Stockholm Syndrome [01] - Stockholm Syndrome (11 page)

"Oh, yeah. Your mum come round." He swallows, hard. Lindsay can feel the slide of it under his palm. "She's nice. Back off that cruise. You should take me on a cruise. Not now, not til we're ancient, it's a fogeys' holiday, but you should."

Lindsay presses up hard under his chin again, slams his head against the wall hard enough to make him squeeze his eyes shut and bite on a noise of pain.

Something more, too. This Pavlovian response to violence would be worrying in anybody else, but Valentine's a twisted little shit and there's nothing surprising about him any more.

"Didn't I tell you never to answer the door?"

"She crept up on me! I was making tea and then she was knocking on the window and letting herself in, I nearly chucked a knife at her head."

"You're insane. Don't you understand what's at stake here?"

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"Shut up, I know the stakes make you hard, you get off on danger even more than me."

"Not when it's my
mother
."

"Ain't
my
fault you're lost in Narnia, mate. OW, leave off, you're hurting..."

"You're making me crazy."

"So stop fucking me without johnnies, if you don't wanna catch my diseases."

"Don't move." A last vicious squeeze and he lets go, leaves him there against the wall all flushed and wheezing and hard and coughing up greedy fresh lungfuls of oxygen. "I swear to god I'll make you sorry if you move."

The kid stays on the spot but he stretches and yawns deliberately, smirking. Lindsay wants to snap his little bones like dry twigs.

"What're you gonna do this time? Oh, wait, lemme guess. Are you gonna... point a gun at me? Do I get a prize?"

The revolver's in the dresser drawer, empty as always, but the bullets are right next to it. Now he's got the kid's attention.

"What're you doing?" he asks, uneasy. Lindsay doesn't answer. He takes six cartridges, makes a big show of considering them, then puts five back into the drawer, very slowly, one by one so the kid's got plenty of time to count them.

His mismatched eyes have gone very big. He just stares at Lindsay, with his mouth slightly open like he's trying to say words he's forgotten how to form. The whirr-click of the spun cylinder going back into place makes him jump, and the noise of the hammer being cocked, and the noise of it falling onto an empty chamber.

"Fuck, Jesus, fuck, you
are
fucking crazy, what are you
doing
?" He's gone very pale, and almost comically wide-eyed. Lindsay wonders whether this is what crazy feels like. He doesn't
feel
crazy any more, but maybe that's a sign of it. The gun's heavy in his hand. He cocks it again and aims the next shot at his

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own head. Two seconds after the hammer slams down on nothing again, the kid bursts out crying.

"Shut up," Lindsay says, calm as anything. "Shut up." He feels like he's soaring, he's higher than he's been on any drug in his life, but flying's always made him want to throw up and there's that as well, twisting and coiling round in his stomach. Nothing to do but ignore it, he's gone too far to stop and he doesn't
want
to stop; the kid looks terrified and it's fucking amazing, he's finally getting through to him. Not quite sure what his message is, but there's
something
getting through. Hammer, trigger, hammer, trigger, barrel in the kid's face. Four done, two left.

Valentine's eyes keep darting around like he's trying to work out how to get away, but there's nowhere he can go and he seems to give up, he slumps against the wall and rubs his eyes like a crying child does, clumsy and ineffectual. "This ain't funny," he says dully.

"I'm not laughing, am I?"

"No, but you're smiling like fucking Pennywise."

Lindsay pulls the hammer back again and turns the gun so he's looking down its barrel, but when he pulls the trigger for the fifth time it's pointed off across the kitchen somewhere because Valentine's grabbed his arm. It's all he can do not to belt the bastard one around the face with the handle.

"Come here," he says instead, twisting his hand behind the kid's head and pulling him across the kitchen by his hair, yanking until he complies and gets to his knees. He keeps the gun pointed at his forehead and reaches back behind himself to the stereo on the counter. No idea what's in there, but he presses play and waits.

It's fucking Stealer's Wheel. Funny, he thinks, in a way that makes you want to groan and throw things at the telly.

"What-" Valentine starts, but Lindsay interrupts him.

