Ménage Read online

  When finally I plucked up the indignation to knock on his door, he opened it and struck a dandyish pose, as if he had been waiting all along.

  — Yes? What can I do for you?

  His appearance never failed to throw me: eyeliner, stubble poking through layers of foundation stretched into cracks around his mouth, high-street girl’s T-shirt, far too tight, which read ‘BABE’, army boots, bare legs and his kimono. That damned kimono. The way his dick would peek out from it occasionally, as if checking whether the coast was clear. The whole issue about sex was very confusing and I had lived those two years without it because every time I tried to pick up a girl he showed great disdain, muttering things like ‘Don’t forget – all they want is to steal your talent, and you have precious little of it to spare’. Naked bodies disgusted him, and as for sex, he said, ‘All that grunting and sweating, it’s like doing push-ups till you’re sick.’ No, I was convinced he was as asexual as he was amoral and our relationship was platonic (although I did once dream I let him sodomise me in exchange for him taking out the bin bags).

  He waited in his doorway for me to challenge him, his stereo blaring – Thus Spoke Zarathustra – as if claiming Nietzsche was on his side in the pending argument. His breath was already heavy with sickly sweet breakfast sherry.

  I was afraid of confronting the eviction issue too directly, so said, — We need to have a big talk, and I can’t if you insist on hitting the bottle before breakfast.

  He silently drew on the last strand of fag end, staring at the ground before venting his riposte.

  — Hitting? The bottle! As you may have noticed our penury has reduced us to drinking from boxes. And if anything is being hit it is me, by the poverty of your imagination!

  I knew what was coming.

  — Ungrateful peasant. My God, may He rest in peace, it was me that dragged you up . . .

  — I know, I know – from the proletarian slime . . . but if we’re going to be able to get a flatmate we need to clean the place and if we’re going to clean the place we need to buy light bulbs so we can at least see the extent of the horror.

  — Buy? Buy? Did you not know they invented a light bulb that lasted for a lifetime but the capitalist bastards decided it would put them out of business? I will not subsidise planned obsolescence! Go forth and procure some by the usual methods!

  I protested that I’d almost got caught red-handed last time. There were only so many times I could go to the pub’s pisser and replace their live bulb with our dead one. I proposed candles.

  — Candles are for hippies!

  — Well, if we went to sleep at a regular hour we could wake before it starts getting dark and clean up using daylight; it’s free by the way.

  — I have my best ideas at night. The dark suits me.

  I laid out the cost of light bulbs for him, seventy-five pence from Sadhi’s, sixty-five from Woolies.

  — Do you have sixty-five pence?

  I did not and told him so.

  — My God, may He rest in peace, but what happened to your dole cheque?

  And so I went though our weekly costs. Don Quixote and Golden Virginia, photocopying and pasta shells. I suggested we roll back the carpet and look for spare change, if not our own then from the previous occupants.

  — We did that last month. All is futile. I’m going back to bed.

  He did just that and pulled the covers over his head. It must have been 4 p.m.

  — For Christ’s sake, I protested, are you seriously telling me we’re going to be evicted just because you refuse to save up enough to buy a light bulb!

  — Money money money, you’re like a fucking song by Abba. Why don’t you sell your soul and get some real work, like you really want to, then we could afford all your horrible bourgeois necessities.

  Stupidly, I ventured that he might also try to find work.

  — Jobs, my dear, are for those such as you, who are scared of a moment alone with one’s thoughts. Sustaining idleness is the most difficult vocation of all.

  Oh, how he loved to tease me about my little scraps of freelance writing for the Hoxton Advertiser – a hack from the Borough of Hackney, he called me. I was not proud of what I had to do to earn a crust and did not know how it came to pass that I paid for everything and was poorer than before. To this day I still have no idea how Saul had managed to stay on the dole for seven years, only hints. Something to do with faking a psychology test and his ‘affliction’. He was on invalidity benefit although he was able-bodied, or at least would have been if he for once tried to eat and didn’t smoke so much. He said Thatcher invented all these new benefits to bring down the unemployment figures, and even though he decried the welfare state and railed against scroungers and hypocrites, he nonetheless every second week cashed his giro as an invalid. He was, as he said, ‘gainfully unemployed’.

