Some months prior to his breakdown, Haynes had met a quiet, twenty-three-year-old German girl named Ann-Sophie, who had been working as an au pair in London. Haynes began writing to her more frequently, confiding his distress at the possibility of seeing himself as an utter failure. Through their correspondence the two became very close, and before long it was decided: Haynes would move to Heidelberg to be with Ann-Sophie.
Though the outline of a new future was becoming visible, Haynes needed to feel some sense of closure. Several days before moving to Germany, he resolved to go and see Martin Amis, who was due to give a talk at Kings Place in Islington. On the night of the event, Haynes arrived alone and sat near the back of the auditorium, which filled to capacity. There was a surge of anticipation as the lights dimmed — it was enough to muffle the sound of Haynes’s first gasp, his first sob. Amis walked on-stage, sat down in a leather chair, and began speaking.
Afterwards, Amis sat at a table in the foyer to sign books. Haynes joined the queue, determined if not to speak to Amis, then at least to stand before him and look him in the eye. Perhaps in that way he could convey some inkling of the ardour, the ecstasy, the sorrow he had known.
When there were only four bodies separating him from Amis, Haynes’s nerve failed: he ducked out of the queue and hurried away, out of the foyer and into the street. He walked through London one last time, intensely aware of the city night, its monstrous poetry; he knew that once he left this place, he would never return.
David Haynes moved to Heidelberg, where he married Ann-Sophie. They went on to have two children, Romaine and George, and ran a café that proved popular with students. Apart from the odd poem, which he chose not to show to anyone, Haynes never wrote again.
The Turk Inside
She came to London when she was twenty-one. Now she’s older, I doubt she lives in London any more but I can’t be sure (she deleted her old email account, changed her phone).
She got work as an exotic dancer at a club near Russell Square. It was expected of all the girls there that they slept with the owner, the manager and probably another rank or two along the pecking order as well. The owner was an oily, brutal Turk. As you know, people come to London to make money, they stamp on other people and they laugh about it, never any remorse. It’s horrible, unbearable.
She slept with the Turk, he gloated over it. That’s the kind of man he was. There’s no moral to this story, no kind of comeuppance at all. The Turk is happy still. He abides in splendour and he’s slept with more women than you or I ever will, despite his ugliness. I think of this man as a harvester of souls. He is my shadow self, the projection of my own shrieking, sick and mutilated will to power. I’m a total fucking wreck. He is me, on some level. The Turk.
She slept with the Turk. Him first and then me. She was very beautiful (I think she still is). She had a room in a flat in Canary Wharf that seems, when I picture it, to have had no windows in the corridors, only a warm electric light. She was on the nineteenth floor. There were some nights in there, and mornings across the river with croissants and coffee, looking back over open waste-ground at the clustered skyscrapers of the business district. I wasn’t in love with her. Then I was, but it was too late because I had scared her, or she just felt scared, which in the end are one and the same thing. The tables had turned. Life is like that, and there’s nothing funny or poetic about it. More like a mockery.
One night, when I was still with her, I went to watch her dance. I didn’t tell her I was coming. I sat down the back, almost in disguise, hidden behind my drink, in the shadows. Maybe she saw me, what do I know. Really — and this is probably clearer to me now than it was then — really I was looking for the Turk. I hardly even concentrated on her dancing, though I admit it was beautiful (what I saw of it), her pale young body bathed in the blue light, called forth to radiance from the grime and neglect and all that her father could never protect her from. She had many admirers that night, but I never caught a glimpse of the Turk. Maybe he’s backstage, I thought desperately, draining my drink and wiping my lips as she bowed, then stepped serenely from the podium, and out through the narrow doorway.
I got home that night at three a.m., drunk and furious. Bitter, bitter. I masturbated savagely to web-porn and slept with the come not yet dried on my knuckles.
The next day I saw her, I mean we met up, first for a cappuccino, then an autumn afternoon stroll through Hyde Park, where foreign students walk dogs by the dozen (I hear they make decent money). Every man we passed seemed not only to seek out her eye, but to grin a faint, smug grin, like they were all in on some joke and I was the only one left in the dark. I kept it in, I said nothing, I was fucking chivalrous.
Another time we were back at her place in Canary Wharf — the nineteenth floor, London down there like a plane of stars, or neon smears, or just science fiction. And how many cameras are down there, and not one of them ever saved me from anything. We screwed and I tried to memorise the flawless orbs of her breasts, the way the light caught her body — it felt as if, for once in life, all the promise of pornography had been delivered, there was nothing left to be bitter about. But I kept thinking about the Turk, and then it’s like my dick felt smaller, somehow not wide enough to fill her up, to give her the friction that she wanted. It was an illusion, I suppose, but at the time it seemed real enough. I stayed the night and then I had to put in a shift at the Mexican restaurant, wearing that fucking sombrero. It was an alright shift, though, cause Celak was there and we had sly laughs about pretty customers, and got decent tips. After work we went for a few drinks. Celak wanted to go clubbing in Tiger Tiger, but at eleven I said I had to be somewhere (it makes you feel important, it’s never true, even when you think it is). I said see you man, and took a bus. This time I sat closer to the stage, more openly, and I drank more too, and I was kind of short with the waitress cause Jesus, I’m paying here, I’m the customer, what the fuck is this.
She came on after a Latina woman with a nice enough body but too old, too old. This time I watched her appreciatively and I even forgot about the Turk, more or less. She used one of those long, white, glittery things — what’s it called, a boa? Is it called a boa? Or is that just a fucking snake.
The blue light, the music. Oh you are wondrous, I thought, and the men there all agreed, and she caught a few of their eyes, and I’d say that smile was a little less than professional, wouldn’t you agree now, honey. When she headed backstage, I put my drink on the bar (empty) and tried to follow her in by another route. That didn’t really work out, but it could have been worse and I left, as they say, unmolested. That night the porno I put on depicted weird metal devices and blood (fake probably), and a sinister font. I was ashamed in the morning but it had suited my mood.
For a couple of months we met up once or twice a week, we had sex, we saw a gig in Brixton. But always when I was with her the Turk invaded my thoughts — he molested me. Whenever we drank, things turned ugly. My mind twisted up, I hissed or snapped and said brutal or double-edged things, and basically upset her, but later I always apologised in a gush of sentiment and horniness (I could never walk away — an ass like that?). One morning we slept late and she woke up and said shit, I have to get going, hang around here if you want. So I did hang around, up on the nineteenth floor (thereabouts). I did what you’d expect: sniff her underwear, scrutinise the toilet bowl, pull myself off in her bed. I was going to somehow pretend I’d gone home, then hide under the bed and wait — I wanted to see if she’d bring him back. But in the end I thought the better of it, or really I couldn’t be fucked. I let myself out, slid the key under the door like she’d said, and took two buses home. I got drunk that night and wandered late along Seven Sisters where it’s busy, hoping for I don’t know what, some kind of new horizon, a human reaction, some friendship I suppose.