The Tied Man (44 page)

‘Excellent.  Well, I’ll leave you to your day off.’   She placed the chair tidily by the bedside, still without so much as glancing at Finn. 

I still had no real idea what I was going to do, but I needed to buy time; make my first move.  ‘
Blaine
?’

‘Yes?’

‘Do you think we could talk later?  Please?  In private, I mean.’

I was rewarded with the hint of a smile that suggested she knew she’d finally worn me down.  Gracious in victory, she nodded.  ‘I’ll be free at eleven.  You can come to my study.’

‘Thank you.’  I forced as much humility and gratitude as I possibly could into the words.

I thought
Blaine
was about to leave, but at the last second she turned to Finn.  ‘You should be grateful to Lilith for taking the time to look after you, darling.’

‘I am.’

‘Good.  And thank you for last night’s entertainment.  You were very... versatile, is perhaps the best word. 
Chester
and Ellis were delighted with your performance.  They asked that I gave you their gratitude, and let you know that they’re hoping to spend some more time with you in the spring.’
Blaine
reached inside her jacket.  ‘I thought you might like a reminder of your talents.’ She dealt three photographs of the previous night’s savagery neatly on the duvet.   ‘You’ve always been the most photogenic of my staff.’ 

Finn picked them up and everything fell apart.

With a desolate howl, he dived from the bed, retching and wild-eyed, heading for the bathroom.  He  crumpled on the floor before he got halfway there.

Blaine
observed Finn’s reaction with that same self-satisfied smile she had worn the night before, as if the universe existed simply to provide her with an endless private joke.  ‘Enjoy your morning,’ she said to me, once she’d had her fill.  ‘I’ll see you at eleven.’ A final approving glance, and she was gone.

I dragged the duvet from the bed and wrapped it around Finn.  He still held the photographs so tightly that his knuckles blanched.

‘Give them to me, sweetheart,’ I prised the pictures from his grip and threw them onto the fire.  They flared briefly, then burned away to nothing.

‘Get away from me.  I’m disgusting,’ Finn did his best to push me back, but I caught his wrists.

‘And when Coyle stuck his filthy fingers inside me, did that make me disgusting?’

‘
No
!’

‘So look at me.’  He gave one last attempt to escape my grip, but there was barely any fight left in him.  ‘Look at me.’ His eyes finally met mine.  ‘What
happened
was disgusting.  What they did; what they made you do.  But that wasn’t you, do you hear me?  Stay with me, Finn.’

‘I thought you were gone, Lili.  I thought you were gone, so I let them.’

‘No you didn’t.  You just had nowhere left to run, and that’s not consent, Finn.  It’s nowhere near.’ I pulled him close.  I could feel every rib as his chest began to heave.

The first sob came from so deep inside that it bent him double in my arms, then a lifetime of grief spilled to the surface.  There was nothing Finn could do but cry as it consumed him, and there was nothing I could do but hold him close until it ended.  I had no more words, so I sat on the cold floorboards and embraced the thing that I had once feared most in the whole world: the chaos and fragility of a life cast so far adrift that there didn’t seem to be any way to rescue it. 

I needed to stop.  I was making a tit of myself over nothing at all.  I needed to go and hide until I’d sorted my head out, so I could tell Lilith that it really didn’t matter, but I couldn’t form real words;  I needed to do a lot of things, and none of them appeared to be possible right now.

I had never cried, as far as I could remember.  Not once.  There was a certain masochistic pride to be had in that.  Sure, I had yelled out often enough, but this shit with the tears and the snot and the scrabbling for breath was entirely new to me, and I didn’t know what the hell to do.  All I knew was that I couldn’t stop the noise for the life of me, and that Lilith was the only thing anchoring me to what remained of my sanity.

All that time, she wordlessly held me and let me howl.  I cried for me, for the damage that had been done to her, even for my bloody dog, and by the time the worst of it had come to an end, I wasn’t even making proper sounds; instead a strange, high rattle replaced my voice, and my broken chest ached as I sucked in air with a series of ridiculous, hiccoughing sobs.

