AN: This is set a year after Brendan goes to prison – everything that's happened since has still happened, with the tiny exception that the club was never sold (Brendan still owns it)… And obviously other things have happened in Ste's life since it's soapland and nothing stays the same for too long – of which there'll be some references to and explanations given in due course! Hope you enjoy, and please review if you do!
WARNING: HAPPY ENDING LIKELY
My chalk ran out on Day Two-Hundred-and-Ninety-Eight. Plus two.
Had it since the third day. Some skinny little bugger, tattoo of a bird's name – "Shannon" – on his neck, comes up to me in the food hall.
"You're new, ain'tcha? Well whatever ya need, I'm the bloke that gets it, yeah? Fags, smack, girly-mags – whatever you need".
I'm about to take a big bite of my cold beans and toast and tell him to fuck off through a full mouth, but then instead I say, "I need chalk".
Shannon, he gives me this big toothy grin and nods and I wonder what the fuck he thinks I'm planning to do with the chalk that's making him smile like that, but I nod back and eat my beans.
Next day he's there with a box of white Crayola like the ones they had in primary school, and I slip one stick out and tell him, "Just the one mate".
Then, for two-hundred-and-ninety-eight days I counted. I'd wake early – always did, even on the outside – and while I waited for the metal door to clang open I'd fish my stick of chalk out from the broken tile behind the sink and I'd scrape my bed over six inches and draw another line on the hidden floor. Another day done. Plus two, because I only started counting on the third day.
Didn't ask Shannon to get me a new stick when it ran out. Don't need it no more. The counting was just until I got to this place – this, the numbness of routine, the solace of amnesia. I'm here now. Just existing. No more counting now.
So I don't know what number day today is. Just know it's Monday, coz the breakfast is soggy granola and coz at the end, Puggy stands at the top of the room, double chin wobbling and tongue hanging out the side of his little pug mouth panting from standing up, and calls out the names of blokes who have visitors. I don't even listen no more. Visitors are for people doing three years, not thirty. People who are still arsed to count.
But today, he calls me. And it's a fucking kick in the stomach, to be honest, because I know exactly who it's going to be and that's exactly what I said I didn't want. I'd a letter from her every week since the start. Every week. And I clung to them. Poured over every word of every sentence, wrung whatever filtered joy I could from them. When they'd tell me again that I'd another visit request from Steven Hay I'd pull out one of those letters and read it until I knew it off by heart and until I knew visiting time was over and he must be gone home.
The requests stopped coming on Day One-Hundred-and-Thirty-Three. And on Day One-Hundred-and-Forty-Five I wrote to Cheryl and told her not to send more letters.
They keep coming, of course, but I don't read them now. I just let them get mouldy under my bed where I used to count.
I could refuse. I know that. But I think of her face, of the guilt carved into it, of the sixty-something times I'll have to picture it again because I know she'll keep coming back until I set her straight: this isn't what I need. No more counting. I need to just exist. So when the mutts start scrambling over each other to line up for the visiting room, I tumble in with them and try to bury the dread of what sleeping part of my mind is going to kick-start awake after this.
The visiting room is like a classroom – rows and rows of wobbly little tables and those hardback plastic chairs they have in waiting rooms. A face at every table, all facing the same way, looking to the door as we walk through in our gaudy orange vests like they're waiting for us to start the day's lesson. The men around me fan – they pick the face they want and they home towards it.
Me, I'm scanning. Looking for blond curls, for a wild waving hand with painted nails that I don't want to see. I scan, but I can't find her.
Then I kick-start. Not just a part, the whole fucking lot. Palpitations and stomach-flips and sweaty palms. It's not Cheryl.
It's Steven.
His eyes are on me. He saw me before I saw him and he's just watching me and I don't know how but I make it over to the table and lower myself into it. Can't even focus properly because stuff is hitting me from all sides and making me a bit breathless. I never had it this bad, surely, on the outside? He never made me like this?
"So you finally agreed to see me, then?" He's pissed. His mouth is curled down at the corner and his midnight eyes are flashing, but even with all guns blazing he looks so fucking vulnerable it scorches into me.
"I didn't think it was you," I tell him. What the fuck I say that for, I don't know. I'm just… fuck, I just don't know what I'm at. Two-hundred-and-ninety-eight days of counting is gone, I'm back in that first two days were every hour brought another surge of panic as I realised how close I'd been to that happy ending… how fucking close I'd been… until I was roaring and flinging and they had to sink some syringe full of sedative into my arm.
