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It was seven o’clock on an icy December morning and Gavin was already at work. His alarm had gone off at five and such being the indiscriminate nature of alarms, had woken Tim as well.
Gavin had taken one look at his rumpled, furious face and slithered away across the mattress, bleating excuses.
“It’s just, I promised Mr. Brittas I’d check over the Centre before it opened and I have to do my morning exercises before I leave...”
Timmy had glowered at him from a welter of blankets, pouting and unplacated. Gavin would have liked to kiss him, but was too nervous of his reception to try. He’d put on his socks instead, which was a poor substitute and tried again.
“And I do want Mr. Brittas to see me as manager material and this is a manager’s job and Laura was up till midnight trying to get the soot off the decorations in time for the staff party and seeing as Mr. Brittas has had to walk ever since the exterminator glued that dead rat up the tailpipe of his car I thought if maybe I volunteered...”
This made things rather worse if anything. Tim had turned his back, supple and cosy looking in blue flannel pyjamas, and pretended to go to sleep.
The day outside was grey and uninviting. The bed inside was big and warm and full of sulking boyfriend. On the drive in Gavin had tormented himself with the luxurious thought of being a completely different person, one who had taken off his socks again and climbed back into bed, who had kissed along the curve of his lover’s neck until he relented and turned to embrace him. That other, less ambitious Gavin would probably be getting laid right now, or maybe sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of steaming coffee waiting for the blueberry pancakes to be done.
But actual Gavin was maybe going to be Assistant Manager one day and that was even better. Definitely.
He went grimly about the morning duties of opening the Centre; unlocking the doors, turning on the lights, skimming the daily death threats for anything especially imminent, checking the pool for floating bodies...
There was something wrong with the water.
Gavin stood by the side of the pool and squinted into the depths. It was blue enough, certainly and not bubbling suspiciously or letting off strange smelling steam. No ominous triangular fin came beelining at him, not even so much as a marinating turd. But something…
He got down on his knees and reached out, touching the water with a cautious finger.
The water bent.
* * *
The list of suspects was long. The caterers who had been chided on the sweaty redness of their faces. The owner of a local corner store whose son had got his hand stuck in the vending machine trying to steal chocolate and who had been left there, on purpose, for six hours. Any number of disgruntled ex-employees whose friends or relatives might, just might, have owned a gelatin factory.
“It’s not so much the who,” Laura said, gently patting the pool’s surface and watching the subsequent wild jiggling. “It’s the how. I mean, it’s not exactly a small pool.”
“It most certainly is the who!” Mr. Brittas glowered at the twenty five meter jelly spread out before him, clearly taking each jiggle as a personal affront. “How can they go to prison if we don’t know who did it?”
Mr. Brittas had already closed down the whole Centre in the hopes of preserving evidence and Gavin had re-locked the doors with a sinking heart.
Friends of his had used to be puzzled by Gavin’s desire for as many people to come to the Centre as possible.
“It’s less work, isn’t it?” one had said, leisurely sucking an olive off a cocktail stick at the bar of the rather exclusive pub he and Tim liked to frequent “and you get paid the same whether they come in or not?”
Another, embittered by years of retail work had chimed in “If I only had to deal with three customers a day you wouldn’t see me being so bloody miserable all the time. If it ever happens, I’ll throw a party and you’ll be the only person I don’t invite for being such an ungrateful ass about it.”
And then the day had come, a dark day, when Mr. Brittas’s enormous healthy body had filled the doorway of their quiet retreat. He had been jovial. He had brought them all drinks and enquired endlessly about wives and extolled the virtues of his own. He had described, in relentless detail, the birth of his children, blithely ignoring the white faces of his trapped listeners. He had clapped two young men on the shoulder and congratulated them on the closeness of their friendship. “My brother and I” he had brayed in their shrinking ears “hug all the time. I always say we wouldn’t see so much youth violence if young men weren’t so afraid to hug each other.” And then his arms had opened, wide as crocodile jaws, in invitation.
They had understood, after that. It was a dilution thing, really. The more people who were in the building, the smaller the percentage of them who were Mr. Brittas. Gavin dreamed of the doors opening to a flood of people, all of them not Mr. Brittas. A 100:1 ratio of normal human beings to Mr. Brittas. Mr. Brittas a forgotten speck in the multitude.
Tim, standing with his arms crossed in the assembled gaggle of astonished staff, was looking rather more upbeat about the whole affair. His mouth, held in a firmly controlled line, was suitably solemn but his blue eyes sparked with mirth.
Gavin looked at him longingly. Apparently the ruining of Brittas’s day and the subsequent looming cancellation of the Staff Christmas Party had overcome his earlier bad mood. Gavin would make a try for his good morning kiss in the locker room; there was a shadowed nook that had been left behind after two of the lockers had melted that seemed almost made for sneaky workplace clinches.
