Trowchester Blues

by Alex Beecroft

  She clutched the tiller bar with both hands. “You want something for this. You must. I’m not going to—”

  “No, hey.” He held his hands out in surrender. “I don’t. Look, my name’s Michael. I’m . . . I used to be a policeman. I worked in the missing persons unit. I tracked down lost kids, and so many of them . . .”

  He had to pause to get a handle on his breathing again, his chin trying to tremble with all the years of grief he’d laughed off with black humour while he was still at work. “So many of them I couldn’t save. If I want something for this, that’s all—I want to know I got it right, just once. Okay? I’m not going to do anything you don’t want. You want to go, you go, I won’t stop you, but you’re welcome to stay.”

  Another long moment during which she looked down on him, like a wild thing deciding whether it was safe to come closer, to accept an offering of food. Then she put the tiller bar down by her feet and said, “Sarah.”

  He was pretty sure that wasn’t her real name, but it made him smile up at her nevertheless, hugely relieved. “Hi, Sarah. It’s good to meet you.”

  Slowly he raised himself to his feet. She backed up a little but didn’t go for her weapon, and that made him smile too. She peered from a distance as he got the water pump going and demonstrated the shower, her filthy hands clutching at her grimy clothes as though she simultaneously hated them and was afraid to emerge from their shelter. He guessed they made pretty effective armour, given the fact that he would want to put on rubber gloves to handle them. Even her dirt was a defence.

  “I’ll go see about some other clothes,” he said again, happy to have something uncomplicated to do, something that overwrote all the miserable business of his life with useful urgency. “I don’t have anything your size. How do you feel about meeting another teenager? My neighbour’s child is about your size. They might have something you could borrow.”

  “‘They’?” she said, her hands now fiddling with her hood as though she wanted to raise it, to hide, but was making the effort to trust him with her face.

  “Yeah, Tai’s . . . um . . .” What was the correct word? He wasn’t really familiar with today’s terminology, and in his day there hadn’t been a term for it at all. “Genderqueer? Neutrois? They’re kind of neither one thing nor the other.”

  Sarah twisted her fingers in her messy greasy hair. “And their parents still love them?”

  Shit. Would she ever stop making him cry? He bit the inside of his cheek to keep himself together. “Yeah. They’re good people, the Lis. They’re sure to want to help.”

  “You can’t tell them,” she said, her hands now tugging at her collar, always clenching and twisting somewhere over herself, like she could pull her skin off and be someone else. “About finding me on the streets. You have to tell them I’m your niece or something, or they’re going to think it’s dodgy, and they’re going to tell social services.”

  “I can’t just go around lying to people,” he protested, slightly horrified at the thought.

  And she bristled, stooping down to reach for her shoes. “You can. You have to. I mean you get to be honest because everyone always believes you, because you’re an adult and you’re a man and you’re the law, so what fucking reason have you got to lie? It all works out your way anyway. But when everyone’s against you, you tell them whatever works, because they wouldn’t listen to the truth anyway.”

  It had the ring of bitter experience behind it. When he thought about how small he’d felt, how accused and how disbelieved by the police when they visited, he could almost see what she meant. If the world really was out to get you, dealing with it honestly might just be the same thing as standing up to get punched.

  Adopting a niece sounded like a hell of a responsibility. Something he really hadn’t bargained on when he’d offered her a shelter, but she had a point. If it became widely known he had a sixteen-year-old runaway on his property? Well, people would draw conclusions and things could get ugly fast. Not to mention that his niece would have a respectable address and persona, would have job opportunities and a chance to establish herself in society that a nameless homeless girl would not.

  A niece. For all intents and purposes a daughter. Wow. He was not in a good mental place to be taking on something like that. But the alternative was to—what? Turn her back out again? Shove her into a government system she was terrified of? That was never going to happen. He reconsidered.

