Chapter Text
We didn’t see him leave but we felt it. It’s similar to the sort of feeling we got when our nan died, on a Friday morning several months back: even before the phone call came, we woke up feeling sort of void, and unprotected. Like a layer of warmth was shed off us, that we had not noticed was always there.
We could hear our bare feet slap quietly on the icy tiles, now that everyone had unfurled out of the studio and spilled down the stairs. We stood at the top, holding the handrail with both hands and feeling like a drunken sailor, looking down at a clashing of viscously moving patterns of something that looked like a psychedelic rug. ‘Oi,’ we called softly, and from the sea of people he was the only one that turned. He looked at us over his shoulder slowly, his white checked shirt appearing very clean, very inviting to breathe around, unlike the cacophony of colours behind him. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I mean, everyone’s…’
We tilted our head back to the studio door. We felt a little bit offended that Damon counted himself as a guest and not as part of the studio, like, say, a table, or the little sink.
We headed back inside, a sort of post-apocalyptic atmosphere settling itself delicately over the room, now that it was void of people but full of signs of them- like a forgotten bag, and toppled cups everywhere, and the phantom smells of sweat and perfume, and the record player snagging every once in a while in the quiet hissing of cars below.
There was some sort of pipe running beyond the ceiling and cascading down the wall, from which liquid would drain a couple of times per day. We did not know where it came from or what caused it, we were not very technically minded despite a short dream of working as an electrician.
We were, however, highly imaginative, to a cumbersome degree. ‘Sometimes I think the studio is a belly,’ we confessed in the quiet, Damon and us following the gurgling sound with our heads as it ripped through the ceiling and trickled down the wall. ‘It horrifies me a little bit.’
Our first proper words to him, in almost a year, and it was about a room being a stomach. It made us want to curl into a ball, disappear into the floor, unscrew the top of our cranium and shove some real boy thoughts in there.
But then Damon said, very seriously, ‘What, like you’re being digested?’
‘Just… turned to mush.’ We started cleaning up, for an excuse to avoid his stare, which was sort of tender if we had ever seen one. A bit too gentle to be returned. We were always taken by the depth of Damon’s emotional intelligence, his elegant way of navigating personal conversations, which was completely overlooked by people in favour of his other louder characteristics, like confidence or competitiveness. We unfurled a black bin bag, started placing the empty bottles inside, chugged the ones with substance still in them on the spot. ‘In a very slow way. To feed the rest of the machine.’
‘The machine of the art industry,’ Damon mused, voice coming a little strained as he crouched down to sop up liquid from the floor. ‘Will it crush your originality?’
‘There was none to begin with. Last time I made something original it was when I was around, maybe, five… or younger, these weird little…’ We never finished the thought, because Damon had stopped wiping the floor to look over like he was sort of dying to know. We realised we were bound to disappoint him then. ‘It’s absurd isn’t it, studying art? Like someone’s mind is to be studied… I think it’s just an excuse for people to talk together.’
When the studio was cleaner and we became a little awkward, we busied ourselves with exchanging the Velvet Underground vinyl for a Gershwin one, the very slim strip on the Venn diagram where our and Damon’s tastes overlapped.
‘What’s this one?’ he asked in a small voice, and at first we thought he meant the record. But when we turned, he was holding out one of the nudes from behind the canvas with the two horses, #6, we thought. The background was black, the figure was turquoise, contorted in a sort of Z-shape, and cropped at the thigh and the neck – we did not enjoy drawing faces. They slipped us easily in real people and reminded us too much of masks. We hated ours as well; if God was real, his cruellest decision was to give man the same face throughout a lifetime.
‘An assignment.’
‘What was it about?’
‘A romantic encounter.’
Damon snorted softly, and looked back at the painting more carefully. There was something like a smile playing on his lips. ‘Who with?’
‘You care?’
‘Of course I care. You have a girlfriend and you’ve not told me?’
Our mouth does a little nervous press, and we find it too much work to look into Damon’s eyes. ‘No, it was a… a live drawing assignment.’
‘Oh,’ he said very softly, understanding something with his little mind that we had no idea what it was. ‘You like that, live drawing?’
