[fic] LIKE ANYONE CARES WHAT THE FUCK I'M POSTING
Title: Life During (Cold) War Time
Fandom: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011)
Word Count: 10,200
Rating: Uh. R? Maybe. IDK.
Pairing: Peter/Ricki
Warnings: Uhm
Disclaimer: These characters etc are the intellectual property of John leCarre via that filmything, and I am not making money from this.
When Peter tells him he's almost expecting it; somewhere in his mind, he knew this choked up mess was going to end in loss, the news of Haydon's unexpected-expected execution trickling through to him the way Irina's didn't, but he was an idiot, an optimist, until now. He thought, perhaps, that he'd get lucky twice, the fate that spared him giving her a free pass too. Not to be.
“She's dead, Tarr,” Peter says without delicacy or discourtesy. Lunch in a cafe fogged with cigarette-and-pipe smoke, rain clawing at the London-grimed windows like the fingertips of a nosy child. “I'm sorry. K---er, our friend to the east had her ... terminated.”
Tarr nods his understanding for so long that the movement becomes a tic instead of an acknowledgement. “I see.” The nodding continues, a separate being jerking his head as his hands frisk about each other, crawl into his pockets and out again. “How long have you known about this, how long has Control--?”
“Ricki,” Peter says, trying that frequency of pure reasonableness that Control exudes, but falling short somewhere in what sounds to Ricki's slowly-constricting chest like the vicinity of condescension, “things have been very busy. Complicated. We didn't know for sure--”
“I see,” repeats Tarr, although with red-rimmed eyes and the casual blur of the foreground he does not, not so well. With a robotic twitch he gets to his feet, slopping hot, acrid tea all over his newspaper and new blue jeans, and he punches Peter in his hateful horselike face, there in Betty's Cafe.
The sound he can hear is like the whine of a mosquito, trapped inside his ear, as he walks away into the traffic in the winter drizzle.
When he clears his head enough to look at landmarks and see them again, Tarr's at Gray's, a tangle of posh relics dozing behind their antique stalls like emblems of continuity made dusty flesh, as they always have and always will. An as-yet unquashed romantic capsule in his mind, bitterer than cyanide, toys with the notion that, should Brezhnev's atomic threat be made good, and London incinerated and melted to radioactive glass, these old fossils will plod on. They probably wouldn't even notice the lack of custom.
He is on the verge of buying a woman's gold-and-sapphire ring, its paper label denoting it a little pitted fragment of Napoleonic history, when he remembers with a cold wash of unidentified emotion that he has no one to buy it for.
He buys it anyway.
Tarr is, for the time being, technically homeless. It is a state to which he is well-used, and he is also £30,000 of unearned Soviet blood money in credit. Uncharacteristically, Control had allowed him to keep the false bribe in what he now understands to be a placatory gesture: 'sorry about your woman, Tarr, here's thirty large'. And maybe he knows that's unfair, to think Smiley, Control, that callous; and maybe he doesn't give a damn if it's unfair. They shouldn't have let Irina die.
He rents a suite at the Savoy, and a poky room in a bed-and-breakfast in Wandsworth where he is the only white tenant - force of habit divides his addresses - and he deliberates, vacillates between them until he strikes out, belt-and-braces, for a spare room to let, on the Russell Square side of Soho.
On his first night his new landlady leaves him a pot of tea and a piece of shop-bought fruit cake on a tray outside his door, even though the ad said 'meals not included. There is a tea cosy on the pot and a plastic cover over the cake, to keep away the mice he has already spotted peeping furtively out of his wardrobe.
The taste of sugars on his tongue nauseates him, disorientates him until a surge of paranoia convinces him it is poisoned, and he purges the kindly-presented cake with a toothbrush handle and some muted retching.
No one is trying to kill him any more. It should be a relief, but, as he traces with cloudy eyes the lines of slowly unsticking wallpaper pattern with painted rabbits wearing green waistcoats, there is only the slow lap of iron-grey sea against his heart.
