Blue Steel Chain (Trowchester Blues Book 3)

by Alex Beecroft

  “No.”

  He doubled over as if he were kowtowing to the crate of broken things, and it felt like he’d been stabbed through the stomach and the head simultaneously. He could neither breathe nor think.

  “No!” Aidan was inside James’s skin, inside his DNA. His organs would shut down without him. He could not do this.

  The pang of loss was staggering, considering they’d done nothing more than chat and eat together and laugh. But James had some basic principles, and one of them was that you didn’t continue to pursue someone who didn’t really want you.

  He repacked his crate, because even this trusted meditation technique wasn’t helping anymore, went upstairs and got undressed for bed. Showered, cleaned his teeth, lay between the sheets that didn’t even smell of Dave anymore and stared at the darkness for a long time.

  Michael’s disapproving look came back to him, rested heavy on his chest as he tried to tell himself that it was for the best. After all, Dave might still come back. His tour was due to end today, and perhaps with that off his mind he might spare a thought for the relationship he had spurned. Late today or early tomorrow, depending on flights, Dave might return in contrition, looking to be forgiven. He’d left it a little late for that—by now James was entirely unsure if he wanted Dave in his life at all, even attentive and changed. But if James had to let go of Aidan for Aidan’s sake, perhaps it was a sign from the universe that he should mend things with the man he had always thought of as his life partner. His husband in all but name.

  James smiled in the burnt and bitter dark. Right. And one day he would get to excavate the ruins of Atlantis, and read the ancient writings of the masters of Shangri-La. Who was he fooling? Dave wasn’t coming back, and James didn’t want him to. What he wanted was Aidan.

  But you did the right thing, in love as in everything, because what sane man would deliberately choose the wrong?

  His selfish heart flared up in a last gasp of flame. Would it be so terrible to let Aidan imprint on him though? Would that really be so wrong? James would be ever so grateful for whatever Aidan could give him. He would be ever so kind. He would try to forget that what held them together was a kind of prostitution and not love at all. It wouldn’t really be abuse.

  Right. And that was probably what the other guy thought too, at first.

  James woke suddenly, his heart kicked into a gallop, sure he had heard something. His eyes were gritty and glued together. He felt grubby and thick-headed as if he had a hangover, but that was to be expected when he had fallen asleep at five in the morning after tossing in miserable self-reproach and loss through the small hours of the night.

  Now light was irradiating his curtains, prying through the gaps where the fabric didn’t quite meet and pouring into his raw eyes like onion juice. He looked at the clock and it was 2 p.m. God damn it. Which meant that Aidan had gone all morning with no call, must be thinking he didn’t care at all. Even if they were only going to be friends, he didn’t want that.

  He leaned over to pull his phone from the pocket of his trousers that lay crumpled by the bedside, their cuffs trailing in the dust beneath the bed. His hand closed on it, and the noise came again, recognisable now he was awake as the slam of the front door. A moment later it came again, followed by a series of thuds that might be caused by heavy things being carelessly tossed on the parquet floor.

  Indistinct voices filtered up from the hall. He couldn’t tell what they were saying, but their tone was confident, untroubled, like they belonged here. Maybe not burglars, then.

  His bedroom door was open. Whoever they were, he didn’t want them coming upstairs and finding him in his boxer shorts. He shot out of bed, tried to leap into his trousers in double time, but only succeeded in getting tangled in the partly inverted legs. Slowing down—this being a clear case of more haste less speed—he untangled himself and managed to get them buttoned and the fly done up before the first stranger appeared on the upstairs landing and looked at him as though he was the one in the wrong place.

  Black T-shirt with cut-off sleeves and silver decal Celtic knots. Badger-striped hair. Worryingly young, ridiculously pretty. The boy looked at him and said, “Who the fuck are you?”

  “I live here.” James pulled a fresh shirt from his drawer, while a tension headache began to bloom in the centre of his punch-drunk skull. There could be other explanations for this, but he would lay odds that Dave had caught an earlier flight, had not troubled to tell him about it, and had brought some “friends” to stay. “This is my house.”

