A Life Less Ordinary

by Vali

Summary:

A boy who can talk to animals meets a boy who tries to eavesdrop on the moon. Howard and Vince, since the beginning and beyond.

Notes:

Takes place predominantly pre-S1 and post-S3. References radio canon, but familiarity therewith not required. Angsty and fluffy in equal measure, I think, and as the tags indicate pretty much a straightforward love story. Who knew.

1. Mother, father, I'm doing okay
On the other side of the country, far away

The red brick semi-detached where they live, his dad and his mum and himself, is pin-neat and scrupulously clean, every piece of furniture dusted daily, every picture carefully centered on the walls, books and record albums cross-referenced alphabetically and by genre. Chaos is consigned to the back garden: a half-finished footpath of uneven, potentially injurious bits of stone, a bent bicycle wheel, several old chairs with broken legs or cushions oozing their batting, all tossed hodgepodge amid the scrubby, half-dead grass. Mrs. Hinshawe's back garden, by contrast, is like something from a far-off fairyland of luxurious scent and color, stuck right next door as an ongoing rebuke. Roses, lilacs, daisies, lavender, black-eyed susans, bleeding hearts, peonies, sweet violet, dozens of plants Howard couldn't imagine the names of, all painstakingly tended and fussed over, spilling tendrils heavy with blooms onto their side of the fence.

Mrs. Hinshawe, herself, is a great sprawling riot of color and cheerfulness and health and…something, that Howard really doesn't have a word for, as he crouches in the garden pushing a toy lorry around the ant-hills and glancing up furtively every now and then, drawn in by the thick rope of strawberry hair tossed in a messy braid over her shoulder, the muscular lines standing out on her arms as she wrestles with bags of potting soil, the curves of full breasts and a great round bottom and the snaking S-curve of her waist between them, all outlined by the thin cloth of her short little caftans like paisley night-shirts. She seems to have an infinite supply of them, a different color for each day, and though Howard's no expert she doesn't seem to wear much of anything beneath them. He isn't the only one to have noticed.

"Look at her," his mum hisses, glaring disapprovingly out the kitchen window. "Just look. Does the woman even own a brassiere? You'd think she'd have some sense of shame, walking around like that. She must know the whole neighborhood's noticed. Probably likes it that way."

"Mm-hm," his dad says, not glancing up from his copy of Great Sixteenth-Century Naval Battles of Lichtenstein.

"Are you listening to me? I said, it oughtn't to be allowed."

Mrs. Hinshawe (if a Mr. Hinshawe exists, no one has ever laid eyes on him) seems serenely indifferent to glares and snubs, singing tuneless little songs beneath her breath as she waters the dahlias and weeds the candytuft. Il faut cultiver notre jardin. We must cultivate our garden. Voltaire, an important man, had said that. His dad likes to say it, whenever his mum gets particularly angry about a neighbor's transgressions or some greater governmental failing, though he shows no sign of cultivating his other than occasionally surrendering a battered chair to the bin men. Howard thinks he might quite like to be a bin man when he grows up. You'd get to see what everyone was up to, going house to house, perhaps even catch murderers if they tried hiding evidence in the rubbish tips.

Right this moment, though, watching Mrs. Hinshawe, he can't seem to think of anything but how her caftan--scarlet and tangerine, today--clings to the dark patches of sweat under her arms, beneath her breasts, at the cleft of her bum, the way her hips move back and forth as she pushes a small red wheelbarrow laden with new plants toward a bare soil patch. Her nipples, her thighs, the declivity of her navel are outlined clearly against the damp fabric. As she lifts out the first flat of seedlings she turns her head just in time to catch his eye through the fence, and pins him beneath her gaze, and looks him very deliberately up and down, down and up, just as he's been doing to her. His face grows hot. She laughs, a full, throaty chortle.

"Cheeky little one, you are," she says, in great amusement, and turns away. "Although," she adds after a moment, tossing it over her shoulder like the strawberry braid, "at least you're not dead from the neck down like your dad is."

And with that, she goes back to the seedlings as if he weren't even there. He should say something, he knows, to defend the family honor after that last remark, but he's horribly embarrassed now and her studied indifference is an immense relief.

At night, though, she refuses to leave him alone. He starts dreaming about her, always in that same sweat-soaked bright orange dress, lingering so closely near the fencing separating them that it seems to dissolve like fog. Get in my wheelbarrow, she orders him in an urgent whisper, it's very important, and he tumbles into it without quite meaning to, and the dream always ends just as she's carting him off to…somewhere, he has no idea where, and he wakes up feverish and weirdly restless like something vitally important was indeed about to happen, could have happened, but there's nothing for him but watery moonlight and lost opportunity. At least she's got her snapdragons for consolation.

When the summer gets very hot and Mrs. Hinshawe starts doing her weeding in a halter top and gauzy skirts you can see through from a yard away, his mum actually marches next door to complain. Oughtn't to be allowed. (Howard is inclined to agree, he's really desperately in need of a decent night's sleep.) Amazingly, disconcertingly even, they get on. Mrs. Hinshawe never darkens their own doorstep, but his mum's always over there now for tea, a chat--and what on Earth could she have to say to Mrs. Hinshawe? She hates gardening. And chit-chat. And tea, for that matter.

"It's just nice to have someone to talk to," she says once, the only time she ever talks about her new friend. "At long last."

"Mm-hm," his dad says, not glancing up from his copy of Home Electronic Circuitry and You.

When his mum and Mrs. Hinshawe finally run off together, the scandal keeps the neighborhood enthralled for months on end; everyone, it seems, personally saw it coming but everyone, it seems, is drunk on the delicious, dizzying shock of it just the same. Howard's dad shrugs, and politely entertains the neighbor women--more than one already married--who come dropping by oozing outraged, calculating sympathy, and passes along without rancor the letters, sweets, little gifts his mum sends Howard from London, Copenhagen, Ibiza, Long Beach, Tuscany. For his part, his dad seems quite content--and really, other than having to dust the chairs and make his own fry-ups, his dad's life hasn't actually changed much at all.

"There's no point making a fuss," his dad says, sometimes, as he surrenders Howard's mail to him. "That hardly changes anything, does it?"

Howard considers this, and glances down at the worn, creased card in his hand postmarked from the Seychelles, and can't exactly argue with the assertion. He can barely read the writing, something got spilled on it and dried somewhere in transit.

Someday you'll understand, Howard, one of her later letters declares, somewhere between a command and a plea. You truly will. I promise you that.

Howard reads it all the way through once more, as he habitually does, noting the little left-hander's ink smudges along the margins, the tall spidery loops of the d's and p's. Then he folds it carefully, replaces it in the wooden box beneath his bed where he keeps all her correspondence and returns to the guitar, the present he'd begged for the last Christmas she was still there, whose secrets he's still struggling to master. D minor scale. E Phrygian. F major. Fourth dyad chord. Parallel thirds. D minor. F major. Over and over and over again.

Mrs. Hinshawe's garden goes to weed and seed. He never answers any of his mother's postcards or letters, and after a few more years they stop coming.

******

2. Keep your eyes on the sky
Put a dollar in the kitty
Don't the moon look pretty?

The moon is alive. It speaks.

Howard doesn't know how he knows this, because he can't understand a word it's saying or even hear the incomprehensible rush of its argle-bargle, but he just knows. The moon is a living thing, not just some ball of dead rock. It thinks. It speaks. So do the other planets, and all the suns and stars. There's your music of the spheres.

He keeps this opinion--this fact--to himself as he's well aware just how mad it sounds, perhaps he should worry he really is mad, but he knows, with absolute certainty, that he isn't. Nobody else around him thinks this way. He's too old to think this way, to ascribe thought and feeling to planets and stars, agency to trees and rocks. There are religions, he understands from all his reading, very well-established ones, where this sort of thinking is commonplace but it's not about worshipping anything, for him, it's simply about acknowledging what is. The world's terrifyingly sentient. All the worlds are. All the beings on them. More facts, those other worlds he's never seen, other beings he's never met, that you can't talk about with anyone, ever, without being dismissed as a complete nutter. He doesn't understand why. It's like everyone collectively pretending, for inexplicable reasons, that the color blue doesn't exist.

In school they've just done squares of the hypotenuse and he's been reading, on his own time, about Pythagoras. Pythagoras said Hades and the underworld were lies, that the life you've got now is the only life there is, that the dead reincarnate over and over back into this life and thus the bacon on your plate might be, quite literally, your departed brother. Howard tries not to dwell on this idea--he loves bacon too much to acquit himself well--but the essential point remains: Everything's alive in ways you can't begin to understand by applying reason or religion to the question.

Not just anyone can appreciate all this, mind, only the great men and women of history like Pythagoras, Marie-Sophie Germain, Lao Tzu, Edison, Queen Nzingha, Edmund Hillary, Jack Flanders, Dizzy Gillespie, Alan Turing, Rudi Van DiSarzio, Emma Goldman. And himself, of course. A great destiny awaits him, a walk down profound, dazzling pathways that will sweep him into an existence far beyond the everyday doldrums of home, school, home, school, home, school, Saturday evenings alone, Sundays with Gran in Wakefield, you could scream from the torturous boredom without stopping but nobody would even hear you. No matter. He's a man of destiny. It's why he has no friends, why he's always picked last for games, why his teachers dismiss him as an annoyance, why whenever he opens his mouth and says something he thinks perfectly ordinary everyone reacts as though he just throat-sang the Mahabharata in Tagalog. All men of destiny are lone wolves, condemned to solitude by virtue of being so far above the common herd. (Women of destiny seem a bit better adjusted, when he finally meets some of them he's got to ask them their secret.) It will all come to him, in time.

Time drags, presses down, smothers, exhausting as the weight of Sisyphus's rock. He's been reading Camus's Myth of Sisyphus. He doesn't entirely understand it, but he likes the Frenchman's call to embrace the absurd. He's absurd, Howard is. He's a bloody pan-fried absurd-cake. Camus would be in awe of him. Pity about the car smash, they could've been great mates.

"I might live in France someday," he announces. "Or Algeria. After I've explored the Amazonian rainforests. The Yagua would know what I'm all about, they'd embrace me like a brother."

"Mm-hm," his father says, not glancing up from his copy of Fifty-Seven Even More Practical Uses for Blu-Tack.

"Next time, Moon," his fourth-form English master admonishes him, handing back another essay covered in scarlet scribbles, "try sticking to a subject more at your intellectual level. Like Blue Peter, or the inner workings of the Chinese takeaway box."

Knowing himself, despite every last insult and jibe from the yahoos and L-sevens, to be secretly a man of destiny is bracing, vindicating. But he's tired sometimes, so tired, of the secrecy part, he wants everyone to see it. Acknowledge it. Afford him the respect and renown he innately deserves. That's hardly very much to ask, now is it?

Barring that, he wants to know just what it is the moon is saying to the stars. But he's shut out of all that, just as he is from so much else.

******

3. This is the day
Your life will surely change

There's a new girl in school. Or boy. No one seems entirely certain. Howard hardly notices, why take notice of one more common-herdster who inevitably won't speak to him anyway, but he (she?) is the talk of the school. Alan Hollsworth and his friends mutter darkly about the "posh little poofter" but many of the girls, including Alan's own girlfriend, seem infatuated. Ominous-sounding plans are floated to "teach the poofter a lesson"; somehow, though, they never come to fruition. Presumably the newcomer, all other attributes aside, knows how to run very fast.

It's a warm spring afternoon and Howard wanders aimlessly around the schoolyard blacktop, trying to distract his thoughts from food: He's saving up for saxophone lessons--old Mr. Pennybaker, in despair at Howard's stubborn lack of progress on the instrument, must now be bribed a double fee to keep him on--and between that and the "protection" money Hollsworth routinely demands, purchasing lunch is out of the question. He keeps by the chain-link fence at the periphery, forcing himself to think about Charlie Parker and Slim Gaillard instead of Mars Bars, goes into a bit of a mental jazz-trance and nearly stumbles straight into a knot of girls standing around a concrete bench, their blazered backs and flapping skirts shielding the object of their attention from view.

"…and so I was raised in the jungles of India by Bryan Ferry," a voice--male tenor, female contralto?--announces from amid the thicket.

"You never," says one of the audience, flirtatiously stern. "You're such a liar. You lie like you breathe."

"It's the truth," the phantom voice calmly insists. "Of course, he was always touring, and then after Flesh + Blood came out he was a bit depressed and had to go to the Towers of Inverness to try and find himself, and he got stuck in the Bodhisattva Jukebox for a while, so I was mostly raised by the jungle animals. Ashapurna, the old vulture, she used to regurgitate bits of meat for me to eat when I was a little baby, and then Poulomi, the she-wolf, she got jealous and started bringing me whole grizzled squirrels all chewed up, imagine that--"

"Have I got to?" groans another girl, no less entranced than the first. "I just ate, Vince! You're so awful."

A low, somewhat self-satisfied laugh. "Ashapurna, she was a motherbitch. Well possessive. Those two were constantly fighting over me, it was a bit embarrassing, really…"

Vince. A he, then, if all the billing and cooing weren't clue enough. Without quite realizing it Howard's drifted ever closer, still trying to parse out these nonsensical outpourings, when the class bell suddenly rings; with cries of disappointment at being left hanging, the girls start to scatter, a skinny spotty one with a frizz of canary-colored hair nearly barreling straight into him as she turns.

"Sorry," he mumbles, getting an icy glare in return.

"Look, everyone," she announces, as the others smirk, "it's the Jazz Giraffe, trying to worm his way in again--why don't you try finding some friends of your own, you berk? There must be someone you can bribe to pretend to like you--"

"Oh, let him alone," says Beatrice Bennett, Hollsworth's girlfriend, who being preternaturally stunning can also afford to be magnanimous. "It's not like he can help being creepy and weird--see you in art class, Vince!"

They rush toward the school doors at top speed; Howard always seems to have that sort of effect on the fair sex. The boy on the bench stares up at him. A pale, thin, pointed face, nose oddly flattened along the bridge, wide blue eyes, mouse-brown hair cut in what even Howard can see is a clumsy, amateurish style: flat in patches and unevenly spiky in others, as if a pair of scissors got drunk and staggered home from the Shear Arms across his scalp. Almost painfully skinny, his blue school blazer hanging off him; it's emblazoned with pustulent clumps of sequins and glue spots where the sequins have fallen off, pins advertising a dozen different pop bands Howard's never heard of. A shocking pink T-shirt beneath the blazer, and instead of trousers he's got a girl's uniform skirt with silver leggings underneath, white Cuban-heeled boots on his feet. How has he not been sent home to change? A pink lunchbox sits open on his lap, filled with an array of nibbled-at soft cheeses and what looks like a gold foil crisps bag. His eyes on Howard's are perfectly neutral, unreadable; he could be looking at anything. A bare wall. The clouds. A cockerel reciting Tennyson. After a moment he tears the gold foil bag open, nearly ripping it down the side.

"You want a Vizier's Folly?" he asks Howard.

The label on the bag doesn't look familiar. "What are they?"

"They're soft pretzels with a sort of green chai ganache inside, sprinkled with fleur de sel and rosewater."

Howard shakes his head. Vince dips his fingers into the bag, displaying peeling, half gnawed-away scarlet nail polish, and munches thoughtfully for a moment or two.

"So when I was older," he continues, as if he's never left off, as if he's been telling all this to Howard all along, "Banibrata the marsh-mugger had all sorts of grand plans to make me like his apprentice, yeah, he was gonna teach me to crawl on my belly in the mud and ambush fish eagles and all that, and I was all excited about it but my uncle, he's a French duke, he's got a chateau and everything near the Dordogne, he convinced Bryan I needed a 'proper English education.' They get all worked up about doing things properly, the French do." He takes a large bite of Camembert. "So Bryan sent me here. He's in the Paraguayan rainforest right now, financing research into cutting-edge synthesizers--they've got a prototype now, it's gonna make the Moog sound like a kids' xylophone. It's space-age, except, bigger even, it's universe-age. It's still in blueprint phase, they blindfold you on the drive to the lab." A wedge of Port Salut vanishes in short order. "Everything you think you know about new wave? Gonna sweep it all aside. It'll cause a revolution. Kids'll be rioting in the streets. Smashing up shop windows with toy xylophones."

After this extraordinary outburst he just sits there, gazing at Howard. There's nothing defiant or challenging in his expression, no hint he's taking the piss; it's clear he actually believes what he's saying or, at least, couldn't care less if anyone else doesn't. Howard, standing there watching him gnaw on a cheese rind and swing one silvery leg back and forth, is unimpressed, deeply unimpressed; God knows what this Vince is on about, or just plain on, but he's a budding musician, a poet, a man of destiny, he's got no time to humor the unhinged ravings of an epicene lunatic. He's far too busy for this perfumed rot. In fact, he's just going to say as much, right now, in no uncertain terms.

Instead, he says, "The moon's alive. It speaks."

Vince's bright eyes get brighter, and he grins. Not like someone hearing a joke, more like a track and fielder who's crossed the finish line while you were reveling in clearing the first hurdle.

"I thought you were gonna tell me something I didn't know." He tilts his head, the grin getting wider. "Is your name really Jazz Giraffe?"

"Of course it isn't," Howard says sharply. "It's Howard. Howard Moon."

"You should change it to Jazz Giraffe," Vince advises, offering up a piece of Brie de Meaux. "Got more of a ring to it. Or Johnny H. Jazz--you know, like Johnny Hates Jazz? Yeah. Johnny H. Jazz. Jazzy Johnny. That's good."

"My own name's just fine, thank you very much." The cheese is so good it melts into his tongue and makes his skin prickle. He still clings stubbornly to his indignation through every bite. "It's a good solid name, Howard Moon. It wears well. It's a name you remember--"

"It's boring," Vince insists. "It's so flat. Now see, my name's alive, it leaps right up and bites you--Vince Noir, tres bizarre. Vince Noir, rock and roll star. See? It's got a ring to it. It's got flair. Howard Moon just sort of…sits there, limp. Like a dead vole on the motorway."

He bites into a piece of Saint Nectaire, frowns critically and tosses it back into the lunchbox, snapping the lock shut. Then he looks back up at Howard. "Animals speak too," he says. "I can hear them. I can talk back to them." His face is suffused with genuine pride. "It's my gift."

Howard considers this. "You're like Mowgli in a dress then, are you?"

Vince laughs out loud, seemingly delighted. "Mowgli! That's great. Mowgli. I'm like Mowgli. I love it." He looks thoughtful for a moment. "Who's Mowgli? Is he in a band?"

Oh, dear. "Not to my knowledge, no."

"Mm." Howard can feel Vince immediately losing interest. He rises to his feet in a flutter of skirt-pleats, the lunchbox dangling from his fingers.

"Plants are alive too," Vince says. "Like we are. Listening in. Plotting and scheming."

"Planets, too," Howard replies. "Plants and planets. And all the stars."

They both stand there for a moment. Then Vince smiles, at once ingratiating and completely distant.

"Got art class," he says, and turns and strolls toward the school doors without looking back, casually as if there'll be no penalty at all for wandering in late. Perhaps there won't be, if they let him walk around looking like that God knows what else he gets away with. Nice for some. Howard licks the last buttery traces of cheese from his fingers, realizes he simply can't face maths and domestic science this afternoon and heads for the exterior gate; his teachers seem just as happy not to have him around the place anyway. Go downtown, wander around the Leeds College of Music for a bit, now there's somewhere he truly belonged. Someday.

As he walks away his skin prickles again and he feels, for a split second, what he could swear is like a pair of eyes following him, as though someone else had stopped in their tracks and turned to watch him as he departs. No more than his own paranoia about getting caught, doubtless, and by the time he's through the gate the sensation has vanished.

******

4. They all laughed at angry young men
They all laughed at Edison
And also at Einstein

Howard discovers vocalese, courtesy of an old Jon Hendricks album, and nothing's quite the same afterwards. He's always sung little songs to himself, doggerel comprised of lists of the kings of England, the actinoid and lanthanoid elements, directions to and from the Flamingo Land Zoo, all the places he might have left his favorite tan cardigan: It's the easiest way he can remember anything, setting it to a melody. But to know that someone out there has raised random meandering singing to an actual art form, that you're allowed to take a well-established piece of jazz music and junk the music entirely--just sing any lines you've made up to the tune of that song, acapella, and call it something new--that, sir, is a revelation. That's the answer. Instantly his failure to make any headway with the tenor sax, alto sax, trumpet, clarinet, piano stops being a source of shame; it's just that he hadn't found his destined instrument yet, his proper vehicle, namely his own voice.

He starts composing his own vocalese masterpiece, a grand overview of the history and geography of Leeds, set to the tune of A Love Supreme. Mr. Pennybaker begs him to stop. Howard ignores him. All visionaries are scorned in their lifetimes. He scribbles line after line in the back of a battered green notebook, the same one where he writes down the odd bit of poetry, ideas for future novels, random guesses of what the moon and trees might've been talking about that day, filling so many pages in such a short time he could have danced a little jig of pure, thrilling productivity. One afternoon he's strolling home, scrawling more lines as he walks and singing, to himself, a half-formed countermelody:

Right hand writing, left foot walking,
Left foot, left foot, sinister toes,
Sinister toes, evil in the instep--

"MOON!"

Blast, bugger, bollocks and balls. Howard looks up just in time to see Alan Hollsworth, two equally broad-backed and thick-necked cronies in tow, blocking his only escape path from the narrow, deserted side street.

"Hollsworth," he nods, trying to sound perfectly casual, hands clinging protectively to the notebook and feet twitching to run. "Lovely to see you, if you'll just move aside I'll be on my--"

Hollsworth shoves Howard one-handed against a damp brick wall, fingers sinking hard into his shoulder. "Where's my money, Moon?" he demands, almost pleasantly; his breath, inches from Howard's nose, smells unpleasantly of shrimp crisps. "Hand it over."

"I haven't got any," Howard says, truthfully. He'd spent it all on record albums. It's his money, he can do what he wants with it. He hates himself for having to remind himself of this.

"I said, hand it over."

"I haven't got it," Howard repeats, feeling the wall's cold wetness start to soak through his school blazer. "I'm skint. It's the truth."

He waits, heart pounding, for the sneering dismissal, or the fists and feet. Hollsworth can always go either way, an arbitrariness he clearly revels in, but he's been visibly seething since Beatrice Bennett gave him the boot and Howard won't get off lightly this time, not lightly at all. Hollsworth studies Howard with a thoughtfulness that presages trouble, then suddenly yanks his head back by the hair, so hard he's nearly hauled onto his toes; he starts, struggles, and Hollsworth's mates burst out laughing.

"Fucking pillock," jeers Kevin Collins, the second in bullying command.

"Did I hear you singing just now, Moon?" Hollsworth demands. "It was either that, or a dying weasel getting buggered bloody by an elephant--"

"I'll sing if I like," Howard replies, chin pointed forcibly toward the sky, emboldened both by thoughts of what Robert Johnson might do in this situation and the knowledge he's going to be thoroughly trounced no matter what he says. Robert Johnson's voice, he's miserably certain, would not be shaking like his. "It's not any concern of yours."

" 'Ith not any conthern'--could you be more of a pathetic queer, Moon? I mean really, seriously? Prancing about town singing"--Hollsworth's rumbling basso voice goes screechingly high and sing-song--"writing your precious poems in your poxy little notebook--" Then he releases Howard's head, grabs the notebook from his grasp and tosses it to Collins, who eagerly flips to a random page.

" 'The moon's shining light spills down/Like a bath of alabaster cream/On the cream-tinged paving stones'--what is this poncey shite?" Collins hoots derisively, pages crumpling in his fist as he plows ahead for more. "Oh, you're gonna love this, Alan--'Beauteous Beatrice, in all your creamy-skinned beauty--' "

"What's this in the back?" demands Gary Niles, grabbing it from Collins. " 'A Leeds Supreme'?"

"Give it back!" Howard shouts as he barrels toward them both, rage making him reckless. "It's mine!"

The notebook goes sailing from hand to hand, pages torn out and trampled underfoot; Howard seizes Niles's arm, trying to grab it back, then doubles over as Hollsworth sinks a fist into his stomach, hits him again, kicks him to his knees in the mud puddles. Ruined pages, all his work, weeks and months of it fluttering past, Hollsworth punches him again, Collins and Niles try to rip the notebook in two along its spine, they shout with delight as it's sent airborne for one final sacrificial journey--

--and then there's a flash of flamingo pink and a small, slender figure darts into the fray, catches the notebook with nonchalant, one-handed ease and darts back out again, so quickly and efficiently that Howard's tormentors look about them and blink in sincere confusion. Howard struggles to his feet, taking advantage of their distraction, and sees Vince standing there, notebook cradled in one curled-up arm like a woman's clutch handbag, a small smile playing on his lips as he regards the four other boys.

"Wotcher, Howard," he says casually, as though they're not even there. As though they're not about to turn his face into moussaka meat. He's dressed down today, proper uniform trousers and shirt, the white Cuban heels, a long pink jacket cut like a frock coat.

"You," Hollsworth growls, Howard already good as forgotten. "Hand it back and piss off, Lady Stardust, if you know what's good for you--"

"Don't think so," says Vince, slowly shaking his head.

His smile broadens. Hollsworth just stands there, anger oozing from him like a bad smell. "You'd better leave, Vince," urges Howard, still out of breath from the pummeling.

"Don't think so."

"I'd listen to the Giraffe if I were you," says Collins, he and Niles already moving into position to dispense with the interloper.

Hollsworth flushes beetroot. "I said, hand it back and piss off, you filthy little arse-bandit--"

"Arse-bandit?" Vince bursts out laughing. "I'm an arse-bandit then, am I? And your girlfriend still fancies me instead, so what must you have been giving her all this time?"

Oh, Christ. Collins and Niles let out low, chortling whistles, torn between loyalty to the cause and admiration for this rhetorical bullseye; they pull back a bit, eagerly watching the impending showdown.

"I'm gonna smash your head in," Hollsworth says, quietly enough to signal not a threat but a promise.

"No, you're not," Vince replies, unfazed by Hollsworth's grim expression and clenched fists. "You're not gonna do anything. You're afraid of me."

"Afraid?" Hollsworth advances on him. "Afraid? Of you, you mincing little piece of--"

"That's right." Vince starts rocking from foot to foot, a boxer floating about the ring. "You're afraid of me, everyone's afraid of me 'cos I'm from sooooooooouth London!" His voice suddenly twists into a gravelly, bellowing music-hall Cockney; he springs onto the balls of his wide-planted feet, poised for attack. " 'E's the little Cockney boy with the deadly little toys! 'E got a shiv in his Christmas stocking and it's time for the bleedin' baptism!" He swings his arms, notebook wielded like a blade, his face crumpled into a distorted, knife-wound grin. " 'E shivs 'em one way!" His arms sweep to the left. " 'E shivs 'em another!" To the right. " 'E's derry-derry-down on all the wankers and tosspots and 'e shan't quit rippin' 'em!"

He stands there, the grin frozen on his face, eyes glassy and unnaturally wide and staring down Alan Hollsworth and his friends like headlights sweeping over a deer herd. Howard can't stop staring himself because for a moment there, just a second, Vince actually became something else, something predatory and otherworldly and gleefully malevolent; he saw it happen, they must have too because Collins and Niles are glancing at each other, uncertain, and Hollsworth actually takes a step backward. The mask slides away--or back into place, for that split second Howard's not any more certain than they are--and then it's Vince again, waiting, still with that mad smile.

"You're fucking barmy," Hollsworth finally says, still belligerent but now considerably more subdued. "You're completely off your head, you little bender--"

"Let's go, Alan," urges Collins. "Little shitbox wants to rescue his boyfriend, let him. Neither of 'em worth the trouble."

Hollsworth glances from Vince to Howard and back again, quickly, as if safety dictates he keep a close eye on Vince. Then he recovers his mien, smirking at them both.

"Yeah, all right," he agrees. "Hardly worth it." He turns back to Howard, spitting a fat wad of chewing gum at his feet. "Stay out of my way, Moon, or I'll kick the shit so far out of you they'll find bits of your colon on the M40, you understand me?"

Howard nods hastily, and Hollsworth and company saunter off. Hollsworth hesitates the briefest moment as he walks past Vince, hesitates like there might actually be a knife in Vince's hand and he might actually find blood on his cheek, his throat if he puts a foot wrong, but soon enough he and his gang are strutting along with heads high as if they've actually accomplished their nebulous mission. Once they turn the corner Vince finally lowers his arms. They're trembling, Howard suddenly sees, Vince's arms are, and the fingers gripping his notebook are white-knuckled. Today's polish is an iridescent, lizardy green.

"Thanks," he tells Vince, a trace grudgingly. He could've taken them on himself, really, if Vince hadn't happened along. The Axe of Ambush, they call him, the Shimmying Shiv. Sneaks right up on you, aieewhooaaa you're a goner! He starts plucking wet, torn-up pages from the ground, seeking what he can salvage.

"That all of them?" asks Vince.

"It's all the ones I can find, anyway." Howard holds out a hand for the notebook. "Seriously, thanks for--"

"Well, hang on," says Vince, smiling now like his own self, sly and maddening. "I haven't finished reading it yet--"

"What? Okay, whoa there, that's my notebook, I thought we just went through--oi! Where are you going!"

Vince trundles back down the alleyway--a mud-spattered Howard following indignantly in his wake--settles himself on someone's front stoop and starts to read. Howard looms over him, impatient, watching Vince's lips move slowly line by line until he finally closes the notebook and, looking somewhat troubled, hands it back.

"What?" Howard demands, feeling quite justifiably irritable.

"Well, see, it's not enough, is it, really?" Vince says, biting at a hangnail. "I mean, it's fine on paper, but you gotta have a look to go with it."

Howard shakes his head in confusion. "To go with what?"

"With the poems," Vince explains patiently. "All those lines in there, yeah, about how the moon's a big creamy orb in the sky and the daffodils are like thick yellow cream on stalks, and the sun's a ball of cream that caught fire? You can't say all that and then go shambling out there wearing any old Oxfam rag, can you? If you're gonna be a cream poet, you have to look like one." His eyes are bright and excited, brain-gears whirring with the possibilities. "You have to play it up. You should get a sort of cream-colored suit? An ice cream suit, like that Yank writer always wears. And a cream fedora, maybe with a black feather in the brim, for contrast--"

"Right, hang on. What does any of this have to do with my writing?"

Vince regards him in complete bewilderment. "What d'you mean, what does it have to do with it? It's your look! That's the most important part, that's what people remember! They don't care about the words! I mean, Howard, come on, you'll never get anywhere as a writer walking around like that--"

"What's wrong with how I look?" Howard demands, scrubbing a palm against the mud drying on his trousers.

"What's wrong is, you don't look like anything," Vince says, sternly tapping his emerald nails against the stone step. "You've got no look. I mean, I see you walking down the street or around school, you just blend right in, I can barely spot you even when you're coming right at me. I'm surprised Hollsworth could even track you down--"

"I have so got a look!" Howard shouts. He has, in fact, only the vaguest notion what the hell Vince is talking about, but he's damned if he's going to listen to all this and not defend himself. "This is my look! I'm the…the…Run-Down Renaissance Man. Yeah." Yeah. He likes that. "I'm the Mangy Polymath. I'm a poet, novelist, musician, lyricist, a trenchant social critic, I haven't got time for all that fashion styling muck--"

"What sort of music?" Vince perks up instantly, like a golden retriever who's just spotted a squirrel. "New wave? Electro-pop? Postpunk? Madrilenian groove? Coldwave? 2 Tone? Glam troubadour neo-synth?"

"I like real music," Howard explains patiently. "Jazz. I like jazz. The only real music that's left."

"No, seriously, what sort of music do you do?"

"Real music isn't about clothes and hairstyles." Vince just blinks at this bizarre pronouncement and Howard plows on ahead, stubbornly. "It's about what's inside you, it's about reaching into the deepest recesses of your soul and expressing yourself, your true self, through the--"

"Yeah, but if you're shallow that doesn't do you much good, does it. It's all about style, all right? It's--seriously, what d'you think would've happened to British music if Vivienne Westwood never came to Kings Road? "

"That like Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane?"

"Who're they?"

Howard sighs, running a hand through his hair before he remembers his fingers are caked in mud. "Look, all I'm saying is I don't care how she dresses, when this Vivienne Westwood or whoever gets up there on stage the important thing is whether she's got the talent, the chops, the ear for…what're you goggling at?"

Vince gazes back at Howard, quietly astonished. "You don't know who she is, do you?" he replies in disbelief.

"Am I supposed to? I told you, I don't listen to pop--"

"You don't know who Vivienne Westwood is?" Vince actually leaps to his feet with the shock, eyes gone to saucers. "Where've you been living all this time, the north face of the Eiger? Christ! You actually don't know who--it's that jazz music, you know. It's walled you off from normal people. It's poisoning your mind."

"You're 'normal people' then, are you?" Howard just starts walking away, laughing, somehow knowing instinctively that Vince will follow. "Hate to tell you this, but Alan Hollsworth, he's 'normal people' and he hates both our cheap, stinking guts--"

"Alan Hollsworth's all Motorhead and Ozzy Osbourne, that's a different kind of brain damage to what you've got." Vince strides alongside, hands thrust deep in his pockets, shaking his head at the tragedy before him. "Right, you've got to get educated in some really good music, yeah? We'll start you off slow, a bit of Johnny Zhivago and Duran Duran, then some Sigue Sigue Sputnik and then some of my stuff. I've got a band, we're famous, we--"

"I don't need educating, thank you very much, I like jazz. I'm allowed to like jazz." Howard stops in his tracks, trying his best to stare down his opponent. "And you don't have a band."

"I've got a band," Vince insists. "We're gonna be on New Faces of Pop, yeah, we play all the clubs, all the record companies are after us to sign, just because you're living in a cockpit black box and don't know about it, Mr. Jazz Freak--"

"So what's it called, this band of yours?"

"Hiram's Cheese Shop." Vince looks triumphant. "That's what it's called."

Howard nods. "Hiram's Cheese Shop? You mean like the name of the shop we just passed the last street down?"

Silence. Vince shuffles his feet. "I've got--"

"You don't have a band," Howard says firmly. "All right?" Silence. "I don't mind all those other…stories and things you tell, the ones about India and French castles and all that, but you don't have a band. That's just nonsense. Knock it off."

"Like you would know anyway," Vince calls out, as Howard starts walking away again.

"I know you don't!" Howard replies, without turning around.

He continues on his way--indifferent as you please, thank you very much--then his steps falter and he turns, reluctantly. Vince is still standing there, with the same distant, meditative look on his face as when they first met.

"So what were you singing, before Hollsworth showed up?" Vince asks. "He said you were singing something. Some stupid jazz song, right?"

"It was my own song," Howard retorts, annoyed with himself that he's suddenly, acutely self-conscious. "Just…it didn't mean anything. I make up songs sometimes so I can remember things. Or because I want to. All right? They're not real music or anything."

"You don't think anything's real music," Vince mutters. He approaches Howard again. "Could I hear it?"

"What for?"

Vince just shrugs. And waits. So now he wants a laugh at Howard's expense too, because he won't pretend to like Vivian Westbrook or whoever she is? Fine, let him have one. Howard glances round quickly, making sure nobody else is listening in.

" 'Right hand writing, left foot walking, left foot, left foot, sinister toes, sinister toes, evil in the instep'--and that's all of it, all right? You happy? It's just a stupid--"

"Soles toward heaven! Toes toward hell!"

Howard frowns. Vince waves an imperious hand at him--well, come on, then!--and repeats himself, slower. "Soles toward heaven! Toes toward hell!"

He waits, almost dancing with impatience, for Howard to follow his cue. Improvisation, Howard realizes in sudden excitement, jam session, their own cutting contest like Art Tatum and Count Basie used to have--"Hellbound, hellbound, manky mucked-up metatarsal--"

Vince's face has lit up. He feels it too. "Aerosole, Aerosole!"

"Hanging by the nails, riding on the rails--"

"Bootlaces!"

"Lipstick traces!"

"Falling arches--"

"Falling into--"

They take the last line together, singing it low and slow: "Cooooooorns!"

Silence, a conspiratorial silence with its own little echo. Vince smiles, a tentative smile like he's not sure what just happened but still rather likes it, and Howard stands there feeling torn: It's not strictly jazz, it's not vocalese, it's not quite scat, it's not any sort of real proper important music but…but. He's never done anything like it before, not with anyone. He'd rather like to do it again.

"How many more of those do you have?" Vince demands. "Those sorts of songs?"

Howard shrugs. "I don't know. I never kept track."

"I like them a lot better than the ones you wrote down."

That should make him angry, that dismissive comment, but then look how many of the true jazz greats produced their best work right there, in the moment. And you can't jam in a one-man vacuum. Vince's got a point. Not that Howard's going to give him the satisfaction of saying so, no sir.

"So stick around," he tells Vince, quite liking his own air of sangfroid, "and maybe you'll hear more of them."

And with that he strolls off, alone, flapping the retrieved notebook pages against the air to try and dry them out. Most of them are indecipherable, the ink from the fountain pen he likes to use melted to a dark blue sunburst, but somehow this doesn't upset him as it properly should.

After that day, wherever he goes, Vince is there. Howard has no idea where Vince lives, where he disappears to after school, what he does with himself the days Howard is stuck in Wakefield or at music lessons or in mandated "family time" with his dad and his dad's new wife; when he asks, all he gets is an evasive smile and tilt of the head. He's no longer alone, that's all. And with a strange swiftness it feels as though he's never actually been alone, that all Howard's life ever since he can remember Vince has been just around the corner, across the room, right down the hallway, strolling laconically towards him to ramble about talking water snakes or Dalek I Love You or the gold elastane trousers he just thrifted, shoplifted, ran up for himself in domestic science when he was meant to be sewing a pillowcase. It's easy, their talk, so weirdly easy given that more often than not, neither of them has any real idea just what the other's on about. It just is. And it's always been like that, or at least that's how it seems.

It doesn't go unnoticed. Occasionally now Howard sees Beatrice Bennett observing him from a distance like some sort of lab experiment, clearly trying to decipher the mystery. Jenny Pilchard, she of the canary hair, is blunter: "Is that greasy-haired eejit blackmailing you or something?" she demands of Vince. "Why are you always talking to him?" Vince just smiles, tells her about the Sumatran tigers he supposedly saw strolling on the Civic Hall's parapets that very morning. She seems bored, put off even, where she would once have been dazzled. Vince's stock has gone down, thanks in no small part to Howard's proximity. If this bothers Vince, he shows little outward sign.

Of course, Vince shows little outward sign of nearly anything, which sometimes makes Howard wonder. One afternoon Howard is walking back from Mr. Pennybaker's, taking a shortcut through an interestingly dodgy neighborhood, when from the corner of an eye he swears he sees a streak of flamingo pink, the exact shade of Vince's long frock-jacket, disappearing into a dilapidated building across the way; it's an abandoned, half-collapsed structure, every window broken and the gardens gone to rubbish piles, one of the heaps rumored to be a squat for runaways, throwaways, all manner of hand-to-mouthers. Cacophonous punk music blares from somewhere inside, the singer spitting and snarling in some Germanic-sounding language. Howard stands there for several minutes, but nobody goes in or comes out and he's not at all sure he really saw that little flash of pink. Did he imagine it? Then two female passers-by, one very pregnant, erupt into a drunken screaming match before him and he hastily heads home.

At lunchtimes Vince always has either a Lucullan banquet, crammed cheek by jowl into its pink tin box, or nothing at all. One day Howard brings an extra sandwich, Jaffa Cakes, a satsuma, offering them offhandedly as he can manage.

"Potted beef?" Vince demands scornfully, eyeing the soggy, clumsily slapped-together sandwich as though Howard just handed him a gift-wrapped dog turd. "You are joking, aren't you? Who do I look like, Albert Steptoe?" Then he devours the entire thing in three large bites, stuffing the biscuits and fruit into his pockets for safekeeping.

They chant and sing together spontaneously, carelessly, the mutually nonsensical, anarchic little tunes springing from nowhere and flowing as freely as coins from a rich spendthrift's pockets. It becomes an understood shorthand between them both, a language only they speak, privately, when nobody else is there to willfully misinterpret them. It still bothers Howard a bit, sometimes, that it's all too random and unmelodic to be proper vocalese; the songs are all so small, stunted even, the words and notes caught up in invisible kirby grips.

"Kirby grips?" Vince repeats, laughing, when Howard tells him this. Typically, he seems quite unfazed by the criticism. "They are like, sort of tightly squeezed, aren't they? The songs? All crimped up. Like they're in kirby grips. That's a bit good, I like it."

Crimped up, Howard thinks. Crimps. Crimping. Now, there's a thought.

******

5. Zebras are reactionaries
Antelopes are missionaries
Pigeons plot in secrecy
And hamsters turn on frequently

He joins the South London Animal Conservatory specifically to work with Tommy Nooka, one of his heroes, a world explorer, visionary, conservationist, raconteur, one of Britain's truly great men--and of course within the month Tommy goes missing in the Jungle Room and Bob sodding Fossil's suddenly in charge, the zoo renamed, the new overlord bellowing nonstop over the PA in that unbearable Yank Bronx-honk and nursing his psychotic breaks like newborn kittens. Howard has his suspicions about this course of events, a great many suspicions--not that they do him any good--but Tommy's legacy must be preserved, the show go on, the polar bear enclosure get mucked out, he's got a job to do and by Christ, a pathetic specimen like Fossil isn't going to stop him. He's a stubborn man, Howard Moon, a man of unshakable principles. They call him El Hombre Inamovible. Actually they call him a lot of things around the zoo, most of them unflattering, but the one thing they never seem able to remember is his own bloody given name. The hoi polloi's rank resentment is not a pretty thing.

It's when he realizes one afternoon that on Fossil's orders he's just spent forty minutes wrestling with a chamois goat trying, and failing, to get it into a multi-teated blue cotton bra--a device which, though he's not on intimate terms with female undergarments (women all seem threatened by his raw sexuality, he's really got to work on toning that down), even he could see was lumpy ill-fitting tat no self-respecting doe would wear--that Howard finally acknowledges the place is driving him slowly, inexorably insane. It's not exactly the Algonquin Round Table at Bob Fossil's Fun World, or even the Rickmansworth Grillomat luncheonette counter: Joey Moose braying about the mighty manly Outback (Howard earns Moose's eternal enmity by wondering aloud what exactly he knows of the place, given he came to London straight from downtown Sydney), Tony Ice murmuring incoherently about the I Ching and rams in rut, fucking supercilious Graham playing gatekeeper to the underworld every time Howard shows his employee pass and Fossil, Bob Fossil, if Howard has to sing him that song about the ponies one more time they'll both end up sectioned.

