Among the Ruins Chapter1, Part 1

Luke Woolfe and Evelyn Rouge will always be a part of me. We were friends for little less than a year, but they impacted on every aspect of my life. They changed who I am and destroyed who I was before. They shattered my soul, ruptured my body and tore apart my emotions as if they were nothing.

           Despite myself I’ve never stopped thinking of Luke all these years. In the beginning, when the scars and wounds across my body and mind were still fresh, I tried, with little success, to banish him completely from my thoughts, but he persisted. But he stuck his ground and, with a startling rapidity and an almost supernatural grace, revealed himself to me in the smallest hints of a conversation and the merest glimmer of a word. He made himself known to me in words as disconnected, every day, and meaningless as: leaves, wine, Charles Dickens, church, bullets, poison, alter, parents, murder.

After years of holding back his spectral presence I had to give up, write it all down, and hopefully exorcise him from my life. It was never easy. With all my thoughts of him comes a terminal and mysterious feeling of melancholy and loss. I will never forget his beautiful, jovial face, or his messy hair, or his feminine way of standing and his girlish hips. What has stuck in my mind most of all is his laugh and his smile. Both seemed to touch upon the great gulf that exists between reality and expectation, truth and lies, morality and murder, without revealing anything of either. I remember the way he laughed and smiled after we left the burning mansion where Seth died. I tried to reproach him for his happiness but he laughed even harder. Then he said that those with the most sin should cast the first stones. I thought at the time that he was alluding to us and the murder we has just committed, but he could just as easily been referring to Seth and the noose he had been tightening around our necks.

            Thoughts of Evelyn have always been present as well, just as bright and vivid as when she existed as the burning star on my horizon. My memories of her are mostly ephemeral traces of physical sensations, like the feel of her lips on mine or the damp sensation of our sweat mixing on our bodies. I would be reminded of her by the warmth of a handshake, the clap of wet skin smacking on wet skin, or a women's delightfully mysterious but perfectly formed cunt. On a crowded underground train I can be surrounded by her imitating the bodies of others, softly caressing the back of my coat with someone’s bag or elbow, hiding just beyond the edges of my vision in someone’s slouch or the curve of their hips. My passion and love for her was of a different sort than the way I loved Luke. I can still see the perfect outline of her naked body, and the impression of the soft downy hair covering her breasts comes to me of its own accord.

Despite all the pain and death that followed the three of us and our lust for each other there is one night that even now overrides all the others in my thoughts of them. It wasn’t our first meeting, or any of the nights we killed someone. I mean, this night I’m thinking of had lots to do with those nights, but in the end the times we killed Viktor and Seth, and the whole thing with Cullen were just ancillary events that happened to us. Even the death of Luke’s parents was a non-event. It occurred off-screen, in the wings, and in a horrible way was fairly unimportant and even superfluous, happening as it did between the second and third acts.

The night I’m thinking of had very little in the way of action and didn’t exactly progress our story very much. It is more for what it revealed about Luke and Evelyn, and I guess in a way what it revealed about me, that it means so much to me.

It was in the winter that the first cracks began to appear in the Berlin Wall, and the Iron Curtain started to seem a little softer and more forgiving. There was a thaw in the news, and the papers, and on the streetand people were holding hands in solidarity with the Estonians, Austrians, and Latvians, and all the others. In retrospect the world was almost holding its breath, waiting to see what was going to happen with all the protests and Glasnost and all of that. But to those of us at university in South London, who had little political inclination or any real knowledge of what was happening outside of our own skins, we were just content to pass the time in drink and drugs and the occasional act of sex. We had no need to rebel against anyone or anything; we just wanted to revel in our vanity and immortality. Unlike the activists in the east with their velvet or purple or red revolution, we knew what colour our morning sun would be and so we didn’t need to see what it looked like. We knew that it revolved around us. When we closed our burning, blackened, blood-shot eyes and laid our empty heads down on the pillows, nothing happened in the world. Of that we were certain.

