Tales of Persuasion. Philip Hensher

country and some people in this one, too, like to call a sexual pervert. And then I might have to show them the hole that you drilled in the wall to watch me getting undressed at night. It’s there, that hole.’

      ‘There’s no hole in the wall.’

      ‘Take a look. I think you’ll find there is.’

      ‘You’ve drilled a fucking hole in the wall of my spare bedroom?’ Fitzgerald said.

      ‘Of course,’ Timothy Storey said. ‘I’m not going to tell anyone any of those awful things. I like it here, I really do. And another thing – those towels Mrs Baxter was telling you about, they’re my towels. I bought those towels. I swear on my mother’s life, I bought those towels.’

      Satisfied that the conversation was over, Timothy Storey pushed off her shoes and lay back on the sofa. Fitzgerald went without speaking into the kitchen. A voice through a microphone in the other room began to announce the results of a phone-in vote, to wild applause, yellings of names and long, dramatic silences. The kitchen table was covered with the detritus of a quickly arranged snack; a tub of taramasalata lay open with the edge of a cream cracker broken off in it, like a tiny Excalibur. Fitzgerald pulled it out. Small fragments of cheese, of bread, lay scattered like bleak waste across the surface of the table; an open carton of orange juice had spilt onto the floor. The fridge door stood open, waiting for Timothy Storey to return to graze some more. Underneath the cork message board, Fitzgerald looked, and there was, indeed, a new hole, drilled in the wall, giving onto the spare bedroom. How had he failed to notice that? The situation bore down on him; where people like Bradbury had a handsome half-naked beast like Eduardo lolling around waiting for Bradbury’s attentions, someone like Fitzgerald would only have a Timothy Storey, spilling biscuit crumbs down the sofa, thinking up blackmail attempts, destroying the masonry and eyeing up the bath towels.

      ‘Can you give me a hand?’ a voice called from the sitting room. ‘This seems to be stuck.’ Hopeless and speechless, Fitzgerald went into the room. Timothy Storey was kneeling before the DVD player, jabbing at buttons. ‘I’ve tried this and I’ve tried that,’ she was saying. ‘But none of it does anything.’ Fitzgerald contemplated, with hatred, her enormous, lying, blackmailing, cotton-straining, homophobic, racist, idle arse. Then a joyous possibility occurred to him. There was no reason not to do it. With three fast and accelerating steps, he was behind her, and he did it. He had never been good at school at football or rugby, but there, with a single, confident, long smooth swing, he gave Timothy Storey’s arse the single kick of a lifetime.

      He took a detour on his way to Eduardo’s flat, going to the fancy confectioner’s on Clapham High Street and buying an expensive box of chocolates – two pounds of pralines and fruit creams. Only when he reached Bradbury’s road did he remember Eduardo’s obsession with not eating or drinking anything that might make him fat. But it was too late; and, anyway, he realized he had bought the chocolates for himself, really.

      ‘I want to say sorry, Eduardo,’ he said, coming into the flat. The sun was streaming through the long windows, and lighting up half of Eduardo’s face. ‘And also goodbye, I suppose.’

      ‘Goodbye?’ Eduardo said. ‘Are you going away?’

      ‘No,’ Fitzgerald said. The pathos of his farewell almost made him lapse into tears. ‘No, I just think it’s better that I don’t see you again. It seems like a bad idea.’

      ‘But where are you going?’ Eduardo said.

      He hadn’t understood, and Fitzgerald said, ‘I don’t know yet. You might as well have these.’

      He handed over the box of chocolates, and from the way Eduardo took the bag, eagerly, peering in at the confectioner-wrapped box of ribbons and bright paper, Fitzgerald saw that he was a man who liked to get presents, to get a present every day, no matter what it was. ‘It’s only chocolates,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to eat them if you don’t like them.’

      ‘You can come in,’ Eduardo said. ‘I’m on my own. Daniel went to Monaco and he won’t be back until Friday night. He went away this morning. It’s so boring here.’

      ‘I thought he went to Munich?’

      ‘Yes, he did, he went to Monaco.’

      ‘That’s not the same place.’

      ‘OK,’ Eduardo said. ‘I didn’t know that. You want a coffee?’

      ‘Only if you’re making one. I’ll stay and fend off your boredom, if you like.’

      ‘Excuse me?’

      Fitzgerald looked around. In this setting, this golden late afternoon, with the sun falling through the windows and the lilies from Saturday night’s party now full-blown and on the edge of falling, Eduardo looked more dark, glowing and healthful than ever. He had not shaved today, and a dark shadow around the jaw gave him the air of a beautiful navvy. Fitzgerald drew in a great breath, savouring Eduardo’s warm, animal, marshlike odour. ‘Beautiful,’ he said. ‘I love the scent of lilies.’

      ‘Lilies are so ugly,’ Eduardo said. ‘Everyone else thinks they’re beautiful. For me, they’re ugly, the way they fall, the yellow thing in the middle. I think they’re ugly.’

      ‘You have interesting opinions,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘I always thought you had a lot of interesting views about things.’

      ‘Do you think so?’ Eduardo said. ‘I think I have interesting opinions. I think you’re right. But Daniel always says, “Darling, just shut your mouth and look pretty. No one wants to know what you think.” And one guy, one friend of his, asked me once if I knew how to tell the time, or maybe if I could tell my right foot from my left foot, some shit like that. His friends, they all think I’m just stupid, I know.’

      Fitzgerald’s attention was drawn to Eduardo’s feet, his left foot, his right foot, perfect, dark, hairy and masculine. He would agree to be walked over, by such feet, he truly would. ‘I don’t think you’re stupid,’ he said. ‘I always think you have the most original views about things. Not everyone would say that lilies were ugly, but they are kind of ugly, as flowers, you’re right. I’ve often thought you had interesting opinions about all sorts of things.’

      ‘That’s funny,’ Eduardo said. ‘Because I do. I do have opinions about all sorts of things. For like, I think what we do in our lives, it comes back and has an effect on what happens to you. Like, if you are bad and mean to someone, then maybe later, someone else will be bad and mean to you. That’s my opinion. I don’t know how it works, but it does. And I think we’re all connected somehow, like maybe if you are friends with someone, and they are friends with someone else, and that someone else is friends with someone else, then you are connected, you have a connection with that person, and in the end maybe you have a connection with all the world.’

      ‘So because I know you, I have a connection with all sorts of South Americans I’ve never met,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘That’s really an interesting idea. You’re really an intelligent person, Eduardo.’

      ‘And I think there is maybe enough money in the world for all the people, the rich people and the poor people,’ Eduardo said. ‘So there is no need for there to be poor people and rich people, the rich people, they don’t need so much, so maybe the money can be shared about and the poor people get money from the rich people, and then everyone has enough and everyone is happy.’

      ‘That’s so true,’ Fitzgerald said, in an ecstasy of happiness. ‘That ought to happen. That definitely ought to happen.’

      In the sunlit sitting room of a South London flat, the beautiful man sat, his hands clasped between his knees, his eyes widening, his pupils broad and dark and empty. He dipped now and then into the full box of chocolates, and his brilliant teeth shone from between his full lips as he went on talking, explaining, eating the pralines, emptying his poor unindulged mind before Fitzgerald. And Fitzgerald, understanding at last what it was that Eduardo wanted, and how, in the end, he saw himself, sat, barely interrupting, saying from time to time, ‘That’s so true,’