“Darling heart, you’re looking especially radiant tonight!” He kisses me, on the cheek, not the mouth-to-mouth soul kiss of tesh meeting. He calls for cocktails. “Your mother is well, dismal suburbia notwithstanding?”

  I reply that business is booming, and tell him about the pimp.

  “I heard about that on News at Ten. That was you? A gangland killing, they said, made to look like an overdose.” He takes a Turkish from his silver cigarette case, taps it once, twice, three times. “That was bit of a bloody risk, wasn’t it, dear heart?”

  “He’d broken in. Credit him with some intelligence, he could have worked out something was going on.”

  “Still, Orion darling, you could have left him to us. It’s our job to look after you, and yours to provide us with what we want. Yon people have a vicious streak a mile wide. One of your less endearing traits. Smoke?” I take the proffered cheroot.

  “So, this new client.”

  Vinyl Lionel examines his chrome-polished nails. “Well, there’s not a lot to say about him. Nice enough boy. You wouldn’t think to look at him, but then you never do, do you? Fat Willy recruited him, you know, the usual way.” He moistens a finger in his Singapore sling, draws a yin-yang symbol on the marble table top.

  “How much does he know?”

  “The bare minimum. He’ll talk the leg off you, dear heart. One of those confessional types. Well, fiddle-dee-dee, if that isn’t him now…” Vinyl Lionel waves flamboyantly, trying to attract the attention of the lost boy by the door, fidgeting and conspicuous in a chain-store gent’s ready-made suit. “Oh God, I told him don’t dress up, Strangefella’s isn’t that kind of place, and what does he do? Well, don’t blame me if the gorillas bounce him.”

  “Nerves, Lionel,” I say. “You were as bad the first time.”

  “Bitch,” says Vinyl Lionel. He resents any overt reminder of his fall from youth and beauty while we remain changeless, ageless, ever-young. He beckons the young man between the tables and the smokes in the back-beat and the bass. “I’ll bet you fifty he drives a Ford.” One bet I won’t be taking, Lionel. A Ford Sierra, metallic gray, F-registration, the odd rust spot. Something to do with metallic finishes, I always think. Garfield crucified upside-down on the back window. Open the glove compartment and cassettes fall out. Home bootlegs, all of them, apart from the mandatory copy of Graceland. Nothing more recent than three years ago.

  He is nervous. I can smell it over his Heathrow Duty-Free after­shave. Nerves, and something I cannot quite place, but seems familiar. I do not much like being driven by someone who is so nervous. Gaily lit buses swing past headed down across the river South London way; girls in smog masks, denim cut-offs over cycling shorts and ski-goggles weave past on clunking MTBs like the outriders of some totalitarian, body-fascist invasion. I light up a cheroot Vinyl Lionel gave me as a keepsake as we surge and stop, surge and stop along Shaftesbury Avenue. Lionel, the outrageous old ul-goi, was right. This one seems to want to talk but is afraid of me. I weave pheromones, draw him into a chemical web of confidence. On New Oxford Street, he opens.

  “I cannot believe this happening,” he says. “It’s incredible; that something so, so, huge, could have been secret for so long.”

  “It has several thousand years of pedigree as a working relation­ship,” I say. “As long there have been tesh, there have been ul-goi. And our mutual need for secrecy from the goi.”

  “Goi?”

  “Humans.” I wave a lace-gloved hand at the rain-wet people hud­dling along Holborn. “Those. The ignorant mass.”

  “And tesh?”

  I draw a circle on the misted-up quarter-light, bisect it with a curv­ing s-shape. Yin and yang. Male and female in one. From time before time the symbol of the tesh.

  “And ul-goi?”

  “Those who can only achieve sexual satisfaction with a tesh.”