Tarr goes out.
“Do those legs go all the way up to heaven?” he asks, over the horn section of a song he doesn't recognise.
She's wearing white go-go boots without stockings, and the legs in question have an unmistakeable purple scar leading down from the hem of her matching, buttock-skimming mini. Her perfume is as cheap as the wine she's swilling; her eyes thick with a forest of mascara and false lashes, but not thick enough to obscure a kind of clutching sadness.
He's going through the motions, and it looks to Tarr like she is too. She says her name is Emma. Her hair is brassy, bleached blonde and set in hot chemical curls.
When she kisses him back, her lips are dry and her tongue still as a stunned fish, but she strokes his newly-shaven face like its upholstered in velvet, and she's nearly as tall as he is.
When they fuck, in the Savoy suite (well why not? Why not show the girl some luxury?), he reminds himself: gentle, be a gentleman, the lady must always come first. She scratches his chest with her fingernails (these are least are not fake additions), bites down on his deltoid with a startlingly feral hiss of ecstasy or anger, and as he is frozen somewhere between tears and climax, she reverts to to dead-eyed disinterest. With a kind of dreamlike gratitude for the escape, he brings himself off in the bathroom, alone.
The ring, the antique, he leaves prominently on the dresser. Tarr's not sure if he means it to be a test of her honesty - what does he care about that - or a kindness to her poverty and sense of pride. If she steals it, he's not paying her; if she steals it, she can reward herself without having to think of herself as a whore.
She doesn't steal it, and she doesn't stay, and she doesn't kiss him goodbye as she pulls on her go-go boots and settles her skirt back in place over her pubic hair. Emma doesn't even look at him, and he can see in her gait as she leaves the weary step of someone whose hearted is weighed down with loss.
He doesn't stay either; on his return to Soho he borrows his landlady's scissor's and tries to cut his hair.
His new landlady salvages the remains into a rather severe haircut and extracts from him a promise that next time he starts looking like a hippy, he will come to her instead.
When he gets back inside the Circus Peter doesn't comment on his absence - it has been four days since Tarr left him dripping nasal blood onto his egg sandwich - only on his haircut.
“Rather dramatic,” Peter remarks as Tarr slides into place next to one of the filing cabinets, his back to the wall. “It doesn't suit you, you know.”
Tarr runs his hand over the short bristles reflexively before luxuriously bestowing a raised middle finger upon his superior. “Any work?”
“Not unless you want to help Brigit with her filing,” Peter says with an unconvincing facsimile of a smile. Brigit, a faded redhead who has already succumbed once to Tarr's charms, had a propensity for peach-coloured slips under her woollen skirts and had once called Tarr a vile beast for suggesting with a wink and a smile that perhaps it being her Time of the Month shouldn't be such a great impediment to lovemaking after all.
Tarr eyeballs Peter's desk pointedly, the shifts and drifts of paper; just as pointedly, Peter shoves and shuffles them until every piece of information is safely sheltered by card-board folders of ochre and dusty pink.
“I'm not running you again yet,” Peter says, looking Tarr in the eye.
He may not have meant to, but that's when he reveals himself, Peter Guillam, with that look. Tarr spots it in the back of his eye, the same heaviness that dogged Emma's go-go booted footsteps in the Savoy, the same weight that he is half-sure drags at his own shoulders down. Someone he's lost, Peter. Someone he's lost.
“Why not?”
“Because there's nothing suitable, and your head isn't straight,” Peter says with admirable bluntness and an even gaze. It moves over the scabs on shaving cuts and the hollows Tarr knows are staking out their territory under his sleepless eyes. “Take some holiday. We'll be in touch.”
“I'll get bored,” Tarr says. He makes it sound very slightly like a threat, moving his weight forward on his feet until he looms over Peter. Standing, Peter is several inches taller than him, but he's the physique of a wading bird, even if he does punch surprisingly hard.
“Then read a bloody book!” Peter snaps, flushing briefly scarlet as his hair tangles in his eyebrows.
