Blue Steel Chain (Trowchester Blues Book 3)

by Alex Beecroft

  In the incinerator, Aidan burnt the clothes he had been wearing when he escaped. Seeing the fire, Zara came down to hand him a cup of tea. After a while of watching the flames silently, the evening growing blue around them, Molly found them there, and instead of leaving, she began to feed the fire with the garden waste. When the night fell properly, Carol brought down mulled wine for everyone, and they stood around the bonfire talking quietly about little things. The way the daffodils had spread since last year. The fact that these trees bore yellow plums in the autumn, sweet and free.

  Aidan felt so safe he didn’t even go to his room to weep, just covered his eyes and let the fire’s warmth and the warmth of tears mingle on his fingers.

  Molly had clarified Carol’s statement for him, explained that “ace” in his case probably meant “homo-romantic asexual.” Over many evenings in the kitchen, while he did the veg preparation and the cleanup for the house’s shared meals, he quizzed her about what it meant—whether it was normal. Whether it was allowed. After she directed him to the AVEN website for the fifth time, he worked out that if he was frugal, he could afford a smartphone contract with all-you-can-eat data, and he used it to look the answers up so he didn’t have to annoy her anymore.

  Apparently, he wasn’t the only one in the world who felt like this after all. He was too shy—and too conditioned to avoid leaving any kind of evidence of his interests or search history—to leave comments on the forums, but he found people there who made sense to him. Not just what they said, but the way they thought, the things they prioritized and valued, the deep assumptions they made: they were like him.

  As his terror of meeting strangers—of making them angry, of making the universe (Piers) angry with him for talking to them—decreased, he began to be overtaken by flashes of joy. When he got into work first thing in the morning and ground the day’s first batch of beans, filling the warm kitchen with the rich scent of coffee. When he ate his modest sandwiches, sitting by the riverside on his own—taking an hour to refresh from having to deal with people—and the ducks would come with their ducklings to snaffle up his crumbs. When he finished work and he was free to walk into town whenever he liked.

  Knowing what he was—that there was a name for it, and it was something he shared with others—was such a relief. It took a while to sink in, like a stone dropped into mud. But when it settled, it became somewhere firm to stand.

  Feeling braver because of it, feeling the borders of his life expand, he began to make small decisions for himself. He painted a wall of his room green and drew James’s bull-leaper on it. He began to sit regularly outside the gallery that ran along the river bank on the other side of the square from the tea shop. One day he was going to go in and ask if they knew any local potters who might share kiln space and resources, but he wasn’t quite there yet.

  First there was the question of James.

  Dutifully, in obedience to Finn and Michael’s commands, he had not contacted James. At first, with all the other things to learn and adapt to, it hadn’t been so hard. But now . . . now there was an order to his new life, and he was beginning to feel like someone real, like a person who could have desires of his own and need not feel guilty about them. Now he began to contemplate something even more radical than making his own decisions.

  He was starting to think about deliberate disobedience.

  After all, this was supposed to be about learning to be his own person, yes? And what if his own person was the kind of person who wanted to be with James? If some kind of break had really been required, two months was surely enough, wasn’t it? I mean I have my own life now, and I’m making my own decisions, and if I decide I want to see James, I can!

  So on his next Friday afternoon off, he walked through a snowstorm of falling apple blossom up from the river, into town, and to the centre of the little square that opened before the museum steps.

  He stopped there, shaking. Sat down on the lip of the small fountain—turned off in this windy, chilly spring. Some kind of steel Aphrodite clutched her errant shawl to herself as Aidan tugged his own coat closed against the breeze, breathing through the memories of beatings the museum’s facade had unexpectedly brought up.

  He put his head between his knees and held on to the thought of James. Eventually the phantom pain and fear eased. He clambered to his feet again and ran up the stairs before they could come back.

  James was in the Egyptian gallery, backed by a stele on which jackal-headed Anubis appeared to be trying to swallow the sun. James had a tray of little scarabs in one hand, his notebook in the other. His glasses were a disaster waiting to happen, tucked in the back pocket of his aubergine-purple skinny jeans.

