Stockholm Syndrome 2- 17 Black and 29 Red (9 page)

 

Roza's not so pale now, she's blushing a furious red. "Do you mind not just walking in and staring like a pervert?"

 

"Do you mind getting your fanny off my boyfriend's fingers?"

 

"Your
boyfriend
?"

This just keeps getting better. "I ain't sure no more," he says. He's calm now, but only because he's numb. It feels as if there's something waiting to bust free like in Alien, but not yet. "Let's ask him."

"God," Roza mutters when Olly doesn't say anything. She throws the cushion hard at his face and straightens her clothes, pushes past Pip in the doorway with only a quiet helpless apology, and slams the front door behind herself. Nothing then but a sort of thick solid silence, suffocating and nauseating. Olly puts the cushion neatly back in the corner of the couch where it belongs. Still nothing. They've been friends long enough for Pip to know Olly will
never
be the one to say something first, when something needs saying. He'll just sit there staring out the window, scowling, sulky lip, just waiting for Pip to make it all better again - which he
always
does, rolling over like a puppy and taking whatever he can get, no matter how crap and unfair it is. Not this time, not when Olly's still sitting there with wet fingers from sticking up some girl.

"Don't mess me round just cos you think you owe me something," Pip says, forcing his voice steady. "You ain't my whore. I never bought you nothing cos I wanted paid back, you don't owe me nothing. If you don't wanna be my boyfriend just
say
so, cos if you're in bed with me and you're cringing and feeling sick and you hate being with me and you just wanna be with girls... I can't stand it if you're just doing it cos you think you have to."

"I never said I was your boyfriend," Olly snaps. He's worse than all the kids together when he gets in a sulk. Funny, that. He likes to think he's the grown-up sensible one.

"Alright, but you never said you weren't neither."

He's waiting to get angry but it won't come, like sometimes you bang into the coffee table but the bruise never shows up on your shin. He kind of feels like he should
force
it, shout or slap him or throw things at him and run up all four flights of stairs to the bedroom he had before they started sharing and slam the door so hard it chips the paint. Maybe he'll feel it for real then. Or maybe it's better not to feel it at all, just let this blank non-emotion run itself out like a road that disappears so gradually you don't even know it's happening until there's grass under your tyres.

He counts his slow measured steps going down to the front door. Seven to the top of the staircase, thirteen down the stairs, six to the door. Nearly half a minute for Olly to call him back and... what? Apologise? Maybe. Of course he doesn't. The house is silent, just the gentle thud of Pip's boots on the carpet, the rumble of the washing machine in the back room, humming traffic outside.

He goes back to the studio, because he doesn't know what else to do, and tattoos a dashed "cut here" line and a tiny pair of scissors over the blue veins inside his left wrist. Then he feels stupid.

***

There was a time several years ago when he always felt bad going into the Princess bar dressed like a girl, because he didn't mean it. It felt rude and wrong, like saying prayers he didn't mean to a god he didn't believe in because it made his grandad happy. It seemed kind of disrespectful, putting on a dress for a giggle and going out dancing when all those people really
meant
it, like he was taking the piss out of their lives or something. Now he feels weird going into the bar dressed like a man. A girly man in polka-dotted skinny jeans, a jade green feather-trimmed coat, sparkly red cowboy boots, a Take That t-shirt, eyeliner, nailpaint, the works - still a man. There's faint stubble on his face and his hair needs washing.

It's still early, the DJ isn't even there yet. The bouncer lets him in for a kiss on the cheek - that makes Pip laugh, the first time he's felt anything remotely pleasant for hours. His boot heels click loudly on the empty dancefloor. It's weird seeing the place like this, without the scatter of discoball lights bouncing off the walls or six and a half foot tall drag queens dancing in a circle around a pile of handbags, and even weirder when he gets through the stage door into the corridor leading down to the dressing rooms. He's only ever seen it full of people before, discarded tiaras and feather boas, broken shoes, emergency make-up applications between songs.

