Pictures

I was looking at a man who wanted a bondage slave for hot nights in leather and lycra. His words drew pictures of whips and straps which streaked across the page to the Libran who wanted to travel to the outer zone with a passionate Sagittarian. I was looking at a blond man who said he was tall and attractive and loved to work on his body. He said he was Adonis. He was looking for Eros.

I was looking for you in those pages. I was hoping to see you folded between the lines, staring out from bold type looking for me. Dark hair, green eyes, fair skin. I know what I like. I hadn’t seen you for two weeks, so I was searching for you there. Drawing pictures of you with other people’s words. I was tracing the outline of your face through the paragraphs of black ink, lying in shadows beneath the words. You seemed like a shadow then.

My memory of you was like a shadow. I held it close to me as I waited on the mosaic tiled bench for the number five tram. I let your shadow fall between me and the words as I stretched the paper between my fists to shield my hopes from a bitter wind. It swept down low over the tram tracks. Rushed along the thin silver streaks in the bitumen to disappear in a point over the next hill. I held the pages out across the mosaic tiles. They chased each other over the seat in paisley curves and arabesques, but their colours held no brilliance for me. After you had gone, I saw the world through a filter of black and white. There was no more colour, only light and shade. The mosaic tiles on the bench where I would wait were only segmented blocks wedged into a concrete slab. Once I chose colours for you from their rainbow palettes and gave you a different one each day.

I gave you green for the time your eyes locked into mine across the sea of shoppers hurrying up and down the street. Green for the pools of light like shallow water, as though you had emerged from the sea like a merman.

You were like a merman, so slender and tall. I watched you drift through the doorway and hover around plate glass windows with tiny lights that hung in the air like stars. You stopped to watch me move through the crowd of Christmas shoppers and I pretended not to notice. I pretended to lose myself in Christmas windows dressed like an English winter. But I knew you were there. I knew you were watching me, tracing my steps along the pavement with questions of me. I placed my feet carefully so as not to disturb your thoughts. The bricks in the paving swept away from me in an arc that curved to my right, leading me to you. It seemed that all of the shapes in the world led me to you. A tram passed between us then like a bright green ship drifting through an ocean of bodies. And when it was gone, so were you.

You gave me burgundy and called it crimson and then I found a crimson tile at the centre of the paisley curves on the bench. That was your tile. I saved it for you, to give to you another day. But then you avoided me, so I never had a chance. That day, the day of crimson and burgundy, I found you out amongst the blazers and jackets of menswear and I asked you – I had so many questions, but I asked you instead for a crimson jumper. You showed me burgundy and I bought the more expensive one. And then as you were folding the jumper in layers of tissue paper, smoothing it out against the zigzag grains of the timber counter, I applied for a credit card. Then I had to keep coming back, you see. I had to make payments. Keep the balance clear.

After you gave me burgundy, you disappeared whenever I came close. I knew you were avoiding me. I knew, because I’d see you disappear between the silk shirts and linen trousers and all I could find of you was the scent of sandalwood as it lingered somewhere amongst the floral prints.

I used to draw pictures of you in the sand and then wait for you to emerge from under the white curled lips of the waves. I’d draw your face over and over in a series of repetitions like a film sequence framing the ocean, and then I’d climb the rocky outcrop at the end of the beach and wait for the tide to come in. I’d wait for the waves to push their frayed edges up along the sand and drag the pictures of you back into the foamy bubbles. And when the ocean had crawled back down again into the hollows of the deep blue, I’d take a number fourteen bus back over the hills to my parents’ brick mansion in the suburbs. To my mother trying her apron around her waist, rearranging doilies and teasing out their lacy frills over the polished mahogany furniture. To my father resting in his Jason recliner throne, flipping through the television channels and spitting darts over the proliferation of poofs, faggots and queens.

I told my mother about you, one morning, as I stretched out across the laminated emptiness of her kitchen benches. I told her about the letter. The one I sent to you folded up in lavender and sealed in a rice paper envelope. I had to send the letter, you see, after two years, I had to let you know that there was an invisible string between us which you tightened whenever I saw you. That’s why I wrote to you and signed the letter ‘D’. Enclosed my phone number so that you would have it.

That morning, in the kitchen, I was waiting for your call. I told my mother that I was waiting. That you would call soon. She smiled like she knew too. Like she knew something in the faraway recesses of her memory. She kissed my forehead and called me her little Dejan. I’m still her little boy. Her little Dejan. She smoothed the hair out of my eyes and combed back the orange lick between her fingers. She said she hoped I would look after myself while they were away. I was driving them to the airport that evening for their flight back to the homeland. My mother said I should forget you. She told me to find another boy. She said she would ask her mother for a dream when she got back to their village. I said I would wait for you to call first.

