by KJ Charles
“My brother stole my father from me to save himself fifty pounds a year,” Gil said. “And he did it with the help of his man of business and a good family of English gentlemen—because Jessamy and Horace would have been there when the will was read. They knew. They knew he was cheating me and they didn’t care. So fuck them. Fuck the lot of them. I took this shop because to hell with English gentlemen, and the law, and the done thing, and the kind of respectability that means keeping other people in line while you do as you please. I took the shop to show I’d survive—no, thrive, whatever they did, and I put my name on it because I thought it might piss Matthew off all the more to be associated with filthy books. Ha. I missed the mark there, didn’t I? Anyway, that’s that.” He gave a little shrug, not the usual easy don’t-care movement, more as if trying to knock some crawling thing off his shoulder without touching it. “That’s why I left school like I did, and it’s why I didn’t get in touch afterwards. Because what part of any of that would you have wanted to hear?”
“‘I’m alive’,” Vikram said. “I wanted to hear that. It’s all that matters. I’m so sorry, Gil.”
Gil’s eyes met his. They were a shade lighter than his skin, brown with amber depths, and just for a moment they were wide and raw and unguarded, and Vikram wanted to reach out and pull him close. He wanted to hold Gil until that damned hard shell of his shivered away and he felt the boy he used to know, the one who would grab on and hold tight and laugh through tears, telling him everything would be fine.
Gil didn’t look like he thought everything would be fine ever again.
But Vikram didn’t reach for him, because he didn’t know how, and Gil looked away. He picked up a photograph album as though it were interesting, and said, quite casually, as though they’d discussed nothing but the weather, “So what about you?”
“What? Me?” Vikram couldn’t seem to understand the question.
“While I was off making a living. What did you do with yourself?”
“Oh. Uh. I went up to Oxford, to read law.”
“How was that?”
Vikram had absolutely no desire to speak about himself now, but Gil could hardly make his wishes clearer. “Er, busy. I got involved in politics.”
“I bet you did. Indian independence?”
“And the rights of Indians living here. The way that Indian workers are treated is a disgrace. Lascars are paid a pittance and left to starve; ayahs are brought over and abandoned. Someone needs to speak for them.”
“And that’s you, is it? What do your parents think to that?”
“We, ah, we aren’t on marvellous terms at the moment. They find me rather disappointing.”
Gil’s brows slanted. “Must have high standards. What happened?”
“Well, they disagree with my political views. And my choice of career. And my choice of clients. Everything, really. My father wanted me to be a barrister and aim for Parliament. To work at a higher level, not to spend my time in the gutters of Shad Thames. And then there was the trip to India.”
Gil sat up. “Blimey. What was that like?”
Vikram picked the next photograph off the pile, glaring at it. “I didn’t go.”
“Sorry?”
“I have work here, people who need me, and it’s a damned long way. It would take months I couldn’t spare.”
Gil blinked. “Have you ever gone?”
“No. I... No. It was never convenient.”
“But you always said you wanted to go home as soon as you’d finished school. You talked about it all the time.”
“I know. I wanted to complete my studies at Oxford first, though, and then I was offered a pupillage right away, you see, and—” Gil was listening with his head cocked, a very familiar gesture of sceptical enquiry. Vikram felt himself sag. “Well, it’s not that easy. India is my homeland, but we came here when I was three. My parents always spoke English at home. I don’t speak anything except English and French.”
“I’m sure you could find someone to translate.”
“Of course, but— Look, I’m an Indian national. That’s important to me. I count myself an Indian, not an Englishman.”
“So?”
“So what if I went home and didn’t feel as though I belonged?” Vikram blurted the words. “If ‘home’ wasn’t home at all, what—who—would I be then? What if I was an Englishman there?”
It was almost a relief to say the words out loud when he’d barely articulated the thought to himself previously. It had always been easy to talk to Gil. “You don’t have to tell me that’s absurd,” he added, in case. “I’m sure it sounds ridiculous.”
