Archive of Our Own

1998

When the bangs on the front door came, Graham was lying on the floor hugging his guitar, trying to get to the shortest version of himself. Obviously this was much easier done drunk. You were automatically the shortest and simplest you when drunk, laughing and pissing and sleeping and hitting and kissing unrestrained by the hideous fetters of anxiety and people’s blinking eyes. To reach it sober, you had to become an animal as small as a note and play that note until it was unbearable, then play another. Much of poetry was understood this way by Graham, who did not know much about poetry. Pick the shortest word for the biggest feeling, the shortest sentence, the most banal, the C, and let the biggest feeling run under it. A man lies on his carpet under a can of beer. Someone knocks on the door. This is where it stopped, of course, because there was no shortest word for Damon.

When Graham peered through his letterbox, he was already bending down to press his grin through the slot. Graham sighed.

“Fine. Come in, Afrika Bambaataa.”

He was dressed like he was going to breakdance before a Leninist Young Communist League convention. His big Che Guevara chain shone, his belt was flirting with the idea of slipping halfway to his arse, and he had shoved a bucket hat on his huge head. This was another costume change on the stage of the ever-morphing Damon Albarn performance. Done with Britpop it was now all about America, man, and he needed to dress the part just like he decided he had to be a man and reply to accusations of being a ponce by giving himself a cockney gravel and going to football matches instead of shrugging and grabbing Graham by the waist to give his mouth a long wet kiss to wind up the accusator even more and make everyone laugh.

Despite it all there was always an air of quiet disbelief around the witnesses, like Sure poof, we’ll humour you if you want to pretend you’re butch now, and football fans would never stop treating Damon at the very least like a Johnny-come-lately, at their nicest. There was some smugness to be gleaned from that for Graham at least. Wasn’t it so much nicer when it was just us wobbling on a guitar string in a disgusting hovel eating desiccated croissants and drinking wine and knowing, knowing, we were better than all of them and we would destroy them and you had never, never, never, never in your life said the words Chelsea Football Club.

“I would have called, but you don’t answer the phone.”

“You’d think my solicitors would take the hint, wouldn’t you?”

“Come on,” he said, smiling, and it sounded more like Cahhhme on.

He was becoming harder and harder to bear. Graham had to keep a white-knuckled grip on his mental image of Damon quietly crying in a recording booth, eyebrows sweetly pinched, voice singing It’s over, it’s over, it’s over. He’s like me, he had to repeat to himself, but did not know how to slip his fingers through the new concrete crack and touch the flesh-and-blood Damon. He knew how to walk up to him and smash his fist in his face or whatever else into whatever else of his, but was unsure of how to tenderly lay his blonde head on his shoulder, caress it. And although he couldn’t imagine a universe where Damon pushed him away, it was just as impossible to picture Damon accepting it as it was himself doing it, having always been the one who was coddled and comforted, even if he resisted it at every turn.

“I brought you a present,” Damon said, thrusting forward the coffee cup he was holding.

Graham tasted it. It was very sweet, which was how he liked it, but tepid, like it had been sitting around for a while. “Thank you,” he murmured. He'd never liked bitter things. Not made for this world, Alex would say to wind him up.

Damon took his shoes and hat off and shook his head. His hair was growing longer than it had been since 1991, and he had apparently given up on his bi-weekly lemon juice wash since his hair had turned what one, if they so wished and happened to be a teen magazine writer, would call a light chestnut instead of a very dirty blonde. Alex used to offer to piss on him to bleach his hair, Graham remembered semi-fondly; one of them would always quip that his piss was probably sparkling.

Damon had never looked like what Graham pictured as a male blonde beauty anyway, sod the teen magazine; despite the perfect nose, despite the eyes, he had never looked like those stocky blonde English men with perpetually red cheeks, all those slightly dumb-looking rugby players with faces like grown-up fat cherubs, like a Leyendecker illustration. He'd always been too mean and skinny for it, an animal with fleas and its ribs showing through the skin. Beware! Dog Bites.

“How are you doing,” he asked.

Graham made a face he hoped represented it all-in-one; the animal, the wine, the football, Leyendecker, Chuck D and Alex. Damon chuckled.

“D’you know what, you should come to Iceland. I think it would really help you.”

“I did come to Iceland, you’ll find. Remember me? I’m in your band.” He set the cup down.

Damon flicked his hair out of his eye like it was an irritating fly. “But you didn’t really. Complaining about the cold and getting—” He hesitated. “And going out with Alex every day.”

“Instead of taking in the landscape.”

“Just makes you feel small. Reminds you that you’re really so tiny it does not really matter.”

Graham had never needed reminding he was small. “You’re like—I dunno. You’re like The Beatles in India. It’s like you found religion, and all those Icelandic girls are your Maharishi.”

He said it with a tiny smile around the nail he was biting so it wouldn’t be too mean, and it wasn’t intended to be because he didn’t especially want a fight, but it came from a deep place inside his belly, hurt like Graham was Justine, yelling at him about all those Maharishis he was shagging on his spiritual journey. Now he’d gotten clean, he’d gotten sanctimonious, and Graham was drinking again. Everyone was trying to be an adult and Graham was still the bratty kid who needed looking after.

