The King's Road
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Preface
It was the end of a perfectly disappointing British summer. Everyone I knew had run off to various choice destinations around the world, the kind of places they enjoy listing with ‘proper pronunciation’, as if I needed proof they were actually there — ‘Tenereef!’ ‘Ibeetha!’ ‘Bear-leen!’ and so on. I was given no such divine right and had to settle for ‘the Temms!’, spending sleepless nights in a cell-like dorm room on the South Bank. When university was in, the building served as a residence for first year students at the London School of Economics. Of course this poses a problem during the summer months when there are no student’s to drink from the in-house bar and buy food at the in-house cafeteria, so they offer the building’s services to a different audience, a most detestable niche market of travelers to which I belonged: The tourist on a budget. This includes, but is not limited to: ‘Teen Tour’ groups from Spain, Italy, Germany, Korea, China, France, Manchester, Liverpool (and many other annoyingly-accented countries/cities I can’t recall and have in all probability chosen to forget), ‘hen parties’ and ‘stag do’s’, Eastern European ‘spur-zee-moment’ thugs that have come to London ‘to find zee puss-ee’ after three years in the nick, and a foursome of dangerously young Parisian girls that I met at Café Léon and flirted with in exchange for using my computer to check their Facebook. But I digress, those stories are for later.
As I was saying, it was the end of a perfectly disappointing summer in London and the daylight was fading fast; the shadows of early winter were already upon us. The sun no longer lingers on the horizon as it did in the middle months; it descends faster now and will show its face less and less as the winter wears on; the drear of the night will melt into the ever-shortening day and soon none of us will be able to shake its ashy sorrow from our boots. It is the great disease of Britain, this drear, this omnipresent dread. It has been a symptom of the nation since it was founded, and ever since they have been constantly, somewhat carelessly, curing themselves with the only vaccine that has been proven to work. It is found in a yeasty fungus, somewhat like penicillin but far more enjoyable to be inoculated with; it is the solemn comfort of a freshly pulled pint of lager. Trips outdoors in the cold of winter are often only to find this cure and, on a Friday such as this one, the business men and women can be seen swooping from their offices, like bats out to feed at dusk, to hide from the lugubrious and looming London sky under the familiar comfort of a pub. I was one of them, only I was aware of it and could measure it against the other heavy-drinking nations I had lived through in years past. I didn’t mind joining their ranks, but I was wary of over-medicating myself as most young men are want to do when faced with such a dangerously dreary disease as this one. As with most medication, irresponsible dosages means that soon the cure becomes the disease and we are cast as slaves to the solution that once brought us our sanctuary. Willard and I were teetering on this precipice.
I.
“I AM incapable of indulging in anything but pleasure,” nodded Willard with a wave of his wine glass. He was considerably drunk at this point and talking to a young lady with a rather disproportionate forehead—a Five-head, if you will—perfectly enormous and eggular and extraordinary. But that didn’t matter to Willard, for he was on a mission—we both were—and tonight’s objective, as it had been every Friday night for the past seven weeks, was to find a girlfriend. “We will stop at nothing!” he would shout at me down the long hallways of our flat, his flat, as we tidied ourselves so London’s women would never know how utterly bastardized from the real world we both were. He would bellow the words with a go-gettum punch of the air that made me think he needed the pep-talk more than I, like he needed to convince himself he wanted a steady girl, guilty of knowing deep within that his affected moral constitutions, the convictions he bellowed with such fervor only hours before, will shatter under the slightest weight of emotional responsibility. It had been like this for some time; getting women was easy for a good-looking chap with money of his own. But Willard was handsome in the way that social royalty always are; bred between an ageing millionaire father and a far younger mother who exchanged life-security for a male heir; composed with the intention to carry on the family’s name and appearance with a well-defined jaw, to answer certain questions with deft and well-practiced manners— ‘How do you do?’ says the Monocle-Man. ‘How do you do?’ says Willard. This affectation of gentle-manliness was what enabled him to briefly enrapture women, but when situations arose where Willard found himself alone and without the benefit of chivalry, he vanished on the spot, disappearing into a snifter or pint or whatever it was in his hands at the time, reappearing transmuted into a vague semblance of the man that was there just seconds before.