  The boy laughed. “I don’t think so. This is Dave Debourne’s house. Me, I’ve been invited. Not so sure about you.”

  While James buttoned his shirt and tried to even out his hair—the left-hand side of which had decided to lie flat this morning, while the right made its usual riot—the boy leaned over the elegant art nouveau curves of the bannister and yelled down, “There’s some wanker here says this is his house. You want we should throw him out?”

  “No, no.” Dave’s voice came up from the well of the hall, sounding tired and nasal, like he’d got a cold. Despite everything, James’s first reaction was sympathy. Dave sounded like a man who could use a long shower followed by a long sleep. “That’ll be James. Hey, lover, you up there?”

  Badger-boy’s mouth dropped open in astonishment as he eyed James up and down. “Him? He’s the one you’ve been writing about? He’s ‘memories of youth in amber steeped’?”

  The boy couldn’t have been more unimpressed if he’d found Aragorn with a potbelly, smoking forty a day, and working on a bin lorry.

  “Welcome to the difference between fantasy and reality,” James told him, nettled already and suspecting that it was only going to get worse. He debated the merits of socks. Yes. Socks and shoes. He didn’t feel safe enough not to be fully dressed. “Now I suggest you contemplate what your own life looks like from the outside.”

  “You don’t half talk bollocks.”

  Dressed and armoured finally, James pushed past the boy so that he too could hang over the balcony and see what was going on below.

  It was an invasion. The hall was covered in boxes, trunks, amplifiers, suitcases, bags, musical instrument cases, and sleeping young persons of unspecified gender. Among the people still upright, James recognised Dave’s manager, her girlfriend the doctor, a publicist, a stylist, his biographer, and his dealer. They were all emptying their bags of clothes and stained towels, piling them in a little Vesuvius of dirty washing in the middle of the floor.

  “Hey, sweetie.” Dave had spotted him looking down. James tried to catch and hold Dave’s gaze, but it flickered over him as though it wasn’t really interested. “I’m bushed. I’m going to bed. You look after everyone, okay? And we really need this washing done, so just stick it in the machine, would you, there’s a darling.”

  Dave plodded upstairs. He looked terrible, his skin waxy and faintly damp, his makeup not quite distracting from the dark circles beneath his eyes. When he finally made it even with James, he made a lurching grab for James’s collar, tried to pull him in to a kiss. He smelled unclean, and James pushed him away without a second’s thought.

  “Fuck you, then, darling,” said Dave. Waving the annoyance off, he staggered over to the bed. “Everyone’ll need feeding too. You’ll deal with that, won’t you? Know I can count on you.”

  James felt sure he had reached his saturation point for misery. It gave him a kind of grounded place in the midst of all the turmoil from which he could laugh at his own naivety, at the hopes he had been half entertaining since Norway. “You didn’t even notice that I dumped you, did you? I’ve been sitting here assuming you would come back and apologise, and you—”

  Dave turned his back, drew the covers up over his head. “Don’t fucking start.”

  James drifted downstairs with a sense that something was about to give. Like the feeling of nausea that teeters on the edge for far too long just before heaving, he couldn’t quite tip it past the point of no retu
rn. He didn’t want it to get there, but he couldn’t stay here balanced in the unbearable moment either.

  Aidan shouldn’t have to deal with all of this, and if he went to Aidan now it would be to throw himself into the man’s arms, to hold on tight to something that felt sane and healing compared to this. And James had convinced himself that that would be bad for Aidan. The man was coming out of one abusive relationship, and he didn’t deserve to be dragged into the ugly wreckage of . . . another one.

  James stopped in the centre of the entrance hall as that thought hit. Had he just thought of his relationship with Dave as being an abusive relationship? That was a little melodramatic, wasn’t it?