“Alright,” Tarr says, backing out of the room with his hands raised in front of him, placating him. “Alright.”
He pauses in the doorway, remembering that the last time he saw Peter's face he'd just put his fist in it and left it dribbling a swathe of bright red from nose to upper lip.
“Sorry about the--” Tarr raises his fist in a feeble mime of a punch, with a sheepish expression.
“Yes, well,” Peter sighs, “I suppose that leaves us even.” His smile - if it is a smile - is a poor hybrid of sheepish and wry, still weighed down with that invisible blanket of not-quite-concealed loss.
Tarr is bored.
Four women of varying hue and style have failed to steal the ring he bought. After Emma there was Mary, who had short dark hair and a stare that reached to some distant planet, her small tits marred by cigarette burns he refused to add to in spite of her entreaties; then there was Christine, whose flamboyant and gargantuan Afro proved ample distraction from her downturned mouth, who had an arse you could balance a pint on, and who cried in the hallway after fucking; the next failure-to-steal was Georgina, a mousy, plummy-accented beanpole with a hard face and a faint waft of junk sickness from her pores. He was surprised in her, but she'd made a point of telling him, for or five times, her father paid for everything. She'd told him, without apparent rancour, to check her pockets when she left if he didn't believe her.
“Most people don't.”
He didn't search her. Tarr has always had a good enough grasp of Kim's Game to know when something is missing. He'd have got nowhere as a strong boy if he didn't.
The last of the four was Nina, whose driver's license said her name was Gareth, and who was so appallingly shy that she more or less needed Tarr blindfolded before she would let him touch her. He almost offered her the ring himself, but she had left before he could make up his mind whether it would be interpreted as an insult or a kindness.
Tarr is bored.
He eavesdrops on Met officers - they are so careless, these civilian lawmen, just like the police in Istanbul, Jakarta, Prague ... he stands idly by and for all his flair and for all the gallstones of sadness that pepper his body like shot in an unlucky rabbit, he become invisible. They talk, quite openly, about things they shouldn't.
Tarr is bored, and because he is bored and there is no work and the walls of each of his three temporary homes is closing in on him like a coffin, because he can't face another woman and another closed-down pair of eyes drowning in whatever she uses to keep the world at bay... he trails the police, who are so plainly planning a raid that they might as well have taken out a full-page ad in the Sun.
The raid takes place on the Swiss Tavern, a short walk through Soho from his room, and along with a smattering of locals and a couple of confused-looking tourists from West Germany, Tarr watches this odd theatre unfold. Men of different shapes and sizes and fashions and ages are shoved out of the pub in the hands of the beat police, protesting and occasionally struggling. Some are silent and slumped, and everything about the parade says that this is far from the first time the pub has been raided.
His suspicion is confirmed when one of the men being lined up by the wall, a middling blond with an overbite and excellent shoes, raises his head to wearily ask one of the policemen, “What is it this time?”
He is shoved into the wall for his curiosity, which sets off a whole round of angry muttering and shouts from the pub's clientele, and Tarr glances up and down the road, suddenly more interested in the audience of the spectacle than the spectacle itself. He sees for a moment a man who looks a bit like Peter, if Peter had suddenly started wearing leather jackets instead of being a public-school heron in a flash fashionable suit, and then can't find him again; he's replaced by a shaven-headed man with a corduroy coat, a hard posture and soft eyes.
As the police jostle and harry and fail to actually arrest any of the customers of the Swiss Tavern, Tarr edges along the pavement opposite and closer to his acquired quarry. There's nothing in it, no reward for making contact, no information to be retrieved, he just wants to know if he's right, and the theatre opposite is nothing he hasn't seen before. Just bullies exercising their waning power.
