Title: Past Imperfect

Author: Lobelia <[email protected]>

Website: http://www.geocities.com/lobelia321/

Pairing: David Wenham / Marton Csokas

Rating: R

Summary: The second Dave set eyes on the man, he knew who it was. He knew, and he remembered.

Feedback: Yes, please, I would love feedback! Anything, one line, one word even.

Content/Warnings: RPS. Sex with a minor (aged 17). Rough sex (but not gratuitous).

Spoilers: TTT, RotK.

Archive Rights: Beyond the Fellowship. My niche. Anyone else, please just ask.

Disclaimers: This is a work of amateur fiction. I do not know these people. I am not making money. The events described in this story did not happen.

Author's Notes: Despite what the warnings may suggest, this story is not about kinky or rough sex. It's not even really about sex but about memory and about how the past connects with the present. 'Tchockie' is my own invention, based on Marton's surname (which, in Hungarian, is pronounced 'Tchockuss'). Thanks so much again to Gabby Hope for her thoughtful and kind beta.

Dedication: This one's for Quiseyes who reminded me of Marton's existence and of my own long-lost Sydney youth.

Visual Aids: Pics of Dave and Marton.

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The second Dave set eyes on the man, he knew who it was. He knew, and he remembered.

The years contracted to nothing. As if squeezed by the pleats of a time-travelling concertina, Dave was back in 1983. He was eighteen years old, a scrawny kid from Marrickville, out on a big night in Oxford Street. He'd gone there with a group of friends to celebrate his coming of age. They'd got dressed to the nines, casually and coolly, affecting the slightly formal buttoned-collar-and-tie look of the early eighties. They'd caught the train to Sydenham, changed onto the still-new Eastern Suburbs Railway to King's Cross, and got lost among the crowds of milling, mad pedestrians between Taylor Square and the lower end of Paddington. Crowds of men with short-cropped hair, men with pierced nipples and lurex shorts, men in nuns' habits and men in high heels.

Not the sort of men you saw hanging around in Marrickville.

They'd gone there to party and to have a bit of naughty fun. And Dave, without telling anyone, had possibly gone out to lose his virginity. Not that he'd told anybody about being a virgin. In 1983, you didn't really let on that you were still a virgin at age 18. But they all had been virgins, as far as Dave could make out in retrospect, all except their young gay friend from school.

Because yes, they did have one gay friend. They'd taken him along as their entrance ticket and their alibi. Because they felt safe behind his so obviously much more at-home demeanour in that environment. Because they'd all been hopelessly out of their depths, and Dave most of all. They were just kids from the suburbs, after all; they hung out down the mall and at the teenage end of Coogee Beach, and they rarely came further north than Bondi Junction.

At the time, they didn't see themselves like that, though. They were part of a small arty clique. They had their lunch in the out-of-bounds area of the playground, and they didn't call the music students poofters. And Dave was going to be an actor, and actors always hung around with gay people. Still, Oxford Street was out of their league, and they felt it although they pretended they didn't.

Oxford Street after midnight was even more daunting. Last train home gone, all the friends except for the gay one gone, and the gay one almost gone. The gay one draped decadently against a bar and wound round some crop-headed, ear-ringed YMCA-lookalike in leather vest and bovver boots. Dave had remained there, bum on barstool, strangely fascinated by his friend's tongue down the stranger's throat. This boy with the slightly pimply forehead whose tie was always askew on Monday mornings and who never tucked his school shirt in.

Those were the days just after the AIDS epidemic first broke on the news but nobody was taking it seriously yet, and Oxford Street was mayhem.

Dave had never gone cruising before and he was never to go again. On that night, he didn't even realise that that was what he was doing: cruising. He stuck with his pimply friend for a while until the friend, too, disappeared, in that callous way eighteen-year-olds have, disappeared with the stranger in search of selfish pleasures elsewhere and left Dave to his own, pathetically inadequate devices.

Dave had gone on floating through what seemed to him the netherworld of society. And, of course, he had got picked up. Of course, he got taken to some seedy hotel room, and of course, he got fucked. Buggered right out of his innocent little brain. Lost his virginity all right, and not in a way he had expected, at four a.m. on the morning on the day after his birthday.

Happy birthday, whoever you are.

They'd never exchanged names. All that Dave knew about the guy was that he wasn't Australian, he was from South Africa and on his way through to Europe. At the time, this had seemed intriguingly exotic. Not part of Dave's daily experience at all. Sex, strangers, men from overseas, funny little drugs that came in phials.

Later, of course, Dave had realised that the experience hadn't been that exotic at all. The so-called South African hadn't even been South African. Dave came to meet other New Zealanders and quickly recognised the accent. The guy had just been some bloody Kiwi (and what could be less exotic?), out for a bit of a good time in the big wide world of Sydney. And what a bonus too, to end up deflowering some young schoolboy.

Another thing Dave realised when looking back on the whole thing in later years, was that it was not at all surprising that he should have got picked up that night. It hadn't been because he was specially beautiful or specially alluring or specially anything. It was simply because he'd been young flesh. If you were eighteen, and if you had two legs and a dick in front of your balls, the odds were a million to one that you would not get picked up on Oxford Street.

So there had been nothing special about Dave, and there had been nothing particularly special about his little experience, either. Which was bitter to swallow at first, and in fact, took a few years to swallow, but which was true, nevertheless.

Dave never told anybody about this episode. At first, he carried it about like a hot shaming secret, a secret that was nearly too big for him to manage. Then life took over and youth bounced back, and the experience faded into the general maelstrom of time. After a few more years, he forgot to think of it more often than once every few months, and in the end, it settled entirely into the dust of the past and became, in a way, almost too insignificant to mention to anyone else.

He did have the HIV tests done, however, when they were first offered.

His friend, the one with the pimply forehead, had died in the mid-eighties. One of the first real victims of what had initially appeared to be the media scare of the decade.

Dave didn't go to the funeral. He was already at drama school by then. He was trying to forget his former incarnation. It was only later, when he was again attempting to connect to his younger self, that he drove out to the windswept cemetery, overlooking Botany Bay and booming with the sound of jets passing through the flight path overhead, and placed a bunch of wattles and winter jasmine onto the granite tomb slab.

He never told anyone about that cemetery visit, either.

And now, on the Lord of the Rings set, on his first day at this shoot of a lifetime, the past had caught up with him. Here, just beside him, in an identical folding canvas chair to the one he'd been placed in, here was the very man.

Dave knew at once and instinctively that it was him. Despite the changes. It had been, what, fifteen years since he'd slept with him. The guy had lost his floppy forelocks and the pudginess around the cheeks. And his eyes were a different colour from what Dave had thought and evidently mis-recalled. But it was him all right. Without a doubt. Dave felt it in his very balls. And for a milli-second of nauseating flashback, Dave could taste the guy's come on his tongue and feel his rectal muscles protest against the intrusion of the alien prick.

