A story by RORY PATRICK GRAHAM.
I still don’t have the key to open the second window in my bedroom; my landlord is a serial four-day-late replier. The autumnal breeze rattles the glass. It’s colder than it was this time last year, some pink-haired girl on TikTok turned that into a metaphor. Two suitcases, grey and bulging, are tucked into the corner of the room, covering the coffee spill from the previous Parisian tenant that still won’t wash away.
I’ve been thinking of the “girl-friend” of some gay guy I used to know – a blood-chilling, sinister homosexual with an unerotic proclivity toward self-flagellation. He never knew that this “friend” (a typically loose London term) was utterly and profoundly indifferent towards him, smiling emptily during their Pret coffee conversations that filled the one hour gap between their two morning seminars. As a central-European UCL student, this “friend” insisted she was struggling to find a flat within her “limited budget”. Simultaneously, she owned two Cartier love rings (gold and rose gold, stacked on her right index finger) and recently returned from her mysterious “fashion internship” in Milan, gallivanting around Tuscany every second weekend. Now, her grin seems wider, her cheekbones higher. She lost weight in Milan, I thought – the miraculous summer diet of spritzes and cigarettes.
During those vacant, expansive months of May to August, London paradoxically feels like Eliot’s dreary Waste Land, no matter how sunny and sanguine the weather may be. People leave. They leave to get bronzed in Lake Como, or they work, snapped up in the omnipresent jaws of another nondescript pub, “The [BLANK] Arms” or something or other. If your father works in private equity, you’ve just come back from Saint-Tropez. Your go-to phrase of the burgeoning autumn – recycled at the four housewarmings you attend in Angel and Finchley Road – will be: “I speak conversational French, but only when I’m drunk”. You have a neurotic aversion to polyester fabric and smoke straights but never have a lighter.
May to August felt like a motley knit of days and nights, to me. There’s only threads of feelings. I installed and uninstalled Grindr five times, fluctuating with my changing libido which oscillated between sexual repulsion and insurmountably enormous erotic yearning. I discussed my insatiable Freudian death-drive with my Jungian psychoanalyst, whose eyes subtly shift to the clock on the wall when I start pontificating at length about the quasi-religious profundity of two men with moustaches making out with each other. “Some mirrors can be portals” he told me, idly stroking his beard. I took the Lizzy line back from Whitechapel, North Face jacket on because it’s already colder. I listened to the Black Eyed Peas and thought about the cultural currency of aphorisms.
I went back to Neukölln in July. It wasn’t the same. For the first time, I don’t want to go back. The DIY “Achtung! Sie verlassen jetzt West Berlin” patch I stitched on my Uniqlo crossbody finally felt stupid, a silly remnant from my incessant outings in Dalston last October. I flipped the bag so the patch was hidden against my jacket, the outward facing side blank and black, walking with my head down through the streets of Kreuzberg. It was hotter here last summer, too, but no July is ever really the same. The cash-only, Denglish-speaking cafe I went to everyday last summer was gone, not replaced by anything but boarded over with graffiti. In this way, it blended in with the latent, ever-wartorn atmosphere of East Berlin, instead of standing out, but it still stopped me in my tracks, and not only because I had walked there planning to spend my morning inside.
The distinctly human temptation to sequence one’s life – to forge a temporal narrative of order out of the chaos of disorder – is virtually inescapable. I’ve spent the past month utterly inundated with work from my full-time CELTA course, a prerequisite to me teaching English in Poland next summer, thus spending the last, fading fragments of my summertime preparing for the next. Warsaw is what Berlin was at the turn of the century (a crude comparison – we all know no two things are ever the same) and I’ve spent no previous summer there so I can’t compare it to the next, which makes the burgeoning prospect feel sprawling and perfect and undeniable.
But as September slides into October and flats are being warmed by start-of-year revelries, I’m spending less time at gay clubs in Clapham (a choice I make for the plot) with leering thirty-year-olds who say things like “I work in general practice but I’m a musical theatre performer at heart”. I side-eye my 24-year-old arm candy and wonder: Have I become the thing I hate the most? I’m finally back to “chill drinks” with my friends – ten glasses of white wine and three-hour long debriefs and a cigarette between my lips – and I think: was it like this last time?
My friend cackles, as if telepathically answering me. She’s bronzed post-Paros and there’s a glimmer in her eye. The semester is churning back to life, the slow cogs of Outlook emails and Portico notifications whirring in the drunken background.