When Christmas Lights are Blue Read online

  I bit back a laugh. This was Karan’s home, so I lowered my voice. “You have to be fucking kidding, mate. Yes, I’ve heard of them. Your mam and dad would keel over if they heard you talking about that crap.”

  “That’s right. Modern, intellectual Sikhs reject such barbarity. Which leaves it up to me to defend my family’s honour.”

  My spine prickled. I smelled danger coming from him, raw and real. “And how were you planning to do that?”

  “None of your business. Just remember, though, Rob—we don’t punish the lover. We punish our own.”

  I closed my eyes. I put my hand down flat on top of one of the Diya lamps, which should have burned, but became a flat surface under my palm. When I looked again, I was back in Queenie’s living room. “Karan,” I said weakly. “I think there’s something the matter with me. I didn’t just see that—I was there.”

  He was staring at me, eyes wide in shock. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I am telling you. I must be sick or something. Hallucinating.”

  “No, not that. I know Vish talked to you that night, but not what he said.”

  “It didn’t matter.”

  “How the fuck can you say that? He threatened you. And you changed towards me after that, Rob. You know you did.”

  “You’re missing the point. He threatened you.”

  I’d never seen Karan cry. I’d broken down in front of him a couple of times before I’d changed—because he was spot-on bloody right about that—back when I’d still been new to the job, and the strain of the births and the deaths could still crack me apart. He felt it as keenly as I did. I’d never forget the look on his face when I arrived with my crew in time to see him deliver his first roadside baby. Maybe he was better adjusted.

  His eyes were full of tears now. “Vish wouldn’t hurt me.”

  “Maybe not. I didn’t want to give him any fucking excuse.”

  “So you were—what? Backing away from me? Is that what I could feel?”

  “Karan, please stop it. I can’t explain now.”

  That was a coward’s way out. He accepted it, just as he had all my others: he’d never liked to fight. “No, I know,” he said, grabbing one of Queenie’s reindeer napkins to wipe his eyes. “We have to see more before either of us can explain.”

  “No. We have to get out. I don’t know what’s going on here, Kaz, but I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

  His gaze became diagnostic, the way he looked when he was shining a torch into a patient’s eyes. “Maybe you’re right. I’ll check her over again, see how she’s doing, and then let’s both go up to the road.”

  I watched him bending over her. Someone who didn’t like human beings must have chosen our uniform colour, but he almost made it look good. I loved the soft sable crop of his hair, the capable shift of his shoulders under the bottle-green shirt. I could have watched him all night, so I didn’t know what drew my attention back to the book. I’d had more than enough of the damn thing. I didn’t want to see any other manifestations of my stupidity. It was almost as if the page had rippled beneath my fingers, demanding my attention. Karan finished a read of Queenie’s pulse and glanced at me sadly over his shoulder. “Oh, yeah. That was the night you lost faith.”

  Rain was drumming on the ambulance roof, a summer storm. Almost exactly six months ago, a solstice on the far side of the wheel from this one, and I was on duty with Longshanks Len. “I don’t see,” I said bitterly, for what felt like the fiftieth time, “how the bloody hell you could do it.”

  We were parked on the edge of the Scotsbridge estate, a wasteland of half-derelict high-rise blocks. Len turned to me with that impenetrable expression of sweet bloody reason he’d worn all day. “Give it a chance, Robbie. Things’ll be better now. You’ll see.”

  “How...” I paused to ungrit my teeth. “How can things be better? We’ve just held a great big flag to the whole world saying, screw your game, we’re going home. And we’re taking our football.”

  “Seriously, mate. Do you not think it’s time we managed our own economy and made our own laws? What’ve a bunch of business suits in Brussels got to do with that?”

  I just stopped short of punching the wheel. God knew what the onboard computer would make of that. Probably she’d been programmed to hit back. “How many times... Europe never made our laws for us. And as for the economy, you just watch what happens to it now. The system wasn’t perfect, but we sure as hell won’t be able to fix it from the outside.” I rubbed my forehead in frustration. Len was such a good guy. I still couldn’t work out why I’d found him cheerful and grinning in the coffee room that morning, waving his copy of the Daily Mail. Everyone else I’d met at the station had mirrored my own look of hollow-eyed shock. “Wait. You believed bloody Farage, didn’t you? Three hundred and fifty million quid a week for the NHS?”

