Stockholm Syndrome [01] - Stockholm Syndrome (32 page)

"See you on the other side, then," Lindsay says, and the kid pulls a face.

"They're shit final words."

"So? Nobody's going to know."

"You could say you love me."

"Oh Christ, not this again."

"You're

such
a bastard. I'm gonna die and it's your fault and you can't even say three little words."

"Oh, that's nice, send me off on a guilt trip two seconds before you shoot me in the head."

"You're a homophobic fucking cunt, really."

"I'm

what
?"

"I don't think I
will
kill you. You can see a shrink in prison. Learn to deal with how you're a great big bender then put it to practice in the communal showers."

"Shoot me. Now."

Valentine starts to reply, but there's the sound of rolling tyres and headlights swoop down over the dingy grey walls.

"Cop car," he says.

"Do it." Lindsay clenches his teeth against a noise of pain when the kid presses the barrel against his temple a bit too hard, then looks at him fuzzily when he moves away again. "What?"

"I

can't."

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"Yes you can."

"I

can't."

"If I say I love you, will you do it then?"

He hesitates, and moves the gun back, and nods his head, once. "I'll do
anything
."

The car pulls up next to them, and Danny sticks his head out the window.

Lindsay forgets how to talk at all. He just looks at him and blinks, wondering if he's bled so much he's hallucinating.

"The fuck's all this, Homo and Juliet? Get in the car, Pipsqueak." He gets out to help drag Lindsay into the back seat. If the bleeding had been stopping before, it makes up for it now by starting up harder than ever, it seems.

Lindsay doesn't even have the energy for that held-back girly scream, he just clenches his teeth and hears himself making strange unreal moaning sounds through his nose. He's leaning against Valentine, he's got his hands over the gash in his side and the kid's pressing against his shoulder. He's going to suffocate on the scent of blood in the air, if he doesn't pass out first.

"How'd you manage to nick a
cop car
?" Valentine asks. Nobody in the entire history of human existence has ever sounded so full of awe about anything as the kid does now.

"Lay down in the road," Ty says, making a wide u-turn in the mostly-empty car park and heading back out the way they came in. "Pretended I was dead, shot him in the face when he got out the car."

"I nutted the other one out," Danny says proudly. He turns round to grin at Lindsay between the seats. They must have wrenched the grill off somehow, or there never was one, and everything looks weird, his unimpeded view out the windscreen. Lights and trees and telegraph poles as they make it onto the road and away, everything's moving too fast, everything feels like it's spinning.

"Did you have to kill him?" he asks, and Ty looks at him in the rear-

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view mirror.

"It's kill or
be
killed, mate, you know how it is."

Valentine just laughs, quiet but slightly hysterical. He spreads his fingers out – his silver-painted fingernails and the orange plastic ring he always wears are all crusted and smeared with blood – and presses his palm harder against Lindsay's shoulder. It still doesn't stop the bleeding, it just hurts like fuck.

"Which way's the hospital?"

"We're not going to the hospital."

"Are you nuts? He got
shot
, he says he's dying, take us to the hospital!"

"No."

"I said take us to the hospital."

Ty calmly reaches back and removes Lindsay's revolver from Valentine's hand without even taking his eyes off the road.

"You pull a gun on me again it'll be the second-to-last thing you ever do, kid."

"What'll be the last?"

"Die."

"It ain't loaded," he lies sullenly. Danny cuffs him round the head anyway, then apologises when Lindsay coughs in a way that's got nothing to do with having to clear his throat and everything to do with reminding him who's in charge, even when he's curled and twisted and cramped on the back seat, streaming blood and pulsing with pain and only clinging on to consciousness by the thinnest fraying thread.

"I'm getting blood on your top," he manages to say.

The words feel heavy, like paperweights, and he's not sure they sound the way they're supposed to, but the kid seems to understand because he says,

"It's alright, it's red anyway," and touches the corner of Lindsay's mouth like he's trying to make him smile. He does, a bit.

