He was Eros. He was Kama. In his bounty five arrows, each finger on the hand. This paint-chipped angel inhabited the long alley wall of Dupp Street, pointing, with both heart bow and pink erection, to the entrance of the adult theater that bore his name. The gateway to the Eros, where matinee tickets were still only two Muggle pounds, was a cracked set of doors; the silver inlay of its Deco frame having long since unraveled.  The Eros carried cheap sweets under glass, sweets and brightly packaged venereal curatives, side-by-side in tidy rows. It was at this same counter where patrons purchased their ticket, from an elderly West Indian woman named Tapp; Tapp, who knitted throughout the day and noticed only the carryings on of the theater's familiar, a striped housecat. Regulars bypassed the dusty confectionary while newcomers tended to stop and haw over the colorful fair, in hopes of legitimizing the cinematic experience. A snuffy-faced man was taking his time at the counter. He cradled a briefcase to his gut in the fashion of a schoolgirl, and sweated an aura of hennish virginity.

“Take a box of those caramels- and some of the toffee bits- well now, maybe I shouldn’t… aw, go ahead. Eh, what d’you think miss? Can’t say that they’d hurt me anymore then they have already.”

In his fretful blather, the little man marked himself an amateur to the Eros scene. Small talk was lost on Tapp, who only ever responded in rote: “Two quid” and “Fifty pence” and “No bottles.” Tapp’s authority aside, the rowdier clientele felt free to bring in anything they liked; with clattering pockets this group would creep up to the Eros’s shaky balcony, an asylum better known to the staff as The Clouds. The Clouds- named not so much for its height but for the heady puffs of marijuana smoke that regularly curled up from its hidden seats. The man at Sirius’s left pressed against him with his leg. He looked a banker, with a crisp blue square in the breast pocket of his suit. When romping around a Camden head shop with James, Sirius happened upon a card of codes:

“If a man wears a lgt. blue hankie in his left back pocket, then he likes bj- receiving. If he wears it in his right back pocket, then bj- giving.”

“If a man wears a dark blue hankie in his left back pocket, then he likes fucking- top. If he wears it in his right back pocket, then fucking- bottom.”

He’d snuck the card into his purchases while James wasn’t looking and later showed it off to Remus. Between them a secret joke blossomed, moments of sputtering, hand-over-mouth laughter whenever they spotted a hankie-outfitted passerby. This banker, displaying his proclivities from the lofty corner of his suit, he was no different than the phlegmatic Mr. Snuffy at the counter or Sirius at his side; together each of them followed an unspoken sort of faith, all of them bowed under the same prayer: for the love of a good man and a good cock, the rest of ones days- amen. Sirius’s own good man was lounging about his flat, coiled in the dry tub reading. “Like the prefect’s bath,” Remus had said. “Only place I could ever get away from you gits.” Sirius flicked the imaginary water at the edge. “Don’t stay in too long.” He gave Remus’s thigh a merciless squeeze, which was answered by a shove to his shoulder. “Be back. Soon, I think.”

Mr. Snuff, having exhausted both conversation and wallet, waddled through the turnstile down the theater row. The banker persisted, staying at Sirius’s side, soldiers marching through high brush. “Piss off,” Sirius whispered. He stepped up and slid his coins to Tapp. She nodded him down the same dim corridor, a stile licked by red lamplight.

His mind was kindled by the darkness- evening activities had been expanded outside of the vinyl sphere to include visits to Muggle flicks when he wanted an intensity of feeling but not make himself vulnerable to tender scenes. Tender scenes like the caramel sugar skinned lad who had led him into the alley behind the Prakash’s market. He had hooked his fingers around the belt loop of Sirius’s jeans just like Remus had done months before, and slid cold fingers down the ticklish part of Sirius’s stomach. It was well past two, the sky above them beautifully supple and wet; a watery spread of clouds flowed in from eastern heavens- racing, chasing and returning. They watched it silently for a moment before slipping back down into each other. The Muggle world was closed- there was nowhere to go, no one about but the chill few who found this stirless quiet as remarkable as Sirius did. He wondered at the people who would be up at this hour; he thought he would like them best of all. His boy in the alleyway, how they then grinned white canine teeth to each other in the dark before kissing- the recognition a fellow disciple. Lads like this, they crowded the city like lice- collected in its darkest corners and clung to one another in circles of pollen lace. These were the errant youths from which one caught strange rashes, prickling on cock and balls, necessitating the Eros’s sinful candy cures.

