Trowchester Blues Read online

  When he looked up again, ashamed of his inarticulacy, his bald, unimaginative earnestness, Finn was so close he could see the faded freckles over the bridge of the guy’s nose, laughter lines like spidery writing in the corners of his eyes. They were blue, close to. Blue with scatters of yellow spots around the pupil that made them seem green at a distance. And they were full to the brim with amusement.

  Finn leaned in even closer, making May freeze, afraid to do anything in case he got it wrong.

  “I’d open anytime for you.”

  Finn laughed at the expression on May’s face. Nipping his upper lip between his teeth as if to stifle a triumphant smirk, he retreated and let May catch his aborted breath, struggle to slow his runaway heart. Wow.

  Teasing. That had been teasing, nothing more. But shit. The visceral need to grab hold with both hands and taste that mocking mouth was brutal. Like nothing he’d ever felt before. He almost . . . It was almost scary. So unexpected, so unprecedented. He didn’t know where to go from here, what he should say or do to put things back to normal. He covered his face with his hands to try to hide the fact that it was burning.

  Silence from Finn, and then footsteps approaching him. He startled as a narrow hand wrapped around his wrist and tugged, making him uncover his face.

  Finn looked older, with the impish expression dropped to make way for concern. Lines on his forehead and bracketing his mouth said he was about the same age as May, just doing a better job of not crumpling under the years. “I’m sorry,” he said gently. “That was too much, wasn’t it? You’re bereaved. I shouldn’t make fun.”

  Embarrassingly enough, May had to pull his hand back and cover his face again as his eyes stung. He didn’t care about the old bastard dying. He didn’t. But bereaved just about covered everything else.

  “Let’s find you a book.” Finn touched his wrist gently again, leaving a fleeting impression of warmth. “Books cure all ills. What will it be?”

  May rubbed his knuckles under his eyes to be sure they were dry, raised his head in time to see Finn trailing his fingertips lovingly along the polished wood of the bookshelves. Maybe age and experience was why he wore the clothes well—because for him they were a self-expression rather than a costume.

  “I would recommend a happy ending, but there are too few antiquarian books where things work out well for men like us. So . . .?”

  He turned to give May a quizzical look. In the muted light of the globe lantern that hung overhead, the posture bared the long line of his throat. May wanted to touch it so much he could hardly think of a reply, but inspiration came at length. “I— I have a boat I want to renovate. Have you got anything on boatbuilding?”

  He braced himself for Finn to reduce him to the level of a tongue-tied teenager again with some kind of quip about being good with his hands. But Finn just beckoned.

  It looked like the bookshop pierced the terrace of shops only to expand out in either direction behind them. There was a warren of rooms back here, all as idiosyncratic as the first. Mostly books, but with two or three beautiful things on pedestals in each room, vases that seemed to shine from within, automata that turned to watch them as they passed and that May found intensely creepy.

  They stopped in a room that put him in mind of the Natural History Museum, where single-page illustrations, magazines, plans, and maps were stacked in sliding teak chests of drawers. Finn went directly to one and brought out a leather document folder which he pressed into May’s hands.

  May opened it with the care it deserved, conscious of the stiffened, cracking leather, the brittleness of the paper. It wasn’t a book on boat repair; it was a plan for building a new one from the keel up.

  “It’s a traditional colliery barge,” said Finn with an air of academic approval, “which is a little more spacious than a narrowboat but still fits in the locks. What better way to learn how to repair something broken than to build something better from scratch?”

  “I . . . uh.” May felt as if he was hanging halfway down a cliff. Finn, on the top of it, was holding on to the rope that was the only thing preventing him from falling. It was intensely unsettling to feel something so strong, so essential, for a man he hadn’t known existed ten minutes ago. He also had no idea what to say about it, defaulted to the safest option, which was trying not to let it show at all. “How much?”

