Tag Archives: Fiction

Short Story: What the Crowd Cannot Have

The first time Brodie and Archie met was not under the best of circumstances.

It was a Friday afternoon beneath the Miller Theatre on West 51st Street. Brodie – hi-viz vest zipped to the throat – stood amid abandoned scaffolding, photographing stress fractures in the concrete. The air was dense with dust, old and mineral, as though the building itself were exhaling.

A figure emerged at the far end of the tunnel and walked towards him.

Brodie lowered the camera. He waited until the young man was close enough to see properly, then snapped, “What are you doing here? This is a restricted area. Turn around and go back the way you came.”

“I’m sorry,” the young man said. He spoke with an English accent, careful, almost courteous. “I didn’t realise. What was this tunnel used for?”

“The other side of that wall is backstage,” Brodie replied. “Probably for actors crossing beneath the stage. But there’s no time for questions. It’s unsafe down here. The roof could come down at any moment.”

It was an exaggeration. But saying it gave him a small, illicit thrill – authority borrowed from the place.

The young man hesitated. He had floppy brown hair, eyes dark and inquisitive despite the rebuke. “What are you doing?”

“I’m inspecting the structure,” Brodie said. “Everything looks glitzy up there. Down here it’s rot and age.” He paused. “You still haven’t explained why you’re trespassing.”

“I was just exploring.”

“Explore somewhere else.”

The young man’s shoulders dropped. As he turned, he fumbled the folder under his arm; papers spilled across the dusty floor.

“Shit – sorry. My script.”

Something softened in Brodie then, too late to retract the sharpness he’d already spent.

The second time they met was in the staffroom.

Brodie was entering notes on his laptop when the door burst open and a tide of people flooded in, loud with laughter, trailing the smell of coffee and citrus wipes. Lunch packs appeared: protein bars, yogurt, hummus, cut vegetables. Actors, Brodie thought, irritated beyond reason.

Michael wanted renovation proposals by Monday. Concentration felt impossible.

Then he saw him – the boy from the tunnel – laughing with the others, sleeves pushed up, script tucked under his arm as if it were a talisman.

Of course.

On their way out, the young man stopped at Brodie’s table. “I’m Archie,” he said, holding out his hand. His eyes lingered, dark and unguarded. “I think we got off on the wrong foot.”

Brodie hesitated, then took it. The contact was brief, oddly charged. “I’m Brodie. Forget about it. Just – stay out of the tunnel.”

Archie smiled, chastened and amused all at once.

After that, Brodie thought about him more than he liked to admit.

He knew he could be abrupt, inflated by his own sense of usefulness. Actors irritated him on principle. But Archie – English, polite, quietly intense – had unsettled him.

Late one night, Brodie searched the Playbill bios. Archie was a rising star: television work, the National Theatre, lead roles in the West End, now a Broadway debut.

Impressive.

What Brodie didn’t know was that Archie had been searching too. He’d asked about the surveys, about the renovation. He found the company. He found Brodie’s photograph.

Hazel eyes. Skin warm-toned, as if lit from inside. A face shaped by movement rather than posing.

Tasty, Archie thought, surprised by his own boldness.

Two years later.

Archie slipped out of the Walter Kerr Theatre the moment the curtain fell on Chatterton. No shower. No linger. Wool coat, beanie, scarf pulled high. He moved fast, before the autograph hunters gathered.

Outside, Broadway surged and glittered – yellow cabs, steam vents, neon, voices colliding. It still thrilled him. It always did. A world away from Buckinghamshire.

At the apartment, Brodie checked the clock: 10:30. Any minute now.

The flowers were arranged just so. Archie liked flowers. Brodie liked that Archie liked them.

When the door opened, relief moved through him like a current.

Tea was requested. Always tea. Archie shed the night – coat, scarf, public self – and collapsed onto the sofa. He spoke about the show, about the line he’d missed. Brodie stroked his hair, grounding him.

Later, Fleet Foxes floated from the bathroom. Steam curled beneath the door.

Brodie knew the routine by heart. He would collect the clothes, note the forgotten boxers, breathe in the faint, intimate salt of them – something human beneath the polish. It embarrassed him how much that scent moved him.

Archie emerged clean and fragrant: Le Labo, Dior and mint. Blue silk pyjamas. He smiled like someone stepping into safety.

