He must be about twenty-two, twenty-three, certainly no older than me.

His hair is thick and dark and slicked up into a kind of rockabilly quiff.

His eyes are big, the eyelashes long, his lips full and slightly parted. The effect might be almost feminine were it not for the big, straight nose, the heavy eyebrows and the strong jawline.

He’s naked, except for a pair of leopard-skin briefs that taper to tiny straps on the hip, and just about contain him.

He’s holding a bar in a bicep curl. His biceps are big. So are his pecs, deltoids, triceps and lats. The legs are great. Everything is in proportion. He has a tattoo on his left forearm; it’s a bit smudgy on the black-and-white print, but it looks like it could be a bird of some sort. On closer scrutiny, it could be a peacock.

He’s staring into the distance, clear-eyed, with a hint of a smile, his fists bunched around the bar like hammerheads, ready for anything.

I strip to my underwear, and duplicate the pose in the mirror. It’s like a distorted reflection in a fairground mirror.

There’s a round rusty mark on the top border of the print, and a hole in the middle, where a drawing pin must have gone. I find a new drawing pin and carefully tack the picture to the headboard of my bed, so he’s watching over me.

I wish I’d met Mervyn. But I only ever saw his dead body being carried away in an ambulance.

Eight

Mervyn is washing dishes in a café called Carlo’s off Leicester Square, which he hates. From what I can gather from remarks that Stephen has made, he is not above supplementing his income from the generosity of various ‘admirers’ who take him out for dinner and feed him with steak and potatoes. It’s hard for Mervyn to keep his weight up, especially when he’s spending every free hour training at a gym in Putney, the one where all the serious bodybuilders go. At home – either at his nan’s in Shepherd’s Bush, more usually at Stephen’s, since they found each other wandering around the West End one night – he eats beans on toast, a sausage if he’s lucky, a piece of cake. He’s keen to do more modelling, he says – he ‘did the rounds of the studios’ when he got to London, but didn’t like what he found there, and is unwilling to say more on the subject. Stephen occasionally ribs him, but Mervyn’s temper is as quick as ever and he lashes out if Stephen goes too far.

We live in a strange domestic bliss in Queensway, the three of us. Stephen is out all day at Muscle Boy, and in the West End most evenings, but often entertains our ‘landlord’, Tony, at night. We know that we have to make ourselves scarce while ‘Momma pays the rent,’ as Stephen puts it. I slept on the couch in the living room for the first two nights, while Mervyn was in the guest room. On the third night, when Stephen was out and we were celebrating the news that I had been accepted at a very lowly post at the Treasury, starting the next day, Mervyn and I had a conversation. We had not talked about ‘it’ since I came to London, since that first impetuous kiss of reunion.