Sarah Waters - The Night Watch

' Get down out of those fucking windows! ' roared someone out in the yard, and there was the rapid crunch , crunch of boots on cinders, as the officers emerged from their shelter and started heading towards the prison. From all along the hall, then, there came the thump and scrape of tables: the men were leaping down from their windows, hurling themselves back into their bunks… In another minute, the electric lights were switched on. Mr Browning and Mr Chase came pounding up the stairs and started racing down the landings, hammering on doors, flinging open spy-holes: ' Pacey! Wright! Malone, you little shit - If I catch any of you fuckers out of your beds, the whole lot of you'll be banged up from now till Christmas, do you hear? '

Fraser turned his face into his pillow, groaning and cursing against the light. Duncan drew up his blanket over his eyes. Their door was thumped, but the racing footsteps went past. They faded for a moment; stopped; grew loud, then faded again. Duncan had a sense of Mr Browning and Mr Chase turning snarling about, thwarted and furious, like dogs on chains… ' You shit-cakes! ' one of them cried, for show. ' I'm warning you-! '

They paced back and forth along the landings for another minute or two; eventually, however, they tramped down the stairs. In another moment, with a little phut , the lights in the cells were switched off again.

Duncan quickly put down his blanket and moved his head to the edge of his pillow. He liked the moment when the current was cut. He liked to see the bulb in the ceiling. For the light faded slowly, and for three or four seconds, if you watched for it, you could make out the filament inside the glass, a curl of wire that turned from white to furious amber, to burning red, to delicate pink; and then, when the cell was dark, you could still see the yellow blur of it inside your eye.

A man gave a whistle, quietly. Someone shouted to Atkin. He wanted Atkin to carry on singing. He wanted to know about the girl whose hair was yellow-what did she like? What about her? He called it twice, three times; but Atkin wouldn't answer. The matey, mischievous feeling that had gripped them all, ten minutes before, was losing its hold. The silence was deepening, growing daunting, and to try to break into it, now, was to make it seem worse… For after all, thought Duncan, you could sing or bellow as much as you liked; it was only a way of putting off this moment-this moment that always, finally, came-when the loneliness of the prison night rose up about you, like water in a sinking boat.

He could still hear the words of the songs, however-just as he'd still been able to see the glowing filament in the bulb against the darkness of his own eyelids. Give me a girl , he could hear in his head. Give me a girl , and I'll be seeing you , over and over.

Perhaps Fraser could hear it, too. He changed his pose, rolled on to his back, kept fidgeting. Now that the place was so quiet, when he passed his hand across the stubble on his chin-when he rubbed his eye, even, with his knuckle-Duncan heard it… He blew out his breath.

'Damn,' he said, very softly. 'I wish I had a girl, Pearce, right now. Just an ordinary girl. Not the kind of girls I used to meet-the brainy types.' He laughed, and the frame of the bunks gave a shiver. 'God,' he said, 'isn't that a phrase to freeze a man's blood? “A brainy girl”.' He put on a voice. '“You'd like my friend, she's ever so brainy.” As if that's what one wants them for…' He laughed again-a sort of snigger, this time, too low to make the bed-frame jump. 'Yes,' he said, 'just an ordinary little girl is what I'd like right now. She wouldn't have to be pretty. Sometimes the pretty ones are no good-do you know what I mean? They think too much of themselves; they don't want to mess their hair up, smudge their lips. I wish I had a plain, stout, stupid girl. A plain, stout, stupid, grateful girl… Do you know what I'd do with her, Pearce?'

He wasn't talking to Duncan, really; he was talking to the darkness, to himself. He might have been murmuring in his sleep… But the effect was more intimate, somehow, than if he'd been whispering into Duncan 's ear. Duncan opened his eyes and gazed into the perfect, velvety blackness of the cell. There was a depthlessness to it that was so queer and unnerving, he put up his hand. He wanted to remind himself of the distance between his and Fraser's bunk: he'd begun to feel as though Fraser was nearer than he ought to have been; and he was very aware of his own body as a sort of duplication or echo of the one above… When his fingers found the criss-crossed wire underside of Fraser's bed, he kept them there. He said, 'Don't think about it. Go to sleep.'

'No, but seriously,' Fraser went on, 'do you know what I'd do? I'd have her, fully clothed. I wouldn't take off a stitch. I'd only loosen a button or two at the back of her dress-and I'd undo her brassière, while I was about it-and then I'd draw the dress and the brassière down to her elbows and get my fingers on to her chest. I'd give her a pinch. I might pull her about a bit-there wouldn't be a thing she could do if I did, for the dress-do you see?-the dress would be pinning her arms to her sides… And when I'd finished with her chest, I'd push up her skirt. I'd push it right up to her waist. I'd keep the knickers on her, but they'd be that silky, flimsy kind that you can work your way about, work your way up…' The words tailed away. When he spoke again, his voice had changed, was bare and not at all boastful. 'I had a girl like that, once. I've never forgotten it. She wasn't a beauty.'

He fell silent. Then, 'Damn,' he said softly again. 'Damn, damn.' And he moved about, so that the wires supporting his mattress flexed and tightened, and Duncan quickly drew back his fingers. He had rolled on to his side, Duncan thought; but though he lay still, there was a tension to him-something charged and furtive, as if he might be holding his breath, calculating. And when he moved again, to draw up the blanket, the movement seemed false, seemed stagey: as if it was being made, elaborately, to conceal another, more secret…

He had put his hand, Duncan knew, to his cock; and after another moment he began, with a subtle, even motion, to stroke it.

It was a thing men did all the time, in prison. They made a joke of it, a sport of it, a boast of it; Duncan had once shared a cell with a boy who had done it, not even at night, with a blanket to cover him, but during the day, obscenely. He had learned to turn his head from it-just as he'd learned to turn his head from the sight and sound and smell of other men belching, farting, pissing, shitting into pots… Now, however, in the utter darkness of the cell, and in the queer, uneasy atmosphere raised by Miller's and Atkin's singing, he found himself horribly aware of the stealthy, helpless, purposeful, half-ashamed motion of Fraser's hand. For a moment or two he kept quite still, not wanting to betray the fact that he was awake. Then he found that his stillness only made his senses more acute: he could hear the slight thickening, now, of Fraser's breath; he could smell him as he sweated; he could even catch, he thought, the faint, wet, regular sound-like a ticking watch-of the tip of Fraser's cock being rhythmically uncovered… He couldn't help it. He felt his own cock give a twitch and begin to grow hard. He lay another minute, perfectly still save for that gathering and tightening of flesh between his legs; then he made the same sort of stealthy, stagey movements that Fraser had: pulled up the blanket over himself, slid his hand into his pyjamas, and took the base of his cock in his fist.

But his other hand, he raised. He found the wires of Fraser's bed again and just touched them with his knuckles, lightly at first; then he caught the tension in them, the hectic little jolts and quivers they were giving in response to the regular jog-jog-jog of Fraser's fist… He worked one of his fingers about them-clinging to them, almost, with the tip of that one finger; bracing himself against them, as he tugged with his other hand at his cock.