Chloe Aridjis: Asunder

He put down the tobacco and squinted, the cracks in his face deepening, and held out a large hand decked with rings. Within seconds it all came back: the strong grip, the enormous palm, the rings from Great Frog, that venerable institution in Ganton Street where he went for his own skull bibelots. Caricature or embodiment, I could no longer tell.

‘And this is Jane,’ I said.

‘Jane,’ Lucian repeated.

They shook hands, registered one another.

‘How much is this scarab?’ I asked.

‘Twenty. You can have it for fifteen… So how are you, Marie? You kind of disappeared. Just like that. Poof.’ He snapped his fingers.

Seeing Lucian there in his skinny black jeans, Birthday Party T-shirt and studded belt wrapped twice round his waist set off vapours of memories. For two years we had shared a flat just off Camden High Street, a grim place but I wouldn’t have wanted to live anywhere else at the time. It was his sole possession in the world, the fifty-six-metre-squared flat inherited from his grandmother, and he rented out the living room to make ends meet. He got the bedroom and I slept in our communal area on a mattress behind a screen. The kitchen had no stove, only a hotplate with two burners, but in those days we lived off pizza and curry. The bathroom was minute, with a shower like an upright coffin and tiles stained with black hair dye.

I’d like to say those were my shape-shifting days but the truth is, I didn’t shift shape that often. Lucian, who was a good decade older, only invited me out with him a handful of times, on nights when he was feeling especially gallant or adrenalised. Yet looking back on those few nights, a crack of darkness between two eternities of light, I’d felt I was somebody, although the reality was, I went as his diluted shadow, always a few steps behind, stopping whenever he stopped to greet people, get drinks from the bar, light a cigarette, fix his hair, or whatever else required immediate attention.

Though they were few and far between, I vibrantly remembered those nights out. To the sound of his favourite tracks, he would prepare for hours as funereal voices mired in synthy graves or guitar riffs wafted out from under his bedroom door and circled the living room, following him to the bathroom as he stood at the mirror teasing his hair into an elaborate cobweb. Face, hair, nails, rings — white, black, black, silver: always in that order.

Once Lucian had donned his sooty threads and I’d put on my make-up and most alluring black clothes, usually a high-necked tunic or netted tanktop, we would jump on the bus to Soho. Occasionally we’d drop by the Intrepid Fox but usually we would head straight to Meard Street, home to the Bat Cave. Past the tattooed man at the door, from Soho into its netherho, I would follow Lucian as he embarked on his well-mapped journey through the insomniac rooms, past glow-worm faces in every nook and sequined Glams with trapeze-artist make-up who emitted sparkles each time they blinked their eyes, waved an arm or crossed their legs, past Goths huddled in corners like packed umbrella stands, every now and then unfolding their wings to dance to one of their anthems.

As we cut through the smoke of each room, billowing curtains parting just for us, Lucian would tip an imaginary hat towards nearly everyone he encountered. He was the Duke of the Bat Cave.

‘And how much would this be?’ Jane timidly held up the scarf.

‘Ten for you,’ Lucian said, staring down at her nails, which were painted a metallic greenish blue, a mermaid’s tail or a drop of petrol.

‘What’s happened to Camden?’ I asked. Before Camden, he’d sold bootlegs at Kensington Market, mostly of gigs he’d gone to himself, but once the place closed and with the days of bootlegs over, he had ‘gone silver’.

Lucian glanced over at Jane before answering, then exhaled a large cloud of smoke.

‘What’s happened to our Camden. Bloody good question. It’s a bloody nightmare. First the Emo kids and the cyber kids and the hippies began setting up, pushing us farther and farther out, and then there was that fire a few years ago. I knew we were finished. After that the developers were all over the place. Now it’s just me and Black Rose and Elysium, those girls with the corsets and stuff, you remember Kate and Jackie, don’t you? Tourists go to them when they come looking for Goth, but it all got a bit carnival if you know what I mean… I’m the last one here, and I don’t think for much longer. Last year they moved me to this outside stall, where at least I can smoke, and knocked a hundred quid off the rent. I’m still holding on to the mast but with one hand… ’

Jane shook her head in sympathy.

I asked about Louis.

‘Still at the centre of your desk?’

‘Dead centre.’

My first month in the flat, Lucian had spent half a year’s savings on Louis, the skull of a twelve-year-old pickpocket trampled by a horse in 1852, or so the shop owner in Bloomsbury had claimed. Lucian placed him at the centre of his desk, right there between spilt tobacco and overflowing ashtrays, and Louis’ eye sockets would watch as his owner rearranged rings on a board, strung silver bat wings into a bracelet, tightened the catch of a necklace. We always wondered what this little urchin had looked like, what his story had been. Perhaps he was the son of watercress sellers or chimney sweeps, lived in the slums of Bethnal Green or had recently come in from the provinces. Perhaps he’d moonlighted as a mudlark, collecting debris fallen from boats on the river, a splash of the Thames in his veins.

‘And how are the ferrets?’

‘Oh, my boys died long ago, didn’t you know? They don’t live forever.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘Yeah, well, it’s all origami shadows, isn’t it?’

I nodded as if I understood.

Lucian’s other great loves, apart from Louis, had been his two ferrets. They had the run of the flat and slept curled up in his armpits or, if he had a woman over, in a shallow hamper by the bed. Once they nearly drowned, when he took them to his friend Vince’s and left the cage in the bathtub — it was only because one of them got up to use the bathroom that they discovered the ferrets’ home floating in bathwater, their pointy ringed faces held just above the waterline. No one ever found out who’d turned on the tap since neither Lucian nor Vince had budged from the sofa where they’d been watching a film, and neither would have wished for that cruel burial at sea.

Conversation came to a standstill. Lucian looked at Jane again.

We said goodbye and started to walk away, back into the market’s sacrificial heart.

‘Marie,’ Lucian called out, ‘don’t you want the pin?’

I returned to the stand and bought the little scarab. Jane didn’t buy the scarf, however: an unspoken promise to return.

After Jane bought her corset at Elysium, so stirred up she didn’t even bother trying it on and just held it up to her body for measure, we found the nearest exit from the market and were released. Questions and daydream all the way up the high street. She demanded to hear about Lucian. It’s true I’d hardly mentioned him during my four years living with her, and certainly never in detail. Once that chapter in Camden, wedged between a flat share in King’s Cross and our home in Essex Road, was over, I hadn’t wanted to revisit.

It was a lifetime ago, at the end of a corridor past many shut doors, and I preferred to leave those doors shut and the corridor unlit.

Now I’d have to explain the longing that for two years often kept me awake behind my screen, the twitches of desire as I watched my handsome flatmate seduce everyone around, not to mention the few times I brought someone home myself, usually emotional boys from the bookshop or café, Lucian would stop speaking to me for days.