The Boys of the Hacienda Bitch Back.

When I was my fandom's whore

2006-01-07T03:51:18Z

The sound of the telephone roused Maedhros from the colourless daydream he’d fallen into watching the fuzzy shapes on the little CCTV that showed the grey blotch of street outside the club door. It had been half an hour since a living creature had entered that square of the world and he even his mind had shut down from so long staring at paving slabs.

Patch was sitting on a wooden seat opposite resting one foot on his knee. He wore Chelsea boots and a small strip of rubber was hanging from the sole. Maedhros remembered he had wanted to twist it off an hour ago. Patch looked up from his book. From room three the muffled sounds of work drifted across in between the phones’ screeches.

Maedhros picked up the receiver.

“Club 39,”

“Namarie Maedhros,” drawled Deeded down the line. “I need your help.”

“I’m working Deedee,”

Patch went back to his book ignoring the unintelligible conversation.

“I know honey, that’s why I called here. I got a kid been beat up on the West Street walkway,”

“And?”

“I don’t think he’s legal.”

“Immigration?”

“Yeah.”

“Why are you calling me?”

“You’ve got a cellar, haven’t you?”

“Deedee, this club is a cellar. We don’t have a hospital wing.”

“You’ve got a store room.”

“It’s freezing in there. And it’s damp. All our whips got mildew last winter.”

“Got any other ideas where I can put him?”

“The boat home?”

Deedee’s voice suddenly became very thin.

“As one illegal to another, I suggest you start looking after your own.”

“Is he one of us?”

“No,” said Deedee. “But he’s one of something.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know yet. But I’ll find out if you help me.”

Maedhros sighed.

“Alright, bring him down.”

There was a pause. When Deedee spoke again her voice was unusually small.

“I was rather hoping you’d help me move him.”

“Can’t you get a taxi?”

“He’s a real mess Maedhros. They’d never take him.”

“Nothing infectious?”

“No, just blood.”

“Alright.”

Maedhros put the receiver back into its cradle a little to forcefully. He wondered what it was that he’d lost to let himself be ordered around by a common Sinda. Almost everything he thought grimly, pulling his coat over his rubber t-shirt.

***

When he got to the walkway there was no sign of Deedee. The Hudson blew its usual February bleached out chill back in to the city. The concrete pillars of the walkway looked like the city’s exposed bones.

“Over here,”

Maedhros looked round. Deedee was kneeling in the doorway of what had once been a garage. There was a thick trail of blood at her feet leading from the gangway to the body lying beside her.

“All that’s coming from him?” Maedhros asked.

“It’s stopped now, the worst of it,” said Deedee. “Did you bring a blanket?”

“Did you ask me to bring a blanket?”

“I thought it would have been obvious he’d need a blanket.”

“I’m a fighter Deedee not a nurse.”

Maedhros peered over Deedee’s shoulder to take in her patient. He thought he saw the swollen eyelids flicker a little at being watched.

“Are you sure he’s overage?”

“He said he was nineteen.”

“He looks like a Teleri,” said Maedhros. “One of Olwe’s lot.”

Deedee snorted.

“Blood and blonde hair?”

“And the way the skin bruises is very dramatic, like ink on snow.”

“I guess you’ve seen quite a lot of that.”

“Some spilt ink, yes.”

“I’m quarter Telerin,” said Deedee.

“I didn’t know that.”

“You didn’t think my hair came out of a bottle did you?”

“With you Deedee, I never know.”

“We should get him out of here,” she said.

Maedhros knelt down to lift up the boy and noticed the blood streak on his left ear where an earring must have been. Then he brusquely flung him over his right shoulder and headed back to the club.

“They weren’t children,” said the dark haired elf standing in the clearing. The bare trees were like cracks in the sky.

“A few more years and they would have been fighting with their father,” said the lighter haired one.

Maedhros didn’t kill them, not even for answering back. It would have been a pointless indulgence; two abuses of power do not cancel each other out. He turned on his heel into the snowy wood.

~*~

So when they came to the door of Club Clinton, - the ragged greying one, the crazy-eyed one, the earnest one with the green eyes who wasn’t much more than a kid himself, - saying they were looking for a murderer, Maedhros kicked the silver haired kid into the cupboard under the sink.

***

They put him in the storeroom. It stunk of damp and the distant smell of Jeyes fluid from the cleaners who came in before the workers every morning at 9am. Maedhros found a reasonably clean mattress to put him on. Deedee fussed over him, feeling under his ribcage, his legs and arms.

“He’s still bleeding,” she said.

Maedhros looked at him. The immediate wounds seemed to have closed up. There was still blood in his hair and over his face, head wounds he knew from experience bled like demons for almost no reason.

“Is he?”

“Yes. Here, he’s bled before too.” She was holding his arm at the elbow.

“Why before?”

“The bruises are old. It’s badly swollen, almost seized up, I’d guess. He’s bleeding into his stomach too. Listen, I think I might have to go away and get something.”

“Get something?”

“There’s a charity mission that helps me out sometimes. They run a hospital in the projects in Suvesant Town. They’re mostly nuns but Ellie, the head Doctor is cool.”

“Ellie?”

“He’s cool, he helps me out.”

“What do you need?”

“Factor VIII. If I’m guessing right, blondie here has Haemophilia.”

“Blood – lover?”

“It’s an inherited condition. It’s prevalent amongst the inbred. Queen Victoria of England was a carrier. It means his blood is missing the muck that makes ordinary human blood clot.”

He looked at her. She replied quickly:

“I need to take a sample and I need to do a test. If I’m right I’ll be back with what he needs to sort him out. Keep him comfortable and keep him warm.”

And without a further word she was out the door.

Maedhros found some old green velvet curtains, only slightly mouldy, to wrap him up in. The boy murmured as he worked.

“Shush,” said Maedhros. “Shush. Your safe now, Deedee’s gone to get something to fix you.”

“Cigarette?” He whispered.

“Not in your bloody condition.”

He rolled over on the mattress his swollen bottom lip slightly protruding. Maedhros felt a little snarly at his sulk.

“Hey,” He said. “I can kick you out on the street if you’d like that better.”

Suddenly, he struggled to sit up. He was obviously fighting pain, his skin was chalky white under the bruises as he pushed himself upward.”

“Fuck you,” He said in an archaic accent, too English for royalty to use these days.

“Oh Kid, come on,” said Maedhros, “You’re bleeding like a bastard and your safe here. Don’t annoy me.”

He rolled his eyes in their purple sockets. It must have hurt. He was that young Maedhros thought; he was at that age where the skin was still bright and luminous and one could fool oneself that there was an immortal underneath until he opened his mouth.

“Come on, “Maedhros continued, “Don’t fuck yourself up. We’re all in the same boat here. You got rolled. These things happen. Now lie quietly like a good kid until Deedee sorts you out.”

“I got – what?”

“A trick beat you up. Trust me, I know the score.”

He was as upright as he could be, resting on his good elbow. He tried to pull the parts of his face still under his command into an expression of ultimate superciliousness.

“I don’t think so,”

He favoured Maedhros with his most offensive stare.

“But if you would kindly tell me where I am and how I got here I will pay you a more exorbitant rate than you usually command.”

Maedhros laughed.

“With what?”

The boy lifted his damaged arm painfully and patted his pockets.

“Ah,” he said, “I seem to be momentarily financially embarrassed.”

Maedhros smiled.

“You’re English.”

“Norman French,” he hissed, “Viking if you look back far enough. Hence the hair.”

“Silver blonde is still pretty rare for a Viking,”

“Yes, well I’m rather extraordinary.”

“So Dr. Deedee says. Your blood doesn’t seem to be clotting an you are currently engaged in bleeding to death.”

He quietened at that.

“I am?”

“Yes.”

He made a spluttering noise that could have been a laugh.

“Deedee is getting something to fix you. Now you are a guest of mine, would you mind telling me your name and your business with as few insults as possible?”

“That’s my affair. Don’t you smoke?”

“No, and you shouldn’t either.”

“Then can I ask you a question?”

“You can ask.”

“What are you doing here in a – self confessed - whorehouse when I clearly remember being taught in school you were extinct?”

“Am I that obvious?”

“Well, I’m guessing the Muggles here would have their own theories about you. But you do seem to be glowing in the dark.”

“I’m sure you had the smarts not to believe everything your teachers told you.”

He looked momentarily at a loss.

“I don’t believe anything anyone tells me. That’s rather my problem.”

“Anyone? Then why believe in me?”

“Because I can see you.”

For a minute he was lost in pain. He seemed swallowed up by some spasm deep within him. Maedhros held him, and the creature struggled a bit at the arms over his body. He drew back so he was gently stroking his arm. The boy looked shocked to find the tension easing.

For all your protests, you are one of us Maedhros thought.

“You don’t need to give your real name,” he said, still stroking. The boy seemed to relax at each touch knowing the Calaquendi was milking the pain out of his body with each stroke. “No one here uses their real name. You can call me Red.”

“I don’t know Red,” he said dizzily.

“You do now,” said Maedhros with a smile.

“No, I don’t know Red. I’ve never seen it,” He sounded snappish from the weakness seeping the words from his brain. He swallowed, checked himself and added, “I’m colour-blind. All the men in our family are.” He laughed. “That’s why we prefer the dark. In the dark I can see as well as anyone else.”

“Goodness, you are inbred.”

“I’m pureblood.”

“Yes, and it’s killing you.”

He swallowed.

“Of course, the Arachnae potion would be wearing off by now.”

“Arachnae potion?”

“It’s what, it’s what we use to treat it. A lot of us, over the years have had what I’ve got. I know. Given the chance I’ll bleed and it won’t stop, right?”

“Yes, I think that was what Deedee was getting at.”

“I’ve taken it since I was a kid. No side effects, sorts you right out. We have our own way of dealing with the inconveniences of privilege.”

“Never thought of widening the gene pool?”

“And loosing our power. No.”

“Your power?”

He sighed.

“Look I’m dying, please don’t let me suffer nicotine withdrawal while I’m doing so.”

Fair enough, thought Maedhros. He’s dying anyway; it’s the human condition. He wandered off. Jain’s Lucky Strikes were still hidden behind the bar where he’d left them to go into room four. He stole three and the emergency matches for when the dubious electrics failed.

Maedhros lit a cigarette in his mouth and handed it to the boy who lay back on the mattress and inhaled ravenously. The words started to pour out with the carbon monoxide, like he had been unplugged.

“Our Power, our charisma if you like, it’s in our blood. We’re like the fated prince, the direct descendant of the direct descendant; we’re the Damn heirs to everything, the best in the business. We inherit history in a direct line through the blood. That’s worth a few side effects.”

“You’re delirious,” said the heir of Feanor.

“I know, but it fucking well means something to us mortals.”

Maedhros sighed. The boy was as hectic as a consumptive. It’s funny what humanity cherishes, he thought. It’s that pathetic stab at immortality that drove Numenor crazy; keeping it in the family is as good as living forever. The kid had the blood of heroes in his veins no doubt, but it had clearly fossilized and turned sour. It no longer nurtured. It was a miracle it still contained life force at all.

Maedhros smiled and finally understood the law that forbid the Noldor to marry closer than second cousins. Humanity, the only species that never grasped the strength of the mongrel.

“It doesn’t seem to have done you much good.”

“Ah, well you see, there was a war.”

Oh. Thought Maedhros. My line. How I explain anything unusual. Of course, I have the accent and the exotic looks to pull it off.

“In England?”

“In England. And in Scotland, rather a lot of it in Scotland in fact. Some minor skirmishes in the other territories.”

Maedhros blinked. Even his reasonable grasp of conspiracy theories gleaned from the abandoned copies of the Fortran Times Zack sometimes left in the club gave no indication of a war in the United Kingdom. Unless the blonde was some illegitimate scion of the late Diana Windsor, which he supposed would explain the boy’s air of someone skating on the edge of breakdown.

“There was a war in England?”

“Yes, there was. Don’t ask.”

“I didn’t, you told.”

Deedee had rolled the boy’s sleeve up over the swollen elbow. He twitched it for a minute, then Maedhros noticed there was a small mark slightly below the swollen joint. It looked like a brand with a tattoo over it. Body modifications, they called them these days all the kids that showed up with piercings and scarifications and Valar knows what. I’m modified quite enough thank you, he thought. He caught a good look at it; definitely on the gothic side of atheistically pleasing then the other hand obliterated it.

The boy ground the snub end of the lucky strike over the mark. He didn’t flinch. Drama queen, thought Maedhros.

“I had rather thought you’d been injured enough for one day.”

“It doesn’t go away,” he said softly.

“You could probably get laser treatment.”

The boy made a strange hacking sound that Maedhros guessed was laughter.

“Wouldn’t work. That’s for keeps – forever.”

He looked at Maedhros. Maedhros who’s own war wounds amounted to slightly more than a bad tattoo was not inclined to be charitable.

“There are worse things to have to live with.”

“No,” He said simply. “There aren’t.”

~*~

When Deedee returned Patch was sitting beside the semi-conscious boy, murmuring a fairy story of hope in his soft, deep, eminently trustable voice. He could work for him and Kiki when their club got set up. They’d sponsor him for a visa; send him on a college course. A good-looking smart kid like him could get ahead, green card or no. He was sure of it; hell he knew lots of people who’d made it starting from the wrong side of immigration law. This city was practically built by illegals.

The kid was quiet. It was castles-in-the-sky talk and maybe he could still take in enough to know it. But the hope at least had a nurturing value. The confident voice drawing out pictures of a future that wasn’t huddling in the shadows of life until one became to old for the game was a reason to cling on at least. Deedee always thought it a shame Patch was chasing the nightclub dream and didn’t consider going into medicine. He had a rare gift for calming people in the worst situations.

Deedee knelt beside them.

“Where’s Red?”

“Room two.”

Deedee nodded.

“Hey kid,” she said softly.

He raised his eyes enough to sweep a glance at her face. Then they fixed on the metal badge on her bag and stuck there.

Patch held out a cup half full of biscuit coloured fluid and gave the boy a mouthful. Tea, thought Deedee. Red must have told him the kid was English. Patch was thoughtful like that.

“How you doing?”

The boy kept staring at the badge. Something bright and shiny Deedee thought.

“You like that?”

~*~

He watched it flicker in the light as she moved. Sugar on his lips and a fuzzy warm voice in his ears and the little lights glittering off twin serpents around a sword. There wasn’t anything else.

The snakes disappeared and he was left staring at the grey cloth of her side. His eyes flickered shut and they danced on the blood inside them.

A girl’s voice, a nice voice, clear like water dripping from leaves. He thought he might be out in the sunshine when she spoke, in a forest a long way from people. The water dripped harder. A message wasn’t getting through. Then the chocolate buzz of the man, and then silence which was lovely because his head hurt.

The girl stabbed him in the arm.

“What?” He sat bolt upright in panic. His eyes opened very wide and he screamed. His arm felt numb and he looked down and saw what looked like a glass mosquito stuck in it. He struggled and blood run down his arm. The man got him in a bear hug and stopped him moving. He was very strong.

“Shush, it’s just an injection. Shush.” Said the woman.

“You’re stealing my blood,” he said.

“Making you better,” The man said. Fingers run over the bruises under his hair. He tried to snap at the hand with his teeth.

“I’m giving you blood,” said the woman. “Or blood product anyway.”

He snarled, bared his teeth, couldn’t think of anything else to do.

The woman pulled the mosquito off his arm. His blood was in its belly. He could see that.

“Give me that!”

“I need to throw it away. It’s not hygienic.”

“Give me that!” His voice was commanding, his spell casting voice. He demanded of the world and it bent beneath his fingers. He had no wand and was too weak for magic, but it worked anyway. She took the metal nose off the creature and gave it to him.

He felt calmer. He clutched the barrel in his hand. It was made of something hard and smooth like moulded fingernails. The world was cold and cruel and increasingly painful but at least he could hold on to his blood. He replayed the attack again softly in his head, feeling for any nuances he missed.

“Whose blood did you give me?”

The woman laughed and it was a pleasant noise despite everything. Sharp and soothing, like real lemonade. He was terribly thirsty.

“I gave you factor eight. It’s a blood product that helps your blood clot. It’ll stop you bleeding.”

“From where?”

“From a blood bank.”

“I never put any of my blood in a bank.”

“Of course it’s not yours. Yours doesn’t clot. It wouldn’t be much use to you.”

“Then - whose?”

“A couple of hundred blood donors? It’s only blood product, probably came from a lot of different people.”

“What’s a blood donor?”

“Just an ordinary person who gives a bit of their blood now and again in case someone else needs it.”

“Why?”

“Because it saves lives. It just saved yours.”

“But, that doesn’t make sense.” His pulse was weak and fast and fluttering in his ears. “They don’t know me.”

He tried to focus on her. Her skin was a clean silver in a grubby world.

“I don’t know. I suppose it makes people feel better to think they’re helping strangers.”

“You put blood inside me of several hundred muggles who all want to save my life?”

“If muggles mean people, then yes that’s just what I did.”

“Not necessarily.”

He lay back. There were probable implications of this. Was he a muggle now? Or a mudblood? He wondered if he'd just been attacked and if he should care. Feel dirty. He felt a sweat film greasily over his forehead like he was becoming ill. Then he gave in to the darkness.

Deedee stopped by the open door to the club’s toilets. Maedhros was bent over the sink rinsing his mouth under the cold-water tap. She watched him for a moment, eyes shut, snatching at the water with his lips deliberately as a cat. He stood up and splashed a little of the water on his slightly flushed cheekbones, smoothed down his braids, and gave the mirror a strange appraising glance that she felt embarrassed at witnessing.

She knew all the boys did that in private, looked into the mirror to see if their faces had changed.

“Deedee?”

“Maedhros? Can we talk?”

Maedhros inclined his head with little surprise. Dr. Darthadúliel has bitten off more than she can chew with this one, he thought. His eyes shut snakily and he nodded.

“In the back room, come on.”

The clock showed two thirty am. Maedhros made his way back through the clubs foyer, switching on the main lights as he went, breaking the spell. Without the shadows, the club looked tawdry. The carpet was stained with wax and chewing gum, the marble top of the bar became painted plywood, the pictures of naked men that lined the walls looked foolish, cheesy poses, cocks like sausage meat. Seduction withered on the air. The boy’s faces at the bar looked pale and tired.

Maedhros run up the stairs and pulled down the shutters. Kiki wafted in behind him looking a bit tired herself, although goodness knows what she did during the day. Slept, said Patch, when asked. She seemed to have attained the teenage fantasy of turning star-crossed lover into a full time occupation. She was wearing one of Patch’s battered jackets over a pink sundress. In February. She picked her way delicately down the stairs in kitten heels and nearly nude nylons that Deedee had stolen from her and settled herself behind Patch’s chair, putting her arms over his shoulders. Maedhros opened the till and counted out everyone’s earnings to the sound of their soft voices cooing to each other. He didn’t know the language, Deedee had told him it was Greek.

When everyone had been paid up and retreated up the stairs, Maedhros put on the kettle and brewed a pot of coffee in the little kitchen behind the bar. He swallowed a few mouthfuls of cold Singapore noodles, closed the box and put it in the refrigerator.

“So what should I do with him? Pin a note on him for the cleaners – “Don’t throw this out?””

Maedhros was very good with these notes, Zack’s magazines, Patch’s battered paperbacks, Jain’s scribbles all left behind and all marked up safely as someone’s property from the unseen hands that vacuumed the carpets and cleaned the bed sheets each morning. They were found so safely the next time the boys turned up on shift they’d all got lazy about remembering to take their belongings home.

“Do you think the cleaners go in that storeroom? There was dust an inch thick in there.”

“They might do. I’ve never seen them.”

Maedhros briefly wondered if brothel cleaning commanded a higher premium than offices. He twisted the club’s share of the takings into a manila petty cash envelope, licked it sealed and then used a discarded chair leg to ram it into the chute at the top of the safe.

“Well, we could stop them.”

“We could?”

“Maedhros, you might have been brought up to believe all elven power resides in objects you can make to trap it in, but I was brought up in the hidden kingdom.”

“Didn’t it get bulldozed?”

“In the end,” said Deedee slowly, “it did get bulldozed. We lost the ability to protect a whole kingdom. But a single room shouldn’t be too much of a problem. How do you think the NYPD haven’t found me and Treacle’s hideout yet?”

“Because it’s on top of the Richloux Theatre?”

“With an attached herb garden?”

“Point taken.”

“Besides, I’m guessing the cleaners won’t be going out of their way to look for extra rooms to tidy.”

“Alright, you do your Galadrahim voodoo to keep him safe for a few nights, then what?”

“I was rather hoping you’d have some answers for that.”

Maedhros poured the coffee.

“So, not only do you expect me to house him and feed him, you also expect me to find him a future.”

“You’re good at that sort of thing.”

“Deedee, if I was in any was good at that sort of thing don’t you think I’d sort out the boys here in my care with better futures?”

“You hold them together.”

“Yes well, I was the eldest in a large family and old habits die hard. Especially when there’s surviving to be done.”

Bloody fitting end for the heir of Feanor, Maedhros smiled into his coffee. Commanding the underlings to the last, even if your captains are now greatly reduced in stature and circumstance. I wonder if the Valar are still taking an interest in my fate after all.

“Did he give you any clues as to where he came from?”

“At a guess, England.”

“That’s not quite what I meant. You know more about the world than me, you must have picked up some clues.” Deedee blew on her coffee. She took it black. She’s really studied the hard bitten image thought Maedhros, smiling at her warrior braids. For someone born after the event.

“He’s English, he’s upper class, and he’s never been acquainted with modern medicine. That’s all I got. Oh and he’s not a sex worker. You were wrong.”

“And can you think of a logical conclusion for that?”

“He was brought up in some hippy commune or cult that didn’t agree with germ theory. There are still plenty of pockets of well to do people that don’t. Look.”

He rummaged under the telephone directory and came up with a copy of Zack’s “Aquarian Era” magazine and turned to picture of a smart suited grim faced couple walking purposefully. The headline read “Berkley, California: Couple face murder charge for refusing medical intervention on baby.”

Deedee nodded, taking it in.

“Except,” she said. “Whatever this boy’s parents were giving him was working.”

“It was.”

“Yes. Haemophilia’s very serious if not controlled. I doubt he’d still be alive if he were being treated with mumbo jumbo. At the very least, he’d be half crippled. But he’s not. There are no signs of any previous bleeding.”

“Well, they must have been good alternative medical practitioners.”

“Possibly, but that in itself is odd. I mean, normally mortals are very bad at that sort of thing. Look at all the things that kill them.”

“He said something,” said Maedhros slowly, “About an Arachnae Potion. Arachnae means –.”

“Spider,” Finished Deedee. “I am a Doctor. That requires quite a in depth knowledge of Latin.”

“Really,” said Maedhros. “I thought it was nineteenth century stuff.”

“It makes us sound so much more impressive,” said Deedee. “All healing has an element of showmanship. Ask Saint Tecia of Ynys Ariconium.”

Maedhros snorted. “I wonder if Treacle would know what an Arachnae potion was.”

“I could make a good guess. Come on Maedhros, you must have some memories of field healing? Putting spiders webs on wounds to stop the bleeding?”

“I think the Noldor were a little more advanced than that, even back then.”

“It works, anyway. I’m guessing the boy grew up being given some concoction made with spiders webs as some form of sympathetic magic.”

“Sympathetic magic?”

“Usual mortal grasping at straws. Treacle knows more about it than me. He saw a lot of it during his time as a Saint, well, didn’t see.”

She mused into her coffee. Maedhros was suddenly struck by how very fond of her he was, for all her poses of experience. He’d thought her a rather ordinary looking elf when he first met her. Pretty enough by human standards but nothing to loose a kingdom for to a Noldor. Over time, he’d revised his opinion. She had what one might call an “interesting face” although he’d never tell her that. It sounded too impolite. He liked women on the odder side of beautiful, they reminded him of his mother. Who was remarkable. He liked Deedee’s face, he decided.

“If it didn’t work, why did mortals persist with for so long?”

“Never underestimate the power of mortal hope,” said Deedee in that grandiose voice she used when quoting Treacle. “They’ll believe anything rather than give up the fight to live. It’s a truly heroic part of their nature.”

Yes, thought Maedhros. Look at my boys.

“Besides,” she added, “The important thing now is this sympathetic magic worked.”

“So?”

“Ever heard of Merlin Ambrosias?”

“As in court wizard to King Arthur? Of course, mortal fairy tales have penetrated even down here. ”

In fact, though Maedhros, they carry considerably more weight down here where reality sucks than they do in the daylight world where it’s cosy.

“Maedhros, we are mortal fairy tales.”

“But you said yourself, mortal magic doesn’t work.”

“I’ve never known it to work, and Treacle hasn’t either. But there were stories of mortals the magic did work for. Not everyone in sixth century Britain thought Treacle was a Saint. Some people called him a wizard. And they accepted that as normal. The idea that there were some humans who could do what others couldn’t do wasn’t strange to them.”

“Perhaps that’s just the human capacity for blind faith again.”

“It doesn’t explain why no one made much of a fuss over the blind guy on the island who could mysteriously cure untreatable illnesses.”

“Canonisation is rather a big fuss.”

“Oh everyone got canonised back then. Discover a new village well, have a Sainthood. Adopt a lame dog, get a church named for you.” Deedee waved her hand. “It helped the Christian cause to give the Holy Spirit credit for everything. Besides he’s not an official saint. The Celtic Church was still separate from the Vatican in those days. He doesn’t have a day or anything.”

Maedhros laughed.

“These people believed Treacle was a Saint and your trusting their judgement on the existence of wizards?”

“I think Treacle makes a very good Saint,” said Deedee, mildly affronted. “Better than the ones who got the honour for killing Saracens.”

“Alright,” said Maedhros, “Going back to the kid, any answers as to how such a supernatural phenomenon end up beat up on the West Street Walkway?”

“Same way two elves are chatting in a brothel at –,” Deedee looked at the clock, which was tilting towards four am, “this time in the morning.”

She paused.

“Actually speaking of Treacle, I really should be heading home. He’ll be thinking you are getting me drunk again.”

“He knew,” said Maedhros suddenly remembering, “He called me a Quendi. Said he thought I was extinct.”

Deedee raised her eyebrows.

“I’ll ask Treacle more about wizards when I get home.” She stood up. “I’ll just check the kid is still breathing first.”

~*~

He was still breathing. In fact he was sitting up in bed breathing in nicotine fumes, still clutching the syringe barrel in his left hand.

“Oh kid,” said Deedee.

“Red gave me them,” he replied.

Any thing else you neglected to mention about your conversation with this kid, thought Deedee irritably.

“When did you start smoking?” said Deedee.

“Quite late on,” he replied. “There was a war you see and I needed something to steady my nerves.”

“Nervous type?”

“Goes with the territory really. Family inbreeding for generations, parents had a tempestuous marriage,” he paused. “People trying to kill me on a regular basis.”

“Why would they want to do that?”

“It’s rather what one does in a war.”

“You’re remarkably open about it if people are looking out to kill you.”

“I haven’t got much more to loose have I, Quende?”

“Who told you about elves?”

