Trowchester Blues 01 - Trowchester Blues (28 page)

Now he seemed faded and weary, as though the cells had sucked out his uniqueness, turned him into a statistic. Michael rose abruptly, instinctively, as he came through the door and was at his elbow in three steps, trying to touch him, pass on some of his own vitality to replace what had been stolen.

Finn pulled his arm away, glancing at him sideways with eyes green as deep water. “I’m not talking to you.”

“Right.” Michael passed him the coat and scarf he had brought with him. “You just sit in the car and say nothing, then, while I drive you home.”

“I’m taking a taxi.”

Louise had left him, saying he spent too much time at his job, and that even when he was home, he was not truly with her. There were nights he still woke confused from dreams of her and reached out, expecting to touch her hair, feel the lash of her temper for disturbing her sleep.

It wasn’t hard to believe that Finn too might simply have had enough of him, might want his peace and space more than he wanted Michael. Michael bit the inside of his cheek and worried it between his teeth to take his mind off the despair of that thought.

He sighed. “Look, throw me out later, okay? I’m here, I stood bail for you, you don’t need to pay for a taxi when I’ll take you home for free. And if you want me to piss off after that, it’s fine; I’ll go. Just, just let’s not argue here, all right, in front of everyone.”

He half expected Finn to run with that—take it as a challenge and stage the biggest shouting match the station had ever seen. It would have been embarrassing but reassuring at the same time—showing that Finn retained his fire, his defiance, and his love for the theatrical. Instead Finn just shrugged the coat on, hugged himself, hands knotted in the ends of his scarf. “All right.”

“The hearing’s in a week,” Michael offered, tentatively, as they turned down Jasper Street. “That’s really fast. Lady Harcombe must really want her book back.”

Silence. Finn rested his head on the window and watched the city go by.

“It’s not going to be that bad,” Michael tried again. “Didn’t the solicitor tell you? You have no previous convictions. You turned yourself in. If you plead guilty, they’ll go easy on you because you didn’t jerk them around. You assisted the police in a different matter. It’s a first offence. You’ll get a suspended sentence at the very most.”

He thought this overture too would be ignored, but as they waited for a car to pull out of the residents-only parking spaces to allow them in, Finn turned his head a millimetre. “They won’t send me to prison?”

Michael laughed before the horror hit him. “God, no. D’you think I would have risked you being sent to jail? This was about getting it all out from under you so you could have a fresh start with nothing hanging over your head. A clear conscience and a record that said you’d paid for what you’d done, and it couldn’t ever be used against you again.”

Finn turned another millimetre towards him. “But she has it in for me, that woman, she’ll—”

“She’s just a magistrate. If you plead guilty, she will have to refer you to the Crown Court for sentencing, and that will leave you being sentenced by a judge who doesn’t know you at all. That’s how it works. You were never looking at a custodial sentence, or I wouldn’t have persuaded you to give yourself up. You are not going to go to jail, I swear it.”

It didn’t bear thinking of, Finn in jail, with his off-kilter sense of style and his not-quite-camp delivery, tiny and blond and pretty as he was. But now that Finn had put the thought into his mind, he couldn’t quite shake it off. Sometimes judges did decide to come down harsh on something in what felt like a whim. And what if Lady Harcombe had friends in the Crown Court? What if she only had to tip the Crown Court judges the wink, and they too would do exactly what she said?

He stopped the car, covered his face so that he could pretend in the darkness of his fingers that he didn’t actually exist, that he couldn’t be here to continually make these bad decisions.

What if by some fluke or corruption it did happen? Would Finn ever make it out again as the lighthearted, strangely innocent person that he was? Had Michael done everything in his life to avoid it and still become the kind of man who tormented and broke anyone more defenceless or weaker than himself?

“Good,” said Finn beside him. “That’s good. I didn’t like to think you’d do that to me. I suppose a suspended sentence is not too bad, and then it’ll be well and truly over, and I can relax.”

