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. 😏’