  “All right. How about this. I’ll go and buy you some clothes, so you can get changed first, and then we’ll introduce you to the Lis as my niece. I think you’d like Tai, and Mrs. Li’s always looking for someone to help her clean out the boats, so you could maybe pick up a job there if you wanted.”

  “And pay you rent,” she said, eagerly, as though paying him rent would be a fail-safe way of fending off any unwanted advances. It twisted his heart, reminded him that she really was so very young.

  He smiled, for her sake. “Yeah, pay for your food and fuel and rent, so you’re properly independent. It doesn’t have to happen all at once, but that’s the long-term plan, okay?”

  This time she did tug her hood up, disappearing into the shadow, her little mouth twisted with ferocity and her thin wrists raised, covering her face. He dropped his gaze to the floor, knowing anguish when he saw it, praying that it was the anguish, the disbelief of someone who recognised hope after too long without.

  He figured she needed to be alone with that, and backed away, coming out into the overcast grey weather of an autumnal noon as a changed man. Shutting the doors behind him, he set off back into town with new purpose and focus to his life, fairly sure that when the gains were balanced, she had rescued him, not the other way around.

  The weather had worsened, and it was cold and damp, the leaves on the trees now thin and sad against the white sky. Long plumes of reeds hissed along the riverbanks, a sound as relaxing as the susurrus of the sea.

  As he walked, he thought about lying—Sarah’s assertion that sometimes the truth was a luxury the underclass could not afford. Like everything else in his life at the moment, it made him think of Finn.

  Finn who surrounded himself with outrageous lies. Finn with his misdirection and evasion and downright deceit; Finn who loved words for their own sake, not necessarily caring if he meant what they said.

  What made him think that Finn was telling the truth this time?

  Michael always believed I don’t love you. I was just playing with you. It had gone home like a bullet to the brain. But years of self-examination had taught him that he believed it too easily, that he sabotaged his relationships by expecting it. That that flaw in him was a neurosis left over from his father and only strengthened by his divorce.

  He knew that Finn lied as easily as he breathed.

  There was a distinct chance that Finn had not meant what he said.

  Michael’s pace slowed as he came off the bridle path, into the park from which a footpath led up into the streets of the town. With his mind clear of rage and misery, he found himself remembering details he had skipped over this morning.

  Finn small and abandoned in the centre of a black star. A black star? Michael slowed to a halt, examining his memories. Smoke in the air, water underfoot, drenched books covered in ash and the black scar of newly doused fire on the bookshop ceiling and floor.

  What the hell?

  He knew he’d been preoccupied, but there was no excuse for missing the fact that there had been a fire at the bookshop. A fire in the heart of Finn’s pride and joy, in the place that was almost an extension of his soul. He remembered now that the man’s hands had been wrapped up, and his eyes smoke- and tear-reddened. God. Thank God Michael was no longer on the force. He deserved dismissal for not noticing these things before, for not connecting the dots.

  There’d been a fire at the bookshop last night, when Michael’s phone had been off, when he’d been drinking himself into a stupor from what he still thought of as betrayal. He’d been unavailable while Finn w
as living through some kind of terrifying near-death experience. No wonder the man had greeted him with anger.

  And instead of calmly trying to find out what had happened, Michael had lost his temper. Finn had . . . Well, he still couldn’t quite work out what Finn had been trying to do. They’d both said the most damaging things that had come into their heads, and things would probably never be the same again between them.

  Guilt pulled at him, tried to slow him down, suck him under into suffocating despair. It was as hard to walk through as quicksand as he pushed himself uphill towards the shops. Shit. He had not handled that well.

  Finn was still a villain though. That mattered, didn’t it?

  Or did it? After all, Michael was not a cop anymore, and Finn knew it. Of the two of them, it was Finn who’d taken the biggest chance, getting involved with the other side. Finn who risked being grassed up or sent to jail. What did Michael risk by loving Finn? Only disappointment and the loss of a reputation he probably didn’t deserve.

