7
–i’ll text you when i get back safe
He had sent that message just before eleven, when he’d left Eastbourne. It was now four o’clock in the morning and I was freaking out.
We always did that thing. Just a text to say that we were home and in one piece and that we hadn’t been mugged, stabbed or blown up by some snot-nosed suicide bomber. One of those things you did as a sort of insurance policy, or a prayer.
And you always assumed that that text would come, because if it didn’t you were heading for the day you’d been trying to stave off the whole time. The day where it didn’t, and you would be left alone with nothing but the darkest thoughts your brain could conjure. All the terrible things you most feared for those you loved.
That’s where I was right now. Already I was looking back and envying the person I’d been five hours before, when the total wreck of Derek’s career was the worst thing I could imagine happening to him. I’d lost count of the times I’d texted. I’d called. I’d emailed. I’d messaged him on Twitter, and now I was all alone in the darkest, quietest part of the night, trying to soothe myself by listening to the sound of the rain, but it couldn’t drown out the sounds that kept playing in my head. Squeals of brakes, tyres on wet roads.
God, where the fuck was he?
Tomorrow I was supposed to cover the Prime Minister’s speech for the Independent. The old me, the one before Derek, would have been agog at this career move, but at this moment it just felt like an irritation. Something I could really do without. I had more pressing concerns right now.
Like him.
My eyes felt gritty. Time for more caffeine. At least I’d got some more teabags from reception, when he’d walked out of the hotel and I hadn’t dared look back, like some kind of Orpheus who had actually done as he was told. Didn’t seem fair that I might share the same fate. Where had he gone after he walked out of that door?
The phone rang.
I’d been waiting for it to do that for so long that I stared incredulously at it for a split second, before snatching it up.
“Toby?”
I exhaled. My body felt light with relief at the sound of his voice. “Oh my God. Where have you been?”
“Okay,” he said, speaking slowly and with an artificial calm that immediately reignited my panic. “Listen to me. I need you to stay very calm...”
There was a weird, honking, sobbing sound, and I realised it was coming from me.
“...I’m in hospital.”
“Oh my God.”
“Shh. It’s okay. I’m all right. Just had a little bit of an accident in the car.”
I covered my mouth. The last thing he needed right now was me making dying whale noises at him down the phone. “Oh my God. What happened? Are you all right?”
“Fox,” he said. “Fucking thing ran straight out in front of me. Swerved and drove straight into a tree.”
Oh. There it was. Dying whale noise. Not even my hand could hold that one back. I was shaking so hard I thought the phone would fall out of my fingers.
“I’m okay,” he said. “No broken bones. Just a nasty concussion, although I think I might find myself getting cropped out of the wedding photos on Saturday. Between my driving glasses and the airbag it’s done a hell of a number on my face.”
I raced into the bathroom and started gathering up my things to pack. “Where are you? Which hospital?”
“No, Toby...”
“What do you mean, no? I’m coming. I’m not leaving you on your own.”
“I’m not alone,” he said. “Mia’s here.” His adviser. Of course. “She’ll keep an eye on me once they discharge me. It’s only for the first twenty-four hours that...oh...” I heard her voice in the background. “Oh, okay. She says you shouldn’t be alone for forty-eight hours after a concussion.”
“Yes, but–”
“–no, love. Listen to me. It’s not like I’m leaking brain fluid or anything, and you have the Prime Minister’s speech to cover.”
“Fuck the Prime Minister,” I said. “I don’t care.”
“Well, I do,” said Derek. “Come on. I know you’re scared and I know this is a horrible shock for you. Believe me, it hasn’t been very pleasant this end, either, but earlier you kept me from wrecking my career. I think this is the bit where I stop you from wrecking yours.”
My legs didn’t seem to work any more. I slid down the side of the bathroom doorway, crying helplessly down the phone at him. He needed me to be strong and brave and sensible right now, and here I was dissolving in snot and tears. “I want you,” I said. “I want to see you. I want to hold you. I never want to let you out of my sight again.”
“Don’t cry, Lamb,” he said, his voice breaking slightly. “I’m in good hands, and I’ll see you very soon. I want you to do two things for me, okay?”
