Life After Joe

by Harper Fox

  Chapter Two

  For the first half hour of my walk home, I barely noticed the cold. To be honest, I barely noticed I was walking. The railway station, the elegant Regency facades of Grainger New Town, seemed to float obligingly past me of their own accord. I was smooth and easy. I was on the moving walkway at the airport taking giant steps. I was skating on ice.

  Ice. I put out a hand to steady myself on the rail by the Grey’s Monument pedestrian crossing—careful, Matthew, no sense in all this beautiful striding and skating if you walk straight out under a bus—and my palm stuck to it. The shudder that ran through me as I jerked my hand away woke my whole body to the temperature of the night around me. A rip in the chemical veil. Through it, I saw the glimmer of frost on the railing. On the pavement, the tarmac. All over my tired, dirty city. A benediction…

  To concrete and glass, anyway. On my skin, it was just a dull ache. And I was feeling it because I was out on the streets, fifty-five degrees north, three weeks before Christmas, in my T-shirt. That was because my wallet, and taxi fare, was back in the Powerhouse in the pocket of my jacket, and my jacket was there because the world’s biggest bouncer hadn’t given me time to pick it up before slinging me out into the street. Which was, in its turn, because I had committed an act of public indecency on the dance floor of a busy nightclub. You had to do a lot to piss off the Powerhouse bouncers, but I supposed that had been enough.

  With Nicky, several times arrested for dealing crack outside the Scotswood secondary schools. My stomach heaved, and I grabbed at the rail again. It might have done me good to chuck up a night’s worth of toxins there, but Grainger Street was lined with CCTV, and I’d probably end up fitting community service around my first set of foundation exams. A scatter of people were still out on the streets too…

  Among them, in the distance, just a graceful shape in the lamplight, was Aaron the Oil Rigger. I straightened up, glad the impulse to vomit had passed. He was still a good way off, but his movements were intent. Too good to talk, too good to dance. Not too good, apparently, to follow me home. A kind of ugly triumph burned its way through me. I waited a few seconds—didn’t want to make it hard for him, did I?—then set off again, not too fast.

  Over the monument’s open spaces, up Northumberland Street. A pause, as if to admire the Christmas display in Fenwick’s windows. Which, this year, I did not. The tableau might be locally famous, but this time around had gone ferociously reactionary, a full-on nativity with bells. So much for the multicultural society. Yeah. Sometimes I could almost see how Joe might have had enough and gone to bat for the winning side. One day I might do the same myself…I grinned at the idea, catching my reflection just under the Virgin’s cardboard halo. Plainly and obviously gay from the instant of conception.

  And not half as pretty as when I’d set out for the night, that was for sure. I didn’t remember landing on the pavement outside the club, but apparently I’d done so at least partially on my face. I winced and dabbed with one finger at the grazing on my cheek, my bust lower lip. Oh yes. Lovely.

  Still, good enough to pull the best-looking bloke to grace the Powerhouse in as long as I could remember. I glanced back down the street to make sure I still had him in tow. Long walk from the west-end dives to the elegant little bohemian quarter where Joe and I had taken our first flat after graduation…

  No. Not him. A lump of lead worse than nausea slipped down from my heart into my gut. Amongst the scatter of people back at the monument, if I’d bothered to look—Baz and Wayne bloody Parfitt and a couple of their hangers-on. If anything in this world could make Nicky look classy, it was the Parfitt lads, who managed to reconcile occasional homosexuality to a neo-Nazi worldview with a flexibility that astounded me. And now I gave it a thought, hadn’t Nicky been keeping company with Wayne over the last few weeks?

  Fuck it. Yes. I always got my man. Trouble was, I sometimes got someone else’s. As for my beautiful oil rigger, the night had swallowed him. Probably he had just been walking home.

