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Hold my hand and come let’s pray, tell me this is haram and this is halal, give me a quran and let’s read together. 

Wake me up from my sleep and tell me: don’t miss prayer, and do good, talk me about jannah,advise me on how to work for afterlife,

"Can't believe you brought a fucking gun on a romantic Paris holiday," Valentine says. His voice sounds choked and raspy. Lindsay jabs the silencer into the hollow at the bottom of his neck, and Valentine makes a funny little sound and squeezes his eyes shut. "We playing roulette again?"

"I don't fancy your chances much with a semi-automatic."

"Is it loaded?"

"Why the fuck would I have an unloaded gun?" He racks the slide to load the chamber, and Valentine's eyes fly back open at the sound. "I told you not to..." What? Talk to anyone else? Smile, dance, smoke? Sit there at the table in the corner of the dark noisy bar with his chair shoved back and turned away from Lindsay so he can rest his hands on that chambermaid's thighs, just where her slutty miniskirt ends, and let her breathe the last of the blunt into his mouth? "I don't want you doing drugs," he says. It sounds lame. "Not even that."

"You're gonna shoot me cos I had a smoke?"

"You kissed that girl."

"No I never!"

"I saw you, do you think I'm blind? You were sitting right there next to me, I saw you."

"I never kissed her, it was just a shotgun, everybody was doing it." He almost smiles at that, even as he's trying to edge away from the barrel jammed against the underside of his chin. "Heh. Shotgun." Lindsay slaps him over the cheek as hard as he can, and Valentine stays there where he ends up, with his head turned to the side from the force of it and resting against the door. He's got his eyes closed again. He's breathing quietly, like he's trying to keep calm, and Lindsay hates him for it; he wants him to break. He can see the pulse beating in the kid's neck, and nudges the barrel up against the beat.

"I'll do it. I will. Don't you believe me?"

"I believe you."

"Why aren't you scared?"

"I am."

"Why aren't you trying to get away?"

"Cos you'll shoot me."

"Why..." This is what he wanted, the kid motionless and scared and doing what he's told but it's not helping, everything's just making him want to burst out crying. He won't, not over this stupid whoreish little shit and his utter lack of understanding about what's acceptable behaviour. He just needs to get a hold on himself, swallow hard to clear his throat, try to concentrate past the alcohol buzzing round his brain. Very slowly and deliberately, he moves the gun up to press hard against Valentine's temple. "You cried last time. Why aren't you crying?"

"Thought you were gonna kill yourself before."

"I'm going to kill you. Why aren't you crying?"

"Will it help? I can, if you want."

"Shut up. Shut up."

"Sorry." He doesn't move his head but he's looking at Lindsay now, sideways. He's clearly frightened but he's calm, he looks much more in control than Lindsay feels, and that makes it so much worse. "Shoot me cos you want me gone, not cos of something you think I did when I never."

"Shut up." The kid nods his head, just slightly, and goes silent again, except for another pained little noise when the gun digs in a bit more. "You have to do what I say."

"I do. I will."

"Don't... you can't... I don't want you to..."

"What?" Valentine says, quietly. "Tell me. So I won't."

"I don't know." He swings the gun around and shoots the wall, up in the corner near the ceiling. It's still noisy, even with the suppressor, and it makes Valentine flinch, but there's nobody else staying on their floor to hear. "Loaded, see?"

"I said I believe you."

"Why aren't you scared?" he demands, but the noise and recoil seem to have snapped him sane again and he suddenly feels tired and stupid. Slowly, very slowly, Valentine reaches out for his hand, stroking gently over his clutching fingers until he relaxes them and lets the kid slip the gun out of his grasp and put it on the table next to the door.

"You are gonna shoot me," he says. "One day." He's still holding Lindsay's hand, he's looking down at where their fingers are wound together and not at Lindsay's face, but his voice is clear. "I ain't thick. I know you'll get sick of me. You can't just let me go, I know too much, you'd be freaked out forever in case I snitched. You'll get proper sick of me one day, not just annoyed, and then you'll shoot me. It's okay."

"I won't get sick of you," Lindsay says. He feels numb and far away, as if it's somebody else talking, and almost like he's going to throw up, a sort of lurch in his stomach like when you're at the top of the Angel tube station escalator and somebody a bit too eager to get on the train shoves you from behind.

"Yeah you will. I'm gonna be with you til I die, though. Least I can say that and know it's true, how many people can do that? Bit romantic, really. If you squint, and look at it sideways."

"I don't like you talking to people," he blurts out, and Valentine finally looks up at him. His eyes are bright and his slapped cheek is dark, but he's smiling just a little.

"It's good for you. Make you grow up big and strong, you little weed."

"It's disgusting. You know what'd make this taste better?"

"What?"

"If you tipped raw sewage over it."

He has a drink, watching the kid calmly, then puts his bottle down next to his empty plate and says, "Come here."

"I'm sorry," the kid says immediately, going completely still again. "Don't-"

"I'm not going to smack you. Come here."

