In hiccups I woke up, being pushed downstairs through a spinning hounds-tooth tunnel. Beeswax polished my oesophagus until it shone and I retched. Then I was in a car, and the car was sailing forwards – and my eyes numbed backwards into silence.
The paint-thinning can was affixed again to my mouth and nose – and I woke inside it. I was walking upstairs now, with wings on my feet, through a corridor of amoebae. The air smelt expensive. The steps were fractals. Dawn’s handbag was on fire.
But my skeleton was straightening into itself, I was better-aware – and a door opened before me, dim bulbs were lit – and I was in a bedroom beside a wall of glass, high above London under night.
In fast-forward, Kimber removed his helmet, pushed me onto his bed, and held and huffed from the paint thinner himself. His eyes regained their rage.
My mind was floating sideways in a dozen separate baubles – but one of them bobbed in delight at what he’d done. The paint thinner would derange his senses beyond the extremes that meth had taken him to – and perhaps he knew that, perhaps he wanted to go there – beyond even the desires and memories that terrified him – towards something stranger. Towards somewhere I was stronger – my parallel world, the world of the sick – where I was ruler, and he was just a visitor.
He inhaled from the tin again and forced me to inhale again – and then we seemed to swap hands – so that mine were the hands that kept the tin to my mouth, and his were the hands that tried to force my hands away. But then the tin lowered – and Kimber was far away – on top of the steeple of Saint Paul’s Cathedral – and I was on the other side of the Thames, on a deck chair on top of the Tate Modern – and his hands were stretching across the water, and he was punching me, or undressing me, or both – and a chandelier above us bulged in inflorescence – and the Thames became the bed again.
‘Are we home?’ I asked, at last able to speak.
‘Ah your voice survives… that is fortunate,’ he said, with a curious new softness, far from the visionary conviction of his meth persona. ‘I was afraid you’d end in idiocy. And that would have been no —’
A wind covered his words – a wind with the scent of fried chicken and the ringing of mobile phones – and the wind bucked sideways and the phones turned into pigeons, in Trafalgar Square – and the pigeons flew up and south towards our perches – at St Paul’s and the Tate Modern – and settled on the Millennium Bridge – and the bridge wobbled back into being a bed.
Kimber knelt over me to stroke my painted face, speaking into the wind. His gun was in his other hand. He was trying to transfer my paint onto himself – but under the paint thinner’s influence, he was as unsure whose body was where – and occasionally he missed us both altogether. His action soon simplified into smacking my neck and then his stomach in overlapping gardenia palm prints that made him laugh. His laughter quietened the wind.
‘I am wearing you, now, Leander, I said I’d wear you,’ he said, his tone softening as the paint thinner bled further through his brain. ‘But you came back to me, knowing this is how you would end. How did you not predict this? We… we can’t work together.’
He sounded unconvinced by himself – like he had forgotten how to play the boss – or simply no longer believed in his performance of that masculinity, perhaps because he knew how it felt to kneel in front of me – and perhaps, secretly, longed to kneel there again.
‘We are working together,’ I said, surprising myself with the sound of my own voice. ‘I predicted this. You need rituals, and you want to learn a new one. You had to take me home.’
I stretched my arm behind his back – and it came out of his mouth. I looked into his face, and it was my face. I leaned forward for a kiss, but my lips closed on metal – the barrel of his gun. My heels were lifted up and I did not know if he or I were lifting them – my muscles didn’t answer. I could have been naked – but my skin was a canopy of leaves in a rainforest.
‘Why did you come back to me?’ he asked.
‘Because I am your son,’ I said.
I remembered the bite of his syringe in my urethra and his gun’s silencer in my arsehole and the force of him fucking me as I vomited – but memory and body were interchangeable here – and it could be the past, or it could be the present re-enacting the past. Kimber was smiling childishly from both sides of my head – inhaling through his nose as he sucked on his gun’s silencer.
‘If I’m your father, your father,’ he said, his voice randomly varying its volume, as though grappling with tenderness. ‘You must tell me who I’m replacing. Who was your mother before Dawn? How did your parents die?’
He pointed the gun over my heart, but my heart was outside my body – asparagus green – beating in the same irregular jerks as the bed. And his eyes were geckos darting over the duvet, never meeting mine.
