One thousand and ten

ONE THOUSAND AND TEN

Downtempo drum and bass. 5am. He walks me back to my tent in the acid grey mist of Glastonbury’s South East Corner, IICON stage - the giant head - looking away from us with an iota of content. His best friend bounds across the grass, back from the bar, drinks in hand and then she spots me, and stops. “I'm gonna walk Jack to his tent for a bit” he says, she nods, walking backwards into lasers with her little spoon of K, pity glistening in her eyes for me like gift shop topaz in a child’s palm. It is easier to breed pandas than make our love work, but she gives me my chance once a year. Dutifully she disappears.

Tanned and dusty, slumped back on the blow-up mattress, he is quietly confident in his beauty. He wears his vest taut like a sail in wind, rising from the boom of his pecs, never too tight, just casually statuesque. He is never basic. He is perfect. I have loved him since we were nineteen.

This is it. My kiss for the week. A thank you and goodnight before he flies back to New York. I must make this kiss last for the year. Longer possibly. The clouds part, and his comet goes past, I take a bump off his key. I want to be on his level, a functioning addict again, using drugs as a smokescreen for feelings, drinking instead of growing up, every day just shake the Etch-o-Sketch and start again.

Romance? Tradition? Obsession? Charity? Intrigue? Coercion? I kiss him. He kisses me. I live. He bides.

I can pull his cock out in this moment and he might go with it, but I don’t. Not this time. We are growing older and a new fatal politeness is threatening our edges like fruit mould. Nearly forty. The best years of our life, which we spent apart, are behind us already. Just having him close is what I want really. In this moment I am the only person in the world who can see him and I feel like I’ve won. The ghosts in our eyes stare at each other silently from their opposite ends of their long banquet table, our shared past of untouched dishes. I feel like our ancestors are old friends, doing what they can to bring us back together again, or perhaps it’s a cosmic force from the future, knowing what we could both achieve.

I don’t think he can tell how close I am to tears. I’m doing great, as they say. Outside drum and bass is flying across the air like warfare, DJ Storm is playing Photek, “Hidden Camera”. And then it stops. The music ends. It must be 6. He lies me down and kisses me again, holding my beard. “I love you”, he says. “I love you” he says again. “I love you” I say. And it is cruel, because I cannot have his love, he has withheld it for decades. But it is also true. He doesn’t love me, so much as he loves my love for him, or it periodically fascinates him, it is a phenomenon that he checks in on.

What am I to him? I feel like a prize courgette, buried in the undergrowth of a walled garden. Huge, growing in the dark, in showers that nobody else felt or even saw, no courgette has ever been bigger. He will not eat me, but he likes to know that I am there. I wait for months until the correct moon comes, and then in the dead of night I hear the key in the lock, the old wooden door, his footsteps on the sandy path. His strong warm hands sift through the large cold leaves and he touches me, just for a minute. Checking I am still there.

To say his love comes in waves would be a generous exaggeration. It’s more like sightings of a monster in a lake. Sometimes I wonder if I’m not gay, I just love him. Every other cock is a stunt double, a voodoo doll, a placeholder, the wooden peg that a medieval woman bites while she is giving birth. Or perhaps there is a deeper layer than this, one that I do not want to see myself. He is, in fact, a dummy for something I can never have, the boys I didn’t fuck at school. I met him when I was young, full of dormitory trauma, and I stored some down the back of his hoodie, he unwittingly carries a parcel of my past.

Either way. He is the start and the end. The pin drop. The [INSERT COIN] and the GAME OVER. I can remember the evening when this love came out of nowhere, like a bomb in 2008. And the blast of it has lasted forever. A vortex of light suspended above me like a vast bivouac. I have paused the light of his explosion and made it into a cold sunshine somehow. It is wrong. It is weird. I cannot fix it.

I better go, he says. He better go.

Robert my tent buddy comes back from the club in drag, and starts taking off his make up. Did you see him? I ask. See who? She giggles. He was here, I whisper. Who was here? He kissed me. Who kissed you? He kissed me. He came. And then I fall asleep. It is midday when I wake and Rob has already left for London.

I tidy the PR office in production silently, bin bag in hand. I slide empty cups and Penguin wrappers and DJ set lists and white board markers into a bin bag listlessly and think, this is how he loves me, like someone sifting through a TV guide midweek, nothing but boring repeats.

I am not alone in loving him hopelessly. There have been others who have fallen hard. I’ve seen their desperate comments on Instagram and studied them like Jessica Fletcher. I’m always in the hedge with my binoculars opposite his grid. I’ve shagged some of them in an attempt to get closer to my own dilemma. I’m reluctantly in his “Never The Bride” club. Perhaps I should start an annual convention. I’ve seen boys set up shop outside his city walls, wait a year or two, and then pack away again. But I am still here, tragically, with my heart on a trestle table, and an iZettle that says 1p - Please Tap here.

