Stockholm Syndrome [01] - Stockholm Syndrome (49 page)

Later on, when the tinge of dawn is just beginning to show at the edge of the window, there's nobody left in the room but Lindsay. He closes the door, and he sits down heavily in the chair near Pip's pillow. He doesn't say anything, he just sits. After a minute he sighs, then he scrubs his hands over his face and makes a funny sort of groaning noise that could mean anything at all, tiredness or frustration or apology or god knows what, and after that he starts following a crease in the white sheet with his fingertip, just a few inches along and then back again, back and forth and back and forth like it's a compulsion.

"Your facefuzz is gone," Pip says. He's only just realised.

"Yeah." Lindsay stops pushing at the creased sheet and self-consciously rubs his hand over his chin. "They've got these awful disposable razors in the shop downstairs. I don't know if..." ...
the police got a good look at me
remains unsaid, but Pip hears it anyway.

"Don't suppose I'll be allowed near a razor while I'm here, will I?"

"No, I don't suppose you will." He's never sounded so awkward. "They want you to talk to someone. Therapist."

"Stupid, though, really, ain't it? Bet the people who make them rules ain't never tried actually slitting their wrists on a safety razor. Ain't possible. God knows I tried enough times, but you just shave the hairs off your arm. Best you'll do is a little nick. Nobody's gonna bleed to death from a Bic."

Lindsay's horribly silent.

Pip's had long enough to think things over, to work things out and put bits into order like a jigsaw where you kind of wish you can rip a bit back out and unsee the finished picture. He sort of feels angry, or like he's
going
to be angry, upset, hurt, betrayed, a thousand other things, just as soon as he's got the strength for it. Mostly he feels tired, and lazily vindictive. He usually makes a noise when he loses his temper, he shouts and throws things around just like 395

C H A P T E R 3 3

Lindsay does. Now he just wants to twist and twist the knife without even getting up from his bed, twist and twist and
twist
until they both lose their minds, if they're not already there.

"What was it, sleeping pills? Crunched-up paracetamol? What?" Still nothing. "Can't've been much, though. You're a rubbish murderer. You could've just shot me nice and quick."

"I didn't want to scare you," Lindsay mumbles, aiming the quiet words vaguely at his own knees.

That's a bit funny. Pip almost smiles, even. "Oh yeah, good job with that, tonight's been well nice for me, not scary at all."

"Shut up." The words sound strange and hollow.

"I was gonna kill myself before, you know. When I was a kid. Well.

About sixteen. I googled it and everything, I weren't gonna be one of them failures who fuck it up and have to carry their piss round in a carrier bag for the rest of their lives, I was gonna do it
proper
. If you do sleeping pills or something, I think you're meant to take some then wait a bit then take some more and wait a bit and take some more just when you're about to fall asleep, cos if you take 'em all at once you'll just throw up. Or your wrists, yeah, don't just cut
over
your veins, that's rubbish, that's just what emo brats do to make people think they're all tortured and stuff. If you go right up your vein, right up to your elbow, ain't nothing they can do about that, you'll bleed out before you even realise you're done carving yourself up."

"Shut up," Lindsay says again. "Please stop it."

"And I nearly jumped off the roof this one time. Cos after they won the Lottery, yeah, and they made me go to this posh twats' school for A levels, it weren't cos they wanted me to get taught better or nothing, it was just cos it cost money and they were showing off. Miss Wyndham liked me cos I'm good at drawing, she was my art teacher. Everyone else thought I was a robber or something, cos their dads were all like Sir Whatever or big important businessmen and I never know when I'm meant to say who and whom. So I went

396

S T O C K H O L M S Y N D R O M E

in one day pissed as fuck cos Olly stayed over and we drank all my mum's Stella, he skived off work and sneaked in with me and we went up on the roof and we were gonna jump off, cos him and his girlfriend broke up and I was just tired.

Bet you don't even know what that's like, when you're tired enough you just wanna go to sleep forever. Miss Wyndham talked us down, though. Probably best. There was a bit..." He gestures with his hands, but the shape in the air doesn't look anything like it's supposed to. "Like the lobby bit, it stuck out in front, we'd've probably just landed on there and broken our legs or something, then our parents would've battered us anyway while we couldn't run for it."

