Lust Or No Harm Done

by Geoff Ryman

  'Anyway Peaches started running round and round the deck, and we couldn't figure out why. And suddenly I said, Dad, she needs to go for a walk!'

  'Well, she was a poor little thing then, wasn't she? Why take her with you on a houseboat? Couldn't you have left her with friends?'

  Michael relented. 'You know, most people find this story funny. I don't know many funny stories, and this is my effort to, like, be amusing.'

  'Thank you,' said Chris perfectly seriously.

  Michael took a deep breath. 'Yeah. You're welcome. Anyway, the dog can't take it any more and suddenly she just jumps off the deck and jumps into the marsh. And she disappears. She just completely sinks into the mud.'

  Chris covered his mouth. 'Oh my God, what did you do?'

  Michael was still waiting for laughs. 'I jumped in after her. And I sank too.'

  Bubbles of marsh gas had tickled his feet and smelled like farts. Michael reached into the ooze and pulled poor Peaches out. They both emerged stinking with no way to wash. Chris reacted as if Michael was describing a friend's death from cancer.

  'Anyway, Dad said you're not coming onto my boat. I mean we smelled like a sewer. And so we climbed into the dinghy and just sat there.'

  'Oh, it sounds disgusting,' said Chris.

  'Actually, I still find it kind of funny.'

  'Oh.'

  'I was telling it as a joke.'

  'Were you? I was thinking it didn't sound too funny at the time, being banished by your Dad.'

  'I wasn't being banished. I mean, I couldn't go on board, that was all.'

  'Sorry.'

  So much for telling jokes.

  'Actually, I was bloody angry,' said Michael.

  And that made Chris laugh. 'I'd have fucking laid one on him.'

  'Oh no you wouldn't. Not if you saw my Dad. My Dad was a really big guy. In fact, he was a Marine, which is why we lived where we lived near Camp Pendleton. No, he was a really big man.'

  'He sounds fanciable, your father. Do you think you could introduce us?'

  And Michael heard himself say, 'I did fancy him, actually.'

  Yup. There you go. Chris's face froze.

  Michael kept on like it was a funny story. It was some kind of revenge for the funny story. Part of Chris made him angry. 'Well, I didn't see him a lot; he never felt like my father and he was built like, whatever, and he was really handsome, and competent, and smart and I just fell in love… and one night… I made a pass at him.'

  Chris went rather still. 'What did he do?'

  Michael smiled. 'He went berserk. He rang my Mom.'

  Chris saw the humour. He chuckled. 'That sounds awful. That sounds beyond awful.'

  Michael didn't. 'It was a laugh riot.'

  'I'm… I'm sorry, I shouldn't laugh, but it does sound like some kind of living end.'

  'That and more. I'm impotent, Chris. Last night was a fake. It was a pill, it was Viagra.'

  Chris looked suddenly dark. 'It still seemed pretty good.'

  There was something else he needed to see.

  'Do you want to see my father? Do you want to see how good-looking he really was?'

  Chris began to look troubled, he sulked a bit; his hot date had turned out to be a flake. 'You have a photograph?'

  'More than that. Turn and look at the men's room door, and in a second, he'll come through it, wearing nothing but those swimming trunks he wore all that summer boating holiday. Turn around, Chris. Look. Now.'

  The doors swung open, and out came a man wearing surfer shorts. The shorts were blue with a half-inch band of white around every edge. He was tall and square at the same time, with shoulders like volleyballs, and a bare chest that seemed to support breasts, and a collarbone that was parallel to the floor, stretching his trunk wide. He had a face a bit like a more thickset, Latin Gregory Peck, decent, almost wise. The eyes were absolutely black, darker even than Michael's. The crew cut was savage, unflattering. The thighs and calves were a particular feature; this was a big man who could sprint.

  Marine Staff Sergeant Louis Blasco. Eventually made Master Sergeant, the last two years Michael knew him.

  Staff Sergeant Blasco paused, looked confused, as if he'd lost his way. Drugs, you would think. A man wearing nothing but swimming trunks stumbles out of a toilet and looks confused. Conversation in the restaurant settled in a hush like the surf on Oceanside Beach.

