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a special working of gravity, cont’d
part two
He should have known really. If he wanted to find Bodie, he shouldn’t treat him like a suspect. He shouldn’t waste time with leads and questions and tip-offs. All he needed to do was submit to the gravitational pull that for a few years now had meant he and Bodie were never far apart and mostly in each other’s pocket.
Bodie was already turning from his place at the bar as he came through the door. He must have felt Ray’s presence like a tap on the shoulder.
Bodie reacted first, closing the distance between them. He grabbed Ray by the arm and dragged him into a narrow corridor on the way to the loos. He pushed him against the wall, pressing close enough for Ray to share his warm, whisky breath.
“Just back off, Doyle, stay out of my life,” he barked. “We’ve got nothing to do with each other anymore.”
Some would have been scared off by this stony-eyed stranger, but Ray knew this mask as well as he knew all the others.
“Don’t be a twat, Bodie. Let’s have a drink.”
A ghost of a smile began on Bodie’s lips and vanished.
“Leave it alone, Ray. I’ve told you, we’re finished.”
“Okay, we’re finished, you don’t have to see me again, that’s your business but-.”
“What happened between us–.”
Ray cut him short. He didn’t want to hear it was a mistake though this was self-evident.
“I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about Peter Armstrong.”
“How do you know his name?”
“Don’t go in with him, Bodie. What you’re getting into will get you locked up for a lot longer than six months, or it’ll get you executed, or just shot in the street. And what’s more, you’ll probably deserve it.”
“Well if that’s what you think –“
“Me, I’ll come and get your body. I’ll take you home, make sure your remains get taken care of. I’ll go to blinking Liverpool and tell your mum. I’d do right by you, and you know I would, so why won’t you listen to me? Why won’t you stay with me for more than half a miserable Tuesday?”
“Because,” Bodie said evenly. “There isn’t a choice.”
“You’re talking about Batan, Bodie. Batan! Colonel Ojuka would give you a job if you asked him. He had to be restrained from awarding you the Order of the Batanic Bed Chamber last time you met. Why would you want to wreck his country?”
“You don’t get it, Ray,” Bodie sighed. His hands now rested on Ray’s chest, just flat there, rising and falling along with his breaths. “You never will. With you it’s the cause that matters, you want to be on the side of the white hats, but that’s never mattered to me. It’s always been just a job.”
“Bollocks it has. If that were true, you would never have given everything you did for CI5, you would never have risked your life every single day.”
“Risking your life is the job. I’m not a coward.”
“Yes you are. If you go to Batan, that’s exactly what you are.”
“I need the money.”
“You don’t care about money,” Ray said. “You think there’s nothing left for you here. That’s why you’re doing this. But this is a bad choice. This is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done in your life. And that’s saying something.”
Bodie had suddenly had enough and shoved Ray back. Then they were fighting, pushing and scuffling like playground boys who don’t really want to hurt each other but can’t help but fight. Bodie’s fist on his chin put a stop to it and Ray found himself on the floor.
“Christ, this is hard enough,” Bodie said. “I tried, I really tried to do things right, to do things your way. I still ended up in the nick. Back where I started. I can’t keep trying.” He pushed open the door to the bar. “Look, just piss off will you, mate?”
Ray spent a moment on the floor after Bodie had gone, prodding carefully at his jaw. He wondered how far Bodie actually believed this terrible myth about himself - if he really believed himself to be a machine capable of killing if the right coin was pushed into the slot.
3.7, 4.5, 6.2, 2.8. They were identified like guns on a rack, defined by a measurement of calibre and used in similar ways. Taken down, loaded, aimed and fired. Their numbers fell into every day use, supplanting names in ordinary conversation. He understood this was self-protection, one of the ways they stopped the corpses which piled up in imagination from having human faces. It was hardly surprising they would develop shells to keep out this kind of reality.
But for a long time now he had shared his shell with Bodie, and he knew him. Bodie would kill if he had to, but he was no hit man or mercenary, and Ray became angry all over again with Armstrong, the man who had approached him in prison, when he was at his lowest, and made him believe he was.