What was most shocking was how young the guy was. All of these years, Dave had been under the impression that he'd been seduced by an older man, by some worldly-wise and experienced philanderer. But this guy looked pretty much Dave's age, he wasn't older at all. Which meant that, at the time of their encounter, he couldn't have been more than a schoolboy himself.

They'd never asked each other's ages. Dave had thought later that the other guy had obviously not wanted to discover that his fuck of the night was under-age -- which wasn't so farfetched because Dave at eighteen could easily have been taken for sixteen. Now it occurred to Dave that maybe the guy hadn't asked because he himself had been barely legal.

"Do you two know each other?" said the personnel assistant who was doing the rounds and nearly startled Dave out of his canvas chair.

"No," Dave said immediately.

"Well, this is David Wenham," the woman said, smiling non-committally, as if introducing rhododendron fanciers to each other. "And this is Marton Csokas." She leaned in closer and lost her affected neutrality as she whispered to Dave, "Quite the local celebrity."

Marton. Dave had read that name in his schedule on the flight out. Marton Csokas.

Not so completely unlikely. Small world and all that. Not so entirely implausible that an adolescent cruiser of gay bars should become an actor in later life. Around two-thirds of Dave's fellow students at the Nepean had been gay. That just came with the territory. And the antipodean actors' network was not so large that colleagues wouldn't run into each other at some point in their careers. It was bound to have happened sooner or later. And now was the point. Now was the sooner.

Luckily, Dave was immediately introduced to someone else, and then someone else was introduced to him, and then there was official business to be conducted. It was only hours later as they walked towards the luncheon tent, that the other guy came up to him again, touched him on the sleeve and asked, "Haven't we met somewhere before?"

"No, "Dave said and kept walking.

"Hang on, I'm sure," the guy said. "You do look familiar somehow. Did you ever live in Christchurch? Or in Canterbury?"

"No," Dave said.

He stopped and looked into Marton's eyes. The eyes still looked pretty much as they had done fifteen years ago, slightly heavy-lidded, and they still had that habit of gazing at you in a sort of sideways manner.

"Yes?" prompted Marton.

"Nothing," said Dave and started to walk again. "You must have seen me on TV or something."

"Oh yes," Marton said and laughed. "'Diver Dan'. Yes, well, that must be it then."

He didn't sound entirely convinced, though, but Dave could barely find time to worry about that because the effect of the laugh had been so disconcerting. That laugh had once again, for the second time today, transported him into the past in a rush of vertigo, right back to those sweaty moments on that narrow hotel mattress. A short, clipped laugh that broke off before it had quite run its course, as if embarrassed about its own throaty abandon.

After that, after the laugh and the short dialogue, Dave just exchanged unimportant pleasantries with Marton. The pleasantries continued throughout lunch, thankfully diluted by the presence of other, obligingly boisterous people, and they continued throughout the next seven weeks. Seven weeks of pleasantries. Seven weeks, actually, of not seeing Marton overly much, because Marton's part was smaller than Dave's and he wasn't needed as often, and because Marton lived in Auckland and only came down when scheduled. Seven weeks of pondering what this belated second meeting with the man from Oxford Street betokened in the context of Dave's life as a whole.

Not a lot, Dave decided. It didn't make a lot of difference. Or rather, it shouldn't. It needn't. Both of them had quite evidently moved on. The past was the past, let bygones be bygones, water under the bridge, all of that. In the end, the episode with Marton had been just a one-night stand with an anonymous stud. Running across him now didn't change an iota of that. Dave was no longer the bashful, brash teenager, and Marton was clearly well-established in his career and grown-up and the rest of it. To all intents and purposes, they weren't even the same two people any longer. They might as well not have met again, for all the difference it would make to their lives.

Yet Dave couldn't let it go. Despite his own rationalisations and despite the good sense accumulated in the intervening one-and-a-half decades of maturation, Dave was left permanently breathless after that encounter. He was unsettled, and he couldn't quite pinpoint the exact reason for his disquiet. It wasn't just that Marton reminded him of a foolish mistake in his past life -- his life was crowded with foolish mistakes -- but that there was also something disconcerting about Marton in the present tense.

What that something was, Dave couldn't identify. And as he'd told no one else about his Oxford-Street adventure, there was now also no one to tell about its strange, delayed sequel. The snatches of memory just went round and round in Dave's head, with no place else to go. He wasn't obsessive about it, not by any means; but the thoughts did provide a buzzing undertone to the days and nights of filming.

About the only thing that did click into place was the name. It turned out that Marton, though he had lied about his national origin, had not lied about his name. He'd told Dave that his name was Marty, so that all these years, Dave had imagined his mystery man to be called Martin Somebody. As in Martin Luther King and Martin Place.

After the first few weeks, Dave started asking cautious questions of the other New Zealanders on the shoot.

"So," he said to Karl Urban, both balancing lunch trays on their upturned palms. "I hear you did some episodes of Xena the Warrior Princess with that Marton guy?"

It wasn't true that Dave had 'heard' this. He had looked it up on the back of video covers in one of those big multimedia stores in the centre of Wellington. He himself had never followed that particular television series nor could he recall ever having seen Marton in anything else.

"Marton?" said Karl, fishing a slice of lemon out of his glass of mineral water and putting it thoughtfully between his lips. "Sure. I worked with Marton. Why?"

"Nice guy?" said Dave.

"Yeah, sure. Terrific guy. Oh, hello, Bern."

That had been only marginally enlightening. However, Dave was undaunted and, the week after, sidled up to Craig Parker, another one of those kiwi actors who was not always on set because not always needed. Craig, or so Dave had gleaned, was gay, and that was definitely a more promising avenue of enquiry. If only Dave hadn't been embarrassed to bring it up directly. After all, he could hardly clap Craig on the shoulder and shout, 'Hello, you old bugger, been sleeping round much in your life and ever been to bed with Marton?'

"So," Dave said, twisting the ends of his belt round the handle of his sword. "You see much of Marton up in Auckland?"

"Marton?" said Craig. "Tchockie? Yeah, on and off. You know. It's a small two islands. Actors get around."

"Right," said Dave.

Get around? Get around where? How? Sleep around? Or was that just an innocuous remark?

After these two forays into the world of detection, Dave decided he was not cut out to be a sleuth and abandoned his investigations. Instead, he bought a few of those old Xena episodes and watched them on his nights off.

Sometime in spring, almost two months into the shoot, Dave was scheduled to do some filming together with Marton. That is, not filming any scenes together but filming together in the same building, in the blue-screen studios on the outskirts of Wellington. Dave was battling phantom nazgûl in one room, down the corridor his hobbit colleagues were perched on an ent-crane, and at the other end of the building, the Lothlorien elves were striding around the Golden Wood.

At a quarter to eleven, a morning break was called in Dave's studio. Dave wandered down to the facility's cafeteria. Nobody he knew was there, just row on row of sparkle-topped tables and there, near the windows, sat Marton.

