Trowchester Blues

by Alex Beecroft

  Even when he had slipped into a doze, he found himself being woken every two hours to have his breathing checked, to reassure everyone that his lungs hadn’t been cooked from within by residual heat, or eaten away by the acidic residue of the smoke. Imagining that had naturally led him to be afflicted by phantom chest pain all night long.

  And while he lay, not sleeping due to this onslaught of irritants, he could not help but picture the police in his poor flat. He was fairly certain he no longer had anything incriminating or illegal on hand. The supplies he used for falsifying provenance on objects without it could be readily explained away as supplies he needed to create books like the one in the window. Other than those, everything was aboveboard and paid for.

  It didn’t mean he liked the idea of the plod rooting through everything with their cold eyes and their cold hands. Lumbering up and down his stairs, opening his cupboards and fingering his things. Looking at his pictures of Tom and raising their eyebrows at one another because these days they couldn’t get away with the full-blown sneer.

  They’d fixed a hasp with a padlock over the front door to secure it after the fire brigade had smashed in the lock. He hobbled gingerly in through the back garden, where he kept a crowbar in the shed and levered the hasp away, more out of principle than rational thought. After he’d done it, he regretted it, but he hadn’t been able to bear the thought of having the police’s lock on his front door—a lock for which he didn’t have the key. No one locked his door against him, damn it.

  He would phone a locksmith as soon as the shops opened. Until then, he could lock the flat upstairs and put up with a few early tourists wandering in out of the cold.

  They hadn’t let him shower at the hospital, and his clothes were still full of ash. He headed up to get clean and to eat something. His insides felt TARDIS-like, cavernous, bigger and emptier than anything his skin should be capable of containing.

  He wasn’t liking this business of being an honest man so far. But fuck them. Fuck them all, if they thought they could bully him out of it.

  Bathing and dressing in clean clothes did a little to alleviate his mood, but not even eating bacon and eggs, toast and marmalade, and coffee did anything to fill the hollow inside him, where everything that he was had drawn itself deep inside, retreated, squeezing itself together in a singularity of soul so buried he couldn’t tell if he was angry or sad or calm.

  The sun had risen and was lancing through the bookshop windows when he ventured back downstairs again to see the damage. The open front door framed a yellow tree in front of the bakers’ steamy red-painted windows and the nodding purple violas in their hanging baskets. It was also cleansing some of the smell of char and heartbreak.

  He walked through each room telling himself it wasn’t so bad. In most it was almost true. A lick of paint would spruce up the ceilings where the smoke had left a brown, carcinogenic stain. Only the two rooms directly connected to the Jules Verne room needed their carpet pulled up and replaced where dirty ash-grey water had soaked from one room to the next.

  The arch into the final room proved difficult to walk through. He stopped in its liminal embrace, with his hand on the coving, and closed his eyes, while flames leaped in his imagination, his cut hands stung, and his eyelids tightened as though they were still burning.

  Was he afraid? God damn it. No one was going to make him afraid in his own fucking house. Yes, very well, he could admit it had been a little scary at the time, but it was over now, and he had survived. He was not going to be the kind of idiot who allowed himself to get intimidated after the fact.

  Straightening his back, opening his eyes, he walked into the disaster area. Glass squeaked under his new shoes, but the floor was already almost dry. The scar left by the fire, when he studied it with determined optimism, resembled a giant kraken with tentacles reaching from one side of the room to the other. It didn’t seem to have done any structural damage. Perhaps when he redecorated, he could make a feature of it. Call it a portal. Put the horror stories in its epicentre as though they were crawling out of the very pit of Hell?

  He’d have to do something like that. He approached the nearest bookshelf like a mourner approaching a corpse. He’d have to, because the books that had been in here before were as good as pulp. It was as he thought—the water had destroyed them as thoroughly as the fire. Some of them would have to be shovelled out.

