Blood Rising - Part Thirty-Nine
Title: Blood Rising (Part Thirty-Nine)
Author: gregoria44
Rating: 15+ for language and concepts, this part
Word count: This part 3,752
Summary: Rock bottom.
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 / Part Thirty-Six / Part Thirty-Seven / Part Thirty-Eight
Time collapsed, the landscape folding and contorting into different shapes. I was a long time ago, my own room, a crappy small box of a TV which my brother had found somewhere, loop for an aerial and a weak picture which rolled for five minutes after it was turned on. Despite my deep love for it, and even deeper patience, it quietly died a few weeks later, but that wasn’t when I’d returned to, but before.
Sitting on the carpet, the back of my neck resting against my bed, my spine sloping away to the floor. Something funny onscreen: a kids’ cartoon or a daft film or a Saturday morning show with send-up voiceovers and presenters clowning around. Whatever, I’m laughing, and the noise I’m making is travelling through my skull and echoing in the bedsprings, and that’s funny too.
I turn to see if Des is laughing: he’s lying on my bed, arms crossed behind his head, propped up so he can see the telly, but he’s not looking at what’s on, he’s smiling at me, eyes half-closed, content and drifting.
“You all right?” I ask.
He lifts an arm, drapes it across my chest. “All good,” he says, shutting his eyes.
When his arm drops a while later, I miss its weight.
*
Eyes open: uniforms, white vehicles, blue lights, light rain. Eyes closed: blinding bathroom, puddling blood, wasted limbs. Even outside I’m carrying the smell of what I saw in there. It’s clinging to the air around me and in my clothes, my nose, my lungs. I’m frightened my memory is permanently scarred with it as much as I am of anything else.
*
“He hit me.” The offended disbelief in his pale eyes is as fresh as if it’s just happened. It’s the first day of the first term in our first year of Bryndleigh Comp and everything is new. This is the first chance we’ve had to talk properly since our form groups were called in assembly. “Right in the stomach. All this stuff came up my throat and I had to swallow it back down or be sick on him. It was disgusting.”
The story can’t make any more sense to me than it does to him, and taken by surprise, I accidentally ask a question which rings with rudeness.
“Then what’s with the side of your face?” I’m looking at the bruise which reaches from his temple down to his cheekbone.
“I fell into the doorframe when he slammed the door on me.” He pulls his shirt over to one side, showing me dark blue skin on his shoulder. “I mean, on me.”
“God, Des. What did your mam say?”
He pauses for the first time in the telling, glances away while he shrugs the shirt back into place. “She said she’d told me not to pester him.”
I’m about to ask another question when Mark comes back from the toilet, shyly taking his untested place next to Des and smiling nervously at us both. Des smiles back, the bewildered indignation of his story quickly hidden. “It doesn’t matter, anyway,” he finishes lightly, as if we’ve been talking about a lost pencil case, or an almost-friend who’s gone to a different school.
“O-kay,” I reply slowly. He’s thrown me, but I’m relieved I don’t have to offer a more useful reaction.
Mark’s known us for less than two hours, and besides, he’s been too well brought up to ask personal questions, certainly not on the first day.
*
The stuffy warmth of the police car. Things travelling past too fast and the reeking air freshener mingling with what’s already in my nose and the confusion of everything that’s been happening and I’m welcoming the noise-filled blank which rises to meet me because at least everything vanishes behind it for a while.
Then tiles, a scratched metal door, overworked disinfectant, and I’m surrounded by a weaker version of the sounds and stench from before and that’s the point I give up and start crying.
*
More tiles, the sting of chlorine in my eyes and nose, rushing water and steam. The local swimming baths, Des rinsing out his hair under the shower next to mine.
“Are you gonna get it cut soon?” I ask him, noticing the weight of water pulling it down to the slender wings of his shoulder blades.
He laughs at the expression on my face. “No, why would I? For a start, it’s really annoying the teachers.”
“’Cos you look like a gosh-darned hippy,” Will tells him, using the clipped, posh tones of a comedy army officer, sleeking conditioner through his own hair. “Short back and sides is the way forward, Mr. Doran.”
“Don’t call me that,” Des says mildly, the suddenness of his reply not quite matching the tone.
“What about the swimming team?” I go on, lurching obliviously into a stupid mistake. “You’ll have to wear a hat for the trials if you don’t; you’ll look a right div then.”
The smile slides from Des along with the shampoo, and instead of answering, he turns to stick his face under the stream of water. Beyond him, Will stabs two fingers towards me with a vicious scowl and then mimes pulling a trigger against his own temple.
