Stockholm Syndrome [01] - Stockholm Syndrome (53 page)

"Unbelievable. You do actually like the Clash, then?"

"I was ten years behind the rest of the country. In the eighties when all the boys had Princess Di hair, I was still clinging on to punk."

"I'm gonna piss, stop it." He pulls Lindsay's arms tight around his waist so he doesn't giggle himself right off onto the floor.

"Your turn."

It's a simple enough concept, older than the Bible – a eye for an eye, right? So they take turns
talking
, for hours and hours, about unimportant things and things that matter, stuff that doesn't make much sense, old scraps of memories and half-arsed ideas for the future.

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"You're giving me a dead leg," Lindsay says. "You can't sit on me all the time. You're not a cat." Pip can purr like one, though, so he does, rumbling and quiet and watching Lindsay through his eyelashes to look for the moment he cracks and can't hold back his smile any more. It's a good effort, but then Pip starts nuzzling against his neck, up to his ear and all down his jawline, purring and rubbing his face against Lindsay's cheek until he feels the tremors of laughter vibrating through the stubble under his chin.

"I'm pretty good, though."

"Yeah. Good kitten." He starts stroking Pip's hair, from the top of his head right down to the newly-trimmed ends, slow and firm. Pip wriggles against him, trying to ask for more without actually asking, because he knows his voice is going to have that embarrassing desperate little squeak in it, like he's regressed to fourteen. "Aren't you gonna complain about my big clumsy hand squashing your hair flat?"

"Don't stop it. Ever."

"Ever?"

"
Ever
. I don't wanna move ever again."

"What about food?"

"Plenty of protein right here, ain't there?"

That makes him laugh again, and tug gently on Pip's hair. "Don't be disgusting. I mean it, you're killing my leg. Get up."

"But we're
bonding
. You're actually
talking
to me. It'll break the spell."

"It'll break my
back
," Lindsay mutters, standing up and carrying Pip awkwardly like a sack of coal. He dumps him down on the sofa and ends up on top of him when Pip grabs his hand and pulls.

"Whoops."

"Why can't you behave?" As soon as he's said it he looks troubled, like he thinks it's the wrong thing to say, like he wants to take it back. He looks down 425

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at his own hands and sighs a bit. Pip knows what he's thinking. He's good at knowing what Lindsay's thinking, even if Lindsay believes he's a dimwit who wouldn't know empathy if it stripped him naked and sucked his cock – Lindsay's thinking something melodramatic and emo like
How can I tell him what to do,
after what he's done?
There's an answer to this somewhere, but he's still working on excavating it and polishing it, so he doesn't answer at all but just slips back into where the conversation was before Lindsay called him a kitten and stroked his hair.

"Tell me something else I don't know about you."

They shuffle around on the cushions trying to get comfortable while Lindsay thinks of something to say. They're not close enough, even when they end up holding hands like teenagers. Lindsay's sitting cross-legged in the middle of the sofa and Pip sideways at one end, leaning against the arm with his legs slung over Lindsay's lap. He strokes the back of Lindsay's hands gently, just waiting.

"I've still got a Paddington," Lindsay says, very quickly – like ripping off a plaster so it hurts less. "Well, Mum's still got it. I'm mean about your monkey, but my mum's still got my Paddington."

"Why ain't you got him here?"

"Mum adopted it, when I moved out for university. It lives on her dressing table now. Guarding her hairbrushes and perfume bottles, this dirty threadbare old toy from when I was five."

"Don't say
it
."

"It's a toy bear."

"Paddington's a he."

"Alright, then.
He
stays with my mum. Because..." He trails off, almost laughing again. "This is stupid. Let's talk about something else."

"No, I wanna talk about your bear."

"We just did. Tell me something I don't know about
you
."

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"Alright." He kisses the back of Lindsay's fingers and holds his hands there against his mouth, searching for something good to say. It's much more difficult for him. He's told Lindsay everything already. "Oh, yeah, alright. You know I said I never kissed a girl before, when we were fighting once? You remember, about that girl off holiday, and Ellie?"

