Sex and Death (13 page)

When I first met God I was desperate and lost and my balls were leaping about within me from the lack of use. I was twenty-two years old and I'd never been laid. For a time I was stoical about the situation but that time had passed. I'd taken to scanning the faces in whatever room or street I was passing through as though looking for someone I'd lost when in truth there was no one to lose, and in this way I'd come to see how many people were odd-looking or sad or turned-in-upon in their own special way. My face was looking much the same and I tried to hide it but the hiding only made it worse. The state of most people it was a wonder anyone ever got laid. I was twenty-two years old and I felt that time was passing. University had finished and I was stuck for ideas. It was the summer time. There was a party and I went because the others were going. Tony the Dutch and Jimmy James and X, the X-Man. Tony was from the Netherlands so we called him Tony the Dutch. The X-Man's name was something Greek that no one could pronounce. We were living in Leeds and the party was in Hebden Bridge so we took the train, shunting past the back-streets and burning wastelands towards the narrows of the Calder Valley. There was a watery light washing over the hills and the air was charged. Jimmy James was already on his second can. Tony the Dutch was quiet and he kept rubbing his hands like he had a plan that would soon come together. X-Man was rolling a joint. He was saying a lot of words but it was a job to know what all of them were. The train crossed a canal and in the middle of the canal was a boat so slow it could have been there since the
day before. The man at the tiller was watching the train with a patient kindness as though he'd always known our paths would cross and he would one day see us with our faces turned to the glass. We went into a tunnel and there was darkness and we came out into the light.

At the party the kitchen was full so we went through to the back yard. We couldn't see anyone we knew so we just stood around for a while. There was corduroy and there were conversations about Derrida and Brazilian dams. It was an academic crowd. Whose party is this anyway, X-Man wanted to know. Tony nodded through the doorway towards a woman with black hair and thick lashes who was holding up a long cigarette and tilting her head back to laugh. He said her name was Sofia and she was teaching Silent Cinema at Leeds Met. A smile crept over his face and he wiped it away with his hand. X choked on a laugh and the smoke streamed out of his nose. Jim opened the fourth of his cans and fell back into a white plastic chair. He was on a teacher-training course and the workload always had him wiped out. I went inside for a drink of my own. As I walked through the kitchen I heard the German Expressionist talking softly about the next on her list. I took a beer to the back room, where there was food on a table and Nick Drake on the stereo and still nobody I knew. I edged through the crowd and by the time I reached the buffet I could tell this was another night I wouldn't get laid. I had an instinct for it. There was a pattern I couldn't get past. I saw a large bearded man at the savouries and before he'd even turned towards me I knew this was God himself. For a moment I was afraid to look upon his face. I'd known him by reputation long before we met and what I'd heard hadn't led me to expect that we'd be friends. Full of himself, was the impression I'd formed. The kind of northern chancer who turns up at parties empty-handed and is drinking the best wine by the end of the night. His real name was Godfrey but he never answered to that. A big lad, with a beard he'd grown to go with the name and talk
that he could handle himself in a fight. No one I knew was likely to handle themselves, in a fight. Those weren't the circles we moved in. We framed this as a question of non-violence but in truth we were sheltered and overfed. We stayed out of the town centres in the evenings and we kept our eyes lowered in the poorer neighbourhoods where we lived. God didn't sound as though he lowered his eyes for anyone. He turned to face me. His mouth was full and when he spoke he spat pastry flakes.

‘Eh up,' he said. ‘You tried these vegan sausage rolls? They're well mint.'

Later there was djembe drumming and God said there were better places we could be. We followed him and we didn't ask where. As we left there was a girl with red hair who looked like she thought she knew me but I hadn't seen her before so I nodded and followed the others. The streetlights were just coming on. There were seats on the train but I couldn't sit down. There was something urgent clicking through me. I asked X-Man did we know the girl with the red hair and he said he didn't think so. I wondered if I should have stayed behind to talk or if I would have been wasting my time. I watched through the window the lights of Hebden Bridge slip away around the corner and I didn't know how I would ever get laid. The ache of it was all over me. God took us off the train at Bradford and led us through the littered streets. He had a light-footed swagger that didn't fit with his size. The swagger was from Manchester, though he'd done his growing up in towns further north with far less spring in their stride. We ducked round some bins and down an alley and he knocked on a red steel door. When it opened there were handshakes and God introduced us and we followed him down some stone cellar stairs. There was a wet heat coming up to meet us and a noise that was mostly bass. We asked him what this place was and when he said it was the Mormon Social Club it took a moment to realise he was kidding us on.

