by Geoff Ryman
No harm came. The little Chinese seemed in no way offended or embarrassed, nor were any of the boys. They went on doing their party tricks, until an adult arrived.
The masters pretended to be horrified that the boys had imposed upon the gentleman, and insisted that they must not bother him any longer with foolish things. The boys protested that this was a scientist from London. So the maitre honoured Michael with Nescafe. Michael was seated on a naugahyde sofa in a concrete office with a tin roof that served more as an oven than a shelter. He used a tissue like a windscreen wiper on his forehead as sweat drummed down. He tried to piece together a serious conversation with the master, whose French was for the most part incomprehensible. Was it not true that science was now confirming the teachings of the Buddha?
When it was polite, Michael stood up to say goodbye and asked if he might say goodbye to the boys. The master's smile explained: not possible; boys at prayer. Michael walked past the long, cool stone chamber and peered in on tiptoe. It was empty. Michael marvelled at the courage and beauty of the Chinese boy.
So, now, in his London flat, Michael made a restitution. He put on his old copy of Thriller and called all the monks up into his sitting room. The air moved like there was a bonfire. Suddenly, there was an orange swirl like flame and his room was full of young men in loose orange robes, bouncing as if made of coiled springs.
Let it go, he told them, for it had been something of a missed opportunity for them as well. The orange robes spun free.
They were beautiful: small and slim with perfect complexions, or large and beefy with spots on their cheeks. Michael bathed in them. He ran his hands over the smooth skin as they rippled past him, over him, under him. They felt like warm waves, until his fingers found sudden clusterings of hair. Some of them knocked away his hands; others were more biddable, caught up in the excitement of the dance. With a kind of baffled wonderment, they let Michael proceed. Others even knelt around him.
After they were gone, whirling away in rippling spirals of air, Michael listened to the silence. They would now be thirty years old, seasoned. Michael thought of the small Chinese.
Michael called him up, as he would be now.
The man looked almost the same; he was still slim, with an hourglass waist. His face was not more lined, but it did look plumper and wise. He wore black trousers and a translucent blue shirt and now spoke rudimentary English.
'You're not a monk any more,' said Michael, disappointed.
'No. Only monk for two years. We do Army, also we are monks.' He smiled and nodded, and the implication was delivered lightly: better monks than military. He ran a nursery in Chiang Mai. He showed Michael his card. 'Orchids, fruit. Big palm trees for the city. Work for all the husband of my friends' servants. I am very popular man. The ladies can have their husbands join them from the north. And they work in shade.'
He showed Michael photographs of his house. It was an old-fashioned teak house with a huge garden. 'You know Thai fruit? My garden have rambutan, and jack fruit.'
Michael suddenly remembered. 'Oh yes, rambutan. They're like clusters of lychees.'
'You like music. Music, boom,' he said. He made Michael understand the teak house acted like wooden speakers on the sound.
It was good to have someone spend the night. The nurseryman who had been a monk curled up next to and around Michael like a cat. His body was still hairless and hard, but he had become far more butch as he aged. He overwhelmed Michael physically, and when he slept, he purred. In the morning, the monk's black eyes shone with affection.
'You come to Chiang Mai, you give me call,' he said, and placed a card on the bedside table.
'You won't know me,' said Michael.
'Say a friend recommend my nursery. To buy rambutan for England. I will get to know you. I have no boyfriend now. I will like you.'
Michael remembered to write down the name and address before he disappeared. After he left, the card had vanished. But the naturalized Thai name and the address were real and belonged to a real person.
It was not until later, travelling on the tube, that Michael realized how this differed from every other encounter with an Angel. The Thai had said: the real me will like you. Could Michael go to Chiang Mai to find someone he had never actually met? What could come of a love separated by seven thousand miles? Harm? That had been Michael's experience of love.
There were other restitutions to be made.
There was, for example, Al.
