Chapter Text
Friday 19th December 2014
A biting evening wind wafts over the thin sheen of sweat on Matthew’s skin. He bends double, puts his hands on his thighs, squeezes his eyes shut and tries to modulate his breathing. Directly across the street, the gaudy Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens stretches up to the black, cloud-streaked sky, and even though he’s not looking at it, he can feel it looming over him.
He feels sick. He does not want to be sick in Kensington Gardens, which is why he hasn’t yet crossed the road, but it’s the only place nearby where it wouldn’t cause a scene. The street is oppressively clean and absent of bins. He should have stayed inside and gone to the bathroom, but at the time he was leaving he wasn’t thinking about being sick, he was thinking about trying to get out of the stifling heat and catch his breath, which can’t really be done in a toilet stall.
He has a little while, he thinks, before someone comes out to get him. Talitha is the most likely, because she’s always assigned the gruntwork of comfort and consolation. He doesn’t particularly want to talk to her, but he would rather it be her than Edward, whose bracing masculine energy is exactly the thing he doesn’t need. His father is not an option: observing his son’s distress is not within his repertoire. As far as his father is concerned, Matthew simply ceases to exist as a person and becomes a concept, an idea, the second he vacates his line of sight.
His stomach is still churning. The hedgerows across the road are starting to look particularly enticing. He wouldn’t be the only person in the history of London to be sick in a Kensington Gardens hedge, surely, given its proximity to Hyde Park. Hesitantly, he opens his eyes; the sky is still black and the world is still alive around him, groups of people chatting as they stroll by, wrapped up in warm coats and winterwear. He left his coat inside, and the bitter cold already has its claws in him.
He watches a double-decker bus roll to a stop across the street. An old man gets on, taps his Oyster Card, and shuffles to a seat near the front. The bus’s yellow interior lighting looks warm and comfortable. Matthew imagines jogging after him, catching the bus before it pulls away. The rumble and sway of the bus wouldn’t be a problem, since the act of catching it and being carried away from here would instantly cure his upset stomach. Instead he just watches the bus lurch forward and trundle down the road until it turns a corner and disappears from view.
The trilling beep of the pedestrian crossing spurs him into belated action, and he starts to move, crossing the road as fast as he can stand. He heads through the open gate into Kensington Gardens and takes a right, hopping the fence from pavement onto field. The bushes rustle enticingly. He thinks for a moment that he doesn’t feel sick anymore, and then a thick wave of nausea rolls over him and he bends double and throws up the measly amount of food he’d been able to force down his throat in the restaurant. His sinuses clogged with acid, he shudders and gasps, clutching at his stomach until he’s retching emptily. He’d at least had the foresight to shove one of the restaurant’s thick cloth napkins in his pocket before he left, so he wipes his nose and mouth with it, and then his eyes with the heel of his hand. Frost is already glittering over the grass at his feet, and he can see his breath misting in front of him.
All things considered, this could have gone worse. He could have thrown up at the table, for example.
His legs are already aching a little from the awkward squat he’s been forced to adopt, but if he kneels or sits, he’ll leave wet marks on his trousers. He turns his head to look around for a bench. That’s when he sees the man. He’s on the other side of the fence, standing very still with his hands in the pockets of a leather jacket, and he’s looking at Matthew.
“Hi,” he says, and pulls his hand out of his pocket to wave. He’s wearing gloves. His hair is hidden under a grey knitted beanie, and there’s a matching scarf wrapped thickly around his throat. He looks very warm. “You alright there?”
Matthew wipes his mouth again with the back of his hand and then curls his fingers into his palm to hide the fact that they’re shaking. It could be cold or nerves. “I’m fine.”
The man’s head cants a little to one side. Matthew’s mouth tastes sour; he turns his head away and volleys a mouthful of acrid spit into the grass. The man pauses as if in thought, and then takes a very decisive step over the low fence, crunching through the frosty grass underfoot. He swings a backpack off his shoulder, unzips it, roots around for a moment, and emerges with a bottle of water. “Swill it around your mouth a bit. It’ll help with the taste.”
Matthew wonders what the man wants. He wonders if he’s a serial killer. He wonders if the bottle is poisoned. He takes it, unscrews it, and swallows a large mouthful. It’s not a suicidal act, he thinks, because the bottle is obviously not poisoned, and the man is obviously not a serial killer. That would be ludicrous.
He holds the next mouthful for a bit, puffing out his cheeks and sluicing it around his mouth like mouthwash before he spits that out too. The man watches silently.
