Alan Hollinghurst - The Sparsholt Affair

‘I’m fine, thanks,’ said Johnny, stroking his neck, his thumb circling on the little rise behind his ear. But Z rubbed the captive hand against himself till Johnny with a certain bashful good manners as well as a marvellous surrender to the currents of the night scrambled up after him and they went off, a bit unsteadily at first among the crushed plastic bottles on the floor, to do some undisclosed thing in the lavs.

There was a queue, which Z cut in near the front of, behind some other Brazilians he knew, and stood introducing Johnny to the boys who were too off their faces to be much surprised or interested by him. They gabbled away in their own language. In a little defensive reflex, another passing few seconds of shyness, Johnny took out his phone, which was a puzzle to get into in his own addled state, with the mad old black queen who ran the room trailing up and down shouting, ‘Hurry up! Hurry up! No fuckin in the toilets!’ and banging on the closed doors, lively with voices on the other side, which opened here and there, now and then, to let two people out and another two or three in. He had two shots at entering his passcode. ‘Here we go!’ said Z, and Johnny went in with him, and felt a buzz in his palm – he had voicemail, and then he saw messages, which, chewing and grinning, he felt were both charming and ungraspably remote. Ivan . . . Pete G . . . Lucy had all texted him. Z pulled him forward and bolted the door against another man who was pressing to come in. Lucy had texted at 12.27, an unnoticed three hours ago. The letters were swollen and sugary and he had a sense of a joke and its warmth, though he didn’t quite get it . . . David who?

‘What is?’ said Z, angling his head.

The weirdly cushioned shock; the unstoppable chemicals dancing and smiling in his brain as his throat closed on the need to make a decision.

‘Bad news,’ Johnny said, but still in the intimate, confidential way, mouth to ear, of their earlier nonsense, his hand again unthinkingly round Z’s warm waist. He let Z take the phone and look at it. ‘Dad SOOOOO sorry about David XXXX Thinking of u.’ ‘My father,’ said Johnny. ‘I don’t know . . .’ Z noticed the voicemail, put the phone up to Johnny’s ear. It was a woman, and he could hear her with strange clarity, intimate but impersonal, with the roar of voices outside, the club music booming beyond and the mad old queen shouting, ‘Move along! Move along! No jiggy-jiggy in the toilets!’: ‘Hello Jonathan. Your father’s died. He was eighty-nine. I’m very sorry. I’ll try you again’ – a little finishing clatter, then, ‘It’s June, as you probably realized.’ He reached out for Pat, who was leaning in an archway beyond and a little above the wild crowd of strangers; but Pat had gone before , he felt the phrase, a further room of the club, far deeper and darker, an infinitude of people, with only those on the near edge, just over the threshold, fleetingly distinct before they merged into the mass.

They went back into the bar, Z a little preoccupied now; but he was unexpectedly wonderful. As they waited at the coat check Johnny squinted at the other texts, Pete Grey remote good news about an exhibition, Ivan on to it as if by telepathy, V sorry about your old man. Will call tomorrow IXX – of course, he would be writing the Telegraph obituary . . . and the thought that his father would be in the papers again seemed to heighten the crisis, which he saw massing and approaching, like a squadron of planes still lightless and soundless in the depth of the night. Surely no one else knew about it yet. Then he listened to June’s message again, hearing the hard reproof in it, and a sense of the future, which she, unlike Johnny, had long been giving thought to. They stumbled upstairs towards the entrance, the music from below in wafts here, through opened and closing doors, people coming in still, others going, going on, in the artificial madness of the night. From the outer doors, in front of them, the January night air, four in the morning, balm for a moment, then, as they stood confusedly, too cold for them, in their heightened warmth. The security, in black, stood around.

Z came out with him to where the taxis were. ‘You like I come?’ – and of course he was still off his face, he hadn’t had bad news himself, and all the energy and love of the drug still filled and absorbed him. ‘Oh, no – it’s all right.’ Z stood shivering in his T-shirt with an arm round Johnny under the greatcoat in which he stood hot and reeling and incapable as Z spoke to the security man and then the driver, not letting go of him. Then he said, ‘I come with,’ and went back in, while the security grew impatient and Johnny stood and watched for Z, unable to explain. In the back of the car they each had a sense of the crisis; Z sat looking ahead but holding Johnny’s hand. It was the hot unhesitating grip of the night, the unconscious oneness of feeling, floating very strangely for Johnny over the knowledge that something momentous and terrible was still waiting to be felt. He felt acutely thirsty, and the driver gave him a bottle of water – an old black man whose view of the wrecks he picked up all the time from the exits of clubs was hidden by dark glasses and laconic humour. ‘Had a good night, have we?’ Z didn’t treat the driver with much respect, and Johnny as a sixty-year-old very rarely in this world tried to show himself sober, while all Z’s kindness was kept for him. ‘Yeah, we get you home, yeah,’ said Z.

‘What a night,’ said Johnny, holding Z’s hand. ‘Thank you.’

And there they were, fifty quid later, in the kitchen, Z wandering into the studio. And why were they here? There was nothing to do, for four or five hours, till he could talk to people. Z came back, hugged him and put his head on his shoulder and then started kissing him. But they had a cup of tea, and then a Pepsi, which Z thought helped bring you down, and then just a toke on a tiny little joint Z had in his wallet. ‘I’ve got to go to Nuneaton tomorrow . . . today.’ It was a sentence lofted weakly against the dark north light of the studio. ‘My father’s died,’ said Johnny.

‘Yeah . . . is very sad,’ said Z, taking his hand. ‘Sad for you.’

Johnny stared at him, sadly enough. He said, ‘I’m going to have a shower,’ and went up to the bathroom not sure if he wanted Z to follow him. He was very glad when he did, he pulled the curtain round, Z stepped into his arms under the wide pan of the jet, Johnny gasping as he held him in the falling water.

4

The next afternoon Johnny made the old train journey from Euston to Nuneaton, an hour and ten minutes with half a century packed into it. For years his rare visits had been made by car, but now he was in no state, sleepless, bog-eyed, ears still distantly ringing, to drive. It was like when he’d first lived in London, long before the red Cortina or the Vulva, going home by train for Christmas in Warwickshire one year, Somerset the next. Now suddenly, at last, he was an orphan; he was ambushed again by the loss of his mother, felt the hard downward drag, too familiar now, of a death close at hand, of things irrefusibly to be done. He slid down in his seat, saw his own face weary and apprehensive in the black screen of his laptop before he turned it on, the chunky positive chord, the photo of himself and Pat in Granada, framed in ripples of white stucco – another life: unknown to these hikers with backpacks on the seat, the couple who’d been up to town for a show, students plugged into smartphones, parents with kids sallying to and from the bar, none of them aware that among them was a man whose father had died last night.

He looked at new emails, no news yet, in a Google search, the story still slept, on a winter Sunday. He looked out of the window, travelling fast towards childhood, a hundred half-forgotten sights in their half-remembered sequence reeling him in, warehouse, sewage farm, rusty barn, the brick tower of an edge-of-town Tesco. And other odd evidence, exposed in the winter woods – a round pond fenced off, two blue tents, a long shed of unguessable purpose, its roof under moss and dead leaves, the tone of dead leaves over all.