Only Lovers Left Alive

by Dave Wallis

  Charlie was looking at him. He thought, “I got them all into this.” Three Kings came at them, flailing chains edged with old razor blades soldered to the links. He had just time to wave to Charlie with a cutting motion. A barbed chain hissed past his skull and he glimpsed a pair of newish boots. He made a feint and then spun himself to fall, curled, on hip and shoulder, shooting out his feet, ankles pressed together, at the shins of his enemy. He rolled over and was up and away while the King was still wondering what had hit him. Charlie had understood and the Seely boys were now split along both sides of the street. Dusk fell. In the midst of battle both sides felt the odd longing for the sight of the streetlamps and the shop-fronts alight once more. The untidy running fight went on, sparking from doorway to doorway. When the Kings held a building they swung a flag out of a window and shone a torch on it for a moment.

  The groups of fighters spread down darkened side-turnings and the noise of firing came from the distance. Ernie found himself with three boys and Kathy at his side in a pitch-dark doorway.

  He had a torch. The shadowy bulk of a group of Kings passed them. In the black of a moonless night the fight had become a duel in the use of torches. A beam both sought out your enemy and gave yourself away.

  There were whispers in the street and four dim shadows loomed. Ernie chanced a flash of his torch. The beam showed four Kings who started to run as the light struck. Led by Ernie they whooped in pursuit, and into the trap. The decoys suddenly turned and faced them and from the shadows of a tall building ten Kings slid out. They had more torches and flicked them on boldly so that Ernie had to raise a hand to shield his eyes. One or two Kings were already outflanking them and at one side he could see a shadow stretching and twitching in the beam. Even his own shadow seemed to be uncertain what to do. The Kings closed in. Three of his boys went down gurgling from a bullet in the guts. As if as a counter-weapon he switched on his own torch and called to the others to do the same. He saw Charlie stumble and fall as a chain wrapped itself round his neck. Kathy’s face for an instant flared in a torch beam the lips slightly parted, without fear of any kind, with a lock of hair, sweat-plastered over her forehead, as she swung a tommy-gun round and held it down against its lifting kick. At that moment one of the Kings gave a shout, “Look out!” High above both sides a window had opened and four stories up the tiger-head flag of Seely St. jerked out of a window on a pole made from the base of a standard lamp. It seemed the Seely boys had seized the top of the very building from which the Kings were operating. Perhaps they had climbed over the roofs. Ernie wondered who they could be. The Kings hesitated a moment and three dropped squirming, caught by Kathy’s tommy-gun. In the confusion the others must have thought that the shots came from above them and believing themselves attacked now from both front and back, they raced off down the darkened street.

  For some hours the battle went on with chance encounters and sudden hand-to-hand scrimmages. Robert stuttered out the explanation for the flag’s appearance, some girl he’d met on his spying trip and he’d given her a flag. Well, it had certainly helped.

  They moved in on the castle itself. A few Kings fired from round corners and then beat it down into the strange cellars and among the rambling collection of state rooms and the portrait-lined corridors.

  It took a long time to round them up, but the slaves helped. Ernie sat in a main state room with people running in and out dragging captured Kings and excitedly reporting news of distant skirmishes.

  Robert met Julia strolling calmly into the castle as if she owned it. She was with two girl-friends. He rushed up to her and began to stammer out, “Hhhhhh-hullo, thanks for the flag bbbbbbusiness. I told Ernie what you’d done.”

  “Think nothing of it,” said Julia and giggled. Her laugh! He was suddenly conscious of nothing but the intense memory of her young body flexing against his own and her smell. This feeling had as well the bitter sharpness of the past. He moved a step nearer, sick with longing. One of the girls said, “Who’s this, Julia?”

  “One of the boys I knew,” said Julia.

  “Handsome isn’t he,” said the other girl and all three laughed and stood back as if they were admiring a view or a picture.

  The first girl said, “I like the way his ears stick out but he don’t seem to have much go in him, does he Julia?”

