House of Cards

by Garrett Leigh

  Calum turned the van left, his expression inscrutable. Brix took a deep breath and continued. “At the hospital, my temperature was so high they said I had meningitis. They put me in an isolation ward and told Jordan to call my family . . . luckily, he didn’t have their number, because the next morning—” Brix faltered.

  “Go on,” Calum said gently. “It’s okay.”

  “They sedated me overnight so I could sleep, and the next morning, a different doctor came round. He said he was going to do some tests—he didn’t say what, and I didn’t ask. I was distracted, you see, because Jordan had decided he needed to go home and get changed.” Brix stopped and shook his head. “I—I should’ve known then that something was up, but at the time, I just didn’t want him to go. I was so fucking ill and scared.”

  “He knew, didn’t he?”

  “That obvious, eh?” Brix tipped his head back and briefly closed his eyes. Talking about this—with Calum—was easier than he’d expected, but the weight of keeping it to himself so long had left him drained. “Well, you’re right. He scarpered, and that was the last I saw of him for a while. The doctor came back that afternoon with a nurse from the GUM clinic. They told me I had a recent HIV infection that was probably what was making me so ill—conversion sickness, or something, not everyone gets it—then they gave me a number to call when I was discharged and left me to it.”

  “They left you?”

  Brix shrugged. “They didn’t boot me out, but there wasn’t much they could do for me. I left as soon as I could walk.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “To find Jordan.”

  Calum fell silent as the sea came into view. His eyes remained on the road, but Brix could tell his mind was racing, drawing the same conclusions Brix had all those years ago.

  “Don’t hurt your brain, Cal. Whatever you’re thinking is probably true.”

  “You got it from Jordan?”

  Brix nodded. “Yep. He’d known for six months but done nothing about it. We didn’t bareback often, but you know what things were like back then, with the drink and weed and shit. Stuff . . . happened, and the axe fell on me.”

  “I’m so sorry, Brix.”

  Brix turned to Calum as the van eased to a stop outside the cottage. “It ain’t your fault.”

  “It isn’t yours either.”

  “Isn’t it? I got tanked up and had unprotected sex—more than once—with someone I knew was sleeping around with half of Camden. You can’t deny how fucking stupid that was.”

  “Piss off, Brix. You can spout as much self-deprecating crap at me as you like, but you’ll never convince me that you deserved this.” Calum shut the engine off and slid abruptly out of the van, slamming the door. Brix stared after him, frozen, but then the gravity of all he’d told Calum sunk in. I told him.

  For a long moment, it didn’t seem real, but Calum’s absence made his bones ache too much for him to linger in the cold van. He got out and trailed Calum to the front door. “Are you angry with me?”

  Calum sighed. “Of course I’m not. I’m angry that you’ve had to go through this, especially on your own.”

  Brix opened the door and tried to put himself in Calum’s shoes, reverse the situation, but his brain was too tired to make sense of what he found, and two days without sleep sunk in. He stumbled. Calum caught him.

  “Bed.”

  Brix didn’t argue. Letting Calum lead him upstairs and sit him on the edge of his bed had begun to feel normal. He bent to untie his boots, but Calum beat him to it and eased them off his feet. Dude, you don’t have to undress me. I can do it. But the words didn’t find their way to Brix’s tongue. Instead, he raised his arms so Calum could slip his T-shirt off, then forced himself to stand and swap his jeans for comfy trackies.

  Calum disappeared. Brix’s heart followed him, but his body couldn’t comply. He crawled into bed, so tired his head was spinning, even as he strained to hear any sign that Calum had come back. For too long, there was nothing, then the bed dipped behind him and Brix found his head suddenly in the warm, soothing safety of Calum’s lap.

  “Will you tell me what it’s like?”

  Brix opened his eyes. “‘What it’s like’?”

  “Living with it.” Calum stared down at him. “Does it make you ill?”

  “Not often. Most days I forget I have it.”

  “Really?” Calum’s gaze turned quizzical. “I don’t get that.”

