Blue Steel Chain (Trowchester Blues Book 3)

by Alex Beecroft

  “Do we know that? What’s he taken?”

  “I don’t know, do I?”

  “Do you care?”

  “Not fucking particularly. Jesus, James, he’s your fucking rival. Have a bit of backbone and put the boot in, why don’t you?”

  Shaking his head, aware that at least some of the heaviness inside him was sheer disappointment in Dave’s behaviour at every level, James slipped into the bathroom to find a towel, which he dropped gingerly over Steve’s limp but sticky private parts. He went for the phone. “I’m going to get him a doctor.”

  This time Dave made it all the way up to standing, managed to take a step towards James, before his foot turned under him and he had to hold himself up by the wall. “Jesus fuck, James. D’you wanna ruin our fucking reputation?”

  “I don’t give a shit.”

  The profanity sharpened Dave’s eyes as nothing else had done. James rarely swore. On those few occasions when it happened, Dave knew things were serious. He lurched to the fridge and twisted the top off a bottle of orange juice, swigging it down with one hand while with the other he reached for the phone. “Well, I do. Give me that, I’ll phone our manager. She’ll bring a doctor in. Someone discreet. You know? Someone that can be trusted not to blab to the press.”

  James took a step back and bumped into the countertop where the TV stood. He put his elbow down and felt a warmth and strange yield. Turning with a sickened feeling, he saw he had leaned in an overflowing ashtray fragrant with the butts of dead reefers. White powder on a plate by the hair dryer lay next to two discarded condoms. No one had bothered tying them shut so they were oozing from their opened ends onto the fake marble.

  God, this was nasty.

  “What makes you think I won’t tell them everything, Dave?” He took a deeper breath, something loosening in his chest as he did so, as though he had snapped a bond. “Are you ever going to apologise to me? I thought we were partners. I thought we were going to be faithful to each other. I . . . I’ve been faithful to you.”

  “Yeah, only because you didn’t have any choice. I mean, look at you.”

  Oh, the bastard! James expected shock, misery, but surprised himself by feeling strangely vindicated. Everything was simple for one moment, outside the realm of his eternal second thoughts. This was so clearly disgusting and vile, any reasonable person must agree that James didn’t have to put up with it. “That’s it,” he threatened. “I’m phoning a local doctor, and then I’m phoning the press.”

  Dave gave two sharp laughs, like a fox barking, and then stopped, looking at James’s face. He weaved closer, flung an unsteady arm about James’s shoulders, squeezing. James’s skin tried to crawl away from the touch, as it did when he handled the remains from plague pits. He wasn’t particularly germ-phobic, but Dave was going to have to bathe in TCP before James would feel happy at being touched by him again.

  “Darling, sweetie. Don’t be cross with me. Don’t be cross, okay? I’m not making sense. I’m just high, that’s all. Of course everyone would want you. I want you. I’m the luckiest man alive to have you, darling. Just let’s . . . just let’s go to bed okay? It’ll be better in the morning. Of course it will.”

  “Right, that was subtle.” James’s disgust roiled in his stomach like nausea. Dave hadn’t managed to achieve what he wanted with insults, so he had switched to fawning. How very insincere of him. Yet the turn away from conflict stole whatever steel James had in his bones. He was suddenly aware that he was very tired and miserable, and he yearned to blot it all out, to sleep and wake up to find it had not happened. A weight like a small planet landed on his shoulders as he gave in. “All right, phone your manager and get her to deal with the sot. I don’t care, I just don’t want him dying on us.”

  Dave finished his orange juice and grinned with a little more solidity, as though he was slowly coming back from a long distance away.

  “Sweetheart, I knew I could—”

  “Don’t!” The rage returned. Perhaps it had been hiding there all along, swimming under the surface of James’s calm like a great white shark. “Don’t call me that. Don’t think I don’t know the only thing you care about here is your goddamned career. Don’t think I don’t know you’re only sucking up to me now because you think I’ll out you to the press as the pathetic piece of cheating shit you are if you don’t get me to forgive you.”

