Phil has had a tough week at work. Luckily for him, it’s a Gillespie day.
Continuing on from A Clean Pig.
Phil Hutchinson, a detective inspector, has stumbled into being the kept pig of the beautiful young Adrian Gillespie – half his age, devastatingly attractive, and sick. Uses a wheelchair, takes a bunch of meds, is weak and ill and has a thousand allergies sick. So why the fuck does this kid have such a hold over him? Why does Phil feel like falling to the floor at his feet whenever he lays eyes on him?
Dom/sub dynamics, age gap with the younger one domming, lots of powerlessness and grappling with self esteem, building to some fucked-up sex. References to domestic violence, homophobia and bigotry, antisemitism, mild bigotry on Phil’s part as you’d expect from a cop (racism, antisemitism, the Islamophobia you’ve seen so far, etc).
A few days later, Phil gets home from work and finds that Gillespie’s Mercedes is parked across from his drive, with Laborious sitting inside in the driver’s seat, idly doing the crossword in today’s Metro – in biro, at that. The window is open a crack despite the cool bite to the air, and Phil can hear his radio, a woman’s voice. He can’t make out the words until he gets closer, but he can glean from the tone and the style of the music that it’s probably one of his history shows.
“I’ll need a minute,” Phil says. “Just need to chuck my stuff inside and take out the bins.”
“Take your time,” Laborious says mildly, glancing up from his paper and giving Phil a friendly smile. “Two hours until Maghrib, and traffic isn’t too bad today. It’s easier picking you up from here than Bishopsgate.”
“I bet,” Phil says, trudging inside and kicking off his boots, putting his bag down and taking off his clothes to toss into the wash. He takes a quick shower before putting on the wash – his water pressure is less than great at the best of times – and puts on a pair of jeans and one of his nicer shirts. It’s blue with dark flowers on it, in an ivy pattern, something he ordinarily only wears out for the occasional drink with a woman.
It’s been a year or two since one of those. He’s really not at home with dating apps, and no matter what Jez or Baz say, he’s not going to a fucking speed dating event, and in the meantime, well. It’s not so easy to meet women, women that he likes, let alone women that like him, or want to give liking him a go.
There’s a new sofa in his living room. It’s much nicer than the one he got from DFS however many years ago – pretty fancy thing, extends out into a bed, but it’s not a cheap fold-out thing, isn’t like any sofa bed he’s ever seen before. He can’t conceive of how much the thing must have cost, because it wasn’t ordered flat-pack out of a catalogue, and it’s heavy, too, made of real wood, but the mechanism is on a spring-loaded slider activated with a pedal, so you don’t need to pull or push on anything to pull out the bed.
Accessible.
Easy.
Gillespie can turn the sofa into a bed without Phil’s help, and without Hanzalah’s or Laborious’, either, if he shows up at Phil’s gaff. It has drawers underneath with fresh sheets and soft, fluffy blankets, dark greens and browns that match with the rest of Phil’s shitty furniture rather than the colour palette Gillespie uses at home. As if Phil even fucking cares about that shit – most of the furniture he has, he bought in sets just because it was cheaper that way, easier.
Various things have changed each day whilst he’s been at work, every day, and he hasn’t come home to find Hanzalah and Laborious (assuming it’s only them, and they don’t have a parade of tradies in and out of the place) still working like he did last week. His little bath has had one of those doors put in it, and there are support rails on the walls; his showerhead’s been replaced with a better one; there are heavier pieces of cutlery in his kitchen drawers, and little doohickeys he doesn’t know the names or purposes of, accessibility things for opening things, or mixing things, or whatever else.
There’s new hooks and shelves at wheelchair height, and a space made in his living room for a wheelchair to go about, and all these things have been seamlessly installed like they’ve been there for years, with no dust or debris or lost screws left behind.
Some pisstake of the cobbler’s shop in the story, it seems to Phil – he’s at work trying to stop people from killing each other or themselves with drugs or weapons or outright fucking stupidity, and whilst he’s away, fairies are rushing around and putting his house in order.