I remember, then, why Des isn’t going for the team after all; can’t help glancing at the fading yellow and grey on one arm and the colours riding up his other hip. I shut up.
*
I always shut up. We all did.
*
“Why was he in a cell?”
Beside me at the sergeant’s desk, Duncan was there, solid and real, signing a form as we waited for an interview room. What I wanted to do was clutch him tightly enough to never be prised off again, but I didn’t have the strength for anything except drooping against the counter, staring at the side of his honest, all-in-one-piece face.
He asked the question flatly, only wanting an explanation, and I was grateful he wasn’t trying to start an argument. I couldn’t have dealt with any more raised voices; I’d had enough of my own.
“He was upset when he got here,” the sergeant replied, the bald understatement a sign of a long career dealing with over-excited idiots. Her lined expression was firm and her style severe, but she was levelling with Duncan in a way I knew he’d appreciate. “He was never under arrest. It was safer to put him in a holding cell until we could find an appropriate adult,” she glanced at me, a brief but all-seeing look, “and to keep him away from the possibility of being charged with assaulting a police officer.”
Duncan looked at me then. Stopped writing and angled himself on an elbow to really look at me. He took his time weighing up what he saw, but I couldn’t hold his gaze long enough to read it properly. “You okay to talk to them now?” he said at length.
I nodded.
*
The police weren’t interested in what I wanted to say. As the officer who took my statement and Duncan both kept telling me, they could only take note of what I’d actually seen and not my guess about who was responsible.
I was struggling to listen to the questions properly anyway. They couldn’t tell me anything about Des, wouldn’t say anything about Mark, and my ability to picture events from before was increasingly swamped by waves of grief and exhaustion.
The officer kept asking whether or not I’d seen anyone on my way to the Dorans’; whether or not I thought there’d been anyone in the house apart from Des and Mark; whether there were any cars or other vehicles I’d had reason to notice outside; if any other neighbours had made themselves known.
All I could reply was that I didn’t know. Like every other side street around town, the Dorans’ was always double-parked; people left their cars wherever they could. I didn’t think I’d seen anyone else, but then my memory was too full of blood and broken things.
Besides which, I didn’t want some bloke sat in front of me asking questions about my day. I wanted them all out there looking for Thomas. I needed them to get their heads round the fact he had to have done it; that he’d finally cracked and not been able to stop, just as Des had always said he would.
On the fourth or fifth time I’d interrupted the man’s note-taking to ask when they were going to arrest him, he stopped writing altogether, held both ends of the pen and twiddled it between his fingertips, considering.
“Listen, mate…”
His voice was gentle, but Duncan spoke for the first time in a while, keeping it short. “He’s not your mate; he’s a sixteen year old kid.”
The man frowned, but Duncan was being watchful rather than combative. He let out a small sigh and turned his attention back to me. “Listen, Steven, we’re doing our job. Anyone we think we need to talk to will be brought in one way or another, believe me. But right now, my job is to talk to you, make sure there’s nothing you’ve missed or forgotten that I can help you remember. Okay?”
“I just want to know how Des is.”
He put down the pen, folded his hands over his notes and ducked his head to make sure he had my attention. “How long have you two been friends?” There was concern there, and I supposed he’d dealt with similar situations a hundred times.
“All through school,” I told him; anything to get closer to finding out if Des had made it, “and before.”
“That’s a long time.”
“Yeah.”
“Is he your best mate?”
“We… no, we were…” my throat closed, and Duncan shifted his weight, lifting his shoulder from the wall and hunching further upright. Did they need to know that much? Would Des want them to know?
That was when the thought I’d refused to acknowledge barged to the fore and shouted itself out loud in my head: only if he dies.
“Please, no.” I folded forward until my forehead was pressed against the table. “Oh, God, no.”
My brother’s arm pulled me in, and the floor shrieked as the policeman pushed back his chair. “I’ll make a call, see if there’s anything more I can tell you.”
*
After that, there was a lot more I didn’t remember. Duncan told me they found a doctor to check me over when I felt so cold I couldn’t stop shaking, and in the end I was given a sedative and sent home to sleep it off.
I came to about five o’clock the next morning, brain replaced with cement, totally confused and desperately thirsty. For a long time I lay still, nagged by a far away sense of something wrong, somewhere in the world, but it was like looking for a dust mote down the wrong end of a telescope.
