Some Boy (What's Love? #1) (13 page)

I opened my mouth in a silent howl, my eyes watering, and I panted and rolled to the side, trying to get to my feet as I rubbed my coccyx. Any movement drew sharp winces; I couldn’t straighten up so dropped back to my knees. I was already saturated by the rain, and now I couldn’t even stand up. This was fucked up.

There was more violent shouting coming from inside; I was considering crawling for the street when the front door flung open, illuminating me in a flood of light where I crouched, sodden and wide eyed on the path. Brendan burst out, slamming the door behind him with a harsh grunt and then stopping abruptly as he saw me.

We just blinked at each other, then I got to my feet and grit my teeth to stand up, though my tailbone throbbed painfully.

“Hiya,” I murmured idiotically.

He just stared at me, like he had turned to stone. Then he turned his face away, descended the steps and passed me, heading for the street.

“Brendan, wait,” I said, whirling round to follow him. And then I gasped as I caught a glimpse of the side of his face that he’d been trying to hide from me. “What...what happened?”

“Nothing,” he said sharply, and kept going. I hobbled after him.

“You’re bleeding,” I said. He stopped then, putting his hand to his hairline and bringing away bloody fingers. His knees jerked, like they were going to buckle. And then he sat down heavily on the neighbours concrete fence, buried his head in his arms and his shoulders began to shake. He was crying.

The combination of adrenaline, alcohol and the sight of blood collided in my stomach. It twisted and lurched. And as the blood drained from my face, I leaned over the fence beside him and puked into a bush.

*-*-*

We sat side by side on the low fence, the rain drizzling around us. I pushed my sodden hair off my forehead and tried to wipe away the water dripping into my eyes, but of course every drip I wiped away was replaced my another immediately. I was shivering and my stomach still churned uncomfortably, but I was trying to be calm and sober for Brendan’s sake.
 

He still hadn’t said anything. While I’d puked, he’d leaned over and made an attempt at holding my hair back for me. But as soon as I’d recovered, he’d withdrawn again, put his head in his hands and sat slumped and silent.

“Is everything okay?” I murmured eventually, then screwed up my face and shook my head for a second. What a stupid question. Would he be sitting on the street in the rain with a bleeding head if it was? “I mean, can I do anything? I should look at your head.” I got to my feet and leaned over him, brushing my fingers gently across his hair to move it out the way and see the damage, but Brendan just lifted his arms and roughly pushed my hands away.

“Leave off. I’m fine.” As he moved I could see the smear of blood down the side of his face, and the glisten of more in his hair, though it was hard to tell how much was blood and how much was rain in the dim street lights.

“You’re not fine. Let me look.” I tried to move his hands away more firmly this time; abruptly he grabbed my wrists and glared up into my face.

“I said stop.” We stayed frozen like that for a moment. The flash of anger that had passed over me at his obstinacy dissipated quickly; his face was stricken, though he tried to keep it neutral. I stopped straining against his grip and sunk down to squat in front of him. He released me.

My hands hovered by his knees, then I drew them back and tucked them under my armpits. My fingers were stiff and icy. “What happened, Brendan? I want to help.” Droplets of water splashed from my lips as I talked.

“You can’t. You shouldn’t be here.” He turned his face away, then frowned and glanced back at me. “What are you even doing here? How did you know where I live?”

“Justin…” Brendan had already rolled his eyes, realising the answer before I said it. He kept his face turned away, staring down the street. I reached out with one frozen hand and forced his head to turn to me, pressing against his cheek. I gasped when I saw the whole side of his face streaked with blood that looked almost black in the darkness. “You’re still bleeding. Maybe you should go to a hos—”

“No.” His voice was harsh, but he was blinking his eyes rapidly and didn’t seem to be able to focus on me.

“At least let me look at it then—Brendan.” I grabbed his shoulders as he teetered where he sat, stopping him from toppling backwards into the neighbour’s front garden. They already had vomit in their bush, they probably didn’t want a bloody mess as well.

“I’m fine,” he said, shrugging me off again. “Just dizzy.”

“You’re not fine. Come on.” I took his hand and tugged him to his feet, and surprisingly he let me lead him. I hesitated for a moment. I’d been planning to go into his house, find a bathroom and a first aid kit if they had one, but his house was the place he’d just run from.

