TALLOW
Dean's fingers shook as they sank into the warm white wax congealing on the table around the thick base of the altar candlestick. Molten liquid scalded his knuckles as he molded the pastry-thin tallow and tried to ignore the swelling screams of the baby in the bedroom.
The sulphurous stench of the candle rose around him making him nauseous. He pressed harder and harder at the glutinous knobs of wax oozing down the thick stem, kneading it and squeezing it as he might the throat of some strangling victim.
The baby's cries grew louder, more accusing.
He choked, smeared wax across his chin and cursed. Pain rose in his face and stabbed at his eyes. He lashed out. The candle spattered across the table and rolled onto the carpet.
"Shit," he whispered.
The wailing stopped.
Peace, apart from the sound of a football being kicked around outside and the tick of the electric heater. Normal sounds he could handle.
He was holding his breath, as if letting it out would start the cacophony again. Eventually, when he was sure the lull in the crying was more than a deceptive pause, he breathed out the tension.
He glanced across the living room at the bedroom door, shut tight since he had left it two nights ago. In that time he had tried to sleep on the sofa and at the kitchen table -- both options proved impossible. The bed in the closed off room seemed like an oasis but, similarly, sleep on it would be as impossible as a mirage.
He scooped the fragments of loose wax from the carpet. A few firming gobbets had already leached into the thick strands of the carpet. There would be mess if he tried to pull wax from wool so he left them until he could get the flat iron from the kitchen.
A key rattled in the front door: he flinched, throwing panicked glances between the bedroom and the entrance to the flat. His alarm receded slightly when Barney appeared carrying brimming Tesco carriers.
"Oh, you are in," said the young man. He carried on into the kitchen with only a nod towards Dean and dumped the shopping on the steel draining board. "You forgot to unlock the door".
"I know," Dean smiled apologetically.
They kissed and Barney broke away in search of teabags in one of the cupboards above the Microwave.
"How was it last night?" Dean asked.
"It was fine," Barney sighed. "Sometimes I can't see the point, two days out of the office doing team building exercises with people who resent each other, telling tales behind each other's backs, then you're expected to put on a united front for set piece dinners. I mean, for whose benefit? The waiters?" He gave up on the teabags and started to shovel loose tea into a teapot. "You want one?"
Dean nodded. "When have you got to get back."
"Not supposed to be gone," Barney smiled. "I was just going to put my feet up for ten minutes, didn't think you'd be here, but perhaps we could fit in a shag before I return."
"What, here?" Dean stepped back, shocked not by the thought of fucking in the kitchen -- seen that, done that -- but, instead, haunted by the vision of opening that bedroom door.
"Oh, come on," Barney teased. "You've gotta be as desperate as I am."
Yes, thought Dean, and you only know the half of it. He took the offered mug of tea and sipped at its scalding lip. "You think you'll finish early tonight?" He said, laying a plan to mollify his lover.
"Should be."
"Good old fashioned candles and satin sheets?"
"Right now I'd much prefer the kitchen table but -- "Barney shrugged. "How's it been here?"
"Quiet."
"What happened to the table out there?"
"I went for a bath and when I got back the candle had spilled all over it. I tried to clear it up but --"
Barney fingers tightened around his cup.
"I'm sorry."
"Get it cleaned by tonight." The sudden anger rolled in spasms across his face.
Heat swelled in Dean's cheeks. He hated Barney's put downs, for not being able to respond quickly enough but, worst of all, for not being able to please him all the time. Maybe he should guide his lover's fingers down the zip of his jeans, lay back on the table and let Barney use up his anger between his legs. Anything was better than another half an hour of simmering irritation.
Barney slammed his mug down on the table and the smile reappeared on his face. "What are you going to do this afternoon."
Disarmed, he told the truth. "I think I'll give Suzy a call."
Barney's sigh was thick and betrayed the sarcasm that entered his voice at the mention of Dean's sister. "What's the point. She's just like your parents were. You'll never cure her."
"She's not." Dean insisted. "They managed to push her away just as they did me."
"I'd say that was a good thing. But just because she was finally categorized as outcast by your mother doesn't make her any less of a homophobe."
"She might understand better."
"Oh yeah, like blacks have it tough, agreed, but that doesn't stop some of the soul brothers beating the shit out of other minorities."
Sometimes I wish someone would beat the shit out of you...the thought tip-toed guilty across Dean's mind, unbidden, unnerving, unvoiced.
He kept the rest to himself, knew that if he steered the conversation back to Barney the danger would pass. "What's left to do when you get back?"
"We're working on a mission statement and set of plans for the next six months -- that's if Blake doesn't start arguing with Harper about roles and responsibilities."
"When do you think you'll be back."
"About seven. Why?"
"Candles and satin sheets."
Barney grinned and slid his hand between Dean's thighs. "And don't forget to mop up the candle shit."

