Blue Steel Chain (Trowchester Blues Book 3) Page 14

  Aidan caught the full blast of their inquisitive looks in the face, could feel them cataloguing the sutures on his cheek, the greening eye, the tattooed eagle beneath his ear, and the lightning bolts on the backs of his hands. He reddened in shame as their faces stiffened and their eyes grew wary.

  Lalima tilted her head consideringly to the side and then smiled a rather doubtful smile, giving Idris a look over Aidan’s shoulder that plainly said, What the fuck are you thinking? “Welcome to the team, Aidan. I’ll call you if I need you. I’m sure Molly could do with a hand.”

  “I could.” Molly was as fair as skimmed milk, with a great shock of curly copper hair that was fighting its way out of a tight bun held under a wire cage with a pin through it.

  “Come with me,” she said, and led him to an inner utility room where she opened a cupboard full of utensils. “Knives, forks, and spoons need matching together and wrapping in napkins, then put them in the basket so they’re ready to take out to customers who want food.”

  She showed him how to do the first, and stood back to supervise as he tried it himself. It was easy enough to do it the way he had been shown, but after a little while, it displeased him that the cutlery was able to slither out of both ends of the wrap. It seemed untidy, so he added an extra tuck, like the fold on a tortilla to keep the filling inside, and he had done five of those before it occurred to him he had changed something without permission and she might be angry.

  But she was smiling when he looked up, surprised but apparently pleased. “Well, now. Or do it like that. That’s much better. I like it.”

  It hurt to smile, but it was a good hurt, because oh God. Oh God, to be so easily praised. Some of his own wariness lifted off him in favour of anticipation, and he finished filling the basket in double time, aware of her assessing gaze on him, suddenly aware of the possibility that he might do other things right. There was a whole day’s worth of chances to do things that would make her happy.

  “You need to keep an eye on that during the day and refill it whenever it’s looking low. Which means if there’s no clean cutlery you’ll have to run the dishwasher. Plates can go in the washer, but teacups and saucers are too delicate. They need to be done by hand. Got that?”

  He nodded, still smiling a little. “How long is the dishwasher cycle?”

  “We put them through on the hottest setting for half an hour.”

  “Okay. Got it. And?”

  Molly laughed, her round, moonlike face pinking slightly over the nose. “Customers come here for the ambiance. They like the feeling they’re in a storybook England that the outer world has left behind. Can I be honest with you?”

  It startled Aidan to think he had a choice. “Um. Yes?”

  “We can certainly play up your Viking look—sell the tattoos and the bruises as something romantic to talk about. They’ll stare and whisper, but they’ll be secretly thrilled. Are you all right with that?”

  “Um.” The prospect of being looked at by crowds of happy people who saw his injuries as something interesting to speculate about was . . . God, it was like being invited to cut his skin at the hair line and pull it all off. He didn’t want to make trouble for her. He didn’t want to disappoint—to already be failing at this—but how could he do that? How?

  Oh God, no, not tears. He turned his face away from her, covered it with both hands. How could he say no, when everyone had been so kind? He couldn’t be so monstrously ungrateful as to deny Finn and Idris and Molly anything at all. He’d survived worse things. He would just have to deal with it. “Yes, it’s fine.”

  Molly touched his elbow with a little warm soft hand like a marshmallow. The touch didn’t have the same intensity as it had with James, but he still liked it. “Right, of course it is. You know what I think? I think you need to be in the kitchen until you’re feeling better.”

  Aidan shook his head, trying not to be so pathetic but failing. The kitchen sounded good. A private place where he could practice being human with the other staff before he had to face the public. And a place where he could do something he already knew how to do. But he had spent the last ten years learning to interpret expressions and tones of voice, to read the smallest signs of unhappiness, and he was absolutely sure, “Lalima doesn’t want me in there.”