Half awake, I let the more immediate surroundings come into focus: my bed, my bedroom, my brother’s steady breaths as he lay on top of the duvet, fully dressed, wedged along the wall. A sharp edge glinted in the murk of my mind, and out of nowhere I started crying again.
Much later, Duncan having had a wash and put on his dressing gown, he returned to sit on the bed, two mugs of tea steaming from his fists. Still huddled miserably under the duvet, I shook my head, making the throb there worse. He shrugged and leaned across to place one of the mugs on my desk.
I wouldn’t have recognised my voice, except I felt my mouth moving and it was the same question I’d been struggling to form since I’d fully woken. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“No!” Duncan was startled. “Last we were told, he was ‘stable’, whatever that’s supposed to mean, but he’s not…” he reached to pull the edge of the duvet down so he could see my face properly. “Steve, I’m sorry, I didn’t realise you were out of it by the time they said: I’d have told you straight off.”
Relief trickled from an immense distance, pooling inside as flat and dull as anything else I could be feeling.
“What about Mark?”
“That much I don’t know. I’ll ring his mam in a bit if you want.” He took a mouthful of tea and winced at the heat. “I’d never have had him down for the heroic type.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
Too tired to follow the thought through, I let it drop, needing the energy for a confession. “I didn’t go with him when he asked.”
Curling his mug closer into his chest, Duncan shook his head. “You’ve lost me.”
“When Mark went to Des’ house: he asked me to go with him. I said no. I thought it was just another fall out between them.”
“They’d fallen out?”
I had to think about that. I remembered the way they’d looked at each other before Des left class: not with anger, but as though they’d discovered a new danger in each other… then the scene flooded with the next time I’d seen them: Mark, one breath away from panic but holding himself together; Des’ body, lifeless across the floor, head twisted to one side, the visible half of his face purpling and bloody and grey, disfigured with swelling, almost inhuman…
“You got there in the end,” Duncan’s voice dragged me back, “that’s what matters.”
My head was pounding, unpleasant truths shoving themselves through the fug. “No. The woman next door phoned the police; she’d given them the house number. All I did was get in the way: they were outside thinking I’d done something instead of getting inside and radioing for an ambulance.”
“You can’t look at it like that.”
“Why not? I was useless, Dunc. I froze. If I’d gone there and Mark hadn’t…” I faded to a pathetic whimper. “I couldn’t have done what he did.”
The mixture of pity and discomfort on my brother’s face was hard to bear, and I turned into the damp pillow to block him out. His hand found my head and stroked through my hair, but there was nothing useful for him to say. “Come on, don’t do this. None of this is your fault.”
“I let him down. Thomas was always going to do this, and when he did, we weren’t there; no-one was there to help.”
Duncan’s hand fell away. “Don’t start that again. You don’t know it was Thomas; even the police think he’s in Ireland.”
The police could think what they liked. I knew.
*
Mr. and Mrs. Lomas didn’t want me talking to Mark. Mr. Lomas only spoke briefly to Duncan on the phone, long enough to explain Mark was in a state and not up to speaking with anyone. The hospital wouldn’t tell us anything over the phone either, and Duncan couldn’t get through to the police officer who’d given us his contact details.
“Sorry, Ste,” Duncan told me, carrying the remains of his breakfast from the front room through to the kitchen, “you’re going to have to sit this one out for a while. Maybe it’s a good thing; let everything settle down a bit.”
“I want to go down the hospital,” I replied, slightly more with it since having a bath and getting dressed, though still nursing a sickening headache.
“That’s not a good idea.”
“Why?”
“You’re the one who was bothered about being in the way. They’ll be taking care of him; they don’t need you to worry about. Anyway, his mam’ll be there, and she won’t appreciate your theory about Thomas, right?”
“Fuck her,” I muttered, but he was running water into the washing-up bowl, and didn’t hear.
The day dragged by. I kept dropping off to sleep without realising, waking with a jolt to a heavy grinding noise, no idea if it was real or a hallucination but convinced each time the walls and ceiling were closing in on me.
Late afternoon, the phone rang. It was Wayne, wanting to know why we’d all missed school, but Duncan dealt with him, saying something vague about my not being well.
By evening, my mind was on overdrive with too much sleep and not enough food, and anxiety was setting in. There was some crap on the telly, but I wasn’t seeing it. My knees were jigging of their own accord, and it was only when I tasted blood I noticed the mess I’d made of the skin around my fingernails.
With a whole host of things I didn’t want to think about, and for want of anything else to look at, I eyed my brother across the room, feeling my lungs getting tighter on each breath.
