Chapter 3 #3
I got to know these boys because they’d saunter over to my desk with their fat asses stuffed in their tight trousers and ask me for special favors.
They’d roll a chair over too close to mine, lean back, stretch, let me watch their pecs, their nipples hard under thin white shirts, and ask if an adjustment could be made.
They would beg for it. Could a tweak be made here or there.
It was sick how fast I would say yes. Oh yeah I can tweak a few things for you, Callum, I can insert something right there for you, Jack, I can fuck something—a number, a formula, a date—or not fuck, Ollie, just gently nudge it, soothe it, try a different position until a new total came and everyone left satisfied. “Thanks, mate, I owe you one.”
In moral terms, all I was doing was painting grayness over an already gray canvas of numbers. The companies, firms, and trusts
we worked with were already hell bound and dirty to begin with, so whatever new arrangements I concocted of their sins was
simply water made wetter. Anyway, in a world of trickle-down economics, what difference was I really making here, perched
on my midlevel rung, pissing numbers? What was a misplaced zero but another pawn of speculation that ultimately gave everyone
the same, satisfying result: a paycheck.
I knew the job would be a void but I didn’t know the void could move. I didn’t expect it to migrate like it did and become
a void that was then inside me. Which was all the more titillating of course, because a hole was a hole, and I was the bad
boy entrusted with secrets, aloof but worshipped by a lineup of reckless men wanting me to service them. And that was ultimately
what I wanted. Those fat-assed banker bros—I wanted to be inside them. Not sexually (although yes, sexually), but anthropologically,
observationally; assimilate enough to be accepted into their fold, to become one of them. And I did.
They took me out for drinks, dinners, some even shared their commission bonuses with me but nothing ever went far enough.
None of the men were gay, as far as I could tell, but that didn’t stop our interactions from building up layers of flirtation, a kind of straightness that ends up being gayer than actual gayness.
We’d chat each other up—the banter!—nonstop over work, lunch, texts, drinks, trips to the bathroom, my voice mimicking their posh bellows, echoing off tile walls, peeing together, herd mentality, become one—become one so that I might be worshipped the way I worshipped their posh suits, hipster backpacks, ankles skinny enough to snip, snip, snip, their minoxidil hair, their fitness-corrupted bones covered in HGH-assisted slabs of muscle, beef, pork, their pissing dicks at the urinal, and me with my glorious peripheral vision, a stained glass window of their warm fleshy hooks.
I worried about how reckless I was being, how empty-headed, and about the growing distance between me and my boyfriend—a man
who actually enjoyed my company and the extra money I was bringing in, but hadn’t anticipated the kind of vapid Canary Wharf
whore I was becoming, with my ￡300 gym membership, ￡300 lunches with the lads, the sloppy abandon with which I went about
tinkering lines of code, fueled more than once by lines of coke. Little baggies turned up everywhere. I was in fearful awe
of myself. If I was turning into this horrible creature, where was the me I had been before? That shy, sarcastic, jokey boy
who took life in sometimes too-earnest stride, with a smile and a sense of charity—or at least a sense of law—where was he
beneath these new layers of corporate circus orgy? The answer was left unfound. The void was left exposed, and into it went
a rushing wind.
The boys, my apostles, they sensed this happening, this hollowing out of my core.
I simply didn’t have the guts. They sniffed it out and noticed my hesitance, my growing reluctance, and similarly to how a fever breaks, the bromances intensified.
That whiff of rot turned them on, and they went further.
The innuendos became more radical, more tempting—the hands on the shoulder, the bathroom breaks, boundaries crossed, drunken cheeky kisses, showers at the gym, the shape of a bulge between legs, and the financial dares became more risky in tandem, and my depression—which was what this had been all this time—bloomed into its formal, blackened flower, and it aged me, crisped me up like a weed.
Suddenly I found myself having worked years at this job, becoming the kind of brain-dead charlatan I had always hated, dripping with lies and bitter venom, and as for the boys .
. . when I began to wear this all on my face, they abandoned me.
There is no better explanation than to say that I was simply no longer beautiful.
I had lost something irreplaceable and I was finally left alone. I wanted to blow up Canary Wharf.
I became hateful in a typical way. Another year went by. Another crop of boys, each one paying me less attention than the
previous. Of course I still wanted to be them. I still wanted to be inside them, but now I understood that that desire operated
from a deeper, primordial place, not just to be worshipped. My lust was decrepit and cavernous. I wanted their organs. I wanted
their eyes so I could see what they saw when they looked out at a London that no longer felt liveable to me. I wanted their
hair, I wanted their skin, I wanted their ears so I could hear their phone calls with their mums and girlfriends, how they
FaceTimed with them in the street, oblivious to traffic, how they spoke so loudly, so unafraid. I wanted their families. I
wanted their weekend plans, their voice notes, their nude photos, their salaries. I wanted their brains because I no longer
had my own. I wanted their faces because I couldn’t recognize myself in the mirror. I didn’t look like me.
Do I look like you?
Pitter-patter remnants of rain finally stopped and Simon stood up. Slowly, I did too—Simon helping me, hands grasped, pulling me up. His hand didn’t feel like a handshake, it didn’t feel like it had been typing out emails all day, like a claw, like a vise.
Blue-blushing clouds tightened back up and sunlight appeared, filtering through leaves that were once again their splendid
greens. The rustle of the forest reprised its tune that hinted of abundance—of gamey birds, goats, wild boar? I had no idea.
There could be dragons out there for all I knew, and Simon didn’t look like he knew either. He knew where the river was, he
knew which direction was west, and he had been to London proper plenty of times before, but it felt like we were on equal
footing now, our certainties only based on what was behind us and all the things we could not go back to. Simon looked back
toward Greenwich, then looked at me, watched me rubbing my sores and aches.
“You good?” he asked, hesitantly certain. Ready to go but only within this one shaky minute.
I nodded. I walked a bit, testing my legs, which were fine, and I said, “Yes.” Then I waited for something—a phone call or
an airplane above us or the hum of an idling car, anything to stop and give me pause, but there was nothing, only a silence
walled up by trees that would all one day be chopped down.
I said yes again, let’s go, and it was decided, clear and resounding within myself, that I didn’t want to go back. Not just
back to Greenwich, to the manor, but back to my Greenwich, to my time, my flat, my life, my days of toil and ruin. I would not go.
I simply did not want to return.