I was sitting in front of Triptych 1974-1977 by Francis Bacon at the gallery, waiting for its clear sky to visit outside. It was time to run away from that deep bellow and rough hand to where outside ribbons of water danced in the air, velvet rebellion, mixing with soil, painting my soles like woodblocks, bistre. Morning athletics, I hurdled the train turnstiles all the way, backpack flailing. A stop later, a dozen boys got on, filled the top-car with swearing, taking proud sips of cheap beer, chuffing vapour down into the neckline of hoodies. Young as 13, nursing broken knuckles. The other commuters diagnose discipline deficiency. They need a good kick in the pants.

Reading the little plaque, this is one of those rare outdoor works in his oeuvre. Renders a beachfront getaway for his vacationing models of pink amorphous body and ominous black square.

Rain patters outside, a tremulous eulogy. Pink Amorphous Body makes kissy faces at me through what I think is its mouth, or kicks me with what I think is its foot. Why my sudden fear? Pink Amorphous Body whispers through its foot that its name is George and that he used to be a boxer. In my shrinking I wonder why anyone would step into a place that would beat them. My hurt mouth flubbers this question, and George asks what’s going to happen when I go home.

I tell him I’m staying here until they close, and through his feet he kisses me and the ground beneath him before retreating back to his dimension, his big purple shadow a bruise. My own foot puckers to kiss him back, but he’s gone and I’m left on the little seat, pulling myself, skin, hair, over myself, shell, Shetland shield. Home is where no one never wants to touch you.

These beautiful creatures that live everywhere. The few pairs of lips, the dead and others busy dying in the far background dressed in black suits, everything is sweating without breath in the shade of dark umbrellas. I feel myself tired, knotted and beginning to hunch over, mirroring the pink bodies like oysters, extroverted, raw. My lip stings from an ulcer, a drunk mouth that forced itself on itself. Hot tongue digging in the sandy fibrin.

Pink bodies, sunburnt or blushing or feminine or foreign. They have taken my backpack and given me some little card, warming itself in my right pocket. Shetland is the wool of outerwear but it’s all I could find in my haste and its dank dew and bristle, like beardhair, itches perverted and desperate on my skin. It is the sensation of everything made to scratch and I wish I could be made of hair all over, or something, anything less tender.