Late Night, Maudlin Street

I’m outside my old house – it’s late, and I’m alone, solitary in the beam of a streetlight. It’s nineteen-seventy two and now all at once for me.

You said my name, muffled into vowels.

“Hmm?”

“You’ll come back, won’t you? Come back and see me…” You were falling asleep. I didn’t answer you – you wouldn’t have understood me, anyway. You were already in that hazy state where I could have said anything and you wouldn’t have opened your eyes – you were already too far away from me. It was just as well. I wouldn’t have known what to say.

I still sleep with a picture of you framed by my bed. It’s summer and you’re smiling, sat on your doorstep, a couple of weeks after I met you. You’re looking at your mother, who’s taking it – she told you to put your legs straight, because you looked knock-kneed, but you didn’t. I was leaning against the wall to your left, but I’m out of view. You can see the shadow of my arm.

It’s childish and it’s silly, but I talk to you – I pretend it’s you, in my room, by the bed, and I sit and tell you everything – everything I don’t have anyone to talk to about. I don’t have anyone to talk about anything to. It’s strange how all the interesting people in the world seem to avoid me – I am surrounded by people like my parents. I’m not scared that I’ll turn out like them anymore, by the way. It is impossible to become that boring by being unemployed and living alone. It takes a special kind of pressure.

”Insolent little bastard.” I didn’t ask him what I had done wrong. I knew what I had done wrong to deserve his disapproval in everything I did. This time I let it go, and got up to leave the room. As I reached the door, I swear I heard him say something else. He may just have coughed.

My father would have liked you, had he got to know you. You were a go-getter, as he would have called it from his indented position on the sofa. You said what was on your mind. He would have liked some of the things in your mind, maybe – all the things you could see in people, all the things you knew about things like football and cars. You could have talked for a long time, and he could have grown to like you, had he not known what he did.

But oh, you could have strung him along. You could have strung anybody along and led them to believe anything about you. When I met you, do you remember what you had me believe? You told me you had been thrown out of boarding school for being insolent to teachers and failing to apply yourself – and that the reason you had been failing to apply yourself was that you had been running a cannabis den in one of the basement rooms, but they never discovered that. It turned out that your father had become bankrupt and moved with you back to live with your mother, grandparents and two younger brothers in the house at the corner of Maudlin Street and Saltus Road. I may have known you when we were too young to walk, but neither of us could remember. You left when you were three and I was four. Things could have been very different if your father hadn’t left and taken you with him. If we had never been separated, we may have never known each other like we did.

As for me, I was born and raised here on Maudlin Street, in the same house I escaped that morning in early September, four months after my seventeenth birthday. I learned to walk in the living room, where I also learned to throw punches and to stay silent when challenged. When I outgrew my cot under the window it was replaced with a bed, and every nightmare I ever had, I woke up from with my head in the very same place that my head hit the pillow when you pinned me down that night.

“What did you say?”
“Doesn’t matter.” Your face was illuminated in the sodium orange glow from the street outside, through the window. You hovered over me and smiled, smiled as if you were just where you wanted to be, as if this face that you were staring into was the only one you would want to be pinning to a single bed at midnight.

I was the world’s ugliest boy. You made me question it, I’ll admit, but it was everywhere I cared to look, and in every face I presented myself to. It was in the mirror, with my heavyweight brow and my sour mouth, and my father’s eyes. It was in my father’s eyes. It was in my notebooks and around my rounded shoulders, muting my voice and making my mother desperate. I was the ugliest child and the worst son their mixed genes and efforts could have produced.

I suppose I’d rather you never saw me now. I’ve become the world’s ugliest man. It’s even worse, I can promise you.

On that day that I met you, I could imagine you fully grown already – I could imagine you taller, and with small crows feet at the corners of your eyes from laughing so frequently as you did, from smiling with those eyes almost constantly as you did that afternoon. Your grey eyes were lanterns when evening came about. I could imagine you old enough to walk down the isle, and I could imagine you on top of a wedding cake. I imagined the both of us at the alter, and the absurdity of it made me blush, and that was the first time I ever thought of you like that. I had known you for two minutes. It took ten months for you to kiss me, but I wanted to marry you from the moment I imagined you in a suit with a rose in the buttonhole.

