Romance short. A painter is obsessed with the butcher across the road.
7k, M/M, rated M. A painter is utterly obsessed with the butcher across the road, and the butcher is a little obsessed back.
Lots of mental illness in this one, lots of reference — implicit and explicit — to suicidality, drug use, alcoholism, sexual assault and rape, ableism, consent issues, including past child sexual abuse, all in the context of a victim in recovery whilst also being in active addiction.
Bertie knows a few things about Michael pretty much as soon as he moves in across the way. He’s the sort of man, it becomes clear, to wear his heart on his sleeve, and on his face, and sometimes, stained down his front.
Bertie initially met him in the corner shop — it was only ten in the morning on a Saturday, but Michael had already been drunk. Bertie had been arrested at the sight of him, hadn’t known exactly what to say or what to do, but had felt he should perhaps do something — Michael had been bent to the side with his torso at a sixty degree angle from his waist, a half-drunk bottle of vodka hanging from his right hand’s loose grip, peering at the magazines.
“’Scuse me,” Bertie had said quietly, reaching past him for a copy of the i, and Michael had turned to look at him and his jaw had dropped. He was a painfully thin man, so skinny as to seem almost skeletal under his grey hoodie that was a few sizes too big for him, and his tracksuit bottoms where there was nearly half a foot of string hanging down his crotch, because he’d pulled the cord so tight about his waist. The whole tracksuit is spattered with multicoloured dribbles of paint, and a lot of those paint stains are on his skin, too — around his wrists, his neck, all over the backs of his hands and underneath his fingernails.
“Who are you?” he’d asked, his eyes as wide as dinnerplates, so much so that Bertie almost couldn’t see the grey bags underneath them.
“Me?” Bertie had asked, glancing from Michael to Javed behind the shop counter, who shrugged at him. “Uh, I’m Bertie, mate. The butcher shop is mine.”
Michael’s eyes had blinked a few times, and he’d smiled sort of dreamily, high as fuck and out of it but at least happy in the moment. His gaze had roved from Bertie’s face down to his throat, then to his shoulders, his chest, further down. “A butcher,” he’d said breathlessly, and then trailed after Bertie as he’d bought his newspaper and his pint of milk, followed him into the street.
In short order, Bertie had learned the basic facts about the man — that he’d moved into the flat across the road, above the old laundrette, that he was a passionate alcoholic, that he had a great affection for various drugs and hallucinogens, that he was an artist.
That frequently, he wanted to kill himself.
He seems a nice lad, though — he’s cheerful, when not on the verge of committing, and he’s complimentary, friendly. He wouldn’t harm a fly, except that he might harm himself. He likes to stand on the pavement outside of the shop and watch Bertie work.
“You’re literally the only reason I’m still alive, Bertie,” he says softly after two months or so after moving in, a month and a half after they meet in the shop. “I think about not seeing your shirt ride up while you lift a pig carcass over your shoulder ever again and I put the gun down.
“Oh, you have a gun now?” Bertie asks as he shifted his coat on his shoulders. “Well, I’ll need to take that off you, I think. But otherwise, Michael, that’s really nice.”
* * *
Bertie is a straight man, mostly. Michael isn’t, obviously.
Bertie discovers the first time they kiss outside the Goose and Gander that he’s actually quite a good kisser. Michael stands between his legs where he’s sitting down and moans when Bertie drags him in closer, and they kiss for a while — kiss until Michael’s hair’s all mussed up and there’s a thin sheen of sweat on his skin.
That happens a few times, every few weeks — each time, Michael’s on top of the world for a few times; each time, Bertie thinks, “Am I gay, maybe?”
He has very good wanks about it, although Michael’s not much like the girls he’s fucked or dated before. Bertie feels a bit hot and funny in the stomach when he thinks about just how narrow the man is about the waist, about how Bertie can get his hands all the way around him, about how his thumbs fucking touch over his navel. Michael’s got light bones like a fucking bird, and it takes nothing to lift him up and move him around, fragile and easy to manipulate.
Gay or not, Michael’s a good inspiration for a bit of horniness, and it’s —
They’re good wanks.
Michael’s unstable, sure. Sometimes, on the nights where he gets drunk without much else — the same nights Bertie crosses paths with him in the pub — he’ll sing and sing, sing love songs and hymns in French or German or Latin, and he’s honestly got a lovely voice until it breaks in the middle and he starts to sob.
