Chapter 1
Louis is already in a bad mood by the time he arrives at the gallery. It’s a grey, drizzly day – the kind he never remembers encountering in New Orleans but seems to take up most of the calendar between September and May in London – and his tube carriage is packed to the brim with a group of tourists who refuse to take off their backpacks even when Louis glares at them over his book, their voices loud enough to penetrate his headphones. Which was the stop for the British Museum, they yell at each other over the screeching of the train; who had made the lunch reservations? Should they book a pre-theatre menu for tonight or go à la carte?
Louis hates them all the way to Oxford Circus, and hates them even more when they crowd the escalators on his way out. He barely nods at Rashid on his way in, ascending the stairs to his office and closing the door with a sound that’s just short of a slam. His anger distracts him from thinking about Claudia, which he is determinedly not grateful for; he sets an alarm on his phone for three hours from now, when she might be awake to answer a call, and gets to work.
He’s less than half an hour in when there’s a knock at the door. Rashid waits politely outside until Louis calls for him to come in. “Mr le Russe is here to see you,” he says, and Louis looks up from his screen, feeling his eyebrows rise.
"Armand is here?”
Rashid nods, just once, with a practiced blank expression that somehow still indicates that he thinks Louis is very stupid. Louis misses Bricktop, who would call him stupid to his face. And would probably not have let Armand past the threshold in the first place. He sighs. “Bring him up, then.”
The door swings open again. “Good morning, Louis.” Because of course Armand won’t have waited downstairs.
“Is it?” Louis is never in the mood for Armand. He is especially not in the mood today.
“I suppose that depends on your viewpoint,” Armand says, taking a seat without being invited. “If you’re referring to the weather, personally I find the cloudy days strangely inspiring. Rather Turner-esque, in a way.”
Louis suppresses a sneer. The unrelenting concrete of London in February is nothing like the swirling storms of Turner’s landscapes, he thinks, but Armand has always been able to put an unearned sheen on things. When he wants to, that is. “I know you’re British, but you didn’t come all this way to talk about the weather.” There’s something strange on Armand’s face, and as much as Louis really, really doesn’t want to know what he came here to say, he’s keen for Armand to hurry up and get to whatever the fuck the point is so he can then hurry up and leave.
“It’s hardly a trial, Louis, you’re only down the road.” Armand looks pointedly at the cup of coffee steaming on Louis’s desk. Louis, just as pointedly, does not offer him one. “But no, you’re right. I came to discuss a rather delicate matter with you.”
“Tests come back positive?” Louis asks, unable to clamp down on his sneer this time. “Cause if so, it’s not anything to do with me. I’m all good.”
“This crudeness doesn’t suit you, Louis.” Armand smooths his hands over his trousers, though if there’s a single crease other than the one ironed into it Louis can’t detect it. It’s a very sharp suit, such a dark grey it’s almost black. Two buttons undone at the throat, as per. Louis is deliberately not looking at the hollow there, the merest hint of chest hair beneath the crisp shirt. “No, I came to talk to you about Lestat.”
“No.” Louis feels his spine straighten, like when he was a kid and Mama caught him slouching in church. “Whatever he’s done, whatever mess he’s got himself into –”
“He has threatened to quit,” Armand says.
“And? He does this all the time.” About ten times a week, if Louis’s memory serves him correctly, the frequency of his dramatics possible only because he never sees them through. Lestat has always forgiven Armand his trespasses by the next day, if not by lunchtime, no matter how severe they are.
“He told me three days ago. We’re due to reconvene for the season’s first rehearsals in a week’s time, and he’s refusing to rescind his claim,” Armand says.
“So he’s holding a grudge a little longer than usual,” Louis says. “He’ll be there on the first day.” Charming all the new corps, he thinks bitterly; deciding whose legs he will have wrapped around his waist by the end of the week’s practice, if not before.
“Not this time,” Armand says, and Louis suddenly recognises the look on his face. It’s the subdued panic of a man who is attempting to stem the flow of water through a cracked vessel with only his hands, incapable of patching it before every last drop escapes through his fingers. The same look, in fact, that he had given Louis when he’d thrown a duffel bag at Armand’s feet and told him he had fifteen minutes to grab his shit and get out. “He doesn’t intend to quit the company. He intends to quit ballet ."
