by Sarah Waters
‘But, do what?’ Duncan asked him, stupidly.
Alec made the theatrical gesture again—as if to say, it was nothing to him, one way or the other. ‘I’m going to kill myself,’ he said.
Duncan stared at him. ‘You can’t!’
‘Why not?’
‘You just can’t. It’s not fair. What—what will your mother think?’
Alec coloured. ‘That’s her hard luck, isn’t it? She shouldn’t have married my oaf of a father. He’ll be pleased, anyway. He wants to see me dead.’
Duncan wasn’t listening. He was thinking it through and growing tearful. He said, ‘But what about me?’ His voice sounded strangled. ‘It’ll be harder on me than on any of them, you know it will! You’re my best friend. You can’t kill yourself and leave me here.’
‘Do it, too, then,’ said Alec.
He said it quietly. Duncan was wiping his nose on his sleeve, and wasn’t sure he’d heard him properly. He said, ‘What?’
‘Do it, too,’ said Alec again.
They looked at each other. Alec’s face had flushed pinker than ever; he’d drawn back his lips, unguardedly, in a nervous smile, and his crooked teeth were showing. He moved closer to Duncan and put his hands on his shoulders, so that he was facing Duncan squarely, only the length of a curved arm away. He gripped Duncan hard, almost shook him. He looked right into his eyes and said excitedly, ‘It’ll show them, won’t it? Think how it’ll look! We can leave a letter, saying why we’ve done it! We’ll be two young people, giving up our lives. It’ll get into the papers. It’ll get everywhere! It might bloody well stop the war!’
‘Do you think it would?’ asked Duncan, excited too, suddenly; impressed and flattered; wanting to believe it, but still afraid.
‘Why wouldn’t it?’
‘I don’t know. Young people are dying all the time. That hasn’t changed anything. Why should it be different with us?’
‘You chump,’ said Alec, curling his lip, drawing off his hands and moving away. ‘If you can’t see—If you’re not up to it—If you’re windy—’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘—I’ll do it on my own.’
‘I won’t let you do it on your own!’ said Duncan. ‘I told you, you’re not going to leave me.’
Alec came back. ‘Help me write the letter, then,’ he said, excited again. ‘We can write it—Look.’ He stooped and picked up one of the torn-off halves of the call-up paper. ‘We can write it on the back of this. It’ll be symbolic. Give me a pen, will you?’
Duncan’s leather writing-case was on the floor, beside the bed. Automatically, Duncan took a step towards it, then checked himself. He went instead, as if casually, to the mantelpiece, picked up a pencil, and held it out. But Alec wouldn’t take it. ‘Not that,’ he said. ‘They’ll think a bloody kid wrote it, if I use that! Let me have your fountain pen.’
Duncan blinked and looked away. ‘It isn’t in here.’
‘You bloody liar, I know it is!’
‘It’s just,’ said Duncan, ‘if a pen’s any good, you’re not supposed to let other people use it.’
‘You always say that! It doesn’t matter now, does it?’
‘I don’t want you to, that’s all. Use the pencil. My sister bought me that pen.’
‘She’ll be proud of you, then,’ said Alec. ‘They’ll probably put that pen in some sort of frame, after they find us! Think of it like that. Come on, Duncan.’
Duncan hesitated a little longer, then reluctantly unzipped the writing-case and drew out his pen. Alec was always badgering him for a go with this pen, and he took it from Duncan now with obvious relish: making a business of unscrewing the lid, examining the nib, testing the weight of the pen in his hand. He took the writing-case, too, then sat down on the edge of the bed with the case on his knee, and he smoothed out the paper, trying to press the creases from it. When he’d got it as flat as he could, he started to write.
‘To whom it may concern…’ He looked at Duncan. ‘Shall I put that? Or shall I put, To Mr Winston Churchill?’
Duncan thought it over. ‘To whom it may concern sounds better,’ he said. ‘And it might be to Hitler and Goering and Mussolini then, too.’
‘That’s true,’ said Alec, liking the idea. He thought for a second, sucking at his lip, tapping with the pen against his mouth; and then wrote more. He wrote swiftly, stylishly—like Keats or like Mozart, Duncan thought—dashing the nib with little flourishes across the paper, pausing to frown over what he had put, then writing stylishly again…
When he’d finished, he passed the letter over to Duncan, and gnawed at his knuckle while Duncan read.
