Hideous Beauty

by William Hussey

  I can see Ellis is turned on by his own words. His finger flicks to the stereo and he silences George Ezra, something he never does. His tongue moistens his lips. I swallow hard. And now his hand is on my headrest. It’s in my hair. I roll with his touch, my eyes closed, my breath catching. His knuckles trace the contours of my face. His palm presses my chest. I arch my back to meet him and his hand slips under my T-shirt, and all he has to do is brush my nipple and I moan.

  His hand is gone. No, you bloody tease! But then it’s back. My right knee…Ellis’s fingers crabbed there and fanning out. It’s a spot that makes me go weak; a place I had no idea about until El found it a month ago. He moves on, slowly, slowly, inside my thigh, a warm hand, pressing and pushing upwards.

  “Ellis,” I whisper. “El, I—”

  And then his hand whips away, and he screams, and the car screams, and the trees race towards us.

  Something had flashed into the road – white on black – a comet streaking across the dark strip of tarmac. People, animals? No idea. Their blur was all I could make out before El wrenched the steering wheel and the car spun ninety degrees, its back wheels shrieking.

  The g-force slams me sideways and I bump shoulders with El. He’s straight as an arrow in the driver’s seat, hands cemented to the wheel, foot ramming the brake. His shirtsleeves have hitched up and I can see his beautiful, self-designed tattoos spiralling down his arm.

  He grabs the handbrake and wrenches it up. Hey, he’s the master of the handbrake turn, right? But this is too much for the old Nissan. El has ridden his luck with it once too often, maybe, and if it’s heading for the scrapyard, it’s not going alone. A split second later we’re facing the opposite direction, half in the road, half on the forest verge, and my passenger-side wheels are leaving the ground.

  What starts as an almost tender motion picks up momentum. All at once, the Nissan hurls itself onto its roof, leaving the road completely and tossing us into the forest. I thrust my hands against the ceiling just as the windscreen buckles and breaks. Glass pixelates, frosts over. My passenger window shatters too, the impact knocking the safety glass into the car. It’s a weirdly soft sort of implosion, a bit like a sudden gale of snow, and I don’t know if it’s the pieces of window or a bit of random junk – loose CDs, pens, books, the little snow globe I gave El the first night we ever spent together, everything’s flying around in this insane vortex – but somehow I’m cut and a flash of blood strikes across my eyes.

  The world spins downwards. My body shuttles away from El and hits the passenger door with a dull crack. In the hard flashes that come to me then, I realize I’ve been lucky. If my arm had flailed out of the broken window it would have been crushed as the Nissan tipped over. A rectangle of dewy spring grass fills the window and I crane my neck sideways as we continue to roll. I catch a glimpse of El hanging face down in his seatbelt, cradled there like a fly in a web.

  I try to reach for him. He looks so scared. El is hardly ever scared. He reaches out. Then the car is upright again and gravity drops our arms to our sides. Misty through the fractured windscreen, I see the bonnet sheared into something like a mountain range. Smoke hisses from jagged peaks. But the car seems to have stopped moving. This is it, I think. Thank God, it’s over. A few cuts and bruises, maybe a broken bone or two, but in a couple of hours we’ll be sitting up in our adjoining hospital beds, reliving this close call, laughing at mortality. Adjoining beds. I wonder if we can get away with pushing them together when no one’s looking? I almost smile.

  I see El take a breath. He’s hurt. But not badly.

  Don’t say badly.

  And then it’s like that moment when the washing machine fools you. When it’s finished what seems to be the final super-mad spin cycle and starts to whir down, only for it to start up again the second you reach for the door release. I begin to call his name, my blood surging, when El is suddenly thrust against the driver door.

  We’re rolling again, picking up speed, going faster if anything. As my seatbelt cuts into my shoulder and my head smacks the ceiling, I see the path we’ve cut through the tall grass, the trail of rubbish and broken belongings we’ve left in our wake. The wine bottle has been thrown clear and is now rolling down the hillside. Except it isn’t quite a hill. We left the road at that part of the forest where the trees are sparsest and the land drifts downwards, sloping its way through a clearing until it reaches a shingled shore.

