"You know, you almost sound like you were telling me off, there. Look, Nathan. Sergeant Nathan Stephenson." She knows of my rank during the Second World War. Not what I had to do to earn it. The things I've seen.
I've seen men get their legs blown off, heard dying men wailing for their mothers while bullets separated soul from flesh. It wasn't all shiny brass buttons and "I say, isn't this frightful war simply ghastly? " Unless you were a fucking officer back home moving model soldiers around on a map while one's butler fetched another bottle of port for the General.
Okay, that's closer to the prevailing attitude during the First World War, but my sentiments remain.
The Great War indeed. What was so bloody great about it, God alone knows. My own father was killed--- slaughtered---during that so-called Great War. I have no memories of him, and even photographs I once possessed have become dog-eared and creased beyond all recognition.
Oh, books and television programmes glamorise it all, make soldiers returning home seem like conquering heroes. Downton Abbey has a lot to answer for. The poems of Wilfred Owen tell a story closer to the truth.
So the First World War killed off Major Reginald Stephenson. And in a way, the Second did for his son.
"Yes, Miss Palmer? What is it now?" I outrank the uppity civilian, but she still has a commanding air about her, a way of making me pay attention.
"I'm fine. Honestly. Don't worry. I'm---"
"Don't make me pull rank."
"Is that your old service revolver in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?"
"Not too ill to make terrible jokes, I see. Listen, Alyssa. I won't drink from you while you're still recuperating. I won't have your mother making accusations that I'm careless with her daughter."
"I wish I hadn't told you now."
"You had to. It was obviously worrying you. I'll escort you home then go find---"
"Escort? You're terribly old-fashioned sometimes, Stephenson."
"That's Sergeant Stephenson to you."
"Oh, fuck off."
"I could have you court-martialled for insubordination."
"I'd like to see you try." Again, she winks.
"Bloody waste, if you ask me. Good-looking man insisting on seeing me home, and he's as bent as a nine-bob note."
Unable to help myself, I tut. Sometimes, it amazes me, this twenty-first century nonchalance about homosexuality---something else besides measles that would have got me a death sentence way back when. Quietly, I laugh.
"Nathan?"
"Hmm? Oh, nothing, nothing." Death sentence indeed. My propensity for the love that dare not speak its name did kill me in the end. Sort of. Oh, the irony. "Let's get you home. If you're a good girl, I might even tuck you into bed and read you a story."
"Shut up, Nathan."
"Much more of your cheek, and I'll sing you to sleep. That would really give you nightmares."
"Idiot." Alyssa elbows me in the ribs, not standing a chance of hurting me, even if that was her intention. "If you insist, you can walk me home, but no singing. Then you can go out and do your thing."
Do your thing. It sounds so modern, so civilised, so accepting. Very avant-garde and forward-thinking. So contemporary.
Which is a good thing, I try to tell myself.
Living in the twenty-first century might go some way toward curing me of my addiction to the past.
Chapter 2
"YOU REALLY DON'T HAVE to do this, you know."
Alyssa stops at the entrance to her tenement and looks back at me.
"But I want to."
"You do this every time you see me home."
"And you complain about me being over- cautious, so why don't you just let us into the block, I'll see you to your door, we can just pretend we've had our usual conversation, and I'll leave. Everyone's happy."
She uses her passkey to get us through the security door. "God, you're like an old woman sometimes."
"I'm not giving your mother any more cause for complaint about the way I treat you."
" Yo u smother me. Both of you." Alyssa's voice echoes in the cold stone block as we ascend.
"And you haven't given her any cause for complaint. It's something she just likes to do anyway. She doesn't approve of what I'm doing. What we're doing."
"Which we haven't done in a while because you've been ill, which she in turn blames on me." I roll my eyes. Alyssa's illness isn't my fault, but I still feel guilty. Not for the chicken pox, but for causing a rift between parent and child.
"I still think I shouldn't have told you."
"Look. Alyssa." I grab her hand, and we stop, halfway up a flight of stairs. "When we got into this, we promised we'd tell each other everything. Everything. Even what's..." I bite my lip. "Even what's on our minds, things that might seem irrelevant but aren't---" The arrival of someone else, another of this block's tenants, cuts short my speech. Echoing footsteps preceded the arrival of a man from farther up the stairwell, and upon turning the corner of the last flight of stairs before us, he stops short, almost comically.
"What's..." he begins, and seems to think again. Cocking his head, he catches sight of my hand on Alyssa's wrist and frowns. "What's going on here?"
"We're having a conversation. Or trying to," Alyssa says, glancing over her shoulder but returning her gaze to me immediately after.
"In the stairwell?" Our kindly visitor advances a few steps, eyeing my hand for a moment here and there.
"Looks like it," I say, adding a heavy sigh.
For effect, of course. I have no need of breathing and have to remind myself that to sigh, I first have to suck in air and whoosh it out again. Unpractised, I borderline-groan instead. Still, my clumsy attempt does the job.
"So you have to have a conversation in the stairwell? Look, what's---"
"I live here, okay? If that's all right with you?" Alyssa snaps, and I try not to smile. Instead, I content myself with running my thumb back and forth over her wrist. Attuned to her by now, I detect her pulse, much stronger than it
