Mark Mills - The Information Officer

On this occasion, common sense dictated that he leave the motorcycle outside his flat and walk the rest of the way, but somehow it wasn’t an option. He drove straight to Hastings Gardens, tucking the machine out of sight in a narrow alleyway, leaning it against a wall daubed with the words “BOMB ROME.”

As ever, the lock downstairs resisted the initial advances of the key. And, as ever, he paused to catch his breath on the third-floor landing before placing his palm against the door to the apartment. It was unlocked and swung open without resistance.

A ghostlike apparition stood before him. It was Mitzi, her naked limbs rendered more pale by the dark negligee.

She drew him silently inside, easing the door shut behind him. “I was beginning to think you wouldn’t come.”

They stood close, the way they used to stand. And in the deep darkness of the entrance hall he could feel the heat coming off her.

“Where’s Lionel?”

“Gzira. He’s spending the night in one of the officers’ rest flats.”

Gzira sat on the slope right across from the sub base, and ever since the transport infrastructure on the island had all but collapsed, the navy had taken on a number of flats there where officers could overnight.

Max reached into his hip pocket, then placed his hand in hers.

“An egg? I’m lost for words.”

“There are more where that one came from, if you play your cards right.”

“Well, let’s see, shall we?”

He hadn’t meant it that way, and when she dropped to her knees in front of him, her fingers groping for the buttons of his shorts, he protested.

“Mitzi, don’t …”

He heard the egg rolling away across the tiled floor, discarded.

“Mitzi …,” he pleaded.

“Ssshhh …”

“I can’t.”

“If memory serves, you most certainly can.”

The shorts dropped to his ankles, and her long fingers closed around him.

“This isn’t right.”

“Of course it isn’t. That’s the point. It never has been.”

“Mitzi …” He took her by her bare shoulders and raised her to her feet, proud of his resolve. “I don’t want to.”

“So why are you getting harder in my hand?”

Did she really think him so powerless in the face of her desire?

He was on the point of posing the question when she dropped once more to her knees, and all thoughts of resistance were swept aside by the warm embrace of her mouth. His hands went instinctively to her head, his fingers entwining themselves in her soft hair.

It always surprised him that she appeared to derive so much enjoyment from having him in her mouth. Her pleasure seemed almost to equal his own, if the low moans she emitted every so often were anything to go by.

Breaking off, she peered up at him. “You see, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Rising slowly to her feet, she added, “You don’t have to follow me. I’ll quite understand if you let yourself out.”

With that, she made off down the corridor, a dim form fading into the gloom.

His thoughts turned to Lilian. He imagined her standing there in the darkness beside him, observing him, waiting to see what he did, and yet he still stepped out of the shorts gathered around his ankles, leaving them where they lay.

Mitzi was waiting for him on the bed. He couldn’t see her, but he could hear the faint squeak of the springs as she adjusted her position. He removed his shirt and laid it carefully on the floor, aware of the eggs, two in each of the breast pockets.

“I should warn you, I’m very wet.”

He shed his desert boots and his socks and lay down beside her, naked.

“I’ve been wet for hours, thinking about you.”

She liked to talk, and she liked to take her time, he knew that, just as he knew that her lovemaking with Lionel had always been a rushed and entirely silent affair.

“Are you sure you didn’t start without me?”

“I might have, just a bit,” she admitted coquettishly. Reaching for his wrist, she drew his hand down her body, guiding his fingers between her legs. She could have raised the hem of the negligee, but chose not to, preferring that he first feel her through the material.

“You see? I wasn’t lying.”

He slowly worked a finger inside of her, as far as the restraining tension of the moist satin would permit. Her mouth reached for his, her tongue edging between his lips, mimicking the movement of his finger.

Apart from the first time, when he had gone to her room at the Riviera Hotel and found her naked beneath the sheet on the mattress on the floor, underwear of some kind or another had always played a role in their lovemaking. Underwear lent an illicit frisson to their trysts, a whiff of the forbidden, its flimsy barrier a token gesture to Victorian prudishness.

Max didn’t mind; it cost him nothing to play along. It was also an excuse to draw out their few precious moments alone.

On this occasion, though, Mitzi’s characteristic restraint seemed to desert her suddenly. Straddling him in one swift movement, she guided him into her.

“I’m sorry, I need to feel you inside me. Just for a moment. Just for a moment …”

The moment was heralded by the eldritch scream of the air-raid siren, its sickening cadence somehow all the more ominous for the fact that it had gone unheard for so long.

“Oh God …,” Max breathed.

It wasn’t the siren. For all he cared, two hundred German bombers could have been closing in on Malta with instructions to obliterate Number 18 Windmill Street. They were nothing when set alongside the sensation of Mitzi lowering herself onto him.

“I’ll stop if you want,” she teased. “We probably should.”

He placed his hands on her hips and drew her down the rest of the way. She winced, adjusting her position to accommodate him.

“My God, you’re a good fit. Any more would be too much.”

His hands climbed to her small firm breasts, the nipples hard beneath the satin. She placed her hands over his, holding them there.

“We’ve still got time to make the shelter,” she said, almost drunkenly.

“Oh, I think I’ve already found safe harbor.”

It was a terrible joke, a childish jeu de mots , but she laughed, recognizing it for what it was—a cheap swipe at Lionel and his submariner chums. He already knew from her how they liked to talk in such terms when it came to women. Expressions such as “raising the periscope” and “arming the torpedo” figured large in their schoolboy innuendo.

“Well, as long as you don’t blow the tanks too early.”

That was one he hadn’t heard before, and they giggled like two naughty schoolchildren.

“I can feel it when you laugh,” said Max.

“And when I do this …?”

She started to move, a slow, rhythmic roll of the hips, a reminder that they weren’t in fact welded together, one being.

The distant bark of a heavy battery suggested that the searchlights had picked out the first of the raiders.

“There’s no hurry,” she whispered.

“Tell that to our German friends.”

“Let them do their worst. We’re untouchable.”

“I mean it.”

“So do I. If I’m going to die, I want it to be like this, with you inside me.”

And that’s where he stayed. Long after it had become clear that Valetta was the target, long after the whistle and crump of the first bombs had drowned out the dirge of the siren, he was still there, inside her. And as the heavens outside pitched and rolled in one vast, undying thunderclap of sound, they twisted and turned together on the bed, at one with the holocaust, somehow a part of it, immune to it. Terrific concussions tossed the building, but the tremors seemed only to resonate with the febrile tension of their bodies. And as the raid built in ferocity, so did their own exertions, rising to a crescendo, almost in defiance now, looking to drive back the deadly storm, to outlast it.