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Tincan had evaporated, though Mikhail could hear his rasping breaths from behind one of the metal posts. The thought that his friend was within earshot made him feel even more awkward.
He walked across to the man. Tincan was right, he smelt of stale fish and cabbages. He was chewing something – tobacco maybe – and he spat it out as Mikhail arrived.
‘Have you got the money?’ Tincan had told Mikhail to ask first. The man held his hand out; there were coins in his palm, glinting in the lamplight.
It was the clumsy attempts at tenderness that appalled Mikhail more than the lust. The man pulled his face closer beneath the lights, and tried to kiss him on the cheek, but Mikhail turned away. The man’s eyes looked regretful. He sighed a deep sigh and unzipped his flies, exposing a thick white cock. He gripped Mikhail’s shoulders as he was masturbated and Mikhail worried that Andreas’s coat might tear.
Tincan was right; it was nothing, really. The man came quickly, with a grunt, and his knees buckled heavily, which meant he almost pulled Mikhail over. He looked different when he had finished – the sadness had gone from his eyes to be replaced by a cold look of disgust. He pushed the coins into Mikhail’s hand in a business-like way and pressed his cock back into his trousers.
There was a splash of white semen on Andreas’s coat. He walked quietly down to a small pond and washed it off with his handkerchief. He thought he saw Andreas’s face reflected in the dark water, smiling back at him, and he almost screamed. The water was ice-cold. He took a mouthful without caring how dirty it might be, rinsed his gums, and spat it out. It made his teeth begin to ache.
The man stayed in his mind; his sad eyes, his smell, the grunting he had made. He wanted to wash the memory away, too. He wanted to cry for his mother, even though he had never really known her. When Tincan came over, though, he stood up and laughed instead, flicking one of the coins into the air.
‘What did you have to do?’ Tincan asked. He looked cold through from the waiting.
‘Nothing much,’ Mikhail told him.
Tincan grinned. ‘See? I told you it was easy money. OK?’
‘OK,’ Mikhail said.
Andreas had told him about the parties their mother used to have after the last stage show on a Saturday night, when there would be huge plates of gleaming salami and cold sausage and bottles of Bull’s Blood to wash it all down. Mikhail had never tasted wine but he thought it sounded wonderful.
Sometimes he would stand alone on the ridge of Castle Hill for hours, until it grew dark. He liked watching the floodlights come on along the bridges because they looked like diamonds strung across black velvet and this, for some reason, also reminded him of his mother.
He had never seen his mother dressed up, though, except in his imagination. The one thing he wanted was what he knew he could never have, which was to go back in time and live happily with his mother and Andreas, in the days when she was a successful club act and not living in prison, which was all he could recall of her.
Tincan still worried about him.
‘You look ill, Mikhail. You should take care. I saw you yesterday, just wandering about in the cold. Now that sort of thing will kill you, don’t you know that? Stay where it’s warm, Mikhail. Eat plenty. Beg if you have to; the money is good in this weather because the people feel their consciences prick when they see us standing there, blue with the cold. I got fifty forint in half an hour yesterday, did I tell you?’ He grabbed Mikhail by the shoulders and stared him full in the face. ‘Do well, Mikhail,’ he whispered, ‘we are going places, you and I. We’re special. We have been marked out for importance. Take it how you can and when you can and don’t worry how you get there. Just do it, OK? You think too much. Thinking can kill you.’
But Mikhail was no longer interested. When Tincan tried to cut him into his drug dealing schemes he left the shelter of the metro altogether and never went back.
The businessman approached him just as he was sure he would die of it all. At first they just chatted as usual but then the man leant across closer and Mikhail could smell the expensive cologne Tincan had noticed.
‘You look a little unwell,’ the man said quietly. ‘May I offer you a bed for the night?’
Mikhail looked at him. The man’s face had turned pink with embarrassment and his eyes looked comically mournful. How could he turn him down? He had no choice. It was either go with him or die out here.
The man talked nervously and cleared his throat a lot as they walked. His name was Claude and he came from Switzerland, though his Hungarian was almost perfect. He was not enormously wealthy – Mikhail saw that the minute they entered the building he lived in, which was in a small shabby street off a modern square behind a synagogue in Obuda. He had three locks on his wooden door and once they were inside the apartment he reached up to close a large bolt on the inside.
