Stockholm Syndrome [01] - Stockholm Syndrome (2 page)

"HA. How? You couldn't grow a beard if you slept with your head in a bag of fertiliser."

"Alright, smartarse. I been working evenings in a barber's since I was fourteen, ain't I? I'll tell you what, I could sort out that crap you call hair and all."

"Absolutely not."

Valentine disappears, though, and comes back with bacon-greasy scissors slipped through a beltloop on his jeans, dragging a chair from the kitchen. "Come on, sit down. You make me go all... nervous, I dunno, I don't like people doing it themselves if I can do it better, makes me go all skincrawly."

"No!" He wants to laugh, suddenly. This is ridiculous.

"Come on! We'll pretend you're in the shop, yeah? Alright, Mr. Brown, how's it going? Come and sit down, what's it gonna be today? Nice shave and haircut? Ain't the weather been good? You going on your holidays this year?"

Lindsay sits down, only to shut him up, and the kid grins at him. "That's it. No murder, I swear. Swear on Jagger and Bowie and flying saucers, you'll get out of this alive."

"I must be insane," he murmurs, trying not to move too much.

"Shut up. Let the maestro work." He turns out to be one of those people who stick their tongue out the corner of their mouth when they're concentrating, which doesn't fill Lindsay with much confidence in his abilities at all. He's got

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this dreadful lurching feeling in his stomach that he's going to die here, shirtless on a metal chair in his friend's bathroom, bleeding out from a razor plunged into his artery by a man wearing smudged eye make-up and sticking his tongue out like a dog.

"Put your tongue in," he blurts out eventually, and immediately feels like an idiot.

"What? Oh." The kid laughs a bit without stopping working. "Put my tongue in where?"

"Shut up."

"Alright." He's like a clockwork toy, though. He just can't stay silent, he's babbling on again before too long about how he's just been kicking Danny's arse on the old Sega Mega Drive. All the time, the gentle scritch of the razor over bristles carries on, quiet and steady. It's a strange angle, it's awkward trying to see anything, but Lindsay watches him work in the mirror, and slowly, slowly begins to relax. He wasn't lying or exaggerating, he
does
know what he's doing.

He's a got a firm, sure touch and a look of intense concentration on his face even as he's rattling on about Sonic.

"See. Weren't that bad, was it?" Valentine says, after a while. He catches Lindsay's eye in the mirror and grins, looking pleased with himself, then finds a towel and starts patting his face dry. "Where's your moisturiser?"

"What moisturiser?"

A little pause. "Fucking hell," he mutters, under his breath, then disappears again; he's got his Harry Potter backpack on his shoulder when he comes into the bathroom again, and roots around inside it until he's found the right bottle. "You really should.
Really
."

"Don't-" Lindsay starts, but it's too late, the kid's already slapping a palmful of cream onto his face, so he sighs and puts up with it.

"Sun protection in it and all!" Valentine's saying cheerfully. "I mean, not like you're gonna need it in
Manchester
, but y'know. Always best to be safe, 15

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innit? Bit late for you, mind."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

He comes round the front of the chair and steps over one of Lindsay's legs, leaning against the sink and still touching his face, although it's more like stroking now, just with his fingertips, gently over his cheeks and down his jaw.

Lindsay's not sure whether this is supposed to be part of it. He stays quiet.

"Nothing," he kid says, but he's smirking a bit. "Only you've gotta be as old as my dad, ain't you? No hope for you now."

"I only just turned thirty-four last week!"

"Yeah? I was nineteen in March."

"So I'm not old enough to be your dad at all, thank you."

"Yeah, mate. You wanna see where I grew up. If you didn't have a baby by the time you were in Year Nine, that automatically made you a poof."

"Oh." He's pretty sure the kid's hand on his face isn't doing anything useful any more at all, just cupping his jaw, stroking his cheekbone gently with his soft thumb. "Are you?"

"Might be. Are you asking me out?"

This is stupid. He slaps Valentine's hand away and gets up, taking the chair with him back to the kitchen. The kid doesn't follow after him, he just shouts: "Aww, come on, let me do your hair!"

"Absolutely not!"

"Fucking spoilsport, you look like you been dragged through a hedge."

"Fuck off."

