Lenny sighed. “Do one or the other, will you? Before I lose my shit.”
“You’ve already lost your trousers, mate.”
Damn. Lenny had forgotten he was enduring this shambles of a conversation in his pants. “Don’t change the subject. How are you feeling?”
“All right . . . I think?” Nero finally sat back down. “Reckon I could sleep another week, and I feel like I drank way more rum on . . . shit, whatever day it was, than I actually did. But I’ll live.”
Lenny laid his palm on Nero’s bare chest, absently wondering if Nero had made the connection between Lenny’s obsession with his tattoo and the technicolour beast TST took its name from. “You don’t feel as hot.”
“No? Shame.”
Lenny rolled his eyes. Nero must still be half-delirious if he was making quips like that. “Sorry I screeched at you.”
“Don’t be. I’m a dick. What time is it?”
“Nine-ish. Cass doesn’t need me till twelve. Are you hungry?”
Nero blanched and shook his head. “Fuck no. Could murder a cuppa, though. Want one?”
“I’ll get it.” Lenny started to get up.
Nero beat him to it and pushed him back down. “Stay. I want to sit with you before you go back downstairs.”
As if Lenny could argue with that. Nero left the room, weaving slightly, and Lenny lay back on the bed, enjoying the cool breeze that filtered through the open windows. He’d thought the flat above Pippa’s a little gloomy when Cass had first brought him here, but he enjoyed the relative tranquillity now, craved it, even, and with Nero for company, it felt like home.
Nero returned with tea and a banana for Lenny. “Don’t tell me you’ve eaten,” he said. “Cass never gets the brekkie started on time.”
Lenny accepted the banana and made short work of it. Forty-eight hours without Nero forcing food on him had left him quickly slipping back into his old habits of binging on Haribo, and his body reacted instantly to the hit of vitamins and energy, while Nero yawned. Lenny sat up and leaned back on the headboard, opening his arms. “Come on. I’ve got a few hours. Take a nap.”
Nero looked briefly like he might protest, but then folded his long body back into bed without another word. He curled against Lenny and laid his head in Lenny’s lap. For a long while he lay very still, eyes open and unseeing, apparently mesmerised by Lenny’s fingers combing gently through his hair, but eventually his breathing evened out and he fell asleep.
The hours passed in a flash. Cursing his commitment to Cass downstairs, Lenny carefully disentangled himself, wincing as Nero groaned and rolled over. Leaving was gut-wrenching, but Lenny knew Nero would rather suffer alone than have the kitchen neglected. Bloody workaholic. Though Lenny was starting to feel like one himself as he made his way back to Cass, half a mind on the unfinished painting outside in the shed. He’d promised Jake he’d get it done fast, but with Nero’s shift to cover, he was already a day behind, and there was no way he was letting Nero sleep alone while he pulled an all-nighter. Urban Soul had saved his life, but Nero had saved his heart. The painting could wait . . . right?
It turned out not to matter. Lunchtime service was quiet by Pippa’s standards, and at tea time, Cass informed Lenny that between them, they’d somehow managed to prep enough food for the whole day and then some.
“Go on. Piss off,” Cass said. “I’ll be all right even if I get slammed. Got nothing to do except grill some shit.”
“You sure?” Lenny hovered. Nero could handle the grill on his own any night of the week, but Nero was the exception to just about every rule, and his ability to man the grill, run the pass, and supervise the entire kitchen single-handed was nothing short of inhuman. “I can—”
“Go,” Cass insisted. “Seriously. Nero’s never had a sick day in his life, and I’ll feel less guilty about that if I know you’re with him. You make him smile, kid. Now fuck off, before I get all emo and shit.”
Lenny left Cass to the order pad he’d been glaring at for the past hour, went to the staff room, and tried not to think about that blowjob in the cubicle as he changed and dumped his chef whites in the laundry bin. Tried and failed, because it was an image that would be on his mind forever, or at least until next time.
Next time. The notion was sobering, because with Nero apparently on the mend, the elephant in the room was hard to ignore. They needed to talk, not fuck, and until that happened, no one would be blowing anyone.
