Lust. Geoff Ryman

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СКАЧАТЬ At just the right moment she nipped him back to the table and stopped him drinking. She sat looking at him affectionately, introducing him to people. It was like having a mother who was truly cool.

      The next day his real mother, bitter with disappointment and suspicion, said, ‘Did you take any drugs?’

      ‘No, Mom.’

      ‘Who were you with?’

      ‘A girl from school, Mom.’

      ‘You were drinking. You’re underage.’

      His mother had a long pale face that had lost its prettiness quickly, lining in her thirties. Her hair was an unattractive orange pudding basin with its roots showing. Michael’s Mum looked worn, downtrodden, and utterly wrapped up in her own unhappiness. She looked like someone who had been deserted. She also looked like someone who was enduring it.

      ‘It’s not a good way to begin life, Michael, drinking in clubs.’

      Reality was returning like a headache.

      ‘No, Mum.’

      Her narrow face didn’t trust him, and didn’t trust itself. She didn’t know what to think. And gave her head a shake.

      ‘Your clothes are ruined. How can we turn them back into Moss Bros like that?’

      ‘They’re used to it, Mom. That’s why people hire gear.’

      ‘And they pay to have it cleaned and all. Do you have the money to pay for that or do you expect me to pay for it, Michael?’

      Bottles gave him a call. ‘Hiya! How’s tricks?’

      He didn’t know what tricks were. ‘Oh OK, but Mom’s on my case about the clothes.’

      Bottles chuckled. ‘Fun costs, Michael. That’s how you know it’s been real fun and not TV.’

      Michael thought of sports teams in California, and the coaches who all talked like General Patton. ‘No pain, no gain,’ he mimicked, calling them up.

      ‘No pain, no game,’ she corrected him. ‘So, are you man enough for another night out at Club Louise?’

      Perhaps he wasn’t and that was the trouble. At the very least, he was scared that the magic wouldn’t work a second time. At the most, Michael was scared that she would make a pass at him. He was confused, confounded by sex. Her big breasts had allure, but Michael also knew already that his future did not lie with women. He just had a lot of trouble finally admitting that to himself.

      It made him awkward. ‘Hi!’ he kept saying brightly, every time he saw her, and nothing else. He could think of nothing else to say. He sounded like a chipmunk and felt five years old.

      Michael wanted his more normal friends to see how wise she was, so he trapped her into a lunch with them. The girls, particularly, were fashionable and elegant and calm and confident and virginal and enclosed within a social circle. One of them grew up to be a newsreader; another was now a big cheese at the British Museum. They eyed Bottles, who plainly had a rich future as a floozy. The future newsreader widened her eyes and stared fixedly at Michael and that meant: ‘What on earth are you doing with her and why have you brought her to our table?’

      Ostentatiously, Bottles began to smoke in public in the school cafeteria. This was likely to get the whole table into trouble. The girls started to leave.

      Bottles had no social circle, but promiscuously joked with anyone who would have her. Michael sat with her at these scattered tables surrounded by surly underachievers. His mouth ran away with him. He bragged to them about Club Louise. He knew it was a mistake, he could feel coolness slipping away, but he wanted everyone to know that they had gone to a club. So he repeated every last incident of their evening out, like it was some big deal, and Bottles ground out her cigarette with impatience.

      Eventually Michael stopped trying to spend lunchtime with her. It was too painful. He started to nod at her in corridors as they passed, feigning mild friendship.

      He knew Bottles thought it was what always happened to her, that there was something about her that put people off. She was fed up being too old for her age. Gradually, they lost touch.

      Michael saw Bottles a year later. He’d convinced a bunch of people in his biology class to go to Club Louise.

      Louise still greeted visitors as if to a literary salon, but inside the atmosphere was different. Tami didn’t remember him. She went hard-faced and silent when greeted by this pale, stolid-looking nerd. ‘Hmm. Hmm,’ she said several times and pointedly moved on.

      The music was terrible, like something recorded by amateurs in a bathtub. Michael asked for Station to Station and the DJ curled his lip. People sat glumly and defensively at tables, greeting only a very few people with effusive kissing on the cheeks that made plain to everyone else that they were not being kissed. People rolled their eyes as you passed, or said, ‘Get out of the bleeding way. Honestly, these stuck-up queens.’

      Bottles came in and at first Michael didn’t recognize her. She’d cut her hair and wore thick make-up that made her look Egyptian. She was kissed into a table with gladsome cries of feigned elegance, and then they all fell into the same chill silence. A ferret-faced young man with dyed blond hair was giving a very hard time to some overly pretty old hippie who had cut his hair. In something like despair and panic the old hippie was trying to convince him of something. It was Malcolm and Johnny, and if that was the birth of punk, as far as Michael was concerned, you could keep it.

      ‘Everybody’s so bitchy,’ despaired a member of the biology class. She played cello in the school orchestra.

      ‘It used to be so nice. Really,’ said Michael.

      Like a basilisk, Bottles looked stonily through him.

      The next time Michael saw her was in the 1990s on TV. She looked like Mo Mowlam, and wore pantsuits and sensible middle-length hair and was a spokesperson for an Aids charity. She was on the breakfast show, convincing people to come forward to have an Aids test. ‘The main thing to remember is there’s now some point to having the test. If we catch it early enough, we know the drugs can work.’

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