Lust
Geoff Ryman
What if you could sleep with anyone in the world, just by thinking about it?Michael Blasco, a young scientist, is waiting for the train when he spies a friend he fancies. Idly, he imagines Tony naked and an extraordinary thing happens – Tony strips there and then on the platform and offers himself in front of all onlookers. Horrified, Michael flees. But back home, Tony magically reappears. Then disappears, when Michael wishes him away.Michael sets out to test the parameters of his new-found gift, rapidly calling up Billie Holiday, Johnny Weismuller, Lawrence of Arabia, Alexander the Great, Picassao, and even his younger self. The world is there for the taking and Michael runs the gamut of his fantasies. But what does he really want?
Lustor
No Harm Done
Geoff Ryman
Dedication (#ulink_7e9c858d-e025-5e60-a521-f9287e661ceb)
para o meu Txay
Um livro dedicado a ti deveria ser intitulado Amor, ou no mínimo: Sem Escândalo. Eu prometi que nele tu não te encontrarias, mas tu estás em todo lugar.
Epigraph (#ulink_881d388e-d705-5069-ac87-ababcc88c356)
‘In the bend God created the hen and the education. And the education was without founder, and void; and death was upon the falsehood of the demand. And the sport of God moved upon the falsehood of the wealth. And God said, Let there be limit; and there was limit.’
A text produced from the Book of Genesis using a method invented by Jean Lescure in which each noun is replaced with the seventh noun following it in a dictionary.
As reported in Oulipo Compendium edited by Harry Matthews and Alastair Brotchie
Contents
Cover (#u16a81ea5-5e7c-559c-a872-8e9b55f2a368)
Title Page (#u6b3940c9-0d64-52f1-bb9f-348ed72d40cf)
Dedication (#ulink_bc31a598-9d54-545d-80ae-e34424a4ee22)
Epigraph (#ulink_107fdeef-75d6-5d2c-99df-c82b006c1e01)
Part I
So how does it start? (#ulink_3f046678-fa56-5df8-b6d6-1b44e1ecac92)
Who indeed is Michael? (#ulink_24b3993b-883d-5afa-a135-2a5d1afae055)
So where is Philip? (#ulink_ef907299-e5af-5862-8044-01a1b25060d9)
Was the guard hit? (#ulink_d14a8f1d-7445-5e79-9f03-72548be6e5e1)
Can I call up a copy of someone else? (#ulink_979c0ad9-2dac-52eb-b06f-0cf56f331a18)
What if this isn’t about sex? (#ulink_b0da9c0d-1506-5038-a352-247e87f76010)
Can Angels be dead? (#ulink_8ff1421b-521a-5383-8a05-7566459b8e0e)
Can I make them do it when I’m not there? (#ulink_a3d62fdc-91e8-5bb3-8a21-36130883dad9)
Do they have to be male? Can I make more than one at once? Where do they go back to? (#ulink_1d2f5d09-98f4-5946-bb55-6818d859b9fb)
Who killed Dumb Duck? (#ulink_d83da613-9d90-5b49-9db3-f82091719b75)
Do people I copy really know it? (#ulink_dbb0d2cd-45e2-5f83-87aa-250db38d6fc4)
Can Angels do work? (#ulink_6e255fc8-ed11-57d2-afeb-37cb2ee3d700)
Can they give me Aids? (#ulink_c2c7c302-9bca-51d0-af98-380e7c788ca3)
Can I cure Angels who are sick? (#litres_trial_promo)
Part II
What’s so painful about love? (#litres_trial_promo)
Why don’t you just try joy? (#litres_trial_promo)
Does Viagra work? (#litres_trial_promo)
If you could sleep with anyone in the world, who would it be? (#litres_trial_promo)
The men I slept with, did they make a difference? (#litres_trial_promo)
Why are men satisfied with whores? (#litres_trial_promo)
Do blondes have more fun? (#litres_trial_promo)
Who’s for real? (#litres_trial_promo)
What’s eating Michael Blasco? (#litres_trial_promo)
So what do you want, Michael? (#litres_trial_promo)
You are a person? (#litres_trial_promo)
What am I looking for? (#litres_trial_promo)
Why does God suffer the Devil? (#litres_trial_promo)
Did we learn anything? (#litres_trial_promo)
Part III
What do you want for Christmas? (#litres_trial_promo)
What do I do next? (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgement (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Part I (#ulink_9b448202-a05a-5eab-b28e-c07debb14c55)
So how does it start? (#ulink_73cc88e5-852e-51cb-946f-02d4b34018ac)
Michael was happy. It was the first day of his research project. His team waited for him outside the gates of the lab, in the March chill. Ebru, Emilio and Hugh all smiled when they saw him.
It was a new lab, in rooms within arches under a railway. Michael had the keys, leading his team into one beautiful new room after another. They moved their desks and wired up their computers. They arranged staplers, pens and envelopes in drawers, determined that everything would stay tidy.
Ebru had brought flowers and a traditional Turkish shepherd’s cloak to hang on the wall. She was one of Michael’s students, doing a doctorate of her own, and had been hired to help administer the project. Ebru had bet Emilio a bottle of champagne that his new network would crash. Instead, the network came triumphantly to life, and they exchanged chiding e-mails, and raised glasses of champagne to the start of their brave new project.
‘To continued funding,’ toasted Michael. They all laughed.
The first shipment of eggs arrived in a box marked FRAGILE COMPUTERS. This was to fox the animal rights activists. The eggs were packed in grey foam like recording equipment. Ebru and Michael laid them out in the darkroom, on straw, to hatch. Everything was in place.
‘This is going to work,’ said Michael.
In the evening Michael went to his gym. He saw Tony. Tony was a trainer and Michael had a crush on him. Tony was tall and sleek and so innocent in his manner that Michael’s nickname for him was the Cherub. Tony had a radiant announcement to make.
‘I decided to take the plunge,’ Tony said. ‘Jacqui and I are going to get married.’ He had the eyes of a happy schoolboy.
‘Aw, that’s fantastic. Well done!’ said Michael and they did an old-fashioned hand slap. Tony’s hair was cut short and dressed in spikes. Everything about him took Michael back to his youth. Tony talked a little bit about how he had realized he didn’t want anyone else. ‘It’ll mean moving up north, but hey, she’s worth it.’
That’s what I want, thought Michael. I want a beautiful love.
Inspired in his heart and in his belly, Michael decided to visit the sauna in Alaska Street.
The smell of the place – hot pinewood, steam and bodies – produced an undertow of excitement as if something were pulling insistently downwards on his stomach. Naked men circulated in the steam in early evening.
Stripped of his glasses and lab coat, Michael was tall and athletic. A young Sikh with his hair tied at the top of his head in a bun saw Michael and did an almost comic double take. He was hairy and running slightly to fat, but the face, Michael suddenly saw, was smooth as marble. This was a young man with a fatherly body.
Michael followed the Sikh into the steam room with its benches. The Sikh looked at him with a teasing smile. They moved towards each other.
Michael didn’t trust kissing. He knew people often brushed their teeth before cruising. Brushing teeth always produced blood; blood carried the virus. When the boy leaned towards him, Michael turned his head away and pressed his cheek against his. Michael gave him quick, dishonest pecks on the lips, pretending to be romantic and playful instead of merely safe.
Even this was enough for the young man. They sat down and Michael leaned back on the bench as they embraced. Briefly they made a shape together like a poster for Gone with the Wind. Then the Sikh slipped lower and went to work (work was the only word for it) on Michael’s cock.
Michael’s cock stayed dead. All the young man’s ministrations only made it worse. It retreated further, back up and away. Not again, thought Michael, not again. It always happened, and it was always worse than Michael remembered. It was always worse with someone he liked. Most especially it happened with people he liked. The Sikh stopped, and looked up. He turned down his mouth in a show of childish disappointment.
Michael asked, ‘Are you too hot? Would you like something to drink?’
It was a way of saving face.
On the mezzanine, there were free drinks in the fridge and smelly beanbags on the floor. Michael poured them each a glass of spring water. Perched on a beanbag like a Buddha, the boy shook down his long glossy hair and began to retie it. Michael wanted to take him home and watch him wind it in his turban.
Michael passed him the water and the young man gave him a sharp little smile of thanks. When Michael lay down next to him, the Sikh stayed seated upright. In his heart, Michael knew what that meant, but yearning and hope persisted.
The young man talked politely. He was a medical doctor, a specialist in tropical diseases. He had been working in Africa and was back home to see his family. His name was Deep.
Michael asked him: did he work for Médecins sans Frontières?
‘No, I don’t like those organizations. They are too Western. They go there thinking they will show the natives how to do it. But, you know, they have no experience of infectious disease. I apply for the same jobs as the local doctors. I learn more that way.’
He was pleased to talk about his time there. The lack of roads, the digging of wells. Suddenly Deep lay back and let Michael rest his head on his fatherly bosom. Deep’s breath smelled of liquorice. ‘You know, I was working in a hospital in Malawi, by a lake. I was sitting out by myself drinking a beer. And I could see the animals come down to drink. The deer and the lions. And I could watch the deer as they kept watch. They kept flicking their ears. There was a moon on the lake.’
I’d go there with you, thought Michael. For just a moment he glimpsed another life. He was by that lake with Deep and they were together and Michael was doing … what? Michael was binding an antelope’s broken shin.
Michael ventured forth. ‘I, uh, have a boyfriend, but he won’t be there now. I don’t live very far from here.’
Despite his size, Dr Deep’s face was thin, slightly cynical, and it did not respond to the suggestion.
Michael endeavoured. ‘Would you like to come back with me?’
Dr Deep shook his head. ‘I’m not what you’re looking for.’
Oh, oh, but you are, thought Michael. ‘You’re sure?’ he asked and tried to engineer a winning smile.
Dr Deep was sure. ‘You know, I have been very tired and tense coming back here to see my family. I’m about to change countries again. So I just came here for the sex.’
They kissed and parted company. Deep was one of those perennial boys who only like older men. Over the next 45 minutes Michael watched Dr Deep kneel in front of one middle-aged man after another, his head bobbing away and then abruptly withdrawing, like a bee gathering honey. A medically trained bee who must know the risks.
The last Michael saw of Dr Deep, he was standing utterly alone, having sucked off every older man who wanted sucking. Dr Deep held up his towel, masturbating on show. Only one person was watching, but Dr Deep was looking pointedly away from Michael.
It’s all you want, Michael thought in disappointment. And if I’d been able to give you that, would you have talked to me? Gone out to a movie with me? Become friends? Do you want to die that badly, that you can’t even take time to talk? No one ever even talks. No one ever rings back. Is a hard dick really that important to you faggots?
How could I be stupid enough to get emotional? I know the score; I can’t get it up, so I either put up or dry up. I know what will happen, it always happens and I always forget. I always keep thinking it’s not that bad. But it is that bad. It’s like I think it will clear up by itself if I leave it alone. Like a sock that loses its other half. You put it back in the drawer, hoping it’ll find the other half by itself.
Well, I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I look like such a big butch man who’ll slap you and then fuck you silly. I’m sorry that I got a bit romantic. I won’t do it again. I keep forgetting what you guys are like.
Michael dragged his ass back into his underwear and out to Waterloo station, and on the underground platform. He cursed sex. He cursed the need for it, and how men wanted it. He cursed being gay. He cursed all other gay men. He cursed his dick and he cursed himself. As all the day’s happiness crushed around him like ruins in an aftershock, he prayed, or came as close to praying as he could get.
Michael pleaded for all the weary dead weight of his sexual desire to be taken from him. ‘Look, just castrate me, get rid of it, please, please just take it all away!’
Was a train coming? Wind blew along the platform; a newspaper rose up by itself into the air.
And Michael noticed that his gym instructor was standing a few feet away. Oh Jesus, not now, thought Michael. He didn’t want to see happiness; he didn’t want to see joy. He looked at Tony and thought: all I want to do is see your dick.
There on the platform, with fifteen other people, Tony pulled down first his tracksuit bottoms and then his clean white briefs. The Cherub stood still and exposed, his bovine thighs and brown pubic hair on display. His stare was as blank and disconnected as a sleepwalker’s.
The people on the platform looked disconnected as well. A greying man in a tan checked jacket glanced sideways and began to edge closer, eyes flickering. A woman searched her purse with immense concentration.
Then Tony sat down on the platform, and rolled onto his back, sticking the perfect bottom into the air, like an animal about to be spayed.
Oh, Jesus, thought Michael. So much for innocence. Bitterness and rage were countered by another thought: Tony must be in trouble.
Michael walked towards him. He saw the chords of muscle on the inside leg, and the head of the reasonably sized uncircumcised cock. Michael looked and then was sorry for looking. Tony gazed up at him, eyes unfocussed, dim with a half-formed question.
‘Fancy a portion?’ the Cherub asked.
Drugs, Michael decided. He doesn’t normally do drugs, so he’s gone and got what he thought was E only it was speed, plaster of Paris and battery acid.
‘Tony. What are you doing on the ground?’ Michael felt the eyes of the other people on the platform. His ears burned. He wanted them to know his intentions were honourable. The Cherub blinked, his head haloed by the grey and white patterns of the platform paving.
‘Stand up, come on.’
Michael didn’t want to touch him in public. Tony rolled to his feet. He stood without adjusting his clothes, facing the woman with the handbag. She looked like she might pull it down over her head.
Pull your trousers up! thought Michael, and immediately, the Cherub bent down and nipped both layers of clothing back into place.
‘Did you take anything? Do you remember what it was?’
The mouth hung open, the lips fatter when they were not smiling. Tony’s brows clenched, trying to find an answer. ‘I didn’t take anything.’
‘Are you sure? Try to think. What was it called?’
Tony nodded his head solemnly, yes. ‘Diclofenac,’ he said. ‘For my knee.’
Michael was a biologist. Diclofenac was a powerful anti-inflammation drug. Did it have side effects?
‘Have you taken it before?’
Tony nodded yes again, like a child.
The wind blew. Like a friend showing up, the train rumbled out of the tunnel. ‘This is my train,’ said Michael, trying to keep the tone conversational. ‘Where are you going, Tony?’
The Cherub replied as if the answer were obvious. ‘With you.’
It wouldn’t be right to leave him. Michael looked up at the handbag lady and she looked away hastily. The greying man looked miffed that Michael had got there first. Michael pushed his way onto the train as others were getting off, and Tony followed him. Michael clenched the handrail almost as hard as he was clenching his teeth, and looked around him.
Two teenage Indian boys were talking about cars or computers in a jargon he didn’t understand. A woman turned over a page of her crinkly newspaper as if toasting its other side, and sniffed delicately. None of them had seen the banquet of Cherub laid out on the platform. Very suddenly, normality closed over them. The doors rolled shut. The noise of the train provided an excuse not to talk, as if it were embarrassed for them.
Tony simply stared, the flesh on his face slack, like old Hush Puppy shoes. There was definitely something wrong with him; he squinted up at the advertising, looking as if ads for Blistex were beyond his mental age. As the train approached Goodge Street, Michael wondered what on earth to do.
‘Look, Tony. I get off here. Will you be OK?’
Tony nodded yes. The train stopped and the doors opened. Michael got off. Tony followed him.
‘Do you want to see a doctor?’
Tony shook his head, no. Michael could think of nothing else to do, so he headed for the WAY OUT sign and the lift. Tony started to whistle, in a kind of deranged echoing drawl.
I don’t like this, Michael thought. He said airily, ‘So. Do you live around here, Tony?’
‘I live in Theydon Bois.’ Theydon Bois was at the end of the Central Line. This was the Northern.
‘So,’ Michael ventured. ‘You’re meeting someone?’ A coldness gathered around his heart.
‘No,’ said the Cherub in the same numb, faraway voice.
‘So where are you going?’ Why, Michael thought, does the underground always smell of asbestos and urine?
‘I don’t know. I don’t even have a ticket.’
They had reached the lifts. The windows in the metal doors looked like empty eye sockets. This was getting weird. ‘Look,’ Michael asked him, ‘if there’s something wrong, I’m not sure I can help you. Do have a phone with you?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Tony patted his tracksuit pockets.
Michael began to be afraid. This guy can bench-press 130 kilos. The elevator arrived filling the two windows with light as if they were eyes that had opened. The doors beeped and gaped but Michael did not get in.
‘You don’t want to go this way,’ said Michael. ‘You want to go back that direction.’
‘What I want doesn’t count,’ said Tony.
My God, thought Michael. He hasn’t blinked, not once.
Stand clear of the doors please said a cool, controlling voice. Michael decided it was best to get upstairs where there were people. He got in, Tony followed, and the doors trundled shut. They were alone.
Tony slipped his fingers under the spandex waistband, and pulled down both trousers and underwear, businesslike, as if finishing a warm-up.
Stop! thought Michael. Tony stopped. ‘Pull them up!’ said Michael. Tony did. The Cherub looked back at him, scowling slightly as if he couldn’t quite hear what was being said.
Jesus, thought Michael, this is what you get for fancying some guy at the gym: you chat away, you’re nice to him, and suddenly you’ve got a psychopath following you home. There was sweat on Michael’s upper lip. The lift did a little bounce and stopped, mimicking the sick sensation in Michael’s stomach.
The doors opened and Michael swept through them, fumbling to pull his season ticket out of his jacket pocket. He strode to the barriers, slipping his card into the slot like a kiss, nipped it free and pushed his way out and away. He could feel Tony’s eyes on his back as he escaped.
Michael thought and then stopped: you know he’s in trouble. It might be an insulin reaction, something like that. You can’t just leave him. He turned around. Tony was standing dazed behind the ticket barriers. What if he’s too ill to even know his way home? Michael sighed and walked back.
‘Is this something that happens to you sometimes? Are you diabetic, are you on any kind of medication?’ Michael was thinking schizophrenia. The ticket barriers were hunched between them like a line of American football players.
‘No,’ said Tony, as if from the bottom of a well.
‘Well look, the Central Line is back that way,’ Michael said. ‘Go back down and change at Tottenham Court Road.’ Michael glanced sideways; the guard was listening.
The guard was a young, handsome, burly man whom Michael had once halfway fancied, except for his unpleasant sneer. The guard was looking the other way, but his ears were pricked.
Tony said, mildly surprised. ‘Don’t you want to fuck me?’
Michael said, ‘No. I don’t.’
The guard covered his smile with an index finger.
Tony looked bruised. ‘You do,’ he insisted.
Michael began to talk for the benefit of the guard. ‘I’m sorry if you got that idea. Look, you’re in a bit of a state. My advice is to try to get back home and sort yourself out.’
The guard suddenly trooped forward, his smile broadening to a leer. ‘Bit off a bit more than we can chew, did we, sir?’
‘I think he’s on something and he’s been following me,’ said Michael.
‘Must be your lucky day,’ said the guard. He began to hustle Tony back from the barriers. ‘Come on, let the Professor be. He probably can’t afford you anyway.’ The guard had the cheek to turn and grin at Michael like he’d said something funny.
