Crying in the Rain (Hiding Behind The Couch Character and Festive Episodes)

28 Uncle

Kris

K ris led A de away from the crowded atrium and down the deserted passageway towards the conservatory. It was too dark to pick out the décor, pictures on the walls appearing as indiscernible black rectangles. A closed door on their left opened as they passed, providing a glimpse of deep-green tiles and an ornate porcelain hand basin and toilet with brass fixtures. They exchanged polite nods with the person who exited and continued onwards, stepping into the shaft of tungsten-tinged light coming from the open door to their right.

“Wow!” Ade slowed, taking in the vast kitchen. An empty shell last time Kris had been there, it was now fully refurbished in the Victorian style. An enormous scrubbed-oak table took up the centre of the room, with a solid oak worktop around the perimeter, providing a warm contrast with the polished steel cookware and enormous shiny black-and-chrome range. It was a stunning kitchen, mixing modern and traditional, in keeping with the house, as was true of the atrium, the bathroom they had just passed and the conservatory they now entered.

“This place is incredible!” Ade said, gazing around him in awe.

“Yeah. It looks a million times better than the last time I saw it.” Despite his fractured frame of mind, Kris was as impressed as Ade by the transformation. “You couldn’t even see out of the windows—well, the ones that were still in one piece.”

Ade lifted a corner of the pool cover to peer underneath. “Imagine the work that went into laying those tiles.” He dropped the cover back into place and caught up with Kris. “Did you know the Victorians built these as a conspicuous display of their wealth?”

“I didn’t.”

“Sometimes they used them for growing fruit, vegetables and herbs for the kitchen, but they existed primarily for the purposes of entertainment and showing off.”

“Your knowledge is amazing.”

“It’s really not. I did a stint on Gardeners’ Question Time during my internship. Which means I can also tell you that those palm trees or whatever they are will thrive as long as there’s good ventilation.”

With the pool covered, the smell of chlorine was present but not overpowering and mingled with the warm earthy scent of the tropical plants in large pots along the glass side walls. Kris and Ade edged past those and the loungers, eventually making it out of the doors to the garden beyond.

Kris put his arms around Ade, pulling him close. “I’m sorry I left you on your own. Are you OK?”

“A little overwhelmed, but yes. I’m fine. You’re not, though, are you?”

“I’m all right.”

“Babe?”

“I just don’t like it when someone else has all the limelight.” Kris smiled to make it clear he was joking.

“Naturally! You’re used to being the star of the show,” Ade said, playing along briefly before asking, “But that’s not the whole story, is it? What else is going on?”

“Why would there be anything else?” Kris tried to withdraw from their embrace, but Ade kept hold of him.

“Have I upset you?”

Kris shook his head. “Of course not.”

“Is it about Dan?”

Kris hid his face against Ade’s shoulder. Whether it was a lucky guess or he’d picked up on Kris’s unease earlier, Ade had got it in one .

“Is that where you were? Talking to Dan?”

“No,” Kris mumbled. “His mum.”

“OK.” Ade kissed Kris’s cheek and kept his head turned, speaking so quietly it was little more than a rumble in his chest. “If you don’t want to tell me more, I understand, but you’ve got me second-guessing, so I’ll ask one more question, and if you can answer it for my benefit…”

Kris straightened up so he could look Ade in the eye. “I’m not in love with Dan,” he said.

“Phew!” Ade laughed, but admitted, “I did wonder. You’re very close to him.”

“Yeah. We’ve known each other since we were kids. His mum was my childminder.” That was how he’d become caught up in conversation with her—she’d just found out she was Krissi’s grandmother, and to say she was in shock was putting it mildly. By the time he escaped, he felt as if he’d been through a military interrogation, interspersed with pearls of misplaced but well-meant wisdom about being true to himself and gratitude for ‘the wonderful thing he’d done’, standing by Shaunna and her daughter all these years.

Dan’s mum, like most people, saw the world in shades of straight and gay, and her son’s engagement party was not the place to challenge her, even if Kris had felt up to doing so, but she was right in one respect. The abuse was as much a part of who he was as his sexuality, and until he told Ade the full story, he wasn’t being true to either of them.

“It wasn’t just me.” The admission rushed from him in a barely intelligible stream. He didn’t dare look at Ade for fear of seeing judgement, revulsion, pity. Moments passed, thick and heavy in the silence, as Kris tried to get the rest of it out, but the words rattled around inside like forgotten lines from a script he’d never rehearsed because he’d never wanted to play this part.

“It was Dan too, wasn’t it?” Ade said eventually.

Kris nodded. The silence resumed. Ade reached out and gently lifted Kris’s face until he had to look at him .

“I’m here and I’m listening.”

“I don’t…” Kris sighed, his breath stuttering with his shivering.

“You don’t want to tell me?”

“No, I do. I don’t know how.”

