by Alexis Hall
“I’m not. It was really hot.” Fen’s hand snaked around and squeezed Alfie’s arse, a little bit playful, a little bit possessive.
And Alfie made a funny little hiccoughing noise, desire and embarrassment. “Look, do you want me to leave? Or are we doing it over the counter instead?”
Fen glanced longingly over his shoulder towards the back room. Then cleared his throat. “You . . . you’d better go.”
Neither of them moved.
“Alreet,” Alfie sighed. “I’m going.”
It was way more difficult than it should have been, especially when Fen’s hands were inclined to cling and linger, even as he stood there insisting Alfie get out of his face. Eventually, though, he was sitting in his car—which still smelled of sex and McDonald’s—wondering what to do with himself.
That was when his phone bleeped. An email from J.D. Jarndyce himself. It just said: Meeting, 7 a.m., next Monday.
Well, that wasn’t good. Alfie waited for the reality of it to sink in, but apparently it was already sunk, because he felt fine. There were tonnes of guys in the city who kept swearing they were going to get out of it. Just five years, they’d say at first. Then, just until I’m thirty . . . forty . . . fifty. It was the money, of course. Not so much for its own sake, because you never got the time to spend it, but there was something reassuring—addictively reassuring—in watching those numbers tick up. And up. How were you supposed to know when enough was enough? Always easier to wait for the next bonus.
At least Alfie had access to a . . . whatchamacallit . . . a halfway house, between investment banking and the rest of the world. He wouldn’t be cast adrift on too much money and too little anything else. He could drive to London next Monday, get fired, come straight back. Figure out the rest of his life after. South Shields wouldn’t have much use for someone with a master’s in econometrics and mathematical economics, but Fen did. At least for a little while. Assuming he ever let him do anything.
Alfie very nearly slapped his steering wheel in frustration. Except no amount of bad feeling could have made him touch his Sagaris with anything other than loving hands. He didn’t want to get in Fen’s way or trample over him. He just wanted to help. Was Fen ever going to see that? Or was Alfie just going to have to watch supportively and space-givingly while Fen ran himself, and the shop, into the ground?
Well, fuck that. He was willing to do that therapy bollocks to a point. But only to a point.
He snuck a look at Pansies through the rear-view mirror. Fen had put the kibosh on pretty much anything he could do in the shop—he hadn’t said anything about outside, though. Which made Alfie remember that bloody awful word, splashed so gleefully across the grille, and gave him his plan for the day.
He drove back to B&Q, which turned out not to stock what he wanted, so they sent him to the Halfords near Washington instead. And, honestly, that was fine—wasn’t like he was short of time.
He invested in safety goggles and gloves, solvent and wire wool. It was a bit less exciting than his last shopping trip, but at least he knew he wasn’t going to fuck anything up this time. He might not have been able to hang a shower rail or mix plaster, but he could clean a fucking wall. That took no skill at all, just the will to do it, and Alfie had never lacked for will.
Washington had always seemed pretty exotic to Alfie when he was growing up. His dad used to drive them up every once in a while so they could go to the big shopping centre. He was pretty shocked to discover that, compared to the gleaming glass temples of London, the Galleries was actually kind of small. To say nothing of concretey, and even a little bit dingy. Yet somehow Billy had managed to get lost in it once. They’d found him, several nervous breakdowns later, in the ice-cream shop, staring dreamily into the freezer with its magical rainbow of flavours.
That place was long gone. Alfie couldn’t even remember what it had been called, or where it had been. But he remembered the ice cream: one scoop of your favourite flavour in a wafer cornet that tasted faintly of dust and paper, eaten while they were all perched in a row on the rim of the fountain and busier shoppers hustled by. The blue-green water had smelled of chlorine, and you were meant to throw pennies in for a wish.
His dad had this weird habit of biting the bottom off his cone and sucking the ice cream through. Billy had tried to copy it once, and ended up with most of his ice cream on his shirt. Then there’d been tears, and recriminations, and finally bitter protests. He’d got another cornet though. At the time Alfie had suspected a ploy to get more ice cream, but he’d probably been jealous. They’d both wanted to be like their dad. It was just Billy was braver in his trying.
