by Harper Fox
“Is something the matter, Tom? Florrie says you got into a punch-up with one of the lads from the airbase the other week.”
God, not you too. “Florrie says too much,” he said grimly, and then regretted it. “Sorry, Vic. Bad day. You want to come in and talk?”
Vic looked down at Tom from the foot of height he had on him. His expression was thoughtful. “No. I think I’ve pretty much talked you to death over the last few years, haven’t I? And I know you have bad days.” He reached out, put a large hand on Tom’s shoulder and awkwardly squeezed it. “Just wanted to see you were all right. Come down and have dinner with me and Florrie some night, okay?”
Tom watched him depart. It struck him that both he and Victor had been chasing mirages out there in the Middle East. Vic had wanted excitement, adventure, and he himself…
Opening the door to the tower, distractedly greeting Belle, Tom tried to remember what he had joined up for. Just to bring the benefit of his medical skills to the front line? Hardly, although he had wanted to change things, make something out there better. He had been lonely—looking for just the kind of comradeship which had two minutes ago presented itself to him outside his own front door. Which had doubtless been here all the time, if he’d been brave enough to look. But he hadn’t been brave. He’d been shy, too chained up even to accept the bright and unreserved love David Reay had laid in his lap.
Shy, stupid, blind. Sure of his own sexuality, too scared to take it with him into the army. Even if he was inclined to damn poor Flynn for cowardice, who was he to talk? He didn’t have a leg to stand on.
And now Vic was gone, Belle fed and given her hour’s runaround on the cliff tops. Tom looked around his home, which, for once during his occupation of it, could really use a cleanup. The undone dishes, the sheets he hadn’t been able to bring himself to change since Flynn’s brief visitation to his solitary bed, the books and newspapers scattered round the living room—all these had been his friends before, or handholds at least, when he was trying to stay out of the pit.
Locking the back and front doors behind him, securing his prison, Tom admitted to himself that he wasn’t trying at all. He sat on the sofa, and after a minute picked up the receiver of the phone. He was aware that he was struggling not to ball up, to wrap his arms around himself, and stopped it. It was cold in here, that was all. He dialled the number of the locum doctor he shared with the surgeries in Newlyn and St. Just. Yes, she was available to cover for him tomorrow. That was good, Tom told her, absently pushing Belle away as she poked an anxious, food-speckled nose beneath his arm. He’d been called away unexpectedly—it would only be the one day.
And surely Flynn should be safe for that amount of time, shouldn’t he? Until Tom emerged? He and Tremaine didn’t fly together anymore, were in different branches of the service. No, he should be fine. Locked into a barrack room, beaten up and fucked raw, which was what he appeared to want. Fine…
The Stoli Elit was better chilled. Tom reckoned, if he gave it half an hour, he could almost disguise this oncoming bender from himself as a few pleasant drinks. The first part of it, anyway. And he was not so desperate, was he, that he couldn’t put the bottle in the fridge and wait for thirty bloody minutes? He stood in the kitchen, rolling the bottle, with its bright contents and shining silver label, between his palms.
Rage shook him. No, he couldn’t bloody wait. He was an addict, same as any bored housewife he tried to wean off sedatives or any junkie kid on the Penzance estates. An addict, a drunk, without even that last shred of self-control he could use to hide from his own shame. Without warning, the muscles in his arms and shoulders tensed—the same involuntary spasm that had pitched Rob Tremaine off his back and onto the cobbles at the Fox—and he found himself smashing the bottle down on the edge of the sink.
It did not so much break as explode. Tom stood at the end of his action, staring dully at the floor. He tried to be so gentle, didn’t he? A doctor. But he didn’t know his own strength. Given opportunity, motive, he could be just as much of a ham-fisted brute as Tremaine. If the bastard were here now, he would show him. Pull him off Flynn. Slam him down among the shards and batter him to death and beyond, rather than ever let him lay a hand on Flynn again.
The old flagstones were glimmering like a night sky. Hypnotic. A good idea. The raw ethanol evaporating off the spilled vodka rose into his brain. Shivering, Tom dragged a hand across his eyes and stumbled back into the darkness where the tower’s stairs coiled down.