The Eros had become a frequent spot in Sirius’s cinematic rotation, a tomb of cheerful squalor where his imagination sparked and images poured from the screen in corona hues. The theater’s bill of fare ran from sleepy-looking lads in rustic dalliances to brutes in leather, yelling insults at one another. The appealing scenes of youth interested him on occasion, while the flop-sweated men- their confident swagger unnerved him. Who were they to be so shameless- these fat old poofters with rings of hair circling every orifice? Never did these two universes intersect; the youthful frolics never journeyed beyond the confines of Elysian fields or locker rooms, and the crinkled leathermen stayed to their rough streets; one did not seem an inevitable conclusion to the other. But the Eros played to customers of many whims, and Sirius came only on the sweeter days. The exit signs were kept low, anonymity being a privilege for which Eros’s patrons were grateful. Ascending to The Clouds, in this darkness, was manageable only with pocket torch or illuminated wand; Sirius held his against his forearm under jacket sleeve. A clanging set of stairs led up, up- twirled around the metal post until landing on the balcony. One pale face below, the sticky-thighed banker from the sweets booth, turned and glanced at him. The projection booth doorway was draped with a heavy curtain and from under it swayed cold drafts. Sirius drew it aside and entered. Cupped in his hand, beside his want tip, a little note:

Shipton & Co.

Spiritualist

“Inquire Within”

Whether by magic or thick drapery, the low room of the projection booth was decidedly silent, save for the crackling flair of candle and incense stick. Just a card table, which held the projector, and the screening window before it, evinced the lustful exercises taking place below. This eerie little chamber- it could only be conjured by a member of the wizarding world. Sirius peeped out the wall hole, expecting to see his doppelganger in the balcony, dreaming- but no. A new feature had begun: a blond lad sidled up to a curly glam who seemed to be taking his cues from off-camera. Sirius drew away from the window, his pale face small above the random coughs and smoke. There were shelves along every wall but the one he had entered though, and on these shelves were bottles- gloomy bottles containing teeth, blood eggs- a coterie of doves. These sweet creatures were alive, not moving- eyes looking like ticks in cream. A spell from Le Sommaire philosophique had called upon dove wings. Le Sommaire was kept behind doors of leaden glass and lozengy in his mother’s library. Beside Le Sommaire on the shelf was Malleus Malificarum, and next to that terrible volume, The Life of Gilles de Rais. The mere sight of Life had always been enough to infect his juvenile curiosity, as though the title alone carried a virulent fever. On tedious holiday afternoons, when he wouldn’t risk a citation for underage Apparation, Sirius would hide out in the second-story study, curved over The Life. He hadn’t cared to dwell over de Rais declining years but rather the twilight time between heroism and depravity, when the fruit of de Rais’s soul had not yet grown soft with the burrowing of pederast worms. He was the hero of the empire, a brave knight with the azure cross bleeding on his breast. And on these pages Sirius too would march alongside the French, Jeanne the Maid, and the patriot de Rais, to find their rightful king, the pointed text a silhouette of banners and swords. Upon this unearthly battleground would be the sacrifices of just war, young men who believed in something worthy, soldiers’ faces flecked with blood. Below on the movie screen, the coupling had finished with blond lad’s cock spitting on glam one’s chin and mouth. Incense floated from the table and lost itself in the projector light. Above this apparition was a matchstick cage, containing an unseen cricket.

“Rather like home, isn’t it?”

Shipton’s cloak slipped about her arms, stirred dust from the floor. She retrieved the miniature palace from a wire hook. “But I believe your mother keeps her specimen in cages, not bottles- such purities should be poured into small bottles, not left outside. The city air stifles them, smudges them. Might as well stuff them up an exhaust pipe for all the good it does them there.”

“And him?” Sirius indicated the matchstick captive.

“Risi- he’s an exception. Under glass he’d be silent- but in the open, he calls out continually, hoping for the answer of another.” Shipton gathered the tiny, flaked creature into her palm. She had large hands, pale with raw-looking fingers- the hands of a chemist. “The India Song, that’s what he wants: to live in a big white house- to drink gin and tonic- to find a nice girl. Ah but little friend, how very far is the life you long for.” She addressed Sirius without looking up from her palm. “And what is it that you long for?”

