Blue-Eyed Stranger, page 11
Martin gritted his teeth and thought again about recruitment. He could get the names, offer a refuge. “You threw them out?”
“Course not! What d’you think we are?” Brian was honestly indignant, as though the thought that anyone could possibly think he was homophobic was downright insulting. “They just had no sense of humour, po-faced bastards. They couldn’t take a joke. And you know what the society’s like—you gotta have a sense of humour, right? You can’t be too much of a special snowflake about this stuff.”
“Yeah,” Martin agreed, sinking his face into his cup and despising himself for not saying anything.
Damn it, he’d left the society to get away from this, and while Brian was proving what a good move that had been, Kayleigh’s “this brooch is so gay” comment had rubbed him exactly the same way. He should say something. He should not let this go past him unchallenged. He should get into the habit of knocking it back so it didn’t take root in his own society and end up driving him out. Except what if it already was there, quieter, more insidious, and he wouldn’t know until too late—until he’d told them and been rejected?
“You remember Dave Bryson?” he managed.
“Biscop Benedict.” Brian looked about for the biscuits, and Martin dived back into the kitchen to bring them. “Yeah, good bloke.”
“He was gay, you know.”
A moment’s feeling of tiny triumph because he had set his trap well, because he had at least got Brian to acknowledge that a gay guy could be a good bloke. But then Brian dunked a digestive in his tea and raised his eyebrows. “You don’t say? Well, that explains a lot.”
“Sorry?”
“Well, you know. Not fighting. Poncing about in purple silk. All that incense and singing. Always thought he was a bit nancy. I don’t know why I’m surprised. He kept that quiet, though. I wonder why?”
“Yeah, who knows.” Martin pinched his protest back behind his thinned lips and decided he’d had about enough of this. “So, that wool.”
He flicked the roll open to show that the colour hadn’t faded. “They said it was pretty colour fast, but I’ve kept it in the dark anyway, so it’s . . . it’s pristine.”
Brian slid off the sofa onto one knee next to the bolt and examined the thread count with a discerning eye. “Your new society having problems, then? If you have to sell this?”
“It’s not the society,” Martin snapped. “I’ve lost my job. The fee from our next show will cover the society’s bills, but only after we’ve done it and been paid. So I need some other means to drum up the petrol money beforehand. And this . . . well, I’d never dare wear it anyway. I got it for three hundred and fifty quid, so I’ll give it to you for three hundred.”
Unrolling the bolt, Brian slung the fabric over one shoulder and admired himself in the black reflective surface of the TV, pulling it in at the waist to look like a tunic, checking the way it draped, the way the skirt flared out when he moved.
Martin watched, in two minds. The part of him that was a ninth-century Viking noted regretfully how awesome the fabric looked—how the folds fell exactly as they were depicted on the carvings and the manuscripts of the time. The part of him that was a modern man reflected caustically on how “gay” it was of Brian to be admiring his pretty dress in the mirror.
“It’s a deal,” Brian said. They exchanged a handshake and then money, counted out in twenty-pound notes into Martin’s hand. He and Martin rolled the material back into the old curtain in which Martin had been keeping it dark and safe and under wraps.
Brian picked it up and tucked it under his arm. “Listen, kiddo. If you get fed up with all the work, you know you’d be welcomed back. You and all the splitters who went with you. I was sad to see you all go, no kidding.”
That was enough to give Martin an ache in his chest because yes, there had been good times, full of the rough and ready camaraderie that came from being the toughest, the most kick-ass, the most dangerous, the all-round-best society in the country.
But he couldn’t say he was sad to go because if he did, Brian would ask him why he had felt the need to split in the first place, and he’d rather get out of it with the man’s respect, even if it was fake, contingent on Martin being something he wasn’t.
I’m one of those poofters myself. He could almost feel the words behind his teeth, filling his mouth like saliva. All this time you’ve been thinking I was one of the lads, and actually I was gay. And no, I don’t have a sense of humour, because I don’t find it funny to be mocked.
But what good would it do to tell Brian now, when he would probably never seen the man again? He swallowed the spit. “We’re doing okay,” he said instead, walking his guest out to the car. “But yeah, if it doesn’t work out, then thanks.”
Why did you do that? he asked himself as he watched the car drive away. You hate people falsifying the past. Why do you falsify your present?
Because I’m not putting one more thing in the way of getting a new job. I’m not giving Dad one more thing to complain about. I’m not making it even harder to get anyone to do anything I say in Bretwalda, and I’m not . . . I’m just not ready.
Feeling tired and vaguely unclean, he switched the computer back on, intending to check whether anyone had offered him an interview. No one had, but his despondency was interrupted when his email programme flashed up a window that made him catch his breath, telling him he had new messages.
It flickered out before he could be sure what he’d seen. Something about morris, from an address he didn’t recognise. Trying not to get his hopes up, he clicked through to his emails and yes, there was one labelled “history of morris” that he could not imagine would have come from anyone other than Billy.
He opened it up with an easing around his heart. One good thing in a shit day.
