Page 19 of Playing By Ear

By the time he returned to his office, his channel was filling up, so he took the laptop into the bedroom, switched on the pair of studio lights, and arranged a selection of toys within easy reach. Then he went to the bathroom to apply concealer over the bruises on his legs, the sort obtained playing football or bumping into unyielding objects.

Ready at last, Perry sat on the bed, Bluetooth-connected earpiece inserted and laptop out of the camera’s view.

Usually the mere thought of performing would give him at least a semi-erection, but nothing was happening down there just now. He could cancel the session, but that would ruin his perfect 5-star rating. Besides, it would be unprofessional to disappoint his followers. Camming was a job, not a hobby, so the show must go on, even when it wasn’t fun or easy.

Perry opened a new browser tab and brought up one of his bookmarked porn clips, saved for emergencies such as this. It featured a particularly keen bottom whose voice never failed to arouse him.

“Five minutes,” said Perry’s countdown alarm app.

He focused on the blurry, heaving bodies on the screen. Pleading moans escalated into grateful screams, yet Perry’s cock lay limp and apathetic in his hand.

One minute to go. Time for desperate measures.

He closed his eyes and thought of Jamie.

Chapter 4

“He’s still normal, for the most part,” Belinda said as they sped along the M8 toward their childhood home. “You may not be able to tell anything’s different.”

Jamie dug his nails into the side of the tan leather passenger seat. For a decade, he’d expected the next glimpse of his father to be in a coffin. He never thought he’d have to survive another face-to-face encounter. “How would I even know after all these years?”

“Dad is forever Dad,” she said, enunciating each word as though they formed a pithy epigraph. “Until he’s not.”

Jamie frowned. He knew he should be planning what to say to his father after their long separation. But all he could think about was that last text to Perry.

I don’t want u. What a sad fucking lie. In their hours together—had it been less than a dozen?—his mind and body had tingled with a delirium he normally felt only while songwriting, when melody and harmony traveled unscathed from his imagination to the strings of his guitar.

Decidedly not a lie was Jamie’s previous message: Can’t. Such joy wasn’t for the likes of him. He was a MacKray, after all.

His attention snagged on the twin cylindrical gas holders looming over the motorway. The distinctive steel frames of the empty Provan Gas Works had been a cherished part of Jamie’s childhood skyline. Now they looked decrepit.

Just past the gasworks, he pointed through the windscreen. “Sky’s empty without the tower blocks.”

“You’ve not been here since the Red Road flats came down?”

“Not much good busking out this way.” Provanpark was neither city nor suburb, but rather a placeless place created as a repository for those un-housed by Glasgow slum clearances.

They turned off the motorway onto the main boulevard, where obsessively neat hedgerows guarded terrace homes’ tiny front gardens against whatever riffraff might traipse upon the pavement. Jamie looked the other way, past Belinda and a low stone wall, into the cemetery. He raised a hand toward the graves.

Belinda did the same, pressing her palm to the driver side window. “I would stop there first, but we need to catch Dad between meetings. Maybe after?”

Jamie nodded. “Does he still go to see Mum on a Sunday?”

“Rain or shine. Uncle Mick and Aunt Frances, too, of course.”

Of course. Martin’s wife, twin brother, and sister-in-law rested in the same imposing black-marble mausoleum that would soon house the man himself, if the doctors were correct.

They entered the housing estate, its main road winding past semi-detached villas with front gardens split into two roughly equal patches. Then one final turn, and there it was on the corner. He let out his breath in a rush.

“Is our house how you remembered?” Belinda asked.

“Nah, in my mind it was a massive haunted mansion. Shutters banging, lightning shooting out of windows. Bats.”

Belinda parked the car in a small brick recess behind the house. She switched off the engine and turned to him. “Jimmy, I know this is hard for you, but mind, we made a deal. You could be free as long as Dad was running the firm, but then you’d come back when it was safe, when he got old.”

“Fifty-six is not old.”

“Tell the cancer that.”