We had barely noticed the changes in the weather. Autumn had ended and frozen serenely into winter. The skies had gotten darker and darker, and the cold grew more and more pervasive. The leaves had fallen off the trees and covered the paths and roads, and then, seemingly without warning, frozen bodies of rabbits had begun to litter the pathways of the Hill. Then they appeared in alcoves where the bins were stored and entranceways of the flats on the campus. It was as if the myximatosis that had twisted their little bodies had driven them in their death throes to seek out the warm sheltered spaces created by man to hide his refuse and store his mail. True, the more superstitious among us could have read in the stars what the fates had planned out for the rabbits, but then, one by one, the stars had disappeared behind a thick cloud that promised snow, but only gave us rain and fog.

We all began wearing more coats, scarves and hats, if only to combat the chill that we got walking to The Garden from our flats and that brief walk from the bus to a bar in The Village. By the end of the night we were so drunk that we never noticed how cold we were. Our condensed breath mingled with the smoke from our cigarettes and made it seem as if we were smoking ourselves to death.

            Luke had so much money and such an appetite for alcohol and company that we were never without either, and Evelyn had such a personality that she commanded the attention of any and all she met. I was the ghostly figure following behind them, like a dog, emulating them and their emotions, applauding them for their audacity, and justifying the injustice they perpetuated on others. I aimed to live in their shadows, revelling in the lives they led that somehow, for some unknown reason, almost seemed to revolve around me.

On the night I’m thinking of I had resolved to stay in my room and recover my strength. Their constant presence sapped my energy and drained my tenacity. It took a monumental effort to be around them for any length of time, an effort I was normally glad to make. I was trying to read a book Cullen had lent me and told me to read and I had purposely not gone out to the Garden and hadn’t drank anything. At dinnertime I was eating some poorly cooked food in the kitchen and struggling to start the book when Luke appeared on the balcony, banging on the window and yelling to be let in.

            “How the fuck did you get there?” I demanded of him when I opened the window to let him in.

            His face was bright pink from the cold and his coat was pulled firmly around himself to keep warm. “I climbed up,” he said simply. “You know it is frightfully rude to ignore a person’s request for company, especially when that certain someone has no one else to drink with.” He pulled two bottles of wine out of his coat pockets and put them on the table.

            “I live on the third floor, you know. You could just have come in the front door.”

            “I thought you told me that the front door buzzer didn't work.”

            “No, I didn't.”

            “Strange. I'm almost sixty percent sure that someone told me that. Oh well, I thought coming up the balcony was the best way to get your attention and would convince you of my desperation to not be alone tonight. Being alone is the worst thing in the world; you only have yourself for company and there is nothing worse than having to make polite conversation with yourself and failing.”

            “I kinda just wanted a lonely, quiet night in on my own tonight,” I told him, knowing that it wouldn't make a difference and that he would always be able to convince me do whatever he wanted.

            “A quiet night? Here on your own? How revolting. Who ever came to university to have a quiet night? I thought we both came to university to have an excuse to be drunk all the time?”

            “No, I came here to learn,” I told him patiently. “It was only after I met you that I needed an excuse to be drunk all the time. I'm trying to read this book Cullen lent me.” He picked it up.

            “Italo Calvino?” He said dismissively. “That’s typical of Cullen. That boy has too much time and not enough brains. He’d starve to death in a fucking library if you played hide and seek with him there. But I find that reading post-modern fiction is best done with a glass of red wine. Red wine and a packet of cheap cigarettes help the brain with a particularly difficult book.” He threw the book back down and picked up the wine bottle. “How about a night-cap?” he asked greedily.

            I tried to form in my mind the perfect argument to convince him to leave me alone for the night but the words were hollow and the argument unfocused. Something about his presence always affected me this way. I could never think or talk clearly without having had some alcohol to steady my train of thought. Sometimes I would drink before meeting him so I could override the effects of his personality. Any evening spent with him without consuming alcohol always left me feeling lethargic and tired.

