by Alexis Hall
“I’d still have asked you to dinner. You just wouldn’t have been able to eat anything.”
Fen laughed, and it had a startled edge to it, like he didn’t quite believe Alfie could do that to him. He had such a good laugh. It was like his smile: a bit too much.
Alfie wanted to bask in it, but he suddenly remembered he was missing his cue. He held out his menu, grinning at Mr. Ali. “They don’t even bother to ask me what I want anymore.”
“That’s because you always have the same thing.” Mr. Ali tucked his notebook away and took the menu.
“What can I say? I know what I like.”
And, wow, that sounded weird with Fen sitting right there, his hand still trapped under Alfie’s.
But Mr. Ali only smiled and turned to Fen. “And what is it you do?”
Oh God. Too late, Alfie realised that Fen was probably going to get the same polite interrogation as the rest of his dates. He rushed to the rescue. “He’s got a flower shop.”
“I’m a lighting designer,” said Fen.
Huh? They hadn’t even got to starters and Alfie was already losing the plot. The cute gay florist he’d met in South Shields was apparently neither gay nor a florist. Definitely still cute though, so it wasn’t a total bust.
“You mean,” asked Mr. Ali, who was somehow managing to learn more about Fen in two minutes than Alfie had since he’d met him again, “interior design? Or for television?”
“Theatre actually.”
“Theatre?”
“Well, I was working on it. It takes time to make a name for yourself, but I was getting there.” His hand twitched under Alfie’s, inviting the press and clasp of his fingers. “I was getting there.”
Mr. Ali nodded his approval—Fen had clearly passed Round One of being allowed to date Alfie—and left them to it.
“I didn’t know you did that.” Alfie hadn’t meant to sound quite so accusing.
“You didn’t ask.”
“And the shop?”
“Is what I’m doing now.”
“But,” Alfie pressed, “you said you were a lighting designer.”
Fen dragged his hand free. “I am. Was. Am.” He sounded, suddenly, on the verge of tears. “I don’t know.”
Alfie was horrified—mainly at himself, his rough and careless ways, rampaging through a conversation like a confused bear. “Fen, it’s all right. I didn’t mean to give you the third degree. I just didn’t know.”
“Why would you? You don’t know me.” Fen’s anger came out of nowhere, as sharp and brittle as frost. Just as sad, in his way, as tears might have been.
“I want to know you.”
Alfie wanted to say something comforting. But he wasn’t sure what he was trying to be comforting about, except that sometimes Fen seemed so lost. So the silence lasted well into the starters.
“This is really good,” offered Fen finally, almost pleadingly, like he wanted Alfie to play along and forget everything they’d just said and failed to say.
Alfie was only too happy to oblige. “I’ve no idea what you’re eating. It looks like curried polystyrene.”
“It’s cheese, Alfie.”
“Curried cheese? That’s so wrong.”
“Do you want to try it?”
He really didn’t. But Fen was waving a forkful of cheese between them like it was an olive branch. So he leaned over the table and tried not to make too much of an arse of himself trying to eat the thing. He hesitated a moment before he took it, flicking an anxious glance about the restaurant in case the other customers were pointing in outrage or recoiling in disgust, but nobody seemed to care. So he ate curried cheese from the fork of another bloke, and it was fine. “It’s okay,” he mumbled. “Be nicer if it was meat.”
Fen laughed again. It wasn’t like last time. More of a chuckle really. But definitely a sound of amusement. A real one, vanishing too soon. “Alfie?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry about before. I didn’t mean to be all snappy.”
“No, it’s okay. Nothing to be sorry for.”
“Well, I said we could talk and then shot you down when you tried. So . . . ask me something.”
“Um, what sort of thing?”
“Anything. Let’s just pretend this is normal.”
Alfie wanted to protest that it was normal. Or it could be. “So, what happened with your boyfriend?”
A clatter as Fen’s fork dropped onto his plate. “That’s not normal.”
“Yeah, it is. You brought him up.” And, honestly, he wanted to know what he was up against.
