‘Like Wilde’s youth on the young.’
‘It wasn’t Wilde,’ I snapped. ‘It was Shaw.’
Later, that piccante little exchange having hovered between us like something imperfectly exorcised, he came into my room in the small hours. I knew he knew I was awake, so I didn’t bother pretending to be asleep. The moon was up, a solitary petal of honesty casting stone-coloured light on the Aegean, the sleeping harbour, the hill, the veranda, the terra cotta, the silk-fringed counterpane, my bare arms. His eyes were slivers of agate. It would have been nice for me if the bed had made a silly noise when he sat on it – some boing or twoing – but the mattress was solid and silent, no help at all. I’d drunk too much and not enough.
‘No, Raphael,’ I said.
‘I know. Not that. I just mean: Please think about it, okay?’
‘Although it seems rude not to, given that we’ve got the flesh.’
‘Don’t play with me, please.’
‘Sorry. I know. Truth is, there’s a good chance I’d give you something.’ He didn’t understand. ‘Something nasty,’ I said. He was bare-chested, in pale pyjama bottoms. Theo Mandros’s body was brown and lean with ropy muscle in the long arms and a small pot belly of almost unbearable pathos. His dead wife had loved it; the ghost of her love still surrounded it in a little crescent of warmth. It suited Raphael.
‘Tell me something,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Why you’ve found it so hard to admit that you’ve considered it?’
‘Considered what?’
‘Staying.’
I half-smothered the laugh, very inadequately tried to pass it off as a cough. Slowly reached for and lit a cigarette. ‘I assume – hard though this is to countenance – that you mean staying here, staying human?’
‘I know you’ve considered it. I know the flesh’s seduction.’
‘What a lot you seem to know, Mr Mandros. I wonder why you bother to ask anything at all.’
‘I know your capacity for self-delusion.’
‘And I know yours for credulity. Not to mention limp-wristed infatuation.’
‘You lie to yourself.’
‘Good night, Biggles.’
‘You deliberately avert your gaze from the true appeal of this world.’
‘And that would be . . . what, exactly? Daisies? Cancer?’
‘Finiteness.’
Oh the nasty things I nearly came out with then. Really. It’s lucky for him we were old chums. All things considered, I was glad imminent operations wouldn’t affect him.
‘Lucifer?’ he said, putting a hand on my pelvis. ‘Is the peace of forgiveness so terrible a thing to embrace? Wouldn’t redemption be the mightiest gift He could give? Haven’t you ever, in all these years, haven’t you ever once longed to come home?’
I sighed. Sometimes, I’ve found, sighing’s just the thing. Moonlight lay on my face now like a cool veil. My bedroom doors opened onto the veranda; the white wall; the constellations’ impenetrable geometry. There’d be an epiphany, I was thinking. Anyone else’s story, this is where the tide would turn, objectively correlatived by lyrically described buggery, no doubt. Any other fucker’s story.
‘Raphael,’ I said – then, staying in character, added, ‘Raphael, Raphael, Raphael.’ Didn’t quite have the effect I was after, somehow. None the less I pressed on. ‘Let me ask you something, dear boy. Do you think I despair?’
‘Lucifer –’
‘Do you think I exist in a state of despair?’
‘Of course you do. Of course you do, my dear, but what I’m trying to suggest is that –’
‘I do not despair.’
‘What?’
‘You heard.’
‘But –’
‘Despair is for when you see defeat beyond all hope of victory.’
‘Oh, Lucifer, Lucifer.’
‘I repeat: I do not despair. Now please, for fuck’s sake, go to bed.’
He didn’t. He sat there next to me with his palm against my hip and his head bowed. I might have been mistaken but I thought I saw the glimmer of tears. (And I know this is really awful, but I did, actually, feel the first scrotal stirrings of an impending erection. Typical.)
This time he sighed. Then said: ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going back to London.’
‘When?’
‘Tomorrow. I need . . .’ What did I need? The flat? The Ritz? To finish the script? The book? To idiot-check the details of my upcoming venture? (Well I did say at the very beginning that I wasn’t telling quite all . . .) ‘I need to be alone with it. With what you’ve told me. It’s not that I don’t believe you –’
‘You don’t believe me, Lucifer, I know. Why should you? Why should you think this was anything more than some ruse to . . . to . . .’
Couldn’t finish that. Got up and padded on Mandros’s long bare feet to the door, where he halted and said, to the tiles, ‘I just want you to know that I’m here. I’ve made my choice.’
‘No month’s trial?’ I asked him.
I saw the gleam of his teeth in the moonlight. ‘Up a long time back,’ he said. ‘This is my home, now.’ Then, again to the floor: ‘And yours, too, old friend, should you need it.’
I don’t know what you’d call it. Goin’ Loco Down in Acapulco – except it wasn’t Acapulco, it was London. A farewell binge, I suppose. Tying one on. A bender. A spree. I’d half a mind to kill the last week in Manhattan, but the jetlag would’ve slowed me down and every hour was precious; by the end of the week in London, it just felt like I’d half a mind. First thing I did was e-mail the bulk of this to Betsy with instructions to read it and whiz it out to the usual suspects ASAP. If the thought of slipping out of Gunn’s bones hadn’t entailed the thought of excruciating pain I’d have dropped in bodilessly on the head honchos at Picador or Scribner or Cape or whoever the fuck, to work the necessary chicanery; but the memory of my big ouch over the Aegean was still fresh. No need to repeat that before I absolutely have to. Anyway the point is I let myself go. Man did I let myself go. Have you had flambéed mangoes? There are so many flowers in my room now that I can’t handle more than three XXX-Quisite girlies without crashing into a vase or bruising a blossom. I’ve prowled the city’s parks and yards day and night molesting odours of every stripe, from freshly laundered bed sheets to the diarrhoea of dogs. I’ve fist-fought in Soho (I won, perhaps not surprisingly – come a long way since the night with Lewis and his beard) and bungeed over the Thames. I’ve snuffled and retched my way through three grand’s worth of Bolivian Breeze, dropped E, acid, speed, shot up, tuned in, turned on and passed out. I’ve been ravished by the warm wind and rinsed by the rain. Blood is a juice of quality most rare . . . Oh I’ve manhandled, I have, stone, water, earth, flesh . . . Yesterday night I swam in the sea. Don’t laugh – at Brighton, where the pier’s lively fug (candyfloss, mussels, hot dogs, popcorn) and delirious soundtrack dropped the nukes of Gunn’s childhood in my head, tipping me momentarily off balance. I swam out and flipped onto my back like a seal pup. The water was a dark and salty slick, the sky diagrammed with myth. I got depressed as hell (not to mention cold as hell – five seconds of warm bliss when I emptied Gunn’s bladder) hanging there all alone and looking back to the seafront’s chain of lights. Nearly drowned, too, as a matter of fact, what with that coke nod-out when I should have been kicking back to shore. Where would that have left us, I wonder? (I wonder a lot, these days. You must spend your whole lives at it, this wondering game.) But time – this New Time, how it flies – has done what time will do. Every hour, no matter how mighty the wall of your dread, comes through . . .