He got underway again at about two, after a hasty pub lunch, suddenly realising that the epic journey from South Shields to Washington, which had required the Lord of the Rings cassettes and promises of ice cream before Alfie and Billy could be coaxed into the car, actually only took about twenty-five minutes. It was a bit scary how much smaller the world got when you grew up.
He passed through Cleadon on his way to Pansies. Which sort of somehow led him to pulling into the driveway of his parents’ house. Though not before checking to see if there was any sign of his dad’s car, which there wasn’t.
He stood for a minute or two on the doorstep, like a complete lemon, before finally ringing the bell. He probably still had a key somewhere, but just walking straight in would have felt so wrong.
After a bit, the door opened and his mam peered out. She looked surprised, but not entirely in a bad way.
“Alfie pet? Is summin wrong?”
“No, Mam. Nowt’s wrong. I was just around like.”
They hugged, a bit awkwardly because Alfie’s mam seemed to be one of those women who got smaller with age and he was afraid he’d squash her.
“Eee, well come in, then. I’ll put the kettle on.”
He followed her into the hall, with its flock wallpaper and all the family pictures going up the stairs.
“Why don’t ye go and have a sit down?” His mam nudged open a door for him.
“Wha?” His exclamation brought them both up short. And Alfie suddenly felt completely lost in the house where he’d grown up. “Mam, it’s me. You know I don’t go in the good room.”
“But I don’t see you very often, love.”
“Yeah, but I’m not a guest.” He was silent a moment. “Besides what if I spilled tea on something?”
“Well, then I’d have to kill ye.”
Now that sounded more like it. Alfie grinned, and they went into the kitchen together. Alfie’s dad had done it up properly when Alfie had been quite little. He’d been too confused by the chaos to really understand what was going on or why, and then it had simply been the kitchen. But he looked at it now with eyes that had lost their familiarity, and what he saw was so much love. Which was a fucking weird thing to notice about your parents. Except there it was, in the mellowed light that painted golden streaks upon the floor, and the pale halos left on the kitchen table from uncountable cups of tea.
Shit. Alfie swallowed.
“Have you seen me decking?”
“What? Oh.” He dutifully went to the window and peered out at the back garden. “Looks good, Ma.”
“Doesn’t it though? I saw Wendy from next door eyeing it up from ower the fence just the other day.”
“Did Dad do it?”
“Aye. Took his time aboot it mind.”
Alfie thought about pointing out his dad had turned sixty-five that year, but had the feeling it wouldn’t make any difference. To his mam, he was just the man she’d married. So Alfie didn’t say anything at all. Just stared at the envy-inducing decking, with its hand-carved balustrade.
Behind him, he heard the whoosh and the bubble of the kettle. The clatter of mugs.
“He’s doing well, ye know. Your dad.”
“Yeah?”
He turned back. Picked up his cuppa. It was exactly how he liked it: too much milk and too much sugar—not that he usually took it that way.
Out of nowhere, he remembered Greg the morning after, sprawled across Alfie’s bed, demanding tea. I like it like I like my men, Alfredo: hot, strong, and very, very sweet. Alfie cradled the mug between his hands, letting the warmth creep into his palms, and thought, Me too.
“Ye should talk to him, Alfie. He misses ye.”
“You saw the way he looked when I told him.”
“Aye, but ye gave him a geet big shock, love.”
Alfie’s heart was overspilling, hot and liquid, like he was scalding himself on the inside. “You had two kids. There was a nineteen percent chance one of us was going to be gay. That’s not a thing that should shock you. It’s just a thing about one of your children.”
He’d been shouting a bit at the end there. And now his mam was looking upset. Shit. Shit. Shit. He shouldn’t have come.
“Ye didn’t give him a chance.”
He didn’t give me a chance, Alfie wanted to tell her. He just wrote me off. Like I wasn’t his son anymore. But there was no point. She wouldn’t understand, and he couldn’t explain. How bad it felt to be a shock. To be an idea people had to get used to. To be a moment of hesitation. A flinch when someone touched you. A wariness in their eyes. How much it fucking hurt.