He needs someone to talk to, desperately, and while Vince isn't exactly a shining intellectual light he at least has familiarity and some degree of tractability to recommend him. Do them both good, really, because Vince needs direction; he's seemed a bit aimless and unmoored since Howard finally lost patience with school, home, Leeds, everything, and voted with his feet, and Vince has to settle on something to do with his life anyway, all those pop stars and aristos he keeps claiming for family aren't exactly returning the favor and--all right, why not just admit it, Howard misses him. Quite a lot, actually. He might even be a bit worried about him. God knows why, as Vince himself lives in the moment so effortlessly he could make a Zen master cry with envy. The point is, do them both good. And if nothing else Vince could help sew some of the miniature animal lingerie, he's always loved fussing with bits of cloth.

"GCSE's aren't important," Howard urges him, rubbing fretfully at the goat-hoof-shaped bruises on his collarbone. (Good thing, really, as Vince has flunked all of his save Bengali.) "Come and work at the zoo with me."

Vince makes vague noises about BTEC qualifications, fashion (of course), maybe music or fine art, but he really takes almost no convincing and inside of a week has charmed himself into Fossil's good graces, such as they are, and an assistant zookeeper's position. He actually seems to love it, all those animals. (And he really can talk to them. Howard's so impressed, when first he sees it, that Vince actually smiles and studies his brothel creepers abashedly for a few moments.) For a while, anyway, Howard has the pleasure of being treated as the expert, the born teacher that he is. Vince shadows him everywhere he goes, genuinely anxious to acquit himself well, asking a thousand and one questions and some of them actually pertinent. He's so nervous his first few days, Vince is, that his hands shake. Howard's never seen him quite so worked up, and it inspires the same sort of odd solicitude he felt when Vince would arrive at school without the pink lunchbox. Of course, this honeymoon state soon passes and Vince becomes his old preening, oblivious self with dispiriting speed but for a while there, a short window of time, he was unashamedly reliant on Howard and Howard's good opinion. The fact that his trembling hands were personally responsible for decimating the zoo's acclaimed newt-breeding program is really, next to that, a minor quibble.

On the mutual insult of their salaries neither of them can strictly afford even a small flat; the abandoned keepers' lounge, eternally scheduled for remodeling or teardown some future decade, becomes their new digs. Two sleeping bags tossed on the floor, a gas ring and mini-fridge, a folding table and chairs, a secondhand telly so Howard can watch his Larisa Shepitko films and Vince can keep up with Captain Cabinets and Collobus the Crab, what more do they need? (Joey Moose complains constantly about the unfairness of married employees receiving on-site housing. Aussies, Howard decides, have cretinous senses of humor on top of all their other innate shortcomings.) The only real downside to living with Vince is his horrid, horrid music, of which Howard's forced to listen to skin-peeling quantities now that Vince has finally inveigled his way into a band and imagines he's going to be the next Marc Bolan. Of course he can't even say a coherent word about their power-mega-pop-whatever, which surprises Howard not at all.

"I was pulling shapes," Vince brags, about yet another "gig" that sounds more like a Roman orgy for toddlers. "I'm a figure of eight! I'm a pencil! I'm the side panel of a tractor!"

"You're a tit," Howard snaps, cutting the conversation mercifully short. Nonetheless, Vince's choice of words intrigues him: pulling shapes. That's something a jazzman might say, might aspire to: The essence of jazz is shapes, after all, chaotic, primal, protean. Even Vince senses it. If he could just be a bit more broad-minded, Vince would see he really does have a true musician's soul under all that useless glitter; Howard could school him in jazz, tutor him, just as he did those first few months at the zoo. He'd be happy to do it. Howard persists, stubbornly, in this endeavor, even though the mere mention of Art Blakey's name produces only eyerolling and martyred sighs.

Anyway, Vince has a band, such as it is, he should be thrilled. Howard can't even get the Blue Aubergine to return his phone calls. The odd thing is, though, that Vince seems constantly frustrated: The guitarist's hair is all wrong, the drummer insists on rehearsals, the bassist snipes about chord progressions and other esoteric nonsense, doesn't anyone understand what pop stardom's meant to be about? Howard nods politely at these outraged confidences, tries vainly to get Vince to sit through a bit of Cecil Taylor, feels increasingly impatient with the whole nonsense until the day he finds a waste bin full to the brim with crumpled-up notebook pages: Vince's attempted song lyrics scrawled in sparkling purple gel pen, crossed out, scratched out, no! and shite and other self-condemnations scrawled in the margins. Some of them are even a bit good--more than some of them, actually--but they've been tossed out with the rubbish just the same.

"Stop trying so hard," Howard ventures one day, though Vince certainly hasn't asked his advice. "It makes you freeze up. You could just do, you know, the little songs like we do? The crimps? Set it to a bit of music?"

Vince, sprawled on the sofa admiring his new burgundy suede boots, straightens up and turns toward Howard. There is genuine shock in his expression.

"Crimping is private," Vince admonishes Howard, actually looking disquieted that Howard didn't already understand this. "It's what we do, you and I. It's not for anyone else."

Vince has more than a few strange moments like this, defensive and evasive about the very talents Howard, himself, would yearn to proclaim to the wider world. Crimping is private. Anyone but Howard knowing he's got the animals' wavelength gets his back up. ("I'm never doing that for an audience again," he tells Howard vehemently, after Mrs. Gideon has persuaded him to interrogate the cobras. "I'm not some sideshow act, yeah?") He proudly hangs his paintings on the keepers' lounge walls, but seems not to want them anywhere else. He recycles the old Poulomi and Ashapurna story to great effect at the annual keepers' lodge banquet, but it's only Howard who gets to hear all the rest of it: Vince drifting downstream on the crocodiles' backs as Maitreyi the Florican serenaded him with bird-cries, riding Bankimchandra the Rhinoceros through the miles of untouched grasslands, witnessing the epic feud of Vardhan and Vijay, the brother jungle cats. ("Vijay had the right of it," Vince notes, and after hearing the whole tale Howard can only nod in firm agreement. "That Vardhan, he was always a snotty little bastard.")

An encounter with Lopamudra the Hyena still makes Vince shiver, decades later, telling it. Howard shivers too. He can feel the hot, merciless sun beating down on his own back as Vince tells the tale, hear the deranged hyena laughter, smell the blood of the lioness they're ripping to pieces. Vince can talk and talk, until he's hoarse despite numerous cups of tea, and Howard insists, like a small child, on hearing the stories again. Sometimes Vince just laughs. "You've had your fill," he'll announce airily, rising from the sofa and walking off with a superior little twitch of the lips and a triumphant saunter in his step. "I've got things to do." Other times, less often, he talks until he's tired out. Once he gets so caught up he misses a rehearsal, an important one apparently, for his own band. He doesn't seem to care. The bassist has betrayed him by insisting that recording contracts should be scrupulously inspected before they're signed.

"Why d'you have to lie all the time?" Howard demands, when they're on the search for Tommy Nooka and have just talked their way deeper into the Jungle Room: They're the band, the evening's entertainment, Vince somehow convinces the strange satyr-like little gatekeeper blocking their path. Something about the ease with which he tosses off this fable, never mind he's continuously on the outs with his own musical compañeros and can't stomach any music Howard loves, makes Howard profoundly irritated and he can't help poking Vince in response.

"What do you mean?" Vince replies indignantly. "I am in a band!"

"Well, yeah--but you know, we're not in a band, are we."

"We could be," says Vince.

We could be. Vince's voice when he says this is casual, almost indifferent, but in his eyes there's a genuine, outright question. An invitation, even. Howard is caught so off guard that at first he says nothing at all, lets the moment pass, but the more he considers it the more he can't put the thought out of his mind. Madness, really, what on earth could they possibly do together? Vince can't play a single instrument, he can barely sing; he'd find Howard's instinctive versatility quite intimidating. They hate each other's music. The handful of times Howard did play backup for him did not…well, go entirely to plan. Their own, spontaneous experiments in the form, those have already been ruled out for public consumption. Ludicrous, the whole idea, just patently ludicrous. Doubtless Vince really just meant it as a joke.

"We could be in a band," Vince repeats, months later, after his fourth or fifth attempt at new wave glory has crashed and burned. Offhand again, one morning, as he cuts up bananas, tosses honey and protein powder into the blender. "You and I."

"You're right," Howard replies, recklessly, leaping into the breach. Offhand as well, not looking up from the eggs he's whisking. "We could be."

The subject doesn't come up again right away, not for quite some time in fact, but it's settled between them. Just like that. Now, all that's left to decide is everything else. But that's Vince's way of doing things, and for all that it's maddening Howard's become well accustomed to it. Meanwhile, life goes on as before. Bands may come and bands may go, but the cockerels' lounge isn't going to clean itself.

One night Howard wakes from an occasional dream, his mother visiting the zoo and angrily chastising him in front of everyone for some failing she refuses to explain, and hears noises from Vince's direction, several feet away. At first, still half-asleep as he is, he thinks Vince's also having a nightmare, nearly stretches an arm over to nudge him awake; then the small thrashings of Vince's sleeping bag and the labored, rhythmic sound of his breathing make it clear what's actually going on.

Now fully awake, Howard is both annoyed and embarrassed; this is hardly the first time this has happened and Vince really might think to conduct his wanks in a more private setting, like the shower, but naturally any normal sense of inhibition or common courtesy is beyond him. Perhaps he's vain enough to imagine the bats and owls outside their window are enjoying the show. Howard lies very still, politely feigning sleep and attempting to focus his thoughts on work, jazz, the Robert Musil novel he's slowly struggling to finish, as Vince's breath grows faster, more uneven, becomes a stifled gasp and then slows and quiets once more.

There's more soft shiftings about of Vince's sleeping bag, then he's finally still. Howard opens his eyes briefly, and in the streaks of moonlight showing through the shutters sees Vince lying on his back, chin tilted toward the ceiling, throat curved and arms curled loosely over his head. The Adam's apple stands out prominently, his bright green T-shirt is rucked up around his armpits. His elbows form twin pale hillocks, masking his face from view. Howard's eyes drift shut once more.

For a fleeting moment, as he sinks back into unconsciousness, Howard suddenly thinks he senses a light, extremely tentative touch against his shoulder, almost an illusion of questioning fingertips. He's too groggy to react, however, and before his brain can fully register what he might or might not have just felt he's fallen asleep again in earnest.

******

6. Nightclub jitters
Only thing that scares me is the dark

When Bob Fossil, and the zoo's finances, finally fall apart in a massive, Viking-funeral spectacle that sweeps the entire trustee association overboard, it actually comes as a relief. The animals, spearheaded by Jack Cooper (he's an ornery one, something Howard always respected about him, though where Jack gets off blaming him for those filthy rumors…), pool their resources, buy the place out and go co-op, all humans granted seventy-two hours to vacate the premises forever. Vince and Howard pack up what bits of the keepers' lounge will fit in Naboo's caravan, climb aboard with Bollo and head for Dalston without looking back. No more shit-shoveling, no more of Fossil's bursting blue buttons, no more candy-floss-smeared brats and administrative in-fighting and seemingly sophisticated women who take up with pandas and run off to Yunnan--it's a chance to start over, and Howard means to make the most of it. They call him the Skin-Shedder. Always shucking off the past, slithering forward without a backwards glance.

He worries Vince will be a bit bereft without the old place, he really did seem to love it there, but even as they pass through the Zooniverse gates for the final time Vince is chatting animatedly with Bollo and Naboo's camel team, completely preoccupied with the costumes he's designing for his and Howard's new band. Howard vetoes a good three dozen proposed his-and-his glam-fantasia getups before Vince finally sighs resignedly and reaches for a swatch book of herringbone tweeds. The chance, too, to decorate an entire flat just as he wants it makes Vince's eyes light up, and the four of them are soon occupying a baby bohemian's nursery suite. Naboo gives him free rein, preoccupied as he is with trying to start some sort of trendy-tat consignment shop; they've jobs waiting for them once it's up and running, but until then they've all the time in the world to ignore needless fripperies like making the rent, to concentrate fully on their music.

None of these indulgences are for Howard's sake, Naboo makes that very clear; he's being tolerated solely as an accessory of Vince's, like some sort of peripatetic duffle bag. Whenever Naboo's got a bit too far into the hash oil (namely, any random Tuesday) he likes to burble about how he and Vince are actually blood brothers in some other, alternate reality, Howard their pet basset hound. Howard, preoccupied as he is with the vintage Fender Strats and gamelan instruments and banks of synthesizers Naboo conjures from seeming thin air, graciously lets this pass, though he does occasionally find himself examining his jowls in any nearby reflective surface.

"So what's our sound gonna be, anyway?" Vince asks one day, posing for the triple mirror in some sort of purple feathery getup and high scarlet boots, clearly chuffed that finally, someone else is handling the dull minutiae and leaving the real pop-star stuff up to him. "Don't be always hiding it under your trilby hat, if you're leaning ska or Kraut-dub I'll have to rethink our entire wardrobe--"

"Our entire wardrobe? I already told you, I'm not wearing any of that diamante nonsense where anyone can see me."

"This concerns you too, you know--you can't have on taupe or nutmeg if we're going neo-classical. You just can't." Vince regards him sternly from the depths of a furry peacock-green cloak, the feathers of his collar ruffled up behind his hair in a wine-colored crest. "Of course, if we stick with 2 Tone like I suggested, then I could wear the toffee apple red jacket and you could--"

"Excuse me, wasn't our agreement that I handle the music and you stick with the costumes?" Howard plunks at a few random synth keys, shakes his head and fusses some more with the electrodes attached to the crab; it's gone a bit gamey, the past few days, but he's still stubbornly convinced it's the key to their aural identity crisis. "You don't just stick a coin in a vending machine slot and pick a sound, you have to nurture it. Usher it gently to life. Encourage its growth little by little--"

"So our sound's like a jar of sea monkeys, then?"

"Vince, I'm trying to work here. Go practice walking in those new platforms and let me concentrate."

The truth, if he were simply to admit it, is that he's now got nearly every instrument he could ever imagine at his disposal, all the time in the world to play with them, nobody looking over his shoulder, dizzying arrays of shamanistic potions and philters to help usher in the muses (Naboo's already taken them both to task endless times for rummaging through his magic cabinets, but then Naboo is often so stoned he can't quite pinpoint just what they've stolen), everything he ever wanted, the perfect atmosphere in which to realize his musical genius and nothing, nothing, nothing is coming to him. It's got to be good, better than good, it's got to dazzle like Mozart and Miles and Monk and Mindhorn all dipped in chocolate and rolled in shredded silver threads because now he's got no excuse, none at all, and the beautiful gongs suwuk and Gretsch Tennesseans are an ongoing rebuke and he can't think, he can't muster up a single bloody half-arsed backbeat to save his life--

"Have you got it yet?" Vince calls from his room, which looks like a jumble sale at the court of Louis XIV. Their Hungry Mouth gig is in half an hour.

"Yeah! Got it! Yeah!" Howard rummages through his desk drawers in a blind panic, where did he put it, where-- "Go pack up the maracas! And the flugelhorn! We're good, we're great!"

And already horribly late. Clutching the sheaf of dogeared, ripped-up papers to his chest, Howard sprints frantically down the stairs. They make it to the gig with ninety seconds to spare, and are booed offstage twenty minutes later, but Vince seems oddly unmoved by the whole fiasco.

"That one song?" he tells Howard, when they're back at the flat cooling their heels, taking long, appreciative breaths of the clouds of Naboo's hashish still hovering in the air. "The one about trumpets and bookmarks? That was a good one, I like it."

Howard hesitates. He wasn't going to tell Vince this, not when Vince didn't figure it out himself, but a vague sense of guilt is prodding him. "Well…it's not exactly my song."

"It's a cover, then?" Vince sits up, interested, silk dressing gown nearly sliding off one shoulder. "Whose? Can't be one of your freaky jazz men, this song was actually catchy--"

"It's one of yours, actually."

Vince shakes his head in confusion. Somewhat abashedly, Howard displays the sheaf of papers: the pages of purple-penned lyrics from back in their zookeeping days, rescued from the wastebin, smoothed out, taped back together. "One of your old songs, I, uh, changed all the bits about spacemen to trumpets and bookmarks and set it to a simple three-chord melody, I do have our new sound but it hardly seemed worth wasting it on that lot of bourgeois--"

"Hang on, those are mine?"

It's clear from Vince's expression that he really doesn't recognize his own words. "It's your handwriting," Howard says, impatiently, thrusting it under Vince's nose. "See? Don't you remember? You wrote those! Years ago, then you threw them away."

Vince runs a finger over the lines, shakes his head. "I don't remember writing this. That's never mine--"

"That's yours! For that band you were in for about three weeks, Who's On First or First of Four or whatever they were called?" Finally, the faintest glimmer of recognition. "I found them in the trash. You'd tossed them."

"And what, you fished them out and carried them around all these years?" Vince breaks into a typically self-satisfied grin. "Right next to your heart? There, see, even you can't resist the patented Vince Noir charisma, nobody can. I'll find you sniffing at my socks next if I'm not careful--"

"It's not about charisma," Howard bristles. "I just…thought you might want them, later. That's all. Then I forgot I had them."

Vince takes the pages from him, studies the awkward, sprawling loops of his own writing, the revisions and grammatical corrections in Howard's tense, spidery, vertical hand. His own past judgment calls, crammed into the margins: No. Shite. Stupid. Not enuf like Bowey. Ask Howard about mor rimes? An odd look crosses his face.

"But you hate my music," he says, gazing a bit suspiciously at Howard.

Howard shrugs. "I was desperate." He reaches over, smoothes out the crumpled paper Vince still holds. "And it's growing on me, a bit. I like that band with the song about the hollow horse, Chinese Pipe or--"

"China Crisis," Vince corrects him, automatically. "They are quite good, aren't they? My songs."

"Well, they wouldn't amount to much without my whipping them into shape but yeah, the raw material's somewhat promising." Howard leans back, rubbing his shoulder blades against the sofa cushions. "Just stick with me, Vince, and you might actually go places."

Vince gives Howard an inquiring glance. "You don't have our new sound yet, do you," he says.

Howard sighs. "I'm more fucking blocked than Tommy Nooka after a pound of Emmenthaler."

"Thought so." Looking utterly unfazed by this development, Vince rises from the sofa stretching and yawning. "Don't worry, you'll think of something. Our next gig's not for another four days."

Then, almost as an afterthought, he reaches for the abandoned papers and, with rapid and ruthless efficiency, starts tearing them into confetti.

"What are you doing!" Howard shouts, bolting across the room several seconds too late. Vince just grins again, strewing the bits of paper over Howard's hair. Howard seizes his wrist. "That's yours, for God's sake! And I just spent the better part of--"

"It's you who goes all over funny for anything old, not me." Vince pulls his hand away, making short work of the last of his back pages. "I don't even remember writing any of this. We're after a new sound, yeah? No wonder we got kicked off if we're giving the audience just any old tat out of wastebins--"

"You just told me you liked it, you little titbox!" Howard grabs for a large paper shred, Vince grabbing it right back. "You just said they were good! What's wrong with you, anyway?"

"Yeah, they were good. They were good then. I want something that's good now."

His expression in the face of Howard's looming, righteous wrath is serene and a bit mischievous and utterly, completely intransigent. As Howard continues to sputter incoherently, he turns on his heel and, leaving a festive little trail of torn paper, heads off to bed.

Three and a half days later Howard still has nothing, other than a small, smoldering grudge against this bit of grandstanding that flares anew whenever Vince smirks at him sideways. Right, then, you little Camden claim-jumper, I'm ruining this next gig on purpose! He loads their instruments into the van (all by his lonesome, of course, Vince is in the passenger seat fussing with his jacket cuffs and Bollo wouldn't piss on Howard if he burst into flames), tosses the suicidal crab's corpse to a lucky stray cat and arrives at the Lunatic Fringe without a sound, a plan or a sweet clue what they're both going to do onstage. Let's see how much you smile now, how about it?

"Hey, everyone!" Vince calls out up on stage, every vacant-eyed trendy's friend, oblivious as a carp in aspic. "We're the Mighty--"

Howard slams the knuckles of both fists against the keyboards, producing a ragged, horror-show synth-screech that cuts Vince off in midsentence and makes dozens of hands fly to wounded ears. Again, again, banging out formless, deranged arpeggios sounding like Diamanda Galas trapped in a wind tunnel, and by the time he starts tossing porcelain doll heads at the cymbals a third of the room's walked out and Vince is standing there looking patently bewildered. Howard ignores them and him completely, littering the floor at his own feet with broken Kewpie-china, sawing furiously at a cello until he's produced the groans of the damned, banging at the abused keyboards with his shoe, his elbow, more violently random fists. A skinny streak of high-heeled electric blue is coming towards him, Vince doubtless about to plead, or rage, or try and snatch his hands from the keys but too late, perhaps now you'll learn better than to pull stunts like--

The mike clutched in one hand, Vince leans over the keyboards in a vulture crouch until he's nearly nose to nose with Howard, waggles his shoulders like a pouncing cat's hindquarters and starts to sing. Singing's not the right word for it, though, no, it's a long hard waieeeeee! of sound gathered like a fist punching straight through Howard's keyboard walls, again, again, and Vince's face is one big broad, open smile and his eyes on Howard's are steady and unblinking and he's not defying Howard at all, he's just giving good as he gets, urging him onward, agreeing with him. Howard smashes a doll-body against the keys. Vince lets out an uneven, teetering howl like something broken, broken to pieces scattering every which way from his throat. Howard flails at the cymbals. Vince lets out a rat-a-tat counter-rhythm of random, free-floating words, nonsense sentences from the tops of his lungs. Howard calls his bluff, produces a flurry of gentle, muted chord progressions. Vince screams between the notes. They keep going and going just like that, tumbling into chaos, throwing each other harmonic ropes, weaving clumsy, snarled cat's-cradles of lyrics for songs they've never written over melodies they never composed.

Vince has drawn away from the keyboards and has his head thrown back, eyes closed, pulling one shape after another: trapezoid, octahedron, snaking curve of an ampersand. Howard tosses out the dog-ends of every random sound he can imagine to urge Vince along, he's vibrating with exhaustion and hoarse from shouting back, Vince's electric blue feathers are drooping and his jet-dyed hair is plastered to his cheeks with sweat, the current of pure noise snaking relentlessly, involuntarily between them is roaring through their nerves and burning both of them from the inside. It actually hurts. Vince half-slides down the mike stand and catches Howard's eye and it's a mirror of his own high-flying enervation, the audience is an afterthought now, the self-generated chaos is drowning them both, they're sliding away and they can't stop, Vince, just like that, Vince, keep going, don't stop--

And just like that, it's over. Howard's knuckles are bruised, one of them actually bleeding, and his ankle's bleeding too where he caught it on a shard of Kewpie doll. Vince has thrown off his jacket and his shirt's gone two shades darker with perspiration, each tired breath pulsating visibly in his throat. The remnants of their audience look stunned and slightly ill. So what do they know about it? Howard actually starts laughing, too high and worn out to care, and that's the audience's signal to start hurling any random object within reach so fortunately Vince, though staggering tired, retains the presence of mind to hustle them both quickly offstage.

Back at the flat Vince throws himself full-length onto the sofa, answering Naboo's somewhat acerbic inquiries about the gig with vague, noncommittal sounds. Howard, sitting there pressing gauze to his wounded foot, tries to suppress his impatience; can't the "visionary" shaman see they would both really like to be alone? Once Naboo finally shuffles off to bed Vince opens his half-closed eyes, gazing up at Howard with a sort of contained contentment.

"Could we do something like that again?" he asks.

The ghost of that noise-current is still hanging in the air between them both, a mutual ringing in their ears. Howard nods silently. Something like that, again. Oh, yes.

The next morning's Custodian carries effusive praise for their "brilliantly splenetic piss-take on the most wretched excesses of so-called performance art," with an approving nod toward Vince's "demented Mongoloid comedic persona." The bare handful of other reviews range from pants-shitting laughter to calls for floggings and banishment.

"Right," Vince declares, looking up ashen-faced from the Brick Lane Tatler, "we are never doing anything like that again."

"We were good!" Howard protests, tossing the paper away in scorn. "You felt it! What do they know? You can't sit around worrying what a lot of vapid Shoreditch idiots think of you--how important are they, anyway?"

Vince stares at him in scorn. "Are you ill or something?" he demands, around a sullen crunch of Hula Hoops.

"They're just not ready for us yet."

"They're all laughing at you, Howard!"

"Just at me, is it? You're everyone's little golden boy? That's not what Camden Stylie said, unless you think they meant 'prancing tone-deaf tart' in a good way--"

"Why would anyone laugh at me?" asks Vince, looking sincerely puzzled. "You're a bad influence, is what it is. They see me and they feel pity, look at him, stuck up there on stage with a great Northern jazz giraffe gone haywire, they laugh to keep from crying--"

"You want out, then?" Howard demands. "Go back to Crafty Kumquat or whatever that band was?"

"When did I ever say that? Can we use a marimba next gig? Or a bazantar? Those look cool. What're you going to smash against the strings this time?"

No longer bothering to dream up excuses, Vince starts rifling night and day through Naboo's stock of brews and spellbooks, looking for something, anything to render their band, their sound detractor-proof. Howard makes long, disregarded speeches about Mildred Bailey and Israel Cachao Lopez soldiering on in the face of unjust critical obscurity, then reflects on Mildred Bailey dying alone and destitute and also makes a beeline for the potions cabinets. After Naboo has repaired the jagged hole they accidentally tear in the sky, retrieved Vince from Pan-Demonic Dimension #67A-9 (Gamma Sector), restored Howard's pancreas to its original location and sent the herds of giant winged cats back to Xooberon's outer steppes, he comes to them bearing a large, heavy scarlet-bound book and a cloth bag full of strange crinkly coins.

"Before either of you go through my stuff again," he says, with the expression of a harassed mother trying to placate two uncontrollable toddlers, "consult this. It'll give you all the advice you're looking for, if you learn how to read it properly."

The untitled book, it turns out, works rather like the I Ching: You toss a set of coins, add up the numerals on their faces via an esoteric arithmetical system, look to the corresponding numbered verse to answer whatever question you've asked. They're both skeptical, but the game soon proves strangely addictive and, more to the point, once deciphered the cryptic verses often seem to be correct. Vince learns, even before lesser oracles like Cheekbone confirm it, that mukluks, gold point lace and silk flowers pinned to jacket lapels are this week's last word in fashion. ("You look like a funeral wreath got sick on you," Howard mutters, as Vince clomps past in a shower of threadbare petals.) Howard, at its urging, puts aside the keyboards and metallophones for his old guitar, practices obediently for hours on end just as it orders (E Phrygian, F major, fourth dyad chord, parallel thirds…), and it all produces a strange tonic effect, as soothing as the Lunatic Fringe gig was invigorating. ("Oh, thank Christ," Vince declares heavenward when, also at the book's suggestion, Howard begins washing his hair a bit more often.)

They keep managing an occasional gig. They bomb at Meat Joy. They get chased from the Five-Fifteen. They barely escape with their vibraphones from the Not Fade Away. The crowd at the Squid And Mashed Potato just stands there looking utterly nonplussed, which in comparison is like the sweet smell of victory. The book counsels patience. Vince keeps poking at its pages, throwing one coin toss after another to try and elicit their exact moment of triumph. Howard, for his part, feels oddly satisfied with things just as they are, coaxing endless new ideas and inspiration from the same old sets of guitar chords (parallel thirds, D minor, F major…), consulting the book first thing he wakes up, before going outside, letting it decide between fried and poached for breakfast and whether to wear the olive or chocolate rollneck, soliciting its opinion on his new songs, chatting casually with it about books and philosophy and whether Vince's hair care regimen really requires that many man-hours (apparently yes), whether Naboo will notice his pinching just a bit of that exquisite-smelling Lebanese (hardly, no), if there's any shampoo that can reduce Bollo's cloud of primate funk (sandalwood, hand-harvested by blindfolded Capuchin nuns, far out of their collective price range), whether trilby hats and Birkenstocks will ever come back into style…

"Right, that's about the fortieth time in a row now," Vince complains one evening, as Howard shakes the crinkly coins yet again in his fist. "Give us a go--"

"Off!" Howard snaps, grabbing the book back. "You'll get Marmite all over the pages."

"I just want to find out if I should wear the emerald jacket or the aubergine!"

"Emerald," Howard says, without looking up. "The aubergine makes you look sallow."

"Like you would know."

"I know what I see, little man--would you rather look like an anorectic parrot, or a giant varicose vein? Choose wisely."

"Like taking fashion advice from Norman Wisdom," Vince mutters, making another play for the book. "Come on, hand it over."

Howard throws his coins to the table. "If you insist on the aubergine then at least put that swan's-down boa with it, the one with a bit of pale blue in the feathers, it sets off--give it back! I was in the middle of a toss there, you bloody berk!"

"When aren't you? Story of your life." Vince throws the coins, swiftly turning to his verse. Then he hands the book back to Howard with a scowl of disbelief.

"The one with the blue-tipped feathers?" he repeats, a bit sullen.

Howard doesn't bother suppressing a smirk of triumph. "The very one, sir."

"I lent it to Leroy." Vince tosses the aubergine jacket into a corner, wrestles into the emerald. "Be back later."

"Mm-hm," Howard nods, already bent over the pages once more. Time for a random coin-throw: no particular question in mind, just seeing where the winds of chance decide to sweep him, what game the book will next challenge him to master. They call him Magister Ludicrous. Verse 77-894-76, all right then, let's have it:

Go to the rooftop tonight,
At midnight, alone.
Everything you always knew could speak,
But would never speak to you,
You will hear.

Howard rereads it, then a third time, and though the room is uncomfortably close and warm gooseflesh rises on his arms. It's nine-forty. Re-cross-indexing all his jazz albums kills a mere half-hour, he can't concentrate on the guitar or the latest Global Explorer and when he finally makes his ascent at eleven fifty-eight, it's like he's been waiting for years. And of course, he has. It's freezing up on the rooftop, the wind slicing through his clothes, but he's not squandering this opportunity by running back for a coat.

Eleven fifty-nine.

The moon is full to bursting and seems unnaturally illuminated, at once sickly pale and throbbing white; it's too close, somehow, too big in the sky, like a giant Japanese lantern hovering just inches above his head. Howard checks his watch again, and shivers.

Midnight.

Nothing. He waits. Still nothing. But the book wouldn't lie, it never has, and it's never been once mistaken. Is he meant to introduce himself first? That must be it. He pulls himself to his feet, gripping the chimney corner for balance, and clears his throat several times.

"Oh, moon and stars!" he shouts into the night. "Oh, wind!" No, no, bugger the wind, he's already had proof they don't really get on. Start again. "Oh, stars and planets and…er...elementals! Oh trees and rocks!" Christ, it's cold up here, couldn't they have done this back in July? "I beg you, speak unto me, a humble artist, poet, musician, spanner of genres, I come to you in--"

"The full moon, eh, now he's got a new Moon! Ehhhhh, Saturn, listen to him! New Moon's a right ballbag, Saturn, he don't never shut his gob…"

Howard jumps. All right, so all those times he'd dreamed of hearing the moon's actual, living voice that's not quite what he'd anticipated, but, adopt, adapt, improve. The moon sounds nasal and querulous and…weirdly familiar, somehow. Perhaps he's been attuned to its wavelength all along and just not known it. He waits, silently.

Is that it, then? Well, all right, bit anticlimactic after all that but--

The wind kicks up, the sky spits icy rain and Howard becomes suddenly, horribly dizzy, an overpowering vertigo having nothing to do with the rooftop heights. As the roof tiles sway and spin beneath his feet and he clutches the cold, damp chimney brick in alarm, a low humming sound starts in the exact center of his head, directly between his ears, and the sound grows and expands until it's traveling down his spine, along his skin, enveloping and smothering him, a hundred thousand voices speaking to him at once and drowning each other out in a mad, buzzing cacophony. The moon's querulous voice is back in his head, singing, an island of clarity in the vast amorphous sound-sea, everyone look at the moon, everyone see the moon--and then instead of singing it's roaring, a long gorgeous horrible scream rising above the noise of the wind currents murmuring and shouting at each other, the raindrops hurling disdainful insults, the trees sucking up nutrients from the dirt in a greedy sirrruuuuuuuup!, the branches' monotonous chants, each individual leaf laughing and whispering conspiracy. When Howard looks up he hears the labored, agonized groans of planets turning on their axes, the crackling infernos of distant stars, the long, endless, tearfully beautiful song of the sky, and when he looks down, he can't look down, don't look down--

The tiles heave and Howard shouts in fear, crouches flattened on the rooftop with his eyes squeezed shut, and the sounds won't quit. Amid the moaning, crying, laughter, endless self-important metaphysical chit-chat now he hears even more, feels coming straight through his skin the vibrato voices of rocks and stones, the hiss of the lava pressed into their creation, the breathy shuck-shuck of the dirt and the worms, the insects, the whole kingdom of fungi talking to him nonstop. The alley cats, rabbits, foxes, possums, raccoons, every nocturnal creature, he hears each one, the individual millions of them, how can Vince possibly stand it--his hands fly to his ears, and that simple clap of skin on skin is so loud he nearly screams. His heart thuds deafeningly, the rush of his blood is a tsunami, his joints whistle and nerves crackle and now each and every cell is talking out of turn, the molecules, the atoms, the particles, he's going to fly apart right here, disintegrate in ecstasy and horror, it was all alive all along and he always knew it and now he's going to die, he can't withstand it but it's all right because he'll die having finally heard all of it, everything, everything--

"Howard? Howard!"

It's so quiet. How can it be so quiet? Sensation returns slowly and Howard feels himself, still whole, cohesive, sprawled on the roof tiles drained and shaking. The rain has left an icy scrim seeping through his clothes but he's soaked in sweat, each breath labored and slow.

"Howard!"

Whose voice is that? He should know that voice. A streak of emerald green is coming towards him. Please God, not a leaf or something, he's in no mood to talk--

His vision clears and he sees Vince bending over him, feels hands grasping his shoulders and shaking impatiently. "What're you doing up here?" Vince demands. "Having a nap or something? It's freezing. I've been looking for you all over the flat."

Here. Freezing. Flat. Do those words mean something? It seems like they should. Howard stares back, opens his mouth to speak and finds he's forgotten how; he can form words, somewhat, but they won't cohere in his throat. It's so wonderfully, blessedly quiet.

"Are you listening to me?" Vince shakes him some more, irritated like Howard's playing some sort of joke, and as Howard lies there wide-eyed and mouthing random syllables comprehension, of a sort, starts to dawn. "Right, then," Vince asks, now briskly efficient, "what'd you take?"

Howard manages a half-groan, half-gurgle. "Peyote?" Vince urges, peering into Howard's eyes and feeling absently, on the wrong side of his wrist, for a pulse. "Orange sunshine? Venusian rock extract? Bug powder?" His eyes narrow in suspicion. "Not heroin, then? All those old jazz guys were junkies, yeah? You would go and do that. What happens when you shoot heroin, anyway? Do you see stuff? I once knew this bloke who mixed unpasteurized Saturn Juice and dexymethol and shot it into his eyelids, he ended up starkers on the High Street trying to mate with a traffic cone, imagine that, then this green Bentley started reciting old Smith Crisps jingles at him and he…oh, Christ. You know, I should have guessed."

With some effort, Howard turns his head in the direction of Vince's reproving glare and sees it: the book, sitting in all its dogeared scarlet glory not two feet away and perfectly dry despite the cold damp. How is it possibly here? He knows he left it downstairs. He tries to back away from it, nearly tumbling straight off the roof in the process, and Vince unceremoniously grabs his arm and half coaxes, half drags him inside.

Back in the overheated flat Howard collapses into a chair, sitting there shivering and savoring the quiet as Vince puts the kettle on. "So what'd it tell you, to throw yourself off the roof?" Vince inquires, quite cheerfully, rummaging for the Typhoo. "You'd do it, too. You're rotten with heights, remember that time we went up Wolf Mountain to break into Fossil's lab and you nearly swallowed your…you sure you're all right, then?"

"Fine," Howard croaks. "Fine. Absolutely fine." Deep breaths. He feels like someone ground up all his bones and reshaped them in a gelatin mold. He's just not been having a good few months, really, between the humiliating interval on Xooberon and getting that rotten cantaloupe smack in the face at their Hoss And Crow gig and the whole, er…incident with the man-fish but let's just try and scrub that from our brain entirely, and now this, the bad juju's been oozing from every pore and enough is bloody enough. Start again. Square one. More deep, cleansing breaths. Shoulders and arms nice and loose, shake the tension out.

"Are you having a fit or something?" Vince asks, puzzled. "Your arms are all twitchy."

"I said I'm fine."

Vince shrugs and hands Howard his tea. Good, he made it properly: three teabags per cup at least, milk, cinnamon, cardamom and the crowning touch, brown rice syrup in place of sugar, all mercilessly boiled together for a bare minimum of ten minutes. They've both lived off it since the zoo days, though it's now apparently too déclassé for Vince to drink in front of his Camden mates. Howard sips slowly, feeling his bones start to solidify again.

"That book's creepy," Vince admonishes him, licking syrup off the side of his hand. "I wouldn't touch it again, if I were you."

"No," Howard agrees immediately. (He has no choice, anyway: When he and Vince go back to retrieve it for Naboo they find it's vanished, along with the bag of coins Howard had left on the downstairs table.) "How was the club?"

Vince snorts. "Why d'you think I'm home so early? But! That doesn't matter, 'cos I was looking for you to tell you--" Vince perches on an ottoman, cradling his teacup in his palms; he's half-changed and oddly mismatched, barefoot in his old shantung silk pajama bottoms but with the green brocaded jacket still on top. "--you're never gonna guess what's happened tonight, you'll go mental. Arthur Minty, the head of PieFace Records?"

"What about him?"

"He was there tonight, that's what about him, and he was at our last gig at the Squid And Mashed Potato and--" He grips Howard's arm in excitement, eyes shining with the glee of breaking the news. "Howard, we're gonna be on the next PieFace Showcase. Us. Our band."

Howard blinks. "Pull the other one," he finally says.

"It's true! Howard, you realize what this means?"

"It means…" Howard turns the thought over in his head, not yet ready to believe it. "That you, and I…"

"Are gonna be on PieFace Showcase, on telly, in front of millions of--we're going to America, Howard!" Vince is practically leaping about in his seat, splashing tea on his pajamas. "You and me! Our band! Imagine that!"

"We're going," Howard repeats, and realizes he's grinning. "We're going!"

"Yeah!"

He'd been right all along, he thought triumphantly as he made short work of his tea, Vince had whinged and complained and sought all the easy roads and quick fixes but old-fashioned patience, patience and steadiness and persistence, that's what got them this far, sir, that's what--sweet shitting Jesus on a cream cracker, they're going to America. They're going to play their music in front of fucking millions of people, live, on the air. Tens of millions, maybe hundreds, because where isn't the Showcase syndicated? His stomach lurches suddenly, and he sets the cup down clumsily on the side table.

"But…what if we're just not ready, Vince." He's twitchy now, having to pace or do something labor-intensive to get rid of all this newfound nervous energy--do the kitchen cabinets need cleaning? Bugger that, he's too worn out anyway from his mystic roof encounter. "All our best stuff's improvised, what if we can't think of something? What if we get the chokes? What if they forget to put us on the schedule or we lose all our instruments or there's a fire in the studio or some sort of rabid raccoon uprising or--"

"Howard."

Vince won't be dissuaded, doesn't even hear him. He's smiling so much it's like there's light coming from inside him, illuminating all the shadowy corners of the room and dispelling even the most well-founded doubts. Vince does that, sometimes, smiles in that ineffable way without any artfulness or advance warning; he could ask absolutely anything of Howard when it happens and Howard would feel happily compelled to say yes, to give Vince everything he likes and more simply for the pleasure of giving it, for the mere chance of seeing him smile like that again. (Fortunately Vince hasn't quite figured out that salient fact, or Howard really would be in a world of shit.) He pats Howard's forearm, all young Turk soothing the scared old duffer.

"PieFace Showcase," he stubbornly insists. "You. Me. Us. In front of everyone. Pulling shapes. Smashing dolls. Wearing bassoons. You'll see, Howard. It's gonna be brilliant."

In spite of himself, Howard smiles right back. Vince is right: It's them, isn't it? Of course it's gonna be brilliant. Absolutely.

******

7. What are we coming to?
No room for me, no fun for you

Something's been wrong, off-balance between them both, since they were rescued from the island. Even though they've silently agreed to put the whole Precious incident well behind them, though they can still muster their mutual forces to vanquish upstart outsiders (damn right you don't come at people, Harold whatever-your-name-was), though things seem not to have changed in any really significant way…they have. They've changed profoundly, in fact, in ways Howard can't precisely pinpoint so much as sense round the edges, though one particularly sharp edge is Vince announcing without any preliminaries, days after they're home, "Our band, yeah? It's not working out."

He walks away before Howard can even respond, brushes off any attempt to raise the subject with a smile or a random remark about jungle cats or another paint-dryingly dull Camden anecdote (just how many CD launches for other people's bands can you stand, anyway, before wanting to gnaw off a limb?), and soon enough, Howard just gives up asking. Of course Vince must be heartbroken about missing the Showcase, Howard's not exactly turning handsprings about it himself, but it's not the last time opportunity will ever knock, it can't be (and Milky Joe's single bombed anyway, serves the fatuous little sophist right); the important thing is to keep pushing ahead, barreling through any and all hindrances. They call him the Hurdling Hellboy. But Vince doesn't seem frustrated, is the thing--he just doesn't seem to give a toss anymore. His idea, might Howard remind him, Vince's idea all along, their having their own band, he brought it up, he pushed for it, and now? Pffffft. Just like that. Yesterday's shiny cape.

Well, Vince is like that, all fruit salad and candy floss, attention span drifting like the bits of fluff from a milkweed pod; he can't help getting bored with what he couldn't live without five minutes earlier. It's his nature. Howard might not like it, but that's how it is. He starts spending more and more time at the Stoke Newington Jazz Club, Vince reverts to chasing one new wave rainbow after another--not even starting his own bands, like the old days, at least that would be something, now he's just trying to beg and inveigle his way into someone else's. His stock has gone down, Vince's has, and for all that Vince mercilessly mocks his supposed stodgy senility even Howard can see it--does he really, seriously think he can still pass for twenty-two? Amongst actual spotty, feral children? At least Lester Corncrake doesn't run scared of Ol' Papa Time. Lester, now there's a great guy. One of the old school. A dying breed. They've become great mates, he and Lester, and unlike some folks Howard could mention they can discuss just about anything together.