I wiped my face on the back of my arm and tried to get a grip. “Yes. Anything.”
“Cover the story,” he said, with an emphasis that told me he knew his Hunter S. Thompson. “And please don’t tell me you love me.”
“What? Why?” One seemed reasonable. Two seemed impossible at a moment like this.
“Because my brain is basically scrambled egg at the moment,” said Derek. “And I might not remember it five minutes later. If you’re going to say it, can you save it for a time when I’m absolutely sure that my brain isn’t about to start leaking out of my ears?”
I somehow laughed, cried and snorted all at once. “Yes. I can do that.” Could I?
“Good,” he said. “Then we’ll do this later.”
Later. Was he telling me this because that was his way of saying that there would be a later? Oh God, what he must have been through tonight. Neurologists, brain scans. All those things must have taken him back to some dark and painful places. At that moment I could have sworn my bones ached with the desire to be with him, to hold his hand and kiss his bruises and tell him that everything was going to be okay.
“All right, my love,” he said, as if I were the one who needed care. “Get some rest.”
“You, too. I’ll be with you very soon.”
“I know.”
“Just...” My throat burned with the words he didn’t want me to say.
“...no. Come on. What did we say?”
“I know,” I said. “But I just...” I swallowed hard. “Please be careful. You have to know by now that you are very, very precious to me.”
I heard him sniff and pictured his tears. “I know that,” he said. “And the same goes for you.”
*
It was dark by the time I got back to London. I’d done my best with the speech, but deep down I knew my best wasn’t going to be good enough. I was distracted, sleep-deprived and worried sick.
When I got to Ealing it was Mia who opened the door. She was black and tiny and so arrestingly beautiful that she looked like she’d escaped from one of those Instagram accounts where girls with impossible eyelashes made startling amounts of money off the strength of their immaculately painted pouts. If she’d been run ragged dealing with a cranky Derek then she didn’t show it, at least not on the outside.
“Toby, right?” she said. Her hand felt as soft and bony as a teenager’s, but her grip was fierce. “Am I glad to see you.”
“Has he been very difficult?”
She laughed. “Oh, you have no idea.” Her accent was pure South London.
“I think I can guess,” I said, feeling strangely elated that we were even having this conversation. He was alive, and well enough to laugh about.
I walked into the living room to find him perched at one end of the sofa, wearing an unfamiliar pair of glasses and texting furiously. He had a cut across the bridge of his nose, a big purple black eye and a red rash all up the side of his face. “Collar,” said Mia, and pounced on a neck brace that lay abandoned at the other end of the couch.
“Oh no,” he said. “Not that. It’s like one of those things they put on dogs to stop them from licking their balls.”
She fastened the foam collar around his neck, blocking him from view. “Yeah, well. You’re not missing anything, are you? Because you couldn’t lick your own balls in the first place.”
“Not for lack of trying, I assure you.” He shot me a glance past her hip as she moved aside to adjust the straps in the back. His eyes said ‘help’ but all I could think about was how battered he looked, and how much it hurt to think of him in any kind of pain.
“Right,” said Mia. “I need to get back. Deal with the press.”
“Oh, that’ll be nice for you,” said Derek. “Fielding stupid questions about what I was doing driving around Redhill at one o’clock in the morning.”
Mia, her phone already in hand, peered down at him and sighed. “Nobody’s asking that,” she said. “Except for the Daily Mail. Which I told you not to read because it’s gross, Derek.”
“Gross,” he said, rising stiffly from the couch. “Do you think maybe you children could get together on Tumblr and come up with a slightly less Nickelodeon word for the ideologically repugnant?”
“Problematic,” said Mia.
“On second thoughts, stick with ‘gross’.”
“You were the one who wanted to dip a toe into the discourse, granddad.”
He squeezed my elbow as he wandered past towards the bedroom. No big reunion just yet. Despite being smacked around he was still in spin mode.
“Is he okay?” I asked, once I’d heard the door of the en-suite bathroom close.