There was no avoiding him. Dave had to walk past the window tables to get to the self-service counters. Marton looked up and waved 'hi'. So, of course, Dave had to wave 'hi' in return, and then double back with his tray and sit down opposite his nemesis, with much scraping of his chair on the lino.

Marton was in costume, and that was a relief. It was less fraught to speak to a heavily camouflaged and bewigged Marton, a virtually defaced Marton. And Dave himself was protected, too, behind Faramir's scruffy beard and bulky tunic.

Still, as soon as he looked up from his almond croissant and cappuccino, and into those hooded eyes across the table, Dave was once more the hapless youth from Marrickville, at once diffident and defiant. Unsure of himself but ready to put on a belligerent swagger and bluff it out, despite having jelly for bones and a frayed rope for a spine.

Marton was silent for the first few moments but his jaw was working and finally he came out with:

"Sorry to bring this up again, David, you must be getting sick of me but you just look so much like someone I once knew."

Someone he once knew? Knew? Once? Was this genuine bewilderment? Or did Marton suspect the truth? No, no, implausible. If Marton had started to cruise the bars at a tender age, he must have clocked up hundreds of men in his time, and Dave was surely just one blip among a sea of similar faces. There was no way Marton could recognise and remember him.

What, god what, did one say in these situations? Of course, Dave had been taken for other people before, and there were some polite and some witty replies, he knew, but none would come to hand.

Finally, he remembered one. "I hope it was a nice person, at least," he offered lamely.

"Nice?" said Marton and a faraway look crept across his whitened Celeborn-face. "Yes, I suppose you could say that. Actually, I'm not really sure if 'nice' is the right word."

He laughed that laugh again, that laugh whose tail end was throttled in a hiccup. Dave dropped his croissant. It fell into his cappuccino. Creamy coffee spilled over the lip of the cup and milled around in the saucer.

"You right?" Marton said. "Here, have my napkin."

He pushed his paper serviette across, and Dave spread it across his part of the table. Brown liquid oozed into the tissue. Dave bit into his dripping croissant, although once the pastry was in his mouth, he found he couldn't swallow.

"To tell you the truth," began Marton.

"Yes?" said Dave, spraying crumbs.

"Oh, nothing," said Marton. He shook his head. "This must bore you, going on about this. It's got nothing to do with you, after all. And anyway, I haven't seen this person for years and years. He probably looks completely different now to what I remember."

Marton looked at Dave, then lifted his cup and continued to watch Dave over its rim as he drank.

"So," said Dave, forcing the chewed croissant down his throat. "Who was this phantom doppelganger of mine?"

He couldn't believe his own bravery in having asked that question. Perhaps he'd make a private detective yet.

"Oh," said Marton and turned the cup around on its saucer. "Just someone. He was... To tell you the truth, and I hope I'm not embarrassing you or anything, but he was someone I slept with once. He was from Sydney, like you."

"Sydney's big," Dave managed.

"You all right? You look a bit pale."

"Yes, yes, fine."

"He was called Tom. This bloke was. That's all I know about him. It was only the one time. Hey, you wouldn't happen to know a Tom in Sydney, would you?"

No, of course Dave didn't know any Toms. That is, of course he knew Toms but not the Tom. Not that Tom. Dave had invented that name. Or rather, he had borrowed that name. Just as Marton had lied about South Africa, so Dave had lied about his name. There wasn't much else left they could have lied about, though, because there had, after all, not been an excessive call for conversation.

"Did you want to say something?" said Marton.

"Yes, I..."

"Studio 12. Could all the actors involved in work at Studio 12 please report back there now? Studio 12." It was the intercom. Chairs scraped throughout the cafeteria.

"Right, that would be me," said Marton. He pushed back his chair, smoothed his long wig, adjusted his gown. "See you round, then." Turned to go.

Came back again. Said, "Look, do you want to... you know, just meet up again or something after we wrap today? Just... you know, we don't get to see each other all that often and it might just be fun to... I don't know, get to know each other a bit."

"Yes, why not," said Dave.

He'd been surprised into it. He would not have given that affirmative answer if he'd had any time to consider. In fact, he had changed his mind already and was on the verge of inventing some prior appointment. Too late. Marton had left the table and swept out of the room. Only his coffee cup was still sitting in its saucer.

Moving his own crumb-sodden cappuccino out of the way, Dave picked up Marton's cup. He turned it so that his own lips curved around the rim at the same spot where Marton's had been. He could see the traces of Celeborn's pale lipstick clinging to the porcelain. Dave slowly drained the rest of the coffee, black, bitter, sugarless.

When he put the cup down, the lipstick was gone. It had rubbed off onto his own mouth.

Dave didn't see Marton again, not until they'd finished that day and he left through the automatic sliding-door and stepped into the car park. There, just outside the door, next to a giant spiky plant in a wooden vat which made him seem small, stood Marton. He was out of costume. He was just Marton now, with his short fuzzy hair and his warm complexion, hands crammed into his trouser pockets, looking up expectantly. And Dave was just Dave, without warrior's tunic to hide behind.

"Hi," Marton said.

"Hello," said Dave.

They turned from the doors and started walking. Dave blinked, unused to the outdoor brightness after hours spent with tungsten. The car park was dipped in sulphuric yellow and stained clouds roiled over the tree tops.

They were walking, and Dave didn't know where they were heading, it just seemed imperative to keep moving. Moving took the edge off the intensity of being with this man, and in an odd way, Marton appeared to feel the same. Dave didn't suggest a pub and Marton didn't suggest a coffee shop. It was, as if by mutual agreement, they had hit on the indecisive state of aimless rambling as the least impossible framework for this... whatever it was, encounter, meeting, loop in time.

"Smells like a storm," Dave said.

"Yeah," said Marton.

Dave kept in step with Marton, matching stride to stride. At the end of the row of Toyotas and BMWs, there was a raised strip with shrubs. Marton jumped over these in an almost boyish leap. Dave followed suit, and they were walking along a quiet, suburban street. Jacarandas nodded overhead, reminding Dave of Sydney and the northern suburbs in spring. A bus started up behind them and trundled past.

"So," said Dave, listening to his voice sounding muffled in the vast stillness.

"Yeah?" Marton said.

"Nothing," Dave said. He glanced sideways at Marton's profile. Same man, fifteen years on. Same nose, same forehead, same earlobes. And yet a hundred new nuances. Things Dave hadn't noticed during the night they had spent together. The night had been short; it hadn't been longer than five or six hours. Five hours were nothing, after all, certainly not long enough definitively to register somebody's eye colour or the shape of their fingernails. But there were also other novelties beyond the confirmation of forgotten details. Things that life had engraved or accidentally dropped on Marton since. Things, perhaps, that Marton had wrested from life and made his own. Little tics he had: the way he smoothed his nose, the way he touched his watch strap. There was the confident roll of his shoulders stretching against his shirt. There was the very choice of shirt and jeans and watch, marks of a life with its decisions about what was important and what wasn't.