  “Don’t be rude,” said the second girl and all three giggled. He was expecting Julia to detach herself from these stupid children, to shrug them off and join him and they would walk off somewhere and he would be one of the new rulers of the castle and she would know where there was a room with a bed in it. At that moment she said, “Boys are all the same. They have a bit of go but never for long enough.”

  “Julia!” the other two shrieked and they all giggled again. He was left standing there, hanging in a self-conscious awkwardness. His eyes fell and, without real intent, he found himself staring at her slim waist and the soft swelling start of her firm hips. He heard the shouting and noise of some fight in the distance behind. Ernie’s voice shouted, “Bob, go and see what’s going on.”

  “Go on, do what your leader tells you,” said the first girl.

  Suddenly his anger came. Better late than never. “I thought you, at least, had some sense,” he snapped at Julia. He turned and ran lightly down a wide marble staircase, turfed in some softly decaying green carpet. A group of Kings had been found hiding in a concealed butler’s pantry and some of the freed slaves were kicking and threatening them. Two Seely boys stood watching, already tired with the long battle and the sleepless night and sated with violence and victory. The Kings cowered back against the wall, whimpering and snarling and the slaves kicked at them slyly and slapped them and called them names. It was a messy and uncertain occasion of mutual degradation. The Kings were of those who had not died in battle but run away and hid, and the slaves were of those who had not been tortured to death by the Kings. Thus, there was now only mutual contempt, guilt and the pretence of real hatred to bolster an indecisive revenge; slaps and screams where there should have been the knife and silence.

  One or two turned to look at Robert. The quicker-witted among the Kings thrust meaning glances his way trying to indicate: “Save us from these peasants and we’ll fight for your gang.” Among them was the fat boy, the very one who had cut up Charlie, an epoch ago, and had kicked Gillian in front of his eyes last week. This Fatty was the first to suddenly crack altogether and fall on his knees, squealing and holding his arms wrapped around his head, hands on ears, in an unheeded gesture of self-protection, for everyone was too startled and disgusted to attack him further.

  The three girls, Julia and her attendant graces, had dithered to the top of the marble stairs in curiosity and Robert looked round as they turned and walked up again, not interested in yet another masculine scuffle. Julia lingered for a pace or two after the others and he watched, unable to help himself, the swing of her tight-jeaned bottom, retreating from him, a stairstep at a time and at each lift excluding him further from the world of soft, secret girls’ treasures haired and hidden in that fold of firmness which she now twitched after her, round the curve of the stairs and up out of sight.

  Sensing that the Kings might get in first the slaves started to clamour around him, telling of tortures these very Kings had inflicted on them, asking that they be shot or burnt. Robert thought, “They want us to do what they haven’t the nerve to do for themselves.” He was exasperated and angry for some reason he could not understand. Hardly thinking about it he slashed his stiff-edged hand like a short-sword in front of him and cut a way through to the new prisoners. He felt the sweat on his face and knew that he looked white and crazy with rage. “Child Guidance Clinic, Miss Browning looking at me,” he thought. It was the feeling of being watched in the soul’s nakedness yet again. In the middle of this his left foot sunk into the rubbery bulk of Fatty, who looked up at him and with real tears on his dewlap cheeks, trickling down into the corners of his cruel thin mouth, whined, “Get me out of this,
chum, please, please. I’ll be a slave for you. I know where I can get girls who’ll do anything for you, I’ll see after you, I didn’t mean any harm, there’s worse than me, there is, really.”

  Robert’s rage went back to wherever it had come from. He said, “You Kings get those uniforms off and lose them and then muck in with the work. You boys,” to the slaves, “Leave them bbbbbe unless they don’t work. All of you get bbbusy on car-car-car-ting all the stuff you can find to the main hall for counting. You, come with me Fatty.” He took hold of the hump of the quivering shoulder and got gooseflesh, “You come with me, Fatty,”­ he said again, and the snivelling lump stood up with surprising quickness and trailed after him up the flight of moss-rotting green carpeted stairs.

  In the main hall Robert found the plain Gillian, ploddingly bending her lumpy figure over a pile of tins and counting them humbly for her new masters as she had once cleaned the bikes of the Kings. She stood up as Robert approached and took one glance at his prisoner. Her face, as round and lumpy as her shape, showed no change of expression.

