6

Alex left for lunch a little early, and trotted out down the resonant staircase and through the vaulted vestibules which formed so misleading an introduction to his small, net-curtained office. In the street he unclipped his security pass, and slipped it into his suit pocket; a coach was slowly releasing a team of garish old holiday-makers, with their own badges saying ‘Warren’ and ‘Mary-Jo’ in large schoolroom script. He felt for a moment both anonymous and at home. The sunshine flashed off moving cars and vans, and gleamed in the polished visors and swords of the motionless horse-guards, but there was a lively breeze too that flapped at his jacket and span the dust around as he crossed the Horseguards Parade. He was trying not to hurry, but misjudged the traffic in the Mall, and had to hang back and then sprint to get across.

In the courtyard of the Royal Academy, under the blank windows of the various learned societies, he felt a familiar awkwardness, as though being watched, though he knew the only watcher was himself. At the top of the stairs he showed his Friend’s ticket and signed his name. He sensed the grand continuity of the galleries with the building in which he worked, the pillars and architraves, the high commanding forms, and the dark-suited figures who moved among them, old or prematurely ageing, their talk, when you overheard it, both imperious and discreet. There was an astounding exhibition of sculpture from a great private collection, but the objects, which ranged from primitive grave-goods to rococo saints, from Iceland to Oceania, were commented on with the same mixture of diplomatic wariness and faintly hostile amusement as the affairs and crises of foreign countries were in Alex’s place of work.

He swooped and rambled quite quickly through the first couple of rooms, and when he saw what he was looking for in the third room he approached it obliquely, and with a pretence of donnish absorption in some other items. He inspected the chin, mouth, nose and right eye of a young man, eloquent, polished features with the slight crystalline sheen of marble, and saw them dissolve as he passed by; from behind, the fragment looked like a rough missile, or a meteorite. He came round it again and saw the splinter of face reassert itself. Then he let his gaze float to the head beyond it, a different but perceptible sheen in the crest of blond fuzz and the unweathered smoothness of the skin. The young had a bloom, it was true – despite the hooded, hung-over stare directed halfaccusingly into the middle distance. Alex came forward with a grin already going and an odd third-person sense of himself as a figure unexpectedly descending. He watched closely, and with a kind of fascinated relief, as Danny’s disgruntled mouth opened into a wide smile.

‘Hello, Alex!’

‘Hi, Danny . . .’

They shook hands, looking keenly into each other’s eyes, Alex’s other hand lightly gripping Danny’s upper arm, feeling his quick uncertain attempt to harden up the biceps, then letting go with an admiring fingering of the stiffish grey-blue serge of his uniform. Danny shrugged his shoulders round inside the jacket and shuffled to attention. With his epaulettes and his big patch pockets and his No 3 crop he looked like a bolshy wartime recruit to the RAF, though the triangular tuft beneath the lower lip was a mid-nineties detail. The walkie-talkie in his left hand crackled, he listened to the incomprehensible message and said ‘Yeah’ with a little sneer of tedium for Alex’s benefit.

‘So how’s it going?’ said Alex, in an idiom that was slightly unnatural to him.

‘He’s a wanker, that one,’ said Danny, shaking his head at the receiver in his hand. ‘He’s been on my back all day because I was five minutes late – if that.’

Alex smiled, sympathising, but knowing instinctively that it had been nearer half an hour. ‘Don’t you go mad with boredom?’ he asked.

Danny gaped and slumped as if at the grossness of the understatement, but then said with a smile, ‘No, it’s not too bad. It’s a lot better than supermarkets. There you get chatted up by housewives, here you’re cruised to bits by men. This is more responsible, of course.’ He stepped back to keep his eye on a woman apparently mesmerised by a sleek stone Buddha. ‘They hurl their phone-numbers at you,’ he said. ‘I’ve had twelve this week.’

‘Really,’ said Alex, already resenting these other suitors, and confused to find he wasn’t alone in thinking Danny beautiful. ‘And how many have you –’

But Danny was moving warily away, as another securityman, a bald, scowling Indian who looked unlikely to receive such advances, came marching slowly through from the next gallery; with a delicate regard for Danny’s position Alex sidled off to see something else, wondering at the same time if Danny really wanted to talk at all. He had worked their friendship up so much in his mind, and followed it through the coming months with such tencer imagination, that it was a shock to discover he still had all the work to do. He found himself in front of a sixteenth-century Spanish Saint Sebastian made of brightly glazed pottery. Holes had been left all over it for the arrows, so that it looked like a huge anthropomorphic strainer. He imagined it being pulled from a pond and water jetting out of it for a few seconds, then slackening and dwindling to a drip.

