Twentysix Read online

  Praise for London Triptych

  ‘Charting three very different affairs taking place against the backdrop of three very different Londons, Jonathan Kemp’s first novel is a thought-provoking enquiry into what changes in gay men’s lives as the decades pass – and what doesn’t. This is a book that will make you think – and make you feel.’

  Neil Bartlett

  ‘What an amazing book. This is the best gay novel to be published in many years. It is literary fiction at its best.’

  Clayton Littlewood

  ‘Despite reaching across a century, Kemp’s characters are believable and down-to-earth; the focus is not on period setting but on dialogue. A thoroughly absorbing and pacy read… a fresh angle on gay life and on the oldest profession.’

  Time Out

  ‘London itself, in its relentless indifference, is as powerful a presence here as the three gay men whose lives it absorbs.’

  Times Literary Supplement

  ‘The three stories explore a subculture and an underworld that is hidden from the everyday, yet whilst they are historically and socially distinct tales each one echoes a universal experience. As a writer Jonathan Kemp is akin to the Pied Piper, if only because there is something magical you cannot help but follow.’

  Polari

  ‘By turns explicit and energetic, Kemp’s forceful prose uncompromisingly draws the reader in. A strange, squalid, rather interesting book.’

  Metro

  ‘The patchwork crossover of lives and destinies is explored with a voice that sometimes reminded me of Alan Hollinghurst and other times soared into the metaphorically agonised realms of Elizabeth Smart. I didn’t want this excellent book to end.’

  G-Scene

  ‘A dark novel about exploitation and betrayal that’s full of rent boys, aristos and artists. That’s got to beat the new Marian Keyes any day, right?’

  Boyz Magazine

  ‘From living outside the law to living outside the society, times are irrelevant when it comes to the sentiment of gay men: one of turmoil, of irretrievable loss, of struggle over stigma, and of unrequited love. London Triptych captures these political and emotional battles with a lyrical beauty and raw lucidity.’

  A Guy’s Moleskine Notebook

  ‘First-time novelist Kemp’s book is an intriguing look at the homosexual experience through the prism of male prostitution over the past 100 years.’

  Hackney Hive

  ‘Not only a devastatingly honest exposé of our hidden gay past, but a heartbreaking examination of the intricacies of the gay psyche. Above all, this is a story about the power of feeling and the hope and beauty that can be found in even the darkest places.’

  Dissident Musings

  ‘London Triptych is, hands down, the most heart-wrenching and profound piece of literature I have read this year.’

  Pink Sheep Café

  ‘The three characters and stories showed the differences in the years but also gave voice, masterfully, to those normally silenced. Kemp shows that the way we see the world is not actually necessarily the way it is or the way that others see it.’

  Amy Says

  ‘Kemp has achieved what few writers ever will, a work that stands alone as a heartbreaking love letter not only to a vast and fascinating place, but also to the lives within that serve as its beating heart.’

  Gaydarnation

  For Roy Woolley

  ‘However much men may shudder, philosophy must say everything.’

  ~ Marquis de Sade

  ‘He who wishes to know the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinize its estranged form.’

  ~ Theodor W. Adorno

  ‘Only in darkness can men truly be themselves, and therefore night is holier than day.’

  ~ Michelangelo

  This is for all those nights filled with pleasure and oblivion; for all those hours spent wandering the maze of other men’s bodies, as if you were crawling the deck of a sinking galley;

  This is for all the ones who cry out when they come, and for the ones who don’t because they know that sometimes it’s just sexier that way, making the gasps go inwards like blue smoke;

  This is for all those who find themselves on their knees at nine p.m. in a small park in this city of wounded boys and sexual warriors, barely hidden by bushes, sucking off a man in white trackies who told his girlfriend he was going for a jog (you know who you are); for all those who love it when he leans over to retrieve his beer can without breaking the stride of his wank; the way he slugs it back, fist still pumping;

  This is for when the blood turns black and burns you from the inside, for when you get the hunger – feel it unravelling within its long, dark spine of want; for when the only thing to do is go out and seek what you need in that place where the shadows grow as you pass through them, like a woman strolling through a cloud of perfume she has just released before her;

  This is for then, for those crystalline moments when your body moulds to your desires, contoured by the red heat of longing, and fuelled by all the imaginings you hold.