When Michael returned from California, Al was in Michael's year. Al was Asian, his name was actually Ali, but he had been adopted and had a Western last name: Wilcox. His eyes slanted down at the outside corners. They were dancing and dark, and seemed to reflect Michael's eyes back at him.
In the last year at school, Al's adopted parents divorced, and neither one of them wanted an Asian child. So he was left in an apartment by himself. His parents told him they didn't want to disrupt his studies. He knew well enough that he had been purchased at age four to help glue their relationship together and that he could no longer serve their purposes.
Understand this: he lived alone at seventeen. At seventeen, you are always looking for somewhere to do it: the backs of cars, alleys, behind the pillars at clubs, in darkened archways if the need is strong enough. Al had a huge bed in the middle of a studio apartment that he had all to himself. Understand this: he was beautiful and wanted to be a fashion designer and he had a white girlfriend with a harelip.
Al kept her photograph on a chest of drawers. She was called Tabitha. Michael liked Tabitha: he was young enough to confuse feeling sorry for someone with real sympathy. The part of his mind that always fooled himself said: see how nice Al is? He is wise enough to like Tabitha despite the lip. How I wish, Michael's befuddled brain whispered, that I could find someone as nice as Al.
They had history class together, and when Al wasn't looking, Michael's gaze would be fixed upon him. They had art class together, and everything Al drew was women in beautiful clothes: Audrey Hepburn in cocktail dresses; Asian ladies in big flouncy party frocks.
Al was lean and slim and, like Michael, was on the crosscountry team. Once, after a long late run, they were alone in the shower room, and Al had swung back the door of his locker. He was naked and erect and he looked at Michael in a strangely solemn way.
Michael smiled tolerantly. The front part of his brain said: my friend's body has run away with him. It's hormones, it means nothing. Michael fooled himself into thinking Al needed reassurance, that it made no difference to him. Michael chuckled and gave the head of the penis an admonitory tap, as if to say: I don't mind, but put it away, mate.
By now Michael lived in terror of his sexuality. Michael had conjured out of his big athletic body a big forgiving athletic heterosexual. The heterosexual lived and breathed and took Michael's place whenever he was needed.
Al, shame-faced, turned his back to him and dressed, hunched and quiet.
But Michael could not be acting all the time. He must have been sending signals. He must have looked into Al's eyes at lunchtime, and smiled a big kind loving smile, all unawares. Once in the boys' toilets next to the showers Al walked past Michael's cubicle. The cubicles had no doors and were open to view so teachers could check for smoking or drugs. Al stopped and smiled, and Michael, caught as he was on the toilet, his dick jammed down between his legs, couldn't help but grin back. In that grin, he could feel all of his yearning flash out of him like a sword. There was complicity in that grin; I like being naked around you. He felt his legs unclench and open.
Some time later, Al invited Michael back to his studio. It was tiny, with big windows with net curtains pulled back. Anyone on the street could see them. That meant nothing to Al. He lolled like a tongue on his double bed, having changed into something comfortable: a T-shirt and very tight satiny blue running shorts.
Michael was trying to be good. This nice innocent boy, he told himself: Michael, keep your eyes to yourself. Al tapped the bed for Michael to sit next
to him. Michael perched on its edge at a distance from him. He didn't want to take advantage.
Al heaved slightly on the bed, arching his back. 'My parents are worried about my living alone. They are frightened that I might meet a homosexual.'
'Where do parents get their ideas from? I mean, even if you did, it's no big deal, and if the guy wanted anything you could just say no, right?'
Al nodded, holding his chin up. 'I could, yeah.' He edged closer to Michael. 'Have you ever met anyone… like that?'
'Naw,' said Michael, going into big and butch mode. 'No, I never.'
And in big, blurting butch mode Michael had stood up, afraid, away from the bed.
Al had sat up too, and suddenly swung his feet onto the floor. A few more things were said, and then Al announced, his face closed and wary, 'Anyway, I got my homework to do.'