Dean was rubbing TCP into the bruises on his arms when the baby began to wail again. Dropping the tube into the bathroom sink he groaned and pressed his hands to his ears: but the sound rose as if it was coming from his own head.
He stumbled out of the bathroom and faced the bedroom door. There was no way he could go in there. The constant dread over the past two days had grown like a barrier that would not be broken. Perhaps if Barney was here he might be able to enter the room: the fear of a beating might out-race the terror that marched in his heart every time the child began to wail.
The cries were unbearable now. He knew that if he entered the bedroom he would be confronted by the same unbearable mystery, but the infant's torment was becoming just as painful to him.
Dean gripped the bedroom door handle warily. He twisted it slowly. As door parted from frame the crying stopped. The sudden absence of sound almost made him draw back but, as if on a conveyor belt with no emergency stop button to hand, he continued through.
A milky draft descended as he entered the room and looked around. Quite what he had expected to see defied him, but there was no baby, or any sign of infant occupation. Just like before when he had been so sure that Virginia -- one of the tenants downstairs -- had left young Jordan in the room while she had gone in search of him. The room had been empty, no sign of baby then as now.

He sat on the bed, head drooping, tears threatening to breach his puffy eyelids. When he looked up he saw the phone on the bedside table. Picking it up he dialed an internal number. There was a pause, long enough for Dean to think she wasn't there, but then the female voice answered. "Hello?"
"Victoria. It's Dean. Can I come down and see you?"

The laughing child riding the floor in the corner of the room was oddly comforting. Dean relaxed in a chair soft wide-backed chair, keeping an eye on the little girl while Victoria poured them beers in the kitchen.
"So, what's your problem sweetheart?" She shouted.
She was mature for a new mother - well into her 40s. The room in which they sat, decorated with floral designs, a windowsill full of model windmills and furniture protected with Timberlake throws suggested a strict Victorian view of life. Even her little girl was dressed in a traditional pink floral dress that Dean knew had been run up on the old hand-cranked Singer Sewing Machine. It sat as a permanent fixture on the dining room table denying the youth of the 22-year-old boyfriend she had attracted to this nest, but reassuring any visitor. Homely. Caring maturity coupled with wild, almost erotic, intuition; she was the perfect person to take into his confidence.
He accepted the tankard of beer she offered and looked deliberately into her soothing slate blue eyes. "I know it goes against my nature but I'm worried about Susannah."
"You're right," she smiled, stoically. "That doesn't sound like you. I thought you didn't care what your family did or even suffered any more?"
"I don't," he said quickly. "But Suzy's pregnant -- seven months. I found out last week."
She raised an eyebrow. "How? Spies in the family camp?"
"Someone I know works at the hospital."
"Ah. The eyes and ears of the world are gay." she smiled. "Isn't this something to be pleased about -- even if you don't give a damn."
He sighed. "Did you worry when you were pregnant?"
"For about a month," she nodded and looked over at her baby. "But there's more to fret about when they've escaped the womb. What's the problem? Has your spy said something?"
He could only laugh, but it was short and not particularly sweet. "He's not exactly in with the consultants. And it's just something I'm feeling. Almost like a premonition." How much closer to the truth could he come?
"If it's just a feeling why not guilt, or anger for not seeing her for two years; or frustration that you're not going to be a proper uncle."
"It's more than that."
She seemed to ignore his response. "You made a choice to tell them when you met Barney - God help you." She took a sip of beer and licked at the white froth that gummed her lips. "I don't know. Perhaps the prospect of having a baby will make her a more considerate woman. I suppose she might see you out of pity."
"Oh thanks."
"Does it matter what the reason is? You get to see her, to speak to her. Your chance to show her concern."
"And she might go for that?"
"You haven't tried in two years." Her smile was one of kindness this time. "Miracles and babies seem to fit together, if, sometimes, uncomfortably." She looked at her own child who was staring up at her, silently.