He’s often high — he’s almost always drunk.
Bertie gets used to seeing him around, to making pleasant conversation with him, to singing with him, to seeing Michael watching him through the window, or lingering behind the counter, or catching him in a kiss in the smoking area of the Goose and Gander.
It’s not unheard of, in the four or five months that Michael’s been around, for him to disappear for a day or two, but on the second day, Bertie always goes across the road and knocks on his door, makes sure that Michael answers him.
On day three, with no answer even though Bertie’s nearly shouting through the door, Bertie just forces the lock (he wasn’t always a butcher), and finds Michael passed out on his living room floor. He’s vomited a bit, and after easing his stained hoodie off his shoulders, Bertie lays him down on the sofa in the recovery position.
He’s snoring softly, breathing evenly, and when Bertie pats his face, he grunts and moves a little bit, which is good.
Bertie’s never been in Michael’s flat before, never… Michael’s said, of course, that he looks at Bertie — he hasn’t needed to say, of course, because Bertie’s got eyes. He notices. Michael doesn’t just look at him — he stares at him, studies him, looks at him near-well worshipfully.
It had never occurred to Bertie that he was committing details about his body to memory to fucking paint him.
Michael’s apartment is a mess — the cheap beige carpets are stained with paint and beer and burnt in places with cigarette ends; the room smells most strongly of paint, but also of different alcohols, smoking. After Bertie opens up the window to bring in some more air and ventilation — God knows that the fumes can’t be great for Michael’s consciousness.
He paints with canvases. Bertie’s seen the paint on him, of course, has seen the canvases being delivered, and sometimes Michael walks around with paint brushes in his pockets.
Bertie stands there with his hands on his waist, looking around the room — there’s a singular sofa and a coffee table which have both been shoved up into the corner, and you can’t sit on one or use the other because they both have canvases on them. Against every wall are stacked canvases leaning at an angle; there are twelve or fifteen easels with more canvases mounted on them, and there’s more canvases in the corridor.
There’s more in the bedroom too, Bertie supposes — the only place with only a few canvases is the kitchen, and that’s because it’s a tiny space that’s filled with empty cans and bottles and stacked up dishes that haven’t been done and a few open bin bags filled up with takeaway wrappers.
Bertie moves slowly through the space, absently picking up rubbish to throw away since he’s already here, and he looks at each and every canvas. Some of them — maybe one in eight or ten — are still lifes. They’re gorgeous, lots of them. There’s the classic bowls of fruit — although it doesn’t escape Bertie’s notice that they’re studies of the bowls of fruit he has on top of his counter — and there’s studies of the meat arrays, of his tables, his knives.
There’s studies of shelves in Javed’s shop, of the magazines or the drinks bottles, one of the ice cream freezer; there’s one really nice one of the Goose and Gander after closing, with only two lights left on inside and no one around anymore, glasses and pitchers left mostly drunk on the picnic tables outside. One of the glasses in the foreground is tipped on its side, and Bertie can almost smell the cider in his nostrils, looking at the golden frothing drip of it over the edge of the table to puddle on the floor.
The rest —
The rest aren’t still lifes. There’s a few sketchy ones of Javed in the shop; there’s one slightly larger one of Tina in the Goose and Gander, laughing at someone’s joke as she pushes a full pint across the bar.
The rest of them, the bulk of them? Another, what, a hundred-and-twenty, a hundred-and-fifty canvases?
They’re of Bertie.
Bertie at work — Bertie slicing meat, parcelling apart a chicken or a pig, Bertie making mince, Bertie twisting new sausages into being, Bertie ringing up customers, Bertie smiling, Bertie washing his hands in the sink. There’s detail bits — details of Bertie’s hands and his fingers, the scars and the hair and his fingernails and the bend in his once-broken ring finger rendered in loving detail, looking slick and shiny and almost three-dimensional where it’s been painted and layered on the canvas.
There’s zoomed-in depictions of Bertie’s face, of the side of his mouth, of his upper teeth where you can see the glint of gold on the back one, where Michael’s used real gold paint so it shines, there’s study after study of Bertie’s eyes, of all the little flecks of colour in his irises that Bertie’s never considered before, there’s ones of his eyelashes, of where his hairline is rising and thinning, of his earlobes with the scar visible from where it used to be pierced until someone ripped the ring clear out and he had to get it stitched back up.
