Work Text:
December, 1957
They met in the summer, but it was winter the first time John came round to Paul’s house.
The reasons for this, as far as they went, were practical: Paul went to John’s house because it was closer to most everything that mattered, including the other Quarrymen’s houses and a decent pub not a ten-minute walk away that turned a blind eye to its younger clientele. Mendips was nice, too. If John’s Auntie Mimi was out, Paul and John were free to listen to records, play their guitars, and menace the lodger, and when Mimi was in, she deigned to make Paul tea with only a modicum of tutting. She wasn’t the best cook—no Auntie Jin, anyway—but she was a sight better than any of the current residents of 20 Forthlin Road.
But then, as it turned out, John’s mum lived just down the road from Paul.
John’s mum wasn’t like any other mum Paul’d ever known. For one thing, she was living in sin, at least according to Len and Colin. For another, she never told John off at all, not even when he was making a racket and swearing like a sailor and eating all her food without so much as a please or thank you. Julia would let John get away with murder, Paul was fairly sure. He was starting to feel a kind of kinship with her over this.
They practised at hers, but not often: with all six members of the group it was too much of a squeeze. But Paul knew that John was visiting his mum a fair amount. He was always saying how he liked her better than Mimi, how any day now she was going to ask him to come back to his real home.
Paul liked Julia better than Mimi, too, but the house on Blomfield Road already seemed full up, what with Julia and her not-husband and their two girls. He wasn’t sure what sort of home John thought she could offer him there, or what would make it more real than Mimi’s.
It was under these circumstances that Paul, lying on the rug in the front room with his maths homework laid out half-heartedly in front of him, came to hear a loud rapping on the front door and knew, with instinctive certainty, that it was John.
A knock at the front door was an oddity. As the rule generally went, only important people—the doctor, the vicar—were supposed to come through the front. Like many rules, this one was turning out to apply less to John than to everyone else.
Paul got hastily to his feet, kicked his maths book under the armchair, and rushed to the door before Mike could make it down the stairs.
When he pulled it open, sure enough, there was John. Paul remembered telling John he lived in Allerton, but he hadn’t ever given the exact address. He wondered where John’d gotten it from—Ivan, maybe? With the way they were sometimes, attuned to the same mental frequency, it wouldn’t have surprised Paul to learn that John had simply known, all along, where to find him.
“Are you letting me in, or what?” John demanded. It was chucking it down and his hair was plastered to his forehead, DA well and truly defeated. His coat was soaked through, heavy-looking, and he had his hands tucked into his armpits.
Paul took a step back. “Go on, then.”
John wiped his shoes on the mat, which was good, but there was no stopping the deluge of rainwater he brought in with him.
“Shoes off, if you’re staying,” Paul said. “And you can hang your coat up there.”
Mike’s voice came down the stairs: “Who’s that?”
“Never you mind,” Paul shouted back. It wouldn’t put Mike off for long, so Paul grabbed John by the arm and pulled him down the hallway, into the kitchen.
Rain was drumming on the windows like it was trying to be let in. John dripped his way over to the back door and leaned against it, squinting around at Paul’s kitchen.
Paul had begun to suspect that John needed his eyeglasses more than he let on, and so he wasn’t as worried as he might have been about the crumbs he hadn’t wiped up from the counters, the crinkled shell of an onion embracing the salt and pepper shakers. Paul always cleaned up when he knew they were having guests, but he hadn’t known about John.
“Tea?” he asked, thinking of how best to warm John up. Though a fire was burning valiantly in the front room, the rest of the house was about as cold as it was outside.
“Yeah, alright,” John said. He kept dripping, forming himself a little puddle where he stood.
Paul put the kettle on. “Wait here,” he said.
Upstairs, he snagged a towel from the airing cupboard and warned Mike to keep his nose out. Then he hurried back to the kitchen, taking the stairs two at a time.
“Here,” he said to John, holding out the towel.
“Cheers,” John said. He scrubbed the towel through his hair. Paul looked away. Steam was beginning to spiral out of the spout of the kettle, but there was no whistling yet. He fiddled with the tea towel on the side.
“I can lend you some clothes,” he said to the tea towel.
When John replied, Paul could hear a sly little grin in his voice. “Sure they’ll fit?”
“I’m almost as tall as you, you git,” Paul said, turning to glare.
John shrugged, unapologetic. When they were with other people, John talked Paul up, adding a year to his age and saying he was smarter than the rest put together, anyway. But when they were alone, John sometimes liked to make out that Paul was a kid he was letting tag along in his skiffle group out of charity. It was, Paul reflected, all about appearances.
“See if I let you borrow anything now,” he said.