Dean woke to silence. He lay curled on the sofa trying to distinguish the broken carriage clock, candlesticks and other familiar objects on the mantle above the redundant fireplace. They were comforting, settled in a place that he recognized.
As a child he had suffered from asthma and heavy colds each time the family had gone on holiday. Each break in the country or at the seaside had been designed to give rest to both parents and children alike. Instead the very thought of a long summer holiday had inspired him with fear.
Now he recognised an aversion to the difference and change. When in his early twenties, he had tried to face it off, deliberately going to the most exotic holiday destination - Tangiers, Cos, Lesbia - in an effort to erase the phobia. Now, however, he realised that such fighting was pointless and that the need for routine and familiarity could be a positive comfort in his life. Even Barney's constant rage had, through familiarity, lost its rawness: he could cope with it.
Dean shifted against the leather of the sofa and felt the screw of familiar bruises on his back, arms and legs. The new double bed would soothe them and perhaps now in the silence, he could reclaim the bedroom.
He staggered to his feet, drunk with disturbed sleep, and padded towards the bedroom door.
The handle was stickily warm to his touch, as if a band of wild children had pulled at it. It was then that he noticed her, watching him from the dim corner of the room; no, not watching him but, rather, the door. Her long, blue silver dress was caught around her, stretched by the bulge at her stomach.
She smiled, an expression he had not seen from her in more than two years. "Do you love me Dean?"
It was a challenge he had not expected: in the past two years it was her love he had missed.
"Of course," he whispered, as if any sound might destroy the butterfly illusion of her presence. "I do." Even when you hit me, pulled my hair, forced me into games I hated, I loved you then, so it's easy to love you now.
"Don't go in there. Not right now." It was the type of plea he had heard as a child when she had done something wrong, when her impish self had caved in at the thought of discovery.
And, now, just as then, he did not question her. His hand released the door handle. He looked back for appreciation but found the room empty.

Dean leafed through three old address books before finding Susannah's number and spent a further ten minutes agonizing over his own itinerant handwriting before seizing the courage to make the call.
A woman answered, sleepy and much too young to be his sister. "Hello? Who's this?"
"I...is Suzy there?" It was a foolish question. Susannah lived with her boyfriend in the ground floor flat of a Georgian Terrace in New Cross: there were no others.
"Who? Oh please, not at this time of night."
Maybe this was her and he had misremembered. When he could not reply he put down the phone.

The morning came and so did Barney, horny and insistent on sex before he climbed into bed for a good day's sleep.
Dean never objected and this time he found peace in Barney's satyric demands. They prepared him for sleep quicker than a bowl of Frosties and an hour in front of Breakfast television.
He waited another half-hour before easing himself into the bath and dabbing at the yellowing bruises on his thighs and forearms. The steam rising from the almost scolding water cocooned him from the rest of the flat.
Relieved of tight control imposed on him by others, he began to cry. He made no effort to wipe the thick, itchy, tears from his cheeks where they mingled with sweat. They had as much right to this time as he, and he would not deny them.
Reaching into the water, between his abused legs, he pulled out the can of beer he had hidden in case Barney had woken and found him relaxing with it.
The smallest incidents and objects were enough to make Barney violent these days. Sometimes his lover would even foresake sex when, unable to slide his penis accurately into Dean's prone rump, he would instead beat Dean's naked shivering body around the bedroom.
Dean gulped at the tart beer, rested his neck on the ledge of the bath and looked towards the shelf above the sink. A newly bought box of razor blades, balanced against a bar of grey soap, glinted blue and silver in the light of the heater bulb above him.
So tempting, so impossible.
He would never run away from Barney - even in that most dramatic of acts. He was so used to his lover's violence, and the calm companionship between admittedly escalating outbursts made escape seem unnecessary.
For all his faults, Barney also needed him and had often admitted it. He had compared everyone and everything else - family included - to the wax sloughed off by a brightly burning candle - tallow that could be scraped away and discarded at dawn.
Dean could understand the sentiment and had gone along with it -- until now. The dreams and visions of his sister, the insistent disembodied cries of the baby, had done more than spook him.
They had made him determined.

