Pansies

by Alexis Hall

  Pansies

  A Spires Story

  Alexis Hall

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Pansies

  Copyright © 2018 by Alexis Hall

  Cover art: Simoné

  http://www.dreamarian.com

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  About Pansies

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Epilogue

  Alfie Bell’s Hashtag Eggplant Wednesday Lasagne

  Dear Reader

  About the Author

  Also by Alexis Hall

  About Pansies

  Alfie Bell is . . . fine. He’s got a six-figure salary, a penthouse in Canary Wharf, the car he swore he’d buy when he was eighteen, and a bunch of fancy London friends.

  It’s rough, though, going back to South Shields now that they all know he’s a fully paid-up pansy. It’s the last place he’s expecting to pull. But Fen’s gorgeous, with his pink-tipped hair and hipster glasses, full of the sort of courage Alfie’s never had. It should be a one-night thing, but Alfie hasn’t met anyone like Fen before.

  Except he has. At school, when Alfie was everything he was supposed to be, and Fen was the stubborn little gay boy who wouldn’t keep his head down. And now it’s a proper mess: Fen might have slept with Alfie, but he’ll probably never forgive him, and Fen’s got all this other stuff going on anyway, with his mam and her flower shop and the life he left down south.

  Alfie just wants to make it right. But how can he, when all they’ve got in common is the nowhere town they both ran away from.

  To Kat, for holding my hand (even when it was clammy)

  The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater

  because he is trying to kill you,

  and you deserve it, you do, and you know this,

  and you are ready to die in this swimming pool

  because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means

  your life is over anyway.

  You’re in the eighth grade. You know these things.

  You know how to ride a dirt bike, and you know how to do

  long division,

  and you know that a boy who likes boys is a dead boy, unless

  he keeps his mouth shut, which is what you

  didn’t do,

  because you are weak and hollow and it doesn’t matter anymore.

  * * *

  Richard Siken, A Primer for the Small Weird Loves

  Prologue

  Tuesday was Nora’s favourite day of the week.

  Nobody liked Mondays, and she was no exception, but she thought it was unfair for the bad feeling to taint Tuesday too.

  Tuesday offered all the possibilities of a new week with none of the disadvantages of being Monday.

  It was also the day when Aidan O’Donaghue came.

  Aidan O’Donaghue, who was not from around here, who wore a waistcoat and drove a Ford Thunderbird, and whose mouth tasted like the sky.

  While she waited for him, she made up a basket of sunflowers, chrysanthemums, and glossy green aspidistra. She hummed softly to herself, muddled snatches of whatever had been playing recently on the radio. She’d never been able to hold a tune, but it didn’t stop her singing.

  Not on a Tuesday, anyway.

  He had come into her shop for the first time nearly a year and a half ago. It had been chance, pure chance. His mother’s birthday. Through the big front windows, she’d seen his car, a bold splash on the kerb.

  She’d made him a bouquet of white roses and blue moon freesia, her fingers trembling a little among the petals. Because his eyes were all the colours, and his lashes were tipped with gold, as though some careful artist had liked him enough to try and gild him.

  Nora was dreamy for days afterwards.

  He came back the next week to tell her his mother had loved the flowers. Somehow they started exchanging pieces of information, as shyly as children swapping barnacle shells and coral twists, mermaids’ purses and unicorn hair.

  It began with names.

  Then she learned he was the regional manager for Woolworths. That his father was Irish, and had been in the Army. That his mother was French. And he spun the world for Nora in her little shop: glittering American cities with skyscrapers wreathed in cloud, stars spread as thickly as freckles across a desert night, the heather-purple highlands of Scotland and the glass-blue lakes hidden in the Welsh mountains.

  She also learned that he smiled with the right side of his mouth before the left and that the dimple there was deeper than its fellow.

  One day when he came to see her, she locked the door behind him and flipped the sign to Closed. She took his big hand and led him into the back room, which smelled of pollen and perfume and damp leaves and growing things.

  For a long time they said nothing. Looking had somehow become a different thing now they were alone. And Nora was greedy for it, this newfound freedom to bask unchecked in blue-grey-brown-green eyes and a mouth so full of kisses. Then he reached out and began to unpin her braids, slowly combing out the corn-yellow tresses of her hair. Her mother wouldn’t let her cut it. Called it her crowning glory. Aidan O’Donaghue’s blunt fingers moved through it with unimagined tenderness. When it was all set free, he drew her to him and kissed her.

  Everyone thought Nora was a good girl. A quiet girl. Even if she was a little odd sometimes, with the things she wanted and didn’t want.

  But that afternoon she was neither good nor quiet.