And outside the studio flat, Michael stopped. Next door was the newsagents where Michael glanced up nervously at Gay Times. He had to lean against the wall, and he nearly doubled over in rage. At first, he thought that he was outraged that a pass had been made at him. Then he thought he was enraged at the betrayal of Tabitha. Then he was mad at himself and mad at Al, and he did not know why. A blinding headache spread across the breadth of his forehead.
Michael could not remember what happened afterwards. He and Al seemed to stop talking. Something happened to Al during the last year at school. Michael saw it only from afar. Al didn't study for exams. His dark eyes were clouded and encircled with bags of even darker flesh. His tie was askew, his school uniform was untended. Al wore it with the bitter swagger of the unloved, the outcast. He dyed his hair a muddy, brassy blond.
Michael supposed it went something like this: my adopted parents do in fact care about me. They know I am stranded between two cultures. They don't want me to have to guess where my birth parents were from, and read about those cultures in books. They are worried that I will have no self-esteem. They are concerned that I am young and needing to be constantly reassured, partly because they deserted me. My parents would be horrified to know that I am haunting parks and toilets and taking older men back to my flat and spending all night in clubs. They don't want me getting into drugs and cock rings. It's just that my parents won't do a single thing to stop it.
Sometime before A-levels, Al simply stopped coming to school.
Michael still had fantasies that he had become Al's lover and ended up living with him. They would have moved to Sussex together and found a bedsit in Brighton and Michael would have gone to university and Al to art school. He could see the Cure posters on their wall and smell the curries they would have cooked together.
Michael kept an eye out for Al. He had no interest in clothes, but he read the fashion pages even so. Michael saw young British-Turkish designers become famous, he saw young Italian-British designers move to French couturiers. Al was not among them. From time to time he looked in the telephone directory for Al Wilcox, or rather Ali Wilcox. He looked at the photograph of any young Indian designer, in case Al had changed his name. Silence.
And something in that silence delayed him calling up an Angel now. He had felt that kind of silence before when calling up an Angel.
What was it that someone said? Fashion was moving in circles now because all the talented young designers had died?
If Michael had said yes to Al, if they had become lovers, would it have made any difference? Would Al be alive? It would have made a difference to Michael. He could have practised being in love, making a home, being human and close. Even if it had come to nothing, he would have begun to grow up at seventeen.
I have a feeling Al can make no difference now to anything.
Michael came home from a day back at the university sitting final exams and telling students to turn off their mobile phones. He sat in his darkened sitting room and thought about Al. He crunched a Viagra like candy, and waited for his hour.
He was a little bit scared, and that was good. Being scared, Michael had realized, means you're learning. I can edit this like a film, Michael thought. I can cut to the chase.
The air swung back like a locker door, and Al stood revealed, naked and solemn. His eyes were frightened and serious. This was nothing like a body running away with itself on automatic erection. This was a needy seventeen-year-old who had made a decision that required him to show who he was.
'Come here,' said Michael. 'Sit next to me.'
Al came to the sitting-room sofa, and curled up like a baby, caching his nakedness and resting his head on Michael's lap. 'I missed you,' Al said. 'I missed you for a long time.' Al lay still, and closed his eyes with what looked like relief. 'You didn't get fat. You didn't get boring. You stayed Michael.'
Michael found he was able to lean all the way down to kiss the top of Al's head. 'What happened to you?' he asked.
Al said. 'I missed the train.'
'What does that mean?'
'Oh. It means I died.'
Michael's heart groaned. Not another one. Michael's heart was fed to bursting with this stuff. It was like the war, his gay generation's war. Why didn't it stop?
'How old?' Michael whispered.
'Twenty-one. One of the very first in London.' Al, still curled up, raised a hand as if volunteering. 'They didn't even know what it was.'
Michael had broken out into a sweat and he made a shrugging motion as if he were in harness.
Al's eyes glittered up at him. 'Why did you turn me down, Michael? I wanted to be with you.'