Today, it was the latter – some stupid little cunt whose useless boyfriend has been in for kicking his teeth in three times before now, and yet he’s snivelling in the interview room and insisting that he was just drunk, that he didn’t mean anything by it, that the police have something out for him, that it’s not fair, that it’s targeted.
“Are we targeting him?” Phil had asked quietly. “Look at your face, Tev. Look at the bruises on it – look at that fat lip you’ve got. He’s targeting you, it seems to me. You were very careful about buttoning up that shirt collar today, but I can see how uncomfortable it is, how you keep touching it. Did he start choking you before or after next door rang 999?”
He fucking hates the DV cases. At least most of the shit he sees dealing with organised crime, the violence is, if not organised, then is at least decently impersonal.
Someone gets stabbed or threatened with a gun or slapped about or whatever you like, but at the end of the day, it’s stupid, scared animals trying to keep a pecking order, and with all the posturing of fucking beasts in captivity.
The DV at home, all that stuff, it feels worse. More calculated. Sickens him to his fucking stomach – he can’t inure himself to it in the way he can the gang stuff. He doesn’t know why.
He fucking hates seeing the same stupid pricks go back to the same awful ones; he fucking hates seeing the bruises and the cuts and the marks, the shakes and trembles, hates seeing the dim of the light in people’s eyes and how fucking downtrodden they are; he hates the fucking certainty of ninety percent of the bastards they bring into custody, who are always so fucking certain their boyfriend or girlfriend or kids or grandmother will say it’s all fine, and so certain that CPS won’t bother prosecuting, and if they do, that they’ll get off with a slap on the wrist because the Crown Prosecution Service has more important monsters to be getting on with.
Which, you know. They do.
But that doesn’t make it any fucking easier.
A lot of the DV victims don’t have anywhere else to go – Tevye is a good example. His family are Haredi Jews with their black clothes and hanging tassels and big hats and uncut curls of hair, and Phil knows his dad used to beat him before they threw him onto the street for bringing shame on the family, and Phil doesn’t know everything about Jewish history, but even he can see the fucking irony in a young Jew going out from his family and getting knocked about just like Daddy used to, but by a drug-dealing Pole built like a brick shithouse instead of a nice Jewish boy.
Can’t go back to his family – too much of a faggot, too fey and too nervous, has a lisp that’s not just because of his prominent front teeth. Can’t seek out other Jews, either, because he doesn’t trust them, doesn’t trust everything not to get back to his family.
Can’t make many gay friends – too much of a Jew. Too self-loathing, too religious, too homophobic, frankly. Not pretty enough, either. He knows a lot of gays will forgive anything for a fat arse and a narrow waist and a pretty face, but Tevye doesn’t have any of those, and he might have the gay lisp, but he’s got a stammer, too, and gays don’t relate to that as much.
Can’t make many progressive friends in general – too racist, hates Blacks, hates Asians, hates Muslims, too attached to his grandma and cousins in Haifa to get behind the Palestinian cause, or even pay lip service to a two-state solution.
Phil doesn’t particularly like the man either – he’s unlikable, frankly.
It’s not just because of his politics, which are the reactionary politics of any trapped and furious animal, but because he’s fucking irritating. He’s soft in the head, thinks his boyfriend made the fucking world in between snorts of coke and thrown punches, and he’s self-indulgent and whiny, fidgets in his seat, makes his eyes too big and tries to pretend himself as younger than he is, puts on a higher voice than is natural for him, most of the time, babies himself. Always does his nails in stupid fucking tipped claws that he’s never that good at applying, but gets in too many fights with nail techs to get them done professionally, is scrolling TikTok every second he can, always with the sound on as high as it can fucking go.
Does all of that mean he deserves for his boyfriend to slam his head so hard into the side of the sink that the ceramic cracks? That he deserves to have his face dunked into the fucking toilet as said boyfriend calls him a conniving, cheating whore?
Phil doesn’t like to think so, but the only people that will ever put up with him are the ones that are either putting their cocks in him or beating him senseless or both, and it’s not like Phil has any bright ideas as to where else to send him.
What’s Phil supposed to tell him?
That it’s better to be alone?
Phil’s been alone for years, and now he’s getting in the back of a criminal’s car to be driven to his house for whatever the little prick can imagine doing to him. What does he have on Tevye, really, except a few decades and a bit more glancing self-awareness?
