Blue Steel Chain (Trowchester Blues Book 3)

by Alex Beecroft

  James did care. He went to Oslo in pursuit. It wouldn’t be fair to say that he had his first misgiving when he took the wrong bus from his hotel to the Sentrum Scene where Iluvatar’s Angels was performing to a packed house. He probably had his first misgiving a week before that, immediately after thinking of the idea that he might take a weekend off and surprise Dave by turning up unexpectedly for one of his concerts. He certainly had misgivings on buying the tickets, and on waiting for the plane, and on booking into his hotel. (Will I really need this? Won’t I be staying with Dave?)

  Surely it took two to ruin a relationship, just as it took two to build one? Dave’s final protest had nagged at him from the moment Dave’s plane lifted from the ground a week ago. James had stopped going on tour with Dave years ago—he had his work, his house, his life, his antiquities, and he had perhaps put all of that ahead of Dave. Perhaps he was at fault there. At any rate, it seemed their partnership was in dire straits, and he owed it to all their happy memories, to all their promises, to at least try to save it. But still, he couldn’t shake off his doubts.

  He had misgivings when he found he’d packed three changes of jumpers for the two-day trip and no underwear.

  When he found himself a half an hour before the concert was to begin, standing at a desolate bus stop in a country full of names he couldn’t pronounce, profoundly lost and a little frightened in the bitter wind, his misgivings simply seemed to finally coalesce into a solid presence of dread he could no longer brush aside.

  Already late, he gave up trying to figure out the bus timetables and routes and flagged down a taxi. It turned him out in a charmless concrete square outside a building that might have been a car park but for the large red neon sign and the jostling crowds of teenage girls trying to get through the door.

  Evidently he was not the typical demographic for an Iluvatar’s Angels fan. The oldest looked to be about eighteen, dressed like misguided goths who had wandered through a hostile rose garden—petals in their hair and rips in their black net dresses that gave glimpses of green silk and Celtic knotwork.

  Perhaps unwisely, James had put on a tweed suit. Although he was not the most socially aware of people, he knew enough to immediately take the tie off and shove it in his jacket pocket. He would have taken the jacket off too, but it was too cold.

  He joined the queue to get in, a head taller than most of the teenagers. He had never felt that thirty was so old before. Positioning himself next to a child, he tried pretending he was someone’s parent, but that just made people look at him suspiciously, and he felt an altogether undeserved shame.

  He must have been acting pretty guilty, because he’d only just made it to the front of the queue when one of the bouncers got up in his face, making him recoil and set his back to the steel and glass doors.

  “The girl said you were giving her trouble.” The bouncer indicated the twelve-year-old James had been standing behind.

  He laughed nervously. “I . . . um. I hope not. I was just in the queue behind her. I didn’t . . .”

  “You don’t look like a fan.”

  James grimaced. The plan had been to take in the concert and then slip backstage afterwards and surprise Dave. Not to announce himself at once and cause trouble before he’d even got through the doors. But well, it was typical of James’s plans not to go as intended. He fumbled in his bag and brought out the Sunday supplement.

  “I’m not a fan. I’m . . .” Opening it to the photo of himself he offered it to the burly Norwegian. “I’m Dave Debourne’s partner. I thought I’d . . .” He sighed. “Look, this sounded a lot more romantic when I was planning it, but I thought I would sneak in quietly and surprise him. He’s been away from home a long time and the papers have started talking trash about us and I wanted to . . . I don’t know, just do something unexpected to prove to him how I felt. And now I can’t even get that right.”

  The bouncer gave a sudden smile that twisted the knife scar on his lip and made his small blond moustache writhe like a caterpillar. He gave the magazine back, and James fumbled it into his bag with the beginnings of relief.

  “I work in a museum,” James offered, hoping to strengthen the impression of harmless idiocy. “I’m not really used to all of this.”

  “My wife”—the bouncer stepped back, allowing James to peel himself off the door—“she is a librarian. She also cannot stand the crowds. She knocks things over. Come, I’ll take you to the front of the stage.”