Well, admittedly, they can't discuss crimping. Or the jungles of India, never mind Xooberon's Desert of Nightmares; Lester's never traveled any farther afield than Islington. Or yetis, or Babu Yagu, or the perfect throwing stance for a satsuma battle, or what the thunder said, or shamanic concoctions or the old days toiling for Fossil or any music produced after 1955, for God's sake, Lester might be getting on but did that mean he had to hide cowering in a Guatemalan shoebox from anything that wasn't bebop? Even Vince, through a combination of saintly patience and sweets bribes and barely veiled blackmail about that Terry Nutkin incident, Howard's been able to coax into sitting down for a bit, just a very tiny little bit, of jazz fusion; carefully chosen, of course, he needs to be mindful of Vince's allergies, but he conspicuously didn't go anaphylactic after Steely Dan or Sun Ra. (The day Howard catches him unconsciously humming bits of "Rocket Number Nine" under his breath, he takes it as a personal triumph.) Lester, though, Lester's of the old school, he's a bloody unshakeable fucking old school purist; never mind jazz fusion or post-bop, Lester can barely bring himself to acknowledge Ornette Coleman's existence. Once they have a heated argument over Mario Schiano that ends in flat-out name-calling, and while Howard feels obliged to bury the hatchet after Lester's third stroke they never quite recover their previous equanimity. He's sick and tired of feeling like the oldest man in Shoreditch, but being the youngest one in Stoke Newington is no bargain either.

"You know that story you used to tell?" Howard asks one evening, as Vince picks daintily at his Indian takeaway. "The one about Lopamudra the Hyena, the time she chased you straight down to the river? You never finished it, you always left off right as you reached the water. Whatever happened there?"

Vince deigns to look up from his aloo palak, nonplussed and a bit irritated. "Christ, I don't remember. I mean, how long ago was that, anyway?"

"Not long ago at all, really," Howard answers, in the same tone. "I mean, considering you're a mere infant of twenty-two and everything, aren't you?"

Vince just shakes his head, biting dismissively into a samosa.

Howard can't talk to Lester about his own new music, either. Ever since the strange nightmare on the roof he's found himself catching bits and tail-ends of the whole great celestial conversation, a sporadic tinnitus composed of the murmurs of leaves and fishwife spittings of the sun (and the moon can just shut the hell up any time it likes, really); they don't add up to anything all by themselves, but he could do something with them, he knows he could. This could be it, this could be the answer. He plays with the sounds entirely in private, not trying to reproduce them on Naboo's instruments but instead attempting to work them all out in his head, like a sculptor shaping the air before him with his palms. The music itself, whatever it finally sounded like, would be secondary. He needs someone else, someone to sing the voices of the stars, stones, insects, the kingdom of fungi. Someone who understands him, Howard, well enough to suss out where he's going with all this, get there before he does and show him, make him hear it how it's all meant to sound.

"So, I was thinking," he mentions one day, so carefully offhand, "I mean, I know we're not doing the band thing anymore but we could still jam a bit every now and then, couldn't we? Pull some shapes, play with some licks, maybe toss a few chords back and forth and see where they--"

"So what would be the point of that?" Vince says.

It's not even the words themselves, but how they come out of Vince's mouth: so casually, instinctively indifferent that Howard, for the life of him, can't muster up an answer. Vince has already turned away, radiating sunbeams at a customer exclaiming over their collection of gilded rat skeletons. Naboo's favorites, those, not for sale. Vince, Howard knows for a fact, finds them repulsive--they remind him of some unpleasant incident, back when he was young--but you'd never guess it to look at him and whatever happened, back then, to make Vince shudder and throw a cloth over them whenever Naboo's not around, he's certainly not going to tell Howard about it now. Far better things to do.

It's no fun without Vince. Very little is. That's the whole problem, right there.

Vince has always been self-absorbed and careless and scatterbrained, it's simply how he is and Howard understands that, but what's new is the streak of unmistakable, even calculated malice in how Vince looks at him, talks to him, dismisses him like an annoying, superannuated child needing to be sent off to play in traffic. The business with Vince's idiot punk "friends" was bad enough but it's the bin-bag incident that really shocks him, this after they beat back rank impostors and set the stage on fire, that was meant to be the turning point, the return to how things once were, and then…and then. Vince doesn't know this, doubtless would never guess, but Howard hadn't meant to come back after that Crack Fox business; he'd nodded, smiled, assured Vince they were a team again but once it was all sorted, the wretched thing dispatched to the verminous Seven Realms, he'd intended to leave for good. Amongst the other bin men he was still young and strong, truly one of the crew, why should he go back, anyway?

It was Naboo, not Vince, who actually took Howard aside and apologized to him, muttered something Howard didn't understand about money gone missing from the till, persuaded him to return--if only because a brain-damaged jellyfish made a better stock-taker than Vince on a good day, but still. He'd let himself be flattered into coming back, the bigger fool he, but he was, for a time, quite decided on going. He's wanted to before, now and again, but always with the understanding that Vince would ultimately follow him, just as he'd done long back when Howard left Leeds. Never, not before this, has Howard ever wanted to leave so he could get away from Vince himself.

And of course Howard would miss him. Horribly. But that's just not the point.

He can leave any time he likes, is what Vince doesn't understand. Just like back in Leeds there's nothing stopping him, no great abiding love of Dalston, no family worth speaking of, evidently no lasting friendships. No financial hindrances either, a fact Howard keeps strictly to himself. That advert shoot might have been humiliating but not only can he brag forevermore he's worked with the great Jurgen Haabermaaster, his first residuals check made him blink in shock, certain he must be hallucinating that many zeroes. They fly into his bank balance now like homing pigeons, feathering the nest. There's more than enough there for him and Vince to put out their own CD, stop waiting around for PieFace or NME or This Week's Pigshite or any other idiot kingmaker to anoint them worthy of the throne. He'd meant to mention this fact casually, in passing--being extremely careful not to let on how much they had, lest it all get spent on Sherbet Fountains and jade hairpins--after he'd coaxed Vince back into the musical fold. Best laid plans.

"I can leave any time, you know," he announces one evening, standing watching hard, pounding sheets of rain hammer at the sitting room windows. Vince is out clubbing, again, deftly pirouetting between the raindrops to be feted, again, for showing up and smiling. Nice for some. "I'm a man of means. Action, and means. There's absolutely nothing stopping me."

"Mm-hm," says Naboo, not glancing up from his copy of The Shamanist. Bollo sits muttering to himself in the corner, absorbed in building little towers from Chinese checker pieces.

"It's the truth," Howard persists, pacing up and down before the sofa. "Any time I like."

"So why don't you?" Bollo mutters, constructing a painstaking ziggurat. "Nobody miss you."

"Leave it, Bollo," advises Naboo, now yawning over the pan-dimensional crossword. "He always gets like this after another spat with the wife--"

"And what is that supposed to mean?" Howard demands, halting in his tracks.

Naboo just shrugs, and Howard feels his irritation surge into high tide. "No, I mean it, Naboo. This has been going on forever now and it annoys the piss out of me, I want to know why every other person I meet seems to think Vince is my girlfriend or my--"

"You know what, Howard?" Naboo finally deigns to abandon the puzzle, gazing at Howard with wide-eyed solemnity. "You're absolutely right. It is ridiculous, how people walk around saying Vince is your wife."

This abrupt acknowledgement of common sense catches Howard off guard, though the vindication is certainly richly satisfying. "Well, thank you, Naboo," he replies, drawing himself up and nodding emphatically. "I'm glad to see someone has a simple grasp of--"

"Because if anyone's the wife here, it's definitely you."

Howard's eyes narrow to beady slits. "I'm just saying," Naboo notes calmly, as he searches for the alchemy column, "even that Lance Dior could see it. No smoke without--"

"Right, I'm getting really tired of this. I think we both agreed that a gas cooker plus Vince when he's distracted is a potentially lethal combination, speaking of fire, and I only helped him straighten his hair back that time when he broke his wrist--"

"That's not what I meant." Naboo skims bits of the new Paracelsus translation, snorts and tosses the magazine onto the side table. "It's all this passive-aggressive stuff you do, all the--"

"I am not passive-aggressive. If Howard Moon wants to confront someone, by God he'll confront them all over their face, yeah? He's not one to linger behind anyone's--"

"--all the moaning and sighing and making sad faces, right? 'Where's the magic gone? We never talk anymore. You're always at the pub with your mates. I spend hours slaving over dinner and you don't even show up. You don't remember my birthday, you never say you love me--' "

"Where are you going with this, exactly?" Howard perches on the edge of a chair, one foot drumming tensely against the rug. "Because if you're going where it sounds like you're going, sir, you've gone very wrong."

Naboo gives him a sidelong glance. "Not a 'massive gayist' anymore then, are you?"

Christ almighty, will he ever be allowed to live that down? "I was drinking, all right?"

"Two beers?"

"It was on an empty stomach, you can't--"

"Howard?" Naboo stretches, slides fingers beneath his turban to scratch his scalp. "No offense or anything, but this whole conversation's gone over a bit virginal? Either way just don't go dipping fingers in my owl beaks, it's bad enough you try and steal all my hash."

"And what exactly would I need those for?" Howard bristles, glaring at him.

Naboo raises his eyebrows. "Well, yeah, that's my point. Monopoly, Bollo? I'm the racing car."

"I don't have to listen to this," says Howard, looking from man to ape and back again in high dudgeon. "I don't, you know!"

"Why Bollo always have to be the thimble?" Bollo grumbles, searching in vain for the lost game pieces.

"I can leave any time!"

"You always collect a fortune off Mayfair," Naboo points out. "It's a fair exchange."

Howard stalks noisily out of the room, swinging an arm to knock Naboo's magazine to the floor in the process.

"Good riddance," says Bollo, sorting the money. "What's his problem?"

"Scorpio with a moon in Aries?" Naboo shakes his head. "That's ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundreths percent jerkoff on a good day. Right, it's my turn to roll first…"

******

8. Especially at night
I worry over situations
I know will be all right
Perhaps it's just imagination

Of course he loves Vince, and always has. This is not something he's ever doubted, or denied, or felt the need to try and rationalize: He's loved him since first they met, been cognizant of that love since the whole business with Alan Hollsworth and the notebook, the heart has its reasons as the Frenchman said and hasn't friendship, full stop, always been the deepest bond there is? Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Kafka and Max Brod. Van Gogh and Gauguin. Deeper than brother and brother (well, unless the brothers were Castor and Polydeuces, but the point remains). Certainly deeper than mother and son. Naboo's bewildering little insinuations, the sniggerings of outsiders, they all signify less than nothing--homosocial is not homosexual, no matter how much lesser minds try to reduce absolutely everything to a cheap libidinous level. (A fact which Vince himself might try keeping in mind, before twitting Howard yet again about his supposed yearnings for the departed Tommy.) He and Vince are what they are, and Howard knows exactly how he feels about it, and that's the beginning and end of it.

As for Vince's own feelings, well, who knows what they are, really? Vince isn't someone who feels anything at all deeply, Howard knows this; it's just not in his nature and expecting Vince to understand the significance, the gift, of anyone, for instance Howard himself, telling him that he loves him would be like expecting a whooping crane to comprehend Wedekind. Howard loves him? Well, all well and good, join the mob. Everyone everywhere loves Vince, it's the one constant of the little man's entire life. Everyone wants him. And he loves and wants everyone back. Howard will say this much for Vince, he's got a generous spirit in his own way. He loves being loved. He loves that everyone loves him. He loves everyone who loves him.

Nearly everyone, anyway.

It stuck in Howard's craw, it did, being lectured like that up on the roof on his own damned birthday. By Vince, of all people, because what the hell would a party-usurping electro-tart accustomed to half the universe flinging itself at his feet understand about how it felt to offer up such a private, guarded part of yourself, a part you'd never before offered to anyone else, weren't even sure you'd ever wanted to? You've got to stop falling for people when they give you the slightest bit of affection. Well, it was never people, Vince, admittedly you're no Madame Curie but if you can't even understand that it's not some abstract being who's the issue here, some hypothetical stick figure drawn from the air, that it's you, yourself, the affection you gave, momentarily, under however much outside duress, to me, that this has always been all about you, and me--

All right, then, so not entirely, purely homosocial, his feelings. Their friendship. Possibly. So what? It's the twenty-first century, isn't it, and hadn't Vince that same night bragged he could make Jean-Paul Belmondo rethink his whole--you kissed me plenty of times there, Vince, you did, more than ever you needed to. He'd felt it, Howard had, Vince's breath quickening as their mouths lingered together, the barest touch of his fingertips lightly stroking Howard's face, the way he kept drawing the merest fraction of an inch away and then kissing him again, again, hungry and gentle all at once, and Howard had been too gobsmacked to know just how to react and then…and then…oh. It can't all have been for show, just to put that deranged shaman off the scent--he's the acclaimed actor here, after all, not Vince. It can't have been.

Can it?

It was Howard's fault, really. He'd got a bit, well, overly exuberant and then panicked, and when that girl, Astrid something, came back it was a golden chance to pretend what just happened with Vince hadn't at all and, well, she was very nice, very pretty, he liked her, but when she'd casually pointed out her girlfriend chatting up Bollo in the corner he'd felt not disappointment but an instant sense of relief. She still came into the shop occasionally, always gravitating to the antique coin banks and windup toys. (And the bookmarks, of course, but then what woman didn't collect those like seashells?) The point is, for just a moment there Howard had possibly, perhaps, made the self-declared Confuser a bit confused himself and he was still paying for that, even now, it wasn't fair, but then when did Vince ever go out of his way to be fair to anyone? It just wasn't in his nature and sometimes, perversely, Howard actually admired how utterly, unapologetically for himself Vince had always been, always would be. Just look at the rewards he reaped from it, daily, and ask yourself, who's the fool here?

Sometimes, he feels vaguely tempted to ask Vince if he'd liked it, however fleetingly, however inadvertently. But he doesn't. He isn't half that much of a fool.

He himself, Howard, doesn't like being touched. He never has. Even touching himself, yes, fine, it feels good, but what of it once you realize you're lying there, sprawled out, a great drooling berk, tugging on your tackle like some senile marmoset? The overpowering self-consciousness, never mind he was alone, defeated him every single time.

But it had all been different, so different, right at that moment. However fleetingly. However inadvertently. Hadn't it? Or was his memory just playing tricks on him?

The thing was, he liked women, hell, he'd loved women--well, all right, a woman--but somehow, with only a very few exceptions, he'd always found it that much more difficult to…become exuberant, shall we say, contemplating women. Men, though, that was another story. Always had been. Yes, ever since he was of an age to start thinking about such things and as Vince would gladly point out that was a hell of a lot of years ago now, there, Naboo, are you fucking happy? Howard T. J. Moon acknowledges the male of the species gives him a certain frisson, always has, don't everyone faint at once.

In fact, if you're going to get irritatingly pedantic, you might even go so far as to say that he, Howard, has an actual "type," a specific male subspecies that makes him turn his head: strong men, solid men, men who put their backs into things and build and discover and conquer and get the bloody job done. Men of action. Pioneers. Explorers. Big-shouldered, broad-backed, wasting no time on talk because their deeds say it all. In other words, the dead opposite of Vince physically and otherwise. And really, for all Howard had been in a brown study about the little incident at the party (there, see, he can admit that much too), Vince was right: It was nothing to do with love, nor desire, it was simply physical danger combined with dull, pedestrian proximity. Vince would have kissed absolutely anyone else, exactly that way, had they been there instead. All for show and to save his own skinny neck.

Great. Good. That makes Howard feel just absolutely stonking wonderful. But really, what difference does it make? He has a type, a very specific type. And Vince definitely isn't it. And Vince's type, whatever that alarming unicorn species might be, most certainly isn't him. He, Howard, just got momentarily worked up over nothing. Blame the moonlight. And it's like he'd told Naboo, he'd been drinking.

In fact, what the hell does Naboo know about anything? This conversation's gone over a bit virginal. Pillock. He'd bet his Haabermaaster money the little garden gnome hadn't had a woman round the flat since Attlee was in power. If then.

He hadn't felt at all self-conscious, up on the roof. For a few moments, in fact, he had barely been conscious of anything at all but Vince and his mouth and fingertips and the kiss itself, the sudden, unprecedented, shocking ache of feeling that--

Rubbish. His memory was just playing tricks on him. It always did.

******

9. Clean up your rap, your story's getting dusty
Wash out your mouth, your lies are getting rusty

The rain's stopped sometime during the night, and moonlight spills in thick and heavy through the slats in the shutters. Shutters. Not curtains. Howard's somehow not in his room upstairs in Dalston but back at the zoo in the old keepers' lounge, lying in his sleeping bag on the dust-matted carpet with Vince a few feet away, curled up on his side. Vince doesn't look quite right and it takes Howard a few moments to realize why: It's his hair, it's not properly tawny-striped but glossy black and longer like it is now. This confuses him and he lies there, quietly, as if some creature lurking in the half-darkness might sense his movements and attack. You've got to respect the jungle. Move with the forest.

Fingertips reach out and touch Howard's shoulder, the lightest, most tentative of sensations but still real, still unmistakable. He doesn't stir.

"Howard?" Vince says. His voice is low, but still startling in the night silence. "Are you awake?"

Howard doesn't answer. Vince slides his hand, slowly, so his palm cradles Howard's shoulder, fingers forming the curve of a question mark. Gradually he moves his hand higher, idly rubbing the side of Howard's neck, the edge of his jaw.

A rat suddenly scuttles across the floor, inches from their heads, huge and gray with an odd golden sheen to its fur. Vince jumps, almost shouting, and Howard sits bolt upright, struggling with the zip of his sleeping bag and looking round for something large and heavy to throw at it. The creature vanishes, as suddenly as it appeared. Through one wall bleeds the muted throb of someone's music: cacophonous punk, the singer spitting and snarling in some Germanic-sounding language. Howard turns his head in its direction, strangely mesmerized, and when he turns back Vince is also sitting up, staring at him.

"Think the council knows we're here?" he asks Vince. "We could be arrested."

Vince unwinds his legs from his own sleeping bag, shifts toward Howard without responding. He rests both his hands lightly against Howard's shoulders. The tip of his tongue travels slowly up the side of Howard's neck; again, and then again. Howard shudders, tilts his head back, closes his eyes. Teeth biting very gently at his earlobe make him reach up and, without thinking, sink a hand deep into Vince's hair, fingers twining round the strands and clutching. Vince doesn't seem to mind. Not at all.

"Vince," Howard says. His own voice is foreign to him. "I never…"

Never, ever. Not like you, all those girls, maybe all those boys too, who knew. Even in a dream, it's too humiliating to say aloud. But it doesn't matter because Vince isn't really listening anyway, he's too absorbed in kissing the hollows of Howard's throat, unbuttoning his pajama top to run a palm down his chest. Then he lowers his head and scrapes the skin, the barest bit, with his teeth. Howard cradles Vince's head in both hands, wordlessly urging him on, but Vince pulls free, easy as a dog shaking its coat dry; his steady, unsmiling gaze makes him look like he did when Howard first met him, when he would fire off one self-aggrandizing tall tale after another, after another, silently daring Howard to challenge a word. Howard puts out his own hand, runs it meditatively along Vince's sharp-planed cheek, the jutting chin, his strange half-squashed nose.

They're kissing like they did on the rooftop but deeper, even slower, Howard letting himself be pushed back so he's lying on his discarded sleeping bag once more. Vince tugs the waistband of Howard's pajama bottoms down around his thighs and reaches in a hand, curls it around him and strokes with a steady, patient rhythm, and even as he's moving in response Howard waits for the old embarrassment to set in but he doesn't feel foolish or pathetic at all, not at all, all he ever needed to do was forget himself, give in and forget himself like only music had ever let him do--only the two things ever all his life, only music, and--

The door slams open with a resounding crash, Howard jolting awake and shouting, "Wuuahhh!" as he flails wildly against the intruder. He's tangled up in the bedsheets, sliding down the pillows--bedsheets. Pillows. Dalston. New moon, not full. Outside, it's still storming. Vince is standing sway-footed in Howard's bedroom doorway, rain-soaked and drunk off his tits; clutching his arm, trying to pull him away, is a tall, thin platinum blonde wearing what looks like crumpled magenta tinfoil.

"S'rry, Howard," Vince slurs, with a sloppy smile. "Got t'wrong room--"

"Come on!" the girl hisses, scandalized. "He was sleeping, we woke him up! Close the door!"

With an apologetic glance at Howard she shuts the door behind them. As the footsteps and muffled giggling recede Howard, still groggy and disoriented, pushes the blankets down with his feet and lies there listening to the rain, catching a bit of hydrological chitter-chatter standing out from the dull roar of the water. Half-asleep's an excellent time to eavesdrop on the universe, sounds come through like faraway radio signals that get clearer late at night. His breath is still rapid, he's still hard. Thank Christ the pair of them were too soused to notice. Half-asleep is a good time for a wank as well, when he's too tired to question why he's bothering. He reaches his hand down, replaying every fragment of the rapidly vanishing dream he can remember, but exhaustion and an exhausted melancholy soon overcome pleasure and he falls heavily asleep.

He stirs at the smells of coffee and toasting bread, turns his head to the clock: eight-thirty. A good five hours before Vince ever shows his face, Naboo must have got up early. Howard pulls on his dressing gown and wanders toward the kitchen; the girl from last night is there, alone, thickly buttering a slice of toast. Next to the toast platter sit a dish of butter, opened jars of honey and jam, a little jug of milk for the coffee.

"Oh, hello," she says, entirely amiable, her voice childishly high and a bit posh. She nods toward a teetering stack of magazines on the kitchen table. "Your Cheekbone ninja broke in last night and left these, if you want them. Sorry about waking you up like that, we didn't mean to. I'm Aimee, by the way."

"Hello," Howard says rather formally, reaching for the toast, watching her spread about an inch of raspberry jam over the slick of butter with earnest concentration. Her eyes, still smeared with last night's makeup traces, are very wide and blue, her nose, cheekbones, chin are all sharp angles and corners and her hair, in a better light, isn't blonde after all but pure silvery gray, caught up in a high ponytail trailing down her back. The effect of it against such a young face is striking, and Howard can see immediately why Vince would pick her out from a crowd.

"I had a horrible fever, when I was little," she explains, noticing his gaze. "It was auburn before. The nice thing is I can dye it any shade I like, I just washed out the fuchsia. Coffee?" Howard shakes his head. "Christ, that club. I was ready to leave about an hour after we got there, Vince insisted on staying. All his friends--he makes friends everywhere he goes, doesn't he?"

"That he does," Howard agrees.

"Well, he apparently had to chat up all of them, one by one. The music gave me a pounding headache." She gulps her coffee, cradling the cup in both hands. "How could he even hear them over all that noise, I'll never know--"

"That's never particularly an issue for Vince," Howard says. "Listening to people, I mean."

"It isn't, is it?" she agrees. She bites neatly into her toast. "He's got such a way with everyone, I envy it. But I really was ready to run out of there screaming, I mean, I'm a modern girl and all but just how much darkwave neo-renaissance synth-techno d'you expect me to take? I swear I would've killed for some jazz." She grins, displaying a raspberry thread on her top teeth like a lipstick smear. "Vince never quits making fun of me for it, but I do sometimes like a bit of jazz."

"Big fan of Curiosity Killed the Cat then, are you?"

He hadn't meant that to come out half so snide, but she bursts out laughing. "You're funny! Vince said you were funny. He talks about you a lot." She stirs more sugar into her coffee, the rings covering her fingers clinking softly against the spoon. "Coltrane, I like John Coltrane. Mostly jazz singers, though, I like voices. Nina Simone. Dee Dee Bridgewater. Abbey Lincoln. I keep looking for others but there's so many, I don't know where to--"

"Cynthia Hawkins," Howard says immediately.

"Who?"

"She started as an opera singer, of all things, now she sings anything she likes." Howard crunches into his toast, warming to the subject. "Except 'Pirate Jenny,' she said once that Nina's version couldn't be surpassed. Incredible voice. Words don't do justice. She's a bit eccentric about letting herself be recorded so her records are very rare, lot of bootleg trading--but that's half the fun."

Even though she's listening, quite attentively, self-consciousness suddenly makes a surging comeback. "I mean, if that's your fun," he mumbles. "Probably isn't. But it's mine."

Aimee writes the name down on a scrap of paper, slipping it into her crumpled magenta pocket. "Thanks. Well, I'd better get home and change, the Topshop counter won't run itself." She takes a last swallow of coffee. "It was really nice to meet you, Horace."

She clatters back down the hallway on teetering purple platforms. As Howard drizzles honey over another slice of toast he hears her voice and Vince's from the bedroom, murmuring at each other, then she strides back through the kitchen in a coat that looks like a skinned purple ram and disappears swiftly out the door. Vince emerges a few minutes later, leaning against the kitchen doorway and scratching lazily at his scalp; when he spies the magazines he makes a beeline for the table, nearly knocking the milk jug over Howard's plate in the process.

"Sugar Ape?" Vince snickers in disbelief, culling it from the company of Cheekbone, Camden Stylie and Trendiad with his fingertips and tossing it contemptuously toward the sink. "Christ, they can't even give that rag away anymore, have to try and sneak it in with the respectable publications--like it's been worth reading since the Preacher Man went and topped himself. Shop's closed today, by the way, Naboo's got to start packing for Xooberon."

"What's he going back there for?" Howard holds the spoon poised over his toast, making idle patterns with the stream of honey. "Didn't think he was too keen on the place--"

"Got no choice. Something called a High Shamans' Tribunal--he got the subpoena last night while you were sleeping." Vince reaches over Howard's plate for some toast, smearing it with honey and jam and folding it over on itself in a shower of crumbs. "I'd stay out of his way if I were you. He's in a bit of trouble, sounds like, they caught him red-handed dealing in top-secret potion formulas out of the back of the shop--"

"Well, why the hell was he doing that?" Howard demands. "Wasn't that whole cock-up with the Shaman Juice enough for him?"

Vince gives him a rather pitying glance. "You didn't know? Where've you been? How d'you think the shop makes ninety percent of its money, anyway? I mean, use your common sense, Howard, even the CelebRadar only pulls in so much."

Particularly when you turn right round and spend it all, Howard thinks, but doesn't say aloud; this is very nearly the most sustained conversation the two of them have had, about anything, in weeks. Vince leans against the table munching his toast, dripping jam on his Stranglers T-shirt and leafing through his Shoreditch rags without much apparent interest. He keeps staring down at Howard, his expression veiled and hard to qualify.

"What're you doing up so early, anyway?" Howard asks.

Vince just shrugs, reaching for the last piece of toast.

"She's nice," Howard offers, as the honey spoon leaves a growing, sticky puddle on his plate. "That Aimee."

For a fleeting half-second, Vince actually looks puzzled--Christ, just how pissed was he last night?--then recognition finally dawns. "Yeah. Yeah, she's all right." He gives Howard an acerbic glance. "But let me guess, she's really interested in you, right? Sensitive man of the world and all? I mean, think about it, she likes a bit of jazz, you like--"

"Her loyalties didn't seem particularly conflicted, no," Howard replies, quite evenly. The honey's soaked through his toast, leaving a soggy spot right in the center. He keeps wielding the spoon. "As it happens."

No answer. "Well," Howard continues, stretching his legs out beneath the table, "since we're closed up today I think I'll have a bit of a go at Stationery Village. Been neglecting it lately--"

"Have you," says Vince. "That's tragic, it is."

Not even hostile, that, just out and out dismissive. Actual hostility would take too much energy, distract Vince from his bloody fucking magazines. "The Sellotape tree's lost all its stick--"

"Has it."

Vince is standing inches away now, staring at him like he's waiting for something, daring Howard to do something, God knows what. Whatever it is, he's in no mood to play along. "It has. The paper clip tray's spilling over, the pen-field's a complete--"

"You should be ashamed of yourself," Vince notes, with wide-eyed solemnity. "Letting something so important go to ruin like that."

"--and total mess!" Howard throws down the honey spoon with unnecessary vehemence, barely noticing it clatter and stick to the tabletop. "And don't even speak to me about the Blu-Tack garden, it's all gone right to--"

Vince slides his arms around Howard's neck and kisses him hard. For a moment Howard's frozen in shock, then Vince's awkwardly stooped position makes him stumble and Howard's hands reach out and grab at Vince, steadying him, fingertips sinking into his shoulders as Vince forces Howard's lips apart. Howard can't breathe. His hands are clutching Vince's shoulder blades and he's tasting the traces of jam in another warm, willing mouth and Vince's fingers are stroking his neck, Vince reaches in and undoes one pajama button, his palm against the skin beneath just like in last night's--exactly like, oh Christ--a sound's escaped of its own accord from deep in Howard's throat, too much like pleading, he's pulling at Vince's shirt now to get at his chest, stomach, bare back--

Vince wriggles free with the swift skill of a snake, back to leaning nonchalantly against the table before Howard even quite registers he's gone. Vince runs a hand through his hair, lets out a noise somewhere between a gasp and a laugh, and then it's like nothing's happened between them at all, like Vince has just slid a screen between them and shut Howard out entirely. Out of breath, disbelieving, Howard just sits there as Vince strolls back toward the hallway.

"Going out shopping with Leroy," Vince offers over his shoulder. "See you later."

As Vince heads back to his room Howard doesn't stir from his chair. It's not, in fact, what's just happened that's the issue, he determines, as he studies his forgotten, honeylogged toast and the syrupy trail leading to the spoon. It's really not that. It's the look on Vince's face afterwards: satisfied, just short of triumphant, as if he's assured himself of the presence of something he, Vince, has a right to assume should be there. Something that belongs to him--not that he treasures it, or even particularly values it, it's just it belongs to him and whenever he chooses to he can put it to use. Like a shopkeeper, checking on his stock.

Anger, slow and simmering, bubbles thickly through Howard's body, leaving his chest tight and breath short in ways Vince's kiss could not.

The next day the shop opens as usual and Vince, as usual, is nowhere to be found. Howard fusses with Stationery Village for a bit, weeding large clumps of dust from the Blu-Tack garden, then settles behind the counter with Crime and Punishment; just as Raskolnikov's constant dithering starts making him impatient Vince finally strolls through the door, wearing something red and glossy that's doubtless part of yesterday's shopping haul. Howard barely looks up from his book.

"Christ, it's dead in here today," Vince complains, dropping another armload of shopping bags in the corner. "I don't know why we even bother."

Howard shrugs. "It's just the cover for the real moneymaker, isn't it. Like you said."

Raskolnikov kills the pawnbroker and her sister, cowers in an abandoned flat in the same building, makes a run for it with pockets stuffed full of pawned trinkets. Howard senses he's being watched, but keeps on reading even as the silence grows more uncomfortable.

"Well?" Vince finally asks.

"Well, what?"

"Aren't you going to ask where I've been?"

"Why would I do that?"

"Because you always do." There's a small but gratifying hint of unease in Vince's voice. " 'Late again, little man? So what's the excuse this time? Don't think you can pull the wool over my eyes, sir, I spun that wool, they call me the Wild Woolly Tale-Spinner--' "

"I don't care where you've been."

Silence, again. "What do you mean?" Vince says after a moment, rather a bit uneasier. "You always--"

"I mean just what I said, I don't care where you've been." Howard finally looks up, closing the book and rising from his chair. "You're always late, you'll always be late, you come and go just as you like, hardly matters why at this point, does it?" He pulls on his coat. "Naboo and Bollo should be back around three--"

"So where are you going?" Vince demands, seeming genuinely bewildered, as Howard reaches for his hat. "Your precious Sellotape tree is still--"

Howard walks out of the Nabootique without bothering to answer.

He heads over to the Dirty Fork--a café much favored by the bin men--and has a deeply satisfying fry-up, lingering over his book until Marmeladov snuffs it and Raskolnikov and Sonya finally meet face to face. When he gets back to the shop Vince is neck-deep in customers, winding up a jack-in-the-box with a distorted, grotesquely carved little girl's visage; his own face is alight with such insouciant enthusiasm that they're all hopelessly drawn in, they'll fight each other to buy it, not even notice until they've plunked down their euros and hauled the thing home just how just relentlessly creepy it is. Howard, for his part, will be glad to see the back of it. As he resumes his place behind the counter, not bothering to try to lure anyone away or distract from the main attraction, Vince looks up for a moment, still winding the toy, and catches his eye with a guarded, wary glance. Howard nods back, entirely courteous. The sort of distant, but friendly gesture you'd offer any sort of work colleague you've known for a few years.

The box's plinking, off-key tune reaches its climax and the little girl's carved wooden head springs forth, all popping eyes and Medusa hair and huge, square, hungry teeth. "That is clever!" a customer declares, actually clapping her hands, as though the whole jack-in-the-box concept is something entirely novel. Vince laughs along with her, and gives her just flirtatious enough an eye, and works the ludicrously inflated price into the flow of their talk so smoothly it barely registers even as she's digging in her handbag. When she's bent over the crumpled bills she's pulled from her wallet Vince raises his head and gives Howard an oddly bereft sort of look, the kind he'd sometimes get on his face when they were younger and Howard had forced him into confessing some far too elaborate, top-heavy lie. Before Howard can react, though, Vince has turned away once again.

******

10. Sooner or later
You hit the deck
You get found out

That night Howard dreams Babu Yagu returns to the shop, trapping him in a carved wooden box and making him leap from it grinning and dancing over and over, then forces him to the floor and starts pulling his teeth out one by one. He wakes up shouting, trying to struggle free of the giant gleaming pincers, and whacks his head square against the headboard with a goose-egg-producing thud. He staggers out of bed, clutching his throbbing temple, and feels something crunch heavily underfoot: Cynthia Hawkins, Live at Leeds, wrangled from one of Lester's mates for fifty euros and easily worth at least ten times that much but of course, he couldn't have taken three seconds to pick it up last night when it fell from atop the record pile, could he? He grabs for one of the jagged pieces, hoping in vain somehow to glue it together, and takes a deep slice out of his index finger.

Still sucking on the finger trying to stanch the blood (there's no sticking plasters in the medicine cabinet, of course, all long since banished by Vince's dozens of styling products), Howard bleeds copiously all over his favorite paisley shirt, and the bathroom sink, and one of Naboo's unwound turbans which he realizes, only after he grabs it, isn't a towel after all. He and Naboo collide and trip over each other in the hallway and, once Naboo's done ripping him a new arsehole over the turban--he leaves for Xooberon this afternoon, and is tense as a piano wire about to snap--Howard stumbles into the kitchen, burns his other hand making the tea, and discovers only after he's taken a huge bite of toast that the bread's stale and yesterday's butter has gone rancid.

Downstairs, hobbling painfully on the ankle he twisted on the landing, Howard finds a war zone of merchandise flung every which way, clothing pulled from its hangers and heaped on the floor, the entire jazz LP section knocked off the racks; he reaches for the phone to report the break-in and robbery, then spies the empty crisps bags, alcopop bottles and spent glow-sticks amid the mess and slams the receiver back down. Vince let some of his "friends" come in and treat the shop like their own private squat, again, he knew he'd heard that shit they called music reverberating through the floorboards last night--he grabs at pieces of a century-old Japanese tea service upended on the clothes pile and, while ferrying them to safety, skids on a sticky puddle of Tropical Lime Breezer and lands full-force on his arse, just in time for Naboo and Bollo to arrive downstairs and see the teacups sail from his flailing grasp and smash all over the floor.

"Fucking hell!" Naboo takes in Howard and the chaos around him with astonished fury. "What d'you think you're doing, you great shitbox? Are you drunk? If you don't get this cleaned up in the next eight seconds--"

"I'm trying to!" Howard protests, feeling a jolt of pain in his tailbone as he pulls himself to his feet. "Vince let his little Camden mates in here again, they've torn the place to--"

"Always an excuse." Naboo shakes his head contemptuously, Bollo grunting in agreement. "It's not enough you let all the rubbish pile up in back that time, now you have to drag it in here? I don't have time for this--that tea service is coming out of your wages, Howard, I'm sick of always having to tidy up your messes. Consider yourself on notice."

"I let all the rubbish…" Howard just stands there, gobsmacked, as Bollo exits with a reproachful expression and Naboo, glowering, heads for the stockroom. "What are you talking about! It was him! You said it yourself, you apologized to me personally for it, Vince lied to you about the bin-bags, he--"

Naboo slams the stockroom door behind him.

Howard's barely got the trash hastily swept into the corners (thereby reopening his bleeding finger, and cutting his foot on a piece of china) and scraped up the worst alcopop stains when a wave of hooting, shrieking Shoreditch clones barrels into the shop, a few already (or still) authentically pissed at this early hour, tossing what hasn't already been trashed every which way and oh Christ, Howard had forgotten, there's some sort of "indie festival" going on today in Hoxton and the idiots must've got wind of the Nabootique. He doesn't even have to guess where Vince is right now. They cluster around the counter and of course they all want the fucking CelebRadar, Howard has no idea how to work the thing, Vince's little toy, and after he's tried and failed five times to locate a Lily Allen (which Lily Allen, and do they appreciate just how many Kate Mosses live in and around the greater London area?) the teeming masses go from restlessness to open hostility.

"This place is shit!" yells a squat canary-haired girl, foundation makeup futilely smeared over a faceful of spots. "Sack the geriatric and get someone with a bloody brain cell!"

"Why don't you try getting a life, you little twit?" Howard shouts back, at the end of his frayed patience, amid a chorus of jeers and catcalls. "Queuing up paying money to find out where some overpaid berk on a magazine cover gets his socks, d'you see yourselves! There's a whole world out there, you know! There's…" He's stymied for a moment. "…sunshine, and unexplored wilderness, and music you actually have to be able to carry a tune to--"

A half-eaten Cornetto hits him in the eye as the crowd surges toward him, grabbing at the CelebRadar like zombies on the feed, and Naboo's jumped in the vainly fray pleading for calm and ferociously denouncing Howard's incompetence, stupidity, utter worthlessness as a shopkeeper and human being, and the fleeter indie kids are already trying to vault the countertops when the shop door flies open in a flurry of ringing bells. Mesmerized by the glittery, gold lamé vision lounging languidly in the doorway, the crowd goes instantly docile and parts to let him pass. Casually shaking off every hand reaching out to touch him, Vince sails behind the counter, shrugs off his trailing crushed-velvet coat and, with a bit of a smirk, actually lifts Howard's hands off the radar's keyboard, like a typing teacher repositioning an inept student's fingers.

"You've got something on you," he informs Howard, eyes flickering over the ice cream now drying on Howard's hair, shoulder, the side of his face, then turns toward the throng with a thousand-watt smile. "Sorry I'm late, I got carried off by a giant mynah bird who mistook me for a ring-pull--right then, so who's asking after Lily Allen?"

"Thank Christ," Naboo declares aloud, as the five-euro notes start descending like confetti and the till rings again, again, again. He shoots Howard a murderous glance and marches back toward the stockroom but stops in his tracks, instantly on alert, when in Vince's wake two burly, grim-faced police officers come through the door; the crowd, pacified with the knowledge that Alex Turner is just now gobbling down Chinese takeaway in Battersea, barely notices. The officers look Naboo up and down with bemusement.

"Howard Moon?" one of them asks.

Naboo hastily points out Howard, who, despite all the attendant indignities of the past hour, is relieved to see peace and order finally asserting itself. "There's no more need, officers," he informs them, trying and failing to smooth his crackling, ice-cream-covered hair. "Everything's well under control now, as you can--"

"Howard Moon?" the taller one repeats. "We need you to come down to the station with us."

Howard's reassuring smile very swiftly fades. "Down to the…why?"

"I think you know exactly why, sir," says the shorter one, with the air of a man who's already tolerated more than enough nonsense from Howard for a lifetime. "Or do you mean to claim you don't know anything about the sex adverts you've plastered all over the Bethnal Green and Mile End tube stations--"

"What?"

Customers are nudging each other now, grinning, distracted by this unprecedented new development; Vince looks from the policemen to Howard and back again, seeming quite as amazed as anyone. The taller officer thrusts under Howard's nose a dilapidated poster, the same sort of rainbow paper Vince used to print up notices for his last Camden bash: Howard T.J. Moon, Specialising in Ball-Licking, Muff-Diving and Hot Leather Fetishes. Reasonable Rates. Fulfill Your Fantasies. Underneath this, a crudely drawn, nude caricature of himself complete with giant erect cock, the Nabootique's address and phone number.

"Dozens of these, all over the walls," the shorter officer notes. "Care to explain yourself, sir?"

Howard finds himself very lightheaded, speech a sudden impossibility. Vince's customers start drifting away from the CelebRadar queue and back toward him, rubbernecking at the poster and shaking with helpless laughter. Vince himself has gone from perplexed to stupefied.

"Right," Vince says to the officers, rather hesitantly, "there's got to be a mistake--"

"Christ, I hope so!" shouts a gangling, ginger-haired boy in head-to-toe chartreuse pleather, arm in arm with the canary blonde girl. "Paying, for him? That greasy geezer? Nobody's that much of a masochist!"

Over the roars of mirth, Howard manages to shake his head. "I, I, I can't explain it, but it's like he said, there's got to be--"

"I thought not," nods the taller officer. "Just come quietly with us, sir, if you don't mind."

"Right, wait, hang on," Vince protests. "It's--"

"Now, sir," orders the shorter officer, ignoring Vince entirely. "We can discuss all this much more easily down at the station."

He doesn't feel himself walking, exactly, but somehow each foot obediently places itself before the other as he and the policemen once again part the crowd. He cranes his head toward Naboo, who has stood stone-faced in the corner watching the whole drama play out. "Naboo," he says desperately, "this is a complete mistake, it's just like last time, I--"

"You and I," Naboo interrupts quietly, "are gonna have to have a serious talk about a lot of things after I get back, Howard."

"Oi!" a customer shouts at Vince, waving his money vigorously overhead. "I asked you about Jarvis Cocker! Twice, now!"

The tinkling of bells as one of the officers opens the shop door seems to come from very far away. Howard turns to look over his shoulder, and sees Vince staring after him in an apparently genuine loss as to what to do. Then the taller officer presses a hand between Howard's shoulder blades, a light, silent warning, and he finds himself on the other side of the glass.

When he returns, nearly seven hours later, the light is fading and the shop's deserted. He stands outside, vaguely contemplating Indian food--he's eaten nothing since that morning's befouled toast--decides chicken makhani isn't worth facing other human beings and pushes the door open. Vince is still there, nursing a cappuccino and flicking restlessly through the pages of an old art magazine: He keeps huge piles of them in his room, cutting out the photographs for random, nebulous purposes. When he sees Howard he looks up and nods, casual friendliness tinged with caution.