  “Course I did. It was all over the sides of the buses.”

  And there was my answer. For every racist twat who’d thought he’d wake up rich and employable in England’s green and pleasant land on the morning after Brexit, there was somebody like Len, whose only crime had been listening to politicians. “He’s already backing down from that, Len. He’s probably gonna resign. Did you never stop to think how this would affect people like Karan?”

  “Karan? What’s he got to do with it?”

  “He’s a Sikh.”

  Len broke into chuckles. “Don’t be daft. He can down a pint faster than I can.”

  “I don’t mean a practising one. I mean by birth. It’s very nice and cosmopolitan of you not to notice, but he’s Asian.”

  Len gawped at me. I was going to have to get used to that—the incomprehension of good men. “Yeah, but nobody’s got anything against foreigners like him. It’s just the ones who come over here, think they can play the system, claim benefits and—”

  “Wait. Aren’t they stealing our jobs? Because it can’t be bloody both. Do you think anybody’s gonna distinguish, when they’re lobbing bricks at people with brown skins, between the nice type like Karan and—”

  “Robbie, Robbie.” Len was flapping a hand at me, a gesture more inclined to fan my flames than subdue them. “Take it easy, man. You’re blowing this all out of proportion.”

  Maybe I was. I’d had a bad day. Kaz and I had spent so much time the night before in tense debate about our finances that we’d missed out entirely on the nice dinner we’d promised each other. Somehow our plans for quickie work-night sex had derailed too, and I’d ended up in the living room, staring in disbelief at my computer screen as the referendum results came through. Demons of chaos and mischief had been let loose on the world: Len and I had wasted hours on back-to-back prank calls, then had been sent to keep watch at Scotsbridge. “All right. I’m sorry for yelling at you.”

  “No worries, man. Look, I know why Mackie’s sent us here tonight. I know he thinks something might kick off because of the referendum, and I know stuff’s been happening around the country today, horrible racist shit. You can’t think I wanted any of that.”

  “No, of course not.” I was in the driver’s seat. I leaned my elbow on the open window and listened to the subdued wail and clatter of a summer city night. “Things have always been bad here.”

  “Aye. People fight when they don’t feel like there’s enough to go round, don’t they? If there’s less immigrants coming in, they might relax a bit. That’s what I was thinking about when I cast my vote.”

  “Len, I am sorry I ripped your head off. But I swear to God, if you don’t keep your trap shut for the rest of this shift...”

  The radio crackled, saving us both. I snatched the mic off the cradle. “What is it? Er... Six eight, I mean.”

  “Six eight, three four.” The dispatch operator sounded wearily amused. “Since you’re in such a good mood anyway, Rob, a call’s come in from the Scotsbridge estate. Some kind of incident in the park between the two north blocks.”

  “We’re at Scotsbridge now, Control. On the south side.�
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  “Good. Go and support unit eight-two and the police. You can use the shortcut through the underpass—eight-two says the bollards have been knocked down.”

  Eight-two was Karan’s unit. I put the ambulance into gear and drove her through the estate like a hot wind. If Len had anything to say about my speed, or full lights and sirens in a built-up area, I didn’t hear him. We blazed out of the underpass onto the miserable acre of concrete-framed grass that called itself a park. Karan’s van was parked at an angle by the wall, windscreen shattered. He and his crewmate Gemma Bates were attending a prone body on the ground, crouching to avoid the missiles being thrown by a gang of kids at the top of the steps.

  Not kids, no. Grown-arse men. That was good, because even in my worst rages, I didn’t like to hit down. Len made a grab for me as I leapt out of the van, but his hand closed on thin air. A patrol car had just pulled up too: from a crackling distance, I heard one of the coppers yelling at me to stop. A huge shaven-headed lump had clambered onto the wall and was aiming a half-brick at Karan. “Didn’t youse hear?” he bellowed past an ugly grin, drawing back his arm. “This is our country now, Paki. Youse’ve all got to fuck off back home!”