  While his mind turned over this new find, his body—for something to do—began to pick through the pile of dirty washing and sort it into whites, blacks, light colours, dark colours, and delicates. Dave’s entourage had begun spreading into the other rooms, poking into things, emptying the fridge, crashing on the sofas, and generally sullying James’s house.

  “They pay me a lot of money to put up with this.”

  He focused, startled to find he wasn’t invisible after all. The hall had emptied. Only Peggy stood there now, something about her posture suggesting ballet training, the rose gardens tattooed on her arm full of thorns. She eyed him, somewhere between sympathy and contempt. “Do they pay you? ’Cause they should. You’re not getting anything else out of it.”

  “That’s become quite clear to me too,” he agreed, dropping a pair of soiled underpants onto the dark-colours pile.

  “So why are you still here?”

  Beneath the carbonised layer of this burnt-down relationship, a firmer structure started to show. James carefully brushed the ashes away to better reveal it. “Because this is my house. If anyone ought to leave, then it should be him.”

  She raised an elegant eyebrow at him, hooped with gold. “And you think he will?”

  He gave a huff of dour laughter. “No.”

  “Then what’re you going to do about it?”

  He knew what he wanted to do—to walk to Aidan’s house now, apologise in person, and spend the remainder of the day at the folk festival. He got as far as the door, opened it—dazzling sunshine, new leaves like folded beryl—and his scruples caught up with him.

  It was becoming clear that he loved Aidan. That meant he had to do what was right for him, no matter how much it hurt. He closed the door on a profound feeling of loss, pointlessness, and went back to sorting laundry. “I have no idea.”

  As if to make the day complete, James had just finished running the lights through the tumble drier and was sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor folding them—if people wanted ironing done they could bloody do it themselves—when a deep growling thunder of engine noise sounded outside and Steve arrived.

  Two more cars and a van followed, bringing Steve’s entourage. The day was old and grey by this time, evening blowing in on a chill wind and a seepage of cold dew. “Hey, sweetcheeks,” said Steve as he breezed in. “Good to see you know where you belong. Get me a beer, would you. We’ll chill a bit before the party really starts.”

  It was like switching off the light in a room full of cockroaches. Sensing the new arrivals, Dave’s infestation of groupies began to stir and come out of the walls. James thought about saying, “Don’t touch anything,” but knew that would only make them do it more.

  How had it got to this? How had it got to the stage where he was silent and afraid in his own house? And who was going to rescue him?

  At the very top of the house was an attic bedroom with an en-suite bathroom. He took his phone and a book and retired there, where he could lock the door behind him.

  A glance at the phone and his stomach gave a swooping lurch of alarm. At some point today Aidan had called him and he had missed it. God damn it. A voice message glowed there and a notification told him he had at least one text message waiting to be opened, but he knew that if he did, if he saw a kind word or heard Aidan’s voice, that would be that. His good intentions would not survive it. He would flee to Aidan like a refugee, and he was trying to be a good man, damn it. It didn’t seem fair that the world was insisting on making that so hard.

  For an hour or so there was only heavy treads, voices shouting from every direction, all of the showers in the house going continually and all the doors slamming open and shut. At some point a van drove up, the front door opened with a crash, and someone shouted “Pizza!” which reminded him that he hadn’t eaten or drunk anything today.

  At seven the music started, shaking the floors. There were no painkillers in the bathroom cabinet and his headache was trying to crack his skull from the inside. His breath had sped up, his hands trembling. He had to keep catching himself to unclench the nails from his palms and stop hyperventilating.

  He was keeping track of the footsteps like a hunted man, when a burst of laughter and shouting came from what he was fairly sure was his study. Those bastards. He rose to his feet.

  Crash. And the laughter started up again, raucous and high pitched with guilt. He’d unlocked the door and sprinted out before he could have a coherent thought. Down the stairs, running across the landing with the little brutes giggling at his back. What had they broken? They had better not have touched the bull-leaper. He’d had it fired that first week, and ever since, it had stood in pride of place behind his desk, where his eyes could drift to it when he was searching for inspiration. If they had so much as laid one finger on it, he would . . .