"All right, then?" he asks Howard. "You're not, you know, arrested or anything?"

Howard gives him a long, steady stare, then roots behind the counter for his bottle of aspirin. He swallows two of them dry.

"Bollo's off," Vince continues, blithely as if Howard's been right there all day. "It's one of his deejaying nights. And Naboo left for Xooberon right after you, his defense solicitor came to fetch him. You're lucky you missed her, she was dead creepy, had these weird green eyes that bore right through you, reminded me of Tony the Prawn--remember Tony?" He starts laughing. "The eyepatches I had to make him? He was a right specimen, wasn't he, that Tony. And the solicitor, she walked all hunched over with her hands sort of waving about, like a great bug or something, 'Ohhhhh, me feelers! I've gone and woken up a praying mantis, watch out, boys, yer 'eads'll get pulled to pieces like wet Christmas crackers--' "

"Why the hell are you talking?" says Howard. "My head was already killing me."

Merciful silence. Howard gulps down a third aspirin, rubbing his cut hand absently against a sleeve. He got a plaster at the police station, anyway, from a young, unsmiling officer who was the only one of them who didn't piss himself laughing at that poster. Day not entirely a loss, then. He heads for the till.

"What are you doing?" Vince demands.

Howard ignores him entirely, counting out his last week's wages with scrupulous care and very deliberately not docking himself for the broken tea service. Ray, one of his bin-mates, he can put Howard up for a few nights until he finds a bedsit. Good bloke, Ray. Never asks too many questions. Never talks much at all, in fact. A nice change.

"So is this your new game, then?" Vince says, a querulous note creeping into his voice. "I ask you what you're doing and you just act like nobody--"

"I'd like to thank you, Vince," Howard replies, slamming the till shut and shoving the money into his pocket, "for taking time out of your busy schedule of doing bugger-all to go down to the station, find out how I am, vouch for my character, my whereabouts…don't know what I'd do without you, really. You're a true friend."

Vince shifts, a bit uncomfortably, from foot to foot. "Didn't even occur to you, did it?" Howard laughs. "Who's surprised? Not me, that's for fucking certain."

"Well…I mean, someone had to run the shop, didn't they." Vince throws a hand out to indicate the Nabootique, as if Howard might next accuse him of fabricating it. "I just told you, Naboo left and--"

"Didn't occur to you for one fucking second."

He'd really like to go to Ray's right now, he can't stand the sight of this place anymore, but if he leaves his record collection it'll be sold for scrap or tossed out a window before the week is done. Just the really irreplaceable albums--the ones he's managed not to step on, anyway. He's in a mood to travel light. He turns and heads for the stairs.

"I didn't do it," Vince says softly.

Howard stops in his tracks, pivoting round very slowly until they're again face to face. Then he starts laughing again.

"Vince?" he notes, with a broad smile. "I'm not the thick one here."

Vince's teeth start grinding together. "I'm telling you the truth, I didn't--"

The look Howard gives him makes him take a step backward.

"Hand them over," says Howard. "Hand them over right now."

"Hand over what?"

"The rest of the posters." Howard takes another step toward him. "The posters you printed up, full of lies, about me, and plastered in tube stations all over the fucking city so you and your little mouth-breathing shithead mates could have a laugh and I could spend seven hours at the police, no help from you, being completely--" There's a tremor starting in his voice and he pauses, heart galloping, until it's steady again. "I know you've got more of them, you don't do anything by halves. Hand them over to me."

"I don't have them, Howard. I swear. I don't know anything about this."

Vince is shaking his head now, all wide-eyed, does he seriously think Howard's going to believe a single word? Even now, he thinks that? Oh, little man, you have no idea of the line you've crossed. "Ten seconds, Vince. Want me to do the counting? I know how that can trip you up--"

"I haven't got any fucking posters!" Vince shouts, hurling his magazine at the countertop; the cappuccino capsizes, hot milk spilling over the counter, but he barely seems to notice. "I know why you think it was me, right, I know why, but it wasn't! Tube stations? Why the fuck would I even be in a tube station, you know I only take taxis or the van--"

"Your paper, Vince, your poster paper that you bought, I remember when you--"

"And I'm the only one in London who's got any? Howard, will you listen to yourself? You can buy that sort of paper anywhere!"

"Fine, then! You didn't do it, Vince, you're as innocent as a newborn lamb, you just had one of your friends print them up, right? One of your fucking Shoreditch club-kids whose high heels I'm not fit to lick, I'm too old, I'm too backward, I'm never good enough and should be stuck on the nearest rubbish tip to rot, they did it! But you, your precious popstar hands are completely fucking clean!" He'd meant to be cold, contained, cuttingly distant but he's yelling hard, heat rushing relentlessly through him, and now it's started he can't stop. "You happy now, all of you? You have yourselves a hell of a joke on the sad old geezer? You put him in his place good and proper? Then it's all worth it, right?"

"Howard--"

"Right?"

"Fucking Christ! I told you, I didn't do it, Howard, I don't have a clue who--"

"Give me those posters right now." Howard holds out his hand, the fingers tensed as if around an invisible blade. "You go upstairs or in the back room or wherever the fuck you've hidden the rest of them and you get them, now. And once I've got them, I want nothing more to do with you. I'm gone. And you'll be the happiest little prince in all of Camden."

Vince doesn't move, doesn't say anything. He just stares at Howard, breathing hard.

"Well?" Howard demands. "Go on, Vince, congratulate yourself! I'm off your back, I'm out of your life. You've finally shit out the deadweight. Find your friends and have another idiots' orgy to celebrate, that's all you're really good for anyway."

"I don't have them." Every word is distinct as a rifle shot. "I didn't make them, I don't know who--"

"Vince? I am so not joking here--"

"Neither am I!"

"You hand them over--"

"Or what?" Vince is inches away now, eyes alight with fury, more than close enough to punch, kick, hurt. "Or what, you come at me? You come at me like you keep saying over and over again but you'd never really do it, would you, you're too scared to do it, you're too fucking scared of someone hitting back--"

"Go and get them now!"

"--so why don't you fucking leave, then? You think I care? You can't come at anyone, you can't trust anyone, you can't ever be happy, you can't do anything but moan and bitch and nag and wring your hands and act like Saint Howard the Great Northern Martyr, you talk about what I'm good for, your whole fucking life is nothing but--"

He's coming at Vince now for real, he's coming at him and he can't stop and can't think and Vince is absolutely right: Howard can't do it, even with his vision a red haze of rage and the blood pounding in his ears Howard can't hit Vince, can't hurt him, it's the single act he could never forgive of himself, so he falls on the next nearest target in his path. Stationery Village goes flying from its table as if caught in the path of a tornado, Safety Pin Cottage and the Sellotape tree stomped underfoot to twisted scraps of plastic and metal, the Blu-Tack garden flung across the room, biros and paper clips and Post-It notes hurled in every direction. And it's not enough, it's not anywhere near enough, Howard's kicking at the table legs to try to reduce them to splinters, sweeping an arm through the merchandise on the adjacent countertop, sending glass ornaments and papier-mache curios and wooden puzzle-boxes and the salvaged pieces of that morning's broken tea service to their deaths against the floor, underfoot, his breath coming out in sounds resembling screams. He's up on stage, again, against his will, and this time there's no music in his head, no moon, no light, no Vince, it's nothing but frustrated anger and ugliness and the need to destroy, all of it, it's what he's good for, his whole entire life--

He's out of breath and he's not sure how he stopped, what stopped him, but now both his hands are bleeding and he can't talk, can't think straight, all he can do is just stand there. Vince is still there, Howard hasn't hit him, hasn't hurt him; Vince stares down at the new-made ruins, and back at Howard, eyes and mouth fallen open. For once in his life, only the once, he looks utterly at a loss for words.

Records, Howard manages to think. He needs his records, his music, then he can go. He stumbles out of the pile of rubbish he's made and storms up the stairs to the flat.

He slams the door to his room so hard his plaque from the mayor of Leeds falls straight off the wall, hits the duvet with a soft thud, and he barely notices as he reaches with unsteady hands for the strongboxes where he keeps all his LPs. He's absolutely got to bring the rest of the Cynthia Hawkins with him, Sun Ra's Live at Praxis, Bitches Brew, some of the Coltrane because 'Trane's the only thing that might calm him down right now, where the hell did he put Survival of the Fittest, S for Survival, no, H for Headhunters, no, he must have cross-indexed it under space-funk, no, acid rock, no, electro dub-bass, he can't find the fucking thing, defeated by his own insane arcane classification system that he himself can't even remember, insane and pointless as Stationery Village, as everything else, all his life--he overturns the bright blue strongbox in a rage, throwing records from their tabulated dividers into a chaotic pile all over the rug.

"It's fucking pathetic!" he shouts to the walls, and kicks the emptied strongbox into a corner.

As he sits there on the floor, arms wrapped round his knees, the door opens and he sees a pair of high-heeled gold boots in the doorway. Vince gazes down at him, then perches on the edge of the unmade bed.

"You've gone wrong," Vince says, his voice infuriatingly calm even as his eyes still spark. "Completely wrong."

"Get out," Howard orders, between clenched teeth.

Vince stays right where he is. He crosses each leg and pulls vigorously first at one boot, then the other, until he's in stocking feet; the split-second of weary relief that flashes across his face as they come off is the only admission Howard's ever seen him make, accidental or not, of the sheer ridiculousness of his urban-spaceman getups. Il faut souffrir pour être beau. He tosses the boots aside.

"Fine, then!" Howard shrugs. "Just settle in. Suit yourself. I'm not even here. Never have been, really, have I?"

He forces himself to his feet and rifles through the cupboard, yanking at random shirts whose hangers clatter to the floor and stuffing them into an old duffle bag. He empties a bureau drawer straight onto the carpet, grabs random handfuls of socks and underwear from the pile, heads into the bathroom for his toothbrush--he hears footsteps behind him and whips around to snarl at Vince, get away from me, you little shit, get the fuck away, but Vince continues to his own room and then marches back, meeting Howard in the hallway with a large, overflowing box in his arms.

"Here," Vince declares, "you wanna throw things everywhere? Here's some more."

Still staring daggers at Howard, he turns the box upside down between them: It's his art box, crammed to the brim with bits of construction paper, colored tinfoil, magazine photos and old band flyers and wallpaper samples and any sparkly glittery piece of magpie tat that catches his eye, all flung helter-skelter at Howard's feet.

"See any of your paper in there?" Vince shouts. "Your bloody poster paper? Go on, look! You won't find it!"

"Get this shit out of my way," Howard snarls, deliberately kicking the big paper candy mountain every which way as he pushes Vince aside. "I'm not bringing any of your rubbish with me--"

"Look for them! Go on! I don't have them, because I didn't--"

"Just how fucking stupid do you think I am?" Howard's yelling again, right in Vince's face, but Vince won't back down or back away and that just makes the burning feeling in his chest spark hotter. "This is your proof? Try again, Vince, God knows where you hid them but you sure as shit don't show me one box out of all the storehouses of worthless junk you own and think I'd ever--"

"I didn't do it!" Vince is scarlet-faced and shaking. "Go on, you want fucking proof, Inspector Criswell? Come and look! Look through everything! The whole storehouse! I don't care!"

Howard stomps back into his room, shoving the toothbrush and a bar of soap into the duffle bag, and Vince is right behind Howard again with a chest of old costume jewelry, armloads of clothing, strongboxes of his own crammed full of ridiculous tchotchkes even the Nabootique couldn't give away. "Here!" Vince throws the stuff on Howard's bed, the floor, everywhere. "Want to look through that? There it is! I'll show you all of it! Go through every bloody thing I own and every inch of--"

"You get this shit and your lying little arse out of my room before I--"

"I didn't!" Vince is screaming now, hoarse with fury. "I didn't! I didn't do it!"

In the heavy, ferocious silence that follows all Howard can hear is Vince's ragged, uneven breaths as he tries to collect himself, standing there in denuded feet and ludicrous gold sack coat, the fingers of both hands white-knuckling a bedpost and shoulders sagging in frustrated, exhausted misery. Looking, in fact, just how Howard felt for all the long, utterly humiliating hours at the police station, desperately protesting his own innocence over and over again with no one but himself to back his story and everyone else eager, even gleeful, to drag him to the gibbet. Kafka retold as farce. For the first time since the day's whole nightmare kicked into high gear, Howard feels his anger start to recede in slow increments, feels the first disquieting stirrings of doubt. Vince hadn't looked the least amused when he saw the poster, it'd been (possibly, perhaps) very genuine shock. And now, all this. Never mind any past pranks, any stabs of manipulative malice, Vince is simply not that good an actor. No one is. Including himself.

"You didn't do it," Howard repeats, half question, half resigned realization.

"No! And I don't know who did, all right? I haven't got a bloody clue!" He sits down on the bed again, kicking a copy of Down Beat viciously out of his way. "Wish I did so I could turn you loose on them instead, so are you gonna believe me or not?"

Howard sinks into a chair, hands gripping the armrests. He's so tired, everything's vibrating. Vince picks at a snag in the duvet.

"I'll talk to Naboo," Vince says. "When he gets back. All right?"

"Oh, that'll do a world of good." Howard starts laughing again, he can't help it. "Will you talk to him like you did the first time I got sacked? Speaking of what a loyal friend you always are, whenever I really need you--"

"For Christ's sake, what d'you want from me?" Vince bats like an angry cat at the cotton tufts oozing from the torn duvet. "I'll talk to him, all right? It's all I can do!"

"Yeah, well, we'll see whether you even remember this conversation ten minutes from now--"

"Why do you hate me?" Vince shouts.

There's a childish, almost tearful quaver in Vince's voice, frank bewilderment in his eyes. Howard massages his throbbing temples, makes a valiant effort to gather up the shreds of his temper.

"I don't hate you," he says, slow and measured, resisting the very strong urge to add you stupid git. "I've never hated you. But the thing is? I don't trust you, either, far as I could throw you. You know any reason why I should, Vince? Any at all?"

Vince stares at Howard. "You're the one who's always running off, you know," he informs Howard, with a faint, but unmistakable air of self-righteousness. "Not me, yeah? You. You're never here, you're always off with Lester Corncrake, jazz-trancing each other into a stupor--"

"Which is completely different to what you do, right?" Howard demands. "You get feted and fucked by half of Dalston nightly but I can't even have one mate without you--"

"--you run away with thingummy, Hugo Quartermaster and say you're gonna stay in Hollywood forever, you go off with the bin men--"

"And why did I do that, Vince? D'you even remember?" Howard's yelling again, hoarse and bone-tired. "Because of you! You walk right out of our band without a by-your-leave, you make my birthday all about you and your little friends, you lie about me to Naboo as I'm standing there begging you to help me--"

"I didn't know what to do!"

"Oh, bullshit you didn't know what to do, you knew exactly what you were doing, Vince! You knew exactly what--you threw me over! For a bloody cape!"

"And you threw me over for a coconut!"

Howard gapes at him, shaking his head in complete confusion. "What?" he finally says.

"Your Coconut Lodge? Your precious Coconut Lodge that only you and Milky Joe are good enough to be in?" Vince glares back, his face in a knot. "We're stranded all by ourselves in the middle of the ocean, yeah, nobody else anywhere about, and the first thing you do is make yourself a little club I'm not good enough to join! The very first thing! 'Oh, Vince, you're not smart enough to talk French with me and Joe, Joe's a man of the world, he's got a BTEC National in existential…pie-making and wank, I don't know what, he's not thick as pigshit like you are'--you'd rather talk to a piece of rotten fruit than to me!"

Howard's headache is back with a pounding vengeance. "I don't believe this. Do I actually need to remind you we were both completely off our heads from rancid coconut water--"

"First thing you did! Didn't even have to think about it!"

"Yeah? Well, what about your little girlfriends?" Howard shakes a finger triumphantly at Vince. "What about them? Your little harem of tropical tarts? 'Oh, this is Ruby, and this is Precious, I'll just keep them to myself, you couldn't possibly have anything to say to them, Howard, you're just a sad pathetic knob who--' "

"What else was I supposed to do? You wouldn't talk to me!" Vince is back on his feet, pacing back and forth amid the mess all over the floor in his agitation. "You want me to just sit there all alone and moan and write sod-awful poetry all day 'cos you think you're too good to talk to me?" He comes to a halt before Howard's chair, his eyes narrowing. "And just face it, Howard, you are a sad pathetic knob around women, it's like watching an anteater try to mate with a box of cream crackers! You're shit with girls! Real ones or coconuts! And--and I don't even think you like it, you just think you have to like it, like you keep needing to prove something, and it's embarrassing and I wish you'd stop!"

Vince runs both hands through his hair, tugging fretfully on random unlucky strands: It's his habitual gesture when his own thoughts have got away from him, as if he's trying to corral them back into place by the reins. Howard sits there with his arms folded, nodding, a little smile playing over his face. "I think I understand now," he assures Vince. "This is all about that Aimee, isn't it? You just can't stand that I had a civilized, adult conversation with someone you brought home, that we actually bonded over--"

"Oh, Christ, I knew you'd think--you didn't bond over anything, Howard, she couldn't even remember your name! Neither could Mrs. Gideon! Or that girl from the party, or the one at the festival kiosk, or--" Vince snorts in disgust, throwing his hands ceilingward. "Right, I give up. Just go ring Lester or Milky Joe and cry about how stupid I am and how I'm ruining your life because I don't wanna talk about geriatrics' music or depressing books about how we're all gonna die in a hole in East Newcastle somewhere with our heads stuck in a mound of shit--"

"I don't want--look, I told you Milky Joe turned out a complete titbox arse, all right? Didn't I? None of that was any fun for me, either!"

Vince 's laughter has an edge veering dangerously close to contempt. "You don't want to have fun, Howard, fun's not intellectual enough, only idiots like me ever want to have fun--"

"We had fun!" Howard is furious again, furious in a way making him itch for the cold, concentrated anger he'd had not an hour earlier; this feeling is too raw, too sharp and hurtful. "We had the band, you ended that, you won't even let me mention it anymore--"

"Yeah, well, you're probably too good for that too, aren't you? Our stupid little songs? It's not even 'real' music, right, not like what you and Lester--"

"Why did you kiss me?" Howard bursts out, before he can stop himself. "What the hell was that? Did you just want to make me feel like shit on the bottom of your fucking platforms? Because you did, Vince! You've paid me back over and over and over again, it's your new little game, you can't get enough of it--"

"Like you even care," Vince replies. "You're leaving, right? Packing your bags? You've had it? You don't give a shit about the sodding band, or me, or--"

"I care!" Howard slams a fist against the record table, ignoring the pain in his burnt, bruised hand. "I don't like it without you, all right? I don't like it now, I didn't like it on the island--"

"You just wanted to get your leg over with Precious--"

"And you'd be the first to gloat about how well that worked out, wouldn't you? I was lonely and you were barely speaking to me and I'd done it to myself, are you happy now? You wouldn't understand, you step outside in the morning and the bloody trees start reciting you sonnets, everyone loves you, everyone falls at your feet, I haven't got any--" He yanks at at a loose thread on the chair arm like he's ripping away a scab. "It's lonely like this, and it's not any fun. Maybe you're having fun, you can't not have fun if you try, but nothing's been right since we got back from the island and apparently that's all my fault, because what isn't my fault, and I had this new music only you would understand about, and I thought…"

He laughs, shaking his head. "Fucking hell, it doesn't matter what I thought, you're finished with all that. And that spoils it and I don't care about the music anymore, and I can't talk to anyone like we used to talk, about anything, and you won't talk to me, you accuse me of hating you when you can barely stand the sight of me, you're always angry at me, and it's lonely, and it makes me so fucking sad I don't know what to do."

He hadn't meant to say any of that, not a word. Too late. He forces himself to stop studying the chair cushions, to look Vince straight in the eye. Vince's chin is tilted high as he stares down at Howard; in his watchful, guarded expression, Howard sees disquieting traces of the detective who questioned him all that afternoon.

"You're always sad," Vince finally says, his voice subdued and drained of anger.

"I am not always sad, and how the hell did this turn into a symposium on my supposed personality flaws? This makes me sad, Vince, all right? This I think is legitimately sad!" He presses his toes against garment pooled on the floor, something too bright and diaphanous to be his. "I thought we made each other happy, for a bit there, I was wrong. Sorry. The jazz Dalek gets it wrong again. His mindtank's all rusted out." He motions toward the window. "Look, see, sun's barely set, so just go find some of your real friends and get happy again. It never takes much for you."

Vince just stands there. His metallic clothes, mussed hair and sagging, fatigued posture make him look like some sort of tropical bird buffeted about the clouds by a fierce storm.

"You want me to leave?" he asks.

"You want to, don't you? You always do." Howard shrugs. "What's there for you here?"

"I don't want to go out," says Vince. "Not tonight."

"Yeah, well, the night's young, isn't it. Night's a mewling puking nappy-shitting baby. You'll change your mind. Always do."

Vince fiddles with the line of his coat, smoothing out the folds and wrinkles left from where he sat on the bed. He glances toward the window and frowns at the deepening dusk, the strings of shop lights garlanding the street.

"You do make me happy, Howard," he ventures.

Howard considers this claim at some length.

"Go on, then," he urges Vince. "Go."

Vince turns and walks out of Howard's room, not stopping to retrieve his boots. Howard hears the creak of the floor planks and rustling of strewn paper as he heads down the hallway, then the door to Vince's room slamming shut; several minutes go by, but it doesn't open again.

Howard just sits there, the last dregs of his energy drained; the room looks like glam dragoons ransacked and slaughtered a village of jazz peasants, but the mere thought of pushing some of the mess off the bed so he can go to sleep, banish this whole unspeakably horrible day into the ether once and for all, makes him twitch with tiredness. Better just to sit. And sit. So tired, and suffocating on a sadness that makes physical movement, psychic initiative, of any sort an overwhelming chore. He remembers this breed of inertia very distinctly from when he was young, from the warm spring day he sat in school hour after hour full of a formless, insistent dread that something was wrong, something was very wrong and nobody, anywhere, would tell him what it was all about or why it was happening; that evening, after school and his music lessons, his father met him silently at the door, holding out the note his mother had left him, and he'd read it through what seemed a hundred times in mere seconds without any of the words making sense, his father just standing there. Watching.

"Well," his father said, when Howard finally looked up. "She's made up her mind then, I suppose. No explaining it."

He shrugged, looking only mildly annoyed at this vagary of fate, and after properly centering a sofa cushion went into the kitchen to start their tea. Even now Howard remembers this moment very distinctly, the soft rumblings of the electric kettle, the smell of sausages and potatoes frying, the faint traffic noises leaking through the gap in the sitting room's window frame. It's the moment when he began to hate his father, and no matter how hard he's tried he's never been able to stop hating him since.

Why do you hate me? Vince, if I did hate you, really truly? You would know. I would have been long, long gone. No note.

Music drifts from behind Vince's bedroom door. Roxy Music, For Your Pleasure, the CD Vince always puts on whenever he's feeling out of sorts (once a decade or so, then); invariably he's cheered up completely by the middle of the second track, so Howard can't remember ever having to sit through all of "Beauty Queen." He waits for the door to open, the song as always cut off in mid-croon, Maybe someday be a star, a fast mover like you-- But this time it plays through, segueing uninterrupted into "Strictly Confidential" and "Editions of You," and shows no signs of stopping as Howard forces himself to get up, close his own door, sift through the hideous mess he's made of his own music to find something, anything. Nina Simone, plucked blind from the wreckage. Good enough.

He drops back into his chair, eyes closing as he listens. See-line woman, she drink coffee, she drink tea, then go home… He's got the volume down low, low enough that even beneath the song's insistent little drumbeat he can still catch traces of Vince's music. He doesn't recognize whatever track's on now, Vince has never before played the CD this far through. Make him love her, then she'll fly away…

He jolts awake with a start; he dropped off right in the middle of the song. Nina's oblivious to his inattention, she's already halfway through "Four Women." In Vince's room "Do the Strand" is playing, again.

Why did you kiss me? Vince never did answer that question.

******

11. Won't you turn that bebop down?
I can't hear my heart beat

He wakes with something hard and sharp pressing into his cheek: a huge brooch covered in pasteboard gems, one of Vince's sacrificial offerings from last night, that winnowed its way into the pillows. Howard raises his head slowly and painfully, wincing as memories of the previous day flood him. Not one drink, and he's still horribly hung over. Birds had started singing outside his window when he finally managed to drop off, what time had--

Oh, shitting fuck, the time. He crawls out of bed and drags himself into the hallway, each step like trudging through treacle. The floor looks like Basque separatists blew up a dressage team of piñatas, though it's still a treat compared to the disaster in his room. Vince's door is open, his own room long since empty; Howard's hardly surprised, but still feels a pang upon seeing it. Stomach's sour. When was the last time he ate, yesterday morning? Still doesn't want anything. Please, for the love of Christ, let yesterday's indie kids have exhausted the Nabootique's possibilities, ordinary customers will be hard enough to endure today all by himself. Perhaps he should just close up for the day; Naboo will be furious to lose the money, but then Naboo's going to sack him anyway so what difference does it make? He heads downstairs.

The lights are on in the shop, though the steel shutters still cover the windows. Howard blinks in surprise to see Vince there, in a faded pink-striped shirt he likes to sleep in and an old pair of black trousers, draping the hated rat skeletons with a sea-green cloth. They stare at each other, measured and cautious.

"Hey," Howard says, casually as he can manage.

"Hey."

Vince looks just as awful as Howard feels: puffy-faced, long blue insomniac shadows beneath his eyes, hair flattened on one side as if he hasn't bothered with even a preliminary backcomb. Howard waits, resignedly, for the usual run of jokes and japes and evasive sunny-skydom to kick into high gear. Nothing. Vince doesn't even smile.

"Thought we'd stay closed today," Vince says, glancing toward the darkened display window. "Clean all this up. Naboo'll shit trombones if he comes back and finds it like this."

Howard nods. "Heard from him?"

"No. Don't know if that's bad or good."

Vince starts plucking random rubbish from the floor; Howard reaches for a broom. The sight of the crushed remains of Stationery Village gives him another pang, and he heads for the opposite corner of the shop. They work in tandem for several wordless minutes, then there's tentative knuckle-rapping on the locked front door.

"Idiots," Vince mutters in irritation, cradling a huge shard of bone china in his palm. "There's a 'Closed' sign right there on the--"

"Hang on," Howard says, spying a tall, furry shape standing behind the would-be customer. "That looks like Bollo."

"What, he forget his key again?"

Howard abandons his dustpan and unlocks the shop door. It is indeed Bollo, looking distinctly sullen and hangdog, and accompanying him is a young police constable, with blond hair cropped close to his scalp and a preternaturally solemn expression: the same one who offered Howard the sticking plaster at the police station, a lifetime ago.

"Sir," the constable asks Howard, with no preliminaries, "is this your animal?"

Howard exchanges a confused glance with Vince. "We're, er, taking care of him, yes," he says. "While his owner's away." Bollo glowers at Howard, which Howard ignores completely.

The constable nods. "And were you aware, sir, that he's been spotted in the Shoreditch tube station putting up posters reading"--here he reaches into his breast pocket and flips open a small notebook--" 'Howard Thomas Jeremiah Moon will stick his tongue up your arsehole for less than you'd pay for a decent Punjabi curry'?"

Vince lets out a strange sort of cough but, when Howard whirls round to glare at him, he's not laughing. Howard turns back to the constable. "No," he says flatly. "I wasn't at all aware of it, as a matter of fact."

"I didn't imagine so." The constable nods, apparently pleased that all is proceeding just as he thought it would. "I'm releasing him back into your custody, but try to keep a bit more of an eye on him? Pets, you know, they get bored, start getting into things, making messes, acting out, they're just like children."

Howard tries, and fails, to picture the sort of toddler who might gleefully plaster the city with false pronouncements of his harlotry. "I'll keep that in mind," he promises the constable.

"You might try getting him one of those exercise balls," the constable suggests. "Or something. If they have them in sizes larger than hamster. I wouldn't know, I've only got houseplants myself."

"Or something," Howard agrees.

"I won't keep you," says the constable. "Have a pleasant day." He levels a stern look at Bollo. "And you, learn to control yourself, you don't want an ASBO filed against you." He taps one temple. "Use your brain."

He strides out the door and back down the pavement. Bollo, who has the bare decency to seem very slightly abashed, just shrugs.

"Bollo was angry about Naboo being arrested," he tells Howard. "And the whole Peter Jackson thing. I needed to lash out."

"You needed to lash out." Howard considers this. "I see. And of course, I was the absolute first target that sprang to mind, is that it?"

"Pretty much," says Bollo, and looks to Vince as if seeking a voice of reason. Vince, now scrubbing dried streaks of cappuccino and Cornetto from the countertop, puts the spray bottle down and gives him a brisk nod.

"Well?" he asks Bollo. "What're you waiting for?" He jerks his chin toward the door. "Go out there and take them down. All of them. And the ones from yesterday, too."

"That take Bollo forever," Bollo whines, for a moment looking, and sounding, exactly like the sullen three-year-old of the constable's imaginings. "I have deejaying at 15Peter20 to get ready for--"

Vince looks wholly unmoved. "Go take them down," he repeats, "or when Naboo gets back I'll tell him who put the bat piss in his Peruvian Youth Juice and you won't even be let out of the flat to spin discs at Tiny Tilly Tulkinghorn's bat mitzvah, yeah? Go on, get going. All of them. I'm gonna check."

Bollo slams a frustrated fist into his palm, giving Howard a look clearly indicating whom he holds responsible for this miscarriage of justice, and stomps back out the door. When he's gone Howard stares at Vince, bracing himself for triumphant crowing, vindicated smugness, righteous wrath at having ever been suspected. Instead Vince just picks up his cleaning rag, poking stubbornly at a recalcitrant coffee stain.

"Thank you," Howard says.

Vince shrugs, nods. After a moment he looks up again.

" 'Jeremiah'?" he asks Howard, incredulously.

"We didn't all name ourselves, you know," Howard points out.

They resume their tasks in slightly more companionable silence; then, a few filled bin-bags later, Vince stretches, yawns, claps on a hat that looks like a giant tartan brioche and strolls out of the shop. Howard offers no complaint, he's just lucky Vince's attention span held out this unnatural length of time--Christ, but that fucking spilled alcopop is painted onto the floor. Howard's still working at it, contemplating trying a chisel, when Vince suddenly returns, laden with enormous quantities of Indian takeaway.

"Lunch break," he tells Howard, though it's just past mid-morning, and starts laying out the food on the newly pristine counter. Howard smells chicken makhani and doesn't protest, looking up again only after he's inhaled half the chicken and several pieces of onion naan. Vince, as always, monopolizes the samosas. As he pulls the lid off the saag paneer, still holding a half-eaten samosa in his other hand, Vince's lips suddenly twitch and he catches Howard's eye, seeming both eager and very oddly nervous. A forkful of sambar poised in midair, Howard looks from Vince to the food and back, nonplussed; then it's like some sort of longstanding mental fog instantly clears away, and he starts nodding to the interior rhythm only Vince can also hear.

"Paneer, paneer," Vince chants. "Paneer, paneer, with chilis--"

"Aloo, aloo, alack, allay, fried-up curds without the whey--"

"Callaloo!" Vince flings out an arm.

"Waterloo!" Howard follows suit.

Together, now, though not quite in sync. "Armies marching in a pepperpot, the broth's too hot, five feet tall and that's all…"

And that's all…all…that is all, actually, because they're too rusty, the beat's slithered away from them like a salamander. "All…he…" Howard shakes his head. "…wrote?"

Vince raises an eyebrow. "Right," he says. "Now, that was a bit shit."

He's smiling, though, for the first time all morning, and when Howard starts to laugh he joins in. How long has it been since they both laughed at something together? Howard can't even remember. The saag paneer vanishes in short order.

"Not much left to do down here," Howard notes, as he gathers up the emptied takeaway containers and Vince eats the last coconut burfi. "Thought I'd start picking up the flat."

Vince suddenly becomes fascinated by his half-gnawed sweet.

"So you are staying, then?" he asks.

"Suppose so." Howard shrugs, vaguely embarrassed. "If Naboo doesn't throw me out."

An injured look flashes across Vince's face. "I told you I'd talk to him, didn't I?"

"I believe you. It's just that it's his decision, isn't it."

No answer. Howard wipes his hands on a napkin, tossing it in a half-filled bin-bag along with the containers, and glances at the spot where Stationery Village used to stand. "Now there's, er, a bit more room in that corner you might think about a display of those little toy robots, they sell like--"

"Yeah. Anyway, before I forget?" Vince rummages behind the counter. "I wanted to give you this."

It takes Howard a few moments to place the object Vince has handed him: It's the tin lunchbox he used to carry to school, back when they first met, its pink paint now peeled off entirely in some spots and a large dent bending in one side. He looks at Vince in puzzlement. "So what's this for?"

"Remember that jazz record you had?" Vince says. "The one I ate."

"Howlin' Jimmy Jefferson, yes." He looks down at the box again. "Is this a riddle?"

"You said it was well expensive, right? And one of a kind?" Vince runs fingers through the flattened clump of hair over his ear, trying to rake it upright. "I haven't got however much you paid for it, so, this is something I've got that there's just one of." He rests an elbow on the counter. "Bryan found me with it, in the forest. It had nappies and things in it, and a note. Don't know what the note said. It got lost."

Howard contemplates this information. "I don't understand, Vince."

"I just told you, he found--"

"No, I understand that part. I mean, what's the point of giving me this?" He rubs at the rust caking a hinge. "So I can take a possession of yours that's clearly irreplaceable, that has priceless sentimental value to you and, what? Destroy it in turn as some kind of twisted payback?"

Vince calmly bites away a hangnail, and doesn't reply.

"I can't take this," Howard says, holding it out to him. "It's not right."

"I'm not taking it back," says Vince.

"Vince, look, when I was thrashing about in"--he just escapes blurting out what passes for your brain--"your head, the Spirit of Jazz told me that record was…look, it's a long story but you might have accidentally done me a favor, all right? So just, don't worry about it. What's done is done. Take this back. It's yours."

Vince shakes his head. There's a mulish stubbornness in his eyes that's only too familiar, as it emerges every time Howard suggests it's his turn at the washing-up. "I'm not taking it."

"Fine, then." Howard places it back on the counter and heads for the stairs. "Suit yourself. But I'm not either."

That evening, after he's tackled the hallway ticker tape parade, and addressed the cyclone of his bedroom floor, and pointedly ignored the sinkful of Vince's dirty dishes, he finds the lunchbox has mysteriously materialized atop his record table. So how long will this little game last? He'll put it in Vince's pile of H&M unsorteds tomorrow; by the time Vince finally unearths it from beneath that whole mountain of tat, the seas will have all gang dry. Vince's door is closed again, music coming through in waves: Gary Numan. He must be feeling more chipper. Howard commandeers the bathroom, scrubbing away dust and fatigue and soaking in the bath with a copy of Ada or Ardor for company, until he hears impatient rattlings at the door.

"How long are you staying in there?" Vince demands. "You're already wrinkly enough as is!"

"You know the latch is broken," Howard calls back, studiously ignoring this predictable jibe.

Vince walks in, wearing an old saffron dressing gown and bearing a blender full of the cucumber-avocado muck he likes to massage into his pores, and gives Howard an irritable look.

"Some of us also have to wash our hair," he says, "and mine's a bit more of a job than--"

"There's the sink," Howard notes, not looking up from his book. "Who's stopping you?"

With all manner of outraged mutterings Vince sets down his cucumber cream, sorts through the lotions and unguents and sprays and fixatives clustered on every inch of available space, starts arranging them in the necessary order of use: This little ritual itself can consume up to forty minutes, Howard's timed it, before the real heavy lifting begins. Tonight, though, not more than half a chapter goes by before Vince gives the Strawberry Balsamic Hold-All Mousse jar a reassuring pat and angles his head to read the cover of Howard's book.

"Nabokov," he notes. "Isn't that the bloke who had the girlfriend who was, like, twelve, and they went around America shagging in all those different motels--"

"That was a character in one of his books, Vince," Howard explains patiently. They've been through this before, many times. "Not him. That was a story. Like your Charlie books."

"Charlie's real, though," Vince points out, wrapping a protective towel around his hair. "You can't compare it."

Howard sighs. "I really don't want to have this argument again, Vince. The point is, even if Charlie is real, I'll humor you, those stories you made up about him are--"

"I didn't make up anything," Vince insists, looking mulish again as he spreads cucumber on his cheekbones. "You saw Charlie, don't pretend you didn't, and everything I write is--"

"Fine, Vince, fine." He doesn't want to get into an extended wrangle about this now that he's finally managed to unwind, particularly since Charlie still gives him the fucking creeps. "Everything you write is the soul of verisimilitude, but Nabokov, tragically, he had a much duller and grottier life and had to make it all up. And as that was another book entirely it hardly matters anyway, so now if you don't mind, I'd like to keep reading this one."

About fifteen seconds of peace and quiet ensue. "So what's this one about, then?" Vince asks.

"Incest. On a distant planet."

"Christ!" Vince laughs. "You and your Polish perverts. How come they haven't arrested him yet?"

"Don't make me whip out the Joyce Carol Oates on you, Vince. Two pages' exposure to her moves, they'll find you under a currant bush eating your own fingers."

Vince resumes the far more interesting task of painting himself pale green. Howard leans his head back against the rolled-up towel at the nape of his neck, feeling no longer knackered but just pleasantly sleepy.

"Howard?"

"Hmm?"

"So d'you remember back when you said we could maybe, you know, pull some shapes, or, whatever? Play a bit with that new music you said you had?"

Howard does, quite well in fact, though that particular non-conversation now seems an eternity past. "I remember," he says, carefully.

"So do you still want to?"

Howard raises his head. Vince keeps his eyes on the mirror, patting cucumber into his chin.

"Do you want to?" Howard asks.

Vince carefully tucks a stray lock of hair into the towel. "Said I did, didn't I?"

"No, you didn't," Howard points out. "You asked me if I wanted to. So do you, or not."

Vince turns his head side to side, pursing his lips like a painter inspecting a wall's base coat. "Yeah," he says, "I do." He dips his fingers into the cucumber once more. "We could, you know, maybe, if you wanted, do another band together, or something, again? If you wanted to."

Howard considers this. "Could we."

"Yeah."

Howard nods. "Until when, exactly?" he asks. "Until we're not on the cover of NME four minutes after our first gig, or you decide I need punishing again without telling me what the hell I've done, or it gets too embarrassing standing up there alongside me with your Camden mates pointing and laughing, or you get a call from some electro-synth ravers whose front man just fell on some barbecue tongs, or you swallow a tapeworm and can fit into those drainpipes better than Sammy the Crab after all, or until you just plain get bored like you always do and tell me to piss off and play with the other sad fat wrinkly doddering geriatrics?"

He'd meant it as a joke, really--all that would just be Vince being Vince, now wouldn't it?--but instead the words come flying out in a harsh, angry rush. Vince brushes aside a few idle strands of hair still sticking to his forehead, and turns from the mirror. Covered in green from temples to throat his face takes on a strange, witchy cast, the unnatural color throwing his flattened beak-nose and knobby chin and sharp jawline into exaggerated relief; the wide pale eyes only aggravate the effect, like the flat glassy stare of a taxidermied bird. Then he furrows his brow, pink skin cracking through the green mask, and his eyes look human again, and nearly as exhausted as they did this morning.

"If you want to," Vince says, "I want us to have a band again. It's not any fun, with other people. It starts out as a lot more fun, for a bit, but then it just…" He shrugs, looking slightly annoyed. "It's always someone else's costumes, yeah? Like those drainpipes? It's never mine, and they never have the right look. And everything's all…it's like anybody could be there, singing the same songs, and people act like they see you, up there, but they don't really see you. Your shapes might as well be just plain squares."

He grins, suddenly. "And when you get bored and annoy the guitarist, for something to do, he doesn't go all mental on you and start throwing grapefruits at the strings--"

"And since when have I ever done that?" Howard demands.

"You could do. You get loopy onstage, Howard, I've seen you, you lose your shit, it's a nightmare. A freakmare. A jazz-giraffe freakmare in smelly sandals, with French horns for earrings." Vince tightens the toweling around his hair. "But at least it's not boring."

"I would never throw grapefruits." Howard settles the towel more securely against his neck. "Or peanut shells, or malt loaf. Someone might have an allergy."

Vince stares at him for a moment, then cracks more cucumbery fissures laughing. "You had me going," he admonishes Howard.

"I'm perfectly serious, sir. Some girl with gluten intolerance gets a bit of malt loaf smack in the eye? The liability could wipe us out. They'd go after us, we'd lose everything. Right down to the clothes on our backs. We'd end up panhandling in Marrakech, wearing thobes made of clingfilm--"

"We would?" Vince looks instantly alarmed. "I mean, it wouldn't matter nearly as much for you, losing those weird shirts you wear, but--"

"I'm joking, Vince."

"Oh." Vince looks instantly relieved. "Thank God. You scared me."

He loosens the tops on several of his cream and lotion jars: They have to breathe a bit first, he's solemnly explained to Howard, before they can be fully effective. One of the lids sticks and he bends over it, frowning, until it pulls free.

"So d'you want to have a band again, then?" he says, as he's working on the lid. "You and me?"

Howard thinks it over, really thinks it over. Vince cradles the mousse jar in his hands, looking uncertain.

"Yeah," he tells Vince. "I do."

Vince brushes specks of dust from the jar lid with his fingertips. "So what's our new sound gonna be?" he asks, after a few moments.

"I might need more than two minutes to figure that out, Vince."

Vince nods agreeably--such things are beyond both his ken and his interest--and starts rinsing his face in the sink. Howard leans his head back again and closes his eyes. The next thing he knows, he's startled awake by someone nudging his shoulder.

"You'll drop your book," Vince points out, his face denuded again but for a streak of cold cream.

Howard takes the towel and dressing gown held out to him and yields the bath. Vince will doubtless be submerged for the better part of the night, this time hopefully not with his old transistor perched precariously on the tub's edge; even catching the odd elusive Neuer Weller Rundfunk signal, Howard finally got him to admit after the last near-miss, wasn't worth getting fried to death starkers. Back in his room he puts on I Sing the Body Electric, crawls into bed and is deep in sleep by the middle of "Crystal." His dreams, formless shapeless things, are invaded by Josef Zawinul's synthesizers, blades of grass and crushed pavement stones whispering to each other, the mutterings of clouds. Fleetingly, his sleeping self imagines footsteps approaching, a door opening and then closing again after a long pause, but it's doubtless just the drum riffs from the album's final tracks.

