Dead Europe Read Online Free Page B

stay a little? In this claustrophobic hotel room, with the hot, crowded city outside, I was suddenly childishly lonely: I was scared to be on my own. But no more money, I warned. I don’t have much.
    He glanced around the hotel room, weighed his options, checked my watch, and nodded. We drank more from the bottle. He had been the first to fall asleep.
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    Now, he was taking a long time in the toilet. I glanced at my trousers lying on the floor but they were not in the spot I had thrown them when we’d gone to bed. I checked my pockets and discovered that a fifty-dollar Australian note I’d intended to exchange the night before was missing. I smiled to myself. The price did not seem unfair. I quickly checked under the mattress. The wallet was still there.
    There was a flush and his steps were slow and hesitant when he emerged. He avoided my eyes. For the first time I noticed that there were tiny red scabs forming a grid along his arms. I felt crushed by my age, my thickening body, the sly strands of grey in my once jet-black hair. I could not wait for him to leave.
    â€”I am going out now. We have to leave this room.
    He put on his jeans, slipped on his sandals and rubbed his forehead. He sat on the edge of the bed, silent and sullen. I was afraid of him then.
    â€”Okay, he slurred suddenly. May I have money for taxi? he asked.
    â€”How about the Australian dollars in your pocket?
    He grinned and I was struck again by his beauty. I sat next to him and kissed his neck, tasted pungent buttery sweat. He moved away.
    â€”Taxi no take Australian dollar.
    I handed him a crisp new euro note and we took the stairs together down to the small lobby. The concierge on duty called me over. He was a man in his mid-fifties, with a thick wide belly and wet moustache. An image of fireworks breaking over the Olympic stadium was dusty and mounted crookedly on the wall. He yelled at me in Greek.
    â€”You’ve only paid for one person. Yours is a single room.
    I blushed.
    â€”I am the only one using my room. This is a friend.
    His contempt was clear.
    â€”After midnight, your friends, as you call them, they too will have to pay. He spat out the words.
    Still red, not looking at him, not looking at the youth, I slipped another clean euro note across the desk. He glanced at it, then at me, then at the boy. He picked it up, slipped it in his pocket and turned his back to us.
    â€”Fucking cunt! I was humiliated. The boy shrugged.
    â€”He not like what I do. He said it casually, disinterested. It was then I cursed myself: damn, I should have taken his photo. I stretched out my hand and he laughed without taking it.
    â€”I go. Thank you, Mister. His inflection was mocking and I watched him shoot across a crowded avenue and disappear into the shadows of an alley.
    The streets of Athens were still choked with cars and people. It was late spring but it felt like high summer. I turned and walked without purpose away from the centre and towards Lecavitos Hill. I passed the main square inKolonaki, turned up a small winding lane and climbed the steep stairs that rose towards the peak. The clanking and throbbing of music and conversation, of cars and motorbikes dropped away and I sat on a small concrete wall and looked down to the city below.
    I had arrived in Greece aware that I was going to fuck people, eager to engage in a bout of promiscuity, but the memory of the last few hours in the hotel room now shamed me. The experience of paying the youth for sex, while tantalising as fantasy—in fact, a fantasy in which I happily and often indulged in—in reality had proven cliched. It had been sordid and had made me feel old and disappointed. Not even the illicit memory of the boy’s tough beauty could lessen my regret. I took off down the hill, past the young Greeks in their synthetic Italian clothes, past the fragile old faggots sitting patiently alone at coffee tables. At a kiosk I asked to use the phone and as