  For when no truth could be less secure.

  Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Aa

  Bb

  Cc

  Dd

  Ee

  Ff

  Gg

  Hh

  Ii

  Jj

  Kk

  Ll

  Mm

  Nn

  Oo

  Pp

  Qq

  Rr

  Ss

  Tt

  Uu

  Vv

  Ww

  Xx

  Yy

  Zz

  Acknowledgements

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  1954

  Copyright

  We spend the night exchanging handwritten notes, using a pad and pen the barman has supplied, you writing words you have never spoken, will never speak. Your writing is spidery as a child’s first efforts. I wish I’d kept them, those marks on paper which form a loop that binds us and pulls us back to my flat where we undress in silence and haste in my candlelit bedroom.

  And I am not prepared at all for the sounds that rip out of you when you come, the death rattle of pleasure, more bestial than human, which pierce the room like a gaggle of bats bursting into the night sky from the dark recess of a cave and filling it with Minerva’s screeches; from your cock is released a flock of snow-white doves. Trained in silence, locked in speechlessness, you are unschooled, untamed, letting go of sounds as you let go of your orgasm, in violent bursts that tear like an incision in flesh. Then you sink back into a big-grinned muteness that says everything there is to say about what we have just shared.

  These sounds you give to articulate your pleasure are far removed from the discreet insistencies of language. I snap at the darkness and swallow them like a bird plucking flies from the air. I too want to give up these sounds from a body rendered voiceless by language. I too want to tear myself open and release something monstrous and wild, something from the other side of language, where reason lies comatose and pointless.

  I ring the doorbell three times as arranged.

  The door release clicks and I push the door open and enter the building. I make my way up to the first floor and the door to the flat is open, as arranged.

  The flat is in darkness, but for an ultraviolet glow from the bedroom. I enter to find a naked man face-down on the bed.

  He sits up, picks up a joint from the bedside cabinet and lights it, taking a long, slow pull before handing it over to me. I unfasten my trousers and step closer towards him before taking the joint. He slides his h
and through my open fly and plays with my cock through the fabric of my jockstrap. The wind through the open window makes the blind throw itself against the glass in gatling fits.

  ‘Nice one,’ he says as he feels my cock stiffen under his touch. I push my jeans down and he pulls my cock out and slides his mouth onto it; I groan and lean across to place the joint in an ashtray before peeling off my T-shirt. The man takes a sniff of poppers and hands the bottle to me. My nervous system crackles in nitrous blue flashes as I reflect on the brain cells I’m killing, feeling each one pop like a blown light bulb in my skull.

  He sucks all the way down to the root, right down to the metal of my cock ring and the universe becomes a place I can live in once more.

  I spiral with pleasure, sliding along the curves of the spiral till I land in the centre with a splash. I push him back onto the bed and climb above, thrusting into his face with my hips. He moans with pleasure as I feed him, as arranged. Grunts erupt from my throat with each release. He swallows every drop. I slide out and slide my body down across his till my chin rests on the top of his shaved head and I stay like that for a moment, feeling just enough tenderness to consider planting a kiss on his crown, and just enough restraint to hold back. I roll over onto my back next to him, recovering from the high, floating back into my body from the white light of orgasm. ‘Fuck, that was hot.’

  ‘It certainly was,’ he says, licking his lips and sitting up to get a cigarette. My fingertips glow from the UV, emitting their own light. As I look at them I wonder what it could possibly signify, this feral hunger that pushes me towards this.

  Does it signify anything at all?

  During the long walk home these words emerge like bubbles and I write them down for someone to read, someone like you.

  He has five more men due to visit him throughout the night.

