CHAPTER TWO: Year 2013 – Ste
"There's a three-for-two on those!"
"What?"
Frankie Osbourne's piercing gaze was fixed on him, expecting something from him. He felt himself recoil from it, that blaring gaudy demand.
"Those Brillo pads, they're three-for-two!"
Ste allowed his confused eyes to follow her gaze to his hand which was wrapped around the silver foil wrapper of a Brillo pad.
"Oh, right," he mumbled. "Ta."
Dropping his eyes to the floor he turned his body back to the shelf boasting Price Slice's selection of cleaning supplies, away from the vivid artificial colour of the woman. His eyes roved absently over the selection before him. Oven cleaner and Brillo pads, that was what Doug had told him to get.
After a few more minutes he had successfully wrapped his other hand around a bright orange bottle of oven cleaner. Oven cleaner and Brillo pads, there. He made his way to the cash register, trying not to heed the concerned expression on Frankie's face. He'd got them, the oven cleaner and the Brillo pads.
Life had moved like this for a few weeks now. Underwater. Slow, silent motion, washed in eerie blue-rinse light, pushed from all directions with weightless pressure. Ste was glad to have it like this, glad to have sunk into this numb pool after the screaming vivid reality of the first few days. The only thing he didn't like was hiding it from everyone else. They all seemed to live on land.
"Don't you want to get a third one?" Frankie was asking him now, her forehead creased in confusion.
Ste looked down at the two Brillo pads he had placed on the counter top. He felt like he was acting out a part in a play.
"Oh yeah," he told her. "Yeah, I do."
He was back at the shelf of cleaning supplies, trying to remember what he was supposed to be fetching, when the bell tinkled above the door announcing another customer's arrival. It didn't even register with him until he heard the voice.
"Hiya Frankie, love, could I just get a couple of lottery tickets please?"
Ste's ears pricked up when he heard the familiar lilt, some vague breath of wind finding its way impossibly through the weight of water engulfing him.
"Yeah, course Cheryl. You alright, love? You seem a little down."
"Ach, aye. It's just, y'know, Declan's off tomorrow. Suppose I've gotten used to having him around."
Ste definitely felt the breeze caress his face now. He turned away from the shelf, watching the back of the blonde curly head. Declan was leaving?
"So he's got the all clear from the doctors then?" Frankie was saying.
"He has, thank God. You know Frankie, they thought for a while that he might need dialysis for the rest of his life. It makes me shiver just thinking about it. His whole life."
Ste was moving forwards now, his legs pushing against the swirling current to get closer to the faint flutter of wind.
"Did… Did you say Declan were leaving, Cheryl?"
"Ste!" Her body stiffened minutely, her voice pulling itself a little tighter. She was still nervous of him, afraid of the way he'd thrown himself at her feet and begged and beseeched and demanded information in those first few vivid screaming days.
"Yes," she replied, carefully. She wouldn't look him full in the eye, Ste noticed sadly. She didn't need to worry anymore. Not now that he was underwater. "He's going back to Belfast, to Eileen."
"I'm surprised he didn't go back before now," Frankie commented, lightly, apparently oblivious to the wealth of unspoken words that filled the little shop. "I mean, they have doctors in Belfast too, don't they? Why did he need to stay in Hollyoaks?"
"He wanted to stay here," Cheryl answered, voice suddenly small. "Waiting for… But I suppose he's given up now. For the best, really."
With those words, Ste's numbing pool of water washed up against his face again, blocking out any flicker of wind. Waiting for Brendan. For Brendan to come back. And now he'd given up. Shit. No. It was too soon to give up. Wasn't it? He tried to open his mouth to speak, but it filled the water and he was dumb. He tried to fill his lungs but the dead weight pressed against his chest. His heart was trying to beat heat around him but coolness had immersed him.
"D-does Brendan know?" he managed to utter eventually, squeezing the question out around the thick liquid. He had interrupted Frankie in the middle of a sentence about he-didn't-even-know-what.
Now the coolness was coming from Cheryl, ice etched into the hard line of her mouth, the impenetrable brown eyes.
"No, Ste. Brendan doesn't know because he ran away."
She had been like this for weeks. Immovable. Unforgiving. The quiet empathy that she and Ste had shared, together loving and hating Brendan, had evaporated. Ste couldn't fathom what the man could have done to finally lose her, and he couldn't tell her what he had learned that made him finally understand him. They had moved to opposite ends, separated by eons of impassable space.