“Cassette stereo. New boots. A better offie- the one near my flat’s rubbish. You?”

“I wouldn’t mind one of those cassette stereos myself- dreadful dear though. What? I thought they were sending me a hero. No altruisms? No sop for the Cause?”

He shrugged and leaned against the wall. “Just keeping looking to the sky and say ‘Godspeed’ every time you see another wizard patrolling on his broom.”

“Yes, so you come in here to take a bite from someone else’s story. Muggles haven’t done much in my book to cure any ills- but I’ve got to hand it to them for this,” she indicated the flitting projector. “To sit out there in the dark with this focused beam of light. Forget your worries, forget that all of us are fumbling about on this miserable little island. But I’ll tell you, lad- you and I will never get off it, no matter how swiftly we Apparate, or how fast our flying motorbikes take us.” She turned towards him. “I like the way those single head lanterns light things. It’s almost like a movie- bike coming over a hill at night, all the strange features it chooses to illuminate. Some furtive play of nature, trees acting startled and interrupted- as if we didn’t know better. What goes on between those trees at night? What beasts are running about, causing mischief? A bunch of rough young lads, laughing because they’re fooling everyone under their transformed hides. Maybe my little friend here was once a thoughtless boy too, thinking himself so clever to Animage into an insect- something so insignificant that no one would bother to notice.” Shipton stroked her bug companion. “But I caught you, didn’t I? So cry all you want, I don’t care.”

The woods of mallowsweet burned in his nose, and beneath this scent was something else, a sickly male scent emanating from the folds of Shipton’s robe- the odor of an unclean rag. “I don’t know why I came here-” Sirius began.

“Don’t kid me, lad. You’ve been here before.” Shipton coaxed the cricket into Sirius’s hand. A spade tip of hair peeked from under her scarf. “See how quiet he is now.”

“-Albus Dumbledore, he thought I should come.”

“Just because it can’t be seen doesn’t mean it isn’t there. The air is full of microcosms, little worlds- conversations and emotions are threading through this very room. From you alone, I could write a hundred books with a hundred chapters. Below, those men in the dark- here, in my hand,” She touched her finger upon the cricket’s filigree leg. It seemed infinite. “Listen, he’s waiting to hear your story. Legilmans.”

Together on the roof of Grimmauld Place, he and his brother were playing. Cuts of wind had skimmed the feathers from the ground, and Regulus was plucking them from the air, daring the edge of the battlements. Regulus had liked birds, always poking a stubby finger between the brackets to pet them. “Here bird. Sweet bird,” the younger boy’s lisp was soft and high against the breeze. “See, I told you they’d like me better.” Birds sailed in island formations above them, across the city, over the community garden of Erumpent & Castle, and it now was yesterday morning. He and Remus were standing amidst the ruins of the passing storm. Remus had been digging around the site since daybreak; he’d caught enough of the shower to make his hair cling to his pale face, looking soft and dark and touchable. Sirius had chosen a seat on the brick turrets that bordered the roof. In his hand were the last crumbles of New Year’s Eve confetti, found at the bottom of his trouser pocket.

“You’re not the only one having to learn it all over again,” he said. “I’m not in the habit of keeping things from my friends.”

“Right, right,” Remus had answered. “That’s my place.”

Sirius threw the slivered confetti from his palm. It drifted into the spinning dust of the projector beam. Shipton pulled something from his ear, a stream of hot water. “Should do for now- you’ve got a head full of childhood rubbish; old books, broken chairs- shack of busted furnishings. You’re best off purchasing a Pensive- I can recommend a reputable dealer. You never know whom you’re getting these things from these days- some have a jinxed backdoor to them, lets the true possessor come in and read your memories just like a magazine. Arthur Pym, Floo address on the card. And if I were you, I’d stop wasting my coin on Creem- they’ve gone to pot since Lester Bangs left. Stick with NME, it’s a better read.” Shipton turned away and selected a new reel from the stock below the card table. “The boy- who was he?”

“My brother.”

She shook her head. “The other one, with brown hair- he is a good friend?”

“I- No.”

“He was wearing your jacket.”