“He’s being difficult,” she said. “More than usual. They did say irritability was common with a concussion, though.” She cocked a head towards the kitchen and I followed her, out of earshot. “He keeps saying he’s fine but it was a nasty old prang. Front of the car looks like a concertina.”
“Oh my God.” I imagined the Daily Mail insects were photographing it right now, along with subheadlines like HOW DID HE WALK AWAY? as if insinuating that it was somehow possible for a slippery politician to bribe his way out of a car crash. It wouldn’t make sense, but you didn’t have to if you were writing in such a way as to appeal directly to your audience’s lizard brains, the kind of primitive, fearful part of the mind that might once have decided the obvious way to keep the volcano from erupting was to push virgins into a lake of molten rock. Hadn’t worked before, but hey, maybe this time they’d pick the virgin the volcano really liked and it wouldn’t rain pumice on Tuesday.
“What’s the Mail saying?” I asked.
“Oh, the usual,” said Mia, rummaging through a pile of papers on the kitchen counter. “Driving while gay. Didn’t explicitly say that gay men can’t drive because their brains are devoted to cock 24/7, but…”
“Yeah. I know their style,” I said, immediately uncomfortable, because even a stopped clock was right at least once a day. Derek probably had had cock on his mind at the time. Namely mine, and I’d sent him off with balls bluer than the entire Conservative Party Conference. God, had I inadvertently caused a car crash with my dick? “Gay, left-wing MP driving around late at night. In Daily Mail land that means something dirty and sinister is going on. Couldn’t be anything normal, like seeing family or late night shopping or anything like that.”
Mia paused in her rummagings. “I thought of that,” she said. “But he gets delivery.”
I was pretty sure I looked like a fox in the headlights right now. Her large, dark eyes searched my face as she spoke. “It makes sense,” she said, “That he might have family in East Sussex, don’t it? But his parents are dead. And he’s an only child. You’re about the subtotal of his private life right now, aaand…” She paused to give me another once over with those lie-detector eyes. “You were recently in Eastbourne, right? Party conference?”
“There’s no law against him being in Eastbourne when the Tory Party Conference is on,” I said. She didn’t need to know he’d been in the actual hotel.
“True,” she said. “Although it doesn’t look good.”
“It doesn’t, no. I know that.”
She gave a short sigh. “All right,” she said. “I’ve got to go back to Whitehall and explain this to the spin monsters. What am I supposed to say?”
“That he had a car accident caused by wildlife? That’s about the sum of it. Are people not allowed to have car accidents any more?”
“No,” said Mia. “Not when they’re fucking MPs they’re not.” She started ticking things off on her fingers. “They’re not allowed to have expense accounts, sexual proclivities, second homes or personal taste in anything. Even biscuits, in case they accidentally alienate a handful of voters in Kettering or somewhere who can’t bring themselves to vote for someone who prefers Hobnobs over McVitie’s Chocolate Digestives. It’s ridiculous, but there it is.”
I leaned heavily on the kitchen side. “Fuck.”
She returned to the pile of papers and found what she was looking for. “You’re new to this, aren’t you?” she said.
“No, I had a politics blog–”
“–that nobody ever read. Yeah, I know. I didn’t mean that. I meant this. Him. Being in the inner circle.”
“No,” I said. “You’re right. I was never really in the loop.”
“Well, you are now,” she said. “So be careful.”
“Careful?”
“Careful it doesn’t scoop you out hollow,” she said. “There are some people wandering around Westminster…they’re like husks. Derek’s not too bad, but he’s only been an MP for seven years.”
“So, what?” I said. “He’s going to get…husky?”
“Politics can steal your soul. If you love him, remind yourself of that. And it probably won’t hurt to remind him now and again, too.”
I was slightly taken aback. “Why are you telling me this?”
Mia shrugged. “I don’t know. You seem nice, and I don’t meet many nice people in my line of work.” She handed me the sheet of paper. “That’s what the doctor gave me, okay?”
I glanced down at the list of things you were and weren’t supposed to do when you had a minor brain injury, and realised that Derek had suddenly gone very quiet. “Where is he, anyway?”
“Probably sleeping. He said he wanted a nap just before you got here.”