The last time Louis felt real shock was when he arrived home to an empty house and a note from Claudia saying that she’d gone to Latvia. “He wants to quit ballet,” he repeats.
“Yes,” Armand says. “So you see why I’m concerned.”
“Why you’re – Armand, what the fuck did you do?”
Armand spreads his hands, face innocent. “I know you’re disinclined to believe me, but I haven’t even seen him since the end of our last season.”
“Is there – an injury? A physical problem?” He cannot think of another reason why Lestat would walk away from the only thing he’s ever done in his life.
“No,” Armand says. “He’s dancing better than ever, in fact. His Romeo –”
“Yes, I heard,” Louis interrupts, not wanting Armand to wax lyrical about Lestat’s most recent performance. Louis already knows, from the reviews and from the views in the cheap seats where no one will spot him. “What about over the break? Could he have -?”
“He saw the physiotherapist for a routine checkup two days before he called me. She reported no issues.”
Good to know that patient-client confidentiality is yet another boundary that Armand does not believe in, he thinks. “Maybe he just doesn’t have it in him anymore,” Louis says. “He’s closer to forty than thirty.”
“Barely,” Armand says. “And that’s beside the point. Retirement comes later and later for dancers now. We have dancers in the company five, ten years older than Lestat. With his genetic gifts, his prowess, his technique, the right medical care – he could have another decade before it’s time for him to step off the stage.”
“So, what?” Lestat has been dancing professionally since he was barely a man. His whole life is and always has been consumed by the art, often to the detriment of basically everything else. “There must be a reason.”
Armand shrugs. “He’s at the very peak of his career. The only possible reason to walk away from this is madness.” He gives a little smirk, the kind a novelist might describe as wry. “Which you and I both know he is not short of.”
“And you’d like me to talk him out of it.”
Armand laughs brusquely. “You’re the only person on this earth capable of speaking even the smallest shred of sense into him, so yes, I would like you to talk him out of it.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No. Lestat is not my problem anymore. I can’t even remember the last time I spoke to him.” A lie; he remembers it perfectly. At each other’s throats, first in anger and then in lust; the clash of teeth on teeth. “And I have my own life. My own work.”
“Ah yes. The exhibition.” Armand folds his legs. “I hear you’ve secured several artists of… some renown.”
Louis doesn’t say anything. If he doesn’t say anything, then Armand cannot weave between his words, hunting out the loose threads and pulling on them until the whole conversation rends in two and Louis is left holding the smaller, more ragged half without even realising he’s been had.
Armand bends to his sleek black leather briefcase, the quiet pull of the zip the only sound. Louis clicks blindly at his computer; he doesn’t want to see whatever Armand retrieves. A bloodied ballet slipper? A finger? A ransom note? Could be anything, knowing Armand. The iPad should bring some relief, but it doesn’t. He notices, distantly, that Armand has a new case for it; a charcoal grey that matches his suit. Get some fucking colour, he thinks, and then Armand is sliding it across the table and colour is all he can see.
“You recognise this, I presume.”
“Yes, Armand, I recognise The Kiss.” He closes the case and shoves it back, the familiar sting of condescension barbed with curiosity.
“Would you like it?” Armand asks. As though they’re perusing the dessert menu and he’s just told Louis that the sorbet here is quite good.
Louis laughs. “Would I like The Kiss? Yeah, think it’d go pretty nicely in the lounge. Why, you planning a heist on the Belvedere?”
“I’m being serious,” Armand says. His face is still. He taps a nail on the iPad. “You know I have a vast network of connections, Louis.”
“Sure. Pick me up the crown jewels and the Declaration of Independence while you’re at it.” Louis turns his attention back to his screen, though he knows Armand will see it for the pretence it is. “Stop wasting my time.”
“You think I would come to you if I believed my bargaining power insufficient?” Armand’s voice is mild, but Louis can tell he’s annoyed.
“You genuinely believe you could get the Belvedere to loan their most iconic – fuck, Vienna’s most iconic artwork – to an independent gallery in London?”
“I know I can,” Armand says, coolly.