  Bending, he picked up a gear from the ruined automaton whose casing had saved his life. Fire and terror boiled out of it and up his arm. He dropped it and recoiled, shaking and panting and academically intrigued. That was what a flashback felt like, was it? Well, it was interesting to experience once, but it had better not happen again because he was really not— He tried to get ahold of his breathing, slow it down, slow down his racing thoughts and heart. He was really not—

  A distant crash as the door was shoved open. Was that Kevin? He hoped it was Kevin. He wanted someone to make him coffee and to clean out this mess and to dust the ash from the other rooms so he could pretend in ninety percent of the shop that nothing had happened at all. Kevin was young and resilient and not at all sensitive, and the boy’s cheerful obliviousness would be a comfort at the moment.

  Still at the heart of his destroyed sanctuary, Finn turned and waited to be rescued.

  The footfalls in the passage were heavier than Kevin’s. They had a rhythm and a cadence that made the compressed thing in Finn’s chest unfurl a little, hopeful and relieved and pathetic.

  There was a worrying base note of doglike devotion to his reaction, something in him hoping to be swept up in strong arms and comforted, to be told how brave he was, and to sit down while Michael sorted everything out. To be told it would be all right now, and he should not worry.

  Finn despised that part of himself and despised Michael for provoking it. Hard on the heels of the joy came the deferred anger of a night of unanswered phone calls, a night spent alone in terror, when it should have been spent together.

  “Where the fuck have you been, then?” he asked, before he’d even processed Michael’s glower of fury. He wanted the man to stop, back off, look guilty, so that Finn could shove him and yell at him. Now that the blue touch paper had been set alight, his whole soul was going up in starbursts of anger, shaking him, seeking a convenient target, and Michael would do very well.

  They came together like a car crash. Michael strode up to him, with his craggy face stonelike with anger, grabbed him by the elbows, and shook him, pushing him backwards. He stumbled in astonishment and betrayal. “What the fuck is the matter with you?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were a fucking con?”

  Finn tried to get his footing back, scrambling for reason under the unexpected onslaught. Too much to feel, lit up as he was by glorious explosive rage and disbelief.

  He dug his heels in, but he might as easily have stopped a tank with his bare hands. Michael drove him across the shop and smacked him into the wall. The shock of pain across his shoulders and down his back transmuted into a kind of savage joy, and oh, this was actually every bit as sexy as he had imagined when he first saw Michael, and he first suspected the violence seething under the man’s kicked-puppy exterior.

  “Oh yes,” he laughed, high on a blend of fury and defiance and lust—with, beneath it, just that little tint of relief at having Michael’s hands on him again, just that little delicious anticipation of being made to surrender. But he wasn’t going to make it easy, and he wasn’t going to give in. “Oh yes, because I knew how reasonably you’d react.”

  “You should have told me.”

  “Yeah, because sleeping with me somehow grants you the right to know everything about me? You’re the fucking enemy, Michael. Ex-Met? Why wouldn’t I want to screw you over, literally? Why wouldn’t I have been laughing inside, knowing you thought I actually cared?”

  The anger had taken control of his tongue. He was saying things now just to hurt, his wrists still pinned against the wall by Michael’s grip, his
chest compressed by Michael’s weight, and all of him on fire to win this fight any way he could because this was a fight he could win, this was an enemy he could hurt. Lisa and Benny weren’t there, so Michael got to bear the brunt of his anger with them because Michael could take it.

  Because he trusted Michael to take it and not give back any more than Finn could take in return. Because Michael was safe, safe to attack, safe to hurt, safe to kick and gouge and destroy.

  “You . . .” Michael’s grip tightened until the bones of Finn’s wrists ground together, but his eyes had gone wide and his mouth slack with shock. “You . . . The whole thing? You were laughing at me the whole time?”

  Oh, that had gone home, all right. Finn grinned in the man’s face, hoping— He didn’t know what he was hoping for. Maybe for a slap, maybe for Michael to lean forwards and bite him on the mouth, pushing in closer, forcing his thigh between Finn’s legs, pinning him. He would struggle, of course, but he wouldn’t stand a chance against Michael’s strength, and there would be vicious, painful, hard-core sex that would scour all this anger out of them both and let them start again clean.

