Where, oh where, is my Cubist T. Rex? Now tell me, Kenneth, how do I look?’

“Very smart,” said Ken, from within his tired, hired dinner jacket. Quan was reading Geology, and he was reading Art History, but here on the evening of the Trinity May Ball, as on every evening they’d spent together in their three years at Cambridge, it was the Chinese boy who brought up what Ken’s father called, with beery disdain, the subject of “pretty pictures”. Perhaps it was Quan’s time at Le Rosey that caused him to do this; the patrician manners he’d learned there – alongside all those pubescent Rothschilds and Hohenzollerns, all those Glücksburgs and Hohenlohes – demanded that he cultivate his conversation always in the warm, pliant soil of his interlocutor’s comfort zone. Or perhaps this heir to the Shandong Mining Group (Non-Ferrous Metals) really was fascinated by Chardin and Courbet, Piero and Pontormo, or perhaps – and this was Ken’s dark wish – his real fascination was with Ken himself, the state-school kid who fell asleep each night in his lonely bed, semen cooling on his belly, dreaming of his Huángdi, his handsome, unhaveable Emperor. Not that he would ever find out the truth. Tomorrow, Quan would leave Cambridge forever, flying back to China, and the family business, and its mad, unimaginable wealth. Ken would remain here, taking up a place at the university seminary. Art History had, he thought, prepared him well for life as a vicar. The key thing wasn’t to believe (this was the Church of England, after all), or even to experience a better class of doubt. The key thing was to ache.

“Dinosaurs,” said Quan, crouching to tie his laces, and slipping a small, plastic bag into the top of his left sock. “Kenneth, I’m serious. Why would none of your painters touch them? Fascinating creatures – my father’s always unearthing them in his mines – and I understand they played a significant role in killing off your God.”

“Too modern, at first,” said Ken, ignoring the dangling bait, “and then not modern enough. Dinosaurs look a lot like dragons, and dragons were never going to fly with the twentieth-century avant-garde. They’re medieval. Worse, they’re Victorian. Think of the Futurist manifesto: cars running on machine-gun fire, propellers roaring like a fascist mob, violent electric moons. That lot wanted to flood the museums, not fill them with paintings of Diplodocus.” Briefly, Ken pictured water rising in a great, vaulted gallery space. Drowned canvases. A school of coelacanths swimming by. Sodden parquet floors.

“You Westerners have a lot to learn about dragons,” said Quan, picking up a paper fan from his dressing table, and snapping it into its lacquered casement. This he tapped three times against Ken’s chest. “Come on, Kenneth. The ball’s already started, and I want to show you off. I don’t think anybody at Trinity has ever seen a Wolfson man in black tie before.”

Later, when the June sun finally set on the college gardens, and the marquees began to glow like yellow lanterns in the gathered dark, and everywhere there was the smell of honeysuckle and the shimmer of distant music, Quan led Ken down to the riverbank. They had each drunk, by Ken’s reckoning, a full bottle of champagne, and the English boy was unsteady on his feet. A rowing boat was moored by the water’s edge. Quan stepped briskly aboard.

“Is this thing yours?” said Ken, landing heavily inside the wooden hull. The boat rocked, then stilled.

“Punts are for tourists,” said Quan, by way of an answer. “Come on, let’s go on a little trip.” Settling Ken on the slatted seat, the Chinese boy let slip the rope, and pushed off from the riverbank.

“No oars,” said Ken, as the current caught them, buoying them past Trinity, past St John’s, on towards the Bridge of Sighs.

“Don’t worry, Kenneth, the river knows where we’re going.” Quan reached down into his left sock, and fished out the small plastic bag. “Now, open your mouth.”

As soon as Ken parted his lips, he felt his friend’s finger swipe along his gum line, scouring it with something granular and bitter-tasting. His drunkenness took on a sudden, unfamiliar edge, hard and bright and needful.