‘He’s not well,’ said Michael. Gosh, did he dislike that guard. But he needed him. The guard herded Tony back towards the lifts. Michael saw Tony look at him, with a suddenly stricken face. It was that panic that frightened Michael more than anything else. The panic meant that Tony needed Michael. For what? Something was out of whack.
Michael fled. He turned and walked as quickly as he could, away. He doesn’t know where I live, Michael thought, relieved. If I get away, I find another gym, and that’s the end of it. Michael’s stomach was shuddering as if he had run out of petrol. The tip of his penis was wet.
It had been raining, and the pavements were glossy like satin. A woman bearing four heavy bags from Tesco was looking at her boots; Michael scurried to make the lights and bashed into the bags, spinning them around in her grasp.
There was a shout from behind him. ‘Oi!’
Michael spun around, and saw the Cherub sprinting towards him. Michael knew, from the way his athlete’s stride suspended him in mid-air, that Tony had jumped the barriers.
Michael backed away, raising his arms against attack, terror bubbling up like yeast.
Keep away from me! Get back, go away!
And the street was empty. Tony was gone.
Michael blinked and looked around him, up and down the pavement. When he looked back, he saw the guard hobbling towards him, pressing a handkerchief to his face. He’d been hit.
‘Where did he go?’ the guard shouted at Michael, strands of spit between his lips. ‘Where the fuck did he go?’
‘I don’t know!’
‘Bastard!’
Michael tried to look at the guard’s lip.
The guard ducked away from Michael’s tender touch. He demanded, snarling, ‘What’s his name, where’s he from?’
Michael did not even have to think. ‘I’ve no idea. He just followed me.’
‘Oh yeah. Just followed you, did he? If I press charges, mate, you’ll bloody well have to remember.’
The guard pulled the handkerchief away and looked as if expecting to see something. He blinked. The handkerchief was clean, white and spotless.
This seemed to mollify him. ‘You better watch the kind of person you pick up, mate.’
Then the guard turned and proudly, plumply, walked away. For all your arrogance, Michael thought, in five years’ time you’ll be bald and fat-arsed.
Michael stood in the rain for a few moments, catching his breath. What, he thought, was that all about? Finally he turned and walked up Chenies Street, mostly because he had no place else to go, and he began to cry, from a mix of fear, frustration, boredom. Christ! All he did was go to the sauna. He didn’t need this, he really didn’t. He looked up at the yellow London sky. There were no stars overhead, just light pollution, a million lamps drowning out signals from alien intelligences.
Michael lived in what estate agents called a mansion block: an old apartment house. It was covered in scaffolding, being repaired. He looked up at his flat and saw that no lights were on. Phil wasn’t there again. So it would be round to Gigs again for a takeaway kebab and an evening alone. Involuntarily, Michael saw Tony’s naked thighs, the ridges of muscle.
He clunked his keys into the front door of his flat. The door was heavy and fireproofed and it made noises like an old man. Michael dumped his briefcase on the hall table and snapped on the living-room light.
The Cherub was sitting on the sofa.
‘Bloody hell!’ exclaimed Michael, and stumbled backwards. ‘What are you doing here?’
Tony sat with both hands placed on his knees. ‘I don’t know,’ he said in a mild voice.
‘How did you get in!’ The central light was bare and bleak.
‘I don’t know,’ Tony said. He still hadn’t moved.
The scaffolding, thought Michael. He climbed up the bloody scaffolding. ‘Get out of here!’ Michael shouted.
The eyes narrowed and the head tilted sideways.
And then, Oh God, he was gone. The air roiled, as if from tarmac on a hot day. It poured into the space Tony had suddenly vacated. There was no imprint left on the cushions.
The Cherub simply disappeared. Not even a flutter of wings.
Michael stood and stared. He kept staring at the sofa. What had happened was not possible. Or rather it made a host of other things suddenly possible: magic, madness, ghosts.
Michael sat down with a bump and slowly unwound his scarf. He stood up and poured himself a whiskey, swirling it around in the glass and inspecting it, yellow and toxic. Whiskey had destroyed his father.
In a funny kind of way, it felt as if Tony was his father’s ghost come back to haunt him.
Michael took a swig and then sat down with his notebook and Pilot pencil to answer every question except the most important.
Who indeed is Michael? (#ulink_56141c53-4626-52b4-a14b-11f399774e89)
In a very few photographs, Michael was beautiful.
Most photographs of him were short-circuited by a grimace of embarrassment or a dazzled nervous grin that gave him the teeth of a rodent. If someone short stood next to him, Michael would stoop and twist and force himself lower.
In other photographs, Michael looked all right. In those, he would have taken off his wire-rimmed spectacles and combed his hair and stood up straight. By hazard, he would be wearing a shirt that someone had ironed, and he would have left the pens out of the top pocket. It would be a period in which Michael was not experimenting with beards to hide his face, or pony tails to control his runaway, curly hair.
The best photographs of all would be on a beach, on holiday, with something to occupy his awkward hands. It would be apparent then that Michael had the body of an athlete. He was a big, broad-shouldered man. Because of the flattening of his broken nose, his face was rugged, like a boxer’s. Michael could look unbelievably butch.
There was one photograph from Michael’s youth.
It was hidden away, unsorted. Michael would not be able to find it now. He didn’t need to. Michael carried it around with him in memory. He could always see it, even when he didn’t want to.
His father had taken it from a riverboat in California, during their last summer together. In the photograph, Michael is sixteen years old and is quite possibly the best-looking person on the planet. He is certainly one of the happiest.
In the photograph Michael sits in a dinghy. He’s laughing and holding up a poor pooch of a dog. She was called Peaches the Pooch. Peaches gazes miserably out from under a thick coating of river-bottom mud. Michael’s thighs and calves are also covered in mud. Even then he was a big lad, with wide shoulders and lines of muscle on his forearm. His black eyes are fixed directly on whoever is taking the photograph and they are wide with delight. His face is nut brown, like an Indian’s, and his smile is blue-white in contrast. His black hair has reddish-brown streaks from constant sunlight. Sunlight glints all around him on the slick, brown water and onto his face, which is indisputably happy.
If you look closely, the nose isn’t broken.
By the time that photograph had been developed and posted back to England, it was winter. That summer Michael on the Sacramento River was already history. Michael remembered opening the envelope. There was no letter inside from his father, just photographs, that photograph.
It should have been the moment when Michael learned to love himself. Like every teenager he had been gawky and spotty. It should have been the moment he left doubt behind, and finally accepted that he was beautiful.
Instead, all Michael could do was regret. The beauty, he felt, was a mask. He’d been hiding behind it. It was better now, being ugly. It was closer to the truth. Michael made himself ugly.
The photograph was the last thing he ever had from his father. He knew what his father was saying: this is who you could have been.
Everything changed without Michael noticing at the time. In the summer, he had been determined to be a vet. Now he was a scientist, who experimented on animals.
The summer Michael had enjoyed acting; had been in a drama class for fun, and took the lead role in all the plays. He had a way of conjuring up old ladies, terrified spivs and policemen out of his own body.
In winter, Michael seemed dispossessed of his own body.
This made him mostly harmless. Women liked him; his students liked him. He always kept a distance from them. It was not that he was afraid of women or students, exactly. He was afraid of how he became around them. He knew he could be waywardly funny, exact, truthful. But then something would happen, and power would withdraw from Michael like the tide. Beached and helpless, he would fumble and make mistakes and let himself down. He would forget things, like appointments or his glasses. Uncomfortable, he would grin and grin and grin.
Michael was impotent. If this were symptom or cause he could not distinguish. He didn’t care. Impotency meant that only the most brutal and depersonalized of sexual episodes were safe enough for him. Only parks or toilets or saunas could hide him.
If his partners had no idea who he was, how could they hurt him? If they could hardly see him in the dark and didn’t know his name, there could be no embarrassment when he didn’t get it up. They didn’t care if Michael got it up. They were too terrified of police to notice and too desperate to come quickly. It all stayed hidden and detached.
But it relieved the pressure. It relieved the pressure of living with someone who gave him no sexual satisfaction. It relieved a kind of erotic itch, which he could never satisfy, and had not been satisfied for more than twenty years. Michael was 38 and his very skin crawled with lust.
A quick jerk off in a car park, a slap on the ass in bushes in a park provided cessation and a masturbatory climax but no satisfaction. So he would have to go back again, to a sauna or a cottage. And then, again. This is addiction. Michael was a nice man who was addicted to speedy, functional sex. He kept this shut away from the rest of his life.
In the rest of his life, he offered the world sweetness, integrity and intelligence. He placated life. He worked himself nearly to death.
Michael had a contract to teach biology two afternoons a week. He prepared his lectures and marked papers, just as if he were full-time, only he was paid less.
He joined academic committees and fought for new IT networks. He joined Boards that recruited new teachers and exposed his bitter elders when they said, untruthfully, that a candidate for a post had been fired from her previous position.
Michael lifted weights and read all the journals in his field and did desk research. He became a rising star in his field, producing publishable papers in biology from scanning work in two fields and bringing them together. Somehow this still resulted in very little extra money.
The two fields were neurology and philosophy, the grey area where biology was helping philosophers answer questions such as: do we have a soul? What is the self?
Michael understood how we see. Images are formed from millions of separate stimulations in the brain: one area responds only to vertical lines; others to angles; others to oncoming movement. Others are tickled by symmetry of any kind, or by green or pink. Still others react to shadow; whole other areas bring together the slightly different angles provided by two eyes.
The brain responds to verbs of movement, adjectives of colour, and nouns of space and shape. We spend our first six months learning to read these complex sentences.
Could the grammar of language have its origins in the grammar of sight? If so, then how could people blind from birth learn to talk? What if grammar came before both vision and speech? Michael wrote papers on the subject. They were influential. People were surprised that he was not a professor.
In the spiritual space where ideas were formed, Michael had power. He found power in snatching those ideas out of air and putting them to paper with rattling keystrokes. Michael wrote all weekend long.
In order to answer those people who insisted on modelling the living brain on circuit diagrams, Michael was taking a conversion degree in Computer Science.
So, as if he did not have enough to do, Michael was learning how to program in C and studying how the registers of computer memory worked. He had to turn in programs to a colleague who opposed his views on what networks the students needed.
The programming module alone took ten extra hours a week. When major coursework was due it would be twenty extra hours a week. Having worked all day, he would work all night, and when finally the program worked, he would weep from joy, as if he had climbed Mount Everest. That was the payoff. He had a blazing moment of joy. Two hours later, he crawled out of bed, and it all began again.
Sometimes, Michael saw friends. He would arrive late at their houses, streaming cold air and apologies and feeling awful because he hadn’t been able to organize buying a bottle of wine. His boyfriend Philip would be there waiting for him in worn silence. Perhaps everyone had already begun the first course.
‘Michael’s always late – we told you he would be!’ his hosts would exclaim, laughing and admonishing. Michael’s smile would flick like a switchblade with annoyance. The blade cut both ways: himself and his friends.
Michael spent some of his time in a haze of either petulance, or depressed exhaustion, elated only by his studies and his flashes of inspiration into who we are and how we think. These were brilliant enough and expressed clearly enough to make most guests sit up and listen. They found themselves asking intelligent questions, to which Michael could give simple replies. For the time that they were with him they found themselves in love with learning and with science, and so a little more in love with themselves. Which is why even now, from time to time, Philip’s eyes would shine with pride, if not exactly love. And why, curiously, Michael left the dinner parties even more drained and exhausted than when he arrived. Sometimes he cried without knowing why.
He really couldn’t think why he should be crying. He had a good job, didn’t he? He had a flat in London’s prosperous West End. He had a sensible relationship that had lasted nearly thirteen years. His papers had helped earn his ex-polytechnic a 5 from the Higher Research Board. Who was he, to be unhappy? Who, indeed, was Michael?
So where is Philip? (#ulink_f51334dc-834a-56ce-ae47-44e0fe8917c8)
Out, as always. Michael had no idea where.
It hadn’t always been like that. There was a time when they did things together and regularly cooked meals for each other. There was a time when he and Phil regularly attempted to make love.
They’d met more than twelve years before. Michael had been 26 and had his father’s athletic build. His beard outlined a smooth and doleful face, but in doleful repose it was rather beautiful. His hair, for once, was cut short. Michael at 26 was many people’s cup of tea, if not exactly his own.
They met at First Out, a gay coffee shop. Phil was trying to find copies of the free newspapers. Michael gave him his, and Phil sat next to him in the window.
Phil had been skinny, intense and spotty. His cheeks were pitted, but that only increased the craggy drama of his face. He was all a-quiver, in his first week of art school, nineteen, terrified, anxious, and aggressive, like a stray terrier needing a home. It is perhaps to Michael’s credit that he found this touching, moving and beautiful in a way.
Their attachment was brusque. Halfway through the first lovemaking session, Michael had known it would work. Philip was hot to the touch and his ribcage showed pale and lean. His hands shivered like butterflies. The two men made a shape together – Michael’s bulk against Philip’s fragility – that seemed to tell a coherent story.
On their second date, Michael called Philip ‘my love’. Phil hated his student roommates; they didn’t wash their cutlery or themselves. He needed a place to crash, he said. Michael, full of hope, asked Phil to live with him. There was something suddenly erotic about being the older man, about offering a flat, an income, a routine, a home. Philip moved in two weeks later.
Domestication with its rituals over salt and spoons soothed them both. They took turns with the washing-up and shared expenses, and settled quickly into a life of tidal regularity. There was something soothing, too, about being with someone whom so few people would find attractive.
The age difference helped. Michael could play the role of protector and teacher; and Philip was insecure and young for his age and needed that. For a time it was charming that Philip’s nickname for Michael was ‘Father’. It sounded like an old-fashioned marriage. ‘Hello, Father,’ Philip would call out on Michael’s arrival home, or when Michael showed up at the pub for a crawl.
Early on, before art school got to him, Phil painted Michael’s portrait. This was before Philip stared to glue dirty carpet onto metal poles, so it was a perfectly conventional painting. Philip said that it was designed to fill a niche in the sitting room.
It portrayed Michael as ballast. The jacket, slightly crumpled, looked like a carved stone replica of clothing. The weight of his body was given a granite substance, and he stood feet well apart looking as immovable as the Earth. The painting was called ‘Taurus’. At least in the beginning, Michael was an anchoring point.
Even then the sex didn’t work. But it didn’t work in a strange backward way that they both noted and were proud of. It seemed to confirm they were some kind of perfect match. They would allude to it lightly, discreetly to their very best friends.
Phil hated any male response from his partners at all. For all his fluttering, or perhaps because of it, he would not suck Michael’s cock and found the idea of anal penetration repulsive. Which was just as well, considering Michael could not penetrate whipped cream.
It was no mystery to Michael why Philip was screwed up. A year after they met, Philip finally summoned the nerve to take Michael home to meet his parents. Michael would not have believed Roland and Virginia if he had not met them. They were fake posh. They pretended to be from Surrey, where they now lived. Who in their right mind pretended to be posh these days?
Philip’s father was some kind of retired manager from ICI. He had a worn moustache and some kind of dressing on his hair which rendered it flat and glossy. Roland wore navy blazers without the right to, and shirts whose thick blue stripes were still somehow garish. Virginia’s hair was died orange and piled high like Margaret Thatcher’s, and she had an air of studied, delicate refinement. She talked like an actress in a 1950s film.
They had made cucumber sandwiches. Their teapot had pink curlicues. Michael kept his eyes fixed on it as Philip’s mother made efforts to persuade her son to go back to medical school. They didn’t like the idea of art school at all. Roland was robust. ‘Don’t want people to think you hang around with a bunch of arty-farty people, Philip.’ Arty-farty meant queer. Roland was supposed to have no idea about his son’s sexuality. Only Philip’s mother ‘knew’.
The family had a best room that was kept under wraps, and of which Michael was vouchsafed a glimpse. The furniture was sealed in plastic and the carpets covered with protecting translucent treads. It was as if they wanted people to have safe sex with the sofa. The dresser proudly displayed the Wedgwood china, which was never used. ‘This is for special events,’ said Philip’s mother, communicating with no effort that the first visit of her son’s partner was not special enough.
When Philip’s sister died unexpectedly, his mother rang to ask that Michael not come to the funeral, as it was ‘a family occasion’. In any event, Michael was not ‘to visit quite so often, as it might give rise to questions’.
‘I’ll make it easy,’ said Michael. ‘I won’t go at all.’
‘That’s not what she wants, Michael,’ said Philip, looking anguished.
‘It’s what I want,’ said Michael. ‘I don’t like being treated like the mad aunt in the attic. It’ll be easier for you too. You won’t even have to mention me.’
Indeed, Michael was not mentioned in family conversation. Philip’s family weekends were now just another period of absence.
Which Michael had been grateful for, as it made it easier to bring people back. It’s how most gay marriages are supposed to work. You get tired of sex with each other, and being a man yourself you understand: it’s fun to be let off your leash for a scamper.
But when does it cease to be that? When do you start hoping he won’t be home so you can bring a trick back? When do you start saying: ‘Got another arts do on tonight. You won’t want to come, will you?’ When do you start slipping sideways into bushes at Russell Square after every social engagement?
How long is it then before there is no sexual side to the marriage? What do you call the marriage then? Like other mainly financial arrangements, you might call it a partnership. They still both took a measure of pride in it.
‘He’s a scientist,’ Phil said at a recent party, as if clearing the table for a specially cooked, nut-free dish. Philip at 31 was already beginning to look ragged and discontent. ‘He’s doing brain research. You’re trying to prove we have a soul aren’t you?’
‘Do we have a soul then?’ asked Jimmy Banter. He was a better-known artist than Philip. He had a merry smile and a watchful eye.
‘What we have,’ said Michael, feeling his weight, ‘is more like a centre of gravity. You can’t find a centre of gravity surgically. It’s not an organ or an inner eye. You won’t find a car part called the centre of gravity, but the car has one anyway. The self is like that. It’s the centre of focus if you like, where all the stresses and strains of the brain come together.’
Jimmy Banter looked over his shoulder. ‘Is that why you’ve got such a big ego then, Phil? All those stresses and strains?’ Jimmy disliked weight and he disliked bald truth but he loved drama.
‘At least my work doesn’t involve killing chickens,’ said Philip.
Thanks, Phil, for blowing my cover.
The room went cold and still. ‘What was that?’ a woman in a red dress asked, sitting up.
Michael sighed. ‘Uh. I am about to start a research project that involves experimentation on animals.’
‘And how,’ the woman asked him, with the cautious determination of the righteous, ‘do you justify that?’
With difficulty. It takes a long time. Most of the night, in fact. And the one thing I dread is some animal rights activist getting hold of it because my partner wants to score points at parties.
Michael glared at Philip who stared sullenly back. It was very difficult to see any love in his eyes now.
Some weeks before, Philip had come home at eleven o’ clock. For Philip, that was early. Michael was still up, exhausted from marking phase tests. Philip came home elated rather than high. He came home seductive.