There’s studies of his apron strings, and you can see the bulge of his backfat over the tightly-drawn white ribbon, see the fabric puckering where it’s been pulled in flush to his body and it wants to get itself free, of the little sliver of his belly and its underside and the creases of flesh there when he lifts something heavy or reaches for things and his shirt rides up, and studies of the bulge of his cock in his tracksuit bottoms or his shorts when he gets an early delivery and comes down without yet getting dressed.
There’s details of beads of his sweat or saliva, or the slickness on his lip after he and Michael have kissed, of the whiteness of his knuckles as he grips tight at a delivery box.
And those aren’t even the full portraits of him — the one lugging a pig on his shoulder, or laughing with a pint in his hand, or just him standing there in conversation, just him walking down the street.
Bertie’s dismissed a lot of things he’s said before. When Michael’s said things like, “I could stare at your ear lobes forever,” or “Sometimes, Bertie, my heart stops beating because I look for too long at the dip of your belly against your thighs and I think about how warm my hand would be if I slid it in between them,” or “I really like that grey t-shirt you have, the worn one that gets sweaty and goes dark at the small of your back.”
He says nice things — he says Bertie looks good, or handsome, and he’s even said, “I’m obsessed with you,” or similar things, and more than that, he smiles at Bertie. He beams at him, he walks up to him in the shop or in the street and just lingers at his side, or —
But painting like this? It’s real.
Sure, they’ve kissed, but Michael never remembers to charge his phone, and often forgets the whole thing entirely, so it’s not like he uses the hook-up apps, and he can’t reliably go further into the city, is by his nature a homebody, even gets all his drugs delivered. Bertie had shook it off as convenience, as Michael reaching for Bertie because he’s there and he’s convenient and he’s safe and he’s not terrible-looking, although not good-looking either, just average and reliable.
He’d thought he was just —
Just flirting. Laying it on fucking thick, sure, but at the end of the day, just trying to get Bertie’s attention and keep it.
He’d never even mentioned fucking painting him.
Bertie feels his eyes burning a little as they water, and he wipes at them, breathlessly laughing.
“Oh, God,” Michael wails as he sees Bertie standing there — luckily, he’s moving pretty fucking slowly with the weight of the hangover, and it’s not really any work to wrestle the Stanley knife out of his hand before he can slit his wrists open. He squeezes on Michael’s wrist to make his fingers go weak, the knife clattering onto the floor, and then he keeps him held by his skinny little wrists as he sobs drunkenly into Bertie’s thigh, mashing his face into the flesh.
“Do I need to call an ambulance?” Bertie asks over the noise after a few minutes, and Michael mumbles, “I’m so sorry I’m so embarrassed I’m so — ”
Bertie lets him keep going until he tires himself out, and then melts over Bertie’s lap.
“I need to replace your lock,” Bertie says after a while, rubbing circles into Michael’s back. “I can pick one up around the corner and put it back.”
“Bertie,” Michael says quietly, the words muffled by Bertie’s thigh, “Do you ever want to run away together?”
“Well, Michael, we’re both forty, and I haven’t run anywhere in twenty years,” Bertie says. “Plus there’s the mortgage to consider.”
“I’m thirty-two.”
“You look terrible for it. I hope you don’t mind me saying.”
Michael turns in Bertie’s lap, looking miserably up at him. His hair is greasy — Bertie isn’t sure when he last had a shower, and he’s vaguely aware that Michael might not know when asked, either. He’s the sort of man that always looks a bit physically wet whether he’s recently showered or not.
“Didn’t think I’d live this long,” he says.
“Oh dear,” Bertie murmurs. “Shall we get you in the bath?”
“There are paintings in the bath.”
“Right,” Bertie mutters. “Well. I’ll move them, first.”
* * *
An hour later, Bertie’s fixed the lock on the door, and he’s sitting on Michael’s toilet, which is made of an astonishingly green ceramic to match the bath, looking at him stewing in the bubbles.
“So,” Bertie starts, watching as Michael scrubs over his knees with a flannel. “Are you… rich?”
“God, I wish,” Michael mumbles.
“Where did you learn to paint like this?”
Bertie gestures to the largest painting that’s now leaning up against the wall — it’s one of Bertie leaning down to scratch one of the neighbourhood cats behind the ear. Part of the reason he’s painted it, Bertie supposes, is because crouched down Bertie’s jeans have come down to show his arse crack and the lower part of his back, but it’s still lovingly depicted. Every thread of his jeans is visible, it seems to him, and it’s fucking incredible — let alone the hairs on his back.
