Jackdaw, page 11
‘Sir?’ said the constable. He looked worried and did he wrinkle his nose?
‘Yes, I live here. What’s the problem, officer?’ In a voice that said, fuck you.
Fuck you, because Sir Edward Coke said so.
For a man’s house is his castle, et domus sua cuique est tutissimum refugium (and each man’s home is his safest refuge).
But I didn’t say that because I didn’t want this guy in my house.
‘What’s your name, sir?’
I told him.
‘We received reports of an altercation from this address. Sounds of loud distress.’
‘What does loud distress sound like, officer?’
‘Shouting, sir.’
‘I see.’
‘Do you mind if we come in and look around?’
‘Do you mind if I see a warrant first?’
‘We’ll be quick. Just to be sure everyone’s okay. Is there anyone else in the house?’
‘Okay, listen. I do not have to tell you any fucking thing. I don’t have to answer your questions. I don’t know what you’re expecting to find, but you can show me a warrant or get the fuck off my property.’
‘There’s no call for that kind of language, sir.’ He cocked his head. ‘Have you been in a fight, sir?’
‘Is this any of your business?’
I have no idea why I was being so combative. Okay, I do. I fucking hated the police. Remember way back when I told you my brother and I had to steal food when my father was detained? Well, the police held him without trial, seized his assets, and froze his bank accounts for eighteen months, and when there was no evidence of any offence they released him. He took them to court the next day and after like ten years, he won the case. They never paid the damages. My father died. They did not pay his estate either.
There was and is no reason to talk to the police. They even have to tell you that you don’t have to talk to them. Most people, even fucking crims, think being entangled in the criminal justice system is the time to get it all off their chest. It really isn’t. Any involvement with the police is the time to make like a monk and shut the fuck up. Make them work for everything and give nothing away, even if you haven’t done anything, because they’ll take what you say in jest or by mistake and create a felony out of it.
None of which was this sweet boy’s fault, but he wore the uniform. The thin blue line is the cyanosed lips of an oxygen-starved victim of police brutality.
Older guy came out, all placatory good cop and ting. Babylon.
I banished them both with crisp consonants and middle-class outrage, promising to keep the noise down. I wasn’t sure it would work until it did.
I fell asleep in the hallway, on the floor, in what I was wearing.
I woke up to knocking again. It was bright, but I was discom-bobulated for a minute, and Henrietta wasn’t helping.
‘I told you to get a warrant,’ I said, so groggy, I couldn’t work the lock.
When I got the door open, Destroyer was standing there.
‘Oh, thank god. I thought you were dead,’ she said, concern furrowing her brow.
She looked different, conservative. Blouse, jacket, jeans, hair tightly controlled, an office worker.
‘How are you here?’ I asked. ‘How do you know where I live?’
‘I know where all my clients live, Tade. Due diligence. It’s best not to wake up murdered, don’t you think?’
Not being murdered was best.
‘Okay. Why are you here? I’ve stopped the standing order, and as per the contract, that means no service.’
‘Are you going to invite me in?’
‘I suppose I’d better,’ I said. I moved back and she walked in. Her shoes click-clacked on the panelling.
‘Did you sleep in those clothes?’ she asked.
‘I did, right where you’re standing.’
She touched my swollen face. ‘What happened to you?’
‘Why does everybody want to know?’ I pulled away. ‘I don’t want to go into it, all right? Why are you here? My family lives here.’
She looked up and around. ‘Really? Because you’re not whispering, and you let me in.’
I needed my codeine fix and she was in the way. ‘Get to the point. I have a busy day ahead.’
‘I just wanted to be sure you were okay. And you left this at my place.’
She handed me a Batman key-pendant. Trap had given it to me on my last birthday. I always made sure I had it with me, but I hadn’t thought of it in ages. Broke off my keys, most likely, but the shitty thing was how I didn’t notice its absence.
Destroyer hugged me and it was surprisingly warm. I was ready to surrender to her then, just sink in and relax. Forget everything that might be—
Key in lock, wiggle round, door opened.
Elise.
16
The guy took a drag of his cigarette and placed it on the window-sill, a line of smoke reaching from the lit end to the ceiling.
‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ he asked. He busied himself wrapping filthy torn clothes around his knuckles.
‘I was here one night weeks ago,’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘Before that. A year ago, year and a half. Victoria Station. You took my cat.’
‘Oh, that was you?’
‘Yes,’ he said, and punched me in the jaw. New pain, plus old pain reignited.
The Victoria Station Cat. Shit, I remembered that.
The police called up about this homeless guy who they said was mentally unwell. So two doctors, myself and some other guy who wore leather and rode a souped-up muscle car in London where such things are useless, turned up to assess this guy and decide if he was going to be detained under the Mental Health Act. Muscle Car Guy is dead now, by the way. Car accident.
The homeless gentleman wasn’t mentally unwell, just really high on amphetamines, which meant he could be taken away temporarily.
