Stockholm Syndrome [01] - Stockholm Syndrome (39 page)

"Good morning," he chokes out, after, with his eyes still heavy from sleep and his hand tangled in the kid's hair, trying to get his breath back and find the energy to wake up properly and reciprocate. Valentine just smirks.

"Yeah, it is. Lazy fucker, I've been awake
ages
. Get up, I wanna go and see Jim Morrison."

Lindsay uses the shower like a normal person. Valentine insists on using the gigantic bathtub and all the bubbles. When he finally comes out of the bathroom all toothpaste-fresh and hair-washed he smells like a girl. Still, Lindsay stops getting dressed, even though he's only half-done, because he gets this urge to ambush the kid with a hug. Just that, nothing else. He wraps his arms around

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Valentine's skinny body and pulls him close and rests his cheek on the still-damp hair and inhales the cherry-almond scent of his shampoo, and Valentine says,

"Oh!" in a really odd way, like he's just read a particularly interesting fact on the back of a Penguin biscuit wrapper. Lindsay's got his eyes shut but he can feel the kid's hands creeping up his bare arms, over his shoulders. One stays there and the other comes to rest on the back of his neck, fingers playing idly with the ends of his hair, and several minutes pass without sound or movement, just the gentle thud of heartbeats.

"What's that for?" Valentine asks, when Lindsay finally lets him go.

"Don't know. Nothing. Just seemed the kind of thing you'd like. BAM, surprise ninja cuddles."

Valentine's laughing a bit, reluctant to give up the hug and still clinging to Lindsay, arms up around his neck. "You know, when you forget how sad and embarrassing it is being in love, you're pretty good at it. I mean, for an old miserable fart who hates being touched."

"You cheeky shit, let's have less of the old and miserable." He slides his hands over the back of Valentine's jeans, pulling him closer at the hips, and starts to press a line of gossamer-soft kisses on his face, starting at his mouth, ending up by his ear. "I've only just put my belt on," he murmurs. "Don't make me take it off to you again."

"Oh,

there
you are. Thought I'd lost you for a minute." He's laughing but it's shaky, and Lindsay's pretty sure it's going to be easy enough to convince him to put off sightseeing for a little while longer. He gives the hem of the kid's t-shirt an experimental little tug, just to check, then he's laughing as well when Valentine lifts his arms up in the air so he can peel it off, cheerfully calling him a tart and manhandling him back to bed.

ii. Thursday noon. Musée du Louvre.

"I swear to god," Lindsay says, for about the fortieth time today, "if one more Da Vinci Code tourist gets under my feet I will shoot it in the face."

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"You ain't even read it. It's good."

"...If you've read that book, you're getting it too."

"No, but I watched the film. It was good! Forrest Gump's in it."

"Have I taught you
nothing
about cinema?" His anguished tone is only half-faked. Ten minutes in the Louvre and he's already on the verge of homicide from being slapped around the face by everything he loathes about Paris. This is why he bought the house in St. Lizier – because it's about as far away from Paris as it's possible to get while still being in France, geographically
and
culturally.

"I'm changing your prescription. You're very very sick. You need some Hitchcock, a bit of Fritz Lang, a Truffaut triple-bill, and lots and lots of Billy Wilder, quick, before it's too late."

"You're a snob. You don't even like Star Wars, you ain't allowed an opinion on films."

"It's for children."

"Oh, yeah, right, and you weren't ever a nipper, were you? You were born forty-five."

"I'm thirty-six!" he starts to object, but doesn't get to finish because Valentine stops dead just in front of him and Lindsay treads on his heels and then there's shoe-drama. "Shut up, don't just
stop
in front of me if you don't want me scuffing your stupid boots," he snaps, and Valentine sniffs in a passive-aggressive sort of way but doesn't say anything more, just turns again to look at what it was that made him stop.

"All them people..."

"Da Vinci Code tourists. Yes. Need culling like manky cattle."

"What are they looking at?"

Lindsay raises an eyebrow and stares at him. "You ever heard of the Mona Lisa?"