Pity for Justine was especially useless considering it was certain she held no pity for him, and they had never tried to get on or even really interacted beyond customary hellos and awkwardly timed smoke breaks and Graham vaguely knowing she and Damon occasionally fought about him, which wasn’t an interaction but a smirk he got on his face from time to time that Als told him made him look dumb, especially since Damon and him fought about Justine too, though it was only sonically. Graham still couldn’t help but feel an entirely one-sided and impossible-to-examine kinship with her; Haven’t we been jerked around the same? In clearer moments he’d think that not only had they not, but Damon wouldn’t have borne anything close to the amount of jerking around Graham inflicted on him from any woman or, really, anyone but Graham. It never made him feel better and could only be reconciled with business grinning pop prince unfeeling demon/damon with the link he didn’t have, chip in the glass; the tears shining on the cheeks, it’s over, it’s over.

Damon smiled, which he was wont to do when the atmosphere wasn’t conducive to a fight. “Don't need ‘em. I'm my own Maharishi, mate.” A pause for the audience to savour the perfectly executed football-punter “mate”. Once it would have been only an impression of the guys who used to kick the shit out of him in pub toilets.

“You haven’t found religion, then?” He continued.

Graham went to tug at his fringe and then remembered his hair was too short for it. “No, I don’t think I will. I don’t think drunks find religion; I feel like it’s for people who do too much cocaine.”

Damon flinched a little bit at “drunks” but chuckled obligingly. He thought for a beat and said “You’ve that picture of Audrey Hepburn you kept around on tour like she was a patron saint.”

“Maybe I was wanking to that,” Graham replied, suddenly irritated that Damon remembered, which meant he probably remembered him sulking and his drunken tears after learning about her death, and he remembered telling him he was sorry about her like it was at all rational.

Damon did his open-mouthed big throaty laugh. “Right, sure. Each man prays in his own way.” He extended his arm to catch Graham's wrist and tugged to pull him to his chest. Graham went, stumbling. Standing toe to toe like this, it was possible to tell that Damon was a bit shorter than him.

Damon looked him in the eye. Damon always looked people in the eye, in a way that reminded you of how little one actually looks people in the eye. He licked his lips. His hand was warm and dry around Graham's wrist, thumb pressed firmly against his pulsing blood. Graham let himself feel the magnetic pull of him and leaned in.

“You look good,” Damon said in his ear before sucking his earlobe for a bit; mouthed at his jaw, then his chin, and stuck out his large tongue to lick at Graham's lips. He was like a very slobbery puppy. They had not done this in over a year, not since the letter. The letter had fixed the music, the music was flowing like an open wound, which was what it needed to be, raw and shortest and long to make it press on the skull, to make it scary, but still there both of them stood, decidedly unfixed despite the music wobbling between them. It was so painful a thought it could not be looked at directly.

He very gently removed Graham's glasses from his nose and slipped them in his back pocket, giving his arse a squeeze that made him jump.

Graham considered pushing him away, thought of the hundreds of minuscule channels of blood running under the skin around his eye, saw them exploding under his knuckles, and kissed him before he could. His lips had the alcoholic taste of fruit that has only just begun to rot. He smelled good this close, like his sweat and women’s perfume.

He gave Damon some tongue and slipped his hands under his shirt to pinch his stomach. His skin was satiny and addictive once you had your hands on it. Graham could still feel down in him the teenage instinct he used to have of throwing clothes away to get to the fine tanned skin under, quick, quick, and rubbing his hands, his mouth, his nose, his thighs, anything he could against the revealed expanse, Damon laughing and himself feeling sort of embarrassed about it in a hot, tingly way low in his stomach.

“Do you want to shag,” Damon said when he pulled back.

Graham kept his eyes closed. Damon kissed his eyelids, then his mouth again. “Will your girlfriend mind?”

Graham scrunched up his nose in distaste while Damon attached himself to his neck. “You know, it’s not actually sexy to say things like that. Please don’t give me a hickey.”

“Get a few drinks in ya and you wouldn’t mind,” Damon said in a pervy old man voice. He nudged at Graham’s chin with his nose to make him look at him. Big blue eyes. Danger! High Water.

Damon went back to trace the notch between his collarbones with his tongue, hands firmly gripping his bum to press them against each other. Graham could feel every button of Damon's trousers. His skin was warm under Graham's hands.

“Time was, I could drag you over by my necklace,” Damon was saying against his throat, maybe only to himself.

“Do you want me to start wearing ties again?” Graham said with a flash of Damon in his school uniform. Never sweet, even in actual pictures and not just Graham’s memory of him, always wearing an expression that screamed I'm a fucking twat. Sure it would be amusing to have a band with a frontman dressed like a B-boy and the guitarist in a suit, though people would probably take it like some sort of statement. Maybe Dave could bring back the pyjamas. Maybe they could start chucking stones at the audience.

He could feel Damon smiling in between his ministrations. One of his hands climbed up the rungs of his spine to hold him quite securely between his shoulder blades. “How about a dog collar?”

He'd walked right into that. Maybe if Graham had been drunker, he really would have punched him. Or would have thrown something at his head; everybody knew to take cover when Graham had had too much to drink. But the time for punching had passed them by. He squirmed.

“Yeah, I want to shag,” Graham said.

They went to his bedroom. Damon tactfully did not mention the mess and did not step on a single record spilt on the floor. He sat on the edge of the bed, procured a cigarette from his pocket and lit it with an old novelty lighter Graham had laying about, a sausage dog whose head you had to uncap to ignite. It didn't amuse Graham like it usually did.