The second and third bottles came easy to his hands. He smashed them one after the other on the edge of the sink, this time feeling a kind of scarlet relief as the flying shards bounced back to slice at his palms and wrists. Blood joined the constellations and the vertiginous mess on the floor. He’d kicked his muddy boots off when he came in—did not notice, going back for a fourth, that he was barefoot, that the glass pierced his soles.
A terrible sound brought him to a halt. It was like a child’s wail, except that no human throat could have made it. Tom wheeled round, grabbing at the table to stop himself from falling. For a moment there was nothing but his own fractured breathing and the drip of vodka on the flags—and then he saw his dog huddled against the kitchen’s far wall. Trying to press herself through the stonework. Eyes wild, hackles raised… She was keening at him in absolute terror.
Tom let go a breath. “Oh, God. Belle.” He put the fourth bottle down on the table carefully. There was a bloodstained handprint on it, another on the scratched deal table’s surface. Choking faintly, Tom glanced at his hands, made a distracted effort to wipe them on the backside of his jeans. “Belle, sweetheart.” He took a step towards her, and she cringed from him.
He didn’t know her background, what had happened to her before she had been rescued. The shelter had her history, but Tom hadn’t wanted to know, unable at that time to bear the knowledge of further cruelty or pain. Whatever it had been, he knew that he could be kind enough with her, patient and peaceful enough, to make it better. He crouched beside her. He was aware, from a great distance, that he was sobbing, great rough gasps that tore his chest.
“Oh, Belle.” When finally she let him touch her, he collapsed against the wall at her side. He drew his knees up, folded his arms across the top of his head. He could not breathe or see. The smell of blood and vodka filled his lungs; the sounds of his own grief flooded his ears. Balled up, clutching blindly at the dog’s scruff with one hand, he wept, unable to believe the depth, the age, of the wounds gaping wide in him. What was he becoming? What had he already let himself become? The red tide swept through him, through and through, convulsing him until he began to retch dryly and see stars, and even then there was no stopping it, not for a long time, not until he wore himself out and exhaustion at last came to his rescue. His last awareness was of feeling his limbs go slack, of sliding wearily down onto the ancient chilly bones of the watchtower and closing his eyes.
The cool rush of wind-driven rain on glass brought him round. He opened his eyes and stared for a long time at the kitchen window, where silver-grey streaks were appearing, sudden bright patterns that destroyed themselves and flickered back, an endless repeat that soothed him.
It occurred to him that he was seeing the pane from an odd angle. A slight kilt off landscape, like a badly hung picture. He normally watched it in dignified perpendicular from his breakfast table. When he tried to correct the orientation, he became aware that his neck was hurting. That there was a sting in his hands and arms like the results of his long-ago tussle with a jellyfish off Porth Bay beach. That he was in fact curled up on his kitchen floor, and that things would have been a lot worse had Belle not forgiven him and lain down with her warm bulk between his spine and the wall.
He sat up with a grunt. The hot spell had broken, a silvery rainstorm now dancing round the tower. The shifting light gleamed dully on a thousand bits of broken glass smashed over the kitchen’s flagstones. He croaked, “Jesus Christ,” shoving himself upright. He put out a hand to th
e dog. “Belle. Paw.”
She wasn’t hurt, somehow. He checked each one of her feet, spreading the hairy pads. Ordering her to stay, he scrambled up, finding out as he did so that he didn’t share Belle’s discretion or her tough soles. He’d cut himself to ribbons, left a carnage of foot and handprints everywhere. He made the safest track he could to the little utility room, pulled a broom from it and began a swift, dry-mouthed clear-up, brushing the glass into shimmering heaps. The pain in his feet was extraordinary. He took a clinical interest in it, moving back and forth, back and forth, until every shard was swept up, bagged, wrapped in newspaper so the collection men wouldn’t do themselves an injury, and dumped in the outside bin. Then he took the vacuum cleaner round. Powdered glass was worse than fragments; got into dog food and water, swallowed, inhaled…
This much accomplished, he sank onto one of the kitchen chairs. He stretched out a hand in a gesture which meant Belle could move, and felt a surge of guilty relief when she came to him without hesitation. In her canine mind, then, everything forgiven and forgotten. She was just hungry, waving her tail in long slow arcs, all sorrows passed.