To whom it may concern. If you are reading this, it means that we, Alec J. C. Planer and Duncan W. Pearce, of Streatham, London, England, have succeeded in our intentions and are no more. We do not undertake this deed lightly. We know that the country we are about to enter is that ‘dark, undiscovered one’ from which ‘no traveller returns.’ But we do what we are about to do on behalf of the Youth of England, and in the name of Liberty, Honesty and Truth. We would rather take our own lives freely, than have them stolen from us by the Pedlars of War. We ask for one epitaph only, and it is this: that, like the great T. E. Lawrence, we ‘drew the tides of men into our hands, and wrote our will across the sky in stars.’
Duncan gazed at Alec in amazement. He said, ‘That’s bloody wizard!’
Alec flushed. He said, as if shyly, ‘D’you really think so? I thought of some of it, you know, on my way here.’
‘You’re a genius!’
Alec started to laugh. The laugh came out as a sort of giggle, like a girl’s. ‘It is all right, isn’t it? It’ll bloody well show them, anyway!’ He held out his hand. ‘Give it back, though, for me to sign. Then you sign it, too.’
They added their names, and then the date. Alec raised the page up and looked it over, tilting his head. ‘This date,’ he said, ‘will become like the ones we learned in school. Isn’t that a funny thought? Isn’t it funny to think of kids being made to remember it, in a hundred years’ time?’
‘Yes,’ said Duncan, vaguely. He’d thought of something else, and was only half listening. As Alec smoothed out the paper again he asked diffidently, ‘Can’t we put something in it for our families, too, Alec?’
Alec curled his lip. ‘Our families! Of course we can’t, don’t be stupid.’
‘I’m thinking of Viv. She’ll be bloody upset by all this.’
‘I told you,’ said Alec, ‘she’ll be proud of you. They all will. Even my father will. He calls me a bloody coward. I’d like to see his face when this gets into the papers! We’ll be like—like martyrs!’ He grew thoughtful. ‘All we need to do now is decide on how we’re going to do it. I suppose we could gas ourselves.’
‘Gas!’ said Duncan in horror. ‘That’ll take too long, won’t it? That’ll take ages. And anyway, the gas will get out; we might end up gassing my father. He’s an old sod but, you know, that wouldn’t be very fair.’
‘It wouldn’t be sporting,’ said Alec.
‘It wouldn’t be cricket, old chap.’
They began to laugh. They laughed so hard, they had to cover their mouths with their hands. Alec fell back on to the bed and buried his face in Duncan’s pillow. He said, still laughing, ‘We could poison ourselves. We could eat arsenic. Like that old tart, Madame Bovary.’
‘An admirable plan, Mr Holmes,’ said Duncan in a silly voice, ‘but one with one substantial flaw. My father keeps no arsenic in the house.’
‘No arsenic? And you call this a modern, well-appointed establishment? What about rat-poison, pray?’
‘No rat-poison, either. Anyway—wouldn’t poison hurt like billy-oh?’
‘It’s going to hurt like billy-oh, you imbecile, whatever we do. It wouldn’t be a gesture if it didn’t hurt.’
‘Even so—’
Alec had stopped laughing. He lay thinking for a second, then sat up. ‘How about,’ he said seriously, ‘if we drown o
urselves? We’d see our life flash before our eyes. Not that I want to see mine, my life’s been lousy—’
Duncan said, ‘I’d see my mother again.’
‘There you are. A man should see his mother before he dies. You can ask her why the hell she married your father.’
They laughed again. ‘But, how could we do it?’ asked Duncan at last. ‘We’d have to find a canal or something.’
‘No, we wouldn’t. You can drown in four inches of water; I thought everybody knew that. It’s a scientific fact. Don’t you keep your bath filled up in this house, against fire?’
Duncan looked at him. ‘Bloody hell, you’re right!’
‘Let’s do it, D.P.!’
They got to their feet. ‘Bring the letter,’ said Duncan, ‘and a drawing-pin.—Wait! Let me comb my hair.’
‘The man wants to comb his hair,’ said Alec, ‘at a time like this!’
‘Shut up!’
‘Go ahead, Leslie Howard.’