I slide a box of wristbands into the bin. They meant something a few hours ago, and now they mean nothing.

I walk to the Stone Circle and speak to Peter Serafinowicz. His creativity refills me. A man bursting with ideas. A genius. I realise love is a waste of my time. Love is not how I will be remembered. He’s getting old now anyway. Put him into writing. Writing is who I must marry now.

I share a spliff with a car park twink in high-vis, and he strokes my legs and calls me Daddy, and then I hang out with Iggy and Lily under a giant ash, posh children in love who have been working the bars all week. They cheer me up with their smoky giggles and stolen rizzlers and gossip about crazy godmothers and house parties in Ladbroke Grove, their voices are like warm pebbles in a brook. Tomorrow I will be on the motorway with Ben, my techno DJ friend, and we can stop at KFC. This is all I am looking forward to.

Nobody wants me, but I can still buy a Zinger.

TENNIS COURT

It’s nearly a week after Glastonbury and I am by myself eating slices of Edam in Spa Fields across from the tennis court.

I allow myself to cry. Big truncated sobs that make me jault forwards painfully like a lawnmower that can't start. The noise shocks me. I hardly ever cry. Boarding school smacked it out of us, but occasionally I must. It is not just him, it is the post-Glastonbury dip, it is Pride looming, it is Elliot, it is Mum, it is Dad, it is everything.

But I am ashamed of my feelings for him, how they continue across my life like gneissic bands in a cliff. The pattern goes on and on, unstoppable as tinnitus. My feelings embarrass me, they hurt physically. My brain feels overwhelmed, like I’ve been tasked with folding the sky like a tablecloth and putting it into a match box.

People talk about unrequited love. But it is not this. It is worse.

He loves me a bit.

He is a fruit machine that pays out very occasionally. If I put in one thousand, he’ll give me ten. But it is worth it because I love him.

I’ve spent my life putting coins in. Spinning the wheels. Two melons and a treasure chest. Two melons and a cherry. Two cherries and a melon. Two treasure chests and a cherry. Three melons. A Kiss. Start again.

In turn, there are boys that love me, a drag queen, a museum gay, a squid farmer in Vietnam, and I string them along, doing to them what he does to me, keeping their love in the fridge. At least I hook up with them regularly, and send them nudes when they ask, and buy them things. I took one to Budapest, I paid another’s rent when they were skint. I am kind to my boys, but I am cruel too because ultimately I am not theirs, I am his. And then I walk past a cute blond boy and think “why all this fuss - he’ll do”. I’m a mess.

I cry with the immensity of it. How awful we all are. How horrible life is behind the music and the drinks. This invisible pyramid of endless rejection and hurt that we have built around ourselves, that we spin like a web, each looking left with panting tongues, while punching someone to the right in the face. A cruel dance that the universe controls, our negative energy, it is cosmologically harvested. Confusion. Jealousy. Intensity. Regret. All of it is invisible melons and courgettes.

Why can’t he just come here and let me hug him. Why can’t he just walk to mine. And let me stuff a fucking pepper, and watch a movie. Why can’t he. Why can’t he. Why can’t he. He is just a few streets away, staying at his Mum’s on Chancery bloody Lane. It drives me insane. I have a double bed, a free flat. But he doesn’t want me like that, and I can’t accept it. I can cope at best.

I hate these weeks. These weeks when we are in the same city. When he is just a few streets away. How does it feel? It feels like a giant finger in the sky striking a deep dark piano key and just holding it there.

Ommmmm.

One continuous note.

Ommmmm.

In the same city for a whole week. In this time we could have watched a different musical each night, we could have gone to Whitstable and had oysters and sat with blankets around a fire on the beach, we could have called in cocaine and fucked each other on Viagra over the breakfast bar, we could have attempted a beef wellington and watched Sandra Bullock rom coms until we fell asleep in our ice cream. We could have gone to G-A-Y and sat in the corner laughing at everyone. But I haven’t seen him yet. Every day I wake, I wait for an hour or two, and then I try him. But it’s “dinner with Alex”, or “Joel’s birthday”, or “pizza with Katie”

I want to carve it in my chest with a pizza wheel: PIZZA WITH KATIE. And then massage white spirit into the wounds and set myself on fire and just lie on my back in the street screaming, emblazoned with these flaming words PIZZA WITH KATIE !!!

Why did I have to pick someone so beautiful and popular? Everyone is cooing for his time, he is constantly stretched because he is perfect.