  When they were together, they talked as infinitely and endlessly as they touched each other, and she never asked, or thought to ask, for promises. She had no need of them. She was South Shields born and bred. A sand dancer. The sea was everything she knew. She would no more have thought to keep him as she would have thought to hold the waves. She simply loved him, as she loved the flowers that lived their lives in a brilliant moment, and the whispering tides that came and went with the turning of the moon.

  It was strange, she thought to herself this particular Tuesday, not quite six months from the first, the way everything could change, and nothing.

  Certainly not her. Or Aidan O’Donaghue. Who came into her shop, wearing the sun in his hair and carrying the world in his eyes. Who, every Tuesday until this one, had given her his body like a gift. And who had, perhaps unintentionally, given her another gift, even more precious than the first. The promise of a life, curled deep inside her, already loved and waiting to be free.

  Just like always, he turned the key and flipped the sign, but she did not lead him to the back room. Instead she took his hand, as she had the first time and every time that followed, and drew it down instead to rest against her stomach.

  His eyes we
nt wide.

  Then he pulled away.

  She bowed her head against the pain. Expecting it had not made it easier, as she had dared to hope it might. It was a little piece of loss, amidst all her joy.

  I love you, she thought fiercely, to the life beneath her fingers, I will always be with you.

  Her friends and family wouldn’t understand. They would watch her and tsk, as they so often did. They would whisper she had been careless. But it wouldn’t matter, because she hadn’t been. She had loved and been loved, and from that love had come a child, who would know the sea and the sky and all the worlds between.

  “Nora.”

  She turned slowly.

  Aidan O’Donaghue. His eyes wet and bright like summer rain. In his hand was a piece of the thin green wire she used for her bouquets. “I’ve had enough of Tuesdays. I want to stay. Will you let me?” And as she watched, he went to one knee on the stone floor. “Will you marry me?”

  She thought about it a moment. Her friends and family would like this. It would somehow make them approve of her. But what they wanted was not what Nora needed, and she already had everything she needed: her lover, her child, her shop, the wild seas, and the rough air. “No, Aidan. I won’t marry you.”

  The colour fled his face. “Nora, I—”

  “But you can stay with me . . . with us.” Us. “As long as you want.”

  What difference did it make, really, promises given in buildings and written in books? These things that let the world believe in what you had. Why did that matter, if she believed in it? If she believed in the way he looked at her and the way he touched her. The words he’d already given her. Their child. The life they could make together.

  “I do.” He coloured a little, perhaps startled by his own certainty. “I want every day.”

  She nodded, breathless and giddy suddenly on the realisation that he believed too, just like she did.

  He laughed up at her, but he was shaking as he gently wound the piece of wire about her fourth finger. “Then this is today.”

  She stretched her hand into the dusty sunlight.

  “Tomorrow there will be another, and another, until your hands are full of all my days.”

  And she looked at him, kneeling there, and smiled. Brighter than all the flowers in her shop.

  1

  “An’ wharraboot ye, pet?”

  “Huh?” Alfie made a valiant attempt to look like he’d been paying attention. “What about me what?”

  Great Aunt Sheila jabbed him in the ribs. “When’s it ganna be your turn?”

  Oh God. Was that going to be the question now?

  “Well, you know . . . it’s just . . . how it is,” he mumbled.

  The DJ, who was probably somebody’s uncle or somebody’s neighbour or somebody’s neighbour’s uncle, was playing Erasure’s early nineties classic, “Always.” Which at that moment swept into a passionate crescendo.

  Sheila cupped her hand to ear. “Eh?” This was local speak for I’m sorry, could you say that again?

  “I’m not really . . .”

  “Eh?”

  Always, da-da-da-dah-di-do . . . “I don’t think I’m the marrying . . .” Harmony, harmony, oh fuck it. “The thing is, I’m sort of gay.”

  “Eh?”

  “I’m gay.”

  “Ye wha’, pet?”

  “Gay. I’m gay. I like cock.”

  Whoa, that was way too loud. It seemed to echo in the silence and— Wait, silence? Of course silence. The song had ended a couple of seconds ago.

  Which meant Alfie was standing there. In the middle of his best friend’s wedding. Yelling about cock. While everybody stared at him.

  He wasn’t an expert, but he was pretty sure there were better ways to come out.

  Great Aunt Sheila rolled her eyes. “Well, we all knaa that, pet. But it’s nae reason not te be settled doon in this day an’ age.”

  “Oh right. Right.” He was too dazed to manage anything more coherent. Who was we? And how did they know? When he barely did himself?

  “There’s more te life,” Sheila went on with the dogged wisdom of the far too bloody old, “than bums.”

  Alfie waited, hopefully, to die. And didn’t. “Thanks. That’s . . . Thanks.”

  Uncle DJ had finally remembered he was meant to be providing music, not allowing the room to fill up with awkward revelations of homosexuality, and hastily fired up the “Macarena.” While everybody was distracted, Alfie reeled away to the relative safety of the finger buffet.

