Address Book E-Book

Neil Bartlett

• Herausgeber: Inkandescent
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 295

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Address Book is the new work of fiction by the Costa-shortlisted author of Skin Lane. Neil Bartlett's cycle of stories takes us to seven very different times and situations: from a new millennium civil partnership celebration to erotic obsession in a Victorian tenement, from a council-flat bedroom at the height of the AIDS crisis to a doctor's living-room in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, they lead us through decades of change to discover hope in the strangest of places. Neil says, 'Every place I've ever slept in, I've always wondered about what went on at that address before I moved in. To write this book, I went back to some significant places in my own life and let the walls talk to me. The result of that listening is this new cycle of stories.' Editor Nathan Evans says, 'I've loved Neil's writing since finding his first book in the university library, so to publish his latest is something of a dream for me. Inkandescent are proud to be working with such an important queer writer with so much to say about where we are and how we got here.' 'Bartlett is a pioneer on and off the page and we are lucky to have him telling our stories'—DAMIAN BARR​ 'One of England's finest writers'—EDMUND WHITE

Leseprobe

ADDRESS BOOK

Table of Contents

Title Page

ADDRESS BOOK

Praise for ADDRESS BOOK

Praise for Neil Bartlett

ADDRESS BOOK | Neil Bartlett

14 Yeomans Mews

103 Cavendish Mansions

103 Cavendish Mansions (again)

72 Seaton Point

203 Camden Road

8 Hamlet Gardens

40 Marine Parade

A postscript;

Acknowledgements

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Praise for ADDRESS BOOK

‘The rooms where we live out troubled, anxious lives are slovenly or crazy-clean, are as spacious as our desires and as cramped as our frustrations. As a man of the theatre, Neil Bartlett knows how to fill a bed-sit with love or malice, how to elevate a neighbour boy into a military saint, how to find in a dirty mattress a platform for redeeming passion. He is an all-seeing wizard.’

EDMUND WHITE

‘Neil Bartlett’s astonishing novels have always seemed content to stand on the edge of the party, like the elegant gay uncle content to entertain and startle any who approach. With Address Book he sheds his jacket to get on down. This is a cleverly structured, funny then deeply moving novel about connections, sympathy and the traces left by our lives and loves. This is a novel for anyone who has ever mourned in silence, a book for anyone who has wondered about that well-dressed man next door but one.’

PATRICK GALE

‘Neil Bartlett is a peerless chronicler of queer lives lived—past and present. Address Book is peopled with lovers, battlers, ghosts, penitents, adventurers, and optimists.

We’re lucky to have this book.’

NIVEN GOVINDEN

Praise for Neil Bartlett

‘Bartlett is a pioneer on and off the page

and we are lucky to have him telling our stories’

DAMIAN BARR

‘Neil Bartlett can conjure up a world like no-one else.’

S.J. WATSON

Published by Inkandescent, 2021

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Text Copyright © 2021 Neil Bartlett

Cover Design © 2021 Justin David

Neil Bartlett has asserted his right under the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher assumes no responsibilities for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the information contained herein.

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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

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ISBN 978-1-912620-12-8 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-912620-13-5 (ebook)

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www.inkandescent.co.uk

ADDRESS BOOK

Neil Bartlett

‘This was my bedroom.’

‘This? When?’

‘When I lived here.’

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HAROLD PINTER, The Room

14 Yeomans Mews

Tomorrow, everything will be different. There’ll be a brand-new care-team for me to head up—a brand new hospital whose corridors I’ll need to learn how to navigate—and yet another set of protocols for me to get familiar with I’m sure. But tonight, here I am; seated in the middle of my living-room floor, surrounded by boxes and files, still procrastinating over what to take with me and what to leave behind. It’s twenty past eleven, the moving van is booked for seven o’clock tomorrow morning—and here, between my fingers, is a small piece of thin blue paper.

When it first slipped out from between the pages of my old address book, I had no idea what this piece of paper was. But then, as soon as I unfolded it, I remembered everything. His handwriting; his address, and all eleven digits of his phone-number.

Arriving at the train-station, that Saturday morning.

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Everything is quiet, and I’m fifteen.

When I get to the ticket-hall, the tiles of the floor are still all wet and shining. I’m clearly going to be the first person to walk across them this morning, and so I stop for a moment to gather my nerve. While I stand there in the doorway, I can hear myself starting to mutter something under my breath; Andrew, I seem to be saying. My name is Andrew.

I sound like I’m trying to convince myself of something.

