I swallow down a fresh wave of anger, resenting her for not teaching me better. Should have taught me to stand up for myself, to care less. Instead I spent so many of my school days wandering around feeling bruised and raw, wondering why my skin seemed so thin compared to everyone else’s. I cried too easily, lost my temper too quickly and laughed and sang far too loud. “I was always going to stand out,” I say.
“I know you were. Even when you were small I could see it. You were always going to be a far, far better dancer than I could have even dreamed of.” She reaches out and brushes my hair back from my face, her eyes gleaming and wet. “And I’m not just saying that because I’m your mother, and because I love you more than anything in the whole wide world, but you’ve got that spark, Milos. You’ve got that light inside you that lifts everything you do beyond mere technical perfection. And I’m not the only one who’s seen it. Your teachers always said to me that you were special.”
She’s crying now, and so am I, tears splashing hot over my chilled hand and knee.
“You slip under the skin of a role so easily,” she says. “And I think it’s because you were so, so sensitive as a child. I used to lie awake at night, frightened to death about all the millions of ways the world could hurt you. And when you quit? It was like living through a nightmare.” She reaches out to touch my hair again, making me sob. “You were so unhappy, baby. And your light – I thought it was snuffed out for good, and you not even ten years old. And it was my fucking fault, because I didn’t protect you the way I should have done.”
“No, Mom. No.” I sniff and snort. “It wasn’t. It was just a clusterfuck all round. You did what you had to do.” All those years I blamed her for taking me to the doctor and starting that whole shitstorm of tests and anxiety and bullying, but really what was she supposed to do? Your kid throws up, you take him to the doctor. End of story. She wasn’t being hysterical. She was just being a mother.
“No,” she says, reaching behind her to snag a roll of paper towels from the table. “I should have taught you to be proud of what you are.”
She should, but never mind. “Whatever,” I say, wiping my eyes. “Chances are I would have been ground down to a fine paste by the time I’d even finished elementary school anyway. You know what little assholes children can be.”
“I guess.”
“There’s no point dwelling on it, Mom. Yes, I quit, but I got back up. And I’m tougher for it. A lot tougher. You don’t have to worry about me freaking out or folding up at the smallest hurts. Or even the biggest ones. I’m a man now. That’s how it works; life hurts, you roll with it.”
She blows her nose and the noise attracts the dog, who was sniffing around in the laundry room. Henry comes trotting over, wagging the stump of his tail and trying to lick the icepack. He knows what’s up, for all he’s no rocket scientist, a thought that sets me snuffling with laughter through the tears I’m still trying to stop.
“What? What’s so funny?”
I rub Henry’s ears and he makes low growly noises in his throat. Doesn’t bite, or bark, and his stump goes right on wagging. We never figured out what was with the ear-rub growls. “The dog,” I say. “He laughed so hard when I told him we had a Jack Parsons terrier. Tom, that is.”
Mom frowns. “Tom. Is that his name?”
“Yeah. He thought it was hilarious and I was like ‘Why?’ and I said they were like Jack Russells but slightly different. So he said ‘What’s the difference? Jack Parsons terriers worship Satan and blow themselves up?’ and I was totally confused.”
She doesn’t look much better off than I was at the time.
“Turns out there was a rocket scientist named Jack Parsons,” I explain.
“Right?”
“Who also worshipped Satan and blew himself in a lab accident. I mean, seriously – who even knows shit like that? Never mind makes jokes about it. But he does. It’s incredible, the amount of stuff he manages to remember, Mom. He is so, so smart.”
She crumples a paper towel in her fist. “Smart is a bonus,” she says, after a brief pause. She reaches out and tucks a stray curl behind my ear. “Is he kind to you?”
It strikes me as a weird question, and I realize I’ve never applied it to a lover before. Are they hot? - sure. Are they smart? Are they funny? But kindness, no. It’s never appeared on that unwritten checklist, and that’s when it hits me, how kind he’s always been. Even when he was trying to end the whole thing he couldn’t bring himself to be cruel. One of the first things he ever did was apologize for getting ahead of himself and calling my mom. I showed up in his office in a blind panic and he took me home, talked me down, made me coffee.
