Stockholm Syndrome [01] - Stockholm Syndrome (41 page)

Lindsay shoves at him, trying to make him get up so he can go and use the hotel phone to try and sort out emergency plane tickets to England, but Valentine just smacks at his hand and pushes him back into the chair, straddling him properly and pinning him there. "Heyyy, happy birthday! What are you now, twenty-five?

Did you get cool stuff? What did you get? Oh no WAY – she got High School Musical tickets, how come I don't get High School Musical tickets for
my
birthday?"

Lindsay mimes gouging out his eyeballs and eating them. Valentine covers his mouth with his hand so Melissa can't hear him laughing.

"We're having a good time, yeah. What are we doing? Uhh... well. We went round the art gallery and stuff, it was pretty cool. No, not EuroDisney. I wanted to but Lindsay's a right boring old fart, he won't take me. Just between you and me, right, I reckon he's scared of rollercoasters. What d'you think?

Yeah. Wait, he
what
? You took Melly and Kate to EuroDisney and you won't take me?"

"They're

children
."

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"So you don't mind going to Disney if you've got children with you?"

"It's

for
children."

"Alright, then, Smelly, any time you wanna go back, you tell your mum and dad to bring you and Katie on a plane over here and we'll meet you and take you, yeah? Cos I wanna go. It'll be wicked, we can wear them Minnie Mouse ears and everything, Lindsay'll be dead embarrassed. Good idea, right? Alright, let's do it. We'll plan later at your party, yeah? Okay. See you later then. Love you too. Yeah, so does Lindsay. Bye! ...You
wanker
!" he adds, when he's pressed the end call button. "You forgot."

"So did you!"

"Yeah, but she ain't
my
goddaughter."

"Kind of is. Step-goddaughter. Almost."

"Only if we get married."

"Oh. Uh. Right. Yeah. So she's not, then. Shit, come on, get up, emergency shopping-trip." He sees the bullet-hole high in the wall when he stands up and adds, a bit sheepishly, "Maybe it's time we got out of here anyway."

vii. Saturday evening. Cheshire.

"This is the worst night of my life," Lindsay says. Ty smiles weakly and gives him another glass of whiskey.

There's too much pink. Everything seems to be
pink
. They've got this beautiful centuries-old manor house and it's been turned into a hideous frilly princess-castle. There are small children running amok. The DJ is working his way methodically through everything that's ever been bad about music, and now Valentine's in the middle of a shrieking gang of girls in sparkly party-dresses showing them how to do that wretched Macarena thing.

"You should've shot him. I told you a hundred times."

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"Don't lecture me on relationships, I thought
you
were getting divorced."

He can see Ellie across the room, statuesque in Versace with a sickrag thrown over her shoulder and a sleeping baby in her arms. She catches his eye and waves, and Lindsay raises his glass to her then downs the lot and she laughs, rolling her eyes like she understands.

"Thought we'd stick it out."

"Like last time and the time before and the time before?"

"What can I say? I'm weak. You
know
the woman could suck a golf ball through a garden hose."

"Heh. Mine too."

"Oh Jesus, keep it to yourself. He kissed my wife hello with that mouth."

Now Danny weaves through the crowd to join them, holding a beer bottle in one hand and a plastic plate in the other, piled high with party food. By the time he's figured out how to work this set-up with only two hands, Ty and Lindsay have nicked most of the sausage rolls and little cocktail bangers.

"Thanks," he snaps bitterly, like nobody's ever done something so awful to him before.

"No, no, thank
you
," Lindsay says, with his mouth full of pastry crumbs.

Danny gives him a dirty glare.

"So when're you coming back for good, then? You lost your nerve for it?"

"Hardly. Just having a break." He remembers what Valentine said, that day of the botched job. What if they could start over, and be
normal
? That's what it's like down in St. Lizier now, carrying on this act of the slightly reclusive writer and his... whatever they think Valentine is.
L'égérie de Monsieur Lebrun7
, Aurelie said once, quite solemnly, and Lindsay refused to translate in case it 7 Mr. Brown's muse

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gave the kid an even bigger head than he already had. "Don't you ever want a break?"