*****

The mellow pulse of Cotter High Street was set daily by the Prakash’s countertop percolator. Mornings began with this acrid whiff of coffee, the sticky sound of trainers on the unwashed market floor. The shop squatted over a sunken garden flat, while the building’s upper stories served as home to the owner and his kin. He had once dreamed of a battery of sons- strong lads, born Hindi, raised English- to take over for him, to leave the market in their capable hands. One would handle the books, another the vendors with unbendable charm and skill, while a third perhaps would take the shop’s maintenance on his back, always with a mop or broom at the ready. He, the father and proprietor, would then shuffle off to the Club, assured that no National hoodlums could crash his windows in, a front of brown fists ready to crack open fascist heads like eggs.

But his wife could produce only daughters, girls whose narrow shoulders and feminine minds could never bear the responsibility of anything greater than a til box. The eldest lived in blue jeans and did homework at the counter, ready to follow any young lad who trekked in off the street. The bells of St. Paul’s, though a distance of some blocks, were clear and divine, carrying over to the river in silver laps. Remus crept into the shop early to fill his thermos flask, clad in Sirius’s olive-colored jacket, the cuffs rolled back twice. On the jacket were numerous pins and badges, memorabilia found in record shops and off-street markets. These latter affairs were araby bazaars, so different from the junk rumbles of his youth; and in place of elderly churchgoers were rapid young women, sloe-eyed beauties picking through trucks of fabric. In these same girls Remus would find himself interrupted from his rummages- the girls would make small talk over purchases, they touched his hands. Often he would be invited back to some leaky garret flat to smoke, and he chose to follow them because he could. And from these encounters bloomed a greater desire for independence or distraction; even yet he was unsure of the genus of this plant.

“You’ve such pretty eyes, you’re so quiet, you’re so sweet. Other lads aren’t like you- they just want up your skirt, poke their fingers in your twat- but not you. You’re different. What’s wrong? You look so sad. Don’t you want to?” Carmen, or so she had said- natty headed, reeking of hashish Carmen who had approached him at the exit of the Brick Lane market. She carried a Saint Martins’ duffle; she claimed to have visited Marrakech. She had sat beside Remus, her slight face close- closer still was the pale hand resting in his lap. Carmen wore a print scarf over her hair, the dim candlelight catching on the hoop in her ear- she looked a vulgar madonna. Remus spilled ash from the joint down his shirtfront. He hadn’t come in what felt like years.

“What were you saying before?” Remus continued, “about the Saadians, I mean. How there are tombs under the palace?”

Carmen pulled away, examining the ash marks dusting her blouse. “What? I didn’t go there to visit old rubbish bins- that’s for tourists. I wanted to live and breathe the culture- not spend it in a museum, having their traditions dictated down to me by a bunch of misogynist wogs.”

But Cotter High Street refreshed him with its Eastern communal comforts- and Carmen’s artless italics could be tossed out the window. The Temple was wonderful, yes, with its delicate frosting roof, as well as the Prakash market, a harbinger for all Oriental celebrations. Already the storefront was dressed with new delicacies, the implements of Holi: small firecrackers, lacey sweets, plastic baggies containing colored dust. But nothing held Remus’s fascination like the square plot of Sirius’s kitchen garden. The building’s round, brown landlady had taken to piling reserves of garbage there- left uncultivated, the flora rebelled and massed into the artificial milieu; and past this uncombed brush, laid deep into the brick, was a hidden door that led to the old Kelly home. Unlike Erumpent & Castle’s decrepit rooftop wasteland, the incense of the garden emanated from distinctly feminine curves. Everything spoke of this as being a house of women- the cloudy discharge tea sold in their family market, the glad rock n’ roll stylings of Mrs. Prakash’s niece in the bedroom above Sirius’s. “Place always niffs of chips and fish fingers to me,” Sirius would scoff with a vulgar waggle of his hand. “You know Moony- fish fingers?” The clerk at the market counter rested her soft cheek into her hand with a sigh. Colored bangles ringed her arms and gave a sweet echo to the bells of St. Paul’s. The morning hour was still; the shop was suffused with hothouse air. Remus recognized the girl as the landlady’s niece. He offered her a tentative smile, and told her how much he liked their building and tangled yard.

