“Oh my God,” he moaned.
Standing, Daddy leaned down and hauled Angel to his feet. In the bathroom, he got him out of his shirt and jeans. “What happened to my jacket? Did I lose it?”
“I took your jacket and boots off you when we got in. Can you stand on your own?” Daddy’s voice was calm. Not sweet or loving or gentle, but he didn’t sound angry, which was a relief. Angel was expecting to be punished for such stupidity.
“I think so.”
Breathing heavily from the exertion of standing, Angel waited while Daddy turned on the shower. The more he came down from the drugs and booze, the more he became aware of how he must look with vomit in his hair and his breath smelling foul. A niggling desire to look in the mirror was overcome by a greater desire not to see what Daddy was seeing right now.
What the hell had he done?
“Right, let’s have you.” With his hands under Angel’s armpits, Daddy directed him into the shower and under the rushing, hot water. With a long sigh of relief, Angel tipped his face up, allowing water to pour over it and into his mouth. He rinsed and spit several times.
“Keep still, boy.” With a handful of shampoo, Daddy began to wash Angel’s hair. The strong fingers massaging his scalp brought immense relief to the tight, sticky feeling in his head, and the hot water washing away the shampoo helped to clear his mind. Daddy began to scrub Angel’s body with the soapy loofah. Angel didn’t open his eyes but let Daddy take care of him.
Daddy’s big hand washing Angel’s backside felt very comforting until he shoved two soapy fingers up Angel’s rectum, rubbing vigorously, twisting his fingers this way and that. “Daddy, that hurts.” His voice sound much whinier than he intended.
“That’s too fucking bad. Did that bloke get his cock in there?”
So Daddy
was
angry. He was just suppressing it, which was worse because it meant he was so mad that he was afraid of his own temper and what he might do. “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
“I’m taking you for an STD test. We’ll go to the health clinic tomorrow.” Daddy turned off the water, and they stepped out onto the mat. With a big white towel, he rubbed Angel’s body roughly, which actually made him feel really good, like he was coming back to life.
Feeling refreshed from the shower, Angel walked to the sink to brush his teeth and began to waver. His whole body shook. Daddy put a steadying arm around him. “You need to start drinking water to get that shit out of your system.” He put toothpaste on Angel’s brush and held him upright while Angel scrubbed his mouth. Then Daddy passed him a capful of mouthwash that he swished around his mouth.
“There. Do I smell better, Daddy?”
“Yes. Now you can lie on the bed while I clean up your vomit.”
Yep, Daddy was really mad
. “Do I have to go to school today?”
“Have you looked at the time?”
He hadn’t. Sitting on the side of the bed, he looked at the clock. “Shit! It’s five p.m. I slept all day?”
“Slept?” Daddy got down on the floor with a plastic bag, a roll of paper towels, and a bottle of pine cleaner. “You cried, rolled around, crawled on the floor, pissed, and threw up. And then you did it all over again! I’ve cleaned up three lots of vomit so far. If I’d had a fucking nappy, I’d have put it on you to contain the piss.”
“Sorry, Sir,” he mumbled.
“You were only quiet the last couple of hours. What did you take?”
“I don’t know. It was a pill.” Angel lay down with relief. His body felt like it had been run over with one of those big roller things people used to flatten their lawn. His stomach was growling empty, but he was certain if he ate anything, he would bring it up.
Daddy looked up at him from the floor. “Genius. Fucking genius.”
Angel’s tears began to flow again. “Yeah, well, when you called me an idiot the other night, I guess you were right.”
“You are not an idiot. But you certainly acted like one last night. There’s a difference. If you were a full-time idiot, you wouldn’t be my boy.”
“Daddy, how did you find me?”
“Jack was worried about you. He took your phone out of your pocket to get my number. He said you didn’t even notice because you were too busy chatting up the turd who tried to rape you in the toilets.”
“Jack said that?” Jack would never drop him in it like that.
“No. What he actually said was, ‘Mr. Saunders there’s this really creepy dude trying to get Angel to go into the loo with him and Angel just took a tablet and I don’t know what it is or what to do. Please come and rescue him.’ He was scared stiff for you. He’s got more sense than I gave him credit for. He did exactly the right thing. By the time I got there, you were already in the cubicle with the creep.”