“Yeah,” I say, swallowing down stinging fresh tears. “He is.”
“Good,” she says. “That’s good.”
“I should call him. Or just text to say I’m home.”
Where is he right now? Still talking to the police? What’s going to happen now? Charges, courts, restraining orders. God, what an unholy fucking mess. I call his number, but it just rings.
And rings.
*
He doesn’t come to school.
The phone keeps ringing all night, and by morning I’m frantic. I drive round to the house and see his car is gone from the drive, but there are tire marks and a trail of oil that suggest it’s been towed away rather than driven. Other than that, the yard’s the way we left it, with blood from my elbow on the rock edge of the path and the tulips that got smashed in the scuffle turning brown where their stems were snapped.
Oh God, where is he?
I startle as someone comes around the side of the house, but it’s not him. It’s one of the guys who were yesterday, the little stocky one with the bald head and the leather-daddy beard. “Hey,” he says, when he recognizes me. “You okay?”
“Uh, I dunno. Where’s Tom?”
He shrugs. “Well, that’s a fucking question for the ages, pardon my French.” He holds out a hand. “I’m Otter – like the animal. You must be Milos. Guess we didn’t get around to the formal introductions yesterday.”
“Yeah. Have you heard from him? I’m really worried.”
“He’s somewhere,” says Otter, and holds up a bunch of keys. “Lucky I still have this.”
Jesus. It’s come to that already? I’m suddenly very afraid of what we might find inside the house. “Are you sure? I mean, he’s…”
“Relax. He’s still breathing. At least he was two hours ago.”
“How do you know?”
Otter looks around and slides the key into the front door. “Because I checked out his Twitter. He was liking Stop Homophobia tweets two hours ago, same as he usually does.” We step into the hallway. The house feels unnaturally quiet. “Tom? Hello?”
There’s no mail on the doormat. His outdoor shoes are gone; he was wearing them the last time I saw them. Heart in mouth, I walk through the house, taking in every detail that might be a clue as to where he’s gone. An unopened bottle of wine on the kitchen table, a sweater thrown over the back of his desk chair.
“Milos,” says Otter. “Interesting name. What is that? Greek?”
“Uh, no. It’s Slovak. After my grandfather. His parents saw what was coming and got the hell out of Czechoslovakia before Hitler rolled in.”
“Smart,” says Otter, opening the bedroom door. The bed is made. It hasn’t been slept in.
“Yeah,” I say, trying to ignore the sickening feeling in my stomach. “It was something like eighty-three per cent of Bohemian Jews got wiped out. Like, there’s huge swathes of my family tree that are just…not there anymore.” I keep talking as I approach the bathroom door, to keep up my nerve more than anything else. I remember reading somewhere that people who are serious most often do it in the bathroom, out of consideration for those who are going to have to clean up the mess.
It’s empty. He’s not in there. The sink tap – the one with the water pressure that coughs and splatters you if you’re not careful – is hissing quietl
y. His toothbrush is not on the shelf.
“Goddamn it,” says Otter. “Drama queen.”
“I never figured him as the type.”
Otter goes through to the kitchen. “Honey, he’s a queen with a doctorate in Elizabethan drama. There’s no way he’s getting out of that one.” He opens the fridge, glances inside and closes it again. “Eesh. Nothing but wine. You want to go get a cup of coffee or something?”
“Yeah, I guess.” Where the hell is he?
“Come on, then. We’ll take my car.”
We lock up and go back outside. I feel like I’m about to puke. The worst part is that I have no idea where he might be; we never got as far as admitting our safe havens to one another. We might have done, but as always we didn’t have time. We were on course for more love, more confessions, but then his douchebag ex tried to run me down in the driveway.
“Lucky that goddamn gun nut next door wasn’t around,” says Otter, as we head out.
“Mr. Jefferies?”
