Blue-Eyed Stranger

  Riptide Publishing

  PO Box 6652

  Hillsborough, NJ 08844

  www.riptidepublishing.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Blue Eyed Stranger

  Copyright © 2015 by Alex Beecroft

  Cover art: Lou Harper, louharper.com

  Editors: Sarah Frantz Lyons, KJ Charles

  Layout: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com/design.htm

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, and where permitted by law. Reviewers may quote brief passages in a review. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Riptide Publishing at the mailing address above, at Riptidepublishing.com, or at marketing@riptidepublishing.com.

  ISBN: 978-1-62649-212-7

  First edition

  April, 2015

  Also available in paperback:

  ISBN: 978-1-62649-213-4

  ABOUT THE EBOOK YOU HAVE PURCHASED:

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  Billy Wright has a problem: he’s only visible when he’s wearing a mask. That’s fine when he’s performing at country fairs with the rest of his morris dancing troupe. But when he takes the paint off, his life is lonely and empty, and he struggles with crippling depression.

  Martin Deng stands out from the crowd. After all, there aren’t that many black Vikings on the living history circuit. But as the founder of a fledgling historical reenactment society, he’s lonely and harried. His boss doesn’t like his weekend activities, his warriors seem to expect him to run everything single-handedly, and it’s stressful enough being one minority without telling the hard men of his group he’s also gay.

  When Billy’s and Martin’s societies are double booked at a packed county show, they know at once they are kindred spirits, united by a deep feeling of connectedness to their history and culture. But they’re also both hiding in their different ways, and they need each other to be brave enough to take their masks off and still be seen.

  To my therapist, with whose help I’ve been fighting my own depression.

  And to my husband who loves me even at my worst.

  About Blue Eyed Stranger

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Dear Reader

  Also by Alex Beecroft

  About the Author

  More like this

  “I am Hasheput! Tremble before my mighty sword!”

  Martin Deng detached himself from the shelter of the school’s back porch to watch tiny Trisha Nkembe flourishing her badminton racket like a legendary weapon of yore. She had an army of five followers, their scowly-faced seriousness a little belied by the plastic bobbles in their hair. They were facing off the dastardly Ammonites, led by Oscar Peterson in a bucket helmet liberated from the gym equipment storage room.

  Martin smiled and walked into the standoff, where he was eyed with resentment and trepidation, and one cry of “I never did nothing!” from Natalie Hoon in the back.

  “We don’t mean no harm,” Trisha got out, preempting his teacherly wrath. “We ain’t going to have a real battle. It’s a peace talk, right? Because they know already that Queen Hasheput is gonna smash their heads in if they try anything.”

  The combination of defiance and enthusiasm warmed his heart. “Oh, no,” he said, before he could spoil their playtime entirely. “That’s fine. It’s just that her name is Hatshepsut, which is a little harder to say but worth it, don’t you think? And it’s not a sword; it’s a mace.”

  “What’s a mace, sir?”

  “It’s like a big club.” He gestured. “Like a baseball bat, but made of stone. You really would be able to smash people’s heads in with it.”

  “Whoa, cool!”

  “Just—” he backed off with a hand gesture that gave the breezy May lunchtime back to them “—checking your historical accuracy. Might as well get it right, right? Carry on, then.”

  A real punch-up across the other side of the playground caught his eye, making him turn and stride away to break it up, but he did it with an internal smile. It was great to see the kids responding to history with such enthusiasm. Great to see the way they bloomed when they realized that the world was full of heroes just like them.

  He relived the memory of Trisha’s head coming up, her eyes widening, as he told them about the Nubians in Egypt. When he first took over the class, she had been one of those students who laid their heads on their arms, draped over their desks like the dead.

  He knew how she felt. The teaching of history in UK schools could so easily be an all-white thing. Not a deliberate glorification of the Anglo-Saxon race, nothing as egregious as that, but simply the underlying assumption that all the important things in world history had been done by white people, whether those people were British or Roman.

  Trisha’s astonishment when he began to put up images that proved there had been people of colour in Britain since Roman times, and that people of colour had had a long and glorious history in the world, had been echoed all over the class. Children who’d picked up the modern myth that all black people had once been slaves, and who therefore had rejected history as something they didn’t want to know about, suddenly began to see themselves as kings and prophets and world leaders.

  It was Martin’s magic. Once he’d seen the transformation in his black kids, he’d hunted down little-known facts for the children of other ethnicities, and for the girls. Through warrior queens, pioneer aviators, the Night Witches of the Second World War, and the pirate empire of Ching Shih, he had taught his girls that they too could be glorious. Now they came into his class prepared to be amazed and inspired. They came with their heads up and their little faces bright, reassured of their own noble heritage and potential.

