by Russ Thomas
The crowd laughs dutifully, and a young guy Tyler vaguely recognizes from the Family Liaison Unit says, “OMG, people, we need a better acronym.” The guy catches his eye and winks.
Tyler does his best to smile and nod at the faces round the table. He recognizes some of them from the station. Civilians mostly, like Sally-Ann, but one or two are from Uniform. Conspicuously, there’s no one else from the Criminal Investigation Department.
After a while the group fragments into smaller conversations, and Tyler finds himself standing slightly apart, not quite part of any of them. Sally-Ann leans in to him. “I’m glad you came,” she says, “but don’t feel you have to stay if it’s not for you.” She’s intuitive, Sally-Ann. Whatever else they might say about her, she’s that.
He admits to her that none of this was his own idea, that the DCI made it clear she expected him to mix more. Minority groups being good for the public image and all, she feels he needs to make more of an effort when it comes to networking.
Sally-Ann laughs. “She’s making you go out to play, is that it?”
“She wants a tame CID-queer she can stick on the town hall steps at Pride and show off to the world.” He’s not being entirely fair, but there’s some truth in it.
“Poor Adam, a poster boy’s work is never done, eh?” She reaches across and ruffles his hair. She’s not the sort of person who can get away with gestures like that. “We’ll have you on a float lip-synching to Gloria Gaynor before you know it.”
“No,” he says. “You really fucking won’t.” He changes the subject by offering to buy her a drink.
* * *
—
“Bourbon,” he orders at the bar. “On the rocks with a twist.”
“My dad used to drink that.”
Tyler glances once at the man standing next to him and then turns to the mirror behind the optics to finish his appraisal. He noticed him earlier. He’s the sort of guy people notice. Pretty rather than handsome. All defined cheekbones and chiseled jaw, a triangle for a torso that ripples beneath a skinny-fit white shirt. He has a mop of shaggy-dog hair that frames a face with skin so pale he might have just stepped off the set of the latest teenage vampire movie. He’s a few years younger than Tyler. Twenty-three, twenty-four, maybe.
Their eyes meet in the mirror. Long enough for them to both know they’re not wrong. The man looks in and away, in and away, like a wildebeest checking for predators before dipping its head to the watering hole.
Someone in the crowd jostles the guy, and he steadies himself with a hand on Tyler’s elbow. “Sorry,” he says, but the hand lingers longer than is strictly necessary. He has a surprisingly deep voice. Rich and full-bodied. For some reason it makes Tyler think of blackberries.
The barmaid returns with the bourbon, and Tyler orders another pint for himself.
“Not much of a match,” says the pretty guy, pointing to the TV screen above the bar with a hand that’s still clutching a pint glass.
Tyler looks at him rather than the screen. “Do you really want to talk about football?”
The man opens his mouth, pauses, and then laughs. A plump blackberry laugh. “Actually, that’s the sum total of my football knowledge expended.” He’s too confident by far in his ability to charm.
Tyler watches the barmaid singularly failing to pull his pint, engaging instead in a conversation with a colleague. He considers encouraging her along with a choice word or two but resists the temptation.
The pretty guy tries again. “Can I buy you a drink?”
“I have one.”
The man laughs again. “You’re not making this easy for me, are you?”
The barmaid finally returns and slops a pint glass down in front of him. Tyler pays her. He picks up the drinks and glances over to the work crowd where Sally-Ann stands out a head taller than everyone else. “I’m with friends,” he says.
The man shrugs, not obviously disappointed. “Maybe another time.”
When Tyler passes Sally-Ann her drink she immediately asks, “Who was that?”
“Nobody.”
“A cute nobody, though.”
“Drink your bourbon,” he tells her.
“So you’re actually going to pass on a handsome guy that throws himself at you?”
“He wasn’t my type.”
“Sweetheart,” she says, the endearment sounding false from her lips, “he was everyone’s type. Even mine.”
Tyler drains the remains of his first pint, slips the glass back onto the table, and starts on the second. “I can’t stay long,” he says. “I have work tomorrow.”
“Oh, Adam,” she says, shaking her head, but leaves it at that.
He stays long enough that he won’t feel like he’s lying when he tells the DCI he did his bit. He nods politely if anyone talks to him directly, but most of the others don’t. He’s not the only one being given the cold shoulder, though. He notices the two from Uniform have subtly shifted their seats so as to appear slightly removed from the group. Civilian workers never seem to mix well with the ranks; Sally-Ann is the exception that proves the rule. They don’t want him there any more than he wants to be there. He has nothing in common with these people except a label, and he has no intention of categorizing himself in that way.
Sally-Ann is watching the cute guy at the bar again. He wonders if she meant what she said about him being her type. He’s always assumed she was interested only in women, but then, he supposes he doesn’t really know her very well at all yet.
“Sal,” he says.
She’s miles away. He reaches out to touch her arm, and she flinches, snatching her arm away. “Sorry,” she says, rubbing at the thick velvet of her sleeve. “You made me jump.”
