Blood Rising - Part Thirty-Six
Title: Blood Rising (Part Thirty-Six)
Author: gregoria44
Rating: 15+ for language and concepts, this part
Word count: This part 4,090
Summary: Deeper down.
A/N: Same as Part One. All comments and concrit always welcome and actively encouraged. Special thanks to haldoor, rivers_bend, extra special thanks to ladywillin and everyone who's reading and commenting. If you have any trouble accessing any of the previous chapters, please message me and I’ll sort something out for you.
Warnings: These are teenagers and this is gay fiction. Stuff happens.
Part One / Part Two / Part Three / Part Four / Part Five / Part Six / Part Seven / Part Eight / Part Nine / Part Ten / Part Eleven / Part Twelve / Part Thirteen / Part Fourteen / Part Fifteen / Part Sixteen / Part Seventeen / Part Eighteen / Part Nineteen / Part Twenty / Part Twenty-One / Part Twenty-Two / Part Twenty-Three / Part Twenty-Four / Part Twenty-Five / Part Twenty-Six / Part Twenty-Seven / Part Twenty-Eight / Part Twenty-Nine / Part Thirty / Part Thirty-One / Part Thirty-Two / Part Thirty-Three / Part Thirty-Four / Part Thirty-Five
In the middle of the night: weight like I’d never known it, thrusting down on every inch of my body. With lungs failing to inflate, blood unspooling thickly in my veins, I tried to throw him off, finding only bed clothes to battle. I tried to move, to roll over, to sit up, and saw a face hovering in the gloom by my bed. Des? Duncan? Dad? No-one there at all.
I finally broke clear of my wine-fractured nightmare, and the weight withdrew to its real source: an unshiftable, leaden layer of wrong in my head and chest.
*
As I gingerly cleaned my teeth and splashed water on my face (wishing I’d taken Duncan up on his offer of teaching me to shave properly), bits of the previous evening slunk back into place. More than once I had to clutch the sink and groan my way through a particularly bad one.
Agreeing to work Wednesday had been a stupid idea from the get-go, but that’s what I’d done, and along with everything else, I was going to have to live with it.
*
“Good night was it then, lad?” Derek was all amused non-sympathy, which was as much as I deserved.
“Not brilliant, no.”
“Ah, well. I’ll get the kettle on. Go and sort out those parsnips, will you? Some of them are starting to look at the customers a bit funny.”
The dry, grocer-shop smell of decades-ingrained vegetables didn’t bother my stomach as much I’d feared. If anything, the dusty, low-grown notes cleared my head an amount, and I could concentrate on sweeping and piling, though conversation was out of the question. In a skewed way, it wasn’t unlike being in Nan’s church: the sense of atoning for sins, of being a humbled part of something more eternal; sprouts and holly for incense, the chatter of customers for a congregation, and Father Derek, high priest of greens, overseeing it all.
My sodden mind was awash with nonsense, and I was grateful.
*
Having made it through the day without being disturbed by friends or other ill-wishers, I ran the hottest bath possible and attempted to sweat out the remains of the night before while thinking things over.
I’d done a stupid thing, I knew, and the real question was how much damage I’d done and what I should do about it. Instead of working on that, however, my mind kept bringing up pictures of the state Des had been in, and the way I’d reacted.
Whatever his reasons (and I wasn’t sure I’d be brave enough to ask for them a second time), he’d made it through the dark and the rain and the alcohol, only for me to be a shit to him. Then I’d been shovelled out of the way by adults, who had, far too late in the day and with stupid adult timing, decided it was the moment to step in.
Through the muddy lens of my hangover (wine so much worse than lager, was the dismal discovery) I was having trouble calling fully to mind why I’d done what I’d done afterwards. In trying to wrap my head around the arguments and counter-arguments for how we’d both acted, the spinning behind my eyes started again and I had to give up.
I knew I should go and see him. I knew I should at least phone, but I was also sure if I saw him, he’d know what I’d done just from looking at me. Even if he didn’t, I’d have to try and explain. Not saying anything was out of the question: if I wasn’t the one to pass on the news, the most I could hope was for the lid to stay on things until school restarted in the New Year.
There was another, more cowardly motivation for putting off seeing him: until I knew why he’d behaved as he had, I had the tiniest justification for my own behaviour to cling to, though it was feeble at best.
Under the steaming surface of the bath, my body lay: drained of colour by the greenish water, traitorous from the bits which floated to the heavy bones beneath. I remembered Des’ body; the way it had been all angles from the lip of the same bath, three days after Thomas had battered him half-senseless.
Cold to the marrow, despite the heat of the water, I made up my mind to call him before he called me. It was the right thing to do in a whole list of bad choices, though it was too late at gone ten: it would have to wait until the next day, and it would have to wait until after work.
*
“Think you’ve got an admirer.” Derek nodded past the window display to the outside world, where a pale, round face kept appearing and disappearing as someone strained on their toes trying to see over a pile of satsumas.
“Eh?” I handed the woman in front of me her change which she immediately started counting, and saw Derek’s yellow-toothed grin as he expertly twizzled her paper bag shut.
