The Spell

by Alan Hollinghurst

  ‘We’re together!’

  He felt compromised being here, he found pornography depressing, and the glimpse of the video, in which a man was rolling a condom on, was a flustering anticipation of what he hoped himself to be doing in a few hours’ time. He stepped back and wandered round, insofar as wandering was possible, coming face to face with the raring phallus at every turn, like a surreal sequence in a fifties thriller: there was no escape from his depravity. He picked up a magazine called Big Latin Dicks, a title more blunt than exotic; penes magni, he thought, and for some reason found himself imagining the men who printed it, perhaps as equably as if it were Homes and Gardens, and the men who put it together (‘What does your dad do, by the way?’ ‘He’s the deputy editor of Big Latin Dicks. I thought everyone knew that.’)

  Now they were alone and Dave and Danny were talking coolly about doves, pyramids and bulldogs. Alex wasn’t innocent to this of course, and found it had an anxious-making glamour. Dave stood about in the shop, in his tight pin-stripe jeans. ‘I had Tony Betteridge MP in again tonight’, he said.

  ‘What was he after?’

  ‘Oh the usual. I sold him this piss video, that’s his thing, We Aim to Please it’s called, great title. He said, “I’ve had this video before.” I said, ‘I thought you were into recycling.”’

  Alex sort of got it, and actually that was one of Justin’s preoccupations that he never went along with. He wondered if Robin was more obliging. ‘I didn’t know he was gay’, he said.

  ‘I ought to have photos of them outside, the MPs and that. What do you call it . . . “by appointment”.’

  ‘Testimonials.’ said Danny.

  ‘So what was it?’ Dave asked, with a seller’s confident return to the subject of mutual interest. Danny took Alex aside and muttered,

  ‘Have you got sixty quid?’

  Alex paused. ‘I can get it.’

  He slipped out of the shop and hurried up the street, already half-expecting to be jumped by the drug-squad, and possibly the vice boys too.

  He paid off the taxi outside the club, and kept close to Danny as they strode past the hundreds of people queuing. At the crowd barrier Danny leant over and kissed the bomber-jacketed security guy on the lips, a few jeering fondnesses were exchanged, and that was all it took – the barrier was pushed back and they walked through, a ripple of nods and calls going over their heads from echelon to echelon of bouncers and greeters to signal their exemption and desirability. Inside the door a beautiful black woman as tall as Alex said ‘Hello darling’ in a chocolatey baritone.

  They were moving at once in the element of music, the earth-tremor bass and penetrating shimmer of high metallic noise. Alex checked his jacket, and as he stepped down with Danny on to the edge of the immense dance-floor, swept by brilliant unpredictable stabs of light, a shiver of recognition ran up him from his heels to his scalp, where it lingered and then gently dropped downwards again through his shoulders and spine. On the wall behind him was a sign saying ‘Dangerously Loud Music’. Alex was shocked and laughing at the sound. Crowds of men were moving in blurred inexhaustible unison with it. Others, in tiny shorts and lace-up boots, danced alone on platforms above the heads of the crowd, some strutting like strippers, others sprinting on the spot with a flickering semaphore of the arms. And all around the floor, and trailing away into other unguessed spaces, there was an endless jostling parade of half-naked men, faces glowing with happiness and lust. Alex howled ‘Do you want a drink?’ into Danny’s ear.

  They took their Es at the bar. ‘Get yer gear down yer neck,’ Danny said, with a big rascally grin, pushing the tab between Alex’s lips with his thumb to make sure it went home, but watching him carefully too as he swallowed and screwed up his face at the bitter admonitory taste.

  ‘Anything that tastes that bad must be good for you,’ Alex said, imagining the small grey pill tumbling down inside, dispersing its molecules of pleasure and risk. Danny knocked his back with a swig of Vittel.

  ‘You’re going to have a fabulous time,’ he said. He pulled Alex’s head down close to his and shouted confidentially, ‘You tell me if you feel anything bad, if you’re not well – tell me straight away.’

  ‘I will darling.’

  ‘You’re going to have a fabulous time!’ He was jiggling about and his smile seemed full of affection and something close to mockery as he watched Alex drifting towards his unimagined thrill. ‘I’m really envious.’