‘If the model’s pretty.’
‘Does it ever turn you on?’
‘What is this, 20 questions?’
It comes off far sharper than any of us intended. If anything we were the weird, annoying ones, who did not wish to indulge our best friend in the world into conversation, to satisfy his curiosities that have built up so honourably over these past months. We thought back to a time we'd allow him to wear us out with questions, the 5 whys, his favourite and our worst, because when what turned out to be trifles were laid bare they seemed like toys, and we felt the delicate sort of shame that comes with relief.
We saw the beginnings of that glint in his eye and his lips tremble, but ultimately he said nothing, a drop so visceral in his expression it looked like a cloud had cast its shadow over him. We felt like the day had exhausted him somehow.
He curled a piece of his hair behind his ear, which is something we had never seen him do before. ‘Right. Sorry.’
‘Usually I’m too concentrated on getting the anatomy right. But… only usually.’ It was true and Damon was onto something, as always. Flexibility was always somewhat erotic to us, as was shibari and any sort of restraint that would test the limits of the human body. It didn’t matter if it was ours or someone else’s. We don’t remember how it started, though more and more we realised much of our current primal urges including fetish originated in childhood. A shame it was so uncontrollable.
But we were like Damon in this regard, privacy about personal things was dearly prized, held close to the chest like few gold coins. Giving them out carried the magnitude of an investment; to the wrong business a horrible loss, to the right one it made you feel a bit better, really, that your coin didn’t only go somewhere you disapprove of. And of course, you want to keep as much as possible to yourself.
‘My turn to ask something now.’
Damon nodded slowly, trying to tuck his smile into something appropriate, though we could see a singular laugh line from this angle, a graceful curve spanning his cheek. When he turned his eyes to us slowly, we were suddenly startled at how tired they looked.
We pulled the lonely easel bearing a half-finished painting into the final dying lights of dusk, in the centre of the room. ‘You wanna sit for me?’ We pointed at the stool tucked under the table with all the wine. ‘I want to finish this.’
‘Dragging me all the way from Essex… to ask me for favours,’ he reprimanded very quietly, almost in a purr. His voice got a certain way when day slowly bled into night, as though aware of the monsters lurking in the darkness and wanting to be enticing for them. We replayed those little purrs in our head until our skin tingled and we had to cross our legs. ‘Make it quick, then. I don’t want to miss the last train.’
He dragged the stool in front of the easel and stared at us, his expression a cross of anticipation and defiance. We were looked at this way one time during sex, and it shook us so deeply we will never forget it.
We almost fell out of the window when we first saw Damon today. He had cut his hair quite a bit shorter, and it was amazing how much it changed him, showing off the beautiful shape of his face and his big almond eyes and his eyebrows that we don’t think we had seen before, thick and a few shades darker than his hair, giving a masculine edge to the features he took after his mother.
We swallowed thickly, did some sort of weird nonchalant gesture with our hand. ‘Go on, then. Take off your clothes.’
He frowned and leaned back. ‘No.’
‘How am I supposed to paint you, then?’
‘I’ll take off mine if you take off yours.’
Diplomacy was at the tip of his tongue; he would go far one day. There were very few things at the moment we wanted more than seeing Damon naked, and they were all in the realm of world peace and resolution of the homelessness crisis and things to that effect.
With trembling hands we took off our shirt, all the way staring into Damon’s playful eyes. Our pendants did a silvery jingle before slapping back onto the thin chest, and we immediately felt cold and hypersensitive. Damon was not shy about letting his eyes wander across all the less than ideal spots on our body where bone came too close to skin, offsetting a low, buzzing excitement within it, at the prospect of maybe being loved.
Appearing satisfied, Damon undid the buttons of his shirt one-handed, one by one until he was able to shrug it off his shoulders. Surely at some point we had seen him shirtless given our proximity in childhood and adolescence, but it had never caused us such unrest. It was not the conventionally attractive male body with narrow shoulders and thick waist and soft hair swirling down from his chest to his navel, but there was something about it – perhaps the way his skin glimmered in the soft darkness or the promise of pliability, that made us want to kiss and lick the sweat right off the whole of him, starting from the tattoo on his hip we did not know existed, its placement absolutely maddening.
