by Geoff Ryman
Ebru’s grin opened wide. ‘You did that? You asked her out? Oh, but this is very romantic.’
Hugh’s smile veered sideways and his eyes turned inward. ‘She couldn’t speak English. She couldn’t understand what I said. She’d been telling jokes in Portuguese.’
‘What did she do?’
‘She smiled sweetly and walked away.’ Something strange was happening in Hugh’s face. It was becoming beautiful: the fresh skin, the black hair. Tenderness suffused it. He looked at Michael. ‘That is what I would do. I would use it to make restitution. For all the opportunities that I missed.’
The men I slept with, did they make a difference?
In his youth, Michael had imagined that he would be a traveller, visiting India, China and the Andaman Islands. Thailand was as near to it as he ever got. Mark knew a Thai art dealer who stayed in Michael’s flat, and who returned the favour.
Michael went to Thailand in 1985, and spent the entire trip in an agony of unfulfilled desire. The Thais were sleek and smooth and friendly, but he turned them all down. He and the rest of the world were terrified of Aids.
Bangkok was not. The Thai friend took him to see shows where naked boys danced: some were slim and effeminate; others looked like samurai. They sat on Michael’s lap wearing nothing but dressing gowns and jockstraps. He bought them drinks, and under the cover of their dressing gowns, they flipped their erect genitals out of the jockstraps and used the heads of their penises to give Michael’s bare arms butterfly kisses. He still turned them down. His Thai friend shook his head in disbelief. Michael saw some of the other Europeans at the bar: outrageous air stewards who were going upstairs with one boy after another, or ugly Europeans whose faces seemed puffed out with disgust or greed. This, Michael thought, would be a terrifically easy place to get ill.
He went to the far north, to the Mekong and the borders with Laos where tourism ended. The Communist municipalities blared propaganda from loudspeakers across the calm river. Michael walked along its banks, and heard Blondie coming from a Buddhist temple, as if competing with the Communists. On tiptoe he peered in through a window and saw fifty Buddhist monks in training, all in their teens, bopping to ‘Call Me’.
He walked on, until an uninviting soldier with a gun waved him back. When he passed the temple again, the same monks were all lounging on the river bank, sitting on upside-down, beached boats. They were young, bored and falling out of orange robes with unfulfilled desire. Their naked shoulders had the colour and gloss of polished wooden floors.
‘Parlez-vous français?’ one of them called.
Michael did his best. It is a heart-stopping thing suddenly to be surrounded by admiring young men.
‘Vous êtes riches?’ the young monk demanded.
They all laughed and giggled, and adjusted their dress.
No, he said, I am not rich, I am a scientist. This was a mistake. The boys veered away from any possibility of being kept by a rich Westerner. Suddenly they wanted Michael for his mind. They had only the dimmest idea of what a scientist did. Michael tried to explain: something about the brain. They all nodded in respect and looked a bit ashamed.
‘Je suis pêcheur,’ said the one who spoke, his smile dim with shame. He was a fisherman.
‘Vous parlez le français beaucoup plus mieux que moi.’
The smile widened. ‘Je suis vietnamois. Tous les vietnamois parlent le français. Je suis réfugié.’
The boy explained shyly: his father had worked in the French embassy in Hanoi. He was not allowed to move more than a mile from the town.
The boys were interested in Michael and so demanded what in the West would be considered personal details. Was he married? No? Oh, that is sad, children work for you. Do you have a girlfriend? Michael lied and said many: he had many girlfriends. The boys all cooed and laughed.
One boy kept pressing questions on Michael: did he live in a big apartment? Did he have many clothes? Did he drive an ambulance? The boy was very pretty indeed and paler than the others, with a rounder face. Ethnic Chinese, Michael decided.
‘Voo lee voo dang see?’ the soft boy asked. ‘Noo avong ung fate.’
Michael didn’t understand. The fisherman explained. ‘Une fête. Avec la musique. Il veut que vous allez danser avec nous.’
The boys all demanded it in unison. They made it clear that it would be an enormous privilege to dance disco with a real Westerner. Michael could also see that some of them were telling jokes about his height and girth and hairiness. They would see Westerners as big, clumsy, slow and indelicate. He very nearly said no, out of humility.
But he loved dancing. In fact it would be easier to dance with the boys than to talk with them. ‘Ce n’est pas une problème avec vos maîtres?’
‘Non. C’est educatif! Nous dansons avec un savant d’angleterre!’
So Michael bopped to Michael Jackson. It was the most enormous, innocent fun. Michel danced a reel and a jig, which made them roar with laughter. Each of the boys in turn did something silly to make him feel at home. Some of them made goofy demon faces; a big thick-bodied youth nipped onto his hands and walked on them; one of them moonwalked.
And then the little ethnic Chinese began a traditional Thai dance. There was no mistaking the hand gestures; the covering of the face, the alluring postures, the hands held out to ward off unwelcome advances. He was miming a female part. The boys chuckled but Michael saw them looking sideways to gauge his reaction.
The boy tripped up to Michael and, fully in character, made some kind of declaration or assertion. Suddenly sick in his belly, Michael knew that something was being offered, something he wanted. He pretended not to understand. Befuddled, he turned to his Vietnamese host.
‘C’est une danse. Une mise-en-scène.’ The Vietnamese started to laugh. He caught the eyes of his fellows, and slapped his hands together and turned away, grinning.
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 maître honoured Michael with Nescafé. 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 Ch
inese.
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 cross-country 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, partl
y 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.