There was no sign of Danny now, and he walked round discreetly searching for him among the thickening lunch-time crowds. He wondered, with his usual instinct for the bleakest view, if he was just an other old queen hoping for the young man’s favour, pressing his number on him like a supplicant bringing his absurd request to a shrine. He looked around at the detritus of old religions, vessels of exhausted magic. In front of him was a mask of blistered bronze, paper-brittle and azure with age. For a moment he remembered the broken-nosed mask on Tony Bowerchalke’s pyramid. Perhaps he was wrong, but he thought something had passed between him and Danny as they groped round that unsettling building.

‘Don’t breathe on the objects please sir.’ Danny was beside him, and slid an arm quickly round his waist.

‘Are you okay?’

‘Yeah, fine.’ His demanding mouth twisted into a grimace. ‘It’s so great to see you,’ he said.

‘You too,’ said Alex. ‘I suddenly realised on my way here you might be on duty.’

‘You mean you didn’t come just to see me?’

‘Of course I did really,’ Alex said, glad that the little pleasantry was also the truth.

‘I was going to give you a ring actually.’

‘Oh . . .’

‘See if you wanted to go out one night.’

This was exactly what Alex wanted to do, and he said, ‘That would be gorgeous.’

‘I felt so sorry for you last weekend,’ Danny said, perhaps revealing that his motives were mainly charitable. ‘What is the matter with my dad at the moment? Justin not giving him his Weetabix, maybe.’

‘I don’t think that can be it,’ said Alex quietly, with a sick second of recall of the sound of the two of them at it. ‘It was probably stupid of me to come.’

‘No, I’m glad you did. It made it much more bearable for me, you know. I was getting such a heavy number about Terry staying over.’

‘Ah yes . . .’

Danny looked around to see if they could be overheard. ‘Dad’s not all that together about me liking blokes.’

‘Oh! . . . Well . . .’

‘That stunt in the car!’ Danny frowned and slowly shook his head. ‘What the fuck was all that about . . .?’

Alex gave a curt unamused laugh; then said, ‘He was very upset afterwards.’

‘Must be the time of life . . .’ Danny said, sagely or cynically, Alex couldn’t tell.

A couple of young men drifted past, one of them in sunglasses as if the art might hurt his eyes, the other talking and swivelling his arm from the elbow, perhaps to explain it to his friend, but eyeing Danny lazily up and down – then gasping and stretching back to him, flicking his fingers as if he had been asked a difficult question. Eventually he said, ‘Sean!’

Danny nodded tolerantly. ‘It’s Dan,’ he said.

‘Dan! I nearly walked right past you, in all that butch clobber. This is Hector by the way.’

Hector winced in acknowledgement.

‘This is my friend Alex.’

‘Pleased to meet you. Alex. I’m Aubrey.’ He gazed at Danny and clutched his hands to his chest in almost tearful amazement at the encounter.

‘Well!’ he said. ‘Haven’t seen you out for ages.’

‘I was in the country last weekend – we both were,’ said Danny, signalling Alex and giving a surprising suggestion of closeness. Aubrey looked unimpressed by this.

‘Ooh, not settling down, I hope.’

‘How about you?’

‘I don’t know . . .’ He gestured in turn to the speechless, perhaps non-anglophone, Hector, and gave him an irritable sluttish stare. ‘What you doing this weekend?’

‘Not quite sure,’ said Danny. ‘May be at the Ministry tomorrow night.’

‘Oh . . .’ Alex murmured, wondering which Ministry, and picturing some familiar function, Danny in uniform checking bags and coats.

‘It’s a bit straight, isn’t it? Though what’s it matter when everyone’s off their face anyway?’ Aubrey smiled wearily. ‘Can you get us on the guest-list?’ Alex thought that would be pretty unlikely, unless it was somewhere very socially compromised, like Ag and Fish.

‘Look, I’m not supposed to talk to people when I’m on duty,’ Danny said, and pointed to the tab on his shoulder, on which the word ALERT was embroidered.