  Aidan had thought he’d felt joy before, but that had been nothing to the great wave of rightness that rolled over him at this sight. It was as if everything James did, everything he was, was that last final biting commentary that completed the rest of the world. James was significant. The way he bent to unlock the long display cabinet said something profound about the nature of reality. There had never been anything more important in the world than James’s messy, spiky hair.

  In attempting to get his keys into the lock, James fumbled and dropped his notebook. He made a soft sound of embarrassment and resignation, bent down to pick it up. As he was doing so, Aidan walked up and plucked the glasses out of his back pocket before he could sit on them.

  James must have thought he was being groped. He straightened up, turned with a frown. It took a moment for him to realize who it was, and then his face split with a huge lopsided grin, his posture relaxed, and something about him just seemed to kindle and glow.

  Aphrodite’s statue might be outside, but her spirit must be in here, because it felt for a moment like there was a god present between them—something else, something higher and more beautiful than the animals they were supposed to be. They stood stupidly staring at each other for a long while, with no need to do more, and then James made a heroic effort and whispered, “Hi.”

  “Hi.” Aidan looked aside with his heart pounding and the blood coming fiercely hot into his face and ears. He held out the glasses as an explanation. “I’m going to get you one of those glasses cords so you can hang them around your neck.”

  “I don’t remember putting them in my pocket.” James took them gingerly, turned them round between his fingers as if he was feeling for damage. “That seems like a very bad idea.” He gave a helpless shrug. “And yet there they were. Thank you.”

  More silence. Aidan’s plan ran out at this point, and James seemed too blissed out to catch up. Aidan thought he had imagined every possible outcome for this meeting, from How dare you darken my doorstep again? to What a pleasant surprise, but James’s reaction was blowing the top off the scale, making Aidan almost embarrassed to have provoked such delight.

  “I know they said I shouldn’t see you again for a year, until I’d discovered who I am,” Aidan offered, feeling as rebellious as a pirate on the high sea. “But I thought about it and I discovered I was someone who wanted to visit.”

  James looked around himself as if for a magically appearing cupboard into which he could put the scarabs, settled for slipping them on top of the display cabinet. With a smile like the surface of the sun, he said, “No. Oh no, I’m so glad you did. Idris has been giving me updates on how you were doing—through the book club, you know. But it’s not the same.” He stepped back, spread his arms. “Look at you though. You look amazing. I have to say that while I like the bodybuilder look from an aesthetic point of view, this is much more classical. It suits you so much better. Mens sana in corpore sano, so to speak, and you look much improved in both directions. If it’s not rude to say so.”

  Aidan looked down at himself, surprised. He had begun to run most evenings—if he didn’t, his nights were restless and full of nightmares. And he had found a dirt-cheap set of hand weights in Age UK, with which he kept some tone in his shoulders and arms. But without his strict daily regime, he had lost a lot of his
bulk. His tattoos looked less intimidating on his smaller frame. Ever since Molly called them Viking, he’d begun to see them as something tribal, as connections to an imagined history rather than as threats. He was still saving up money to change the most egregious of them, but these days, he almost liked what he saw in the mirror. It hadn’t occurred to him that James might have an opinion on it until now.

  It was a slightly unsettling thought—that James didn’t love him entirely for his personality. That even James thought his body somehow defined who he was. But then it was also praise, and James evidently still liked him, so he smiled.

  Finally succeeding in getting the cabinet locked, James picked up his tray of scarabs and his notepad and made a sweeping gesture towards the door. “Let’s go and put this in the office, and then we can have dinner in the café, like old times . . . But better, obviously.”

  “I wanted to come and find you,” James explained later, earnestly, over a steak and kidney pudding and chips. The museum’s café was three-quarters empty and smelled of fresh paint, the walls now covered with scenes of feasting, coiffed wives reclining on their husbands’ chests to watch the servers bring in heaped plates to the sound of the double pipe, under awnings dripping with grapes.