We started happy hour in a perfect example of Britain’s endless creativity when it comes to giving things a name (see: The Chunnel [Channel + Tunnel], The Underground/Tube [those tubes that run underground], The Gherkin building [that building that looks like a gherkin], and just about every state and city across the U.S. Eastern seaboard [I suppose New York is better than New Cockfosters, but still…]). The pub we chose was called The Bar and was presently crammed full of bearded suits, shoulder to shoulder and drink to drink, all gasping for the attention of a lone, saggy-tit nanny that looks like she might put out after a few ciders. She bounced her bosoms in and out of the pub, at once reeling back with false laughter as she reveled in the attention of one group of men, then out of sight again to break into her packet of Pall Mall’s and make obscenely obvious innuendos with a lipstick stained cigarette. I watched her curiously as she did this, inside, then back outside, then back to the bar where a man would order her a drink with a hand on the small of her back, all the while drinking more and more until she could confidently forget her insecurities and climb into the front seat of a ’98 BMW M3 and roar off to his counsel flat. I found it sad that she didn’t have a man, but only briefly before the thought crossed my mind that Willard and I could wind up just as desperate and alone, just as easily, just as quickly. There were no women here, I finally decided, not the ones we were looking for at least.
I weaved my way to the window at the end of the bar. It was raining, as London tends to enjoy itself, and with every drop the streets filled with a little more treachery and the dread and drear inside me grew. I had been in London for five months and was yet to find a job. Willard had been here even longer but saw no need for employment on account of what was left to him in the Will of his gratuitously rich mother’s brother. His Uncle Gilbert, a convicted pedophile, died the year before of a bizarre disease, Pemphigus Vulgaris, the symptoms of which I will not get into (look it up yourself if you are that interested), and left him everything. Estranged from his sister after the whole pedophilia thing and with no other family, Uncle Gilbert left Wilalrd two-hundred and twenty-two shares of Citigroup stock (bought in double-digits some four years ago, now worth around $2.48 each thanks to “the goddamn recession”), a fully stocked bank account (he never told me how much money his uncle left him, only that “it was enough to skate by on for the next forty years or so…”), and an over-indulgent three-storie flat, just off the King’s Road, with four bedrooms, two bathrooms, two living rooms (one for entertainment and the other for entertaining), a wine/ale cellar of unprecedented majesty and whose stock was currently in rapid decline, a bar with two separate taps from which to drink the barrels of ale from, four televisions, the finest collection of original Jim Marshall prints I had ever seen, and an eighty-year-old cat (in cat years, that is) named Amber. This life was fine, for a short period, like an extended holiday of sorts, but I knew I could not sustain such decadence without security for much longer. The other shoe would soon drop and I intended to be far away it when it did. This was why we were looking for girlfriends; they were one of many deliberate steps Willard and I were attempting to take in the right direction.
The reason the pub was so popular was the reason any pub could become the inexplicable ‘place-to-be’: drink prices. Every Friday, during the ‘happy hours’, The Bar offers ‘Treble-for-One’, that is, three shots in your highball for the low, low price of £3.60. Despite the clientele, this was enough to satisfy my appetite, although I was not sure how much longer I could not speak for Willard who was currently bending the ear of the Five-head. What time does happy hour technically end? I leant across the bar and yelled at the barmaid—a dainty little number from the north—“What time does happy hour end?” Immediately I felt a hard hand fall on my shoulder and was wheeled around to face Willard, not four inches from his already glowing nose.