"He's trying to protect Declan," Ste could hear himself protesting dully. He wished he could just shut up, stop pouring pointless defences out into his friend's deaf ears. "He thinks he's doing what's best for him."
"He's doing what's best for himself," Cheryl bit, slicing through Ste's numbness momentarily and cutting into his skin. Not because of words being spoken, but because it was Cheryl saying them. He felt the sting of the wound, hot against his cold existence. "He's running away like the coward he is."
"No, Cheryl, stop," Ste said, loudly. The numbing water was still there, but Cheryl's knifing words jolted a whisper of forgotten passion. He felt Frankie shifting uncomfortably. So what? He couldn't let Cheryl say these things. She didn't even know how her own father had crippled the man. "You don't understand, you 'aven't a clue!"
"I understand plenty, Ste! Brendan is a fucking coward, that's the truth!" She half-shouted those words back at him, but her voice fell quiet as she continued, eyes wide and wild as they watched something that Ste and Frankie couldn't see. "A coward and a monster."
"Cheryl," Ste whispered, his hand suddenly finding its way into hers and pressing its fingers into the soft skin of her palm. Finally he saw her eyes soften, the chocolate brown melting as they looked sadly into his pleading ones.
"I'm sorry for what he's done to you, too, Ste," she whispered back. Then she pulled her hand away and took a step backwards before turning and hurrying out of the shop. Ste stared after her, clinging to the third Brillo pad in his hands and feeling the cool water swallowing him up, airtight.
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Three a.m. and Ste lay staring at the faint orange stain on the flowery bedroom wallpaper. He had been staring at it for hours now, memorising the jagged edge and the low sweeping circle that completed it. Leah had created it, years ago, racing from the kitchen with a plate of spaghetti in her hands and flinging it violently at the bedroom wall during a two-year-old tantrum. The "Terrible Two's", they called it. He'd been so pissed off the day it happened, scrubbed ferociously at it to try and erase the mark. Afterwards, in his child-free home, it became precious, a tribute to the wonderful chaos of his kids. Now it was just like everything else. Unreal. Artificial. Part of a world that everybody else seemed to live in.
He could feel the weight of Doug's arm across his midriff, thrown casually. He was able to throw it casually now. When he first came home from the States, when he found Ste rocking back and forth on the threadbare sofa in the dark, Doug's touch had been timid, filled with unspoken anxiety. But then three months had passed. Three months had turned Ste's screaming vivid reality into strange washed-out numbness. Three months had Ste wrapping clinging arms around Doug's neck to keep himself from floating away in the black ocean. Three months had Ste's clawing fingers pressing themselves into Doug's skin, making sure that he was still there even though he couldn't feel. Three months had made Doug secure again, secure enough to run a suggestive finger down Ste's spine as they climbed into bed that night, to throw a casual arm across his body as he drifted into slumber after they had finished love-making.
Probably, after three months, he thought that Ste's closed eyes weren't seeing a hazy, washed-out fluorescent orange café anymore. Probably, he thought that Ste's strangely silent world wasn't filled with echoes of a droning, nonchalant voice. "He's gone, lad. Ran out of the place like he left the oven on. He said to tell ya thanks for trying. And that he's sorry. Oh yeah, and that you should call Douglas, yeah, that were it."
The sleepless hours that had followed that sentence were like scenes from a movie to Ste now. The boy standing staring at the fluorescent orange wall, the blond girl arriving, hair bed-messed and eyes like worried saucers, roving his face and arms with her hands as she tried to pull him back to life, the boy going with her because he had nothing else to do. After fifteen minutes in Mike's car he had known where he needed to go.
"Take me back to Hollyoaks!" he demanded, almost shouting at the driver.
"Ste, you're in no fit state–" Amy started to protest but he cut her off.
"Take me back!" he shouted, angry panic building up like a wave inside him. "Take me back or leave me here and I'll walk!"
"Ste, what did Brendan do to you?"
Ste had felt the air sucked out of him with that question. What had Brendan done to him? What hadn't the man done to him? Grabbed him by the wrist, yanked him into a world of darkness and blinding fucking light, shown him the exquisite pleasure of existence and the crippling need of obsession. How could he even have started to explain, to tell that father and daughter living sunshined lives, that Brendan Brady's branches were his sky and ground and world around? How could these people, who walked through the world certain of their right to be there, understand that the mistaken misshapen existence he hid from the sunny world they belonged to made glorious sense with Brendan's hot, tight arms wrapped up in him?