“I’m going to get going.”
“Okay.” She hugs him again and thanks him for coming.
“By the way,” he asks as he gets up, “what was the acronym?”
She looks confused.
“SYP, etc.”
“Oh,” she says, “South Yorkshire Police Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transsexual Support Network.”
“Right.”
She laughs and the whole group choruses, “It’s a bit of a mouthful.”
He leaves them giggling at the feeble double entendre and heads off, making sure to take the long way round the bar to the door.
The pretty guy looks up as he approaches.
“How about that drink then?”
The man smiles at him. “What’ll you have?”
Tyler shrugs. “I guess that depends what you’ve got back at your place.”
The man hesitates for a few seconds, but the smile remains fixed in place. “I’m pretty sure I’ll have something you’ll like.” He drains his own glass and gets up, leaving Tyler to follow him out of the bar.
* * *
—
Lily takes sharp tugs at her hair with a copper brush, separating the straw ends with the tips of her fingers. Her right hand moves erratically and the brush jerks, not quite following the path she sets out for it. The doctors tell her this is quite normal, that she may never regain the full use of it, and she has resigned herself to that. There are worse fates, after all.
She examines her reflection in the dressing table mirror and remembers a time when her hair consisted of long, thick tresses that brought her more than her fair share of attention. But now, the woman staring back at her is only vaguely familiar, a shadow image she recognizes but can’t quite place. She pulls a handful of treacherous silver hair from the wiry bristles and drops it carelessly to the floor.
Behind this stranger in the mirror sits Edna, propped up in bed, reading. She has on her half-rim glasses and the nightgown with the roses she was wearing the day the ambulance brought her home. Her own feeble hands struggle to hold up the weight of the paperback and, not for the first time, Lily is struck by the
recognition that one of them will soon be alone. She knows it will be her. It is her lot. For Edna’s sake, for all that she owes her, Lily must be the one to hold vigil. She just wishes she could remember why.
Her cheeks heat, giving away her morbid thoughts. Her voice, when she finds it, is cracked, as unrecognizable as her reflection. “Ed-na?”
Edna continues to read.
“Would you stay? Do you think?”
Edna fails to look up.
Lily takes another savage tug with the brush and explains: “Here in the cottage, I mean. I’m not sure I would, not on my own.”
“Hmm?” says Edna, her eyes still fixed on the page. “What’s this?”
Lily swallows; her throat feels swollen and dry, but she forces herself to go on. “I was just wondering, that’s all. I mean—if it is me that goes first—would you want to stay here? In the cottage? I can’t imagine you’d want to go back . . .” She hesitates. Edna only ever refers to it as that place, but it seems important somehow to give it its full name, to try, as they come to this point so near to the end, to be honest with each other. “To the hospice,” she says, quickly adding, “Of course, there might be other options we could look at?”
Edna finally looks up, frowns at her, and uses a crippled finger to mark her place in the pages. She stares at Lily for a moment and then sighs, a long blast of irritated air. “Oh, Lillian.” (Only Edna calls her Lillian, and her mother, of course.) She shakes her head. “Do hurry up and come to bed,” she says, and returns to her book.
Lily resumes her brushing. Another face appears in the mirror, conjured by her thoughts, perhaps. Lily’s mother stands behind her and takes the brush from her hands just as she used to so many years before. One hundred strokes before bedtime; far fewer needed now. “Stop your fidgeting!” her mother would say in much the same tone Edna uses now. And “Oh, Lillian.” Yes, she used to say that, too. “Oh, Lillian, why are you headed to London when every sensible person is moving away? Don’t you know what sort of people they have down there?”
Her mother is one of the reasons she has asked the question. Lily sees her more often now, along with other faces from long ago. Contrary to what she might have expected, the past seems to be drawing ever closer. Events that once seemed vague and distant are becoming clearer; people whose faces she has long forgotten appear before her like hazy photographs coming back into focus. She feels the weight of them pressing down on her, dragging her backward. She wonders if this is a symptom of her illness. Her “little turns,” as she and Edna have taken to calling them; so much nicer than “ischemic incidents,” which is the name the doctor uses. Her fractured mind is trying to piece itself back together, even if it has to dive decades into the past to find its material. But there are still huge gaps, too. They warned her there might be memory loss, though she’s never let on to Edna, nor anyone else, just how far those gaps extend.
Whatever their provenance, she doesn’t want to be alone with the ghosts when Edna is gone. And, despite her earlier question, neither of them has any real doubt who will be the one left behind. Mini-strokes or not, it is Edna who is living on borrowed time.
She looks up to find Edna watching her. The book has fallen discarded in her lap, the page left unmarked this time. She’s shaking her head again, a small smile playing on her lips. “For heaven’s sake, woman, how many times do I have to ask you to drop your hair in the basket? It’s a small miracle we don’t have rats in this place.”
Now it’s Lily’s turn to sigh, though she isn’t as good at it as Edna. She bends and scoops the ball of hair from the carpet, drops it into the bin. “There’s no need to snap at me. I’m not a child.”