Matthew wipes his mouth again and holds the bottle out to him, though there’s a little hesitancy to it. If he lent a bottle of water to someone who’d just thrown up, he probably wouldn’t want it back. The man is obviously thinking the same thing, because he grins and shakes his head. “’S alright. Keep it.” His teeth are very straight and very white, and now he’s closer Matthew can see two small silver hoops hugging his left earlobe.
Matthew has a few more small sips, still crouching, and then straightens up. Uselessly, just to have something to do with his hands, he brushes his trousers down, but they’re clean and dry.
“Are you?” the man asks. He’s still watching, shrewdly. “Alright, I mean. You don’t look it.”
Matthew nods. Carelessly, he twists the bottlecap on and off and on and off. “I’m fine. Thank you.”
“Okay.” He doesn’t look or sound convinced, which is irritating. It doesn’t feel good to be seen through by a stranger. “Bad seafood?”
“Something like that.”
The kindness of strangers notwithstanding, Matthew would like the man to leave. On the totem pole of people he’d most to least like to talk to right now, the man is above Edward but below Talitha. That doesn’t mean much: he doesn’t want to talk to anyone. He has another sip of water, feeling it slip coolly down his throat.
A woman’s voice sounds behind him, and Matthew whips his head around. He’s expecting to see Talitha crossing the road, calling his name, but it’s just a stranger and her friend chatting as they pass by. He watches them walk onwards in the same direction that the bus had gone and thinks about running after them.
“Listen,” the man says. He still sounds concerned. When Matthew turns back to him he’s folded his arms over his chest and appropriated a deep frown. “I know you’ve said you’re alright a good few times by this point, but to be frank you just don’t look it. And I’d feel bad about just leaving you.”
Matthew sort of wants to bash his head against a nearby tree. He sort of wants to scream. “I’m really fine. Don’t feel bad about leaving me.” He tries to pull the sleeves of his blazer down over his chilly fingers but it doesn’t work: it’s tailored. He usually likes his clothes too big for him. Then he asks out of pure curiosity, “What would you do if I said I wasn’t alright?”
The man’s face shifts: his mouth – full, defined lips – ticks up at one corner. He has blonde stubble, but the flecks of hair escaping from under his hat are black. “Sit with you for a bit, I think,” he says slowly. “Talk, if you wanted to talk. Do you want to talk?”
“Not really.”
“Then I’d just sit with you.”
“Where?”
“Bench.” He points to one, a little way through the trees. For a moment they stand in silence and look at it.
“I’m okay,” Matthew says. “I’m out for dinner with my family.”
“Ah.” The man nods as if this explains everything. “That’ll do it, yeah.”
“It’s not their fault.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“I don’t really like steak tartare, but I ordered it.”
“Why?”
“I’m nervous.”
“Just – in general?”
Matthew considers telling him about the performance. It’s not a recital, just an end-of-term Christmas thing in the Fleming Concert Hall, so there really shouldn’t be any pressure. But at dinner they’d barely started on their entrée when his father had announced, with a tone that implied he thought he was being generous, that he’d delayed his evening flight up to Aberdeen to tomorrow morning so that he’d be able to stay to see him play.
“Yeah,” Matthew says. “In general. Malaise, you know?”
The man laughs, his teeth flashing white again. “Sure,” he says, and then, as if it’s part of the same thought, “How old are you?”
“Nineteen.” Matthew blinks. “Twenty.”
“Which is it?”
“Twenty. It was just in June. I keep forgetting.”
“Right.” He seems to be considering something; indecision manifests on his face as a frown. Then he sticks a hand back in his backpack, rifles around a bit, and emerges with a stack of business cards. Fumbling a little to extract one from the pile with his gloves still on, he slides it from the pile and holds it out. “This is probably going to sound weird, but I’m a photographer and I’d like to take some photos of you, if you’re interested.”
Matthew eyes the card. It’s black and the text is dark and embossed, so he can’t read it in the low light. “Photos?” he asks. “Of me?”
“Yep,” the man says with a bright nod. “Photos of you. Only if you’re interested.” He pinches the card between finger and thumb. “Have a look at my portfolio first – my website’s on here. And then if you are interested, just shoot me an email, any time. If you’re not, just don’t email, no hard feelings.”
This is such a bizarre non sequitur that it takes Matthew a few seconds to properly parse it all. He wants to ask again, just to make sure: Photos? Of me? He knows it’d be rude not to take the card, but he still moves hesitantly as he reaches for it. His touch slips briefly over the plush knit of the man’s glove before he takes it.
“Matthew?” That is Talitha; he recognises the way her accent curls around his name. Out of her mouth, his name sounds more like Matteo. He turns around to see her striding over the street towards the entrance to Kensington Gardens, bundled up in a long coat from which the flowing skirt of her dark blue evening gown spills like a waterfall. She is sickeningly gorgeous, even overlit by the harsh streetlamp. “Come inside, amore. You will catch a cold.”
