Stockholm Syndrome 2- 17 Black and 29 Red (11 page)

can we go to your old house before we go to your mums? cos i dont think i can be with you for them 3 days and not touch you i'll EXPLODE and i still feel weird doing it in her house haha. i will tho. i cna be dead quiet if you can, cant make a noise if my mouths full anyway. OH WHOOPS there i go, thats quite dirty. i aint got the energy to make a proper efort, you shoudl just know if i WANTED to write you a dirty email it'd be the fucking best dirtyest email anybody in the whole world ever ever read.

i love you. your gonna get bored of me saying it. i swear it aint just to fill up silences or something or cos i dont know what else to say, i swear i mean it all th etime. i just want you to KNOW. i know you say you do but you dont realy cos even I dont, sometimes i wake up in the middle of the nihgt and i'm looking at you and i love you so much i even suprise myself XD i'm like WHOAH TOO MUCH its like in supernatural when the psychic saw the angel on acident and her eyes fell out cos humans just aint built to cope with that, i dont know what to DO or say or nothing. aw fuck it everything just sounds wank. its a proper cliche but i never felt like this befor eover anythign. even the time i met David Bowie (<3) and i was sat in a room with him just him and me for like 10 mins when i was skiving off i was mant to be taking people drinks but yeah right like i'm going ANYWHERE when he's started a convasation with me!! i remember i thought this is IT, this is true love, my heart was going that fast and i couldnt breathe properly and every time he looked me in the eye i wanted to bust out crying and laugh and kiss him and throw up all at once (lol not throw up ON him i would have to kill my self) and thats what its like now EVERY DAY EVERY SINGLE MINUTE ALL THE TIME with you, its like it aint even feeling love when i see you or think about you or nothing its like feeling every single feeling its posible to feel all at once even the bad ones, like love and lust and beign happy and safe and all the normal stuff but then as well i'm scared cos one day your gonna stop being amused by me and that'll be it. thats stupid. i know you love me. i dont know why you do but i believe you. maybe thats the scary thing, i aint used to KNOWING, i'm used to hopeing but not propelry knowing. whateverrr. lol emo bitch. i love you too. xxx

wow ok. i only started typing so i could tell you i miss you and how much i wish i had your cock down my throat right now,got a bit carried away and it turne dinto some fucking soap opera soliloquy (although that bj statment is still true) haha this is why i never wrote a love letter before XD except to David Bowie but that dont count cos it was a bit stalkery i think. good it all got vommed up maybe, i cant say it in person cos i cant make my mouth work on words, its only good for 1 thing ;) well 2 cos i'm quite good at eating haribo too

so yeah i'm gonna go and have a little sleepy now i think, i feel all naughty cos this is only the 2nd easter saturday night of my whole life i aint wasted on church \o/ feels quite nice getting one over on the fuckheads who kept threatning me with all sorts of nasty eternal peril, i was chucking myself round the floor gettign high on basslines while they had their stupid little holy water fights, quite briliant. i wish you was there though. i mean not realy cos it aint your scene i know you would of hated it. or maybe not? you used to like it, you liked it enough to get that tattoo. haha its still there inside you i bet like a dormant volcano, just needs the right tune to wake it up again..... we can investigate this another time maybe

ok seriously. hope your having a brill time cos i am, i miss you loads but maybe its best yeah? friend time or whatever. but i cant wait to see you again. thursdays a million years away

