by Geoff Ryman
Secondly, in contradiction to this, you learn how rare attraction is. We don’t sleep with most people, because we would not remotely enjoy sleeping with most people. They smell, they fart, they occupy our space, all the things people we love do and which make us leave them in the end. Only, we don’t understand what these strangers mean. Their preoccupations are alien to us. We are unmoved by the thing that most moves them. Their genitalia look shrivelled, hairy, forbidding.
Only sometimes are there exceptions.
Michael thought again of monks, and remembered his time in California. He had often visited an old Spanish mission surrounded by fields and an ancient graveyard. It was the only thing in Oceanside that a Brit would recognize as history, and it was shaded and cool. In the old storerooms there were exhibits of early California life: dummy Indians grinding maize; a replica of a colonial bureaucrat’s office.
The mission had been restored in the 1930s by monks. They smiled out of old photographs in the historical exhibition. Unlike most people in old photographs, they looked contemporary. You could see who they were. They were all in their thirties or forties, some plump, some slim. But they all looked secure, satisfied, and even merry. They looked happy slaving in hot sun while wearing thick woolly robes. They sang or joked in photographs posed to demonstrate the robust Christian life. It seemed unlikely even to Michael at sixteen that they could all be quite that good-looking by accident.
Michael invited them all home. It was a Thursday evening and he made a party of it. The Californian monks had come from Spain, from Costa Rica, from Ireland, and they sang romantic 1930s songs on the guitars that came with them. They made something like sangria with a different name and became boisterous. The Irishman sang an old love song in a high and wild voice that was only slightly off-key. They began to dance arm in arm around his apartment floor until the downstairs neighbours thumped on his door.
‘It’s a religious gathering,’ Michael told his neighbours and invited them in. The neighbours were Polish and rather shy. Michael knew them only well enough to nod to in passing in the corridor. He learned their first names: Thadd and Marta Miazga. They spoke a strained and cautious English and were overwhelmed by the ten thumping, handsome monks who sounded like a jolly tower of Babel and who wore robes and sandals, and who welcomed them with cries and kisses and resumed their religious songs, as if around a campfire. At one point Mrs Miazga slipped out of the flat and returned with more wine. At 1.00 AM her husband shyly took the guitar and started to sing ‘Good King Wenceslas’ in a tired, happy voice. Michael suddenly saw that he was handsome too, and his wife. In fact everyone in the world suddenly seemed beautiful.
Finally, someone glanced at a watch. The Miazgas had hatched out of their shyness, into a pleased, flushed conviviality.
‘It is so silly to be neighbours and not know,’ said the wife, in a voice like someone drawing a bow across violin strings. Silly not to know that our neighbour is jolly and pleasant. They had become, at least potentially, friends.
All the monks gathered round them in the hallway, and shook hands and kissed Mrs Miazga good night. They all chorused good night, and then were gone.
Silence fell like a curtain. Michael sipped some wine, and considered and called back the Irishman.
The Irishman had a mop of straw-coloured hair, and a classic profile and milk-white skin. Michael felt woozy with sociability, wine and a broad and generalized love of the world. He popped his Viagra, and asked the Irishman to lie down next to him. The Irishman tumbled into his arms as naturally as dice, his legs crossing over Michael’s. He rested his head on Michael’s chest and started to talk.
His name was James. He had grown up in Clonmel in Eire. From the way he described it, the town was almost medieval: a big Spanish-looking church by a river; peasants, weekend markets, horsecarts in the streets, cattle fairs. Like other children he had swum in the river, toppled outhouses, stolen and smoked cigarettes, and attended mass. Then he had fallen in love with God. He wanted to be dedicated to God. Half asleep, he used the word ‘married’.
Then his neck arched upwards, yearning, and Michael kissed him. The young monk kissed like a woman, almost chastely, shyly. He ducked away, like a nervous horse. Waiting for the Viagra to take effect, Michael asked him questions. Yes, he had been in love once. While still living in Clonmel, he had fallen in love with a married man.