"So, how was filming today?" Dave asked after casting his mind over a variety of potential subjects for conversation. There, that was a nice, neutral, colleague-to-colleague question. Boring but perfectly acceptable smalltalk.

"Good," said Marton.

Right. Good. Well, that didn't get them very far.

They walked on in silence for a few more strides. A wooden fence appeared on their right, and Dave trailed his fingers along it -- bedump, bedump -- , vaguely wishing he had a stick to make it really clatter. This, too, reminded him of Sydney. Maybe it was just walking along with Marton, being carried back to his stick-clattering youth. The street itself, with its steep incline, was like some Sydney streets. Often, back home, you could drive to the top of a hill, only to find that the street suddenly shot away into nothing. At least, that's how it would appear. In reality, the street would veer downhill again so sharply that, if you timed yourself and hit the pedal at just the right moment, your car felt as if it might fly into the sky and out into the Pacific below.

"David," said Marton.

"Yes?" said Dave, louder than intended because he was startled out of his thoughts. The word hovered in the hushed air.

"I hate to bore you with this all over again," said Marton. "But you know how you asked this morning who your doppelganger was?"

"Yes..."

Dave shivered inwardly. Here it was, that subject again, the bush they'd been beating about like a couple of wary hunters. Or rather, he had been. Marton seemed eager enough to broach the topic. And with another shiver, Dave realised that he'd been only too happy for Marton to broach it. That was why he had agreed to come along. Secretly and despite himself, Dave was fatally drawn to Marton.

"Well, I told you the answer but that was the short version," Marton said. "You want to hear the long version now?"

Dave shook his head but the words coming out of his mouth were, "Yes, all right." His fingers were still on the fence, wood chips catching at his nails.

"I'm sorry, I'm always doing this to people," said Marton and laughed his truncated laugh again. The laugh made Dave press too hard into the planks and drive a splinter straight into his flesh.

"I'm always glomming onto people and telling them endless stories they don't want to hear," Marton continued. "Do you mind? What's wrong with your finger?"

Dave was sucking on it. "Oh, just got a splinter."

Somewhere, thunder rolled.

Marton's mock self-deprecation was as much a mark of change as anything else. Much more of a mark, in fact, than the few extra lines around his eyes and the broadening of his shoulders. It was the mark of someone who'd come to accept and recognise a few things about himself and who felt easy about sharing them: 'Hi, I'm the sort of person who likes to tell stories. What are you?' 'Hello, well, I'm the sort of person who likes to hide. I like to look and listen; I don't really like to tell.' 'Do you? Is that so?' 'Yes, I am suspicious. I don't like to lay myself open, unlike you. I don't like to show all the layers and peels of my existence.'

Still, why was Dave here if not to have the layers of his past peeled away? Each of Marton's sentences was peeling another one off, leaving Dave raw and chafed, like the sunburns everyone used to suffer from back in the seventies, before the discovery of skin cancer and the ozone hole.

"It's just because you remind me of this guy such a lot," said Marton. "You even have some of his mannerisms."

"Mannerisms?" said Dave. "You remember mannerisms?"

"Oh yeah," said Marton. "I remember a lot. It was only one night, you know, but it was really etched into my memory. It was a big deal for me."

They rounded a corner. A mail box crouched next to the kerb. Dog shit wilted on the pavement.

"Careful," said Marton. "Don't step in that. What I was going to say was that this guy... well, I don't know. I was very starry-eyed then. I was very romantic. It was just one of those things, you know, ships in the night and all that. But I thought about it for ages afterwards. I was completely obsessed by it. I was in Sydney only for one week. School holidays, and I was supposed to be visiting my uncle. Well, I did visit him. He lived in Woollahra. But, well you don't want to know all the details but there was this big fuck-up. My dad got the dates wrong and it turns out that my uncle was still away on a business trip when I got to Sydney. So I was going to stay in a youth hostel or something but I talked to my dad on the phone and he got into a fury. He made me promise that I'd stay in a hotel. It was only one night; my uncle came back the next day. So, anyway, are you sure you don't mind listening to all this?"

"No," said Dave. What else was there to say? What else was there to do but to walk besides Marton and spiral back through the years, back to that spring night in 1983?

"Anyway," said Marton. "There I was, holed up in this hotel in Elizabeth Bay. And Elizabeth Bay is very near Kings Cross, of course, so that night, and because I didn't know anyone else in Sydney, I went out on the town, and whoa, all those prostitutes, I was totally surprised. I'd never been in such a big city before, all on my own, I felt quite daring. So I kept on walking, and I knew about Oxford Street so when I got there, I just started going into some of those bars."

"Right," said Dave. The air was starting to feel thick as starch. Electricity danced between the fenders of parked cars. As they rounded another corner, they came upon a deserted playground set on a triangular patch of land between two roads forking off in different directions. Marton looked left and right, then crossed the street, Dave in tow.

They ambled across the springy safety surface, past a roundabout and two wooden animals on metal springs. "Hey, I haven't been in one of these for a long time," said Marton and plonked himself down on the seat of a swing.

"I have," said Dave. "But they make me feel sick these days."

"That so?" said Marton. "Must try that." But he didn't. He waited for Dave to sit down on the other swing, facing him, and started to rock back and forth just slightly, propelling himself with the balls of his feet. The swings weren't built for adults. The moulded rubber seats were just a little narrow, squeezing buttocks together between long, interlocked chains.

"So?" said Dave.

"Right, Oxford Street. Have you ever been to one of those gay bars? Discos, whatever. Well, you probably remember that in those days, Oxford Street wasn't nearly as trendy as it is now. It was still a bit tacky. To me it just seemed like... completely out of this world. I was just staring at everything and everyone, all those people, but pretending like mad not to be staring, of course. And then I met this guy there."

"Yes?" said Dave.

"Haven't you ever had anything like that happen to you?" said Marton. "You meet someone, you have sex, it's wild sex, it's out of this world. And the next day you realise that it's much more than sex, you're completely head over heels in love with this person? Has that ever happened to you?"

"No," Dave managed. His knuckles were starting to hurt, he was clutching the chains of the swing so hard. And his finger was throbbing where the splinter had caught.

Marton continued talking. He looked strange, illuminated by the feverish light. He didn't look real. He wasn't real. This wasn't real. This was like trying to force a square peg into a round hole. Marton was the peg, and Dave's life was the hole, and the two, peg and hole, didn't seem to fit together at all. How had the callous flesh-hunter who had been part of the furniture of Dave's construction of his past for so long, how had he morphed into the wide-eyed, lovelorn youth of Marton's story?

"I never saw him again, you know," said Marton. "I went back every single night for the rest of that week. God knows what I told my uncle. I went to all the bars and all the discos but I never saw him again. I was also very, very stupid because stupidly I never told the guy my name or anything about me. It didn't really hit me until the next day. And you know what, I still go back, every time I'm in Sydney. I still go to the Oxford Street clubs at least once, just on the off chance."