Corduroy Coat is watching the raid with an almost unreadable expression, but his mouth betrays him, it won't settle into a grimly fascinated formation like the other spectators - the ones who aren't shouting 'Shame' or 'pigs' - and when Tarr very deliberately catches his eye, he jerks his head in an unmistakeable pantomime for 'let's go'. To Tarr's field-trained eye it is the equivalent of screaming to everyone in the vicinity 'WE ARE LEAVING TOGETHER', but if agents are watching they're watching the wrong man, and the plod are busy with their imposition of uniformed heterosexuality. There is no one to see this brazen gesture but him.
His name is Barry; Tarr gives his as Dave. He has an inkling that Barry is as much as nom de la rue as Dave is, though there is less fakery in “Barry”s casual anger at the police than there is in “Dave”s agreement; it's not, Tarr thinks, that he supports the mindless kicking of the city's queers. It's more that he doesn't bloody care. None of it matters.
Barry's quick, firm stride carries them in good time to a hotel room somewhere on the skirting board of Camden; they talk about football with the strained enthusiasm of two men who don't know or care about it.
The hotel is not respectable. It rents by the hour, and from the looks of the women they pass on the stairwell, so do some of the guests. A girl of about fourteen, fifteen is having a quiet fag on the stairs to their floor, her oddly clean and shiny hair falling over her face; it is not until they pass that Tarr realises it's a wig, and finds himself briefly remembering Nina.
The room resembles nothing so much as a holding cell with the bars missing, and the grey light that filters through the cobwebbed window is sluggish as a brutalised prisoner. Barry sniffs disapprovingly, and says, “No kissin'.”
Tarr nods his assent and is about to make some precautionary request regarding arses when Barry beats him to the punch, and after a too-long, spring-loaded gap in events pushes down gently on Tarr's shoulder with the palm of his hand.
Barry's cock is clean and pale and uncircumcised and unremarkable. His pubic hair confirms what his eyebrows suggested; he is, or would be if he hadn't nearly scalped himself, an icy Ayran blond.
Somewhere in the desolation of a back room with a stranger's hand on the top of his bobbing head and a stranger's cock filling his mouth, Tarr thinks, the things I've learnt on this fucking job, and almost laughs. Adapt and survive.
But there's no job, not right now, and once Tarr has his balance he uses his hand to help his mouth and the increased pressure on his short-shaven skull, the whispered non-word from above tells him he's done the right thing.
Barry's come is bitter as coffee grounds, but to Tarr's surprise he settles cross-legged at Tarr's feet as soon as he's on them, and undoes his fly.
The speed of his own reaction shames him momentarily. He is already hard, which Barry notes with what might be a smile, and Barry is good; it doesn't take long. Tarr suspects even in the immediate giddy aftermath that he could have been faster, that he is being toyed with a little, but he hasn't the oats for resentment.
Perhaps expecting coolness or a businesslike handshake and departure, Tarr is taken aback by an abrupt embrace that is a solid natural force, a tree trunk or a cliff face come alive and enfolding him. It is tempting to sag, to pretend gauche tiredness and take advantage of this unearned intimacy.
He goes 'home' instead.
Tarr is bored.
He begins to contemplate Haydon. The lure of money is no risk, but what if that fay fop just ... got bored? Do men defect through tedium? Do they sweep their allegiance from pillar to post simply to have a new set of puzzles, of enemies to occupy otherwise formless paranoia?
Walking Wandsworth Common with a toothpick rotating along his tongue, the winter closing over his head in a thick eiderdown of early sunset and biting winds, Tarr considers what the Soviets would want.
No harm in just thinking.
And God he's bored.
He ruminates on the problem, dodging buses in the rush hour like a man possessed by the spirit of some suicidal pigeon. He lets the buses come too close.
Would he do it? They shot Irina. They took her and they took her away.
Wild fantasies of recrimination ride roughshod over common sense; he wanders Hamstead Heath before dawn and eavesdrops on brief liaisons with a detachment he's never felt before, cataloguing the gulps and snorts and hushed exhalations like codes to be broken.
He settles on Peter because Peter is comparatively easier to crack than Smiley, than Control, who is a sheer cliff, and of more potential value than Alleline. Also, Tarr admits as he leans against the window of a newsagent opposite Peter's first stop on the way to an unidentified home, he would rather not have to learn anything about Alleline's rotten, twisted inner life, or Estherhaus's boring little world.