‘How would you ,’Philip said, sitting on the arm of the sofa, ‘like to be photographed in the nude by me.’
‘It depends on what it’s for,’ replied Michel.
‘It’s for my next and breakthrough show. It’s called Lust.’
Ah.
‘You’re going to be the centre piece.’
‘Am I, now?’
‘Yup. I want your cock to be the anchor. I want it to look earth-bound. I want to adorn it with grass and soil and flowers. And I can tell people: it’s my boyfriend, actually. It will all be terribly Gilbert-and-Georgeish.’
Philip. Phil, you are 31 years old. Shouldn’t you be getting beyond this?
‘Are you trying to get into advertising or something? It won’t work, Phil. If advertising agencies like your stuff, they just steal it and call it a quote.’
‘And that promotes you too. Just hear me out.’ Philip shifted, smiling on the arm of the sofa. ‘I haven’t pitched it to you properly.’
Pitch? What are you, a filmmaker?
‘Everything is a branch of pornography, including religion.’
‘No, Phil, it’s not.’
‘In this sense. It uses the same techniques as pornography. Nothing to do with sex. Pornography is to do with keeping people comfortable and managing their disappointment. You cannot give someone sex except by giving them sex. But you can give them a substitute, and make sure it’s barely just good enough. So they’re not satisfied and have to come back for another fix. McDonald’s hamburgers are pornography. Blockbuster movies are pornography. The key to their success is that they don’t offend and never satisfy. The other thing is that nobody gets hurt. Or rather they get hurt, but there’s no real pain. So, in The English Patient you can set people on fire and cut off their thumbs and everything still reads like a Fiat ad.’
‘So. How are you going to demonstrate this intellectual point using craft skills? Which, as I understand it, is your definition of art.’
Philip was grinning. ‘I’m going to photograph your cock in a McDonald’s bun.’
Michael couldn’t resist. ‘It will certainly be an improvement on their usual fare.’
‘I’m going to photograph you as Billy Graham preaching, but with your cock hanging out.’
See what an education in the arts can do for you? ‘What about lawsuits?’
‘You want lawsuits? I’m going to dress your member up as Monica Lewinsky.’
‘How? How are you going to do that?’
‘I’ll put a beret on it, and stick it in a weight watchers ad. I’ll wrap it up as a cigar. I dunno.’
‘Phil. This is not art. These are ideas for joke greetings cards. You know, courgettes standing in for dicks. And why pick on poor Monica?’
‘Because she got hurt. The Republicans got it wrong. They thought pornography meant sex rather than harmlessness. They wrecked a nice, modern girl’s life and people hated it. I mean, would Republicans understand pornography? Politics is pornography. Will the Right Honourable Member for Finchley East please stand?’ Phil flickered like a candle about to go out.
Michael was smiling. In many ways, this was the best conversation they had had in years. ‘Phil. You are not going to photograph my dick. Use someone else’s, but not mine, OK?’
‘Why not?’
Partly, Michael thought, because it’s so ugly. ‘Well aside from putting your audience off their dinner … I just don’t want to. I’d be embarrassed. I’m a lecturer, I’ve got students. It might cause trouble at work. OK?’
‘All right.’ Philip stared at his knees. He looked genuinely disappointed. ‘I just thought that for once you might like to share in my life.’ His voice went even quieter and he muttered, ‘Instead of me always having to share in yours.’
This was neither jovial nor seductive. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand that last remark, Phil.’
Philip stood up, disconsolate. ‘Look around you, then. The flat’s yours, everything in it’s yours.’
‘You’re perfectly welcome to buy something, Phil.’
Philip said very softly, ‘I don’t have any money.’ And he went out to the kitchen.
Somewhere in there, Michael sensed, there had been a wasted opportunity.
Lovers come and lovers go. Usually they leave by the door. Sometimes, very occasionally, they just disappear.
Was the guard hit? (#ulink_fb536799-fe34-580a-9b5b-57e65481a0da)
Philip did not come back until gone 2.00 AM.
All lights were out and Michael was nearly asleep when he heard the front door wheeze and grumble its way open. Phil let it swing back and slam. It took him forever to lay out his keys, undress, have a glass of water, pee, flush, belch. My God, how long can it take someone to get to bed? Perhaps he was just washing himself after sex.
When he finally lay down next to Michael, Philip fell instantly asleep. His breath rattled out of him like leaves blown along a sidewalk. He smelled of cheap red wine.
Michael was left awake, full of lust, but not for Phil.
He thought of the Cherub: the smooth pink arms, the smooth pink face, the ready smile. Michael saw him again, prone on the platform, undignified, head over heels and his face sad with questions, as if he had learned about death for the first time.
I won’t sleep, thought Michael.
It is bad behaviour to wank in the same bed as your partner. Michael got up and went to the bathroom. Michael tried to ease the bathroom light on soundlessly, but it snapped anyway. It sounded as loud as a gunshot.
And there, standing in the shower-bath as Michael had really rather known he would be, was Tony.
The Cherub looked like he had been scanned in from a photograph and pasted onto another image. His back was towards Michael. He was drying himself with a white gym towel. Michael did not own any white towels. His scientific mind clocked: towels are part of the deal.
So was the perfect, pink, hairless bottom, rounded muscle so lean that the cheeks were parted even standing up. The anus was visible, pouting as if for a kiss. Michael touched Tony’s shoulder, and he turned around. His face had the same baffled expression. Michael wanted him to smile. Smile, he yearned.
The Cherub smiled in delight. Michael kissed his cheek. Tony’s smile did not respond. It remained fixed and dazzling.
Michael sat down on the lid of the toilet. Tony’s penis was still recognizably stale from being swaddled all day, even in the most evenly white, clean briefs. Michael checked that the head was dry, permitted it to enter his mouth once. The penis swelled, lengthened, and went bulbous at the head. Michael pulled back.
Michael touched Tony’s body, started to masturbate and told Tony to do the same. Tony leaned back against the bathroom door, head thrown back, eyes closed, as he would have done if he were alone. Michael looked at his beautiful body as if it were a photograph in a magazine. The Cherub came arching into space.
Then the room cleared as if a mist had been burned off. Michael padded back into the darkened bedroom where Phil still snored. Michael had a moment’s worry: he’ll smell it on me. Then he realized the tastes and smells on his tongue and fingers had all evaporated. Leaving nothing.
In the morning, the mystery remained.
As always Philip slept on while Michael prepared instant coffee and granola. I must have dreamed it, thought Michael. He picked up his filofax and looked at his notes from the night before. There was hardly anything useful except for one clear question.
Was the guard hit?
He walked to Goodge Street tube. There must have been an unusual shift pattern, because the same guard was lurking behind the barriers. Or maybe he just needed the money. He was propped up against the wall and nodded a grim good morning at Michael.
Michael shuffled his apologies. ‘Uh. I’m sorry about last night. Did he hit you?’
The guard looked up, bleary from lack of sleep, angry at first for being disturbed. Then he remembered to be civil. ‘Sorry?’
‘Um. Last night. That big bloke who was a bit woozy. You came running after me and I thought he’d hit you.’
The blue eyes were too pale; there was something frozen about them. ‘You must want someone else, mate.’
Michael shook his head at his own mistake. ‘Of course. You wouldn’t get two shifts in a row would you?’
‘I would. I need the money. I was here last night, but there was no big man. Sorry.’
Michael stood frozen. All right, Tony had not been real. ‘But don’t you remember talking to me?’
The guard wanted to read his paper. It was called Loot and sold houses and cars to people who had no money to buy them. He lowered the paper. ‘There was something. You were standing there by the barriers.’ He gestured towards them, scowling, looking as baffled as the Cherub had the night before. Michael saw that he needed a shave. ‘That’s it. You were drunk.’ The guard’s lip curled, and he lifted up his paper. He looked pretty and petulant and butch, all at once. ‘You were right out of it, mate. So that explains it then. All right?’ He stared stonily at his paper. Conversation over. They waited for the lifts to arrive.
I didn’t drink anything. Michael reconstructed the entire night and day in his mind. He hadn’t been to the pub. He hadn’t drunk a thing.
The guard rocked himself away from the wall on which he was leaning, and punched big silver keys. The lift door opened.
I must be going nuts, Michael thought.
‘Sleep tight,’ said the guard and gave him a cheery, leery grin.
There were smiling Japanese tourists in the lift. You are bowing to a crazy man, Michael told them in his mind.
I made the whole thing up. I had a bad experience in the sauna, my life is shit, I’ve been depressed for years without doing anything about it, and now I’ve gone and broken my brain.
Christ. Michael remembered the feel of Tony’s skin, its smell, its taste. It increases your respect for schizophrenics, really. They’re not just a bit muddled. All those brain cells get tickled up, and they start making brand-new sentences of sight and sound and touch. The new sentences are lies, but they feel like the real thing.
You lose a certain kind of innocence when you go crazy. You used to take it for granted that your brain shows you what’s actually out there. Now all you’ve got left is doubt, Michael.
But then, science is built on doubt.
The train bounced and rattled him, like life.
At the lab, Michael strolled through his normal routine as if sleepwalking.
He fed his smartcard into the reader at the front door. He said hello to the security guard Shafiq and showed him his pass. He went down the line of offices, one by one. None of them had windows.
Hello, Ebru! Hello boss! It amused Ebru to call him boss.
Hiya Emilio, how’s the system? Why you ask? It’s great like always!
He heard their voices, as if in his own head, as if no one were really speaking.
In his own office, Michael slipped into his entirely symbolic white lab coat. He asked Hugh to check the thermostat readings in the darkroom. ‘If the temperature goes much under or over thirty-eight, give me a shout.’
And he sat down and he had no idea what to do. His desk stared back at him, as orderly as his notebooks. There were three new things in his in tray, and the out tray was empty. On his PC would be a timed list of things to do.
What the fuck do I do now?
Look in the Yellow Pages for psychotherapists? Do they section people right away? Should I be writing my letter of resignation? What do you do when you realize you’re seeing things?
You might just try to see if it’s going to happen again. Look, I’m still capable. I can say maybe it won’t happen again, maybe it was just a one-off, something that only happened once. Maybe I’m better already.
Put another way: just how badly broken am I?
The door opened and the sound was as sudden and as loud as if he made it up, and Michael jumped up and turned around.
It was Ebru. ‘First day post.’ She always made English sound like something delicious to eat: post almost became pasta. She passed him five different coloured files – his sorted mail.
‘Thank you, Ebru,’ said Michael. He felt like a bad actor, awkward on the stage, with a fixed grin. She read him out a list of messages. He didn’t really listen. He just kept smiling. Finally she left, bouncing and strong in blue jeans, a picture of wholeness.
Then Michael stood up, and looked from side to side as if there were someone watching. He padded carefully to the lab’s one WC.
It was a single tiny room with sink and toilet crowded together. Michael locked the door.
OK, he said to the air. Come back.
Suddenly crowding against the edge of the sink, the Cherub ballooned into reality. Tony was jammed against Michael, forcing him to sit down or fall over. Michael felt the texture of the brick against his back. It seemed to push him insistently back into Tony’s arms. Go on, the wall seemed to say.
Michael reached out and prodded Tony’s collarbone. He could feel it solid under lean flesh. He could feel the green T-shirt slide away from it. The room was reflected in Tony’s eyes, perfectly, the glint from the strip light, and Michael himself. In the fine-grained skin there was one clogged pore going slightly red.
Michael prodded him again. Dammit, he was solid. Michael picked up Tony’s hand and saw ridges in the fingernails and flecks of white.
No. Hallucinations were foggy, you knew things were clouded, you felt confused. This did not feel like the product of a confused brain.
I am not making this up!
‘Come on,’ said Michael.
He took hold of Tony’s hand and felt its palm, fleshy and armoured with weightlifter calluses.
Then Michael stuck his head out into the corridor. It really would not be a good idea to be seen coming out of the toilet with a strange man.
‘OK. Come on.’
Tony followed him. ‘I don’t like this,’ he said. ‘Tony doesn’t like this.’
So, Michael thought: he thinks of himself and Tony as being different.
‘Does Tony know this is happening?’
The copy nodded. ‘He saw last night in a dream.’
Michael kept his voice low. ‘I need to know if anyone else can see you.’
They went into Ebru’s office. Her back was turned and slightly hunched as she read personal e-mail from Turkey. Michael coughed.
She turned around. ‘Sorry, Michael. My mother sends me e-mail here.’ She looked embarrassed, her smile dipping and then she looked up straight at Tony. ‘Hello,’ she said.
‘This is Tony.’ Michael paused. He had not really expected Ebru to see Tony, so he had nothing ready to say. ‘He’s uh, my trainer at the gym.’
Ebru raised one eyebrow at Michael briefly, as if to say: and he’s good-looking, what’s going on here, Michael? She stood up and reached across the desk to shake Tony’s hand. The meeting of the hands was perfect, like those moments when the CGI dinosaurs actually seem to touch the ground.
‘Hello,’ said Tony, in a soft, neutral voice.
Michael explained. ‘Um. I hurt my elbow weightlifting, so Tony’s here to give me some advice about it.’
‘A handsome gym instructor who makes house calls.’ Ebru’s eyes glinted.
A certain adjustment was necessary. ‘This isn’t my house. Tony only makes office calls. We wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea.’
‘Um,’ said Ebru, as if to say, OK, I’ll mind my own business.
‘I guess that’s about it,’ Michael said to Tony. In the empty corridor, he sent Tony back. To wherever it was he came from. The air closed over him like surf and he was gone.
What the fuck is going on?
Michael got out his notebook and drew a line down the middle.
On one side he wrote ‘Hallucination’ and on the other he wrote ‘Physical Presence’.
Under ‘Hallucination’ he wrote: my distressed mental state. He wrote: lack of reaction from people on platform. He wrote: guard did not remember Tony. He wrote: guard said I was drunk.
He stared at ‘Physical Presence’. The page was blank. All he could write was: Ebru shook its hand.
So what was it? Hallucination was by far the simplest explanation, except that either Ebru was hallucinating too, or Michael had made her up at least temporarily. The physical presence would have to be some kind of physical copy of a human being.
Until recently, teleportation was supposed to be impossible. Then in 1998, the mathematics of quantum theory were revised, and it became, at least in theory, possible that objects could be completely read, and thus reliably re-created somewhere else. Or rather, duplicated. Michael had been searching for information on quantum computing and had accidentally ended up deep inside the IBM website, on the page describing IBM’s teleportation project. The aim was successfully to transport an inanimate object by 2050. There was the usual team of delighted, slightly skuzzy-looking men, thrilled to be living in the dreams of their youth.
So who or what would be sending you copies of handsome young men, Michael? Who would devote the time and expense necessary? If you postulate that, you can postulate Descartes’ evil genius, but an evil genius could just as easily be beaming hallucinations as well.
What we have is an anomaly. Something that does not fit with currently accepted theory, something we cannot explain. The first task, therefore, is to describe it accurately. Order and method seemed to dissolve like Pepto Bismal, calming Michael’s stomach. He made a list of what he knew.
A physical copy
of someone I know
in train, tube and 2 x in my flat, 1 x in office
Can call up at will and banish
other people appear to interact
His behaviour, my behaviour both sexual
the real person is straight
copy says real person dreams what happens
So the next question is: what else don’t I know about this?
In effect, the next question is: what question do I ask next?
Well, so far, all he had done is call up a copy of one person.
Can I call up a copy of someone else? (#ulink_7442c53e-7fd7-515d-9957-f456c29acfec)
Michael needed to limit variables. He needed to think of someone who shared as many characteristics as possible with Tony, someone known, someone whom he had seen and fancied, at least somewhat, in the gym.
The showers at Michael’s gym were full of men. It was one of the things that kept Michael motivated to work out.
There was the tiny brown Englishman with a beautiful body and a hatchet face whom Michael nicknamed the English Thai. Michael knew he had a wife from Thailand, and imagined that she had married him because he looked so much like one of her own people: small, neat and brown. The English Thai wore fawn trousers with a spandex waist instead of a belt. Michael had decided he worked in a car repair workshop, but at the front desk, greeting customers and nervously mismanaging staff. Michael could imitate the way he moved, not quite relaxed, hopping instead of stretching to reach parts on the top shelf.
That’s what Michael did now, back in the WC at the lab. Michael’s arms sketched how the English Thai moved.
OK, he said. His mouth had gone dry. He was half-hoping nothing would happen. Come on.
The English Thai arrived, naked, streaming water from the showers. He blinked and rubbed the water from his eyes.
Well there we go, thought Michael. That’s it. Reality’s got a hole in it.
The English Thai stood five-foot-four and proportioned as if he were a taller athlete, brown all over, a beautiful swelling chest, slim belly, tiny circumcised dick. He had a face like Mr Punch, with designer stubble.
Turn around, Michael thought at him. He did. Hold your cheeks open. The English Thai did, and easily and effortlessly his anus also opened, and mouthed desire like a fish.
Michael could direct him.
You like being fucked, Michael realized. The English Thai turned back around and nodded yes, mournfully. Michael could imagine him in insalubrious surroundings, with that same expression. There was something in the hurt and ugliness that created in Michael a stirring of lust.
Michael asked him, murmuring, ‘What does your wife think about this?’
‘She don’t know nothing,’ said the English Thai.
‘What do you think about it?’
He shrugged. ‘It’s just something I do, you know?’ He smiled, embarrassed, his wounded animal eyes saying fuck me, hurt me. I’m ugly.
There was a knock on the bathroom door. A voice came beyond it. It was Emilio, sounding reluctant. Michael sliced the air with his hand, and the English Thai was gone, as if he were a shower that someone had turned off.
Someone spoke, Emilio, sounding reluctant. ‘Uh, Michael. Do you have someone in there with you?’ This is not a question many people like asking their boss.
‘Uh,’ Michael improvised. ‘No, just talking to myself.’
My God, do they really think I’d have someone in here with me? Well, actually Michael, you did. He flushed quickly to explain why he was there and flung the door open.
Emilio was already halfway back down the corridor.
‘I’m sorry Michael, I have to use the toilet.’ Emilio smiled and shuffled. He wore yellow trousers and black sneakers, which emphasized the embarrassed digging of his feet.
‘We need more than one, don’t we?’ Michael said.
Emilio nodded, embarrassed. Michael held out a generous arm. Go in. See? No one there.
Michael went back to his desk and tried to work. He liked to work and had certainly ensured that it would not be in short supply. He had e-mail to answer. He had tomorrow’s lecture to prepare on nerve cells. He had a program to write for his MA Computer Science course. The assignment was to write a program that was supposed to convert any ordinary text to all capital letters. He knew how to do it principle … just add a fixed number to the ASCII code that would move it to upper case. He just couldn’t make it work in practice. That morning, he could make nothing work.
All right, then! He surrendered as if in anger. Michael stopped working and went to the gym.
