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Then Tony sat down on the platform, and rolled onto his back, sticking the perfect bottom into the air, like an animal about to be spayed.
Oh, Jesus, thought Michael. So much for innocence. Bitterness and rage were countered by another thought: Tony must be in trouble.
Michael walked towards him. He saw the chords of muscle on the inside leg, and the head of the reasonably sized uncircumcised cock. Michael looked and then was sorry for looking. Tony gazed up at him, eyes unfocussed, dim with a half-formed question.
‘Fancy a portion?’ the Cherub asked.
Drugs, Michael decided. He doesn’t normally do drugs, so he’s gone and got what he thought was E only it was speed, plaster of Paris and battery acid.
‘Tony. What are you doing on the ground?’ Michael felt the eyes of the other people on the platform. His ears burned. He wanted them to know his intentions were honourable. The Cherub blinked, his head haloed by the grey and white patterns of the platform paving.
‘Stand up, come on.’
Michael didn’t want to touch him in public. Tony rolled to his feet. He stood without adjusting his clothes, facing the woman with the handbag. She looked like she might pull it down over her head.
Pull your trousers up! thought Michael, and immediately, the Cherub bent down and nipped both layers of clothing back into place.
‘Did you take anything? Do you remember what it was?’
The mouth hung open, the lips fatter when they were not smiling. Tony’s brows clenched, trying to find an answer. ‘I didn’t take anything.’
‘Are you sure? Try to think. What was it called?’
Tony nodded his head solemnly, yes. ‘Diclofenac,’ he said. ‘For my knee.’
Michael was a biologist. Diclofenac was a powerful anti-inflammation drug. Did it have side effects?
‘Have you taken it before?’
Tony nodded yes again, like a child.
The wind blew. Like a friend showing up, the train rumbled out of the tunnel. ‘This is my train,’ said Michael, trying to keep the tone conversational. ‘Where are you going, Tony?’
The Cherub replied as if the answer were obvious. ‘With you.’
It wouldn’t be right to leave him. Michael looked up at the handbag lady and she looked away hastily. The greying man looked miffed that Michael had got there first. Michael pushed his way onto the train as others were getting off, and Tony followed him. Michael clenched the handrail almost as hard as he was clenching his teeth, and looked around him.
Two teenage Indian boys were talking about cars or computers in a jargon he didn’t understand. A woman turned over a page of her crinkly newspaper as if toasting its other side, and sniffed delicately. None of them had seen the banquet of Cherub laid out on the platform. Very suddenly, normality closed over them. The doors rolled shut. The noise of the train provided an excuse not to talk, as if it were embarrassed for them.
Tony simply stared, the flesh on his face slack, like old Hush Puppy shoes. There was definitely something wrong with him; he squinted up at the advertising, looking as if ads for Blistex were beyond his mental age. As the train approached Goodge Street, Michael wondered what on earth to do.
‘Look, Tony. I get off here. Will you be OK?’
Tony nodded yes. The train stopped and the doors opened. Michael got off. Tony followed him.
‘Do you want to see a doctor?’
Tony shook his head, no. Michael could think of nothing else to do, so he headed for the WAY OUT sign and the lift. Tony started to whistle, in a kind of deranged echoing drawl.
I don’t like this, Michael thought. He said airily, ‘So. Do you live around here, Tony?’
‘I live in Theydon Bois.’ Theydon Bois was at the end of the Central Line. This was the Northern.
‘So,’ Michael ventured. ‘You’re meeting someone?’ A coldness gathered around his heart.
‘No,’ said the Cherub in the same numb, faraway voice.
‘So where are you going?’ Why, Michael thought, does the underground always smell of asbestos and urine?
‘I don’t know. I don’t even have a ticket.’
They had reached the lifts. The windows in the metal doors looked like empty eye sockets. This was getting weird. ‘Look,’ Michael asked him, ‘if there’s something wrong, I’m not sure I can help you. Do have a phone with you?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Tony patted his tracksuit pockets.
Michael began to be afraid. This guy can bench-press 130 kilos. The elevator arrived filling the two windows with light as if they were eyes that had opened. The doors beeped and gaped but Michael did not get in.
‘You don’t want to go this way,’ said Michael. ‘You want to go back that direction.’
‘What I want doesn’t count,’ said Tony.
My God, thought Michael. He hasn’t blinked, not once.