‘My biological mum and dad aren’t dead,’ I said, my speech calmly quick. ‘I’m a suburban kid from a normal nuclear middle-class family, with an older sister and a younger brother. There was love enough. But on my fifteenth birthday I decided to be someone else, so I left and changed my name and never spoke to them again. I’m a self-made demon, that’s my secret – and I’ve spent so many seasons in hell since then that I’ve become invulnerable. But I’ve glimpsed your hell – and I’ve glimpsed your father. Tell me, who was Kimber before Kimber?’
‘I don’t believe you,’ he said, tapping his head hard with the butt of his gun, trying to force himself to concentrate. ‘You’re, you’re being incomprehensible.’
I was trying to climb into his skull – my fingers were already fidgeting under his fingers’ skin, my teeth were already behind his teeth, nervously chewing his cheeks from the inside – trying to eat backwards down to his vocal cords.
‘You never had a father, you never had a family,’ he insisted. ‘You’re an orphan. You must be. Your voice is faked. Don’t – don’t tell me you have a family.’
There was no sandalwood in his tone anymore, and no vinegar aftertaste in my gums. Somewhere in the floating pockets of my mind, I knew he was in a hypnotic state again – in that terror of desire, wanting to give up control, not understanding why, not understanding anything.
‘What happened to Nikolas?’ I asked, with a new authority.
‘He is well, I got what I wanted – I, I got you your invisibility, I, I don’t know why I did it, for you, I —’
He tried to match my assertive tone, but his voice had buckled back into uncertainty.
‘The cover photo, you’ll be above suspicion, it’s a clever idea, disguise, I, I wanted my power across the city, the bruises, I don’t know why, you wanted to be my son, you said,’ he laughed worriedly, ‘because you – you got what you wanted, did you?’
My body was becoming more discrete, even as the paint thinner’s nausea increased – and I moved my hand over his, to where it was holding the gun over the side of the bed. With my other hand I forced up his chin so that our eyes met – and willed him to meet all the violence of his empire in my eyes, all the horror and grief and guilt and arousal and fear of his childhood – here in my eyes, in this room, in my voice.
‘No – I didn’t get what I wanted, not yet,’ I said. ‘Don’t look away from me now, it’s my turn to talk. I came back to you to talk to you… I wanted to tell you about Dawn’s old radio. She’d sing along to it when we were going to sleep – though she never knew the words… and she’d say to me, don’t worry darling, the painkiller will start its killing soon, I’ve got you, I got you, and she’d sing me to sleep… and the song she sang the night she met you – she misheard ‘I’ll go back to the road’ as ‘I’ll go back to Rome’, and I teased her for that – for longing for a different life, of travel and warmth, not wanting to be trapped and high in a cold mould-filled room with me, with nothing but our love for each other left… When she found me I was a lonely sick little boy, crying from constant pain – I was eighteen but I could have been eight or eighty, I’d been through a whole life already, and my life still hadn’t begun… and she held me in the cold, promising to get me some heroin for the pain, promising to teach me everything she knew… and she taught me… she – I didn’t have a sense of humour till she taught me, she had laughter and she gave it to me… and then you came along and she thought you’d save her like she saved me, she said life was about to happen to her… but then I found her in your bathroom in a wedding dress, and she looked like me when I was eighteen, a sick boy screaming in pain… she said you weren’t the man she thought you were, she needed to get out, but you’d kill her if she left you, or you’d sell her like you sold other women… so she made me inject her with everything we had, she said we can’t let him win, don’t let him win, don’t worry darling, the painkiller will start its killing soon, I’ll go back to Rome...’
He was paralysed by the visions the paint thinner was writing out of the words between our eyes. Gently, still forcing him to look at me, with our fingers still wrapped together around the trigger, I guided the gun up to the side of my head.
‘She didn’t want to be your wife,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to be your son. How could you have a son? You weren’t the man Dawn wanted, you weren’t the man your father wanted. Did you really think I wanted to be invisible – hidden by a magazine cover – because I wanted to help you? What is there to help you with? You don’t have anything. The police know everything, of course they know everything, I told them everything, they’ll be here soon. Your empire is over. I came to you to… to end – as pain would have ended me long ago, anyway, if I hadn’t had Dawn. And I came to you to… beat you. And so… I just wanted a parting joke – in a magazine cover, an online self more real than my physical one – an image to be adored – and then I could… then I could go one step further into the invisible – become as invisible as my illness, so it can’t hurt me anymore – I want to be erased in body – and then I’ll get what I want, and you’ll be beaten.’
Kimber gazed, enraptured, limp, his hand entirely held up by mine around the gun against my head – and softly, he began to cry.