For all the secrets that lie hidden in the corners of this cottage, thoughts are by now painfully transparent, so Lily knows Edna is thinking, Yes, you are. They stare at each other in silence until Edna sighs once more and picks up her book. But rather than resuming reading she finds her page and marks it with a tasseled leather bookmark edged in gold leaf that Lily remembers they bought on a trip to Cockermouth where . . . they eat a cream tea and listen to the rain drumming against the café window. She asks Edna if she can see the bookmark, and Edna extracts it from the small paper bag given her by the woman in the shop. It has a golden silhouette of Wordsworth and a few lines of poetry. She can’t make out the poem; the writing is too small and the glinting gold of the letters . . .
“Lillian? Lillian!”
“Hmm?”
Edna is staring at her from the mirror. She has put down her book on the bedside table and removed her spectacles, which now lie folded in the palm of her hand. “It happened again, didn’t it?”
“Oh, Edna, don’t fuss.”
“But you were miles away! It was as though you weren’t here in the room with me at all.” Edna’s face evokes nothing but its usual authoritative calm, but Lily knows her better than this; Edna is worried. “Will you please go back to the doctor? Have you even taken your warfarin today? When’s your next checkup?”
Lily ignores her. She knows Edna’s relentless questioning is only born out of love and concern, but she is so sick of doctors and medicines and checkups! She puts down the brush on the dressing table. “I’m finished now. Let’s just get to sleep. Things always seem better in the morning.” She stops, but Edna is too shrewd not to notice such a slip-up. She meets Edna’s eyes. They make her think of hard, shiny conkers and the rapping of cold, raw knuckles.
Edna raises one eyebrow. “What ‘things’?”
Lily filibusters, arranging items on the dressing table as though curating a shopwindow display. “Oh, everything. And nothing. You know. Are you finished with the light?”
The ghost of Lily’s mother is shaking her head, her lips tight. Such a disappointment! But then Edna grunts and clearly decides to let it go. She pats herself down and folds the sheets around her bulky body. She is no doubt tired, which was largely the reason Lily picked this moment to try to tell her. Edna is easier to deal with when she doesn’t have much fight in her. So why hasn’t she told her? Well, it’s too late now.
Lily lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding and watches her mother slide back into the woodchip on the walls. She gets up and pads barefoot between the beds, enjoying the scratch of the nylon carpet between her toes. By the time she reaches for the lamp, Edna is nestled beneath blanket and sheet. As she turns away, Lily sees the small square indentations Edna’s hairnet has left on her pillowslip. She decides not to bother with her own and pushes the switch under the shade, the hot metal pinching the loose skin on her thumb.
“You’ll regret it in the morning,” says a voice, and Lily is no longer sure if it’s Edna’s, or her mother’s, or someone else entirely. She climbs into bed, trying as she did as a child to slip between the sheets without bunching her nightdress. Slowly her eyes adjust to the dark. Beyond the bedside table a lump of crinkled bed linen refuses to look in her direction.
“Edna?” she calls softly.
Silence.
“Edna?”
“What’s the matter?”
For the briefest moment Lily is going to tell her everything. Tell her all about the letter that arrived yesterday morning. The letter that is currently tucked under the lining in the drawer of the bureau where she knows Edna never looks. She could blurt it all out in one go. It would be so easy, and then Edna would take control of the matter and she’d sort everything out. Again.
But then a car passes by outside, and the headlights cause a garden shadow to slide across the ceiling above them like a threatening cloud, and all at once Lily cannot speak.
She says nothing more, just listens for Edna’s breathing in the dark. If her breath is shallow or broken, she will force herself to stay awake in case Edna needs something. But tonight Edna breathes deeply and is soon fast asleep.
Lily, however, lies awake in the darkness.
day one
He turns from the window and watches the man still sleeping. His soft breathing conjures images of fireside cats that dissipate when he notices the prominent Adam’s apple pulsing under the translucent skin of the man’s throat. It looks as though it’s trying to break out and makes Tyler think of the face-hugger from Alien.
The man groans and turns onto his side, light feathers of hair falling across that perfectly chiseled face. A delicately proportioned nose, square jaw, thick lips. A calculated length of fine stubble to set it all off. Too perfect. Perfect never works.
The man shifts, reaching up to the pillow with his right arm and causing the duvet to slide off his chest to expose a sculpted washboard stomach and two hard pink nipples. His left arm, bent at the elbow so the wrist disappears under the duvet, is sleeved in an intricate swirl of Celtic tattoos. Like a bush of thorns, or dancing black flames.
He opens his eyes and looks straight at Tyler, the irises bright green in the morning sunlight. He looks almost reptilian.
“Hey,” he says, yawning and sitting up.
Tyler moves away from the window and begins to gather his discarded clothing.
The man watches him dress. “I thought we could get breakfast together?” he says. He has that annoying habit of letting his voice go up at the end of every sentence, turning statements into questions.