Page 45 of Pansies

Fen gazed up at him so intently, it was all Alfie could do not to squirm. He didn’t feel judged, exactly. It was more just the sense of being looked at.Deeplylooked at. “You know,” said Fen softly, “you really are just the same.”

“Uh, last time you said something like that, you meant it in the bad kind of way.”

“Well, it was a bad kind of moment.” Fen wriggled a hand free, lifted it to Alfie’s face, tracing the line of his jaw. “But I meant the good things, this time.”

Alfie’s mouth opened, but words entirely failed to happen. How could Fen possibly have seen any good in him back then? When, right now, he was having trouble seeing it in himself. If you’d asked a month ago what Alfie thought about his teenage self, he’d probably have said he was a bit of an idiot but a good mate and a decent bloke. And maybe that was still true, but it was hard to reconcile with what he’d done to Fen.

“There’s this confidence you have,” Fen was saying. And it sounded sincere—like he really believed in an Alfie who was strong and capable and who would fix things and sort things and make them right. And that was amazing, but also scary, because he didn’t feel very much like that Alfie anymore. Hadn’t for years. At least not since the gay thing happened. But then Fen’s eyebrows got all ironic, and he added, “And, of course, that entitled golden-boy magic.”

For some reason, it made Alfie laugh. There was something kind of…focusing about Fen’s sharpness, when he could be so disarming in other ways. The bite of lemon after a tequila shot. “Leave it to me.”

“All right.” Fen stepped into the hall. Hesitated. Spun backand struck an absurdly imploring, lash-fluttering pose in the doorway. “Help me, Alfie Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.”

“Oh my God, you proper nerd.”

A rare smile from Fen, not hesitant, or bitter, or mocking. “Yes. I…I haven’t changed all that much either.”

And, with that, he was gone, leaving Alfie alone with his promises in the war zone he had made of the bathroom. He gazed round, horror dawning afresh as he took in the scope of the mess. How had it got so bad? Why hadn’t he stopped? Instead of charging forward, hoping it would miraculously get better the harder he tried? Shit. Hehadto fix this. Come hell or high—higher—water. He plonked himself down on the toilet lid and rang every plumber in South Shields. Sadly, Fen had been right. The earliest someone could get out to them was next Friday, and that was only because Alfie had begged so pathetically. Except it might as well have been next month, or next year, for all the good it would do.

Alfie’s stomach had curled up like it wanted to eat itself. Because the truth was, when he’d fucked up this completely, there was really only one thing he could do.

He rang his dad. Who actually answered the house phone, which meant Alfie’s mother was dead or shopping.

“Aye?” was Alfred Senior’s wary greeting.

“Hi.” Alfie’s throat had closed. “Erm, it’s Alfie. Alfie Bell.”

“Your mam’s not in.” Though with his dad’s rough lilt—so familiar, even after two years of silence—it sounded more likenorrin.

“Actually I wanted to ask you something.”

“Oh aye?”

“Yeah, I’m in town at the moment. I’m at”—shit—“a friend’s. I’ve kind of… There’s been an accident with a wall.”9

And so, half an hour later, Alfie’s dad; his brother, Billy; Billy’s mate Joe, who was a plumber; and Joe’s apprentice, Harry, were somehow crammed into Fen’s tiny bathroom like that joke about how many elephants you could get in the fridge. They were assessing the extent of the damage and talking about what to do, which seemed to involve either compression or soldering, and every now and then Alfie’s dad would draw air slowly through his teeth as if what had happened to Fen’s bathroom was too awful for actual human speech. Alfie had asked if there was anything he could do. And his dad had said, “I think you’ve done enough, lad” and exiled him to the hallway. As if he was still a kid.

Billy stuck his head out from behind the door, his cheeky grin very much an echo of Alfie’s, except way more annoying. “I could murder a cuppa, Alf.”

Yeah, I’m gay, not a woman, was what Alfie could have said, but didn’t quite dare.

It would have involved saying the Word to his little brother, and anyway, he could hear Kitty in his head, calling him sexist for the assumption that making tea was a gendered activity. So he just shrugged. “Not my house, mate.”

Billy retreated with a forlorn sigh, and the conversation in the bathroom resumed. Alfie really didn’t want to hang around in the hall listening to a bunch of people, including his own family, discuss how shit at DIY he was, but he would only have been in the way in the shop. That didn’t make it okay to snoop around upstairs either, but surely Fen wouldn’t object to him sitting in the kitchen. Though by sitting, he meant sulking.

Unfortunately, the first door he tried led him into a bedroom. Probably Fen’s bedroom. Another dank little room, floor strewn with piles of clothes. And a futon mattress with rumpled sheets, one pillow still bearing the depression of a head and a few twistsof silver-gold hair. He stared in a kind of shock, trying to work out whether he was a complete pervert or there was actually something intimate about the place where someone slept. After all, usually by the time you were being let into someone’s bedroom, they’d tidied it up for you. Made it a reflection of the person they wanted you to see. Whereas this was just a mess. A very human, very private mess. Which Alfie shouldn’t have been looking at. But it was like seeing Fen naked again. Seeing him smile.

There was a familiar pink jumper thrown into a far corner and a book, splayed open, pages down, at the foot of the mattress.A Grief Observed.10 Very carefully, so as not to lose Fen’s place, he picked it up and turned it over. “This is one of the things I’m afraid of. The agonies, the mad midnight moments, must, in the course of nature, die away. But what will follow? Just this apathy, this dead flatness? Will there come a time when I no longer ask why the world is like a mean street, because I shall take the squalor as normal?”

He wasn’t a big reader. Didn’t really have time for it now and hadn’t had the patience when he was younger. It had a faint taint of sissy-ness, but also seemed inaccessible: all those fictional lives and worlds. Still, there was something about this scene, and these words, that reached him, stirring a kind of nebulous pain. A…loneliness, maybe, he both recognised and wanted to assuage.

He hastily put the book back where he’d found it and made his escape. Thankfully, he found the living room next, which seemed a more acceptable place to lurk. It had a view of the delivery yard and the wheelie bins, which gave it the rare luxury of natural light. There was a sagging sofa and an assortment of old, mismatched furniture, but it wasn’t exactly what Alfie would have called cosy. He would probably have balked at habitable.All the same, he slumped onto the sofa. They could be friends. It looked about as bad as he felt.

Fen was everywhere again. In the cigarette ends piled up in the ash-stained saucer on the coffee table. In the slick, shiny laptop that sat next to it. In the books on the floor. And the scattered LPs. Alfie picked one up and looked at the sleeve.Rex Harrison & Julie Andrews: My Fair Lady.

His parents used to have a record player. He’d been sort of terrified and fascinated by it at the same time, and he’d never quite mastered it. The fragility of all the bits and pieces, fitting the needle to the groove without scratching or shrieking. The faint, familiar crackle like old leaves and paper before the song began to play. Then came cassettes, CDs, the doomed fad of minidiscs, making music something easy. And now of course it was all digital. Simple and thoughtless. No crackle. No anxiety. Better in pretty much every way, except you no longer had physical things to collect and to hold and pin your love to.11

Was this how Fen spent his evenings? Sitting on this sofa, smoking? On his laptop? Or listening to these records? He wouldn’t fumble with the needle. And he would know exactly how to hold the discs so as not to drop or scratch them, cupped against the heel of his hand, supported by his pale, rough-tender fingers.

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