Thicker Than Bone

23rd January 2015

23rd January 2015

That afternoon, they went straight up to Leeds General Infirmary.

Ali hadn’t been here in a long time—relatively speaking, he supposed, and the taxi curving gently into the drop-off point felt too much like those three years of tests, treatments, and transfusions that had been worse than the disease. He clutched Yazid’s hand tightly in the back of the taxi, and comforted himself with the strength of the returning grip, with the fact that Yazid needed no help to get out.

“Remembering?” Yazid guessed as he paid the cabbie.

Ali pulled a face.

“Well I hardly ever came here if it wasn’t about you.”

“Lies. The first time you came here with me, it wasn’t my fault at all.”

Ali cracked a faint smile at the memory of that disastrous date, and squeezed Yazid’s hand. It was cold outside the main entrance, but he didn’t want to move just yet.

“Hey,” Yazid murmured, wriggling his fingers free to cup Ali’s face in both hands and kiss him: soft, chaste and barely-there. His whisper-kisses, Ali had named them so long ago now. Ali relaxed under the touch the way he had that very first time. He simply closed his eyes and breathed, centring himself on the gentle calluses on Yazid’s palms, on the hardly tangible touch of his lips—more a presence than a feeling—and…exhaled.

“Thank you.”

“He didn’t break us then, and he sure as hell can’t break us now,” Yazid whispered. The kiss transferred to Ali’s cheek. Heavier, more assertive, more perfunctory. “He’s just a monkey-cunt.”

“A what?”

“Like it?”

“Was your boss swearing about customers again?” Ali asked doubtfully.

“What, Rafiq? Nah, that beauty was Farah,” Yazid said, and beamed. “If you ever dump me, I might just marry Farah instead. We could have a bunch of beautiful, foul-mouthed Iraqi dumplings.”

“That you call them dumplings testifies you’d be a crappy father,” Ali said snottily. He bumped his nose against Yazid’s before stepping back. “Thanks.”

“Hey, it’s what I’m here for,” Yazid said, the obnoxious grin softening into an easy smile, and he offered his hand again. “My very existence on this planet drives your brother mental, so why not go the whole nine yards?”

Ali laughed, sliding his fingers back between Yazid’s and letting himself be towed beyond the automatic doors into the bustling hospital entrance. The smell of hospitals was the most unpleasant thing now, because in the worst times during Yazid’s illness—one of which he had come so close to losing the battle that it brought Ali out in a cold sweat just thinking about it—he’d smelled like this, too. Sterile and cold, not of cooking and laughter and their fabric softener. Not of their life.

It had been such a large part of both their lives for so long that Ali had to actively stop himself from pressing the wrong button in the lift.

“Not anymore,” Yazid said cheerfully, jabbing the right one.

Ali smiled, dropping his head briefly again on Yazid’s shoulder.

“If one of your test results ever comes back positive again, I’ll kill you myself,” he promised.

“Really?”

“Yeah. Cancer won’t get a f*****g look-in.”

Yazid laughed. “Seems a bit unfair on me. I can’t help it.”

“Well, I’m sick of chemo.”

“You’re sick of it?”

“Yep,” Ali said loftily, and took advantage of the privacy of the lift to kiss Yazid on the jaw before the doors slid open and they were spewed into a bustling corridor. He pulled away, but kept hold of that hand. “I’ve gotten used to you being better this last year.”

Yazid wiggled his fingers in Ali’s grip, the knuckles shifting and settling rhythmically. Ali squeezed until he stopped—and then stopped himself, staring at the entrance to the ward.

“Is it really crap of me to say I don’t want to go in?” he whispered.

“Crap? No. Does it make you a massive p***y? Yes.”

“Yaz!”

“Hey, remember when they gave me the diagnosis?” Yazid asked. “I felt wiped out already, and they caught mine early.”

Ali hunched his shoulders.

“He’s not going to be in any state to give more than a bit of lip, Al,” Yazid coaxed. “And c’mon, what’s the worst he can say?”

“Last time you saw him…”

“Last time I saw him, he got four years in prison,” Yazid said.

“Yeah, and he served two!”

“Doesn’t matter,” Yazid said flippantly. “This is a hospital, Ali. He’s not going to launch out of the bed and try beating me to death with his IV stand. Some nurse will screech his eardrums out if he tries anyway.”

Ali laughed shakily, hating Yazid’s flippancy but also loving his calm surety. He took a breath, blew it out, and pulled Yazid by the hand through the doors.