"I need to find him," he breathed, ragged. His face had burned in Ste's memory, the wet crumpled face with raw eyes and trembling lips. That night, Ste made Brendan's misshapen existence make sense too, just for an hour. He knew he had.
Something in the way he said it must have impacted on her, because they drove him home. An hour and forty minutes in silence, Ste's mind bleeding chaotically with everything since he slammed his way into Brendan's office the evening before. When the car pulled to a slow halt outside his cold, damp flat he sprang from it without a word of thanks or goodbye. The futile scenes had played repeatedly in his brain since that day. The boy's feet racing up the steps to the blue door, the boy's fists pummelling as he shouts the name over and over, the neighbour's door finally opening and the sleepy head poking out. "For Christ's sake, Ste, what are you playing at? It's five in the bloody morning!"
"Sorry Tony. I'm sorry," the boy staggering backwards.
The boy staring up at a nightclub then, massive and dark, imposing shadow engulfing him, blocking even the wan light of the moon. The boy collapsing into the familiar gutter. Daylight creeping into the village and the boy trudging to an empty shabby flat and sitting on a threadbare sofa, concentrating on the sound of his own breathing and the sick knot of knowing that the light has gone out forever.
Ste felt Doug's arm shift across his torso. He stayed very still, barely daring to breathe, praying that he wouldn't wake, eyes fixed dispassionately on the once-beloved orange stain.
He had lied earlier when Doug had asked what took him so long to get the cleaning supplies.
"They 'ad no Brillo pads, did they! Frankie went to fetch some from the store room, took ages."
It wasn't a necessary lie. If Ste had told him about meeting Cheryl, about Declan leaving, there would have been no argument. There never was anymore. Not since Doug had burst into the flat three months ago, fresh off his last-minute flight home from California, bubbling with love and apologies and promises of forever. Ste was silent and shrivelled, rocking gently back and forth in the pitch-black living room.
Doug had fallen instantly silent too. Wordlessly, he'd led him by the hand to the bathroom. He eased the broken boy from his sand-covered clothes, allowing the water in the shower to run hot before guiding him into the comforting steam. Afterwards, he patted his hunched, naked body with a soft blue towel and lay him gently on the mattress, covering his heartbreak with the hugging duvet. Doug lay on the covers, watching and not touching, and Ste felt sleep finally tug at his eyelids and pull him into unconsciousness. When he awoke thirteen hours later, Doug was still watching. Slowly, he leaned forward and brushed dry, undemanding lips against Ste's, asking a wordless question. It was the only question he had asked that day.
Ste's mind had still been facing a fluorescent orange café, his ears were full of a droning nonchalant voice. His hands were scrabbling for branches, branches that had trapped him and had sheltered him, branches that were his sky and his ground. Through it though, he had felt Doug's question on his lips and had been overwhelmed by it. By its acceptance and its forgiveness. Abject fear roiled in his gut. They were gone, his branches, suddenly and forever. He could feel the world slipping away from him, the hot tight arms vanished, the sunny world he had never really belonged in further away than ever. He felt Doug's question on his lips and he answered, softly pressing back into the pink mouth, telling him to stay. Doug asked no more questions.
Still, Ste lied to him about meeting Cheryl. A little lie, a fib. Easier than watching that flicker of hurt.
Doug stirred again, opening his mouth in a bleary yawn before his blue eyes flickered open.
"Hey," he murmured, catching Ste's sleepless face. "Can't you sleep?"
"No, not really," Ste whispered back, chewing on his lip.
Doug's hand rubbed at the skin of Ste's abdomen, gently tracing the contour of the muscle.
"Don't wake yourself though," Ste went on, carefully extracting himself from Doug. "I might just sit up for a bit, 'ave a glass of milk or summat."
Doug's eyes were already closed by the time Ste was slipping on his tracksuit bottoms and picking up his keys from the dresser.
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"Alright Declan?" he grinned ridiculously, as if it wasn't three o'clock in the bloody morning and as if he hadn't been hammering on the door for the last five minutes praying desperately that the boy would answer and hoping furiously that Cheryl was as heavy a sleeper as he remembered.
"Hi Ste," Declan mumbled as he rubbed sleep out of his eyes, also obtusely ignoring the fact that he had been dragged from bed by his dad's ex-lover the night before he returned to Ireland for good. He stood aside to let the older man in. "You want a cup of tea or something?"