“Tough. Try again.”
He flailed around for a safe, neutral, normal topic. “What’s a lighting designer?” Fen opened his mouth. “And don’t say you design the lighting for shit.”
Fen’s hair fell forward as he ducked his head. Was he hiding a smile? “But I really do design the lighting for shit.” Alfie gave him a look. Now there was no hiding the smile. “Okay, sorry. But, at the most basic level, it’s my job to make sure you can see . . . um, the stage?”
“But there’s more to it than that, right?”
“Well. Yes. It’s . . . it’s storytelling. I mean a set is just an illusion everybody already knows is hollow. But lighting is part of how you make people forget.” Some of Fen’s reluctance seemed to fade, his voice quickening, his hands moving with his words. “It’s not just about how you make something look, but how you make it feel. Like floristry, it’s a kind of art. Painting with light.”
“Wow.”
“Stop looking at me like that, you’re making me self-conscious.”
But Alfie didn’t know how he was looking, or how to stop. “I just don’t know how you figured all that out.”
“Well, I’m a fully qualified electrician, and I spent all my time at university doing theatre stuff before I dropped out, and I—”
“No, I mean how you knew that was what you wanted to do.”
“Oh. Well. I didn’t really. I thought I wanted to be on the stage, at first.”
“What, like an actor?”
“Mainly I wanted to be in musicals.”
Alfie didn’t mean to, but he laughed. Sort of guffawed, actually, as the plates were being cleared. “Musicals,” he repeated. And did jazz hands.
Fen flinched, then scowled. “I’ve always loved musicals. You know that. You took the piss out of me enough for it.”
Truthfully, Alfie had forgotten this too. Also he mustn’t have changed as much as he’d hoped, because he was still pretty inclined to take the piss. “I just don’t get them,” he explained. “Like, somebody will be walking down the street, and suddenly they’ll burst into song for no reason. People don’t do that.”
Fen didn’t seem impressed by this line of reasoning. “Fiction isn’t mimesis, Alfie Bell.”
“I don’t understand what any of that means.” Except when Fen used his full name. Which meant he was cross.
“An imitation of what is.”
“Okay.” Alfie thought about it a moment—though why something so bloody simple needed a massive, weird word was beyond him. “I get that stuff doesn’t have to be realistic or whatever, but the whole singing and dancing and everybody just amazingly joining in, knowing what to do, goes too far for me. There’s no way I’m just going to be able to see that happen and not be like, ‘No, that makes no sense.’”
“Fine.”
“I know I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I know fine means not fucking fine.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Their eyes met across the table, Fen’s still locked away behind pink glass. “But it obviously matters. Why won’t you talk to me about it?”
“Because I hate this argument. And I hate that people always think they’re so bloody clever for not liking musicals. And also, I don’t want to talk about it.”
Alfie was going to protest, but Fen had sort of hinted in the car that he was too pushy sometimes. And while there’d definitely been times it had tur
ned out okay, he could tell this probably wouldn’t be one of them. Fen didn’t have to talk to him about anything, and he definitely didn’t have to justify what he was into. Even if it was cheesy gay shit like musicals.
He had no idea if things were going well. There were definitely moments when they were, except they were mainly sex moments or laughter moments. All of which was great, but still left a vast in-between. Maybe Fen was right. Maybe this was all too complicated. Maybe ridiculously horny (Alfie was going to carry that phrase around with him like a conker in his pocket) wasn’t enough. Not with all that anger and sadness and confusion floating around underneath it. And everything Fen didn’t want to talk about. Wouldn’t trust him with.
Even tandoori king prawn jalfrezi just the way he liked it didn’t do much to cheer him up. It should have tasted so good, but it felt like it was sinking straight down to meet wherever his words were stuck.
It was Fen, eventually, who broke the silence. “I don’t think you said what you do these days?”
He really wanted to be standoffish—to not want to talk about something right back, and see how Fen liked it—but Fen was looking at him in a sweetly interested kind of way, which basically turned Alfie to rice pudding. “I work for J.D. Jarndyce, as part of the financing group.”