"I'll do it while you're sleeping."

"I'll
kill
you while you're sleeping."

Later on, after they've devoured a takeaway Chinese banquet big enough for twice their number, the other two start up one of their dumb computer games

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again, as if they ever do anything else when they're winding down after a job.

Lindsay starts on the book he brought along for his flight tomorrow. He's going to have to buy another at the airport, or at least that's what he thought when he started; he's not actually getting very much reading done at all, though, so maybe not. Valentine's lying on his front on one of the sofas, half-heartedly flicking through an old copy of Empire. He's got his legs bent, kicking up behind him like a little girl, and the huge ridiculous flares have slipped down around his knees. Lindsay looks away from him, back to his book. A minute later he has to look away
again
; it's almost like his eyes have forgotten who's in charge and don't want to do as they're told any more. They keep sliding back to the kid, the way he's shovelling handfuls of Butterkist into his mouth and the way he's swinging his legs in time to some silent music only he can hear. His bare skin is very pale and the hairs on his legs are very dark.

Lindsay frowns and pushes his glasses back into place from where they've slipped down the slope of his nose. Five lines later he's looking at the kid's arse and how tightly the denim is stretched over the curves. It says 'princess'

on one of the pockets in peeling red glitter.

"You wanna take a photo, old man?" Valentine says suddenly, and Lindsay almost drops his book. "Might last longer, yeah?"

He manages a glare and starts his page over, but when he looks up again after a few minutes the kid's watching him already, twisted slightly sideways so he can look back over his shoulder. He's sort of smiling. He's wearing light blue socks with pink heels and toes and a pink and silver unicorn on each ankle.

Lindsay wonders what the fuck is going on and why things are never straightforward.

"What?" he snaps. "Leave me alone, I'm trying to read."

"I ain't stopping you."

"Stop looking at me."

"Are you five?"

"No, but I've got a gun."

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The kid laughs at that, almost. A breathy sort of noise through his nose, and a curl of the lips. "I know," he says quietly. He chucks his magazine onto the floor, dropping all pretences, and turns over onto his back so he can see Lindsay better. It makes his t-shirt ride up a bit, exposing a wide stripe of white skin interrupted in the middle by the dark little comma of his navel and a line of black hair. He doesn't seem to notice, he just yawns, scratches his hipbone idly, puts the empty popcorn bag on top of the magazine, and keeps on looking at Lindsay.

"What else've you got?"

"What?"

"You know. Boyfriend?"

He spills a sudden little burst of laughter, only because he's surprised and doesn't know what to say. "What makes you think I'm-"

"Come off it, mate. Act straight all you like, but Danny and Ty ain't staring at my arse."

"Nor am I."

"Only cos I'm sitting on it now." He shuts up for a minute, still wearing that strange half-smile, then he glances down at himself, the Pac-Man belt and the creases and folds in the fly of his jeans, then back up at Lindsay, and somehow it's obvious that he means it. If it was anybody else, Lindsay would laugh it off or get in a temper at being made fun of, but there's something different here – the angle of the raised eyebrow, maybe, or the way the kid's started curling a long lock of dark blond hair around and around his finger. He realises it all at once like a slap in the face, and has no idea what to do with the information:
I could have this kid
.

The pause drags on just a fraction too long, and he quickly settles his mouth into an exaggerated, not-entirely-genuine sneer. "You're not my type.

Really."

"What's your type?"

"Triple-digit IQ might be nice."

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"I ain't got a type." Valentine yawns again and stretches, a proper full-body stretch with toes pointed in those ridiculous socks and fingers splayed above his head, so the hem of his t-shirt shifts up almost to his sternum. "Just, y'know. Pulse. I ain't that fussy, beyond 'pulse'." He raises his voice, suddenly, and calls down the length of the room to where the other two are sprawled on beanbags playing their stupid car racing game. "Oi, mate, where am I sleeping?

Am I just crashing here?"

Danny pauses the game and looks at him. "You know it ain't even ten o'clock yet?"

"Yeah, but I only got three hours last night, then some bloke stuck a gun in my ear. Adrenaline crashdown or something, innit?"

Danny seems to find that funny. Lindsay rolls his eyes.

"Down the hall, second door on the left, there's bunkbeds."

