Chapter Text
He did not know, at first, that he knew them.
They came to him as voices, Liverpool voices in the dark: two voices and then three soldiers in the bright of his torch. Their faces were black, smeared, which was nothing special. One wore glasses. He stood with his chin up and seemed the tallest, though the one behind him was actually taller. That one came forward, smiling; there was something brittle in the smile.
“Starkey?” he said. He had high, arched, girlish eyebrows and would likely be handsome if washed and fed and rested. “Ritchie Starkey?”
“An’ who are you?” Ritchie said.
“Paul McCartney. We met at the céilidh in Toxteth just before the war. We played and you sat in with us on the tambourine.” He was moving closer, slowly and smoothly. Senses much older than the war were sounding an alarm in Ritchie’s brain. For that reason it was no surprise when the one with glasses threw a fist at his face and Paul grabbed for his rifle.
He dodged the punch, shoved the torch in his belt, whirled, swung the stock of the rifle hard into Paul’s stomach and had the muzzle jabbed into the other one’s sternum before he could rebalance to swing again.
The moment was perfectly still, one soldier standing as all men at gunpoint stand, the other on the ground hugging his stomach. The third soldier, silent until now, wailed, “John!”
John—he remembered then. John Lennon, the tin-whistle player of a good three-piece, with McCartney on accordion and a fine little fiddler who couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Where was the boy now? Dead, probably. His gift wasted. The name, what was his name…
“Keep back of me, George,” John said between his teeth, and Ritchie stared, and could not believe it.
Barely eighteen, not even finished growing, and yet all the youth was gone from George’s face. His huge eyes were like coal pits, so black they seemed to have no iris. There was no sign that he recognised Ritchie, and he wondered if this George would have recognised his own mother.
Paul was sitting upright on the ground now. “Let’s all—” He coughed. “Let’s keep our heads, right?”
“Our heads,” Ritchie said. “You’re the fuckin’ chancers who went for me.”
“We don’t want to hurt you—”
“That’s good, ‘cause you won’t.”
“We just want to go through. Just let us through.” It was still Paul talking, but Ritchie kept his eyes on John, who stared back with mute fury. They’d stayed after the céilidh, long after the dancers went home, and John had sung “The Butcher Boy” and “Barbara Allen” and “The Wind That Shakes The Barley.”
“Passes,” Ritchie said.
“Ritchie, come on.” Paul’s voice was high, strained. “You know us.”
“I know what you’re about, don’t I?” It was beginning to rain again. He was cold, his coat full of holes. “I’m detailed to arrest deserters.”
“You know what’ll happen,” John said suddenly. “How’ll you go back to Liverpool, knowin’ you sent us to be shot? If you see George’s mum in the street, will you tell her what you did to her boy?” His eyes blazed cold fire. Oh, make my grave large, wide and deep, he sang in Ritchie’s mind, his whole heart on the tip of his tongue, put a marble stone at my head and feet, tears in his eyes behind the glasses, and then they were all three of them singing, and in the middle a turtledove, so the world may know I died for love.
Ritchie lowered the rifle. He looked at George, whose face was bone white under the dirt. “Nobody needs to be shot,” Ritchie said. “Just turn yourselves round and go on back to your unit, and there’s no more has to be said about it.”
Then, in the space of a breath, a falling raindrop, George darted forward, seized the barrel of Ritchie’s rifle and lifted it straight up, Ritchie’s hands still on it, dumb as dolls’ hands, and shoved the muzzle up into the beardless flesh under his chin and held it there, white-knuckled, shaking, and Ritchie was shaking too, and George said, “Do it.”
He could hear “The Green Groves of Erin,” played quickly, brilliantly, see a fiddle under the boy’s chin instead of a gun. Paul cried out wordlessly and John howled, “Starkey, I will tear your fuckin’ head off—”
“I won’t go back,” George was gasping, almost choking, and Ritchie saw the fiddle and the boy and blood and brains and could not breathe, and he thought the moment would never end, the four of them frozen in horror until the end of the world.
And then two bright tears ran down George’s cheeks, and Ritchie felt them in his eyes too, and he said, very softly, “George, let go of me rifle. You’re not going back. Let go of me rifle, son.”
A deep shudder went up John’s body, and then he was reaching to clasp George’s wrist, with such care it was like George was a house of cards he was building. “Georgie.”
Paul echoed him, rising gingerly from the ground. “Georgie.”
All at once the air poured out of George’s lungs and he collapsed sideways and John caught him and held him against his chest.
“I’m sorry,” Ritchie said, not knowing why.
Paul said, with strange, distant eyes, “He hasn’t strung that many words together in months.”
Memory: the black-haired, black-eyed boy perched birdlike on a pub stool, chattering away. Ritchie felt dimly nauseous. “Changed,” Paul said, “our Georgie has,” as if he could see into Ritchie’s mind. “You understand now, don’t you? Why we have to get out?”
John was whispering something to George, who was still visibly trembling. Below the wretchedness of it Ritchie recognised in himself an odd longing. He’d had his own comrades from home, his pals, and then he’d been gassed and evacuated and by the time he got back from hospital all of them were gone.
