by Adam Roberts
The candle flames quailed, seem to shrink away from me, then stood up tall again.
‘The news says lucky,’ said Harry, in a quiet voice. ‘Or it says treachery. Or it says regular army incompetence and calls for generals to be sacked.’
The movement of that candle flame. All my spidery-senses tingled.
‘And now,’ Joram added, ‘the news says the surge has finally knocked you out.’
The momentary bowing down of the candle flames meant that somebody had opened a door, somewhere behind me. I put my weight on to the balls of my feet, feeling the awkwardness of using my left hand to operate the gun.
‘We won because democracy is a better way of organizing an army than feudal hierarchy,’ I said, slipping to the side so as to put something solid behind my back. The unrightness of holding my gun in my left hand was throwing me a little. I had some movement back in my right hand, but not enough to hold a pistol.
‘Who else has a key to this house?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Harry, his voice even softer. There was something in their look - both of them were staring at me now with a kind of mute, passive horror. That didn’t reassure me.
‘Don’t play games Harry, who else has a key here?’
He was perked by my tone. ‘Nobody! Nobody does! Jor and I have keys, and my Mum has a key but she’s in Weston-super-Mare.’ The pleading face; the warbly voice. I could read this, of course; it meant please don’t discharge your weapon inside my lovely house! ‘The only other key is the spare, and I gave that to you!’
I aimed the pistol through the dining room door into the hallway. From the light into the darkness. Naturally I couldn’t see anything. The tall glass panel that ran vertically parallel to the front door gleamed dark blue with the evening’s ambient light, but otherwise it was all in shadow. There was no silhouette, no noise. If I had come creeping in through the door to kill somebody, what would I do? All that Ninja malarkey: it was just nonsense. This was not how the world worked. I pondered the idea of simply letting a couple of shots off and seeing if I flushed anything out. Then I balanced that against the idea of holding my fire.
I was too obviously a target, standing outlined in the doorway of the candlelit dining room. It would not do. I ducked and took a step to the left, ready to slink quietly through the kitchen and round into the TV room when - bathetically - a black cat padded into the room.
The slinky beast went under the table and wrapped itself around Joram’s legs. I stepped into the hall and switched the light on. Nothing there. The cat-flap looked awfully low down in the door to have let in a breeze capable of disturbing the candles on a table in the other room. But a quick check through the rooms of the ground floor revealed nothing.
I was a little jittery. Evidently I was.
‘I’m going to bed, gentlemen,’ I said, in a loud voice. And I tonked up the stairs.
I spent no more than five minutes in the bathroom: brushed my teeth and washed my face. As I came out, heading towards the spare room, Joram was going along the upstairs landing. He passed as if I did not exist.
And I was alone on the landing,
I went into my room, and shut the door, and switched on the wiki and spent a quarter of an hour in conversation with any comrades who happened to be online and in the e-vicinity.
‘[But this is from the inside,]’ said a trooper called Makouk; I can’t remember his first name, but I’d helped haul him into cover at Reading, where he’d lost some toes, bleeding nastily out of a hole on the toe of his boot. His foot was mended now, he said; or good as.
‘Inside what?’ I said, logging in.
‘[Block? We’re talking about the Provisional Scottish Government,] ’ said Fish.
‘[Block, hello,]’ said Makouk.
‘[Hello!]’
‘[Hiya!]’
‘[They don’t like the P-word, the Scots]’ said Makouk.
‘How’s your big toe, Makouk?’ I put in.
‘[I have all new toes now, fitted by one of the country’s leading experts in prosthesis. She said that people sometimes ignore toes, but that they play a much larger part in balance and so on than you might think.]’
‘[I can’t believe we’re jawing on about toes,]’ interjected a soldier called Wigley whom I did not know personally.
‘What were you saying about the Scots?’
‘[I have a source inside the Government. They say they’re anxious.]’
‘[They think we’re beaten,]’ said Wigley. ‘[But the Scots need to be patient.]’
‘[I guess they reckon the next step is the English Army rampaging through the lowlands.]’
‘[They don’t want us using atomics, for sure,]’ said Fish. ‘[A spokesperson was on the news. A lot of stuff about, they never authorized the use of such weaponry, that they can see why the English are calling it a war crime and so on.]’
‘[War crime?]’ Wigley was outraged at the suggestion. ‘[We killed enemy combatants. The civilians had all long since vacated Hampton.]’
‘[Part of our contract with them,]’ put in a young soldier called John Stammers - I’d once shared a lift with him, on our way north at the start of operations, though it seemed a long time ago now - ‘[is that they negotiate peace that includes amnesty for our actions during the war. So talk of war crime doesn’t worry me.]’
‘[That’s what I’m saying,]’ said Makouk. ‘[My friend inside the Scots Government says that that is what worries them. The end of hostilities in England. They’re anxious that we won’t be happy with the settlement they negotiate. They’re scared we’ll become a loose cannon, that we’ll take our quarrel to Scotland and waste the land.]’