Love at first sight may sound trite, but it’s true, you know. Its ironic how, of all people, I should know that as fact – how one so lonely as me should be, perhaps, the only one in any number of rooms I could walk into who can say that they have been struck by a love so strong for a person upon meeting them that they know immediately that they could quite happily spend their life with that person – you were burned into my mind that day, everything about you, and there you still linger. I could list the detail of everything you wore or how you stood, or how you used to say all those things that were peculiar to you. Bursting into French, or speaking in Wildean pomposity when the mood took you. Smiling sideways and saying “Sounds like a laugh.” The way your voice changed when you whispered serious things to me, the night before I left. I am lonely – painfully lonely, and I don’t have a friend in this world – but my faith in love is still devout because I still have you, in a way. I have not seen you for eight years, so in my mind you are still on Maudlin Street, still going to the picture house every Friday night, still hanging round in the park with your school friends.

I seem to remember it was I who helped you out that night. You had been playing dares, and they had stolen your clothes. I was looking for you in the park, but I never dreamt I would find you sitting in the bushes naked, your hair wet, shivering.

“What happened?”

“Dares. Went in pond starkers. Bastards ran off with my stuff.”

I couldn’t keep a straight face. You manoeuvred out from between the branches, your back to me as you asked if I had anything you could borrow to get home.

“What would you have done if I hadn’t have come along?”

“Dunno. I’m freezing my bollocks off here. Can I have your jumper?”

I pull it over my head and give it to you. You look vulnerable naked – smaller, shoulders rounded against the cold. The lights from the street, far away behind the trees, make your skin glow pale amber, as if in fire, but you’re shivering. When you take my jumper you smile – it is a knitted, warped thing, dark blue and too large – and wind it around your jutting hips like some bizarre nappy.

“Ta.” We walk home together.

You almost made me into a petty criminal that night – we passed through the snicket that was edged in by a ten foot tall stone wall and the fences of back gardens on Firth Street, and you stopped without warning and stared over a whitewashed wood palisade.

”What’s up?”

“It’s Alan’s house.”

“Leave it.” I was warning you. I never had any authority over you, of course – it was a thinly veiled plea.

“Get me those jeans, would you?”

I remember there was a clothesline hung across that meagre garden, the clothes hung like lynch-mob victims, swaying slightly. Among them was a pair of black Levis.

“Oh, come on.”

“I can’t walk down the street like this!”

“No one’ll be up –no-one’ll see you.”

“But I want those jeans…” Alan was bird-hipped, rather like you. They would fit.

You were holding my arm by this point, grinning sideways, your teeth reflecting vague suburban starless sodium sky-light.

“Come on… they won’t be up – no one’ll see you.”

“I will not steal a pair of jeans off a clothesline for you!”

“Oh, fine, then.”

You shimmied over the fence, barefoot, naked except for a misshapen knitted blue thing for modesty. You took the jeans and put them on right then, unwinding my jumper. An upstairs light came on and your animal instincts kicked in – you ran for the fence and vaulted, still holding the loincloth-sweater, swearing in French as you landed on your feet in the grass, and I don’t know quite how you missed all the broken glass on that path but you did, and we ran.

I thought you were utterly insane in that moment, but I loved you. By then I knew it, completely, but not how it would change things for me – and I never would have dared to dream that you felt the same way. I was a schoolboy with a secret obsession – a working-class oik with a beautiful, bittersweet secret. It was a warmth, a sweet ache. As we turned the corner at the end of that snicket and stood against the fence, almost shoulder-to-shoulder were it not for an inch of space, and laughing, I ached for you in the strongest and sweetest way. I watched you get your breath back, your hair stuck to your forehead, chest raking in air at double speed, glowing streetlight-gold. There were moments when I loved you so much I could have exploded with the force of it.

I loved you in your absence when I heard that they took you away in a police car, the week before I left. You did not want revenge, you said, but justice. You tackled him one to one and left him bleeding into a drain, with broken fingers and a chunk missing out of his ear. I want to say I couldn’t believe it when I heard, but I could. I could believe that you could leap on someone like an animal and tear into them like pray. It was your way – you may have suited a certain sophistication with your lovely features and suave expressions, but you were built like a small, sly animal, and in your bursts of enthusiasm you became manic. They took you and decided you were not manic, brought you back. You were to go to court, but I left before I found out how that went. You were too young for prison – they wouldn’t have sent you to Borstal, either, I don’t think. I think you must have wormed your way out. Surely once you told them what they did to me, they would have sent them with you.

