They were very quiet all the way back to Ben’s cottage in increasingly heavy snow. And it wasn’t a comfortable silence of two old friends thinking their own thoughts.
Despite the four-wheel drive of the Merc, Ben only just made it up the track that led to the old house. He only roused to speak when he pulled into the yard. “Tea?”
Nikolas didn’t want to reply and, anyway, saying, “Fuck you,” seemed to take more effort than just climbing out of the car and crunching into the little cottage with Ben.
The place was freezing. Nikolas pulled his cashmere overcoat tighter around his body.
“Damn it, the range has gone out again. Take a seat. I’ll get it going in a minute.”
Nikolas sank wearily onto one of the upright chairs. “Tuesday?”
Ben flashed him a glance. “It’s Sarah’s birthday. She’s having a party.”
“Uh-huh. She seemed very taken with you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. There.” He moved the kettle onto the re-lit stove and then hesitated, apparently unsure what to do.
For the first time, Nikolas noticed that the place was different. It was clean. Dilapidated as it was, it had obviously been scrubbed from ceiling to floor. Clean squalor. Score one for the British army. He debated commenting on the purity of it, but the chill in the room didn’t only come from the lack of heating.
“Are we going to sit in the dark?”
Ben jumped a little as if he’d been in deep thought about something. He glanced at the window, the yard now obscured by heavily falling snow. “The electricity cost too much to have reconnected. Sorry.” He rummaged about and found a candle, which he stuck on the table alongside Nikolas.
There was no fresh milk for the tea, and Ben got tired of waiting for the kettle to boil, so Nikolas got a lukewarm slop in a tin mug with the bag still in.
Staring at this offering, he murmured wearily, “I think I’ll go.”
Ben stepped in his way.
“Come with me on Tuesday. I know Sarah won’t mind an old friend being there. You’ll like her, Nik. She’s been so kind to me…they all have. Food and…stuff. Please, you said we’d still be friends.”
Nikolas regarded Ben for a moment. He tried to conjure some remnant of the man he was, his essential strength, which never failed him. All he could come up with was, “You selfish fuck.”
He pushed past Ben and stalked out into the snow, holding out his hand for the keys, which Ben, his eyes wide with dismay, handed over.
Ben stayed in the open doorway, watching, as Nikolas began to manoeuvre in the yard. When the tyres spun and then stuck, Ben slipped and slid over. “Let me try.”
“Fuck off, I know how to drive in snow.” Nikolas tried again but only succeeded in getting more embedded in the snowdrift.
“I’ll get some sacking.” Ben disappeared and returned with some pine logs and an old piece of carpet. Nikolas swore, Ben heaved. The car remained exactly where it was.
Nikolas thumped the wheel in frustration. “I’ll walk.”
Ben put his hand on the car door, preventing Nikolas from getting out. “Now you’re just being dumb. You’ll have to stay, and you can call out a tow truck in the morning if it’s still snowing.”
Nikolas took a deep breath and dug out his phone. He rang Squeezy. He was still in London. He dialled his breakdown service. They were overwhelmed with callers all over the region caught by the sudden, heavy fall. They anticipated being with him in four hours. He told them to make it sooner or he’d sack them. By this time, Ben was shivering, standing miserably outside the car, still watching him.
“You don’t want to stay.”
“What do you fucking think? Good fucking guess!”
“Don’t swear, Nik, it—”
“Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck fucking off! Get out of the way!” He shoved his door open and slammed into the house, shaking the snow off his coat like visible darts of fury. He jogged up the stairs and inspected the bedroom.
There was an armchair. It would do. He flung himself into it then staggered back to his feet with an uncharacteristic cry of alarm and disgust. Ben pounded up the stairs, saw what he was staring at and mumbled something, probably an apology, but Nikolas wasn’t in the mood to hear one of those for any reason whatsoever. He pointed, trying to create saliva. “I have just sat on a dead cat.”
Ben wrinkled his nose. “Two actually. I found them up the chimney when I was cleaning. See? They’re all tangled with the ribbon they were probably chasing. It’s just so…sad. Sorry.”
