Gregor Montgomery, she told me, was a man of such standing, of such unimpeachable gravitas, that no matter the location of a party, he was surely known by at least two attendees in any given room at any given time before his arrival, such had his legend spread. All who had heard of this icon, this giant among men, were ineffably drawn to him. She continued in this vein for another 30 seconds until she began to lose track of her sentences, her eyes sliding back in her head, trying to rescue the riff she should have brought to a close a minute before. She was leaning out the window of a house party with a joint between her ring and middle finger, brandishing it at the sky as she extemporised on the lore of Gregor. She forced the window open wider then pulled me by the collar towards her. She shook her head solemnly, repeating his name over and over slowly.
Gregor Montgomery
Gregor Montgomery
Gregor Montgomery
As though he had most certainly died, possibly tragically.
Come, see his work, she said.
She put her arm around my shoulders and pulled me out of the window frame with her, the pair of us wedged through it. Above us the night sky was brutal and angry, gnarled with low clouds that glowed a threatening yellow.
Gregor Montgomery, she said, sweeping her palm to behold the clouds. He was the one who set that night sky alight.
Yellow means thunderstorms, I said. Trouble coming.
Horseshit, she said. It was all Gregor. Now there was a man who could light the stars.
She leaned too far forward. And fell out the window.
*
I applied ice to her forehead in the kitchen as she sat on the oven, jostled by other partygoers slugging wine from teacups and ashing into cans. One drunk man behind my right shoulder pointed out that R.I.C.E. was the method we should be using, not just Ice, as a fall, even from a ground-floor window, should be treated consistent with best practices. If we were going to skip the Rest, Compress and Elevate elements, he said, we really had no business supervising anyone’s medical care, let alone our own. He blew smoke into her face and waited for a laugh that never came. She looked at me from under a tea cloth filled with ice and said, When this sap leaves I’ll tell you my name is Lily.
The man heard this and left.
My name’s Tara, she said.
Paul.
Paul, she repeated.
She pushed away the cloth on her forehead to see me better. She shifted forward on the hob, closer to me, so her socked heels dangled before the oven’s glass door.
What are you thinking, Paul?
It’s getting hot in here, I said.
Maybe it’s the oven.
Maybe it’s not.
She pulled my hand holding the tea cloth to the side of her right temple. Water from the melting ice ran down my wrist, making a trail to my elbow.
Your ice is melting, she said.
Your ice are green, I replied.
She seemed to like that.
Gregor Montgomery, she said, never ogled a woman to whom he was providing medical care.
Maybe Gregor Montgomery never saw someone so gorgeous. Do you have a boyfriend?
Would I be talking to you like this if I did?
Maybe.
If I was your girlfriend, she said, And you saw me talking to some man the way I’m talking to you now, me sitting on the oven and him holding a tea cloth to my head…
I pushed closer to her. A smirk was curling the left side of her lip.
…his arm slowly moving around my back, the way yours is now…
My arm was almost full around her.
… you wouldn’t like it at all.
Ice slipped from the cloth and hit the ground. We kissed on the oven.
*
Gregor Montgomery was the leader of a cast of recurring characters Tara had invented and continuously updated over the last several years. He was an effortlessly charming bachelor, man’s man, savant, intellectual, seducer. He acted as a yardstick to measure all others who came before her: men, women, children, terriers. None could match Gregor Montgomery, Esq. His function was to trump any accomplishment you or any other could trumpet. Run a four-minute mile, Gregor once ran a threefer. Passed your exams, Dr Montgomery was a PhD at fourteen. Shifted a model on a night out? Piss, he popped his cherry with two Viennese gymnasts on the final ascent of Everest.
I think she was mostly just pleased with the name. She had a number of other characters she talked up, with a long series of in-jokes and histories behind them.