Louis does not speak.
“You’re doing an exhibition on gold,” Armand says. “Its cultural value, its historical significance in the world of art. Klimt’s work is undoubtedly the most famous example of such.” Debatable, Louis thinks, but Armand is barrelling on, as always oblivious to how the flow and ebb of an actual conversation works as opposed to a lecture. “To skip over it entirely would be… lacking. Especially when you would have to expend so little effort to obtain it.”
Louis snorts. “If talking to Lestat is so little effort, why don’t you do it?”
“As I said. You’re the only person alive who could convince him to do something he doesn’t want to do.”
“And how do you propose I do it?”
“Use your imagination,” Armand says, breezily. “Make him see that this is a foolish idea. Remind him of his love for the art. Fuck some sense into him, I don’t care how. But have him there on stage, and I’ll ensure that the Klimt is yours.”
“The exhibition opens in eight months,” Louis says. He feels sick, suddenly, the way he used to before Christmas morning; the anticipation of receiving something greater than he felt he deserved, and the fear of receiving nothing at all.
“And the ballet will open in five,” Armand says. ”A new work of mine – an adaptation of Dracula – in which Lestat is, of course, playing the lead. So you understand the importance of my request.”
“Of course,” Louis says, letting a little contempt enter his voice. He doesn’t doubt that Armand created the entire ballet in order to give Lestat the starring role; no wonder he’s so pissed that Lestat is threatening to quit.
“Get him to the stage,” Armand says. “That’s all I ask.”
“Get him to the stage,” Louis repeats. The iPad is closed but the searing brilliance of the painting – even when rendered on a pixelated screen – has not left his mind. “And I would trust you, why?”
Armand looks unfairly wounded. “I’m a man of my word, Louis.”
He’s anything but. Louis knows this more than anyone. And yet. He thinks of the far wall of the exhibition space, up the stairs and furthest from the door, ready and waiting for a final, showstopping piece. Every artist exhibiting alongside it would be brushed with its same preternatural glow. The gallery is not short of success – but nor was the Mayfair down the road, and that closed its doors two months ago. The Blackwood, three months before that. Louis is already mentally steeling himself for the patron’s dinner next month, considering how he can charm those deep pockets into turning out for him. But The Kiss? That would have the patrons salivating, the press queuing down the street. It would secure another couple of years, at minimum.
He thinks of the back wall. He thinks of Claudia. He thinks of the artists. He thinks – with no small measure of shame – his name gilded with praise on every critic’s silver tongue. Has The Kiss left the fucking Belvedere in recent memory? He doesn’t know. All he knows is that he can feel the same tingling in his fingers, the same electric crackle in his blood, as when he’s at the poker table and he knows that if he just plays his cards right, he’s walking home with the whole pot.
“Eight months,” he says. “You confident you can make the arrangements that fast?” Usually it takes years for a loan of this magnitude to come through, but Armand’s connections are far removed from the sphere of usual.
“That’s your problem, Louis. Always so distrustful.” Armand tuts softly behind his teeth, a sound that angers Louis more than any shouting. “In fact, I’ve already set the cogs in motion.” He reaches for his phone, taps the screen; out of the corner of his eye, Louis sees a new email pop into his own inbox. “I’m sure you’ll find the terms quite agreeable.”
“You were that confident I’d say yes.”
“I was that confident that you were an intelligent man,” Armand says, sliding his iPad back into his briefcase and standing. “Of course, I haven’t spelled it out in black and white – I doubt it would be legally binding – but we’re both able to read between the lines, aren’t we?”
Louis feels as though he has his whole life doing nothing but. “I’ll have the lawyers take a look,” he says. “We’ll get back to you by close of play.”
“You do that,” Armand says, and smiles for the first time since he arrived. Louis wishes he wouldn’t; it looks too practiced on his face. “I rather think I’ve got the easier end of the bargain. The upper echelons of the art world are much simpler to sway than Lestat de Lioncourt.”
And doesn’t Louis know it, he thinks bitterly to himself as he watches Armand show himself out, a fox leaving the hen house satiated. He picks up the phone and dials Bricktop’s number.
