eyeballs. The white flames on the silver taps, the blinding sky of the mirror (facing the window, you see) the turbid water’s mercurial meniscus – bright fires and brilliant serpents all around me. A lesser angel would have . . . Well, one needs . . . poise at such moments. A cool head. Overall, a sense of entitlement. Mine, mine, mine all mine. Prince of this World, as the Good Book says; just how hitherto unearned a moniker those first seconds revealed. I counted seventy-three shades of grey in an eight-by-ten room.
That whiner, Larkin, once wrote a poem to his skin. An apology for having failed to bring it within range of the sensuous or the tender, for having, all in all, let his skin down. Do you monkeys underrate anything more than you do skin? Granted, you’ve got to be careful with taste – trial and error being no way to work your way around the flavours of a bathroom (as I found after swallowing a dab of what turned out to be Gunn’s verruca gel) – but with the exception of the dangerously hot or riskily cold you should be rubbing and dragging yourselves up against pretty much everything. I spent an hour playing with the water in the tub. Another two adding hot and watching my thighs go red. Don’t get me started on Gunn’s towels. Nor the deliciously cool thorax or throat of his bog, nor the boiler’s lagging, nor the velvet throw in the cupboard, nor the slick lino, nor the warmed enamel of the tub after its water had spiralled away, nor – I could go on, obviously.
And in spite of all this, I still believe I would have made it outdoors that first day had I not been ambushed by the most horribly engorged erection I’ll wager Gunn’s pesky little penis has ever entertained. Rather embarrassing to admit, but there you are: a rod-on like the Unholy Poker of Antioch.
Naturally I got better at it, over the fourteen hours that followed. It’s in my nature, getting better at things. A stunned and ham-handed debut it might have been (oh, I found myself saying, between Popeye gurns and Fontainesque pointwork, oh, oh, oooohhhh), but I’ve had all sorts of wanks since: breathless, businesslike, vicious, enervated, feisty, playful, lingering, nuanced, crude, nasty, hysterical, sly . . . I don’t believe I’m boasting when I say I’ve had ironic, perhaps even satirical wanks. Shameful, the speed of that particular assimilation. Dad hooked by state-of-the-art toy. Damn this thing. What’ll they come up with next?
Let me be honest: I knew I’d have myself to contend with in those first hours of incarnation. I knew I’d have my . . . appetite to deal with. You want to be cool. You want to be selective. You want – if you’re possessed of even a shred of dignity – to avoid the temptation to rush around perception like a Sunderland lottery winner in Harrods. I remember thinking, just prior to taking ecstatic possession of Gunn’s bathing corpse: What I really must avoid is making an absolute pig of myself. On the other hand, that’s quite difficult given that I intend to make an absolute pig of myself.
The handjobs took me on a tour of the porn closet that is Gunn’s head. I’d expected to meet Great Lost Love Penelope in there, naturally, since he spent so much of his time remembering Her Voice and Her Smell and Her Eyes and Her Soul and so on – but au contraire. Violet. It’s heavily Violet. Violet being Penelope’s problematic successor. Quality grist to Gunn’s fantasy mill in that, unlike Penelope, she’s not in the least interested in having sex with him – chief aphrodisiac to our boy’s libido. Violet’s better-looking than Penelope. That is to say, she looks less like a real woman and more like a pornographic model. (Pornographic models, Gunn knows from lengthy study, have mastered the arousing art of looking like they’re doing it for money. One of the reasons he sticks (ahem) to magazines rather than videos is that too many of the women in the videos seem bent on convincing the viewer that they’re doing it because they enjoy it; worse still, not a few of them actually do seem to be enjoying it. Post-Penelope, anything that focuses on the genuine rather than the fraudulent condemns Gunn to a depressing detumescence.) Therefore Violet, who certainly isn’t doing it because she likes it. So much so that Gunn can’t quite believe she lets him have sex with her. Not that she often does, these days. Her sexual availability has declined as her initial conviction that Gunn was someone who’d be rubbing shoulders with useful people has waned.