  ‘But you’re doing it too.’

  Danny shook his head. ‘There’s nothing like the first time.’

  Even so, within a few minutes Alex saw him altering. They were out on the floor, in their own disputed little space among the thrashing dancers. Everyone was staring, but like people gripped by thought, without much knowing what they were looking at. Alex kept being jabbed by elbows and hands that milled to the beat like tick-tack or lightning kung-fu. The boys glistened and pawed at the ground. They looked like members of some dodgy brainwashing cult. Alex pursed his lips at so much willing slavery, and imagined it all going wrong for him, and the incomprehension of his family and colleagues as to why he had done it. He felt abruptly sober and self-conscious about his expressive, old-fashioned 1984 style of dancing. Danny flung an arm round his neck in his sweet way, and he was warm and excited, like a drunk who has lost his sense of the other person and asks a question because he wants to tell you something. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Alex, with vague irritable pride, like someone immune to tickling or hypnosis. ‘I mean, I don’t feel anything.’

  ‘God – I’m spinning!’ Danny said, but drew away from him very slowly, his hand round his waist. Another little clinch. ‘Tell me if you don’t feel okay.’

  ‘Yes, darling.’ He saw it wasn’t quite like drunkenness, Justin for one was never so trusting and attentive. Danny danced up against him, lovingly, but unaware how he was lurching into him.

  After thirty minutes Alex acknowledged to himself that he felt quite pleasant, but he could easily argue the feeling away as the elation of drink and dancing and the company of a thousand half-naked men. Though the men were beautiful, it was true, in the cascades and strafings of coloured light. Each of the men round him seemed somehow distinct and interesting, in a way he hadn’t understood when he wandered in past the long line of cropped heads and top-heavy torsos. But of course people were unique, one tended to forget. He twirled round with a smile and saw Danny getting out of his short-sleeved shirt without stopping dancing. He thought he was lost in a world of his own, chewing and licking his lips, fumbling as he tucked the shirt through a belt-loop. Then both arms were round Alex’s neck:

  ‘Fuck, these are strong, I’m going to sit down for a bit.’

  Alex hugged him loosely, with a slight queasy sense that in fact it was he who was going to have to look after his guide. Danny took his hand and they sidled through the crowd and flung themselves down on a wide raised step that ran along the wall. Others were there already, heads nodding, dancing in a way though they were sitting down. Alex still felt shocked at this wholesale surrender to the drug, but the abandon was beautiful too, he could see that. The music built and built in ways that were inevitable but still exceeded anything you could expect – arms were raised towards it in a thronging silhouette against jets of dry ice; and that was the last time Alex saw anything sinister or inhuman in it.

  Danny said, as if unaware of a break in the conversation, ‘Wow. How are you feeling, darling?’

  ‘Fine. I don’t feel anything much yet’ – with an exaggerated desire not to exaggerate, to be sure of whatever happened when it did. He looked at his watch.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Forty-five minutes.’

  ‘Just sit back, breathe deeply, don’t fight it, Alex!’ – with a tiny spurt of annoyance, as if the novice was stubbornly defying the master.

  He did as he was told, and found himself putting an arm round Danny, his fingers playing dreamily on his bare biceps, his h
ead against the wall rocking as the music climaxed and broke off in gorgeous piano chords.

  ‘Mmm. The music’s fabulous.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What do you call this music?’

  ‘It’s house.’

  ‘So this is house. Why’s it called that?’

  ‘Not sure actually.’

  ‘It’s fabulous.’

  ‘I know.’ Danny smiled at him with what might already have been the tenderness of love when it is first revealed. ‘Go with it . . . Think what you want. Say anything you want.’

  He didn’t know about that. He closed his eyes and snorted in air as if about to dive for something he’d lost. Now Danny’s arm was looped over his knee, his hand fondly but abstractly stroking his shin, which had never seemed so sensitive a place. The music pounded and dazzled but had its origin in somewhere subtly different, grand and cavernous; yet when Danny spoke again he didn’t need to shout – it was as if they’d been granted a magical intimacy in the heart of a thunderstorm. What he said was, ‘Fuck, this is good.’ And then again, with what seemed an angelic concern, ‘Tell me straight away if you don’t feel all right.’