“I learnt about them in school, doesn’t everybody?”

Yes, thought Deedee, everybody learns about elves in school. They get the tooth fairy, and Tatiana and Oberon and perhaps a whisper of Morgan Le Fay if they read widely enough. But nobody ever believes in us for all that.

His battered lips forced themselves into a grin.

“Shocked?” He said. “Not all humans are stupid you know.”

“Is it so smart to believe blindly in forces that have no explanation?”

“It is if you can control them.” He paused. “My father always said that muggle folly could be defined the equation Y = MC squared.”

“You know physics but not modern medicine?”

“I know that there are a lot of fools who feel very contented with the notion that power is defined by the effort put in to achieving one’s ambitions. It makes even the greatest of criminals feel honest. I’m not that deluded.”

I’m pretty sure delusions are going to put in appearance somewhere in your story, thought Deedee. We’ve been working at the bottom of the world a long time now, Treacle and I, and we know the masks people wear here. She was rather used to outrageous confessions within minutes of meeting from boys and girls with limbs like matchsticks and eyes shining with the cold and the drugs and the chaos of surviving. Their horror stories, their talisman of identity against a creature who had what little power a tattered doctorate from the last century and a flea market silver badge gave her, their little comfort stories of protection.

Other Doctors would call it other things, Borderline Personality Disorder, Attention seeking behaviours, but Deedee didn’t think much of that. When the world has left you to die on the West Street Walkway attention isn’t a commodity, it’s essential goods in perilously short supply.

“I think,” she said softly, “You need to sleep.”

“Really?” he said, “You healers don’t miss a trick. I’m all right you know. I’m not one of your lost sheep and I’m not going to die on you.”

“If I asked you to leave, where would you go?”

“You won’t ask me to leave. People never do.”

“Why do mortals constantly equate kindness with weakness?”

“Because they have the same effect?” The kid laughed breathily then held his nose.

“That feels weird.”

“You’ve probably got a hairline fracture. Yes, you are still pretty, before you ask. Or you will be once the bruising has gone down.”

“You think I’m that shallow?”

“I think you are living a life where you need every weapon you can get your hands on and being young and beautiful is still a reasonable one when resources are low.”

“Like I’d ever do that.”

“I didn’t mean a literal exchange. I meant that most people have a vested interest in keeping the attractive alive.”

“Is that why you do it? I’ve heard about elven damsels and their taste for tragic mortality.”

“That’s not why I do it.”

“Why do you do it?”

Deedee looked thoughtful for a moment.

“Because I am a healer by profession and I want to practice my trade. There aren’t that many openings for Doctors who qualified in 1893.”

“But you are young too look at least, and you are pretty. As you said, weapons that could be used to improve your employability.”

“Because I am an elf and demons are my business. Because we are creatures that live where reality fails.”

“We?”

“I’d say down here is the only place your” she was going to say “father’s mad ramblings”, but checked herself “magical powers of control over the universe could be semi-believable.”

Magic, so the upstairs world has it, is what you believe in when you don’t have anything else. Dr Rittengard-Levoski, her Psychiatry lecturer peered over his lectern and addressed the black backs of the gowned students of her medical faculty.

“Magical thinking is what occurs when the normal order of society, it’s rules and values, are presented to the child in early life in an arbitrary and chaotic manner.” He paused impressively. “The child, finding no logical correlation between its crimes and the punishments it receives constructs its own fantastical set of rules of how the universe is governed. He languishes in the ego-dominant stage of development, when all events emanate from his thoughts or actions…”

So that’s what I’ve been living for all these years, she’d thought bitterly. Then she thought something else.

The magic is that they survive at all.

The kid smiled and appeared to be pulling a face of deep contemplation.

Then he disappeared.

~*~

It’s scarcely credible how resilient young mortals are, thought Maedhros. You wouldn’t think that less than a month ago I carried that kid in here over my shoulder, blue lipped and bloodless. Not now the bruises have gone down and he’s leaning on the bar as though he owns the title deeds, bright and shiny and so very young. Maedhros was never that young himself, elves never are. They’re late blossoms, fifty by the time they reach anything like full adult strength. By then, they’re old. They’ve already seen enough to make them use their muscle and their beauty wisely. But mortals never do. They’re given their greatest physical gifts when they barely have the smarts to sit still and finish a book. It’s like putting an AK-47 in the hands of a toddler.

Maedhros is surprised that no worse has come of it, over the years.

“He won’t be young for very long,” says Deedee in an undertone, watching the line of Maedhros gaze.

He won’t and Maedhros knows it. He’s lazing for a comfortable moment in the glass bubble between potential and experience, but it’s catching up all the time, and whatever winged fate waits for this kid moves quickly. Perhaps it is the indolence that makes him so attractive. He’s not handsome, like Patch or beautiful like Kiki. He’s short and somewhat brittle looking. Fey, Maedhros thought, appreciating the irony. It’s a charm that is more a trick of charisma than the result of good bone structure. The face and body will not be grown into; they will not improve with the passing of time. His moment will be brief and it is now or never.

“No,” said Maedhros softly watching him address Patch in an accent so arcane Queen Victoria’s grandmother would have found it dated. It was so old it sounded foreign. But then all the Englishmen of noble birth were exotic imports, weren’t they? They were all married into the Mafiosi of Europe’s ruling clan, swapping syphilis and defective DNA in it’s own air-locked circle since the crumbling of Rome. Mad, blind, crippled or just downright incompetent, they shored up the family through wars and famine and revolution. All gone now, though. Maedhros couldn’t quite put his finger on when the great disappearance had occurred, he guessed they fell somewhere into the eclipse between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One moment Europe had been a swarm of ermine clad Grand Princesses and wax moustachioed Arch Dukes, the next it was ruled by men as dowdily be-suited as his adopted home’s leaders. He wasn’t paying too much attention back then, he had other things on his mind than reading the newspapers.

He’d said himself he was Norman French, a direct line of the Angevin Count who had taken the snake legged Lady Melusine for a bride, daughter of Satan himself. That story always rather amused Maedhros. Those had been the days when no expansionist clan worth it’s broadswords was without at least one fairy grandmother. They needed the glamour and they didn’t have film stars back then. Well of course, thought Maedhros flippancy over this comes very easily from where I’m standing, after all I’ve got four perfectly good fairy grandparents and that never won me any wars. That and he supposed they desperately wanted some kind of legitimacy for their personal manifest destinies, and what better way to do it than to claim they were the descendants of the firstborn, the original inheritors of Arda.

But claiming descent from the Devil, Maedhros certainly had to give them points for originality, and more than a little fuck you attitude as well. Of course, it stunk of the highly-strung neurotic imaginings that would win them historical fame as a tribe of paranoid, blood letting drama queens. Maedhros looked at the boy again. He had now hoisted his thin frame onto the counter of the bar itself and lay back, smoking, waiting for fate to come for him. His eye caught Maedhros’ glance and he had to admit they were remarkable eyes, not beautiful, but strikingly cold.

He sat perfectly still with his ancient grey eyes giving nothing away.

They were eyes with a connection missing, eyes that expected to observe the world but never be a part of it. Well kid, Maedhros thought, are you infinitesimally part demon?

Factually, it was complete rubbish. Later historians had traced the line back and proved it to be nothing but self-aggrandizing bravado, besides, the Devil as Maedhros knew him had no daughters.

He continued to stare out at the world breathing in it’s potential. He looked like he was waiting for the signal for all hell to break loose so he could run in the moonlight and rejoice in all the trouble there was to be made in the world.

Maedhros realised it didn’t make much difference what the truth was, the kid believed unshakably that he had he blood of Lucifer in his veins and that was power enough.

~*~

“Okay, what’s he up to?”

The blonde demon, the pretty lady devil thought Kit, wondering why the white ladies of the Underworld had been lost to folklore, looked pointedly at him from across the booth. Relentless grey eyes like Mephistopheles met his. Soulless eyes, one-way mirrors, eyes meant to look on the world and never be changed by it. They were oddly bright too, as if the lights of hell were magnesium flares not the more traditional red glow of the smithy.

Kit had wondered if he were going mad when he first found himself attended by demons but had abandoned that thought as histrionic. It wasn’t as if Dr. Darthadúliel and Mephistopheles were visible to him alone. Other people saw them, talked to them, behaved as if they were perfectly ordinary persons engaged in nothing stranger than surviving in the underbelly of New York’s black economy.

He found that most odd. One glance had told him they were not human. People here were strange. They put their faith in belief systems far more than in the evidence of their own eyes.

Someone had once told Kit that madness was believing you were the only sane person left. It had annoyed him at the time, the way all those over confident buffoons who made sweeping statements about complex subjects always did. And they get called clever for it, the thought, biting his tongue. It still annoyed him, but now it frightened him a little too, because if it were true, Kit was as crazy as a bedbug.

Kit cleared his throat.

“He’s picking up men and disappearing with their money. Clipping, I believe it’s called.”

Deedee nodded.

“I’d guessed that. Have you noticed anything more unusual?”

“I meant disappearing in the literal sense.”

“No, I knew he could do that.” Deedee took a swig of her orange juice.

Kit looked into the depths of his coffee. His wide slightly indolent looking eyes stared back at him. Lascivious eyes, he’d been told, but not by a credible source. Still it had stuck like all the petty insults had like splinters in the soul.

Kit didn’t believe in soul, or at least didn’t believe it existed in any form other than electrical impulses in the synapses of grey matter. Deedee said he had poor self-esteem. Mephistopheles had laughed at that.

“That’s her quack’s patent medicine,” he’d said. “Poor self-esteem.”

He felt like a hermit crab sometimes, hiding what he was beneath a glittering armour of collected abuses and insults.

“I think I’m out of my depth here,” he said finally.

“How so? I’m paying you to watch someone, isn’t that what you do?”

Kit breathed out heavily and the reflection of his face disintegrated. He wanted to say, actually I’m a playwright, but he never did. Let the kids who wait tables and hawk Rolexes brag about their hobbies and publicise their failure. The world will know my name one day without me pimping it.

He swallowed. Sex – and sexual exploitation just wouldn’t stay out of it. It was studded through the lexicon of those in the gutter aspiring to greatness. And yes, minion does mean cocksucker.

He never asked how Deedee knew he was a spy; although he’d got the horrible feeling he’d told her. Which surely must have broken the first rule of espionage: Never tell anyone you are an undercover agent. Not that anyone had explained any rules to him when he’d begun his rather unorthodox career. He’d simply been caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Same old cliched shit.

And more

2005-09-15T23:06:44Z

~*~

“What brings you here?” asks Treacle, after I had rounded into the alley beside the movie house, narrow and filled with overflowing trashcans giving off the sweet sickly reek of discarded burger buns and lettuce, avoided the beady gaze of the furred and sleek rats out for a feast, and made my way up the rusting fire escape on to the roof.

“Deedee knows,” I say, curiously unwilling to bring the events of the day back by repeating them.

“I saw you get taken away,” she said softly. “I didn’t know what happened after that.”

Treacle sniffs.

“Why the disguise, Maedhros?”

“I do not wish to be observed.” I sigh.

“People are watching me. People I knew nothing about until this afternoon. That rather makes you wish to hide.”

Deedee nods. We are sitting on the rooftop around the mean glow of a red fire. In the distance, Deedee’s herb garden throws shadows around us like jungle, grey, huge and crazy. Three elves sit around a campfire and we could be on border patrol anywhere, at any time, guarding the boundaries of our kingdom against the ever-encroaching mortals.

Kingdom is perhaps the wrong word, because I was never really a king. Well I was briefly, but I was asleep for most of it. Principality sounds like a mid western bank.

“What did they say?” Deedee asks.

I bite my lip and recount the events of this afternoon. I seem to talk forever. Deedee’s sharp grey eyes seem to follow every word, but Treacle looks away, preparing supper. He hands me a strange green tinted drink in a tiny cup that smells somewhat of thyme, but tastes of warmth itself. We eat the crumbly elf-bread that Deedee makes, from an ancient recipe from the forest kingdom. It’s not bread by any human standards, for one, it probably contains beechnuts, but I doubt it contains wheat, because elves never got the hang of stable agriculture. It’s very wholesome, but it takes a little getting used to after the easily consumed sugar and spice diet of New York City. There are memories in every bite, but also the rather odd culinary sensation of chewing the forest floor.

“Do you believe them?” Asks Treacle.

I look down and suddenly realise what my feeling of unease in the back of the taxi had been.

“No.”

“Why is that?” Treacle was well named by those first humans. His voice coils around the air like smooth sticky black fluid.

“I don’t know. Kiss and tells are common enough. And all political parties employ armies of muckrakers these days. It’s how Kit paid for his ticket over here. All the candidates get snooped on.” I sigh

“It just seems like they went to an awful lot of trouble.”

Treacle and Deedee both nod. Elves are very attentive listeners. After a while Treacle speaks.

“What else have you got to give people?”

“Nothing. No influence, no money, just a small flat and a few knickknacks,” I reply.

“What else?”

“I do not know.”

“You have immortality, Maedhros. That, if someone became aware of it would be sufficient reason for mortals to try all sorts of unusual tricks.”

“How would my being immortal help other people?”

“You are being wilfully obtuse now.”

He sits backward. From somewhere far below a police siren wails.

“They will assume it is something in you. Something that can be refined an extracted.”

“I’ve often wondered if really it was.”

Treacle laughed softly.

“You think so?”

“It would rather mess things up wouldn’t it, if all our greater spiritual awareness or whatever it is we were supposed to be granted as the first inheritors of the earth was really lots of collagen and some really nifty regenerative cells.”

“I think,” said Treacle, “you are confusing the ends with the means. What you describe as greater awareness is a product of being around a long time, not vice versa.”

“That’s never been proven,” said Deedee thoughtfully.

“That is because you have not dissected any elves,” says Treacle.

“But nobody knows,” I say. “I’ve told no-one, not even Kit.”

“Someone may have guessed.”

“No, humans would say they were mad before they admitted they’d seen an immortal.”

“Anything strange happened recently at the club?”

I pause.

I know the answer.

~*~

It’s too early for the Hacienda to be open, but the metal grille is already half way up. I wonder if I could finally catch a glimpse of our invisible cleaners. But I feel uneasy, I can smell treachery in the air like I can smell the ghost of other men’s lust on Kit’s body. Then I realise it’s not treachery I smell, but blood. Blood and smoke and an uncanny presence in the air as if the law of physics itself had been bruised.

Ducking under the shutter I get the full measure of it. The Hacienda reeks like a butchers shop. The air is clammy as if the damp has been summonsed to protect the stairs. The sweet smell of burnt flesh coils within the acrid smell of old smoke. Somewhere in the shadows, behind the ebony painted cash desk from when the Hacienda was The Sunset Strip, is the damp sucking sound of someone breathing in blood.

“Snowball?”

There’s no reply. The sucking continues. I can see well enough in the dark, even in colours, look behind the desk. There’s a trail where he crawled up the stairs from the cellar, black on the burgundy carpet, sticky like the trail of a giant slug. Maybe he was trying to get out, then forgot himself and curled up to die. He’s wrapped up in a semi-circle in his work clothes, torn skinny jeans and a dirty t-shirt, a blood stained bandage on his elbow. He hates jeans, but he knows what the tricks expect, what they’re looking for in street trade.

The t-shirt is burnt into his skin. His left shoulder gapes, the flesh hangs back in livid yellow rinds around the deep, slimy pink crater of the burn. It runs up to his neck where his hair has caught and down below his waist. They’d cut his face, horribly. His hands were still tied behind his back and I don’t know how long they’d held him downstairs for. It’s dawn now, just gone six thirty, I wonder how long they hurt him for. Hurt him, stabbed him, set the club alight and left him in there to die.

Still ghosting over the stench of the blood, the faint tang of peroxide.

I go downstairs and call Deedee. There’s a small patch of ash above the door to the storerooms, but apart from that, the club is unharmed except for the eerie, chilly congregation of water molecules in the air. The phone rings off the first two times. I feel my stomach tense. The blood smell oozes down the stairs. I leave sticky red footprints on the back room tiles. She sounds breathless and cross when she finally gets on the line and hisses, crossly.

“For the second time in fucking three days, dial nine one one.”

“But he’s illegal.”

Deedee utters a very un-elven wail, rather like the warrior cry of a herd of police sirens.

“Better deported than dead.”

“He might not think so.”

“Well, he can commit seppuku in hospital then. At least that way he’ll have a choice.”

I have an instinctive dislike of calling any authorities to the Hacienda. It feels like a betrayal of the clubs trust, a forcing of the hitherto secret realm into the public eye. But the mortuary smells drag me on and I make the call, feeling like my limbs are moving through a thick veil. I’m amazed to here the operator log the location, amazed it exists on maps and official plans when it is so studiously avoided by the rest of the world.

And then I leave the brisk, confident, unflappable voice on the end of the phone and return to the boy in the dark. Some flies, out early in the muggy morning have gathered for a feast on the congealing blood. I swat them away.

He swallows roughly as if he is coming round and emits a slow whimper. The top of his jeans are sopping, he’s been sliced deeply. That would be the last wound, the one they left him to die of. I untie his arms, which flop awkwardly downward, and try and put as much pressure as I can on the wound in his stomach. His eyes flash open in pain, very wide grey eyes, a shock to see such perfect eyes in the mess that was his face.

“Ssh,” I say. “Ssh. I’ve called a doctor.”

That doesn’t shush him. He squirms beneath my arms becoming even more disturbed.

“They’ll make the pain go away.”

He whimpered into my arms, then started sobbing. Racking, dry sobs that sometimes brought up mouthfuls of blood. I’ve seen him cry before, Patch and me sat with him the couple of times the tricks were too quick for him. We used to give him sweet tea and aspirin.

“Come on, come on, try to shush. That’ll only make it hurt more.” I hum softly under my breath. I’ve heard Quendi singing can act as an analgesic to humans, although I was never very medically minded. I was more into the taking life side of things. He relaxes a little anyway.

“I told them,” he hissed, “told them you’re immortal.”

“I know,” I say, “It doesn’t matter.”

“Matters to me,” he whispered.

“It’s alright, the most important thing is you try to keep calm now until the ambulance comes.”

“They gave me money, as a loan”

The sneer has been cut into his mouth forever, his upper lip flaps, slit in two over his broken teeth. He slithers beneath my fingers like chopped liver, or some other dark and bloody meat that Kit will not let me prepare in the house, whining softly.

As I grow used to the smell of blood, the ammonia bite of the peroxide comes rushing up to me, insinuating, mocking, like a song I cannot remember but whose refrain is stuck in my head.

Then I remember, Skerries, the loan shark. The man who had held me captive, shapeless sack in a suit too good for him, stinking of peroxide.

I remember too the dark man I saw, also portly, chasing Snowball into the Hacienda. I’d warned him about clipping, warned him he wouldn’t stay pretty for long in that game.

“I couldn’t pay up,” he hissed.

I thought he ignored me because he thought he knew better. The invincibility of the young and all that. Now I know he ignored me because he was desperate.

Skerries had been something much worse than a ripped-off trick. I think I know now why Missey Secretary knew so much about the Hacienda’s goings on. And why she is not Missey Secretary at all.

Gently, I untie the rag on Snowball’s elbow and look at the bruises beneath. It isn’t a feint anymore.

“How long have you been using for?”

Even in his terrible state I see warmth coming into his face as I mention it.

“It helps.”

He’s almost smiling at the memory.

“So you needed money.”

“Yes.”

“And you gave them information?”

“Mmm.”

“So what went wrong.”

“I had nothing more to give. Still owed them.”

“So they cut you up?”

“And set me alight, they take non payment badly.”

“Set you on fire?”

“Yes,”

“Why aren’t you dead?”

I swear, even with him lying prone, he nearly shrugged.

“I mustn’t be very flammable.”

Then his eyes roll backwards and he faints again. I can feel his body relax as he slips away from the pain.

I wait until the ambulance comes and takes him, and then I sit there, immobile, waiting for daylight to happen and the morning to begin. There are no other thoughts, not of cleaning, or of witness statements or phone calls to friends.

There is only me sitting in a bloody stairwell thinking of revenge.

~*~

It has been a long time since I walked abroad in black weeds splashed with crimson. It has been many centuries since I have walked in daylight with blood in my hair, and on my face and hand and yet kept going forward, looking to the horizon, never thinking to stop. We would have had horses back then, at least, in the early days. By the end it was just us and our long knives and sharp teeth, attacking in the deeps of mid-night.

The door to the Hyacinth suite opened as I pushed against it. I’m not sure if it was locked or not, but I have always had a way with metal. The Feanorians, cold steel in the blood, and never more so than when we are out for revenge.

“Poley.”

It’s not a question it’s a statement. She was sitting at her desk arranging paper, compiling perhaps more assignations of death on the hotel’s own lilac scented stationary. Dear Skerries, we need to terminate our arrangement with the blonde.

Or not even that. She just employed him, pretended she didn’t know what for, like a redneck claiming to hold an AK-47 for self-defence.

She looks up, and smiles unsurely.

“You left rather suddenly.”

“I got cold feet.” She nods as if this is no major problem.

“Did you change your mind?”

There’s a thin stripe of black and red across her nails like modernist art, over the glossy talons.

“What did you do to Snowball?”

“Snowball?”

“The boy downstairs at the Hacienda.”

She looks blank.

“He was knifed this morning. Nastily. Someone had gone to an awful lot of trouble to make him suffer.”

“That’s terrible.”

“I’m not disputing that. I’m asking why you did it.”

“I think you are confusing me here.”

“That man, Skerries, the one who brought me here. He’d coloured his hair recently. I could smell the peroxide when he brought me to you. But he was with Snowball the day before with dark hair. Now Snowball’s turned up slashed up and the whole club smells of peroxide.”

“That’s very acute senses you have.”

“Yes, but you know that.”

“I do?”

“What,” I say wearily having certainly given up on ever seeing Kit again, and perhaps ever seeing the Hacienda, “do you want from me. No lies this time.”

“I’ve told you what I want.”

“You could get any ten dollar hooker to tell you that story. Why go to all this trouble to get me.”

“You’d be a very striking image.”

It’s hard not to smile at that. I get the feeling this woman is good at diffusing situations. There’s something in her stance too used to giving evasions, too much moving of the hands, sweeping behind her all the time, as if the facts were always being brushed behind her. This nervous habit gave me hope.

“I’m sure there are similar south west of Christopher Street more amenable.”

“You are not going to accept my offer are you?”

“No.”

I don’t bargain. It’s a family tradition. When we hit our bottom line then there is no haggling. I know this means the end of love, the end of sniffing Kit’s smoky stale skin in the morning and the feel of his skinny arms around me. The door of family pride bangs shut and it is an iron wall that holds me in place behind it.

She lowers her eyes as if she would rather not see what was coming next. Perhaps she would not, the next sweep of her hands might condemn me to goodness knows what but I know she never sees it. She drafts in her connections, her contacts, and they move the problem away. There’s a blinking away of culpability for what would happen afterwards.

“I have a story then,” she says raising her eyes. She cannot be more than twenty-four, she may even be younger, her eyes are lineless, the softness in her face is not an act. “Five years ago, I was studying.” She smiled. “No affirmative action, I got there fair and square, highest grades my school had ever seen at graduation. I went to Columbia on scholarship.”

A fly enters and buzzes loudly behind the wisteria curtains.

“I used to make the other students beds in my hall. Three dollars fifty per hour I got for that. Because I was live in they didn’t even have to pay me minimum wage. I still got into debt. Not with the banks, no banks were queuing up to give me a loan. I got a loan from the University hardship fund and couldn’t pay it back. Four hundred dollars, that all it was.”

She examines her nails. The fly falls silent.

“I finished with a first, English Literature and Political Studies, but they wouldn’t grant me my degree because I was in debt.”

“Are you trying to inspire some sex worker empathy in me?”

“What?” For one minute only, the full Brooklyn of her voice comes out, before it is smoothed neatly behind the elocution. “Oh no. I didn’t do that. You never really need to do that, do you?”

“You’d have got on with Snowball,” I say acidly.

Her eyes lower again, as if once again something has entered the room that she is too modest to see.

“There was a small newsprint add in the back of the New York Times, two lines, girls wanted as sales clerks, up to $200 per hour. So I went. It turned out to be an old soak in Queens who run a detective agency.”

“Baines.”

“Of course. He used to –“

“Kit told me the scam. Women would come in to check their husband or fiancé’s faithful, you’d go out and try and seduce the man and collect on both fronts.”

“I never slept with them.”

“How honourable.”

“I’d just do enough so they’d leave incriminating messages on my answer phone, then take it into Baines who’d do the collecting. I got twenty five per cent of all cash, twenty per cent of all card payments.”

She smiled suddenly, a little to wild, a little too feral.

“A lot of girls would come through, but only a few had a talent for it. There were only three or four at any one time he could count on to go out for regular jobs. I stayed, I was good at it.”

“What happened?”

“I saved up enough to get my degree. Then I decided to work for myself.”

“Like trying to black mail would be senators?”

“No, not that entirely although we all have the small mundane jobs that keep food on the tables. I find information. It’s a very simple thing to do really. If you just listen long enough, you’ll hear what you need in the end, because all people love to talk about themselves.” She paused and sipped from a plastic bottle of water on the desk. “All I ever really needed to know about the trade I learnt from Baines teaching me how to rip off upstate suburbanites. Facts, he’d say, forget the ambiance collect the facts. I was best at bringing in the facts. The others all, somewhere started telling stories, but I always got the cold hard facts, where he worked, where his moles were, whom his life was insured with. I used to make a game of mining for as many facts as I could. It made their conversation more interesting.”

“Why are you telling me this, because you want me to feel sorry for you?”

“No not at all. I’m telling you this because I know what Kit must have gone through.”

“You have no idea what Kit has been through,” I sneer. “You’ve got a nerve saying his name when it’s you trying to get him deported.”

“Maybe it would be better for him if he was. Did you ever think of that? He’s a low grade snoop that’s going to end up like Baines in twenty years if he gets stuck here.”

“He’s not a clinically paranoid sociopath. He rather lacks the basic raw material to become Baines.”

“As a worker, would you say what you have seen of life leads you to the developmental theory of nature or nurture?”

“What do you want?”

I’m hoping I don’t have to hit her. She’s petite and fragile and it would be in all ways dishonourable. Elves never really had a taboo on hitting women, but then elves generally didn’t hit each other very much. Youngsters would tussle as they do, and occasionally there were wars, but there were no massacres. The whole point with a taboo is there is always some social circumstance where it is lifted, and some poor sod taking the brunt of hundreds of years of repression.

That’s something you think about a lot in my trade. You have a lot of sitting around to do to pontificate on such subjects.

“I want to help Kit, I know he’s mixing with the wrong people.”

“And you would obviously know who they are.”

“Of course,” she said with a disarming smile, “I employ them.”

She would be charming with her contralto voice and her pretty rouge ways if I had not held Snowball as he gasped this morning, blood squeezing through my fingers. It takes an extra special kind of cruelty to cut a working boy’s face, particularly one as pretty as Snowball, whose looks in the long term might have got him out of the mire.

“I know that,” I say stonily. “You should have seen the state on Snowball this morning. Your operatives had set him on fire.”

