by Patrick Gale
One of his earlier, less judiciously chosen lovers had taught him how to give better blowjobs, how to break into a car with a wire coat hanger and how to use two partially uncoiled paperclips to pick small scale Georgian and Victorian warded locks.
He worked on the caddy at the dining table. It took him longer than usual because his hands were sweating with nerves for some reason, and he had to break off repeatedly to wipe them so as not to lose his grip on the wires.
The lock gave suddenly, startling him. The hinge turned on an unusually powerful concealed spring, which caused the lid to fly open with a bang as soon as the little lock’s levers gave under pressure. There must have been a gust of wind down the chimney or up the stair at the same moment for a kind of shudder passed through the building, fluttering curtains and causing two of the doors to slam.
Chris held the caddy to the light and was surprised to find it quite bare inside; in the second that it opened, he thought he had caught a glimpse of something like ash inside it. He saw it was lined, most atypically, with lead, hence his having thought the wood so unusually dense. It couldn’t have been for tea after all. A tiny sarcophagus for a small pet, perhaps? A tamed starling or tiny marmoset whose mourning owner wanted them kept beside her but not so close as to have body fluids leaking through the joinery onto her writing desk.
But the need for a spring was a mystery. He tried pressing the lid closed again and found there was no catch to keep it shut so it flew wide again immediately. By instinct, he raised the casket to his face and sniffed its insides. There was none of the normal antique smell – no ghost of bergamot or lavender dust. There was only the unmistakably frank musk of warm, male groin. It cut through the honeyed overlay of the polish he’d applied earlier like a dirty laugh in a silent order.
Shocked, amused and, for all the chill and their recent fumblings, turned on, Chris pressed his nose in deeper to breathe it in again then flicked out the light and hurried back upstairs to show Hugo.
‘I got it open at last,’ he called up as he rounded the stair’s spiral. ‘And I think I can see why someone locked it, because of these sprung hinges. But get a whiff of—’
He was startled to find Hugo not curled up half-asleep with M.R. James but standing naked in the doorway, waiting for him. Usually fairly slow to get started, he already had a pornographic hard-on and his eyes were glittering like splintered coal.
‘On your knees, Boy,’ he said in a voice he had never used before. ‘And worship.’ He snatched the casket and tossed it aside then pushed Chris roughly down to the icy stone threshold.
As was explained earlier, their recently registered partnership was founded on the principle that Chris was the pretty, Hugo, the lucky one. The dynamic seemed to work for them both and Chris had never analysed it beyond noting occasional pangs for the craving he had felt with the picklock or some of the other Unpresentables.
Overnight it was as though their polarities had changed. In the days that followed, Hugo looked at him with nothing warmer than amusement and he found himself desiring without dignity or control. Hugo hadn’t suddenly changed shape. His legs were still sturdy, still slightly out of proportion to his long trunk and wiry arms. He had not suddenly developed a rippling six-pack or a swimmer’s shoulders but Chris had only to look at him to want to press his face into his belly or feel Hugo’s forearm hairy against his lips. At a glimpse of Hugo’s teeth or the way his hair grew in forks down the back of his (shortish) neck, something gave way within him and he felt no feeble sense of shame or decency could stop his wanting to possess or be possessed by him. Seeming to sense this, Hugo would give his newly characteristic smirk and murmur, ‘Insatiable!’ in a way that only made the hunger for abasement more intense.
As the holiday progressed, the casket went ignored, as did their stash of maps and guides and careful itineraries. Instead, Chris fell in with whatever whim seized Hugo – be it an afternoon lost to a seaside amusement arcade, an extravagant quest for new, frankly rather common clothes or an evening wasted on a terrible horror film full of lingering torture scenes – in the hope that his meekness or subservience, or whatever this was, would be rewarded by more sex and as soon as possible.
