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“I’m fine, Sam,” Surrender-not said, and not for the first time. “I wasn’t exposed.”
The way he said it, like someone placating a slightly mad uncle, might have irritated me, if I had paid him any mind. In this matter, I definitely had more experience than he did.
“Strip,” I said. “Clothes in the rubbish and you in the bath.”
By rights, we should have been exhausted by the only partially thwarted disaster of Christmas Day 1921. But as the driver brought us home, I was humming with energy. In part, it was leftover anxiety from the danger we had escaped, but the roiling energy I felt was more than that, more even than the rising craving for O I was experiencing. Images from the war, images I usually tamped down with opium, kept rising to the surface of my mind like bubbles in some nauseous mental stew: sounds, smells, the gruesome colors of suppurating flesh. My own skin crawled, and even though I knew we were safe, I kept imagining a burning sensation, or a change in Surrender-not’s breathing.
When we finally returned to our flat, I tried to restrain myself, knowing most of what I felt was fear and nothing more. To no avail.
“You don’t know how mustard gas can stay hidden,” I told Surrender-not. “In ditches, in puddles. Maybe in clothes. Please take those off and get into the bath.”
In the end, he complied, though whether because I had truly alarmed him, or to soothe my increasing hysteria, I didn’t know.
“You too,” Surrender-not said. “If I am at risk, then you are, too.”
We stared at each other for a moment, and then I began to peel off my clothes, until I stood naked and shivering in the middle of the sitting room. I must look a wreck, I thought incongruously: addict-thin and puckered with scars from the war and after. Surrender-not had disrobed, too, and for a moment I envied the youth and health of his body. Under the uniform and the spectacles, he was beautiful.
“Come now,” he said, a hand on my shoulder to guide me to the bath. There was no mistaking the kindness in his voice now. And perhaps something else, too. “I will scrub your back, and you shall scrub mine. Tomorrow is Boxing Day. A new day. A holiday.”