John didn’t even deign to answer; they both knew by now that Paul would let John have whatever it was in his power to give. The kettle whistled as though in confirmation, and Paul busied himself with the teacups. He could hear John moving around the kitchen, poking his nose into each corner.
There were only two sugar cubes left in the bowl. Paul gave both of them to John.
“Milk?” he asked.
“Ta,” John said.
“Did you want anything to eat?” Paul asked, sloshing milk into both cups. “I can make you something.”
“No, you’re alright.”
Paul kept on looking at the teacups, swishing the bags around with a spoon as though that would make them steep faster. It was odd: in all the times he’d had friends over before, it’d never felt so important to get everything right. You weren’t supposed to care this much about being a good host when you were fifteen, he thought. It was the sort of thing that only mattered once you got older.
“Were you visiting your mum, then?” he asked.
“Yeah, ‘til we had a row.”
Paul twisted, shocked.
“Not with her, exactly,” John acknowledged. “With her fella. He doesn’t like me hanging about. Maybe I remind him he’s not her first, or something.”
“Oh,” Paul said, weakly. He scooped the teabags out and tossed them in the sink. “Still, it’s not on, chucking you out in the rain like that.”
“No, I walked out,” John said with pride. “Couldn’t let the old bastard talk to me like that, could I?”
“Right, yeah, of course not,” Paul said. He passed John his tea, and John downed it in two long gulps. With a twist in his stomach, because there was no more sugar, Paul said, “Did you want more?”
“That’s alright,” John said. He went to the window and looked out. “No signs of letting up.”
The twisty feeling didn’t go away, and Paul wasn’t sure if it meant he wanted John to stay or go. It was a Friday, and on Fridays Paul normally made scrambled egg on toast for tea, or jam sandwiches if they’d run out of eggs. Neither were the sort of thing you made for a guest. Or not a guest like John, anyway.
Paul was just wondering if they had any baked beans left, and whether baked beans on a jacket potato was more of a proper tea than eggs on toast, when John clicked his fingers right in front of Paul’s face.
“Oi,” he said, “what’s got you away with the fairies?”
Paul flushed. “No, nothing. It’s just—you can stay, ‘til the rain stops. It’s no trouble.”
John’s mouth twitched off to one side, neither a smile nor a frown.
“That’s what me mum always says, you know,” he commented. “It’s no trouble. Only, according to her old man, it is really.”
Something solidified in Paul, then, and he said, “Well, I don’t care if it’s trouble, anyway. Here, come upstairs. Let’s get you some dry clothes.”
Part of the problem, Paul thought, was that John was older: newly seventeen, an art college student, leader of his own group. The gulf between them wasn’t so big when you measured it in months (twenty) or skill on the guitar (Paul was better during practice; John was better onstage) or love of music (equal). But in this moment, leading John up the stairs to his bedroom, there might as well have been the entire Atlantic Ocean between them.
When Paul had friends his own age over, there were a lot of unspoken understandings. Like, for example, how you could get changed in the same room as a mate but you had to make sure neither of you were really looking in the other’s direction.
Paul’s skin was prickling all over by the time they reached the top of the stairs. The rules might change as you got older, and he couldn’t ask without drawing attention to his own vaguely panicky uncertainty.
Mike’s head was poking out of his bedroom door, curiosity writ large, but Paul ignored him.
“Just in here,” he muttered, leading John into his room.
It wasn’t like John’s, except in size: there were no posters on the walls, for one thing, and no dirty pairs of pants on the floor, for another. It was small and neat and tidy, the bed made and everything in its proper place. Paul was embarrassed by it.
“Hospital corners,” John commented, jerking his chin at the bed.
“My mum taught me,” Paul said. John got that awkward look everybody got when Paul mentioned his dead mum, so he added, “Wait here, I’ll get some clothes.”
Paul’s clothes were kept in Mike’s room, all shunted to the side in the built-in wardrobe to make space for Mike’s strings of developing photographs. It was a new hobby, and Paul was hoping it wouldn’t last.
He barged past Mike in the doorway.
“Go on, then. Is that the John you’re always on about?” Mike asked in a whisper. “Why’s he come here?”
“He’s none of your bloody business,” Paul muttered.
“Is none of my bloody business staying for tea?”
Paul took a jumper, his softest one, and unclipped a pair of trousers from a hanger. And then it occurred to him that John was most likely soaked through. He opened the underwear drawer, feeling furtive, and snatched up underpants and a pair of socks. His cheeks burned.
“Keep your nose out,” he said to Mike, and then he left, shutting the door behind him. Mike would still be able to hear them, but only if he stood right up to the door and listened.
When Paul came back into his own room, John was wearing a half-smirk, towel slung loosely around his neck.
“Little brother?”
“Mm,” Paul responded.