You see, deep down I knew what you must have been feeling. When you finally called and then denied ever having any knowledge of me, ever having seen me, then I knew that you must have been denying something else too. I had this image of you, the merman, etched out in my mind. In my picture of you, you were always returning to the sea. Or else I imagined you coming from there, from under the white curled lips of the waves when I would sit by the ocean on weekends and draw pictures of you in the sand. But when you called, I could not fit this voice to your image. I could not draw you together, the two of you, the merman drifting past shop windows and Christmas decorations and the voice with the broad accent who thought my letter was from one of the girls in college.

This voice, your voice that shot through the electric cables across the outskirts of the city, it drew pictures in the dark of your girlfriend. The one with short blonde hair and linen dresses. You just came from there, you said. You have a girlfriend, you said. But I didn’t know. You see, when I searched out your details, your life, your history – when I assumed the voice of a telephone researcher and called you at work under the guise of conducting a cancer survey – I didn’t ask about a girlfriend. I didn’t think it would be that way.

You were always watching me. Standing in the doorway, framed by the windows of the mannequins dressed in double-breasted suits. I’d see you there looking out into the sea of shoppers, looking for me as I sat on the mosaic bench and chose coloured tiles for you. I moved my studio to the tram-stop bench and I’d sketch out posters for the arts and the festivals and the circus, and somehow you always found your way onto the page. You were always emerging from the shadows of my designs and my clients could never work it out. They started to wonder why this image of you kept appearing from behind the masks of a Greek tragedy or from within the gaiety of a festival crowd decked out in ribbons and banners and flags. They thought I’d begun to signature my work with cameos of you, like the way Alfred Hitchcock cameoed in his films. I gave you cameos in my life.

But then the pictures didn’t come so easily. Not since the letter. Not since your phone call and the girlfriend. Not since I promised never to contact you again. I’d scribble on the corners of the pages. I’d trace circles and swirls of black ink and there was never anything more. No faces on the beach, under the waves, hidden beneath letters and words. There was no more space under the lines.

I waited for the number five tram, looking to see if you might drift through the doorway once again. Just by chance. Step out amongst some stray elm leaves twirling in spirals in the wind. I ran my finger across the broken surface of the tiles, let the cold press up against my skin. I folded the paper, leaving lonely hearts layered between the sheets. I stepped up into the tram, into a rush of hot air blowing out from the doorway.

The tram tunnelled through the city of classical buildings and elm trees spotted with fairy lights. I pressed my forehead up against the window and watched the buildings rush past in a multi-coloured blur of doors and mouldings overlaid with posters and signs and advertising. The buildings gradually flattened out into the vast expanse of the suburbs. We passed by rows and rows of wide flat houses with prefab gardens and Japanese cars in the driveway. I was watching the silver lines of the tram tracks converge at the point where the road curved into the base of the hills. I thought of my parents back in the homeland and how far you were from them.

At night I’d climb the stairs and let the darkness invade my body. With my parents gone, the house was wide and flat. The silence invaded the corners of the joints and the seals in the window. I’d lie back in the darkness and watch for you in the shadows. I’d watch the glint of metallic blue in the corner of the room, a slab of colour fluorescing in the dark. I bought you a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and kept it for the day you would ask me. I kept it there still, tied up in a ribbon flecked with silver and pink. To match your name. Pink. I left it there, sitting diagonally on the corner of the dresser. Just in case.

That night, I must have been lying in the dark for hours. A knock at the front door resounded through the empty spaces of the house, reverberated against the stair well to wake me from my dreams. The neon figures by the side of my bed told me that it was midnight. Midnight and someone kept knocking.

Above the stairwell, there’s a tall window like a viewing deck that looks out onto the street below. I could see you pounding at the door, shuffling with your feet as you waited for me to answer. It was your car in the driveway. It was your Renault, clean and white. But you’d left the door open and the engine running. The headlights were curved like sad eyes. They flooded triangles of light onto the bitumen in a yellow haze that turned the street opaque.

You knocked once more and then all was silent. I hurried through the darkness, reaching for the brass handle of the door. I knew why you had come. I’d been waiting.

I opened the door and stepped out into the cold night. The street was silent. Empty. I looked for you but you were not there. I stood in the space where you were, but you had gone, and all I could see were the outlines of the trees.