“Nap?” I said. “Aren’t you supposed to stay awake if you have a concussion?”
Mia shook her head and headed back to the living room. “Only for the first four hours,” she said, gathering up her things. “After that you only have to worry if they can’t carry on a conversation, walk normally or have dilated pupils. If they have any of those symptoms and then go to sleep, call a doctor.”
“Okay. Thank you.”
“The NHS website is very helpful. Just don’t Google anything else about brains because–”
“–because the Internet will convince me it’s a brain tumour. I know.”
“Smart cookie,” she said. “It’ll scare the shit out of you. Don’t do it.”
“Thank you.”
“No problem,” she said, and was out of the door.
I went into the bedroom. The foam collar was on the floor, along with Derek’s clothes. He lay on his side with one arm under the pillow. The reading light was still on, giving me an opportunity to examine the damage to his face without him swatting me away or telling me he was fine. It looked bad, but it was clearly only superficial, and far, far better than the shape he might have been in if it hadn’t been for the seatbelt and airbag.
But he was snoring too loud and too deeply, and while I tried to assure myself that it was just because he probably still had blood in his sinuses, it started sounding frightening to me, like the deep, sighing snores my grandmother had given as her heart slowed and eventually shut down.
“Derek,” I said, gently shaking him by the shoulder. “Baby. Wake up.”
He opened one eye and squinted at me. “Unnh?”
“I need to check your pupils?”
“Wha?”
“Your eyes. Let me see your eyes.”
“Toby, fuck off,” he said, and pulled the covers over his head. He was his usual cranky waking-up self, and I had never been so happy to be sworn at. I gently patted the mound he made under the duvet and set about picking up his clothes and straightening the dog-eared books next to his bed; something impenetrable about economics and one I recognised, the Alicia Dujovne Ortiz biography of Eva Peron. I had a strange feeling that Evita was haunting my love life.
I left him to sleep and went into the kitchen, where there were a couple of dishes and cups piled up on the side. I washed them up and made some tea, thinking how strange it felt to be in his house like this, as though I could become a permanent part of his life. Could I ever really think of this kitchen as mine? Ours? As I stood there drying up the cups I had a vision of how this could have been, if not for an airbag and a seatbelt and a speed limit. It was like cold air stirring the hairs on the nape of my neck, a brief remembrance of how a person’s house feels when you know they are never coming home again. Black clad groups, finger food, murmured conversation. All the mirrors covered.
I looked in on him again, just to be sure.
He was sleeping peacefully, so I took my tea into the living room and opened up my laptop. I’d spent four days writing about nothing but politics and the thought of writing fiction again felt like the first day of the school holidays. I could conjure up a whole world of my own, fill it with people I’d invented out of thin air. And the best part? They were mine to control. Nothing happened on that page without my say so. A whole little universe that danced to my tune.
And Derek said politicians were megalomaniacs. They had nothing on writers.
I got maybe a couple of pages down and was beginning to enjoy myself when Virginia rang. She was the editor of the Independent, and she was not entirely happy.
“I have to admit,” she said, in a headmistressy tone that was far worse than simply being put on blast, “I did kind of expect a bit more from you, Toby. The Prime Minister’s speech coverage…”
“…yes, I know. I rushed.”
“It showed. It was messy and disjointed.”
“In my defence, so was the speech.”
She made a soft, irritated sound. “You do know that this is one of the most newsworthy events of the entire political calendar, right?”
“I do. I know. I’m sorry. I had a bit of an emergency.”
“Right,” she said. “I heard. How is he?”
“He’s fine. Sleeping.”
“Well, give him my best, won’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Do you know what happened?”
I hesitated. On one hand she was effectively my boss, but on the other hand she was still a journalist and one who had a significant stake in getting eyeballs on her content.
“He swerved to avoid a fox,” I said. “In a forty mile an hour zone. They caught the whole thing on the speed cameras. He wasn’t drunk. Why is everyone behaving like this was Chappaquiddick?”