  Brix steeled himself, then relinquished the best pillow in the world and sat up, spinning around so his legs could wrap loosely around Calum’s waist, a move that seemed to surprise Calum, until Brix took his hands. “It doesn’t make me ill. I’ve been on the medication for years now. My viral load is undetectable, and my CD4 counts are good. In fact, I reckon it’s the meds that give me the most gip, more than the disease.”

  “The meds . . . you mean Truvada, right?”

  A few years ago, Brix would’ve been surprised Calum had heard of the magic blue pill that kept him alive, but times were changing fast, and for the better. “Aye, I take Truvada combined with another drug. Three fat pills a day, two red, one blue.”

  “And the side effects are nasty?”

  “Only if I don’t pay attention. You gotta take them regularly, with food, and leave off the binge drinking and shit. Truvada’s a bitch on an empty stomach. Hurts like hell and gives me vertigo.”

  “That’s why you get dizzy sometimes?”

  “You’ve noticed, eh? Thought I was better at hiding it than that.”

  Calum grinned a little, though it was strained. “Most people don’t stare at you as much as I do, remember?”

  The theory made sense if Calum stared at Brix half as much as Brix did him. “You can stare at me all you like.”

  “Noted.” Then Calum’s grin faded. “What else do the meds do? You’ve seemed really tired since I came here. Is that the virus, or the meds?”

  Brix shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. I do get tired sometimes, and a nasty bout of flu most winters, but so do lots of people who aren’t living with HIV. It’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s in my head. I just try to look at the numbers and go from there.”

  “The numbers . . . you mean your blood counts?”

  “Aye. The viral load measures the level of HIV in my blood—how many copies of the virus I have, and the CD4 count monitors my immune system . . . how well my body is coping with the infection.”

  Calum nodded slowly. “I’ve heard of that before, but I’ve never known what it meant.”

  “Neither did I until I had to, Cal. Don’t look so guilty.”

  “I’ll stop feeling guilty when I understand what it all means for you. Humour me, yeah?”

  Fair enough. Brix delved into the bank of knowledge he’d accrued over the years and laid it out as best he could. “Because the medication works for me, my viral load is low—undetectable, remember?—which means I’ve got fuck-all HIV active in my system. My CD4 count is high—twelve hundred last time—which is good . . . normal, like yours, probably.”

  “Like mine? So you’re healthy?”

  “Most days. A doctor told me a while ago that people who get on Truvada quickly after infection have a good chance of living as long as they might’ve done without the virus.”

  Brix watched Calum frown as he digested the heavy influx of information, knowing it flew in the face of everything he’d likely thought about HIV before. He wondered absently if Calum had assumed, like he had back then, that he was dying, rotting away from AIDS, like the men who’d died in the eighties epidemic. “I’m okay, Cal, really. My biggest battle is with myself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Brix traced an abstract pattern on Calum’s wrist. “It just seems too good to be true sometimes, you know? Like I’m building a house of cards and it’s gonna blow down every time I get a fucking cold. Makes me want it over with. To let it kill me now so I don’t have to fight it.”

  “But you’re not ill.”
/>
  “I know . . . and I believe it most days, but it gets on top of me from time to time.”

  “Do you think that might be because you were prone to depression before?” Calum’s tone was cautious. “I’m not pretending I’ve got a clue how you feel, but you felt like that before the HIV . . .”

  When you tried to off yourself. Brix heard the end of Calum’s unspoken sentence loud and clear. “You sound a lot like my nurse. She reckons HIV probably saved me. I thought she was off her tits when she first said it, but it makes more sense these days. I was on self-destruct in London, but I’d never have come back here if things hadn’t gone so wrong with Jordan, and then who knows what mess I’d be in now, even without the HIV.”

  “I thought all Porthkennack folk came home eventually.”

  “Not alive, they don’t. It’s the sea, Cal. We need it, it’s who we are, and I wouldn’t have survived this without it.”

  “You’re not going to survive the night if you don’t get some sleep.” Calum touched Brix’s face, rubbing the pad of his thumbs over Brix’s stinging eyelids. “We can talk forever, if that’s what you need, but it’ll all still be here tomorrow.”