  At three a.m., at the back of Jack Straw’s Castle, a fissure opens up in reality, through which he steps, and a new world unfolds beneath his feet; the trees grow denser with each step, the air more primitive and wild. He looks across the tree-tops and beyond to a sky the colour of which remains nameless, knowing that this night will never leave him. On his deathbed this memory will visit him like a nursing angel. The timeless landscape matches the timeless feeling inside. The wind gets tangled in the tops of the trees. The night races forward like a dark horse. Fear and desire commingle within the swinging pendulum of his stomach. The distinctive sound of a slap against bare flesh flaps through the air towards him.

  ‘Come on,’ his friend whispers excitedly, grabbing his arm, breaking the reverie, ‘there’s someone at the Spanking Tree.’

  The two friends move quickly through a shadowed clump of trees, where men lean and loiter, others passing slowly by, skirting close enough to make out the value of the chase. Now and then a cigarette tip burns red against the black, or a lighter flame momentarily pulls a face from out of the dark.

  They emerge in a clearing, in the centre of which lies a fallen tree, its trunk worn to a bare polish, its branches withered or broken. A naked man lies across the curve of the trunk, and in the half-light they can make out his moonwhite buttocks. Another man is standing beside him, bringing his palm down in slowly paced smacks that ripple through the silence. A group of men forms around them: hands moving across bodies, cocks emerging from flies, mouths meeting mouths. Outside the circle, a daddy bear stands holding his boy’s black leather jacket. He is big and round and white-bearded, Santa Claus in faded denim. His boy stands tall and lean and smoothly white amidst the pack, jeans puddled at his feet, white T-shirt rucked behind his head. Several men kneel before him, taking it in turns to suck him. The two friends approach, have their go and move on. Daddy walks over and whispers something to his cub and the young boy lifts his jeans and lowers his T-shirt and they walk away, to start somewhere else. Two or three men follow, dancing to his tune, cruising to the sweet smell of this naked climate.

  The darkness moves like a vapour, coagulating around bodies – only to evaporate in their heat. As the two friends move silently on one of them spots someone and, grabbing the other by the wrist, pulls him towards new prey. He approaches a tall, well-built skinhead, whispers something to him. The words disappear, lost forever. The three men move off towards some bushes, unlocatable now, without those maps that have yet to be drawn. Tucked into a space behind a tree, the two friends kneel before the skinhead’s porn-star cock, passing the amyl and taking it in turns to choke and sniff, choke and sniff. The skinhead lets loose a stream of verbal in rough cockney: ‘Look at him demeaning himself, sucking on that fascist cock with his nigger lips. You like that big fascist cock, don’t you, you filthy cocksucking queer.’ The two friends will laugh about this later, but for now they are hungry so they feed, passing the cock between them, each enjoying watching the other go to work. Sharing it brings something to the act that, had only one of them been present, would be missing. A thrill, a joy, an intimacy it would be impossible to try to name or describe. They push their faces forward and open their mouths in unison when the skinhead says he is about to come, and receive the blessing as their just reward. In this world they have entered, this drink is the only nutrition. Like extracting the sap from rare fruits, they will move from tree to tree for hours, sometimes finding nothing, sometimes a feast.

  On their way out, the man selling drinks and poppers from a bench near the car park will ask, ‘Had yer Weetabix, lads?’

  Driving out of the car park as the sun begins to rise, they will pass a short, stocky, hairy man squeezed into a blue-sequinned mini-dress, rocking on black kitten heels, his big fuzzy arms swinging by his side, off to taste the freedom only found in this other world, and then only rarely. The night folds up like a sheet of paper, sliding itself into their memories, to be unfolded and relived, recounted and treasured.

  Sometimes life isn’t meant to make sense.

  Or that time when I awoke to the rhythm of you fucking me, taking me, pulling me by the waist towards you, slamming against me, me slamming against you as I rise into consciousness like a swimmer breaking the surface, breathless and disorientated, locating myself, drowning in sensation. The darkness and the pillow and you inside me like fireworks. I know I’ll never know that night again. Nor that brutal love that’s locked within my blood.

  The projector jams, the screen blistering into white light as the celluloid disintegrates and the scene dissolves. I disintegrate and the scene dissolves.