He lowered the paper he was reading. “What’s the matter?”
Right then, it sounded like the stupidest question I’d ever heard, and already wound up, the urge to lash out won through. “Oh, I don’t know,” I spat, “take a wild guess.”
“Look,” he replied, pointedly light in the same way he’d made his ‘hero’ comment about Mark, earlier, “you’ve got to be patient, mate. It’s barely twenty-four hours since…”
“How would you feel if this was Lizzie we were talking about, and you’d found her wiped across the floor?”
A muscle seized in Duncan’s jaw. “Don’t say things like that.”
“But that’s how it was yesterday, and you’re acting like it was nowt and I’m going out of my bloody mind here.”
“It’s not the same…”
“It’s exactly the same, whether you want to hear it or not.”
“Shit, Steve, you really want to do this now? This is the conversation you want to have right at this moment?”
“Why not? It’s as crap as any other.”
He stood up, threw the paper across the room. “Why would I want to hear it? Whatever you and he were getting up to, it was already over, right? So what’s the point in putting me through the grotty details?” He made to leave the room, but I stood up as well, grabbed his arm to stop him. His gaze found the top of my head, travelled down to my face; for a second we were both stalled by the diminished difference in our heights.
“It was Lancashire,” I told him, aware of his arm going limp in my grasp, “that’s when we got together, and it wasn’t easy, and it’s never been straightforward, and I didn’t want you to know because it was over, but it wasn’t my choice to end things, and you don’t just stop feeling things for someone ’cos they tell you to piss off.” I let go of him, sank back down into the chair. “So there you go. Sorry you had to listen to something so grotty.”
“Fucking hell,” he whispered to the space I’d left. Swearing never sounded so much like a prayer. He sat down as well, but perched on the edge of the sofa, elbows on knees, a hand over his mouth. “I don’t know what to say,” he admitted eventually, eyes steadily on mine, darker than usual in the half-light of evening. “You’re growing up, man.”
“What’s that got to do with…”
“’Cos when you were ten, you only needed plasters for your knees and the occasional hug. I’m out of my depth, here.”
“So am I.”
We were quiet for a while, the telly wittering on in the background and Duncan distractedly picking at the remains of a blister on his palm.
If it had been possible to avoid continuing the awkward conversation, I would have done, but it was time to settle certain facts. I took the deepest breath I could manage and offered a dangerous test. “Mam asked me to move in with her.”
His face fell and his voice came hollow. “And what did you say?”
“I said I’d move out when you asked me to.”
“Then why bring it up now?”
“Do you want me to go?”
He paused in disbelief rather than indecision. “Of course I don’t. I want you here, with me.”
“Even if I want to be with Des, rather than some girl?”
Understanding fell on him like a punch. “Oh, Steve,” he dropped his head into his hands, screwing his palms against his forehead. I was left with a view of his hair sticking through his fingers in ridiculous tufts.
“And even if it was someone else offering me a room, not just because it’s Mam?”
“Oh, Steve,” he said again, dragging the skin of his face down as his head came back up. “You’re my little brother, and I love you, and I want you here, but I want you to be…”
“Straight?”
“Safe!” he snapped. “I want you to be safe, and I think, going on the evidence, it’s fair to say Des is not a fucking safe option.”
“He’s not an ‘option’ at all!” I fired back. “I’m sitting here like a twat, doing nothing because the police, and you, and Des’ mam, and Mark’s parents don’t want me anywhere near. So I’m growing up? Well, about fucking time, because apparently when the shit hits the fan, that’s when the grown-ups get involved. Months, this has been going down, months, and no-one’s wanted to know; everyone’s turned their backs and put their fingers in their ears and now, now they’re all over it like flies on shit, and telling us to go away and be quiet and sit down like good little boys.”
Duncan’s mouth went from hanging open to clamped-white shut. Closing his eyes for a second, I couldn’t tell if he was gathering his wits or holding back from bellowing me into the following week. “What…” he began, sounding like every syllable was an agony of restraint, “…do you want me to say?”
“That you and me are okay,” I ground out, “that you’re still on my side whatever happened with Des, whatever’s going to happen with me.”
“You don’t have to ask that,” he told me, wiping a wrist across his nose. “You don’t ever have to ask that.”
“And I want to go down the hospital. I want to see Des.”
He swallowed. “Okay. All right. If that’s what you want. I’ll take you down there tomorrow, but it has to be tomorrow now.”
