Hard Tail (7 page)

Well, maybe not just him. There were a whole lot of other issues that went hand-in-hand with that can of worms. Not that cans had hands, or worms either, for that matter…

Damn it. I got out from behind the counter and started to pace around the shop, straightening the hanging bike locks (again) and arranging the helmets in order of size this time. Colour-coding them had been a daft idea.

I suppose I was hoping that setting my body in motion might still the whirling of my mind. And in fact the mindless tasks did their usual trick of setting my subconscious free—although not in the direction I’d expected. I suddenly realised where I’d seen that coral necklace Matt was wearing before. Jay. He’d brought it back from Goa.

My throat went tight. Had Jay given it to Matt? Jewellery, in my admittedly limited experience, was what blokes gave to their girlfriends. I’d bought Kate jewellery. Sometimes even when she hadn’t asked me to. Was Jay after Matt to be his…boyfriend?

But Jay wasn’t gay. Or even bi. Was he? No, he couldn’t be. And even if he was, he wouldn’t cheat on Olivia—although come to think of it, after a night spent in her chilly company, a bit of time with Matt’s warmth would definitely look attractive. But Matt already had a boyfriend, anyway…

I gave a guilty start as the man himself emerged from the back room. “Everything all right?” he called out cheerfully.

“Yes! Yes, of course. Fine. Why wouldn’t it be?” I rubbed my hands together nervously. “Sorry. It’s been a bit quiet, that’s all. Makes me restless.”

“Jay usually reads a magazine.” There was a stack of old bike mags up on a shelf behind the counter.

“Not really my thing,” I said, shrugging. “Although I suppose I might find out a bit more about the business if I look through a few of them.”

Matt tightened his lips like he was trying not to smile. “You might want to look at the ones on the bottom first.” He reached over for the repairs ledger, dropped it, picked it up again and wandered out back with it, whistling an off-key tune I didn’t quite recognise.

I stared after him for a moment—then dug out a magazine from the bottom of the pile and opened it up. And goggled at the assortment of naked breasts and other female parts that leered up at me from the glossy pages. Well, I say assortment, but they were all pretty similar, really, with only minor variations on the general theme of barrage balloons. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t even any pretence at being natural—these girls were apparently only too happy to show the world a goodly proportion of their body weight was made of silicone.

The jangling of the shop bell startled me out of my appalled fascination, and I frantically tried to shove the magazine out of sight of the teenage lads in hooded jackets coming through the door. I fumbled, ended up dropping it, and kicked it under the counter as far as I could.

The boys were laughing and joking with each other, and I wondered if they might be trouble. I’d read the
Daily Mail
, so I knew anyone wearing a hoodie was liable to mug me as soon as look at me. But as far as I could tell, they didn’t try and shoplift anything, and eventually coughed up the money for a puncture repair kit and another pump adaptor. That made three in the last two days. I wondered where all the old ones were going—was there a pump-adaptor fairy somewhere, maybe living in a brightly-coloured castle built of short lengths of tubing with a screwy bit on the end?

Still, I wasn’t complaining. I rang up the sale with a smile. As the lads turned to go, one of them stooped to pick something up and handed it to me solemnly.

“There you go, mate. Dropped your porn.”

It was Jay’s bloody magazine. Conveniently open to a centre spread of a young lady who’d obviously decided to blow her limited clothing budget on the very last word in depilatories instead. I must have kicked the wretched thing right out from under the counter. “Thank you,” I said with as much dignity as I could muster and watched as they left the shop and dissolved into wild laughter outside.

“Bloody,
bloody
Jay!” I fumed, shoving the magazine roughly back under the pile of bike mags.

“Trouble?” Matt’s voice made me jump, and I cricked my neck turning back towards him.

“Ouch!” I rubbed the side of my neck, grimacing as the pain and the pins-and-needles gradually wore off.

“Sorry.” Matt hung his head. “Didn’t mean to sneak up on you.” He turned and started to lope morosely back to the other room.

I stared. What was that all about? “Did you need something?”