They had never been a couple that touched in public. Chris was perfectly happy, if not quite proud, to be gay but he disliked public displays of affection in anyone, had always thought them ill-mannered. Yet suddenly he was groping Hugo whenever he could, seizing his arse, his hand, his thigh – whatever Hugo would allow – immune to the angry or uncomfortable looks this provoked in others. Aside from a very few attempts in the first days of their courtship, they had only ever made love under cover of darkness. Now they were having sex in broad daylight, even in the open air, even in a corner of an otherwise unremarkable church.
It was in many ways the very thing one would hope for, but hardly dare expect, from a honeymoon, only it was so unlike who they were.
Chris made no connection between what was happening and the stolen casket until his phone rang on the fourth day.
Hugo had horrified him by going out on his own soon after breakfast, returning after two agonizing hours with a burly, donkey-jacketed road worker who was evidently as deeply under his spell as Chris. He had the road worker strenuously service them both in a kind of frenzy – hands and boots leaving tarry prints on the sheets – until the man seemed to come to his senses and announced in a broken undertone that his wife would be expecting him. Hugo had fallen into a deeply sated sleep so Chris pulled on a dressing gown and saw their visitor politely out.
The phone had gone unused for so long he had trouble tracking its ringing down to a pocket of the tweed coat he hadn’t worn since Hugo called it maidenly, a few days before.
It was a woman. Fifty-something. Maybe younger, but she sounded careworn. ‘I found your note,’ she said at once.
‘Oh God,’ Chris said. ‘Is the caddy yours? I was so sure someone had stolen and dumped it and it was getting ruined by the damp. Where are you? I can jump in the car and bring it—’
She laughed, cutting him off. ‘We don’t want it back! I wish you all joy of it. Just tell me…have you opened it?’
‘Well, I have to say I was a bit cheeky and I picked the lock with a couple of paperclips. The spring in the hinge was a bit of a surpr—’
There was a clatter.
‘Hello?’ he called out.
She had just dropped her phone on the nearest surface. Her voice grew rapidly fainter. She was calling to someone and laughing. Laughing almost wildly. ‘Dee? Dee! He opened it! Oh my God! At last! Dee?’ Her tone changed. ‘Dee!’ There was silence for a minute then footsteps coming closer and her rapid, asthmatic breathing. Then came the sound of three digits being dialled and then her voice again, frantic now. ‘Bloody hell. Hang up, will you? I need to—’
Then it went dead as she succeeded in breaking the connection. Chris checked his phone’s record of incoming calls but the display logged her simply as Unknown.
Shaken, feeling a little bruised after the morning’s unexpected extra exertions, he pulled his dressing gown more tightly about him and poured two tumblers of restorative Barolo – they had slipped into a holiday habit of daytime drinking – and bore them upstairs.
Their grandly vaulted bedroom reeked of sex in a way it had surely never done in the bishop’s day. Hugo was still fast asleep, with just a sheet to cover him. His arms and legs were flung out in childlike abandon, as though sleep had caught him unawares. For all the room’s iodine reek and the tarry fingerprints on his cheek and neck, he had an air of innocence about him. Chris set the wine on the bedside table as silently as he could and gently drew the blankets over the sheet to keep him warm. He realized he was looking down at him fondly, hungry for nothing but the quiet pleasure of gazing unchecked. He saw that he was thinking of Hugo’s innocence as something lost.
As if by association, he glanced about them for the casket. For an instant he thought Hugo could have thrown it out in one of his new fits of t
emper, then he spotted it on its side beneath the chair where he had tossed his clothes earlier. It was still gaping open but when he picked it up he found its lid closed quite easily and stayed closed. Whatever had the woman been making such a fuss about? He set it on the dressing table, opening and shutting it a few times to see if there were some hidden catch he had missed. The spring must have broken when the casket fell to the floor. In the looking glass he saw Hugo stir, wake and stare at him from the mass of pillows.
‘What are you up to?’
He whipped around guiltily. ‘Playing with the box,’ he said.
Then Hugo’s eyes took on that glinting blackness again and Chris felt compelled to go to the bedside and offer him his glass of wine. If he looked even half as shattered as he felt, he must look half-dead, he thought. He longed for nothing and nobody but a long, inactive sleep followed, perhaps, by a gentle day of church-crawling across the Humber in northern Lincolnshire but, probed by Hugo’s gaze, he found he was getting hard again.
