Blue-Eyed Stranger, page 16
“You do seem to be spending an awful lot of time with this Early Dance Group.” Edith picked up Rolf’s complaint and ran with it. “And we need you here. Clients are getting confused as to which group you belong to and—”
“It’s interesting.” Martin withdrew his placatory gesture. A note of implacability entered his voice. “This is a hobby, right? Something I do because I want to. If I want to take it in a new direction, that’s up to me.”
He sat up straighter, returning accusation for accusation. “I don’t have to devote every moment of my life to this society if I don’t want to. It’s already made me lose my job, what more do you want? You don’t think I’m pulling my weight? I’m here every event, I bring the stuff, I set up for everyone, I take the stuff down and take it away. I deal with membership and money for food and organizing the firewood and the water. I get us bookings. If I want to do something else as well, that’s none of your fucking business.”
Implacable had sledged downhill straight into anger. “If you think I’m taking too much on because I’m researching stuff that fits into our remit and our time period, because it fucking interests me, then maybe some of you should step up to the mark and take some responsibility yourself, instead of leaving it all to me. I wouldn’t have to do every bloody thing if you lot would pull your weight. Because, let me tell you, it’s been a hell of a long time since any of this was fun for me.”
A silence. Billy thought they were abashed as he was. He hadn’t thought that he was creating trouble for Martin. That their little venture together might be eroding the things Martin cared about. Why hadn’t he thought that he was demanding too much? That there was a cost to Martin in keeping Billy safe, and the cost was too high. Why must you always do this? Always be so needy and so fucking selfish? His throat closed and his breathing tightened up again, a giant’s hand tight around his rib cage.
Kayleigh laughed, flourishing her bottle of cider so that it gleamed like a citrine in the light of the fire. “Stop giving him a hard time, you lot. He’s in luurve. Him and that Billy bloke. Course they want to be together. You seriously haven’t seen it? It couldn’t be more obvious.”
Billy tried to pretend he wasn’t merely invisible, he was actually not there at all. He wished hard to stop existing, and it only made him hate himself more when he couldn’t make the wish come true.
Uncertainty passed like a whisper around the fire, as one by one the Vikings took on the frozen expressions of people who are entertaining a completely unfamiliar thought for the first time.
“Seriously?” said Rolf at last, his voice hovering between discomfort and laughter, as if not quite sure whether Kayleigh was pulling his leg or not. He turned to Martin. “Seriously, you’ve got a boyfriend?”
Martin looked from face to face anxiously, as if for signs that anybody had got his back. Maybe he didn’t get them, or maybe he was just so ashamed of Billy he wouldn’t have said anything if he had. “He’s just a friend. I’m allowed to have friends, aren’t I?”
He ground his beer can into the soft sand at the edge of the firebox and stood up, pulling his cloak tighter around himself. One long wine-coloured cylinder with head and feet. “I’m going to bed.”
“Martin,” Edith said, as if she was working up to something very reasonable. “Don’t—”
“Good night.” Martin strode away, and while they were all watching his departing form, Billy slipped back out of the gap in the shelter and took refuge in the night.
He wanted to fall to his knees, put his forehead on the cool ground, and let everything go—simply to stop existing until this moment was past, until he had regained some resilience, enough energy to order his thoughts. But he couldn’t. There were still people walking up and down the paths through the fairground. People would see it and think he was crazy, and then they would interfere. Then he’d have to talk and manage concerned strangers, interact and form words and make decisions. He didn’t have the wherewithal to cope with any of that at the moment.
So he’d thought he could cope with being denied, and it turned out he couldn’t. God, he needed Martin right now, needed him like he needed a safe place to curl up in. But Martin wasn’t safe. Martin didn’t want him, couldn’t be trusted. Martin colluded with the whole world to make Billy invisible, and he . . . and he . . . maybe he always would. Billy had known that, but he hadn’t truly felt it till now. He’d had energy and optimism holding it away. That was gone.
Maybe all those people’s opinions would always matter to Martin more than Billy did. And maybe that was all Billy deserved, but even so he wasn’t going to fucking stand for it.
He loved Martin. He did. He did. But he was not, not something to be ashamed of.
Fuck the bastard. Fuck him.
His plan to stay overnight here was thoroughly screwed. The barrier between himself and Martin’s tent, fifty yards away, could not have been more impenetrable if it had been some kind of force field. It offered no real refuge at all, only pretence. He couldn’t possibly turn up now and ask for a place to sleep. He had more pride than that, and Martin wouldn’t thank him for it.
That left his flat. Thirty miles away, thirty-five maybe. And the Griffins danced here often. He knew the way. The need for home, a refuge, familiarity and a locked door between him and the world took the place of a decision. Willpower and higher thought were both offline—he couldn’t think about buses or taxis or train timetables. That was too complicated, too impossible to deal with. He went on instinct and started walking.
The next morning, Martin was still angry, itchy with it beneath the skin. He packed up the group’s work shelter, disassembled the firebox, put the sand back into its sandbags and the tent into its cover, and folded up the furs and blankets that lined his floor in lieu of a groundsheet.
The garrison were all noticeably helpful and cheerful towards him.