Thought you’d like to see this, the message said, with a link to a website that took the origins of morris dancing back to the fifteenth century, and showed him pictures of guys in doublets with sleeves that grazed the ground. A medieval lady stood like a judging queen in the centre of a ring of dancers, all of whom were trying to impress her with their capering.
It was very odd. Billy had included a quote from a seventeenth-century Puritan who obviously regarded the dance as a highway to hell. “It hath been tould that your morice dauncers have daunced naked in nettes: what greater entisement unto naughtines could have been devised?” And despite everything that had gone wrong today, that was so bizarre it made Martin laugh out loud.
He’d thought that perhaps the Griffins were fooling themselves when they talked about the history behind what they did. He was impressed to find they had evidence, some kind of rigour. This brush with the sheer strangeness of humanity had the same texture as the experience he had when reading ibn Fadlan, seeing the Vikings from the inside.
Encountering the minds of people from history was like encountering aliens. Funny and bizarre, unsettling and uncomfortable, sometimes even repellent. But you always returned from it with a refreshed perspective, so that just for a little while, before habit kicked back in, you could see your own world with a stranger’s eyes, and all the things that were normally invisible showed up like cancer cells tagged with radiant dye.
It put his problems into perspective, for a while at least.
There’s a session at the King’s Arms tonight, Billy’s email finished. I wondered if you’d like to come. But then I thought you’re hardly going to want to drive an hour here and then have to drive an hour back in time for work in the morning. So maybe you could come at the weekend?
Martin thought about breakdown cover and the cost of petrol, and then he thought, Oh, what the hell. He had just come into three hundred pounds, and he might as well enjoy the advantages of joblessness, such as they were.
He put another sheaf of copies of his printed CV into envelopes and dropped them in the postbox on the way out, phoning Billy this time to let him know he was on his way.
Martin had not been sure what “a session” was, but had assumed it would be something to do with morris dancing. As he pushed through throngs of people, young and old, filling the pub’s large back room, he could see there wasn’t floor space enough for that.
The room was packed so close with tables it was hardly possible to edge past them to the bar. He ordered two pints of Theakston’s Old Peculier and two packets of crisps as he watched the crowd squeeze themselves onto chairs and begin to assemble equipment out of the many rigid black cases they had brought with them.
Outside the windows of the room, weeping willows trailed against the brickwork, and he could see the waters of the Arborough Drain surge like a tide towards the sea. Although he only lived an hour’s drive away, he had the strong impression that stepping into the marshlands was stepping back in time by at least twenty or thirty years. It gave him an unexpected sympathy with the Griffins’ view that reenactment was theatre—dressing up, playing let’s pretend—whereas what they did was a continuance of the past. Theirs was a live tradition, his a dead one.
“You all right there?” Billy asked. Tonight he was smiling. Something loose and relaxed about his long limbs indicated he was having a good day. They stood together next to the bar and Martin noticed that the flow of people streamed straight past Billy. He was constantly having to move aside as folk went through him as though he weren’t there.
Martin edged a barstool out for him with his foot, so that Billy could get out of the way properly. They hopped up together and Billy opened his own black case, taking out a violin.
The close-packed tables in the centre of the room were now covered in beer glasses, wicker baskets containing complimentary chips, and more musical instruments than Martin had ever seen in his life. Things were being screwed onto other things, folded out, clipped together, or otherwise assembled.
There was a sense of anticipation and an odd discomfort, as though something momentous was about to happen and no one could be entirely sure it would turn out well. Billy smiled at Martin and screwed a wood-and-leather ledge onto the underside of his violin, swinging the instrument round to check that the rest sat comfortably on his shoulder. “You’ve not been to one of these before?”
“No.” Martin felt a little wild-eyed, like an anthropologist coming across an entirely new culture. “Is it okay to be here if you don’t play anything?”
“Oh yes. Everyone loves a listener.”
A clink of a coin on a beer glass called the room to order. Everyone quietened as a frumpy, middle-aged woman with some kind of squeeze-box strapped to her chest got up to welcome them and suggest a first tune. She sat down, and Martin braced himself for the grown-up equivalent of school music lessons. When Mrs. Palmer at that place where he didn’t work anymore left her classroom doors open in the summer, the sound of the school orchestra pervaded the whole building like the smell of cabbage. All the squeaking recorders and sawing violins and bassoons like the horns of passing taxis.
But this . . . They did take a while to start up. One guy played something plaintive and soft on the Irish pipes, the sound like whisky—misty, oak flavoured, eerie. Then Billy joined in. The purer notes of the fiddle intertwined with the rasp of the pipe, and although he was playing the same tune, the effect was of more than double the complexity. As each new instrument joined in, adding its unique voice, a whole was created more powerful than the combination, until it seemed that they’d opened a portal and something alive had entered the room, independent of them all.
It gave Martin the shivers. He’d always thought of music as being the purview of specialists. You got bands who were intensively managed and packaged by the industry, or you got classical musicians, who were intensively managed and packaged by their orchestras. Either way, music was like everything else in the modern world—too sophisticated to be done by ordinary people. Another form of self-expression, of creativity, taken out of the hands of the common man and given over entirely to trained professionals.
Clearly he couldn’t have been more wrong. Here it was, music in the hands of ordinary people, more powerful, more beautiful and stranger than he had suspected.