  The open air through the doorway of his office stopped him like a wall. He ran into it and winded himself.

  Aidan’s statue was smashed. Irreparably smashed, the bull’s legs in smithereens beneath it, its big body crazed with cracks. Only the dancer’s hand was still attached to its back; the rest of him was broken off at the wrist. His severed head had rolled under James’s office chair, and as James watched, some wanker in the seat rolled backwards and caved in the side of that sloe-eyed face.

  He felt himself turn to stone. “Out!” he yelled at the top of his voice, hurting his throat, trying to be heard over the volume of the sound system. “Get the fuck out of my house. Get out! Get out now!”

  They looked disconcerted for a moment, and then their faces hardened into maddening smiles as James slowly realized that if they didn’t do what he said he was utterly powerless to make them.

  “You fucking cunt,” said Dave from behind him. When he turned, still furious and devastated, but now hot with humiliation too, there was nothing but disgust on Dave’s face. “I’ve had it with you and your fucking nagging. Throw the bastard out, someone, and let’s get on with the party.”

  “You can’t do this!” James shouted, as two of Steve’s bouncers picked him up by the arms and literally carried him out of the door. “This is my house. Dave! You can’t do this to me.”

  They pitched him out of the door with enough force to send him sprawling to hands and knees. By the time he had scrabbled back up, it was shut and locked against him. “Dave! Dave! Damn you! I’m going to get the police. You can’t lock me out of my own house. I’m going to get the police.”

  “You don’t want to do that.” Peggy’s voice completed the betrayal, speaking to him from behind the shut door. In there, with the rest of them. Somehow he’d had the impression she was on his side. “Just calm down and come back in the morning when they’re sober. Okay? We’ll negotiate when no one’s stoned, all right? You got somewhere to go in the mean time?”

  Plenty. James had plenty of places he could go. Finn would take him in, as would Martin or Idris. His sister lived a half an hour’s drive away with her brood of five kids. If he was a good man, he would go to any of those.

  But as it turned out, he wasn’t actually that good a man at all, because in the face of all of this unbelievable . . . meanness . . . he was going to do what his heart ached to do, even if that wasn’t the right thing.

  He kicked the door, leaving a scuff on the paint and hurting his toes, and then he squ
ared his shoulders, put it behind him, and fled to the car so he could find Aidan.

  Aidan had been useless all day. When James did not phone in the morning, Aidan’s nerve had gone and he’d chickened out of making the first move himself. It seemed quite clear that James had indeed decided that sex was a deal breaker for him. That or sanity, at least. It might just have been the flashbacks that the guy couldn’t deal with.

  When he didn’t appear for breakfast, or take his allotted bathroom slot, the housemates had got involved, sending Carol in to give him a stern pep talk about not letting any of this beat him. To please her, he had made himself presentable and had gone out to help open the Rainbow Café, which was always short staffed on a Sunday.

  There, after the third time she caught him staring into space with his tables unmopped or an order half taken and forgotten, she dialled James’s number for him and held the phone to his ear. The hope and the disappointment as the answer service picked up made his stomach roil.

  Trying with texts was not much better. At least he knew they’d got through, but the morning passed into the afternoon and they weren’t answered. His conviction that he’d been dumped hardened like concrete around him, and he felt like he’d been weighed down with it and fed to the fishes.

  In the afternoon, he scalded his fingers on the borscht, and dropped a plate of butternut squash crumble all over the kitchen floor. Then he had reburnt his scalded fingers on the water he drew to mop up the mess. “You’re frightening the customers,” Carol said at last, “with that Halloween face of yours. Go home and clean the oven. That thing hasn’t seen a Brillo pad since 1948, and it’ll keep your mind off things.”

  Obediently, he had gone home and cleaned the oven until it sparkled, taking most of the skin off the burn and making his nails as rough and hooked as a cat’s tongue. But it hadn’t really helped. Moment by moment he felt he’d had as much as he could take of the worry and the sadness, but the day continued and they both just went on.