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40
June 2019
My apartment smells of bleach and damp towels. It’s at the back of the building, facing out on to the rear ends of the buildings behind, a criss-cross lattice of ironwork fire escapes, and huge metal dumpster bins huddled grimly in courtyards below. The owner has left a jar of what look like homemade chocolate truffles on the kitchen table next to a single tulip in a vase, which is very sweet of course, but doesn’t really do much to take the edge off the unprepossessing feel of the place. I think of Phin’s apartment with the Frida Kahlo cushions and sigh. Of course he would get the superior Airbnb. Of course he would.
I have deduced that Phin’s apartment is two floors below mine and three apartments to the left. I head down the echoey stonestaircase that threads the building together. I count down the doors to the third and see that Phin’s apartment has a door that is painted a gorgeous dark teal and has a golden knocker in the shape of a fox’s head. I can almost smell the scent of the neroli and pomegranate reed diffuser that I saw in the photographs wafting under the door. I put my ear to the door, but I can hear nothing beyond.
Back in my apartment I open my suitcase and hang my clothes in the musty wardrobe, mentally writing the review of this place that I will post when I go.Somewhat tired fixtures and fittings. Needs a little tlc.
And then I am confronted, suddenly, resoundingly, horribly with the result of all of the decisions that I have made since I left London. I am alone in a sad apartment in Chicago staking out the apartment of a man I have not seen since I was sixteen years old, a man who despises me, and I have no idea what I do now. This is as close as I can get to Phin without physically breaking into his apartment and being there, arranged against the Frida Kahlo cushions, when he gets back from wherever he is and that is – well, no, that’s too much. I fear where that might lead. I fear what I might do. I fear what he might do. I fear the power of everything that has kept us apart for all these years and I fear what that power might lead to if it found itself trapped in an Airbnb behind a closed door. And then I feel a pall of despondency descend upon me. Why am I here? What am I doing? What the hell do I want? But, suddenly, I have it and I sit up ramrod straight as it comes to me in a flash.
I grab a notebook from my laptop bag and a pen. I scribble a note.
Dear person at apartment 12. I am a person at apartment 35. I really don’t like the apartment I’m in and I see on Airbnb that your booking ends in ten days and I’d love to take it over once you’re gone. Would you be willing to let me have a look at it before I book it? No worries if not, I totally understand. But if you’re happy to oblige, just give me a knock or drop me a text on this number. Thanks.
I pause. I was going to say Joshua, but if Kris has tracked Phin down, he might have said something about a strange British guy called Joshua asking questions, so I think for a moment and then I sign it ‘Jeff’.
I fold the note into a square and I go back down to Phin’s apartment and leave the note pinioned under the fox’s chin. Then I head out to a perfumery I noticed earlier three blocks down and I spend seventy dollars on room sprays and scented candles.
There is no message from Phin by the evening. I’m hungry, the day is growing dark and I’m feeling a terrible thumping, throbbing urge for something, and I do not know what it is. I don’t know if it’s sex. I don’t know if it’s alcohol. I don’t know if it’s exercise or violence or loud music or junk food but there is something in my gut and it’s roiling and agitating and I have a sense that I would like to punch the wall, but I have done that before and it was incredibly painful – the scuffs and cuts took three weeks to fully heal – and frankly it was not worth it.