They ate together. They watched television under the blanket Archie’s grandmother had made. Archie pressed close, smaller than he seemed onstage, all softness and thoughtfulness and unspoken worry.

Sometimes Brodie felt the weight of what he was not allowed to be – unseen, untagged, absent from photographs. Invisible by design. But here, in this private room, their bodies fit without explanation. The most erotic moments were those that could not be shared publicly.

Brodie was Archie’s shelter. Archie was Brodie’s undoing.

Brodie had watched hundreds of videos of Archie on YouTube, moments in which he appeared entirely at ease – charming interviewers, holding eye contact, listening with an attentiveness that felt generous rather than rehearsed.

His answers were always articulate, delivered with that unmistakable smile. But Brodie could see what others missed.

The exposure beneath the polish. The small betrayals of nerves: the way Archie’s smile lingered a fraction too long; the absent-minded stroking of his own arm as he spoke; the slow, circular massaging of each finger; the hand lifting to his hair, not to adjust it, but to reassure himself it was still there.

These gestures were invisible to the audience, but to Brodie they were intimate, almost confessional – proof that the confidence was something Archie stepped into, not something he owned.

Thomas Chatterton had been an ideal role for Archie. The eighteenth-century poet – celebrated as the marvellous boy for his precocious brilliance and dead at seventeen – had been reimagined as the subject of a hugely successful Broadway musical.

In his twenties, Archie might once have been considered too old for the part, but his fine, boyish beauty dissolved any such doubt. Night after night, he stepped into Chatterton with such ease that the distinction between role and actor began to blur.

To the audience, he seemed timeless, suspended in youth and promise. To Brodie, there was something quietly unsettling in this devotion – the way Archie gave himself over to a boy who never lived long enough to be disappointed by what came after.

When the movie ended, the future rose between them.

“Would you come to London?” Archie asked quietly.

Brodie had been waiting for this. “Yes. If you ask me to.”

Archie’s eyes filled. “You’ll have to share me.”

Brodie pulled him closer. “I already do.”

The Patron Saint of Foolhardy Teenage Boys

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A solitary figure stands above Kinder Scout. He cannot be seen, yet he watches from afar. The darkness thickens over the peaks, and a westerly wind rises as if summoned from nothing, but neither deters him. This is not a place for the unprepared. The temperature will fall; the warmth of the day will slip away, unnoticed, into the stone.

As the figure observes the six boys pitching their tents, a quiet certainty settles within him: he is powerless. He cannot call out. He cannot warn them. Leaning on his stick, he endures the bitter air and waits, bound to witness how they will meet the night. Their laughter will thin, their bravado ebb, as loneliness takes hold. Escape will become a wish rather than a choice, and sleep the only surrender, each of them willing the morning to arrive.

When he is certain the boys have fallen into a restless, unhappy slumber, the figure moves. He steps softly across rock and scrub, listening, careful not to betray his presence. Only when he is satisfied that he will not frighten them does he pause to peer into each tent. There he sees them cocooned within their sleeping bags, clinging to one another, sharing the fragile warmth of slender, adolescent bodies against the cold.

At last, he chooses a broad, ancient rock and settles there, a silent sentinel. He remains, guarding their sleep, until the first pale glow of the new day begins to rise in the east.

David: A Good Story, Apparently

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“A swell so big and strong it will wipe clean everything before it.”

I got a message from David. The first I’d heard from him since our falling out in December. I hadn’t been expecting an apology and didn’t get one. I wasn’t even sure one was required. Some days I thought I might be the one who owed it. Still, the silence had broken, and that felt like something.

‘My boy turned forty this week and wanted to see where he was born. I took him to the Kapiʻolani Medical Center, where his mother gave birth to him. It wasn’t what he had in mind. But he stood straight, like the military taught him, and was too polite to tell me to go to hell. He was a Kamaʻāina — child of the land — but this wasn’t where he grew up.’

“What???” I replied.

David rang immediately.

I paused Heated Rivalry, which had literally just started. I hadn’t even got past the opening credits. Everyone had been talking about it, which was precisely why I’d been avoiding it. The same thing had happened with Adolescence. The louder the praise, the more stubbornly uninterested I became. But Heated Rivalry had the added incentive of steamy gay sex scenes — and I liked the idea that large audiences wanted that and were openly enjoying it. So fine. I’d given in. And then David called.