‘[That’s bullshit,]’ was Fish’s opinion.
We chewed the topic out for a bit. The thing to do, we all agreed, was to finish the fighting sooner rather than later. Not that we should rush matters; and anything we did would have to be articulated by the wisdom of our crowd. But the English were tottering on the point of pushover. We had started a job, and we needed to end it.
I turned the light out and lay on the bed - fully clothed, on top of the covers, my pistol beside the pillow. For a while I stared through the gloom, and just lay there. I can’t say that thoughts were going through my head. I was just lying there, not asleep and not, properly, awake. Occasional passing cars stroked the ceiling with their headlight beams, unfolding and folding up fans of light. Half an hour went by. Maybe it was more than that. I was in a kind of reverie, imagining the passage of something huge, something mighty, over the green pastures and steppe-land of my imagination. Like clouds being driven along by the wind, and hauling their shadows over the ground. Like clouds, but not clouds: something cloud-sized.
‘Tonio?’ An urgent whisper. Not a knock, but the scrape of nails down the wood of the door. ‘Tony, it’s Harry. Can I come in?’
I lay for a while listening to this, sifting it out from the reverie, comprehending it was a piece of the real world. ‘It’s your house,’ I said, eventually, speaking as loud as an auctioneer, and even startling myself a little with my own volume.
Harry carried on with his whispering. ‘Can I come in, though?’
‘Come in for Christ’s sake.’
The door opened, aggressively bright, and Harry’s silhouette inked itself in. He shut the door behind him, and padded over to the bed. I could hear as much as see (the hiss and draw of silk over silk) that he was in a dressing gown. The mattress sagged near my feet.
‘What is it, Harry?’ I asked. I was expecting, I suppose, conversation. That’s not what I got. Instead there was the sound of silk sliding, and then somebody else’s fingers fumbling at my trousers. I took hold of the stock of my gun with my left hand, and, a little belatedly, my heart rate got faster. Harry’s nimble fingers separated my fly, and pulled out my cock.
He shifted his weight, and straddled my legs, lifting himself momentarily to give himself room to shuffle my trousers and pants down. My knees went out, and the bunchi
ng of clothing at my ankles mimicked shackles, or ties, and that was something that always excited me. I was awake, but not fully conscious. Or else I was conscious, but not fully awake. I was passive, certainly, and my left hand clutched my gun so tightly I could feel the grooves tooled into the stock leaving an impression upon my palm.
Harry ducked forward in the dark and fitted his mouth around my cock. No mistaking that sensation. You know what it felt like? I don’t mean being on the receiving end of a blow-job - I assume you know what that feels like, that such activity happens even in West Texas. I don’t mean that. I mean that, at that moment, in that place, it felt like the dissolution of time. It felt like Harry and I were still together, and I hadn’t left to join the army, and he hadn’t married Joram, of all people. That none of the things that had forced me away - all the way away to the British Army - had happened at all. Except that those things had been functions of Harry’s extraordinary physical beauty, and I was very much conscious of that. The sensation was more than physical pleasure; it was that hint, or intimation, of coming home - and that, Colonel, I need hardly tell you, is the key to unlock my very soul. Harry was sucking the end of my cock, and his left forefinger was pressed at the exact midpoint of my perineum, and his right hand was twined-in my pubic hair and tugging it rhythmically. And as he sucked he pushed the tip of his sharp-little tongue into the hole of my urethra. Nobody else sucked my cock in exactly that manner. It flushed my spirit with nostalgia.
‘Harry,’ I said. Given how pleasure-blissed my brain function was, my voice came out surprisingly cogent. ‘What do you think you’re doing, Harry?’
He could not reply with my cock in his mouth; and an intensification of suction stabbed sweetness up my torso. I arched the small of my back.
‘Stop,’ I said. ‘Stop a second.’
He pulled his head back. ‘What?’
‘What are you doing, Harry?’
His fingers were still tangled in amongst my pubes. ‘Which part of this are you finding hard to understand?’ he said.
His evasiveness, or the implied giggle in his voice, or the fact that my blow-job had been so abruptly interrupted, made me snappish. It occurred to me that I could bring the gun out and point it at his head - that this might make him answer me properly. Not that I wanted to kill him, you understand. I don’t think I did. I only wanted a proper answer. But I didn’t do this. It would have been rude. ‘What the fuck, Harry?’
‘Is this not—?’ he said, a twinge in his tone. ‘Do you want something else?’ He rearranged his weight, and began pulling his legs round.
There was enough play in the fingers of my right hand - though it smarted when I used it - for me to be able to reach out with it and turn on the bedside lamp, without having to let go of my pistol. The light made me close my eyes. When I opened them again Harry was there, naked, sitting on the bed between my knees.
‘Whatever you want,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Whatever,’ he said again.
‘Joram’s, like, in the next room,’ I said. I sounded more puzzled than rebuking, I think.