‘So. How did we compare?’ Hugo asked. ‘Was he man enough for you? Hmm?’
Chris tugged back the sheet to press one of Hugo’s feet to his face and take its big toe deep into his mouth. He heard the unmistakable clack of the casket’s lid flying open again.
There were only two days of honeymoon left. The ever-shrinking part of his mind that was still alert to things like time, diaries, responsibility and the need to return to his primary-school job the following week, struggled to form a plan and hold it in mental place long enough for its execution. A fox’s yelping woke him in the depths of that night, while Hugo was still asleep, and he was able to slip across the room and close the box again. But when sunlight returned and Hugo had finished with him for the moment and gone to take a much-needed bath, he found the box open again and again as hard to close and keep closed, as if some unseen force were holding it wide. He knew he could only think or act freely when Hugo was asleep or out of the room. He hurried downstairs, past the mercifully closed bathroom door, found the bent paperclips in one of the plates Hugo had been using as an ashtray for his new cigar habit, and hid them in his dressing gown pocket. Then he hung the gown on the back of his bedroom chair and left the box close by it, oh so naturally positioned on the dressing table.
He knew minutes later he would neither know nor care about any of this but sensed, with a shred of survivor’s instinct, that if he woke again in the night he would have exact comprehension of where they were and why. Having so plotted, it was with a mix of regret and sweet, quasi-suicidal abandon that he gave up halfway through the attempt to dress and went to tap on the bathroom door to ask if Master wanted his back scrubbed.
The day that followed was especially draining. Hugo fetched no more what he called takeaways but he insisted they drive all the way to a windswept funfair near Bridlington where he made Chris ride every sickening ride with him although he knew – or always used to know – that they brought on his labyrinthitis. And everywhere he flirted – with men, women and children alike. Everyone caught in that glinting stare responded like a dog to roasting chicken. Hugo seemed to feed off their eagerness to please, as if their quick devotion were a kind of fuel to him, but there was always a trace of mockery in his expression as they fawned on him.
‘He despises us,’ Chris thought, briefly freed by Hugo’s taking a long, lascivious lick from a small boy’s cheerfully proffered ice cream. ‘He despises us for being merely human.’ But then Hugo flicked his eyes back to him and smirked in a way that made Chris breathless with jealousy. He would have brained the child had its mother not arrived to snatch it away with a hot-cheeked apology.
After the possibilities of crude sensation had been exhausted in the funfair, Hugo made them gorge on seafood then he drove them at maniacal speed out to a car park near the bleak tip of Spurn Head where he pleasured a sequence of birdwatchers in their cars while Chris looked helplessly on through the misting car windows, half-wishing a policeman would intervene.
After such quantities of sea air and exercise and the wine Hugo encouraged him to drink over supper, they slept profoundly and it was not the fox yelping but an urgent need to piss that woke Chris shortly after dawn. Returning from the bathroom he saw Hugo’s sleeping face, blameless and benign, and remembered the casket. He hurried over to it, all but slammed it shut then frantically worked the paperclips in its lock, his fingers cramped from tension in his hurry to work the mechanism before his clattering woke Hugo.
It locked and held fast. He tugged at the lid to test it then bundled the thing into a bag of dirty laundry that lay ready for their departure. He slipped back to the bed.
‘Hugo? Hugs?’ Hugo stirred at his touch and mumbled grouchily. The second he opened his eyes Chris could see he was himself again. They no longer looked coal-black but had resumed their old watery grey. They were even a little bloodshot. And his voice was his own once more: soft-edged, slightly peevish.
‘What time is it?’ he muttered.
‘It’s early. Sorry. I couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d slip into town and bring back papers and croissants for our last breakfast. Before we start packing up, I mean.’ He kissed him on the forehead. ‘Go back to sleep.’
There was really no need to hide the casket but he left it in the laundry bag just to be safe and carried it down the winding stair with a heap of books, as though starting to load up the car.