The gym was one more way of working himself to death. It also made up for a feeling he had of losing time. It was too soon to be exiled from the world of male beauty. Michael didn’t question why he wanted to be beautiful or what the ultimate goal of that beauty would be. He did know that he could bench-press three sets of 100 kilos and do 80 crunch sit-ups.
Tony was there, filing work-out cards in a box.
‘Hiya Tony,’ said Michael, like an anxious parent trying to sound cool for his son’s friends.
Tony’s head jerked around almost in panic, and he glared at Michael, alarmed and hostile. With a snap, Tony mastered himself. He gave a brief and professional greeting. Michael’s ears felt numb and he didn’t hear it. Tony turned his back.
Fumbling slightly, Michael straddled himself onto an Exercycle. He pedalled for six minutes, and for six minutes he tried to catch Tony’s eye. Like a compass needle pointing north, somehow the broad back in its green shirt was always turned towards Michael. It was like stalking a rare marsh bird. Michael finished his aerobics.
‘Tony,’ Michael asked him. ‘Is there anything wrong?’
‘No, mate, no,’ said Tony, shaking his head.
‘You had a bad dream last night,’ said Michael. Tony’s face fell, gathering a line of pale tissue either side of his mouth. ‘So did I,’ said Michael.
Without another word, Tony turned and walked into his tiny office, and firmly closed the door.
What if this isn’t about sex? (#ulink_6f07e444-f3a3-5637-bda0-57cacf4eb873)
The next day, the chicks hatched.
Ebru came into Michael’s room looking slightly blue and pinched around the cheeks. ‘I am hearing peeping from the darkroom.’
‘OK. Make sure nobody goes in.’
They weren’t set up yet. There was a small workroom with a sink, a draining board, and an interrogation lamp. Something that looked like it might be for stretching tyres over wheels was in fact a small centrifuge. There was a kitchen magimix. Setting out the instruments of the experiment brought home to their hearts and stomachs what they were about to do.
There were new garden secateurs, the blades a polished chrome. There was the cheese shave with its wire. There were the lined bins, with their black sacks wafting plastic odours.
Inside the darkroom, the new chicks were wet, warm, shivering. In the dull red light, their ancient heads looked outraged, as if they had been pulled back out of heaven after death. They demanded, mouths open.
Every other chick was lifted up and lowered into a trolley. They jolted with life in Michael’s hands as if attached to live wires. The trolley was wheeled through the double set of doors that cut off all light, and into the workroom.
‘OK, let’s have some light,’ said Michael. And as if the chicks were criminals, the workroom lamps were switched on, blazing.
For the first time in their lives, the chicks saw light. They blinked and squinted.
‘They look so small,’ said Ebru.
Michael knew he had to be first. He was the boss, he had designed the experiment, and he couldn’t ask them to do anything that he himself ducked. Come on Michael, they wouldn’t be here but for you; you have to take responsibility for their deaths as well.
Michael took a deep breath and picked up the first chick. It was no longer warm, but wet and chill and it went silent as he picked it up, and he knew it was because the chick was pre-programmed to treat large warm near objects as mothers.
He focussed, took the secateurs and as quickly as possible snipped into the little leathery skull, nosed in the secateurs, snipped quickly at the base of the brain.
‘Let’s start with the centrifuge,’ he said. Ebru touched his arm. ‘The trick is to do it quickly, so there’s no pain.’
The first chicken brain was rolled carefully by Ebru into the palm of her gloved hand, and then dropped into the magimix.
The second was laid out in the tray.
One half of the brains would be reduced to their chemical components, which would be analysed. The other half would be stained and then frozen immediately in the cold room for slicing. The results would be compared with the control groups, who would die without ever seeing any light whatsoever. The bodies were thrown limp into the bags, which were then sealed.
Michael ran with the tray towards the cold room. The Fridge was a big white box, and it shivered to the touch, like Michael’s slightly sick stomach. The tray was numbered and it was placed on a shelf space with a matching number.
When Michael returned, the centrifuge was humming, and the clean draining board was being dried, and the garbage bags were in hessian sacks stencilled with the words WATERLOO FEED COMPANY.
‘Well done, gang,’ he said. He had to go into his office and sit down.
Well, you knew it would be like this when you set up the experiment, Michael. The same fate awaits every hen in Britain at some point, even free-range ones.
But they, at least, have some kind of life.
Did it make any difference that they were trying to provide answers to some truly big questions? Michael loved science and he loved life somewhat less, and he had faith that in the end the two would support each other. But he still felt sick.
He felt compromised. This affected his self-esteem in other areas. He had to go for a walk in the park to clear his lungs. He sat on a bench and ate his sandwiches, which fortunately were cheese and not chicken. Nevertheless, he found the sweaty taste of animal fat unappetizing. He crunched his way through his apple.
You know, Michael, it is not everyone who can call up simulations of people from thin air. This … this miracle … arrives. And what do you use it for? You use it to turn tricks. Which is what you always do. You can turn tricks in Alaska Street. What if this isn’t about sex?
The more Michael thought, the more unlikely it seemed that the universe would change all its rules to keep him supplied with fancy men. Suppose I could clone Einstein and set him to work solving equations? What are the limits of this thing?
Michael wrote in his notebook.
Hypothesis: I can call up copies of people but I do not have to fancy them.
Method: Try to call up someone for whom you feel not a trace of lust and note the result.
Michael decided to call up Mother Theresa.
He admired her, he wanted to talk to her, perhaps about the morality of animal experimentation. And it was a certainty that he felt no lust whatsoever for her.
It was a brilliant diamond of a spring day. The light seemed to have edges and cut. Why not just do the show right here? What better church to call up Mother Theresa than Archbishop’s Park?
He felt the sun on his face. It was as if the light was reflecting off the daffodils. He called out. With his eyes closed, it seemed to him, he reached out into darkness hidden behind the light.
Nothing happened.
He opened his eyes. A football team from a local office, in mismatched T-shirts and shorts, loped towards the red-grit soccer pitch. Michael closed his eyes, and asked again. The bench next to him remained stubbornly empty.
He got out his notebook, feeling disappointment. Just to be sure, he looked over his shoulder, and called up the Cherub. There was the faintest wuffling sound as the air seemed to fold itself into a green and pink origami. The Cherub sat next to him on the bench.
‘Keep your clothes on,’ whispered Michael.
So, thought Michael. This is about sex. He felt a further degree or two of increased disappointment.
‘I don’t suppose,’ he whispered to the Cherub, ‘you know how this works?’
The Cherub stared ahead like a starship captain gazing at a far galaxy. Michael suddenly saw how the real Tony would look when he was older: solid, pale and a bit blank. ‘It goes all the way back,’ the Cherub said. Then he turned and looked at Michael with a sudden urgency. ‘The back of the head.’ And he jerked it behind him.
‘You wouldn’t happen to know what part of the anatomy?’
‘So far back it goes outside.’
Yes, well, it was possible that being copied induced mild brain damage. Michael gave him instructions. ‘Stand up and walk away towards the alley between the two brick walls. If there’s no one there, disappear.’
The Cherub stood up and more tamely than a Labrador walked towards his own oblivion.
Well Phil, Michael thought: there is one element you left out of pornography. Power. In pornography, you have the power to make people behave. Michael began to wonder how good this thing might be for what he still had to call his soul.
Michael’s father had been a Marine. There was a plaque somewhere in Camp Pendleton that bore his name and a gravestone somewhere in Orange County that Michael had never seen. In America, everyone went to church, especially in the military. Every Sunday, he and his father would go to a bare and unvarnished Catholic church. Michael ate wafers, drank wine, and learned about sin, and then in the afternoon played touch football on the beach. The exposure was enough to make him feel regretful rather than indoctrinated.
Michael watched Tony’s retreating back, wearing only a T-shirt on an icy spring day. The Cherub entered the funnel of brick between two high walls. There was a whisper in his head, and Michael knew the Cherub was gone.
So, he thought. I’ve learned I can’t call up just anyone. It could be that I can’t call up women. Or maybe I can only call up copies of people I’ve actually met. He stood up to go.
Or, it could be that they have to be alive. I’ll have to go on asking question after question.
He left the green and the trees. Traffic and black brick made him feel English. God made him feel American. Michael would shift between American and English selves and accents without realizing it. His English self went back to work.
His American self thought of his messengers, how they came and went. Angels, Michael decided. Until I know them better, I will call them Angels.
Can Angels be dead? (#ulink_b7f69e6b-e882-5bdd-960c-dda53bea43df)
When Michael was ten years old, he was sent to spend the summer with his father for the first time. He had cried alone in the airplane with his ticket pinned to his little grey dress jacket. He had to change in Chicago and everything looked like a Dirty Harry movie. Bleached blonde women wore denim suits and chewed gum and talked like gangsters’ molls.
Michael knew his Dad was going to meet him at LA International. He arrived exhausted and trying not to cry and he looked at all the waiting people and he saw this huge man who looked like Burt Reynolds and wore a uniform. He carried a big sign with Michael’s name on it.
‘Hiya Mikey, howya doin’?’ the man said in a mingled mouthful of words and chewing gum. He wore mirror shades.
Michael forgot to say anything. He gaped. This was his father? His father looked like something out of a movie too.
He chuckled. ‘Come on, guy, we’ll get you home.’ Dad scooped up Michael’s bag and threw it over his shoulder. Michael dragged his feet, walking behind. His father chuckled again, leaned over, and simply picked Michael up whole. His big arm folded into a kind of chair and Michael fell asleep being carried, his face resting warm against his father’s chest.
After that, every two years Michael lived for the summer near San Diego with his Dad.
He loved it. Southern California is the perfect place in which to do nothing. Indeed, everything is so far apart, and it takes so long to drive anywhere, that it is very difficult to do anything other than nothing. You call it going to the beach.
On the beach at twelve years old, Michael felt he was immortal. He would take the big green bus out of Camp Pendleton, past the Rialto cinema with its delectable range of kung fu and horror movies. He would reach the cliffside park and the earthen cliffs of Oceanside, California. Once there, he would throw himself in front of a few waves and call it body surfing. Then he could do nothing but lie on his back for three hours, toasting. This was before skin cancer was invented. He went from lobster-red to California-brown in less than two weeks. His bright grin beamed from his newly darkened face – he felt like something from an American situation comedy: the young teenager part.
Resting on the beach, the idea came to him, that he could stay in America and become American. He could do it. After all, his father was American. He could stay in the sunshine with the movies and the skateboards and the long hikes in hills that Camp Pendleton protected from development.
The thought made something inside him flutter with fear. The part of him that fluttered spoke with an all-purpose London accent that was another layer of self. His mother spoke with a Sheffield bluntness. Michael felt himself stretched. Michael felt himself in danger of being torn.
‘Whatcha do today?’ his Dad would ask. Dad was trying to get to know his son. He had abandoned England and his wife when Michael was three.
‘Went to the beach,’ Michael said proudly.
‘D’ja meet any girls?’
Michael did not say: Dad, I’m only twelve and um … but I have noticed that I’m not even looking at girls yet.
What he said was, ‘No, Dad.’ And he hung his head, feeling ashamed.
‘Listen, there’s a guy at work runs Little League. You wouldn’t want to try your hand at baseball, would you?’ His Dad looked hopeful, and made a swinging motion.
His father would have been shocked to discover that Michael didn’t like sports. He didn’t know then that he had a son who did nothing except cram for exams, and who now more than anything else just wanted to luxuriate on the beach or watch American TV.
American television was a miracle. There were about ten channels, so many that it made sense to flick round them until you found something you wanted.
What Michael found, luxuriating at 5.30 every Saturday afternoon, were old Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weissmüller. In the very first, Tarzan tore off Jane’s clothes and threw her naked into a river. She swam deeper and deeper into the river, a glowing white against the darkness, shadows both covering and hinting at her nipples, her pubes.
His father called, ‘Mike? Mikey? You wanna come outside and pitch a few balls?’ Both father and son were exercising their American accents as if they were stiff muscles before a game.
Michael was staring bug-eyed at a naked woman.
Part of the luxury of California was having a TV of your own, in your own bedroom, to do what you liked.
‘I can’t Dad, it’s time for the Tarzan movie.’
How many movie stars get officially called something as friendly as Johnny? How many of them are Olympic athletes who wear loincloths that let you see their naked haunches, thigh to stomach? How many of them are beautiful with a reassuring lopsided, chip-toothed face, and a high, light voice?
Under Michael’s tan and athletic frame, his young and genuinely feminine heart would sit entranced by what his father thought were adventure movies.
‘Mikey? We could go to the movies later if you wanna.’ His father was big and athletic too, but his face was glum and disappointed. His son had been away all afternoon and they had only Saturdays and Sundays to do stuff together.
‘Dad, I really want to watch this, OK?’
‘OK, son. See ya later,’ his Dad said. He left punching his baseball mitt. Michael felt bad. Michael had not meant to hurt his father’s feelings. Michael’s eyes were suspiciously heavy with deep feelings he had no name for. ‘Dad. Why dontcha watch it with me? Dad?’ He heard the back door slam.
His father had a rival.
Michael knew, even at twelve, what the MGM executives had known all along: they were selling a love story. A love story that promised, and delivered, a beautiful naked man. Michael’s young heart would soar through the trees alongside Johnny Weissmüller. He dreamed of leaving the world behind, of living like a Boy Scout in a treehouse with a man as dumb and reliable and graceful as a horse. He dreamed of slipping the loincloth aside to see what lay underneath it. At twelve, that was as far as the dream went.
His father eventually nagged his son into joining a baseball team. It played on Sundays, which left Saturday for Tarzan and, in fact, gave Dad even less time with his son.
Summer wore on. Johnny got old. The series left MGM and went downmarket to RKO. It lost Jane and its love story. It gained Amazons in bikinis and cut-price Nazis. Johnny was no longer a sex symbol. He was a star of B-movies for kids. He got fat. A fat Tarzan is a great sadness. His last movie in the series, Tarzan and the Mermaids, was made in 1948, filmed in Mexico with beautiful Mexicans standing in for some kind of lost but completely unconvincing African tribe. Any one of the men could have made a more suitable Tarzan, except of course that Tarzan was supposed to be Anglo. Weissmüller was Romanian. He had been born near Timisoara and his real first name was Jonas.
Michael stayed in California long enough to see that sad ending and to experience something of a lover’s sense of loss and longing as a partner ages.
Johnny Weissmüller died in Mexico in 1984, when Michael was 24 years old. Michael remembered reading about his death in the newspaper and thinking, Johnny Weissmüller? 1984? It was Michael’s moment for realizing that we spend more of our lives being old than young.
In Michael’s days of California sunlight, saltwater spray and young Americans in shorts, there had lived in that same state, an old bronzed man. He looked a little bit like a balloon from which the air had leaked. That man would have been able to tune in every Saturday at 5.30 as well, to see his sleek and catlike younger self pad lissomely through a studio jungle.
Maybe it was enough for him to remember the days when he had been a sex symbol, and it was possible that he could go on to be a real movie star. Maybe it was enough to have been the lover of Lupe Velez, the Mexican Spitfire, to have acted with Maureen O’Sullivan, to have people still call you Tarzan … once they recognized you. Maybe it was enough for him that he had won five Olympic gold medals and set 67 world records. In the encyclopaedias, it was those he was most remembered for, rather than a mere acting career. After all, sport is not fiction, is it? But Michael, even as an adult, would remember him for the heartbreaking climax of Tarzan’s New York Adventure, when he leapt off the Brooklyn Bridge to almost certain death, yodelling backwards, for Jane, for Boy, for the jungle life.
Lust requires restitution. Even more frequently than love, lust goes unrequited.
Hypothesis: I can call up anyone that
• I want sexually (confirmed)
• Who is alive or dead (not confirmed)
Method: Try to call up someone I fancy who is dead and note result.
The Chez Nous Hotel near Vauxhall Bridge Road is a French franchise operation. To an Englishman, it looks Scandinavian: clean, spacious, bland and smelling faintly of the mildest possible cheese. Being near Vauxhall Bridge and south of the River Thames, it is actually nowhere, and no one wants to stay there. Even at lunchtime, its brasserie is empty. Michael could eat there in perfect anonymity, and go upstairs alone without the slightest fear of being seen by anyone he knew. How, otherwise, would you explain booking a room 500 yards from where you worked? He could enter his room at 12.30 PM in complete assurance that it would be comfortable, clean and looking exactly as it would look in Luxembourg or Shepherds Bush.
Michael sat on a bed so perfect it looked as if no one had ever slept in it. As this was the Chez Nous Vauxhall, it was perfectly possible that no one ever had. He disliked crumpling the mottled blue duvet. His breath came fast and shallow. He asked for his boyhood love.
As naturally as a light breeze through eucalyptus trees, Johnny Weissmüller was sitting next to him. Unlike most movie stars, he was bigger than Michael expected – huge, broad and smooth, wearing only the loincloth. A flop of silky brown hair tumbled into his eyes. He stared intently at Michael, half in fear, one hand on his knife.
‘Tarzan,’ he said, jabbing at his breasts.
‘I’m Michael.’
‘Tarzan. Mikey,’ Weissmüller said, prodding Michael so hard that for a moment Michael thought he would fall backwards out of a tree. ‘Mikey. Tarzan.’
Tarzan looked baffled by desire. Desire was something new that he had never felt. He leaned closer to Michael and sniffed his face.
‘Mikey smell like flower.’
Tarzan smelt of Max Factor.
Michael said, ‘That’s my aftershave.’
‘What shave?’
Michael stroked his smooth cheek. ‘You know, shave. Beard.’
Tarzan looked even more baffled. He rubbed Michael’s face and looked puzzled.
‘Bee-arr-ddd,’ he said.
‘Yeah beard, you know, shave. You don’t shave?’
Tarzan scowled. He rubbed his own perfect chin. ‘How Tarzan shave? No razors.’
‘I don’t know. I guess I never thought about that. Yeah. Howcum Tarzan doesn’t have a beard?’
‘Not monkey,’ said Tarzan, and grinned.
They hovered about six inches apart. Michael wanted to kiss him, except that Tarzan was covered in tan body make-up, head to toe. It would leave marks on Michael’s shirt.
‘Uh. Johnny. Could you drop the Tarzan talk? It’s a little bit creepy. I want you, not Tarzan.’
Tarzan got that look of idiot firmness he got when mistaking the motives of white hunters. ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘Mikey want Tarzan.’
Tarzan was shaved all over. Everywhere Michael touched him there were little pinpricks of body hair, like mustard on ham. Michael leaned forward and tried to kiss him and Tarzan ducked away.
‘It goes like this,’ said Michael and brought their lips together.
Tarzan tasted like one of your mother’s friends. He had that perfumed, powdery, clotted smell of face paint. Tarzan smiled and pressed Michael to him, rather as if he were Cheetah at the end of the film. Michael had to coax him out of the loincloth. Tarzan had no conception that it could be removed. He looked as surprised as Michael when it slipped aside to reveal handsome, Catholically uncircumcised genitals from which every trace of pubic hair had also been shaved. MGM couldn’t have pubic hair leaking out over the edge of the loincloth.
