On the huge square stairway going down the banging of the music grew louder and louder like a boring threat, the noise of other people’s pleasure. When they opened the door into the bar it came at them hard, the bright ping-ponging happiness of a tune on top, all warmed up, geared up, and bouncing fast, while he still had his coat on and wondered as they joined the queue for the coat check if he wanted to bounce at all. The medium of the club, three floors below ground, was an absolute darkness, on which multicoloured light played and darted incessantly, over the naked shoulders and handsome faces of the milling and gathering men. Johnny’s fear here was the sixteen-year-old’s again, that he would lose Graham, that his friend would make out with someone else, leaving him more lonely than ever in an alien crowd. He thought, for god’s sake, I’m a father, I’m on the committee of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, I own a large house in Fulham. He handed in his coat and scarf and big jersey and came away with his ticket and a little shiver past the huge ducted air-conditioning. And the truth was he had made a puzzled private attempt, back home, at looking sexy, a raid on his youthful self, old jeans shabby and tight, a faded T-shirt he’d screen-printed himself – a deniable effort but perhaps an appealing one. The two beautiful men from the restaurant came past and looked at them in the split-second misapprehension of their knowing each other, the twitch of a smile sliding at once to some worthier object – the smile deniable too. Graham marched him into the bar.
It was in the toilet stall, with his bottle of Corona and his twist of crystalline powder, that he saw himself most starkly, as if in a security camera, risky, ridiculous: what if he collapsed on the dance floor, and died? What would his father say, what would he tell his friends when the news appeared in the Telegraph? For a moment, above the narrow, black-walled cubicle, his father hovered like a genie. He wetted a finger, dipped it and licked it again, tiny granules bitter and authentic as he washed them down with two swigs of beer. He unbolted the door with unexpected firmness and relief, and went back to the bar.
He found Graham talking with a huge shirtless blond, formidable torso a swirl of tattoos, cogs and blades, Celtic but industrial, a legend on his chest in a font so fancy you had to work it out . . . If You Want You Can Do It: ah, well, thought Johnny. They were at different stages, Graham standing with his drink, a man at a party, the blond chewing, eyes dilated, touching him and stroking him. ‘Johnny, this is Billy,’ Graham said – Johnny found himself pulled in, kissed, held under Billy’s fondly protective left arm, his skin silky and warm, Johnny’s hand round his waist in lightly adhesive contact as he rocked to the music. ‘Having a good time?’ said Billy. ‘I’m starting to,’ said Johnny. Billy kissed him again and squeezed him – then shouted, reached out over Johnny’s head to another massive beauty going past, and in a moment he was off, pulled away by the other man, but leaning back to kiss Graham too – ‘Catch you later!’ before he was taken into the surge that was moving and building towards the dance floor beyond. ‘How do you know Billy?’ said Johnny. Graham smiled and shrugged – ‘Never seen him before,’ he said.
He felt tired as they waited, the music, which all the others seemed to know and love, demanding something impossible of him, and someone was looking at him over Graham’s shoulder, could it be a man he knew, a friend’s child? A friend’s grandchild . . . ? Not a sitter, he was sure of that. He went on past, turned and squinted at Johnny, said something to the boy with him, and hung around before coming back: ‘Hello, Mr Sparsholt!’ Johnny looked narrowly at him, skinny, posh boy, dark, borderline pretty, eyes chemically engorged. ‘It’s Tim! – you remember, I was going to marry Lucy . . .’ ‘Oh, Tim . . .’ said Johnny, then worked it out, as the boy shook his hand and kissed him on both cheeks. ‘It’s Mr Sparsholt!’ Tim said to his friend. It was what he had called him in the days when Johnny took Lucy to play with him, or he came round to the house to play with her. At the age of eight he proposed to Lucy, but at some point in the twenty years since then had clearly thought better of it. Now he had nothing on but shorts and trainers and was hand in hand with this restless young man already tugging him on towards the dance floor, who also had something tattooed on his chest like a necklace, in flowing script: Never A Failure Always A Lesson – well, that was great too. Johnny followed them with his eyes, explained to Graham who he was, and felt his feet slyly shifting and rocking, an effortless energy pulsing up his legs, his head nodding, right arm rising on invisible currents to part the air in time to the music. He knew he was a lightweight, when they’d gone out in the old days he’d danced all night on half a pill. This was much quicker than a pill, he felt it lift him and stagger him at the same time. But it was lovely, absurdly lovely, too lovely for the mere materials at hand, and so with its own fine filament of regret, though he couldn’t stop smiling. ‘Shall we dance?’ he said, and they threaded their way through to the edge of the floor, Graham shifting his shoulders, looking round, not up yet himself, but playing up to Johnny’s sudden bold gestures. It was fabulous to move without thinking, among all the others, accepted. Graham touched his arm, gave him chewing gum, a swig of his water. ‘That stuff’s all right, then!’ The big tune they all knew came back, held back, waited for, a countdown, open faces of the crowd turned towards the DJ in his booth, Johnny laughed and shook his head and his hand pointed skywards when it came.