“Sorry.” He pulled out a chair and sat down next to her. “How are you doing?”
She seemed a bit startled. He guessed it wasn’t the sort of question he usually asked. But she answered readily enough, sharing the small pieces of her life with him. Alfie drank his tea, and listened, and let the cadences of his mother’s voice comfort him a little.
“And what aboot ye, love?”
“What? Me? Oh, I’m fine.” That sounded unconvincing, even to Alfie. And his mam gave him a look that confirmed it. “I’m just on holiday, that’s all.”
“But ye never tek holiday.”
“I decided I was owed some.”
“And ye came te Shields?”
He laughed. She had a point. “I . . . sort of met someone.”
There was a delicate kind of silence. “A lad?” she asked.
“Yeah. A lad.” A man.
There was a blank sort of silence this time, and Alfie didn’t know how to help. He knew what he wanted to hear, but he wasn’t sure it would count if he asked for it. At last, he got an uncertain-sounding “I’m happy for ye.”
“Mam, you went for my girlfriends like the blummin’ Spanish Inquisition.”
“Well, I had te know they were good enough for ye.”
“Right, and because I’m gay, anything with a knob will do?”
“Alfred Junior!”
“Sorry, I’m sorry. Just—” he couldn’t quite keep the pleading from his voice “—don’t you want to know what he’s like?”
After a moment, she nodded.
Alfie opened his mouth, and all the words came pouring out. “He’s beautiful, Ma. And I really want to be with him and make him happy, except I dunno how because we’re stuck in the wrong places and— What’s the matter?”
His mam was staring.
“Wha?”
“Ye never talked about your girlfriends like that.”
“Like how?”
“Dead romantic.”
He blushed. “That’s cos I don’t feel romantic about girls.”
“Well,” she said finally, “alreet.”
Maybe he should have been grateful. A year ago, maybe even a week ago, he probably would have been. He’d just have been so relieved that she wasn’t screaming or weeping or recoiling in disgust. But something had changed—he’d changed—and he needed more from her than passive acceptance. He needed understanding. “It was really confusing at first. Not the—” Shit, he couldn’t talk to his mam about sex. “I mean, the idea of being with a lad, same as you would a lass.”
“But, Alfie, it’s not the same, is it?”
“Why not?”
“Well, because you’re both men.”
He didn’t dare look at her right then, so he took a massive mouthful of tea, and it was slightly too hot, so it burned all the way down. “That’s just chromosomes.”
“Look, I might not’ve had an artsy-clartsy university education like you, pet, but I’ve been married for gan on forty years. So I do know a bit about men and a bit about women, and you need both te make a proper family.”
“I thought all you needed to make a proper family was love.”
She sighed gently. “I’m not saying men aren’t loving, I’m saying they’re different, and they show it different. It’s women who are the caretakers.”
“Don’t you think,” Alfie snapped, “that mebbe when you’re with someone, you should maybe take care of each other?”
“You’re twisting me words.” She sounded genuinely upset, which made him feel like an absolute monster. “That’s not what I meant. Men bring some things to a relationship, and women bring others, and they’re both important in their own ways, and that’s . . . that’s just how it is.”
Oh God, he’d made her cry. He’d made his mam cry with his gay.
She pulled a tissue out of her sleeve and wiped her eyes. “And ye can be angry with me, and say I’m . . . a . . . a basher . . . but it won’t change what I know and how I feel. I’m sorry, Alfie. I want you to be happy, I really do, but this is never going to be summin I can understand.”
“Alreet.” He gulped down the rest of his tea and took the mug to the sink to wash it out.
“Ye don’t have to do that.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Alfie overdid the Fairy Liquid and ended up with a massive pile of bubbles. Tiny iridescent spheres drifted up from between his fingers. Then popped, one by one by one, leaving nothing behind at all.
“What if you want bairns?” his mam asked suddenly.