  Hunter’s Lake.

  “No!” I scream as this new reality hits me. “NO!”

  Because I’m looking over at El and his eyes are shut. Not screwed tight in terror, but loosely lidded, like he’s drifted off to sleep. He is hurt. Badly. Half his face is awash with blood, like a red-lit Phantom of the Opera mask.

  “El!” I try to reach him, but the cyclone continues and he’s twisted and dangled in his seatbelt web. “EL, WAKE UP!”

  Through my window, then through his as we roll, I see the dark shimmer of the lake. They have punting and pedalos here in the summer. El and I haven’t spent a summer together yet. Messing about on Hunter’s Lake was a tiny part of the plan we made at last night’s picnic. The lake is bigger than I remember. They say a toddler drowned here once. She was chasing a butterfly and her parents weren’t watching. She flew with it right to the end of the diving pier, and then beyond.

  I don’t know when we hit the water. Maybe it’s the blood loss, but I pass out for a minute or two. It can’t be much longer than that, because when I come round we’ve finally stopped and we’re upright and the black water is only just beginning to slosh around my ankles. It seeps and gushes through a thousand different openings in the car, big and small, seen and unseen, and I swear it’s laughing at me.

  So you thought this was forever? it chuckles. There is no forever, Dylan. Not for you and him. There never was.

  It’s a warm night but the water’s cold and murky and stinks. My skin freezes as it oils its way slowly up my leg, across my knee and along my thigh, moving like an anti-Ellis, its touch intimate and disgusting. I try to free myself but the belt holds me fast. It’s jammed and for some reason I don’t have the strength to unclip it. It’s like my fingers are being worked by some drunk puppeteer. I watch them fumble and paw at the fastening, and all the while I switch my gaze from the creeping water to El and back again.

  Ironically, his seatbelt has snapped at the buckle. He’s free, slumped forward over the wheel, unmoving. For twenty heart-stopping seconds I think he’s not breathing. Then he takes a shallow, stuttering inhalation. I shout and plead with him, try to grab something random to throw at him, but my hands won’t do as they’re told and he won’t wake up. Gouts of red that make me shriek drop from his chin into the water. They billow around his waist and send out tentacles towards me.

  I turn to the broken window and the shore. We’re within a few breaststrokes of land but Hunter’s Lake is notorious for its deep and sudden plunges, and just as I’m about to cry out for help, the Nissan lurches sideways. The lake bed is a kind of loose black peat that squelches through your toes like sinking sand, clinging to you, trying to claim you. It’s a jealous lake and it wants me and Ellis.

  We begin to slide deeper and deeper. El’s side of the car is soon underwater but his window is intact. Fresh springs hiss through the cracks and shower his motionless face, washing it clean of blood. We’re drifting downwards, forty degrees maybe, and the lapping waterline bubbles up to El’s chin. My heart thunders. I thrash the water, rip my hand raw against the belt clip. Still my fingers won’t work properly. I glance right. Black, filthy, frothing water touches that beautiful bottom lip – the lip I used to catch between my teeth, teasing him. The lake quivers there for a moment and then begins to dribble into Ellis’s unresisting mouth.

  “No! Please, NO!”

  I can’t watch him drown. I want to die first. Please, God, let me die first.

  And then a miracle. The rear end of the car starts to pivot in the sludge, edging us around until, at last, we’re f
acing shoreward with the crumpled bonnet tipping up. Still unconscious, El gasps as the water slides from his face and flows backwards, over his shoulder, into the rear seats. I laugh through chattering teeth.

  “We’ll be okay,” I promise him. “We’ll be okay.”

  But the lake won’t give us up. Maybe it’s toying with us, I don’t know.

  The rear of the Nissan groans like some prehistoric animal caught in a tar pit and we begin to sink again. My T-shirt billows out as the water reinvades the front of the car. It chuckles as it creeps forward, like some bratty little kid that won’t stay strapped into its booster seat. Still harnessed by the belt, I manage to free my leg from the footwell and, straining, lurch sideways, kicking across the gear column. My trainer hits El in the ribs.

  “Wake up! El, please, if you love me, WAKE UP!”