“Well, the lass out there’s a bit young for me, and since it’s the third time I’ve seen her today, I’ve got to guess she’s waiting on your mug.” He spoke loudly to the woman who was still peering at her few coppers, waved the bulging bag at her. “It’s all there, Mrs. Thwaite: even this one can count to five!”
“Heh-heh-heh,” she chuckled, lifting her head to eye first me then Derek, “I know that, love, but either me eyes are gettin’ worse or these pennies are gettin’ smaller. I like to put ’em in a special place in me purse if they’re shiny ‘uns.”
“I see. Saving up for Mr. Thwaite’s Christmas box, are you?”
“Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh! If it’s not six foot long and two wide wi’ me in it, he’ll not be interested, the miserable old bogger!”
They both laughed at God only knew what, while the face on the street appeared again. There was no-one else waiting at the counter, and Mrs. Thwaite and Derek were happy enough setting Mr. Thwaite’s ears on fire, so I took a deep breath and stepped outside.
Tina was not exactly dressed for the weather. I was wearing as many layers as I could without beaching myself, plus scarf, hat and gloves, all for mostly working inside where there was the added benefit of a kick-space heater behind the till. Apart from a black bomber jacket which was at least zipped up, Tina had bare, marbled legs beneath a knee-length skirt thing (possibly designed with sports in mind given the stripes down the side) and sockless ankles squeezed into trainers. She scuffed one foot over the other like a bad audition for a modern Bisto kid, and stared, red-faced, at the ground.
“Hi,” I said, trying not to feel too generous by granting her a conversational ‘in’; she was the living, breathing (scuffing, gum-chewing) evidence of my lack of gentlemanliness.
“’Lo,” she replied, more like a kid than ever. In the darker moments of the previous twenty-four hours, I’d wondered what on earth I’d been thinking when I kissed her; with her standing in front of me, there were twelve hundred reasons why she wasn’t my type, and that was before tackling the obvious.
“How’s it going?” I asked, subtly checking her usual cronies weren’t about to leap from behind the post box and provide background mockery.
“Didn’t know you had a job and that,” she said, peering up at the faded lettering above the window canopy, impressed as a coach-trip tourist beside Canary Wharf.
“Yeah, I’ve got three Bentleys and a Jag in the garage at home, but I save on petrol costs by walking to school.” Was I having some sort of seizure? What the hell was coming out of my mouth? Or maybe it wasn’t so bad; maybe it was better than her thinking she’d lost out on some sort of Loadsamoney twat as well as the world’s least interested boyfriend.
“Wot?”
Nope, the joke had gone sailing safely by.
She chewed open-mouthed on her gum, watching me without blinking. I watched back, finding myself thinking about chickens and chalk lines. “Wanna do something later?” she asked.
Startled back to why we were talking at all, my answer fell out by itself, “No.”
“What about…” Chew. Chew. Chew. “…tonight?”
“Um…” since she hadn’t taken offence at my first reply, I risked it again, “No.”
More chewing. More staring. “Tomorrow?”
I broke before she did. “Listen, Tina…”
“’S all right,” she shrugged, doing a slow blink while stretching the gum across her tongue and stowing it in the opposite cheek. “I’ll see you later.” She started walking away and then paused, looking back over her shoulder and canting her legs. “You haven’t got any fags on you, have you?”
Had the question come from anyone else, I might have been suspicious: her gaze was as blank as ever.
“Why, are you trying to give up chewing gum?” Oh, God! Shut up, shut up!
Thankfully, she didn’t get that one either, and grimacing warily at the loony she was leaving behind on the pavement, she went away.
That’s the easy part done with, I thought.
*
Des didn’t wait for me to call. I was hanging my coat up in the hall at home when the phone started ringing. I hung onto the coat rack with bloodless fingers, wildly fantasising about Duncan picking up elsewhere and Des (it had to be him: my conscience was screaming loud enough) hanging up. I even bellowed an investigative ‘HELLO?’ up the stairs, though by the seventh ring, I knew I was only delaying the inevitable.
Reaching for the receiver, I didn’t get beyond a croak, knowing my ill-deserved interval of peace and respite was over.
“Can we meet somewhere?”
A thick-voiced, subdued sounding Des: my stomach and throat clenched, making my reactions even worse than they’d been with Tina. “I haven’t had my tea yet.”
There was a long silence, time enough for me to wish I’d eaten my damned words instead. Any possibility of a career as a diplomat died quietly in the far distance.
“Well, y’know, whenever you’re ready,” his reply was heavy enough to leave boot marks.
I stumbled through an apology about having just got in, and having been at work, and some other useless stuff which I had no idea if he was listening to or not. In the end he interrupted to ask if I’d meet him in the park at half six. It was a close run thing, but I managed not to answer with, ‘won’t it be dark by then?’ because my avoidance techniques were becoming more and more like those of a doddery old man.
*
People always went on about the dangers to girls in going out after dark, but I wasn’t mad keen on it myself. On the main road, there was plenty of traffic going in and out of town, but the minute I turned down the alley by the Co-op there was a sense of things hidden and wrongly intentioned.
The park lay draped in luminous drifts of mist, rising where the brook ran and carrying a pale copy of distant lights. Strange noises drifted with it, filtering from the tree line; as likely idiotic teenagers as survivalist wildlife, but either way, I wouldn’t be shortcutting home in that direction.