Matt spun around. “Oh—nothing important. It can wait.”

“Why would it have to?” I frowned.

“Well, you know. You looked a bit…” Matt gestured vaguely.

It was lost on me. “A bit what?”

“Um. Pissed off?”

I had to laugh. “Well, maybe. I just inadvertently corrupted a couple of teenage boys, that’s all.”

One soft brown eye went wide; the swollen one, not so much. “You what?”

“With, I might add, the magazine
you
suggested I read. You might have warned me,” I added with a smile. Now the pain in my neck had disappeared, it just seemed like a bit of a laugh. “I tried to get it out of sight and ended up shoving it right under their noses. Does Jay seriously read this stuff at work? Well, look at the pictures, anyway,” I amended. Maybe there were articles in the thing, but I’d bet my black belt nobody ever read them. Probably they just printed out the same ones each month.

Matt twinkled. There was seriously no other word for it. “Yep, ’fraid so. I come out of the back room sometimes, I don’t know where to look.”

“I’d like to say I thought Jay had more taste, but…” I let it hang there—and then laughed as a thought hit me. “You know, I feel sorry for Jay, if he has to get his kicks from this sort of trash. I always assumed that frigid exterior of Olivia’s was just a front, but now I’m starting to wonder.”

“You bastard.” Matt was cracking up. “Next time I see her, all I’m going to think of is Jay with a porno mag.”

“And his right hand. Don’t forget that very important part of the proceedings.” I sniggered. Which, all right, was neither mature nor very brotherly of me, but in my defence, I had spent my whole adult life in the sad and certain knowledge my brother had had more sex when he was still in his teens than I was likely to manage in a lifetime.
And
he’d enjoyed it more.

Just then a customer came in, so we had to straighten our faces and get back to work. It might have been a bit embarrassing if she’d asked what the joke was.

What with her wearing a dog collar and all.

After the Rev had gone off with a new pannier, which I strongly suspected Jay had got in especially for her—after all, it’s not exactly something you see on the average mountain bike—we hit another dry spell. I ended up flicking through a magazine again, being very careful to take one from the top of the pile this time. It was full of pictures of blokey men in helmets doing blokey things, most of them covered in mud, and was written in an over-the-top hearty, all-mates-down-the-pub style.

No wonder Jay liked this sort of thing. God, I’d been an idiot, jumping to conclusions about him and Matt. Of course Jay was straight. I was about to close the magazine when a title caught my eye:
What Really Happens During Bonking
. I did a double take and looked around furtively, wondering for a moment if one of the porno mags had slipped inside this issue.

Turned out it was just biker-speak for a catastrophic loss of energy during an endurance race. And they meant catastrophic—apparently bonking can cause dizziness, confusion, heart palpitations and, in extreme cases, seizures and coma. So a bit more serious than just feeling sort of knackered.

I still sniggered as I read the article, with its useful tips on how to avoid a bonk.

The next time the bell jangled, I looked up to see someone who could have stepped right out of the pages of that magazine. He had on baggy shorts and a faded T-shirt and the sort of leathery tan you only get by being out in all weathers. Somebody really should have told him about sunblock and moisturiser. He also had a liberal splattering of mud up his sturdy-looking calves. When he turned to shut the door behind him, I saw the mud extended right up his back, almost to the ends of his over-long ginger hair.

He was probably Jay’s dream customer. I could imagine this bloke and Matt talking for hours about
grunts
and
grinders
and other terms I’d picked up from the bike mag but which were still, sadly, all Greek to me. He lingered to cast an eye over the high-end mountain bikes on display, raising my hopes for a moment—those bikes didn’t just cost an arm and a leg, you’d probably have to throw in a head and a torso as well; Jay would be seriously chuffed if I managed to sell one—then loped up to the counter.

“‘Lo. Matt thur?” he said out of the side of his mouth.

My hopes crashed so far they probably bonked. For all I knew, they grunted and ground too. I pasted on a smile that made my jaw ache. “You must be Steve,” I said, shoving a hand out for him to shake.