Graham nervously took off his shirt and sat next to him to drag his trousers down. His underwear was old and his legs looked pale and hairy in the dusty light passing through his blinds. He let himself fall back on the mattress.

Damon silently poked at a small round bruise near where his hip disappeared under his pants. “That's an actual bruise,” Graham muttered. He had a tendency to pace around drunk in the dark and forget where his furniture was. Damon looked at him. “Not that I need to explain myself to you.”

Damon crawled up his body to kiss him slowly, his jaw open, washing machine on spin. He smelled like cigarette smoke and tasted like the first swig out of a newly uncorked wine bottle. Graham only minutely pulled back for air and to make sure the house hadn't collapsed in the hundred years since this started and kept kissing him, opening his mouth for him again until all he could taste was the inside of Day’s mouth and his tongue and his saliva, and then kissed him some more.

Damon drew away and reached over Graham's head to the side table to put out his cigarette. Che Guevara slipped out of his open shirt and smacked Graham clean in the face, almost taking his eye out.

“Jesus,” Graham grumbled. “Will you take that stupid thing off?” Damon obediently slipped the necklace off his neck, fully sat up on Graham’s stomach to take his top off and shimmied to get rid of his jeans; knickers carelessly tossed away to be without a doubt forgotten so Graham could later be embarrassed finding them under his bed or in his clean laundry.

Now entirely bare, instead of flattening on top of Graham like he would usually do, he rolled onto his side next to him on the bed, kissed the comet on Graham’s shoulder and stared up at the ceiling, unselfconsciously star-fished. Star-shaped, Graham thought, annoyed that he was being unusual by not holding him down and rubbing himself against him, eating the skin of his neck.

Graham looked down at his body. The hair around his nipples crawling down until it reached his appendicitis scar. The blue doughnut tattooed near his hipbone. The skinny and fragile-looking shoulders and wrists and ankles, so strange in contrast with his thick chest and stomach, his little love handles he’d never been without, even at his most underfed. Damon shook his boyish, coltish legs like he was getting impatient. Skinny and nervy, twiggy stick-like footballer legs and his absurd cock laying there on his thigh.

His eyes opened and flicked over Graham’s face. Graham took it as Albarnese for I want it out of my hands, so I’m waiting for you to make a move. Slowly, Graham dragged his hand over his jutting hip bone. You could still see the line of a low-hanging bathing suit there, the vestige of his doomed intended-to-be-relationship-saving last vacation with Justine.

Damon was somehow perpetually tanned. Graham remembered him during the dreadful American tour, always out in the desert sun without a shirt when they had a day off, climbing on the bus roof when he was drunk, pushing Graham down into those minuscule bunk beds they had. Graham would press his mouth to his browned skin to see if it was still warm. He would think of his childhood attempts at tasting snow by sticking his tongue out to catch the flakes and figured if anyone thought to lick a sun ray, it would probably taste something like the sweaty salt flavour he found on Damon’s neck around the glass beads.

Damon kept his eyes on him. They were still so close Graham could feel his warm breath on his naked shoulder. Graham let his fingers continue down to his thigh, the muscle tight to the touch despite Damon’s apparent relaxation. He had an enormous bruise in the shape of an iron bar purpling all the way across his shin, no doubt caused by some recent drunken acrobatics, and he hissed when Graham pressed on it with his fingers. A cut on his knuckles from a bar fight was scabbing green-brown over a healthy scar-pink. Sometimes Graham wondered if Damon’s bullheaded attachment to him was a manifestation of his propensity for self-harm.

Graham pressed his thumb into his foot to see the white imprint appear and disappear, thought of the much more permanent marks he’d left on Damon’s body, then brought his hand back up to grab Damon’s cock and work his hand up and down the length. He was still partway soft, but his libido was meant to have been restored since Iceland. Long gone were supposed to be the days of Graham fumbling inside his pants for ages until Damon told him it just was not going to happen.

Graham had always seemed to feel more embarrassed about it than Damon, who usually told him he would still get him off, or that he could come on his stomach if he wanted, or one memorable time after a split from a party where Damon had taken ecstasy and Graham had grudgingly done a few lines, that he could just put it in, which Graham had declined, feeling like he was going to pass out from the coke-infested blood rushing to conflicting parts of his body. He had ended up just sort of grinding against his hip, his head bowed to avoid his eyes, almost completely clothed, while Damon, naked, felt him up and told him he loved him and that they were the same soul that had split into two different bodies, his mouth pressed open to the crown of Graham's head, and after, Graham remembered his hair sticking to his forehead because on-E-Damon had chewed it so thoroughly it had been wet from his spit.

Graham was feeling himself growing stiff from the memory and Damon lying there in his bed with all his bared expectant skin, wanting to be taken. He was getting properly hard now as well and already pearling a little bit at the tip, which was familiar territory to Graham, who remembered long teenage snogs where Damon would eventually take out a prick so wet any kind of palm licking they insisted on doing was entirely redundant. Graham raised his head to look at Damon looking at him, the very silent blink of his lashes and his hand that had moved to go and clutch Graham’s waist. Graham shrugged it off by shuffling backwards on his knees and bowed his head to be mouth-level with Damon’s prick.

