Lust Or No Harm Done

by Geoff Ryman

  Cups and saucers: things Michael had given Phil that Phil now did not want; beautiful heirloom silver spoons that Phil had given to Michael that he had not wanted. His old life was stripped bare. His old life naked looked like an empty room. He was leaving the carpet and the rosewood fireplace.

  Michael started to cry. Picasso was overcome by kindness. 'Oh, my love,' he said, which in French is something you can say more easily between men. 'Hold, hold.' He chuckled sympathetically, and held Michael's shoulders. 'It is always hard to move. You know, when I was young, we moved here, we moved there. In Spain when you move, everyone speaks a different language. This is just to Camden Town. Eh? Eh?' Picasso held up Michael's chin, and made him look into his eyes. It worked. Michael smiled, embarrassed by his own weakness and by love.

  'I help you!' Picasso exclaimed and flung out his arms, to greet the changes.

  So Michael's old life was packed away into tea chests, except for the four-poster bed from Lancashire. That had been sold to the Poles. Michael slept in that bed for one last night. Picasso did not snore, placated by the reassurance of sex. He slept umbilically attached to Michael, planted deep inside him.

  In the morning, Picasso jumped about the flat as if the floor were a skillet. Michael heard him from the warmth of the duvet clattering away amid the kitchen things. As if Michael were a nervous invalid, Picasso arrived with breakfast on a tray: croissants and coffee. 'Here, a last breakfast for the condemned man,' he said, gesturing at the tray. Michael took a tiny sip of coffee to savour it. Picasso gulped down half a cup and one torn strand of croissant before jumping up again. He would have nothing else to eat until supper that night.

  Picasso darted up and down the stairs like a muscular squirrel. The moving men thought he was a porter who was paid to help with the move. Picasso wore overalls from 1916. The legs had a sewn-on lower half of a different colour. He pointed, clicked his fingers, grinned and somehow acted so completely like a mover that the movers began to follow his instructions. Picasso made sure the sofa bed was loaded last, facing out from the back of the lorry. He indicated that he and Michael would travel to Camden Town sitting on it.

  One of the moving men said, 'Tell him he mustn't, please, it's the insurance.'

  Michael shook his head. 'It won't do any good telling him anything.'

  The mover was old and reliable, and he looked at Picasso as if accepting some fundamental fact of life. 'It's your funeral. I hope not,' he said.

  Michael and Picasso stayed in the back of the lorry. It jerked and thumped and squealed its way up Tottenham Court Road to Camden Town. Picasso sat on the sofa, looking out the open back. Somehow he had spirited a bottle of champagne from his other world, the eternal past from which Angels seemed to come. The ink on the label was as thick as a rubber skid mark and the font plain, listing the name of a village. Picasso began to sing an old, strange yelping song. Michael was to learn later it was cante hondo, the only music Picasso really loved. He waved a bottle and irresistibly forced Michael to sing along. Canta la rana, y no tiene pelo ni lana! he announced. The frog sings, though she has neither fur nor wool.

  The van took fifteen minutes to coax itself backwards into their narrow side street. Picasso manhandled packing cases with the gusto of a bullfighter. He nipped so quickly up and down stairs that he reminded Michael of a silent flickering film, a two-reel comedy short.

  Picasso was untidy and disordered; everything he did was a kind of unintended blurt. Their new flat rapidly filled with papers, boxes, chairs, CD racks, suits on hangers, lamps and cutlery. They were piled high in unsorted and unnecessarily exciting piles that threatened to spill paint or crystalware onto the floor. Picasso flung himself onto the toilet, fully clothed, in order to sit down, and announced with a sigh, 'We are done!'

  Michael looked around forlornly. A heap of previously sorted lab reports slithered onto the floor as if depressed and exhausted.

  Picasso gulped water from the tap. 'We go!' he announced. 'We help your friends.' He took the keys and locked up, and Michael found himself heading back to the apartment that was no longer his.

  The Miazgas had economized. They were carrying their own furniture up the stairs. Picasso hoisted the Poles' piano on his own back, and twisted it sideways up the circular staircase. He carried Marta's valuable china in an orange washing-up bowl. The plates and glasses clashed and tinkled as he bounded up the stairs. Picasso pogoed down them again on two feet, like a child splashing in mud puddles. He gave Mr Miazga orders and Madame Miazga compliments. He let Marta mop his brow and he mimed having a fever, panting with the heat she generated.