He did not bother to check Bodie had gone as he pushed through the crowd and out of the pub. When he had stopped driving and realised what he was doing, he was vaulting over the sticky bar of the Ill Sergeant and slamming the scrappy barman into a rack of glasses which came crashing to the floor.
“Where’s Armstrong?”
“Gerrof,” the man shouted, struggling away from him.
What Ray had not fully thought through was that he had started trouble in a pub full of probable mercenaries who didn’t know the meaning of the phrase ‘innocent bystander’. He was dragged over the bar, landing on his back on the floor. He got a few punches in all right and did some damage to someone, or at least to someone’s shin. But not enough before the lights went out.
He was dumped outside on the pavement. Someone called an ambulance, and when he limped, against advice, out of A&E, it was with concussion, a black eye, a selection of bruises, mysterious pains yet to bruise, an aching back, a twisted ankle and a wrenched muscle in his shoulder. The trip to the Ill Sergeant hadn’t been one of his better ideas.
It wasn’t the first time Alf had had a damaged CI5 agent in his B&B, and he stuck his head round the door from time to time to check for signs of life. Once he came up with cream of mushroom and buttered Mother’s Pride.
So Ray was not surprised to be woken by a knock at the door, but this time, instead of Alf he found Bodie.
“You’ve got to be joking,” Bodie said and caught his arm when the standing up part of the door-opening exercise got too much for him. “Christ, you’re a mess.”
Ray shook off the hand attempting to guide him across the room.
“What are you doing here?”
“I heard some oik got his comeuppance at the Ill Sergeant.”
“How did you know I was staying here?”
“Well, I didn’t read your mind this time. Armstrong had you followed.”
“Oh yeah, your mate.”
“Yeah, my mate.” The hand came back more firmly. “Come on, let’s be having you.”
Ray found himself lying down and his various injuries assessed with a hand as sure as the A&E doctor’s, but gentler.
“I trust you’ll not be wanting a sick day.” Bodie impersonated Cowley as he always used to and drew the covers over him.
“Do you need anything?” Bodie asked. He shook his head and let his eyes close. A hand rested on his forehead then on his cheek. “Ray, is it all right if I stay for a while?”
“Why would you?” He murmured. “We’ve got nothing to do with each other any more.”
“Yeah, I said that.”
“I was wrong before,” Ray said.
“About what, mate?”
“The stupidest thing you ever did was save my life that time at the embassy.”
“No way. That makes all this bearable.”
When he next woke, Bodie was still in the chair by his bed, arms folded, watching.
“Nothing’s changed,” he said. “I still have to go.”
“You do that.”
His head was clearer when he woke again. Bodie had evaporated leaving the taste of a kiss on his lips. When he got up for the bathroom, he found Bodie’s broken love note, which he had left on the chest of drawers. He swept it onto the floor.
At around noon the following day a trio of blurred Murphys arrived.
“Ho ho ho,” they said mysteriously.
“Murph.”
“What happened to you?”
Ray got back into bed, squinting to bring the Murphy quota down to a manageable one.
“Nothing good.”
“Have you been to Casualty?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. What’s up?”
“I just stepped out for a bit, the turkey’s in the oven.”
Ray frowned. “Is that a code?”
Murphy rolled his eyes. “It’s Christmas, Ray.”
“Oh,” he said. “I must have missed the briefing.”
The corner of the room was fitted with a small kitchen area. Murphy filled the kettle and spooned Nescafe into mugs.
“Any sign of young William?”
“He’s in with Armstrong. I haven’t managed to persuade him it’s a bad idea.”
“He didn’t do that to you, did he?”
“’Course he didn’t,” Doyle said defensively and then amended, pointing to the bruise on his chin, “Well, just this.”
“Don’t worry about that. That’s his way of saying hello.”