  Alex felt a trace of shyness still because what he wanted to say was deeply to do with Danny. He closed his eyes and his mind sped ahead down the glittering tracks of sound. It wasn’t a hallucination, but he saw his own happiness as wave on wave of lustrous darkness, each with a glimmering fringe of light. The words when they came were totally inadequate, but he knew at once that Danny would understand them and read his indescribable sensations back into the tawdry syllables. He said, ‘I feel ravishingly happy. I’ve never felt so happy.’

  Danny had his arm round Alex’s shoulders, they half twisted towards each other and kissed, though the wonderful thing was the silky feel of Danny’s neck and arms and the heat of him in the sweat-damp tank-top. Alex saw that what he most wanted was happening and groped marvellingly between the different kinds of happiness, the chemicals and the sex. It seemed that happening and happiness were the same, he must remember that, to tell everyone. Danny sat behind him and hugged and stroked him. Wherever he touched him little shivers swept over his skin. Alex gripped and stroked the arms that were stroking him, and pulled Danny’s feet round inside his legs. He wanted them to touch all over simultaneously. He could feel Danny’s nipples as they rubbed against his tingling back.

  They were dancing in the middle of the floor, in a loose group with some other friends of Danny’s. Alex had never felt so agile or so energised. He pulled off his wet T-shirt, and knew what a shining streak of sinewy beauty he was from the way people looked at him and lightly touched him. His thick black hair was soaked, and fell forward and was flung back. He danced like everyone else now, but better, more remarkably. He found himself staring rapturously at the dancers around him – it was never deliberate, it was as if he woke up to find his gaze locked with a grinning stranger’s. Or he was suddenly talking to someone, or taking a drink from their bottle. Everything was immediate, but seemed to have started, unnoticed, a few seconds before. The music possessed him, he lived it with his whole body, but his ear had become so spacious and analytic that he could hear quite distinctly the hubbub of everyone talking, like the booming whisper of tourists in a cathedral.

  Danny left him in the bar with a friend of his, a muscly young Norwegian with silver blond hair. ‘You look a bit like Justin,’ Alex said to him, with a laugh at how little he cared about Justin or anything that had hurt him in the past.

  ‘Do I now,’ said the blond.

  ‘Do you know Justin?’

  ‘No, darling, but don’t worry about it. This is your first time, right?’

  Alex loved the Norwegian’s accent, and his fluency in English. ‘You’re gorgeous,’ he said, and they bumped their lips together in an unsentimental kiss.

  ‘You’re pretty cute yourself, as a matter of fact. You’re feeling quite great, am I right?’

  Alex just laughed and shook his head, and gripped his friend tighter. There were three of them now, Dave from the porn-shop had his arms around them both, and Alex kissed him on the cheek and kept squeezing the back of his neck in a state of almost unconscious oneness with him. He had never done more than shake hands with a black man, or tackle one perhaps in a school rugger game – he sighed at how black he was, and ran his fingers in slow arcs up and down the small of his back.

  ‘Those pills were all right then . . .’

  Alex was trying to formulate an amazing truth. He confided it first to Dave, as the purveyor of all this bliss, and then to the blond. ‘I feel so happy I wouldn’t care if I died.’

  ‘Oh don’t do that!’ said the Norwegian, in his practical way. ‘You can always get happy again.’

  Alex kissed the two strangers and they stood and caressed him for minute after minute with the indulgent smiles of all-knowing, all-forgiving friends.

  He was parched and drank a little bottle of Lucozade. He twisted his watch to the light and saw he’d been here nearly three hours. He knew he had to have a piss and roamed off from his guardians with a vague idea of where the lavs were. Walking was somehow harder than dancing, and he almost lost his footing on some stairs littered with empty plastic bottles. In the passageway a shirtless blond boy was dancing in front of him, beaming, pupils dilated, alight with drugs. He hugged him, and they started snogging – there was a tiny round bolt through his tongue, which lolled and probed and rattled against Alex’s teeth whilst their hands gripped each other’s backsides and they swung about with fierce hilarious grunts and gasps. Alex pushed him slowly away, with soft pecks on his nose and forehead, and when ht looked back a few seconds later he could see that the boy had already forgotten him.