"
Bunkbeds
?" Valentine repeats, like nothing in the world has ever been so brilliant.

"Yeah. For when he brings his kids over." He nods his head at Ty, and starts the game up again. "Might be toddler piss stains on the mattresses, sorry.

Sheets are clean, though."

"That's well cool." He tugs at his t-shirt then, as if he's only just realised he's exposing half his torso, and swings his legs over the edge of the sofa so he's sitting properly like a normal person instead of lounging there like a Roman.

"You going on top, Mr. Brown?" he asks softly, and something warm and almost impossible not to react to seems to unfurl in Lindsay's stomach.

"Just... shut your mouth and get to bed."

"Jesus, don't say things like that if you ain't coming with me." He's actually blushing a bit, but half-laughing as well, like he's not really embarrassed at all. He pulls an elastic band off his wrist and holds it in his teeth while he finger-combs his hair back into a shaggy ponytail, then binds it off. Bits immediately fall out back around his face, they're too short to stay. He pushes his 19

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bottom lip out and blows a strand away from his eye so he can look at Lindsay again. "See you in the morning then, yeah?"

"Yeah," Lindsay says, even though he's leaving early and probably won't see him at all, then he adds, "Sweet dreams," without realising he's going to. Still, it's almost worth feeling like a right prat for the look of surprise and then pleasure that flashes onto Valentine's face. The kid waves over his shoulder, then he's gone. Lindsay suddenly remembers how to read again.

He wakes in the morning in a very strange mood, to the insistent bleeping of his phone alarm; life feels real again somehow. It's always the same after a job, even the ones that go flawlessly. Things don't feel real for a little while. It's the waiting, the constant certainty that there's going to be the sound of sirens any second now, even though logically he knows they've covered their tracks well enough. Sleep seems to give him the distance he needs to get over the thrilling rush a bit, start to settle back into normality – except it's not normal any more, there's a pair of dead policemen and surely a shitload of press attention to navigate, as well as this crazy new scam going on. He's always found it easy enough to keep his two lines of business separate, but now he's flying off for meetings in America with the kid's face rattling around in his head.

"Morning," Valentine says, and Lindsay swears like crazy and waits for his heart to clamber down from his throat back to where it belongs.

"What the hell are you doing here?"

"Reading." He holds up the same magazine he was idly flicking through last night.

"It's five in the morning."

"Yeah. I shouldn't've gone to sleep so early, I'm all out of whack. Wide awake. How come you never slept in the spare bed?"

There's another spare bedroom, a
proper
spare bedroom with a proper double bed that they take turns in, but Ty refused point-blank to share and only burst out laughing when Lindsay tried to talk him into sleeping in the bunk, so he gave up eventually and took the tiny single duvet off the bed so he could sleep

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on the sofa. Valentine had been flat out when he went in, illuminated by a sharp line of moonlight knifing in though the crack in the curtains. Most of his hair had fallen out of his ponytail, and he was lying on his back hugging the corner of his duvet like a teddy bear. Fucking little idiot, Lindsay had said under his breath, and he'd meant it, too – but he'd still crept across the room to quietly pull the curtains closed.

"Didn't want to blunder round and wake you so early." He fumbles to find his glasses. The room's not that much more in focus when he's got them on, so he shoves them up on top of his head and scrubs his knuckles into his eyes, trying to wake up. "Can I smell coffee?"

"Yeah. Fucking Gadget City in his kitchen, you seen it? He's got all sorts but I dunno how to make nothing work so it's just Kenko. You want some?"

"Yeah."

"Magic word?"

"Black, no sugar."

"Good enough."

He's awake enough by the time the kid gets back to have started feeling slightly uncomfortable about how little they're both wearing. Lindsay's only got his boxers on, but he's under the cover. Valentine's wearing blue and white y-fronts and the faded pink Roxy Music t-shirt he had on yesterday. He seems utterly unconcerned, slumped there in the armchair with his bare legs slung over the arm, drinking his coffee. He's dotted with tattoos – a scatter of black stars on his left foot, some words written up the length of his inner forearm, the number 15 on the back of his right wrist. Lindsay stares at them so he won't stare at the bulge in the kid's pants and feel like a paedophile. Valentine doesn't seem to notice.