Life After Joe

by Harper Fox

  As usual I was jumping ahead of my facts. The box could contain anything. And if I thought about it, what would Aaron be doing giving me a bloody ring? I knew—we both knew—he was not heart-whole. Not in a position to be offering signs of commitment and trust. Oh God, I didn’t understand—and suddenly I needed to, burningly. We were almost outside my flat. I put my hand into the crook of his arm, drawing him gently to a halt. “Aaron, love. Tell me, please. Who is—”

  “Matthew!”

  I spun round. Felt Aaron turning with me, to look at the open front door to my flat, which was unexpectedly ablaze with light. A figure was silhouetted in the doorway. For a moment, irritation seized me. God, was nothing sacred? I couldn’t believe even Lou would let in a viewer at eight o’clock on Christmas Eve…

  The figure moved, began an uncertain track towards me down the path, then broke into a run. “Matthew. Mattie, sweetheart! Matt!”

  Joe. I couldn’t get a word out. He launched himself at me from three feet away, and I caught him on reflex, falling back against the frost and ivy on the garden wall. Instinctively I shielded him from too hard a meeting with the brickwork, and his embrace closed round me—so tight, so familiar, it was for an instant as if he had never been gone. The scent of his hair filled my nostrils. Johnson’s shampoo, an economical habit from council-house days that he’d never altered. It paralysed me. “Joe,” I choked out, helplessly grasping at him. His rangy, rawboned frame, sometimes feeling barely different from that of the skinny, scab-kneed boy who’d run at my side through hostile Shieldwell streets and parks. “What the…fuck are you doing here?”

  “Home. Come home for Christmas, Matt. Come home for good.”

  I got my hands onto his shoulders and heaved him back, far enough to see his face. Yes, he was crying. Joe never cried. I looked beyond him to Aaron, who had backed up to the gate. His expression was unreadable, just as it had been the night I first set eyes on him under the Powerhouse lights. And all of his had gone out. “Aaron…”

  He quirked a smile. “There you go,” he said, softly. “You’ll be okay now. Not a bad Christmas present, eh?”

  “Aaron, no. Joe, please. Back up for a second. This is…”

  “Aaron?” Joe echoed, letting me go. He swept me and then Aaron with a bright, assessing gaze. I couldn’t remember when his eyes had gained that calculating light, like he was taking somebody’s measure, and not kindly. “Pleased to meet you,” he said, holding out a hand. His other was closed tight on my upper arm. “And you are…?”

  “A mate,” Aaron responded calmly. He shook the hand offered him. “I live up the road. Just walking Matthew home.” He gave us both a nod, the faint smile still in place, and began to turn away.

  “Don’t!” I gasped, not sure what I wanted to prevent or deny. My heart was pounding wildly up under my ribs. Joe was here. Joe was back. My fucked-up head was having one last game with me, I thought, and whipped round to check. Yes. He was there, seizing my chilly face in both warm hands and stilling it, staring at me. I could have it all back. It hadn’t been perfect, but what was? It had been my life. My partner, my home, my day to day. Our circle of friends, our nice holidays, our evenings and our weekends…I said, lamely, hardly knowing why, “I think it’s too late. The place is more or less sold.”

  “Oh, bugger that! That was all Marnie. I talked about you one time too often, and she freaked out and told me to sell the flat to prove she came first. I tell you what…” He released my face, whirled me round by the shoulders until I was looking at the agency sign on its wooden post by the gate. “Let’s get rid of this now.” He reached up, grabbed the sign by its little red and white two-bed-terrace label and began to tug.

  And that would never bring it down. I don’t know what came over me. Adrenaline or hysteria maybe. Joe and I had been partners in crime for our entire lives. If he wanted to graffiti-tag the railway bridge higher than anyone else, I would give him a leg up. He would hang on to the seat of my pants while I dangled over the top to make my mark. Wild laughter burst from me, and I sprang up onto the garden wall and grabbed the sign at the top. “All right!” I yelled, getting a grip. “Pull now!”