“Let me get that.” Edith lifted the chest of crockery into the trailer as Rolf strapped the tent supports to the roof rack. Martin thought he should lose his rag more often with them if this was the result, but frankly he’d rather have had them take him for granted again, if it came without the memory of being forced to choose between Bretwalda and Billy.
He was pretty sure he’d made the wrong choice.
He’d just panicked. Anyone would have done when put on the spot like that. Anyone would have said whatever they needed to say to get the intrusive personal questions to stop.
Anyone might have done, but he still felt like a shit about it. Thank God Billy had gone home an hour before and hadn’t been around to hear it, because if it was making him feel like this, what would it do to someone as fine tuned, as sensitive as Billy?
He slung his chain mail and shield on top of the deflated air bed in the boot and wedged his three spears down the side of the car, in the gap between the seats and the doors.
“So, we’ll see you at Detling?” Rolf rubbed one hand across the stubble of his hair, beneath which the Odin rune tattooed on his head gleamed blue. He had the other hand thrust deep in his pocket. His shoulders were hunched, and Martin could tell perfectly well that this was an apology and a request for forgiveness. He just wasn’t feeling very forgiving at the moment. What was the point of them leaving their old society if they were only going to reestablish the bitching in this one?
“Maybe.” He got into the car, closed the door, rolled down the window, and relented a little. “If I can’t make it, I’ll make sure someone picks up the kit and brings it down for you.”
Rolf rocked onto his back foot, opened his mouth, and then closed it again as he decided to settle for what he could get. “Yeah, okay. See you, then.”
Martin drove away, and everyone in Bretwalda waved at him as he went. Bad news travelled fast, apparently, if everyone knew they had to be nice to him this morning.
At home, he unloaded the tent and the work shelter, spreading the canvas out in the living room among the litter of craft projects, the half-made leather cups, the woodworking tools, the disassembled shaving horse propped against the end of the sofa. There had been rain in the middle of the night, and the tent would need to dry for a couple of days before he could put it away properly.
He brought in the cooking equipment and the trestle tables, the bouquet of antlers, the basket full of nets, the hides and wicker eel-pots, the sieve, the bellows, the tripod and its chain. The crockery that needed to be washed before it could be shoved back behind the door and forgotten.
It was nine in the evening before he’d finished, and he was still angry. Where did they get off telling him he wasn’t allowed to have other interests? Where did they get off looking at him like that, laughing like that, as if it was somehow unthinkable that he might be gay? Why? Because he was black, and everyone knew there were no gay black men? Or was it just because they couldn’t believe anyone they actually knew could play for the other team?
Wankers.
He peeled out of his Viking clothes, packed them away without washing them. Washing damaged the dye and fatigued the material, and the smell of deep-ingrained sweat and smoke was far more authentic than that of laundry detergent. Then he went into the bathroom and set about trying to bring himself back to the twenty-first century.
He caught sight of his braids in the mirror before it steamed, and they pissed him off. Time for a change. He hacked them off with the kitchen scissors, unwound the remnants, leaving himself with short unkempt curls. It felt good to be without the weight of them, good to be able to get his fingers in and work shea butter through what was left, soothe his tender scalp. His hair follicles ached to the touch.
Once he was dried and dressed, he ate a packet of Super Noodles with a tin of sweetcorn stirred into it and wondered if now was a good time to call Billy. Phone in his hand, he slouched back out to the car, the anger finally loosening its grip, his head feeling oddly unanchored. Could he cope with getting back on the road and driving for another hour?
The hand of the petrol gauge was hovering just above red. If he did go, he’d have to fill up again, and he couldn’t really afford that. He thought of Billy’s flat, a second home by now, with his toothbrush in the holder and a set of his clothes in the drawers, and wondered how you asked someone who clearly needed his privacy to function if you could maybe . . . perhaps . . . please move in.
If he did, he’d have to tell everyone. Scratch that—everyone would know even if he didn’t tell them. But he’d still have the Early Dance Group. Annette already knew. And Bretwalda’s anxious contrition this morning might mean he wouldn’t lose them either. Not all of them, at least.
He was getting tired of pretending, to be honest. There was something rather pleasing about the thought of letting people know that he’d caught a gorgeous thing like Billy. The thought of coming out was terrifying, but he didn’t have any real doubt that he ought to get it done. He didn’t have anything to be ashamed of, after all, and if he lost jobs or reenactors or his father over it, then those things would not have been worth keeping anyway.
Can I see you tomorrow? he texted Billy and went back indoors to turn the computer on so that they could at least Skype before going to bed.
Billy’s Skype came up unavailable, which wasn’t like him. He generally put the computer on first thing in the morning and often forgot to switch it off at all. Martin put a Star Trek movie on to play in the background and tried to relax, but after half an hour with no reply to his text, he gave in and phoned.
“Hello. This is Billy Wright’s answering machine. If you have something to say to me, speak and I’ll listen.”
Martin turned the volume of the TV down as Kirk hung off something by his fingernails. “Um, hi, it’s me. Martin. Are you okay? If you’re off doing something interesting, then that’s great, but I know you crash sometimes after a dance out, so if you can call me back, please do. I just want to be sure you’re all right.”