“Do you ever feel like it’s all been my fault?” Damon suddenly said, stopping Graham’s progression, loud in the dusty bedroom.

It was so odd a question in a context where the only things Damon usually asked were “Can I pull your hair?” and “Can you look at me”, the latter not being so much a question as a drunken breathless injunction that usually ended quickly once obeyed with spunk landing on his nose or his glasses, that Graham wondered if Damon had just wanted to have a conversation all along and he had somehow misinterpreted “Do you want to shag”.

He sat back on his heels, not very far, and kept his hand laying on Damon's groin. “What?”

“I mean, are you angry with me? Are you— Are you?”

“Have you done something?”

“I was just wandering about before I came here, and about us, I was thinking... I was just thinking that I was the one to ask.” He shook his head, aware probably that he was speaking genuine gibberish.

“I guess I'm asking if you regret it all.”

He was so naked and serious in front of Graham. All of it, the hairy navel, the lean thighs and the jutting knees. His prick twitching in Graham's fist between them. It was all bearing down on his shoulders, and like a pillar that had been erected for longer than anything else inside him, it was The Beatles that came to Graham; I want to hold your hand… Well surely, I want to hold your cock was the very next best thing, he thought madly.

“You're great, Damon,” Graham said slowly. “There's no need to worry.”

It was a conversation they had never managed to have and yet had been having in some form or another for the past ten years. By giving him everything he'd ever wanted, Damon was perpetually nearly killing Graham, and Graham was trying his very hardest to make it as quick as possible and take as many people down with him as he could. There was no way to reply with something that wasn't what Graham had apologetically murmured with his guitar, hidden under a table in the studio, making the words unnecessary; You're so great, you're so great, you're so great, and I… Well, you get the point.

Maybe Damon understood his meaning; certainly there had been a time where he would not have needed words to know what Graham had said, Graham thought bitterly. Maybe he was about to say something else, but when Graham bent back down after a beat to kiss his tip, he simply let his elbows collapse under him and sighed, and when Graham took him fully in his mouth, remembering to look up across the valleys and plains and mounds of skin and sweat and hair at the perfect face, he moaned.

Afterwards, Graham wandered back to the living room, fumbling up his briefs, to retrieve the pack of Camels he’d left there; he refused to smoke Damon’s disgusting banana peel cigarettes. Damon followed behind him in the trousers he came in with and a Ralph Lauren jumper he took from Graham’s pile of clothes but could have been originally his.

He collapsed heavily on the couch. “There any hash in here?” he asked, toeing at an old biscuit tin abandoned under a side table with his bare foot. Graham mumbled and went to the kitchen to take a swig out of the wine bottle sitting half drunk in his fridge door.

He went back to the living room to light a cigarette, feeling Damon's eyes on his back, feeling himself assuming a half-cocked, awkward standing position, hunched over his fag, and his other hand making the heavy glass ashtray spin on the side table near the unplugged telephone.

“You know who you’re reminding me of right now?” Graham straightened, made a face at the feel of cold ash on his fingers, rubbed them together to get rid of it. “What?” He coughed. “Who?”

“Who, who, says the owl…” Damon smiled. “Digging around ashtrays. In An Introduction, you know—”

“Yeah.” Graham cut in. He’d been rereading Salinger recently, which wasn’t doing much for his mood. His cigarette was shivering in his hands. He went to sit next to Damon, who was always warm. “I used to eat ‘em, you know, when I was a kid. The contents, I mean, not the ashtrays themselves.” He wished Damon would put his arm around him, but he seemed to be thinking about something else.

“I didn’t know that,” Damon said mournfully, like it was a personal insult to him that he did not know every detail of Graham's life. Even when they were angry with each other, he never relinquished the claim he felt he had on Graham, and he was sometimes annoyed when presented with evidence there were parts of Graham still hidden to him, like it was on purpose. He was looking at the goose fleshed skin of Graham’s chest, his stiff nipples. In the silence, he ruffled his hair, and suddenly he was Jane at the end of Graham's bare knee, in the way she would collect the hair at her nape like a bouquet for just an instant to feel the air on her neck.

“The anaemia, probably,” Graham explained without much enthusiasm. “You want to go back to bed?” The room had become cold, and Graham felt suddenly awkward, which could have been because of Damon recently comparing him to a suicide victim.

“I wanted to tell you something, before,” Damon said lowly, which made him whistle on his s even more than usual. “So you would. So Alex wouldn’t tell you first to wind you up or—or something.”

His sweetly halting voice made Graham suddenly flash with an image of what he must have been like as a child, before even – though it somehow seemed impossible – they had met. A golden-haired, toddling Damon skipping to catch up with adult legs, dwarfed by a child's backpack, saying And then I And then I And then I. The imagined picture made Graham so tender he decided he would forgive almost anything that would next come out of adult Damon's pinched mouth, for the sake of the child he had been.

“It’s nothing bad, but I’ve been looking at places with Jamie, and we think we’ll just move in together, since anyway we’re both looking and we get along.” Graham felt himself shrink. The “we” was almost what was most unbearable; the all-encompassing-married-couple we, the “we're trying for a baby” we, the impenetrable unit we. They got along now, after ten years of Damon hating him; it seemed right when it would hurt Graham the most. That useful we circumvented saying whose idea it was, though Graham had a guess. Damon had his own particular way of making you regret ever feeling bad for him. It’s over, and the tears shining.

