The Ghost Of Kensington.
Mr Jack Johnson, 73, always wore a deerstalker but had no Dr Watson.
He affected an Edwardian gait and said, once, with the brutal simplicity
we always demanded from him, that history's just 'stuff that's gone before':
no joy, no thought, no spirit, no fun, no pain, nothing ventured, nothing...
He wandered Exhibition Road: part tramp, part superhero, unknown, unknowing,
wise beyond our years. We expelled him, in the end, from our consciousness,
his prickly, checked clothes and wild monocle having tripped us up
as we dashed across to the tube station, putting our life, foolishly, in his hands
as the Lamborghini spat itself out of the showroom and roared into us gauche,
oohing and aahing boys, us small men drooling at the red phallus that then
killed us: ironic (but not in the literal sense), full of meaning, that HIV-negative
symbolism that made the ten o'clock news and forced us to leap into the shade
of a new dimension. But not him: he told me later (among other things) that
the V&A was, has always been, pointless - corpsed, he said, filled with autistic
stuff-mountains that weird our passions in archaeologised mirrors and skew
our ability to cope with him and his well-planned randomness; replace them instead
with artefacts of impure rage. So he was staying here, he whispered, and, in the end,
I was glad I was dead without him, glad he'd taken us that sun-sparkling afternoon,
away from the tourists and the taxis and the hooded sullenness of our town.
And so glad that he never let me grow into another queer, collecting Englishman.