Page 144 of Pansies

Said fuck it to Aiden. To Fen’s other world. His other boyfriend. To any future that wasn’t this one.

But what would that make him? He’d ruined Fen’s childhood out of carelessness and cruelty. How could he do the same thing again and call it love?

So he put it right, as he’d promised he would.

“I’m sorry.” He had to pause to steady his voice. To clear the guilt and anguish clogging his throat. “I thought I could do this. But I made a mistake. It’s not for me. I need to go back to London.”

The world cracked. Flaked into pieces.

For a long moment, the longest moment Alfie had ever lived through, Fen said nothing. Then he gave a chill, empty smile.

“You know,” he murmured “it’s getting absolutely hilarious how many times I let you hurt me. You’d think I’d learn but…” He shrugged. And, just then, it was easy to remember he’d once been on the stage. “Well. Thank you for another week of fuckery, Alfie Bell.” Then he stepped off the Waltzer deck and walked away through the empty fairground.

24

Alfie woke up at 5:00 a.m. on Monday morning feeling like he had a hangover, except it wasn’t physical. All the same, he dragged himself off his handcrafted, hypoallergenic, gazillion pocket-spring lambswool mattress and out of his Egyptian cotton sheets—in which he’d had the worst night’s sleep of his entire life—and got into his multidirectional, astonishingly powerful shower. Stood with his face turned into one of the jets that wasn’t going to explode his eyeballs, oddly disorientated by the gleaming glass and chrome, the lack of pink tidemarks and pale hair. The pristine tiled walls.

He dressed in his best suit, the bespoke one from Savile Row that had cost him in the region of four grand and made him itch in weird places, and went to work. To the meeting with J.D. Jarndyce, where he was probably going to get fired. Which, right now, he did not give a fuck about.

Jarndyce occupied a cubbyhole on the third floor. It was where he’d started when the company had been Locklear Grayson Bayle. Before it became Locklear Jarndyce Dance, then Jarndyce & Dance, and finally J.D. Jarndyce. He said he liked to remember where he’d come from because it never took much to send you back there.

His first question, rapped out even before Alfie’s bum had met the seat, was, “Tell me why I shouldn’t fire you.”

It was pretty much what he’d been expecting. Which meant he should have prepared one of those polished “I’m the best at everything” type answers. Except…he just couldn’t be arsed. He sighed. “Look, I’ve been working here for seven years. You’ve seen what I can do. And you’re not going to decide whether to fire me based on what I say in the next ten seconds cos you’ve already decided.”

Jarndyce was a slim, polished conker of a man, smoothed and toughened by forty years in the pocket of corporate London. The only time Alfie had ever seen him smile was in the photograph he kept on his desk: him and Dance in some green-gold Oxbridge place, arms around each other. He was the sort of person it was hard not to admire. Though nearly impossible to like. And right now, his cold, tarnished-steel eyes were stabbing Alfie.

“I’ve always rather liked you, Bell,” he murmured. “And you’re right. I had decided to fire you.”

“Uh. ‘Had’?”

“I’m going to give you another week. Come back next Monday with a better answer, and we’ll see.”

Alfie shifted uncomfortably. Accidentally rammed his foot into the back of the desk and brought all the photos toppling over: the university boyfriend, the ex-wife, and the three kids, one of them apparently in the middle of an androgynous, purple-haired rebellion.1 “Shit, sorry. I’m just not sure I’ll have a better answer. I’m not going to come in here and start begging.”

“That’s not what I’m looking for.”

“Well, what do you want?”

Jarndyce picked up one of the photos and put it back in itsusual place. “Someone who wants to be here. Who will make this their life, as I did.”

It was dismissal. But Alfie, still sitting there, heard himself ask, “Is it worth it?”

“It depends on your priorities. To me, yes.”

“I don’t see why you can’t have a bit more balance.”

“Because,” said Jarndyce impatiently, “life is conflict, disappointment is inevitable, and I prefer not to live with failure. See you next Monday.”

* * *

Alfie went straight back to bed. There was actual sobbing involved. A bit of howling. Lots of drinking. Some clinging to his pillow.

He just hadn’t quite realised it was possible to feel this way. It was like last week but backwards. All that joy turned into pain. These barbed-wire knots stuck inside him, impossible to dig out again unless he ripped himself to pieces.

Suddenly a whole bunch of movies were making a lot more sense. He’d always rolled his eyes when characters got all heartbroken and boring, letting their lives go off the rails or the plot slow right down while they got to grips with their emotions. It had seemed like a bit of an overreaction, considering the world went on, other people existed in it, and sometimes there were terrorists to catch, or supervillains to stop, or spaceships to blow up.

But right now, Alfie couldn’t have saved the day if his life depended on it. Laurence Fishburne could have turned up on his doorstep, blue pill in hand, and Alfie would have told him, “Sorry, too sad.” And, wow, now that he thought about it, it had been fucking forever since he’d been to the cinema.

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