  They made the damn things pretty sturdy. After ten seconds or so, we both gave up and stood staring at each other, breathless. Slowly I realised I could see the whole street from here. That the street and our gateway and the garden were all empty, except for the two of us. “Aaron,” I said, voice still unsteady with laughter. “Joe, did you…I didn’t even see him go.”

  “Well, he’s gone. Very discreet.” Joe held up his hands, and I took them automatically and jumped down off the wall. “Who was he? And don’t tell me your mate. He was bloody gorgeous.” Not waiting for my answer, he wrapped an arm around my waist. “Fast going, Mattie! See—didn’t I tell you you’d do okay without me?”

  Air left my lungs. “Joe, you…you’ve got no idea.”

  “Well. All that’s over now, sweetheart.” The arm tightened, and I found myself being half tugged, half guided towards the open door. “Come on. Come on in, and let’s start over…Oh, wait up. Grab that plastic bag—don’t leave your champagne behind…”

  ***

  I sat with my coat still on, in the living room of my old home. It was very cold. Joe was rattling back and forth between the fire and the kitchen, switching on lights, chattering. He was back. I’d been given the one thing I’d wanted, and with perfect Christmas timing.

  There were lines in T.S. Eliot. I couldn’t remember which poem they were from, and hadn’t paid them much attention at school, but somehow nevertheless they had stayed with me. Something about the passage of time, and the way the world answers what we think are our needs. “She gives when our attention is distracted / And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions / That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late / What’s not believed in, or if still believed, / In memory only, reconsidered passion.” I hadn’t liked those words. My twelve-year-old heart had rejected them, even while my brain recorded. They meant, didn’t they, I could want something forever—like getting into the Gateshead football squad—and burn and yearn and work my arse off for it, and when it came, it might not be worth it. Not even what I wanted anymore.

  The Picture of Dorian Gray was a tough one for preteens, as well. I had just the faintest suspicion—nothing concrete, mind—that Dorian and the artist who paints him and maybe even the author of the story himself were all batting for my team and Joe’s. Not that I was about to impart this to our poor English mistress, who had wanted to enter a convent and instead ended up teaching forty sneering council brats in Shields. Back then, being young, I hadn’t thought much of Wilde’s theory that the inner life could taint the outer man, make such differences to him that a portrait in the attic taking all the hits and moral decay on your behalf could be an invaluable asset. Back then, no matter what Joe and I had been up to, we could raise such clear and incorrupted eyes to teachers and to parents that, unless they had proof, we got away with everything.

  Joe hadn’t got round yet to the lamps we had scattered around the front room, soft ones on low tables that shed light through coloured glass or nice silk shades. The overhead was on, a pale yellow glare. “Joe,” I said as he came back into the room, and something in my voice made him stop. “Sit down a minute.”

  “In a bit. Just gonna make us a cup of tea, and…”

  “No. Now. Please.”

  He obeyed. I think he knew then the game was up, that whatever sweeping, overwhelming thing he’d meant to do, it was no good. He sank onto the edge of an armchair opposite to me. Perhaps he was just tired—or maybe two years of steadfast deception had done their work on his once-open, sweet-natured face. He looked…faded, and there was a twist to his smile I hadn’t seen before.

  I was sure I was altered too. He said uncomfortably, “Come on, Mattie. I’ve got things to do.”

  No one else in the world called me Mattie, not unless they wanted a punch in the mouth that had formed the word. I
t was a name from our deepest past, from bloody nursery school, for God’s sake, when Joe had been too young to pronounce my real one. I said, throat burning, “Marnie must be devastated.”

  He shrugged. “Well. You know Marnie.”

  “No, I don’t. I only met her a handful of times before you left. Where is she?”

  “She’s at home.”

  Home. Leaning forward, I propped my elbows on my knees and ran both hands through my hair. I knew this would make it stick up like electrified wheat, but it helped me to think, to begin to get some fragile grip on what the fuck was going on here. “Okay,” I said wearily. “Okay. Here’s what I think is happening. If I’m wrong…” I tailed off, choking a bit. My chest felt dry and sore. “If you want to stop me at any point, go ahead. Marnie’s at home. You haven’t told her you’re here. You’ve brought…just enough clothes to get by for the night and your spare toothbrush, nothing she’s actually gonna notice is missing. If things go all right here, well and good. And if not—if it all goes tits up, you’re going to pick up your rucksack and go quietly home. To Marnie. Is that right?”