  “Will you?”

  “Me?”

  Brix leaned into Calum’s touch. “Will you be here tomorrow . . . I mean, right here? With me?”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “It is. Stay with me, Cal. Please. I can’t let you go.” There was so much more to say, but fatigue had finally won the war. Brix fell forward into Calum’s arms. “Please . . . Cal. Please stay.”

  “Shh.” Calum manoeuvred them so deftly that Brix hardly knew he was moving until he found himself on his side, cocooned by Calum’s larger, stronger, warmer frame behind him. “I’m not going anywhere, Brix, I promise.”

  “Stay, please—”

  “Shh. Sleep, mate. I’m here.”

  Calum studied the hole in the chicken wire, perplexed. It looked like a hen had tried to dig out of the enclosure, but as far as he could tell, they were all still inside. He counted heads to be sure, starting with Bongo, but lost track as they wandered in and out of the nest box to lay their morning eggs. Damn bloody birds. Though he’d fast learned to share Brix’s affection for them.

  Which made the hole in the fence all the more concerning. Were there foxes in Cornwall? Wolves? Shamefully, he had no idea. One thing he did know, though, was that the hole needed to be fixed and there was no way he was waking Brix to ask him where he kept his hammer.

  Calum went to the shed and rummaged around amongst the bags of animal feed and boxes of random tools, trying not to glance up at the bedroom window where he’d left Brix sleeping a few hours ago. The urge to check on him for the hundredth time was strong, but Calum fought it. Brix was exhausted, and Calum was fucked if he was going to disturb him for the sake of his own obsession.

  Didn’t stop his mind racing as he armed himself with a hammer and a box of nails though, and returned to the hole in the fence. He’d done a bunch of googling that morning to fill a few blanks in what Brix had told him—medication, long-term prognosis . . . sex. Right. ’Cause that’s what’s important? With considerable effort, Calum pulled his mind from the gutter and focussed on the fence. He’d just about fudged it when a battered Land Rover drove down the side of the cottage and pulled up by the gate.

  Calum locked the shed door as the infamous John Lusmoore got out, accompanied by a woman who looked so much like Brix that Calum would’ve bet a limb that she had Lusmoore blood. Would they let themselves in the gate and stroll on in?

  Lacking any brighter ideas, Calum met them at the gate, his hand on the bolt to let them through, but they stopped on the other side, clearly as curious as him.

  John Lusmoore eyed Calum. “You that fella from London?”

  “I’m Calum.”

  “Aye, that was the name, John,” the woman said. “Got the girls in town all aflutter, he has.”

  John grunted. “A scruffy carthorse gets those twits excited. Where’s my boy at? Workin’? We didn’t see him at the studio.”

  “He’s asleep,” Calum said. “Last few days have worn him out.” For a moment, he feared he’d said too much, but the woman nodded.

  “Not surprised with this halfwit jumping on boats at all hours. I’m Peg, by the way. The prodigal son’s favourite aunt.”

  “Favourite aunt” bore little resemblance to the Aunt Peg Brix had described, but despite knowing the crates of contraband in Brix’s garden had been her doing, Calum couldn’t help instantly warming to her. She had Brix’s smile, and Calum had been under its spell for as long as he could remember. “Do you want me to wake him?”

  “Too late.”

  Brix’s smoky voice startled Calum. He turned to find Brix behind him, looking—albeit dishevelled—a million times better than he had this morning when Calum had left him in bed. They stared at each other, a thousand things to say, but no words to say them.

  John cleared his throat. “What you been doing with that chook fence, boy? Looks like you drove the van over it.”

  Brix blinked. “What?”

  John pointed. “It’s all over the place.”

  “That’s my fault,” Calum said. “There was a hole in it when I got up. That’s my city boy attempt at fixing it.”

  Brix regarded it over his shoulder, then turned back with a smile that seemed suspiciously kind. “It ain’t half bad.”

  Calum snorted. “Liar.”

  The collective Lusmoores seemed to agree. John put his hand on the gate, and Calum stepped aside as he let himself in. “You need to move that post for starters. Come on. I’ll show you.”