They keep the shop closed the next day as well. Howard wanders briefly into town, then retires to his room with his old guitar; Vince is God knows where but it doesn't feel like a slight now, he's just having his aimless fun, it's what he does. (Though Howard does suppress a flash of irritation at finding Vince's pink tin box sitting in the front hall cupboard, his own Birkenstocks balanced neatly on top.) Howard runs through his chord progressions and then, vaguely dissatisfied with the results, puts the guitar back in a corner and picks up a dilapidated old notebook. He fills pages with cross-outs and scribbles and doodled pictures, breaks for meals slightly longer than strictly necessary (a good curried chicken salad deserves one's undivided attention), erases the mercifully few phone messages responding to Bollo's adverts, switches round his wall posters like he's been meaning to do for ages, matches up all his spare socks, tackles the dust tumbleweeds beneath his bed, daydreams at some length about Catherine Deneuve, rearranges the front room murti collection by divinity names and sizes, pokes about Naboo's disappointingly depleted potions cabinets and, well after sunset, is finally settling down in earnest to work on his and Vince's new music when there's a knock at his bedroom door.

"This is brilliant, Howard," Vince declares, beaming, as he walks in not awaiting an invitation. "Thanks."

Howard just shrugs, but nonetheless he's pleased: Vince is wearing the new scarf Howard bought him that morning, vivid blue silk with gold embroidery, fashioned from a worn-out sari. He saw it in the window of one of Naboo's competitors down the street, raised his eyebrows at the inflated price, then bought it anyway (he's rather inclined, these past few days, to give money to Naboo's competitors), placing it in the pink lunchbox with one end trailing outside and putting the box on Vince's pillow. Vince has it looped round his throat like a bright soft necklace; it's incongruous paired with the old pink-striped T-shirt, shantung pajama bottoms and bare feet, but then such consistent inconsistencies are Vince's stock in trade. As Howard scratches another line into his notebook Vince casually drops down next to him, both men sitting on the floor with their backs resting against the side of the bed.

"Your hair looks good," Howard comments. It does, in fact; whatever Vince slathered on it last night--Howard couldn't begin to guess, though there's a lingering smell in the bathroom that puts him in mind of bananas foster--had its intended effect. Vince nods matter-of-factly, patting the thick strands with maternal solicitude.

"What's that?" Vince asks, examining the notebook. "You trying to write another novel?"

"I don't have to try to write a novel, sir, I have done. More than one." (This is entirely true, as it happens, and the completed manuscripts being very slightly plagiarized from Herman Hesse, in certain inconsequential spots, and confined to other notebooks stacked up in his closet is completely immaterial.) "I know my oeuvre, you don't know my oeuvre, petit homme."

Vince just shakes his head in bemusement. "Tu et ton oeuvre," he says, with pointedly perfect pronunciation. (Sometimes Howard's inclined to believe his uncle really is a French duke, it would explain a good deal.) He cranes his head toward the page. "All right, so what are you doing? Is that for our band? You writing our new songs?"

"I'm working out our new sound, that comes before writing any new songs. It's all part of the artistic process, Vince."

Vince nods solemnly. "I just mean, last time you never actually got around to the bit where you wrote any new songs, so--"

"I was creating in the moment," Howard points out, not a little irritably. "I was riding the wave, I was grabbing the juju beast by the scruff of the neck and shaking out all the shapes. Our sound's different this time, it's primal, it's chthonic, it's a literal force of nature, it's got--"

"It's not jazz, is it?" Vince interrupts him, with a look of distaste. "Don't try sneaking in any jazz, you know that Mingering Mike or whoever it is always gives me hives."

"That's Charlie Mingus and of course it's not gonna be jazz, I don't need your throat swelling shut on me onstage. It's…did I ever tell you what happened, that night you came home and found me up on the roof?"

As Howard relates the story Vince's eyes, brighter and bluer from the scarf, widen with unfeigned interest. "I thought you just went up there to have a sulk and got dizzy, you're rubbish with heights. So that's gonna be our sound? That's gonna take a lot of synthesizers."

"It's the inspiration for our sound." Howard rubs the back of his neck, aching a bit from being bent over the notebook. "I'm trying to sort of write out bits and pieces of what I heard, that whole natural universal conversational…thing, the music of the spheres. And the rocks. And the trees and the sun and the--do you hear animals talking, I mean, without trying to, or d'you have to sort of will yourself to listen in?"

Vince looks genuinely taken aback by the question. "Usually just…happens. I don't know, I don't think about it." He looks thoughtful. "Sometimes they're a bit sad, the animals. Strays and things. Don't like that."

"Everyone's a bit sad sometimes." Howard jots down a few more random phrases, things he vaguely remembers the grass stems saying in his dreams. "Well, maybe not you, but--"

"I think things should be happy all the time. So that no one's ever sad."

Howard glances at him. "You can't exactly dictate that, now can you?"

"Why can't I?"

There's nothing smug or defiant in his voice, it's a sincere question. A frustrated one, even. Howard, having no idea what to say in response, turns back to his notebook.

"Can I help?" Vince says presently.

"I thought you weren't interested in all this, you're the style man--"

"You're writing down stuff you hear the universe say, right?" Vince taps a finger on the notebook's spine. "To make music of it? Well, I hear stuff like that. All the time. I just don't try to pin it down and squash it all flat on the page, that ruins it."

The old argument, Howard thinks, but as always he can hardly fault Vince's flailing instincts for the importance of improvisation. "Fine," he says obligingly, setting the notebook down. "You wanna help, then start listening in. Right now. We'll find that cosmic wavelength, and take it from there."

"All right." Vince folds his hands comfortably behind his head. "You're on. Mind you don't flood your brain-engines again like last time, that was a bit--"

"Understood."

They sit side by side in total silence. Outside the bedroom window the vague hum of city noise is muted and inconsequential, they've pushed it aside like a drape to try and access the deeper sounds of the night sky, the planets, the branches of trees. Howard shifts his foot and in the heavy quiet between them, the soft rustle of his trouser leg is deafening. He'd have expected Vince to get restless long before this, start pleading crushing boredom, but instead he's perfectly still with an ear cocked to the stratosphere and his eyes gone somewhere far away. Howard closes his own eyes; yes, he can indeed hear them tonight, the supposedly inaccessible voices of everything living, all their discordant melodies and harmonies. His muscles tense as he exerts all his concentration, trying to coax the elusive sounds just a bit closer, a bit clearer, a bit louder--

"Ow!"

Howard jumps, startled from his reverie. Vince is looking at him reprovingly. "Not so loud," he admonishes Howard, fingers pressed to one ear. "It's like getting a blast from an old speaker. Dial it back."

"Sorry." Howard lets the sounds get a bit softer, a bit farther away. Listen, he reminds himself; don't keep trying to translate it into musical notes, to squash it all into B-flats and A-sharps. Just listen. (And what does he sound like, to the rest of the universe? This simple question has never even occurred to him before.) Vince is nodding in time to a melody only he can hear and Howard feels quite left out for a moment, then suddenly he picks it up too. It's like jazz-trancing, except…not. Better. Stranger. Just as overwhelming as that night on the roof, but not nearly so frightening. He'll never be able to reduce any of this to an actual tune, but it's still beautiful. He could float away on it, drift forever, a small boat spilling from the narrow river of his own life into an endless, formless sea--

Mind you don't flood your brain-engines again. The warning flashes suddenly through his consciousness and he forces himself back to the surface, surprised to find himself sweating and breathing more rapidly as if he's just run a race. At the same moment Vince blinks and shakes his head and looks round the room, as though he's just returning to it after years away. Then he grins.

"That was cool," he says. "So we just get up on stage and do that?"

"Some extremely badly transcribed version of it, yes. I suppose." Howard runs a hand through his hair, stretches his cramped legs out. "Though there's no way to ever make it sound right, not really, so I guess I shouldn't--"

"Yeah, there is." Vince looks quite puzzled at Howard's doubts. "You could. You're a good musician, Howard."

Howard just stares at him, this offhand statement echoing in his ears. He is as certain as he's ever been of anything that Vince is entirely sincere.

"Don't know about that, Vince," he finally says. He's not feeling any sort of genius tonight, nor any time lately that he can recall.

"You are," Vince insists. "You can do all sorts of things, play music, write novels, do poetry, act, read heavy books, explore the Arctic, do shop accounts and all that, it's just you're a crap salesman and awful with other people and there are blind blokes with better dress sense so that's where I come in." He folds his arms, looking chuffed at this sensible division of labor. "I'm a prodigy at the clothes rack, I'm Vince Noir, style tsar. Stella McCartney's seamstresses sing songs about me, to inspire them."

"And you can talk to animals," Howard notes.

"And I can talk to animals. But sometimes they talk to you, too." He gives Howard a sly look. "I mean, you and Jack Cooper--"

"Right, I know for a fact who started those particular rumors and it wasn't Joey Moose, yeah? You're not half as clever as you think, Beau Broomstick." He glares sharp, pointy daggers at Vince, who just smirks. Then Howard reluctantly starts to laugh. "Hardly matters now, though. Jack was already reading those separatist pamphlets the flamingos were passing about, he wasn't gonna compromise his newfound principles by staying chummy with a human. Pity, I really thought we were friends."

"Yeah, well." Vince shrugs. "All my friends are dead shallow, too--"

"He wasn't being shallow, though, that's the thing. He actually thought about it all quite a bit. And that gave him second thoughts."

Vince contemplates this conundrum. "Well, that's why you shouldn't sit around thinking too much," he tells Howard. "It ruins everything."

"I'm afraid some of us just aren't satisfied with a mindless magpie existence, Vince." Howard rubs at his neck some more, feeling another twinge. "Some of us are above the ordinary run of person, we need the nourishment of philosophy, ideology, studied meditation on the mysteries and paradoxes of--"

"You don't listen to that jazz nonsense because it's philosophical," Vince interrupts scornfully. "You listen 'cos it makes you happy--I don't know how it can, but it does. You don't like tabbouleh because it meditates with you."

"Well, there was that one time," Howard feels compelled to remind him.

"Oh, right. Forgot. That was a crazy day."

"One of the craziest."

Vince rubs a shoulder blade against the duvet. "You like a lot of things without having to think about them. Don't pretend you don't 'cos you think it makes you sound smarter."

"And you," Howard retorts triumphantly, "think about things more than you let on. 'Why does happiness elude us?' That one's stymied the great men of history, Vince. It's ancient angst. A time-honored tooth-gnash."

The notion that he shares in the heritage of a lot of dead, depressed philosophers clearly puts Vince out of sorts. He fiddles with the edge of his scarf, fingertips tracing a line of gold thread.

"Fine, then," he mutters. "I got sounding like you for a minute. It was an accident." He turns toward Howard. "But the important stuff? I mean, really important? I don't need to sit around wondering what it all really means like some great berk, I already know. It's, like, all instinct. It's just I forget sometimes, 'cos I get distracted. But then I remember again." This realization clearly pleases him. "There, see? I get second thoughts too, just like your precious red foxes."

Is Vince actually bragging he has the brain-pan of a canid? Well, it wouldn't be the first time. God forbid Howard credit him with any capacity for introspection. "Yes, Vince," he dutifully agrees. "You get second thoughts too."

Vince nods, obviously now quite satisfied that he's won the argument. "And the best part about that is, once you've had your second thoughts, you can tell the brainy bits to get stuffed and just go on and do what you meant to do all along." He reaches out and rests his hands on Howard's shoulders. "Before you forget again."

Fingers slide up Howard's neck, rubbing at the little ache like he'd done, then Vince's lips are against his and he's dragged beneath the surface once more, drowning. Vince is pressing his mouth and his body against Howard's and hanging on like he's drowning too but he's still somehow yielding, quiescent, so that it's Howard whose lips push Vince's wide apart, it's Howard who pulls Vince up against his chest and nearly into his lap, it's Howard who circles his arms tightly around Vince and reaches beneath the faded pink T-shirt, stroking every part of him he can reach. Vince's eyes have fallen closed and his breathing is swift and there's not a single calculating thing in how he lets Howard touch him, how he silently urges him on. Howard's hands are wandering lower now and Vince shifts his body in eager, accommodating haste, his interlaced fingers resting behind Howard's neck; Howard feels his own heart thudding, feels the tightening, agitated heat of his own skin, and he's got all the words he didn't have that night on the roof crowding inside his throat, he's ready, so ready to beg for more, again, everything, I don't care, Vince--

--but then Vince's hand moves to Howard's collarbone and skims it lightly, again, again, the gentlest sweep of his palm, just like, oh hell, just like during that kiss in the kitchen, oh bloody hell, it's all just another game, isn't it, take anything Howard's been stupid enough to let slip he likes and use it against him, absolutely anything, oh you really do think and plot and plan so much more than you let on, Vince, you're such a selfish scheming little--

When he shoves Vince away Vince tumbles back on his arse and lets out a squawk of indignant surprise--something that under other circumstances might actually have made Howard laugh, but as he struggles to his feet he feels only mortified fury, pulling him under head-first. "No," he manages, stalking across the room, the bed a barrier between them. "Not again, you don't get to do this to me again--"

"Do what again?" Looking utterly flummoxed, Vince pulls himself upright, crawling onto the bed and seating himself against the pillows. "Why'd you go and do that? We were--"

"So what's this then, third time for the prize? You needed to make sure, yet again, that you can do this and then just walk off, leave me in the dust and go giggling with your friends about--"

Vince is staring at him with the wide, astonished eyes of a very confused cat. "My friends? What? Howard, are you high? You're the one who's walking off--"

"Why do you always have to spoil things?" Howard shouts, knowing full well how unhinged he must sound and unable to stop himself. "It was just starting to be all right again, and then you do this! The first two times weren't enough? I get it, Vince, it's a nonstop source of hilarity how I fall all over my big Northern feet for anyone who can remember my name much less show me a fleeting bit of affection, can the joke please be over now? I don't like it! In fact I'm so bloody sick of it I could retch up a polystyrene horse!"

Is that comprehension, of a sort, finally dawning on Vince's face? Well, hallelujah, it's an early fucking Christmas miracle. Vince sits up straighter against the pillows, assuming a studiedly patient expression that makes Howard scowl.

"I'm not joking about, Howard," he says calmly. "I'm really not."

"And I'm meant to believe that why, exactly?"

Howard's supposed to have the upper hand in this particular argument, he's got Vince's tricks and games down to a T and can throw them right back in the little man's face, but of course he's the one standing here steaming with rumpled shirttails and hair gone wild where he shoved frustrated fingers through it, while Vince just sits there cool and unruffled as you please. Nothing ever changes. Vince makes a steeple of his fingers, looking down at it for a moment until he grows bored with the construction and lets its roof collapse flat.

"Howard," he says, in the same maddeningly measured tone, still meditating upon his fingers, "it was never a joke. It's just you always get things the wrong way round--"

"It's always my fault, isn't it? Always! No matter what happens, it--"

"Just let me finish." Vince gazes up at him, a sudden hard little edge to his voice. "Then you can go back to feeling sorry for yourself--first off, I was keeping Naboo's idiot shaman with the mad wife and the big scimitar from turning me into a little head on a skateboard like your mate Lester, wasn't I? Big wide head full of self-pity you've got, you don't even remember that much? That's hardly a joke--"

"And you still threw it back in my face afterwards." Howard folds his arms triumphantly, nodding in satisfaction though the memory, itself, still stings. "Or don't you remember that?"

"Me! You bounded off like a spastic gazelle soon as you thought that girl was interested, or don't you remember that? That's just what I meant, Howard, the minute you think anyone anywhere's got a thing for you, you forget what you were doing and go chasing after them--you're babbling about how I gave you the gift of love, or something, you look like you're about to try to rape me in the storm drain, then she shows up and bang, I'm yesterday's red pleather trousers?" Vince rests his hands behind his head, looking no longer annoyed but simply faintly reproving. "I don't mean to hurt your feelings, Howard, but the thing about you is? Sometimes you can be a bit flighty and immature."

Howard considers some of the more colorful responses he could make to this statement, and decides against them in the interests of détente. "I panicked," he says, truthfully, not looking at Vince as he does. "All right? She showed up, it looked like a good out. Then it was too late."

Vince is silent for a moment, digesting this. "You could have said."

There's a kindly tone to this reply that makes Howard let out a laugh. "I could have? Not then, I don't bloody think."

Silence, again. "No," Vince agrees. "Maybe not."

He doesn't look pleased with himself, Vince doesn't. That surprises Howard, throws him a bit off his guard. "What about in the kitchen, then?" he says. "If that wasn't a joke either, then what the hell was it?"

Vince shrugs. "I was angry at you and couldn't figure out why. Not until the other night. So I decided to do something cruel."

There's nothing apologetic in the words--Vince is a pragmatic soul in his own immature, flighty way, what's the point of closing the barn gates now the horse is halfway to Surrey?--but the straightforward admission is still something of a balm. "So what's this, then?" Howard demands. "Still angry? Still 'need to lash out,' do you?"

"I told you what this was." Vince has relaxed against the pillows, half sitting and half lying down, obviously believing the heavy conversational lifting to be at an end. "I always meant to but I never got around to it, so I wanted to do it now before I forgot again--I was going to yesterday, when you were in the bath, but you'd have fallen asleep on me. Plus my hair looked like complete shit." Another shrug. "So? Here I am."

He gives Howard a slow, insinuating smile, the wordless equivalent of C'mere then, there's a good lad. And then actually pats the empty spot next to him on the bed.

Howard just stands there, hoping he looks dignified and indifferent in the face of this invitation. He hopes that, because his anger at this utterly unprecedented behavior is dissolving beneath a surge of desire that makes it hard to breathe.

"Vince?" he says, when he can trust his voice to remain steady. "I'm flattered. But I really want you to leave now."

"No, you don't," says Vince, still the soul of calm.

Howard grits his teeth. Inform me from on high what I want? Imply Howard Moon doesn't know his own damned mind one minute to the next? How dare you. "Vince, I'm very glad we've settled our last few lingering differences, honestly, and I'm happy to have you contribute to the musical direction of the band, but it's very late and I'm tired and I think we'd both live to seriously regret this--so if you don't mind, I really want you to get up, leave the room and forget this whole conversation ever happened."

Vince contemplates this request, his eyes steady on Howard's face. His expression is serene and congenial and utterly intractable.

"Howard?" he says. "No, you don't."

He can throw Vince out, has the height and weight advantage to propel him bodily out of the room. He can do it right now. Except that means touching him again, and if he does that then he will never let Vince leave.

The horrible embarrassment, worse even than what he felt in the police station and he hadn't imagined that was possible, paralyzes him where he stands and he stares, shoulders hunched, past Vince toward the window. Fine, then. You win. You always have, you always will. And you know it. Now please, please, please just go.

Vince curls his legs up beneath him, looking quite comfortable just where he is. His gaze, studying Howard, isn't entirely unsympathetic. "This isn't easy for me either, you know," he tells him.

"Meaning what." Howard's voice is subdued, a deflated balloon.

Vince laughs quietly, shaking his head. "You like jazz. Your favorite color is brown. You watch ten-hour black-and-white films about Lutheran manatees with wooden flippers committing suicide, for fun. You spend days at a time arranging paper clips and collecting horrible vinyl by manky old geezers and you couldn't sell Bill Burroughs a rent boy and you dance between the beat and you wear socks with sandals and I think you still don't know who Vivienne Westwood is, I mean, Howard, what in the name of Christ am I doing here?"

"That's an excellent question, sir!" Howard resists the overwhelming urge to seize his own forearm in the mother of all Chinese burns. "Now you've kindly catalogued all my crimes and misdemeanors? Now I've told you about eighteen times running I want you gone? Why exactly are you still here, Vince? I'd love to hear it!"

Vince doesn't say anything, just fixes his eyes on Howard and looks him very slowly and deliberately up and down, down and up. Then gives him another insinuating little smile.

Howard shakes his head. "Right, now I really know you're joking."

Vince's fingers come together again, steeple, flat roof, flat roof, steeple. "I'm not, actually."

"Mm-hm." Howard gives him a jaundiced look. "So after, what, decades of not breathing a word about it, you're suddenly overtaken by mad lust for 'two hosepipes propping up a beanbag'?"

Vince sighs in exasperation. "You never can figure out when anyone's taking the piss, can you, Howard? It's threatening to become pathetic."

"Let me repeat myself, decades of--"

"Why don't you ever listen to me? I told you, I kept meaning to say something, it just slipped my mind. I've got a rich and varied life, it's like a big shimmery Karibbean Kola rainbow shining down everywhere I go, there's all these distractions and so stuff just gets lost in the shuffle. It's nothing personal." Vince lies back against the pillows, clearly enjoying the artful way this movement fans out his hair. "Besides, for a bit there I thought you really did just like girls. And you always go on and on about how you don't like people touching you--"

"Well, I don't, all right?"

Vince doesn't even dignify that with an answer.

"You're taking the piss right now," Howard declares, feeling increasingly like a murder suspect confronted with a fingerprint-smeared dagger. "Don't try and hide it, you are. Before you turn round and have a little cackle with your whole Shoreditch coven about the pathetic gullible jazz giraffe who's so hard up for a snog and a kind word that you've got yourself a handy charity case sitting right down the hall, whenever you don't fancy going out for a real--"

Howard's voice becomes more and more agitated, and he forces himself into silence. No cola rainbow, all that, just the rusty trickle from a worn-out tap. Vince studies his fingernails for a moment and Howard feels a sudden strange nostalgia for the cheap, bright shades of red, pink, sparkly blue and silver and burgundy that Vince would paint on in the schoolyard, then gnaw to shreds mere hours later. Always biting at hangnails too, back then his cuticles looked like they'd gone through a pencil sharpener. Bit them until they bled. Howard would scold him about it. Right now, he himself feels quite like he's been gnawed down to raw remnants of skin.

"You really don't understand anything at all," Vince says, without rancor.

Howard laughs again, a bitter edge to his voice. "Doesn't look that way, no."

"My friends wouldn't know anything about crimping," Vince continues on, with a somewhat stern expression, "except you spilled it to that Harold thingummy without asking me first. But I think they already forgot anyway." This thought clearly cheers him. "They don't know I can talk to animals. They don't know about my Charlie books. They don't know about the time we caught Bainbridge in the baboon enclosure with that…costume on, at least I hope it was a costume, and blackmailed him into a proper raise. They don't know about the Plan Pony or the Satsuma Wars or when I rescued Abanindra the Civet from those poachers or that sunset we saw on Xooberon or that day over in Stoke Bamford or us fighting about the Coconut Lodge or listening to the trees talk or who gave me this." He holds up the scarf's trailing edge. "That's all private. I thought you knew that. Why, do you go on and on about me to Lester, or--"

"Of course not," Howard answers, a bit snappish; shouldn't the answer to that be patently obvious? "None of that's his business."

"Yeah, well, exactly."

Howard shuffles his feet. He hadn't quite anticipated this ending with them both on exactly the same wavelength. It's an awkward feeling. "And what about Leroy?" he asks.

"What about him?"

"Well…er…all right, then."

"Yeah, all right."

"Okay."

"Good."

They both glare at each other for a moment. Then Vince's expression softens.

"Come over here, Howard," he says quietly. "Please."

Two things, the two only, all his life, that ever let him forget himself. The music. And. Neither of them can ever be adequately explained to anyone else. And someone, it seems, in fact the particular someone, understands that. Instinctively. And perhaps always did. Life surprises you, like that.

Howard walks over, sits down on the edge of the bed. Vince waits, patiently, until Howard turns to face him.

"I really don't know what I'm doing," Howard says, before he can stop himself. "You'll laugh at me."

"I laugh at you all the time anyway," Vince observes. "So this won't be any different."

"I'm always gonna be a tall Northern jazz freak with no dress sense."

Vince doesn't smile, but there's a flash of humor in his eyes. "There's an easy way round that last bit."

Howard suddenly has the uncomfortable, dutiful feeling of being at a doctor's: Here, just put on a paper robe so we can all see your giant fish-belly-white arse, and wait on this icy metal table for six hours. Marvelous timing. He turns away again, willing the sensation to subside.

Vince's hands are on his shoulders once more; they rest there for a moment, the warmth of his palms seeping through the cloth of Howard's shirt, then start massaging the muscles with slow, measured persistence. He's slapped Vince away from doing this more times than he can remember, faintly repulsed at the thought of someone else's fingertips burrowing into his flesh like deer ticks, but his back really is clenched up with tension and the pressure of Vince's hands is oddly compelling, like the feeling when your tongue can't resist worrying a sore tooth. The springs creak faintly as Vince kneels behind him, putting his weight into it, and as Vince moves his hands to Howard's cricked neck a tight, angry knot just beneath his skin suddenly loosens, eases, and he sighs in relief. Why exactly had he refused this for so long? He can smell that faint not-quite bananas foster scent coming off Vince's hair, feel Vince now literally breathing down his neck but it doesn't bother him, that's the odd part, the more Vince touches him the less anything seems to disturb him at all.

Vince settles his chin atop Howard's head and his hands slide down Howard's chest, deftly undoing shirt buttons as they travel; his lips find Howard's ear and he licks at the whorl, seizes it daintily between his teeth. Bites down very gently, then a bit harder. And again. Howard shivers and Vince puts his mouth directly to Howard's ear with a ticklish, echoing smack, kisses the soft spot behind it, the juncture of his jaw and throat; lick my neck, Howard wants to ask, remembering his dream of the keepers' lounge, do it, but he can't bring himself to say the words, Vince will laugh, he warned Howard right out he'd laugh. And then, without his having to ask, Vince goes and does it. And again. And Howard makes a sound dangerously close to a moan.

He pulls Vince's hands away from his chest, clasping them briefly in his own, then does an awkward crawl over Vince's body to sit beside him on the pillows. His fingers are trembling as he slowly unwraps the blue silk scarf from Vince's throat, stroking the skin beneath it in turn; Vince catches the scarf as Howard makes a motion to discard it, then swiftly reaches up and winds it several times round Howard's eyes. His vision reduced to a surge of bright blue, Howard feels his head instinctively tilt back, hears his own hard, fast intake of breath, and then suddenly he can see again and Vince has the scarf back in his fist, smiling, his eyes hungry and full of barely restrained glee.

"I'll remember that," he promises Howard, as he tosses the scarf aside.

He digs his nails eagerly into Howard's chest, then rubs soothingly at the scratches he's left, his pinching fingertips like pecking little birds. As Howard wrestles with Vince's T-shirt, Vince draws back just long enough to pull it off himself; then he leans forward, hands now idle in his lap, pressing his closed lips to Howard's with a strange, distant formality. He wants me to do it, Howard thinks, just like I did before, and the terror that he's wrong about that is swept away by the warmth of Vince's breath and the softness of the kiss and the strands of his hair brushing Howard's cheek; he grabs at Vince, a bear-hug of an embrace, forcing Vince's mouth open once more beneath his own. Vince's whole body shudders, long and sustained (and he did that, Howard realizes wildly, he, Howard Moon, did that to him, to Vince--this isn't happening--), and Vince grabs Howard back just as tightly, his fingers splayed against Howard's shoulder blades, their mouths locked together until they both gasp for breath.

They can't let go of each other now, can't bother with trivialities like pausing for air. They're sprawled diagonally on the bed, still kissing long and hard, wrestling to get their bodies pressed as close together as they can, Vince struggling to divest Howard of his clothes, Howard kicking at the bunched-up heap of the duvet until it's halfway on the floor. Vince gets the upper hand and rolls on top of him, leaving a trail of almost hurtfully rough kisses against Howard's collarbone, chest, belly. When he cups Howard's balls in his fingers and leans down to take him in his mouth, Howard feels his hips arch up of their own accord, like he's a marionette cruelly yanked at the strings; he cries out and then louder, again, as Vince's tongue wraps around his cock, tugging wetly at him and eliciting sensations that make him actually shove a fist between his teeth to hold back a babbling tide of Vince, I never, I never felt like, I didn't, that, again, yes, you have to keep doing that keep doing that keep--

Vince gives the shaft a last long, steady lick, gently mouths the head, then pulls abruptly away. "Enough of that," he announces, his voice ragged, pushing the hair back from his face. "You'll come too soon--"

"No, I won't!" Half angry, half pleading, bloody hell, he's Howard Moon, he's a man's man, he's stalwart under fire just let him prove it please Christ please. "I'm not--"

"Yeah, you will. I can tell." Vince shakes his head. "I can't believe it, you're such a little bitch."

And he's laughing as he says it, just like he'd promised he would, but his laughter's a strangely weak, uneven sound and his whole face is open with delight and need and something that looks so very much like he's thinking I did that to you, I did that, this isn't happening, that Howard pulls Vince back up against his body, finds his mouth again. He tastes what must be traces of himself, there on Vince's tongue, and it's arousing and a bit revolting and makes him go suddenly tense and cold thinking how much Vince's royal Shoreditch court would jeer to see him like this, begging to have his cock sucked, if anyone's the wife it's definitely you, Moon, could you be more of a pathetic queer?--fuck you, Shoreditch, fuck you, Hollsworth, fuck you, Naboo, fuck every one of you. You're out there shitfaced drunk spewing your meager little brains into the gutters, you're back in Leeds or Dubrovnik or bloody Xooberon, I can't hear you. Fuck you, I like being on my back. There's someone else who likes it too.

Vince rubs vigorously against him, his penis still sheathed in the thin silk pajama bottoms. Howard moans at the simultaneous hardness and softness against his own cock, cupping his hands tight around Vince's arse, thrusting upward in response; then he pushes Vince away just enough to get a hand around him through the cloth, watching Vince's eyes drop half-closed and his mouth open as he works himself against Howard's palm, letting out short panting breaths at every stroke. Howard slips his hand inside the waistband, fingertips lighter and more teasing, then taking firmer hold, and Vince sighs, raises himself up so Howard can push the pajama bottoms out of the way--

"Shit," Vince says abruptly, and rolls right off him.

"But--" Howard's left lying there naked as Vince crawls off the bed, almost tripping over his own shantung hems. "What did I--"

"Just, stay there, all right? Don't be running off like Chinedu the Chewy-Toothed Goat--"

Vince shakes his leg free of the pajamas and practically sprints down the hallway. Howard hears a clatter of items in Vince's room being thrown every which way, accompanied by muffled cursing; then he comes bounding back in, slams the door behind him and tosses something on the pillow.

"Sorry," he says, settling back next to Howard with the old ingratiating smile and nodding toward the tube of lubricant now sitting between them. "Forgot."

The tube is quite large and a bit grimy where dust has stuck to the sticky traces leaking from the rim, and something about the way it's at least half-empty and painstakingly rolled up from the flattened bottom, the way Vince never even thinks to do with the toothpaste, makes Howard feel a sudden, don't call it jealousy, he's a man of the world whatever anyone else says, profound and quite justified aesthetic irritation. "Right," he says curtly, "I'm not using that."

"Howard, it's gonna hurt like a motherbitch if you don't."

"I mean, we don't need it, all right? Because I'm not doing anything…invasive. Yeah?" Howard stares stubbornly back at Vince as the latter's smile fades in astonishment. "I'm just not."

"Since when?" Vince demands. "You're on heat for it two minutes ago and now--"

"This isn't the bloody mare paddock and I am not on heat, for Christ's sake, can you stop talking like an idiot for three seconds?" Howard grabs the tube out of Vince's immediate reach, suddenly profoundly annoyed with himself that he's still hard. "I appreciate the gesture, but--"

"I don't believe it." Vince has the indignant, thwarted look of a child unjustly denied an ice lolly. "Is this how you pretend you're still saving yourself for Mrs. Gideon?"

" 'Avocado mango orange blossom?' " Howard reads from the side of the tube in disbelief. "You're joking, right? It's one thing for your scalp to smell like a giant fruit salad, but I'm not having half the produce aisle shoved up my arse--"

"So who even said it'd be up your arse?" Vince snatches the tube back and throws it on the nightstand. "Sorry they don't make one that smells like stale tobacco and old sweatsocks, or whatever you think's manly enough..." Looking a little less annoyed, he starts to laugh. "…or you could just admit the whole idea of a proper bumming scares you a bit."

"I am not scared," Howard declares from between his teeth.

"So what if you are? I was."

Howard blinks at the straightforward ease of this admission. Vince has stopped laughing; he's now running a hand lightly over Howard's flanks as if, yes, he's trying to soothe a shying horse. Who was this that made Vince scared? When? Did he, whoever he was, help christen that tube of glorified salad cream? (Or is he the reason Vince knows just how much it can hurt?) Of course Vince won't answer if he asks, just smile in that enigmatic way Howard's so often itched to slap straight off his face. It's not Vince he wants to slap, though, this time.

"Was it Leroy, then?" Howard asks, sharply, before he can stop himself.

"What?" Vince appears completely confused.

"The man." Howard looks away, mumbling in embarrassment. "You know. The scaredy-man. Was it him?"

"Leroy?" Vince looks gobsmacked at the very idea. "Christ, no, it wasn't Leroy, why would--I don't even remember his name, it's been ages. He had this violet satin coat, I should've nicked it when I had the chance. Why d'you keep banging on about Leroy, anyway?" Vince leans back over him, arms curled and poised above his own head like a human proscenium arch, crossed wrists resting on the pillow. "You're not actually jealous, then."

Howard doesn't answer. "Are you jealous?" Vince persists, more quietly. "Are you?"

If Vince finds the idea another great joke, another lump of sugar to feed the ravening ego-beast, at least he's hiding it well. Still arched above Howard, arms encircling the air overhead, he dips his pelvis downward in an easy, graceful movement to slide against Howard's groin. And again. Slowly, steadily, until Howard's breathing grows shallower and quicker and he's responding once more in kind. Vince lowers an arm, takes Howard's hand and somewhat clumsily places it back on his own hip; Howard gets the hint, fingertips running idly over the long, raised burn scar at the hipbone before he slides both his hands back to Vince's arse. Every last bit of Vince's skin feels good and the little man's always had a lovely little arse, always thought that, Howard can finally admit it to himself, he's always, since they were young, wanted to--

His nails sink in and he's wriggling against Vince without any restraint, trying somehow to pull himself bodily into the heat and smooth sweep of Vince's flesh and Vince is pushing back, pressing down on Howard closely as he can, mutual gasps and murmurs of pleasure muffled in their conjoined mouths. With a visible effort Vince breaks off his own kisses and raises his head, his face flushed and every muscle tensed.

"Turn round," he whispers urgently, actually doing a little circular motion with his fingers as if the concept requires demonstration.

"Vince, I told you already, I'm not--"

"I know, I heard you, no armies invading Fortress Moon, don't get all worked up again. Just, turn around. Please, Howard. Just for a minute."

Fine, whatever, if you insist--Howard rolls onto his stomach, arms clutching a pillow, feeling Vince land rapid, scattershot kisses on his shoulder blades, spine, the small of his back, the inside of a thigh. His tongue makes inroads to the juncture of Howard's leg and torso, making Howard squirm restlessly where he lies, and when Vince cautiously spreads Howard's knees just a bit apart Howard doesn't stop him. Vince's mouth slides downward, finding the back of Howard's knee, worrying the thin delicate skin with the lightest of little bites. Howard mumbles appreciatively, starts to shiver when Vince finds the sole of his foot and licks along the arch, draws in and tastes the toes in turn. The tip of his tongue finds the spots where the toes meet the ball of the foot, concentrates much effort there, and Howard's appreciation becomes steadily louder and stronger.

"That all right?" Vince asks, still holding Howard's foot in his hands. Not teasing, not this time. He really wants to know.

Howard manages a nod. His head's spinning. "Yeahhh…"

There's an almost thoughtful-seeming pause, and Vince gives the foot an absent kiss, sets it down. Howard hears rustling sounds as Vince yanks a twisted bedsheet aside, then he jumps and laughs as Vince gives a sudden, ferocious nip to one buttock. That hurt, you pillock. Vince doesn't laugh back. His hands caress Howard's arse, fingers roaming along the crease at the back of each thigh. Feels nice. Better than nice. Vince can do that for as long as he likes, really, he can--what is--he--

A fingertip's traveled between his buttocks, stroking there, pointedly making not the least attempt to slip inside him, but Howard barely registers its presence before it's replaced by Vince's mouth. Fingers dig talon-like into Howard's arse as Vince holds him wide apart and licks feverishly at his arsehole, the surrounding skin, dipping down to the perineum, and sensation rushes straight to Howard's cock, down his legs, up his chest, through his whole body, burning away self-consciousness and squeamishness and hesitancy and every other crippling hindrance that's ever defined him, imprisoned him. He's not even here. Someone else is groaning and calling Vince's name and clutching the slats of the headboard so hard his hand hurts, it's not his thighs and chest seized up hot and tight or his cock that's throbbing and aching for more and he's not shouting that incoherent stuff about wheelbarrows, well all right, only he would think of that at a time like this so it must be him, he must be the one furiously humping at the mattress like an animal on heat and arching back to try and somehow open himself up even wider, Vince has stopped licking him now and is biting at his arse like he really means it, like he could eat Howard alive, Howard wouldn't stop him, he wants that too, he wants everything--

"Don't stop." Howard's out of breath, his voice high and wrung out like a dishrag. "Please--"

"Roll over and I'll suck you off." Vince sounds like a stranger now too, his voice thick and heavy and ragged with its own unspoken pleas. He puts hands to Howard's hipbones, as if to turn him forcibly on his back. His fingers are shaking.

"No." Howard shakes his head vehemently. "I want you to--"

"Go on then, roll back over, I'll--"

"Please!"

He doesn't even know just what he's asking for. If he makes himself try and put it into words, even think those words through to himself, the old mortification will return and finish him off, ruin everything. He's ruining everything now. Vince is so quiet. He's scotched it, Howard has, because he couldn't just fucking shut up for two minutes. Then the mattress dips and the springs creak again and Vince is on his knees stretched over Howard's body, reaching for something; he retrieves it and curls onto his side, toes pressed lightly against Howard's shin, and runs a hand along Howard's arse, the back of his thigh.

"Remember you asked me about Lopamudra?" he says to Howard, the soul of seeming calm even as his hitched breaths and restless fingers betray his excitement. "The time she chased me down to the river, when I was small?"

Howard's eyes draw closed. "Yes." Anything. Yes.

"Even for a hyena, she was mental. A raving fur-covered loony." Vince snaps open the tube of lubricant, smears it thickly over his fingers until they have a pale orange sheen and the barest hint of tropical florals starts permeating the air. "So anyway, the whole day the sun was scorchingly brutal, it was like a hot wet cloth draped over your face smothering you. Bryan was on a spiritual pilgrimage to Uganda and Poulomi, the she-wolf, I don't know where she was, I just slept until sunset. I only woke up because Vijay and Vardhan, the jungle cats, they were having another of their fights--"

"Never did anything but fight," Howard puts in. They've always been his secret favorites, the feuding brother-cats. He likes their aggro.

"Never," Vince agrees. He strokes at the cleft of Howard's arse, slowly, very slowly, easing his fingers past it. "I woke up and it was still stifling. The sky was streaked all different colors, like a lot of Ribena flavors all spilled together. I couldn't stop thinking of a nice cool, refreshing drink of coconut milk, so I--raise up a bit, Howard. Yeah, like that. That's good."

He's running his fingertips back and forth, teasing at Howard's arsehole. "That's good," he repeats, more softly.

"Ribena," Howard manages, raising his arse up that much higher, moving without forethought to the rhythm of Vince's hand. "Then--"

"--so I'd been sleeping in this big banyan tree, yeah, so I climbed down, all I could think about was the milk and I was gonna find Poulomi, have her get me some--and I jump down in the grass and there's Lopamudra, sitting there, like she's been waiting for me. And she rises up from where she's crouched."

He pushes fingers inside Howard, not far, up to the first knuckle. Howard tenses, just for a moment, then along with the stretching and burning that makes him wince there's a new, sudden warmth in his arse and his balls, it's all too foreign, too intimate, too much but at the same time deeply comforting, don't laugh just now, please don't laugh at me. Vince pushes a bit farther, and a shudder runs down the length of Howard's back.

"Keep going," he whispers to Vince.

"And I just stared at her. And she just stared at me. And then she opened her ugly little spittle-covered hyena jaws, and…"

And Vince hasn't tried to imitate the sound, in fact he's gone dead quiet, but Howard still hears it so loudly in his head he nearly jumps: the shrill, congested, deranged laughter of a hyena ready to crunch prey down to the bones. His eyes fly open. Vince is looking straight at him and nodding, with a knowing, distant look like he still hears that same laughter in dreams.

"…and she leapt." Vince works his way farther in, slow, precise, relentless. "And I ran."

He moves his wet, slippery fingers back and forth, soothing and steady, and Howard closes his eyes again. His balls feel tight and heavy, he's so hard it hurts. "And then…"

"And then, well…"

"Don't stop. More. Please."

"It was like running in a steam bath. Still so hot. Lopamudra wasn't joking. She was right on my heels, I could smell her scavenger breath wafting over me. We ran past the banyans." He gives his fingers a sudden, carefully judged shove. Howard gasps and moans. "Beyond a big clump of bamboos." The fingers splay very cautiously, stretching him out again, drawing back, doing it some more. "Right into--"

Howard grinds hard against the pressing, crowding fingers, head thrown back, mouth open and panting, and Vince lets out a sudden shaky, breathless sound. "--right into the, the darkest underbelly of the forest and suddenly I saw Haraprasad and Dhurjati, the tiger cubs. We'd played together, when they were newborn."

"Yes."