There was Germaine Qualities, a stoic penpal from the convent who wrote Tara’s closest friends letters from beyond the grave. Germaine drowned at sea on a return trip from Buenos Aires after her heart was broken by an importune deckhand, Rodney Smullens. Rodney also wrote heartbreaking letters to Tara’s friends professing both his innocence and his intention to haunt them for the rest of their lives. There was Clement Shiner, toff and amateur magician, who left notes on playing cards under friends’ doors or in the glove boxes of their cars, usually warning them of the dangers of unprotected intercourse. Nat O’Higgins was a childhood friend whose criminal past and history of incarceration could be improvised for at least two minutes without break. There were about ten in total, and during our first six months together Tara made constant reference to them, pleased with herself, pleasing me. After a date went well she would say she doubted even Gregor Montgomery had ever wooed a lady such as I had just done, though actually he almost certainly had, this was Gregor Montgomery, after all, she said. No offence.
Tara liked to scrawl notes on scraps ripped from beer mats, takeaway menus, receipts, fortune cookies and napkins. The notes ranged from life advice to recipes for beef stroganoff to clandestine tip-offs. Your cover’s been blown GET OUT NOW. Or: Your abs are sex. I found them in my shoes, sellotaped underneath the toilet seat, hanging from strings above the bed, folded into origami cranes, tucked into my jacket pockets, hidden inside boxes of cornflakes. I stored them in a large plastic folder, along with the anonymous fanmail she sent directly to my office and the five-star review of my penis she’d written in the style of a high-end food critic. Exquisite mouthfeel on the dome with a punchy range of flavours.
After getting to grips with the whole cast, I began to send her notes back, pretending to be Gregor. I’d do a Shiner impression, or email anecdotes from O’Higgins, though she rarely replied. I wrote a review of her breasts and sent it to her office. That one annoyed her.
When I told her I loved her she said the affection she bore for me was as fierce as that of Ms Qualities for her own Mr Smullens.
I love you too, she said quickly, a week later.
I picked her up, carried her to the kitchen, and left her sitting on the oven.
*
When we moved into our first flat together, I strung up fairy lights while she photographed blemishes on the wall for when the landlord would try and fuck us out of the deposit. Then we painted over the blemishes.
I told her Gregor Montgomery couldn’t have done a finer job.
Yeah, she said. I guess.
Despite his several years as an apprentice in the service of Italian military decorators, I ventured, he’d have struggled to do a better job on that wall.
Yep, she said, and drifted into silence.
She kept her eyes on the wall. Strands of hair were caught in her mouth, and she tried to blow them away, the paint roller still in her hand. I asked what was wrong.
To be honest, I’m getting a bit sick of Gregor, she said.
How do you mean?
I’m thinking of retiring him.
Retiring him?
Getting old, she said.
She put down the paint roller and went for a smoke.
*
We rustled up a good crowd for the flat warming. Tara had friends, lots of them, outnumbering mine. People arrived wanting to meet me, to prove that Paul Harden was real, not another made-up character, the civil servant with the suggestive last name. Artsy types brought more artsy types. I talked to a pair of graphic designers in the hallway, pointing out the kitchen doorframe, explaining that it was Gregor Montgomery himself who had installed it. He was a craftsman after all, a master carpenter and artisanal woodworker. He could fashion an exact replica of your face from a single beam of ash using a croquet mallet and a toothpick. When he arrived, which he surely would, he would give us a demonstration–Gregor being one of my very good friends. They laughed, these graphic designers, and regarded me warmly. I turned to find Tara behind me, holding two shots of tequila.
One of your very good friends? she said.
Yeah, course, I said. He’s a friend to everyone.
I reached to take a shot of tequila. Tara drained both shots.
*
As the rush of the new flat faded, Gregor’s trail went cold. Germaine wrote less frequently while texts from Smullens grew sparse. Tara spent most evenings at promo nights and magazine launches, working the room. It was her job, she said, so she couldn’t have me along. When she got home she’d be exhausted and just want to scroll. I stayed in, waiting for the night when she would come alive again.
On our second anniversary, Clement Shiner left his first note to me in over nine months. It was pushed under the door of the bathroom as I sat on the toilet. One does love you very, very much, he had scrawled over the face of a Jack of Hearts.
