Stockholm Syndrome 3 - No Beginning, No End (22 page)

"I think you can stop now," Valentine says. He still sounds as calm as Lindsay felt when he realised what was happening, but his eyes are wide and frightened in the dim light. Lindsay drops the man to the slimy cold concrete and wipes his fingers on his trousers where the ends are slick with blood. London's never seemed this quiet before. Neither of them speaks for what feels like hours.

"A knife?" Lindsay finally says, sounding dull and stupid. "Did he stab you?"

"No. He dropped it, he was trying to keep me quiet, I bit a chunk out his finger and he dropped it. He was holding it on my throat, though." He's hugging himself, cupping his elbows in the opposite hands, standing there all pigeon-toed and awkward like he's got no idea what's supposed to happen from here. "Did you kill him?"

"I don't know."

"I hope so," Valentine says viciously after another hesitation. He crouches down beside the mugger, turns him over onto his back, and swears quietly. Lindsay's not looking, he's got his eyes fixed on the wall.

"Well?"

 

"His pulse is going. But... Lindsay, he ain't hardly got a
face
no more."

 

Lindsay closes his hand around the phone in his pocket. It's cool in his palm, which is suddenly sticky with sweat. "I should call the police." "Don't," Valentine says immediately. "Let's just go." "Are you crazy? There'll be cameras everywhere on the main road, you bit him, I smashed his face in, there'll be DNA everywhere..."

"Don't call
me
crazy, you're the one with the anger management issues. He had a knife, anyway. He said give him my phone and money or I'm dead, he had his knife on my neck. Ain't it self-defence?"

"Just shut up a minute," Lindsay mutters, leaning against the freezing brick wall and rubbing his eyes with the fingers that don't have blood on them. "Just let me think." Easy enough to
say
that, but his mind is blank like new paper. All he can see is Valentine's scared face, how wide his eyes just were and the dark smear of blood on his mouth.

"You smashed him in pretty good considering it was spontaneous self-defence," Valentine says quietly. "I don't think his pulse is going no more."

"I told you to shut up." Then: "What are you doing?" when

Valentine picks the man's hand up by the wrist. "If you're trying to steal his watch I can just
buy
you one." "Ha, ha, ha. I ain't stealing nothing. It's just..."

Lindsay sees the silver shine of the knife blade when Valentine picks it up, using the other man's hand like one of those toy-grabbing claws on a pier arcade.

"Philip. What are you-"

 

"If he stabbed me
then
you smashed his face in when he come at you, that's probably alright, ain't it?"

"Put that knife down. Now."
"Better this than you get sent down. You know I'm right."

He doesn't know anything any more. The world is slipping out of his grasp again and a tiny plaintive little voice in his head says
I want another go. Today doesn't count. I should get another go.

"It's okay," Valentine murmurs like it's a dream. "I ain't gone in my kidneys or nothing."

"You idiot," Lindsay says desperately. Somewhere, fireworks start going off and he has to shout to make the operator hear him when he dials 999.

"It's only a flesh wound..." But Valentine sounds scared and his shirt is hot and soaking.
16.
This has to end. No more hospitals.

Lindsay watches them through the little window in the door, Olly's fingers curled against Valentine's cheek, Valentine's hand on top of Olly's. They're talking, but he can't hear the words. At least Olly's stopped crying now. He ran past Lindsay in the corridor without even seeing him, red raw eyes and the most stricken expression Lindsay's ever seen. It's so hard to hate him, suddenly. He doesn't even feel jealous of the way they're touching and talking – though as things are right now, he can't feel much of anything at all. Tired, sick, scared, but it all seems far away like
he's
the one on the painkilling drugs.

There's a noise behind him, rapid footsteps up the corridor. He turns round and sags against the wall, he can't even find the energy to look up and greet them until they're right in front of him and Valentine's mum is flinging her arms around him, pale and shaking and fumbling for words.

"If you weren't there..."
"He's fine. He's awake, you can go in."
She's gone in a second, but Phil doesn't follow.