"I ran to them--"

"Yes--"

"--and they thought it was a great game, they whooped and roared and drove me right back toward Lopamudra. For fun. I thought they were my friends." His free hand's clenched down on Howard's shoulder now, his teeth biting and nipping at Howard's arms and ears and neck. "I ran the other direction, out of the forest, toward the river--"

"Mm-uhhh--"

"Pouring sweat, heart was bursting--out of my--get up, raise up on your knees, I need--"

"Yes, anything, please, just--"

"--couldn't breathe--"

Vince is draped over Howard's back, fingers pushed in as far as he can, and he curls his fingertips and touches spots that make Howard shout, squeeze down as if he could keep Vince there inside him forever, and Vince is grabbing at him, kissing, biting, scratching like he can't let go. "The river," Howard moans, bereft, as Vince's fingers slide away and out of him, "the riv--oh, God--"

"--and the grasslands were, were all laid out, spread out wide, between the forest and the river." Vince is fumbling with the lubricant again, spilling some on the sheets; he takes Howard's cock in his palm, wrapping his fingers tight, moves his hand slowly as he can as he positions himself between Howard's knees. "I thought, I'll die before--I ever--reach--"

His other hand is light and soft against Howard's chest and belly, calm the shying horse, but shyness is a farce now because Howard's been spread open physically, psychically, he has no shame left and as Vince enters him it's so easy, no one ever told Howard it was as easy and natural as this, he could kill them for making him think it wasn't. Vince's skin is as sweat-slicked as Howard's own and he's making moaning noises as he thrusts like he's wanted this for just as long, forever, and Howard's leaking onto the fingers circling his cock and squeezing down hard as he can on Vince's cock deep inside him, making Vince moan louder, come on, Vince, come on now, you've got to get to the river, you can't stop now--we're both--so close--

"I fell," Vince tells him, voice now an almost keening chant, "fell face-first like an idiot in the grass--so tired--no breath--"

"No oh no--"

"--and Kaliprasanna--long-billed vulture--grabbed me--picked me up from--oh fuck, Howard, you're--he flew me away, and--"

"Like that, Vince, please, just like--I can't--yes--please--"

"--flying away--Lopamudra, how she--God!--how she--screamed--"

And Howard's thrashing and letting out sobbing sounds and he can't think, talk, beg, move of his own volition anymore, he can't do anything but let sensation tear through him and he comes, all over Vince's hand, with a long, choked groan. Vince lasts seconds longer, fucking him so hard it hurts no matter any preparations but Howard doesn't care anymore: He's not himself just now, he's Vince's to use, to use up, all he needs do is crouch here quietly like an animal in the grass as Vince thrusts inside him and grunts with pleasure and shakes from head to foot. Vince digs his nails into Howard's arms so roughly Howard moans in pain, then the sharp tearing grip eases and Vince makes a noise that starts like an apology but suddenly becomes a high, swiftly stifled cry; he collapses atop Howard's body, still holding on hard, not letting go.

They lie there for several minutes, still half-conjoined, breath and sensibility slowly returning, then Vince eases himself back by Howard's side. Howard can't speak, can't think what to say, so he takes Vince's face in his hands and kisses his forehead, his temples, gnaws at Vince's ear just as Vince had done to him, and Vince laughs at this last gesture and bats him away; his batting hand strokes Howard's hair, slows and stops, and they rest silently, just barely entwined.

There's so much more to Vince's story, Howard knows this because Vince has hinted it, tantalizingly, more than once: There's the strange misadventures he and Kaliprasanna had after his rescue, and Lopamudra's psychotic schemes for revenge, and the feuding jungle cats and those tiger cubs and another great bird are somehow involved but Vince has never detailed exactly how and there's so much more to it, Howard knows this for a fact and he wants to hear all of it, wants more, wants everything. Wants to hear it again, and again. As many times as Vince can manage.

But not just now. For once, he thinks, as Vince presses his forehead to the hollow of Howard's shoulder and Howard curls an arm tighter round his back, Vince has the right of it: He's had his fill, Howard has. He's clearly not the only one.

"Vince," he says, when he trusts his voice to be his own again. "I…"

But Vince is already asleep. That's all right. Soon enough he is as well.

******

12. Years from the land of the Bird
And I'm still feeling the spirit
Five thousand light years from Birdland,
But I know people can hear it

He wakes up blinking into gray rainy half-sunlight from beyond the curtain gap, a sheet pulled haphazardly over his body. Alone. What is this sudden--and right now profoundly annoying--new penchant Vince has for rising at bin-men hours? If he's trying to prove a point of some sort, Howard's not particularly interested to hear it. Christ, he's hard. Doesn't usually wake up like this, but then, he's never before woken up from…

Where the hell is Vince right now, anyway? Of all times? And why is he, Howard, still smiling in spite of himself? The whole world's gone topsy-turvy. Before he can let himself start agonizing over how it might look to some fictitious audience he closes his eyes and starts stroking his own cock, replaying random scenes from the previous night all out of order and tweaking them, doing judicious cutting and re-editing until he gets it just as he likes: That's it, Vince, you little slag, my little bitch, lick my arse, you love it, that's--get down on your knees and suck me off, that's right, on your face now, get your little arse out--get your little--uhhh--

Oh, God, perfect. So much better than the old fantasy about Mrs. Gideon and the rhino enclosure. As he lies there, sleepy again, listening to his breathing slow to normal and idly watching the light go from pale gray to dark and back once more, he turns his head and finally notices the sheet of pink notepaper resting on the opposite pillow.

Nabue called, hes coming back today. One of us shud be in the shop or hell go mentul, I tryed waking you to do it but you wud sleep thru the doomsday. I dont think the tribiunull went well. When he rang I herd his solisister yelling he shud kiss her arse for geting him such a good plee bargin. He shouted back she was a worthless cow. It was pretty funy actualy. Anyway Im going downstares now. I wud stay out of Nabues way he just keeps throwing strops.

Vince

P.S. I think he forgot about fireing you.

P.P.S. Last nite was a bit gud.

He can hear Vince's righteous outrage at having to do actual work coming straight off the page, as if he's standing there, and this makes Howard curl his lip ruefully: It is, in fact, genuinely reassuring to know some things will never change. He drags himself reluctantly out of bed and into the shower. He's glad Vince is just downstairs, glad of his proximity--dare he dream this might presage an actual proper division of shop labor (though let's not let our fantasies get too out of control)--but he really could have stayed up here, they could in fact have seen each other's faces of a morning, just this once. It's hardly as though Naboo's going to get here now.

So it was a bit good then, wasn't it. It wasn't just him, not knowing any better, thinking that. He's grateful, in a way he's never been before, that Vince has no talent whatsoever for the ego-boosting lie.

The kitchen table's covered with the splatters of Vince's workingman's breakfast: an open tin of banana Nesquik, a half-drunk glass of something strawberry-colored and slopping with crushed ice, an empty Space Crunch bag. As Howard's rooting in the refrigerator for eggs he hears footsteps coming up the stairs, the door opening; he turns to see Naboo standing there disheveled, completely bareheaded and with an expression suggesting Saint Cecilia facing the boiling water bath.

"Where's Bollo?" he demands of Howard, with no preliminaries.

Down a pit of pythons for all Howard cares, but he just shrugs. "He had deejaying last night, he must've gone out afterwards. Where's your turban?"

"I don't want to talk about it." Naboo throws himself into a chair, slumping dejectedly over the tabletop. "Glad one of you bothers minding the shop, for all the good it does me."

Howard ignores this little jibe, occupying himself with tearing holes in the middle of some bread slices. "Hardly matters, though," Naboo mutters. "I'm ruined. Completely ruined."

Howard heats up a pan, throws in a lump of butter, watches carefully to make sure it doesn't brown.

"Did you hear me?" As always Naboo's voice never seems to waver from the same flat, nasal monotone--it must be the native Xooberon accent, or something--but a very careful, trained ear might yet pick up a fleeting hint of pique. "Or do you just not give a toss?"

"I thought you said you didn't want to talk about it."

"Look at this." Naboo holds out his arm, now almost quivering with indignation. "Just look."

Dutifully, Howard looks: Naboo's wearing a bracelet Howard's never seen on him before, a thick piece of dull gold metal with what appears to be a huge, clumsily cut emerald in the center. Bit gaudy, Howard thinks, but then he's no expert on baubles and trinkets, he's got deeper concerns in life. "Souvenir?" he inquires.

" 'Souvenir,' he says--you know what this is? It's a monitoring bracelet. I can't take it off." He rattles his wrist. "The ballbags took away my shaman powers for a year. I can't cast spells, can't make potions, can't do anything, if I try it this thing blasts me into an alternative dimension where I get chased about by huge radioactive American Fuzzy Lop rabbits--"

"A whole year," muses Howard, putting the bread in the pan to sizzle. "That's too bad."

"It's more than too bad, if I can't sell any potions for a year what d'you think's gonna become of the shop? You think that place actually turns a profit by itself? You know what my legal fees are for this whole travesty? I'm done, I'm finished. I might as well pack it in right now."

Howard breaks eggs into the centers of the frying bread slices. "So can't you complain to the Shamans' Council, or--"

"Who d'you think ratted me out in the first place?" Naboo cries, his tone suggesting Howard's a rare idiot not to have figured this out himself. "I swear I'm gonna turn that little shit Kirk inside out by the nostrils next time I see him. He'll be a rotting throw rug on the lino. You watch me."

Howard pours tea, slides the eggs-in-baskets onto a plate. "Or you could take a chance on outrunning the rabbits," he suggests.

Naboo actually looks thoughtful for a moment. As Howard makes short work of his breakfast he feels Naboo watching him, as if he's trying to suss out something amiss, then he spots the direction of Naboo's gaze: He's eyeing the fingernail marks Vince left on Howard's upper arms, long and deep and not fully covered by Howard's shirtsleeves. Howard pours a second cuppa, studiously ignoring him. Halfway through his tea, he realizes Naboo's still staring at him.

"What?" he demands, setting the mug down.

Naboo opens his mouth to speak, then seems to think better of it. "Nothing," he shrugs, digging for the glassine bag of Venusian rock extract he keeps hidden in the sugar bowl.

Downstairs, Vince is behind the counter yawning over a copy of Trendiad. "Good morning," Howard says, his voice sounding oddly tentative in his own ears.

Vince nods, just like always. "All right."

Is there some sort of etiquette for this kind of situation Howard doesn't know? No matter, a workday's a workday and he's got work to do. As he walks over to check that the Open/Closed sign's been properly turned around, he catches Vince watching him from the corner of his eye.

"What?"

Vince just grins. "Nothing," he says, and keeps leafing through his magazine.

Still grinning. Jungle cat that swallowed the canary that ate downtown Tokyo, that's what Vince looks like right now. Well, Howard supposes that much was predictable (though really, when you look clearheadedly at the situation he's the one who really took matters in hand last night, Vince can imagine it the other way all he likes but it's Howard who's the man of action, the one who knows what he wants--). Irritating, but predictable. He goes about his business, polishing up Naboo's horrid gilded rat skeleton collection and rearranging the toy robot display that's now occupying Stationery Village's old corner.

"You talk to Naboo?" he asks Vince.

"Yeah, he's all worked up. Going on and on, 'Ohhhh, I'm ruined, ohhhhh, what devastation's been wreaked on my mighty empire--' " Howard can't help but laugh at this, and Vince responds in kind. "Like I said, I'd stay well away from him."

Howard nods in agreement, starts placing the robots in a neat little line according to height. Vince abandons his magazine and walks over, watching this solemn task, then after a moment casually rests his hand on Howard's arse.

"Don't touch me," Howard says automatically.

Vince shakes his head, looking amused, and makes a great show of removing his hand. Then he slips it beneath Howard's shirt, rubbing at the small of his back.

"I said--"

"So anyway," Vince interrupts him, cheerful as you please, "I thought we could have lunch upstairs today." He hooks his fingers around the waistband of Howard's trousers, rests his cheek against Howard's shoulder. "If you want."

Howard contemplates the sudden tightening in his chest and the pit of his stomach, and chooses to interpret it as impatience. "Vince," he says, focusing on spacing each toy a precise two inches from its brethren, "we've got to look after the shop. You said that yourself."

"We close for lunch every day." Vince's curled fingers reach past trousers and pants, brush against bare skin; his lips linger just behind Howard's ear. Howard's concentration falters for a moment. "You know how sometimes," Vince continues, "you get takeaway or whatever and you think you were only a bit peckish until you start to eat, and then it turns out you'd been starving for it?" His exploring hand ventures lower. "Ever have that happen?"

"Can't say I have," Howard manages, as Vince's tongue traces the side of his neck. "Always try my best to eat a balanced--" Blast, he's gone and knocked over a whole robot grouping. "Someone could walk in any minute, stop that."

Vince nips at his earlobe. "So is that no?"

"Didn't you say--" It's becoming a bit difficult to form words with Vince licking at his ear like that. With some effort, Howard shakes him off and starts righting the capsized toys. "--to stay out of Naboo's way? He's up there sulking right now--"

"And he told me he's planning to spend a good week off his tits on Venusian dust--you could fire a cannon right by his ear, once he's snorted a line of that stuff, and he still wouldn't come back down to Earth." Vince puts a palm to Howard's back, tracing slow broad circles. "He won't hear a thing."

That shit-eating grin makes a sudden comeback. "Lucky for you."

Howard feels immediately snappish. "And just what's that supposed to mean?"

The grin grows wider. "It's just you're a bit…operatic, is all." He massages the back of Howard's neck. "I like it."

Operatic. Lovely. He hadn't even considered what he might have sounded like, he'd been far too preoccupied with the revelation of how it felt being willingly on his back, on his face, for someone else, for the first time in his life. No, not "someone," in fact a very particular--really, if you consider all the available evidence, you'll find it was actually himself, and not Vince, who'd taken charge of the whole--Christ, he'd been very nearly yelling. Like an utter knob. No wonder Vince warned him he'd laugh.

"You're going all red," Vince observes, in seeming surprise. There's predictable triumph in his voice, but also the most fleeting hint of affection catching Howard off his guard.

"It's warm in here," he mutters. "That's all."

Vince scritches lightly at Howard's neck, sends fingers trailing down his shoulder blade, spine, back to his arse. "There's something you could do for me," he proposes, "where you'd have to be a bit quiet to do it right, yeah? If you're so worried about Naboo overhearing."

His hand finds the inside of Howard's thigh, venturing teasingly close to other spots. "Vince," Howard attempts again, as Vince returns to kissing his neck, "this is a shop. Shops are public places. Any…" Higher, God move your hand higher what am I thinking remove it from my person please. "…minute now, someone could very easily walk in and see--"

"Why are you shivering?" Vince asks, the soul of innocence. "I mean, if it's so warm in here."

"Vince, just stop it."

"You're not afraid of sucking me off?" Vince is facing him now, pressed against his body, nails tracing the scratches he left on Howard's arms. "You won't choke or anything. It's nice. I liked doing it to you."

"Look, d'you ever hear a word I say? This is not about bloody bridal terrors, it's--"

"I liked it a lot." Vince slides his arms around him. "I'll do it again. Until you come, this time." He rubs himself against Howard, eliciting a gasp. "I could do it now."

"Vince, there is a big fucking window right there, facing the street--"

Vince rubs a bit harder, expression arch but eyes soft with arousal. "You're right, I wasn't thinking. You should do it to me instead, so I can look after any customers while you--"

"Stop it. Now."

Vince obligingly shifts his body the barest half-inch away from Howard's, then kisses him hard on the mouth. Howard pulls Vince back against him and they stumble against the table in a tangle of arms and legs, sending toy robots careening to the floor. Vince sinks his teeth into Howard's lower lip, his tongue running soothingly along where he's bitten down, and makes a muffled, happy sound as Howard thrusts involuntarily against him, his hands wandering to Vince's arse and gripping tight. Their mouths part for each other and Vince's palms are warm and eager against Howard's back, beneath his shirt, and though Howard absentmindedly registers the shop door's bell-ring and approaching footsteps his brain doesn't recall how he should react to this for several critical seconds; when he and Vince, similarly disoriented, do finally disentangle themselves they're being stared at by a trio of makeup-plastered, aggressively Topshopped teenage girls, a strangely avid collective look in their eyes.

Howard straightens his shirt and smoothes his hair, valiantly attempting to appear professional and dignified, but of course they're already clustered around Vince, whose color is high and breath audibly faster and the fronts of whose scarlet sateen drainpipes don't warrant close examination in polite company (though one of the girls, a tiny rail-thin thing with mauve-streaked hair and a ferrety little face, isn't at all bothering to hide her glances). As Vince chats and gesticulates and radiates instant sunshine, casually leading them on a walkabout past the most expensive tchotchkes the place has to offer, one girl disengages herself from the tour group: spotty and bespectacled, less gaudily dressed than the other two, with a perpetually glum expression and the slouched posture of one trapped in a too tall, too buxom frame too young. She picks up one of the robots now lying on the floor--the smallest one, thumb-sized and shocking pink--and approaches Howard with it sitting protectively in her palm.

"This one for sale, then?" she asks, so softly he's got to lean forward to hear her.

"They all are," he assures her, hastily attempting to recreate the display. "Each one winds up in the back, see the little key there, and--"

"Oh, my God, Anjali," Mauve Ferret shouts at her from across the shop, "have you seen this?" She's holding up one of Naboo's rat skeletons, cradling it like a proud new mother. "It's brilliant."

Anjali shudders a bit and turns back to Howard. "How much for the tiny one?"

As she's wavering over the shamelessly inflated price the third girl, who resembles a sturdy ginger-haired quetzal, is exclaiming with Mauve Ferret over the shiny-dipped rats. "Look, Keira, there's a whole set!" she says triumphantly, unearthing the rest from beneath the cloth Vince had covering them. "Even Top Goth doesn't have anything like this--"

"There's no price tag," Keira notes, straightening her back and furrowing her ferrety brow like she's preparing to haggle Vince and Howard into the floorboards.

"I'm sorry," Howard calls out, "but those actually aren't for--"

"Five euros each," Vince interrupts swiftly.

Before Howard can make any further protest Keira and Ginger Bird are hauling the skeletons to the counter, clearly unable to believe their good luck; Anjali mumbles something to him, which on repetition is her asking for a small box for the robot. She hangs back until Vince has completed his illicit sale (she seems vaguely intimidated by him, the more so the more he smiles), letting Howard wrap and ring up her own purchase while her friends wait in the doorway. Once she's joined them again they linger for a moment, glancing from Howard to Vince and back again; then the ginger-haired girl whispers something to the other two and they all erupt into giggles of seeming delight, making haste down the pavement but with frequent looks back.

"So what was that all about?" Howard asks nobody in particular, shaking his head as he neatens up the remaining toys.

"Can't imagine," Vince says airily. "You know girls. Well, really you don't, but--"

"Naboo's gonna kill you, you know," Howard observes, gazing at the large, empty spot on the front display where the rats used to stand. "No, actually, the way things usually work around here he's gonna kill me."

"He'll be orbiting the outer reaches of Kukundu for the next fortnight, he won't even notice. I'll tell him they're being cleaned or something." Vince turns back to his magazine, snorting in apparent derision at one of the fashion spreads. "Anthracite bracelets? Christ, those were the 'latest accessory' last month, what sort of cardboard hut do these idiots live in to think--they used to give me proper nightmares, those things, I couldn't sleep thinking how they were all down here, lying in wait, ready to get me. Glad they're finally out of the shop for good."

Howard's never had any abiding love for them either, but then he could say that about three-quarters of the Nabootique's inventory; Vince's quiet vehemence surprises him. "Remind you too much of Indrashish?" he asks. Vince has some tales about a mischievous water rat which made Howard laugh quite hard, in the telling, but perhaps they were only funny from a safe distance.

"Indrashish?" Vince laughs. "No, Indrashish was a waterlogged wanker but he was harmless. Once when you and I were still at school, right, I woke up one night and--"

He breaks off, suddenly, as if he were about to blurt out something appallingly intimate or impolite or both; Howard waits, but Vince is back to eyeballing the magazine as if he'd never said a word at all. Presently, though, he glances at Howard again, at some length. Then resumes reading. Howard, rather nervously, clears his throat.

"So," he asks, casually as he can manage. "Stockroom?"

Vince looks up, casts aside the magazine and lets out a long, persecuted sigh of disbelief. "God," he demands, "you are joking, right? Sometimes I really think you're ill or something, Howard, I mean, Naboo's high as a prickly pear, shop'll be dead the whole rest of the morning and you still go on and on about the accounts and stock-taking and all that boring rot like anyone else actually even gives a…"

Howard waits, quite patiently really. Finally, Vince's expression changes. "Oh," he says. And then lights up smiling. "Yeah. Right. Okay."

"You really are unbelievably thick sometimes," Howard mutters, as Vince practically dances into the stockroom ahead of him. "I think you deliberately cultivate it, like some sort of brain-eating plant--"

Vince tosses an embroidered cushion from the stock shelves straight at his face, snorts in triumph, then lounges with seeming indifference against the wall, arms folded. He waits, quite patiently really. When Howard, face gone hot once again, starts unfastening the scarlet trousers Vince obligingly lends a hand, offers soft and, eventually, very slightly louder encouragement. A middle-aged American tourist couple wanders into the seemingly empty shop, exchanges confused looks and, after a skeptical glance at the racks of haphazardly organized clothing and the wall full of clocks, wanders back out again.

"Anyone could steal anything," the wife notes, shaking her head. "You'd think they'd know enough to lock up."

"It's because there aren't any guns over here," says her husband, as they go in search of something called a cream tea. "It's not like anyone really dangerous is gonna walk in."

Behind the stockroom door Vince jerks his head back, sighs, strokes Howard's hair and the sides of his face more fervently.

The trio of raucous, garishly dressed teenagers keeps returning to the shop, again and again, dutifully buying some small inconsequential item and staring at Howard and Vince with weirdly hopeful expressions on their faces each time. A couple of times they actually sneak in on cat feet, one of them holding the shop-bells silent in her hands, as if planning some sort of ambush. Howard would find these inexplicable adolescent hijinks deeply irritating, save that they don't seem to be attempts at shoplifting and the girl who bought the little robot, Angie-whatsis, really isn't a bad sort despite her taste in friends: She always waits to have him ring up the day's trinket, actually seems to read the occasional book and once, when she comes in alone--she's been doing that more and more, lately--he sees her linger by the rack of jazz albums for so long that he approaches hopefully, ignoring Vince's derisive lip-curl and head-shake.

"So, when you first found out about jazz," she asks him, slightly more audibly than usual, "how did you know to listen to any one album? I mean, who told you where to start? Are there top ten lists or something?"

This is actually an excellent question and, to Howard's surprise, he can't think of an answer: He's simply always been the Jazzy Boy, it's in his blood, his bones, his flivver, he can't even remember where or how it began. It wasn't at home, his parents' or at least his father's tastes ran much more to Mantovani. Certainly not at school. Can't recall a family friend or relation who listened to it, either. How, in fact, had he first realized this particular branch of his destiny? He's anxious to know because if this girl is a future woman of destiny herself, well, it's downright irresponsible of him not to guide her along the path. In the end he urges her toward Brubeck and Chet Baker, hands her some old back issues of Saxim, and though she leaves without buying anything he's really quite chuffed. That is, until he sees Vince standing there chortling behind his hand like he's choking on the most ludicrous joke in the world.

"Have you got something to say, then?" Howard demands, replacing the albums back in their slats with slightly more vigor than strictly necessary. "Or can't you stand the sight of an inquisitive young person developing a taste for real music--"

"Oh, bugger your 'real music'--you think she actually gives a toss about jazz? Chip Brubaker or any of your nonsense?" Vince smirks gleefully, latte cup tilted against his lips like a microphone. "I know that look she's got, she'd pretend she was fascinated by hedgehogs or baguettes if that's what you liked to bang on about--"

"Well, why would she do that?"

"What do you mean, why?" Vince seems amazed Howard hasn't caught on yet. "She'd say anything to keep you talking to her--she's got a crush on you, Howard! I mean, an actual crush! On you!" He can't get over it, he's practically hopping foot to foot at the thought. "Imagine that!"

"Don't be daft," Howard snaps, uncertain whether he's meant to feel insulted on his behalf or hers. "What is she, fifteen? She's a fetus. Girls that age only like…" What do they like, anyway? Sustained campaigns of emotional sadism, if he recalls his own adolescence correctly. "…paper dolls. And Italian novels."

"I'm telling you," Vince insists. "You wait." He's grinning, ear to ear, with the hilarity of it all.

The next time she comes in the shop, though, Vince abruptly stops laughing: She's abandoned her neon getup entirely for a black turtleneck, Indian print skirt and Birkenstocks, has swapped the utterly unflattering geometric mirror shades for a set of horn-rims and is spilling over with pleasingly arcane questions about hard bop, the Village Vanguard and the new Marzette Watts Ensemble CD. Howard holds the floor for a good half-hour, his truncated audience all ears and flattering, if futile, pleas for an in to the Stoke Newington Jazz Club. After she departs again with a copy of Whistlin' Will Henderson's final LP and a battered Nat Hentoff omnibus, Vince turns to Howard in abject horror.

"What have you done!" he cries, gesturing after her in complete agitation. "It's not funny anymore, she was well trendy, that one, and you made her into a jazz-pod! You've got to her somehow! You've poisoned her mind!"

"You can't beat back the power of the bebop, little man," Howard crows, proudly placing a Cannonball Adderly box set right in the front window display. "It smokes you, it slays you, it smears itself on your synapses like a jam doughnut stuffed full of melodic might and majesty--"

"I'm going to Club Ayesha for the next eighteen years," Vince groans, pulling on his bottle-green velvet coat with the abrupt, angry motions of the righteously wounded. "I feel sick."

As Vince stalks out the door Howard doesn't even bother with a comeback, just hums happily to himself as he balances a trilby hat on one of the shop's dozen-some severed mannequin heads. A new generation of impressionable young minds rejects its simpleton pablum-pop conditioning in favor of polyrhythm, tritone substitutions and a big fucking funk-fusion wah-wah pedal. It's gonna be a trend, no, bigger than a trend, a movement, sweeping all that sugary pop-gunk straight into the gutters where it belongs, all thanks to the timely and well-chosen interventions of one Howard T.J. Moon. The Jazz Maverick rides again. Chick-a-chick-aaaahh.

After a month or two she grows bored with jazz and returns to the Nabootique for the final time, to trade in a copy of Rip-Roarin' Rockwell Live at the Garden State Penitentiary, but somehow this doesn't bother Howard nearly as much as it once would have.

******

13. I was a good time
Yeah, I got pretty good

They've got a whole new set of crimps now, exuberantly filthy, full of nudges and nods to matters not ever to be shared with an audience, not even if PieFace Records comes knocking, not even if the Flighty Zeus crawl back from the wilds of Aberdeen and attempt an encore (should this happen, they've mutually agreed to skip the preliminaries and go straight for the cricket bats). After the sustained, bitter drought of the past few months, inspiration's pouring down in buckets: Both of them routinely find themselves humming and finger-tapping in immediate unison wherever they may happen to be, in the shop, at meals, out on the street, and then catching each other's eye and only with a real, concerted effort forcing themselves into decorous silence. Later. When we're alone. They're alone quite a lot, by design, of late.

Howard could fill whole notebooks with them, if he wanted to, their latest crimps. One's a shockingly complimentary ode to his cock and balls, Vince chanting and tapping it out against the bedsheets as his other hand goes counter-rhythmic fondling and stroking, and as Vince replaces his fingers with his mouth Howard can't continue the crimp for anything, not least because you can hardly sing, moan, shout out in homage to your own tackle, now can you, that's just utterly deranged narcissism (well, Vince might do, but point proven)?

No matter, he's got his own crimp dedicated to Vince's arse, that arse well deserves to be immortalized in song, Howard's long since decided that and Vince hardly seems to disagree. Vince has a truly embarrassing one that's all Howard's own vocalizations in the act, fed straight back to him in discordant three-four time. Thank Christ, Cthulu and Charles Aznavour that Vince has seemingly given up his little sex-advert pranks for good, because he now has all manner of new material with which to mortify Howard publicly should he choose. Howard Moon Likes, No Make That Loves, Your Fingers Up His Arse. Howard Moon Likes a Whole Lot of Things Up His Arse, Actually. Howard Moon's Become a Surprisingly Accomplished Ball-Sucker in a Very Short Period of Time. Howard Moon Likes to Kiss You Afterwards, Who the Hell Cares Where Your Mouth's Just Been. Howard Moon Doesn't Frighten the Horses, But He Can Make the Occasional Raccoon a Bit Nervous.

Howard Moon Can't Quite Believe What's Happened To Him. And he can't, he really can't, because he hasn't magically become some new sort of person: He still flinches instinctively when he's going about his business and someone leans in too close or puts a hand on him out of nowhere, Vince's dreadful music and scatterbrained self-absorption and inexplicable sunny-Jimness and inane little trendy obsessions still irritate the living shit out of him, the bickering hasn't dissipated, Vince still can't be arsed to work at work, the universe still affords him no greater measure of respect, but. And yet. It's not the shagging, really, though he already can't fathom how he lived without it so long, if nothing else having it off regularly does seem to temper those longtime, sporadic urges to set fire to the flat--it's something else, something more than that, though he can't put words to it in crimp form or otherwise. And he wants to, it feels so desperately important that he figure out how to say it all--whatever "all" even is--out loud, and he can't. He just can't.

Vince, of course, suffers no such doubts or hesitations or frustrated, stymied muteness about any of it; such weighty considerations would never drift through his airy little mindtank. He just goes shopping.

"Right, you're not getting that thing anywhere near me," Howard preemptively announces one evening, as Vince starts smearing lubricant ("There, see?" he'd declared triumphantly to Howard, displaying the tube. "Unscented. Die of joy. You're so boring.") over a particularly ludicrous new purchase. "You can forget it, sir, just go put it back where you found it right now."

"I'm putting it somewhere, yeah," Vince muses with a maddening little twitch of the lips, blithely continuing his ministrations. "Why're you all knotted up all of a sudden?"

"Why? Because if you haven't noticed it's made out of glass, just for starters--"

"Well, it's not gonna break or anything!" Vince looks highly indignant at the proposition. "Or what, you think you can shatter champagne flutes and bend titanium spoons into Piccadilly pretzels with your all-powerful downstairs death grip--"

"Just how much of this tat did you buy, anyway?" Howard twists himself round where he's lying, not at all an easy task given the awkward way he's been shackled, and cranes his head toward the overflowing shopping bag. "Had a big fire sale at the Kentish Town dog kennels, did they? I bet you don't even know what half of it's for--"

"Yeah, well, no one's ever gonna have your worldly expertise, are they," Vince calmly retorts, with a sideways grin that Howard makes a mental note to slap off his face once he's got his arms back. "Master Bassoon and His World-Famous Pit Ponies--so walk me through it, then, if you're such a dab hand. You'd like that."

"Vince," Howard attempts, yet again, "I look fucking ridiculous."

"You always do anyway. Your Northern bones do something weird to innocent clothes, you put on a halfway all right shirt and it starts looking all warped and distorted, like you're a great big walking funhouse mirror--"

"Vince, I'm really not kidding about this--"

Vince finds an already time-honored spot on the back of Howard's thigh, presses his lips to it. Runs the tip of his tongue along it. Bites at it. Howard stops protesting, momentarily.

It bothers Howard, sometimes, nags at him the slightest bit, that something so overwhelming to him, something that he can't find the words for or even get his mind round for trying, is for Vince just another blithe, happy-making, diversionary pastime among dozens--but then, what else is new? Was he really expecting any different? He's happy for what he's got (truly, he's shockingly happy for it, and it's funny how it's precisely when he starts thinking I never felt this way, I didn't think it was possible to feel this way that the thinking and the words all shut down entirely), it's just…it's just. But then, that's Vince, isn't it? Things just don't affect him like they do Howard, and we can't all be sensitive intellectuals by nature. Nursing even fleeting discontent over that fact is the definition of foolishness.

"Looks like we've got a leak in the bathroom pipes," Naboo comments one day, apropos of nothing. Since his shaman powers were suspended he's grown morose and aimless, spending days at a time eating his weight in smoky bacon crisps and watching old Children of Castor episodes on infinite loop. "Water all over the floor."

"Really," Howard remarks casually. He and Vince had taken advantage of Naboo and Bollo's absence to spend a Sunday afternoon in the bath, not strictly enough room for both of them in there but very soon neither of them cared, and the bathwater did possibly overflow a bit and afterwards they were both feeling too lazy and too good to deal with the mopping up (not that Vince would ever bother with such a task anyway). He is genuinely sorry Bollo went sliding in one of the puddles and nearly cracked his head on the rim of the sink, but then Bollo's never exactly been fleet of foot anyhow. Such things happen.

"I can't find the leak, you might want to take a look," Naboo suggests, then gives him a narrow-eyed glance. "I mean, if you and Vince can take time from all that rehearsing for your band."

Naboo's sour expression and the waspish tone of rehearsing make Howard bristle a bit: What the hell business is it of Naboo's, anyway? (Though clearly Howard's room being the farthest down the hallway from everyone else's hasn't been the discretionary solution he'd hoped.) But it's not just that, it's that lately Naboo's found a new source of entertainment, namely inquiring of Howard constantly, at any opportunity, in all apparent innocence, just how's that new band coming along, anyway? Written any new music? Care to play us a bit of it? Vince pick out his costumes yet? Got any gigs? Any tickets for your old landlord? Any record companies sniffing about? Velvet Onion even remember you're alive?

Howard's trying on that front, he really is. It's just that even with Vince newly enthused and the universe obediently whispering sweet nothings into Howard's ear he's creaky and out of practice and nothing he comes up with sounds quite right and he's more than a bit shocked at just how many local clubs, ones where he'd sworn they'd come flying at the audience like a beam, like a ray, like a mighty something-or-other, have flat out banned them from the premises. The lure of Vince himself isn't helping like he'd thought it would, either: Being the Mayor of Camden only gets you so far, apparently, and that's not nearly far enough to score even a supporting slot at the Tyger Tyger. There are so many genuine twenty-two-year-olds out there, all snapping at the same bait. Well, fuck them, those infant shitboxes can't pull shapes half like Vince can, he invented shapes, sir, not like your vacuous little trendoid straight lines. They'll find something. They will. It's just that right now, on this particular front, the chokes are leaving Howard gasping for air.

Vince himself isn't asking any questions, mind, not like Naboo, other than whether his Mexican ant ring would look right on stage with the diamante-collared green suede. He's leaving it all in Howard's hands, again, apparently perfectly content to do so. But his patience won't be infinite. Howard's got to come up with something. And it's got to be good. Better than good. Or else…

Or else what? Howard doesn't know. It's just an unspoken fear he's got, a fear that isn't even about the band or music or any creative ambitions at all, a fear that seems to linger just on the opposite side of all those thoughts he won't let himself think about how I never felt, I didn't know I could, I need, I want, I have to have, I can't. And there's Naboo, poking merrily at it like a wound. How's Vince holding up his end of things, then? He pulling any new shapes? You two lay down any beats? Need any gig flyers pasted up?

But Vince, himself, hasn't said any such things. A relief. So much of one it almost makes Howard afraid somehow, all over again.

"So that girl who used to come into the shop," Vince says one night, apropos of nothing, as he lies draped over Howard's bed watching him undress. There's little erotic about the ritual, they've shared close quarters and seen each other at them too many times over the years for that, but there's a comforting familiarity to it that Howard likes. "Whatever happened to her?"

Howard drops on the bed beside him in vest and pajama bottoms. "Who?"

"The jazz girl," Vince says, with the same level of distaste someone else might have said the public masturbator. "Little Alice in Acid-Bop-Firepants-Wonderland, the one who thinks she wants to be you when she grows up, where'd she ever run off to, anyway?"

"Oh." Howard peers over at Vince, who's propped on his elbows gazing idly up at the ceiling.
"Her. Got sick of jazz. Traded in all her old vinyl. God knows what syrupy pap she's back to listening to now."

Howard waits for Vince's crows of triumph, Shoreditch crushes Stoke Newington underfoot yet again, but they're not forthcoming; he just shrugs at this revelation and stares back down at his own foot, flexing and pointing it like a ballerina. He's got true ballerina's feet, Vince does, all corns and bunions and calluses and healed-over blisters and a crooked-up hammer toe from those unforgiving high-heeled vice-toed boots he crams them into day after day. He's in a new dressing gown, a scarlet kimono splashed with deeper red hibiscus flowers, one leg tucked underneath him and the other pale calf stretched out against the bedsheets. Always suited him, that shade of red. Howard reaches over, places questioning fingers on the kimono's loosely tied belt, slowly starts undoing the knot.

"What're you doing?" Vince pushes his hand away, a bit half-heartedly. "I'm going out."

"You said things never get started till at least one-thirty, right? That's hours off."

"My hair's gonna take at least ninety minutes, if I rush it." Vince tightens the belt knot again. "And I've got to try on that new turquoise PVC--"

"It looks fine," Howard mumbles, fiddling with the knot again.

"Like you would know."

He lets Howard kiss him, however, and digs nails into the nape of Howard's neck as the kiss deepens, and when Howard slips hands and then mouth beneath the kimono cloth Vince swiftly undoes the belt himself. He shivers in pleasure as Howard massages and licks his chest, bites hard at a nipple, presses lips to his abdomen, but when he not very subtly starts pushing Howard's head lower down Howard eases away, rolls onto his side and reaches toward the pile of books on the nightstand like nothing's just happened.

"Well, hang on," Vince demands, as Howard calmly leafs through Steppenwolf, an old favorite, until he's found his place. "What're you doing?"

"You're going out," Howard reminds him, continuing to read even as Vince reaches a hand into the pajama bottoms, stroking him until Howard swallows and momentarily closes his eyes. "No time, you've got your hair to think of."

Vince looks sincerely indignant. "Don't go stealing my act, Harold."

"What act?" Howard shifts against the mattress, spreading his thighs a bit, quite enjoying both Vince's attempts to hold his attention and his own refusal to play along; Vince's persistent fantasies, those he's let slip, of going about some entirely unrelated, mundane activity with his cock incidentally ensconced in Howard's mouth are making a bit more sense to him now. "Ninety minutes, Vince, and that's pushing it--"

"The Dangler? That's my act, I'm the one who leaves people hanging, you don't leave people hanging." Vince is scowling now, pulling his hand away. "I'm not gonna stand around weeping into a fishpond just 'cos you're feeling stroppy, I've got things to do."

"Indeed you do," Howard agrees, and reads onward. Harry Haller finds the first sign leading to the Magic Theater: For Madmen Only. At fourteen he'd longed for exactly that to happen to him, so many times, that he feels a distant, nostalgic twinge of melancholy in the rereading. (Pity old Harry had to go and sneer at jazz music like that, though, rather spoiled the last third of the book for him to turn out such a pillock.) Vince sits there half in and half out of the kimono, glowering, then red silk sweeps over the pages as he walks across the bed and starts rummaging noisily in the nightstand drawer.

"Eighty-five minutes," Howard notes, not looking up.

Random items start landing on the bedsheets. Howard doesn't lift eyes from the page to see what they are, nor when he feels Vince fastening something soft and padded around his right wrist; Vince gently pries the fingers of that hand from the page, lifts Howard's arm and clips it to the headboard railing, and Howard finally deigns to turn his head. It's one of the thick leather cuffs Vince brought home on another plain-brown-wrapper shopping spree, delighted to have found a pair in bright purple: The inexorable black on black just didn't light him up.

"And the other one?" Howard inquires, studying his bare left wrist.

Vince snorts scornfully. "You really don't know a thing about accessorizing, do you? That's all wrong, same thing on each hand all matched up, da-da-da, like cufflinks or something--you want a nice asymmetrical look, yeah? Catch the eye better."

"I see." Howard finally puts his book down. "You're not really grasping the whole point of this particular exercise, are you, Vince? Eighty…" He looks at the clock. "…two minutes, more or less."

He reaches up and starts undoing the buckle, but then he glances over at Vince and sees him kneeling there on the bed, the scarlet robe draped over and falling off him in rather eye-catching ways, and more than that sees the flash of very real disappointment in his face. He obligingly refastens the cuff, and Vince lights up grinning and starts making short work of Howard's pajama bottoms. Howard pulls the kimono off Vince's shoulders, down his arms. Vince slides a hand beneath Howard's vest, pushing it up his chest and running fingernails down his ribs until the ticklish ache makes Howard squirm a bit, ease a knee between Vince's thighs. The cuff's connected to the bed railing by a short length of chain, just enough slack in it to let Howard try to turn himself around where he lies. Vince gives him a little shove, keeping him on his back. They spar back and forth, cocks rubbing against each other, breathing hard, then Vince reaches for one of the toys he's thrown onto the bed. Not one of the new purchases, instead an old cloth sleep mask of his that he slips over Howard's eyes.

"Since you want to pretend you're not even seeing me," Vince mutters. "Better, yeah?"

The worn, threadbare mask actually shuts out the light more effectively than many they've tried. That bit of darkness can be oddly reassuring, Howard's found, a private space where not seeing means you're somehow not seen either, but right now he's less in need of a psychic cave to crawl into than plain excited he can't track where Vince's fingers will travel next. Nails gently rake his throat, dig more roughly at his chest and sides and arse, and as Vince bites his shoulder, kisses the side of his neck, Howard gropes with his free hand for the tube of lubricant (unscented, cry for joy) he knows was just inches away beforehand, then hears the telltale sound of it being slid out of reach.

"Come on," he murmurs, a bit irritably, fingers touching only the bare duvet. "Give us it."

"You can't even do anything with it," Vince points out. "Not one-handed." He bites suddenly and hard at the underside of Howard's arm, making him jump and yelp.

"Ow! Stop that, you little--just give it here."

"You're the one who wants everything he sees shoved up his arse, not me." Vince taunts him by pressing the tube against his side, his leg, always snatching it away at the last moment. "It's a bit disgusting, really, I mean, someone's gotta protect you from your own--"

"Vince? Hand it over. Come on." Howard sighs wearily. "Please."

Vince bites softly at his ear. Howard pulls the mask off and, by some lucky accident, his grabbing fingers catch the tube just as Vince is angling it away; Vince yields the prize, catches Howard's mouth in another long kiss. Howard wraps a leg around Vince's body, circles him with his free arm, and in the process of trying to roll them both over at once wrenches his cuffed wrist, whacks his forehead against the headboard and knocks a foot hard against Vince's shin.

"Shit!" Vince leaps backward, rubbing in high dudgeon at his wounded leg. "What're you on about? Thrashing around like some sort of spastic rabbit--"

"We're not playing that game tonight, I'm not up to all that running."

"You've got no imagination," Vince mutters, briefly hopeful expression fading as he undoes the purple cuff and Howard rubs his injured head, winces at the pins and needles in his hand. "It's always got to be real, doesn't it? You're, like, the kitchen sink shagger, the chicken-soup-and-barley man, if it were up to you it'd be all dingy old sheets and sticky cups of Horlicks on the nightstand and a broken gas fire and ohhh, crikey, the missus wants to live dangerous tonight, let's 'ave it off with the lights onaaggh!"

Ignoring the annoying new ache in his shoulder Howard flips Vince over with little ceremony, wrestles him onto his face and pinions his arms by his sides, planting hard smacking kisses on his shoulders, neck, scalp. Vince twists in his grasp, trying to get away, arching upward enough to let Howard kiss his temple; he goes suddenly slack, then struggles briefly with renewed, furious energy, then gives in once more as if torn between battle tactics, as if deliberately trying to wear himself out. He's panting a bit. The sound of it makes Howard press his weight down more heavily on Vince's body, keep a stubborn vise-grip on his arms.

"All right, then!" Vince finally says, relaxing into Howard's hold. "Calm down. Christ."

Studied indifference, humoring the madman, but there's an oddly soft, incantatory edge to his voice and when Howard releases one arm, reaching for the abandoned lubricant again, he doesn't try to wriggle free. Howard bites at Vince's ear, rather more roughly than Vince did at his, eliciting a yelp and more outraged mutterings, then hooks his chin over Vince's shoulder.