  Robert jerked his thumb at Fatty. “This character was found hiding,” he said. “If Charlie recognises him he’ll shoot him straight off. I thought you ought to have a chance of revenge. I mmmmmmm-ean after all he did to you, I mean . . . NNNNNNNow. . . .” His voice trailed off. He was safe in the knowledge that his meaning must have been taken and that as a victor and bringer of a great gift he had no need to feel insecure. Gillian’s face was still expressionless, it crossed his mind that she might be really a bit feeble-minded. “GGGGo on,” he stammered in an annoyed tone. “Do what you like with him. Or I will if you sssay whwwhwhwhat.”

  Fatty fell on his knees once more. Sweat poured from the back of his neck. When he lifted his face imploringly up to them it was sopping with tears and blubbery with the sweat of terror. “Please Gillian, please,” he supplicated. “I know I done wrong to you. Do what you like to me only don’t tell them to do me in, please Gillian, please. I’ll do anything for you, anything, please Gillian please.” He subsided into whimpers and disgusting sobs.

  Robert was revolted to the point of nausea. He looked at Gillian, seeking to share a raised eyebrow of distaste. She looked back at him quite emptily. She bent down and patted the same fat shoulder which it had given Robert gooseflesh to touch.

  “Stop carrying-on,” she said. “It’ll be all right. Everything’ll be all right, you’ll see. Sit up on this chair. Take off that captain’s jacket and sit quiet. Nobody’ll get you. I’ll fetch you a cup of tea. Then you’ll feel better.”

  Snuffling like a boy who wishes to dramatise the effect of some punishment from which he has already recovered, Fatty did as she said. He was holding her hand. Robert stood dumbfounded and they both ignored him. All that was happening was Gillian saying, “There, there,” and wiping the slob’s face for him, but he felt as if he were a Peeping Tom watching something better not observed. He walked off into the bustle of the hall. The damp and decaying smell of the rotting castle carpets and the neglected warped panelling and peeling gilt was yielding to the gunpowder and oil stench brought in by the Seely boys and to the clean smell of the freshly uncrated stores. It was three in the morning and the tiredness of one and all had given way to a strange light-headed excitement. Most people felt hungry but didn’t want to eat. In a corner he saw Julia alone, standing watching. She waved to him as if nothing had happened and, still dazed with surprise and disgust at what he had just seen, he crossed over to her.

  Julia ran a few steps up to him and took his arm and started telling him details of stuff not yet found and offering to help uncover it and asking him to introduce her to “that good-looking leader of yours”.

  A fresh bewilderment piled on top of his existing puzzlement.

  “You’ve changed, I mean changed your mmmind, then?” he managed to get out.

  She looked at him. “I do like you, Robert,” she said and pressed against him so that her breast nuzzled his arm once more. “What’s the matter? Surely you’re not all that surprised are you?” She looked at his face more closely. “I knew it for certain just now, when you walked away from us instead of trying to answer back and all that silliness. You mustn’t pay too much attention to us girls when we get like that. We have a lot to put up with from boys, and not being boys ourselves if you know what I mean.” She glanced at him again, closely. “There’s something else,” she said. He told her all about Gillian and the fat boy and how disgusting the chubby bully had looked when he had collapsed into a fear-trembled jelly. He finished, “I was amazed, I was really. What got into her? Why should she look after a pig that’s treated her like that?”

  Julia laughed and said, “Oh, Robert I do like you, really.”

  “And,” he went on, “she never even thanked me for bringing him to her for her revenge.”

  “Don’t worry, Robert, I’m sure she was grateful.”

  “I ddddon’t understand it,” he stammered and she squeezed his arm again and said, “Where are they?” He pointed over to the far side of the great room. Gillian had fetched the tea. The two were sitting sedately side by side sipping it and watching the bustle like an oldie couple in a Lyons.

  “Well,” said Julia. “That’s easy. She couldn’t be choosey could she?”

  “I still don’t understand,” said Robert, “after the way he treated her and then crawling like that. . . .”