And, having stripped Johnny/Tarzan, Michael discovered that, like his twelve-year-old self, he wanted to do nothing else.
So he lay next to Tarzan and was cradled. Protected like Jane by the Hays Code, Michael wallowed in the bed as Tarzan prodded him, tickled him, and examined his feet. He sniffed his chin.
As Michael lay there in his arms he wondered. Is this all I wanted all along? With all those other men? Just to be held, stroked and cuddled? Perhaps it is simply that I never wanted real sex at all.
In which case it is possible that I never grew up.
And he could choose to accept that. He could decide to stay a child. Who was anyone to tell him his sexuality was wrong? If this is what he really wanted, he could stay here, warm and sheltered. If this was some new sexual home, why leave it? Michael stroked the smooth firm backs of Tarzan’s arms.
‘Pee pee,’ said Tarzan. He stood up and discovered with wonder that the toilet flushed. He roared at the gushing of clear water, knelt and began to drink from it, lapping like a lion. He looked up in delight.
It was nearly 2:00 PM. Time to go. Tarzan had no concept of time or work, and tried to keep Michael with him, holding his arm, stroking it. In the end, Michael had to disperse him.
He didn’t want to see Tarzan dissolve like a TV channel. Michael simply turned away and heard something like a gust of wind, and felt a sudden hollowness in the room behind him. Every trace of jungle was gone, including the smell of Max Factor.
At reception, he coughed and asked like an out-of-town guest about local restaurants. Tomorrow morning he would check out and pay his bill as if he had spent the night there.
Michael walked back through Archbishop’s Park. It was a dull grey English spring, stark with no leaves on the trees. He thought of Tarzan’s body, its pre-pubescent smoothness, of his tenderness and the caresses. The main sensation in the pit of his stomach was fear, as if he were still taking that first trip to California.
Circumstances meant that an unexpected question was answered next.
Can I make them do it when I’m not there? (#ulink_c552b880-1de7-55a0-ac73-00e502e4077e)
‘We’ve got an invitation,’ Philip said, opening their post. ‘It’s from Zoltan Caparthi,’ he said. ‘You know, the glass artist? The one who does those fabulous piss-takes of beauty contests? He’s invited us. Well, you me and whoever else we want to bring. He said everybody’s lover has a lover, and they must come too. Do you want to come? Can you bring someone interesting?’
‘Oh,’ said Michael, ‘I think so.’
‘I’ll meet you there,’ said Phil. ‘With mine.’
The house had a name: the Looking Glass. A sign said so, in a cluster of mirrors and neon and preserved feather boas high up, out of the reach of vandals. The walls were painted mauve covered with mirror stars along the top.
Michael arrived alone and rang the bell with a shiver of mingled anticipation and inadequacy. He held a John Lewis shopping bag full of his costume.
The door was opened by a young man dressed like Carmen Miranda. A Salvador Dali moustache was painted on his upper lip.
‘Hello, I’m Billy, welcome!’
Billy kissed him on the cheek and ushered him in. There was a kind of combination office, kitchen and reception area, covered in cork with photographs pinned to the walls. There was no one else. Michael had come on time, and was the first to arrive. ‘You want to change?’ Billy asked.
‘Yes indeed,’ said Michael, feeling dowdy. ‘I’m … I’m …’ He tried to think of the formula: somebody’s amputated other half. He showed the invitation.
Billy completed the sentence. ‘You’re one of the optional extras. So am I. I’m the son of the woman who keeps Zoltan’s books. You and I will have more fun than all these old slags because it’s all new to us. Now. I want your drink ready when you come out looking fabulous. What do you fancy?’
Michael was scared of being boring so he said, ‘A margarita.’
‘I meant herbal tea,’ said Billy.
Michael smiled at himself. ‘I don’t know anything about herbal tea. Choose the nicest.’
Billy smiled too. ‘The nicest for the nicest,’ he said.
Michael went into the bathroom as himself and came out with Tarzan. He wore Tarzan, Tarzan was his costume. Weissmüller loomed over him, loose-limbed, brown, sprawling, barefoot. Michael wore a concealing leopard skin that crossed his chest and hid his belly, as if he were plump. If anyone asked he would say he had come as Boy.
Billy looked a bit confused. ‘Two herbal teas, then.’
‘Yes, thank you.’
Tarzan approved. ‘Tea good. Tea come from jungle.’
‘This is … uh … Johnny,’ Michael explained.
‘Hello Johnny.’ Billy was young enough that a beautiful body was nothing special. But he kept glancing back towards the front door. How did this person get in?
‘Woman pretty,’ said Tarzan. ‘Nice moustache.’
There was a broad staircase leading upstairs. The host must have heard voices, for suddenly he descended. He was a huge man, big in every direction, with a pregnant potbelly and a devilish goatee. He wore a sari, and from out of his back, four extra blue papier-mâché arms.
Tarzan drew his hunting knife.
‘Hello, hello, and welcome. I am Zoltan … and you?’ He extended a hand towards the knife. He had style.
‘Tarzan. Boy,’ growled Johnny, hand on knife. Zoltan’s smile thinned somewhat.
‘Well, I am Kali. For the evening.’ Hungarian was the lightest possible seasoning in the thick soup of his Oxbridge accent.
Michael said who he was and his name seemed to evaporate even as he said it. He didn’t hear it himself. Tarzan was engaged in a traditional movie-monkey greeting, making Cheetah-like noises and sniffing Zoltan’s extra blue arms.
‘Will your friend keep this up all evening?’
‘Day and night,’ said Michael.
‘You’ve sought help for him, I hope.’
Michael said without thinking, ‘No, I love him just the way he is.’
‘There are some trees upstairs,’ said Zoltan, speaking to Tarzan as if to an idiot. ‘Figs. On the trees. You’ll like figs.’ He turned back to Michael. ‘Harry is the gardener, you’ll have to talk to him not me. Perhaps your friend would like to swing in them.’
It was a cue. Michael said thank you, and walked upstairs without his host, both of them grateful to be spared more conversation.
The room was full of mythology and mirrors: a sphinx in gold foil with turquoise eyebrows, or a fourteen-foot-high statue of Liz, portraits of the famous on mirrors so you could see yourself as them. Much of it was beautiful. Michael wished he had managed to stay the distance with Zoltan, this far at least. He would have liked to know more about the glass buddhas, the holographic eyes. One whole wall was clear glass, and beyond it, huge-leafed plants.
‘What a fantastic place,’ he said and sipped tea. Fancy Philip knowing someone who lived in a place like this. Michael wondered what other places Philip had visited without him. What else, indeed, did he not know about Philip?
Tarzan was unimpressed. ‘Crazy place,’ he said. ‘Boy go. Tarzan go.’
Why, wondered Michael, am I always playing somebody’s father, or somebody’s son?
‘We’ll stay for just a little while, OK?’
The room began to fill with people: ageing psychiatrists in beards; a filmmaker who had just done a documentary about Zoltan. As Michael approached them, summoning a smile, their eyes drifted off to his left or his right. A very nice woman from the corner shop wore a blue chiffon dress in folds and was far too butch to be intimidated by anything. Michael liked the look of her, and was grateful for fifteen minutes’ conversation.
‘Zoltan buys mangoes from me. They’re hard to get this time of year, and he’s very particular.’ She shook her head as if to say: you know what I mean. Her eyes gleamed up at Johnny.
There was a roar of greeting from downstairs and a sound of cheeks being kissed. An actor who was one of the glass faces had arrived. Zoltan whisked him up the stairs, holding his arm. ‘Everyone, Adam’s here!’
‘Oooh, Adam!’ said the shop owner with enthusiasm. She turned back to Michael with narrowed eyes. ‘He owes me money.’ She joined the surge forward.
Michael stood alone. I am here because of Phil, he remembered, to show him.
Phil arrived an hour late. He was wearing bandages and a headdress hung with daisy chains of decapitated dolls’ heads. He looked like a serial killer’s chandelier. It’s all right for me to try too hard, Michael thought: I’m a nerdy scientist out of my depth. But you are supposed to be an artist. You are supposed to be cool.
Michael met Phil’s new friend. At very first glance, there was not much to see. He was a skinny young man wearing a brown sweater with holes in it. There was something familiar about his face; maybe he was an actor.
‘This is Henry,’ Philip announced, his eyes flicking back and forth between him and Tarzan. The dolls’ heads kept clacking against each other.
Henry looked up. He had large brown eyes that engaged Michael directly with a pre-emptive warmth and kindness. The eyes seemed to say I know this can’t be easy for you, but hi anyway. They shook hands, and Henry chuckled. God, he was handsome. His smile was sweet and broad and his skin was perfect, very pale but with flushed pink cheeks and a complexion as unblemished as shaving foam.
‘Nice to meet you, Henry,’ Michael said. ‘Congratulations.’
‘Why?’ Henry asked. His voice was surprisingly resonant, rumbling.
‘For not being bullied into thinking you’ve got to keep up with the rich and outrageous.’
‘I don’t have any money,’ Henry said, and smiled and shrugged. Educated, Michael decided, old family, possibly dropped out. At a guess, I’d say you were the son of someone landed with a big farm in Norfolk, that you live in the country and possibly have a pair of tame jackdaws that sit on your shoulder.
Michael liked him. ‘I don’t think you’re the type that would dress up anyway.’
Henry gave a very gentle bow of acknowledgement. ‘Probably not, no.’
Michael fancied him. It was the same old mystery. Even Michael didn’t think Philip was good-looking, but his boyfriends were always gorgeous. I’m forever fancying your boyfriends, Phil. Michael felt a thin strain of regret for his old marriage.
‘Are you going to introduce me?’ Phil asked, nodding towards Johnny.
‘Him Tarzan,’ said Michael. ‘Me Boy.’
‘Is Tarzan a paedophile then?’
‘He’s my lover, if that’s what you’re asking.’ Michael kept his gaze steady and open. He found how little it mattered to him.
‘Does he speak?’ asked Phil, who suddenly looked frail.
‘Not much. He’s Romanian.’
Tarzan spoke. ‘Tarzan loves Mikey.’
‘I hope you and Mikey are very happy. Maybe you’ll have a chimp together. Incidentally, Mikey, Henry is my lover too.’
‘You couldn’t find a nicer one,’ said Michael. ‘Really. Lucky old you.’ Michael couldn’t help reaching out and clasping Henry’s arm. ‘He’s very nice.’
Philip stared back at him with the strangest expression in his eyes, ringed round with red: tense, resolved, heartstricken, angry. ‘Henry is an animal rights activist, Michael.’ He swept off.
Henry walked away backwards, holding out his arms as if to say sorry. Michael apologized to him. ‘Sorry if we embarrassed you.’ Henry shrugged his shoulders, which could have meant anything from nothing embarrasses me to sorry, I can’t hear you.
‘Tarzan not understand,’ said Tarzan, standing alone.
‘Angels wouldn’t,’ said Michael.
Well, he had come here in order to assist Phil in the wrecking of their marriage. If that was accomplished, was there any other reason for him to stay?
He worked his way slowly through the crowd to where the booze was being served. A woman in a beige dress, with beige hair and beige fingernails said, as he passed, ‘I found the colour scheme of that film so irritating. All those reds.’ Her eyes trailed off to Michael’s left.
‘But Monica, it was in black and white!’
‘Oh, you know what I mean.’
It was strange. People looked distracted, even slightly out of balance, looking past him or around him. Michael began to be aware of something out of kilter, beyond his own unease.
The barman wore a turban and tossed the glass up in the air and caught it, like Tom Cruise, except that his eyes were fixed on something just to Michael’s left. Michael followed the barman’s gaze and finally understood.
People were staring past Michael at the same object. They were staring at Tarzan. The beige woman was intent, a cuddly woman carrying a tray kept turning in their direction, even the mango woman kept glancing through him. Michael himself was vapourware, but he was with the most overwhelming man in the room.
Right behind Johnny stood an old man. He was intent and pale and looked shaken as if he had seen a traffic accident. Cords of loose sinew hung down his neck. He wore a glass bow tie, blue with mirrors and a blue eye where the knot should be. He didn’t move, transfixed.
‘Hello,’ Michel said to him.
The old man’s face quavered like a flower in a breeze. Someone else out of balance. ‘It’s a miracle,’ the man insisted, as if someone had contradicted him.
Michael felt careless. ‘It is,’ he agreed.
‘It really is him,’ the old man said, in the hushed voice of someone visiting Chartres.
‘They’re both Romanian,’ said Michael. ‘Family resemblance.’ He realized he knew the old man from somewhere. Some old actor; some old impresario.
Very suddenly the old man wilted. He seemed to sink from the knees, and Michael had to catch him. There were further steps, a spiral staircase up to another floor. The old man shifted awkwardly like a collapsing ironing board. Michael lowered him down to sit on the steps. The old man took out an embroidered handkerchief.
‘Do you want some water?’ Michael asked.
‘Please,’ said the old man.
The turbaned bartender already had a glass of water ready. ‘Is your friend OK?’ he asked, American, concerned.
‘I don’t know. I think so,’ said Michael.
The old man was sweaty, his elegance outraged. He mopped his brow. Elegance was what he had left.
He took the water and sipped it, and sighed. ‘You keep thinking, you can just turn a corner, and you’ll find us all there, like we were.’ His rumpled old eyes suddenly went clear as if made out of glass. ‘Beautiful and at the height of our powers. Like all of you now. Tuh. It seems more real to me than this.’ He held up his hands. They were blue and crisp in patches and looked like melted candles. Eighty? Michael thought. Ninety?
The old eyes strayed back to Johnny. Johnny was standing tall, and still and distant, forgetful of himself. He was staring at the fig tree behind the glass wall.
‘Did you know him?’ Michael asked. ‘I mean, the real one?’
The old man shook his head, without moving his eyes. ‘Oh no. No. But I wanted to. People of my generation, you know we had never seen anything like it. For only a very few years, he was … It. A sensation. People don’t remember that now.’
He closed his eyes and shuddered. ‘The past is a chasm it’s as well not to look down,’ he said.
Michael sat next to him on the steps. ‘How old were you then?’
The old man’s eyes looked as if they ached. ‘I was twenty-two when I saw the first of his films. Of course in those days you thought you were the only one in the world, and so you dreamed. You know what I mean, I don’t have to spell it out. You lived in dreams, because you knew that you were a good person, or good enough, but you wanted things that everyone else said were evil. It was difficult. You ended up loving dreams.’
He shivered, gathering himself up. ‘You’ve been very kind,’ he said, and offered a hand. ‘I’m so sorry to have a been a nuisance. I used not to be. But age hits you, you know.’
‘Perhaps you’d like to meet him. His name is Johnny.’
A pause for about a beat. ‘It won’t embarrass him?’
‘I think you’ll find he is beyond embarrassment.’
Michael helped him stand up. The old man rose with a sudden fluidity that hinted at what he had been when young. ‘The terrible thing,’ he said, casually, as if making a general observation, ‘is that we feel more as we get older. Not less. The heart really ought to diminish along with everything else. Don’t you think?’
His eyes were ice-blue and not at all weak. At one time those eyes would have presided, gone flinty with the hard bargaining and constant politicking of putting on a show. He would have been cagey, cunning, enthusiastic, wise and probably indelibly handsome in an etiolated London theatrical way.
Without meaning to, Michael sketched with his own hands and eyes how the old man would have moved. In the joints of his hips, he embodied the way the old man moved now. Michael felt the bargain he had made with ageing, with the death of colleagues, the death of his world. Michael had seen that bargain collapse, because of him, because of the miracle.
Michael was moved by pity. He suddenly felt that something might be in his power. I know I can make them do what I want. Can I make them do it when I’m not there? With someone else? He stopped the old man and asked, in a low voice, ‘Do you know this place?’
‘Oh. Zoltan? He exhibits me as a piece of camp history, but it is good to receive invitations.’
‘I mean, do you know if there’s a bedroom. You can go there.’
The old face went limp, flesh as confused and blank as his understanding.
‘I mean,’ said Michael, ‘you and he could go there.’
‘What an extraordinary thing.’
Michael felt a full heart. Full of victory perhaps in part and also guilt for hurting Phil, but full of what … abundance, too. These episodes, wherever they came from, were an abundance, a superabundance that ached to be shared.
I create them, Michael thought. I make them. He told Johnny what he wanted him to do.
Tarzan turned and climbed the steps, perhaps without even knowing why. Michael hoisted the old man around and helped him up the steps. Outside the bedroom door, the old man turned still in disbelief, and Michael had to give him a gentle shove. Then Michael stood guard. He sat on the top step, looking over a party at which he did not belong. He wished that he smoked. At least smoking would have occupied his hands.
Someone dragged open the big glass doors to clear the air, and the party moved out into the sheltered garden. Suddenly you could hear air move in trees.
He gave them twenty minutes.
Then the old man blurted out of the bedroom doorway like a coltish teenager. His glass tie was askew; his smile was wet and broad. It was a grin. He looked foxed, as if a shaft of God-light had blazed its way back into his life.
Michael had time to feel happy for him.
Then he saw Tarzan’s face. Tarzan was innocent no longer.
His face had curdled with disgust and outrage. His look said to Michael: I want to kill you.
He gave one animal growl and then hurled himself over the banister of the landing. People screamed. Tarzan landed catlike on his four padded feet. Then he jumped up onto the bar, bounded over the heads of the people.
Don’t hurt anyone! Michael commanded.
Tarzan jumped up into the fig tree, and gave one long backward yodel, the Tarzan cry. He scampered up the branches. The main trunk bent under his weight, then sprang back and he leapt up and over the brick wall. It was as if he were suspended for just one moment, against the stars.
Then he sank from view. Everyone in the room applauded.
Michael tried to leave.
‘But he was magnificent! Who was he?’ the beige woman asked. Michael thrust his way past her and through the crowd.
Billy stood back for him at the head of the stairs. He knew something was wrong. ‘What happened?’ he asked, walking with Michael down to the kitchen.
‘I made him do something,’ said Michael, and heard his own voice: shaken, sick at heart.
Billy’s high heels made a sound like Carmen Miranda, as he ran on ahead to fetch Michael’s coat.
‘Does he have any other clothes?’ Billy asked. ‘He’ll freeze out there.’
Michael stopped and turned and faced him. ‘He’s the real thing, OK? He’s not in costume.’
Michael stumbled out the front door. In the brick street, he could hear the murmuring of the party. It was cold and he felt lumpen and foolish in his leopard skin. It was a bleak place of old brick warehouses and a single closed pub with lights on and street lamps throbbing yellow like the aftermath of a burglary.
Yes, I can make them do what I want. I can violate them.
‘I’m sorry,’ Michael said, to the shadows and street lights. ‘Johnny? I’m sorry.’
‘Not Johnny,’ said a voice. It was fierce with pain, affirmation. ‘Tarzan. Me Tarzan.’
