Again Finn says no. His eyes roll back in his head.
‘This must stop now. His pulse, and his heart, they’re poor.’ Mockett shakes his head.
A weak sound persists against the door. They cannot see that Clovis lies against it in the foetal position. Her foot taps for attention. Urine seeps from the bottom edge of the door.
‘Open it,’ Finn rasps.
Mockett quickly opens the door to the anteroom. Clovis points to the opposite door that leads into the annex. He helps her to stand and she whispers the location. Steadying her body against the wall she watches Mockett search the tool shelf for the large tin of polishing wax.
‘In here?’ he asks.
She nods.
He opens the tin and takes out a small package wrapped in newspaper and opens it.
‘One? Just one phial?’ he asks with an incredulous gasp. ‘Where are the others?’
She manages a smug smile before she doubles over again in pain.
LONDON
1956
CHAPTER FIFTY
The room is dripping in tat. A frayed lampshade sends a sickly, yellow glow into a grey corner that rivals the afternoon’s clouds. Puckering across the single bed a dingy, blue blanket fails to disguise the lumpy mattress. A weathered, Lusty chair, meant for a garden and cocktails, sits beside a small, unused Victorian fireplace in this rented room in Pimlico. It’s noisy, a bit smelly, and a hidden paradise. Kay Starr sings from a beaten up portable gramophone. Two men stand entwined in a small moon-shaped space in the centre of the room. To dance naked is unbearably exciting. Jonesy lets David take the lead.
‘I love your long brown cock. It’s the longest I ever seen.’
‘And I love your short fat red one.’ Jonesy laughs.
David smacks Jonesy’s buttocks hard. ‘Are you laughin’ at mine?’
‘That hurt. No. I said I love it, didn’t I? I love you.’
Jonesy missteps, longing to hear if maybe today David will requite his love.
After David’s hungry mouth and his short, square body are satisfied, he chooses another record, snaps it across his bare thigh, and throws the pieces onto the floor.
‘I hate Doris fuckin’ Day. That’s all Tammy ever listens to. Fuckin’ Doris Day.’
Jonesy ignores the mention of David’s fiancée.
‘I’ll go out and get those cakes you like.’ Jonesy wipes himself with a towel and pulls his trousers on.
‘Get three of them lemon ones for me. I’m hungry. Bring us a tea.’
‘Whatever you want.’
Jonesy makes no eye contact with any of the other men he passes in the dim corridor or on the stairs. This is a careful house; a room to let by the day doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a safe haven for two men to have sex. They don’t wish to give the discreet landlady any reason to reconsider her business with them.
Uneasy in Pimlico, Jonesy walks swiftly past the rubble of building work. Each time he comes here, and it takes him forever because the Tube hasn’t reached these parts, he discovers a little more of the area that borders his former miserable nine years of incarceration. He would have liked to witness the destruction of that gruesome fortress and shudders with wonder at how the four of them were released with their sanity intact. He knows how they survived physically, those two little magical drops, but he was so often sick with despair. The kind of despair he feels today, sore from the reminder that his rough lover upstairs will be married soon. Jonesy conceals his hurt in David’s presence. Lust is a healing companion.
‘Two, no, three lemon cakes and a custard slice, please.’
He always says please, hopeful of supressing a racist remark.
‘Them’s the lot,’ she says. ‘We can’t keep ’em on the racks.’
‘And two teas with milk and sugar, please.’
‘For both?’
‘Yes, please.’
Jonesy waits patiently; she’s slow with the teas. Thank the goddesses there’s plenty of sugar and butter again. Thirteen years they suffered without enough of those comforts.
That first night at the bathhouse, when David stood close to him with his towel wrapped well below his taut waist, the mechanic’s greeting was, ‘I’m not queer.’
God, hadn’t he heard that before.
‘Do you know how ridiculous that sounds in a room full of us?’ Jonesy had walked away with every intention of avoiding heartache.
But here he is, two years later, buying cake, saturated in his desire for a barely literate man who insists he is going to ‘stop all of this’ as soon as he’s married.
Jonesy is not honest, either. He won’t tell David about his family, such as it is, and he certainly won’t reveal the dangerous secret that weighs on him.
‘You’re lookin’ real smart today, young man,’ the bakery girl says.
A reflex sends his hand to fiddle with his black roll-neck. He forgets that his body disguises his true age; blood always rushes to his face when he remembers.
‘Thank you.’
‘Look at your face! I didn’t know your kind could blush.’
What an idiot, he thinks. She’s a bottle blonde, always with a bit of gnawed pencil behind her ear, a huge gap between her front teeth – and she smells like over-baked sugar. He doesn’t want a fuss.
On his way out with his hands full, she runs around to open the door for him and thrusts her body forward a bit, brushing against him.
‘Nice coat. Where’d ya get it?’
Willa had pulled it out of one of her clothing chests. An authentic gem with engraved anchor buttons that make him nostalgic for his long-dead sailor. It’s also thanks to Willa that his grey trousers are just on the right side of tight. She could make alterations to a rag and the result would be unique and beautiful.
‘Friend gave it to me.’
‘That’s a friend you’ll want to keep.’
‘Yeah. See ya.’
‘See ya.’
His brown jodhpur boots slide past the girl and he’s on the street again. A light wind blows his chin-length hair into his eyes and he tucks it back behind his ears, balancing the cakes and teas in his hands. Just as he reaches the lodging house a man stops him to ask directions.