  The word seems to release him. He closes his eyes for a reckless moment, sighs. “It’s funny. No, it’s not funny, it’s tragic, it’s frighten­ing. It’s only recently I’ve found where it started. When I was a kid I read this comic, the Eagle or the Lion or the Victor. There was one story, one scene, where this diver is trying to find out who’s been sabotaging North Sea drilling rigs and the bad guys catch him and tie him to the leg of the rig until his air runs out. That was where it started for me, with the guy in the rubber suit tied and helpless, with death inevitable. It was such an anti-climax when he got rescued in the next issue. I used to fantasize about wetsuits. I must have been Jacques Cousteau’s number one fan.” He laughs. Beneath folding umbrellas, girls in Sixties-revival PVC raincoats and Gerry-Anderson-puppet hair-dos dart between the slowly grinding cars, giggling and swearing at the drivers.

  “You don’t know what it is at that age. But it was a major motive turn in my childhood: tight clothing. Superheroes, of course, were a real turn-on. I remember one, where the Mighty Thor was being turned into a tree. Jesus! I nearly creamed myself. I was addicted to downhill skiing. If there was ever anything in the Sunday color supplements about downhill skiing, or ballet, I would cut it out, sneak it up to my room and stare at it under the sheets by the light from my electric blanket switch.

  “Jane Fonda was, like, the answer to my prayers. I used to borrow my sister’s leotard and tights and dress up, just to feel that head to toeness. Sometimes…sometimes, when the evenings were dark, I’d pass on late-night shopping with the family so I could dress up, nip over the back fence onto our local sports field and walk about. Just walk about. It was good, but it wasn’t enough. There was something in there, in my head, that wanted something more but couldn’t tell me what it was.

  “When I was about seventeen I discovered sex shops. The number of times I would just walk past because I never had the nerve to push that door and go in. Then one day I decided it couldn’t be any harder going in than just walking past. It was like Wonderland. I spent the fifty pounds I’d been saving in one pig-out. There was one magazine, Mr. S.M…. I’d never seen anything like it before, I didn’t know people could do that sort of thing to each other. Then, after I’d read them all twenty, fifty, a hundred times, I realized it wasn’t doing it anymore. I bought new mags, but they were the same: there were things going on in my head that were far, far more exciting than what was going on in those photographs. In my best fantasies, there were things like no one had ever thought of before.”

  “This happens,” I say. They all think they are the only ones. They start so differently, men and women, back among the sand castles and Dinky toys and Cindy dolls of childhood; they think there cannot be anyone else like them. But already they are being drawn toward us, and each other. They realize that what excites frenzies of passion in others leaves them cold and uncomprehending, and everything falls apart: friends, lovers, jobs, careers, hopes, dreams, everything except the search for that something that will fulfill the fantasy in their heads. Can anyone be as tormented, as depraved, as they? I do not disillusion them: fantasies and confessions, and the small absolutions and justifications I can offer; these are treasures held close to the heart. Tell me your story, then, ul-goi boy in your best suit, and I will listen, for, though it is a story I have heard ten thousand times before, it is a story that deserves to be heard. You have had the courage that so many lack, the courage to reach for what you truly want.

  For the ul-goi, it is the frustration of desiring to be what they are and what they are not simultaneously.

  Where have all the fluorescent re-spray Volkswagen Beetles started to come from?

  What is he saying now? About some 0898 Sexline he used to dial “Cycle Club Lust”; how he sat hanging on the line running up obscene bills waiting for the payoff that never came. How Telecom regulations compel them to use words like “penis” and “buttocks” and “breasts.” How can you get off on words like that? he says.

  And I sense it again. A scent… Almost totally masked by my own pheromone patterns; that certain uncertainty. I know it. I know it…lower cranes decked out with aircraft warning lights like Christmas decorations move through the upper air. Towers of London. Close to home now. I show him a place to park the car where it will be fairly safe. In this area, you do not buy car stereos, you merely rent them from the local pub. On the street, with his coat collar turned up against the drizzle, he looks desperately vulnerable and uncertain. The merest waft of pheromones is enough to firm that wavering resolution. Gentle musks carry him through the front door, past the rooms when we cater for the particular tastes of our goi clients, up the stairs and along the landing past Cassiopia’s room, up another flight of stairs to the room at the top. The room where the ul-goi go.

  18 November

  On the third day of the jhash, I went to see Mother, a forty-five-minute train journey past red-brick palazzo-style hypermarkets under Heathrow’s sound-footprint.

