Armand’s Misspent Youth
Armand’s Misspent Youth
“Bloody pens!” I tossed one straight at the wall and watched it bounce unsatisfyingly onto the linoleum.
Lucas glanced up from his phone. “Are we experiencing technical difficulties?”
I was on the kitchen floor, drawing. For the past two weeks (he’d been here a full two weeks and allegedly not got sick of me yet), I’d tried staying in the workroom, but could only manage it when Lucas was out of the flat.
We’d fallen into a frighteningly comfortable routine.
Some days, he’d go out exploring while I worked under my drafting table.
Other days, like today, he did whatever he did on the computer, or cleaned, and I worked on my lap desk on the kitchen floor.
“It’s these pens.” I held another up and glared at it. “They’re trying to kill me.”
Between worn out nubs and clogged reservoirs, I’d lost two fully penciled pages. Hours of work down the drain, and the desire to keep going all but extinguished. Redrawing at this point in the process was thoroughly demoralizing.
“Let me see.” Lucas walked over.
For some truly unfathomable reason, I allowed him to photograph the mess I’d made and post it online with some sort of witty caption about chaos and art and birth.
The ruined pages were partially blurred to avoid spoilers, but he checked with Lakshmi just in case.
Less than an hour later, Lucas pulled me out of my re-penciling mope and excitedly showed me that the photo and myself were now featured on an extremely popular site, in a “list-icle” about the benefits of analog vs.
digital art. It had already been viewed by thousands of, one assumes, utter prats.
“Look, they linked your FotoBom, Flutter handle, and your profile on Drake House! Can you believe a couple weeks ago, the only Surrogate Goose websites were fan-made? I mean, honestly, where have I been all your life?”
It was a good question. And this all sounded wonderful—if wonderful meant terrifying—but it didn’t change the fact that I’d botched two full pages.
Lucas looked sympathetic. “Anything I can do?”
“No, just sit there. Allow me to yell abuse at inanimate objects.”
“Fair. Keep up the good fight.” He smiled, which made me consider abandoning work altogether.
After all, I’d turned in next issue’s pages, so the fires under my arse were a simmer at best. I’d likely feel better about re-penciling if I didn’t immediately get back to it .
. . It took Lucas raising his eyebrows for me to realize I was staring.
Heat climbed my face, and I cleared my throat. “Right. Later.”
“Presumptuous, Mr. Demetrio.”
“Hopeful, Mr. Barclay.”
“Okay. Yes, but actually we should both do work. Don’t talk to me.
” He slumped on the couch, having gone a bit pink in the cheeks, hiding behind the open screen of his laptop.
I could barely stand it; Lucas becoming so sweetly flustered when I flirted, while teasingly reciprocating, caused a pooling warmth that was so complete and depthless I nearly groaned.
The way he vacillated between confidence and shyness, blossoming and curling inwards, made me want to hold him and study him and explore every part—
“Work,” Lucas insisted, pointing at my lap desk. He’d gone even pinker and was biting his lip. I gave a performative sigh and shifted a bit so he wasn’t in my direct eyeline. Fine. I’d pencil.
We worked in companionable tension for a short time, until he said, “Armand . . .”
I looked up with a suggestive joke halfway to my lips when Lucas’s expression stopped me dead in my tracks. The coquettish blush was gone, and there was a concerned pinch to his brow. “Um. Can I show you something?” He patted the couch cushion next to him.
I made my way over on suddenly watery legs. I expected the screen to show an overwhelming mess of windows, all open to different websites, but instead a sunshiny horse greeted me serenely from Lucas’s desktop background.
He’d minimized everything. Oh no. Whatever it was, it was bad.
“Well”—I tried to ignore the distant thundering in my ears—“I’m properly bricking it.”
“It’s okay; if it is a problem, I know what to do. It’s just . . .” Lucas bit his lip. “There’s a video someone tagged you in, and I think it’s fine, but—”
“Let me see.”
He pulled it up, and all I needed to see was the grainy, ill-lit thumbnail and the title of the video.
My chest imploded, cold trickled along my limbs, and my vision went fuzzy. It was a moment before I could remember how to breathe, let alone speak.
Years ago, Sam and I had danced at a club called the DOL House.
They’d filmed a night’s performance for promotion purposes.
I hadn’t thought about it in years, but at the time I remembered feeling—through a haze of youth and chemicals—a prickle of discomfort.