Eventually I found enough air to murmur, ‘M’okay.’

‘You’re not okay, Finn.  In fact, I’d say you were about as far from ‘okay’ as a human being could get right now, short of being dead.’

I attempted a smile that probably looked more like a gargoyle’s grimace.  ‘Was aiming for that.  The ‘dead’ thing.’

‘I guessed.  And you’ll never know how grateful I am that you failed.’

‘Makes one of us. What the fuck do I do now?’

‘What we’re going to do now is deal with this. One step at a time.  Starting with getting you cleaned up.’

‘
We
’, I mouthed, and just that word threatened to set me off again.  ‘You can’t, Lili.  Too risky.  You’ve got to stay away...’

‘We tried that one, remember?  We both just spent the last ten days obeying the rules to the very last letter, and I don’t think this can be called a successful outcome by anyone’s standards.’  She sat back on her heels.  ‘Anyway, today’s covered.  All I need to do is to figure out what the hell we do about the rest of our lives, and we’re sorted.’

‘That’s all right then.’  I glanced up at her.  ‘What do you mean, ‘covered’?’

‘I need to run your bath.  I’ll tell you later,’ Lilith said, and I decided I was better off living in ignorance.

*****

Just ten minutes later I was submerged to my neck in water that had turned sea-green from the contents of a small bottle that Lilith had swirled under the running taps.

‘How are you doing?’ She sat cross-legged on the floor next to the bath, in case I showed any signs of slipping under and never coming back up.

‘Bit better.’  It was the truth.  The warmth of the sweet-smelling, dark water had begun to seep into me and wash away some of the taint.  ‘Fighting the urge to reach for the scouring pad, but better.’

‘Do you want me to do that?  Not with the scouring pad, obviously.’

‘Please,’ I began, then had to shut my eyes tight against acting like a dickhead again.  ‘You’re the first person in this whole fucking place who’s ever asked permission to touch me, you know that?’

In the tranquillity of our temporary haven I began to wash him.  Finn acquiesced to my touch with such trust that I ached for him, and I had never undertaken a task with such self-conscious care.  This was the body that I had spent months coming to know in a detail I could never have imagined; the days when I could gain distance by thinking of him as an anatomist’s model were long dead.

‘Oh.  I remembered,’ Finn suddenly frowned. 

‘Remembered what?’

‘Why I’m scared of fuckin’ needles.  All those years and it finally came back.’

His left hand rested on the rim of the bath.  I curled the tips of my fingers around his and waited.

‘It was this fella.  My ma’s shag.  The one... that Christmas.  I told you?’

I nodded.  The one who had raped a boy whilst his mother slept drunk and oblivious in the next room.

‘Jimmy-Boy Dean. “Jus’ like the feckin’ actor,” he would say.  Reckon I’d have been thirteen or so.  Ma actually had some shitty weekend job for once, an office cleaner, so Jimmy said he’d look after me one Sunday afternoon.  Took me down the arcades, gave me a handful of shrapnel for the machines and slipped me a couple of halves of lager on the sly.  Said it was ‘cos it was his birthday.  I won a couple of punt – thought I was the dog’s bollocks.’

Finn paused to cough; a wet, rattling hack that didn’t quite manage to leave his chest.  ‘End of the afternoon, we didn’t go home.  Bastard walked me for miles to some old wreck of a house, all boarded up, black walls from the damp.  Filthy mattress,  a bust-up sofa, and half a dozen of his mates waitin’ there like all their birthdays had come at once.  I guessed fuckin’ sharpish why they were there so I tried to leg it.  Never even got to the door.  One of ‘em had this syringe ready and Jimmy held me down whilst the bastard  whacked it into my arm, and that was it.  Next thing I knew I was wandering back home, away with the  fairies – newspaper hoardings giving Tuesday’s news and the blood still drippin’ down the leg of my jeans.’  He turned his head so he could look at me.  ‘Mad, huh?  All those years stuck at the back of my mind, then just when I think I’m about to snuff it, I get the whole thing back like a fuckin’ movie.’  He blinked.  ‘Jesus,  you look knackered.’

