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It was one of those days when John could not seem to stop asking himself uncomfortable questions, to the point where he was almost willing to confess to the uncomfortable answers if that would make the whispers in his head shut up.
He knew he’d reached his limits when he caught himself reading the same line over and over again; but instead of closing the magazine or distracting himself by spending his precious change on a cup of tea or a scratch card, he poked himself with yet another question: Do you really want to know about the ‘new era in publishing’ or do you hope reading the magazine will change things, change who you are?
It wasn’t selling The Big Issue that made John feel bad about himself—selling it without reading it did. It was the last nail in the coffin of his self-respect. Being homeless was a combination of choices and circumstances, but being disinterested in the world was all on him: a sin, a shame, a failure.
John tucked together the four copies he had left to sell and put them carefully in his backpack. He was going to have to come out here tomorrow, too, if only as means of punishing himself for not staying long enough today. He knew he shouldn’t be leaving his spot now, no matter how on-edge he was feeling. The night was young, this was prime time. More than that, there were only two days left until next month’s issue was out. Chances of the regulars buying had long dropped very low, they all got their copies early on. John had been doing this for close to six months now, he should have known better. He had to stick around for the tourists and for the random acts of kindness—or for the random acts of egotism and the need to feel better about oneself by buying ‘that magazine the homeless people sell’.
As he limped through the narrow passage leading into St Christopher Place John wondered whether ‘random’ was the accurate word. Some kind of inner logic had to click together in that person’s psyche to make them decide to fish out their wallet today of all days, that moment of all moments. The regulars, they had their reasons. The irregulars had to have them, too.
***
John managed to make it to the back of the fanciest restaurant on Blandford Street, before he collapsed on the ground with a quiet groan, digging his fingers into his leg. He opened his backpack and tossed a couple of Neurophens into his mouth, swallowing them with the help of a sip of water and a brisk tilt of the head. The pain had flared up a few minutes after he’d taken off from his spot, sudden but not surprising. He didn’t need his medical degree to know that his limp was psychosomatic. Even if he didn’t know the first thing about how the mind and the body affected each other, he’d have been pretty quickly clued in by the way his body always responded with pain on particular days…days when the night seemed too far off. John had wondered whether it wasn’t some perverse confirmation of the whole unity principle that seemed to dominate so many religions and spiritual teachings. It made sense that exactly when his soul was clinging onto the thinnest rays of light, his mind would start snarling at him, firing on all those questions—
How did I get here? How?
—and then his flesh and bone would catch up last, seizing in angry spasms, adding the final touch of torment to make for a truly wholesome experience.
He picked himself up and limped over to the darkest corner, both hands clasped around his thigh. He kept as far away from the door as possible. The area was fairly big with an empty clearing right in the middle around the steps from the back door. The rest was some bins and the typical accessories for such a place: crates, black industrial strength bin liners in various stages of fullness, containing things in various stages of decomposition. There were also cardboard boxes that used to contain food and drinks—some empty, some full with things ready to be dispatched to another destination, often for recycling. John knew he was too early for any quality leftovers to be taken out, but he needed the seclusion.
For a few minutes he massaged his leg, keeping quiet and hoping the restaurant was too busy for the Wanker to come out for a smoke. Being told to fuck off was not an option right now. John didn’t care about the actual verbal abuse or whatever else might get thrown his way, perhaps literally: he just couldn’t move. He knew that he needed at least half an hour for the pain to subside to a manageable level and allow him to actually fuck off. He’d have killed for any prescription painkiller, any. He was a doctor and he had nothing, just as he was a decorated soldier who would hardly have made anyone applaud him. Disgraced, addicted, but worst of all, purposeless. He had no anchor, no axis around which to center himself and claim back himself bit by bit from that empty, oblique space in him that had grown scarily big in months.
