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“Stay below, please.”
The stool the blond was perched on rocked uneasily with the snapping turn of Peter’s body to face the source of those ancient words. He felt his heart atrophy in his chest once, twice, before he met the eyes of a man buried deep in the sands of time.
“You’re… you were…” Peter feels the words stick in his throat like choking gauze, every syllable feeling like it had been ripped free. He swallows thickly, hoping to oil the rusted trap of his vocal cords, but he still can’t quite coax the final few words free. You were at Dunkirk.
“I figured it was you- still wearing that bloody red sweater even after all these years.”
The man sits with a grimace on the stool next to Peter, his elbows settling heavy on the bar top. Peter thinks absently that he may’ve heard the joints creak in a quieter setting. Peter watches that worn face scrutinisingly, trying to pick out the set of his jaw and the crease between his brows and those tired green eyes from the hundreds he’d seen that day out in the channel. He blinks and tries to imagine thick, black oil muddling the picture of the other man’s face.
“I don’t know your name, I’m sorry,” Peter stammers, gesturing to the bartender to get something for his… ghost.
“But I know yours, Peter” he trails off as he roots through the pocket of his trousers, pulling free a worse for wear packet of cigarettes and plucking one out, dropping the packet on the counter like he was planning to get through a couple more before he leaves. He must notice Peter’s shocked expression, because he flicks his hand, “heard your old man say it on the way to Dover- I have a good memory.”
“Weymouth.”
“What?”
Peter clears his throat and has a sip of his drink to try and keep himself talking, “your friend thought it was Dover, but it was Weymouth- are you so sure about your good memory?”
The man laughs and it sounds gritty, maybe he didn’t make a habit of laughing too often. Had to relearn all the mechanisms every time. “Just for names then, I suppose.” He’s pulling the cigarette to his lips now, but hesitates and fixes his intense gaze on Peter. “Do you have a lighter?”
“You’re the one smoking, where’s yours?”
Another huffed chuckle, “stuck with matches at the moment, you may not have noticed the rainstorm outside with your head so far up your arse.” The words may have stinged if Peter hadn’t noticed the tired amusement written onto his features. Peter remembered back on the channel- the fierce set of his features; it was a slight comfort to see the years hadn’t drained him of all his spark. Peter had seen way too many men who had been.
Peter sighs and pulls his lighter from the pocket it had been sitting in, he flicks the lid and holds it steady as the man leans in and waits until the cherry is glowing and trailing a thin line of smoke as he sits back. The blond watches, almost hypnotised as he grabs the cigarette in his teeth, lips pursing around it, his cheeks puff once, twice, and a cloud of smoke billows from his nostrils and corners of his lips. He looks immediately more relaxed, and when he holds out the smoke to Peter, the blond shakes his head, “can’t help but feel they’re not great for you.”
“You’re alone in that, I feel… why the lighter then? You an arsonist?”
Peter shakes his head and fiddles with the lighter, thumbing over the patches on the object where fingers had worn the engraving down long ago. “It was my brothers, like to keep it on me. Also helps when random people ask for me to light their cigarette because their matches got drenched in a rainstorm.”
“Wouldn’t call myself a ‘random’ person, you did save my life once,” Peter could tell there was an unsaid ‘and’ after that sentence, and Peter dropped his eyes, he had a good feeling he knew what that ‘and’ was. He’d heard those three words in his dreams, no matter how long ago, no matter how much moving on he forced upon himself, he could never quite unstick them.
“I don’t even know your name.”
The man holds Peter’s gaze as he inhale’s the final millimetres left on his cigarette, and as the filter finally runs down, the younger man squirms at the weight of the other’s eyes. He doesn’t lift his gaze as he lets the smoke billow out in thick plumes until it trails into barely a whisper. Peter swallows and busies himself with his glass, throwing back the remaining trickle and ordering another. The blond plucks at the frayed hem of his sleeve, ordering himself to beg his mother to fix it again just to have something to think about beyond the weight of the other’s gaze.
