Chapter Text
God forbid it didn’t rain when Damon left the house. It was like the heavens detected he had errands to run, or job interviews to go to, or acquaintances he would bump into on the way, and mourned his life with tears, sometimes fat and aggressive, other times gentle and opaque, but the sort of tears that would soak him to the bone nonetheless.
Damon, part in protest part in resignation and mostly due to lack of means, never invested in an umbrella. The one his father sent him off to drama school with had expired, gracefully with one of its metal spider legs bent up like a crooked ballerina, after dutifully protecting him from exaggerated winds all throughout fall and winter. Buying a new one in spring felt redundant and pointless.
Teeth chattering, windbreaker dripping, cigarette damp and wilted between trembling fingers, hair matted against forehead, Damon power-walked to the train station. He had put his glasses in his pocket because he could see less with them on rather than off. He had developed an odd peculiarity recently, wherein he struggled to settle his face as he walked. The question was ignited when it downed on him one day that he was being stopped a lot by people wanting to ask directions or trying to sell him things: was it something he was doing? His mother, bless her, would have said no one is making them sell you things, Damon. Of course it’s not your fault. Although back then it was more to do with the beatings he took by the kids in Class B, and anyway you tend to approach your parents’ opinions more pragmatically as you grow older.
12 pm Sunday reduced service to Deptford meant a train packed to the brim with middle-aged women and men, good-humoured after a few mimosas or pints at brunch, respectively. Damon could not find an empty seat, so he was stood against the glass of the train door, sweating under his polyester jacket. He felt the body heat and saw the ghostly reflections of passengers squeezing themselves to settle behind him, and then they departed, one minute early.
The world was shockingly toy-like in high speed, and identical, as though humanity had reached the perfect, final form of society and there was no improving upon it, where houses are best to look like this, and roads like this, and cars being the best means of transportation, which also happen to be one of the world’s best, most effective murder weapons killing about 5,500 in the UK that year.
There were two stops left when Damon felt it: the hand of someone on his back. It was a big hand and burning over Damon’s thin jacket, as it slid easily down to the small of his back. A man’s hand, squeezing his hip only with the audacity a man could ever be allowed to have. Squashed as they all were in there like sardines in a tin: surely, an accident.
Then the hand reached lower, and lower, and settled on his bum. It was a startling sensation, especially when the fiddling started. So startling, that Damon refused to let the possibility of the accident go; until he felt something else stir behind him, and heavy breathing, and felt burning eyes stare at him through the window that he would rather die than meet.
He wanted to look to the person next to him, but he didn’t dare. And do what? Ask for help?
A minefield, the space between body and mind. Mysteries of all kinds lurked there, though there was some educational attempt to ease this awkward relationship. Most notably, from a very young age those whose minds harnessed their bodies best were rewarded, so at nineteen it felt terribly wrong for Damon to trust his body. What was it doing now – useless; frozen up completely yet sweating profusely. His buffed up, powerful mind had taken over, chanting: please stop please stop please stop please stop please
The train had barely stopped when Damon slid the door open and dashed outside, wincing when he landed badly on his knee and stumbled on the platform. It earned him a piercing whistle from the guard, but he didn’t stop running, not when he sensed the man was chasing after him. He moved through the station like a small fish against the artificial current in a tank, sliding between people and turning corners blindly until he gratefully reached the toilets, ran into a stall, locked the door, and jumped onto the lid.
He curled himself in a ball, there. His entire auditory system was failing him, he could only hear the blood pumping in his ears, his limbs going numb, and his sight focusing very sharply on an unpleasantly detailed cock drawn on the door whilst everything else went dark. A sort of rot had started eating him up from inside, a very profound disgust. Settled already like ancient sediment, like it had always been there, and now that he’d noticed it it would never go away.
As though in a dream, a pair of greasy brogues appeared from under the gap of his stall. They lingered there pointlessly, and after what seemed like hours, they vanished again.
Damon was shaking like a leaf when he started rummaging through his bag. He was feeling this pleasant feeling sneaking into him from the edges, the feeling he got whenever he was bedridden with illness or after getting his head shoved in the toilet in school – the feeling that he had earned the right to take care of himself. To “take it easy”. That he deserved it, which was a feeling he got at no other point in his life.
He opened the first can of Carling, sssssst, and chugged half of it in one go, squatting still on the toilet. Slowly his senses returned to him, though kinder, softer around the edges. He shed his windbreaker and dragged his fingers over his beaded necklace, which was a protective charm, a bit accusatorily.