  Or that time in the cemetery one hot summer afternoon, sheltered only by the thin curtain of greenery growing over the doorway we have joined within, your body in my body, locked in some secret pact that pushes us together, as if our only hope of salvation is to merge into one single creature, my shorts round my knees, my bare skin brushed by brickdust, my love for you immeasurable.

  Or that time on the roof, both naked, draped in summernight heat, the city spinning around us like a ring of meteors which satellites the planet our bodies have made. Circling us, the universe expands its star-flecked possibilities, and Heaven rains down, not thunderbolts, but flowers, that fall on us and about us in bursts of colour.

  These moments tear at me, clawing for attention. My body is a book overflowing with stories that can’t be read without your hands roaming the Braille of my sensations.

  The possibility of using our bodies as a source of very numerous pleasures is something that is very important. Sexuality is part of our behaviour, part of our freedom, something that we ourselves create. It is our creation, and much more than the discovery of a secret side of our desire. With it we make and unmake the world. With it, we speak a different tongue.

  The communication joining lovers depends on the nakedness of their laceration. Their love signifies that neither can see the being of the other but only a wound and a need to be ruined. And no greater desire exists than a wounded person’s need for another wound.

  All attempts at joy are futile but necessary, like everything we do. But it is not until we are out of the dark
that we can assess the extent of the damage. The doorbell rings, and we run down to the hallway in our underpants, giggling like children. As the skunk wends its way through the burrows of my mind, I feel desire uncoil within like a bullwhip, lashing out at the world to see what it can fell.

  He had wanted us naked when he arrived, but we compromised with underwear.

  He had wanted us on our knees, so, after turning the key and pulling the door slightly ajar, I fall to my knees, the consummate act of submissive worship. Erotic submission is a limit-experience, beyond which something else comes into play, something not quite human. It all happens so quickly, and time slows down only once it has passed. The organic flows of the body – sperm, blood, piss and shit – are conducive to the amorphous manifestations of corporeal pleasure. The human body shatters beneath a multiplicity of sensations and intensities the overall experience of which results in what has been erroneously called ‘the subject’. My question is this: can the movements and flows of the body be represented, or does representation itself only function upon a foreclosure of such nomadic flesh?

  As much as language threatens the body, however, the body also threatens language.

  The music is loud, guitar-based, rock pop. The space in front of the stage where earlier a band had played is now scattered with people dancing. In the centre of the crowd, stripped to the waist, his lean body hairless and slick with sweat, this lupine man whirls inside the unpredictable steps of St Vitus. He unbuttons his flies and lets his baggy jeans slink to the floor, revealing his cock. He moves too fast, too manic, for anyone to do anything but watch. His head is an explosion of dark thick curls, his face all Caravaggio hunger and intensity. I have barely articulated to myself how much I want him when he is pulling up his jeans and tearing through the crowd towards me: a cannonball in human form. He fells me and we crawl and roll like wrestlers in the beer-mud that covers the bare wood floor. I manage to fight loose and stand up only to be floored once more, this time pushed backwards onto an empty couch against the wall. He lands with a belly flop that momentarily winds me. I am dizzy with lust and confusion. His warm wet skin is under my hands, his hands are on me, one down the front of my jeans, squeezing my cock. ‘I’ve got a big thick Irish cock,’ he drawls warmly in my ear in his rich Dublin brogue, ‘I know what you boys like.’ Through the haze of the drink and the speed of the encounter, I look past the boy’s shoulder to see a barman standing watching us, terrified and unsure what to do. The boy kisses me, hard and urgently, and the lights on the ceiling kaleidoscope wildly. The music allows me to imagine this isn’t happening in reality; it is only my wishes assaulting me. My booze-sodden imagination has created something that seems real, the way a dream can when you inhabit it, but dissolves once you crawl from the damp cave of sleep. I slide my hand down the back of his jeans and take in the firm round perfection of his arse, the blunt suede hardness of his coccyx. His skin beneath my palm is hot and wet. The barman invades this Eden in which we lie and says, ‘Oi, lads, pack it in, will you?’ I don’t feel any danger, only the hot hot heat of the immediate, and this loud bright crazy music seems to be the only voice I hear.