by Geoff Ryman
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 blinked.
‘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.
‘You’re looking so old,’ she said. ‘That’s a compliment.’
‘And you’re looking so over the top. And that’s a compliment too.’
She smiled in approval. You don’t take any shit if you want to sit at the right table. ‘I bought us a bottle,’ she said with a swagger.
Michael led her into the dining room, where there were champagne glasses. ‘Babe,’ he said, expertly feigning a seventeen-year-old feigning sophistication. ‘Tell me. Who should I screw next?’
‘A woman,’ she said and blew out smoke. ‘A woman definitely. It’s just so naff being trapped with one sex.’
‘Well OK, but who? I’ve already slept with you. If you count as a woman, that is.’ He opened the cabinet for glasses.
Her face started out mean and bitchy. ‘If you ever sleep – get to sleep with me and I get to – oh bollocks!’ She stamped her foot, and started to laugh at herself.
‘The line you’re looking for goes: if you do sleep with me and I ever hear of it, I shall be very, very annoyed.’
She nodded yes, yes, I screwed up.
‘The implication is that my dick is so small you’d either be asleep or you wouldn’t notice.’
‘All right.’
Michael had another one at the ready. ‘It’s a wonderful old joke, I haven’t heard it in months.’
Being bitchy was such a simple, innocent game really. Why had he been so scared of it? Bottles laughed and gripped his arm. ‘All right then, but at least I bought us a bottle.’ She was suddenly the gauche loud girl of years before. ‘And, just to complete the image of sophistication, I bought us … a couple of straws.’
And that made Michael laugh.
They sat down at the kitchen table and Michael expertly turned the bottle around the cork and not the other way around so it didn’t gush. This impressed Bottles beyond all reason. ‘Tch. I usually get it down my front. Here you go.’ In went the straws.
They had accordion bendy bits, which Bottles adjusted to face each of them.
‘Honestly, it’s like we’re at an American soda fountain or something.’
She nodded and laughed, yes, yes, that was the joke.
Something about Bottles changed who Michael was. Around her, he was able to tell jokes. ‘Do you want to put ice cream in it? I mean, really come on like an urban sophisticate.’
Bottles mimed laughter silently. Silence was her way of controlling what she knew could be an ungodly squawk. Silence did indeed give her a certain lacquering of dignity. She wobbled her eyebrows, stuck the straw in, looked him dead in the eye, and began to blow into the champagne, frothing it up. Bottles doubled up with laughter, and let rip a horrible, piercing screech of a laugh. Michael looked at her, maintaining a stone face. That set her off again. Just as she was recovering, he leaned forward as if in sympathy, to pat her arm.
‘Suck, dear. Blow is just an expression.’
Bottles had probably arrived stoned, which might account for the callisthenic effect the next laugh had on her; she looked like she was doing some kind of warm-up exercise. Conversation took a back seat to the recovery of composure.
Bottles wiped her face. ‘Oh, man, if you had done that back in 1977, you’d have been in a band.’
‘Now then. You will recall, we were discussing who I should fuck next.’
‘Indeed. And I have just the gel for you.’ She was imitating some kind of school-ma’am. ‘That American singer you like so much. No, not Julie Andrews.’
It was Michael’s turn to laugh.
‘The other one.’ Her voice returned to normal, perfectly serious. ‘The good one.’
Why are men satisfied with whores?
There were some pretty weird radio stations in Southern California in the 1970s. They were meant to lose money. Tax-loss radio, it was called. Tax-loss radio broadcast from trailers or the basements of disused churches. The DJs played whatever they liked: Black Flag next to Tony Bennett next to Miles Davis next to Magazine.
Next to Billie Holiday.
At fourteen, Michael didn’t really know who Billie Holiday was, except that maybe she was something to do with Motown. Lost in the doldrums of knowing no one in California, being a teenager, being gay, Michael suddenly heard a voice that sounded like he felt.
Jazz was supper-club music for people who wore slightly transparent socks and liked it when Frank Sinatra sang ‘hot damn’. It was in old movies. And in this old movie-music style was someone singing about a lynching. The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, drawled a slow, sad, horrified voice.
There was something relentlessly modern about it, like someone singing Brecht or a song about a serial murder. It was perfect, just perfect. It was cool. Michael could see himself coming back from California with that kind of music and being cool.
He reckoned that the stores in the camp would be good on jazz, so he went there and asked by name for Billie Holiday. They stocked a lot of her product. By luck alone, he landed on the fifties album, Lady Sings the Blues. He read the song titles, which for the last time, would mean nothing to him: ‘God Bless the Child’, ‘Lady Sings the Blues’, ‘Strange Fruit’, ‘I Thought About You’. Walking back to the bus stop, he met someone who was almost a friend, a Marine’s son on the baseball team. With him was the coolest guy of them all, the son of a black officer. His name was Hendricks, Rousseau Hendricks, and he claimed to be Jimi Hendrix’s cousin.
By now Michael’s taste in records was a reliable source of scoring social points for the children of Marines. Nobody, but nobody, bought Julie Andrews records except Michael. So when the white kid said, with a hooded smile, ‘What have you got now?’ Michael had a sudden surging stab of pride. I’ll show you.
Out came the blue album. ‘Oh, man,’ said the white kid in real embarrassment. The record looked old.
But Rousseau Hendricks looked up, his eyes widening. ‘You bought this?’
‘Yeah, it’s got all her best stuff on it.’ At least, that’s what the guy in the record department said.
