Volta

You wrote without structure or rhyme, which was not necessarily a bad thing, but I wanted to prise you from your comfort zone, so I told you to write a sonnet. Specifically, I told you it must be the most traditional and least avant-garde kind of sonnet, with Elizabethan form, and “…all that shit”, so ended because your phone rang and you answered it. Your ring tone was obnoxious nu-techno-punk, and your phone was expensive, ostentatious. It was your art department friends, wanting you back. I didn’t want them to take you. I had never before thought that art students could be so vacuous and shallow before fleetingly meeting your art department friends. No, that is too harsh – I disliked the way they all had the same geometric haircut and dressed in much the same way. You dressed like them, and you had that haircut, but that didn’t matter, because you weren’t obnoxious to me. Your art department friends seemed as inverse-snobbish and uncouth as the youths that sat on the back seat of the bus I took to and from the sixth-form college. I didn’t let you know that I thought this. I didn’t want to risk insulting you.

I was teaching you poetry. You had asked me to – or, rather, the progression had been a natural one that I suppose you took a role in steering, although I also enjoyed the position of having a protégé, and sharing my wisdom with a handsome youth, exchanging knowledge for beautiful company. I didn’t tell you that, either, at the time – it didn’t exactly come up in conversation. I thought of it that way to myself, and my chest swelled in my stupid frilly shirt that I was living so Wildean. Oscar Wilde’s life was ruined by the boy that he called ‘lover’. But I didn’t call you lover from my pen or my tongue – and besides, there was only a year and a half in it, the age gap. But oh, I felt I had so much to teach you. I wanted to mould you. I wanted to take you like the clay you worked with to make your cartoon flower-monsters and turn you into something that could understand me.

But you had found me, after all. You had approached me by the Classics A-G shelf and said that you were a poet too, and that you loved my work. I allowed myself to feel like a celebrity for a while, as I did for a second every time I saw my skinny little anthology with its melancholy dove-grey cover on the shelves in the college library. Despite this, I did not feel better than you, which is why I ended up becoming your teacher. If I had felt that I was better than you, it would have been far easier to become your friend – but you were innocent, for all that you had drank and smoked and done with girls in their bedrooms before their parents got home. You had not witnessed the horrors and wonders that I had seen in my mind’s eye – you had never let yourself really think, not like I had, and it had preserved your sanity. I wanted to cradle every brain cell and tell you to stop smoking weed, please, but I didn’t. It was none of my business. I was teaching you poetry.

You handed the sonnet to me three days later, written in neat ballpoint pen on a torn-out piece of the Moleskine notebook I had given you for your birthday a couple of weeks after we first met (late November, Saggitarius, fire and lust for life). It bore your trademark barefaced wit and flippancy, but it was a sonnet, no doubt about that, thus proving that when you wanted you could write poetry that was not abstract prose with abstract line breaks – although said unstanza’d chaos-verse almost never failed to delight me when you showed me it for comment. With your sonnet, though, I had one quarrel; a small one, and not your fault, but a fault nonetheless.

“There’s no volta.”

“What’s volta?”

I hadn’t told you about volta. “Typically, in sonnets, at line eight there is a volta – a change in tone, mood, even theme. It’s a change in course. I didn’t tell you, but look at almost any traditional sonnet and there will be a volta.”

“Oh.” You raised your eyebrows, looked mystified at your sonnet upside-down, as I read it again. I didn’t ask who it was about, but it was about falling out of love.

You seemed to want to tell me about your love life, but I always stopped you - subtly enough, I thought, for you not to notice that the topic had been averted. I did not want to know about you and any number of pretty and vacuous girls. I wanted to know about you. I realise now that the people we are involved with, and the people we love if we allow ourselves to, are as much a part of our personalities as any inner thought or wish that we can tell someone in the selfish first-person. I had always thought of the reasons I adored the objects of my infatuations to be nothing more than interesting lists to write, and a subject to have serious conversations with myself with, in my own head, and if they were the appropriate reasons then things to think of when lying awake at night with my bedroom door closed.

But of course, if somebody had wanted desperately to know me – still, in fact – then eventually in in-depth conversation you would come up, and of course, I realise, the fact that you became an obsession for me says a lot. You may have been the artist (though useless at true-life and only really gifted with a skill for poppy stylisation and adorable cartoon humanisation), but I wanted to paint you in all your post-adolescent glow, pampered-punk hair and all, and I wanted it to be real as if I could tell it everything I never had the nerve to tell you to your face, but I wanted it to be art. But my life’s first frustration was that I never could draw worth a penny. My second was that I was afraid of girls.

But what I was scared of was immaterial, because I was stealing you every spare moment, and you were letting me. You even told me that you were thinking about things you’d never thought to think about, but you found it rather funny – you joked to me that I was a cult leader with the fervour of Jesus, and even guessed in jest that all I intended was to turn you into a mini-me, a doppelganger five inches shorter, a silk-scarf wearing fop to join me in my adventures of being languid, fascinating and essentially useless, in my home and in my drear locality. I foisted books upon you, and you devoured them, devoting time you could have spent playing Xbox to poetry and prose, to romantics and gothics and realists and war and epic romance and a glut of tragedy. Even when you discovered Palahnuik off your own steam and decided it was made for your consumption, I viewed it as my doing. This thing that I was cultivating, sometimes it grew its own limbs, and who was I to prune them? For months I parodied what you thought I was trying to do, by giving you plastic bags of dog-eared novels over coffee-shop tables and wandering with you in the park with my hands behind my back, extracting pure and brilliant thoughts from you. As I fell deeper into my infatuation with my position as mentor of arts and philosophy, and with building you out of the bricks of whatever I could pull from myself and what I wanted and believed and loved, I became ever more like a time-travelled Romantic, with my moods never allowing me to take jeans from my wardrobe even if I was not leaving the house, and dressing instead from the shoulders with absolute vigour, and letting my hair grow wavy and rebellious as running water. I was a terribly silly caricature, and you found me hilarious and masked it as fascinated.

