How We Smashed Johari's Window (part two) by halotolerant, Brown Cortina, Gene/Sam
I have been chewing all your ears off about this monster fic of mine, and now 'tis done! My type of LJ account doesn't seem to let me post more than ~5000 words in one go, so to prevent this 25,000+ thing clogging everyone's f-lists I think the best thing is probably to post it in chunks of a few chapters at a time BUT it is finished and will keep coming over the next few days!
Title: How We Smashed Johari's Window (part two- chapters 3-4)
Rating: Brown Cortina
Pairing: Gene/Sam
Words: ~3,700 (this part)
Notes: Oh boy, I hope this makes as much sense outside my head... In psychology there is a tool called a Johari window, which divides personality into: things we know and others know about us; things we know and others don't; things others know about us but we don't and; things we and others do not know about ourselves.
ETA: Thank you
m31andyfor alcohol intake correction :D
Summary (this part): For now Gene sees but through a glass darkly (apologies to 1 Corinthians)
Part One
Chapter Three
After Annie had left him in the pub, her notebook full of theories and ‘to-do’s they’d listed together, Gene sat contemplating the end of his second pint. He’d been so involved in conversation with her that his orders hadn’t piled in as swiftly as usual.
His beer glass was shimmering with condensation. From the rim a lone droplet trailed down the side and to the table.
Sam had used to rub at his glass, when they’d sat like this, enjoying an hour’s relaxation at the end of the day. When the conversation had stilled, maybe when one of them had said something to which there wasn’t really an answer (“Shall I give my assessment, then? Of you?”) Sam would pass the time running the pad of one finger over the cloudy surface, wiping the water that came off onto his cheek or the back of his other hand.
Probably didn’t even realise he did it, let alone that Gene noticed, that it kept Gene quiet, fascinated.
And Gene shouldn’t be thinking of it now. Knew he shouldn’t. But seeing that picture had broken down carefully constructed barriers in his memory, and warm memories were hard to block away when you were sat alone and mostly sober.
They had been happy then, of that he was sure, as far as either of them seemed capable of it. Their conversation had flowed easily, in its words and more importantly in its silences. That they both had had secrets was clear, as was the way they both respected the fact, treading carefully around topics neither ever seemed eager to discuss - love, family, childhood.
Gene ran his finger down his beer glass in the cold moisture, thinking of the dew in the Castlefield Cemetery that day last July, the way it had cut through the knees of his trousers.
It is not usually something important, to tell someone that you have, no, had a brother. That is not, for most people, a shocking intimacy that you half regret sharing.
The first giant leap in a friendship is not always protecting someone from a murder charge, nor is the second often accompanying someone to a cemetery they haven’t been able to bear visiting since they buried that brother there. Not every friend is prepared to then get hit out at in every way with the angry grief that has never found a direction except down a bottle.
There are not a lot of men who’d wait until it finished and have the grace not to comment on it. Who’d press your dignity back into your arms and smile in the summer sunset as you walked along the gravel path away from the dead and unchangeable past, and say “Thank-you. Thank-you for trusting me” like they’d been the ones given something.
Gene sipped at his beer. He had to get this down and go home before he could order any more. Before he could spend any more time sitting and seeing into the past.
He could see now that he’d been so busy forgetting the things he wished had never happened, that he’d failed to think of the good things. They were even more important to forget, they were the things that had cut him fucking open in the first place, made him vulnerable.
Because they’d walked down that gravel path together, him and Sam, nothing seeming to have changed, but the path hadn’t ended that day or that week or that month. What had (not) happened in September, on that day two days before Sam had left, had been part of the same thing, Gene could see that now.
That had been, in fact, the same day that Frank Hagwood had first wandered into the station, eager, earnest and upset, and had unfortunately first encountered DS Carling. Gene, who’d seen the debacle earliest, had dragged Ray away, yelled at him to find some fucking manners, and returned to the front desk to find Sam and Annie gently comforting Frank with tea and biscuits, Sam clearly itching for a self-righteous argument.
And yes, Ray was a tosser to use words like that to a distressed man, even if he was a fucking Spastic, but Gene felt oddly partial to a fight, somehow. The three of them had looked so flipping sickeningly domestic.
Thus he and Sam had yelled, grabbed each other, tussled in the corridor, fallen into the locker room and broken a chair.
Just another Wednesday really.
“Now let me see, Marjorie” Gene had yelled, pinning Sam to the ground with no little satisfaction. “What penalty shall I exact today? My powers of imagination wear a little thin when you piss me off this often. So a classic, say, buy me a drink?”
“Always buy you a sodding drink” Sam mumbled, “Oh OK, OK, I will. Let go. Just let’s get back to Frank; he must think we’ve killed each other.”
And then, suddenly, they’d both seen the funny side and started laughing so hard they slid onto the benches and had to wait a moment before they could go back into the corridor.
