Equivocator (9 page)

The sleeves of Jesse's cream pullover are rolled up. He sits beside me on the edge of the bed, bent double, elbows propped on his knees. He doesn't look at me. I lay my palm on the inside of his arm, where the pale veins fork, and stroke the intimate skin. It comforts me to touch him. He removes his arm and shakes the sleeve back down as if my touch had riled him. He shivers. With a great yawn, he ruffles his hair with both hands.

There's nothing conspicuously attractive about Jesse – except everything. Bread and salt, I think. And the mad idea sweeps over me – not for the first time – that if I could have had someone's baby, it would have been Jesse's, and all would be well. Or if he could have had mine. The biological absurdity of this idea doesn't really strike me. I've felt it before, fleetingly, as we lay in a loose hug half asleep at the end of a tired day.

‘Jesse, I'm so sorry,' I say.

‘You always are, I do believe you when you say so, I really do. But it's pointless. Don't start. Not now.'

‘What do you mean, don't start?'

‘Look, sorry, I'm just – really tired. I've never been so tired in my life. I need to sleep. And don't wake me up in the night, for God's sake.'

‘Jesse.'

‘I mean it, Sebastian!' he bursts out. ‘I've had enough of all that. Enough.'

I swallow hard. Flush to the roots of my hair. My voice comes out small. ‘All what?'

‘All the stuff we pretend not to know about, we pretend isn't happening. It used to hurt me. Appal me. I used to think it was my fault. It's beginning to bore me.'

‘You don't sound like you,' I mumble. What I don't add is that he actually sounds rather like me. Taking hold of the reins at last, resisting, controlling. I've never thought how much that unique ability to listen, the exceptional empathy of the man, might have cost Jesse. And how much temptation it has offered me, not only to take him for granted, but to trample all over him.

Without reply, Jesse lies back, turns on his side and falls fast asleep, just as he is, fully clothed. When I ease off his shoes, he hardly stirs. I inch in beside him. It's the first time in our life together that I don't dare reach out to him. Has something happened while I was away to put iron in Jesse's soul? But what? Is there someone else?

Sleep doesn't come. I lie in the lee of Jesse's breathing. It comes like sea-waves, in a hushed rhythm, steady and remote. A respiring tranquillity, over there, in which I long to take shelter.

In the early hours I give up on sleep and stand at the bedroom window, lifting a slat in the blind to peer out: there's what they used to call a bomber's moon. In the milky brightness, I can make out St Giles Cripplegate, where Foxe and Frobisher and Milton are sleeping. The pond holds the moon quite still. What is all this fuss I've been making about the past, when it comes to it? Even my father is old history, stale and unsustaining. Rhys Salvatore is nothing to me. Only my mother and Jesse have any call upon my heart. The lumber of my obsessions is tomb furniture: viscera preserved in a canopic jar. I have allowed my parents' world a mortuary persistence.

When I turn from the window, Jesse is awake.

‘Off on one of your jaunts?' he asks. ‘Don't let me hinder you.'

‘No,' I say. ‘No, of course not.' I perch on his side of the bed. My ulterior mind dives to the questions: how does he know, how long has he known and what precisely does he know? Or think he knows. ‘I'm going nowhere, Jesse. Can't sleep. I thought I might smoke a joint.'

‘OK.'

‘Have your sleep out, love,' I say. ‘Sorry to wake you. We can talk in the morning.'

‘No, it's all right. I'm used to it.'

I make hot chocolate and root out some ginger biscuits. Jesse rolls the joint, puffs and holds, passing it across between finger and thumb. Perhaps hash will soften his sardonic turn of mind. I've bruised him so badly. I've made a habit of reaching in and roughly handling Jesse's heart. Why? Because I could. Not once but countless times. Now his grief, so long constrained, is in process of turning rancorous – and anger will free him. Justin's words echo: ‘People think they can mess him about.' A clear warning.