  I digress. I should be telling you about how I met Dot, but it is important for you to picture the mire she was just about to wade into.

  To resolve the crisis over flatmate and electric light, I, as a last attempt, proposed that we go to one of the gallery openings that night – there were many at that time. It was at Dazed and Confused and there would be wine to steal. Perhaps, I thought, if Saul got wasted enough he might help me clean up. Saul, shook his head – I could pinch sherry from Sadhi’s much more easily, he exclaimed, so I added the prospect of real toilet paper. While he had often insisted that my complaint over using newspapers for the purposes of anal cleansing was reactionary, I knew that he harboured a secret nostalgia for quality loo roll (‘Tabloids are smoother on the anus,’ he’d declared, ‘being cheaply made on thin, inferior paper, while The Times and Guardian do lead to chafing and occasional bleeding. Such is the burden of intelligence.’) That was it then: the promise of some pinched Kleenex and white wine had him motivated. As he got dressed I secretly searched my mind for a plan to leave him. I did not for a second really hope or believe that anyone would or could enter our lives and save us from ourselves, certainly not one such as Dot.

  Arseholes was the name of the exhibition, and it was, quite unexpectedly, a series of eighteen high-gloss cibachromes, about a metre square, of human anuses in extreme, almost medical, close-up. (There was no way the Hoxton Advertiser would publish a review, which would leave me twenty quid short the next month.)

  I set about locating and stealing the wine bottles while Saul got to work distracting the masses.

  — Such a succinct sphincter, he pronounced as he gesticulated before a tight pink arsehole, — but my favourite is the one with hairy haemorrhoids, very Jackson Pollock!

  He soon had quite a circle round him. I located a hidden place beside the drinks table, with bottles well within reach. And so Saul stared ranting about Damien Hirst; how he’d first met him three years ago and told him: — Darling, you’re flogging a dead horse with this art of yours. Why don’t you just in fact exhibit one?

  The sheep and the cows in formaldehyde that then followed Saul claimed as his own, to rapturous laughter from the circle.

  — He has still to do a horse, though. I think he’s afraid I might sue.

  I grabbed two bottles while Saul went on. Pearls before swine, he muttered. Pearls before swine. As he threw back a glass of wine I heard him start his old favourite.

  — Did I ever tell you about the Duchess, he ranted, — the mistress of Duchamp? She once walked down Fifth Avenue with a corset built from a birdcage, with a live bird inside it!

  Bottles stuffed in bag, I snuck to the back and, before heading to the toilet, paused and stuck up an advert for the spare room. On looking up I noticed this girl was staring at me. Quite beautiful in a way, skinny-looking with long mousy hair, not dyed or cropped. Young, privileged, but not hip. Twenty-one was my guess. Flat sensible shoes, not retro heels or Doc Martens like the rest, and an Aran sweater. Something freakish but endearingly geekish about her, profoundly uncool, but still an elegance, the high cheekbones and large sky-blue eyes, a sign of good breeding, a tro
phy mother maybe. It was not my fault that Saul taught me to read class background from faces. He liked to joke that Dr Mengele was right. Eugenics would be on the pages of Vogue soon enough. I imagined her in time lapse, a hundred people buzzing around her in a soft blur of excitement about what’s hot and what’s not, and her standing so still, staring out at the arseholes.

  From across the gallery, Saul nodded to me to proceed with phase two. So I ducked away and headed to the toilet. The process was tricky as I’d made the mistake of swapping light bulbs before attempting to steal the toilet roll and so had to work in the dark with my penknife to open the big white metal thing. (Did they do that to stop toilet rolls being stolen? Were there others like me?) It was a real treasure, though, a whole new roll, about a foot in diameter. It was hard to stuff it into the shoulder sack with the two bottles and the bulb in there already, but the thought of actually cleaning my arse on something other than Saul’s stolen tabloids got me through the humiliating process. Then there were knocks at the door and posh voices laughing and I was crouching by the door, listening like a cat, trying to will the bodies away, feeling rather like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment.

