Life After Joe

by Harper Fox

  “I didn’t find out his name from the e-mails. You say it in your sleep.”

  He flinched. “What?”

  “The first night I was with you, and…often since.”

  “I…I do?”

  I had to lip-read it. His brow was furrowed. I saw that his cheeks were wet. Carefully I laid the photograph down on the desk and came to stand in front of him. He flung out a hand at me, a gesture of warding off, and I accepted it. “Yes. Often.”

  “Good, because when I met you—and you look nothing like him—and I started to feel the way I do about you, I thought I was beginning to forget…”

  The way I do. My mind set that aside, though it felt like being thrown a handful of diamonds. “You’re not. You never will.”

  “Good,” he repeated. Then, again, “You’re nothing like him. I thought at first…I was afraid it was just the state of you. Rosie never needed much looking after, God knows, and…”

  “And you thought I did?”

  “Yes, I…It felt good. But even that couldn’t last. I found out what had happened to you, and I saw how hard you were fighting—just to stay sane, to stay alive. Winning too.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “Was I? Maybe after I met you…”

  “No. You’d have been okay. You’re strong, Matt. Not in the same way Rosie was, but—you were open, loving, somehow, even after what Joe had done to you. I saw that soon enough. It wasn’t just—compassion, needing someone to care for. Then every time we touched one another, it felt better and better, until…” He shuddered to a halt. I waited, watching his fading colour in concern. Hearing this was life’s blood to me, but he didn’t sound steady. The hand he was holding out to me opened and closed in a sudden spasm. “You know, by the time I knew you’d read my fucking e-mails, I was almost pleased. Because…because you were guilty and miserable, and that meant I wasn’t the only one starting to fall in—Oh God—to fall in love. I realised that, and I thought—I think about Rosie, and it feels like only yesterday he died…” He watched for a moment unseeingly, his eyes dark and bewildered. Then he whispered, barely audible, “Fuck. I can’t breathe.”

  “What?” I slipped past his outstretched hand and stood close to him. “What is it?”

  “Don’t know. Just can’t…can’t get air in.”

  For a second, panic seized me. Then, just as quickly, it died. I might be a fake doctor here, but back on land I was a real one. I put a hand on his shoulder and listened to him. He was struggling—drawing short inhalations too high in his chest to do him much good—but I couldn’t hear wheezing or fluid. People dropped into respiratory distress for dozens of reasons. Trauma, disease; sometimes just overwhelming, inexpressible pain. The sense of knowing what to do came back to me like the memory of a long-gone dream. “Okay,” I said, reaching for the pulse in his wrist. It pounded hard beneath my fingertips, racing with his fear, but it was strong. “All right. This will pass. Can you come with me?”

  He moved obediently when I took hold of his arm and guided him over to the bunk. I could feel him spiralling, the panic feeding on itself, and I ran a hand up and down his back. “Sit down for me.” His lips were going blue. In a moment I would run and hit whatever alarm it took to get the rig’s medical team down here, but I had one trick. “Okay. Now rest your elbows on your knees and put your head down.”

  “And what the fuck…is this meant to do?”

  That was good: still talking, and irritation coming through the fright. “Opens your chest out,” I told him. “Relaxes the bits that are trying to clog up. I get asthmatics to do it.”

  “Not an…asthmatic,” he growled, but he suddenly drew a huge, half-drowned lungful of air. “Oh God.”

  “That’s it. Again.” I waited for the next inhalation and the next, and the third one became a grating sob. “Aaron, love…”

  I reached for him, and he stiffened. “Nn-nn. Don’t.” His hand came out once more in that hopeless sign of rejection, pushing me away. I had thought he was trying to sidestep the breakdown beginning to overwhelm him, but finally I saw his problem. I had come out here, reenacting the trip which had killed his last lover, and taken a hammer to the shell in which he had been rebuilding his life. Coping. Surviving. Oh, and I’d begun my work long before that—needing him, making him be more to me than just the simple lay that would have done him good and left him with intact memories. Making him, never expecting any such development, begin to fall in love—long before he was ready for it. Getting between him and his memories. I was the fucking problem. “Aaron, I’m sorry,” I whispered, hating the inadequacy of the words. “I am. I’ll clear out, okay? I’m so sorry—for all the stupid things I thought. For coming out here tonight especially. God, if I’d known what had happened…what had happened to Rosie, I’d never have…” I watched, paralysed, while another sob wrenched his frame, and he pulled back the hand and wrapped it round his nape, clenching, trying to curl up on himself. “I’ll leave you alone, okay?”