  And apparently it spilled out onto the playground too.

  After dealing with the scrap before anyone got a bloody nose, he handed off the playground watch to Mrs. Hobbs, the chemistry teacher, so that he could retire to the staffroom and get some lunch.

  Satisfaction carried him bu
oyantly through corridors whose yellowed paint was pocked all over with the greasy spots of Blu-Tack. The macaroni art of the junior school wing gave way to the informational posters of the GCSE curriculum as he swung past the ground floor toilets, up two flights of stairs, and into the attic room the teachers had claimed for their own.

  Mr. McKay, the PE teacher, looked up from his Tupperware container of quinoa salad to say, “All right?”

  “Pretty good,” Martin agreed, putting the kettle on for a cup of tea and a pot of instant noodles. “You ever thought of teaching them fencing? They don’t know the first thing about real armed combat.”

  McKay laughed, and gave him the you’re a weirdo but you seem harmless expression he so often got when he forgot himself and talked about his obsessions. “Well now, I would have said that was a good thing. Actually, I think sports were invented to replace the use of lethal weaponry among our schoolchildren.”

  Early summer sunshine slanted into the room through the windows at the eaves and heated up the old sofas and the paint. With the advent of the hot dust smell he associated with summer, his mind turned to the weekend. The first show of the season.

  It was Friday, and freedom was only three hours away. And there were so many things he still had to do.

  The kettle switched itself off. “Yeah,” Martin said, tipping water on his lunch and filling the air with a smell like Marmite. “But you have to force them to do games. I bet they’d be queuing up for sword fighting, and it’s good exercise.”

  McKay looked at him sideways from beneath his sandy lashes. “You’re itching to get away, aren’t you? Got one of your events this weekend?”

  “How could you tell?” In Martin’s day, PE teachers had been nasty, small-minded little martinets. He was always thrown when McKay said something insightful.

  McKay laughed again. “Any time you start talking about sword fighting, I know you’re due in on Monday bruised and hungover and stinking of smoke.”

  Martin found himself by the window, gazing out over car parks and the backs of the suburban streets, tapping on the glass. He wasn’t sure if McKay’s comment had provoked his impatience, or if it had been simmering all day, simply interrupted by the satisfaction of having something he’d taught finally sink in.

  “Well, it would be good if I could get away.” Articulating the sentiment seemed to make it worse. “I’ve got a show over in Trowchester that opens at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Which means I’ve got to get the car packed and drive over there tonight . . .”

  And I have to unpack when I’m there, and set up my tent and the work shelter, and find the people in charge of providing sand and wood for the firebox, and locate the standpipes for water. Which will inevitably not be turned on yet. And hunt down the guy responsible to get him to turn them on. And fill the water barrels, and haul them from tap to tent. And cut up the wood because it will be too thick. And inflate my mattress. And locate a shop where Edith can buy fresh milk and bread. And . . .

  Fucking organisers who wanted their shows open first thing in the morning had no idea. If he had to spend all day at school first, he’d be doing all of it in the dark, working flat out until midnight or later. He’d start the weekend exhausted and cranky, and it would only go downhill from there.

  “I’ve actually only got one lesson scheduled for this afternoon,” he ventured.

  McKay snorted, and rose to check the timetable pinned on the corkboard by the fridge, above the dozens of used tea bags heaped on the empty foil takeaway container. “I . . . happen to be free at that time. But I don’t know shite about history.”

  Tempting. Very tempting. “I . . . uh. I have a programme about the Air Transport Auxiliary I’ve been meaning to show them for the Second World War module. If you were kind enough to take over for me, all you’d need to do would be to wheel the TV in and switch it on.”

  McKay put his whistle between his teeth and gave him a double thumbs-up. “But you’ll owe me. Next sports day, you’ll be my second-in-command.”

  Martin rolled his eyes as though he were very put-upon, but couldn’t help grinning, immensely relieved. This would help so much. “It’s a deal.”

  His back was to the door, and his nose in his plastic pot of noodles as he slurped them down. He didn’t register there was something wrong until McKay straightened up, tucked his whistle inside his shirt and gave him the urgent side-eye of doom.

  Only then did he hear the faint creak of leather shoes and scent the Old Spice aftershave of the Head’s PA, standing silently, judgmentally, directly behind him.

  Glossy was the word that came to mind when Martin contemplated the Head’s personal assistant. One of the new breed of young men who spent more time than pageant queens beautifying themselves. Charlie’s carefully cropped red hair had a curling spiral shaved above one ear. There was a gold ring in his left eyebrow, but from the neck down he was plastic perfect, as though he had spent his lunch hour pressing his slacks and starching the points of his collar.