Aubrey took it well. ‘All right, doll, well maybe see you’ – giving him a kiss on the cheek, which was obviously also not allowed. Hector smiled and shook hands firmly, as if after an invigorating exchange of views.

‘Shagged them both.’ said Danny, when the couple had turned the corner; ‘though Aubrey doesn’t know that.’ He glanced around naughtily. ‘Hector is’ – and he merely mouthed the word ‘huge’, with a comic mime of staring incredulity. He walked off, in his squashy, slightly squeaky Doc Martens, but turned, in front of a long Greek lion. ‘I’ll ring you tonight . . . but Saturday, okay. Keep it free.’ And he gave him the smile again, which to Alex seemed more than ever private and unpredictable, like something you might normally only discover with more intimate knowledge of a person, like Hector’s hugeness, but which to him was far more exciting than anything like that.

On the way back to the office he realised he’d forgotten to have lunch, and ate a sandwich on a bench in St James’s Square. The plane-trees, in their grandly reluctant way, were only just coming into leaf. Alex felt the beautiful unwise emotions of something starting up, and grinned to himself between bites, as if his sandwich was unaccountably delicious; though what he was savouring was the longed-for surprise of being wanted. He looked up, with a sense of being still in the exhibition, at the statue of William of Orange on its tall plinth. The king was heroically bare-chested, and reined his horse back with a glare into the future he was destined to command. The horse’s high bronze foreleg was frozen in the air – and Alex pictured it plunging forward, along the paths and away under the trees.

Danny lived just off Ladbroke Grove in a tall terrace house which until last Christmas had been a private hotel. Beside the front door the words HOT AND COLD and APPROVED could still faintly be seen through a covering of whitewash. Alex arrived early and walked on past; he wasn’t sure how keen he should appear to be, though he had been thinking ravenously about Danny for the past two days. He had forgotten the mood of a new affair, the compulsive mix of risk and reassurance. He had spent an hour that morning in Sloane Street having his hair made fractionally shorter; and more than an hour walking about the house in different clothes and glancing soulfully but self-critically into mirrors. He never put on weight and at thirty-six could still wear everything he owned. He found himself zipping up jeans and laboriously unbuttoning shirts he hadn’t touched since long before he met Justin; some of them were probably fashionable again, though others, he was pretty sure, were merely evidence of a styleless past. He finally left home in blue jeans, a white T-shirt and a short black leather jacket, an anonymously classic effect which belied the carnival of uncertainty that had produced it.

So this was Danny’s neighbourhood. Alex wondered if he ever used that gloomy, velvet-curtained pub, the Chepstow Castle – though of course gay men nowadays were meant to use bars, where there was nowhere to sit down and the drinks cost twice as much. There was a launderette, a caged West Indian off-licence, and an Italian restaurant which looked attractively mysterious from outside, though photos in the window showed the interior as a hell of crowded tables, sadistic gypsy fiddlers and dangling Chianti bottles. He thought of the evening he’d been meant to spend, Traviata and then dinner with his old friend Hugh, and Hugh’s swiftly hidden envy when he learned why he’d been chucked.

He came back and searched the tall panel of bells. A housing trust now ran the place and seemed to have welcomed in an extraordinary number of people. The bell marked ‘Woodfield’ was near the bottom, and seeing the name again, with its trilling resonance of sexual power, Alex felt the incongruity of chasing after Robin’s son. He wasn’t sure if he was taking a devious revenge on Robin for stealing Justin, or if he was helplessly joining Justin under the spell of the family. But then Danny himself was jumping at him with a kiss on the cheek and a tight hug that was almost aggressive.

He led him through to a tall room at the back of the house, with a window open above the garden. It still had the built-in cupboards and corner washbasin of its hotel days and an overwhelming wallpaper of bunched pink roses on a pale yellow ground. There were various house-plants, some thrusting and barbed, others droopy and sprawling, like conflicting moods. ‘I’ve just got to get ready,’ Danny said, half-unbuttoning his shirt and pulling it over his head like a kid rushing for games. Alex smiled at him, and tried to look casually at his lean hairless torso, the surprisingly fleshy brown nipples. He immediately loved the ordinariness of him as well as the oddity. When Danny turned and stooped to splash water from the basin on his face and neck Alex saw the small blue knot, like something from a scouting manual, tattooed on his left shoulder-blade. He felt abashed that Danny had already marked himself for life; he turned away and slouched about the room in such a relaxed fashion that he looked as if he might fall over.