Or maybe I sound like an anaesthetist does, in the ICU, when they lean forward and ask you to please start counting backwards from twenty.

When they want you to let go.

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Now, my feet are stepping forward; they are starting to make their way across a skin of evaporating water. And now, I can see my hands resting side by side on the shelf in front of the ticket-office window. What am I trying to say to the man behind the glass? Ah yes, of course; the name of my destination. The word I’ve been practising in my bedroom every night for the last two weeks. Twickenham, I say. Or at least, I try to say it—I try to heave the word up out of my throat at least twice, but for some reason it doesn’t want to move—and so I cough, and try again. I’d like a cheap day return, I say; A cheap day return, please, to—but at this point my throat closes up completely. The man behind the window leans forward, and he asks me to slow things down a bit. I do what I’m told—and that seems to work, because the next thing I can see is my fingers sliding a sequence of coins through the gap at the bottom of the glass, and the man’s fingers pushing my two cardboard train-tickets back towards me in return. I blush, say thank you—and then keep those two precious rectangles of cardboard squeezed tightly in my hand as I head back across the tiles and then turn left towards the ticket-barrier.

The water’s mostly gone by now, I notice. I keep my head down, and avoid making eye-contact with the man at the barrier.

Now, I’m out in some sunlight—and finally starting to breathe properly. I find a bench, lean myself back against a patch of already-warm brick wall, and discover that my shirt—my best shirt—is already starting to stick to my back. I look away to my right. Down the tracks, I begin to see a dot, shaking in the heat.

I want this dot to hurry up.

I want it to burst into being a train, and save me.

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I know what day of the week this is, because my schoolboy trips up to London were always on a Saturday, even during the holidays. And if I was still fifteen, then the heat that’s making my shirt stick to my back already must be happening on the morning of the first or second Saturday of August, 1974. All of that, from one small piece of pale-blue paper.

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I’d actually met John two weeks earlier, in the gents toilets that used to be down a sharply turning flight of stairs just opposite platform nine at Waterloo Station. We’d both been washing our hands, and the first thing that I can remember catching my eye about him was his long and sun-tanned fingers. They were so very brown, you see, and they looked so strong. Also, there was his ring. It was a gold ring, on his left-hand little finger, with a small black stone in it. As I stared, that sharp black eye had started staring right back at me, as if it somehow already knew what my fifteen-year-old self was after.

The hands stopped moving—and before I could look away, it was John himself who was making eye-contact. He used the mirror to do it, the one they had running in a strip along the top of the washbasins—and he somehow managed to arrange all of the angles so that our eyes met exactly. And it wasn’t a question, the way John looked at me; it was a statement.

I felt a kick, somewhere down between my legs—and then I can remember John keeping his eyes locked onto mine, and smiling at me as he shook the water off his hands. And that shocked me, because smiling wasn’t what I was used to on these occasions; I felt my face starting to redden—I was a terrible blusher, at fifteen—and then I just sort of stood there, I think, with my own hands dripping uselessly into the washbasin. The muscles in my throat, of course, were starting to knot themselves right up again.

A persistent and involuntary cricopharyngeal spasm, I would label that contraction of my throat-muscles now.

John turned his back. And then, he dried his hands—and left, closing the door to the gents behind him.

As it happened, there was no one else around; no one, to make me feel that I had to hurry with my next move. I dried my hands for a bit—the towel was useless, I remember, all hot and stiff and unhelpful when you pulled it down to try and find a clean bit—and then—well, then I expect I went back to the basins and soaped and washed my hands all over again. That was my usual routine; I would have been hoping, you see, that the door John had closed behind him was somehow going to swing back open all by itself, and that this older man with his suit and gold ring would just walk back in and make everything happen. Make everything happen, without my ever having to be responsible for what any of it looked or felt like.

However, on this occasion, the older man didn’t. The door stayed shut, no matter how many times I glanced up in the mirror or pulled down at the towel.

And so—eventually—I must have given up, because the next thing I can remember is my fifteen-year-old self standing out on the station concourse, just by the top of those stairs. There were eyes and hands absolutely everywhere, up there—all moving about in different directions—and I suppose I must have been staring at as many of their owners as I could, while at the same time trying to make sure that my searching didn’t look too obvious. However, no matter how hard I stared, I still couldn’t make a single one of these hurrying faces or pairs of hands belong to the person I was looking for.

And then I found him. He was the only still figure in that entire, heaving place—and he was standing directly under the famous Waterloo clock, with his back fully turned again, and his hands clasped neatly behind him.

