Chapter 5 -HOLE IN THE WALL-

From my roster of friends in London I was the boss when it came to longing. The cravings began (I think, I am no expert in prenatal psychology) inside my mother’s womb. The gestation period was calamitous for Delia. For starters, the revelation of my gender coincided with one of the shittiest days of her life. It was a Friday in April 1982. She was running back home from the Health Clinic in Casemates Square with an ultrasound of a three month old male tadpole, to inform Sandy of the ‘the news.’ She was wearing a white linen dress which radiated in the golden rays of the African sun. Her red lipstick and the thick long black hair flapping up and down in the spring air. She had hoped the pregnancy could mend the rift in her marriage. Too many nights. Too many drugs. But perhaps Sandy would change. Now that she was expecting a boy? Perhaps he would stay home. Perhaps they could start again. 

But when Delia opens the door of their council flat in Varyl Begg Estate, Sandy is not there. She collapses onto the beige faux leather sofa and lights a cigarette, perhaps the last one before she quits. She is knackered from the running and the pregnancy. Her feet hurt. The living room smells of aftershave and sweat. There is an eerie quietude hovering over the room. The remnants of an argument perhaps. Where the hell is Sandy? Has he fled to the Pig and Whistle to drink with his colegas again? It gets worse. There is a knock on the door and Pili, the next door neighbour, is screaming her tits off. That woman revels in the drama of her neighbours. The woman lives for everyone else’s misfortunes. That woman is a pain in the ovaries. She rules over the patio and the public life of the families in Barham House and Warspite House. Pili is jumping up and down like a coked-up monkey. She informs my mum, with scowls and howls and exaggerated arm movements, que la policia have been there moments before, and con hand-cuffs y to, taken Sandy away. Delia tries to save face, attempts to hide the desolation of an illusion gone awol, but it's too hard. She makes gargantuan efforts to hold her stomach in place because the bloody stomach wants to spurt out. I wonder if her stomach ever recovers?  La Pesa de Pili is in her face, spurting nonsense about this and that. Delia is trying to contain the urge to strangle her. Arrested. Again. The bloody smuggling. Why didn't the Moroccans pass their dirty shipments of cigarettes and hashish to the Spaniards? Why did the whole hippy generation of Gib go from bell-bottoms to high-speed dinghies? Not that she saw much of the money anyways. Sandy spent it all showing off in the bars of Gibraltar. She had always told him to keep it under the hat. She had asked him to quit playing Johnny Big Balls, begged him to stop confronting the cops and laughing at the magistrates who according to Sandy were all pish and queer as fuck. But would he listen? No. He was a stubborn machote, wasn’t he? And she knew one day the cops would be done with all the nonsense and put her man behind bars.  One day but not like that. Not on the day she brought news of their boy. Not with Pili wiping shame and grief all over her face. Not with the neighbours sticking their puto necks out the window. 

Years later Delia told me that she marched off to the Police Station in Irish Town and yelled at what she called the idiots that looked like minions of Darth Vader. She was livid. She even toppled a Bobbies’ hat at the station. Just slapped the black oval crown off the lanky bloke who refused to tell her where he was. He stood there saying nothing. Atontau. Looking at her like she was some kind of drugged-up skank. What the hell was he thinking? She was carrying a baby inside her belly. A baby boy and those cabrones in black cockroach suits were not letting her inform the father. Shame on them! She used to make fun of the incident but we all knew her bravado was a farce. The day was no joke. The incarceration released a toxic uncertainty inside her: how would she survive raising a male on her own in a kingdom of judgement and obtuse morality the size of New Cross Gate? What would become of her? To make matters worse the midget monster who ruled Spain with an iron fist had closed the frontier in 1969 leaving Delia’s mum, my grandmother, trapped on the Spanish side of the border where she was giving palliative care to her Andalusian mother. Delia was alone and desperate. She could not help but feeling life had it in for her.

  ***

‘You are more like a top dog of delusion mate,’ concluded Jez after pretending to listen to my drunken monologue. He was one of the only people I opened up to in those days. I felt comfortable revealing secrets to him, mainly because I knew Jez was not listening. Not properly anyways. 

‘That too,’ I replied. 

Jez smirked and pulled me by the collar of my Americana shirt to the smoking area where he extracted a Marlboro light from his silver cigarette case and whispered to my ear.

‘Look there. The one on your left gobbing it out to Simon.’ 

‘Tara?’

‘I had my tongue between her legs the other night. I have never felt more alive,’ claimed Jez.   

‘When the hell did you become a pervert-philosopher?’ 