"Right," said Dave. His tongue felt like a paddle of mould in his mouth. He rubbed it against the roof of his mouth but everything tasted furry and stale.

"The funny thing is," said Marton, "that I'm not even gay. Well, I've mucked about a bit with men, as you do when you're young. You don't mind me saying this, do you? I'd done stuff with a guy before I got to Sydney too, a boy from my class. But I was also going out with girls. It wasn't as if I was gay or anything. It was just that one time. Sorry, were you going to say something?"

Dave shook his head.

"It's all so long ago now," said Marton. "It's almost like a dream. I was so very, very young. But things like that can change your life."

"I don't believe that's true," Dave heard himself saying.

"What? Why not?"

"I," said Dave and cleared his throat, fungus coating the sides of his gums. "I think it's never just one thing that changes your life. Can be, I suppose, but it's like layers. One thing leads to another thing, and that leads to another thing, and so on."

"How do you mean, layers?"

"Well, I find that life is starting to feel like it's made up of many layers. There are the eighties, and then the nineties..."

"Yeah, and don't forget the bad-hair seventies."

"Yes, and these build up layers. It's a sort of richness in life. Life gets richer. And you reinterpret things you did earlier. I do, anyway. Some things I did when I was younger seemed to mean one thing, but later I realised they meant something else entirely. It's not something you have when you're really young."

"No," said Marton. "That's interesting. But you're right." He scuffed his shoes on the ground. "Being young is overrated. I did some stupid things when I was young."

"How old are you now?" asked Dave.

"Thirty-three," said Marton. "And you?"

"Thirty-four," said Dave.

Shit. Thirty-three. Dave did some frantic mental arithmetic.

Another thunder rumbled, not so distant this time.

"I was seventeen when the thing with that bloke happened," Marton said.

"Yes," Dave said. Shit. Seventeen. And then he said something he hadn't expected to hear himself say. He said, "Weren't you going to tell me the long version?"

"Oh, yeah," said Marton, still swinging softly back and forth, in counterpoint to Dave. "You sure you want to hear all of this? I tend to bore people with my stories."

"You've told others about this?"

"Oh yeah. Well, not a lot of people but a few. You know." The chains of the swing creaked. Bits of shiny paper, chocolate-bar wrappers and inside-out chips bags, flew by in a whirl. The trees rustled. "Anyway," said Marton.

And he went on. He was like someone out of one of those nineteenth-century Russian novels Dave had once spent an entire summer reading. The kind of novel where a straggle-bearded stranger accosts the protagonist in a late-night railway carriage and proceeds to disburden himself of his life history. Confiding intimate secrets to a complete unknown -- perhaps, indeed, that was the clue to confiding secrets: choosing unknown strangers to disclose them to. Marton had no straggly beard but he was talkative enough and he was confiding intimate secrets all right, secrets so intimate and deep that Dave would not have believed it was possible that they could ever see the light of day. He himself had certainly never let them out, and probably never would have if it hadn't been for this chance meeting and this nineteenth-century moment on a swing.

All that was required to keep the story flowing was the occasional 'yes' and 'right' from Dave. Dave obliged. He provided the 'yeses' and the 'rights' and listened with a perverse kind of fascination to the unfolding of his own history. He experienced the vertigo of someone who has another's story superimposed on his own account of his life, with an uncanny point-for-point correspondence, as if the green part of a polarised transparency had been placed onto the red part and, miraculously, a whole image emerged from the chaotic pattern. Except that the contours were blurred, the edges didn't match up precisely, everything was the same yet different. Everything was somehow skewed.

"When I first saw the guy," said Marton (...'me', thought Dave, 'that guy was me, of course, my god, me, me'...), "they were playing that song, do you remember it, by the Talking Heads. Burning Down the House. Pretty good song. Well, I thought so at the time."

Marton actually started singing the opening bars of the refrain, substituting 'nah-nah' for the words until he got to 'burning down the house'. Dave hummed along politely. He looked at Marton, singing, his elbows hooked around the metal chains, knees bending and flexing with the motion of the swing. Marton's face looked soft and tough all at the same time, with his rounded lips and Mel-Gibson cheeks framed by that harsh number-one haircut, shading in his skull with charcoal.

Marton's eyes, however, were all soft.

"That was the song that was playing when I first saw this boy," said Marton. "Everyone was dancing. You can imagine, gay disco, early hours, people were going berserk. It was one of those tiny sweaty dance floors, shiny and with a mirror ball over it. Remember how everyone liked to be so cool when dancing in the eighties? Just move a finger here and a bit of a hip roll there. Well, this song, they let it all hang out, people jumping up and down, waving their arms. Guys camping it up in a big way. That's when I saw him, you know, classic thing, eyes meeting across a crowded dance floor."

Marton fell silent, arms draped around chains. Leaves rustled again and a gust of wind hoovered across the playground. Marton was looking somewhere into the distance.

"So," Dave said.

"That was the fast song," Marton said. "The hopping-around song. The sidling-up-near-each-other song. Have you ever had that sort of experience? Bolt out of the blue, first-sight type of thing?"

"No," said Dave.

The chains creaked. Marton twisted sideways in the swing, and back to the other side.

"Then came the slow song," Marton said. "I've got your attention now, haven't I?" He smiled. "I can see that I have." More creaking, more twisting. "Anyway, the slow song. You know it? Great Southern Land."

"Yes," Dave said. "Icehouse."

"Yeah, you know it, great. Well, you would, Aussie band."

"'It's a prison island, hidden in the summer for a million years,'" said Dave. "I always liked that line."

"Yeah. That is a good line. They should write songs like that about New Zealand."

This time, Dave hummed the tune, and Marton joined in for the chorus. They stopped and laughed. Dave had vertigo again, caught dizzily in a time switch. Memory coming up short against the present, nothing quite fitting. The pressing present, with him and Marton sitting on swings and singing songs. In the background, like a shifting pattern, the wallpaper of that barren hotel room, hot skin, sheets thrown off onto the floor, gasps and desperate gulps.

"The line I remember is 'looking everywhere because I had to find you,'" Marton said. "I bought that song the next day and listened to it about a hundred thousand times. Hey, remember singles? This was before CDs."

"Yes," said Dave. "But I don't remember them playing that song."

"What?" said Marton.

"I mean," said Dave and felt heat blush across his forehead. "I don't... I never owned that song. I think I only heard it later, not when it first came out."

"Right," said Marton and scrutinised Dave. There was something moving in the corners of his eyes, like a wolf in a forest, glimpsed one second, gone the next. Then his smile was back, and he continued swinging and twisting.

