Читать книгу Lust - Geoff Ryman, Geoff Ryman - Страница 19

After California, Michael spent the next ten years missing sexual opportunities. As these years were 1976 to 1986, missing opportunities probably saved his life.

Everyone else was going at it like ferrets, not knowing there was something brand-new in the world. By the time Michael emerged from purdah, he and the world knew things had changed, and were taking precautions.

But it was already too late for several dear friends. They rolled on all unknowing for many years, all through the eighties into the nineties, though they were, like Shrödinger’s cat, already dead mathematically. They had the virus. Or rather, it had them.

If you can have sex with anyone in the world, you need to know as a matter of urgency, if they can make you ill. Answering this question presented Michael with several interesting methodological difficulties.

If he experimented on himself and it made him ill, that would indeed be a result, but it would rather defeat the purpose. On the other hand, experimenting on someone else did raise certain ethical questions.

It was also methodologically suspect. Michael would first have to ensure that whoever was being tested was HIV negative to begin with. Proving HIV negative status is extremely difficult. Antibodies take three months to show up after infection. That means a second test is necessary three months after the first. During those three months, you have to know absolutely that the person has avoided all risk of exposure to the virus. That means no kissing. If there are any doubts, you have to test again three months after that.

If the subject was, say, a nun who never had sex with anyone, Michael would first have to find the one Angel in the world who could seduce her, and then persuade her that she needed an HIV test. This scenario seemed unlikely.

Perhaps his own Angel could sleep with another Angel with Aids. And then be tested twice, once while the infected Angel was still in the world, and again, once he had left it to see if the virus remained behind.

But that meant the slate would be cleaned whenever the carrying Angel disappeared. And even perhaps when his own experimental Angel dipped in and out of existence.

Both the infecting Angel and his victim would have to remain in the world for an uninterrupted three months.

Well, Michael could rent a house somewhere out of the way, Scotland maybe, and have them live there under iron orders to sleep with no one else. It was a little bit like keeping experimental dogs in kennels. There was no doubt that science was easier when you did it to animals.

But Angels are not people. What if their immune systems worked differently? Suppose Angels could infect people but not each other?

Michael considered testing with a less serious virus. He could conjure up an Angel with a severe cold, sleep with him, and see if he caught anything. Or call up a copy with diphtheria on his moustache and swab his own lips and grow a culture.

But HIV was a retrovirus. It copied itself into the RNA of your cells, and took over their reproductive function. It becomes you, and you are real. Suppose over the three months it worked its magic, the virus became so entwined with your non-miraculous body that it gained a real life?

The more he thought, the more difficult and absurd it all became.

Then he remembered that one of his many lost opportunities had grown up to be an expert on Aids. Her name was Margaret White, but Michael had known her in school as Bottles. They had been friends during Michael’s brief period of popularity before his last trip to California.

At sixteen, Michael was just American enough to find it easier to meet strangers and stay sunny and positive about things. He was invited to parties. He was likely to succeed, and grumpy jealous spotty pale blokes grumbled about him behind his back.

Michael was in the school theatre club and was big and strong and handsome and could act. There were more girls in drama club than blokes, so they did a production of Anouilh’s Antigone: lots of juicy female roles. Michael played the old, heart-torn tyrant. He moved with a combination of bullish swagger and slight arthritic limp that left the audience astonished. Michael had conjured up the king.

His sport was long-distance running. The beefiness he inherited from his father was yet to develop; he maintained an easy luxurious swing to the way he moved. He combined beauty with a certain shy sweetness that did not threaten or repel, and his black eyes reminded people of a particularly friendly, lively spaniel. Indeed, he was very good with animals. He worked for the local vet part-time and had decided to become a veterinarian.

The nicest thing about Michael was that he was no snob.

Bottles was the unkind nickname given to a big-breasted girl who existed on the social margins. She was tall, big-boned, a little ungainly, with a certain daffy spinning to her eyes. Her classmates whispered about her with a fascinated prurience, because at sixteen, Bottles was living the life of grown woman. She looked 22, had adult boyfriends with cars, and spent weekends in clubs. Rumour was accepted as fact: Bottles did a strip show in the local pub.

Michael got to know Bottles on a school trip to Windsor Castle, an attempt to steep them in the mystique of royalty. They met over a joke.

As they got off the train at one of Windsor’s stations, Bottles said to him, cheerily, ‘My goodness, two train stations. Is that so the Queen can get away in case there’s a revolution?’

It was 1976 and there was little to make any hungry secondary-scholar feel wild, free and funny. Bottle’s top was cut low, and her breasts were squashed together, showing pale skin and a hint of blue veins. She had been sent home recently for the unheard-of thing of piercing her nostril with an earring.

