. I rang until I couldn’t distinguish the bell from other sounds. I rang until I spoke aloud, pleading, the tears mixing with the rain into my mouth.
‘I’m here. Francis, I’m here. I’ve come home. I didn’t mean to leave – or, I did mean to leave, but leaving was a mistake. I’m – sorry. This performance is emptying me. I admit it, it’s a defence. It’s so obvious. I’m pretending to be strong. Let me in. I want you to want me to come in. I’m not invulnerable, I’m not some supervillain beyond conscience who toys with wills for sport. I’m lonely. I’m still a boy, Francis. I’m a – a boy with a wasting body. I’m not a carnivore – or, I am but it’s because I was made one – a carnivore of circumstance – anaemic, fiending, and predatory, but without a predator’s power to choose. I pretend I chose to be this, but I – I was scared and proud and lying. Please open the door. I admit everything was a… it was a manipulation of who I am – I pretended I knew how to manipulate, or, I pretended I knew how to love in order to break those I loved. But those were games that had no experience behind them, except the resentments of loneliness. I wanted to hurt you because I was scared that you didn’t love me as much as I love you. I have no idea how to love. I don’t have any power. I know poverty and I’m still there. Let me in. I pretend I descend from a summit when I visit you – and when I visit anywhere else I pretend you’re the summit I’m descending from. I perform independence; I’ve been performing too long. I long for dependence. I was afraid I would never find my equal. But I don’t want an equal anymore, I want a… I want to be held. I don’t care about being understood or stimulated. Or I do, but I don’t need to be. Or I do, but I have higher needs as well. I want to be next to you. I want you to tell me about myself, Francis – I want you to see through my fiction that I’m a master of fictions – I’m not a master, I’m just a lonely opportunist. I’m a fraud trying to hold up different faces. And probably you know it already. I weave fantasies, that’s all I do, but behind them there’s only air. I’m an architect of exits without a home. I tricked myself into believing my own lies about myself. And I didn’t mean to kill Dawn, or I meant to, but I thought it was a story – I thought it was the kind of thing I ought to do because I was me. But the me I was telling myself that I was isn’t real. Or it is real, but it was still just act. And I regret it, I don’t believe it as a real me, or there are no real mes, but some are falser fictions than the others – and I can’t pretend to be the me that is indifferent to Dawn. I was wrong. And I can’t be indifferent to you. I was wrong. I can’t be the debonair libertine safe in my own vacuum-sealed ballad. I’m leaking. And I can’t continue. Let me in.’
The bell rang and rang unanswered. Crying, I sunk into the doorstep. The bell still rang in my head and in my chest, where it was lining my lungs in gunmetal. The camera I’d taken from Iris lay in my lap. The snow before me was too fast to fix on. But closer to me, my vision shook less. With whitened hands I slotted in Kimber’s memory card and pressed play. Francis’ yells rose into the bell’s rings.
I saw myself fucking him on screen. My face was not the face I knew from photographs – I was a victim playing the villain, and I played so well that I became victor, eventually. But Francis’ pain was too loud. I could not keep watching, however comforting the idea of him was. I pressed left on the camera’s click wheel, and we were replaced by a photograph of Dawn and Kimber, dressed in their wedding clothes in a dark room, holding hands. Dawn was smiling but her jaw was too stiff and her eyes had the bird-like fixity of a heroin high. I pressed left – to a video of Dawn showing off her wedding ring to the camera, laughing and sobbing at the same time.
‘I seen death and he don’t look like you,’ she shouted – joking or defiant, I couldn’t tell. ‘I fell out the sky like the moon. No… it was a squirrel – you’re the squirrel – it was my womb, you know, my womb! It passed on a disease to my son. You think I’m afraid of you? You ain’t gonna eat me – you ain’t done nothing worse to a son than I done to mine. I passed down a disease to Leander, and he weren’t even in my womb, he got a disease meant for my real son, but my real son’s immune, he can look at the moon – he was born and a buzzard got struck by lightning – he’s got health, nothing like us… and I never loved him enough, I loved the man who fucked me over, and I loved Leander, but that’s because I loved the disease, I loved the disease —’
I pressed left quickly. I wanted to be sick but couldn’t lift my body up – and there was a black image – or not quite black, and not quite still. It was a video of a dark ultramarine surface – and, as I strained to focus on it, I heard singing, faintly – perhaps Kimber, pretending to be a woman – or perhaps a boy, being forced to sing – off-screen, unaccompanied, a sad song.
‘I was the loneliest woman, I was the loneliest woman, I was the loneliest woman, in love with…’ – but it stopped.
I pressed left – and it was my and Francis’ video again.
So I listened once more to his yells and grunts, with my eyes closed, and tried to imagine him beside me. But I couldn’t imagine him as a body – he was a network instead – and we were surrounded by a crowd, indifferent to us but very close – commuters perhaps, pushing off a train, and we were obstacles to them, or I was an obstacle – and Francis was somehow outside of them – since he was made of lines, the lines of a subway system – the lines of the London Underground – and thousands of people were riding around inside him – and his brain was King’s Cross and his prostate was Victoria – and I was fucking him again – and he was moaning in pain and excitement – and his heart was a bridge beneath the sky before a tunnel – and his hands were quiet, somewhere in the suburbs, where the stations were far apart – and I couldn’t remember what it was like for Francis to be Francis.
I turned off the camera and threw it into the hedge – but Francis’ screams remained. The scent of almond surrounded me, rising almost into a flavour. I couldn’t feel the snow. My body was a window of stained glass – nickel, sulphur, selenium – in unequal fragments.
Francis’ cries combined with the bell – and I reached beneath my kilt. Dawn’s face shone over Francis’ face, in multiple exposure, until my face joined theirs too – all of us captives, victimised by Kimber’s camera – and in abhorrence and in sympathy, I was aroused.
I masturbated easily – the tensions of pity and fear, and the memory of our vulnerability and degradation, dissipating into pleasure.
And as I ejaculated, the shouting quietened and the hologram dimmed. The snow fell faster. But something was wrong.
My chest lurched. The sky went silent. Ultramarine melted off the edges of my face. Ladders of jagged ultramarine sprang up into the snow. I couldn’t breathe. My blood was deflating.
I was having a heart attack.
My sight shrank. I curled into a protective ball, but there was nothing to protect – I wasn’t a body anymore. I was glint above a cliff of almonds, drifting upwards into blackness.
My heart’s last beat was tolled by the bell – and then it stopped, and the bell widened into an eyeball – and I sped into it – into a pupil that let only the light of the bell inside – until I was at the heart of the eyeball – and it blinked, and the glint was gone.