He waited an hour in the park behind Benjamin Street, snacking on a packet of Poppadum crisps before going in search of his sister’s house.
New Cross was little different from how he remembered it three years ago when Susannah had moved in after her honeymoon. Tatty terraces stood beside new glass paneled office buildings, a mixture of dwelling and dealing places - in every sense of the phrase.
Dean recognized the glossy green doorway in the arched white-stoned porch. He crossed the road, looking down the long lines of double-parked cars for signs of movement. The entrails of suburbia mixed here with the tight suits of city central: everyone's eyes on everyone else.
No one was watching now. It was the time of day that all was in transit: workers to offices, children to school or nursery. Only those with incentive to stay housebound would remain and he hoped Susannah in her last weeks of confinement might be there.
The path up the driveway was full of weed and long grass grew in the borders where the yellows and purples of spring plants struggled to make their presence known. Susannah was a wonder worker with gardens - her latest boyfriend, whomever he might be, obviously was not.
Dean searched for the doorbell, but after a minute gave up and slammed the ornate brass knocker. The footsteps beyond were light but slow, the rattle of the security chain hesitant. Whoever was answering had just got up. He hoped it wasn't the boyfriend.
The face at the doorway was female, the young body pregnant, but this was not Susannah.
She echoed his frown with her own and a movement to close the door.
"Excuse me," he said, trying to sound polite and trustworthy but feeling neither. "I'm looking for my sister. I thought she lived her."
She eyed him, nervously waiting for him to push his way in. "You have the wrong number or street?"
"No, I've been here before." He said.
"Did you phone last night?"
"Not me," Dean lied, sure that the truth would shut the door on him. He needed her trust and understanding.
"Well, I'm obviously not your sister."
"No," he said again. "I'm sorry, the person who told me was so sure. Maybe -- could I ask you when you moved in?"
She considered her response. "About a year ago."
He wanted to hit the doorframe, to vent his anger and frustration, but such violence was pointless and would only frighten her. "I don't understand it."
"Understand what?"
"A friend told me she was pregnant and as far as I knew she was still living here."
"It sounds like your friend got it wrong, or was winding you up?"

He called the hospital first but must have misdialled as the number would not connect. Terry had given it to him at the end of the hurried conversation and he must have written it down wrong.
The short bus journey to Southwark General gave him time to brood on just what else Terry had got wrong. Was Susannah even pregnant. If not, what was Terry's motive for lying?
Stepping off the bus, Dean stood at the shelter and pretended to read the timetables while the war between fear and determination engulfed his mind. What would be accomplished in yet another argument with yet another friend? Or what if he, himself, had got it wrong and looked the fool?
The need for closure won and he went in search of the hospital's inpatient reception area. A short, slender woman, who put him in mind of a dwarf from Norse legend, stood guard against a sea of struggling relatives. "Who was it you have an appointment to see."
"I've not got an appointment. I need to see Terry Ackwell. He's a junior Bed's Manager, I think that's what you call them" He selected the lie. "It's a family emergency."
She looked down at her computer terminal, typed at a few keys and tapped the spacebar. "Terry Ackwell. Are you sure he's in this building. There is a Doctor Terry Atwell...he's in Out Patients."
Dean shrugged. "Okay, thanks. I'll try over there."
Why wasn't he surprised? It had to be some sort of game: not the sort of cruel joke of which Barney would be capable but here he was the victim yet again.
Perhaps his family had decided to have its revenge, to show that while they could survive without him, he would scamper back at the slightest threat to them.
"Dean."
Thoughts scattered at the voice. He pulled up short of direct collision with the man who was walking toward him, the man who smiled grimly as if the meeting was fortuitous but his message not.
The man offered him his hand. "Terry Ackwell."
So this was the man he had never met, who had called out of the blue as a go-between with news of his sister; a man he had trusted because he knew so much. Dean shook the hand with little enthusiasm. "Is that Ackwell or Atwell? And you didn't tell me you were a doctor."
"I'm not. Never said I was. But I can see we need to talk more."
Dean allowed himself to be led down the corridor to a fire door that led out into a small, deserted quadrangle. They sat on a bench in the middle, surrounded by rose beds and a tiny cupid fountain.
"It's a memorial garden," Said Terry. "Used by the gynaecological department. Some of the women who feel up to it after their ops come out here."
"Ops?"
"Hysterectomies."
Dean nodded, slowly. "Can we clear up who you are before you go any further."
"I'm flesh and blood, work as a volunteer in the hospital shop and visit the patients with tea, coffee that sort of thing."
"Flesh and blood?"
"Yes." Terry moved quickly on. "I met your sister just under a year ago right here in this garden. She was sitting on this bench. We talked about her and her baby: it was due, would have been due, a week after we spoke. She was a nice girl. Said she was on her own, parents dead, boyfriend gone, all she had was a brother who she rarely saw -- said it was her own fault.
"I promised to drop by her ward, bring her some tea and a magazine the next afternoon. Problem was, I couldn't find her, not on any of the wards. I asked around and one of the nurses checked the hospital records. The only woman with that name was in intensive care and had been for more than a week.
"When I first saw her I thought she'd been in a car accident, but she hadn't. Apparently someone had beaten her - badly. She'd managed to get back home but..."
"She lost the baby?"
Terry nodded. "And she passed away the next day."
"But not for you." Unbelievably, he began to understand.
"No, not for me. I found her out here one evening looking confused. It was a shock for me. She was all cleaned up, not like in the IC unit.
"When she saw me she smiled and placed a hand on her belly. She was with her child again, just as she must have been before she was rushed into hospital."
Dean shook his head. "I can't..." the baby's cries, the image of his sister in the flat, of course he could. "Did she say who?"
"Yes, and she finds it hard to understand why you are still living with him."
"Barney."
"She never gave me his name."
"Why did you decide to tell me now?"
"She thought she could survive without justice, saw you were having a bad enough time right then, so, she told me to leave it alone. But she can see that if you keep letting him do what he does to you you're going to go where she is."
"Perhaps that's for the best."
"At his hand; all ugly and violent? You can't be that far-gone to want him to have his way with you as well. He is a monster, Dean, and what he says is wrong. Other people? He told you they're 'tallow'? They're not 'tallow'. What they do, what they say does matter. It has an impact, Dean."
Dean wiped tears from his eyes.
"She told me. You matter to her Dean. Even now."
"And she matters to me."
Terry nodded and frowned at the look Dean gave him.