“They’re not. But you can’t blame people for wondering what he was doing driving around at–”
“–no, I’m sorry,” I said. “Is there a curfew for members of parliament or something? Aren’t they allowed to drive around at night? What are they fucking supposed to do? Return to little cages in Whitehall basements after every vote and interview? He’s a human being with a private life. One that is none of your business, I might add.”
There was a silence on the end of the line, a moment in which my brain caught up with my mouth and I realised I’d just lost my temper with the editor of the Independent.
“Well,” said Virginia. “You’re a better boyfriend than you are a journalist. I’ll give you that much.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve had a bastard of a day. You have to understand, I’m under a lot of stress right now.”
“No, it’s fine,” she said, but the chill in her voice said ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you’. “Get some sleep. We’ll catch up later.”
“Yeah. Okay. I’m really sorry.”
“I know. Bye.”
I heard the bedroom door open. Derek padded in, wrapped up tightly in his huge, fluffy navy dressing gown. “What are you doing?” he said, shuffling up next to me on the sofa.
“I think I’m getting fired,” I said. He leaned his head on my shoulder and I kissed the top of his scalp. It felt hot, like he was running a fever.
“What did you do?” he said.
“Oh God, it hardly matters right now,” I said, running my fingers through his hair. “I’ll just have to go back to writing pornography, I suppose.”
He pressed a lazy kiss against my shoulder. “I like pornography.”
“I know you do, dear.” The lid of his right eye looked like it had swelled more in his sleep. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m okay,” he said. “I look a lot worse than I feel.”
I closed the laptop and took a good look at him. That cut on the bridge of his nose was nasty and looked like it might leave a scar, and the whole of one cheek was covered in tiny abrasions that felt hard to the touch, like a crust on top of his skin. “I think you look absolutely beautiful,” I said.
He smiled and kissed me lightly on the mouth. His lips were chapped. “So do you.”
“Do you want some tea?”
“Mmm. That would be nice. Let me get it.”
“No, you don’t,” I said, putting a hand on his knee to hold him down as I got up from the sofa. “I know it’s your kitchen, but I’ve figured out how to make a cup of tea in it. You sit there and relax.”
“Relax? If I relaxed any further I’d be in a persistent vegetative state.”
I thought he was going to get up and follow me into the kitchen, but amazingly he stayed put. When I came back to bring him his tea he was sitting erect, his fingers on his neck, like he was trying to somehow feel through the skin and ascertain whether all his vertebrae were still where they ought to be.
“I wish I wasn’t so fucking sore,” he said. “I had it all planned out.”
“Planned?”
“When you came back from Eastbourne. I had all these amazing ideas about what we were going to do in bed. And the bath. And the sofa. And maybe the dining room table…”
“Uh, no,” I said, thinking of the glass box extension that led outside to the patio. “I think that might be taking exhibitionism a bit too far. Besides, doesn’t that table have a weight limit?”
Apparently satisfied that his head was on straight, Derek stopped poking at his neck and reached for his tea. “You see,” he said. “This is why we definitely need to get a sex swing.”
“Yeah. Pretty sure you’re not supposed to do that kind of thing when you have a minor brain injury.”
He raised an eyebrow. “We have to have sex, Toby. While you were in Eastbourne I tested the limits of what the human wrist can handle. If I don’t have sex with you soon I think I might actually explode.”
“Fine. Gentle sex.”
Derek groaned. “Gentle? But I love rough sex.”
“I know you do,” I said, reaching for the information Mia had given me. “But look here. Says no sports for at least three weeks following a concussion.”
“Sports?”
“Yes, I know it’s not an Olympic event, but I’m pretty sure hardcore rope bondage and spanking with implements exerts as much stress on the human body as playing football or something.” I knew as soon as the words ‘hardcore rope bondage’ were out of my mouth that I’d really screwed the pooch. Because Derek’s eyes lit up like Christmas.
“Wait,” he said, clearly determined to nail me on this point. “Does this mean you’re down with spanking and rope bondage once I’m recovered?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You implied it.”
“No, I didn’t. You just chose that implication.”
“Okay,” he said, changing tack. “Just out of interest, how hardcore are we talking? A little light tiesy-upsies or we talking dangling from the ceiling shit that looks like Spiderman got involved somewhere?”
