no such thing as too much meat

                   ❛  i don’t believe we’ve met before, though i’ve          certainly heard about you.  —— JOHN WATSON.  ❜

The bell jingled overhead as Wiggins slipped his way in to the small electronics shop. Of course he’d been standing outside for a while now, making sure no suspicious eyes were watching, ready to accuse him or shoplifting - of course, in no way was that why he was there.

He made his way through the shelves of old, used, but somehow still workable wires and system parts, and through the maze to the back counter. “Shinwell!” he called out, none too worried about volume or courtesy for other customers (as if there were any). It was only about getting his older friend to come out from the back rooms.

     Rather than coming out, then, he elected to keep working on what he’d been working on all morning and leave it at that. Hardly anyone ever came by without calling ahead, and those who did--

                                       Ah. Yeah, that’d make sense. 

    With a glance at the clock - dangerously close to time for lunch -, he picked up the transistor and carried it out to the front. On his path to the right shelf, he only very briefly looked over to the boy at the counter before putting the heavy box back to where it’d come from.

It’s late and she’s cold (when is she ever not cold?) and the sky is dark and the air smells like sewage and there’s no place like London.

Soho is a shitty place in the daytime and night isn’t any better. There’s always a rat in the corner of your vision, always a prick in a suit offering to buy you a drink if you’ll only answer his ‘friends’ question.

Tuesday, mercifully, isn’t too busy. Too many wanker bankers holed up in their offices and the students were indoors fucking and doing anything that wasn’t their reading to make it busy out. If it wasn’t for the piss and the shit and the general feeling of disease that seemed to hang around the so-called bohemian centre it might have been a pretty sight. All low hues and deep reds and inky blacks and cobbled alleyways.

Delphia wouldn’t even have bothered coming this way if she hadn’t misplaced her oyster card and her bankcard and any spare cash she had while she got high in the back of Frank’s club. The tosspot had fucked off before she realised and rather than grovel to one of his shitty bouncers, she strode (hobbled, swayed, stumbled) her way through the streets of London with only a vague idea of how to get back home.

There’s an alleyway up ahead, she knows. One that’ll lead out onto the main road and then it’s only a fifty minute walk. Only. With a sigh she continues, side-stepping the globs of sick coated to the sorry excuse of a pavement when a shout captured her attention.

Usually she wouldn’t care. Not in her state of in-tox-i-ca-tion but she knows that voice. Knows that timbre of self-hate and self-consciousness and self-loathing all rolled into a perfect smile and a dumb Mancunian accent. She turns, half-hoping she’s wrong because fuck, how is she supposed to get home if he’s with her asking questions and prodding and flicking her nose and being joyful even though she knows he’s sad?

No dice. It’s him alright.

Plaid shirt over a plain t-shirt and black jeans and black docs and even from across the street she can see that there’s grease on his neck where he’s given into an itch and oil on his sleeves where he’s been careless. She has half a mind to leave him here. Even as she watches (grim and inexplicably angry at him for some reason) him get tossed out of a crappy looking pub by an even crappier looking person. Seriously. This guy was fifteen stone of sharp edges and glares.

Shinwell was shouting, even as he landed on his side with a thud and rolled into a semi-sitting position. Indignation helped to soften the slur of his words but he was clearly piss-drunk.

Fu c K.

By the time she’s decided to help him she’s, curiously, already half way across the street, waving and shouting and swaying.

“He’s mine. I’ll take him. Don’t call the police.” The words are rushed, monotonous as she looks at Shinwell and the sorry state he’s in. She can’t judge too much though, the creases of her elbows are starting to itch.

The pub guy (owner, landlord, general sheep-fucker?) grunts at her, crosses his arms and mumbles something in a thick Irish accent that she doesn’t bother to ask him to repeat. Shinwell quiets as she stands above him. Delphia is all long limbs and brittle bones and eyes that are swimming on a high that is definitely about to take a nose-dive into comedownville.

“Get up.”

He’s smiling at her. All goofy teeth and full lips and puppy eyes and he makes her sick because that fifty minute walk is gonna take a minimum of two hours and she’ll definitely not be high by the time she gets back. She offers him a hand, jerking her head in the direction of home.

“Come on you fucking twat. Get up.”

*

In the end it only takes twenty minutes. She picks his pockets the moment he’s upright and finds thirty quid that she’ll replace with a fifty in the morning. They hail a cab and he sticks his head out of the window like the dog he was born to be the entire ride home. He talks too. Too-long sentences and slurred words and he’s not really making any sense but she doesn’t tell him to shut-up. His voice and the noise of Central London at night all blend into one low buzz until she’s back in her happy place. That is until she driver disturbs her peace and demands a tenner more than what she knows it should cost. She pays anyway. Why bother arguing?

Shinwell has cuts on his knuckles and he winces and hisses like a baby when she wipes at them with antiseptic and pushes her hard when she tries to bandage them. It isn’t long, though, before he’s quiet (finally, finally) and tucked into her bed on her side without a care in the fucking world. He mutters occasionally, lifts his feet at the appropriate times as she peels his trousers and socks off and chucks them to one corner of the room.

He’s soon asleep and Delphia lets out the breath she had been holding since Soho. He’s so strange when he sleeps, all the stress and the sadness is tucked away in his dreams and he looks so goddamn young. Smooth skin and light stubble and thick eyebrows. She sits down next to him, watches him the way she imagines her parents used to watch her when she slept.

“You can’t do this again.”

Her voice sounds strange, strangled with emotion the way a normal person’s voice might waver when they were sad.

Is she sad?

“You can’t do this again. Not ever. I’m not good, Shin,” she sounds like she’s pleading, though for what she does not know. “I’m not good at all. I’m actually very bad but when you’re here, well- I’m not completely terrible so you can’t leave.”

There’s a ‘me’ on the end of that sentence somewhere. Maybe twenty years back or so but it’s there. Suspended in time and space forever as she selfishly begs a good kid to stay with her because she’s too high to do anything but get more high and take money off bad men to pay her rent.

She’s so tired and upset that she rolls forward after her little begging session, sweaty forehead coming to rest on Shinwell’s broad chest. His breaths are so slow that she panics for a moment and thinks he’s dead but his hand untangles itself from the blankets and comes to rest on her head and wasn’t he supposed to be asleep?

He pets her hair for so long she thinks he’s fallen back asleep and continued the repetitive motion into REM but he surprises her again. Sits up and leans down and kisses the top of her head with such sweetness that her mouth fills with saliva in retaliation.

“Steak’ tom’row, yeah?”

She knows what he means. He means he wants steak tomorrow, of course (when does he never not want steak?) and it also means he’ll be on her side of the bed till then but above all that shit it most definitively means that he’ll stay.