Hard Tail (21 page)

Matt’s head jerked up, and he started to say something, then stopped.

“I shouldn’t have said that. It was just a, a gut reaction—Steve and I didn’t exactly hit it off.” I cleared my throat and wiped my hands on my jeans. “I’m sure he’s, um, a lot…nicer…when you get to know him outside karate. Anyway, I’m sorry.”

“No—it’s all right,” Matt said. “I mean—Steve just rubs people up the wrong way, sometimes.” It sounded like something he’d learned by rote, as if he’d had to apologise for Steve before.

No surprise there. “Right,” I said. “Not his fault.” I was lying through my teeth.

“No!” Matt agreed a bit too quickly for my liking. “It’s just…how he is.”

“Absolutely.”

As the conversation seemed to have stuttered to a halt, I muttered something about needing to get back to work and escaped out front again.

I still couldn’t believe it. Gentle, sweet, vegetarian Matt was living with Steve Pit-bull Pritchard? I’d always assumed vegetarians were what that bastard ate for breakfast. Maybe…maybe he really was different, outside the dojo?

Or maybe he wasn’t. God, how much did Matt have to put up with from Pritchard’s bullying ways? Whichever way I looked at it, it was pretty depressing—either Matt was with a bastard, or I’d have to accept Prick-tard had hidden depths. Neither option was particularly appealing.

Too fed up to bother nuking anything for tea that night, I sat on the sofa with Wolverine and ate tuna out of the tin. Having already eaten, he weighed down my legs like a furry cushion stuffed with nails and purred his approval of my dinner choice. “I just don’t get it,” I muttered, my mood as sour as my dinner companion’s breath. “Why the hell would someone like Matt be with someone like bloody Prick-tard? He’s a thug, a bully, he pretends Matt’s his lodger…”

Then again, was that really so different form me claiming to have had a quiet night in when I’d in fact been experimenting with homosexuality in general, and Adam in particular, down at the Cock?

I put down the tin of tuna, having unaccountably lost my appetite. Wolverine stood, anchored himself briefly with a few well-placed claws, then hopped onto the table to finish my dinner for me.

Chapter Sixteen

When I got to the shop on Tuesday morning, it wasn’t just Matt waiting for me in the doorway. There was a large rucksack, a mountain bike and a guitar collectively taking up a lot more space than he did.

“Hey, I didn’t know you played guitar,” I blurted out before my brain could catch up with what my eyes were telling me about his hunched-over posture and sad eyes. “Bloody hell, are you okay?”

Matt sniffed and struggled to his feet, nearly falling on his guitar in the process. “’M fine.”

“No, you’re not.” For one thing, he was muttering worse than Adam. “Come on in and tell me what’s happened. Have you and Steve had a bust-up?” It was hardly a Holmesian effort of deduction, given the luggage and the general despondency.

Matt grabbed his bike and pushed it into the shop. I picked up his guitar in one hand and his rucksack in the other and followed him in. “Matt? Come on, talk to me.”

“Yeah. Sorry.” He wasn’t looking at me. “I’ve left him,” he told his handlebars.

My heart leapt—and then my conscience stepped in to grab it, give it a good shake and slam it back down to earth. I had no business whatsoever being glad Matt and Steve weren’t an item any longer. “For good?” I couldn’t help myself asking. “I mean, you’re sure you won’t work things out?”

Matt rolled his bike into the back room and leaned it against the wall. Finally he turned to face me, his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pockets. He shook his head. “Nah. It’s over.”

“Did…did you have a fight?” I broke into a cold sweat at the thought of Matt trying to stand up to Pit-bull Pritchard.

The shaggy curls shook again. “Not this morning. I just…I just left. I waited ’til he’d gone to work and then I grabbed my stuff and left. I mean, I wrote him a note so he’d know why I’d gone.”

“Why?” My blood ran cold. “Is there someone else?”

Matt’s face, what I could see of it, turned pink. “It’s not that. It’s just—it just wasn’t a good idea. Me staying, I mean. I thought he’d change—he kept saying he’d change—but he never did.”