She pays the man no attention, stopping on the other side of the fence. Two of them on one side and her on the other: she won’t dirty her shoes in the grass. But she holds out a hand to him. “Come inside, Matteo,” she says again. Her skin is smooth and brown, and in the London cold she looks like she’s been cut and pasted from a beach in Sicily. She beckons; the jewels on her fingers and around her wrist glint.
Matthew takes a few shuffling steps towards her, and then over the fence. On pavement again, he glances back at the man. “Thanks,” he says. “For the water.”
“No problem. Good luck with your malaise.”
As they wait for the light to turn green on the pedestrian crossing, Talitha’s cool hand curls around his. She shepherds him across the road as if fearful he might somehow get lost on the short journey back inside. The Royal Albert Hall towers over them, impassive; she leads him back through the lobby and towards Coda, the restaurant where they’d been having dinner. Usually Coda is for ticketholders only; usually Coda does not accept last-minute walk-ins. ‘Usually’ does not apply to the Bellamys.
As they near their table, Matthew wants to dig in his heels; he wants to force Talitha to drag him like a screaming toddler. He wonders what would happen to the world if he threw a tantrum, smashed glasses, knocked plates to the floor. But he sits down, and Talitha takes her place next to his father and lays her glistening, bejewelled hand over his, and all is normal again.
They don’t talk about it. Matthew’s absence from the table is yet another unsaid thing, but there are looks and he knows them well. Talitha is watching him with undisguised concern. Edward, tall and broad like their father, glances his way now and then. Under the table the toe of his shoe prods Matthew’s calf relentlessly. It’s only because he has a habit of crossing one leg over the other and swinging it back and forth, but he knows what he’s doing. His father has so far looked at him once, as if to check he’s still breathing.
“We’re so excited to see you play, Matteo,” says Talitha. This is the closest anyone will get to acknowledging his disappearing act: the tacit reminder that they will, all of them, be present for the performance. Matthew watches her thumb rove back and forth over his father’s wrinkled knuckle. She is the worst sort of stepmother: she’d come into his life too late and too young to be any kind of mother to him at all, but still she acts as if one day he’ll change his mind and run weeping into her arms. For a while she had suggested with a great spirit of optimism that he and Edward could call her Mum. Neither of them picked it up; she stopped suggesting it by the time she and their father had tied the knot.
Matthew nods. It’s only when the waiter returns with their mains that he remembers his hands are full: he leans down to put the half-empty water bottle on the floor and nudges it under his seat with his foot. In his other hand is the man’s business card. He doesn’t want to lift it up to read it, but the embossed text is thick under the pad of his thumb, so he tries to feel it out like Braille, tracing the letters over and over. By the time they’re finished eating he has it sussed: Dominic Howard.
*
For the performance he plays In dulci jubilo from Liszt’s Weihnachtsbaum Suite and an arrangement of Borodin’s In the Steppes of Central Asia. The Liszt is a last-minute addition to sub in for Theo Vandermeer, who has glandular fever and can’t make it; everyone else only plays one piece. This should make him feel special, but he doesn’t much like playing Liszt and performs it with technical aptitude but little passion. The Borodin was, at least, his own choice.
One of the first-years plays a jazzy, arpeggiated arrangement of Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, which he hates, but it at least stands out in the sense that it is hateful enough for him to have an opinion. Everything else is boring. When he’s not at the piano he has his hand in his pocket, thumb still tracing the embossed letters on Dominic Howard’s business card. I’m a photographer and I’d like to take some photos of you. Maybe he was a serial killer.
Talitha gushes in the car on the way home as she releases her thick black hair from its chignon. She tells him he played wonderfully, beautifully, incredibly, better than all the others combined. He is so talented, she tells him; isn’t that right, she asks his father. His father grunts. Matthew presses his forehead to the cool darkened glass and watches the leafy promenade of Cromwell Gardens scroll by. By the time they’re passing Harrods a minute later, the car has subsided into a silence so heavy it feels viscous. Matthew shuts his eyes.
Home, at least one of them, is a six-floor townhouse in Mayfair. The lower ground floor is a self-contained apartment which his father graciously bequeathed to Edward when he turned twenty-one a few years ago; most of the house’s six other bedrooms lie empty, lending a strangely hollow feeling to the place, which has not been improved even after having been meticulously and thoroughly decorated for Christmas by his father’s near-invisible squadron of staff. Growing up, it was not for the Bellamy children to hang ornaments on a Christmas tree: instead they would go out to dinner at the Ledbury or Pied à Terre one day in early December and return to find the whole house thickly coated in festivity – a festooned tree in every living space, garlands coiling around the bannisters, stockings hanging by the first-floor fireplace.