Des was waiting for me at the kids’ fort, beneath the same overhang we’d sheltered under when everything went wrong back in the autumn. I saw the glow of his cigarette before I could pick him out from the surrounding shadows. He was wrapped in a long dark coat I’d not seen before, hair hanging to cover most of his face as he huddled forwards.
Wanting to avoid the whole ‘and when did you last see your girlfriend?’ set-up, I didn’t stand and wait for acknowledgement, but sat down next to him, ignoring the galloping of my heartbeat. He let out a slow stream of smoke but didn’t otherwise offer a response.
“How’ve you been?” the opener was too formal, but I needed a clue on how to aim my pitch.
He slowly rocked back and forth, stiffly nodding. The cold-damp smell of his coat stirred around him, something spicier behind the harsh reek of cigarette. “I know what you did,” he said.
My heart rate steadied, making me realise exactly how much I’d been dreading the moment of revelation. So he knew, and wasn’t in a rush to tell me how he was feeling about it. I needed to see his face properly, and reached out to slip the screen of his hair behind his ear. He silently accepted the touch, leaning slightly into my trailing fingers before jerking back. The swiftly checked action gave me some hope. “I’m sorry,” I told him.
“It was Mark,” he said, voice flat. “He didn’t trust you to tell me yourself.”
“’Course it was.” I couldn’t help my tone slipping, though we both knew I was in no position to call Mark on his judgement.
“Would you have done?”
“Yes. I was going to ring you when I got home this afternoon, but you beat me to it. What happened was stupid. It was a stupid mistake; it was a stupid night. I don’t know why it happened. I am sorry.”
Unmoving, he stared at me, the effect terrifying in the way Tina’s vacant gaze could never have been. His eyes were black pits in the white sliver of his face, and I wondered what mine looked like to him. I wondered if he thought I was bullshitting about telling him, or about being sorry.
“She doesn’t matter.” I was adamant. “The whole thing was a stupid mistake.”
“She does matter.” He threw the stub of his cigarette away, and watched it glow briefly against the ground before rolling to its death smoulder. Defending Tina’s honour was a strange choice for him to make, but I corrected myself anyway.
“Well… okay, she’s not that bad, but…”
“No, Steve,” he snapped, “she’s a fat, ugly, thick-as-pigshit, slag is what she is, but that’s not the issue, is it?”
They weren’t the worst words he could have used, but they weren’t the sort of words he’d ever have used once upon a time. They made me flinch.
“Come on,” I tried, weak and feeble in my own ears. “It wasn’t her fault: nothing would have happened if…”
“If what?” he demanded nastily, already knowing what I’d been about to say.
“If you hadn’t let me down,” I mumbled, ashamed to prove him right, the excuse expiring instantly on the freezing air.
He rocked again, accepting it as an admission as much as an accusation. “I thought we were the same,” he said. “I thought this was all either of us had.”
“Would you’d have felt better if I’d got off with another lad, then? If it had been Will, or Wayne?”
“You’d have had your head kicked in,” he bluntly reminded me, “but I’d rather you’d gone with someone who was fucking worth it.”
I had nothing to say to that, and sat stewing for few minutes, letting the weight of my annoyance switch from side to side, unable to decide where it fitted best. “So what happened to you?” I asked, making a too-little-too-late attempt to redistribute blame. “How come you got so hammered?”
“Doesn’t matter, does it?” he answered. “It’s not your problem now.”
“Meaning?”
Ignoring me, he reached down between his legs and produced an immediately recognisable carrier bag. “I was going to give you this. I shouldn’t have accepted it in the first place: you can’t afford it, and I can’t wear it without explaining to Mam and Thomas how I got it. They wouldn’t believe it was a present from a friend. Your uniform’s in there an’ all.”
‘Wouldn’t believe’ or ‘hadn’t believed’? He’d arrived at the disco in a shit t-shirt, with a bruised mouth. Had that been coincidence, or was it the shirt which started everything off that night? When I didn’t immediately take the bag, Des thrust it more aggressively, knuckles gleaming.
He delivered his terminal blow as I closed numb fingers around the plastic. “But I needn’t have worried about how you’d react, or about you trying to convince me I was wrong: you’ve already sorted things for yourself. Well done.”
“That’s not what I was doing…” my brain and mouth weren’t co-operating, shovelling together words which were nothing more than useless sounds. He was dumping me, and I was providing no defence at all. “That wasn’t how it was.”
“Then what were you doing?”
It was the right question, the one I’d been asking myself over and over, but I hadn’t found the answer; how was I supposed to explain to him? All I had were bald facts. “I wanted you to be there, but you weren’t and she was.”
Horrible, horrible, horrible.
“Fuck off, Steve,” he commanded, and glared at me until I did.
*
There was rain mixing with the mist as I moved towards home, but though the air hung thick and damp, an unending wind howled through my insides, snatching my breath away and forcing me to bend into each step to make any headway. I made it as far as the motorbike barrier at the mouth of the alleyway and grabbed hold of its thick poles, wrapping both arms around to stop myself blowing apart altogether.
