‘Sometimes, Declan, honestly, I can’t . . . I mean what is it?’
‘Perhaps I don’t fancy you any more,’ I said in an undertone. Undertone or not, it summoned up a Vi-silence of formidable charge and mass. Then, with a compressed artfulness that, actually, made me proud, she drew the sheet slowly up over her breasts and turned away from me in a foetal curl.
‘Oh come here,’ I said, like a successfully soft-soaped uncle – and she did, too (rifling through her memory files, wishing she hadn’t lied to Gunn about having read his novel, wishing she knew immediately which part was hers, hers, hers!) – but it was no good. It was no damned good, I tell you. Gunn’s penis might as well have been a tomato sandwich for all the impact it was going to make. On the other hand, it did give Violet an opportunity for some of her best work to date.
‘Never mind, honey,’ she said, huskily. ‘It’s no big deal. It happens. You’re probably just overtired. Did you drink a lot last night?’
I might have been mistaken, but I thought I detected a slight American accent.
Violet, you know, is troubled by a Little Voice. (I worried that the transmogrification would fuck with my clairvoyance, but it hasn’t substantially. I’ve noticed blips, the odd blind spot, but by and large I seem to have got away with it as carry-on.) Violet never listens to her Little Voice and she hears every word it says. Not that its range of words is wide. On the contrary. It repeats the same things, at irregular but increasingly frequent intervals. You’re not an actress. You don’t have any talent. You’ve knobbled your own auditions because you know you’re not up to it in the end. You’re a vain and talentless fraud.
It’s not me. Not all Little Voices are me, you know. Even my own Little Voice – did I mention that? – even my own Little Voice comes from a place I’m not sure I own. I have of late, it generally begins . . . I don’t quite ignore it.
Declan, of course, had a Little Voice of his own by the end, and should probably have gone to see someone. Hardly an astute diagnosis given the bath and razor blades, but one I can’t resist making. The odour of that sadness lingers, you see, in the rucks and runnels of his mortal flesh. Stretch marks of the soul, so to speak. It bothers me. In the absence of my angelic pain I feel it like an intimate and diffuse toothache.
I don’t much like the look of him, if you want the truth. If I was considering staying – staying for good, I mean – I’d be hitting a bank and forking out for state-of-the-art plastic surgery or a Californian bodyswap. Est hoc corpus meum. Maybe so, but it leaves a lot to be desired. When I confront the mirror I see a simian forehead, dolorous eyes and thinning eyebrows. His skin’s beige, greasy and porous. The hairline’s not exactly struggling to conceal its upcoming recession, and the pot belly (too much booze, too much fat, zero exercise – the corporeal side of the basic adult human story) doesn’t help at all. The flesh on the nose is thickening and the slightest dropping of the head reveals a putative double chin. He looks, all in all, like an under-the-weather chimp. I doubt very much he’s washed his ears since childhood. At seventeen, eighteen, he might have taken you in with his Navajo granddad story (supported by the usual nonsense: long hair, silver and turquoise jewellery, beads); you see him at thirty-five and look for a much less glamorous explanation: spic-mix, wog-cocktail, decaf wop. Truth is: Irish Roman Catholic mum boozily knocked up in a moment of weakness (I thank you) by a saucy Sikh from Sacramento at a friend’s birthday party in Manchester. Ships in the night, bun in the oven, he’s gone, she’s Catholic: enter beige Gunn, fatherless and feeble at five pounds, six ounces. She brings him up on her own. He loves her and hates himself for blighting her young life. Grows up with bog- standard Virgin-Whore dichotomy as far as women go (with which I’m now lumbered, thank you very much); rabid Oedipus complex replaced during teen years by terrifying phase of homoerotic fantasies (I’ll find a use for them before I’m done, you watch), before sexual imagination stabilizes around mild heterosexual sado-masochism in early twenties, concomitant with discovery of some effeminacy of body, a loathing for manual labour, a penchant for the arts and a much mauled but still virulent belief in the Old Fellah and yours truly.