Trying not to let Finn see his sudden doubts, Michael raised his head to smile at him. The animation, the dynamo glow that suffused Finn’s presence, had begun to show again beneath his face, filling the car with relief, and Michael couldn’t . . . It was . . . He just couldn’t bring himself to poison it with his infernal doubts.

“Yeah.” He leaned over to open Finn’s door for him. Though Finn was clearly capable of doing it by himself, the guy—even in this subdued form—had a movie-star quality that made Michael want to wait on him hand and foot. “Yeah. It’s going to be no big deal. I’m sure of it.”

Finn let him stay after all, and he was in combination so grateful not to have been kicked out and so guilty-worried about the upcoming trial, he may have taken the protectiveness a little far.

“You’re fucking smothering me,” Finn said as he drove him back out of the door two days later. “Every time I bloody turn around, there you are.” He pushed Michael in the chest, making him take two steps back. “Don’t take this the wrong way, because I know you’re concerned about me, and that’s sweet, but I don’t need you around here constantly. Go and do some Michael things. Stop bothering me.”

He stood on the doorstep in another grey, chilly, autumnal day and wanted to be able to smile. If Louise had only wanted him to stop bothering her sometimes, they might still be together, paradoxical though that sounded. It was one more reason why he desperately didn’t want this to end, as prison would surely end it.

Finn seemed to have taken Michael’s reassurance as gospel truth, and was almost back to his old self, though sharper and with less patience. But in return Michael had picked up Finn’s fear, and he didn’t know how to put it down.

“Okay,” he said slowly, retreating another step with his hands up. “But this has been a shit couple of days, and we’re both on edge. So can I just check that you mean ‘get out of my hair for a few hours and come back this evening,’ and not ‘piss off, I never want to see you again’?”

Finn’s brave face was like his outfit, a little more conservative than usual, the colours paler, the vibrancy dimmed. Michael was beginning to think he hadn’t really stopped worrying at all. He was just determined not to show it anymore.

Finn managed a strained smile. “I have forgiven you, you know. Subject to unexpected incarceration. I knew what I was getting into, taking on an ex-cop.”

“So that means . . .?”

“Yes, yes. It means come back this evening, you idiot, and we can do the awkward-conversation-followed-by-desperate-sex thing again. But for now I need to work, so sod off.”

It was pleasant to get out of the tight confines of the flat, even if it meant walking down streets slippery with rotten leaves, desolate and quiet now the tourists were gone, half the shops shut up tight until the winter solstice. Michael left the car at Finn’s and walked home, glad of the exercise and the peace. Simultaneously relieved and terrified that there were only four more days to go until the trial.

Awkward
scarcely covered it. Michael was frightened and clingy; Finn was frightened and sarcastic. Michael wanted to wrap Finn up in silk sheets and worship him as if he were precious and breakable. Finn wanted to be hit. With copious self-restraint and a great deal of careful conversation, they were managing to hold it together, but the thought of the oncoming trial was already beginning to assume the shape of a relief, however it turned out.

Streaks of pale rain fell through the hanging streaks of reed feathers along the borders of the river. A curl of darker grey smoke rose from the chimney of a narrowboat he almost didn’t recognise as his own. Hard to tell, with water in the face, but he didn’t remember it having scarlet panels choked with golden roses, or blue hyacinths on its stern, or a cluster of black-enamelled watering cans on the roof, on which copper Daleks shot death rays of green ivy and a board proclaiming that these things were for sale.

He knocked at the stern door, now painted to resemble a set of theatre curtains. “Sarah? It’s Michael. Can I come in?”

The door opened, but it was Tai on the other side, clutching their laptop to themself and giving him a sceptical look. “I suppose so.”

Ducking through, he found the blank white canvas of the interior of the boat equally transformed, with tattoo-like birds and flowers on every wall, and one or two dinosaurs hiding amid the leaves.

“We didn’t steal anything.” Tai retreated backwards, not taking their eyes from Michael’s face. “My father had some ends of paint cans left from when we painted the house, and I bought the varnish and the things to be decorated from my cleaning money.”