What was one more night if I still had my brother on side? “Thank you.”
*
Part Forty
Author: gregoria44
Rating: 15+ for language and concepts, this part
Word count: This part 3,752
Summary: Rock bottom.
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 / Part Thirty-Six / Part Thirty-Seven / Part Thirty-Eight
Time collapsed, the landscape folding and contorting into different shapes. I was a long time ago, my own room, a crappy small box of a TV which my brother had found somewhere, loop for an aerial and a weak picture which rolled for five minutes after it was turned on. Despite my deep love for it, and even deeper patience, it quietly died a few weeks later, but that wasn’t when I’d returned to, but before.
Sitting on the carpet, the back of my neck resting against my bed, my spine sloping away to the floor. Something funny onscreen: a kids’ cartoon or a daft film or a Saturday morning show with send-up voiceovers and presenters clowning around. Whatever, I’m laughing, and the noise I’m making is travelling through my skull and echoing in the bedsprings, and that’s funny too.
I turn to see if Des is laughing: he’s lying on my bed, arms crossed behind his head, propped up so he can see the telly, but he’s not looking at what’s on, he’s smiling at me, eyes half-closed, content and drifting.
“You all right?” I ask.
He lifts an arm, drapes it across my chest. “All good,” he says, shutting his eyes.
When his arm drops a while later, I miss its weight.
*
Eyes open: uniforms, white vehicles, blue lights, light rain. Eyes closed: blinding bathroom, puddling blood, wasted limbs. Even outside I’m carrying the smell of what I saw in there. It’s clinging to the air around me and in my clothes, my nose, my lungs. I’m frightened my memory is permanently scarred with it as much as I am of anything else.
*
“He hit me.” The offended disbelief in his pale eyes is as fresh as if it’s just happened. It’s the first day of the first term in our first year of Bryndleigh Comp and everything is new. This is the first chance we’ve had to talk properly since our form groups were called in assembly. “Right in the stomach. All this stuff came up my throat and I had to swallow it back down or be sick on him. It was disgusting.”
The story can’t make any more sense to me than it does to him, and taken by surprise, I accidentally ask a question which rings with rudeness.
“Then what’s with the side of your face?” I’m looking at the bruise which reaches from his temple down to his cheekbone.
“I fell into the doorframe when he slammed the door on me.” He pulls his shirt over to one side, showing me dark blue skin on his shoulder. “I mean, on me.”
“God, Des. What did your mam say?”
He pauses for the first time in the telling, glances away while he shrugs the shirt back into place. “She said she’d told me not to pester him.”
I’m about to ask another question when Mark comes back from the toilet, shyly taking his untested place next to Des and smiling nervously at us both. Des smiles back, the bewildered indignation of his story quickly hidden. “It doesn’t matter, anyway,” he finishes lightly, as if we’ve been talking about a lost pencil case, or an almost-friend who’s gone to a different school.
“O-kay,” I reply slowly. He’s thrown me, but I’m relieved I don’t have to offer a more useful reaction.
Mark’s known us for less than two hours, and besides, he’s been too well brought up to ask personal questions, certainly not on the first day.
*
The stuffy warmth of the police car. Things travelling past too fast and the reeking air freshener mingling with what’s already in my nose and the confusion of everything that’s been happening and I’m welcoming the noise-filled blank which rises to meet me because at least everything vanishes behind it for a while.
Then tiles, a scratched metal door, overworked disinfectant, and I’m surrounded by a weaker version of the sounds and stench from before and that’s the point I give up and start crying.
*
More tiles, the sting of chlorine in my eyes and nose, rushing water and steam. The local swimming baths, Des rinsing out his hair under the shower next to mine.
“Are you gonna get it cut soon?” I ask him, noticing the weight of water pulling it down to the slender wings of his shoulder blades.
He laughs at the expression on my face. “No, why would I? For a start, it’s really annoying the teachers.”
“’Cos you look like a gosh-darned hippy,” Will tells him, using the clipped, posh tones of a comedy army officer, sleeking conditioner through his own hair. “Short back and sides is the way forward, Mr. Doran.”
“Don’t call me that,” Des says mildly, the suddenness of his reply not quite matching the tone.
“What about the swimming team?” I go on, lurching obliviously into a stupid mistake. “You’ll have to wear a hat for the trials if you don’t; you’ll look a right div then.”
The smile slides from Des along with the shampoo, and instead of answering, he turns to stick his face under the stream of water. Beyond him, Will stabs two fingers towards me with a vicious scowl and then mimes pulling a trigger against his own temple.
