Geoff Ryman - Lust Or No Harm Done

Suddenly, there was a spliff in her hand. She looked around the living room, the wall-to-wall carpet, Phil's paintings, his family's furniture, and the bay window. 'Posh,' she said, with little interest. 'Nothing much happens here, does it?' And then she said, 'I'm sorry, I didn't mean that. You've done well, Michael. You look so adult, like a kind of teddy bear.'

'That doesn't make sense.'

'You look like an adult teddy bear, a Papa Bear.'

'How did we screw up?' he asked.

'We didn't.'

'I mean, why didn't we stay friends?'

'Um. We were young and frightened and we fell in love in a kind of way and you weren't ready for it.'

'You know why we never did it?'

'Because I moved like a bison on a trampoline?' She had the habit of taking the piss out of herself. Her smile was crooked.

'It's true, you did, but I thought that was sexy. But I'm queer, and I wanted to tell you first, and I was… more scared than most of saying so.'

'I knew that!' she exclaimed.

'You did?' He smiled, embarrassed.

'Of course I knew that, Babe. That's why…' It was just the teeniest bit difficult to say. 'That's why I felt safe around you. Both of us ran away from people because we thought we were ugly.' Maybe Angels find it easier to say things than real people.

'You ignored me in Club Louise.'

She sighed and shook her head. 'You looked so naff. I mean you looked like one of nature's born Radio Three listeners. And punk was all style, and you can only keep up a style by being mean. So I was mean. Forgive me?'

He nodded. 'Yeah.'

'Can we have sex just once?'

He settled in next to her, and sucked the dope in, and waited for it to buzz his brain. It never did, with him. Michael had marijuana impotency, too. But it produced a pleasant lazy atmosphere. She gave him a long lazy tobacco-and-peppermint kiss, and began to give his dick a rub.

'There's something else I have to tell you. I… I…' Michael sagged with disappointment at himself. 'Why can't I say it? I hardly ever get it up.'

'Hmm,' she said, cosily in his arms. 'That's OK. I never have orgasms.'

'What? You?'

She cradled him. 'Mmm hmm.'

'But you had all those men at school.'

'Maybe that's why, or maybe I was trying to prove to myself that there was nothing wrong. If there is anything wrong with not having orgasms.'

A pause. A beat. They both burst out laughing. 'It's fucking awful not having orgasms!' Michael yelped.

She nodded. 'I keep thinking I'm going to get there, I'm going to get there… and nothing fucking happens.'

'At least you can fake it. I just sit there dangling.'

'Hey, we're famous. The Dysfunction Twins.' She took another drag and said, 'We could have lived together and had the same boyfriends.'

'That sounds really good. We could have both disappointed them.'

'We could have cried on each other's shoulders and told the lot of them to go get screwed.' Bottles and Michael casually held each other like lovers, old lovers who are eighty.

'Men,' said Michael. 'They're no good to live with.'

Bottles adopted the tone of a school-ma'am. 'Never. Never live with a man.'

'They belch,' offered Michael.

'They fart on the tube.'

'They don't wash up.'

'Or they start to, make a big deal about how much they're helping, and then bugger off before it's finished.'

'They get mad if you don't call them, but they don't even notice when they haven't called you.'

'They want you to take care of them and then they go and fuck some other cunt.'

'Or arse.'

'Give me another kiss.'

They smooched. It was a theatrical kiss, a kiss in quotes, a spotlit kiss. It made her giggle.

'You've gone all butch,' she said.

'Me?' That was a new one.

'Yup. You used to be a little squit of a thing. Oh, very, very pretty, but I'd have been frightened of snapping you in two.'

So they smooched again. Her lips were fat, her breasts were fat, and Michael yearned to see her squirm out of her 1976 skin-tight jeans.

She peeled like an orange, and her body was in sections, restrained by straps. He sucked her shoulder. He tried to flip her breasts out of the bra, and then tried to undo it, and he got her tangled up, like a horse caught in reins. She started to

giggle.

'You've never done this before. You have never got a woman out of her bra before!' she shouted and laughed.

He remembered how badly his copy made love. He tried to be better at it. He tried to delicately twitch her nipples. She giggled and kissed the top of his head. 'You're twiddling them like they're knobs on a stereo.'

So they just cuddled naked, deliberately kissing the neglected parts: elbows, ears, eyebrows.

He said, 'This is more fun than sleeping with a man.'

Bottles couldn't resist. 'I was about to say the same thing.'

'Oh cheers.'

'Men are always trying to fuck me without a condom.'

'Oh no no, it's just the opposite with me. They always have a condom because sleeping with me puts them at terrible risk. They couldn't sleep with me without a condom, they don't know where I've been. It's a good thing I liked being fucked, or they'd get nowhere.'

'I can't help you there,' said Bottles, sucking on a roach that would have required a microscope to see, let alone smoke. 'It seems to me that you urgently need to meet some nice men.' She offered him the roach, and after breathing out said, 'If you find one, let me know.'

This seemed to have introduced the topic of the episodes.

Michael began. 'Does… does it seem kind of strange to you that you're sixteen and I'm thirty-eight?'

She paused. 'Not really. But then the world doesn't really add up for me.'

'What do you know about yourself?'

She seemed to darken and go dull. 'That I'm…' She sucked on her teeth. 'That I'm some kind of construct. The real Maggie is thirty-eight, a single mum and lives in Islington. She's real and I'm not, but then I never really felt real.'

Michael explained the miracle to her. He explained why he needed her help.

She took it on the chin. She sat up and went business-like. 'I'm not the Aids expert. She is. I guess she'll help you. But. Don't call her Bottles. She hates the name. She's Margaret to strangers, Maggie to friends. She'll know something, dimly, about this. Like she's dreamed it, so she won't be entirely surprised to see you. She believes, a little bit, that women sometimes see things.'

Bottles leaned back, and looked up into his face, and it was firm. 'I meant what I said about swots.'

Why did everybody always have something perfectly justified to say about him?

'Go ahead,' he said, 'let me have it.' He wished he were dressed. His stomach was hairy and his dick shrivelled.

'You're so concerned about yourself that you're asking the wrong question.'

'So what question should I be asking?'

She told him.

'Oh God,' he said, and covered his eyes with shame. She was right and all. Right on methodological grounds. Right about the self-concern. He chuckled at himself.

'Can I go now?' she asked. 'The more I know about this, the weirder it gets and the sadder.'

'How come?'

'Because I'm dead. There hasn't been anyone called Bottles in years.'

'Can I see you again?' he asked.

'Yeah sure,' she said, in voice that meant no. 'Is it up to me?' There was no point pretending that it was.

'See you around,' said Michael, and she was gone.

Can I cure Angels who are sick?

That was the question to ask. If Michael could call up Angels and cure them, then he could make love to them after they were rid of the virus.

So, after making certain arrangements, Michael ended up in a clinic after hours. Margaret or Maggie was doing him a favour.

'It's not for me,' he had told her on the phone. 'It's a friend of mine. He won't come in for a test if I don't come with him and he doesn't get the answer right away. And… he's also paranoid about false results, so he wants to take the test two times in a row. Yes, I know, it's weird, but I'm really concerned.'