He took in the jumble on the mantelpiece, but didn’t study the curling snapshots too closely for fear of cutting himself on the grins and glints of Danny’s world. He had an impression of life as a party, as a parade of flash-lit hugs and kisses, in a magic zone where everyone was young and found to be beautiful. He drifted over to the bed, which was wide and low, with a red cotton bedspread neatly pulled up. Danny’s phrase about ‘shagging’ Aubrey and Hector came back to him.

‘Now what shall I wear?’ Danny said, towelling his head and coming over to Alex with half a smile and the peculiar promise he seemed to give off that there was going to be fun.

‘I’m not the person to ask,’ Alex said, uncertain whether to admit to his own dress anxieties, his desire to fit in while still somehow being himself. He saw that since Justin had gone he was in tatters as a social being; he didn’t know what effect to make, or how to make it.

‘You look great,’ said Danny, with an emphasis on each word, as if contradicting someone else. He crouched to undo his shoes, then stood and unbuttoned his trousers and wiggled his hips to make them fall down. Alex felt a bit breathless.

‘Oh yes,’ he said inside his head, with a split-second glance at the leftward tumble in Danny’s black boxer-shorts. He wondered if he was meant to make a move on him now, and if he would always regret not doing so, but Danny turned and opened the big cupboard, in which clothes were hung or folded in a way which suggested discipline and self-respect. And in a couple of minutes he was dressed, in green and beige gingham bags that might have been made from the curtains of a holiday caravan, and a loose pink tank-top and a white sleeveless shirt left open and hanging out; he sat on the bed to pull on black trainers with soles suggestive of a specialised orthopaedic need.

‘Do you want some white wine?’

Alex said yes, and Danny went out to the kitchen, leaving the door open – he could hear him talking to someone. He went to the window, so as to be somewhere when Danny returned, and gazed out at the tangled garden and at other figures getting dressed and undressed and pouring themselves drinks in the tall back windows of the next terrace. That brief routine, the stripping, the picking out of different clothes, had moved Alex and confused him. He saw how long it was since he had shared such unselfconscious moments with another man, or even allowed himself to think in terms of his own happiness. He had a sense of the danger of it, like the neglected reminder of an old injury, as well as an amazed absorption in Danny; he found himself forgetting that Danny was fourteen years younger – or half-forgetting: the clothes he had finally chosen were a cheery signal of the distance between them.

Danny came back in still talking unencouragingly to the man from the kitchen, who had a black pony-tail and bare feet and looked as if he had just got up. ‘Yeah . . . great . . . okay . . . I’ll let you know . . .

‘I’m Dobbin,’ said the man, leaning in the doorway and scratching himself.

‘Hi,’ said Alex cautiously. ‘Alex.’

‘Alex. Nice one.’ Dobbin winced. ‘That was some fierce gear,’ he went on, as if Alex knew what he was talking about. They both looked vaguely at Danny’s trousers.

‘We’ve got some stuff to do,’ said Danny. ‘I’ll catch you later.’

‘Okay, man.’ Dobbin winked a gummy eye and wandered away, maybe hoping to be reminded where he was or what he was supposed to be doing.

‘Dobbin’s had a little bit of a heavy night on Special K,’ said Danny, in the tolerant sotto voce of a well-paid nurse.

‘Oh . . .’ said Alex, who had a sympathetic regard for bowel troubles. ‘He probably needed something stronger.’

Danny smiled at him narrowly and Alex felt he had missed an allusion. And then how could Dobbin’s night be finishing at 8.30 p.m.? They raised their glasses and began to drink.

By the time they left the house they were both a little hectic from the wine, though Alex began talking responsibly about dinner. There was a harmless tension between them as to who was in charge. Alex kept glancing over his shoulder for a taxi, and gave amusing descriptions of various expensive restaurants that he liked, in each of which he had already pictured the two of them dining in old-world gloom or unsparing post-modern glamour. Danny bounced along the pavement saying ‘Yeah’ and ‘Sounds great’ with indiscriminate enthusiasm. One or two of the places Alex listed had strong associations with Justin and with nights of memorable happiness or misery, and in either case seemed to offer the furtive prospect of an exorcism. Alex longed to reinhabit the disused wings of his life. He felt the tingle of benign power in having someone to pay for again.

