The Enemy Within, page 17
GOD
OK; not what I was expecting.
SAVE
Surely not?
OUR
And then it was suddenly obvious.
QUEEN
And then, slightly ridiculously but rather marvellously, with our paint-spattered priest conducting us with kitchen knife and paintbrush, drops of Clarrie and International Klein Blue flying off to spatter the stones around him, twenty-five or so men joined in with a rich baritone chorus of the national anthem, and I remembered my friend and mentor on another sunny afternoon at Pride years ago, tiara shining on her head as she waved a gloved hand at the crowds and soaked up the abuse along with the acclaim; letting every bit of it make her stronger.
Send her victorious
Happy and glorious
And I was crying again, but there were tears of happiness mixed in there too as I said a final goodbye.
Long to reign over us
God save our queen!
TWENTY-THREE
After that it was pure celebration. There was just enough Pernod and black to go around everyone – you wouldn’t want more than a small one – and we all raised our plastic cups to the sun and toasted Clarrie before knocking it back, making faces, and then opening the cider barrels to get rid of the taste as soon as possible.
Brian cranked up his gramophone and started playing old Cole Porter 78s, and although they started off on the intended wistful note with ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’ it wasn’t all that long until people were trying to Charleston along to ‘Night And Day’ and ‘Anything Goes’. Clarrie’s painting sat in the middle of us, hardening in the evening sun, with people periodically going up to it to take a closer look at the scored surface. A couple of people had brought flowers, which they lay at the foot of the easel, and as the shadows began to lengthen, and the cider did its work, it was easier to imagine that a garden might bloom in the barrenness after all. I took off the golden robe before it got damaged and hung it over the back of the wooden throne, where its glow began to deepen from gold to bronze as the sun made its way down beyond the vast bulk of the nuclear power station. We spent the evening reminiscing about Clarrie, and about ourselves, and instead of feeling jealous about the overt attention everyone was paying to Liam I just felt pleased and proud to have his arm around me. It felt like the funeral ceremony, such as it was, had finally released me to be able to properly feel things again: there was a fresh clearness to my head and a tingling in my body that wasn’t just down to the gallons of scrumpy we were putting away.
We’d all declared our intention to party right through the shortest night quite early in proceedings, but as the sky finally worked its way through rose and red, and darkened all the way to International Clarrie Blue, and I still hadn’t eaten anything since the Happy Eater eight hours previously, I could feel myself starting to flag. Thankfully at that moment someone shrieked ‘We need to swim!’ and there was a general gasp of agreement that swiftly translated into a frantic mass dash across the road and onward across the shingle. We flagged slightly when the loose stones turned out to go on for further than we had imagined, but were spurred on by the crashing of waves getting undeniably louder. Finally our dash culminated in two dozen men of varying ages and shapes tearing off all their clothes as they stumbled and scrambled down the last steep bank of stones and, pale bottoms gleaming in the twilight, hurled themselves headlong into an invigorating sea.
The shock of the water made me gasp, but it wasn’t cold: two full weeks of summer sunshine had heated it to a welcoming temperature. At least I hoped it was the sun, rather than the nuclear power station. It was deep, the shingle shelving away dramatically just a few feet out from shore, leaving us kicking our feet into nothingness as we tried to avoid taking the foaming waves full in the face. Each one that curled and crashed itself on the beach behind us was followed by a cacophonous rumble as the water sucked back, sending pebbles tumbling over and over the full length of the shoreline. It was a magical, elemental sound.
‘Are you OK?’ Liam said from beside me, and I nodded a delighted yes to him before kicking out deeper and onward beyond the rolling foam, following my companions out into darkness and freedom. I was an OK swimmer – I did lengths at the Oasis in Covent Garden in the summer, and sometimes went to the pond at Hampstead too, although it had some bad associations for me – and while I wasn’t planning on going out stupidly far, it felt like the sort of blessed night where nothing bad could happen.
