Michael smiled, almost tenderly, at his screen, murmured, ‘No, bitch . . .’ and thumbed in a quick answer. He glanced at Johnny. ‘Sorry, what was it called? A movie, right?’
‘Well, not yet,’ said Johnny. ‘No, it was . . . oh, it doesn’t matter.’
‘Oh, OK . . .’ said Michael, with a little doubting look. ‘Is it a book?’
Johnny lay back, relieved and remotely indignant, dry-mouthed, communicative, waiting to hear himself go on. ‘Well, there have been a couple of books about it, someone called Ivan Goyle wrote one, and there’s one by a Sunday Times journalist.’
‘Yeah, I don’t have much time for reading,’ Michael said.
He had another line of coke (Johnny, still buzzing, not) and fetched them both fresh drinks; then he showed Johnny the profiles of three or four people on Grindr he fancied, and one or two he’d hooked up with. Johnny felt put out by this but agreed magnanimously that they were hot or cute. Michael sent messages to a couple of them and laughed at the replies. There was another app too that he hadn’t heard of, for older men and their admirers. Some of these looked so geriatric as to be beyond sex, even with modern aids. Johnny went out to the lavatory, tall and bright, and when he came back he bent over Michael and ruffled his dark hair. But it seemed that for Michael a half-dozen birds in the bush were worth one in the hand, the shimmer of potential sex was more alluring than the fact of it, here in the gold-ceilinged drawing room. ‘I’m attracted to older men,’ said Michael, as he peered into the screen of his phone.
‘Oh, good . . .’ said Johnny, sitting down again, and starting to wonder if perhaps he just wasn’t old enough.
Michael went upstairs for a bit and left Johnny to swipe through the photos on his phone, endless selfies against backgrounds in Paris, Cape Town or New York, Michael among friends, party-goers, the phone held high so that they looked up from the crowd with arms round each other and always more clown-like expressions than Michael, who seemed fixed, as though by some botched cosmetic surgery, in a rictus of glamour. Here he was last month in a packed London club, among shirtless young beauties, their arms and chests badged, swirled and enlaced in tattoos: Johnny prised the picture wide to read the details. His old friend Graham had said they should go out, the two of them – the idea of joining a crowd like this was both enchanting and absurd. Going out, dancing, not just getting drunk as he had in his twenties, but taking powerful drugs, as he had a few times in his forties, ranked among the high pleasures of his life, free of all inhibition and doubt. Odd, then, that he’d surrendered it, he’d denied himself such nights for ten years or more. It seemed to him part of the tact of age.
Michael came back with his laptop and sat pressing lightly against Johnny on the low sofa. ‘You’ve got to look at this,’ he said, dopy but manic with the coke, clicking on a link that opened a new window, the tall portrait shape of an iPhone video. He smiled at the entertainment Johnny was about to have. ‘It’s my friend Snapstud,’ he seemed to say.
‘That’s an unusual name,’ said Johnny, leaning in, putting an arm round him. ‘Who is he?’ He saw a naked young man wanking and staring at the camera while sliding a translucent blue dildo in and out of his arse. ‘Good grief . . . !’ It wasn’t remotely the sort of thing he was used to looking at, and he was giddy for a moment at the sequence of casual revelations, that people did this, and that they filmed it, and that others watched it. It was like a first teenage glimpse of a hard-core mag, but in its matter-of-fact way not like pornography at all.
‘Do you love him? He’s so cute,’ said Michael.
‘Mm,’ said Johnny, blushing and frowning down at the screen. Snapstud had dirty blond hair, and a left arm sleeved to the neck in multi-coloured tattoos. ‘How do you get this?’
‘What’s that . . . ?’ said Michael, with a slow shake of his head as he watched, ‘It’s just on his Tumblr. Go, Snappy!’ in his hazed mid-Atlantic voice, as Snappy sent up an astonishing plume of semen, a quick sequence of plumes that could be heard very faintly pattering on to a surface out of view. Then he winked and raised a thumb in self-approval as the image froze.
‘Can anybody look at these?’ said Johnny.
‘Yeah, they’re just like on his page . . .’ and Michael clicked back and scrolled through the ‘archive’, where dozens of such videos of himself, alone or having sex with other men, were thumbnailed.
‘What does he do, your friend?’
‘What . . . ? I don’t know, I’ve never met him,’ said Michael. ‘I think he like works in a bank?’ He took Johnny’s confusion for excitement, and selected another, which it took a moment to work out showed Snappy with his knees behind his head fellating himself.
‘Well, well,’ said Johnny, and sat forward and closed the laptop as he took it out of Michael’s hands – it was a small not quite friendly struggle.
‘I thought you were into young guys,’ said Michael.
Johnny set the machine carefully on the table. Hearing his preference defined, as plainly as Michael had stated his own taste for older men, he felt there was something amiss with it, a quick desire to exonerate himself that ran ahead of a more puzzled feeling: that young guys weren’t what he particularly wanted. But he said bluffly, ‘That’s why I’m here, isn’t it,’ and after some brief wriggling and dodging on Michael’s part they started kissing.
Johnny stayed for most of the night. It wasn’t a great success, but belonged even so to a private sub-category in his life, the miss that was an achievement in another way. Michael was twenty-three and it was twenty-three years since Johnny had slept with anyone new. The boy’s body retained something ideal, and he visited it with faintly amused respect, with several admiring intakes of breath at its smoothness and beauty, and some looser but larger dissatisfaction, that it seemed to know nothing. His cock had more character than he did, tight-skinned and curving to the left. Johnny marvelled at it, amazed to think cocks were still going on, all over the place, when for years he’d rarely seen anyone’s but his own and Pat’s. Michael’s made its own undoubting bid for attention; and received it. But it was all very quick when it came to it. ‘Oh, is that it?’ Johnny thought. ‘Well, what did you expect?’
‘So do you have a partner?’ said Michael, a few minutes later, curling up with his head on Johnny’s chest, in a cautious late start at showing a personal interest in him – all his gadgets were elsewhere and Johnny feared doing anything that might alert him to their absence. He pulled him closer against him.
‘Did have,’ he said. ‘He died a few months ago.’
Michael seemed to make, in the blurred close focus, a pouting face. He might have been respectfully absorbing the news – he didn’t say he was sorry to hear it. ‘What did he die of?’ he asked, with a flutter of eyelashes, a silent whirr of scanning the previous half-hour for any possible risk.
‘He had prostate cancer.’
‘Oh, right. That’s bad, isn’t it?’
‘It’s . . . yes, it is.’
‘Must make sex a bit difficult, so I’ve heard.’
‘Oh, our sex life was buggered,’ said Johnny, which was Pat’s joke. ‘Though it didn’t seem so important, you know, compared with life itself.’
‘No . . .’
‘Sex doesn’t matter that much when you’re my age.’
Michael twisted his head round to smile at him. ‘That’s not the impression I got just now,’ he said, as if referring to a rather greater triumph than they’d had ten minutes before.
‘What about you?’ said Johnny. ‘Any long-term affairs?’
‘Yeah, I have a boyfriend,’ said Michael.
‘Hmm, what’s his name?’
‘Oh, Robert.’
‘Is he in London?’
‘He’s in LA right now.’