‘What, with your father?’
Michael laughed rather grimly. ‘Absolutely no way!’ He got out of bed, put on a dressing gown and went into the next room – soon Johnny heard him on the phone, it seemed he’d put an idea into his head, he was talking to Robert, in the early LA afternoon. ‘Yeah? . . . Oh, cool, no . . . Well, I hope you get it, you deserve it! What? . . . Oh, no . . . nothing much going on here, just having a night in by myself . . . You can tell? Yeah, I guess I’m a bit high.’ For a moment Johnny enjoyed the deceit, then suspected its cooler reverse – he wasn’t worth mentioning to Robert.
‘What was your partner called?’ said Michael when he came back into the bedroom.
‘Patrick,’ said Johnny. ‘How was Robert?’
‘Oh, fine,’ said Michael, slipping out of his dressing gown. They snuggled up together again. ‘Did you have rows?’
‘Mm, of course we did,’ said Johnny. ‘They never mattered much – you know, I wasn’t afraid of him. We always said what we liked.’ Though he’d been astonished, as a row-avoider, a conciliator all his life, at Pat’s sudden and furious naming of his faults, new ones he’d never guessed and old ones unforgotten, such as being too conciliatory, and not wanting a good row. Johnny always sat waiting for the humour that crept up through the shouting, and was fatal to it. ‘Why, do you have rows with Robert?’
‘No, no,’ said Michael, as if already thinking of something else.
Johnny ran his hand over the boy’s buttocks and pressed in a middle finger, a forgotten luxury. ‘Could he tell you had someone here?’
Michael didn’t answer, and what he did next made it hard for him to do so coherently.
When they turned off the light Johnny reached a fraternal arm around Michael, who laid his head on it, and shifted every thirty seconds. Johnny had an old idea of his own looming discomfort, the numbness of the well-intentioned embrace when to move the arm is to wake the man sleeping on it; but there was something nostalgic in it too – a trace of forty years ago, when all such embraces were experiments. Still, he detached himself, turned again and lay flat on his back, a thin slip of light above the curtains defining the near zone of the ceiling. He knew now that the coke would keep him awake. That, and Michael snoring, half-waking himself, shifting, and wrapping himself round Johnny in a muttering convulsion, arguments of a dream.
Still, Johnny slept; and in the early winter light, about seven o’clock, found himself awake, eased himself free (Michael turned as if in a huff to the far side of the bed), and went through into the bathroom. He was looking forward to going home. The faint distracting throb grew slowly louder, overlaid after a minute with a higher mechanical whine. He parted the curtain as the busy green bug of the street-cleaning truck roared into view in the mews below, busy but slow-moving, its circular brushes almost beautifully missing the seven or eight bits of rubbish on the cobbles and leaving a wet dirty smear as it circled, turned, and disappeared the way it had come. He watched a little longer, as the swirled pattern started to dry and fade, like a canvas in a dream whose erasure began the moment the brush had made its marks.
The next week Johnny found Michael back in his mind, not the sex, or really his smoothly undeveloped features, but the feel of a warm young person moving in his arms – it wasn’t just making up for Pat, it was something he’d never thought to have again. Better perhaps not to have met Michael, but once met he set off a painful yearning. Johnny decided to write him an email, finding the tone hard to get, not to be clumsily courtly or offputtingly brisk, unsure how much to use their thirty-year difference in age. He heard back from him next day, a cool, almost contentless paragraph, ‘You’re right, I am working on my Subjectivity module. You have a good memory Johnny.’ And signed off disconcertingly, ‘Thanks for reaching out, MX’. The phrase disturbed him, and went on doing so. There was a euphemistic kindness to it, a hint of surprise at his worthy but absurd attempt to see Michael again. He had an image of a hand stretching out through the bars of a cell – he might have reached out, but he hadn’t, by some distance, reached what he wanted; and Michael, it was clear, was unlikely to reach back.