  A terrible, hard-edged silence descended, weary and tarnished as the light. “Come on, Joe,” I said. “Whatever you tell me, I’ll believe it. You know I will. So make it good.”

  He lifted his head. He had been staring at the hearthside rug, where so much had gone on, but now he looked at me. His eyes were dry and empty. He said, hoarsely, “You don’t understand, Matt. I thought it was right, but…I can’t even fuck her.”

  Walking out was easy: I only had one small rucksack of my own. Picking it up, I fished in my pocket and tossed Joe my set of keys. He didn’t try to catch them but flinched from them, and they clattered down onto the hearth. I thought he might follow me, but he did not. The street was deserted, painted in coloured lights, beginning to be hushed with snow. I didn’t know what time the Metros stopped on Christmas Eve, but now was the time to find out. I ran.

  ***

  I got no response to my pounding on the Quayside flat’s door, and reluctantly—Aaron’s privacy seeming doubly sacred now—I let myself in. I hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but he’d placed a lot of faith in me, hadn’t he, giving me my own key on the second day of my stay with him, as soon as he could get one cut. A nice return I’d made him for his trust.

  I scanned the flat’s sparse rooms. It barely took a minute to establish Aaron was not just out, but gone. Unlike Joe, he’d taken things he really needed for a proper stay, and I wondered—sick at heart, unable to stop myself—how pleased Rosie would be to see him. Home for Christmas after all…Turning on my heel, I walked out.

  Chapter Nine

  I realised halfway down the corridor that I had no idea of where I was going, and slackened my pace. A dull blade of loss began to push its way under my heart. I tried his mobile number for the nineteenth time and got nothing. Well, I wouldn’t answer to me either, in his place. His last sight of me, I had been clasped in my ex-lover’s arms, or maybe leaping about laughing like a bloody chimp on the wall, paying no attention to his retreat, his sudden, total disappearance from my world, an instant of time I would happily have traded the rest of my life to recover.

  A lock clicked down the corridor behind me, and despite knowing Aaron’s flat was empty, I spun round in stupid hope. A stocky man in his midfifties was lugging what looked like a huge navy kit bag out through his front door. He locked up behind him, shouldered the bag and set off towards me. As he drew near, he gave me a vague but friendly smile. “Evening. You all right? Looking for someone?”

  No harm in trying. “Er, yes. Aaron, who lives a few doors down from you…I don’t suppose you know where he is?”

  “Aaron West? Works for Sunsol Oil? Yeah, I ran into him on my way in. Said he was going out early for the Christmas shift.”

  “On the…on the rig?”

  “Yeah. Me too, worse luck.” He hefted the kit bag, grinning. “Mind, the pay’s spectacular. Triple time. Can’t turn that down, not with my brood. Can I give him a message for you?”

  “Yes. Yes, please.” I thought fast. What the hell could I say? Just the news that he’d gone back to work instead of the house in the suburbs had lifted my heart, but then again, his work was two hundred miles away on a speck of metal in a dark, howling ocean. Maybe I was more unbearable even than I’d given myself credit for. “I keep trying his mobile, but…”

  “Oh, he’ll be on the chopper by now. I’m going out by the second one. You’ll be lucky if he gets a signal once he’s on the Kittiwake too. Still, anything I can tell him for you…”

  I decided on formality. Maybe Aaron didn’t want his colleagues to know that his feckless, ungrateful gay lover was running about seeking any last desperate chance to put things right. “Okay. Thank you. My name’s Dr.—”

  “Dr. Barnes?” I blinked at him. Before I could open my mouth to say no, he set the heavy kit bag down. “Ah right. The new medical assistant. I get it. He was meant to meet you and escort you out, I bet. Oh, that’s typical Westie—great guy, the best, but if it’s not about hydrogen fuel-cell tech, it doesn’t really register…Well, don’t worry. I can give you a ride. Is that all your kit? Did you have your stuff sent out ahead?”

