I don’t know why Logan left. I don’t know why any of the men left. All I do know is that they left my mum in ever-worsening states, which always seemed bizarre to me. Most people would celebrate their passing, but my mother clearly didn’t feel she ever deserved anything more than the lowest form of existence. I would watch her snivel on the sofa after another Logan exited our lives, a full ashtray balanced on her legs, beer cans littered by her feet, her eyes losing their focus, and I would want to jump up and down in front of her. I am here, I used to want to shout, but I’m not sure she’d have noticed me even then.
You are not like her, V said to me time and time again, when the fear used to overtake me. But I was never honest with my reply. Because, before V, I was like my mother. I didn’t care, I found it easy to shut down, I turned away and found it too easy to be cruel to others. I think the truth is that V made me a better person and without her I could easily slip into the person my mother became.
V taught me not just what it felt like to really care about someone else, but also what it felt like to care about myself. She didn’t just sculpt my body, but my mind as well. When we met I ate crap and got out of breath walking up the stairs. I was skinny as a whippet and my unwashed hair hung long over my ears. I only asked her once why she had spoken to me at the party. I was too scared to jolt her into the realisation that she had been mad to do so. We were in bed at the time, her head on my chest, which had already started to change shape and fill.
‘Your eyes,’ she said, her hand resting on my lower belly. ‘I genuinely did just want a light, but when I looked at you to say thanks, you looked so lost, so vulnerable, I couldn’t just walk away.’
‘But why did you agree to go on a date?’ I asked into the blackness surrounding us.
‘Because I liked you by then. I could see your potential.’
V wasn’t my first girlfriend, but she was the first one who meant anything to me. And when I say anything, I mean that word literally. Before V I couldn’t understand anything about women and how they worked. I had no idea what they meant when they spoke, no desire to see them after we’d had sex, no comprehension of why they sometimes got angry and cried. It was like my heart hadn’t been used before I met V, like I’d never really noticed it or felt it beat. I mean, I know I care for Elaine and Barry, and I must have loved my mum at some point, but when I think about them it doesn’t feel like a real connection. When I think about V it is like there is a thread reaching from my heart to hers, tautening and relaxing with both our breaths.
I could look at V when she came in from wherever she’d been and know instantly how she was feeling. Every time she rang I knew it was her without looking at the screen. When we watched a film or listened to music I knew what her reaction would be without speaking. I knew how to make her scream and moan and thrash, every inch of her body mapped indelibly on my mind. Connections like that cannot be broken, however much they are separated.
I was unsteady on my feet when I finally gave up on seeing V that evening and left the bar. I stumbled on the pavement and had to lean against a wall to right myself. My head felt dislocated and nothing seemed real. People walked past me into the night and I forgot where I was going or where I had been. Nausea rose upwards and into my throat, squeezing my heart and constricting my breathing.
The next day at work felt like torture, a steady stream of needles driving into my skull, my body hot and shaky. I hadn’t run in the morning and I didn’t go to the gym at lunchtime, instead eating a bowl of pasta at a cheap restaurant filled with tourists round the corner. The food landed on the acid of my stomach making me want to retch, but I forced it down and then drank two strong coffees.
During the afternoon the company doctor rang and said he had an appointment for the next day at 3 p.m. and I was too befuddled to think of an excuse. I laid my head on my arms on my desk and looked sideways out of the window at the birds riding the wind currents outside. I’ve always known that if I had to kill myself it would be by jumping from a great height because that way you would at least have a few seconds of knowing what it felt like to fly.
George put his head round my door just after six, when the thought of the Tube was defeating me. I had already decided not to go to meet V that evening as I didn’t want her to see me in the state I was in. ‘A few of the chaps are going to this club,’ he said, with a wink. ‘Wondered if you’d like to join.’
‘A club, at this time?’ I said, my brain beating against the side of my head.
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I’ve got a really bad headache.’
He came into the room, closing the door behind him, and walked towards my desk. He put his hand in his pocket and held out two red pills on the palm of his hand. ‘These’ll perk you up.’
The pills were no larger than the head of two pins fused together and the thought of anything making me feel better was too delicious to refuse. I reached for them and swallowed them in a gulp.
‘Good lad,’ he said, laughing. ‘Come on then.’
There were five of us, all walking purposefully through the old streets of the City into the East End, an area at once totally and not at all changed. I have always thought that the history of the East End is still written in the buildings and streets. The air hangs heavy with death and poverty and sex, however many grey coffee shops you plant along its highways.
We turned down a cobbled street with the houses so close together I could imagine people passing things to each other from high-up windows, or washing lines stretched between rooms, or mothers shouting for dirty children far below. My mind felt loose and my internal organs fluid in my body, as if suspended in liquid.
George knocked on a black door, which was opened by a man who was almost as wide as the door, his nose smashed across his face, his head shaved, his eyes wild. But he smiled incongruously and opened the door wider, ushering us inside. All the other men had clearly been there before and they peeled off up and down dark stairways and into dimly lit rooms. George beckoned for me to follow him, up a narrow flight of stairs towards a thumping beat which seemed to be part of the stone and plaster of the house. We climbed ever higher and the beat turned into music, which rested in my stomach like something primal. At the last door George turned and winked at me again before opening it and releasing the heat and stench of the place into my face. It took me a while to figure out the space, which was surely much larger than the house allowed, but when I did I thought it was fantastical. It was clearly the top floors of most, if not all, the houses along this street, an endless stretch of cavorting degradation.
The space had been sectioned into hundreds of booths and the walls were all mirrored, so it was impossible to tell what was real and what was simply a reflection. The air hung heavy with smoke and the musty, salty stink of semen. The carpet underneath our feet was sticky and the backs of the chairs looked greasy and grimy. The lights were off, apart from ill-placed spots which stabbed the air, blinding you if you looked too closely. Only the music felt natural, as if it had become part of me, lifting and guiding me towards something I could almost remember.
George pulled me forward and I realised as we got closer that we were heading towards a round stage on which twenty women, maybe more, writhed. Their bodies glistened like plastic, their feet distorted by the sort of heels even Kaitlyn would draw the line at. Some were completely naked, but most were wearing a sparkling V over their vaginas, with a corresponding line cutting through their buttocks, like an electric sign announcing their wares. They danced as though they were in a trance, dropping often to the floor and opening their legs, licking their lips and closing their eyes, their hands never far from their breasts.