"Vaguely." There's a movement in his jaw where he's clenching his teeth, so obviously there's nothing vague about the memory at all. Pip kisses his knuckles again.

"I mean, it was
kind
of true, cos I never kissed a girl and
liked
it. But this one year I had to, in a school play."

"What play?"

"Grease."

Lindsay's right eyebrow raises, very slowly, and then he's got his head back against the top of the cushion and he's
laughing
like Pip hasn't heard in a long time. He wants to cry, suddenly. He prods Lindsay in the stomach with his knee to snap them both out of it.

"Yeah, I don't know what you think's so funny. I was
good
!"

"Sounds horrific."

"I was Danny. Olly was Kenickie. All the other boy characters were girls with their hair scraped back, cos boys who went to drama club got their heads kicked in. Olly was alright cos his big brother was tough, nobody ever picked on him, but-" He starts counting off on his fingers. "One, I fight like a fucking little girl. All flappy hands and hair pulling, ain't no good against skinheads. They like that, they're too piss-scared to pick on anybody really unless they know they're gonna win. Two, you join drama club you might as well just go right up to them and make a your mama joke and get it over with, cos you're gonna get it sooner or later anyway. Three, it was Year Ten, so I was going through this goth phase, yeah? They kicked me in for wearing make-up and nailpaint anyway, but I grew my hair all first term and dyed it black over Christmas, so when I got back in school first thing they did was flush my head.

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You ever had your head flushed? Ain't that funny, really. Drowning in teenage piss? No thanks. Last thing you ever see is some twat's graffiti on the bog wall in biro saying Philip sucks dicks for money and my phone number. But then my mum and dad won the lottery after Easter,
that
fucking shut 'em all up." School feels so far away, here in the house on the cliff by the sea holding hands with Lindsay, but the memories jab like little needles when he lets them, and now he feels weird.

"I'm always fucking complaining," he goes on, quiet. "Don't mean it.

Sounds like my whole life's just been one big fistfight, don't it? It's been alright, sometimes. I was thinking. When you weren't talking to me. I thought, what if I just
went
? Would that help? Thought you might be glad, only then I remembered what I'd go back to if I ran off to London, and even when you hate me and want me dead I'd still rather be here."

"I don't want you dead, sweetheart." There's a strange emphasis on it. He sounds miserable again.

"But you hate me."

"Sometimes."

"Yeah. I can work with 'sometimes', cos that means you sometimes like me too. My mum and dad hate me all the time, only they
try
to like me sometimes and it don't work, so all the nice bits are fakes. Holidays and stuff.

Christmases when I was little and my dad helped me build Lego castles, or when my mum put me in the seat in the trolley in Asda and gave me sweets to keep me quiet while she did the shopping. It weren't all bad, but they always meant the bad bits more than they meant the good bits. You mean it when you hate me, but you mean it when you love me too. It balances. It never balanced before."

"You think too much."

Pip laughs a bit, then. "You're always telling me I don't think
enough
."

"You've changed."

"Well. Yeah. I'm right, though."

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"Maybe."

Shifting position is a bad idea, because lying down and getting comfy always makes him pass right out. He's drowsy, slipping into that phase of sleep where you can't move or open your eyes but you still know what's going on. He feels Lindsay's hand under his head, moving it gently off his leg, and hears the faraway noises of him padding around the room, then feels the shift of the cushions and Lindsay's hand under his head again, bringing it back to its old place against his thigh, and then fingers threading through his hair – not pulling, just
there
. The telly sounds very far away. It's something French. He's getting much better at reading and writing in French, when he's got a dictionary and a lot of time to translate Aurelie's letters, but he's hopeless at knowing what the sounds mean when people say them so he doesn't even try. He can't even move, can't even open his eyes to see if Lindsay's got the subtitles on for once. He just dozes and wakes, dozes and wakes, in and out of sleep like ripples, and Lindsay's fingers are always there against his temple, carefully stroking his hair.

