Blue-Eyed Stranger, page 15
“Well, I thought I’d show you the sacred well, and some of the hill fort. James may even be there.”
The dog leapt up and licked Martin’s face in good-bye, then bounded off to follow its people. Martin straightened with a smile. “James?”
“He’s a member of that book club Finn told us about.” Billy clambered over the boot-polished step of the stile and landed on dusty wood chippings on the other side. When he was a boy, the path had been nothing but a scraping in the earth, a palm’s width of rubbed-off grass in the summer, a muddy drain in the winter. Trowchester council had obviously decided its tourists needed better than that.
“The gay book club?” Martin made heavy weather of getting over the fence, obviously unpractised in the art of navigating the countryside. His frown had returned, and it twinged something resentful and angry in Billy’s chest.
“Yes,” he said. “The gay book club. I thought I would go because I am gay. You are too, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
Martin gaped at him for a moment, perhaps taken aback by the unfamiliar note of anger in Billy’s tone. Then he lunged forward and wrapped both arms tight round Billy’s chest. He pushed his face into Billy’s neck and held on. The embrace was too tight, making Billy’s chest hurt, making him feel sorry that he ever raised the subject, sorry for being difficult and demanding at a time when Martin was already going through enough.
“I’m sorry,” Martin said into his collarbone. “I didn’t mean that to come out how it sounded. Not accusing. It’s just . . . you know. I know you want me to be open about this. I know you want me to be out. And I’m going to be. That is the plan. Long-term. But I don’t want to jinx my chances of getting a job. All it takes is one bigoted parent raising an unfounded scare about homosexuals and paedophilia and a school could find itself in more shit than it wants to handle, so of course they’re going to go for the uncontroversial option and find someone straight—white too. My dad is disappointed enough with me already. I just . . . I can’t face it, Billy, not right now.”
Martin smelled of citrus from his shower gel, and his arms were warm and strong. Billy let himself relax into them and relish the way they drove away his own demons. God, he hoped Martin’s current down was not his fault. Hoped that he was not somehow feeding off the man’s strength, sapping his will to do the things that scared him. Could that happen?
Billy sighed, and as he breathed in again, his lungs were filled with the scent of trees, with that leaf-mulch and high-oxygen thrill of the woods. Maybe this argument could wait. Billy could wait a little longer, couldn’t he, before he decided Martin’s closet was an unbearable place to be? He felt strong today, but he wasn’t sure he felt strong enough to have that fight Finn recommended.
“All right,” he said and kissed Martin’s eyebrow and the tip of his nose, making him smile. “Come on.”
You’re going to give in forever, you know. You always do. You have no fucking backbone at all. He’s never going to change, you’re never going to change. You’re going to carry on being dishonest for the rest of your life.
But the peace and the trees held him up, and it was another good day, and he could let that part of him ramble on to itself, a little grimy, a little wearying, but ignorable for now.
They trekked uphill again, through groves of hazel where the nuts were beginning to form. On into the deeper forest trees, bent oak and brave ashes and sycamore heavy with seeds like helicopters. Sun filtered down in shafts of heavenly gold, and as they went their strides opened out, and a blush of exertion came to Martin’s cheeks.
The path took a quick dog-leg around a jutting outcrop of rock, and then the hillside came closer on the left, the ground tilting up into a sheer face of grey stone in which ferns and the roots of bent little hardy trees were anchored like grappling irons. The land to their right began to slope down, glimpses of retreating views and sky showing through gaps in the branches. They heard the sound of water, intermittent and untrustworthy, over the sound of the trees.
And then the path swung hard left and the rock wall opened out into a grotto, an almost circular space in the cliff, as though nature had meant to create a tower room and forgotten to give it a roof. The ground had turned to wet red clay, sticky with the prints of thousands of hiking boots.
In the inner curve of the wall, a hole gaped, about the size of a football. From its upper arch, where a long green fern hung, several unimpressive dribbles tinked into the lower, where the water formed a hand-sized pool before spilling over the lip and onto the ever-wet ground.