“Jamie can’t keep his eyes on his own lunch,” Graham said with a grimace. He’d rarely in his life been more aware that he was in his pants. He could not stop imagining that he could still feel the strip of skin on his lower back Damon had licked wetly earlier drying and growing cold. Damon laughed more loudly than it warranted, probably relieved Graham wasn’t tearing his hair out or punching him or whatever other melodrama Graham had apparently taught him to expect from him. He reached over to ash his cigarette and stood up.

“I have to—I’m just going to put something on.” He went back to the bedroom.

The sight of the rumpled sheets made Graham shiver. He stuck his ciggie in his mouth and bent to retrieve his jeans. His shirt had apparently disappeared. He eyed Damon’s crumpled button-down, from which something was refracting afternoon light into his eyes. Damon's Che Guevara.

Graham reached to grab it and turned the necklace around in his hands. Probably he was imagining it, but the metal still seemed to his fingers warm from Damon's skin. Damon had made him a necklace once—he thought of his small unsure smile when he had entered his hospital room, his hand on the bed, so close to Graham's, and the way Graham had nodded at him like Go on, take it so they could make it a joke, but Damon had done it so tenderly it hadn't been funny. He threw the chain inside his bedside table drawer. It clunked accusingly, and he shut it before he could think about it.

He put on the first shirt that happened under his hand, which turned out to be an old Morrissey tour shirt that made Damon wince when he came back to the living.

“I’ve written some songs,” he said. Damon brightened.

“You have?”

A horrible flower was unfurling inside Graham’s chest. “I mean I’ve—” Damon deflated. His lips pinched again. It made him look like a schoolmarm.

“No, I’ve got it. That’s great, Graham. You should play them for me.”

“I’ll bring the demos to the studio so you can tell me if you want any.” Now that Damon had become the slighted party, Graham felt like he had lost control of the situation again. How easy it was to be the one who was hurt! He couldn't think of what to do, standing there in front of him like a complete prat.

“You could play me a bit now; you have your guitars right here.”

“No,” Graham started protesting. “Not…” Damon looked at him. He had meant not after sex, but he was sure Damon had heard not this sober, which all around meant not with you looking at me.

“I'll bring you the tapes; don't worry.”

Trying to say anything was like shouting through a wall you've been scratching at with your fingernails, hoping against hope that there was someone on the other side and that they had their ear against it. Sometimes during sex or when sufficiently drunk on stage in the early days, they would look at each other and the wall would crack. It would seem ridiculous that they'd ever thought there was a wall there and then it would reappear when they next spoke or after they opened their eyes after a kiss. He bit his thumbnail.

“Do you want a cup of coffee, or tea, or something?” Damon looked up at him like he was still naked.

“Thank you,” Damon said, “but I've got to go.”

No you don't, Graham thought, You don't at all; you just can't stand the sight of me, and I can't stand to look at you. He wondered if one day they would become so stranger to each other he wouldn’t actually be able to tell when Damon was finished with him, just like the old people who don’t even realise they’re going mad. He wondered if it would be a relief to forget him all.

Graham politely accompanied him to the door. Looking at someone hunching and struggling to slip into their trainers was so horrifyingly human it always temporarily took their magic away from them, but it came back as soon as he straightened and turned around, closed down. Keep Out!

The living room was growing blue, like Damon was taking the sunlight away with him. It would have been a beautiful thought once, but it just made Graham angry.

“I'll see ya,” he said and then suddenly brought his hand to his sternum like he realised something was meant to be there but wasn't. His fingers closed around nothing. He began something that looked like a frown, then relaxed his face.

Graham wished very hard that he would start yelling. He wished he’d clutch his hand and his waist and waltz him around the room. Instead his empty hand twitched towards Graham who was standing dumbly on his own front step with a fresh hickey pulsing on his neck, straining for a fight, and he squeezed two fingers of Graham’s right hand. Something glimmered in Graham’s periphery, the last ray of sun of the afternoon, out of the clouds and through the blinds. The healing light in Graham's chest was still there. Perhaps it was futile to hope it would vanish. His hands were always warm.

“Bye.” And he turned away and left.

Graham closed the door so he wouldn’t have to see if Damon turned around and looked back before disappearing. In the glass pane of his front door, he could see his own reflection, and it had an angry scratch just next to its left eye.

1992

Damon almost tripped over the inform mass that was Graham slumped against his own hotel room door and smashed his front teeth into the frame.

Graham had clearly been sick down his front and either couldn't figure out how to get in his room or had been abandoned there by the Samaritan that had led him this far. Graham's eyes fluttered. His eyelashes were wetting his cheeks, and he was muttering to himself. Someone had punched him in the face, and his nose and top lip were sluggishly crying blood that mingled with bile at the corners of his mouth.

They'd all gone out together and subsequently fought, raw and jagged to the nerve like they were by the slogging of the weeks, and Damon had uncharacteristically split early and gone back to the hotel, sure he'd rather stare at the water stains on his ceiling than spend another second with these people. Only to come out of his room lurking and still stumbling drunk to go scratch at Graham’s door, in search of—something he wasn’t sure he could name unless under duress, a snog or a talk or a smoke or something even flimsier, a look from Graham that would have meant he remembered he knew Damon before anyone else and he still liked him the best and in his clear moments he didn't begrudge him for what he'd dragged them all into.