“Blasphemy!” He cried. “Don’t you dare ask such a question! Who are you? What have you done with my friend?” He gripped my face and shook me about as he pretended to inspect me from every angle. “I’ll tell on you! I’ll tell the King!” He looked at the Five-head and raised his pint in the air, “We will tell the King!” She only nodded then dove back into her drink, as if slurping it through her nose. I reminded Willard that England was currently under the rule of a Queen, not a King, and he promised not to tell on me so long as I told no one about his momentary bout of ignorance. “Let’s go somewhere where there are actual girls,” I pleaded with Willard, “I can’t stand all these old men. They all look so sad. Its creepy…”
“But we have ol’ Deidre with us!” He responded and gripped the Five-head around the shoulders.
“My name is Gemma.”
“Nonsense!”
“Fuck you…”
“Tell me something, Deidre. With that noggin of yours, do you dream or is it like watching movies?”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean when you dream… is it in wide-screen, or have your dreams not been properly formatted to fit this skull?” And just like that Willard’s drink was gone, doused on his blazer (there is a pun there somewhere), and so was Gemma/Deidre the Five-head. We walked out onto the Tottenham Court Road and Willard popped his Winnie the Pooh umbrella with the kind of pride only a truly mad London Gentleman could affect.
“Where to now?” He asked me.
“North.” I said.
“Then north it is!” said Willard and pointed his Pooh umbrella directly south; I chose not to correct him.
Despite the rain the streets were still busy—a flock of young and brazen university children screeched past, presumably fueled by £6 ASDA vodka and spurred on by the prospect of £1 VKs (an atrocious wine cooler that I’m sure gives more of a sugar high than any form of inebriation.) Willard found this quite amusing and chased a group of girls down the street for a while, desperately trying to make conversation, but they would have none of it and he eventually gave up; he was too old, too dazed, too crazed. He sat down on the side of the street and waited for me in the rain, protected by his Winnie the Pooh umbrella. When I finally reached him he leapt up and slung his arm around my shoulder and kissed me on the cheek.
“Two degenerate youths, lost in this foul year of Our Lord, two-thousand and ten!” He lit a cigarette.
“You’re not Hunter Thompson, old boy.”
“Nonsense!”
“Thompson had a job. He was a journalist... technically.”
“My job is leisure.”
“Yes, well ‘leisure’ doesn’t pay the bills.”
“Perhaps, but at least ‘leisure’ has fun whilst not paying said bills. All you do is mope!”
“Because nobody is paying the bills!”
“Nonsense!”
“What?”
“Hmm?”
“What is nonsense?”
“All of it!” He said and simultaneously spotted a queue of students lining up outside some club, the name of which I seem to have strangely forgotten. “There!” He said and pointed with his cigarette. He bounded ahead like a puppy after a ball then stopped as an idea swam through his pickled brain to arrest him on the spot. “What shall we call ourselves?”
“Pete Mitchell and Nick Bradshaw.” I told him firmly. He looked at me puzzled. I continued, “Maverick and Goose? From Top Gun? Christ, man, I thought you wanted to get into film.”
“Oh, not anymore, I want to be a musician now.”
“Ah...” I said and we took our places in the line. The girls that Willard had been molesting earlier were just in front of us. He noticed this immediately and licked his chops dramatically, taking an exaggerated step toward them and tapping one on the shoulder.
“Why won’t you talk to me?” He begged one of them—a tall, very attractive blond.
“You’re shitfaced, mate, go home.” Rather cruel coming from a university fresher, but I still laughed.
“Nonsense! I swear on drunk I’m not my Nan’s gave!” She laughed at this. “What is your name, you beautiful child?”
“Daisy.”
“Marvelous! Daisy who?”
“Buckingham. Daisy Buckingham.”
“Daisy Buckingham, will you talk to me?”
“For now…” she said, “… but any monkey business and you’re out. Comprende?”
“Comprendo!” And our evening was settled.