“Is that a severed head?” Martin asked, squinting up at the faint scratches that surrounded the spring.
Billy was impressed. “Come here.” He shoved Martin to the best spot, where the combination of light and shadow would pick out the age-worn carvings most clearly. “Yeah it is. See his long hair and his beard? It’s been dated to somewhere in the one thousand BC range. So you can’t blame people for thinking it’s sacred, even if no one really knows what it means.”
Thinking that it was sacred had not stopped people from dropping their rubbish here. Billy picked up crisp packets and Coke cans and empty water bottles as Martin stood in the centre of the stone chimney and soaked up the chill of heavy shade and cold water under the eyes of that drooling face.
They were blessed with a heartbeat of numinous terror and silence before a loudspeaker on the outward track crackled and an enthusiastic voice cried, “And now the sacred well of Urd!” A coachful of tourists in skimpy summer wear and flip-flops emerged from the woods opposite and began sliding unhappily over the blood-red ground.
“This way out.” Billy caught Martin’s arm and waded through the scrum to the other side of the clearing, where a larger, tarmacked path followed the slope of the hill to where a small car park had been cut in its side.
Billy led Martin through the car park and up the footpath beyond, watching with delight as Martin caught his first glimpse of the hill fort. As they climbed out of the trees, the first wall caught them by surprise, its bank like a moat of shadow under it, its face sheer, still with traces of lime clinging to the stones, making it shine white under its cap of green grass.
“This is fantastic!” Martin exclaimed, all his lines of stress wiped away and a blazing smile in their place. He pushed ahead as the footpath threaded itself through the first bank and ditch, sloped up and curved to pierce the second.
Inside the third circle of battlements on the hill, high above a spectacular view of forest and furze and the red-tiled rooftops of Trowchester set in burgeoning farmland, the tarpaulins and blue plastic that shielded the dig were something of an eyesore. But after walking around the inner bank, surveying the world like the king of this castle, Martin wandered over to them curiously, as Billy had known he would.
A grid of tape had been laid down over a half acre of land in the centre of the fort, measuring sticks at each corner. Two students from the academy were kneeling in opposite corners, one scraping at the dried earth with a trowel, the other brushing fine particles of dirt off something brown.
Although Billy had a lot of respect for archaeology as a discipline, he hadn’t really got over his feeling that if it wasn’t gold, he didn’t want to know. The thing she had found seemed to be a potsherd, which was probably fascinating to those in the know about such things, but it didn’t make his heart race. Martin, however, lurched closer as if he’d been pulled, and his expression took on a hint of yearning that made Billy’s heart clench.
Be nice if he looked at me like that.
“James not here?” Billy asked the girl with the trowel. He’d hoped that perhaps introducing Martin to a few more openly gay people would help reassure the man that life after coming out was not all that bad.
“A metal detectorist down Hincksley Bottom found something Roman, he said. James had to go off and examine it.” She didn’t trouble to look up at him, carefully delineating a line of light-brown soil from a line of dark.
“Will he be back today?”
“I don’t think so.”
Damn.
Martin watched the excavations for another half hour, while Billy found a patch of long grass and cornflowers in which to lie down and bask like a lizard. He would have liked Martin to lie next to him, pliable and warm, so they could sun themselves together and exchange lazy kisses. But when Martin came, he sat a good metre away, obviously conscious of the possibility that the girls might look up and see.
Billy shared out jam sandwiches and crisps, poured the thermos of coffee, and listened to Martin speak about Bronze Age society, with his eyes shining and his limbs loose and his mobile mouth turned up at the ends.
He thought about saying, Come live with me and be my love, and the words got trapped somewhere in his lungs, somewhere under his ribs. Because, God, Martin was so beautiful when he was transported like this, with his deep voice rolling like the land, and his mind full of wonderful things that he had to teach, and his hands expressive and strong like the way he danced. He was wonderful, and Billy wanted him to be his.