  James’s cup of worry ran over once more. “I don’t want any special treatment, I—”

  “You may not,” the man said, still smiling, amiable in the way only very large and powerful men can afford to be. “But if the management knew I had a VIP here and let him sit with the crowds, they would be unhappy.”

  So James went from “freak” to VIP in a single dizzying swing and wasn’t sure he liked that either. They pushed through the wall of bodies milling at the back of the auditorium and down the ranks of unoccupied seats, until he was deposited in the middle of the front row.

  “I will come and get you and take you backstage after. Enjoy!”

  Above James, so close he could have reached out and untied their shoelaces, a warm-up band was playing to the empty seats, reaching the end of their thankless set. Steeleye Span wannabes, whose music felt derivative even to him. They didn’t bother taking an encore, just mooched off with tired faces.

  Then darkness fell, and James was surrounded by stars as the audience began to pour into the hall using torches and phones to find their place. The seats around him filled, and the narrow band of floor between the seats and the stage was packed with vibrating bodies. The atmosphere went from ennui to unbearable excitement so fast it made his head spin. All the young faces around him glowed with anticipation. He struggled out of his jacket while he could still move, because the temperature had reached the hot-house tropics already and was likely to get worse.

  The stage was so dark it might have ceased to exist. And then a violin spoke out of the void like the voice of God and even James felt awe travel down his back like an electric current.

  Two guitars joined the fiddle, wailing high, then swooping down to a bass riff in a cavern, and in came the bodhran and everyone was screaming.

  A spotlight lanced out of the rafters and hit Dave as he stood with his microphone raised high, blood cascading down his bare arm, looking like Tiw after the Fenris wolf had bitten off his hand. James had almost stood up in horror before he realized that the gore was ribbons and clever lighting, that Dave was singing about Valhalla with all the conviction of a man who was positive he would never die.

  For perhaps ten minutes, James was swept up in the music, exhilarated and proud at how splendid it was, Dave’s grumbling and exhaustion and surly selfishness completely forgotten. But then Dave and Steve began to sing into the same mic and flirt and touch each other, and James came down to earth with such a crash that his legs gave way.

  The screaming from the crowd had picked up a notch, the fervid faces were sweaty and steaming. It’s a performance, James thought desperately, determinedly. Just a performance, as Dave bent Steve back over his arm and dipped him. Just acting, playing to the crowd, as they kissed, openmouthed, the screaming drowning out the music for a moment.

  Everyone else was made out of fire. He was the only one made of ice. It solidified in his veins, turning his blood into crystals that cut him as they pumped through him, clogging his arteries shut, and dipping his bones in dry ice.

  The kiss went on all evening. All right, perhaps it was technically over in thirty seconds, but it was all James could see thereafter. The storm of music and the torrent of half-leashed sexuality beat all around him, lights and fireworks and fake fog clamouring to impress him, but he was frozen solid and he weathered it without even noticing, not even stirring when the lights went down again and comforting darkness fell.

  Then his friendly bouncer was shaking him. “You should have come to get me sooner! They’ve already left. Com
e, now. I will deliver you to the hotel.”

  James could almost feel all the ice crystals shatter as he moved, every particle of him shredded by their sharp edges. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to go to Dave’s hotel. In fact, what he really wanted to do was go home. Go home and catalogue something—little spinal bones, perhaps. The little spinal bones of Neolithic rats.

  “You shouldn’t get high until you are at home, man.” His metal angel looked him in the face with concern and mild disapproval, but he let the assumption lie because what did it matter? What did anything matter?

  Indifference got him through the back door scrum and into another taxi. It had begun to wear off when he was carefully peeled out of the car and walked into the lobby of a charmless high-rise hotel on the outskirts of town. He wasn’t by any means the only person there who wanted to speak to Dave—the lobby was so thick with fans James’s escort had to pass through them like an icebreaker through bergs.

