He walked across to the man. Tincan was right, he smelt of stale fish and cabbages. He was chewing something – tobacco maybe – and he spat it out as Mikhail arrived.
‘Have you got the money?’ Tincan had told Mikhail to ask first. The man held his hand out; there were coins in his palm, glinting in the lamplight.
It was the clumsy attempts at tenderness that appalled Mikhail more than the lust. The man pulled his face closer beneath the lights, and tried to kiss him on the cheek, but Mikhail turned away. The man’s eyes looked regretful. He sighed a deep sigh and unzipped his flies, exposing a thick white cock. He gripped Mikhail’s shoulders as he was masturbated and Mikhail worried that Andreas’s coat might tear.
Tincan was right; it was nothing, really. The man came quickly, with a grunt, and his knees buckled heavily, which meant he almost pulled Mikhail over. He looked different when he had finished – the sadness had gone from his eyes to be replaced by a cold look of disgust. He pushed the coins into Mikhail’s hand in a business-like way and pressed his cock back into his trousers.
There was a splash of white semen on Andreas’s coat. He walked quietly down to a small pond and washed it off with his handkerchief. He thought he saw Andreas’s face reflected in the dark water, smiling back at him, and he almost screamed. The water was ice-cold. He took a mouthful without caring how dirty it might be, rinsed his gums, and spat it out. It made his teeth begin to ache.
The man stayed in his mind; his sad eyes, his smell, the grunting he had made. He wanted to wash the memory away, too. He wanted to cry for his mother, even though he had never really known her. When Tincan came over, though, he stood up and laughed instead, flicking one of the coins into the air.
‘What did you have to do?’ Tincan asked. He looked cold through from the waiting.
‘Nothing much,’ Mikhail told him.
Tincan grinned. ‘See? I told you it was easy money. OK?’
‘OK,’ Mikhail said.
Andreas had told him about the parties their mother used to have after the last stage show on a Saturday night, when there would be huge plates of gleaming salami and cold sausage and bottles of Bull’s Blood to wash it all down. Mikhail had never tasted wine but he thought it sounded wonderful.
Sometimes he would stand alone on the ridge of Castle Hill for hours, until it grew dark. He liked watching the floodlights come on along the bridges because they looked like diamonds strung across black velvet and this, for some reason, also reminded him of his mother.
He had never seen his mother dressed up, though, except in his imagination. The one thing he wanted was what he knew he could never have, which was to go back in time and live happily with his mother and Andreas, in the days when she was a successful club act and not living in prison, which was all he could recall of her.
Tincan still worried about him.
‘You look ill, Mikhail. You should take care. I saw you yesterday, just wandering about in the cold. Now that sort of thing will kill you, don’t you know that? Stay where it’s warm, Mikhail. Eat plenty. Beg if you have to; the money is good in this weather because the people feel their consciences prick when they see us standing there, blue with the cold. I got fifty forint in half an hour yesterday, did I tell you?’ He grabbed Mikhail by the shoulders and stared him full in the face. ‘Do well, Mikhail,’ he whispered, ‘we are going places, you and I. We’re special. We have been marked out for importance. Take it how you can and when you can and don’t worry how you get there. Just do it, OK? You think too much. Thinking can kill you.’
But Mikhail was no longer interested. When Tincan tried to cut him into his drug dealing schemes he left the shelter of the metro altogether and never went back.
The businessman approached him just as he was sure he would die of it all. At first they just chatted as usual but then the man leant across closer and Mikhail could smell the expensive cologne Tincan had noticed.
‘You look a little unwell,’ the man said quietly. ‘May I offer you a bed for the night?’
Mikhail looked at him. The man’s face had turned pink with embarrassment and his eyes looked comically mournful. How could he turn him down? He had no choice. It was either go with him or die out here.
The man talked nervously and cleared his throat a lot as they walked. His name was Claude and he came from Switzerland, though his Hungarian was almost perfect. He was not enormously wealthy – Mikhail saw that the minute they entered the building he lived in, which was in a small shabby street off a modern square behind a synagogue in Obuda. He had three locks on his wooden door and once they were inside the apartment he reached up to close a large bolt on the inside.
Claude did not live alone in the apartment. His father, a bedridden invalid, lived in a room at the far end of the passage. The old man was deaf but not so deaf that they could afford to talk in anything above a whisper. All the curtains were drawn because the old man was allergic to prying neighbours. Mikhail didn’t mind this so much, though, because it meant the place was warm. He felt as though he had never been so warm before in his life and he took Andreas’s coat off for the first time that winter.
Claude made them tea and then talked about his job. He worked in a bank – nothing important, just mundane stuff – but he also worked as a photographer, which excited him, and which he said prevented him from going insane with boredom. He had converted a bedroom in the apartment into a studio and took his shots there, some of which had been subsequently published in various magazines. He was proud of his work, Mikhail could tell by his eyes when he spoke about it.
‘I would enjoy doing some shots of you some time,’ Claude said. He wore nail varnish on his fingernails. The warmth of the room had overcome Mikhail; he was struggling to keep his eyes open. ‘If you don’t object, of course,’ Claude added.
He cooked Mikhail a meal and ran him a scented bath before showing him where he could sleep. The softness of the bed filled Mikhail with melancholy and he went off to sleep with tears running down his cheeks.
The first morning went well. Claude showed Mikhail proudly around his ‘studio’ and then he brought out some shots he had taken previously. The walls of the room were painted dark and there was a stained sheet hanging in one corner, as a backdrop. In front of the sheet was a white umbrella on a stand and Claude’s camera on a tripod.
The photos were innocent enough: soft-focus shots of a woman with too much lipstick on her mouth, a couple of black-and-whites taken at a railway station, and a shot of a boy a bit older than Mikhail, sitting on a stool and smiling at the camera. The boy was wearing old-fashioned-looking clothes: a cream-coloured nylon shirt and the sort of jumper Mikhail had worn to school as a kid, but he looked pleased enough.
Claude had gone into the kitchen to cook breakfast and the smell of the bacon made Mikhail’s stomach start to complain. He mooched around the studio. There was a cupboard with the door half open. Inside the cupboard was a pile of cardboard boxes. He pulled the top one open and there were shots in there of the same boy, only this time he didn’t have his cheap shirt and jumper on. This time he didn’t have anything on.
Claude was whistling in a dreary style. Mikhail replaced the box and crept out of the studio and along the corridor to the old man’s room.
Claude was still whistling. Mikhail listened at the door for a second before pushing it open. He wasn’t scared of making a noise; he had developed a talent for moving about silently. The room was dark, apart from a dull light that seeped through the holes in the brown lace curtains. There was a warm smell of sickness and urine and disinfectant.
The old man lay on a large wood-framed bed, his head lolling back onto a couple of white pillows. It was a moment before Mikhail realized his watery eyes were open and looking directly at him. A spasm of fear ran through his gut, even though he knew the old man could do nothing to harm him.