I remember, then, why Des isn’t going for the team after all; can’t help glancing at the fading yellow and grey on one arm and the colours riding up his other hip. I shut up.
*
I always shut up. We all did.
*
“Why was he in a cell?”
Beside me at the sergeant’s desk, Duncan was there, solid and real, signing a form as we waited for an interview room. What I wanted to do was clutch him tightly enough to never be prised off again, but I didn’t have the strength for anything except drooping against the counter, staring at the side of his honest, all-in-one-piece face.
He asked the question flatly, only wanting an explanation, and I was grateful he wasn’t trying to start an argument. I couldn’t have dealt with any more raised voices; I’d had enough of my own.
“He was upset when he got here,” the sergeant replied, the bald understatement a sign of a long career dealing with over-excited idiots. Her lined expression was firm and her style severe, but she was levelling with Duncan in a way I knew he’d appreciate. “He was never under arrest. It was safer to put him in a holding cell until we could find an appropriate adult,” she glanced at me, a brief but all-seeing look, “and to keep him away from the possibility of being charged with assaulting a police officer.”
Duncan looked at me then. Stopped writing and angled himself on an elbow to really look at me. He took his time weighing up what he saw, but I couldn’t hold his gaze long enough to read it properly. “You okay to talk to them now?” he said at length.
I nodded.
*
The police weren’t interested in what I wanted to say. As the officer who took my statement and Duncan both kept telling me, they could only take note of what I’d actually seen and not my guess about who was responsible.
I was struggling to listen to the questions properly anyway. They couldn’t tell me anything about Des, wouldn’t say anything about Mark, and my ability to picture events from before was increasingly swamped by waves of grief and exhaustion.
The officer kept asking whether or not I’d seen anyone on my way to the Dorans’; whether or not I thought there’d been anyone in the house apart from Des and Mark; whether there were any cars or other vehicles I’d had reason to notice outside; if any other neighbours had made themselves known.
All I could reply was that I didn’t know. Like every other side street around town, the Dorans’ was always double-parked; people left their cars wherever they could. I didn’t think I’d seen anyone else, but then my memory was too full of blood and broken things.
Besides which, I didn’t want some bloke sat in front of me asking questions about my day. I wanted them all out there looking for Thomas. I needed them to get their heads round the fact he had to have done it; that he’d finally cracked and not been able to stop, just as Des had always said he would.
On the fourth or fifth time I’d interrupted the man’s note-taking to ask when they were going to arrest him, he stopped writing altogether, held both ends of the pen and twiddled it between his fingertips, considering.
“Listen, mate…”
His voice was gentle, but Duncan spoke for the first time in a while, keeping it short. “He’s not your mate; he’s a sixteen year old kid.”
The man frowned, but Duncan was being watchful rather than combative. He let out a small sigh and turned his attention back to me. “Listen, Steven, we’re doing our job. Anyone we think we need to talk to will be brought in one way or another, believe me. But right now, my job is to talk to you, make sure there’s nothing you’ve missed or forgotten that I can help you remember. Okay?”
“I just want to know how Des is.”
He put down the pen, folded his hands over his notes and ducked his head to make sure he had my attention. “How long have you two been friends?” There was concern there, and I supposed he’d dealt with similar situations a hundred times.
“All through school,” I told him; anything to get closer to finding out if Des had made it, “and before.”
“That’s a long time.”
“Yeah.”
“Is he your best mate?”
“We… no, we were…” my throat closed, and Duncan shifted his weight, lifting his shoulder from the wall and hunching further upright. Did they need to know that much? Would Des want them to know?
That was when the thought I’d refused to acknowledge barged to the fore and shouted itself out loud in my head: only if he dies.
“Please, no.” I folded forward until my forehead was pressed against the table. “Oh, God, no.”
My brother’s arm pulled me in, and the floor shrieked as the policeman pushed back his chair. “I’ll make a call, see if there’s anything more I can tell you.”
*
After that, there was a lot more I didn’t remember. Duncan told me they found a doctor to check me over when I felt so cold I couldn’t stop shaking, and in the end I was given a sedative and sent home to sleep it off.
I came to about five o’clock the next morning, brain replaced with cement, totally confused and desperately thirsty. For a long time I lay still, nagged by a far away sense of something wrong, somewhere in the world, but it was like looking for a dust mote down the wrong end of a telescope.