“Snot a baa iff” Sam had said much later, slumping in a booth at the pub, acres of beer glasses but not much else between them.
“What? Wassat Gladys?”
“Said: it’s not a bad life, Guv.” Sam had been leaning over sideways in his seat, grinning and playing with a beer mat.
“Nah, you’re right. ‘S’not bad” Gene had slurred back, after a moment’s consideration. Sam didn’t smile like this very much. Was nice.
There had been another moment or two of comfortable silence. Gene drained the end of his pint - he’d only had six, felt like more - and put the glass down amongst the ones Ray, Chris and Annie had left as they had slipped away and home to whoever they had waiting.
Then Gene had risen with a slight wobble and clapped Sam on the back.
“Home time, Doris.”
“You wanna curry or somethin’?” Sam had asked, staggering up from the booth and trying to get into his coat.
“Nah. Full. Time go home.” Gene insisted, finally grabbing Sam and the coat and inserting the one into the other through brute force.
“Thanks.” Sam had said, patting the coat appreciatively. “But Gene, you’re drunk, yeah? Le’s have coffee an’ that at mine. Has to be mine, cos further to your’s, sides, you can’t drive now an’ no bus there.”
“Fair ‘nough. Lead on MacDuff.”
They’d made for door, Sam pausing to call: “G’night Nelson!”
Nelson was wiping up glasses behind the bar. “You two be careful now” he’d said.
He hadn’t spoken casually. Gene would remember that even after other details of the night blurred or became repressed: “You two be careful now” Nelson had said, seriously, as if he had bleeding precognition.
All most of us get, thought Gene now, staring into the remnants of his pint like it was a crystal ball, is bloody 20:20 hindsight.
“For now we see but through a glass darkly” he muttered sarcastically, since he was quite sure no one could hear him.
- - -
Chapter Four
Another day, another pub - so far, so Gene Hunt. But this time it was the White Lion in central Hyde, and the drink was less Dutch courage than sheer prevarication.
He’d have to bring Ray here one day, Gene thought, sipping appreciatively at their very fine bitter. Ray understood beer. You could talk to Ray about beer all evening, no fuss, no complication, simple pleasures.
You could not, of course, talk to Ray about coming to Hyde to seek out the mystery of Sam Tyler. Gene had first thought he would need something as vaguely humiliating as Annie providing a cover for him. It had turned out, however as he’d sorted through Frank Hagwood’s file (all these bad habits, couldn’t shake any of them, be sodding taping interviews soon) that Frank had attended a kind of social group for ‘Retarded Adults’ in Hyde. It had met in the Circle bar at the old Theatre Royal, apparently, and used the theatre’s on-site craft facilities for ‘learning projects’. Gene had never heard of such a thing, but the woman he’d phoned had told him that all new policy was now focussing on getting such people out of institutions and ‘into the community’. In Gene’s mind this had roughly translated to ‘killed’ but he was too eager to use the excuse to get going to say so.
And this morning, after a cursory visit to the theatre - imposing red brick building, shabby Edwardian glamour, no one about except a deaf cleaning lady - he was getting himself ready to visit the home address he’d obtained from Central Police Records.
Beginning with the half-hour drive to Hyde earlier that day, Gene had been fighting a rising sense of foolishness, never an emotion he was comfortable with. The paper, after all, could have been wrong. There might be some reasonable explanation - a joke gone wrong: “I feel like I’ve been in coma”, Sam might have said, and been taken literally.
But then, Sam and comas…it didn’t seem likely he’d joke about the subject.
After all, during their two days of snatched minutes of planning and theorising, Annie had told Gene possibly the most bizarre series of anecdotes he’d ever heard. Sam, comas, delusions, fluctuating beliefs in reality - things that in their sheer loopiness made a whole lot of sense out of a ragbag of confused moments he’d spent a long time trying to make head or tail of. Tony Crane’s accusations, for one. The way Sam behaved around telephones, or TVs.
“I thought he’d got over it,” Annie had said, shaking her head, “I mean, for the last three, four months, he’d stopped mentioning it. After that shoot-out we had on the train tracks in July. It was like he figured out which way was up at last, you know? I thought he was over it.” She’d folded her arms and looked him in the eye: “Even if he’s delusional again, he still needs our help.”
He never wanted my help with any of that in the first place, Gene had thought, not a little bitterly. He never told me anything.
Now, thinking it over - and when the hell had he let himself become so bloody reflective? - Gene couldn’t help remembering Sam’s behaviour that night in September when they’d stumbled off to his flat for tea. It was something Gene had forgotten in the whirl of what came later.
And, that? The later stuff? That hadn’t happened. But remembering the tea and TV, that was OK. Just about.