“He the one you said could play the drums?”
“He’s given that up now,” Paul said. “And he was never any good to begin with, really. Not like—” He cut himself off.
“You and me?” John said.
Paul nodded.
John nodded, too, decisively. “Reckon it’s something you’re born with,” he said. “The music. It’s either in you or it’s not.”
This was how Paul felt about it, too, and something like relief rushed through him at finding John in agreement. He held out the pile of clothes.
“Here,” he said.
“Thanks,” John said. He took the clothes in one hand and started peeling off his sodden socks with the other.
Paul gulped in a breath. He wished he’d left his room messier, so he’d have a reason to turn around and look busy. As it was, all he could do was absorb himself in the record sleeve he’d left on the desk—Gene Vincent—his eyes skirting over the track list he already knew by heart. And then he peeked over his shoulder anyway: John was putting Paul’s clothes down on the bed so he could unbutton his trousers.
Heat bloomed in Paul’s throat; he gripped the back of his desk chair. Outside, the rain was being whipped into odd, swirling patterns by the wind before splattering down into the kinds of puddles that were sure to linger for days.
“Hey, would you close the curtains?” John said. “Can’t have your whole street seeing me starkers, can we?”
Paul closed the curtains, which left him with nothing to look at, really, besides John. He turned around, careful to keep his eyes fixed above the belt.
“Fit alright?” His voice sounded clogged up.
“Mm,” John said. “Maybe you’re not as titchy as you look.”
The heat was spreading: it was in Paul’s chest, now, expanding with each breath. And John was taking off his shirt. He was towelling his chest dry, careless sweeping motions. His body still held the lankiness of unsteady growth, but there was a solidity to him that Paul had yet to obtain. And so it must be envy, Paul thought, causing the dryness in his mouth and the erratic throb of his pulse.
But it was no better when John pulled Paul’s jumper on. Paul was over-conscious of how the clothes sat differently on John’s body than his own; how the broadness of John’s shoulders would surely stretch the jumper into a new shape, a shape Paul would feel every time he wore it from now on.
“How do I look, then?” John asked.
The tip of Paul’s tongue felt sharp with everything he could say.
“Drier,” he said.
“Just about,” John agreed. “Could go for some food, now, if you’re cooking.”
There was a tin of beans in the back of the cupboard, but John said he preferred eggs, anyway, so they sat eating beans-and-egg on toast on the stitched-together rug in the front room, the wireless tuned to Radio Luxembourg. The good stuff’s on Wednesday nights, John kept saying, as if Paul didn’t know.
Rain continued to batter the windows, and Jim didn’t come home until the eggs Paul had done him had congealed to the pan. Paul heated soup out of a can for him and Mike, though he would rather have spirited John away first.
John regarded Jim with the suspicion with which he seemed to regard all adults, especially the men. Having both of them in the kitchen left Paul on edge. He never knew what John might say.
But once the soup had been ladled out, Paul and John were free.
Halfway up the stairs, John said, “I never make me own dinner. If Mimi’s not in, I always buy chips.”
This seemed, to Paul, a life of obscene luxury.
“God only knows what you’ll do if you’re ever by yourself.”
“Live on chips, I s’pose,” John said, unconcerned. “Or I’ll invite you ‘round every night, have you feed me.”
This sent an odd bolt of pleasure through Paul’s sternum. He couldn’t imagine why, because he didn’t even like cooking, and certainly wasn’t any good at it. It was just something he had to do.
They reached the door to Paul’s bedroom, John letting himself through first. Inside, he tossed himself backwards onto the little bed.
Paul said, “If we get famous—”
John made a face.
“Alright, when we get famous,” Paul corrected himself, “we’ll be rich as kings, won’t we, and then you can have y’self one of those private chefs.”
John settled back on his elbows. He was all stretched out, taking up the entire bed, and Paul’s clothes weren’t quite big enough for him after all. There were all these strips of skin peeking out. John didn’t seem to notice.
“Don’t need a private chef when I’ve got you, do I,” John said. “I reckon we’ll live together, in a big house with three—no, four—floors, and a swimming pool and all. And then you can make me egg on toast.”
Trying to seem casual about it, Paul leaned against the wall. A house with four floors felt like a far-off prospect in this room, which seemed smaller than ever now John was in it.
“Egg and caviar on toast,” he suggested.
“We’ll be rich, not knobs.”
“Unless being rich makes you a knob,” Paul considered.
“That’s why we’ll stick together,” John said. Deepening his voice, he added, “If you start developing knobby tendencies, son, I’ll be on hand to snap you out of it.”