“Snowball?”

“The blond kid at the Hacienda. The one that was giving Skerries and Fraizer all the information.”

“I wasn’t on face to face terms.”

“He doesn’t have a face now. Those two slashed it up, set him alight and left him to die.”

“My God!” she sounds horrified, “Is he… I mean, he’s dead, right?”

“No, amazingly not. Something about him didn’t burn very well. Funny that.”

She looked down at the desk in an imitation of shame.

“He owed them money,” she sad softly. “I knew they lent cash as an aside. I knew they had their own ways of collecting it, but I didn’t know they would do that.”

“They did.”

“Do you see now what I do not want Kit involved in?”

I snort.

“If he needs money, he can come to me. And if he needs protecting.” My eyes flash. I can feel the heat in my face, the anger now. I can hear the soft thudding sound of my heartbeat in my ears.

“It’s sometimes hard to avoid making debts.”

“Snowball told Frazier and Skerries I was immortal. That is your interest. Stop pretending otherwise.”

She smiled thinly.

“It was Baines who marked you actually. He used to follow Kit you know, mainly because I don’t think he had much better to do with his days. He saw Kit with you and marked you down as something to watch. It took a while before I believed him, but by then we had you covered. Skerries and Frazier knew Kit vaguely, Frazier is occasionally employed by Tom, you know Tom, his patron?” Her eyes narrowed.

I did not know about Tom. Clearly he had not made much of an impression on Kit for all she inflected the word to sound somewhere between tart and geisha.

“I don’t I’m afraid.”

“He gave him an arts grant to write a book of poetry. He wants to appear cultured, and wants to make a name for himself for something other than what he makes his money doing.”

“What does he make his money doing?”

“Rack renting.”

“And Fraizer is his secretary and Skerries his bailiff. Of course.”

“Indeed. Kit wouldn’t talk about you, but Skerries started watching the others, to see if any had something that could be used.”

“And found that Snowball needed money badly.”

“At first no one believed him, but then he brought us things.” She wondered in the top drawer and came out with a hermetically sealed plastic bag. “Your hair. Three strands, trapped in the sink drawer. We got it analysed, and decided you were interesting enough to pursue.”

“But Snowball was expendable?”

“There’s only so much information you can gather second hand before you need the real thing.”

“Well, here I am. What do you intend to do with me?”

“For now? We want samples, blood, skin, nothing major. We’d pay. And of course, we’d return Kit.”

“Alright,” I say. “But bring me Kit first.”

~*~

It’s a gilded afternoon in early autumn and the sea salt is in my hair, as I stand outside Rikers Island waiting for the afternoon releases. The turret clock chimes four and then suddenly Kit is in my arms again, smiling into my neck in his faded blue jeans, clutching his belongings in a clear plastic bag. It’s good to feel the shape of him against my skin, small, twitchy, filled with life.

“Did you bring any smokes?”

I sigh and hand Kit the packet, and watch as he has another beautiful reunion. Watching Kit smoke is a guilty pleasure of mine, particularly when he’s gasping for a cigarette. He sucks down the smoke hungrily, shutting his eyes and letting the relief flood his body.

Also, smoking makes him look incredibly cheap, which I’m quite fond of. Something hot and giddy shoots down my spine to my knees.

The guards stare at us. I run my hand over Kit’s stomach. His brown eyes look up into mine.

“Lets find somewhere,” he says, his voice slightly ragged from the smoke. “Quickly.”

~*~

We lie under a stained pink blanket in a hotel that charges £10 per hour and is probably set up exclusively for the just getting out of jail trade. My finger rests on Kit’s lips, touching them, marvelling at the reality of another one I thought had sunk back to memory.

I honestly think I would have gone to England for him. I honesty do.

Kit shifts and our skins, stuck together with sweat, tug and are unwilling to separate. The heat looms in around us like an accessory to the bordello air, thick and sleepy and lewd.

We touch each other gently with reverent fingertips, tracing outlines of each other to remember in case we are parted again. We lie fascinated by each other. And we make love fiercely, pushing against each other, relieved beyond words to hold one another.

“We should go out for dinner or something,” Kit said. “Something that real couples do.”

I laugh softly into Kit’s chest.

“Really? Would you like that? To sit and talk over chilled consommé in the grill room at the Plaza.”

“I’d like to do it once. And I’d like to do it with you.”

His hand goes up to my hair.

“That’s what I was thinking of in there. All the things I wanted to do with you that I hadn’t got a chance to.” He paused “We should go ice skating.”

“It’s August.”

“Not tomorrow. Next winter.”

“I’m pretty good,” I say, which is an understatement if I say so myself.

“I’ve never tried.” He shrugged.

“We have all these things to do,” I say.

“We do.”

“But first you must kiss me.”

He obliges and for a long time we are silent, just liking the salty taste of each other off our lips. I stroke is sides and he whimpers softly.

“But tonight we are needed at the Hacienda.”

“No love, no tricks for you tonight. Not tonight.”

“No tricks,” I say, “but we need to be there.”

“Why?”

“This needs to be paid for.”

~*~

Patch watches us slowly as we trot down the stairs, my arm around Kit’s waist. They’d acquired a thin, incongruous strip of floral carpet to hide the bloodstains on the stairs, and the whole club reeked of burning incense. Business is going on as usual.

Under the exotic temple scent, Snowballs blood still hangs in the air. Kit seems oblivious to it, but he smokes terribly and his smell is poor even by human standards.

“Any news on Snowball?”

“Still in intensive care, although Deedee says he’s doing better than they first thought. He’s pretty resilient under the hypochondria.”

I nod. I have my own thoughts on the bizarre durability of fragile, aristocratic Snowball, although I do not like to say them out loud. The poor kid is probably suffering worse than he ever has right now.

Or perhaps not, come to think of it.

“What are you doing here?”

“I came to see if you were all aright after everything.”

“Yeah,” said Jian. “We’re fine. We’re freaked out but we need to earn a crust so –“ He shrugged.

“It’s all under control,” said Patch. “Paulo is in room three with a new guy. Wants spanking and watersports, pretty generous. Paulo did him because you know him, he doesn’t give a fuck.”

Kit smiles a little despite himself. I know he enjoys the brothel atmosphere. Well, perhaps enjoys and feels intimidated by it both. We’ve joshed him often enough about coming down and joining us on a few shifts, I particularly, get a nasty sense of passive aggressive victory in offering him a job every time he comes home and I taste another man’s cock in his mouth. But he never will, he says he never will, because he enjoys sex too much to make it a dayjob.

He looses most of us working boys with that.

I am here, but I should be elsewhere. I asked them for three hours with Kit, then promised to return. The taxi would be waiting for me at the Hyacinth suite, ready to whisk me away to the upstate private clinic where the samples would be taken. Perhaps Poley wasn’t even lying. Perhaps they would let me go the first time with just some blood and nail clippings, but I doubt it. I know the desperation of mortals when eternity is on the table.

Besides, beneath all that is pride. I do not wish to be poked and prodded like some lab-bred bacillus. I am a person above my species and I wish to retain my mystery here, thank you very much. After all, no one can be forced to donate bodily material against their will. It contravenes human rights.

I am not a human. Still when they come for me, I want to be on my own turf.

~*~

It’s seven PM when they come clattering down the staircase. The day outside would be beginning to blush rosily into twilight. But down here there is no night and day, there are only bills to be paid. Skerries must be getting quite sick of the place by now.

Poley leads, her strait spine and impeccable posture give her the air of a drum majorette leading an army of clowns. Behind her Fraizer walks with the puffed chest of a man that deludes himself of his own importance, and Nick the fat, sluggish devil slouches in the rear as if he is unwilling to return.

We are waiting for them behind the black painted plywood bar that separates club from kitchen, those of us who are not in the back rooms. It serves as our parapet to defend, or mine at least, who knows wars are mostly won or lost in the mind and needs to scrabble together what memories I have of defending the mountain kingdom to this tawdry stand off beneath the streets.

Poley walks up to the bar, for all the world like she is about to order a gin and ginger, rests her hand on the parapet and states he case.

“We returned Kit,” she says evenly. “Now it is your turn for your part of the bargain.”

I smile.

“I renege.”

“Very well,” She said. “I can just order the police back down to take him.”

“No,” said Kit “You can’t.”

She seems to consider this. I know this is all play, the actions were decided on long before this. But before every battle there is a parley, for that is the rules of war, although often it serves to re-enforce to each side the righteousness of their particular cause.

“Why not?”

“I have a letter from Dr. Lewis Knightly, countersigned by my head of department, stating that it has been agreed for me to study at Columbia while I am in New York.”

“That’s only a piece of paper.”

“Dr. Knightly’s father is a British peer in the House of Lords. If I disappear, questions will be asked.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Also, his partner is one Daniel Newman, who sings with this years Billboard top selling rock artists, Arch.”

“Very well. You are not going to disappear. So we will have to try another tack.”

“Which is?”

“We take Red back with us to teach him to keep his promises. He owes us a debt, and it must be repaid.”

At this, Skerries seems to stiffen into action, like a plump old dog obeying his master’s command to heel. He reaches inside his jacket pocket, just as I reach behind the cash register.

“Over my dead body,” said Kit.

“Such clichés should not be used by poets,” said Fraizer silkily.

Suddenly there are more footfalls on the stairs, this time a light, skipping patter. Kiki rounds the corner of the club stairs and her grey eyes go wide.

“Oh bad timing, sorry.”

She scans across the floor, at Skerries pointing the gun towards the bar, the bar with Patch on the other side. Skerries, possibly a little discomfited by the depictions of male love on the wall turns round and finding himself in familiar territory with this pretty teenager, winks at her.

Kiki pulls herself up strait to her full six foot four. Skerries looks suddenly mortified, as the realisation dawns there are enemies on all sides. Suddenly he lunges at Kiki. There’s the sound of a gunshot. Kiki staggers back, Skerries flies into the air and falls in a lump at her feet, bleeding a little at the temple. There’s a small round burnt hole in the front of her blouse.

TONIGHT TAMBURLAINE MUST DIE.

Patch runs towards her in shock, but she stands there without an auburn hair falling out of her chignon.

“Kiki,”

“Love.”

“You’ve gotten shot, Kiki.”

Kiki wrinkles her button nose.

“I know. Lucky Mother always taught me to never leave the house without good foundation garments.”

“I didn’t know they made ultrabras in Kevlar,” says Kit.

“I always wear my vest, like a good girl.” Kiki blushes.

Poley looks thoroughly uncomfortable at the way the evening is panning out. It’s hard not to like her, for all her cruelty, she is only a hairs breadth away from us, she has the pretty, spiteful look of a woman for sale and it is hard to dislike those in the same boat as one, just in case a fight causes it to capsize.

“Get up the stairs,” she says suddenly, with disgust in her voice. She’s reached in the pocket of her neat, tailored jacket and pulled out her own gun, a sleek, skinny spray and pray. This woman clearly takes no prisoners.

I reach for the old Smith and Wesson in return. Kit moves to stand in front of me. Skerries snorts on his blood.

“Get back Kit,” I hiss.

“You do as I say, or he’s dead now.”

“Aren’t you showing your true colours.”

“Go on,” says Kit. “I dare you too.”

“No.”

Several things happen at once. I shout and somehow Poley shoots the ceiling. Something buckles and the roof starts to precariously sag. Poley is staring at me hypnotised as the goblins of old, although I never knew what I did to them I knew I inspired terror.

A cascade of white plaster falls from the roof. Kiki throws Patch over her shoulder and drags her upstairs. Kit shouts that Jain is still in room three and I walk before Poley, who is now white as a floured ghost and kick down the door. It buckles on it’s twisted hinges and a plump yet terrified man still wearing nipple clamps runs out, closely followed by Jain.

I make a move towards the stairs behind them, and Poley recovers her voice.

“Oh no you don’t.”

“We will all die if we stay here.”

And with that she looks me dead in the eye, despite the white fire there. There are things in life that she knows are worse than death.

The ceiling sags. Black mouth cracks have opened up in it, gaping and wide. Suddenly Poley laughs.

“This looks like the apartment I grew up in.”

There is a rush of air as Fraizer attempts to run up the stairs. She shoots him in the back as he goes. The little explosion of the gunshot causes a beam to work its way loose. A minor avalanche brings a portion of the floor above us down.

Then Poley says softly.

“Go”

“Pardon”

“Go. Run Get out.”

“What about you.”

“I’ll survive. Just get out of the club. Take it as a gift from me.”

We run upstairs into the starlight. There is a gunshot behind us, but I suspect it is Skerries who lies dead not Poley. Then we run.

~*~

We never saw Poley again. The structural damage to the Hacienda was not as bad as first feared, and we were open for business within a week. If the ceiling was no longer a pretty sight, few of out patrons looked up.

I wonder if Poley ever found immortality, though I doubt she wanted it for herself. She was an odd girl and I keep expecting her to turn up in the papers one day, either as running for the Whitehouse or dead in the canal. She never does.

And that is often how it goes with those that survive, cursed by God and men.

The Rest

2005-09-15T23:03:10Z

~*~

“Deedee”

“Good evening,”

She calls me by my name then, which comes as a shock. My name gets used so rarely these days it is as if she is referring to another person. It takes me a while to register that is me, that she wants to talk to me, and maybe, it is a term of endearment.

I’m sitting on the floor of a phone booth, pulling the receiver down as far as it can go, resting the side of my head that isn’t a bloody mess against the side of the hissing and clicking column where the phone wires are.

“I’ve been shot in the head.”

There’s a two second pause before Deedee, good girl that she is clicks into her professional mode.

“Where are you?”

“Phone booth. Flushing.”

My head is singing. There’s a hot, burning sensation running along the right side and sparks keep blustering before my eyes.

“Can you see a number on the phone box?”

“Yes.”

“Give it to me. I’ll try and call you back in ten.”

“Okay.”

“And -,” she used my name again. It felt like we were in on a secret. “It’s going to be alright.”

I’m nearly sick standing up again to get the number. Something fleshy falls from my shoulder to the floor. I give Deedee the number then rest my head against the phone and vomit.

“What’s happening?”

“I’m puking.”

“Ah. Okay. While your doing that I’m going to call an ambulance on the other line.”

I make some wet gasping noise with my mouth full of returning treacly coffee. It’s very, very quiet even out on the Broadway. There seems to be no noise of cars, no headlights searing through the dark. Or maybe there are and I can’t see them anymore. It got dark, while I was with Baines. It’s so quiet without Deedee’s voice. You’d think I’d think less with my head like this, but my thoughts are racing. I want to know what state I’ll be when this is over, when the bleeding finishes and the hospital send me home. Will I be blinded, or deaf or paralysed? Will I not be the person I am now, but someone else with slower thoughts and little memory? Are these the last minutes I’m going to be myself? My right side already feels stiff and cold, but that maybe the blood dripping on it, must be the blood and the night air and my imaginings, surely.

I used to be a soldier and would face this every day. My lover died like this on the battlefield, with his head split in half, and I have tried in my worst hours, in the clammy midnights when man was young and went to bed early to rationalise this. To go into what he must have thought as his self fled, his eyes dimmed, as thinking itself became impossible and he stopped feeling the blood trickling through his nose and mouth. I wonder what is the last memory to go? Not me, I doubt it, something much more primal, much more deeply locked inside. Maybe that first forgotten glimpse of the world from the hands of the midwife, that same moment of shock and terror ends everything as began it all.

You can’t think about that on the battlefield of course. It was only ever the slow night watches that allowed for such maudlin thoughts. You cannot think at all of what will be after when you are in combat. You have to take everything, rationalise it, and leave consequences for tomorrow. So, I suppose it must be now.

I sit back on the floor avoiding the dark pool of vomit as best I can. In this new spirit of rational investigation, I pick up the piece of me that is lying on the floor and turn it about between my fingers. It’s reassuringly hard and gristly, thankfully lacking in gooey texture of grey matter. It’s altogether an odd little triangle of tough flesh with a little fold down the far side.

Then it dawns on me I’m holding most of my right ear.

~*~

“I have an undercut.”

Deedee is fussing over me across the far side of my bed. It’s true. From two inches above the ruin of my right ear my thick, red braids, my life saving braids if the doctors here are to be believed have been shaved to nothing. There’s a wide, bruised graze along the right side of my head where the bullet flashed past it, close enough to burn, close enough to fracture if my head wasn’t so well padded with spiders web steely alien hair.

“I look like a goth.”

I have not yet forgiven myself from my moments of weakness on the floor of the phone booth and am taking it out on everyone now with a completely reprehensible attack of the sulks. It’s a most terribly immature behaviour from someone older than the ice age, but there we go. Vintage does not necessarily sweeten, and I am as flawed as anyone.

“Come on Deedee, lets go.”

She looks shocked. I realise I haven’t even thanked her for getting me to hospital.

“You need to stay here and rest.”

“I’m an unregistered alien, someone here is bound to notice at some point.”

“At the moment, that is rather a secondary issue.”

“I’m not going to die.”

“You’re concussed and need to rest while your brain settles down.”

“My brain feels fine.”

“That’s because it is being gently washed in the 20ml diamorphine permeating every tissue of your body.”

“I’ve got to find Kit.”

“Tomorrow.”

“Really.”

“Yes really. The quest is over for tonight. You were the one who was panicking about being brain damaged.”

“I’ve obviously got a thick skull.”

“I’d hardly be the one to argue with that. But your heads been through quite a trauma and if you don’t rest it, you could end up with internal bleeding.”

“Doctors know all the best threats.”

“Of course.”

“Deedee.”

“Yes?”

“Thank you for everything.”

I think, although I can’t be sure, maternal gestures are generally not in Deedee’s modus operandi, she smoothed the blanket over my shoulder, but I couldn’t tell anymore. I never dream you see, haven’t at any time in my life, but in this strange white environment, nestled in the cosy calm of the painkiller, I can almost get there.

If I shut my eyes, I am on the icy walls of my once was, now lost mountain kingdom, watching the icicles grow in grottoes from the shelves of bare rock. The sky is shaking down snow and Kit is beside me with snowflakes on his eyelashes, wrapped deeply in a chocolate brown fur coat.

“Funny to see you here.”

It is funny for Kit to be here, because when I think of snow, in the winter iced cake of Central Park, or the Styrofoam landscapes of Macy’s Santa World, if I think of anyone, I think of my first lover, the one who wasn’t much for kissing but was very much for holding my arms behind my back and taking me in the long grass. He used to write me poems, sometimes, although never about me. I was not his muse. He wrote very well, as I remember, scenes from nature, a wild swan rising from the clear water of a mountain lake, the bones of a tree on the horizon. They were always short, brief and melancholy, and he showed me because he was embarrassed to show anyone else.

My brother’s reputation went before him. His epics on me, though never fawning, were the leading fashion in poetry for the best part of four hundred years. Mags was always one of those deeply unselfconscious people who told the truth always, in perfect clear droplets and perfect rhyming stanzas. He would never consider softening the icy tower of truth, even to escape a charge of treason. And I loved him so much for it, I would never think to. He lost me in the end and maybe that was punishment enough. The worst he ever got from me was a cold shoulder across the dinner table. He never understood why, to the point of being almost comical.

All Quendi are born with wide eyes, a trick of nature so I’m told, to increase our beauty so parents do not abandon the inquisitive, mewling, attention grabbing little fools that children are. I say this as someone who has raised six brothers and is rather fond of children. Mags’ eyes never quite shrunk to adult size, and to me it was sometimes hard to regard him as anything but the lonely little creature who I protected from a distance in the forest where we grew up. I realise that is perhaps a somewhat patronising approach to a younger brother who grew into very much his own quende, but it is the first feeling that comes into my heart on hearing his name.

Mags’ eyes are so big because he sees everything, I remember thinking once, and it was true. He saw everything in the world except what was under his nose. However scathing about my conduct in the last skirmish he had been, it would not take long before some stranger at my table mocked him discretely for being a simpleton and I would rally to his side once more, leaving him as confused as ever.

I’m pretty sure he thought I was unstable a long time before I might have given him more obvious reasons for such a conclusion. We’d retire to bed and talk until the sun rose over the cold plains of the north, and the black tower of the Necromancer was a clawed finger against a blood red sky. Mags, I remember, never really drunk wine even though I was probably quite sloppily verbose by that time. I do not think he understood it. He inspired almost universal adoration amongst the Quendi under his command. I loved him more than I have ever loved anyone, and I do no resent a good evening’s thinking about Kit being invaded by the soft warm memory of one of the few truly good hearted beings I have ever met.

But still, I preferred my lovers fragile little poems.

I twist on my side. I’m untubed and unbandaged, so can move around freely, which I take to mean that Deedee’s worries about my condition are mostly unfounded. Sniffling in another noseful of pillow, I try to retreat back to Kit in his fur coat on the mountainside. I feel very warm towards him, very affectionate, although I’m sure this is a side effect of the morphine, I’m not going to waste a good evening of feeling happily horny. I don’t get many holidays such as this in life.

It occurs to me I’ve never taken Kit on vacation, and that maybe I should. Somewhere away from the trade and the bustle of the city, where we could spend a week just innocently enjoying each other. It’s the wrong continent to be innocent on, I think. The grass is wrong; it’s a different colour, a far more bluey-green than the grass I remember from my days of true innocence. The mountains tend to brown rather than grey and the woods are filled with alien species, not the sweeping beeches I made my first clumsy gropes for another’s body beneath.

Fin, lying beside me, moaning. Me rather embarrassed and slightly amused that we could get such a result from each other. After all, this was the business where Neri and Nesse or whatever we called boys and girls back then got together and made babies. We didn’t know that two boys could do it together for fun, although our panting and our hardness told us we must be doing just that. We’d lie there and rub against each other, hands on each other’s cocks, clothes discarded, saying the dirtiest things we could imagine to each other. Some were biologically impossible, but we were innocents and just thought to say the rudest thing that entered our heads. Others, we discovered later, were with a little practice and a little lubricant perfectly possible. But for a while, we thought this tugging and touching and gasping of obscenities was all sex was. At the time, I recall us being quite happy with it.

Kit, I think. Kit. Kit opens up the dark fur jacket and is perfectly naked beneath. He smiles up at me and I remember him telling me he was ashamed of being seen naked. I pull him downwards and shrug the coat from his shoulders so it becomes a thick rug for us both to lie on. I kneel beside Kit, still fully dressed, letting him rest against me as I stroke one pale protruding hip.

He kept his clothes on he said, unless they were total strangers he’d never see again. What am I, then? He’d laugh and kiss me, reaching up to put both hands around my neck.

“You’re a dream,” he said. “Your not real.” And then softer, between kisses, “You understand me.”

I don’t claim, even distantly, to understand him. What he means perhaps is I don’t judge him. I’ve been around for too long to put much store in ropey teenage suicide attempts and their attendant scars and slashes. After twenty years of sex work in New York, I assumed it was some coming of age rite. It barely occurred to me there were plump and sheltered teenage boys who lived behind white picket fences and got to adulthood with their wrists intact. To me it seemed like the strange, cutting rituals of the first humans, the boys who waited in hillside caves for death to claim them or the sun to rise.

Kit’s scars are no weirder to me than those on the arms and legs of his ancestors, who would notify me of important events and occasionally made visits to my castle. I had a cousin who specialised in them. If he hadn’t been another war casualty, he could have founded the science of anthropology. He died and man was unaware of the science of itself for many millennia more.

My mind slides back to Kit. He’s blinking at me happily and the high altitude has frozen the smell of smoke from his skinny body. I reach over his hip to trail my fingers through the dark curls between his legs before I touch on what I want. Kit’s quite hairy down there and I was a little amused by how arousing I found that. Quendi generally aren’t, and up until I was first confronted by Kit with his trousers undone, I found the excess of human hair rather repulsive.

Kit arches his back against me with his arm flung over my shoulders. For a while, I just watch him, breathing heavily into his neck, watching the cold air tighten his nipples to tight little berry coloured buds. I adjust Kit’s position against me to suck one, to torture him delicately, hot mouth and cold air alternately on each nub, until he claws at my arm gently for being evil.

There’s a terrible problem with me and Kit you know, for all he claims I am his one true soul mate and muse, and all he really means is I am the one who is not afraid to go down into the cellar to fix the fuses after the lights have blown. We’re both terrible submissives and we both want more than anything someone hard and heavy to stick it in. We’ve found numerous answers to this dilemma over the months we’ve been together, involving among other things well shaped pieces of battery powered plastic, my modified anatomy, our own unique gifts for talking very dirty, fingers, and on one memorable occasion me watching Kit being taken by an open minded other.

I didn’t find that as enjoyable as I’d liked, or rather, perhaps I found it considerably more enjoyable than I liked. I got the feeling the open minded other would have enjoyed it more if I had wanted to join in, which I didn’t. Then there was the feeling of uncomfortable arousal, too unclean, and too like what my tricks can sometimes inspire in me that did not abate until I was bending Kit over the cold chrome grab bars on the subway, giving him his second exhausting stuffing of the night.

It’s a shared joke between us how we’re both hungry for a good fucking, and we often find if we talk about that for long enough one of us can usually oblige to help out the other. But tonight, at altitude and in my kingdom, it is no difficultly at all to provide Kit with the long stiff cock he begs for, thrust between his thighs. I bend him over and watch his arsehole quiver in the artic breeze, hold him by his belly and admire how his balls hang between his legs, before I lube him gently and take him so hard he cries out.

Kit can come just from fucking if the moment is right, and when it’s my turn to take him, I often play this little game with him, holding his hands away from his cock, making him concentrate completely on my thrusting inside him. He whimpers a little at first, but soon appreciates the discipline. He forgets the aching of his stiff prick stretched out in front of him and we concentrate totally on what is going on behind him. He pushes against me to get the angle right, eyes shut, cheeks flushed, sweat dripping off his body into a world white with snow.

I lick a drop of sweat from his forehead. On the horizon, the dark tower still looms, now like a burnt tree stump against the iron hills. I know he still watches me in my mountain kingdom, my stalker before the word was in existence. Who built a tower on the hills so he could see me, all day every day, the one who escaped. Of course, that was the heroic age back then, when dysfunctional behaviour was how we all got along, but still. I do wonder if he ever saw me like this, legs spread, bent over, one remaining hand holding me upright while Fingon tugged at my cock.

Call me kinky, but I hope he did.

The tower has fallen, the merciful gods thrust it down, in the time that they still bothered with the earth’s feeble docu-drama, before it al became repeats and they reverted to high art. The tower is gone, but the foundations still remain, even as I’m holding Kit and smelling his damp hair, I know. I know from the boys of the Hacienda, even from the dead-eyed attention seeking of Snowball, that tower was not unmade. Perhaps we all at some point dream we are up here, lewdly spayed, showing the dark pinnacle we still know how to fuck.

Kit comes in my arms with a cry. The deep brown fur wraps around us, and I am drifting into a distant and dreamless sleep.

~*~

I wake with what could probably be best described as a mild to moderate hangover. It takes me a while to remember that I am I hospital, I was not drinking the night before, that the ache in my neck is probably caused by it being forced backward rather quickly by a speeding bullet, and that I’m feeling warmly fuzzy in spite of all of this because I drifted off to sleep enjoying a little morphine induced reverie involving me and my naked poet on a mountainside. My poet who is, at the present time still missing.