‘When I was a child,’ I whispered, ‘I would walk for hours along a dual carriageway, holding my toy lion called Lyon – looking up into the evening, dreaming of getting out of the city eventually too – and I thought the aeroplanes were sad because they could never meet, always leaving trails for each other, but flying alone – and now —’
‘No!’ Kimber screamed – a scream of love, a final vanity.
He pulled the gun away from me – and trembled a moment, his eyes in mine – and with an ecstatic crack, shot himself dead.
Mosquitos filled the air. My ears screeched – and the agony of the gunshot aroused me – and I couldn’t find my lower body – and he had an erection, or I had an erection, or we both did, and I ejaculated, or he did, or we both did – amazed at the brain sprayed across the pillow and the face sinking inwards into its skull and the blood leaking under him towards my knees.
But my energy was failing; the paint thinner was wearing off, my performance was ending.
‘Francis?’ I called into the drone’s buzz, not very loudly, crawling backwards off Kimber, turning to face the rest of the flat.
My body weighed as though it were underwater, and I wanted to stop, sleep here, give up – but I had to search. The room’s acoustics seemed corrupted by the gunshot. Kimber was dead! Time was too rapid to understand. The fatigue confused me in seconds-long windows of amnesia – and suddenly I was back at the bedside, trying to roll Kimber’s corpse off the mattress, but it was too heavy. And it was too bloodied for me to get in next to him – and Francis was still unfound.
So I staggered into a bathroom, and then a cupboard – and then another bedroom, and there was a little light on, and a bed, and boy on the bed – in a grey tracksuit – and white trainers.
‘Francis!’ I called. ‘Francis, it’s Leander.’
I was at Francis’ side – Francis was safe! Francis was here! – and I was watching him uncurl his body. He smelt of urine. I kissed him and kissed him – and tried to yell in delight – but croaked out only paint. His left wrist was cuffed to the headboard. His eyes opened but said nothing. I ran – with no energy but the weightlessness of relief – back to Kimber’s room. I sought in the bundle of clothes on the floor the key to the handcuffs. In seconds, I was returned to Francis’ side with no memory of the intervening journey.
I unlocked Francis’ handcuffs and he wobbled upright, shaking his legs. He opened his mouth without speaking. I tried to hug him but he pushed me away.
‘He’s gone,’ I said. ‘It’s just me.’
He staggered wordlessly into the dim corridor and crossed it into the kitchen, to drink from the sink.
‘Francis,’ I said, dragging myself after him. ‘I knew you’d be here.’
My need to hold him was more than I could bear – it cancelled the rest of my consciousness, so that even as he was here, he seemed a mirage. But before I could reach him, he retreated, groping for the fridge.
‘Don’t touch me,’ he said.
I halted pathetically. Too tired to stand, I crumpled against the sink, into the surface he’d left wet.
‘Francis,’ was all I could say.
‘Don’t talk to me.’
Shaking, he ripped open a packet of salami and ate it all. Back-lit by the fridge, his cheekbones cast sharper shadows, and made his expression more carnal – like he was experiencing his own starvation as erotic. I lapped at the water he’d spilled.
Time jumped again, and he was gone. I turned to see him by the front door.
‘Where you going?’ I asked. ‘Stay here. I’m... I’m tired.’
‘Fuck you,’ he said. ‘Fuck you. You’re disgusting. You’re… disgusting. You don’t give a shit about me. This is you covering up for yourself. Don’t talk to me. You’re disgusting. Don’t follow me.’
He closed the door. I was alone.
Time flickered, and I found myself on Francis’ bed – still warm and wet from where he’d been lying. I had nothing in my head.
‘Is that fucking it then?’ Dawn asked.
I looked around – Dawn was hovering in the doorway, in the forget-me-not nightie I’d stained with my and Kimber’s blood.
‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘Where’ve you been?’
‘I’ve been being a ghost, sweetheart. It’s fucking great. But I come here to check that you’re alright and you’ve fucked it all up, didn’t you? Do you know what you just did?’
‘Not really. Can you sleep next to me?’
‘Course I can, gorgeous. But why’s it smell like piss in here?’
‘Francis was locked up in here too long.’
Dawn’s ghost got into bed beside me. I closed my eyes and faded from my body.
‘So now what?’ she asked.
Beside us a choir began singing softly, sarcastically, ‘Homeless, homeless, we are our own home, homeless, homeless…’
‘I dunno,’ I heard myself say. ‘I dunno —’