A spot of light appeared on the ground with the opening of the door, its clean cut, rectangular form made even starker by the wavering outline of a shadow in the middle. A tall man, clothes seemingly dark, hair dark, face half hidden by the lapels of his coat. John tried to scoot back further into his own shadows, biting his tongue when agony shot up through his body. He couldn’t see the man any longer, but John’s backpack remained in plain sight where he’d left it and he could only hope that whoever had come out wouldn’t notice it. The lights at the back had been playing up in the last few days and only one was on at the far end. Besides, people didn’t really take more than a moment to examine their surroundings and when they did, they usually failed to see much. John liked that about the human psyche. He didn’t always respect it, but he appreciated its necessity. Right now, he prayed for it.
For the longest moment there was no movement or sound coming from the man. Then John’s nose twitched when the unmistakeable smell of tobacco reached to it. Best case scenario, there’d be a few more quick drags and the bloke would have to go back in. He had to be a staff member, and even if the restaurant was empty, the Wanker—who had to be some kind of a manager—still never let anyone else out for a cigarette break. This man was sneaking out. It meant John just had to keep biting his tongue for another minute at the most. The pain had diminished a little bit anyway, pushed away by distraction.
“Do you need your bag?”
John’s heart jumped in his throat at the sound of the man’s voice. It was a deep voice, levelled and posh, but not just that—John’s own response to it was almost visceral, the hairs on his arms prickling.
Hang on. No one with that kind of accent would be working here. John slowly shifted forward on his backside, ignoring the way his jeans dragged through the dirt on ground.
The man was standing outside the door with his back to it. John could barely distinguish his features, but what he did see slotted in well with his confusion and upped it. There was something definitely upper class in the high cheekbones sketched by the interplay of light and darkness. A few strands of a fringe, artfully hanging over half of a pale, high forehead. John couldn’t see the man’s eyes, but he felt their focus on himself. He felt trapped between the sensible urge to clear off as fast as he could and a small sense of calm. Nothing here felt a threat.
Then again he didn’t have to feel it for there to be one.
He managed to stand up, wobbled for a moment before finding his balance, tested surreptitiously if his leg would support him, then took a few steps towards the stranger, tamping down on the pain. The man picked up the backpack from the ground and turned to John, half his face fully illuminated now. He stretched out his hand and had the bag hanging from his fingers in perfect timing for when John reached him.
John would have probably felt grateful that he’d been saved the need to bow and pick it up himself—as that motion would only exacerbate the pain—if he wasn’t too busy checking out mentally at the sight of the stranger’s face up close.
Neither darkness, nor artificial light could transform the staggering translucent blue green of the most exotically shaped eyes on a Caucasian person that John had ever seen. Set wide apart, strikingly tilted yet not small, they met John’s eyes and seemed to freeze—not with any strong emotion, but not in a machine-like, stupefied way, either. Calm curiosity; something guarded and something open, maybe more open than John had encountered since he came back. Or maybe a different kind of open because John had met kindness both upon his return and after, but the openness here was not accompanied by any professional or personal need to connect to John, make something of him or do something for him—
“Afghanistan or Iraq?”
The stranger’s timbre was that of rolling thunderclouds in the distance, sans the danger. The voice was in harmony with the gaze but at odds with the mouth and the curls, both of which crowded out the need for any other adjective to describe them but ‘sensual’.
Between one heartbeat and the next John realized two things: the first, that he was utterly fascinated, the second, that he was staring.
Then the actual meaning of the question reached him and made him blink quickly. “Excuse me?” he said, feeling his back start to go up warningly.
“You’ve been invalided back from either—Afghanistan or Iraq.”
“Afghanistan,” John answered on auto-pilot. “How…how did you know?”
Shouldn’t I be worried? Okay, I’m worried. Shouldn’t I be more worried?
The man regarded him silently for a few seconds then suddenly nodded towards the door. “Did you think I was Clements?” There was a hint of derision in the way the name rolled off his tongue.
“I don’t know who that is,” John replied, already having the feeling that yes, he did, actually.
