The Devil's Trill Sonata (7 page)

“But to accept it
yourself
…”

“Jodie, leave him alone,” Tony repeated as Rachel returned—finally—with a couple of pints and set one in front of Darren. “Some people can just accept who they are. It’s a
good
thing.”

Rachel pinked a little, but said nothing.

“I’m the music teacher,” Tony continued genially. “Are you into music?”

“I was.”

“Oh? Did you play?”

“Piano and violin,” Darren said. “Quit the violin a few years ago. Still play the piano now and then, landlady has one on the ground floor.” A battered, clapped-out old thing that needed some love and care, but good enough for the odd ditty when getting his post. “Lot of queers in an orchestra,” he added to Jodie, who was resting her round chin on her hand and beaming at him in a disturbing sort of fashion.

“I think it’s wonderful,” she gushed. “You know, for you to be out and proud…” Well, he didn’t know about proud. “…and in the police, no less. Isn’t that a hostile environment?”

“Er, no.” He didn’t know, truth be told. Darren wasn’t out in the way Jodie meant, he suspected. He never really said to anyone ‘I’m bisexual’ very often. It tended to come up when he mentioned having a boyfriend. He was just honest. And nobody at work had asked if he had a partner, or really talked about girlfriends and boyfriends with him, so it hadn’t come up. They all knew his football team and where he was from, but nothing else really. But it probably wasn’t hostile. One of the girls was obviously a lesbian, as were a couple of the instructors. Most just didn’t seem to care about that kind of thing.

“It’s just, you know, I think militaristic or police environments are still very…”

“Oh, come on, Jodie, you’re not a bobby, you don’t know what…” Rachel began.

Darren’s phone went off. It was so unusual for someone to call that he jumped, nearly spilling his lager, and had to fumble it out of his pocket as he stood up. Rachel laughed, hauling his chair out the way for him, and he nodded a thanks as he stalked away.

Then the annoyance faded. “Hey, Jayden,” he answered as he reached the door and slipped out into sharply cold evening air.

“Hey.” Jayden’s voice was low and quiet and soothing. “Sorry I kept missing you, it’s just been awful today trying to get all my work done, but I didn’t want to wait until tomorrow.” Darren felt the irritation easing. “I mean, if you’re busy or anything, I can call you tomorrow, that’s fine and everything, I just, um…”

“No, go ahead,” Darren said, leaning against the wall. “I’m glad you did. Feels like we’ve just been ships in the night lately.” Since September, in fact.

“Yeah,” Jayden sighed. “Well. Good news!”

“What?”

“I found out our Christmas timetable for coursework and stuff, and there’s a couple of days at the end of the semester when I won’t be too busy.”

“So…”

“So!” Jayden said. “You have to come and see me.”

“You’ll have to text me the dates. How close to Christmas?”

“Like, the twenty-second,” Jayden said. “I have a big exam on the twentieth, so that sucks, but after that I’m done. And Christmas is a weekend this year.”

“Yeah, I’ll have to get leave,” Darren said, but he was smiling anyway. The prospect of actually
seeing
Jayden… “Why do I have to come there?”

“Because I want to show you off,” Jayden said. “And I miss you and you get paid and I don’t so you can afford the train tickets easier than me and from what I’ve seen on Skype, my bed is more stable than yours.”

“Your bed is wrought-iron. Mine’s flat-pack furniture pretending to be solid wood. Of course yours is more stable.”

“Yeah, but we’ll need that.”

“Is that a promise?”

“Mhmm,” Jayden hummed lowly. “God, I miss you. I’m sorry I’ve been so busy all the time. Are you all right? Are you out with Rachel right now?”

“Yeah, and I feel doubly sorry for you. I’m being accosted by some bird called Jodie and asked for my opinion on teaching LGBT issues to kids. And whether it was hard being a poufter because I’m apparently mixed-race. How do you do this every day?”

“You’re not, you just have amazing hair,” Jayden said quietly and laughed a little. “Mm, I know the feeling. Every dinner they talk about politics here. I’m beginning to get the hang of it, but it’s so complicated!”

“Don’t change,” Darren blurted out.

“…What?”

There was a short pause, like a tidy silence between them that wasn’t planned, but fitted itself in and made itself at home. It wasn’t questioning, but it was prompting, like one of them had forgotten their lines.