3
At the end of January he was rung up again by his old friend, originally Pat’s friend, Graham, who’d been keeping an eye on him post-bereavement. Graham was five or six years younger than Johnny and had never had a long-term partner himself: he was someone for whom ‘settling down’ represented a terrifying rejection of choice; even so, there was a hint of changed valency in the call, from one single man to another. Johnny pictured him as he spoke: bald, black-eyed, still fit, in a way he himself had never bothered to be, with the look, in his jeans and blue-checked short-sleeved shirt, of a schoolmaster spotted in the private depths of the holidays. He used the old language, over the phone, ‘Yeah, I got some good gear, wanna go out?’ – always parody, and said now with a sweet sense of absurdity half-masking his excitement. He was a civil servant doing something that Johnny had never grasped, a set of abstract terms; in the very moment he told you his job description you found yourself helplessly forgetting it. For twenty years he’d been a distant but a good friend, whose pleasure was in seeing you, with no hint of blame on either side for the time you hadn’t been in touch. It was a kind of trust, and Johnny knew, if he was going to do anything so silly, so much in defiance of his own loneliness, that Graham was the person to do it with.
They met for dinner in a noisy Clerkenwell eatery, cocktails first and then a bottle of Shiraz. Graham had forgotten Johnny was vegetarian, or perhaps thought, now Pat was gone, he would revert to common sense, or taste; Johnny made do with two starters, the drink going straight to his head. They talked about Pat for a while, but Johnny saw Graham looking beyond him now, with an amiable waning of patience; he talked instead about the Brazilian boy behind the bar, and a dazzling young couple two tables away who they worked out were going on to the club as well. One of them, late thirties perhaps, had the gay voice that survived through generations, the illusionless adenoidal whine and drag, just a far-off hint of Australia in the colour of the vowels. Why did he mind it now, when he’d heard it, been thinly amused and reassured by it, all his adult life? He felt somehow troubled by their beautiful necks and biceps and hair.
Graham leant forward, charming, demonic in the uplight of the candle, covered Johnny’s hand at the table and left in it the almost insensible presence of a twist of film, small (when he peeped at it) as the blue twisted paper of salt in a childhood packet of crisps. ‘Good stuff,’ said Graham: ‘well, put it away’ – perhaps unprepared for his innocence.
‘In my day,’ said Johnny, ‘it was pills.’
Graham looked for the waiter. ‘Yeah, this is better. Don’t take it all at once, for god’s sake. You’ve got seven or eight hits there.’
‘OK,’ said Johnny, ‘thanks very much.’ The sense of his trusting incompetence spread and he thought, when they’d paid the bill and got outside, he might just give the wrap back to Graham and put up his arm for a passing taxi. Graham would understand.
They walked for five minutes to the club, which wasn’t a building, just a roped-off doorway giving on to a lobby and a deep descending staircase. ‘You have no idea,’ said Graham, ‘what that doorway leads to.’ ‘Well, I have a bit,’ said Johnny. In the queue the mood was unexpectedly exciting, and Johnny didn’t mind waiting, adapting himself with a kind of shy watchfulness to the attitudes of the much younger men jiggling in front and massing, very quickly, behind. He caught their own reflections in the dark shop window beside them, two other people they were surprisingly connected to, Graham in his bomber-jacket, Johnny his old greatcoat, the collar turned up. He remembered the inexorable routine, new arrivals striding up or stepping out of taxis, squeals and kisses. Some of the men were sombre and subdued, saving themselves for a long and demanding night: it seemed something almost grim they put themselves through. He and Graham kept chatting quietly, but he felt a tightening in his gut, and was glad to be drunk already when the queue started moving forward. In the lobby a door opened and they heard the music from far inside stripped down by distance to a rapid menacing thump. They paid at a little window, £12, Johnny peering anxiously at the young ticket-seller, who smiled back and seemed unconcerned by his age; or was the smile too insistent, a hint of concern and amusement shown to the elderly? Immediately the ticket was taken from him and the back of his hand was stamped in black ink with an illegible emblem.