He taps gently on the second door, just underneath a glittery gold plaque shaped like a star with the name 'Tess Tosterone' written on it in black script. "Hey, are you there? Ian let me in."

"Come in, hon, it's open."

He closes the door behind himself, then nearly breaks something in his haste to cover his eyes up with his hands. "Shit, I'm sorry, you should've said you were naked."

"I don't mind, it's only you."

He peeks through his fingers, feeling inexplicably embarrassed at seeing Tess without her wig. Tess without her wig is just Barry Kersley in his titsuit, and that's weird. Not for what it is - maybe for what it
isn't
. Pip can't forget being seventeen years old and completely lost, constantly shouted at and mocked by his dad for wearing eyeliner and girls' t-shirts, all the wankers in his stupid posh Westminster school who would have hated him for being dirtcommon anyway even if they didn't have the tranny angle to tease him from. He tried explaining it a million times, being bent and sometimes wearing make-up didn't make you a tranny, but everything was always so black-andwhite to other people. He remembers the first few times he crept into the club on fake ID, how Tess laughed at him for it but didn't kick him out. He remembers being a bit drunk on cheap alcopops and making some crack about how he wasn't used to being the
least
girly one in the room, the warm foolish glow he felt when he made people laugh. Hugs at the end of every night, swapped make-up tips, sharing hairspray, how it only took a couple of weeks to start feeling like their friend and not their pet - even so, he always felt a silly little thrill any time he got a lipsticky kiss or an invitation backstage or somebody told him he looked pretty. There was always something a bit magical about the place, and about the people - partly because everything was fabulous, fantastical, you couldn't get the stray glitter off your skin for a week never mind how many showers you took, but mostly because for the first time in his life he felt part of something that made all the shit outside seem meaningless and far away. He remembers hanging out in the dressing room before the New Year's Eve cabaret show when he was eighteen, Tess asking how he bruised his face. He tried at first to make up some fumbling lie about how he fell out of bed but he started crying instead because he was tired. That one was my dad and that one was my boyfriend cos I don't know when to stop mouthing off, he said, and Tess hugged him into that massive squashy fake bosom and murmured vague threats about what they could do with six-inch stilettos until Pip was laughing through his tears when two minutes earlier he felt dead and empty and like he'd never laugh again.

He feels better when the wig is on, a towering auburn beehive with curls at the sides, and crosses the room to lean over Tess's shoulder where she's sitting at the dressing table and kiss her hello on the powdered cheek. "Hey, beautiful. Stop losing weight, you'll disappear."

"Get away. I've not been less than sixteen stone since I was about eight months old, you're helping me celebrate tonight."

 

"Alright. I brought you that dress, you need to try it on cos it'll want taking in. You don't have to do it now, though, just whenever."

 

"Yeah, I wasn't expecting you til tomorrow, am I going senile?" "No. Just don't feel like being at home."

"Ah." It's a knowing sort of 'ah', Pip's not fooling anyone. He never intended to, he realises lamely. Why else would he come here, to the place he always felt safest when he lived in London before? The story tumbles out in a mess of spat swears, as he's helping her into the white dress he made and trying not to jab her with pins in his rage. She doesn't say anything else, just calmly lets him rave on until he can't keep the pace up any more and trails off pathetically, staring at the 15 on the back of his right hand.

"I ain't good enough for no one," he adds, a bit more calm now the worst of the poison is gone. "That was like the
point
with Darren, he just wanted someone to push about so it don't matter I weren't ever good enough, but Lindsay always had a go cos I was too girly even though he got a proper rock on any time I dressed up, and now I spose Olly don't wanna be with me no more cos I ain't girly
enough
..."

"Well, you know what the answer to that is, don't you?" She turns gently from side to side, watching the folds of fabric swing in the mirror. "Marilyn, Seven Year Itch?"

"More like Wilma Flintstone."

 

"Cheeky bitch."

 

"I'm kidding, you look well fit. I'll bring it back at the weekend when it's done. What's the answer?"

 

"Does he know Ophelia?"

 

Oh. "Yeah."

 

"Biblically?"