Those beautiful, sun-tanned hands.

That heavy, slow-moving clock.

And now, of course, I wonder what John can have possibly been thinking. I wonder what on earth can have been going through his twenty-nine-year-old mind as he placed himself right in the middle of all that chaos and waited to find out if I’d followed him. I mean, he must have known how old I was, because there’s no mistaking fifteen-year-old skin, is there? And, like I say, this was happening in 1974, so if any single one of those hurrying people had realised what was going on between the two of us, then their reactions would more than likely have been as ugly as they would have been swift. If—that is—they had been able to read what was written in blood across my teenaged face, as I stood there and stared at John’s back, and his hands, and breathlessly willed him to turn around and find me.

Was he thinking of walking away, I wonder? Of giving up, and just getting back to work?

Was he hard, too?

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I stood there for quite a long time, I think. And then—then, John did turn around. And despite the crowds, he somehow repeated that extraordinary trick he had of being able to hook his eyes directly into yours. He smiled, even more broadly than before, and the next thing I can remember happening is that I made my way towards him in an absolutely straight line. Which is impossible, given how crowded the station was that lunchtime—but honestly, that’s how I remember it happening. I can even see myself doing it; I can see myself, walking towards John across the concourse, and as I watch my face being reeled in by his it’s somehow as if everybody in the crowd has been magically instructed to get out of my way. It feels as if it is John himself—John, and his steady smile—who are making this extraordinary thing happen.

It feels as if everybody else there, suddenly isn’t quite there at all.

It feels as if he’s made me invisible.

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I’m going to stop for a minute now. I’m going to put this piece of paper safely back between the pages of my address book, and then I’m going to pour myself a glass of wine.

If I can remember which of these boxes I’ve packed my wine-glasses in, that is.

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Damn. My phone says it’s ten past midnight already.

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We’re standing about two feet apart now, and we’re face to face. All of the Waterloo people are still busy walking and talking everywhere around us, but still, none of them seem to be taking any notice. I think I can remember trying to smile myself, at this point, like an actual adult. Or at least like my idea of one. John and I swap names—and I suddenly realise that I’ve never done this before. None of the other men I’ve met has ever made me admit that the boy doing the staring and the boy with my name are the same person. My throat snaps shut; no wonder then that it’s now John who does all the rest of the talking. He’s working just across the road from the station, he tells me, in a church just over the way—and he uses the church’s name as if I ought to have heard of it. I haven’t, of course, but I nod anyway. And then John says it’s a shame, because he only has a quick break for lunch, today, and so he can’t stop or do anything just now. And I nod again, because I know what he means when he says that, because I’ve done plenty of things with men in public toilets before—but at the same time, I don’t really know what he means at all; I mean, I don’t know where this is going, or what he wants me to say—and so next, there’s quite a long pause in our conversation. And then—right out there under that ridiculous great hanging clock that they still have at Waterloo, the one that still always looks to me as if it’s about to come crashing down and start killing people—yes, right out there in the middle of the main concourse at Waterloo Station, right in the midst of all of those hurrying people, this handsome, sun-tanned and considerably older-than-me young man says again that he thinks it’s a shame he’s working just now, but that another time, he’d like to be able to invite me back to his house.

And that stops everything.

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Because I really don’t know what that sentence means.

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Because where I come from, that’s not what houses are for.

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My throat stays closed. John doesn’t say anything either, but then—almost as if he’s realised it’s now or never, and that I might be about to lose my nerve—he reaches inside his jacket. He produces a little black notebook, and a fountain pen—the book has soft leather covers, I notice, like skin, and the pages all have gilt edges—and then John licks his finger, and finds an empty page, and he starts to ink something across the pale blue paper in four separate lines. The strokes of his pen are hard, and fast, and exact—and now, as I watch him do that again, after all these years, I notice that he’s writing down all of his details for me exactly like a Junior Doctor writes out a prescription. I mean, with that specific kind of haste which isn’t actually hasty or careless at all.

The kind of haste where every word matters.

John puts his pen away, and tears out the page from his book. He checks that the ink is dry, folds the page in half, and holds it out towards me. He’s put his phone number at the bottom, he says, and sure, I can hear myself saying, I’ll try and call you tomorrow.

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What kind of fifteen-year-old agrees to go home with someone he’s never met before?

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A fifteen-year-old who’s ready.