“My parents sort of let me alone with a local painter, and he trained me up,” Michael says, gesturing vaguely with one hand before continuing to scrub, sloshing the water a bit.
The silence lingers between them for a few moments, and Bertie listens to the slosh and splash of the water, watches Michael’s pensive expression. “Did he do anything else to you?” Bertie asks cautiously, and Michael looks up at him, smiling faintly.
“Oh, yes,” he says. “All sorts.”
“Christ,” Bertie mutters, and Michael laughs, like he sometimes does when he obliquely references some horrible fucking thing that’s happened to him.
“Well, it was worth getting fiddled,” Michael says. “That’s how I learned to paint — I didn’t go to university or anything.”
“I don’t think it was worth getting fiddled, but I suppose I’m not an expert,” Bertie says. “How do you pay for groceries?”
“Oh, my sister comes in and picks out the saleable things every month or so and she sells them — she pays my rent and food and gear out of the money.”
Bertie blinks, taking that in. “She’s selling them?”
“Mm. Or, she takes them, anyway, and she pays my rent — my groceries get delivered, and she gets paints and canvases delivered. It might be that she just takes a few to make space.”
“So people might be buying pictures of me?” Bertie asks, feeling slightly faint at the idea of anyone taking home any of these extremely horny oil paintings of his body and hanging them up on their walls.
Michael sighs softly and says, “I’d buy pictures of you.”
“Yeah. Okay. Well, I need to talk to your sister, because I need to know who is buying this stuff of me. And also, she needs to put more vegetables in your grocery order.”
“Ugh,” Michael groans, and falls back in the bath.
* * *
Michael’s older sister is a genuinely pleasant and surprisingly well-adjusted woman — she’s eight years older than he is, and she comes around on the last Sunday of each month to check on her brother, take canvases, clean up a bit around the flat. She looks flustered, at a glance, not necessarily because she is, but just because she looks like that.
Where Michael’s hair is limp and prematurely greying from its mousy blond colour to an anemic white-grey, Cath’s is a brighter blond, sticks up at all angles from its messy top-heavy ponytail, and where Michael’s eyes are a pale green, hers are darker, more intense.
“I’m Bertie,” he says.
“Oh,” Cath says as she stacks some more small canvases in a crate. “I know.”
Bertie looks at the painting in her hand, one that Michael’s done of his armpit. Bertie owns the green vest in the painting, but he doesn’t remember when Michael might have seen him. The hair painted there is curling, sweat clinging to some of the hairs. “Right,” Bertie says. “Of course.”
“I know quite a lot about you,” Cath admits, looking awkwardly down at the canvas and then looking away, seeming almost abashed. “Not just physically. He doesn’t really talk about anything else since he first laid eyes on you. You’re actually why he moved in.”
“Aww.”
Cath blinks at him. “… Aww?”
“Well,” Bertie says. “That’s sweet, isn’t it?”
“People don’t normally find it sweet,” Cath says.
“Well, it’s not as if he means any harm — and the art is beautiful. It’s obviously a bit much, it’s… It took me by surprise. But Michael, he’s lovely — we get on. I suppose I’m glad I make him so happy.”
Cath bursts into tears with a wail to rival her brother’s, and Bertie stares at her. Cath sobbing in front of him was not exactly what he’d wanted out of this meeting. He leans back in his seat to make sure that Michael still isn’t back.
“Everyone’s so awful to him, they’ve always been awful to him,” she sobs into her hands, tears streaking down her cheeks and dripping down her chin. “I always think I’ll come around to wherever he is to find him dead, we’re always having to find him somewhere new to live because he starts getting obsessed with someone or starting fights or kids throw rocks at him or call him awful names, and it used to be we’d always have to keep in contact with the council and half his social workers have been awful — lots of them hate him, you know, because he’s so, so… And one of them raped him, and it was so awful, that was in Chichester, and when we tried to take it to court Michael refused to testify against him even though he was bleeding after and so I started selling his paintings and we moved him closer so I could come regularly and sometimes Stephen comes except he gets in awful fights with Stephen and I just want to make sure he’s got shelter and food and that he’s drinking water and not getting hurt or assaulted and this is what Van Gogh’s family did, basically, they just sort of tried to look after him and he died and I don’t want him to die but I just don’t have time to be here all week when I’ve got the kids to look after and Auntie Eva and you’re just so patient with him and you’re so kind to him and you just let him sort of, sort of be with you and it’s just so good of you, I can’t get over it!”
