My mind's eye

I saw the body while it was still alive but by the time I reached it, it was still. I breathed into it, willing the chest to heave, but only a long cloud of seawater shot like an unplugged geyser from the man's throat and after that, a kind of gaseous exhale, like the smell of paintstripper or acrid ashes. A blessing, I began to believe, as I dragged the corpse up behind the dunes.

Where am I going with this? I'm not a murderer. The only thing I murder is time. That quote from Theroux glares back at me from the fridge door like a curse: how can you kill time without injuring eternity? I'm out here on the flats, waiting for the tide to turn. It turns, regularly, but I always miss it, something always calls me away or distracts me at the quintessential moment between from and towards, the cusp, the meeting and the parting. I don't care how long it takes. One day, I'll be there. But there are so many distractions. Here I sit, like a hermit, in my room, telescope fixed on the sea, my easel empty, cartons of contrabande cigarettes open on the floor around me, my cat, Sinbad, watching from the other windowsill. Us in a white and blue room, set apart. Invisible. Except we're not. We're always being forced to make contact, to account for ourselves. A woman asked me in the Supermarket the other day while we were passing in front of the Kellogs boxes (I was looking for vol-au-vents and the dried goods were piled so close to the refrigerators I thought they might all fall in), she stopped me with her gloved hand, cleared her throat, and said, Excuse me. I don't know how you'll take this. This is a small community and all but I just have to ask because Cheryl, my neighbour, keeps asking me and I always say I haven't a clue and what does it matter anyway and she says, Cheryl says, well, if he is we can invite him round for a coffee and the other half won't go spare so I say, what you want to know is, am I gay? Is it? And she says, yeah, you're not offended are you? I say, well, no, but it's a funny kind of question to ask in a supermarket and she says, but I never see you anywhere else, you're never in the pub, and I say, no, I prefer to drink alone. And that includes coffee. And she says, oh, you are offended then and I say, no, I'm just happier this way. Does that answer your question? And she says, I'm pretty sure it does and I say, look, anything can happen. Stop me again. Don't be shy. I liked our little chat but I must get back now and she smiles, all relieved-looking, breath heaving in her heavy chest and I think, Oh, I wonder if there's something else to this but by now I've steamed off like a cruise liner, I give her one long final 'BEEEEEP' of a look before turning to look straight ahead. Dead ahead. Ready for docking or the wide ocean.

I came here in 1989 after a love affair. I was bored, mainly, by the scene in Manchester and London, by the terrible noise and the incessant questioning. Where did I come from? I hear the question echo through bars and down alleys. A long line of artists, my usual response. True. Of course, true. Piss artists. Con artists. Vagabonds. Fraudsters. None of them believing in a million years that a freak like me would out from the mix and end up, end up, in a borstal in Bristol. The one thing they taught me was basic survival strategy: back against the wall and watch for the knife. Disarm and dive. Scuffle. Cover your tracks. Chance it and you'll be saying Cheese to the cop cameras faster than you can respond to the phrase, bribes please. I'm not vain. I'm not ugly either. That helped. Luck does. Lady Luck. Not to be confused with Lady Muck. Much more graceful smile. Is it luck or grace that guides us through, though? My father nearly chocked when I showed him my 'lucky' chain, set with symbols from all the world's religions interspersed with stones representing the chakras, and topped off with a small metal Sile na Gig. You've gone soft, you bleed'n woofter, he hollered. You need protection, not bleed'n fairy tales.

I've had it up to here with fairy tales, I replied, almost weeping. I deserve to die if this system you've pinned your colours to is the only one that words in this jurisdiction. Or any other, brother, yelled my brother. Right, I yelled back, and left, too!

And so I got drunk, and leaning, left. That was the last I saw of them. The rose garden. The rows of broccoli, pushy in purple rows. The goldfish bowl staring back at me illuminated by a pink mermaid. I'd go to the sea, I thought. I tried Bangkok. How corny's that? But I was a volunteer. I held out monkeys for the children to stroke, to see what they were missing – the great forest beyond, the mountains of Burma, tigers and the wild all caught in them still, so fresh for them the memory of all-being connection while I lay out here, great White, stranded on a beach, generations lost in our quest for, or lust for, the power of life, its virility, its sheer sexy decadence, now, at the cost of and with the justification of any sacrifice.

I was all cut up inside. I got tattooed. The rain poured down on bamboo and street porter. I came home with a daughter. Now who was going to look after us, I thought, as I boarded the shuttle bus to the airport terminal with a numb, dumb four-year-old at the end of my tanned and bejeweled hand. I hailed a taxi. Where did I get my money? I had none! I was emptied and had no place to go. I remembered the month's rent in my pocket, my redomiciling grant, and an account with a balance of zero but an overdraft facility of £250. I guessed that would keep me for a couple of weeks but the future was clouded. All I could do was sit at the house of a friend of a friend of a friend and eat fried rice and noodles, reading the paper and circling any likely opening. I make a few false starts but gradually, like breached windows, possibilities emerged. I could teach English here in London. Manchester too had places. I had friends I'd lost touch with who contacted me with options. I put out the word. The word traced its way and touched those who heard. I got offers of help with the language from Thais who'd been in England for yeras. Soon, Suu Kyi, for so I named her, knowing nothing of the power of names, could converse in English and Thai together, sometimes separating or combining the two languages so skillfully it seemed as though only the Thai or the English word fitted that particular meaning space. She was an inspiration to watch.

Oh. Don't worry. It didn't last long. The Thai women began to question my being entrusted with Suu Kyi. She belonged, they argued, with them. And I, with guilty joy, relinquished her. On one stipulation: that they would not write me out of her life. That she should be told of me. That I would help her if ever I could. That she should know that I loved her and genuinely believed that these people were doing what they thought was right, even if I was not so sure, and that because I was still open to question myself, still not absolutely sure about any of the big questions, I wasn't in any position to contradict them. That life with me would undoubtedly have been interesting and perhaps informative, the fact was I lived on the cusp and fell into darkness so often that perhaps I was not an appropriate person to be a parent. And yet, I loved her and it was painful to be parted from her, she who had already lost so much. I hoped she wouldn't lose faith, though I had no idea what faith might be.

Anyway, that was that. I was out and proud and free and I fucked everything, everything in the full and nihilistic belief that this was how this society expected me to behave and then I thought, fuck, I'm not here to do the bidding of society, I'm here to be whatever it is I am. And so I asked, what's that? And that's when I became an artist. Questioning, asking the question questions. I went to the sea again.

Which is where I found the body. My family had ordered that I be shot, or else, if it were easier, that all those belonging to the families that hated our family, and in particular, those who had insulted and abused me, that they be shot. This was the first bloody result of that vendetta. I buried the body in the sand and thought about the insult that homosexuality was supposed to throw in the face of a family like ours that valued perpetration above all else. I heard noises. There was a long pause while I waited for the faces I had imagined painting to appear over the ridges of sand, armed with nothing but my mind's eye.