"When the slow song came on," Marton continued, "the Icehouse song, we were right opposite each other, and we swayed at first, you know, not sure what to do with a slow song. All around, the gay guys were doing slow dancing, grabbing each other and pashing off and everything. So finally I sort of put my hands on this guy, around his waist, and he put his arms around my neck, and we did an exaggerated slow dance. You know, sort of making fun of the whole slow-dancing thing. But then, after a bit, it all became terribly serious. You know, how a song can take on this great big meaning when you're seventeen. I thought, wow, great southern land, and here I am, at night, in Sydney, dancing with this incredible Australian boy. We were doing this slow, slow dancing, and getting quite close, you can imagine. And about half-way through, we started kissing."

Marton stopped talking. A bird cawed past, some sort of large grey pigeon. Marton's words had been exerting an almost hypnotic effect on Dave. The words were weaving the woof of the tale, the woof to Dave's weft. Never had Dave imagined the woof to be so different from his own weft. Where he had imagined brown rope, there was brilliant silk.

And where he had imagined a suave traveller, possibly a businessman, careless and sexy, there was instead a story-weaver, someone who had perhaps become an actor because he liked to plunge into life's stories, a guy who remembered pop songs and pubescent kisses. Here was someone who had braided the memories of that night into the fabric of his life. And it seemed that Dave hadn't been in any way a blip in an ocean.

Marton had probably not been very suave back then, although he seemed suave enough now, in his own way, and he was still sexy, as far as Dave could appreciate. If you liked that sort of languid, almost throw-away kind of sexiness that stole upon you like an afterthought. Dave had evidently liked that kind back then, or maybe Marton hadn't had it yet, maybe it was something Marton had acquired or refined over the years. At any rate, Dave remembered finding Marton sexy. He hadn't put it to himself in so many words but he'd paid attention to the guy's mouth and to the curve of his arse in his baggy trousers.

There was also, now, in this playground, a peculiar vulnerability about Marton, Dave realised. Marton was peeling himself open, and that was a risky undertaking. Marton didn't seem to mind taking the risk. He seemed to be happy to lay his story at Dave's feet and to trust Dave not to trample all over it.

"You don't mind me telling you this?" Marton said again. It was the other half of the equation that kept the story going. Dave saying 'yes', and Marton saying, 'you don't mind, do you?' Marton going inexorably on, Dave knowing the ending of the tale long before the teller got to it but hanging on Marton's words nevertheless. Marton not knowing that Dave knew the ending, that Dave knew more than just the ending, that Dave knew even those things which Marton chose not to tell. That there were still some loose threads in this narrative tapestry.

With each additional sentence of Marton's, Dave felt more of a fraud. He did not inhabit the role of impartial, detached listener that Marton had cast him into. He was terribly partial, passionately attached, a horrible betrayer of trust. Dave had chosen to be reticent but he had been reticent too long and now he felt trapped inside his own reserve. His tongue wasn't simply tied; it was knotted in mean-spirited deceit. He should open his mouth now. He should own up. He should say... what?

"You right?" Marton said.

"Oh," Dave said. "Yes."

"Were you going to say something?"

Dave shook his head. He looked at the tips of his shoes on the ground, at his shoelaces curling themselves into loops under the cuffs of his trousers.

"Go on," he said.

"Well," came Marton's voice, and Dave was starting to think it was really a very good storytelling voice, and that Marton had a real gift for narration, or was it perhaps just that he was mesmerised by his own story told back at him in this way?

"You can imagine," said Marton. Dave didn't need to imagine. He knew. He could feel the exact contours of Marton's tongue in memory. He remembered the thick roll of Marton in his own mouth, remembered his own startled surprise at being kissed, at the heat and rush of it. Not only the sexiness of it but also the consciousness of having been singled out. He had felt knighted by that kiss.

"This guy," said Marton, "this guy kissed like a dream. It sounds corny to say it but he really did. I'd never kissed anyone like that before. I had always used kissing just to get into girls' pants. And I don't think I'd ever really kissed a guy, certainly not that boy from my school. This boy -- his name was Tom, by the way, had I mentioned that? -- this boy kissed just for the sake of kissing. It was really something else. It was out of this world."

Shoelace. Tip of shoe. Crumbs of concrete or rubber or whatever they made this kiddie surface of. Ant crawling across his shoelace. Clambering across the plastic bit at the end. Dave's world had shrunk to a tiny orbit.

"Well," said Marton and laughed his laugh, breathlessly. Dave turned to a statue of salt. A statue with shoelaces.

"If I tell you any more," said Marton, "I'll be arrested for pornography."

"Haha," said Dave. Salty words.

"You know, on second thoughts," said Marton, "that guy didn't really look like you. Not now that I've looked at you a bit more closely."

Dave raised his face.

"Well, he was blond like you," Marton went on, "but all you Aussies are blond, right? He had different hair, though; it was this sort of asymmetrical fringe thing. And..." Marton bent forwards, moved his swing near Dave's, and for an absurd, brief moment Dave thought that Marton was going to kiss him. He didn't. He lifted up his hand and stroked the back of Dave's head, the crest of his nape, and then his skull behind the ears. "... he had his hair very short all around here, shaved almost."

"Bad eighties-haircut," Dave managed.

"Yeah," said Marton. "You should have seen what I looked like. Did you ever have hair like that, floppy at the front and shaved around the sides and back?"

"Yes," Dave heard himself say, "yes, I did. Just like that. Asymmetrical."

Marton looked at him with his pupils darting around to the corners of his eyes.

"I mean," Dave stammered. "I mean, sort of like that."

A plastic bag whirled by, got caught in an upstream, and was whipped around in a tight mini-tornado. A fat drop hit Dave's forehead.

"Oh, shit," Marton said and jumped up.

Plop, plop. The first drop was followed by a second drop followed by a third and then followed almost immediately by five million more. Before they had time to get very far, they were enveloped in driving rain.

"Come on!" yelled Marton. He grabbed Dave's hand and started running across the street.

"Where are we going?" gasped Dave.

"Back to the car park."

"You got a car there?"

"No." Marton stopped short, eyebrows glistening wet. "I thought you did."

"No," said Dave. "What made you think I did?"

"Because you walked away from the car park. I normally take that bus they have."

"No, you walked away. I was just following you."

"Shit," said Marton. "And which way is the fucking car park?"

He looked around wildly. Waves of water were streaming across the street in veils. The houses on the other side were already barely visible through the Niagaran rain.

"Wasn't there a..." said Dave.

"You're right," said Marton who still kept hold of Dave's hand. They ran back, Marton's fingers warm around Dave's palm. Dave splashed into a puddle by accident, Marton skidded on a bit of mud, they skirted the slide and the seesaw, and ducked into the triangular shelter underneath a wooden climbing frame.

Their little retreat seemed to be designed as some kind of playhouse. There were two logs to sit on. The area was quite dry. They could see the playground through the opening at the side: it was a churning mass of drops.

"Shit," said Marton and passed his hands over his dripping skull. "That was lucky."