“Don’t change,” Darren repeated slowly. “To fit in with them.”

“Um…”

“Because you’re perfect like you are.”

“…Oh my God, Darren, are you drunk?”

“No, I’m not bloody drunk,” he snapped, then pinched the bridge of his nose. “Sorry. Sorry, I just feel like there’s been a bit of a drift lately.”

“That’s okay,” Jayden said lowly. “It’s just been busy and hard and everything. For both of us. Trust me, when I get hold of you…just book your tickets? Soon? My exam is the Monday and I have an essay due on the Wednesday, so try and get Thursday or Friday? It’s only four weeks away.”

“Four weeks,” Darren said and smiled. “Yeah, I think I can last another four weeks.”

“And tell that Josie…”

“Jodie.”

“Whatever she’s called, tell her to leave you alone.”

Darren raised his eyebrows. “Why?”

“Facebook,” Jayden said promptly. “You just got tagged. ‘
With the usual suspects and a new hottie called Darren Peace. Yummy
.’ Apparently. So tell her to go away.”

“Yessir.”

“I want a dislike button. And a—hang on. Hang on.
What
?”

Darren rolled his eyes as Jayden suddenly called to someone else who’d presumably come into his room. Ella, no doubt. Darren was getting mighty sick of Ella. Half the excuses of why he hadn’t called were Ella-related, and half the calls they
had
managed had been Ella-interrupted.

“Just go,” he said. “Ella’s calling you.”

“Darren…”

“And Rachel’s calling me,” he lied. “Go on. I’ll book tickets and see you just before Christmas. Four weeks.”

Jayden sighed heavily. “…Okay. Okay. Four weeks,” he said.

“Love you,” Darren said.

“You too,” Jayden whispered.

Darren hung up, and stayed outside for several minutes, staring up into an inky sky and looking for stars obscured by streetlights.

Why did he feel so
alone
?

Less than a week before Christmas, Darren’s shoddy luck hit a new low. Specifically, the training centre floor.

Self-defence training was mandatory for all frontline officers and staff, the instructors had boomed at them from day one. The chances of any of them getting hurt, as scenes of crime officers, were very low, they trumpeted, but those chances existed, and therefore, they needed to be trained.

It was a case of swings and roundabouts, really. Self-defence training meant gym kit instead of the starchy uniform. Darren couldn’t see the sense in it, because if he was attacked at work he’d be
wearing
his uniform and not a comfortable pair of jogging bottoms and a T-shirt he’d nicked from Jayden last summer. But the trade-off for not having to check his trousers were ironed all the way up to his arse and his jaw was shaved to within an inch of his jugular was that self-defence training was meant to take all day, and started at eight in the morning.

Darren couldn’t even remember driving to work, just the minute that one of the other trainees, a pretty woman in her early thirties called Amy, pressed a plastic cup of strong coffee into his hand and offered him a free bagel.

“I love you,” he said, and she laughed.

“I love you too, Darren, but I think your boyfriend might hurt me if we start having an illicit affair.”

“Think your husband might hurt
me
,” Darren pointed out, inhaling the coffee and promptly pouring himself another one. “It’s too early for this shit.”

“Oh, God, tell me about it,” Amy said, grimacing. “I was up before the baby, for goodness’ sake.”

The canteen slowly filled with sleepy-eyed officers. It was the first time they’d seen each other in civvies, and some people looked completely different. Darren imagined he did as well, especially when the first of the instructors turned up, eyed him, grunted, and said, “Scruffy as I imagined. Hope you’re better at dodging a punch than combing your hair.”

Amy sniggered; Darren rolled his eyes and poured another cup.

Police self-defence training was…poor at best. It was offered one weekend a year, nowhere near the required amount to ingrain the techniques in anyone’s brain. Part of Darren thought that they may as well not bother and rely on the officers’ natural instincts. But on the other hand, an alarming number of his would-be colleagues didn’t
have
any instincts. Or, apparently, older brothers who had spent their formative years introducing them rudely to various household flooring types. He made a mental note to thank Scott at some point for that.

The hardest part, in Darren’s opinion, was the shit they wanted them to learn about incapacitating people by twisting their fingers or thumbs. He’d done a brief stint in Aikido as a kid, before Father had decided it was a waste of time, and it took ages to learn those fiddly techniques perfectly. Today, focusing on them, was supposed to teach them in eight hours.
Right
.

