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This is all Butch’s fault, actually.
He’d woken up in his car, sans car keys, with a note jammed between his forehead and top of the steering wheel: Come find me for your keys when you have a clear head again, my darling. After last time I’m a strictly pro boner -not pro bono- lawyer! Hugs and kisses, Butch xxx
Niall fires off a few irate texts to Butch, who responds simply with a blowing kiss emoji. One collision with a lamppost and a close shave with a Driving Under the Influence conviction and suddenly he’s the one who has to be saved from himself.
The morning is grey and cold and Niall contemplates it for a while, trying to put it into words he could use in his book but soon gives up.
He starts walking in what he’s pretty sure is the direction of his flat. The route is familiar, taking him across still quiet roads and past sleeping houses. His stomach growls - demanding of a suspiciously cheap prepackaged sandwich and a Red Bull, but every shop he passes is shut up with its iron shutters down.
Eventually, after what feels like the slow sludge of entire years, he gets to an underpass by the main road that his flat is on the other side of.
It has a malign aura from the moment he walks in. It smells like stale piss, which is nothing new. Graffiti -some with at least some artistic merit, some just massive anatomically incorrect cocks and balls- covers every inch of the walls. There’s a single guy near the opposite end, as though waiting for something: he’s huge, ginger, cauliflower-eared. When Niall enters, the bloke smiles at him - wide and threatening.
It’s immediately clear he was, in fact, waiting. For some unfortunate cunt like Niall to be out walking in an underpass at the arse crack of dawn.
Niall tries to keep walking, keeping his eyes down. They meet in the middle. He steps in Niall’s way several times, deliberately.
Fuck.
“Can I get through, please?” Niall asks tightly.
“Not ‘till you pay the toll, mate.” Niall tries to step beyond him again, but isn’t quick enough. “Ah, ah, not so fast.”
“Just let me go through,” Niall says, wishing for the first time ever he’d gotten himself into steroids on his journey of self destruction. Just a tiny bit of ‘roid rage could have really helped in this exact situation.
“Can’t, mate. Rules is rules, you gotta pay the toll.”
Probably no point asking exactly which byelaw or subsection in the Glasgow City Council Ordinances gives him the authority to collect this supposed toll. It’s probably not really the point.
He’s too tired for this shit. “Why don’t you fuck all the off, ‘mate’.”
For his trouble, Niall is immediately shoved back against the wall, head cracking against the concrete. He hisses in pain.
“Now, now, don’t be rude. The toll is going up and up the more you drag this on, you wee cunt.”
“What do you want?”
“Your wallet and phone, for starters.”
There’s just enough drug-induced invulnerability left in him to not turn ultra-submissive in the face of threat like he usually does.
“Or what?”
The guy’s face curls into a sneer. “Or I’ll-“
“Ronnie,” A new voice says. A young man saunters towards them. Taller than Niall by a clear few inches, not as tall as Niall’s underpass friend, but more instantly imposing and interesting by strides. He has a smirking, unbothered confidence about him that makes even Niall feel a need to stand up straighter.
His would-be mugger shifts characters instantly.
“Pallie! What the fuck? Not seen you since Polmont!” They do some intricate masculine handshake-cum-hug thing that Niall’s never had enough male friends to ever have done before (Butch was made too late in life and also, barely counts.) “What’s happenin’? How you been?”
Fantastic, the fucking juvenile deliquent cavalry’s arrived, Niall thinks darkly. He briefly considers using the distraction to make a run for it but he doesn’t fancy his chances against two of them. Not even on his best day, much less after a night of drugs and blowjobs.
“Aw, you know. Carrying on.”
“You still with that bird of yours? What’s-her-name, Maura?”
Niall just stands there, staring ahead at the graffiti on the opposite wall, feeling like a spare prick. What a great time for two fine young criminals to have a casual catch up. Right in the middle of Niall’s mugging.
“Mona,” Pallie corrects sharply. “Maura’s my mum, you dumb fuck.”
“Oh shit, sorry, Pallie. Mona, I meant.”
“Sure you did.” Pallie rolls his eyes. “On and off, mate. On and off. There’s lots of lassies in this city, Ron. Be cruel to deprive them of what I got being tied down to just one of ‘em.” At this Pallie catches Niall’s eye and actually winks. Niall has no idea what to do with it or why his cheeks start heating up in the chill of the morning.
“Fuck yeah. Nice, nice,” Ronnie says. He sounds oddly simpering now, and Niall finds him a whole order of magnitude less threatening than he did about two minutes ago.
There’s an awkward minute where no one speaks. Niall just looks between his would-be muggers, waiting for something to happen.
“Off you fuck, then.” It takes a minute for Niall to realise Pallie’s talking to Ronnie, not to him. And then he isn’t sure what the fuck is going on anymore.
Ronnie’s mouth opens and closes like a particularly ugly fish. He glances at Niall as though for back up. The cheeky gobshite. “I was just going to-”
Pallie stares. “You were going to… what?”