“Oh, I like it too,” she said, leaning forward. “I like to read there, or draw sometimes. It’s very interesting- when it isn’t raining- and you can see all the little nests the animals make from the rubbish.” She pointed out the stock room window to a wilting cushion resting against the wall. “In there’s a family of white mice, and they’ve only just come back. And in that old, cracked sink, it hides a mole hole.” She looked down to her textbook. “Your friend, he doesn’t care for it, does he? He never goes out there, except at night. I hear him sometimes come in very late. The backdoor, you see, it’s below my window. Sometimes he is alone- most of the time at least. But sometimes other people stand out here, talking and smoking. Maybe- maybe he would like it here more if I planted something for him. What does he like? Does he fancy flowers? Or herbs perhaps?”

There were pits off the high street where the younger set played, shelters for the animal gangs of the niece’s observation. Cavities at the end of blocks, holes slowly being swallowed by new, double-glazed constructs; the leftover pockmarks of Muggle air raids. Like the Faust’s veteran patrons, the older residents of the street pontificated at length on these sites, of nights without so much as a hand lantern to read by, windows with shades drawn at full-mast come noon. And still, the bombs came. “Oh it’s not likely I’ll forget it,” Mrs. Prakash had told her nephews one afternoon. Remus was sitting below the stoop, listening outside Sirius’s door. “It was my birthday, and we couldn’t go out for there was a siren going, and nani wouldn’t put candles on my little teacake, and I cried. The sirens- they were so loud- like one dog barking to another, block by block, until the whole street was howling. Now be good, bhanja, and don’t go in that old rubbish; that’s where those nasty little Crown boys hang, and their sure to find broken glass and cut you.” Sirens, not the cousins of Merpeople, but wailing speaker boxes posted at the corners of the East End streets. Even now, long out of use, they warbled and gabbled feedback, wet shorts in the wire. The little boys tossed rocks at the siren mouths, searching out more hiccupping whines. Each siren post was squired by a red phone-box, Remus’s preferred receptacle for Apparation. The scents fried deep inside these booths spoke of their actual usage- the congregation of young men, punching off anxious fistfuls of dreariness and libido.

“Careful,” Sirius had whispered. In the enclosed space, they were all elbows and head knocks. He unzipped the front of Sirius’s jeans; the head of Sirius’s cock escaped from the fly, purple and wet, an unbroken bud. They had Apparated from the movie house, he to the phone-box and Sirius to the street corner. Sirius, puffed and laughing, turned down the sidewalk to meet him at the crashed-in door. Sun fades and rain had left the little house scarred- no longer were its walls red; and rust had crept in, rash-like, up its folds and crevices. The inner booth too was scratched with obscene scribbles- sex ads and polari slang. “Not even a proper red booth Moony, but a pink one,” Sirius shook his head. “Christ, you should have seen the girl Peter brought to the Faust yesterday- dressed in robes of this exact color- like some terrible cross between stop sign crimson and- and labia pink. Oh don’t look at me like that,” he laughed. “Of course you’d never be so callous to say it,” Sirius slipped both hands into Remus’s back trouser pockets. “But you think it, Moony, and that’s almost as bad. I can read it right on your poncy little face.” And on these nights he would see Sirius at his best; cleared of self-righteous debris, with the illuminants of cinema flicking over his pale countenance long after the feature had ended.

“Pubs or flicks, pubs or flicks. Flip a Galleon, the night’s decided. Sirius, the only thing you’re fighting against is boredom.” This was Lily, flipping rapidly through a milk crate full of discs. Lily had a decided bend, as though burdened by dervish key on her back- being wound up by an unseen god. She came for Sirius’s weekly ritual of album organization and rearrangement, making weak tea that Remus only pretended to drink, and bringing store-bought biscuits that none of them ever touched. What was the flavor of these pastries now, compared to the shop above them, swollen with Asian sweets like orchids? Still, she played mock hostile with these treats, in trade for conversation. “Tell me something new,” she would demand before releasing to Remus his mug. “What have you dug up and locked up and told no one else?” With Sirius, she would discuss records and retired musicians, or chide him for his reckless insouciance. Lily and Sirius bantered in the fashion of an old-style radio programme, the ones Remus’s grandmother would flip the dial to on rainy holidays.  “Oh, I always fancied a presenter in the family, someone to host on 2 with Malcolm Tulley. Would you like that Remus lad?” his grandmother would ask. “Go around the world and find out the names for all those strange things you put in your pockets?” Together he and his grandmother would listen to Waggoner’s Walk or Sunshine & Co. on the fuzzy StellarCaster enshrined in the front room of her cottage, with its round topknot of green Bakelite, polished and warm. Given wax paper and pastels for amusement, Remus would sketch lazy curves and arrows, an appeal to his subconscious. He drew curves because they felt natural- while arrows imparted the cruel yet erotic sharpness of fingers, brush handles, etc. He couldn’t define why the waves of his affections picked up certain frequencies and not others; but in the movement of his hand, in both arc and line, the possessive motion felt familiar and true.