  “You are nice, Robert,” said Julia. “I think I could get quite fond of you.” They left the big over-furnished, over-crowded room and found some food in a deep-freeze, chicken and white-frosted sprouts which Julia melted and boiled up. “I knew the slave-boy who fixed this up,” she said, making small talk over food. “He had lovely black curly hair and he was all the time on his own and in his shirt-sleeves with those nice boy’s arms of his showing, you know?” Now that they were close she obviously expected Robert to nod as if he were an unconcerned, unjealous acquaintance, a girl friend even. “And he kept saying to me ‘It’s only a matter of changing A.C. to D.C. but I haven’t the stuff here to do it.’ And then I’d say ‘Tell them, then,’ but he just used to run his hand through his hair, leaving all grease in it, and get on fiddling about with wires and screws and things. He was like you in a way.”

  “I don’t know much about electricity,” said Robert. “WWWe did a bit in Physics of course, in the old days, but I don’t know as much as he must’ve. . . .”

  “I do like you, Robert,” she said yet again, absently gnawing a chicken femur in her little white teeth, which were round, clean and well-chosen, but set slightly crooked, at odd angles, as if she had grabbed them up in a rush that morning and stuck them in hastily just as she had powdered her armpits and pushed up her hair. She led him off to where there was a broad couch, not yet found by the pillaging Seely boys and their own newly liberated slave-girls, and there under covers of jerked-down, dusty velvet curtains he managed it nicely in spite of his tiredness. It seemed a revenge of sorts but for what precise indifference he could not have said. After a time he started to stroke her breasts once more and to try to place the hardening nipples so that they would cool the itch of his hot palm-centres, and to slide and clamber about with his eyes very tightly shut like a mountain-climber in a blizzard. “Don’t worry, Robby Boy,” she whispered. “You’ve made your point.”

  “Don’t call me ‘Robby Boy’,” he hissed, eyes still closed and teeth shut tight. With such amplitude as the heavy velvet curtain coverlet allowed she swung her arm and smacked his bare tense buttocks and at once his masterful strivings seemed absurd.

  “Rest a bit,” she said, lazily and comfortably. “Go to sleep. See me in the morning for confession, as the bishop said to the actress.”

  For an instant he was alone, aware of himself alone, as when seized with the bleakness of watching Kathy go off with Ernie, on the roof-tops or that time they were all telling stories of some fight and he couldn’t get his own out because he had to begin with, “In Percy St.” and the P in “P
ercy” was too much for him and he never got past it.

  All this in the instant in which she had made him aware of his body separate from her own. He was, all at once, furious, with life, with himself, with his body and, above all, with her. He opened his eyes and in the dim light saw her face and the way her hair grew round her ears. Her eyes were wide open and looking into his as if she had been waiting all along for him to open his own. His manhood rose unasked and he kneed the pearly steed and stretched his length along to her womb-tip.

  When it was over she sighed and relaxed against him. They became very close. He began to talk to her. He told her about the stammer and his own theory of why it sometimes didn’t come on at all. He told her about that lady doctor at the clinic years ago; and about the time he’d sailed the paper-dart across the classroom and tried to own up so that the others wouldn’t think he was afraid of the stick, and then couldn’t get a word out, not even when the teacher brought the ruler down across his inky palm.

  All these things came off his tongue without a stammer at all. “You see?” he said. “That just shows, when I’m with you. . . .” He turned towards her to share the delight of her part in his cure. Her lips were open, showing the little teeth, and her breath fell regularly and softly on his cheek. She must have been asleep for quite a time.

  The dirty velvet covering felt sticky on his tired limbs. He could have done with a shower and a glass of cold milk. He turned on his back and gazed at the high ceiling of this secret little ante-room of the palace. His gang had taken this place. His own girl slept sound at his side. He was free of the ache of loving Kathy. Yet he felt he wanted to get up and find some member of the gang, not a close friend, but not too much a stranger either, and tell him all about it. Why should he feel like that? “Besides,” he thought, “if you did you might only stammer.” In the stillness Julia sank deeper into sleep and began, ever-so gently, charmingly and lightly, to snore.