Trowchester Blues Page 10

  But neither had the energy or courage to insist on going to a doctor. His father did not approve of needing the doctor, didn’t approve of weakness or sickness. Even if they were too worthless to avoid illness altogether, they had both been trained for years not to let such a sin show. When the cuts swelled and reddened and began to seep, Michael had bought antiseptic cream from the chemist with his pocket money, and his mother had smilingly told him he was her angel, that everything was all right, that she was much better now, even as she began to stink.

  There were stains from infection on the sofa too, because when she died of it, Michael had put the covers through a hot wash on the washing machine, not knowing that would fix the stain in and make it indelible.

  Infection, and the blood poisoning that came with it, was a fucking awful way to go, and he didn’t understand—even now, thirty years later, he didn’t understand how his father could bear to sit on the fucking couch, in the same fucking house where she had been driven to do that to herself, and look at the bloodstains while he watched the TV.

  Bastard. The bastard. The fucking, fucking bastard.

  And he kind of resented her a little bit too, because she’d gone away and left him alone with it. But that was shit and unworthy of him, and he wished he could cut that feeling right out. Maybe with the same knife.

  He choked in a strangled breath and stopped. The sofa lay dismembered about him, the room covered in fluff and horsehair. His hair and clothes were drenched with sweat and gritty with dust, and his limbs shook. Picking up the biggest of the pieces, he levered it through the doors and dumped it in the skip. When the whole thing was gone, he felt a little better. Calmer. Emptier.

  Might as well follow it with everything else: the TV, the ornaments, the paintings, the hi-fi, the chairs, and the carpet.

  By four in the morning he was ready to drop, but he stood in a reclaimed space, torn back to the bones. His hands and knees were like water. He fumbled whatever he tried to pick up. Opening the door, stumbling down the garden, finding his bed in the narrowboat felt like an unattainable goal. Kneeling in the bared room, he toppled slowly sideways, just to rest for a few moments while he got up the energy to move.

  He awoke two hours later, stiff as hell and freezing, with a headache like a diamond drill boring its way through his skull above his right eye. He wanted a coffee and a shower and painkillers. Lots and lots of painkillers. But he still didn’t think he could face the journey down to the bottom of the garden to get them.

  Necessity drove him upstairs to the bathroom, where he soaked for half an hour in a scalding bath before the cold was fully driven from his bones and some flexibility returned to his overexerted muscles. The bathroom wasn’t so bad. As the only room in the house with a lockable door, it had often been his refuge as a child, and it still carried echoes of safety. But he could hardly stay in here all day, and he wanted coffee.

  Locating fresh clothes from a box in the hallway, he dressed and brewed coffee in the kitchen with a small feeling of satisfaction. It wasn’t much, but he’d conquered two rooms and spent some part of the night here. He could do this—reclaim this territory for himself, not have it reclaim him.

  When the coffee and ibuprofen had eased the headache a little, he went back upstairs, put his hand on the handle of his parents’ bedroom and tried to turn it. He made it halfway before love and despair and hopeless bitterness lanced out from the metal and pierced his hand.

  “Fuck.” He dropped it and backed away. Stood in the centre of the upstairs landing breathing hard and holding his clenched hand against his chest. “Damn it!” They were fucking memories, nothing more. Why was he so bloody pathetic? Such a waste of space and air?

  Okay, okay. He unclenched his fist and used it to cover his face. So he wasn’t doing that today. There were other useful things he could do.

  He tried to enumerate them as he fled downstairs, stuffing his feet in his shoes and his arms in his coat like he was being pursued. He could order wood and begin the process of laying out the new boat. He could buy paint and paint the narrowboat so it was a decent place to live. He could drive back to London and beg to be reinstated in his job.

  Instead, he locked the front door behind him and, without thought, snapped there like a pole of a magnet to its opposite, he found himself knocking on the cephalopod knocker of Finn’s bookshop. The only thing moving on an early-morning street that hadn’t yet begun to wake.

  No answer. But he wasn’t having that. He carried on knocking. He was going to carry on knocking until Finn came, because there simply wasn’t anything else to do.