"Eh, yeah ok," Ste answered lightly, squeezing his way through the open door to the hushed flat. "Milk, no sugar."
He sat at the kitchen table while the boy rattled around the kitchen, not fully sure what he was doing here but enjoying the light whisper of wind on his face.
"Here ye go," Declan announced, plonking a milky mug of tea in front of Ste and collapsing into a chair beside him, dirty blond fringe falling into his eyes.
"Ta very much," Ste said.
He took a long, slow sip of the tea, waiting for Declan to ask him what the hell he was doing here in the dead of night drinking tea in the dark. Nothing came. Surreptitiously, he stole a glance at the boy and found him sitting, arms folded on the edge of the table with chin resting on top, apparently in no rush to end this strange companionship either.
"So, I hear you're leaving tomorrow," Ste broke the silence, eventually.
They boy's eyes flickered to him, flashing momentarily with something. Ste thought it almost looked like hope, but it was gone by the time Declan spoke.
"Yeah," he said, yawning tiredly. "Now that the doctors are happy and all. Nothin' much to hang around for, y'know."
"Right, course," Ste replied, quickly burying the gasp that wanted to escape in another gulp of tea. "We'll miss you though, us around here!"
As though she could sense the words through her slumber, Ste heard Cheryl's voice waft down the stairs, murmuring incoherently in her sleep. He froze for a second, suddenly picturing the scene if she woke to find him here, sat with Declan at three a.m.
"Listen, Declan," he hurried on, feeling time pressure now that the image of Cheryl's wrath loomed in the back of his mind. "You know your… your Dad."
"I hate him," Declan spat immediately. Ste literally jolted. It felt like electrocution.
"What? No. Declan–" The boy's eyes were black holes, his mouth a bunched up scowl, his hands curled into fists. No. No this couldn't happen. Not to Brendan. Stupidly, ridiculously, panic was rising like bile in Ste's throat. Brendan, who would take any punishment so his kids could be happy and safe. Brendan, who never had even a tiny chance to be happy and safe himself.
"I fucking hate him," Declan was hissing, venom oozing from his pores. "I could be hooked up to a machine for the rest of my life because of what he did, and he didn't even care enough to hang around and see if I would be."
"That weren't him Declan, that were Walker," Ste protested weakly, fighting back the acid threatening to erupt from his gut.
"He's a coward, that's what Aunty Cheryl said to Mam," Declan was deaf to Ste, his knuckles blanched white from the fury in his fists. "He's a shit brother, and a shit father, and a shit person."
"Declan, no!" Ste didn't know how his voice came out sounding like that, filled with quiet, commanding urgency. His insides were trembling. But his tone turned the boy's head momentarily. Again, Ste saw a flash of something, something vulnerable and innocent and beautiful. It lasted a second, proud fury screeching back in to his posture and expression, but the flash was enough for Ste.
He lunged. Roughly, he seized the boy's biceps and dug his nails into the bare flesh of his arms. Declan shock strangled his yell, furious face whispering fear as Ste pulled him nose-to-nose, forcing the boy to look straight into his eyes as he spoke.
"No, Declan, he's not. He's done shit things, yeah – to you, to me – but he's a good man. He don't believe that, Declan, but he is."
Declan was squirming, trying to wriggle out of Ste's grip. His eyes darted, trying to escape the heat of Ste's gaze, trying to cling on to the fury. Ste's fingers only tightened, he leaned in closer so the breath of truth would fall on the boy's skin.
"Me and you, Declan, we need to believe in him. Even if no one else does. Even if he don't believe in himself. Even if–" Ste heard a murmur of his trembling gut break in his voice, but he forced himself on "–even if we don't never see him again. It's up to me and you, Declan."
One incredible swaying instant, suddenly the furious pretend-man dissolved, now a child was dribbling beseeching, rattling sobs from his devastated face. His balled up fists were gone, now grappling fingers clung at the collar of Ste's jacket and the dirty blond hair was all Ste could see as the head buried itself in his tshirt, covering itself from the cruelty of the world. Ste found his vice grip loosening, his delicate hands wrapping themselves protectively around the crying child, stroking the dirty blond hair softly, murmuring soothing nothings into the quiet night. His own eyes were strangely dry, his heartbeat strangely steady. His insides didn't tremble anymore. For the first time in three months, he felt like he was exactly where he should be.