Song of excess
ALRIGHT THEN, this is what I want to tell you: I wake each morning, early, it’s still dark, and the mid-winter cold is out there waiting for me. But in bed I want to find your fingers and squeeze them, hold them within mine, squeeze them, hold them. That’s what I want to do. I wonder if you know that. Wherever you are, I wonder if you know what goes through my mind when I wake up. Why your fingers? It’s my question, possibly yours too. What is it about fingers? Yours are larger than mine, I’ve always known that, not that they dwarf mine, but still they are larger, and that’s part of the reason why I want to hold them. You’d think, then, that when you’d hold my fingers you’d hold them hard, squeeze tight, crush them. But you didn’t hold mine hard, not that your handshake was piss-poor. It was just a soft drop of fingers, resting, so even the word ‘squeezing’ isn’t quite right. Just a soft drop, almost as if they weren’t there, but I knew they were – there’s nothing comparable to skin on skin. But still the question, why fingers? The accessibility? The sense of ordinariness? The offer of movement? I think it’s all of these. Accessible because they were never far from me. When you’d be cooking I’d sit and watch you chop onions, chop garlic, stir up a stir-fry, and I’d want to touch them. If we were watching TV, ‘Sex in the City’ maybe, or ‘The Bill’, both of us sprawled on the couch like pets, they’d be there, your fingers, on your lap, holding the remote, never far away, and I’d want to touch them. Sometimes when we were in bed, doing what for us only ever happened in bed, you would place your head halfway along my body, and your hands would be somewhere – I’d want to touch them. Ordinary. Nothing is ordinary when your name’s Michael Showell. None-the-least your fingers, large, the ones I want to soft drop onto mine. Movement. Stationary, that’s an option. But there will always be others – where could we go? It’s the airport of the body. You could take my fingers onto your chest, your nipples, small, tight, upright. I could take yours onto my lips. You could take mine onto your stomach, feel the soft line of hair you have. I could take yours into my armpits, and you could touch me there, almost tickling, almost something very different, taking me back to the time I would wear a white T-shirt beneath my white school shirt so no one would see that I was becoming a man. You could take mine to a place of yours that still seems dangerous.
I wonder who this is helping. You or me?
Your smell, that’s another thing. I can even smell you now. Listen. Listen as I smell you. Sniff, sniffing for you, tracking you down in this room. It’s what I still have, will always have, your male musk, not just the smell of your breath, or the places of your sex, something much more. This house, 18 Wannaroo Street, Griffin, holds your smell, it’s where it lives, it’s where it’s home. How strange to think a smell can have a home, but I know it can – a smell can own a house. Because yours does. You won’t believe it, I know, I know you wouldn’t, because I know you. Thomas, you’d say, smells don’t own anything. But how can you tell me that when your smell owns me? And the smell, the smell, the one we’re talking about, it’s true that it has parts, components, cells of itself. Your mouth plays a part. Is it bacteria? Is that why your mouth has its own scent? Is it something deeper, something down in the pit of your gut? How can the pit of your gut be something I think about? Well, it can, because what I’m trying to say is this: I might be able to find the parts of your smell, locate them, analyse them, but still it’d be greater than the sum of them, it would never be able to made in a lab. But it’s not just mouth and gut, of course it’s not just that stuff. When you would be home from a day, an office day, and you’d be seated at the breakfast table with your coffee, your legs apart like always, that’s when I could really smell you. Sometimes you said you too could smell yourself and you’d cross your legs, but I wouldn’t want you to do that, I’d want to keep smelling you. Not because I’d be waiting for something else to happen, just because the smell was enough. But it’s not just mouth and gut and groin stuff, there’s more. There’s always more. If I rested my head on your chest, I could smell you. With my head there, I’d wonder if what I could smell was your heart. I’d like to do that to you now. You’re lying on your back as if today’s been your last. Your eyes are closed, your chest is naked, mostly hairless, not waxed, just mostly hairless, and I want to place my head to it, feel warm skin, listen to your heart beat, wait to smell your heart, the groin stuff, the gut stuff, the mouth stuff. All of it adding up to the smell I’ve got inside me right now.
Still, I wonder who this is helping. You or me? You need to tell me somehow whether you want me to go on.
You don’t say no, so I won’t stop.
You were always around. Always somewhere. On the end of the phone, ringing before you took yourself off to work. Ringing when you got to work. Ringing at lunch. There’d always be an afternoon call. Then you’d ring when you got home earlier than me. You didn’t have to work full-time, you earned enough without that. But there you would be, on the end of a phone line. Between those calls were the emails, not jokes, sometimes just a line or two, sometimes just one word, sometimes only a symbol. :-) There it’d be, on my screen, waiting for me. Even if you were out in the garden, your massive vegetable garden, the one sometimes I’d laugh at because it seemed like a commercial operation, that maybe you were expecting the need for another income, still you would be around. But soon I wasn’t making comments about other incomes, not that the vegie garden came to the rescue. You don’t grow vegetables anymore. Even when you were painting in the shed, the tiniest of tiny paintings, I knew you were there, around somewhere, I didn’t even have to go looking. Your paintings: they had colours in them three years ago, two years ago, twelve months ago. Then they became compositions of blues and whites, then just blues, and then the blues got darker until you were using just one tube of black oil paint. And it’s then that I asked you to tell me the title of your latest, and you said, The Death of Michael Showell. Was I too late? Had it settled in you already, got its claws into you, too tight, the grip too much? Excess, that’s what management told you, but you didn’t feel like excess, you didn’t work like excess. But still you were excess. We don’t need two senior programmers, they said. Programming is not our core business, they said. But it was your core business, it was your skill, your knowledge. Whatever, the word they used was excess. Excess. That word sounds like a brand of petrol. If that word was a brand of petrol I’d strike a match and put it to flame, wait for it to be a flimsy piece of ash, and then I’d put my mouth to it and softly blow it away, turning it into small pieces, smaller pieces, thin air, gone.
But still I wonder: who is this helping? You or me? You need to tell me somehow whether you want me to go on.
You don’t say no, so I won’t stop.
I won’t ever stop.
Because this is what I want to tell you: I wake each morning, early, it’s still dark, and the mid-winter cold is out there waiting for me. But in bed I want to find your fingers and squeeze them, hold them within mine, squeeze them, hold them.