It was later on in that week he took a video of himself in a dress, all pink and corset and ribbons and huge white petticoat after a night out in Princess, going all out for the camera with fake-shy smiles and coy glances through heavy eyelashes as he inched the skirt up his thighs and started stroking himself, talking quiet filthy nonsense the whole time. When he hired a car a few days later and drove up north to meet up with Lindsay they didn't even make it to his mum's house like they'd planned - Lindsay let Pip kiss his cheek hello then told him to get in the car, and when they reached the nearest Travelodge he carried Pip's bag up for him and told him to get changed and he fucked him there bent over the dressing table, hard enough to bruise his hipbones, hard enough he kept banging his forehead against the mirror and leaving sweaty smudges there.
I love you, I love you
, Pip kept saying, when he had enough breath to speak at all, and Lindsay kept saying,
You're a disgusting filthy little bitch, is that what you want to hear?
and yanking hard on his long hair, yanking harder on his corset strings so he couldn't breathe at all and when he came he did it half-blind, with black and colours creeping into his vision until Lindsay loosened the strings and slapped him back awake.
God, I missed you
, Pip said, laughing and gasping, and Lindsay pulled his jeans back up and went to sit on the bed, smiling a bit nervously. He was always embarrassed after. Pip hopped up to sit on the dressing table, swinging his bare legs and waiting for his thudding heart to calm down.
Do you love me?
he said, and Lindsay got up again all in a rush to kiss him in a way that was almost an attack, passionate and furious with his fingers tangling tight through Pip's sweaty hair.
You know
, he said, losing the words into Pip's mouth - and later on that night, when they were curled up together in the bed Lindsay slept in as a teenager, surrounded by old relics of rockstar crushes and favourite books, Pip played that bit of it over and over in his head like a stuck record.
You know
. He found Lindsay's slack hand under the covers and kissed his fingers gently so as not to wake him up, and he finally fell asleep there beside him, holding his hand.

"I always play Russian Roulette in my head," Tom Waits drawls from inside the car. Pip kind of laughs at that, not because it's funny but because he's singing his life. Seventeen black or twenty-nine red, choices and chance and just maybe a bullet in the head. He leans back through the driver's side window and pushes the button to eject the CD just after
I'll always remember to forget about you
- then he skims it out into the empty space past the cliff edge, like a silver frisbee glinting sharply in the sunlight until it runs out of motion and disappears out of sight.

The Great Orme, the huge hill peninsula where they used to live, is far enough away down the coast to the east that he can't actually see their house, but he knows where it is. Alice Liddell's house is there too. He always felt stupidly excited waking up every morning and knowing he was looking at the more or less the same view across the bay to Anglesey that she saw all those years ago, although the Liddell's house wasn't as high up the hill as Lindsay's. Desperately sad, too, driving past the rundown wreck every time they went somewhere in Lindsay's big shiny maroon Jaguar. It seemed rude and wrong, just letting it go to ruin like that, but he didn't know what to do about it so he didn't do anything, he just felt a bit strange and heartbroken every time he saw it. He wonders what he'd feel now. The same, maybe. Not nearly as bad as he'd feel driving past Lindsay's old house. He wonders whether maybe Lindsay's sold it or rented it out. Maybe it's empty. Maybe he's
there
, Pip thinks suddenly, and feels a dreadful lurch in his stomach at the idea that just maybe he's standing twenty miles away from Lindsay right now.

He gets back into the car, with the booster seats in the back and crisp crumbs ground into the carpets and storytapes in the glovebox for keeping four bored children amused on drives to Brighton, and when he gets to the turn for Llandudno he stays in the fast lane with his eyes fixed resolutely on the whizzing road in front of him, just wishing he could leave some things behind as easily as he's leaving the miles.

He thought he was coping with it before, but the first time Lindsay got lost in syringes and needles it happened so gradually he barely even noticed, and by the time he did it was too late to feel like it mattered. Now it's a calculated trainwreck, planned to the detail and carried out methodically with all the self-control he had to use to stop it last time. He knows it's stupid. It doesn't matter. He remembers all these things he wanted to tell Valentine but never did - not because he wouldn't understand, but maybe because he'd understand all too well. These stupid, crazy, dangerous things. Driving too fast through slippery narrow mountain roads, a crumbling cliff face to one side and a sheer drop to the other, sixty miles on hour on the ice just to get that thrilling shot of terror when your tyres lock and skid on a corner. Stealing things he didn't need or want, just to get the pleasure of winning. One time after they hijacked a jeweller's van years ago, he and Ty bought a girl who thought she was too classy to be called a hooker - she kept insisting she was a
personal escort
, as if that's something else - and they blindfolded her with her own silk stockings and fucked her on a hotel bed dotted with hundreds of loose glittering diamonds, far too high on adrenaline to feel the sharp stabbing points in their hands and knees, or to care how uncomfortable it was for her or that they were never going to pick them all up when she was gone.