“Yes, you do, actually,” the man said. “The manager here. Six feet tall, early thirties. Moderately efficient at his job. Quite obnoxious.” His face became more and more animated as he sped up, adding his next words as if he was vocalizing an internal monologue. “Although not the kind of obnoxious that I am, I suppose. Good taste in shirts, probably about the only commendable thing about him. Poor taste in shoes, wine, friends…” There was a brief pause that allowed something oddly conversational to filter into the man’s expression. “And banks, it seems, although I doubt it he’s aware about that yet, and besides, I don’t think anyone would feel sorry for him. Quite stupid, pretentious…” The man took a deep breath, eyes boring into John’s. “The kind,” he said quietly, “who would assault a woman half his size and begrudge a homeless man the restaurant’s leftovers.”
John swallowed carefully and shifted on his feet, redistributing some pressure on his cane. He was feeling a little dizzy, as if the stranger had chained John to himself without so much as a how do you do. An unpleasant throb started up in his stomach that took him a beat to decipher—he couldn’t afford to find himself in trouble and the individual in front of him might as well have worn a badge that said, ‘Trouble is my middle name.’
“Who are you?” John asked, voice calm.
“My name is Sherlock Holmes. I’m a consulting detective.”
John was puzzled. “Aren’t…all detectives consulting? I mean, people come to you for that, don’t they? You know, to consult you?”
A line appeared between Holmes’s eyebrows. It was not a happy sight. “People don’t come to me,” he retorted, half-irritated, half-imperious. John was about to point out that this was hardly anything to be above about, couldn’t mean much for business, but decided to keep quiet.
All the more that Holmes was still speaking. “I consult with the Police,” he was saying, then rolled his eyes. At least the words that followed revealed it was at himself not John. “Well, not on this particular case. I am doing this as a favour. The woman wouldn’t name her assailant and Clements has the perfect cover—a serious injury on his lower arm that prevents him from closing his hand even hallway let alone punch with a fist. There’s a doctor’s note and everything.”
Holmes wasn’t giving any signs of stopping—obviously enjoyed the sound of his own voice, that one—so John interrupted him, unable to help his eyebrows from shooting up. “You consult with the Police,” he repeated.
“Yes,” Holmes said after a beat, sounding a little taken aback, on the side of offended. “Thank you for keeping up,” he added—with undue sarcasm, John felt, and tried to convey it with a patronizing look of reproach. Holmes sighed, but spoke again, the bite out of his voice. “When the police are out of their depth, which is always, they consult me.”
John grinned. He felt the chill of the air on his gums, in his mouth. It was weird. It was good.
“The Police don’t consult amateurs,” he pointed out.
The tiny smirk he got in return could have put Mona Lisa to shame. “A moment ago I asked you, ‘Afghanistan or Iraq?’ You looked surprised.”
John nodded. He took half a step back without thinking.
“Your haircut, the way you hold yourself, says military,” Holmes ventured to explain. “Your face is tanned but no tan above the wrists. You’ve been abroad, but not sunbathing. Your limp’s really bad when you’re focused on it, but in the last couple of minutes you seem to have forgotten about it, so it’s at least partly psychosomatic. That says the original circumstances of the injury were traumatic. Wounded in action, then. Wounded in action, suntan – Afghanistan or Iraq.” The sound at the end of Iraq sounded like a hollow click; it wasn’t an unpleasant sound. The silence that followed made it echo in John’s ears louder with each second that ticked.
John’s mind was reeling, but this time he found he’d followed every single word, kept in step. It was the act itself that captivated him: how wondrous that someone would just be able to…get these things simply by applying logic.
He shook his head in disbelief, his smile flushing him with forgotten, cherished excitement.
Then he remembered that while he was everything Holmes had said, that was not all he was.
“How did you figure out I’m homeless?” he asked, keeping his tone neutral.
Holmes put his hands in his coat pockets, the motion making him sway a little. It seemed to put a distance between him and John; an infinitesimal distance, yet John was grateful for it.
“There are a few copies of the same magazine issue in your bag. The Big Issue,” Holmes added evenly. “Obviously, not a reader.”
“My backpack isn’t open.”
“Wrong. It’s open enough to allow me to catch sight of the stack and of one of the letters on the cover. The font is very distinctive. And although you’ve made an effort to keep yourself and your belongings presentable, I’ve spent a long time interacting with homeless people. I recognize the signs.”