I wondered exactly what Steve had been doing that he shouldn’t. Just being himself would have been ample grounds, in my view, to dump the bastard like a ton of steaming hot manure, but presumably Matt had different views on the matter. If Prick-tard had hurt him… “Are you all right?” I asked again, more urgently this time. My chest ached with the need to go and give him a hug, but distrust of my own motives held me back.

Plus, my arms were still full of Matt’s stuff. I put the rucksack down next to the workbench and propped the guitar up against it carefully.

Matt nodded. “Yeah, I’ll be fine,” he said, his gaze falling to the floor and his uncertain tone giving the lie to his words.

A thought struck me. “Have you got anywhere to stay?”

“Was going to ask if you’d mind me kipping down in the shop for a day or two.”

“Don’t be daft! Come and stay at Jay’s. He won’t mind.” I gave Matt an encouraging smile. “The sofa’s enormous, and it’s actually pretty comfortable. It’ll be nice to have someone else for the cat to ignore.”

He looked up at that. “Jay’s got a cat? I didn’t know that.”

“Well, the jury’s still out on whether he knows himself, actually—I keep forgetting to ask him—but the cat seems to think he lives there, so who am I to argue? Anyway, it’s settled—you’re staying.”

“Are you sure? I mean, it’s a bit much to ask…”

“Good thing you didn’t, then—I offered, remember? Come on, don’t worry about it. I’d better go and open up the till out front, but if you need anything…” I trailed off. I wasn’t honestly certain what he might need, as such. But I’d make damn sure he got it, anyway.

Matt’s smile told me just how relieved he was to have somewhere to go. “Thanks,” he said, still sounding a bit awkward. “S’pose I’d better get down to work, then.”

I nodded and left him to it.

Unsurprisingly, Matt hadn’t provided any lunch today, so I sent him out to get something from Asda. Not that I was feeling particularly lazy or anything like that, but I wasn’t sure Matt was really up to dealing with customers on his own, and a bit of a walk in the sunshine would undoubtedly do him good. He came back with a baguette, some French cheese and various other ingredients which he then proceeded to assemble into a simple but delicious lunch. “You know, I’m not saying I don’t appreciate this, but an egg and cress on white would have been fine,” I mumbled with my mouth half-full of brie.

Still subdued, Matt managed a weak smile. “Yeah, well. I like good food, all right? And it’s not healthy, eating a load of packaged crap.” He ducked his head. “Sorry. I probably sound like your mum.”

“Your mum, maybe, but not mine. Mum hates cooking, always has. She thinks convenience food is the best thing since sliced bread.” I looked at the remains of my baguette. “Although I have to say, my opinion of sliced bread has gone right down since you’ve been doing my lunches.”

Matt had a far-off look in his eye. “My mum loved cooking. She was always in the kitchen in her pinny, baking something or other. She used to joke that my stepdad only married her for her sticky buns.”

“Oo-er, missus!” I laughed, pleased to see Matt smiling along. “You must miss her a lot,” I added more seriously.

“Yeah—it was always just me and her, you know? Even when she married my stepdad—I mean, I was five then, so before that it really was just me and her—but even after, we always spent a load of time together. Dad wasn’t really into playing football in the park or any of that stuff—I mean, he’d done all that with his daughters, hadn’t he? So it was just Mum and me, ’specially in school holidays. Dad kept working well into his seventies, and he still does the gardening and stuff. He’s always hated just sitting around doing nothing.”

Matt paused for breath after that little speech, and I nodded. “He’d have been a child in the nineteen-thirties, wouldn’t he? I suppose if you grew up during the big depression, you wouldn’t want to give up a decent job until you had to.”

“Yeah—he was always mad keen on saving money too. Used to drive Mum mad, sometimes. And me.” Matt tidied up the remains of our lunch and the various bits of packaging it had come in. “Right. Better get back to work.”

“I suppose so,” I said, sad our little break seemed to be over.

Matt nodded and headed out back again.

Trade was fairly quiet that afternoon, so as often as I could, I popped out to the back room, where Matt at least was keeping busy with an endless stream of repairs and services.

“I really ought to learn how to do this stuff,” I commented as he tightened up the brake cables on an old-fashioned sit-up-and-beg-type Raleigh.