"Care to tell me where you've been?"

"Walking." After a while, when Lindsay doesn't speak again, he adds, "It's raining," and then Lindsay looks up and stares at him, as blankly as he can manage. His hair's plastered to his head and face and neck, he's splattered with mud, there's rainwater streaming off him like he's just jumped in the sea fully clothed. He's clutching himself and shivering, trying to rub life and feeling back into his bare forearms – still, he's remembered to take off his muddy boots in the kitchen, like he's proving he still knows how to behave himself.

"Go and get changed," Lindsay says, very calmly. "Dry your hair. You'll catch pneumonia, if I don't murder you first."

"Lindsay-"

"I'm sorry, did I just say that last bit in my head? I thought I told you to go and do something."

He hesitates a second more, then nods and goes. Lindsay can hear him in the bedroom, the slam of the wardrobe and the faint roar of his hairdryer. He just carries on rolling smokes, very slowly and methodically, taking his time to make them neat and exactly the same size in the hope it'll keep him from exploding.

"I hate Nutella."

"Bad day?" Valentine says, mildly, handing him a steaming cup of tea. He goes back to lean against the counter, just watching Lindsay, and there's something in his expression that indicates he's about to say something aggravating, like he sometimes does when they argue and he's hoping to wind Lindsay up enough to throw a punch, something smug and frustrating like, "Calm down, little man." Lindsay decides if he gets "little man" turned back at him one more time he's going to break Valentine's nose, and that's only for starters. Instead Valentine blows on his own cup and takes a careful sip, looking at him all the time, then says, "Temper, temper."

Maybe he intends for the smile in the sound to make it less infuriating but it doesn't work, it's probably the worst thing he could have done. Lindsay hurls his mug down but it doesn't even have the decency to shatter, it just bounces off the lino and floods the crooked bit in the kitchen floor with tea, which really makes Valentine laugh, so Lindsay sweeps last night's drip-dried dinner plates off the draining board in a clatter of crockery. He's momentarily pacified when some of these do break.

But: "Are you five years old?" Valentine's saying, all arched eyebrows and calculated smirking, and then he's saying nothing at all because Lindsay's raged across the kitchen at him, snatched away his mug and covered them both in scalding tea, and has him by the throat up against the wall. The buzzing burn in his fingers is screaming at him, but he ignores it.

"Care to tell me what you're playing at?" he says. He's surprised his voice sounds so even, considering the inside of his head feels like trying to navigate a fairground funhouse when you're drunk and high and really really fucked off. Valentine doesn't answer, he can't answer, he just makes a sort of gurgly choking noise, so Lindsay relaxes his grip enough to let him breathe but not wriggle free.

"Oh, yeah. Your mum come round." He swallows, hard. Lindsay can feel the slide of it under his palm. "She's nice. Back off that cruise. You should take me on a cruise. Not now, not til we're ancient, it's a fogeys' holiday, but you should."

Lindsay presses up hard under his chin again, slams his head against the wall hard enough to make him squeeze his eyes shut and bite on a noise of pain. Something more, too. This Pavlovian response to violence would be worrying in anybody else, but Valentine's a twisted little shit and there's nothing surprising about him any more.

"Didn't I tell you never to answer the door?"

"She crept up on me! I was making tea and then she was knocking on the window and letting herself in, I nearly chucked a knife at her head."

"You're insane. Don't you understand what's at stake here?" "Shut up, I know the stakes make you hard, you get off on danger even more than me."

"Not when it's my mother."

"Ain't my fault you're lost in Narnia, mate. OW, leave off, you're hurting..."

"You're making me crazy."

"So stop fucking me without johnnies, if you don't wanna catch my diseases."

"Don't move." A last vicious squeeze and he lets go, leaves him there against the wall all flushed and wheezing and hard and coughing up greedy fresh lungfuls of oxygen. "I swear to god I'll make you sorry if you move." The kid stays on the spot but he stretches and yawns deliberately, smirking. Lindsay wants to snap his little bones like dry twigs.

"What're you gonna do this time? Oh, wait, lemme guess. Are you gonna... point a gun at me? Do I get a prize?"

The revolver's in the dresser drawer, empty as always, but the bullets are right next to it. Now he's got the kid's attention.

"What're you doing?" he asks, uneasy. Lindsay doesn't answer. He takes six cartridges, makes a big show of considering them, then puts five back into the drawer, very slowly, one by one so the kid's got plenty of time to count them. His mismatched eyes have gone very big. He just stares at Lindsay, with his mouth slightly open like he's trying to say words he's forgotten how to form. The whirr-click of the spun cylinder going back into place makes him jump, and the noise of the hammer being cocked, and the noise of it falling onto an empty chamber.

"Fuck, Jesus, fuck, you are fucking crazy, what are you doing?" He's gone very pale, and almost comically wide-eyed. Lindsay wonders whether this is what crazy feels like. He doesn't feel crazy any more, but maybe that's a sign of it. The gun's heavy in his hand. He cocks it again and aims the next shot at his own head. Two seconds after the hammer slams down on nothing again, the kid bursts out crying.

