London Triptych Read online

  I thought that only drugs or music could supply me with the transgressive thrill I sought. I never gave sex much thought. I had had a lacklustre and lustless grope with Julie one night before she and Spike started what my grandmother would quaintly call ‘courting’, but on the whole I knew even then that I preferred boys – knew that I would rather be kissing Spike. I hid this desire beneath a smog of drugs, claiming a cynical lack of interest in anything sexual, even though I imagined Spike naked and tied to my bed each time I masturbated. Spike and the others mockingly called me the Poet because books and the lyrics to songs – and the thoughts they inspired – were more important to me than trying to get laid. Whenever we got stoned they would all sink into torpor around me while I grew more and more animated by my own fucked-up monologue, till one of them would shout, ‘Hey, Poet, fuckin’ can it, will ya?’

  Then I discovered whoring.

  I wanted more than anything to leave this world behind, but not in order to destroy myself; only in order to find another world, one in which bodies glowed and danced like flames. Such a world is not found, however, but must be created anew each time we want to live in it. I know that much at least.

  1894

  The name’s Jack Rose, or Rosy Jack as the gents like to call me, on account of that soft pink bud nestling between me rosy arse cheeks. I’m a Maryanne, see, and gentlemen pays me handsomely to do things I should likely enough do for free, though the cash definitely helps, make no mistake. Steamers, we call ’em, the gents what come around; or swells or swanks: moneyed geezers, well-mannered, classy, not like the lowlife I knew before I started in this game. But they all, to a man, love that arse of mine, love watching it pucker and pout, the filthy bastards – love to poke it, finger it, sniff it, lick it, fill it, fuck it. And I love them to do it, I’m not ashamed to admit. But I love too the gifts and cash what they show their appreciation of my little rosy star with – my asterisk of flesh, my puckered pal. This hole of mine has turned out to be a right little golden goose.

  I don’t suppose boys are any different from girls in liking to take presents from those what are fond of us. There isn’t much wrong in gents showing their appreciation of the finer things in life with a trinket or a few shillings, is there now? I wasn’t the first and I doubt very much I’ll be the last, that much I do know. I know too that it is a harsh world, and harder still in this bloody shithole city of London I was pushed into. Fuckin’ impossible if the jaws of poverty hold you as they hold me ma and pa and the other seven miserable brats he sired. If that’s your lot you’d do well to keep your eyes shut and crawl right back into the cunt you came from, if only that was an option. Instead we open our eyes and crawl forward, lambs to the slaughter every last one of us. A smack on the arse and you’ve no bloody choice is the truth of the matter. Every day a fuckin’ battle. So if you can claw back a little happiness, a little pleasure, a little laughter and joy, it’s no crime. It’ll come as no surprise then when I confess that I feel like the king of the world when a coin is pressed into my palm after being pleasured. It’s bleedin’ hilarious to be making money so easily, isn’t it? And this line of work takes me places I’d never have seen otherwise, that’s for sure. When you have nothing to begin with you only stand to gain, and the way of life most rich gents take for granted seems to me to be the trappings of heaven itself. And the police are kind to me after their fashion. They shut their eyes for the most part – but then they’ve shut their eyes to worse than me and no mistake. The things I’ve seen in this town would make even old Queen Vic crack a smile.

  Odd the way I fell into the whole business, really. By accident, you might say. I certainly never planned it, but then again I don’t suppose anyone ever sets out to become a whore, do they? It was a bollock-numbing January in ’93 and I was several months past my fifteenth birthday, though I looked much younger. Skinny as a runt and no trace of a beard as yet, though I had sprouted a soft dark down on my privates which thrilled me. I was running telegrams. Fuckin’ awful, it was. Perhaps you’ve known it yourself, that horror when you realise all your time is being given over to others, all your thoughts are about day-to-day survival. Perhaps like me you’ve felt yourself chained to a fa’te you detest. I don’t know. Where I grew up, ugliness was the one and only reality; joy was unheard of except for the odd booze-up or street fight. I was working about fifteen hours a day running around in all weathers.

  I was born and raised in Bethnal Green, a stinkin’ hole of a place with a cesspit the size of a small lake down the road from our home that filled the air with the stench of shit the whole time. We shared the house with three other families. We had no running water so going for a piss or a crap meant finding a space that hadn’t already been used – in or outside the house. We were all of us permanently sick and two of my sisters died before even learning to walk. My pa is a useless alcoholic crook. Never done a day’s work in his life. Robs to get his beer money and we never saw a penny of it. He’s violent and spiteful, too, to all of us. One day I came home to find my two little sisters, Millie and Flossie, crying something awful, and, when I could finally get some sense out of them, it seems Pa’d got them to pull on a piece of string threaded through a keyhole in the front door. ‘Pull it hard, girls,’ he’d said, so they did, eager to please their pa, not knowing that on the other side of the door the string was tied around the neck of a stray cat. He swung the door open to show them the poor strangled beast hanging there, dead by their own fair hands. That amused him no end. The cunt.

