I was sitting at the dark end of the bar. It had been recently refurbished and had enjoyed a momentary resurgence of popularity. The decor now resembled a slightly shabby fifties nightclub with recessed banquettes, a giant mirror ball and fake palm trees sprayed white. Peggy Lee and Sinatra seeped from the speakers. Grace said that it was a feeble attempt to recreate the El Morocco. ‘Or the Trocadero on a bad hair day.’ I hadn’t seen much of Grace since the funeral and I missed him. He was busy with the biker with the snake tattoo.
‘Your sister’s heels over head, doll. It’s so Barbie and Ken I could expire. You can expect the patter of little feet at any moment, now that I’m shacked up and rusticated. We’re going to have a pussy and a bow wow wow.’
Grace had sold the salon for an enormous sum and bought a cottage on an acre of land north of the city. They were landscaping it and came into town on the weekends to ransack the garden centres for box hedging, esoteric seeds and saplings.
‘Fuck Gertrude Jekyll and Syrie and Vita and all those other bucolic old dykes, with their pastel tonings,’ he had said, when I saw him last. He fanned a handful of seed packets on the café table. ‘Who needs a white garden, doll, when there are all these fabulously vulgar hues. Shocking pinks and oranges and scarlets. Dahlias and petunias and asters, doll. Look at these. Purple zinnias! We’re thinking of calling the place Sissyhurst.’
The same listless barman languished in a bow tie and tuxedo. The new regime must have forbidden him cigarettes behind the bar because he gave me a look of envy and longing when I lit up.
‘Did you ever catch up with that mate of yours?’ he said, leaning across to inhale my smoke. ‘The skinny bloke with the earrings.’
‘No,’ I said after a while. ‘He caught up with me.’ The barman looked at me as though I was a bit mad, shook his head and made a great show of emptying the ashtray.
It was late when he walked in. The barman was collecting the last of the glasses and wiping the tables, getting ready to close the bar. He had extinguished all the lamps except for the two spots directed at the mirror ball and the one above the bar. Motes of light swirled like submarine galaxies, like little flakes of memory.
When the latecomer opened the door, the street light coming in behind him ignited his long auburn hair. He was slender and tall, wearing a dark grey shirt with the sleeves rolled up and black jeans. His hair was combed back exposing his small, tender ears and his eyes were an unusual pale green colour. As he stood waiting at the bar the mirror ball showered him with petals of light. He looked at me and smiled and all the phantoms converged.
Fabulina observed me from behind the fluttering wing of a pearl-handled fan. The Poole twins emerged from the darkness, dressed in their violent tattoos like a double X-ray. And Sykes. There was Sykes, sitting far at the end of the bar, looking down at his beautiful hands. Then, slowly, he raised them up, drawing back his hair to reveal a pair of extravagant silver earrings. He smiled his dumb, rueful smile and gently evaporated.
‘Come here,’ I said to the boy, ‘and tell me some lies about yourself.’