“It’s a paragraph I’ve just written,” he said. “I found a draft of something I wrote about Hawaii in the eighties. A good story’s been hiding in a drawer for forty years. It’s time to rewrite it. Update it.”

“Hawaii?”

“If memory serves, I based it on a Rolling Stone article about a teen suicide. But I think that was Kansas. Or somewhere like it. No idea why I chose Hawaii.”

“Suicide?”

“That only comes at the end.”

“Well,” I said, buying time, “I suppose there has to be a happy ending.”

“A suicide and a birth,” he said, as if that clarified things. “You get the opening now?”

I didn’t. Except that David was a successful writer, and it clearly made sense to him. Which, apparently, was enough.

“I think I know why I chose Hawaii,” he continued. “There was a film I saw. Big Wednesday. Surfing. Jan-Michael Vincent, Gary Busey. Semi-naked most of the time. Very young. Very hot.”

“Who?” My patience was thinning.

“Ah. Before your time. Though now that I think of it, that film was set in California.”

“Get to the point, David. The longer we talk, the longer I’m delayed from steamy gay sex. What’s the story actually about?”

“Whoa,” he laughed. “So you’ve sorted things out with Charlie. What did I tell you? You can’t keep a good man down.”

I froze. Had I really discussed my prolonged sexual drought with David?

“I’ll be brief,” he said. “It’s about jealousy. At least on one side. When three people are involved, somebody always loses.”

This was unexpected territory for him. David could spin a tight crime plot or disappear happily into a historical setting, but relationships were something he normally sidestepped entirely.

“It feels a bit left-field,” I said. “And why go back to something written that long ago?”

“It was shite,” he said cheerfully. “I never read past the first page after I shoved it in a drawer. My first novel came out ten years later — my style had changed completely by then. But time’s counting down. It feels like unfinished business. I want to turn it into something wonderful.”

“How old were you when you wrote it?”

“Let’s see… I started it in 1984, so I’d have been twenty. Finished it the year after. That’s why the characters were that age.” He paused. “It’ll read like I’m reliving myself.” Then, suddenly: “Goddammit. I remember now. I’d just read Michener’s Hawaii. That’s why. Oahu, specifically. And Magnum P.I. was on television.”

I thought about my own life. Whether anything I’d written would still exist in forty years. Whether I’d ever be considered established, in any meaningful sense. I’d been carrying an idea for a book for years, but inertia kept winning. Instead, I scraped a living writing about country houses and cities. It all felt increasingly dull. Stranger still, it occurred to me that David must have written that early draft on a typewriter — a genuinely painful way to work, as far as I was concerned.

He said he had to go.

“By the way,” he added, “I’ve finished the Isherwood biography on Kindle. It ended rather abruptly. One moment he was alive, the next he was gone. Dead. But I won’t mention it again. You seem sensitive about that.”

I restarted Heated Rivalry. Two seconds later, my phone buzzed.

‘Forgot to say. I’m going for a drink with a young man — a student — only nineteen. Just out of nappies, really. Don’t tell Josh, but of all people, I thought you’d like to know. 😏’

Charlie: Almost. Almost. The Scent That Remained

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Charlie didn’t go to Paris for Christmas. A family dispute—best addressed through absence—kept him away. Instead, he stayed with a cousin in Woodstock, near Blenheim Palace: an improbable place for pleasure. I was content with the opposite arrangement. Christmas alone. Eating, drinking, letting Netflix decide what mattered.

On Christmas Eve, I dreamed he climbed into bed and lay on top of me. His naked body was warm, yielding, unmistakably real. He kissed me. A faint musk rose from his skin—intimate, animal—stirring every sense at once. At last, I thought, this is the closeness.

I woke up with the sensation intact. The dream clung to me through Christmas morning, vivid enough to unsettle. I searched for an explanation and learned that smell can infiltrate dreams, especially when memory and desire are involved. Olfactory dreaming, they called it. Cologne was the usual example.

In the nineteenth century, a French physician, Alfred Maury, described inducing such dreams by getting his assistant to place eau de Cologne beneath his nose while he slept. On waking, Maury claimed to have dreamt of Cairo, of the perfumer Farina’s workshop, of adventures set loose by scent alone.

I hadn’t smelt Cologne. What lingered with me was the smell of a boy. And with it, a quieter truth: Charlie and I had never moved beyond kissing.