I stare groggily at the ceiling and compile my morning’s to do list.

1) Find a cup of decent coffee.
2) Ring Hacienda; pull sickie. Shot in head should suffice.
3) Kit?
4) Hair – Henna
5) Hair – rebraiding.
6) Who the fuck is Poley?

I’m just persuading my neck to hold upright when Deedee comes blustering in. I’m getting a feeling that it was lucky I hadn’t required more than morphine and stitches last night. It looks like what could be politely described as a field hospital in Zimbabwe circa 1952. I’m cramped into what looks like an iron framed ex-army cot, the paint is peeling, the brown tiles on the floor have the scuffed colour of twenty five years of ingrained dirt.

“Deedee?”

I’m wearing a white hospital tunic accessorised by my own blood and am still easily the best dressed person in here.

“Red,”

“How you doing this morning?”

“Fine.” I pause. “Hungover,” I add. “Also, having a bad hair day. Could I have some more morphine?”

Deedee shushes me in a manner that suggests if I hint that morphine shots are up for grabs everyone will want one. She tips my head on one side and inspects the wound where my ear was.

“Any dizziness?”

“Not when my head’s right way up.”

“Nausea?”

“Nope.”

“Deafness?”

“Pardon?”

“Ha-ha”

Deedee let go of my head and started wiggling her fingers in front of my eyes until I feel both nauseous and dizzy.

“Deedee, yes I can see that. Forgive me, but I believe most hospitals don’t operate on a bring your own doctor basis. Yes I can see that too. Does this place not have staff?”

“It has staff. I believe it has two Doctors, Ellie and Anno, and some part time locums who cover for sickness and leave and help out when they can. That’s me, by the way. I’m not currently being utilised, but Ellie deserved a break. The nursing is done by nuns who are mostly at prayer at this time in the morning.”

“For how many patients?”

“Only about thirty seven.”

“What?”

“We’re not a very fashionable cause. But we don’t ask questions.”

“Can I go now?”

“Ideally you need at least twenty four hours bed rest and observation with a head injury.”

“Or how about some ibuprofen and a double shot espresso. You can observe me if you wish.”

Deedee clucked.

“I’ve got a jailed writer and still no clue as to a defence case. Plus I need you to help me fix my hair.”

“Hair injuries aren’t actually covered in Medical School, you know.”

“It’s alright, you have plastic dishes, you have latex gloves, it’s all you need. Where are we?”

“Stuyvesant Town.”

“Oh good grief, well if we can manage to get out of here without being shot-,”

“You did okay at getting shot in suburban Queens.”

“I need to get my hair fixed Deedee. I used to be a Noldorin warrior and it’s still deeply ingrained in me.”

Deedee laughed.

“You know, I have never heard anything quite so ridiculous in all my medical career.”

“Well, you always have your braids done rather nicely, not that it’s your place to wear them, I should add.”

“Why ever not?”

“Braids were traditionally worn by soldiers Deedee, to keep their hair out of the way when going into battle. You are a healer and they traditionally wore their hair loose.”

“I take it Quendi healers of the heroic age had less qualms about getting their locks entwined with someone’s perforated intestine,” said Deedee dryly.

~*~

I’m sitting on Deedee’s roof terrace. I cannot claim she is completely happy with the idea I am going to douse my freshly stitched scalp with a concoction that looks like a liquefied cow pat and does not smell much better. Between the three gloved hands we have at our disposal, we manage to get as much mixture onto my hair, and as little onto my shoulders, neck, forehead and remaining ear as possible. Deedee wraps it in plastic cling film and then I wash my torso in a bucket beneath the cinema’s fire hose. Deedee lends me a shirt of Treacle’s, slightly too tight and deep red.

“Did you think all that blood suited me?” I ask.

“Red’s better than black,” Deedee said, “For today anyway.”

Most of St Tecia’s wardrobe is black. He takes being a dark elf a little to seriously. Of course, if Deedee had half an ounce of cruelty in her, she could dress him in whatever colours she liked. He was blind as a bat, blinded by the venom of snakes before the sun rose, and now he can tell very little except the grain of light and dark. But Deedee is always respectful of his wishes and brings back clothes for him in the deepest hues of midnight. Except this tunic, I thought, which probably explains why it is still neatly folded and laundered. Not that Deedee and Treacle were anything but neat.

“Autumn’s coming,” Deedee said.

I hadn’t noticed. I had perhaps attributed the new greyness of the skyline to the insulation blocks and burnt lots of the housing project I had emerged from the hospital at. Deedee had provided me with some ibuprofen and some surprisingly good fairtrade instant coffee from the doctors’ private stores. My head stopped feeling so fuzzy, but there was a sad air to the day, a feeling of irritation with any way I walked or went or held my body. If I was on the subway, I wished to be above ground, if I was on the streets, I missed the rattle and the bright light of the subway. Nothing really felt right until I put my head down in the damp, sweet air of Deedee’s roof garden and thought yes, indeed, autumn is indeed coming.

When I woke, it was about noon. The sky had already cleared, but a chiding breeze from the north worried about the cotton clouds of mid-summer and the trees danced in it, ready to give up their heavy mantle of leaves. It was still warm, still over thirty degrees, I’d reckon, but there was a freshness to the air that wiped the day clean, lifted the smog and spoke of rainshowers and winter. I was still groggy when I woke up, a little thirsty. I sniffed around for water and painkillers before I could move my legs.

~*~

Constantinople is a Turkish Diner on 40th, the wrong side of the Port Authority bus terminal. It sells espresso so strong a spoon stands upright in a cup, as well as doing the best hash browns, scrambled eggs and fried bacon in our corner of Manhattan. It was also not the sort of place to be unduly concerned that one of their regulars has turned up for breakfast in the mid afternoon with his hair wrapped in a beach towel. It would not, necessarily, be anything they had not seen before.

I had just remembered that I hadn’t eaten all day yesterday and was in the middle of my eggs benedict when my quarry, as so often happens when one waits long enough, turned round and started looking for me.

“Red?”

The man had an English accent, educated, if I guessed correctly and was wearing a grey cashmere sweater with a check shirt beneath over jeans. His face had a rather too healthy tan to it that made his lips look somewhat purple and emphasised the encroaching thread veins on his nose. There was an ill-judged streak of peroxide at the front of his dark hair that may have been intended a compliment to his sun kissed skin, but looked more like a misjudged attempt to cover grey. He sat down beside Deedee, who scowled at him, with the look of a man making every effort to be friendly.

I look at him.

“What do you want with me?”

At this a large, blonde man sits down beside me. The hair is thinning around the crown, I notice from my superior vantage point. He’s a gone to seed a little, a fighter, slackened with age perhaps, so the tone of his muscle has vanished beneath the solidity of flesh. He is either deeply unfortunate in his genetic inheritance or his nose has been broken. He is clearly here as some kind of enforcer. I suspect, he is intended to instil fear, but all I really get is a nasty, satisfied sort of feeling that in ten years time this will be Kit’s big boned pretty professor.

“I thought we could do business.”

“Well, if it’s that you’re after you better ask for me at the Hacienda. Three blocks down off Second.”

He did not blink but carried on as if some frivolities were beneath his notice.

“I believe you have been making enquiries as to the wherabouts of one Christopher Arthur?”

“He is a friend of mine.”

“You told Baines he owed you money.”

“I lied, although I hardly think Baines is in too much of a position to complain, seeing as he shot me.”

“And of course, you will be reporting this to the Police Department.”

“I’m having breakfast. Loosing large quantities of blood is a hungry business. I’ll contemplate what I intend to do about Mr. Baines afterwards.”

“You won’t do anything about Mr. Baines.” The blonde man added. His accent was also English, although for some reason it felt commoner, and seemed to remind me of jangly popular music. A strong waft of peroxide hooked itself around my nostrils then passed on.

“That’s rather presumptuous of you.”

“You won’t go to the Police because you’re an illegal.”

The smaller man raised his hand evenly across the table as if he wanted to put aside the other’s rather indelicate comment.

“We who find ourselves beneath the law, must make the laws for ourselves.”

Finally, I look up and give him my full attention. I give him a stare that benefits from twenty thousand years of being somewhat on the wrong side of the law. Kit calls it my “Hello Medusa” look. The small man wriggles in his chair a little.

“That’s not friendly,” he said.

“I do not mean to be. I take interruptions during breakfast badly.”

“We are merely concerned,” continued my oilier dining companion, “that one of our associates caused you considerable distress last night and we wish to make it up to you.”

“Do you work for Poley?”

He looked taken aback but then narrowed his eyes and replied with the happiness of a habitual liar who can finally latch onto a fragment of truth.

“I do not.” Then he smiled. “Ingram Frazer, Private Secretary to Lord Walsingham of Scadbury.”

“One does meet a better class of illegal here these days.”

Ingram smiled with a cold ghost of pity in it.

“Oh no. Our documents for this trip are very much above board, aren’t they Nick. It’s just one does remember the days when one was not quite so legitimate.”

“Gentlemen,” suddenly it was Deedee’s eyes who flashed, and her that was speaking, setting her coffee mug down on the table with a clink. “This is fine drama. You are obviously excellent students of Mr. Scorcese and Mr. Tarantino. Now, could you make your request and go before my toast gets cold?”

They were both silent for a minute, then Ingram looked at Deedee darkly.

“We have an invitation to discuss business from an interested party, one who may be able to assist you in returning your missing friend.”

I laughed. It’s a good laugh and it’s certainly stood by me in worse situations than the present.

“Do you know how I lost this?” I say, holding my stump in the air. Both men look faintly shocked, which Ingram turns into a mild scowl, as if I’d shown bad form. “By answering an equally shady invitation to a business discussion where my interests were at stake. You might have been able to lure my younger self down dark alleys with impossible promises, but I am afraid now my limbs are precious.”

“I am sorry you have had such previous unpleasant experiences,” soothed Ingram, although he did not sound particularly sorry at all. “However, the matter we have to discuss is not one for third avenue diners. Or for all ears.” He gave Deedee a wary look with his frosty blue eyes.

“My ears are getting somewhat exclusive too.”

“As I have mentioned, you have our apologies. We wish only to be able to demonstrate how sorry we are for our colleague’s misconduct.”

“You could be demonstrative then leave,” hissed Deedee, but I am already feeling the slight jab of a metal tube against the side of my back.

“I see. What part of me will you be blowing off today?”

“Oh, I should hope it will not come to that. When we have a chance to discuss this fully out of the sight of prying eyes I am sure you will find our interests run in common.”

“You’re not exactly giving me a lot of choice.”

“Mr. Smithsson, being given fewer choices only makes it more likely the right decision will be made.”

I’m rather busy contemplating the exact reasoning for that sincerely stated truism to be nonsense as my companions throw a fifty-dollar bill down onto the table. Nick sidles between myself and Deedee, clearly meaning us to be separated, while Frazer leads the way. Rather unsurprisingly, there is a black hire car waiting outside from a private firm, one with darkened windows. These men have certainly gone to a lot of trouble to get their props right, I think.

~*~

Nick sits in the back with me and pulls sunscreens down over the windows to my left and right despite the noticeable lack of sun. The sky is grey as I’m bundled out quickly and through a side door in an alley. Nick nudges me to move quickly so I cannot see where I am, but I would guess from the scent we are near central park.

I’m lead to a lift. Whoever I am visiting in this hotel is higher in the world of vice than my informant police chief. The hotel has a rich grandeur to it, like a claret that has aged well. The interior has a healthy, rosy glow that could have been furnished for the season, a thick old New England interior for a day that turns one’s mind to midwinter. Everything glistens with polish and smells deeply of pine. The plants are tall and slender leaved, like delicate green skeletons, and look in the finest of health. The lift comes complete with a mahogany seat and deep red cushion. The buttons are authentic, little knobs of piano ivory with black numbers. A dial strait from the cartoons informs us of our progress towards the roof. Peroxide still curls viciously in my nose and every so often the man called Nick jabs me a little in te back.

“Hello Nick, I’m Mephistopheles. You must be the boss round here,” I contemplate saying, but Nick does not look the one for obtuse jokes. His face is pudgy, like it has been mis-moulded and I could not imagine the slack muscles of his jaw exerting themselves enough to break into a smile.

We stop at the Hyacinth Suite. It feels a little too much like lavender and old lace, the quilted wardrobes with the ornate gold handles, the violet valance and lace canopy on the enormous white satin bed. It could be the room perhaps that Grandma’s would dream of, that no matter what the price should always be accessorised by a jar of cold cream and a crystal bottle of glycerine and rosewater. It was a room, completely at odds with its one occupant, a woman sat at a writing desk in a neat, tight fitting pinstripe trouser suit.

It looked expensive, the material had no hint of shininess to it, and the stripes were narrow and discrete. It could possibly have been tailored. Neatness and composure seemed to be her most characteristic feature in fact, and I wondered if she had a little Quendi blood somewhere down the line because of the smoothness with which she moved.

“Ah, Red.”

She had a voice like Nerwen. It did not suit her small frame.

“Mr. Skeries,” she added to the plump man behind her, “I think he can sit without your assistance. Perhaps you could bring me some tea.”

She spoke with a Seven Sisters accent that was perhaps a little too cautious around rough O’s and R’s. A scholarship girl perhaps, or an aspiring PA keen to bury her roots. The lights in the room, a veritable wedding cake of a chandelier reflected of her nails as she put down the paper she had been reading and looked into my face.

“You must want to see Kit?”

I stare at her for a moment, this being so completely unexpected. There is concern in her voice, a little catch of worry. Considering I was expecting to be interrogated, I am more than a little confused as to how to answer.

“Of course.”

“Then I suggest you wash, whatever it is you have, off your hair in the bathroom and do so.”

I look around wildly as if she might have him locked in one of her wardrobes.

“Where is he?”

“He’s being held on Rikers awaiting deportation. I have,” she said, returning to her papers, “a pass here for you. Police Department. You will not make such a good police officer, but I am sure you can talk well in difficult circumstances.” She gave me a reassuring smile. Her teeth were very strait and white.

“Will you not be coming with me?”

“No, I have a car at my disposal that will take you and bring you back.”

“But what if I don’t return.”

“You will return Mr. Smithsson, because if you do not, Kit will be deported on a flight tomorrow evening.”

“And if I refuse to see him?”

“What good would that do?” She seemed genuinely perplexed.

“I’d like to know why you are offering me this?”

“ A goodwill gesture from somebody who may want your assistance in future.”

“What sort of assistance?”

“Nothing it will cost you to highly to provide.”

“How do you know that?”

“I know the price of most things, Red.”

I was getting nowhere. Skeries, he looked more of a Skeries than a Nick, more of a butler than a devil, brought in a wooden tray on which was placed a cornucopia of silver tea things. The woman poured out the amber liquid like a girl scout at a homemaking demo, stiffly, neatly, trying not to look as though it was as unfamiliar as it was. I found it hard not to smile.

She put two perfect white cubes of sugar into the rusty, clear fluid before her with a set of tiny silver tongs. The stream used to run that colour back in the copper mines where I was born. They said my mother’s family got our hair colour from always washing in the orangey water.

The woman catches my face reflected in her cup. She watches me for a moment, then adds with a half smile,

“I have a dairy intolerance.”

“Do you work for Poley?”

She gives me a strange look then, as if I have committed some terrible social faux pas, mentioned the war, or sworn in front of her grandma. She did not reply, but took one of the miniature silver spoons and stirred her drink counter-clockwise.

~*~

It was a cell just like in the movies. The right side of Kit’s face was bruised and he looked up at me angrily as the door opened. I willed him as hard as I could not to register shock at my arrival. The secretary had granted me a police pass, fifty unadulterated minutes with my poet before he was bundled onto a plane. The documents said I was here to question him. I do not look much like a serving officer with my long braids and blood red tunic however the staff here did not question me. They never do.

Kit held still while the custody sergeant stood beside me. I registered her hip at my elbow, the contrast of the cheap nylon slacks with the heavy steel of the chains and keys. She had a set of handcuffs in her back pocket that seemed like an unspoken threat, and a loose thread hanging from her waistband where the material had bobbled and pulled. It seemed a moment for noticing such things. I looked away into Kit’s face. His mouth opened slightly, so there was a black line between his lips.

The woman turned to go. I stood still, as if I had been frozen while I hear the door clang behind me and her rubber-soled boots echo down the walkway. I count twenty foot falls then pitch myself forward so I am kneeling before Kit with my arms around his waist and my head pressed into his belly.

“Your hair is damp,” said Kit. The lavender scent of the hotel shampoo fills the acrid smelling cell as he lifts up a line of my hair and lets it fall down on us like a veil.

“I love your hair loose.” He adds.

“I got shot,” I say into his stomach. “Baines.”

“That dirty little bastard.”

“Did you used to wind him up a lot?”

The cell is grimy and the light is too. Kit is in his own clothes as a remand prisoner, but they still look strange here, out of place. I could still swear I saw Kit’s mouth kink in the dark.

“You did.”

“He was an arsehole, always banging about drunk and shouting at me. He stood on the bottom landing and shouted at me for half an hour one night, blazing on the top of his voice about being un-American. ”

“Had you bought a date back?”

Kit looked down at me a little ruefully.

“I thought you said you didn’t mind?”

“Not now, Kit,” I say and pull myself up onto the plastic bunk beside him. I kiss his lips softly. “Not now.”

“God, I’ve got a headache.”

“I wasn’t going to take advantage.”

Kit rests his head on my shoulder and I kiss his temple. He shuts his eyes and despite myself I think of him as I saw him last night, naked on the mountainside.

“What did you do to Baines to piss him off so badly he gave the Police an affidavit swearing you were virtually a new recruit to Al-Quaeda?”

“Where do you want me to start?”

“This isn’t helping your defence Kit.”

“I hate Baines.” He sat up and rubbed his forehead wearily, gently prodding at the battered patches of skin. “I hated Baines since the first week I moved into that flat. To tell you the truth he reminded me of my Dad, you know, a big drunken bully.” Kit smiled. “Only this time, I was big enough to knock him down, and he knew it. So I could say to him what I damn well liked.”

“And you did.”

“You know me.”

“Yes Kit,” I say, running my thumb over his exposed collarbone, “I do know you.”

Kit smiled into the gloom.

“Who did Baines know that could get you into this kind of trouble?”

“As far as I’m aware, he didn’t know anyone. Well, anyone except the all American streetwalkers he’d sometimes bring back. He skimped on tips, you’d hear them calling him a cheap fucking cocksucker twenty minutes after he went in.”

He paused, I run my hand gently over his thigh like I would in those all night diners.

“And the girls he had working for him of course.”

“He was a pimp? He said he was a private detective.”

“He was a serial fantasist. He used to specialise in seduction jobs. He had about two or three pretty college girls on his books. You know the idea, he advertised his services as a way for women to test their partners fidelity, they’d be worried about their man, he’d send round a pretty girl to do her damnedest to get into his pants.” Kit smiled. “Only of course, Baines cut it both ways, he made most of his money from the errant menfolk paying to hush things up.”

“Doesn’t really sound like a man with contacts in high places.”

“You’d be surprised who has contacts where. Most of the big shots in politics started in the muck, didn’t they? You make some strange alliances to get on, alliances that don’t always leave you when you’d like.” Kit’s arm is snaking out to me. I realise we only have a short while left of concentrating on the issue at hand and do my best to order my thoughts to get in the most important questions before the inevitable distraction takes over.

“Do you know a woman called Poley?”

“Never heard of her.” Kit runs his hand over my neck. It’s still sore, and his fingers feel alien and strange on the hot grazed flesh. He pushes my hair back and gasps.

“Oh God.”

“Told you I’d been shot.”

“Your ear.”

“I have another one.”

“That’s becoming your catchphrase.”

“Isn’t it wonderful how the body produces such duplicates.”

Kit runs his tongue down the side of my face.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were still studing?”

“Didn’t seem relevant somehow. You always distracted me.”

Kit’s hand is working its way down the waistband of my trousers. I suddenly become very resentful of all this necessary talking, for eating up the time I could just spend on his lips.

“Did you fuck that jock lecturer of yours?”

“Lewis, Oh God no.”

Kit’s hand slips inside the waistband of my trousers. Suddenly I feel much less resentful towards everything. Kit looked sheepish.

“I used to try it on something rotten, but he wasn’t interested. Too right too. You’ll never guess who his partner is.”

“Daniel Newman”

“You know that band Patch is really into – wait, how do you know.”

“I wasn’t always your muse, Kit.”

Kit blinks.

“You weren’t Patch’s?”

“No, I was Danny’s.”

Kit’s eyes widen, presumably in surprise at having his hand on the cock that Daniel Newman had stroked before him.

“Connections in low places, indeed.” Kit looks like he could quite happily spend the next twenty minutes of our precious last hour together swapping Arch gossip, so I decide to distract him.

“I dreamt about you last night,” I say without thinking.

“You don’t dream.”

“Well, thought about you very hard while lying down.”

“Mmm?”

Kit’s pulling at my hips, trying to pull me onto his lap so I can straddle him. I realise I only have one question left.

“Who pays for you to be here Kit?”

~*~

The Secretary observes me as I return to the Hyacinth Suite. She knows I have had sex, and the room suddenly seems to have taken a high moral tone on that. It puts me on the wrong foot, somewhat.

Well, Missy Secretary, what did you expect me to do? I feel like asking, but it seems like I have conceded too much already. She knows my desires, that I’m guilty as anyone of the weakness of wanting. And she knows what Kit means to me, I’ve proved it to her as easily as if I had entered the room wearing a placard declaring my love for him.

I bite my tongue slightly, which still tastes of Kit, salty flesh. If that was our last moment together, I do not intend to ruin it with the memory of a betrayal of Kit afterwards.

“Shall we return to business?”

“We could do, if I knew what business was.”

The woman unlocked one of the delicate white draws underneath the writing desk with a click and pulled out a manila envelope. There’s a picture inside of a pale, freckled man, a well groomed forty something, with his mop of chestnut hair looking somewhat in opposition to the pallor of his face.

I knew him. We used to call him the cleaning man. He liked to do menial chores in his wife’s underwear. He got the rooms sparkling beautifully, much better than the regular cleaners at supplying the elbow grease. His only stipulation was us boys leant around and watched him. He paid us all with crisp hundred dollar bills, even the ones who had just observed.

I’d actually say Patch was his favourite for his post clean up refreshment, although I’d done him a few times. He had a small prick and huge balls, framed by the ginger hair he was so ashamed of, but apart from that was unmemorable.

“David Sanderson.”

“Should I know him?”

“He’s due to stand as the Democrat Senator for New York.”

“How ambitious of him. Should this concern me?”

“He comes to the Hacienda. I’m representing the interests of those who would like him not to stand.”

“Where do I come into this?”

“Simple, I’d like a statement ruining this man’s career. From what I heard, you wouldn’t need to lie.”

I looked into her eyes. She had rich brown pupils that in the chandeliers light seemed shot through with red. The room having a light on in daylight made the heavy sky look even greyer.

“I don’t trust you.”

“It’s a simple kiss and tell. You go on record explaining Mr. Sanderson’s peculiar habits and you get Kit back.”

“Why me?”

“Pardon?”

“There are a twelve boys who work out of the Hacienda. Why pick me.”

“Because you were the one we could exercise leverage with.”

Something about that statement jars. It is true, they do have Kit, they do have leverage, I do know this man they claim to want to frame. But they could just as easily use Patch. In fact, they probably would have more leverage with Patch, considering Kiki’s delicate legal position.

“How long do I have to think about it?”

“You don’t.”

~*~

I’m not too bothered about staling the ginger trick’s political career. Although it’s supposed to be a break in whores’ code of honour to run to the papers, to be honest if one I prepared to be professionally buggered on a daily basis, one probably never had much honour in the first place. I have no problem with delivering Mr. Sanderson into the well-polished talons of the woman before me.

I’m bothered that it’s that she really wants.

~*~

“So, if I say yes, what would you have me do?”

“I have a friend,” she said softly in a voice that probably didn’t know the meaning of the word, “he works for the New York Post. I’d like you to talk to him, have your photograph taken that kind of thing.”

She sounded dismissive but I sensed she was speaking through a smile.

“We have a car waiting.”

~*~

The sky has mellowed to a sullen white and there is a hint of damp foliage in the air, the way there always seems to be when the wind is from the west. Although where it blows from I don’t know. I used to think it came from the gardens I grew up in, the white courtyard where I’d chase my brothers. They were bigger now, we’d left the woods and come to town, although we still played outdoors. Well, all except Maglor, who hated the city and stayed indoors dreaming he was back under the scraggly pines and the sharp cliffs of the mountains.

It’s gone now of course, forever in the case of Mags and I. The only thing west of us is California.

It’s that odd thing about one’s nature, perhaps I should say heritage although it sounds such a long word for what is simply the noises and smells one grew up with. They’re locked into your bones. One’s identity is harder to kill than the cockroaches that joined us a few years back in the Hacienda. Just as you think you have crushed it beneath a new life, and new clothes and a layer of mannerisms designed to deflect ones true self into an opaque pool of generalised otherness, its dying form is laying it’s eggs in your mind which will hatch and jerk you backwards when you least expect it.

Identity, just like a cockroach. It’s a good job I left the poetry to my brother really. I don’t think I’d win many laurels for that metaphor.

Still, the newly autumnal city flashes past, and I swear I can see the tips of the tired trees turn golden. It’s August thirteenth.

I smile, and suddenly Kit, and the Hacienda and even the car I am sitting in seem a terribly long way away. I feel like I have pushed my hand downward and touched the fabric of the earth, which I might well have done. I have one of those flashes of lateral vision that at once calms me.

In a hundred years time they will be gone, but I will still be here.

You cannot go through life thinking like that of course. One would go mad. But it doesn’t hurt to remember that once in a while. Whatever happens, the word keeps turning, and I shall watch it spin until it breaks into the dust of the cosmos it was made from.

~*~

Suddenly, I know I want to get out of the taxi. It comes through me like a reflex, like being sick or needing to faint. Certainly that is what my guard, because yes Mr plump and Mr. Skinny have accompanied me on this trip think. My sudden shifting from perfect detached calm to scrabbling at the car door has Frazier worrying for his smart suit. Skerries doesn’t seem to care.

“Door’s locked,” said Skerries.

“I’m going to be sick,” I say, sounding thoroughly convincing.

“Tough.”

Frazier clicks under his breath. He at least objects to spending the next half hour of a muggy day in a car full of vomit.

“Do it out the window,” he says.

As if the car obeys his voice, the cool glass to my right glides perfectly downward. I lean my head out, and they both seem ready to politely avert their eyes. When they look back, I am already out the window.

Quendi really can fit into the smallest spaces when pushed. We have flexible skeletons, Deedee says, like rats. Rats and cockroaches and other things that live in the dark, I don’t make my species sound too beautiful, do I?

We are, of course. It’s in our nature. Too beautiful, too still, too perfect. Too fond of seeing things in the long perspective. We’re so beautiful people assume we are good, and that is where they make a mistake.