Well, god knows what would’ve happened if not for it.
The rain had eased into a drizzle as Damon walked uneasily the two remaining stops to Graham Coxon’s new studio. The thought of getting into another mode of public transport profoundly disconcerted him; the thought of having to hand someone money for his fare, or having to ask someone to sit next to them, or scooching over for space, or anything to do with human interaction, really. So he relied on his two feet, that were made for whisking him away from unpleasant situations.
The streets were fairly empty save for the odd pedestrian and slow car, though the drink made him paranoid and prone to showing his teeth to whoever passed him by like a dog. He was feeling what he thought Graham had once described to him he felt, in a rare moment of vulnerability - that everyone was watching his every move, waiting for him to slip up and humiliate him for his mistake. Or his clothes exaggerated terrible faults on his body, and he kept fidgeting with himself whilst waiting for the green light, bouncing his leg for having something to do.
He was walking for about an hour and a half by the time he reached the studio. It was a tiny room in the second floor of a larger exhibition venue, but in the eyes of the art student, who enters this line of work knowing they will starve on the streets, it spelled success. His skin and clothes were sopping wet with humidity by the time he reached inside, and there was someone with a large-brimmed hat at the front desk that stopped him politely on account of looking suspicious. He had to tell her Graham’s name twice, then spell it C-O-X-O-N, and just when he was about to abandon hope she said oh, Graham with something like an eye-roll, and sent him upstairs.
Music was faintly spilling from the door in front of him when he knocked, along with someone’s occasional, high-pitched laughter. He started biting his nails, which he never did, suddenly very eager to just turn around and leave, fully convinced that walking the whole way back to Essex would be more tolerable to his frazzled body than spending a few hours here.
He was about to cave in to his gut feeling when footfalls thudded dully behind the door, familiar little raps that anchored Damon in place and filled his chest with oxygen. He wanted nothing more than to see Graham’s face and fall into his embrace, long and tight like it sometimes got, that had Damon’s mum teasing them saying it’s not the end of the world, boys. Get in the car, Damon, we need to go.
The person who opened the door was not Graham.
She was a tall girl, about Graham’s height, sandy hair falling unkemptly against her shaggy cardigan. The synthetic wool of it was lit ablaze by the daylight behind her, making her margins appear fiery, like she was some sort of mythical creature.
‘Sorry, I brought beer,’ Damon fought to keep his hiccup down, looking into her black eyes as he lifted his empty bag, ‘but I drank it all on the way.’
‘You can have our wine, then,’ she offered easily, and stepped aside to let him in, watching him with something like a smile.
It was smaller than he expected, was Damon’s first thought. It made the ten or so people in there crowd it like his train trip all over again.
His second was surprise at the girl-to-boy ratio of invitees, though he supposed it made sense given Graham’s surround of women that raised him - his father a withdrawn and strict figure even in Damon’s memory. How many of these girls were secretly trying to shag him? How many of them had done? Or was Damon just being a bitter cynic, unaccepting of the fact that ulterior motives did not always power a relationship, and that Graham was finally allowed to pursue friendships that meant something to him, now that having female friends did not make you a ponce like it did in school.
Damon was quickly confronted with the anxiety of knowing no one. It was always a gamble, how such situations would go: him striking easy conversation with the other slightly less sociable person in the circle, or him seeking a permanent spot against the wall and doing his best to chase people away by schooling his expression into something disagreeable. The atmosphere around him buzzed with a gentle energy. It was less a party and more a gathering, really, “housewarming” is what Graham called it in his letter, with people broken off into small groups, three by the window, two by the table, some lying on the floor passing a joint, chatting over a backdrop of Velvet Underground. It seemed it would be the latter today.
Graham’s art was all over the place, which was natural of course but made Damon feel like he was peeking at something he was not supposed to. Canvases and wooden panels were mostly lined against the walls or balanced on top of the large mirror by the sink, in sizes that shocked Damon, clashing with the tiny sketchpad he knew his friend to confine his drawings to. He appeared to use solid black backgrounds a lot, that made his work look very sophisticated; contrasting with bright Basquiat-type faces and Lowry-like dogs and other skinny, scraggly creatures. Damon was a little unsettled and excited at the extreme angles Graham seemed to enjoy putting his subjects in: his eye fell onto a sadistically contorted female figure that was sort of slid behind another, thicker canvas, like someone had tried coaxing it out of its hiding place, startled, and put it back.