Someone, inevitably, had to puncture the theory. A psychiatrist dismissed the idea entirely. You don’t smell the coffee and wake up, she insisted. You wake up, then you smell the coffee.

I abandoned science and let Spotify take over. It suggested an album by Wolfgang Tillmans, which surprised me. I’d known him only as a photographer. The music turned out to be a sound work made for an exhibition—joy and heartbreak threading through collapse and repair.

I first encountered Tillmans years earlier through a Pet Shop Boys video composed almost entirely of mice living on the London Underground. Ever since, I’d found myself scanning platforms, tunnels, tracks—without success. A memory surfaced: my friend Stephen once worked on a four-hour Tillmans sound installation of It’s a Sin. He now despises the song completely.

Christmas dinner was an indulgence of sorts: cold baked beans eaten straight from the tin. I spent an hour scrolling through films before accepting, once again, that choosing outlasts watching. I downloaded the Christopher Isherwood biography David had recommended—the one that never seems to end—and fell asleep within pages.

When I woke, the room had darkened. Charlie had messaged: Will be home tonight at about eight x.

Transport on Christmas Day was nonexistent, yet somehow he’d convinced his cousin to drive him 130 miles. When Charlie arrived, I asked where his cousin was.

“Gone back,” he said.

“You didn’t invite him in?”

“It’s Christmas. He’ll want to be home.”

“And petrol money?”

He hesitated. “I didn’t think of that.”

Our former lodger once called Charlie a “me, me, me person.” Another friend was less generous and called him an asshole. Perhaps it was cultural. Perhaps it was simply him. Charlie struggled to imagine himself from the outside. I told myself it wasn’t malice. Just a narrow field of vision.

Despite the journey, he looked fresh, handsome. He smiled; I mirrored it. I considered mentioning the dream, then decided against it.

“Why come back early?”

“I shouldn’t have left you alone,” he said, without pause. “It’s Christmas.”

While he dropped his bag in the bedroom, I switched on the tree lights. We exchanged gifts a day early.

His were faultlessly chosen: Salò on Blu-ray, Sargent, Ramón Novarro, Edmund White, a glossy Igor Mattio photography book. Then he disappeared into the studio and returned with a canvas. He turned it around.

It was me.

He’d painted me sitting, relaxed, looking beyond the frame—as if caught somewhere warmer, lighter. My eyes were generous. My mouth was kind. Around my neck he’d included a thin silver chain, a birthday gift I wore only on rare occasions. The detail felt deliberate, almost intimate.

“I painted while you were writing,” he said. “I hope you like it.”

I had never been seen like that before. Not by anyone. I felt exposed, and cherished.

“I don’t know what to say,” I told him.

“One day,” he said lightly, “when you’re old—célèbre—people will say, painted by his French lover.’”

Charlie went to shower. Alone, I recognised a flicker of shame. I’d suspected his absence was a ruse. I’d rehearsed disappointment, punished him silently for not being who I wanted. The dream—so tender, so convincing—had fed that instinct. Sex can exist without love; love can exist without sex. The phrase circled uselessly.

Still, it would be nice.

There it was again. That reflex. The mind’s preference for negativity over positivity.

Charlie returned wearing only grey jogging bottoms and a Santa hat. He stretched out beside me on the sofa, smelling faintly of crushed mandarins, and rested his head in my lap.

“A Christmas film,” he murmured. “Something cosy.”

I stroked his stomach as we watched The Holdovers: a misaligned teacher, a sharp-tongued cook, a boy full of grievance. By the end credits, Charlie was asleep.

I didn’t move. I was afraid that motion would undo everything. His weight, his warmth, the faint citrus on his skin—it felt provisional, like something borrowed. The room held its breath.

I loved him then with a sudden, almost painful tenderness. Not the urge to claim, but to preserve. To keep the moment intact, untouched by language or expectation.

I stayed exactly where I was.

And waited to see whether stillness could last.

The Shadowed Hand Behind the Letter

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– Being the transcript of a letter unearthed in the long-sealed vaults of the Royal Bank of Scotland, November 2025

George Walker Wood
66 Cavendish Street,
Marylebone
London

29 November, 1881

My dear Reader,

If by curious chance you hold this manuscript in your hands, I entreat you to read its contents with the utmost seriousness. Only by such attentive perusal shall you perceive that the pages which follow are both an explanation and a justification for their long concealment.