‘And your trousers,’ we said, a feat to keep our voice steady.
‘After you.’
We looked at each other for a long time before we did, as we debated telling him something. Finally we reached down, with his eyes trained on our legs as they slid slowly one by one out of the jeans. We hooked our finger into the elastic of our briefs and slid those down, too.
We relished the little shudder in Damon’s breath; he had not expected that, did he. We also thought we saw his heart beating below the thin skin of his chest, and his movements had become a bit less self-assured this time. He undid his belt with that exciting sound a metal buckle produces, and stepped out of his trousers. His thighs were dusted with hair and so strong looking, beautiful in a way men’s legs typically cannot look. Oh, to bite and lick their insides, to litter them with marks. Would he be sensitive there? When he took his underwear off, our mouth was already sort of salivating and we felt a lurch in our groin at the sight of its thicker and shorter size, wondering how that would feel in our fist, and maybe even inside us.
Have you shagged a guy yet, we wanted to ask. If so did you give it or take it and did he touch your bum and did you like it or did it feel sort of really weird but also a bit flattering but mostly like you did something really dirty or like a violation although you said yes to it and so went the imaginary conversation in our head.
He would say, if we asked. We didn’t let Damon know until years later how we lost our virginity but we were the first Damon let know, other than the girl involved. We remembered how he ran to our house after because he hated the telephone but he had to tell us, and we were in pyjama bottoms when he dragged us by the tree in our yard and our bleary eyes widened and we felt our face glow hot the more Damon whispered filth in our ear, with his hot lips occasionally brushing against the shell, and sometimes in the dead of night when we toss ourselves and feel desperate and vulnerable and struggle to come we still think back to that moment though Damon had been very young then and it is completely inappropriate.
We had shared minimal detail, so Damon recalled it perfectly, along with the timid tone and the downcast eyes. It was good - we had said - and, she was kind. Damon told us it fascinated him what we deemed important, not mockingly but not too honestly either. What we didn’t want to tell him, because only now that we were closer to her age did we understand how creepy it really was, was that she was twenty-one when we had just turned seventeen. And the beautiful experience – because it was truly beautiful - was sullied with a flurry of questions and disconcertion for the rest of our life.
We had Damon lie on top of the stool, with which he complied albeit with narrowed eyes. It was long enough to support his back with his hips and his shoulder blades dropping down, in an opisthotonus-like arch. Now that his hair was dangling messily out of his face entirely, a little golden hoop gleamed on his ear.
We absolutely loved live drawing. We thought that the human body was complex and beautiful. And Damon’s… the way the moonlight lapped the expanse of his smooth skin, the splash of freckles in unexpected places, how it highlighted the elegant twin curves of his ribcage, his hip bone, the muscle down his thigh… we traced over and over those details with the paintbrush, craving to feel his warm body under our hand.
‘Now clench your teeth… Harder… Okay, you can stop.’
‘Which- which assignment was this?’ he asked then, voice as strained as his red face.
‘Dunno. I just wanted to paint you like this.’
In truth, it depicted an exorcism. Black cleric figures extracting the blue evil spirit from the victim in what looked like an excruciating by proxy electric shock: our mother was always concerned about our drawings, draw something happy for once she would say, and we had never heard anything more pointless in our life.
When was a good time, if ever, to tell him we were on our last leg? That we felt so immensely void and purposeless this morning before the party that we almost found God? That the only way for us, at this rate, would be to enter a monastery? That we craved ascetism? Graham wanted to exorcise us, though he was the one who invited us into his body in the first place, by fear of bearing all his shame by himself like Atlas did the world, as it is a world’s worth of shame, to divide the load, you see. Though he was not at all equipped, his frail body was not at all equipped to face the full blast of us, as his root childhood problem had slipped nowhere but deeper within his soul, if such thing exists, and the second he exorcises us he will cave again and seek larger, more hurtful monsters, not ones like us. Not unless his body had already been broken by starvation and thirst and his knees bleeding in prayer and his tattered black clothes melted and become one with his skin so he truly becomes nothing but a vessel, body and soul, for the great unknown beyond, and Graham Coxon the man, the boy, the fake boy with the fake thoughts has been lost somewhere in the ether. No, he would not even talk to his other brothers, he would lock himself up in his cell and pull thick black drapes over all windows and ways out and dedicate his puny little immensely disappointing life to prayer.