- - -
The tea had been over-brewed and in mismatched mugs, Sam’s a chipped brown thing that he’d inherited with the flat, Gene’s a hideous yellow-and-purple free gift with ‘only the crumbliest, flakiest chocolate’ inscribed in curly writing.
They’d talked sporadically, sobering up a little, commented on the TV - Gene couldn’t even remember what programme had been on, now - and eventually he’d fallen asleep in the armchair. It had, in fact, been banal almost to the point of dullness, with an odd sideways feeling of something slipping past them, a punch-line they weren’t getting, some opportunity lost.
When Gene had woken up, he’d regretted it. The chair had smelt like all fifty previous occupants of the flat, and from lying on it he’d embossed the rough texture of the patterned upholstery into his skin. He could remember running his fingers over the prints of ferns and flowers on his forearm.
But he had barely been able to see them.
It had been dark, with only a flickering blue-ish light from the television.
This had been odd, because it was at least two in the morning, when even the test card went to bed.
Had been odder still, because Sam had been sitting up close to the television, apparently watching the snow storming static, reaching out to it, even.
“I thought I told you to leave me alone” Sam had said, coldly.
“What?” Gene had felt a wave of disbelief. “What did you just say?”
And Sam had turned around quickly, shocked, as though he hadn’t known Gene was there.
“Nothing, I…Sorry, half-dozing!” he’d said, with an insincere chuckle. His expression was worn, almost haunted.
Gene’s eyes had been swollen and aching with drowsiness, but he blinked anyway, sat up and rubbed his eyes. “How’s about you turn that thing off, eh?” he’d said, with a lot more patience than his ex-wife ever would have credited, given that he’d just been woken. “Can’t you sleep?”
Sam had turned the screen off slowly, still watching it, like he was waiting for something. “Not easily” he’d said at length. “Might have a shower, try and calm down. You go back to sleep again.”
“To be honest, I don’t think I will, not in this chair.” Gene had shuffled, running a hand over his sleep-oily face. Then he had straightened up purposefully: “C’mon, I’m the superior officer, I get the bed.”
“It’s my flat” Sam had replied with an air of wearied tolerance that made Gene breathe a sigh of relief. Sam could only use that tone if he was very much himself.
“I’m doing you a favour, Tyler. That thing’ll murder your back. Now, for an athlete such as myself…”
“Fine. Whatever.” Sam had held up his hands, silhouetted in the light from under the door. “I’ll go and have that shower.”
Gene had crawled into the bed gingerly - from the only other night he’d ever stayed at Sam’s he knew and respected its powers to fold in half without notice - and pulled up the covers. Much better. Nice and soft. Easily go back to sleep. And Sam would be in the chair now, which faced more towards the window and not the TV.
In retrospect, Gene could see that he must have drifted off, because although he had heard the start of the shower, he had distinctly woken when a heavy, human weight landed on top of him.
It had been Sam. A warm, slightly damp, soap-smelling Sam, lying across him and apparently as surprised as he was.
- - -
Gene got up from the White Lion’s bar and grabbed his coat off the back of his stool. This was time to stop, time to leave well alone. He was about to try and meet Sam for goodness sakes! It wouldn’t help to be thinking about…
- - -
Sam’s voice had been low and thready, his breath warm on Gene’s shoulder, smelling moistly of mint. The sleepy haze in his words had diffused Gene’s own anger before it could have grown.
“What the..? Oh, shit, Gene, I’m so sorry. I forgot you were here.”
“Nice one, Gladys” Gene had gasped in response, a bit less cuttingly than he’d meant. The heat had rolled off Sam, almost comforting. With it came the scent of him, close and thick and familiar. It had seemed to slow Gene’s thoughts effectively as a race through treacle.
Sam had been trying to get off the bed, but their combined weights had so sunken the springs that he couldn’t achieve the leverage he needed.
In essence: he had been wriggling.
Gene had lain back, staring at a ceiling he couldn’t see, and closed his eyes in desperation.
He’d thought he’d got over this…problem. Years ago.
Eventually, after five or ten wonderful, awful, dreadful seconds, and with a mumbled apology, Sam had rocked them both as he sat up. Grabbing blindly for a handhold, he’d run his hand for a brief half-second over Gene’s open mouth and tight, aching heat pooled in Gene’s stomach, making him bite his lip and spread his legs wider.
And then the warmth had gone. Sam had made it off of the travesty of a bed, and was settling on the chair away somewhere in the darkness.
Arousal hadn’t been so terrible for Gene since the distant days when he’d had to take to running away from alley-way football matches. When he’d raced to his bedroom, panting with the need to get his cock in his hand and defuse it, a harsh, rough tackle from another boy having drawn up his hardness faster than his bruises.
But he’d got his act together, shaped up and lived right. He’d been what he ought and since the age of twenty two, until now, he’d truly believed that was that.