The blurry figure on stage could’ve been anyone, but the recognition and cringe thrummed deep in my stomach.
It could have been anyone, but it was me.
“You’ve watched it,” I managed hollowly.
“No! Well, yes. I needed to know what it was.” Lucas set a hand on my knee and rubbed tentatively. I surprised myself by leaning into his touch rather than flinching. He kept his voice gentle. “Is that actually you or is it someone who looks—”
“It’s me.” I flexed my fingers in my lap, eyes still glued to the screen. I had to explain. I could explain. “I was eighteen, and not very bright, and very poor . . .” Deep breath. “And I was high a lot of the time. Schoo—he, the character wasn’t my idea. It was—”
No.
I couldn’t do this. Not yet.
I swallowed again and again until my mouth remembered how to form words. “I don’t regret being a dancer.” I couldn’t look at him. I needed to look at him. “I just regret . . . other things that were happening. Concurrently. Many other things. I— I wasn’t my best self.”
Lucas entwined our fingers, and he leaned in to nuzzle the side of my head, before gently pushing me away so he could start typing again. Furiously.
“What—” I stared. “What are you doing?”
“I’m filing a copyright claim, reporting and blocking this commenter—” he clicked and clacked “—aaand flagging the url in case the claim gets denied, and it gets posted again. There we go.”
I watched him for a few moments, biting my lip.
“You have no idea what I said, do you?”
I shook my head.
He laughed and pulled me toward him, kissing my forehead. “I’m making it go away. As much as anything on the internet can go away. Let me type this up real quick for Lakshmi so she knows what’s up.”
When he was done performing more technological wizardry, Lucas closed his computer and turned toward me, suddenly hesitant. “Can I ask you something? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
Fuck. Fuck. Keep breathing, Demetrio. “O-of course.” I coughed. “Anything.” Fuck.
“The other day, when I”—color rose to his beautiful face—“when I did my little”—more color, downright flushed—“my little striptease. Did that, like, look really stupid to you?”
I laughed, and it felt like a dam giving way. I took his hand in mine. “Lucas, I was under the impression that my reaction was rather unambiguous.”
The blush burned prettily in his cheeks. “But you were a professional! And you were so good—” He broke off with a sweet little noise as I raised his fingers to my lips, then the palm of his hand, his inner wrist.
“It was one of the sexiest things I’ve ever lived through.
Barely lived through,” I said, muffled, breathing in the smell of him under all that soap and cologne.
Buttery sunshine. I wanted to wrap myself in that smell, in the flutter of his quickened pulse, the salt and tang of his warmth, downy hair tickling the tip of my tongue and the corners of my mouth.
“Oh—” He swallowed. “Oh, you are such a good liar.”
“Actually, I’m a terrible liar,” I lied, and brought his hand away from my mouth to the back of my neck.
His fingers, at my direction, gripped my collar and pulled the ratty T-shirt over my head.
Slowly. Under everything, the panic still throbbed, but I folded it deeper into the heat and the rush, guiding Lucas’s hand down my chest. “Ask me anything. I’m an open book. I’m a bloody pamphlet.”
Lucas giggled and leaned in to kiss me. “Okay. And what do you get out of it?”
“I need something to take my mind off these dodgy pens, love.”
He allowed me to distract us both, and it was lovely, but I couldn’t quite kick the feeling of being watched.
By punters of the past, by strangers on the internet, and by—because I’d asked around and no one could tell me who it belonged to—the gleaming black whip across the way.
September 8
23 days sober
I ran a hand along the peeling metal gate, looking for the broken latch that I had no right to expect was still there. “I was up in Newcastle with my nan, till she passed, then Dad dropped me here with an auntie.” The gate sprang open, creaking louder than a car alarm.
“Oh,” Lucas whispered. He’d been snapping photos of me all day: standing awkwardly under the East Stand Facade at Highbury Square, standing awkwardly on the East stairs of the British Museum, and even walking awkwardly along Regent’s Canal and Whitecross Street.
But now his camera was hanging untouched.
I’d explained the concept of council estates and tried to prepare him for Grimaldi Court—or at least the version of it I remembered from more than a decade ago. I’d been back to visit over the years, but I hadn’t really looked.
The differences were subtle to the untrained eye, but to an eye well-trained by necessity, experience, and the critical gaze of the artistically narcissistic, the place had been reborn.