He looks rough. Skinnier than he was. Pale. Circles rimming beneath those electrifying eyes.
"How've ye been, Steven?" and it sounds so trivial, so mundane, but I mean it. Fuck it, I don't care if I need the whole box of Crayola after this, he's here and I wanna know how he's been.
He just snorts, rolls his eyes, and more than anything I know he's pissed as hell at me. I suppose I get it. Just… I'm paying for it.
"Oh, great yeah," he answers, dripping in sarcasm. "I've been just brilliant, me. Moved into a castle in Ireland with the man of me dreams… Oh no, wait, that were Cheryl."
Seriously? He's come here to bang on about Cheryl being happy instead of us?
"Steven, you know why... I owed her."
"Yeah, whatever."
It grates me, that sulky teenage thing. And I'm fucking PAYING, alright?! I swallow it down though. I owe him too, I know that.
"Seriously, Steven, how are yeh? You look kinda… rough."
He does. But when I say it, he sighs, and it's a big rattling tired noise that makes me cringe. Why does he sound so tired, so ready to give up?
"I'm… fine. Listen, Brendan, I come here to ask a favour."
"Anything."
He nods, like he knew I'd say that.
"Right. Well, this favour, it's quite a big one. And you can't ask me anything about it. Can't ask why."
"Steven, is everything okay?"
He presses his lips together and looks me dead in the eye.
"It will be."
"Go on."
"I want ya to sell the club. And give me the money."
I don't know, I just feel numb when he says it. Maybe because fear isn't something I'm able to feel anymore. But my blood does feel cold.
"What's wrong, Steven? Why do you need the money?"
"I told you not to ask questions! Just… will you sell it or not?"
I pause. The club. It's the only thing I have left, the only thing I have to leave to my boys.
"Yes. Anything. Whatever you need."
He nods, slowly, and I feel his eyes soften so very slightly.
"Good. Right."
No thanks. Suppose I don't deserve it.
"Make sure it's a quick sale, Bren. I need the money soon as."
And then abruptly, he stands, and he's gone.
XOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOX
"…and Brendan Brady."
It's Puggy, reading out the visit list. Thirty-nine days since he last came. I've started counting again.
I think, y'know, I'm ready for it this time. Ready for the sight of him. But I'm not.
Obviously.
He looks worse. Like he hasn't eaten or slept in days. The circles are still there under the eyes that used to be fierce, darker than before. His knee is knocking off the table, he's glancing over his shoulder, and I want to put my hand out and cover one of his but I don't think it's my place. Not after what Jim told me.
"So, um, thanks for getting me that money," he opens, and I just nod and wait for him to go on. I suppose I'm hoping that he'll tell me why he needed it. But up close it's not just weariness on his face, there's a fading purple bruise decorating his left cheek too. So maybe I'm not.
"Listen, Bren," he says, pressuring his voice into a whisper and leaning towards me. Those midnight eyes have me locked. Can't help it. I lean in too. "I 'ave another favour to ask ya."
My heart drops a little. Just a tiny bit. I owe him, I know that, but still…
"Steven, tell me what trouble you're in. I can help. I know people."
He just shakes his head and pulls it back and drops his gaze, and I want to grab the neck of his t-shirt and pull him back to me and force it out of him, but I know I can't. Not my place. That place belongs to someone else now.
"What, Steven, what's the favour?" I sigh, because it's like I said the first time – whatever he needs.
He's chewing on his bottom lip now and it makes me ache for how close I was. Everything he does makes me ache for how close I was.
"Well… See, right…" he starts, but he's struggling, eyes not meeting me properly. "Bren, there's a guard in 'ere, right – fat, an' bald, an' the skin on his face kinda 'angs down at the sides and jiggles when 'e talks, right–"
Puggy.
"Yeah, I know him."
"Right, good. So tomorrow, I need ya to hit 'im."
"What?!"
Shit, that's not a good plan. Not a good plan at all.
Steven just leans back in his chair and folds his arms defiantly.
"Steven, I can't do that – they'll have me killed. D'ye get that? Tell me what's going on!"
"No, Bren, I told ya, no questions. Just… just trust me!"