‘And that’s the best there is,’ said Rousseau. The white kid scowled. Michael had scored cool points plus. Michael knew then that his instinct had been right; Billie was what he needed.
Michael returned to Britain and scored cool points all through his brief period of glamour. He played Billie Holiday for Bottles in the long magic afternoons before parents came back from work. It was like listening to the Bible.
‘Oh, that is the story of my life,’ Bottles had declared. It wasn’t then, but it was soon to become so, for a while.
Later, Michael read the biographies. Her voice had not always been sandpaper; she had not always sung in a heightened style. The recordings from the thirties were smooth, dapper, even merry.
It was that Billie he called up. She arrived direct from 1938, having left the Artie Shaw band.
Billie arrived unfussed, plump and pretty in a blue dress with white polka dots. She sat down on the sofa, lit a cigarette, looked at Michael and crumpled forward. She leaned back, smiling, narrow-eyed and took one long draught of her cigarette as if it were a cooling drink.
‘Oh, baby,’ Billie muttered to herself. ‘Man.’ She shook her head.
‘What?’ asked Michael nervously. ‘What?’
Billie blasted smoke out of both nostrils. ‘You don’t even know what you want, do you?’ Somewhere there were nerves; she suddenly reached up to tug on her hair. ‘You going to offer the Lady a drink or not?’
‘Sure. Um. Whiskey? Gin?’ Michael tried to remember what he had in stock.
‘A Grand Slam,’ she said confidently.
‘What’s that?’
‘Oh, man,’ she groaned again. She strode into his tiny kitchen. ‘Where do you keep the hooch around here?’ She started to mix the drinks. It was Michael who was fussed. Michael fussed around the cabinet and the ice-cube tray.
‘So. You don’t know why you called me here.’
‘I … uh … a friend suggested it.’
‘Um,’ she said, sounding completely unflattered. ‘Maybe I ought to meet your friend instead.’
‘I … I’m supposed to be exploring sex or something, and I guess I’m trying to do justice to women.’
‘Justice to women. My, my. You reckon that’s possible?’ Billie unobtrusively took down another glass and started making him a drink too. ‘Looky here. This is how you fix a Grand Slam.’ She showed him, and passed him the glass. ‘Here. You look like you need it.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome.’ She said it because it was good form to do so, and comportment was important. ‘So. What do I get out of this?’
‘Well, some people think it’s neat being alive.’
‘I never did think that life was neat particularly. Death’s part of the deal. Why should I be happy to be resurrected as a whore? Hmm? When I spent all my whole waking life trying to make myself a Lady?’
Michael coughed, with unease. ‘Yeah. I … uh … I’m a bit English and to us a Lady is some old bat whose great great grandfather was good at railways or killing people and who lives in a stately home.’
Lady Day suppressed a prejudice of her own, visibly swallowed it. Who were more ofay than the English? Then something like sympathy swam into her eyes.
‘A Lady is somebody with dignity. And nobody can take that dignity away.’
Sympathy swam up in Michael as well. ‘Did you get there?’
‘Yes,’ she said in a determined voice. ‘Yes, I did.’
And Michael wondered: how much of her future does this Angel know?
Lady Day was concerned about this present. ‘So you see why I don’t accept this situation. I was a whore at fourteen because my mama had just become one too, and it was the only way to put food on the table. I didn’t want to be no whore, I was made to be a whore, and a stupid white judge put me into the workhouse at fourteen years old. She didn’t jail the men who paid me that fifty cents. They knew I was fourteen. Th
ey didn’t go to jail.’
Smoke poured out of her nostrils like scorn.
‘Men like you. White men who would never have a black gal in their house.’
It was not often that an Angel expressed active, positive dislike. Michael wondered what to do. He could send her back, but that would be chicken-shit. So, Michael told himself, hear the truth, tell the truth.
‘Not men like me. Those men were seventy years ago. And they weren’t gay.’
‘Gay?’ She scowled and was bumped from behind by a chuckle. ‘What, you a whore too?’ Then she was bumped by the truth. ‘Oh, I get you. You’re a pansy.’
‘Yup.’
‘Aw hell, there was a pansy craze not so long ago. A lot of clubs had pansy comperes. A couple of guys in bands were like you and they were always pretty nice except Moose. He always used to get drunk and mean and call everyone else a sister. He hated women though he was one himself.’
Twang. Like a guitar string something snapped. Billie suddenly stretched out like a cat finding a warm place to sit. ‘So. You been whoring around.’
Michael explained. ‘It’s like a gift. I can sleep with anyone I want to. Alive, dead. Except they’re not real.’
Billie coughed a cigarette laugh. ‘Man, you won the male jackpot.’
Truth. ‘I’m impotent and it’s ruined my life so far.’
‘Ruined, how?’
‘My boyfriend’s left me, and I’m not concentrating on my work.’
‘Sounds like life, baby.’
‘No. Not when I can call dead people back to life.’
Billie thoughtfully plucked a bit of stray tobacco from the tip of her tongue. ‘So. You got yourself a calling. Nobody said being called was any fun. I got myself a calling. It kept me alive a long, long time after all I wanted to be was dead.’
She managed a smile, held up her drink and toasted it, toasted her inhuman calling, toasted Michael’s calling too.
‘There was this time, I was singing against Baby White at the Apollo. And all the Apollo wanted was fast-time stuff, and folks who sang like it was opera, and they thought I was just imitating Louis. So I got up there, and I dragged anyway. Dragged behind the beat. I did not knock ’em dead at the Apollo. Not ‘til ten years later, anyway.’