“I like pubs,” Sirius returned. “And I like the flicks. Get away from it all, a nice smoky room.” He leaned back against the wall. “There’s not a chance of getting things done, not with the Ministry buggering it all up. They’re wasting our time- mine and James’s. Yours. I hear enough of it from Peter, ‘Oh, when are you joining up, Sirius?’ or ‘Did you find out where so-and-so’s going to be stationed Sirius?’ Christ if I know Peter,” Sirius sighed. “I just want to buy my records- is that too much to ask? Shop for records without getting hassled by some old bag from the Charitable Cauldron Brigade.”

“You’re always needing a love story, always needing an adventure- until the next shiny bit comes along and claims your attention. What’s this?” Lily pulled a 45 from the crate and shrieked laughter. “I never figured you for a Carpenters fan.”

“Give it here,” Sirius snatched the brown sleeve from her, smoothing its wilted corner with his thumb. “I’ve got enough adventure, thanks.” He knocked a knuckle on the window, indicating the festival outside. “They’ve been banging since noon, tossing off crackers and rolls of snaps. Yesterday the kids battered Mrs. Najeed with purple dirt- looked like one of those ink scarabs, flailing on her back- but no one likes that old cow anyway. They’ve got these little darts and bows made of looped sugar cane in the market upstairs- better than any Quill I’ve ever had. Everyone’s in the streets swearing and laughing, shaking hands- it’s madness. It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.”

Lily pressed on. “Oh, boys like you get all the glory, fopping around, thinking yourself so clever. Peter, at least he’s out there everyday- don’t think I notice how you treat him- clumsy, stupid Peter, just because you wanted some fun. He knows what you think of him. And Remus- Remus tell him,” Lily roused him from the radio dream with a shake of his sleeve. “I know Sirius won’t read the papers, so he can keep his ignorance in check. Tell him about the meeting, what Albus said-”

“Oh, so it’s Albus now? Bit familiar that. Love’s a scandal. It’s joke. Everyone’s given up on it,” Sirius restored the Carpenters’ 45 to its proper habitat. “And don’t expect Remus to be my conscience forever,” Sirius reached over and gave his lank hair a push. “He never got to be young, even when he was a boy,”

Remus’s shiny bit- a guitar pick purchased from a Brick Lane vendor, who swore on the heads of his children that it had belonged to a Very Famous Personage. Said Very Famous Personage was known to frequent such places, cashing in on his molding fame with the youth squanderers of the market. “Close you eyes- they’re all wasted,’ That is him, yes,” the vendor sang, slapping his leg. “The very same. For you, lad, a deal.”

It was the year of waste. Mods was dead, punk equally dead- the revolutionary scenes that so defined other generations had passed them by. Very Famous had given up his music for chocolate bar commercials on the Muggle radio, fearful no longer of age but of a corrupt bank account. Fear was infectious, and those most fearful acted as carrier. A pestilent rigidity had contaminated both the Wizarding and Muggle worlds, seen in the election of new PMs ready to divide the classes like pie. Wizard Wireless was in denial; they pandered only to the old farts and older ladies ready to settle down after their Ministry eight and hear sonsy, upbeat tunes- a condescension that is always obvious to the young and wannabe righteous. Fruit too had been very poor that spring, not alone in Diagon’s open markets, but across the city, the sweet harvest from the north refusing to trickle down; while the foreign imports that crowded the docks were of poor flavor and rotted color. The East End markets, previously a wonderland of enriched rot, yielded only bitter, piss-yellow knots that were once considered apples, and peaches with alligator skin. Remus purchased a bagful reluctantly; and when he pushed his finger into the soft fruit, he could feel its core wiggle around- a dislocated eye. Very Famous’s pick was a mottled maroon- like a perfect, crystallized blood drop, descending from that possibly gakked, certainly infamous nose. They had all taken in a midnight show of Very Famous’s latest concert flick the previous weekend- he and Sirius, Peter, the elusive James. It had been Lily, not Sirius, who had sat beside him the entire evening, feeding him her stale humbugs from the concession stand, dancing with him in the aisles during the show. Remus had punctured the pick with his wand, and through it strung a length of leather cord. He gave the charm to Sirius, who bit down on it as though eating a hard toffee or testing a diamond.

