by Alexis Hall
Alfie, in a mess of hope and joy and fear and yearning, stared helplessly at the T-shirt.
Fen looked down at himself. “I’m quirky,” he explained, “and adorable.”
Things to say. There were too many and none at all. And the sea-sharpened chill had left goose bumps all over Fen’s arms.
“You’re cold.” Alfie took off his leather jacket and flung it over Fen’s shoulders.
A blink. The instinctive clutch of hands, to hold the coat in place. “But what about you?”
“I’m a big lad who’s just run down a hundred stairs. I’ll be fine.”
“Oh God—” Fen’s voice cracked with yearning. “Oh, Alfie.”
Alfie stepped forward and pulled him into a hug. There wasn’t even a moment of resistance, just Fen falling against him, soft as the sea, with a small, breathless oh. And fuck, the man was freezing, like a prince in a fairy tale, held captive in a winter prison. Warmth gathered gradually between them. “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”
“I . . . I don’t know what I’m doing.” Fen tucked his head beneath Alfie’s chin and hid there. “I just know that I’m tired . . . tired of fighting and being sad. And I want to be with you.”
The words enfolded him as warmly and tightly as his arms held Fen. They were so simple, yet so shining. He could wear them like wings. And then a sort of panic seized him. Because Fen had sat in some private darkness in a flower shop he didn’t want and waded through grief and fear and uncountable memories of cruelty . . . for him. For Alfie Bell. Who at that moment felt like the most ordinary man in England. But there they were. With Fen saying I want you. And Alfie’s heart a lump of wet tissue.
“Uh, wow.” Okay, that was crap. Try again. “I mean . . . thank you. For taking a chance like. I won’t let you down.”
Fen’s lashes glittered in the weak winter sunlight as he looked up. “You’d better not, Alfie Bell.”
It was so Fen—vulnerable and defiant, with laughter lurking deep in his eyes—that Alfie grinned. Put a hand beneath his chin to keep him there, just like that, and tugged him into a kiss. It was a sweet, soft thing, just the press of closed mouths and all the things Alfie hadn’t managed to say.
Afterwards, Fen gave a shaky laugh. “I’m not much of a catch, you know.”
“Well, given that I’m the kid who bullied you at school, neither am I.”
“You’re so much more than that.”
“And you’re so much more than what you’ve got going on now.”
“When you say it—” colour broke out across Fen’s cheekbones “—I almost believe you.”
“You should.” Alfie kissed him again, deeper this time, enough to make himself dizzy on heat and salt and Fen.
“God,” Fen whispered, “I’d forgotten what it was like to feel this way.”
Alfie nudged his nose. “Kissed?”
“Alive, arsehole.” But Fen was laughing. “Normal.”
Once again stripped wordless, Alfie mumbled something that was probably just Fen’s name and held him a little tighter. Earned the reciprocal pressure of grasping fingers against his forearms. A sweet, needy pain.
“And you’re sure we can do this?” Fen asked. “I mean, whatever it is we’re doing? What about . . . your life? Your job?”
“Do you know the last time I took a holiday?”
“Well, no?”
“Neither do I.” Alfie shrugged. “I’ll have to go back at some point, probably in a week or two. But that gives us time to figure stuff out.”
Fen’s lips curled into a not-entirely-happy smile. “You do realise I’ve been trying to do that for over a year?”
“Yeah but—” Alfie reached for Fen’s hand and fit their palms together, Fen’s rough and dry, and Alfie’s all soft and southern “—you were doing it on your own.”
“Don’t you try to fix me, Alfie. Stay because you want me.”
“Yeah, I’ve learned my lesson about DIY, thank you very much. Wanting to help isn’t the same as wanting to fix.” Alfie tried to steady himself by breathing, but his throat was tight. “And, anyway, I’m hardly one to talk.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that . . . Shit, I dunno. I think about my life, and it should be a great life, cos I’ve got everything I’m supposed to have, except I’m pretty sure I’m not happy.”
“Oh, Alfie. How can you know something like that?”
“Because of how I feel when I’m with you.”
