Four

There is a rhythm to my friendship with Mervyn Wright. When he wants me for something, he seeks me out, he spends time with me and makes much of me, giving me packets of fags and illicit booze that he smuggles in from God knows where. He sits with me in the NAAFI, he visits me in the office, in fact he flaunts our friendship before the whole camp, even going so far as to walk about with an arm around my shoulder. He loves the fuss this causes, the cracks, the kisses blown, the whistles, the mutterings from Sergeant Kelsey, who has taken to calling us ‘the Wolfenden Boys’. Wright parries it all with quick repartee, followed through with an obscenity and, in extreme cases, physical violence. Nobody messes with Airman Mervyn Wright. His prowess in the boxing ring makes him – us – invulnerable. Excitement is mounting around the camp about the regional tournament next week. The AOC has paid for posters, using my photo, which are plastered over every noticeboard. The ten by eights I churn out in the darkroom have sold better than even Wright dared hope, and adorn the lockers of about half the camp, alongside Sabrina and Brigitte Bardot.

As for those other photographs, they stay in a brown envelope inside a folder of old medical records at the bottom of a box file at the back of a drawer of a filing cabinet in the medical records office where no one will ever find them. I don’t need to look at them. They’re burned on my mind’s eye forever, like the shadows on the streets of Hiroshima. Wright keeps his in his wallet.

Wright’s interest peaks when we take photographs (we’ve done two sessions now) and in the darkroom, when we both seem to be caught up in a kind of fever, a whirlwind, I don’t know what, when something always seems about to happen and never does. I know what it is – I’ve spent enough time thinking about it – and he, surely, knows too, at least if the stretching of his pants and the constant flashing and fiddling with his cock is anything to go by. I often think that he’s waiting for me to make the first move – perhaps so that he can knock me back. To make some declaration, so that he can tell me not to be so fucking stupid. But I don’t. I fear that if I bring this thing into the light, it will instantly die. I prefer the uncertainty of expectation to the finality of rejection. And so we press ourselves together in the darkroom, or he exposes himself in the studio, but nothing happens. The words freeze on my tongue, and my hands, which want to reach out and touch, are paralysed.