  Finn tilted his head so that his asymmetric fringe fell entirely over one eye. A quizzical, birdlike look, as if he were a raven wondering if May was yet dead enough to be safe to eat. “Well, that’s quite a question. If you follow this plan to the letter from beginning to end, not only will you end up with a new boat—a habitation, a form of transport, of freedom—but you will also have taught your hands and your body and your mind a dozen skills you never had before. In this plan you have the seeds of a new life, a new business, a new you. So you tell me. How much is that worth?”

  The voice was peaty as whiskey and just as warm. May would have said it wheedled or cajoled, but those words were too weak to give the proper taste. It enchanted, and it filled the world with wonder. He found himself laughing at it as he had laughed at the warning on the window. Charmed and willing to go with it.

  “How about you try again including the facts on what you paid for it yourself?”

  “Oh!” Finn touched two fingertips to his mouth as if to hold in his own laugh. “You philistine. You wound me. And really, such a dreary way of estimating a thing’s value. No wonder there isn’t much joy in your life.” He brushed his lopsided hair out of his eye with a theatrical gesture. “But if you insist. It cost me five pounds. Such is the folly of mankind, that inestimable knowledge is valued a little less than a burger and fries.”

  “I’ll give you a tenner for it then. Hundred percent profit, you can’t say fairer than that.”

  Finn opened another drawer. This one full of glossy leaflets, some of which May recognised from the local tourist information board. He brought out one that had been edged in silver, like a posh party invitation, and held it to his waistcoat as he gave May a sly look. “Are we bargaining?”

  “I guess.”

  “Very well, then. How about you give me fifteen, and then you will value it all the more.”

  May laughed again. This guy was outrageous, and he knew it himself, and he still managed to pull it off somehow. “I don’t think you know how this bargaining thing really works.”

  “I’m using the auction-house method.” Oh. Finn didn’t like having his competence questioned, even in jest. May found the brief coldness in the guy’s voice a little reassuring. There was something real under the play, and he wasn’t ashamed to show it. Good. That was good, because the only people May had ever met who were unfailingly pleasant all the time had been the most careful of psychopaths.

  He stepped back, lowered his head in acknowledgement and heard the guy’s tone warm right back up, though his words still gave no quarter. “I think you should quit while you’re ahead.”

  “Fair enough.” May leafed through the plans again. They were pretty extensive. Scale them up and he could see how all the pieces would fit together. He’d need a big, flat bare space to lay it all out in, but the disputed land was exactly that. None of it looked beyond his technical capabilities. With the first stirring of excitement since leaving London, he handed over fifteen pounds.

  Finn gave him the flier in return. “I run a book club,” he said, watching as May read the details. “Here on Friday evenings. We concentrate mostly on queer literature, and so in practice we are also Trowchester’s equivalent of a gay club. You should come. Unless I read you wrong?”

  May considered for a moment saying, Yeah, you did. I’m straight as an arrow. But he couldn’t find the impetus to lie. So he’d never been out in his life? Then maybe it was due. “Apparently I’m an open book.”

  “I value that.” Finn gave him a smile that was a little less like a weapon than his previous smirk, and leaned in to press the folder against May’s chest. “So I’ll s
ee you there? We generally buy in fish and chips, so don’t eat dinner first.”

  That jogged May’s memory, which had been clouded by the experience of being leaned against confidingly by a perfectly shaped armful of mature, bohemian gentleman. He shook off the urge to reach out and grab the back of Finn’s blazer, drag him close, and crush the plans between them. “Ah. No, I’m having dinner with my neighbours, Friday. Ah, I can’t.”

  Finn stepped away but didn’t stop smiling. “Well, stop by here early on. You can say hello to everyone, and I can give you the book for next week. Then you can come Friday week. There’s no rush, after all. We’ll be here when you’re ready.”

  With his plan and flier in hand, May staggered back out into the early-afternoon light with a sense of having left a parallel world. A better one. The bookshop door closed behind him with a sense of finality, and although he was perfectly aware it was because there was a stiff spring bolted to it at the top, it still felt like a portent—as though the magic had decreed that was all he was allowed for today.