“So this is what it’s come to. A matched set, eh? Two for me and none for you. Sop. Ponce.” Yet he smiled, examining the trinket in his hand. Sirius then pushed him against the wall, and reached between his legs exclaiming, “Go down to the old Kelly hole. Bet I can get there faster than you. Expelliarmus.” Sirius held their wands above his head and sneezed. He took off for the stairwell, shoving Remus’s shoulder, laughing. Remus hurried to the garden wall for his escape. The grope had kick started his hard-on like an engine.

Rain had left the Kelly place damp and green, full of mossy channels in which one could pop a fist or tickle a finger. The building was half-sunk, its upper stories like a brick behemoth wrestled into the ground, with only its howling visage rising from the pavement. The yard too, had an under bite of rocks and bottles. Below the grass were the hips and haws of slumbering beasts, along with craters split down to the gas works. Inside, on the lino of the kitchen- puddles of cloudy water, divinatory pools. The lost effluvia of the Kelly girls was thickest here, in the pantry, where three sisters had once huddled in a understairs cupboard and clasped each other in the dark. They had come on the boat, shop girls all of them: one to do the accounts, one to purchase from merchants, and a third to mind the til. Only Mary had emerged standing from the raid; to her chest she cradled her shattered starfish hand. School couples now took off for the building’s thickened wilds, to grip hips like pinball machines and wipe handfuls of cold spunk on the walls. The Kelly hole, so they called it- a fuck pad for three generations, a nest for ghosts and microbes. Years had passed since its night of infamy, and it remained the only house not rebuilt; though its newish plate-glass neighbors had crowded it shamefully from view- the cripple of the high street. The Kelly hole was a dead end, and around it a new city was being built. He heard Sirius enter before he saw him.

“I win,” Sirius said, taking in deep breathes. “Tell me I did Moony. Tell me that I won. Don’t you want to play? Such a hero,” Sirius chuckled. He wiped his nose on his jacket sleeve. “The old queens, they look at me to say, ‘Sure wouldn’t mind a bit of that. Bet he’s got a nice boy to go home to.’ ”

He twilled the hem of Sirius’s shirt in his fingers, looking him in the eye. “Yeah? So what do you tell them?”

“I want to tell them that I do. I want to scream at them, punch their fat faces with the answer. I want to cut my fingers and bleed it out. Maybe I’m just waiting for someone to do it for me. All those medic text you and Lily pour over- got to be something useful in them. So cut it out of me, nice boy, right here.” A run of sweat split the breast seam of Sirius’s gray t-shirt- like steel raiment, better dismantled than pierced. He tossed Sirius’s jacket onto the floor, rolled the soiled shirt up to his underarms. Down Sirius’s stomach, a black fuse line of hair branching up from his jeans. The city was a place of certainty, of sure and immense darkness. Its roots extended into the ground, around train tunnels and pipelines; crept into the electric grid, up the grass lawns and drifted into the atmosphere. Sirius was his soul root to the city, a fierce plant that refused to bloom; in the undersea air of the Kelly pantry, he had become indistinguishable from the ruin itself. Inside his unzipped trousers was foliage of a sticky and redolent nature, ready to be assimilated to, to be fed and nurtured by hand and mouth. The fine blue vein that ran up the underside of Sirius’s cock, he followed it as though drawing with his finger- the same bows and arrows from his wax paper dreams. He pulled Sirius’s hand to his own fly, feeling it pop open like a bottle cap. “They say he goes in for that,” Sirius indicated the pick charm around his neck. “But likes ‘em in the stalls. Always has a bag to stand in. Would you stand in a bag for me Moony? I’d stand in a bag for you. Can’t think why anyone would like that though. Stinks of old man down there. And he’s got such a bloody big conker, who wouldn’t recognize him anyway? Still,” Sirius sighed. “Still wish I had taken up the guitar. I think I’d express myself better through music- songs and such. Be on stage.”

