She seemed to darken and go dull. 'That I'm…' She sucked on her teeth. 'That I'm some kind of construct. The real Maggie is thirty-eight, a single mum and lives in Islington. She's real and I'm not, but then I never really felt real.'

Michael explained the miracle to her. He explained why he needed her help.

She took it on the chin. She sat up and went business-like. 'I'm not the Aids expert. She is. I guess she'll help you. But. Don't call her Bottles. She hates the name. She's Margaret to strangers, Maggie to friends. She'll know something, dimly, about this. Like she's dreamed it, so she won't be entirely surprised to see you. She believes, a little bit, that women sometimes see things.'

Bottles leaned back, and looked up into his face, and it was firm. 'I meant what I said about swots.'

Why did everybody always have something perfectly justified to say about him?

'Go ahead,' he said, 'let me have it.' He wished he were dressed. His stomach was hairy and his dick shrivelled.

'You're so concerned about yourself that you're asking the wrong question.'

'So what question should I be asking?'

She told him.

'Oh God,' he said, and covered his eyes with shame. She was right and all. Right on methodological grounds. Right about the self-concern. He chuckled at himself.

'Can I go now?' she asked. 'The more I know about this, the weirder it gets and the sadder.'

'How come?'

'Because I'm dead. There hasn't been anyone called Bottles in years.'

'Can I see you again?' he asked.

'Yeah sure,' she said, in voice that meant no. 'Is it up to me?' There was no point pretending that it was.

'See you around,' said Michael, and she was gone.

Can I cure Angels who are sick?

That was the question to ask. If Michael could call up Angels and cure them, then he could make love to them after they were rid of the virus.

So, after making certain arrangements, Michael ended up in a clinic after hours. Margaret or Maggie was doing him a favour.

'It's not for me,' he had told her on the phone. 'It's a friend of mine. He won't come in for a test if I don't come with him and he doesn't get the answer right away. And… he's also paranoid about false results, so he wants to take the test two times in a row. Yes, I know, it's weird, but I'm really concerned.'

Margaret's voice sounded just the same as Bottles, as if it were the sixteen-year-old on the phone. Except that she didn't call him Babe and was content to stay with her all-purpose native London accent. Her voice was calm, and soft and business-like all at the same time.

'A lot of people are very frightened by the test, so it's good that you want to come in with him. Does he have any problems with confidentiality?'

'Um, in what way?'

'If he's paranoid about one thing he may be paranoid about other things. Like being seen by anyone.'

'Could we come in after hours?'

'It's an imposition,' she told him directly. 'But if it will make the difference between him coming in or not, then I'll do it. But it can only be this Wednesday night.'

Her clinic turned out to be attached to a hospital in the East End. The door was locked, but he rang and she herself opened it.

Margaret's hair was the colour of carrots, like his mother's used to be. Michael had the feeling that the hair and her long loose Chinese jacket were all carefully calculated to strike the right balance of flamboyance and reliability. She was like a civil servant with a past. I used to be quite interesting, but now I'm reliable. It was a balance inclined to create trust on both sides: the ill and the official health establishment. Her voice was motherly, concerned, and extremely cautious. Every word was carefully rehearsed; not so much chosen as identified over thousands of ticklish interviews as being the most appropriate thing to say.

Yup. Bottles was dead.

'Hello,' she said to Michael's companion, and held out her hand. 'My name's Margaret, I'm an old friend of Michael's.' She was searching his face with concern.

'So am I. My name's Mark.'

Mark was tall, broad-shouldered with wavy red hair streaked with grey. He had died five years before from Aids.

Michael had met Mark at Sussex University. Mark was in the Army, studying under some kind of Army grant, and he was big and muscular and freckled and slightly overripe. He wore cravats and played polo, and wore a green carnation in honour of Oscar Wilde.

Mark was one of Michael's more spectacular missed opportunities. They met in drama club and were doing an experimental piece that involved a lot of stretching, yoga and jumping about. It was easier than being talented. At one point they all had to lie on the floor on their tummies and put their heads on someone else's bum.

The entire time Michael's heavy head rested on Mark's bottom, he flexed his cheek muscles, up and down. Michael's head wiggled. Mark turned back and grinned naughtily. He had a general's face, lumpy and attractive rather than pretty, and he had a soldier's lumpy body. Jolie-laide, they might call it in France. Butch, Michael called it. He was unable to believe that someone so masculine and so military whom he fancied so very much could actually be gay. Instead, just to stop Mark's flexing, he bit the bum very hard.

'You must be hungry,' said Mark. He spoke rather like Noel Coward. 'Why don't you come back to my flat and have another bite to eat.'

Michael managed to pretend to himself that this was an invitation to supper.

So he showed up with a bottle of wine, and talked in a prolonged way about the director, a woman called Rosie. Mark began to look wistful. Rosie fancied Mark, and had asked Michael to find out if he was gay. Even this was not enough to trigger the conscious thought in Michael that the man he fancied might fancy him.

So Michael pumped Mark for information about his reaction to Rosie, which confused the issue more.

'I'm afraid I'm a bit inexperienced with women. I imagine you're not,' said Mark.

'Tuh. Not that much experienced. But I get along with them.'

'Well, perhaps you can show me how to as well.'

'I'd be really surprised if I had anything to teach you about women.'

When someone wants you, they admire you. You seem larger to them than you actually are, which is why it's difficult to believe they can or do love you, and not some image they've made up. It was hard for Michael to imagine that this strapping, athletic, outgoing, happy man admired him, respected him. It was simply unthinkable that he actually desired him.

So. Nothing happened.

There was a florid would-be Englishman at Sussex. He was in fact South African, and tried to live up to an image of England that had more to do with Bloomsbury than the new era of Margaret Thatcher. He kept talking about Virginia Woolf and Quentin Bell, and 'real universities' like Oxford. He ran the literary society and wore white suits and once, even a straw boater. Michael detested him.

About six months after his dinner, Michael saw Mark with this man together in Sainsbury's, plainly doing domestic shopping together, having a slightly acid conversation over the right choice of coffee.

Michael said hello, and Mark's chest swelled with pride as he introduced John, who said coolly, 'We know each other. Michael acts, doesn't he?' Mark seemed to display their married condition like another green carnation, and Michael ended the conversation, blinded by an inexplicable headache.

Mark and he stayed friends. The straw boater had married Mark in an attempt to marry old England. Mark realized this, as the bickering got worse. 'He's a bit of a fraud, actually,' Mark said lightly to Michael in the student bar. 'He's moved out. I'm doing some reassessing. I'm beginning to understand that, as much as I love it, the Army and I aren't meant for each other either.'