Should it prove that I still draw breath when these lines meet your eye, then I beg of you—burn them without delay, and disclaim all knowledge of ever having encountered them. The shame that would ensue from their divulgence is of so dreadful a nature that I scarcely dare commit the thought to paper.

I shall therefore begin at the point where first I made the acquaintance of one Johane—an Irish youth of some four-and-twenty years, of humble condition, and with every outward appearance of one who might easily draw misfortune to my door. He was, however, most commonly called Jack, and by that familiar name I shall refer to him henceforth. Dear Jack belonged to a loose fraternity of young loafers and street-bred rascals—variously known as the “London Boys”—a wild and merry set whose manners were as questionable as their morals, yet whose very recklessness possessed, for me, an unaccountable fascination.

In time I grew most attached to Jack, and he attended me frequently at my lodgings in Marylebone. There, behind doors safely bolted, we indulged in certain intimacies which, though common enough within that unseen sphere of which London pretends ignorance, would cause polite society to feign horror. Jack’s person was slight, his garments threadbare and ill-assorted, and he bore all the marks of those who are forced to wrest their sustenance from the streets; yet beneath that rough exterior there was a warmth and vigour not easily described. When fortune smiled and I had a few coins to spare, he would remain with me until morning, and those nights—cold, anxious, sweet as they were—remain fixed in my memory.

I suspect that my landlady, Mrs. Chivers, a stout matron of no small curiosity, had taken something of a liking to Jack as well; for once I discovered him seated at her kitchen table devouring a modest breakfast of bread and scrape. The glint of mischief in his eye, as he looked up at me over the crust, told me all I needed to know. She had chosen to see nothing of the nature of my rooms above.

My days were spent at the old desk overlooking Cavendish Street, where I composed articles for The London Figaro and The Dark Blue. Yet I had long nourished the ambition to attempt a novel—something that might echo, however faintly, the triumph of A Tale of Two Cities. My parents, never slow to remind me of my deficiencies, assured me that I lacked both imagination and creative faculty, that I was fit only to set down facts and order them neatly upon a page.

Still, I could not forget the tales Jack whispered to me during those winter nights—tales of gentlemen of rank who sought his company at a high price; of drawing-room adventures veiled beneath the richest draperies; of temptations and behaviours of which the world speaks only in scandalised murmurs. Spurred by these accounts, I sought the acquaintance of a certain printer known to an associate of Henry Ashbee—a man whose livelihood depended upon the discreet production of pamphlets of a decidedly provocative character.

Mr. William Lazenby, a sharp-eyed fellow, showed interest in my idea and agreed to an initial impression of two hundred and fifty copies. He offered me a share of the profits, subtracting his considerable costs, should I but write with candour. The sums he mentioned far exceeded any I had yet earned, and the promise of so easy a reward was exceedingly tempting. He informed me that the book should be sold exclusively by mail-order through an address in Paris, and insisted that I adopt a nom de plume, lest I bring inevitable ruin upon myself.

When I conveyed the scheme to Jack, he immediately demanded—nor without justice—a share of the proceeds, and further insisted that his own name be affixed to the work. I warned him that the police might take a dim view of such recklessness, but he merely laughed and declared that the “mutton-shunters”, knowing full well he could neither read nor write, would never suppose him connected to any printed matter. With that he tumbled himself upon the bed in his usual impudent fashion and suggested that we commence our “research” without delay.

By June the manuscript was completed, and I had settled upon what I deemed a most fitting title—The Sins of the Cities of the Plain. Though Mr. Lazenby scoffed at it, he conceded that the biblical suggestion would doubtless catch the eye of those gentlemen who take an interest in such hidden matters. I confess I feared that certain passages, dealing as they did with the concealed customs of our clandestine fraternity, might prove too recognisable to those acquainted with that shadowed realm.

Lazenby nevertheless published the work in two parts, and it found immediate favour among readers eager to feast upon the covert indulgences of the great and respectable.

Though I tremble at the thought of its reception, I take comfort that my own name has thus far escaped suspicion. I offer here my apologies to Mr. Simeon Solomon and Mr. James Campbell Reddie—both of whom have been unjustly whispered about in connection with this deception. Jack, meanwhile, basks in the admiration of his companions and seems persuaded that a century hence his name will still be spoken among certain circles of “inverts”, as he jests.