But he didn’t want, he very much didn’t want to be invisible in his own life, and Martin threatened to make him that.
So he ate his picnic and sunned himself and said nothing.
In the evening they went home to Billy’s and cooked together and ate and laughed over the TV, and planned out the upcoming appearance of Bretwalda, the Griffins, and the Early Dance Group at Hunstanton Country Fair. Still he wanted to tell Martin to stay, so they could keep doing this forever. And still he couldn’t make himself say the words.
Two weeks later and August was confirming that it was a glorious summer. Billy waved the Griffins off in their minibus and stood at the edge of Hunstanton Country Fair, watching the bunting flutter against a stripy red sky as the strong sun finally went down.
In the field in front of him, the lights of a carnival came on, picking out fudge vans and shooting ranges, a merry-go-round of multicoloured horses with curlicued manes, a set of old-fashioned swing boats the colour of crushed topaz, covered with gilding and painted roses.
From the beer tent, the dull rhythmic thud of bass jangled unpleasantly with the nearer steam organ, whose little painted eighteenth-century musician-automatons were dinging tiny bells in time with mechanized Vivaldi. From a nearby stall where you could buy designer wellies, and the yuppie clothes to wear them with, came the sound of Max Bygraves crooning a tune that had probably been popular a half century ago. The combination of all three types of music wound through Billy’s bones like an infection, made him feel feverish and nauseous and barely able to breathe.
He blocked his ears and walked closer to the barrier that separated the show ground from the outside world until he was pressed against green-plastic-covered chicken wire and could go no further. Fixing his eyes on the sunset with fierce concentration helped a little. With huge mental effort he could block it all out, and it would be worth it. It would be, because he was still kitted up—he had his mask on—and the mask would make him strong enough, reckless enough, to actually ask Martin to move in.
That was the plan, anyway. Martin had had job interviews over the past two weeks that meant he had to return to his flat and stay there. Billy had spent the time wandering around his rooms, deeply aware of how empty they were. The bed was too big to sleep in. Cooking—eating, even—was just not worth the effort if the food couldn’t be shared with Martin. He missed the guy from morning to night, and everything was more difficult, everything more of a struggle without him, from summoning the willpower to get out of bed in the morning, to brushing his teeth, to forcing himself out of doors to get to practices. The constant nagging ache of it put his qualms into perspective.
He could deal with being Martin’s silent, invisible partner, surely he could. If the alternative was not being Martin’s partner at all, then he could deal.
That was his decision. When he had made it, at home, on a morning filled with champagne sunlight washing over night-fresh greenery, in the silence and the emptiness of 6 a.m., it had seemed more achievable than it did now.
Someone shrieked in the beer tent. A jostling knot of young men passed him, swearing and laughing at each other, giving him dirty looks as if there was a law against being overwhelmed by people and noise. He recognised that he was not in the best shape at the moment to execute his plan, that his endurance was coming to an end and a crash was becoming inevitable. He should have gone home, made it to safety before the storm hit.
But you can never get anything right, can you? You’ve had a lifetime to learn how to manage this and you still can’t do it, and that’s because you’re pathetic.
But he had just waved his transport good-bye. He laced his fingers through the wire, leaned his weight on his arms, and took a deep breath. There seemed very little oxygen in the air; it didn’t ease his chest as it should, but he repeated it two, three times, breathing out hard, until he had inflated himself enough to move.
No need to panic. He would go to Martin. Martin was safety. Martin had seen him freak out like this before—no need to fear that this would drive him away. In Martin’s tent it would be quieter, or darker, at least, and he could sleep with Martin wrapped around him, keeping it all out. He could put aside the idea of talking about big life choices until the morning, when everything should be easier.
He took another breath, braced himself, and walked back down into the bowl of the field, and the claustrophobic crowd of stalls and strangers.
By the time he got to Bretwalda’s encampment, night had fallen properly. The Viking tent village was soothing, a scatter of campfires under canvas awnings, a huddle of cloaked figures around each, lit in subtle shades of umber and gold, talking quietly in lowered voices.
