Lemonade

Chapter One — The Holy Fool

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.

I did not meet him all at once. Nobody did. The first visit ran late because he would not let a subject die merely because it had reached its conclusion. He had a book balanced on one knee and an ashtray on the other, and when he wanted to make a point he would reach for the wrong one. At some point he noticed I was cold, got up without interrupting himself, and pushed the window shut. It was a small consideration. I remember it because there was no audience for it and no reason, beyond the cold, to perform it.

We saw one another again. At first I could have said why on each occasion: a question about the man we both knew, a book he wanted back, an evening in which neither of us had anywhere urgent to be. The explanations became less convincing as the evenings grew longer. We ate whatever was left in his cupboards, quarrelled amiably over the last clean mug, and sometimes sat without talking while the traffic washed past below the window. If you had asked me then what we were becoming, I would have said friends. I would have meant it, too.

Being near him felt like grace. I came out of the flat into the wet South London dark with the bus timetable disintegrating in my hand and incense caught in my coat. At the stop I found the book he had meant to lend me still under my arm. I considered taking it back. Instead I carried it home, giving us an excuse to meet again.

From a working edition. The final published text may differ.