Lying there, Sam’s scent still around him, Gene had clenched his hands at his sides and cursed very explicitly and very silently.
Then, from the region of the chair had come Sam’s voice, small and fearful:
“I’m sorry, I was almost dozing in the shower and I just blanked, you know? Please don’t go. Gene? Stay with me.”
“OK, OK, keep your hair on.” Gene had managed. There had been something so desperate about the words - besides, he couldn’t easily have left, not in the state he’d been in.
The next morning, over breakfast, Sam had been businesslike, almost formal. Gene - after a reasonable night’s sleep and no longer drowsy - had started to realise that six months ago he would have yelled blue bloody murder and a year ago probably would have beaten Sam until he couldn’t walk. But that morning he was passing the jam and helping them both pretend that nothing had changed at all.
And of course, that evening, he hadn’t even been asking whether Sam was still afraid to go home alone. Hadn’t asked himself what it meant when Sam had just followed him out of the pub and he’d driven them both to his house instead in silence.
Gene had never had the words to stop it happening.
- - -
Even as Gene drew the Cortina into what was apparently now Sam’s road, there was a temptation to turn away, leave it all the fuck alone like anyone sensible would.
But under every other possibility of mistakes and embarrassment, there was the fact that Sam might be in trouble. And, frankly, Gene could and did try and turn off or bury any given emotion, except loyalty. That was his moral standard, the one thing he would never, ever be ashamed of.
- - -
The doorbell rang the opening notes of the Blue Danube inside the terraced house. Gene stubbed his cigarette under his toe and waited. Eventually the door began to open, and a woman’s face peered out. It was the woman from the newspaper photo, except - Gene noticed with surprise - in colour you could see that she was, well, coloured.
“Can I help you?” she asked, warily.
“Alright luv? I’m a friend of Sam’s. I was wondering if I could have a brief chat with him.”
“Actually I’m afraid we’re just about to have lunch. What did you say your name was? I don’t think I recognise you.”
“Just bring him out here, he knows who I am.”
“I don’t think…” she began, and then stopped, turning to someone behind her: “Thought you were asleep, darling.”
“Not with you away from me,” came Sam’s voice, tenderly. “Anyway, Maya, what’s all this?”
The voice alone made a shiver pass down Gene’s spine. He stepped up. This made the woman flinch away but he didn’t care about that. He reached for the door, wanting to get it open properly.
“Sam? Is that you?”
And there he was. Sam. Coming from behind the woman to stand protectively in front of her, his eyes taking in Gene in a cold flicker.
“Hello? Can I help you?”
“Sam?” Gene’s voice was gone. Whispering like some twat in the final reel of a film, but his breath had been taken away easy as…It was Sam.
“Yes? I don’t think I know you, Mr..?”
“Sam, stop playing silly buggers, it’s me.” Gene searched Sam’s face, from the ever-anxious eyes to the thin, pale lips, his own overwhelming, gut-level recognition perplexed by Sam’s blankness.
Sam whispered something in the woman’s ear, nudging her further back into the house, then turned back to face him: “I’m sorry, but I really don’t recognise you. Now, do you have a point or can I get back to my nap?”
Instinctively, and with rising frustration, Gene grabbed him, clutching at his shirt and dragging him out onto the pavement. He yelled in Sam’s face, trying to ignore the visceral gratification of physical contact with him after so long.
“Sam! No one is this forgetful! What the hell is going on? Who the hell is she and what are you doing here?”
Sam, with a sneer on his face, broke the hold with astonishing speed, twisted his arms and then ducked and struck in some way so that Gene wound up smacked down on the paving stones. Sam loomed over him with red-faced outrage: “Her name is Maya. She’s my wife. Alright? I don’t give a fuck what you and your tosser friends at the National Front think.”
Gene could see Sam’s eyes, up close and deadly serious.
“I’m not…”
The door opened again: “I’ve called the police, Sam!” the woman cried, but Gene barely heard it. Whatever was going on, no one laid him out. In a burst of energy, he rose, flipping them over, forcing Sam down on his back and straddling him, fixing his hands above his head.
“I’m not the fucking NF!” Gene growled. “I’m…” He stopped. The simple dislike in Sam’s expression was unnerving. He’d seen that directed at murderers, hooligans, bombers. Never at him, not even at the start. And it was not what he had become used to seeing in Sam’s eyes, when they met his.
“I’m a friend” he said, at last. “We met in February. This year. 1973. Hoops, remember?”
“Piss off.” Sam spat out, “Till last month I spent 1973 in a sodding coma.”
“I’ve got your reports, dated, signed, everything. I’ve got your charge sheets. I’ve got a bleeding birthday card from you with a fucking teddy bear on it that you thought was funny. ”
Sam blinked, momentarily relaxing in Gene’s grasp: “Look, if this is some sort of joke…” he said warily, but with uncertainty in his tone.
