Alan Hollinghurst - The Spell

The Drop was packed when he arrived and he pushed his way through to the bar and ordered a large brandy and coke. It was important to be served by Heinrich, whom he’d had a brief intense fling with, and who always gave him back in change the whole amount he had just handed over in payment. As the coins slipped from hand to hand it was clear that neither of them could remember why they weren’t still together. Danny swung about a bit with his drink on the edge of the dance-floor, and leaned in at the little gate of the DJ’s desk to give him a kiss between the wires of his headphones. He exchanged nods and smiles with a few regulars, the older men he was sometimes so drawn to, and let his eyes run over what he called the usual strangers, young tourists who jammed these low brick cellars all summer long, and gave off such a heady mood of temporary trashiness. Then he went into the Gents and chopped some coke up crudely with a phone-card and snorted the biggest line he’d ever had, since it was free and he felt he’d earned it. He waited there for a moment or two, wondering impatiently how Martin had got on to him, what he hadn’t noticed. He thought he might have followed him for some sexual thing; maybe he should have offered himself to Martin. He pictured the scene, and gripped himself between the legs as the coke opened up his mind and sent its amusing surge of energy through his limbs. It was tip-top stuff. A bit speedy, maybe. He was going up more sharply than he’d expected -he was olympian, but alight. He wondered if he’d ever been randier. He burst out into the club with something between a laugh and a snarl.

Even so, he danced for a while, just because of the power in his legs and the spreading hilarity he felt. Someone he vaguely knew came up and hugged him and he told him he’d been fired – he raised his hands as he danced and shook the thing away, the veil of shame and self-accusation. The boy laughed too, since Danny was happy, and said, “Congratulations!” Danny was so relieved to find that everything was all right.

He didn’t think this guy was hot enough to have sex with. He had a look in the Ladies, which was always very busy on a Friday or Saturday night, when ladies themselves were not allowed in the club. The main space was sometimes taken up by a slowly mutating body of men, a couple maybe having sex in the middle while ten or twelve others pressed around them, staring and saying “Yeah” and “Fuck him,” jacking off and getting caught up with each other in turn. But at the moment nothing much was happening, though rapid jolting noises from one of the cubicles showed that someone had got the right idea.

There was a mysterious dim passageway which started outside the lavs and went round two corners before ending up by the front door and the cold draught down the stairs from the street above; Danny had sometimes emerged from the corridor blinking as if from an improbable erotic dream. He swaggered along it now, past heavily groping couples, and at the first corner he met Luis, a big Brazilian boy in boots and falling-down jeans and a leather waistcoat, muscly but a bit plump too; his back was long in proportion to his legs and he had a big head of curly dark hair. He looked like a giant dwarf, Danny thought, as Luis frowned at him, and then gave him a smile with some gold in it, and put his arms round his neck and his tongue in his mouth. Danny pushed him against the wall, with one hand in the cool sweat at the top of his bum, and the other, after a moment’s polite hesitation, working roughly at his loose crotch.

They agreed to go back to Danny’s place – this was too good to squander in five minutes in the toilet. It turned out Luis had a friend in the club, another Carioca, whom they went to say goodbye to, a thin, poetic-looking boy all in black. After a minute 6’f impenetrable muttering, perhaps an argument about keys and plans for the morning, Danny placed a hand on both their necks, apprehending them from the Utopian height of his mood, and said to Luis, “Why doesn’t Edgar come with us?”

He rang Alex at 7.30. “Hi darling,” he said, in an airy, somehow miserable way.

“Hello, sweetheart. I hope you’re hungry!”

Danny let out a little groan. “I’m not really. Actually, I’m at home.”

“Oh darling. Are you okay?”

He paused in the face of Alex’s innocent whole-heartedness, the maternally prompt note of worry. “Yeah, I’ll be fine. I just felt a bit strange in the night. I don’t know…”

“I’ll come over. I’ve made the pancake mixture, but that doesn’t matter. Let me see, can I bring you anything? Have you got some Disprin?”

“No, don’t. There’s no point,” Danny said, with an edgy jump of volume that he regretted. “Really, Alex, I just need to sleep for a few hours. I’ve been up all night, remember…Okay…I’ll ring you later, darling…I’ll ring you later…okay…bye…bye,” and he squeezed the End Call button with a vivid, not wholly serious image of prising someone’s fingers from a life-raft.

He pulled on his boxer shorts and went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. Dobbin was sitting at the table, with a haggard but sentimental look. “Dan, my man,” he said. “That was some wild shit last night.”

“You look like you had a good time,” said Danny.

Dobbin cast around the room for help in conveying what he had been through. “I was stuck down this fucking K-hole for like, forever,” he said. “And they’re all saying, “Come on, man, let’s get out of here,” and I’m like, “I can’t move, guys! Don’t leave me, guys!””

“You’re always getting stuck down a K-hole,” said Danny. “I don’t know why you keep doing that stuff.”

“Am I…? Yeah…” Dobbin pursed his lips and nodded slowly to suggest that Danny was right, he’d have to get a rein on this thing. “What about you man?” he said.

But Danny didn’t feel like accounting for his night with Luis and Edgar. When the kettle boiled he said with a yawn, “I think I’m going to give up this job. It’s too boring, being stuck there all night, with nothing happening.” He’d never had ketamine, with its notorious hour-long “holes” of dissociation, but he said, “I might as well be in a K-hole.”

“Right,” said Dobbin, with a slow laugh. “Except of course you get paid for it.”

Danny took his mug of tea to his room, closed the door and then set about stripping the bed. The rucked bottom sheet was damp with sweat and blotted with drying semen. Dark pubic hairs jumped up from it as he pulled it tight. He searched the duvet and the bedspread, which had been thrown aside at the beginning, and pulled the pillows out of their cases. He ran his hands over the roughness of the carpet under the edge of the bed. He looked for a second or third time in impossible pockets. But the truth was unavoidable: he had lost the chain.

He tried to think how or when it might have happened. The night was rather a blur. They’d all had their hands in each other’s pants in the taxi, and from the moment they reached the house it went – wild: Danny was no better than Dobbin at expressing where he’d been. They had wolfed up all the tiptop charlie, which even the Latin Americans were impressed by, and drunk a whole bottle of brandy that the Halls had given him for his birthday. They had been through every reasonable sexual permutation that three men could manage, and given up on one or two others with baffled laughter. They just didn’t stop. Edgar was what Alex quaintly called Danny: a demon. Though what that made Luis…The time shot by. And then the boys were getting dressed, talking quietly to each other in Portuguese, with odd nervy gestures in his direction. There was something weird about it, a sudden professional distance, as if his time was up. It was true there was no more drink or coke. They hid in their language, they couldn’t explain why they were going. Luis left a number on the mantelpiece, and said “Call me”; he and his friend, in their jeans and boots and sweat-shirts, each gave the nake,d Danny a friendly but formal embrace. Then they left. And then Danny, puzzled, drifting round the room unable to decide if it was accusing him or congratulating him, raised his hand to his throat and the shiver of a suddenly noticed loss. He dialled the number now, and was told by the pleasant unanswerable woman in the machine that it was not available.