“Christ you really are a poofter.” A fragile current crossed from arm to arm, connecting point at their hands. They hid in the shadowy corner behind the pantry door, avoiding the damp. “When did you know?”

“Hmm?”

“When did you know that you felt this way? About fellows, I mean.”

Sirius shrugged, t-shirt still curled to the top of his chest. “There was this bloke once. Watched me take a piss in a park toilet. He kept glancing over and smiling at me. So I smiled back. Thought it a good game really. Cock was nice. Fancy the head looked like a heart. Rather pretty, I think- like yours,” Sirius wetted his finger and traced it along the slit. “I thought then, maybe, it’d be okay. And James, he wouldn’t care,” Sirius coughed into his fist, and ran it through his hair. “Sometimes, I’ll go upstairs to use the landlady’s phone, and they’ll be watching telly, and these poofs will be on it, looking all sweaty-faced. Enormous bottoms. Waving lavender scarves. They never touch anyone, Moony, not even for a bloody handshake. They never touch anyone and no one wants to touch them, like it’s the funniest thing in the world.” In the light of the afternoon, the collapsed cupboard was unmistakable- along with the holes dug by rescuers, where the last of the sisters’ remains had been recovered. From its depths came a white mouse, tailless, one of the Prakash specimen; it scuttled over the cracked lino, over Sirius’s jacket, sniffing them out. Remus reached down to touch the hand that cupped him, the soft pale corner of skin between Sirius’s thumb and forefinger.

“They’re going to take away my Apparating License,” he whispered after a moment’s silence; and then he laughed.

            “Then they can bloody well take mine too.” And their kiss was like a suckling breath passed between swimmers underwater. Pollution low in the sky above them- cigar smoke drifting in from the east, from the old bachelor docks, with their dank pockets and corners. Sea stories, Remus knew; but the docks were different- a resting place where objects awaited release, or sank to the bottom of the pile, chipped and flawed. He had always liked the flawed things best, items through which use produced crusted beauty. Strange charms that came not from perfection of craft, but warped by nature or neglect- becoming the singular, remarkable creatures they were meant to be. The city was awash in these little universes, he discovered them daily; how could anyone deny the fundaments of their world? A ghost was no more extraordinary than a microbe; he needn’t eat of the bagged peach to know it was rotten. And in the gloom of the hole, he could see them- the three weird sisters of the pit below, crawling up from the muck, writing to him on the spoiled drywall- all of their stories, a thousand stories- lost to primordial milk. They too lived out spectral lives, this home like a discarded rind. Yes, the flawed things; Remus stroked the shallow dip of Sirius’s chest

“Girl at the shop counter- she wanted to know how you got this scar cross your collarbone,” Remus pressed his finger to the tender white line. “So if she asks, you played forward at school, like Dalglish. She’ll know what it means.” He pulled Sirius’s wrist up from his fly. “Bugger if you know anything about football though- or anything else of importance.”

“I know Prongs scored a record thirty-eight goals in his sixth season. That should be worth something. I know they’ve got Animagi crickets in India. And I know you,” Sirius wrapped his arm around Remus’s neck- a brotherly headlock, a distraction; he was unable to look Sirius in the face. “I was watching you all night at the show. Trying to dance with Lily, your hands stuffed in your pockets, tag of your jumper sticking up. You’re a rotten dancer Moony- did you know that? Just awful- all round shoulders and tics. I had half a mind to cross the floor and set you to rights. Steady those twitchy legs of yours. Take your hands out of your pockets, maybe. Put them in my own.” Sirius released him and stood against the peeling pantry wall. He was not shrinking, but he seemed smaller, taking up less space. He licked his wet fingers meditatively. “Get a drink with James tonight. You?”

They crossed the soaking grass of the lawn, crunching over the bottles and paper cups. Sirius was leaned over, carelessly shaking paint chips from his dark hair. Outside the paved wilderness of the block hushed for evening telly, and neighbors poured their garbage into the street.

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