  “I wanted to help you adjust to life on your own.” James separated his pastry from his meat guiltily. “But that’s rather an oxymoron isn’t it? I mean . . . I didn’t like what Finn said very much, but he was right. You needed your independence. And as I say, Idris has been filling me in and letting me know how well you were doing. I didn’t want to put a spoke in that.”

  He put down his fork and took a deep breath. Then he leaned over very deliberately and clasped Aidan’s hand. Something in Aidan that he hadn’t known was tense relaxed at the touch with a sigh.

  “But I’m so glad to see you again. You have no idea how I missed you. Now you’ve come to me, we can do this again at least, can’t we? We can learn to be friends, at least.”

  Because he couldn’t always guarantee a Friday afternoon off, they made lunches a regular date on Wednesdays. Aidan had two thirty to three thirty free, and would sprint up to the museum in time to meet James as he locked something in the office safe, or breezed in from the dig on Wednesday Hill with mud on his boots and thumbprints on his glasses.

  James paid, but that was fair because he had an inheritance that had paid off his house and left plenty over. Aidan had tried to argue for appearances’ sake, but the truth was that he liked the fact that James wanted to spend money on him, so his argument had lacked force.

  Since then, they’d talked about their interests enough for Aidan to begin quietly trying to find out how to make James happy. He was lonely at home, apparently. He didn’t like cooking for himself and would sometimes not bother, just have a large lunch and snack on crisps and biscuits when he got back.

  The week after James had told him this, Aidan brought a Tupperware box of the Rainbow Cafe’s leftover butternut squash curry and rice with him to their lunch date. James had laughed and said, “You don’t have to . . .” but he’d taken the meal with a slightly dazed expression that spoke of being touched.

  So Aidan made a habit of it after that, abuzz with the pleasure it brought him to do something that made James smile.

  On the second Wednesday in May, Aidan discovered that James’s favourite colour was grey. “I know it’s weird, but there are so many shades. Silver and iron and steel. There are lavender greys and the kind of soft pinkish grey you get on pigeons, and the fluffy greys of different ashes. I know the human eye can distinguish more shades in green, but to me grey is undervalued.”

  That was the week Aidan spent scouring the thrift shops for grey clothes. The first time James saw him in a gunmetal grey T-shirt, he didn’t seem capable of taking his eyes away. He kept leaning forward and smoothing the material over Aidan’s biceps, over his shoulder blade and his chest and his waist. And while there was something to the heat in his eyes that Aidan didn’t like, he did like the fact that he had done well.

  Now it was June. Every door in the tea shop stood open. The wisteria that hung around the front door curtained it with chandeliers of purple flowers. The public moved more slowly, in their flip-flops and their sunhats, unwound by the summer warmth into a slightly more Mediterranean attitude towards time.

  Aidan was kneeling in the tea shop’s garden at lunchtime. He’d come out just to escape the heat of the oven and take five minutes in the shade to cool down, but he’d seen the weeds and hadn’t been able to resist just clearing that mess of thistles around the rose bush, making space for the dianthus by rooting up dandelions.

  “So you’re still seeing James?”

  He looked up to find Idris in the doorway, smoking one of his rare cigarettes and seeming—Aidan checked twice to be sure—not displeased.

  “We have lunch sometimes.”

  “He won’t bloody shut up about it.” Idris flicked ash onto the crazy paving path. “Which—do not get me wrong—is not a bad thing. That musical jerk of his made him unhappy for a long time. And now he’s floating on air. When is it my turn? That’s what I want to know.”

  Aidan couldn’t tell what Idris wanted from him, and it made him anxious. Was he asking because Finn had told him to make sure they were staying apart? Would Aidan be stopped? Punished? “We’re not dating. We’re just having lunch.”

  Idris made a sceptical face, but confronted by Aidan’s certainty raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Well, maybe you should be. Maybe James can handle the uncertainty of not knowing whether Dave’s ever going to come back while simultaneously not knowing if you’re ever going to make a move, but . . .”