He found Barney on the sofa watching Parkinson on television. He leaned over the back of the sofa and kissed him on the top of his head. "You know, I thought all gay men were victims. Obviously not."
He pulled Barney's head back and slipped the wide-bladed knife against his throat. "You thought you could get out of being a victim by playing predator. Well, that's easy when people can't see it. But I can now."
He pulled the knife horizontally. A thin line of blood jagged from his lover's badly shaved throat.
Barney yelled and, for the first time since Dean had known him there was fear mixed with his anger.
"You live for it, don't you," hissed Dean. "All that grovelling from other people makes you feel better. Well, you can't abuse what's not there. I'm going into the bedroom, if you try to join me your stomach will be crawling all over the carpet." He tugged again at Barney's hair. "I hope you understand just how I feel."

The bedroom was dark but that did not matter. It felt cool, normal, and peaceful. It was not the sort of place he could have expected murder to be committed. Yet, of all the places in the world they inhabited, Barney was most likely to have gone too far here.
Dean could not imagine his own body lying naked and bloody against the torn white sheet they often used as a covering for the more messy sexual acts. He did not want to imagine it because he knew it could happen if he stayed here.
Pulling a flight bag from the top of the wardrobe, he packed as many t-shirts, pullovers and boxer shorts as he could find. There was not much time. Dean knew from experience: Barney would not stay stunned long.
He was right. When he re-entered the living room, Barney was standing near the door. He backed away, no doubt wondering whether Dean's suddenly found self-belief could be put back in its case.
"Wrong." Dean mouthed. "I'm not the hesitant type any longer, not where you're concerned."
Barney stretched out his arm towards him. "What's the matter with you? The fucking knife --"
"I can't live with a murderer; I don't think anyone could, not knowingly - and I know."
"Know what?" Barney stepped closer.
Dean edged towards the front door. For the first time in his life he did not feel obliged to answer. "I kept with you because any other way I would have felt lonely. I suppose you'll be lonely when I've gone: no one to share your fists with, to abuse, to rape. It'll be a change for you, a bit quiet. But don't worry. I get the feeling you'll never be alone for long."
No time for hesitation. Dean closed the door on the flat before he could see Barney's response. He imagined the furniture would suffer.
As he left the building, the babies began to cry.

© John Gilbert, 2004