Peter's car is easy to keep track of. In this morass of idling engines and choking smoke, it is possible to follow on foot, which he doesn't appear to be expecting.
Sloppy, Tarr scolds, to himself. Sloppy, Peter.
He lives in the suburbs. It takes three days to track the entire route, and Tarr is quite spent with walking before he's traced Peter back to his unassuming bolt-hole in Finchley. But it keeps him busy.
Peter keeps a hair on his front and back doors, but leaves open an upstairs window; the route to it is concealed from the surrounding buildings by his neighbour's trellis.
Tarr tuts out loud.
He knocks a flake of paint off the window sill on his way in, a rose leaf stuck to the sole of his shoe, and mutters, “Now who's sloppy, Ricki?” as he puts the leaf in his coat pocket.
Peter is meticulously tidy, which is annoying on a practical front. The carpets are soft; Tarr removes his shoes and stuffs them into his jacket pockets with some difficulty.
The bedroom, into which he has broken, is devoid of personality: a double bed made with hospital corners (British public schools, Tarr acknowledges with a smile, taught a man to make his own bed damn well), a mirror, a dressing table that could be anyone's, and a wardrobe half-full of Peter's well-tailored, carefully-pressed clothes. Bugger all of use.
The flap of the letter slot is a gunshot in the empty house, and Tarr freezes in place until he is sure that only the letterbox and not the door is to blame for the bang.
He pads carefully down a beige-carpetted staircase, angling himself invisible to windows, and peers at the envelopes on the spotless welcome mat. There are bank statements and letters clearly from the man's mother, but a plain, unstuck envelope bearing no stamp or frank immediately draws Tarr's attention.
Rick Tarr cannot recall a time he did not read other people's mail; he can only just remember a life before constant vigilance and an ever-present knife on his person, if not a gun.
He bends back the hand-delivered note and sweeps it for some sign of a code. All there is for his eye are a few terse lines, no date or address, and only a single initial to attribute them to:
I am not going to wait for you.
At the very least you could have told me why.
M.
The ink is heavy and black, with the metallic sheen of a ballpoint; the final full stop pressed hard into the good quality paper. The envelope is addressed merely to 'Peter'.
M.
Tarr returns the letter to its sheath and the envelope to its place in the pile, and creeps into the living room with his shoes in his pockets like some sort of absurd antlers growing from his hips. Clearly a spurned lover - he didn't think Peter had it in him, quite the dark horse - but spurned over what?
Tarr surveys the living room, as barren as the bedroom: no photographs, almost painfully pedestrian art, no postcards, none of the unspent ordinance of home life.
M. for Mary?
With a snort Tarr thrusts his arm down the back of the sofa cushions, his fingers rooting blindly for the lost and forgotten, trace elements of a life. M. for Margaret, M. for Melissa, M. for Mandy, perhaps, although Peter hardly seems the sort to conduct an affair with the species of girl that calls herself Mandy. Matilda, maybe?
His groping fingertips brush paper in the neglected darkness of the sofa's innards, and with a triumphant 'ha' swallowed quickly back, Tarr scissors it into his palm and pulls his catch to the surface.
Merely an envelope, the kind he'd use as a bookmark and Peter probably wouldn't, and he's about to return it to the unfertile fishing grounds of the surburban sofa cushions when the first letter of the address catches his eye:
Mark Weston
M. for Mark, then.
“Well, well, well,” Tarr murmurs, pushing the envelope back into the sofa. “Well, well, Peter. Well.”
There is snow on the ground when he crosses the courtyard at the Circus. No one pays any attention to him, although he knows he cuts a bizarre figure in cropped hair and a new suit; the suit is an affectation for Peter's sake, and his feet itch for trainers.
“Give me some work,” he tells Peter, stepping into his office without knocking.