“And you have decided to start a collection?”
“Oh, no. I wanted to show them to—” He stopped abruptly, and Nikolas felt his righteous anger drain away just a little. Ben had saved this pathetic bundle of fragile bones and fur to show him, because that’s just the way they were together.
The way they used to be.
§§§
An hour later, Nikolas had recovered from his small meltdown enough to accept a place by the restored range fire and take another mug of tea, this one at least boiled properly. Still no milk though.
Their position, side by side, the faint light from the flames and the intense cold in the room, stirred memories. Nikolas felt like glancing outside to check on the fog. Ben, it seemed, was thinking along similar lines for he suddenly said softly, “I think it was God calling to me. In that hut when I heard someone asking where I was. I think it was God.”
Nikolas privately thought this was about as likely as Ben hearing that from his thoughts now—because that is what he had been thinking: Ben, where are you…?
“Ben?”
Ben glanced up.
“I will leave as soon as it is light and I can get someone to tow me out. Could you please not mention the god word to me at all while I am stuck here? Please? As a personal favour to me?”
“Don’t be like—”
“I will be any fucking way I like. You used to call me your god once. Have you conveniently forgotten that? Now it appears I am the old deity no longer worshipped. What shall I do, hmm? Pack up my fake credentials and slink away to some distant mountain, a fading idol no longer loved?”
He could barely see Ben’s face in the gloom, which was just as well he reckoned, as it meant Ben couldn’t see him either. He heard Ben swallow.
“Do not say you are sorry. Say anything else, but do not tell me how sorry you are again.”
Ben didn’t. Instead, he took Nikolas’s hand in his, and however much Nikolas wanted to snatch his away, he actually couldn’t. When push came to shove, he was weak, and he craved the touch, even though he knew there was no real intimacy in the re-joining of their flesh.
“You still are everything to me, Nik—brother, friend, my whole life—why can’t that be enough without the sex?”
Nikolas did jerk his hand away then. “That is what you think this is? That I am missing having sex with you? My God, you are un-fucking-believable.” He shot to his feet, leant over a clearly very startled Ben, paced away, afraid of what he might do, then came back, leaning right into Ben’s face. “I told you—I told you, Ben! I said it was your heart that I loved best. That you were my shield against the world, the thing I held in my head most precious, and that you are the only one who keeps it all at bay, and you tell me this now? That I’m thinking only about sex!” The words poured from him like cathartic vomit, but he welcomed their release, for what was there without them? There was violence, and he felt its siren call like pressure behind his eyes, a killing rage that was always close to the surface despite how hard he fought to be as other men. But he’d never felt it for Ben Rider before. He’d never wanted to hurt Ben. He did now and it terrified him.
He made to go toward the door, blindly, his eyes betraying him. He felt Ben seize his arm, tried to fight him off, but Ben pinned him against a wall, hissing in his ear, “You’re a bit stronger now, but not as strong as I am. You never have been. Don’t fight me. You won’t win.”
Nikolas tried anyway, but it was a battl
e lost before he’d begun. Ben began to rock him in his arms, his hold crushing. “We can still have all that. That’s exactly what I just said. We can be everything to each other still. Twins. Like real brothers. Why can’t you just accept that? Please.”
And then Nikolas had the strength to steady his voice, and he turned to the warm stubble of Ben’s face and used the desire to hurt. “Because I would then have to find another to give me the rest.”
Ben reared back. “What?”
Nikolas shook himself out a little, readjusting his hair, his coat. “How long would our friendship last then, Ben? Our brotherly love. Tell me that.”
“You’re making this up. You’re trying to mess with my head like you always do. You—”
“What? I what, Ben? You think I’ll remain celibate for the rest of my life?”
“You’re saying that to derail me, I know you are. You didn’t have sex before you met me so…you’re laughing? You laugh at me?”
Nikolas pushed past him and retook his seat by the fire. He was shaking and knew it wasn’t from the cold, but he wanted to give Ben the impression that it was. “Where on earth did you get that idea from?”