We sat on a set of stained-red couches just off the dance floor. Daisy took one of the couches to herself and laid flat out on it, arms thrown back behind her head as if exhausted from the ardor of waiting in line. We had already gone to the bar; Daisy ordered a triple vodka on ice. I remember being impressed with her brazen choice of drink but hedged my hopes knowing that she wouldn’t be able to sustain her composure for long. Willard was on a completely different tack—while Daisy sipped, he gulped, and throughout the night would jump up suddenly from the couches as if struck by convulsions of genius, asking us if we wanted a drink, to which we raised our half-empty glasses and politely said “No,” and left him to weave his way towards the bar alone. Laurie wasn’t drinking anything and consciously sat on the opposite side of the couch from me. I found it somewhat presumptuous that she felt the need to blatantly display her unavailability to me, a man no more interested in her than she was in myself, but I suppose that is the standard response to friendliness these days.
-dialogue-
“Lezgo t’ the bafroom!” She launched herself into the air and slapped Willard and my shoulders. “Come, Laurie.” She demanded to her redheaded sidekick and we started our way up the stairs to the restrooms, the club’s VIP location for the chemically starved. Daisy emptied out a prescription bottle of MD and passed the chalky pills out to the rest of us, careful to pour some glasses of Laphroiag for those that wanted it. I took one of the glasses eagerly and looked at the chalky pill – smiling at me, knowing his destiny is with me now and that he was not in the hands of some bastard like his brother was with Willard. Pills and whiskey, the 21st Century’s version of Catholic confirmation.
For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body–whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free–and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Now the body is not made up of one part but of many.
And then there was clarity; sweet chemical clarity. Strobe lights and disco balls danced around us in some righteous affirmation that what we were doing was right; so all the beastly wrongs in the world were rectified only for us and only for that moment beneath the bruising London sky; ecstatic with ourselves and our company we danced with them. You’re my disco! the invisible man sang and I passed his message along to Daisy. I’d lost Willard hours ago to Ketamin and Mephedrone and along with Laurie . Where were we? “Soho!” she said and kissed me. She smelled sweet, like the ripest apple on the tree. I plucked her closer to me and she blossomed at my touch and the inspiration of Miracle-Grow and horse tranquilizer. We mixed our words with whisky and lager and mashed chalky and dehydrated lips in the hope that this night would never end. Was this love? No, silly, its Ecstasy! It certainly was, but who was this girl in front of me? The strobe lights froze her in place as she danced a stop motion flamenco – her feet and hands clapped out in majestic praise of this marvelous moment while she, intense and Cheshire-smiling, floated wildly around me. You’re my disco!, the invisible man sang to the heartbeat of bass and love and ecstasy and we held each other as close as gratuity would allow, a momentary incarnation of kindred lost-souls; a poor lost sometimeboy and girl.
Somewhere, away from daylight and the chaos of purpose and direction, we had wandered to the same fork in the road and found ourselves alone at this cross-section, no friend in the world to tell us where to go, and disappeared down a dark and spooky trail from which a bass heavy medley hummed; two degenerate youths, lost in this foul year of our Lord, two-thousand and ten.
II.
In the morning we found ourselves still in the company of Daisy and Laurie. I stumbled out of my dreams early in the morning, before any of the others, and my eyes opened to the blurry sight of lovely Daisy lying face down in my bed, braless, and I suddenly realized I had been sleeping on the couch. I couldn’t remember arriving home, let alone the events that followed, and spent the next hour smoking cigarettes in the garden, ravaged by the idea that I had engaged in unprotected coitus and would most certainly become a father in nine months. While some find it trendy to be post-modern and nonchalant when it comes to wearing condoms, what with the threat of AIDS out of the media and the assumption that every woman is and should be taking hormones, I find the idea of unprotected sex an astonishingly terrifying prospect; the thought of becoming a father is not something I am ready to wrangle with just yet. My fears were only eased when Daisy finally awoke and joined me in the garden.
She opened the French doors leading to the garden with a serene grace, as if completely unbothered by the fact that she found herself lying topless in a man’s bed, and I thought for a moment that her phlegmatic poise came from many a-mornings spent doing just this. She wore a t-shirt she had taken from my wardrobe and thinly laced underwear, appearing at once as one of those rare women that look better in the morning than they did the night before. It was a quality I had always searched for in a woman and had only ever found once before.