Tell me about John Paul then, I wanna shout. Tell me how you're shacked up with him for the last three months, Hollyoaks' latest out-and-proud romance, that I heard about from my lawyer. Tell me you've moved on, like I told you to. Tell me that and I won't ask what you used my kids' inheritance for when I gave it to you no-questions-asked a month ago. Tell me that and I'll punch the living daylights out of that fat screw and let them burn me at the stake. Just tell me the truth, and I'll trust you.
But I don't shout that because I don't want to have to ask for it.
"Please, Bren," he whispers and it's the same thing he's said to me a million times and he's looking at me the way he has a million times, it's like he does still belong to me, whatever Jim says. And I just… trust him. I do.
"Okay."
XOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOX
If I was gonna smack him one, I was gonna make it count. So I did. I waited until mid-breakfast, food hall teaming, as many eye-witnesses as there could be, enough guards around to batter the life out of me in sixty seconds. Then I whacked his tubby, self-satisfied face with everything I had.
I don't know what I thought would happen. A beating, at least. Then solitary confinement, if I wasn't so fucked-up I had to go to the infirmary. Or so fucked-up I was dead. And then there was some weird part of my brain that thought maybe the punch would turn him into a frog and the walls of the prison would just melt away because Steven had told me to do it and I trusted him.
None of those things happened. Instead, they grabbed me, six of them, and dragged me out to the yard and jerked my arms behind my back around a pole and left me tied there.
It pissed rain. All day. My hoody was soaked in the first hour and I just dripped onto the ground like the sky around me letting the freeze chill through my layers of cloth and skin and muscle and bone and wishing it could get all the way to my soul. I heard the siren sound for back-to-cells, the noisy clang of a hundred footsteps on metals stairs. I watched the glowing windows vanish at lights-out, that house of miserable sinners falling dead. I alone stood. My knees were shaking from standing by then, and my fingers were numb from the knotted rope, and my brain was weary from thoughts of him and why he wanted me here.
And that's how I am now, hours or weeks or years into the black night where even the moon has abandoned me behind a veil of clouds, just shaking and numb and weary. And finally I hear them coming.
There's four of them, I think. Four sets of steps, four gently clinking batons, four snarling voices and deadly laughs. They loom as shadows from the shadows, only taking the form of men when they're three metres away and I can suddenly see the whites of their eyes, and they're thirsty.
I straighten. Tell my legs to stop shaking because this is it. Intermission over. Time for the show.
"So Brady, you had some time to think out here?" That's Puggy, I know his wheezy voice, and as he moves closer I figure I can see the shiner starting around his right eye, lit up by the cigarette dangling from his pug mouth. Almost worth it.
Almost.
"Brady," he puffs, leering in closer and pushing my chin right up to the uncaring moon so my head scratches against the splintering pole behind me. "I asked you a question, fag. You had some time to think? You got anything you wanna say?"
That's how they do, y'know, try get you talking. Like a cat playing with its food. End result ain't gonna change, I know that much – so I keep my mouth shut.
"Tongue tired from lickin' out arseholes, is it?" he says, running the baton down my neck so I feel it on my adam's apple. "Nothin' to say?"
He looks back at his boys then, fucking revelling in this performance. What's coming was always gonna come, just faster if I don't play ball. There ain't no winning here.
"Let's see if we can make you sing then," he says, and his baton travels its way down the front of my chest to just above my groin. Gently, gently – all part of the show – he hooks it under the hem of my hoody and draws it up, displaying my pale chest to his buddies before he plucks the smoke from his mouth and brings the glowing tip to my nipple.
I clench against it for a moment, but he increases the pressure and I can't stop the howl erupting.
"Listen fellas, he can sing can't he!" I vaguely hear it but it's drowned out by the white noise and light as they all crowd in with their own smokes to leave their own scars. And then it's business, batons out and all their fucking pent-up rage at cheating wives and shitty bosses and the fucking government ends up on my body. It doesn't stop. Not for a minute, not for a second. It just goes on and on and on and I can't even fall down because of the fucking rope so I just howl into the night like a dog and take it and take it and take it. And then I just want them to end it, just finish me and be done, and whatever one of the shitty things I did to Steven made him want to punish me like this, I just throw a half-formed prayer of sorrow for.
I guess I pass out or something, because it's suddenly black and quiet again and the pain all over feels stiff now, but the moon is peeping through her veil finally. They've gone, I think, but I hear it behind me then. The wheezing.