‘Jesse, could I say something? I know it solves nothing. But I do – just – love you.' I'm hardly able to look him in the face. ‘As I have never loved anyone before. In my life. Please, please – dear, darling Jesse – would you at least believe that? – if you believe nothing else.'

He takes another drag, clasping it deep in his lungs and blowing out a thin stream of smoke. I feel him falter. Then he tells me.

The night before I left for Wales he heard me get up and dress, as he'd done before. He watched through his eyelashes as I picked up my trainers and tiptoed to the door. It wasn't new. Always before, he'd let it happen. He'd exercised restraint and given me the benefit of the doubt. As soon as I closed the front door, he threw on a tracksuit and followed.

‘I can still hardly believe, Sebs, I can't – that you'd behave like that. To me. To yourself. Even though I half knew. But half knowing isn't the same as seeing with your own eyes. As I followed you, you seemed like another animal. You looked smaller. You even walked differently.'

My palms sweat. I'll stop. On my honour it will never happen again.

He makes no effort to disguise his cynicism. Honour? I'd have felt just the same in Jesse's position. Any person of average intelligence would sneer at the clichés I find myself coming out with. I swig back my chocolate. He hasn't touched his. I stop myself asking him if he'd like a biscuit. I go blurting on. I've no idea why I behaved like that. Well, I do have some idea, but there's no excuse for it, none in the world. So I won't try to explain. It is, in some horrible way, mechanical.

Yes, Jesse says, he knows that: mechanical. When we were first together, he thought I was sleep-walking. In fact there were occasions in the past when I had sleepwalked. He'd shepherded me back to bed.

‘What was I doing?'

‘One time you tried to clamber into the mirror. I did my best not to wake you up, just guided you back to bed. You'd do things that were not really in character. Weird. You cleaned the bath with bleach. Another time you made toast and spread it with Marmite, which you normally dislike.'

‘You never said, Jesse.'

‘No. I didn't like to. I felt it might disturb you.' Jesse's voice is softened.

‘Actually,' I venture, cupping my hand around the weak flame of intimacy. ‘I used to love Marmite when I was a kid.'

‘Fuck the Marmite, Sebs. Fuck it, fuck the childhood memories. I'm not interested. You reek of nostalgia, did you know that? I'm assuming you admit to being awake when you go off cruising?'

‘I'm awake. Yes, of course I am. Jesus, Jesse—'

‘No, Sebs, I'm not Jesus, you see. I'm plain Jesse, with feet of common clay. I value decency. But all the rest of me is clayey too. Perhaps that's your mistake.'

He assumes I was bare-backing, he adds. Bringing back shit knows what infections. Bringing death into our bed.

No, I say, oh no, never – it was only ever –

‘Only ever fucking what?'

‘You know.'

‘But that's it, I don't know.'

The shame of having to declare it. The frantic relief of rushing to offer Jesse honest reassurance. I haven't risked his health or his life, never would. He flushes, his lip quivers – reassured? No. I can hear him thinking, You kissed me with that mouth.

The joint has burnt down nearly to its tip: I motion him to finish it. He lies back against the cushions and the dressing gown falls open across his chest. Jesse gazes at me impartially as if trying to put his finger on what species of insect I am. A forensic stare. Drawing on the joint, he spits the ember into a saucer just in time.

‘So. Is there someone else, Jesse?'

‘How can you even ask that? What world do you live in, Sebs? You don't know me, you don't know me at all, do you?'

In bed Jesse turns his back; then somehow, still high, we're fucking. It feels wrong — it feels right — it hurts like hell – it gratifies – it's an act of erotic vengeance, accepted in a spirit of remorse. Foul. Some force in my brain seethes and fizzes like a bulb that's telling you it's about to blow, it's been going downhill for some time, and now it's on the point of …

When he drags himself off my back, slick skin sucks against skin and comes away with a cartoonish smacking sound. Shaking and bathed in cold sweat, I manoeuvre myself round in the bed, a heavy, yeastless dough of flesh. I flop down beside Jesse on the rucked sheets. Always afterwards we'd kiss, sliding asleep in one another's arms. He has taught me this tender language of belonging. Now Jesse's back is turned and we fail to kiss. Which feels – it's an odd word – profane. The perishing bulb splutters a biblical phrase:
If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out.
Shivering convulsively, I edge on to my side, dragging up the duvet and placing one palm on Jesse's back.
Pluck it out and cast it from thee, pluck it out
.
Through the slats in the blinds, strips of dull daylight leak, rippling
over the back of Jesse's head and bare shoulder. I nuzzle his neck with my forehead and cup his head in my hand.
If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee.