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Phone boxes always smelt terrible. They stank of sweat, of piss—of cigarette-smoke—of all the other people who’d ever been in there before you. Also, the doors had this unnerving habit of swinging silently shut, like they wanted to trap you.

I’d laid my bike down in a patch of long grass—I’d cycled to a phone box that was right across town, and so was nearly out in the countryside—and now I was inside, and already breathing hard, and getting myself all ready for the call with a stack of ten-pence pieces. I had my piece of blue paper there with me, naturally, and had already got it unfolded and propped up next to the coins. I’d long since memorised everything that was on it, but I still wanted the strokes of John’s handwriting there in plain sight.

For the cycle-ride, I remember, I’d hidden the piece of paper down the side of one of my socks.

I dialled his number—a different hole for each number, you had to use—and then, at the very last minute, just as I was struggling to get my ten pence piece into the slot in time, I remember feeling as if my fingers had suddenly become somebody else’s. I remember smelling some previous caller’s breath on the receiver, and hearing my own breath coming back down the line at me like surf. I remember thinking: are you supposed to say your name, in case he doesn’t remember who you are? And then, quite naturally and calmly, John took over.

Just let me check, he said.

Yes, he said; it looks like the weekend after next should be fine.

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Do I really remember his voice unknotting my larynx at that point—or is that just what’s happening to me now?

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I can certainly remember John’s instructions. I suppose that’s because of how clearly he delivered them, like it was going to be the simplest thing in the world for me to leave my address after breakfast and then arrive at his by lunchtime. Oh, it’s easy—he said—you just get on your usual train for London, but hop off at Clapham Junction. Once you’re there—he said—look up on the departure boards for anything that’s going west marked Twickenham—and don’t worry about the train’s final destination—he said—just look out for that one name. Twickenham trains run all the time—he said—and once you’re on one all you have to do is sit tight and count to seven. First there’s Putney, and then Barnes, then Mortlake; there’s Richmond, then North Sheen, then St. Margaret’s. And then—hey presto—there’s me. Come straight out of the station, turn left, and I’ll be parked just across the road. Okay?

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I remember a slice of sunshine coming in through a dusty window, and moving very slowly across my lap.

I remember watching my legs cross and uncross themselves, and being amazed that there was no-one else in the compartment to see me doing that.

I remember the train slowing down—and I remember especially how strange it was to see the word I’d been muttering in my head all week finally materialising; how strange it was to see it in big black capital letters, sliding past the window.

I remember the catch of that compartment window, as I struggled to pull it down in time, and also the metal of the door-handle outside. I remember the metal of that handle being as hot beneath my hand as the rib of a panting dog, or a strange man’s cock.

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Time for another drink.

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Itis easy. Walking across the road to his car seems a much simpler operation than crossing those tiles had been this morning—but then, at the very last minute, I mess things up. I go round to the passenger side of the car, like John has told me to, and that’s all fine—but then, when I actually get inside, the black, woven strap on the seat-belt feels suddenly way too hot and flexible. It makes me blush again, and fumble. It makes me think of skin—of the covers of his little black notebook—and now that both the car doors have swung shut, I suddenly feel like I’m back in that telephone box again. I can literally smell it—smell all of that trapped breath, and panic—and also I can see John’s hands taking a firm hold of the steering wheel, and there’s that ring again. It’s winking at me.

I feel I badly need to create a barrier between John’s hands and my face—and so I use the only thing I have. I start talking, much too loudly—the extra volume, of course, is because I’m trying to keep my throat open—and eventually I do manage to fill the air between my face and John’s hands with a layer of protection. I fill it with words about my school, and the train, and the small town I’ve just come from. I think I possibly even talk about my parents—and all the time, outside of the slowly-moving car, I can see that the August sunshine is starting to hammer down almost vertically, and that it’s drawing a hard white line around the edges of absolutely everything. And because of that, even though I’m talking out loud, I can also hear a voice that’s located only in the back of my head, and this second voice is saying to me, Andrew, you do know this is actually happening? It says those words several times—and I recognise it, because of course it’s the same voice that I’d used on myself in the ticket-hall, when I was worrying about whether to put my feet down on the skin of water stretched over those tiles.

Eventually, I manage to look away from the white light outside the windscreen and back across at John. I look at his hands, first, on the steering wheel, and then, gaining confidence, I move my eyes up to his face.

The kick between my legs comes even harder this time. John is watching the road, obviously, but I can see that he’s smiling all the same.

I shift in my seat, to try and hide myself.

My shirt is sticking to the small of my back again.