Bertie doesn’t know how to interrupt her, or if he even should. He just sort of sits there and lets her sob at him, listens to the torrent that falls out of her mouth.
“It’s not really patience,” he says. “We’re friends.”
And yeah, Michael is psychosexually obsessed with him, it turns out — probably wanks himself over Bertie until he’s raw, if only he could get his cock hard enough to do that — but it’s not as if Bertie doesn’t wank a bit over Michael too.
They’re bros. They hang out, they talk, they chat.
They talk about sports, a bit — Bertie explains what’s happening on the television, explains the rules or why the ref has made one call over another, what exactly is happening. Sometimes, what the game is. They talk about politics, which Michael knows a lot more about — about different politicians, about different fuck-ups and shit on the news, all that sort of thing. Michael knows about all that, actually listens to the news sometimes when he paints — Bertie avoids it all like the plague.
Michael’s had, what, a hundred or so psychiatrists? They’ve talked about those, and Bertie has a job keeping them all straight, which ones were good — a disappointing number of them. They’ve talked about Bertie’s past as a burglar, too, and his two years in the nick, what it was like. Michael’s been in every kind of institution except an actual prison, it seems.
Cath is still crying, and Bertie doesn’t exactly know how to explain to this sobbing and obviously loving woman that his relationship with her brother is not exactly the sexual-romantic or maybe just kind of divinely ordained thing Michael has been envisioning (or imagining), but it’s not as if it’s charity.
Bertie’s a bit of a freak himself, isn’t he?
“Well,” Bertie says, patting her knee, “you know that you were worried about finding him dead? About him — Well, killing himself, or anything else?”
Still teary-eyed, she draws in a hitching gasp and asks, “What? Oh. He said you took the gun off him.”
“It was a starting pistol, and it was unloaded,” Bertie says. “Chaz, his ket dealer, gave it to him.”
“Chaz?” Cath repeats faintly.
“I just think he’s probably anaemic,” says Bertie. “He’s been feeling more faint more often, and he’s paler, bruising easier. He needs to eat more iron.” Cath starts off like she’s going to do another round of wailing, and before she can fill her lungs up, Bertie says, “Listen, listen, Cath, I’m just saying — Why don’t I just do it? Do his groceries? Like, I can do that — we eat a lot of meals together anyway, takeaways and that. Is that okay? Would that help you?”
It occurs to him that maybe the woman should be a little more fucking streetwise than she is, at least where her brother is concerned, that she should show a bit more distrust of him, that she should at least ask some questions —
She just hugs him and sobs thanks into his shoulder.
He feels bad that she’s so upset about it, just that it feels a bit shit, he supposes, that she’s crying so much without asking Michael, without talking to him. Obviously Michael threatens to kill himself every other week, but this really is his shit to get upset about more than hers.
Bertie is distracted by it, anyway — he forgets to ask if she’s been selling the paintings or not.
* * *
It puts a fire under him to eat at least one meal a day with Michael, which is normally dinner, because Bertie is awake from five or six in the morning until about ten, and Michael’s typical sleep schedule is from about three in the afternoon until eight, in the periods where he’s sleeping more than usual.
Sometimes he cooks at home and brings things around, or Michael brings things over to him — sometimes, Bertie brings the ingredients and cooks in Michael’s kitchen, which he has to attack vigorously with cleaning supplies to make it habitable and usable before he starts being able to do that.
Not so much because of dirt — although it’s dirty, most of it is just piled up dishes and empty cans and bottles — but more because of paint and turps and all sorts of stuff, none of which is advisable for human consumption.
Bertie’s eating more, too, eating more healthily. After long, hard fucking days of physical work on his own, being on his feet all day, keeping track of everything, doing his accounts, doing everything — It’s not like his hours are unbearable. He’s lucky to be in the position he’s in, he knows that.
But it’s hard to make himself go through the effort of a proper homecooked meal when he’s been handling meat all day and has no brain left for it, easier to just toss an oven pizza in or get a pie from the pub. It’s easier, when he’s got someone else to cook for — it’s easier, when someone else justifies the effort, someone he cares about.
