Читать книгу Carnivore: The most controversial debut literary thriller of 2017 - Jonathan Lyon, Jonathan Lyon - Страница 10

I closed my eyes, exhaling, savouring the room’s tensions. In elevated states, my synaesthesia becomes more intrusive. And here, Eva’s half-fake hysteria lingered in the air with a taste like elderflower. I imagined licking the sugary rim of a bottle as cordial dribbled down my chin.

When I opened my eyes, Francis was resting his elbows on the counter, his face in his hands. I was unsure of his response to what we’d just witnessed, until he raised his gaze to mine – and I read its desire.

‘Where’ve you been?’ He came to me. ‘You weren’t answering your phone...’

‘I’ll tell you…’ I began to lie, but he kissed me, his hand behind my neck, keeping me against him.

He pulled down his sweatpants and kicked them off over his feet. He tried to unzip my tracksuit top, but I didn’t want him to see the belt wounds beneath.

‘Forget that,’ I said.

He tugged down my trousers and boxers instead in the same motion. The stack of £50 notes fell out, scattering across the floor. I grinned. He grunted interrogatively.

‘I’ll tell you…’ I said, but he kissed me again, biting my lips until I tasted my blood on his tongue.

I associated Francis with the colour of wheat – and this colour grew again to dominance as we kissed. Depending on the stimuli, my secondary senses sometimes associated Francis with wheat’s texture, too, and its taste, and its rustling sound.

He turned me around. I lowered my face to the granite and he lowered with me, his chest pressed into the buckle welts along my back, his teeth at my ear, gasping nearly with laughter. His joy at my return was elevated by the evasion of his guilt for his girlfriend, and his jealousy at the revelation that I’d just slept with her. He was trying to repossess me, but the intensity of his arousal was due partly to the fear that I was beyond his control, even here.

Repeatedly, he tried to unwrap his hands from my stomach to unzip my top and have full access to my back – but I gripped onto his wrists, preventing the reveal of the whip lines by keeping his arms beneath me, as if I couldn’t bear to be released.

He came inside me, pushing me into the countertop edge, his mouth at my neck, sweat pricking where our thighs’ skin met.

He untensed, reaching around to finish me off, and said ‘I love you,’ which made me come too.

‘I love you,’ I said.

Obviously I didn’t love Francis, but these words marked the end of his seduction. I was aroused not so much by the fulfilment of my desire – to make the straight boy fall in love with me and admit he’s fallen in love with me, first, out loud, without prompting – but rather by the ease with which I had fulfilled that desire. I was aroused by the efficiency of my scheme – having premeditated every move that had led me here, and with no missteps! And now that his resistance was over, it was time to be cruel.

We hugged, and for a moment my mind left our heat – into a quicksilver that felt as close as I could come to peace.

He went to the sink to drink from the tap. I gathered my money from the floor and tucked it back into my boxers. The evening light tinted the granite the colour of elderberries.

‘Why you been ignoring me?’ he asked.

He splashed himself with water, smoothing his hands through his hair, his face lifted to the ceiling.

‘I had no money,’ I said. ‘And I was depressed… about you not telling Eva. That’s why I went home with her… It’s the only way I could get the situation to an end.’

‘You could of warned me.’

‘That would have made it worse. It didn’t mean anything. It was for you. And it worked.’

He sat down against the cupboard, pulling his sweatpants on as he shook the water out of his hair. I pulled mine on too and joined him, resting my head on his wet upper arm. He was not capable of argument, so had to accept my claim that I’d been doing him a favour by fucking his girlfriend. He couldn’t really believe that, but he had to try. Much of my pleasure came from making him lie to himself in this way.

‘What’s that money for?’ he asked.

‘I need new poems.’

He wanted to ask further, but was afraid of being hurt by the answer, or of me seeing that he was afraid.

‘Dawn said you’re moving,’ he said instead.

‘Yeah.’

‘So you don’t want to move in with me?’ he asked, with a playful indignity that failed to conceal his sincerity. ‘I got a big house now.’

‘I noticed. Did you hope you could rescue me?’ I teased.

He smiled, ashamed of his own affection. ‘Maybe. And we couldn’t do that in a hostel.’

‘We can at my new place. I don’t know if it’s going to last – it’s always unstable with Dawn. You probably will still have to rescue me.’

