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Three years after the war ended, Ralph still felt the familiar rush of dread whenever he heard the siren of an ambulance or a police-car. It reminded him too much of the alarum rung during the air-raids. His lunch-break was thirty minutes: he was due back at the hospital by two o’clock. He tried to push its wailing sound out of his head as he ducked into the alleyway and climbed into the building through the open window. As he swung himself down the railing of the steps that led to the basement, he had to admit: the underground storage of the department store was not what he expected.
Drip. Drip. The water leaked from the rusted end of a pipe, its sound an echo in the silence. Drip, drip. Drip.
Merridew was sitting in the corner, beneath the rows and rows canned beans and pickles. He was cradling one arm awkwardly against his chest. Ralph stopped in the doorway.
“Goddamn. I’d hate to see the other guy.”
Merridew looked up, his eyes narrowed fiercely. “You’re early.”
“Pity. Was hoping to beat you.” Ralph stepped forward. “What happened to your wrist?”
“Disagreement with a customer.”
Six years since Ralph decided that he wanted to learned how to hold a surgery knife. Three years since the War: repairs, maintenances, public mourning. The country still covered in ash. Somehow, after all these years, Jack Merridew still haunted Ralph's fucking life like a wraith. Jack Merridew with blood all over his shirt.
“Let me see it,” Ralph said.
He couldn’t tell if there was a taunt in his own voice, or sympathy. An olive branch, or a twist of the knife.
“Right.” The sneer was back: jagged, ugly, Merridew all over. “Forgot you’re a medic.”
There was a medic’s kit in Ralph’s bag. These days he brought it everywhere with him. Ralph sat down against the wall, cross-legged. The coldness of the floor seeped right into his trousers. He took Jack’s wrist with a gentleness that neither of them knew if they could tolerate.
The cut was rough. Blood was crusted around the wound, long streaks turned maroon as they dried. The ragged opening ran halfway up to Merridew’s elbow, stuck with bits of flesh along the frayed edge. It was knifework.
“I’ll ask again, huh. How’d you get it?”
The corner of Jack’s mouth pulled down. No response.
“Hunting again?”
Part of Ralph savored how Jack flinched when he dabbed alcohol into the lacerated skin. He couldn’t help it. The savage part of him, the animal nestled in his stomach: the part he hid from everyone else, well-buried beneath a good-morning smile and a mild look of sanity. He wanted it, wanted to savor Jack’s pain. There was always a queer pleasure in seeing Jack vulnerable.
“I’m volunteering to go work on the Reservoir,” said Merridew, all of a sudden.
Ralph looked up in surprise.
Working on the Reservoir was risky. These past three years the laborers were set to build a sector of enormous walls: the dam to contain and hold back the roaring river, and the weir to divide the water into the East and West basins. At the hospital, Ralph had seen the damage the jobs cost. Your leg crushed by a block of stone or the steel-jaws of a crane, and amputation would be the only option.
“They’re enlisting for the mines, too. Salt and coal. Not enough money for the factory-workers, so everyone’s considering it. Least the Reservoir is government-funded.”
Ralph worked slowly, meticulously. The two of them sat together in silence. He could hear the drip-drip-drip of water somewhere in the ceiling above his head, in the hollow walls.
“There’s rumors of strikes happening up North,” Jack continued. “None down here, though. I doubt the men could afford it. Figured I’d better find another fixed position before the waters get muddy.”
All that education: all those books, white collars and dark robes, cricket and squash, choral songs and politics. The best that England had to offer. Weren’t they promised the same silky tones of refinement that school once offered them in the real world? When did all that poetry run out? Here they were: in hospitals, in mines, in the crevasses and scars left behind in a ragged country. The media forgot about them quickly enough after incident of the island. You could only write about barbarian boys for so long before remembering that there were far more barbarian men.
Ralph shook his head—eyes shut, for a moment, to chase away thoughts. It had been eight years. He had seen battlefields. He had stood on the deck, being questioned by some officer about whether Jack Merridew had bested him in the fight. He could never best me, Officer, the childish voice inside him begged. I could make him holler, Officer. I could pull his hair, take a pinch of his skin between my fingers and twist it, his head thrown back, make him cry out in C-sharp.
During training, once, the elder surgeons asked Ralph why he wanted to be a medic—asked him about his childhood, his history with the incident on the island. He didn’t tell them it wasn’t because he wanted to save lives. He didn’t tell them that the truth was, these days, he could numb so much of his own disgust that seeing blood and injury did nothing to him. That he could see death and barely want to retch anymore.
“Machinery’s cranky, up there.” Jack’s voice was low. “If something happens to me, someone needs to get into my flat and feed Limb.”
Limb was the stray cat that Jack had adopted, about a year ago. Dirty, ugly thing missing a leg. Ralph didn’t know that Merridew could keep an animal alive for that long. Ralph wouldn’t trust Merridew to keep alive a houseplant.
“You tell me that thing’s still alive.”
“Yeah, I know. Beats me.”
“The hell does it eat?”
“Scraps of canned tuna, mostly. If I got any to spare.”
Once in a while he saw it in Merridew: glimpses of a human being, somewhere. For some reason Ralph wanted to pin it down, to injure it.
“You worry you might die, and I’m the one you wanted to tell?” Ralph said. He pulled back. “You’re a sad fucking sonofabitch, Merridew.”
Jack said nothing.
“Well,” said Ralph. The prospect of Jack dying roused a curious anger in his stomach, and he wanted to repel it from his system. “I’d make sure they run you a nice obituary in the papers. Bright young man, the finest batch of English youth. Could’ve made a good butcher if he wasn’t stuck working along the dam.”
Jack flinched.
“They made you a celebrity once. You’d think that was enough.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“Printed your name on the newspapers. Made sure all the little ’uns knew your name.”
Silence.
Ralph put the spare gauze, the iodine, and the bandages back into the kit. The fight ran out of him slowly when he looked up once more and saw the dirty, tired look on Merridew’s face. He’d been tormenting Jack for years, now. He didn’t know why Jack still asked him to come back, why he still left him signals in the underground tunnel they once shared as a meeting place when both of them first moved into the rougher part of the neighborhood. He didn’t know why Jack did any of the things Jack had done.
“You know, if state funds give better money to the hospitals, we could probably afford safer amputations. That way, even if you get an arm mangled—”
“Hey. Ralph.”
“You could probably still live. Bit useless, but you’d live.”
“Ralph.”
“What?”
He curled a fist into Ralph’s collar. “Shut the fuck up.”
Then Jack reached in and kissed him.
Ralph recoiled sharply and bit down in surprise. It was a rough, ungainly kiss. The taste of Merridew’s blood in his mouth made him ache somewhere deep in his chest. He made an involuntary sound against Jack’s mouth, a small sound like a wounded animal. The world darkened and softened from all around him. Cold. Cold, again, when Jack jerked back and abruptly let go of him.
Jack was looking at him with the strangest expression.
“What?” Ralph breathed.
Jack shook his head. His eyes were big.
“Thought I’d—hurt you.”
Oh.
“I’m tough as an old fucking nail,” said Ralph. The hoarseness in his voice betrayed him—perhaps. He wasn’t sure. “You don’t gotta worry.”
Jack’s fingertips grazed the back of his neck, brushing over the stubbly ends at the short tufts of his hair. The warmth of those fingertips trailed along his jaw, his throat, the shyness of his touch almost unbearable. There was a scar there, Ralph knew. Somewhere from the island.
He kissed Merridew again: gently, this time, nudging Jack’s bottom lip open. This year, then another year, then another. Forget the hunting ground, forget the boneyard. Survive, survive, survive.