‘Look at her! She’s incredible!’

Jez's eyeballs were spitting out into the cold London night. He seemed deranged and possessed but I kind of knew what he meant. 

‘I have felt that too. She was Italian in my case! Wah! I confessed. 

‘A Brit! A Brit mate! Europeans are overrated.’

I could only see the back of Tara’s malnourished body but I remembered her well. Her tattoos and her shaved undercut were encrusted in my mind. Her eyes were stuck there too; massive green balls which hoovered up all of my senses. Those were the eyes of a woman who had experienced the terror and splendour of life’s journey. I immediately thought of Luc Besson’s Joane of Arc or Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. I saw the same madness in Klaus Kinski’s eyes as he attempted to drag a steamboat over a mountain. 

‘Is she really a singer-songwriter?’ I asked anxiously. 

‘Who the hell cares!’ answered Jez in despair. ‘Look at her.’

Her figure was well-proportioned. Taller than the average Jane, shorter than a Danish model she boasted the exact measurements for a medium-sized man to feel lucky but not particularly threatened. 

‘Did you hear what happened to Romeo?’ continued Jez. 

‘He drank poison, didn’t he?’

‘Not that Romeo you twerp. The lead singer of the Dead Acrobats I mean. The guy who had a residency at the Betsey on Monday nights. They say he has left England because of her. Cancelled all his shows.’ 

‘What an idiot!’ I exclaimed as I puffed on a cigarette.

‘He threatened to throw himself onto the railway tracks on Christmas Eve.’ 

‘He can’t have known her for more than two weeks.’

‘He told me they had a connection, a bond or some shit. He told Tara’s mate, Cristina, that she felt it too.’ 

‘It is impossible to know what anyone is thinking, let alone what they are feeling. How many people have you told?’ 

‘About what?’

‘The licking thing.’ 

‘Just you,’ responded Jez shyly. I could see he was quickly losing his bravado. 

‘Don’t tell anyone else. They’ll hate you.’ 

‘Who will hate me?’

‘All of them.’

‘Why would they hate me?’

‘We are all jealous monkey’s in the end. Yes, me and you too and it does not matter how many self-help books we read.’ 

‘Oh shut up with your negativity Mark!’ 

Jez lifted his eyes to stare at Tara’s neck. There was a man turned into a jellyfish of fear. He grabbed me by the collar again. He was trying to remind himself that there was still determination and strength in him. But I knew Jez well. His confidence had been toppled. Even observing her there surrounded by singer-songwriter wannabes was making him angry and uncomfortable.

‘How do you feel?’

‘The fuck if I know. She tasted me and then told me to bugger off.’ 

‘Do you really want her?’

‘I want her to want me more than those chatterboxes.’

At that moment Tara turned around. She moved away from the other revellers outside The Betsey and walked in our direction. Jez was paralysed. I was surprised too. The night was warm and calm. Clerkenwell looked dreamy in the pinkish smog. Offices were empty and only drinkers roamed the narrow cobbled streets of the neighbourhood. It was as if the spirit of old central London had suddenly been stirred up. As if the capital had ceased to be the city of traffic and offshore banking to become, once again, the hunting ground of bohemians and seekers like Virginia Woolf  and Lord Byron. 

‘What’re you on about, you two?’ enquired Tara cheekily as she approached us. She placed her hands on her hips and protested. ‘Aren’t you sick of the drunks? Small talk, small talk everywhere. So sick of bloody small talk!’

Tara wore a 1950s style blue dress with a thick shiny white belt that  tightened her belly and proliferated her hips and her legs. She accompanied the dress with torn tights and tattered Dr. Marten boots. I could not situate her style. It escaped the frames of fashion I had stashed up in my mind in the more than fifteen years living in the city. 

‘What else is there to do?’ I asked. 

‘Anything but wait here to die,’ she replied.

‘You are a bit dark today.’

‘It’s a Townes Van Zandt song, you twerp.’

‘I prefer Cohen,’ I replied.

‘I prefer real poets.”

‘Like who?’

‘William Carlos Williams, for example. Now, that’s a white man who could write.’ 

Jez tried to capture Tara’s attention by humiliating himself with the little knowledge he had gained from BBC4 programs and Google search. He started speaking about French surrealism for some reason but got into such a muddle that Tara started to wonder if he was actually simulating a surrealist lecture. I added very little but enjoyed watching him fail miserably at impressing her with his sparse knowledge of literature. Jez often confessed that the first book he had read was The Alchemist at the age of 17. He made the mistake of mentioning it and Tara went berserk.