There was a sudden, sharp fizz in the pit of Paul’s stomach. He was beginning to recognise it as the feeling of the future: he got it before they went onstage, and when he and John were practising sometimes. It was like pure, distilled possibility. He could feel the way he was smiling, big and toothy. But it was alright, because John was smiling back.
The rain didn’t let up. It kept drumming its rhythm on the window, and eventually that rhythm had Paul reaching for his guitar.
“We sounded pretty good last week,” John said, as Paul made a show of tuning the thing.
Last week had been their second performance at Wilson Hall, which John liked because it was where the real Teddy Boys went. The thing about the Teddy Boys was that they were atrocious hecklers, but John didn’t seem to mind that; he just heckled the audience right back. Paul, meanwhile, had focused on making his own playing beyond reproach. It didn’t matter so much if Colin’s drumming was the thing on the firing line, really.
Paul felt a bit weird standing there with his guitar, like he was about to serenade someone, so he told John to budge up and sat down beside him on the bed. Then he started to play.
There was still enough of an imbalance in their technical ability that Paul was able to show John things he didn’t know yet—though John was catching up fast.
“This one,” Paul said, demonstrating, “well, I don’t know what it’s called yet. But I reckon it’s what we were missing from Blue Suede Shoes.”
“Show me again,” John demanded.
Paul did. He hesitated, and then he said, “I’m thinking it could sound good, in a song.”
“It already does sound good in a song,” John said.
“No, I meant—” Paul stopped. He braced himself—because if John laughed at him for this, he knew, it was going to hurt. “Maybe for a song of me own.”
Instead of laughing, John was quiet. Paul shaped his fingers on the fretboard, but didn’t strum.
“Your own song?” John asked eventually, like he’d misheard.
“I know it’s a stupid idea, but I think—”
“It’s not stupid,” John said.
Paul twisted to look at him. There was an expression on John’s face he hadn’t seen before. It seemed to skim jealousy and splash down in awe. Paul knew he’d impressed John before: it was practically the first thing he’d done, in that hall across the road from St. Peter’s. But there was always that slight caveat—Paul was impressive precisely because he was young, and thus below John in the pecking order in that essential way. His guitar-playing was great, for a fifteen-year-old. His ability to hold his drink was amazing, for a kid. And so on. But with this, Paul seemed to have broken through an unseen boundary, and emerged ageless and equal.
“Have you written anything yet?” John asked.
“Only a bit,” Paul said. “They’re not real songs, really, just ideas.”
“Play me one,” John said.
Paul hesitated. The most developed of the ideas was the first one he’d had, I Lost My Little Girl, and it only had three chords. When he’d played it for Ian James, a few months ago now, it had seemed impressive. Now he suspected he could do better.
But the other songs were either formless or best played on the piano, and he didn’t want to take John back downstairs. So he looked down at his hands and played: G, G7, C. He repeated that a few times before John cut in, impatient, “Has it got any words?”
Paul cleared his throat. He sang the first verse with a Buddy Holly twang, like he’d lost his little girl in Texas. John seemed to like that, so he hammed it up for the rest of the song, adding a few of Buddy’s vocal flourishes for effect.
The song trailed into a finish; he hadn’t yet worked out how to end it properly. But when his fingers stilled on the strings, he kept looking down at them. It wasn’t much of a song, really. He should have waited until he had something better to bring it up with John.
“And you just came up with that?” John asked.
Paul’s head snapped to look at him. “In bits and pieces, yeah,” he said. He swallowed. “Have you ever tried it?”
“Just joke songs,” John said, which made Paul realise—
“Those songs you do, with the silly voices, during rehearsals…?” It was preposterous. “You came up with those?”
Paul had assumed John was drawing on some unknown backlog of joke songs for older boys. It hadn’t even occurred to him—
“Yeah,” John said.
“But they’re so…” Paul let himself say it, this time: “Good.”
John scoffed.
“They’re about Mexican bandits getting under girls’ skirts,” he said, “y’know, and the like.”
The Mexican bandit one wasn’t actually Paul’s favourite. His favourite was the one where a French girl (voiced by John) fell in love with a French boy (usually voiced by Pete), who turned out to be another French girl—which was, according to the song, a mistake easily made because all French boys looked like girls. After that, the song devolved into John’s bewailing that their love could never be, while everyone around struggled to hold back their giggles.
“What’s to say a joke song’s not a real song?” Paul said. “It’s got the same stuff, hasn’t it? Chords, a melody, words. You should write them down.”
“Steady on, there,” John said, his mouth twitching all over the place. He seemed pleased by the suggestion, even if he wasn’t taking it seriously.
“We could be like Buddy Holly,” Paul insisted. “Writing our own songs and performing them. There’d be no need for anyone else, then. Just us.”
John laughed—not a bad kind of laugh, not like he thought Paul was being ridiculous. It was a laugh like: I can’t believe you.