“I can understand that.”

“You managed to tell me about the ex.”

“Not really. I gave you the basics and let the bruises and drama do the talking.”

Kris didn’t have that option. His bruises were deep beneath the surface, and the drama…well, it was nothing compared to how Ade had suffered.

“He never even touched us.”

“He still hurt you.”

Kris heard the words, could still hear the music from the party, could feel the cold bite of frost forming around them, but he was straddling two worlds now, the thrum of the bass beat falling in time with the thump of heavy feet on the ladder up to the treehouse.

“He just watched, told us what to do, told us we liked it, that this was what little men did. You don’t want to get aroused by it, but you do. It’s over quicker if you can just make it happen, and you’re waiting to hear it, that grunt that tells you it’s finished.

“And you think, I’ll never get in this situation again , but there’s nothing you can do when he’s the one who’s supposed to be keeping you safe. We tried to stay away from the treehouse. We asked if we could go to Dan’s house after school, but there were no other grown-ups to look after us. My dad said maybe, when we got to high school, they’d think about it. So we played outside and talked about how we couldn’t wait to go to high school, pretending what we were feeling was excitement for that instead of it being a countdown to when it was over.”

Kris closed his eyes, but it only made the image stronger. Sometimes it consumed him completely and he was back there, inhabiting the memory, missing the football every time Dan kicked it to him, neither of them acknowledging it, just talking about learning new subjects with new teachers. Now, with Ade’s arms around him and the quiet hums to confirm he was listening, Kris was watching his younger self from a distance, saw the resignation settle on his and Dan’s faces as the sky darkened and the trees began to sway. He held out his hand, palm up, behind Ade’s back. The rain was in his head too.

“We got away with it for ages,” he said. “Keeping out of his way. But then there was this massive storm and we had no choice. We were drenched in seconds, and we thought Uncle Anders was in his room, so we’d be OK sheltering in the treehouse. But he was in there already. It stank of his sweat—he’d been gardening, and his hands were covered in soil, the trowel was on the floor next to him, his boots…”

Sweat and shit and hot damp wood, drip-drip-drip through the hole in the corner, heavy feet, a voice—

“Dan?”

“Mike came to pick Dan up, and he caught us. Literally dragged Dan from the treehouse. He was crying. And Anders…he just smiled, said, ‘What a shame,’ and left me there. I wanted to stay there forever, but Mum and Dad came home from work and made me come inside. Mike had told his mum, and all hell broke loose. They wanted to know why we hadn’t told a grown-up, but how can you? How do you even begin to say the words when you don’t know what they are?

“Uncle Anders went back to Sweden. I don’t know what happened to him after that. Don’t care. Maybe he’s dead. Nobody talks about him or what happened. I don’t remember much after that, like the whole summer holiday was deleted from my head. The only other thing I remember was being at Dan’s, and Mum and Dad came to pick me up, both of them together, which they never did, and we were sent up to Dan and Andy’s room to play. I went to a different primary school to them—a private one—and I was supposed to stay there for high school. I’d pretty much begged my parents to let me go to school with Dan, but they didn’t like the British education system .

“After a while, they called us downstairs. My mum and Dan’s mum had been crying, and my dad explained that his cousin Eric, who lived with us, was sick and needed to go to a special hospital, so they’d decided I could go to school with Dan after all. I couldn’t work out what Eric being sick had to do with me being allowed to change schools, and I didn’t ask. I was just glad they’d changed their minds. I get it now, obviously.

“When we got home, there was a private ambulance outside, and they were trying to get Eric out of the house, but he’s albino and it was a sunny day. His room was so dark and cold because the light hurt his eyes, and he burnt even in the winter. He was all wrapped up in a blanket, and a nurse had to guide him, like he was a little old blind man. He was only nineteen. They took him away in the ambulance, and it was over. That’s what they said. It was over, and everyone tried to act like everything was normal again.

“When George and I started going out with each other…that was the first time I went back in the treehouse, and I had to make out like it was OK being in there, but I could still see Anders, sitting with his back to the wall and his hands in his pockets, playing with himself. I never told George. He was nervous enough about getting caught without me adding to it. He still doesn’t know. The only person I’ve ever told is Shaunna…”

Kris stopped talking and took a step away from Ade, but Ade caught his hands and kept hold. He smiled sadly. “And now me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know you are, because I was too when I told Pip, but it doesn’t feel the same for other people as it does for us. Or so she tells me. I bet she’s enjoying the break from me, though.”

“Have you spoken to her since…”

“ That Afternoon ? No, but we’ve been texting. She’s going to come round tomorrow, help me sort out the apartment, catch up on all the news and gossip. Then I think I’ll have a long soak in the bath and an early night so I’m bright and fresh on Monday morning.”

“Back to normal,” Kris said .