Claude did not live alone in the apartment. His father, a bedridden invalid, lived in a room at the far end of the passage. The old man was deaf but not so deaf that they could afford to talk in anything above a whisper. All the curtains were drawn because the old man was allergic to prying neighbours. Mikhail didn’t mind this so much, though, because it meant the place was warm. He felt as though he had never been so warm before in his life and he took Andreas’s coat off for the first time that winter.
Claude made them tea and then talked about his job. He worked in a bank – nothing important, just mundane stuff – but he also worked as a photographer, which excited him, and which he said prevented him from going insane with boredom. He had converted a bedroom in the apartment into a studio and took his shots there, some of which had been subsequently published in various magazines. He was proud of his work, Mikhail could tell by his eyes when he spoke about it.
‘I would enjoy doing some shots of you some time,’ Claude said. He wore nail varnish on his fingernails. The warmth of the room had overcome Mikhail; he was struggling to keep his eyes open. ‘If you don’t object, of course,’ Claude added.
He cooked Mikhail a meal and ran him a scented bath before showing him where he could sleep. The softness of the bed filled Mikhail with melancholy and he went off to sleep with tears running down his cheeks.
The first morning went well. Claude showed Mikhail proudly around his ‘studio’ and then he brought out some shots he had taken previously. The walls of the room were painted dark and there was a stained sheet hanging in one corner, as a backdrop. In front of the sheet was a white umbrella on a stand and Claude’s camera on a tripod.
The photos were innocent enough: soft-focus shots of a woman with too much lipstick on her mouth, a couple of black-and-whites taken at a railway station, and a shot of a boy a bit older than Mikhail, sitting on a stool and smiling at the camera. The boy was wearing old-fashioned-looking clothes: a cream-coloured nylon shirt and the sort of jumper Mikhail had worn to school as a kid, but he looked pleased enough.
Claude had gone into the kitchen to cook breakfast and the smell of the bacon made Mikhail’s stomach start to complain. He mooched around the studio. There was a cupboard with the door half open. Inside the cupboard was a pile of cardboard boxes. He pulled the top one open and there were shots in there of the same boy, only this time he didn’t have his cheap shirt and jumper on. This time he didn’t have anything on.
Claude was whistling in a dreary style. Mikhail replaced the box and crept out of the studio and along the corridor to the old man’s room.
Claude was still whistling. Mikhail listened at the door for a second before pushing it open. He wasn’t scared of making a noise; he had developed a talent for moving about silently. The room was dark, apart from a dull light that seeped through the holes in the brown lace curtains. There was a warm smell of sickness and urine and disinfectant.
The old man lay on a large wood-framed bed, his head lolling back onto a couple of white pillows. It was a moment before Mikhail realized his watery eyes were open and looking directly at him. A spasm of fear ran through his gut, even though he knew the old man could do nothing to harm him.
‘Fuck off.’ The old man’s voice wheezed out of a thousand bellows.
Mikhail shut the door quickly and crept back into the studio. Claude arrived a few minutes later with a jug of fresh coffee.
‘Did you like the photos?’ he asked. ‘What do you think?’
Mikhail shrugged, ‘I don’t know. I wouldn’t know good from bad. They look nice enough.’
Claude took the photos from him.
‘Do you think you could do better? I could pay you to model for me.’
The coffee was too sweet on an empty stomach. Mikhail took the bacon sandwich Claude offered him and grease ran down his chin as he bit into it. Claude had fed his father first – he still smelt of the sickroom. No wonder he wore such expensive colognes; the stench of illness clung like wet fog. It reminded Mikhail of the mortuary.
‘Did you pay that other boy?’ he asked. Claude looked down at the shot.
‘That one? No. He is a relative. My nephew.’
‘How much?’ Mikhail asked.
‘What?’ Claude looked surprised.
‘How much will you pay me? For artistic shots?’
Claude pulled a face. ‘Twenty forint? You have a roof over your head too now, you know.’
‘Twenty-five, or I tell your father.’ Mikhail looked him straight in the eye.
Claude looked disappointed. OK,’ he said, ‘if you like.’
9 (#ulink_3afc8958-613d-5fbf-853f-0f8c109ac03a)
Cape Cod
Miss Clayburg tried her best and so did Evangeline. They painted rainbows and they painted castles and they even painted the sea, but nothing Evangeline created showed any flair whatsoever.
They went down to the beach together to collect driftwood and then returned to the studio to draw it.