I pace this apartment which now smells of lilies and mandarins and, apparently, sea foam. My hands clench and unclench. My breathing solidifies. I watch some porn on my phone, but it justmakes me cross. I decide I need to go out. I take the echoey central stairs and cut down the corridor on the first floor. I pass Phin’s door and see that the note is still there. I thunder down the last staircase and I burst through the front door and on to the street and immediately I feel myself plugged straight into the energy of the balmy Tuesday night, of the streets filled with office workers cut loose from desks and tedium, with tourists and locals and old people and young people, and I walk where they walk, in their slipstream, like an invisibly coupled train carriage, and I think I probably look mad and I think I probably am mad, and the lights sparkle and refract and make me feel dizzy and drunk although I am entirely sober, and at some point I decouple from the crowds and stop outside the doors of a brasserie with six-foot parlour palms in front of heavy velvet curtains and a maître d’ in fitted black shirt and trousers and a smile to charm the birds from the trees as well as the mad lonely man from the street, and I am ushered into a booth and given a menu, and I order the porterhouse steak for $90 and the onion rings and a Tibetan wine called Shangri-Lacan you believe itfor $450, and I drink the wine as if it is fruit juice and barely touch the steak because I’m not actually very hungry after all and my eyes cast across the room towards the pavement and I look at the men going by, at the boys, and I want all of them, all of them. But then my heart fills with rage because they don’t want me so I order a bottle of Ruinart champagne for $195 and eat the onion rings with my hands and swipe through Grindr with my greasy fingers, and the agony of being so close to Phin is excruciating, it’s eating me up from the middle out like a disgusting piece of fruit and I can’t do anything with any of these feelings, all the things I want to do right now wouldend with me in a police cell so I get the bill and I pay it, adding a 50 per cent tip, and I get up and find that I cannot balance and have to grip the table and the waiter who was the recipient of the $300 tip takes me by the elbow and guides me sweetly across the restaurant, and he is not even cute but I cannot help but say, ‘You’re very cute, what’s your name?’ And the way he smiles at me, as if there is maybe a globule of sick in his mouth, might well be one of the worst moments of my life, and believe me when I say there have been many.
I career around the pavement, and I want to kiss someone, hit someone, shout at someone, kill someone, stick my hand down the front of someone’s trousers and squeeze them until they squeal. I realise in some base way that this is me, this has always been me, but that I have sat on it, stifled it, trapped it in a cage, sedated it like a pet tiger, and it seems at this moment in time that the line between me killing someone and not killing someone has always been so much finer than I’d ever realised, and I want to stab someone through the heart and punch someone in the face. I want to do that. I really, really want to do that.
But also, I want to do drugs. I want some coke. And some vodka. I find my way back to the Magdala and make myself as sober as possible before I ask the barman if he knows anyone, and thankfully he gets the inference immediately and points me in the direction of a woman in the far corner of the bar who looks about fifty. She is drinking beer, alone, and I walk towards her and shegestures me towards the private area in the far left corner and says, ‘Are you OK? You look pretty wired.’ And I say, ‘Yeah, I am pretty wired.’ I tell her that I’ve drunk a bottle of wine and a bottle of champagne and that I feel like I’m losing my mind and I need something, I just need something, and she says, ‘Well, you don’t need coke, that’s for sure.’ And she gives me some ketamine and some Valium and I give her fifty dollars and she goes back to her beer and I pocket the pills and the powder and I leave.
Immediately I’m annoyed that I let her talk me out of the coke. But I don’t want to go back so I go into another bar and drink three shots of tequila in a row and send a text to Kris Doll.
I’m drunk and horny. Come and find me on your big bike.
(Although actually it says:Im dunk and horn comr adn find em On your big bike, with a bike emoji.)
I try to get into a club but the security guy won’t let me in and I tussle with him, physically, slam my hands into his chest, feel the futility of it as he pushes back with his own steroid-pumped forearms and peels me away from him like a wet leaf, and then I am free-wheeling for a while, shouting things out to strangers now who stare back at me with disgust and wry amusement. I hand the ketamine and the Valium to a pair of teenage boys. ‘Here. Have some drugs.’ They take the baggies with slack jaws, and then I am outside my apartment block and I look up and I see the light is on in Phin’s apartment and my gut is burning, my heart, my head are burning, flames of fury are licking up through me and threatening to swallow me whole and I need I need I need …
I buzz myself into the building and I storm the stairs to the first floor and I know I should wait and I should plan and I should do this properly for God’s sake do it properly but I just can’t and Ibang on the teal door with the fox-head knocker and I hear a voice saying, ‘Er, hi?’
‘Hi,’ I say, using an American accent. ‘This is Jeff. From upstairs. Could I have just a minute of your time?’
There is a pause. I shuffle from foot to foot and then I hear the chain unlatch and the door open and I put my foot right there, in the gap and I leave it there and I look up and there is Phin looking down at me and I see it, the split second that he goes from thinking I am Jeff from upstairs to knowing that I am Henry from his nightmares, but it is too late, because I am in his apartment and there is absolutely nothing he can do about it.