He jerks awake to music, a woman's voice, and half-opens his eyes to watch her because Lindsay's stopped moving his fingers – almost stopped breathing altogether.

"If I didn't know better I'd say you've got a crush on her," Pip says, thick with sleep.

"I kind of do," Lindsay admits guiltily.

"More confessions, Bisexual Boy?"

"Shut up. I don't really. She's just..." He doesn't finish, but Pip kind of understands anyway. He can't take his eyes off her either.

"What's she singing?"

Lindsay doesn't answer for a moment, then he clears his throat carefully and resumes the hairplaying. "I got drunk listening to her," he says. "Alcohol makes you forget time. I woke feeling her kisses on my burning forehead."

"Oh."

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Pip remembers light-hearted arguments he had with his grandad when he was younger, how he said black and white films were so
boring
and pointless and what's the use of having black and white films when you
know
the world's really in colour? Grandad George tried to convince him that black and white was best by showing him Some Like It Hot, waggling his bushy eyebrows at little Pip and waiting for a reaction to Marilyn Monroe's tits that never came because he was too busy dribbling over the costumes. People should have spotted the signs earlier, really.

"Shall we move again?" Pip asks suddenly. He's not sure whether he actually means it, or whether he's just saying it to make Lindsay happy because of his favourite silly black and white French film with the girl in it he's pretending he doesn't fancy. "You were happy in France. I mean, apart from all the fucking whingeing cos your shoulder was sore. What if we just
went
? Started over."

"And do what?" He's playing with Pip's fingers now, slipping his own in between and sliding over his knuckles, down to touch the little tattoo of a crescent moon he got near his thumb just before everything went wrong.

"Fuck all. We're loaded, we don't need to do nothing."

"You couldn't live like that. You'd die of boredom. I know I would."

"Alright." Pip stretches a bit, closes his eyes, thinks. "I'll paint," he says.

"I'll just paint, all day. I'll paint little cobbly streets and the cathedral, market day, the mountains, cows. You, if you hold still long enough and don't make angry faces cos I'm disturbing you and putting you off your writing."

"My writing?"

"Yeah. Cos that's your cover-up, ain't it? That's what they think you do anyway, down there. You can do it for real. Write... I dunno, gay crime capers where there's this gang leader who recruits this gobby little street urchin with shit for brains and accidentally falls in love with him and hates himself for it." Good, he's made Lindsay laugh again. He smiles, still doesn't open his eyes, carries on.

"Or write about jazz, or biographies and stuff. Or, I dunno, school textbooks

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about when you're meant to say who and whom so's I can learn. Write poems. I know you can. I know you
want
to. I'll paint and you can write. We don't have to go on the rob no more, we've got enough money to last forever."

"It was never about the money anyway."

"Why, then?"

He feels a bit of movement, and guesses it's Lindsay shrugging his shoulders. "A rush you don't have to snort or inject."

"Oh." There's this weird feeling of disappointment settling heavily in his stomach, now. He was getting far too deep into his little domestic fantasy.

"You'd get bored."

"As I recall,
you
were the one who got bored of it last time."

"Yeah, but..." He opens his eyes and looks up at Lindsay, right up his nose, and quickly closes them again before he laughs and spoils the moment. "I think I'd quite like being bored for a bit."

***

Bored isn't the right word, really. Things are still too strained to be properly boring. Everything's such an
effort
, but that only makes every tiny little victory even sweeter, every rare time he makes Lindsay smile and every rare time Lindsay's the one to touch him first, even if it's only to be annoying on purpose and ruffle his hair up when he's passing behind Pip's chair.

Back in St. Lizier, days and weeks creep past like snails.

He behaves himself, most of the time. He acts up, some of the time. It's just to see what happens. Lindsay's still being quiet, still not responding, until one day he comes downstairs and hauls Pip up off the sofa by his t-shirt and slaps him hard across the face, because he's left his clothes hurricaned all over the bedroom and hasn't bothered putting them away yet even though he was 431

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asked ten times over the last two days. He's almost forgotten what it feels like.