  I didn’t know where I thought I was going to go, an illicit stranger on an oil rig in the middle of the North Sea, but that seemed a small concern. I could wander about aimlessly there as well as anywhere else, and when challenged, hand myself over to Larsen’s mercies, or the brig if they had one. I struggled with the cabin-door lock. Like everything else around here it was massive, heavy, cold and awkward to my hand, but eventually it gave, and I managed to shove it open, to squeeze through the gap and let it bang closed.

  Chapter Eleven

  I stood in the corridor, leaning on the metal wall. Outside of Aaron’s cabin, with its trappings of civilisation, humanity, I became once more aware of the huge industrial structure around me. And beyond that, the wider ocean. A wave of disassociation began in my marrow and gut. I thought I could see myself from outside—feckless, shivering, displaced by two hundred miles, a waste of sea, from everything I knew. Aaron had said I was strong—and I knew, on some level, that he was right, or that at least I would have crawled out from under the loss of Joe and lived some kind of a life, or fallen back into Joe’s arms and lived another kind, both types of them shadows. I would have lived as so many men do, never dreaming of anything better. I would live now, God knew. Was it better to know what I would be missing?

  I pushed myself to my feet. I had to go somewhere. I was glad—astonished—that Aaron had loved me; that he’d felt that way even for a second. But I had no illusions—knew I would never match up to what he’d lost. I started to walk, back in the direction that would lead me out into the night.

  Behind me, a cabin door swung wide, hard enough to bang off the wall. There was obviously a trick to it. If you worked here, you must learn it fast enough, I thought, coming to a helpless stop in the middle of the corridor. I should keep walking. There were dozens of possible doors, and I’d made enough of an arse of myself for one night. Maybe I’d ask whoever was coming out of his cabin behind me where the canteen was, or where the fuck I should go to hide out and wait for the supply boat. I heard, on a raw exhalation, “Matthew!”

  I turned around. Aaron had half fallen out into the corridor; was clinging to the open door to keep upright. His beautiful face was contorted with tears. “Matt, where…where are you going?”

  “I don’t know,” I said faintly. “I just thought I should…”

  “Don’t. Please. Please don’t go.”

  I ran to him. He reached out and seized me the second I was within arm’s reach, and I flung a rough embrace around him. Together we stumbled back into the cabin, and I heaved the door closed behind me with one hand, feeling muscles wrench in my shoulder. He was hurting me too, dragging us both down to the floor as his knees gave. I had never been so glad of any pain. I didn’t know how to hold him, how to get my arms round him tight enough. I was down on my knees, where I had dropped after running to him, and his hands were twisting in the fabric of the damned survival suit, bruising my ribs. I didn’t want him touching that. I wanted to give him my skin, my flesh and bone, but I couldn’t m
ove until this tempest passed and he released me. Gasping, hearing my crushed efforts to breathe intertwine with the sounds of his grief, I stroked his hair, kissed his ear and the side of his neck, the contact clumsy and hot. “Aaron, love! I’m so sorry!”

  “What the hell for?” he sobbed. “You came out here—did all that—for me. I still don’t…fucking believe it.”

  “Well, I’m here. I’m here. Come on, sweetheart—up you get, up off this cold floor. Can you…?”

  I don’t know if he hauled me up or if I surged to meet him. Once there, his arms locked round me so fiercely I could not imagine ever being parted from him, and I grabbed him in return, one arm around his waist, supporting him. We made our clumsy way across the short distance to the single bunk; went down in a bone-bruising tangle onto its unyielding mattress. “Don’t leave me,” he choked out. I rolled on top of him, scrambled to stay with him, to be his shield—his place to hide, because I knew that as much as he needed this, it wasn’t bearable to him. “Matthew. Matthew. Don’t leave.”