“I do want bairns.” There was no point arguing though—she wasn’t going to get it. Probably never would. He shook off the excess water and put the mug neatly on the drying rack. “Well, I’d better be off.”
“Y’know I love ye, don’t ye?”
“Course I do.” He crossed back and kissed her lightly. “I love you too.”
She reached out and caught his hand. “Who does the cooking?”
Instinctively, he sensed it probably wouldn’t be Fen. “Suppose I’ll have to learn.”
“Eee, wor Alfie, don’t tell Da.”
“Bye, mam. Thanks for the cuppa.”
17
It was a little bit after five by the time Alfie made it back to Pansies, bursting through the door with his arms full of graffiti-removal supplies. Fen was closing up, tugging the unsold flowers into the cold room at the back. He looked tired, tousled, and a little bit sweaty, and greeted Alfie without even looking up.
“I’ve still got some stuff to do down here, so you might as well head on up. Make yourself comfy. Um, if that’s even possible in my flat.”
“Got something to take care of first.” Alfie sourced a bucket from the pile and tugged on his safety gloves.
That got Fen’s attention. “What on earth are you doing?”
“I’m going to scrub that crap off the safety grille.”
He wasn’t sure what reaction he was expecting or hoping for. Vague interest would have been nice. But all he got was, “Don’t waste your time.”
“Doesn’t feel like a waste of time to me.”
Fen shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
“Doesn’t it bug you?” Alfie was scrutinising the instructions on his graffiti-removal solvent. It seemed pretty straightforward, but then so had the plaster mix, and he wasn’t taking any chances. “Having it there?”
A rough, exasperated sigh. “Yes, if I think about it. But I don’t think about it. I only have so much space in my heart, so I have to prioritise what upsets me. Nonsense like that wouldn’t make the top twenty.”
“Well, I’m still going to do something about it.”
“As I said: suit yourself.”
Alfie grabbed his bucket—which he hoped was full of correctly made-up graffiti remov
er—and headed outside. The words were stubborn, but so was Alfie. It took him a good hour or so of furious scrubbing with the wire wool, and most of the bottle of solvent, but he did manage to get the grille clean. It didn’t exactly look good—it looked like somebody had scoured the surface off the metal—but faggot was gone. Then he ditched his gloves and sluiced out the bucket, and headed upstairs after Fen.
He was sprawled on the sofa, a bottle of wine on the floor beside him, a cigarette smouldering between his fingers. At least, until he started guiltily and crushed it out on a nearby saucer.
“If that’s for me, there’s no need.”
There was a telltale flush, bright across Fen’s cheeks. “But isn’t kissing a boy who smokes like licking an ashtray?”
“Dunno.”
Alfie leaned over him, fit his palms to Fen’s jaw, and turned his face up. Held him there for a moment, his stubble-flecked throat pulled taut, and then kissed him. Fen quivered, a sound somewhere between protest and surrender catching against Alfie’s lips. And then there was nothing but surrender, Alfie’s tongue sliding deep, deep, and deeper, into the clinging warmth of Fen’s mouth.
“Seems alreet to me,” he said, finally drawing back. “Not sure there’s much could put me off kissing you.”
“All the same.” Fen swung his feet off the sofa and took the saucer into the boxy kitchen. “I shouldn’t be smoking.”
“I have to say, I’m not massively keen on you dying of lung cancer.”
“It’s more not knowing if I’m choosing anymore.”
“It’s the lung cancer,” repeated Alfie firmly, not wanting to get dragged into a philosophical discussion about addictive, bad-for-you substances. “You got plans for dinner?”
Fen came back into the room. “That bottle of ‘crisp and fruity’ Blossom Hill?”
Flinching, Alfie picked it up, unscrewed the cap and took a sniff. “Wow, you should’ve said you had this. I wouldn’t have needed to buy that solvent.”
“Alfie Bell: wine snob?”
“I’m not,” he lied. “It’s just . . . if I’m gan te put summin in my mouth, I’d like it to be nice.”
A flicker of gold as Fen blinked. “I don’t drink for a sensual experience. I drink to get drunk.”