"That's

it
?" Valentine says, although it's more like a screech and people

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turn round to glare at him. He ignores them and tries to peer over the heads of the crowd to see better. "It's rubbish! It's dead small!"

"Ooookay," Lindsay says, and grabs onto his sleeve to hurry him away, in case the rabid crowd decides to turn nasty and try papercutting them to death with the pages of their shitty novels.

He tries to tell the kid things, bits of Byron when they're looking at Delacroix's La Mort de Sardanapale, but Valentine just flaps a hand at him like he's an annoying little fly and goes to gaze at the brushwork. Lindsay shuts up, a bit sullenly. This is the first time ever that Valentine hasn't been pestering him to hold hands or buy him something or go somewhere else because he's bored. A good thing, really. Isn't it? He shoves his hands deep in his pockets and feels a bit lost – a bit, weirdly, like
he's
the uncultured brainless one, even though it's Valentine standing there in a scarlet cowboy hat and a Morrison Hotel t-shirt with his mouth gaping open like he's seconds away from drooling.

Later, the kid comes up behind him and slips his hand into Lindsay's, puts the other on his shoulder and goes up on tiptoe to whisper in his ear,

"Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael... they got any Donatello here? Cos then we seen all the Turtles and we can go home." Lindsay feels better then.

iii. Thursday afternoon. Cimetière du Père-Lachaise.

"...and

that's
why I like the Strokes," Lindsay concludes. "Get baby Hammond on keyboards where he belongs, that's exactly what the Doors would sound like if they were around now... what?" Valentine's laughing and clutching himself like he's going to have an accident. "What?"

"I would love to see you at a Strokes gig. I'd
love
it. I'd give a kidney."

"You will eat your mocking words, sir. Bake them up into a big humble pie and eat it down, next time you hear Juicebox and have to admit I'm right."

Valentine's managed to get them holding hands without him realising it, because he lifts their little clutched bundle of fingers now and kisses over Lindsay's knuckles.

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"You're

ridiculous."

"I'm

right
. Give me back my hand."

He reluctantly drops it, and wanders by the edge of the path to nosy at the monuments to people he's never heard of. Héloïse and Abélard, Francis Poulenc. "Thought you only liked dirty jazz?"

"I'll listen to anything, if it's good."

"But you won't listen to Wig Wam Bam?"

"...I'll listen to anything, if it's good."

"You

are

such
a square. The Sweet's one of the most underrated bands of all time, never mind just the seventies." Some blank-eyed stoner in a leather jacket is drawing a big arrow on the paving in what looks like snooker cue chalk, where the path forks. Valentine steps around him and turns, green coat flying out like a dancing girl's skirt, so he can walk backwards and get a look at what the man's scrawling in big messy capital letters under the arrow.

"
Square
? It's not the nineteen-sixties."

"Yeah it is." He stops walking and waits for Lindsay to catch up, and gestures at the blue letters. "We're entering the lair of the Lizard King. It's 1967

forever."

Lindsay stays back when they get there, out of the way, while the kid joins the little group already there to pay their respects to Jim Morrison, or whatever it is they're doing. Paying your respects to Jim Morrison appears to involve cadging a smoke off the chalk-dusty graffiti artist and losing your mind in his honour. He half-expects to see someone handing out heroin needles. It all seems a bit grubby and
dis
respectful. There's a teenage girl in tears leaning over to drop a red rose on top of the heap of flowers. Her
parents
can't have been old enough in the sixties to go to Doors concerts and now she's here sobbing her heart out over a dead drug addict she's probably only ever heard on mp3.

Valentine gives her a hug and offers her his smoke, and they stand there with their arms around each other's waists, a couple of complete strangers who can't

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even understand one another staring mutely at a grave.

Lindsay sighs and looks away, checking his pockets until he remembers he's out of cigarettes. He feels irrationally annoyed by the gang of kids and kind of claustrophobic, even in the open air and brisk breeze, like he's just too old and uncool to be allowed in this bit of the cemetery. And if that girl's hand slips any lower over Valentine's waistband, he's going to break her fingers off.