‘A great big fella with a handsome moustache. He’d go riding past in his plus fours on a bicycle, and he was the handsomest thing you’d ever seen. And he always grinned at me. And then he started stopping by to talk. And I realized there was this look in his eyes. And I thought no, it can’t be, he’s a married man. Either that or he doesn’t realize. So we did nothing about it. And one night I was walking in the moonlight. It was a beautiful night, and I was just out for a stroll. And I heard his bicycle coming. Brother James, is that you? he asked. And I just said, Hello, Georgie my dear, because my heart was full. He took me off into the hedges. I still didn’t know for sure what he was going to do until he took my hand.’
Scandal had been an ever-present danger. They had to pretend hardly to know each other. They would meet once a month, when George had a good excuse to be away from the farm. Once they were walking along the road hand in hand, when the last thing they expected in the world, or at least in Clonmel, came roaring up the road: a motor car. Its headlights blazed. They dived into a ditch, and the car roared on past.
James and George saw the car parked outside the local hotel and heard roars of laughter, and decided not to go in. Ah, it would be a great story to tell. Apparently the driver told it, roaring with laughter, buying drinks. These two fellows, he said, one of them a monk, and they both dived into a ditch! Maybe they thought it was the crack of doom.
The locals knew. Two men, one of them a monk, did not walk out together at night. The publican and his regulars neither knew nor really cared who the man was: likely a substantial citizen. But a monk was not exactly a man; if he went with other men then he was a monk who was doing the Devil’s work.
‘Would the monk be having blond hair?’ asked the landlord, which earned a roar of steely laughter.
James was called into the Abbot’s office, and the story of the motor car recounted as if it had happened to someone else. The Abbot said nothing too direct. A few of James’s unexplained absences were noted, and he was asked, in the kindest, most helpful way, if perhaps he would not be interested in an exciting mission to California.
‘So that was the end of George Kelly and me.’ James seemed quite cheerful about it. ‘At least I got out of Clonmel. And into all that sunshine.’
They kissed again, and the Viagra moved into the bed with them. James became suddenly demanding and masculine. In the street lights, Michael saw the outline of his lean stomach. Michael counted the years. If James were still alive, he would now be over ninety years old. James entered him.
I hope you found someone, James. I hope the sun and the sea and the health of California urged you to throw off your robes. I hope you moved to Santa Monica and met Christopher Isherwood, and set up a retreat in Big Sur. Or that you and one of your brother monks quietly and discreetly tied the knot. I hope you played guitar around campfires for many years to come, and that your God reciprocated your love.
Or maybe I’ll wish even you another life in which George Kelly goes after you and comes whistling up to the mission over the brow of a California hill. I think I’ll see that and wish it, and then I’ll put you both there. Somewhere else.
‘Good night,’ said the monk, and kissed him again. ‘I’d like to go home now, if I may.’ He went with a sound of a whisper in the air.
It was two in the morning, and Michael was left alone.
The miracle was a wonder, but what good was it if it left you alone? What good did it do you if it meant you had no one in your life. What had Billie said? People want love?
‘Henry?’ he asked. ‘Henry, are you there?’
Henry, naked, was su
ddenly at the foot of the bed, his wings folding shut.
‘Henry,’ Michael began shyly. ‘Henry … could there be two of you?’
Henry rested his chin on his hands, tossed the tousle of his hair away from his face. ‘There already are,’ he replied. ‘Me and the one asleep with Philip.’
‘Well. If there are, could one of them live with me, too?’
It wasn’t a handsome face, but it was a good face, and it widened in sympathy and a kind of amusement. ‘You know the answer to that is yes. But is that what the miracle is about?’
‘I don’t know what it’s about and I don’t care.’
‘Oh, you do care. Because you know that the universe can’t keep twisting itself into new knots just to keep you happy.’
‘That’s why I want it to stop. I’m sick of people who fade out.’
Henry smiled. ‘You’re sick of Angels then. And what am I, Michael?’
Michael closed his eyes and sighed.