‘I mean, do you suppose the Queen goes to the toilet in public? I’m being serious. There she is, waving to crowds and suddenly she gets caught short. Can she say, sorry everyone, I need a pit stop? Or does she just have to wait until she gets home?’

To a sixteen-year-old in the run-up to the Jubilee, this was scandalously original. Bottles began to walk in a clenched, constricted way and grunted in agony. ‘One is so pleased to be hyah.’

Michael laughed, partly with disbelief that someone real could suddenly start saying such things. He laughed with relief because he found Bottles reassuring. Daftness is not only funny but very slightly pitiable.

Michael’s laughter was constrained by fear, fear of being awkward or saying too much, and this constraint made it elegant. It was elegance that Bottles craved.

Both of them felt an irresistible tug of charm. Bottles suddenly put her arm through his.

‘You,’ Bottles announced, ‘are a Louise.’

Michael’s panic surfaced: how did she know? Had someone told her? If someone had told Bottles then maybe everybody knew.

She saw it and chuckled. ‘Don’t look so baffled,’ she said, and stroked the top of his brown and flawless hand. ‘Louise is a club. It’s run by the most wonderful Frenchwoman and she’s called Louise and so her club is too.’ She lapsed into fake American. ‘You wanna go?’

Michael beamed relief and friendship. ‘Absolutely, without fail, please.’ After all, he was the school’s official American, and Americans are never supposed to be afraid.

She got the message. He liked her. ‘Friday night OK with you?’

Michael offered, ‘Or Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday …’

‘Full social calendar, huh?’

‘I’m a hot date, but I can squeeze you in.’ Michael felt sophisticated, all of 22. ‘I’m generally pretty busy except for weekdays and weekends.’

‘Aw,’ she said and gave his hand a quick squeeze. ‘And you’re the nicest man in the year.’

At sixteen there is something irresistible about being called a man, especially by someone who has had some experience of them. And with whom, for some reason, you feel both safe and giddy at the same time.

So that Friday they went to the Club Louise in Soho.

Michael loved it. It was full of other daffy people, starting with Louise herself. She sat in a basement cubbyhole, greeting teenage visitors from Bromley as if they were French aristocrats. She took Bottle’s coat (long with a collar of black feathers that smelled of burnt sesame oil), and kissed her on both cheeks, and called her ‘ma chérie’ with a skeletal detachment.

Bottles looked a cool 25 let alone sixteen. She ordered champagne. A woman called Tami bubbled up to them, nipping someone else’s glass off a table en route. She held it up, empty, with a hungry grin. Tami wore black gloves with rings on the outside, something so chic it made Michael speechless with admiration.

Tami talked about American black music, how only American black music was worth listening to. Did he see Bowie at Wembley? Amazing, all done with just those brilliant white lights, everything black and white, and he just strolled out of this haze of light. ‘I got so excited, I nearly mussed my perm.’

Michael loved Station to Station. Drunk, emboldened by moral support, he went up to the DJ’s hidden booth and asked for his favourite track, ‘TVC15’. Instead of curling his lip in contempt as Michael expected, the DJ said, ‘Too right, mate.’

So up came ‘TVC15’, and Michael, out of sheer love, began to dance. This should have been terribly uncool. No one else was dancing.

But Michael was grinning like a monkey, and he had decided at the last minute to rent a tuxedo, onto which Bottles had pinned her earrings. Somehow that was just right. Suddenly, with an ungainly whoop, Bottles and most especially Tami joined him. That probably did it. An awful lot of people looking tough at tables were suddenly left behind as people started to dance.

Michael had trouble with conversation. He was always scared of running out of things to say. But dancing was inexhaustible, and he used dancing to communicate. He even did the terribly hippyish thing of linking arms, and got away with it. Station to Station kept coming back; people groaned and shouted when it was turned off, and Michael found himself in the centre of a circle of people who knew where the good time was.

The good time was him. Tami put all her rings on his fingers. They did a whip-round and bought another bottle of champagne, and Bottles, giggling, poured it over his head, like a ship being launched, knowing somehow that he wanted to stain those hired dressy clothes. At just the right moment she nipped him back to the table and stopped him drinking. She sat looking at him affectionately, introducing him to people. It was like having a mother who was truly cool.

The next day his real mother, bitter with disappointment and suspicion, said, ‘Did you take any drugs?’

‘No, Mom.’

‘Who were you with?’

‘A girl from school, Mom.’

‘You were drinking. You’re underage.’