  But he won’t. I kick until a spasm of cramp shoots down my frozen calf and makes me roar. Reluctantly, I draw my leg back. I’ve probably broken one of his ribs. I look at him through a haze of tears.

  “Please, El. Please. Please, I love you. I love you so much…” I whisper the words. Then scream: “Fuck you, Ellis! Don’t you dare die! Don’t you even dare do that to me! PLEASE! PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE! You’re killing me. You’re killing me!”

  I bellow against this new feeling. I hate him. Why won’t he wake up? He would if he really loved me.

  The car lunges backwards. The water laps at my throat. At his lips. My head swims. I shake myself. I’m so cold. Inside the car it’s getting darker. My anger starts to ebb. It doesn’t matter. Not really. I withdraw my torn-to-pieces hand from its futile battle with the belt and push it through the lake. It’s very hard and takes all my concentration. It’s just a slab of useless meat now; hardly any sensation at all. But I pray there’s a little feeling left. Just so I can touch him, one last time.

  My hand surfaces and I move it as gently as I can towards him. The lake is trying to make him drink again. I ignore it. I can’t save you from it, El. All I can do is this. I brush my icy fingers against his face; his wonderful light brown skin, his strong jaw, his perfect cheeks. There isn’t a millimetre of this face I haven’t kissed. Thank you, Ellis. Thank you for being my first. Thank you for being my friend. Thank you for showing me who I am.

  Who I was.

  Movement behind the shattered windscreen. A lurching, splashing darkness. My eyes flicker. I don’t want to stop touching El but I have nothing left. My fingers drift on the current as I feel my thoughts float with the lake. If there’s an afterlife, let me be with El. If there’s nothingness, that’s okay too. But don’t part us…

  Then an arm, warm, incredibly warm, reaches across my face and body. It presses against me and I breathe in its heat, like oxygen. There’s a moment of fumbling, and I’m released. The belt flashes past my eyes and I can’t believe this incredible sense of freedom. It feels like that moment after I told my family who I was. I’m giddy with possibility again.

  I turn, ready to make a grab for El, but my freedom vanishes. The same arm that saved me now destroys me. It takes hold of me somehow and, within a few seconds, I’m being dragged backwards through the broken window. I kick and fight but I’ve already used every morsel of strength. I scream, gag, try to reason with my rescuer. I don’t know what I say, maybe it’s just noise; I’m ignored anyhow. It’s lucky I’m skinny, I guess, because getting me out through the window seems easy enough. I drift back, back, back, and all I see before the darkness takes me is…

  El.

  I love you, I tell him. His face floats just above the waterline and seems to turn to me, like a child listening. You hear me, Ellis? I love you. My El. My heart. My reason. My future.

  My past.

  Darkness there and nothing more.

  It’s a line from an Edgar Allan Poe poem we studied in English. “The Raven”. It’s about this guy driven mad by grief when he loses the girl he loves. Everything he sees and hears reminds him of this one amazing person, and he’s so obsessed with her memory that he’d rather go mad than say goodbye forever.

  Poe knew his shit.

  I sit up in my hospital bed and stare at the empty bed across the aisle. That’s Ellis’s. No bastard had better take it. A nurse is gluing my head together – at least I think that’s what she’s doing. She did tell me. I forget. Anyway, she’s really nice and very gentle and keeps asking if what she’s doing hurts. I tell her no, but honestly? I couldn’t say. I tell her thank you when she’s finished. Maybe I don’t say it right. All I know is she gives me this long look and when I look back she does this little sniffy thing, like she’s embarrassed that her eyes are damp. I don’t know, are damp eyes considered unprofessional?

  Before she goes, she tells me I’m really lucky, I have the ward all to myself. It’s a sort of post-surgery ward, you see, and there was this really annoying cyberattack on the NHS today and the computers went down, so all non-emergency treatment was cancelled. She hopes there’s a special place reserved in hell for this particular hacker.

  “There’s no such place,” I say, and she nods and kind of bows and leaves.