‘Maybe it’s time to try your wings,’ said the Angel, and smiled.
Who’s for real?
In the last days of his marriage to Phil, as promiscuity took hold, Michael often went to Russell Square.
Usually, he would be a bit drunk, having spent an evening with one of his own few friends. The controls would be switched off. Usually the controls warned Michael that what the Square contained was dangerous. Drunk, he didn’t care.
In the early nineties, the untended shrubbery would be full of groups of men, some on their knees, others with shorts down. It was a curiously generous place, where strangers would give their all, or what they could.
A sweet and beautiful black man with liquid eyes would suddenly offer his rear. A German tourist would walk you safely home and say good night on the doorstep. An Israeli soldier, as big as Schwarzenegger, would shake with excitement in your grasp, and quickly go through every sexual motion, short of coming. There were people who wanted to pick someone up and take them home. There were people who only wanted to touch a dick with the tips of their fingers and then leave.
As the nineties progressed, the shrubbery was trimmed and the arrival of police cars grew more frequent. Circles of hardier souls would gather around a small public utility, rather like a gas meter or water pump that was camouflaged with a screen of green wooden slats. Inside those protective walls, it could be as crowded as a rush-hour tube train. Once Michael found himself wanking off an extremely well-endowed Australian, while his own penis was flailed with desperate vigour by a Japanese tourist who stayed completely zipped in. Whatever they wanted, they all kept Russell Square in a sealed compartment away from the rest of their lives.
Michael was here because he could not take people back to the flat. Michael’s offer was clear. Hi, I have a boyfriend but we’re not faithful, and I’m passive and here for safe sex.
Others seemed to say: I don’t want love; love hurts. Or, I am HIV positive and I don’t care who I make ill. Or, I am not HIV positive but I’m pissed and I no longer care … for now. Hiya, my name is Nick and I play the cello and live at home and I am very slightly crazy, enough to be on medication, and I am lonely and this makes me feel less alone.
Hello, I’m an American tourist and I come here once every five years and my wife back in the hotel thinks I am out for an evening stroll.
Hi, my name is Adam and I’m rich and sixteen and I have a car of my own.
Michael’s idea of getting real was to go back to Russell Square. He popped a precautionary Viagra and went out.
He had forgotten that deep thrill of cruising at night. It produced a dragging sensation of mingled fear and excitement in his bowels. He could hear his own breath and found that his eyes flicked towards any movement in the darkness. Like desire itself, seeping out of your bones, men moved in shadows, behind trees.
A young guy, a skinny student in a baseball cap, walked past Michael stony-eyed. You could tell he was a student because the baseball cap looked fake. Students mostly wanted other students. Lurking by a tree was what looked like a very short, fat Italian waiter who stared straight through Michael. Even an old guy in the rolled-up sleeves of a striped dress shirt ignored him. He had metal-frame glasses and flyaway white hair.
Michael began to get worried. Usually, you had to find something you wanted quickly. If not you could spend hours circling in the dark, past the same men eyeing up the same you, in ever decreasing spirals of lust.
A tall man strolled towards him. He would be a bit younger than Michael; white shirt, black trousers. A bouncer maybe, with a bit of a potbelly.
His eyes followed Michael as he passed, and they were blue, and his hair was a faded, natural blond. Michael couldn’t help but turn his head. The man stopped, as if jingling change in his pocket. Michael felt a constriction around his heart and his breathing. The man started to walk towards him. Bingo.
‘Do you live near here?’ the guy muttered, the standard polite introduction. He had an Irish accent. Clonmel, Michael thought. In the yellow glare of street lights dappled through leaves, he saw a handsome, sensible face.
‘I’d live anywhere you wanted me to live,’ replied Michael, which was true for a moment.
As they walked home, Michael kept watching for disappointment in himself or the other, but it did not set in. The man was a few years younger than he was, and pleasantly talkative. He looked tired, in a worn, homely way. He smiled tiredly. His eyes crinkled and they were a very clear blue.