‘Why’d you want to live with her? I don’t get it. She’ll steal from you and lie about everything.’

‘That’s what I like.’

In the pause, I admired the muscles I rested on – and thought of the thousands of pulls-ups that had formed them – the trapezius of his neck and the sphere of his shoulders, and the extra muscles of his upper arm that knotted around bicep and tricep, and the wide vascular forearm that ended in a tattoo – ‘SE5’ – his childhood postcode. He had another tattoo on his torso, under his arm, under me – ‘LET GO’, written in gothic script, in some early claim to masculinity that almost contradicted itself. I lifted my wrist to his in comparison – my veins were violet-blue, my skin ghostly and dotted with moles, and my hair was like feldspar in late afternoon light – while his veins were copper-green, his skin darker and unmarked and nearly hairless – smoothed by the coconut oil he lathered into it at night, and which made his hard muscles feel soft when I kissed them. I kissed them.

‘What happens with Eva then?’ he asked.

‘What you mean?’ I asked. ‘You’re a carnivore now, the kill is done. The more indifferent you are, the more she’ll love you.’

‘A carnivore!’ he laughed. ‘Fuck off! What’s that again?’

‘It’s from Latin – it means flesh-eater. The Greek version is sarcophagus – but that means coffin. So Greek flesh-eating tends towards death – while Latin flesh-eating goes the other way – towards life, towards sex.’

‘And which way do you go?’

I smiled back. ‘Both ways – I want to be a Greek and Latin flesh-eater – the demon of Europe’s worst fever-dreams – the answering scream of a generation fucked over by a whole millennium.’

‘And what about me?’

‘Well you just started, you’re still an entry-level Latin carnivore. But look what you did to Eva – you were talking about love – love is an old carnivorous urge – but it isn’t positive, it’s destructive – it’s meant to rip you away from your old mate with enough force to overwhelm habit and convenience – so you choose a new one. Me. That’s all this was. Flesh feeding on flesh. But these urges can warp, in some of us – become more irresistible, more flattened out, and spread beyond the systems of love…’

‘That’s not what love feels like to me.’

‘That’s because you haven’t learned how to feel.’

He laughed. ‘If I hadn’t met you I’d be so bored.’

‘Same.’

‘No, it’s true,’ he said. ‘Before I met you I was stuck. I mean before I did modelling I was proper stuck in South London. It was like there was a border around me. I wouldn’t go past it. It felt like you had to get a visa and like vaccinations to go to North London – it was so far away to me. It was all local girls and boys, that was it – and I couldn’t leave, really – and then with modelling I got to travel the world, non-stop travelling the world, meeting new people every day – and it was good, really good, getting different people’s aspects on life. I really respect modelling for that, cos it opens my eyes. But I was still stuck before you.’

I nudged my head against his to keep him talking.

‘When I got scouted,’ he said, ‘I did my first job for a gay magazine – and I didn’t really know what to think. I get up, I go on the job, it’s pretty good – it’s just fashion really. But a few weeks after that, when it gets released, I ain’t got a clue it’s a gay magazine – and all my friends want to see it ’cos it’s my first time – and I’m telling them “Go out and get your own copy, go on, show your mum” – all that, you know. And they see it’s a gay magazine and I get ripped!’ He laughed. ‘I swear! But that’s life, you know… I became a bit of a gay icon, and I never knew I’d want to do that myself. I mean if a gay man didn’t like me, I’d feel bad about myself, like I weren’t wanted, you know, I should feel like I’m wanted by both sexes. All sexes. I get people coming right up to me saying I want to fuck you, that kind of thing happens all the time… But I never thought it would actually happen with men, until you… Your world is so much bigger than mine.’

‘My world is tiny. I’ve never travelled, I’ve just read about it.’

He kissed me.

‘I ain’t got the focus for that,’ he said, leaning back. ‘You got the focus. You should tell me what to read. What should I read?’

‘Poems. You don’t have to focus for long.’

‘Tell me one.’

He shoved me off his shoulder so that he could lean against mine, pressing his cheek into my cheek. He was warmer than me – and at his touch I thought of sapphires cut in sunlight.

‘I don’t have a good memory,’ I said. ‘But in my head… there’s bits of a poem by Wallace Stevens, if you want. Called “Esthétique du Mal”.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘The art of evil.’