Duncan stood at the dressing-table mirror and quickly tidied himself up. Then, as quietly as they could, he and Alec went out of the bedroom and down the hall, through the parlour and into the kitchen. The doors were open, in case of blast; Duncan closed them, very softly. He could hear his father as he did it, snoring his head off. Alec whispered, ‘Your father sounds like a Messerschmitt!’—and that set them off laughing, all over again.
They put the kitchen light on. The shadeless bulb was rather weak, and made the room spring into life in flat, drab colours: the stained white of the sink, the grey and yellow of the patched linoleum floor, the brown-as-gravy of the woodwork. The bath was next to the kitchen table, against the wall; Duncan’s father had boxed it in with more gravy-coloured wood, years before, and made a cover for it. The cover was used as a draining-board: it had bits of crockery on it, and some of Duncan’s and his father’s underwear, soaking in soda in a big zinc pail. Duncan blushed when he saw this, and quickly moved the pail aside. Alec moved the crockery, piece by piece, to the kitchen table.
Then they each took an end of the bath cover and lifted it off.
The water beneath was left over from a bath that Duncan’s father had taken days before. It was cloudy, and filled with little hairs—coarse, curling hairs, more shaming even than the underwear, so that Duncan took one look at them and had to turn away. He made fists of his hands. If his father had been before him now, he would have punched him. ‘That swine!’ he said.
‘There’s about enough, anyway,’ said Alec dubiously. ‘How will we do it, though? We can’t both lie in it at once. I suppose we could hold each other’s heads in?’
The thought of putting his face in that filthy water, which had sloshed round his father’s feet, his private parts, his arse, made Duncan want to be sick. ‘I don’t want to,’ he said.
‘Well, I don’t, much,’ Alec answered. ‘But look here, we can’t afford to be choosy.’
‘Let’s make it gas, after all, and risk it.’
‘Shall we?’
‘Yes.’
‘All right. Or—Crikey, I’ve got it!’ Alec snapped his fingers. ‘Let’s hang ourselves!’
The idea was almost a relief. Duncan didn’t mind what they did, now, so long as it didn’t involve his father’s bath-water. They put the draining-board cover back in place, then looked about, at the walls and ceiling, in search of hooks, something to tie ropes to. They decided at last that the pulley of the laundry-rack would take the weight of one of them; the other could hang himself, they thought, from the coat-hook on the back of the kitchen door.
‘Have you got any rope?’ asked Alec next.
‘I’ve got this,’ said Duncan, with a flash of inspiration. He meant the cord of his dressing-gown. He untied it, pulled it out of its loops, and tested the strength of it with his hands. ‘I think it’ll hold me.’
‘That’s you taken care of, then. What about me? You haven’t got another, I suppose?’
‘I’ve got plenty of belts and things like that. I’ve got plenty of ties.’
‘A tie would do it.’
‘Shall I go and get one? What kind do you want?’
Alec frowned. ‘A black one, I suppose. No! The one with the blue and gold stripe. That looks like a university tie.’
‘What difference does that make?’
‘There might be photographs. It’ll make more of an impression.’
‘All right,’ said Duncan reluctantly—for, as it happened, he felt about that particular tie more or less as he’d felt about his fountain pen: that it was a good one, and belonged to him; and what was the point of using one like that, when an ordinary one would do? But he wouldn’t argue about it now. He went quietly back through the parlour and hall, into the bedroom, and got the tie out. He could hear his father, still snoring, and he stood for a second in the darkness, with the tie in his hand, half wanting to go in and give his father a kicking, to scream and yell into his face, You bloody old fool! I’m going to kill myself! I’m going to go out to the kitchen and actually do it! Wake up, can’t you?
His father snored on. Duncan went softly back out to Alec. ‘My old man sounds like a bloody Hurricane now!’ he said as he closed the kitchen door.
But Alec didn’t answer. He’d put the dressing-gown cord down and was standing at the sink, half turned away. He’d picked something up from beside the taps.
‘Duncan,’ he said, in a queer, low voice. ‘Look at this.’
He had Duncan’s father’s old-fashioned razor in his hand. He’d drawn out the blade, and was gazing at it as if mesmerised—as if he had to tear his eyes away from it to look at Duncan. He said, ‘I’m going to use this. That’s what I’m going to do. You can hang yourself if you like. But I’m going to use this. It’s better than a rope. It’s quicker, and cleaner. I’m going to cut my throat.’