His name was Chris. Chris, Michael repeated in his head so he wouldn’t have to ask again: Chris, Chris. Chris managed a pub, a quite nice one actually on this side of Euston Road. Tended to get the after-work crowd rather than the usual King’s Cross lowlife.
‘How much further is it?’ Chris asked after they had walked only two blocks. They always got scared that it would be far or that they couldn’t find their way back, or that they were being led to a sidestreet mugging.
Chris’s eyes shone with relief inside the pleasant apartment. In the light his colouring seemed to heighten, his eyes went cornflower-blue, his hair golden, his cheeks pink.
‘I’ve been working all evening and I’m a bit sweaty. Would you mind if I had a shower?’
Michael caught himself working magic. He thought at Chris as if he were an Angel: you’ve just showered. He felt something come up against the wall of reality.
So Michael said, ‘Of course you can. In fact maybe I should too.’ It was considerate, but taking a shower is a passion-killer. It is difficult to maintain a macho facade when you offer someone a towel in decorator colours. It is difficult to hold up the mask of fantasy as you peel off day-old clothes and used knickers that look like blotting paper. You are left naked, in a less than ideal body.
In the bedroom Chris turned away, and stepped out of his clothes cautiously, in that hunched and delicate way that makes people look embarrassed. He carefully hung his trousers over the back of the chair. He had a slight undercoating of fat all over his body, produced perhaps by nightly access to beer. Chris, who managed a pub, was not one of the great names or bodies of the century. Michael remembered discretion and hesitancy and withdrew.
He also remembered that this was not an Angel. You don’t know who he is, Michael. He took his wallet and portfolio and hid them behind books on the shelves. Then he threw off his clothes and worked his way around Chris in the narrow bathroom. Michael showered quickly, giving his bum a quick scrub. He did not want to leave Chris unobserved in the flat. He shouted from behind the shower curtain, ‘So um, did you close up early tonight?’ He shut off the water and nipped out of the bath.
Chris was waiting for him, wanting to talk. ‘No. This is my normal knocking-off time. As it were.’ Chris grinned: it was his normal knocking-off joke as well, but it was enough to make Michael smile. Chris wore his white towel high around his midriff, to hide his tummy.
Michael blotted up water and hared after Chris and caught up with him in the bedroom.
‘I’d say we’re both getting a bit w
et,’ said Chris.
I hope he won’t make jokes like this all night, thought Michael. He blinked back at him from behind his specs, feeling owlish. He had forgotten to take them off in the shower. Chris delicately removed them, and leaned forward and kissed him.
Chris still tasted of hops. He was a tall man and was at his best lying face down: his legs and buttocks were still slim, unlike his stomach. Michael had taken the Viagra before he went out, and it worked triumphantly, spiked perhaps by a tickle of fear and uncertainty that had long been missed.
Face down on the bed, Chris pulled his cheeks apart, and Michael suddenly wanted to feel himself inside there. Anxious lest the erection collapse, he pushed his way alongside, up to and then very suddenly inside Chris, real flesh to real flesh. Michael began to pump.
Without a condom. Michael had to repeat that. Michael, this is real and you are not wearing a condom, Michael stop. He wanted to go on and was suddenly aware that Chris would let him.
‘This is silly,’ Michael said. He half hoped Chris would say, never mind. Instead, Chris said, after a pause, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’
Michael pulled out. Condoms, condoms, where did he keep condoms now? It had been five months since he’d used one. As he pulled open drawers, he felt his erection subside. He raced back to the bathroom, catching his little toe on the side of the lintel. He hopped and hobbled towards his sponge bag and found both condoms and KY. Cursing under his breath, he winced back into the bedroom, trying to walk as if he hadn’t nearly broken his toe.
Michael glanced nervously at his erection, which was now best described as a plumping of penis, like a fluffed-up pillow. It was soft but fatter than normal. He tore at the packet with his fingers and then with his teeth, and then he remembered where those fingers had been. Finally the condom was liberated and he checked it, and he slid it down his cock and it wasn’t until it began to curl inward at the top that he realized he’d put it on inside out.