Daisy tiptoed around the chilly dew of mid-morning London and pulled a chair close to me to rest her bare feet on my lap, away from the cold and wet bricks of the garden patio. We said nothing for a moment and she extended a slender hand towards me and withdrew the cigarette that hung from my mouth.
‘Do you remember getting home last night?’ I asked her. She dragged from my cigarette and craned her taught neck backwards to face the gloomy London sky as she blew out the cigarette smoke.
‘I never went home,’ she replied.
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Do I remember getting into your bed last night is what you are really asking.’
‘Yes.’
‘We didn’t shag, if that’s what you’re after.’
‘Sorry for being abrupt so early in the morning.’
‘You hoped we did?’ She placed the cigarette back in my mouth.
‘No!’ I protested, momentarily shocked by her passiveness to the situation. ‘In fact, I was worried that we had and even more worried that in our states we would have neglected to use protection. Its one of my phobias, the idea of getting a girl pregnant and becoming a father.’
‘Do you have to be so goddamn proper?’ she asked rhetorically and this time withdrew a full cigarette from my pack. ‘I bet you suffer like hell from the Fear.’
‘What is the Fear?’
Daisy craned her head back again and blew her smoke into the sky and for a moment the sun slithered between a gap in the clouds and doused us in a fleeting bath of gold and warmth and suddenly, foolishly, I thought I was in love. ‘The Fear is when you wake up in the morning after getting stone pissed and are stricken by the dread that you did not portray yourself in the best of lights the night before. It is the great disease of the self-conscious waster.’
As she explained, my thoughts suddenly filled with romantic grandeur. I saw her sitting across from me at lavish dinner parties, wearing pearls and a flowing white evening gown that would smell just how I imagined; how we would entertain those sitting next to us at the table with the stories we collected through our adventures as lovers of each other and the world, breaking intermittently to ask each-other magically boring things like, ‘Do you remember that lovely couple we met in the Ardennes? I was just telling Imogen—she’s an artist you see, yes, yes, married that lovely Nigel, the photographer—I was just telling her about how wonderful that couple in the Ardennes were. Weren’t they marvelous, dear?’ We would be envied by all the other couples, just like Old Bull Lee and his wife in Kerouac’s Great American Odyssey, just how they loved each-other; silently, comfortably knowing the grass will never be as green on the other side of the fence; one of those couples at a party that could be at opposite ends of a room and still hear what each-other was saying. I quickly put a stop to such ideas, as any sensible man should, and slowly sobered to the reality of our current relationship. It dawned on me that we were complete strangers.
‘How old are you? If you don’t mind my asking,’ I said. She said that she was twenty years old. ‘And you are at university?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where?’
‘My, you are quite the bore in the mornings.’
‘Excuse me?’ I said and she suddenly took her feet from off my lap and stood up.
‘I should go. I’ve class in the afternoon and I still have to do my readings.’
‘Oh,’ I said and standing up with her showed her upstairs to the bedroom where her clothes and purse were.
‘Are you okay to get home?’ I asked, attempting to mask my disappointment.
“Yes, yes, I’ll be fine, don’t you worry one bit. It was lovely to have met you. Do you mind if I keep your shirt? Don’t want to look like a dirty stopout.’ I told her it was fine and she pulled on her jeans and packed her blouse into her purse.
‘Shall I call you?’ I asked
‘Oh, certainly, if you feel you must. Here—“ She reached into her purse and withdrew a pen and notepad, from which she tore out a yellow page and wrote down her name and number in dainty feminine hand. I felt the need to say something important or poignant, but I could only muster another question:
‘What did you mean when you said I suffer from the Fear?’
‘Oh, darling,’ she said patronizingly, ‘I was only pulling your leg. No need to be so sensitive.’
‘I’m not being sensitive, I’m merely curious as to what you meant by it.’
‘I only meant to point out that you had a rather terrified look on your face when I came out this morning.’
‘And?’