  Waiting in the ringing brightness of the lavatory he felt a tinge of loneliness, and wondered where Danny was. Everyone was busy here, men in pairs queuing for the lock-ups, others in shorts or torn jeans nodding tightly to the music, caught in their accelerating inner worlds. A guy in fatigues half-turned and beckoned him over to share his stall – Alex leant on his shoulder and looked down at his big curved dick peeing in intermittent spurts. He unbuttoned and slid in his hand and for a moment couldn’t find his own dick, he thought perhaps at some stage in the zipping forgotten hours he’d had a sex-change, but there it was, so shrivelled that he shielded it from his friend, who said, ‘You’re all right, you’re off your face’, and ‘You can do it’, and then, hungrily, ‘Well, give us a look’, while he stroked himself and stared and stared.

  An hour or more later Alex was sprawled in a chill-out room with his arm round Danny, chewing gum, still rocking and tapping to the music in the vaster space beyond. There were fluorescent hangings that absorbed him for long periods. The blue was transcendent, infinitely beautiful, all-sufficient. And then the red . . . People drifted past, or sat down touching them as if they were old friends and said ‘All right?’ Sometimes they were friends of Danny’s, and they hunkered down peaceably for five minutes and said nothing much, though everything they did say was charming and inexplicably to the point. The giddy excitement of earlier had subsided into a perfect calm without boundaries, across which figures moved with something of their vivid drug presence still about them. Once a boy called Barry something, whom Alex sometimes passed in the corridor at work, loomed up in front of him open-mouthed and doubting, and after a moment’s thought said, ‘No, you look like Alex, but you’re not Alex’, and went on his way.

  Danny shifted round so that they were face to face, their legs hooked round each other as though they were talking in bed. ‘All right?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, darling. I know why it’s called house music, by the way.’

  A humorous pause. ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘It’s because you just want to live in it.’

  Danny pushed his hand through Alex’s hair and kissed him. ‘Do you want your other E?’

  He was interested to find that he didn’t. ‘I wouldn’t mind just lying here for ever.’

&n
bsp; But Danny was a little moody and restless. ‘Yeah, I’ve really come down now.’

  ‘Well, do you want another?’ The idea seemed grossly greedy, like eating dinner straight after lunch; though he’d read about how people did four, or six, or twelve. He couldn’t imagine anything better than what he was still going through.

  ‘Nah . . .’ Danny was struggling to his feet, and looking down to help Alex up, as though he were pregnant and delicate with his own happiness. ‘Let’s go home,’ he said.

  7

  Justin listened to the bang of the front door, the brisk and wounded footsteps up the path, the remoter thump of the car door, the noise of the car starting up and then swiftly receding. When Robin worked at home Justin seemed naturally to sleep on, but now that he had the cottage to himself he felt relieved and alert. He rolled over on to Robin’s side of the bed. They had been keeping to their own sides all week, and he snuffled up his lover’s smells from the sheet and pillowcase with a fetishistic pleasure that was keener at the moment than his feelings about him in person. To wake up to the smell of Robin after a night of sex and before another mumbling half-conscious morning bout was the firmest promise of happiness that Justin could expect; but he refused to wheedle him out of his sulks, and admired his own connoisseurial way of enjoying him in his absence.

  Nothing had been quite right since the weekend with Alex. Justin opened the door in his fantasy of that Sunday morning and had Alex join them in bed for a rivalrous threesome. Alex never sulked and never refused him. He had to admit that the shock of seeing him again had brought a hidden trail of quiet after-shocks. He didn’t know at the time why he’d asked him down, but now it appeared like a covert reckoning, a need to compare, a weighing-in as if the fight hadn’t long been over; he wanted to be sure he hadn’t made a mistake. In the week that followed he had thought about Alex, especially his innocence and – what was it? – his lack of ego, with more and more puzzled fondness and with illicit whoofs of lust.