He found a locksmith after driving around Selby’s one-way system a few times. He was clearly the first customer of the day. A small, sharp-featured woman in a nylon housecoat unbolted the door to let him in.
‘He’s in the back finishing his breakfast,’ she said shyly. ‘I’ll send him out,’ and she darted through a curtain at the back of the shop. Chris could smell toast and bacon. It felt curiously intimate, as if he were sharing their kitchen. The man, pinker, larger, brought his mug of tea out with him. He seemed friendlier than the wife, the sort of man who kept a lurcher and would murmur tendernesses to it when away from the house. Chris felt a pang of guilt and half thought to leave the box under his arm and make something up, buy a padlock instead. But then he saw himself in the mirrored back of a key ring display, saw how exhaustion had aged him by years in a matter of days, and he resumed his ruthless purpose.
‘I need a key making for this,’ he said. ‘And the lock freeing up.’
The man took the box. ‘Oh yes?’ he said. ‘Ooh. Heavy, ain’t it?’
‘Er. Yes. Don’t shake it, though. It’s…it’s quite valuable.’
‘Well that shouldn’t be a problem. I can do it while you wait, if you like. I’ve a stash of old keys out back. One of them’s bound to fit.’
The wife reappeared briefly, to cast an appraising glance over the man’s shoulder at the casket. She must have been listening in from the breakfast table.
‘No hurry,’ Chris stammered. ‘Honestly. I’ve got a few other things to do in town. You finish your tea. I’ll take one of your cards, if I may.’
‘Right you are, then.’
As he left, the bell on the door jangled behind him in tinny accusation.
He drove off, bought a paper, found an old-fashioned baker’s and bought them rolls for breakfast still warm from the oven and, from a shop nearby, local butter and honey. Instead of returning to the locksmith’s, he drove back out towards Cawood and stopped by an ancient phone box on the edge of the village. He glanced at his watch. They’d surely had long enough. He took out the locksmith’s cheap little card and rang the number on it.
The woman answered. A woman. Her voice was transformed and husky, somehow lubricated. ‘Hello?’
‘Oh. Yes. I brought the little tea caddy in for your husband about forty minutes ago. I wondered if he’d managed to get it open.’
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘He got it open all right. Didn’t you?’ Her voice hardened suggestively. ‘I said didn’t you!’
Somebody mumbled something then cried out as if struck.
When she came back on the phone, her voic
e was so close he imagined he felt her breath, hot at his ear. ‘That was very clever,’ she purred. ‘And rather nasty. Christopher.’
His hand shook so violently as he hung up that the receiver bounced off its bracket and swung with a clunk against the wall. He lurched out to the car and sped back to find Hugo.
The gatehouse was still quite silent. There were no signs of life from upstairs yet but neither was there that sense of all-seeing malignancy, he realized. They were free. They had been spared. He walked to the kitchen to put on the kettle and toss the rolls in the oven to keep warm. He poured an orange juice and downed it in three greedy draughts, its taste as fresh and clean as the reassertion of order. Then he filled a second glass and carried it upstairs.
Hugo didn’t stir as he came in. He lay there with a hand thrown across his face as though to ward off a blow from an unseen assailant. It was such a pleasure to see him simply lie there, homely again, even vulnerable. Chris wouldn’t wake him straight away.
DREAM LOVER
‘What do you mean?’ she said, fingers twined in his hair as he continued to nuzzle her awake. ‘Of course you do. Everyone does.’
‘Not me.’
‘You must. If you didn’t you’d…’
‘Die?’ He looked up from the breast to which he was paying sleepy homage. He grinned. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘But everyone dreams. You must simply forget them.’
He shrugged. It could not have mattered less to him. She loved that in a man; that guileless, unquestioning confidence in his own normality.
‘So how about you?’ he asked. ‘How’d you sleep?’
‘Fine,’ she said, thoughtfully.
‘Did you…?’
‘Well yes,’ she said, remembering. ‘I did. It was rather amazing. You took me to a huge hotel and I was so excited but when they gave me the key to our room it was just a sort of drawer with a mattress in it. Not a room at all.’