CHAPTER 16 #3
“I’m calming down,” Jericho said. “It helps when someone tells me fairy tales in a lovely Hreod accent, honestly. They should prescribe you on the NHS.14 Actually, you should be on the radio.”
Avelyn laughed. Usually his accent drove people mad. It occurred to him suddenly that for all they’d spoken a lot now, Jericho hadn’t once asked him to repeat himself. “I am on the radio. The Jesuits run Radio Vaticano. I read the news in Latin.”
There was a pause in which Jericho absorbed that. Then, as usual, he skipped the normal responses. “What happens if you have to say something modern?”
“We have a whole modern dictionary that scholars work on, we can say anything. Your Latin must be okay, you’re a doctor trapped with Catholics? I once had to say brevissimae bracae feminae.”
“Super . . . short . . . lady-trousers?”
“Hot pants.”
It was a real, brilliant laugh that came through the door then, and in it, you could hear that Jericho could sing like a chorister. Avelyn hoped that you couldn’t be laughing like that and still scared by having been made to go aboveground with no warning because some cock had got himself shot.
Dressed now but still sitting on the floor, not completely sure how to approach standing up, Avelyn pushed the door open again and leaned out to see into the firelight. His boots were drying out by the stove, and his wet clothes had vanished.
“I didn’t mean for you to deal with all my wet things,” he said.
Jericho winced. He was still on the floor too. “Y . . . es. They’ve gone to the laundry, you’ll be lucky if you ever see them again, and even if you do, they’ll probably be pink.” The beginnings of a smile traced lines around his eyes. “You look so different.”
“I know,” said Avelyn, tying his damp hair back into its normal high knot.
In civilian clothes, he looked like a reformed skater boy who was right on the edge of deciding to go backpacking somewhere remote.
He had never been able to bring himself to cut his hair as short as Outsider men did.
He couldn’t shake his childhood certainty that the only men with short hair were criminals, so the compromise was to keep it just long enough to tie up, and that way he could face himself in the mirror.
“How is it?” Jericho asked, nodding to Avelyn’s leg.
“Amazingly okay. How are you?”
Jericho nodded, letting it slide off. He wasn’t seeing it as a real question. It was what people did when they were never at the top of the list, for anything. Now Avelyn was looking for it, though, he was a markedly starker shade of pale than his usual one.
Avelyn held his arm out. Jericho’s expression fractured, and then he leaned into him and hugged him hard. There was an urgency to it that said he had needed it. Avelyn held him for a few seconds, worried that he was much more disturbed by having been made to go above than he was saying.
Feeling Jericho’s whole spine bow toward him, the yield of that solid muscle across his shoulders, was a shock.
The only other person he normally touched was Father Li, but Li was so tiny that Avelyn mostly just arced over him and gave him a quick pat in case there was an accident and then he was in trouble with the Secretary, who frowned on leaving squashed diplomats on the expensive carpet.
But Jericho—if a marble statue had leaned across to be reassured, it would have felt as outlandish.
“How did it happen?” Avelyn said. Just for a moment, he let himself bow his head against Jericho’s hair.
It was a relief to find he wasn’t the only one who had some cracks in his soul, but he wished that there was a way to mend these ones.
He couldn’t think of anyone who deserved them less than Jericho.
“Oh, you know,” Jericho said. “Just my age, I suppose.”
Avelyn didn’t push. There was a fine line between weaselling and bullying.
He nodded instead and fist-bumped him gently, trying to let him know he still had his dignity.
But Jericho gave him a crooked smile, caught his fist in one open palm, and kissed his knuckles.
It was the chastest touch, nothing but a joke and a courtly scratch of stubble, but it still felt like being branded might have if burning could feel good.
There was something in it that said: That’s it.
We have to be friends now. And it was true.
Today wasn’t a day two people could live through together and come away without an invisible string linking their wrists together for years.
Avelyn was stupidly glad.
And . . . all that was left now was to limp up to his room and go back to bed. Suddenly there was nothing in the world he wanted to do less, but he didn’t know how to ask if he could stay here for a little while. He had taken up enough of a busy doctor’s time already.
Someone tapped on the Lodge door. It was Annunciata. Her salt light halo was brighter than ever, lighting the way before her and casting its own shadows now.
“I heard Avelyn was just shot?” she said. “By someone with a crossbow?”
“He was,” Jericho said. “He’s here now.”
“You stupid sod, what did you go and do that for?” Annunciata asked. It cracked all of Avelyn’s hesitance, and he started to laugh. They all did.
Before long, Avelyn and Annunciata were tucked under blankets on the couch, and Jericho was reading to them aloud from The Exorcist, which Annunciata said was much better than the film and which Avelyn hadn’t read.
He sat curled sideways with his head on the arm of the couch.
Between the sleepless night and everything else, he was exhausted.
Sometimes, if she thought he’d gone too long without laughing, Annunciata poked him with her cane, with its little ferret tail on the end.
Jericho made a new round of hot chocolate after every few chapters, and on his way by, he pressed his hand to the side of Avelyn’s head as if he were stroking an unhappy puppy.
Before long, Avelyn faded into a shallow doze, dimly aware he was going to need to get up and go to his room, and dreading it.
“How old is he?” he heard Annunciata ask, hushed. They must both have thought he was asleep. “He sounds really young.”
“He is. He must be . . . twenty-seven, twenty-eight?”
“Jesus. I’d have been in bits if this had happened to me when I was twenty-seven.”
“Honestly, I don’t think he particularly noticed,” Jericho said, from closer.
He tucked a hot water bottle under Avelyn’s arm.
Avelyn felt dishonest and opened his eyes to show that he was awake.
Jericho made a pretend-stern face at him.
Avelyn hugged the hot water bottle, guiltily loving being looked after.
“But being repulsively young, he’ll get better quickly down here. ”
Avelyn grinned and sank further down.
“Yes,” Annunciata said pensively, as though she would have liked to say something else.
“What?” said Jericho, looking back.
“Jericho . . . is there any chance you’ve got black hair with a white mark through it?”
Jesus.
Avelyn sat up.
Jericho held up both hands. “Can you see how many fingers?”
“Seven,” Annunciata whispered.
14 The UK’s national health service. Doctors treated you for free, something Father Li brought up a lot when he wanted to enrage Americans.
In practise though, Father Li had warned Avelyn not to get sick while he was in England, because the whole idea—even though doctors worked heroically hard—proved tricky to enact on a damp island almost in the North Pole with millions of people on it, most of whom were chronically ill because of age, the pandemic, living chiefly off chemicals cooked in a microwave, or the landlord’s point-blank refusal to do anything about the suspicious mushroom growing through the bathroom floor.
If you had a problem that wouldn’t kill you, nobody was interested, a broken leg could take weeks to treat, and even if you had been run over by an industrial lawn mower and were currently in pieces in the hospital foyer, there was probably a waiting list.