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"Use cold water, and shampoo."

"What? I ain't wasting my shampoo on my
clothes
, you freak."

Lindsay laughs at that, even though it hurts, and calls the kid an idiot, and fades into sleep like a ghost.

***

There'd been a day that spring where April pretended to be July. The sun was blazing and the sea purred against the pebbles, and nobody paid attention any more. Rockstar weddings and philandering politicians and robberies and murders and war and global warming and gossip screamed out all the papers. It's funny how quickly hot news is old news.

They walked on the pier, dodged a snarling pitbull some stupid chav had let off its lead, talked in meandering scraps of sentences that managed to make sense anyway. Valentine was eating chips and curry from a polystyrene tray, with a little wooden fork all stained a nasty sort of neon mustard colour, and it only took him about forty seconds from leaving the chip stand to drop some down his top.

"Oh

fuck
," he said. "I've only had this a week, you got a tissue or something?"

Lindsay checked his pockets and offered their only tissue-like contents, an old till receipt. "How old are you? You want a bib."

"Aww, you know, if you wanna look after something so bad we can always adopt."

"Christ, I can't think of anything worse."

"Yeah, me neither. I'm glad we had this little chat. You got any coppers?

I wanna play on the two pee slider."

Lindsay dug a handful of change out so Valentine could pick out the

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coppers. He nicked all the pound coins as well and pocketed them, with a shameless cheeky grin Lindsay let slide, at least until later. He leaned against the arcade wall, waiting for the kid to play himself broke, and on a whim he got a twenty pence coin back out his pocket and put it in the machine next to him, the sort that's a big bubble like a fish tank with a handle to turn at the bottom and a little metal prize chute.

"Got you something," he said when Valentine came back over empty-handed, having lost all his money and left his chip tray on top of the machine.

The kid lit up like a Halloween pumpkin.

"Present?"

"Yeah.

Here."

Valentine just stared at it like it was Fabergé. "What is it?"

"Well, I don't know, do I? That's the point. It's a stupid plastic egg. Like Kinder Surprise. Probably a spinning top or a toy soldier or something crap like that."

"No it ain't like a Kinder egg. No chocolate."

"You can have a disgusting Nutella sandwich when we get home, then.

Are you going to take this or am I gonna bounce it off your head? I feel like a tit.

Take the damn egg." Then: "Oh fuck," he added weakly, when Valentine took the egg, cracked the two halves apart, held up a horrible plastic ring in the sort of made-in-Taiwan orange you don't find occurring in nature, and burst out laughing so loudly that people around them looked over to see what they were missing out on.

"You old romantic."

"Okay, shut up. Give me that back."

"No way. You bought me a
ring
, Lindsay."

"That's not what I meant."

"You're doing it all wrong, you're meant to be down on one knee."

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"I'm going to hurt you."

"This is brilliant."

"Throw it away. Get rid of it, I'll buy you something better. We'll go to Topshop."

"No chance. You ain't getting rid of me now, not ever. Til death us do part, right?"

He rammed it on – it was for children, really, it only fit his little finger – then leapt on Lindsay and kissed him soundly. Lindsay tried to push him away but he clung on, he was kissing him and he tasted disgustingly of curry sauce and it was all clumsy and rubbish because he couldn't stop laughing.

Somebody jeered and somebody wolf-whistled, and Lindsay reached up to wrench the kid's arms from around his neck and drag him off the pier by the hand, back to the car, and back home.

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Half-asleep and fighting up towards consciousness like a drowning man trying to swim for light, he's aware of pain as something foggy and far away –

like the
concept
of pain, instead of pain itself. That comes later, sweating and thrashing with fever when his deepest wound gets infected. He knows Valentine's there, he can sense his presence even when the kid's quiet – although when is he
ever
fucking quiet?

"We need to go to the hospital," he keeps saying. "Make something up.

Hunting, clay pigeon shooting, I dunno. I'll take the rap, I'll say
I
shot him, I don't care. Just get him to a fucking hospital, alright?"