"
Shut up
."

"Alright," Pip says, amiably enough on the outside although there's a vicious nasty bit on the inside that's cheering.

They don't speak for a while. Inside the room it's completely silent, but there's noise all around – the beginnings of birdsong outside, the squeak of shoes and wheeled beds the other side of the door, the sound of voices.

"Was it because he ripped your monkey?" Lindsay says. His voice is low. He's looking at his knees again.

Pip realises he's rubbing the corner of the pillow between his thumb and fingertip, the way he rubs Mister Bollo's ear when he's anxious. It's a stupid, babyish sort of habit, he
knows
it is, but he doesn't know how to stop.

"Not

only."

"So

it

is
? You set us up and got them killed because... he ripped the arm off your toy monkey?"

"I said 'not only', Lindsay," he says peevishly.

"Why,

then?"

"Cos he's a twat. And a horrible bully. And oh yeah, nearly forgot, a mass-murderer. How many coppers did he kill, in all? Did you even keep count that high?"

Lindsay sighs, long and shaky. "What about his children, then? Did you 397

C H A P T E R 3 3

think of
them
?"

"Yeah, he weren't good for them little girls, they're better off without him."

"Better off without their mum, too?"

"No, no, she's alright."

"They'll raid the house. They'll find the stolen paintings and everything, she'll-"

"No she won't. She can just play dumb. There's enough ancient Holbein copies and shit in there, there's enough he bought all legit, she can just make on like she knows fuck all about art and left all that to him. He was a proper cunt but he weren't
thick
, don't you think they'll have made plans for if something went wrong? She knows what she's doing."

Lindsay breathes out, long and slow. He rests his elbow on the bed, and his face in his hand, so his next words are all muffled. "Do
you
know what you're doing?"

"
I
ain't thick, either. It's sorted. Everything's fixed with the chief constable." He thought Lindsay might have some kind of reaction to that, but he just sits there still and silent, just breathing. "You're blackmailing him, he's blackmailing
you
, I wanted a go. All I said was he's got to make sure the other two get caught and you don't and I won't let slip about stuff he don't want letting slip. Weren't even that hard, was it? I mean, I knew you were driving cos you wouldn't let me come, so all he had to do was set up an ambush in the building and job done."

"He'll kill you. For blackmailing him."

"No he won't, I said I'd suck his cock." That makes Lindsay snap his head up and stare in disbelief. "Only kidding." His head goes down again, his hand goes over his eyes again. "Don't worry about alibis or nothing, either. We'll probably get people snooping round anyway cos you were mates with them, but there's no way you could've been there cos Harvey's gonna swear to the ends of

398

S T O C K H O L M S Y N D R O M E

the earth him and his wife were round ours for dinner and drinks. Spose it's even better I chose tonight to try and commit suicide. Loads of witnesses saying we were here, too."

"What if people think you tried to kill yourself because you saw the news?"

"Just need a character witness, then. As if
I
watch the
news
."

The square of sky outside the window seems like it's getting brighter by the second, filling up like the colour bleeding off a paintbrush dunked in water, all pinks and oranges. Pip remembers driving past the hospital a thousand times going up and down the A55 – a squat ugly dingy concrete block, like a prison clinging to the side of the hill. He always thought if he ever ended up in the place he'd probably die of misery whether they cured him or not, but it doesn't seem too bad looking out.

"My dad died in this hospital," Lindsay says suddenly.

Pip wonders what you're meant to say to something like that. He settles on a noncommittal sort of
oh
.

"Stomach cancer at first, but it spread. I was eighteen. I just started at King's, I was back and forth every weekend sending myself insane with it all.

And that's about when I started seeing Ellie..."

Pip wants to kill her. It doesn't matter how much he actually likes her, he wants to kill her every time Lindsay says her name, and he hopes for a minute she
does
get sent down for all the robbed paintings in her house and fisted in the showers by some massive dyke with ugly tattoos and a shaved head. He doesn't say anything, though, and Lindsay doesn't notice anything's wrong because he's still hiding in his hand, mumbling into his palm.