‘That patriarchal git,’ she grunted.  ‘Second rate guru. A fucking insult to literature if you ask me and probably a paedophile. You know how much dosh he made selling mystical journeys to housewives? I fucking hate Paulo Coehlo. 

‘Yes, me too, me too,’ assured Jez. 

‘You just said you loved his book!

Jez’s face swelled up. I could not help giggling like a silly teenager.

‘What’s your bloody problem?’ asked Jez as he shoved me out of the way. 

I receded a couple of steps and looked around. The wannabes had gone. I thought Tara would abandon us too, especially after Jez's Coehlo fiasco, but three pints in and were still chatting merrily outside The Betsey Trotwood. We were chuffed that she had left the group of aspiring poets, singer songwriters, playwrights to turn her attention and conversation to us. But why us? We did not have a single hit between us? We were unknown. We were nobodies. We decided to accept her interest gladly and to let her speak, interfering as little as possible. She spoke about the prophetic qualities of Dylan Thomas’ poems; the origins of morphic philosophical theories and their application to art history, as well as  the symphony in C major of Richard Wagner in comparison to Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and the magical realism of Louis De Bernieres ‘Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord’. We ended up on a street corner beside the pub reciting Yeats,

Coleridge and William Blake. 

‘Cockroaches!’ screamed Tara. ‘Bloody cockroaches.’  

Then Tara started to recite the poem ‘The City’ by Cavafis. The girl knew the whole thing by heart and she recited it with such ease and grace that both Jez and I were awestruck. Tara paused for an instant before delivering the incontestable verdict of the last lines: ‘we take the ruins of our city everywhere we go’. I knew the poem well but I had never heard it recited with such purpose and clarity. It was also the first time I saw Jez enjoy poems at all. He usually accused poets of being failed singers and ugly nerds. He was the kind of guy who ran away from poetry readings and left the room if a singer-songwriter decided to sprinkle the set with some Spoken Word. I had seen Jez laugh at and even heckle poets in the London scene. But this was something else. I agreed with him in a way. Nothing else should have been called poetry until that moment. No other moment was worthy of the adjective: poetic. It was too beautiful and intense not to be affected. Or perhaps Jez's senses were all mixed up and his attention was another way of venerating Tara’s physical splendour. I did not think so. I knew Jez quite well to tell when he was putting on a farce. No. We were both in a trance. We were both one with the city of Cavafis. I finally understood the poem. It was not some nasty depressive shit as Dorian had once said, it was actually inspirational; you carry the ruins of the city everywhere you go, there is no escape, no trip to Barcelona, no success story in the UK would help, you have the same history everywhere you go, God will not help, nor will money. Wake up. Suck the marrow of your journey now! Wherever you are! 

I swallowed another can of beer purchased at the off-licence and bellowed. 

‘I get it! I get it! We have to live, fuck, write, now!’

‘Chill out Neruda,’ mocked Tara. ‘The neighbours are gonna ruin our party.’    

‘No one lives here. No one can afford it!’ I screamed from the top of my voice as I got up and started spinning, arms out, like a carousel. 

Tara and Jez laughed. They had never seen me make a fool of myself. I could not help it. I felt overjoyed. Tara and Jez were holding hands. Jez was on the verge of breaking into tears. I knew the look in his eye. Tara noticed he was quivering and let his hand go. She then stood up and announced a new Manifesto that would overturn what she described as the ‘despicable state of contemporary English poetry’. She said modern language poets were a bunch of mediocre corduroy-wearing farcical flag-bearers. ‘The first thing we have to do,’ she said, ‘is ban these fools from publishing, especially any of them who have participated in a literary contest.’ She said that career-serving writers deserved the historical guillotine. She said poets were supposed to modify and extend consciousness through language and metre. She said they were not meant to collect medals and badges and buy second homes in Cornwall. She was adamant that they had to be removed from the literary scene and thrown to the lions of mediocrity and damnation. 

