'If you blow me,' he said softly, 'I'll give you some.' Her lips tightened. 'How much?'
'A bag, a deal.'
'A full deal? Show me.'
'No. You want it: yes or no?'
She shrugged. She didn’t like blowing him, but there were worse things. He came quick and then she'd have the grass and the money.
'O.K.,' she said, 'get it out.'
'Don't talk like that.'
'Like what?' She had him now. Now she was the one with power.
'Don't talk tough, talk soft. O.K.?'
'O.K.,' she said.
She sucked him then, with neither passion nor revulsion, thinking what a stupid thing it was to say: don't talk tough, talk soft: how could she talk? It did not occur to her for a moment that he wanted her affection and love.
'Sister,' he said, 'little sister.'
He was miming affection, she thought, simulating love. It was necessary for him and she felt sorry for him. She could imagine him, in a brown shirt, being a Fascist, his hair slicked flat, the dark irises of his eyes stopped down to exclude ordinary people, to include nothing but the fiery bright light of some impossible hero, some unvisited place. This hate was all he had managed to pick up from his mother, who, at this very moment, was entering the front door.
Lucy stopped. 'Betty's home,' she said.
He forced her head down and she knew, as she heard the footsteps and her mother's voice, that he would not let her go. The footsteps were coming up the stairs when he finally shot his 10 ccs.
When Bettina opened the door she found David sitting at his desk with a book and Lucy brushing past her. David was smiling. Before she could ask him what the joke was she heard Lucy retching in the toilet.
'Hello, Mummy,' he said, 'how's Daddy?'
'What's the matter with Lucy?'
He shrugged. 'I guess she's a bit sick. How's Daddy?'
Bettina looked at him sharply. 'You little bugger,' she said. 'What have you done to her?'
It was not a question that would have occurred to Harry, who had never seen his family as you, dear reader, have now been privileged to.
The fluorescent light cast green over everything. The apples and bananas and grapes and biscuits and Black Forest torte and smoked trout were all placed on a small table and arranged like flowers. Why did everybody bring him food? Why, now, did they all look so sinister, the dead green things he had been given?
He sucked on his sheet and lay quite still.
The apple had once been connected to a tree. Now it was disconnected. Did it die? What was death to an apple? It had never occurred to him before that there was a vast distance between the apple on the tree and the apple on the table. Nor had he thought of the trout as connected to a river, a silver and pink being in cold blue water, eating, breathing and fucking, now laid out in a morgue under green light, a place as unimaginable to the trout as his vision of Hell had been to him.
But these things were gifts, given to him by people who loved him! They wanted him, needed him, wished him alive. As John Spearitt said, 'You always make me feel happier, Harry. Even now, when you're sick.' These were no polite little lies. And how about old George Meaney who ran the newspaper kiosk below Milanos, who had travelled by bus and tram to reach him, had hobbled painfully up the steps and stood awkwardly in this room to give him (how had he known?) smoked trout.
Yet what power would these people (coughing John, hob-bling George) have to save him? Why, even the green light could suck the life from their gifts as if reality itself (hadn't he seen it? Wasn't it proven?) was only something as thin as a tissue paper and you put your foot through (like glass, quicksand, ice) and you were, suddenly, like the trout.
For the hundredth time he clenched his eyes shut against the terrors of infinite space. He was going to die! He felt himself sucked down long green corridors of despair where he could not define his 'I' except by a dull pain which would not stop. The room began to be not a room at all, but a construction caught in the wafers of undefined space. The apples ceased to be apples, the trout was merely the external form of pain.
'Hello, Daddy.' He looked with staring eyes at his son who held a wrapped parcel in his hands.
'David,' he sat up. He was still half-caught in his waking dream. He tried to smile. He took the parcel. 'Well, well, this is nice.'
He busied himself over the parcel, hiding his confusion. 'Chocolates?'
'No, not chocolates.'
He ripped at the paper. 'Ah, a book' He felt confused. People did not give him books. He did not read books.
'I know you don't read,' David was saying, 'but it's a very unusual book. It's about drugs.'
'Ah.'
Looking at Harry's puzzled face, David began to wonder at the wisdom of giving him the book It was a thrilling, adventurous book about cocaine smuggling and the drug business. Yet when he saw the book in his father's hands he knew he would never understand it. To Harry it would be a book about criminals.
'Medical drugs?' Harry smiled at his son and turned the book over and over, wondering about its title:
'No. It's about drug smuggling.'
'Ah,' said Harry and turned it over once more. 'Ah, I see.'
In spite of himself, David felt irritated. The father he imagined was never the same as the father he spoke to. He had crept out of the house, so he could come here without Lucy, so he could be alone with his father. He had imagined a different conversation, which he now tried to induce: 'It's really very exciting,' he said. 'There's a lot about South America.'
'Ah.'
'It seems to be quite an unusual business.' He felt an almost overwhelming desire to tell his father what he was really like, that he gave not a damn about medicine or being a doctor, that he would be a son to be proud of, journeying to foreign places, confronting dangers, laughing at lightning, falling in love in Colombia. He would be a businessman adventurer and return with money and strange stories.
Harry looked at his son and was very proud of him. He was proud of how he looked, of his dark intelligent face and his rather shy gentle smile. He was proud that he had given him a book about an unusual business. He was proud of his academic record.
'How's school?'
'It's O.K. They treat us like kids.'
'Well, you are a kid.' Harry took his hand for a moment and neither of them quite knew what to do. They wanted to hug each other but it was not what the family did. They were not touchers. Sometimes they tickled. Harry, for instance, was known to have particularly ticklish feet and David was remarkable for being almost immune.
He did not want to burden his son with his father's death, and yet it seemed to him to be wrong not to tell him. They might only meet three, four, five more times and how would David feel to be cheated of this time, to squander it while his father tore up wrapping paper into little nervous strips.
And yet when he did say it, it was so unreal, so lacking in feeling or conviction that he wondered, for an instant, if he wasn't just making it up.
'David,' his son was still smiling, 'I've got to talk to you about what plans I've made,' the smile had gone, a frown begun, 'because there is some chance I'm going to die.' The dark eyes wide with shock, the mouth open, the head shaking.
'No.' Harry took his hand. 'Don't be frightened. I'm not frightened.'
'No.' Tears streamed down his face: 'You can't.'
And suddenly they were in each other's arms and Harry held the hard young body as it was ripped with sobs.