  I knew better than to run. Not yet, anyway. A sprint this far from home would leave me short on breath for a fight if it came to that, and with the likes of the Parfitts, it inevitably would. I turned from the windows and set off again, keeping my shoulders—and, I hoped, my line up the street—as straight as I could. What was Quentin Crisp’s rule of thumb in these situations? That few muggers would persist in following a quietly determined four miles an hour for more than a couple of miles…

  Perhaps he hadn’t encountered a mugger from Scotswood. When I reached the Jesmond station underpass, Wayne and Baz were still doggedly following in my wake. They seemed to have lost their satellites, though. That was good. In my current state, I could almost kid myself I could handle two mean-eyed skinhead bastards on my own. I jogged down the steps and into the dark. A chilly detachment was settling on me like mist. I felt more interest in the rhythm of the flicker of the tunnel’s one still-functional neon light than in the footsteps coming up hot and hard behind me. The Parfitts, making their move. So be it. Even a lost fight—a beating—seemed suddenly preferable to my empty flat and another night alone.

  At the far end of the tunnel, where the station steps ran steeply down through streetlamp shadows and falling leaves, Baz and Wayne’s cronies suddenly appeared. As if they’d dropped out of the sky, although logically I knew they’d only run ahead and jumped the traffic barricades to cross at the junction, which was, on reflection, exactly what I should have done. Not thinking. Stupid, even for a man coming down off a chemical-ethanol high. Maybe it was just bloody entropy. Whatever mystical energy it was that kept people out of these situations was draining out of me at last. Or did I somehow want to be down here getting the shit kicked out of me, hopefully propelled into blissful unconsciousness on the tip of Wayne’s steel-toed boot…?

  I never got the chance. Suddenly there were three silhouettes at the tunnel’s far end, not two. One of them was as graceful as a puma. That one moved, and the other two went down with a violence that suggested their little shaven heads had been smacked together. A rich west Cumbrian landsman’s voice barked, “Watch your back!” and I whirled to face the Parfitts.

  Not much call for bare-knuckle skills in medical school, though the parties could get ugly. I had, however, grown up queer on one of the toughest estates in the Northeast. The first punch I landed felt good. Better because Wayne had judged the poof by his Ted Baker cover and plainly wasn’t expecting it. There was something familiar in the feel of teeth breaking under my fist. Well, some kids look back with fondness on model aircraft and grandmother’s jam tarts. Yes. I had knocked down schoolmates, neighbours, random brats in the street—anyone with a bad word to say about how I looked, what I was…

  But now I came to think about it—and thinking at this juncture was a really bad idea—nine times out of ten I had lashed out to protect Joe. I didn’t mind the shit that got thrown. He hated it. Even at thirteen, he hadn’t wanted to be outed in the playground or the gym by some indoctrinated little fucker who had just learned the term arse bandit, probably from his dad. Without Joe, what was I fighting for?

  I didn’t care. Wayne saw it and drove a punch through my defences that sent me flying back to hit the tunnel wall. Oh, that was good—the crack of the concrete almost did it for me, almost brought down the dark.

  Then the flickering neon eclipsed, and I flashed back to the moment of the bouncer’s intervention in the House. I was being forcibly reprieved from my insanity again—with style this time, I thought, forcing my vision to focus through sparkling fog. The puma had ploughed through to the Parfitts’ end of the tunnel and was neatly taking them apart.

  Shame hit me that I was leaving him to deal with it alone. As much use as tits on a bull as I was at that point, I had to help. I shoved myself upright against the horrible mural of a ship some joker untiringly dubbed Titanic in careful marker-pen letters after each one of its cleanups. Aaron, having dispatched Wayne with a high-power roundhouse, was swinging round to
face Baz. Didn’t look like much of a contest, but I knew these crew-cut little weasels of old. Wouldn’t put it past Baz to pull a knife. Deciding not to give him a chance, I launched myself at his back. Weight and lack of balance were about all I could bring to the party, but Baz was off his guard, and we went down in a flail of arms and legs onto the tiles. I could smell him. Getting a second’s advantage, I slammed him over onto his back and straddled his belly. Oh, I wanted to kill him. It was nothing to do with the cowardly four-on-one hunt through the city, or the fact that Wayne blamed me for Nicky’s infidelity. I was just sick with rage. I saw Joe’s beloved face gaping up at me from the underpass floor, and I drew my arm back and clouted the illusion as hard as I could round the jaw. I heard myself sob, in relief and the wild need to punch him again. Again, until Joe was pulp, until his beauty was only a memory like all my other memories…

  Hands closed on my shoulders. “Matthew, stop.” I twitched and jerked round. The oil rigger was leaning over me. His eyes looked full of thunderclouds, and his mouth was bleeding at the corner. “He’s down. Leave it.”