“Years treated you well, Peter?” he finally looks away to pluck another cigarette free, and Peter has barely the time to spark the wick before the other man is leaning across the bar, lips attached to the end of the cigarette and holding it still long enough to catch. He grasps it with his index and middle finger as he leans back, puffing all the way like a steam engine. Peter inhales the secondhand smoke and tries not to cough, his eyes prickling- they were obviously very cheap cigarette’s. He remembers his father offering him a lungful from his pipe when he’d turned 18, the year before Dunkirk, and although it had singed a strip from his throat to his lungs it’d been a lot nicer than whatever this bloke was smoking. Maybe that was why his voice seemed so harsh, so gritty.
“I finished university two years after… you know… I’m working for a publishing company now- writing freelance here and there, but mostly editing and… publishing.”
The other man hums as he draws from his cigarette again, cheeks hollowing on the inhale. Peter picks at the bar top to draw his eyes from the sight. “So that’s why you got off, eh? Lucky bugger- couldn’t imagine you having much fun on that beach with the rest of us,” he taps at his cigarette to dislodge the charred bundle at the tip and Peter’s looks back to him- he doesn’t look bitter, like he envies Peter’s lucky escape from warfare. “I was never smart enough for school- suppose that was my fault though.”
“Education isn’t for everybody.”
“You got a bird? I tried to make it work when the war was over and everyone still thought we were gilded heroes, but she caught on pretty quick, and I discovered I had something I thought I’d lost.”
Peter shifted in his seat again, he gestured at the man, “and what was that?”
“Empathy- I let her go, didn’t push her to stick around because I wanted to make myself feel better. The first time you see death, you cry, you see it in your sleep or whatever- then you see it a second, third, fourth, fiftieth time and you don’t feel a way about it anymore. Makes you wonder if you’ve lost it for good. She hadn’t realised when she met me that I’d have so much… baggage.”
They sit in the silence and Peter watches his face, a pinch between his brows- deep buried pain pulled to the surface, a sniff as he takes another drag- burying it again. When he looks back at Peter it’s with an expectant raise of his brows, and the blond stammers his way into a response- “no- nobody for me, kind of buried myself in school after I lost… George and- and my brother. Then I buried myself in my job to pay for school. Not much time for women.” He internally winced at the specification, like all those stolen moments in alleys and dorm rooms and libraries refused to be denied outright. He studied the man’s look for suspicion, but only caught the subtle flicker of something like understanding.
They sit in silence as Peter finishes another glass and the man smokes through another cigarette. Finally deciding he’d had enough by the third and tucking the packet away. Peter is quick this time, sparking the lighter and holding it out awkwardly, away from himself so all’s needed is a tip of the mans chin to reach the flickering flame.
“You’re not the first I’ve bumped into- if you’d believe it,” he mumbles at last, breathing out a lungful of smog and chasing it with a mouthful from the same drink he’d been nursing since he’d sat down- mouth too preoccupied with his cigarette to give it proper attention. At Peter’s enquiring hum, he nods, “my mate that I was with on the boat- served with him here and there before the end of the war, we stay… familiar these days. He’s not much fun to be around though,” Peter can tell he intends it as a joke, but there’s fresh pain buried just under the surface of his skin, and even when joking about it, it felt like peeling back a fresh scab.
“And you are?”
“You better watch your mouth- I’m a veteran, you know?” he’s standing as he says this, and Peter jolts at the prospect of him leaving.
“You haven’t finished your drink,” he reaches out with an open palm, as if to appease the man into sitting back down, he doesn’t. He hums as if to say, of course, and throws the rest back with a thick swallow, eyebrows pinching as he heavily places the glass back onto the counter.
“I’m afraid I feel as if I have used up all my,” he waves his hands about in Peter’s general direction, “social resources- complaining about my love life, my emotional constipation, general depressing small talk. I’d best be going.” He’s smoking the rest of his cigarette hastily, before smushing it into the ashtray, already a step away from the counter. “I’ll be seeing you, Peter.”
He’s put about a meter between them when Peter unglues his throat enough to call out to him, “you still haven’t told me your name!” now Peter has stood up and follows the man almost to the door.
He shrugs his moth-eaten, damp coat on without looking back at the younger man, “it’s Alex.”
When he swings the door open, it’s raining bullets and his form turns to shadow right in front of Peter’s eyes. Swallowed up by the cold, rainy night.