“It doesn’t,” Gil said. “There’s nothing funny about having your roots torn up. Thinking you belong somewhere and the people there don’t agree.”
Vikram’s lungs felt tight. “It’s not the same. Of course it’s not.”
Gil ignored that. “But I don’t know if it wouldn’t be worth taking the risk. You always wanted to go.”
“I did. But the longer I waited the harder it seemed, and...well, I haven’t gone, that’s all.”
“Maybe you need to make it all a bit less meaningful. Just a visit, without looking for a homeland.”
“I’m not very good at making things less meaningful,” Vikram pointed out, and won a quick grin that helped his muscles relax just a fraction.
“Fair point. How about this: if you went to India, you might even see the sun again.”
“Now, that is a compelling argument. Damn this sodden island.”
“I vote you book a berth right now, and take one for me while you’re at it.”
“That’s a bargain.”
They exchanged quick smiles. Vikram returned to the photographs, rather hoping that they would leave the subject here, but Gil spoke again after a moment.
“So your parents aren’t happy you haven’t gone?”
Vikram contemplated the photograph he held. “Not at all, no. They took it really quite badly. I hadn’t understood it mattered to them so much, but they seem to feel I’ve turned my back on my heritage, which, considering they made their own home here and chose this country in which to bring me up—” He could hear his voice rising, and stopped himself. “Well, it’s not worth going over. The long and short of it is that I was angry with myself for letting them down, and with them for expecting more, or different, from me, and we argued quite badly. It’s been awkward since.”
“It would be.” Gil didn’t say anything else, didn’t point out how damned lucky Vikram was to have loving, even if disagreeing, parents. Vikram wondered whether he knew it didn’t need saying, or if he just didn’t care.
Silence fell after that. It was almost a relief. Vikram hadn’t spoken so honestly to anyone in a very long time, and he suspected Gil was in much the same boat. It was as though they’d picked up their friendship at the point it had been broken thirteen years ago and slipped back into intimacy without thought, leaving them both now unsettled and exposed.
They carried on working. Vikram leafed through the album he held, image after image of intimate parts, breasts and pudenda, pale flesh and tangled limbs, all dishearteningly similar. He found himself rapidly more intrigued by the bizarre variety of backgrounds than the depravity. Some images had painted backdrops showing thatched cottages and countryside, occasionally for bucolic scenes with costumes, sometimes for no apparent reason at all. An orgy was backed with painted Roman-type columns. Where drapes were used, most were plain, but a few had patterns, including a truly strange one with giant flowers. He took up the next album, expecting much the same, and stopped dead.
All the ones so far had been women, or men and women. This was two men, both rampantly erect, facing one another against thick drapes of a dark colour.
The next showed the same pair, one now on his knees, the other with a hand on his shoulder. In the third, the kneeling man had the other’s stiff piece in his mouth.
In his mouth. Lips closed around it almost to the base, even th
ough it was surely far too big for that. Vikram felt as though he had something in his own throat. He swallowed, turned the page. One man sprawled back on a divan that had been added to the scene, legs wide. The other leaned over so that each had his mouth close to the other’s stand.
In the next—
“I can’t do this.” Vikram pushed the album away. “I’m sorry.”
“Why, what’s wrong with it?” Gil squinted over, frowning.
“It’s illegal. The image, and the act. I can’t have anything to do with it.”
“Well, yes. Though, if it helps, I know these two.” Gil indicated the photograph. The man on hands and knees, legs wide, the other behind him. “They aren’t doing anything they wouldn’t be doing on their day off, trust me. And they were both alive last Wednesday, in case you’re worried.”
Vikram hadn’t even considered that. It was the least of his problems. “I just don’t want to look at these, that’s all.”
Except that he’d promised he would, he’d promised to help. Except that he did want to look at them. Or rather he didn’t, but he did.
Gil cocked his head. “Well, if it’s not your cup of tea, fair enough. But it’s just people doing what people do. Human nature, whatever the law says.”