Dave flexed his left hand, the hand that had been held in Marton's. They both sat down on the logs, opposite each other, knees bumping at a 45-degree angle. There was a lot of sound outside, gurgling noises, rushing rain, thunder, the drumbeat of drops on the climbing frame.

"So," Dave said.

"Yeah?" asked Marton and rubbed his hands dry on his knees.

"You're a good storyteller, Marty."

"Yeah, it's all true, too. Sorry, what did you just call me?"

"Nothing," said Dave.

"You called me Marty." Marton looked at Dave and he had that shadow in the corner of his eyes again. "No one's called me that in ages."

"Marton. Sorry." Dave's forehead heated up again.

"No, no, go ahead. You can call me Marty, if you want. I used to be called Marty at school. Marty. Tchockie. Whatever. What did they call you? Davie?"

"No, just Dave. Or poof. The nasty ones. Because I did drama."

Marton moved his head slightly to face the rain outside but continued to look at Dave from the sides of his eyes. "But you're not, are you?" he said.

"Not what?"

"A poof. You're not, are you?"

"No," said Dave.

A warm wall of water hid the world. Not far away, thunder crackled. Big drops splashed into puddles. Everything was white and yellow, that strange bright light of the eye of the tempest.

"I'm not, either," said Marton. "I've said that already, I think. Funny, isn't it? After all that." He dug around in his pockets for something, didn't seem to find it, clasped his hands between his knees. Dave noticed the way his fingers fitted together and the way his wrist was hugged by a silver-hinged watch strap.

"Have you ever," continued Marton, "slept with a bloke, though? Even though you're not gay. Just to see?"

"No," said Dave.

"Sorry, do you mind me asking?"

"No. I mean, no, I don't mind. And yes. Yes, actually, I have. Slept with a bloke."

Marton smiled, a quick half-grin. "I knew there was a reason why you were so interested in my story. Go on."

Marton was perilously close. Dave would have studied his face carefully, to gather some clue as to whether Marton was just joking or having a stab in the dark, or whether Marton knew. Whether Marton had known all along and was stringing Dave along. Except Dave didn't dare study Marton's face; he didn't even dare glance in his general direction. Instead, he stared out into the strings of rain washing the swings and the see-saw and the wooden animals that looked as if they were weeping.

Marton began to wind up his watch. Dave saw the way his thumb and forefinger twisted around the tiny knob on the watch. He realised that this was the first time he had ever told anyone about his night of sex with a man. For a second, it did almost feel like making a confession to a stranger in a railway compartment. But it wasn't a stranger, of course. It wasn't even a true confession. There wasn't much Marton didn't know about the ins and outs of that particular night.

"It was a long time ago," Dave finally said.

Marton was silent but the silence wasn't awkward. It was encouraging. It was the silence more than anything that drew the next words out of Dave.

"It sort of fucked me up for a bit afterwards," he went on. "I didn't sleep with anyone for ages after that. I was a virgin before, and then I didn't sleep with a girl until I was twenty-two."

"Shit, what a bummer" said Marton. "Did it turn you off sex or something?"

"No," said Dave. "It wasn't that. I've been thinking about it. It's what I meant before when I said about the layers. About how you reinterpret things after they've happened. Because at first I thought I was very special because this guy had singled me out. Everything else afterwards seemed somehow not so special. Or not special enough. That sounds stupid but, as you said about yourself, I was very young and I'd never slept with anyone before. I was a bit overwhelmed. I also thought I was a bit of a freak because I'd slept with a man, and that got me tied up in all sorts of knots about my sexuality. Then, though, as I got older, I realised that I'd just been picked up by some guy and that it wasn't because I was special or anything. I also realised that I hadn't really been ready for it. It was all a bit much to handle. It was a difficult period in my life," he finished lamely.

"Wow," said Marton.

"What?"

"I just didn't think I'd ever hear you say so many words all together. Sorry, David, only kidding." Marton briefly put his hand on Dave's knee, then returned to his watchwinding.

"I've never told anyone," said Dave.

"What? You've never told anyone? As in, I'm the first person you've ever told this?"

Crash-boom. That was thunder, quite close by. A jagged neon line cracked across the sky.

"Yes," said Dave.

"Oh," said Marton. "Right. Well, nothing like one big stupid tale of long-lost love to prompt another one, I guess." He leant forwards, watching Dave while still twiddling his watch which, by now, surely must have been wound to breaking point. "And the bloke? Was he someone from your school? How young exactly were you?"

Marton's face was very near and seemed even nearer, as if Dave was focusing on it in close-up. Marton's pupils were darting back and forth in his eyeballs. Dave realised that the to-and-fro, the skittering of irises, was due to Marton trying to scrutinise each of Dave's eyes in turn. He was so close that he couldn't take Dave's eyes in all at once. He was trying to get a stereo insight into Dave's gaze.

"I was just eighteen," said Dave.

"Eighteen," said Marton.

"Yes. It was the twenty-first of September."

Marton's pupils stopped skittering.

"What?" he said sharply. "What did you just say?"

"My birthday," said Dave. "The twenty-first of September. That's my birthday."

Marton stopped trying to scrutinise both of Dave's eyes at once. He stopped winding his watch. He looked as if he'd even stopped breathing, as if he'd been turned to stone.

"You're Tom," he said.

Time dripped to a halt.

"Aren't you? You are. You are Tom from Oxford Street."

Dave shook his head but his eyes, his knees against Marton's knees, his whole body, his bloodstream, his nostrils and his eyelashes, the hairs on the back of his hand and his tongue sticking drily to his gums -- everything else was saying yes.

Yes, I am. I'm the guy. I'm the boy who thought he was special and then forgot that he was, and who, it turns out, was the most special one of all, after all.

"Shit!" said Marton. The syllable ricocheted off the logs like a shot. It made Dave jump, made his eyelashes vibrate and his knees jerk. Marton sprang up, stumbled over Dave's legs, hit his head against wood. He threw up his arms but the space was too confined for grand gestures, so before Dave could still his pulse, Marton was outside. Dave saw him standing in the puddles, arms flung outwards, water running down his head, shouting, "Fuck! I can't fucking believe this! All this fucking time!"

Then he was back inside, dripping over Dave's trousers. He sat back down, but not on the log opposite. He sat down next to Dave.

"Sorry," Marton said. "Sorry about that."

Dave tried to reach for words but there weren't any about.

"It's a fucking bloody miracle," said Marton. Dave could see his face in profile, gaze on Dave, sideways gaze. "I've looked for this guy for years and years, and here he is. You, I mean. Here you are."

The way he said 'you' made Dave's spit run dry.

"Shit," Marton said again. Dave could feel Marton's leg shaking against his own. Wet denim pressed against warm cotton. Marton sat quite still but there it was, his legshake. The rain came down, drops spluttered into puddles, a car splashed by, and Marton's leg was shaking.

"I don't know what to say," said Marton.

"No," said Dave.

