By James Bennett.
Every morning he walked down Piccadilly, sizing up every man over forty in a suit, wondering if he could sexually intimidate him in some way. With some it was obvious. They were so uptight, so worried-looking. They poured out of the station, out of Pret, one after another, another man always following the last. He made a quick judgement as he passed each one, walking down Piccadilly, walking up the stairs to sit in front of a computer for eight hours and send two or three emails. Maybe if he had more work to do his mind wouldn’t wander as much. Maybe it would. Maybe if he had more work to do he would have quit his job, because as bored as he was, the only thing worse he could think of was actually working. There’s no dignity in work, he thought. He had known that for a while. His new and more interesting discovery was that there was little dignity in anything else either. Art was undignified, especially if you went looking for dignity in it. Love too was undignified in the end. How can we possibly have dignity when we all care so much about ourselves? It’s disgusting, he thought, how much we truly, genuinely care about our tiny little selves. Any possible attempt at dignity has already failed the second it occurs to me, he thought, poring over a draft of a three-line email. He opened Grindr. Almost instantly someone messaged him. It was the same faceless profile 102 metres away that always wrote to him when he opened Grindr at work. Discreet here looking to suck someone off in Fortnum and Mason’s toilets. Nine identical messages stacked on top of one another, going back months. He never replied. The thrill of the cloying approach was enough. It made the time go by. He closed Grindr and sent the email. It was unlikely he would have another one to send until later in the afternoon. He came back to the question of dignity. We can’t have dignity because we care too much about ourselves, he thought, but I’ve tried not caring about anything and that doesn’t work either. It seemed you did have to care about something to have real dignity. Maybe god was the answer after all. He had done away with god in his own personal reckoning with the universe as a teenager, but now he wondered if it might be time to bring him back. He knew he was unlikely to find dignity in the grandeur of god like this, by bringing him back like a character in a soap opera. But he also knew there was no point holding out for perfection. It could be a useful experiment. How would it work, though? Would he start going to mass again? Start praying again every night before he went to sleep? It felt disingenuous. The dignity of the early Christian martyrs was gone, and he wasn’t going to bring it back. He wasn’t going to be a modern-day St. Sebastian. At least not a real one, something more than an image. There was no room for him to get tied to a post and shot with arrows until he died. Maybe god wasn’t the answer then. What about money, he thought, there might be some dignity to be found there. It seemed more promising than god. He went out on his lunch break. St. Sebastian played on his mind as he walked down Jermyn Street to Tesco. Before, when he thought about St. Sebastian, he used to think about a line of men stretching back through history who had used his image as an excuse, an outlet for their desires, a way to paint, carve or sculpt them. He didn’t care about that anymore. He was interested in actual martyrdom. The dying. The arrow as arrow, as opposed to a dressed-up dick. He went into Tesco, bought some bread and hummus and started walking towards St. James’ Park, noticing he now felt little interest in the men that passed him. His mind was preoccupied with thoughts of god, money, St. Sebastian. As interesting as the martyrdom question was, money seemed a more feasible way to tap into something absolute and experience real dignity. He sat on a bench and ate his food, trying to meditate on the idea of money but finding it boring. He was pulled out of his reverie by the sound of a swan hissing. That’ll be me, he thought, once I’ve embraced the power of money. I’ll be the opposite of St. Sebastian. An arrow in the flesh of the world. He messaged Mario and asked him if he wanted to come over later. They had met in a sauna a few months ago. Mario was the same age as him, but not out. He was an engineer on building sites. New high-rise blocks in Canary Wharf. In many ways the whole thing was a pathetic fantasy, but he reminded himself that pathetic pleasure is still pleasure, and as such he was not inclined to give up the one night a week he had grown used to spending with Mario. The sex between them was good. They enjoyed each other’s bodies, and when they were together he rarely thought about things like dignity, money, god or St. Sebastian. Mario usually didn’t reply until later in the afternoon. His work was real. It required him to focus on things continuously throughout the day. It was nothing like sitting in an office for eight hours and sending two or three emails. The practicalities of embracing the power of money started to become more tangible to him. Would he have to get a job like Mario’s? Not necessarily a physical one, but one which required sustained attention throughout the day? Was that a price worth paying for dignity? And even then, the dignity wasn’t guaranteed. It was all speculative. He would be paying for a shot