This very day I have deposited my first earnings at the Lombard Street branch of Messrs. Glyn, Mills, Currie & Co., alongside this confession, sealed and hidden, to remain in the vault until such time as Providence ordains its discovery. Should that day come, I trust that The Sins of the Cities of the Plain shall be regarded as a truthful and unvarnished portrait of those whose society I have come to cherish.

Ever, dear Reader, your faithful servant,

𝒢. 𝒲𝒶𝓁𝓀𝑒𝓇 𝒲𝑜𝑜𝒹
⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣
George Walker Wood

*****

Now read on to separate fact from fiction.

This edition contains the unabridged text of the first edition housed at the British Library, together with a new introduction by Wolfram Setz and a facsimile reproduction of the original volumes’ title pages.

The Sins of the Cities of the Plain is an influential Victorian erotic novel, originally published anonymously in 1881 and widely considered one of the first works of exclusively gay pornography in English. It is a fictionalized memoir attributed to real-life Irish prostitute Jack Saul.

The book is a narrative, presented as the “recollections” or “memoirs” of Jack Saul, detailing his experiences as a young male prostitute (a “Mary-Ann” or “rentboy”) in the clandestine gay underworld of Victorian London. It traces his escapades from boarding school into young adulthood, describing his sexual encounters with various men, from schoolboys and guardsmen to wealthy aristocrats and members of high society.

While attributed to Jack Saul, the actual author is debated by scholars, with some suggesting a ghostwriter or figures like the painter Simeon Solomon or James Campbell Reddie were involved. The book was privately printed in two volumes in 1881 by William Lazenby to avoid obscenity laws and sold for a high price.

The original printings are unobtainable today, but modern editions are widely available from various publishers, such as Valancourt Books and Mint Editions.

What remains for Harry Oldham when the glow fades?

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Harry Oldham is writing a novel based on his criminal and sordid past. To do so, he has returned to live at Park Hill, where he grew up, and the place that he once left behind. That was then and this is now, in which the old world collides with the new. (Parts 1 to 17 are available to read in the menu)

Perfectly Hard and Glamorous – Part 18

October 2025
There was a paperback of Saturday Night Fever published in 1977 by H. B. Gilmour. I read it when I was twelve. If I remember right, the novel said that Tony Manero looked like a young Al Pacino. In the film that came first, a girl he kissed on the dance floor gasped, “Ohh, I just kissed Al Pacino!”

I hadn’t a clue who Pacino was, only that he must’ve been something to look at. “Pacino! Attica! Attica! Attica!”

Decades later, Pacino published his autobiography at eighty-four. Everyone knows who he is now. It’s a decent book—above average—and I doubt he wrote it himself, but I’ll gladly be proved wrong. He writes beautifully about the part of life most people avoid thinking about: the last act, when the runway ahead is shorter than the one behind, as David Foster once put it.

Compared to Pacino, I’m still young. But sixty looms, and yes—I care a fuck. Quite a lot, actually.

I looked in the bathroom mirror and flinched. The face staring back didn’t belong to me. Wrinkles, dull skin, cheeks softening with age. Not the face of an eighteen-year-old; the face of an old man.

That night I dreamt of Andy, Jack, and me—partying by the Cholera Monument. Summer, though the skies were leaden. We were drunk, a boom box blaring New Musik. Rain began to fall, but we didn’t care. We danced, the drops sliding down our fresh, young faces. “It’s raining so hard now / Can’t seem to find a shore…”

We stripped to our boxers, soaked and clinging, leaping like fools. Paolo watched from under a tree, the outsider at the edge of a brotherhood. I wanted him to join us, but he stayed still, afraid.

When the song ended, our clothes were a sodden heap. We grinned, knowing this moment could never happen again. Paolo walked over, still fully dressed, and looked me up and down. Do you like what you see, Paolo?

He shook his head. When he finally spoke, I wished he hadn’t. “Harry, what are you doing? What happened to your body? Old men don’t behave like this.”

I woke to a shadow in the doorway. “Harry, you okay?”

Tom. He came and sat on the edge of the bed. “I think you were dreaming. You started shouting.”

“What did I say?”

“I don’t know, but you woke me up.”

“Fuck.”

“What were you dreaming about?”

I’d read that dreams fade fast because they live in the same part of the brain that controls movement—crowded out the moment we start to stir. But I remembered this one. And I blamed Al Pacino.

