“Can I ask you a question, babes?”
Showered, dressed, and only mildly purple, I stepped into the living room to find Darian sprawled out on my sofa like he belonged on it. Did the man have no understanding of the delicate ritual of casual sex? He should have left by now. More disquieting still was the discovery that I was not entirely horrified he had chosen to stay.
“You just have.”
I perched, as though I were the interloper here, on the arm of my own sofa. But it gave me a fine view of Darian, stretched out beside me like a veritable invitation to debauchery. His toenails twinkled silver.
“Ha-ha, anuvver question.”
“If you must.”
“Do you know your plants are all like . . . dead?”
I looked around. As a certified loon, I was always being given plants, and Darian was right: they were all dead. Very dead.
I coughed. “Oh, yes, I’m the Green Reaper. I bring plants here to make them suffer.”
“You what?”
“Not really. I . . . I’ve been away.”
“Aww, babes, that’s well ’arsh. You should’ve got your mum to take care of ’em.”
Wonderful. I was now obliged to come up with an explanation as to why I hadn’t made suitable arrangements for the plants I didn’t care about while I was away on the trip I hadn’t taken.
“My parents live in Brockenhurst,” I said, which, at least, was not a lie. “I could hardly ask my mother to drive two hours across the country to water my plants.”
“What abaht your nan?”
“Both my grandmothers are dead.”
He sat up at once, snaked along the sofa, and wound his arms around me. I was going to pull away, but it would have been undignified. And I liked being touched by him just a little too much to be sensible. “That’s sad.”
“My mother’s mother killed herself before I was born, and my father’s mother passed away when I was ten. Grandparents die. It’s what they do. I’m over it.”
He nuzzled into my shoulder. It was like owning a dog that wouldn’t shut up. But there I was, not pushing him away. “Don’t be like that, babes. It’s not nice to talk abaht people dying like it don’t mean nuffin.”
“Sorry.”
Sorry? God, what was he doing to me? He was pulling me to pieces, and he didn’t even realise. I leaned against him, letting the warmth of his body lap at me like waves, letting him hold me as though any of this mattered, and we sat like that for a few minutes, in my unintended sepulchre for forsaken plants and forsaken selves. Of course, it was too good to last.
“Got anuvver question.”
“What now?”
“You ’aven’t got no food eeva.”
“Bollocks.”
“No, seriously, look.” He unwound us, took my hand, and pulled me into the kitchen, flinging wide my fridge door.
I pointed at the jar of Branston Pickle. “That’s food.”
“That’s a condiment, babes.”
“It is not a condiment. It contains vegetables. Ergo, it’s a foodstuff.”
“Anyfing what you put on anuvver fing is a condiment.”
“Well, by that twisted logic, maybe.” I started opening and shutting cupboards pretty much at random. “Hah! What’s that, eh? Eh?”
He peered. “Whas what?”
“This!”
I pulled out a half-used Merchant Gourmet packet from behind a dusty colander. Darian took it from me and peered inside, then flinched back like I’d handed him a box of alligator faeces.
“Ahh, it’s dead as well, mate.”
“They’re not dead. They’re porcini mushrooms. They’re supposed to be like that.”
“I nevva seen a flat mushroom. That ain’t right.”
“They’re dried, you . . . you . . . donut.”
He kissed me, and it tasted sweet, like his laughing.
I boiled the kettle and soaked the mushrooms. We ate them with Branston Pickle, sitting on the kitchen floor, and Darian said they were well rank. He was right.
“I tried to read your uvver book,” he said, when we’d given up on the possibility of food. “The one abaht the smoke being briars or whateva. But I couldn’t get into it.”
“Oh. Right.”
My discouraging monosyllables failed to have the desired effect. “Well, it weren’t abaht anyfing. It didn’t ’ave a proper beginning or a middle or a end or anyfing. And I didn’t know what was supposed to be ’appening now and what’d already ’appened and what wasn’t ’appening at all. What’s wif that?”
I shrugged. “In fiction, like life, there’s only ever the now. And the boundary between the real and the unreal is simply a matter of perception.”
Who knew that now better than I?
“That don’t make sense, babes,” said Darian Taylor, Literary Critic. “I fink you should stick to the other stuff. You’re good at that.”
I rolled my eyes. “Genre tat.”
“What? Don’t you like it?”
“Well, I suppose it’s better than digging a hole.”
“But don’t you like it really,” he persisted, “writing summin to make people ’appy?”
“I don’t really care.”
“Aww, babes. That’s sad.”
“For fuck’s sake,” I said wearily, “stop saying everything is sad. It isn’t sad. It’s just . . . the way it is. It’s my job, not a divine mandate. It’s not as though . . .”