The lanky figure of Phil Archer, his mother’s second husband (not Ali’s stepfather, really, as they’d not married until Ali was already in his twenties) was lurking by the entrance to one of the bays, hands in pockets and head back against the wall. His perpetual pose was behind a newspaper in the living room, cigar clamped between his lips. He looked as though he itched to light up here, too.

“Afternoon,” he grunted in that deep, tyres-on-gravel voice of his. “Vi’s in there,” he added, jerking his head towards the entrance to bay six. His slate-grey eyes slid to Yazid. “Surprised you came.”

Yazid shrugged. “What’s he gonna do? Throw his bedpan at me?”

Phil guffawed loudly, and heaved himself off the wall. “Now you two’re ‘ere,” he grumbled, “I’m goin’ for a smoke.”

He trudged out, but Ali was already ignoring him. Bay six was quiet and mostly empty, but in the far corner he could see the end of a bed peeking out from between white curtains, the vivid purple of his mother’s favourite handbag darkening the crisp sheets.

He swallowed.

“Come on, then,” he whispered eventually, squeezing Yazid’s hand one last time for good measure before dropping it and shoving his fists in the pockets of his jacket. He felt sick at the thought of seeing Tony again after nearly four years. Ali still felt angry with him, still felt as though Tony had torn away any hope Ali had ever had of his brother not turning out to be…

To be the man he ultimately was.

And there he was. Small in a hospital bed, sitting up and talking to their mother and sister as though he were a normal man with an abnormal disease and his loving family were rallying around him.

Not like a f****d-up monster.

Tony’s eyes caught Ali’s, and silence fell.

Once, Tony and Ali had looked very similar. They had the same wiry frame, the same ash-blond hair, the same shade of blue in slightly too wide eyes. Once, they had had the same habit of freezing up when angered, of speaking slow and low when furious, of watching in a predatory stillness that spoke of calculating danger.

But there the similarity ended.

Tony’s hair was shaved down so far the blond could have been white against the paleness of his bare scalp. His skin was washed-out and grey in the way Ali remembered from his grandfather, his father, and even Yazid under the darker tone. There were lines around Tony’s face there hadn’t been in the courtroom years ago, and the tattoos were faded, the thick oil they’d been when fresh dulled to a charcoal haze now.

But they were still there, and the hard expression on Tony’s face said they were as true as they had ever been. Forever England on the left side of his neck, C18 on the other side. The intricate, heavy sleeve of ink and skulls snaking down his right arm, ending in a swastika on a banner on the back of his hand. And without a trace of irony, the letters L-O-V-E tattooed over the knuckles.

Just the sight of him made Ali feel sick, and then that lean, hard face twisted into a sneer, those sharp blue eyes sliding away from Ali and staring at the epitome of everything Tony hated. An Islamic, dark-skinned, foreign-born homosexual.

The sneer twisted and showed yellowed teeth, blunted and broken. That whispery, harsh voice that had been the source of Ali’s dread as a child, and his nightmares as an adult, bled into the room like a gangrenous wound oozing pus.

“Get that f*****g Paki out of my sight,” Tony snarled.

“Anthony!” Violet snapped from the visitor’s chair.

Ali squeezed Yazid’s elbow, a fury bubbling up as fresh and hot as the day he’d realized his own brother had nearly—

“I’d point out I’m from Mosul, not Karachi, but I’m pretty sure you don’t know where either of those places are,” Yazid returned coldly. His face had shuttered in that distant, cool facade that Ali so rarely saw, and usually hated—but now he welcomed it.

Ali clenched his fingers harder in the sleeve of Yazid’s jacket, fisting his hand at the elbow.

“If I didn’t have strict orders, I’d get out of this f*****g bed, and—”

“Tony!” Jo, Ali’s sister and the middle child, spoke in a soft but commanding voice. The command went ignored.

“You count yourself f*****g lucky I’ve been told to—”

“Let’s not pretend Anthony Barraclough is obeying doctor’s orders,” Yazid sneered. “How bad’s the leukaemia?”

“You shared our family business with this raghead?” Tony snapped at Ali.

“His name is Yazid, and he’s my partner,” Ali retorted.

Tony’s lip curled. “Yeah, you’re both arse-f*****g benders, how could I—”

“Stop it, all of you!” Violet snapped. “I won’t have this—this hate, not right now. We have to stand together. As a family.”

“I’m not in the same family as no f*****g darkie,” Tony snarled.

“Then you’re not my brother,” Ali snapped. “I’m here because Mum wanted me to be. You can f*****g die for all I care, after what you did to Yaz.”

“And the minute I’m over this, I’ll f*****g finish it,” Tony threatened.

“Good luck.”

Yazid’s voice was little more than a murmur, and yet the gravity of it silenced the cubicle.