I should take this opportunity to thank my host for providing the wank-addicted Lucifer of those embarrassing early hours not just with Vi’s short-limbed, shampoo’d, bodysprayed, lipsticked, varnished, stilettoed, hot and foul- tempered little bod, but with a gallery, a slew, a plethora, a glut, a truly appalling superabundance of fantasy femmes, from the professional snarlers and pouters of American porn to the unsuspecting ladies of Gunn’s everyday life. You’ve got to hand it to my boy. It’s carnage in there. It’s common knowledge ’round my way, the deadly damage you can do to Catholics just by persuading them (and what am I if not persuasive?) to own up in their fantasies to what turns them on. Doesn’t have to be anything drastic – no sodomizing chickens or money-shooting thalidomide tots – because the bare experience of being turned on is saturated with guilt to start with. I’ve taken Caths all the way from handjobs to homicides just by getting them used to doing the thing that makes them feel guilty. My boys brought Declan’s suicidal depression along nicely with regular top-ups to his sense of his own enslavement to lust. He made it easy, not least thanks to his own ready swallowing of my sneaky story that surrendered-to filth was both an imaginative catalyst (he started writing round about the time he started whacking-off) and a source of mighty self-knowledge. But that’s by the by. The point is Violet loomed large those inaugural hours, so much so that by the morning of the second day paying the little cracker a visit was all but at the top of my list of Things To Do. Besides, I thought, with a sheepish-cum-wolfish grin at my new reflection in the mottled mirror of Gunn’s dark wardrobe door, it really was obscene to have spent so long indoors.
You’ll be wondering about the agenda. You’ve got a month on earth: what do you do? Granted, you’re trying with no intention of buying, but that’s no reason not to have some fun, no reason not to. . . put flesh and blood through its paces . . .
I can now get from Gunn’s front door to the tube station at Farringdon in six minutes, but it took me rather longer that first morning. Four hours, actually, and that’s if you don’t count the forty minutes I spent in Denholm Mansions’ stairwell – mesmerizing graffiti and rubbery echoes, one stunning front door in canary yellow, odours of disembowelled bin bags, fried bacon, stale sweat, mossed brick, burnt toast, marijuana, bike oil, wet newspapers, drains, cardboard, coffee and cat piss. An ecstatic nasal dalliance it was. Funny look from the postman when he passed me on the stairs (a letter for Gunn from his bank manager, but more of that later). Then I stepped outside.
I’m not sure what I expected. Whatever it was, it was surpassed by what I got. I remember thinking, That’s air. That’s air, moving, slightly, against the exposed bits of me, wrists, hands, throat, face . . . The breath of the world, the spirit that wanders gathering germs and flavours from Guadalajara to Guangzhou, from Pawnee to Pizzarra, from Zuni to Zanzibar. There are tiny hairs . . . tiny hairs that . . . oh my word. I’m tickled to say that without a second’s hesitation I unzipped Gunn’s trousers and gently manhandled his – sorry my – tender todge and sizzling scrote out to where the air could caress them. Not a sexual thing. Just to take the smart off. When I quit this carcass at the end of the month Declan’s going to have some trouble repairing his reputation with Mrs Corey, the round-hipped, long-eyelashed and depressingly good- natured Jamaican seamstress who lives above him and with whom he’s been known to exchange stairwell pleasantries. No such pleasantries when she caught sight of me that morning, standing with eyes half-closed, lips and legs parted, trousers down, shirt-tails fluttering, and throbbing goolies cupped in my tender palms. I did smile at her as she hurried by, but she didn’t reciprocate. With great reluctance, I put myself delicately back in order.
The sky. For Heaven’s sake the sky. I looked up at it and had to look down again since the . . . well, frankly, the blueness of it threatened to swallow my brand new consciousness whole. My progress was the jerk-shuffle of the funhouse punter on the moving staircase. I suppose it doesn’t strike you, particularly, that sunlight races ninety-three million miles to smash itself to smithereens on Clerkenwell’s concrete, transforming tarmac into a rollered trail of gem-shards? Or that a slate wall will cool your blood’s throb when you hold your cheek against it. Or that summer-heated brick, porous and glittering, has a taste unlike anything else on earth? Or that inhaling the smell of a dog’s paw-pads tells your nose the animal’s crammed and lolloping history? (I’ve rubbed my nose in a good many places since then, but I’m damned if I’ve found much to compare with the honk of a dog’s foot. It’s the smell of idiotic and inexhaustible optimism.)
Do you know what I thought? I thought, Something’s wrong. I’ve OD’d. This can’t be what it’s like for them. If this is what it’s like for them how do they . . .? How on earth can they . . .?
A group of bronzed and artfully stubbled labourers in orange hard hats and lime-green plastic tank tops were engaged in digging a hole in Rosebery Avenue. Four men in dark suits walked past me, smoking and talking about money. A black bus driver whose bus appeared to have died of a broken heart sat in his cab reading the Mirror. Surely, I remember thinking in my innocence, surely it can’t be like
