Geoff Ryman - Lust Or No Harm Done

Michael could not remember what happened afterwards. He and Al seemed to stop talking. Something happened to Al during the last year at school. Michael saw it only from afar. Al didn't study for exams. His dark eyes were clouded and encircled with bags of even darker flesh. His tie was askew, his school uniform was untended. Al wore it with the bitter swagger of the unloved, the outcast. He dyed his hair a muddy, brassy blond.

Michael supposed it went something like this: my adopted parents do in fact care about me. They know I am stranded between two cultures. They don't want me to have to guess where my birth parents were from, and read about those cultures in books. They are worried that I will have no self-esteem. They are concerned that I am young and needing to be constantly reassured, partly because they deserted me. My parents would be horrified to know that I am haunting parks and toilets and taking older men back to my flat and spending all night in clubs. They don't want me getting into drugs and cock rings. It's just that my parents won't do a single thing to stop it.

Sometime before A-levels, Al simply stopped coming to school.

Michael still had fantasies that he had become Al's lover and ended up living with him. They would have moved to Sussex together and found a bedsit in Brighton and Michael would have gone to university and Al to art school. He could see the Cure posters on their wall and smell the curries they would have cooked together.

Michael kept an eye out for Al. He had no interest in clothes, but he read the fashion pages even so. Michael saw young British-Turkish designers become famous, he saw young Italian-British designers move to French couturiers. Al was not among them. From time to time he looked in the telephone directory for Al Wilcox, or rather Ali Wilcox. He looked at the photograph of any young Indian designer, in case Al had changed his name. Silence.

And something in that silence delayed him calling up an Angel now. He had felt that kind of silence before when calling up an Angel.

What was it that someone said? Fashion was moving in circles now because all the talented young designers had died?

If Michael had said yes to Al, if they had become lovers, would it have made any difference? Would Al be alive? It would have made a difference to Michael. He could have practised being in love, making a home, being human and close. Even if it had come to nothing, he would have begun to grow up at seventeen.

I have a feeling Al can make no difference now to anything.

Michael came home from a day back at the university sitting final exams and telling students to turn off their mobile phones. He sat in his darkened sitting room and thought about Al. He crunched a Viagra like candy, and waited for his hour.

He was a little bit scared, and that was good. Being scared, Michael had realized, means you're learning. I can edit this like a film, Michael thought. I can cut to the chase.

The air swung back like a locker door, and Al stood revealed, naked and solemn. His eyes were frightened and serious. This was nothing like a body running away with itself on automatic erection. This was a needy seventeen-year-old who had made a decision that required him to show who he was.

'Come here,' said Michael. 'Sit next to me.'

Al came to the sitting-room sofa, and curled up like a baby, caching his nakedness and resting his head on Michael's lap. 'I missed you,' Al said. 'I missed you for a long time.' Al lay still, and closed his eyes with what looked like relief. 'You didn't get fat. You didn't get boring. You stayed Michael.'

Michael found he was able to lean all the way down to kiss the top of Al's head. 'What happened to you?' he asked.

Al said. 'I missed the train.'

'What does that mean?'

'Oh. It means I died.'

Michael's heart groaned. Not another one. Michael's heart was fed to bursting with this stuff. It was like the war, his gay generation's war. Why didn't it stop?

'How old?' Michael whispered.

'Twenty-one. One of the very first in London.' Al, still curled up, raised a hand as if volunteering. 'They didn't even know what it was.'

Michael had broken out into a sweat and he made a shrugging motion as if he were in harness.

Al's eyes glittered up at him. 'Why did you turn me down, Michael? I wanted to be with you.'

Michael said, 'Because I think that if I make a pass at someone, I'll kill them.'

The words popped out, like a pip squeezed from an orange under stress, hard and bitter and glossy. Michael ran a hand over his brow. The words, he realized, were true. Michael chuckled. It was a strange kind of laugh that bent him over in the middle.

'Now it looks like I kill people if I don't make a pass at them.' He managed a sick sad smile.

Al was shaking his head. 'You didn't kill me.'

'Then why do I feel sick? Why does sex always make me scared?'

''Cause you're screwed up. We're both screwed up.' Al hung his head. 'I killed me, Michael. No one else did.'

Al reached up and played with Michael's long, curly hair. He leaned his forehead against Michael's as if in submission or final rest.

For the first time in his life, Michael's cock responded to emotion. Yes, it was also the Viagra, but the blood pushing into the opened veins of his penis was driven hard by a sense of farewell, of wishing someone did not have to go. It was the emotion you might have if your faithful lover was leaving for a month. Michael's heart yearned up through his penis.

Al could sense it. Something quickened in his eyes and he arched his back. He stretched his legs and opened up like a flower displaying its pistils. Michael's face slipped down the length of Al's trunk and kissed Al's penis and went further down to the neatly folded anus. The front of Michael's trousers had soaked through. His underwear was difficult to peel off. Al's legs went over his head, and Michael entered him and strained within him to reach further inside. All Michael saw was Al's eyes, and his delighted smile.

Michael lifted Al up, still joined to him, and carried him to the bedroom. He settled Al onto the edge of the mattress, and he kept standing and watching himself making love and that looked like a miracle in itself.

And the air whispered again. It seemed as if restitution had been pushed even further. It seemed suddenly that afternoon light was filtered through old-fashioned net curtains in a single window. Michael blinked at the illusion and it remained for a moment. They were back in a studio flat in Romford. He blinked again, and the room sighed with relief of tension, and collapsed back into its ordinary self, as both Michael and Al came together.

Al took his hand and rested it against his leg. 'It wouldn't have made any difference, Michael. It would have ended the same.' His dark pupils were holes that seemed to go on forever.

'I… I could let you stay here, Al.'

Al blinked.

'You stay here. You could live.'

His black eyes reflected little pin pricks of light, diamond-bright. There was no light in the room that was that bright. Al's mouth worked, as if he were about to say something.

Michael pressed home. 'Stay here and live with me.'

Al stroked Michael's forearm. He cleared his throat. 'Michael. There is a place without time. And we are there before we are born, and there after it. We are born with wonderful potential, and we live, and while we live, we fulfil it. Or not. In any case, when you die you are completed.'

The light in those dark depths was even brighter. 'I'm complete, Michael. That's my story now.'

'You're saying no.'

Al smiled sleepily. 'I can say yes or no to nothing. You can make me stay. For what it would be worth to you.'

Michael did not want to lose him just yet. He held him, and pressed his face against Al's brown firm chest. And felt love yearn out of him again.