Edward leans over and gives his shoulder a shake when the car rolls to a stop. Matthew could easily have sat here all night where it’s warm and comfortable and quiet, but instead he slips out of the car, yawning and scrubbing at his eyes as he troops inside, where he immediately hangs up his outerwear and starts the trek upstairs. His bedroom is on the top floor. There’s a lift, but his father is taking it up to his office and he’d rather not share it with him.
When he finally makes it to the top, Talitha’s black Sphynx cat is curled up at the foot of his bed. Amaretto is a recent addition to the house and none of them except Talitha like him much, but for some reason he likes Matthew’s room best. Amaretto lifts his horrible wrinkled head when Matthew opens the door, blinking at him balefully. Matthew flips his middle finger at him and sheds the suit he’d been wearing. Everything lands in a pile in the corner of the room as he changes into a large jumper and a pair of sweatpants. His room is messy but not dirty, and there’s a sense of order in the chaos, at least in his mind.
Matthew grabs his Macbook from his desk and sits down heavily on the bed, hoping to jostle the cat into moving somewhere else. As if he’s being deliberately stubborn, as if he even knows what stubbornness is, Amaretto ignores him entirely.
He pulls up Valentina Lisitsa’s performance of Rachmaninoff’s first sonata. Even through his laptop’s tinny speakers, it is breathtaking. It’s been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, and a significant chunk of those views must be his. He’s hunched forward, close to the screen, watching her hands, his own hands miming the key presses in the air, when he feels something square and pointy dig into his hipbone.
“Fucking ow.” He puts his laptop aside, letting the video play softly as he digs around in his pocket for the source: the business card, which he’d stuffed in there on the way home. He’d almost forgotten about it entirely. He regards it for the first time now, chewing his lip. It’s very bare: just the embossed name on the front, shiny against the matte black of the card, and below it the word Photography. He turns it over. On the back, in thin grey lettering: DOM.MEN. It takes him a second to realise that this is the link to the website.
Compelled by sheer curiosity, he types it in with one finger. He presses enter. The website is as dark and minimalist as the business card, just pale text running down the middle of the page. His name, and three links: About, Portfolio, and Contact. Only because it had been mentioned specifically, he clicks Portfolio first.
It’s another long list of text links. The first one reads Hands (November 2014). He clicks it.
Just about the second the page loads, Matthew’s hand scrabbles awkwardly to shove the cursor upwards and close the tab as quickly as he can physically manage, as if he’d been in danger of someone peering over his shoulder and seeing what he was looking at. His heart thuds erratically in his chest; his body feels uncomfortably hot, like someone just rolled his inner thermostat all the way up.
“Okay,” he says under his breath. He doesn’t know what he’d been expecting. Portraiture, maybe; that’s what he’d made it sound like. Except he hadn’t really made it sound like anything, so perhaps that was pure inference on Matthew’s part. That’ll teach him to make assumptions.
His teeth clamp down on the soft flesh on the inside of his cheek. He rolls his tongue around his mouth, opens an incognito tab and types in the website address again. This time when he opens Hands (November 2014) he’s prepared.
The page is sectioned into a grid of photographs. The first on the page is lit with heady chiaroscuro, black shadows and pale highlights, flesh and twisting muscle on a dark background. Matthew’s eyes blur and refocus and the image clarifies into the shape of a man from behind, shirtless, cropped just to the torso. The man is bent at an angle, his arms twisted behind him and held in place with knots of thick black rope; one hand makes a claw, another a fist. The angle and crop and harsh lighting combine to make the image almost unidentifiable as a body at first glance. The next photo is of a throat, tendons sharp, the warm skin beaded with sweat. A man’s hand reaches down from above, fingers curled around the neck, thumb pushing up against the Adam’s apple with enough pressure to divot the skin around it.
Matthew’s hand shifts reflexively to his own neck and he swallows, feeling his throat bob under his fingers. The touch – his own – startles him, and a flush runs from his scalp down to the backs of his calves. He thinks back to the conversation they’d had in Kensington Gardens, if he’d done or said anything that telegraphed that he’d be interested in any of this. He doesn’t think so.
He’s still scrolling, though. The photographs are obscene but never quite explicit. Fingers in mouths, nails clawing into skin. All men. Sometimes – mostly – it’s just a man alone in the shot; other times there are hands reaching around from behind the camera, touching or scratching or intruding into an open mouth.