John took a breath to ask Holmes how on Earth he had spent time mingling with the homeless—he certainly didn’t look the type to do volunteer work—when something vague nagging at him took a clear shape.
“When did you say the assault took place?” he asked.
Holmes’s eyes flashed at him, alert. “I didn’t.”
“Okay, you didn’t. When was it?”
“Two days ago.”
John pursed his lips in thought.
“What?” Holmes urged him after the whole of two seconds.
“Hang on. I’m trying to work out something. You said he’s got an injury on his lower right arm, right?”
Holmes nodded.
“When did he get it?” asked John.
“On the day of the incident.”
“Yes, but when? What time, do you know?”
Holmes was looking at John intently. “The incident took place around midnight on Sunday night. Clements says he tore a ligament during his Sunday morning game of tennis. The staff can’t swear his arm wasn’t bandaged, because he’s been wearing a shirt and a jacket. Yesterday I tried coming close enough to…inspect, but he asked the security to throw me out and earlier today threatened to call the Police.” Holmes sounded mildly inconvenienced.
“I thought you worked for the Police,” John threw in, letting the teasing twang into his remark.
“Not for,” Holmes corrected him, on the verge of scandalized. “With.” His eyes darted around, giving him a look of uncertainty. It suited him. “When they let me. We…I’m not on such good terms with everyone there…With most people there.”
“Right.”
They regarded themselves in silence for a few seconds. “Why are you here now?” John asked.
“I made a false phone call to Clements pretending I was his neighbour. I told him I’d seen paint splashed all over his front door and his lock seemed tampered with. He took off, giving me a chance to bribe the guard, then look around properly and maybe pressure the two waiters working that night into remembering any useful details.”
John nodded, acquiring a serene expression. “How did that go?”
Holmes shrugged. “Not very well.”
“Didn’t think so, no. Well,” John took a breath, an odd flutter in his chest. “I was here that night around nine and assuming Clements is the cock I’m used to seeing having a smoke outside, he’s your guy.”
“How do you know?” Maybe John’s imagination played him, but Holmes’s cheeks seemed to be tinting in pink. It made him even more impossible to look away from.
“I know because he did come out for a smoke,” John told him. “He held his cigarette as he usually does and if he had a torn ligament, he wouldn’t have been able to.”
“He was using his right hand.”
John appreciated that Holmes made it sound not like a dismissive question, but like a statement he only needed to confirm so he could cross his ts and dot his is.
“He was using his right hand,” John echoed. “He’s your man.”
“You sound very certain.”
“I used to— I am a doctor. I am certain.”
No one said a word for a few long seconds. Neither did Holmes shift his gaze from John, making another army of hairs stand to attention all over John’s body. Somewhere at the back of his mind a voice told John that Holmes’s understanding of personal space and boundaries was not like most people’s, while another voice countered that a gust of wind would have John standing practically chest to chest with the other man. Not to mention that such prolonged eye contact needed two peoples’ full involvement.
It felt like a confrontation. A confrontation that wasn’t threatening but exhilarating. It felt like an itch for closeness skirting the waters of the subliminal, ready to nosedive into them and turn into an itch for intimacy in the space of a heartbeat.
John took an audible breath, rocking on his heels with it. Even though it felt like the other’s face was the only thing in focus John still couldn’t tell if the brief arch of Holmes’s right eyebrow was a trick of the light. He licked his lips; Holmes’s gaze swooped down to them before diverting to a point above John’s right shoulder.
Holmes stepped back, rolling his shoulders a little. His gesture broke a spell of sorts and John stepped back too.
“Well,” Holmes drawled, hand diving into the inside of his coat to produce a packet of cigarettes. John realized he hadn’t seen him finish smoking the first one; he must have extinguished it the moment John came out of his hiding place.
“Put on your best shirt tomorrow morning,” Holmes went on, “and come to New Scotland Yard at ten. If I’m not there ask for Detective Inspector Lestrade. I assume you’d be willing to sign a witness testimony?”
It was as if an iron rod shot up through John’s spine, but one that held him up, supported him, rather than keeping him locked in pain and rigidity.