"Make me come in three minutes twenty-nine or I'll shoot, I swear to 89

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god."

The kid stares at him like he's grown an extra couple of heads, until Lindsay cocks the gun and taps him on the forehead with it and then it's a flurry of desperate hands and a hot, wet mouth.

He thinks about boring things and horrible things – shopping list for Sainsbury's, mental note to get the MOT sorted on the Transit, Tony Blair taking it up the arse from an enthusiastic George Bush, what name to use on his next fake ID, the mastectomy scar his mother proudly flashes at anybody dumb and polite enough to sit still and take it when she's had a gin too many, how much he fucking loathes Gerry Rafferty, the smudge of birdshit on the kitchen window –

even so, it's no easy task keeping control. The kid's good at this. He's not smart but he's a fast learner and he's had enough practice to be close to perfect; he knows exactly how Lindsay likes it, the pace and suction and exactly where to put his fingers, and he's never usually one for rushing a job best done slowly but then he's never been threatened with an actual bullet before. He wonders whether the kid's still so afraid he's crying. He hopes he is. He can't tell, the top of his head looks the same as it ever does. Black, red, stupid.

Lindsay moves a bit, just very slightly, just so the corner of the worktop is digging painfully into his back. He concentrates on that feeling instead, he presses harder, he visualises little blood vessels bursting and spilling and the mottled colour the bruise is going to be, anything it takes to keep a hold. With a wave of relief that's almost like nausea he realises the song's almost over, and when it's finally faded to its finish he pulls his cock out of Valentine's mouth with his hand, using it like a sort of shield in case the kid takes it on himself to panic and bite. "Not good enough," he says, and he tucks the barrel of the gun against Valentine's ear in pointed mimicry of the first day they met, and pulls the trigger.

"You absolute
cunt
," Valentine says. He swats the gun away and rubs his ear. "You palmed that bullet. Like fucking Paul Daniels."

"I don't need to think about fucking Paul Daniels, thanks."

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"That Debbie's a saint. You're still an absolute cunt."

"Was that Tarantino enough for you?"

"That weren't Tarantino. It weren't funny or clever. That was derivative."

Lindsay hesitates, fighting the sudden inappropriate urge to laugh. "It was what?"

"Derivative. You're nicking off Tarantino trying to be cool but it ain't working."

"That's a long word for a little man."

"STIs? You're turning crazy, I'm turning smart."

"Hah, I don't think so."

Valentine reaches up to move Lindsay's hand away and begins kissing him again, but tiny, tickling, feather-light touches this time, all up and down the underside of his cock. "You want me to finish?" he murmurs, and Lindsay shivers. The urge to grab the kid's head and fuck his mouth until he chokes is almost unbearable, but that's what he wants so there's no
way
he's doing it.

"No," he says. He shoves him away, into the puddle of spilled tea, and refastens his trousers. "Clean this mess up, I'm going out."

***

The shower's going when he gets upstairs, noisy and hot. Tendrils of steam are creeping out the open bathroom door. He sits on the bed and waits, and waits, staring at the carpet and just listening. There's a creak in a pipe somewhere, when the water's on this hot. He listens to the sounds of the silence when the rainstorm of water gets switched off – the squeak of the shower door opening, a cough and a sniff, Valentine's wet footsteps on the tiles. The tap comes on, he listens to the teethbrushing and gargling and spitting, then the faint 91

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scratch of hair being vigorously rubbed dry, then:

"
Shit
, you scared me, I never knew you were back."

Lindsay tries on a smile that feels incredibly fake, and the kid hesitates and seems to think about returning it, but in the end he just tucks his towel more securely around his hips and comes over to sit on the bed next to him.

Silence.

When Valentine finally looks up and gives that half-smile, his eyes are red around one green and one blue iris.

"You
idiot
, what am I always telling you about your contacts, hmm?

Hold still." Lindsay leans in close, hand on the back of the kid's neck to keep him steady, and carefully plucks the single blue lens out of his eye. Valentine does as he's told and stays as still as the grave, except for his breath in Lindsay's face, all Aquafresh and Listerine.

"Did you like that?"