As I stole you away, though, and as I succeeded in sculpting you, you must have gained a taste for it. I am sure, after all, that that Monday morning in early March was due to myself, and your flamboyant beauty of attire was inspired by the casual irregularity that I had cultivated, and from that day we were both misplaced in time and place, and we were both the only friends each other had.

Something tipped you into the most wonderful madness, but it tipped you during half-term, and I was not there to witness the acquisition of all of those strange and colourful clothes. I didn’t stand at your shoulder as you dyed your hair auburn – only a saturation of your natural brown, but more brave and vivid. You arrived at school, not as a print of me in cold darks, but in red and gold. You already owned the scarlet jeans, but the way you wore them was quite different, with black and white winkle pickers and the most fabulous shirt, ruffled with no intention of being shy about it, and jewellery clinking about your neck and wrists. At the corner of your eyes there were subtle shadows, pencilled in kohl. I turned to meet your greeting and was stunned.

“That good, hey?” You grinned, unabashed, mile-wide. I found it in me to smile – it appeared like a spluttered exclamation, morphing my raised eyebrows into something more amiable.

“Yes… wow… why?”

“I don’t get invited to enough parties. I decided to make my life one beautiful party. Do you approve?” Those first two sentences sounded like something that had been prepared for a long time but had not come out quite like the most perfect version that you had designed, but I feel in love with the idea anyway. Of course – the kid’s not me, I thought. Rather, the kid is my parallel. I’ve built him, but he’s turned himself over, and on the other side of the coin is his soul’s version of myself – the sun rather than the moon. But no – he was supposed to reflect me. Not the sun and moon, then, for I was a head taller anyway – I had created daylight from my own intensity, from books and darkness. I had made myself a day for my night. My heart swelled at the thought.

You made me come out with you, that night, into the town centre. You couldn’t drink yet, not until late that November, so I wondered what the purpose of it was to be. It turned out that you were to treat it much as I had treat our walk on the moors that Sunday afternoon in January – you were showing me lights in the dark, beauty in the uncouth. I had only ever shown you beauty in beautiful things. Neon frightened me, and I hated the jaundiced way the amber streetlights made the things look, the way they bathed the groups of young men in their angry unsaturation. I didn’t like being shouted at, but you grinned at me. You were already drunk. You took me to a park at ten, and we sat on the fountain, and you tried to explain to me why violence was perhaps the most beautiful thing of all. I didn’t immediately and wholeheartedly agree, but finally you were trying to teach me something philosophical. All that you had changed was your attire, and with it you had become louder, larger, more noticeable to everyone else, and now it meant that you were teaching me, and I wondered for a moment, tired and cold, whether the person who wears the most black is automatically the student of the other. Still, I loved to watch you. You turned to me, breath curling out of your mouth into the cold dark air, asked for confirmation of my approval for the second time that day. You asked if I was happy with what you had turned yourself into. I told you that you were the best piece of poetry I had ever composed. You kissed me then, and I accepted it for a few seconds before getting up and walking home, calling behind that I would see you tomorrow on thinking I appeared too hostile.

I saw you the next day, but you were preoccupied. You were dressed in foppish grey and purple, with silver jewellery this time and not gold, looking more like the moon than fire. Almost immediately on my running into you on my way to English you dropped your voice, asked if what you had done had changed anything, said you knew that it had been stupid. I told you that I hoped it hadn’t changed anything, and that I really had to go. At lunch I found you again, and I was the first one to acknowledge that conversation wasn’t flowing as it should have done.

“Where is your newfound enthusiasm? I thought you were living life as a party?”

“Every party has a morning after.”

“A day is not a life.”

“It’s still the morning after.” I looked up from my coffee, felt myself exasperated against my own will. Still, I could not find anything else to say. “Me and my fucking volta, hey?”

“You and your fucking volta.”

It ended there. We continued with our suddenly muted friendship for perhaps two weeks, before the conscious decision was made to give up on trying to talk to each other again. It was made in your lounge as we watched a film, finding little comfort in the expected silence. I leaned over and kissed you again in a fit of frustration, to see if it made things any easier. It did, until you looked me in the eye, which would have been survivable had your hand not been travelling down my stomach at that point, and I recoiled as your fingers found the button on my trousers. I stood up and we ended it right there, within the space of a five-second conversation. I picked my overcoat up and left my best piece of poetry.

A few days later I received an envelope with my handwritten address on it. It was your handwriting – I had become so familiar with it from reading the scribbled verses you used to give me so regularly – and it was from you; a package of poems to me, dated at the top (some in brackets, approximate dates such as ‘Early December’ given), spanning the time from before you found the nerve to approach me to the day after I left your house for the last time. They were predominantly love poems, and while the earlier ones suffered from lack of structure and outpourings that had not been controlled enough to be considered art, the later ones were breathtaking in their skill and emotion, and my heart swelled once more, because it had, after all, been myself who had taught you poetry.