Here we have Leroy's sweetie sode. I'm thinking of writin a continuation to this about the animosity between Vince and Leroy in series 2 (I don't think Leroy is mentioned once), showing Leroy's crueler side. I'll try and finish Secret Hstory first though.
If anyone's waiting, the third and probably final chapter of Secret History hasn't been forgotten, I'm just having a minor block with it. Hoping to get it up pretty soon.
Anyways, enjoy.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
The Man in Light Blue Trousers
I'll admit I was using him right from the start. I saw him, and I saw his friend, and he looked like the approachable one, so I went for him first. He was a stepping stone, or the porch door, you might say.
That's not to say I didn't enjoy his company. He was sweet, and incessantly funny. He was absolutely thick as mud, but somehow he managed to use that to his advantage, and it made him endearing. I do think that I came to like him.
He was working in a zoo at the time, and he usually slept in his little hut thing, because he didn't have a permanent home, and if he was going to squat, he might as well do it somewhere legal and convenient. His friend, the inscrutable Howard, stayed with him most nights; I'd heard him describe his own flat as a "deathtrap" and a "hellhole". When Vince invited me over of an evening, Howard would be in and out, mostly just popping in to use the toilet, and then going back outside, whether for smoking, reading, checking up on animals, or hounding some woman if she worked late. Or, according to Vince, fox bumming, but I sincerely hoped that wasn't true. If it was late he might come in and complain that I was still here when he wanted to go to bed. It felt disappointing at first, but later I began to see it as affectionate. You don't just say that to people you're not comfortable with, do you? I'm always pedantically polite with people I don't know very well.
They slept on the floor in sleeping bags, next to each other. I used to wonder sometimes, when I was alone at night, or even when I was in the hut and I watched him walk through, how close they got at night. Was there a gap between them, or did they touch? Did they ever huddle together? Did they hug each other if it was cold? Or if it was hot, did they ever sleep naked?
Sometimes I found these thoughts fascinating, other times it hurt me to think them. I couldn't think of the two of them together. Doing things. Things that stayed shrouded in my mind, torturing me with threats of vivid detail.
He never spoke a word to me, besides "hello" or "alright", but if I ever walked past him, like if I was meeting Vince, I would pray to get a smile or even just a twitch of the eye. When they started writing their strange show thing about the bizarre events that happened when I wasn't around, I used to ask to see their scripts, to bring up criticisms or ideas, just to get him to talk to me, to see if I could get a whole, proper conversation with him. I loved hearing him speak. I followed every word, watching his mouth, the way that moustache moved…
Vince criticised the moustache all the time. He criticised everything. I hated it when he did. Howard was a beautiful man. Strong and tall, sometimes endearingly awkward, a disarming, open smile, and one hell of a pair of pins. And the moustache was by no means the worst one I've seen.
I stood up for him one day.
"He looked good yesterday," I said. "When he had those light blue trousers on."
Ohhh, those legs…
"Yeah, I suppose," Vince agreed. "They're alright those trousers. They suit him."
I thought, perhaps, he finally understood. He realised how I felt about Howard. Maybe he could talk to Howard about it for me, maybe even set something up.
But of course, it was Vince; he'd missed the point entirely.
"You can have them if you want."