“Oh, it’s like we’re married,” Michael says one evening as he comes in from the living room, watching Bertie spatchcock a chicken in his kitchen. Michael’s flat is much smaller than his, but it holds the warmth a lot better, and it’s cosier, now the sofa isn’t filled all over with paintings. “Would you be my housewife, Bertie?”
“I think you’d be mine, if you were a woman.”
“I’ll be a woman for you,” Michael says breathlessly, and Bertie turned his head to look at him, gave him a half-smile.
“I like you like this.”
Michael gasps, spreading one paint-spattered and grimy hand over his extremely-oversized (it’s Bertie’s, and Bertie has no idea when he pilfered it) t-shirt, which reads 100% PRIME ENGLISH BEEF. “Homo,” he accuses.
“Internalised homophobia much?”
“Darling, I’ve internalised things you couldn’t even imagine.”
“I bet,” Bertie says, tossing his potatoes in the colander before he gets the pan of hot oil out of the oven, exchanging it for the chicken.
“Would you pose for me?” Michael asks.
“Seems like I don’t have to — you paint me from memory well enough. You got a photographic one?”
“Eidetic. Remember every crease and hair and dimple on every man who’s ever touched me. Consensual or otherwise.”
Bertie must crumple somehow, or show his horror in his expression, because Michael giggles, his arms crossed over his chest, huddled in the overlarge t-shirt and swimming in the fabric. “But it would still be nice.”
“Do I have to?”
“No. But would you?”
“What do I have to do?”
“Take all your clothes off.”
Bertie huffs out a laugh, tossing the potatoes in the sizzling oil before he slides it into the next shelf in the oven before reaching for an egg-timer. “Is that all?”
“Would you? It would make me so happy.”
“For how long?”
“Forever.”
“Liar.”
“It would be forever if I killed myself right after,” Michael says.
“If I take all my clothes off for you and you kill yourself, Michael, that will hurt my feelings.”
“Does that mean you’ll do it?” Michael asks, and Bertie sets the egg timer down before wiping off his hands.
“The timer’s set for an hour and ten. I need to give those potatoes a shake at forty-five.”
Bertie strips off his clothes and sits back to pose on a stool. To begin with, Michael doesn’t actually start painting — he sets up one of his primed canvases and just stands there and gazes at him, looks his body over. Bertie’s never felt threatened or insecure about male attraction, even though the man that catches his eye is pretty rare compared to a woman. He let a few guys suck him off when he was inside, and there’s something nice, even, about how open and and hungry men are about his body when they’re horny for him. They don’t just see him as cuddly or cosy or as some kind of protector for them as a big, beefy fat man.
The way Michael looks at him is not just horny. He has a feverish, twitchy manner about him at all times — he’s almost always sweating, hair streaked back, smeared with paint, his eyes wide, his breathing a little fast. He tics in conversation, especially once he’s excited, and especially once he’s high.
When he stops to look at Bertie it’s like he comes over almost meditative for a little bit — he comes over a little calmer, breathes slower, relaxes, sighs. It’s the way some people relax when they go into a church or when they get into a quiet room after being in a crowd, when they finally make it to an appointment when they were scared they were going to be late.
And that? That’s not just flattering — it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful and baffling, the idea that a man should look at him — him! Bertie Strand! — and experience such peace, even fleetingly.
“Your cock is gorgeous,” says Michael.
“Thank you,” Bertie says, feeling his lips twitch.
“Can I suck it?”
“You’re meant to be painting.”
Michael shifts on his feet, pouting out his lips and looking at Bertie with his eyes widened. “But I — ”
“After dinner,” Bertie says. “Maybe.”
Michael paints like a demon most days, paints fast — he doesn’t really go out much, rarely goes further afield from this street. He gets nervous and paranoid around crowds of people, and his definition of a crowd is frequently more than two people. He doesn’t smoke cigarettes, but they always meet up in the Goose and Gander’s beer garden anyway, because he can’t bear the people in there when there’s walls on all sides.
Now and the Bertie insists Michael come with him for a walk and they look at the roses in the community garden — Michael always brings his sketchbook and some charcoals, complains about having to go out and walk anywhere, but once they make it, he draws and he draws. He draws flowers in bloom, draws leaves and stems, draws people’s dogs or passing cats, draws people here and there. It’s easier for him when the two of them go places together, when he knows he can just lose himself in what he’s doing. He’ll fill page upon page with flowers or bees or animals or people, gets down on the floor and lies there so he can see the grass from a particular angle and draw it just right from the close-up, from below.