“Yeah. I have no interest in finding out how much bluer he’s got since I last saw him.”
“Bluer?”
“He’s been taking that colloidal silver shit for years,” says Otter. “Gets it off the Alex Jones website or something. Probably looks like a smurf by now. You gotta wonder what goes on in some of these people’s heads, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I guess.” The only person’s head I’m interested in right now is Tom’s. He’s obviously gone somewhere, but where? He’s not going to just leap on a plane back to London, is he? He can’t do that, surely. “Can you leave the country if you’re a witness or whatever it is he is right now?”
Otter shakes his head. “Nah. He hasn’t run that far, if that’s what you’re thinking. If he was going back to England he’d take more than a toothbrush and an overnight bag. Although it would really fucking help if he’d cut the shit and tell us where he is; Nicky picked up all the forms for a restraining order last night and now Tom’s not around to file it.”
“A restraining order?”
“Yep. Should have done it earlier, but who knew Simon was going to go off the deep end like that?” He sighs as he pulls in to the parking lot of a coffee shop that Tom has pointed out a couple of times. “How about you? You okay? I’m sorry to hear you got bashed up.”
“My knee’s a little stiff. That’s all.” It’s more than stiff. It’s all kinds of interesting colors, but I’ll wing it. I’ve still got body make-up at home, the industrial, waterproof stuff I’m sometimes obliged to slather on over my tattoos if I’m dancing the part of some goody-two shoes prince or something. Hell-cat Tybalt needs no such tattoo cover up, but I might need it to hide the bruising. “No broken bones, thankfully. Nothing as bad as what it could have been.”
“Seriously.” We get out of the car. “If you hadn’t leapt out of the way when you did.”
“Yeah, well. Leaping is kind of my thing; I’m a dancer.”
He doesn’t know quite what to say to that. Maybe he thinks I’m a stripper. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d been mistaken for one, and given what he’s heard about my little side hustle…
Jesus. Even my own parents think I’m a whore.
We go inside. The place smells warmly of ground roast and baked goods, but my mind is elsewhere. Should I call him again? I don’t know if I can handle more silence. If he’s alive and liking things on Twitter that raises a new and awful possibility: he doesn’t want to talk to me.
I must look nearly as scared as I feel, because Otter reaches across the table and gives me a reassuring pat on the back of the hand. “We’ll figure this out,” he says. “I promise.”
“Yeah.”
“How did you two meet, anyway?”
He’s trying to distract me and I appreciate the effort, but it’s not working. Tom and I never had one of those polite relationships where you meet, date and fall in love. We just sort of collided during a series of minor personal catastrophes and ended up rummaging around in one another for comfort, only to discover our passion was almost too hot to handle, never mind something you could curl up alongside and get cozy.
“Long story,” I say. “He…he accidentally gave me head when I went to hand in a paper.”
Otter blinks. “What? You just tripped and your dick fell into his mouth?”
“Something like that, yeah.” I have the phone in front of me again. “Why isn’t he picking up? The last thing I ever wanted to do was to hurt him…” Otter tries and fails to hide his ‘oops, too late’ expression. “…and yeah, I know. Believe me. I know.”
He presses his lips together for a moment in thought. “People do what they do and that’s cool,” he says. “But sometimes people like full disclosure before they–”
“–find out they’re fucking a camwhore. Yeah, I know.”
Otter shrugs. “Yeah, well. For what it’s worth I think he’s being totally Angel Clare about this.”
“Angel Clare?”
“Tess of the D’Urbervilles?”
“Nope.”
“It’s a book. Tess marries Angel and he dumps her on their wedding night when he finds out she’s not a perfect virgin. Oh, spoiler alert, I guess.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “I doubt I’ll ever read it. Nobody will believe me, but I dropped English because I was bad at it, not because I was fucking the teacher. Although I was also doing that, obviously.” My phone bloops and I drop on it like a leopard, but it’s nothing. Just some Google update. “Goddamn it, what is wrong with him? So I stuck things up my ass on a webcam – so what? He’s acting like I committed genocide or something.”