 

"No."

 

"There you go. I mean, that is if you
want
to. Personally, I'd break all his cheating fingers off and kick his nads up to his tonsils, but maybe I'm just old and bitter." "You ain't old."

 

"I'm forty-six next month. I'm practically dead."

"Shut your face, I never known anybody so alive as you." He's leaning against the dressing table now just to the side of the chair, fiddling with a little pot of cream he picked up from the mess of cosmetics littering the surface just for something to do. He still can't feel properly angry. It's not even simmering any more, it's just nothing. He can't feel sad either, hurt, upset, anything. He just feels tired. "Everyone always knows what they're doing," he says abruptly, still not looking up from his hands, the little plastic pot and the old tattoo and the new white dressing on his left wrist. "You know what you're doing, you got your work and your friends and everything and miserable headfucky little teenage girly boys think you're amazing and, I don't know, you might've saved my life, who knows? I might be dead if it weren't for you and Olly but people can't keep looking after me all the time cos that ain't healthy neither, that's just as bad as people not giving a fuck at all. And, like... I'm
trying
to sort my head out and be a proper grown-up and get my degree and go to work and look after them kids and make sure my dad ain't kicking my sister round the house like a football but it's just so hard all the time, and I know I ain't got no right to complain cos that's just life, ain't it? Everyone's the same, least I ain't got money worries or nothing. I just don't know what I'm doing, everything's too hard. I can try and try forever but I can't be good enough for no one so what the fuck's the point?"

Now
he's feeling something - for the first time in a long time he misses Lindsay so sharply it's almost physical pain instead of something deep down and hidden. He wonders whether that might be better after all - trapped and desperately lonely in a centuries-old house in the middle of nowhere in a country whose language he can't speak, no friends, no college, no tattoos, no London noise and pollution, never ever being forgiven for that one stupid awful mistake, always having that hanging over him like a massive stormcloud or a neon sign saying "Never forget how much you really hate me". All that, just to be able to breathe again. There was a kind of weird freedom in giving up control of his life so completely, not having to think about bills or exams or other people's welfare. Even the stuff that seems
really
bizarre now he's no longer in the middle of it, being ordered to bed when he was tired and bratty even if it wasn't late, being smacked with a belt or a hard hand when he played up, being sent to stand in the corner with his hands on his head or the time Lindsay told him he wasn't allowed to get dressed today and he had to just get on with it all confused and embarrassed for a whole day, watching telly naked and sitting at the table for three meals naked and even coming out for a nighttime drive in the mountains naked, all without ever getting an explanation. Sometimes Lindsay wrenched his arms up and tied him to the bedstead and didn't even stop when Pip broke down crying, just slapped him round the face and told him to shut up and kept on fucking him so hard he felt it for days.
All
of that and Pip never said his safeword and meant it, not even once. He said it to be a brat, to test if it would still work when Lindsay was ten seconds away from coming. He never said it and
meant
it, even when the ropes or handcuffs bit too tight into his skin or the slapping got too much to bear. He just put up with it, all the maddening pain and humiliation and snarling words chipping him away to nothing because that meant he could start again from scratch - he wondered, back then, if something as simple as a big warm morning cuddle would still mean as much if he didn't have that contrast. He's not had that in ages, but now it almost feels the same. After all this, he thinks if he goes home and Olly just gives him a
smile
then that's going to be enough to fix things.

Tess is watching him, he can feel her gaze like it's actually touching his skin. "You can go on stage if you want," she says quietly. "If that'll make you happy."

"Yeah. I don't really feel like it."

 

"You want to get dolled up and work the bar for me tonight? Have some company, might cheer you up a bit."

"I don't know. I might just go home." Home is a stupid word. Nowhere he's ever lived in his whole life has felt like his home, not the flat and the house he grew up in, not Lindsay's houses like gilded prisons, not even the house he paid cash for to give to Olly and the kids. "Sorry for dumping all my shit on you
again
."

"I wish I could help."

 

"It's alright, it's like food poisoning, it just needs getting out. I'm alright."