A night of drunken defiance, the air outside warm and sticky, carrying the sour breath of alcohol from the open doors. My head feels heavy, my stomach lined with white rum, and the thought of going home to curl up with a Jacques Tati biography feels more attractive than another drink. Still, I order another one – habit, not desire.
Ben messages to see if I’m out, and I can feel the eagerness in his words, the barely disguised hunger. Last week we sat in a corner booth until five in the morning, the world narrowing to the scrape of glasses and the whisper of confidences. But I put him off tonight. Familiarity is dangerous.
I once fell for him and, in a moment of reckless honesty, suggested we sleep together. He brushed it off with a laugh, not knowing that I never give anyone a second chance.
“It is a sign that you are growing old,” said the old man, his voice soft with resignation. “Each year, the boys seem to get better. As if someone laced the ordinary—Big Macs, frozen pizzas, vending machine snacks—with something secret and sublime that improves a man’s sperm. A quiet alchemy that sharpens jawlines, brightens eyes, perfects the symmetry of youth. It’s not just beauty—it is evolution disguised as convenience. And I watch them pass, these boys, like living advertisements for a future I won’t inhabit. It makes me sad. And jealous. Not of their youth, but of the ease with which they wear it.”
A hillside in the remote countryside. Serge Gainsbourg sang Black Trombone on the iPhone. Charlie danced in his underwear. His hair formed a question mark on his head. He looked cute. I grabbed him from behind and he reached over and patted me on the head like a dog. Then he pissed into the wind and I got covered from behind.
Sometimes, you have nothing to do except watch and think. It’s Tuesday afternoon, it’s overcast, and I’m sitting on a beach… I tap random thoughts into my phone… and later, it reads like a diary, but also conjures up memories of being a child when we had ‘news books’ in which we wrote any drivel that might have happened.
This is my drivel…
Megan tells me a story about Peran of Polruan, with his salty brown legs, who lives alone in an old fisherman’s cottage called The Buoy. Never a visitor. Not a word to anyone. The girls think he’s a Cornish Saint and want to have sex with him. Every morning he catches the river ferry and returns at teatime. Where does he go? What does he do? On summer evenings he reads on the doorstep. I’m intrigued, but I want to know more about the books that he reads.
***
I’m looking for a bit of phwoar on the beach. I want a handsome young guy who strips to his shorts and goes swimming. But on this cloudy Tuesday afternoon I’m blessed with old ladies in one-piece costumes who do sedate breast-strokes to the pontoon and back. Shortly after four o’clock, a blonde schoolboy appears and parks himself close by. His shirt is untucked and the school tie hangs loose around his neck. From his bag, he pulls out a copy of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and starts reading. He seems happy being with Ralph and Jack, and I wonder which one of them he’s sympathetic to.
***
It’s been a month since I had a cigarette. I realise this whilst standing on the quayside. Instead, I’ve been using my Pro Max Double Apple – 10K puffs. What might you get up to with ten thousand puffs? Behind me, a sour-faced woman moans to her husband that I’m vaping. I turn around and give her a deadly look and she tuts. There wouldn’t have been any remorse if I’d pushed her into the sea.
***
“The Tesco delivery is coming tomorrow morning,” says Megan. She makes it sound like this is the highlight of the week. It might well be. She’s changed a lot since moving down here. Where is the Megan I once knew? The girl who drank Aperol Spritz by the dozen and got her tits out afterwards. “That’s exciting, I look forward to it,” I reply. She gives me a wicked look. “I was hoping that you might stay in and wait for him. I think that you’ll be less sarcastic after you’ve seen the Tesco guy.”
***
I write at the kitchen table with the door open and ignore the wasps that fly in and buzz above my head. I’ve realised that they soon get bored and leave the same way that they came. Megan appreciates my eclectic music tastes and has recommended an album called Senza Estate by My Friend Dario. It plays on my laptop while the wasps gather around the Corn Flakes. One of the tracks is called Keep on Cruising which is calming and innocent, and far removed from the cruising that I’m used to.
All things considered, there is something perverse about this Sunday afternoon. But the sun shines and makes you do things that are out of the ordinary. And on this day you follow a stranger into the Oxfam shop and watch as he browses a secondhand copy of The Divine Beauty of Mathematics. You kid yourself that this isn’t wrong. Strange maybe, but when he bends over to put it back on the bottom shelf, and purposely shows you the crack of his arse, then everything about this is okay.
What is it with buying new notebooks? I see one that I like and end up putting it on the growing pile of unused ones, and I tell myself that one day I will put down all my thoughts and ideas until it is full, and resist the urge to start a new one. But it will never happen because there is something therapeutic about starting a new notebook. Those seductive pages that urge you to write something brilliant, but never actually get around to it.
I swear that I didn’t tell anyone, Colvey. I know that you won’t believe me, but I didn’t write this. It was supposed to be a secret between us. But if I’m honest, I kinda like the fact that you like twiddling.
I saw you several times and you ignored me. Why do I remember that? It was because I thought you were handsome. But ignorance turned into friendship, and I hadn’t realised how generous you were. And that generosity came from Robin Hood. Steal from the wealthy, and give it to others. I met you tonight, fresh faced and smart, a tap on the shoulder, a cheeky wink, and you gave me a bottle of beer. I doubted that you had ever ignored me.
They said he was a prodigy, and I didn’t doubt it. Pour le piano. He played notes that were delicate and haunting. But those gentle sounds had meaning and showed that he recognised beauty but didn’t know what to do with it, and this was the cause of his torment.
He peered from underneath a baseball cap, sad frightened eyes, that looked at the door behind.
“When Debussy died on March 25, 1918, in Paris, it was being bombarded by the Germans….” He stopped playing, “ … “and it was raining.” I’d heard this line before but couldn’t remember where.
He walked towards the bookshelf and pulled out a pack of Marlboro cigarettes that were hidden behind Patti Smith’s A Book of Days. The holy egoism of genius. He blew smoke into the air. “I am repaired, reconstructed, remodelled, remixed, rethought, reimagined, reinterpreted, rekindled, reactivated, but not rebooted!”
***
Almost everything here is inspired by Art of Noise
A girl who was supposed to be Ian Van Dahl mimed Castles in the Sky on stage. We wandered along the dark balcony and thought that it was incredibly good. Balloons rained down and the crowd shrieked. She reached the chorus line – Oh tell me why. Are the castles way up high. Please tell me why. Do we build castles in the sky? – and it all went wrong. I tripped over a hidden step and fell twenty feet below. I felt nothing because I was happy. I lay there and heard a guy say, “That was a fucking big balloon!”
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 