Damon’s eyes followed the artwork to the window, which was open, allowing a pleasant breeze to come in. The couple of people who sat there streaked the white sunlight pooling on the floor with disfigured shapes, now that Damon had tucked himself inside, and the sun could safely peek from the rainclouds again.
Graham was sitting on the ledge next to someone, looking down on his legs as they dangled in the open air. It was up to his friend behind him not to push him off. He was wearing a pink and black henley Damon had never seen before, and a heart pendant jingled against another piece of crystal that looked like a rose quartz, the careful wire caging too loopy a handiwork to be Graham’s own. He wasn’t wearing the beaded necklace Damon made him, the one he used to never go without; it probably didn’t go with the outfit.
Graham turned his head to light his cig away from the wind, showing off how he had chopped his mop of hair into an Audrey Hepburn sort of fringe, that made him look rather older, sharper, and less sweet. Their gazes met from a distance, and Graham’s large eyes lit up suddenly, and his hunched body straightened up, and his mouth opened, but then someone else tapped his shoulder and all this goodness was taken away.
Damon made his way to the table which was littered with wine bottles and the odd tequila, and poured himself a generous cup. Look at this, wine and Velvet Underground, and people he had no idea about, and an art studio all to himself, and large-scale, cryptic artwork. He used to think they were about equally matched in art skills; he had no idea Graham could draw like that, with oil paints. He had no idea he could know more than five people at a time, five girls, and throw a quiet little party, and fit so effortlessly in it without his help. He flicked through the small collection of specs scattered around the bottles, recognising only the round ones Graham wore at school.
‘You know I was only kidding about the wine, right?’
Damon looked up suddenly, his vision swimming a little before settling on the girl who had opened the door for him earlier. There was no way of telling whether minutes or hours had passed since then, and she was the only person he had exchanged words with, and he had already managed to piss her off.
‘You’re supposed to BYOB.’
Damon felt the blood drain from his face. ‘Oh, shit, I’m so sorry,’ he said, the alcohol in it giving his apology a profoundly empathetic dimension, with knit eyebrows and big eyes making it impossible not to forgive.
It made her cackle. She pushed his shoulder, in drunken solidarity, and said, ‘I’m taking the piss.’
Damon let a scoff escape him and hung his head.
‘And you totally believed me. I’m Christie.’
‘Damon.’
Ηe was still the person kind souls took pity on in social gatherings, it seemed.
Christie topped her own cup up with the same bottle, grabbing the neck of it a bit brashly.
‘So how do you know Graham?’
A surreal question: it was surreal, to talk about Graham behind his back. He had never been quite popular enough for that sort of thing. ‘From school. We were in the same music class,’ Damon heard himself reply.
‘I don’t think I’ve seen you around on campus.’
‘Yeah, I don’t go here. I study acting, at East 15.’
‘Oh, never heard. Where is that?’
‘It’s in Debden.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Uh, in Loughton.’
‘Is that in…?’
‘Essex.’
‘Oh, right,’ she murmured. Sipped her wine. ‘Long way.’
A few seconds passed, where they pretended to be engrossed in their unsavoury wine, letting the silence grow uncomfortable between them until Damon started to break into a new sweat. ‘How about you?’
‘I do fine arts, with Graham. He, um… On the first week he didn’t know what rabbit skin glue was and he asked me because I was sitting next to him. And I had no idea what it was either, but I was too embarrassed to say so so I said I didn’t use that stuff anyway because I was vegetarian, but I’m actually not. And now I can’t eat meat around him, which is horrible because we’re around each other a lot and I miss it!’
‘It’s a sort of sizing, isn’t it, the…?’
Her smile dropped. ‘Well, maybe you should be studying art instead of me then.’
It was a thin line between dread and relief when one of her friends called her over for a hit of the joint. Damon wasn’t quite sure what happened; he didn’t mean to offend, but there were also about a million other things less diabolical he had the wit to comment on.
He spent the rest of the party crafting a shell around himself, memorising every detail of Graham’s canvases, working through the bottles of wine too quickly, catching whiffs of his neutral-smelling sweat that came with certain movements of the arm, and watching the sunlight retract itself slowly from the window. The crispness with which he had left his house this morning felt a deeply buried, ancient memory. Long way, Christie had said.