"Shut up," Lindsay says, calm as anything. "Shut up." He feels like he's soaring, he's higher than he's been on any drug in his life, but flying's always made him want to throw up and there's that as well, twisting and coiling round in his stomach. Nothing to do but ignore it, he's gone too far to stop and he doesn't want to stop; the kid looks terrified and it's fucking amazing, he's finally getting through to him. Not quite sure what his message is, but there's something getting through. Hammer, trigger, hammer, trigger, barrel in the kid's face. Four done, two left.

Valentine's eyes keep darting around like he's trying to work out how to get away, but there's nowhere he can go and he seems to give up, he slumps against the wall and rubs his eyes like a crying child does, clumsy and ineffectual. "This ain't funny," he says dully.

"I'm not laughing, am I?"

"No, but you're smiling like fucking Pennywise."

Lindsay pulls the hammer back again and turns the gun so he's looking down its barrel, but when he pulls the trigger for the fifth time it's pointed off across the kitchen somewhere because Valentine's grabbed his arm. It's all he can do not to belt the bastard one around the face with the handle.

"Come here," he says instead, twisting his hand behind the kid's head and pulling him across the kitchen by his hair, yanking until he complies and gets to his knees. He keeps the gun pointed at his forehead and reaches back behind himself to the stereo on the counter. No idea what's in there, but he presses play and waits.

It's fucking Stealer's Wheel. Funny, he thinks, in a way that makes you want to groan and throw things at the telly.

"What-" Valentine starts, but Lindsay interrupts him.

"Make me come in three minutes twenty-nine or I'll shoot, I swear to god."

The kid stares at him like he's grown an extra couple of heads, until Lindsay cocks the gun and taps him on the forehead with it and then it's a flurry of desperate hands and a hot, wet mouth.

He thinks about boring things and horrible things – shopping list for Sainsbury's, mental note to get the MOT sorted on the Transit, Tony Blair taking it up the arse from an enthusiastic George Bush, what name to use on his next fake ID, the mastectomy scar his mother proudly flashes at anybody dumb and polite enough to sit still and take it when she's had a gin too many, how much he fucking loathes Gerry Rafferty, the smudge of birdshit on the kitchen window – even so, it's no easy task keeping control. The kid's good at this. He's not smart but he's a fast learner and he's had enough practice to be close to perfect; he knows exactly how Lindsay likes it, the pace and suction and exactly where to put his fingers, and he's never usually one for rushing a job best done slowly but then he's never been threatened with an actual bullet before. He wonders whether the kid's still so afraid he's crying. He hopes he is. He can't tell, the top of his head looks the same as it ever does. Black, red, stupid. 

Lindsay moves a bit, just very slightly, just so the corner of the worktop is digging painfully into his back. He concentrates on that feeling instead, he presses harder, he visualises little blood vessels bursting and spilling and the mottled colour the bruise is going to be, anything it takes to keep a hold. With a wave of relief that's almost like nausea he realises the song's almost over, and when it's finally faded to its finish he pulls his cock out of Valentine's mouth with his hand, using it like a sort of shield in case the kid takes it on himself to panic and bite. "Not good enough," he says, and he tucks the barrel of the gun against Valentine's ear in pointed mimicry of the first day they met, and pulls the trigger.

"You absolute cunt," Valentine says. He swats the gun away and rubs his ear. "You palmed that bullet. Like fucking Paul Daniels."

"I don't need to think about fucking Paul Daniels, thanks."

"That Debbie's a saint. You're still an absolute cunt."

"Was that Tarantino enough for you?"

"That weren't Tarantino. It weren't funny or clever. That was derivative."

Lindsay hesitates, fighting the sudden inappropriate urge to laugh. "It was what?"

"Derivative. You're nicking off Tarantino trying to be cool but it ain't working."

"That's a long word for a little man."

"STIs? You're turning crazy, I'm turning smart."

"Hah, I don't think so."

Valentine reaches up to move Lindsay's hand away and begins kissing him again, but tiny, tickling, feather-light touches this time, all up and down the underside of his cock. "You want me to finish?" he murmurs, and Lindsay shivers. The urge to grab the kid's head and fuck his mouth until he chokes is almost unbearable, but that's what he wants so there's no way he's doing it.

"No," he says. He shoves him away, into the puddle of spilled tea, and refastens his trousers. "Clean this mess up, I'm going out."

"Why?"

"It's like German, innit? Everything sounds like filth in Welsh and German, don't matter what you're actually saying. Come on."

"Um. Gyrrwch yn ofalus."

"What's that mean?"

"Please drive carefully."

"Yeah, it's not really working, is it? Do another one."

"Dw i'n dy garu di, cariad."

"What's that- oh fuck, hang on, I've gotta go, I'll phone you back." "Please don't," Lindsay says, but the line's already dead.