While Murphy waited for the kettle to boil he pottered round the room, checking it out as people in their line of work tended to do as unconscious reflex. He picked up the pieces of Bodie’s note and placed them back on the chest of drawers.
“I’ve got a bit of information about Armstrong. Though, by the state of you, you’ve already found him.”
“Go on, what is it?”
Murphy poured the hot water and added the last of the milk. Ray pushed himself up on to one elbow to take his cup, trying to ignore the world starting to revolve above his head. Murphy sat down on the bed with his own cup.
“Did Cowley tell you he knew Armstrong?”
“Did he give me the whole story? What do you think? Did they serve together, is that it? Armstrong knew about code-name Morris.”
“More than that, they went through World War Two together. Seems like they were the Bodie and Doyle of the eighth army.”
“So what happened? I know he got done for stealing.”
“Yeah, he’d got in with a black market ring in North Africa, which evidently Cowley found out about. It was Cowley who put the report in about him, and he was a witness at the court martial.”
“Bloody hell.” If it had been him and Bodie in the same position, he wouldn’t have been able to do it. The revelation hit him. “It would have broken Cowley’s heart.”
“You did get a bang on the head, didn’t you? So the Old Man’s probably been keeping track of Armstrong ever since. I wondered why he put a man on him the minute he came back into the country.”
“And Armstrong’s been keeping track as well. He targeted Bodie out of revenge.”
“Oi, what the –“
There was a sudden crack of splintering wood, and before either of them could react the door was kicked open. Ray had time to see a flash of dark metal and a man masked in a balaclava before Murphy pushed him down and a shot was fired.
Murphy stopped moving, and by the time Ray struggled from under him, the gunman had run off.
“Murph?”
Blood had started to darken the leather of Murphy’s jacket where he had been shot. Ray checked and found him still alive. He packed the wound and did what he could for him while they waited for the ambulance summoned on Murphy’s RT.
~~~~
Ray was sitting against a wall outside a private room in the hospital’s surgical ward. He had been waiting for about five, slow hours, and now he was watching Cowley make his way down the corridor. He had been spending Christmas with cousins in Surrey and was dressed in unsettlingly casual tweed.
Cowley knocked and went into Murphy’s room where Lisa was sitting with her still unconscious husband. He came out a few minutes later.
“What happened, Doyle?”
Ray told him as much as he knew, watching the growing anger in the old man’s eyes.
“This is Armstrong’s work. He’s trying to cover his tracks. It was foolish of you to pick a fight with one of his associates, Doyle.”
“I know that.”
“Did you get to Bodie?”
“I couldn’t stop him.”
“That’s unfortunate,” Cowley said. “But he’s a grown man and must make his own decisions.”
“Did you try to stop Armstrong? Back then, when you found out he was involved in the black market.”
Cowley looked sharply at him and then shook his head.
“I’d seen the way he was going for a while. Needless to say, he wouldn’t listen to me. I thought a shock like a court martial would be enough.”
“Instead it pushed him the other way.”
“It did.” Cowley’s expression hardened. “And it’s time to put a stop to this once and for all.”
“What are you going to do?”
“This is my responsibility. I should have taken steps years ago.”
“What steps?” Cowley turned to leave, and Ray limped after him. “Wait, I’ll go with you.”
He contemplated Ray critically.
“Look at you; you can’t even stand up straight. You’re neither use nor ornament.”
Ray, suitably humbled by the judgement, watched him go. “Well, take someone,” he called. “Sir.”
A few minutes later he followed Cowley downstairs to get some air. He was out of practice with this type of existence, he thought as he stood in the hospital entrance breathing in the cold and petrol-smell from the ambulance bay.
He felt each of his injuries reasserting themselves as the effect of the last painkiller he had taken wore off and the adrenalin keeping him going faded, too. The thundering and buzzing in his head started up again, and he turned and pressed his forehead to the wall.
He wished he’d had the sense to grab his jacket and some money for a cup of tea before he left with the ambulance, and he decided he never wanted to do this again. He had spent far too many hours waiting in hospitals for friends to live or die, too many hours dodging too many bullets himself. He knew right then he would not go back to CI5. That, at least, was a decision.