By now, Claudia thinks, she has probably tried every kind of breakfast under the sun. Her earliest memories of bread straight from the packet, pulling the blue mould off with her tiny fingers and hoping someone was gonna come back sometime soon. Later, oatmeal that they stirred spoonfuls of Nutella into and called swamp mud, a refill ready as soon as she emptied it. Later still, Lucky Charms, on the rare occasion Louis didn’t pluck them out of the shopping cart before they got to the checkout: every morning an unspoken competition between her and Lestat about who could get the most marshmallows in their bowl, one of the few games he’d ever let her win. Pastries and full English fry ups and Lestat’s pancakes in the London house. Illicit trips to McDonalds wherever they were, ones that she wasn’t to tell Louis about. Dry, doughy, pre-packaged croissants that stuck in her teeth on the night buses, cornflakes and cardboard slices of toast in the hostels across Europe, fresh fruit and rice in the ones in Asia. On that morning in Bangkok she had been in a rush, so all she’d had was a banana. There are three turning brown in the fruit bowl now, untouched while she drags her spoon through her Cheerios.
“Claudia,” Louis says patiently, as though he’s been saying it for hours, and she looks up.
“What?”
“I asked,” Louis says, “if you had plans to see Les anytime soon.”
It‘s been unsubtle for years, this prompting, a clear sublimation of Louis’s own longing. Equally unsubtle is his furtive foraging for information whenever she returns: every question about Claudia and yet only about Lestat. Has she eaten? (Read: did Lestat take her out to eat and if so where; or did he cook, and if so, what?) Was she warm enough without a coat? (Read: did she and Lestat roam the heath for hours, or did they hole up in a museum; did he lend her that scarf, or did he buy it for her?) Did she have a good time? (Read: what kind of mood was he in? Was he the Lestat who had spent three long summer days in the yard of their house in New Orleans teaching her how to do the perfect cartwheel, demonstrating it for her again and again until his palms were green with grass stains and she could finally do it unsupported; or was he the Lestat who walked out of that same house and didn’t call for six months?)
The question he never asks is whether Lestat is seeing anyone, and Claudia has never volunteered an answer. She doesn’t know how to explain that even the most obvious signs of another presence in his flat – an extra toothbrush, a cigarette butt in the ashtray that is not Lestat's brand and tinged with pale pink lipstick besides – when combined with his hungry, void-like loneliness, indicates nothing more serious than an endless string of one night stands. But then, they were the problem to begin with.
“No,” she answers, because his question is still hanging between them. “I was going to see if he was free maybe one night next week.” She hopes he doesn’t mention that she’d said the same thing last week. She can’t put it off forever, she knows. But apart from a tart, brief voice note when she’d let him know she was back in the UK, she hasn’t heard from Lestat since she returned and his silence stings more than she’d care to admit.
“I have tickets for that new Lightroom exhibition,” Louis says. “The Vogue one, press agency sent them through. Monday lunchtime, you both should go.”
She lets the milk drip off her spoon. The Cheerios are sodden, swollen to triple their size. ”I can’t do Monday lunchtime.”
“What are you doing?” Louis asks, his voice so hopeful it hurts. “You going out with friends, or – did you ever look at those painting classes, I think –”
“I’m starting my new job,” Claudia says, before Louis can go too deep into the ways he wishes she’d spend her time instead of lying on the couch watching two or sometimes three screens at once.
“A job?”
“Well. An internship.” She glances sideways at him. “At the British Library.”
His whole face transforms when he smiles, nose scrunching up like the sun’s just come out. “Claudia,” he says, “Claudia, that’s great. Why didn’t you say anything?”
She shrugs. “Didn’t want to, not til I got it.” She’d seen the posting – a last-minute fill-in, shared online by one of the instructors at a creative writing camp she’d gone to years ago – one sleepless night at 3 or 4am, had thought of the comfort and the dust and the quiet of the libraries and bookshops Louis had taken to all her life. The email asking when she could come in for an interview had been waiting in her inbox the next morning.
“You should have said,” Louis tuts, and pushes his coffee aside. “We should celebrate. C’mon, let’s go out for breakfast.”