Liam obviously knew what he was doing too, keeping pace with me in a sturdy front crawl until we made it to a point where the sea’s churning simply held and bounced us gently up and down rather than trying to turn us over. Bodies bobbed all around us as we trod water. Brian was a few feet away, walrus-like with his big white moustache; there was slender-shouldered Gary just beyond him, keeping a watchful eye. Ivan was behind us, his chest a mass of salt-and-pepper curls glistening with water droplets. Over there was Olly, sticking close to the muscular guy he’d had his eye on all evening, and furthest out of all, Lee, shrieking ‘look, lads’ before pinching his nose and hurling himself up and over, kicking his legs high so he could flash his bum at all of us. The stars were coming out above us – already more than you ever saw in London’s murky sky.
‘This is amazing!’ I gasped to Liam.
‘Isn’t it?’ He propelled himself towards me, curling one leg and then another around my waist and placing his hands on my shoulders as I redoubled my paddling to support us both. His skin felt silky against mine below the surface: his open bum-cheeks settled into the cushion of my pubic hair as the water floated my flaccid cock up to meet him. I kissed him urgently, bitingly.
‘Don’t mind us!’ camped Ivan as we drifted, entwined, dangerously close to him, and we broke apart in a fit of giggling breathlessness. He gestured to the bodies floating all around us. ‘It’s like poof soup, isn’t it?’
I heard someone say ‘Who’s that?’ Something was happening on the beach. A clothed figure was making its way towards the waterline, holding something and looking right at us in the water. For a second I thought it was someone coming to tell us all off, but then I realised it was Derek, still in his overalls. He put the box he was carrying down and opened it, taking out some long cylindrical objects that were too far away to make out, twisting them into the stones so they stood upright near the water’s edge.
‘What are they? Candles?’ murmured Brian, as we saw a spark and a flame grow in Derek’s hand. He got his answer as the first cylinder blazed into an impossibly bright white light, sending sparks jumping high up into the night sky and continuing to burn just as blindingly as Derek moved across to light its twin.
‘Flares,’ Gary explained, and when we looked at him in surprise, said ‘we’ve got a friend who’s got a boat down at the Marina.’
‘He’s not gonna have the coastguard out after us, is he?’ asked Liam, amused.
‘Wrong colour,’ said Gary, and when Brian looked at him in disbelief, splashed water in his face. ‘I knew you weren’t listening to Rupert! Red for danger. You’re just lucky you’ve got me to save you from peril.’
‘Always,’ smiled Brian, and craned over to kiss his boyfriend.
The flares’ incandescence was reflected in the water: two sparkling white lines on the surface of the sea, a path to guide us home. As if in silent agreement, we all began to swim in towards the shore, but I couldn’t resist a last dive down to see if I could touch the bottom – I couldn’t – which meant Liam and I were at the back of the crowd that clambered up onto the beach and began their ungainly whimpering progress up the sharp stones. I clocked from a good few yards out that Derek was filming us – he usually has a cinecamera on the go at any given time; I was surprised he hadn’t had anyone recording the funeral service – but didn’t think anything of it. While I wasn’t quite as enthusiastic as Lee, who had jumped into the centre of the frame and started enthusiastically helicoptering his penis at the lens, so many people have seen me with my kit off over the years that it’s long-since stopped bothering me. Besides, Derek’s films tend to come out so grainy it’s hard to make out what anyone actually looks like. But it turned out Liam, picking his way through the surf a few feet behind me, felt very different.
‘What? Are you filming? Get that thing off me, man!’ he squealed, pushing one wide-spread hand towards the camera and holding the other indequately in front of his cock and balls. ‘No – no way – stop it!’
Anyone else might have complied, but Derek is Derek and with a wicked grin on his face he kept the camera pointed firmly in Liam’s direction, twiddling his zoom lens as the rest of us all turned to look at him too.
