I’m mad, I am. Absolutely mad. Honestly. I should be on telly. You won’t believe what I did yesterday. Truly you won’t. Shall I tell you? Shall I? I went to see Penelope.
Gossip columnists must be depressed. Deeply depressed. For in a state of profound depression I opened my mouth to tell the tale – well, I mean switched on and addressed my quicksilver fingertips to Gunn’s keys – and lo! The above idiom sprang fully formed into being, like Athena from Zeus’s thunderous forehead. It’s inappropriate. The only thing to do with atrocity, it’s been said, is to chronicle it. There’s no working it, shaping it, making art of it. Just history’s obligation to document the facts. Well then, let me list the facts of atrocity. I went to see Penelope.
There are idiots among you, I daresay, so wedded to the love story that some preposterous and epoch- making affair of the heart between me and her is already taking shape in your imagination. You’re the punters for whom Hollywood producers like Harriet’s chum Frank Gatz exist: ‘You got a story where the Devil comes to earth, right? Takes over this writer prick’s body, right? Okay. Now whatever the fuck else happens in the story, what’s got to happen is that he falls in love. With the writer prick’s girl. Then you go with it. She get’s shot, whatever. Hospital. Toobs. Life-support. Our guy’s got to make a deal with God. Her life in exchange for his. Boom. You see this? And when he croaks, the scaly wings and shit are gone. Pure white feathers. “He thought he’d fallen from Heaven. It was worse than that. He’d fallen in love.” That’s your tag- line. You seeing this? Get me Pitt’s guy on the phone. He’ll be all over it . . .’
I don’t quite know where the idea came from. (It’s one of the few questions I’d still like answered. I mean I know where your ideas come from. But what about mine?) Horribly curious, I must admit, to meet her in the flesh – my flesh as much as hers. Gunn’s flesh, anyway. I even had a harmless plan. One that would set the cat among Gunn’s pigeons when he returns (if he returns, that is, misery guts that he was before he left) without incurring the tiresome prohibitions of Charlie’s Angels from Above. And before you get all political on me – I wasn’t going to do anything to her. Not in that way. Just a bit of innocent mischief. I was going to – well . . . You’ll see presently.
I took the 12.00 from Euston, due in at Manchester Piccadilly at 14.35 (useless Gunn can’t drive, and I was hanged if I was going to waste a day stealing a vehicle and teaching myself). It was a heartbreakingly beautiful day. Londoners haven’t seen a summer like this since ’76. Heat rippled the city. I had four 99s and a Strawberry Split on the way to the station. Ice cream. Oh, man: your mouth’s a volcanic orifice; in goes Mister Softee – and lo! thou art filled with bliss. Or I am, at any rate. It’s the hot/cold thing, I know. Hardly surprising when you think about it. I’ve been troughing for England since I got here (lamb jalfrezi; anchovies by the pound; green olives slathered in oil and flecked with raw garlic; glace cherries; chargrilled salmon steaks; Toblerone; iced radishes dipped in sea salt and fresh ground pepper; pickled herrings; After Eights . . .) but I’ve yet to come across anything to match the delights of Mister Softee’s aerated icecream, spiralled into a 99 cornet, garlanded – nay, bejewelled with the glutinous sauce of the noble raspberry and accented with an ingenuine and vastly overpriced Flake. I tell you solemnly: ice-cream’s so delicious and bad for you I can’t believe I had nothing to do with its invention.