It’s true; they didn’t hurt me as much as you hurt Peter Anderson when you jumped him that night in August. There were nine of them, though, and I was terrified. I was a coward – I revealed myself to be a coward as soon as they started appearing from alleyways and avenues. I’m pretty sure I screamed – I know I ran. I tripped, and one of them fell over me, grabbed me around the neck with one trunk-like bicep and punched me in the mouth with another. It came from a strange angle, so it didn’t cause much damage – what caused the most damage was when they picked me up and smashed my head on the corner of Bewlay Avenue and Firth Street. I started bleeding profusely – I think it scared them, because I blacked out and when I woke up they were backing away, the couple that were left. I think they thought they’d killed me. They never set out for that – it’s a myth that people didn’t back then, because they did, and they always will, but they only wanted to give a queer a little bash around. They didn’t want murder.

You didn’t know whether to laugh or punch the wall when I told you the first time that after that, I caught the bus to hospital. I took off my jumper and staggered to the bus stop, and one came along and I got on it and paid, and sat at the front. If I’d have started dripping on the seats or the floor I’m sure the driver would have ejected me, but I didn’t. I just sat there with a blue jumper pressed to a copiously bleeding wound, wavering in and out of consciousness. It was never blue again, actually. I washed it through twice in the sink, and it didn’t come clean. My mother threw it away when I put it in the wash basket.

My injuries (and they totalled bruises all over my body quite apart from the gash) were not grievous, and they had me stitched up and sent on my way by ten. They needed room for more serious victims of other Saturday night fights. I called my house on the pay phone – no one was home, so I called yours instead. Your father came to pick me up in his van. He was an amiable and fascinating man, was your father, from what I knew of him. He had issues, and from what you told me I could believe quite easily that he was a self-important, unmotivated fool, but I couldn’t hold anything against him. He picked me up that night when my father may have left me out to perhaps slip into a coma on a doorstep somewhere. He chattered on at me, didn’t ask me what had happened, chattered about you, but mostly about himself. He was aware of his failings, I suppose. He was bemoaning his love life at one point, and I felt quite uncomfortable – I took to staring out of the window, unable to put my forehead to the glass in case I dislodged the huge bandage over my left eye. At one point he said something that killed me, it really did, but I found it very easy not to laugh – he was talking about this woman who he had hooked up with and seen for about a week, before she left him when she found out just how impoverished he was, and how much baggage he carried. He sighed, and he said “Women only like me for my mind…” As if they flocked to his intellect, went with him not out of desperation or drunkenness but because he fascinated them, and were genuinely horrified, suffered genuine shock when they discovered his situation.

Everyone was in, but no-one stayed up for me that night. I got home to an empty house, unlocked the door with my own key. Where I stand is where your father dropped me off on an August night ten years ago, and number eight, Maudlin street – well, it’s only bricks and mortar, after all. It’s home, but it is still a shell, and now it will have different furniture and different coloured walls. Different people will see it as home. Having said that, I can’t say that there’s nothing else it can give me. To see my room again, but not my room – I would like that perspective. I would like to see if the bed is in the same place as I used to have it, when it was my bed – and, you know, I don’t think of it as my bed where I had every nightmare of my life up until the day I left, but as my bad where you fell asleep on my chest the night before I broke away.

”What are you doing?” Your grandmother had let me into the house, the morning you came back from the police station, and as I ascended the stairs I heard you singing. It was some popular air or other – the words don’t matter, and neither does the tune – but you were singing it as if it was a work song, at the top of your voice, sometimes stopping and grunting in the ends of lines, as if you were doing some sort of heavy physical labour, accompanied each time by a crash or a thump. Each note rang out like gold, uninhibited and perfect and beautiful, somehow enhanced by the spite with which you were spitting out the inane rhyming couplets.

In the room that you shared with your eldest brother, you were throwing things at the wall. A pile was building up at the skirting board, comprised of shoes and belts and pots of hair products and books and even a football trophy, snapped to reveal that under the painted gilding it was blue plastic.

I’m not sure what made you that angry – you had your revenge. You said that whatever the law could do couldn’t faze you. Perhaps you were putting on a brave face. You didn’t need to do that for me, but then, you did that for everyone. You singing manically whilst pelting things at your wall was you losing your nerve.

”Sing again – properly.” Teatime that same day, in your room again. You were calm but slightly desolate, as far towards sulking as I ever saw you. You were the day to my night, but now a storm had come and you were darker than your face was made for, and I was left stumbling around in the pitch black, trying to find your light again.

You smiled, but bitterly. “I can’t sing.”

“Yes, you can. You sing beautifully.” You raised your eyebrows, picking at the toe of one of your socks. “Sing.”