“What time is it?” I asked. “When did you get here?”

“Four a.m. After midnight, maybe. You didn’t hear me come in.”

“At least you haven’t lost your key yet. I take it you’ve finished your drug dealing for the night.”

He rolled his eyes. “Harry, I told you—what you don’t know won’t hurt you.”

Tom had mellowed since I met him two years ago. Back then he’d have clenched his fists and spat, “What the fuck’s it got to do with you?” Now twenty, he was as much a part of the flat as I was. He drifted in and out, sometimes gone for days, then suddenly asleep on the sofa when I woke.

Why I let him into my life, I’ve asked myself a hundred times. Just not tonight. Tonight, I was glad of him.

He lay back, staring at the ceiling. I went to piss. When I came back, he’d slid up beside me, hands behind his head.

“What are you doing?”

“I’ve never really been in your bedroom before.”

“Liar.” I’d made it clear it was off-limits, but I knew he’d snooped when I wasn’t around.

“Why did you become a writer?”

“Ah, the loneliest job in the world.” I hesitated, then answered.

“One night—a year before I left school—my parents came home from an open evening. Same story every year: teachers saying how useless I was. But that night, my mum came into my room looking excited. She said, ‘Mr Green, your English teacher, thinks you’ve got imagination if you put your mind to it. He said if you used better, longer words, you might pull through.’ My dad, standing behind her, added, ‘I told Mr Green he needs to speak properly first… but it’s a start.’ That was the only bit of hope they brought home.”

“Is that when you started writing?”

“Didn’t mean anything then. But in the early nineties, when I was broke, I had this client—older guy, fat—wanted me to piss on him. Easy money. We were lying on a wet plastic sheet in a hotel bed, talking. He worked for a publisher. Said I could make money writing about life as a London rent boy. I didn’t, of course—it sounded like work—but he told me to keep notes. Can you imagine?”

“And did you?”

“Not at first. Then one day I nicked a pack of exercise books from WH Smith and started jotting things down. Faces, nights, bits of talk. Eventually I began adding fiction, and that’s probably when I realised I could be a writer.”

My first book came out when I was in my forties. Nothing to do with rent boys. I’d drafted that novel, but no one wanted it—too sordid, too shallow, they said. One editor told me to try something else. So I wrote a formulaic thriller about a teacher investigating a missing student. I hated every minute of it, but it sold.

Tom turned toward me, and I braced for a jab. Instead, he said, “Maybe it’s time to revisit that old story. Nothing you write could shock anyone now. Might even fit with the book you’re working on.”

He hadn’t read any of my new work, not since that first night. My return to Sheffield and Park Hill had been interesting, if not productive. The book was two years late, my agent losing patience. Still—Tom had a point. I hadn’t thought about including the London years.

“There was a book published in the nineteenth century,” I said. “The Sins of the Cities of the Plain. No one knows who wrote it—some say a young rent boy named Jack Saul. It’s pretty explicit. I lived a life that echoed its pages once, long ago, when I was young… and now I’m not.”

Charlie / I will make him appear extremely homoerotic

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“Shameless. He floats naked in the water, the light rippling over chest and stomach. His lips, as if caught between a breath and a moan, his hand loose at his side like he’s waiting to be grabbed. There’s nothing soft about it – just flesh, need, and the unspoken dare in his stillness. Every line built for touch, for heat, waiting to be claimed. The invitation to take what you want. The sight is blunt, undeniable: he wants to be used.”

Charlie had taken his art in a new direction. He was bored, disillusioned with paintings of landscapes, objects and street scenes. A flirtation with what he called ‘art contemporain’ had ended in frustration. “Circles, squares, solid colours, lines, zig-zags … they mean nothing to me!”

The first that I knew about this new path was when I returned home to find Levi, our former lodger, sprawled on the sofa in just his underwear. “It isn’t what it looks like,” he flushed. ”I’m only doing it as a favour.”

Charlie shouted from the bathroom. “I am ready now. The bathtub is full and my camera is ready.” I was bemused to say the least.

Charlie wandered into the room. “Ah, you are home, mon ami. I need the bathroom for thirty minutes while I photograph Levi.”