She raises an eyebrow. Since he’s given up the pretence of breakfast being the most important meal of the day – a charade he upheld for her sake until she was fifteen and he was seemingly satisfied she hadn’t picked up any of his worst habits – Louis drinks only plain, black coffee. “Breakfast,” she repeats.
“Yeah, we could go to – oh, no, that closed down.” Louis grimaces. “Or we could go into town?” He looks at his watch, grimaces again. She knows he’s already late from taking the time to sit down and watch her not-eat her Cheerios.
“Why don’t we go out for dinner, instead?” she suggests, and relief floods his face. Louis can’t lie for shit. “We could go to Citro.”
“Citro sounds good,” Louis says. “I’ll call and book a table.” He tilts his head. “You want to go shopping or anything, get something to wear for your first day?”
She shakes her head. “Dress code is just librarian, basically.” No one else had been wearing anything particularly out of the ordinary when she’d gone in – just drab amalgamations of dark trousers and shirts and jumpers – and she finds that she doesn’t particularly want to stand out.
“Beyond Retro is full of ugly sweaters,” Louis says with a grin. “We could get you a patterned cardigan, how about that?”
“I’ll just raid your wardrobe,” she teases, and he laughs, momentarily erasing the little line of worry that’s been etched into his forehead since she returned.
“Alright, alright,” he says, holding up his hands in mock defeat, “though I’ve never known you to pass up a shopping trip.”
She shrugs. “Maybe once I start.”
“You told Les yet?” She shakes her head. He looks a little gratified – pleased to be first, she thinks – but also a little torn. “You should, he’ll be happy for you.” He hesitates. “Did you two have a falling out?”
“No. I told you, I haven’t seen him.”
“I’m just asking,” Louis says, “because I know how he can be. If he’s said something –”
“I’ve just been getting used to being back,” she says and then, because he’s not gonna quit, “I can do Monday night. If they can change the tickets.” The venue is around the corner from the library; she can finish work and head straight over before she has time to sink beneath the surface again.
“They’ll be able to,” Louis says. “You want me to call him for you?”
She shakes her head. She’d rather deal with Lestat’s sulking herself than witness the utter fucking mess her parents become when they’re in each other’s orbit.
“It’ll be good. You can tell him all about your travels.” Louis’s smile is a little forced. “Though I feel like you’ve hardly even told me anything.”
“I’ve told you loads.” Her tone is sharper than she intends, sharper than he deserves. ”I’ll show you some more photos at dinner,” she says, an attempt to soften it. “Don’t you have to go on that studio visit?”
“Yeah,” he says, checking his watch again, as though more than a few minutes might have passed. “I’ll see you at dinner, yeah? I’ll book for seven, half seven, I’ll let you know.”
“Cool,” she says, and lets her spoon clatter into the bowl. “Go on, you’re gonna be late.”
“I’m going, I’m going.” He leaves the room. She stares down at the bloated Cheerios, floating like rubber rings in the pool of an all-inclusive, and feels nauseous. She stands and takes it to the sideboard, staring out over the garden. Everything in it is dead.
Louis returns wearing his black pea coat, the one that she remembers him buying the year they moved to London. “See you later,” he says, hesitating just a fraction of a second before closing the gap between them. The hug he pulls her into is tight and fierce, and she tries not to tense up within it. “I’m so proud of you,” he says into her hair.
“I know,” she says, and waits until she hears the door close behind him before emptying her bowl into the sink.
Lestat usually finds yoga class a calming experience, if not exactly a spiritual one; today, he feels his irritation rising with every pose. There are numerous things he could blame his mood on, but he chooses to leave most of it at the feet of the old man in front of him who can’t even do a downward dog, let alone cobra. Lestat glares at his untoned ass and inflexible spine through an interminable series of cat-cows, and dips out early purely because he thinks he might scream if he has to watch this sad septuagenarian crawl into child’s pose. Irony makes him queasy and the itch under his skin from not finishing the class is the lesser of two evils. He gives Christine as apologetic a look as he can muster as he leaves. He’ll be extra enthusiastic next time.
