Lust Or No Harm Done

Picasso seemed to sense him relenting. 'My maker of Angels.'

I'm in love and I'm helpless, thought Michael. I am shooting Whitewater rapids of love. All I can do is hang on and try to avoid the rocks.

Picasso leaned around and kissed him, and the river bore Michael away.

The apartment never recovered from the move. As fast as Michael tried to put it in order, Picasso created another row of jam jars full of brushes in the bathroom, or a pile of printed help files on the floor. There were heaps of opened boxes from amazon.com. Half-read books were left open and face down on the floor. Sandals, socks and paint-stained newspapers stayed where they fell. It had never struck Michael until then that he himself was basically a tidy person.

'Leave it, it will continue to protect the floor,' said Picasso, bemused by Michael's protests.

'It's a horrible mess,' said Michael, going firm.

'That is a matter of aesthetics,' Picasso replied. 'I will not be bullied by you over aesthetics.'

Something shuddered in Michael and went still.

Paintings began to appear, stuck to the walls with Blu Tack: gouache on crumpled paper: a parrot in blue and green and red; a vaguely African-looking pattern in black and ochre with white dots in swirls, a tunnel of blue and white light. A sculpture in Blu Tack was stuck to the coffee table, a kind of amused Isis with hips and breasts, and a shocked open mouth. Michael asked who it was supposed to be. Picasso had to repeat several times before Michael penetrated his accent: it was a Blu Tack Geri Halliwell.

Picasso developed a bewildering affection for the Spice Girls: he played the CD over and over.

'Why don't you stop?' Michel asked him.

'I will when I understand it,' said Picasso. In self-defence, Michael bought him a compilation of Asian dance, Anohka, and Madonna's album Ray of Light. He bought him Philip Glass and Arvo Part. 'They are no good, they try to be intelligent,' Picasso said, dismissing everything else except S Club 7 and Steps.

Picasso loved CDs. In the world music section of HMV he found compilations of Europop and Brazilian brega. He played CDs incessantly. 'They do the same to music, make it perfect but inhuman.'

Picasso loved Pot Noodles and disposable cameras; he was entranced by Play Station and tried to get Michael to buy one and a samurai game called Soul Blade. 'Tush. You buy rubbish that does not move. I want Ade's Oddyssey. I want Sonic Hedgehog!' He kept buying glossy magazines – Q, Maxim, Elle, Vanity Fair, Empire. He would tear them to pieces and Blu Tack together mosaics out of fragments of shiny, laminated print. Discarded corpses of shredded journals began to litter the flat. He made himself little bracelets of Blu Tack, he stuck shards of magazine colour to his T-shirt with Blu Tack. In the corners of the room or running along the picture rail were little families of creatures not entirely unlike mice made out of Blu Tack.

'You practically breathe Blu Tack,' said Michael. He was being driven, slowly and without cessation, out of his box. The first of his blinding headaches arrived, after a glass of wine on a Friday evening.

Three weeks later, Picasso called him to the screen. 'The first,' he said.

It took a moment for Michael to understand what he was looking at.

It was pieces of his room. When Michael moved, flesh-coloured fragments moved in shards. The videoconferencing camera on top of the computer was feeding what it saw live to the hard disk, and those images, refracted and broken, were made part of a series of mirrors. The series of mirrors formed a face, in the same way that feathers form wings.

It was a portrait of Michael, in fractured, virtual mirrors.

The head could be turned, rotated and sometimes, as if at random, the entire face would blossom outwards, the mirrors separating and reassembling into a portrait from a greater distance.

'It's your face when I fuck you,' said Picasso.

Each time the portrait reassembled, its eyes would gleam brighter and a smile would assemble in sword shapes.

'The audience can choose all angles, but each time they choose, the program will force the image of you closer and closer to joy. You look like that. When I fuck you, you have a joyful face. You look like a young man!'

The face assembled and reassembled every time something moved in the real world.

'Then you come.' Picasso mimed something explosive with his hands, fingers outstretched. 'You will break up into pieces of light. And you are reincarnated.'

No one had ever done anything like that about or for Michael before. 'Do you…' Michael wondered how to proceed. 'Do you love me?'

Picasso shrugged. 'I ponder you. You have this miracle, and you don't use it because I satisfy you. There is an economy about that which I like.'

The face on the screen grew brighter and brighter and more joyful, unavoidably, pre-programmed. That was what Picasso wished for him.

Picasso said, 'You have nothing. No money, no morals, no interests, no conversation, no friends to speak of. But you Are.'

'What am I?'

'There is no word for what you are. You just Are. Ah, watch now!'

And the mirrored face dissolved.

Michael's heart swelled like a satsuma growing wings, and rose up as if wanting to be born, jamming in his throat with love.

When Michael came home at night, the whole apartment would smell of eggwhite, turpentine and glue. Suddenly the walls were papered with new Picassos, their colours like tropical glazed pottery: greens, reds, blues and yellows. The whole flat seemed to trampoline off itself with joy, bouncing back and forth between its own exhilarating surfaces, the spaces between gaping with amazement. The only possible response walking into the room was: who the fuck has done this?

When Mr Miazga came to give Picasso his lessons, he was stunned, his mouth going slack and sad. It's not fair, his eyes seemed to say, that my rival should be such a man.

Mr Miazga looked forlornly at Michael. Help me, he seemed to say.

Michael found his return glance said: you help me first.

At eleven o'clock one night about three months after his arrival, Picasso barrelled into the flat with ten boisterous, excited people whom Michael had never met, except for Phil's friend, Jimmy Banter.

Jimmy's eyes boggled. 'My God it's M'n'M! You did land on your feet with this one, didn't you? So what's the story? Is he gay?'

'No, but he sleeps with me.'

'I wonder why,' said Jimmy. 'I mean, if he isn't gay. I mean, you were a man the last time I checked. Dear old Philip's not doing too well.'

'I'm sorry to hear that.'

'No, you're not.'

'What's wrong?'

'Lost his way, I would say. Says he's suffering from a crisis of direction.'

'Maybe he's finding a direction,' said Michael.

'He's painting portraits,' said Jimmy, miming horror.

The guests studiously avoided saying anything about the work on the wall. They stood back, and raised eyebrows, and waited for someone else to say something first. Michael offered them drinks, and learned that some of them were dealers.

Among the influx was the art critic of the Evening News. The critic's accent was ludicrously posh, a deliberate effort to be noticed and to give affront to an egalitarian world. He fearlessly gave affront to Picasso. 'Are you unable to experience any anxiety of influence?' the critic demanded. 'You do know of course from whose work you are stealing?'

'No,' said Picasso, looking smug. 'Tell me.'

'Hockney,' said the critic, as if barely able to bring himself to say the name aloud. 'In his dreadful Picasso