Through the uproar in his head, he heard his name urgently called. Before he could react, hands which he recognised as Bodie’s turned him round.
The grey sweatshirt he had been sleeping in and the jeans he had dragged on were both filthy with blood and spilt coffee. He had washed the blood from his face before Lisa saw him, but he knew there was still some in his hair.
Bodie began a quick and anxious check for the source of the blood.
“You’re okay?”
Ray realised what Bodie thought and must have been thinking for a few hours, judging by how badly he had lost his cool. He stopped him by taking his hands.
“It wasn’t me, it was Murphy.”
Bodie looked up and met his gaze, eventually understanding. “Murphy? Is he all right?”
“They’re not sure yet. He got hit in the back. The bullet missed his spine, but one of his lungs collapsed. Stupid bastard saved my life.”
Bodie held his hands tighter. He was close enough to share heartbeat and body heat with Ray, who needed them both.
“I heard there’d been a shooting in a Camden B&B on the radio news,” Bodie said. “I went to your room, and it was a bloody mess. The uniforms on the door said someone had been shot, but they didn’t know who. And they didn’t know which hospital you’d gone to. I’ve got no car; there’s no public transport. That’s why it took me a while to find you.”
Ray got a picture of the horror of Bodie’s last few hours. “Well, I’m okay, mate. Wish I could say the same for Murph.”
“What happened?”
He let Bodie’s hands go.
“I don’t know. But I’m guessing your mates were worried I’d get the law on to them. Murphy was just visiting.”
“I didn’t -, I didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know what sort you were getting into bed with? Course you bloody did.”
He watched Bodie pale and for a moment Ray thought he was going to throw up. But instead his eyes turned cold, and his hand went to his jacket, instinctively checking for the gun holstered there. Ray had seen the gesture a thousand times before. It meant Bodie was going to war. “I’ll find out who did this.”
“We’ve got a bigger problem than that, sunshine.”
“What?”
“Cowley’s been here. He’s not best pleased, and he went off promising to poke a stick into a wasp nest.”
“Where did he go?”
“To find Peter Armstrong.”
“Armstrong’s rented a house in the East End. Do you think the Cow knows about it?”
“Could be, he’s had a man on him.” Bodie was turning to leave. “Hang on, where are you going?”
“To find him. How much of a head start has he had?”
“Ten minutes, and I’m going with you.” He might not be much use but he didn’t intend to be left behind again.
Bodie didn’t question it. “Is your car here?”
“Nah, it’s still at the Ill Sergeant.” Miraculously the keys were still in the pocket of his jeans.
“That’s on the way to the house. We’ll get a cab.”
They lost time waiting for what was apparently the only taxi running on Christmas day, but eventually picked up the car and drove east.
Armstrong’s house could not have been in a worse position. It was in the middle of a terrace with no obvious access to the back gardens. There was no alternative but to go through the front door.
They had not been there long when another car parked close to them on the corner. It was Cowley’s car, and their old boss, accompanied by a younger agent Ray did not recognise, quietly emerged. Cowley nodded to them as if it were a pre-arranged meeting. He looked over at the house where one light was on in the front room.
“Have you seen anyone go in or out?”
“No, but we’ve only just got here.”
“I can get us in,” Bodie said. “They think I’m with them.”
“You are with them,” Cowley reminded him. “Do you know how many live there?”
“Just Armstrong, but people are in and out all the time.”
“Let’s go then. I want Armstrong alive.” Neither Cowley nor Bodie appeared to be questioning which side Bodie would be fighting for.
Bodie looked at Ray critically. “Don’t come with us. You’ve got no gun, you can’t fight, and they want you dead.”
It made sense. Bodie, even this Bodie who continued to insist there was nothing between them, would risk himself for Ray. He nodded.
“Be careful.”
Bodie led the small team to the door. Cowley and the other agent stood to the side while Bodie knocked, taking his gun out but holding it out of sight.
