Free London Triptych by Jonathan Kemp

two weeks she couldn’t even be in the same house as Edward. He knew that he was a freak, but he grew to wear his monstrosity with pride. A very regal freak, he was.
    His father was a vicar, his mother a vicar’s wife, and he grew up in the remote suburbs of London, dressing up in skirts and frocks at every opportunity and lip-syncing to David Bowie, dreaming of escape. His one and only friend was a fat girl, Yvonne, who had stones and insults thrown at her every time she left the house because of the outrageous way she dressed. They would sit in her bedroom smoking Consulates, listening to Patti Smith’s Horses over and over, talking about London and the day they would live there.
    On the day he finished school for good, he came home to find a packed suitcase in the hall and his parents standing there looking more morosely stern than ever. They’d had enough of him going out dressed up like someone from another planet and coming home late and wired, if at all. His father explained that now he was of legal age to leave home they expected him to do so, that afternoon. His mother wouldn’t meet his gaze, but gave him a hug with tears streaming down her face. They gave him an envelope stuffed with banknotes. He told me that he felt as if he’d been handed the keys to the city, and practically ran to the train station before they changed their minds, calling in on Yvonne to say goodbye. She hurriedly packed a case and left with him. So he knew all about finding your feet in the big smoke. They spent their first few nights sleeping rough. That, he said, was why he had let me stay. That was five years ago. (As for Yvonne, she returned home about a year after their arrival, after they fell out about something and nothing.)
    I had moved to London hungry for one thing, striving toward one goal: to be stronger, more wicked, and more profound. With curiosity as my only map, I moved across the surface of this occluded world searching for a way in.
    I traced around its borders with a torch, sniffing out a hole in the fence. The heartbeat I detected when I moved here was faint, but I followed its call and found those dark chambers, thanks to Edward. We found it in the clubs where the freaks hung out. All those others who were also desperate to escape the daylight. The drag queens, the druggies, the prostitutes, the good-time girls of either gender. Although escaping isn’t quite right. For in their flight they picked up the nearest objects, some of them quite everyday—cosmetics, for example, or clothes—and brandished them like weapons against anyone barring their way. In their midst I could breathe for the first time, speak for the first time, and share in a lust for all things rotten. When I found myself in a council flat in Belsize Park with a cocaine dealer known as Timmy Toots, snorting the white lines as quickly as he could cut them, and for free, I felt at home. When he proudly showed me his collection of guns, I smiled as if admiring family snapshots. When he showed me a photograph of his fourteen-year-old son and suggested I might like him, I began to fear for my life. For years, my desires were a question mark whose dark curve I followed, never knowing what I would find at the end. I certainly didn’t expect prison. Although in truth, even now—especially now—the inevitability is complete.
    After spending nearly two hours in the bathroom that first afternoon, Edward swanned out wearing a white suit printed with enormous red roses, a leopard-print fez, full slap and Chanel No. 5. Lots of it. We spent the afternoon going around his favourite fabric shops in Soho where he bought yards of cheap garish fabrics. Everywhere we went people stared at him, open-mouthed, perplexed. He took me into a church off Leicester Square to show me a mural painted by Jean Cocteau. He took me for a drink in the Golden Lion and chatted to some rent boys who were friends of his. Toward the end of the day we called in on his friend Lilli, who