"I don't know why you think you know him better than I do just because you suck his dick and I don't," Ty snaps. Lindsay's never heard him sound so worried before.

He's lost all concept of time. Sometimes it feels like day follows night so quickly he'd half-expect to see somebody flicking the light switch on and off, if he could only move his head far enough to look, and sometimes the night won't go away – and then, one morning, his fever breaks as suddenly as a 263

C H A P T E R 2 3

shattering mirror, and he can see and think and focus again. Unfortunately, this means he can feel the thudding pain in his shoulder and side as well. He tries to make some sort of comprehensible noise, not sure whether his mouth still remembers how to talk until it's saying a brittle, croaky, "
Fuck.
"

Valentine jolts awake, raising his head from where he's folded his arms on top of the mattress to stare at Lindsay, and then a slow, hopeful smile creeps onto his face. "You lazy fucker. Talk about a lie-in."

"Nngh." He doesn't want to ask anything so clichéd as 'where am I?' but he has to. "The farm?"

"Yeah. I kept saying we should take you to hospital, but-"

"No. No, we know doctors."

"Yeah." He sits up a bit, drags his chair closer to the bed, and hesitates for a second with his hand near Lindsay's face before he goes for it and touches his cheek gently. "You feeling alright?"

"Are you kidding? I feel like I died six weeks ago but I'm too stubborn to actually stop breathing."

He laughs a bit at that, but he sounds like he's going to cry. "Yeah, you look a right fucking state. Still, least almost-dying's made you lose a bit of podge, eh?"

Two minutes after resurrection and Lindsay already wants to throttle him.

Nice for things to be back to normal.

That said, it's not long before he's wishing himself unconscious again.

The stitches are crooked, even worse where the infection was, where they had to pick the seam apart and stitch him back up – and they
itch
, it's making him crazy.

The itch is worse than the pain sometimes. He bites his tongue and lips raw trying to control himself, trying not to scratch. Valentine tries to lend him a pair of woolly mittens to wear like a baby so he doesn't have a go at himself in his sleep, but he point-blank refuses. He thinks he can handle it, he thinks it's just a

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matter of concentration and willpower and as long as he talks himself up to it there's
nothing
he can't deal with, but he's never been tested like this and he can't help himself. He doesn't even realise he's doing it sometimes, until there's blood smeared under his fingernails and the pain suddenly breaks its localised little barriers and hammers straight into his brain.

"You'll infect it again," Valentine says quietly. He seems to have taken on the job of nursemaid, which Lindsay is kind of glad about in a way, because it means he'll never again have to endure the horror of waking up to find his best mate's nan standing there with a bedpan and an expectant, determined look.

"I'm

going

out of my mind
!" Lindsay yells at him. The house is still, everybody must be out, so he can shout as much as he wants. "Get me something, I don't care, anything, get me
anything
, I can't stand it."

Valentine doesn't speak for a while, just carries on cleaning and re-dressing the ragged sticky cut at the side of his stomach. "Anadin? Or ibuprofen, there's some of that round the place somewhere..."

"You

know
that's not what I mean." The pain in his shoulder is like being battered with a sledgehammer. He knows he's had a lucky escape, he
knows
that, he knows if the bullet hit just a fraction away from where it did it would have ripped right through his lung or his heart or his jugular or would have splintered his bones beyond repair instead of just leaving him trussed up here stuck full of long steel pins like a fucking shish kebab – but knowing it doesn't help, it doesn't make him feel any better or any more charitable towards the people who are trying to help. He's tired and weak and angry and frustrated and
bored
and in constant pain and if the offer of Anadin is a joke then it's in fucking poor taste.

He's got Tom Waits on his iPod later, when Valentine opens the door and slips into the room bringing in with him the faint chatter of voices from everybody else out in the other rooms. He changes it quickly to some old Harry James. It's so petty and stupid but he does it anyway; he feels hateful and wants to ignore Valentine until he's had his fill of music he knows the kid can't stand.