Page 73 of Pansies

The fork dropped out of Alfie’s hand. “What, me?”

“No, some other bugger. Yeah, you.”

“Well…wow… I don’t know what to say. I mean, yes. Yes, of course. I’d be honoured.”

Once they were done with eating, Kev insisted they go on to the Gutter Ball, to properly round off a Saturday night on the town. The place was actually called the Glitter Ball, and back when Alfie and Kev had been mainstays of the South Shields party scene (such as it was), it had been Venue. The floors, however, were as sticky as ever, the room just as crowded, and the corners equally as grim. And it was still full of fifteen-year-olds pretending to be eighteen and thirty-year-olds pretending to be twenty. Even worse, they were having a Nineties Night, which made Alfie feel far too old.7 Right now they were playing a slightly half-arsed remix of “Ooh Aah… Just a Little Bit.” And if Alfie hadn’t been thirty, gay, and living a completely different life, he might have believed he’d gone back in time.

To top it all off, he thought he could probably remember the Eurovision dance, which was not something a man of any age should attempt in a public place. He’d long ago perfected what Greg called the straight-boy shuffle, a low-key, if slightly suggestive, swaying that—when he was younger—had encouraged girls to use him like a prop. And, as much as Greg might deride the technique, it seemed to translate pretty well across orientations. After all, it hadn’t taken long for Greg to start plastering himself over Alfie that night at Fire.

When “Better Off Alone” came on, Alfie threw caution to the winds and danced the way he felt like dancing. He probably looked like an emotionally overwrought buffalo, but he didn’t care. And, while he was vigorously being better off alone, a slinky-hipped boy slipped free from his friends and slinked in Alfie’s vicinity, trying to catch his eye. Wariness, at first. Then curiosity and recognition. He was too young, but he already knew more about himself than Alfie at his age would have had a hope of unravelling. There was a boldness in him that maybe came with that sort of knowing. At last, he circled in close, and Alfie put his fingers in his belt loops and pulled him closer still.

He felt the contact ripple outwards somehow, but they were sheltered by the darkness and the disco lights, and nobody around them seemed to care, least of all the boy, whose breath was hot and eager against Alfie’s throat. He smelled of hair gel and alcopops, and his hip bones ground against Alfie’s as they moved. Awkward fragments of touch, pushing together and pulling apart, never losing that edge of strangeness, which might once have been enticing. But it felt good in other ways too. Nothing Alfie could really have articulated, not with his ears full of Alice Deejay and his arms full of teenager, but some sense of possibility, like a window opened in a too-hot car.8

The boy went up on tiptoes, pressing his skinny body to the length of Alfie’s, and yell-whispered in his ear that he was lush.

Which was flattering.

“Like a porn star.”

Or not so much.

The boy grinned up at him, lip ring flicking pieces of multicoloured light in all directions. “You gay?”

Alfie sucked in a breath of sticky, fetid air. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m gay.”

By the time the song was done, the boy was all over him, wriggly and slick with dance sweat, gazing up at Alfie with glazed and hopeful eyes. “D’ye wanna…?”

Unpeeling him gently, Alfie dropped a kiss on his brow. “Not tonight, pet.”

A flash of disappointment before the lad’s friends swept him away. It didn’t take him long to find someone else to dance against, and there was something oddly pleasing about that—the ease of it. Alfie couldn’t have imagined anything like it when he was growing up.

He left before midnight, alone, and he didn’t mind. The electric gleam of the curry houses and the kebab shops on Ocean Road led him back to his B&B down pavements streaked gold and silver by streetlight and starlight.

The next morning, there was still no message from Fen, so he packed up his stuff in a leisurely kind of way, checked out, and then found himself seized by a weird impulse to visit the South Marine Park before he left. He knew he was stalling, but he decided to let himself get away with it. Took a circuit of the duck pond, which his memories insisted was a vast, shimmering lagoon. But really wasn’t.

And, anyway, it wasn’tjustabout Fen. After all, it would probably be a while before he was back here. He’d been gone for years before Kev’s wedding—so why was the thought unsettling now? It wasn’t like life in London wasterrible. It had its limitations, sure, but so did life in South Shields. In fact, South Shields probably had more. And he could hardly keep avoiding his dad if he lived here.

Eventually, he left the pond behind and wended his way up the terraces, past the empty bandstand to the artificial waterfall right at the top, which a little plaque told him had been recentlyrestored. It was quite a Victorian waterfall: a spill of white silk water falling between stones as neatly stacked as Jenga bricks. Alfie thought he could remember coming here on Fireworks Night, when the water had been lit from underneath with bulbs as bright as jewels, amethyst and emerald and gold, matching the sky.9

But there was only so long he could stare at a waterfall.

It was time to go. Time to get on with the life he was supposed to be living, instead of trying to magic a different one out of sea-foam and salt air.

14

As he was heading back up Ocean Road, his phone rang. Unrecognised number. Probably just a client, right? Fumble. Fumble. Panic. “Hello?” Silence. “Hello?” Silence. “Fen?”

“I…I’m sorry… This is… Alfie, did you really mean it when you said you’d stay?”

“Course. Where are you?”

“Marsden. At the Grotto.”

“I’ll be right there.”

Alfie ran to his car. Like literally ran. Like a maniac. Marsden was only ten minutes down Coast Road, but it seemed like forever with Fen alone and waiting for him. He floored it along Ocean Road, past the park where he’d just been walking, past the lifeboat memorial and the funfair, and the Rattler, where they’d kissed. Between caravan parks and sand dunes and promenades. Another branch of Minchella’s. Another bandstand. And then over the roundabout, up to the flat-topped cliffs, sandwiched between flat green grass and flat grey sky, where the ocean was just a ribbon of blue tied round the edge of the world. Another roundabout, taking him past the bottom of Lizard Lane, yet another branch of Minchella’s, and he was pulling into the car park outside the Marsden Grotto pub. It didn’t look like it wasopen yet, so he couldn’t use the lift shaft, which meant he had to take the hundred and thirty-two (or was it a hundred and thirty-six?) steps to the beach.

The tide was coming in, but slowly. There was still an expanse of dark, wet sand glistening beyond the shingle, and Marsden Rock itself was standing at the edge of the sea like an elephant going paddling, silver-ridged waves swirling through its caves and crevices.1 Fen was standing on the whitewashed terrace of the Grotto, his elbows braced on the top of the wall.

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