My phone is beeping in my trouser pocket, and there’s a message from Jonathan that says WHERE THE FUCK R U?, to which I don’t reply. Stuart comes out of the bathroom, naked apart from his socks, and stands over me as I lie there on the floor, my trousers still bunched up around my shoes.

‘Time for bed,’ he says, and he’s getting a hard-on again. I can’t help noticing that he is also sniffing, but perhaps he has a cold.

Three

As Wright’s friend, girlfriend, bum-chum or, as the padre rather wistfully calls me, ‘Jonathan to his David’, I am basically bulletproof at Reville. In fact, I’m popular. I’m one of the lads. My drawings are admired, my ‘scribbling’ tolerated and even respected (it’s been put around, by whom I don’t know, that I’m writing a novel of National Service life), I’m included in pub runs and barrack-room bonhomie. I would not say I have friends, other than Wright himself, but suddenly I have plenty of mates. People know me, and through me, Wright. We’ve become inseparable in people’s minds, a team, a duo, like Laurel and Hardy, Flanders and Swann, or, as Kelsey calls us, Wright and Wrong. It’s the nearest he can get to picking on me. Even Kelsey beams when Wright deigns to talk to him.

So of course all his venom is saved for Stephen. The nearer I come to the light, the further he’s banished to the outer darkness, and there’s little I can do to help him. He doesn’t bother me. He hasn’t tried to corner me since that evening in the bogs when he passed me the newspaper clipping. I can see he’s getting sicker, sadder, more desperate, but what can I do? I’m not going to risk my new-found status by consorting with someone who, by his own admission, is trying to work his ticket out of here. The way he’s looking, he’ll manage it sooner rather than later.

He won’t be the first one to get chucked out for being queer. The place is full of rumours. There was the Squadron Leader who, many years before any of us got here, was caught with an Aircraftman Second Class and had his stripes torn off in front of the whole camp. He was marched off the parade ground by two Warrant Officers, stripped of his uniform and pushed through the gates in civvies. He has since been sighted, they say, in London, ‘hanging round the West End’ in brown shoes. There were the two AC1s who were caught in the back of one of the old ambulances one night, bouncing away on top of each other with their trousers round their ankles; it was the creaking of the suspension that alerted the guard, who opened the doors and shone his torch inside. They disappeared the next day, carted off to RAF Halton, ‘the loony bin’, where they send all the queers and the would-be suicides and the more obvious nutters, ‘for tests’, and were never heard of again.