“It’s fine. He’ll be gone now, out the back,” Brendan said, and nodded towards his front door. He staggered slightly on his feet. I tucked myself under his arm and gripped his waist, trying to support him. I didn’t know who
he
was, but I hoped Brendan was right about him being gone, because I didn’t know what else to do; we were going in.

I opened the door and lugged him inside. It opened straight onto a small lounge room, with a dingy carpet and a couch that had burn marks that the rug thrown over it couldn’t completely hide; the whole room smelled like an old ashtray. A TV hummed in the corner, strobing the room with coloured light. No one else was there at least.

“Where’s the bathroom?”

Brendan gestured weakly in the direction of the stairs, and I inwardly groaned. He was already leaning on me heavily and I couldn’t exactly piggy-back him up there. I sat him down on the first step, and he slumped against the balusters, staring blankly at the TV across the room. I ventured a bit further into the house, through the door that led into a small kitchen.

“Hello?” I called out tentatively. No one answered. I’d thought of using the kitchen instead of the bathroom, but it was a mess of unwashed dishes and takeaway containers. As I stepped further in to assess where a first aid kit might be kept, I felt a wet, gravelly crunch under my boot and looked down. There was a shattered bottle on the kitchen floor, shards of brown glass swimming in a pool of beer, tinged red. Blood. Was this what had hit Brendan? A clench of fear gripped my stomach, and I turned quickly back to the lounge room behind me where I had left him. My hands were shaking.

“What happened, Brendan? Are you sure it’s safe here?” I asked him, crouching down in front of him again. He didn’t look at me, just stared past me. My whole body was taut with anxiety. I was considering ringing an ambulance, maybe the police, when he spoke.

“It’s fine now. He’s gone.” His voice was flat and he still didn’t look at me. I searched his face. He looked pale and drawn, but I couldn’t tell if his demeanour was because of the injury or just a morose depression. I pressed my lips together tightly, determined not to cry in panic.

“Do you think you can get up to the bathroom?” I asked. He just nodded and started getting to his feet. He stumbled once, but tried again.
 

“Hang on,” I said. I stripped off my wet coat then reached down and unzipped my boots to wrench them off. We’d both fall down the stairs if I tried to carry him in those. As I was wrestling with the last boot, I heard a sound above us and looked up sharply.

“Fuck, Brendan. I told you to just let him go,” a voice said.

A teenage girl was staring down at us. She barely glanced at me before descending. The resemblance to Brendan was striking. She could have been a younger version of him, if he’d been a girl. Except that where his hair was unkempt, hers was ironed straight, and a heavy fringe nearly covered her thickly made-up eyes. Eyes that were eerily the same as his, I saw, when she glanced at me again. She paused next to Brendan, her brother I felt safe in assuming, and sneered. “You daft git. What’ve you done to yerself?” She roughly grabbed some of his hair out the way to look at his head, the huffed and slapped him on the back of his skull.
 

I gasped, and dropped my boot to reach out. But Brendan had already come to life with a yell, and swiped at her.

“Get off. You think I’m just gonna let him take it all without a fight?”

“Well ain’t he taken it anyway? And what have you got to show fer it? Nowt but a bleedin’ ‘ead.” Her accent was much stronger than I had ever heard Brendan’s. She was pushing past both of us and heading for the door.

“Wait,” I said, and she turned on me with a frown that bordered on disgust. “Can you help me get him upstairs?”

“What fer?”

“I need to look at his head. Do you know what happened? And is there a first aid kit somewhere?”

The girl’s top lip quirked up as she stared at me, looked me up and down, then she pressed her lips together like she was blotting her lipstick. “Dad hit him with a bottle. And I doubt it.”
 

She was standing a little taller now, and she flicked her straight hair back from her face primly. Even her accent had smoothed out; was she doing that after hearing mine? I knew I didn’t sound much like I was from Leeds; boarding school in London had trained that out of me a long time ago.

“Just help me get him upstairs, alright?” Brendan was getting to his feet on his own now, gripping the handrail.

“I can do it,” he said flatly.