*

That was the summer I worked at a bread factory on the edge of town, one week on night shifts and one week on days, and the havoc this played with my sleep only added to the trembling state of confusion I was in. The work was lifting tins and wheeling trays and sorting the subs from the batches as they hurtled down the line. It was heavy work and hot. The line moved fast and there was a fear of falling behind, the bread backing up and tumbling to the floor while the mocking shouts rang high. I thought the hours of work would make me stronger but they only made me tired. I lost weight. Most nights I spent the whole shift thinking about sex. I once made the mistake of mentioning this to God, while the two of us stood by the punch bowl at a Green Party fundraiser near Roundhay Park.

‘That'll be the yeast,' he said, as though the problem was familiar. ‘Whole place reeking of it, our kid. All that rising action. Stuff of life.' The party was quieter than we'd hoped for and this wasn't a conversation I wanted overheard. God had a voice that could project. It was an older crowd on the whole and the women had a strong commitment to knitwear. In the back room there were bald men with homemade guitars singing paragraphs of Foucault to a twelve-bar blues. We finished the punch and were halfway down the road before Tony thought to ask where we were going. God said there was a party in Headingley and we had time so we might as well walk. The evening was long and the shadows were longer and we had all the time in the world. We were lost and we had to cross a dual carriageway and cut through some woods. In the woodland there were three boys standing around a fire and two girls sitting on a mattress and nobody spoke as we made our way past. In a park James fell down a grass bank and it took a few minutes to get him back on his feet. This was how that summer went: walking around looking for the next party or gig, jumping on buses and trains, chasing rumours of lock-ins and open-mic nights and gallery shows and often this long veiled light of the sun
going up or coming down. We never made arrangements but God always showed up. It was a long time before I even knew where he lived but I had started to think of him as a friend. I didn't know if he considered me the same. We came into the leafy streets of Headingley and God put his arm around me and said maybe this would be the night I found my way to the bread-oven door. I must have looked puzzled for a moment too long.

‘Bush, our kid. Boggy hollow?' I nodded, but he carried on. ‘Olive grove, mangrove, peaches and cream?' I told him I'd got it but he persevered. ‘Lady garden? Garden of tears?' X-Man said something in Greek which he later translated as secret harbour. I told them all I had got it, and God said getting it was exactly my problem, and as we came to the house where the party was he started singing ‘Like a Virgin' to the tune of ‘Ilkley Moor Baht 'at', and he was still singing as we walked through the door. God always liked to make an entrance.

I didn't know how lost I was. It wasn't that I didn't know how to talk to girls but there were some things I just couldn't say. Some of my best friends were girls and we talked a lot. I never knew how to get to where the talking would stop; if there were cues I was missing or questions I was failing to ask. At heart I assumed that no one would want me so there seemed little point taking the chance. The beds I slept in were all too big and I was kept awake often thinking of these things. The summer came to an end and the autumn was wet. I didn't get the funding for my PhD and sometimes after work I went for drinks on campus with a girl who had. She'd been on my masters course and was writing a thesis on hypertext. These were the early days of the internet and I didn't always understand what she said. Her name was Isobel and she had eyes that were hard to avoid. She had a way of holding a gaze. She'd ask what I was reading and my answers made her sad. One night she took me to a benefit gig for a group called Soldiers for
Peace and before the music started there were people talking on the stage talking about checkpoints and demolitions. This was in the Wesleyan chapel in Shipley. One of the speakers was a woman who'd served in the Israeli army and she challenged the audience directly while Isobel took notes on her use of rhetorical device.