Peter sighs and doesn't look up. “We've been through this, Ricki. There's nothing suitable.”
“You misunderstand me,” Tarr says, closing the door and standing too close to the desk. “Give me a job, or lose yours.” His fingers splay on the edge of the desk.
“Blackmail threats now?” Peter says, still sorting through papers. “What will you have me suspended with, I wonder? I suppose I have been slow in turning over reports.”
“You know,” Tarr says, and the edge in his voice is unpleasant even to his own ears. “Bloke gets bored, he can get up to all sorts of mischief. You should shut your windows when you go out.”
“And you should be more careful about the paintwork on my windowsill,” Peter says, looking up at last. “I assume it was you?”
“Going to tell Control about Mark?” Tarr asks, walking his fingers along the desk. “Or am I?”
Peter is good. His voice is steady, and so is his gaze. His hands give him away, a fine tremor before they're laid on the papers. “It's not his business.”
“Everything is Control's business, that's why he's Control.”
“Well, not this.” Peter's face is almost still. If he's angry with Tarr for breaking into his home, he's doing a good job of keeping it out of his features. There is a knock on the office door, and Peter says, “Busy,” without breaking Tarr's gaze.
“It makes you a security risk,” Tarr says, leaning toward him. “You know what that means.”
“We are not having this discussion,” Peter says sharply, “and you are not going back into the field yet. Have a little patience.”
“I told you, I'm bored,” Tarr hisses.
“Then go and gawp at some more raids and shag some more rough,” Peter says in a low, polite voice which doesn't quite conceal the razorblade that he's slipping Tarr between the words. “And before you think of running to Control, remember: I know things about you, too.”
When Tarr arrives at Peter's house the following evening, the upstairs window is shut. He picks the lock on the back door, saunters into the kitchen as if it's his own house - an accolade nothing's had in decades - and finds a terse note sellotaped to a fridge that bears no magnets.
Piss off, Ricki
Tarr smiles to himself and settles down in the living room for a cigarette. It's six-thirty and completely dark outside, streetlights bouncing off miserly outcroppings of downtrodden snow. He watches the clock and examines the consumately dull prints: Turner, Constable, boredom and death; Peter does not possess a television and his bookshelf has been carefully engineered to make him look like a stockbroker with no imagination.
He will probably work late into the night: he has nothing to come back to.
Tarr helps himself to a lonely knob-end of nearly-stale battenberg from the tin. It seems more likely to be a vice of the last holder of the spare key than of Peter.
The sweet taste makes his gorge rise.
At nine, footsteps on the path jolt Tarr from a doze he didn't realise he was in, and he rubs his face, jerks his body alert before the door opens.
“Get out,” Peter says, shutting the door behind him. “I told you, there is no work and you're not helping your case by behaving this way.”
Tarr says nothing. He stretches, rubs his palm over the short bristles on his scalp, and watches Peter's choked down rage with detached interest. Having this hollow privacy punctured seems to upset him quite thoroughly, and Tarr, who has been living out of hotel rooms, dormitories, and other people's spare rooms for an incalculably long time, is intrigued by this solid domestication. The boys back at the Circus really are a different breed to the strong boys out in the field.
“What do I have to do, then?” Tarr says, eventually, eyeballing Peter very deliberately at crotch height.
“Stop behaving like a lunatic, for a start,” Peter growls. “And there has to be some work for you to do. You'll be even more bored manning a listening post downstairs.”
“M'not behaving like a lunatic,” mumbles Tarr, who spent an hour last night regarding his own reflection with bewilderment, sure he could pinpoint the man's name if given another minute.
“You broke into my house,” Peter says, his hands shaking hard enough to flutter the envelopes he is holding. “Twice.”
Tarr straightens his legs in front of him. “Why did you chuck him?”
Finally the angry red flush reaches Peter's face and turns him a revolting colour. “That's none of your business,” Peter says in a dangerous and uneven voice.
“Well, since I have no business of my own, I'm making it my business,” Tarr says, getting to his feet and standing too close to Peter, the threat implicit in his shoulders' set. “I am bored, Peter.”
