Chapter Six #2
was. The very idea, no matter how faint and far off, that he could
one day join SAR...!
It was
just that Trewin had also said Merou had good reason never to
return, and even if he did, he was some sort of criminal and Priddy
shouldn’t trust him. It was just that Trewin, used to looking out
for occult injuries in rescued sailors, had noticed his
scar.
Priddy
set the bottle and cotton wool down. He parted his hair with
trembling hands. This was why he’d never followed his mates into a
fashionable brush-cut or practical short trim, why he’d hung onto
his thick curls even when the surf-bunny look had become démodé. If
no-one ever saw or asked, he could forget.
It had
worked beautifully. All he’d had to do was let the memory slide
away. His own dreamy nature had saved him: even before the advent
of drugs into his life, if there was an alternate reality to be
found, he’d drift into it. Books, films, music; even the inside of
his own eyelids, a screen onto which he could project infinite
wonders not to be found in everyday Rosewarne life.
Tell me all about it, Merou said
inside his head. Nevertheless, tell
me.
Priddy
looked up. His imagination was still good. He could conjure Merou’s
outline, though he wasn’t sure why he’d pictured him perched on the
loo. The lid was down, and Merou made anywhere he sat look like a
throne, but still... “All right. It’s not a tragic tale, though.
Just horrible and stupid.”
He
didn’t have to say it aloud. All he had to do was lean forward,
bury his face in his hands and watch his twelve-year-old self, back
home early on a school afternoon. Everything was just as it had
been. There were his mum’s plants, wilting on the windowsill. There
was the mountain of washing up in the sink. There was Mrs Govett
from next door, laid out on the kitchen table with her legs in the
air, Vigo planted between them, pasty arse pumping away.
Nance
Govett was a decent sort, despite sporadic outbreaks of adultery
and betrayal. After a shrieking descent from the table, hoisting up
her knickers and rearranging her skirt, it was she who’d tried to
get between Vigo and Priddy. Yelled at the old man to back off,
that it wasn’t the lad’s fault. But Vigo had lost it. Maybe his
dozy kid had irritated him beyond all endurance. First he threw a
pan, which Priddy ducked. Then a bottle, which caught the cringing
boy in the face and struck a nosebleed from him like a spring from
a rock. Something in the sight of it sparked in Vigo a hideous
excitement, the terrified, nauseated rush of a hunter faced with
prey which bled but wouldn’t die. He grabbed a knife.
The playback began to break up. Splotches appeared on the
reel. Nance Govett stood gasping with her hands to her mouth, then
swore mightily, grabbed a pan of her own and bashed Vigo on the
head with it. Nance hauled Priddy into her arms and rocked him,
then staggered upstairs with him and dumped him on his bed. Doors
slammed and opened again. A glass appeared at Priddy’s lips, filled
with cloudy liquid—the bitterest thing he’d ever tasted, but
because Nance was sobbing when she asked him to drink, because she
said please and
kissed him like a child of her own, he did as he was told. Next
there was ice, and a needle, and he recalled that Nance was a nurse
at Trelowarren hospital, but none of it hurt as much as it should,
or meant as much as it should, and the film reel decayed into
soundtrack, frantic voices from downstairs. I don’t care about your bloody head, Vigo! I’ve stitched him
up, and you tell your Karen he fell off one of the ponies the kids
are always messing with down Pritchard’s field. Tell the lad that’s
what happened in the morning. I’ve given him enough of my valium to
stop a bullock, and he’s such a little soft, he’ll believe
anything. A pause, then the sound of
belongings being brusquely gathered together. And I tell you what, Vigo—don’t you breathe a word. My man’ll
snap you over his knee like a twig if he finds out, and me too.
It’s over anyway, you bloody brute. Christ, you nearly killed
him... You don’t deserve a nice kid like Jem. If you raise a hand
to him again, I will tell, even if Gary does end my life for it. Do
you understand?
Priddy
thought that Vigo must have understood. The walls between the
houses were thin, and the casual violence that had gone on in the
Priddy household had stopped from that point on. No more
wallopings, no more backhanded cuffs that had made him see black
holes fringed with doomed stars. From that point on, Vigo had just
ignored him.
He got up unsteadily. Merou was gone. Just tell me anyway was all very
well, but then what? You were empty and alone, and the thing you’d
buried so carefully was out, roaming bestially around your home,
destroying all comforts. Priddy washed his face. He dried off,
making certain his fringe was covering the tail end of the scar.
Hanging onto the banister, aching as if Vigo’s assault had happened
yesterday, he made his way back upstairs.
Kit had
emailed him. Suddenly hungry to hear from someone utterly lacking
in mystery, Priddy sat down at his computer. The message opened
with the usual news about rotten student accommodation and
difficult assignments, Kit’s conscientious efforts to make it sound
like he wasn’t having the time of his life. Priddy grinned, reading
between the lines of the godawful field trip to Lundy where Kit had
been seasick and nearly fallen overboard with the top-end,
military-grade observation equipment they’d been sent out to test.
Happy as a pig in shit, and maybe one day he’d be able to tell
Priddy so without all this fuss...
Then, suddenly: Mate, there’s
something I want you to know. I’ve met someone. Priddy sat back from the screen, tilting his chair. He’d
forgiven all, not that there had been anything to forgive,
begrudged Kit nothing. Their own fling been a short-lived mistake
and Priddy didn’t have a dog in the race, a foot in the door or a
leg to stand on if his friend had moved on. You know I wasn’t sure if I was gay or not? I think I know
now. At least, I’m not sure I could be this much in love with
another bloke if I was straight.
In love. Priddy whispered the words
aloud, trying them on for size. Kit—solid, unimaginative,
impervious to the teenage goings-on of his generation—had found
someone who could reach inside and make a difference. Would it have
made a difference to Priddy if the someone had been a
girl?
Yes.
Yes, even though he and Kit had never had a spark. “Sorry, mate,”
he murmured to the screen. “Being a right dog-in-the-manger here,
aren’t I? Who is he, then?”
I don’t want you to freak out. I know it’s not exactly
ethical but he’s being very discreet, and he says it’s the first
time this has ever happened to him—falling for a student, I mean.
He’s as bowled over by it all as I am. His name’s Geoff, and he’s
my personal tutor as well as the head of department. I swear to
you, Prid, it probably sounds sleazy as hell, but if you met him,
you’d know it’s not. He’s in his fifties, but you’d never think it
to look at him. He’s gorgeous.
Kit was
nineteen. Sharply Priddy reminded himself that until two days ago,
he personally had been lusting after a guy who’d been a friend of
Jacques Cousteau.
But that
had just been one of Merou’s exuberant fantasies, or outright lies
if you chose to look at it that way. This Geoff guy sounded all too
real. Priddy wasn’t about to freak out about it, though. These
things sometimes defied all the odds. One girl from Redruth
sixth-form college had hooked up with the head teacher in a blaze
of scandal—married him, borne him three kids, and the five of them
lived happily in Mawnan Smith, the model of devotion and
respectability...
And those kinds of endings were rare as rocking-horse shit.
Priddy got his phone out. Email wasn’t fast or personal enough to
say what he wanted to say, which was oh,
mate, be careful. Be careful, Kit, please.
The next line of Kit’s message caught his eye. And please don’t tell me to be careful, Prid, because it’s
too late.