Bertie likes to watch him sketch or paint — he really loses himself in it, moves so quickly with his pencils or charcoals or crayons or paint brushes, and as Michael starts to paint now, his hand becomes a blur. He spins the palette around and around in his hand, a nervous movement like a fucking pizza tosser — he says it helps him mix the paints.
“I’m sure people think you’re my carer,” he says after a few minutes of painting, and Bertie thinks about when they’re out in the park together. Michael won’t go without him — pigs’ll come fucking harass him otherwise, want to arrest him or have him committed or otherwise want him to be inside where no one can see him. Kids will have a go; “concerned parents” and neighbourhood watch sort of cunts and all those kinds of people. “Did Cath say?”
“Yeah,” Bertie says. “Tried to explain that we were friends, that it wasn’t just, you know. Fucking sympathy or some bullshit.”
“She can’t really imagine that anyone would be friends with me,” Michael says, shrugging his shoulders. “The only reason she doesn’t have me put in some institute is because I’m such catnip for sex offenders. Did she ask if you were raping me?”
“She didn’t,” Bertie says. “I thought that she should have, to be honest.”
“Maybe,” Michael says. “She’s never really understood it. When I was a teenager, after Mum cut me off, she thought I was asking for it all the time and kept thinking that, and then after what happened with Paul Sears, she felt really guilty for everything. Went extreme in the other direction. She’d do anything for me, I think. But she doesn’t really think of me as a person, I don’t think. She doesn’t even like to be here when I am — she always sends me out when she brings things over or starts cleaning up.”
Michael’s voice is quiet, his tone distant and a little dreamy, although not particularly happy or contented. He’s not smiling or laughing like he does with some of the rape jokes, where he enjoys saying things just to make Bertie flinch or groan, enjoys making the subtext and the assumptions explicit and blatant.
This conversation is more honest, in a way — and more painful, too.
“People think all sorts,” says Bertie. “It doesn’t make them right.”
Bertie’s arms aren’t crossed, his hands resting on his thighs. Michael’s enthused about his “magnificent rack” before, so he doesn’t want to cross his arms.
“A lot of people think it’d be better if I just bit the bullet and killed myself,” Michael says casually. Bertie can see he’s not thinking that much about it, because he’s focused on the work, looking between Bertie and the canvas.
“Well, I don’t,” murmurs Bertie. “None of those people know you — I do.”
Michael looks over the canvas and meets Bertie’s gaze now instead of looking down at his chest, and he smiles at him.
“You went to school in Birmingham, right?” he asks as his eyes flit back to his work. “Were you always big?”
“Always,” Bertie says. “Used to get in fights at school — I was softer when I was a younger, started to put on bulk and muscle when I was a little older. Used to get in fights a lot.”
“You got bullied?”
“I was a bit of a bully, probably,” Bertie says. “I got impatient with people. All my teachers thought I was thick as well as ugly — other kids picked up on it. Couldn’t read, couldn’t do a lot of maths. Dropped out early.”
“You couldn’t read?”
“I can,” Bertie says. “Takes me ages, though — all the letters swim. My parole officer when I got out, he put some stuff on my phone and my computer. Changed the fonts so they’re easier.”
“Dyslexia?”
“Probably.”
“I’m no great reader either,” Michael says. “Can’t concentrate on the page — I prefer pictures.”
“I see that.”
Michael watches a lot of TV, although he doesn’t like the noise — he always has the TV on in the background, the sound muted with the subtitles on. Bertie’s never sure how much of it he takes in, how much he engages with it.
“What about you?”
“Dyslexia? No, not that one. I tick a few other boxes, depending on which expert you ask.”
“I meant school.”
“Oh.” Michael pauses a moment, resting the corner of his paint palette against his chest and letting the arm holding his paintbrush go loose. He’s only smoked a bit of weed today and he’s moderately drunk — they’ve been sharing beers, and he’s only had enough vodka to steady his hands. He’s squinting into the middle distance, thoughtful, when he says, “I don’t remember much of it. I got in fights at school too — with teachers, with students. I wasn’t nearly as mad back then, but I wasn’t normal. The term “wasted potential” was bandied about.”
“Mm, I know that one.”
Michael tilts his head slightly to the side, his tongue darting out to wet his lips. “I think my PE teacher hit me once,” he says. “I might be remembering it wrong, but I think so — he said I shouldn’t run like a faggot, and when I pointed out that maybe I should, because I am one, he smacked me. It made such a loud sound, Bertie. Like a thunder clap.”