  “Oh, right,” I rasped. “If I was down, he’d bloody leave it, wouldn’t he?”

  “No. He’d nick your wallet and kick you in the head before he left. Are you like him?”

  I gave the question thought. It was easier to consider that than the feel of this strange man’s hands on me easing me up onto my feet. Steadying me, once I was there, with a grip on my upper arms so powerful and warm that the night and the neon and the cold pain in my head and heart seemed to fade and lose reality. “I dunno. I hope not.”

  “Well, come on. His mates have run for it. Let’s go before they come back.”

  Outside the tunnel, the air was dank, but a breeze moved through it that did not stink of urine. I took a deep breath, then shuddered and coughed as it caught in my lungs. To my surprise, Aaron went and picked up a nicely folded jacket from the rails that led up to the station—my own, which he’d apparently laid there before wading into my fight. “Here,” he said, holding it out to me. “Your wallet and keys should be there.”

  Keys. Great. I wondered when I would have noticed those were missing. “Thanks,” I said awkwardly. “How did you know it was mine? How…how did you know to come after me?”

  He looked at me. He was taller than I was, but only by about an inch. I wasn’t sure how he made the difference look like a foot. His eyes were hazel now—green plus orange streetlight, and filled with wry amusement. “You sit and watch for long enough, you see things.”

  “Is that what you do? Sit and watch?”

  “Sometimes. That was nice going, by the way, back there in the club.”

  I felt a blush start. Christ, it was the painful schoolboy kind that crawls up out of your crotch and paints your face guilty scarlet. I hoped the weird light would hide some of it. “You were happy enough to spectate,” I said harshly, trying to thrust some of my shame back out onto him.

  He quirked a smile. His mouth and eyes were briefly touched by the shadows of half a dozen emotions, none of them readable to me, except I was pretty sure not one of them was shame. “Well,” he said. “Part of it was worth watching.” My mouth went dry. In spite of myself, a dull tingle of excitement began at the base of my spine. As if to reinforce it, he said, “Do you live far from here?”

  “Er…no. No, just up the road.”

  “Come on, then.”

  The street was quiet, only a handful of late-night revellers making their way home. The last of the Metro trains were long gone, the railway line across the road hushed with that unique city silence, the pause between movements of industrial symphony. I’d been deaf to such music for far too long. Too busy keeping my head down, avoiding the memory of meeting up with Joe at the station—ridiculous for a sixty-second walk home, but that was what we’d always done. I noticed, too, the difference between walking alone at this time in the morning and walking in company. That no one looked, not even a second glance. I was plainly off the market. Taken…

  We stopped outside the gate that led to my building. He stood on the pavement, looking up with his hands in his pockets. “Is that your flat? The one with the light on?” I followed his gaze and nodded. He said with an odd, rough gentleness, “It looks very nice.”

  Did it? I blinked and tried to see my home through the eyes of a stranger. I supposed it did. From here, you could see the rich ivory walls, a couple of our paintings and the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The windows were clean. I had, over the last six months, continued to keep the place neat and pleasant. It was a kind of habit, I supposed. I’d never been domestic, but Joe liked things that way. I’d left a light on because Joe hated coming home to darkness. “Thanks,” I said and turned to Aaron. “Come in. For God’s sake, come in and…fuck my brains out.”

  He put his hands on my shoulders again. Why the hell couldn’t I get a read on his face? The mouth, the green eyes, so expressive, and yet it was as if he’d learned to code their language into their very beauty, like hieroglyphics or the jewelled breastplates of the Levite priests. “I’ve done a lot of stupid things in my time,” he said quietly. “But I’ve managed never to screw someone as drunk, stoned and fucked-up as you.”

  I stared at him. I’d thought I was hiding the state of myself pretty well, but that was a fair assessment. “What—all that was just to walk me home?”