It is better when he is in New York and the rejection is justified by an ocean, and I can carry on with being mean to the boys that love me instead, and he can sit at his desk planning billboards. But when he is here. When he is here. I must kneel before his throne waiting for that one bone. He will see me once before he leaves. He always does.

My crying slows down eventually until it sounds more like a toddler doing backing vocals for The Lion King. I blow my nose on my Kyran Thrax t-shirt and just sit there wearing a large rosette of yellow snot in the park, my jellyfish of self-torment that has taken shape in bile form, sliding down my breast towards a sea of grass. Snot really holds the sunlight. I can see it in my lower peripheral vision blinding me. I hope that it helps the Gods to pick me out and send help, my Bat signal of snot, marinated in tears. I sit there for an hour with my head in my lap softly sobbing. Until I feel a hand on my shoulder. I look up. Is it him? No. It is the men from the tennis court, they have walked over to see if I’m okay. “You ok mate?” the shortest says. The shortest straight man is always the voice, he won’t have it any other way.

“It’s alright”, I whimper. “It’s just .. heart break” I say, pathetically.

“She’s not worth it” he says.

The other man nods sternly with his arms folded. “Mate, forget her. Go out this weekend and get yourself a new bird with a big fucking rack”

The third man doesn't get involved, he just scrolls his phone with a frown, making it clear that he has not invested any interest in someone else’s feelings.

“Thanks”. I smile at them, thinking how rad it would be if all three of them just face-fucked me.

They go away again holding their tennis rackets like clubs, high from doing a good thing.

It is sunset.

And then he texts.

He texts!

“How about we get some lunch tomorrow, around 2?”

I skip home, my head dizzy with this new information, already it is a hit song in my life’s musical. LUNCH TOMORROW - AROUND 22222222 !!!

He has given me the Friday lunch slot. That’s how you know a man doesn’t love you, when he has a week before going back to New York, but he gives you the Friday lunch slot. But a lot can happen over lunch. I take it. What else can I do?

If his life is a Now CD, he is making me track eight on CD two. The cheap seats. Some random song that flopped by Vanessa Paradis or LeAnn Rimes during a bad week. I take it. But I ignore the clues. My life has purpose, at least for tonight.

I change the bed, I floss my teeth, I trim my pubes, I do a complicated moisturiser routine as if I’m some lame marketing gay with a mortgage on City Island. I find a clean t-shirt. I iron it. I find my most inviting socks, the ones that offset my calves, and I wash and dry my best shorts, the ones that taper just so at the thigh and show off my cock. I spend an age choosing the angle of the living room blind slats, so that sunshine pours lazily into the flat. I take the bins out, I have a reason to do things now. I put champagne in the fridge. I lay two magazines open on the table, and some books, I am cultured you see, it’s one of my few advantages over the twinks he breeds.

I draw the line at cooking. But I buy salt and vinegar Pringles. Full price from a proper shop, none of this off-license marked-up Costco crap for my man.

Normally he likes meeting me in restaurants but this time he wants to see the flat. A good sign? Restaurants shield him from my intensity, he can see me up close safe in the knowledge that I’m handcuffed to the savoir faire, he can hide behind menus, waiters adjudicating everywhere. A table for two is just longer than two erect cocks, it is only the fur of our knees that interlocks, but at the flat, at the flat… Anything is possible! In the back of my mind I know I am being ludicrous but I am always ready. We are both top, but I’ve practised in Berlin, I will switch for him. I wish I had some mephedrone suddenly. Then he texts again to say he needs to be in Soho by 5. He has wedged me in. Okay. That’s okay. I’m still on the bill. I’m lucky to be on it at all. Perhaps we can go into Soho together he says. Thats kind of him. An outro.

The door bell rings and I feel the flood of oxygen to my heart. I stand by the receiver and count to ten, then let him in. I try to play it cool, walking away from him a lot, talking to a vase of spatulas for a minute, and then making a joke to the coffee machine. His shoulders fill the space. Is it really him. He is here.

His ego needs to see me make a fool of myself, so we sit on the terrace where I’ve laid out blankets, and I half cuddle him. But he is more irate than usual, I spot the start of a middle-aged frustration that wasn’t there before. It is unattractive but also ups my chances, I will process it later. A Glastonbury comedown? But there’s something real about it too. He is going through something, one foot on the diving board of something else, something new. I have a year to chew it over. I present a bowl of peanuts. Call me Nigella. And then I chain smoke, letting him whine about things, he’s bordering on unhappy, but I feel bad because it’s still music to me. He is here. I wish it was my problem too, I wish he would let me. I just listen.