  A flash of sullenness. Normally it would’ve passed more quickly, been more fleeting and elusive, but Dave’s reaction times had slowed until even his most uncharitable thoughts were on display, and clearly he had resented that.

  But what he said was, “James. Yeah, you’re right about everything, as usual. Let’s just get Steve seen to and then I’ll make it up to you, I promise. The fans’ll probably lap it up if we have a big breakup on stage. We can do an angsty album, yeah, and they can cry their little eyes out. I’ll write you a song. Yeah? I’ll write a song for you, and they’ll realize they love you too, just like I do. It’ll be epic, darling. Sweetheart. I promise. It’ll be a new beginning . . .”

  James recognised the look on his face now. It was the inward-turning gaze of a man who had a new concept for one, maybe two more albums. He was planning the breakup songs and the poetic love-triangle songs, and the will-they, won’t-they teasers for the collection after that. It had been a real thrill to be Dave’s muse at first, but now he was sick of it.

  I’m not the wellspring of your art. I’m a real person who exists outside your head, Dave. Come out of your solipsistic little universe and see me for once.

  Dave raised shining eyes to his face as he speed-dialled his manager’s number. “I gotta talk to Peggy about this too. It’s a fantastic idea. You’ll see, James. You’ll see. It’s going to be epic.”

  When the doctor arrived, accompanied by Dave’s manager Peggy, James appropriated the single chair in the room and sat against the wall, watching and trying to sort out what he was feeling.

  He’d been travelling for the greater part of sixteen hours, his sleep broken before that by anticipation and dread, and the tiredness had blunted the edges of his emotions. Undoubtedly when he got home, he would reexamine this conversation and keenly feel the shame and the burning fury and the heartbreak of this. He would relive it a thousand times until he had sucked out every bit of poison in it and either spat it out or choked on it. But for the present what he felt added up merely to a kind of weary disgust.

  Over the past five years, Dave had been on tour more often than not. He’d phoned at first, every day, and they’d Skyped in the small hours of the morning. But that had fallen off when both of them found it too exhausting to try to synchronise their time zones. Gradually the phone calls had grown shorter, started feeling like a nuisance, an interruption in James’s ordered day.

  They’d sworn when it started they would beat the curse that apparently lay over long-distance relationships, but perhaps that had been naive.

  Some women managed it, he knew. Military wives, whose husbands were posted on active duty for years at a time. They waited at home and raised the children and got on with their own lives. Made a big fuss of their heroes when they returned, attempted a domestic idyll with this near stranger for a few months, and then waved them off again with relief for another tour.

  He had thought he could do the same . . .

  He caught himself feeling like a failure and gave himself a mental shake. He could do the same. He had been doing the same. This was not his fault.

  Certainly in the forces there was an unspoken understanding that distant husbands might take a lover—and a feeling that it would only be fair for the wives to do the same—but that a happy marriage could still be achieved if both parties made sure the other didn’t know about it.

  In theory, therefore—in theory—James did not object to a certain amount of mutually agreed infidelity. In practice, however, now that he knew very well what Dave was up to behind his back, it was going to take more discipline than he thought he had to try to forget abou
t it. Looking around the hotel room—Dave already hunched over a notepad scribbling lyrics, Peggy and the doctor crouched over Steve’s unconscious form—he found himself unsure if Dave was worth the effort.

  Closing his eyes, he forced himself to look back over ten years together. Ten mostly happy years. They were worth something, weren’t they? The love that had sustained them both through some very thin times, it was worth fighting for, surely? Could they claw this back? Could they somehow rebuild what they had allowed to slowly fall apart? Did Dave even want to? Did James?

  Without raising his head from his book, Dave reached out blindly and closed his hand around James’s knee. It brought a flicker of grey affection, like light through a dusty window. And then Dave said, “Get me a drink, sweetie? I’ve got some good stuff going on here, I don’t want to interrupt it.”

  James hauled himself to his feet with a feeling of full-body fatigue. Or maybe he’d had enough. Because it took two people to rescue a relationship, and Dave wasn’t even in the same world as him most of the time.