  Molly huffed a small laugh. “I know what she thinks, because I thought the same thing at first. She thinks you were fighting. She saw the tattoos and the bruises, and she thinks you’re some BNP hooligan who’ll cause her trouble. If you want to be in the kitchen, you’ll need to explain to her that’s not how it is. Come on.”

  She pushed him back into the kitchen where Lalima had just begun to stir together a batter that smelled of chocolate and bitter oranges. A catering-sized sack of carrots sat on the counter beside her.

  Lalima pulled her hairnet firmly down over a stray lock of hair and raised an eyebrow at Molly. “Problem?”

  “I don’t think Aidan got these bruises from fighting,” Molly said brusquely. “And I think he’s too upset to be dealing with the customers right now.”

  Lalima softened immediately, a speculative look coming into her eye. “I wondered what Finn thought he was doing, asking us to take on one of his lowlife friends. But . . .” She leaned her spatula against the bowl and uncapped a jar of crystallized orange peel, letting a burst of bright citrus scent out into the room. Then she fixed Aidan with a look of kindly authority, like a teacher to a child with a grazed knee. “Aidan. You don’t have to tell us why you needed this job in such a hurry, but if you have problems we need to be aware of, then now is the time to tell us.”

  That was fair. He could acknowledge it. And nobody had been angry yet. Nobody had even shouted, let alone hit him. He backed into the fridge and hugged his battered ribs until they throbbed.

  “I ran away from my partner because he hit me,” he managed before his throat closed. Molly nodded as if this confirmed what she thought, and Lalima’s mouth hardened. Angry, he thought. He really, really hoped she wasn’t angry with him. “He made me get the tattoos. I like some of them but I know I look like trouble.”

  He was hotly aware of the swastika on his hip, ugly as a brand and painful as the day it had been cut. It could go now, couldn’t it? He could get an artist to change it into something else. A Celtic cross. Or a flower: a plump-petalled cottage rose. Piers would hate that! The thought was a secret defiance that gave him strength to carry on. “But I don’t want to be trouble. Finn let me stay at his house because I don’t have anywhere else to go, but I know he and Michael are getting twitchy about it. They don’t like people in their space, you know? I don’t blame them but . . .”

  His words locked up again. He concentrated on the chill of the big metal doors behind him, trying to absorb some of their solidity by contact.

  “Oh sweetheart,” Molly exclaimed, touching him on the arm again, kitten-light. Both of the women had tears in their eyes. For him? He didn’t understand that, because they hardly knew him. Piers had known him all his life and Piers hadn’t cared at all.

  “So I want to do well at this job. And then I want to find somewhere to live so James’s friends can have their life back. And then, when I’ve proved I can be a normal person for a year, I’ll be allowed to date who I want.”

  The women exchanged a glance, half-amused, half-appalled. “That sounds like a good plan,” said Lalima at last. “Now we know, we can help. How are you at cooking?”

  Neither of them were angry. Not even now. He took a long shaky breath of relief and tried again to be helpful. He couldn’t say he was good, although in his secret heart he believed it. “I love cooking,” he said instead. “And I really quite like doing all the prep and the washing up too.”

  “So a long day helping me make soup and scones and cakes . . .?”

  In this warm little room looking out onto spring sunshine and flowers? Did things like this actually happen? His chin crumpled by itself, and he had to cover his face again fast to avoid bawling in something lik
e agony. He had scoured a layer of protection off and instead of hurting him they had come together to protect. He struggled with volcanic levels of gratitude and anger—anger because Piers had told him people weren’t like this, but they were. Sensing them watching him, he managed to scrape himself back together again to say, shakily, “That would be wonderful. Thank you.”

  “All right, then.” Lalima scattered crystallized peel into her mixture with a bracing gesture, her tone brisk but kind. “There’s a computer on the pay desk. Set up what you need delivered for the coffee. Then you can come and peel these carrots for me.”

