‘Long time no see, Catman. You didn’t have a beard then, did you?’
It was the twink. His voice was high, so high that Harry wondered if he was putting it on. The animal his mask was meant to depict was not obvious, but it wasn’t a mouse anyway. It was green, and the scaly pattern and narrow eyes pointed more in the direction of a snake.
‘No,’ Harry said.
The twink raised his glass and looked questioningly at Harry when he hesitated.
‘Tired of Caesar?’
Harry nodded slowly. The Caesar had been the number-one gay drink at Dan Tana’s in LA; apparently it was a Canadian thing.
‘Maybe we should have something that wakes us up, then?’
‘Like what?’ Harry asked.
The twink cocked his head to one side. ‘You’re different, Catman. Not just the beard, but your voice and—’
‘Throat cancer,’ Harry said. It had been Øystein’s suggestion. ‘Radiation treatment.’
‘Oh dear,’ the twink said without any appreciable interest. ‘Well, then I get the ugly hat, and that you’ve gotten so thin. Certainly was aggressive, I must say.’
‘You’re not wrong,’ Harry said. ‘How long has it been exactly, since we’ve seen each other?’
‘You tell me. A month. Or is it two? Time flies, and you certainly haven’t been here for a while.’
‘If I’m not mistaken, I was here on a Tuesday five weeks ago, wasn’t I? And on the Tuesday before that?’
The twink drew his head back a little between his shoulders, as though to regard him at slightly more distance. ‘Why the interest?’
Harry heard the scepticism in his voice and realised he had got ahead of himself. ‘It’s the tumour,’ he said. ‘The doctor says it pressed on the brain and is causing partial memory loss. Sorry, I’m just trying to reconstruct the last months.’
‘You sure you remember
‘A little,’ Harry said. ‘But not everything. Sorry.’
The twink snorted at the affront.
‘Can you help me?’ Harry asked.
‘If you help me.’
‘With what?’
‘Let’s say you pay a little more for my blow than usual.’ The twink drew something halfway up out of his jacket pocket, and Harry saw the little plastic bag with white powder. ‘Then I can give it to you the same way as last time.’
Harry nodded. Alexandra had told him that drugs — cocaine, speed, poppers, emma — were bought and sold more or less openly at the gay clubs she had been to.
‘How did you give it to me last time?’ Harry asked.
‘Jesus, I thought you would have remembered that. I blew it up your lovely, tight bear-hole with this...’ The twink held up a short metal straw. ‘Shall we go downstairs?’
Harry considered Alexandra’s warning about dark rooms. Rooms where anything and anyone were fair game.
‘OK.’
They stood up and moved through the room. Eyes watched them from behind animal masks. At the far end the twink opened a door and Harry followed him into the darkness and down a steep, narrow staircase. Already halfway down he heard the sounds. Moans and cries and — when he came down into the basement — the slapping of flesh on flesh. There were small blue lights on the walls and when his eyes eventually adjusted sufficiently to the semi-darkness, he could see in detail what was going on around him. Men having sex in all manner of ways, some naked, some half dressed and some with just their flies open. He heard the same sounds behind the doors to the cubicles. Harry’s eyes met those of a man wearing a gold mask. He was big and muscular and thrusting in and out of a person bent over a bench. The pupils behind the gold mask were large and black in the wide-open eyes fixed on Harry who instinctively flinched when the man bared his teeth in a predatory leer. Harry let his eyes wander further. There was a smell in the room almost making him gag. Something other than the mixture of bleach, sex and testosterone, an acrid odour resembling petrol. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was until he glimpsed a naked man open a small, stubby bright yellow bottle and sniff. Of course, it was the smell of poppers. The stimulant had been popular in the clubs Harry had frequented in Oslo in his early twenties. They had called it rush back then, probably because that was what it was, a rush of a few seconds where the heart beat like hell, increasing the blood circulation for a brief moment, heightening all the senses. It was only later he learned that gay men — receivers — used it to boost the anal pleasure.
‘Hi.’ It was the man in the gold mask. He had sidled up next to Harry and placed a hand on his crotch. His predatory smile widened and he breathed on Harry’s face.
‘He’s mine,’ the twink said in a sharp voice, grabbing Harry by the arm and pulling him along. Harry heard the beefcake laugh behind them.
‘Seems all the cubicles are occupied,’ the twink said. ‘Shall we...?’
‘No,’ Harry said. ‘In private.’
The twink sighed. ‘Might be some empty ones further in. Come on.’
