‘Oh, good . . .’ said Johnny, sitting down again, and starting to wonder if perhaps he just wasn’t old enough.
Michael went upstairs for a bit and left Johnny to swipe through the photos on his phone, endless selfies against backgrounds in Paris, Cape Town or New York, Michael among friends, party-goers, the phone held high so that they looked up from the crowd with arms round each other and always more clown-like expressions than Michael, who seemed fixed, as though by some botched cosmetic surgery, in a rictus of glamour. Here he was last month in a packed London club, among shirtless young beauties, their arms and chests badged, swirled and enlaced in tattoos: Johnny prised the picture wide to read the details. His old friend Graham had said they should go out, the two of them – the idea of joining a crowd like this was both enchanting and absurd. Going out, dancing, not just getting drunk as he had in his twenties, but taking powerful drugs, as he had a few times in his forties, ranked among the high pleasures of his life, free of all inhibition and doubt. Odd, then, that he’d surrendered it, he’d denied himself such nights for ten years or more. It seemed to him part of the tact of age.
Michael came back with his laptop and sat pressing lightly against Johnny on the low sofa. ‘You’ve got to look at this,’ he said, dopy but manic with the coke, clicking on a link that opened a new window, the tall portrait shape of an iPhone video. He smiled at the entertainment Johnny was about to have. ‘It’s my friend Snapstud,’ he seemed to say.
‘That’s an unusual name,’ said Johnny, leaning in, putting an arm round him. ‘Who is he?’ He saw a naked young man wanking and staring at the camera while sliding a translucent blue dildo in and out of his arse. ‘Good grief . . . !’ It wasn’t remotely the sort of thing he was used to looking at, and he was giddy for a moment at the sequence of casual revelations, that people did this, and that they filmed it, and that others watched it. It was like a first teenage glimpse of a hard-core mag, but in its matter-of-fact way not like pornography at all.
‘Do you love him? He’s so cute,’ said Michael.
‘Mm,’ said Johnny, blushing and frowning down at the screen. Snapstud had dirty blond hair, and a left arm sleeved to the neck in multi-coloured tattoos. ‘How do you get this?’
‘What’s that . . . ?’ said Michael, with a slow shake of his head as he watched, ‘It’s just on his Tumblr. Go, Snappy!’ in his hazed mid-Atlantic voice, as Snappy sent up an astonishing plume of semen, a quick sequence of plumes that could be heard very faintly pattering on to a surface out of view. Then he winked and raised a thumb in self-approval as the image froze.
‘Can anybody look at these?’ said Johnny.
‘Yeah, they’re just like on his page . . .’ and Michael clicked back and scrolled through the ‘archive’, where dozens of such videos of himself, alone or having sex with other men, were thumbnailed.
‘What does he do, your friend?’
‘What . . . ? I don’t know, I’ve never met him,’ said Michael. ‘I think he like works in a bank?’ He took Johnny’s confusion for excitement, and selected another, which it took a moment to work out showed Snappy with his knees behind his head fellating himself.
‘Well, well,’ said Johnny, and sat forward and closed the laptop as he took it out of Michael’s hands – it was a small not quite friendly struggle.
‘I thought you were into young guys,’ said Michael.
Johnny set the machine carefully on the table. Hearing his preference defined, as plainly as Michael had stated his own taste for older men, he felt there was something amiss with it, a quick desire to exonerate himself that ran ahead of a more puzzled feeling: that young guys weren’t what he particularly wanted. But he said bluffly, ‘That’s why I’m here, isn’t it,’ and after some brief wriggling and dodging on Michael’s part they started kissing.
Johnny stayed for most of the night. It wasn’t a great success, but belonged even so to a private sub-category in his life, the miss that was an achievement in another way. Michael was twenty-three and it was twenty-three years since Johnny had slept with anyone new. The boy’s body retained something ideal, and he visited it with faintly amused respect, with several admiring intakes of breath at its smoothness and beauty, and some looser but larger dissatisfaction, that it seemed to know nothing. His cock had more character than he did, tight-skinned and curving to the left. Johnny marvelled at it, amazed to think cocks were still going on, all over the place, when for years he’d rarely seen anyone’s but his own and Pat’s. Michael’s made its own undoubting bid for attention; and received it. But it was all very quick when it came to it. ‘Oh, is that it?’ Johnny thought. ‘Well, what did you expect?’