However. I walked to Euston. I find I still adore walking. Absurd, obviously, what with it being merely a case of putting one foot in front of the other and so on – but there you are. The sky was distant, madly blue, ethereally marbled with altocumulus clouds. My shadow wobbled and jogged alongside me like a retarded or palsied companion. Dear, pan-fried London gave out the reek of its traffic and waste – you can smell the nineteenth century in London, the eighteenth, the seventeenth, the sixteenth; its odours shuffle the ages, lace KFC with ancient sewage, diesel with velum and dust. (I’ve come a long way since first opening my eyes in Gunn’s bathroom. With an effort, I can remain calm in the presence of myriad colours; with an effort I can hold back the swoon or the rabid assault; with an effort I can – as they say Stateside – deal.) No, I can’t deny the merits of wandering about, nor those of doing nothing. I cancelled Harriet the other evening, you know. Just like that, cancelled her. I was sitting in my room at the Ritz, having just inhaled a judiciously measured line of Bolivia’s finest when the scent-tendrils of Green Park’s recently mown grass drew me, snout-first, like a nose-ringed bull, to the open window, where I looked out. That’s all – just looked out. The sky all furrowed mauve and indigo splashed from below by a preposterously bloody sunset; meanwhile the bruise-coloured park exhaled its day’s stored heat; the trees crackled, softly; the air had a parched or purged taste, as if a fire had charged through it . . . I called her mobile and told her I was sick. You can’t believe it, can you? Trading Harriet’s mesmerizing monologues for an evening’s quiet contemplation of twilight’s gentle passage into night. I can hardly believe it myself. My mature phase, perhaps. Beauty and sadness. I got so melancholy (what was it it all reminded me of?), so blues & country lonesome, that it was all I could do to rustle up Leo for a midnight rub. (Did I mention Leo? As in ‘Man-2-Man Leo, genuine 10” cut offering full body work/role play dom or sub, TVs o.k., no TS, no women’? I didn’t? Well, my dear Declan, I’m afraid I’ve got some rather startling news for you . . .)
Anyway. (Do you prefer Anyway or Some? This title- hunting’s a bitch. I spent an hour or two toying with calling it Huh.) Anyway, Penelope’s back in Manchester. She moved back there after her and our Declan went their separate ways. She’s unresolved about it, mind you, the move up North. (It kills me, you know, all you humans lying on the couch talking about being unresolved. I’m unresolved. Oh, really? You don’t say? You mean, you’re actually . . . not . . . resolved?)
Stalling. Sorry. Pitiful.
I’ve seen photos, obviously. She hasn’t changed much. The hair’s still warm golden and prone to tangles, but shoulder-length now, not the spine-long treasure that drove Gunn potty. The green eyes still have it. Beauty, of course, but life, time, history, thinking, pain. Less curiosity than the Gunn Penelope. Less curiosity, more life.
She lectures. There’s a one-bedroomed garden flat. A cat called Norris and two unchristened goldfish. There are men, when she feels like it: illicitly indulged-in post-grads from time to time; these or wild cards picked up during assaults on the city’s nightlife (her and her debauched mate Susan); but since Gunn she’s treasured her own space, a burrow to which she can retreat and brood; a smouldering Marlboro, a bottle of plonk, the garden at evening, its anarchy of birdsong. There’s been a woman, too (footage Gunn would have paid cash money to see), a PhD third-year with feisty black eyes and wet-gelled hair who wore tan leather strides and what must have been cripplingly expensive silk shirts. Laura. Smelled of lemons and Impulse Musk. Deeply exciting for Penelope, initially, her adventure at the Looking Glass. Ultimately no more manageable than the half-dozen straight lovers since Gunn.
The green leather jacket hangs on the back of the kitchen door. She sits opposite me at the stripped oak dining table, in profile, her arms around her knees, her bare feet up on the chair next to her. The kitchen’s door opens directly onto the bright garden. I’m tempted to giggle, glimpsing it, remembering my unseemly moments back at St Anne’s. She’s opened the wine I brought – not plonk, but an extortionately expensive Rioja – but both of us take our first gulps without the bother of a (to what, exactly?) cheers.
‘I wanted to talk to you,’ I say.
She swallows, takes another quick sip. Swallows again. I know what she’s thinking. I’m about to tell her that: Penelope, my darling, I know what you’re thinking, I’m about to say, when she turns, suddenly, and faces me.