~*~

I wait in my apartment until evening. I half expect someone to break the door down, but no one does. I make sweet tea and wait for nightfall, which obligingly seems to come a little earlier today.

I’m standing with my fingers covered in what looks like blackberry jam, covering up, inch by inch the distinctive glint of my red hair. I have not done this for years, over ten thousand years to be exact. It was the last twilight in a land that soon would be known only as a memory, a place beneath the waves, that in time sunk to legend.

My brother’s scared and mud blackened face appearing through the walls of my tent.

“It is time”

All the stars were behind him. That was the last time I saw the magnificent jewelled sky of Beleriand. We’d picked a night with no moon.

Then we stepped out into the darkness. My blackberry smell followed behind me. I have never been able to stomach the fruit since, and it’s said that the Quendi will not eat them after late August because they belong to the souls of those that did not return.

I’m not sure they might not mean me by that, if so the gesture is in vain. I can’t stand them. They remind me of treachery.

Tonight though, I believe I look quite imposing in disguise, my hair tied loosely away from my face, wearing the baggy black clothes that usually see the light when I spring clean. A burgundy halo dances over my hair in the fluorescent light of my kitchen. I turn the light of and head out once more into the dark.

~*~

It’s no later than nine in the evening although it feels like midnight. The sky is its usual muddy soup, a struggling planet, Venus, makes its way through the murk. I smile. It is my night, and the luck of the Feanorians is with me.

The luck of the accursed damned by the gods.

~*~

Treacle is standing on the rooftop of the Richeloux cinema, a tall thin figure dressed all in black. If one was fanciful, one could imagine the body hard as stone, the spare flesh clinging to the bones by some great act of will. Treacle is possibly the oldest thing alive on this earth.

He’s Avarin, a wild elf, what us dwellers in great white cities used to look down upon sneeringly. He refused the lure of Gods, preferring the simple creatures of the woodlands that were before people. As such, he never had to live through the Gods turning out to be a sore disappointment. He’s blind as a bat now, but that has nothing to do with age, because like me he was once a captive and like all of us he had to leave something behind to escape.

Peculiarly, he is the only Quendi I have ever met who has received sainthood. Some time in the early sixth century, the humans of a wide tidal estuary got Christianity, and decided to bring their ages old practice of wandering across the mud to a tidal island at sunrise to seek cures for their woes and aliments from the blind hermit who lived there in line with their new faith. They created Treacle St Tecia of Archenfield.

Deedee comes to stand beside him and rests her blonde head on his shoulders. I don’t know how they met. On the road, they tell me, the only place where exiled spirits can be at home now we have outlived the culture that made us.

The city coils and flows beneath them in a thousand filaments of light. Headlights and Neon and the little man on the corner selling multicoloured fibre optic glow sticks for two dollars to the children out late, all swirling along in its chasm beneath the rooftops of Forty-second Street.

Treacle and Deedee stand above them all in the cool darkness. I do not know if that is why no one ever notices them in their rooftop home, I’ve heard human eyes adjust to the darkness only slowly, and blinded by the glare around them it would be hard for them to make out any shadows.

I see Treacle and Deedee. I see them more clearly than the pink front of the Disney Store or the glittering entrance to McDonalds. They are the only things on this street that are solid, and real. Besides that, they shimmer faintly with a pale white light against the autumn sky.

TfT 2

2005-08-16T20:10:26Z

~*~

I have never been to Columbia University. I think were I to study, and the urge has come upon me once or twice, I would go to NYU, Ivy League be damned. I like the grit of the city college, it’s close enough to the lower east side for it’s lessons to feel relevant, the kids that spill out over Union Square after classes seem like they have come from this world.

Not so of iced cake Columbia, white walled and impressive. We have no dreaming spires in this new land, but we have solid buildings in the classical style to screen our higher class of students from what we call life.

Snobbish? Why, I am a terrible snob. It hurts to see these little Pekinese performing children lauded above me for being able to regurgitate misguided formulas and revere dead mediocre poets. At the last, I know everything because I have lived through everything; I am a primary source and as such am justified in feeling a little superiority to the well-meaning theoreticians.

So I walk in haughtily with my nose held high, and if the uniformed guards at the door were supposed to ask for identification, they did not. People tend not to question the distinctive, except occasionally old ladies waiting in taxi queues who ask if I am a film star. I walk as if I know where I am going, striding forward purposefully, trying to take in any signs out the corner of my eyes.

“Excuse me, where is the Classics department?”

The blonde man looks me up and down. I picked him to ask because he looks a little older than the average student, therefore more likely to take being questioned by an auburn haired giant without hysteria. He was also the best looking man I’d met all morning, from a purely aesthetic point of view. I don’t go looking for sex these days, even Kit felt more like a well timed accident. Kit is pretty enough, but I do feel it was more his dirty fingernails and need of a muse that made him an enjoyable proposition to go to bed with.

I’d say my sex drive was quite low. Certainly, low in terms of individuals. But here we are, and I am with a boy with honey coloured hair and smooth cheeks and shoulders impressively powerful beneath his suit jacket.

I cannot help myself; I surreptitiously look down at his thighs. I’m not being dirty; really, I’m recreating a memory.

Big Fin, with his shoulders like a leopard and his thighs like battering rams, the great-lost dead love. Perhaps all muses have one, to give depth to our beauty, to stop us being watercolour portraits on a chocolate box. I like seeing things that remind me of him, dredge up the last dying reflexes of a love that was cut short before the last ice age.

I am older than our current president believes the world to be. Kit finds that extremely funny, such paradoxes tickle him deeply.

The man seems to be following my braids to my hips. I forget mortal hair doesn’t often get below waist length. He looks briefly at me as if he recognised me from a nightmare, then his face pulled together almost to its previous look of slightly distracted equanimity.

“Are you visiting?” His accent sounds like Snowball’s. Something tells me I asked the wrong person, that this man already knows me, and I scan through who it might be.

Then it dawns on me, he must have been a trick. I have a good memory for faces, but the johns who march up and down the Hacienda’s stairs day in day out remain a blur. Patch once opined that we hardly remember any of them, but he’s pretty sure they all remember us.

It is strange the realisation one is known by a multitude one has forgotten, known in a way so intimate it is almost embarrassing.

“I was wondering if anyone knew anything about the arrest here?”

“Are you Police?”

I look at him sternly. Once again he takes in my long red braids.

“No, I am not police.” I smile. “I don’t think they would have me.”

“No, probably not.” He returns my smile, but not as easily as he would have me believe. “Well if you’re not someone official I’m afraid I can’t really comment,”

I lift my right sleeve to my chest, just so he notices, so he is aware I know him.

“I knew the boy who was arrested.”

But the man is staring at me once more as if he has been dazed. Then he says softly:

“Michael.”

I blink, I haven’t been called that in five years, but he can tell the name is familiar to me.

He seems to pink a little around the cheekbones while the very British terror of making a scene in the streets takes over him. Sounding like a hundred stilted Cambridge dons before him he adds:

“I think perhaps you should come to my office.”

~*~

“Why are you here?” He says quietly when the door clicks shut. I take it I am not to be offered tea.

“I’m looking for Kit,” I say. “The boy who was arrested.”

“Why?”

“That’s rather a matter between myself and him.”

The man looks up at me and his eyes are hard. I had a cousin once who claimed the thoughts of mortals were as easy to read as the direction of the wind on the surface of a lake. It was not something I had much personal evidence of being true. With this man, however I am reasonably confident in my guesses. I am watching, I think, a mild nature be torn apart by a sudden, inexplicable urge to do damage.

“You know Danny?” I add.

“Don’t call him that.” He has positioned himself behind his desk, I guess so there is a barrier between him and his need to lash out. His right hand clenches and he forces it to relax; his left eye gives an almost imperceptible twitch.

“It’s his name.”

“It’s too familiar, too familiar for you.” There’s a slight tremor now in his voice. I am beginning to be sick of this. I am rather weary of being perpetually in the wrong and have grown bored with the lectures. Mephistopheles, the lap cat of Satan; not a good person, deal with it.

“Well I always was hired help.” I shouldn’t have said that, but righteous indignation brings out the worst in me.

“He loved you.” He spits out the words very deliberately as if they are a grievous accusation. Or maybe just in an effort to keep his voice steady.

“I know.”

“You nearly killed him.”

“What should I have done?”

He blinks at me.

“What do you mean?”

“Danny was obsessed with me and I did not love him. It was better for him, I think that I left.”

“That’s very altruistic of you.”

“I’m not altruistic, not remotely. But it does seem to have worked out well.” I raise an eyebrow. He looks away and I know my assumptions have made their mark.

“Stay away from him.”

“I intend to.”

He looks for a moment, wildly panicked as if the neatly plastered ceiling has started to fall down around his ears. I am guessing from the leather bound volumes of the Classics Review that this man is no stranger to the rules of tragedy. That they begin with a young man of great talent who has been lifted up by fortune and end with his total destruction.

“Is this blackmail?”

And that there is always a scene early on where the means of his degradation is revealed, a moment’s flippancy with a God, or fling with another mans wife. It is always something small that mushrooms behind the action of the play, growing in the dark behind the theatre curtains. Like dry rot it eats away unseen, until it is finally revealed once more as huge and hideous, with its teeth in everything and everyone on the stage.

“No.”

I’m certainly familiar with the phenomenon.

“You want something to stay away from us – money or such like.”

No, kid I do not. I have been the subject of one tragedy, which has taught me enough to never wish to be the puppet master of another. You are the one who must decide to destroy your cosy world tonight and hope it can be repaired, or to tuck the knowledge of my existence away and hope it does not flourish in the dark.

“I want to know where Kit is, but if you do not tell me I am sure I can find out another way.”

“Screw it out of someone else?”

“Yes, actually.”

“What?” He suddenly barks like an old man gone deaf, his voice sounding too old to come from his body.

“If you don’t tell me, I probably can screw it out of somebody.”

“Do you have no shame?”

I flash him a rather rueful smile. I can tell he wishes I wasn’t so good looking. It makes it terribly hard to completely hate me.

“Not much, no.”

He stares at me once again for a long moment. I can tell we have reached an impasse. He is caught between wanting to give me nothing, wanting to chase me from his room and set his hounds on me, and needing some kind of reassurance from me that I am not sure I can give. After all, I can agree to stay away from Danny, I might for the right price agree to leave New York. But I cannot erase the knowledge of my existence from his brain, and really whatever I say and whatever tokens he takes from me, that is the only think that will restore his day to anything like bearable.

“I’ll just go then, shall I?”

“No,” he says. There is a long pause. “Wait.” He swallows as if decency itself has bubbled up in his throat. “I will tell you what happened to Kit.”

He smiles.

“I think you should sit down,” he almost laughs dryly. “We need to be civilised about this.”

And then he does indeed offer me tea.

I stir in a spoonful of sugar while he tells me about Kit. A warm sunbeam had fallen across his desk on a bitter day in March; he had felt light, charitable, in one of those omnipotent moods that comfort and confidence and regular good sex bring. He’d stumbled across Kit at shelf V12 of the periodicals, reaching for The New Hampshire Review of Classical Criticism. His curiosity was piqued as to why a young man not signed up to a classics course should be wading through such heavy articles for pleasure. Being only human, the fact the young man in question was dark eyed and high cheek boned probably added to his interest.

‘You have a personal interest in the Classics?’

‘I’m studying them.’

‘No your not.’

‘What makes you so sure?’ Kit would have curled his lip. I can see that now.

‘Because I teach in the Classics department.’

And then, maybe because the first splash of spring light had softened Kit, or maybe for the chance to capture the rather Adonis like blond in conversation, or perhaps just weariness that he had had no one to have a decent talk about Sophocles with for three months, my usually wary little sneak of a poet spilt his secret.

‘I study Classics, but not here.’

They talked, and in the professor’s shining cloud of lazy kindness he offered Kit unofficial tuition. Kit impressed him, he said he was one of the most able students he had ever taught, although judging by the man’s age, he can’t have taught that many.

“Did you fuck him?”

He looks shocked. He seems momentarily lost for words. I could see this golden haired child of the rolling shires of middle England being just the sort of thing that would get Kit going.

It’s a most harmonious bi-product of the English class system that the upper classes all desperately want a good flogging and the working classes have the hate to make sure they get just that. I wonder if some kinky Earls have in the past subjugated the peasants on purpose, the better to reap the masochistic rewards.

“No, I did not.”

He hasn’t touched his tea. I’m not sure if I believe him.

“It’s alright, Kit will fuck anything.”

“That’s not a compliment.”

“It’s true.”

“This bothers you?”

“Not really.”

“Did it not occur to you that he could just have found someone better and disappeared into the blue?”

“Such things happen.”

We pause.

“But in this case, they didn’t.” I continue. “I’m not a great believer in natural justice.”

“I would like to believe there is some order to things.”

“I don’t think there is you know. I’m a complete believer in chaos theory.”

He raises his eyebrow.

“So we are free to act how we will without fear of judgement?”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps I have just been judged so often I have grown immune to it.”

He looked at me then with utter contempt.

“You are very fond of this routine of disaffection aren’t you?”

“So, you gave Kit private tuition and then he vanished. Is that all?”

It’s not, I can tell by his face. He seems to be a most inept liar.

“No, the Police spoke to me after they had arrested him. I think perhaps he mentioned my name.”

“What did they say?”

“If I knew he had a faked library pass.”

“What did you say?”

“No.”

“And if you’d have said yes?”

“I didn’t.”

“You are a lecturer here, you could have authorised him to use the library.”

“I’m not sure I could have.”

I raise an eyebrow and he looks rather stung.

“Besides, he never asked me too.”

“But you could have said you did.”

He looks at me.

“Have you ever had the pleasure of being interrogated by five armed immigration police?”

I try not to flick my eyes downward to the stump of my right arm resting in my lap.

“I’ve had - similar experiences.”

“They seemed very confident that they had a case against him.”

I snort.

“They impressed you with their intelligence did they?”

He cannot lie and he cannot hide the fact he was deeply annoyed by the cops stupidity. I would guess idiocy might be the one thing he finds harder to forgive than betraying Danny.

“They kept showing me the print out of the books he had taken out on his fake card and kept asking if any were written by communists, or had anti-American themes.”

“Did they?”

“I’m not aware of the political leanings of the editors of “Re-reading tragedy: performances of Euripides in the twenty first century,” and I’m fairly sure the author of “The Iliad as a heroic text” is a staunch Republican, albeit in deep denial.”

“Did you tell them that?”

“Yes, very firmly. Although, they didn’t seem to want to listen. They got quite nasty.”

I furrow my brow.

“Oh of course,” I say. “Your own status here is questionable. And then you’d have to leave Danny.”

“I told them the truth.”

“Couldn’t you have exaggerated a little?”

“I didn’t think to.”

“You gave him special tuition.”

“You rather make it sound like an obscene act.”

I stare at him trying to read what happened between him and Kit. I stare too hard and he takes my disconcerting gaze as a threat.

“I think you better go,” he adds in a low voice.

I nod. I cannot see any good coming out of our continued sparring in this airless room.

As I turn towards the door, he says:

“There was one thing. They showed me a list of accusations, things that he’d said. To be honest, it sounded like the things most of my undergraduates say after they’ve got a few pints inside them. “It says In God we trust on the money here and that’s about right considering the one hundred and fifty two other idiots this country has put it’s faith in.” But at the bottom, someone had handwritten “Baines”.”

“Baines?”

“Yes. I thought it might mean something to you.”

“It doesn’t,” I say and leave.

~*~

I must pause the story here because I pause. I sit on the manicured lawn of Columbia University and watch the sloppy young mortals idle gracelessly around the square. I’ve bought some water and several of them stare at me pushing the plastic bottle between my knees and twisting off the lid with my left hand. A little water spills down my thighs. I feel briefly resentful at looking foolish before the gaping young slobs.

The water feels almost medicinal. It lightens the chill of hopelessness that had come over me since leaving the office. I shut my eyes and try to think where Kit is now, but it keeps segueing into a vivid picture of Kit bent over the desk I had just been served tea on, looking out the white framed window onto the lawn where I am now sitting as the young professor let him feel the strength in those thick thighs as he thrust into him. It is a painfully clear picture, right down to the white shirttails of the professor poking out from the sides of Kit’s arse.

I’ve watched Kit fuck another boy before and found it rather enjoyable. I’m not sure I enjoy the idea of his private lessons here so much. Of course, I am no one to stand in the way of a poet’s journey of self discovery, or whatever other grand title he gives to his rangy prowls for anonymous loving. I just do not like the idea of someone else having a claim on him, someone else who perhaps has been granted a look inside his head and a kiss and cuddle afterward.

Kit’s own identity is a hazy as the thin streaks of cloud that run in lamb’s tails across this July afternoon. He talks of his own life as if a stranger lived most of it. He has more knowledge the identities that he dreams for himself than of his own. His character’s pasts have moved him to tears on occasion, and yet he relates the story of his own ordeals with a flippant, dismissive humour. He has perfected a façade that is little more than borrowed charm from his heroes, and he likes to try it out on the strangers. He likes to fuck as Faustus and Tamburlaine. I liked to believe I was the only person he fucked as himself.

~*~

It is mid afternoon already by the time I stir from the lawn. I got to feeling comfortable on the grass, and I begin to get a sense of unease about this evening’s assignation. I sink into that restful pause that cannot bear to think on what has happened moments before or will happen moments later, but can only dwell on the comfort of now. I cheat myself that if I do not move the arrangement will be taken from me by some unseen hand.

As a clock somewhere within the university chimes three I return to my senses. I realise I should probably return to the Hacienda to check no one has been murdered in my absence and to pick up a few things I might need for tonight’s meeting. Reluctantly, I push myself upright and dust the stray blades of grass from my trousers.

It already feels as though I am walking into the sunset, as I head west for the Lexington Avenue line.

~*~

One block away from the club I am nearly knocked over by a streak of blond hair that flies past me and disappears down the club stairs. I can hear the thud of his feet bashing their way down the wooden staircase from where I stand. Then I am knocked again as a large, be-suited man runs after him but stops at the club’s mouth and stares in blind rage.

He stands outside the club for almost five minutes, his fat neck growing pinker as he stares, looking at the blank hole of the doorway in disbelief, neatly blocking the way for any tricks. Just as it looks as though I am going to have to approach him, his trance breaks and he walks away slowly, quickly sinking into the anonymity of the street.

I walk slowly down the stairs. Patch is sitting in my seat watching the monitor. The others are all in the back room.

“Quiet day?” I ask.

“Yeah,” said Patch. “Carlos had a Korean tourist who came in for a handjob, and one of my regulars. That’s been it.”

“Any sign of Snowball?” I ask softly.

“He just returned,” said Patch.

“I noticed. In rather a hurry.”

Patch looks at me as if he does not see my concern.

“He had a trick running after him,” I add. “He’s been clipping on our doorstep.”

“Oh,” said Patch in a manner that is pretending to know what the big deal is.

“Do you fancy taking a punch from some guy Snowball’s just ripped off?”

“No,” said Patch. I can see he feels he his failed in his duties as stand in bar keeper. “Shall I have a word with him?”

“It’s alright. I’ll do it.”

I was half tempted to let Patch have the honour of delivering the dressing down. I have had more than enough confrontation for one day. I knock on Snowball’s door.

“Snowball?”

It’s a while before there is any reply.

“What?”

“Can you come out please?”

“What is it?”

“I want you outside, now.”

“I’m changing.”

“Get out Snowball or I will break the door down.” I state matter-of-factly.

He stands in the doorway, his thin face pulled tight against accusations. He’s still wearing a silver mesh top and poly-vinyl trousers.

“What?”

“Come into the club, snowball.”

He opens his mouth to object and then reconsiders. We stand beneath the gazes of the cock-sucking centrefolds in the heavy red light of the club foyer. Patch ducks a little behind the bar.

“Why were you working outside the club?”

He hunches his shoulders and looks wearily back in the direction of his cavern. He looks all of fourteen.

“I wasn’t.”

“Then why was a fat guy in a purple tie and a grey suit chasing you into the club?”

“I wasn’t working. He came up to me.”

I look him up and down.

“Really?”

There is silence until he looks at the floor.

“I should throw you out now.”

“Do it then.”

“What if he comes back with the cops and we all get slung in the van?”

He shrugs.

“You guys can look after yourselves.”

“What if he remembers where you live and follows you tomorrow. What you do is fucking dangerous Snowball.”

“I know. I’ve been battered, I’ve been raped.”

I sigh.

“You’re worth more than that.”

“I need to go and get changed.”

“Why did you clip a trick on the club doorstep?”

“Told you, he came up to me.”

I drop my voice.

“Why did you run back?”

“He got hold of me, I couldn’t get away, he was too close.”

“Come upstairs for a moment.”

He looked again like he might moodily object.

“Why?”

“I want a look at you in daylight.”

“You want to check my arms.”

“You know how bruises don’t show in the red light.”

“That must have come in useful in the past.”

“Quite.”

“I’m clean. I told you. I don’t do that.”

“I want to know if you’re bleeding again.”

“I’m not.”

“Then you won’t mind coming upstairs.”

He scowls.

“You’ll tell Deedee.”

“You still have an arm because I told Deedee.”

“You manage without one,”

“I don’t understand why you dislike her.”

“I don’t.” He says. Then he adds, “Her injections steal my magic.”

~*~

The white light of the back room hurt my eyes after the club. It was formerly a kitchen, a metal range still sits rusting in the corner and the walls are covered with clinical white tiles that have turned yellow in the haze of cigarette smoke. Alex is sucking on a McDonalds cola, rolling a spliff on the safe. A grey pipe from nowhere empties into a metal drain on the floor that smells rotten and stale. Carlos is sitting on a wooden chair snoozing with his head on the cooker.

“What happened there?”

“Just Snowball.”

“Put him out man, Red.”

“He’ll be alright. Where else would he go to?”

“That’s his problem. Maybe if you put him out, he learns not to be such a big asshole.”

“Maybe if I put him out he’ll become a worse one.”

He licks the rizla paper and rolls the end into a twist then sparks up.

“Like that’s possible.”

I sniff the discarded rucksacks that have been squashed down the side of the metal range to find the one that smells least of sweaty gym kit and trainers, then take it out into the cupboard at the back of room two that has become our store room since Snowball moved in. I pull out some of the accessories I might need, the slim whip with gold braids on the handle, a crucifix, some rosary beads then head out once more.

“He stays.” I say. “He’s fucked up and he’s got nowhere else.”

~*~

The Holiday Inn on Broadway is older and frowsier than it’s cousin at the airport. In fact, a similar dustiness clings to it as does to the police offices I visited earlier this morning. A rubbery aspidistra dies slowly in a chipped urn. The gold braids are hanging from the bellboy’s uniform; he looks like a failed jester. There is a tarnished silver bell at reception, and a burly man in a bowtie behind the counter with the faint outline of a former stain on his shirtfront. The brown leather sofa in reception sags. It was a chic hotel once, filled with wasp waisted ladies with set curls and cigarette holders and men in hats and trench coats. Then the location fell from fashion and the management went bust and a chain that keeps the fustiness for authenticity bought it out. It’s only tourists who come here now, I suppose.

It’s the place for your middle draw hooker, the sort that is hired for the night not the hour and comes with a change of clothes and styles themselves an escort. One that the john can kid the receptionist is a date and himself that it is having fun.

I walk up to reception.

“I’m here to see Mr. Goldman.”

It’s the name he always uses. He even has a credit card in that name which he uses to book his little indulgences. The receptionist stares at me. I don’t believe he doubts my morals, I think he is just using my immediate proximity to indulge his curiosity. He looks at the bright grey eyes behind the auburn braids, slightly hard looking, with faint purple shadows beneath them. He looks at the quirk of my thin, coppery lips and the faint scar on my cheekbone.

One of my own soldiers did that, ripping back his knife too quickly from the flesh he had just skewered. He went white with shock, but at the time I barely noticed. Battles are like that.

“He said he was expecting a visitor. Mephi are you?”

“Yes.”

“Unusual name.”

“It’s Latvian.”

“Shall I wait in the lounge?”

“No, he said to go strait up and wait. Room 407,” he says, handing me the keys. “Turn right when you get to the fourth floor and follow the signs.”

I pass the dilapidated bellhop on the way to the lift. He’s a tiny man with dreadlocks, his face wizened into a thousand wrinkles. If I were feeling imaginative, and I’m trying not to, I would imagine him as a guardian of some circle of hell.

Inspector Collins always makes me wait. I think it is a power game of his. The longest he has kept me is six hours, just I suppose to prove he can. I sit on the bed, creasing the brown floral counterpane that looks as though it is patiently waiting to return to fashion. The chocolate brown sheets will show a myriad of stains, but that is not my concern. I doubt he will leave me too long here, it’s too close to the centre of town to be drawing attention.

He’ll make me look like a business call; two hours after work then send me on my way. I wait staring at the magnolia walls trying to muster the questions I need to ask.

After half an hour, I order some more mineral water on room service. I have to restrain myself from the lure of two double brandies. I need a little numbing. I could have done without my afternoon in Columbia it made me feel to cheap to comfortably turn a trick like Collins. I tell myself I need my wits.

I wander into the bathroom, immediately greeted by the howl of the extractor fan. I splash my face with cold water, and catching my reflection in the mirror whisper to it:

“Baines.”

As if it were the code word that could guide me through tonight.

I open my rucksack and do what I have to do. I change into my rubber t-shirt and hold the iced mineral water against my nipples so they show through hard. I sit on the edge of the bath and lube myself, rip into a condom packet so it’s ready to open in my pocket, and rub vaseline onto my lips to make them look full and wet. I pull my trousers back up, pat myself down to check nothing is rumpled and take the small pile of white towels over to the bed.

I lie on the bed dead centre, in the valley between the two pillows sipping my water. The sun is slanting outside, the are is blue and the shadows neat and precise in the diamond hard light. It could almost be romantic perhaps, the time of day when all is what it seems and the dark corners have not yet gathered their clouding mist of fear.

Inspector Collins opens the door and shuts the blinds.

“You came.”

“Of course.”

He neatly removes his shoes and coat then lies down beside me on the bed.

“Shall I order us drinks?”

“That won’t be necessary.”

I smile and lower my lashes and roll towards him on the bed, so I’m on my front, staring over him. I work at loosening his tie with the hand I have. I do not recognise my fingers, they suddenly seem to long and brittle to belong to something that lives.

“So, do you have any news for me?” His shirt is now open, revealing the pot scourer grey clumps of wiry hair on his chest.

He smiles and takes my hand in his crushing my fingers and find my hand being pulled down to his groin. That seems to serve as an answer. His breath has a sour, sweetish taint to it. I try ignore what I am breathing in as I tease his cock through the beige fabric of his suit. I begin to hum as if the hardening there satisfies me.

It’s night a long way away and I’m lying here on my side in a room with thick stone walls pulling at someone’s cock. If I look out the window I can see faint stars sometimes, over the smoke and the fumes that coil and reform like a hypnotist’s trick. The bed is heavy dark wood with thick red blankets, my bed, the bed where I’m kept anyway, and I have two hands. The air is full of a deep incense of burning and blood and iron that fills my head and makes it sleepy. I’m still lying over someone, parting my lips juicily and touching them in the hope they bring me news.