I watched Jez’s face distort with craving and desire. He had no idea what Tara was talking about but would have done anything to stay there. He would have given an arm or a leg to listen to her feverish lecture forever. He also wanted me to disappear. I read it on the twitch on his lip. That tick of nervousness that he often displayed when he struggled to be completely honest. He was wondering why I was still there. He wanted to follow Tara alone into the darkness of the London night and end up in a room on a mattress licking her skin to infinity. But I was not ready to leave. I had no sexual interest in Tara at that point, or at least the craving was easy to control, but I wanted more of her soul. In truth, I too could have remained paralysed in that street corner listening to Tara dismantle the smoke-castle of modern literature for eternity. Drinking cheap cans of Heineken in a Clerkenwell corner, mocking the drunken small talk of the hipster looking hotties that passed us by. It seemed for an instant, Tara could redeem the madness of my childhood disasters. It seemed for a moment that there was purpose to the randomness of my history and Jez’s for that matter. It seemed that it was ok for the police to have arrested Sandy the day Delia came home with the ultrasound, with the name on her lips. Mark, Mark, Mark. Me! It was ok because it all led to this: to Tara reading Cavafis on a Clerkenwell pavement. To her lips murmuring instances of perfect writing merged with wisdom. 

‘I am the prince of longing!’ I shouted. I was slurring my words and feeling the advent of a devastating hangover. 

‘I am glad we are not the same,’ pronounced Jez.

‘What the hell are you saying? It's the longing that fuels writers, no?’

‘Only writing can fuel a writer you git!’ screamed Tara. 

‘Does anyone fancy chips?’ interrupted Jez. 

Tara laughed like a teenage medusa on magic mushrooms.

‘I am up to my throat with musos,’ she screamed, ‘poets or death. Poets or death!’  

Then she left. Suddenly. Without a whisper. Without warning signals. Before the boredom and the hungover. So fast, so determined that we had no time to digest the end. In the middle of our drunken spiel, Tara picked up her leather bag and disappeared. Jez and I looked at each other in desperation and wondered if the whole night was some kind of sick cosmic joke. We saw her vanish into the traffic of Clerkenwell Road and were unable to get up and stop her. We were paralysed. Baffled. We lay there in the street corner with a can of Heineken in one hand and disbelief in the other. Still hypnotised by the sound of her voice. Still wondering what she felt. Did she feel anything? Why had she spent all that time with us? For all our panache and cockiness, we really did not think we deserved to be around someone like Tara. We did not consider ourselves worthy. It took twenty minutes for us to open our mouths again. We did not think for a moment to follow her.  We were drunk and unhinged by the reality of her sudden disappearance. 

‘Fuck you mate! Why didn’t you say anything?’ exploded Jez, suddenly. 

‘What the hell do you want me to say?’

‘I don’t know, stay or something? Some of that Latino schmooze nonsense you force into everyone’s throat! What did you read Lorca for? Wasn’t that the right time for some of his romantic poems. 

‘He was gay, remember?’

‘He knew what to say. You never say anything when it matters!’

‘You are out of your tits.’

‘She left because of your eyebrows. They are ugly as fuck.’

‘Fuck you Jez. Fuck you! At least you have been there.’

‘Been where?’

‘In her city!’

‘What are you on?! It’s worse! Much worse!’

‘What is?’

‘To have and then lose.’

‘No, it’s not. Wondering always hurts more! Delia always used to say.’

‘Who is Delia?’

‘My mum you prick! I have told you about her a thousand times!’

‘Why don’t you just call her mum!’

I had waited for the bus with Jez hundreds of times in the last eight years, at that exact bus stop on Clerkenwell Road, just outside the torrid club night club Piano Works. We had leant over the same bus sign many times, trying to prevent the gravitational pull of alcohol from pushing us to the pavement, fighting to stay lucid, jumping around to stay conscious. We had been in that exact spot so many times before. At two  or 3 in the morning . With the rain pouring down or in mild weather conditions, the English winds of June swiping off the sweat and the tiredness, surrounded by snogging youths, drunken louts, noisy cocktail waitresses, angry workers of the night shift. We had been standing in the exact same spot carrying guitar amps and musical instruments after performing at The Betsey or The Ninth Ward, disappointed with the night or high on adrenaline and drugs. But something was different that Tuesday night. Something had changed between us. Something more real. More important. More transcendent. Or at least we definitely perceived the whole affair differently. It was probably the first time I prayed for the night bus to be late. It was probably the first time I wanted the bus to be cancelled. It was probably the first time I would have stayed with Jez for another night. On that same bus stop in Clerkenwell Road. Outside Piano Works. Watching other night buses navigate along. Observing the drunken youths stumble into taxis and buses. Remembering our street corner and Cavafis. 

‘I finally understand Sandy.’

‘England is not as bad as it seems,’ responded Jez. 

‘He just did not want to wake up.’ 

‘Who is Sandy?’ asked Jez as he puffed on a cigarette. 

‘He could not bear it.’ 

‘She is better than a Nick Cave concert,’ responded Jez looking into the London sky. 

‘He could not bear the light.’