He looked around the corridor hoping for someone, anyone, a ray of light under Ifan's door (though he couldn't really remember which one it was), but the dusty carpet only breathed serenely at him, quiet and dark.

Graham moaned and weakly tried to raise his arm to paw at his face to feel the blood now slipping beneath his collar or grab his glasses; Damon wasn't sure. He gently pushed his hand back down and started riffling in his pockets for his room keys.

The inventory of Graham's pockets was as follows: one marker, no cap; several pub napkins, wet, scribbled over with drawings and at least one phone number Damon could decipher that he quickly crumpled, then guiltily smoothed over, then crumpled again; three condoms on a strip, given by Alex; one American tenner, damp; one old receipt with snatches of lyrics on the back in Damon's hand; one hair tie; one hockey stick-shaped pin at the glory of the Toronto Maple Leafs; one lone cigarette, ripped near the filter and spilling tobacco; one pack of Stimorol, half opened with gray blue pocket lint and loose tobacco clinging to the tacky warm exposed chewing gum; Keys, absent.

Damon sat in the circle the precious sticky possessions formed around him, working himself up to the idea that he would have to drag Graham to his room, when Graham raised his clenched hand again, and this time it clinked.

“Thank you, love,” Damon gratefully murmured, kissing the fingers he was extirpating the keys from.

The door snicked open while Damon held on to Graham’s elbow to keep him from spilling all over the floor. His head lolled painfully on his shoulders without the support of the door, making him whine. Damon carefully laid him flat and crawled over him—Blah—to crouch behind his head and drag him by the armpits. Every time he would move or touch Graham in any way, he would moan in pain.

Damon lifted him until only his bottom half remained on the carpet, ignoring his pitiful groans and his litany of No, no, nos, dragged him to the bed and heaved himself up on it backwards, with Graham’s limp head and hair and chest and arms on top of him. He spat out a strand of hair that got into his mouth and rolled him over. He threw Graham's legs on the bed, pushing his bum so it wasn’t sticking out and risking making him fall off. The entire time Graham was weakly crying out You’re hurting me, you’re hurting me, you’re hurting me, you’re hurting me, which was so painful even from someone at the very last frontier of consciousness that it couldn’t bear to be lingered upon.

Damon crumpled next to Graham and let his head fall forward on his T-shirt, feeling more exhausted and older than anyone his age should ever feel. A hand touched his hair in a manner that could be interpreted as clumsy loving petting if one wished to decode the heavy-limbed gestures of a person so drunk they could no longer stand or remember what they were doing. He got on his knees and took off Graham's glasses, wrestled the soiled shirt off his head and used a clean corner to try to wipe off the worst of the blood and spittle.

The harsh burnt orange light from the parking lot shone directly on the bed, unhampered by the flimsy curtains, softening Graham’s near-catatonic features and erasing the cuts and the blood. The patheticness of their situation hit Damon so suddenly that he nearly keeled over.

Despite the crushing aloneness that struck Damon again just like he was stricken earlier, suddenly cold when staring at his water stains, that even near each other they were merely in a square box bobbing along an ocean of sand, stranded so far away from anything and anyone they knew, left only to grasp at each other to find empty air whispering between their fingers; Despite the horror of growing to despise the only remains of home you brought with you just as they spat and hit and despised you too; Despite it all, the beloved face tried to flinch away from the offending cleaning shirt by scrunching its nose in a manner observed hundreds, thousands of times before.

He felt his mouth murmuring Graham like he was praying the Rosary, thumbing his shirt.

He threw the shirt over his shoulder and tenderly ran his thumb over the abused lip. Graham’s mouth opened, and Damon would swear on everything, his grave and the ones of everyone he had loved, that Graham had said Damon.

The nights were a type of cold you couldn't fathom in the middle of the day when you were cooking under the tin roof of the bus, thinking there was no freshness left in the world, and Graham, half naked, was already shivering. Damon could not picture a way to wrangle Graham under the covers, so he piled a coat and a pair of jeans he found on the floor on top of him. He curled up at the foot of the bed, trying to keep his own body heat about his person, thinking there was no need to get in the sheets or even go back to his own room as he was just making sure Graham didn't die in the next hour. Graham twitched and touched his shin with the sole of his dirty sneaker, Forgot to take off his shoes, Damon thought and fell asleep.

When he woke up, Graham was perched on the old hotel armchair in a classically Coxon-esque gargoyle position. MTV was humming on the TV in front of him, and he was eating fluorescent red Maraschino cherries from the jar. There was something hypnotising about the elegant mechanical manner in which his two fingers plunged into the glass, pinched a cherry, came up stained pink, went to his sweet puckered mouth; index and thumb in a circle and the other three spread out like he was hailing a taxi in a black and white movie; then were absent-mindedly sucked clean and returned to the jar.

He turned his head to spit out the pit into what looked to be an empty champagne bucket, reaching the bottom with a clean clang. His hair was sticking up in the back in a really lovely way. Damon cleared his throat, and it was like the subject of a painting suddenly turning its head to stare at you as you walked past it in a museum.

“Hello.” Graham set the opened jar down on the carpet, where it would no doubt later be accidentally punted to its bloody death, to the despair of the unfortunate souls charged with cleaning up spunk from hotel room sheets.

“Why you eating cocktail cherries,” Damon mumbled.