  I got to him too late. The brick left his hand half a second before I tackled him off the wall. We both hit the frosty pavement hard. Len, whose long stride covered ground fast, grabbed me by both shoulders and wrenched me off my squalling prey before I could do any more damage to his face or my career. He dumped me into the arms of the police sergeant who’d come running into the fray, and the copper in turn bent me neatly over the wall and started cuffing me. “Bloody hell, Jack,” I heard him say to his partner over my back. “First time I’ve had to do this to a paramedic.”

  “Well, read him his rights and do it by the book anyway. Don’t wanna be up all night with procedural errors, not when Rowan’s cooking dinner.”

  “Yep. We do not want to miss the special dessert.” He tightened his grip on my arm. “Easy does it, mate, easy does it. Jack, go see to that poor lad down there, the other ambulance guy. That bastard hit him dead-on.”

  And the stupid, wicked thing was that even then I couldn’t stop. A riot unit had turned up and was smartly dispersing the crowd. The brick-lobbing thug was under restraint. Len was where I should have been: kneeling beside Karan, mopping blood off his face. Instead I kept struggling in the sergeant’s arms, until he jerked on the cuffs hard enough to bring tears to my eyes, and despite all my fuss and violence laid a gentle hand on my head to push me down into the back seat of the car.

  Chapter Four

  Karan knelt at my feet. He used the reindeer napkin to dry my tears, then tucked it into his pocket. “I really missed you while you were on suspension. Three whole months, you stupid git. You were lucky not to be fired.”

  “How can you have missed me? I was at home the whole time.”

  “Something was at home. Not my Robbie.”

  No. I’d hardly recognised myself in the creature that sat staring at daytime TV while Karan was out, and night-time TV while he was home. A sob escaped me. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

  “What I never understood was... if I could deal with it, with Brexit and all the crap that came after it, and being called names and having bricks chucked at me—why couldn’t you?”

  “It was all so fucking horrible.” There was no room for anything but honesty in this house. As long as the book lay open on the table, I had to speak out of an undefended heart. “I didn’t understand why you weren’t shrieking and yelling about it too. You seemed to... accept it, and I didn’t get that, Kaz. I still don’t understand.”

  “You think I haven’t wept and raged about it too?”

  “I don’t know. I never saw you.”

  “No. I took it to Vishram. He’s my big brother, and I loved him like the moon and stars while we were growing up. You knew that, didn’t you? That’s why you didn’t tell me what he said to you at Diwali.”

  “How could I drag him down like that in your eyes?”

  “The Brexit deal changed him. In a way it had nothing to do with us, with immigrants from outside the EU. But hate breeds hate, I suppose, and suddenly you’ve got a country where it’s that bit less safe to have a different-coloured skin. Where you always have to be watching your back. Maybe you and I didn’t take it in properly, Robbie, what with being gay and having to watch our backs anyway. But Vish—I’m scared for him. Scared of him. This is how lads like him end up getting radicalised.”

  “You don’t think...”

  “I don’t know. He goes to a lot of meetings. My mum says she doesn’t know where he is half the time.”

  “Jesus, Karan. Was he serious about the honour-killing thing?”

  Karan sat back on his heels. “You took it very seriously indeed.”

  “Yes. I did.” I ran my hands over my head. “Why can’t I tell anything but the truth in here?”

  “Truth’s not supposed to be a bad thing.”

  “Oh, you reckon? I did a lot of thinking while I was suspended, even if I did look like a vegetable from the outside. I thought about the job, and how much it’s changed. How for every callout we get where we can help someone, there’s half a dozen where we can’t. And the paperwork, and the admin, and missing a real emergency because somebody’s made yet another fucking prank call. And getting rocks chucked at us, because...”

  “Because Scotsbridge was far from the first time where that happened. You were always so tolerant and patient with stuff like that. You just couldn’t bear it when—”

  “When I saw it happening to you.” I swallowed a sob. “Oh, shit, Karan. I started thinking I wasn’t cut out for the job. And when Vishram threw honour killings into the mix, I started thinking I wasn’t right for you. That I was bringing more harm than good on you. I started thinking I should let you go.”