He took it like this was some arcane ritual never before seen in darkest Totton, and let it go again like it might bite him. “Nuh-uh. ’M Adam. Me ’n Matt ’r jus’ mates.”

I felt a weird mix of relief and disappointment. “He’s just out the back.” I found myself pronouncing my words more precisely than usual, as if to compensate for his unclear diction, and hoped he hadn’t noticed. “I’ll go and give him a shout.”

Matt was in his default position: bent over an upside-down bike frame, his rear end pointing at me, baggy jeans for once stretched tight over his arse.

It seemed awfully warm in here. I was surprised he hadn’t opened a window. I spoke to him twice before I realised he had his iPod on and couldn’t hear me. I didn’t think prodding him in the bum would be an acceptable way of attracting his attention so, feeling a bit foolish, I moved around the room until I was in his field of view—or at least, my feet were. Finally, he looked up.

“Tim!” he said a bit more loudly than usual. Then he remembered to pull out the earphones and gave me a goofy grin. “Nearly finished with this one. Need some help in the shop?”

“No—your, er, friend is here.”

Matt went utterly, completely still. “Steve?” he said. There was something odd about his voice. Was he embarrassed at the thought of me seeing who he was shagging? I felt myself begin to blush at the thought of Matt and the as-yet-faceless Steve. Shagging.

Alternatively, maybe Matt was just embarrassed at the thought of his lover seeing the clueless idiot he was nominally working under. “No! No, it’s, er, Adam. That’s who he said he was. Adam. A mate, he said.”

“Oh! Adam! Yeah, he’s a good bloke. Comes out with us on Thursday nights—you remember I told you about him? Haven’t seen him for a while—how’s he looking?” Matt chattered away as he stood and wiped his greasy hands on already-stained jeans.

“Er, muddy?” Had Matt mentioned Adam? Maybe he had—when we were at the café, perhaps? I was ashamed to realise I couldn’t remember. I’d been too worked up about the whole bloody
gay
thing at the time.

“Yeah, that’s Adam all right. Do you want to send him in here?”

I could hardly say no. “All right.” I nodded and wondered why on earth I hadn’t just done that in the first place. “I’ll, um, send him in.”

Adam responded to my invitation to go out back with an indecipherable grunt. Or possibly a grind. Then he loped through the door, treating me to another view of his mud-spattered back. I hoped he wasn’t planning to lean on any walls.

He was in the back room so long I started to entertain dark suspicions as to what he and Matt might be up to in there. In fact, it began to be getting on for lunchtime, and my stomach started rumbling so loudly I was worried it’d scare off potential customers three streets away. It struck me I didn’t even know if we shut for lunch, so I wandered over to the door and had a look at the opening hours on the sign. No help there—it just said nine thirty to six, Monday to Friday, and nine thirty to one on Wednesdays. I dithered a bit about going in to speak to Matt—then told myself firmly that as his (acting) superior here, I was perfectly within my rights to interrupt his conversation with a mate.

I walked into the back room to find them both staring gloomily at a back wheel that, even to my untrained eye, looked a bit bent out of shape. “Is it supposed to look like that?” I blurted out.

It was Adam who answered. “Nuh-uh. ’S buggered.” He heaved a heavy sigh and patted Matt on the shoulder. “Gotta go. See y’ t’night?”

Matt seemed a bit subdued for some reason, but he nodded and dredged up a smile. “Yeah. See you, Adam.” Then he bent his head back down to his work while Adam plodded out through the shop.

Adam’s arms were too long for his body, I noticed as I watched him go—his hands were almost down by his knees, and seemed over-large. His legs, in contrast, were short and stubby, and slightly bowed. All he needed was a slightly thicker coat of body hair, and possibly a banana, and the resemblance to an orangutan would be complete.

“He’s a good mate, Adam is,” Matt said, making me jump a little. Had he noticed me staring at his friend?

“Um,” I said self-consciously. “I was wondering, what do you and Jay normally do for lunch? When it’s not half-day closing, I mean? Do you close for lunch?”