‘I mean it! Get it off me! Seriously, fuck off!’ And with that Liam took off across the beach, slipping and stumbling in the shingle and coming dangerously close to one of the sparking flares before disappearing into the thick darkness beyond it.
Oh, shit, I thought to myself. There was a ripple of nervous laughter among the other men, although I noticed that most of them had their hands clamped over their bits too. ‘Yeah, all right, calm down,’ I spat at them, and stomped off after my boyfriend.
Man, it was hard to walk on the shingle. I swear it hadn’t hurt this much on the way in. God knows how Liam had managed to get so far: he was nowhere in sight. After it felt like several stones had impaled themselves deep in the soles of my feet I diverted and limped up the beach to locate my trainers. Thankfully they weren’t so far from where I guessed I had discarded them, and I stuffed my damp feet straight into them without bothering to find my socks or any of the rest of my clothes. I was too worried about Liam. I kept calling his name, but the only noise apart from the crashing waves and sucking pebbles was a faint hum from the floodlit power station, which I realised I had been hearing in the background all day.
I stomped on along the crest of the shingle, sending showers of stones landsliding down it, my eyes peeled. I hadn’t worked out what I was going to say if I ran into anyone other than Liam, stark naked as I was. I didn’t really care about that. I was really worried about him.
‘Liam!’ I hollered again. ‘Liam!’
Darker shapes loomed out of the darkness: an old boat hauled high above the waterline, a low hut, a rusting hulk of winch machinery. But still no Liam. And then at last, when I must have walked a good couple of hundred yards along the shore, I spotted a hunched figure sitting on the steeply banked shingle, knees drawn up, head down, curled almost into a ball.
‘Liam!’ I ran the last few yards, sliding to a stone-scattering halt and dropping to throw my arms around him. ‘Hey! Where did you go? I was worried about you!’
He was rocking himself backwards and forwards, shivering. ‘I can’t do it, Tommy. I just can’t,’ he muttered. ‘I can’t.’
‘It’s all right.’ I kissed his salty hair and settled into a sitting position beside him, my arm round his shoulder, our bare sides pressed together. It was lucky it was a warm night. ‘It doesn’t matter. Its just Derek’s way: he films everything; he’ll probably never even develop it.’
‘You don’t understand. I can’t be on film. I just can’t,’ he repeated.
‘Don’t worry.’ I pulled his head into my shoulder. Things had been going so well between the two of us for the past couple of weeks, I sometimes forgot I had a good twelve-year start over him on the whole gay thing. The shame and the guilt go deep inside when they’ve been hammered in to you every day of your life. And with him being brought up Catholic, that added a whole other layer I could only begin to guess at.
‘I’m sorry. It’s all a bit much for me to spring on you, I know. All this – today – it’s not how I live my life most of the time; don’t worry.’
‘No, I…’ He petered off, turning and putting an arm around me, burying his face in my chest, sniffing hard. ‘I’ve just ended up in this mad situation, and I don’t know how... It’s happened so fast.’
‘I know.’ I stroked his back. He smelled of the sea. It was deeply inappropriate of all this to be giving me a hard-on. ‘We can slow down. If you like.’
He raised his head and did his thing again, where he presses his forehead against mine. ‘That’s the very last thing I want, Tommy.’
I sighed in relief. ‘Good. Me too.’
Staring right into my eyes, he spoke slowly and deliberately. ‘You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, Tommy. You’ve changed my life. Opened my world.’
I didn’t know quite what to say to that.
‘I’m serious. The last five weeks – they’ve been incredible. Ever since I first saw you outside the Poly.’
‘I feel the same.’ I really did.
‘I love you, Tommy Wildeblood.’
Shiiiiiit. What was I meant to say to that?
How about the truth? ‘I love you, too.’