  Karan got up. He climbed onto the sofa, knelt beside me and took me into his arms, far more frankly and thoroughly than I’d ever thought he would while we were on duty, even if our only patient was sound asleep in her chair. Tensions and pent-up fears melted out of me. I burrowed my face into his shoulder and closed my eyes. “But you didn’t let go,” he said, his grip closing round me so hard it hurt. “You hung on. You’ve got to hang on, Robbie! Phil, for God’s sake, get the cutters down here—the van’s gonna roll!”

  What on earth was he on about? A wailing sound filled my ears, like sirens braiding with a night-time forest wind. The only Phil I knew was a fireman, and why would Karan be shouting at him in Queenie’s living room? We needed the fire in here: that, and Karan’s embrace, were the only things keeping me from freezing to death. The whistling moan faded out. I raised my head. “I did hang on,” I said wonderingly, the longest night catching up with me at last. “It was you who said we should stop. My God, Kaz—it was you.”

  “Yes, it was. Look, love—we’ve come to the last page.”

  He kept one arm around my shoulders. I wrapped mine around his waist, and tucked my thumb into his belt the way he liked me to do, because it made him feel captured and sexy and safe all at once. We could have been the same two lads who’d sat that way all through the first picture they’d been to see together. My arm had gone numb, and I couldn’t remember a thing about the film, but I’d been so blindly bloody happy. We’d run back home through the city streets. Chased one another up the stairs of our shared student flat. I recalled with pristine clarity the scent and feel of him, wrestling me down onto his bed. “The last page,” I whispered, tightening my grip. “I don’t want to look.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because... what comes after that? I can’t see, Kaz. I’m so cold.”

  “I know. I know. But just hold on.”

  He lifted the book so that we were sharing it. I didn’t want to let the image rise up and consume me, but I was so cold, and the dispatch room had been warm at the crack of dawn that morning. I was glad of the bright neon strip lights, the bustle, the smell of coffee. Even the sight of Mackie
, descending upon me with a roster sheet in his hand. “Morning, Mac. Everything all right?”

  “Very bloody far from it. Sally Ward, Naz Chaudri and Longshanks have all called in sick. Where’s Karan?”

  “He decided to bike in. Bit of exercise, you know.”

  Mackie pursed his lips. “It’s the coldest, darkest morning of the year, Robbie.”

  “Yep.”

  “He couldn’t stand to be in the car with you, could he?”

  I stared at the scuffed lino. We’d fought, in the course of the last twenty four hours, over whether we even needed a car, living where we did. Over our new house, which I’d wanted, and whether we even needed such a thing, when we’d been as happy as sandboys in our old flat, and over the big family wedding, which he wanted, and whether we could possibly need such a thing when all we had to do was tie our knot with a registrar and run off on honeymoon. There was a question mark over whether he’d have given me a backie on his bike, let alone consent to share space with me in the car. “He’s on his way.”

  “Listen to me, mate. You and Karan have to get yourselves sorted out. It’s not affecting your work yet, but you’re on the bloody edge, and you’ve already got a suspension on your record. And—God help all of us—I need to send the pair of you out together today.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Deadly. Cheer the fuck up, Rob—you’re on your holidays from tomorrow, and it’s the shortest day. Things get better from now on. So find him, get into the van—you’re in eight-two today—and go out and do your bloody job.”

  So I had. We both had. Karan had looked at me so kindly when I’d clambered into the driver’s seat of unit eight-two, as if, despite everything, he knew every thought that went through my thick head. As if he could see straight down to the hot core of my love for him. And one thing we both knew for sure was how much depended on our ability to set all our struggles aside once our duty shift began.

  We did well enough until the midwinter dark came down, until the last callout before our watch-and-wait in Hollyford. A multi-vehicle RTA on the single-carriageway stretch of the A1: exactly what everyone needed at rush hour four days ahead of Christmas. I just didn’t understand how alternately-flashing left and right headlights, a two-tone wail on the siren and the nerve-jangling close-quarters yelp were failing to make my ambulance noticeable to the coach driver grinding along at forty miles an hour up ahead. Even the drivers coming down from the opposite direction were gesticulating at the guy, trying to make room for us in their lane. But I couldn’t get round him, not without turning a bad situation to shit on a shovel by hitting someone else. I was distantly aware of Karan’s hand on my arm, of his voice—level and low, but urgent—telling me to calm down.