Michael said, 'Because I think that if I make a pass at someone, I'll kill them.'
The words popped out, like a pip squeezed from an orange under stress, hard and bitter and glossy. Michael ran a hand over his brow. The words, he realized, were true. Michael chuckled. It was a strange kind of laugh that bent him over in the middle.
'Now it looks like I kill people if I don't make a pass at them.' He managed a sick sad smile.
Al was shaking his head. 'You didn't kill me.'
'Then why do I feel sick? Why does sex always make me scared?'
''Cause you're screwed up. We're both screwed up.' Al hung his head. 'I killed me, Michael. No one else did.'
Al reached up and played with Michael's long, curly hair. He leaned his forehead against Michael's as if in submission or final rest.
For the first time in his life, Michael's cock responded to emotion. Yes, it was also the Viagra, but the blood pushing into the opened veins of his penis was driven hard by a sense of farewell, of wishing someone did not have to go. It was the emotion you might have if your faithful lover was leaving for a month. Michael's heart yearned up through his penis.
Al could sense it. Something quickened in his eyes and he arched his back. He stretched his legs and opened up like a flower displaying its pistils. Michael's face slipped down the length of Al's trunk and kissed Al's penis and went further down to the neatly folded anus. The front of Michael's trousers had soaked through. His underwear was difficult to peel off. Al's legs went over his head, and Michael entered him and strained within him to reach further inside. All Michael saw was Al's eyes, and his delighted smile.
Michael lifted Al up, still joined to him, and carried him to the bedroom. He settled Al onto the edge of the mattress, and he kept standing and watching himself making love and that looked like a miracle in itself.
And the air whispered again. It seemed as if restitution had been pushed even further. It seemed suddenly that afternoon light was filtered through old-fashioned net curtains in a single window. Michael blinked at the illusion and it remained for a moment. They were back in a studio flat in Romford. He blinked again, and the room sighed with relief of tension, and collapsed back into its ordinary self, as both Michael and Al came together.
Al took his hand and rested it against his leg. 'It wouldn't have made any difference, Michael. It would have ended the same.' His dark pupils were holes that seemed to go on forever.
'I… I could let you stay here, Al.'
Al blink
ed.
'You stay here. You could live.'
His black eyes reflected little pin pricks of light, diamond-bright. There was no light in the room that was that bright. Al's mouth worked, as if he were about to say something.
Michael pressed home. 'Stay here and live with me.'
Al stroked Michael's forearm. He cleared his throat. 'Michael. There is a place without time. And we are there before we are born, and there after it. We are born with wonderful potential, and we live, and while we live, we fulfil it. Or not. In any case, when you die you are completed.'
The light in those dark depths was even brighter. 'I'm complete, Michael. That's my story now.'
'You're saying no.'
Al smiled sleepily. 'I can say yes or no to nothing. You can make me stay. For what it would be worth to you.'
Michael did not want to lose him just yet. He held him, and pressed his face against Al's brown firm chest. And felt love yearn out of him again.
Michael rolled the duvet over them both. Al spent most of the night curled like a baby. The sky greyed and for some reason the song of the garden's blackbirds was replaced by the cries of seagulls. Michael was both awake and asleep, his body unmoving as lead, and his mind dull. Michael thought to himself: all right then, go now.
In the morning Michael sat up in his big bed. Right, he thought, and stood out of bed alone. That is it. I am fed up with all this tragedy. Henry, he told the air. You were right. God dammit, I want to have some fun.
And, as if in answer, the curtains round the bed stirred.
That night, after work, Michael called up Bottles again.
Bottles showed up in her punk Egyptian phase this time, wearing a Tom of Finland T-shirt showing two men tweaking tits. She wore a leather glove with studs that was clenched around a bottle of champagne.
There was the elaborate ritual of Continental kissing. It had scared Michael once. Then he saw: we were poor suburban kids trying to be different, smarter, sharper, harder.