  Somehow or other, once in the flat, it was Michael and Mr Miazga who did all the less spectacular lifting. Picasso stood back with Marta and conferred and suggested the best places for the furniture to go in their new and cramped surroundings. For this Picasso had absolutely no talent. He suggested their enormous rubber tree stay in the hallway, where it would have no light and block access. With minimum ceremony, he dumped most of Mr Miazga's suits on the kitchen table.

  Michael was by now exhausted and dazed. An avalanche of other people's things poured into what still felt like his home. He kept thinking he would offer people a drink: the tonic water was in Camden Town, the ice was melted. He wanted to comb his hair, but his comb of course would no longer be in its accustomed place on the mantelpiece. Except that it was, poor forlorn, forgotten comb, faithfully waiting his return. See, Michael thought, I haven't forgotten you. If he felt that about a comb, what did he feel about a man? A whole habit of life?

  Michael combed and recombed his hair and watched Picasso. Picasso had flung himself down on the sandy carpet as if it were a bed. He lounged up a hand to accept a cup of tea that Marta had managed to assemble from the scattering of her kitchen.

  Picasso was vain; he seemed to think the smell of his sweat was manly, virile. He did not bathe every day.

  The smell of Picasso permeated the flat. It was not an unpleasant smell, certainly not to Michael. It was a sexual smell. It was as if the very air were stuffed with Picasso's penis. All three of them, wife, lover and anxious husband, could not think of anything other than those powerful genitals.

  Mr Miazga was pale and thin-lipped, and sat on edge, hands clasping his knees, his delicate down-turned face looking as if someone had farted. Mrs Miazga's movements were anxious, faltering. She was disoriented. Her fine blonde hair came increasingly undone. It seemed to be falling out, drifting to the floor.

  Michael took stock. Well, he told himself, you could have had a very clean pub manager instead. Instead you chose Pablo Picasso. It will be exciting, Michael. It will not be easy. And it may not last forever.

  Michael could see the moment when Picasso wanted to get back to painting. In one single rolling motion he was up from the carpet and pounding the palm of his hand with his fist. He looked around the flat as if all of it, the original ownership, the sale, the move, had been his own work. He nodded as if to acknowledge the good job he had done. He said, direct to Michael, 'Come, we go to our home.'

  Then Picasso took Michael's hand. It was evidently unpremeditated, thoughtless, sincere.

  Michael found himself grateful and slightly weak at the knees. So, evidently did Mr Miazga. He settled back in his chair from relief, and his chest expanded, and his eyes zipped left towards his wife, and then widened, once. See? he seemed to say. I told you. They are lovers. You get all excited over a man who is homosexual.

  After they left, outside on the landing Picasso promised, 'I will have the wife.' His voice was airy, amused, and he spoke out of the corners of his mouth as if Madame Miazga were a cigar.

  The new flat in Camden was dark and in disorder. Street lights outlined the crags and valleys of jumble. Michael was given no time for regrets. Picasso herded him to their unmade bed, driven by a lust that Michael knew that he himself had not inspired. Picasso wanted Marta.

  Picasso dozed and then woke up with a snort. He flung off the single summer sheet, and padded i
nto the sitting room, leaving Michael in the bed. Lights blazed around the edges of the bedroom door, and there was a sound of assembling, plugging in, mild swearing. Michael finally admitted that he was awake and would not sleep. He stumped downstairs into the sitting room and saw Picasso at 2.00 am, sitting in front of the computer playing Myst. His bare buttocks hung over the edge of the chair as round as peaches.

  'Hmm,' said Picasso. 'This is not three-dimensional… you just move closer to the drawing.' On his right, there was a pad and scrawled sketches of the Myst world populated with drunken people and smiling goats. Their smiles were drawn as a series of single unbroken spirals describing cheeks. Michael glanced down over Picasso's body. Picasso worked erect.

  'Coming back to bed?' murmured Michael.

  'I don't know,' grunted Picasso.