“You . . . pardon? What’s the financing group?”
“It’s kind of an umbrella term for a bunch of specialist teams who offer, like, a range of stuff.”
A pause. “What sort of stuff?”
“The usual stuff. Like corporate finance solutions, liability management, or whatever.”
Fen’s eyes were so wide. “Alfie, are you . . . the wolf of Wall Street?”
That, combined with the way Fen was looking at him, as if he’d grown a set of antlers or something, made him laugh. It was the sort of laugh he felt all the way to his bones. And suddenly his jalfrezi was perfect again. “Well if you take away the fraud and the ludes and basically everything else, yes. I mean, no, not really. Some of the other guys are into all that work-hard, play-hard, snorting-coke-in-the-bogs macho crap. But I’m in equity capital markets, which is pretty civilised.”
“Holy shit.” Fen had put down his knife and fork. His hands were hovering over his mouth, like he was six years old and the Daleks were on TV. “I can’t believe it. Alfie Bell grew up and became an investment banker.”
“Only a little bit,” Alfie protested. “I’m not on the trading floor or anything. I work with companies and governments and financial sponsors. People like that.”
“Okay, but what do you with them?”
“Uh, equity and bond issuance, and some risk-management stuff, as well as, y’know, like, initial offerings, follow-on offerings, convertibles and derivatives—” Fen’s mouth had fallen open slightly, his brows stuck in shocked little arches. Alfie sighed. “I make money, Fen. I make a lot of money.”
There was a long silence. Alfie absentmindedly stole a piece of Fen’s paratha and used it to mop up the last of his sauce. It wasn’t until he’d eaten it that he realised what he’d done. “Shit, sorry.”
But the corners of Fen’s mouth kicked up. “Be my guest, mate.”
“Oh man, they hate that down south, have you noticed? They get proper territorial.”
“Right? It’s like they all think they’re going to get food lurgy if you touch their plate.”
Alfie looked at what was left of his jalfrezi, which was basically nothing. “I should’ve got summin vegetarian.”
Fen waved a dismissive hand, and stole a swig of his Cobra instead. And, in that moment, with Fen, in South Shields, in his favourite restaurant in the whole world, Alfie felt so happy and so right that his heart got huge and tight and hot, and he wasn’t sure if he was going to laugh, or cry, or have some kind of weird aneurism. Thankfully he didn’t do any of those things. But the possibility of them left this floatiness behind.
“Do you like it?” Fen was saying. “The . . . the equity risk derivative . . . whatever it is you do?”
He shrugged. “I’m good at it.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“No, but—” Alfie finished the last swallow of his Cobra, tasting Fen “—it’s kind of the answer. It’s . . . well . . . it’s hard to describe. I like being good.”
“But isn’t it a really cutthroat environment?”
“It’s competitive, yeah, but there’s a simple answer to that.”
Fen tilted his head enquiringly.
“Be the best.”
“Arrogant, and yet annoyingly attractive.”
“That’s me.” He grinned.
“Oh, Alfie, why? Why do you do this?”
“I told you—”
“I mean, how. How did you get here? Is this really what happened to you?”
There was something . . . something in Fen’s tone, or the angle of his head, or curve of his mouth. A kind of hunger, or maybe a kind of despair. Alfie wasn’t sure he liked it. “What were you expecting?”
“I don’t know. Something . . . else, I think. Something golden and special and magic, just like you.”
Alfie spread his arms across the back of the booth, trying to pretend he was comfortable. “I dunno. It all seemed pretty obvious. I’ve always been good with numbers. Did maths at uni.” He wanted to add, Got a first, because he had, but he was afraid it would come across as bragging. Well, it was bragging, but he was desperate to show Fen something good. Something he could admire. “And I didn’t really want to stick around here.”
“Because you were gay?”
“I hadn’t figured that out then. Except probably I had.” Alfie tried to laugh. Thumped himself on the chest. “We Bells do things proper, we do. Including denial.”
Fen’s hand did an odd little dance, like maybe it wanted to reach out. But then it didn’t.