“Minus the violent ex-boyfriend,” Ade added with an almost playful wink. “You realise, of course, this is our normal.”

“More baggage than Paris Hilton.” Kris nodded in agreement. He still felt raw and exposed, but dwelling on it didn’t help any more than sweeping it all into the back of an ambulance and slamming the doors on it, and he was absolutely freezing. Even so, he needed a bit longer before he went back inside. “Thank you for listening. I didn’t mean to go on like that, especially at a party. I should’ve waited—”

“Shhh. I’m glad you were able to tell me. Now I understand why you’re struggling this evening. Or at any other time, really. Because it’s not just your own pain you’re feeling. It’s Dan’s and Eric’s too. That’s probably why it’s so important to you that everyone around you is OK. Have you ever talked to Dan about it?”

“No. It’s not like we pretend it never happened, but his coping strategies are…different from mine, shall we say.”

“He starts fights,” Ade said, adding in response to Kris’s astonishment, “Not a shot in the dark. These days, I have a finely tuned violence detector.”

“He’s not a violent man as a general rule, but when he loses his temper, he goes up like a barrel of gunpowder.”

“Right. Don’t wind Dan up. Check,” Ade said.

“Or his brothers.” Kris released one of Ade’s hands and turned, moving off slowly, back towards the conservatory doors. “And don’t get caught in the middle of one of their fights.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

“Not that I think they’ll come to blows tonight.”

“No, but forearmed is forewarned.” Ade grinned. “Like Vishnu.”

Kris laughed. “Shaunna’s mum used to say that.”

“Yes. I’m afraid I shamelessly stole it.”

“I think she’d approve.”

They returned to the atrium, where the party was still swinging, although the music wasn’t quite as loud as it had been before. Kris grabbed George, who was on his way back from the bar .

“Ade, this is George.”

“Hi, George. Again!”

“Hi, Ade,” George said with a grin.

“Oh. You’ve already done all that.” Kris sagged.

“We can do it all again, though,” Ade suggested. He held out his hand for George to shake, both of them playing along for Kris’s sake. “You didn’t tell me what you do for a living, George.”

“Ah, well, I’ve just started work on a farm, actually. An educational farm, with lots of miniature animals—Shetland ponies, pygmy goats—I’m only part-time till spring, but it gets busy then with lambing and school visits, the boss says, so hopefully, he’ll make me full-time. And you’re a radio producer?”

“I am,” Ade confirmed. “Drama and documentaries. Mostly drama.” He tilted his head in Kris’s direction.

“I hear you,” George said.

“If you two gang up on me, I will be…outraged!” Kris declared over-dramatically, appreciating that he’d put the other two men in a potentially awkward situation and they were giving their fullest efforts to stopping it from becoming so. He looked around, searching for Shaunna in the hope of having someone there to stop him further dropping himself in it, quickly locating her on the opposite side of the atrium, talking to Jess. Shaunna saw him, excused herself from her conversation and headed over.

“Hey,” she said, giving him a once-over, followed by a small smile that confirmed she knew he’d told Ade. “I’m going for a drink. Anyone else want one?” The question was intended to give him a get-out, but he didn’t take it.

“I’ll come with you,” Ade volunteered and hooked his arm through hers. Kris watched until they were out of earshot and turned back to George.

“So what do you think? Honest answer.”

George shrugged. “He seems nice.”

“Nice?”

“Right for you.”

“That’s what Shaunna said. ”

“Well, then.”

“Is that all I’m getting?”

“What d’you want me to say? I like him.”

Kris sighed loudly.

George grinned. “He’s got the measure of you already, and he’s not gonna take any of your melodramatic crap.”

“I am not melodramatic!” Kris protested. George was still grinning. “I’m not!”

“If you say so.”

Kris was about to complain further but contained it, as it only would only serve to prove George’s point. “But you do like him?”

“Yeah. He’s kinda…cute.” George’s attention had wandered, no need to check why.

“Not as cute as Josh,” Kris remarked.

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you thought it.”

George gave him a sheepish smile. He was blushing.

Kris hugged him. “I’m so happy for you, George.”

“I know. You told me weeks ago.”

“OK. I’m still happy for you. And you’re definitely OK with me and Ade?”

“Yep. You know what they say—first time for everything.”

“Us agreeing on something, you mean?”

“Well, yeah, that,” George said, “and us both having boyfriends at the same time.”

“We’ve done that once before,” Kris reasoned.

George tutted. “OK, wise guy. Boyfriends that aren’t each other.”

Now Kris grinned. “You said the B-word, in public. Twice.”

“I did, didn’t I? Guess we’re both finally getting it right.”

Ade and Shaunna were on their way back with the drinks, and the sight of Ade laughing and chattering away made Kris’s heart pump faster. “Yeah,” he said, his voice quivering from the effect Ade was having— always had—on him. “I guess we are.”