  He beats Ma all the time. She always puts up a fight but she always comes off worst, poor cow. He’s a big fucker. I got good at cleaning her up afterwards. We were scared shitless, the little ones crying and screaming every time he was around. I’ll never understand why Ma married him in the first place. I asked her once and all she said was, ‘He used to treat me like gold.’ Sure, it’s good to be treated like gold, but I can hardly believe that ole bastard even knows how. She’s deaf in one ear after he thought it a lark to smash two cupboard doors closed on her head one day.

  It was all Ma could do to feed us proper once a week, let alone once a day. Then at the age of fourteen a stroke of luck landed me a job as a messenger for the Post Office in Charing Cross. True, I was delivering grams in storm and snow, frozen to the bone, miserable as sin and tired as a dog. But being a thick bastard I considered myself fuckin’ lucky. All my friends, my elder brothers too, had turned to crime, for where we lived it was steal or starve. I come from a fine line of criminals – though not very good ones. Pa was always behind bars. If we ever needed to find him, we knew he’d be in the pub or in the clink. But for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to do it. My one and only joy was handing my wages to Ma once a week and seeing her face light up from the glow of the coins, both of us knowing I’d earned them honestly. But I was soon to discover another much greater source of both money and pleasure, a way of life that would show me things beyond that narrow horizon of poverty and survival.

  Strangely enough, I never thought it a crime, becoming a renter.

  1954

  He came over again today. I should stop saying ‘he’. He has a name. But it is such a grotesque name that I fail to link it with him, with his beauty: Gregory. How can a parent burden a child with such a monstrous name? There’s no nobility in it, no grace. It sounds like the death rattle of an ancient bullfrog. He told me some of his friends call him Gore, and, since this is the name of a novelist whose books I enjoy, I feel happier calling him that.

  Gore’s not shy at all and strips off as soon as he’s in the studio without having to be asked. Just stands there and disrobes. I usually offer models the use of a bathrobe and get them to undress in the bedroom before coming into the studio, but he’ll have none of that. It’s as if he can’t wait to be naked, as if wearing clothes is an encumbrance he escapes at the first opportunity. We start off with a few short poses to warm up and then move to longer ones. He’s very good and doesn’t fidget like some of the models I’ve
had.

  We often chat as I sketch, and he is pleasant enough company, at ease talking about his life. His parents are gypsies – or, as he prefers to call them, travelling people. His mother is French and his father Italian, and he’s fluent in both languages, as well as English. He was born outside Brighton but they moved all over the country while he was growing up, never settling anywhere more than a couple of months, always being moved on, made unwelcome, and sometimes hounded out. Since he left his parents at the age of sixteen he has been travelling all over the world, mainly on merchant ships, doing all sorts of jobs, working in circuses, working on building sites, gardening, occasionally whoring. Dodged national service by going abroad, spent most of the war years wandering across Europe, often ending up imprisoned for vagrancy. Seemingly immune to the social imperatives to forge a career, to settle down, he has lived off his wits, working with bands of actors or street performers, doing mime, juggling, fire-eating and the like, or, when that dried up or bored him, selling his body. He has studied yoga and meditation in Tibet, rope work in North Africa and Noh theatre in Japan, picked grapes in Italy, smuggled drugs in and out of just about everywhere. It seems incredible that he could have done so much in his twenty-nine years. I have never met anyone quite like him before in my entire life.

  He told me a rather fascinating story about spending an evening with a group of young Arab boys in the middle of a desert somewhere outside Morocco, conversing through the only youth who spoke French. Having chatted underneath a star-flecked sky on myriad topics, smoking hashish and drinking wine with them all evening, he was told that they were all about to indulge in a homosexual orgy, and he was welcome to stay or be taken to the nearest town. He chose to stay. He described in detail the combinations of bodies and pleasures he enjoyed that night.

  His stories provoke such profound inadequacies in me, just as his presence works such magic on my art. The drawings I produce disturb and excite me, as I try to capture not just his likeness but his energy, his charge. I feel this peculiar mixture of desire and regret, and these feelings seem to spill into the images that appear when I draw, images that both disgust and fascinate me. Even as he makes me recognise the narrowness of my life, I still feel freer than I have felt for years – perhaps ever. There’s an urgency in the way I am working now that there has never been before, a tension that expresses itself in the most ambiguous and intriguing ways. These new sketches look like nothing I’ve ever seen before.

  He has only been back in London eight months, lodging in a house in Islington. It’s the longest he’s ever spent anywhere, he told me. I’ve never been any further from London than Hampshire, and I find this lifestyle almost incomprehensible, though fascinating. I responded to the revelation that he is a renter with a worldly nod, as if I meet them every day, though inside I was rather shocked and excited. I wanted to bombard him with questions, but underneath his apparent openness he is remarkably guarded so I restrained myself, saying only, ‘And do you find your work interesting?’ What a pompous bore I must have appeared. Or perhaps am.