“And I suppose we’ll be our own manager and our own record label and our own audience, too, if you have it your way.”
Paul grinned. “No, we can keep the audience.”
They passed the guitar back and forth, making up snatches of songs, until Paul heard the creak of Jim’s footsteps on the stairs. It was getting late. It hit him, all at once, that he couldn’t send John home now. The rain had slowed down to a drizzle, but it wasn’t the done thing: past ten, you ought to let someone stay.
“That your da turning in?” John asked.
“Think so, yeah,” Paul said. He propped the guitar in the corner. “I’m a bit knackered, myself.”
John smirked. “O-Levels are hard work.”
Paul knew John had failed all his O-Levels, because Ivan’d told him. Paul supposed it was because John was the kind of clever that flew right over the heads of all the stuffy examiners. Or, possibly, it was because John was the kind of person who might not show up to the examinations at all if he didn’t feel like it.
He was at art college now, anyway. Paul wasn’t sure what kind of magic had to be done to get them to let him in, but he was grateful. Art college put John right next to the Inny, five days a week. They hadn’t yet done more than exchange nods when they saw each other, but Paul felt sure that they were working up to something more—that, in a few months, they could be sneaking off to get lunch together, or that they might get the same bus to and from. It all seemed distantly possible.
John nudged him, and Paul realised he’d gone quiet.
“Did you want to stay over?” he blurted.
It was like a shock to his own system, the boldness of asking. It was the sort of thing he might have just let unfold on its own, stretching the night until they were both too tired to keep their eyes open. But John would need pyjamas, and the spare toothbrush from the case in the bathroom. It was probably better to formalise it.
“Think we’ll both fit?” John asked, dubious.
“Oh,” Paul said. He’d shared the bed with Mike when their aunts were visiting, and with boys his own age. None of them, he supposed, took up as much space as John. “I could sleep on the floor?”
“Don’t be stupid,” John said. “I was just saying, your bed’s titchy.”
“So’s yours,” Paul pointed out. But, then, he hadn’t stayed over in John’s bed. This was new for them.
As if in confirmation, John said, “I never share mine with anyone.”
“It’s not so bad,” Paul said. “And it’s only one night, anyway.”
John shrugged. Paul wanted to ask if he did this often: if he slept over in Pete Shotton’s bed, or Eric Griffiths’. He wanted to ask if there was anything the older boys did that he ought to know about, now he was becoming one of them.
“I’ll get you some pyjamas, then,” Paul said.
John wrinkled his nose. “I normally just sleep in my kecks.”
“But,” Paul said, boggling at him, “it’s winter.”
More than that—sleeping in only underwear struck him as uncouth. It made him embarrassed on John’s behalf. It made him—something that had a lot to do with blushing, anyway. He wondered that Mimi stood for it.
“Yeah,” John said with another shrug, this one jerkier. “Look, I’ll wear some if it’s going to make you—”
“No,” Paul said, quickly, “no, it’s fine.”
“Okay,” John said.
“I, um.” Paul bit at the inside of his lip. “Could you pass me mine, though? They’re under the pillow.”
His mind was already skittering ahead, wondering if he should change in the bathroom. But John hadn’t, had he? And if John was going to be lying there, in Paul’s bed, in nothing but his pants, it stood to reason that Paul shouldn’t excuse himself to another room to get changed. That it would look odd, girlish, to do so.
John passed him the pyjamas, and Paul decided to just start talking about the first thing that came to mind, which happened to be Elvis’ latest film. He’d read about it, and when he asked at NEMS they said they’d be getting the EP soon, but it seemed endlessly unfair that the Americans already had it.
That got John going, a proper rant about how all English music was shit and the only good stuff was American, notwithstanding Lonnie Donegan. Paul took advantage of the distraction and got himself out of his clothes and into his pyjamas in record time.
Once they’d brushed their teeth, and John had stripped down, Paul was struck by an instinct of chivalrous nobility.
“You can have the pillow end,” he said. “I’ll take the bottom.”
“Bottom of what?” John asked.
Paul was starting to wonder if John had ever slept over at anyone’s before.
“Of the bed,” he said. “You’ll have the top, I’ll have the bottom. But I’ve only got the one pillow, so. You can have it.”
John stood there, in just his boxers, and he crossed his arms right below his nipples. “Why?”
It was a double-edged sword, the fact that John wasn’t like anyone else Paul’d ever met. It made every moment spent with him thrilling, but it also sometimes made Paul want to shake him and yell why can’t you just be normal?
“That’s just, y’know,” he said. “How it’s done.”
“And what if I don’t want your smelly feet in me face?” John asked.
“My feet aren’t smelly!”