In the taxi his hand lay on the seat in the early dusk between them; when he glanced forward he saw the wild pink aftermath of the sunset reflected in the wing-mirrors. The cab rattled along the length of the Park, with the windows down and a cool draught that took away the need to say anything much. At the lights they felt the brief proximity of roller-bladers under the trees, and the evening’s ordinary flux of pent-up energy and fatigue. When Alex looked quickly at Danny he saw something mischievous and self-absorbed in him that he hadn’t noticed in Dorset; the half-bottle of wine had freed him up surprisingly and in the running shadow and glare his face seemed coloured by suppressed or anticipated amusement.

They got out in Soho, where the cab was immediately taken by someone else and whisked off, leaving Alex with an odd subliminal feeling of no return. He’d forgotten how crowded the streets were, and wondered if in fact they had been quite so busy in the old days. Danny’s mobile phone rang, and he turned away to laugh and jabber into it, while Alex stood and was bumped into. There was something festive about the streams of people; but he felt he hadn’t yet entered the fun. He thought of his usual Saturday nights in Hammersmith, with only the noise of dinner-parties breaking up, and then the distant rumble of the Great West Road; and the weekend, once a month or so, with his parents near Chelmsford – the firm sympathetic grip they had on him since Justin had left.

‘Come on,’ said Danny. ‘Day-dreaming.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘I’ve got to try and find someone.’ He took Alex’s hand, but people barged between them and he let go. He followed on, caught up with him, then was suddenly alone when Danny stopped to hug and kiss someone. Which was how it continued. He began to think they would never get to the end of Old Compton Street. Danny knew every beautiful or interesting-looking person who came towards them, and those he didn’t know were registered, with a raised eyebrow or turn of the head, for future investigation. A bar or cafe with its tables out on the street could take five minutes to get past while he squeezed in between the chairs, bestowed stooping embraces, sat briefly on people’s laps and uttered bursts of mildly hilarious nonsense, underpinned by casual hand-holdings and caresses. Alex couldn’t tell if he was a star or a mascot. ‘This is my friend Alex,’ he said punctiliously to everyone, and several of them found the time to say ‘Hello’, or at least ‘Hi’, and give him a cursory upward glance, before getting on with their chat, during which Alex stood about with a distant but forgiving expression. He felt somehow provincial, and afraid of showing his ignorance. Words like Trade, Miss Pamela and Guest-list were produced and received with the gratified ennui accorded to a well-established ritual. Anecdotes of excess got the most laughs, and Danny himself carried one or two that he heard to the next little group, in an easy pollination of gossip. When he moved on he waved impatiently as if it was Alex who was keeping him waiting. ‘Come on,’ he said. Alex knew already he would do whatever he said. He thought he was showing off by marking his place in this world so insistently, it was really quite childish. But then he saw his own childish longing to be known and greeted in a world other than a third-floor corridor in Whitehall.

In the restaurant Danny was rather quiet and ordered only one course, as if hoping to discharge a social obligation as quickly as possible, while Alex chose a souffle with a twenty-minute handicap. They had a table in the window, and Danny sat breaking up bread and looking out past Alex’s shoulder at the parade of pleasure-seekers outside. At first he said ‘Yes . . . yes’ with distracted regularity while Alex was telling him sweetly self-deprecating stories about the office: he had never had any special arts of courtship, being very nice was his only technique. He watched Danny’s cool grey eyes slide from right to left, passing briefly over the obstacle of himself. He said, ‘I’m sorry, it’s a bit dull in here’, feeling the gloom and discretion of the restaurant as if they were expressions of his own character, or indictments of it. He seemed to have picked the one place among these gay blocks that was still a haven for heterosexuals. Then Danny smiled enormously, and reached across to touch Alex’s arm. He leant forward, and re-angled his attention – it was a change of gear that thrilled Alex and slightly unnerved him, since he had seen Robin do just the same thing the previous weekend, in a physical convulsion of remembered manners; he had been glad of it and doubted it at the same time.

Danny said, ‘I wonder what Dad and Justin are up to this weekend.’

Alex looked at his watch. ‘Ten fifteen. I don’t know about . . . your father, but Justin will be drunk.’

