Alan Hollinghurst - The Spell

They were dancing in the middle of the floor, in a loose group with some other friends of Danny’s. Alex had never felt so agile or so energised. He pulled off his wet T-shirt, and knew what a shining streak of sinewy beauty he was from the way people looked at him and lightly touched him. His thick black hair was soaked, and fell forward and was flung back. He danced like everyone else now, but better, more remarkably. He found himself staring rapturously at the dancers around him – it was never deliberate, it was as if he woke up to find his gaze locked with a grinning stranger’s. Or he was suddenly talking to someone, or taking a drink from their bottle. Everything was immediate, but seemed to have started, unnoticed, a few seconds before. The music possessed him, he lived it with his whole body, but his ear had become so spacious and analytic that he could hear quite distinctly the hubbub of everyone talking, like the booming whisper of tourists in a cathedral.

Danny left him in the bar with a friend of his, a muscly young Norwegian with silver blond hair. “You look a bit like Justin,” Alex said to him, with a laugh at how little he cared about Justin or anything that had hurt him in the past.

“Do I now,” said the blond.

“Do you know Justin?”

“No, darling, but don’t worry about it. This is your first time, right?”

Alex loved the Norwegian’s accent, and his fluency in English. “You’re gorgeous,” he said, and they bumped their lips together in an unsentimental kiss.

“You’re pretty cute yourself, as a matter of fact. You’re feeling quite great, am I right?”

Alex just laughed and shook his head, and gripped his friend tighter. There were three of them now, Dave from the porn- shop had his arms around them both, and Alex kissed him on the cheek and kept squeezing the back of his neck in a state of almost unconscious oneness with him. He had never done more than shake hands with a black man, or tackle one perhaps in a school rugger game – he sighed at how black he was, and ran his fingers in slow arcs up and down the small of his back.

“Those pills were all right then…”

Alex was trying to formulate an amazing truth. He confided it first to Dave, as the purveyor of all this bliss, and then to the blond. “I feel so happy I wouldn’t care if I died.”

“Oh don’t do that!” said the Norwegian, in his practical way. “You can always get happy again.”

Alex kissed the two strangers and they stood and caressed him for minute after minute with the indulgent smiles of all-knowing, all-forgiving friends.

He was parched and drank a little bottle of Lucozade. He twisted his watch to the light and saw he’d been here nearly three hours. He knew he had to have a piss and roamed off from his guardians with a vague idea of where the lavs were. Walking was somehow harder than dancing, and he almost lost his footing on some stairs littered with empty plastic bottles. In the passageway a shirtless blond boy was dancing in front of him, beaming, pupils dilated, alight with drugs. He hugged him, and they started snogging – there was a tiny round bolt through his tongue, which lolled and probed and rattled against Alex’s teeth whilst their hands gripped each other’s backsides and they swung about with fierce hilarious grunts and gasps. Alex pushed him slowly away, with soft pecks on his nose and forehead, and when he looked back a few seconds later he could see that the boy had already forgotten him.

Waiting in the ringing brightness of the lavatory he felt a tinge of loneliness, and wondered where Danny was. Everyone was busy here, men in pairs queuing for the lock-ups, others in shorts or torn jeans nodding tightly to the music, caught in their accelerating inner worlds. A guy in fatigues half-turned and beckoned him over to share his stall – Alex leant on his shoulder and looked down at his big curved dick peeing in intermittent spurts. He unbuttoned and slid in his hand and for a moment couldn’t find his own dick, he thought perhaps at some stage in the zipping forgotten hours he’d had a sex-change, but there it was, so shrivelled that he shielded it from his friend, who said, “You’re all right, you’re off your face,” and “You can do it,” and then, hungrily, “Well, give us a look,” while he stroked himself and stared and stared.

An hour or more later Alex was sprawled in a chill-out room with his arm round Danny, chewing gum, still rocking and tapping to the music in the vaster space beyond. There were fluorescent hangings that absorbed him for long periods. The blue was transcendent, infinitely beautiful, all-sufficient. And then the red… People drifted past, or sat down touching them as if they were old friends and said “All right?” Sometimes they were friends of Danny’s, and they hunkered down peaceably for five minutes and said nothing much, though everything they did say was charming and inexplicably to the point. The giddy excitement of earlier had subsided into a perfect calm without boundaries, across which figures moved with something of their vivid drug presence still about them. Once a boy called Barry something, whom Alex sometimes passed in the corridor at work, loomed up in front of him open-mouthed and doubting, and after a moment’s thought said, “No, you look like Alex, but you’re not Alex,” and went on his way.

Danny shifted round so that they were face to face, their legs hooked round each other as though they were talking in bed. “All right?” he said.

“Yes, darling. I know why it’s called house music, by the way.”

A humorous pause. “Why’s that?”

“It’s because you just want to live in it.”

Danny pushed his hand through Alex’s hair and kissed him. “Do you want your other E?”

He was interested to find that he didn’t. “I wouldn’t mind just lying here for ever.”

But Danny was a little moody and restless. “Yeah, I’ve really come down now.”

“Well, do you want another?” The idea seemed grossly greedy, like eating dinner straight after lunch; though he’d read about how people did four, or six, or twelve. He couldn’t imagine anything better than what he was still going through.

“Nah…” Danny was struggling to his feet, and looking down to help Alex up, as though he were pregnant and delicate with his own happiness. “Let’s go home,” he said.

Justin listened to the bang of the front door, the brisk and wounded footsteps up the path, the remoter thump of the car door, the noise of the car starting up and then swiftly receding. When Robin worked at home Justin seemed naturally to sleep on, but now that he had the cottage to himself he felt relieved and alert. He rolled over on to Robin’s side of the bed. They had been keeping to their own sides all week, and he snuffled up his lover’s smells from the sheet and pillowcase with a fetishistic pleasure that was keener at the moment than his feelings about him in person. To wake up to the smell of Robin after a night of sex and before another mumbling half-conscious morning bout was the firmest promise of happiness that Justin could expect; but he refused to wheedle him out of his sulks, and admired his own connoisseurial way of enjoying him in his absence.

Nothing had been quite right since the weekend with Alex. Justin opened the door in his fantasy of that Sunday morning and had Alex join them in bed for a rivalrous threesome. Alex never sulked and never refused him. He had to admit that the shock of seeing him again had brought a hidden trail of quiet after-shocks. He didn’t know at the time why he’d asked him down, but now it appeared like a covert reckoning, a need to compare, a weighing-in as if the fight hadn’t long been over; he wanted to be sure he hadn’t made a mistake. In the week that followed he had thought about Alex, especially his innocence and – what was it? – his lack of ego, with more and more puzzled fondness and with illicit whoofs of lust.