Geoff Ryman - Lust Or No Harm Done

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.'

Sensible, modulated, contact-lensed and TV-ready. This was not at all the Bottles he remembered. Old for her age back then, she had grown up even more.

Michael was aware that he had grown down. Overwork, tight scheduling, embittered sex: all of it had made him hurried and crabby.

And what would have happened to him if he had kept on dancing? The answer, watching Bottles, was suddenly clear. He would have become a vet. He would have been a vet because he would have been less ambitious, less self-denying. He would have been more himself. If he had kept on dancing, he and Bottles might have stayed friends and he would have gone on with the amateur acting and the animals.

I should have told my polished little social circle to get lost. They dropped me soon enough. When I needed help.

That had never bubbled to the surface of Michael's conscious thought before, but it was true. The future newsreaders avoided him when he came back from California – they were not up to tending the wounded. Bottles had gone on to tend his dying friends.

Gosh, he missed her, now in this future he made for himself without any friends.

Bottles, honey, he thought. I need you. I'm sorry.

The air swirled, and Bottles bounded back into his life wearing a tank top and clunky shoes and long hair. 'Babe!' she cried, 'Howya doin'?'

'I'm OK, Bottles,' said Michael, his voice warm. He was surprised by the flood of affection he felt for her.

They hugged and she pressed herself against him, and kissed him on both cheeks. Bottles said, 'It's good to see you. You know, it wasn't such a rocking good time without you.'

He'd forgotten how everything she said was quotes, in someone else's voice. He was touched by that now. Now she looked young and small and scared, but above all else, sweet.

Michael kissed her forehead. It was too much like child abuse otherwise. 'God they were dumb not to make more of you in our school.'

'Like I said, you were the nicest man in the year.'

'There wasn't much competition.'

'No,' she agreed lightly, and gave him a gentle little bat. She slipped out of his hug. 'But you haven't aged well. Too much science, love. I bet you went to university.' There was scorn in her voice.

'I did.' He had to chuckle.

'Ruined you for life. The trouble with being a swot is that you think you're dedicated to something else, when really, you're only dedicated to yourself.'

She turned back to him, appraising. 'You're… how old?'

He had to think. 'I'm thirty-eight.'

Bottles did not say he didn't look 38. 'So… that makes it sometime in 1998. Gosh, did the world survive that long?'

'It did, and so did you.'

She paused for a moment, considering. 'Hmmm.'

Impulsively, she flung herself onto the sofa, but kept her shoes hanging over the edge of the sofa arm. She looked like something from a Roxy Music album cover.

'I grew up happy, baby,' she announced. 'I'm fat and happy, and I never give Romford Comprehensive a moment's thought. The secret was to leave London and go somewhere where they make their own fun. Two days after school finished I ran off to Scotland with a real creep. On the way back, the train stopped in Newcastle. I jumped off it at the last minute, just grabbed my bags, said "Sod off" and stayed in Newcastle. I waited in bars, stuff like that.' Her voice went very small and quiet. 'I was on the game for a while.'