  I gave a kind of affirmative grunt. I heard it with astonishment. What the fuck was I doing? My new friend—Dave Wycliffe, he told me over his shoulder, lugging his bag off the floor once more and heading towards the lift—didn’t give me a chance to insert another word edgeways, and I rode in the slipstream of his chatter all the way down to the ground floor and into the car park. When I was sitting in the passenger seat next to him, I finally allowed myself to realise my intentions. My blood ran hot and cold at the same time. Christ…I’d end up shot or tied up on the next boat for G Bay…

  Wycliffe was starting the engine. He glanced across at me. “You all right, son? Been out on the rigs before?” I shook my head, unable to trust my voice. “You’ll be fine. It’s the chopper ride you want to worry about. Fucking horrible.” He seemed to find this hilarious and roared with laughter as he gunned the car out onto the road. “I hope they pay you lads triple time for the Santa shift, as well.”

  I had to say something. “Is that why Aaron—Mr. West…Is that why he does it? For his family, like you?” I immediately flinched and regretted it. Calling him Mr. West didn’t make the question any less personal, any less likely to come from a stranger. But Wycliffe didn’t seem to find it odd—burst into laughter again. “Family? Westie? Not very likely, Doc.” He leaned forward, squinting against headlights, then eased into the traffic stream flowing south to the High Level Bridge. “Not your family man, so to speak. I don’t know what you’d call it these days—the politically correct term. Confirmed bachelor, shall we say. Nice enough lad, though. Don’t know how he gets away with it, with all us roughnecks out on the rig, but nobody messes with him, anyway. What about you, Doc? Wife? Kids?”

  I didn’t have the strength to invent any. Mercifully, before I had to explain the incurable nature of my own bachelor status, he had pulled a photo off the dash and started telling me about Mrs. Dave and his many offspring, and after that I only had to listen.

  The guard at the Baltic Road docks checkpoint was unimpressed with my frantic search for Sunsol ID in the pockets of my jacket and jeans. I didn’t think I was doing too badly, considering I knew I’d never find it. Putting a good deal of worried sincerity into the act. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting. I…”

  “ID and appointment note,” the guard repeated for the third time, his head stuck through the wound-down passenger window. A sense of total unreality swept me. Whatever I was playing at, this was the end of the game. I opened my mouth to hurry it along. But Wycliffe leaned suddenly in across my lap. “Oh, come on, Finch,” he said. “Don’t be an arse. This is the new medical boy. Westie was supposed to pick him up, and the dozy sod’s forgot all about him and gone off. Probably got his papers too.”

  I mimicked relieved surprise. “Oh God. Y
es. That’ll be where they are. I gave them to him the other day, and…”

  “All right, all right.” The guard gestured forward, clearly bored of the exchange. “Go ahead, Dave. Merry fucking Christmas to you.”

  The car bumped over pitted tarmac. Around me, I began to see vast industrial shapes emerging from the darkness. I didn’t know what to expect of an oil company’s shore terminal, but perhaps the Kittiwake’s new AMO was expected to be pretty green, and the good-natured Wycliffe, having run out of family to describe, contented himself with pointing out the various processing towers and storage units along our route. My mind was floating somewhere up among the arc lights that illuminated the whole bleak, superscaled scene, but I found myself trying to retain some of the names and functions. In case I need to make polite conversation later on, I thought, a bit hysterically, and decided I should add in some good manners at this point. “It’s very good of you to bring me down here, Mr. Wycliffe. I’d have been stuck otherwise.”

  “Dave,” he corrected me, slowing up as we passed a flat expanse of concrete behind wire fencing. “No trouble at all. They’re lucky to get a decent medic out on that old tub. Well, there she is—your chariot for the night. AS332 Super Puma, pretty reliable…” He paused, face twisting oddly, then shook his head. “Most of the time. Looks like they’re warming her up. We’d best get moving.”