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We turn left. There’s a curve in the road, lined with some houses—and they’re big old-fashioned houses, not the small modern ones that we have back at home—and then there is a dual carriage-way, cut off from us by a set of traffic lights. There are some bright, dusty trees, close by the road—and now we’re turning left again, because the lights have finally gone green. And then, suddenly, there’s a plane—an aeroplane, huge—and so close overhead that it seems to fill the whole of the windscreen. I duck, and John laughs. He tells me that Twickenham is right under the Heathrow flight-path; sometimes, he says, there are great queues of the things, whole rows of them hanging up above his house like some sort of giant waiting birds, but that you get used to the noise eventually. Next, there are some big dusty trees again—behind a high wire fence, this time—and then we go left, and right, and left. There’s a row of modern-looking flat-roofed houses—and these ones are a bit like ours at home, all small and tidy and predictable—and John tells me this is just around the back of where he lives. Then, before I’m quite ready, the car is parked. And here is that seat-belt again, with the fleshy strap that won’t quite behave itself between my fingers.

John gets out first.

I remember this next bit as all being in especially vivid colour, for some reason, like one of my grandfather’s home movies. The ones he used to show us on Sundays, after lunch.

First, John and I are ducking under some kind of wooden arch or pergola—and then we’re coming out onto a bright green lawn that’s dotted with still-young trees. I’m two paces behind him, now. The lawn seems to belong to some sort of a communal garden, filling up the space between the two rows of houses which make up John’s address—and look, there’s a neighbour, across the way, doing some sort of watering with a hose. Because of all this over-exposed sunlight, the water that he’s spraying over his flowers is turning into something else entirely. Diamonds, I think. They’re certainly making a rainbow. And while I’m noticing this, the man starts waving and calling out a cheery hello—and not just to John, but also it seems to the person walking two paces behind him. As if everything in this sunshine is normal, and all three of us are in the right place at the right time.

John doesn’t miss a step.

In fact, he waves right back—and I suppose I must have been looking down at my feet by this point, because what I’m noticing now is that the path which crosses John’s grass is made up of exactly the same sort of concrete slabs that we have dividing our front lawn back at home. For some reason, noticing this makes me hold my breath again. We turn left, and I follow John’s feet. There are more flowers now on either side of us—fat pink hydrangeas, and some red and white geraniums—and now I must be looking up and ahead of me again, because I can see that John’s front door is painted black all over. There’s a brass door-knocker, and the house number is in brass too—whereas at home, people ring the bell, and the numbers are just white plastic.

I decide I’m going to try and stop counting all the differences.

John stands aside; there’s a step you have to take, he says—and he’s right, because I can see that to get fully inside John’s house you have to get your feet up and over an odd little raised threshold, which means I’m going to have to watch myself and not stumble. And now John is saying, you go first, and I’m saying, thank you—and look, my feet are doing what they’re told.

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Because of all that dazzle from the water, and the sunshine, everything in here seems dark.

I can see a dining table, with a few too many chairs around it, and now, as my eyes start to gradually adjust, I can make out some sort of a big wooden chest or cabinet. It’s very large, and very locked-looking. To the left, there is a piano. Yes—really; right in the middle of John’s living-room, there is a jet-black grand piano, which is not something that I knew before today anybody could actually have in their home. Because of its colour, it seems to be soaking up all the noise in the room. It also seems to be collecting all the available light; the lid, for instance, is a gleaming pool of flat, black oil—and I can see that there’s a piece of music, floating in it, which I suppose must be something that somebody has lost or forgotten. Behind the piano, there is something else, almost as big as a person. This mystery object is wrapped in a dark blue blanket, tied with a belt and leaning up against the very far wall.

I don’t ask.

I don’t ask, because I need to concentrate. I say my name again—in my head—but it doesn’t really help. At this point John puts his bunch of keys down, and the noise of metal meeting metal brings me back to myself. I turn around, and watch his feet going first up the stairs.

On the landing, there’s a bathroom—John points that out in case I need it, I suppose—and then he tells me that the next doorway along is just his spare room. Through the open doorway, I can see a left-open suitcase, and piles of clothes. These things have all just been left sitting out on the bed, and they’re clearly all waiting for something to happen to them, but I don’t ask what any of that means either.

And then here, at the end of the landing, is the door to John’s bedroom.

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The door opens, and everything is white. White walls, white wardrobe doors, white bed—and opposite the bed, there’s a big piece of mirror, a mirror which has somehow got me trapped inside of it already. I turn away, because I’m not quite ready for that. There are some thin white curtains in front of the window just by the bed, I notice, and they’re moving very, very slowly.

