Lust Or No Harm Done

'All right,' agreed Michael.

'All right,' said Picasso, grinning and slapping his knee. 'So now we look for a new place to live. How do we do that?'

'I don't know,' Michael admitted. 'When I first came here to live, I rented, and then they sold it to me for a low price. So I don't know how to find houses, or get another mortgage.'

Picasso tutted. 'You are a child. Are you poor in spirit to stay here without thinking? For how long have you lived here?'

'Thirteen years.'

'You need a new life?'

Michael found that the answer was, 'Yes.'

It was a trifle. 'We move,' said Picasso. He stood up abruptly, walked away, and came back with heaps of newspapers that looked like an unmade bed. He pushed these at Michael, and growled, 'My baby boy. My baby boy needs to grow up.'

It could get awfully tiring living with somebody who went straight to the truth without passing Go.

'Here. They have ads for houses? You read the ads, I will go get us bread to dunk in the coffee.'

Michael began to look. Everything seemed to start at ?200,000. Picasso came back from the shops with croissants. He flung the grease-spotted bag on the table, dunked a croissant in Michael's cup and demanded, his mouth full, 'You have found somewhere?'

'It's not that easy.'

'And that one there?'

'I've already looked.'

Picasso seized the newspaper and read out loud in criminal English: 'Two-bedroom apartment three floor roof garden? Garden. Camden Town. One hundred eighty thousand. Sounds OK!' he declared and pushed the billows of newspaper back down onto the table.

'Sounds good,' repeated Michael, mystified, and picked up the newspaper again to look again at the page of ads to make sure it was actually there, and try to understand how he could have missed it.

'We have to make an offer quickly, if it is a bargain, yes?'

'I think so. But I have to go to work today.'

'No you don't. No one has to do anything. They choose to do it. You choose not to work today, so that we can buy this apartment.'

'I'm sorry, I can't do that.'

'Hmm.' Picasso looked suddenly worried and concerned, and he swallowed. 'My friend,' he said and took Michael's knee again. 'Look at me. Look at me in the eyes. I am hungry to paint. If I think you are stopping me painting, I will go evil. Do you believe me?'

Michael rang in sick.

Picasso sang while he washed up, and Michael looked at his pay slips and his bank balance and tried to find ads for apartments similar to his own to see how much it might be worth. He only earned ?35,000 a year, partly from the lab project and partly from teaching. The bank would be nervous about the temporary nature of the project, but even so, he should be able to get a mortgage for about ?99,000. If you called the study a bedroom, this was a two-bedroom flat. One of those in a mansion block around the corner was selling for ?350,000.

He could do it. He could do it and make money.

Michael looked at the sunlight streaming in through the bay window, on the old sand-coloured carpet, the old sofa, and the old wallpaper. There was a butterfly fluttering inside him that made him smile. It was time to go. It was time to find somewhere new.

Picasso had them down into Goodge Street tube station by 8.15 am. He breathed in the stench of the trains and strutted up and down the platform, taking possession. He looked at the posters and beamed.

'I was right,' he said. 'This is my world. I made it.'

He pointed to a poster for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. A computer-distorted Johnny Depp grimaced out of a field of white, amid Gerald Scarfe-like splashes of black. 'That is a photograph, yes? What did that to a photograph?'

'It's a computer graphic. Ordinateur. Oh shit.' Michael took a deep breath and tried to explain computers in French. He knew none of the words. He got across the idea that it was a machine that could add and subtract, and could turn anything into numbers, even images. So by changing the numbers, you changed the images.

'You can make anything.' Picasso looked impressed.

'They made dinosaurs.'

'Tuh. They did that in King Kong.'

'These looked real. They can make people look real.'

Picasso's jaw thrust outwards. 'You have one of these ordinateurs?'

'I use them at work. I also have one at home.'

'You have one at home? Do many people have these things at home?'

'Yes.'

Picasso laughed aloud and did a little dance. 'I am in the future. You have brought me into the future, my friend.' His eyes were sparkling.

The apartment looked unprepossessing. It was on a corner over a shoe shop, with a battered multi-locked door on a side street facing a recently closed ex-supermarket. Picasso rang the buzzer and then shouted up, 'Hallo. Hallo. We want to buy your apartment!'

A woman looked out from the top of the wall. Evidently, she was sipping coffee on the roof. 'I'm sorry, but you will have to talk to the estate agent first, if you want to see the property.' She had what might pass for an American accent. She did not look at all offended. If anything, she was rather amused.

'Estate agent, qu'est-ce que c'est?' Picasso demanded of Michael.

'Hold on, I'll be down,' the woman said.

Michael tutted. 'It is not possible to arrive at people's apartments at this hour of the morning.' They heard footsteps. The door was opened by a tall woman, grey-haired in a blue-patterned kimono. She explained. 'Estate agents sont agents immobiliers.'

'Uh, estate agents!' huffed Picasso. 'They are only after your money. It is us who want to buy your apartment.'

The woman chuckled. 'Well, OK, come in.'

She spoke French and was Canadian and her name was Mirielle. Mirielle led them up a staircase that was crammed with bicycles. On the landing there was a toilet in a kind of booth that had been jammed against a sloping roof. It looked like a set from an early German Expressionist movie like the Cabinet of Dr Caligari.

Past more banisters and they were in one huge room. One wall was lined with kitchen sink and encrusted cooker. Two other sides were crowded with bookcases, desks and sofas. All along one wall arched windows faced east, dancing with light. Picasso was overjoyed. He turned and rubbed the top of his head in a circle against Michael's chest.

Mirielle led them through a door out onto a flat rooftop, lined with big red pots holding giant ferns, bamboo and evergreens. 'This is the garden. We would sell the plants with the flat. Do you like gardens?'

'He does,' said Picasso and pointed to Michael.

The banisters led up a staircase that smelled of sawdust, to two bedrooms. One was long and dark with a sloping roof, and the other was a garret with another huge window. It was full of canvases lined up like cards in an index file. Picasso rifled through them. His cheeks rose up like buns. There were Goths with facial tattoos, cross cut on the same canvas with the backs of turtles. Magicians in top hats were under the sea, but the seabed was an aerial map of New York. 'You are one of my children,' Picasso said.

'Oh really,' chuckled Mirielle. 'And what is your name?'

'Pablo Picasso,' he announced. Um, thought Michael, that might be a mistake.

'Funny,' said Mirielle, without missing a beat. 'That's my name too.'