  Jeeze, I think I totally freaked her out. And after she made my boo-boo all better too. Not much of a human being, am I? Practically a monster, really. Yeah. A snivelling little monster, up and breathing and dressed in his nice new jim-jams brought straight from home. Remember what El said he slept in when he was a kid? His underwear. Same filthy underwear, night after night after night, until he was so raw with rashes even his dad said maybe someone should wash those pants.

  But Dylan McKee? Well, I’ve always had everything I ever wanted, and I still ended up a whiny little bitch. If El had been given even a fraction of what I took for granted, just imagine what he could have achieved. But the universe doesn’t work for people like Ellis Bell, does it? Just as his life was turning around, he gets this card dealt to him. And all because he was making me feel better after I’d hassled him with my stupid questions and suspicions. If only he’d been watching the road, he’d have seen that bastard thing – whatever it was – darting out of the trees. But no. Because needy little Dylan needed reassuring again, Ellis Bell is dead.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Dylan, but your friend was found dead at the scene. Now, the police want to question you—”

  I look down at my empty left hand. The hand my mum held because my right is taped up and bandaged. I can see her hand there now as clearly as I can see the doctor who was standing at the end of the bed, even though Mum’s popped out for a coffee and the doc’s probably writing up his notes somewhere. He had these thick glasses, the doc, and this big bald head that made him look a bit like a nerdy Lex Luthor.

  “Oh, darling,” my mum said, squeezing my hand. “Thank goodness you’re all right.”

  “He’s going to be just fine,” said Dad from across the room.

  My brother just stood there, looking tired and confused. I glanced at him and thought: Was he right about you? Three girlfriends, yeah, but El’s gaydar is pretty spectacular. Was. No, is. I don’t care what Dr Luthor says.

  “Now, before my son answers any questions I want to make one thing absolutely clear,” said Dad in his pompous lawyer’s voice, even though he only ever really draws up people’s wills. I’d imagined him drawing up mine after I decided to leave all my worldly goods to El. When did that conversation happen, anyway? A week ago? A month? Dad butted into my thoughts: “Dylan will not be interviewed without legal representation.”

  “Well,” said the doctor, blinking, “that’s not really my department, but I believe the police only want a preliminary word. He won’t be interviewed tonight as such.”

  “Oh. Well then,” Dad huffed. “I suppose that’s all right.”

  “Poor Ellis,” said Mum, giving my hand another squeeze. “We all really liked him. Didn’t we, love?”

  “Eh?” Dad grunted.

  “Ellis. He was a nice boy, wasn’t he?”

  “Oh. Yes. Interesting. Interesting boy.
Very…”

  “Interesting,” I agreed, and my dad relaxed so much I wondered if Dr Luthor had given him an enema.

  “And very funny. Wasn’t he funny, Chris?”

  My brother dragged himself into semi-consciousness. “What? Oh, yeah. Funny. He was really funny.” I could practically hear the gears grinding into reverse. “I mean, funny ha-ha. Not weird-funny. You guys weren’t weird. Being gay isn’t weird at all. In fact, Hannah only just said tonight she thought you were really nice together. Cute.” He grasped at the word like a life jacket. “Really cute.”

  Hannah’s his old girlfriend. Number two since Christmas. The current one is Izzy.

  It was then that I noticed the doctor looking at me, and I couldn’t be sure – those lenses were so thick – but I thought I saw pity in his eyes. He consulted my chart and sighed.

  “Ellis was your boyfriend, Dylan?”

  “Yeah. He’s…he’s my boyfriend.”

  Dr Luthor nodded his great dome of a head. “Then you’ve lost someone very special. All right, once we’ve got your head fixed up, I think I’m going to allow the constable outside to have a few minutes with you, but then I’m going to prescribe a sedative, okay? It’s just something to help you sleep.”

  The doc checked my pulse, asked if I was warm enough, took my temperature, listened to my chest, grunted, made a note. While all this was going on, Mum said Dad and Chris were heading home; she would just go grab herself a coffee from the canteen and be right back. Dad said he was leaving his mobile for me and that he’d call first thing in the morning. Chris seemed at a loss. Then he gave me a thumbs up and appeared delighted with himself.

  I was left with Dr Luthor. He waved a pen light in front of my eyes.