  Michael bought two changes of girls’ clothes in Primark, judging the sizes by eye. The cashier looked askance at him, particularly when she was ringing up the underwear. “My niece has come to stay,” he told her, and watched her face relax at the explanation. Now he was a liar too, and probably on the wrong side of some child protection law he wasn’t aware of himself. “The airport still hasn’t found her suitcase.”

  The bags seemed to burn his fingers as he stood outside, close enough to the Bibliophile Bookshop to see the locksmith repairing the door.

  Finn had every right to be pissed off with him, and he was still pissed off with Finn. He didn’t know if he wanted to be involved with some London fence. No, scratch that, he was pretty sure he didn’t. There were plenty of things he was willing to tolerate in a partner, but a criminal career wasn’t one of them.

  He took out his phone nevertheless and dialled Finn’s number. It rang twice, was snatched up as if Finn had been waiting for it. “Michael?”

  He really wished he didn’t have such a reaction just to his voice. Roughened by smoke though it was, it still set his heart pounding, dampened his hands, and made him feel warm all over. “Yeah. Look, I don’t really know what happened this morning, but we should talk.”

  “I was thinking the same thing myself.”

  Finn made everything seem easier, more reasonable. Of course they would both want to talk. All intelligent life forms were agreed that was the only sensible course of action. Although he wished it wasn’t the case, Michael felt the tension leave his body at Finn’s words, and wished he could close his eyes and have that smooth Irish lilt close over him like a stream and lap him to sleep.

  “Is now good?”

  “It’s not, really. I’ve got the book club lads round, and they’re a prying nosy bunch of gobshites that wouldn’t let us get a word in edgeways.”

  Michael wondered if he was being fobbed off for a moment, before the distant sound of cursing and laughter corroborated Finn’s story. The guy had someone there with him. That was good.

  “I’m sorry about the fire.” He lowered his voice and whispered it as if the nosy lads were standing at his shoulder. “I’m sorry I didn’t notice you’d had one. I was kind of wrapped up in my own concerns.”

  Finn laughed, and the sound relaxed Michael from the hair down. He had it bad if nothing more than standing here with Finn’s voice on the phone made him feel so much better.

  “You don’t say,” said Finn. “Look, I’ll throw everyone out at 6 p.m. Come over at half past and we’ll get this sorted out like grown-ups. I’m glad to know you’re all right.”

  “I’m glad to know that you are too,” Michael agreed, smiling, because yes, even if Finn was a villain, and even if this was over, he still really liked the guy. He still wished him well. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do in the meantime.”

  Finn laughed again, a little more naturally. “Darling, leave me space to breathe. You’re far more of a stick in the mud than I could ever be.”

  Which was at least not any kind of lie.

  “See you then.” Michael couldn’t keep the warmth from his voice or tamp down the pleased excitement at the thought, parts of him not at all troubled by questions of illegality, the rest of him troubled that he even had those parts.

  “See you.”

  Considerably happier, Michael rang off and turned towards home, intending to take Sarah her jeans and jumpers and new shoes, to call on Tai and ask if they wanted to come over for a visit, and maybe to finally get some more work in on the new boat.

  There was still a little over five hours until six thirty. Plenty of time to do everything else that needed to be done. Five and a half hours was frankly a lifetime.

  “That was him, wasn’t it? Your mysterious lover?” Idris paused in his grimy task of levering the rolled-up carpet out of the door, bending it to try to fit it through the passage without smudging the paint so that it could be taken out to the back garden.

  “Whatever gives you that idea?” Finn tucked his phone away with the sensation of being three stone lighter, the constricting bands of tension around his chest having loosened at Michael’s call.

  “Oh, that’s a besotted smile.” Idris gestured, the loose shapes of his hands seeming to describe something that was self-evident. He caught James’s eye and gave a little jerk of the chin, inviting his opinion. “Wouldn’t you say? That’s the smile of a man who’s in deep.”

