That first day in Kilburn he was in a tangerine linen suit, quite crumpled, with the shoulders rucked up from the way he’d thrown himself down. He had the Saturday papers already spread out across his lap carelessly, and his shirt was so white, his hands so clean, that you couldn’t help but worry that he’d cover himself in newsprint. And this was my first reaction to Josh: an involuntary twinge, because he set out so clean and obviously he took care of himself, but he immediately messed it all up. He was smoking impatiently, taking swift gulps and blowing it noisily out of one side of his mouth like Popeye. His head was shaved almost completely, his features large and sensuous, with a jaw that dimpled when he read. He was unshaven and I found that very sexy from the start: his tiny blond hairs everywhere which, he once told me, sometimes grew in pairs in the same place, and simply slid out of his face when pulled gently. Later on he would let me try that. He was looking at me over his trendy half-moon glasses, which were very dirty. When Serena entered the room with a tray laden with her Mexican pottery tea service, he shot his cuffs to show he was wearing scarlet cufflinks.
“They’re beautiful,” I said. “Like burning coals.”
“Would you like them?” He grinned at me, stubbing out his cigarette quickly and fiddling with his cuffs. “I’d gone off them anyway, actually.” He pursed his fleshy, succinct-looking lips, uncrewed the links, and handed them to me. “I’m sure you’ll find a use for them.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I took them.
Serena seemed very nervous, perching herself on her usual chair, looking at us. “The tea’s passion fruit.”
“Oh, fuck,” said Joshua. “Why do you always have to push the boat out? Something strong and sweet and ordinary would have done for me. And this girl’s from the north, isn’t she?” He inspected the tea service. “But your ceramics are rather nice.” He felt over the warmed surface of the mustard and purple glaze as if he was reading Braille. When Serena poured his large cup he let it cool all the way through his visit, only drinking it at the end, in a single, gulping swallow. He only ever stayed long enough to let the tea cool. Josh always gave that impression of having to be off, with other things to do, but when you went with him and found out what those things were, it was most often another cup of tea he had to wait to let cool and another pile of newspapers he could riffle and dirty himself with. I ended up loving the way he read the papers, seemingly cover to cover, every column. I watched his eyes flick back and forth. He spent hours, but it was the only thing he did fast. It turned out he knew everything about what was in the papers. “Oh god,” he’d say. “Listen to this.” The bits he found to read to me were always to do with somebody’s ineptitude.
“Of course I know better than everyone,” he would say when challenged. “I just can’t do anything, can I? It’s when you try to go and do things that you fuck it all up. I like intentions. They’re fine, and as long as they stay in your head, they stay that way.”
“He’s very anal,” Serena put in.
“If I was anal, I’d be forever on the point of doing something,” he said briskly. “As it is, I’m not. I know better than that. Coleridge would have been a finer poet if he’d fallen asleep for all of his poems. If the person from Porlock had come knocking every time he was trying to write up what he’d pieced together. Imagine having a reputation for brilliance and nothing to show for it! There would be nothing for anyone to pick over and tell you you were actually rubbish.” I liked the rolling way he said ‘rubbish’. He said it with tremendous relish (which is one of his phrases, actually, not mine) in his cultivated accent, his exemplary, buffed-up BBC voice. “Coleridge was the last man to claim he’d read everything that had been published up to that point,” Joshua went on. “Imagine being him! He didn’t have to write a single word. He could go round being the universal expert, the only one in a position to judge. He could go round telling people—that’s rubbish, they’re rubbish, and you’re rubbish as well.” Joshua sighed and lit himself another cigarette, snatching it out of his mouth while he was still inhaling. “Yet he had to go on writing things. He fucked his happiness good and truly. Mind, he wrote some lovely things.”
I hadn’t read Coleridge then, so I didn’t say anything.
Serena began: “’In Xanadu, did Kubla Khan…’”
“Yes, yes,” said Joshua, to shut her up. “Now explain to me again why you haven’t been in touch with me. Not since I sent you that lovely message at Christmas.” He looked at Serena over his glasses and his eyes were blue and hurt.
“I left you lots of messages!’
“Did you?”
“Yes! Then I gave up because you were snubbing me.”
“I don’t snub people. I just don’t listen