‘Mm,’ said Danny nostalgically, and pulled the bottle out of the ice. He was drinking quickly but not heavily – it was the acceleration of the evening, which Alex only resisted because he couldn’t tell where it was going. ‘Did he always drink that much?’

It was a hard and posthumous-sounding question, like something asked in court. Alex wasn’t sure whether to protect Justin or expose him. ‘It varied. He never really gets hangovers, I don’t know why. It’s never really been a problem. He drank a lot last year, after his father died. That was a bad time for us. The beginning of the end, I suppose.’ Alex found himself looking into the shallow bowl of a camera obscura in which a country scene was projected, lawns and chestnut-trees, a saturation of green, the agonising stupor of a summer day, Justin in a dark suit walking steadily away from him. ‘After the funeral things were never the same.’

‘When was that?’

It really wasn’t what Alex wanted to think about – it was everything he was trying at last to escape, and it gave him a sense of foreboding to have it conjured up by the beautiful young man he hoped would be Justin’s replacement. ‘Exactly a year ago.’

Danny seemed to be working it out. ‘So when did he meet Dad?’

‘Actually, I’m not sure. Some time after that.’

Danny was already laughing. ‘And we won’t go into how they met.’

‘No, quite,’ said Alex plonkingly, to hide the fact that he didn’t know and never wanted to. When at last the food arrived, the waiter drained the bottle into Danny’s glass and accepted his enthusiastic nod at the suggestion of another one.

‘He’s quite a change from Simon,’ Danny said, holding his knife and fork straight up as his eyes explored a plate of capriciously disguised cuts of guinea-fowl. And again he seemed to be smiling at a recollection he couldn’t politely explain. ‘Quite a change . . .’

There might have been some mockery of Justin in the air, and again Alex, who knew better than anyone what Justin’s failings were, was surprised to find himself lightly wounded on his behalf. ‘Why, what s Simon like?’

Danny waited till he’d finished chewing and then said, ‘You’d have to ask in Golders Green cemetery’, and laughed quietly and bleakly. ‘No, he died last year.’

Alex raised his eyebrows and nodded, taking in the fact and with it a sense that he might have been unfair to Robin, whom he’d thought of up to now as a mere loose libido, a lordly saboteur of other people’s happiness. ‘AIDS?’

Danny paused and said, ‘Yeah’, as if it was unnecessary or even bad form to mention it.

‘But . . . Robin’s okay?’

‘Oh yes.’ And with a grin: ‘My impression is he’s always been a pitcher not a catcher.’ Alex wasn’t sure if they both saw the double meaning. He was oppressed again by his own dark inner loop, the melting fade into fade into fade of his memories of sex with Justin. ‘This is delicious by the way.’

‘Good – this is too,’ Alex said, though even the fugitive demands of a souffle were a little much for his amorously shrunken appetite.

‘I mean he looks different, Simon was dark, I suppose they both had rather gorgeous bums. Do you think people always go for the same type?’

Alex wondered this about himself; part of the point of Danny was that he wasn’t like Justin. ‘It can be very nice to have a change. Some people have to have a blond, or can only get it up with black guys, or only like short people.’ He sounded stolidly expert.

‘Yeah, what about you?’

‘Well, almost everyone’s short to me. Though I admit I never quite see the point of other tall people.’

‘I like the way they go on and on,’ Danny said impressionistically.

‘Do you?’ Alex gave a grateful smile.

‘I do,’ said Danny, acting sly.

Alex loved being with him, it went off like a rocket in his heart, the fierce ascent and all the soft explosions of descending stars. He wanted passers-by to stop and watch them leaning together in the candlelight and speculate enviously about them. He said, ‘I suppose the thing is, with types, it’s not so much the look as the psychological thing. Whether you’re drawn to givers or takers.’

‘Mm . . .’

‘I’ve got a ruinous taste for takers.’

Danny was picking ferally at the last brown-mauve flesh on a white bone. ‘That’s just a typically modest way of saying you’re a giver,’ he said, smiling with grease on his lips. ‘It’s really sweet of you to take me out to dinner.’

‘It’s a pleasure, darling,’ Alex murmured, obliterating, with the gentle pounce of his endearment, a momentary discontent – he hadn’t yet said he was treating him, so Danny had robbed him of a moving gesture later in his synopsis for the evening. It was strangely as if Danny knew this when he said,

‘I really want you to have a good time tonight. This is your night.’