‘And… My father always told me to never trust a man who doesn’t trust himself, especially when drunk. Men who get the Fear don’t trust themselves. That’s all I’m saying. You’re a lovely boy but I must go,’ and she kissed me on the lips. I showed her to the door and stood in the threshold, waving good-bye like a sad little boy waves good-bye to a mother as she drives away on his first day of school.
Willard and Laurie said their good-byes over some tea in bed that Willard treated her to. He was the kind of man that goes about shooing a woman from his room in the morning with the utmost care and gentlest of touches towards the door. I remember being quite surprised the first time I saw him escort a lady out the door, and the more and more I saw him do this, the more I realized that Willard was always very deliberate with his actions in the morning, contrasted his fits of wild abandon at night-time; he balanced the rollicking emotions of the morning with a steady and reassuring hand—‘Spot of breakfast? Tea? Howja’ like it darling?’—No talk of the night’s events or trying to get a little more honey from her before she leaves; no canoodling or pinching her bum or begging her to call him some-time if she fancies it; he was businesslike while also acutely in tune with the varying range of vibrations a man receives the morning after a one-night-stand. For all he knew, he could have taken home a prostitute, or a virgin, or any number of the vast range of female species that find themselves attracted to him. So instead of trying to figure out if the girl enjoyed her night or made some drastic mistake, he let them figure it out for themselves. If they found it not to have been a mistake, which they almost always did, they would call him and he may or may not see them again, depending on his mood, and life would go on and the balance would be restored.
When he finally emerged from his chambers he was already in his emotional management mode. He came barefoot into the kitchen, clad only in his underwear, with the glaze-eyed look of a man still drunk but trying desperately not to be. He said nothing at first as I sat at the table reading about the un-capping of university tuition after the extraordinary budget cuts by Lord *Mandleson*. His uncle had the papers delivered every morning between seven and seven thirty, a huge stack of them thumped on the doorstep, and we found them all remarkably entertaining in the morning, especially when we were hung-over or still drunk, as Willard was presently.
After flicking on the kettle he grabbed me by the chin and kissed me on the cheek and said ‘Morning, sugar-pumpkin’ in a mockingly loving way, ‘Did you and Daisy get along last night?’ I told him I didn’t remember and that I woke up on the couch and recounted our conversation out on the patio. ‘That’s dreadful, Old boy, but its your fault for not handling it properly.’ I asked him what he meant and he explained my error in judgment: ‘She was into you and you didn’t reciprocate, simple as that. I know its all nonsense but the female mind works in mysterious ways, you see. A man must learn to translate everything that comes out of her mouth with the utmost care and compassion. Now, I would love to help you through this arduous time in your morning, Old boy, but I must attend to the lovely bird nesting in my bed.’ And with that he poured two mugs of tea and gaily sauntered back into his bedroom.
Laurie had left by the afternoon and straight afterward Willard went out to the Offie for a bottle of Laphroiag and some canned tuna for Amber, the cat that outlasted his uncle and, judging by the look of her, will in all probability outlast us. He returned with the whisky already opened and jittery with anticipation of the party he was to be throwing that night, which he had failed to mention to me.
-the daily routine of living with Willard-
At tea time a young Scott named Thomas Grint would drop by the flat ‘ferra good (pronounced ‘güd’) chin-wag.’ He was a family friend of Willard’s and attended Trinity College with him for a short time, before Willard was asked to leave, and I enjoyed talking politics with him whenever he came by. He was a marvelously informed man and, like me, had a particular fondness for Boris Johnson and his seemingly endless supply of synonyms. We would sometimes sit over a thesaurus and read aloud to each-other odd words we would find and laugh and yell them at Willard with as much conviction we could muster. Today he had come at Willard’s behest to help prepare for the party, for which there was much preparation to be done.