The staff party being cancelled was a bit of luck too. It meant he could go straight home after his shift was ended. Have himself a nice cup of tea and a bit of a sit down before tidying the place up. Perhaps just once he could forget about the heating bill and turn on their struggling radiators full blast and light a scented candle or two so when Tim came home later it would be to warmth and comfort. There’d be time for a film in the evening now, something silly and Christmassy that they could fall asleep watching. Gavin could almost taste the swiss hot chocolate, feel the warm weight of Timmy tucked up against him and the brush of his hair against his cheek, see the gentle twinkle of the fairy lights. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad day after all. Maybe-
Mr. Brittas was handing him a bucket, one of the large red jobs that were supposed to be used for putting out fires. Gavin took it with reflexive obedience then stared at it helplessly. Surely there wasn’t a fire as well?
“Get going then!” Mr. Brittas beamed at him as if he was a particularly dense schoolchild.
“Get going with what, Mr. Brittas?” Gavin clutched his bucket to his chest, as if it might shield him from whatever was coming. It did not. Mr. Brittas gestured sweepingly towards the still rippling disaster that only yesterday had been a rather nice pool.
“Emptying it, Gavin! It can’t stay like that forever, can it? What if a small child snuck in and tried to eat the whole thing? The health implications don’t bear thinking about. And that’s not to mention the damage to the community from not having regular access to one of the leisure Centre’s most important facilities.”
He was serious. Gavin knew he was serious because he wasn’t having his shoulder slapped or his ear tweaked.
He looked at the bucket, the 20,000 gallon pool and finally back at Mr. Brittas’s stupid, smiling face. Tim had already left to change into his uniform. He was probably in the changing rooms right now wearing nothing but a pair of little shorts. The dark, chemical smelling cranny where the lockers had been loomed invitingly in his mind.
In some other universe there was a Gavin, a bold, irresponsible creature, who was even now thrusting the bucket back at Mr. Brittas with a laugh of cold derision and striding off down the corridor, heart full and lips ready.
His mouth opened in protest, then closed.
“Right away, Mr. Brittas.”
It looked like his good morning kiss was going to be delayed again.
* * *
Gavin had only been emptying the pool for half an hour before he started seriously considering flinging himself into the waters and letting the jelly take him. The bucket, though comically small for its purpose, was gruellingly heavy when brimful of highly chlorinated dessert and the handle, which was no more than a narrow strip of galvanised scarlet wire, dug painfully into his hands.
The first bucketful had been optimistically carried through to the kitchen sink, where the wobbling blue mass remained in stubborn resistance to begging, pleading and plungers. Following buckets had been carried out to the cricket pitch, which was a good three minutes walk from the pool. His back ached, his shoulders burned, his legs and feet were slippery with partially melted jelly. The heap on the cricket pitch grew to a discomfiting size but the pool looked as full as when he’d started.
He got down on creaking knees to fill bucket number ten. The fire bucket held two gallons, which meant he had about nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety buckets to go.
“Don’t tell me you’re actually doing it?”
Gavin started, sunk in slimy misery he had missed Tim padding up behind him on noiseless bare feet. He couldn’t help noticing that Tim had exchanged his uniform for a pair of silky black swimming trunks that were most definitely not Leisure Centre compliant. Standard issue or not, they were making him seriously consider breaking his own rules on public displays of affection by resting his hot forehead against the lustrous curve of his boyfriend’s thigh.
“Mr. Brittas told me to.” It came out as a defeated whine. Grovelling about on his hands and knees by the clammy poolside, Gavin wondered vaguely how anyone had ever managed to be attracted to him.
When I’m Assistant Manager, he promised himself, everything will be different.
Tim gave him a contemptuous glance, clearly restraining several unflattering comments and lowered himself into the pool with a series of intriguing squelching noises. Gavin stared at him helplessly.
“Did Mr. Brittas say you could, I mean, are you supposed to…?” When he was Assistant Manager, he would give the orders. He’d let Tim play in the jelly pool all day if that was what he wanted.
Tim slapped the pool with an authoritative hand. The jelly disintegrated under the impact.
“Gelatin collapses when agitated” he explained, patiently. “If we move about in it enough, it’ll turn back into water and we can drain the pool and go home. Or I can go home and you can spend the night making a jelly mountain on the cricket pitch because Mr. Brittas told you to.”
God but he wanted to go home. Gavin pulled off his sodden trainers and slid, rather nervously, into the pool. The cold, slick jelly felt wonderful against his overworked body. He picked up a double handful of it and let it drop again, watching as it jiggled itself into harmless liquidity.
