An Afternoon at Kennington

F Scott Fitzgerald often used seasonal change to reflect the emotional trajectory of his characters. In The Great Gatsby, the narrative opens in the optimism of spring, reaches its fevered climax on the “hottest day” of summer, and concludes amid the quiet decay of early autumn. A similar pattern might be observed in David’s work. It has been noted that in almost all his books he refers to a particular season in the opening paragraph—yet, once established, the season is never mentioned again.

He pondered this as he walked through Kennington Park with Joshua. He was trying to compose the opening paragraph of a new book yet found himself unable to begin without invoking spring. The task was made more difficult by Joshua, who insisted on talking without pause.

Joshua waved a hand across the grass toward the flowerbeds, where the first signs of growth were beginning to appear.

Spring again.

“Freddie told me a weird thing. He was walking through the park and saw Bob Marley playing football with some guys from the Rasta Temple.” Joshua waited for a reaction, but David was still wrestling with the seasons and didn’t respond. “Are you listening to me?”

“Don’t you think it’s strange that Freddie was at this spot when he saw Bob Marley playing football?”

“That would have been impossible because Bob Marley died in 1981, and what year was Freddie born in?” 

Joshua had been prepared for this and guessed that Freddie was a millennial child. “That’s why the story is so spooky, but he swears that it was Bob Marley playing football, and that he waved to him.”

David had long decided that Freddie was kooky.

“I’ve told you before,” Joshua continued. “Freddie is a ‘ghost whisperer’ and sees things that we can’t.” 

“Like the ghost of Bob Marley?”

“Well Freddie did research and discovered that Bob Marley used to stay at house in St. Agnes Place and that he was photographed playing football here.”

David did not believe in the afterlife and regretted that Joshua seemed so easily taken in by it all. He was reminded of the time Freddie had visited Cleaver Square and claimed it was haunted by a man—someone who had murdered his female partner, a widow who made her living selling greengroceries.

“I can’t believe you can’t smell the cauliflowers,” Freddie had shouted.

Not long afterwards, while researching for a book, David came across a newspaper article from the 1960s that described Cleaver Square as “a square for the dead.”

“Freddie talks bullshit,” David sighed. Yet he could recall once seeing a photograph of Bob Marley playing football.

“There was that time we were walking along Kennington Lane,” Joshua went on, “and Freddie said he could see a man playing a barrel organ. I couldn’t see anything. But Freddie described two barefoot boys running out of a nearby house to collect pennies from passers-by. The man shouted, ‘’Ere you two—hop it!’ Do you know who he said one of the boys was?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“Charlie Chaplin—as a boy.”

David was not persuaded.

“How interesting.”

“And another time we were outside the Tankard and Freddie said he saw Charlie Chaplin peering in at the men from the vaudeville—dressed in chequered suits and bowler hats.”

David knew well enough that Chaplin had grown up around here. It had once inspired him to begin a short story about the time Chaplin destroyed an entire film rather than pay taxes on it. The incident was true enough, but the manuscript had never been finished and was still languishing somewhere.

Joshua had no idea, but David had once slept with Freddie. It had happened at a New Year’s Eve party near Elephant & Castle, when David had been in his forties and Freddie an irritating little twink. As the years passed, he had only grown more annoying—though also better looking. Now that David was in his sixties, he occasionally toyed with the idea of feigning an interest in the paranormal in the faint hope that past conquests might somehow be revived. But he had been with Joshua for eighteen years, and the thought of the “ghost twink” was quickly put out of his mind.

David sat down on a park bench.

“This is where Gay Pride began,” he said. “It was 1986. I was twenty-two and not brave enough. I came a few years later, when there was a big demonstration for gay rights. Thousands turned up. I remember Ian McKellen urging everyone to be open about their sexuality—to come out. I also recall Sandie Shaw singing.”

“Sandie who?”

David had forgotten that Joshua was still in his thirties, and the generation gap seemed to widen the older he grew. These days, while Joshua championed the big gay events, David preferred to avoid them. The crowds and the screaming queens were banished. The last time Pride had come around, he had spent the day rereading Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story instead. It had been the first gay book he had ever read, and he had kept it hidden beneath his mattress in case his mother found it.

Later, at the White Bear Theatre bar, David sipped a white rum and tonic. It was about all he could drink since being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes—the small indignities of growing old, though it seemed these days that everyone was diabetic. Joshua, meanwhile, drank a pint of Madri, blissfully unaware of the perils that lay ahead in later life.

“I once saw a play in the theatre behind here,” David said. “I can’t remember what it was called, but it had something to do with a ring that had belonged to Leonardo da Vinci. It passed through a group of frequently naked gay men in America at the end of the twentieth century. My straight friend went to the bar during the interval, and someone asked him, ‘You watching the football?’ It turned out a match was being screened in the pub.

“‘Nah,’ he said. ‘I’m watching the queer play out the back. Mind you, I probably won’t stay if there are any more cocks showing.’

“That was it—that was the title: Leonardo’s Ring. Which said it all.”

Joshua had wanted to take David to see a Henry Moore sculpture on the Brandon Estate, but the older man had dismissed the idea.

“If there are two artists I hate most, it’s Henry Moore… and Barbara Hepworth. The whole world seems obsessed with Barbara fucking Hepworth.”

Afterwards David felt a twinge of guilt, because Joshua was also an artist. These days everyone seemed to be a fucking artist. Joshua made contemporary work too—it was his passion—but to David it often appeared absurd. Of course, he would never say so and accepted that the pieces had to be displayed around the apartment.

Joshua had also begun attracting the attention of collectors. Works that once sold for a few pounds now fetched thousands. Occasionally it crossed David’s mind that one day Joshua might become more famous than he was—and under his own name. David, despite being a well-known writer, had always published under a nom de plume.

“I would have liked to have been young and gay in the eighties,” Joshua said.

“Are you kidding?”

“But it was so pioneering—gay rights, marches for equality. Groundbreaking stuff.”

“And it was also miserable. There was nowhere to go. Queer bashing. Cottaging. Rent boys in dirty bedsits. Plucking up the courage to buy a copy of Gay Times at the newsagents. And, of course, AIDS.”

That generational divide again. Joshua had never lived in a society more backward than the one he knew now. In fact, David believed things were infinitely better. He had grown weary of people who complained endlessly about discrimination, forgetting how bleak the past had often been.

“There’s something else you should consider,” David added. “If you had been young and gay in the eighties, then now you’d be old and gay in the ‘roaring’ twenties.”