‘Your grandmother said you brought driftwood home before,’ Miss Clayburg said. ‘She told me it was something your stepfather used to do when he was young. Would you like to draw it, Evangeline? Find a nice big stick of charcoal and see what you can do.’
But Evangeline did not use the charcoal because she had found it made the paper messy. She picked a pencil out instead and spent a long time sharpening it. Then she made a few small marks on the paper but proceeded to rub them out. Miss Clayburg smiled but her eyes went narrow.
‘I thought I told you not to use the eraser, Evangeline,’ she said. ‘What is that you are drawing?’
Evangeline turned the page round. It was a tiny detail of a piece of bark.
‘What about the shape of the whole thing?’ Miss Clayburg asked.
‘I’ll get to it,’ Evangeline told her, leaning over the paper again before she caught the look of exasperation in the tutor’s eye. It was no good. They both knew it was no good. Only Grandma Klippel wouldn’t be told, and so Miss Clayburg stayed on – for her sake as much as anybody else’s. Evangeline looked down. Her sleeve had dipped into some paint and the paint had made a crimson smear across her clean white paper. The smear would never clean off. She began to cry silent tears.
10 (#ulink_8ab828f6-4a19-58eb-ad05-a53bc7f44400)
Mikhail stood self-consciously on the backdrop, staring at his fingernails. The nails were dirty. The rest of him, on the other hand, was scrupulously clean. Claude had suggested he go for a scrub before the session and he’d spent an hour in the tub, wasting time, trying to delay things.
Claude was whistling again, busying himself behind the camera and pottering excitedly. He’d put Mikhail in a black kimono. Then he’d covered some wooden crates with a sheet and told him to drape himself over them. Draping yourself was more difficult than Mikhail had thought. He felt awkward and stupid, like an upturned insect that can’t right itself again.
‘What is that song?’ he asked Claude. Claude stopped pottering and looked up, surprised.
‘What song?’ he asked.
‘The one you are whistling.’ It was getting on Mikhail’s nerves. He felt anxious and he hated himself for it. Claude had insisted on having a three-bar electric fire in the small room and Mikhail could feel the sweat running down his back. The lead from the fire was plugged into a lamp socket in the hall and he kept wishing Claude would forget and trip over it.
Suddenly Claude seemed ready. He pushed his glasses to the top of his head and beamed at Mikhail.
‘Is everything all right?’ he asked. Mikhail nodded. Twenty-five forint. It was all he allowed himself to think of. Living in the apartment meant he could save some of the money, too. How long would it be before he had enough to get away from Budapest? A flash went off and he jumped, squinting.
‘Try to relax,’ Claude crooned. He waited until Mikhail was still again and then took another picture.
‘Why are you nervous?’ Claude asked.
‘I feel stupid,’ Mikhail replied.
Claude smiled. Mikhail had never seen him smile so much. ‘You look terrific,’ he told him. ‘I wish you could see how good you look. If you did you wouldn’t worry. Here – this is what you look like.’ He held a book out to Mikhail. The book was an old one, the pages yellow at the edges. Mikhail supposed the pictures were works of art. Most of them were etchings of young boys in togas. Their faces were beautiful. Mikhail closed the book and put it down carefully.
Claude took some more shots before suggesting Mikhail have a break. The cooler air in the passage felt good. Claude went into the kitchen to make them some tea. Mikhail followed him.
‘What happens next?’ he asked.
Claude looked alarmed. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Is this when you fuck me?’ Mikhail had never used the word before but Tincan used it all the time.
Claude dropped a teacup onto the floor. As he bent to pick it up Mikhail noticed that the seam of his trousers had split. Claude reached out for the cup but his hand missed and he stayed there where he was, as though frozen to the spot. Mikhail could not see his face but, when his shoulders started heaving, he assumed the older man was crying.
‘Shit!’ Mikhail whispered. It was another Tincan word.
Claude moved across the floor on his knees, his glasses misted with his tears. When he reached Mikhail’s feet he bent double and kissed them. His mouth felt wet. Mikhail kicked him away and he rolled like a dog.
‘Don’t hate me!’ Claude said. He was sobbing properly now, his belly rising and falling like a child’s. He would wake his father. Mikhail put his hand out to stop him and Claude grabbed it.
‘Please don’t hate me,’ he whispered, pressing his lips against the centre of the palm.