He goes back to the menu and clicks About. It tells him next to nothing, except that Dominic Howard is a photographer and artist based in London and that enquiries about purchasing prints should be directed to the Contact page. Matthew waggles the mouse around the page as if he might reveal some information that would clarify this situation for him. Had he been joking? Is this all some sort of prank? He hadn’t sounded like he was joking, but Matthew’s always been a pretty terrible judge of character and sometimes gullible to the point of stupidity.
With a surge of irritation, he closes the tab and tosses his laptop aside again. He’d had a whole stack of business cards, hadn’t he? Obviously he just hands them out to everyone he has so much as a conversation with, on the off chance that he comes across some nutter who wants to be tied up and put on the internet for people to gawk at. It’s so absurd that it makes him laugh, which finally jostles Amaretto enough to leap nimbly off the end of his bed and slink out of the room.
“And stay out, you fucker,” Matthew mutters. He slides off his bed and pads out of the room, downstairs a floor, to where one of the bedrooms has been converted into a practice room. A grand piano sits quietly as if waiting for him there.
*
Tom comes back from the bar with a diet coke for himself, a lime and soda water for Dom, and a bag of pork scratchings for them both. He tears the bag open right down the length, spreads it out flat and slides the pile of scratchings into the middle of the table. The Gloucester Arms is weirdly empty for a week before Christmas, but that suits them fine. They’re at their usual table in the back corner and Tom is slouched in his seat feeling sorry for himself while Wonderful Christmastime pumps cheerily from a speaker. This is the second time it’s played since Dom got here.
“Enough about me,” Tom says with a sigh. He has just experienced, in his words, the worst breakup of his life, and since they sat down a few hours ago he’s talked almost incessantly about it, even after prefacing his greeting with a warning that he didn’t want to talk about it at all. Dom doesn’t mind; he’d liked Grace well enough, but he was Tom’s friend first and it feels right to get the story from him before he hears it from someone else.
“Mate, if you’ve got more in you, lay it on me,” Dom says with a genial shrug.
“I really don’t want to talk about it,” Tom says with solemn finality. He does seem to mean it this time. “Have you got any shoots lined up?”
“Probably not until the new year, at this point,” Dom says. “Freddie said he’d come back and do another one with me but I don’t know, I’m getting kind of bored of, like, muscles. I just feel like it’s kind of passé.” He crunches on a salty scratching and chases it with a mouthful of his drink. “I got more business cards printed.”
“Wow, really? Back to scouting?”
“Well, if it ain’t broke. I actually gave one to someone on the way here. He was sicking up in a hedge.”
“Sexy.”
“Well, kind of, yeah. He had potential.”
Dom decides not to say anything about the boy’s age. The truth is that he feels a little skeevy about it, and even skeevier that he’s been thinking of him as ‘the boy’. A few years ago he’d made the mistake of believing someone who’d told him he was twenty-two, only for him to show up to the shoot with a fake ID and a school uniform stuffed in his backpack – his tie had been hastily shoved in at the last minute and was poking out from the almost closed zipper. He’d kicked the kid out immediately and felt so thoroughly perverted that he hadn’t scouted anyone for months after. People tend not to lie when he asks their age out of the blue because they don’t have a reason to, but the boy in Kensington Gardens had looked very young. He’s fastidious about record-keeping, though, and the model release is dependent on having provided valid ID.
He supposes he’s falling into some fairly unfortunate stereotypes, and wonders if it’s because he recently turned thirty-seven, which feels about a thousand years older than thirty-six, maybe because he can no longer conceivably say he’s in his mid-thirties. Gay men and their penchant for young, slender boys, or something like that – but he’s not some ancient perv. Sure, there’s a whole teenager, almost old enough to drink, between their ages, but it’s not as if he’s going to fuck him. He’s going to take some photos and send him on his way.
Actually, he’s not going to do anything if the boy doesn’t email, so he needs to stop thinking about him until it happens, if it ever does. Probably never. A lot of people don’t email, and even the people who do sometimes get scared off by the consent form and release agreement. Actually, he speculates that a lot of the people he’s handed his business card to probably don’t even look on the website, which is fair enough. But there’s something about this boy that makes Dom cautiously hopeful that he’ll email. Something about the shrewd, pointy face, the cool blue eyes and small mouth, and his hands. He’d noticed his hands almost immediately: the long fingers; the clean, short nails. Hands that don’t work. Hands that don’t get dirty.