"Spread your knees," he tells him.

"You're loopy tonight," Vince says sternly, screwing his face up as Howard kisses his temple again, his cheek. "You're like the Leeds-wolf, gone over all hairy-clawed."

"Cheeky thing," Howard murmurs in Vince's ear, sinking a hand into his hair. "Pretty little slag."

"That's your secret identity, yeah?" Vince closes his eyes as Howard gnaws at his shoulder. "Superleeds. You ate a radioactive chip butty and now you can leap lager bottles in a single--"

"Spread your knees like you want to." Howard's voice is thick and almost slurred as if he really were lagered up but he's perfectly sober, focused, just the smallest bit high on the smell of Vince's hair and skin. "Go on, you dirty little--"

"You've gone wrong. You're like--ow, watch it!--a randy science teacher who's cornered the janitor in the supply closet, you're completely--"

Howard keeps a hand in Vince's hair, pulling, clenching, mussing with abandon, and Vince is suddenly wholly acquiescent, there's a good boy, raising himself up on his elbows as Howard readies them both and making a quiet sound between his teeth at the feel of Howard's slicked fingers against his cock. He pushes his hips back against Howard, squirming, a last-minute burst of defiance, then he's suddenly so relaxed and open and willing and Howard groans at how deep he is inside him, at how easy it all is. Not slow, not tonight. Not in any mood for slow. He's being rough and selfish on purpose, because he can, because he wants to, and Vince is arching back toward him and taking it without protest, all hitched, rhythmic breaths and whipcord muscles and warm, bare skin pressed to his. Vince's cock twitches in Howard's palm, then he suddenly twists against Howard in an involuntary spasm; Howard shudders in turn, savors the growl of protest when he slides his hand away and clutches Vince's shoulders, letting his fingertips sink in.

"You're a dirty boy," he whispers, thrusting harder. "You're a cheeky little tart, you're the last squashed-fly cake in the shop--"

"You're a lunatic." Vince's hand snakes up, trying to peel Howard's fingers off his shoulder and restore them to their original task. "Who's always--got to fucking talk--during--"

Howard thrusts his fingers into Vince's mouth, bracing himself for the onslaught of teeth, but Vince twines his tongue around Howard's fingers, sucking and making quiet, soothing little sounds, and the almost unbearable gentleness of it makes Howard shiver and pull his hand away and shove Vince bodily into the pillows, no more talking now, just grunts of wordless pleasure, and Vince is panting and grinding back against him without any restraint and Howard Moon Can Indeed Bum You Silly If He Wants To, Sod the Loose Change. Vince's breath seizes up and he laughs, a high, shaky, pleading sound, and Howard's got his arms pinned though the last thing Vince is seeking is escape; Howard's thrashing uncontrollably now, eyes squeezed shut, every muscle in his body unbearably tight and full of need and beneath him Vince chokes back something that could be Howard's name, could be random noises, it doesn't matter, doesn't care anymore, get your little arse out you dirty piece of be a good boy Vincey just like that, that's it, just like, just like, oh God--

He collapses onto Vince's body and doesn't want to move, he can't move, but Vince moans in frustration and Howard forces himself to pull away, wrench them both apart. "Turn on your back," he mumbles, still slightly dazed, "go on--"

And Vince rolls over without wasting a second and Howard sees the finger marks he's left on Vince's arms, faint red, they'll be another deeper color later on and Naboo will make all sorts of sideways remarks but sod him, sod everyone, Vince would roll his sleeves up on purpose and laugh in all their faces. As Howard takes him into his mouth Vince's hands in his hair are easy and relaxed as the rest of him is knotted and tense, he knows he'll get what he needs, and soon Vince is shaking and crying out and with a loud, hard gasp he comes, stroking Howard's face as Howard swallows it down, cradles Vince's softening cock against his tongue, finally pulls away for breath. He's still got that bloody vest on, now rucked up beneath his armpits and drenched in sweat, and with his last vestiges of energy Howard pulls it off, wipes his mouth on it and throws it on the floor. He crawls back up against Vince's side; Vince shifts about, getting an arm around Howard's back, and lies there silently as Howard rests his head in the curving crook of Vince's neck.

Minutes pass, Vince so silent Howard wonders if he's fallen asleep. He himself, though, is completely awake, his thoughts a beam, a ray of concentrated clarity as he remembers his father handing him that first note from his mother, the day she left for good, and all the subsequent letters, postcards, Christmas cards, birthday cards, random notes, torn-off bits of brown mailing paper with his name and address--he'd kept anything and everything in her handwriting--creased with age and stuffed in a wooden box somewhere in the cupboard, he's forgotten just where he put it, might be behind his Swedish army boots. He's thinking about how right from the beginning everyone, his father, the stream of neighbors imparting outrage and collecting gossip, the old pensioner Mr. Kirkwood across the way, the blandly pleasant new postal clerk who'd soon become his stepmother, Howard himself, had taken it as read that Mrs. Hinshawe was the true culprit, the vile seducer, inveigling a decent normal woman away from husband and child and home for her own, inexplicable amusement. Clearly, his mother had been unarmed, defenseless, against the onslaught. Obviously, Mrs. Hinshawe had taken full advantage, had singlehandedly talked her into God knows what sort of--

--but what if it hadn't been that way at all. What if instead his mother, all herself, came to understand just why she was so angry at Mrs. Hinshawe, came to suspect it wasn't really anger at all. What if the first indiscreet words were hers. What if she kissed Mrs. Hinshawe, not the other way round. What if, one afternoon, when everyone but themselves knew they were meant to be having a cuppa and a chat, she had lain there naked in a back bedroom with the shades drawn tightly shut, just like this, her head in the crook of Mrs. Hinshawe's neck just like this, her thoughts sharper and more focused than they had ever before been in her life, and she realized, with utter certainty, that she could not live without this, without Mrs. Hinshawe, that going back to how things had been before would be like dying. He can hear her voice in his head, he swears it. The thing is, Mrs. Hinshawe--actually, it'd be a bit odd if I'm still calling you Mrs. Hinshawe, I mean, considering. What's your first name, anyway? Margaret? Catherine? Gloria? Howard's always thought you look like a Gloria, for some reason. You know, Howard? My son? I know you know him, Gloria, you've bloody met him, you can't just lie there and pretend all this isn't going to affect--but I'm getting off the subject. What I meant to say, Mrs. Hinshawe, Karen, Lucy, Ann, Ermentrude, is that I need you. I need us. I need us, together, all the time.

And for once, Gloria--I'm dead certain it's Gloria, don't ask me why--for once in my life, I thought I'd actually say what I mean.

Vince runs his hands along Howard's back, startling him from his reverie. "You're trancing," he says, with a faint note of reproof. "And without any music, even, all that jazz is eating holes in your brain--"

"I'm just thinking," Howard says. "That's all."

Vince yawns and turns over on his side. "About what?"

"My mother naked."

He couldn't resist saying it, and Vince's expression as he slides away and quickly sits up is well worth it. "Right," Vince says, seeming a bit queasy, "if you tell me I look like her or something, I'm gonna be well creeped out--"

Howard starts to laugh. "No, I look like her. Big hands, cockerel's eyes and all." He remembers how, long before Mrs. Hinshawe ever moved next door, she'd stand staring out the kitchen window with tense hunched shoulders and folded arms and an expression that seemed hundreds of miles removed. He would stand there too, not touching her--they both reflexively shied away from that--trying hard to see whatever it was she was really looking at, clearly not the back garden, not the street, feeling as though they both shared a sort of secret, unspoken complicity in the search. Eventually, after minutes, or hours, she'd snap abruptly out of it, shaking her head like she'd been in a trance, and go without any comment to start the tea.

"I still wonder where she is, sometimes."

It takes him a moment to realize he's said that aloud.

"Leeds," says Vince, like this is patently obvious. "I mean, if she's just like you, she can't help being from Leeds, can she? She'll be from Leeds the rest of her life, even if she runs away to Jupiter." He starts laughing. "We could go outside right now, wave up at Jupiter, 'Oi, 'Oward's mum! Show yerself! Are ye out there? Are ye? Give us a wink back, then, ye great ham-handed cheeky vixen--' "

"I don't know where she is. I haven't seen her since I was nine years old."

He's never said those words aloud to anyone, ever. Vince abruptly stops laughing.

"What happened, then?" he asks. Not right away, and uneasily, as though he's about to venture into a meadow rigged with snares.

He really wants to know? That's a bit of a surprise, almost nothing bores Vince as much as other people's family sagas, but he did ask. And so, leaving his own youthful fever dreams strictly out of the equation, Howard tells him about Mrs. Hinshawe and the garden and her gauzy skirts and his mother's furious diatribes and all the to-ing and fro-ing next door and the whispers and rumors and the day he'd come home and it was him and his dad, alone. Doesn't take very long to tell, really, Madame Bovary it isn't, but Vince is actually listening intently, leaning forward, a small frown forming on his face.

"And you never saw her again," Vince says. "Not a visit, or--"

Howard shakes his head. "Never saw her again. She sent letters, though. Letters, postcards--a lot of them. I've still got them." He stretches his arm out, massaging his aching shoulder, then rests his hands behind his head. "But I never answered any of them."

"Why not?"

Howard shakes his head. "She must have thought I was trying to punish her. I wasn't. It's just I could never think of a single thing to say. Not a word. So I didn't say anything." He shrugs. "Bit late now."

But that was long ago, in another country, and besides the wench would be at least sixty. Sixty. At least. He's old enough to have a parent that age? That just doesn't seem right. How old would his father be now? The half-sister he'd barely even met? No idea. Little point in speculating, really. He turns back to Vince, half-expecting him to have fallen asleep from the tedium, but Vince is fully attentive, raised up on an elbow, and if he's bored senseless he's doing an excellent job of hiding it, in fact he seems a bit upset. No, not just upset. He actually looks angry. But why?

"So that's it, then?" Vince demands. "She skives off, no warning, nothing, I'm off to go ski-jumping on Planet Bebryx with my new girlfriend, you have a grand old life, don't call us we'll call you, and that's it for--"

"I just told you that wasn't it, Vince. She did write me, I just never--"

"So what if she wrote you?" Vince's voice is sharp, verging on contentious. "What's that add up to? Does she still? I've never seen any letters--"

"So who says I'd show them to you?" Howard pulls the bedsheets over his legs, straightening them with abrupt, impatient gestures. "But no, she doesn't. When you and I met, she'd already stopped." He shrugs again. "She said, in one of the letters, that one day I'd understand. That's the only time she ever talked about it."

Vince falls silent again. "Since before we met," he finally repeats. "That was a long time ago. But what, a year or two goes by and she just can't be arsed anymore? Is that it?"

"Vince? This is my mother you're--"

"But 'someday you'll understand'? Yeah, well, maybe you'll understand, big wide head full of knowledge, that'd be good 'cos I don't bloody understand." Vince grabs some of the bedsheet for himself, yanking it in his fist. "I mean, Ashapurna was a right old bitch, never stopped complaining, she'd have thrown me to the snow leopards if she'd thought she could get away with it--but she would never have just left me." He scowls, clearly daring Howard to challenge this assertion. "Not even the hyenas. None of them would have done."

But Vince, Howard thinks, someone left you there in the jungle, by yourself, with that pink tin box. With a note that immediately got lost. If there ever really were a note at all. But it's so very much not his place to mention this, so he doesn't. He pats Vince's shoulder, a vague conciliatory gesture.

"Hardly matters what I understand," he points out. "Not now. What's done is done."

No answer. Howard stretches his legs out, feet rubbing against the duvet, and slides his hand back up to Vince's head, resting fingers against his scalp. He likes doing this sometimes, something nobody else is allowed to do. The feel of thick, soft hair beneath his hand always has a tonic effect.

"Why d'you always straighten it, anyway?" he asks. "It looks fine curlier."

Vince just gives him the look, like Richard Dawkins sizing up a snake-handler. Back when Vince broke his wrist--he'd got drunk off his face and went sailing on an icy front stoop, bloody lucky it wasn't his neck--Howard had found him sitting disconsolately before the three-way mirror, arm in a silk-scarf sling, staring in frustration at the straightening iron he couldn't finesse one-handed. Well, Howard had seen him do it a hundred times, how hard could it be? Vince took some coaxing to be convinced Howard wouldn't singe him bald, but once he'd successfully flattened down a few locks Vince finally stopped twitching and bitching and bent his head forward. A pointless, rather tedious exercise, really, but it made Vince happy and Howard found himself almost looking forward to the daily ritual despite himself. Once or twice Vince actually fell asleep during it all, chin resting peacefully on his chest as Howard straightened him out. Rather nice, really, to be entrusted with someone's prize possession. He still thinks it looks just as well or better untouched.

"Well," he says reluctantly, sitting up and reaching for his pajama bottoms, "if you're still going out you'd better get your hair corralled and tagged before--"

"Why're you always trying to get rid of me?"

Howard blinks in surprise and turns, pajamas dangling from his hand. Vince isn't joking. "You said you wanted to go out, Vince," he reminds him. "You said it quite a lot, actually."

"So, I changed my mind," Vince replies, his tone suggesting Howard's going out of his way to misunderstand him. "You change your mind all the time, don't you? So why can't I change mine? I'm not as simple as you think, I've got facets and angles too, I can--"

"Vince, yes, you can change your mind. You're one of the most changeable people I've ever met, no fear." Howard threads his legs into the pajama bottoms. "Bit too changeable if you ask me, always sailing this way and that on--"

"Change it whenever I like. You can't stop me."

"You're the one always saying you're a simple man, not me."

"Well, you still can't stop me."

Christ on a fucking toffee apple stick--"No, Vince," Howard agrees, doing his best to impersonate a man cleverly backed into an intellectual corner. "You're right. I certainly can't."

Vince slips his arms back into the scarlet kimono sleeves, knotting the belt with a look of barely contained triumph; then he seems to turn almost thoughtful. "Gets a bit old sometimes, anyway," he admits, sitting there with his arms wrapped around his knees. "All that pretending to be happy about other people's bands."

The bedroom's turned as damp and cold as the front room is always dry and stifling; the flat's heating system's eternally cocked up. Howard pulls on a clean vest, an old cotton jumper. "I am working on--"

"Yeah, I know." Vince studies the Miles Davis poster, the framed Ermanox advert declaring What You Can See You Can Photograph, the picture next to it of them both on holiday, ages ago. "Remember Johnny Two Hats?"

"That prize tool?" Howard snorts. "Why, what's he up to now?"

Vince shrugs. "He's on the cover of this week's equaliser. That's all."

He looks morose for a second, then turns to Howard with an air of determined indifference. Howard shoves his feet into a pair of slippers.

"I've got some new songs," he tells Vince. "Want to take a whack at Naboo's keyboards?"

Vince cheers up immediately, bouncing off the bed and padding cat-footed past Howard into the front room. "I don't believe it," he calls over his shoulder. "You actually wrote something, instead of all that sitting about all hours pretending you're meditating, banging on and on about the universe giving you a prize eardrum-bumming straight back to the Iron Age--"

"I do not pretend I'm meditating," Howard snaps, tossing the notebook with his newly-scribbled songs on the sofa with more force than strictly necessary. "That's not 'sitting about' you're seeing there, that's rigorous and exhausting mental exercise--"

"Is it, now."

"It is. I render myself at one with the universe. I commune with the greater forces that make up the great pounding throbbing heart of this whole--"

"They call you The Communist?"

"Shut it."

Vince is foraging in the refrigerator, a small smile on his face; Howard joins him, anxious not to miss out on the last of the manakeesh. "You weren't up there on the roof," he reminds Vince, around a large bite of cold batata harra. "You wouldn't joke if you had been. It changed everything, it changed my life. I very nearly died up there, sir--"

"You weren't ever gonna die," Vince says scornfully, spooning up tomato chutney straight from the jar. "I saw you, you looked like you were gonna sick all over yourself but you were never gonna die. You sound like you'd be happy or something if you did." He wipes his fingers on a dish towel. "Besides, you can't die. It's impossible."

"Don't be ridiculous," Howard admonishes him, though he's genuinely touched by this declaration. "Death's just another part of life. We all die."

"Not us." Vince shakes his head emphatically. "That magic poetry book Naboo gave me, the one with all the fashion tips?"

"Gave me, I think you'll find." He'd never found the book again after it vanished from the rooftop; when he confessed its disappearance to Naboo, expecting a wrathful outburst--the thing couldn't not be incredibly rare and valuable--the shaman just shrugged. It likes to wander about, he told Howard. "And it was a serious prophetic tool, by the way, not a hardbound Stiletto's Greatest Hits--"

"Whatever. Anyway, remember when Bollo brought home that flu last winter?" (Howard snorts; oh yes, he remembers that weekend-long, four-way death race to the toilet all too vividly.) "So I was lying there guzzling Lucozade and feeling like I was gonna die any second, and I got curious, and I asked it how I was gonna die for real. And you too." Vince drums his heel idly against the chair leg. "Bit scared to look, in case it said I was gonna fall off my platforms and split my head open Tuesday after or something--but it said we don't get any older, and we don't die. Ever." He grins, tapping the chutney spoon in between his fingers. "Genius, isn't it?"

Howard shakes his head, putting the depleted leftovers back in the fridge. "Vince, the book was just telling you what you wanted to hear. It's an inevitable process, we get old, we go gray--"

"Not us." Vince stands up, stretching, the dressing gown gaping open across his chest. "It said there's reasons why not, important ones, and someday we'll both know why--but I don't really care about all that boring stuff, the point is, I'm never gonna lose my hair. Not one strand." He throws himself onto the sofa, flicking through Howard's notebook at random. "And when's it ever predicted anything wrong?"

When was the book ever wrong? Well now, since you bring it up, Howard quite distinctly recalls it promising them musical and artistic success, many times actually, in an unlikely venue. Which he'd quite logically understood to mean he'd find fame and fortune in one of Vince's more pop endeavors instead of the jazz that was his natural calling--a bit disconcerting to know that, but then wasn't it always the anodyne fluff that garnered a huge audience while real music had to go begging at the backstage door--and just look how all that always, inevitably, seemed to turn out. But Vince is smiling that old irresistible smile that lights up everything around him from the inside, and he really wants to hear Howard's songs, and Bollo's taken Naboo out Christ knows where to drown his dethroned-shaman sorrows and they won't be back for hours, he and Vince could have another shag right here in the front room later if they wanted, perhaps they will, so really, why be churlish and point out how reality actually works? Vince never believes him anyway, when he tries. He takes the notebook from Vince's hands and walks over to the window, the bank of keyboards he's had set up since the last time Naboo dryly inquired how all that rehearsing was going, ignoring the thin film of dust that gathers on his fingertips at he touches the keys.

"Right, then." He clears his throat, feeling inexplicably nervous. Actually it's good he's still tired and a bit high from the previous hour's exertions because lately the thought of tapping out even the most random, throwaway tune fills him with an I'll-do-it-tomorrow nebulous dread of…he has no idea what, but Vince sits up instantly, eager, really wanting to hear it, and that helps a bit, as much as anything can. "I was gonna start with a whole series of improvisational chords based around that new note, you know, the one I found between B and C, I know it didn't sound quite right the last time I messed about with it but I fed it through a G-minor key and got a much more interesting sort of modal progression, but actually the whole point of those in-between notes, you know, there's many more than just the one, the point is to get away from having just one tonal center, I think if you read up on Ornette Coleman's whole theory of harmolodics you'll have a much better idea of what I'm trying to--"

"Howard?"

Howard looks up. "Yeah?" Vince, inexplicably, is laughing and shaking his head. "What?"

"Just bloody play something, all right?"

Howard plays something. There follows a good deal of key-trawling and meandering atonal singing and sparring and squabbling and a bit of crimping just to loosen up all the mental muscles and even some actual flashes of inspiration, and later on, once they're both thoroughly musically worn out, Vince spontaneously finds something else to do with his mouth; Howard, forever afterwards, will marvel at how when they both heard Bollo's unmistakably heavy footstep on the stair, unexpectedly early, Vince still managed to time things exactly so they'd both had it off again in shudderingly satisfying fashion, their clothing was readjusted and they were sitting quite decorously on the sofa pretending to discuss the latest Brick Lane Tatler just as Naboo and Baloo poked their heads through the flat's front door. The little man truly is, in fact, some sort of authentic genius, exactly what sort Howard doesn't really want to speculate but the fact, in fact, remains. Put that in your wandering book of prophecies and…smoke it. Or publish it. Or something.

The next day, as Howard stands at the kitchen counter beating eggs for an omelet, he feels eyes boring into the back of his head and turns to see Vince staring at him intently, as if trying to work out some complex, troubling puzzle. He seems disquieted somehow--as much as someone so mercilessly thrilled to be alive ever can be--and as Howard waits for the teasing jibe, the amused barb, the random bizarre inquiry into whether eggs can hear music or why lightning doesn't come in more interesting colors, nothing's forthcoming. Vince, seeming a bit disconcerted at being found out, breaks his gaze and looks away.

"Don't forget the red pepper," he tells Howard, and returns to constructing a card-house from slices of toast.

******

14. So we put our curtains up
And ignore the sounds that break walls down

Vince is out for the evening, some sort of Cheekbone-sponsored space-tart fashion show folderol whose invitation-specified theme was Halls of Mirrors. (Vince was so shiny-reflective when he left the flat, right down to the wash-out chrome-colored spray dye in his hair, that Howard had spots dancing before his eyes for ten minutes afterwards.) Naboo and Baloo are holed up with a mountain of fresh-baked majoun and a copy of Spells Without Spellcasting: A Coping Guide for the Frustrated. Lester Corncrake, what's left of him, has snuck out for some sort of liaison with Tony Harrison while the latter's missus is out of town, something Howard decides not to contemplate lest the screaming horrors prove debilitating. He retires early with a stolen bit of majoun (overcooked, bitter aftertaste) and a copy of Chekhov's short stories, falling asleep with the book still in his hands, and has one bizarre, fleeting dream after another: He's trapped in an insane asylum, he's a priest wandering the hallways of a dilapidated hospital, he's a bank robber, he's a famous surrealist painter, he's a shaman like Naboo, he's dying of cancer and has a wife who keeps him locked in an attic, he's trapped in a roomful of mirrors that grows smaller and narrower until he's squeezed and fighting for breath, he's got fingers turned to whirring blades slicing at his own skin, now his hands are paws covered in filthy verminous fur and he's splashing through brackish puddles in a rubbish-choked alleyway, trying to scream in panic but all that comes out of his mouth is shrill, malevolent howls of laughter--

He wakes with a jolt, heart pounding, and turns his head to the nightstand clock. 3:42 a.m. Dreams, dreams don't mean anything. He rolls on his side, waiting to drift back asleep. As the minutes tick by and he grows ever more tense he gives up, snaps on the light, leafs desultorily through his book, then finally throws a dressing gown over his pajamas and heads downstairs to the shop: A bit of early stock-taking should be soporific enough to do the trick.

The wood of the steps is soothingly cool against his feet, overheated from their entanglement in the blankets. At the foot of the stairs he hears small movements from the other side of the door, faint faraway sounds of music; he feels a momentary surge of irritation, imagining Vince's friends crash-padding in the shop yet again, but it's too quiet to be them and what sort of burglar would spin tunes while he raided the till? He pushes the door open unobtrusively as he can.

The shop is dark save for one large gooseneck lamp, its light pooling over a large wooden table sitting where the toy robot display once stood. Vince is seated before it in a foldout chair, his mirrored costumery lying in a shiny discarded pile on the floor and the hair dye streaks already half washed out from the rain; the sleeves of his silver jumpsuit are rolled past his elbows, he's humming tunelessly along to an MP3 player whose phones are jammed in his ears and all his concentration is focused on the project before him. Howard steps noiselessly closer, and sees at Vince's elbow a pile of Pritt Sticks, Sellotape, paper clips, sticky notes, Artgum erasers, thumbtacks, push pins…just a few more steps confirms it, it's Stationery Village, rising from the ashes. The old stalwarts, the safety pin cottage, the Blu-Tack garden, they're all there rebuilt painstakingly from memory, and there's new touches, ingenious ones, that Howard would never have thought of himself: a paper clip tree with the clips arranged in gracefully cascading rows, like a small metallic weeping willow. Little birds made from index tabs, each one an impossibly tiny work of origami peeping from the tree's shining tiers. A river of old typewriter ribbon winding sinuously behind the Blu-Tack garden, a thumbtack fish leaping from its depths and carved Artgum benches scattered along its banks, and each bit of Blu-Tack itself shaped into an actual flower, no two of them alike.

Vince thinks he's asleep, Vince who hasn't said a single word about Stationery Village since Howard's rage-fueled destruction of it, he'd simply assumed Vince bid the thing good riddance and forgot all about--he needs to retreat back upstairs, before he's spotted. Vince thinks he's asleep. He can't take his eyes off it, everything Vince has added Howard would never have thought of himself. He's coming closer and closer to see it all and Vince is so absorbed he hasn't once looked up, but then Howard's shadow falls over him and Vince raises his head, leaps a good foot in the air and sends his MP3 player and a handful of biros clattering noisily to the floor; he swiftly abandons his chair and positions himself in front of the table, trying to shield what Howard's already seen from view.

"What're you doing here?" Vince demands, rather accusingly. The fallen music player soldiers on, emitting a ghostly-sounding synth beat from beneath the table.

"I couldn't sleep." Howard shifts from foot to foot, hands in his dressing gown pockets. "Was gonna do some stock-taking."

Despite this being nothing but the truth he feels strangely awkward, as though he's actually been sneaking around after Vince all night and had to cobble together a quick excuse. Vince, who seems just as ill at ease, nods reluctantly. Howard tries not to peer over Vince's shoulder.

"So how was the party?" he asks.

"Brilliant." Vince's eyes light up. "Absolute genius. I was the shiniest thing in the room, so much light bouncing off me I accidentally gave Bea B a bit of a seizure--remember her? Beatrice Bennett? Her new collection, the clothes. All the models were transgendered Albanian flamenco dancers, they invented a new zapateado right there on the runway. Couldn't even see their feet, they were moving so fast. Just great clouds of sparks."

"Must've been quite a sight." He does indeed remember Beatrice Bennett, their old Leeds schoolmate turned Camden couturier; very hard indeed to forget beauty that spectacular, and judging by recent photographs she either had a genius Botoxing team or bathed regularly in the blood of Wiltshire virgins. "How were the clothes?"

"Oh, Christ, they were shite, a blind platypus wouldn't wear her tat--but who cares, the sweets tray was amazing. I didn't even know Chupa Chups had an Atmospheric Clouds of Jupiter flavor. You want one?"

Howard shakes his head. Vince reaches behind him on the table, retrieving and unwrapping what looks like a neon-pink boiled sweet from a pile of chocs and lollies, and pops it into his mouth; he keeps folding and unfolding the bit of cellophane, seemingly just for something to do with his hands.

"We've got a gig," Howard tells him. He's been sitting on this news for a couple of days now, intending to reveal it very casually in Naboo's presence next time the little shaman starts up, but something about the soft, crinkling sound of the cellophane wrapper decides him. "Our band."

Vince's eyes widen. The sweet now wedged in his jaw clicks faintly against his teeth. "We do?" His voice is tentative, as if he's afraid Howard's trying to trick him.

"We do, sir."

"Where, though? The Not Fade Away's gone grime and the bloody Velvet Onion--"

"Well, it's not at a club per se." Bugger the fucking Onion, if he wanted to spend the rest of his life begging Bob Fossil for petty favors he'd never have left the Zooniverse at all. "It's at a museum, actually."

"A museum." Vince now looks utterly confused. "So we're gonna lay down beats for a lot of Rembrandts, or--"

"It's a modern art museum," Howard explains patiently. "Tracey Emin, Sarah Sze, Gilbert and George and all that?" Vince shakes his head. "Anyway, it's called the Boîte Blanche Gallery and they've got a performance space and we're playing it, Thursday next. They came after us."

Howard's still rather amazed by that: He'd been walking down the street, just minding his own business, when a quavering, elderly voice behind him suddenly declared Howard Moon! and of course his guts knotted up like macramé because who else but the Spirit of Jazz, student loans and other such horrid freaks of nature ever recognized him on sight? But in fact it was the gallery owner, who had a Savile Row suit, an Einstein-like dandelion puff of gray hair and a gap in his performance roster now it turned out Charlotte Moorman had long since gone and died, no one ever told him these things, could you both possibly be very dear boys and take her slot? Of course you can, can tell just by looking you're a seasoned professional, drop by later and we'll make it official, cheery-bye. Howard barely said a word through the whole encounter, which was good as he was far too shocked too produce very many of them. He smiles at Vince, attempting to indicate this is a very promising development, but it's clear from Vince's skeptical frown that he's simply not buying it.

"So what do a lot of highbrow wankers want with us?" he asks Howard. "They like Beethoven and the Four Tops, old rubbish like that."

"They saw some of our old shows, apparently, they must've liked something." Howard shrugs. "Anyway, a gig's a gig, isn't it?"

Vince crunches down on the sweet. "I don't know," he ventures. He seems, to Howard's amazement, almost afraid to think this might be good.

"A man from Crammed Discs might be there," Howard offers. This isn't, in fact, an outright lie: Someone from a record label could decide to show up, anything's possible. He still hasn't told Vince about the Haabermaaster money, that they don't actually need PieFace or Crammed Discs or anyone else to put a CD out if they really want to. Vince doesn't reply, but Howard can tell he's wavering.

"They want to talk to you about your Charlie books," Howard continues. "The gallery owner's got a whole set of them. The ones you used to put in the cereal boxes, scatter about?"

Vince suddenly looks a bit defensive. "So what's it to them? That policeman that time said it wasn't technically littering, you were there--"

"Vince, they want to talk to you about them because they like them." Why on earth they do is another question entirely, but then Howard's well used to Vince's most random meanderings being received like a resurrected Oscar Wilde's bon mots so no matter. "They might want to put them on display, or something. Who knows?"

Vince's tongue worries a back tooth for several moments, clearly trying to melt a stuck bit of sugar, then Vince reaches for a second sweet and unwraps it. Shimmery orange, this one. "Can I wear that new green jacket, with the sequined insets?"

"Why couldn't you?"

"I don't know. Thought maybe they have a dress code in those places, or something." He rolls the orange sweet in his hand like a marble. "Well, all right then. I suppose."

Not exactly the ringing endorsement Howard had thought fitting, but it'd do. He's suddenly very sleepy again, blinking just to keep his eyes focused. "That's settled, then. I'm going back to bed. I'll leave you to…your stuff."

Vince nods, and somewhat self-consciously retrieves his MP3 player and sits back down in the folding chair. Howard heads for the stairs, then stops in his tracks and turns around.

"It looks beautiful," he tells Vince. "It really does."

Vince considers this, gazing down at the tabletop. His expression when he looks up again is hard to qualify.

"I can't really work with you watching me, yeah?" he tells Howard.

Fair enough. Howard nods. "Good night, then."

"G'night."

As Howard opens the stairway door Vince is already bent back over Stationery Village, twisting a series of pink sticky notes into some long, bulky shape that's familiar but Howard can't quite place. Charlie, he suddenly realizes when he's back upstairs, it's bloody creepy bubblegum Charlie gamboling through the streets terrorizing innocent push pins, probably his own damned fault for mentioning the sticky shitbox in the first place, and the thought makes him laugh out loud as he pulls off his dressing gown and crawls back under the duvet, falling asleep again within seconds.

When he wakes the next morning Vince is snoring softly beside him, stocking-footed but otherwise still dressed; bits of Sellotape and matte paper are stuck in his hair, both his silvery arms and a leg thrown over Howard's body as if trying to shield him from some invisible menace lurking in the air, hovering spider-like on the ceiling. Howard eases away carefully without waking him, opens the shop by himself, offers no complaints when Vince finally arrives for work at the crack of two p.m. Stationery Village now sits beneath a white tarp-like cloth, a hand-lettered CLOSED FOR RENUVASHUNS sign pinned to the top. UNAUTHURISED VISITURRS WILL BE PROSACUTED.

"You're sure I can wear the green jacket," Vince asks Howard, a day or two later.

"I'm sure," Howard promises him.

******

15. You tell yourself you're not my kind
But you don't even know your mind
And you could have a change of heart

A good gig. A really, truly good gig, better than good, one of the best. And another one, and another after that. A real, actual, unambiguously positive review--in a hand-lettered, barely legible student zine, yes, but you've got to take 'em where you find 'em. And another one, in a slightly less slapdash publication, and another after that. And the gallery wanting them back. And others asking them to appear. And for the first time in his life, Howard feels the hit of a drug stronger than any potion Naboo's ever concocted: the vital, instantly addictive electricity of an audience that gets what he and Vince are doing, that believes in it, that understands it perhaps even better than they do themselves. An audience that takes their own energy and chaos and noise and need and feeds it all back to them in a perpetually spiraling current, buoying them up, dragging them back down, sending them spinning far out and floating until there's no barrier at all between himself and Vince and everyone else watching, listening, frowning, nodding, laughing, applauding, needing to see what happens next. Just one night like that, just the one, would have been more than he'd ever hoped for. But unbelievably, it happens again, and again.

Vince, at first, simply refuses to believe it--this isn't his scene, these aren't his people, it all must be some sort of trick. "Right, then," he mutters reproachfully to Howard after the second gig, when their keyboards short out right in the middle of the set and they devolve into nervous, petty onstage squabbling for a good ten minutes, "that'll be the end of all that, you and your bloody Gauguins. You just watch."

The audience loves the bickering, seems to think it's all part of the act. So does the London Chronicle. Vince instantly forgets all his doubts, in fact seems to forget he was the one who had to be coaxed into all this in the first place. You've got to be a bit more adventurous, Howard, start to branch out--can't always be angling for the same old club gigs, now can you, a man of your age? Actually needles him about it onstage, the ungrateful little shit, whenever he gets bored with shape-pulling, verbal grapefruits lobbed at Howard's guitar strings. Howard fires back with the most embarrassing anecdotes he can remember from their youth, fabricates a few more right there in the moment for good measure. Vince cuts him off with a banshee screech of nonsensical singing; Howard chases him round and round the stage with frenzied electric-bass chords, the sounds of raindrops' and tree branches' argumentative screams reduced to insane harpsichord arpeggios until they, and the audience, are drained and exhausted. (Afterwards, back at the flat, ears ringing, they're too knackered for actual sex but are still so worked up they grab at each other until they fall ignominiously asleep in mid-grope; they wake up on the sofa with a blanket draped over them, Naboo sitting in an armchair sipping coffee and looking righteously disgusted.) The Stage thinks they're something unique and new. All they're doing is being what they've always been.

Where, in fact, does the act end and their real lives begin? Even Howard's occasionally pressed to remember. Their names are suddenly cropping up--fleetingly, but regularly--in some of Vince's art magazines, the ones he previously only collected for the photographs. Arcane academic journals are showing an interest. There are theater directors, arts festival organizers, who want to talk to them. A performance artist whose name even Vince instantly recognizes, if only because that incident with the human fetus, the bottle of Branston Pickle and the Pont d'Avignon made international headlines, is claiming to have discovered them. Howard knows what he should feel--triumph, vindication, pig-in-shit glee that it's all (apparently) real, it's all finally (possibly) happening, for both of them--but what he does feel is something more akin to an intoxicating breed of terror. These aren't his people, this isn't his scene--but no, he's wrong about that, they are, it is, isn't he an artist, a poet, a man of destiny, hasn't he always known he had a hidden thwarted genius that would, someday, be gloriously revealed to the light? It's just…it's just that as much as he'd rather saw off a hand than ever admit it to anyone, this is all scaring him a bit shitless. The only thing that assuages it is his occasional suspicion that Vince, beneath all the calculated sangfroid, sometimes feels exactly the same way.

"You know, you haven't looked me in the eye once during this whole conversation," declares a young American woman from something called the Performance Arts Journal, quite cheerfully, at the reception following their first Schneemann Gallery gig. "Are you making a satirical commentary on the assaultive hegemony of the male gaze even in supposedly genderqueered socio-visual discursive presentations? Such as your own, for instance?"

"Er…"

"Do you acknowledge the clearly problematic racial undercurrents of your fetishization of African-American cultural tropes and your partner's romanticized Kiplingesque fabulism?" She leans in and stares at him over the tops of her spectacles, her headful of shocking pink braids falling over her face, her lips twitching like they're both sharing a glorious joke. "Are you familiar with the work of Third World Bunfight, for instance, and all the attendant criticism they've attracted? Or the controversy over the Wooster Group's Route 1 and 9?"

"Uh…"

"For that matter, isn't 'outsider art' a troublingly reductive category in and of itself?"

"Well…it…I…"

"The feminine in your work is almost inevitably a grotesque and ultimately unknowable force, if not an entirely absent one. Why do you suppose that is?"

"Uh…well, the thing is…y'see…"

"Why satsumas? Wouldn't damson plums be far more socio-aesthetically apropos?"

Howard looks rather desperately around the room, wondering if perhaps one of the canapé-hustling waitstaff can rescue him. Vince is off in the corner, surrounded by a small gaggle of art students whom he's graciously allowing to touch his hair; he catches Howard's eye, glances at Howard's conversational partner, gives him a look that clearly says Better you than me and deftly shakes his head free of a shaven-headed boy's lingering hand. The pink-haired woman notices the direction of Howard's gaze.

"So how did you two meet, anyway?" she persists. "Was it in India? Or the south of France? Or one of the clubs around here? What sorts of projects were you working on, before you both began collaborating?"

Vince is leaning against the wall now, arms folded, telling some story that makes the art students finally lower their wandering fingers and laugh and listen and hang on every word; just like when Howard first met him, just like in the schoolyard in Leeds, eons ago. What was his life even like, before Vince? What does he, Howard, actually have or want to tell anyone about himself, from that increasingly hazy time? He honestly can't remember. Something about some confusion with a pencil case.

"We met over an array of soft cheeses," he finally tells the woman. Something about this answer seems to delight her, and he sees her scribbling it down eagerly in a small black notebook as he finally extricates himself with a polite goodbye.

"…and so I was raised in the jungles of India by Bryan Ferry," he hears Vince telling the students, as he approaches through the crowd. "Ashapurna, the old vulture, and Poulomi, the she-wolf, they were always fighting over me--"

"Tell us about the crimp-off again," one of them demands. "I was gonna go to the Onion that night but I missed it, I've been kicking myself ever since--"

"Well, it was actually Brian who saw them first," declares a booming, commanding basso profundo drawl from ten feet away, drowning out the art students: It's the internationally famous performance artist declaiming to a dozen-some admirers, his or her face an otherworldly mask of fluorescent makeup, wearing a stiff black crinoline and World War I German pith helmet and nodding toward a tall, solemn dark-haired man he, or she, is leading by a leash. "The legendary Lunatic Fringe gig. I was appearing that night in the Conceptual Cheese-Off at Studio Xie. I won, of course. I told Brian, if you see anything happening around this shithole of a city that even vaguely resembles actual creativity tell me about it immediately, but frankly I thought it all sounded like so much warmed-over John Zorn bullshit until I saw them for myself and I said to them, backstage, I said--"

"You've never said a word to us in your life, you Crayola-sticked chancer."

Howard blurts it out without thinking, every head swiveling round to gape at the rank interloper; Vince, too, has abandoned the students, grinning in anticipation of a genuine knockdown dragout art-fight. Howard stands his ground. "I remember you from the Squid And Mashed Potato," he continues stubbornly, "with about four inches less face-paint--"

"--and I said to them," continues the internationally famous performance artist, as if no one has spoken, "I said, 'Maybe nobody else can really appreciate your work, but I--' "

"I remember you too," Vince concurs, and starts to snicker. "I'd recognize those big ugly bulging frog's-eyes anywhere. You were utterly shitfaced, you heckled us the entire show--"

The internationally famous performance artist turns a jaundiced and authentically bulging eye on Vince, grinning ominously from lips painted an iridescent, amphibian green. "--and I said to them--"

"You threw a dead whelk at Howard and tried to set his hat on fire, the bouncers had to drag you outside, and then you started choking on your own sick and they had to call in the--"

"--and I SAID TO THEM, if you don't stop FUCKING INTERRUPTING ME WHEN I'M SPEAKING TO MY PUBLIC--"

Almost wheezing with laughter, Vince shakes his head and walks away, ignoring the students' cries of disappointment. "But what happened after Round Eleven?" one of them pleads. "You can't just leave it at--"

"You've had your fill," Vince offers serenely over his shoulder. "I've got things to do."

The internationally famous performance artist gives them a smile seething with such crocodile-toothed poison that Howard takes an instinctive, nervous step backwards. The man on the leash looks mournfully reproving. The pink-haired American woman is bent nearly double over her notebook, scribbling frantically.

"Christ," Vince mutters, still laughing, as he deftly grabs another shrimp toast from a passing waiter's tray. He's glowing from all the attention, it's meat and drink to him like mere hors d'oeuvres never could be, but he's got an enervated, almost glassy-eyed look that tells Howard they're both reaching their limit. "And you think my friends are shallow idiots?"

"Those are the vagaries of fame, sir," Howard declares, rather blithely now the moment of true danger has passed, biting into a bacon roll. "You get your groupies, your hangers-on, your I-knew-them-whens coming out of every crack and crevice in the woodwork--"

"I know all about fame," Vince reminds him, sounding a bit annoyed. "I know a lot more than you do. I'm Vince Noir, rock and roll star, maybe you're bowled over by Crunchy Frog-Tits knowing your name but I'm hardly--so what's it mean if you're a 'bold and subversive rising force in the neo-naïf school of Art Brut, albeit one demonstrating consciously transgressive but still disturbing hints of a nascent neo-imperialism'? Because that carnation-headed Yank who was flirting with you, she says that's what we are."

Note to self: Get that lending library copy of Critical Art Studies for Beginners, look up "arbaru." "It means she loved it when you forgot the lyrics and began singing bits of 'Monkeys Stole My Face' in the wrong key instead," he assures Vince, who beams and nods like he was certain that was it all along. "And what d'you mean, flirting with me? You didn't hear her, she raked me over the coals for a good twenty minutes."

Vince just shakes his head, giving Howard the old, bemused look indicating he'll never, ever catch on. "Could we go home now?" he asks.

"Please."