Despite his affected nonchalance, Willard was actually a very calculated man (when he wasn’t stone drunk) and his parties were organised accordingly; each guest invited was an informed decision on his part. There was to be a girl to boy ratio of three-to-one and each girl must have a dainty hand in either the arts or business or politics or else something equally as interesting and engaging. Of course this went for the men as well and was even more imperative they brought something interesting to the table; Willard would never let a man into his home without complete confidence that at least three of the women would find him compelling, whereas a female guest could be an utter dolt as long as she made up for it in appearance. It was also imperative that there was at least one proprietor of substances (usually a Samoan boy named Raoul), three musicians for late-night entertainment (Natasha the Soprano, Lee the guitarist, and Rudyard the pianist), a man who can choose the best wine from Willard’s collection (an aspiring sommelier named Rupert), two professional fighters should things get leary (Marcus the Thai Boxer and Ricky, a black belt in Ju Jitsu), and finally at least one of Willard’s ex-girlfriends.
I left Willard and Thomas to prepare whatever it was that needed preparing and decided I would go to the library to catch up on the reading I had forgotten and which was currently raking my body with guilt. I had discovered the library, which was really only a glorified book-store, when I first moved in with Willard and found its dark corners somewhat peaceful when I first sat down in the large leather seats to read. I had only visited twice before and I remembered the young librarian that had enchanted me both times. What I didn’t remember was that her name was Daisy.
At first she didn’t notice me and I walked straight past her; she was sitting solemnly behind her desk reading Dante. I took up my usual post in the dark corner of the mythology section, where tattered copies of Homer and Virgil had sat untouched, and I noticed that the large tome of the Divine Comedies had been withdrawn and I momentarily wondered why Daisy had chosen to read the epic that my name was drawn from. After an hour or so I gave up; I was reading Joseph Conrad and he was far too verbose to read with any accuracy whilst Daisy danced through my head. I decided I would say hello and approached the desk and coughed to get her attention. I could see her eyes and they gave no inclination that they would look up at me, not even a momentary shudder in my direction, and all she said was: ‘Are you stalking me, young man?’ I asked how she knew it was me and she only sighed and turned the page. This annoyed me.
‘I’m sorry, but did I do something to offend you?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘Then why do you act as if I have done you some grave injustice?’ She looked up at me now. I hadn’t realized her eyes were so green, chartreuse and speckled with flecks of gold and my breath drew short as she raised her gaze to rest on mine. Her skin was darker than I had remembered, somewhat olive-Italian, and new freckles appeared beneath her eyes that had not been there in the morning. She was a completely different creature than the one from the morning and suddenly I knew, foolishly, that our paths had not crossed twice in the past twenty-four hours, in fact we had long been reeling towards the horizon together, only we had never noticed it.
Before she could respond to my question I blurted that there was a party at my house tonight and asked if she would be my date, ‘…to allow me to make up for any transgressions the night before.’ I asked her what time she closes.
‘Now,’ she said. ‘You are the only person here.’
‘We’re you waiting for me?’
‘Don’t be silly.’ She shut her book and looked up at me again, ‘I was going to go to the park, if you would like to walk with me.’
I said I would love to and waited outside as she closed up. The light had faded fast while we were in the library and the tangerine haze of the setting sun mixed with the city’s grey and gloomy atmosphere. Shops along the King’s Road were closed now and the display windows appeared warm and friendly and inviting and you would promise yourself to return to some of them in the day-time but never would. The streetlamps flickered on and lazy groups of people stuttered past here and there, chatting indistinguishably amongst each other and occasionally shooting glances across the road at me as I stood alone and suddenly I felt the chill of world going on around me and how infinitesimal I must have looked to them as I stood outside in the cold without purpose, not waiting for something but as if something was waiting for me. I lit a cigarette and Daisy soon appeared at my side and held my arm as if she had held it for years before.
‘Why do you like me so much?’ She asked me as we finally began walking, a destination and purpose in mind.
‘I didn’t follow you to the library, you know. I’ve been there twice before.’
‘I know.’
‘So what makes you presume I like you so much?’
‘I don’t know, I just do. I think if you didn’t really like me so much you would have said something when you came in.’
‘You looked like you didn’t want to be bothered.’
‘So you do like me?’
‘I suppose.’
