He felt the delicate scrape, brushing and tweaking of cosmetics. No one had touched his face in years. These parts of his body were brought back into existence.
Once more he was in the position of being grateful to Mark for making love to him. Tony was back where he had been at sixteen: full of relief and gratitude that Mark had risen to meet his challenge, in whatever form.
Mark was oblivious, as always, having been gently probed and manipulated into this position of reciprocation. As far as he was concerned, he was being nice. He was doing something for Tony, making things better. It was that innate child-rearing instinct in him. He was, after all, a breeder. But Tony was angry. Mark could be provoked to make the significant gesture and give the kiss-off to this life in a perfect, epiphanic scene. But it’s always got to be me doing the provoking, Tony thought.
I sit here passive, being painted on, for Mark.
As I lived here for years, pretending to be in prison, selling antiques, being shat on by Mark.
And as I was sent down, in the first place, taking on Sam’s culpability for manslaughter, all for Mark.
At the outset I was the one to let Mark know his potential. I tempted him into looking at me, at my body, and led him to what his inarticulate desires were clamouring for.
I didn’t create you, you bastard; I was the raw material you took yourself from. You’re a thing of shreds and patches, a snatched-together, botched-up man, and you’ve left me behind. But I am your inner man, Mark; you have me inside.
“There,” Mark said at last. “So that’s how you are.”
He sat back on the bed to survey his handiwork.
Through the colours Tony’s face rose up to meet him, through the false accentuations, the pouches, the changes worked over the years. With the face of a clown, a drag artist, an embalmed corpse, Tony looked out through a complex, unreadable mess of emotions. But Mark looked and he thought, This is Tony. Changed, yeah, but so have we all. So this is what the years do? And it’s good to get the update. But this is Tony after all. At least as close as you could ever get.
“Go now,” Tony told him, with some difficulty. “Just go, Mark.”
Mark went.
And when he went, at last, Tony walked to the window. The snow was coming down, thick enough to give him a reflection. He saw himself once again.
“Simmonds!”
Anger does strange things to people.
When circumstances get too much, when they crash down like portcullises and you are expected to become something else again. And you’re tired, tired of hauling yourself up out of the mess gratitude and relief have made you into. When your self-respect has scraped too thin, and you’re not sure there’s enough left for you to reinvent into yet another, hopeful self. That’s when anger does strange things.
Tony attacked the bed. It was, after all, the root of his problems. He stripped the sheets and shredded them with his gloved fingers, and the bits fell in a mock snow shower. Then, gathering all his resentment, he took a deep breath and hauled the bed around on its castors. With a final burst of righteous adrenaline he sent it crashing through the bedroom wall.
“Simmonds!” he screamed. “Simmonds!” he howled at the old man who had rescued him from penury once before. He had one more use for Simmonds and, furious, he waited for the patter of hi-tech trainers.
He stared in the meantime at the destroyed outer wall. The snow was falling thick beyond and coming into the room. The crash of the bed into the garden below still rang in his ears.
Tony didn’t question how he could have managed such a thing, how he had gathered the strength. It seemed entirely reasonable. When you’re as impossible as I am, Tony thought, you learn not to worry.
Impossible he might be, but the wind coming in through the trashed bedroom wall was freezing him as he stripped off Mark’s clothes.
“Simmonds!” he yelled again.
Like a smashed window in an aeroplane, the gash in the wall let in the sky and it fought for possession of him. Tony stood with his handfuls of Marks clothes whipping up around him.
The old man had been standing in the doorframe for some moments. Mark had pushed past him on the way out, almost startled to see him in the same room as Tony. Somewhere in the back of his mind Mark had expected them to be the same person. Anything was possible. But Simmonds was real, just an old, old fuck of Tony’s. The cast-off older man, a withered shell Tony was good enough to keep about the place.
“Why didn’t you come when I shouted?”
Simmonds looked to where Tony stood, where he was visible by virtue of the mess he had made. Simmonds was used to the ways of his one-time golden boy, his only love. He was used to his invisibility. Talking to Tony was like spot-the-ball. Simmonds played the game with the dogged optimism of a lonely pensioner and he knew how to field Tony’s anger. Today, though, he would play a dangerous game with it.
“He’s told you no, hasn’t he?” Simmonds sneers.
Mark’s clothes are wrung out in mid-air, eloquent with fury. Tony answers stiffly, “Yes.”
“I know rejection. You can’t hide that’s what you’re feeling. Not from me.”
They are quiet a moment.
“How did you manage to push the bed through the wall?”
“Shut it.” The clothes begin to unwind, as if purposefully, like a serpent’s coils. Tony is sloughing Mark’s