‘A little tired, maybe.’

‘You sleep at all?’

‘Didn’t dare.’

‘What did you do?  Last of the phet?’

‘I found blind rage to be more effective.’  I trailed my fingertips across the surface of the water and watched the ripples circling out.  Thought about nothing in his life ever changing except the decor.

Thought about Jimmy-Boy Dean’s birthday present to himself and the kind of party Blaine Albermarle would arrange for her own special day and finally managed to grab the gossamer threads of my idea.  Now I had something to bring to our meeting.

‘Tell me about her party,’ Lilith said.  ‘Please?’

‘Variation on a theme,’ I said, every word hurting. ‘She dresses it up as one of her fundraising events – getting her gang of inbred hangers-on to empty their pockets for the good of the starving peasants at her gate.  But basically they take an E and a V, get hammered, and then I get fucked by the highest bidder, however they want me.  She brings up one of her best girls from the
London
place as well, just in case I’m not to everyone’s taste.’

‘She auctions you off.  I almost wish I were shocked.’

‘I fetched about six grand last year.  Maxwell, the doctor.  Doing his bit for charity and all that.’  I tried to laugh.  ‘I’d be fuckin’ lucky to make thirty pence this year, huh?  Shit.’  The laugh died in my throat and I had to clutch for her hand as the panic surged back. 

She responded with a gentle, reassuring squeeze of my fingers. ‘What is it, Finn?’

It was the first time I’d ever let myself consider it.  ‘It’s not a joke, is it Lili?  I mean, it’s the reason I’m here, the only thing I’m fit for.  If I can’t do this, and I mean
really
can’t, then what the fuck is she going to do with me?’

‘Do you really want to know?’

I nodded, not entirely sure that I did. 

‘The woman’s addicted to hurting people – you, particularly, but not exclusively.’  Lilith glanced down at her right hand, where the bruises from that night still hadn’t faded.  ‘It stopped being simple pleasure  for her years ago. This isn’t just
Blaine
’s family business; it’s her entire existence, and it’s been going on for so long that the softer stuff isn’t doing it for her anymore.’

I knew this one.  ‘She needs to get her hands on the nastier shit just to get the same rush.’

‘Exactly.  Just look at what’s happened to you since I’ve been here.  There’s no way you’d have survived three years of the kind of treatment I’ve witnessed in the last few weeks.’

‘True enough.’ I lay there half-dead, staring at the ceiling. ‘I’d nearly stopped giving a shit before you arrived, you know that?  Christ, she’d get so fucking frustrated with me, whack me half to death every night for a week, or pull in the roughest client in her address book so she could sit and watch, and all the time my head was slidin’ out of the door.  The less I cared, the more furious she got.’

Lilith nodded.  ‘So I was brought  here to drag you back to life and extend the game for as long as possible, but that time’s just about up, and I think she’s already planning your replacement.  You’re a snuff movie in waiting.’ 

‘Jesus.’ I’d got my answer and I couldn’t argue with a word of it. The water turned to ice around me. 

‘Finn, listen to me.’  Lilith’s voice was faint against the roaring in my head.  ‘You asked me what I thought, and that’s the truth.’  She knelt up against the side of the bath so that we were face to face.  ‘But none of that will happen, because we’re going to get the bitch first.’

The second tap on the door that morning was so soft that Finn, now clad in clean pyjamas and swaddled in my duvet, didn’t even hear it.  But I did.  ‘It’s all right Henry, you can come in.’

‘I was worried when you didn’t collect your breakf... Oh dear
Lord
!’  Henry caught his first glimpse of what was left of Finn. ‘I’ll go,’ he finally managed to splutter.  He began to shut the door as he reversed.

‘No you will not,’ I ordered.  ‘You’ll come here and take a good look at him, and see what happens when you play by
Blaine
’s rules.’