Matt looked up and grinned. “Are you trying to put me out of a job?”

“God, no!” It was a horrible thought. I’d found it bad enough on Saturday without him. “Is this what you’ve always wanted to do, fixing bikes?”

“Pretty much, yeah. It was one thing me and Dad used to do together, you know? Messing around with bikes and tools and stuff. He’s got a garage full of stuff he’s built from bits and bobs—there’s an old radio with actual valves in, can you believe that? Still works and all.”

I frowned. “Valves?”

“That’s what they used to have before transistors were invented.”

“
Which
century was your stepdad born in?”

“I know what you mean. It’s weird, really, how much the world’s changed in just his lifetime. When he was young, half the local farms still used horses to work the fields.” He made a face. “And being gay got you sent to the nick.” He bent his head to his work. “Did you always want to be an accountant?”

“God, no. I don’t think there’s anyone who’s ever grown up wanting to be an accountant.” I shrugged. “It just seemed like a good career—decent money, plenty of jobs. Well, back then there were, anyway. Plus, I had a sad lack of any useful skills that didn’t involve numbers,” I added.

“You shouldn’t do yourself down,” Matt said earnestly. “I mean, I think you’d be great at running a business, and that’s not all numbers. You’ve got ideas about promotions, that sort of stuff.”

“Unfortunately, I also know the statistics for how many new businesses fail in their first year. Jay’s done well with this place,” I conceded.

Then the bell jangled, and I had to get back out front before I undermined all Jay’s good work.

As I unlocked Jay’s front door that evening to usher Matt in, it occurred to me a little too late that, given the choice, I’d probably have preferred to get the dragons out of sight before he saw them. Still, maybe he wouldn’t notice them at first, and I could shift them while he had a shower or something.

Of course, no sooner had I formed the plan than Matt blew it out of the water. “Hey, I didn’t know Jay collected these—they weren’t here last time I came round.” He picked up the one I’d put next to the computer—it was the one I’d bought Gran just before she died, called “Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger”. It was a model of a smug-looking dragon crouched on a box, with a tiger’s tail protruding from its mouth as if it hadn’t quite finished swallowing the beast. “That’s pretty cool,” Matt said, smiling.

“Oh—it’s mine, actually, not Jay’s,” I said, daftly pleased, as if I’d made it myself. “Well, they used to be our gran’s, but she left them all to me.”

“You’ve got more?”

“Dozens. Well, not literally, but there’s quite a lot.”

“My mum used to like this kind of stuff. Reminds me of her reading me
The Hobbit
when I was little—she used to let me hold one of the dragons, as long as I sat still and listened to the story.” Matt stared at the dragon, a tiny smile on his lips. I felt as if I was intruding into a treasured memory and didn’t know what to say.

Wolverine, bless his self-centred, greedy little heart, said it for me, choosing that moment to announce loudly from the doorway that it was about bloody time he got fed. Matt turned and, for a heart-stopping moment, almost fumbled the dragon and dropped it, but he managed to set it down safely on the table. “This is Jay’s cat, right?”

“Matt, Wolverine. Wolverine, Matt. Better watch out for his claws,” I added. I was still looking at Wolverine, but I was confident they’d both realise from the context I was talking to Matt. “He nearly eviscerated Adam last time he was here.” My shoulders tensed up. Why the hell did I have to go and mention Adam?

“Oh. Right.” Matt studied his feet. Perhaps he was worried Wolverine was about to pounce on them. “Listen, you know, if I’m in the way here, if you want to have Adam round, and all—”

“Don’t be daft.” It came out a bit more sharply than I’d intended. I felt my face grow hot. Bloody Adam.

Then I reminded myself Adam was Matt’s best mate. “Look, it’s not a problem for me, having you here, and I’m sure it won’t be for Adam.”

“You sure? I mean, with him still living at his mum’s, it’s got to be hard…” He shrugged. “You know. Getting time alone.”

The heat spread down my neck and formed a tight band around my shoulders. I really,
really
didn’t want to talk to Matt about what I did with Adam. Which was undoubtedly all the more evidence that I shouldn’t have been doing it in the first place. Bloody hell, what a mess. Finally, Matt was single, and he was even living in the same house as me.