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Jamie had a British Girl doll as a lad, and Roy braces for a long story at Higgins’ bustling cookout.
“Arsonist Emmeline, the suffragette,” Jamie grins. “Accessories were a Votes For Women sash, a feeding tube, and a poster of an ugly lady that said, “Forty and not married yet!”
“Why the fuck did she come with an anti-suffrage poster?”
“Well obviously cause she torn it down?”
Jamie has a way of getting a high-pitched laugh out of Roy lately, one that’s very different than his usual devilish purr. Only Jamie can get that laugh in this easy atmosphere that seems to follow them anywhere.
Things like this get Roy googling “do I have a fucking enlarged heart” more than he’d like.
Leslie’s terraced house is speckled with families, the smell of the cookout heavy on the elm-lined road. The five Higgins boys are hard at work making paper plates buckle under burgers and sausages, and the Greyhound boys are chasing each other with Nerf guns.
Roy recalls a time he wouldn’t have cared to socialise with the team, much less watch Leslie play stand-up bass in a polka-dotted apron, but all of this is strangely everything.
Roy is aware that Jamie forgets to eat at parties because he’s talking so much. What’s with the hunger strike, Temple of the Cog? Ted would say, and Roy hates what Ted has done to him. He makes Jamie a charcuterie sans crackers, and a cheeseless burger cut in quarters because he tends to wolf them down. Roy seriously considers a a slow feeder maze dish sometimes.
Jamie’s knee—crowning a bit from the rip in his jeans—is pressed firmly into Roy’s knee. It stays that way well after they devour everything, and maybe Roy pushes back a little harder, feeling a little lightning in his tired joints.
Now their hands are brushing on Jamie’s phone. “I must have a picture of a picture of that doll in here somewhere,” Jamie says.
At some point, Jamie really needs to buy himself a scanner, but Georgie has too many photos for a lad in constant motion to feed through one at a time.
Roy doesn’t even torture himself with the fact that he was in the premier league when some of these photos were taken, or that Jamie is younger than the fucking sun baby on Teletubbies. He's wrapped in the stories, and the way Jamie’s rubber lips form around certain words. It’s nothing like the sexy-baby way he used to talk about himself. Rather, it’s like now he wants Roy to know everything embarrassing.
Keeley is observing the boys as Rebecca makes a fussy plate for Jelka. “Oi, look how easy they are together lately,” Keeley nudges.
“Mm. Easy like when Roy had to convince Jamie to stop using natural deodorant?”
“Oh, much easier than that. I was erm, Team Aluminum myself.”
Roy and Jamie’s faces are close as they browse the scattered camera roll. “Look, my yam thighs were too fat for the trolley seat.”
“I hate pics of pics. I can see your hands in every one of these,” Roy sighs.
“I’ll crop them later, I was antsy to have my own copies. Never seen these before til recently.”
Roy’s brow sinks. Not because toddler Jamie is holding a cigarette in Tesco— that was acceptable in shops back then— he starts to notice what poor condition these particular photos are in as Jamie swipes through the lot. Sun bleached, creased, yellowish discoloration of the Polaroid borders. He remembers Georgie’s flawless Jamie shrine and finds this odd.
In one pic there’s another hand holding the photos, a weathered, spotted hand with a tacky ring.
Hard not to recognize a ring on someone who kept putting his fists up.
Roy lets out a low, but seismically significant growl. “You…saw that dicksplash?”
“Roy just let me just expla—“
“I knew those tattered-arse pictures didn’t belong to your mum. Don’t come crying in my arms again when he fucks you over!”
“You hugged me, twat! You always hug first.”
Roy can’t dispute that. He fumbles with a Nerf gun and shoots Jamie’s nose with a styrofoam dart, then storms towards Leslie’s house.
“Ey!! Really, Roy? Point blank?” Jamie sighs, holding the bridge of his nose. “I think you triggered me oil glands!”
Keeley and Rebecca—getting regaled with pregnancy complaints by Jane—look at each other with concern as the boys’ spat moves towards the house.
“Everyone keeps saying I don’t look pregnant from the back but what the fuck does looking pregnant from the back look like anyways?”
“Perhaps like Jamie?” Rebecca shrugs, watching as he sidesteps into the door.
“Huh. You got a point there.”
As always, Jamie follows Roy like Earl chasing a pigeon to his inevitable demise.
Leslie’s front room is drenched with light from the large windows, and Roy plops into a winged chair and says nothing, his brows doing all the talking.
This will be hard, Jamie knows that. As hard as it was to convince Ted that a Manc’s greatest wish was not, actually, for Oasis to get back together.
Jamie folds his arms. “Oi, fine, Clenched-Arse. Those pictures were Da’s. I seen him.”
“Surprised there wasn’t a pic of the Dutch window lady you both had a good laugh about.”
“Well. It were in there somewhere, I just-- Roy, please,” he addresses his leathered back that’s suddenly facing him. “It’s different now. He’s in rehab, ain’t had a scoop in months. He don’t talk to Bug and Denbo anymore.”
“Nobody should talk to people named Bug and Denbo!”
“Fuckin’ agreed mate, alright, but get this, he’s in step nine of all steps,” he says, hand to chest. “Eh? Making amends to everyone you fucked. Funny, yeah? He never got to step nine before.”
“That’s your sign that this time will be different for that tosspot?”
“It is, tho. He only had three slams of my performance in the final match. Three!”
Roy makes a sound like a clogged Nespresso machine. “Jamie.”