Billy slipped into the back of the work shelter, his bells wrapped in his hankies, silenced in his pockets. He dropped down onto the dry ground, with his back to one of the supports of the table that ran along the side of the shelter. Even though they were facing away from him and had not seen him come in, black-coated and painted-faced in the darkness as he was, the presence of nine other people was an oppression on his spirit like the walls closing in. But the notional solitude of the fact that they didn’t know he was here was just enough to keep him breathing.
They took up so much space. There was so little left for him.
You still demand too much. You’re still too selfish. You could make yourself smaller if you tried. You just don’t care to try because you think you’re so wonderful, but you’re not.
“I can’t believe we’re here instead of York,” Edith was saying when Billy tuned back in after a long enough period of watching the grass had given him the mental energy to do so. “I mean, it’s Jorvik. If they say, ‘Come and do an event for us,’ we say, ‘Right away, how many hundred people do you want?’ The chance to work with the Jorvik Viking Centre is—”
“They weren’t going to pay us.” Martin’s voice was deep and soft. Billy would have said there was a silence to it, if he hadn’t known that made no sense to anyone but himself. He looked up. Now his eyes were adapted to the dark, he could see that Martin was in a camping chair on the right hand side of the firebox, his feet up on the edge of it, the dew of the evening steaming off his leather shoes. Under such a clear sky even the summer night had an edge to it, and Martin had pulled his woollen cloak tight around him like a cocoon, only his calves in blue-and-yellow leg bindings, and one arm, in which he held a can of beer, protruding from the embroidered material. He looked harassed and guilty.
“I can’t afford the petrol to drive all the kit up to York for a show that wasn’t even going to pay costs. These people are giving us two hundred pounds.”
“We don’t do this for the money,” Edith protested. “And Jorvik is like the holy grail. If we can get ties with them, we’ll really have arrived. It would have done us more good in the long run.”
Her cloak had gold thread in its borders, and was held shut by a silver brooch the size of Billy’s fist. He suspected, uncharitably, that she’d simply never experienced what it was like to be in want. You could only afford to think it wasn’t about the money when you had enough of the stuff.
Taking a deep breath through his nose and letting it out, he felt some tension leave him. The ground was pleasantly cool beneath him, and he considered toppling over sideways and pressing his cheek to it, closing his eyes.
“You’re not fooling us, you know.” Rolf’s voice interrupted the slow reintegration of Billy’s calm. He didn’t like the tone of it—hostile, accusatory. It arrested Billy’s sideways slump, made him sit up again, braced for fight or flight.
“I don’t know what you mean.” Martin attempted a laugh that sounded unbearably fake in Billy’s ears. Billy’s heart rate picked up and the muscles of his flanks shuddered. “I’m not up to something. I haven’t got some kind of hidden agenda—”
“Yeah.” Rolf had replaced his helmet with a crocheted hat that still failed to make him look any less the hard man of the group. “Of course not. Of course we just keep turning up at events where your morris buddies are also performing out of pure fucking coincidence. And it’s pure fucking coincidence that you’ve got half of us poncing about doing talks about dancing instead of concentrating on the battlefield. It’s pure fucking coincidence that you spend more time with that prancing nancy of theirs than you do paying attention to us?”
Billy froze as if hit with a freeze ray, trying not even to breathe. Although he generally loathed being invisible, the trait had its advantages. He hoped, painfully, that Martin would not let “prancing nancy” slide—hoped to be defended in his absence, but the hope coexisted with a sickening foreknowledge that it wasn’t going to happen.
“Yeah.” Martin freed both hands from his cloak so he could spread them wide in a shrug. “Yeah, I’ve been booking us into things that the Griffins are doing too. What’s wrong with that? Most of our bookings this year come from me stealing contacts from their programme. You think we’d have had half these shows without them? They’re established, we’re new. We’re tagging on to their coattails while we build a reputation of our own. We should be thanking them for that.”