Events unfolded quickly. The door opened, and Ray caught a glimpse of Armstrong’s second in command who had been part of his interview panel. Bodie had him restrained in an instant, and the other two disappeared inside.
A shot was fired, and Ray, forgetting the plan, ran to the house. By the time he got there, it was over.
Bodie was restraining Armstrong’s lieutenant by the door. The younger agent had finished checking the other rooms and was talking to headquarters on his RT. Bodie nodded Ray into the living room just off the hallway.
He found Cowley kneeling over Peter Armstrong’s body, his gun still in his hand. To Ray it was clear the man was dead from one shot to the chest, but Cowley kept checking and rechecking the pulse at his neck. Eventually he sat back on his heels.
“I wanted him alive,” he said.
Finally he stood up and left the house without another word.
Following the clean-up, Bodie drove them back to the hospital. Murphy was still unconscious, and his condition had not changed in the few hours they had been away.
The visitors’ waiting room had been taken over by Murphy’s extended family; a well-stocked gene pool of blue-eyed, brown haired brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces decamped from their Christmas reunion. The whole room was vibrating with worry so Bodie led Ray to the quieter end of the corridor where they sat on the floor together to wait for news.
Ray was very far from his painkillers and his head and back and shoulder were not letting him forget it. But these seemed trivial complaints when a dead body had put a bloody scar through Christmas and Murphy, who had stopped a bullet for him, was fighting for his life.
“What do you make of Cowley and Armstrong?” Bodie mused.
“They went way back,” Ray said.
“Armstrong was obsessed with him, and I’ve never seen the old man react like that to a death. Do you think they were...you know?”
Ray dropped his head into his hands to keep out the glare from the strip lighting.
“It’s a blurred line sometimes,” he concluded.
“Not really,” Bodie said after a while. “You okay?”
“Storming.”
Bodie slipped his arm around Ray’s shoulder. He eased him close until Ray let his hands fall away from his eyes and his head drop to Bodie’s chest.
“Go on, I’ll wake you if there’s any news.”
When his various aches woke him sometime later, it seemed natural to find himself folded into Bodie’s embrace.
They had never been like this before, he reminded himself. They had been close, but personal space had never dissolved in this way. It was not the strange, distant sex they had shared that had made the difference, but the six bewildering months apart, the months without the one who was always there.
The meaning of this was clear to Ray, but he knew even now Bodie was waiting his moment to leave. This time he did not need a note, he could hear goodbye in every heartbeat.
Lisa came out of Murphy’s room, blinking in the brighter light of the corridor and looking dazedly around for Ray. She was too preoccupied at first to register Bodie’s appearance at Ray’s side as they came to her.
“How is he, Lise?” Ray asked.
She pushed a tired hand through her hair.
“He’s better. All his vital signs are improving. They think he’ll be able to breathe on his own soon.”
“Has he woken up yet?”
“No, and that’s what I wanted to say to you. They’re keeping him under until tomorrow, so there’s no point you staying. He won’t be waking up tonight.”
“Are you sure you don’t want us to hang around, love?”
“No thanks; honestly.” She waved a hand in the direction of the waiting room. “I’ve got the family.” She smiled vaguely at Bodie and then the penny dropped. “Oh! You’re back.” She tried to hug him, but he stopped her.
“Look, you ought to know,” he said. “This is my fault.”
The swift, questioning anger in her eyes quickly faded. “I doubt it, and I doubt he would see it that way. It’s this life you’ve all chosen. It catches up with you one way or another. You should both know that by now.”
They walked down to the ground floor and out into the darkness. It was about one AM and Christmas day was finally, thankfully over. Ray felt the cold in his bones. If he didn’t find somewhere warm and somewhere to lie down, he was coming back to this hospital head first.
He suddenly felt fractionally warmer as Bodie draped his jacket around his shoulders. His heart broke a little.
“Are you sure, mate?” he said. “You’ll be down to your last four layers of clothes if you’re not careful.”