“Just get in,” John said, climbing into the bed himself and scooting so he was against the wall. “No need to make a bleedin’ production out of it.”
Paul, having never shared a pillow with another person before, took several deep breaths. He looked at the bed, which was as small as it ever was. He looked at John, who was tall and, relatively speaking, broad in the shoulders. Then he got into the bed.
The first thing he was conscious of was warmth. He hadn’t felt it since mid-September: the entire house was heated by the fire in the front room, which was so far from Paul’s bedroom that it might as well be in Antarctica. He had long suspected his window of being unfit for purpose, and Mike was always hogging the good hot water bottle. Besides all that, his blanket—though thick and woollen—was just slightly too short, being the same one he’d had since the age of ten. He was accustomed to choosing between his feet and his shoulders in the quest not to freeze.
John, meanwhile, was a veritable furnace.
It didn’t make sense: he was close to starkers, and had been out in the rain, and was in the same house as Paul was.
“You’re bloody freezing,” John commented.
“It is bloody freezing,” Paul responded. “Why are you so…?”
He trailed off.
“Hot?” John suggested.
“Give over,” Paul scoffed.
“Here,” John said, in a put-upon voice like he was doing Paul a favour, and he turned on his side to put his arm over Paul.
Paul’s breath came to a brief and stuttering halt. He managed to get it going again, though not without effort. John’s arm was heavy and warm on his stomach, and there was a slight tension in it, pulling Paul closer. His hand was loosely brushing the dip of Paul’s waist.
Paul stared up at the ceiling. He kept his arms very still by his sides. If anyone came in—they wouldn’t be able to see, John’s arm was under the blanket, but Paul knew it was there. Heat spiked through his belly. Even his feet didn’t feel cold.
He waited for John to say something. He waited for the courage to say something himself. He waited so long that he fell asleep.
It was still dark when Paul woke—the greyish dark of a winter morning. He and John were safely enclosed by the shut door and the drawn curtains, but it could only last so long. He could hear someone clattering about in the kitchen downstairs.
John’s body, pressed along the length of his right side, felt like a brand. The cold night hadn’t robbed him of that radiating heat, and Paul couldn’t help himself: he basked in it. John’s breathing, lengthened by sleep, puffed against his cheek.
Usually, Paul got out of bed immediately upon waking. He wasn’t one for lazing about—there was always too much to do, anyway.
He couldn’t make himself move.
It was a Saturday, he reasoned, and getting out of bed might disturb John. John, who elevated laziness to an art form, would be peeved if Paul denied him his lie-in. And, besides, it would be cold outside their little cocoon of blankets and body heat.
As he lay there, he considered that John had been right about not top and tailing. This had been better: no knees knocking into awkward places, no sleep-jerk kicks to the face. Still, Paul didn’t think he’d be suggesting this positioning to George, or Ivan, or anyone else really. Even though John hadn’t made a big deal of it, it still felt special, something just for them.
Eventually there came a knock at the door, and every muscle in Paul’s body locked in panicked rigidity, and John woke up, and Mike started whinging through the door that Paul was supposed to have gone out and done the food shopping already, because he’d used up all the eggs last night.
Terror made Paul’s stomach too tight for speech. It was John who called out, “Some of us’re trying to sleep, midget!”
Paul held his breath. Mike grumbled something about wanting bacon, but then there came the sound of his footsteps, of him going away. And then Paul felt silly, because there hadn’t really been anything to worry about. What would Mike have even said, if he’d opened the door and torn into the space where Paul was lying with his chest tingling and John Lennon right beside him, head on the same pillow? There weren’t words for it.
John was awake now, and he was moving the way he always did, big and careless, stretching out. His feet pushed between Paul’s.
“Morning,” Paul said, stupidly.
“Was’at something about bacon?” John asked.
“We haven’t got any.”
John grunted. Paul chanced a look in his direction, and John’s eyes were even squintier than usual, cracked to bare slivers. There were pink streaks on his face from the folds of the pillow.
“Sorry,” Paul added.
“Y’r alright,” John said. The soft slur of his voice, which Paul had never heard before because when John got drunk he mostly just started shouting, was like a glimpse into another world. He’d been cataloguing John for months, squirrelling away parts of him—the books he liked to read and what he wore and what kind of girls were his type—but this newest acquisition seemed to hint at a hidden reservoir of information left to discover. You wouldn’t ever know what someone sounded like first thing in the morning, Paul considered, if you didn’t wake up beside them.
“I can do you toast, though,” Paul said softly, “for breakfast.”
“And tea.”
“Alright,” Paul said. He had to look away, because the way John was stretching his arms up above his head was revealing the sweat-damp thatches of his armpit hair, which was so gross that Paul’s stomach was twisting in on itself. “Give me a tick.”