‘Is it? Thank you . . .’ said Alex, though still with a feeling that he was being pitied or at least humoured, and that it was ‘his’ night in the exceptional way that a birthday was, or the annual visit to town of a terrified old relative. ‘Well, I’m in your hands.’

Danny nodded his head with a firm, self-confident moue. ‘I thought we could go to Chateâu, it’s pretty fantastic right now. If you’d like to.’

‘Great,’ said Alex. He’d seen the club’s name fly-posted over derelict shops and on switch-boxes at traffic-lights, and would recognise its logo of an exploding castle. If it had truly been his night he would never have thought of going there. But he kept to his deepening sense that he must put his trust in Danny, who had been sent by the magic of coincidence to take care of him. And he loved dancing, even if he hadn’t done it much in the past ten years; when he imagined bopping around it was to a song called ‘Let’s Hear It for the Boy’, which he knew had been the big hit of summer 84. Sometimes he walked past the queue of a club after a dinner in the West End, saw people keyed-up in front of the ropes, and felt his own inhibitions like forces in the air, dark columns of crushing barometric pressure.

While they waited for coffee Danny went to the loo. Alex watched his swinging shirt-tail as he sauntered between the tables where suited older men and their glossily coiffed women were expensively stuffing themselves. He found there was something sexy after all in having come to this starchy place, where he and Danny struck a note of casual deviance. Then he watched him coming back, the unemphasised beauty of his strong young body in :he bright baggy clothes, the mixture in his face of natural eagerness and moody self-possession. Alex thought to himself, ‘This isn’t going to happen’, and at once offset the idea with a resolution that he would simply get what fun he could from it. The mechanism of disappointment in him was rapid and supple with use.

The coffee came, and Danny sat back, turning the little cup with outstretched fingers. ‘Have you ever done E?’ he said, and gave him an amiably calculating look.

Alex said, ‘No’, firmly and quietly, perhaps primly. ‘No, I’m a narcotics virgin, really’; he might as well own up, and indeed he wasn’t ashamed of this, though his choice of words seemed to hint at the need for a deflowering.

‘Nothing?’ said Danny, with kindly incredulity. ‘Never?’

Alex pondered. ‘Well, you had to smoke dope at school. But it never did much for me – I stopped when I grew up.’

‘Ouch,’ whispered Danny.

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Didn’t you and Justin do drugs?’

‘Justin has a horror of drugs – if you don’t count alcohol, of course.’ Alex paused, still unsure if he should talk about the foibles and phobias of someone he loved and who now stood in a nameless relation – uncle, stepmother – to Danny himself. ‘He had a bad trip on acid once, when he was a student. He looked in a mirror and his face was all made of animals. He never took anything after that.’

‘Very Arcimboldo’, said Danny.

Alex was looking ahead, down an avenue of easy-going criminality, with busy shadows between the wide-spaced pools of light. He was pliant and emotional with drink, and said humbly, ‘You’d have to look after me.’

Apparently Dave, a friend of Dobbin’s, was the man they had to find. When they were out in the street, Danny recovered his air of bossiness and mystery, like a prefect in the school of pleasure. He conferred on the mobile for a minute, then led the way through a couple of alleys, with people pissing and snogging in them, and out into another busy street, bright with restaurants and cafés, and crowds of drunks threading among the stalled traffic. Alex looked up at the narrow strip of night sky, a pinkish grey, any stars smothered by the glare of the district. Then he found Danny had doubled back abruptly and darted in through the door of a shop; Alex followed him as the strings of the bead curtain swung into his face.

Dave sat among the shiny flesh-colours of shrink-wrapped pornography and rubber sex-aids like a big black deity in a garish little shrine. He had the jaw and the firm weight of a boxer, but his hair was dyed, like blond astrakhan, and his voice was jaded and high as he tried to hustle a punter into buying a video. ‘Yeah, you’ll like it. There’s a bit of leather in it. It’s got older guys. You don’t like that? Well, it’s got plenty of young guys too. It’s got everything really . . .’ He winked at Danny as the man, with a briefcase under his arm and perhaps a train to catch, squinted hotly at the TV screen on which an extract was playing. ‘Can I help you?’ he said to Alex, as if dealing with a notorious browser. Alex jumped and clung to Danny’s arm.

‘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 head 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.’

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.