Sacrament

The phone was handed over, and Patrick said:

'Will? Is this really you?'

'It's really me.'

'Jesus. That's so weird. I was sitting by the window, having a siesta and I swear I was dreaming about you.'

'Were we having fun?'

'We weren't doing much of anything. You were just here ... in the room with me. And I liked that.'

'Well I'll be there in the flesh soon enough. I was just telling Jack, I'm getting back on my feet.'

'I read all the articles about what happened. My mother kept clipping them for me and sending them down.

Never trust a polar bear, eh?'

'She couldn't help herself,' Will said. 'So how are you doing?'

'Hanging in there. I lost a lot of weight, but I'm putting it back on again, bit by bit. It's hard though, you know. Sometimes I get so tired and I think: this is just too much trouble.'

'Don't even think about it.'

'That's all I can do right now is think. Sleep and think. When are you here?'

'Soon.'

'Make it sooner. We'll have a party. Like the old days. See who's still around...'

'We're still around, Patrick,' Will replied, the sorrow that was barely buried in their exchange turning his pain-killer high into something dreamily elegiac. They were in a world of endings; of early and unexpected goodbyes; not so unlike the time from which he'd woken. He felt a tightness in his chest and suddenly feared tears. 'I'd better be going,' he said, not wanting to upset Patrick. 'I'll check in again before I arrive.' Patrick wasn't going to let him off so quickly. 'You are up for a party?' he said.

'Sure...'

'Good. Then I'll get planning. It's good to have things to look forward to.'

'Always,' Will said, his throat so full he couldn't put a longer reply together.

'Okay, I'll let you go, buddy,' Patrick replied. 'Thanks for calling. It must have been that siesta, right?' 'Must have.'

There was a silence then, and Will realized that Patrick had sensed the suppressed tears in his voice.

'It's all right,' Patrick said softly. 'The fact that we're talking makes it all right. See you soon.'

Then he was gone, leaving Will listening to the buzz of the empty line. He let the receiver slip from his ear, his body so suddenly and completely overcome by tears he had no control over his limbs. It felt good, in its cleansing way. He sat there for ten, maybe fifteen minutes, sobbing like a child; catching his breath, thinking it was over, only to have another wave of weeping follow. He wasn't just crying for Patrick, or for that remark about seeing who was still around to invite to the party. He was crying for himself; for the boy he'd met again in his coma, the Will who was still inside him somewhere, wandering.

The skies that boy had seen were there too, and the fells and the fox, filed away in his memory. What a conundrum that was: that in this age of extinctions, some of which he'd chosen to document, his memory should have penned a book of his days so perfect that all he had to do was dream and they were conjured as though they'd never slipped by; as though - did he dare believe this? - the passing of things, of days and beasts and men he'd loved, was just a cruel illusion, and memory a clue to its unmasking.

The next day he was, if anything, harder on himself than he'd been the day before. The fox was right. There was work to do out in the world people to see, mysteries to solve - and the sooner he had bullied his body into shape, the sooner he'd be on his way.

In a short time, his tenacity started to show results. Day by day, session by session, his limbs strengthened and his stamina increased; he began to feel restored and rejuvenated. In spite of Koppelman's gentle mockery he sent out for a selection of homeopathic medicines to supplement his diet, and was sure they were in no small part responsible for the speed of his recovery. Koppelman had to admit he hadn't seen anything quite like it. Within ten days Will was making plans for his trip back to San Francisco. A call to Adrianna, asking her to open up the Sanchez Street house and air it out (which she'd in fact already done); a call to his editor in New York, telling her of his imminent change of location, and of course a second call to Patrick. This time the prodigal Rafael answered, returned and apparently forgiven. No, Patrick wasn't at home, he told Will, he was at the hospital, having his blood checked. He'd be back later, but Rafael didn't know when. He'd just take a message and pass it along. Make sure it gets to him, Will said, to which Rafael curtly replied: 'I'm not stupid,' and slammed the phone down.

'You've made a remarkable recovery, but you're still going to need to be kind to yourself.' This was Koppelman's farewell speech. 'No trip to the Antarctic in the next few months. No standing up to your neck in swampwater.'

'What am I going to do for fun?' Will quipped.

'Contemplate how lucky you are,' Koppelman said. 'Oh ... by the way ... my sister-in-law-'

'Laura.'

Koppelman beamed. 'You remembered? I brought her book for you to sign.' He rummaged in the bag he'd brought with him. Out came a copy of Boundaries. 'I had a look through it last night,' he said. 'Grim stuff.'

'Oh it's got a lot worse since then,' Will said, taking the pen from

Koppelman's breast pocket, and relieving him of the book. 'There's a couple of species in here lost the fight.'

'They're extinct?'

'As the dodo.' He opened the book to the title page, and scrawled an inscription.

'What the hell does that say?'

'Far Laura. Best wishes.'

'And that scrawl underneath's your signature?'

'Yep.'

'Just so I know what to tell her.'

He left two days later. There were no direct flights to San Francisco, so he was obliged to change planes in Chicago. It was at most a minor inconvenience, and he was so happy to be back in the stream of people that the drudge of getting through O'Hare became positively pleasurable. By late afternoon he was in the plane that would carry him west, and seated by the window, ordered a whisky in celebration. He hadn't had any alcohol in several months, and it went straight to his head. Pleasantly happy, he let sleep overtake him, as the sky ahead darkened.

By the time he awoke the day had long gone, and the lights of the city by the Bay were glittering ahead.

CHAPTER III

i

San Francisco had not been Will's first port of call when he'd come to America. That honour had fallen to Boston, where he had gone at the age of nineteen, having decided that whatever he was yearning for he'd never find it in England. He didn't find it in Boston either. But during the fourteen months he lived there a new Will emerged, falteringly at first, then with fearless abandon. He had known his sexual preferences long before he left England. He'd even acted upon his desires on a few occasions, though never in a state of complete sobriety. In Boston, however, he learned to be happily queer, reinventing himself after his own idiosyncratic mode. He wasn't a corn-fed American beauty, he wasn't a plaid-shined macho man, he wasn't a style queen, he wasn't a leather boy. He was his own peculiar creature, desired and pursued for that very reason. Qualities that would have gone unnoticed in a bar in Manchester (some of them obvious, like his accent, some so subtle he couldn't have named them) were here rare and coveted. He learned the nature of his advantage quickly, and exploited it shamelessly. Eschewing the uniform of the day (sneakers, tight jeans, white T-shins) he dressed like the impoverished English lad he was, and it worked like a charm. He seldom went back to an empty bed, unless he wished to do so; and in a few months had gone through three love-affairs, two of which he'd concluded. The last had been his first and bitterest taste of unreciprocated love. The object was one Laurence Mueller, a television producer nine years Will's senior. Blond, sleek and sexually adroit, Larry had drawn Will into a heady romance only to drop him cold after six weeks, a pattern he was notorious for repeating. Heartbroken, Will had mourned over the loss for half a summer, salving the hurt as best he could with behaviour that would probably have killed him five years later. In the sex emporia of the Combat Zone and in the darkness of the Fenway, where on weekend nights a sexual bacchanalia was in constant progress, he played out every sexual scenario his libido could conjure, to put Larry's dismissal of him from his mind.