“It’s working,” he murmured, wonderingly, “it’s really working.”
“I told you it would.” And Timmy looked so handsome and so smug, beaming triumphantly in waist deep jelly that Gavin simply couldn’t resist. He took up another handful of the jelly and threw it.
Gavin had been captain of the cricket team at school. His handful rocketed through the air in a perfectly delivered and highly illegal beamer before spattering against Tim’s chest with a loud smacking sound. Tim gave a pained yelp and clutched the smitten area as if he’d been shot, even staggering back a few paces from the force of the impact.
Gavin was clearly the worst, most thoughtless boyfriend in the whole world, ever and he started to say so, which was apparently what Timmy had been waiting for because a large wad of jelly came sailing through the air and smacked him right in his open apologising mouth.
Gavin coughed, spat blue slime and thought, right.
The tensing of his muscles had given him away; Tim whirled in place and set off in a floundering but surprisingly effective front crawl. Gavin hurled himself after him, half swimming, half running, a comet tail of broken jelly trailing out behind him.
Tim was a good swimmer, but this was no ordinary water and Gavin’s extra few inches of height gave his method the edge. He closed the gap, arms wind-milling furiously, and made a wild grab at Tim’s bare shoulder, which slid from between his fingers like a buttered otter. He lunged again and got a firmer grip around his wrist.
“I’ve got you!” he crowed, hauling him in and keeping his head bowed against a last ditch defensive barrage of jelly. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you..” His voice trailed off. They were flush against each other now, normally familiar skin made slippery and strange. Their ribs heaved in tandem. Tim, always the more daring of the two when it came to this sort of thing, caught his lower lip between his teeth and slid his thumb beneath the waistband of Gavin’s shorts.
Gavin nervously swallowed a mouthful of partially congealed pool water. It was still morning, which meant there was still time...
“Timothy Whistler aren’t you supposed to be running the Jolly Holly aerobics class? And Gavin, I told you to get the pool emptied!”
They burst apart, panting, in a lagoon of liquefied jelly. Mr. Brittas’s long shadow stretched over the rumpled water, almost touching them.
“The aerobics class is cancelled Mr. Brittas, you closed the Centre, remember? And Gavin is emptying the pool” Tim went through another demonstration of the jelly’s fatal weakness.
Mr. Brittas frowned and looked critically at the pool, taking in the incriminating paths of broken jelly that led straight to their steamy little snogging pond. Gavin’s erection had disappeared so completely he thought he may never have another.
“Well.” Mr. Brittas said slowly, “Well, this is exactly the kind of innovative thinking that I’ve been trying to encourage in the staff. I’m very proud of both of you.”
“It was Gavin’s idea, really” Tim added, and Gavin could have hugged him. Could have, but didn’t.
“In fact,” Mr. Brittas continued, “by a wonderful stroke of luck I’ve got a spare pare of swimming trunks in my locker. I think I’ll get in with you. If we all link arms and really work together, there may be time for the staff party after all!”
Mr. Brittas was turning away. He was going to get his swimming trunks. He was going to get in the jelly with them. No. No.
“I’ve just thought,” Tim said quickly. “Jelly melts easily. I bet if you turn up the pool heaters it’d do the trick. It’d be a lot quicker too.”
A terrible, familiar glow illuminated Mr. Brittas. His cheeks quivered with ripples of emotion. His chest puffed out. His eyes, hot with fanaticism, fixed themselves on Tim, who quailed beneath their uncomfortable intensity.
Gavin stepped in front of him without thinking, although they both well knew that Mr. Brittas inflamed was more of a spiritual than physical threat.
“Did you know Tim, when I first interviewed you I didn’t think much of you? I thought ‘there stands a man who’s never done a worthwhile thing in his life’, a man doomed to failure and obscurity-”
Tim made a strangled noise low in his throat; Gavin’s protecting arm had become a restraining one. “-but I saw potential in you too. And under my tutelage you’re finally blossoming into something resembling a worthwhile citizen. This is a proud day for me. A proud day for Whitbury Newtown Leisure Centre. I shall put a gold star on your performance sheet.”
He about-turned, a parody of military bearing and marched off, hopefully to melt the pool.
They watched his departing back with matching sighs of relief. Gavin started slowly for the edge of the pool. The jelly was as squelchy as ever but the fun had gone out of it. He suddenly realised his spare uniform was in the dryer at home and that he was going to be stuck in his jelly clothes until his shift ended.
“Couldn’t you have thought of that thing with the pool heaters earlier?” He complained. “It would have saved a lot of trouble.”
Tim heaved himself out, sleek as a seal, and grinned unrepentantly at his dishevelled partner.