With no-one else near, any muggers were missing a trick, because they could have taken anything I had, or done anything they wanted, and I wouldn’t have stopped them. I knew I looked an idiot, doubled over the barrier and choking on the stupid noises forcing their way up my throat, but I had nothing to spare for caring, even if there’d been anyone to watch.
Blinking between the darkness behind my eyelids and the glistening blackness of the tarmac before me, I had a flash of memory: emerging from a different damp darkness into a less murky space; the set line of Des’ shoulders and the gurning features of the broader, older man next to him.
Our debate wasn’t done and dusted. I had my argument. All it took was to turn round and have the wind at my heels instead of in my face. I let go of the barrier, fell into the slipstream and was away, feet pounding back the way they’d come.
I got Des in my sights as he drew level with the tennis courts. “Oi!” I called, caught in the flow of running, wanting him to stop and not thinking beyond the immediate. He didn’t turn, but squared his back and picked up his own pace. I pounded on, gaining ground by the second, thoughtless to anything other than saying my piece.
By the time I’d closed the gap, he was alongside the squat concrete panels of the toilet block. I hadn’t considered stopping, and made a lunge for his arm with the barely formed plan of using him as both pivot and brake.
Too late, I saw the moment from his point of view: a random shouting person bearing down on him. He tugged and fought to get his arm free, throwing me off balance and causing me to grasp tighter as I avoided skidding onto the floor. We completed a full circle before I could squeak out, “It’s me,” and he could focus enough to realise I was right. When everything stopped fair-grounding around us, I had the cold hard concrete wall against my back and a wild-eyed Des pressing me into it.
“You twat,” he gasped, breath billowing in the starkness of the automatic security light. “I thought I was done for.” There was as much relief as anger, so I gulped down some air and launched into what I’d wanted to say.
“You told me…” breath rushing out, breath pouring in, “…you went with someone else. I believed you. I was mad at you, but I got over it… we got over it.”
“Oh, God,” he pushed off me and fell back a few steps, face screwing up. “That’s it? That’s what you’ve come up with?”
“It isn’t any different.”
“Are you for real?” He stared at me disbelievingly, and then stepping close, pushed his hand between my legs and worked the wrist and heel in a long, slow knead. He got a response on the second pass. “That’s why it’s different.” He let go. “I don’t want anything else, Steve, but apparently you do.”
“And Lee Matthews, was he worth it?” I adjusted myself with more force than necessary, annoyed at how easily he’d shown me up.
“Oh, right!” He laughed scornfully. “You want to hear about that now, do you?”
“It matters now,” I told him, “’cos all I did was kiss someone, and whoever it was, I can’t see how that’s worse.”
“It’s worse because you had the choice, you fucking moron!” he shouted. “You have it all so easy and you don’t even know it. If everything comes out, you get to walk away with your face in one piece and your teeth still attached, just like I told Mark after that bollocks with Davy. What do I get?” he stabbed at himself with rigid fingers. “The same as I always fucking get, and you know it.”
“What am I supposed to do about that?” I threw back. “You’re acting like everything’s changed, and it hasn’t. If people found out, you really think I’d be left alone because I got off with the school slag? You want to talk about choice? Well I chose to be with you, Des, and you chose to get fucked by some bloke from a nightclub. Which of us gets to be the most pissed off, here?”
For a moment, I thought I’d gained some ground. He gave me a little more space, appeared to be considering the point I’d made. “You know,” he said, almost conversationally, “I didn’t say he’d fucked me; you said that. That’s how much you thought of me: you saw something you didn’t understand, and immediately assumed I’d taken it up the arse from someone else. Thanks for that. Thanks a fat lot.”
In the weeks since I’d first seen the bruises on his wrists, the exact details had slipped, but some things remained clear enough for defence. “I asked you. You said you’d been with him.”
Everything went very still. We’d found our way back to the edge of the gaping pit from two nights before, both of us carefully poised, no teachers on hand to drag us away a second time. The anger dripped from Des’ face, leaving behind something set and unnatural; the mottled ivory of bone exposed by scraped-back dirt. “I offered to explain that. You missed the moment, Steve.”
“Just tell me if it was a lie.” I thought everything rested on the one point: who was most to blame; who owed the biggest apology; whether it was worth continuing to argue for us.
The security light snapped off. For a split second, the world disappeared: glinting flecks of rain; steam from our breathing; the night all around us, gone.
“I told you what was easiest to say,” Des’ voice scratched across the afterimage, trailing neon in its wake, “because I wasn’t given a choice.”
Before my eyes could fully adjust, the white-blue brightness fired again, bleaching the scene long enough for me to glimpse the truth of his meaning; then everything was rushing back into place, and it was hidden again.
“Whatever you want to believe,” he told me, “it doesn’t make much difference now. Everything has changed, and you can’t help me any more.”
If I was honest with myself, I knew he was right, and that the last part had been the case for some time, but I’d carried a sense of uselessness from the start and it hadn’t stopped me then. “Let me try.”
“There’s nothing to help with.” The stiffness in his face and voice went on the last word, and he looked away, hissing in a breath. “There’s nothing left, all right? Everything I thought I had, everything I thought was mine…” he thudded a finger against his temple, “…I don’t have any more. Not even you.”
It was too much for me. It always had been. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, and finally let him go.