“Baines,” I say, leering at him as though he does something for me.

“You’re incorrigible,” he says thickly before biting a little too hard at my collar bone.

I strip his chest bare slowly, tantalisingly, with strokes and kisses and half lidded looks into his face to check if he’s ready to speak. Finally, I get what I’m after:

“Baines is a half-nuts private detective that lives out in Flushing,”

I choke on a nipple.

“Yes, right next to Kit, in fact downstairs from him. As far as I remember he first came on our books after threatening to poison the sociology block at NYU as a hotbed of Communists. He did three years for that, but we kept an interest in him.”

“Do you need many Communists poisoned?”

“That was in the eighties. You’d probably be to young to know.”

I undo his belt. I’ve been hit with this belt before, I think dully, then, he’s not going to do that tonight. Whatever I need to know he’ll tell me without that.

“You see,” He’s half hard and important now, warming to his theme. “It’s sometimes important to keep an interest in fanatics. They’re very useful, they see all sorts of things that the sane miss. That’s the job of intelligence really, to be a filter.”

I hum. I’m working around his crotch with my mouth now I’ve got his trousers down. He grunts.

“Baby, did anyone tell you you were good at that?”

It’s been mentioned, I think. I’m running my tongue over the wrinkled, hairy flesh of his balls. They smell slightly sour too. To give myself a little respite I look up cockily:

“So what did Baines give you?”

“Oh nothing much, just a letter. He knew Kit you see and knew of his opinions. Not the most reliable document in the world, of course, but it helps give flavour to the extradition proceedings. It gives a good background picture of the sot of man we’re dealing with.”

“But why did you want him extradited in the first place.”

Inspector Collins rolls on top of me as if that is quite enough information for now.

~*~

The sky is still light when I emerge. That feels like a terrible trick of the summer. You’d think surfacing from what I’ve just done, licking the gritty toothpaste on my newly freshened teeth, I’d walk out into a clammy subterranean twilight. Instead, the heat is still there looming in the street and the day is as bright as ever.

It’s a funny way to tell a whore, I think. They’ve got minty fresh breath at odd hours of the day. Say what you like about girls with damp hair or anklets or red hair ribbons, I always know I’m speaking to another worker when I smell Colgate on their lips at three thirty in the afternoon.

I stopped into Starbucks near 57th street for that hot sweet tar they call Coffee. Deedee and me nicknamed it Angband Juice, although perhaps I find it funnier than she does. The boys of the Hacienda like a good espresso and would turn their little snouts up at this something shocking. Still, I need to sit down and gather my thoughts and here for the moment feels like the friendliest place.

Baines it seemed had not been a lead at all, instead he had been some crazy former Commie hater who was branching out his crazy after the thaw in the Cold War. He was merely colour on the case, a little bit of gloss. I guessed Inspector Collins had just glanced at a file, looked at some orders being obeyed without knowing himself what the orders were.

I’m feeling slightly sick from my syrupy latte. I know it’s time to return to Kit’s flat again.

~*~

I doubt you need me to tell you that I’m pretty sure who that bleary face at the ground floor window was now. I’m still not sure if I’m going to learn anything useful from him as I retreat to Flushing, the sky at last bleeding into sunset. It feels a very long time ago that I sat on this train heading back to the city, thinking of my mouth on Kit’s, and Kit’s little hisses of pleasure. I wonder where he is now, cold, frightened, wrapped in on himself in a grey cell with an orange blanket. They’ll give him no news and maybe he’ll be passed caring by now, just wanting to shut his eyes and escape into the darkness where there are no goodbyes.

I have no idea how I will persuade Mr. Baines, Richard Baines it transpires to talk to me. I shouldn’t have worried. Baines is a lunatic, and like all lunatics will talk to anyone.

“They call me tricky dicky.” He says with a flourish. He hasn’t shaved since this morning and he pours wild turkey into the sweet black coffee he offers me. There is no milk. I take mine un-medicated.

Maybe it’s my evening for being around unpleasant smelling people, but Baines too smells lousy. The flat is very musty, and damp has congregated in dollops at the corners of the walls, stinking and looking like a hundred years of chewing gum. There’s also a faint after note of decay, over flowing trashcans I would guess, somewhere hidden in a back room. Baines seems to have absorbed the odour of the room into his paunchy, pouchy skin. Close up his saggy cheeks and tiny red eyes make him look like a satanic rodent. He might have a beard, one of those thin ones that frames his pear drop face with a dark black line, but it’s clearly been a while since he shaved so it’s hard to know.

“Kit,” I say, returning to my theme.

“Say, you ain’t here to mess with me are you, cos I warn you,” he broke off sternly as if he wished his threat to be taken seriously, even if he was not altogether sure what he was threatening me with.

“I’m not here to mess with you.”

Then it occurs to me what I need to do.

“I’m here for information if you name your price.”

There is a short, pathetic battle over the wide expanse of his face, where joy at un upcoming offer of rent money is tampered by the old snoops trick of dragging out the highest price.

“Some of it’s classified.”

“I wont press you for what it’s against your conscience to tell.”

“Conscience don’t come into it my friend. Rules of court do, Two year stretches for perjury and contempt, not worth a few bucks.”

“Of course.”

“How do I know you don’t work for his lawyer?”

“As I said, you are free to decline any information I ask.”

“What’s your interest?”

“Friend of a friend.”

“Now you can’t pay a player.”

“Tell you the truth, he owes me money. Rather a lot of money. I’m not altogether keen on his leaving the country so unannounced.”

He sizes me up with his watery red eyes as if he is trying his hardest to see whether I’m telling the truth.

“You came round this morning.”

“I hoped to catch him.”

“You came very early.”

I lower my eyes as if I would rather not go in to the finer points of debt reclamation.

Finally he nods. I hand him a hundred dollars. His mouth quivers, and he knows I’m serious.

“Not to tell you your business, but he wouldn’t be the sort I’d make a loan too, although,” he savoured his fuming coffee gratefully, “he seemed like the sort who’d get in to debt.”

“I am already aware of that Mr. Baines.”

“He was one of those,” Baines said letting his wrist droop theatrically.

I arch an eyebrow.

“Caught him one time on the stairwell with a man must be twice his age.”

“Blond?”

“Oh no, greying. I called him a filthy little bastard and he shouted back a few choice things at me. Very dirty mouth he had, and always using it. Drunk or sober it made no difference to him.”

“What did he used to say?”

“Well, give him his due, he was a cut above the average ‘cusser. It was as if your regular obscenities were beneath him. Then again, I think he was a college boy gone wrong, and him cussin’ in that funny accent of his just didn’t sound right.”

“Go on.”

“Well, to tell you the truth in my mind, there’s some folks that if they can’t be civil about the country they live in, would have done better to have stayed at home. No offence to you. Kit was one of those.”

“Right.”

“I’ve done service for my country before now.”

“Military?”

“Intelligence.” He nodded sagely as if he could say no more then poured more cheap whiskey into his empty mug.

Poisoning Communists, I thought.

“That’s highly commendable.”

“Indeed. You have the bearing of an army man, I might say.”

I nod.

“I was in the war back home.”

“Uzbekistan you say. So who were you up against, the Commies or the Muslims?”

I toy briefly with announcing to him I am an Islamic Socialist. I could see why Kit, younger, crueller, less sure of his place in the world, found Baines a irresistible target.

“The forces of Darkness.” I say strait facedly. He nods into his wild turkey as if he knew them well.

“Though I must say,” I continue, “Kit struck me as a foolish young man rather than an enemy of the state. What is it he used to say to me – `It says in God we trust on the dollar bill and that’s about’ -

“Right given the hundred and fifty two other idiots this gullible country has put it’s faith in.”

Typical Kit, to be so very fond of what he fancied as one of his good lines.

“You’ve heard it before?”

“Many times,” he said with mock weariness flooding his voice.

“But does it not sound to you like the simple bragging of an obnoxious school boy in love with his own brains?”

He hovers the whiskey bottle over my coffee cup with a conspiratorial air. I wonder briefly if accepting a cup would put him at his ease, but my hand has covered the rim of my cup as a reflex. He pours another glass for himself then I realise he is well on the way to taking me into his full confidence without any brotherly gestures from me.

Also, I identify the whisky smell as part of the stench of the apartment, and the idea of putting it into my stomach makes me feel vaguely queasy. I want nothing from this stinking hole to sully my person; it feels bad enough I have to bear the greasy air on my skin.

And my writer Kit, used to live upstairs. Baines wakes me from my musings.

“You’re not a Muslim are you?”

“No.” His face looks hard. He took the spurning of the communion of whiskey hard. “I find your brown spirits hard to get used to.”

“Of course, it would be all vodka where your from?”

I nod.

“So, you were telling me about Kit’s heresies.”

“Now, don’t think I didn’t try and make excuses for him being young and all. I mean, what they teach at college today would send any kid bad, you know all this sixties rubbish about how their too smart to earn a living and settle down with one member of the opposite gender.”

Poor Kit. Spitting and hissing at this man would have come as second nature to him. With his wide girth and narrow mind he would have been an irresistible target, and Kit was bad at resisting temptation at the best of times.

“You know, I think that kid was just born bad. People say it can’t happen, which is bullshit in my book. I grew up in Brooklyn and there was a kid there, by the time he was six he strangled his baby sister. And they were a good family, wouldn’t even raise a hand to their kids, so you couldn’t go saying it was abuse. There’s just some people born with a little bit of the devil in them.”

He paused and refreshed his mug.

“Not that I believe in the devil as a manifest being or such. But some people, it’s hard to explain, like they do have something in their hearts that’s black as coal.”

“That’s a rather fancy way of disagreeing with someone.”

“Kit was like that. It wasn’t just when he’d been drinking. He’d stand on the landing and say just the most offensive things he could just to see people hurt. A sadistic streak, you could say, although he never raised his fists to me. No with him it was all mouth. Lashings with his tongue.”

He caught his breath and then said slowly as if excusing himself.

“He was altogether too fond of hurting other people that one. His eyes would slit up as he was saying it, like it was giving him kicks and sometimes he’d be so angry he was spitting. Kit’s the right name for him. He was like one of those Mexican cats with rabies.”

“Obviously made quite an impression on you.”

“I think he was Catholic.”

“Really?”

I’m not quite sure why this is such a grievous offence but I assume I’m shortly to be enlightened.

“He knew an awful lot about religion, obscure stuff, like saints and obscure rites and conjuring. Things that have no right belonging to Christianity, pagan stuff.”

I nod my head and signal him to continue.

“You see the thing is, every catholic is a potential defector, because before everything they swear loyalty to the Pope. So before their country, or their friends or family, they’ll always take the word of some old guy in Rome. And if he says kill your wife, or attack your country you have to do it. They believe no laws really apply to them that aren’t sanctified by their church. They make natural traitors.

“That’s a very wide reaching statement.”

“That’s what Poley told me, and she was born one.”

“Poley?”

“Never mind. She’s a good girl. Keeps me in business. And there’s no doubts where her loyalties lie.”

“Anyhow Kit.”

“Yes, well she took my notes on Kit and seemed very pleased with them. It took her a while of course to realise anything was going on, but when she saw what I saw, she said my information was very useful. And now he’s disappeared, so I can only assume it was.”

“Wait, you didn’t give the statement to the Police?”

“No, I find it easier not to deal direct, more professional like. I give my information to Poley and she makes sure it goes where it’s needed.”

“Where can I find this Poley?”

“Now what do you want to go finding her for? I’m the first hand witness. I’m not going to let you ruin a perfectly good contact by her thinking I’m indiscrete.”

“Of course not.”

His eyes narrow. He’s virtually dragging me into focus, but I can tell something has changed. The slippery veil of whiskey friendship has fallen away and he suspects. I almost expect his whiskery rodents nose to sniff the air.

“Poley won’t help you find Kit,” He hisses.

No, I think. Neither can you, you know that. The only story you sat down tonight to tell me was how you betrayed him. What was it, were you too pissed, proud or just plain lonely not to realise the only person who’d listen to tales of your misdeeds would be your prosecutor?

I’m sensing moral high ground beneath my feet, it’s an unfamiliar sensation and I don’t like it. I should just go now, slam the table into his side and make him squeal, perhaps kick him to the floor and ask him how much he got for sending little Kit into exile.

I loose track of myself in my fantasies of rage. He’s dripping bloody beneath my boots before I’ve even moved towards him. Then I realise my foolish mistake; my anger has so blurred my vision it has given the drunken man the advantage.

Baines is standing across the room pointing a gun at my head. He pulls the trigger.

17,000 / 33,000
(51.0%)

Taxi fr Tamburlaine

2005-07-29T20:32:38Z

I am a muse without a writer. This has been the situation for forty-eight hours. After calling my usual round of hospitals, police stations, and cheap rents in Queens, I confess I am now somewhat perturbed.

Writers get sick and crawl away to hide under sweaty sheets like wounded felines. They get drunk and fight and do six weeks on remand in Rikers, or six days in St Aloyus’ hospital getting their faces sewn back together. They go to rehab or die in duels or fall lifelessly into the grey and silent Hudson. They never leave me.

Two days ago, I was cheerfully shopping for strawberries in Nita’s grocery. It’s high summer, the little organic ones have just appeared, plump little fists of flesh, not like the hothouse bred ones, pumped full of chemicals and water. I’d picked up a punnet, and some buffalo mozzarella. I sniffed at the fresh bay in pots and felt like a small child rolling in grass cuttings before deciding to add one to my basket. Anything that freshens and deodorises Kit is always useful.

I fuss. I am the eldest in a family of seven, old habits die hard. I learnt pretty quickly to value myself by how well I looked after others, looked after in that nosy, cheeky, claustrophobic way that is always checking whether greens have been eaten and if winter vests are worn. Mother left us when the twins were still babies, I was the only one who really had the benefit of a mother right the way to adulthood, and I felt obliged to replicate what they lacked. I think it was pity. I never feel guilt.

My brothers are gone now, well gone except for one, the first creature I mused for. He was a poet and I was his subject matter. But I lost him in the war, a long time ago now. I’ve heard he’s still alive but I do not know where. I have also heard that he is mad.

So I was replicating motherliness for my replica poet the evening he did not appear at my flat. I had brought strawberries for vitamin C because he is malnourished and deficient. He smokes like a chimney. That is why I do not give him his own key to my apartment. I like my own space and also, my azaleas would never forgive me.

Sometimes, Patch laughs and quotes someone intelligent saying “He’s the sort of person who lives for others. You can tell the others by the hunted expression.” This may be true of me, but what choice do I have. I am the tallest, the strongest and the least destructible out of the whole harried group of them. People disappear easily down here, they forget themselves if not gently reminded. It’s right it’s my job to do that. I’m the eldest, and not the stupidest, either.

He calls me Mephi. Lying on the bed, rubbing my side, Mephi you are beautiful. Mephi I’d give the world for you. Starry-eyed boys talk all of it. Mephi means the noxious vapours that rise from cracks in the earths skin, the heat haze above the molten rock. It’s oddly apt, considering. They used to pray to these vicious fumes, the Roman’s dignifying the breath of Mount Etna with the form of a goddess in an attempt to control what they could not. In time, these ghosts of the fiery chasms became devils. And so I am my poet’s demon.

The last one called me Michael. I was an angel for him. It’s always M something. My original mother-name began with that letter. In our culture those names are supposed to be prophetic. They say in almost all languages the word for mother begins with the “M” sound. Maybe she knew even then how it would turn out.

Incidentally, mother was a sculptor; Father is probably best described as a jack-of-all-trades. They say I take after my mother, but I like to think I followed my Father into the musing game. We both had the odd surety that strangers must find us fascinating.

Kit is a little creature, a lost creature, a much better poet that the last one, but much bolder, much surer of his own genius and less willing to compromise. But not vain, not quite. He has dark eyes, dark hair to his collar and black coffee shadows under his eyes. British, although of Spanish descent he told me, but I think that’s when his eyes were to the distance and he belonged to the world of rumour and dream. He was a frequent visitor there.

It’s not obligatory for a muse to sleep with one’s writer. Muse isn’t the most reputable of positions I know. It’s rather like a Geisha, sexy but exclusive. Except of course the geisha would claim they are the opposite because they are the artists. I had a long relationship with an Oxford professor in the inter-war years that rested on nothing but very masculine adoration. But most poets, well, they’re horny buggers. You don’t hit their neurons unless it’s through their balls. Plus, they want their money’s worth from a muse. Their bohemia is empty without a beauty that will put out.

Kit and I probably had less sex than you would imagine. He was not afraid to go elsewhere, for him I think; lovelessness added something to the act. For me, I had grown rather bored with it. But we had something more; we had affection, maybe even love. Actually our intimacies are none of your business.

Kit smokes too much and he’s always thirsty. Kissing him is like kissing a dried dishrag at times. But he puts effort into it, which makes up in some part. The dry rasping flesh that wants so much to be part of you, that’s the beauty of the way he kisses. I like kissing him, and I was never much for that before. My first lover, the only one perhaps I have any business calling my soul mate, or my partner in the grey vernacular of modern times, was most perfunctory about such things. We got down to business right away once we were alone, because that business was what made us different from other close friendships of the war. It was a statement of identity when one was constantly threatened with annihilation.

They did annihilate him in the end despite all the fucking. Now sex is business, for me at least, for really what other avenues does a crippled red head of extraordinary looks and uncertain identity have? What I have left after that is Kit’s rough tongue pressing against my lips. It makes me happy, and the only real lesson I have drawn from a long life filled with over exposure to the Gods and man is to take what happiness you can.

I did not loose sleep over my missing writer, this is because I do not sleep, not often. I sit on my windowsill and read books, barefoot in the August skyline. The lights are so white against the burnt orange mud of the sky. My braids take on this colour of smoggy midnight; they lie heavy on my shoulders in the heat. The night air smells smoky from the charcoal ovens of the pizza bars, hazy with the traffic fumes.

I usually find this muggy high seat comforting, a place that is both quiet and balancing on a sea of human life. It’s still soothing, but tonight there’s a little irritation in it, a little grit under the eyelid. I turn the pages and realise I have forgotten the chapter I last read. And I have a good memory for incidental detail. Deedee always tells me to wait twenty-four hours whenever one of my boys vanishes so as not to be too much of the maternal neurotic stalker. Twenty-four hours is this cultures accepted period of time to elapse before serious events can be assumed.

But I know at once it’s not like that. For all he looks like he was scraped from off the sidewalk, Kit isn’t a big drinker and he is never late. Perhaps I should rephrase that comment on Kit’s drinking. He drinks like an Englishman. That is, he drinks infrequently, but spectacularly. It’s truly curious the way he drinks, lager with vodka in, wine with brandy, shots after everything. It is as if there is some British craze when imbibing alcohol to fill any drinking vessel with as great an amount of the chemical as the stomach can hold down.

Deedee and I have learnt to drink like Americans. We sip expertly mixed doses of complimentary flavours and gently slide over an afternoon and an evening into cheery incoherence. Although, I’ve smelt alcohol on a tricks breath at eleven in the morning, so I cannot say this country does not produce it’s share of functional drunks. No doubt, these morning tipplers smelt earlier, but I’ve never done a trick before eleven am. I’m not desperate.

Deedee is Dr. Darthadúliel. She has a mobile phone. I refuse. That will be important at some later stage in our story.

I was at my window, and finding it comfortless, did not wait the appropriate twenty-four hours. It’s that time of year when it gets dark, but it never gets cool. The air is as thick as syrup as I walk out into the street below. A light breeze rustles my muslin sleeves. I still keep covered, even in the summer. It’s a cultural thing, neither Deedee nor I flash flesh in the worlds leading city of body consciousness. It’s not a moral thing. Nakedness can be all well and good. It’s just a habit to from the old days, a little mark of respect for the past from whence we came.

I get the 7 train from Grand Central to Main Street. That’s not as simple as it sounds at this time of night. It’s a fair walk up third from where I live, a non-descript flat that manages to be neither east village or lower east and is politely ignored for it. I have heard several other residents of 11th street complain they cannot get their house prices to rise in line with the rest of Manhattan. The street does not capture the imagination. Most of us rentiers are glad of this fact.

So I walk past groups of people in doorways, huddled backs in dark clothes, bending over, buying, and selling, whatever they do. They’re wearing donkey jackets or battered leather coats in this weather. The taxis still drive past, but the brightly dressed girls don’t work this pavement anymore, they’ve been cleaned up to cellars and suburbs. The delis still serve, neon and soda and take home to microwave meals, and the last dive closes and spills the final dregs of the barflies out into the night.

I find it endlessly comforting, the way all strangers develop affection for familiar streets in lieu of friendship. Although I have enough friends, I suppose. The salty, fatty smell of the hot dog stall wraps me in its fug; it’s too hot for smells like those, to greasy and cloying for the heavy air. And too full of wintertime memories.

Kit standing outside Easy Everything in February, stuffing his mouth with fried onions in a roll, laced with poster paint mustard and ketchup. I grimaced my disgust. He said he was a vegetarian. He eats like an Englishman too, stodgy and functional, food that fills without thrilling.

I often wonder that they call us the Puritan nation.

The express train stops on the local tracks at this time. I wait twenty minutes, when the train arrives its brightness still shocks. Our is a very bare bones subway, the machinery is open for all to see, the seats uncomfortable moulded plastic that catch the glare of the carriages strip lights. It works and we need it. It doesn’t need any window dressing.

I watch Queens flash past. The turquoise light of dawn is growing over the New Jersey docks. Flushing Main street is deserted, the air rank from the Chinatown restaurant’s bins left to fester in the humid night. I ring Kit’s buzzer, then not altogether convinced that the rusting, cracked thing is functional, knock and shout until a man with a round face and a fully receded hairline opens the window and tells me to Fuck Off.

“Have you seen Kit?”

He’s bleary and annoyed, but I can see his face change.

“Why you asking?”

“I’m a friend.”

He eyes me up and down as if he expects to sit a test on my appearance at some later date.

“I haven’t seen him. I don’t think he came back last night.” He holds out the information like bait. “But I could tell him you called.”

“If you would.”

“What name should I give?”

His interest almost bounces off his bald pate. I bite back an inquiry - Mr. Arthur has many seven foot, one-handed red-haired callers, has he? – and remember I am asking this man a favour.

“Mephi. Tell him Mephi called. He can call me at the Hacienda.”

His eyes widen. I’m sure it’s not just ordinary nosiness. Still the information I am giving him costs me nothing.

“Thank you,” I continue. “I appreciate it.”

“Not a problem,” says the man. He hesitates as I turn and then adds:

“Say, I’ve always been fascinated by accents. Where’s yours from?”

I select a country from my rotating list of exotic possibles.

“Uzbekistan.”

“Say.”

It’s when I’m hungry and empty and I can see the early dawn that I feel most hopeful about sex. The motion of the subway car can’t help either. In the pink glow of dawn, the pure light that flashes from the metal stacks of the dockyards and dazzles from Manhattan’s brittle glass it is hard not to feel that everything must be clean and hold no fear. It’s not just the audience I miss. My pale skin reflects the sunrise in a hazy blush. I have to confess, my body misses him too. At this point in my journey, I fall into a reverie that lasts all the way to Grande Central, despite the jostle of morning workers that begins to crowd around me.

When we slept together, it was most often at dawn, or thereabouts. When Kit would come to and claw at the body he had collapsed next too, pushing the blood to his fingers and away from is pounding head. Or when the new dawn had washed me clean of a night’s work, and I was ready to pounce on the exposed skin of a pale thigh escaped from beneath the duvets. Or sometimes, when we had been up all night after Kit had picked me up at closing and we’d walked down to Times Square together, seen the stragglers and the bums still lingering amongst the jewelled Bedouin’s tent of gold beads and red light and sapphire blue like ice, that turned out on closer inspection to be nothing more interesting than a McDonalds and a Disney store.

We rode the subway in the small hours to the student cinema on Bowery that showed indie films at odd hours. It’s amazing how cultured insomnia can make you; I only discovered Bunel and Fellucini because I couldn’t sleep at nights. They always had something obscure on at 3am, black and white, or blurred 8mm, subtitled from Russian or Persian or French.

Then we’d go to a round the clock diner and order cheap food for cheap sluts. I don’t care what they say about oysters and asparagus, for me there will always be something about a boy with dirty fingernails and shadowed eyes, sucking coca-cola through a plastic straw. Call me a poor fool from beyond the great curtain still clinging to the rags of dazzle of the new west, but still. For me cheap food eaten before dawn will always have some allure.

He knows how these nights will go. We’ll talk about anything, or eat in silence, and then I will slide my hand onto his thighs beneath the table. He’ll close his mouth around the morsel of hash brown on his fork and give me a smile that’s cocky and knows the ways of the world, and means yes. Then we shall walk home.

I remember the last time, before this heat rolled over the city like a jellyfish, melting us all into lethargy. It was in the sharp cool of early dawn, and Kit was on my sofa. I don’t think we bothered to turn the lights on when we came in. I wanted to see the blue light on Kit’s body, and Kit just wanted to get off.

He looked so fragile in the dawn, the skinny muscles, taught, defined but small, the ribs visible above is stomach. I covered him with my body, lay him down with my skin over his and kissed and kissed until he could bear it no longer and slipped a hand between us to touch himself.

I drew back and watched him for a moment, just let my mouth fill with the idea of tasting his cock, watching it get harder, pale on the shaft, flushed on the head. I moaned for it a little and he smiled.

“Like that?”

“Yes.” I say. We are not the most articulate of lovers. “I want to taste, I want you in my mouth.”

I know, the words sound most trite and pedestrian now. But moaned over the body of a mouth wateringly stiff boy teasing at his erection, they were perfect.

“Mmm,”

Then Kit took his hand from his member and wiped it across my lips, so I could lick the salty taste of him off his fingers.

I begged for more. I kissed down Kit’s body from the neck, fussed over his navel, dipping my tongue in and out until he squealed. I kissed down the line of little dark curls that ran from his navel to his crotch, the little line all mortals have and I do not.

“No,” said Kit. “I want to see you. I want to see you get hard from sucking my cock.”

So he sat and I knelt naked before him, running my tongue over the springy, tough flesh of his erection. I took the tip in my mouth and let him have what he wanted.

A good blowjob takes time, even with a horny young poet. You learn to control the sensations running through the other, when your slow gulps of flesh will bring exquisite pain, when you go fast to make them feel they’re going to come so hard it blinds them. A good blowjob puts another person totally within your power; it is like a puppet master pulling on the nerves of the body. You have absolute control.

Like meditation, this relaxes me.

I eased Kit forward on the sofa. He took the hint and rolled his hips up so I could stroke his arsehole too, and slid a finger inside to intensify the sensations. He was fucking my mouth now, pushing into it, grasping the sides of the sofa for balance as he desperately arched his back.

I swallowed and licked him clean, like a cat. I kissed his arsehole. Then I held him as he drifted into sleep.

It’s a pleasant enough memory, but now as well a making me feel warm in the crotch, it also makes me feel cold in the chest.