He spotted the message light blinking on his landline answerphone as he was passing through the hall eating toast, leading him to drop a slice butter side down on the floor. Billy?
“Hello?” He wedged the phone between his ear and shoulder and retrieved the toast, now covered in bits of grass and an earwig that had come in with the canvas.
It was not Billy. It was St. Dunstan’s Church of England (Aided) School who had called on Friday afternoon to tell him that they were sorry but he hadn’t quite impressed them enough at the interview stage and they would not be giving him a job.
He sulked about that for a good half hour as he toasted the heel of the loaf and ate it. His pride had led him astray, and no amount of rationing was going to stretch his savings any further. He had kept putting it off, but now it really was time to bow to the inevitable and go sign on for Jobseeker’s Allowance, which would at least presumably allow him to eat, though there wouldn’t be anything left over to pay the bills.
He emailed off a few more job applications and tried not to think about it too hard. Billy couldn’t know somehow, could he? He couldn’t know that Martin had denied their relationship in front of his whole society? No, of course he couldn’t. He hadn’t been there. It was just Martin’s guilty conscience tormenting him, and Billy was blissfully ignorant. He was fine.
Of course he was. He was probably just in the grip of a particularly bad down. He must have gone to bed as soon as he got home and stayed there. If so, pestering him would only make him worse. Martin should go to sleep himself and try again in the morning, when they would both be feeling better. So he switched everything off and turned in, spent four hours trying to calm down enough to fall asleep and only managed it just as the sun was coming up.
Having fallen asleep at five, he didn’t wake until midmorning, when the phone rang. Thank God, he thought, picking it up so sharply that he bashed his jaw with his own knuckles. “Billy?”
“No, it’s Nicky Riley from English Heritage, Mr. Deng. We met at Dover Castle?”
Martin rubbed a hand through his hair and let the bruised feeling of his scalp distract him from a worry that was building into something volcanic by now. “I remember. Sorry. Go ahead.”
“I’ve got some good news for you,” she said, seemingly amused by his incompetence. “We’ve had an enquiry from a Mr. Inman, who was in the crowd that day. He’s a producer for the BBC, and he wants to talk to you about possibly doing some film work. I understand he’s doing a fantasy series set in the Dark Ages and wants some authentic-looking extras with their own kit. I said I would pass along his number and you would phone him to talk further.”
“Absolutely.” Martin tried to sound as enthusiastic about this as it deserved, his mind working on the problem of how to get the guy to feature the Early Dance Group in more than one episode. “But the group is really more Billy Wright’s baby. He might be the person to do it?”
“I understand that,” she said dismissively, “but he’s not answering his phone this morning and you are. So here is Mr. Inman’s number, and I’ll leave the rest up to you.”
Martin wrote the number down, feeling a little sick. Okay, so it wasn’t just that Billy was avoiding him for some reason. He was either avoiding everyone or something even more sinister was happening.
At the thought of “sinister,” Kaminski’s face came to mind, along with the police in the hallway downstairs, with their professionally closed faces that gave nothing away. Don’t be ridiculous. People don’t get kidnapped or blown up by Russian mafia mobsters in real life. That kind of thing only happens in films.
Except it didn’t. If there was some kind of Eastern European terrorist cell at work in Billy’s ground-floor flat, you could bet all the neighbours would say, We were so surprised. That sort of thing doesn’t happen here. And yet if it happened at all, it had to happen somewhere, to people someone knew. What if this time those people were Billy and him?
You’re being paranoid.
Maybe, but then why were the police there?
Martin dragged the paperwork for his car insurance and his breakdown cover renewal out of the pile of “urgent things to be paid when I can afford them,” and thought that maybe he could manage one of them if he used the petrol money on it. That still added up to no way of actually going physically to Billy’s place and checking on him.
Could he phone one of the garrison and ask for a lift, after he’d just pissed them all off over this very issue? They’d know, if he did, that his “we’re just friends” thing was the bullshit it was.
Why not? Kill two birds with one stone. Rip the plaster off the coming-out thing with one movement while more important things were taking up his mind. If they didn’t like it, they could take their judgement and stick it. This was no time to be worrying about something so trivial.
He was scrolling through his contacts, trying to remember who lived closest to him, when the phone buzzed again in his hand. “Hello?”
“Hi, Martin? It’s Annette.”
His heart did a good impression of a black hole at the sound of her voice, the uncertainty, the concern. “Hi.”
“Um, is Billy there with you? I wouldn’t normally ask, but he didn’t come to practice last night.”
“Is that so unusual? He’d had a full day of dancing the day before. Maybe he was tired?”
“No.” He could hear his own anxiety reflected in her tightening tone. “No, you don’t understand. He never misses practice. That’s why we call him ‘Constant Billy.’ Because in five years I’ve never known him to miss a practice once. I called his house, but he’s not answering, and his mobile’s turned off. Did something happen?”
“Nothing I know of. Not between us, anyway. You sure it’s not a slightly-worse-than-usual crash? Maybe he’s lying on the sofa ignoring the world.”