“Where are you goin’?” he said.
Paul said, “Switzerland,” as if it was just next door.
“How’re you gonna get there?”
“Zeppelin,” John said over George’s shoulder. “How d’you think? Fuck.”
“Well. If,” Ritchie said slowly, “if you were goin’ back to the line, I’d tell you that you’re on the correct road.”
“Told you we were lost!” Paul whirled and glared at John. “At the last crossroads I said—”
“You said nothin’! You and your I-told-ye-so’s—”
Without lifting his head, George made a small gesture, and they quieted. Paul touched George’s back briefly and turned back to Ritchie. “Anythin’ else you might say?”
“If you go back the way you came about two hundred yards, there’ll be a branch going off to your left. Don’t take that road. You’ll never get to the front.”
When he said nothing further, Paul nodded, and gave John a look, and John whispered to George again and gently separated them. Ritchie pondered the three of them, three dirty, wet, rather pitiful figures bunched together like mongrel pups with no mother. Of course they would never make it to Switzerland. The most they could wish for would be to stand side by side at their executions. He wondered if they knew that. He had seen deserters shot before; most of them went with pleas and tears and vomiting. He wondered if these three would sing before the firing squad. He hoped they would.
“Ta,” John said, and started back the way they had come, Paul following, but George stood still in the road, looking at Ritchie. A skinny hand reached for Paul’s sleeve, and they both turned, and George tipped his head in Ritchie’s direction, communicating something, and John said, “Don’t be daft.”
He saw George draw himself up, a clear statement: Listen to me. Paul said, “Well…”
“Are you takin’ the piss?”
“He’s from home,” Paul said.
“And what’s that supposed to mean.”
“He’s the only one left. It’s just us, and him.”
With a hard jerk it came to Ritchie that he could not remember the last time he’d heard Liverpool voices other than his own.
John’s eyes moved rapidly between their faces and Ritchie’s, outnumbered and mystified. “He’ll be a fuckin’ liability! He joined up, the stupid bugger!”
“So did you! We all did!”
“That’s different and you know it’s different!”
“I’m gonna ask him,” Paul said. “If he says yes then we can have a barney over it.”
John turned and kicked at a rock in the road, which failed to budge, embedded in the mud. “Fuckin’ hell,” he said. “I don’t want to have a barney. I’m knackered.”
“Right. Ritchie,” Paul said. “Come with us.”
He could’ve laughed: I’m gonna ask him, and then not a question at all. Paul’s head was back, his shoulders square; he’d made up his mind. Ritchie should have laughed, but that certainty nudged the world a little off its axis.
“You’re fuckin’ mad, you are,” he finally said. George’s lips parted but no sound came out. In the black depths of his eyes there was a stirring of life, something waking. “You’re askin’ me to abandon me post. You’re out of your heads,” Ritchie said, speaking to Paul, staring at George.
“What is your post? Turnin’ your weapon on men from your own country. You’re not doin’ anything more to beat the Hun than we are.” John’s voice was bright with bitterness.
“Me post is—it’s me post!”
“You standin’ at this crossroads doesn’t matter. The war doesn’t matter. We haven’t won, we haven’t lost, we’ve done nothin’ at all over here but kill and grow poppies. Well, we’re not fuckin’ killers, we’re fuckin’ musicians and we’re goin’ to Switzerland and for some reason George thinks you ought to go with us so—come’ead.”
Ritchie stood thunderstruck. His training blared Sedition in his mind. But he thought back to Loos, felt the itch in his throat. Gassed. By his own side.
He looked again at George’s face, and George looked back and this time he saw true recognition, and the alarm going off in his head grew fainter, more distant, and what was close and clear was the memory of George’s laughter. He took a deep breath. A step in the direction they were going was almost certainly a step toward death. But wasn’t that every step, over here?
To die in front of a firing squad, stone drunk and blindfolded… There were worse ends he could come to. Drowned. Minced by a minenwerfer. Screaming his throat out in no-man’s-land. And if—it would take a miracle—if the miracle came—
Then he would be in Switzerland, and he might even hear George laugh again, someday.
Forty or fifty paces down the road, he said to Paul, “How is it different?”
“Oh,” Paul said. “Well, John’s mum died, see, and he went roarin’ all over Merseyside, and when he sobered up he was holdin’ his enlistment papers. And then Stu joined up to look after him, and then me and George and Pete joined up because home was dead dull without John.”
John, walking in front, suddenly slowed his pace so that Paul and Ritchie came up even with him. He said, in a hard, cold, insistent voice, “Julia didn’t die. Your mum died. Mine was killed.”
“All right, John,” Paul said gently, and Ritchie had the sense that he’d said it a thousand times before, and would keep on saying it as long as he needed to. He felt himself an intruder on their history, and in a quiet loneliness he dropped back to where George was.
George turned, looking at Ritchie with those lightless eyes, and his mouth tensed just slightly and Ritchie was appreciative, understanding that it was as close to smiling as George could get.