Harry sighed because he didn’t want to tell the story but he saw that he must. Very slowly he reached for her hand. ‘I know what he was like Pauly. I knew him when I was young. He was very kind and he was very brave. Listen... I’ll tell you.’ Lights flashed across their faces over and over again as he told her about the waste ground in York in the night so long ago.

*

In Casablanca now, Harry drew again on the joint, looked at the blue blue Moroccan sky. It was the past, it was all the past, the past is another country.

Hours passed perhaps. The sweet scent of the cigarette somehow mixed in his nostrils with the smell of sex, the sun shone down. When one of the waiters brought him a portable telephone he stretched out lazily, his hand touching the waiter’s.

‘Harry, it’s Juliet, I’m sorry to track you down like this, your agent gave me your number, have you heard about Terence Blue?’

Fuck her. Her voice jarred the peace of his Moroccan pool. He could not bear to speak to her. And why did she always just say ‘It’s Juliet’? He could know twenty other Juliets for all she knew.

‘Harry? Can you hear me? Have you heard about Terence?’

At last he spoke. ‘Everyone’s heard about Terence Blue Juliet.’

‘But did you know he was stabbed last night?’

‘Good God. Why?’

‘You should have said Good God who,’ said Juliet.

Harry sat up immediately. The smoke of the joint hung on the air but his mind was suddenly very clear.

‘Who?’ he said, but he knew.

‘Nicky.’

‘Oh Jesus Christ,’ said Harry Donaldson. ‘Is he dead?’

‘Critical.’

‘Where is Nicky now?’

‘Back in the loony bin I suppose, I don’t know, no one seems to know.’

There, by the pool of a gay hotel in Morocco, Harry suddenly felt the feeling he’d had for days, he now realised, of wanting to weep.

‘The past always finds us I suppose,’ he said, but more to himself than to her. For a moment neither of them spoke. Then Harry said at last, ‘Poor old Terence.’ And then, ‘Poor, poor Nicky. After all these years and that’s all she wanted to do.’

He could have said, look what you did Juliet, but he did not. For then he would have had to say also, look what I did.

The waiter, aimlessly polishing a table, caught Harry’s eye, smiled from across the pool. Harry sighed.

‘But why are you phoning me Juliet? What’s the point, what can we do?’