The rest of the way towards the Gloucester Arms he’d been thinking about him: how he’d looked almost feral when he was half-crouched on the ground; the sharpness of his jaw when he turned his head and spat thickly onto the grass. It was raw, dirty, disgusting, in sharp contrast to the tidiness of his tailored suit and neat dark hair. He’d been strange aside from all that. The woman who came out to collect him had been odd too. Not in herself, but as a piece of the puzzle. Drop-dead gorgeous and dressed like she was about to attend a premiere or the opera, which had made the boy’s suit look less absurd. Matteo, she’d called him, but he sounded English when he spoke. Not that English people can’t be called Matteo, but she’d had an accent. She’d called him amore too, but there’d been an odd stiltedness between them that makes Dom think they weren’t lovers, even though he’d seen her reach for his hand as they crossed the road. Even that had been sort of pastoral.
Dom sighs and resolves to put the boy out of his mind for now. He resolves, also, to stop thinking of him as ‘the boy’. This will be easy, he tells himself, because if he’s not thinking about him then there’s no need to be giving him any kind of epithet at all.
“Sicking up in a hedge isn’t sexy, Dom, you’re just a freak,” Tom says. He’s looking at Dom wryly. “So do you have a new project in mind?”
“Projects depend on the people. But I have a few things I wanna try out.”
“Like?”
“I’m not saying it. It’s like a birthday wish. If I say it then it’ll never happen.”
Tom rolls his eyes. “Well, I still think you should film a shoot. Galleries fucking love a film. I’m not saying someone else needs to be there to film it – you could just put a camera on a tripod and let it run. I think it’d be cool.”
Dom shakes his head. Tom’s suggested doing this a few times, and while Dom thinks it’d be an interesting curio, he spends an awful lot of time during shoots carefully positioning people, moving them around. He thinks that to see him there holding a camera and poking and prodding at his subject would remove the heady sense of constructed spontaneity which has always been important to him. The absence of the controlling figure, the one who tied the knots. “I think me being in it would take some of the magic out. I’m not even sure how I feel about my hands being in some of the photos I just did, and that was meant to be the point of them.”
“I really liked those, though,” Tom says. “I liked how painful you made it look. There’s a lot of, like, weird tenderness in your stuff. But then the ones with your hands, they’re so violent.”
They haven’t really talked about Hands yet – Tom is often his sounding board for projects, but he’d been going through a rough patch with Grace at the time Dom was shooting, and Dom hadn’t wanted to bother him. Now he’s wishing he had. “Really? Violent?”
“Yeah. I dunno how else to explain it. Like, the one with your fingers in his mouth, the way your thumb’s gripping his chin and he’s kind of drooling? It’s so gross. It’s cool. Did you not mean for it to be like that?”
“Well…” Mollified, Dom has another pork scratching. “I wanted it to be gross, definitely, but the idea was for the hands to just be, like, intrusive. Getting in the way of something clean like his throat or his back or his mouth.”
“Right.” Tom considers this, nods slowly. “Well, yeah, I can see that. I just read it a bit more straightforwardly, I guess.”
Dom sits back in his seat, frowning in thought. Fetish photography, erotica, whatever you want to call it – he’d sort of tripped into it backwards while trying to do something interesting. He likes it, more than he’d like doing any other kind of photography, but sometimes he feels like he’s fallen into a rut, like he just takes pictures of the same things over and over and calls it a new project. Hands is the first time in a while that he’s actually tried to do something new. For Tom to misread it suggests that maybe he didn’t think it through enough.
He’s known Tom since uni, which is why they both like to go out of their way to drink in their old regular now and then, even though Dom lives in Islington and Tom lives in Hackney. They’d both gone to the London College of Communication for uni. Dom, getting additional financial aid from a bursary scheme, had felt hopelessly out of place with everything and everyone until he met Tom at a Film Society movie night and they hit it off. From second year onwards, they’d shared a ropey flat in Shepherd’s Bush and were constantly in each other’s ways. Even after they’d graduated it made sense to keep living together since they both got places on master’s programmes at the Royal College of Art. They stayed flatmates until Tom hit the big leagues when Channel 4 funded his year-long documentary project, Alight Here, which followed three London bus drivers on night shifts over twelve months. With the influx of cash and promise of further job opportunities, he’d moved in with his then-girlfriend Rachel, forcing Dom to find somewhere on his own. He’d bounced around several places before he settled in the flat he has now in Islington.
It’s hard to believe, sometimes, that he’s known Tom for almost twenty years. It doesn’t feel like it’s been twenty years since uni. It feels, sometimes, like five, and other times like a hundred. He swipes his fingers through the condensation on his glass.
“I do think I need to do something different,” he says haltingly. “Like, properly different. I’ve just been shitting out the same photos of blokes tied up and bent over for a while now. I feel like I’ve been in such a fucking rut.”