  “Mr. Deng. The Head would like a word with you.”

  Martin’s good mood took a nosedive, as though the engines had cut out catastrophically on both wings. “I’ll be right along. Let me just . . .” He waved his fork to illustrate the inch of noodles and the half cup of tea he had left to consume.

  “Of course.” A cold smile, too indifferent to be called hostile, and the PA departed.

  “I hear tell he files his socks on the Dewey Decimal System,” McKay murmured sympathetically, “and only goes home to plug himself into the wall to recharge.”

  The noodles had in fact lost their appeal. Martin pinched the foil cover back in place over the top of the tub and dumped them in the bin. “What have I done now, I wonder?”

  “One way to find out.”

  The school was laid out on a roughly cruciform pattern, all four corridors coming together to form a central hub. Here, the desks of the school’s administrative staff surrounded the inner sanctum of the Head’s office. Martin waved to Maureen on reception, but she was too busy trying to puzzle out a spreadsheet—nose pressed to the computer screen—to acknowledge him.

  Going past, he stopped outside the white-painted door in the white-painted wall, retucked his T-shirt into his trousers, and smoothed down his jacket sleeves.

  The door sat ajar in its frame. Snatches of voices filtered through the crack. Martin stepped up to knock, and heard the gravelly alto of the Head’s voice scoff, “I even heard he might be gay.”

  He froze midmovement. His heart stilled and his ears strained to hear more. Charlie was saying something now, but it was too smooth, too low-key to make out.

  “Well, one doesn’t want that kind of person in charge of vulnerable children.”

  The air around Martin burned away in a short-lived inferno of rage, and when it was gone, fear rushed in to fill the gap. He loved this job, this school, but damn, he despised the Head, and she . . . well she obviously returned the sentiment. But she couldn’t do anything. Even if she did find out he was gay—and God knew how she would do that when he hadn’t had time for a relationship in the last three years—she couldn’t fire him for it. He would take it to an employment tribunal. He would win.

  And then everyone would know.

  He swallowed, all the joy of the playground gone beyond recall. He wasn’t ready for anyone to know. Not yet. Not with his father already disappointed he was a jobbing teacher and not a professor. Not with his mother already blaming herself for his sister’s depression, certain to blame herself for this too.

  Queasy, seasick from being tossed between anger and dread, he pushed the door open without knocking and went in.

  “. . . don’t want to do anything illegal.”

  The door bounced off the rubber stop screwed into the blue carpet. Charlie fell silent and turned to look at him, pulling the lever arch file he carried closer to his chest.

  Behind the desk, the Head placed her pen carefully in its penholder. She had finely coiffed bright silver h
air and wore a black polyester blouse printed with white dots.

  “Thank you, Charlie.”

  She indicated the seat across from herself, and as Martin lowered himself into it, Charlie left the room and closed the door behind him.

  “Mr. Deng. I won’t keep you long. I know you have a lesson coming up in—” she checked her watch, which hung around her neck on a chain like a steampunk pendant “—ten minutes. I presume you know why you’ve been called here.”

  “I don’t,” Martin said curtly. If she was going to insult him, she could damn well have the courage to do it to his face. “I’ve not been made aware of any problem.”

  “Oh well, consider this fair warning, then.” She smoothed her skirt over her knee and tilted her office chair back to stare out of one of the small windows through which she kept her eye on the surrounding desks. Her pink lipstick matched her nail varnish so perfectly it looked as though she’d lacquered her lips.

  Time was suspended for an agonising moment, and then she began to speak. “I’m afraid, Mr. Deng, that your performance is subpar. I’m going to have to insist on some changes in future. Firstly, this is a school into which parents compete to place their children. Your appearance should reflect that. This—” she gestured at his clothes “—is unacceptable.”

  He could see that, he supposed. Truth was, he’d put on something this morning that he would be able to load the car in. The work shelter was coated inside with soot, the cooking equipment coated with it outside, so he was wearing a black Metallica T-shirt, and perhaps he should have gone the extra step and added Get changed into camping tat to the long list of things he had to do this evening.

  Acknowledging the fairness of her point, he nodded, chastened and not liking the feeling very much.

  “Your timekeeping leaves a great deal to be desired.”

  The weight in his stomach sank a little lower. Looked like she had a point there too. “I’m sorry?”

  “Unpaid leave is for emergencies, Mr. Deng. Not so you can drop your responsibilities here whenever your bizarre hobby calls you.”

  Guilt began to tip back into anger again. “That’s not fair. I don’t do it that often. It’s been, what? Three times this year so far.”