  I was out and mumbling apologetically about the damned light bulb that had just blown, as a couple laughed past me and entered together. Coked up, obviously, going for a kinky shag. I searched through the bodies for Saul and the door.

  The girl was still there at the noticeboard, in front of my advert, and I realised what a stupid mistake I’d made. How easy it would be for anyone to work out that the guy loitering by the noticeboard had been the toilet thief. My name and address there for all to read. I feared she was maybe the daughter of the gallery owner and was about to have me arrested. She smiled as if with a look of pity, or embarrassment. Anxiety gripped me.

  I pushed through the thickening trendies to the exit. Outside and round the corner, I waited for Saul. As my breath calmed and I counted the minutes, I was suddenly crushed by the pettiness of what I had found so all-consuming just minutes before – the theft of a light bulb, toilet roll and two bottles of wine. As I had to pay for both our tickets on the late-night bus and as Saul would consume all the wine himself, I calculated that, even after such entrepreneurial exertions, I was left at a loss of something like forty-seven pence.

  As I rested my head against the cold wall and closed my eyes, her smile came to me. And a phrase – ‘Alone among the arseholes’. I thought that, as with most things of beauty, I would never see her again.

  Five flatmate interviews were scheduled for the day after next, but still the stand-off on the bin bags had not been resolved. To make matters worse Saul had dressed in his most offensive attire to greet the potentials: that wedding dress he’d torn in half to make into a T-shirt – grey with grime – his red rhinestone cowboy boots and a huge beauty spot over his stubble. — Try to have some common sense for once, I begged, to which he replied, — Sense is far too common for me! I decided it was best he stayed out of the proceedings and had dragged only the first of the stinking bags out of the door when they started arriving.

  First there was a lovely, elderly Francis Bacon type, who found it ‘all so bohemian’ and was dying to meet my ‘chum’. Who seemed oblivious to the stench and was just ‘so thrilled’ about sharing with ‘two young aesthetes’.

  Saul played the Osmonds and would not open his door.

  Then a young German student guy with bicycle clips on his chinos, who arrived just as a bag burst in my arms and I was covered in fungal noodles, and insisted I lower the rent for reasons of basic hygiene and common decency. And Saul played that terrifying album by Einstürzende Neubauten, with the chainsaws as musical instruments. In desperation I did all that I could. I climbed up to the fusebox, and flicked off the power. The sound of his stereo dying. That was it for him, that roused him. I threatened to move out if he did not help me with the flatmate situation.

  — Go then, he said, — you’ll find nothing much out there, believe me, it’s a void.

  The doorbell rang again and he turned, flicked the electricity back on and ran back to his room, his kimono flying behind him.

  I took a deep breath and opened the door. It was her. She offered her hand and her name and laughed nervously

  — Dorothy, but people call me Dotty. I guess I am rather, sometimes.

  She was a final-year student at Goldsmiths, a painter. Her voice was very pukka-pukka, like royalty. She seemed ashamed of it, putting her hand over her mouth. Perfect American TV presenter teeth, a slight stutter, she did not finish her sentences.

  I invited her in and no sooner did I indicate Saul’s room, than ‘Happiness in Slavery’ started up from behind his door – that track with the S&M noises. I led her swiftly away, then to the kitchen, apologised for the lack of light, then showed her my room – the only one not toxic – apologising that we hadn’t had time to clean the spare one, but really, she could trust me, it would be fine and was about the same size as mine and really cheap.

  She left with a smile and said we seemed very interesting, but I could tell she was glad to get away. As if in celebration of her departure Saul turned up the volume: the sounds of electric guitars and a man being whipped filled every room.