For a moment, they gazed, assessing each other.
Then a heavy hand descended on Gene’s shoulder: “Afternoon, mate. You’re nicked.”
Part Three
Title: How We Smashed Johari's Window (part two- chapters 3-4)
Rating: Brown Cortina
Pairing: Gene/Sam
Words: ~3,700 (this part)
Notes: Oh boy, I hope this makes as much sense outside my head... In psychology there is a tool called a Johari window, which divides personality into: things we know and others know about us; things we know and others don't; things others know about us but we don't and; things we and others do not know about ourselves.
ETA: Thank you
m31andyfor alcohol intake correction :D
Summary (this part): For now Gene sees but through a glass darkly (apologies to 1 Corinthians)
Part One
Chapter Three
After Annie had left him in the pub, her notebook full of theories and ‘to-do’s they’d listed together, Gene sat contemplating the end of his second pint. He’d been so involved in conversation with her that his orders hadn’t piled in as swiftly as usual.
His beer glass was shimmering with condensation. From the rim a lone droplet trailed down the side and to the table.
Sam had used to rub at his glass, when they’d sat like this, enjoying an hour’s relaxation at the end of the day. When the conversation had stilled, maybe when one of them had said something to which there wasn’t really an answer (“Shall I give my assessment, then? Of you?”) Sam would pass the time running the pad of one finger over the cloudy surface, wiping the water that came off onto his cheek or the back of his other hand.
Probably didn’t even realise he did it, let alone that Gene noticed, that it kept Gene quiet, fascinated.
And Gene shouldn’t be thinking of it now. Knew he shouldn’t. But seeing that picture had broken down carefully constructed barriers in his memory, and warm memories were hard to block away when you were sat alone and mostly sober.
They had been happy then, of that he was sure, as far as either of them seemed capable of it. Their conversation had flowed easily, in its words and more importantly in its silences. That they both had had secrets was clear, as was the way they both respected the fact, treading carefully around topics neither ever seemed eager to discuss - love, family, childhood.
Gene ran his finger down his beer glass in the cold moisture, thinking of the dew in the Castlefield Cemetery that day last July, the way it had cut through the knees of his trousers.
It is not usually something important, to tell someone that you have, no, had a brother. That is not, for most people, a shocking intimacy that you half regret sharing.
The first giant leap in a friendship is not always protecting someone from a murder charge, nor is the second often accompanying someone to a cemetery they haven’t been able to bear visiting since they buried that brother there. Not every friend is prepared to then get hit out at in every way with the angry grief that has never found a direction except down a bottle.
There are not a lot of men who’d wait until it finished and have the grace not to comment on it. Who’d press your dignity back into your arms and smile in the summer sunset as you walked along the gravel path away from the dead and unchangeable past, and say “Thank-you. Thank-you for trusting me” like they’d been the ones given something.
Gene sipped at his beer. He had to get this down and go home before he could order any more. Before he could spend any more time sitting and seeing into the past.
He could see now that he’d been so busy forgetting the things he wished had never happened, that he’d failed to think of the good things. They were even more important to forget, they were the things that had cut him fucking open in the first place, made him vulnerable.
Because they’d walked down that gravel path together, him and Sam, nothing seeming to have changed, but the path hadn’t ended that day or that week or that month. What had (not) happened in September, on that day two days before Sam had left, had been part of the same thing, Gene could see that now.
That had been, in fact, the same day that Frank Hagwood had first wandered into the station, eager, earnest and upset, and had unfortunately first encountered DS Carling. Gene, who’d seen the debacle earliest, had dragged Ray away, yelled at him to find some fucking manners, and returned to the front desk to find Sam and Annie gently comforting Frank with tea and biscuits, Sam clearly itching for a self-righteous argument.
And yes, Ray was a tosser to use words like that to a distressed man, even if he was a fucking Spastic, but Gene felt oddly partial to a fight, somehow. The three of them had looked so flipping sickeningly domestic.
Thus he and Sam had yelled, grabbed each other, tussled in the corridor, fallen into the locker room and broken a chair.
Just another Wednesday really.
“Now let me see, Marjorie” Gene had yelled, pinning Sam to the ground with no little satisfaction. “What penalty shall I exact today? My powers of imagination wear a little thin when you piss me off this often. So a classic, say, buy me a drink?”
“Always buy you a sodding drink” Sam mumbled, “Oh OK, OK, I will. Let go. Just let’s get back to Frank; he must think we’ve killed each other.”
And then, suddenly, they’d both seen the funny side and started laughing so hard they slid onto the benches and had to wait a moment before they could go back into the corridor.
“Snot a baa iff” Sam had said much later, slumping in a booth at the pub, acres of beer glasses but not much else between them.
“What? Wassat Gladys?”