There would be no coming back from this, but if so, hopefully he would come back a changed man.
‘You know that your canine peeks out when you smile? Even with your lips closed, it…’
‘You know that your front teeth are off-centre?’
‘Shut up,’ we murmured, spreading black all over the canvas, its sleek dangerous sheen deposited from the paintbrush making it seem like a live sort of matter, that we hoped one day would assemble itself and engulf us. ‘I meant it as a compliment.’
‘No one wants a compliment from you. Lover of ugly things.’
Good god, no, never of ugly things; never of ugly things, Damon, not when you look like an angel, in this moment much more than you ever have done. Jealousy of him had been poisoning our heart since the day we met him, and had started by now decaying our extremities. And watching him strike conversation so easily with all those people he had never met in his life before, eleven against one like it was nothing, that took us the entire year to even approach… But of course we could never let him know. We could never let him know we were so rotten inside.
‘It’s done,’ we said, slightly breathless. ‘Will you make your train?’
He glanced at his watch that he wore like a very loose bracelet. ‘If I run.’ He started to pull his clothes back on swiftly, and then he was fully clothed and us bare as the day we were born, wood digging uncomfortably in the bone of our pelvis. ‘Can I see it?’
We panicked. ‘No,’ we rushed, and stood up as though or negligible body could hope to hide such an atrocity. The pretentiousness we were experiencing could not quite be separated from our art anymore, as though it had seeped so deeply in us it was no longer a foreign entity. As a matter of fact, we wished to hide away all our works with drapes before the party, so that no one could see. But we decided on a path of selfishness by choosing art, so we had to see it through.
Damon’s face didn’t quite drop exactly, but he did look a flavour of offended, or disappointed, or even shocked. We played it off as a joke: ‘You’ll have to come back for it another time.’
It made him smile, at least, though it was an unhappy sort of smile. ‘Okay.’
Woe is me, he is leaving! What sort of existence is this- what sort of cordiality is this where we cannot grab his beautiful body and push it flush against our own, for the sake of listening to his heartbeat, and thank it for persevering? What sort of evil sorcery that pulled us apart from him when he was the only person we cared for in this whole party, the only real person amongst all the substitutes of his we scoured the campus to find?
There was a time we would hug goodbye, where he would swing us slowly in his warm embrace from side to side – dramatic, like his nature he followed now academically. The sort of hug that made our father squint at us over his newspaper and we would have to urge Damon out of his line of sight in order to resume.
But now he swung his bag over his shoulder and only threw us a glance, before disappearing into the darkness. Well, we supposed, he was running late for his train, and he had much better things to do in Essex anyway. Better friends to be with… A life without us could only be a better life.
Rooted deeply in the chest, right above the heart, as it is cruel and thus cannot originate in the heart, one tries to expel it. If not, it will spread forever in the wilderness and pollute the ecosystems, all the animals and plants I love dearly. It will pump the skies full of malicious clouds that seed off moonlight and the good parts of the light of day.
To curb it how? How to avoid this cosmic despair? Perhaps with the silence that the host so craves, the empty house.
To curb it with crying? I cried my bleeding heart out in the shower this morning, for more than halfway through the Mission of Burma Vs. record, so my housemates would not hear - especially Trem Two, that song really gets me around the 3-minute mark.
To curb it with easy listening music? Practice Anji on a tinny, shy electric?
To curb it with lukewarm black coffee?
To curb it with painting? Pour out all the blackness that is in my soul onto the canvas, though I finished bottles and bottles of paint and there still is much left.
The root is still there, and will be for the rest of my life. All I can do is curb it, so deeply rooted in me I don’t think it’s meant to be expelled.