Later he was watching a man dancing with friends, the rightness and beauty of him first of all, the strain of his neck, the face tighter but longer from baldness, but yes it must be Mark, he beamed at him, and Mark saw him too, and came over smiling – shirt tucked in his belt, leather bands tight round his biceps, all the handsome maintained muscled of a fifty-year-old, and the single small tattoo of thirty years before on the left arm, just below the shoulder, a rose: Johnny rubbed it with his fingers, with the ball of his thumb, magical, testing it. It was more touching, and more pleasing, than he could say, and Mark, who had probably half-forgotten it himself, rolled his shoulder to peer at it, and peered at Johnny with his funny saucy smile. He pulled him in, Johnny glanced back for Graham, who nodded happily at him, Mark took both his hands and they were dancing together.
There were questions Johnny dropped before bothering to ask, had Mark stayed on the scene, needing it, loving it, these past twenty years, or was this a rare nostalgic venture for him too? Johnny knew the answer, Mark gripping his shoulder and making happy incoherent remarks: flashes of memory and facts about the people he was with and what he’d been doing earlier in the evening all mixed up without connexion: he was very high. And Johnny got the drift, he was touched and charmed by the rubbish Mark was saying. They danced with a third man, Max, in a leather harness, their arms round each other’s shoulders and waists, Max losing the rhythm as he got out his phone and tried to make sense of a text, and struggled for a minute or two, jaw working and pupils like dark pools, to send a reply – the phone was fertile with predictions as he thumbed the wrong keys. Johnny offered to help him, which was a joke in itself, but they got it off just as the friend he was texting, a tall black man clutching bottles of water and Lucozade, squeezed his way through the crowd beside them: Smirnofg and redbBull, it said. The black man was called Arnold, and made droll conversation with Johnny before someone else claimed him. All around them in the fluent glancing colours of the lights men half their age danced, shoulders rolling, hands rising and pointing; among them Johnny spotted here and there the bald and grizzled pillars of his own generation, and was troubled by them for a second, and then as quickly grateful that some looked older than him. After a bit, Mark pulled him into the amorous head-lock that signalled a wish to speak, and said again, ‘Who are you with?’ Johnny looked back, said, ‘Well, I came with Graham’ – and wondered as Mark’s fingers slid down his arm and interlocked with his own in a warm strong grasp if there was more to this question, some faint enduring thread through the great perspective of time that seemed to open up under the glittering archway of the club. He danced for a while with his hands on Mark’s shoulders, Mark holding him lightly round the waist with one arm, and smiling, at him, and over his head at Arnold, whom he reached out to with his other hand to bring him into the circle. Arnold kept his shirt on and had a nice ironical slant on the place and the people – it was hard to say if he was high himself or not. ‘How long have you known Mark?’ he said. ‘Thirty years!’ said Johnny. ‘Mm, I’ll have to ask him all about you,’ said Arnold. Johnny said, ‘How about you?’ nodding at Mark, who was smiling from far away in the tunnel of pleasure, though his hand was squeezing Johnny’s neck. Arnold raised three fingers, and then with one of his gracious ironical gestures lifted Mark’s other hand and showed their matching gold bands side by side.