“Said: it’s not a bad life, Guv.” Sam had been leaning over sideways in his seat, grinning and playing with a beer mat.
“Nah, you’re right. ‘S’not bad” Gene had slurred back, after a moment’s consideration. Sam didn’t smile like this very much. Was nice.
There had been another moment or two of comfortable silence. Gene drained the end of his pint - he’d only had six, felt like more - and put the glass down amongst the ones Ray, Chris and Annie had left as they had slipped away and home to whoever they had waiting.
Then Gene had risen with a slight wobble and clapped Sam on the back.
“Home time, Doris.”
“You wanna curry or somethin’?” Sam had asked, staggering up from the booth and trying to get into his coat.
“Nah. Full. Time go home.” Gene insisted, finally grabbing Sam and the coat and inserting the one into the other through brute force.
“Thanks.” Sam had said, patting the coat appreciatively. “But Gene, you’re drunk, yeah? Le’s have coffee an’ that at mine. Has to be mine, cos further to your’s, sides, you can’t drive now an’ no bus there.”
“Fair ‘nough. Lead on MacDuff.”
They’d made for door, Sam pausing to call: “G’night Nelson!”
Nelson was wiping up glasses behind the bar. “You two be careful now” he’d said.
He hadn’t spoken casually. Gene would remember that even after other details of the night blurred or became repressed: “You two be careful now” Nelson had said, seriously, as if he had bleeding precognition.
All most of us get, thought Gene now, staring into the remnants of his pint like it was a crystal ball, is bloody 20:20 hindsight.
“For now we see but through a glass darkly” he muttered sarcastically, since he was quite sure no one could hear him.
- - -
Chapter Four
Another day, another pub - so far, so Gene Hunt. But this time it was the White Lion in central Hyde, and the drink was less Dutch courage than sheer prevarication.
He’d have to bring Ray here one day, Gene thought, sipping appreciatively at their very fine bitter. Ray understood beer. You could talk to Ray about beer all evening, no fuss, no complication, simple pleasures.
You could not, of course, talk to Ray about coming to Hyde to seek out the mystery of Sam Tyler. Gene had first thought he would need something as vaguely humiliating as Annie providing a cover for him. It had turned out, however as he’d sorted through Frank Hagwood’s file (all these bad habits, couldn’t shake any of them, be sodding taping interviews soon) that Frank had attended a kind of social group for ‘Retarded Adults’ in Hyde. It had met in the Circle bar at the old Theatre Royal, apparently, and used the theatre’s on-site craft facilities for ‘learning projects’. Gene had never heard of such a thing, but the woman he’d phoned had told him that all new policy was now focussing on getting such people out of institutions and ‘into the community’. In Gene’s mind this had roughly translated to ‘killed’ but he was too eager to use the excuse to get going to say so.
And this morning, after a cursory visit to the theatre - imposing red brick building, shabby Edwardian glamour, no one about except a deaf cleaning lady - he was getting himself ready to visit the home address he’d obtained from Central Police Records.
Beginning with the half-hour drive to Hyde earlier that day, Gene had been fighting a rising sense of foolishness, never an emotion he was comfortable with. The paper, after all, could have been wrong. There might be some reasonable explanation - a joke gone wrong: “I feel like I’ve been in coma”, Sam might have said, and been taken literally.
But then, Sam and comas…it didn’t seem likely he’d joke about the subject.
After all, during their two days of snatched minutes of planning and theorising, Annie had told Gene possibly the most bizarre series of anecdotes he’d ever heard. Sam, comas, delusions, fluctuating beliefs in reality - things that in their sheer loopiness made a whole lot of sense out of a ragbag of confused moments he’d spent a long time trying to make head or tail of. Tony Crane’s accusations, for one. The way Sam behaved around telephones, or TVs.
“I thought he’d got over it,” Annie had said, shaking her head, “I mean, for the last three, four months, he’d stopped mentioning it. After that shoot-out we had on the train tracks in July. It was like he figured out which way was up at last, you know? I thought he was over it.” She’d folded her arms and looked him in the eye: “Even if he’s delusional again, he still needs our help.”
He never wanted my help with any of that in the first place, Gene had thought, not a little bitterly. He never told me anything.
Now, thinking it over - and when the hell had he let himself become so bloody reflective? - Gene couldn’t help remembering Sam’s behaviour that night in September when they’d stumbled off to his flat for tea. It was something Gene had forgotten in the whirl of what came later.
And, that? The later stuff? That hadn’t happened. But remembering the tea and TV, that was OK. Just about.
- - -
The tea had been over-brewed and in mismatched mugs, Sam’s a chipped brown thing that he’d inherited with the flat, Gene’s a hideous yellow-and-purple free gift with ‘only the crumbliest, flakiest chocolate’ inscribed in curly writing.