  Molly had retreated to the doorway into the larger outer room where the tables were set up. Her arms had been crossed as she watched him with a contemplative expression. Now she uncrossed them decisively. “And I can help with part two of your new life plan. There’s a spare room at the shared house where I live. Come find me at leaving time and I’ll take you there. You can see if you like us. And if you do, and my housemates also like you, you can move in tomorrow.”

  The room was perhaps the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. Set right up at the top of an old Victorian house, it had windows in the eaves and a ceiling that sloped so he could only stand upright on one side of the room. There was a bedstead along the low wall, looking bare with no bedding or coverings to the mattress. Along the taller wall ran cupboards, and under the window was a small desk and a plastic chair. The walls were white, the carpet blue, and the whole thing was awash in pale, clear light.

  He wanted it so badly it made him tremble. A place that was his. A room that belonged to him, with the right to have in it only what he wanted, and the right to shut everything else out.

  Molly and Zara stood like caryatids at either side of the door and watched him turn around in the small space like a dog finding just the right angle to lie in its basket.

  “I think he likes it.” Zara, introduced as Molly’s girlfriend, was an older black woman even rounder than Molly herself. She wore an elaborately tied scarf over her hair and a batik smock over tight stretch jeans. She had been making her own bread when they’d come in, up to her elbows in flour, smudges of which still clung to her forearms. “But Molly, are we sure we want a man in the house? We don’t want to start poaching the book-club boys. What about the demarcation lines then?”

  “I love the room.” Aidan wasn’t sure if he was being rude in answering a question that had not been addressed to him. He was trying to be the opposite, even though he really, really did want it. Could almost taste what it would be like, living in that emptiness, with walls around him and a door that could be locked. “But I don’t want to cause any trouble.”

  “Come on downstairs to the sitting room.” Molly gave him a reassuring look as she led the way. Down past a landing out of which opened Molly and Zara’s room, a door with a ceramic plaque labelling it Carol’s room, and the bathroom. Down again to a floor that held a laundry-cum-utility room, where Victorian slatted drying racks hung from the ceiling on ropes tied to anchor points in the wall. Then along the corridor to a shared sitting room where the person who had been introduced as Carol was just dishing servings of chilli into bowls set on the coffee table in front of the TV.

  Middle-aged Carol had a heavy-boned, square face, and her filmy mint-green gauze scarf did not quite disguise the Adam’s apple in her throat, but nobody had called her anything but “her,” so Aidan felt it would be best if he did the same. Piers was gone. He didn’t have to be rude to people just because Piers wouldn’t have approved.

  “Have a seat. We’re just about to have tea,” she said in a Northern accent that was so thick it overruled everything else he thought about her. Sunderland? Newcastle? He couldn’t pinpoint it, but it was gorgeous.

  They offered him a beanbag and squeezed into the three-seater sofa, looking like an examining board. He felt very much on display, very eager to please.

  “You’re one of Finn’s friends?” Zara asked, leaving him uncertain if that was good or bad.

  “I’m actually James’s friend.” He had a little flicker of annoyance that nobody seemed to remember James. “James the archaeologist? James helped me get out, and Finn helped me find a job because James asked him to.”

  “Get out?” Zara questioned, obviously asking for an explanation.

  Aidan took a deep breath to try to say it again. It grew worse the more he had to repeat it.

  “He was in an abusive relationship with an older man,” Molly cut in, shrugging off his surprised look with a single raised shoulder. “We got some of the story from Aidan at work, then I phoned Finn at lunchtime and got the rest of it.”

  “So he is.” Zara nodded. “He’s one of the book-club boys. They should look after their own, and leave us to look after ours. This house is for the rest of us.”

  Molly looked apologetically at Aidan again. “A bit of context here—um. Trowchester was a bit of a desert for queer people when most of us moved here. Not even a nightclub to hang out in. So then Finn starts his book club, and that’s lovely, but somehow it’s always harder to find books about the rest of the QUILTBAG, and gradually we stop going, and it becomes a gay man’s thing. Which—you know—is fine. But Carol saw the need for something for the rest of us, and she opened a café, the Rainbow Café, down in Stamford Road, and that sort of became a rival nexus for the queer community—mostly the girls and the transfolk, to be honest. And . . .”

