Mixed Signals

Signs flicker while I sleep. Moments repeat.You want to talk about it but you want to keep it a secret. They say secrets are bad, but they also say that some things are impossible to talk about. But you've stopped calling, and I can understand your reasons. I've taken to pre-recording responses onto a collection of antique tape-recorders, playing them back at random. "A program for young adults... by young adults... " might not be the perfect response to a statement like "I'm having your bastard."

Laudanum: it makes water taste really, really... interesting...

And you write your confessions in biro, across the back of my legs, where no one else will find them. But when I slip my response, scrawled inelligently in waxy Crayola, a scrap of paper slipped between shaking hands, it seemed too much. You wouldn't read it. You blamed it on my handwriting, but we both knew the truth.

Someone I know has been sending me naked web-cam stills of themself. I'd just like to say how grateful I am, they've been a much needed island of sublime naughtiness at a time of great emotional emotiveness.

So I'm at this party...

When you saw me cry, when I combed your hair, when you sat on the fridge and I held you, when we brushed our teeth, when you rescued me from that blazing building...

There's a an older couple at the bar: that's them in twenty years. She looks good. Her hair is completely white and cropped, but she's still wearing D.M.'s.

Her party piece: fucking a friend's handbag. "You haven't lived," she says, "until you've cum into a close friend's family photo album on at least one occassion.

Leo Sayer was there, a boyhood hero of mine. What a great bloke. I sold him some e's. But he's looking tired, they should at least offer him some kind of Quiz Show involving an uneccesarily illuminated stage-set. He says that he makes honey, accept I know for a fact that he doesn't own any bees.

Conveniently inconviened again, aren't you?

He has the kind of face with features that need to be freshly applied every four hours. Those glinting crayon eyes and teeth... She began her affair with the hoover after I moved into the bathroom, refusing to come out for days on end, living on toothpaste tainted water and hand cream. The uneccesary heat... the soft-seduction of damp towels.

"You were more fun when you were on drugs / ill / angry / unavailable."

You shame me, edging closer to the door, my attention turned "Oh look, Woody Allen's on TV!"

I was feeling really, really ill - the kind of flu that fills you from head to toe with helium and thoughts beyond your control. And sensing my vulnerability, you slid your hands beneath the bed clothes, seeking exposed skin. My defenses were down, otherwise I'd have put up a fight. But a kiss would have been a little more appropriate.

So I'm at this party and I'm looking for a warm place to sleep...

I'm a very self-centred person. My thoughts are entirely wrapped up in myself. I never, ever call my friends, I disappear for weeks on end and wherever I'm actually living, I'm never really there for longer than it takes to sleep it off. I have no regular social life because I don't like to devote much time to other people - and as Gurdjieff said, all social activities are essentially about sex anyway. Once a month I'll have a sociable binge.

I've been living this way for almost ten years. My 20's were a blur. At least my dress sense has improved, a little, and my dancing too apparently.

The external world doesn't hold my attention - unless it's something sitting entirely out of context: speaking with the diallect of cellotape and newsprint scraps, cut and paste, speaking sleaze in a sincere and whispered tone of voice. The news makes me cry.

I did see you cry once. You were sitting next to him and you'd been crying. I was pre-occupied with the two girls that had been flirting with me for the last few weeks - but the truth is I wasn't really interested in either of them. I don't think I saw you again after that, not for years. And they stopped coming around soon after that.

It's never going to happen again. I can see that now, and I'm almost OK with it. These things should never happen very often - taking someone into your confidence, emptying out the things that you don't even tell your diary: side by side, consulting reflections, straightening ties, arranging unruly haircuts, our conversations going on without us.

For a week before we met, I'd been trying for early nights and healthy eating, but I couldn't keep it up. I needed the distractions.

She wanted to know how I could still keep photographs of her. I told her they were cool photographs, and I couldn't see the point in pretending it had never happened. She tore some of them up, but I taped them back together when she left. But she looked better in person.

The room sticks in my mind because the door was like the door to a safe - flush with the wall, two feet thick, rounded, steel plated. You were so hung-up on your appearance, how you hadn't brought the right clothes, but these things are fleeting. They define you but they are still ephemeral, changeable. People don't see the details, they see the over-all picture.

and I was at this party...

He's sleeping on the floor again, downstairs. In an hour or so, she'll go down and collect him, but she'll turn and sigh throughout the night to insure he never sleeps.

She say's she's four days late. You know. Accept he say's they've not had sex in over six months. He's not convinced it's anything to do with him either way. But there's no getting rid of her. We spent the day in the pub, we say a film, we got chatted up by the bar-staff, he fell asleep in the cinema. But she was still sat on the doorstep when we got back (a move calculated to insure maximum levels of guilt on his part). This isn't even our house. It used to belong to my Gran.

There's something kind of Dickensian in our relationship, whatever you'd call it. It's resting just beneath the surface, but it's always there, in our shadows, in unecessarily complex sentence structure, speaking in code, speaking around the perimiter of the issue, great-coats and spats and canes, battered hats, perpetual gas-light evenings, alcoholism, oversized boots, complex underwear.

I never give away the details, but you were the only one who noticed. Whoever's airing cupboard I was living in, I was always afraid that you might call and I would have to tell you what I've been up to - I've never been able to lie to you.

Whenever I've dreamt about being rescued, abducted, whisked away in the night, I'd always hoped it would be you.

and at this party...

But I was only really flirting because I thought that I was on safe ground, that this wasn't a mutual thing. I never meant to scare you off. I've no intention of becoming the 'other man'. You're assuming something might happen - but I've spent so long burying my sexuality that I think it's beyond rescue. I can't say where I'm from anymore.

I'd like to have been there in all the years between, all the years before and after. But I can't believe a word that comes out of your mouth. I don't know you well enough, even after all this time.

I loved the way her hands moved, the way she rested her head in her palms, defeated, the way she sighed, the way she changed her haircut every other week.

He has this strange way of walking, and when he talks, all of his words are mis-spelt.

Must now go.

Rollo Kim.