Paul Edwards

Tonight, Rocco’s was heaving. Kylie’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head throbbed over all the shouting and laughter. On a gigantic TV screen, Inter Milan were playing Juventus in the Coppa Italia.

I found Ethan sitting at a small table in the corner, watching the football. “Good game?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Both teams are defending well. Vieri’s fucking class, though.”

I took off my coat and folded it over the chair. “I just phoned my sister,” I said. “She thinks I should contact my parents.”

Ethan sneered, but said nothing.

Inter hit the woodwork. A group of lads perched close to our table leapt into the air. “Christ,” said Ethan. “Did you see that?”

“I didn’t realise you liked football,” I said, over the noise.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” I replied, embarrassed.

“Listen: you know what I think about your parents. So we don’t have to go there, okay?” 

“Caitlin says they want to mend things, Ethan. They want to know me again.”

Ethan stood up quickly, knocking the table. “I’m going to get a beer. Do you want one?”

I placed my hand on his. “Do we have to stay here? Jesus, you know how much I fucking hate this place.”

He glared at me. In those eyes I could read exactly what he was saying: Get the fuck off.

I took my hand away.

Ethan spun around and pushed his way to the bar.

*

After the match, as we walked out into the night, I said: “Sorry.”

Ethan dropped his shoulders and sighed.

“It’s just that…I’ve been thinking about my family a lot just lately, you know?”

“Why?” he said. “I mean, after what they put you through, you should just fucking forget them. Forget they ever existed.”

“It’s not as easy as that…”

“The problem with you, Mark, is that you’re too fucking nice. You don’t live in the real world. You hurt too easy. You’ve got to disassociate yourself from all that stuff, man.”

I stared at the pavement. Why couldn’t I ever find the right words to argue back?

“Hey,” he said, punching my shoulder. “I want to take you some place.”

“Where?”

“You’ll see,” he smiled. 

*

“What are we doing here?”

The moon shone faintly through thin, black trees, picking out ghost-white angels; ivy-choked crypts; bent, crooked headstones. 

Ethan didn’t answer. Instead, he reached into his trench coat pocket for a small bottle of beer.

“Look what I smuggled out of Rocco’s,” he grinned. He snapped off the lid. Then he stared at me with those cold, black eyes of his. “There’s a gateway to Hell somewhere in this cemetery.”

I laughed. “Sounds like something out of a Lucio Fulci movie.”

The look in Ethan’s eyes quickly killed the smile on my face. “It’s true, Mark. True as I’m here.” 

We both looked away, embarrassed. Everything was so silent and still. Then he shattered his bottle against a tombstone and said, “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

*

The next morning, I woke up alone. I washed, dressed, then walked back to the graveyard, knowing, somehow, that I’d find him there. Sure enough, from behind a low-cut wall, I watched him flit around all those decaying crypts and tombs and marble headstones. 

I closed my eyes. My mind backtracked. I thought about the first few months of our relationship, and how everything seemed less complicated then.

We first met in a dingy bar in Old Church Street. To look at, he’d reminded me of the indie-actor Vincent Gallo, from that movie Buffalo 66. It was the intensity of his eyes, I guess, and the gaunt face and shock of long dark hair.

I let him move into my flat with me. Before, he’d squatted in a tenement in central Portsmouth, behind the decaying Tricorn Centre. He’d look out of my window onto the rain-lashed park and garages below and say without irony, “At least the view’s an improvement.”

During the first three months of our relationship, he hardly ever left the flat. In fact he’d sit on the windowsill and stare out of that same window with such an intensity, that I’d swear he was projecting images from his mind onto the dark, empty wastelands below.

At some point the bulb popped, and we never got round to buying a new one. As a result, the flat was perpetually dark: the sun couldn’t penetrate the room because of the thick, dense oaks in the parkland. My job as an assistant in the local library just about covered the rent. Ethan never worked, and he never seemed to eat. He stole cigarettes from the local Tesco to stave off hunger.

Sometimes, in the cloying gloom of the flat, his skin would look so white that I could swear he was a ghost. That was when I’d feel most for him. We’d wrap ourselves up in the sheets of the bed, swathed like mummies, clinging to each other, too afraid to let go.

Ethan introduced me to poetry: Blake, Keats, Rimbaud, Larkin. We’d spend our days sitting at the windowsill or on the bed, reciting poetry, or listening to music on my beaten stereo. He liked indie-rock: stuff like Nick Cave, P.J Harvey, Mogwai, Tindersticks.

Later I taught him some chords on my acoustic guitar. Pepped up by black coffee, cheap marijuana and whisky, we’d play our favourite songs deep into the early hours of the morning, or until the old woman was banging on the wall next door with a broom handle. 

I loved him.

I loved everything about him.

But even in the first few weeks of our relationship, I knew that the things we’d offer to each other could push the world that little bit further away.

*

I opened my eyes.

Ethan had finished his tour of the graveyard and was walking home. I came out from behind the wall, feet scrunching dead leaves. He turned when he heard me, and for a nightmarish moment I thought he was a vampire, or zombie. His eyes snagged on me, and he grinned. It was horrible, like the rictus of someone long dead.

The wind blew his greasy hair into his eyes. “I’m close, Mark,” he said.

I didn’t want to talk about it.

As I passed him, he said: “You will come with me, won’t you? When I find it, I mean.”