“Well? He has to cut down before going cold turkey.”
“Look…I want to believe he won’t fuck it. For your sake. And mine, because I—“ Roy trembles, swallowing words and letting his breath reach Jamie’s face instead. “I just…strongly suspect that a lot of the bad shit can’t be exorcised by the sweats.”
Jamie sighed. “Don’t think I haven’t gone over and over all this. And still…”
“I know.” Roy understands the and still. It keeps him seeing his Tory dad even if any conversation makes him want to twist his own head in a vise. “Even if he’d been sober, would you have told him about your British Girl doll back then?”
“Erm...”
“Thought so. That’s in his bones. And if I…came with you on a visit to the rehab. He’d take the piss about us being boyfriends or some shit, yeah?”
“Probably. But… it’s not like. I-mean. Would that even be so bad?”
“For you, yes! Maybe he won’t get violent in a facility, but he’ll fuck with your head over it.”
“Why would a joke about us bein’ boyfriends fuck me? I want you to come!”
They freeze solid on that wording like a couple of 8th year lads.
“—t-tothevisit. But er…also in the other manner. Independently or otherwise. Who wouldn’t want that for anyone? Boyfriend or not?”
Roy is visibly flushed. “Anyone would want that for anyone yes. However I’m—not—having a good experience right now and I think I’m going to go home and lie in bed like a human pot roast. After I piss. Here. Not here-here but—fuck.”
Jamie blinks pronouncedly as the bathroom door plonks shut, then turns to go back outside.
Roy looks in the mirror in Leslie’s powder room.
The shrew in Arsonist Emmeline's anti-suffrage poster probably resembled a beast quite like himself.
Forty and not married yet!
Well, there are many reasons for that. Cowardice, mostly.
“Look here, Old Man Tartt,” he mumbles to the mirror. “There’s going to be real accountability here. No ‘sorry, here’s a yellowing photo of you that I cut part of your head out of with my drunk finger on the shudder.’ Specific examples of every way you broke his heart. You’ll write them down til your fingers bleed and praise the man he is despite everything you’ve done.”
He grips the sink. His face softens. He needs a better mic drop.
“I fucking love him,” he says, scratchy but clear.
Jamie sits next to Keeley in the front garden, eating an oily crisp he surely isn’t supposed to.
“Everything alright?”
“My dad’s in rehab and I seen him,” he munches.
“Oh...”
“Yep.”
“Is that why Roy is upset?”
“Mhm.”
“I’m sure you understand his…thoughts on it. But in the end you have to do what you feel’s right.”
Jelka pounces at Jamie’s knees with a toothy grin. ”Wil je mijn pop zien?” she asks.
Jamie’s Dutch is awful, but he gets the gist when a doll is being thrust in his face. Surely, Rebecca got this for the new little passenger in her life. “Bedanky!” he says.
“It’s Boadicea the Warrior Queen, the latest British Girl,” Rebecca says, gesturing over her helmet, tunic and robes. “Failed uprising aside, she’s quite stunning.”
Jamie blinks.
Suddenly he wishes that Arsonist Emmeline had a helmet.
He has a flash of his father impaling the doll’s head on a wrought iron gate in Manchester. “No son of mine’s gonna be a fucking knobjockey with dolls!”
Jamie gasps, wondering how well buried that memory was. His eyes sting. His skin burns. That crying boy had already given the old man too many chances.
“Jamie? You okay?” Keeley asks.
“I… I will be.” He returns Boadicea gently to Jelka’s arms. “‘Scuse me a moment, ladies.”
He marches toward the house, but Roy has already emerged. They say each other’s names at the same time with clunky urgency.
Roy looks him over, reading the distraught worry lines in his forehead. “What happened?”
“It’s okay…just…realised I don’t have to reconcile with my father if I don’t want to.”
“Jamie," Roy is able to make those two syllables rumble the ground. "See him if it’s what you want. Don’t let me stand in the way.”
"You already have. Since Wembley when I went no contact. ‘Cause you gave me the strength to do it. Even stone sober he’ll never know what I need from him, even if I spell it out plain. You always know, even if you’re useful as a marzipan dildo when it comes to other things.”
Roy lets out that high pitched laugh, with bit of a sniff.
Jamie yanks him into a hug of his own, his nose in his neck. Instead of the starved, broken breaths Roy felt against his chest that day, Jamie takes a full inhale. Roy braces his arms around his back. A few people clap, though unsurely. OK, maybe it’s just Will.
Roy presses a kiss into his cheek, and the barbeque shoots a towering flame into the air at that exact moment. “Sorry!” Leslie says. “Fatty sausage!”
The window table at The Iceni Brewery is worth the drive to Norwich. They’re not sure whether to call this a first date, but the lovely view of the cathedral makes it feel special enough.
Jamie just wanted to be in the Warrior Queen’s favorite city for no particular reason.
“Whenever we play the Canaries I always say I’m gonna come to this pub,” Jamie says. “Sadly my coach can be a real dick about early training.”
Roy shakes his head. “Well, we can stay as long as you want tonight.”
“I'll probably be in bed by eight, but...we don’t have to sleep straight away.”
Their fingers crawl across the table and tangle up in a warm tackle.
“No presh,” Jamie eyebrows. “We can take this slow.”
“Figured I at least had to wait until after we hit the British Girl Shop."
"Oh, give over."
"You know what's great about dolls, Tartt? They can do anything you can imagine."
"Try me."