  OK, Dad. Michael toyed with the idea of making his father drop his shorts. To avenge himself. So that big uncircumcised American head could show itself. So Michael could see it again.

  Michael said, 'He's dead now, actually.'

  He made his father march quickly out of the restaurant.

  Back home, Michael called up Henry. His Angel sat at the foot of the bed.

  'Henry, it didn't work.'

  'What happened?'

  'The same thing that always happens. I sent him away. I've spent all my life sending people away. I told him something I've never told anyone else.'

  'Ah,' said Henry and sat back.

  'It just came bubbling out of me. I was mad at him, and I just suddenly heard myself say it.'

  'What did you say to him, Michael?'

  Michael felt a rush, as if he were in aeroplane, and it was taking off. 'I told him something about my father.'

  'Something you've never told anyone else?' Henry took hold of Michael's hand and coaxed him by rubbing it.

  Michael just nodded. He let go of his breath. He'd been holding it without realizing.

  'Maybe the time's finally come. Why don't you tell me?' the Angel asked.

  So, finally, Michael did.

  What's eating Michael Blasco?

  At twelve years old, Michael believed in love. He believed that love was the natural state. If you were out of love, then through a kind of natural gravity you would roll back into it. Michael believed that some day he would roll home.

  Home was probably Romford, though Mum still sounded like she was from Sheffield. Michael was a mystery to his mother. His underwear was going crisp and no one had ever told Mum about wet dreams. She accused him of masturbation, and knocked on the door of the toilet when he read comics, demanding 'What are you doing in there?' Michael's puberty had been more traumatic for her than for him.

  Michael's visits to California became an escape to another world of beaches and palm trees. Coming back every two years was like visiting another self. This self was called Mikey or when he got older, Mike. Mike had his own room, which was full of things, neat things his Dad had bought him, boy things. They were just where he left them: well almost. His Dad had maybe moved the boy things forward to kind of emphasize them – the baseball glove, the Swiss Army knife, the bicycle-repair tools.

  Michael would come back at twelve or fourteen, to find all of Mikey's old things there. He could sit up late at night and read his old X Men comics. Sometimes there was a sense of homecoming. Hiya, how ya doing, his California self would say, perking up after two years without being used. Sometimes Michael would settle into Mike as if he were a sofa. Other times he was a bit frosty with his old self. At sixteen, his lip curled. X Men? You're still into X Men, oh God, they're terrible.

  Michael would play his old records. His first love had been Mark Bolan and T-Rex and then, glistering with make-up, dear old Bowie.

  This could cause some tension with his father. Dad thought rock music was socially destructive. He had few records himself. Staff Sergeant Blasco owned The Sound of Music and My Fair Lady. In a strange convoluted way, this was to do with his Latin background. The Blasco family had been in California for 100 years and were thoroughly Americanized. That meant the Catholic League of Decency, and that meant Family Entertainment. At ten, at twelve, Michael heard and learned to love Camelot and Mary Poppins.

  While other twelve-year-old kids were buying Grand Funk Railroad, Michael was seeking out the Original Cast Recording of Cinderella.

  Michael played Cinderella year in, year out, at twelve, at fourteen, even at sixteen. Mayb
e it was the link with England. Or maybe it was identification. In 1957, Julie Andrews had been twenty-two, the same age as Elvis Presley. Polished, operatic, old-fashioned she may have been, but everything she did crackled with a youthful energy that made Michael bounce. It was a feminine energy, something he could identify with. And this Cinderella was like him, stuck powerless and dreaming in a family that didn't quite work.

  There was one song, about sitting in your own little corner and dreaming of adventure, and that was what Michael was doing. There was magic, and Michael always loved magic. Cinderella insisted on it: impossible things happened every day.

  And there was the soppy song about love, which Michael was ashamed of loving back. It was a song of disbelief, that the one we love is so beautiful.

  Every year his father would greet him at the airport with a great bear hug. 'Hey, Mikey, how's it going?'

  'Fine, thanks Dad.'