What nobody told us is that he had this tabby. Most homeless people who had pets that I had seen up to that point had dogs. This was the first one with a cat. Don’t ask me how, but it became my role to wait at Victoria Station for the fucking RSPCA and they took their sweet time. This cat, who I was reliably informed was called Serpico, did not go easily. She ruined my £400 coat, scratched me and earned me weird looks from commuters who thought I was trying to steal this stray cat to sacrifice it to Satan, or some shit. When I tell this story I usually say it took two hours for the RSPCA person to arrive, but it seemed longer.
Turns out Serpico didn’t make it back to her owner.
He decided to take it out on me, and not just because I paid him fifty bucks to beat the shit out of me. What happened next was entirely his fault.
Obviously, I was still annoyed about the coat and the scratches and my wasted time. I mean, he couldn’t have known that, but he could have just kept quiet and beaten me more. I didn’t have to know he had a grudge.
When he swung at me I slipped it and countered with a right hook, sending him right to the ground. He landed with a wet, smacking sound.
‘Ah, shit. Sorry, sorry, it was a reflex. I don’t know what came over me.’
I do. My training kicked in and I did not stop it.
His lip was bloody and it looked to me like he would have a black eye soon. He got up, got his legs back, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘You know, I thought you was a grass when you first walked up.’
‘Again, really sorry. I’m not with the police. Let’s continue our arrangement.’
He proceeded and I was impressed at his professionalism. He didn’t strike me in the kidneys once because I told him about my hospital visit. Such a gentleman.
My one claim to fame has been knocking out an Olympic taekwondo hopeful back in university. My club had been grooming this one guy, training him for weeks, one-to-one work with the sabonim. I had never really gone all out because at the time I had no idea what medical specialty I would be pursuing. I had to protect my hands in case I decided to become a surgeon.
As part of the final week for the preparation before the trials, they brought me in to spar with this guy, probably expecting him to make short work of me. We got into the square, bowed and started. He darted all over the space, wasting energy, trying to distract me or something, I don’t know. The strategy was opaque to me. I stayed in the centre, still, turning around to keep up with where he was. He closed quickly to kick me. I sidestepped into him and slammed him in the centre of the chest with a side kick, full power, fully anchored. I can’t swear to it, but I think it lifted him off his feet a little. He fell, unconscious. Shit, I thought I had killed him. I hadn’t.
Everyone was quiet, but I knew what they were thinking.
Why aren’t we taking Tade to the Olympics?
It wasn’t because I was hot shit. It was because the guy underestimated me. It wasn’t a lucky kick, but if he had been more serious I wouldn’t have been able to knock him out.
And if this guy working out on me had been smarter, he wouldn’t have pissed me off and ended up on the floor.
But you want to know what happened with Elise meeting Destroyer, don’t you?
It is a curious thing that electricity that passes between human beings, that aliveness that is communicated by locking your attention on another and knowing that the other’s attention is locked on you. All senses funnel to that pinpoint focus. It doesn’t matter if it’s love or hate that underlies the look, it makes the subject feel special.
At first I could not parse the look they exchanged, although the emotional currents were fairly straightforward. Here was a strange woman in Elise’s space, in her home, with her husband. Not in flagrante delicto, but might as well have been. In those first few seconds of sizzling stares, anything could have happened. Destroyer could have been a Jehovah’s Witness. That wouldn’t have been an unreasonable assumption to make. I had been known, when bored, to invite them into the house just to engage in a theological argument. One has to hone the skills of rhetoric somehow. Elise always knew when I was looking for verbal conflict as sport and tuned out. Trap was too young. Nobody understood that when you grew up with a lawyer like my dad who also undoubtedly had some kind of personality disorder, your debating game had to be tight. Everything from an extra portion of pork chops to an increment in pocket money was at stake. I had to make a case for everything. Imagine my surprise at the real world when I found out this wasn’t routine and that the ability to argue didn’t get you friends. It made me tedious and difficult to deal with. Humans avoid people who are tedious and difficult to deal with, and if you combine that with my already fractious upbringing, I wasn’t growing up to be the life of the party. I could fake it for a night or two at a soiree, but I couldn’t live it. Most people stayed away from me, which is one of the reasons nobody checked on me while this Francis Bacon malarkey was happening.
Elise said, ‘I’m going to have some tea.’
Other women would have asked who Destroyer was, and although Elise would have wanted to know, she would never condescend to give the slightest advantage by asking for anything, even basic information. When it came to being offended, she was a scorched-Earth kind of person. She slid through into the house leaving me and Destroyer standing there.
‘Oops,’ said Destroyer, in a small voice, a whisper practically. She hunched and shrunk herself, much in the same way she commanded me to. I realised that this was a submission display for Elise who wasn’t there to see it. ‘I’m glad you’re alive. I’d better go.’
I let her leave, but didn’t say anything. I was emotional and didn’t trust the words that might have poured out. Seriously, I might have said I loved her just because she came to check on me, even though by so doing she had probably taken dynamite to my marriage. My heart was that hungry. My psychotherapist, the one who told me that I was well-defended, said I was a hungry ghost, preta in Buddhism, and that this tendency would come out at times of stress. She was right, I was, and it did. But I hid it well in most situations.