Lenny let himself into the flat with a heavy heart, and went straight to the bedroom, but Nero wasn’t there. A quick search turned up empty rooms, and a note written in Nero’s beautiful handwriting, directing him to the shed where Lenny had intended to end up all along once he’d checked Nero was still in the land of the living.
He found Nero in the yard, his legs poking out from beneath the dilapidated old minibus. Lenny kicked his feet gently. “You’d better be sleeping under there.”
Nero chuckled, throaty and low, and wriggled gracefully out from beneath the minibus. “Stop glaring at me. You look like a psychotic chicken.”
“Chicken?”
“Mother hen, whatever. I’m okay, I promise. Just got bored. I ain’t used to kicking around the flat on my own anymore.”
The backhanded compliment almost made up for being compared to angry poultry, but Lenny knew he couldn’t take credit for Nero’s grin. He’d noticed during the all-nighters they’d pulled in Vauxhall that tinkering with the bus took Nero to his happy place. “I’m glad you feel better. I was worried about you.”
“I know, and I was kinda relieved.”
“Eh?”
Nero shrugged. “You told me you loved me. I thought I’d dreamed it.”
“And my charming bedside manner changed that?”
“No, but it did remind me that I love you too.”
Lenny blinked. “You do?”
“You didn’t know?”
It wasn’t the most romantic declaration, but Lenny couldn’t help the shit-eating smile that split his face. “How would I know? You aren’t much of a talker, remember?”
“So? Who needs words? Come here . . .” Nero beckoned Lenny to lie down beside him and peer under the bus. “See this?”
Lenny studied that mass of metal and wire. “What exactly am I looking at?”
“All of it. Cass knows engines as well as I do, and he reckoned it was a goner, one for the scrap heap, you know? I didn’t see it that way, but Cass’s logic made sense to me, perhaps more than my own.”
“But you worked on it anyway. Why?”
“Because I wanted it.”
“And I wanted you.” Lenny couldn’t be sure Nero had meant his cryptic words to turn them full circle, but he couldn’t deny the engine’s mystery was on par with his reticent lover. “I still want you, even if we can’t get past this . . . impasse.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Deadlock,” Lenny said around a heavy sigh. “I can’t keep asking you for something you can’t give.”
“Pass me that spanner.”
Lenny crawled to Nero’s pile of tools and fetched the spanner, trying not to let the pain of Nero’s nonanswer cripple him. Nero had said he loved him too, but what now? And how many times could they recycle this conversation?
“So, where do you want me to start?”
“What?” Lenny turned his head sharply.
Nero kept his eyes on the bolt he was attacking with his spanner. “You stare at my stumpy finger a lot, but I reckon you know it’s the missing tip of a fucked-up iceberg. And you’re right. I can tell you what happened on that day, but it don’t mean nothing without the rest.”
“Will you tell me the rest?”
“I’ll tell you anything, Lenny. You just gotta listen.”
It wasn’t the way Lenny had envisioned they’d have this conversation—Nero chipping away at the bus engine while Lenny sat cross-legged at his feet, passing him tools—but it somehow felt right. “You were born in London?”
> “Uh-huh.” Nero pointed to a spanner, then held out his hand. “In my grandparents’ front room.”
Lenny passed the spanner. “Your mum’s parents?”
“No, my dad’s. We lived across the road from them in Bethnal Green until I was seven.”
“Then what happened?”
Nero did something loud to the engine. “My dad worked in a factory up the road from the estate. One day, he didn’t come home. A machine broke down and collapsed on him when he tried to fix it.”
“Oh God. I’m so sorry.”
Nero sighed. “It was a long time ago. So much has happened in between, I can’t really remember it.”
“Do you miss him?”
“Sometimes, but I don’t know if that’s because I’m comparing him to someone else.”
Dread churned in Lenny’s gut. Nero had rarely spoken of his family, save the occasional mention of his paternal grandparents and the way his lips curled around someone else seemed more ominous than Lenny already knew this conversation to be. “I’m sorry you lost your dad. What was his name?”
“Raffa.”