  Michael would be pressed up against the T-shirted pectorals and surrounded by the melon-like arms. Michael would look up to see something like his own face, as he wanted to be.

  His father had a thick neck: it went straight down from his ears. His square jaw never seemed to need shaving. Mirror shades, laconically rotating chewing gum and a brutal crew cut all added up to the desired image. This was one tough hombre.

  Michael would be both agog and dismayed, buffeted by alternative breakers of admiration and self-denigration. How could he ever hope to match his father?

  Dad looked like someone who starred in police thrillers. He wore grey T-shirts with AFL logos. The tops of his father's bare feet were always coated in sand from surfing, jogging or volleyball. Michael's Dad played basketball with the Latino kids on the beach; he jogged from the camp to the power station beyond Carlsbad and back; he played touch football nearly incessantly. Every part of his body from his cheekbones to his feet was bronzed, lean, rounded, veined and gritty. He looked like Michael's more popular older brother.

  When Michael was ten his Dad was Senior Drill at boot camp in San Diego. Staff Sergeant Blasco spent his days barking orders at intimidated new recruits. Michael sometimes watched from the back of the drill hall. 'Tiger! Tiger! Kill, kill!' the recruits would bellow in unison.

  'We break 'em down to build 'em up,' his father said once, on the drive back home. Michael's first two experimental weeks in America were spent in the top floor of a duplex near San Diego airport. 'You see, Mikey, if there ever is a war then those guys won't have time to think. We don't want them to think. We want them to do. So we have to rehearse everything so much that they just do it automatically. That's why we do all that animal stuff. I don't want you to be embarrassed by it. All that animal imagery is real important to the psychology.'

  Michael sat looking at the billboards on the roadside, feeling pale and weedy.

  His father wanted high spirits. 'So what animal are you, Mikey?'

  'I don't know. Probably a chicken.'

  'Oh, man. We gotta do something about that.'

  Sometimes Staff Sergeant Blasco was more like a Mom. He'd say Mike was looking kinda pale. Was he getting out? He was looking thin; maybe he'd like to stop and get something to eat? He'd slap Michael's back to get an idea of its fleshiness. Didn't Mike's Mom feed him anything?

  'We gotta get you out on that beach. What sport you doing these days, Mikey?'

  Michael dreaded that question. Just the question alone made him feel cold and shivery and skinny. 'Um… snooker? That's something like billiards.' California sunlight made Michael squint.

  'Uh-huh,' his father would say, without commitment. 'Snooker sounds cool. Listen, I know you have a lot of studying to do in England, but now that you're here, maybe you'd like to join in with some of the stuff that's going on in San Diego. I know you don't play basketball or any of that stuff, but there's a sailing club, tennis. All kinds of stuff. Some of the NCOs have set up a kind of sports club for the kids in the camp. Maybe you should check it out.'

  When Michael came back at twelve, his Dad had just been promoted from Staff Sergeant to Gunney. He worked in Camp Pendleton and so they lived in camp accommodation, a regulation bungalow with a regulation yard.

  Dad would have the guys in to watch the game, or he would host a staff barbecue, or there would be a sailing club annual accounts meeting. Marines with wives from Manila or Topeka would mingle in a tiny condo without a single book to talk a mix of baseball statistics, camp politics, shopping tips and the latest model cars.

  Sometimes they talked movies. An old guy, somebody's granddad, asked Michael, 'Have you seen that movie Poseidon Adventure yet?'

  'I thought it could have been better,' said Michael. 'I thought the ship turning upside down would be magic, but it wasn't.'

  'Huh, huh, I love that accent of yours, Michael. Hey Louis, your kid talks better than you do!'

  'Don't I know it!' Louis shouted through the open back door. He was grilling hot dogs on the barbecue.

  Michael was still trying to talk movies. 'I really like Planet of the Apes movies.'

  'Yeah, my grandson loves those too.'

  'He gets it all from his mother. She's English!' Louis called back, dumping chicken wings onto a plate and family history at the same time. His calf muscles looked like drumsticks, brown and sinewy.

  The old man asked, 'You live in England most of the time, Michael?'

  'Yes sir.' That 'sir' was American.