“See, he’s fine. Cheerio,” she said in a plummy voice, and I was left in no doubt she was intending to mock me. And then she grabbed a coat from behind the door and went out into the night.

“Where’s she going? Should I stop her?” I asked, glancing at Brendan and back to the door.

“Why?”

“How old is she? Is that your sister?”

“She’s fifteen. And yes, she’s my sister. So clearly I’m not her father.” Brendan was climbing the stairs now, and I took two at a time after him to slip myself under his arm again. I didn’t know how much support I actually was, but he let me be there, and he gripped my shoulder as we went.

I felt more out of breath than he seemed by the time we got to the top, and once we were in the bathroom, I sat him down on the closed toilet seat and leant on the sink taking a few deep breaths. I glimpsed my reflection in the mirror and had to stifle a grimace. The fluorescent lighting did me no favours, but I would have been a sight in any lighting. My hair was plastered to my head like a skullcap, and my skin was a blotchy mess of white and red. My lips were a lovely shade of purple.

“Shit,” I murmured under my breath. Then louder, “Right. Let’s have a look at you.” I stood upright and ignored my own cold and aches. My tailbone still protested when I moved too quickly, but I figured a bleeding head was higher up the triage list. Brendan flinched reflexively as I reached out to touch his head, but then held himself still again. I could see his jaw was clenched tight, but I didn’t know if it was pain or pride.

As gently as I could, I parted his hair and brushed the wet matted clumps of it out of the way, searching for the origin of the blood that streaked his face. I had to clench my teeth together as my stomach lurched, when I found the gash in his hair. It was still oozing blood, and I couldn’t really see clearly how bad it actually was. There was blood under my fingernails when I took my hands away.

I turned to the sink, opening the cupboard underneath it to peer inside. “Clean towels or anything in here?” I was saying it almost to myself, because the state of the house wasn’t giving me much hope of finding a clean anything. And the cupboard contained a few random pill bottles, some mouthwash and bottles of shampoo, but nothing even close to a clean towel. The two hanging on the towel rail, and the one in a damp ball on the floor didn’t look promising.

“There’s alcohol in the kitchen.” I assumed he meant for cleaning the wound and not for drinking, but I couldn’t be sure. “And get a clean shirt from my room,” he added.

“You want to use a shirt?”

“What else are you going to use?”

I opened and closed my mouth a few times. “Okay. Which is your room?”

“Door at the end,” he said, pointing me in the right direction and I left him in the bathroom to investigate. I passed a door plastered in pictures of boyband members and Keep Out signs, and then came to his at the end of the hallway. It had a heavy lock on it, one you’d normally find on a front door, not a bedroom. But the wood was splintered on the door and the doorframe, like someone had forced their way in. I ran my fingers over it, blinking slowly. A shiver ran down my spine.

Inside, Brendan’s room was almost a shocking contrast to the rest of the house. The draws of a tallboy in the corner had been opened and the clothes inside thrown on the floor. But under that was a clean room, surprisingly neat. Sparse, but warm. And it smelled like him. While the rest of the house had the aroma of mould and smoke, his room was almost sweet and musky. Maybe a hint of tangy boy sweat, but mostly appealing. I had the urge to lie down in his neatly made bed and wrap myself in it.
 

But I roused myself and crouched down beside the clothes dumped on the floor. What had gone on here? Someone had been searching for something, clearly. I grabbed an old but clean shirt, dropped it off in the bathroom and made a quick trip downstairs to the kitchen where I found a bottle of vodka in a cluster of alcoholic drinks on the bench. I’d seen it in movies, so I hoped you actually could use it to disinfect wounds. Then I climbed back up to the bathroom where Brendan was leaning over the sink splashing his face with water.

He glanced at me through the reflection in the mirror then stood and leant against the sink.

“I can take care of it now. You can go.”

“I can help—”

“You don’t have to—”

“I
want
to. Fuck Brendan. Just let me fucking help you.” I marched up to him and grabbed him by the shoulders, forcing him to sit back down.

Then I started running the taps.

“You’re a scary nurse,” he said, and I glanced at him. Then realised my face was set in a hard scowl. But I couldn’t seem to relax it. I was afraid if I did, I’d start crying.