at dignity. Or maybe it would work the other way. Maybe the higher you moved up the money chain, the more empty your job became. The actual work you did to deserve your extravagant pay might be the work of looking like you deserved it, he thought. That rang truer, especially given what he had observed in his own office. And if he did climb that ladder, would he still be able to relate to Mario? Would they still have a good time together? Would he change so much that Mario would find him unbearable? These seemed like undignified thoughts to have about a closeted guy he was having sex with, so he tried to think about god again, but he couldn’t. Normally he would be here with Clare, but she had gone to Ireland for two weeks to see her family. He missed having someone to talk to on his lunch break, although lately she was becoming obsessed with marriage and children, which he found hard to relate to. She was a year older than him, and would be turning thirty in a few months. Over the last year he had watched her become fixated on finding the father of her children before it was, as she said, too late. The sequence of dating, being engaged, getting married and then having children required a certain amount of time to be spent at each interval, in order to preserve everyone’s dignity, and thinking about this made Clare despair. If she did it right, which she intended to, she would not have a baby until she was thirty-four, which apparently was a geriatric pregnancy, and that was providing she met the guy this year. He felt thankful he did not have to go through this. Maybe there was a kernel of dignity built into the structure of homosexuality. Or maybe there used to be. He looked over to where the swan had been. It was gone. He got up to go back to work, brushing the crumbs off himself as he stood. On his way back to the office, he got a text from Mario saying he couldn’t come over that night. Probably not at all that week actually. He was busy. He tried to have a dignified internal response to this, to remind himself that they owed each other nothing. The lift was broken when he got back to the office so he climbed the five flights of stairs, thinking about Mario. It felt like the start of being blown off by him, and he was determined not to care more than he should.
The afternoon went by more slowly than usual. Usually something came into his inbox around three o’clock, giving shape to the second half of the day. Sometimes, like today, it didn’t happen, which meant that from two until five he had to look busy doing nothing. He tried to type some of his thoughts about dignity into a google doc, but he was afraid somebody might walk past and get a glimpse of it. He managed to get a few sentences down and then stopped to read back over what he had written. In the staid surroundings of the office it seemed unhinged. But he knew he wasn’t mad. He trusted himself. It was mad that he was being paid to sit here and do a fake job. That was obvious. His worries about dignity and his attempts to get beyond them by way of god, money, or St. Sebastian seemed like a reasonable response to the situation. He closed the google doc and made a mental note to try again at home. He left the office at five on the dot, feeling thankful to have landed such a low-pressure job which nevertheless paid his rent. His own situation was not normal in London, at least not among people his own age, who often stayed in the office until late in the evening. He wasn’t sure if he could stay in a job like that, and the implications of this dawned on him. It would be hard to embrace the pursuit of money, and all the power and dignity that might come with it, without becoming part of the intense work culture he had so strategically avoided until now. The practical side of the money plan seemed more unappealing the more he thought about it. What would he do with the money? Spend it or just let it build up? Would he move out of the house he had lived in for the last three years, into his own apartment? What if it was too lonely? Would he just move into a more expensive house share? Maybe in Richmond, or Greenwich? That night he dreamed about an episode of Coronation Street he had seen as a child. Someone was being told they were dying of cancer. Afterwards the scene had preoccupied him for weeks. He wondered what he would do if it happened to him now. How long would he hold out before going back to Ireland to die? Would his life in London ever accrue enough substance to see him all the way to the grave? When his alarm went off he was already awake. He told himself that if it was quiet in work today he’d write about Mario in a google doc, turning down the brightness on his screen this time to feel less exposed. Not that the structure of a sentence could do any justice to sex, he thought. He thought the thought again and it sounded good to him, but then he thought it again and it sounded awful. He checked the time on his phone as he went out the door, not that anyone would care if he arrived a bit later than usual. It wasn’t that kind of place.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Bennett is a writer and translator from Ireland based in London. He has published poetry and prose in Berfrois, The Bohemyth, and The Honest Ulsterman. His translations have appeared on the Asymptote blog and in Mexico City Lit. He is currently working on his first novel.
