One of the moving men said, 'Tell him he mustn't, please, it's the insurance.'
Michael shook his head. 'It won't do any good telling him anything.'
The mover was old and reliable, and he looked at Picasso as if accepting some fundamental fact of life. 'It's your funeral. I hope not,' he said.
Michael and Picasso stayed in the back of the lorry. It jerked and thumped and squealed its way up Tottenham Court Road to Camden Town. Picasso sat on the sofa, looking out the open back. Somehow he had spirited a bottle of champagne from his other world, the eternal past from which Angels seemed to come. The ink on the label was as thick as a rubber skid mark and the font plain, listing the name of a village. Picasso began to sing an old, strange yelping song. Michael was to learn later it was
The van took fifteen minutes to coax itself backwards into their narrow side street. Picasso manhandled packing cases with the gusto of a bullfighter. He nipped so quickly up and down stairs that he reminded Michael of a silent flickering film, a two-reel comedy short.
Picasso was untidy and disordered; everything he did was a kind of unintended blurt. Their new flat rapidly filled with papers, boxes, chairs, CD racks, suits on hangers, lamps and cutlery. They were piled high in unsorted and unnecessarily exciting piles that threatened to spill paint or crystalware onto the floor. Picasso flung himself onto the toilet, fully clothed, in order to sit down, and announced with a sigh, 'We are done!'
Michael looked around forlornly. A heap of previously sorted lab reports slithered onto the floor as if depressed and exhausted.
Picasso gulped water from the tap. 'We go!' he announced. 'We help your friends.' He took the keys and locked up, and Michael found himself heading back to the apartment that was no longer his.
The Miazgas had economized. They were carrying their own furniture up the stairs. Picasso hoisted the Poles' piano on his own back, and twisted it sideways up the circular staircase. He carried Marta's valuable china in an orange washing-up bowl. The plates and glasses clashed and tinkled as he bounded up the stairs. Picasso pogoed down them again on two feet, like a child splashing in mud puddles. He gave Mr Miazga orders and Madame Miazga compliments. He let Marta mop his brow and he mimed having a fever, panting with the heat she generated.
Somehow or other, once in the flat, it was Michael and Mr Miazga who did all the less spectacular lifting. Picasso stood back with Marta and conferred and suggested the best places for the furniture to go in their new and cramped surroundings. For this Picasso had absolutely no talent. He suggested their enormous rubber tree stay in the hallway, where it would have no light and block access. With minimum ceremony, he dumped most of Mr Miazga's suits on the kitchen table.
Michael was by now exhausted and dazed. An avalanche of other people's things poured into what still felt like his home. He kept thinking he would offer people a drink: the tonic water was in Camden Town, the ice was melted. He wanted to comb his hair, but his comb of course would no longer be in its accustomed place on the mantelpiece. Except that it was, poor forlorn, forgotten comb, faithfully waiting his return. See, Michael thought, I haven't forgotten you. If he felt that about a comb, what did he feel about a man? A whole habit of life?
Michael combed and recombed his hair and watched Picasso. Picasso had flung himself down on the sandy carpet as if it were a bed. He lounged up a hand to accept a cup of tea that Marta had managed to assemble from the scattering of her kitchen.
Picasso was vain; he seemed to think the smell of his sweat was manly, virile. He did not bathe every day.
The smell of Picasso permeated the flat. It was not an unpleasant smell, certainly not to Michael. It was a sexual smell. It was as if the very air were stuffed with Picasso's penis. All three of them, wife, lover and anxious husband, could not think of anything other than those powerful genitals.
Mr Miazga was pale and thin-lipped, and sat on edge, hands clasping his knees, his delicate down-turned face looking as if someone had farted. Mrs Miazga's movements were anxious, faltering. She was disoriented. Her fine blonde hair came increasingly undone. It seemed to be falling out, drifting to the floor.
Michael took stock. Well, he told himself, you could have had a very clean pub manager instead. Instead you chose Pablo Picasso. It will be exciting, Michael. It will not be easy. And it may not last forever.
Michael could see the moment when Picasso wanted to get back to painting. In one single rolling motion he was up from the carpet and pounding the palm of his hand with his fist. He looked around the flat as if all of it, the original ownership, the sale, the move, had been his own work. He nodded as if to acknowledge the good job he had done. He said, direct to Michael, 'Come, we go to our home.'
Then Picasso took Michael's hand. It was evidently unpremeditated, thoughtless, sincere.
Michael found himself grateful and slightly weak at the knees. So, evidently did Mr Miazga. He settled back in his chair from relief, and his chest expanded, and his eyes zipped left towards his wife, and then widened, once. See? he seemed to say. I told you. They are lovers. You get all excited over a man who is homosexual.
After they left, outside on the landing Picasso promised, 'I will have the wife.' His voice was airy, amused, and he spoke out of the corners of his mouth as if Madame Miazga were a cigar.
The new flat in Camden was dark and in disorder. Street lights outlined the crags and valleys of jumble. Michael was given no time for regrets. Picasso herded him to their unmade bed, driven by a lust that Michael knew that he himself had not inspired. Picasso wanted Marta.
Picasso dozed and then woke up with a snort. He flung off the single summer sheet, and padded into the sitting room, leaving Michael in the bed. Lights blazed around the edges of the bedroom door, and there was a sound of assembling, plugging in, mild swearing. Michael finally admitted that he was awake and would not sleep. He stumped downstairs into the sitting room and saw Picasso at 2.00 am, sitting in front of the computer playing
'Hmm,' said Picasso. 'This is not three-dimensional… you just move closer to the drawing.' On his right, there was a pad and scrawled sketches of the Myst world populated with drunken people and smiling goats. Their smiles were drawn as a series of single unbroken spirals describing cheeks. Michael glanced down over Picasso's body. Picasso worked erect.
'Coming back to bed?' murmured Michael.
'I don't know,' grunted Picasso.
In the morning, the bed was cold and when Michael went downstairs Picasso still sat in front of the computer with a cup of cold coffee and strewn stale bread. Had he been up all night?
'You eat too much,' Picasso announced, in a bad mood. 'You will get fat. You will become a drunken boor.' He sighed, as if it were inevitable. 'Do not expect me to cook you breakfast,' he said. He slip-slopped his way out to the roof garden, carrying his coffee, escaping Michael. It was summer, warm, with beautiful light over the ferns. Michael joined him and Picasso said, 'You missed work yesterday and the day before. If you were more dedicated, you would do a better job.'
Picasso wanted him out of the flat. Michael showered, and deliberately took his time over coffee and yoghurt and bananas, and pointedly washed up – not a Picasso habit – and left at his usual time feeling bloated around the eyes and saddle-sore.
No one at work mentioned that Michael had missed two days. He began to explain that he had had to move flats suddenly. No one asked him any questions about it. Ebru and Emilio were quiet, brisk and business-like, as if Michael were a customer they would attend to in a moment. He filed slides and looked at data, and by the end of the day realized that he had spent it alone.
When he got back home, he found Picasso at the computer, now wearing Michael's best Japanese bathrobe. The game was noisier and the images moved. A tiny alien leapt and jumped and avoided being fried by robots.
Picasso kept playing. 'She is softened and ripe and if you are a man at all you will have her,' he said. Then he looked up. His eyes were angry and hungry. 'Do it because I tell you. I will like fucking you better if I think you are a real man.'
Upstairs, Mrs Miazga was in Michael's bed. She was huge, pink and dishevelled, her hair in Pre-Raphaelite waves. The room smelled of her hair, and of her body, opened and reopened during the course of the day.