“I like that name.”
“Yeah?” Nero dropped his spanner and pushed himself out from under the car. He lifted his T-shirt high enough to reveal the bottom of his epic tattoo. “Maybe that’s why you seem to like this so much.”
Lenny frowned. Nero’s ink was etched on his own soul in minute detail—or was it? As he peered closer, he saw a faint, swirling script layered in the tiger’s left eye. Raffa.
Damn.
The threat of tears heated Lenny’s face. He looked away, swallowing hard to contain himself. “I’ve never noticed that before.”
“I know. Otherwise you would’ve plastered it all over the wall in Vauxhall, right?”
So he had made the connection between Lenny’s paintings and himself. “Are you pissed off with me?”
“No, I just don’t get what it means to you, or the business.”
Lenny snorted softly. “That’s why it means everything, because you have no idea how much you mean to the people around you.”
Nero let his shirt drop and returned to his cave beneath the bus. “Do you want to know what happened to my finger?”
“Is it relevant?”
“I’d imagine so.”
“You can tell me . . . if you want to.” Lenny’s hand hovered over Nero’s ankle, but he curled it into a fist and pressed it against his lips. For a long moment, it appeared that Nero was done with the conversation, but then his heavy sigh broke the weighted silence.
“My mum came back after my dad died. She got a flat in Tower Hamlets and took me to live with her.”
It hadn’t occurred to Lenny that Nero’s mother had been absent in his life until that point, but instinct told him that interrupting Nero could end this before it had truly got started. He settled for letting his hand have its way, and squeezed Nero’s calf. “What happened next?”
“Nothing, for a while. I don’t remember much about life with her until after primary school. Then my mum got a job at the pub down the road and started bringing men home.”
“Men? You mean like, um, punters?”
It was Nero’s turn to snort. “No, she wasn’t hooking.”
“She got a boyfriend?”
“Yeah, Malcom. We moved in with him a few months later. He had one of those old houses in Hackney: huge rooms, high ceilings . . . a cellar. I liked running up and down the corridors, hearing the old floorboards echo.”
“Sounds nice.”
“Does it? Well it wasn’t. Turned out my mum’s Prince Charming was a bastard. And he didn’t like ten-year-old me telling him so.”
“Ten-year-old you sounds fierce.”
“Not really. Just gobby, and it got me in trouble with Malcom. Nothing I couldn’t handle at first, a few clips round the ear here and there, but then my mum started leaving me with him when she went to work.”
“Did Malcom have a job?”
“Never. Fuckin’ dole scrounger, weren’t he? That’s why he moved my mum in—to give him extra money for the bookies.”
Lenny had a horrible feeling he knew, in part at least, where Nero’s tale was going. “Was he a drinker?”
“Yeah, he was all the stereotypes, but he got worse after I turned twelve. I can’t remember why . . . but I remember him tying me up in the cellar every night when my mum went to work.”
“That’s awful.”
Nero grunted as he wrestled with a metal pipe. “It weren’t fun. I can still smell that place if I don’t keep my mind busy.”
“Is that what you dream about?”
“Sometimes.”
There’s more. Nero didn’t need to say it. “How often did your mum work?”
“Three nights a week—Tuesday, Friday, Sunday. Funny thing is, if she’d worked all week it would’ve stopped sooner. My school was already suspicious when it all went tits up.”
Tits up for who? Lenny didn’t ask. Nero’s style of storytelling was beyond frustrating, but he was getting there . . . slowly. Lenny picked a hole in his jeans as Nero continued.
“It was a Friday night, around Christmastime, when it kicked off good and proper. My mum had gone to work, and I was down in the cellar, as usual, but the rope he used to tie me had gone missing. He accused me of hiding it—which I hadn’t—and flipped his shit. He kicked the crap out of me. He, uh, took my clothes, and used a cable to string me up to this old picture hook, and then he turned the TV on loud and went out.”
Cold sweat beaded on Lenny’s neck. Hearing this kind of horror about any child was bad enough, but this wasn’t any child. It was Nero, and the slashed scars on the back of his legs now made a sickening sense. “How long did he leave you there?”