  “Can you honestly tell me you’re up for anything more?”

  Absolutely. Come in and see. At the very least I can lie facedown and let you do me like that lad I picked up last week, whose name I can’t remember, and I passed out in the middle of it, and when I woke up he was gone, so no harm, no foul, right? I lowered my gaze. Suddenly I was so tired I could hardly stand, and on a dangerous knife-edge of tears. He turned me between his hands. He swung open the gate and guided me step-by-step to my building’s front door. He stood there behind me until I had dug out my key, and when the door opened, he carefully pushed me inside.

  I collapsed on my backside on the stairs. Scrambling round, I began belatedly to thank him for coming to my rescue. But the hall was empty, the door closed as tight in its frame as if he had never been there.

  Chapter Three

  The next week was strange for me, mostly in that it was more normal, more like the weeks before Joe’s departure than any I’d managed in some time. I’d missed two sets of rounds but did not miss the third one, which probably went a long way towards saving my career. I volunteered for long shifts, minimising the empty-flat syndrome which so often triggered my searches for company elsewhere. Lou caught up with me in the hospital canteen, apologising for having bailed on me, and instead of brushing him off and pretending I didn’t remember, I apologised in turn for being so fucking unbearable. He was astonished and relieved, and we ended up having a more normal conversation than any we’d enjoyed for a while, both of us tacitly avoiding any mention of Joe.

  I didn’t know what the difference was. It wasn’t so much that I’d bottomed out in the Powerhouse that Saturday: I knew from experience I could in fact dive a hell of a lot lower than that. Maybe it was knowing how close I’d come to being beaten raw, or worse, because I doubted the Parfitt lads on a rampage would have known when to stop. Maybe it was having had my degradation witnessed by Aaron. The more I tried not to think of him, the more he haunted my mind, and the more I didn’t want ever again to make that kind of first impression on a man like him. Not that I’d get the chance. If there were other beautiful, sexy, kindly, courtly oil riggers running about on the streets of Newcastle, they were all avoiding me. God—not only had he rescued me, he’d made such a gentlemanly catch when I’d thrown myself at him…Well, maybe that was it. Maybe being thought worthy of respect even in such a condition was making me think twice about further self-harm.

  At all events, I spent a lot of that week replaying moments from that night in my head. They stuck up like volcanic islands from the sea of my drunken amnesia, and while some were god-awful, making me suddenly groan a
nd clutch my head in the quiet of the library, I could dwell for a long time on the others. His appearance among the shadows in the underpass. The way he’d held me on the street outside my flat, the way his hands had cupped my shoulders…Even, God help me, the searing instant when I’d locked my gaze to his and shuddered to climax up against the wall in the House: his look then, and his wry admission of watching, had somehow partway redeemed me. Letting my mind go over these imperfect pleasures was a viable alternative to lying awake missing Joe, and that was such a relief that I went after the memories hard, turning them into fantasies where Nicky turned into Aaron, and Aaron did not display such nice manners in the doorway to my flat. For the first time in months, jerking off brought release and then sleep. When I did it thinking of Joe, all I could do afterwards was cry myself into a blinding insomniac headache.

  The following Saturday night found me back at the Powerhouse. Of course I was looking for Aaron, but I kept that motive as carefully concealed from myself as from Lou. I didn’t want to be scared off my own turf by the likes of the Parfitts, I told both of us. I’d given Lou part of the story of my night’s escapade, but not all. Not the part where Aaron had come charging to my rescue like a knight in a scuffed but stylish leather jacket. Not his tender, gracious delivery of me to my front door. I wanted to keep those memories, not have them pawed over eagerly by Lou for signs of budding romance. I knew he wanted me to find someone, and I knew his motives were more than half guilt. And I didn’t want to admit, even to myself, that I could begin to consider anyone but Joe in anything other than the most rawly sexual light. Oh, I’d tumble half the town to take my mind off things, but to wait all week, hoping against hope that a sensible man like Aaron would even take the risk of encountering me again…No, I didn’t care if I didn’t see him, and with that in mind, set off for a very moderate night on the town, surrounded by a group of mates, promising Lou I’d stay on however short a leash he chose to hold.