Lemonade

I want to give you Ash as I knew him then: a man in a room, and the room considerably more alive for his being in it.

He lived, when I met him, in a flat that smelled of damp and incense and the sweetish ghost of spilled poppers. He received you from the sunken middle of a sofa like a pope granting audience, and everything about him announced depth. The face, first — a fallen-angel face, a face that had plainly seen and felt far too much and stayed, against all sense, open to more. And then the talk. Ash could quote scripture with the exact fluency he quoted a street price, and mean both, wholly, in the same breath; he’d move from the love of Christ to the merits of a particular brand of poppers without changing gear, and you’d follow him, rapt, because he made the two things feel like verses of the one psalm.