‘I can’t afford to hate you,’ Mikhail said quietly. ‘If I don’t live here I’ll die.’ He knew that. He had no option. That was the way things were in his life. If you wanted to stay alive there were certain things you had to do: steal; sell drugs; pose for pictures; get fucked by old men. That was how it was, he understood that. Nothing was for nothing – it was a fact of his life.
Claude was groaning at his feet, soft little whelps, like an animal in pain. Mikhail undid his robe and the moans grew more intense. Mikhail blocked out what was happening and thought about the money.
Twenty-five forint. It seemed like a fortune. He would save it all for a plane ticket and then he would fly off somewhere where there was no snow. America was a good place, Andreas had told him that. You could get everything there; everything you wanted. Andreas had planned to go to America to get a record deal for his group. Maybe Mikhail could go there in his place. How much and how long would it take, though?
Claude was kissing his feet again and he kicked him harder, this time in the belly. Claude let out a cry of pleasure. ‘Again!’ he called. Mikhail watched him squirm on the floor.
Too long, was the answer that came into his head, much, much too long.
It was a whole year after Miss Clayburg had left the house at Cape Cod, and nothing much more had happened other than Evangeline growing another inch and her grandmother having her heart broken for the second time.
The old lady never said a word, but Evangeline knew she had pinned great hopes on her being artistically gifted. She still went up to the studio to try long after her tutor was gone, but one day the door was just locked and that was obviously an end to it. Evangeline would have been relieved, but her disappointment stung like salt on a scratch.
She wanted to do well so badly that it hurt. If Grandma Klippel was searching for another Darius, then she was looking, too, for some special talent to make her worthy of her parents’ love, even though she knew they were dead now. Sometimes she got angry rather than sad and wished she had a flair so that they might have realized too late what they’d missed and regret not taking her with them. She even wrote small scripts in her workbook:
DARIUS: Did you reelize Evangeline had flair as an artist too, dear?
THEA: No i never new that. she was always such a plain child that i never held out much hope for her. Perhaps we made a misstake, Darius. Perhaps she shuld be here with us now, after all.
When she had finished writing she would always tear the pages out and screw them up into small balls, just in case. She didn’t think Grandma Klippel ever came snooping but if she did Evangeline didn’t want her finding out her son and his family were all dead. Sometimes she wished Cecil was still there so she could discuss things with someone. She even asked her grandmother if she had his address, but was told he was back in Britain and wouldn’t want to be bothered by letters from little girls he hardly knew.
Then something strange happened.
Evangeline was called out of class one wet September day and sent home early. All the way back in the car she worked over what might have occurred but nothing came to mind – apart from the extreme long shot that Patrick might have found his way back.
When they got to the house Grandma Klippel was not on the porch as usual but waiting in the best lounge beside a tray of tea. Evangeline had not been in the room much before. Someone had taken the sheets off the chairs and there was a fire burning and spitting in the hearth; they had put pine logs on the fire and the smoke smelt sweet. Mrs O’Reilly must have been up earlier than usual because there was the biggest bunch of anemones ever in a porcelain bowl on the centre table.
The room itself was mainly reds and rose pinks, and would have looked jolly enough had it not been for the expression on Grandma Kippel’s face. Her nose was as crimson as the wallpaper and she looked like she had a cold. Her eyes were swollen and her hands looked fidgety. When she picked up her cup it danced noisily in its saucer.
There was a man in the room. Evangeline thought he must be the new chauffeur, even though she had no idea the old one was leaving. The man was no taller than her grandmother but he had thick hands that were making heavy work of the bone china. His dark hair was cut short and greased back and he wore a suit that looked wrong for his body. He smelt faintly of frying, as though he had stopped off at the diner on the journey down from wherever he lived.
‘Evangeline,’ her grandmother said, ‘… dear, this is Mr Castelli.’
He had a good-looking face, even though he was nervous. Evangeline stepped forward to take his hand, wondering why it was so important for her to meet the new chauffeur.
‘Mr Castelli is your father, Evangeline, your real father.’
She stopped before their hands touched. The man gave her grandmother what looked like an angry glance before turning back to stare at her. It made her itchy-uncomfortable.
‘Darius is my father.’ She knew she’d used the wrong tense but anything else would have hurt her too much to say it.
Grandma Klippel’s face looked funny, as though she wanted to sneeze and was trying not to.
‘Darius was only your father because he married your mother, Evangeline. When he adopted you he took you for his own, I know that. But Mr Castelli is your father by blood. Do you understand? He was married to your mother before she met my son.