At Grande Central I change for the third avenue line. There’s a rush hour of sorts starting already. Not the official workers, these are still in bed, or in the gym or jogging in Hyde Park. This is the preparatory rush hour. These are the people who slope in yawning, who clean the offices and make the sandwiches and generally make the world a wholesome place for the real New Yorkers. I’m sharing a car with men in royal blue overalls, ill fitting and more humiliating than any monks habit. The women wear candy stripe blouses and too much make up, uniform of the new serving girls who bite their lips for tips and put Revlon over the creases.

Someone, Patch I think, told me Revlon funds nuclear missile testing, or was it Maybeline. Either way, it doesn’t surprise me. What these women paint over the cracks could withstand Armageddon.

One of the overalled workers jostles into an oncoming businessman who was clearly ignoring subway protocol by refusing to let him off the train before boarding. The scuttling cleaner knocks away his headphones and drags at the strap on his Ralph Lauren bag.

“Fucking Immigrants,” he says to the air of the carriage.

I raise my head to look him fully in the face and add in my most accented English:

“Yes, you seem to be the type who would enjoy doing just that.”

He registers me, but makes no response. It was a cheap shot I know, tacky and below the belt. But it was good to see his muscles flex in anger and yet the coward held himself still. I like to know I can still terrify.

I returned to my flat and in lieu of sleep stared at the ceiling for a while. It was the only thing I could think to do.

It was Deedee who woke me by ringing on my doorbell. It took me a good few moments’ deliberation to decide whether or not to answer it. But Deedee is the most persistent caller. That’s how I know after three minutes it’s always her.

“Deedee?”

“It’s Kit,” she said. “He called me from a police cell.”

I roll my eyes rather resenting the adrenalin I wasted on him.

“What’s he done now?”

“He’s getting deported as a security risk.”

“What?”

I’m quite impressed at the ingenuity of Kit’s thickheaded ability to make trouble for himself.

“He says he was using a fake ID to get into the Columbia to use the library. They caught him and went to check out his flat, where he says they discovered incriminating documents.”

“How did they manage that? Kit keeps nothing in that apartment. It’s unfit for human habitation.”

“Maybe they thought he was growing biological weapons in his laundry pile.”

“Ha-ha.”

Deedee pushed a silver blond plait behind her ear.

“How does one get someone off a deportation?”

“One makes me a cup of coffee. Not as much milk as last time.”

I moved towards the kettle and swilled some mugs in the sink.

“Is there an appeal?”

“Yeah. But Kit’s got a duty solicitor. He’s shit I talked to him. He’s all fresh out of law school and dying for a fight on the high ground of human rights. I told him this is America; they don’t give a rat’s ass about human rights. They like cold hard evidence. He seemed to think on those grounds, Kit was truly screwed.”

“How long have we got to put a case together?”

“Three days.”

“Fabulous. And I’m down to do a double shift at the Hacienda today.”

“You could call in sick.”

“Deedee, I have the keys. Besides, everybody knows I don’t get sick.”

It’s like lifting molten concrete moving my body to an upright position, but the day has to be faced. I peel the sticky shirt from last night off my back and look for another one. There’s not much clean at this time of year. I sweat just like everybody else, although I don’t smell due to not being a viable habitat for bacteria. But the damp fabric attracts grime, and the heat holds the petrol fumes down so walking to the seven-eleven is a trawl through noxious miasma, and I dislike looking grubby.

There’s little left except three shirts, white, black and red. Black seems like a bad omen, red too dramatic. Reluctantly, I pick up the white.

It’s pure cotton. Deedee got it for me because she thought it would look fetching, but I don’t like white. With my colouring it makes me look like a Victorian invalid. I feel it makes me look too delicate, and it emphasises my freckles.

But it seems right today. It seems the appropriate thing to wear, maybe because I feel like playing the sickly one with my heart beating hard for my missing poet. It feels correct to look neutral and innocent too, particularly as I am going to have to search hard for my information, and the streets it takes me down may not be seemly.

I trudged to work wondering exactly what happened to Kit. Did they break down his door at dawn in riot shields, pushing him against the walls, hands above his head? He would have appreciated the drama at least. Or did they sidle out from beside the security guard as he made his way into the library, dragged into a side room, interrogated with his head still half filled with Greek Theatre.

I don’t like to think of those cold, humourless men with him. I feel they must be a brutal lot, the immigration Police, hardened to ripping people from their adopted homes and throwing them back out into the loneliness of a world of unbelonging. They’re the underground’s most hated, the bogeymen of the Green Cardless. The cellar dwellers are always full of stories about them, how Jain spent twelve hours in an air vent when they paid the Buffalo Bar a visit. Or how one immigration man bust six clubs in a day and found a Sylvester Rodriguez in all of them, and then deported the real one for aiding and abetting, even though he had both the correct paperwork and three born in America kids. We tell ourselves they’re sick, they’ll beat you in the cells for kicks with the buckle of their police issue belt, take your dollars from your pocket, your wristwatch, even pull out your gold teeth. And don’t even think about bribing them with sex. They’ll fuck you with their assault batons and send you home all the same. They put a bag over your head and shove you through the airport, so you don’t even get one last glimpse of your chosen country. You get jostled onto a cargo plane and turn up where you left five years ago without even fifty cents to show for your trip.

They don’t like to leave you with things see. They think if you go home looking too sleek it will encourage more of your scrabbling country folk to try. So they like to send you home looking bruised and humiliated. It makes them hard. That’s what a sex worker’s got on everyone, the worst insult. You sick fuck it makes you hard. The kinky thrills the immigration take out of their job makes them the lowest of the low. For all we sell sex, we’re not much for pleasure. We’re exempt from this; people get hard over us. It gives us a moral advantage that most people ignore.

I don’t want to think of them hitting Kit, fucking him with their truncheons and then sending him away bound and blindfold, like a man about to hang. They’ve sent men to their death before now, these Immigration cops. They wouldn’t care for Kit’s shivering. And I’d never see him again. Which overall would be a pity.

It’s tougher today twisting the lock. It’s a tricky one to work for the one handed anyway, it’s an awkward metal roll blind, locked into the floor. I have to push the shutter down with my stump to get the lock to turn. This is never pleasant, the skin there is still not settled after all this time. It’s tender and a little sickening as the cold metal jabs. The key would not turn, then turned to fast, I slipped and the edge of the shutter pushed into my arm. It bled.

It felt very curious. I stared dumbly at it for a while. I never actually saw it bleed and now I have I noticed it looks crazy, like that Francis Bacon painting, Scenes from a Crucifixion. I stand up and drag the shutter half open, trying not to get blood on the sleeve of my best jacket. It’s only then I notice the note pinned to the door.

You immigrant thieves from overseas,
Murderous Arabs, pick- pocketing Albanian
Sickly wetbacks or grasping Chinese
Lazy Nigerian lout, or drink sodden Feinian.

You use us for our welfare checks,
Your deal in drugs and guns and slaughter
You prowl the streets selling deadly sex,
You rob our homes and rape our daughters.

There’s no way out except the boat home
To escape what’s coming to you,
Your Kitty cat frets in his cell alone,
We got him and we’ll get you too.

I raised my eyebrows. It was quite the worst poetry I had ever seen. If it hadn’t have made an illusion to Kit, I’d have used it to stem the blood from my scratches. I switched the utility lights on and collapsed into the barman’s chair, having far too much to think about at the moment. The most obvious being that whoever did this obviously has what Deedee would call “Mental Health Difficulties”. Not the least of them being the belief scansion that bad should be seen in public.

“Are you making tea?”

Snowball is standing at the bar blinking his eyes. I must have woken him coming downstairs. Sleep makes his eyes pink and puffy and he looks more albino than ever.

“I thought you might like to give it a try. The exercise might do you good.”

He puts his mug down, points his nose high into the air, and takes a supercilious breath. In the two months I have known him I have noticed he has a pathological fear of doing anything for himself. It is as if he fears he will wither if not constantly being served.

“I’m preoccupied.” I say. “I found this on the door.”

He scans over it lazily.

“I’d say their daughters are safe.”

I snort.

“I don’t think logic was the writers first priority.”

“Well, it certainly wasn’t art.”

“True. But they’ve got Kit. That’s real. The immigration picked him up yesterday. Something to do with his fake library pass.”

“Do you think they’ll raid today?”

“How the fuck do I know?” I can loose my temper with Snowball’s self-centeredness. “If they do, it was most considerate of them to warn us first.”

Snowball won’t be the only one here to think of that. Nobody will thank Kit for drawing attention to the Hacienda, and they certainly won’t be tripping over themselves to give him a character reference. They’ll close ranks, and Kit who was never truly one of us, because let’s face it Kit never turned a trick in his life, and above all it’s that that binds us, our outlaw status. Kit will slip from being a friend, to being an acquaintance, to being a one-night stand of a friend’s ex-partner. He’ll grow faceless and someone who can be fucked over for leverage.

Kit was once, and for quite a long time, mistaken for a prostitute. I often wonder if that was rather the appeal of me as a muse. I actually was the creature he stole the notoriety from, without ever really paying the price. He told me in one of those conversations we’d occasionally have when we were both damp and sweaty from a hot bath, and Kit would curl into my arms because I was not real therefore he could say what he liked, because whatever he’d been through I’d lived through and fought worse.

He’d been sixteen, in school, thrown out of home and then suddenly with great fanfare moved into a care home. He’d been thrown out for being gay; everybody knew that, Kit’s Dad had faced an ABH charge for battering the work trainee he’d found naked with his son in the workshop’s old garage. It was assumed by every child in Mathew Parker Comprehensive that Kit had spent the intervening months selling sex. He wasn’t bullied for it; it was as if he had achieved a state of freakishness that could not be normalised by the bulling process. Everyone regarded him in stunned silence and he read graffiti about his alleged menu of services and price range with a curiously numb feeling in is stomach, as if he were reading about a distant relation.

But Snowball has spied Patch making his way downstairs and is already blinking at him, trying to get a sugary tea out of him as he heads into the kitchen to change out of his jeans.

Snowball doesn’t work here. He lives in an old wine cellar from when the club was a restaurant. Deedee brought him back after he was rolled. He’s a clipper and has nowhere else to go. I’m not an asshole; I wouldn’t put a battered kid on the streets. Unfortunately, Snowball is an asshole and half of the other workers beg me to do just that. Or just express a wish to batter him.

“So,” smiles Snowball snakishly, “What are you going to do about Kit?”

Snowball decided to celebrate his return to functionality after his beating by having sex loudly with Kit in his dusty dungeon storeroom. That in itself is noting special, Kit has slept with most of New York to my knowledge, and I don’t expect loyalty of that sort. But it means every time Snowball mentions him he gets this little gleam of condescension in his eye.

Snowball must be all of seventeen. I can understand why Kit would go for him, he’s pretty enough in a fragile blossom kind of way. But he’s kidding himself if he thinks he’ll ever be more than a wordless fuck from Kit. From anyone, if he doesn’t sort his rather unfortunate personality out.

“Patch,” I say, “Can you mind the bar?” Patch, at least is legal here. “Hide the rest in the back room and don’t let them out if it’s not a regular unless they pass the test.”

When we get paranoid we ask the customers to show us their cocks first. It’s misconduct for a cop to expose himself to a hooker. So once we see the pink elephant, we know we’re safe.

“And watch for weapons.”

Patch nods.

I’m pretty sure I’m justified in having an uneasy feeling about today. There’s an old cash register under the bar, or at least under the ebony painted piece of plywood that separates our space from the club. We don’t use it, it may even be a relic from another incarnation of our basement. It may be too heavy to move, or maybe just no one could be bothered. The johns never see it.

I know there is a gun behind it, a Smith and Wesson that I fancy is rather an antique. Still one only needs one shot often enough and I guess I’m a good aim. I toy with pulling it out while Patch’s back is turned.

It would lower the odds, I think.

I have a rather imperious streak when annoyed, which is why I do not carry weaponry. I have not for a very long time, perhaps it would make my life easier at some junctures if I had, but like all reformed sinners I need the sting of a little difficulty to make me feel truly absolved of my former crimes.

I will never be absolved of my former crimes, of course. The Gods have been quite emphatic on that point. So the only judgement of my actions I have to fear is my own. Why should I mind if someone dies standing between my lover and I?

From somewhere in the backroom, Patch flips off the utility light. The light becomes weaker and softer, red like in a darkroom, or a mock up of hell.

They do not live long anyway, I think. No one would notice, really if one went missing? After all, who notices there are a few more creatures than there should be on this island?

They’ve taken what is yours, I think. There would be a time when you would lay to waste a kingdom for lesser loves than him.

No, I tell myself. I’ve never killed for love. And I am not who I was when I was a killer. Look at me:

Here I am in the mirror of a whorehouse, reflected in the luxurious scarlet light. I am wearing no armour; I am carrying no arms. I am wearing the white tunic of a man of peace. That is the self I am now, that shall be the person who walks out to fight this battle.

I turn to the stairs.

“Where are you going?” Said Patch.

“I’m throwing a sickie.” I say. And with that I throw the keys at Patroklos and head back out into the light.

The heat is already waiting for me when I emerge.

~*~

“We’ve got your Kitty-cat.” I presume from that the doggerel writer was not too familiar with young Christopher. He was none to kittenish, although I can see why the temptation to felinise was too much for a man of so little intelligence. It is, I suppose true that he carries with him the wariness of a feline, and he is no pack animal. He stalks his territory, such as it is, alone. He pissed against my doorway once, when too much liquor and too few public restrooms conspired against him in the small hours, which is thoroughly tom-cattish. He slips his eyes from one’s gaze if he likes you and can lick his own nose. He is also warm skinned and pleasing to have on one’s lap to stroke. But I would say all of this was circumstantial evidence as to his kittiness. They are after all, all characteristic of young men with poor prospects and high reaching dreams. He is framed into cattiness by his anachronistic nickname, which is just a little too sweet for this century’s boys.

He is no cat compared to me, with my lion’s mane and my tiger’s colouring. His footprints clatter on the sidewalks; they do not fall soundlessly as if swathed in velvet. His eyes cannot see in the dark and he has never been a killer. Like most mortal youths, he lacks grace. I sometimes think of him as one of the little black fur mice of the subway; their beetle black eyes taking in a city that could squash them at any moment with such wonder, their hands always so busy and curiously human, blessed with opposable thumbs.

I cannot hold a nut or a sandwich crumb in two industrious hands to nibble. The subway mice have that over me.

But I can still hunt, and I can still sense prey on the air. I often think of my musing skills as little different from the skill of a common tabby, whose sleepiness curled in a circle tempts the lonely old lady to give him a character and a name of her own invention, one that ignores his carnivorous, vindictive habits when out of her sight.

Really, we are no more than cat and mouse.

I am not all together sure I have an exact plan of the best way to locate a lost lover. However I feel less useless striding down a street under a sky so blue it bleaches than I do hiding in a cellar. I know my first point of contact, because more than anything I need information, and there is only one place I can think to go to get that.

I do not really wish to go there, for any knowledge my contact can give me will of necessity come at a price. I’m surprised how unwilling I am to walk to the metal and blue glass building that is the 51st Precinct police station. I tell myself I am only going to trade, that after all is what I was going to spend my evening doing anyway. It’s not just sex, he’ll want humiliation too, and that makes me feel sicker than ever.

The cop behind the counter does her best to ignore me. She clearly has strict orders to talk to people one at a time and no one, no matter how unlikely it is that they are reporting a missing wallet or a stray dog should be allowed queue-jumping privileges. The NYPD have a nose for people with a knack of obeying strict orders strictly. So I lean against the glass wall of the reception box until my turn arrives.

“I’m here to see Inspector Pat Collins.”

She looks me up and down.

“Inspector Collins doesn’t see members of the public. How did you get his name?”

“He gave it to me. Tell him Mephi is here.”

“Mephi.”

She looks at me sceptically.

“That’s right.”

She picks up a phone and talks into it briskly. Whatever is said on the other end clearly doesn’t put her at ease.

“He’ll send someone down for you immediately.”

I take a plastic seat and I watch her take in surreptitious glances of me while she deals with a German family whose luggage has been stolen.

I hold myself very strait as I walk behind the junior officer to Inspector Collin’s office. I breathe deeply, trying to exude as much calm as I can. It’s the same little impeditive state I go into walking across the few yards of red carpet to meet a trick at the bottom of the stairs. It’s putting one’s body completely in the service of one’s mind. We take the lift, it’s mirrored and carpeted and little red numbers count our progress up to the seventh floor, although the building itself is shabby, like a heavy old school. The paint is dull and utilitarian, the floor tiles dusty and cracked and the panelling is heavy oak, dark and ominous, propriety from another time.

The junior officer lets me through a glass door with peeing letters on it saying Head of Traffic Division. Inspector Collins works for vice. He holds his face remarkably steady as I enter his office. It is clearly not only me who has steeled one’s mind for the visit.

He says nothing until we hear the door click shut behind us.

“How did you know I was based here?”

“I looked you up on Google.”

His grey eyebrows twitch slightly. He’s got an odd face; it looks too small for his head. His features group around his nose leaving too much smooth empty skin all around. He still has a thick hair although it’s flecked grey at the temples and streaked salt and pepper over his whole head. He’s wearing a suit, or at east a shirt undone at the collar, with pink beads of sweat beginning to become visible in the tuft of hair that is exposed against his pink, rather meaty neck.

I slept with him. When I first started at the Hacienda, the management, Sevros, told me that I must do an outside call as a favour to the club. It was a condition of my employ. We’ve all slept with him, everyone who works there. Sevros gave me seventy dollars for it, which was good of him, as I guess it’s a condition of how we stay open.

Inspector Collins gave me a two hundred dollar tip. That was unusual.

I often saw him after that, same hotel always, the Holiday Inn at JFK, out of the city and away from prying eyes. Thursday nights usually, I guess he had a light morning Friday and wanted to spend the weekend with his family. I used to steal the boxed little squares of soap.

He liked me because I was a heathen, an infidel. He liked to vanquish me. He had me parade in rosary beads and feathers, or kohl and velvet, tall and proud and insolent, and then he would conquer me.

He paid exorbitantly, but it was a drag to get out to the airport and usually thirty bucks plus toll were lost in cab fare. Plus he often left bruises. It’s not good for tricks to see you with bruises; it gives them the wrong impression of what you will put up with. I never usually let them leave marks. But he was important. We needed to keep him on side. Sevros started giving me a clean hundred every time I went around on top of letting me keep everything Collins paid me.

“Why are you here?” He sounded hostile. I wonder vaguely if I’ve blown our professional relationship and find I don’t care.

“I need information. A friend has gone missing.”

“A friend.”

“Yes. Kit Arthur. Snatched by immigration yesterday.”

“I don’t know him.”

“He wasn’t a worker. He was on a holiday visa. And he did that. He holidayed.”

“Friend of yours then.”

“Yes.”

His eyes narrowed as if I had no business having friends without his permission. I try to hold my face perfectly still although I can feel a sigh wanting to burst out of me.

“Where was he from?”

“England.”

“White guy?”

“Yes.”

He nods as if some basic clearance has been passed.

“Give me his full name and date of birth and meet me in the Holiday Inn at five thirty. Not the usual, the one on Broadway.”

“I only have three days before he will be deported.”

“You better be there then.”

I leave his office feeling battered and not altogether clean.

In a way, there’s a buzz to it. There’s always a buzz to a sex worker when a line is crossed, even if it makes their skin crawl and their stomach sicken. Beauty is always thrown into relief by ugliness; the clean green of the central park trees is always at it’s most wondrous when it is the only thing that rises clear above a smog of disgust.

It is true that some drug their way through these barriers, addling their senses to blunt the revulsion, or drinking until their faces are ragged to bring them courage. This only lowers their skills, makes them less able to take the control they need to carry them through.

Sex work, as I tell my boys over and over again is the ultimate victory of mind over matter. It is a discipline, not unlike that taught in the temples of Zen Buddhism. Your path will often be blocked by veils of distaste, a loathing in the mind of what the body is being asked to do. One must stay in control, and one must ride through it, and then the city lights will sparkle all the brighter. One transcends ones body slurping below on a fat man’s tiny prick, the whip wheels on one’s arse, watching instead from above the grace with which one holds one’s spine, the sleekness of one’s hair, the toughness of one’s own skin against the client’s flabby pink paunch. From above I critique my technique, compose my shopping lists and watch that the exits are clear. It is as this silent watcher I feel the most safe.

It’s why we find quitting so hard, we miss this rapture.

~*~

“Did I mention I was busy?”

Deedee is standing on her rooftop garden watering plants. Spikes of green protrude from between the giant rainbow coloured confectionary attached to the front of the Richeloux Movie Theatre. She briefly disappears behind a ten-foot swirl of pink and white lollipop then emerges tugging at her nylon bed-jacket. Curlers would not look out of place, although her hair is still in its warrior braids despite her frowsy get up. If anyone from the street notices her horticulture or her hollering, they do not let on.

“I’ll walk with you.”

“I’m going working.”

Deedee has two occupations: Doctor, which pays intermittently and appallingly due to her chosen group of patients being those without medical insurance, and shoplifter, which pays extremely well. Often, she can combine the two, and she frequently takes orders for jeans and underwear while inspecting abscesses or listening to murky chests. I’m welcome at neither due to a wonderful blur of the Hippocratic oath, the confidentiality of personal image consultants, and just being too damned distinctive.

“Your not going to teleport there are you?”

The watering can stops being applied to the vervain flowers and starts being applied to me, twenty feet below on the sidewalk.

“That’s not a yes.”

She continues watering me, soaking my shirt.

“Deedee, I’m beginning to look a little obscene.” This is true; the white is rapidly becoming translucent. In the harsh light of July that drowns out even the neon of Forty-Second Street, my scars peer out from behind the sodden cloth. You can see where my left nipple has been sliced, where the right one is missing, the muscles on my chest and the freckles on my shoulders.

She looks down and giggles, has her little victory, then relents.

“Okay, I’m going Upper West. I was going to get the subway, but I’ll walk with you. You need to dry out.”

I wait for her by the gold ropes that are gathered idly outside the picture-house’s doors, with my hands across my chest, trying hard not to look like a Boyz centrefold.

~*~

I dry quickly in the heat, but I still look a little rumpled. I doubt I’ll get home to change before today is out. Deedee walks beside me in plastic sunglasses. The heat haze shimmers across the street.

“You look ridiculous.”

“Thank you.”

“I need to do something.”

“Of course.”

“Why Kit?”

Deedee furrows her forehead above the dark plastic.

“You would know how to answer that better than me.”

“I’m not sure where to begin.”

“How about Columbia?”

“Isn’t that rather a way to go for news?”

“The University of Columbia. Where he was arrested. Going back to the beginning might give you some clues.”

Deedee adjusted her shopping bags. She always carried several neat paper and rope carrier bags with her when she went out shoplifting emblazoned with the names of the famous fashion houses. It helped to detract attention from her frayed trousers.

“What was he doing in the University of Columbia?”

“He was a classics student, working towards his Masters.”

“How do you know this?”

“He told me after that fight when you found him on your fire escape.”

“Which one?”

“ The one where he broke his arm and chipped his front tooth. I think he has some deal with his tutor at Cambridge.”

“Why’s he going to Columbia if he’s studying at Cambridge.”

“Because Cambridge is in the UK.”

“Oh, that Cambridge.”

“Yes.”

I never knew Kit was clever. I mean, I knew he was smart, but I never had him down as an academic. Perhaps a magpie reader of old and assorted second hand paperbacks like my dear Patch, but never a scholar.”

“He knows Latin and Ancient Greek,” she continued.

“How do you know?”

“He recited verses from Aeschylus while I was setting his fractured arm. I’d run out of morphine.”

“Surely the Stoics would have been more apt?”

“The stoics where philosophers not playwrights.”

I sigh. Deedee turns at the junction of 57th street. Bloomingdale’s stripy canopy billows over Fifth Avenue to our left.

“Well, I’m here,” she said.

I nod. I’m glad I’m not going inside just yet, I feel just a little claustrophobic. I’ve only been in Bloomingdale’s once myself and found it a pointless exercise, the clothes were tired and plain and none of them fitted me. The walls were too white and it was just a little to utilitarian.

Clothes shops are where one acquires the costumes for the roles that one must play in life, and Bloomingdale’s, I’m afraid lacks that quality of theatricality.

~*~

I’m walking westwards and there is a whisper of a breeze from the sea. I need to go crosstown and there is no point going underground as yet. I walk down Fifty Seventh Street; it’s shining walls framing the thin slice of cobalt blue sky that floats above the torpid, sunlit Hudson. It looks like a metal corridor in a house made for giants.

There is the slightest tang of salt in the air, and also a sour acidic taint from the factories across the water. Perhaps it’s only Quendi that can pick that up.

The city suddenly looks very fragile, like tinder in the heat. It seems to dry and brittle to withstand the glare of the relentless sun, made as it is of strips of wire and shards of glass. The buildings flaunt their delicacy as high art. It’s all a trick of course; they’re built to withstand hurricanes. But it makes me suddenly dizzy.

I remember the first time a tourist asked me –“ Where is ground Zero?” – and the ground shook a little beneath my feet in the way that pain can so smoothly turn to spectacle. We can’t resist staring, perhaps we think it makes us stronger, makes our sufferings easier to bear.

It is also a terrible thing when pain becomes normal, too the realisation the body has adjusted to the amputation.

And I was reminded of the first time I showed a trick my right arm, my own personal ground zero that too has been poked and prodded and sold to the curious and the collectors. We are both remarkable edifices that fascinate by what are, but most of all, by what we have missing.

The floor swoops a little beneath my feet just like that now. Perhaps you must think me most arrogant comparing myself to my home in this way, but really I am older, I have seen it spring from the marshes and watched it grow like my own child. We’re a good team the city and I, even when the faces change we stand together, watching them come and go while we go on forever. Well, I will at any rate.

Eh, we did a little not in the story line updating.

2005-04-17T03:57:08Z

Look, you may as well know, cos we all gossip about it - Red and Kit really got serious when Red allowed him to sweat in his bed for four weeks when he had influenza. It's kind of irrelevant to club HC but it can be read here.

As good writers we should all plug the great snipets from the greatest net authors available here cues, hyperbole courtesty of drama queans international.

Seven New Recruits for the Jihad

2005-04-10T01:44:00Z

((The greatness that is the Unitarian Jihad is here, stolen from tyellas and elenbarathi))

Well, It being a sunday morning and all the sinners in Church the boys of the Hacienda get some downtime in which to discuss the burning issues of the day:

Maedhros: I'd like to be Brother Hell-Wrought Manacle of Rational Contemplation.

Patch: Can I be Brother Dirty Bomb of Neo-Platonic Harmony?

Patch: Well I am a swarthy Mediterranean in a leather jacket. People expect me to sound somewhat perverse.

Kiki: *Swatting Patch on the shoulder and giving him a dead arm* Only if I get to be Sister Carpet Bomb of... of... Sister Carpet Bomb of Tasteful Small Pink Flowers.

Maedhros: I don't think Tasteful Small Pink Flowers really shows a commitment to Unitarian Principles, Kiki.

