Lust Or No Harm Done Read Free Page B

and it made noises like an old man. Michael dumped his briefcase on the hall table and snapped on the living-room light.
    The Cherub was sitting on the sofa.
    'Bloody hell!' exclaimed Michael, and stumbled backwards. 'What are you doing here?'
    Tony sat with both hands placed on his knees. 'I don't know,' he said in a mild voice.
    'How did you get in!' The central light was bare and bleak.
    'I don't know,' Tony said. He still hadn't moved.
    The scaffolding, thought Michael. He climbed up the bloody scaffolding. 'Get out of here!' Michael shouted.
    The eyes narrowed and the head tilted sideways.
    And then, Oh God, he was gone. The air roiled, as if from tarmac on a hot day. It poured into the space Tony had suddenly vacated. There was no imprint left on the cushions.
    The Cherub simply disappeared. Not even a flutter of wings.
    Michael stood and stared. He kept staring at the sofa. What had happened was not possible. Or rather it made a host of other things suddenly possible: magic, madness, ghosts.
    Michael sat down with a bump and slowly unwound his scarf. He stood up and poured himself a whiskey, swirling it around in the glass and inspecting it, yellow and toxic. Whiskey had destroyed his father.
    In a funny kind of way, it felt as if Tony was his father's ghost come back to haunt him.
    Michael took a swig and then sat down with his notebook and Pilot pencil to answer every question except the most important.
     
    Who indeed is Michael?
     
    In a very few photographs, Michael was beautiful.
    Most photographs of him were short-circuited by a grimace of embarrassment or a dazzled nervous grin that gave him the teeth of a rodent. If someone short stood next to him, Michael would stoop and twist and force himself lower.
    In other photographs, Michael looked all right. In those, he would have taken off his wire-rimmed spectacles and combed his hair and stood up straight. By hazard, he would be wearing a shirt that someone had ironed, and he would have left the pens out of the top pocket. It would be a period in which Michael was not experimenting with beards to hide his face, or pony tails to control his runaway, curly hair.
    The best photographs of all would be on a beach, on holiday, with something to occupy his awkward hands. It would be apparent then that Michael had the body of an athlete. He was a big, broad-shouldered man. Because of the flattening of his broken nose, his face was rugged, like a boxer's. Michael could look unbelievably butch.
    There was one photograph from Michael's youth.
    It was hidden away, unsorted. Michael would not be able to find it now. He didn't need to. Michael carried it around with him in memory. He could always see it, even when he didn't want to.
    His father had taken it from a riverboat in California, during their last summer together. In the photograph, Michael is sixteen years old and is quite possibly the best-looking person on the planet. He is certainly one of the happiest.
    In the photograph Michael sits in a dinghy. He's laughing and holding up a poor pooch of a dog. She was called Peaches the Pooch. Peaches gazes miserably out from under a thick coating of river-bottom mud. Michael's thighs and calves are also covered in mud. Even then he was a big lad, with wide shoulders and lines of muscle on his forearm. His black eyes are fixed directly on whoever is taking the photograph and they are wide with delight. His face is nut brown, like an Indian's, and his smile is blue-white in contrast. His black hair has reddish-brown streaks from constant sunlight. Sunlight glints all around him on the slick, brown water and onto his face, which is indisputably happy.
    If you look closely, the nose isn't broken.
    By the time that photograph had been developed and posted back to England, it was winter. That summer Michael on the Sacramento River was already history. Michael remembered opening the envelope. There was no letter inside from his father, just photographs, that photograph.
    It should