“I don’t know why I bother.”
Bodie drove Ray back to the Bed & Breakfast, and they called a taxi from there. Waiting together in Alf’s hallway, they were as awkward as a separating couple finding themselves accidentally together outside the divorce court.
“I mean,” Ray said continuing a conversation they hadn’t been having. “It’s your car, do you want to take it?”
“Nah, keep it for me until I get back.”
“Don’t do that, Bodie,” Ray said wearily. “Don’t let me think you’re coming back.”
Bodie didn’t answer.
“Stay with me,” Ray said as the cabbie sounded his horn.
Bodie shook his head. “No.”
~~~
It was immediately clear Ray would not be able to use his room at the Bed & Breakfast. It had received a perfunctory tidy, but the mattress, carpet and wallpaper all needed replacing before it would be habitable again.
He took a careful bath and then, when the painkillers started to take effect, fell asleep on the couch in the guest sitting room.
He woke up late on Boxing Day morning feeling old, his thoughts sluggish and every muscle complaining. He reached up from the sofa to look behind the grey net curtains at clouds darkened and heavy with rain. He tried to remember how long it had been since he’d had anything to eat or drink and became nostalgic for the days when Bodie’s spoon-dissolving builders’ tea and bacon sarnie doorsteps were a guaranteed therapy for any kind of injury.
He wrote a cheque for Alf to cover his stay and the work that needed doing in the room. Then he packed his suitcase and went out.
He walked to the nearby shops hoping to find somewhere open. A stale cheese sandwich and two Kit Kats were the depressing outcome of his search, but after he had eaten, the world steadied itself and he trusted himself to drive.
He met Lisa at the hospital. She was on her way out to her parents’ house to check on the baby and catch a couple of hours sleep. She told him Murphy was out of danger, and he could go in and see him.
Murphy was awake but sleepy, and he smiled as Ray came in. Cowley was there, too. He folded the newspaper he had been reading as Ray came in.
“Hallo, Murph, you don’t look too clever,” Ray said.
“Look whose talking.”
“Hallo, sir.”
“Doyle.”
“The doctor says you’re going to be fine,” Ray said to Murphy. “Me on the other hand, you really messed up my hair landing on me like that.” Murphy coughed out a laugh. “So can you be more careful when you’re saving my life next time?”
“Do me best,” Murphy managed. “Thought you’d been shot and they wouldn’t tell me.”
Ray covered his hand. “I’m fine, thanks to you.”
“The prodigal’s been in,” Murph said.
“Bodie?”
“To apologise.”
“He feels pretty bad about what happened to you.”
“So he should,” Murphy replied. “But he’s done right by me.”
“How’s that?”
“He brought in the man who shot Murphy,” Cowley said as Murphy found it increasingly difficult to speak. “Complete with confession.”
“Alive?”
“Basically.”
He’d been busy then, since leaving Ray at the Bed and Breakfast.
“He also came to say goodbye,” Cowley continued. “He said he was going overseas.”
Ray absorbed this not so surprising piece of information.
“Did he say where he was going?”
“He didn’t. But Batan appears safe for the time being.”
Cowley got up from his chair and walked to the window. The rain had started, quickly turning from a few spikes to a deluge.
“I’m sorry about how it worked out with Armstrong, sir.” He foresaw himself in Cowley’s place in years or months to come kneeling over Bodie’s body, desperately looking for a sign of life. He understood the regret.
“Thank you Doyle, but we hadn’t been friends in a long time.”
Cowley put on his raincoat, picked up his briefcase and umbrella. He spoke a few words to Murphy and then turned to Ray.
“There’s always a place for you in CI5, if you want it.”
“Thank you, sir, but I can’t go back,” he said with more finality than he felt. “Not without Bodie. Maybe not even then.”
“I told Bodie I had too many battles to fight already; I told him I couldn’t do anything for him.” He opened the door but paused before leaving. “Which seems to be my reprise.”