  Why had I sacrificed my life to be his apologist and slave, I asked myself in the days that followed as I made plans to move out. It took me back to that very first time I met Saul and the question of why I moved in. I’d been in my third year, studying for a BA in political theory and journalism at the London School of Economics. I was twenty-one, and much angered by the decline of the Left. It was just after the Wapping dispute, Rupert Murdoch and the great cull of permanent staff at the newspapers. I swore I would never walk past a picket line even though I needed work to pay back my student loan. I was a member of the Socialist Workers Party and stood every weekend, outside Camden tube station, beside the alkies and bums, trying to sell papers with headlines like TORY SCUM; DESTROY THE CAPITALIST MACHINE. But the more I studied Trotskyism the more my thesis on working-class solidarity bore no relation to the world around me.

  I’d been going through a messy break-up with my then girlfriend, Debs, who was angered both by my sexual inadequacies and my revolutionary beliefs – the latter she saw as a pathetic excuse for the former. It had been on a day when I had been struggling with my thesis and had failed to sell a single paper after six hours shouting, ‘This week’s Socialist Worker,’ a day when Debs had given me an ultimatum to move out. Facing homelessness, I came across an ad in a shop window. The rent was cheap and I was pushing well into my overdraft.

  I heard his music before I saw him at the door. Some kind of terrifying art-student experiment. But it was his face that really scared me: he was wearing foundation and looked like the Joker in Batman. He nodded at me, reluctantly, then let me enter. I found his rudeness perplexing, as all previous potential flatmates had given me the tour like they were estate agents. I walked to the back room and ‘squalid’ would have been a compliment. I entered his dark cavern of a room with questions about rent. He gave me a figure, ridiculous, then, as I was about to leave, he cut it in half. Two hundred . . . and then he added thirty more. He asked me to sit, and as I set down my stack of unsold papers, he laughed. I asked what he found so funny. He read the front page aloud: — ‘Support the Wapping workers.’

  — Waking the masses from their slumbers, are we?

  I took offence and explained that Marxism was an analysis of –

  — Yes, yes, yes . . . he interrupted, – cultural hegemony, historical necessity and all that jazz.

  I was shocked that he knew the lingo.

  — I’m sure equality seems lovely to you, but let me tell you, people will always find a way to fuck each other over. You see, there’s no such thing as Left and Right, there are simply those who shaft and those who get shafted!

  I picked up my papers and headed for the door.

  He called after me: — In time you may come to see the simple beauty of this.
/>   With no money for the tube I headed to the intersection at Shoreditch in a fury. A minicab screamed to a halt before me; I passed a sex shop, beneath the shadow of the high-rises where drug dealers loitered – the shafters and the shafted, and how dare anyone say this was anything but ugliness and hell. The sky was bearing down on me, burning yellow. On the overpass thousands of headlights screamed red beneath my feet. I looked up and an ancient tramp was there, ten feet from me, alone at the railing. What little change I had I decided to offer him, and walked to his side.

  — Lovely, ain’t it? he said, almost to himself. The headlights lit his drunken teary-eyed face that seemed moved as if by poetry. He did not take my money but smiled, turned and walked slowly away, carrying his one plastic bag. I stood where he’d stood and stared out.

  It was then as I felt the cars push wind on my face, as I surrendered to their power, that I realised I would never escape from that voice that dared to show me the world in negative, to turn all I had known inside out, and speak to me through other people and things. In that moment all judgement fell away and I glimpsed the fatal beauty of it all. The cars were unstoppable in their force, capitalism could not be overthrown, these things were not external to me, to be critiqued, but inside me, as alive as the toxic car fumes in my lungs. I was of it, and it of me, and the headlights became stars that wept for me. I roared with laughter then and fell headlong into that scepticism that had long been brewing. I fell and all I once believed in fell away. At the end of the overpass I threw my papers to the ground and walked away. Within the week, I had said my goodbyes to Debs and my degree and I became the student of the terrifying laughing man who saw beauty in the crap of the world.

  It seemed a miracle. I had been scanning the For Rent pages when Dot rang to say she would move in. I said yes, unconditionally, then recanted: I’d have to clear it with Saul first.