  'So you think you'll probably be coming over here to live?' The old man's eyes narrowed and his mouth went thin from expectation.

  This was a trope. The little kid from England was now supposed to say oh yes, I want to live in America more than anything because there are beaches here and job opportunities and liberty and the Constitution and you can go to football games.

  Michael was English enough to resist being bullied into unwarranted enthusiasm. 'I might come here, I haven't really thought about it.'

  Michael had recently found himself corralled into the camp's 4th of July pageant. He had to stand up on a stage in a hall and recite: 'Hello, my name's Michael. I'm from England and I want to know more about the Declaration of Independence.' At least the kid from Chile got to ask about Daniel Boone.

  The old man took Michael seriously. 'The schools here are real good if you're thinking of going to university. Good colleges around here too.'

  Michael's father shouted from the kitchen, 'Mike's the only guy in the family with any brains. What was that exam you took, Mikey? The elevensomething? Well, anyway, it's like he's a straight-A student.'

  'Is that so?' the old man intoned. He didn't have that much time for grades.

  Something in Michael wanted to twist the knife. 'Actually, I can't live in California. I'm allergic to sunlight.'

  'Allergic to sunlight.' The old man cast a look back over his shoulder in case this was new to Michael's father. 'What are the symptoms, Mike?'

  'I go this strange shade of brown all over.' It was a joke. It was a joke about Britain, you know, we never see the sun. so we don't know about tanning. Unfortunately Michael had committed a breach of etiquette. You never tell a conservative American a joke without first signalling and confirming that what will follow is a caprice meant only to amuse.

  The grandfather leaned forward, serious and concerned. 'I mean strange how?'

  'Dead weird. I mean, where the sun doesn't hit, like under my shorts, it stays white, and you can see the line where the brown stops.'

  The old guy blinked in confusion. 'But does it interfere with your activities? Sports, going to the beach, community work?'

  'Oh it doesn't hurt or anything.'

  'Well. How does it differ from a tan?'

  'Tan?' Michael said, rounding his vowels to Terry-Thomas proportions, 'Whot's a tan?'

  A shivering nervous laugh, and the old man's steepled hands moved towards the thin little smile. 'Oh. Ha-ha, I getcha.' There was a long uncomfortable pause and he fought his way to his feet. 'I'm going to go and see about those wieners.'

  Mich
ael felt pity then; the poor old guy had only been trying to be nice. He felt sorry for himself too: now he would have to talk baseball statistics.

  He could at least talk to American adults. American kids seemed to Michael to be unbelievably obnoxious. It was like someone had granted them Asshole Licences that weren't revoked until they were twenty-five. Well, at least the sons of Marines commanded to play team sports. They shouted a lot and could be quite funny, unlike their cautious, thin-lipped, watchful parents. But the humour was loud, often cruel, and consisted of set phrases that Michael simply didn't understand.

  'Big man he got money in his hand. Hey big man, whoo-hoo!'

  They roared with laughter.

  'Hey, he's got a man-tan, man!'

  Michael could even begin to join in. He listened to the radio, he watched TV, he tried to understand. A local DJ had an ID that rumbled The Big Man'. But most of it remained mysterious. Maybe it all came from going to Oceanside High School together, stuff they made up. In any case he was irredeemably out of it. And as Michael played baseball, basketball, volleyball, tennis, etc, only when he came to California, i.e. every two years, he was hardly going to win respect on the field.

  One of the kids asked in disbelief, 'Are you really Sergeant Blasco's son?' The kid was big, blond, lean and spotty. Despite expensive dental work his face looked like someone had bashed it in with a spade. Aggressively, he drove the hardball into his own mitt, breaking in a new glove.

  Michael had to concur. 'Yes. Hard to believe, huh?' He squinted into the sun, sitting on the bench, dreading his turn at bat.

  'You got it. It must be something to do with how they raise ' em in England. '

  As the summer wore on, it got worse. The accent was an easy target. Americans couldn't hear the difference between posh and Romford-Sheffield and didn't want to.

  'I say, old man, just how did you get to be such a discord?'

  'Ooh rather.'

  'Spastic, I believe the term is.'