  The centrepiece of the whole arrangement was a tinfoil hedgehog skewered with cheese and pineapple pieces on cocktail sticks. This was as close as North East England got to a canapé. He ate one out of long habit. The pineapple was dry, the cheese too rich and faintly sweaty. It tasted of home.

  He could feel about thirty people trying not to look at him, so he began vigorously helping himself to the potato salad. It was basically a bowl of wobbling mayonnaise with a few unhappy potatoes bobbing in it.

  Then came the clicking of dress shoes behind him, and he had no choice but to turn and face his best friend. Kevin was shiny-faced with groomly joy, and stuffed uncomfortably into a morning suit that had clearly been chosen by someone else, presumably the bride. Alfie had known Kevin for nearly his whole life, and he’d never seemed like a heliotrope cravat sort of bloke.

  “I divvent knaa ye were a puffter,” he said.

  Alfie picked up a sausage roll so big he could barely get his hand round it, and then wished he hadn’t. “Yeah, sorry.”

  “Eee, well.” There was a pause. “Are ye sure?”

  He nodded. It was one of the few things he was sure about.

  “I dunno, man. Doon sooth for five minutes, first you’re talking like a reet ponce and the next thing we knaa you’re an arse bandit.”

  Sweat prickled the back of Alfie’s neck, oozing beneath his collar. “You don’t just turn gay the moment you go past Leeds. And believe me, your arse is very, very safe.”

  “Oh aye. Like ye haven’t been after it for years.” Kevin slapped himself soundly on the buttocks and grinned.

  It was meant to be a joke, so Alfie dutifully tried to find it funny. Nope. “I really haven’t. Sorry if I wrecked your wedding. I didn’t mean to tell you like this.”

  “Dan’t be daft, man.” There was another pause, somewhat more fraught than the last, and then Kevin went on plaintively: “I just divvent gerrit.”

  Alfie ran his hands through his carefully spiked hair. The least he owed his friend was some sort of explanation, but he hardly knew how to start. He’d left South Shields his father’s son. And now he . . . well . . . wasn’t?

  “It’s complicated,” he tried. But then the words came tumbling out of him and couldn’t be stopped. “It took me a long time to sort of . . . figure it out. Even longer to get my head round it. I just never thought I was, y’know, that way. But I guess I am? I mean, I must be.”

  Kevin blinked. “Wha’ ye gan on aboot?”

  The sweat clung cold to Alfie’s body. What was he doing? This wasn’t how they talked to each other. They were mates. They took the mick, they had a laugh, they didn’t emote at each other like southerners.

  “I just meant,” Kevin was saying, “I divvent knaa how ye go from, ‘Oh, that’s a bloke ower there,’ to ‘I fancy banging him like.’”

  Alfie shrugged. He didn’t know either. “Look, I’m sorry if—”

  “Alfie, ye knaa you’re still me best mate. Ye always will be.”

  Relief and gratitude rushed over him, but they were followed by a nasty sort of resentment that the words were necessary in the first place. That Kevin had needed to say them and that Alfie had needed to hear them. As if there had ever been the possibility of another answer. Which, of course, there had.

  Kevin grinned. “Even if ye are a shirt lifter.”

  If his hands hadn’t been full of phallic sausage, Alfie might have put his head in them. “Kev . . .” But there was no point. It had been k
indly meant. So maybe this—why couldn’t he even think it sometimes?—would just be something else for Kev to rip the piss out of, like his hair or his tattoo. Comfortably meaningless. “Well, you’re still my best mate too, even if you’re a complete knob.”

  Kev laughed and flung an arm across Alfie’s shoulder. “Takes one te know one.”

  “And I should know, right?” Oh God. Now he was doing this shit to himself. But he had to say it, to prove it had no power over him. And it worked. Kev spluttered, caught between shock and amusement, and it was close enough to winning that Alfie was able to be generous. “Congratulations, by the way.”

  For a moment Kev looked blank. “Blummin’ hell, I’m married.”

  “Till death do you part.”

  “Or we get divorced.” He gazed proudly across the room at his bride. “What do ye think, though? Didn’t I do well, eh?”

  Lisa—he was pretty sure she was called Lisa—seemed nice enough: pretty, friendly, a bit of a glint in her eyes. What Alfie really wanted to say was As long as she makes you happy. But he knew it wasn’t what Kev wanted to hear—that he’d probably think it sounded gay.

  Which left Alfie trying to remember who he used to be. “What is she,” he managed, “a mental case?”

  “Oi.”

  “Well, she’s out of your league, mate, so there’s got to be something wrong with her.”

  Kevin beamed like this was high praise. “I’d better get ower there or I’ll never hear the end of it. She’s feisty when she’s roused.” He gave Alfie’s shoulder a final, rough squeeze and headed back to his new bride.