She perused them idly while she sipped her coffee. Many of the photographs had been up on the wall for years, their unfixed images decaying further in the light.

'Are you ever going to do anything with these?' she said.

'Like burn them, you mean?' he said, coming to stand beside her.

'No, like publishing them.'

'They're fuck-ups, Adie.'

'That'd be the point.'

'A deconstructionist wildlife book?'

'I think it'd attract a lot of attention.'

'Fuck the attention,' Will said. 'I've had all the attention I ever want. I've said Look what I did, Daddy to the whole wide world and my ego is now officially at peace.' He went to the board and started to pull the pictures down, the pins flying.

'Hey, be careful, you'll tear them!'

'So?' he said, chucking the pictures down. `You know what? This feels good!' The floor was rapidly littered with photographs. 'That's more like it,' he said, stepping back to admire the now empty wall.

'Can I have one for a souvenir?'

`One.'

She wandered amongst the scattered pictures, looking for one that caught her fancy. Stooping, she picked up an old and much-stained photograph.

'What did you choose?' he said. 'Show me.'

She turned it to him. It resembled a nineteenth-century spiritualist picture; those pale blurs of ectoplasm in which believers had detected the forms of the dead. Will named its origins instantly.

'Begemder Province, Ethiopia. It's a walia ibex.'

Adrianna flipped the photograph over to look at it again.

'How the hell do you know that?'

Will smiled. 'I never forget a face,' he said.

ii

The following day he went to visit Patrick, in his apartment up at the top of Castro. Though the pair had lived together on Sanchez Street for almost four of their six years together, Patrick had never given up the apartment, nor had Will ever pressured him to do so. The house, in its spare, functional way, was an expression of Will's undecorative nature. The apartment, by contrast, was so much a part of who Patrick was warm, exuberant, enveloping - that to have given it up would have been tantamount to losing a limb. There at the top of the hill he had spent most of the money he earned in the city below (where he had been until recently an investment banker) creating a retreat from the city, where he and a few chosen lotus-eaters could watch the fog come and go. He was a big, broad handsome man, his Greek heritage as evident in his features as the Irish: heavy-lidded and laden eyes, a thug of a nose, a generous mouth beneath a fat black moustache. In a suit, he looked like somebody's bodyguard; in drag at Mardi Gras, like a fundamentalist's nightmare; in leather, sublime.

Today, when Rafael (who had apparently recanted and come home) escorted Will into the living-room he found Patrick sitting at the window dressed in a baggy T-shirt and draw-string linen pants. He looked well. His hair was cropped to a greying crew-cut, and he wasn't as beefy as he'd been, but his embrace was as powerful as ever.

'Lord, look at you,' he said, standing back from Will to appreciate him. 'You're finally starting to look like your photograph.' (This was a back-handed compliment, and an on-going joke, begun when Will had chosen an unflattering jacket photograph for his second book on the grounds that it made him look more authoritative.) 'Come and sit down,' he said, gesturing to the chair that had been put opposite his in the window. 'Where the hell's Rafael gone? You want some tea?'

'No, I'm fine. Is he looking after you okay?'

'We're doing better,' Patrick said, easing back into his own chair. Only now, in the tentativeness of this manoeuvre, did Will get a sense of his delicacy. 'We argue, you know-'

'So I heard.'

'From Adrianna?'

'Yeah, she said-'

'I tell her the juicy bits,' Patrick said. 'She doesn't get to hear about what a sweetheart he is most of the time. Anyway, I have so many angels watching over me it's embarrassing.'

Will looked back down the length of the room. 'You've got some new things,' he said.

'I inherited some heirlooms from dead queens,' he said. 'Though most of it doesn't mean much if you don't know the story that goes with it, which is kinda sad, because when I'm gone, nobody will know.'

'Rafael isn't interested?'

Patrick shook his head. 'It's old men's talk as far as he's concerned. That little table's got the strangest origins. It was made by Chris Powell. You remember Chris?'

'The Fix-it man with the beautiful butt.'

'Yeah. He died last year, and when they went in his garage they found he'd been doing all this carpentry. Making chairs and tables and rockinghorses.'

'Commissions?'

'Apparently not. He was just making them in his spare time, for his own satisfaction.'

'And keeping them?'

'Yeah. Designing them, carving them, painting them, and leaving them all locked up in his garage.'

'Did he have a lover?'

'A blue-collar honey like that, are ya kidding? He'd had hundreds.' Before Will could protest, Patrick said: 'I know what you're asking and no, he didn't have anyone permanent. It was his sister found all this beautiful work when she was cleaning out his house. Anyway, she asked me around to see if I wanted something to remember him by, and of course I said yes. I really wanted a rocking-horse, but I didn't have the balls to ask. She was a rather prim little soul, from somewhere in Idaho. Obviously the last thing she wanted to be doing was going through her cute fag brother's belongings. God knows what she found under the bed. Can you imagine?' He gazed out towards the city-scape. 'I've heard it happen so often now. Parents coming to see where their baby ran away to live, because now he's dying, and of course they find Queer City, the only surviving phallocracy.' He mused a moment. 'What must it be like for those people? I mean we do stuff in broad daylight here they haven't even invented in Idaho.'

'You think so?'

'Well, you think back to Manchester, or, what was the place in Yorkshire?'

'Burnt Yarley?'

'Wonderful. Yeah. Burnt Yarley. You were the only queer in Burnt Yarley, right? And you left as soon as you could. We all leave. We leave so we can feel at home.'

'Do you feel at home?'

'Right from the very first day. I walked along Folsom and I thought: this is where I want to be. Then I went into The Slot and got picked up by Jack Fisher.'

'You did not,' Will said. 'You met Jack Fisher with me, at that art show in Berkeley.'

'Shit! I cannot lie to you, can I?'

'No, you can lie,' Will said magnanimously, 'I just won't believe you. Which reminds me, Adrianna thought your father

-was dead. Yeah. Yeah. She gave me hell. Thanks very much.' He pursed his lips. 'I'm beginning to have second thoughts about this party,' he groused. 'If you're going to go around telling the truth to everyone I'm going to have a shit time; and I know the party's for you, but if I'm not having fun then nobody's going to have fun

'Oh we can't have that. How about I promise not to contradict anything you've said to anybody as long as it's not a personal defamation?'

'Will. I could never defame you,' Patrick said, with heavily feigned sincerity, 'I might tell everyone you're a no-good egotistic sonofabitch who walked out on me. But defame you, the love of my life? Perish the thought.' Performance over, he leaned forward and laid his hands on Will's knees. 'We went through this phase, remember? Well at least I did - when we thought we were going to be the first queers in history never to get old? No, that's not true. Maybe we'd get old, but very, very slowly so that by the time we were sixty we could still pass for thirty-two in a good light? It's all in the bones; that's what Jack says. But black guys look good any age so he doesn't count.'