So his second first-time is in a Thai hotel, tying off and shooting up in a room in Pattaya after buying all the gear through friends of friends of friends in Bangkok and driving down the bay with it tucked into his unfastened battered old school bag on the passenger seat. He was after that same old stupid deadly thrill, being so blasé about it all, but it was a bit of a half-hearted attempt. Even the threat of harsh foreign laws wasn't
that
dangerous, not really, not when he had almost a billion dollars in cash and assets. He was fairly sure he could bribe his way out of anything if he needed to. Forget the barely-existent danger - it was all building up to
this
, the scratch of the needle slipping home into a vein and the thump of poisoned blood.

That's life, for a week and then two and then he's not sure because he doesn't care about keeping track of the borders between day and night any more. It's not working. It worked before, it was worth feeling dreadful between doses because there was always something or someone to keep him occupied always a new job to plan, or his business to run, or his mother he had to play straight for in more ways than one. People always said you couldn't be addicted to jabbing yourself up
and
keep your normal life running at the same time, but he managed to keep them both going like juggling balls and he thought he was doing fine, until the end. That night, that horrific family party in his mum's house full of cousins he barely knew and great-aunts who wouldn't stop telling him how much he'd grown since he was little as if they expected him to be the same height at thirty-one as he was at ten. He thought he could do it just for one night... or he
thought
he thought he could do it, but then why would he have brought it all with him and hidden it in his old bedroom? He couldn't find anything to use for a tourniquet in there, he wasn't wearing a belt or shoes with laces. The only way to stop the shaking was to fall down on the carpet, tucked between his mother's bed and the cream painted wall, and unplug her hairdryer to use the cord. That's where she found him later when she realised he wasn't downstairs - curled up on her bed with sweat drying in his hair and pupils like pinpricks. He found all this out after, too out of it at the time even to notice if the world exploded; while his mother was kicking everybody out of the house saying she had a bitch of a migraine, he just lay there on the flower-patterned bedspread feeling warm and lazy. She quietly tidied away his syringe and spoon and dirty cotton wool, and when morning came and it all started to fade away she was still there, sleeping next to him with red eyes and smeared make-up.

He needed to throw up but she was holding his arm so he couldn't pull away fast enough and had to vomit all down the side of the bed. She woke up then, the noise and movement and stench of sick, and he couldn't look at her any more, not even when she uncurled her fingers from his shirt and touched his face instead to make him.

"I think I'm going to need some help," he said very quietly, and she sighed long and slow and started stroking his hair away from his hot forehead so she could kiss him there.

She sat with him through a week of sweating and throwing up and spasms and cramps and fever and maddening itchy blood, she forced him out for walks when he was up to it, she ignored his shouting and pleading. There was one time he got frantic and angry enough to lash out at her with his fist but even that didn't put her off; she just slapped him hard round the face - the first time she ever hit him in his whole life - and locked the door on him and left him there to rot. Tough love, or something. He was glad of it after. He wasn't still too far gone to feel sick at himself. He could have broken a window and got out easily onto the porch roof and down the trellis if he really wanted to, but he gritted his teeth and stuck it out. Those were the worst days, even though he was past the worst bit - doing it alone, knowing she was upset and furious but not too upset and furious to still bring him food and leave it outside his door.

He took her on holiday when he was better, down to all the sun and noise in Madrid where she fell in love with an old building and he bought it on the spot.