‘It's nice that you came tonight,' the woman said; ‘it's nice that you are concerned and you care, okay. So what are you doing to change things? Who are you challenging? What good is your concern to us?' She looked angry, and I noticed that her eyebrows were dark and incredible and how attractive she was in her scorn, and I knew if I didn't get laid soon my politics would be lost in a haze of objectification. The band started playing, and when Isobel touched my arm to ask what I wanted from the bar it was the first time a woman had touched me for weeks. I kept my arm still so the sensation would take longer to fade. I saw God and Jimmy James talking to the Soldiers for Peace, reading their leaflets and signing petitions. Later when they said they were leaving I asked Isobel if she wanted to join us, but she had somewhere to be and for the rest of the evening I felt raw with shame for having asked her at all.

There was a gallery opening in Saltaire, and a warehouse party in Manningham, and by the end of the night we were getting henna tattoos on our hands to raise money for the Zapatistas. The logic of these things wasn't always easy to follow. At some point in the evening God told me he was adopted and I couldn't work out how the conversation had begun. He'd never known who his real parents were but his adoptive parents were so good to him that he waited until they died before trying to find out. He told me this like it was something he'd read in a book. We both kept our hands very still. I wondered how long the henna would take to wash off. After the second funeral he went to the archives and looked out his birth certificate. He made it sound easy. The tattoos were done by then and we stood up but the woman told us not to leave until they'd dried. Wave your hands around, she told us.

‘When I found it there were no father listed,' God said. This stuff just rolled out of him sometimes. We both stood there with our hands in the air. ‘But my mother's name was Ruth Schalansky.' He looked at me like I should know what he meant but it took me a moment to cop on.

‘So – God's Jewish?' I asked. He shrugged.

‘Who knew?'

*

One night in the spring we were thrown out of a party in Sowerby Bridge. I'd been talking to a concrete poet from Kingston-upon-Hull who had just started teaching in Tony's department. She had pale eyes and freckles across her nose and a skirt that swung thinly around her thighs when she danced. She was dancing while we talked and I was trying to keep looking at her eyes. Once I realised how long we'd been talking I got nervous and ran out of things to say. She didn't seem to mind. There was a silence between us. A shout went up from across the room. Jimmy James had fallen asleep in an armchair and wet himself, and the BBC producer whose party it was started shouting about the chair being genuine Eames. He tried pulling Jimmy to his feet, and we told him to get his hands away. Someone came through with a bucket and sponge, and the producer told us all to get out. As we were leaving the poet said something I couldn't hear. I didn't even get her name. When we came out of the house a drunk driver skidded on the corner and crashed into a row of parked cars. It happened with a chill kind of slowness and a great racket and by the time it had stopped God was already in the road. These things followed him round and he took them in his lengthy stride. He opened the door and snatched at the keys and told the driver to go ruddy nowhere. He pushed the man's face hard against the steering wheel to be sure. We were away down the hill before
the police arrived and at the station we had to carry Jim onto the train. By this time we knew Jim had a problem and his drinking wasn't funny any more.

The next morning I woke with a pain in my neck and the many faces of Noam Chomsky looking over me from the bookshelves above where I'd slept. There was an open patio door beside me and a cold wind coming up from the river below. The patio was thick with bottles and ashtrays. Past the patio the garden fell steeply away. I had a blanket around me but it was thin and I felt exposed. I was still in Mytholmroyd. We'd turned up late the night before and it looked like I was the only one left. It was the leaving party for a semiotics professor from Isobel's department who wasn't quite retiring but going on extended research leave. There'd been a restructuring. The party had been tense and most people had left by two. When I'd fallen asleep God was still out on the patio talking to Tony the Dutch about the Soldiers for Peace. I'd heard him say something about going to Bethlehem. It seemed far-fetched. The morning was bright and there was an elaborate smell of coffee. I saw the semiotics professor in the kitchen reaching for some cups, bending for the milk, setting a loaf and a knife on a board. Her movements were flowing and light. When I tried to stand I felt like an old man. She watched me creak towards her and said good morning. There was classical music. The coffee machine on the counter was beginning to steam and she asked if I wanted one. I leant on the counter across from her. My neck was so stiff I had to move my whole body when I tried to nod. She flinched. I said it was nothing and she talked about posture, and when she mentioned the Alexander Technique I thought she was talking about sex.