So now, I guess. They stopped, eventually, got bored or got tired or got hungry, and left Puggy to finish it unwitnessed. He's breathing hard, probably from the fucking erection this is giving him. I close my eyes and wait for it, try hard to think of my boys and of Cheryl, but all I see is Steven's face, his midnight eyes – "Please, Brendan… Just trust me."
But Puggy doesn't hit. He just leans in real close so I can smell the sweat and pug-breath on the words he whispers into my ear – "There's a hole in the fence behind you. Take the tunnel." – and I feel him press something into the palm of my hand before he waddles off after his mates.
I slump forward a minute, addled brain still trying to process the whispered words. Not finished. And a hole in the fence. The tunnel. And something placed in my hand. I move my clumsy fingers around it, feeling out the shape, and it stings me. A penknife.
And Steven. He's put me here.
I'm possessed. Whatever torture my body has suffered doesn't count suddenly, as I blindly hack at my bindings with the knife. They give suddenly and I'm on the ground face-first, mouth full of dirt, but I spit it out as I crawl to the fence with fingers scrabbling for the promised escape. I find it, the weakening in the wires that easily buckle under pressure from my knife 'til there's a space big enough for me to slither through on my belly and I'm just facing a concrete hole half as tall as me that's pitch black and smells of faeces.
I look at the open stretch of field before me, wide and clear and free. But Steven put me here. Here. To get in the tunnel.
And I trust him.
I bend over and step in, senses almost overwhelmed by it. The fucking smell. It fills me up – my lungs, my stomach, my ears, my eyes. I try to cough against it, but I just drag more mouthfuls in. The moonlight is still decorating my feet but ahead is midnight blind. I squat and run. As fast as I fucking can with my shaking knees and for miles and miles and miles until I think maybe this tunnel never ends at all, maybe it just runs forever and I'll be bent in half breathing shit for the rest of my life. Whenever I slow I feel the stench start to take me over, threaten to kill my senses completely and make me want to lie down, to sink into unconsciousness in the sewage around my ankles. But Steven, Steven put me here. He needs me to go on.
I've run around the world before I see it. Moonlight. Ahead of me. The other end. It's a rainbow's gold and I'm smashing towards it until finally I'm falling out into the cesspit leaking from the concrete hole and I'm breathing air again.
I start to laugh. I don't care if I'm a maniac, who fucking cares?! I'm out! I'm out, in the air, and I'm alive, and I'm fucking done with counting! I splash forwards through the shit and my arms open wide to embrace the whole fucking world and my face is turned up to the sky to say thank you to the moon, and then I hear it:
"Brendan!"
It's HIM, slithering in his tracksuit bottoms down the muddy bank to my filthy pond. HIM, eyes worried and wide and belonging to me and before his feet have even landed in the muck I've caught him and have plastered my lips onto him. He's soft, and yielding, and warm, and fierce, and everything I've been trying to forget because we were close but we missed it. His arms tangle round my neck and my hands are on his body, needing to feel him to know this is real. Our tongues slide against each other, hot and tight, until we need air and we break and I rest my forehead against his and just LOOK at his face until I just need to kiss him again, but he's pushing me off.
"Bren," he strangles out, and his voice is wet with tears I can't see coz I've smeared his face with the dirt I've been wading through. "Brendan, I need you to run. Can you do that for me? Can you run?"
I can't even fucking speak, I'm so breathless, but I choke out a "yeah" and he nods, and there's no smile in his face it's just serious and determined and fierce again as he pushes himself free of my body and clambers back up the side of the bank he slid down. I watch him go, his wiry frame scaling the six foot climb, and I follow, forcing my creaking bones into submission, because Steven told me to.
He's waiting for me at the top. Legs astride, tracksuit bottoms billowing in the wind, thin t-shirt moulded to his graceful frame, hair fluffy from where I worked the product out with my fingers. And his eyes electrifying me so I wanted to grab him all over again and kiss that mouth of his 'til it's red raw and chaffing.
But his face is so serious, so worried.
"Right, Bren, it's about a mile okay. Then that's it, I promise. You can rest then."
I just nod because I still can't find words. HE has got me to here. HE has done this.
We run. We tear through the grassy landscape and the burn in my lungs is nothing because I'm fucking alive and free and HE'S running beside me.