The Spell by Alan Hollinghurst

items. He inspected the chin, mouth, nose and right eye of a young man, eloquent, polished features with the slight crystalline sheen of marble, and saw them dissolve as he passed by; from behind, the fragment looked like a rough missile, or a meteorite. He came round it again and saw the splinter of face reassert itself. Then he let his gaze float to the head beyond it, a different but perceptible sheen in the crest of blond fuzz and the unweath-ered smoothness of the skin. The young had a bloom, it was true – despite the hooded, hung-over stare directed half-accusingly into the middle distance. Alex came forward with a grin already going and an odd third-person sense of himself as a figure unexpectedly descending. He watched closely, and with a kind of fascinated relief, as Danny’s disgruntled mouth opened into a wide smile.
    “Hello, Alex!”
    “Hi, Danny”
    They shook hands, looking keenly into each other’s eyes, Alex’s other hand lightly gripping Danny’s upper arm, feeling his quick uncertain attempt to harden up the biceps, then letting go with an admiring fingering of the stiffish grey-blue serge of his uniform. Danny shrugged his shoulders round inside the jacket and shuffled to attention. With his epaulettes and his big patch pockets and his No 3 crop he looked like a bolshy wartime recruit to the RAF, though the triangular tuft beneath the lower lip was a mid-nineties detail. The walkie-talkie in his left hand crackled, he listened to the incomprehensible message and said “Yeah” with a little sneer of tedium for Alex’s benefit.
    “So how’s it going?” said Alex, in an idiom that was slightly unnatural to him.
    “He’s a wanker, that one,” said Danny, shaking his head at the receiver in his hand. “He’s been on my back all day because I was five minutes late – if that.”
    Alex smiled, sympathising, but knowing instinctively that it had been nearer half an hour. “Don’t you go mad with boredom?” he asked.
    Danny gaped and slumped as if at the grossness of the under- statement, but then said with a smile, “No, it’s not too bad. It’s a lot better than supermarkets. There you get chatted up by housewives, here you’re cruised to bits by men. This is more responsible, of course.” He stepped back to keep his eye on a woman apparently mesmerised by a sleek stone Buddha. “They hurl their phone-numbers at you,” he said. “I’ve had twelve this week.”
    “Really,” said Alex, already resenting these other suitors, and confused to find he wasn’t alone in thinking Danny beautiful. “And how many have you-”
    But Danny was moving warily away, as another security-man, a bald, scowling Indian who looked unlikely to receive such advances, came marching slowly through from the next gallery; with a delicate regard for Danny’s position Alex sidled off to see something else, wondering at the same time if Danny really wanted to talk at all. He had worked their friendship up so much in his mind, and followed it through the coming months with such tender imagination, that it was a shock to discover he still had all the work to do. He found himself in front of a sixteenth-century Spanish Saint Sebastian made of brightly glazed pottery. Holes had been left all over it for the arrows, so that it looked like a huge anthropomorphic strainer. He imagined it being pulled from a pond and water jetting out of it for a few seconds, then slackening and dwindling to a drip.
    There was no sign of Danny now, and he walked round discreetly searching for him among the thickening lunch-time crowds. He wondered, with his usual instinct for the bleakest view, if he was just another old queen hoping for the young man’s favour, pressing his number on him like a supplicant bringing his absurd request to a shrine. He looked around at the detritus of old religions, vessels of exhausted magic. In front of him was a mask of blistered bronze, paper-brittle and azure with age. For a moment he remembered