The Polish boy with the Yorkshire accent followed him along the corridor and into the brightly lit bathroom. With a certain amount of embarrassment he stepped into the bath. “Lay down, Levi, and put your head underwater. I am going to stand on both sides of the bath and take photos from above.”

I watched from the doorway and listened while Levi was told to take deep breaths and submerge himself. Then he had to raise his right arm, then his left, and then both of them together. All the time, Charlie was precariously balancing, taking shot after shot.

When they had finished, Levi stood up, looking satisfyingly toned, and dripping from head to toe. Charlie looked him up and down. “As I suspected, you have a little dick, but we cannot all be lucky. You can get dry now.”

“I feel stupid,” Levi told him, “and I haven’t brought any dry boxer shorts.” Charlie flicked through the images and appeared not to have heard him, so I went to a bedroom drawer and gave him a pair of mine to change into.

That night Charlie spent hours searching for the right photo. The next morning he visited a local print shop and had it blown up to the size of a small poster. He placed it on an artist’s easel and studied it. “I am going to use this photo to create my next painting,” he announced. “If it is successful then I am going to start painting beautiful men from now onwards.”

I reminded him that there had been a time when he would have considered Levi anything but beautiful. “That was the case,” he replied, “but I needed somebody that I knew who was willing to model for me, and when I have finished, I will make him appear extremely homoerotic which is something he is definitely not.”

Somewhere he hasn’t yet imagined

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He crouched at the platform’s edge, elbows balanced on his knees, his bare arms lit starkly by the fluorescent tubes above. The train had not yet arrived, but the rails sang faintly, a low vibration that climbed through the soles of his shoes. He leant forward, alert, as if he could will it closer with the sharpness of his gaze.

The station smelt of metal and damp stone, a place most would find tired and ordinary. But for him it felt alive – charged. His youth made everything sharper: the hum of electricity, the echo of footsteps along the tiled walls, even the restless air that slipped through the tunnel ahead. He sniffed his armpits and detected the sweet aroma of innocent sweat that he rather liked.

And then the lights appeared, two pale orbs cutting through the dark, and his breath caught. It was only a train—one of a thousand that came before and would come after. Yet in that moment it felt like something else entirely, a promise or a dare. The train held his past, and once he had boarded, it would move him towards a future. He didn’t know where it would go, only that he was ready to be carried.

He grinned to himself, a private smile that nobody else saw. His whole body hummed with the knowledge that he was young, and that youth meant possibilities.

The Bathwater

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Maria was tired of life. Tired of the flat that they lived in. Tired of not having enough money. Tired of being a mother to a four year old. Tired of not being able to take a bath on her own. That was it. She was tired of Joe most of all. They sat opposite each other in silence. She kept still, but he fidgeted, unable to get comfortable and put his feet against the wall behind her and trapped her head between his legs. She noticed the scar on his left knee that had turned pink in the hot water. She also saw how white the bubbles on his legs seemed against the dirty bathroom tiles. Joe lit a cigarette and offered it to her, but she declined, and he simply shrugged. All the time he flicked ash into the bathwater, but she no longer cared. At least he wasn’t wearing sunglasses like he normally did in the bath. ‘I used to love him,’ she thought, ‘but now I hate him more than anything.

And then to bed, where half in doze, I seemed to float about a glimmering night of Uranians

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I was dancing with ghosts. Men who lived from the reign of Queen Victoria, through Edward VII, to King George V. A few lived beyond. They were spectral figures circling me, wavering, and waiting for a response. Watchful. Whispering. Lingering. For the most part, they were happy that I was there, but a few eyed me with caution. They lived in a time when it was wiser to trust nobody.

More and more joined the dance. Coming out of doors that had long closed, from dark corners, and miserable places to where they were banished.

Each told me their name, some I knew, but most were unfamiliar, and frowned at my ignorance. There were those whose names I recognised, but not the men they belonged to. But there were so many that I would not remember everyone, and I resorted to recording names in a notebook. I wrote frantically, eager to please, careful not to miss anyone.

A long list of dead people, some of whom were friends, acquaintances, and some who were strangers to one another. They danced because they were connected – names intrinsically linked – but they might not have known it. They had gone into my notebook because they shared something in common.

When they lived I did not exist. I came much later, born into a kinder world.

The passage of time puts me at an advantage. A century later, it is easy for me to see how they lived, what achievements came their way, if at all, and how they were remembered, for better or worse. The links are in the chain – who was attached to who?

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