“I think,” Alfie went on, “I told myself I wanted to do something with the degree. I mean, what’s the point of having one if you just come back home and be a plumber?”
“You did better than me. I think I lasted a year.”
“Didn’t you like it?”
Fen smiled suddenly, a touch sheepishly. “I liked being at university, I just didn’t like studying. I mean, I did geography. Who gives a crap about geography?”
“You should have gone to drama school or something.”
“I’m glad I didn’t. I don’t actually like being on the stage very much.”
A memory caught him then. The school play one year. He hadn’t been paying much attention. He just remembered Karim being pissed off he had to be a Shark because he was brown. “Wait. When we did West Side Whatsit. You were . . .” He flapped a hand excitedly.
“Triple threat, baby.”
“No, no, I think his name was Tony?”
Fen laughed. “You doofus. Yes, I was Tony. Triple threat is when you can dance, sing, and act. Although actually I’m not that great at any of them.”
Alfie wondered if Fen was just being modest. Like him and his degree. He couldn’t remember a damn thing about the play, but suddenly he could remember Fen. Alone in the moonlight—or, rather, on a darkened stage—leaning dreamily against the scaffolding that was all they had for scenery at Whitburn Comprehensive, singing about some girl he’d just met. His fluff of pale hair. His hands, stripped of their restlessness, given focus and purpose. Confidence. His body, too, graceful, not nervous. And his voice, its cold, clear swoop through notes Alfie could barely recall.
“It should probably have been,” Fen was saying, “. . . Oh, who was that boy? Karim. He was better than me. But I was white, so, hey, I got the part.”
“You were good. Why’d you stop?”
Fen looked down, his fingers twisting idly with the green wire. “I didn’t . . . need it in the same way, so I lost interest.”
“Need what?”
“Oh . . .” He glanced up again, and shifted a little uncomfortably. “Oh. Well. I . . . suppose I learned how to like being me. Your turn, now. What happe
ned after university?”
Fen still looked like he was on an anthill, and Alfie realised the kindest thing he could do right now was answer. “Well, I got onto this National Scholarship Programme, did an MSc in risk and finance at the LSE, and J.D. Jarndyce recruited me after that.” Fen seemed calm again, so he babbled on. “Promised me the entire world. Pretty much gave it to me, actually. So, if that’s not golden, I don’t know what it is. I made more in my first year than my dad has probably earned in his entire life.” Alfie let out a slow breath he hadn’t even realised was caught inside him. “I don’t even know how I’m supposed to think about that.”
Fen folded his elbows on the table and leaned forward. It was one of the few times he’d done that. Actually reached out to Alfie. “But what did you have to give up?”
A defensive kind of annoyance prickled down Alfie’s spine as he tried not to think of the car he barely drove and the penthouse he barely visited. And he definitely didn’t think about the family he wouldn’t have, because that was a different problem. “There were choices, and I made the ones I did, that’s all. I work long hours, my job is hard, but so what? Yeah, it’s not the sort of thing you dream about when you’re a kid but, again, so what? When my dad put his back out, he got to retire. When the recession hit, Billy didn’t go under.”
“It’s for your family, then? So you could support them?”
One of Fen’s hands was lying carelessly in the space between them, between the dirty plates. It would have been so easy to touch it. To take whatever it was he kept not quite offering. But Alfie was afraid it might be pity, and he didn’t want that. He wanted the other things: lust, and need, and approval. “You can’t tell anybody. Dad thinks the insurance paid out. Billy just thinks he got lucky with an investor.”
Up went Fen’s brows. “Alfie, you can’t do that to people.”
“Can’t do what?”
“Lie to them. Trick them. Even in the name of helping them.”
“Howay, man. They’re both proud as fuck. It’s bad enough cos they probably think I think I’m better than them. And then being a woofter on top of that. I couldn’t be further away if I moved to New Zealand.” Alfie ran a hand through his hair. “I just want them to be okay. Is that too much to ask? Being able to take care of the people I, uh, love?”