‘Why?’ She asked and stopped walking. She let go of my arm and turned to face me. When she did, I saw a flicker of desperation in her eyes, a tenderness overcame me as I looked back at her and saw a fragility that I had somehow missed. I felt sorry I hadn’t seen it before. I was about to reach down and kiss her when something caught my eye.
Some distance behind her the sidewalk opened up into a small square. Trees ringed with black iron fences shot up from either side and from the branches hung two spot-lights that came together in the middle of the square to light an unfilled circle, as if something or someone should be there. I realized there was music playing. Daisy noticed I was looking past her and, turning to see what it was, she grabbed my arm again and pulled me towards the square excitedly, exclaiming: ‘It’s a stage!’ I didn’t quite understand but said nothing.
As we drew nearer I noticed a small crowd of people gathered on the opposite side of the road, looking at the spotlight and listening to the music as if they were expecting someone to pop out and begin a performance. Daisy tried to pull me into the spot-light but I protested, saying it was probably for a movie or something, although there were no cameras around. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘Its for everyone!’ I protested again but she gave me no choice. ‘I will leave you right here if you don’t come with me into the spot-light,’ she said.
‘Why do we have to be the ones?’ I asked.
‘This is your last chance, Virgil.’ I conceded to her ultimatum and she pulled me into the center of the spot-light. It was surprisingly warm and I looked about me but couldn’t see anyone besides Daisy, the spot-lights were too intense. I felt her hands around my neck.
‘What now?’ I asked.
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘People are watching us.’
‘Let them watch.’
I kissed her, at first wary of appearing gratuitous, but as I felt her hands tighten around the hair on the back of my neck I felt suddenly uninhibited.
The music changed. It was familiar song, a movement from some long-lost composition I had heard sometime amongst the stars. A lone cello played in a tenor clef voice, sorrowful, mellow, its usually deep and brooding tones replaced with a higher pitch of sorrow, as a man might sound when struck with some unbearable and insufferable tragedy, or else a longing for some lost beauty; behind it two delicate pianos and harp, slow and methodical and desperately sad, crying together with the man, the lone cello, sharing his sorrow. The spot-lights dimmed from their golden intensity into a misty blueish haze and the violins cried out as well, swelling momentarily, but they too remained muted behind the longing wail of the cello. As we kissed, I felt my cheek becoming damper and I realized that Daisy was crying. I pulled away from her and caught her chartreuse and gold-flecked eyes, saw them tremble for a moment, then shut again to push out one last tear that she quickly wiped away. She hugged herself tight to me and I recognized the song from a trip to New York City my mother brought me on as a child. I remember sitting in a vast amphitheater and wanting to leave. We were at a performance of Swan Lake, the famous ballet, and as the cello trembled in its crescendo I realized it was The Dying Swan we were listening to. I remember the ballerina as the stage was lit for the final movement—arms folded, on tiptoe, she dreamily and slowly circles the stage. By even, gliding motions of the hands, returning to the background from whence she emerged, she seems to strive toward the horizon, as though a moment more and she will fly—exploring the confines of space with her soul. The tension gradually relaxes and she sinks to earth, arms waving faintly as in pain. Then faltering with irregular steps toward the edge of the stage—leg bones aquiver like the strings of a harp—by one swift forward-gliding motion of the right foot to earth, she sinks on the left knee—the aerial creature struggling against earthly bonds; and there, transfixed by pain, she dies.
My mother read me a poem that night, as she often did, telling me the final dance was inspired by the words of Lord Tennyson, how all music was poetry and all poetry was music and one cannot exist without the other because they are both the same. The last lines of the poem read:
“With a music strange and manifold,
Flow'd forth on a carol free and bold;
As when a mighty people rejoice
With shawms, and with cymbals, and harps of gold,
And the tumult of their acclaim is roll'd
Thro' the open gates of the city afar,
To the shepherd who watcheth the evening star.
And the creeping mosses and clambering weeds,
And the willow-branches hoar and dank,
And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds,
And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank,
And the silvery marish-flowers that throng
The desolate creeks and pools among,
Were flooded over with eddying song.”
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