It was Fox. A blend of feelings churned in me like a complex and potent emotional cocktail. Relief, surprise, disappointment, anger. Walter Fox leaned down and kissed my mouth. A kiss full of teeth. The gasoline taste of tequila. He was drunk. He had never kissed me on the lips when we were together and my mind scrambled to construct the correct response.
‘Gimme two of what he’s having,’ he said. The barman looked at me. He had thrown Fox out the last time we were here. It had been at the height of the summer, more than a year ago, but it seemed like a decade. Everything had changed and nothing had changed. I knew he hated Fox. Most of my friends did. But I nodded and he reached for the vodka bottle.
‘So,’ said Fox, ‘what’s happening? Still at the same place?’ I shrugged, I decided to be cool and noncommittal this time.
‘How about you? Are you working?’
‘Nah mate. Same old story. Selling a bit of weed and that. You know how it is.’ Yes, I knew how it was. Selling a bit and smoking a lot. He was smiling at me with that beguiling, bad-boy half grin that once dissolved me. I remembered those eyes. I remembered falling into those syrupy eyes. And I remembered how they could change without warning into blank channels.
‘I’m going for a piss,’ I said. I needed a moment to think. To sort myself out.
I never knew how Fox got my address. Perhaps I gave it to him in the bar where we first met. When we linked eyes and I wouldn’t let go. He turned up at the fag end of a fag dinner party I was giving to celebrate the first asparagus of the season. Everyone was drunk and a bit jaded. The table was littered with plates and leftovers and empty bottles. We were having a conversation about the effect of asparagus on the urine — that sharp, green metallic smell it imparts. Someone must have left the door open and Fox appeared on the threshold with a joint sticking out of his grin and a six-pack under his arm. He was wearing a white singlet that exposed the taut bronze arms and chest he was sculpting at the gym. His black hair was cropped short and his black eyes were as limpid and deceptive as moonlight.
The party revived with the advent of this handsome latecomer. Suddenly we all became sharp and witty. I put a new tape into the machine and turned up the volume: Something’s gotten hold of my heart, keeping my soul and my senses apart. This was to be the song of the summer. Fox jockeyed himself into a seat next to me so that his thigh pressed against mine. I tentatively returned the pressure, barely able to believe my luck. He stayed until the last of my guests had gone. It was very late. He asked if I would drive with him to the beach. It would soon be sunrise and he had another six-pack in the car. I was tired and I could feel the mounting threat of a massive hangover. I recklessly invited him to spend the rest of the night with me.
‘Nah, mate. I’m not like that.’
‘But I am.’ I said, feebly.
‘I know mate.’ He drew me into a hug and for a minute I thought he would kiss me. But he turned and I heard the door slam and his boots bounding up the stairs. I didn’t expect to see him again.
But he returned the next Friday and the next and I lived for those weekend extravaganzas. We would hurl ourselves into the turbulence, drinking and carousing all night and all day, to be washed up on the shores of Monday morning, parched, hungover and edgy. I tricked myself into thinking I was in love with him, that he was my lover. I paraded him around the town from bar to bar like a prize showdog. And woe betide him if he was caught licking anyone’s hand but mine. I would barricade myself behind a wall of jealous silence and close my wallet. Needless to say, and to my eternal chagrin, we never made love or even slept together. Fox stayed on the couch. But many are the times, deluded by alcohol, I crept into the moonlit living-room in my underpants and insinuated myself next to his skin.
‘Give it a rest, man,’ he would sigh and decamp to my bed, leaving me stranded.
The last time I saw Fox was when he stormed out of my apartment with blood on his fists. My blood.
It had been a torrid afternoon. One of those looming days of summer when the heat drives you inside and daylight burns until nine o’clock at night; the deadening, shadowless sunlight that bleaches the blue from the sky, ignites scrub-fires and fricasees the brains of human beings. Fox and I were playing desultory scrabble and drinking our way through the fridge. Fox lit a joint and the pupils flared in his eyes. He had taken off his shirt and I became mesmerised by the architecture of the bones at the base of his throat. His ripe nipples. We abandoned the game when the beer ran out. The cretinous monosyllables seemed to testify to the tone of the afternoon — slam, dope, skin, zoo. I reached into the fridge for one of the bottles of eight dollar Australian Champagne — shampoon, as we called it — that we had taken up that summer. It was as sour and virulent as carbonated mouthwash. Fox rewound the tape and cranked up the level: Something’s gotten into my life, cutting me straight through my dreams like a knife. We sat there without speaking while the tape played itself out. Drinking, sweating, watching the sky turn dark blue and then purple outside the window.
We had reached that dangerous substratum of drunkenness where it seems possible for a man to peel back the veneer, take out his heart and lay it on the table. We became engorged with sentiment. We recounted our adventures together. Our heroic weekends of triumph and catastrophe. The time that Fox had picked up a man by the throat, smashed his face and tossed him down an escalator for calling me a fag. We planned world trips on the proceeds of the lottery prizes we would share with each other. New York, Paris, London. We invented an imaginary future as glittering and precarious as a pyramid of champagne glasses balanced on the table in front of us. Fox reached over and put his hands on my shoulders.
‘I’ll always love you, mate,’ he said and I was filled with a yearning so acute that I wanted to mutilate him.
‘Prove it,’ I said, pulling him in so close that our noses touched. I could see myself reflected twice in his eyes as I slipped my hand down the front of his track-pants.
His fist split the skin over my left eye and then landed in my stomach. The air went out of me and I was down on one knee. His boot caught me under the chin and flipped me onto my back. A glass hit the floor and exploded next to my head. The lamp ricocheted off the fridge.
‘Fucking queer,’ sobbed Fox. ‘Why did you have to ruin it, you fucking queer.’
When he had gone, I sat for a long time with blood coming out of my face, listening to the dial tone seeping from the receiver of the telephone, trying to construe the letters of the alphabet scattered on the table. I couldn’t see where to begin to clean up the mess, so I reassembled the phone and called Grace to come and get me.