  John strode across the garden without waiting to see if Calum followed. Taken aback, Calum glanced at Brix, whose only answer was an amused shrug. Great. Calum had a feeling he was about to get schooled.

  He joined John at the fence, trying to ignore Peg’s soft laughter as she and Brix went inside. In hindsight, his work on the fence was a heap of shit, and he couldn’t say what had possessed him to try to fix it. “Sorry. I was worried about foxes.”

  “Don’t be sorry, lad,” John said. “They’re everywhere, even this close to the sea, and they won’t take one gal, they’ll kill ’em all. Bastards, they are.”

  Calum had always thought foxes beautiful, almost mystical creatures, the very essence of nature, but he held his tongue. He remembered his Roald Dahl well enough to know foxes liked to kill chickens, and the thought of anything happening to Bongo made him feel slightly sick. “Do you think it was a fox that made the hole?”

  “Not likely. They don’t leave none alive when they get in. You’ve lost a few nails in the storm. See ’ere?”

  John pointed to a series of holes in the nearest post, holes that, on closer inspection, were so bloody obvious Calum wanted the ground to swallow him up. Not that John seemed to care much for Calum’s woodwork shortcomings. He unpicked Calum’s wayward nails and tossed them aside, then replaced them with his own.

  “Do you right, boy, it ain’t as bad as I thought. I can see where you were goin’, and it might’ve worked if you’d secured the post properly.”

  “That’s nice of you to say, but securing the post never occurred to me.”

  John laughed, a deep rumbling chuckle that eclipsed his surly demeanour. “Jesus wept. Your face. I’m not telling you ya killed a dog or summit. You think that boy in there built this thing on his own? No, these bare hands did all the bloody work while he heckled me from that bench over there.”

  “Really?”

  John shrugged. “Well . . . he mighta hammered in a few nails when I told ’im to. Ain’t none of us born knowing how to build the ark.”

  The obtuse biblical reference caught Calum off guard, but John wasn’t looking at him. Calum followed his gaze to the kitchen window, where he could just about make out Brix and Peg sitting at the table.

  “He’s so like Peg,” Calum mused as much to himself as John.

  John grunted. “Aye,
he is, without the gob on him, though. Abel’s like his mother—pretty and daft.”

  “Do you miss them?”

  “Miss ’em?” If John was surprised Calum had asked a question so personal, it didn’t show. “I miss my boys—both of ’em when him in there goes off on one—but their ma can fall in the sea for all I care, if the sea weren’t too good for the likes of her.”

  The brutal sentiment was softened by a gleam in John’s eyes that Calum had seen in Brix. Perhaps they were more alike than anyone knew. “Is the fence safe now?”

  “Aye, it is. Help an old man up, will ya?”

  Calum stood and helped John to his feet. He turned up the path, but John’s hand on his arm stayed him.

  “What you doin’ down here anyway? It’s been a few months now, eh? You sticking around?”

  “Um . . . if Brix wants me to, I guess? I’ve got a few long-term projects in the bag at the studio—” Calum stopped, unsure of how much John knew about tattooing.

  John stared at him expectantly. “So, you’ve got work lined up? That’s good. I think the boy likes your company, and he’s a good lad. Deserves to be ’appy, don’t he?”

  “I reckon so.” Calum didn’t know much, but of that he was certain. “I don’t know if I can make him happy, but I’ll be here as long as he wants me to be.”

  “That’ll do me.” John clapped Calum’s shoulder. “There’s room for an emmet in our ranks yet if it makes our Ben smile.”

  Ben. Calum often forgot Brix had been known by another name. John brushed past him and strode to the back door, but Calum didn’t follow until Brix appeared and beckoned him forward.

  “You okay?” Concern etched Brix’s already strained eyes.

  Calum found a smile—a real one—and plastered it on his face. “Yeah, just got a bit Lusmoored. You know how it is.”

  “Actually, no. These fuckers are my normal, but I’ll take your word for it. Tea?”

  “Sounds good.”