Kiki: *Glaring* Nonsense, we should be encouraging carpets to have tasteful small floral designs. They're so much less invasive than bold prints.

Deedee: Maybe you should put it to the committee?

Maedhros: Alright everyone, show of hands, can Kiki join the cause as Sister Carpet Bomb of Tasteful Pink Flowers, alright, motion carried 4-2 with one abstention.

Kit: Brother Twelvepenny Dagger of Reflective Sobriety reporting for duty, sir.

Maedhros: Sir?

Kit: I mean, facilitator of actions in which we are all equals, Mephisto.

Treacle: Should I be Brother Darkwood Crossbow of Non-Violent Opposition or Brother Black Iron Broadsword of Pantheistic Consciousness?

Maedhros: The former. I don't think we should link our participation in this Jihad to individual belief systems.

Deedee: Let me think of something - Sister Anthrax Baccillus of Universal Regard

Patch: I object, surely we hold all living forms as sacred parts of the tapestry of creation and therefore should not be regarding bacteria as inherently negative in themselves?

All: *Tut at Deedee who looks embarrassed*

Deedee: I was just trying to go for something that reflected my medical training.

Snowball: How about Sister Cyanide Gas of Postitive Re-enforcement?

Deedee: Very well, if I'm not untowardly prejudicing cyanide molecules.

Snowball: *Looks around* Very well, another excellent idea put forward by me. I shall be joining the cause as Brother Aveda Kedavera of Humility in the Face of Dissent.

Kiki: You're showing your roots blondie.

Maedhros: Reprimanded Sister Carpet Bomb of Tasteful Pink Flowers. You shall form the after committee refreshments sub-committee.

Kiki: *Sulks*

You can get your name here. Or join up at unitarian_jihad

That great Will Shakespeare/ Kit Marlowe collaboration

2005-04-09T00:55:45Z

A very long digression on Kit's undergraduate days. Done in modern dress. Kit's a helpful slut, Will's a wannabe playwright who gets the brush off. Rated R for Kit's extra curricular college activities and foul mouth.

Kit blinked into his cornflakes (40p) and watched the sugar (three sachets –free) dissolve into a greyish gloop on the unnaturally yellow flakes in his bowl. Light was streaming in through the leaded windows, making the whole canteen look as pink and white as a fondant fancy. He stirred his cornflakes with his spoon.

He’d never quite got used to the incongruity of Cambridge. Even in Canterbury, which had it’s own fair share of revenant buildings, American tourists and improbable alleyways, he’d never actually been expected to live in the ruins. They were there to be admired, photographed, ticked off on a list. One was not supposed to use them, particularly not for so mundane a purpose as eating one’s breakfast.

Five hundred years of Dons and Masters, all in various states of indigestion, watched Kit move his spoon to his lips. At least they don’t whip the miscreant of the day at the service hatch anymore, he thought, wondering if he’d be amused or put off his dinner by a side order of corporal punishment. I wonder if any of them got off on it? He thought. The Masters only gave up the right to do that in 1967, kinky buggers.

“Marlowe?”

Speaking of indigestion, Rupert sat down next to him. Kit could just about handle the smell of frying bacon when it was a background aroma drifting from the hot counters, as exotic as the angelcake walls of the medieval buttery. When it was shoved beneath his nose, it made his cornflakes very hard going. His mouth objected to the crackling blandness. Shut up you, thought Kit. You are smarter than he is, you get laid more than he does, allow him a fry up every morning to console himself.

Besides, you get to eat this evening.

“Rupert.”

He had abandoned all hope of Rupert ever using his first name.

“How –rustic,” he’d said when they’d first been introduced.

And Kit, who’d been called Kit for far to long to ever consider it an affectation bit his lip. It did sound painfully rural here amid the Joaquins and Marcuses and all the other refined sons of Empire to which even a name was a statement of intent. Rupert had ever since avoided the aura of smocks and cider by referring to him only by his surname. Kit, who didn’t have hatred to waste on such obvious targets as the boy next door, liked to hope it was more Rupert organising the world as one gigantic Rugby Union side than complete class snobbery.

Besides, Kit had other reasons to feel superior to Rupert. Cambridge was still an annoyingly masculine town, which rather gave Kit the advantage when it came to matters of love, or more accurately lust. It also ensured there was a readily available pool of deeply frustrated young men who weren’t too fussy where the next blowjob was coming from. So Kit got to give a lot of head, got to lie back in a lot of study bedrooms while undergraduate jocks panted out their lust for that gorgeous blonde at Trinity and inexpertly ravished his arse. They were often pleasant companionable meetings, bookish Kit Marlowe, reading Classics and Theology was considerably less threatening than the bleach cropped boys of the college’s Gaysoc with their cropped tight tee’s and their ironic appreciation of Kylie. Nothing effeminate about working out a bit of pent up late adolescent lust on curious Kit, who liked boys and liked to be helpful.

“Of course you’re not gay,” he’d say consolingly, afterwards. After they’d moaned that he was hot and tight, and fucking unbelievable, man! and come inside him.

“Really?”

“You like girls, you said so. I never liked girls. From the minute I started getting horny, I knew it was boys I was after.”

They’d be reassured. Some would even grow bold and curious. Boys and their dicks, playing around, it all felt natural as hell.

“You come from that?”

“You just saw me.”

“Does it feel good?”

“I’m not here because I fancy you.”

They’d laugh in relief. Some of them would even whisper:

“Could you do me? Just as an experiment, like. I’d like to know just once, before I meet someone, someone proper.”

Kit, as ever was obliging. Usually, just with his fingers, sometimes a bit more. He never truly believed any of his temporary lovers were gay, any more than he believed a drunken one night stand with a girl would make him strait. He was pretty sure that a few of them got more of a thrill out of being with another boy than they admitted, but probably no more than they would get participating in any illicit fetish. Being gay felt like an immutable part of Kit’s soul, the muse that had been with him since the beginning, and Kit hadn’t quite given up on the concept of soul yet. Sexuality was one thing, knowledge was another, and he was never in favour of knowledge being locked away behind one label or another.

Then he would go home, shower, make another mug of black coffee and settle down to his studies. He was always amazed at how much extra energy sex gave him, how alive he felt afterwards. He could work easily until three in the morning after a good session, and find it easy going. Kit did not have a natural head for languages, particularly ones last spoken conversationally around 5CE. But after nearly seven years of it he’d got into a routine of learning that helped him at least to cope with them, to turn in reasonable grades. He never really liked the languages, more the voices that hid behind them. And he’d much rather be left alone at midnight with Ovid and Lucian than with the squealing ecstasy comedowns of the boys in pink who cultivated their partners.

So Kit Marlowe was to all eyes watching a demure student of religion and ancient verse. He wore loose fitting dark clothes, ate the typical meals of an impoverished student, followed his course with dogged determination rather than flamboyant excellence, lived quietly in a sparse study bedroom in the Old Court, filled with nothing except unwashed mugs and overdue books. Nothing remarkable about this dark haired scholarship boy with his estuary English and his moth eaten charity shop jumpers. He drunk rarely, smoked occasionally, had taken speed once and didn’t like it.

And to the handful of girls, the boys of Gaysoc and those uninterested in a little left field experimentation, that was all there was to him. However, once he’d helped out a few of his fellow students, word about Kit started to get around. Nobody admitted it, nobody claimed to have any personal experience, but the knowledge hung in the air. If you’re desperate to get off, Kit will help you. He’d suddenly become another of the arcane secrets that Corpus sheltered in its walls, and he liked being an official secret. It gave him a sense of all power being essentially chimerical, of being based on shallow roots and dirty secrets that could so easily shift and give way to something new.

By his final year as an undergraduate, he was spending nearly as much of his feeble weekly budget on condoms and lube as he was in the canteen. Of course there was somewhere in the pastoral care centre of the Student Union that doled out the necessaries free, but he never liked the idea of his sexual adventures being monitored in such a way. It drew too much attention. Far better the anonymity of Boots where no one was keeping tabs him. He wasn’t just taking on the undergraduates now, Dons and Fellows were casually making his acquaintance, helping him with his studies while he helped them explore theories they’d never dared before. He wafted around in a haze of strong coffee, old poetry and furtive sex and that was all the nourishment he needed. At times it made him feel almost high, transcendental.

And really, some of those old Roman guys were filthy. If people could actually read Ovid in a language they understood, they’d change their estimation of Classics as such a chaste area for a young man to be studying in an instant.

He was acutely aware of the accidents that had led him to Corpus Christi. More than any genius on his part, although he conceded it was a fair bit of that, he was aware of being a smart boy in the right place at the right time. His scholarship had required residency in Canterbury, and had also required him gaining the support of his classically minded English teacher. It had required having a Father who went to Church, knew the Dean personally, and could put a word in. Which was why he sometimes felt annoyed that all this knowledge, all the books in the library, the research journals, the lithographed manuscripts were hidden away from the public, freely available to airheads like Rupert but locked away from the grubby fingers of the population at large. Fingers that could, but for a quirk of fate, have been his.

It was this semi-sympathy with the great outsiders that lead to the one thing Kit could nearly call a friendship during his time at Cambridge. He got on with his fellow students well enough; some of them made reasonably smart comments during seminars and could be relied upon for semi-intelligent discussions of pertinent topics in the common room. But beneath the shared quest to get to the end of the course, Kit had little desire to pry. Their lives seemed not like his life; even the less well heeled seemed like alien beings, to want things all together more mediocre than his insatiable appetite to know. They had become familiar faces, not friends. In truth, they bored him.

Professor Hargreves was one of his lecturers in both senses of the word. He took Kit for his Classical drama module, and later had got into the habit of taking him over his desk during “essay consultations”. Hargreves was quite a big name at Corpus, not just for his recent translations of Antigone and Oedipus Rex. He had been involved as consultant in the staging of several Classical productions in London’s West End. He occasionally wrote Theatre reviews for the Telegraph, and his lectures were, in Kit’s opinion, filled with self-congratulatory name-droppings of the Sir’s and Dames of the English stage. It was all “as Ian said,” or “as Judy remarked,” with him. Kit took his revenge by rifling through his papers if he was left alone in his study with enough time to do so. It was during such a furtive shuffle that he had come across a manuscript tossed in the wastepaper basket, still half wrapped in its yellow envelope.

He looked at the front page, neatly handwritten - although with several misspellings on best bleached white supermarket stationary.

Dear Dr Hargreves,

I appreciate unsolicited mail must be the bane of professional dramatists such as yourself. However, I remember very clearly reading your notes to your translation of Oedipus Rex about the importance of any drama being able to speak to any audience, and I believed so utterly in that statement, that I felt you of all people would be the best judge of whether my attempts at playmaking had anything to say to the world at large.

Please therefore forgive the imposition of sending an unsolicited manuscript. I understand you are a very busy man and have kept it short – I’ve only included the first five scenes of the first act, which should be enough for you to judge whether my efforts have any worth. I would appreciate any comment at all however brief.

Yours sincerely,

Will S.

Fucker. Thought Kit. Fucking pretentious egotistical fucking prick. This man spent three hours trying to make a chinless wonder like Rupert understand why the fuck ten people come on stage and start giving half the plot away in Greek Tragedy just so he could go home to his country estate with a BA from Cambridge like a new boy fucking scouts badge –

Fuck suddenly became a beautiful word to Kit. It seared across his brain like a perfect jet of white flame.

-And here is someone who clearly wants to learn, clearly wants to know, and you throw his advances in the bin without so much as a letter saying thank you very much but I’m very busy right now sticking my head up Dame Judy’s arse.

He had never had sex for material gain before now. He’d occasionally helped himself to a cold beer or a fistful of fags from his conquests, but saw them as nothing more than pulling trophies, perks of the game. Now, he was standing in Professor Hargreve’s study in a mood anything but conducive to sex, knowing in his black, black heart that he would damn well go through with it and he’d damn well leave with that manuscript. Even if it was the most terrible play ever committed to paper, the man deserved a response.

He bit his lip. He wasn’t looking forward to this. He was pretty sure that plenty of people had sex when they weren’t quite in the right frame of mind, he was certain that his mother had used it as a weapon to keep his father quiet, it just hadn’t been something he’d planned on doing in the near future. The door to the study opened and he breathed in deeply. Never tried prostitution before, he thought, looking down on the leather of the desk. He tried to rally himself that it was just another kink he was playing with, but it was no use. He didn’t want it.

It was, as these things always are, a learning experience. It was curious to see the motions of sex laid bare, to go through them without the intoxication of desire. It was odd, for the first time, he really got to watch the mechanics of what was happening without the haze and the ache blotting his memory. It dawned on him how terribly surreal all this shoving and rubbing was, not much above watching a cat on heat with a chair leg. But he got through it, and for that he was proud of himself. He snatched the envelope under his jumper while the professor turned to dress, and they left the study together, Kit reying very hard not to russle.

When he got back to the Old Court, Kit sat on his bed and read the play. As it went, the scenes were interesting enough, considerably better than some of the Cambridge Dramsoc plays he’d taken in out of curiosity, so much for the seedbed of talent for the English speaking world. He wouldn’t sully his works by putting them though their hands. Not that his works amounted to much more than some scrawls on an A4 pad and some hectic fantasising at three in the morning right now, but still better than Cambridge am-dram. Some of Will’s dialogue was clunky, there seemed to be a muddle in the thrust of the action by scene four, and he was trying to be far to high flown in some of his wording. But overall, not bad. It kept him interested at least. He got out his pen.

Dear Will,

No luck with Dr Hargreves I’m afraid. The man’s a vain name dropping tosser anyway, he might know a lot about ancient Greek, but he doesn’t know much about people, not ones who don’t have OBE after their name.

Oh great Kit, he thought, make the man feel like more of a bumpkin than he must already feel. This guy you’ve been idolizing, guess what he’s a wanker. How glib you can sound from the inside.

I found your play in the wastepaper basket. I’m sorry, but I suppose it’s going to happen a lot if you’re determined to make it. There’s a lot of sharps out there who’ll only back a horse when they know it’s a winner, you’re just going to have to live with that.

For what it’s worth, I like it. I’m just an undergraduate, but I’m pretty sure if his eminence had actually bothered to read it, he’d have been impressed too. I’m not much of a contact, I’m afraid I’m only here on scholarship, no friends in high places. You didn’t say much about yourself, for all I know your far better educated than me.

Scratch that, thought Kit. You’ve read the play; you know the man hasn’t been inside a university in his life.

You didn’t say much about yourself. I’m guessing, but it looks like to me, you’ve got the voice to touch people, you just don’t have the polish that will get you taken seriously. Trust me, it’s an old boys club here, if you don’t talk the language they won’t go the extra mile trying to hear what you’ve got to say. It’s a bit presumptuous, but I’ve got some ideas that could help you with that.

He toyed with putting in “Maybe you could help me with some of my ideas too,” but he knew in truth he was just too jealous of them, they we’re just too damn personal.

Write back and let me know if you’re interested.

Kit M.

And that had been the start of a friendship.

On Kit's rather demure exterior: Marlowe never realy went wild until after he got his BA, according to the college records he attended class and caused no problems. Also, he probably had very little money to go wild on, as until he started doing whatever shady stuff he started doing, his income was the princley sum of a shilling a week (roughly £5 modern money). Well, he never went wild on record anyhow.

On his reasonable grades: The historical Marlowe wasn't an academic genius, the source I've got states he came 199th out of 231 BA candidites in his year.

Kit's dirty mouth is at least apocryphal if not historically provable.

That which feeds me destroys me

2005-04-06T22:08:03Z

Update by Red. Red/Kit

“Must you do that constantly?”

Maedhros liked having Kit around. He was someone to take care of; he was smart, and rather attractive as mortals went. The only downside was the waves of noxious fumes that followed him everywhere. He left great clouds of smoke behind him after a visit that made the flat reek and the plants unhealthy. Maedhros often felt like he should apologise to his azaleas after a visit. He’d dust their leaves and mutter, “I know you don’t approve of my taste in men.”

Maedhros had met a fair few smokers in his time, but no one so rapaciously addicted as Kit. His fingernails stunk of it. “It helps me think,” he’d say and Maedhros bit back a lecture on nicotine reducing the blood supply to the brain. It was, as a good demon, Maedhros’ usual stance to take the side of the libertarians in whatever particular argument was taking place. He just wished in this case the libertarian side wasn’t so damn smelly.

Roughly two months into having Kit about he’d caught influenza. Not the common ‘flu, something really nasty.

“’Flu is nasty,” said Deedee, shaking the thermometer that had just diagnosed Kit with a temperature of 102. “Most people say they have ‘flu when they have a bad cold. When they see real influenza in action, they’re shocked.”

He’d been stuck in Maedhros’ bed for four weeks sweating like a pig. Maedhros bore sleeping on the couch and the increased laundry bills with good grace. Kit, barely able to stagger to the bathroom and unable to swallow more than soup and the fizzy vitamin c packets Deedee brought nevertheless managed a daily shuffle to the seven eleven for cigarettes and still made his way through a carton a day.

You certainly have to give the boy points for commitment, Maedhros thought.

“I’m orally fixated,” Kit said, inhaling deeply.

“I noticed,” said Maedhros. Yes Kit, that look on your face when you drag on your cigarette, I know where I’ve seen it before. Eyes shut; hungry, sucking in breaths like the air is ambrosia. Admittedly, your face is usually partly obscured by my thighs when I see this expression, but I still recognise it.

Kit snorted.

“It’s the insatiable hunger of artists, Mephisto.”

Maedhros smiled and lay back on the couch so his head was in Kit’s lap. Kit’s non-smoking hand began to twist softly through his braids.

“If you were a more whimsical poet you’d keep cats.”

“Instead I keep demons,” Kit laughed as he felt Maedhros’ shoulders moving to a comfortable position against his legs.

Kit took one last deep lungful of his cigarette and ground it out on the ashtray beside him. Maedhros watched his eyes flicker over to the packet again. He’s never satisfied, thought Maedhros. If I could define that boy in one word it would be “craving”. He let his empty hand rest on Maedhros’ chest, letting the need rest in the air around him for now.

Insatiability isn’t a bad trait in a mortal that dares to love the inhuman, thought Maedhros. The need to be totally annihilated into a greater self, a desire few humans could meet was what had brought Kit into his flat, got him down on his knees, made him keep returning. He wants to be more than mortal, thought Maedhros.

And he loves me, he thought. I love him too.

Maedhros remembers when they’d come to this conclusion. They’d never dated as such; neither Kit nor Maedhros had needed courting to take their clothes off. From that first flash of recognition in the internet café, sex had been a foregone conclusion. They both wanted it, why delay the inevitable? As things progressed, Maedhros became aware of how little of the island Kit had seen. The inside of bars, the internet café, the bright lights of Times Square, that was all.

“How long have you been here?”

“Seven months.”

“And you’ve never been up the Empire State?”

“I’m not a tourist, Mephisto. I like people, not places.”

“You should. It’ll give you perspective at least.”

Kit smiled.

Even New York’s top tourist attraction could draw only a smattering of people that drizzly February afternoon. The sky was already pinking towards dusk over New Jersey. Kit picked his way gracefully around the square of the viewing platform, preparing to be underwhelmed, refusing to participate in any spectacle that amused the gawpers of Wyoming and Arkansas in their garish anoraks.

He’s such a kid, Maedhros thought. He leant against the wall of the skyscraper, and pulled Kit in towards him as he completed his circuit. It was a risky gesture, up here among the visitors from the mid-West, and it knocked some of Kit’s cynicism out of him. It was a statement to the visitors, you want to see New York, here is New York, and it is our city too.

“I’ve seen –“ said Kit into Maedhros’ chest.

“You haven’t seen,” Said Maedhros. He held him for a few moments more, eyes half closed, willing down the darkness.

When Kit removed his face from Maedhros’ chest, night had fallen. Maedhros took Kit’s hand and walked him to the edge of the viewing platform where beneath them the city had been transformed into a galaxy of bright and burning stars.

Kit looked down, and gave in to it all.

“You like the night altogether too much, little poet,” Maedhros said.

“But you are so beautiful in the dark.”

“You should try and live in the daylight, among your own people and stop living on dreams.”

“It’s too late. I don’t belong there. I can’t – they don’t seem like people who could ever truly know me, not really. Even before I met you.”

“But being with me takes you further from them,”

“No you, you’re almost an accident. You are something that happens to people who can’t live in this world. And you shall make me great, I know that.”

Maedhros’ fingers ran through Kit’s hair.

“I’ll burn up your soul,”

“It’s a fair bargain.”

Kit turned his face away from the glitter beneath him up to meet the eyes of his lover.

“If I had as many souls as there are stars in heaven I’d give them all for you Mephistopheles.”

“Quite the poet tonight.”

“I love you.”

Maedhros held Kit and knew how much those words cost such a trustless, lonely creature. He knew because he’d been there before, spoken like that before. Kit said them with all the hurt and the daring that he had said them himself on the shores of Mithrim over a millennia ago. Kit had let something else in to a world that had previously only ever contained himself.

“I love you too.”

The pact was sealed. It was probably nothing but trouble, but they couldn’t go back now. They were bound together, by blood, by sex, by soul. They were confederates, loyal to each other if to nothing else in this world.

Kit’s mouth was dry as he kissed it.

Remembering that kiss, Maedhros shifted his position so he was straddling Kit and tried for another one. There was always something dirty about kissing Kit Marlowe, and it wasn’t just the aftertaste of all that nicotine making him taste so strange. As Maedhros licked his tongue over Kit’s lips, chapped ragged from the incessant smoking and felt them grow moist and soft he couldn’t help but think of the other end of the boy, that other tight dry little entrance that with enough kissing and enough lube became another part of Kit’s body that he could work his way into.

One end or the other, it felt the same. Kissing Kit was sex. The boy was so damn hungry; he wanted to absorb anything you put inside him. Here he was now, sucking on Maedhros’ tongue, wanting more, wanting to be satisfied.

Maedhros knew he could slake Kit’s eternal hunger, but even he couldn’t end it. He could use his body to bring him a few hours dozy respite from the gnawing neediness for life, for everything that is, but he couldn’t stop the force. Maedhros thought it wasn’t coyness that made the French and the Elizabethans describe orgasm as death. Death would be the only thing that could bring satisfaction to all this constant scratching desire.

Poor Kit, Maedhros thought, and gave him the best comfort he could.

Maedhros didn’t know quite why he loved sitting on Kit’s lap and kissing him, just kissing him, until he could feel Kit get hard beneath him. He could feel it now, already, the effects of his tongue, through the thin fabric of the boy’s trousers, hear it in the little moans that escaped from him every time they drew back for a breath. Maedhros would kiss Kit mercilessly until he ached, until he was desperate for relief, until they both were. It didn’t stand to reason, Maedhros had kissed enough people before this bedraggled poet, continued to do so every night at the Hacienda to pay the rent. He couldn’t even remember kissing Fingon being this good.

Other things with Fingon perhaps, but not the kissing.

Sex is magic, Maedhros thought breathlessly. Sex is sacred. It’s beyond science. You can do the same thing with one person and it produces nothing more than a little ticklish, unwilling arousal. You can do it with another and it feels like this. No wonder it scares people. I’m only kissing him and it feels like, it feels like –

He stopped and gasped for breath. Kit’s eyes, almost black with arousal looked back at him. This time it was Maedhros who moaned.

It feels like we are swapping souls. Like I have his life force in my mouth and he has mine. Like we are feeding off each other.

Maedhros pulled Kit’s shirt over his head, then removed his own. He shifted a little to allow Kit to work his trousers down, to shake them off his ankles. My beautiful mortal, thought Mae, my beautiful second-best poet. The boy was pulling Mae’s own trousers down now, retrieving the tube of lubricant from his pocket as he did so.

Maedhros held his fingers out to catch the gloop that Kit let fall on them. There was a moment of conspiratorial understanding flashing between them, then they changed positions, Maedhros on his back, Kit lying over him. They kissed again and Maedhros guided his slick hand behind Kit.

Now that your mouth is wet and yielding and open, lets see about what we can do for the other end, thought the Quende.

They kissed and Maedhros worked his fingers over the knot of flesh between Kit’s nethers. He stroked it until he felt it relax, tentatively pressed a finger against it, until Kit moaned and parted his legs further to let him in. He worked him from both ends now, arching his back to press his body against Kit, controlling him between his hand and his mouth, feeling the little whimpers he gave out as stroked the delicate skin inside him.

“I love you like this,” Maedhros gasped.

Kit tightened around his fingers in reply. Being inside him felt wonderful. He worked methodically, brushing against the layers of muscle, feeling them twitch and open up to him. It was so good to make someone feel this good. Reading Kit’s pleasure with his fingertips, the way each movement inside him reflected in a gasp, in a twitch of his stomach and a thrust of his cock against Maedhros’ thighs, it didn’t feel dirty, it felt like kindness, like pure charity.

Maedhros knew Kit liked to be used like this. He was the proudest sodomite Maedhros had ever met, once his clothes were off. He took immense pleasure in what his arse could do, what it could take in, how beautiful it felt to be stretched, to yield, to feel the muscles down his back ache as they accommodated another man inside them. The brave big boy who took all that was given, who swallowed it whole. Maedhros liked to help Kit feel proud of himself.

He toyed with keeping the kid like this until he came. He’d done it before and sorted himself out later, getting more from the memory of bringing his lover off than from the strokes of his hand. But Kit moaned, pushed out of the kiss and fumbled on the floor for more lube.

“I love –“

“Don’t say it,” said Kit, slicking himself as Maedhros’ hand was occupied. “Say it and I’ll come.”

“I want you to come,”

Kit’s face visibly tensed as if he was trying very hard not to do just that.

“Please, I want – I want.”

Kit pressed against Maedhros, his body saying what his mouth could not. I want to be inside you Mephisto. I want to loose myself in you.

So they lay on the rug, Kit fucking Maedhros and Maedhros fingerfucking Kit, lost to the world. They were somewhere blank, somewhere away from earth, somewhere with a white stage and a white backdrop that was silent, completely still.

Sweaty hair fell over Kit’s face as he asked, “Where have you taken me now Mephisto, where have you –”. Then he was crying out again, because his body was so full and all that mattered was feeling the pleasure, feeling Mephistopheles pleasure, feeling in his own skin how the demon felt as he fucked him. My body, your body, who cares, who cares, it’s all one, one being, oh fucking Christ.

Maedhros held him safe as he came. I won’t let you go mad Kit, he thought even as he shot hot semen over his stomach. He waited until Kit was ready to open his eyes again, stroking his back, enjoying the calm that flowed through his lover’s body.

“Oh,” said Kit, senselessly blinking, lost for words and lost to everything else.

“That good?”

“I love you Mephistopheles.”

“I love you, Kit Marlowe.”

They lay on the rug and held each other as their bodies gently re-acclimatised to being without desire. Carpet burns started to bite slightly, skin began to feel clammy under the sweat, and the world came back to them. Kit snuggled into Maedhros’ arms as it happened, feeling the peace that only the dead of exhaustion brought him. Maedhros stroked his hair.

“Must you, Kit.”

But Kit had already got up and reached across the floor for his lighter, his cigarettes, the ashtray. He leant against the sofa and breathed in the fumes once more, already hungry, already craving again.