"Philip," he calls. The kid ignores him. Lindsay didn't expect him to answer, but it's still aggravating when he's clearly heard. "Okay, then.
Pip
," he says, saturated with sarcasm because he still thinks it's a stupid nickname.

Valentine does answer to that, passes the chalky joint back to its owner and looks up with his eyebrows raised.

"I'm going to talk to Oscar. You coming, or do you want to meet later?"

"Don't

just

maroon
me in the middle of Paris!" He hurries over, trailing a faint scented haze of marijuana. "Oscar who?"

"Wilde. You stink of that stuff, I don't like you smoking it."

He gently bumps into Lindsay as they're walking, teasingly. "Nothing makes one so vain as being told one is a sinner. Oh, don't look at me all surprised, I ain't read Oscar Wilde, I've just seen Velvet Goldmine fifty thousand times. I used to have a coat like his, the blue stripy one. My dad put it on the bonfire Guy one year and burned it up cos he said it made me look like a bender."

"Oh," Lindsay says lamely. He never knows what to say when Valentine brings his parents up like this. It's easier when he's angry and raging about something from his past he's suddenly remembered and been upset by, because then the only thing to do is soothe him and try to calm him down and stop him kicking walls and throwing things about. Sometimes, though, he just talks about things in such a matter-of-fact way and Lindsay's uncomfortably lost.

Valentine seems cheerful enough, though, putting his hands in his pockets to hold the shiny green coat out, twirling around like a little girl doing 321

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ballet. "He'd fucking
loathe
this one, that's why I like it best. Oh, hey, I just thought of something." He stops fooling around suddenly and comes back to walk to Lindsay's side. "If people leave them little drug-offerings on Jim Morrison's grave like altar goodies..."

"...yes?"

"Then what are you gonna do to me at Oscar Wilde's to properly honour
him
?"

iv. Friday morning. Paris hotel.

He's flirting with the chambermaid again. He's not even trying to be discreet about it. He
knows
Lindsay's standing there waiting for him and he's still at it, lolling against the wall chattering away to this little French thing with her lipgloss and dark curls, laughing at something she says and then being laughed at in return when he tries to repeat it and gets his pronunciation all wrong. He reaches out to fiddle with something on her trolley as they're talking, a tiny bottle of shampoo, and she closes his fingers around it like it's a Darling thimble.

"Pip," he says, sharply. Sometimes the kid won't respond to his name just to be difficult, not even Pip, but he looks up now.

"What?"

"Come

on."

He rolls his eyes and grins at the girl like they're sharing some wonderful joke, then pockets the shampoo bottle and calls a soft, "À bientôt,"

back over his shoulder. When the lift door's closed behind him he slips his arms up around Lindsay's neck and kisses his stubbly jaw and his cheeks and nose and lips like nothing's wrong.

"Get off me," Lindsay mutters. He's rubbing his fingers together because one's got inverted Braille marks where he's been holding the button to keep the lift doors open.

"What's up with you?" He doesn't move away much, just relaxes his grip

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a bit so he can see Lindsay's face. He's got his wide-eyed innocent look on.

Lindsay's not fooled for a second, he never is.

"Do you have to flirt with that girl every single time you see her?"

"I'm

not

flirting
, I'm just talking! She's got to strip our manky spermy lubey sheets off the bed every morning, least we can do is be
nice
to her."

Lindsay kind of thinks that's a reason to
avoid
her, not engage her in conversation knowing all the time that she's probably gossiping every spare second away with the other maids about those lust-crazed benders in the top suite. "It's her job, isn't it? That's what she gets paid for. It's not
my
fault she's too dim for anything except changing beds and scrubbing toilets."

"You fucking snob, like you're any better. We can't
all
be international criminals."

"Just... I don't want you talking to her any more."

He half-expects Valentine to get all petulant and sulky at being told who he can and can't talk to, but instead he breaks into a smile and slips his fingers through the back of Lindsay's hair to pull him closer, goes back up on tiptoe to start pressing those feather-light kisses on his face again, his forehead and around his eyes and down over his cheek to his ear. "You don't have to be jealous," he says, very quietly. "Ne sois jamais jaloux, jamais. C'est
toi
que j'aime."5