For an early September heatwave, the smell of trash not-quite-making it to the bins was minimal, the little patches of bottle forests had grown sparse, and the teen idlers were giving us no more than a cursory scowl.
I led Lucas up the brutalist stairwell, already smiling at the sounds (babies laughing and daytime TV) and smells (locust beans and pepper soup) drifting down the hallway.
The door opened, and Auntie pulled me in for a hug while berating me for not coming to visit more often.
Auntie Abeni was beautiful as ever, even if there was distressingly more silver peeking from under her gele than when I’d last seen her.
She took one look at Lucas, another at me, and seemed to know the score.
I’d made the right decision. She’d give Lucas a good story.
Calm settled over me. This was a warm, welcoming little home, full of food and people and happiness.
The neighbors present all remembered me as a precocious little boy, good grades, but he was always scribbling on anything, chai, when he wasn’t dancing like a little demon!
No wonder he got into art college. Such a clever boy.
They’d known me back when I was alive. All it took was a quick glance, and everyone knew to cut their memories of me off at seventeen.
I steeled myself. “Auntie, this is Lucas Barclay from America.” Auntie and the others were going to make me look good, but they were also most definitely going to take the piss.
“Nice to meet you, ma’am.” Lucas shook her hand and ducked his head respectfully.
“You found a cowboy, didn’t you?” Auntie grinned, her nose wrinkling. “When Armand was a tyke, all he wanted to watch was Butch and Sundance, or what was it, John Wayne, or Red River—”
“Lucas wants to interview you,” I cut her off, ears pulsing with heat. I avoided Lucas’s eyes at all costs. “About what I was like back then.”
“Yes—” Lucas held up his camera “—and would it be okay if I took some pictures?”
Auntie Abeni complained that I hadn’t given her advance notice (I had, and the place was spotless) but ushered us farther into the tiny flat.
The overtaxed air conditioner rattled in the window, and neighbors and babies shuffled out of the way so we could sink onto the low sofa.
Lucas asked if he could record, and away he went.
“What was Armand Demetrio like as a kid?”
“Oh, he was a good boy who got good grades, but if you left out any paper he’d scribble all over it! Once I found him drawing on the window, naughty boy—”
When asked about my father, she waved him off as a busy man, and explained how good and helpful I was when I came by every day after school. How I’d dance in the courtyard with the other children. So talented, so creative, always so friendly and full of life.
“And did you notice when Armand started coming up with Surrogate Goose?”
“The thing with the penguin? Oh no, that strangeness started after he went off to art college. Want to see some pictures?” She picked up her tablet. “Armand was such a pretty little boy; all the other kids fancied him.”
“Auntie, no,” I groaned.
Lucas laughed. “Auntie, yes!”
It was a brutal if necessary bloodletting.
As we drove back to Croydon in the purple evening, Lucas squeezed my hand. “Thank you for that. I can really imagine you running around that place as a little kid. And it’s going to make great content.”
I swallowed a horrible ball of guilt, anxiety, and a strange delicious ache. “Time is moving . . . really fast, isn’t it?” I managed.
I didn’t dare look away from the road, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lucas nod and fiddle with his camera bag. “You mean the anniversary is coming up.”
“Aye.” I knew he’d scheduled his return flight for mid-October and that it was technically still a long way off, but I could feel us rushing toward it.
“I was worried—” I took a deep breath “—I’m still worried that we’ve been moving too fast, but it doesn’t feel like we are. ” I glanced at him. “Does it?”
Lucas smiled. “Not to me.” He carefully settled a hand on my thigh. And after a few minutes of sweet quiet and sunset light, he asked, “Could you eat?” as if he didn’t already know the answer.
I could always eat. Even after being fed out of my wits by a Nigerian Auntie. “Shall I stop—” I was going to suggest a Tesco sandwich, but Lucas was already excitedly scrolling.
“There’s a vegan sushi place nearby. You down?” He turned his phone toward me, and from the lighting in the photos, I could feel the dosh seeping out of my pockets.
“Er, looks a bit posh—”
“My treat, obviously.” Lucas waved me off. “The map says to stay on the A210.”
So, I stayed on the toll road and tried not to think about the contrast between a North London council estate and a niche little eatery in Blackfriars. About ghostly Porsches on every corner.
About patterns repeating.