  They reached the elevator, and that was thick with older teens of every gender, their makeup blurred and sliding off their sweaty faces. Eyes like panda’s eyes, streaks of mascara scarring wrinkle-free cheeks.

  Something odd was happening in James’s chest as he stood next to his guardian on the long slow crawl up the many floors to the penthouse where the band was staying. His eviscerated innards had begun to spark with fire. His fingers twitched as though they wanted to clench into fists.

  Oh, the poisonous looks aimed his way as he was pushed through the thick mass of fans in the corridor. Someone yelled something in Norwegian, in which he recognised his own surname. There was an intake of breath. The faces hardened from a belief that everything was unfair to a deeply personal, bitter hatred.

  A boy on his left spat in his face. “How could you do this to him?”

  James was huge and filled with universes. He was a god and this little punk was a gnat in his path. So this was rage. James wasn’t sure he’d ever felt it before. He turned with his back to Dave’s door and prepared to unleash devastation.

  “Shhh.” The bouncer reached behind him and swiped his key card through the door lock. “No scenes. It is only going in the paper and you feel bad about it tomorrow.”

  He took James by the arm again and pushed him through, into a burst of talk and chatter and laughter that fell completely silent at the sight of him.

  “Tell me you brought some better-looking ones. These ones are skanks!”

  Dave’s voice, slurring but full of the kind of mischievous joy that had disappeared from their home years ago. It wasn’t a large room—king-sized bed, table, sofa, TV, minibar standing open and empty of everything but mixers. James couldn’t see him at first, and then the pile of bodies on the bed stirred and Dave lifted his head out to peer at him.

  His groupies looked up owlishly after, copying the gesture. Some were half-naked, some wholly exposed, boys and girls about equally. They were probably all of age. That was pretty much the only positive thing James could think to redeem the situation. He had no idea what to say, as he picked out worse details—Steve’s naked buttocks under a puppy pile of girls, the stench of weed, syringes on plates on the bedside tables.

  With some effort, Dave finally focussed on his face. He broke into a wide grin and started to giggle. “Pet! Hubby! Darling!”

  “James.”

  “Whatever. I didn’t think you’d really turn up. But hey . . . take your clothes off and jump in.”

  James was a colossus of rage. He could positively feel his head crashing through the ceiling and expanding out into a mountain range when it hit the sky. “Out!” he said, seizing the topmost groupie by the belt and pulling them bodily off the bed. They managed to get their feet down and stand up relatively straight, peering at him and swaying. He turned them by the shoulders, aimed them at the door, and shoved. “Out, all of you!”

  “Sweetheart,” Dave laughed and played along, shoving his worshippers away from him. “Don’t be mad. It’s too nice an evening to be mad. Did you see us? We were awesome, as usual. We’re fucking legends, we are. Everyone loves us.”

  James’s friendly bouncer, whose name he still didn’t know, intercepted some of the weaving drunk teens as they crashed into walls and shepherded them out into the corridor, helping the most wasted to pull their clothes back on before they went. With the cover gone, Dave was left sprawling in seminaked glory, shirtless and with his trousers unlaced, the fly spread to reveal that he was not wearing any underwear.

  Steve lay facedown on the bed next to him, fully naked and apparently asleep. James watched him snore, then turned away to see the last departing back stumbling out of the door. His eyes met those of his bouncer friend, found him thin-lipped, disapproving, and worried.

  James’s fury had been gorgeous, incandescent as a petrol fire. Almost enjoyable. He certainly regretted the moment when, in the face of adult responsibility, it burned off, leaving him only himself again, disgusted and concerned. “Will you make sure they’re all right? Make sure they get home, or put them in a room and let them sleep it off?”

  “I will.” The man gave him a rueful little shrug. “I am sorry it is not quite the surprise you hoped.”

  And oddly that completed his slip out of Hulk mode. “Well, it wasn’t. But I think it’s what I should have expected.” He turned his back on Dave to shake the bouncer’s hand. “Thank you.”

