Stockholm Syndrome [01] - Stockholm Syndrome by Richard Rider

him. Yeah. Yeah... what? No.
    He said what ? No! Jesus. What do you think? No. He's just pissing around.
    Sorry. He's... no, hang on a minute. No. No ! He works for me, he just needed a place for a couple of weeks. Yeah. Yes , Mum. I'm trying to help him find a place now. No. No. Come off it. No. Well, then he was just kidding, then, wasn't he?
    Mum. Mum. Hello? Shut up a minute. Mother. What? Christ. Do I look gay?
    Yeah, I know he clearly is. Do I look like him? No. Oh, come on. I don't care what he said. He's got a lousy sense of humour, then. No. Mum. Mum . No, he's not my fucking boyfriend, am I thirteen years old? Sorry. No. Bye. I don't care, I'm not. I'm going. Bye."
    He drops his phone, getting out the car, and swears a blue streak at the top of his voice, then he drops his keys and repeats it all over again. There aren't any neighbours to hear it and there's a kind of delirious freedom in that; he trembles and curses and spits and throws his phone onto the lawn in a temper, and he really really needs to kick something, ideally Valentine's face, but the only thing near enough is his stupid West Ham football, so that sails over the edge of the cliff instead and buys the little bastard some time.
    He slams the kitchen door open, slams it closed, slams his case down on the floor so hard one of the clasps comes loose.
    "Bad day?" Valentine says, mildly, handing him a steaming cup of tea.
    He goes back to lean against the counter, just watching Lindsay, and there's something in his expression that indicates he's about to say something aggravating, like he sometimes does when they argue and he's hoping to wind Lindsay up enough to throw a punch, something smug and frustrating like,
    "Calm down, little man." Lindsay decides if he gets "little man" turned back at him one more time he's going to break Valentine's nose, and that's only for starters. Instead Valentine blows on his own cup and takes a careful sip, looking at him all the time, then says, "Temper, temper."
    Maybe he intends for the smile in the sound to make it less infuriating

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    S T O C K H O L M S Y N D R O M E

    but it doesn't work, it's probably the worst thing he could have done. Lindsay hurls his mug down but it doesn't even have the decency to shatter, it just bounces off the lino and floods the crooked bit in the kitchen floor with tea, which really makes Valentine laugh, so Lindsay sweeps last night's drip-dried dinner plates off the draining board in a clatter of crockery. He's momentarily pacified when some of these do break. But:
    "Are you five years old?" Valentine's saying, all arched eyebrows and calculated smirking, and then he's saying nothing at all because Lindsay's raged across the kitchen at him, snatched away his mug and covered them both in scalding tea, and has him by the throat up against the wall. The buzzing burn in his fingers is screaming at him, but he ignores it.
    "Care to tell me what you're playing at?" he says. He's surprised his voice sounds so even, considering the inside of his head feels like trying to navigate a fairground funhouse when you're drunk and high and really really fucked off. Valentine doesn't answer, he can't answer, he just makes a sort of gurgly choking noise, so Lindsay relaxes his grip enough to let him breathe but not wriggle free.
    "Oh, yeah. Your mum come round." He swallows, hard. Lindsay can feel the slide of it under his palm. "She's nice. Back off that cruise. You should take me on a cruise. Not now, not til we're ancient, it's a fogeys' holiday, but you should."
    Lindsay presses up hard under his chin again, slams his head against the wall hard enough to make him squeeze his eyes shut and bite on a noise of pain.
    Something more, too. This Pavlovian response to violence would be worrying in anybody else, but Valentine's a twisted little shit and there's nothing surprising about him any more.
    "Didn't I tell you never to answer the door?"
    "She crept up on me! I was making tea and then she was