When he sits back in the seat, Laborious has finished the puzzle pages – the paper is folded over on the passenger dash shelf, every puzzle filled in in little black pen marks – and is sitting with his hands on the wheel, his head tilted to the side. Phil doesn’t say anything, lets the bloke on the radio finish up the conclusion of his little show on the history of pre-Chinese Tibet.
He flicks it off when the credits start to play and glances to Phil in the mirror.
“You look different now you’re growing some hair,” he says. “Do you like it?”
“Doesn’t make any difference to me either way,” says Phil.
Laborious smiles faintly as he reaches for the handbrake and pulls out. “Not very convincing,” he remarks.
“I’ll work harder to pretend,” Phil mutters, his hands twitching at his sides with the urge to reach up and touch his hair. “You mind if I ask you something?”
“Not at all.”
“You’re alright with gay people.”
“It’s not a formal alliance.”
“You’re not a homophobe, you’re not, Hanzalah isn’t. Your mosque isn’t homophobic.”
“It’s not an assertively inclusive mosque, as some are, and it could be better,” Laborious says. “But we would go elsewhere if we felt the congregation were moved toward hate or bigotry.”
“What would you do if someone you knew kicked out their kid ‘cause they were gay?”
“It would depend on how well I knew the family,” Laborious says. “If we were friends, I might counsel them peer-to-peer, talk to them directly – if not, I might leave that to someone more prominent in the community. I would talk to our imam, talk to Hanzalah. See where I could find housing or safe community for the young person, if they were comfortable with my assisting them directly – refer them to colleagues or appropriate services, regardless.”
Phil drums his fingers against the seat beside him, wishing there was more resistance from the leather, wishing that it hurt as he his fingertips touch against it. When he was a kid, he used to hit things – used to kick kerbs, break branches, punch walls. He never used to hurt animals, and frankly, he was always too much of a coward to get into fights with other boys, but he had no qualms taking out his temper on objects.
He looks at the window of the van and thinks about how unsatisfying it would be if it shattered – great if you’re in a car crash, those glittering little blunted dribbles of glass, but not satisfying for a man’s temper – and wonders how many windows he broke in his life before he grew up and removed his head from his arse, started sweeping up broken glass instead of making it, started washing and painting graffitied brick walls instead of throwing bottles at them, started trying to go forward in life instead of sitting in one place and breaking everything in reach.
His house is very clean, and he hasn’t so much as broken a plate in a decade. Sometimes, he wishes he still could.
He asks, his voice shaking with anger that would be better put through a window instead of through the cool air in the van, “And if they were a prick?”
Laborious blinks. “You mean, the young person was somehow antisocial, that it wasn’t actually about their sexuality?”
“No,” Phil says. “The family kicked the kid out because he’s gay – or gay and open about it, or too slutty, or something like that. But he won’t call himself homeless. Won’t call himself gay to gay charities because he hates himself. Self-infantilises, narcissistic, gets in catfights every second, can’t follow instructions, won’t play nice. You’re all fucking communists, all of you. What do you do when someone’s too much of a bastard to bring into the commune?”
Laborious is looking at him in the mirror, is taking his eyes off the road to keep glancing at Phil, studying him. His lips are pressed loosely together, and his expression is very serious.
“Why don’t you take a bottle of water from the cooler and have a drink?” he suggests.
Phil glances at it, caught off guard. “Is it drugged?”
“… No, Mr Hutchinson, it’s just still water.”
“Why do you want me to drink it?”
“You seem upset. No point being thirsty as well.”
“I’m not a fucking kid, King,” Phil snaps. “I’m not some fucking child you’re ferrying for one of Gillespie’s charity things, I don’t need your fucking pity.”
“I don’t pity you, Mr Hutchinson,” Laborious says blandly, and he smiles as he says it. “I think you’re a pitiable and pathetic animal,” that hits him like spit in the face, “but I’m not one of the people who pities you, or animals like you. You’re part of my job – so take a drink.”