Michael stood and waited. He could see nothing. He walked forward, out of the light, to the side of the house, in shadow. Tarzan stood there. He hugged his arms and shivered and the top of his head was pressed against the wall.
‘I’m sorry,’ Michael said again.
Tarzan threw off his hand. ‘Tarzan want woman,’ he said, accusing.
Michael had made Tarzan let himself be sucked off by an 88-year-old man. It would have been the first time he had had sex, the first time in his fictional universe that sex had ever been present. Love for him had been sexless: kindness, tickling and caresses. It had been the sensuality of childhood. Michael felt the full crushing weight of what he had done.
The physical reality of sex is always a jolt. How much worse if it is the wrong gender, with loose jaws and crumpled flesh.
‘Sick. Old. Man,’ said Tarzan. All three things were out of kilter.
‘He loved you,’ Michael tried to explain.
Tarzan snarled in rejection. That? That was not love.
‘It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t know.’
Johnny glowered at him. ‘You want that too.’
This was pushing certain buttons from Michael’s past. Those buttons pushed deep. ‘I didn’t touch you. I left you as you were. Did … did you want to do anything with me?’
Johnny/Tarzan considered. ‘I wanted what you wanted.’ He made a cutting gesture with the edge of his hand. Only that. To hold and be held. Johnny’s eyes, fixed on Michael, were now those of an adult. Michael had destroyed any trace of affection in them. That affection could only survive in innocence. Tarzan had grown up. He had wisdom.
Boy looked at Johnny. I don’t know what you are, but you have feelings of your own and a mind of your own and you have a right to be happy. Michael thought of Jane swimming naked in darkness in the jungle of innocence. Maybe, he thought. Maybe I just fancy her enough.
Suddenly, there were many urgent questions to be answered.
Do they have to be male? Can I make more than one at once? Where do they go back to? (#ulink_49153c45-0eba-58a6-9de5-8cc48c3bef7d)
The answers came quickly one after another.
There was a blurring of flesh as if reality had been dipped in turpentine. Flesh smeared like paint. Something flowed sideways out of Tarzan’s belly and ribs – skin and bone poured out of him onto the pavement.
Flesh sprouted like a plant in time-lapse photography, growing a leather skirt like leaves, long hair like flowers.
In the time it takes to pipe a musical scale, Jane had risen out of Tarzan. She stood beside him as if fresh from the depths of the river.
She was played by Maureen O’Sullivan. She was tiny, with a face as fragile as china under a mass of wiry hair.
Michael introduced them. ‘Jane, Tarzan. Tarzan, Jane.’
Click. They fitted together. They had been married in spirit from the beginning.
Michael spoke quickly to Jane, who always spoke for both of them.
Michael asked, ‘Can you go elsewhere?’
Jane’s chin thrust out, and her voice was chilled. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.’ It was the voice she used with New York lawyers.
‘Can you go back to your jungle?’ he asked. ‘I mean, does it exist somewhere?’
Jane’s face softened. Her voice quickened. ‘I think we can, yes.’
Back to the treehouse, with its Flintstone home conveniences, waterwheels driven by elephants. Back to a land where animals spoke and Tarzan could talk with them, where lions lived in forests, where chimps and gorillas mingled in the same tribes. A world where there was always another wonder, another lost tribe, another adventure.
Protectively, Jane took the arm of her innocent. ‘Come, Tarzan,’ she said, her voice cracking like an adolescent’s on the love she felt for him. ‘We’re going home.’
And Michael felt the same ache of yearning he had felt as a feminine boy. He yearned for love, for that particular love between them. He heard the MGM strings, swelling like his heart, like his adolescent sexuality, for them both.
So Michael sent them home. He sent them to their monochrome jungle full of giant trees with conveniently placed trapeze swings. Tired old predators prowled slowly, but were speeded up when anyone was looking. Where love filled their days in pre-lapsarian innocence.
The pub lights rippled again, and the two of them evaporated into fiction, reels of film that had never been shot.
Hypothesis: Angels are a kind of fiction.
Method: call up an Angel who is entirely fictional.
Who killed Dumb Duck? (#ulink_b3f081da-7733-5ebf-b080-683f47d3cee3)
When Michael was sixteen years old there had been a hit movie called Dumb Duck, Detective. It combined live action with state-of-the-art animation, and it resurrected a great old cartoon character called Dumb Duck.
It was Michael’s fourth trip to California and he saw it in floods of tears, to escape. He had to get out of the house. The television was barred to him, and his favourite records had been broken. Michael had fled, wanting never to return, wanting to die.
He sat trying to follow the plot while crawling inside his own skin with anxiety. Dumb Duck was a detective and his partner was a real live human gumshoe played by Clint Eastwood. Dumb Duck asks his partner to follow his wife, Taffy Duck. ‘I’m too closssh to thisssh thing.’ Dumb Duck sprays everybody every time he talks. Only Clint Eastwood can stand it. Eastwood follows the wife, but she keeps giving him the slip, and you keep on hearing things about her: like she’s generous, like she’s a good-time girl, like she keeps you guessing. You don’t see her, so you assume she’s a duck, like her name.
Then suddenly, Dumb Duck is found murdered. He’s been partially erased. There are still crumbs of mingled eraser dust and ink on the floor. The wife shows up having spent the night elsewhere. She tells everybody she’s innocent. She looks like a combination of Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth, shoehorned into a dress that clings to her like a kid’s tongue to a lollipop. She hunkers down over the corpse and cries and her heaving boobs make a sound like rubber balloons.
Eastwood goes to her nightclub. He sits in the dark and watches her sing. Taffy sings like Marlene Dietrich. She rasps every word. She sings like somebody’s tickling your testicles. She’s a sex bomb married to a duck.
Gay men can desire a woman if she is caked in enough artifice. Young Michael forgot his trauma. He found himself yearning to bury his face in those huge soft perfect breasts. And sleep. And wake up somewhere else, as someone else.
It was a comedy about being wrongly accused of murder. Ho, ho. The weapon, a giant eraser – stamped: the Philadelphia Rubber Company – is found in the trunk of Taffy’s car. Tests confirm that the inkgroup is the same as Dumb Duck’s.
For young Michael, Taffy’s nightmare became his nightmare. At that age, he felt more affinity for fantasy than reality. When the film was over, it was back to reality, though in a curious way he felt the burden had been shared.
It was many years ago, but Michael still felt that affinity. The idea of calling up Taffy made Michael grin sideways. He didn’t fancy Clint Eastwood at all. You aren’t meant to fancy Clint Eastwood – you are meant to want to be Clint Eastwood. Eastwood had played the gumshoe like Humphrey Bogart. Michael went out to Jermyn Street and bought himself a trenchcoat and an old-fashioned fedora hat.
And then he wondered where you could go on a hot date with someone who was obviously an animated cartoon. It might cause comment at the Savoy.
A candlelight dinner à deux at home was the answer.
Phil, as always, was going to be out. Michael told him, I’ve got a hot date so come back late. Does this one jump out of trees as well, Phil asked. Ho ho.
Michael cooked a light meal of salmon with salad and cold Chablis. Light enough to assuage hunger, not heavy enough to weigh down desire.
Then Michael put on his trenchcoat and his 1940s hat and waited.
Go, he told the universe, at 6.00 PM.
At 6.00 PM the phone rang.
It was her.
‘Oh, Mr Shamus,’ she said breathlessly, helplessly. ‘Thank you for returning my call. I need help so badly, and I don’t know who I can turn to.’
‘Well. We can talk in private here. How soon can you make it over? I took the liberty of preparing a meal.’ Michael curled his upper lip inwards, talking American.
‘Oh thank you. But I couldn’t possibly eat. I’m too upset.’
‘I got a good bottle of Chablis growing dew in the cooler.’ It was like being in a role-playing game.
There was a pause. ‘Mr Shamus. I’m sorry. I’m afraid cartoons can’t drink wine. It dissolves the gouache.’
‘Forgive me.’
‘No, no. I know it’s hard for you to imagine what it’s like. I’m just so pleased that finally, finally, someone wants to listen to me.’
That damsel in distress routine. Standard forties stuff. The audience can read it like a peach, velvet skin and pit, and so can I. Under that svelte exterior pulses animal heat.
You spend most of the movie absolutely sure she did it and that she’s playing Eastwood for a sucker. You see, Eastwood falls for her, and if Eastwood falls for somebody, you do too.
She was the kind of woman whose high heels you hear ten minutes before the doorbell rings. You’re there waiting, trying to pretend you aren’t hanging on like it’s a liferaft. Where’s the shipwreck? You’ve got sweaty palms and the fettuccine aren’t cooked. The doorbell rings, you wipe your hands on your trousers, and you open the door. There should be a soundtrack, the kind with blowsy music played on a sax.
She’s delicious. She’s a cartoon, so her skin controls the light and shadow on her face. Right now she’s dramatic, backlit, lots of shadows, and she looks up mournfully, helplessly. An unlit cigarette sticks to a white kid glove. The white kid glove goes up above her elbow. The gown is strapless, showing acres of shoulder and collarbone. The white fur stole has fallen back down to her elbows, like she’s disrobing in public. Her red hair has a life of its own. It moves in a mass like a sexy octopus and there are no individual strands of hair.
Her way of saying hi is to hold out one long kid glove.
‘Oh, Mr Shamus. I’m so glad we finally meet. Now I can put a face to that kind, kind voice.’
Never in real life could a pink dress be cut that low around mammary organs that large and stay in place.
‘Come in, come in please.’ Like the gumshoe is a priest offering sanctuary.
Michael reminds himself. This is an animated cartoon. It’s walking across my hall carpet, and her stiletto heels leave no impression.
The white fur slips, trails. The assumption is that he will take it up, and hang it on (non-wire) hangers. He does.
Her head hangs down and she looks up coyly, the cigarette weighty on her lips. ‘Could I trouble you for a light?’
No one in the household smokes, and all Michael can do is offer a rolled-up newspaper lit from the gas-stove pilot.
This kind of blows his cool gumshoe exterior. She looks stricken as he holds up the torching newspaper. ‘I’m sorry, I should have asked if you smoked. How thoughtless of me.’
Michael reassures her, no, no, no problem, as he tries to put out the newspaper before it burns his fingers. Finally, he flips it into the toilet. The basin is still full of flame when he closes the bathroom door. He arrives back in time to slide the chair under her as she sits down.
‘I can’t tell you how awful it’s been. People simply don’t understand my relationship with Uncle Duck. Oh, I know he was older than I …’
He was also a duck, but then hey, you’re both cartoons.
‘People find it so hard to believe that you can love someone for their mind. Those terrible cheap parts the studio made him play …’
You mean the one where he keeps blowing off the top of the bald hunter’s head? Or the one where he drops an anvil on it?
‘This is a duck who dreamed of playing Hamlet, who read philosophy, who wrote poetry.’
Always tell an intelligent person that they’re beautiful. Always tell a beautiful person they’re intelligent. Tell a cartoon that they’re both.
Michael says, ‘It must have been wonderful for him to find a soulmate like you.’
Dreamily, she nods. ‘Reading the classics by firelight together. It was all I ever wanted.’
Except for your boyfriend Bruno Bruiser.
Taffy bursts into Hollywood starlet tears. All coughing sobs, hankies and dry eyes. ‘And to think that people could say that I am capable of … of … uh-huh uh-huh [sniffle]. Forgive me for carrying on like this.’
‘It’s understandable. Under the circumstances.’ Michael lays his hand on top of hers, and she gives his a quick warm squeeze. She feels warm, human warm, but smoother too, slick, no creases or texture to the gloved and perfect hands.
Michael. Do you really want to have sex with a cartoon?
She looks up, determined now. ‘We must find whoever killed my husband. I have money, Mr Shamus. I’ll pay every last penny of it to find out who killed Uncle Duck.’
And to prove you didn’t do it.
‘I warn you. I don’t exactly come cheap, Mrs Duck.’
She breathes heavily and leans forward. ‘People say that you’re the best in the business.’ Appreciatively, she takes his hand again.
‘Perhaps we can leave this difficult decision until later. Won’t you eat something? Starving yourself won’t help.’
Taffy looks wistful. She has a perfect tiny nose that is completely invisible except when she is in profile. ‘No, thank you. Cartoons are different from people. We’re fuelled only by our motivations.’
‘Your motivations?’
‘Our passions. They sometimes take us over. We like or don’t like. We love, or don’t love.’
OK, let’s go for it.
‘Then,’ Shamus says, still steely in his old-fashioned, white knight/tough guy pose. ‘Perhaps you know how I feel about you.’
Alarmed, she stands up. ‘No! Don’t say it.’ She flees to the window on little high-heel steps, and frames her face between her kid gloves.
‘Mrs Duck. Taffy. Kiss me.’
What does it mean when a homosexual wants to stick his face between two artificial breasts? It means that what he finds desirable about them is that men have thought of those breasts. Men imagined them and drew them and shaped them and shaded them. It means it is the male desire behind the image that draws him, the desire of other men.
‘No. We must wait.’
‘No one will know. It is our secret. Our love.’
‘But the court case. People will talk. You don’t know what it’s been like.’
Oh, Taffy.
Her lips are not human lips. They are better than human lips. They are like Juicy Fruit chewing gum: thick delicious mobile wads that respond immediately to pressure, yielding and flowing but never too wet. They are the best lips Michael has ever kissed. And no moustache.
Over the tiny pinprick of her nose, her eyes go wide, wider, big as saucers.
‘Oh. Oh, Michael. Hold me. Hold me close. Take away the fear.’
He cradles her. She has an invented nature and her invented nature is to respond in this way. Her mammoth breasts heave against him; the fabric of the pink dress stretches. She protests, but it is in the script, though normally after the fadeout. The breasts are unleashed from their pink constraints. They are Platonic breasts, breasts in the ideal. Large and firm, but also soft, peach-coloured with baby-bottle nipples. They are supported, protected by her crossed, fluid arms. She keeps changing shape, subtly, to embody the ideal.
Her nipple fills his mouth. She tastes tangy and slightly salty. He fondles a nipple with his tongue, and it engorges. Michael thinks of all those hairy arms that drew those breasts, the thick hands that outlined the nipples through the pink of the dress. Did they dream of supping where he now sups? Michael feels his lips move in unison with theirs. He lolls her in his mouth.
‘Oh my love,’ she gasps.
Her thighs are perfect and without pores. Her translucent panties shimmer their own way down. Michael sees pudenda as babyishly appealing and round-eyed as Bambi or Thumper. There is a button-cute clitoris under his tongue. Unlike the breasts, it tastes real.
A cartoon orgasm, as yet unfilmed, makes the cheeks of her face quake and ride up like a stocking. Her breasts not only heave, but swell. Her face is nearly the colour of tomatoes, and her eyes are huge and crossed. She looks like she’s drowning, desperately holding her breath. Suddenly the nipples blow off steam, clouds of it. The breasts whistle in unison like two trains in a race.
Taffy settles back, crumpling. She goes fluid and pours down over the sofa onto the carpet, as flexible as a shadow, taking the shape of whatever supports her. She lies there panting for a moment, then sticks one of her fingers into her mouth, and reinflates herself, puffing, as if she were an air mattress.
Later, she dresses, in a lady-like fashion, smoothing down her hair and pulling straight the fingers of her gloves. She expertly cups the breasts back into their impossible fittings of pink.
‘Michael, I want to tell you this. That was one of the finest moments of my life. You know so much about the needs of a woman. How to lift her up, away from the inelegant struggle to survive.’
No my dear, that’s what you know.
What you know is what the men who embodied you want. Elegance.
Adjusting the perfect pink dress.
Need.
You turn your back for me to do up the zipper and I see the strong back, with two ridges of muscle down either side of the spine. You lift up the mass of your hair to show what every man dreams the back of a woman’s neck is like.
Class.
What clumsy, sweaty, fat, balding men imagine they want from women. They want to merge with elegance and delicacy, gain it by association.
She fiddles with what can only be called an evening bag. She extracts from it a tiny, flat silver case and takes out of it a single white address card.
‘Call me. Please. I need to know I can rely on someone.’
The high heels clack, on a carpet. The high heels control their own sound. The dress swishes like someone shushing a child to sleep. The shoulders wait for their white furs, a hint of shoulder blade drawn onto the broad expanse of her back. He complies with the script, or perhaps his father’s idea of how men should behave, and brings her wrap. She accepts it demurely, in a manner that can only be called gracious. As she walks away towards his front door, her bottom is shaped exactly like an upside-down heart under clouds of fur.
His door opens at the same moment as the neighbour’s door across the hall.
In the doorway opposite stands a little girl. She gapes at Taffy.
A six-foot-tall animated cartoon fills the apartment corridor, and leans over, warm and giggling.
‘Well, hello there,’ says Taffy. ‘Who are you?’ She coos with a voice like melted ice cream.
‘Mum, Mum come quick!’ the little girl cries in panic and turns and lets the door close.
Taffy Duck turns to Michael and shrugs. She blows him a kiss, and as if disturbed by it, the air ripples and closes over her, just as the neighbour’s front door opens again.
Perfect.
At the end of the movie, you find out that she didn’t do the murder. Her boyfriend Bruno did. She really loved the duck and the detective after all. The last shot is a long kiss between realities. But no one ever shows what happens after the ending.
Twenty years before, at the end of the film, Michael stood up and drove back to the condo in Oceanside and told his father, ‘I’m going back home tomorrow.’ His father said nothing. He just stared up at him from the sofa. Michael still remembered his father’s crew cut and his fathomless eyes, full of hatred.
Like the old actor said: the past is a chasm, don’t look down.
Michael stood looking down in his own sitting room, wearing a trenchcoat and fedora. Fancy dress again.
Weeeellllllll, he thought. It was fun and I always was good at acting.
Uh-huh. And you didn’t come and you didn’t have a hard-on so the sex was acting too. She was about as far from the real as you can get. So when do you get real, Michael? How? You don’t even know how, do you? You just keep repeating your youth. And it wasn’t even a happy youth, Michael.
Do people I copy really know it? (#ulink_cf0d84c4-aa9b-5b41-869d-88fb777fc276)
Michael remembered Tony. The real Tony had some kind of sense of what his copy had done. It was one thing to hurt a fictional character. It was another thing to harm someone real. Michael had no business experimenting on people without being able to assess the extent of the trauma he might be inflicting.
But he couldn’t test it first, because he couldn’t call up anyone without being able to assess the damage, etc, etc. And it was not the sort of thing he could test on chickens, unless he was about to make the unwelcome discovery that he lusted after livestock. So how could he gauge what it was like to have a copy made of you? Michael spent a day in an experimental hall of mirrors, until that metaphor gave him his method.
He checked himself into the Hotel Chez Nous. He approached the front desk with some trepidation. He thought that Tarzan would have left the sheets covered in body makeup. Explaining that would be embarrassing.