  Footsteps in the hall. “I fucking swear.” Finn’s voice made it through the door, sharp and flat with annoyance and something Michael might almost have called fear. “If that’s you two . . .”

  Rattle of key in the lock and the door swung partially open, stopping at the taut end of a short security chain that Michael could have broken with one good push. He was going to have to say something to Finn about putting a spyhole in the door, particularly if the man was already having trouble of some sort.

  They looked at one another through the gap. Finn in a pine-coloured dressing gown atop soft blue cotton pyjama trousers, with his asymmetric hair flattened by the pillow as if tiny aliens had been making crop circles in it. His face morphed out of threat and into greeting in a way that might have been funny had he not also been carrying a raised cricket bat as an obvious weapon.

  “Hey,” said Michael gently, surprised to find that his voice sounded hoarser than normal, as though his throat was raw. “You having some kind of problem with the neighbours?”

  “It’s these e-book retailers.” Finn closed the door briefly to slip off the chain, then opened it wide and made an elegant gesture suggesting he should come in. “Amazon, you know. They’re not joking when they say Amazon is driving small booksellers out of business. You should see some of the toughs they send around.”

  Michael gave an uneasy smile and came in from the cold. He didn’t like being lied to, no matter how transparent and how harmless the lie was. But he also had nowhere else to go that could teach him how to be human again. He needed . . . He didn’t know what he needed, but he was pretty sure he would find it here.

  “I’d ask what brings you here this early—” Finn tucked the bat under one arm and took Michael’s elbow with his other hand, leaning towards him in a strangely formal contact-free hug. “But I can see it’s urgent. Come on up, and I’ll make you breakfast.”

  Abruptly, Michael was ashamed of himself for imposing. “I’m sorry,” he said, following Finn up the narrow stairs and into a large, bright kitchen lined with bookshelves. A country-style, scrubbed oak table in the centre of it held a tragic pile of glister, within which the morning sunlight was picking out feathers and hooves and the curls of a glassy mane.

  “What happened?” Drawn to it as to a corpse, Michael recognised in the wrecked pieces the Pegasus statue he had admired in the bookshop’s biggest room.

  Finn turned from putting beans in the coffeemaker, gave him an oblique look, his bottom lip nipped between his teeth. “My theory is he tried to fly. It’s tragic when one has a nature that doesn’t fit one’s form.”

  “So.” Michael sat at the table amid the scatter of pieces and glue. “You don’t want to tell me anything.” He fitted two pieces of lower hind leg together, located the third at the base of a stack of notebooks. “Fair enough. But bear me in mind if you need any help.”

  “You’re sweet.” Finn set velvet-black coffee down in front of him, with cream and croissants, butter, and jam. “And you’re good at that.” He examined the entire leg Michael had already reassembled. “Stick it together while I shower?”

  “You got anything other than this yellow glue? Because this is going to show every crack like a road map.”

  Finn smiled. “That’s the idea. It’s my take on kintsukuroi. There are flecks of gold in the glue. It will dry clear except for those, and all the cracks will become trai
ls of golden stars.”

  “Kintsukuroi?” Michael asked, trying to wrap his head around the idea that you would want the damage to show.

  “The art of putting a broken thing back together in a way that makes it more beautiful than it was before. It’s a Japanese idea.” Finn’s face pinched for a moment, the encroachment of middle-age showing in the creases around his mouth. “Something I think that offers a little hope to us all.”

  Michael caught his hand and pressed it. They stilled for a moment in silence before Finn pulled away to disappear up another flight of stairs. Michael drank his coffee and began to piece Pegasus back together. He had a whole wing done by the time Finn got back, pink from the shower, dressed in nautical style in navy flannels and a navy-piped white woollen jumper. His entrance perturbed the net curtains at the window and let a band of sunlight fall across the wing, showing the golden galaxies aswirl within the feathers.

  The beauty of the thing brought out a disbelieving anguish in Michael’s chest. “It really is better.”