“You're not bored,” Peter sighs, pushing him away with tips of his long, thin, fingers. “You're broken-hearted, and you're not working again until I'm sure you can act rationally.”
“Rationally like dropping your lover for expedience’s sake ?” Tarr needles, stabbing wildly in the dark. He is not heartbroken. Alright, he had never been in love before, but heart-broken people are sad. They cry, they mourn, they fondle photographs. They don’t fuck their way through the fringes of London and buy antique rings for no reason. They don’t feel nothing, this listless flatness that has occupied Tarr’s entire being since he popped Peter one in the face back in Betty’s.
“The service requires that we must put our country first,” Peter says distantly, “and not end up like Haydon.”
“He was bored too,” Tarr says, leaning forward into the defensive fence of Peter’s fingers.
“He was greedy,” Peter corrects.
“I’ll emulate him.”
“You don’t have the balls,” Peter snaps, “or the intelligence, or the subtlety, and you don’t want to.”
Tarr leans on Peter’s fingers again, almost relishing the anger building up behind his ridiculous horsey features. He isn’t sure what he wants from this counterproductive shit-stirring, but it beats walking like a vagrant round every borough in the city, waiting for the dog whistle of more work.
“Come to bed with me,” he says, close enough that he can feel his own breath rebound from Peter’s face.
Peter laughs at him, and steps back. “Are you mad?”
“You seem to think I am.”
“I work with you,” Peter says, looking out of the window as if someone is watching, as if someone is listening to this damning discussion, “and I am not giving you further fuel for some misguided blackmail attempt.”
He does not, Tarr notices, mention that Tarr is not his type. Rain, needle-sharp winter rain of the lacklustre variety that only ever seems to fall in England, spots the windowpane, and Peter turns back to Tarr with a lock of hair falling loose over his forehead.
“You’re going to have to come to bed with me,” Tarr says sincerely, “because I am not leaving your house otherwise.”
“I could quite easily shoot you in the leg and telephone for an ambulance,” Peter says with a certain coolness.
“I thought you might just leave me for dead.”
“It takes a long time to train a man to your standard,” Peter says, “which is why I am eager for you to get back to normal so that I can find you some work.”
“Come to bed with me,” Tarr repeats, trying to smile, “or we can fuck on the sofa. I don’t care.”
“For fuck’s sake, Ricki,” Peter groans, pushing past him to the kitchen. “Get out of my bloody house.”
Tarr sleeps on the sofa, his hands between his thighs.
Peter wakes him in the middle of the night. “Take your shoes off.”
“No blanket?” Tarr mutters with sleepy peevishess.
“Blankets in your home. If you’re going to invade my house you get nothing. Take your shoes off my sofa,” Peter says, already heading for the stairs.
The third time Tarr breaks into Peter’ house, Peter is already there. It’s less breaking in and more visiting without knocking.
The snow has been shaken off London’s streets as if it never was, but the bite in the air remains. Tarr ambles into Peter’s kitchen with cheeks red from walking in the cold, and Peter says, “Why me? Why can’t you break into Control’s house again? Your know where he lives.”
He sits at the kitchen table, with an untouched mug of tea disgorging steam into the cool air. An electric kettle behind him mirrors it, and Tarr pulls out the opposite chair with a careless brutality that would have raised a scrape, had not Peter chosen to floor the kitchen with linoleum tile. “Thanks, I’d love a cup,” he says into the prevailing silence.
This time Peter doesn’t bother to tell him to get out. He stares past Tarr’s head as at a ghost, his tea steaming sedately between his palms, and without much conviction, says, “You aren’t sleeping here.”
“Can you cook?” Tarr asks, taking in the spotless kitchen. The relative absence of any ingredient from his previous ransacking had suggested not. “Or was that his thing?”
“That’s none of your business,” Peter says tartly.
“Are you going to ask me why I don’t go and ask Control if he can cook?”