In some strange way, Tom’s were gone from him too. He fed her, then limped upstairs and stood for a long time in the shower. He hadn’t switched the tank on last night, and the water flowed cold, but he barely noticed. He dressed, paused for long enough to disinfect and plaster the worst of the cuts on his feet and his hands, then went out into the rain-washed morning. The wind was fresh, rich, full of salt. Opening the Land Rover’s door, he stood for a moment, letting the air’s damp turbulence rock him.
He was here. He was glad he’d booked the locum, but he was here, on his feet in the morning light, not dragging himself off the sofa with the black jaws of his hangover sunk deep inside him. Not crawling out of the pit.
Getting into the truck, he started her up and headed for the road. The rain increased, and he switched on her lights, watched the sweep of the windscreen wipers with a kind of peaceful satisfaction. Clear, he was clear. His mind stretched out like the headlamps, finding the path ahead. He knew, after years of one drink won’t hurt and I can deal with it, that he was and always would be an addict, and that his only salvation—not his cure, never that—lay in absolute sobriety. He knew that he was locked in mourning for one lover, that his efforts to accept another, with this grief unaddressed in his heart, had been hopeless from the beginning.
He knew that he’d lost Flynn. Turning onto the lonely stretch that would take him past Lanyon on the road to the Hawke Lake base, Tom took firm hold of the wheel against the wind’s buffeting, set a straight course. He’d lost Flynn, but, God, Flynn didn’t have to be lost, not to the whole world, not to everything a man like that could have and do if he could be set free. Taking Tremaine from him, turning him in, was not the answer, even if Tom had been sure of his facts, and as time had gone by he was becoming increasingly uncertain. All he could do was tell Flynn what he thought, what he feared, and leave it up to him.
The quoit this morning had hidden itself entirely. Tom shook his head, trying to squint through the veils of the rain. No, there it was—crouching low, looking ready to run. He remembered hot light and warm hands on his bare skin, guiding his movements, opening him up. Pain went through him with a clarity that snatched his breath. God, not much hope for him in a bottle now anyway, was there? He’d drunk because he couldn’t feel, and the numbness of a skinful was preferable to that dead zone inside. It was all restored to him, the full bloody human birthright—from the stinging ache in his cuts to the tearing, oddly physical sensation of loss in his heart. The piercing joy that lit him up in spite of everything, when he thought of Flynn.
Headlights in the road ahead. Couldn’t be, Tom thought calmly, beginning to brake anyway. Too close, too fast, and on the wrong side. He started to pull over. The road curved round to the right here—not much escape for him, and the Rover’s tyres were already bouncing and slipping on mud, but plenty of room on the far verge when the other driver saw him. There was a blind crest ahead. Tom, out of evasive manoeuvres, braced and hoped.
His serenity never wavered. He was thinking of Flynn when the vast truck roared over the crest, full beams blazing, all the way over on the left. Still somehow he was lit up inside, hauling the wheel round in the movement that would smash him into the wall.
No. A gap about four yards long, where the drystone had crumbled. The Rover shot off the road at fifty. Hit the barbed-wire fence that bridged the gap, which slowed her momentum a little but flipped her, turned her flight into a wild sideways arc. She hit turf and rocks on a diagonal, shattering windscreen and bodywork, rolled once and slammed down onto her driver-side flank.
Not much point in worrying about car wrecks, was there? The thought came to Tom slowly, as if wrapped in clouds. It became tangled up with a raw scent of petrol, a threatening darkness, and almost slipped away, but he snagged it back, interested in this new aspect on an old fear. He’d seen so many crash victims. Wondered how they’d felt—if a crippling terror had entered them, an anticipation so dreadful that impact must have come almost as release. Did he have his answer now? He wasn’t sure of anything anymore, but maybe if you got that much time to think, you’d avoid the bloody crash in the first place. He hadn’t had a second. The period between knowing it would happen and the whole thing being over was…
Nonexistent? One dark flash? His mind, on the run from its prison, tried to give him the right word, but there didn’t seem to be one. He had felt something. A bang, like a roadside device going up, but inside him.