Finishing the cleanup job, Daddy carted away the garbage and then returned to open the windows. A cold wind from the river blew in, chilling Angel’s body, still naked from the shower. “Sir, it’s cold.”
Dragging on his jeans and a T-shirt, Daddy said, “And it stinks in here.”
Daddy pulled the duvet up over Angel’s shoulders. “Go to sleep.” With that he walked out and closed the door. After a minute, Angel got up unsteadily and crossed the bare, polished wood floor to the closet. Feeling around on the top shelf, he made contact with the soft, well-worn flannelette of his blankie. For several minutes, he stood pressing it to his cheek while watching the door. He had told Daddy he didn’t need it anymore, and he didn’t want him to catch him with it. He was determined to give it up. Shoving it back on the shelf, he padded back to bed and lay down. After watching the closet door for another minute, he got up and tiptoed back, grabbed his blanket, and got back into bed with it. He pushed most of it under his pillow, leaving just a handful visible and pressed it against his face.
What a mess. Now he hates me.
With tears running down his cheeks, he fell into a troubled sleep.
Chapter Six
With his diary in his hand, Kael took a slug of whisky and threw himself down on the couch. He picked up the beautiful silver Parker pen he always used to write about his past. The diary had long since gone in strange directions, going back and forth between his childhood and young adulthood. Perhaps he would organize it and publish it anonymously:
The Life and Times of an MI6 Assassin
. The whole purpose had been to leave it for his mum in case he just disappeared one day like Misha, whose family was never told what happened to her. His mum would never go through that pain.
The last summer Freddie and I spent together was between our final year of College Grange and our first year of university. He was going to Durham in the northeast, and I was off to Cambridge outside London. We were going to keep in touch and see each other in the holidays, but when the new term began, I spent all my free time either studying or going to gay clubs to look for men to have sex with. Fourteen years went by before we saw each other again, but that summer Freddie followed me around the bars and clubs of London. Shy and self-conscious about his weight, he had some sex here and there, but not with one stranger after the next like I did.
I was eighteen when I walked into my very first leather bar with Freddie behind me, and if one of the men, an older bloke who called himself Sir Killian, had not offered to buy us a beer, we would have been thrown out for wrong clothes, wrong posture, and wrong attitude. We wore jeans and T-shirts. Freddie had a mass of curly brown hair and the most babyish face in the world. Aside from that, he looked terrified. I was tall and thin with short, dark blond hair, and I was so arrogant. I thought I was God’s gift. I acted like they were all just waiting for me to come in. My confidence gained me a lot of attention among my own age group, but the older men found me very annoying.
Freddie and I sat at a table talking and watching the interactions, happy after being sanctioned by Sir Killian. “This place is scary,” Freddie said. I told him, “It’s great!” I felt at home even if I wasn’t dressed for it. I caught the attention of one man and followed him into the toilets for a fuck and a bit of play. “Why do you do it?” Freddie asked when I got back. He was upset that I had left him alone feeling like a divvy. “Do what?” I asked, knowing he meant the sex. That was when he launched into a speech that I assumed had been burning him for a while.
“You started that summer in Devon when we were fifteen, having sex with every bloke who looked at you for more than a minute. Or”—he paused for effect—“going after men to get their attention and trying to seduce them, even if they were straight.”
“I like sex. What’s wrong with that?” I asked him.
“I like sex too, but what is wrong with love and commitment? What’s wrong with waiting awhile? These men are all strangers! They don’t mean anything.”
“I don’t want them to mean anything.” Genuinely perplexed at his attitude, I said, “I never bareback.”
“It’s not about the fucking condoms, mate.” Freddie never said fuck, so I knew he was really upset. “It’s about how you feel about yourself. It’s about what you want out of life and relationships.” I got up to get more beer because I thought he needed to mellow out. I came back and told him to drink up. He was spoiling my day with complicated questions. “Why do you need to have sex with all these strange men? You must be topping a couple of hundred by now. I’ve only had three, and you’re one of them.”
I emptied half my beer down my throat in one go and asked, “Are you jealous or something?”
“No, I just want to know, that’s all.” He was really pissed off.
