You approached the motel from above, along a road that snaked through a landscape of spindly palms and boulders. It was a pale-blue building, two storeys high. There were waves on the roof, sculpted out of poured concrete. It looked like a cross-section of the ocean.
While Reid registered, Nathan looked round. There was a strong smell of seaweed in the lobby. This, he soon found out, was emanating from the motel restaurant where Today’s Special was Charbroiled Shark Steak with Hot Seaweed Salad. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble with the décor. There were racks of pink coral and treasure chests half buried in drifts of sand. There was dim, fathoms-down lighting. There were bits of ships lying about, rusting. The ocean bed. Replace the air with water and you’d be there.
‘What do you think?’ Reid asked him.
But he couldn’t answer. The drug was beginning to rush through him now and he was finding it hard to distinguish reality and hallucination. For instance: he was seeing mermaids everywhere. Cascades of blonde hair, bodies sheathed in silver scales from the waist down. Mermaids. There was something he ought to be doing, but it was as if he had his ear to a shelclass="underline" he could hear the sea and all his other thoughts escaped him.
He saw the car that he’d left on the promenade. He saw it in detail — a city map on the dashboard, the groceries on the back seat. It had been there for at least twenty-four hours. The milk would be sour by now, he thought.
They were following a mermaid down dark-blue corridors with dark-green doors. Her sequins chinked and glittered.
She touched him on the shoulder. ‘Hear that?’
‘What?’ he said.
‘Listen.’
He listened. It sounded like doors being opened very slowly. Or the noise people make when they stretch. ‘What is it?’ he asked her.
‘It’s whales,’ she said. ‘It’s for atmosphere.’
Reid turned to him and smiled.
He keeps doing that, Nathan thought. Turning and smiling at me. Running his eyes over me like hands.
The mermaid stood by an open door, her nipples hidden in pale-pink shells. Smiling, she showed him into a room. One entire wall was an aquarium. The rest seemed plunged in darkness. But he could just make out a bed sunk in the floor. And there was a telephone beside the bed. It was made of clear plastic. There were goldfish swimming in the receiver. He bent down, watched the goldfish. Now he was smiling too. He could no longer remember what was so important about the telephone. All he knew was that Reid hadn’t lied to him. There was a telephone and it had fish in it. Reid had told the truth. That was the main thing.
Reid turned the key in the door.
‘Take off your clothes,’ he said.
Nathan looked across at him. ‘What about you?’
‘You first. I want to watch.’
Nathan began to undress. Soon he was naked except for a pair of white boxers. So white in the mauve light shed by the aquarium. He slipped his thumbs inside the elastic and was about to draw them down when Reid said, ‘Leave those on.’
Reid moved across the room. He covered distance the way other people altered the angle of their heads. He accomplished it with such tact, such grace. There were only two positions: over there and here, now. Nathan felt Reid’s clothes, the fabric coarse against his bare skin, and he was glad that Reid had told him to undress first.
‘You’ve been here before, haven’t you?’ Nathan murmured.
Reid nodded. ‘Many times.’
‘Always with boys?’
‘Always.’
He could hear the whales again. It sounded like something familiar slowed down. It sounded like curiosity.
The gloves lingered on his ribs, slid down his spine.
Only the rush of waves now. They rolled towards a reef, ripped open, spilled their foam. And then a wall built out of water, and fish trailing wakes of red and blue and gold.
There was a click. So precise in the haze of everything else that he was almost startled. He looked round. Reid was shutting his briefcase.
Reid handed him a mask. ‘I want you to wear this.’
He took the mask.
It was black leather, the shape of a head. Two holes to breathe through and a silver zipper for a mouth. No eyes.
‘I won’t be able to see,’ he said.
‘Just feel.’ Reid smiled. ‘Would you do that for me?’
He pulled the mask over his head and found that he could breathe quite easily. He lay back on the bed. The sheets were satin, cool against his forearms. The bed began to tilt and rock.
He reached out, found a body, touched it. Ran the tip of his finger all the way from the armpit to the anklebone. The same speed as a plane crossing the sky. He thought maybe you could learn to read a body blind. By touch. Like braille.
A moment of clarity, and he said, ‘I don’t know your body at all.’ And then, when there was no reply, ‘Are you there?’
‘I’m here.’ A pause. ‘Your skin, it’s so soft.’
‘How can you tell?’ he said. ‘You’re wearing gloves.’
‘You’re forgetting something. There’s my mouth.’
He felt his boxers being eased down, over his thighs, down to his ankles. His cock on a spring. This contact with the air was almost friction enough. Then the sudden warmth. A mouth.
His head locked in darkness, his body twitching like one of those fish you place on the palm of your hand to tell your fortune, they curl, they arch, sometimes they flip right over, but they’re never still, not unless you’re very cold, not until your fortune’s told.
He felt something push through the zipper and into his mouth.
‘Make it tighter.’
He did as he was told. It was taking a long time.
‘Use your teeth.’
And Reid’s body heaved and a sound was dragged out of him, it had notches, like a rack, and Nathan rolled on to his back and lay there, swallowing.
Soon afterwards he took the mask off. The room, it was so bright, it was like being inside a jewel. Reid stood by the window, parted the curtains an inch. Outside it was dark. The room was wearing a mask. Reid began to laugh.
‘What’s so funny?’ Nathan asked.
‘Private joke.’
‘You’re not going to tell me?’
‘No.’ Reid had this way of standing so his face was always in shadow. When Reid turned to look at him, he could read nothing there. He just heard that soft laughter and felt a surprising lack of curiosity about its source.
‘I don’t want to know,’ he said, ‘I really don’t. I’m not interested.’
Reid laughed again. ‘That’s my girl.’
‘If I was a girl,’ Nathan said, ‘you wouldn’t look twice.’
Reid came towards the bed, both hands on the buckle of his belt. ‘Maybe not even once.’
Nathan watched him approach. ‘I thought you’d finished.’
‘I’m starting again,’ Reid said.
Afterwards he must’ve slept because everything went still, that stillness that seems sudden, that tells you time’s gone by.
‘We’ll need a boat.’ A silence. ‘Good.’
Reid was talking on the phone again. Nathan watched through half-closed eyes.
‘Just make sure it’s there. The West Pier, midnight.’
Nathan walked to the window. A flicker of silver on the ground outside. Like a thrown rope, a lasso. It took him a moment to realise that it was a reflection, that there was water out there. A pool.
He slid the window open and crossed the patio. When he dived in he hardly felt the transition from air to water. It was as if he was moving from one kind of air that was warm into another that was cooler. He surfaced, lay on his back. The palm trees were black silhouettes against a bright brown sky. We’ll need a boat. The West Pier. Midnight. He saw Maxie Carlo’s face close up. Maybe you know him as Reid. That’s what he calls himself sometimes. Maxie’s top teeth showed as he smiled, one tooth edged in gold like a page from the Bible. But which page? Not the Ten Commandments, that was for sure. Something from Revelation, maybe. The sound of a plane in the sky like paper being torn slowly. The red light winking on its wing-tip. Know what I mean?