I remember a phrase I'd heard someone use in the dark past. Not to me. ‘If I fail you, take my eyes.' Whoever said it covered both his eyes with his fingertips and I felt in that moment the pulsing jelly of my own eyes nestled beneath unsafe lids. One poke of a finger has the power to blind. It's a monstrous forfeit to offer for a broken vow.

Later, brushing my teeth, I hear Jesse showering. Through the frosted glass I see that he's lathering his belly and groin repeatedly, as if he feels defiled. He'll be in the theatre all day, he's said, working on the set. With his friends.

‘By the way,' he adds as he pads past me, a towel round his waist. ‘I forgot to give you this letter.'

‘I need to tell you, Jesse. Everything. Unreservedly. At least, everything I know. Not as an excuse – but as something I owe you. If you'll hear me, darling, hear me out?'

‘Yeah. OK. But don't call me darling. It makes me itch.'

*

The inscription on the envelope reads: Ava Salvatore – Translation Services – Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Turkish.

Ah, the stalker's daughter. Just what I needed! Chip off the old block? Ye gods, how many more Salvatores are going to come creeping out of the woodwork? Isn't one of you more than enough? Sitting in the cafe at Paddington Station, near the sushi circling on its conveyor belt, I break the seal with my thumb, though I'm hardly interested. It's Jesse who fills my mind's horizons and imprints himself on every thought.

Salvatore's daughter writes briefly that she feels I should see the enclosed, which has just come to light. There is doubtless more, she says. She gives an address in Bristol and a phone number: I may get in touch if I wish. The enclosed is a scanned copy: the original, which of course I'm welcome to see, is not much clearer; in fact she would say that, counter-intuitively, it is less clear.

When I open the enclosure, yes, I'm interested.

Minute scrawl spiders down both sides of the sheet and, finding its path blocked, creeps into corners, then doubles back on itself, as the writer turns the page upside-down to write from bottom to top; the writing crams the margins, until scarcely a morsel of blank remains. He's writing in pencil – and I know which pencil – and his paper supply has apparently run out.

I smell something that cannot possibly be present: Turkish cigarette smoke. At home in Fulham, rays of compromised sunlight penetrated the blue-black swirl of toxins that passed for air in our living room: you saw how choked we were with Dad's smoke. From his lungs into my own poured the rank breath of my childhood. He smoked above my crib. They both did. Ash fell on my pillow. Perhaps I shall die of it.

The smell clung to his jacket, tweedy and bristly against my childish face. Dad! Daddy! What have you brought me? I'd leap up into his arms. The memory of this is so violent that it eclipses all thought of Jesse. Come home, I think, come back. There'd be some keepsake for me in his pocket, a fossil, a pebble, a pumice stone – something unique and precious. My boy eternal! Dad said, hunkering down to my level, cupping my face in both hands to inspect it before whirling me in the air.

I smell the smoke and see the propelling pencil in his jacket pocket alongside a matching tortoise-shell fountain pen – the tools of his trade, to which Dad's fingers would stray, to check that he was armed. This is my gun, he said. The long, fragile leads were kept in a tobacco tin, in a bulging lower pocket. These are my bullets. Woe betide a child who touched the forbidden tin.

Where's the mouth and where the tail of this letter? It's written in fragments, illegibly dated. I'll start here, with what looks like
Azizam
. Beloved. The endearment he used with my mother. How Salvatore's daughter got hold of a letter to Elise I cannot imagine. I take a run at the whole screed before attempting to decode in detail.