“You told me! You said you never slept with Philipa!”
“Good God, Ben, did you seriously take that to mean that I was celibate?”
Ben sat heavily in the chair opposite him. “You had…lovers…while you were married to her?”
“Well, lovers is a bit nineteenth century. I’m not sure they would describe themselves as such, no.”
“When you met me?”
Nikolas shrugged and knew the ambiguity of this would drive Ben insane. “I’m only surprised you’ve never asked me before.”
Ben licked his lips, a movement that weakened Nikolas’s resolve a little, but he damped down the insidious spark of desire and added, “So, if you can accept that I’ll find someone else, then sure, I guess we can still be friends. Good friends even. After all, you know a great deal about me that I would not wish to become more common knowledge.”
Ben ignored this provocative sidetrack, as Nikolas suspected and hoped he might, focusing on the thing that clearly, and thankfully, engaged him more. “You’d find another man and let him—?”
“No.” Nikolas toyed with a tiny thread on the sleeve of his cuff. “I was thinking I might give marriage another go—but genuinely this time.”
“A woman? Get married?”
“I think I’ve had my fill of men. I’ve…seen the light.”
“Don’t do this.”
“Don’t do what, Ben? I’m doing exactly what you want! Are you coming back into my life? No. So, what? You decide you don’t want the family I created for us? Well, fuck you, I’ll go and find my own family. I’ll have my own children, with a wife.”
“Children?” This was said without the emphasis of his previous disbelief but in a whisper so faint it seemed to exhaust Ben after uttering the word.
Nikolas leant in close once more and breathed equally softly, “I had a son. I had a daughter. Now it seems I don’t have either.”
“Oh, God. Oh, God.” Ben sank his head into his hands. “I didn’t mean any of this.”
“No? Well, tough shit, as you would say, it’s what you’ve got. Now, does this fucking pathetic shack of yours have a bed anywhere that I can use?”
Ben didn’t reply, so Nikolas dragged the sleeping mat as close to the fire as he could get it and lay down, his back to Ben and his coat pulled up over his head.
Another round to him.
Possibly.
It was hard to tell who won a skirmish when you left the battlefield eviscerated.
§§§
Nikolas’s body betrayed him. Not in the way he preferred, but by falling asleep, which he’d not intended to do, wanting to stay awake fuelled on his righteous anger. When he woke, every bone in his still too-thin body aching from the inadequate sleeping mat’s protection from the stone flags, he realised that Ben was asleep too. Curled behind him in fact. Sure, it was the only sleeping mat and the only fire, but still. It seemed a little odd to Nikolas. Perhaps Ben was taking his brotherly love to mean how men lived in the army: cheek to jowl; few physical inhibitions; pragmatic.
He rolled onto his back, suppressing a wince and discovered Ben wasn’t actually asleep when a soft, disembodied voice whispered, “Are you awake?”
“Not if you’re going to say I’m sorry again.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Good, then I’m awake.”
“I’ve been thinking.”
“That makes two of us.”
“You’ve been asleep.”
“Ack, I can still think.”
“I don’t want you to see anyone else. That’s what I’ve been thinking, and I know that’s the most selfish thing I’ve ever said in my life.”
“No, Ben, actually it’s not. Telling me that you’re doing this for me still wins that prize.”
There was silence for a while after this, and Nikolas cursed his loose tongue for a moment. Even he was susceptible to close proximity chats with Ben Rider in the middle of the night—confessions being made which he knew only too well the enemy would seize upon and use against him. His mother used to do that to him. When he’d eventually broken and begged her to love him, to notice him, to fucking feed him occasionally, she’d remember every word and use them against him the next time he fought her—you said you loved me; you said you’d be good; you said, you said…
“Nik…” And there it was, the siren call that would weaken him enough to break down, to admit what he was thinking for once in his life instead of continuing to say the empty things that kept him safe. He’d been vulnerable to Ben Rider’s summoning for a dozen years now and guessed this was not the best of times to try a small bid for freedom.
“What?”