  “Oh ye of little faith.” Finn sat down opposite him, cradling his own coffee between both hands. There was a bruised darkness to his eyes that Michael didn’t like, as though Finn felt just as fragile this morning as Michael did. “So what brings you to my door at this ungodly hour?”

  “I . . .” Michael turned away from the man’s riddling green gaze as too much emotion choked him. He wanted to tell Finn everything, have the man piece him back together in such a way that he too was better than before. He just didn’t know where to start. Didn’t dare. “I had a bad night. With my ghosts, you know? In the house.”

  “And you came to me to soothe your pain?” Finn reached over and snatched the last bite of croissant from Michael’s plate, licking his fingers delicately to catch the crumbs after. “Good choice.”

  He leaned into Michael’s space, close enough to bring his mouth within whispering distance of Michael’s ear. The stir of his warm breath and the faint butterfly wing graze of his lips made every inch of Michael’s skin shiver with sensitivity.

  “Do you know what I suggest?”

  Right now, Michael could only think of one thing. He swallowed, turned quickly, and managed to catch the edge of Finn’s smile between his lips before Finn drew away. The little touch still filled his mouth with the taste of tin, spiking him through with the intensity of his need.

  “Let’s go to the fair.” Finn stood, smiling down on him as though he knew exactly what had just happened and it delighted him to know he was a vicious, ball-breaking tease.

  “The fair?” Michael managed at length, steadying his voice by a heroic application of will.

  “Farnham Food Festival.” Finn picked his overcoat from the back of the door and folded it over his arm. “Twenty minutes away by car. I can ask young Kevin to man the shop—he appreciates the hazard pay of working alone—and they always have three good secondhand book stalls that are worth a look. New stock for me. Candy floss and duck races and guess the weight of the marrow for you. It’ll be . . . educational. You can win me something in the shooting gallery. I’m sure the reading room could do with a stuffed plush giraffe.”

  “I’ve never actually trained with a weapon.” Michael followed Finn back downstairs, feeling bemused but already a great deal happier. “I might disappoint you.”

  “You missed my sarcasm there?” Finn had drawn humour back on like armour, like Michael’s stoic calm. He appreciated it. “If you do win an enormous stuffed toy, you should feel free to keep it all to yourself. I’ll simply enjoy your prowess. I’m driving, by the way.”

  The morning sunlight only broadened as they drove through wooded valleys where trout streams glistened, up onto the high moor and then down again into the next valley over. Michael’s dark mood had lifted, and the purr of Finn’s MG engine and the occasional brush of the man’s shoulder against his felt raw and intense in a way he couldn’t completely attribute to too little sleep and too much coffee.

  Farnham was a little grey town around a little grey church. The Kings Arms pub faced the village fish pond, where a couple of keen anglers sat hunched over their rods. Between the church and the pub spread the village green, smooth enough for cricket in the warmer weather and now occupied by a score or so of trestle tables, ice cream and kebab vans, a hog roast, and a marquee. Finn and Michael arrived so early the stallholders were still setting out bunting, and the hog roast had not yet begun to sizzle.

  “Business first.” Finn dragged Michael into the marquee and up to one of the larger stalls, where a rotund lady with bottle-glass spectacles blinked at them both in half recognition.

  “Dorothy, my love, my sweet. What have you got for me today?”

  Dorothy rolled her eyes at Michael, who smirked back. “See for yourself,” she said, indicating the spread of books on the table, and the pile of plastic crates behind her that held hundreds of others. “And in the meantime your friend will . . .?”

  Finn raised his eyebrows at Michael as though astonished at the idea that he might need occupying, but he reached out and snagged a copy of Kraken by China Miéville and pressed it into Michael’s hands. “Have you read this one?”

  “No.” Michael turned it over to read the blurb. He preferred action/adventure to be honest, but this looked weird enough to take his mind off his own troubles.

  “There we go, then. I will browse through Dorothy’s stall, and then move on to . . . is Rob here today?”

  “Mm-hmm. And Steven.”

