LITMIR.BIZ

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saved him.”

      I go outside. It is going to storm. The tall trees are wind puppets, the light is an eerie yellow, the sky is stew, molten and black. The rain comes pelting down. I watch it plummet into the green lake of lawn. Birds sit exposing themselves, opening their wings high up on the poplars. I listen to the symphony, and it is that, for each leaf in this garden park of two acres records the rain differently: the hissing and the dropping, the seething and the puddle puttering. The thunder quakes beneath it all, percussion, a gentle drum roll. I am sodden in a second. After last night, I need it.

      I go back into the house soaked and find my mother in her study.

      “I said to him, don’t get HIV,” I say. “We were standing in the kitchen and I remember saying to him that people are getting infected.”

      My mother is still in her dressing gown, at her desk, trying to pay bills. She turns.

      “Too good looking, too out of control. That’s what happens when you’re too popular. Going to gay clubs. Every weekend. What was the name of that club?”

      “Mandy’s.” I sit.

      “Mandy’s. Staying up all night. He was completely dissolute. He had rings, rings under his eyes. Everything he did had this dissolute look. He was playing the piano in that jersey, with the whole sleeve unravelling. I don’t know why he was so intent on wearing that jersey, but he was. It started with one stitch and then unravelled all the way up his elbow and he refused to take it off. And he was living in that flat in Hillbrow. Who knows what was going on there. He was completely dissolute. We went out to see this film, your father and I, Fitzcarraldo, about a man who wanted to build an opera house in Peru but he needed money, so landed up pulling a boat over a mountain to claim a field of rubber. Do you know that film?”

      “Werner Herzog. I haven’t seen it.”

      “Anyway, he was a completely obsessive character. We were watching the film, and I suddenly got an image of Evan, looking dishevelled and dressing in the jersey that was unravelling and I said to your father, Just take me up to his flat! I’d never been there before, but I knew where it was. I knocked and some boy answered. I could see Ev in the background, standing there looking depraved, looking sloppy and exhausted, black circles under his eyes, unkempt, as though he’d been up all night … you know, that dissolute look.”

      I nod. I know that look. I have had that look.

      “So, I went inside and I said: What-have-you-been-DOING? Where have you been? I started punching his arms, smacking him across the face and screaming at him: Look at you! And beating him, trying to knock some sense into him. And then I walked out. I was shaking.”

      We sit in silence.

      “I don’t want to talk about Mandy’s, or any other aspect of his life.” She sighs and turns back to her bills.

      “We all went to Mandy’s,” I say. “It was the thing to do.”

      It didn’t matter if you were gay or straight, you’d take drugs and dance at Mandy’s all night; Obex and Welconal, it was the art of the perfect mix, one-and-a-half uppers went well with half a downer. It took the edge off the speed and you came down easily into sleep. We would sit; the weekend just started, those pills in the palm of our hands, down them, and wait for the world to speed up, and dress – lurid silk shirts that could have been seen from outer space, peasant skirts like parachutes – then head to Mandy’s and dance all night in those darkened rooms, the boys in leather gyrating on top of large speakers, blaring YMCA, and the smell of cigarettes, beer, poppers, any behaviour welcome, there was no code. And for Evan it must have been an invitation to a place without shame. You were innocent at Mandy’s because finally two people of the same sex could indulge without fear, bodies moving to eighties’ pop, in that sorcerer’s brew of everything’s allowed in here, the sexual energy, the dripping and sweating and shirtless men dancing close with other shirtless men, six-packs tanned and toned and, at the bar, you’d just stop for a quick something to drink, ice to the forehead; you’d see them disappearing intently into the bathrooms that stank of semen and piss, or making their way upstairs onto the roof to step behind the potted plants, that green border, on the other side of which was another world, a place you couldn’t go to unless you were a man with a man, with downtown Joburg lit up and spread out three-sixty, the Hillbrow Tower and Brixton Tower like two needles administered to cool the heat, the pulse, the frenzied beat of the city underneath.

      And then at five, with dawn taking the sky to grey and the newspaper boys assembling their stacks on street corners, we would head to Fontana’s for fast food, dozens of barbecuing birds, going round and round on a rod, varnished dead things in a slow-motion ballet, and we’d sit in the car with everyone pulling the chicken apart, the hot cooked bird coming unstuck so easily, like it never was alive and held together by proper sinew, and spurting oil, falling into ponds on the silver foil, coming down off that night high, sucking the chicken off our fingers.

      I would see Evan at Mandy’s, inside the stew of it all. He didn’t acknowledge me and I made no attempt to say hello to him; I’d catch a moment of him only, dark young man in lounging discussion, leaning against a wall, thick head of Romeo hair, shirt hanging over his belt, tall and coasting above the dense circle that inevitably surrounded him. I would lose him to the crowd and forget he was there, involved in my own sexual politics, my own dancing and flirting, but he was no doubt vanishing into those bathrooms and disappearing behind the green borders on the rooftops.

      Eventually Evan was beaten up outside Mandy’s, said he saw them get out of their car: a silver Ford GX3 with heavy thumping coming from the stereo. Dark, he said. Lebanese straight boys from the south of town come north for trouble and an evening. One had a gun. Silver and black. Called Evan over. They forced him into the car. Three of them. They drove off with him, like it was the Grand Prix. Testosterone gone on a Saturday-night rampage, revving and riding through the lights, tyres squealing at take-off. And Evan lying at the back thinking it was the last night of his life. Chips in tomato sauce, like a packet of amputated fingers, on the dash. They drove him to the edge of town and parked. They beat him up because he was gay, beat him senseless and left him lying in the cold grass, crumpled across spiders in wet webs. And this is where the police found him. He went around with black eyes and stitches. He was crying. And apologising to everyone for everything. It took a week for his black eyes to go from blue to yellow to brown to gone. That’s when he stopped going to gay clubs. Saw it as a sign. And then he must have been diagnosed. And he met Dietmar and gave it up, the hedonistic, clubbing life. Completely. One hundred per cent. Because. That was the end of that.

      CHAPTER 2

      Out of Control

       It is Friday afternoon when I visit.

      I bring Evan homemade soup and freshly baked bread. He is in bed, pallid, as though he’s made of tissue paper: a two-dimensional shadow boy lying on striped hospital sheets. A nurse is giving his hands and feet a massage, stimulating circulation. And Dietmar is here also.

      Dietmar is Evan’s partner. He is German, a boilermaker who works on rigs in a freezing sea for months. He makes his money quickly, then flies out and stays for as long as his money lasts, spending it on my brother. He has filled the ward with flowers, chocolates, a green teddy bear the colour of an apple martini on the bedside table.

      I place the soup on a tray before Evan and watch as he takes a spoonful.

      “Nice,” he says. I relish the sight of his slow sipping, though he manages only a few sips, then stops. He breaks the bread with fingers that stroke the piano keys, that ruffle the fur of his cats, that write on blackboards as he teaches English, those gentle hands that hand over money to charity. It is enough for me to sit here and just look at my brother’s hands, those alive hands, breaking bread.

      “How long you still here for, Diet?” I ask.

      “For the weekend only.” He is settled in a chair in a sharp corner. “But I will come back soon

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