Half awake, I let the more immediate surroundings come into focus: my bed, my bedroom, my brother’s steady breaths as he lay on top of the duvet, fully dressed, wedged along the wall. A sharp edge glinted in the murk of my mind, and out of nowhere I started crying again.
Much later, Duncan having had a wash and put on his dressing gown, he returned to sit on the bed, two mugs of tea steaming from his fists. Still huddled miserably under the duvet, I shook my head, making the throb there worse. He shrugged and leaned across to place one of the mugs on my desk.
I wouldn’t have recognised my voice, except I felt my mouth moving and it was the same question I’d been struggling to form since I’d fully woken. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“No!” Duncan was startled. “Last we were told, he was ‘stable’, whatever that’s supposed to mean, but he’s not…” he reached to pull the edge of the duvet down so he could see my face properly. “Steve, I’m sorry, I didn’t realise you were out of it by the time they said: I’d have told you straight off.”
Relief trickled from an immense distance, pooling inside as flat and dull as anything else I could be feeling.
“What about Mark?”
“That much I don’t know. I’ll ring his mam in a bit if you want.” He took a mouthful of tea and winced at the heat. “I’d never have had him down for the heroic type.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
Too tired to follow the thought through, I let it drop, needing the energy for a confession. “I didn’t go with him when he asked.”
Curling his mug closer into his chest, Duncan shook his head. “You’ve lost me.”
“When Mark went to Des’ house: he asked me to go with him. I said no. I thought it was just another fall out between them.”
“They’d fallen out?”
I had to think about that. I remembered the way they’d looked at each other before Des left class: not with anger, but as though they’d discovered a new danger in each other… then the scene flooded with the next time I’d seen them: Mark, one breath away from panic but holding himself together; Des’ body, lifeless across the floor, head twisted to one side, the visible half of his face purpling and bloody and grey, disfigured with swelling, almost inhuman…
“You got there in the end,” Duncan’s voice dragged me back, “that’s what matters.”
My head was pounding, unpleasant truths shoving themselves through the fug. “No. The woman next door phoned the police; she’d given them the house number. All I did was get in the way: they were outside thinking I’d done something instead of getting inside and radioing for an ambulance.”
“You can’t look at it like that.”
“Why not? I was useless, Dunc. I froze. If I’d gone there and Mark hadn’t…” I faded to a pathetic whimper. “I couldn’t have done what he did.”
The mixture of pity and discomfort on my brother’s face was hard to bear, and I turned into the damp pillow to block him out. His hand found my head and stroked through my hair, but there was nothing useful for him to say. “Come on, don’t do this. None of this is your fault.”
“I let him down. Thomas was always going to do this, and when he did, we weren’t there; no-one was there to help.”
Duncan’s hand fell away. “Don’t start that again. You don’t know it was Thomas; even the police think he’s in Ireland.”
The police could think what they liked. I knew.
*
Mr. and Mrs. Lomas didn’t want me talking to Mark. Mr. Lomas only spoke briefly to Duncan on the phone, long enough to explain Mark was in a state and not up to speaking with anyone. The hospital wouldn’t tell us anything over the phone either, and Duncan couldn’t get through to the police officer who’d given us his contact details.
“Sorry, Ste,” Duncan told me, carrying the remains of his breakfast from the front room through to the kitchen, “you’re going to have to sit this one out for a while. Maybe it’s a good thing; let everything settle down a bit.”
“I want to go down the hospital,” I replied, slightly more with it since having a bath and getting dressed, though still nursing a sickening headache.
“That’s not a good idea.”
“Why?”
“You’re the one who was bothered about being in the way. They’ll be taking care of him; they don’t need you to worry about. Anyway, his mam’ll be there, and she won’t appreciate your theory about Thomas, right?”
“Fuck her,” I muttered, but he was running water into the washing-up bowl, and didn’t hear.
The day dragged by. I kept dropping off to sleep without realising, waking with a jolt to a heavy grinding noise, no idea if it was real or a hallucination but convinced each time the walls and ceiling were closing in on me.
Late afternoon, the phone rang. It was Wayne, wanting to know why we’d all missed school, but Duncan dealt with him, saying something vague about my not being well.
By evening, my mind was on overdrive with too much sleep and not enough food, and anxiety was setting in. There was some crap on the telly, but I wasn’t seeing it. My knees were jigging of their own accord, and it was only when I tasted blood I noticed the mess I’d made of the skin around my fingernails.
With a whole host of things I didn’t want to think about, and for want of anything else to look at, I eyed my brother across the room, feeling my lungs getting tighter on each breath.