  “And then move on to Rob and Steven, hoping for bargains that they are undoubtedly too savvy to afford me. And Michael will get himself a second breakfast, read his book in the sunshine, and accompany me into the garden of delights once I’m done.”

  It proved a good plan. Michael found a bench in full sunshine, began the book, stretched out to get more comfortable, and nodded off. By the time he awoke, Finn had finished his wheeler-dealing and locked his purchases in the boot of the car. They spent the afternoon going round the rest of the stalls together, barbequed pork rolls in hand. They drank mulled wine and sampled homemade fudge and salted liquorice—which was both bizarre and moreish but sent them into the beer tent with a powerful thirst.

  If he’d been asked to guess, earlier, how Finn would take to an event like this, Michael would have imagined the man disapproving, in some elitist, superior, cynical way. But the reality was far from that. Finn rarely stopped smiling, picking up the handcrafted knickknacks to feel their quality, laughingly losing a pound on the hoopla stall, and making Michael squirm by sampling every bottle of wine there was to sample without buying a single one.

  There was alas no shooting range, but Michael made up for it by winning a bottle of shampoo and an egg cosy on the tombola and pressing them earnestly into Finn’s hands.

  The laugh he got as a result stopped the day for him, held him suspended in a timeless moment surrounded by trees and rustling flags, bright against the bright-blue sky, and Finn’s face brighter, open for once, with the sunlight picking out his freckles and being put to shame by his warmth.

  Michael tried to shake the revelation off, but it wouldn’t budge—the crisis point when something that had been tipping in his chest finally reached the point of no return and fell. He closed his hands tighter over Finn’s and held on until the man was looking at him properly, a little startled, a little vulnerable, pushed out of comfort and into intimacy. Then he used the grip to pull Finn in and kiss him properly, nipping Finn’s upper lip between his own.

  For a hot, glorious second Finn kissed back, but when Michael stepped in to close the distance between them, he set a hand on Michael’s chest and pushed him back, his mouth still soft and his eyes wary. “Not in public. This isn’t London.”

  “Okay.” But it wasn’t. Michael needed to strip Finn out of those clothes, to know what he felt like underneath, to touch him everywhere and fold all the pain and grief and uncertainty into his refuge, to be held and healed. “Is there somewhere private we can go?”


  “Keen, are we?” Finn gave him a stronger version of his smug, teasing expression from the kitchen and waved an admonishing finger in his face. “Uh-uh. I want to poke around the church here. It’s Anglo-Saxon, apparently. And then I expect dinner, which you will pay for because I don’t go out with cheapskates. And then you’ll prove to me that you can keep your hands to yourself on the drive home, because you’re a big guy and I don’t want a big guy with no self-control.”

  He put his hand back on Michael’s chest, in between the open flaps of his jacket and his shirt, right where there was only a thin layer of soft cotton between his skin and Michael’s. Michael’s heart thundered beneath his palm, but he took a deep breath, ignored his tingling lips and the ache of pleasure in his cock, and said, “Yeah. Okay. Wise policy there. I can see that.”

  Finn’s approval was laced with ruthlessness. He dropped his hand to Michael’s belt and tugged him in, closing the distance with the swagger of a lion tamer putting his head in the lion’s mouth, daring it to disobey. With the small part of Michael’s mind still capable of rational thought, it occurred to him that Finn had put himself very firmly in charge, and oh God. Oh God. He liked that.

  The rest of the day passed in snatches. The cool of a little church, Finn’s hands moving in expressive curves as he said something Michael didn’t catch about a faded triptych and a knot of carving about an arched stone door. Beautiful hands; clever, expressive fingers. They climbed to the bell tower, and he stood too close to Finn at the balustrade—Finn looking out on the yellow-leaved trees below, Michael closing his eyes and feeling the warmth of Finn’s body through two layers of clothes, trying to imagine what it would be like when there were none.

  Dinner in the pub, then they drove back in the dark, a big harvest moon shining ivory pale on the horizon.

  “Why did you leave the Met?” Finn asked, ever so slightly too casually as Michael shifted to keep his knee from accidentally brushing against Finn’s thigh.