  In the morning, the bed was cold and when Michael went downstairs Picasso still sat in front of the computer with a cup of cold coffee and strewn stale bread. Had he been up all night?

  'You eat too much,' Picasso announced, in a bad mood. 'You will get fat. You will become a drunken boor.' He sighed, as if it were inevitable. 'Do not expect me to cook you breakfast,' he said. He slip-slopped his way out to the roof garden, carrying his coffee, escaping Michael. It was summer, warm, with beautiful light over the ferns. Michael joined him and Picasso said, 'You missed work yesterday and the day before. If you were more dedicated, you would do a better job.'

  Picasso wanted him out of the flat. Michael showered, and deliberately took his time over coffee and yoghurt and bananas, and pointedly washed up – not a Picasso habit – and left at his usual time feeling bloated around the eyes and saddle-sore.

  No one at work mentioned that Michael had missed two days. He began to explain that he had had to move flats suddenly. No one asked him any questions about it. Ebru and Emilio were quiet, brisk and business-like, as if Michael were a customer they would attend to in a moment. He filed slides and looked at data, and by the end of the day realized that he had spent it alone.

  When he got back home, he found Picasso at the computer, now wearing Michael's best Japanese bathrobe. The game was noisier and the images moved. A tiny alien leapt and jumped and avoided being fried by robots.

  Picasso kept playing. 'She is softened and ripe and if you are a man at all you will have her,' he said. Then he looked up. His eyes were angry and hungry. 'Do it because I tell you. I will like fucking you better if I think you are a real man.'

  Upstairs, Mrs Miazga was in Michael's bed. She was huge, pink and dishevelled, her hair in Pre-Raphaelite waves. The room smelled of her hair, and of her body, opened and reopened during the course of the day.

  'Visit me,' she said in a warm and friendly voice, and held out her arms. She looked dazed and dazzled, her blue eyes warmed like a southern sea. She smiled in complicity. I know you are lovers, we will be his lovers together, love me too.

  Well, thought Michael. He could just surf it. Let himself be carried by the wave of adventure.

  He went into their new bedroom, stuffed with boxes, some of them full of shoes and vinyl records, and found his sponge bag. He crunched his Viagra into a bitter, tongue-curling paste, to make it work faster. Then he cleaned his teeth to rinse away the bitterness.

  The taste of Mrs Miazga's mouth was edged with hormones and a scent he did not quite like. But her huge soft, smooth body was a wonderful maternal harbour. Michael weighed into her, waves rippling around him. There was an excitement about being where Picasso had been, in the folds of flesh still moist from him. Perhaps it was the Viagra kicking in early. Whatever it was, it joined forces with Michael's reluctance to have sex with a woman. Conjoined, they had an unexpected effect. Michael rode Mrs Miazga for forty-five minutes. He did not come, but she did, three times. 'My God, you are super lover,' she said in fractured English. Her fingers strutted pleased up the side of his arm. 'I can tell, you have had many women through your hands.'

  Picasso was standing in the doorway. He chuckled approvingly. Much of the time his eyes were kind, as now. 'My big friend loves life,' he said proudly. He mimicked the gesture of Madame's fingers, and strode forward. 'Now I show you,' he said. With no manners, Picasso pulled Michael away from her. He grinned down at the woman. 'I am back,' Picasso said, his teeth bared, and she looked up at him adoringly conquered.

  Michael was relieved to be relieved. He went downstairs, clothes draped over his arms, showered and sat in the sitting room. He poured himself a whisky and ate crisps. For the next two hours, the man he loved was in the next room fucking someone else. Michael turned on the television, low. He was just as alone as when he had been living with Phil. OK, you learn. Having a lover, husband, whatever, does not stop you being alone.

  Michael had power. He could get rid of Picasso whenever he liked. He could walk in there now and banish him, leaving Marta stranded and shocked.

  Except that that had not been the deal. Picasso had given him what he asked for in exchange for life. And why did Picasso want life so very much?