“Yeah, it’s sellout behaviour, mate,” Tom says, grinning. He’s joking, but Dom gives him a withering stare all the same. “I dunno. New year, new me – isn’t that what the kids are saying on Instagram? Just start fresh in 2015. God knows I will be. D’you know, she actually said to me that she thinks I’m stuck in the past? What the fuck does that mean?”
This signifies that the conversation will shift back to Grace and the breakup. Dom doesn’t mind.
*
The journey home is long. He’d been last-minute Christmas shopping in Oxford Circus before he met up with Tom, so it wasn’t especially out of the way, but Islington is almost an hour away by bus. He used to like long bus journeys since they gave him an excuse to sketch, but he hasn’t drawn anything in ages, so he just sits tucked between an elderly woman and a man with a squirming child on his lap and listens to Evil Empire from start to finish.
Off the bus again, it’s bitterly cold and he has to burrow his nose into the thick knit of his scarf as he walks back to his flat. It’s cold inside too. He makes a lot of noise as he comes through the door: dropping his backpack, slamming the door, kicking his boots off, hoping that some or all of it will wake up the man he thinks is still sleeping in his bed. But when he pokes his head around his bedroom door, he’s still lying there, unmoving.
This would be a whole lot easier if Dom remembered his name. Another New Year’s resolution: no more fucking men and forgetting what their names are by the time he’s turfing them out of his flat. He is way too fucking old for this shit.
He stomps over loudly, making sure to let the bedroom door swing and slam behind him, and sits down heavily on the bed, expecting one of those final noises to rouse him. None of them do. Dom reaches out, grips his shoulder and gives him a firm shake. “Hey. You awake?”
That does it, finally. The man rolls over, bleary-eyed. “Mmh. Hey.” He smiles. “What time is it?”
“Half eleven.”
“Perfect. Good time for another round, yeah?” The man stretches luxuriously. Dom thinks this is a little too indulgent given the time, unless he wants to pay for a taxi home. He straightens up a little, shifting close to Dom with his lips in an arrangement that suggests he’s aiming for a kiss. Dom leans back out of his way. “What’s up, babe?”
Babe. Hadn’t he said last night not to call him that? “Not to be rude,” Dom says rudely, “but you’re starting to overstay your welcome a bit.”
It takes the man a few seconds to work out what that means, and then his sleepy grin morphs into a frown. “You’re seriously kicking me out at half eleven at night?”
Dom thinks about presenting a defence. He’s not in the mood to talk to or fuck a stranger. He wants to sleep in his own bed unencumbered by someone else’s body. He just can’t be arsed with this right now. Instead he says, “Yeah, pretty much.”
The man gapes at him in silence. Then he flips the blanket off himself and scrambles out of bed, stooping to pick up his clothes from where they’d been casually thrown all over the floor the night before. If he really wanted to be an arsehole, Dom would point out that he’s been overstaying his welcome ever since he didn’t subject himself to a walk of shame in the early hours of this morning, but he keeps his mouth shut and just sits where he is, watching the man shove on his shoes and clomp down the long, thin corridor between his bedroom and the living room. Dom waits until he hears the front door slam, and then flops onto his back, drawing both hands over his face.
“You need to fucking grow up,” he says aloud into the meat of his palms, and bites the heel of his hand just so he can feel something sting.
He’d been tired on the bus all the way home, but right now he feels unpleasantly awake, which is just his fucking luck. He might as well do something with this second wind, so he drags a hand through his hair and stands up, striding back into the living room. The flat is small and old but extremely charming: a converted Victorian with crown moulding and three large floor-to-ceiling sash windows that look out onto a residential street and a children’s park. The ceilings are tall enough that the living room has been split-levelled, four steps leading up to the platform containing his tiny kitchenette in the corner.
Dom is a fastidiously tidy person, but the limited space means that everything starts to look cluttered after a while, and he kind of likes that if for no other reason than it portrays something about him. A starving artist type, which he’s always thought was sort of oxymoronically glamorous. An in-built shelf holds a cluttered collection of books – Sontag, Barthes, Berger, Benjamin – and a scattered stack of records and CDs. There’s a shabby wooden upright piano pushed against the wall next to the small dining table: it’s been in here for several months, held in storage for an on-again off-again fling who simply never came to pick it up after they stopped seeing each other for reasons Dom can’t really remember now. It hasn’t been touched in ages.
He troops up to the little kitchenette to get himself a glass of water, and then shuffles back down the corridor towards the studio. It had originally been advertised as a ‘multi-use room’; his landlord couldn’t legally call it a bedroom despite the size because it doesn’t have any windows, but it’s perfect for what he needs. In the corner of the studio, next to a desk coated in photographic clutter (he prefers to edit on his laptop, which by virtue of being a laptop can be used while he’s lying on the sofa or in bed) is a stack of boxes. He drags one labelled FIRST YEAR in black sharpie over to a pile of cushions on the floor and sits down to poke through it.