  “We never really intended this house to also become a refuge,” Carol offered slowly. “But that’s how it’s turned out. And this feels like . . . I don’t know. Like Finn’s making a bid for our territory. Or we’re poaching his. Something like that.”

  Despite his feeling of dread, Aidan still managed to eat a scoop of chilli on the end of a nacho. Evidently his body didn’t feel this was the disaster his mind thought it was. “I really don’t want to—”

  “We don’t even know he’s gay,” Molly cut in. “The bastard took him off the streets at age sixteen. He probably hasn’t had time to work out what he is for himself.”

  “It’s not exactly better if he turns out to be straight!” Zara’s turn to look guilty, but he thought he understood. She didn’t want to risk letting someone live in her house who might hurt Molly, and Aidan’s “Viking look’” was doing him no favours in convincing her he was safe to be around. If he and James had lived here, he would have feared for James’s safety around someone who looked like him too.

  “Do you think you might turn out to be straight?” Carol asked, carefully scraping the last of her dinner out with a spoon and placing the bowl back on the table.

  It wasn’t a question to which he’d ever really given much thought. “How would I know?”

  All three of them laughed, and then they gave each other perturbed looks when they saw he was serious.

  “Sweetheart,” said Zara, “it’s an easy question to answer. Do you want to fuck girls?”

  No was a difficult word for Aidan, but this was so simple a thing that it slipped out without trouble. “No.”

  Zara nodded, as if her point was proved. “Well then, you must want to fuck men, and that makes you gay.”

  Aidan began to shake, because this part was not simple. This was the thing about him that had disgusted Piers and confused James. The thing that made him broken and wrong. The thing that made him feel like he came from a different planet, wasn’t even human at all. Look, even they didn’t have a word for it, this trio of women who made up one goddess and ought to know everything. “N—no,” he managed, shaking his head.

  “Um . . .” Zara looked a little taken aback, but she seemed to have the cross-examination bit between her teeth now and pressed on, “So you want to shag nonbinary people? Furries? Star kin?”

  “No one.” It came out firm this time because it was something of a relief to be able to say it. Have it out there in the open, claimed. He could own it in the way he could own that empty room upstairs, in the way he might now be allowed to own his own body. It felt wi
ld and exhilarating, and yet solid at the same time, to be able to speak the truth.

  “I’ve never wanted to fuck anyone.” He looked up, saw startlement and then thought on their faces. “Never wanted anyone to fuck me either—just to make that plain. I was in love with Piers, and I like James very much. I mean, I . . . I want to be in his life. I want to be special to him. But I just . . . I just don’t really want sex at all. I wish they’d be happy to let me hug them.”

  “Well I never.” Carol was the first to recover, though the others got there seconds afterwards. A smile travelled through the group like fire along a trail of gunpowder. “Then I declare you belong here after all. Molly? Let’s break out the wine and toast the fact that we’ve found our first ace housemate.”

  March and April passed in a blur of mixed terror and joy, the days too long, filled with things he had never had to do before, challenges that overwhelmed and were sometimes overcome, the weeks too short.

  After the first two days at the tea shop, during which he proved he would do every task given him in double time and then come back and ask for more, Idris lent him a month’s pay, to be recouped in small instalments over the rest of the year. With this, he bought his own bedding and scoured the local charity shops for three changes of clothes.

  The house had a little garden at the back, scarcely big enough for a postage stamp of lawn, a few flower beds, and a tiny paved square on which stood an incinerator. The neighbours’ trees overhung their fences on every side, and a stack of twigs and branches, hacked off to allow the sunlight to touch the ground, balanced on top of the shed-cum-bicycle garage.