“Do you remember when we lay under the stars in Denmark?”
“No.”
“Yeah, you do. You said you sensed nothing. Well, I was thinking…I mean, when you died…and you did die, Nik. You had no pulse when I brought you into the medical centre. You died, but now here you are, so where did you go? This thing you have inside you…this incredible life force and power and…whatever it is that draws people to you and keeps them in your—” Ben trailed off with an expression on his face Nikolas hadn’t seen on those familiar features before—one of self-disgust. Ben Rider had just realised he was something he despised in other men—that he was weak and hypocritical. But Nikolas was weaker. When it came down to it, he suspected he’d always loved Ben Rider more than Ben loved him.
With a sigh, he mumbled, “Go on. I’m listening.”
Ben hiccupped a sigh too. “Where did it go? That’s what I can’t stop thinking. There’s no way you could just stop existing but then exist again unless you went somewhere else for a while. Bloody hell, don’t you feel the intensity of life? How can we just be nothing the instant the heart stops? Can that really be all there is to us?”
“And how does denying the force we have achieve anything? I told you once that we burn hotter than the sun. What good is there to life on this planet if the sun decided not to burn? Tell me that.”
“Because this is the first time we’ve talked about these things, Nik. In all these years. Don’t you see it? We’re so consumed with ourselves, our bodies, our passion that we don’t think of the bigger things. The more important things. We’ve never talked about what we believe, where we’re going, what we’re here for, have we?”
Nikolas couldn’t deny this accusation. He could have added that he had absolutely no desire to do so now. His formative life had been unusually moulded by the here and now. It was a little redundant worrying over esoteric issues when the rat you’d been trying to catch and eat had escaped your numb, blister-ravished fingers. Catch the rat and then plan for the next one. He’d been applying this principle to life ever since, with rats of varying shapes and sizes and power of bites. The startling thought came to Nikolas then that maybe Ben was r
ight. But this completely novel occurrence distracted him enough not to voice that particular thought and it was lost to the gloomier concerns of the night when Ben continued hesitantly, “I was thinking that maybe we could make a pact. That we’d both…not see other people. Ever.”
Nikolas turned his head. “You’re thinking of seeing someone else?”
“No! Of course not. Not thinking about it really. But—it’s sort of expected…in the church…marriage and—”
“I told you not to mention God!”
“I didn’t! I said church!”
“It’s the same thing.”
“No it’s not.”
“If I said Downing Street to you, what do you immediately think?”
Ben snorted. “Of your face every time you checked your phone and saw it was the PM.”
Nikolas couldn’t help his faint smile.
Then Ben blurted out, “Please don’t…”
“What, Ben? Move on?”
Ben nodded.
Nikolas sighed and very gently eased Ben’s head down onto his chest. It wasn’t for Ben’s benefit he did it so cautiously. He was waiting to see if his heart would finally break. It didn’t. It kept on its powerful, life-demanding beat as it had done through all the other terrible moments of his existence. Who knew stroking through Ben Rider’s hair now would be one of the very worst?
“What does it all mean?”
Nikolas brought his thoughts back into the room and the whispered question. “What does what mean?”
“There has to be some meaning to it all. You died, Nikolas. You died! You left me! I carried your dead body into that hospital and then you came back! What does it all mean?”
Nikolas cupped his cheek. “I don’t know, min skat. I don’t know.” He risked a quick glance at Ben’s troubled face and added, “I have told you before—you are the only thing in my whole life that has ever made sense to me.”
Ben’s gaze held an unbreakable certainty as he said, “And I will be there at the end of these days, Nikolas. For you. We will be together in the life that comes after this one, if we do as God wants us to do now. I asked for a sign, and I was given one. Do you think I would do any of this lightly if I wasn’t sure? After what we have been to each other? After what you have been to me? You have to promise me this. You have to promise me you won’t find someone else—so that I can do this. For both of us. I will carry us into the light that is beyond our horizon now just as I carried you across the ice.”
John Wiltshire - [More Heat Than the Sun 07] Page 22
