Geoff Ryman - Lust Or No Harm Done

'Those people were trash,' he said. 'They have no conversation. Why did we go there?'

Michael was dismayed at the unfairness of it. 'Because you wanted to!'

'Are you alive or dead? Don't you know where the interesting quarters are? Or do you live inside your computer? I will have to find the interesting people. I can see that I will have to do everything. I even have to find women for you. I even have to cook! What do you do well, eh? Anything?'

Without waiting for an answer, Picasso flicked open the double lock on their door and raced up the steps ahead of Michael. Michael listened to the rapid fire of Picasso's feet. He felt leaden. He did not want to go in. It was not his house or his bed. Come on, Michael, he told himself, you have nowhere else to go. But his legs simply would not move.

Michael had thought he was happy and that Picasso liked him. Michael thought: he can snatch away happiness like a scarf. The reversal felt complete. It felt as if all love were gone and the relationship over. Like a ship in warp drive, space seemed to travel around him, and Michael arrived at the opposite pole of the universe. He imagined moving out, selling the flat, sending Picasso back. He considered going direct to a hotel to spend the night. He wanted the affair to end. Michael's eyes ached with loss.

'Henry?' he asked the night air. 'Henry, I need you.'

There was a tap on his shoulder and he turned around, and there was Henry, hair in his eyes, waiting.

'Henry, I'm in love and it's all going wrong.'

Henry looked sad while smiling. 'He's impossible.'

'Yes.'

'He says things that are so unfair you can't believe he said them. They're outrageous.'

Michael found himself pausing, and waiting. The set-up was too neat. Henry had something to say. 'That's about it.'

'Everyone's impossible to live with, Michael. Even saints. I lived with a saint for years. Most of the time he was wonderful, but sometimes all he seemed to care about was his research.' A smile kept playing about Henry's face.

Picasso was something like a saint and nothing like one.

'There's nothing for it, mate. You just hammer each other into each other's shape. And either it gets comfortable or it doesn't.'

Michael half-chuckled. 'You're not much comfort, you know that?'

Henry reached up, and there, in the street in Camden Town, started combing Michael's hair with his fingers. He looked up and down Michael in tenderness. 'You look great.'

'I feel awful.'

'You look… adult.' Henry's eyes sparkled. It was love. Love of a particularly airy, open, fleshless kind.

And Michael felt a kind of hesitation.

Henry gave Michael a little push towards the door. 'Go on. Have it out with him. See who wins.'

Michael hesitated. He would rather stay there, with Henry.

'I'm an Angel, I won't always be here. You mustn't get dependent on me.' Henry started to walk away, determined. 'Go on. It's down to you.'

There was nothing for it. Michael went in.

Upstairs, Picasso had changed into boxer shorts, and was reclining on Michael's sofa bed. 'Miguel Blasco,' he said, with real affection. 'I like you really. Come here.'

Michael yelped. 'You just told me I wasn't good for anything!'

Picasso chuckled at himself as if he had done something silly and amusing, like trying to roast potatoes in the fridge. 'I did not like that pub.' He patted the sofa. 'Sit next to me.'

Picasso Mindfuck, really! Michael's eyes felt heavy, like two hard-boiled eggs. He hated feeling the surrender and gratitude that welled up in him. He wanted to stay angry. He shouldn't allow himself to be jerked this way and that like a puppet.

Picasso stood up. 'Don't be mad over something so small. Mmm?' Picasso encircled Michael with his arms and stood on tiptoe to kiss Michael's shoulder. 'See? I am so small to be mad over.'

Picasso had given Michael a choice: he could go on being angry and have a major row, which would almost certainly fail to change how Picasso behaved. Or, he could weaken as he wished to do, be carried off by Picasso's return to kindness.

Picasso seemed to sense him relenting. 'My maker of Angels.'

I'm in love and I'm helpless, thought Michael. I am shooting Whitewater rapids of love. All I can do is hang on and try to avoid the rocks.

Picasso leaned around and kissed him, and the river bore Michael away.

The apartment never recovered from the move. As fast as Michael tried to put it in order, Picasso created another row of jam jars full of brushes in the bathroom, or a pile of printed help files on the floor. There were heaps of opened boxes from amazon.com. Half-read books were left open and face down on the floor. Sandals, socks and paint-stained newspapers stayed where they fell. It had never struck Michael until then that he himself was basically a tidy person.

'Leave it, it will continue to protect the floor,' said Picasso, bemused by Michael's protests.

'It's a horrible mess,' said Michael, going firm.

'That is a matter of aesthetics,' Picasso replied. 'I will not be bullied by you over aesthetics.'

Something shuddered in Michael and went still.

Paintings began to appear, stuck to the walls with Blu Tack: gouache on crumpled paper: a parrot in blue and green and red; a vaguely African-looking pattern in black and ochre with white dots in swirls, a tunnel of blue and white light. A sculpture in Blu Tack was stuck to the coffee table, a kind of amused Isis with hips and breasts, and a shocked open mouth. Michael asked who it was supposed to be. Picasso had to repeat several times before Michael penetrated his accent: it was a Blu Tack Geri Halliwell.

Picasso developed a bewildering affection for the Spice Girls: he played the CD over and over.

'Why don't you stop?' Michel asked him.

'I will when I understand it,' said Picasso. In self-defence, Michael bought him a compilation of Asian dance, Anohka , and Madonna's album Ray of Light. He bought him Philip Glass and Arvo Part. 'They are no good, they try to be intelligent,' Picasso said, dismissing everything else except S Club 7 and Steps.

Picasso loved CDs. In the world music section of HMV he found compilations of Europop and Brazilian brega. He played CDs incessantly. 'They do the same to music, make it perfect but inhuman.'

Picasso loved Pot Noodles and disposable cameras; he was entranced by Play Station and tried to get Michael to buy one and a samurai game called Soul Blade. 'Tush. You buy rubbish that does not move. I want Ade's Oddyssey. I want Sonic Hedgehog!' He kept buying glossy magazines – Q, Maxim, Elle, Vanity Fair, Empire. He would tear them to pieces and Blu Tack together mosaics out of fragments of shiny, laminated print. Discarded corpses of shredded journals began to litter the flat. He made himself little bracelets of Blu Tack, he stuck shards of magazine colour to his T-shirt with Blu Tack. In the corners of the room or running along the picture rail were little families of creatures not entirely unlike mice made out of Blu Tack.

'You practically breathe Blu Tack,' said Michael. He was being driven, slowly and without cessation, out of his box. The first of his blinding headaches arrived, after a glass of wine on a Friday evening.

Three weeks later, Picasso called him to the screen. 'The first,' he said.

It took a moment for Michael to understand what he was looking at.

It was pieces of his room. When Michael moved, flesh-coloured fragments moved in shards. The videoconferencing camera on top of the computer was feeding what it saw live to the hard disk, and those images, refracted and broken, were made part of a series of mirrors. The series of mirrors formed a face, in the same way that feathers form wings.

It was a portrait of Michael, in fractured, virtual mirrors.