“I told you,” I said. “It’s academic until you’re all better. When they print your obituary I want it to be many years from now and with a list of great achievements and adoring tributes. I don’t want you to be remembered like that one poor bastard who will always be known as the one they found wearing women’s underwear, with a tangerine in his mouth and a Tesco bag on his head.”
“Auto-erotic asphyxiation,” said Derek. “Rookie mistake. He picked the wrong fruit, you see. What you really need is a lemon or a lime, because the sourness is supposed to wake you up and remind you to slacken the…what? Stop looking at me like that. I’m just saying. A tangerine is too sweet. It’s not going to deliver the required jolt to the–”
I held up a hand. “–Derek, please stop talking. You’re starting to scare me.”
He set down his mug on the coffee table. “For the record, I’ve never done it.”
“And you’re not going to,” I said. “That’s a hard no. I don’t care if it makes me sound provincial and boring, but where I come from we do not choke the people we love.”
He stiffened. “Love?”
I felt the atmosphere shift in the room, his apprehension all too obvious. “Yes,” I said, getting off the sofa and perching on the edge of the coffee table. I took his hands and looked into his poor, blackened eyes. “Love.”
He leaned forward, our foreheads touching. “You know I’m still kind of scrambled, right?”
“You seem more than mentally alert to me,” I said. Even with a concussion, Derek’s brain worked a lot faster than average.
“I know, but what if I’m not?” He didn’t look at me, but he reached up and curled his fingers around the nape of my neck. I could feel him trembling, a subdued shivering that he was clearly fighting to keep under control, and suddenly I was aware of every single beat of my own heart.
“Why are you so afraid?” I asked, perhaps to get a handle on my own fear as well. Oh, this was big. This was deep and fast and the kind of thing that could hurt you in ways you weren’t supposed to hurt when you were this far into your thirties, when you were supposed to take your knocks like a grown-up.
“Because,” he said. “Because this feels huge. And terrifying.”
“I’m terrifying?”
He gave a nervous laugh and looked up, his hand moving to cup my jaw. “And wonderful,” he said. “And clever, and funny, and dirty. And kind.” I felt my eyes fill. He braced himself as though he was expecting to be shot and – avoiding my eyes for a second – said, “Just say it, Toby. I think I’ll die if you don’t.”
“I love you.” It came out on a held breath, all at once.
I felt his breath on my lips as he exhaled. When he kissed me his mouth tasted of tears again. “Oh my God,” he said, both hands on my face. “I love you, too.”
He was right. It was terrifying. Especially now that I’d had a taste of how it might feel to lose him. How desolate and empty and grey. That’s how much colour and laughter and lust he’d brought into my life in the space of just of a few weeks.
“Shall we go to bed?” I said.
He kissed me again. “Yes, please. Although I don’t think I’m going to be up to much. Everything hurts.”
“That’s all right. I’m exhausted, too. I barely slept at all last night.”
We went into the bedroom. When he took off his dressing gown I gasped, because there was a huge, seatbelt shaped bruise across his chest and shoulder. He’d always been lean, but tonight was the first time he looked thin, like bone china or beaten gold. Something precious and all too easily damaged.
I folded up my glasses and set them on the bedside table, just as he was turning on the light on his side of the bed. “Oh God,” he said.
“What?”
“Here we are. Taking off our glasses and turning out the lights.”
“Well, we’re old,” I said, slipping into bed beside him. “Want to do it quietly in the dark?”
There was a silence and then he sighed. “I can’t believe I’m saying this,” he said. “But no. I don’t think I’m up to it. They said I didn’t have any fractures, but tell that to my ribs.”
I snuggled closer, grateful for the touch of his skin against mine. “I was joking. We’re not going to do anything you don’t feel up to. Besides, we can always text one another.”
“That could work.” He turned over onto his side, pushing his bum into the curve formed by my thighs and belly. My cock rose instinctively, but my eyes were already closing. “Tell me bedtime stories,” he said, in a low, half-asleep voice. “With tentacles.”
“Lots of tentacles,” I said, kissing the back of his shoulder. “Get some sleep, okay?”