"No," Danny says in a tone of voice more suited to answering a question like, "Don't you ever want a pet llama?" or, "Don't you ever want a sex change?"

"Me neither," Ty says. "You wanna try having three kids and a house this size and a wife who dresses like
that
."

"Yeah, as I recall it's actually her
family's
house?"

"So? I'm paying to keep it running."

"Ain't

you

bored
?" Danny asks, and Lindsay suddenly wants to say
well,
I wasn't until you asked
.

The night stays on a fairly level plane of awfulness for a while. He almost starts to relax into it, which is a mistake. There's
always
room for things to get worse. It doesn't do to forget that. He's not even sure how it happens, exactly. It's something to do with Danny getting drunk enough to proposition Ty's wife, like he does every time the two of them and alcohol are in the same place at the same time for too long, and Ellie laughing him off, telling him no, he should back off for his own sake, she's got some kind of queer Midas touch, just ask Lindsay. Then there's a stricken little voice at Lindsay's ear saying, "What's she mean by that?" and he doesn't know how to answer, except by finishing another whiskey, which appears to be answer enough.

He can hear the kid breathing behind him. Somehow, Lindsay can tell he's brewing an epic tantrum. He can nearly always tell, like a sixth sense, and he turns round and looks him hard in the eye and tries to stop it before it starts. "If you make a scene," he says, very quietly and casually, "I will skin you alive.

Clear?"

Clear enough; Valentine doesn't speak, just walks calmly to the door, and Lindsay follows just close enough to see how he doesn't start running until he's halfway up the massive staircase. Muttering swears and useless threats under his breath, Lindsay goes after him. Parts of the house used to be open to the public, before the family started living here full-time, and they must have kept

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the red no-entry ropes for parties and things; everything past the bend in the stairs is cordoned off and politely marked as 'private', but Valentine pays no attention, just ducks under the rope and disappears.

When Lindsay catches up with him – not as quickly as he could have, because he refuses to cave in to the bratty tantrum and
run
after him – the kid's sitting on a chaise in a hallway with his head down, elbows on his knees and fingers clenched in his hair, dragging it out to stand at every crazy angle. He darts up like a bullet when Lindsay's close enough and shoves at his chest until Lindsay has to grab his wrists and hold him away.

"Do

you

always
share, you three?" he snarls.

"Don't be ridiculous."

"Did you like it?"

"What?"

"Was she good?"

"Christ. I don't know."

"Course you know, you were there, weren't you? Did she make you come?"

"Well,

yes."

"So you liked it?"

"Stop

it."

"How many times did you fuck her?"

"
Stop
it. I don't know. Listen to me, I used to go out with her for a bit but it was ages ago,
years
ago. Nearly two decades ago, we were only eighteen."

"How long did you go out with her for?"

"I don't know. A few months."

"How

many?"

"A

few."

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"But

how many
?"

"I don't know! Four."

"Did you fuck her every day?"

"No."

"Every two days? Three?"

"I don't remember."

"I wanna know how many times you fucked her."

"
I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition
," Lindsay yells in his face.

It's this and Biggus Dickus and the parrot sketch and King Arthur chopping the Black Knight's limbs off, it's all the obvious ones that set the kid off laughing so hard he cries, and he can't think of any other way to break the circle. Incredibly, it kind of works. Valentine stares at him for a second, then bites his lip and almost smiles.

"Nobody does," he mutters. He wrenches his hands away and starts chewing on his thumbnail, avoiding eye contact. Carefully, very slowly, Lindsay slips an arm around his shoulders, and Valentine makes a big shuddering sigh and starts to relax, little by little, leaning into him.

"You have to
stop
throwing tantrums any time you think about, you know. Other people."

"After that tantrum
you
did, though, about that girl yesterday when I ain't never even
kissed
a girl before..."

"I said I was sorry."