“Milos, give him a break,” says Otter. “Please. You have to know; he’s still very fragile.”
Right. Simon. Is there anything that asshole hasn’t ruined lately? “You think it’s too soon for him. For us.”
“I have no way of knowing. All I know is that in the middle of it all – when Simon was going through treatment – I’d look in Tom’s eyes and see…nothing. He was just empty, too exhausted to feel anything at all, I guess. When they were in the hospital me and Nicky would go round and clean house, put food in the fridge, but even when he was thanking us Tom was like a sleepwalker. You could tell he was just about done.” He hesitates, and for a second I think I’m going to have to press, but then he sighs and starts talking. “He had this patch at the side of his head. I pay way too much attention to other people’s hairlines–” He rubs his bare scalp. “–for obvious reasons, right? But I could see he was trying to do it discreetly, just behind his ear.”
“He’s always doing that.” Whenever he thought nobody was looking in class he’d be sat up there with his elbow on the table, stroking the skin behind his ear.
“Is he picking at it?”
“No, just rubbing, I think. Why?”
Otter groans and scrubs a hand over his beard. “At one point I think he was pulling his hair out. Literally. He had this little bloody bald patch behind his ear. A stress thing, I guess, but it’s not good, when people start hurting themselves like that. He wasn’t pulling it out, right? Lately, I mean.”
“No.” Oh God, why didn’t he tell me this? “You think he’d…no. He wouldn’t. He sees death as pointless. That much I do know.” I pick up the phone. “Jesus Christ – why didn’t you mention this sooner?”
“Because I jumped on him at the time. I gave him the number of a good therapist and badgered him into seeing her. And it stopped. I thought he was coping.”
“He was. He is.” I dial again. It starts to ring, but already I’m thinking of the calls I don’t want to make if he doesn’t answer. The police. Hospitals. “Come on, Tom. Pick up already.”
13
Tom
The bathtub is very clean. It was probably scrubbed just this morning, the chrome taps buffed to a mirror shine, and all the things carefully laid out for the next occupant. Miniature bottles of shampoo, tiny soaps, the washcloth folded as if for a state dinner and the bathmat draped over the
side of the tub like a cloth over the arm of a waiter. The hospitality industry, they call it, as if hospitality were a commodity that can be bought and sold, and not some offshoot of simple kindness, a thing too nebulous and precious for price.
I shouldn’t be here. I’m not even sure where I am. I told Nicky and Otter that I’d be okay, that I needed some space, but I think on some level I was already planning to run. As soon as I had that moment to exhale I went around the corner to the car hire place, needing to drive something out of there. And to keep driving until tiredness forced me off the road.
I bought an overnight kit from an all-night drugstore. A plastic comb, a tiny toothbrush, a Liliput-sized tube of toothpaste. And a razor, a thing I stopped trusting myself with maybe a year ago, when I was wandering around feeling like a long, hollow scream. I only did it once. Okay, twice. And I was ashamed of myself the first time, but obviously not so ashamed that I didn’t do it the second time.
It was disgusting. Childish. Petulant. I remember thinking how dare I do this to myself when Simon is in the next room, unable to even cling to life and health by his fingernails, because the poison coursing through his veins had turned them deciduous. He lived every day with the kind of pain I could hardly imagine, but here I was, self-indulgent enough to cause myself pain on purpose.
You can dismantle a safety razor quite easily. I expect there are probably even websites devoted to it, shady message boards where teenagers swap tips and compare scars. It’s mostly teenagers, not grown men in their thirties who ought to know better. They have the excuse of raging hormones, of the exquisite pain of settling into their new adult skins. I have nothing of the sort.
Both times I did it on my feet, on the inside of the arch where the skin is less likely to stretch. You don’t want to feel it after you’ve done it; it’s all about feeling it for a moment. If you’re reminded of it afterwards then it’s just another reason to feel shame.
These Violent Delights Page 17