To be thought of as a credible witness…
He nodded briskly once and Holmes returned the gesture. He lit his cigarette and blew up the first wisp of smoke, tipping his head backwards in what seemed like a preposterously languid motion. John waved his hand against the smoke halfheartedly. He glanced at the column of Holmes’s throat, a palpable sensory whisper at the back of his mind, nameless and fleeting.
“I’ll be off then,” Holmes said, rotating on his spot like a soldier. He glided off in the direction of the street, leaving John staring at the elongated fine line of his dark figure in a flurry of muted impulses. The most discernible one was protest; John had barely given it its name when Holmes stopped in his tracks.
He didn’t turn around, just shifted slightly, looking at John over his right shoulder. John’s entire being froze in anticipation, inexplicably glad to have more of this, whatever this was.
“How do you feel about the violin?”
John blinked at the non sequitur. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I play the violin when I’m thinking. Sometimes I don’t talk for days on end.” Holmes blew some smoke to the skies again. He turned a bit more to John, his expression the closest to chatty John had seen all night. “Would that bother you? It’s occurred to me that it’s best if potential flatmates knew the worst about each other upfront. Since I already know yours, I thought I’d tell you about my own…idiosyncrasies, shall we call them that, hmm? It’s not like you can deduce them by yourself.”
He threw a smile John’s way that was almost endearing in how carefully it was trying for casually sociable. There was nothing casual about Holmes from where John was standing, and probably even less sociable.
Then John repeated his performance from earlier: Holmes words ringing the bell in his head with a few seconds delay.
“What? Flatma—What?”
“Got my eye on a nice little place in central London,” Holmes said, evidently existing in an alternate reality where another, ten times cleverer John Watson was replying to him with a different line. “Together we ought to be able to afford it,” Holmes continued, then grimaced. “If you kick out that nasty gambling habit of yours first, of course. I think I could even help with one of those things you people have…” A graceful hand in matching colour to the throat waved loosely in the air in search of the word. “A job. I can help you find a job. Mycroft owes me for this one. I’ll need you to be able to pay your part of the rent on time. Mrs Hudson might be irritating but she means well, I can’t let—”
Still reeling at the numerous implications of what he was hearing, John had watched Holmes blankly. He now exploded. “Hang on! What rent? Who the hell is Mrs Hudson and who—”
“She’s our landlady.”
John gaped at Holmes then suddenly giggled, looking down to his feet. “Our landlady. We don’t have a landlady. I don’t even have a place to have a landlady.”
“Which I am trying to help with.” Holmes frowned. “Is it the cigarettes? I’ve been thinking of quitting, might as well do it now.”
John grinned again. There was a swarm of shivers running on a loop through him at the intentness of Holmes’s gaze on him that appeared to magnify each time John smiled.
He wants this, John thought. He actually wants me to live with him.
God help me, I do too.
John pinched the skin between his eyebrows, practicality overriding whatever craziness was trying to take over his senses. “Is that it? We just met and now we’re going to look at a flat together?”
“Of course not,” Holmes said, sending John’s spirits to the dumps before John even had to chance to question them what they were doing so high up. “In a month. If you’re debt-free.”
“How do you know about the gambling?” John asked incredulously. Not with distrust, but with something dangerously resembling awe.
He got an enigmatic smile in return, the genuine article this time. Holmes walked to the nearest bin, took a final drag of his cigarette, lifted the stub pointedly, extinguished it against the bin’s inside wall and got rid of it. He turned to John fully, illuminated by the streetlamp just above him. His feet were steady on the ground, slightly apart, his hands in his coat pockets. It gave him simultaneously a very closed off and very exposed air.
“The address is 221B Baker Street,” he said.
They looked at each other across the space, some ten feet between them. Then Holmes pivoted just as abruptly as he had the first time and took off again, throwing over his shoulder, “One month exactly.”
“Hang on. Wait. Mr Holmes…”
Without turning Holmes lifted his right arm in an indefinable gesture. “Sherlock, please,” he called, before rounding off the corner and disappearing from sight.