Mark Dunn - We Five

Jerry got up.

“Where are you going?” asked Katz.

“If I’m lucky, someplace I can avoid the two of you whilst waiting to go wynken and blynken with the eternal poppies.”

Jerry drifted out of the pub.

Will looked at Tom and Tom looked at Will with reflective gazes that revealed nothing. Then Will turned to the bar. His eyes clapped on the large ceramic pig sitting on the top shelf and looking very much like an oversized piggy bank. The pig’s expression matched that of the pig on the sign which swung over the door to the tavern — self-pleased, blissfully unaware that he might at a moment’s notice be converted into a tasty loin of pork or piping hot pork pie.

“She treated us like pigs,” said Will to himself, though his statement could not help being audited by his increasingly besotted and equally belligerent companion.

“Who?”

“Who what?”

“Who treated us like pigs?” asked Katz. “I thought they all did.”

“Ruth. The one who wouldn’t have anything to do with us. I remember that sour look she gave me when Carrie and me were crooning like cats at the Palais.”

Katz laughed. “We all looked at you like you were dotty. You were making a bleeding disturbance.”

“She gave you that look too, Tom. She gave it to all of us. Like she was some bloody toff— better than the whole lot of us.”

Katz took a pull on his beer. “Maybe she is.”

“Bollocks.”

Will sank deeper and deeper into vengeful thoughts — thoughts of how he might right things in a very different way than that sought by his now foolishly forgiving former friend Jerry Castle.

Night and darkness came quickly. Maggie had been home for several hours and didn’t quite know what to do with herself. She’d yet to hear anything from her mother, but held to a shred of hope that some valuable piece of information might somehow find its way to her — perhaps from a go-between of some sort. With the mandatory blackout now drawing down upon both Maggie and all her fellow Londoners, she thought she might walk over to the Balham Underground station.

Maggie had got quite good at negotiating the streets in the darkness. Even though she generally took along her torch, it having been recently fitted with both new Number Eight batteries and a fresh globe, she rarely used it. Perhaps it was the carrots her mother, with typical wartime economy, had put into nearly every soup and casserole she served, or the fresh bilberries Maggie loved (berries which were keen for the eyesight and thought to give R.A.F. pilots the upper hand over their German adversaries).

Maggie had thought during her trip back into the city with Ruth that a very good place for a fugitive and his “gun moll”—as the Americans so colourfully put it (or at least those Americans who worked on the Warner Brothers gangster pictures) — to go “underground” was actually to go underground — that is, to lose themselves among the throngs of Londoners who queued up each night to shelter themselves from bombing raids by descending like Lewis Carroll’s Alice into the city’s deepest rabbit holes. Maggie could easily fancy her mother and the man who would have become her father, should things have transpired differently, spending long evenings in the Balham tube — and perhaps a good part of their days Underground, as well.

Maggie had nearly convinced herself to take a look when there came a knock at the door. She hesitated. She peeled up one corner of the blackout paper that covered the front window. Through the exposed glass she got a sideways view of the front step…and the man standing upon it. It was Jerry Castle, the person in all the kingdom she least desired to see again.

“I’ve come to apologise,” said Jerry to the door.

“I’m over here at the window,” Maggie shouted through the glass, her lips all but pressed against the spot where she’d turned up the gummy paper. “Apologise to me over here at the window and then pop off.”

Jerry wheeled round to address the windowpane. “I’m sorry I behaved so abominably. I am an abominable person and deserve to be removed from your life forever. I am without any hope of redemption. Accept this apology and I’ll be on my way.”

“Apology accepted. Now go.”

“I’m going to enlist.”

“You’re making a list? What list?”

“No. To enlist . In the army.”

“Oh. Well. Take care of yourself. Cheers.”

“I will. Cheers.”

Jerry started down the flag walk just as the air raid siren began to blare. He halted and looked up into the sky. Overhead, the silver-grey barrage balloons drooped in limp silhouette, the conical searchlights that would soon animate them not yet switched to full power.

Maggie looked at him for a moment through the spot where she’d pulled the paper away and where the light from inside seemed, she thought, to be escaping with such brilliance as to target her house for a made-to-order bomb drop from an approaching Heinkel or Messerschmitt.

Then she went to the door. Reluctantly, she opened it. “Come inside. We’ll go round back and you can wait out the raid in my Anderson.”

Jerry nodded and followed Maggie through the empty house and out to the backyard. “Where’s your mother?”

Maggie spoke to Jerry over her shoulder. “It’s a sad but interesting story. You know part of it already. We’ll have plenty of time for me to tell you the rest once we put ourselves beneath the corrugated.”

This particular air raid lasted over an hour. With the bombs falling frightfully close and the two feeling that copping it right then and there was a palpable possibility, Jerry took Maggie in his arms and held her closely and protectively. Maggie didn’t resist. She had, like Jerry, become a helpless victim to the peril of their circumstances. She was frightened. She was also exhilarated.

Soon Jerry was kissing Maggie and undressing her with ravenous paws. Maggie forgave him for every hateful, stupid, boorish thing he’d said, and even forgave his participation in “the game,” for which he blamed Tom Katz, who “had a way of forcing people to do things that were against their generally good natures.” And whereas Pat and Molly had been like two adolescents, exploring one another with tender and curious innocence; and whereas Will and Carrie had delighted at the Hammersmith Palais in all the possibilities inherent in “that which could very well be”; and whereas Ruth and Cain had melded minds and joined their two hearts to the extent that their settled penchants permitted them; and whereas Jane had submitted to a seduction that was less seduction and more a brutal conquest of body, mind, and spirit; Maggie and Jerry found in their present situation the opportunity for union of a different species, enhanced by an aphrodisiac of immense potency. They reeled over the possibility that the climax of their spirited animalistic coupling might be death itself in the form of either an advertent or inadvertent gift from Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering.

It did not end thusly but it did end with feelings of receding rapture that Maggie would have been hard-pressed to describe in words.

No. Maggie hadn’t danced a dervish with the devil, but there was still the distinct smell of cordite and sulphur in the air.

And it made her wonder…

Bellevenue, Mississippi, February 1997

“Where are my panties?”

“Is that them hanging on that rake?”

“That isn’t a rake. It’s a yard broom.”

Jerry was sitting on an upturned wheelbarrow. He was enjoying the scene of a totally naked Maggie Barton searching the tool shed for all the clothes she had flung off before having impromptu, devil-may-care sex with him. “I’m kind of out of my, um, element,” said Jerry teasingly. “I’ve never had sex in a tool shed before.”