Fen stared at him. “You’re . . . ridiculous and impossible and I—” He seemed to run out of words, pressing his body against Alfie instead, as if he wanted to leave the imprint of himself all over him. As if he hadn’t already. And they stayed like that, solid as the rock that stood over them, until Fen pulled back again, just a little. “Can we walk a bit?”
“Course.”
The beach was theirs but for the archless rock, the cormorants, and the kittiwakes, so they held hands as they crunched over the sea-smoothed pebbles.
“This was my mother’s favourite place,” said Fen finally.
“Yeah?”
“Yep. She said it was her rock. When I was little, I thought that meant we literally owned it, you know, like our house. I told some of the kids at school, and they were all like, ‘Prove it.’”
“And what did your mam say?”
“That loving something wasn’t the same as owning it.”
They stopped for a moment to look up at Marsden Rock, which was greenish-brownish against the greyish sky, rough and unlovely.
Fen shook his head. “I don’t get it. It’s just a rock.”
“It’s not just a rock, it’s a sea stack.”
“Oh well, in that case . . .”
“They’re pretty rare, you know, and kind of weird when you stop to think about it. I mean that’s centuries of a particular sort of coastal erosion just standing there like.”
“I’ve never really looked too closely at it. Just in case the tide comes in and I get stuck and drown.” Alfie gave his hand a squeeze, and Fen went on. “I’m a little bit scared of the sea sometimes. It seems so powerful and alien. I mean, look what it did to the rock.”
“Yeah. I remember when the arch collapsed.”
“I liked it more before, when it looked like something. Now it just looks like something left behind.”
Alfie sucked in a breath of air so pure it hurt a little. “Fen? Can I ask . . . your mam, how’d she die?”
For a while, Fen said nothing. Only watched the waves churning ceaselessly at the foot of the rock. “Well, technically it was because she took sodium pentobarbital.”
Alfie had been expecting something more like cancer. “She wha?”
Fen turned slowly to face him, still holding his hand. The sea and the sky and the shingle and the rough limestone cliffs had bleached the whole world to shades of grey and gold, except for Fen’s eyes, which were the greenest green Alfie had ever seen. “She took sodium pentobarbital in a grey-blue prefab in Pfäffikon while I held her hand, and Dad sat beside her. Apparently it tastes very bitter.” He said it without inflection, his voice a low murmur half lost to the tide. “They sent her ashes to us a few days later, and we came up here and gave her to the sky and the sea.”
Before Alfie could say anything, Fen jerked his hand away, turned, and strode off back up the beach, pebbles and sea wrack scattering under his feet. Alfie caught him easily enough in a couple of long strides. “You okay?”
“No, I’m not okay. I watched my mum die, Alfie. I helped her.”
This was all far beyond Alfie’s experience. He knew assisted suicide was a thing, of course. His grandma, who was living, resentfully, in a very nice nursing home for which Alfie footed the bill, kept insisting that they might as well just “euthenate her” and have done with it. But this was the first he’d heard of anyone actually going through with it, and he wasn’t sure how you were supposed to react.
At last, he said, “That sounds really hard.”
Fe
n shrugged. “It’s not quite as peaceful as they tell you. She was coughing in her sleep before she died, trying to reject the barbiturate. Isn’t it strange? The way the body will fight and cling to life, whatever the mind believes.”
“But it must’ve been what she wanted. There’s checks and stuff.”
“Oh, there’s a hundred million million checks. The whole business is a logistical fucking nightmare.” Fen gave a strange, harsh laugh, half-angry, half-sad. “Makes it so easy to forget what you’re actually doing. There’s never a moment when you think, I’m killing my mother. It’s always, I’m trying to locate a notary to sign this affidavit of domicile.”
Alfie grabbed Fen’s elbow and dragged him back, hard enough to make him stumble. “You didn’t kill your mother.”
“I helped her die. What’s the difference, really?”
Slowly, Alfie relaxed his grip, took up Fen’s cold hands instead. “What are you doing, pet?”
“What do you mean, what am I doing? Being manhandled on the beach, I think.”