He lowered the paper he was reading. “What’s the matter?”
Right then, it sounded like the stupidest question I’d ever heard, and already wound up, the urge to lash out won through. “Oh, I don’t know,” I spat, “take a wild guess.”
“Look,” he replied, pointedly light in the same way he’d made his ‘hero’ comment about Mark, earlier, “you’ve got to be patient, mate. It’s barely twenty-four hours since…”
“How would you feel if this was Lizzie we were talking about, and you’d found her wiped across the floor?”
A muscle seized in Duncan’s jaw. “Don’t say things like that.”
“But that’s how it was yesterday, and you’re acting like it was nowt and I’m going out of my bloody mind here.”
“It’s not the same…”
“It’s exactly the same, whether you want to hear it or not.”
“Shit, Steve, you really want to do this now? This is the conversation you want to have right at this moment?”
“Why not? It’s as crap as any other.”
He stood up, threw the paper across the room. “Why would I want to hear it? Whatever you and he were getting up to, it was already over, right? So what’s the point in putting me through the grotty details?” He made to leave the room, but I stood up as well, grabbed his arm to stop him. His gaze found the top of my head, travelled down to my face; for a second we were both stalled by the diminished difference in our heights.
“It was Lancashire,” I told him, aware of his arm going limp in my grasp, “that’s when we got together, and it wasn’t easy, and it’s never been straightforward, and I didn’t want you to know because it was over, but it wasn’t my choice to end things, and you don’t just stop feeling things for someone ’cos they tell you to piss off.” I let go of him, sank back down into the chair. “So there you go. Sorry you had to listen to something so grotty.”
“Fucking hell,” he whispered to the space I’d left. Swearing never sounded so much like a prayer. He sat down as well, but perched on the edge of the sofa, elbows on knees, a hand over his mouth. “I don’t know what to say,” he admitted eventually, eyes steadily on mine, darker than usual in the half-light of evening. “You’re growing up, man.”
“What’s that got to do with…”
“’Cos when you were ten, you only needed plasters for your knees and the occasional hug. I’m out of my depth, here.”
“So am I.”
We were quiet for a while, the telly wittering on in the background and Duncan distractedly picking at the remains of a blister on his palm.
If it had been possible to avoid continuing the awkward conversation, I would have done, but it was time to settle certain facts. I took the deepest breath I could manage and offered a dangerous test. “Mam asked me to move in with her.”
His face fell and his voice came hollow. “And what did you say?”
“I said I’d move out when you asked me to.”
“Then why bring it up now?”
“Do you want me to go?”
He paused in disbelief rather than indecision. “Of course I don’t. I want you here, with me.”
“Even if I want to be with Des, rather than some girl?”
Understanding fell on him like a punch. “Oh, Steve,” he dropped his head into his hands, screwing his palms against his forehead. I was left with a view of his hair sticking through his fingers in ridiculous tufts.
“And even if it was someone else offering me a room, not just because it’s Mam?”
“Oh, Steve,” he said again, dragging the skin of his face down as his head came back up. “You’re my little brother, and I love you, and I want you here, but I want you to be…”
“Straight?”
“Safe!” he snapped. “I want you to be safe, and I think, going on the evidence, it’s fair to say Des is not a fucking safe option.”
“He’s not an ‘option’ at all!” I fired back. “I’m sitting here like a twat, doing nothing because the police, and you, and Des’ mam, and Mark’s parents don’t want me anywhere near. So I’m growing up? Well, about fucking time, because apparently when the shit hits the fan, that’s when the grown-ups get involved. Months, this has been going down, months, and no-one’s wanted to know; everyone’s turned their backs and put their fingers in their ears and now, now they’re all over it like flies on shit, and telling us to go away and be quiet and sit down like good little boys.”
Duncan’s mouth went from hanging open to clamped-white shut. Closing his eyes for a second, I couldn’t tell if he was gathering his wits or holding back from bellowing me into the following week. “What…” he began, sounding like every syllable was an agony of restraint, “…do you want me to say?”
“That you and me are okay,” I ground out, “that you’re still on my side whatever happened with Des, whatever’s going to happen with me.”
“You don’t have to ask that,” he told me, wiping a wrist across his nose. “You don’t ever have to ask that.”
“And I want to go down the hospital. I want to see Des.”
He swallowed. “Okay. All right. If that’s what you want. I’ll take you down there tomorrow, but it has to be tomorrow now.”
What was one more night if I still had my brother on side? “Thank you.”
*
Part Forty