  He said, ‘Whoring isn’t a job, it’s a world view. It’s an art form, even a kind of philosophy. It contours the way you see everything. Nothing is important. Except money. And the only way you can get money is by whoring. So you end up on a treadmill that formulates your entire outlook. What makes a whore anyway? I sell my time. My labour. My body. Whether I get my cock sucked or whether I work at a job I hate for a pittance, it amounts to the same thing. I let my boss suck me off, that’s all. It takes less time to earn the same money. Prostitution is the apotheosis of capitalism. But with the added advantage that, finding I rather like it, it keeps me free.’

  Of course he didn’t say that.

  But his whole life said it. His whole body said it. What he actually said was that it was an easy job that gave him plenty of money and sex and saved him from having to work.

  What could I say, who have bartered my life away for a respectability that now mocks my timidity? Haven’t I survived (don’t we all, in some sense, survive) through a more subtle form of prostitution? We may think that prostitution is something that only prostitutes do – that it names only the selling of one’s body – but what of the selling of one’s soul, or one’s freedom, one’s individual spirit? Doesn’t one’s life also have a price? How much am I worth? How much is he worth? I wonder. I daren’t ask. Not yet.

  He seems to know exactly what he’s doing, and why; and I for one cannot stand in judgement. I am, however, plagued with questions, having had so little physical pleasure and placed so little value on it in my own life. I want to know what it is like to give and take pleasure in that way, to live outside normal society so gleefully and shamelessly. When he told me, I asked none of those questions that rose so urgently within me, however, but simply continued to draw in silence.

  ‘Most of the models who pose for the group do it,’ he said at last, and I knew that I was expected to pick this up as a topic of conversation.

  ‘And does it pay well?’ I asked.

  ‘I made ten bob from one fella last week.’

  ‘Good lord. He must have been well off.’

  ‘He’s a don from Cambridge. You know what he wanted me to do?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He wanted me to sit down on his face.’

  I looked up at him. He was grinning.

  ‘Clothed or unclothed?’ I asked. I could hardly believe the conversation was for real. I had never spoken of such things with another human being in my life.

  He looked at me as if the question were preposterous, which I suppose it probably was.

  ‘Unclothed! He wanted me to rub my arse in his face while he played with my cock. And the whole time he’s trying to speak, but his words are being muffled as I crush down further onto his mouth. Then I spilt onto his fat belly.’

  I was looking at him by now, my hand stilled, struck dumb by this image he had conjured. I was not at all certain what I might say at this point. I am utterly ill-equipped for this. He, of course, was grinning like the Cheshire cat, amused by my discomfort.

  ‘It was all over in ten minutes and he hands me the bread.’

  ‘The bread?’

  ‘The money! That’s the most I ever had.’

  ‘And will you see him again?’ I asked, sounding like a maiden aunt discussing courtship prospects.

  ‘I fuckin’ ’ope so,’ he said with a smile that seemed to invite something I could barely recognise. I pulled myself together and continued to sketch, but still, long after he has gone, I continue to be plagued by the image of him crushing his behind into a man’s face – and find myself imagining what it must feel like to have Gore do that.

  I cannot sleep for imagining it.

  1998

  One night, I left Spike and the others on the golf course and went to meet Phil at the bistro where I’d told my parents I was working. It was New Year’s Eve, the full stop to 1985. I was fifteen. As I arrived at the kitchen door at the back of the bistro, Phil was just finishing. We went through to the bar, where the rest of the kitchen staff and the owners, plus some regulars, were gathered, celebrating. Phil and I got chatting to one of the regular customers, a musician in his late twenties who talked fast and intensely. He announced at one point that he was off to the toilets to do some coke, and did we want some? I’d never tried cocaine before, Johnny’s brother didn’t deal in it, so of course I was curious. Cocaine represented wealth, glamour, debauchery, decadence, rock’n’roll. I knew this much already, knew that there were other worlds. Phil declined but I agreed. I followed this man up the spiral staircase that led to the toilets, and into a cubicle in the gents’. I watched him unwrap the little pouch of paper and tip the white powder onto the flat ceramic surface of the cistern. Every move he made was observed and recorded. The chopping of the powder and scraping it into two fat white lines with a credit card, the licking of the card’s powdery edge, the rolling of the crisp £10 note, the finger closing off one nostril while the o
ther one hoovered up the trail of white grains, the tipping back of the head. Then the furious sniffing, the licking of the finger to gather up the loose granules from the cistern, the squeaking of the dusted fingertip against the gums. I took it all in, like an actor preparing for his role. He handed me the note like a gauntlet while he continued to hold one nostril closed and sniff hard with the other. I bent over, the note up my nose, and chased the length of my line with the sort of enthusiasm I had not applied to anything for a long time. I looked at him. He was beaming, and the rush I felt expressed itself in a return of that smile. ‘Good, huh?’ he said. I nodded. Another vista opened up before me, glistering with possibilities.