  Probably just as well. He was going to have to think about this with some deliberation, give himself time to turn it over in his head and pry it all apart. Something was definitely nagging at him, beneath the worrying flutter of butterflies and heat. Abandoning the idea of a day spent idling in the library, and unable to progress on the boat until he had cleared the use of the land with the Lis, he went home and spent the rest of the day stripping his father’s wallpaper from every room.

  “You know he’s fucking filth, man. Right?”

  Kevin had been fidgeting in the corner of Finn’s eye all afternoon, clearly working up to this. Finn appreciated that he had kept it to himself until he’d ushered all the customers out, closed the shutters on the window, and locked the door.

  “Your grammar, boy,” he lamented, trying to turn the conversation away from himself. “Could you put that in a form your teachers would recognise?”

  Kevin smoothed down his T-shirt and fiddled with his rainbow dog tags. He was a pretty little thing and hardly needed to wear the flag to advertise what he was. His face had been cut open once already because he was so gamine, so slender and effete it wasn’t possible for him to hide. Finn admired that about him, but it fortunately did little to stir his loins.

  What he liked was something a little more rugged. Something with wider shoulders, with lots of bruising physical power.

  “That bloke you were all over today. He is a policeman.” Kevin managed to produce one-and-a-half unobjectionable sentences. It deserved a response for sheer effort.

  “And I am an honest businessman with nothing to hide. As, I hope, are you.”

  The trouble with the fucking bruisers was that they liked to think they were in control. Generally they took one look at Finn and assumed he wanted someone to tell him what to do. They were so preoccupied with being macho that they couldn’t recognise his strength when they saw it, couldn’t reconcile themselves to being bossed around by anyone as small, as breakable, and as offside as him.

  But Michael May had stood in his shop like a lost child waiting for a parent to pick him up. With his stupid curly hair and his bull neck and the open shirt he’d been wearing over his T-shirt that utterly failed to hide pecs like steel. Twice as wide as Finn, and he was willing to bet that all of it was muscle . . .

  “I’m just saying,” Kevin said, sullenly as though he knew it was useless, “he’s probably come from London, recognised your mug shot, and is checking you out for the plod down there.”

  “He’s welcome to check me out anytime.” Finn suppressed a stir of discomfort at the boy’s words. It seemed unusually subtle of the police to send in bait so perfectly calculated to appeal to his tastes, but he supposed it could be true.

  It made no difference if it was, because Finn had put it all behind him with his partner’s death, buried it six feet deep, and run away to mourn and become an honest man. If the police were here to investigate him, they would find nothing worthy of their scrutiny.

  And maybe that was part of what called to him about Michael May—the fact that he knew how it was to have left everything behind and started again utterly new. He recognised the fragility of the man as something he had lived through himself. And when it came wrapped up in such a sturdy little package, all vulnerable and lost, well, how could he stay away? He loved a paradox.

  It occurred to him perhaps belatedly that Kevin might be concerned on his own behalf rather than on Finn’s. “You are currently unobjectionably employed and not entangled with the criminal fraternity?”

  Kevin took a moment to parse this into something closer to the form of English he preferred, his restless hands constantly tweaking at the careful disorder of his hair. “Yeah,” he said at length, giving the inside of the locked door a worried glance. “But you know how they are. They don’t let you go, not ever. Did you see how he looked at me? Like he was just waiting for a chance to have a go. Like I was fucking scum. You get a record, and they never let you forget it.”

  Finn had seen. He’d been lurking behind a bookshelf when Michael ambled in, all compact muscularity and aimless curiosity, like an inquisitive bear. He’d been checking out the man’s very fine arse in those blue jeans when Kevin had made his move, and he’d seen it perfectly. The way all that unassuming, shambling gentleness had hardened and grown taut with the threat of imminent violence, terrifying and arousing all at once.

  “Oh, I saw. It was delicious. Tell me you didn’t want to just lie down in the middle of the floor and let him have his way with you right there?”

  Kevin dropped his head into his hands and shook it. “You’re fucking weird, man. Me, I like a nice college boy. Someone you can talk to, you know? Not that they look twice at losers like me.”