“The law holds that it’s unnatural.”
“The law holds that India belongs to Britain.”
“That’s not the law— That’s not the point— Oh, great Scott, Gil, does none of this mean anything to you?” He gestured, knocking a pile of prints stacked on the rug. They slid sideways, fanning like a deck of cards, revealing glimpses of bare legs, buttocks, bodies.
“A tidy profit. What else should it mean?”
“Why do you need the money? You have your inheritance, don’t you?”
Gil’s eyes hardened. “Try something for me, Vik. Try having everything kicked out from under you and being left with nothing, and then ask me why I don’t fancy it happening again.”
“Granted, but this—”
“What’s so wrong with it?”
“I don’t approve of the exploitation of unfortunates.” Vikram didn’t want to consider Gil all those years ago, forced to do these things by men who used the poor for pennies. He wanted to scrub the feel of the prints from his fingers. “Or the licentiousness and self-indulgence that went into their creation.”
“Self-indulgence,” Gil said. “You mean fun?”
“I don’t indulge in that sort of ‘fun’,” Vikram said through his teeth.
“Well, you used to, as I recall.”
It knocked the breath out of him. Vikram stared at the floor, the photographs, because looking at Gil would be worse. “That wasn’t what I meant. I was referring to the, the purchasers of these images, not the act, which, which isn’t— We were boys. It’s irrelevant.”
“Right, got you. But since you mention it, yes, we were boys, and we had fun, and we didn’t do each other any harm. You don’t have to tie yourself in knots about it.”
“I am not tying myself in knots.”
“You’ve been tying yourself in knots your whole life. I’ve not seen you in thirteen years, and I can tell you haven’t changed a bit. You need to loosen some of those before you strangle yourself.”
And there it was, at last, Vikram’s best friend: anger, rushing through him and pushing everything else back. “You can’t tell anything about me. You don’t know me because, as you so rightly say, it’s been thirteen years. I don’t need to take your advice; I do very well as I am. And I will not sit here amid filth being mocked because I don’t choose to soil myself with it. You can call it tying myself in knots. I call it principles.”
“Fine. All right,” Gil said. “Jesus, mate, calm down.”
Vikram rose. “I am perfectly calm. I need some fresh air.”
“Well, you won’t get it round here.”
Vikram ignored that, scooping up his coat and hat. Gil said something as he left but he didn’t listen, clattering down the stairs, needing to be outside.
It was dark already, and there was a light fog. It would get a great deal worse as they slipped into winter, but it was already enough to catch in his throat as he strode up and down Holywell Street, trying not to tread in anything nasty.
How dare Gil? How dare he presume to comment on Vikram’s principles, how dare he assume that Vikram ought to follow in his footsteps through the mire? How could he be so casual about it considering the horrors of his own past, let alone their shared experience? How dare he speak as though it were easy?
We had fun, and we didn’t do each other any harm.
Evidently it had done Gil no harm. He had not been remotely affected. Vikram was quite surprised he even remembered, given how very trivial and unimportant their fun had apparently been. Curse Gil, curse all of it. Those pictures, those two men, hands and mouths and worse.
Gil had used his hands. Vikram remembered that very clearly indeed.
They’d been fifteen, the two of them, and inseparable. No longer just allies in that miserable school, but friends. They partnered in study where they were in the same class, in games wherever possible, and Gil knew every nook and cranny in the school where they could slip away to experiment with cheroots, to play cards, to talk about everything and anything and nothing. They shared fears and hopes, idle dreams, fantasies and injuries. They squabbled and laughed, comforted each other after the casual cruelties and beatings, and then...
They’d been on the roof. You could get up there and sit behind the parapet, away from prefects and bullies and masters alike, looking out at the countryside around. It had felt like freedom. They’d been talking about one of the sixth-formers who it was said had been sacked for immorality. Leaning back together, on the slates, Gil pillowing his head casually on Vikram’s outstretched arm, looking at him.