            Then the front door buzzer began to sound and I knew who was waiting down there for us. Luke opened the door soundlessly and waited until Evelyn appeared in the doorway. She laughed at the sight of me sat at the table with an uneaten plate of pasta and an open book and I forgot all my objections to spending the night with them.

            We went into my room and opened the wine; the book and my dinner lay forgotten on the table.

            “I detest your music collection,” Luke said as he was carelessly looking at my CD's and records. “It's all Bob Dylan, who sounds like an eighty year old chain smoking woman, and the Manic Street Preachers, who dress as women and call it political. Give me Leonard Cohen anyway day. Music needs to be intelligible and dry, but not too much.”

            Evelyn sat down on my bed in a position I always imagined her taking after I had seduced her and convinced her to come to my room alone. This imaginary seduction never happened. She always anticipated whatever it was I was trying to do and she subverted it, pushed me away, and destroyed my self-confidence. I sat down on the bed next to her. “The rabbits are dying,” I said, to no one in particular. “People say they’re cursed.”

Luke waved this away and opened a wine bottle. The he cleared a space on my desk and slouched against my bookshelf, one leg nonchalantly propped up on my chair. “They’re not cursed. They’re just inextricably lucky.”

“How can you call them lucky? They’re dying,” I said as I got up from the bed and sat on the desk next to him. I put both my feet on the chair and held out a wine glass for him to fill.

“I would love a plague to come and destroy us. It would take the question of our fate out of our hands. Give it back to nature and chaos. We wouldn’t need to worry about anything. The slate would be cleaned and we would all be free. We wouldn’t need to worry about how we were all going to die, because our death would be right there in the streets and on the news.”

“Oh God,” Evelyn said loudly, interrupting him. Her head was arched back in an overly theatrical gesture meant to show how infuriated she was.  “They’re just rabbits,” she said as she dismissed his thoughts with a wild gesture of her hands. “They’re just animals. The only people who think they’re worthy topics of our conversation and time are fools. All of them, boring people with boring lives who have nothing else to think about but the dead animals littering the campus. We didn’t kill them, we had nothing to do with their plague, so just let them die if they want to.”
            We began drinking the wines.

            “It's Argentine,” Luke said as he inhaled deeply from his glass. I did the same. “I adore Argentine wine. It tastes like autumn, and autumn is my favourite season. I love autumn because its melancholy seems to answer my need for sadness. There is more of life and death in a single gust of autumn wind that blows a thousand yellow leaves off a lifeless tree than in all of spring and summer combined.”

            “The wine tastes of melancholic evenings spent by the fire, listening to Tom Waits.” We all laughed at his description, then lapsed into silence trying to think of our own inflated and ridiculous way of describing the wine.

            “It reminds me of that time in a relationship when it has to end, but neither party wants it to.” Evelyn joined in. “and then one of them has to die so that it can end properly.”

            “What a morbid thought,” Luke said as he grinned at me. Then he refilled our glasses.

            To me, the wine had the smell that comes with old books. Stuffy, damp, and with just a little hint of ash or fire or something like that. I thought of the smell that comes with buying an old book from some second hand store, when you open it for the first time to a page picked at random, and inhale deeply. You breathe in the life contained in the book; the story, the plot, the characters and events, the quotable sayings, authorial digressions and character expositions. But then you find the life of the book itself; everywhere it’s been, every owner it’s had, every train journey it’s been on and all the times it’s been crammed into a bag for hours at a time, every page that’s been read and reread and all the underlined phrases someone else picked out for you. You breathe it all in, and your breath adds to it, you become a part of its story and its life and its journey, as if you were a character in another book, a bigger, longer, more expansive book, that contains the book you’re holding now and breathing in, the book of you and your life. It reminded me of that.

            But I couldn’t say that to Luke and Evelyn. The best I could manage was a brief: “Books,” followed by a non-committal shrug and then we moved onto other subjects.