"You didn't want to find me, did you?" said Marton. "I fucked up your life."

"No, you didn't," said Dave.

"You just told me I did."

"Well," said Dave. "It wasn't really you. That was my own view of things. I misinterpreted. I fucked up, not you." He swallowed spitlessly. "Anyway, I was only fucked up for a while. Not very important in the grand scheme of things. And I might have been fucked up, anyway. Aren't we all?"

"How do I know you're not bullshitting me?" said Marton. There was a desperate edge to his voice, and it occurred to Dave that looking was one thing, and finding something else altogether.

"Come on," said Dave.

"No, really. Tell me something. Tell me something only I would know about."

What to tell? Should he tell Marton about the texture of cheap cotton in his mouth, the cotton of the pillow he was biting as Marton ripped into him? Should he tell him about the blood in his shit the next morning? Or should he tell him about the sour taste of humiliation at the back of his throat, muddled up with a deluded sense of having been elected and a confused awareness of his own complicity?

"You came three times that night," Dave said. "Once in my hand, once in my mouth, once in... once in me."

"God," said Marton.

"Yes," said Dave.

"Three times. Fuck, we were young!" And suddenly, he started laughing. Dave waited for the hitch at the end but it didn't come. Marton's laughter flowed on like the rain outside, until it petered out into a soft pitter of chuckles. But the pitter was tinged with a note of hysteria.

"Bloody hell, David. Tom. Whoever the fuck you are. Who's Tom, anyway? Is that your middle name?"

"Tom," said Dave. "Tom is someone who died. He was a friend who came with us to the clubs that night, and he died later. He had Aids."

"Shit."

"I thought," Dave said, "that you were a much older guy. Well, not that old but someone in his twenties at least. For some reason, I got that totally wrong."

"Old? I'm younger than you are! I was totally clueless!"

"Well, you seemed to know it all," Dave said. He leaned his head back against the wood. Purple rhomboids floated through the air, blood vessels behind his irises. "You seemed so forceful. You knew everything. I knew nothing."

"Shit, David." Marton smoothed his nose with his forefinger. He looked down, perhaps studying his own shoelaces. Then he said something.

"What?" said Dave.

"I was a bit rough, wasn't I?"

"Yes," said Dave. "But I could have said 'no'."

"It wasn't on purpose, David. I literally knew nothing. I was just bluffing my way through. I was terrified I'd be found out by the cool Sydneysiders. I was terrified of being buggered. Funny, isn't it? So I tried to make sure I wasn't going to be." He rubbed his nose again, this time with both hands, up and down along the sides of his nose. "I regretted it later. I would have liked to have been fucked by that guy. I'm sorry: by you. Sorry, that sounds so rude. I still can't quite get my head round the fact that you are that guy."

Silence descended again. Dave didn't mind it, the silence. It left some space for his thoughts to settle down in some semblance of order. It left space for him to notice that the rain had stopped as suddenly as it had started. To warm to the feel of Marton's thigh against his, and of Marton's shoulders, round and large, just touching his own.

"We didn't even use condoms, did we?" said Marton. "And I'd never heard of lubrication or anything like that. I was scared and stupid and reckless. And horny, of course, but that was just hormones. What I should have done is... I should have just shouted you a beer or invited you out for a moonlit walk. We should've gone up to South Head and kissed under the stars. There was no absolute need for us to fuck. We could just have taken our time about it and fallen in love properly."

"You are romantic, aren't you?" said Dave. "Anyway," he added in a low voice, "I wanted to have sex. And these days, who knows, I might even enjoy a bit of rough like that."

He looked at Marton. Marton was smiling but his smile was a dark smile. Dave saw the wolf in the corner of Marton's eyes, its teeth clawing at the edges of Marton's cheeks.

"This is very strange," Dave said.

"Too right," said Marton. "This is fucking weird."

"So," said Dave.

"So, what?"

"So... I don't know what."

"When did you recognise it was me?" Marton asked.

"Straight away," said Dave. "As soon as I saw you at that first scheduling meeting."

"And never let on? Bastard." But Marton was still smiling. His teeth were just visible between his lips. They were nice teeth. In fact, Marton was a nice man. That was the most surprising revelation, that Dave's mystery fuck had morphed into this nice man. A man he'd have liked on his own terms, shared history or no. A man he wished he could still go on liking.

"Tell me again," Dave said, "about that night."

"No," said Marton. "You tell me."

"I've tried to repress it. I never wanted to think about it after the first few months. You tell me. Tell me the nice version."

"The nice version? Maybe there isn't a nice version. Maybe the story I've just told you is just the convenient version. Maybe that's just the version I've been telling in order to give meaning to what was actually a stupid, meaningless event."

Dave opened his mouth but Marton cut him off and continued.

"I'm telling you we shouldn't have gone back to that hotel. But I thought that's what you had to do in the big wide world of Sydney gay bars. That's why it's so stupid to be young. You do things you don't want to do and you don't know how to stop yourself when you realise that you're doing something you don't want to do. You never do what you really want to do, just what's the done thing, just what you think everyone else is doing."

"Not only," said Dave. "It's also about not knowing what you want to do."

"Yeah, it's about being stupid and young. And I'm stupid still. I still know the words to those stupid songs, and I still go back to Oxford Street every time I'm over there, trying to undo what's been done."

"Well, you don't need to go back anymore now," said Dave.

"No," said Marton. "I don't. You're right about that."

Outside the shelter, a gleam of sun reflected off a puddle and hit Dave right in the eye. There was the steady after-storm drip of leaves. A bird hooted. They could have got up and left but neither one of them moved.

Marton reached across and lifted Dave's wrist. "What's this watch you've got, by the way?"

"Oh, that," said Dave.

Marton traced the inside of Dave's wrist, running his fingers along the watchband and across Dave's pulse, turning the wrist around and rubbing his thumb over the dial. "Is this still the same watch?"

"Yes," said Dave. "Yes, it is. It's got a new band, of course."

"That's pretty good. What's the make?" He lifted Dave's hand and read the letters above the six-o'clock mark. "Certina. Swiss. I should have known. I should have trusted my instincts. I should have known it was you by the watch. Remember how I kissed your watch?"

"Why... why did you do that?"

Marton shrugged, shoulder moving against Dave's. "Don't know. Just felt like the thing to do. Licking your watch. And your wrist."

"You remember a lot about that night, don't you?"

"Don't you?"

"I thought you were going to tell me the nice version."

"Forget it," said Marton. "You don't need a version. You were there." He was still holding onto Dave's wrist. He rubbed Dave's wrist, running his finger around the outside of the watchface.

They didn't move. They just sat there.

Dave put his head on Marton's shoulder.

"I think I might cry now," said Marton.

"Why?" said Dave, not moving. Not moving his head, not moving his wrist out of Marton's grasp.

"Not really," said Marton. "It's all just a bit... you know."

"Yes," said Dave. "I know."

------------------

The End.

22 July 2002

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