Irritably, Phil pulls a bottle out of the cooler and takes a swig. It’s cool, refreshing – he’s fucking hungry, he realises. He didn’t get a lunch break (he’s not had a lunch break in five years), and he hasn’t had so much as a cup of tea for a few hours. His stomach pangs, and he regrets not having something to eat before he came out to Laborious in the car.
“Do you, um,” he mutters, and he sounds fucking pathetic, “do you have anything to eat in here?”
“The hatch beside the cooler. There’s some dried fruit, or cheese biscuits. Don’t worry about crumbs, I’ll deal with them later.”
Phil eats.
They drive in silence for five minutes or so as he eats a packet of cheddars, and he feels like a fucking kid. It’s not a pleasant feeling. He never got driven to and from school – his mother never learned to drive – but he remembers sitting in uncomfortable silence beside his mother or his nan on the bus, keeping absolutely still.
“What was your dad like?” he asks. He doesn’t know why. Maybe because he can’t stand the silence; maybe because it’s on the tip of his tongue to ask about King’s mother, and he’d rather do anything but that.
“Bad,” says Laborious. “Yours?”
“Bad,” Phil echoes.
“Mine didn’t beat me,” says Laborious. “But he was an immoral man – highly-sexed, and violent about it. He was horrible to women, to girls – there were five of us, myself and my brother, and then three sisters. He always joked about wanting to keep trying after my eldest sisters were born, and then to keep trying again when my elder brother was born – he was born with a cleft lip and palate, and even after surgical repair, he spoke with a slight lisp, and the scarring was visible, as well as some birthmarks blotched on his face. He was delighted when my mother gave birth to me.”
Dread forms in the pit of Phil’s stomach. “What, he touch you up?”
“No,” Laborious says, looking like he wants to laugh. “But he had high expectations, and I resisted several of his lessons. When he became ill – he was bedbound for much of the latter half of his life – and my sister took over the family business, I was half-forgotten, although that was just another extreme.”
“Sorry,” Phil says.
“Yes,” Laborious replies. “Now that you’re a little calmer, Mr Hutchinson, are you trying to ask for my help, or my opinion?”
“I don’t know,” says Phil. “Not your fucking help. The kind of help you people give is fucked.”
“Why so?” Laborious asks as he pulls into the drive, tilting his head slightly to the side as the driveway gates close behind them and he stops the car beside his little bungalow. Phil’s allowed to walk the path up to the house on his own, now.
“I don’t know, you killed next door’s fucking—”
Phil trails off as Laborious opens the door and steps out of the driver’s side – the little black and grey dog from next door yaps and barks and rushes down from the house proper, his tail wagging so fast Phil wonders if he’s going to sprain it.
Pushing open the door, Phil gets out as the dog scurries forward and eagerly sniffs at Laborious’ shoes as Laborious stands up straight and stares down at it, smiling in an easy, gentle way, but not bending down to touch it. Dogs aren’t clean animals like cats are in Islam, he knows that, vaguely, although he doesn’t know the ins and outs of what makes them dirty where cats aren’t.
“Her name is Stephen King,” Laborious says. “Apparently he was the favourite author of Mrs Bell, to whom she belonged. She’s four years old, and she does not know her own name, but these gardens are fortified, and so she can roam as she pleases.”
“I didn’t realise she was so young,” Phil says, crouching down and putting out his hands for her to come and eagerly sniff and snuffle at his palms and fingers, at his trousers, at his shirt. She puts her paws up on his knees, and he smiles, cupping her face between his palms and rubbing against her wiry-haired cheeks, her tail still wagging. There’s a lot of white and grey in her face, but seeing her up close like this, he sees that it’s not what he assumed – it’s not signs of age, just her natural colouring.
“Mrs Bell was an avid walker, and belonged to several hiking groups in the countryside. Stephen King is a Patterdale-cross and is trained in something called Barn Hunt, as well as knowing twenty commands that we’ve been able to determine thus far. She was understimulated, living on your road.”
“Makes sense,” Phil says, scratching Stephen’s back – up towards the house, he hears a sharp whistle, and he follows the sound to see Ysbal standing with a bag of washing on her hip.
Stephen’s off like a shot toward her, and with a shorter whistle abruptly turns, flipping mid-air to change position, to take to Ysbal’s heel and watch her eagerly as Ysbal goes over to the washing line.