*
Part Thirty-Seven...
Author: gregoria44
Rating: 15+ for language and concepts, this part
Word count: This part 4,090
Summary: Deeper down.
A/N: Same as Part One. All comments and concrit always welcome and actively encouraged. Special thanks to haldoor, rivers_bend, extra special thanks to ladywillin and everyone who's reading and commenting. If you have any trouble accessing any of the previous chapters, please message me and I’ll sort something out for you.
Warnings: These are teenagers and this is gay fiction. Stuff happens.
Part One / Part Two / Part Three / Part Four / Part Five / Part Six / Part Seven / Part Eight / Part Nine / Part Ten / Part Eleven / Part Twelve / Part Thirteen / Part Fourteen / Part Fifteen / Part Sixteen / Part Seventeen / Part Eighteen / Part Nineteen / Part Twenty / Part Twenty-One / Part Twenty-Two / Part Twenty-Three / Part Twenty-Four / Part Twenty-Five / Part Twenty-Six / Part Twenty-Seven / Part Twenty-Eight / Part Twenty-Nine / Part Thirty / Part Thirty-One / Part Thirty-Two / Part Thirty-Three / Part Thirty-Four / Part Thirty-Five
In the middle of the night: weight like I’d never known it, thrusting down on every inch of my body. With lungs failing to inflate, blood unspooling thickly in my veins, I tried to throw him off, finding only bed clothes to battle. I tried to move, to roll over, to sit up, and saw a face hovering in the gloom by my bed. Des? Duncan? Dad? No-one there at all.
I finally broke clear of my wine-fractured nightmare, and the weight withdrew to its real source: an unshiftable, leaden layer of wrong in my head and chest.
*
As I gingerly cleaned my teeth and splashed water on my face (wishing I’d taken Duncan up on his offer of teaching me to shave properly), bits of the previous evening slunk back into place. More than once I had to clutch the sink and groan my way through a particularly bad one.
Agreeing to work Wednesday had been a stupid idea from the get-go, but that’s what I’d done, and along with everything else, I was going to have to live with it.
*
“Good night was it then, lad?” Derek was all amused non-sympathy, which was as much as I deserved.
“Not brilliant, no.”
“Ah, well. I’ll get the kettle on. Go and sort out those parsnips, will you? Some of them are starting to look at the customers a bit funny.”
The dry, grocer-shop smell of decades-ingrained vegetables didn’t bother my stomach as much I’d feared. If anything, the dusty, low-grown notes cleared my head an amount, and I could concentrate on sweeping and piling, though conversation was out of the question. In a skewed way, it wasn’t unlike being in Nan’s church: the sense of atoning for sins, of being a humbled part of something more eternal; sprouts and holly for incense, the chatter of customers for a congregation, and Father Derek, high priest of greens, overseeing it all.
My sodden mind was awash with nonsense, and I was grateful.
*
Having made it through the day without being disturbed by friends or other ill-wishers, I ran the hottest bath possible and attempted to sweat out the remains of the night before while thinking things over.
I’d done a stupid thing, I knew, and the real question was how much damage I’d done and what I should do about it. Instead of working on that, however, my mind kept bringing up pictures of the state Des had been in, and the way I’d reacted.
Whatever his reasons (and I wasn’t sure I’d be brave enough to ask for them a second time), he’d made it through the dark and the rain and the alcohol, only for me to be a shit to him. Then I’d been shovelled out of the way by adults, who had, far too late in the day and with stupid adult timing, decided it was the moment to step in.
Through the muddy lens of my hangover (wine so much worse than lager, was the dismal discovery) I was having trouble calling fully to mind why I’d done what I’d done afterwards. In trying to wrap my head around the arguments and counter-arguments for how we’d both acted, the spinning behind my eyes started again and I had to give up.
I knew I should go and see him. I knew I should at least phone, but I was also sure if I saw him, he’d know what I’d done just from looking at me. Even if he didn’t, I’d have to try and explain. Not saying anything was out of the question: if I wasn’t the one to pass on the news, the most I could hope was for the lid to stay on things until school restarted in the New Year.
There was another, more cowardly motivation for putting off seeing him: until I knew why he’d behaved as he had, I had the tiniest justification for my own behaviour to cling to, though it was feeble at best.
Under the steaming surface of the bath, my body lay: drained of colour by the greenish water, traitorous from the bits which floated to the heavy bones beneath. I remembered Des’ body; the way it had been all angles from the lip of the same bath, three days after Thomas had battered him half-senseless.
Cold to the marrow, despite the heat of the water, I made up my mind to call him before he called me. It was the right thing to do in a whole list of bad choices, though it was too late at gone ten: it would have to wait until the next day, and it would have to wait until after work.
*
“Think you’ve got an admirer.” Derek nodded past the window display to the outside world, where a pale, round face kept appearing and disappearing as someone strained on their toes trying to see over a pile of satsumas.
“Eh?” I handed the woman in front of me her change which she immediately started counting, and saw Derek’s yellow-toothed grin as he expertly twizzled her paper bag shut.
“Well, the lass out there’s a bit young for me, and since it’s the third time I’ve seen her today, I’ve got to guess she’s waiting on your mug.” He spoke loudly to the woman who was still peering at her few coppers, waved the bulging bag at her. “It’s all there, Mrs. Thwaite: even this one can count to five!”