Gone was the minimalist emptiness of the small sitting room from which Michael had thrown out everything that could be moved. Now the table was covered in paintpots, brushes, cleaning rags, and varnish. The starboard side of the floor was covered in unpainted wares—flowerpots and planters, watering cans, narrowboat storage chests, and blackboards. The port side was cluttered with the same stuff, but beautifully, strikingly painted, in a style that combined traditional narrowboat motifs with pop culture in a way that even he could see would have the younger boaties geeking out.

He would never have recognised the girl sitting cross-legged on the bed, surrounded by books on the history of art, if it wasn’t for the bare feet and the way he had to stand quite still for five minutes before she would raise her gaze off the bedclothes to meet his eye.

“Sarah?” Oddly enough she could have been his niece by resemblance, though some part of her ancestry must have been black. She had the May family curls, and the beauty that they tended to grow out of around age thirty and mourn forevermore.

She looked so much more vulnerable with her face washed and visible, wearing the bargain jeans and the fuzzy sweatshirt he’d bought her with the white stars, its hood lowered. He thought again about her absent parents who had thrown her out to live on the streets.
How could they? How could anyone?

“Hi,” she said, after she’d determined that he was not going to lunge forwards and grab her.

“Hi.”

Tai seemed to regard this, rightly, as a cease-fire. They relaxed from their position in between Michael and Sarah. Michael only realised that he was seeing a gesture of protection—a knight getting between his lady and the monster, a mother getting between the threat and her child—when Tai dismissed him and dropped to the sitting room bench, sliding their laptop back on the table.

“You didn’t say I couldn’t,” Sarah ventured, her voice small, as though she expected this to be the last straw, expected to be told to leave.

“I think it’s great,” he said. “Genuinely. In fact, when I get my new boat built, will you paint it for me? I’ll pay you by the hour.”

Tai had definitely appointed themself protector and guardian, possibly agent too. They poured a cup of tea and slid it over the table to Michael. “Well, we might be able to help you. It depends on how business is doing by then.”

Michael wasn’t a hundred percent sure whether to be charmed or unsettled. He’d only been away three days. When had all this happened? “Business?”

Tai swung the computer around to display the screen of an Etsy shop on which the newly painted goods were displayed.

“I paint things,” said Sarah proudly, “and Tai helps me sell them, for ten percent of the profit.”

“Yeah?” He brought his reading glasses out of his pocket and looked more closely at the screen. “And people are buying them?”

She looked worried that she had done something wrong, and he hurried to add, “That’s wonderful!”

“We’ve already sold nine items and paid for the materials.” Tai beamed with pride. “And traffic is increasing to the website all the time.”

“They stop outside too,” Sarah offered in a voice so quiet he wasn’t sure he had heard it. “They see the notice on the top and berth nearby, and come over to buy cans or plant pots. I don’t really like that, but they’re mostly nice.”

“I’ll stay with you!” Tai offered fervently, their eyes wide with sincerity. And yes, Tai was a good kid, but they had to learn to back off a little.

“How d’you feel about dogs?” Michael asked Sarah as they exchanged a glance over Tai’s head, him asking if the kid’s enthusiasm was a problem. He got the impression that she thought she could handle it, was flattered rather than frightened. Good. But it didn’t hurt to make sure.

“I’m thinking we could get you a terrier of some kind. Something small enough to live on board but fierce enough to go for people’s ankles if they thought those people were making you unhappy.”

“You can’t keep giving me things!” She sounded distressed, but he had seen the moment before, the moment when she was a child again who desperately wanted a puppy.

“I wasn’t going to,” he trod carefully. “But rescue dogs are cheap. Tai or I could drive you to the nearest shelter to pick one up. And now you’ve got money of your own, you could buy one for yourself.”

A smile. An honest-to-God, unrestrained, unambiguous childish smile. She looked away immediately afterwards as if to conceal it, but it was too late. He had seen, and his day was made.