“I don’t know, to be honest. I was pretty out of it for the most part, but I woke up when my hands started to slip out of the cable. My finger got caught, so it was holding my bodyweight. The bone snapped and the cable eventually severed it.”
“Jesus.” Lenny gagged, glad Nero wasn’t looking his way. Some doctor you’d have made. “I can’t imagine how much that hurt. I’m so fucking sorry.”
“I’m not.” For the first time in what felt like days, Nero slid out from under the bus and met Lenny’s eye, letting Lenny truly lose himself in his molten gaze. “I lost my finger, but what I got back in return was worth every fucking limb I had.”
“You escaped?”
“And then some. I ran screaming into the street—naked and covered in blood, battered from years of that cunt stamping on me. I never went back to that house . . . not inside, anyway.”
Lenny let out a long, shaky breath he hadn’t realised he was holding. “Did your mum leave him?”
Nero pushed himself free of the bus and shrugged. “She didn’t have much choice when he got sent down for child abuse, but she didn’t get me either. Social services decided there was no way she hadn’t known what was going on, and gave me to my grandparents—my dad’s parents—instead. She didn’t bother arguing, just fucked off to Birmingham to shack up with someone else. Never heard from her again.”
Despite Nero’s matter-of-fact delivery, crippling sadness washed over Lenny. He searched for relief that Nero’s tale was over, but found none. Nero absently rubbed the stump on his left hand, and Lenny closed his eyes. “It’s not over yet, is it?”
“Can be, if you want it to be. We can leave it right here and forget this conversation ever happened.”
Lenny’s nerves jangled, and he shook his head, forcing himself to look at Nero again. “Never. Keep talking. I’m good.”
“Liar.” Nero scrambled to his feet and disappeared briefly into the shed. He returned with yet another bottle of rum. “One day we’re gonna have to figure another way of making it through these conversations.”
Lenny accepted the bottle and took a deep swig. “The fact that you think we’ll have more conversations like this terrifies me.”
“Why? I thought you wanted this?”
“I wanted to understand, Nero, not force you back to a place so fucking horrific.” Nausea roared again. Lenny clamped his hand over his mouth and counted to ten.
Nero nudged his shoulder. “I’m sorry I’m upsetting you.”
“Why? It’s my own fault for being a nosy bastard, isn’t it?”
“That’s not what this is. Do you think I’d have put us both here if it was?”
Lenny shook his head. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. Just let me finish? Please?”
Lenny swallowed another gulp of rum and passed the bottle to Nero, nodding for him to continue.
Nero took a healthy swig of his own, then set it aside. “Where was I?”
“Your mum moved to Birmingham.”
“And she’s still there, as far as I know.”
“What about Malcom? Is he still in prison?”
“No. He did three years, then they let him out.” Nero’s hands twitched, like they were itching to reclaim the bottle. “And that’s when it really got messy, because his house was two streets away from my grandparents’ flat, so I saw him every day, whether I wanted to or not.”
“The police couldn’t do anything?”
“You know the answer to that.”
The truth hit home, and Lenny shuddered. “Did you ever speak to him?”
“No. I tried to avoid him, but he knew where my school was and the route I took to get there. It was like he wanted to run into me, the sadistic fuck, and that was him all over, and that was what I couldn’t forgive. He enjoyed it, you see, what he did to me. It was fun for him. His only saving grace was that he didn’t try to knob me. I’d have cut his fucking dick off if he had.”
It seemed a scantly positive point, but the terrifying conflict in Nero’s gaze kept Lenny quiet. He scooted closer and rubbed his cheek on Nero’s shoulder. Nero rested his own head briefly on Lenny’s and let loose a bone-deep sigh.
“I didn’t deal with him very well. I was a little shit at school already, but when I started seeing him on my way there, I just stopped going. Fell in with the wrong crowd, started terrorising the estate . . . fucking stereotypical messed-up kid. Picked up my weed habit too, but I ain’t too bothered about that. Most days it’s the only thing that stops me becoming that person again, you know?”
Strays Page 17