“Heh-heh-heh,” she chuckled, lifting her head to eye first me then Derek, “I know that, love, but either me eyes are gettin’ worse or these pennies are gettin’ smaller. I like to put ’em in a special place in me purse if they’re shiny ‘uns.”
“I see. Saving up for Mr. Thwaite’s Christmas box, are you?”
“Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh! If it’s not six foot long and two wide wi’ me in it, he’ll not be interested, the miserable old bogger!”
They both laughed at God only knew what, while the face on the street appeared again. There was no-one else waiting at the counter, and Mrs. Thwaite and Derek were happy enough setting Mr. Thwaite’s ears on fire, so I took a deep breath and stepped outside.
Tina was not exactly dressed for the weather. I was wearing as many layers as I could without beaching myself, plus scarf, hat and gloves, all for mostly working inside where there was the added benefit of a kick-space heater behind the till. Apart from a black bomber jacket which was at least zipped up, Tina had bare, marbled legs beneath a knee-length skirt thing (possibly designed with sports in mind given the stripes down the side) and sockless ankles squeezed into trainers. She scuffed one foot over the other like a bad audition for a modern Bisto kid, and stared, red-faced, at the ground.
“Hi,” I said, trying not to feel too generous by granting her a conversational ‘in’; she was the living, breathing (scuffing, gum-chewing) evidence of my lack of gentlemanliness.
“’Lo,” she replied, more like a kid than ever. In the darker moments of the previous twenty-four hours, I’d wondered what on earth I’d been thinking when I kissed her; with her standing in front of me, there were twelve hundred reasons why she wasn’t my type, and that was before tackling the obvious.
“How’s it going?” I asked, subtly checking her usual cronies weren’t about to leap from behind the post box and provide background mockery.
“Didn’t know you had a job and that,” she said, peering up at the faded lettering above the window canopy, impressed as a coach-trip tourist beside Canary Wharf.
“Yeah, I’ve got three Bentleys and a Jag in the garage at home, but I save on petrol costs by walking to school.” Was I having some sort of seizure? What the hell was coming out of my mouth? Or maybe it wasn’t so bad; maybe it was better than her thinking she’d lost out on some sort of Loadsamoney twat as well as the world’s least interested boyfriend.
“Wot?”
Nope, the joke had gone sailing safely by.
She chewed open-mouthed on her gum, watching me without blinking. I watched back, finding myself thinking about chickens and chalk lines. “Wanna do something later?” she asked.
Startled back to why we were talking at all, my answer fell out by itself, “No.”
“What about…” Chew. Chew. Chew. “…tonight?”
“Um…” since she hadn’t taken offence at my first reply, I risked it again, “No.”
More chewing. More staring. “Tomorrow?”
I broke before she did. “Listen, Tina…”
“’S all right,” she shrugged, doing a slow blink while stretching the gum across her tongue and stowing it in the opposite cheek. “I’ll see you later.” She started walking away and then paused, looking back over her shoulder and canting her legs. “You haven’t got any fags on you, have you?”
Had the question come from anyone else, I might have been suspicious: her gaze was as blank as ever.
“Why, are you trying to give up chewing gum?” Oh, God! Shut up, shut up!
Thankfully, she didn’t get that one either, and grimacing warily at the loony she was leaving behind on the pavement, she went away.
That’s the easy part done with, I thought.
*
Des didn’t wait for me to call. I was hanging my coat up in the hall at home when the phone started ringing. I hung onto the coat rack with bloodless fingers, wildly fantasising about Duncan picking up elsewhere and Des (it had to be him: my conscience was screaming loud enough) hanging up. I even bellowed an investigative ‘HELLO?’ up the stairs, though by the seventh ring, I knew I was only delaying the inevitable.
Reaching for the receiver, I didn’t get beyond a croak, knowing my ill-deserved interval of peace and respite was over.
“Can we meet somewhere?”
A thick-voiced, subdued sounding Des: my stomach and throat clenched, making my reactions even worse than they’d been with Tina. “I haven’t had my tea yet.”
There was a long silence, time enough for me to wish I’d eaten my damned words instead. Any possibility of a career as a diplomat died quietly in the far distance.
“Well, y’know, whenever you’re ready,” his reply was heavy enough to leave boot marks.
I stumbled through an apology about having just got in, and having been at work, and some other useless stuff which I had no idea if he was listening to or not. In the end he interrupted to ask if I’d meet him in the park at half six. It was a close run thing, but I managed not to answer with, ‘won’t it be dark by then?’ because my avoidance techniques were becoming more and more like those of a doddery old man.
*
People always went on about the dangers to girls in going out after dark, but I wasn’t mad keen on it myself. On the main road, there was plenty of traffic going in and out of town, but the minute I turned down the alley by the Co-op there was a sense of things hidden and wrongly intentioned.
The park lay draped in luminous drifts of mist, rising where the brook ran and carrying a pale copy of distant lights. Strange noises drifted with it, filtering from the tree line; as likely idiotic teenagers as survivalist wildlife, but either way, I wouldn’t be shortcutting home in that direction.