John hummed in response. Paul got up and out of the bed, and his skin prickled everywhere John had been touching him.
In the kitchen, Paul put the kettle on to boil and started toasting some bread. He could hear that his dad and Mike were in the living room with the wireless on. It was just past nine, said the clock on the wall. Hours of wasted time, of indolence. Paul grinned to himself, here where no one could see.
When the kettle started to squeal, Mike came in.
“You’d better hurry up before the shops close,” he said.
“You’re old enough to go yourself,” Paul retorted, loading up a tray with a teapot and cups and a plate for the toast.
Paul had been to John’s house often enough to know that there was a shiny electric toaster there, which meant the toast never got burned on just one side, as well as an endless supply of marmalade, which John always spread so thickly it made Paul nauseated to look at. Paul had neither of those things, but if there was one thing his mother had managed to impart before she died, it was how to make do with less. So he put a little jar of honey on the tray, which could substitute for both sugar and marmalade, and he made sure to flip the toast every thirty seconds, counting quietly under his breath, so it was even.
“You’re supposed to do it,” Mike insisted.
“Well, I’ve got other plans,” Paul said. “I’m not dragging John round to the butchers, am I?”
“Don’t see why not,” Mike said. “Shouldn’t he be going home by now, anyway? Does his mum know where he is?”
Paul chose not to point out the irony of Mike’s assuming someone else had a mum to report to. Aunt Mimi was close enough, after all. And, come to think of it, she probably was worried sick.
“Never you mind,” he said haughtily, picking up the tray. It was so full that it wobbled in his hands, the butter dish sliding to clink against the teacups. He steadied himself and shouldered past Mike, through the doorway and then up the stairs, to where John was waiting.
John descended on the food Paul brought like a ravenous pack of wolves crammed into the body of one teenage boy. He was getting crumbs everywhere.
“Steady on,” Paul said, though inside he was pleased. “Leave some for me.”
“Hurry up, then,” John replied with his mouth full.
There were times when John seemed unreachably adult-like to Paul, but now he was sitting cross-legged in nothing but his pants, crumbs shimmering with honey around his mouth, and that made it easy to sit beside him and slap his hands away from the toast, and to weather the short tussle that followed.
“Can’t remember last time I had breakfast in bed,” John commented while Paul was pouring them both cups of tea. “It’s nice.”
Paul fairly glowed.
When they were done eating, John got changed back into the clothes Paul’d given him the night before, and they took turns brushing their teeth and washing their faces.
“Should be getting back,” John said. Paul didn’t know if it was his own wishful thinking, or if John really did sound regretful, like he’d want to stay longer if he could.
“I’ll walk with you,” Paul announced. “I’m s’posed to be going to the shops in any case.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Paul said, “just let me get dressed.”
The day outside was grey and watery, but it was drizzle now rather than a downpour. There were puddles everywhere, big deep ones that make you want to test how far they went. Right at the end of Forthlin Road, John kicked a pool of rainwater up so it landed on Paul’s trousers. Paul tried to return the favour, but John dashed out of the way, laughing so hard he doubled over.
“I’ll get you back,” Paul vowed, clutching his coat closer around himself to make up for the chill damp seeping into his shoes.
“Have to catch me first,” John said, taking off at a run.
Paul caught him right as they crossed onto the path that hugged the side of the golf course. It was a path that had come to feel somewhat magical to Paul, since it connected his and John’s houses so directly, and was lined on both sides by trees big enough to block out the sky. Those trees were bare now, glistening with the rain, and sodden brown leaves made a carpet under their feet. A stone wall ran to the left, moss peeking out between the cracks.
Why John had slowed down was a mystery, but Paul took the opportunity to get his breath back. He fell into step beside John. Both of them had their hands in their pockets, and their elbows started to knock together as the path got narrower.
“S’nice,” John said into the hush of the lonely path, “your house.”
Paul glanced sideways at him, to see if he was taking the mick. It didn’t seem like it, but with John you could never really tell.
And then John kept going: “And it might be easier, y’know, with me mum, if I came and stayed at yours, sometimes. It’d give us time to practice without those other tossers, too.” He paused, kicking at some of the leaves. “We’re the only ones who’re going somewhere, me and you.”
Paul was still breathless from running.
“Going where?” he asked.
John looked up, craning his neck, as if he thought they were about to lift off and fly through the lattice of branches and into the clouds. And then, quite without warning, he took Paul by the arm and pushed him against the stone wall. Paul was shocked enough that he didn’t resist, and then even when he was up against the wall and a night’s worth of rain was soaking through the back of his coat, he didn’t move. He waited to see what John would do.
