Last - or, The Trouble With Mullane

Mullane had been handsome once, in his younger, slimmer days, before his love affair with red wine had taken him over. There were echoes of that youthful beauty still there in the curve of his lips and the shape of his nose, but he was barrel-chested now and paunchy. His eyebrows had gone the way of Denis Healy’s.

Mullane had been a pin-up poster boy, years before I knew him. I learned his secret past from photographs passed round at parties by the people who had known him longest. The man in the pictures was only a glimmer of the Mullane I knew, and it had given me a secret pleasure to think that the Mullane they held onto was not the same man.

Mullane had sought me out as one in a chain of diversions. My mother had warned me that it would never last.

As I rush through the rain now, my umbrella no barrier against the seeping wetness that sprays under its edge, my mother’s warning echoes in my head. Right as always. Mother knows best. I hurry along the street, avoiding the edge of the pavement with its proximity to puddles and the wheels of passing cars, listening to my mother’s voice, knowing she was right.

Somewhere, once, I’d thought there was a place for us, for me and him to prove my mother wrong. Somewhere hidden deep in darkest night. Somewhere her words and our own instincts couldn’t touch us.

We should have listened to our instincts. Maybe. But if we had, none of this could have happened. Our instincts weren’t wrong, you see. It didn’t last. But, with all the weight of history and my mother’s divination behind it, how did it stand a chance?

I ate toast without jam this morning, alone at my dining table. There are two ulcers on the underside of my tongue, and they kept catching on the edge of a molar at the back of my mouth. I chewed heavily on the other side to compensate. That is an ancient habit.

I thought of nothing. I just stared at the yellow-painted wall, with the window looking out on the garden to my left and the archway through to the living room on my right. The blankness of the painted plaster drew my eyes and held them in a no man’s land of vision. I thought of nothing and I saw nothing. When I finished eating my toast, I looked down and saw a scattering of crumbs across my chest. I brushed them onto the plate, and took the plate to the kitchen sink.

And now I am sitting damply in the Central Library, remembering Mullane.

Mullane first saw me with purpose and deliberate intent. He had heard of me from friends. He had come instinctively to the opening, knowing he would be able to view me, as a potential buyer views a piece of art. I was a collectable for him.

I was the assistant at the opening. The curator who blended in to the background, facilitating the needs of the artist, directing the invited guests to their seats, to the wine, to the art.

I wasn’t the focus of attention for anyone but Mullane.

Mullane wasn’t interested in art. He was interested in people; people as creations, formed by society, by parenting, by childhood memories and fears. Mullane wasn’t interested in anyone who would try to compete with him intellectually, although his pretence was to find everything you said minutely interesting. He would listen to me, for example, just long enough to make me believe he was taking me seriously, and then he would destroy me. It was nothing I understood. It didn’t appear to make him feel better. It just served to make us both miserable; me with wounded pride, and him with disappointment that the world had let him down again.

He claimed it was because he felt passionate about certain things, but he didn’t feel passionate about anything. He had borrowed that sentiment from a book, because it had seemed the sort of thing a man like him ought to feel. Passion.

What Mullane felt most of all was boredom. He was always waiting for something to happen. He didn’t know what, but he waited for it all the same. He tried out new things at every opportunity, building a chain of diversions that trailed behind him, linked together with clumsy welds of forced social interaction.

That was why I was present at gatherings. That was how I saw pictures of him in his prime.

I was introduced as a friend. I was his secret, an unknown quantity among his social group. They knew me from various events. They were the ones, after all, who had brought me to his attention, although none of them knew that had been their role.

I was, in public, his source of entertainment. The centre-piece of some Victorian debauch, stood in the middle of the gathering while he wrapped clever words around me, like a corset, pulling the laces tighter and tighter until I could no longer breathe.

And afterwards, I would rage at him for his disrespect and his arrogance. Loving him all the time. Those were the nights when passion would overspill into hatred, and we would damage each other, physically and emotionally, between his unlaundered sheets.

It couldn’t last. There was nowhere for it to go but the point of destruction. And how could it go anywhere from there?

The library is warm and smells of damp coats and drying out umbrellas. That faint sickly smell, like clothes that haven’t dried properly before being put away in the wardrobe or in a drawer. People are browsing the shelves and, seated here in a corner, unobserved by anyone, I am browsing people.

It is months now since I last saw Mullane. That final night when he tipped me over the edge into something from which I thought I would never recover.

I did recover, though. I am sitting here now, two maybe three months later. Alive and missing him. Hence the path my thoughts are taking. Hence my mother’s voice in my head.

I would ache for him, those months we were together, peppered with sporadic meetings, when he or I, one or other or both, would pick a fight and raise our blood until it pounded in our ears and through our veins, and could only be calmed by fucking. I would ache, in the core of me, behind my pubic bone, and my pelvis would tilt at the thought of him and the hatred I felt.

He would lecture me for hours, and badger me with questions. He would reduce me to tears of exasperation. He would mockingly say, “I so enjoy these moments we spend together, don’t you?” to which my frustration could only reply, “No, I fucking don’t.”

I have no idea if he treated me that way in spite of himself, because I let him, or if he even thought he was doing harm.

The trouble with Mullane was, I had to keep going back for more.

Deviation is the only thing you can allow yourself when you are filled with loathing for yourself and the world. I needed a sickness in my life; I needed something I could wrap around myself to distract me from everything else. Mullane was more than willing to comply, to satisfy that need.

My mother, when she made her statement of fact, didn’t know who I was seeing, didn’t know the details. She only knew that there was someone, and that it wasn’t the thing she wanted for her daughter. I think she recognised something in me, at that time, that reminded her of herself.

The cushion of time doesn’t make these memories of him any easier. Mullane worked his way too effectively into my blood. He’s there, like a virus, underneath my skin, waiting for the opportunity, for conditions to be right for him to flare up again.

Remission is a long way off.

I have seen Mullane abandoned in thought. The hardness of his public face let go. I have seen the tiredness there; the deadness. The good in me still wants to console the sorrow that I saw. The opportunity to take that boy in my arms was never on offer, though. The hardness maintained a fence, arms-length, around him. All attempts to cross over, past the defence of his last name, were rejected by a swift return to detachment. To call him by his first name was to ensure being pushed out into the cold.

I felt tenderness from him once. Two of my fingers gripped in his hand across a table in sympathy and comfort.

I cling to the belief that it was genuine. Even now.

Remission, you see. It’s such a long way off.

That’s the trouble with Mullane. That’s why it couldn’t last, and why it will probably never end.

The last time that I saw him he had already decided. He carried out his plan of action. He pulled back. He didn’t touch me once. We spoke of nothing consequential. But he pressed me until I broke. He reversed his own strange addiction and placed it onto me. But I wasn’t willing for that to happen.

So now I eat toast without jam on my own at my dining table. I sit in the library and observe. I walk in the rain. I hear my mother’s voice.

Mullane and I, we couldn’t last the course.

© J R Hargreaves August 2006