  When the great wave of early-Fifties slum clearance swept the old East End out into the satellite New Towns, it swept Mother and his little empire with it. Three years after the bombing stopped, the Blitz really began, he says. After three hundred years of metropolis, he felt a change of environment would do him good. He is quite the born-again suburbanite; he cannot imagine why we choose to remain in the city. With his two sisters, our aunts, he runs a discreet and lucrative brothel from a detached house on a large estate. The desires of suburbia differ from, but are no less desires than, the desires of the city, and are equally exploitable.

  As Mother opened the door to me an elderly man in a saggy black latex suit wandered down from upstairs, saw me, apologized and vanished into the back bedroom.

  “It’s all right dear, he’s part of the family,” Mother shouted up “Really, you know, I should stop charging him. He’s been coming twenty years, boy and man. Every Tuesday, same thing. Happily married; he’s invited us to his silver wedding anniversary party; it’s a nice thought but I don’t think it’s really us, do you?”

  To the eye they were three fortysomething slightly-but-not too tarty women, the kind you see pushing shopping trolleys around palazzo-style hypermarkets, or in hatchbacks arriving at yoga classes in the local leisure centre rather than the kind that congregate at the farthest table in bars to drink vodka and laugh boorishly.

  My mother was born the same year that Charles II was restored to the monarchy.

  We kissed on the mouth, exchanging chemical identifications, tongue to tongue. I made no attempt to mask my feelings; anxiety has a flavour that cannot be concealed.

  “Love, what is it? Is it that pimp again? Is he giving bother?” He sniffed deeply. “No. It’s Cassiopia, isn’t it? Something’s happened to him. The Law? Darling, we’ve High Court judges in our pockets. No, something else. Worse. Oh no. Oh dear God no.”

  Chemical communication is surer and less ambiguous than verbal. Within minutes my aunts, smelling the alarm on the air, had cut short their appointments with their clients and congregated in the back room where no non -tesh was ever permitted. In the deep wing-chair drawn close to the gas heater sat my grandmother, seven hundred years old and almost totally submerged into the dark, mind wandering interminably and with death the only hope of release from the laby­rinth of his vast rememberings. His fingers moved in his lap like the legs of stricken spiders. We spoke in our own language, sharp-edged whispers beneath the eyes of the hahndahvi in their five Cardinal Points up on the picture rail.

  Jhash. It was made to be whispered, that word. I suggested medical assistance. There were prominent doctors among the ul-goi. Sexual in­clinations do not discriminate. What with the advances goi medicine had made, and the finest doctors in the country, surely something…

  “It must be concern for your sister has temporarily clouded your judgment,” whispered Aunt Lyra, “otherwise I cannot imagine you could be so stupid as to consider delivering one of us into the hands of ul-goi.”

  My mother hushed him with a touch to his arm.

  “He could have put it a bit more subtly, love, but he’s right. It would be no problem to recruit an ul-goi doctor, but doctors don’t work in isolation. They rely upon a massive edifice of researchers, technicians, laboratories, consultants: how long do you think it would be before some goi discovered the truth about Cassiopia?”

  “You would let my sister, your daughter die, rather than compro­mise security?”

  “Do not ask me to answer questions like that. Listen up. One of our regulars here is an ul-goi lawyer. Just to make conversation I asked him once what our legal position was. This is what he told me: we may think and talk and look like humans, but we are not human. And, as non-humans, we are therefore the same as animals—less than animals; most animals enjoy some protection under the law, but not us. They could do what they liked to us, they could strip us of all our possessions, jail us indefinitely, use us to experiment on, gas us, hunt us down one by one for sport, burn us in the street, and in the eyes of the law it would be no different from killing rats. We are not human; we are not under the protection of the law. To compromise our secrecy is to threaten us all.”

  “He is dying and I want to know what to do.”

  “You know what to do.” The voice startled me. It was like the voice of an old, corroded mechanism returning to life after long inactivity. “You know what to do,” repeated my grandmother, stepping through a moment of lucidity into this last decade of the millennium. “Can I have taught you so badly, or is it you were such poor pupils? Pere Teakbois the Balancer demanded jhash of us in return for our enormously long lives, but Saint Semillia of the Mercies bargained a ransom price. Blood. The life is in the blood; that life may buy back a life.”