  “Why wouldn’t I?” He craned forwards and closed his teeth around Michael’s earlobe, pulling, just to give him the idea if he didn’t already have it. “When you walked in here so sad, so pathetic, practically begging to be taken advantage of. Don’t tell me you really thought it meant something?”

  They stood in the moment before detonation, locked together, breathless, with its potential beating on Finn’s skin like a heat, both of them panting hard. Michael’s head bent and his breathing was rough with a growl Finn could feel through his chest. Come on, he thought, anticipating having all the man’s strength unleashed upon him, punish me. You know you want to. “Please.”

  But the explosion never happened. Michael raised his head and gave him a look of devastation, sharp enough, cold enough to cut through Finn’s fey mood like ice water in the face.

  Michael let go, stepped back, still transfixed by him as though he were seeing something alien, something horrifying. “It did to me.”

  Another moment of incomprehension, and then Michael turned on his heel and walked away, leaving Finn’s wrists bruised and his skin cold. Leaving him alone against the wall, shaky with adrenaline and arousal, angry and turned on and abandoned all at once. What? What had just happened?

  He levered himself away from the wall and clutched at his hair, still panting. That had not gone the way he had expected it to go at all. What was Michael playing at? He couldn’t just storm in here and threaten and say four words and leave like that? Could he?

  They had to talk about it. After—after the angry sex—they had to talk. Unless. Oh God. The gorgeous, fiery, floating rage turned by degrees into miserable frustration and then into dread. Unless that’s what Michael thought Finn had been doing all along. Unless the bone-headed, muscle-bound idiot thought Finn had meant it.

  He couldn’t, could he? He would know. He must know that what Finn had said he had said for effect, to provoke him, to play with him, He must know, surely, that it wasn’t true?

  He turned and leaned on the wall, doubled over, panting, as he gathered himself together out of the cloud of incandescent gas he had become. When most of him was scraped inside his skin, he lurched out of the front door, in the hopes of seeing Michael’s retreating back, to shout after him, “I didn’t mean it, come back.”

  He wasn’t there of course. Well, wasn’t that the start of another wonderful day? Fecking idiot. Weren’t they such morons, though, himself and Michael both?

  Michael honestly thought he was going mad. He couldn’t . . . He stormed home barely able to feel the pavements under his feet. He couldn’t connect one thought to another. He was better off. Better off without the lying little bastard. Better off to have found out about this now before he got sucked into some vortex of crime, better now he could finish it and—

  His chest ached, and his vision was white around the edges, too much shallow frantic breathing, too much fight-or-flight response with nowhere to go. God, he’d almost . . . he’d almost lost it altogether and punched the guy, and he was not, he was not the kind of man who hit the people he slept with.

  He couldn’t stop the breathing—the rapid, shallow panting breaths that came like sobbing—and he needed to calm down. He needed to calm the fuck down and think, because something wasn’t adding up here, but he was too wound up to work out what it was.

  The edges of town passed like a blur. Coots scattered from their nests as he reached the bridle path along the river and sped along it, breaking into a jog and then a run in an attempt to burn off some of the energy, the anger, the panic. He was really starting to get scared now. What the hell was happening to him? Even when he’d attacked Watkins he hadn’t felt this unhinged, this out of control.

  It was all a lie. Fucking Finn, who had seemed to be his lifeline, who had pulled him out of the water, only to push him back in and hold his head under until he drowned. How could anyone do that? How could the gentle, whimsical man he thought he’d met be someone who picked up guys deliberately to break their hearts?

  He couldn’t— He couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t.

  Fishermen along the water’s edge looked away as he passed, seeing his face. Even the swans on the stream took off in a long laboured effortful stepping up the yellow morning sky. His house came into view too rapidly, closed like a castle over its secrets, grey and stony and unwelcoming.