Next, there are fingers, undoing buttons, but I’m not sure now if this is John undoing me, or me undoing him. Then, we are both taking off our trousers—and now I’m turning away again, because John is bending over and taking off absolutely everything. His trousers, and his socks, and then his pants—and this is something else that I’ve never seen before, because suddenly he stops being brown all over. Next, there is a duvet—and we only have sheets and blankets, at home—and John is reaching over and dragging this great white thing onto the floor with just the one hand. He does it in one go, just like he tore that page out, and the sudden strength of his arm as he does that makes my throat contract. Next, I can feel the bed-sheet, and it’s very cool and smooth beneath my skin. Those white window-curtains are right next to me, now—easily within reach, should I want to stretch out a hand and touch them—and they have shadows moving through them in long, slow waves. The window itself has been left ajar, and the air that’s coming in from the garden and sunshine outside feels odd, as if it was somehow both warm and cool at the same time. Then, John starts to touch me; on my feet, first of all, because now I’m lying on my back, and John is standing at the foot of the bed. I know that I’m naked, just like he is, and that he’s looking me up and down while he strokes my foot—and I really want to look back up at him while he does that, but I can’t. Not yet. And so instead of looking up at him I turn my head to the side and watch the shadows move through those curtains. They are moving very gently—even carefully—like his hand—and the air that is touching them is touching me all over too. And now, finally, I do manage to look up into John’s face. And again, just like the first time, the very first thing that he does for me is smile. And I realise now—and I mean now, here, in the middle of my living-room floor, in the middle of the night—it isn’t the fact that I’m doing all of this in a house for the very first time that is making my fifteen-year-old self feel so astonished; what is astonishing, is that somebody is teaching him that it’s quite alright to smile.

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The first part of our lovemaking I remember as happening in complete silence. But later on—after half an hour, perhaps—I can very definitely hear myself starting to make a lot of noise. I start to make sounds that I don’t think I’ve ever made before, and that bewilders me. The sounds arrive in the room without my even being sure that it’s my own throat that’s producing them, and I think I flounder a bit at this point, and maybe even call out for help. When this happens, John doesn’t stop. He is using his mouth on me now, and better than anybody’s ever done it before; somewhere low down inside my body, I am beginning to feel sensations that are much too large to stay put. I can feel them getting impatient. They are demanding to be acknowledged—and as my back starts to arch and hollow in response, I get the idea that these sounds or feelings of mine are like those planes that John has told me are always lining up over the roof of his house. Except these planes of mine aren’t high; they’re deep. In fact, they’re as deep as you can go without coming out the other side. I start to pant, and next—well I really don’t know how else to describe this to you, even though I’m someone who has worked in hospitals all his life, and so ought to be thoroughly familiar with the details of what happens to a body when it starts to feel like somebody else’s—next, my younger self arches his back even further, and opens his throat, and begins to sing.

John still doesn’t stop what he’s doing—but with his spare hand, he does reach up and brush his fingers across my opening mouth. Two of them slip inside me, and he hooks them against my teeth.

When he does this, I understand. John is reminding me that the bedroom window next to us is still ajar, and that the water across the way may still be turning into diamonds above those brilliantly-coloured flowers. But he isn’t telling me to stop; he is telling me to keep going. Just quietly. He is telling me that I can signal to those waiting planes any time I want; in fact, he is encouraging me to bring them in to land. He is telling me that nothing needs to stop me now, least of all myself. He is telling me that this sunshine, and my throat, and my voice, are all mine. Andrew, he says, not looking up from his work. Andrew.

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I come.

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We all have to leave our childhood selves behind. To abandon ourselves, in a way—and I sometimes wonder if that’s why we’re all so obsessed with TV shows and stories that take us back into somebody’s past and then at some crucial point snap right around to reveal the terrible wound or abuse that is then supposed to explain everything that ever happened to that person afterwards.

Well, just to be clear: this picture of my fifteen-year-old self involuntarily arching his back in John’s sun-filled August bedroom is not a picture of abuse at all. I mean, listen to those sounds that I’m making—to those long, straying notes, played pianissimo, fingered right up high on the neck of a double bass.

They’re wonderful. Wonderful.

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How strange it is to be remembering those sounds tonight. In the middle of a pandemic, when once again what you have to fear most from a stranger is his touch, or breath.

Tonight, when I’m about to make another journey into the unknown.

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Afterwards, John found