"Yeah, right." He sniffs and rubs his nose hard with the palm of his hand, although he's not crying.

Make it funny, Lindsay tells himself. Make it sound ridiculous, like it was. Make him laugh. So he tells the kid about this girl he went to university with, how she had an ex-boyfriend who wouldn't give up on her, how the ex had found them in bed one day when they were skiving off a lecture, how he'd come

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at Lindsay with a flick knife and how Lindsay had leapt out of bed, arse-naked except a johnny, and produced a gun from his sock drawer to point back at him.

"Like really hardcore rock-paper-scissors," he says. "Gun blows away knife. Christ knows how we became friends out of it, but that's what happened.

Ellie didn't speak to either of us for four years. I stopped trying to iron out all my bent bits, they ended up married, you know the rest."

Valentine finally settles on a sort of strangled-sounding, "Oh..." and then thinks for a moment and adds, "Stop calling
me
a nutter. You lot are fucking
warped
."

ix. Sunday night. Paris hotel #2.

The window is open because the evening's so warm, and they're taking it slow because it's their last night in the city. They've seen everything they needed to. This is the only thing left to do. That was Valentine's explanation, anyway, and Lindsay's not going to argue when it leads to something like this, twisted sweat-drenched sheets and slow, slow fucking, enough to keep them hard but not enough to get them off yet.

"You could, you know," Valentine says. Lindsay cracks one eye open, wonders briefly whether it's worth opening the other as well, then changes his mind and goes back to drowsy darkness. His hands are slick with sweat and lube, sticking to Valentine's thighs where he's holding him and directing the gentle rock of his hips. He does this all the time, the kid, he carries on conversations from hours or days ago as if the time between never happened and Lindsay's always thrown a little bit, even worse at a time like this. He winds his mind backwards like a clock, looking for something this could be continuing, but he can't make himself focus on anything much except the heat and Valentine's quiet breathing and the delicious wet friction.

"What?"

"Marry

me."

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Oh. That. He doesn't laugh this time, but it's close. "You're absurd."

"We're allowed. In France
and
England. I mean, they call it
marriage
..."

He shifts a bit on top of Lindsay and takes his hands off him, where they've been resting lightly on his chest. Lindsay knows he's doing that stupid quotation-mark mime with the first two fingers on each hand and he's glad he's got his eyes closed because it always makes him want to snap people's bones. "All condescending. Like they're going 'Oh, them queers, ain't they funny, having their "
marriages
" like they're normal people?' It's still legal, though."

"So? Just because we
can
doesn't mean we should or ever
will
. Don't stop." He pinches Valentine's leg to get him moving again and the kid wriggles a bit but it's not like before. Lindsay opens his eyes. He's too sleepy and comfortable to be really irritated, but he frowns anyway. "What? Come on."

"What if I don't want to?"

"This says you do." He wraps his fingers around Valentine's cock and squeezes gently. The kid makes a little laugh that's more like a gasp and smacks his hand away so he can do it himself, and Lindsay obeys quite willingly, bringing his hands up to rest either side of his head on the pillows like a surrender, because this is interesting. And if the kid's wanking he's going to shut up. Right? Of course, things can't ever be that simple.

"Yeah, but what if I
don't
?" He finds the crumpled tube on the bed beside them, squeezes out half of what's left into his cupped hand, and starts to stroke himself slowly. "What if I ain't comfortable having pre-marital sex?"

"Bit late for that, isn't it?" There's a little tiny spark of annoyance now, but it doesn't flare up properly. Maybe the kid's embarrassed he mentioned it.

That'll be a first. Teasing like this, it's like he's turning it into a game instead, and that makes it okay. Lindsay opens his eyes again at the slick little sounds of the kid's hand moving and stays watching him as he starts to shift a bit under him, trying to get him going again, but Valentine stays completely still. He's stubborn as hell when he gets an idea in him. He's got the devil in his eyes and a smirk on his mouth, and the only movement he makes is that of his hand, sliding up and

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