“What are you doing?” asked Ken, pulling away. It wasn’t the drugs that shocked him, although Quan, to his knowledge, had always shunned pills and powders. Rather it was the intimacy, the unexpected meeting of flesh and flesh. Other human beings had put parts of their body in his body (doctors, dentists, one disastrous girlfriend), but this was not the same, no not the same at all.

Quan raised his finger to Ken’s lips, first shushing them, then squirreling between their folds. That taste again. That texture.

“Ground dragon’s bones,” said Quan.

The boat passed beneath the bridge. Quan took Ken’s hand, and placed it on his thigh. Ken felt something firm beneath the soft fabric of his trousers. The fan. No.

Then Quan leaned in, and Ken’s heart opened up like never before.

***

The Reverend Ken Carpenter didn’t hate his job, or his workplace – rising from a recently gentrified corner of East London, the Gothic Revival St Michael’s had what he was pleased to call “good bone structure”. No, what the Reverend Ken Carpenter hated was his congregation. Like many English churches, his was affiliated with an excellent church school, and like many excellent church schools, this one had recently adopted a policy of only admitting children from families who made a “clear and regular demonstration of their Christian faith”. Over the past year, Ken’s usual sparse flock of septuagenarians, dry alcoholics and lost-looking immigrants had been joined, then quickly supplanted, by a new type of parishioner: the pushy middle-class parent, happy to feign supplication if it meant their kids could avoid the vivid horrors of London’s comprehensives, or the anti-egalitarian taint of its fee-paying schools. They arrived at his services in a spirit of bustling cheerfulness, belted out the opening hymn, sat tolerantly through his sermon, mumbled a few prayers, rallied themselves for the closing hymn (always, by popular request, the loathsome “Lord of the Dance”), and then applied themselves to what they obviously considered the really serious aspects of religious observance: discussing whether the parish magazine should be typeset in Helvetica Inserat or Akzidenz-Grotesk, or whether the cakes in the church bake sale should be lactose- and gluten-free. Everywhere in St Michael’s were the signs of their growing influence. The noticeboard pinned with flyers for Alpha Courses, Mindfulness Workshops and Hot Bikram Yoga. The Children’s Play ’n’ Pray Space, with its herd of donated Eames elephant stools. In a bruising putsch, responsibility for the flower arrangements had been wrested from a pair of elderly spinsters and was now the province of a lawyer’s wife who described herself to an astonished Ken as an “up-and-coming botanical artist”, much influenced by Japanese ikebana. The Bible study group was reading Khalil Gibran. A pilgrimage had been proposed to see the Chagall chapel at Assy, followed by a week’s snow- boarding in nearby Chamonix.

If St Michael’s was, for its congregation, simply another corner of the world to remake in their own confident and smoothly tasteful image, then this didn’t seem to trouble the senior clergy of the diocese. Pews were being filled like never before, and when Ken had gently suggested to the archdeacon that something precious – a thing not subject to contract, a thing close perhaps to grace – had been sluiced from the church by this tide of new worshippers, he was swiftly and firmly rebuked. In two days’ time, a TV crew would arrive to film a documentary, The Miracle of St Michael’s, focusing, so the producer had told him on the phone, on “Christianity as a relevant lifestyle choice for the busy young professional”. Their visit would coincide with Michaelmas, feast of the church’s titular archangel, a day on which debts were traditionally settled and final reckonings made.

That night in the vicarage, like most nights in the vicarage, Ken lay down on his bed with his laptop bobbing on his belly, and trawled the hook-up sites for men who might summon the memory of his distant Quan. Five years had passed since the boat and the bridge, five years since love had tapped his hollow, echoing chest. Waking up the morning after the ball on an unfamiliar stretch of riverbank – his gums tingling, his awful dinner jacket muddied, his body pungent and pleasantly sore – Ken found that Quan had already left for his flight to China. There was no note, although his smartphone lay nearby, alongside the empty bag, its smashed screen the colour of a bluebottle’s wing. Back at Wolfson, Ken discovered that every one of Quan’s social networking accounts – even his Renren, even his Weibo – had been closed down. The Chinese boy did not return to Cambridge to pick up his degree.