The Carhullan Army

upper windows, scurrying the length of the wall. By the end of the afternoon the yard was full of shadows. I wished again we had signed up for an allotment, or had been placed in a house with a proper garden, but the waiting list was now so long and there were so few of them available to civilians that it seemed hopeless.
    When Andrew arrived back he asked me if I was OK and if he could see it. We went inside, shut the door to our section of the building and I took down my trousers. I sat on the bed and he gently opened my legs. Everything felt inflamed. I had cleaned myself up with a towel after the procedure but the water would not be hot enough to wash properly until later that night. There was still some translucent medical jelly there. It glistened and felt almost unbearably slippery as Andrew ran his thumb over me. ‘How does it feel?’ he asked me again. ‘Is it uncomfortable?’ He was kneeling in front of me. I shrugged, shook my head and looked away. ‘You’re still you,’ he said. ‘Beautiful you. They can’t control that, can they?’ His thumb was rubbing me gently. I wanted to ask him to stop, it had been too traumatic, and there was still some blood, but neither one of us had ever said no to the other.
    I felt him slip his middle finger inside me. He meant to do it slowly and carefully but the lubricant made his movement easy, and I heard him murmur a noise of surprise and arousal. My eyes were closed. ‘Is that nice?’ he asked me. There was the small wet sound of him drawing out and pushing his fingers in again.
    His breathing changed, became thicker. ‘God. I’m sorry, I just want to be inside you,’ he said. ‘Can I? Will it make you forget it maybe? Come on. It’ll be just us.’ He leant forward to kiss me and unzipped his jeans. ‘Here, you,’ he said. He took my hand and put it to his groin. He was hard and as I gripped him I felt the blood straining underneath his tightened skin. He moved forward a little on his knees.
    At the clinic we had been advised by the nurse to wait twenty-four hours. But after the hands of the doctor and the sharp bite of the tubing, any prohibition now seemed pointless. ‘Oh, God, yeah,’ he whispered as I pushed him inside, ‘it’s so wet.’ I could see in his face, the degree by which he felt the sensation more than usual. His mouth was open and his eyes seemed unfocused, with a pleading look.
    As if still afraid it would be painful for me he didn’t move much, but there was a deep rawness to it all. He came quickly, and with more intensity than he ever had. As he pulled out I felt the warm fluid escaping onto my thighs. He held on to me, breathing hard, then his body jerked as if he was coming again. He put his thumb to me and began to rub, but I told him not to.
    When the power came on he ran a bath for me and told the family in the room next door I would need a bit longer than usual. ‘Tough day,’ I heard him telling them. ‘She’s been at the clinic.’ For the rest of the night he was attentive, treating me with kindness, and he seemed happier than he had in months. It wasn’t to last.
    The conditions were hard on all of us. Life changed in every way and it was difficult to adjust. There was despondency and resentment, food shortages, humiliations. Any small feeling of bliss, any cheap narcotic substance available to mask the difficulty, to make people forget what they once had, was easily sold. In the poorest quarters people took low-grade drugs, ketamine, and hits of silverflex, which rotted their jaws. They passed syphilis among themselves and the clinics cut tumours from the genitals of those who abused the animal tranquillisers for too long. There was almost no money, and what little there was seemed meaningless. People traded with their bodies, their possessions, they signed up for futurised loans.
    This was not England, everyone said. This was some nightmarish version that we would wake from soon. The overdose and suicide rates climbed. Each time another occurred in Rith, and was talked about at the factories and plants, Andrew and I walked up the Beacon and held hands. It wouldn’t be us, we said. We were stronger. We’d come through OK.
    But over the years I saw Andrew become weary and practical, reduced to the base mechanism of getting by. Or perhaps he simply lost faith and the energy to resist, realising how close we had all come to something far worse than the critical existence left to us. As time went by he became