  What he couldn’t do was go back there to think. He needed a refuge, somewhere calm, somewhere he could breathe out this panic and not just finish the rest of the whiskey and down some sleeping pills. He was a fucking adult. He would get a handle on this and figure it out and turn it around and win, and going anywhere near his father’s ghost would not help until after that process was done.

  He slowed to a stop where the chain-link fence marked the official bottom of his garden, the house to his left, the narrowboat to his right. It was a no-brainer. He hauled the keys out of his pocket, unlocked the boat, and went to ground inside. A quiet day up the river, that would sort him out. The sound of water, the shadow of trees, and time to think.

  He still couldn’t breathe. It’s okay. It’s okay, you’ve been running. You’ve got to expect . . .

  He had to expect the sobbing? He had to expect the shakes? The feeling that he was falling apart, like he could barely, barely hold himself together anymore?

  The hatch slammed behind him as he came down into the boat’s small galley. The stink of paint was cut with the smell of piss and rotten leaves. After the clear light of the golden morning outside, even the white-painted interior was dark to him for a moment, and his mind was too torn apart to register what he was seeing before the tiller bar smashed into the side of his face and knocked him to his knees.

  It was the best thing that had happened to him all day. Instantly all of the disparate pieces of himself drew back together, sharp and ready for a fight. Something dark and stinking tried to push past him to get to the door. He surged to his feet, shoulder-checked it in the stomach, lifting it off its feet and throwing it three feet down the boat to land sprawled on the tiny sofa. It rolled and leaped up again, still with the iron pole in its hands, and came for him, yelling, “No, no, no! Fuck you, no!”

  It was the homeless girl.

  “Wait,” he said, teetering for one moment as a whole thing, as a glass after being dropped, just before it hits the floor. God damn it! She had trusted him and come here for shelter, and now she thought . . .

  And then he broke. He crossed his arms over his face and let her hit him, the smack of the iron rod against the long bones of his forearms breathtaking. “I’m sorry,” he choked out, buckling to his knees. “I didn’t know you were here. I swear! I just wanted, just once, for something to go right.”

  “No!” she shouted again. He locked his hands over his head and huddled, drawn in to himself like a weeping child. As though the posture had set it off—fina
lly given it permission to become what it had really been all along—his grating breaths turned into sobs. His storm of shredded emotions settled on rain.

  She hit him one more time, across the back, but he was curled into himself, oblivious, and it registered as less of an agony than what he carried in his heart.

  He must have been a pathetic sight. What felt like a long time later, she put the tiller bar down with a clang. The ammonia scent of her came closer and then small hands closed around his wrists and pulled.

  “Are you all right? Did I hurt you?”

  He uncurled a little, raised his head, and focused his streaming eyes on her face. She was so young, with two round chicken pox scars on her cheekbone and eyes the colour of newly split slate. She looked at him like she didn’t know what she was seeing, which was fair enough because he didn’t think he’d ever seen a grown man cry as abjectly and pathetically as this either.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, wiping his nose on his sleeve and drying his eyes with the other cuff. “It’s been a shit year. Not your fault. Are you all right?”

  She moved away a few steps, far enough so she could pick up the bar again, but she had stopped trying to force her way past him. Stopped trying to run. Hunkered down with both her feet under her. Bare feet—her worn sneakers visible beneath the bed in the distant bow.

  “You said I could sleep here.”

  “Yeah.” The crying seemed to have let off some of the pressure. There was space in his skull now, the mad kaleidoscope of broken feelings slowing to something he might have a chance to control. “And I meant it. I just didn’t know you’d taken me up on it.”

  “I can leave.”

  “No. No, it’s good.” The part of him that had wanted to hit something, the anger that had been as red and swollen as a blister, had also been drained off. Looking at her, wary, cautious but unafraid of him, he’d never been more grateful for that. He tried a smile, and though it was a little watery, it didn’t feel strange. “Let me show you how to work the water pump for the shower and the sink. I’ll bring in some wood for the heater, and maybe some food and clothes, and then I’ll leave you be.”