The clerk was French and had irritating nostrils; they looked as if they were flaring in disgust at an unpleasant odour. He took Michael’s card, and once he had come up on the screen said smoothly, ‘Welcome back, Mr Blasco.’ It seemed there was no record of Max Factor on the linen. The clerk asked the screen, ‘Your usual room, sir?’
It was indeed the usual room. It was so usual Michael could not be sure if it really was the same room or not.
His stomach felt feathery, as if he had missed breakfast. He was, he realized, a little bit afraid of what he was going to do next. He started unbuttoning his shirt, knowing it was a delaying tactic. Every episode was a delaying tactic. He should just forget all of it, go to Alaska Street to get his rocks off and hope the whole thing would go away.
But then he would never know what this thing had come for.
Look, how can it hurt you? How can it hurt you, that is, any more than you have hurt yourself? Just do it and then you’ll know, and that will help you decide to forget it, write it off. Just do it.
Michael called up a copy of himself.
The air wavered, parting to admit the newcomer. He was tall and stocky at the same time. You only noticed on the second glance that he was not fat, but really quite muscular: the hair on the arms disguised the definition.
Immediately, Michael felt sympathy for him. There was an air of caged and baffled decency about him, a slight scowl, a hopeful smile. In fact, he was not at all bad-looking, what Michael called a black Celt: slightly sallow skin, a heavy beard and black eyes.
Michael fancied himself. It’s a well-known syndrome, and it had afflicted Michael far worse than most: daughters meeting their long-lost fathers for the first time; sisters and brothers separated at birth meeting on a course. There are two great triggers for sexual desire: extreme but complementary genetic difference, or extreme genetic similarity. You either find someone completely different to complete the genetic puzzle, or someone who is kindred.
So here he was, dragged back to the seat of his neuroses: himself.
‘Oh,’ said Michael and Michael together.
Then they both chuckled shyly and looked down at their shoes in unison.
‘Um,’ they said in unison, embarrassed. They looked up at each other and two pairs of black eyes sunk into each other.
‘Oops,’ they said, understanding each other perfectly. They wanted to fuck themselves.
With that unspoken agreement, they both began to undress. Love finds faults endearing. For the first time ever, Michael saw that he only combed his rich black unruly hair in front. The back of his head was practically in dreadlocks. The back of one trouser leg was tucked into the top of his socks. He looked back around and it was true of him, too. Oh well, he was a bachelor.
The Angel turned back to face him, and viewed as a stranger, he stirred Michael’s heart with forgiveness for what it means to be human. Here was a man of 38 winters, crepe paper around the corner of his eyes, and it was not until you held him that you realized all that flesh was solid. Somebody should tell him about his choice of knickers. And socks. The white Y-fronts were slipped to one side, and there was a penis that was in no way as tiny as Michael thought: it had a nice round head that was beginning to swell and weep.
‘What …’ they both began, and broke off, with a chuckle and a shrug. They were going to ask: what now? They didn’t need to.
A lover who really understands you? Who really knows what you are thinking?
Michael had not felt such a surge of desire since he was sixteen years old: heedless and irresistible. With no discussion, they were pulled towards each other, to embrace, in the French sense of the term: to kiss.
Suddenly his copy jerked his head aside, lips pressed shut. He was frightened of AIDS. It was insulting, disappointing and childish.
The original Michael said, ‘We can hardly give each other something we don’t already have.’
And immediately there was a sense of parting, very slight like a tangerine being peeled. They were no longer exactly one. Their histories were now very slightly different.
‘That’s true,’ said the copy, trying to look amused. He was stiff and awkward, and gave Michael a peck on the lips. Did Michael feel a slight echo somewhere, like a double image? Did he not very slightly feel his own lips peck someone else’s, while they themselves were being kissed?
‘Sorry,’ the copy said and gave Michael a little cajoling shake. ‘Old habits die hard.’ He planted another chaste kiss on Michael’s cheek. Michael felt a falling away. He let his own penis drop, and looked down and saw his copy, thrashing uselessly away at himself.
That was always the pattern. He’d start out well, with a promising swelling, gallons of lubricant, and then the sudden irretrievable collapse.
‘We’re not going to be much use to each other are we?’ the original Michael said.
‘We could just cuddle,’ said his copy, hopefully. Michael had done enough cuddling. He looked at his own body and asked it: why? It’s a beautiful body, everything else about it works.
‘Shall we try again?’ Michael asked himself.
‘OK,’ chuckled the copy, weakly. It was lie, Michael knew. He was ashamed and now simply wanted to escape. This Michael was an amazingly disheartening sexual partner. But Michael was determined to persevere, for both their sakes.
It is a very strange thing to kiss yourself. There is no change of taste, and you know exactly what the tongue will do, how it will respond. I’d never realized, thought Michael, how useful my lips are. I hated my fat lips. But they’re great for kissing.
If only this Angel would move them.
Michael leaned back and looked at himself. He was surprised at how angry he felt. He had been moved, roused, and then let down. It felt like rejection, it felt personal. He made a soft fist and gave his partner a gentle, chiding thump. There was a distant disturbance in his own shoulder, as if someone had thrown a pebble into a pool some distance away.
‘Now you know how other people feel,’ said his copy, something dark and steely creeping into his own eyes.
‘Oh, Jesus, let’s sit down,’ said Michael. They sat next to each other on the bed. His partner looked defeated, mournful. Michael put an arm around his shoulder to comfort him, and they lay side by side, comrades rather than lovers.
Michael changed the subject. ‘You feel anything? From me?’
‘A kind of a buzz.’
‘It wouldn’t hurt you, would it?’
The copy scowled. ‘I don’t think I would know what it was.’
‘I just wanted to know if I could hurt people.’
The Angel sighed. ‘It would give them a turn if they showed up at your flat and met themselves by mistake.’
‘I’ll remember that.’
They turned and looked into each other’s faces, like brothers, like friends. They both had the same dark eyes, and his copy’s eyes were black and sad. Do I always look this mournful having sex? Isn’t sex supposed to be fun?
The Angel asked, ‘Do you have any idea how we got this way?’
The focus of Michael’s vision seemed to shift and he saw something in the face, and jumped up, and scuttled away. ‘Jesus Christ, you look just like Dad!’
Michael turned back around, and the bed was empty. Even the baggy Y-fronts had gone.
Can Angels do work? (#ulink_68b6d4f8-f95e-5c43-8896-007df9514b51)
Back at work, Ebru asked Michael, ‘Where do you go in the afternoons?’
Her smile was rueful, teasing, an evident mise-en-scène. Because her eyes were saying: you’re supposed to be running this place.
‘Lunch,’ replied Michael. ‘Why, was there a problem?’
She was leaning as if relaxed across her desk. She sprawled. It was a difficult posture to read, because it seemed friendly but was also disrespectful.
Her voice drawled; she sounded sleepy. ‘The University called. You were supposed to be teaching a course today.’
Oh shit, oh no, of course, it’s Thursday.
Ebru looked bored. ‘What could I do? I told them you would call when you got back.’
‘Oh, Jees, was it Professor Dennis? Oh darn. OK. I’ll give her a call.’
‘Could you leave me with your number please where you will be when you go out?’
‘Yeah sure. I’ll get a mobile, so you can call me.’
Michael jerked forward, wanting to escape. Ebru had more to say. ‘The grant application forms have been on your desk for a week. I just wanted to make sure you knew they were there.’ Michael had to apply for funds for the next stage of research; they were to teach the chicks tasks such as pushing buttons for food. The aim was to keep the facility going, so the University could rent it out for other projects. The aim was that Michael would eventually make himself some kind of Director.
‘Right, yes. I’ve been meaning to get to that.’
‘Emilio was saying that he has not been told the file names for the control group slides. This means he has fallen behind on his data entry and filing.’
‘Sorry,’ said Michael. ‘A lot on my plate.’
Ebru dismissed it, as if sleepy. ‘I wasn’t chasing you.’
Oh yes you were.
Alone in his windowless office, Michael told himself: you have been neglecting your job.
It had been just over three weeks since the episodes began. There had been five afternoons at the Chez Nous, four with Johnny and one with himself. They had moved from late winter into spring. How did he think people would not notice?
There was a Fridge full of frozen, unfiled slides. How could he ask people to work for him? People who were on short-term contracts, which meant they could not get a mortgage. How could he ask them to work punctiliously, perfectly, as science demanded?
And, oh shit, he was also supposed to be writing a phase paper on the difference between Windows NT and Unix for his MSc in Computer Science. It was due next Monday. He’d done nothing about it.
Michael hung his head, and then lowered it into his hands from shame.
God, he found himself asking, why have you done this to me?
God, in the form of the painted brick wall, could not answer, or rather, decided not to, or rather, couldn’t be bothered.
Well, the wall seemed to say, on its own behalf if not God’s, I’m just a wall and not very interesting, but I am the life you have chosen. You put yourself in this office with these slides and files and papers and coursework and you’d better get on with it.
Michael needed to talk to someone. He had no one to talk to, most especially not his staff, his lover, or their friends. All his friends were Phil’s friends.
‘Help,’ he said in a small voice that was not meant to be heard.
‘Hiya,’ said a voice that poised somewhere in mid-Atlantic. Something white moved in the corner of his eye.
His Angel was sitting on the corner of the desk, wearing his white lab coat. His smile was mild and his eyes faded; he looked detached.
Michael saw himself. I have good feelings for people, but I don’t connect. So they don’t always know that.
‘Hiya,’ Michael said. ‘I’ve been neglecting things.’
‘You have a miracle to deal with. Ah. I think you’ll find that most people who have one of those find it’s a full-time job. I mean, Phil Dick just saw pink lights, and look how long that took to sort out.’
Michael’s face shook itself with unexpected tears, like a dog getting out of water. He certainly didn’t feel that unhappy. The reaction didn’t seem to link to any emotion until he spoke, vehemently.
‘I didn’t want an extra full-time job. I didn’t ask for this. What is it for, what I am supposed to do with it, and why, why me?’
The Angel looked back, big and kindly and powerless. ‘I know less than you do.’
Michael apologized, his default mode. ‘I’m sorry, this isn’t easy for you either.’
‘I don’t matter. I’m not real.’ The Angel managed to say that with a smile. ‘Why don’t you let me help?’
It took a while for the anger to be stilled. The Angel kept talking.
‘I know what you know. I can do just as good a job as you can. We’ve got a backlog. Why don’t you stay here and do the accounts or whatever? I’ll go to the Fridge and do the slides.’
What a wonderful idea. Michael chuckled. ‘It’ll be like the Shoemaker and the Elves.’
‘Let’s wait until tonight,’ said the Angel. ‘That way no one will see you in two places at the same time. We don’t want to give anyone a heart attack.’
‘Can we talk afterwards?’ Michael asked. He felt the same yearning he would for a lover.
‘Sure, baby.’
That was what Michael always used to say to Phil. When they were young and in love.
So he filled in the form for the second stage of their research grant, and wrote the first draft of the accompanying business case. Michael’s career plan was simple. He would keep using the lab for further research projects until his own reputation was established and then let out the secure facility for other projects. At 5.00 PM he was able to bustle into Ebru’s office, fluttering papers.
‘Well, here we go. This is the business case for the grant. First draft. Can you read it for me, make any comments. Oh. I also know nothing about the admin costs, so could you run off a 104 on the office expenses.’
Ebru was still watchful, languid. ‘It’s five o’clock. Do you need it this instant?’
‘Not right now, of course. Close of play tomorrow for the comments. I’ll need the 104 sometime tomorrow morning.’
‘I can do that for you,’ she said airily, gathering up her bag. No, she seemed to say, I am not working late to make up for your lost time. She smiled a hazy, hooded smile at him, and gave him a dinky little wave with the tips of her fingers. ‘Good night. See you tomorrow.’ Faultlessly polite. The draft was left on her desk.
He was left standing alone in the room. I have really pissed her off.
It was 5.03 and there was absolutely no one there. They had all gone home. Who would work late if the boss wasn’t there?
The whole universe has burst its bonds in order to put you in this position. Impossible things are happening, and they are screwing up your life, and nothing in your intellectual or emotional history has prepared you for them.
And you have allowed yourself to become alone.
His only friend was literally himself.
Michael went into the cold room. There was his other self, big and happy, a cheerful anorak singing old Wham! songs. ‘Bad boys …’ The Angel was merry in his work. He turned around smiling, the smile coming from being usefully employed and suffering no doubts. When Michael smiled his eyes went tiny and narrow, almost closed, and that in turn made him look a bit like a Chinese Santa Claus.
‘Just started,’ said the Angel, cheerfully. His breath came out as vapour; frost settled on his eyebrows. ‘Things really aren’t that bad. Emilio’s been good, he’s using a temporary naming convention, which we might as well accept. And everything’s been labelled, in boxes. It just needs to be put away properly.’
The Angel pulled open a drawer. There were the first of his slides, label side up and out, in neat rows. ‘There’s only about an hour’s work.’
Things really weren’t that bad. Relief was like a pillow. Michael settled into it. The work would be done, he would apologize to Emilio, and amends would be made. It would be all right.
‘I’ll be back then.’ Michael kept the need out of his voice.
Back in his office, there were 37 e-mails needing answers. They were mostly from the University, agendas or minutes attached, or new curriculum proposals. He went through picking the most important first. His professor had written three days ago, asking if the project was progressing well.
Michael defaulted to apologies. Sorry, I’ve been in the grip of applying for grants. Wouldn’t it be great if someone just said, fine, here’s all the money you need in one go? We could put it in the bank and use the interest for the project as well. But the project is going fine, great. A lot of data to work through.
There was an invitation to speak at a conference, with a carefully worded guarantee of security. ‘We realize your work is controversial. We will make sure that only nominated delegates can attend, so all questioning will be on the methodology and preliminary results.’ This was exactly the kind of fallout Michael had wanted from the research: increased profile, keynote addresses, publications, and acknowledgement, if only from a very few people worldwide. Michael accepted the invitation, feeling suddenly that all was right with the world.
How delicious, he thought. I can pay my bills and iron shirts at the same time. I can stay late for one hour and do two hours’ work. Everything will be perfect. My desk will finally be cleared; the flat will finally be clean. At last, I’ll finally get everything done! He felt merry.
There were all kinds of admin he could feel virtuous about. There was his own personnel file that had been left blank. Let’s get that out of the way. He had to fill in the name of the nearest relative to call in case of accident.
Once again, it would be his mother, miles away and untelephoned in Sheffield.
Was there anyone else for whom he was number one? It wasn’t Phil.
Who loves ya baby?
‘All done,’ he heard himself say. Michael looked up at the big, reliable broken face. He felt himself smile with gratitude. ‘So am I,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’
‘You’d do the same for me,’ said the Angel, and grinned. It was a Michael kind of joke.
He wouldn’t be able to get a copy of himself past the security guard without telling some pointless story. Hi, this is my identical twin. ‘I’m going to have to let you go,’ Michael said quietly. His voice, he realized, was full of love.
‘I understand.’
The whisper in the air, like a blown kiss. Papers on the desk rattled, lifted up, and sighed back into place, and Michael was left feeling a little lonelier. He packed up his bag, turned out the light, and decided in the corridor just to look at all the beautiful slides.
The cold room had a big white door and a big chrome handle. It was like a 1950s refrigerator you could walk into. Its surface trembled slightly from the chundering of the generator. It shook like Michael. You are in a bit of a state, mate. The door clunked open, the cold room breathing out refreshingly chill air. The temperature only sank into your bones and numbed your fingers once you were inside.
He switched on the light and pulled open a drawer, to admire the neat rows, to be grateful.
Instead there was a crumpled, much reused box, its red ink finger-smeared, cluttered with a cross-hatch of piled slides. A whole week’s work, neglected and growing.
It was as if someone had reached into him, and grabbed his heart and held it still.
He pulled open another drawer. It too simply stored an unsorted box.
All that beautiful work was gone.
But he had seen it! He’d seen it all being done, it was all just here!
In a panic he pulled open one icy drawer after another. The tips of his fingers stuck to the metal each time. One drawer was spread with unsorted slides. The next was empty. He pulled open another drawer. And ah! this one was full of ranked and ordered slides. There was a moment’s relief, until he checked the dates. It was the first batch of slides from the learning group. Emilio had finished sorting that last week.
It was all undone, as if the Angel had never been. Michael clasped his own forehead in his hands. You may have seen it Michael, and you may be going nuts.
He called his Angel back. ‘Where are your slides?’ Michael whispered.
‘What? What do you mean?’
‘Well have a look!’
The copy pulled open the drawer. His face fell. His chin dropped and looked temporarily double. He turned his whole body as if his back was stiff, his chin still resting on his chest.
‘Yes. Well,’ the copy whispered. ‘I’m not real, am I?’ He did not manage to smile. He closed the drawer slowly, delicately with the tip of his finger. He stared at the drawer. ‘I can’t change anything.’
He looked back at Michael, and tried to smile. ‘I can’t write anything. When I go, so will all the marks on the page. I could do all your annual accounts and in the morning, you’d be back where you started. I can’t father a child. I can’t make a difference to anything.’
The two Michaels stared at each other.
‘It really is a very peculiar sensation,’ said the copy and chuckled. ‘I am completely and totally impotent.’ The grin glazed. ‘Can you send me back now, please?’
Afterwards, Michael went to the security room. The guard, Shafiq, sat there in slate-blue uniform, watching EastEnders.
‘Shafiq, do you think we could look at the CCTV tapes, please?’
Shafiq was eating a Pot Noodle. His mouth stopped circulating for an instant and he froze in place. Then he swallowed and stood up.
‘Why, Michael, is something wrong, has there been an intrusion?’
‘No, no, no, Shafiq, nothing’s wrong. I just want to check on something.’
Shafiq was upset. ‘I have been here all the time, Michael. Watching, really.’ The television was still talking, and his eyes listed guiltily towards it. ‘I watch the television, you know, but I always keep one eye on the CCTV, too.’
‘I know, Shafiq, you do an excellent job. I just want to check.’
In a more normal state, Michael would have been stricken with concern: Shafiq was a good man, a good father, who was proud of his work. Shafiq seemed to drop to his knees in prayer and began to open up the banks of secure tapes.
‘What rooms do you think suffered? When?’
‘About two hours ago. Let’s try my office.’
‘Your office.’ Michael could hear the bottom drop out of Shafiq’s stomach. ‘With all your records, and papers!’
He really does care, thought Michael. Why does he care? What have I given him that he should give a tinker’s?
Shafiq inserted the cassette and nervously punched rewind.
‘But Ebru and everyone were here two hours ago. Michael, they would have heard something too.’
It wasn’t fair to scare Shafiq like this. But looking at the security tapes would confirm something.
‘There it is, sir.’
Michael’s office. And there was Michael, turned around in his chair and plainly talking to empty air.
‘Thank you, Shafiq, you can turn it off now.’
‘Don’t you want to wait until you leave the office?’ Shafiq was beginning to look baffled. ‘How would there be an intruder, if you were there all along?’