Des was waiting for me at the kids’ fort, beneath the same overhang we’d sheltered under when everything went wrong back in the autumn. I saw the glow of his cigarette before I could pick him out from the surrounding shadows. He was wrapped in a long dark coat I’d not seen before, hair hanging to cover most of his face as he huddled forwards.
Wanting to avoid the whole ‘and when did you last see your girlfriend?’ set-up, I didn’t stand and wait for acknowledgement, but sat down next to him, ignoring the galloping of my heartbeat. He let out a slow stream of smoke but didn’t otherwise offer a response.
“How’ve you been?” the opener was too formal, but I needed a clue on how to aim my pitch.
He slowly rocked back and forth, stiffly nodding. The cold-damp smell of his coat stirred around him, something spicier behind the harsh reek of cigarette. “I know what you did,” he said.
My heart rate steadied, making me realise exactly how much I’d been dreading the moment of revelation. So he knew, and wasn’t in a rush to tell me how he was feeling about it. I needed to see his face properly, and reached out to slip the screen of his hair behind his ear. He silently accepted the touch, leaning slightly into my trailing fingers before jerking back. The swiftly checked action gave me some hope. “I’m sorry,” I told him.
“It was Mark,” he said, voice flat. “He didn’t trust you to tell me yourself.”
“’Course it was.” I couldn’t help my tone slipping, though we both knew I was in no position to call Mark on his judgement.
“Would you have done?”
“Yes. I was going to ring you when I got home this afternoon, but you beat me to it. What happened was stupid. It was a stupid mistake; it was a stupid night. I don’t know why it happened. I am sorry.”
Unmoving, he stared at me, the effect terrifying in the way Tina’s vacant gaze could never have been. His eyes were black pits in the white sliver of his face, and I wondered what mine looked like to him. I wondered if he thought I was bullshitting about telling him, or about being sorry.
“She doesn’t matter.” I was adamant. “The whole thing was a stupid mistake.”
“She does matter.” He threw the stub of his cigarette away, and watched it glow briefly against the ground before rolling to its death smoulder. Defending Tina’s honour was a strange choice for him to make, but I corrected myself anyway.
“Well… okay, she’s not that bad, but…”
“No, Steve,” he snapped, “she’s a fat, ugly, thick-as-pigshit, slag is what she is, but that’s not the issue, is it?”
They weren’t the worst words he could have used, but they weren’t the sort of words he’d ever have used once upon a time. They made me flinch.
“Come on,” I tried, weak and feeble in my own ears. “It wasn’t her fault: nothing would have happened if…”
“If what?” he demanded nastily, already knowing what I’d been about to say.
“If you hadn’t let me down,” I mumbled, ashamed to prove him right, the excuse expiring instantly on the freezing air.
He rocked again, accepting it as an admission as much as an accusation. “I thought we were the same,” he said. “I thought this was all either of us had.”
“Would you’d have felt better if I’d got off with another lad, then? If it had been Will, or Wayne?”
“You’d have had your head kicked in,” he bluntly reminded me, “but I’d rather you’d gone with someone who was fucking worth it.”
I had nothing to say to that, and sat stewing for few minutes, letting the weight of my annoyance switch from side to side, unable to decide where it fitted best. “So what happened to you?” I asked, making a too-little-too-late attempt to redistribute blame. “How come you got so hammered?”
“Doesn’t matter, does it?” he answered. “It’s not your problem now.”
“Meaning?”
Ignoring me, he reached down between his legs and produced an immediately recognisable carrier bag. “I was going to give you this. I shouldn’t have accepted it in the first place: you can’t afford it, and I can’t wear it without explaining to Mam and Thomas how I got it. They wouldn’t believe it was a present from a friend. Your uniform’s in there an’ all.”
‘Wouldn’t believe’ or ‘hadn’t believed’? He’d arrived at the disco in a shit t-shirt, with a bruised mouth. Had that been coincidence, or was it the shirt which started everything off that night? When I didn’t immediately take the bag, Des thrust it more aggressively, knuckles gleaming.
He delivered his terminal blow as I closed numb fingers around the plastic. “But I needn’t have worried about how you’d react, or about you trying to convince me I was wrong: you’ve already sorted things for yourself. Well done.”
“That’s not what I was doing…” my brain and mouth weren’t co-operating, shovelling together words which were nothing more than useless sounds. He was dumping me, and I was providing no defence at all. “That wasn’t how it was.”
“Then what were you doing?”
It was the right question, the one I’d been asking myself over and over, but I hadn’t found the answer; how was I supposed to explain to him? All I had were bald facts. “I wanted you to be there, but you weren’t and she was.”
Horrible, horrible, horrible.
“Fuck off, Steve,” he commanded, and glared at me until I did.
*
There was rain mixing with the mist as I moved towards home, but though the air hung thick and damp, an unending wind howled through my insides, snatching my breath away and forcing me to bend into each step to make any headway. I made it as far as the motorbike barrier at the mouth of the alleyway and grabbed hold of its thick poles, wrapping both arms around to stop myself blowing apart altogether.