"You can go in as well," Lindsay prompts. Phil just looks at him, then down at his feet, shuffling awkwardly against the faux-marble floor, and in a wave of horrified nausea Lindsay can sense it rising up inside him, an apology or explanation or something awful and heartfelt, he can almost
see
it like a balloon that was ready to burst two breaths ago. "He'll be glad you came," he tries again, searching desperately for something, anything, to make him go away.

"Does he just go
looking
for trouble or what?"

"We got mugged, it could've happened to anyone." There's a short row of hard plastic chairs against the wall and Lindsay goes to sit down, resting his elbows on his knees and raking his fingers through his hair, but that hurts so he stops. He ran the water in the gents' until it scalded, and washed the man's blood off his hands with such force his skin is still tender and red a hour later. After a moment Phil takes the seat next to him and they sit in silence. "Aren't you going in?" Lindsay says after a while, just to shatter this agonising stillness, and Phil takes some deep breaths like he's about to jump into a deep cold lake.

"I'm... really glad you're there for him. Cos someone's got to keep him out of trouble."

"Christ," Lindsay says very quietly under his breath. He can hear voices in the room, but they're too indistinct to make out the words. "You would've done the same."

"I would've slaughtered the fucker."
"More or less did. He's alive but only because of machines."

"Good. Hope he can still feel it, the cunt. Hope he chokes on his own throat."

"He's done it before. He's been sent down twice before for knifing people, or trying to. He's on probation." "Fucked that for himself a bit, ain't he?" "Yeah." "You ain't in trouble or nothing?"

"Don't think so. Self-defence against a proven violent psycho. I've still got to talk to the police, we both do, statements or whatever, but they're not pushing too much."

"Probably glad to be rid of him. Bet they secretly love vigilantes. All that fucking red tape and human rights for kiddy fiddlers, must be a right pain in the arse."

"I bet."

More silence. There's a squeak of shoes down the corridor somewhere, but they don't look up and whoever it is goes into another room down the other end.

"I know you hate me," Phil says abruptly, really fast like he needs to spit it out, like it's burning his mouth, "and that's alright, you've got every reason to. But if you weren't there... he's alive when he might've been dead, and that's cos of you. And I know it don't look it sometimes, but that tranny in there... you know, he's my kid, I..." Now it looks like the words taste really bad. "I love him."

"Tell
him
, not me."
"Yeah."

"He does drag, he's not a tranny. Brush up on your gay terminology if you want to try bonding."

"Urgh." Phil sits up straight, then slumps against the back of the chair. "I used to think I done something wrong. He wanted to go fucking bollywood and ballet dancing lessons with Olly and his sisters when they were kids, I wouldn't let him, I made him do football and rugby instead. He used to play with fucking
dolls
, I couldn't stand it. Them big ugly doll heads with hair what little girls put in bunches and stuff. I took it off him but his grandad kept all this shit in his house and he let him play with anything he wanted when he was over if I weren't there, Barbies and ponies and Sylvanian Families and shit. And... them clothes he wore, fucking hell, ain't no wonder he got decked at school all the time turning up with paint on his fucking fingernails and them faggy little silk scarves and girls' t-shirts and Abba boots and everything. But you know what, he never stopped even after he got like seven Year Tens ganging up on him at once kicking his shit in cos they don't like nothing a bit different. He always said fuck everyone else, it's their problem if they can't handle it, I never hurt nobody in my life, it's up to them to change their attitudes about if its alright to go seven on one on the short skinny girly boy who don't know how to fight, ain't up to me to change my attitude about wishing I was Marc Bolan. He's... I don't know. I never known someone so tough as him. He don't think he is, he cries too easy, he likes girly films and boybands and alcopops, but ever since he was tiny he always knew what he was and never let nobody tell him different, or never listened anyway."

"Never heard you say so much." Phil almost smiles, but it fades away when Lindsay add without entirely meaning to, "If you love him so much and he's so strong and brave and wonderful why did you make him hate you?"

"I never. I never meant to. He makes me crazy, he's a mouthy little shit, I just wanted him to stop. It weren't cos he's bent or nothing, just cos he always swore at me for not letting him do stuff and threw his shoes at my head and locked himself in the bathroom screaming he wished I would just go and die in a fire."