“I did” he said.
* * *
Tim’s idea worked like a charm. With the pool heat turned up to full the jelly softened, sagged and finally surrendered. Gavin had stood by while the last of it swirled down the drain with mixed feelings. On the one hand, he’d missed what was probably a once-in-a-lifetime chance to make out in a jelly vat. On the other he felt he’d come a little closer to the longed for position of Assistant Manager. He and Timmy were the heroes of the hour, or at least they would have been if every member of staff hadn't privately hoped to sneak back in after their shift to have a bit of a go in the jelly and who were not slow in expressing their bitter disappointment .
The Staff Party had been un-cancelled, then re-cancelled when the goose, delivered by an irate and vengeful caterer had turned out to be raw, feathery, and full of vengeance, then un-cancelled again when Mrs. Brittas had somehow been able to produce enough sandwiches for eighty people with ten minutes notice.
The sandwiches arrived partially defrosted and emitting a suppressed but ever increasing odour.
“Don’t eat them!” Mrs. Brittas had whispered urgently “they’re not...recent”
Gavin watched three of them disappear down the serpentine neck of the goose. Colin had assumed it was a Christmas present for him and, his eyes brimming with joyful tears, had named it Noel. In return he had presented Mr. Brittas with a cardboard box of home-made Christmas crackers. The crackers, rudely constructed from recycled paper had a singed look and occasionally shifted in place as if they were under some great internal pressure.
“I didn’t know they’d ever be around people.” Mrs. Brittas defended herself as her husband approached the suppurating platefuls. “There’s never actually been a party. I always turn up with them and the buildings on fire, or everyone’s got diphtheria or something. And I put them back in the freezer.”
Gavin tried to summon a reassuring smile. He’d been at the Centre since before the sun rose and was still here six hours after it had set. Sixteen consecutive hours of Mr. Brittas. In honour of the party he’d changed out of his soggy leisure centre uniform and into the Christmas jumper his mother had sent him, along with a pointed note about coming home for the holidays and meeting that nice girl from church. The jumper, made of toe curlingly expensive wool from an obscure breed of Italian sheep, was itchy.
Tim, resplendent in a new leather jacket that had nearly got them both booted out was eyeing the curling edges of the sandwiches with fastidious distaste. There was a free range duck – most definitely dead- waiting for them in the fridge at home and two plates of smoked salmon pate with Christmas trees embossed on their soft pink surface. Blood oranges in a little bowl on the coffee table. Tim had gotten up at dawn on his day off to be sure of getting them after Gavin had mentioned, quite casually, that they’d been a family Christmas tradition when he was growing up.
Julie had hung a sprig of mistletoe from the lintel of the staff room door, presumably for the purpose of causing sexual harassment suits.
I could kiss him under that, Gavin thought, glancing over to where Mr. Brittas was biting into a five year old fish paste sandwich and pretending for his wife’s sake to enjoy it. Mr. Brittas was an infuriating man but not an evil one, surely he wouldn’t be fired for kissing his boyfriend under the mistletoe on Christmas. Surely.
“Timmy,” he squeaked out, “could you come over by the door for a second?”
Tim turned to look at him. Everyone else turned as well because the stress had made his voice sound like a deflating balloon. Mr. Brittas even put down his gently fizzing sandwich.
Tim walked uncertainly up to him; his eyes flicked between Gavin, perspiring with anxiety and the sprig of plastic mistletoe. Gavin tried to ignore the goggling expressions of his colleagues, the increasingly overwhelming smells of fresh goose shit and fermented fish and to think only of Timmy, his blue eyes, the buttery softness of the new jacket, the bowl of blood oranges. You can do this he told himself, you can.
The crackers spontaneously combusted.
Their position nearest the door was a decided advantage in escaping the billowing clouds of sulphurous yellow smoke that were rapidly rendering the staff room incapable of supporting human life. Gavin groped for Tim’s hand in the smog, found it and towed him out of the nearest fire escape. The night had turned very cold. Gavin’s jelly mountain had frosted over and glittered like an iceberg. They crouched behind it, eyes watering, gulping lungfuls of sharp winter air.
“I would have done it, you know” It seemed very important that Tim should know that.
Tim straightened up, the white knuckled grip he had on Gavin’s hand relaxed a little.
“I know. It’s okay.”
Staff members and foul smells were spilling out of various leisure centre exists. Over the muffled bangs of the remaining igniting crackers, the coughing of escaping employees, the furious honks of Noel and approaching sirens came another sound, bright and pure; the church bells striking midnight. It was morning.
Finally, thought Gavin and took Tim’s tear-wet and smoke-streaked face between his hands and kissed him.