“Oh, nothin’.” Ronnie shrugs, feigning indifference. “Nothin’, Pallie. He’s all yours.”
Pallie just smiles, lips going thin. He already knew the outcome. Ronnie wanders in the direction he came, looking back at Niall threateningly a couple of times as though it’s somehow his fault a second mugger laid claim to him in the space of five minutes. He eventually disappears in the circle of the entrance.
“Oh great. Was your wee mate just keeping me warm for you then?” Niall asks, annoyed. He pulls out his phone and wallet and offers them to Pallie. “Here, here you go.”
Pallie just stares at him. His eyes are a flat blue.
“I can go to the cash machine if you want, get more out if it’s not enough in there?” Niall feels slightly insane. “If you wait til the shops open I can go get an envelope and some pretty fucking unicorn stickers to put on them if that’ll make you happy?”
Pallie says nothing. Does nothing. Niall jabs his belongings towards him again.
“Fucking take them, then.”
“I’m not gonna rob you.”
His outstretched hand wavers uncertainly.
“You’re not?”
Pallie shakes his head.
“Oh.” Niall puts his phone and wallet slowly back in his coat pocket. He doesn’t trust that this isn’t a ploy to get him to lower his guard. “Um. Thanks?”
Thanking a stranger for not mugging him. God, he’s plumbing new depths. His therapist would be so disappointed.
Pallie looks him up and down slowly. Niall swallows hard, half-threatened and half… something else.
“You can owe me one,” Pallie says finally, mysteriously.
And with that, Pallie just walks off. Niall stares after him - trying to process the strange encounter and coming up empty.
“Wait!” It takes him half a second to realise he’s said it out loud.
It well may be that the last thing Niall needs is to be engaging young men he knows to have been once resident at Polmont in conversations in underpasses. Never could leave well enough alone though, as his mum likes to remind him.
Pallie stops and turns on his heel.
“Why’d you stop your mate? Isn’t it against some young deliquents’ code of honour or something?”
Pallie shrugs slowly, something like a smile playing on his lips. “Wasn’t a fair fight.”
“It was one-on-one?”
“Yeah, but look at you.” As though this explains everything. Indignant offence cuts through the gratitude. “Be like leaving fuckin’…. Bambi in a cage fight. Plus, Ronnie’s a little gobshite.”
“I’m stronger than I look,” Niall complains. It sounds more defensive than he intends.
Pallie just snorts out loud. “Alright, big man, I believe ‘ya. I’ll leave you to it next time, aye.”
“Not that I’m not grateful.”
“Ah, I’m sure you are, Bambi. Can’t be at your fightin’ best after all the powder you’ve been on tonight, eh?”
Niall goes pale. “… What? I’m not-”
Pallie points at his face. “The sweat around your noggin, your pupils- oh, and the white you’ve still got on your nostrils is a dead fuckin’ giveaway.”
Niall instinctively sniffs hard, wipes his nose with his sleeve.
“Nah, you don’t like the coke, you just like the smell, right?” Pallie says conspiratorially, smirking. “No worries, Bambi. Your secret’s safe with me.”
Niall’s head is spinning - how Pallie knew about the drugs from one look at him when Niall supposedly tries to be careful (the agent would go apeshit if Niall Kennedy respected author and drug addict started circulating in the tabloids). How he’s already been christened with a nickname from him. How intrigued he is already by this rough and ready, perceptive and unusual young man.
Words spill from his mind trying to capture him properly, to do him justice. Niall wants to write suddenly. He wants to write about Pallie.
“What’s your name?” Niall asks him, out of nowhere.
Pallie considers this, considers Niall, then says simply: “Ruben.”
-
“My keys, please,” Niall demands, as soon as Butch’s door opens. “You cheeky fucking slag.”
“Guilty.” He’s smiling beatifically, hands up in supplication. “Come in, I’ll get you a drink for your troubles.”
Niall follows him in, taking in the now-familiar homoerotic art adorning the walls of Butch’s place. They still make him feel a bit uncomfortable despite everything, all the sculpted bums and chiselled boys. He can’t look at them too long, still scared Gus will jump out of a hidden corner and call him a fag. Scared of being Homosexual with a capital H.
“You could have at least put me in a cab or something,” Niall says as they reach the pristine white of the ultra-modern kitchen.
“A lovely bit of walking can’t have done you any harm.”
Niall perches on a barstool. “I nearly got mugged, actually.”
Butch pauses from pulling two wine glasses from the cabinet to shoot him an incredulous look.
“Oh, pull the other one, Niall - it’s got bells on it,” he says. “You and your writer’s imagination. Let me guess, a handsome knight in shining armour saved you and your lily-white virtue at the last moment?”
Niall thinks about Ruben, the flat blue of his eyes. The ever present smirk. His confidence and control of the situation in the underpass.
“Not quite.”