Here is a little vignette (incomplete, because nothing in life isn’t) of Eggsy and David in a pub on a Friday night, early in their acquaintance, when they were still finding out who the other one was. The conversation doesn't end here, but this is what I have so far, and I wanted to share it because I think it captures something of what these two are to each other — or rather, what they're in the process of becoming. David is someone very few of you will know yet. I hope that changes (watch Bodyguard if you haven't done so yet, for the love of Christ). In the meantime, here's a pub and here's Eggsy saying things he's been saving up for a long time for the right person. Although of course he wouldn't have put it that way.
Eggsy set his pint down and looked in the space in front of him for a moment, as though deciding something.
'I guess you can never make someone feel the way you feel about anything in the world, really. Well, unless it's puppies and flowers. Or little ducklings. Double rainbows.' He glanced up briefly.' Stars in the night sky, if you can be bothered to look up, that is.’
David looked at him, quiet amusement coaxing his face into a half-smile, warm rather than mocking, the kind that arrives when a person turns out to be considerably more than you'd bargained for. 'Didn't take you for a romantic,' he said.
'No, but I am.' Eggsy met his eye. 'I am, and I'm proud of it. Underneath it all, you know, there's a daydreaming soul in here, yearning for...' he paused, almost smiled, 'kinship, I suppose.' He picked up his pint. 'But I never told you that.'
David looked at him. There had been few people in his life who spoke not only of what was actionable, what was necessary and at hand. Who allowed something unalloyed and unasked for to steep the conversation, simply because the moment felt right for it. He had not been that person himself for years and until now he hadn’t known that it was something he'd missed so much. 'I'm honoured,' he chuckled.
'You should be,' Eggsy offered a wink and gestured at his chest. 'Heart and soul, right? Speaking of which... There's this phenomenon,' he added, and then stopped, frowning at the table as though the word he wanted was written there somewhere. 'What's it called. Shit, wait a second, um… It’s —' mouth slightly open, his quick limpid eyes sprinted round the joisted ceiling before returning to the table with more substance to them. 'It's — qualia. Right, that's it. Fancy word.' He pointed briefly at nothing in particular. 'You know what that is?'
'Can't say I do.'
'Right, so.' He shifted forward, put his arm on the table. 'The idea is that — okay. You know how you can describe a physical object in physical terms, yeah? Dimensions, colour, weight, all of that. But that description — it's not actually descriptive. Because the way you perceive that object, like, your actual experience of it, it bypasses the logic of physics and the logic of, er, something or other, right, it's nonverbal, it's —' he made a gesture with his hand, fingers spreading. '— it's just yours. It's a reflection of your inner — I don't know, your inner depths or whatever. Something like that.'
David was quiet for a moment. 'So there's no definitive one-size-fits-all version of reality.'
Eggsy pointed at him. 'Exactly.' He sat back, pleased and slightly flushed with it, the way he got when a thought landed with other people. 'And it can be applied to everything — nebulae, stars, all them thingies in the cosmos. The taste of the same pint,' he lifted his glass briefly, 'in different mouths. The colour of your eyes, right? I'd look at them and think cerulean, probably. And you'd look in the mirror and see something else entirely.' He paused, tilted his head slightly. 'Go on then. What's in the mirror?'
David considered this with what appeared to be genuine seriousness. 'Blue china, on a good day.'
'On a good day?'
'On a bad one it's almost black.'
Eggsy looked at him for a moment. 'See? We'd never agree.'
They sat with that for a while, the pub around them going on about its Friday night business of being rackety and sweaty, abuzz with the sort of din that makes great revelations feel accidental.
'That's the catch, though,' Eggsy said eventually, his voice dropping slightly. 'Globally, like. Will we ever be able to truly understand each other if we can't feel each other proper? If we can't synchronise how our bodies work, how our brains think, if in that way we're just — not compatible?' He turned his glass on the table. 'I'd do anything to see the world through someone's eyes. Work out what I have to do to be good enough, you know? Well, not “good enough”. Just... right for him, innit.'
David watched him. 'I'm not quite sure I'm following.'