I looked into his eyes - and of course my cock was straining, and of course some part of me wanted to quit all this talky nonsense, and instead to drive myself hard inside him, his arse’s tight aperture, the warmth and wetness of his mouth. But instead I experienced a clattering sense of comprehension. Looking into his eyes I saw what was going on here. He was afraid.
That undid everything
‘Jesus,’ I said, sitting up. ‘Christ.’
There was some comical bodily rearrangement, as I got my legs out from underneath him without hooking him in the net of my ankle-tangle of trousers, and he got himself off the bed without falling over. It might have provoked laughter in us both, except that Harry was terrified and I was, abruptly, very aware of how terrified he was.
I pulled my trousers up. I could not stay in that room.
Joram, it turned out, was not in the next room. He was sitting in a chair in the dining room downstairs gazing blankly at the wall. Imaginatively projecting upon it, I suppose, all the things I was doing with his husband up in the spare room. I stood at the door, and after a moment he looked round at me. The terror was in his eyes as well.
I turned. Harry had followed me down. It occurred to me then - it is a stupid thing to say, of course, because it is a very basic thing to do with human interaction, for all that it had never properly registered with me before - it occurred to me that eyes looking at you in terror of what you might do, and eyes looking at you imploringly, especially sexually-imploringly, are the very similar eyes. But that nobody, really, deep-down, could mistake the one set of eyes for the other.
‘Gentlemen,’ I said. I felt completely out of place. I felt like an adult who had intruded himself at a children’s party. I felt I had crammed myself into the playhouse. I felt itchy inside my skull. I felt like I wanted to raise my left hand and aim the pistol and begin firing - not for the bullets, or the physical damage I could do, so much as the sound of it. The roar of it; the yell of it. It could yell. All I could do was say ‘Gentlemen, I shall fuck off.’
I didn’t lift the pistol. I tucked it away into the top of my trousers.
Neither of them spoke a word.
Twenty minutes to load the car, whilst Joram and Harry sat together in the kitchen. Joram had broken open a bottle of brandy, and was slurping it like fruit juice. Harry, always too conscious of the beauty of his body to indulge himself in anything too harming, nursed a half-centimetre of the stuff. Maybe they were thinking: He might still kill us. Maybe they were just thinking: Thank heavens he is going. Perhaps Harry was contemplating the taste of my cock in his mouth again, after so long. But this was not my home. I didn’t care what they were thinking.
After I had retrieved the rifle from the loft and packed it in the boot I was ready to go. Harry was at the door. ‘Look,’ he said, swinging the undrunk glass of cognac in his right hand. ‘This is stupid. At least stay the night and go in the morning. Where are you going to sleep?’
‘Goodbye, Harry,’ I said. Getting in the car meant getting right down into the low-slung seat, which is a manoeuvre nobody can manage with their dignity intact, and then reaching across myself to pull the door shut with my left hand. But then the engine came to life with the sound of rushing water, and I pulled away from the kerb. A light came on inside my soul. I thought: It was a mistake coming here. Then I thought: I need to be with my people.
At the end of the road Harry’s open door was one rectangle of light amongst many. As I turned the corner I was already logging into the wiki.
A trooper called Thirlwell, whom I remembered from Basingstoke was in the middle of expatiating. ‘[They’re actually doing a Mission Accomplished banner unfurling thing,]’ he said. ‘[They’re actually officially announcing it.]’
‘[No fool like a feudal fool,]’ said somebody - Nicolson. Skinny man, sureshot.
Meaney, a woman from Croydon, said: ‘[Is it Reading, then?]’
‘[They’ll concentrate their troops at the sort of targets they would attack,]’ said somebody I had not previously heard from: Gunesekera the name. ‘[Tourist draws, airports, London eye. Fuck that.]’
‘[Reading’s not been voted,]’ said Thirlwell.
‘[Foregone conclusion.]’
‘[We still got to vote.]’
I joined the chatter. I had no compunction about butting it; it was all gossip, really. ‘Guys, I lost some of my kit when a plane blew up the car park I was in. What would you advise me, so far as getting myself some new stuff?”
‘[Block!]’ pinged Thirlwell, immediately. ‘[Good to hear from you.]’
‘[Tony, and Tony, and Tony,]’ said a longtermer called McGuinness. I had fought with him in the ’Stans.
‘[What you lose?]’
‘I’ve still got a pistol and an AK. But apart from that—’
‘[Like, armour?]’
‘No. I’m OK for armour.’
‘[Helmet?]’
‘And helmet.’ [So?]
‘Well, everything else.’
‘[Where was this car park?]’
‘The car park was in Hammersmith, in London Town,’ I said, idling at a red light. A number of young people appeared to be dancing outside a kebab shop - gyrating and lifting their arms high. A thuddy beat penetrated the fabric of the car, though indistinctly. The darkness made it hard to gauge how many there were, and I automatically sized them up: shoot the main street light there, take down those three nearest the café door - if the rest scattered, pick as many off as possible; if they rushed me in a knot lay down a grenade bullet—
I had to tell myself to snap out of it.