  James—their local archaeologist—had taken a day off the digs at Wednesday Keep, Trowchester’s Bronze Age hill fort, to lend his expertise with all things small and delicate. He tugged his reading glasses down and looked at Idris and Finn over the top of them. “I don’t believe this invisible boyfriend of his even exists. I thought he was supposed to come to the book club? I note he never appeared.”

  He raised an eyebrow sceptically, turned back to the plinth where he was carefully sorting the gears of the automaton that he had earlier retrieved from where they were scattered around the room. The retrieval had taken him an hour, and the cataloguing another two, but he had just begun the process of fitting everything back together, and it was going like a charm—the benefits of the scientific method.

  “I’ve seen him,” Idris insisted.

  “Well, you’re the only one who has.”

  “Does my experience count for nothing, then? Am I such an unworthy witness?”

  Finn tried to tuck his smile away as he finished wiping the residue of ash and water off the now-empty shelves. He’d rung everyone in the book club soon after breakfast. David and Peter had come over at once and put in two hours shovelling the worst damaged books into bin bags, while he took those he thought might be salvageable upstairs so he could work on them. At nine o’clock, they had gone off to their jobs, and Idris and James—both of whom were their own bosses and could take time off when it pleased them—had taken over.

  The room was stripped and clean, even the flaky black soot scraped out of the scar in the ceiling. The floor beneath the carpet had proved to be tiled, and was blackened but otherwise unharmed. The shelves were intact, and altogether he was convinced it could have been a great deal worse.

  After emptying the washing-up water down the drain, he returned it to the kitchen. Took a dose of Paracetamol and codeine for the pain in his hands and feet, thankful that they had come away so relatively unscathed. Made a pot of tea and brought it down on a tray with the cake Idris had brought.

  His return only sparked the conversation again as though he had never been away. James had that philosophical twinkle in his eye that tended to presage a long discussion on authorial intent, and the statistical likelihood of whatever plot twist they were discussing. The look of a man who liked to argue logic just because it was there. “In the absence of Finn saying anything at all about this ‘boyfriend’ of his, there’s nothing to prove Idris is not hallucinating the whole thing.”

  Finn turned the heating up, emptied the water from the dehumidifier he had brought fr
om the basement, and smiled at them both.

  “You can’t just refuse to talk,” Idris protested, drawn close by the responsibility of cutting the cake evenly. “Tell him. Tell him about your pocket-sized bear.” He switched his attention to James, who had just fitted a copper disc on the back of the time machine and was checking to make sure it still rotated. “It’s gorgeous. It’s like they’re specially scaled down for each other. The guy is Finn’s height but built like a bulldozer. Handsome in a brutal sort of way. Alexander the Great was short, wasn’t he? That’s what the guy looks like—tiny, but hard-core.”

  “Are you casting aspersions on my altitude again?” Finn tried for lighthearted, but found he didn’t quite have the resilience to laugh off short jokes at the moment. “I carry my inches somewhere else.”

  “Uh-uh.” Idris waved a finger under his nose. “You don’t get to deflect this even with well-phrased dick jokes. Tell the man I’m not making this up—that you have fire in your heart as well as in your buildings.”

  That was in such bad taste it startled a laugh out of Finn. “I’ll tell him what I told you.” Finn perched on the lower steps of the stepladder to pour the tea, and conceded the point—they were helping him put his life back together out of mere friendship. Perhaps they deserved to be included. “Which is that I don’t know whether he’s my lover or not.”

  “There’s a simple enough test.” James wound up the clockwork time machine and beamed with satisfaction when it began to whirr, good as new. “Did you sleep with him?”

  Finn rolled his eyes and sighed gustily. “Yes.”

  “Well, then. And are you going to sleep with him again?”

  Finn’s cup clattered in its saucer. He put it down quickly, but not quick enough to avoid James’s sharply sympathetic glance.