  ***

  Midnight, on the deep-sea Kittiwake. I heard Aaron’s bedside clock beep and saw the digits change to zero. Then I couldn’t pay that or anything else much attention; he was naked in my arms, my thighs clasped round him, both of us rocking softly, inexorably closer to climax. The bunk was barely built to contain one normal-sized male, let alone the passions of two, and I could feel every slat on my spine as he pushed down against me, but I’d have stayed there forever if I could.

  Moonlight and arc lights shone into the room. I could see his smile and the sweet heated brilliance it set in his eyes. For the first time I could see clearly the beautiful rose tattoo that snaked across his shoulder, following its powerful curve. I thought about how many times we’d made love with the lights off, or with Aaron stripped down to his shirt but stopping there. I hadn’t considered why: he was just sexy like that, the one retained garment setting off his nakedness, clinging to him damply as we worked up the heat. I ran my fingers over it now, tentatively, glancing up for permission. Gasped as he went still, took his weight on one arm and captured my hand in his free one.

  He pressed my palm flat to the rose. “I had it done my first shore leave…after,” he said. “Got rat-arsed in Edinburgh, and…” He smiled, leaned down to kiss me. “Larsen was with me, supervising. He held me down, made sure the guy did a good job.”

  “He did,” I managed. “It’s perfect.”

  He shook his head. “You’re fucking perfect. That’s the only thing that’s perfect around here.” He began to move again, and I let my head fall back on the pillow, arching and arching my spine to meet him. Outside, wild white drifts of snow had started to fall, driven by the wind. It hadn’t occurred to me that it snowed out at sea, in lonely wastes of water with no one to watch. I was falling upwards into it, up and…

  “Christ, Aaron!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It moved! It—the rig. I felt it move.”

  “It’s meant to. Haven’t you been up in a tower block in a gale? It’s structured to give a bit.”

  “Oh, I…Okay. I see.”

  “Happy now?”

  Happy now. Yes, in the darkly twining leaves of the rose. I kept my hand pressed to it, just above his heart. I wrapped my other arm around his neck and opened my thighs for him, clinging to him. I’d wanted him inside me, but when he started to move again, I couldn’t think of anything beyond the feel of it, the heat and the velvety urgency, his shaft crushed to mine, the pain and the joy of it rocking us over the top in the stupendous wind-driven sway of the rig.

  His clock beeped again. One in the morning. Something occurred to me, on the edge of blackout sleep. “Hey. Happy Christmas.”

  Silent laughter shook him. I was well placed to feel it, pinned beneath him, melting and boneless in his warmth. “You’ve got to be kidding, but…All right. You too.”

  “Ta. Can you reach my jacket from there?”

  “You cannot be cold.”

  “Just give me it.”

  I found the ring deep in one pocket, after a heart-stopping struggle. So much had happened. The damn landing had been so rough, I couldn’t remember the moment when I’d let go my death grip on the box and tucked it away. It felt to me now as if the whole world depended on finding its smooth, silky curve, and my fingertips closed on it tight.

  I drew it out and looked at the gleaming silver over his shoulder. He took his weight on his elbows and pushed up with a faint exhausted grunt. “What is it, love?”

  “This,” I said, trailing it lightly down between his shoulder blades. “Opened it on the helicopter. It stopped me freaking out—more or less, anyway.”

  He rolled onto his side. For a moment he watched me and the glimmering circle; then he put out a hand. “Here. Let me see.” I gave it to him carefully. For a long while he turned it over between his fingers, silver in the silver light. “You must have thought I was…off my head,” he said softly. “Running off and buying you this.”

  I wondered how he still could have doubts. About me, anyway, and how I felt for him. His free arm was tucked beneath my neck. His ankle was wrapped round mine in a kind of postcoital lock, and our bellies were sticking together in drying semen. Oh God, maybe the doubts were his own—we were lying here in the bed he had shared with Rosie, and if I’d wanted to try and assure him I’d never trespass on the sacred ground of that lost love, I couldn’t be going a worse way about it…I wanted him, even after all we’d shared, to know himself free. “Well, a world’s changed since you did,” I said. “You can cop an insanity plea if you want. I wouldn’t blame you.”