His mother had a long pale face that had lost its prettiness quickly, lining in her thirties. Her hair was an unattractive orange pudding basin with its roots showing. Michael’s Mum looked worn, downtrodden, and utterly wrapped up in her own unhappiness. She looked like someone who had been deserted. She also looked like someone who was enduring it.

‘It’s not a good way to begin life, Michael, drinking in clubs.’

Reality was returning like a headache.

‘No, Mum.’

Her narrow face didn’t trust him, and didn’t trust itself. She didn’t know what to think. And gave her head a shake.

‘Your clothes are ruined. How can we turn them back into Moss Bros like that?’

‘They’re used to it, Mom. That’s why people hire gear.’

‘And they pay to have it cleaned and all. Do you have the money to pay for that or do you expect me to pay for it, Michael?’

Bottles gave him a call. ‘Hiya! How’s tricks?’

He didn’t know what tricks were. ‘Oh OK, but Mom’s on my case about the clothes.’

Bottles chuckled. ‘Fun costs, Michael. That’s how you know it’s been real fun and not TV.’

Michael thought of sports teams in California, and the coaches who all talked like General Patton. ‘No pain, no gain,’ he mimicked, calling them up.

‘No pain, no game,’ she corrected him. ‘So, are you man enough for another night out at Club Louise?’

Perhaps he wasn’t and that was the trouble. At the very least, he was scared that the magic wouldn’t work a second time. At the most, Michael was scared that she would make a pass at him. He was confused, confounded by sex. Her big breasts had allure, but Michael also knew already that his future did not lie with women. He just had a lot of trouble finally admitting that to himself.

It made him awkward. ‘Hi!’ he kept saying brightly, every time he saw her, and nothing else. He could think of nothing else to say. He sounded like a chipmunk and felt five years old.

Michael wanted his more normal friends to see how wise she was, so he trapped her into a lunch with them. The girls, particularly, were fashionable and elegant and calm and confident and virginal and enclosed within a social circle. One of them grew up to be a newsreader; another was now a big cheese at the British Museum. They eyed Bottles, who plainly had a rich future as a floozy. The future newsreader widened her eyes and stared fixedly at Michael and that meant: ‘What on earth are you doing with her and why have you brought her to our table?’

Ostentatiously, Bottles began to smoke in public in the school cafeteria. This was likely to get the whole table into trouble. The girls started to leave.

Bottles had no social circle, but promiscuously joked with anyone who would have her. Michael sat with her at these scattered tables surrounded by surly underachievers. His mouth ran away with him. He bragged to them about Club Louise. He knew it was a mistake, he could feel coolness slipping away, but he wanted everyone to know that they had gone to a club. So he repeated every last incident of their evening out, like it was some big deal, and Bottles ground out her cigarette with impatience.

Eventually Michael stopped trying to spend lunchtime with her. It was too painful. He started to nod at her in corridors as they passed, feigning mild friendship.

He knew Bottles thought it was what always happened to her, that there was something about her that put people off. She was fed up being too old for her age. Gradually, they lost touch.

Michael saw Bottles a year later. He’d convinced a bunch of people in his biology class to go to Club Louise.

Louise still greeted visitors as if to a literary salon, but inside the atmosphere was different. Tami didn’t remember him. She went hard-faced and silent when greeted by this pale, stolid-looking nerd. ‘Hmm. Hmm,’ she said several times and pointedly moved on.

The music was terrible, like something recorded by amateurs in a bathtub. Michael asked for Station to Station and the DJ curled his lip. People sat glumly and defensively at tables, greeting only a very few people with effusive kissing on the cheeks that made plain to everyone else that they were not being kissed. People rolled their eyes as you passed, or said, ‘Get out of the bleeding way. Honestly, these stuck-up queens.’

Bottles came in and at first Michael didn’t recognize her. She’d cut her hair and wore thick make-up that made her look Egyptian. She was kissed into a table with gladsome cries of feigned elegance, and then they all fell into the same chill silence. A ferret-faced young man with dyed blond hair was giving a very hard time to some overly pretty old hippie who had cut his hair. In something like despair and panic the old hippie was trying to convince him of something. It was Malcolm and Johnny, and if that was the birth of punk, as far as Michael was concerned, you could keep it.

‘Everybody’s so bitchy,’ despaired a member of the biology class. She played cello in the school orchestra.

‘It used to be so nice. Really,’ said Michael.

Like a basilisk, Bottles looked stonily through him.

The next time Michael saw her was in the 1990s on TV. She looked like Mo Mowlam, and wore pantsuits and sensible middle-length hair and was a spokesperson for an Aids charity. She was on the breakfast show, convincing people to come forward to have an Aids test. ‘The main thing to remember is there’s now some point to having the test. If we catch it early enough, we know the drugs can work.’