'Laura.'

Koppelman beamed. 'You remembered? I brought her book for you to sign.' He rummaged in the bag he'd brought with him. Out came a copy of Boundaries. 'I had a look through it last night,' he said. 'Grim stuff.'

'Oh it's got a lot worse since then,' Will said, taking the pen from

Koppelman's breast pocket, and relieving him of the book. 'There's a couple of species in here lost the fight.'

'They're extinct?'

'As the dodo.' He opened the book to the title page, and scrawled an inscription.

'What the hell does that say?'

'Far Laura. Best wishes.'

'And that scrawl underneath's your signature?'

'Yep.'

'Just so I know what to tell her.'

He left two days later. There were no direct flights to San Francisco, so he was obliged to change planes in Chicago. It was at most a minor inconvenience, and he was so happy to be back in the stream of people that the drudge of getting through O'Hare became positively pleasurable. By late afternoon he was in the plane that would carry him west, and seated by the window, ordered a whisky in celebration. He hadn't had any alcohol in several months, and it went straight to his head. Pleasantly happy, he let sleep overtake him, as the sky ahead darkened.

By the time he awoke the day had long gone, and the lights of the city by the Bay were glittering ahead.

i

San Francisco had not been Will's first port of call when he'd come to America. That honour had fallen to Boston, where he had gone at the age of nineteen, having decided that whatever he was yearning for he'd never find it in England. He didn't find it in Boston either. But during the fourteen months he lived there a new Will emerged, falteringly at first, then with fearless abandon. He had known his sexual preferences long before he left England. He'd even acted upon his desires on a few occasions, though never in a state of complete sobriety. In Boston, however, he learned to be happily queer, reinventing himself after his own idiosyncratic mode. He wasn't a corn-fed American beauty, he wasn't a plaid-shined macho man, he wasn't a style queen, he wasn't a leather boy. He was his own peculiar creature, desired and pursued for that very reason. Qualities that would have gone unnoticed in a bar in Manchester (some of them obvious, like his accent, some so subtle he couldn't have named them) were here rare and coveted. He learned the nature of his advantage quickly, and exploited it shamelessly. Eschewing the uniform of the day (sneakers, tight jeans, white T-shins) he dressed like the impoverished English lad he was, and it worked like a charm. He seldom went back to an empty bed, unless he wished to do so; and in a few months had gone through three love-affairs, two of which he'd concluded. The last had been his first and bitterest taste of unreciprocated love. The object was one Laurence Mueller, a television producer nine years Will's senior. Blond, sleek and sexually adroit, Larry had drawn Will into a heady romance only to drop him cold after six weeks, a pattern he was notorious for repeating. Heartbroken, Will had mourned over the loss for half a summer, salving the hurt as best he could with behaviour that would probably have killed him five years later. In the sex emporia of the Combat Zone and in the darkness of the Fenway, where on weekend nights a sexual bacchanalia was in constant progress, he played out every sexual scenario his libido could conjure, to put Larry's dismissal of him from his mind.

The hurt had faded by September, but not before he'd had a potinduced revelation. Sitting in a steam room, meditating on his misery, he realized that Larry's desertion had awoken in him some of the same pain he'd felt when Steep had departed. Turning over this realization,

he'd sat sweating in the tiled room for an unhealthy time, ignoring the hands and the glances that came his way. What did it mean? That somewhere in his attachment to Jacob there'd been sexual feeling? Or that in his midnight encounters in the shrubbery there was somewhere buried the hope that he'd find a man who would deliver on Steep's promises, and take him out of the world into a place of visions? He'd finally left the steam room to its orgiasts, his head thumping too hard for him to think clearly. But the questions remained with him thereafter, troubling him. He countered them the plainest way he knew how. If a man who approached bore even the slightest resemblance to his memory of Steep - the colour of their hair, the shape of their mouth - he rejected them with talismanic cruelty.

ii

It wasn't the Larry Mueller saga that drove him from Boston, it was an icy December. Coming out of the restaurant where he worked as a waiter into the maw of a Massachusetts blizza-d, he decided he'd had enough of being frozen and it was time to head for balmier climes. His first thought was Florida, but that night, talking over the options with the bartender at Buddies, he heard the siren-song of San Francisco.

'I've only been out to California once,' the bartender, whose name (Danny) was tattooed on his arm in case he forgot it, told him, 'but man, I was so close to staying. It's faggots' paradise. It really is.'

'As long as it's warm.'

'There's places warmer,' Danny conceded. 'But shit, if you want to be hot then go live in fucking Death Valley, right?' He leaned over to Will, lowering his voice. 'If I didn't have my other half-' (Danny's long-time lover, Frederico - the other half in question - was sitting five yards along the bar) '-I'd be back there, living the life. No question.'

It was a pivotal exchange. Within two weeks Will had packed his bags and was gone, leaving Boston on a day of sparkling frost that almost made him regret his decision, the city looked so beautiful. There was another kind of beauty waiting for him at the end of his journey, however; a city that enraptured him far beyond his expectations. He found a job working for one of the community newspapers, and one momentous day, missing a photographer to cover a piece he was writing about his adopted city, he borrowed a camera to do the job himself. It wasn't love at first sight. His initial photographs were so piss-poor he couldn't use them. But he liked the feeling of the camera in his hands, liked being able to circumscribe the world through the lens. And the subject before him was the tribe in whose heartland he lived: the queens, the cowboys, the dykes, the mannequins, the sex-fiends, the drag artists and the leather devotees whose homes, bars, clubs, grocery stores and Laundromats spread from the intersection of Castro and 18th, north to Market, south to Collingwood Park.

While he learned his craft, he also learned how to be a wild boy between the sheets, until he had quite a reputation as a lover. He seldom played anonymously now, though there were plenty of places to do so. He wanted deeper experiences, and found them in the beds and embraces of a dozen men, none of whom had his heart, but all of whom excited him in their various ways. There was Lorenzo, a forty-year-old Italian who had left a wife and children in Portland to come be what he'd known he was on his wedding day. There was Drew Dunwoody, a muscle-boy who was for a time almost as devoted to Will as to his own reflection. There was Sanders, who was the closest Will had to a sugar-daddy, an older man (he had been admitting to forty-nine for five years) who lent him the first three months' rent on a one-room apartment near Collingwood Park, and later a down payment on a secondhand Harley. There was Lewis the insurance man, who never said a word in company, but who poured out his lyrical soul to Will behind closed doors, and who subsequently flowered into a minor poet. There was Gregory, beautiful Gregory, dead of an accidental overdose at twenty-four. And Joel; and Mescaline Mike; and a boy who'd said his name was Derrick, but who was later discovered to be an AWOL marine by the name of Dupont.