  He looked at me, incredulity painting his beautiful face. Then he rolled back down beside me, cushioning my head on his shoulder. “What happened to you?” he whispered. “Was it Joe who made you feel like a man would have to be nuts to fall in love with you? Give me your stupid hand.” I obeyed, unable to speak. He shifted, made me comfortable in his embrace. I’d given him my stupid left, and he took it in both of his, separating the fingers in the strange mixed light. Joe and I had never gone through this. I realised with a flush that I’d picked up my radical stance on the subject from him. I had no bloody problem at all with the feel of the cool, heavy silver sliding into place, a perfect fit, the symbol and the gesture as old as time.

  ***

  On a cold day in March, I went with Aaron to a windswept graveyard in the Cumbrian hills. We had to look for the right place, which surprised me, but I kept quiet and stayed by his side while we threaded the lines of headstones. When he had laid down the flowers he’d brought, he straightened up and looked at me. It was perishing cold. The grey sky had chased all the green from his eyes. “I didn’t go to the funeral,” he said. “His parents are Catholic. If they’d found out, it would have consigned their son to hell for them.”

  I thought about Aaron, and the considerable deal I now knew about Andrew Rose, and tried to imagine how the union of those two loving souls had added up to perdition. I said cautiously, not sure of the propriety here among the sleepers, “That’s…that’s all bollocks, you know.”

  He smiled, a faint jade kindling under his lashes. “He used to worry about it. So much sometimes, he almost made me wonder. But…I do know now.” He put out his hand to me. If he wasn’t concerned about the rightness of gathering me in and kissing me here, nor was I, and I felt a sudden bone-deep conviction that nothing under this sky or these hills would deny us. Would do anything other than assent to the song, the fragile heat of this shared touch. I strove to make it stronger. He was shivering against me. Coming here had cost him an effort that had drained him from the marrow. I wrapped my arms around him. “Aaron…”

  We went back to the car, uncomfortably poised at an angle on the verge of the single track. It was a sturdy little runabout Ford we’d bought between us, so that when he was home on his off-duty fortnights—and this was the third one we’d shared—we could get out of the city, see the Lakes and Peaks and Pennines we
’d both loved growing up. We’d already crashed her on Shap, spinning off the road into a snowdrift. I loved her. Getting in, I wondered what it was he was about to tell me. There was something—he’d started on the road out here, but his heart had been too full, and he’d shaken his head and asked me to wait. He was ready this time, I knew. And it was serious. I adjusted the seat and the mirror from his long-legged driving position, and I waited still, feeling colder here than I had out in the wind.

  I was afraid. Staring out through the snow-flecked windshield, I found myself playing back the months that had passed since my night on the Kittiwake. I had not faced a firing squad the morning after, and nor had Aaron made me take the long road home by sea—Larsen had given him a day’s leave to escort me back on the Puma, and I’m not sure which of us had been more terrified at the prospect, but in fact I had loved the trip to shore, my hand clenched in his as we rode clear skies all the way. Since then, of course, it had been my turn to die inside a bit each time he journeyed out or home. It was part of the game.

  The relationship game. I knew I had never learned its rules. I had grown up inside my first one, and once cut adrift, had only picked up protocols for one-night stands. We had gone too fast, Aaron and I. Here on the hillside, with the earth still settling around Rosie’s grave, I was sure of it. During his fortnights ashore, we spent every available second together. I was living, more or less illegally, in his company flat. When he was away, my chest ached and my eyes hurt and I went through my days like a zombie.

  I had tried not to. I stayed on my wagon, did my job with a kind of mechanical fervour that sailed me through my foundation exams. I tried to live well. When Lou had asked me to meet up with him—in a restaurant; there would be no more Powerhouse nights for me—I went. I listened to him for about an hour. He only had a little to say, but I understood from his circuits and repeats how urgently he would have liked it to sound better. He’d kept Joe’s secrets in order to ally himself with him, to be there to make the catch when—as he had believed was inevitable—the dream of the straight life with Marnie bit the dust. Losing hope there, and seeing me still on my own, he had started to think he might have a chance with the other half…He had tailed off, and I had gone round to sit in his half of the booth and put my arm around him, because by then the poor bastard had been crying. Joe and I had never understood, he told me, how it felt to grow up looking in from the outside at the pair of us. I could well believe it. We were friends again, of a kind.