  Of course I knew the story. I even understood the biological principle behind the spurious theology. A massive blood transfusion might stimulate the disrupted immune system into regenerating itself, in a similar sense to the way our bodies rebuild themselves by using goi sex cells as a template. I had known the answer to jhash for as long as I had known of jhash itself: why had I refused to accept it and looked instead for, yes, ludicrous, yes, dangerous alternatives that could not possibly work?

  Because Saint Semillia of the Mercies sells his dispensations dear.

  Mother had given me a shoeboxful of equipment, most of it obsolete stuff from the last century when the last case of jhash had occurred. She did not tell me the outcome. Either way, I was not certain I wanted to know. In the house on Shantallow Mews I ran a line into my arm and watched the Six o’clock News while I pumped out two plastic bags. Internecine warfare in the Tory party. Some of the faces I knew, intimately. The blood seemed to revive Cassiopia but I knew it could only be temporary. I could never supply enough: after only two pints I was weak and trembling. All I could do was hold the sickness at bay. I took the icon of Saint Semillia of the Mercies down from the wall, asked it what I should do. His silence told me nothing I did not already know myself. Out there. They are few, they are not perfect, but they exist, and you must find them. I tletched, dressed in black leotard, black tights, black mini, black heels, wrapped it all under a duster coat and went down to the Cardboard Cities.

  What is it your philosophers teach? That we live in the best of all possible worlds? Tell that to the damned souls of the cardboard cities in the tunnels under your railway stations and underpasses. Tesh have no such illusions. It has never been a tenet of our faith that the world should be a good place. Merely survivable.

  Cloaked in a nimbus of hormonal awe, I went down. You would smell the piss and the beer and the smoke and the dampness and some­thing faint and semi-perceived you cannot quite recognize. To me that thing you cannot recognize is what is communicated most strongly to me. It is despair. Derelicts, burned out like the hulls of Falklands’ warships, waved hallucinatory greetings to me as I swirled past, coat bil­lowing in the warm wet wind that blew across the wastelands. Eyes moved in cardboard shelters, cardboard coffins, heads turned, angered by the violation of their degradation by one who manifestly did not share it. When it is all you possess, you treasure even degradation. Fig­ures gathered around smudge fires, red-eyed from the smoke, handing round hand-rolled cigarettes. Where someone had scraped enough money for batteries there was dance music from boom boxes. They would not trouble me. My pheromones made me a shadowy, godlike figure moving on the edge of the darkness.

  Where should I go? I had asked.

  Where no one will be missed, my mother had replied.

  I went to the viaduct arches, the motorway flyovers, the shop door­ways, the all-nite burger-shops, the parking lots and playgrounds. I went down into the tunnels under the stations.

  Trains ground overhead, carrying the double-breasted suit men and telephone women back to suburbs ending in “ng” or “wich,” to executive ghettos with names like Elmwood Grove and Manor Grange. The tunnels boomed and rang, drops of condensation fell sparkling in the electric light from stalactites seeping from the expansion joints in the roof. I paused at the junction of two tunnels. Something in the air, a few vagrant lipid molecules carried in the air currents beneath the sta­tion.

  How will I know them? I had asked.

  You will know them, my mother had said.

  The trail of pheromones was fickle, more absent than present. It required the utmost exercise of my senses to follow it. It led me down clattering concrete stairways and ramps, under strip lights and dead incandescent bulbs, down, underground. As I was drawn deeper, I dissolved my aura of awe and wove a new spell: allure. Certain now. Certain. The lost children in their cribs barely acknowledged my presence, the air smelled of shit and ganja.

  She had found a sheltered corner under a vent that carried warmth and the smell of frying food from some far distant point of the concourse. An outsize Aran sweater—much grimed and stretched—was pulled down over her hunched-up knees. She had swaddled herself in plastic refuse sacks, pulled flattened cardboard boxes that had held washing machines and CD midi-systems in around her.

 

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