‘Alright.’

I could feel his smile against my mouth. We breathed each other in, as I recited:

‘“The death of Satan was a tragedy

For the imagination…

The tragedy, however, may have begun,

Again, in the imagination’s new beginning,

In the yes of the realist spoken because he must

Say yes, spoken because under every no

Lay a passion for yes that had never been broken…”’

‘What’s it mean?’

‘There’s bits I’ve forgotten. But it means creativity is satanic because it is disobedient. Satan was the original artist. You aren’t satisfied with what’s already there, you add to it. Evil is necessary to living vividly. Tragedy is necessary to living vividly. But to develop an imagination, you must also be physical…’

‘I can be physical,’ he said, shifting forwards to stand up. ‘I got a present for you.’

The odour of semen lifted in the air. He walked towards his fruit bowl – and from a mound of satsumas, he pulled out a necklace. I laughed.

The whip wounds in my back were beginning to ache more finely – like filaments heating into a red ochre colour. I leaned into them with pleasure. They complimented the colour beneath them, that was always there – my ultramarine – the ultimate blue of my myalgia, the superlative blue – the deepest colour that’s still a colour before black.

Francis squatted in front of me, tensing his abs into greater prominence, and swung the necklace before my eyes.

‘Since you’re not buying nothing nice for yourself… I got you this,’ he said. ‘I mean I got it in a shoot for free, but I wanted to keep it for you, as a present. It’s more your thing, I don’t do necklaces. Even though you got a bit of money now, don’t you?’

‘It’s for the deposit on the flat,’ I said. ‘And I don’t think it’s going to last. It’s Dawn’s money – that’s why I was keeping it safe.’

He caught the necklace at the top of its arc, closed it in his fist for a moment, and then released it again to lower it over my head. The pendant was a winged key.

‘I liked the little key,’ he said. ‘I felt like it had meaning, you know? And you don’t need to worry about your flat cos you can stay with me, can’t you? You don’t need to be worrying about money, even though I don’t get it, I don’t get why you don’t just go out and make money. You’re clever, why don’t you just get a job?’

‘I’m too ill.’

‘You don’t look ill,’ he smiled, assuming my answer was a joke.

I wanted to say: You don’t see that part of me, I don’t show it – my brain misunderstands my muscles, so they ache like I’ve always got flu, or my mitochondria are fucked, so they can’t make enough energy, or I don’t know, I just know that I’m in pain, and I can hide it with heroin. But I need to hide it from you too, otherwise you’ll think differently of me. So I can’t tell you. I’ll never tell you.

Instead I said:

‘Well I don’t believe in jobs. Most of us could be doing whatever we wanted, while machines did the rest. But jobs keep being invented because we’re supposed to be employed to justify our right to exist. It’s a scam. Money doesn’t work like people say it works, and we’re kept unhappy and exhausted.’

‘But what would people do instead?’ he asked.

‘Evil,’ I said, standing up. ‘The vivid evil, of the imagination.’

‘Where you going?’

‘I have to go.’

‘Where? Why?’

‘We’re moving in today,’ I said. ‘I told you. I promised Dawn I’d be there for dinner.’

‘Shit, ok, but you’ve got to come to Lars Vasari later.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The exhibition, the photographs,’ he said. ‘I’m in most of the photos. I told you. You’re on the list.’

‘Can you text me the details?’ I moved towards the door.

He shadowed me uneasily, alarmed by the suddenness of my departure.

‘You’ve got to come,’ he said. ‘I want to show you to everyone. It’s in Mayfair.’

‘Ok, maybe.’

‘You’ve got to! You can’t wear that though.’

‘Ok.’ I opened the door.

Francis kissed me twice goodbye. The evening smelt of cold wrought iron and all the leaves that had fallen were stirring. I refused to reassure him with parting words. The sky was a deceitful blue, not far from ultramarine – but it wasn’t radiant enough, or resentful enough to be the same – and ultramarine’s pallor, like mine, required a pain that the evening didn’t have.

I knew Francis was watching me walk away as the streetlights turned me amber. There was a nearby bus that would take me to my new address, and to the pain relief I’d been promised. As I turned the corner, I took off his necklace and threw it in a bin.