“Anywhere,” John said, very quiet. His hand was still on Paul’s arm.
There was a furrow between John’s brows and a stray spot of Paul’s toothpaste at the corner of his mouth. He was squinting, which just went to show how blind he was, because their faces were really very close.
And still Paul didn’t realise what was going to happen until John’s lips were already on his.
It felt like being jolted into his body, like every part of himself coming into sudden and stark awareness. The other kisses he’d had, with girls, had been nice; this one was like belly-flopping into a swimming pool. He was stunned enough that after John pulled back, it took a few seconds for him to find his voice.
“Wait, um,” he said.
It hadn’t been much: just a peck, really. John had stopped kissing him before he’d even been able to get used to it.
“Um,” he said again.
When he managed to get his eyes to properly focus, he noticed that John looked a little shell-shocked, too.
“John—”
“I’m sorry—”
“Do it again,” Paul said.
He hadn’t known this was what he was going to say: he could have sworn, actually, that he was going to ask John what on earth he thought he was doing.
John’s hand tightened around Paul’s arm, just for a second, and then he was lifting it to Paul’s cheek. He leaned in, slower this time. It gave Paul time to start worrying about whether he was going to do it right. John had kissed a lot of girls. And maybe other boys, too—it wasn’t the sort of thing Paul would know about. A lot of people, anyway. And how was Paul supposed to measure up, when he’d only kissed two girls and hadn’t even thought about kissing boys until thirty seconds ago? His lungs tightened. He shut his eyes.
John kissed him gently.
It was nothing at all like anything Paul had experienced before, and nothing at all like the way he’d seen John behave with girls. There was hardly any pressure—more a suggestion of John’s lips than the actual fact of them.
Then he drew back, and Paul grabbed him by the wrist, saying, “Again.”
“But you’re not—”
“I’m getting used to it,” Paul snapped.
“You’re…” John’s mouth stretched into a grin. “Alright. Well, anytime you feel like joining in—”
“Oh, piss off,” Paul said. “I’ve never…”
John raised his eyebrows in a mockery of surprise. “Knew you were lying about all them girls.”
“No, I meant—oh, shut it,” Paul said, and pushed himself off against the wall to try and get at John’s smirking mouth. For all he was in the middle of a growth spurt, he hadn’t quite caught up with John yet, and in his eagerness he started to overbalance on his tiptoes. John caught him around the waist.
There were four layers between John’s hands and Paul’s skin—coat, jumper, shirt, undershirt—but Paul still fancied he could feel the heat of John’s touch. In any case, he was sweating like it was the height of summer.
“Easy there,” John said, very close to Paul’s mouth. “It’s just me.”
He might as well have said it was just Elvis, but Paul tried to pretend like he was a person with a normal heartbeat and tons more experience with this sort of thing. He brought his hands up to rest loosely on John’s shoulders. He peered at John’s lips, which were chapped but also a little wet with spit that could have originated from either one of them. He said, “Go on, then. I’m ready now.”
“Oh, well if you’re ready…”
Paul did feel better prepared, when John kissed him for the third time. It was less like he was bellyflopping into a pool and more like he was in the ocean, and every few seconds a new wave came along and he had to just hold on for dear life, lest he get swept away. His stomach was getting the worst of it. There was a pit in the very centre of him, hot and unsettled, and he knew it would go away if they stopped but—
But he didn’t want to stop.
What he actually wanted, it transpired, was to stay here against this wall, half-freezing and half-burning, and be kissed. There’d be time to sort out the tangle of it all later.
This decided, Paul tried tilting his head so John would have more room, and then he parted his lips invitingly in case John wanted to French him.
John was about to, Paul felt sure of it, but then there was a rustling sound from the trees. It was probably a squirrel or a bird, or something similarly innocuous, but it seemed to remind John of where they were: namely, outside, with only a few yards of foliage between them and the golf course. He pulled away.
Paul tipped his head back against the stone wall and tried to breathe through the confusion and disappointment and excitement, all with John still touching his waist. It was no mean feat.
“Christ,” John muttered. “That was mad.”
“You’re mad,” Paul said, because John was. It was one of the best things about him.
Then John’s hands were gone. Raising his head, Paul saw that he was scuffing his feet through the wet leaves, hands tucked away in his pockets. There were bright patches of red on his cheeks.
“You can come round to mine anytime you want, y’know,” Paul announced, as though there’d been no break in their earlier conversation. “I liked having you.”
John smiled at that, wide and delighted, the way he always did when Paul said something a bit dirty. “Oh yeah?”
Paul bit his lip to keep from smiling too wide in response, and kicked some leaves in John’s direction. John kicked some back, along with a spray of mud, and darted away, laughing.
Pushing himself off from the wall, Paul gave chase.