I asked too much of you, and I put you through too much. All I ever repaid you with was preserving your modesty in the park that night, and the fact that I loved you. You refused me, for once, that day. You wouldn’t sing.

”Why not?”

You chose to ignore this. “That guy in the park who sold you those pills that time, have you ever seen him again?”

“Don’t.”

“Why not?”

“What are you asking?”

“If you ever saw him in the park again, is all.”

“No. No, I haven’t.”

I had ended up on your doorstep, faces swimming in the pool of amber streetlight across the road, the trees edging the park becoming giants, monsters, dinosaurs. I was sweating, reeling, almost screaming – but you had come home and taken me inside, hidden me from your parents and let me stay the night, talking me round as they wore off. You were a fixed point of sanity as your bedroom tipped sideways and I saw the light that was filtering through the curtains tip and pour out of the window again, leaving only pitch darkness, and I blacked out, but you panicked and hit me around the face, bringing me round again. I fell asleep with you lying next to me, whispering a string of hushes and reassurances of my safety.

The next morning, though, you were angry. We argued it out in indoor voices, so as not to disturb your family, and when we had reached a point where no one could win or lose but bitterness had been avoided, I went home. I told you then, and I tell you again now, I never meant to hurt you. I just needed something to make me feel alive in your absence that evening.

And so, you made me feel alive for the final and most potent instance when you pelted a football at my window at a quarter to midnight and stood out in the road and sang to me. You threw your arms around, all mock-opera, and I clasped them at the side of my face like a damsel, and you stopped to laugh. I came downstairs and let you in to shut you up, and stop you from waking the entire street. I meant for us to go into the lounge and sit up and talk, but you carried on from the front door straight up the stairs, and so I followed you, whispering that you’d better keep your voice to a level suited to exam-rooms, because if my dad found you round here he’d kill us both. You seemed to think I was joking.

“Sounds like a laugh.”

“Shh!”

“Sorry – sounds like a laugh.” You whispered it this time, letting yourself into my room. I shut the door behind us.

“If I wasn’t serious, I wouldn’t be leaving.”

You sighed, tousled your own hair with one hand, put the other in the pocket of Alan Martin’s jeans. “You still serious about that, then?”

“As a heart attack.” I crossed the room and sat on the bed. You sat down next to me, looking me in the face with a whole lot of compassion as I looked away deliberately, hands clasped between my knees.

“I still don’t want you to leave.”

“I know.” You wound an arm around my waist, surprising me. “I know, but I can’t stay in this place. I can’t stay in this house, I can’t even stay in this fucking area, because…and I’ve never stolen one happy hour around here in my life, except with you. Before you came along… you should have seen me before you came along. My home life is terrible, you know.”

“I know.” You were rubbing my back through my shirt.

“No, you don’t.” I was close to an embarrassing choked hysteria. “You don’t. You don’t.”

“Oh, shut the fuck up with that. What if I do?”

“Sing to me.”

“What?”

“Sing something. Anything. Quietly.”

You knew what I was doing, but you leant back, unwound your arm from around my waist and searched for something. At first you came out with some popular pop tune, and I told you to stop that at once, to sing me something I had never heard. I think you made something up – I didn’t ever ask you, because in the feeble semi-darkness that was left when the curtain was closed your face hovered closer to mine in the dark, golden-streetlight-holy, eyes on sodium fire. You kissed me, mid-word, mid-note. We kissed for hours.

People are waving me on, but for every half of one that’s out on the street here there’s someone inside wishing me gone. There are even people out here wishing me gone. You’re at school, probably pale-faced and sleepy, purple under the eyes. You’re gone, anyway.I woke up alone, and I felt like crying but I was ecstatic, because I reckoned that it hadn’t all been a dream, because the taste in my mouth was more than usually stale – I was dehydrated from exchanging saliva with you. That was the first time I had kissed anybody.

And I left, and where I went doesn’t matter, because I don’t matter anymore – I bet you matter. I went to an aunt’s out west for a few weeks, if you must know, but then I travelled in hostels and clubs and did odd jobs. If I ever found myself in our city, I stayed away from our particular suburb, kept to the centre where we never went, and never needed to go. And I miss you – every day, but I don’t go back, because you probably left too, and now we’re separate needles in a huge world-shaped haystack, most likely around the area of the North of England. So we’re balls in the long grass in the North of England. We’re particles of dust in a beam through a curtain in a large room, and we may never collide.

Wherever you are, I hope you’re singing now.