“You thought we killed the dog,” Laborious says aloud. It’s not a question, but a statement, the sort of thing he says to himself after he finishes one of his podcasts or radio shows or an article, the main point he wants to take away from it and keep chewing on, keep thinking about.
Phil doesn’t say anything, again feeling fucking ashamed, again fucking despising himself and how fucking weak he is.
“Yeah,” he says, maybe because he’s too much of a coward to say sorry.
“I ask again, though perhaps you don’t want me to,” says Laborious. “Did you want assistance, or conversation?”
“You can’t help,” Phil mutters.
“Are you certain of that?”
“You like that she’s got the same last name as you?” Phil asks, turning his head as Ysbal whistles again, and Stephen dances around her as they go back into the house, not through the main front door that has a sloping ramp but through the side one that goes from the kitchen, up a set of steps.
“There’s no shortage of Kings in this world,” Laborious says, taking his rucksack and his paper from the car before going into his own bungalow, and Phil trudges up the path toward the house, following after Ysbal into the kitchen instead of going in through the front door.
“Hello, Mr Hutchinson. You’re looking better,” Ysbal says, and then clucks her tongue. “Stephen. Close the door.”
Phil lifts his hand away from where he was about to push the door closed himself, taking a step aside and letting Stephen eagerly skitter forward to shove at the door with her little paws. She pushes it most of the way shut, leaving it a few inches ajar, and then eagerly looks toward Ysbal.
“All of the way, girl,” Ysbal says, laughing, making a movement with her hand. Stephen nudges the door another inch, then stops. “Come on.”
Stephen barks sharply, jumping up on her hind legs.
“Close the door,” Ysbal instructs, and after doing two circles in her place, Stephen shoulders the door until it shuts properly, and Ysbal claps her hand and cheers. “Yay! Good girl, good girl, that’s it! Come here, have a biscuit.”
“Do I get a biscuit?” Phil asks.
Ysbal laughs – she’s not that old, is only fifty-something, but there’s a throatiness to her voice that makes her sound older, and the way she holds herself is like an old woman’s. She’s always a little out of breath, always hunched over a bit, always weak.
“You don’t do tricks for me, Mr Hutchinson.”
“You haven’t asked me to,” Phil says – and it is flirty, he grins as he says it, but Ysbal just laughs again and shakes her head, in the same indulgent, condescending way she does at the dog.
“Go find your master,” she advises, turning to the kitchen, and Phil does as he’s told, making his way to Adrian’s office and ducking his head through the door, finding it empty, before he goes to his sitting room. He has the big dining table out and is sitting back in his chair, a blanket around his shoulders, and an audiobook is playing from a set of speakers as he works on a keyboard.
All the keys are in little dishes and trays, and with a set of brushes and tools he’s cleaning gunk and dust out from underneath the skeleton of the keys.
“That one’s… interesting,” says Phil.
“It’s a SUN Microsystems Type 5c,” says Gillespie.
“Looks like a keyboard to me,” says Phil.
Gillespie’s lips twitch, and he nods to the seat beside him as he presses pause on his book, which Phil takes, watching as he brushes out the yellow-grey gunk of years gone by from the edges of the keyboard. It’s not like on his shitty work laptop, where a key pops off and you can see the little bits of metal and springy rubber – this thing is split into multiple pieces of frame, two outer bits of shell and then the inside bits which the actual keys must fit onto. He doesn’t know how old the keyboard is, but it looks pretty vintage to him, looks like when you see inside a machine in an 80s movie – looks tactile.
“How old is it?”
“About forty years old.”
“So that keyboard is older than you are.”
“If it was younger than I am, it wouldn’t have cigarette tar sticking up its keys. Can you believe they used to smoke in offices?”
“They used to let us smoke in police stations.”
“Ugh,” Gillespie says, and Phil smiles slightly. He looks better, healthier – he’s not as pale, he’s breathing better, and he’s awake and alert.
“You’re not allergic to all that stuff?”
“This is my second go around,” Gillespie says. “I wore a mask and gloves to start with, using compressed air to get out the worst of it. This is the smaller, grimier bits. I’ll wash my hands well afterwards, but it should be fine.”