‘She’s pretty,’ said Elise when I got back into the house. ‘Legs the way you like them.’ She was drinking from a mug standing at the counter in the kitchen.
‘She’s—’
Elise held up a hand. ‘I don’t care who she is, Tade.’
‘It’s not—’
‘It is exactly what I think.’
‘What is it that you think?’
‘That you brought a whore into our house. Did you fuck her in our bed?’
‘What? I would never—’
‘Stop, stop, stop. You don’t get to say what you would never do.’
That was true, actually. By that time I had no idea what I was capable of. The needle on my moral compass was spinning out of control.
‘How much did you pay her?’ asked Elise.
She was going to find out anyway, so I told her.
‘Jesus, Tade.’
‘I know it sounds bad, but it was for research. I swear. The insight is invaluable. I’m writing this incredible thing.’
‘I’m sure that made sense in your head. Did the words make sense to you after they came out of your mouth?’
‘Art can be—’
‘Are you justifying cheating by blaming art?’
‘I wasn’t cheating,’ I said, but that sounded hollow. ‘Not exactly.’
‘What the hell does “not exactly” mean? What were you paying for?’
‘I didn’t fuck her. She fucked me. So that I could understand Francis Bacon.’
‘Sorry, what are you… how?’
‘With a dildo.’
‘What?’
‘He was gay.’
‘I know Francis Bacon was gay, you idiot. What makes you think getting sodomised by a big-breasted, long-legged cunt-whore hooker is the same thing?’
Since we’re being honest here, my first instinct was to point out her tautology. That was just how my brain handled distress. The second instinct was to realise that she was right. I had been doing it wrong. I was still clinging to my heterosexual schema for safety. Justifications. It was a woman penetrating me, therefore it wasn’t gay? I wasn’t penetrating her, therefore it wasn’t (really) cheating? No wonder I was stuck.
‘Hey!’ said Elise. ‘Focus! Where are you? Your eyes look glazed.’
‘I—’
‘Show it to me,’ she said.
‘Show what?’
‘What you’ve written. This book that is so important you’d destroy your family over it.’
‘I don’t want to until I get the first draft out of—’
‘I don’t care if you want to or not. You showed me what you thought was the previous draft anyway. Let’s see it. Now, Tade.’
I emailed her the stuff I had sent to Wisconsin and stood there while she read it on her phone. I really needed my next dose of opioids by this time.
‘Tade, this person climbing up trees in Africa is meant to be me?’
I nodded. ‘What you’re reading are portraits of people, studies for portraits in the way that Bacon titled… It has to reflect truth.’
‘What the fuck are you talking about? I’ve never been to Africa. This never happened to me.’
Wait.
Wait. What?
‘Who are you writing about?’
At first I thought she was whispering, but the blood rushing through my head had got louder.
‘Tade, look at me. Who do you see?’
I looked up.
Study of…
Portrait of…
Fuck it.
This is what I saw.
A tall woman, taller than me at any rate. Brown hair, green eyes, long face, pale complexion. Huh.
‘Who do you see?’
A black woman, dark as roiling pitch, gigantic Afro, skinny like a stick insect, angular face, red lips.
‘Who do you see?’
Henrietta Moraes.
And that’s about the time when I left home. It was just like when I ran away without planning it. Strangely, I used the survival techniques I learned from homeless people that I had assessed in the past. Hang around the back of supermarkets and eat the food they discard.
I wasn’t really homeless, but I spent a few days on the street. When you can’t even see the wife in front of you it’s time to get some distance and re-evaluate.
Who was Elise? That was what I spent the days wondering and different images flashed through my head as I wandered to my crack house and asked my guy to beat the shit out of me again. Apart from me punching him to the ground, it was going well. Each hit I received helped empty my mind. I wanted oblivion.
I didn’t really come for the beating. I came because of what Elise said about Destroyer. This had been on my mind since then, and when he went panting to his seat and resumed his cigarette, I croaked from where I lay.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Rent boy,’ I said.
‘You’re surprising, doc.’
‘Can you get one?’
No need, he told me. He could provide this service. Extra, of course.
In that dank, dilapidated building, he took the role of an anonymous male sex worker and sodomised me with the help of one latex condom and copious amounts of olive oil, which I’m told is not good with rubbers.
At least Destroyer had prepared me somewhat. When it was over I didn’t feel particularly different or any closer to understanding Bacon. Turns out gay sex is just like hetero sex on the emotional front at least. Lightning didn’t strike me down. That was always a possibility because even though I claim not to believe in God, I still think he’s there from time to time, and I expect him to chastise me when I fuck up. And his servants say gay sex is a no-no. Assholes.
I went back to hospital to the shaking heads of ED nurses who could tell that this harm was, at least partially, self-inflected. They patched me up, asked if I wanted to see psych, to which I laughed, but not maniacally. The last thing I wanted was to get detained under the Mental Health Act, which, heh, is hilarious considering what was in store for me. I left hospital and I went home. It was midday and on a working day, so nobody was there. I was in pain, but used to it, and I wanted writing materials.