  “How’s he going to be?” he asked as he passed the huddled women. Peggy was a statuesque black woman, very dark-skinned, the sleeves of her band T-shirt ripped off to better display the raised scar lines of a peacock on one arm and roses on the other. The doctor, who she kept calling Natalie, was dressed like a fan, her face matt white and her hair sky blue, sprinkled with diamante stars. He had gathered from their hushed chat that they were a couple and considered themselves the only adults in the room.

  “He’ll be fine.” Peggy lifted Steve’s wrists off the floor and began to drag him in the direction of the bathroom. “We’ll just pump his stomach and then leave him to sleep. Are you staying? Because ideally we don’t want to have to haul his limp arse through the corridors in full view of the fans.”

  Well, there the question was in its purest form, wasn’t it? He could decide right here and now whether this relationship was over or not. He was pretty sure he should walk out, take a taxi back to the airport, and go home. Change the locks on the house and consider himself a free man forthwith.

  But that would mean he acquiesced to them putting Steve in Dave’s bed, and he didn’t. Maybe it was illogical, but he’d come a long way to stake his claim to Dave and he was going to damn well stake it. He’d think about whether he really wanted him anymore later.

  “I’m staying. He can sleep on the couch.”

  “Okay. Give me a hand moving him.”

  On stage, Steve had looked like Thor, or perhaps Balder the Bright, blond and perfect. He was considerably less intimidating after James had to prop up his naked form while Natalie inserted a tube into his nose and sluiced a small amount of water down it, pumping it back out again along with the contents of his stomach. Once there was nothing more to come out, she poured down charcoal liquid to sop up any drugs that remained. Steve had begun to struggle by the time the tube was removed, his flailing hand smacking Natalie across the back of the head. Peggy smacked him back.

  “Don’t beat up my patients,” Natalie chided as the three of them lifted him off the floor entirely and placed him on the room’s leather sofa, but she was smiling.

  “Maybe they shouldn’t try mine.”

  Curled on his side in the recovery position, a spare duvet draped over him, Steve slept on, while Dave didn’t even trouble to look up. “Sweetie,” he said, “come and talk to me about this.”

  But when James went obediently to his side, he looked up with a laugh. “Oh no, I didn’t mean you. Peggy. I want to run some album ideas past you.”

  By now it was half one in the morning and James had had enough. He was far too tired and distressed to face the press outside or the night busses of an unfamiliar country. So he pulled the covers out from where they were tucked into the end of the bed, laid himself down across the foot of it, fully dressed, and fell into a sullen oblivion, not even believing it would be better tomorrow, just relieved to have made an end of today.

  He woke to the sound of vomiting and the feeling of a warm hand curved lightly around one buttock. He was not at all rested and in no way feeling charitable enough towards Dave to even think of sex.

  “Oh God,” he groaned, “will you fucking get your mind out of the gutter for once,” and rolled over. The hand didn’t move, just slipped over his hip and his inner thigh and came to rest on his groin, still firmly zipped behind his fly.

  Thank God. Because the hand wasn’t Dave’s. Dave must be the one throwing up with deep hacking gurgles and fire-hose rushes of liquid in the distance. The hand belonged to Steve, who must have recovered enough during the night to crawl across the intervening strip of floor and burrow into bed beside him. Now he squeezed James’s morning erection through his trousers with a look of entitled interest that made James scramble up and out of bed, cross the room, and put his back to the door.

  “Jeez, shit,” Steve scoffed. “As if you’d be that lucky. Oh, my fucking head. Where’s the coffee?”

  “Someone mention coffee?” Dave leaned against the bathroom door, looking ghastly, his pale skin blue white and his eyes ringed with shadows. “James? You going out for coffee? I’ll have an espresso.”

  James laughed, because it was hilarious, and he had to laugh or he would cry. “Your . . . whatever he is . . . just made a pass at me.”

  “Well, you were probably lying there looking pretty. Who can blame him?”