"That's still no excuse for a big grown man battering his kid with a belt until he's bleeding." He tries to will away some old, sick memories: the sound of leather hitting flesh and the sound it forces out of Valentine's mouth, a trembling, whining little breath of
please
that always means
please stop
and
please don't
both at once. The feel of it too, bent over the worktop in the garden shed with involuntary tears rolling down his nose and turning the sawdust into spots of crumbly sludge. It made his mum cry too, so it always happened there and never in the house, but his dad was adamant, old-fashioned and strict and determined. It only happened after warnings, it only ever happened when he pushed, when he cheeked his mum and wouldn't apologise. Two or three times a year, sometimes not even that, and as soon as he turned eighteen it stopped. Even when he realised, when he tested it two days after his birthday and told his mum to piss off when she asked him to bring in the washing off the line, he just got a long, sad look off his dad.
I thought we'd raised you alright
, he said,
but obviously not
. That was worse than anything. He'd rather not sit comfortably for a week than ever put that disappointment in his dad's eyes again – and one tiny pathetic helpless little point of comfort five months later was knowing that he never did.

He realises Phil's talking again and rubs his fingers hard into his eyes until he's seeing floating spots. "What?"

 

"I said I can't change the past. I ain't got a TARDIS."

That makes Lindsay laugh unexpectedly, though the memory jabs like a bayonet. "He's so like you sometimes. He told me that exact same thing once. Same words."

"Yeah, well, he's my kid, ain't he?"
"Aren't you going in?"

"Yeah. Just wanted to..." He stands, makes a vague sort of twirling gesture in the air like he's trying to wind on the silence to find where the words start again, another thing Valentine does all the time. "Say thank you," he finishes lamely. "And I don't hate him or you or any kind of bender, only the ones who tell me to die in fires and call me a fat baldy motherfucking cunt who should've got castrated before I ever bred."

"He's very inventive with his insults, isn't he?" "He'd get a punch if he spent five minutes with Mother Teresa, he's that fucking irritating sometimes."

 

"I live with him. I know."

"Yeah." Christ, why won't he
go
? He's still standing there next to the chairs, and Lindsay feels weird and vulnerable being towered over like this so he stands as well and shakes Phil's offered hand automatically, without really thinking about what a strange, formal gesture it is until it's too late and it's happening. "Thanks for looking after him."

"That's my job."
"That's
my
job but I fucked it up."

"Just go in and talk to him. He's crap at holding grudges, he just wants everyone in the world to think he's wonderful."

The idea of following Phil into the room and having to spend any more time with him being so awkward and sincere is repellent, so Lindsay goes to fetch another cup of coffee and wash his stinging hands again.

17.
"Hey," Pip says softly, when he opens his eyes and sees Lindsay lurking in the doorway. "Missed you earlier, everyone was here."

"I know. I was outside."
"Why didn't you come in?"
"Don't know. Thought you might want family time."

He still doesn't know, or he's not accepting it yet. "You're my family too."

"Yeah," Lindsay says after a pause. Pip's too tired and doped to feel much, but he's more than awake enough to see how uncomfortable Lindsay is. It's written all over his face like words in a book.

"Come in. Come and sit down."
"Are there visiting hours or anything?"

"Dunno. Maybe for the NHS. You're paying for all this, you can do what you like."

 

"Suppose."

There's no point rushing him when he's in a mood like this, you just have to wait til he's ready to get over it. Pip closes his eyes and settles back against his pillows, still trying to find a way to breathe that doesn't make his stitched side twinge, but then he hears quick footsteps and looks up again to see Lindsay's face full of terrified concern.

"Are you alright, should I call someone?"
"I'm just closing my eyes, I'm fine."

"Oh." Another pause, then the quiet scrape of chair legs on the floor as Lindsay sits down. His hand is warm when he slides it over Pip's and winds their fingers together, slightly damp like he's just washed and hasn't bothered drying properly. "Did you speak to the police?"

"Yeah, a bit. I'm meant to do a proper statement tomorrow but they basically even said don't worry too much, he's a proper scumbag, they was after him for stabbing up this old lady for her handbag anyway. They were dead nice, I know PC Barnes anyway, me and Olly shopped his brother to her..." He trails off, realising he's talking too much just to delay the silence. "Lindsay, are
you
alright?"