“Yes,” I said, with my back to him. “You know I would.”

I glanced uneasily over my shoulder. He stumbled forward, black trench coat swinging around his ankles. Then he clasped his cold, white hands on my face and he kissed me hard, viciously, on the mouth.

*

In the cool darkness of the bedroom I took Ethan’s cock in my mouth and sucked as he stared wide-eyed, open mouthed, at the ceiling. He gripped my hair in his hands and moaned, but he couldn’t come.

“I’m sorry,” he said later, as we lay in the darkness together. He tried to smile. “It’s like every bit of me’s used up.”

“Don’t worry,” I whispered, brushing his hair out of his eyes. “Don’t worry.”

Moments later he was asleep.

I slipped out of bed, then moved to the window. I rubbed some of the condensation away with my hand. The moon grinned through that wet smear like a cracked skull.

I couldn’t sleep so I read a little. As the candles dripped and dimmed, the night closed in on me. Eventually I drifted off, but my dreams were lucid and frightening. I was in a graveyard near my parents’ house. My parents were standing over a headstone, Dad with his hands in his pockets, Mum clutching a wreath of dark-blue flowers. I called out to them, but they didn’t seem to hear me. Soon they shuffled off, shoulder-to-shoulder, towards the gates.

I walked over to the headstone. Etched in grey marble was my name, the year of my birth, and also, the year of my death:

Mark Leighton

1974 – 2002

I began to run. 

“Mum! Dad!” 

The wind moaned, the trees creaked. Suddenly I realised I was in Ethan’s graveyard – all around me were those familiar ivy-choked crypts and mausoleums with their crumbling gables and cupolas. 

I caught up with dad, then placed a hand on his shoulder. As he turned, I saw that it wasn’t dad at all – it was Ethan. His face was chalk-white, and there were swirls of purple shadow around his black, black eyes. 

“Disassociate yourself,” he hissed, “from everything.”

*

Ethan was gone before I awoke. I spent the day perched on the windowsill, smoking through a packet of Marlboros. I thought about Ethan a lot: it was hard facing up to the fact that we were running out of things to do, to say now. The romance of our squalid council flat was wearing pretty thin. 

I recalled that night in Rocco’s, days after we’d first met. We’d sat in a corner, under a green lamp and a black and white photograph of Charlie Parker. Ethan had taken me apart with his eyes, his words, his soft, melodic voice: 

“Your parents are selfish, lost people. They want you to embrace everything they value. They crucify you because they don’t understand you.” He’d reached across and laid a cold, pale hand on my shoulder. “You should have grown up like them, didn’t you know? Career-minded, money orientated, heterosexual.”

Perhaps there was some truth in his words. But really he was just exerting his influence over me, and perhaps I should have realised it at the time.

“You will come with me, won’t you? When I find it, I mean.”

What did he really want of me?

It was a quarter to six and Ethan still wasn’t home. The sun was sinking, daubing shadows everywhere. I needed to talk to someone, to hear another person’s voice, so I left the flat and walked up to the callbox. I punched in Caitlin’s number.

“Hi Mark,” she said, brightly. “It’s so good to hear from you again. How are you?”

I told her I was fine, but I couldn’t hide the lie in my voice.

“Things aren’t the same without you around,” she sighed.  “I went home last weekend. Mum and Dad are really frightened. They’re frightened that you want nothing to do with them, and they never wanted that.”

“Dad kicked me out, sis, remember?”

“No, Mark; you chose to leave.”

“I didn’t have a choice! You remember the arguments, the fights we had.”

“They still love you, they’ve told me that. And they blame themselves for everything. You should see them now; it’s like there’s a permanent black cloud over them. They can’t move on. They’re so sad and frail and I feel terrible for lying to them, for having to pretend that I have no idea where you are.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“All they want to do is talk to you,” she continued, her voice softening. “Let them back into your life, Mark. Do it for me. Please.”

As I put the receiver down, I knew I’d called Caitlin at the worst possible time.

Disassociate yourself from everything.

I stared at my ghost-white face in the mirror above the payphone. 

Did I really feel like crying?

I got back to the flat. Tacked to the wall above the bed was a note from Ethan. It read: I’ve found it. Come at once. E.

I stared and stared at it.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, shaking my head, rubbing my eyes. “I’m sorry.”

I fell into the corner, then drew up my knees and wrapped my arms around them. 

Slowly, slowly, the night closed in.

*

I put the phone down and left the callbox. The day was dull, but the sun was trying to pierce the clouds. Caitlin was coming for me in the afternoon, so I had the morning to myself.

I trudged across town to the graveyard. I clambered over the broken fencing and pushed my way through the long grass and nettles. Headstones stabbed out here and there. I combed the cemetery scrupulously, just for a trace of him.

An hour or so later I discovered his footprints in some mud outside a small marble mausoleum. Immediately my chest hurt. I felt funny all over. I had no idea what it was, until I suddenly started crying. Quickly, I wiped the tears away with the backs of my hands and wrapped my coat around me.

I walked up to the door of the mausoleum. I pressed my ear against it. Then I heard him: a dead, far-off scream. I shivered. I turned away.

I paused at the gates, just as the sun came out. Light swept through the sycamore trees, picking the graveyard clean of shadow.

“Nothing,” I whispered, forcing a smile. “You heard nothing.”