“I meant, why are you saying this stuff to me? Do you want me to be all, ‘Oh my God, he’s a terrible person’?”
Fen was shivering, even with Alfie’s coat. “Isn’t that what you’re thinking?”
“Hell no.”
“Oh?” There was a challenging glitter in Fen’s eyes now. “Then what?”
“I think . . .” Shit, what was he thinking? “I think this stuff is really complicated. And I think you must have really loved your mam and that what you did was really brave.”
“I wasn’t the one who died.”
“No, but it’s harder, sometimes, to live with choices that aren’t yours.” Alfie wished he had more than a few ragged images of Fen’s mother. But it was impossible to find her now, because his mind kept filtering her through Fen. He thought her hair was a deeper gold, her eyes bluer, her smile less sharp and fragile, but he still saw Fen in her face, and hers in Fen. “How,” he began. “I mean, why did she, y’know, want to? She was pretty young, wasn’t she?”
“Fifty-six.” Fen tugged his hands free, folded his arms, and hugged his elbows. “Early-onset Alzheimer’s.”
They climbed higher up the beach, back to where the sand was soft and dry beneath the ragged cliffs. Fen found a piece of fallen limestone, salt-pitted almost to the texture of coral and draped with a velvety covering of deep-green seaweed. After he’d touched it to make sure it was dry, he perched on the edge, bringing his knees up to his chin and wrapping his arms around them.
He looked very small. Practically pocket-sized. Like Alfie could pick him up and carry him off.
But he didn’t say that. Just sat down next to him, shoulder to shoulder, and for a while they were quiet, watching the waves until Fen was ready to speak again.
“She hated it, Alfie.” His fingers twisted restlessly, seeking the edges of the piece of wire he wore. “It’s such . . . such violation. We think we’re so safe and sacrosanct. That who we are is ours. But it isn’t. Alzheimer’s takes it all away.”
“And that was when she decided?”
“Mm-hmm. She said she’d lost enough.”
Alfie reached out, wanting to offer comfort the best way he knew how. But Fen flinched away, drew in a ragged breath, and kept talking. “So I came home, started helping with the shop again and with the . . . with Dignitas. There’s things you can do, medications that are supposed to slow the progression. There were times when you wouldn’t have known there was anything wrong with her at all. I don’t think we really believed she’d go through with it.” Something like a smile touched Fen’s lips, his voice soft with affection and unshed tears. “Stupid of us. She was always so fucking stubborn.”
“I’m sorry,” said Alfie helplessly. “I just can’t imagine like.”
“It’s okay. There’s nothing to say about stuff like this. Just don’t hate me.”
Enough was enough. Alfie flung his arm across Fen’s shoulders and pulled him in, and after a moment, Fen surrendered to Alfie’s insistent strength. Let himself be held. “How about you don’t be daft? Why would I hate you?”
“Because it’s so painful and messy, and it was the beginning of the end for me and David.”
“Well,” said Alfie, a little too adamantly, “I’m not him.”
Fen turned slightly, untangling wind-stirred hair from the arms of his glasses. His eyes were wild. “Do you really think I did the right thing?”
“If it was what your mam wanted, then yeah.”
“That’s what I thought too.”
“You don’t anymore?”
“No, I do . . . or I . . . I don’t know. It’s . . .” Fen sounded tearful, his words drowned in the wind and the waves. “There’s what you believe, and then there’s how it feels when it actually happens.”
“Yeah, I get that.”
Fen drew in a shuddering breath just on this side of a sob. “But what if I was wrong? Maybe I should have said, ‘No, don’t do this.’ When I think about it rationally, I remember that we all have a fundamental right to choose how and when to die, but she was my mum. She was my mum.”
Then Fen turned his face into Alfie’s shoulder and sort of cried. Almost tearlessly, breathlessly and silently, his body shaking a little. Alfie held him as best he could and made what he hoped were soothing noises, and felt helpless and tender and impossibly moved that Fen would trust him with all this pain.
Eventually, Fen grew quiet again, and Alfie put him back together, tucking his hair out of his way and brushing a few traces of moisture from his cheeks with his thumbs.
It wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. Fen blinked at him. He looked battered, like a small ship in the wake of a huge storm. And Alfie burst desperately into speech. “I know you said there’s nowt to say about summin like this, but . . . she wouldn’t have asked for help if she didn’t know how much you loved her. And she wouldn’t have left you if she hadn’t known you’d do alreet.”
“She might think differently now.”
“No, she wouldn’t. She’d see exactly what I do.”
“A complete wreck?”
“Someone strong and true and sad, but whole and real and basically okay.”
There was a pause. And suddenly, Fen made an odd hiccoughing noise perilously close to a giggle. “‘Basically okay’? You’ll turn a boy’s head with sweet talk like that.”
“Oi,” protested Alfie. “I also said other stuff.”
“I know.” Fen managed a smile—weak, but real. “Thank you. For that and for listening. And, oh, everything. I have no idea how you do it.”
“Uh, do what?”
“Make me feel this hopeful.”
For some reason this made Alfie get all flustered, and they sat in silence for a minute or two, watching the waves wash in and out over the dully gleaming sand.
“Do you want a Murray mint?” asked Fen, eventually.
“Uh?”
“A Murray mint. I’ve got a couple in my pocket. Do you want one?”
After everything they’d just shared, the sheer ordinariness of the question was bewildering. And also sort of a relief. Like the world wasn’t broken, or spinning out of control, just knocked about a bit before resuming its usual course. “Yeah. All right.”
Fen uncurled and arched his hips off the rock, wriggling a finger into the pocket of his jeans. Now, Alfie told himself, was really not an appropriate time to notice all the lovely ways Fen’s body moved. Eventually, he sat back down and dropped a cellophane-covered sweet into Alfie’s hand.
“God, it’s been years since I’ve had one of these.” He took both ends of the plastic and pulled them taut, untwisting the wrapper and making it crackle.
“My dad somehow gets them. He’s got boxes and boxes. I think he might be some kind of international mint smuggler.”
The taste of the sweet was instantly familiar. Like nothing but itself.
“Oh, Alfie.” Suddenly Fen’s hands were on his face, and they were kissing, Fen’s tongue
pressing between his lips, sliding deep inside him until their mouths were full of mint and butter and each other. Fen hadn’t kissed him like that before, as though Alfie was his to claim and savour. It left him breathless, a little shipwrecked, more than a little goofy.
“You know,” said Fen, afterwards. “This is technically our third date.” And when Alfie gave a startled splutter of laughter, he held up his hand and began ticking them off on his fingers. “On our first date, I had messed-up self-harm sex with you. On our second date, I nearly killed us. So I’m continuing the trend by crying all over you and deluging you in ethical quandaries about my dead mother.”
“Hey, there were Murray mints too.”
“Well, thank God for that. Otherwise you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a complete bust.”
Alfie grinned, stood, and held out a hand. “How about . . . how about what we did on our third date was go for a long walk on the beach?”
For a moment Fen just sat there, looking up at him, clear-eyed. “How romantic of us.”
“Is that a no?”
“It’s a yes.”
He came lightly to his feet and slipped his hand into Alfie’s. And they strolled like that awhile, under the shadow of the cliffs and past the Rock.
Fen slanted a smile at him. “You look good here, Alfie Bell.”
“I like to think I look good most places.”
“Particularly good here, then. All you need is a flat cap and a wet Labrador.”
“Way to turn a compliment—” he gave it a pause “—into an insult.”
The wind whisked the laughter from Fen’s lips. “It wasn’t meant to be an insult.”
“Hardly sexy, though, is it?”
“I don’t know.” The wind had brought colour to Fen’s cheeks. Or some private thought had made him blush. “I’d find it pretty charming.”
They followed a strip of sand between the cliff face and a much smaller sea stack known as Lot’s Wife. The beach was narrower here, mainly sand and clusters of rocks, furry with black seaweed and stippled with barnacles. A much younger Alfie had played among the little pools, occasionally falling into them in his quest for starfish, cockle shells, and mermaids’ purses.