  “You should enrol.” Finn picked up the old argument with a sense of relief. Thankfully Kevin had had enough of talking about his employer and had returned to the safer subject of himself. “It’s not as though we’re overflowing with business every moment of the hour. You could study for A levels when there are no customers in the shop and apply to the university next year.”

  Kevin gave him a complex look he interpreted to mean, You’re so old you don’t have the faintest idea how things work anymore, but thank you anyway, and said, “Yeah. Maybe. I gotta go.”

  “Cheerio. See you tomorrow.” Finn followed the boy through to the back door and gave him an ironic wave as he decoupled his bicycle from the drainpipe and pushed it out between the planters of geraniums, under the arch of brick wall, and onto Cattlegate Street, where the rush-hour traffic was simmering bumper to bumper from one medieval wall to the next. Their windscreens reflected the sunset like so many panes of glorious stained glass.

  He locked the door behind the lad, and put the books to bed, closing those that had been left open, reshelving those that had been half-read by his regulars, Old Mrs. Granger and Reverend Thomas, who came in most days to occupy his cushioned bench and while away an empty day in the warmth.

  When the shop was tidied and dusted, he took the rope off the stairs and went up to his flat. Unlocking the single door on the upstairs landing, he stepped through into the pokey little hall from which all his rooms opened. He’d occasionally thought of knocking some walls down, making everything more open-plan, but when no one saw the flat but him, it hardly seemed worthwhile to beautify it. He spent so much more of his life downstairs. The kitchen had a pleasant air, though, with its window that opened towards the sunset, its view on the back garden, and the vintage French country table he’d found at a car boot sale.

  His cookbooks rested snugly in a glass-fronted cabinet which boring people might have used for plates. He gave them an affectionate look but left them alone, having no patience for recipes tonight. There was spinach in the fridge, and thyme and parsley growing in the window box. He put a pan of pasta on to boil, finely chopped some garlic and herbs, then sautéed them in olive oil with salt and pepper. Added the chopped spinach and then the cooked p
asta, served it onto two plates and shaved a little Parmesan on top.

  Then he put his own plate into the oven to keep warm, took the other downstairs into the back garden, and set it on the iron table where sometimes in midsummer he took his midday meal.

  Once back upstairs, he switched off the electric light, lit a candle, poured himself the last glass of the nice rosé he’d been drinking since Monday, and looked out of the window just in time for his dark-adapted eyes to pick out a slender, hooded form eeling down the garden path. It took the plate, dropped into a cross-legged sitting position, its back against a table leg, and wolfed down his cooking in indiscriminate gulps.

  Smiling, he took his own dinner out of the oven and tucked in. It wasn’t at all like the companionship he’d once had, but there was still something comforting in knowing he wasn’t eating alone.

  Candlelight always brought memories of Tom. In the early days of his loss it used to conjure him out of the darkness in strokes of gold. He’d be looking away and would catch the curve of Tom’s cheek, the glint of his wheat-blond hair in the corner of his eye. He’d turn to it with a stab of anguished hope, desperate for a ghost, a vision, something real. But there would be nothing.

  Thank God, there was nothing about Michael May that reminded him of Tom. The man was as dark as Tom had been fair, with something Greek—or Italian perhaps—about his looks. Tom had been six feet tall, which made kissing an exercise in a cricked neck, had Finn not moved it horizontal more often than not. Michael was scarcely taller than Finn himself.

  Tom had spent so much time in the gym, he’d been sculpted to perfection, a living work of art almost too perfect to be real. He’d been vain of it too, Finn admitted with fondness. Always wearing the tightest garments, and as few of them as he could get away with, so everyone could see and marvel at what he’d made of himself.

  Michael on the other hand dressed like a straight man. A man unaware that anyone might be looking at his figure with interest. Loose trousers. The shape of his shoulders and waist concealed under the unbuttoned shirt he’d shrugged over his T-shirt. It hadn’t quite managed to disguise the fact that he was built like a brick shit house, but it had played coy with the exact details.