The air is crisp and cold, too early to have fully settled into the dullness of the day, and he orders his coffee extra hot and wraps both hands around the paper cup as he heads to the park. His usual bench is occupied by a young woman talking on her phone and intermittently throwing a ball for a little spaniel, who is much more interested in the game than she is. She doesn’t notice Lestat’s scowl as he stomps to the next bench over and takes a seat. The view of the park gate is slightly obscured from this angle, hidden by the spindly branches of a bare tree.
He reaches for his own phone, thumbs swiping through to his Whatsapp and opening the most recent unanswered message with all the self-destructive acuity of pressing on a bruise.
Armand tells me you’re quitting. What are you thinking, Lestat?
It had come through the night before and he’d stared at it for so long that the screen had gone dark. He had put it down; picked it back up again; started to type, deleted, typed again, deleted; even gone so far as to press the little microphone icon before thinking better of it and discarding the blank voice message. The idea of Louis sitting there, watching Lestat is typing… Lestat is typing… Lestat is recording audio…. had hit him like a thunderclap of mortification, and he had resolutely not looked at the phone for the rest of the evening.
Would he even be Lestat, on Louis’s phone? Or some variation of EVIL EX HUSBAND DO NOT ANSWER?
He wonders when Louis unblocked his number.
It has been a little over eight months since he had last heard Louis’s voice. It had been a fairly innocuous call; he had simply rung to share that there was a very interesting exhibition soon to open at the Southbank Centre, one exploring the potentials of Afrofuturism – or something like that, he had seen the poster on the tube and hadn’t had time to dwell on it – but would Claudia like to go? Perhaps they could make a family outing of it, get dinner beforehand, or –
“She’s not here,” Louis had interrupted.
“Well, ask her when she gets back, she is leaving me on read. Or message me when she returns, and I’ll call again to –”
“No, I mean – she’s not in London, Les,” Louis had said, tone half caution and half exasperation, as though this is something he has already explained to Lestat many times before rather than brand new information.
“Then where is she?” Lestat had demanded, and Louis had sighed low and long in the way Lestat just hates , and said, “Riga, I think.”
“You think?” And then the rest of their conversation was a blurred smear in his mind like a dead animal dragged to pulp along the side of the road, the kind of argument Lestat knows he’s not coming off well in even as he opens his mouth to make things worse. Louis had hung up mid-argument, and twenty minutes later there had been a thunderous knock on Lestat’s front door and the fight had ended the way their fights usually end.
And that was the last time Louis had taken his calls. Claudia had relented slightly sooner, though he does not fool himself; she unblocked him on Whatsapp primarily, he thinks, so he could transfer the visa costs and potentially a bribe for the guards on the border of Vietnam. She had paid for it, and for her subsequent flights and Monzo top-ups, with a flurry of FaceTimes in which she always seemed to be enroute to somewhere. “You can hardly be seeing these places,” he had sneered once, as he’d watched the corner of her cheek board a train, and she had raised the segment of eyebrow he could see and said, “because you’re so well travelled,” to which he really had no reply.
The spaniel – perhaps tired of trying to get its mistress’s attention – bounds over to him and Lestat reaches down to brush the soft little head, removes a dried leaf from where it has become tangled in the long fur of the dog’s ear. It is on the verge of no longer being a puppy, he thinks – paws almost but not quite in proportion with its body, teeth still razor sharp. “No,” he tells it firmly as it mouths at his hand. It rolls over instead, tongue lolloping and eyes big and trusting.
The owner is still talking on the phone and for a brief moment he has a flash of a possible future: sees himself bending down, tucking the dog into his coat and walking briskly out of the park, into the street. He would make it to the end of the road before she even noticed the dog was gone. Is there CCTV, in this quiet little park? Can you go to prison for stealing a dog? He thinks he’d do well in prison, on the whole. Sodomy and routine – what’s new?
“Hector,” the woman calls, and the spaniel jumps up and bounds away as quickly as it came. It’s probably microchipped anyway, Lestat thinks morosely. He sips his coffee and stares at Louis’s message for a while, no closer to formulating a response, when another comes through. This time, from the prodigal daughter.
You free Monday night?
That, at least, is an easy response. He sends a thumbs-up and then types out an affirmative as well, lest he be accused of lack of effort, drains his latte, and stands. What are you thinking? As if Lestat himself ever really knows.