“I’m looking for my dad,” I said, not knowing where the words came from. Freddie thought I was being a smartarse because I usually was, and he said, “Don’t be an idiot.”
“No, I am,” I told him. “What if he’s queer like me?”
“He’s been with a woman at least once,” Freddie said.
“If a man is old enough and turns me down, then he might be my dad, because he’d know right away. Right? I mean, who’d do it with their own son?”
“Don’t you remember studying Oedipus with Mr. Langton in year nine?” Freddie said, and we both laughed.
The following week, I went back to the leather bar without Freddie, wearing brand-new leather trousers and a jacket I had bought from my scholarship money and began to learn from the older men about being a leatherman.
Angel had come upon him so quietly that Kael didn’t hear him. He slammed the diary shut when he saw him standing a few feet away, barefoot, naked. It was after ten o’clock, and the boy still looked really rough. His normally fair skin was chalk white with dark circles under his eyes. Eyes that were usually bright and sparkling with good humor and were now lifeless.
“Go and drink some water. It’s the best hangover medicine in the world,” Kael said. Angel headed to the kitchen while Kael put the diary away with his weapons on the top shelf of the hall coat cupboard.
In the kitchen, Kael found him sitting at the table drinking a bottle of water. “You do not sit on the furniture with a bare arse.”
Without looking at him, Angel shuffled off the chair onto the floor.
“Are you hungry?”
“Yes, Sir, but I don’t think I can eat right now.”
“I’ll make you some toast to settle your stomach.”
“Seriously, I don’t think I can eat anything.”
“You’ll do as you’re told,” Kael said.
Looking up at him, Angel said, “This is what you’re so pissed off about, isn’t it?”
Kael put two slices of bread into the toaster and pressed the lever before looking at Angel. He looked so small and vulnerable sitting on the floor naked with his bottle of water and his white face. “What? And be cautious what you say because I’m still angry with you.”
“Yeah, I can tell,” Angel said. “You’re disappointed in me because I’m not as good as you. But what makes you really mad is someone saying no to you. You not having control about whether or not I get into Cambridge is what pisses you off. You want to snap your fingers and have everything line up the way you want it.”
“Yes, I do,” Kael said. “And I’ll still make it work. You’re going to Cambridge.”
Angel was absolutely right. Kael hated anything being beyond his control. The toast popped up, and he took the low-fat Flora margarine from the fridge and spread it on the toast before cutting the slices into perfect triangles and arranging them on a white, square, very thin porcelain plate. “Eat.” He passed the plate to Angel, who placed it on the floor in front of him. The boy took a piece of toast and began to nibble at a corner.
“What are you going to do?”
“Leave it up to me.”
The buzzer sounded. Surprised that anyone would be at his door at that time of night, Kael looked at the microwave clock. “It’s half past ten. Who the hell is that?” He looked at Angel. “Stay there, and I expect you to eat that toast.”
At the front door, Kael looked at the CCTV.
Conran
. What was he doing there? He pressed the button to release the door.
“What are you doing here,” Kael asked when Conran exited the lift. He must have been at work late, because he was still dressed in his formal dark blue suit with white shirt and red tie. He must have a dozen of those suits in dark blue or dark gray, because they were all he wore at work. “Never mind. I wanted to talk to you anyway. Come in.”
“Is everything all right?”
“Why shouldn’t it be?” Then he remembered screaming Angel’s name into the secure line phone yesterday. And he’d canceled his afternoon class. “Oh, yes. Well, it’s okay now. I was having some trouble with Angel, but…” He shrugged.
In the living room, Kael pointed at one of the black leather armchairs. “Sit.” Conran sat exactly where Kael indicated while Kael sat on the black leather couch opposite.
“Where’s Angel?” Conran asked.
“I’m here.” Angel stood in the doorway, holding a piece of toast. “Hi, Mr. Conran.” The boy walked over and leaned down to kiss Conran on the cheek.
Seeming only slightly taken aback that Angel was unself-consciously stark naked in the living room, he said, “You don’t look well. You’re paler than usual.”
“I’m better than I was a few hours ago.” He walked quietly over to Kael and sat cross-legged on the floor at his feet. “I got sick, but it was my own fault. Wasn’t it, Daddy?”