And with that, we both of us started laughing. Slightly hysterical laughter, because we were sitting there stark bollock-naked on a beach miles from home, without the slightest idea where our clothes were, right next to a nuclear power station in the middle of the night and I can honestly say I’ve never felt so happy in my entire life. And then we were kissing, and then his body was on top of mine, and then we had rolled over and I was on top of him and his legs were wrapped around me and there were stones sticking to my back but I didn’t care because things were rushing very fast in one very definite direction, so definite that I had to stop even though my heart was going like mad and say – ‘Wait: are you sure?’
And once again he clamped his forehead against mine and looked deep into my eyes and said ‘Yes, Tommy. Yes I’m sure. Yes.’
TWENTY-FOUR
I don’t know if it was the cold or the sunlight that woke me first. But the sun was just above the eastern horizon, pinking the sea and stretching the shadows of the huts and boats far out across the shingle. We’d burrowed ourselves down into a kind of nest in the stones, but they had lost any warmth they had during the night. The small of my back felt damp and sore. My skin was goosepimpled. But Liam’s naked body wrapped around mine was still deliciously warm.
I lay there for a while listening to the waves lapping on the shore below us and looking up into the endless blue of the sky above us, until my arm began to cramp up under Liam’s back and I had no choice but to move it. And that, in turn, moved him, and he opened his eyes into wakefulness and said ‘Shit. It’s fucking cold.’
‘Good morning,’ I said, rolling over and planting my lips on his. Mindful of morning breath, we both kept our mouths closed, which resulted in a great exaggerated smack as we pulled apart and set us both off laughing. His whole body shook as he giggled, his taut belly jumping and his flaccid cock twitching from side to side. I reached down and gave it an affectionate squeeze.
‘God, look at the state of us,’ he said, pushing himself up onto his elbows and squinting out into the bright sun and its reflection on the sea. ‘What time is it?’
‘Oh, I’ll just check my watch,’ I scoffed, waving an empty arm. ‘Early. That was the shortest night, wasn’t it?’
‘It didn’t feel like it to me.’ He leaned over and kissed me again. ‘Thank you.’
‘Thank you.’ I stroked his tight scrotum, wondering if it was too cold for us to go another round. As an involuntary shiver ran through me, I figured it probably was.
Liam sat up with a grunt. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve any idea where our clothes might be?’
‘Somewhere that way.’ I pointed vaguely back up the beach. ‘That’s assuming nobody’s nicked them.’
‘They’d better not. The car keys are in the pocket of my shorts.’
Slightly sobered by this thought, we both scrambled to our feet. Liam’s back had a deep pattern scored into it from his night’s rest. ‘You look like you’ve been crazy-paved,’ I told him as I brushed a few small stones off him.
‘Ow!’ he moaned as he took his first steps, and looked down at my own feet. ‘Oh, look at you. Clever lad going back for your shoes. I don’t suppose you fancy giving me a piggy back, do you?’
I looked his naked body up and down appreciatively. ‘Happy to give it a go. But it might be easier if I go and look for our stuff and bring it back here.’
‘All right then. But don’t be too long. God knows what time people get up round here.’ He ducked back down beneath the crest of the shingle, and I set off, chuckling to myself. It felt enjoyably liberating to be striding out naked in the morning sun.
All our clothes were still there, though they took some finding. The burned-out flares were still embedded in the beach, too, quite some distance from the water now. I thought I ought to retrieve them and at least put them on higher ground before the tide came back in. That done, I slightly regretfully pulled on my pants and shorts, slung my t-shirt round my neck and carried Liam’s clothes back to where he was squatting and shivering further along the beach.
‘Ah, thank God,’ he said, snatching the bundle from me and scrambling into his boxer shorts. ‘I swear I heard someone walking their dog.’
I’d stashed my watch in the pocket of my own shorts and I took it out to look at it. ‘Unlikely. It’s only five o’clock.’ But what do you know? As we made our way back across the scrubby upper beach to Derek’s cottage, a friendly terrier did come running up to sniff at us, and we could see its owner to wave to over on the road. ‘Shame, you nearly made her day,’ I remarked, as a fully-clothed Liam crouched down to get better acquainted with the dog.