I’d been about to say something . . . something . . . about human naïvety . . . and the fact we had no fundamental right to happiness . . . or something . . . but his hand moved over my thigh, fingers brushing my cock through my trousers, and my breath hitched and my thoughts scattered, and I did not mourn them. He pushed me back onto the kitchen floor, crawling over me like some mountain cat stalking its prey. Well, he was the same colour as one.
“You don’t like nuffin abaht it?” He spread his knees on either side of me. “Nuffin at all?”
My hips bucked. “I just don’t see the point of talking about it.”
“I’m just interested or whateva. It’s called ’aving a conversation.”
He caressed my face, light as nothing, sending a strange pleasure, part anticipation, part frustration, rippling over my skin. I felt like a lake, and his hands were the moon.
“For fuck’s sake,” I growled, “touch me properly.”
“But seriously.” Words I was coming to dread. “You don’t like nuffin?”
“Do we have to do this now? You realise this is blackmail, Essex.”
“Darian.”
“Still blackmail.”
He grinned, reached for my cock again, and tightened his hand until my back arched. “Yeah.”
I drew in a ragged breath. “If I tell you, will you stop asking questions and . . . and . . .”
“And what? I like it when you say fings, cos it sounds posh and filthy at the same time.”
“Make me come.”
“’Ow?”
“With your hand. On my cock.”
His own gave an appreciative sort of jump. He smiled. “Yeah. Reckon you could read the phone book and make it dirty.”
I ran my hands up the inside of his splayed, denim-coated thighs, wishing it was skin beneath my palms. “This is the news at ten,” I whispered. “Politicians are predicting hard times ahead.”
It was a pathetic attempt at humour, but he threw back his head and laughed. I stared at the strong, clean line of this throat. “Ahwight, then,” he said, fingers curling over the head of my cock while I squirmed.
“All right, all right,” I said. “I like . . . I like that I can make it neat, okay?”
He rewarded me with a long, languorous stroke. “What’s that mean?”
I closed my eyes, trying to pretend I lived in a universe that contained only my cock and his hand. And lazy pleasure that spilled eternally in silver spirals. “Well, there’s always . . . an answer. Everything always makes sense. And can be . . . can be fixed.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I ’adn’t fought of that. It’s well deep.”
“That’s all detective fiction is,” I said, while his hand moved in a sweet, tormenting rhythm and I twisted to meet it. “A control fantasy in a world where everything is meaningless.”
“Lots of fings ’ave meaning, babes. And, sometimes, when you fink maybe they doesn’t, it’s just cos you aren’t looking for the same sorta meaning.”
“God help me, I’m being wanked off by Yoda.”
“Ha-ha, wanking the way to the dark side is.”
“Shut up. For the love of Jesus fucking Christ on a moose, shut up. I’m trying to get off here.”
He fell on top of me, howling with laughter. And, somehow, in that ridiculous tangle, his hand moving awkwardly against my cock as he snuffled hysterically against my ear, and me yelling at him, my body shaking with frustration, amusement, pleasure, bewilderment, so much bewilderment, I did, in fact, get off.
It was long past midnight by the time I convinced Darian that his proper place was in the guest room, not my bed, and that “because I don’t do that” was the only explanation he was getting for the arrangement.
“What abaht Brighton then?” he asked, hovering on the threshold as if he believed this was a negotiation.
“An accident.”
I ignored his big, wounded eyes and retired for the night.
But of course, I couldn’t sleep. I found myself wondering what it would be like to have him here with me, the sleek warmth of his body curled protectively about mine.
My thoughts circled like vultures. Non-specific anxiety clawed at me. I felt too hot, too cold, too trapped, too lonely. Tired and cruelly awake.
The night was a vast plughole, an endless spinning of the self through ever-narrowing circles.
It had been (don’t say it, don’t spoil it) a good day. I tried to rationalise it as the result of physical satisfaction but, in other more abstract ways, I had, almost without noticing, been something close to . . .
Happy.
My heart stuttered.
There was little I feared more than happiness, that faithless whore who waited always between madness and emptiness. My moods, when they were not sodden with medication, could turn upon a tarnished penny; happiness was merely something else to lose.
Words and images drifted through my thoughts, catching at me like briars, fading into smoke.
This wasn’t safe. My world was one of only broken images, like I was standing always on the threshold of a mirror, unable to tell the reflection from the real. The shining city and the blasted heath—the truth lay somewhere between, a thin grey line, slender as the edge of a knife.
And I’d known this mirage before. These shimmering moments. But they each had their price that must be paid. Looking back brought little comfort, only pain. The memory of light only made the present seem darker.
This would hurt on the other side. Because it always hurt on the other side.
I should protect myself.
I wished I could sleep. I wished I could stop thinking.
But my mind has always been its own enemy.