Being outside it, watching Billy become part of this collective creature, made him feel left behind. Beautiful though it was, Billy was wrong: this was not a spectator sport. This was not a place for anyone who was not involved.
He glanced along the bar, to where other partners of musicians sat with their empty hands curved around their beer glasses, looking as enraptured and as disenfranchised as he felt.
Billy was swaying on his stool, knee bouncing as he tapped his foot, his body wanting to dance to the music he was making. Martin’s thoughts connected this with reenactment and history and teaching, as he wondered what he could do to share this with others. Did the Vikings dance? Did they make music? What would it have looked like? Sounded like? Why had he never thought about it before?
“You look very thoughtful,” said Billy in a lowered voice, while a lone guitarist played something Spanish and complicated that clearly no one else knew well enough to join in with. Those blue eyes of his were shining and sure of themselves, his face aglow. Martin was three pints in by then, hazy and content, and it seemed right that Billy should be backed by a musical theme of aching sweetness. Look what he had inside him—all this music, all this grace. What a magical creature he was.
“Thank you,” he said, feeling something close to awe that Billy had reached out to him. It was as though he had hunkered down and waited, and a spotted fawn had trusted him enough to tiptoe out of the forest and nuzzle at his hand. Not that he could say that, of course. “For inviting me. It feels like a real honour. I didn’t even know this kind of thing existed before. I bet the Vikings did something similar, in the evenings in their mead halls. I wonder what that would have been like.”
Billy laughed, but didn’t taunt him for his monomania. That too was a balm to Martin’s soul. But then Billy presumably also knew what it was like to live for one’s hobby.
“What kind of instruments did they have in those days?”
“I don’t know.” Martin’s curiosity gave a bound of interest and completed his recovery. Having something to research was also a good reason to get up in the morning. “But I can find out.”
When the session wound down at midnight, they walked back to Billy’s house. All around the village, fields planted with oilseed rape were blossoming, and the warm night air was heavy with its scent.
“What happened with your tenant?” Martin asked, as they passed the heavily locked flat on their way upstairs. “Did they arrest him?”
Billy shrugged one shoulder and put his violin case down to unlock his own door. “I don’t know what happened. The police stayed awhile and then they went. Kaminski’s still there.” He looked uncertain and a little tired as he gestured for Martin to go in, snapping the lights on and following. “They would have arrested him if there was something seriously wrong, wouldn’t they? I mean, if he was making bombs down there or something.”
“You’d hope so.” Martin took the case from Billy and put it down carefully in a corner before pulling him into a long, filthy kiss. The question of the mobster lodger eased its way towards irrelevance as he felt Billy’s mind turn from music towards his other senses. “Though they might have arrested him and then released him on bail.”
“I should ask him about it.” Billy hooked his fingers through Martin’s belt loops and walked backwards, hauling him into the bedroom. Martin struggled a little just for the fun of it, grinning all over his face.
“I really don’t think that’s a good idea,” he managed nevertheless. “Do not piss off the man with the guns.”
Billy laughed, as though he thought Martin was making a joke, and Martin paused in the act of peeling him out of his shirt to shake him by both biceps. “Listen, I mean that, okay? Even if he’s not some kind of Russian mafia thug, he’s pretty clearly aggressive and paranoid and if he’s in possession of live ammunition too, then leave him alone, okay? Let the police deal with it.”
Billy flinched and turned his face aside, and Martin remembered belatedly that his springbok was fragile. Browbeating was probably too much for him to handle. He curved a hand around Billy’s cheek and brought his face back, kissed the moment of rejection away.
“I can see I’m going to have to give you something else to think about,” he said, drawing them both down to a bed that was beginning to feel familiar. Just like you’ve done for me today. Because it was remarkable how much better he felt now he was worrying about Billy than when all he had to worry about was himself.
Next morning, Martin woke slowly to the consciousness of contentment. Having Billy’s slender form in his arms felt right. It felt complete. Even the ceiling of Billy’s flat, with its off-white paint and cracked plaster, seemed friendlier than his own. They ate breakfast together in a pocket of quiet as soothing as ointment on a graze.
“I lost my job,” he confessed, as Billy looked at the clock for the third time. “I don’t have to rush off.”
He half expected Billy to sneer, had his defences up, just in case, but all Billy did was to get up to put the kettle on again, and say, “Oh, I’m sorry,” as if he meant it. “But I’m sure you’ll get another one soon. I don’t know where they’d find another history teacher who cares as much as you.”
Martin sipped his tea, closed his eyes, and felt solid again. You see? he said to his father in the safety of his own mind. That’s the kind of reaction I was hoping for. One that made me feel that at least someone believes in me.
Billy replenished the big blue teapot with more hot water and another tea bag. He’d sucked his lower lip into his mouth as if he were chewing it, thinking something over. Martin had a hunch that he was wondering whether to suggest that Martin should just stay, then. Stay and look for a job closer to Billy’s house. In a twist of unsuspected yearning, he thought he would like that, actually. But in the end, Billy didn’t say it and Martin felt it was too early in the relationship for him to ask.
