A Beggar’s Kingdom. Paullina Simons

couldn’t find a cab, so he had to hoof home five miles across Lambeth Bridge and around Hyde Park. The next morning when Ashton asked him how it went, Julian said, “What can I tell you, everything is worse south of the river.” They both chuckled. “But on the bright side, the Imperial War Museum is near her. Let’s go grab a bite and check it out.”

      “No, thank you. I don’t do anything south of the river, especially having to do with the war.”

      And so it went.

      Julian sparred with four different partners on four different days. He hit the speedbag five times a week with a thousand blurs of his gloved fists. He pummeled the heavy bag three times a week with five hundred blows of thunder. The bag would fall before Julian fell, and the blows reverberated through the gym, the glass in the grubby windows rattling with Julian’s immense anger. He pounded the bag to cleanse his body of rage, he swam miles in the local gym pool to exhaust himself, and when that still didn’t work, he slept with the women he chatted up in pubs and clubs and Franz Ferdinand concerts. They weren’t all named Mary. And Ashton’s theory proved not entirely correct. Not one of them, no matter how brown-haired and brown-eyed and Mary-monikered, no matter how long-limbed and white skinned, felt remotely like the Mary of Clerkenwell or the Mallory of the Silver Cross. Or the Josephine of L.A. Not one quantum particle of them felt like the girl he was eternally entangled with.

      But Ashton was right: Julian had to move on. He had to try to find a way to live again. At the very least he had to have sex again.

      And at the very least, that’s what he did.

      On Sunday mornings, Ashton would crawl out of his room to find Julian making coffee or eating leftovers, and there would be another irate woman yelling, Callie from Portobello, Candy from King’s Road, a girl from the Botanist and from the Colbert. “Howling in the night, yelling in the mornings, destroying speedbags,” Ashton said. “All you do is fuck and fight. Both with the same temper.”

      “I’m doing what you told me to, remember? You’re never happy.”

      “When will it end? I’m going crazy from the racket, both in the middle of the night and in the mornings. I’m going to charge the noise-cancelling headphones you forced me to buy against my share of the rent. Can’t you stay at their place? Are you doing this deliberately? Are you making our apartment uninhabitable so I start praying you’ll go do the time warp again?” Ashton grinned at his own cleverness.

      “Ash, I know it’s difficult for you to believe,” said Julian, “but when I’m with a girl, I hardly think of you at all. One might say never.”

      “Yeah, yeah.”

      Women left Julian nasty messages or waited by his front door to shout obscenities to his face. You never called me, you piece of shit. You said you would and you never did, and then I saw you in the pub with someone else. I know you said we weren’t serious, but you could’ve called me. Julian was left neutral by it. Other women couldn’t move the needle, they broke their mouths on his bitter stone, shattering as they came, while he kept waiting for the end-bell to ring. It never did. Rage was blacker than blindness, blacker than grief.

      Julian, go and come back for me. Clutching the Bill of Mortality in one hand, the gold coin in the other, he kept hearing Mallory’s dying voice in his head—when he wasn’t dreaming of Josephine, walking toward his café table.

       Julian, come back for me.

      Why, when the new moon was invisible in the sky, did he dream of her smiling? Earth, moon, and sun all in a line, a meridian line, a wishing moon, Josephine smiling, Mallory pleading …

       Come back for me.

      And in Notting Hill, the cast-off girls had fun, then wanted more, got insulted, bellowed at him, all hawks in motion. He told them he wasn’t looking for anything. And they assured him neither were they. Yet there was so much yelling. I’m serious, he would say. Please listen to me. But they had three pints, two cocktails, half a bottle of wine, and they couldn’t listen. And when he told one sober woman right at the outset, even before they had ordered the wine, that he wasn’t looking for anything long-term, she slapped him across the face and said, don’t get ahead of yourself, buddy, who even says you’ll get anywhere with me. He got somewhere with her, and now she, too, was shouting at him.

      “Jules, what a mess you’re making of things,” Ashton said. “I think you’ve forgotten how to date women.”

      “You call what I’m doing dating?”

      “That’s true, this isn’t quite what I had in mind when I advised you to plug back into your life. You’ve gone from a monk to a player overnight. But sooner or later, all this whatever you want to call it is going to turn into a bloodbath. You’ll be sorry when one of them bashes your brains in with a cricket bat.”

      “How do you know that’s not what I’m hoping for?” said Julian.

       12

       A Subject of Choice

      AFTER CHRISTMAS, ASHTON ASKED JULIAN TO SIGN OFF ON THE sale of the Treasure Box. Nextel was becoming too big a responsibility. There was a lot to do in London, both in work and in life. And the prop business was dying without Ashton, who sounded philosophical when he spoke about it. It couldn’t continue. Back in L.A. over the holidays, he and Julian held an auction for the remainder of the props, gave away some posters and trinkets to friends, kept a few items Ashton valued, like his Bob Marley poster, and didn’t renew their lease on the building. “It’ll be a taco place now. They might call it Treasure Taco.” Ashton grinned.

      “Are you sure that instead of selling Treasure Box, you don’t want to move back to L.A.?” Julian said.

      “What do I have to move back for now?”

      “How about for me?” Riley said two months later. It was March. She was visiting the boys for a long weekend to celebrate Julian’s 36th birthday.

      “But, cupcake, you’re here in London with me,” Ashton said. “If I go back, I’ll be in L.A. without you. Come here, delicious. Give me a big smooch.”

      “You’re impossible.”

      “Is that why you love me?”