"She came home with me one weekend, and she met my mum and dad, and then in the afternoon she went off to the toilet and as soon as she was out of earshot my dad went 'Oh thank Christ, I thought you were a queer'."

Pip shifts in bed, feeling annoyed and uncomfortable. "What're you 399

C H A P T E R 3 3

telling me that for now?"

"Don't know. I think about it, sometimes. A lot. Everything in the world and the
one thing
he said he could die happy knowing was that I wasn't, you know."

"Bent as a nine bob note?"

"Shut

up."

"Alright." He closes his eyes. He's aware of movement, but doesn't bother looking to see where Lindsay's going. It's not like there's anywhere in the room
to
go. The window, that's it.

"What about Danny?" Lindsay says after a bit, very quietly. "He didn't touch your monkey."

Pip opens his eyes to glare, but it's wasted on Lindsay's back. He
is
at the window, standing there with folded arms and his forehead touching the glass.

"Leave Mister Bollo out of it, I said not
only
that."

"So what about Danny, then?"

"He's... thingy. Whatsit. Collateral damage."

"You're crazy. You're... completely, completely insane."

"Yeah, you keep on saying so. But you still can't kill me, can you?"

Lindsay turns round to look at him. He's got that nothingness in his eyes again. Pip's throat hurts where the tube was. He needs a piss but he doesn't know where to go. He remembers out of nowhere a trip they took to Whitby a while ago, how he'd tried to run a Slinky spring down the steps from the abbey but they weren't spaced right and it didn't work. Lindsay called him an idiot, even though he was laughing. It seemed like a good idea when it was in the planning stage, all of this, but he can feel the beginnings of a blossoming fear somewhere inside, like a rock or a sleeping monster at the bottom of his stomach. It's alright being angry now, Lindsay being angry at Pip for getting his friends killed and Pip being angry at Lindsay for trying to kill him in return, but it's got to end
somewhere
, this stupid tit-for-tat thing, this epic chess game with real people

400

S T O C K H O L M S Y N D R O M E

instead of funny little wooden carvings, and when it does and they have a proper look to see what's changed and what's left, maybe there won't be
anything
left.

He's too tired to care, just now. That'll change soon.

"Of course I can't," Lindsay says. "I love you." He sounds broken, he sounds
dead
, but Pip smiles suddenly, the first proper smile he's done in what feels like forever. He hadn't been expecting it that time.

401

C H A P T E R 3 4

The house feels weird when they get back from the hospital. Nothing's changed. Everything's changed. Lindsay fills the kettle and flicks it on, and stands there at the counter fiddling with mugs and teabag boxes and coffee jars and sugarbowls. There's something different in the line of his shoulders; it's like the way he carries himself has shifted just slightly, not enough to really notice but enough that something feels wrong. Pip watches him so he doesn't have to look at the shattered crockery still on the floor. When the kettle starts to boil he hops up to sit on the dinner table because he knows he's not supposed to, because it's an excuse for Lindsay to speak to him when he turns back round, even if it's only to tell him off.

"Coffee," is the only thing Lindsay says, setting the mug down on the table next to Pip's swinging leg, and then he wanders off into the living room and closes the door behind himself, like punctuation. A big slamming full stop.

Pip blows on the surface of his drink until it's cool enough. It's good.

Lots of sugar and lots of milk, it's the only way he likes his coffee. Nobody else does it properly, they think he's joking when he says four sugars, or they think he means four geometrically-perfect level teaspoons and not big white heaps.

402

S T O C K H O L M S Y N D R O M E

Lindsay does it
properly
, so when he drinks it leaves a sticky, grainy trail up the inside of the mug and he can scoop it up with his finger and lick it off. It's a disgusting habit, Lindsay says, but he still makes it like that, even now after everything, even when they're sort of fighting. They're not fighting, really.

Fighting means spat words and snarling, a slap round the face or a belt over the arse and then they fuck and make up. Fighting isn't this
nothing
.