  This was unbelievable. Absolutely . . . it absolutely stretched the bounds of James’s credulity beyond what he had thought it could encompass. “I’m going out,” he said, and then the small part of his mind that was still trying to laugh offered, “I may be some time,” before he could stop it.

  Fortunately, Dave didn’t get the reference, old black-and-white movies about Arctic explorers not being his thing. “But you’ll come back for the show?”

  “I’m not sure why I should.”

  Sober and hungover, Dave was less articulate but also less flippant. “Because I was a shit to you last night. I get that. I was . . . I wasn’t really myself.” His voice had taken on a tone of warm concern that twisted James’s heart and made him want to run away before everything became more complicated than it already was.

  “Come back this evening, yeah?” Dave went on. “I’ll see to it that you’re treated like royalty, right? And then we’ll talk, when I’m not drunk and I’m not high. I know I fucked it up. Just give me one more chance, okay?”

  The desire to cry was definitely winning out, but James wasn’t going to do it in front of Steve. He swallowed and rubbed at his stinging eyes.

  “I don’t mean the stuff I say when I’m wasted, you know that. It makes me a bastard a little bit. I’m sorry. And the . . .” He made a hand gesture towards the bed, a kind of cupping, bouncy sort of flourish. “It just. They don’t mean anything to me. It takes my mind off missing you, you know? We’ve had a good time together, haven’t we? All those years. Let me make it up to you, okay?”

  James had very little confidence that a second night would help, but he supposed he owed that to both of them. “All right.” He rubbed his aching eyes again. “All right. I can do that. I’ll see you this evening.”

  Only a few die-hard fans were still sleeping in the corridor outside, but they roused themselves to curse at him as he passed. With an aching heart, he considered what to do with himself. If he was being sensible, he should go back to his own hotel for a scalding hot shower and a complete change of clothes, in an attempt to scrub the uncleanliness off his skin. But it was the second day of his weekend abroad and he had spent the first day getting lost and disillusioned. Time for something that would clean the soul and restore him.

  He got himself breakfast at the Kaffebrenneriet on Brynjulf Bulls Plass, drinking three coffees with his ham and brie omelette until his tiredness had given way to a stretched and floating energy that gave his hands the jitters. Then he made his way to the Museum of Cultural History, its clean façade bright yellow in the afternoon sunlight.

&n
bsp; He had decided not to think about Dave all day, and with the help of the museum’s collection of prehistoric items, including some excellent bone fish hooks and harpoon heads, he almost succeeded.

  Perhaps he didn’t give the Egyptian mummies their due, or marvel enough at the Viking spectacle helms or the boat fittings that should have brought their dragon ships to vivid life in his mind, complete with shouted orders and the creak of rope and the spray of the salt sea. Perhaps these things kept being shouldered aside by a deep, pervasive drabness that welled up through his mind and burst out in grimy bubbles—like the world’s most miserable lava lamp. But he knew at least that he would regret not having seen them if he gave in to his personal anguish and went away. And perhaps once he returned home to his own quiet relics, the things he had learned from these artefacts would come with him, inform his study and his teaching.

  Then this weekend wouldn’t have been entirely the worst mistake of his life. In years to come, he would at least have the comfort of knowing that he had taken the opportunity to learn something when it was offered.

  “One little line’s not going to hurt you.” Dave pushed the glass straw back into James’s resisting hand with a combination of brilliant focus and underlying arrogance that made him glow as he had beneath the lights.

  James looked down at the mirror where three lines of white powder had been carefully laid out. Next to him—tight next to him in the cramped confines of a room filled with too many people—Steve leaned down to snort up one of them.

  He was actually tempted. It would be fantastic to exchange this feeling of hollowed-out, grimy despair for the assurance that he was wonderful and capable of all things. From an ethnographic standpoint, it would be interesting to experience the cultural phenomenon that was sharing intoxicating substances in a ritual of inclusion. From a personal, it would be nice to put himself on a level playing field with all these bright, belligerent people who thought they were so fucking fantastic.

  He pushed it away again. Wouldn’t that be great, though? An addiction as a parting gift. “You said we would talk.”