“Trying to tie a knot wif my thongue,” Graham lisped, sticking it out, and wiped his fingers on his shirt. Damon didn't want to think about his tongue or his mouth or his teeth or his lips, so he closed his eyes against the sensation of his stomach rolling.

“I wanted something sweet, and it's the only thing this shit hotel would send up by room service, actually,” Graham continued and spat a wet limp stem in Damon's direction. He stood up and cracked his back in a fairly disgusting manner.

Damon let his eyes slit open. “Want me to give you some sugar, doll?” he said in his best cowboy impression.

“Sod off.” Damon felt at a distinct disadvantage, still half-asleep and coated in that filmy uncomfortable feeling of having slept in one’s clothes. He tried shaking off the crust and wrinkles of sleep and sat on the edge of the bed.

There were streaks of brown dried blood on the pillow. Graham started going about the room in a directionless cleaning frenzy like a marching toy with its spring reset or a soldier caught slacking off.

“Do you remember who hit you?” Damon asked Graham’s shoulders, who were ostensibly busy trying to shove the hurricane of clothes that had torn through the land and traumatised the inhabitants of the hotel room carpet back into his suitcase.

“Dave. I think I was cheating at Canasta. Or I stole one of his cassette tapes; I can’t be sure.”

He straightened in front of the window, blocking Damon’s light. Damon sat in the shadow he extended on the bed, looking silently at him. He was a perfect uninterrupted shape in the eastern light; Have you seen, Lydia, how your forehead and your shoulder and your fingernail and your knee all flow together to create one beautiful line?, Damon thought, worrying at a hangnail with his teeth.

His shirt fell cleanly from armpit to hip, suggesting the curve of his waist and letting his underwear peek above his trouser button. His bare ankles were adorable under the cuff of his jeans, his biceps goose-bumped by the hangover nausea. He bent to pick up some rubbish on the ground over there, and Damon observed the pale ridges of his spine jutting out in a neat row just below his shirt, remembered how they felt beneath his fingers, pressing down like on piano keys.

Damon tugged at one of his belt loops when he passed by him, and Graham went, easy as a dream, to fold over him.

“Will you give us a kiss?” Damon asked, looking up into his eyes. He blinked, pursed his lips the way he always did and poked his tongue out to lick them; seemingly realised what he was doing and stopped.

“I dunno, Damon.”

“Come on. Doll.” Damon added in his bad American twang. Graham shook his head and leaned in like he was doing him a favour.

Damon brought his mouth up to his, sucked at length his bottom lip, ran his tongue across his teeth, feeling at the ones at the front that were adorably off-centre. His mouth was sweet from the cherries. Damon’s stomach rolled over again like he was in a ship’s hold. He wanted him so bad it was nearing violence in his entrails, unsure of where to put this energy if it wasn't taking a bloody bite out of his creamy neck and keeping on chewing until he was sucking on the bone of his spine.

Graham wetly pulled back and crinkled his forehead at him, wordlessly asking Where's the gag in snogging alone in a hotel room. This close, Damon could see that the roots of his hair were still dark damp from his bath.

Damon kissed him again, trying to see what he could get away with before Graham would inevitably push him away, aflame. This is real, he tried to silently tell him, but Graham only slipped his hand under his shirt to grab Damon's waist. Graham often tried to make him laugh by tickling his most sensitive parts, and Damon had always conceitedly thought it was an excuse to touch him.

Damon worried at the wound on his injured lip with his teeth, tasting his blood, and Graham pinched him. He tried to drag him down onto the bed, but Graham only planted his knee between his thighs to balance himself.

Graham swallowed. Damon rubbed his tongue against the roof of his mouth, feeling the odd ridges of his hard palate. His mouth tasted acidic. Damon's jaw muscles reflexively contracted, and he pulled back, feeling himself salivate. Graham was looking noticeably greener. “You're going to be sick,” he said dumbly.

Graham nodded and twisted away to vomit in the bin next to the nightstand, Damon's finger still in his belt loop. As anyone could have predicted, it was bright fluorescent pink.

“You know, a bloke could grow to feel offended by a thing like that.”

“Yeah, this is totally all you,” he muttered, his shoulders blades shockingly prominent under his shirt, shaking. He retched again and spat. Long thin transparent string dangling from his bottom lip.

Damon released his jeans, and Graham slipped away to the loo to rinse out his mouth. The hot acrid smell of sick was rapidly becoming pungent. He kicked the trash can away from himself and went to open the window.

The air was already starting to warm up in the morning sun. Damon turned his face towards it. He could still taste the iron of Graham’s blood when he swallowed. Bless me, he thought. Bless us all.

“Don't you find vomiting to be very purifying?” Damon yelled in the direction of the toilet, gravitating back to the bed. He bent down to taste a cherry from the jar, thinking that surely this was full of his spit.

“Rarely.” Graham walked back in, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“It’s like all the bad stuff is coming out of you.” He did his best impression of his own vomiting noise, sticking his tongue out. “Like running. Or kind of like singing, in a way.”

“Well, that explains it,” Graham said, acerbic.

That was something like Alex would have said. “You're nasty today.”

“Can't imagine why I would be.” Graham could keep going, answering with things that meant nothing like this for hours until he got a punch in the nose.