His first year at LCC had been strange and disjointed, and a lot of the stuff he’d done back then had become embarrassing to him in his late twenties. Now, he flips through project books and prints and thinks that some of it doesn’t look half bad. This is the thing about retrospect: it’s not a permanent state. The further you get away from something, the more changes of heart you seem to have. At uni, he thought he was being transgressive and edgy; in his twenties, he cringed at the idea of some naïve kid abiding so closely by the dictionary definition of ‘transgressive’ that he’d simply fallen into another box; now, older and wiser, he has fondness for the version of himself that had approached everything with overbearing sincerity, that hadn’t yet been swallowed by cynicism.
At the time he’d been really into Nan Goldin – he has The Ballad of Sexual Dependency somewhere on the shelf – and he can see her influence clear as day in the sexy, saturated photos of young people smoking and drinking and thinking they’d be young forever. At the time he’d been that annoying fucker with a camera on every single night out, looking for moments of brutal realism to make warm and soft by standing in just the right place to take a photo: he finds a stack of photographs of people throwing up after too much to drink, the fuzz from the disposable camera he’d used making everything warm and almost tender. (He thinks, again, about the Kensington Gardens boy.)
By about halfway through first year, the novelty of intimately photographing people while drunk or high or otherwise vulnerable had worn off. He’d done a lot of self-portraits, which he really doesn’t want to look at now, since the baby fat he’d still been clinging to up until his early twenties had given even his serious portraits a trace of bizarre comedy, like a toddler in a business suit. He remembers coming back from a night out with blood running down his chin from a split lip he’d received in a scuffle outside a bar, and rushing to take a photo of himself in the bathroom mirror. When he’d showed that photo for critique, another student, Sophie Hallan, had accused him of ‘glamourising self-harm’. He’d had a long, furious debate with her in the middle of a seminar, where he’d pointed out several times that it wasn’t self-harm to get punched square in the mouth by a drunk fucker because they’d been arguing over something he’d forgotten about by the time fists were flying. Her argument was that it didn’t matter what context the photo had, because all people were seeing of it was the blood on his face. He’d raised an objection to this on the grounds that anyone who sees someone with a split lip and thinks it’s self-harm is simply too stupid to deserve an opinion.
It was after the self-harm argument that Jude had first shown an interest in him. He’d asked him to stay back after the seminar; Dom had expected some sort of reprimand for dragging out the argument, but instead he’d been supportive and even complimentary. Jude had told him, leaning against the desk, that this was the first time he’d actually paid attention to him since he’d started teaching him that year, maybe even the first time he’d noticed him at all. With retrospect Dom knows it was negging, but he can grudgingly accept that it was a good fucking neg. Very tactical. “Controversy looks good on you, Howard,” Jude had told him as he shepherded him out of the seminar room. He had a habit of calling everyone by their surnames, so when he’d followed that up by saying, “It’s Dominic, right?” it had felt inordinately special.
So he’d gone off and thought of other ways to be controversial. What, he’d asked himself, was more controversial than violence? The only answer was sex. His next project for Jude’s class was a series of photographs of men asleep in his bed, one each night for a whole month, sprawled in his cheap Ikea duvet cover. No faces, nothing identifying, but the paraphernalia of obviously gay sex around them: used condoms, bottles of lube, occasionally sex toys. He’d called the project Thirty Days of Self-Harm. When Jude asked the class if they had any comments to make, Sophie Hallan had been satisfyingly quiet and someone else had muttered, “Can’t say what I’m thinking or I’ll get kicked out for homophobia.” Dom had ridden that high for days.
He’s still kind of fond of Thirty Days of Self-Harm. It’s the first time he remembers ever really saying anything with his photography, even if what he was saying was a deliberately antagonistic and attention-seeking combination of ‘fuck you in particular, Sophie Hallan’ and ‘Jude Fletcher, I want you to bend me over and fuck me’. The Goldin influence is still there in the cluttered spaces and casual intimacy, but it’s probably the first instance of having done something that was properly his, the beginning of a style.
He’d hoped that filching through his uni stuff might get him in touch with the things that had enthused him in the past, but instead he just finds himself wishing himself back to an easier, more straightforward time in his life. The thing about getting older is that you can’t ever really go back.
Dom dumps the project book he’d been holding back into the box, clambers out of the pile of pillows, and drags himself to bed, which still smells like a stranger. New year, new me. Fuck that.