  On the sofa, on a sketchpad, there was a drawing of Michael. It was one continuous line of charcoal, a single gulp of information, stylish and twitching as a cat's tail. It was a drawing of a man who was windswept as if at sea, eyes narrowed in the face of some invisible force. The tiny Chinese eyes each consisted of a single charcoal line, but you could tell they were about to weep from wind blown directly onto the cornea. The mouth was downturned, enduring and elated, somehow just about to smile, as one smiles in a storm, from exhilaration. It was a drawing of a man caught up in a miracle. It was a new Picasso.

  And it would disappear the moment Michael sent Picasso away.

  Madame Miazga darted into the bathroom, a towel wrapped around her. The water suddenly hissed and she began to sing as she showered.

  Picasso emerged in Michael's boxer shorts, strutting like a welterweight champion. He slapped his belly and announced, 'We go drinking!'

  Madame threw on her light and translucent dress. She smiled warmly at both of them, and giggled with delight. Only a certain hardness in the contrast between her blue eyes and the mascara around them gave a clue that this was a woman who had mastered academic politics. She put a longer finger that was exactly at 90 degrees to the floor against her freshly glossed lips. Sssh, it meant, this is our secret. Her eyes went soft, forgiving, pleading, in memory of her husband. She loved Mr Miazga, but perhaps found him too fastidious.

  They separated in the street, waving good night. In a local Camden pub, Picasso played cards and smoked and joined in a game of darts with fat bearded men in black t-shirts and earrings of whom Michael was very slightly afraid. Picasso's cigarette balanced on his lips all night, and he nodded brusquely when his turn came. When others played he sipped beer, looking serious and constructively occupied.

  They left at eleven o'clock and for some reason Picasso was angry with Michael.

  'Those people were trash,' he said. 'They have no conversation. Why did we go there?'

  Michael was dismayed at the unfairness of it. 'Because you wanted to!'

  'Are you alive or dead? Don't you know where the interesting quarters are? Or do you live inside your computer? I will have to find the interesting people. I can see that I will have to do everything. I even have to find women for you. I even have to cook! What do you do well, eh? Anything?'

  Without waiting for an answer, Picasso flicked open the double lock on their door and raced up the steps ahead of Michael. Michael listened to the rapid fire of Picasso's feet. He felt leaden. He did not want to go in. It was not his house or his bed. Come on, Michael, he told himself, you have nowhere else to go. But his legs simply would not move.

  Michael had thought he was happy and that Picasso liked him. Michael thought: he can snatch away happiness like a scarf. The reversal felt complete. It felt as if all love were gone and the relationship over. Like a ship in warp drive, space seemed to travel around him, and Michael arrived at the opposite pole of the universe. He imagined moving out, selling
the flat, sending Picasso back. He considered going direct to a hotel to spend the night. He wanted the affair to end. Michael's eyes ached with loss.

  'Henry?' he asked the night air. 'Henry, I need you.'

  There was a tap on his shoulder and he turned around, and there was Henry, hair in his eyes, waiting.

  'Henry, I'm in love and it's all going wrong.'

  Henry looked sad while smiling. 'He's impossible.'

  'Yes.'

  'He says things that are so unfair you can't believe he said them. They're outrageous.'

  Michael found himself pausing, and waiting. The set-up was too neat. Henry had something to say. 'That's about it.'

  'Everyone's impossible to live with, Michael. Even saints. I lived with a saint for years. Most of the time he was wonderful, but sometimes all he seemed to care about was his research.' A smile kept playing about Henry's face.

  Picasso was something like a saint and nothing like one.

  'There's nothing for it, mate. You just hammer each other into each other's shape. And either it gets comfortable or it doesn't.'

  Michael half-chuckled. 'You're not much comfort, you know that?'

  Henry reached up, and there, in the street in Camden Town, started combing Michael's hair with his fingers. He looked up and down Michael in tenderness. 'You look great.'

  'I feel awful.'

  'You look… adult.' Henry's eyes sparkled. It was love. Love of a particularly airy, open, fleshless kind.

  And Michael felt a kind of hesitation.

  Henry gave Michael a little push towards the door. 'Go on. Have it out with him. See who wins.'

  Michael hesitated. He would rather stay there, with Henry.

  'I'm an Angel, I won't always be here. You mustn't get dependent on me.' Henry started to walk away, determined. 'Go on. It's down to you.'