With no-one else near, any muggers were missing a trick, because they could have taken anything I had, or done anything they wanted, and I wouldn’t have stopped them. I knew I looked an idiot, doubled over the barrier and choking on the stupid noises forcing their way up my throat, but I had nothing to spare for caring, even if there’d been anyone to watch.
Blinking between the darkness behind my eyelids and the glistening blackness of the tarmac before me, I had a flash of memory: emerging from a different damp darkness into a less murky space; the set line of Des’ shoulders and the gurning features of the broader, older man next to him.
Our debate wasn’t done and dusted. I had my argument. All it took was to turn round and have the wind at my heels instead of in my face. I let go of the barrier, fell into the slipstream and was away, feet pounding back the way they’d come.
I got Des in my sights as he drew level with the tennis courts. “Oi!” I called, caught in the flow of running, wanting him to stop and not thinking beyond the immediate. He didn’t turn, but squared his back and picked up his own pace. I pounded on, gaining ground by the second, thoughtless to anything other than saying my piece.
By the time I’d closed the gap, he was alongside the squat concrete panels of the toilet block. I hadn’t considered stopping, and made a lunge for his arm with the barely formed plan of using him as both pivot and brake.
Too late, I saw the moment from his point of view: a random shouting person bearing down on him. He tugged and fought to get his arm free, throwing me off balance and causing me to grasp tighter as I avoided skidding onto the floor. We completed a full circle before I could squeak out, “It’s me,” and he could focus enough to realise I was right. When everything stopped fair-grounding around us, I had the cold hard concrete wall against my back and a wild-eyed Des pressing me into it.
“You twat,” he gasped, breath billowing in the starkness of the automatic security light. “I thought I was done for.” There was as much relief as anger, so I gulped down some air and launched into what I’d wanted to say.
“You told me…” breath rushing out, breath pouring in, “…you went with someone else. I believed you. I was mad at you, but I got over it… we got over it.”
“Oh, God,” he pushed off me and fell back a few steps, face screwing up. “That’s it? That’s what you’ve come up with?”
“It isn’t any different.”
“Are you for real?” He stared at me disbelievingly, and then stepping close, pushed his hand between my legs and worked the wrist and heel in a long, slow knead. He got a response on the second pass. “That’s why it’s different.” He let go. “I don’t want anything else, Steve, but apparently you do.”
“And Lee Matthews, was he worth it?” I adjusted myself with more force than necessary, annoyed at how easily he’d shown me up.
“Oh, right!” He laughed scornfully. “You want to hear about that now, do you?”
“It matters now,” I told him, “’cos all I did was kiss someone, and whoever it was, I can’t see how that’s worse.”
“It’s worse because you had the choice, you fucking moron!” he shouted. “You have it all so easy and you don’t even know it. If everything comes out, you get to walk away with your face in one piece and your teeth still attached, just like I told Mark after that bollocks with Davy. What do I get?” he stabbed at himself with rigid fingers. “The same as I always fucking get, and you know it.”
“What am I supposed to do about that?” I threw back. “You’re acting like everything’s changed, and it hasn’t. If people found out, you really think I’d be left alone because I got off with the school slag? You want to talk about choice? Well I chose to be with you, Des, and you chose to get fucked by some bloke from a nightclub. Which of us gets to be the most pissed off, here?”
For a moment, I thought I’d gained some ground. He gave me a little more space, appeared to be considering the point I’d made. “You know,” he said, almost conversationally, “I didn’t say he’d fucked me; you said that. That’s how much you thought of me: you saw something you didn’t understand, and immediately assumed I’d taken it up the arse from someone else. Thanks for that. Thanks a fat lot.”
In the weeks since I’d first seen the bruises on his wrists, the exact details had slipped, but some things remained clear enough for defence. “I asked you. You said you’d been with him.”
Everything went very still. We’d found our way back to the edge of the gaping pit from two nights before, both of us carefully poised, no teachers on hand to drag us away a second time. The anger dripped from Des’ face, leaving behind something set and unnatural; the mottled ivory of bone exposed by scraped-back dirt. “I offered to explain that. You missed the moment, Steve.”
“Just tell me if it was a lie.” I thought everything rested on the one point: who was most to blame; who owed the biggest apology; whether it was worth continuing to argue for us.
The security light snapped off. For a split second, the world disappeared: glinting flecks of rain; steam from our breathing; the night all around us, gone.
“I told you what was easiest to say,” Des’ voice scratched across the afterimage, trailing neon in its wake, “because I wasn’t given a choice.”
Before my eyes could fully adjust, the white-blue brightness fired again, bleaching the scene long enough for me to glimpse the truth of his meaning; then everything was rushing back into place, and it was hidden again.
“Whatever you want to believe,” he told me, “it doesn’t make much difference now. Everything has changed, and you can’t help me any more.”
If I was honest with myself, I knew he was right, and that the last part had been the case for some time, but I’d carried a sense of uselessness from the start and it hadn’t stopped me then. “Let me try.”
“There’s nothing to help with.” The stiffness in his face and voice went on the last word, and he looked away, hissing in a breath. “There’s nothing left, all right? Everything I thought I had, everything I thought was mine…” he thudded a finger against his temple, “…I don’t have any more. Not even you.”
It was too much for me. It always had been. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, and finally let him go.
*
Part Thirty-Seven...