‘So do you have a partner?’ said Michael, a few minutes later, curling up with his head on Johnny’s chest, in a cautious late start at showing a personal interest in him – all his gadgets were elsewhere and Johnny feared doing anything that might alert him to their absence. He pulled him closer against him.
‘Did have,’ he said. ‘He died a few months ago.’
Michael seemed to make, in the blurred close focus, a pouting face. He might have been respectfully absorbing the news – he didn’t say he was sorry to hear it. ‘What did he die of?’ he asked, with a flutter of eyelashes, a silent whirr of scanning the previous half-hour for any possible risk.
‘He had prostate cancer.’
‘Oh, right. That’s bad, isn’t it?’
‘It’s . . . yes, it is.’
‘Must make sex a bit difficult, so I’ve heard.’
‘Oh, our sex life was buggered,’ said Johnny, which was Pat’s joke. ‘Though it didn’t seem so important, you know, compared with life itself.’
‘No . . .’
‘Sex doesn’t matter that much when you’re my age.’
Michael twisted his head round to smile at him. ‘That’s not the impression I got just now,’ he said, as if referring to a rather greater triumph than they’d had ten minutes before.
‘What about you?’ said Johnny. ‘Any long-term affairs?’
‘Yeah, I have a boyfriend,’ said Michael.
‘Hmm, what’s his name?’
‘Oh, Robert.’
‘Is he in London?’
‘He’s in LA right now.’
‘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 Mic
hael, 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.
On the huge square stairway going down the banging of the music grew louder and louder like a boring threat, the noise of other people’s pleasure. When they opened the door into the bar it came at them hard, the bright ping-ponging happiness of a tune on top, all warmed up, geared up, and bouncing fast, while he still had his coat on and wondered as they joined the queue for the coat check if he wanted to bounce at all. The medium of the club, three floors below ground, was an absolute darkness, on which multicoloured light played and darted incessantly, over the naked shoulders and handsome faces of the milling and gathering men. Johnny’s fear here was the sixteen-year-old’s again, that he would lose Graham, that his friend would make out with someone else, leaving him more lonely than ever in an alien crowd. He thought, for god’s sake, I’m a father, I’m on the committee of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, I own a large house in Fulham. He handed in his coat and scarf and big jersey and came away with his ticket and a little shiver past the huge ducted air-conditioning. And the truth was he had made a puzzled private attempt, back home, at looking sexy, a raid on his youthful self, old jeans shabby and tight, a faded T-shirt he’d screen-printed himself – a deniable effort but perhaps an appealing one. The two beautiful men from the restaurant came past and looked at them in the split-second misapprehension of their
knowing each other, the twitch of a smile sliding at once to some worthier object – the smile deniable too. Graham marched him into the bar.
It was in the toilet stall, with his bottle of Corona and his twist of crystalline powder, that he saw himself most starkly, as if in a security camera, risky, ridiculous: what if he collapsed on the dance floor, and died? What would his father say, what would he tell his friends when the news appeared in the Telegraph? For a moment, above the narrow, black-walled cubicle, his father hovered like a genie. He wetted a finger, dipped it and licked it again, tiny granules bitter and authentic as he washed them down with two swigs of beer. He unbolted the door with unexpected firmness and relief, and went back to the bar.
He found Graham talking with a huge shirtless blond, formidable torso a swirl of tattoos, cogs and blades, Celtic but industrial, a legend on his chest in a font so fancy you had to work it out . . . If You Want You Can Do It: ah, well, thought Johnny. They were at different stages, Graham standing with his drink, a man at a party, the blond chewing, eyes dilated, touching him and stroking him. ‘Johnny, this is Billy,’ Graham said – Johnny found himself pulled in, kissed, held under Billy’s fondly protective left arm, his skin silky and warm, Johnny’s hand round his waist in lightly adhesive contact as he rocked to the music. ‘Having a good time?’ said Billy. ‘I’m starting to,’ said Johnny. Billy kissed him again and squeezed him – then shouted, reached out over Johnny’s head to another massive beauty going past, and in a moment he was off, pulled away by the other man, but leaning back to kiss Graham too – ‘Catch you later!’ before he was taken into the surge that was moving and building towards the dance floor beyond. ‘How do you know Billy?’ said Johnny. Graham smiled and shrugged – ‘Never seen him before,’ he said.