Thinking of these things, struggling to define them, was very tiring. He lay for a while in the rain. The wind was howling in the Rover’s undercarriage, a mournful, familiar sound. He could hear a rhythmic creaking, like the spin of a disengaged tyre. A gentle pattering, cold small feet, on one side of his face, in the open palm of his hand. Flynn, he thought, with utter satisfaction, beginning to fall away.
He must have said it out loud.
“Yes. I’m here. Oh, holy fucking Christ, Tom. Hang on.”
Another cloudy interval. When he surfaced again, it was to full inhabitation of his flesh, and all he could do was fight not to let go, not allow his ragged breathing to turn into the howls of pain and fear that had suddenly surged up inside his chest. The Rover was lying on her side on the moorland turf. He had gone through the windshield and was trapped from the thighs down in her crushed wheel housing. “Oh… God, Flynn…”
“Here, sweetheart. Breathe. Just breathe. Did this thing have no airbag? Weren’t you wearing your belt?”
No, he tried to say to him. No, too old a model. No, for the first time in my last neurotic, triple-checking, terrified three years, I drove off without it. “See,” he managed, smiling faintly. “This is what happens.”
“Too bloody right. Gonna get help for you. Just hang on.” The feel of a warm hand on his hair, brushing broken glass off his face. The click of a mobile being flipped open, then a triple beep, repeated two seconds later. A volley of swearing that almost made him laugh. Navy boys, no matter how civilised, were all the same underneath. “Godforsaken bastard of a country. Can’t get a fucking signal.”
“No. Not here. Go…” Tom’s throat seized, and he clung to Flynn’s hand through a spasm of coughing. “Back to the road. About fifty yards south. Parking bay. There’s… There’s a clear patch.”
He was gone. Tom listened to the fading pounding of his footsteps on the turf, and wished he could see him. A lovely sight, he’d be willing to bet, that light-made frame at full pelt. The vision deflected his thoughts for a moment. Then he was cold and alone. Shock began to hit him. He felt the first jolts of his reaction, a convulsive shivering, and fought to stay still, to do all the things he would tell a crash victim to do. Breathe. Don’t struggle. Don’t, for God’s sake, start crying out after your saviour to forget the bloody phone call, to please come back and not let you die here alone.
“All right. They’re coming.”
/> Tom released a pent-up breath, the one that had been holding back that last plea. The turf had resounded once more to running feet. There were warm hands on him. He swallowed hard, tasting blood. There was Flynn, kneeling on the grass outside the Rover’s wrecked and empty windshield frame. Irrelevantly Tom noticed that he was wearing the grey T-shirt he had given him. That he was soaked to the skin, and fighting not to cry. “It’s okay,” he told him. “Be okay. Do I… Do I get a Sea King, then?”
“For this? You’re joking. Common or garden ambulance, for you. And some firemen with the tin opener.” It was a good effort. Tom heard it—Flynn sounded good. Giving him back at least his own effort at humour. On the blurry edge of his vision, Tom saw him lean to look through to the Rover’s rear, which a glance in the cracked rearview had told him was a mangled hell of torn metal and vinyl. “Oh, God. Not Belle.”
“No,” Tom said. “No, she’s at home.” Now that he thought about it, there was something he needed to tell Flynn, wasn’t there, about Sea Kings. It was why he’d been on the road in the first place. Something important…
“Tom. Tom! Wake up. You do not bloody drift off, you hear me?”
Struggling back at the harsh command, Tom became aware that Flynn was reaching past him to drag through from the back the tartan rug he carried for Belle. The one Tom had given him, he now remembered irrelevantly, to wrap around himself a million years ago at Porth beach. Flynn had been cold then, hadn’t he? Bleeding as Tom was now, from dozens of places where his shirt was ripped and blossoming red in the rain. Tom felt barriers of perception and identity slide. His blood, or Flynn’s? Flynn was bruised, he knew that much. Terrible livid thumbprints on his arms.