Stand clear of the doors please said a cool, controlling voice. Michael decided it was best to get upstairs where there were people. He got in, Tony followed, and the doors trundled shut. They were alone.
Tony slipped his fingers under the spandex waistband, and pulled down both trousers and underwear, businesslike, as if finishing a warm-up.
Stop! thought Michael. Tony stopped. ‘Pull them up!’ said Michael. Tony did. The Cherub looked back at him, scowling slightly as if he couldn’t quite hear what was being said.
Jesus, thought Michael, this is what you get for fancying some guy at the gym: you chat away, you’re nice to him, and suddenly you’ve got a psychopath following you home. There was sweat on Michael’s upper lip. The lift did a little bounce and stopped, mimicking the sick sensation in Michael’s stomach.
The doors opened and Michael swept through them, fumbling to pull his season ticket out of his jacket pocket. He strode to the barriers, slipping his card into the slot like a kiss, nipped it free and pushed his way out and away. He could feel Tony’s eyes on his back as he escaped.
Michael thought and then stopped: you know he’s in trouble. It might be an insulin reaction, something like that. You can’t just leave him. He turned around. Tony was standing dazed behind the ticket barriers. What if he’s too ill to even know his way home? Michael sighed and walked back.
‘Is this something that happens to you sometimes? Are you diabetic, are you on any kind of medication?’ Michael was thinking schizophrenia. The ticket barriers were hunched between them like a line of American football players.
‘No,’ said Tony, as if from the bottom of a well.
‘Well look, the Central Line is back that way,’ Michael said. ‘Go back down and change at Tottenham Court Road.’ Michael glanced sideways; the guard was listening.
The guard was a young, handsome, burly man whom Michael had once halfway fancied, except for his unpleasant sneer. The guard was looking the other way, but his ears were pricked.
Tony said, mildly surprised. ‘Don’t you want to fuck me?’
Michael said, ‘No. I don’t.’
The guard covered his smile with an index finger.
Tony looked bruised. ‘You do,’ he insisted.
Michael began to talk for the benefit of the guard. ‘I’m sorry if you got that idea. Look, you’re in a bit of a state. My advice is to try to get back home and sort yourself out.’
The guard suddenly trooped forward, his smile broadening to a leer. ‘Bit off a bit more than we can chew, did we, sir?’
‘I think he’s on something and he’s been following me,’ said Michael.
‘Must be your lucky day,’ said the guard. He began to hustle Tony back from the barriers. ‘Come on, let the Professor be. He probably can’t afford you anyway.’ The guard had the cheek to turn and grin at Michael like he’d said something funny.
‘He’s not well,’ said Michael. Gosh, did he dislike that guard. But he needed him. The guard herded Tony back towards the lifts. Michael saw Tony look at him, with a suddenly stricken face. It was that panic that frightened Michael more than anything else. The panic meant that Tony needed Michael. For what? Something was out of whack.
Michael fled. He turned and walked as quickly as he could, away. He doesn’t know where I live, Michael thought, relieved. If I get away, I find another gym, and that’s the end of it. Michael’s stomach was shuddering as if he had run out of petrol. The tip of his penis was wet.
It had been raining, and the pavements were glossy like satin. A woman bearing four heavy bags from Tesco was looking at her boots; Michael scurried to make the lights and bashed into the bags, spinning them around in her grasp.
There was a shout from behind him. ‘Oi!’
Michael spun around, and saw the Cherub sprinting towards him. Michael knew, from the way his athlete’s stride suspended him in mid-air, that Tony had jumped the barriers.
Michael backed away, raising his arms against attack, terror bubbling up like yeast.
Keep away from me! Get back, go away!
And the street was empty. Tony was gone.
Michael blinked and looked around him, up and down the pavement. When he looked back, he saw the guard hobbling towards him, pressing a handkerchief to his face. He’d been hit.
‘Where did he go?’ the guard shouted at Michael, strands of spit between his lips. ‘Where the fuck did he go?’
‘I don’t know!’
‘Bastard!’
Michael tried to look at the guard’s lip.
The guard ducked away from Michael’s tender touch. He demanded, snarling, ‘What’s his name, where’s he from?’
Michael did not even have to think. ‘I’ve no idea. He just followed me.’
‘Oh yeah. Just followed you, did he? If I press charges, mate, you’ll bloody well have to remember.’
The guard pulled the handkerchief away and looked as if expecting to see something. He blinked. The handkerchief was clean, white and spotless.