I’m not wild about his wardrobe, either. I wish there was a more exciting way of telling you it’s dull, but there isn’t: Declan Gunn’s wardrobe is dull. Two pairs of jeans, one black, one blue. The baggy charity shop strides to which I had recourse after my debut wankathon. Half a dozen t-shirts, a couple of woolly jumpers, a beige (!?) fleece, a greatcoat, a pair of brandless trainers and a pair of DM shoes. I look like a tramp. Doesn’t even own a suit. They’ve done this deliberately, to assault my dignity, to wound my much-talked-about pride. Gunn, needless to say after the extravagance of his unsellable and suicide- inspiring opus, A Grace of Storms, can’t afford new clothes, what with the first two books now out of print and his agent, Betsy Galvez, only ever seeing his name because he’s immediately after Guiseppe’s Pizzeria in her Rolodex. He should have stolen some money. Should’ve mugged a pensioner. Pensioners are loaded. Tartan shopping trolleys? Full of gold ingots. Why do you think they move so slowly? They die of hypothermia and no one mentions all the loot they’ve saved by never eating or turning the heating on. I love old people. Seven or eight decades of me whispering to them about all the faggots and coons (it turns out they fought for!) and by the time death comes calling they’re oozing malice and hawking-up spleen. The souls of old people are ten a penny in Hell. Honestly. We’ve got a slush-pile.
Gunn lives alone in a second-floor one-bedroom excouncil flat in Clerkenwell. One small bedroom, one small living room, a small kitchen and a small bathroom. (I looked for other adjectives.) Outside, a courtyard. The surrounding buildings go up six floors so Gunn’s place is starved of light. He had dreams of moving in with Violet. Violet didn’t. Violet had dreams of Gunn using the money from the sale of his then-in- progress masterpiece to tart the Clerkenwell place up and sell it so that they could move to Notting Hill. From the sale of his . . . Yes. There’s the rub. All things considered, I can’t honestly say I’m surprised our boy had settled on suicide. Some humans survive concentration camps, others are driven over the edge by a broken fingernail, a forgotten birthday, an unpayable phone bill. Gunn’s somewhere in-between. Somewhere in-between’s where I do much of my finest work.
His mother died of drink two years ago and left him the flat. Me, drink and loneliness, we finished Gunn’s mother off. Drink wolfed down her liver, me and loneliness gobbled up her heart. Liver and heart, my vital organs of choice. She didn’t come down, mind you. Must be cooling her heels in Purgatory. Last Rites. Gunn called in crapulous Father Mulvaney (sherry-breath, brogue blarney, red knuckles he couldn’t leave off cracking, and eczema; I’ll have his liver too, the old hypocrite) and that was me robbed of another tenant. There’s no justice, you know. Angela Gunn. I wanted her. Some souls – you can’t explain it – they’ve got quality written all over them. She had guilt over Gunn, having brought him dadless into the world (thought the fact that he nearly throttled himself with his own umbilical an indictment of her motherhood); but it wasn’t the guilt that did for her, it was the loneliness. A tawdry smattering of affairs with men vastly her inferior. Her disgust because she couldn’t leave the idea of a grand passion alone. In the small hours she’d observe them (after the grumpy wrestling, the loveless gymnastics) naked and sprawled as if taken down mid-crucifixion. Grimly, she’d force herself to absorb the unpleasant details: fatty shoulders; dirty nails; brittle hair; faded tattoos; pimples; stupidity; greed; hatred of women; pretentiousness; arrogance. In the small hours she’d sit bitter with tears and humming with drink and look down at his body, whoever he was, some Tony or Mike or Trevor or Doug, forcing her mouth into a rictus as the sordid replays ran in her head. The absurdity of it, she thought, this quest for the love of a man who was her equal. She loathed herself for it. She thought of her life (and herself) as a missed opportunity. Somewhere, back there, she had missed something. What was it? When was it? The worse horror beneath: that she hadn’t missed anything, that her life was merely the sum of her choices and that her choices had led her to this: another truncated encounter; the carcinogenic belief in the idea of a Great Love; clammy sex; loneliness in the small hours.
She had loved Gunn, but his education distanced them. She craved his visits then couldn’t bear that he was embarrassed by her malapropisms and too-young skirts. She was intelligent but inarticulate. Words betrayed her: beautiful butterflies in her mind; dead moths when she opened her mouth for their release into the world. Gunn knew all this. Went every time armed with the noblest filial intentions, then felt them evaporate when she talked of ‘broadening her horoscopes’. Her drinking was a spectral third with them, Gunn not quite taking it in. Knowing and hoping. (Jesus, you humans and your knowing; you humans and your hoping.) Her belief in his writing. Gunn suspected she prayed for it. She did. She prayed to God He’d find a publisher for her son’s book.