Ray stayed with Murphy as he drifted in and out of sleep, not bothering him with conversation. When Lisa came back, he gave her a kiss goodbye and left.
After the last few days, he was not especially surprised to find Bodie waiting for him by his car. He was wary though, fed up of being left standing while Bodie perfected his disappearing act. Bodie was not moving now though. Seemingly unaware of the rain drenching him through the black leather of his jacket, he watched Ray’s approach with a hard, steady gaze. If Ray had not known better he would have thought there were tears and not raindrops tracking down his face.
“I thought you’d be on a plane by now,” Ray said.
Bodie took a slim cardboard wallet with the logo of a travel agent from his breast pocket. He handed it to Ray.
Ray took out a ticket. Shielding it against the rain, he read details of a flight leaving tomorrow from Heathrow to Palma in Spain.
“Has civil war broken out again?” He asked.
“Look at the other one,” Bodie said.
Looking again he found a second ticket he had not noticed in the pack. The ticket was under his own name.
“I thought,” Bodie said. “We could do with a holiday.”
~~~
Bodie drove them to the King George. He had rented a room above the pub, and Ray at last understood why he had been drawn so irresistibly to the place. The bar was doing a steady Boxing Day trade, but they went straight upstairs to the living quarters.
When they had dried off, Bodie put what seemed to be the reheated remains of the pub’s Christmas dinner on the kitchen table and opened a bottle of wine.
“That’s very festive,” Ray said taking his seat and contemplating the turkey, parsnips and roast potatoes. “Want to pull a cracker?”
Bodie gave him a look and sat down, too. He drank his wine in medicinal mouthfuls without speaking. He had been silent since they left the hospital car park.
Ray had been deafened by Bodie’s silences before. They were different to simply not speaking. They meant the processing of chains of thought, the chewing over of the pros and cons of an issue, the internalising of an ocean of emotion. The way Bodie occasionally stole glances at him over the rim of his wine glass made him believe he was the thought, the issue and the ocean. Ray ate; he had a feeling he was going to need his strength.
They both rejected leftover Christmas pudding, and Bodie cleared up while Ray showered. Then he went to Bodie’s room. It had seemed a typically shabby bed sit when he first saw it, but now found it warmed by the gas fire and made more welcoming by the muted light of a couple of lamps.
Ray sat in the armchair by the fire listening to the rain against the window. He had a glass of wine, he wasn’t hungry, his assortment of pains were fading, his head was clearer and Bodie, miraculously, was just a few steps away. He tentatively designated himself almost human and fell asleep.
When he woke, Bodie was sitting on the edge of the bed watching him. The glass of wine in his hand was almost empty, and the bottle at his feet was empty, too. Ray wondered how long he had been there, not moving, struggling with his next move.
Bodie slowly put down his glass and stood up. After a long moment’s pause, he took the wine glass Ray had fallen asleep holding, balanced it on the armrest of the chair, and gave Ray his hand to stand him up. Ray started to speak, but Bodie shushed him.
Bodie brought his hand up to Ray’s hair. He explored, sending shivers through Ray as he traced the irregularities of his scalp and the shape of his curls.
Bodie had never touched Ray’s damaged cheekbone, but fingers lingered there next, exerting a firm pressure before moving on. They wandered upwards to a bruise just above his eye and down again, to the one on his chin. Ray closed his eyes as Bodie’s fingers travelled across his lips. He took the tips into his mouth, but they withdrew, stroking down over his chin and neck, finding the sensitive area where his collar bones met.
“Christ, Ray,” Bodie said as he gasped softly.
Bodie loosened the belt of the dressing gown Ray had put on after his shower and pulled it down from his shoulders. His hands travelled to Ray’s arms, to his chest with its undeniable darkness of hair and reverently across the scar from last year’s surgery.
Close now, Bodie kissed the slope of Ray’s neck and shoulder and then hesitated.
Last time there had been no hesitation, just a headlong plummet off the precipice. It had been instinctual, a falling together, an answering of their denied need for each other.