Thanks to Darren’s shoulder, he was paired with Amy today, the logic being she probably couldn’t wrench it badly anyway. Which was right, he supposed, Amy being about five-foot-two, but the height difference meant she’d be dragging his arm downwards anyway. “This is stupid,” she complained after the first thumb-twisting technique was shown. “
And
your hands don’t help.”

“Something to grab hold of,” Darren said, watching her attempting to twist his thumb in a painful way. “Try pushing down while you twist, pop the joint out of line or something.” She did, and a jolt of pain shot up his arm, his back and knees buckling reflexively to relieve the pressure. “Yeah, that’s it.”

“This is stupid, I could just kick you in the balls,” she muttered crossly.

“Yeah, well, don’t.”

The general feeling in the gym was that this was ‘stupid.’ Most of them—Darren included—couldn’t see the point of this. Any scene with the scenes of crime officers in attendance would also have policemen in attendance, who (one hoped) would jump on any random attackers fairly quickly. To top it off, Darren rather expected to have, well, a kit. Some of the examination kit was for picking up and examining very tiny fragments of crap, and he imagined would be incredibly painful to have jammed in your eye. That was his plan if he was ever attacked on a crime scene. Or just go for gold and punch them in the face. (Although apparently, that wasn’t a Home Office approved method of self-defence.)

Still, it was a nice change from sitting in fake crime scenes being told you were useless, or sitting in classrooms being told how to make sure your bootlaces were tied so you didn’t trip over them, and the hundred and one reasons racism was bad. Darren had nearly walked out of the session on ‘the treatment of non-heterosexual members of the public’ because, really, he needed to be
told
how to treat gays? Seriously? So despite the uselessness of this session, it was actually a kind of nice distraction. Amy was funny, and kind of fit, and it took his mind off everything else going on at the minute.

That was, until they proceeded to takedowns. “Mostly,” the instructor boomed (the acoustics in the room made it a boom if he whispered, so everyone was hoping he didn’t shout). “
Mostly
, you won’t ‘ave to take someone to the floor. But every now an’ then it takes a few people to do it, so you might ‘ave to ‘elp out the bobbies.”

A grumble went round.

“Nah,” the instructor said. “Pair up—Amy, switch with Trev, you need to be similar ‘eights for this one—and someone volunteer to go dahn.”

Trev grinned; Darren shrugged and offered his arm.

“It’s a basic move,” the instructor trumpeted. “Take your partner’s arm, ‘old it at the wrist and one ‘and be-yind the shoulder, and pull forward and dahn nice an’ sharp. You need to end up wi’ your knees beside ‘em, and them face-dahn on the floor.
Nah
!”

Darren saw his mistake half a second after he made it. He’d offered the wrong arm. As Trev’s yank barrelled up through his elbow, the drag down created a twinge. The snap forward of his shoulder caused a minor nuclear explosion to go off in his nerves, and suddenly there was the strangest sensation of his fingers being completely and utterly numb. Then he hit the floor, shoulder first, and there was a sickening crunch.

“
FUCK
!” he bellowed, pain consuming his shoulder like it had been beaten with a red-hot poker. He faintly heard Trev echoing him, and curled his arm painfully into his chest, rolling onto his side to relieve some of the pressure.

“Oh, shit!” Trev said. “Fucking ‘ell, Daz, sorry, mate!”

“Oh, fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck,” Darren chanted. His hand was numb, his fingers twitching spastically against his stomach, and everything between his elbow and his collarbone hurt. There was a faint pain in his face as well where he’d hit the crash mat, but he couldn’t give a fuck about that.

“All right, Darren, just ‘ang on a minute, son,” the instructor said, his knees plonking themselves into view on the lino. “I’m guessing that’s the dodgy one?”

“It is now,” someone said.

“Oh, my fucking God, Trev, I’m going to fucking kill you,” Darren ground out between gritted teeth. “
Fuuuuck
.” A nervous laugh sounded somewhere above his head.

“Reckon you can sit up?” the instructor asked. Darren took a deep breath, forcing his lungs open against the crushing agony. He rolled onto his back, groaning through it, and then there were arms under his back and he was being levered into a sitting position. “Right. Let’s get you run dahn the ‘ospital, shall we?”