This seemed to mollify him. ‘You better watch the kind of person you pick up, mate.’
Then the guard turned and proudly, plumply, walked away. For all your arrogance, Michael thought, in five years’ time you’ll be bald and fat-arsed.
Michael stood in the rain for a few moments, catching his breath. What, he thought, was that all about? Finally he turned and walked up Chenies Street, mostly because he had no place else to go, and he began to cry, from a mix of fear, frustration, boredom. Christ! All he did was go to the sauna. He didn’t need this, he really didn’t. He looked up at the yellow London sky. There were no stars overhead, just light pollution, a million lamps drowning out signals from alien intelligences.
Michael lived in what estate agents called a mansion block: an old apartment house. It was covered in scaffolding, being repaired. He looked up at his flat and saw that no lights were on. Phil wasn’t there again. So it would be round to Gigs again for a takeaway kebab and an evening alone. Involuntarily, Michael saw Tony’s naked thighs, the ridges of muscle.
He clunked his keys into the front door of his flat. The door was heavy and fireproofed and it made noises like an old man. Michael dumped his briefcase on the hall table and snapped on the living-room light.
The Cherub was sitting on the sofa.
‘Bloody hell!’ exclaimed Michael, and stumbled backwards. ‘What are you doing here?’
Tony sat with both hands placed on his knees. ‘I don’t know,’ he said in a mild voice.
‘How did you get in!’ The central light was bare and bleak.
‘I don’t know,’ Tony said. He still hadn’t moved.
The scaffolding, thought Michael. He climbed up the bloody scaffolding. ‘Get out of here!’ Michael shouted.
The eyes narrowed and the head tilted sideways.
And then, Oh God, he was gone. The air roiled, as if from tarmac on a hot day. It poured into the space Tony had suddenly vacated. There was no imprint left on the cushions.
The Cherub simply disappeared. Not even a flutter of wings.
Michael stood and stared. He kept staring at the sofa. What had happened was not possible. Or rather it made a host of other things suddenly possible: magic, madness, ghosts.
Michael sat down with a bump and slowly unwound his scarf. He stood up and poured himself a whiskey, swirling it around in the glass and inspecting it, yellow and toxic. Whiskey had destroyed his father.
In a funny kind of way, it felt as if Tony was his father’s ghost come back to haunt him.
Michael took a swig and then sat down with his notebook and Pilot pencil to answer every question except the most important.
Who indeed is Michael? (#ulink_56141c53-4626-52b4-a14b-11f399774e89)
In a very few photographs, Michael was beautiful.
Most photographs of him were short-circuited by a grimace of embarrassment or a dazzled nervous grin that gave him the teeth of a rodent. If someone short stood next to him, Michael would stoop and twist and force himself lower.
In other photographs, Michael looked all right. In those, he would have taken off his wire-rimmed spectacles and combed his hair and stood up straight. By hazard, he would be wearing a shirt that someone had ironed, and he would have left the pens out of the top pocket. It would be a period in which Michael was not experimenting with beards to hide his face, or pony tails to control his runaway, curly hair.
The best photographs of all would be on a beach, on holiday, with something to occupy his awkward hands. It would be apparent then that Michael had the body of an athlete. He was a big, broad-shouldered man. Because of the flattening of his broken nose, his face was rugged, like a boxer’s. Michael could look unbelievably butch.
There was one photograph from Michael’s youth.
It was hidden away, unsorted. Michael would not be able to find it now. He didn’t need to. Michael carried it around with him in memory. He could always see it, even when he didn’t want to.
His father had taken it from a riverboat in California, during their last summer together. In the photograph, Michael is sixteen years old and is quite possibly the best-looking person on the planet. He is certainly one of the happiest.
In the photograph Michael sits in a dinghy. He’s laughing and holding up a poor pooch of a dog. She was called Peaches the Pooch. Peaches gazes miserably out from under a thick coating of river-bottom mud. Michael’s thighs and calves are also covered in mud. Even then he was a big lad, with wide shoulders and lines of muscle on his forearm. His black eyes are fixed directly on whoever is taking the photograph and they are wide with delight. His face is nut brown, like an Indian’s, and his smile is blue-white in contrast. His black hair has reddish-brown streaks from constant sunlight. Sunlight glints all around him on the slick, brown water and onto his face, which is indisputably happy.
If you look closely, the nose isn’t broken.