I found her in the sitting room, lying on the couch, the phone glowing her face a sickly blue.
Party, I said.
I’m a bit tired.
We need it.
So we filled the house and drank the night, though Tara mainly stayed smoking in a corner of the kitchen. We didn’t see each other for most of the party, and when we did it was through crowds of people. After the last partygoer left I fell into bed beside her and we lay on our backs in the dark. I suggested we do it again the following week. Maybe get a different crowd in. New faces.
Sure, she said.
We found ourselves hosting our third house party in three weeks. Tara’s work friends had taken over the kitchen, my school friends the living room, and all other friends at all points in between, until people we didn’t know arrived, packing out the hall, even our bedroom. I found a graffiti artist tagging the bathroom wall with an eyeliner pen. Tara was lost in the crowd. I took some latecomers downstairs to the front garden, to look for stars through the city cloud. Tara’s former best friend’s housemate Eva stood close to me by the wet garden bushes.
Gregor Montgomery, I explained, is an intellectual, a savant, a glorious man among men, higher than men, what all men aspire to, masculine without being macho, confident save the arrogance, muscled but in a sort of black-and-white era Brando way, not in your high-def steroided Hugh Jackman Wolverine sort of way, and he’s travelled the known world, and though famed for his parties and soirées and orgies, even he would be suitably impressed by this little shindig.
Eva smiled at me. She reached over and put the pad of her forefinger on my collarbone.
Your girlfriend wouldn’t mind you talking to me like this, out here? she asked.
What girlfriend, I replied.
*
Gregor Montgomery, I wrote, would not let what we had go.
I got an email back. FUCK GREGOR.
Photographic evidence of the wall-blemishes didn’t stop our landlord from keeping the deposit. The reasons given: neglect of property, expert cleaning services, unauthorised painting and the obvious fact that people had been allowed to smoke indoors. The day she left, Tara slammed the front door so hard she almost tore the handle off.
*
Gregor Montgomery’s reputation still precedes him at house parties and gatherings. At a pub quiz or social, I frown and shake my head gently and say, Gregor Montgomery would have loved this. Had he survived, it would have made him happy, seeing us all here together in this overpriced speakeasy. I’m asked who Gregor was, and I say he was the greatest person I ever met. Charismatic, genuine, creative, though withdrawn, troubled. He died through my fault when we were climbing the Andes together. We were fastened to the same rope, pickaxing our way to the snowy top, when my strength failed. I couldn’t take his weight, I say, so he cut himself from me. He fell away into darkness and was lost to the snows. I was devastated, abandoned, though eventually I would come to understand: his sacrifice set me free.
He was a titan, I say, and he would have loved this slam poetry event. I dab an imaginary tear from my eye, swallow my wine and feel eyes follow me out for a smoke. Outside I share a cigarette with a young woman I barely know and we talk Gregor and Smullens and Germaine Qualities and the people I’ve taken with me, dead to their creator but now belonging to me. I don’t say where I first met Gregor or that his last five begging letters were returned to my address. And that they are now rotting in a folder under my bed marked Tara, changed and stripped of meaning, because time moves on, doesn’t it, I say, things change. The woman I’m with answers, I know what you mean, as I move my hand slowly around her back and she leans closer to me.
Gregor Montgomery was the best man I ever knew, I say, as I bunch her t-shirt over her hips, but people change and the things we love change. We’re all thieves, and if there’s one thing I know, it’s that Gregor Montgomery would want nothing more than for me to be happy, to move on, to make something new.
Where did you come up with all this? she asks.
It hardly matters now, I say.
I look to the storm clouds above us, to the yellow haze of a night sky, then back to her eyes.
He was the one who set that sky alight, I say. There was a man who could light the stars.
She smiles as I move towards her and the wind picks up around us. She uses a quick hand to tuck her hair behind her ear. Her eyes fix upon mine, wide. And I know well how she’s feeling.
How easy it is to fall for a character.
