Six Feet From a Rat

The greater the romance, the bigger the bruise?

Great romances come with bruises. It’s part of the deal. Unless you want to be mediocre, and who wants that?

‘Let’s play a game,’ he said, a year or so in. ‘I’ll try to destroy you. You try to destroy me.’

He loved Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He thought it was fun. Aspirational.

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Let’s see how long we can spend tearing each other apart, then split up.’

He was being serious. I don’t remember agreeing, but somehow found myself playing anyway.

Like I said. Great romances come with bruises.

A week after we meet we have our first date.

Except, it’s not a date. Not really. Not in the ordinary, conventional let’s-go-for-dinner-or-catch-a-movie sense. But then, who wants to be ordinary?

Not us. A week in, and we’ve already convinced ourselves that what we have is special. It’s called lovebombing, but I’d only learn about that later. At the time I just thought it meant that we were supposed to be together, it was written in the stars.

Burton and Taylor. Kurt and Courtney. Sid and Nancy. Great romances come with bruises.

All that would come later, though. Now it’s a Sunday afternoon and I’m going round to see him at his rented flat in the East End of London. Later, he will tell me that his street is connected to Jack the Ripper in some way. He will gesture vaguely at a yard right next door and mutter something about one of the victims being found right there.

I’m not sure it’s true. We have Google, now, and when I look up his address the nearest thing I can find that’s related to the Ripper is that shortly before she died, one of the women was seen sheltering in the doorway of a pub on his street.

But that’s where he lives. Ghosts, legends. Dead women. The Krays. The pub in which Ronnie shot dead a member of rival gang — The Richardsons — is a stone’s throw away.

In London, you’re never further than six feet from a rat.

I arrive a little late. I ring his doorbell, but there’s no answer so I ring again. I call him, as this is in the days before text messaging and we’re all still using our voice. Nothing.

I wait outside on the street for the best part of an hour. At least. Possibly much, much more.

Why did I do that? Ring his doorbell, sporadically, feeling increasingly hopeless?

I told you he was beautiful, right? Not in a generic, male-model/film star kind of way. Later, some of my friends would confess they had no idea what I saw in him.

But.

I could give you a list of what I found attractive in a man back then, and I could give you a list of his features, and you know what? They’d be the same list. What’s on the list isn’t important. But if you want to know: pale skinned, but with dark hair, dark eyebrows and striking blue-grey eyes. Shorter than me, a body that is tight, compact. Toned but not intimidatingly so. Some hair on the chest, and on the legs too, which are muscular but again, not intimidatingly so. His ex-girlfriend, who I would later meet, told me she’d once described his arse as being like two boiled eggs in a handkerchief. I didn’t disagree.

But is that reason enough? I never asked why he took over an hour to come to the door, and he never me why I didn’t give up and go home. Perhaps that was the deal. In any case, I wish I had.

But that day, our second date, I don’t give up. I stick it out, and eventually he appears and lets me in.

(Later, with his dick in my mouth, I swear I can taste latex. But I tell myself I’m imagining it, and besides, he’s a bottom. Why would he be the one wearing the condom?

And even if he was, at least he was wearing a condom. One less thing to worry about.

That’s another weird thing, I realise now. That I never asked. Either at the time, or during our relationship, or since. And it’s even weirder that, a quarter of a century on, and after everything he did, it’s still the only question I really have for him.

Although, at the same time I’m glad I never asked. There’s only one answer, really. He’d been out, went home with someone, fucked them or let them fuck him or maybe both. He hadn’t got into his own bed until late, and hadn’t set an alarm for an hour before I was due, as I’d have done.

He’d overslept. Not so dramatic.)

We go upstairs. His flat is grotty, but no worse than some others I’ve ended up in. A lot of brown. Walls the colour of nicotine, carpets the colour of shit. A chipped bathroom suite that’s avocado green. As we ascend to his room he tells me that, when they’d been given the keys by the landlord, they’d had to fight their way through cobwebs to get up the stairs we were now climbing.

He’s done the best he could with his room, though. A single bed in the centre. A wardrobe opposite.

(Why is that all I can remember? Towards the end I would mentally go around the room picturing it all, starting in one corner and ending in another. Committing it to memory. Fat lot of good it did. Was there a dressing table, a desk? There must’ve been, but when I try to picture the rest of the room now I draw a blank. Did he have pictures on the walls? How big were the windows, did he have curtains? What was the view like?

If we’d met now, I’d have endless photographs of course, and they would be called selfies. But this was at the turn of the century. The room exists only in memory.)

For a while, that shitty room — in that grotty flat on that street with its history of death —  becomes my sanctuary. Despite everything, I experience a happiness there, more simple and profound than at any other time in my life, before or since.

We fuck in that room, and sometimes we stay in bed for the whole day, getting up only to go out for drinks or dinner or to meet our friends. We eat toast when we get hungry, drink water or tea when we get thirsty. We talk. We doze.

A simple life. It’s happiness, for a while.

He plays Stereolab when we fuck. He has a CD player. There might have been a portable TV, but I’m not sure.

I’m still aroused when I hear Stereolab. Pavlov’s dogs.

He loops string around the neck of an empty jam jar and attaches it to the radiator. I ask him why, but he won’t tell me.

I still wonder about that, too. So that’s two questions for him.

There’s a hook hanging off the back of the door. Katya comes round once and they laugh about the time she’d fucked Itsy against it. The door, not the hook. Itsy —whose real name was Elina, I think — had broken it.

At the time I imagine Katya had used the hook to tie Itsy’s hands above her head. I wonder whether he expects similar treatment.

I’m right. He does. Later, he tells me I’m boring. I don’t have any fantasies.

I do, though. I want to be loved. But what kind of fantasy is that?

Not the kind he means. He means leather, rubber. Roleplay, bondage. Sadism. Masochism. Don’t I want to try watersports? Just once, to see what it’s like? Don’t I want to wear a leather hood, a zipper over my mouth? A ball-gag? Don’t I want to have him put me in a dog collar and lead me from room to room? How about being shut in a cage, have my dinner fed to me in scraps through the bars or from a metallic bowl?

No. I think. I want to be loved. But within a year he’d convinced me that was the most stupid fantasy of all.

So I was glad I kept my mouth shut.