“The fuck is it about keyboards?” Phil asks. “I mean, I get it, they make a satisfying noise, and I get the ones you have hung up on your trophy wall, the different colours. But this one is fucking disgusting. Are you even going to keep it?”
“No, I have one of these already, modded it in blues and yellows.”
“Exactly. You’re going to sell it online.”
“Or at a convention.”
“To another computer geek.”
“Probably.”
“Why? It’s not like you need the money.”
“I like the work.”
“Yeah, why? It’s a fucking computer keyboard that somebody made during the Cold War. I bet a modern computer doesn’t even have the right fucking port for that thing to connect to, that you need to use an adaptor and install a little program so it actually works. What’s the appeal?”
“I don’t know,” Gillespie says. He’s smiling. He smiles sometimes, when Phil asks questions, when Phil shows how fucking baffled he is by the things Gillespie likes – he likes pinks and purples because he likes the shades between them; he likes cow print rugs and blankets because he likes the black and white contrast; he likes vintage sweet wrappers and old Disney cartoons because he likes the linework in the drawing, likes the way the colours pop. “I like the noise they make, yes. I like the sensation of mechanical keys. I like the look of them – the colour contrasts, the heavy hard plastic, the shapes of the key caps and the shadows in their valleys, and how all the keys look once they’re laid on the board.”
“That explains having one vintage keyboard. Not a hundred.”
“But you can feel the difference between them.”
“You can feel the difference between them.”
“You could too. The difference between a Model M and a—”
“Uh uh. No.”
“If I taught you.”
“If I let you teach me. If I let you spend hours teaching me the difference in fucking, sound and subtle spring between multiple different, again, Cold War computer keyboards.”
“You’d let me do worse things to you than that.”
“Not more boring things than that.”
He likes how easy the smile is on the younger man’s face, how slack and relaxed his features are, his body is – he’s not in too much pain today, and life isn’t weighing so heavily on his shoulders or his lungs or his heart.
“When one lives as I do, Philip,” Gillespie says softly, gently working a… the fuck is that? A mascara brush? … underneath the mechanism of an Enter key, “one learns to appreciate the subtle gradations and varieties in the small pleasures and sensations that are accessible. I can’t go for a hike or climb a tree or walk through a park in London. I can’t drive a car or ride a motorcycle or even a bicycle. I can’t even ride an escalator all the way to the top or the bottom, if I’m expected to stand the whole ride. But I can type on a keyboard.”
“A hundred keyboards.”
“Different keyboards. Different like you can drive a different car, or walk on a different street, or go to a different pub, drink a different beer or cider. On a whim, at that, without having to send someone to do a survey or check the ingredients list in advance.”
Gillespie looks at him, and Phil raises his eyebrows. “What, you want me to fucking feel sorry for you ‘cause you’ve got a heart condition and you’re in a wheelchair? There’s children starving in Africa, you know.”
“There are children starving in Tower Hamlets, and Hackney, and Islington,” Gillespie says dryly. “But I take your point.”
He seems pleased, though.
“I thought I might fuck you tonight,” he says. “Would you like that?”
Phil forgets to breathe.
“Mm,” Gillespie hums mildly. “I thought so.”
He presses play on his audiobook again – it’s dense non-fiction that Phil couldn’t even hope to make fucking sense of, and doesn’t try to – and the two of them sit with the book playing as Adrian cleans and Phil watches.
He watches, and he relaxes, too – really fucking relaxes, eases back in the seat and halfway dozes, feels a lot of the tension leak out of his body even though he should be anticipating the kid fucking him, Gillespie sliding his cock inside him, or having Phil lower himself down onto him, but despite the anticipation, he doesn’t stiffen up. He keeps trying to think about it, but then his mind goes soft and hazy at the edges again because he’s just so relaxed.
He hasn’t relaxed all this week, he realises, not since seeing Gillespie sick and not seeing him healthy – well, as healthy as he gets – again until now.
Phil vaguely means to be stressed about that realisation as well, but he’s too busy relaxing. So busy, in fact, that he falls asleep in the dining chair, and only wakes up to Adrian’s keyboard shit having been cleared away and a meal being set before them.
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