They drive back to the flat in silence. Vince stares out the passenger window, clearly chuffed at the evening's events--it would be hard not to be--but he also seems preoccupied, somehow, with a look on his face that, were it anyone but Vince, Howard would take to mean he was lost in thought. He's been like that rather a lot, lately. He almost never goes out anymore unless it's to the Indian takeaway or another gig, Stationery Village II is still sitting beneath its white "renuvashuns" tarp, his wardrobe's been looking distinctly less sparkly and he's actually been spotted wearing the same outfit, in public, twice in one week. He doesn't seem the least depressed, though, just…Howard can't put his finger on it. Perhaps he's just tired, this has all been rather a bit of a whirlwind. But hasn't Vince always lived to reap whirlwinds?

The silence, companionable enough in its own way, continues as they park the van and head back upstairs; the flat's dark and quiet, Naboo and Bollo either still out or asleep. Howard wanders into the kitchen, decides against tea and heads toward his room, Vince following close behind. Howard's halfway down the hall when Vince suddenly grabs Howard's shoulders, pushes him against the wall and kisses him hard enough that Howard's gasping for breath, wrapping a leg around Vince's body to steady him as Vince's hands wander beneath his shirt and trousers. Vince grabs at Howard's arse as feverishly as if he's wanted to all night; he bites at Howard's opened mouth, pushes against his body so the perfectly judged friction of thrusting hips and the palm cradling his cock makes Howard squeeze his eyes shut, tilt his head back and now Vince's lips are all over his neck--

"All right, then," Howard manages, pulling away with a shaky laugh, trying to keep his voice low because he can hear Bollo snoring like an angry elephant, Naboo murmuring incantations in his stoned sleep. "Just wait till we get to my--"

"No," Vince says curtly, and before Howard can stop him he's unfastened Howard's trousers, dropped with no ceremony to his knees and Christ, God, Christ, Vince is sucking him off with almost cruel skill, every trick of tongue and fingers and barely grazing teeth he's learned can make Howard beg for more. Not here, he keeps whispering or trying to but his voice is seizing up on him and Vince isn't listening to a word, not out here, they're just outside Naboo's door and the walls are cardstock, any moment now he or the bloody ape will wake up, walk out, find them like this, and that very real, hideously embarrassing possibility sends a renewed shudder of excitement down Howard's back. He's choking back moans and sinking hands into Vince's hair and tugging hard and Vince is making sounds like that's exactly what he wants, like he's been waiting to do just this all night--

From behind Naboo's door there's abrupt silence, then the sound of bedsprings creaking as someone turns over or gets up, and a sudden real panic makes Howard push Vince away. Face flushed and eyes unrepentant, Vince rises to his feet without the least look of urgency, grabs Howard's elbow and yanks him toward his room, right next to Naboo's. Howard tries to pull the other way, toward his own room, Vince's room is far too close to everyone else's and Howard knows he can't be quiet tonight, but Vince has an iron grip on his arm and he's stumbling over the trousers pinioning his knees, too late now, if Naboo weren't already awake there's no way he could sleep through Vince slamming the door like that behind them both.

Vince pushes Howard onto his bed and pulls the offending trousers down and off, he's climbing over Howard's body purposeful and unsmiling, and with patient, methodical skill he does things with and for and to Howard that make him shout Vince's name out loud, he doesn't care anymore, let Naboo bugger off to another shaman stag weekend if his ears are that delicate, Vince won't stop and Howard won't let him. Later on, much later, the only words Howard has are the ones he knows he'll regret saying aloud, he's already heard Vince dissolve into laughter once before over those exact words, ages ago, so he says nothing at all as they both fall asleep.

Howard wakes up alone, smells breakfast cooking as he pulls on last night's bedraggled clothes and pads down the hallway. It's nearly ten o'clock. The kitchen table's strewn with sickly-sweet detritus--the container of banana Nesquik, a half-eaten box of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs--but there's tea on the boil, eggs and sausages sizzling. Vince, still seeming preoccupied, even oddly troubled, glances up as Howard walks in and then turns his attention back to the pan.

"Good morning," says Howard.

"All right," Vince nods.

He's not looking Howard in the eye. He wasn't having any trouble doing that last night, at least not that Howard recalls. He pushes the cereal box and several copies of Stiletto, Raw Vision and Artforum out of his way as he sits down, trying and failing to dismiss a sudden feeling of unease.

"I can finish those," he offers, more to fill the strange, increasingly uncomfortable silence than anything else.

"It's not hard as all that."

There's an edge to Vince's voice but he doesn't seem irritated; his eyes are fixed on the eggs as if they might burst into flames at any moment, his shoulders tense beneath the old Johnny Rotten T-shirt and his teeth catching at his lower lip. Howard sits there, drumming his fingers against the tabletop, and waits for whatever it is he's somehow certain Vince is about to say.

Nothing. The frying sausages apparently make for endlessly fascinating company.

"The trees outside got a bit chatty last night," Howard finally says, sounding as nervous as he suddenly feels. "I wrote down bits for another song but I don't remember all of it, I fell asleep before--"

"Howard." Vince's teeth worry his lip hard enough to bleed. "Look, I just can't do this anymore, all right?"

"The band?" Howard shakes his head in confusion. "What are you talking about? I know that party was berk heaven but you heard the audience, we were on fire, they--"

"You and me, I mean." Vince's words come out in a rush, though his voice is strangely calm. "I can't do this anymore. It's just, I can't. Sorry, Howard. It's gotta stop."

All the breath goes out of Howard's body, as if he's just been knifed in the gut with lethal, brute-force accuracy. Which is, in fact, exactly what's happened.

"All right, then," he manages, after a few moments. "If that's what you want."

Of course it's not all right, it's not ever going to be any measurable degree of all right ever again, but this is what one's expected to say in these circumstances and so he's said it and he'll put it to the side, as much as he can possibly manage to, because otherwise he won't get through the next five minutes, much less the rest of his life. They call him The Compartmentalizer. One thing, at least, hasn't changed: Vince gets what he wants, Howard does not. That's very nearly reassuring, by some standard of reassuring that he would like to see torn slowly to pieces by rabid, starving timber wolves.

Vince slides Howard a plate of eggs, sausages, fried bread, mushrooms, still not looking him in the eye. Everything is cooked perfectly. The thought of eating a single bite of it makes Howard feel instantly sick.

"Suppose I'll go take shop stock today," he says. It's hard to speak as well as breathe right now, there's something hard and suffocating lodged in his chest and throat and it's a concerted effort to push the words out of his mouth. "Keep meaning to. Haven't in weeks."

"We've been busy," Vince says. He sits down across from Howard, spearing an egg yolk with a fork, just staring dispassionately at the leaking stream of yellow.

"No excuse." The hard suffocating thing is expanding inside him by the second, taking up more and more of the space where his heart and lungs are meant to be, and words are dissolving with dangerous speed. "Important part of retail. Got to make the time."

Well, Vince, go on, aren't you hungry? One petty chore already accomplished for the day, so, eat. Enjoy yourself. Vince stares down at his plate, then at Howard.

"That never makes any sense, when you say that." If Vince is happy, relieved this particular hosepipe-beanbag burden is off his shoulders, he doesn't sound it, doesn't look it; there's a shaky quaver in his voice, his eyes on Howard's are stricken. His lower lip is nearly raw. "You can't make time like running up a pair of trousers, go to the Time Bank and say, 'Oi, can you loan me another six hours--' "

"Part of retail." Howard gazes at the mug of tea sitting beside his plate. "Got to make the time." Three bags of tea per cup at least, milk, cardamom, syrup, all of it, perfectly brewed. Just look at it sitting there. "Need to take care of all that before--"

"I love you," Vince interrupts him, with a supreme matter-of-factness, and gives his egg another stab of the tines.

Howard sits there, looking from his fry-up to Vince's face and then back again. I love you. This has to stop. I love you. I can't do this. I love you. Sorry, Howard, sorry, sorry, so very sorry. The new stoniness inside him shifts to one side, graciously allowing a bit more air to escape, and he starts chortling and then outright laughing. He can't help himself.

Vince puts down his fork, studying Howard with widening eyes. "Are you laughing?" he demands, in utter disbelief.

"Oh, yes, sir," Howard replies, now almost grinning. "I am."

Vince shakes his head, trying and clearly failing to fathom how this could be happening. "I just told you I loved you."

"I heard you, yes."

Vince swallows audibly. "I meant it."

Howard shrugs, tapping a nail thoughtfully at the edge of his spoon. "Which signifies fuck-all, apparently, since you can't do this anymore."

"Howard--"

"Right, let me guess, you love me but you're not in love with me, is that--"

"That's not what I meant." Vince couldn't even look at Howard before and now he can't take his eyes off him, a field mouse fixated on a snake, a climber feeling the rock-face beneath his feet start crumbling away. "I didn't, that's really not what I meant, all right? Just forget what I said before, it wasn't--"

"I'm not forgetting anything." It actually hurts physically to speak, his chest's so tight and burning and his throat's squeezed in a great powerful fist, reducing his voice to a murmur of hoarse fury. "You can't anymore, right? It's all got to stop, right?"

"I didn't, you're not--I meant cooking!" Vince motions toward the plates, the frying pan, the electric kettle with a desperate, emphatic sweep of his arm. "That's all I meant, right? You were right, that's all I meant, I should've let you finish doing it after all 'cos it's bloody boring, this is, all the fuss and mucking about and then the washing-up when you could just go out and get a takeaway curry, some Hula Hoops--"

"No, you didn't," Howard says, and he's laughing again from between painfully clenched teeth. "That isn't what you meant at all. We both know bloody well what you meant and I know piss from rain so don't try and lie about it now, Vince, understand? Just do me that one last courtesy, if you can possibly find it in what passes for your fucking heart!"

He can hear his own breathing in the ensuing silence, feel the blood pounding in his ears. He sits there waiting for the protests, the pleas of innocence, the self-righteous declarations about how Howard just doesn't understand him at all, doesn't understand anything, never has, but then that's only the honest truth now isn't it? C'mon, Vince, give me something here. The old shit-eating grin. Nothing? Not even that? Superior little smirk, then, eyes half-closed like a cat in the sodding cream. Come on. Make me proud. We both know you can do it.

Nothing. Vince sits before his plateful of food, forearms resting on the table, hands clasped so the thin rubber bangle bracelets crowding each wrist look like cuffs. Monotonous black, all of them, he's forgotten his own basic rules of accessorizing. He has a look on his face that seems so strange and incongruous, so entirely foreign to everything about him, that it takes Howard several moments to place it. It's embarrassment. And shame.

"Fine," Vince says, subdued and hesitant. "I got…confused, or something, all right, or, scared of…things, being like this, and I thought I did mean it, just for a minute, so I said it out loud, and then as soon as I did it sounded horrible and stupid and completely wrong and I couldn't believe I'd said it, and it just hung in the air like a bad smell--but you agreed with me, yeah?" His voice is getting bolder, hinting at the beginnings of anger. "You just sat there and said all right like you'd been waiting all this time to hear it, so you could say all right then, yeah, whatever, I've gotta go look after the shop, and that made me feel sick, so I took it back. I didn't mean it. I took it back. And when I did, you laughed." His fingers are curled round each other, sliding back and forth like he's scrubbing his hands, the bracelets squeaking faintly together. "So what am I supposed to think now?"

"What are you supposed to think?" Howard clutches the spoon, tapping its handle hard and fast on the table. "What am I supposed to think? You drop this on me out of nowhere, no warning, nothing, and now somehow it's all my fault and oh, never mind, forget you said anything, you just got 'confused'--"

"It's the truth! I did!" Vince clenches his hands more tightly. "I'm a simple man, I get confused a lot! I behaved like a fucking git, all right, I know that, but you didn't have to go and agree with me, did you?"

"There's no point in making a fuss when--"

"When what? When something important's happening?" Vince's face is a thundercloud, he looks ready to spring from his seat. "Or isn't any of this important?"

"Don't be stupid," Howard snarls, sending the spoon clattering halfway across the table. "It's the most important thing in my life and it always has been and you know it, you little shit, you revel in playing these little mind-games so you can keep me on the rails and watch me dance like a puppet, anything for a laugh at that great shambling pathetic pillock Howard Moon, over and over and fucking over again--"

"It's not a game!" Vince shouts. "It's not! I panicked, all right? I'm sorry! I didn't mean it! I won't do it again!"

"Don't do this to me, Vince. I'm not joking, I really can't take it, so please just make up your mind one way or the other--"

"I have made up my mind! I keep telling you that, don't I? Christ, and you think I'm the thick one!" Vince sinks fingers into his hair, yanking hard at the strands. "I'm telling you the truth, all right? I really am, I swear."

"Was this a test?" Howard demands. "Was this some kind of bloody test just to see how I'd react when you--"

"No! It wasn't! I just--"

"What am I supposed to do, Vince?" Howard's shouting back now, his chest hurts from it, his throat hurts, he can't stop himself for trying. "Really, seriously, what do you want from me? How pathetic do I have to get? You want me to beg? You want me to get on my knees and say, please, don't go, I'll do anything, I need you, you're everything I've got, I can't imagine life without you, it'd kill me if you go? Is that what you--" He breaks off, gulping for breath. "Well, let me tell you right now, sir, you'll be waiting until the moon turns green and drops into the Sea of Lugarumbi because Howard Moon is his own man, he doesn't beg for anything from anyone, for any bloody reason. No way, no how."

Vince contemplates this in silence.

"So what if I did that?" he finally replies.

"What d'you mean."

"What if I said…you know. All of that." Vince taps a foot against the table leg. "Instead of you. Would you stop being so angry? All the time?"

"I'm not angry," Howard mutters. And he's not, he absolutely is not. Enraged, bewildered, sorrowful, mortified, utterly confused, yes, give you all that. But not angry.

"You're the angriest person I've ever met, Howard. In all my life." Vince digs his nails into the table's soft, marked-up wood, leaving small pale half-crescents behind. "And I mean, there's field mice who're angrier than I am, so what does that tell you?"

"So you don't want me anymore because I'm 'too angry.' All right, well, let's keep changing the reasons, why don't we, this is an amusing new game--"

"I didn't say that! I do want--" Vince sighs in exasperation, sinks his nails in deeper. "If I did say all that, all that begging stuff? And if I meant it. If I really meant it, if I just hadn't said it before because it's embarrassing, you'd feel like complete shit if the other person didn't care or laughed at you or…" He trails off, seeming a bit flustered. "If I said it. Like that. Would you not be so angry anymore?"

Howard ponders the question, as seriously as it was asked. Because absurd as it was, it was asked seriously. He has no doubt of that.

"I don't want begging," he says. "I don't want pleading, or groveling, or anyone making a fool of themselves for me. I just want…to know it's there, and it's not going away. All right?"

Vince fiddles with the thin black bracelets, stretching the rubber with his fingertip, releasing it again. "Well, you're not gonna run off somewhere, right?"

Howard blinks in confusion. "Where exactly am I gonna run off to, Vince?"

"How would I know?" Vince stares at him irritably, like this is a completely insane inquiry. "Where do they play jazz now, anyway? Some bistro or, science fair, somewhere in…Marseilles. Or wherever." He snaps at another bracelet. "I never know when you're gonna get bored and go off and--"

"When have I ever said I was bored with you?" Howard grabs the mug and forces down several swallows of tea; it's cold and the rice syrup's settled on the bottom like sugary swamp mud, but he needs its sustenance against the sheer absurdity of this conversation. "It's the whole opposite problem, isn't it, the way you whip about from one thing to the other like a flamingo feather in a typhoon, I can't predict from one second to the next what you're gonna--"

"Everyone gets bored, Howard." Vince pulls at a bracelet, keeps pulling, like he's trying to break it in two. "Those people last night? They're gonna get bored, just like they're getting bored with Frog-Face, they'll be that bored with us one of these days--"

"So?" Howard demands. "When they're bored there'll be something else, we'll do something else. We span the genres, if they can't handle real innovative thinking that's their problem. Don't you do that all the time? You get bored with neo-Goth, you become a steampunk raver or a drum-and-bass Romantic or whatever else, frankly you're a little too quixotic with all these to-ings and fro-ings from here to there and…"

It shouldn't have taken him this long to catch on, it never should have. But it has. Because he's just that much of a fucking fool.

"You're bored with me," Howard says wearily. "That's what this is really all about, isn't it." No answer. "Well? Are you bored with me? Is that it?"

Vince releases the bracelets, doesn't flinch as they strike the skin of his wrist.

"That's the thing," he says, scratching at his scalp. "That's what I keep coming back to, see. I mean, you're boring, Howard. You're so, just, completely utterly boring, it's like you've got some sort of mutated super-boringness gene or something, you're the most boring person I've ever met--"

"Yeah, you know, I just had a feeling. And thank you, Vince, for such a heartfelt response and for deigning to put up with me for so long, I truly appreciate the hell you've put yourself--"

Vince slams a fist down on the table. "Christ on a bike, would you shut your great flapping Yorkshire gob for just one fucking second and let me finish?"

"Vince, it's a simple question even for you, are you bored with me. Yes, or no."

"Howard, that's what I'm trying to--"

"Yes. Or no."

Vince lets out the martyred sigh of one destined to be persecuted and misunderstood. Then he shakes his head, emphatically, and leans forward in his chair.

"No," he says. "I'm not bored. That's what I'm saying, Howard. You're boring, you can't exactly help it, it's how you are--but even though you're so boring, and pretty much everything you like is boring, and everyone else sees you're boring? Even with all that? I've never been bored of you." His fork dances indiscriminately over the plate, spearing a mushroom, a tomato slice, then he sets it down again. "And I don't feel like I ever could be. That's the thing. And I've been trying to figure all that out, I mean, really trying. But I can't. I don't understand it."

Bits of the stony monstrosity lodged in Howard's chest are breaking off, slowly, crumbling into a fine powder; it leaves a nasty, metallic aftertaste in his mouth, but at least he can breathe again. Vince frowns, clearly worried by Howard's silence.

"Are you bored, then?" he asks. "With me?"

Howard shakes his head.

"So you're not leaving, then."

"No," Howard says. "I'm not."

"Did I scare you?"

If this has all been a big game, Howard thinks, if you're enjoying this, I really will kill you, I will put my hands around your skinny neck and not stop throttling until I hear something snap. Vince gazes back at him like he knows exactly what Howard's thinking, like he knows and it doesn't frighten him. It's not defiance, though, that Howard sees in his eyes. It's remorse.

"Did I scare you?" Vince repeats. Perfectly calm, like he's ready to stand up and take his lumps, to be hit for what he's done. To be hurt.

The smell of congealing grease is making Howard nauseous.

"You pulled the rug out from under me," he says. "You fucking terrified me. If you really want to know."

"I didn't mean it," Vince insists. Pleads. "I didn't."

Howard nods. "Fine. I believe you." He's smiling, for some reason, he's very far indeed from feeling any sort of humor but he just can't seem to stop himself. "But you know what, I meant what I said. That's the thing, Vince, y'see, I'm a man of my word. I'm not like some people, I don't say one thing and then veer off in the opposite direction and then come zooming back again and make them think, the thing is, I always know--what I--"

Words aren't working. They might not ever again. He pushes the plate away and puts his head in his hands.

Chair legs scrape against the floor, footsteps approach him and then Vince's fingers are in his hair, twining around the strands, releasing, taking hold again. Cautious, almost timid. Howard thinks about Vince's hands trembling, that day facing down Hollsworth, the first day at the zoo. How in school he'd snatch up the sandwiches Howard made him, devour them like they might be all he had all day. How he clutched the bedpost during that horrible fight they had over Bollo's posters, standing there white-knuckling it like it was all that kept him upright. Gripping, scratching, stroking, running over Howard's body in bed like he really didn't want anyone else. Vince's hand slows and stops. Howard keeps his head down.

"You look upset," Vince remarks.

"You are lightning-swift on the uptake today, little man."

"I mean, I'm the one who nearly fucked everything in the ear just now, yeah? Not you. So calm down." His other hand rubs at Howard's shoulder blade, a futile inroad against the perpetual knotted-up tension. "But you meant it. Before."

"Yes. I said I was a man of my word, I am a man of my word. And those were my words."

"About this being the most important thing in--"

"Yes, all right? Yes. Yes! Is it fucking penetrating your thick little skull at all? I meant it!" Howard sits up again, shaking off Vince's touch. "Now can we please just pretend the last twenty minutes never happened so I can fool myself into thinking I've got some dignity left? Would that be all right with you, or is there some new hoop I've got to jump through before--"

"I was just asking," Vince notes softly.

He starts rubbing Howard's neck again. Howard doesn't pull free.

"I feel sick sometimes thinking you're gonna leave," Vince says. Entirely matter-of-fact, again. "I don't like it."

"I just told you about eight times, I'm not leaving--"

"But people do." Vince hesitates. "You know that."

Howard turns to him. "So what, you got all worked up thinking I'd do that and decided to try and hoist me by my own petard? Is that it?"

Vince doesn't answer. He has the look of a child who's entangled himself in an elaborate, conscience-battering web of lies, and is relieved he's finally been caught. He takes Howard's hand, tentative, ready to be pushed away, and after a moment Howard twines his fingers around Vince's.

"I'm not leaving," Howard says. "I'm never leaving."

"You left school," Vince points out. "You left Leeds."

"I came back for you."

"You left to go with the bin men."

"I came back when you went looking for me."

"You went off with that Harbormaster, your precious film genius, you said you were leaving forever--"

"But I didn't." Howard releases Vince's hand. "And if I had, I would have sent for you--"

"I don't want to be sent for." Vince's voice is sharp, contentious. "I want to be along with. I don't want you to come back, I want you to stay. Or both of us to go. Like, at the same time. Not you just running off whenever you decide to and then later on, whenever you remember it, some big afterthought, oh, right, him--"

"That's not how it--"

"Yeah, it was. Even if you didn't know it." Vince glares at Howard. "That's exactly how it was."

He takes Howard's hand again, actually grabbing it, like some bit of personal property he caught Howard nicking from his pockets. Howard tries to draw his hand back. Vince grabs harder.

"I want you to stay," Vince repeats stubbornly. "Or both of us to go."

Howard stares down at his hand, wedged firmly against Vince's. Then he nods. Vince lets go, leaning against the tabletop next to him.

"Don't hate me," Vince says quietly.

"I can't hate you," Howard replies. "Even if I tried. It's not possible." That's the truth. That's his curse. Though as curses go, it's at least one up on killing your father and marrying your mother.

Vince looks skeptical.

Howard reaches out an arm, gently tugs Vince toward him. He's got him on his lap now and Vince is pressing his forehead into Howard's shoulder as if he's afraid of what he's nearly done, as if he's only just now realized the damage they can both do each other. Howard puts his nose to Vince's hair and smells faint traces of sweat, mint styling gel, burnt egg yolk, remnants of last night's thick clouds of cigarette smoke, the skin beneath.

Vince raises his head and looks into Howard's eyes, and Howard draws in a breath because Vince looks so horribly, unshakably sad. He remembers all the times Vince followed him around the zoo like he, Howard, actually knew what he was doing. Every time he turned from someone prettier, younger, richer, more famous, more connected, more fawned-over to talk to Howard instead. Every time he ever asked Howard, it's gonna be all right, yeah? As if, should Howard say it would be all right, then Vince could somehow really trust it was. Every time he ever demanded, wished, entreated, not to have to worry over Howard. You're always sad. I think things should be happy all the time, so no one's ever sad. Every time he ever saved Howard's bacon or his arse or even, very occasionally, his sanity and good cheer. How long has he, Howard, loved Vince while simply refusing to see or hear him at all, taking him to furious task over and over again for being so self-involved, unfeeling, oblivious? You do make me happy, Howard. You'd rather talk to a piece of rotten fruit than to me. He can hear the whole bloody universe talking to and at and past him, at least in fits and starts. He might try, once and again, to listen for the sound of Vince's voice as well.

He touches Vince on the cheek. "All right, then?" he asks. As much a wish, an entreaty, as anything else.

Vince glances down at Howard's fingertips grazing his face; when he looks up again he's more like his old self, though his eyes are peculiarly shiny and wet.

"Yeah," he tells Howard, and smiles at him for the first time since last night's party.

I'm like a beach ball, there's nothing inside me. Bollocks, sir, great hairy swinging swollen bollocks. Simple isn't hollow. Never has been.

Vince turns and glances at the uneaten fry-ups, the tea gone cold. "That leftover garlic naan?" he asks.

"Fine by me."

As they're tearing off chunks of bread and methodically smearing them with mango chutney, the breakfast dishes relegated to the countertop, Vince suddenly looks up, startled, in mid-bite. "Hang on," he says, cramming the rest of the bread in his mouth and quickly chewing, "I wanted to show you, I keep forgetting. C'mon."

Somewhat reluctantly, Howard abandons the chutney jar and lets Vince lead him to the sofa. Wiping his hands on his pajama bottoms, Vince reaches into a cabinet and, after some rummaging, brings out an old cigar box; he sits down next to Howard, opening the box to display its contents.

"Well?" he asks.

Howard smiles. "That's not bad."

"Careful," Vince warns, as Howard starts to reach into the box. "The glue's not entirely dry yet."

Using the tips of his fingers Vince delicately lifts out the two miniature figures, placing them in Howard's palm. "I used bent paper clips and the inside bits of old biros for the skeletons," he explains, "then Blu-Tack and sticky note paper on top of that." He taps very lightly at the Howard figure. "Took ages to cut out all the little paper bits, to make the shirt--you'd think they'd already have paisley or tiki patterned notes, not all the boring solid colors, but I had to start from scratch."

"It looks good," Howard says. Better than good. The figure's little Blu-Tack head isn't just a blank pink-markered balloon, it's got an actual sculpted face; rather too much nose and too little moustache, but still, overall, a fine effort. There's a tiny paper trilby hat as well, sitting on dark wispy hair made from what looks like pencil shavings. "So what's his job in Stationery Village?"

"He's gonna sit on one of the Artgum benches and play jazz. He's got a saxophone I made from pen nibs, but it's not finished yet. I had to put it aside for a while 'cos getting my hair right"--he nods toward the Vince figure--"was a complete bitch. Took me forever."

Doesn't it always. Shredded bits of typewriter ribbon, the hair looks to be, painstakingly layered and lovingly root-boosted, right down to the minute cheeky fringe. There's a fluttering scarf also of typing ribbon, red instead of black, and impossibly small knotted rubber-band bangles on its wrist. "How'd you get his drainpipes so shiny?"

Vince gives him an incredulous look. "Metallic gel pen. Where've you been, big Paladin of the Paper Clips, that you never heard of Pentel Sunbursts?" He fluffs up the figure's hair a bit. "He had a cape from old stationery, but it looked stupid. Not half mod enough. He's King of the Mods, you know."

Of course he is. Howard laughs. "And Lord Mayor of Stationery Village, right?"

Vince shakes his head. "Too much responsibility. He's a gentleman of leisure. He gives all the good parties. He's gonna hang about Safety Pin Cottage, that's the big electro club in town, yeah, and see and be seen."

"And the jazz club?" Howard demands.

Vince looks rather triumphant, as if he had anticipated just this objection. "There's a big outdoor jazz festival. In the Biro Field."

Howard thinks this over. "That's quite nice, actually."

Vince shrugs, though he looks pleased with himself. "Yeah, well. Never would have heard the end of it otherwise."

Howard places the figures delicately back inside the cigar box, first one, then the other, closing the box and placing it on the side table. Vince slides closer to him on the sofa and puts arms around Howard's neck; Howard's just pressed his lips to Vince's when Naboo walks in, punchy, unshaven and distinctly out of sorts, with Bollo following sleepily behind him.

"Fucking hell, not again," Naboo groans, scowling at them both and slamming his water pipe down so hard the cigar box jumps. "It's not enough you two and your mating calls wake me up every bloody night, now I can't even get wasted in my own sitting room without stumbling over the beast with two batty creases in all corners of the--"

"Get stuffed, Naboo," Vince says calmly, his arm now settled against Howard's shoulders. "And by the way, you'd get a lot more sleep at night if you tried staying in your own room instead of sitting outside ours with your ear pressed to the door, yeah? I hear you skulking about breathing funny out there, it's well disgusting."

"Is that what that sound was?" Howard asks, unruffled, raising an eyebrow. He runs a hand beneath Vince's T-shirt, resting his palm on the bare skin beneath. "And those funny rustling noises in the hallway, should've known it wasn't mice after all--"

"You've heard nothing," Naboo retorts, flushing beetroot and glowering at Howard. "None of us have, a man can't hear himself think over you bellowing like a demented water buffalo." Bollo grunts in agreement.

"I like it," Vince replies. He runs his lips over Howard's cheekbone, his ear. "I could listen to it all night."

"Well, do all the rest of us have to, for Christ's sake?"

"This whole conversation's gone over a bit virginal, Naboo," Howard notes. "Just saying."

Naboo grabs his water pipe and stalks back down the hallway.

"Idiots," Bollo mutters as he shuffles groggily toward the loo. Whether he's referring specifically to Vince and Howard, or Naboo as well, or the whole lot of humanity isn't entirely clear, but Howard has only fleeting seconds to contemplate the question before Vince begins kissing him in earnest. The aftertaste of mango chutney lingers with Howard all day.

They're both late to work the next morning, egregiously, inexcusably late. Vince tripped over some colored pencils and fell into a pit of marshmallow snow tigers. Howard got abducted by a roving band of terrorist Lutheran flugelhorn players and had to escape through a tunnel of revolving steak knives. These things happen. With increasing regularity.

******

16. And I will never, never, never grow so old again

The moon speaks. Animals talk. Carpets fly. Magic is real. There are untold hidden treasures in the Arctic tundra, the far Eastern deserts, every neighboring galaxy, the next street down in Hoxton. There are amazing beings you never imagined could exist in the air, undersea (all right, let's not dwell on those in particular, but still), in the forests, in the far reaches of space. There are monsters, and demons, and opportunity, around every corner. There is music in all that exists. The world is everything he wanted it to be when he was young, everything he was told it never could be, everything he feared and hoped for and never truly dreamed he would witness for himself. In a single lifetime you can be an exalted zookeeper, a jazz-fusion pioneer, an electro keyboardist, a champion crimper, a legendary (if unjustly obscure) wildlife photographer, a leading cream poet, a sea-funk guitarist, a liberator of mutants, a slave on a distant planet, a shopkeeper, an avant-garde actor, a bin man, an Arctic explorer, a jungle wolf-tamer, an environmentalist playwright, a conceptual artist in biro and Pritt Stick and thrown satsumas, you can span all the genres and invent new ones, you can raise demons and pilot submarines through a brain and bloodstream, you can mentor the next generation in newt-breeding and bebop. You can try anything you put your mind to, not caring if you might fail. You can discover. You can possess. You can learn. You can love. You can forgive.

He sends a postcard to the last address he ever had for his mother, two words scrawled on the back: I understand. He doesn't entirely understand, not really, not even now, but he's getting there, possibly, just a bit, day by day, and perhaps someday he really will; perhaps by then he'll actually be able to tell her so, face to face. Perhaps she'll throw it in the waste bin, thinking he'd done the same with her letters all those years. Perhaps someone will spill something on his postcard in transit, her name blurred and lost. Perhaps it'll languish in the dead letter office for decades. Perhaps someday she'll answer it. Perhaps it'll be forwarded and forwarded again, again, collecting postage and meter-stamps from country after country as it leaps cities and oceans and continents, and then one day the Nabootique door or some other will open and there she'll be, stouter, grayer and old enough to cause a pang in his heart but still there, still accounted for. She'll exclaim over the wonders of Stationery Village, all the music he's written, the lives he's lived in her absence; she'll tell him about Ibiza and Long Beach and the Seychelles, how far she's gone, how much she's seen, and they'll both understand at long last just how much they've missed each other.

Or perhaps, most probably, she won't, most probably he'll never see her again, most probably he'll never even know if she's still alive. But still, it's not impossible. It could happen. And isn't the possibility enough, at least for now?

Vince is all random possibility, indiscriminate ideas, forever buffeting about on the breezes of what might happen and what could be. He talks and talks about mountains in Peru, chateaux in France, the Amazon Basin, jungles and tundras and planets and oceans and the newest music and the latest club and the trendiest gallery opening and the silliest craze and every amazing experience that must surely lie before them both. Where won't they go, what won't they see, what won't they do, what strange creatures won't they meet? And perhaps he's actually right. Hasn't he been, up to now? Isn't it enough he could be?

"Someday," Howard says to him, one rainy, idle afternoon in the shop, "someday, when we're old--"

"We're not gonna get old," Vince reminds him dismissively. "At least I'm not, you were born forty-seven so you probably still won't be able to help it but--"

"It's the natural cycle, Vince, I don't care what Naboo's book said. We get old, we go gray, we lose our hair, we die."

"That's not happening," he insists. "I keep telling you that. The book wouldn't lie."

"Vince, the book isn't real life and that's just how life is. You've got to accept it. We're no more immune to any of that than anybody else."

Vince just smiles, and shakes his head, and keeps talking. They have a lot of time to talk, these days; the Nabootique is failing by slow degrees, they both can see it happening, without Naboo's black market potion sidelines there's simply too few customers, too many operating expenses and too much competition. When the CelebRadar starts emitting foul-smelling pink smoke and then simply goes dead, apparently driven to its limits by a random query over Russell Brand, Vince doesn't bother repairing it: He's busy with his and Howard's own music, their own art, he's got no more time or inclination to chase glitterati all over town and nobody's ponying up anyway now they can visit stalkshoreditch.com for free. (See, look there, Howard, somebody spotted us out buying corks and wrote it up and everything, that's genius--what d'you mean, "Vince's hair looked a bit flat"? Bloody tosser!) It hardly matters anymore when they arrive for work, there's never anyone there. Naboo shrugs, puts more and more items on markdown, starts talking about returning to Xooberon or buying property in Inverness or getting a job at Shamansbury's or starting some sort of subtropical mystics' retreat once his powers are finally restored. Soon it'll be time to pack up and move on.

Neither he nor Vince has any idea to what, but really, that's hardly the point. Where won't they go, on the way to whatever comes next? What won't they see? Who won't they meet? Everything's possible, absolutely everything. That's his destiny. That's the gift of the life he's been given. That's the gift Vince gives him, every day, whether he realizes it or not.

"So," Vince says, glancing out the shop window as the rain slows and stops, "if we did end up on a mountaintop in Peru, or something, it'd be the two of us, together, right? Double act, like Flanagan and Rose? The old team?"

Howard just blinks. "Is that even a question?"

"Well, yeah, it is," Vince says, looking confused. "I mean, I just asked it."

"That means yes, Vince." Howard reaches into Stationery Village, flicks an incipient bit of cobweb from the miniature Howard's hat. "Double act. The old team."

Vince nods in satisfaction. "The old team. Like Gilbert and Sullivan."

"Erm, they didn't speak to each other for fourteen years, Vince."

"Tony Hancock and Sid James."

"Tony cut Sid dead and then killed himself."

Vince furrows his brow. "Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme?"

Howard just shakes his head in despair. "All right, then," Vince grumbles. "Suppose we'll just have to invent our own act."

"I thought we already had."

"Well, yeah," Vince agrees reluctantly, "but see, the thing is it's been, what, a good twenty-five years now and you still don't have anything like a halfway decent look. I mean, I'm standing there next to you, right, all tricked out and shiny, I'm dazzling the people, I'm the Bobby Dazzler, and there you are stumbling about looking like Ellery Chun after the London Blitz--"

"Oh, bugger your looks." Howard reaches for his jacket, taking a particular, pointed pleasure in its staid, sensible, very un-shiny plain brown tweed. "All that mad dazzling, you'll make someone go blind. No one's coming in today, they never do. Let's close up."

"Cheers," Vince grins, and follows him out the door, flipping the Open/Closed sign as he goes.

The rain's passed, the sky still gray but with a faint light suffusing the banks of dark clouds. Vince places a casual hand on Howard's back and Howard doesn't shake it off or growl about being touched, just enjoys the cool breeze and the fresh springy smell the rain's left in its wake. As they pass the alleyway between the Thai restaurant and the organic grocery someone suddenly emerges from amid the damp brick: It's old Solly, a slightly mad but thoroughly pleasant panhandler who knew all the bin men by name and face, followed them about rather the way Vince used to ambush and tag his CelebRadar pop stars. Solly stands there with his arms folded, studying Howard in triumphant reproof.

"Aye, Howard," he says, with no preliminaries, "how long's it been?" He glances at them both, then nods vigorously so the dozens of pigeon and starling feathers festooning his hat start to rustle. "I told Ray and Alfie and all the rest, I said when you went and gave up the bin-life so sudden like that, it must've been he went out and found himself a pretty wife and never told anyone, didn't he?" He tips his hat gallantly to Vince. "The ladies never like it, they want a man who's home in the mornings, keeps proper daylight hours--"

"Solly, you old sod." Howard shakes his grimy, slightly unsteady hand, man to man. "How are you these days?"

"All right. Got a bedsit. Right beautiful view, I can see the next building over and all the dumpsters lined up outside." He smiles in satisfaction, displaying a mouthful of half-empty gums. "Not drinking anymore."

"Good," says Howard, sincerely pleased. "That's good." Solly has stopped drinking for good at least eighteen times since Howard first met him. Perhaps this time he'll actually stay sober. Anything's possible. "Need some money?"

Solly shrugs, attempting to seem offhand. "Wouldn't turn down a fiver, if you're not skint. But who would."

Howard gives him a twenty-euro note. Solly pockets the money, does a peculiar, slow little pivot all the way round on the toes of one foot, tips his hat once more and turns to be on his way.

"Wait!" Vince calls after him.

Solly pivots back around, very slowly. Vince searches his own pockets, scouring up after much digging, patting-down and an eruption of sweets wrappers, ticket stubs, discarded mobile phone charms and rainbow-colored lint a five-euro note and a small, gold foil snack bag. Solly bows deeply from the waist as he takes the fiver, clutching his hat to his head in his other fist, then when he sees the bag his eyes light up.

"Vizier's Follies?" he says softly. "Haven't had these since I was a lad. Thought they stopped making them." He looks at Vince hopefully. "Green tea ganache?" Vince nods. Solly places the bag inside his overcoat, very careful not to crush it.

"I never got your name, miss," he says.

"Vince."

"Pretty name for a pretty lady. You're a lucky man, Howard." Solly thrusts a hand back into his overcoat, producing a crumpled, greasy one-euro note. "Take her to a fancy dinner somewhere. On me."

Howard takes the note, watching as Solly turns once again and saunters down the street. Vince stares after Solly, then gives Howard a curious glance.

"You think he's gonna be all right?" he asks Howard.

"I hope so," Howard says. "The bin men look after him a bit. He looks after the stray cats. He's not unhappy. He could be worse off."

"I used to worry all the time I'd end up like that."

Howard looks at him in surprise, and some concern. "You did? Why?"

Vince shrugs. "French dukes and pop stars are bloody tightfisted," he says, and leaves it at that. They continue down the street.

"I'm not tightfisted," Howard says, after a few moments. "I'll look after you."

"Look after me?" Vince raises his chin, both gratified and indignant. "Get stuffed, I'll look after you. I'm the problem-solver here, the responsible one--"

"You?" Howard nearly bursts out laughing. "The responsible one?"

"That's what all those brainbox art journals of yours say--or 'responsive,' or 'resonant' or some word like that. Whatever." Vince strolls along smiling in satisfaction, head thrown back and hands in his pockets. "I'm an innovative thinker, they all say so, I'm a gifted child, I'm an 'avant-garde naïf-pioneer'--"

"Naïf? More like naff," Howard retorts, drawing his jacket collar in closer as it starts to drizzle again. "I think you'll find it's actually me they're talking up, I'm the engine-driver here, the deep thinker, the prime mover behind the whole underlying conceptual--"

"It's like I keep trying to tell you, Howard, it's all in the look."

"Don't start showing out again. It's like I keep trying to tell you--"

"We could look after each other then, instead of one of us doing it all." Vince has stopped in his tracks, gazing at Howard. "Like, we could compromise about it, maybe? Take turns being responsible. You could do it on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or something."

Howard contemplates this proposal. "I thought we already did look after each other," he says. "All the time. All our lives."

Vince looks down at his silver boots for a moment, then back up at Howard. His eyes are quite serious.

"Good," he says.

He slips his arm into Howard's as they continue onward. The gray clouds have slowly begun to disperse and as he looks up Howard can see the distant shape of the unrisen moon, faded white against the pearl-colored sky. The moon speaks. It's mumbling something to itself Howard can't quite make out, something a bit strange and disappointingly mundane about dental bills and an expired Oyster card, but as Howard stares at it for a fleeting second he almost swears he sees an actual face up there in the atmosphere, the proverbial man in the moon, gazing impassively down at himself and Vince and Dalston and London and the whole vast sweep of the earth beyond, as if the disintegrating cloudbanks were theater curtains and all the world below a stage. Howard gazes back, and gives a courteous nod.

"Enjoy the show," he says, as he and Vince walk away.

END

(Written 2009)

Notes:

Quoted songs, in order of appearance: "Inheritance," New Model Army; "Time Out of Mind," Steely Dan; "This Is the Day," The The; "Twisted," Lambert, Hendricks and Ross; "At the Zoo," Simon and Garfunkel; "Nightclub Jitters," The Replacements; "Oh! You Pretty Things," David Bowie; "Overkill," Colin Hay; "Funkier Than a Mosquito's Tweeter," Nina Simone; "Save It For Later," English Beat; "Beauty Queen," Roxy Music; "See-Line Woman," Nina Simone; "Monkey in Your Soul," Steely Dan; "Birdland," Manhattan Transfer; "Tattooed Love Boys," The Pretenders; "Pigeon Song," Alela Diane; "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," Steely Dan; and "Sweet Thing," Van Morrison.

The bits of Moon family backstory in the first few sections are my own creation, as are all of Vince's jungle stories. Jack Flanders is a fictional explorer of "exotic" countries and alternate dimensions, first introduced in the ZBS audio drama The Fourth Tower of Inverness; the Towers of Inverness and the Bodhisattva Jukebox also hail from there. Johnny Zhivago is a fictional band mentioned in A Clockwork Orange. Howard's ideal cup of tea is inspired by the "man's tea" recipe in The Buddha of Suburbia, with brown rice syrup swapped out for sugar. Cynthia Hawkins was the elusive opera singer from the book and movie Diva. The creepy jack-in-the-box is based on one featured in The Magic Toyshop. Crammed Discs and the Performance Arts Journal are actual entities. Ellery Chun was the first mass producer of Hawaiian and tiki shirts. Spot the three crossover character cameos and win a free flirtini cocktail. Viedma did the read-through and made me rewrite bits that didn't work. Darthcorrie offered some very helpful insights into Vince's characterization and all sorts of encouragement. The MP3 blog Destination: OUT was invaluable for getting a handle on Howard's musical tastes. If you've actually read this far, thank you very much and have a maggot cider on the house.