“Maybe you ought to slow down,” Damon said carefully. Truth was, it would have meant all of them slowing down all at once, and they could only slow down if the bus and the tour and the t-shirts slowed down. So, simply put, they couldn’t.

“Don’t give me this shit,” he bit, and then a bit softer: “Not you.”

“I don’t want to give you shit. I’m just saying, maybe only brush your teeth with a bottle of beer every other day.”

“You are so hypocritical.”

He seemed like he was really rearing up. “Let’s drop it. Let’s not fight.” This would have maybe been the first time in his life he’d asked that. It felt like there’d be a very strong chance of it winding Graham up even more, but he looked like he was softening.

The cut on his lip was shining red instead of the dull brown it had been when he’d woken up. Tangible proof of Damon touching him. Damon’s whole body twitched like a guitar string being pinched. He stepped to Graham, gently rested his right hand on his waist and clutched his hand in his.

Graham was pliant in his grip. He let himself be taken and guided to step back, then right, before he muttered “What’re you doing.”

“Dancing. You must have heard of it.” The TV was gurgling the jingle of a frozen meal commercial behind them. Damon brought him closer by the hips. Their belts clinked together. Damon remembered very clearly buying the shirt Graham was wearing from a charity shop, and he briefly wondered when he’d taken it out of his suitcase, if he felt the same fondness towards Damon's belongings Damon had towards any piece of old rubbish Graham disseminated. Not that long ago, Alex saw him slip a doodled-over scrap of paper in his pocket and had told him he had a stash of Graham's used gum and cigarette butts if Damon wanted in and Damon had had to clatter over the rickety bus tables to give him a black eye and sink his teeth into his shoulder until he bled to shut him up.

Sometimes it felt like their whole relationship was built on stealing things from each other, or rather Damon stealing from him; records and chords and CDs and cassettes and his music taste and fags and The Beatles and dope from his room at Goldsmiths and deformed funny big nosed guffing figures on the back of receipts and little words and hums to put in songs and kisses and glances and the pearl of sweat on his upper lip and blankets and food from his mum and sips of his beer when he wasn't looking.

He spun Graham away from him, still gripping his hand. He almost tripped on an upturned shoe and tried to free himself from Damon’s jealous clutch only to be brought back to his chest.

“Damon. Stop messing about. Ifan’ll be angry we’re taking so long.” It didn't matter what he was saying because of the feel of his breath on Damon's face, fresh but still a bit sour.

“Ifan, angry with us for being late. Now wouldn't that be a new experience to have.”

Damon tried his best to lead them in a waltzing circle, trying to picture his feet tracing a diamond shape, but he was kicking debris away every five steps. One little box made a plastic-y rattling sound when it bounced away and Graham shrugged at him; Dave's.

He let his head fall on Damon's shoulder, following obediently and so fused to him Damon almost felt like he was carrying him. MTV was playing a Pearl Jam song, according to the banner unfurling at the bottom of the screen. He was annoyed to be experiencing something so pure to something so repulsive.

“It's a cracking idea, spinning me around to make sure I don't spew any more,” Graham said to Damon's t-shirt.

“This could never harm you. Don't you—We're. It would not harm you.” Damon almost stopped. Don't you feel it, he thought, despairingly.

“I'm already harmed. Aren't you too? Aren't you, I don't know, wounded?” He raised his head to look at Damon. “It seems like it shouldn't be hurting this much.”

The cherished, precious face. Enormous brown eyes eating up half of it. Damon's beads on his collarbone. Damon's Damon's Damon's. He didn't want to be kept, which was not the only reason why Damon couldn't keep him.

“You know what I've always thought,” Graham started saying, “is that the most important part of a wedding is the first dance. The dance is all about how your life together will go. Those professions of love up there don't mean anything if you're not dancing well.”

“Doesn't the saying go that you can tell how you'll have sex by dancing together?”

Graham smiled, his lovely smile that showed his teeth. “Isn't that what I said?”

Damon laughed. Oh, the relief of Graham smiling at him! MTV was playing something less offensive. Damon tried to silently communicate to Graham that he wanted him to lay his head on his shoulder again and he did. Everything was perfect. He whirled them into the patch the light of the morning sun was sewing into the carpet.

“It's sort of meant to hurt, Graham,” he said. “Everyone hurts, everyone toils in the dust and the rain and dies and we’re all of those hurting, dying people. We have to be hurt onstage.”

“What about offstage,” Graham said softly. He snuggled into Damon’s neck so Damon could feel his breath on the fine hairs there, maybe his eyelashes fluttering against his skin. “I want to go home. I hate every single mote of dust of this country. I hate you just because you’re in it.”

Damon kissed his hair at its messiest spot. Graham hadn't had a fag yet so it still smelled like hotel shampoo. He felt like he was running off a cliff in a cartoon and he hadn't yet looked down to realize he was about to fall on his head, birds going poo-tee-weet and all.

“You don’t really hate me.”

“Sometimes I think I could kill you.” Needle sharp teeth piercing the thin skin of his throat; or that was it felt like. Damon turned them again and stepped back. He brought Graham’s hand to his mouth and kissed the toughened skin of his fingertips, right where the noise came, then pressed it to his breast. The sun had finally risen completely behind Graham, and he was only a black silhouette in the middle of the light blinding Damon. He closed his eyes and could still see the square burned behind his eyelids with the dot that was Graham in the middle of it, like a negative shot of the sky.