‘Your throat?’ said Duncan. He looked at Alec’s slender white neck—at the cords in it, and the Adam’s apple, which seemed hard, not soft like something you could slice through…
‘It’s sharp, isn’t it?’ Alec put his finger to the blade—then quickly drew the finger back and sucked it. ‘God!’ He laughed. ‘It’s sharp as anything. It won’t hurt at all, if we do it quick enough.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure. It’s how they kill animals, isn’t it? I’m going to do it, right now. You’ll have to go second. Will you mind? There might be a bit of mess, I’m afraid. The best thing will be not to look too hard. If only we had two of them! Then we could do it at the same time…Look.’ He gestured with the razor to the bit of paper he’d written their letter on. ‘Be a good chap and pin that letter to the wall. Somewhere they’ll see it.’
Duncan picked up the letter and the pin; but glanced anxiously at the razor. He said, ‘Don’t do it while my back’s turned, will you?’ He was afraid to look away…He gazed quickly about for a place, and ended up fixing the note to the door of a cupboard. ‘Is that all right?’
Alec nodded. ‘Yes, that’s good.’
He’d begun to grow breathless. He was still holding the open razor as if simply madly admiring it; but now, as Duncan watched, he grasped its handle more firmly in his two hands, lifted the blade, and put it tight against his throat. He put it just below the bend of his right jaw, where the skin was quivering because of the pulse.
Duncan took an involuntary step towards him. He said nervously, ‘You’re not going to do it straight away?’
Alec’s eyelids fluttered. ‘I’m going to do it in just a minute.’
‘How does it feel?’
‘It feels OK.’
‘Are you scared?’
‘A bit,’ said Alec. ‘How about you? You’ve gone white as a sheet! Don’t faint, before it’s your turn.’ He changed his grip on the handle of the razor. He closed his eyes, and stood still…Then, with his eyes shut tight, and in a slightly different voice from before, he said, ‘What will you miss, Duncan?’
Duncan bit his lip. ‘I don’t know. Nothing!
No, I’ll miss Viv…What about you?’
‘I’ll miss books,’ said Alec, ‘and music and art, and fine buildings,’ so that Duncan wished that he’d said that, too, instead of his sister. ‘But those things are all gone, anyway. A year from now, people will start to forget that there ever were those things.’
He opened his eyes, and swallowed, then changed his hold again. Duncan could see that his fingers were sweating; he could see the marks they left on the razor’s tortoiseshell handle. He didn’t want Alec to do it, now. The whole thing had raced forward too quickly. Again he almost wished that his father would wake up, come out, and stop them. What was the point of having a father, if he let you do things like this? He said—as a way of keeping Alec talking; as a way of stringing everything out—‘What do you think will happen to us, Alec, after we die?’
Alec thought about it, with the blade still close to his throat. Then, ‘Nothing,’ he said quietly. ‘We’ll just go out, like lights do. There can’t be anything else. There can’t be a God. A God would’ve stopped the war! There can’t be a heaven or a hell or anything like that. This is hell, where we are. And if there is a place, then we’ll be there together, anyway.’ He held Duncan’s gaze, with his blazing red-rimmed eyes. ‘That would be the worst thing, wouldn’t it?’ he said simply. ‘To be there on your own?’
Duncan nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, that would be awful.’
Alec drew in his breath. The pulse in his neck began to beat more quickly, to almost jump against the blade. But when he spoke, he spoke as if casually, so that Duncan thought he was joking, and almost laughed. He said, ‘See you then, Duncan.’ And he tightened his grip and raised his elbows, as if about to swing a bat; and then he cut.
It’s this way,’ the warden was saying. Kay and Mickey followed him, carefully, over the rubble.
The rubble, until very recently, had been a four-storey terraced Pimlico house. The house appeared, in the almost darkness, to have been neatly plucked from its socket. A woman had been killed outright by the blast; her body had already been removed, by another driver. But a girl was still caught by her legs in the rubble; the Rescue and Demolition workers were planning to set up a hoist to lift the beams that were pinning her. They couldn’t do that, however, until they’d brought out another woman and a boy who were thought to be trapped in the basement.