They’d talked sporadically, sobering up a little, commented on the TV - Gene couldn’t even remember what programme had been on, now - and eventually he’d fallen asleep in the armchair. It had, in fact, been banal almost to the point of dullness, with an odd sideways feeling of something slipping past them, a punch-line they weren’t getting, some opportunity lost.
When Gene had woken up, he’d regretted it. The chair had smelt like all fifty previous occupants of the flat, and from lying on it he’d embossed the rough texture of the patterned upholstery into his skin. He could remember running his fingers over the prints of ferns and flowers on his forearm.
But he had barely been able to see them.
It had been dark, with only a flickering blue-ish light from the television.
This had been odd, because it was at least two in the morning, when even the test card went to bed.
Had been odder still, because Sam had been sitting up close to the television, apparently watching the snow storming static, reaching out to it, even.
“I thought I told you to leave me alone” Sam had said, coldly.
“What?” Gene had felt a wave of disbelief. “What did you just say?”
And Sam had turned around quickly, shocked, as though he hadn’t known Gene was there.
“Nothing, I…Sorry, half-dozing!” he’d said, with an insincere chuckle. His expression was worn, almost haunted.
Gene’s eyes had been swollen and aching with drowsiness, but he blinked anyway, sat up and rubbed his eyes. “How’s about you turn that thing off, eh?” he’d said, with a lot more patience than his ex-wife ever would have credited, given that he’d just been woken. “Can’t you sleep?”
Sam had turned the screen off slowly, still watching it, like he was waiting for something. “Not easily” he’d said at length. “Might have a shower, try and calm down. You go back to sleep again.”
“To be honest, I don’t think I will, not in this chair.” Gene had shuffled, running a hand over his sleep-oily face. Then he had straightened up purposefully: “C’mon, I’m the superior officer, I get the bed.”
“It’s my flat” Sam had replied with an air of wearied tolerance that made Gene breathe a sigh of relief. Sam could only use that tone if he was very much himself.
“I’m doing you a favour, Tyler. That thing’ll murder your back. Now, for an athlete such as myself…”
“Fine. Whatever.” Sam had held up his hands, silhouetted in the light from under the door. “I’ll go and have that shower.”
Gene had crawled into the bed gingerly - from the only other night he’d ever stayed at Sam’s he knew and respected its powers to fold in half without notice - and pulled up the covers. Much better. Nice and soft. Easily go back to sleep. And Sam would be in the chair now, which faced more towards the window and not the TV.
In retrospect, Gene could see that he must have drifted off, because although he had heard the start of the shower, he had distinctly woken when a heavy, human weight landed on top of him.
It had been Sam. A warm, slightly damp, soap-smelling Sam, lying across him and apparently as surprised as he was.
- - -
Gene got up from the White Lion’s bar and grabbed his coat off the back of his stool. This was time to stop, time to leave well alone. He was about to try and meet Sam for goodness sakes! It wouldn’t help to be thinking about…
- - -
Sam’s voice had been low and thready, his breath warm on Gene’s shoulder, smelling moistly of mint. The sleepy haze in his words had diffused Gene’s own anger before it could have grown.
“What the..? Oh, shit, Gene, I’m so sorry. I forgot you were here.”
“Nice one, Gladys” Gene had gasped in response, a bit less cuttingly than he’d meant. The heat had rolled off Sam, almost comforting. With it came the scent of him, close and thick and familiar. It had seemed to slow Gene’s thoughts effectively as a race through treacle.
Sam had been trying to get off the bed, but their combined weights had so sunken the springs that he couldn’t achieve the leverage he needed.
In essence: he had been wriggling.
Gene had lain back, staring at a ceiling he couldn’t see, and closed his eyes in desperation.
He’d thought he’d got over this…problem. Years ago.
Eventually, after five or ten wonderful, awful, dreadful seconds, and with a mumbled apology, Sam had rocked them both as he sat up. Grabbing blindly for a handhold, he’d run his hand for a brief half-second over Gene’s open mouth and tight, aching heat pooled in Gene’s stomach, making him bite his lip and spread his legs wider.
And then the warmth had gone. Sam had made it off of the travesty of a bed, and was settling on the chair away somewhere in the darkness.
Arousal hadn’t been so terrible for Gene since the distant days when he’d had to take to running away from alley-way football matches. When he’d raced to his bedroom, panting with the need to get his cock in his hand and defuse it, a harsh, rough tackle from another boy having drawn up his hardness faster than his bruises.
But he’d got his act together, shaped up and lived right. He’d been what he ought and since the age of twenty two, until now, he’d truly believed that was that.
Lying there, Sam’s scent still around him, Gene had clenched his hands at his sides and cursed very explicitly and very silently.
Then, from the region of the chair had come Sam’s voice, small and fearful:
“I’m sorry, I was almost dozing in the shower and I just blanked, you know? Please don’t go. Gene? Stay with me.”