Bertie looks at him seriously. “You don’t remember?”
“It’s all very hazy, and I’m sure half of it’s imagined and made-up anyway. That’s the problem with very mad people, Bertie. It all gets a bit Alice in Wonderland and the truth gets muddled up — and then when we do tell the truth, nobody believes us.”
“I believe you,” says Bertie. “About your painting tutor, about the social worker, about all of it. They shouldn’t have done all they did to you.”
“Probably not,” says Michael affably. “Do you think I’d be normal if they hadn’t?”
“Maybe closer to it, but it’s too late for that now, and I do like you like this.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” says Michael in a softer voice, warmer, sweeter. His eyes crinkle when he smiles, and they’re slightly wet. “I almost like myself when I’m with you, Bertie.”
“Will you remember that the next time you’re on the verge?”
“Probably not, I don’t remember much of anything when I’m in that state,” says Michael. “But I’ll do my best.”
“That’s all I ask for,” says Bertie, spreading his hands. It makes his chest wobble, how he moves in the seat, and Michael lets out a low, quietly wanting noise.
When they finally stop to eat, Michael keeps making twitching movements back toward the canvas, but each time Bertie says he won’t go back to posing again until they’re both finished their plates. He’s gained a little weight in the past few months, which is good. He still swims in Bertie’s t-shirt, but he doesn’t swim in his own quite so much.
He’ll never be a big man, no, but he’s no longer emaciated in the way he was — his eyes aren’t quite so sunken in, his bones not showing as obviously. He doesn’t look healthy, but he doesn’t look starved, either.
“I love you, Bertie,” says Michael.
“Love you too,” says Bertie, and Michael looks at him so stunned for a second that Bertie actually feels an aching pang in his chest.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Does this mean you’re gay now?”
“I wouldn’t say so, but who knows what other people think?”
* * *
Michael kisses him after dinner, straddles his thighs and kisses him while cupping Bertie’s cheek, cradling him like Bertie’s face is the most precious, delicate thing in the world, and he has to be careful not to break him.
“Can I suck you off now?”
“You don’t want to keep painting?”
“I’ll keep painting you after.”
“Michael, if you suck me off, I will fall asleep right after.”
“I’ll paint you sleeping.”
“Fine,” says Bertie, but before he pulls away he catches him in another kiss, and Michael whimpers. Bertie pulls hurriedly back, not sure if that’s a bad noise, but Michael scrabbles at his arms to pull them to wrap around him, grinds down against his lap and begs silently for Bertie to continue, so Bertie does. They make out for a while before Michael sucks him off, and it’s been a few years since Bertie’s felt anything but his own hand, so he doesn’t last long.
Michael kisses him slowly after until Bertie, dozy and exhausted, relaxes back and falls asleep.
* * *
Bertie wakes in the morning to Michael crammed into the gaps between him and the sofa, his face pressed into Bertie’s chest and shoulder, one of his arms banded around Bertie’s belly. He’s stuck into the gap between him and the back of the sofa, dead asleep.
Bertie smiles at him, gently touches the side of his cheek, pushes a curl of hair back from Michael’s sweaty temple.
“You’re warm,” mumbles Michael. He doesn’t move.
Scattered on the floor are pages of sketches of Bertie sleeping, close shots of his hands, his thighs, his arse, his closed eyes, of the shapes he falls into as he sprawls on the sofa cushions.
“Did you ever find out if she sells the paintings of you?” Michael asks.
“Fuck’s sake,” Bertie mutters, and swipes his hand over his face. “I’ll ask the next time I see her.”
If he remembers, he thinks. He doesn’t know that he minds so much now either way when it makes Michael so fucking happy to draw him, to paint him. When it’s so nice to sit with him in the quiet and pose for him, or just spend time with him like this.
Michael doesn’t sleep enough, so Bertie lets himself enjoy the cosiness of it, of his warm body and his slower heartbeat, until Michael gets up to piss and take a huff of white spirit and then ask, eyes as big as dinnerplates (partly from the inhalant, partly because he’s just good at the puppy dog look) if Bertie can make him some eggs before he goes to work.
Bertie, laughing, makes him an omelette, and Michael sketches him at the hob. Bertie can’t keep the smile down, and he sees the same expression reflected in Michael’s face.
FIN.
Leave a Reply