Pathetically I read his Tarot and it’s awkward because his cards keep telling him to get a grip, to level up in his job, to cut the crap out of his life, to pick a lane and kill off his recusants, of which I am not one. The Knight of Cups tells him to notice me, but he files it under something else.

He reads out the meanings off a Tarot website and his soft primordial reading voice is too adorable, like fourteen year olds taking it in turns to read paragraphs of John Steinbeck in double English. I make him pick two more cards to prolong its effect. I wish they would have him read the news. I love his voice so much, in all its forms, but especially when reading aloud. I try not to laugh.

We lie side by side, for a minute, and I listen to his heart beat while he slags off Gen Z now. Employees that are useless. They’ve been given all the tools, he says. Don’t know what to do apparently. The irony passes over him. But I am happy. We kiss a little bit, at my bequest, he is being polite and so he lets me be a total loser. Also it’s his fault for not containing me in a tapas joint. And then I ask him what his greatest worry is.

He looks down at his perfect legs, and then at me and he says:

“That I’ll never find anyone”

I don’t know where to look. My eyes fly like spears through the French doors and wedge themselves into the holes of a colander.

PRIDE

It is London Pride and I am being paid good money this week to manufacture joy, or something approximating it. As close as we can get with middling speaker systems, ten tired drag queens and a bin bag of increasingly complicated flags.

I spent the night alone hugging a pillow, while he texted me for nightclub recommendations. He is always out, looking for someone who is right for him perhaps, drinking reality away more likely. I love him for it. I am a party animal too at my core. I had to scale it back because I was… well.. that’s a post yet to come. But I am never happier than when watching him scream pop lyrics into dry ice and I wish I was there. I suspect there’s someone else. Of course I do. It would be odd if I didn’t. But yes. He would rather drink continuously in the midst of loud music, and smudge around in the grubbiness of Ku Bar, than be with me under duvet. I don’t think about it. It’s fine.

I am being chauffeur driven now to Chelsea Football Club. I am producing their Pride float. I am producing three Pride floats, in fact. And it’s surreal how I have this role to play that I carved out for myself. I used to be a customer and now I am selling it. Selling the illusory Pride thing. The driver is talking to me, about Palmeiras, and Quarter Finals, and I nod in sunglasses, not listening, just remembering I’m also doing a party in a shop at 6.

Chancery Lane is moving past the rolled down windows and I know that he is asleep in there somewhere. His home nest that I’ve never seen. What does he think about when he wanks in the morning? What does his Mum make him for breakfast? Are there Russian dolls on the window ledge?

The chauffeur is answering my question. I can’t remember what I asked. I listen for a bit. Oh yes. Why is Chelsea football club blue. Great question. I’ve learnt how to live in two modes. I am a schizophrenic, almost by trade. I can hear my voice saying something about the importance of Pride, but my mind is at the bottom of a black sea now, with swirling white froth on the top, sharp bolts of sunlight that dissipate. I start to see that our love has a faint geography, we are a submerged island where the cracks became caves, turned into pillars, and then stumps, and slid away under roaring waves. I see expanses of chalk, acres of it, turned into mulch and then pressed into marble, collapsing into the deep black spiralling waters at nightfall, chalk as high as the eye can see, dove white in the moonlight, marble spiralling like the veins of a tensed arm, sliding vertically into untold depths. Walls of marble deep under the sea. I see sugar lumps now, millions of them, falling and dissolving into the bottom of the black sea, stirred by my eyes somehow, my vision can stir the sea. We are connected by nothing but science and water and theory. I must use my eyes to move the sugar lumps before they smother me, swoosh, swoosh, I start clearing them, but there are too many, the sugar lumps, they start to take form, his face, like Michaelangelo’s David, a giant statue, the size of a ship, bigger, buried at the bottom of the ocean, rising out of the chalk bed. His legs. His legs. His legs. I am floating towards him, towards the giant lips. His sugar lips the size of a street, in black water, swallowing me, I can’t breath.

“We’re here mate”

I step outside the car and there are lesbians with knobbly knees in sports gear holding banners and pom poms. A scowling twink scrolls his phone in a crop top that says PROTECT THE DOLLS. Someone is shouting “Lesley… can you count these flags. We need thirty six”

The drag queens are in good spirits. Drunk at noon. They’re being well paid today to stand in a traffic jam.

Someone says “It’s fine - Jack’s here now” and for a split second I think Jack who. I force myself to cheer up. I open a can of coffee. It’s nice to have something to do isn’t it.

* * * * *

Thanks for reading my Substack. Sorry this post wasn't a sassy take on a BBC3 show. I'm writing my way through something I guess. Maybe you can relate. Thanks again. J xx