“OK, OK, keep your hair on.” Gene had managed. There had been something so desperate about the words - besides, he couldn’t easily have left, not in the state he’d been in.
The next morning, over breakfast, Sam had been businesslike, almost formal. Gene - after a reasonable night’s sleep and no longer drowsy - had started to realise that six months ago he would have yelled blue bloody murder and a year ago probably would have beaten Sam until he couldn’t walk. But that morning he was passing the jam and helping them both pretend that nothing had changed at all.
And of course, that evening, he hadn’t even been asking whether Sam was still afraid to go home alone. Hadn’t asked himself what it meant when Sam had just followed him out of the pub and he’d driven them both to his house instead in silence.
Gene had never had the words to stop it happening.
- - -
Even as Gene drew the Cortina into what was apparently now Sam’s road, there was a temptation to turn away, leave it all the fuck alone like anyone sensible would.
But under every other possibility of mistakes and embarrassment, there was the fact that Sam might be in trouble. And, frankly, Gene could and did try and turn off or bury any given emotion, except loyalty. That was his moral standard, the one thing he would never, ever be ashamed of.
- - -
The doorbell rang the opening notes of the Blue Danube inside the terraced house. Gene stubbed his cigarette under his toe and waited. Eventually the door began to open, and a woman’s face peered out. It was the woman from the newspaper photo, except - Gene noticed with surprise - in colour you could see that she was, well, coloured.
“Can I help you?” she asked, warily.
“Alright luv? I’m a friend of Sam’s. I was wondering if I could have a brief chat with him.”
“Actually I’m afraid we’re just about to have lunch. What did you say your name was? I don’t think I recognise you.”
“Just bring him out here, he knows who I am.”
“I don’t think…” she began, and then stopped, turning to someone behind her: “Thought you were asleep, darling.”
“Not with you away from me,” came Sam’s voice, tenderly. “Anyway, Maya, what’s all this?”
The voice alone made a shiver pass down Gene’s spine. He stepped up. This made the woman flinch away but he didn’t care about that. He reached for the door, wanting to get it open properly.
“Sam? Is that you?”
And there he was. Sam. Coming from behind the woman to stand protectively in front of her, his eyes taking in Gene in a cold flicker.
“Hello? Can I help you?”
“Sam?” Gene’s voice was gone. Whispering like some twat in the final reel of a film, but his breath had been taken away easy as…It was Sam.
“Yes? I don’t think I know you, Mr..?”
“Sam, stop playing silly buggers, it’s me.” Gene searched Sam’s face, from the ever-anxious eyes to the thin, pale lips, his own overwhelming, gut-level recognition perplexed by Sam’s blankness.
Sam whispered something in the woman’s ear, nudging her further back into the house, then turned back to face him: “I’m sorry, but I really don’t recognise you. Now, do you have a point or can I get back to my nap?”
Instinctively, and with rising frustration, Gene grabbed him, clutching at his shirt and dragging him out onto the pavement. He yelled in Sam’s face, trying to ignore the visceral gratification of physical contact with him after so long.
“Sam! No one is this forgetful! What the hell is going on? Who the hell is she and what are you doing here?”
Sam, with a sneer on his face, broke the hold with astonishing speed, twisted his arms and then ducked and struck in some way so that Gene wound up smacked down on the paving stones. Sam loomed over him with red-faced outrage: “Her name is Maya. She’s my wife. Alright? I don’t give a fuck what you and your tosser friends at the National Front think.”
Gene could see Sam’s eyes, up close and deadly serious.
“I’m not…”
The door opened again: “I’ve called the police, Sam!” the woman cried, but Gene barely heard it. Whatever was going on, no one laid him out. In a burst of energy, he rose, flipping them over, forcing Sam down on his back and straddling him, fixing his hands above his head.
“I’m not the fucking NF!” Gene growled. “I’m…” He stopped. The simple dislike in Sam’s expression was unnerving. He’d seen that directed at murderers, hooligans, bombers. Never at him, not even at the start. And it was not what he had become used to seeing in Sam’s eyes, when they met his.
“I’m a friend” he said, at last. “We met in February. This year. 1973. Hoops, remember?”
“Piss off.” Sam spat out, “Till last month I spent 1973 in a sodding coma.”
“I’ve got your reports, dated, signed, everything. I’ve got your charge sheets. I’ve got a bleeding birthday card from you with a fucking teddy bear on it that you thought was funny. ”
Sam blinked, momentarily relaxing in Gene’s grasp: “Look, if this is some sort of joke…” he said warily, but with uncertainty in his tone.
For a moment, they gazed, assessing each other.
Then a heavy hand descended on Gene’s shoulder: “Afternoon, mate. You’re nicked.”
Part Three