Colin laughed. “Why you? What about Rab?”
David said, “Because you talk to me more. You spend the time with me. I thought…”
“Oops,” said Colin. “This sounds like the end of something. I didn’t think we’d have this problem. Look, David. I thought you knew a little more about me by now. I treat all my friends the same. With a bit of manners, I hope. When I do come across males of the straight persuasion, like yourself, I treat them nicely, but distantly, with full ceremonial honours. I treat them—and no pun intended—like proper ladies.” He sighed out his cigarette smoke, disappointed. “So no, I won’t assume that just because we’ve slept together a couple of times you were doing anything other than trying it out. I won’t assume we’re, like, boyfriends all of a sudden.’
David rubbed his eyes slowly and they both listened thoughtfully as they squeaked in their sockets. Crumbs of sand, inevitably, got in there. “Oww,” he cursed, and rubbed harder, complaining.
“Just like a straight man,” said Colin, and passed him the water bottle. “Sluice it out. If thine eye offends thee…”
David saw to himself, and eventually sat with very pink eyes and a wet face, looking at Colin. “You still don’t see what I’m on about, Colin. I want you to take me home one night soon. I want you to take me home up that fire escape and fuck me on my bed.”
Colin snorted. “I don’t do requests.”
“I’m not having you on.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve said it all wrong, haven’t I?” David rubbed one eye.
“Don’t start that again. And yes, you have.” Colin thought. “But you like ladies!” he burst.
“Honestly. Is that the extent of your understanding of the…”
“Yes, yes, the complexity of human sexuality. And yes it is.’
David smiled. ‘I want you to… do more things to me.”
“Do things?”
“I want to try it out some more. All of it. ”
“So I’m going to carry on being your little chemistry experiment set?”
“Yes. No. Oh fuck. I like you, Colin. And… I fancy you.” He smiled, shy, looking down.
“You do, don’t you?”
“Like a bastard.”
Only then did Colin let himself realise that he himself had an erection. He said, “I want to go home now.”
“Tell them,” David laughed.
“I can’t…”
“Can we go off in the dunes?”
They looked, and the tussocky dunes receded far into the distance, up to the woods, beyond which their minibus waited. It certainly looked promising. But they saw a whole host of flashing, silver kites lurching and wheeling above them. The dunes were full of kite-fliers.
“Shit. That’s because the breeze has picked up,” said David.
“Let’s stay put, then,” said Colin, settling back down. “I can absorb this more slowly, then. At my leisure.”
He lay and watched David stare at the empty stretch of beach. It was studded with black and green granite and the occasional waves crashed down as if the North Sea was throwing in its final chips again and again and again.
TWENTY-EIGHT
It was some old portrait painter I read about once who said it. He was asked about his flesh tones. So subtle, so lifelike, so impossible to get. You’d think they were fresh on the canvas, still living, decades after the jewelled worthies and the smug matrons were dead and gone. Asked his secret, the old painted said he mixed his colours with brains.
And when I read that I saw him dabbing his brush in real brains, as if their substance could lend something to the colour, not just grey and white. Other painters had used semen, shit, blood, piss. Their portraits would reek. Untreated, they would smell like the bodies of the unwashed.
I also thought about how it meant putting something of the substance of the person into the picture. It was like voodoo, it seemed to me. Mummifying bits of them against their own image. All I can do with the portraits of everyone I knew is put their brains in with what they said to me.
I look at photos of them all and it’s part of my morbid imagination, part of me, that I can picture levering off their skulls and see their brains like yolk inside. The photos aren’t very good, of course. Everyone is caught at their worst moments. Most of them have red eyes, flash-blind, cats caught on the prowl. On one set of pictures, Christmas that year in the Royal Circus flat, everyone looks pissed. All except Serena, Aunty Anne’s friend, who came to visit on Boxing Day. Serena looks like someone who is used to being photographed. Her head tips forward slightly, so her eyes look larger than they are. Her hands are folded neatly on the lap of her smart dress. It could almost be that she is on her best behaviour for her visit, but I later found that she was almost always as composed as this. Someone had removed her anxiety glands.
Her flesh tones are perfect, even on these rotten, blotchy, precious photos. When whoever created Serena and knocked those pigments together, they were definitely using their brains. She was luminous. Her words were succinct and uttered with perfect, dry diction. It was Boxing Day that Serena arrived, following our two days of haphazard festivities. She came to stay and her style was a rebuke to all of us.
When I look at these pictures of Serena with us at dinner on Boxing Day, 1997, it isn’t pissed we look exactly. It’s messy. As if we were making an unprofessional job of being ourselves.
Mandy never came for Christmas.
Middle of December she sent a card, a letter, and a photo of herself by the canal in Lancaster, holding and showing off her proud bump.
Dear Wendy,
Daniel is a fart. It’s official. Maybe you’ve already heard from Timon, but Daniel as horrible about the baby. He never wanted it, won’t deal with it. It was my choice, he said, I stopped taking the Pill. I took his stuff without even consulting him. I suppose that’s true, but he’s pretty careless himself. If I wasn’t