I don’t even know what immorality he was up to, Vikram had said. Nobody tells me anything. And Gil had given that rich laugh of his, already deepening, and said, Want to find out?
Of course Vikram had known. You couldn’t avoid it in a school packed with boys growing to manhood, where privacy was hard come by. He’d heard boys breathing in the night, in the dorm room; he knew about the prefects one should always visit in pairs.
He’d asked anyway, and when Gil returned his invitation, he’d said yes.
That first time it had been a matter of following instructions. Unbutton your fly. Give it a rub. And then Gil’s hand, so impossibly warm and soft, touching him, Gil smiling as though there could be nothing more natural and enjoyable, and Vikram had stared up at the sky and felt his heart bursting along with his balls.
Gil’s hand. Vikram could feel the blood pounding now.
Gil had never fretted. Where Vikram edged his way through the narrow space left for him by morals, expectations, obligations, fear of consequences, and pride, Gil strolled freely. He hadn’t cared if what they were doing was wrong in other people’s eyes; he’d done it because he thought it a good thing to do, and Vikram had felt his own world expanding too. Gil shoving him into the games cupboard for swift, frantic rutting; Gil reaching over the narrow gap between their beds in the dark of the dormitory.
He’d just been a schoolboy, urgent with the seething needs of growing youth. Everyone did it, by themselves or with a particular friend or with half the school. Of course Gil hadn’t cared, even if it had felt like that at the time. But Vikram had. He’d cared so much it seemed to fill up all the gaps in his mind, like water poured into a jar full of stones. He’d felt his trammelled existence opening out like the sky over the school roof, felt his awkward, growing body and mind and heart come into alignment because of course it was easy with Gil. Everything was.
And then Gil had disappeared one day, somewhere between breakfast and bedtime, and nothing had ever been easy again.
CHAPTER SIX
Gil wasn’t sure if Vikram was going to come back in, and was unreasonably relieved when he heard footsteps on the stairs. He wouldn’t have gone running
after him, that would be stupid, but nobody would want an old mate to walk off in a huff like that for no reason.
Or if there had been a reason it was the tension of their prior conversation, those painful revelations spilled out to someone who was and wasn’t a stranger, was and wasn’t a friend. Doubtless Vikram hadn’t wanted to be reminded of their youthful misdeeds. There were plenty of men who started regretting their acts thirty seconds after they spent; of course it would be embarrassing for an upright lawyer to recall his schoolboy passions, and how very much they’d seemed to mean at the time.
Vikram didn’t make any reference to their conversation or his abrupt disappearance when he came back in. He just hung up his coat in the corner again, and Gil took a look at him while he did so. A lot of his height was in his legs, which had the lean look of someone who walked a lot. Come to that, his expensive shoes were heavily worn on the sole though the uppers were smartly polished. Vikram wasn’t the sort to sit in a hackney when he could be striding along the pavement.
Vikram knelt back down to the pictures, his expression closed. Controlled, it was; controlled enough to make Gil wonder what he was controlling.
They’d played the fool as boys, and it had been...more than fun. It had seemed important then, overwhelming at times. It was hard to imagine that now, these many years over the chasm that separated Gil’s adulthood from his boyhood; hard to remember any of the things that had seemed so important when he’d had things to take for granted, like a soft bed and food and a father who loved him. If Matthew’s malice hadn’t pulled the pair of them apart—
Well, who knew. Maybe Gil would have been the first one to break Vikram’s heart. He was glad he hadn’t done that.
Vikram had come to the end of an album, so Gil passed him another. He groaned. “How much of this is there?”
“Shelves. Matthew liked his pictures.”
“I can’t say I feel the same.”
“Yes, but you don’t enjoy much.”
Vikram’s head came up sharply. His eyes looked huge, dark and liquid, and Gil felt like a shit. It was the kind of dig he’d been used to making when things were different. “Sorry. Look, you don’t have to like pictures. You don’t have to like anything. All I meant was, uh.” He stalled on that.
