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By Root 574 0

with its pseudo-mythic crest hanging between her lace-cupped breasts, the fact that he should not be there, the fact that he was there, lost, that this rich, beautiful girl would take off most or all of her clothes for him, that a dirty dream was real, his dreadful uniform hurled off and strewn in a dim and trespassed space, that it was all incredibly dangerous, that they could get killed for love, that his gropy imaginings had resolved into adoration, that her nipples were discernable through the skinny fabric, that her groin was lowering onto his, that his parents and his gran would go gaping into death not knowing what they’d missed, that there was an impatient horse downstairs, that instead of being in history he was in love, that all shyness was gone, that cold was irrelevant, that everything was against them, that she was against him, pressing herself against him, that it was all, like art, outrageously delicate and exultantly poised in the void, her wonderful flesh in the dimness, his breath her breath, her hands taking his hands wherever they wanted.

Like this, forever. Please, forever and ever. A prayer. A jointing of their bodies in and against the dark. Amen.

“No. Clem. No. Please.”

“You want us to.”

“Yes. I do. You know I do.”

“Frankie.”

She rolled onto her side, her back to him.

After a long silence she said, “I know it must be awful for you.”

“It’s not that. It’s just . . .”

“What?”

“You and me, the way we feel . . . it just seems wrong not to.”

Again she was silent for a long moment. Rooks croaked at one another. He shivered as the sweat cooled on his skin.

Then she said, “Yes. It does. It is wrong.”

She turned onto him and teased the tip of his nose with hers.

“Do you think you could get a sheath from somewhere?”

“A what?”

She bit her lip.

“A rubber johnny.”

OR, TO BE more precise, in Borstead.

There were two options:

1. Scott’s, the barber’s

2. Griffin’s, the chemist’s

The small window of Albert Scott’s shop on Church Street featured four photographs of handsome, smiling men sporting oiled but different hairstyles, none of which was available to clients on the premises. Scott did only one kind of haircut, the kind that he had been inflicting on the men and boys of Borstead since 1936. It involved ten minutes’ smart work with comb and scissors, followed by several runs up the back of the neck with manual clippers that clacked like a mad dog’s teeth. The window also displayed a dusty collection of combs, brushes, and gentlemen’s shaving requisites, and, down in one corner, a little yellow plastic sign shaped like a tent. On it, the almost-word ONA above the word LUBRICATED. ONA was also printed on the small packages that Scott would supply to men who nodded when he murmured, brushing the hair from their lapels, “Something for the weekend, sir?”

Scott had been murdering Clem’s hair, and his father’s, since Clem was five. So it would be perfectly fine if he marched in there and requested, “A packet of three Ona, Mr. Scott, please. No, on second thoughts, make that two packets. I’ve got a lively weekend coming up.”

No, it wouldn’t.

And his mum worked in Griffin’s.

So that was that.

IN THE CABINET Room of the White House, President John F. Kennedy sat, as usual, halfway down the long table, with his back to the tall windows that looked out onto the Rose Garden. On the mantelpiece of the unused fireplace to his right sat a model of the Mayflower. Above that, a portrait of George Washington. Hidden in the light fixtures, microphones that fed tape recorders in the White House basement. Of the sixteen men in the room, only JFK and his brother Robert — Bobby — knew the microphones were there.

Two CIA men were in the room: Lundahl was the expert on aerial photography; Graybeal was the expert on Soviet missiles. On the table, mounted on boards, were three large black-and-white aerial photographs of parts of Cuba. They’d been taken, through a powerful zoom lens, from a U-2 spy plane. Lundahl used a wooden pointer to indicate items of interest.

“These are missile trailers, Mr. President.