  “Anytime.”

  The door closed behind him and the small room suddenly opened out until it became the whole world.

  Dave tried to sit up but abandoned the attempt halfway through, collapsing back down with a snort of laughter. “I’m glad you’re not really here because you’d be so pissed if you were.”

  James shook Steve by the shoulder, bare and damp and a little too hot. The man flopped against the bed like a boneless fillet of fish, and his breathing didn’t even change pace. His eyes were half-open and showed a sliver of white and no iris.

  “Where’s his room?”

  “Just two doors down.” Dave reached for a glass of what looked like water. Knocked back half of it before James realized it was vodka. “But it’s fucking mad out there. They’ll tear him apart if we try to move him now. Fans and photographers, it’s a fucking jungle.”

  James thought of asking, Are you sleeping together?, but even in his head the question sounded naive. Of course they were. Even in the bedroom, the fans would expect the performance to be kept up. They’d want to be certain they weren’t breaking it up. They’d want the titillation of being part of it, at least for a night.

  “Well, I’m not having him in my bed.”

  He leaned over and took Steve’s wrists in a firm grip, hauling until he had managed to slide the guy off the bed and onto the floor, where he lay exactly as he’d been spilled, breathing in soft, disturbing little groans.

  “It’s not your bed though, is it? It’s mine.”

  James wished for his anger back, but all that came was a kind of miserable weariness of analysis and second thoughts. He had read enough anthropology, enough history, in his day to understand that monogamy was far from the default arrangement. He observed with a certain amount of philosophical detachment the fact that from Roman orgies to modern cults, successful men expected to be able to bed anything in their path. He could tell that he occupied the position of First Wife, and that was an honourable position, but it still wasn’t the position he’d expected or hoped for from his life.

  “I’m not having him in your bed either.”

  Dave frowned, his look of stupid good humour creasing into puzzlement and then a pout. He rolled over so he could reach out and poke James in the leg with a shaking finger. “You’re real, aren’t you? I mean, like, you’re here. What the fuck did you come here for anyway?”

  James snorted bitterly. “You said if I wanted to find out what was really going on between you and Steve I should come on tour with you.”

  “Well, you weren’t supposed to actually fucking take me up on it.”

  “I can see
that.”

  “You’re such an old fuddy-duddy. You’re like prematurely middle-aged. You’ve been like middle-aged ever since you were twenty, with your fucking world music and your bits of filthy old bones that no one gives a shit about. Don’t act like you’re fucking surprised. I’m a star. I’m a fucking rock god. I shouldn’t have to be stuck with frigging boring old bastards like you.”

  James was so shocked he actually laughed. He laughed because that was one of those things that strong social taboos required never to be spoken out loud. It was inappropriate, incongruous. It was unthinkable to hear it.

  A deep, buried part of himself said, No. No, that was a deal breaker. He wouldn’t be talked about like that by his own partner. If that was what Dave thought, then . . .

  Was it what Dave really thought, though? How far could one trust words heedlessly spat out under the influence of drugs and hubris?

  A shallower part of James added, Considered in a certain light, it is in fact true that you are quite boring. Certainly not much of a catch.

  An upper stratum of his mind was noticing Steve had lolled into a position on the floor that jammed his shoulder against James’s shin. The side of his throat was pressed against the inside of James’s ankle. James he could feel a spreading damp patch on the back of his heel where the man’s open mouth was drooling onto his trousers. Though he hadn’t finished trying to identify and parse all his own emotions about this debacle and he didn’t want to have anything to do with Steve, he also didn’t want anyone to die because he’d been distracted. Kneeling, he tried again to rouse Steve, shaking him, shouting his name.

  “I think he’s really ill.”

  Dave rolled a languid shoulder, his long amber hair spilling like honey over the V of his throat around which his collarbones made wings. He was still very beautiful, sharp and slender as a Hollywood villain, but his eyes were too vacant to pull the look off. “Put him in the bath and let him sleep it off; he’ll be fine.”