‘It’s not an intruder, OK? Please Shafiq, don’t be too concerned. Do you think you can show me the cold store interior at 5.03?’
Shafiq was going from baffled to slightly annoyed. ‘What are we looking for, Michael? Perhaps I could suggest something else. The CCTV looks at all the doors and even the ventilation shafts.’
‘I’m sorry to trouble you, Shafiq, but please show me.’
The cold room looked grey and indistinct and empty. It was hard to see; for a moment Michael thought he saw something move, as if through fog. He peered, but was finally sure beyond doubt. There was no one there.
The security video jumped between frames taken one second apart. Suddenly, the door was half-open. Suddenly it was wide open. Suddenly Michael himself stepped in in stages, lurching like Frankenstein’s monster. He stayed alone and chatting to no one.
‘OK, Shafiq. False alarm.’
Shafiq stood up straight and adjusted his blue shirt. ‘But if there has been anything moved, surely it would be better to study tapes when you weren’t there.’
Michael closed his eyes, to avoid Shafiq’s face, and his voice was unnaturally quiet and precise. ‘I was mistaken, Shafiq. I don’t want to worry you further. Thank you for helping.’
He walked out of the room, his back held straight.
In the corridor he thought, I’m alone. I’m really alone.
Maybe I am just crazy.
But even if I’m not, they aren’t real. My Angel said that. They are the universe breaking its own rules. If unreal people walked free to change the world, it would be a catastrophe. And so they come and work and love and when they leave, they leave no evidence or trace behind.
They can’t sort slides; they can’t be video taped.
The only evidence, the only scars, will be in my memory. I am the only thing they can change. Otherwise, poor Angels, when they go it is as if they never existed.
Michael felt sad for them. Because I know that when they are here, they love and feel and want. When they’re here, they’re alive.
Michael sat at his desk and looked at the brick wall again, and heard his own voice rage, demanding, ‘Why is the design of this experiment such crap!’
What is a sample of one going to tell you, God? Why bend all the rules of the universe just to do this terrible thing to me? Is it a joke, God? Does it amuse you to see people knocked sideways, their whole life go rotten like an apple? Do you like to see us hauled beyond our limits? Do you like to see us cry?
And why do this to an impotent man? What is it going to teach me, what are you going to learn from this except what we both know? I’m lousy in bed. What’s the big deal about that, I live with it, I’ve learned to live with it.
Michael went back to the cold room. In a rage, sweating in the chill, he tore through the work. The glass edges of the slides cut his fingers.
It took an hour. When he was done he had a sudden moment of irrational fear that his own work would also disappear. He closed the drawer and opened it again, to check. The work remained.
So maybe I do just make them up, maybe I make up that other people see and hear them. Maybe I am just nuts.
Michael arrived back at the flat late, exhausted, chilled and sweaty. He must have looked a state. Phil glanced up at him from what looked like a plate of tomato sauce on cardboard. ‘You didn’t tell me when you would be home,’ Phil said. ‘So I went ahead with dinner.’
So when did Phil ever call to say when he’d be home? Michael sat down exhausted, shambolic. Today was a bad hair day: his scalp itched and he knew his hair tumbled down in dank, greasy curls. His five o’clock shadow had arrived on time, but now, at 8.30 PM, it was even thicker and coated with cold sweat. Phil wouldn’t look at him.
‘That’s OK, I guess,’ said Michael. ‘You probably don’t realize that I’ve been coming home on time lately. You’re never in. It was my effort to be here in case you wanted to go to a movie or anything.’
Phil’s eyes were shuttered like windows. In the silence, Michael had the opportunity to examine Phil’s newly vegetarian food. There was no table fat on his bread.
Phil asked in a light voice, ‘Where exactly is your work?’
It was a question that produced an automatic prickling sensation of suspicion, even fear. Hold on, thought Michael. This is Phil. Then he thought, hold on, this is Phil.
He stalled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh. It’s just that you’ve never told me, that’s all. It can’t be that long a trip. Waterloo, isn’t it?’
‘Waterloo? No! No, no, the Elephant and Castle.’
Phil shrugged elaborately and his eyes didn’t move from the plate. ‘I thought it was Waterloo.’ His tiny mouth had to stretch to take a bite out of a chunk of bread that was the colour of brown shoes. ‘In an old warehouse or something.’
Michael began to trace the criss-cross patterns of green on the waterproof tablecloth. I’ve never said in an old warehouse or anything else. Certainly not in the arches underneath an elevated railway.
‘Yeah, an old warehouse. Near the Old Kent Road.’
Phil nodded now, very carefully, very slowly.
Michael pressed together his thick veined hands.
My boyfriend is pumping me for my work address so he can give it to animal rights demonstrators. My boyfriend of thirteen years wants to betray me. Henry has such a nice smile, doesn’t he?
‘So how is the gorgeous Henry?’ The emphasis on the ‘is’ somehow made it plain that Michael had been reminded of Henry by the previous topic, that there was a connection between them.
‘He’s fine, thank you,’ said Phil, coolly.
He doesn’t even care that I’ve guessed.
Michael struck back. It was a bit like playing tennis. ‘You know many couples in our situation would be busy reassuring each other that they practised safe sex with their lovers. They’d talk about whether they should be using condoms with each other. But …’
Michael considered letting his voice trail delicately away, but you play tennis to win. ‘But we don’t have to, do we Phil? We don’t make love.’
It was only then, finally, that Michael realized he needed a new life.
Can they give me Aids? (#ulink_79ced9de-a83f-53f4-8eb2-b05f6676ed69)
After California, Michael spent the next ten years missing sexual opportunities. As these years were 1976 to 1986, missing opportunities probably saved his life.
Everyone else was going at it like ferrets, not knowing there was something brand-new in the world. By the time Michael emerged from purdah, he and the world knew things had changed, and were taking precautions.
But it was already too late for several dear friends. They rolled on all unknowing for many years, all through the eighties into the nineties, though they were, like Shrödinger’s cat, already dead mathematically. They had the virus. Or rather, it had them.
If you can have sex with anyone in the world, you need to know as a matter of urgency, if they can make you ill. Answering this question presented Michael with several interesting methodological difficulties.
If he experimented on himself and it made him ill, that would indeed be a result, but it would rather defeat the purpose. On the other hand, experimenting on someone else did raise certain ethical questions.
It was also methodologically suspect. Michael would first have to ensure that whoever was being tested was HIV negative to begin with. Proving HIV negative status is extremely difficult. Antibodies take three months to show up after infection. That means a second test is necessary three months after the first. During those three months, you have to know absolutely that the person has avoided all risk of exposure to the virus. That means no kissing. If there are any doubts, you have to test again three months after that.
If the subject was, say, a nun who never had sex with anyone, Michael would first have to find the one Angel in the world who could seduce her, and then persuade her that she needed an HIV test. This scenario seemed unlikely.
Perhaps his own Angel could sleep with another Angel with Aids. And then be tested twice, once while the infected Angel was still in the world, and again, once he had left it to see if the virus remained behind.
But that meant the slate would be cleaned whenever the carrying Angel disappeared. And even perhaps when his own experimental Angel dipped in and out of existence.
Both the infecting Angel and his victim would have to remain in the world for an uninterrupted three months.
Well, Michael could rent a house somewhere out of the way, Scotland maybe, and have them live there under iron orders to sleep with no one else. It was a little bit like keeping experimental dogs in kennels. There was no doubt that science was easier when you did it to animals.
But Angels are not people. What if their immune systems worked differently? Suppose Angels could infect people but not each other?
Michael considered testing with a less serious virus. He could conjure up an Angel with a severe cold, sleep with him, and see if he caught anything. Or call up a copy with diphtheria on his moustache and swab his own lips and grow a culture.
But HIV was a retrovirus. It copied itself into the RNA of your cells, and took over their reproductive function. It becomes you, and you are real. Suppose over the three months it worked its magic, the virus became so entwined with your non-miraculous body that it gained a real life?
The more he thought, the more difficult and absurd it all became.
Then he remembered that one of his many lost opportunities had grown up to be an expert on Aids. Her name was Margaret White, but Michael had known her in school as Bottles. They had been friends during Michael’s brief period of popularity before his last trip to California.
At sixteen, Michael was just American enough to find it easier to meet strangers and stay sunny and positive about things. He was invited to parties. He was likely to succeed, and grumpy jealous spotty pale blokes grumbled about him behind his back.
Michael was in the school theatre club and was big and strong and handsome and could act. There were more girls in drama club than blokes, so they did a production of Anouilh’s Antigone: lots of juicy female roles. Michael played the old, heart-torn tyrant. He moved with a combination of bullish swagger and slight arthritic limp that left the audience astonished. Michael had conjured up the king.
His sport was long-distance running. The beefiness he inherited from his father was yet to develop; he maintained an easy luxurious swing to the way he moved. He combined beauty with a certain shy sweetness that did not threaten or repel, and his black eyes reminded people of a particularly friendly, lively spaniel. Indeed, he was very good with animals. He worked for the local vet part-time and had decided to become a veterinarian.
The nicest thing about Michael was that he was no snob.
Bottles was the unkind nickname given to a big-breasted girl who existed on the social margins. She was tall, big-boned, a little ungainly, with a certain daffy spinning to her eyes. Her classmates whispered about her with a fascinated prurience, because at sixteen, Bottles was living the life of grown woman. She looked 22, had adult boyfriends with cars, and spent weekends in clubs. Rumour was accepted as fact: Bottles did a strip show in the local pub.
Michael got to know Bottles on a school trip to Windsor Castle, an attempt to steep them in the mystique of royalty. They met over a joke.
As they got off the train at one of Windsor’s stations, Bottles said to him, cheerily, ‘My goodness, two train stations. Is that so the Queen can get away in case there’s a revolution?’
It was 1976 and there was little to make any hungry secondary-scholar feel wild, free and funny. Bottle’s top was cut low, and her breasts were squashed together, showing pale skin and a hint of blue veins. She had been sent home recently for the unheard-of thing of piercing her nostril with an earring.
‘I mean, do you suppose the Queen goes to the toilet in public? I’m being serious. There she is, waving to crowds and suddenly she gets caught short. Can she say, sorry everyone, I need a pit stop? Or does she just have to wait until she gets home?’
To a sixteen-year-old in the run-up to the Jubilee, this was scandalously original. Bottles began to walk in a clenched, constricted way and grunted in agony. ‘One is so pleased to be hyah.’
Michael laughed, partly with disbelief that someone real could suddenly start saying such things. He laughed with relief because he found Bottles reassuring. Daftness is not only funny but very slightly pitiable.
Michael’s laughter was constrained by fear, fear of being awkward or saying too much, and this constraint made it elegant. It was elegance that Bottles craved.
Both of them felt an irresistible tug of charm. Bottles suddenly put her arm through his.
‘You,’ Bottles announced, ‘are a Louise.’
Michael’s panic surfaced: how did she know? Had someone told her? If someone had told Bottles then maybe everybody knew.
She saw it and chuckled. ‘Don’t look so baffled,’ she said, and stroked the top of his brown and flawless hand. ‘Louise is a club. It’s run by the most wonderful Frenchwoman and she’s called Louise and so her club is too.’ She lapsed into fake American. ‘You wanna go?’
Michael beamed relief and friendship. ‘Absolutely, without fail, please.’ After all, he was the school’s official American, and Americans are never supposed to be afraid.
She got the message. He liked her. ‘Friday night OK with you?’
Michael offered, ‘Or Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday …’
‘Full social calendar, huh?’
‘I’m a hot date, but I can squeeze you in.’ Michael felt sophisticated, all of 22. ‘I’m generally pretty busy except for weekdays and weekends.’
‘Aw,’ she said and gave his hand a quick squeeze. ‘And you’re the nicest man in the year.’
At sixteen there is something irresistible about being called a man, especially by someone who has had some experience of them. And with whom, for some reason, you feel both safe and giddy at the same time.
So that Friday they went to the Club Louise in Soho.
Michael loved it. It was full of other daffy people, starting with Louise herself. She sat in a basement cubbyhole, greeting teenage visitors from Bromley as if they were French aristocrats. She took Bottle’s coat (long with a collar of black feathers that smelled of burnt sesame oil), and kissed her on both cheeks, and called her ‘ma chérie’ with a skeletal detachment.
Bottles looked a cool 25 let alone sixteen. She ordered champagne. A woman called Tami bubbled up to them, nipping someone else’s glass off a table en route. She held it up, empty, with a hungry grin. Tami wore black gloves with rings on the outside, something so chic it made Michael speechless with admiration.
Tami talked about American black music, how only American black music was worth listening to. Did he see Bowie at Wembley? Amazing, all done with just those brilliant white lights, everything black and white, and he just strolled out of this haze of light. ‘I got so excited, I nearly mussed my perm.’
Michael loved Station to Station. Drunk, emboldened by moral support, he went up to the DJ’s hidden booth and asked for his favourite track, ‘TVC15’. Instead of curling his lip in contempt as Michael expected, the DJ said, ‘Too right, mate.’
So up came ‘TVC15’, and Michael, out of sheer love, began to dance. This should have been terribly uncool. No one else was dancing.
But Michael was grinning like a monkey, and he had decided at the last minute to rent a tuxedo, onto which Bottles had pinned her earrings. Somehow that was just right. Suddenly, with an ungainly whoop, Bottles and most especially Tami joined him. That probably did it. An awful lot of people looking tough at tables were suddenly left behind as people started to dance.
Michael had trouble with conversation. He was always scared of running out of things to say. But dancing was inexhaustible, and he used dancing to communicate. He even did the terribly hippyish thing of linking arms, and got away with it. Station to Station kept coming back; people groaned and shouted when it was turned off, and Michael found himself in the centre of a circle of people who knew where the good time was.
The good time was him. Tami put all her rings on his fingers. They did a whip-round and bought another bottle of champagne, and Bottles, giggling, poured it over his head, like a ship being launched, knowing somehow that he wanted to stain those hired dressy clothes. At just the right moment she nipped him back to the table and stopped him drinking. She sat looking at him affectionately, introducing him to people. It was like having a mother who was truly cool.
The next day his real mother, bitter with disappointment and suspicion, said, ‘Did you take any drugs?’
‘No, Mom.’
‘Who were you with?’
‘A girl from school, Mom.’
‘You were drinking. You’re underage.’
His mother had a long pale face that had lost its prettiness quickly, lining in her thirties. Her hair was an unattractive orange pudding basin with its roots showing. Michael’s Mum looked worn, downtrodden, and utterly wrapped up in her own unhappiness. She looked like someone who had been deserted. She also looked like someone who was enduring it.
‘It’s not a good way to begin life, Michael, drinking in clubs.’
Reality was returning like a headache.
‘No, Mum.’
Her narrow face didn’t trust him, and didn’t trust itself. She didn’t know what to think. And gave her head a shake.
‘Your clothes are ruined. How can we turn them back into Moss Bros like that?’
‘They’re used to it, Mom. That’s why people hire gear.’
‘And they pay to have it cleaned and all. Do you have the money to pay for that or do you expect me to pay for it, Michael?’
Bottles gave him a call. ‘Hiya! How’s tricks?’
He didn’t know what tricks were. ‘Oh OK, but Mom’s on my case about the clothes.’
Bottles chuckled. ‘Fun costs, Michael. That’s how you know it’s been real fun and not TV.’
Michael thought of sports teams in California, and the coaches who all talked like General Patton. ‘No pain, no gain,’ he mimicked, calling them up.
‘No pain, no game,’ she corrected him. ‘So, are you man enough for another night out at Club Louise?’
Perhaps he wasn’t and that was the trouble. At the very least, he was scared that the magic wouldn’t work a second time. At the most, Michael was scared that she would make a pass at him. He was confused, confounded by sex. Her big breasts had allure, but Michael also knew already that his future did not lie with women. He just had a lot of trouble finally admitting that to himself.
It made him awkward. ‘Hi!’ he kept saying brightly, every time he saw her, and nothing else. He could think of nothing else to say. He sounded like a chipmunk and felt five years old.
Michael wanted his more normal friends to see how wise she was, so he trapped her into a lunch with them. The girls, particularly, were fashionable and elegant and calm and confident and virginal and enclosed within a social circle. One of them grew up to be a newsreader; another was now a big cheese at the British Museum. They eyed Bottles, who plainly had a rich future as a floozy. The future newsreader widened her eyes and stared fixedly at Michael and that meant: ‘What on earth are you doing with her and why have you brought her to our table?’
Ostentatiously, Bottles began to smoke in public in the school cafeteria. This was likely to get the whole table into trouble. The girls started to leave.
Bottles had no social circle, but promiscuously joked with anyone who would have her. Michael sat with her at these scattered tables surrounded by surly underachievers. His mouth ran away with him. He bragged to them about Club Louise. He knew it was a mistake, he could feel coolness slipping away, but he wanted everyone to know that they had gone to a club. So he repeated every last incident of their evening out, like it was some big deal, and Bottles ground out her cigarette with impatience.
Eventually Michael stopped trying to spend lunchtime with her. It was too painful. He started to nod at her in corridors as they passed, feigning mild friendship.
He knew Bottles thought it was what always happened to her, that there was something about her that put people off. She was fed up being too old for her age. Gradually, they lost touch.
Michael saw Bottles a year later. He’d convinced a bunch of people in his biology class to go to Club Louise.
Louise still greeted visitors as if to a literary salon, but inside the atmosphere was different. Tami didn’t remember him. She went hard-faced and silent when greeted by this pale, stolid-looking nerd. ‘Hmm. Hmm,’ she said several times and pointedly moved on.
The music was terrible, like something recorded by amateurs in a bathtub. Michael asked for Station to Station and the DJ curled his lip. People sat glumly and defensively at tables, greeting only a very few people with effusive kissing on the cheeks that made plain to everyone else that they were not being kissed. People rolled their eyes as you passed, or said, ‘Get out of the bleeding way. Honestly, these stuck-up queens.’
Bottles came in and at first Michael didn’t recognize her. She’d cut her hair and wore thick make-up that made her look Egyptian. She was kissed into a table with gladsome cries of feigned elegance, and then they all fell into the same chill silence. A ferret-faced young man with dyed blond hair was giving a very hard time to some overly pretty old hippie who had cut his hair. In something like despair and panic the old hippie was trying to convince him of something. It was Malcolm and Johnny, and if that was the birth of punk, as far as Michael was concerned, you could keep it.
‘Everybody’s so bitchy,’ despaired a member of the biology class. She played cello in the school orchestra.
‘It used to be so nice. Really,’ said Michael.
Like a basilisk, Bottles looked stonily through him.
The next time Michael saw her was in the 1990s on TV. She looked like Mo Mowlam, and wore pantsuits and sensible middle-length hair and was a spokesperson for an Aids charity. She was on the breakfast show, convincing people to come forward to have an Aids test. ‘The main thing to remember is there’s now some point to having the test. If we catch it early enough, we know the drugs can work.’
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