Since then, there must have been thinking. There had probably been brooding. There must have been scrabbling for control. Longing and desire fought off with enough logic to stop a bullet.
In defiance of all previous expectation, this hadn’t happened to Ray. He had learnt enough in half a year and one night to know he wanted Bodie full stop any way he could have him.
Where one hesitated, the other acted. He took Bodie’s hand, kissed its warm, damp palm and brought it down to his erection, insistent and unarguable beneath the robe. He kissed him, roughly covering his mouth, tasting heat and red wine there.
Bodie stepped back from him, breathing rapidly. Adrenaline had turned him as unstable as a stick of dynamite. Primed for fight, flight or fucking. He made his decision.
Before Ray had time to understand the flash of predatory desire in his eyes, a tumbling avalanche of Bodie had him down on the bed.
He tipped Bodie onto his back and tugged buttons loose to pull his shirt free. Finding a T-shirt underneath he cursed and when Bodie unexpectedly snorted with laughter, he knew this time they would survive.
~~~
Much later they lay squashed damply together on the single bed. Ray’s arm had fallen asleep a couple of times, so he dragged it out from under Bodie’s back. He let his freed hand stroke Bodie’s hair, starting to grow out from its harsh prison cut.
“Beautiful,” he said.
“Eh?”
Bodie turned onto his side, pushed his head into Ray’s neck, slung his arm over Ray’s chest and fell asleep. Ray dropped his arm around Bodie and held him there. And marvelled. He gave Bodie a shove.
“What?”
“Don’t bloody well leave me again.”
“I know, I know.”
~~~
In the morning when Ray woke, Bodie wasn’t there. The note he found on the pillow said, ‘back in a tick.’
The tick stretched, so he got up, recovered the dressing gown from the end of the bed, and went downstairs for the bathroom. Then he made himself a cup of tea and had a surprisingly normal conversation with the pub landlady about her retirement plans.
A while later Bodie came back. Ray shouted him in to the kitchen where he appeared bringing a whoosh of cold with him. He put down the bags he was carrying and came to Ray and kissed him. Then they grinned at each other because that had just happened.
Bodie began to dig about in one of his bags. The one from Boots seemed to be full of toothpaste and soap and similar. He pulled out the bottle he had been looking for and tossed it to Ray.
“Suntan lotion!”
Ray suddenly remembered. They were, improbably, going on holiday.
“Factor fifty thousand. That’s good. We haven’t seen sunlight since 1977.”
“That’s what I thought.” Bodie had his head in the fridge by then and emerged with a mince pie already half demolished. “We can put that right while you figure out what we’re doing with the rest of our lives.”
“No pressure then.” He looked at the boxes of crisps stacked up in the corner. “Want to run a pub?”
Bodie hooted with laughter. “That’s the first sane thing anyone’s said to me in a year.”
With the kettle on the boil, Bodie sat down with Ray at the kitchen table.
“I bought selotape.”
“Oh yeah, what for?”
Bodie took a folded piece of much-taped paper out of his jacket pocket and gave it to Ray. It was the ‘I love you’ Bodie had written and then discarded. It was neatly reconstructed, its tears taped together on both sides. He must have found it in Ray’s case this morning because he had not, in the end, been able to throw it away.
“Walking out like that was unforgivable.”
Ray shook his head. “You had your reasons.”
“I couldn’t handle any of it. Not how I felt about you. Not the way the future looked. But it was still unforgivable,”
“They sent you to prison for sod-all, you were entitled to go off the rails for a bit.”
“Was I? Tell that to Murphy. Look, what I’m trying to say is, I’m not running off again. I’m not fucking about with this. This - us.” Ray smiled, and Bodie gave an exasperated sigh. “Jesus, Keats hasn’t got anything on me, has he? What I’m trying to say is –“
“Mate,” Ray was laughing now. “If I want a speech, I’ll tap me glass, all right?”
“Shut up. What I’m trying to say is, I love you,” Bodie nodded at the note which Ray still held. “I always have.”
end
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