Lindsay flicks the sticky lens into the ashtray on the bedside table.

"What?" he says, but he knows what. He's just wasting time, putting off the moment he's going to have to say no, no I didn't, I fucking hated it, but as long as you get that look in your eyes I'm not going to stop.

"Honestly scaring me half to death. Cos if you liked it then I don't mind, honest I don't." He's still not moved, still perched there on the edge of the mattress with his towel slipping free from where he tucked it in and his body twisted so he's facing Lindsay. It doesn't look comfortable. Lindsay slides back against the pillows and holds a hand out, and Valentine's smile looks real now, when he swings his legs up onto the bed and curls in against Lindsay's side. He pulls a couple of buttons on his shirt through their holes, but only so he can slip a hand inside and hold him there, just touch his skin. "I'd do anything you wanted, though, if it made you happy."

Valentine's warm damp hair is starting to cool. Lindsay slides his fingers through it. The kid needs to comb it before it dries in a tangle, but he doesn't

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want him to move. "Anything?"

"Yeah."

"Will you get out? I've got a flat you can have. A house, if you want a house. I want you out."

The kid doesn't say anything for a while. When he does speak it's little more than a whisper, but Lindsay can hear him perfectly; Valentine's mouth is right by his ear and the tickle makes him shiver.

"I ain't going back to before. I'll kill myself if you make me go. Or you can kill me if you don't want me staying. Just, stop saying you're gonna shoot me if you ain't really. Stop saying you love me when you think I'm asleep."

Lindsay feels sick. "What?"

"I counted. Eleven times so far. More, maybe, if I've actually been sleeping through some. That's a bit elaborate to be a lie, innit?"

"We rob banks. I'm a master of elaborate lies."

They're talking. It's weird. They've never talked before. At least, they've never
talked
before, not like this, all stilted and awkward and devastatingly sincere. There are things to say, but he doesn't know what or how.

"Pip," he starts, and Valentine wriggles in his arms, frowning.

"I hate when you call me that."

"It's your name, isn't it? What am I supposed to call you?"

"I dunno. Darling. Sweetheart. Cariad."

"Yeah, don't fucking push it."

He leans over to find a comb in the heap of junk on Valentine's bedside table. There's got to be one somewhere, everything
else
is scattered there. He finds one hiding under an empty Quavers packet and a disgusting half-eaten Wham bar. The kid's whingeing and complaining about the movement, but Lindsay just tells him to shut it and begins combing his hair out into smooth, damp little flicks on the pillow and around his face. Valentine melts against him, 93

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sleepy and smiling. Lindsay tells himself he'll kick him out in the morning.

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It's too quiet. Lindsay wanders around the house like it's new to him and he's trying to work it out. The rooms are too big.

He puts The Queen Is Dead on in the bedroom and Telekon on in the living room and Aladdin Sane on in the kitchen and Sticky Fingers on in the car, and he turns them all up as loud as they'll go, and he stands there in the back door with his fists clenched and his eyes closed and waits to feel better but nothing happens. He just gets a headache, and there's nobody to take it out on.

It takes too long to turn everything off.

Of course the bed's still a mess. The childish little bastard never makes the bed after he gets out of it.

"If you're so clever," Morrissey wants to know, "then why are you on your own tonight?"

Lindsay wrenches the plug out the wall, and in the oppressive silence he slowly begins to straighten the bedcovers.

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***

In the end, it had been Valentine who brought up the subject sensibly and calmly and Lindsay who slapped his hands over his ears and went, "La la la la la la la!" like a five-year-old in denial about bathtime. That made the kid laugh, and then there was sex and the subject was forgotten for a while, but he brought it back up after.

"It's stupid," he said, quietly. "It don't have to be like this." Lindsay groaned and hid under a pillow, and Valentine patiently removed it and tried to make him listen. "It ain't fair. I'm not meant to, you know,
actually
be a prisoner.

I'm going off my head stuck in here all the time. You must be, and all. Normal people
go out places
."

"We go out places."

"We go out driving at midnight when you can't see nothing and nowhere's open. Ain't the same, really, is it?"