  Aidan scrambled to his feet without even checking his knees for grass stains. “You think James is suffering? You think I’m making him sad?”

  “Whoa . . . whoa.” Idris held up a hand to restrain his vibrating urgency. “No. I wasn’t saying that, but—”

  “What can I do?”

  A long drag, the cigarette tip the kind of orange that existed in the world only in fire. Then Idris dropped the butt, stamped it out, and exhaled a contemplative stream of smoke.

  “We do talk to each other at the book club. Truth is it’s more of a gossip club with a carefully crafted excuse. Well, I happen to know that James enjoys folk music, and Billy at the club happens to have a couple of free tickets for the Trowchester Folk Festival at which he and his hubby are doing a demonstration of prehistoric music, or something equally fascinating.”

  Aidan’s alarm had died back during this story. Idris had a quietly self-satisfied look to him that didn’t sit right with an accusation of selfishness or disobedience. Perhaps he wasn’t trying to tell Aidan what a terrible person he was. Perhaps he was just trying to be nice? Perhaps—Aidan’s stomach squirmed unpleasantly at the suspicion—he was trying to tell Aidan to stop teasing and to sleep with James? That thought was enough to take all the gloss off the bright world, but he probably ought to consider it.

  “Okay.” He nodded to show he was listening, though he still wasn’t sure what the point of this was yet. “Do you want me to . . . tell him about it?”

  Idris laughed and tucked his fingers into his waistcoat pocket behind the snowy apron. Bringing out two tickets, he fanned his face and then handed them to Aidan. “You’ve been the best business decision I never made. The coffee is bringing in more customers, Lalima is less stressed in the kitchen, Molly is less stressed in the front of house. I’m going to give serious thought to a proper coffee machine, so you can start researching those tomorrow. Your recipe for the peanut butter chocolate brownie is a triumph. And if we consider where you started from . . .”

  He pushed the tickets into Aidan’s hand. “I’m calling this your first progress review. I’m very satisfied with your work and you can call the tickets a bonus. James doesn’t want to go with me, and I don’t want to go at all. You take him. Take him and get him laid. It’s really long past time he was.”

  “This is fantastic!
” James pulled Aidan up to stand on the hay bale beside him, where they had a fine view of what seemed to be a number of dancing Vikings. Aidan was not convinced about the spectacle on its own merits, but it had put a look of almost childlike curiosity and fascination on James’s face, so he tried to find its good points.

  “You see the tall, springy chap? That’s Billy from the book club. He’s married to Martin there, who is half Sudanese. They started out with all Saxon and Viking instruments, as I understand, but they’ve been adding African influences from the same period since. I think the dances are somewhat speculative, but it really is fantastic to hear some of these instruments brought to life. I have some of these in my cabinets at the museum. I wonder if they would like to make a video for us. I’m sure the visitors would really appreciate the artefacts more if they saw them in use like this . . . Some of them are sadly lacking in imagination, you know.”

  James’s enthusiasm filtered through the music and turned the thin notes and the spare rhythms clapped out on bones and finger cymbals into something delicate, wondrous, like an old embroidery, worn to unravelling.

  Today James looked almost like a normal human being. He wore a tweed suit that should have looked ridiculous but in fact only cemented his resemblance to an absentminded professor and resulted in a touching bohemianism. He had attempted to flatten out his hair with some kind of hair product, but fortunately it had fought back and was as distressed as ever. The day’s heat had caused him to take his tie and jacket off and roll up his white sleeves, and the shape of his forearms seemed poetic to Aidan. His fingers itched to re-create the shape in art, to try to demonstrate to the world why James was so desperately important—why his existence said something that could not be said in any other way. Something everyone ought to hear.

  Aidan sat on the bale and enjoyed the sensation of sun filtering through his charcoal T-shirt, the music and the stamping of feet, the quiet hubbub of a summer crowd filtering around the central display arena and in and out of the large marquees. Behind him, someone was saying “One two, one two,” into a microphone and there came the wail and drone of an amplified set of Northumbrian bagpipes.