“Good luck,” he repeated. “Because this will rip every last shred of you into pieces, Tony. This will sap your energy until you feel a hundred. This will burn your blood and tear your muscles until you’d kill yourself just to make the pain stop—and that’s before the treatment. You’ll starve yourself because it hurts less than the vomiting and the heartburn. You’ll sleep naked because clothes hurt too badly on your skin. You’ll beg them to stop and let you go—but you’ll beg them to save you, too, because you’re afraid to lose and afraid to die, afraid that the pathetic shell you’ve become will be the rest of your sorry, miserable little life. So good luck, Tony. Good luck finishing anything you started, because this cancer will finish you, whether you win or lose. You will never be that thug who burst into our flat and took a crowbar to a cancer patient’s head. By the time you even know if you’re going to live or die, you won’t have the strength to lift a crowbar.”

A chilling silence fell in the wake of Yazid’s low voice. Ali found himself unfolding again from hunched shoulders and crossed arms he hadn’t realized he’d adopted. He felt cold.

Footsteps squeaked on the linoleum, and a man in a white coat appeared at the end of the bed. “Ah,” he said, and frowned over the top of wire-rimmed glasses. “Family of Mr Barraclough, I presume?”

Silence—in which, for the first time in Ali’s memory, Yazid and Tony made and held eye contact, with nothing but steel in Yazid’s gaze, and…something unreadable in Tony’s.

For the first time since they were children, Ali simply could not read his older brother’s face.

The doctor cleared his throat. “Is, ah, everything alright?”

“Fine,” Yazid said, breaking eye contact and smiling. “This is a family matter, so I’ll leave you to it.”

Ali caught at his arm.

“I’ll be outside with Phil,” Yazid said.

“Are you alright?”

Yazid’s eyes were distant, as though he’d wandered off inside his own head for a moment, but his hand was warm as it cupped the back of Ali’s neck, his whisper-kiss as soothing as every other that had come before.

“I’ll be outside when you’re done here,” he murmured, the hollow gravity leaking away from his tone, and Ali squeezed his elbows before letting go.

“Won’t be long,” he promised.

And then Yazid was gone, and the doctor was drawing the curtain around.

“I’m afraid it’s not good news,” he said.

* * * *

When Ali emerged from the hospital, Yazid was sitting sprawled out on a bench by the entrance, looking as languid and relaxed as a man waiting for a bus to the local pub. He was texting someone—possibly Harry, but more probably Kevin—and the way he glanced up under his eyebrows was like nothing was wrong in the entire world. Ali’s heart, bruised by the doctor’s frank admission in Tony’s cubicle, yearned to simply be with Yazid for a while.

“Where’s Phil?” he asked hollowly as he approached the bench.

“Gone to get a coffee then heading back up to nab your mum,” Yazid said, squinting up at Ali in the hazy sunlight. “You okay?”

Ali swallowed. “Yeah.”

He felt…strange. Tony had always been so aggressive, so big, so indestructible that the chilling prediction from Yazid had shaken Ali to the core. And yet it wasn’t the idea of Tony being reduced to the same mess that Yazid had been during treatment that did it. It was…

It was the idea that Yazid, who had always been so easy-going and quick to forgive, so laid-back and gentle, would beat it. And Tony might not.

Ali’s heart swelled, and he stepped between Yazid’s spread knees, seized his face in both hands, and kissed him soundly. Because Yazid was still here. He tasted of coffee and spearmint, his noise of surprise was familiar and unchanged over six years, and he was Ali’s, despite everything.

“Let’s go home,” Ali whispered against Yazid’s mouth, then drew back to kiss the spot where Yazid’s cheek met the side of his nose.

“You okay?” Yazid asked.

“Yeah.”

“What’d the doctor say?”

“Later,” Ali breathed, eyes closed and inhaling the heat and smell, wrapping himself in the comfort that Yazid didn’t even seem to know he offered. “Just…I want to go home with you, and appreciate.”

“Appreciate what?”

“That you won,” Ali said, and licked his lips.

Yazid kissed him, swift and sly.

“I was so…so utterly proud of you in there, the way you just stopped him dead. The way you’re not…you’re not afraid of him. You never let him beat you and I am…I am so proud of that.”

Yazid’s arms slid around his waist and pulled. Ali let himself be dragged into Yazid’s lap despite the public setting. Who cared about public? He had Yazid, against years upon years of horror, and the kiss he dragged from Yazid’s mouth was half-desperate, half-passionate, and Ali—

Ali had never felt so impossibly lucky, and so impossibly defiant.

Fuck Tony, f**k crowbars, f**k cancer.