Peter pushes the cup of tea over the table to Tarr, who ignores it, his hands clasped like a churchman’s. “I suppose this is preferable to you drinking yourself to death,” Peter acknowledges, without withdrawing his gaze from the middle distance, “but really not by much.”
Twiddling the mug handle back and forth between his thumb and forefinger, Tarr takes stock of how little he has drunk in the last week. It might be easy to plug the gaps in the soul with booze, but it feels more like fuelling a fire. His mind is empty of anything but how to get himself reassigned, until he drinks.
“Sorry, old boy, I’m not going to jump off a bridge,” Tarr says with a sickly smile that touches neither his eyes or his heart. “Might drool on your sofa cushions again, though.”
“Driving me to drink won’t get you posted any more quickly either,” Peter snorts, and he extends one of his long, bony fingers at the mug Tarr is playing with. “Did you want that?”
“No, but you didn’t either,” says Tarr, dipping his thumb in what is assuredly painfully hot, cheap tea and sucking the milky residue off before it can drip. It doesn’t hurt - the warmth barely registers - and Tarr begins to think that, perhaps, he has no idea what he wants any more.
“How many rooms did you rent?” Peter asks, when he comes down in the morning to find Tarr diligently incinerating toast.
Tarr shrugs and thrusts the grill tray back under the grill. The room smells of burning, and the air in the kitchen has the foggy blue hue of dispersing smoke.
“You’re not short on other places to stay, Ricki,” Peter begins, leaning around him. He is already dressed, waistcoat buttoned and tie knotted. “That’s … more than enough toast.”
Tarr spares a glance at the three plates filled with blackened bread slices and shrugs again, sniffs. “It keeps burning.”
When he meets Peter’s gaze he is dully surprised to find the look his superior gives him is pitying rather than angry or even exasperated.
Tarr flashes a wild and plastic smile. “No chance of a quickie before you slip off to church, I suppose -”
“Leave the toast alone,” Peter says, ignoring the come-on, “and go back to sleep.” He frowns, creasing his bizarre face into even more weird formations. “Did you sleep?”
“No, I spent the night tossing and turning on your sofa. Mostly tossing,” Tarr does not struggle or resist as Peter inserts himself between Tarr and the grill, turning off the gas, tipping all of the haphazardly-stacked charcoal squares onto one plate.
“Go to sleep,” Peter says with the same pitying look.
It isn’t hard to track down Mark Weston. He is a civilian, a plain and simple civilian, and he makes no effort to obscure his tracks as Tarr does as a matter of course. The man works in a shop, a women’s clothing department, his approachable and ugly smile, and spotless suit as unremarkable as waiting room furniture. The lineoleum and prints, the Battenberg, the very location of Peter’s house all make perfect sense.
Tarr engages him in futile banter about trying to buy an evening dress as a surprise for his fiancé, and he is careful to name the fictitious woman Emma, not Irina.
Weston plays well at the married man, but the smile he gives Tarr in exchange for direct, unwavering eye-contact is a little too genuine. As they debate colour and measurements, Tarr knows with a bland certainty that if he shows up this evening, if he casually ‘bumps into’ Weston on the way home, he can fuck him. He can fuck him.
He leaves the ring ‘accidentally’ on the counter beside the till when he pays for the ugly chiffon frock. The dress will fit his landlady, he thinks, and it will keep her from fretting about his regular absences.
As expected, Tarr is not out of the building before Weston catches up to him, a little out of breath and holding the ring in his outstretched palm: “You forgot this.”
Tarr cups Weston’s hands in his as he takes the gold-and-sapphire ring with his opposite pinky, and he makes a point of smiling right into the man’s face as he thanks him.
They fuck in a basement storage room; Weston is ugly, ugly, and his mouth is hard. He kisses Tarr once, on the mouth, but only once, before sucking him off with a messy tenderness and a digit in Tarr’s arse that he doesn’t think to protest.
Weston is less businesslike than Barry, perhaps - after a few minutes Tarr finds he is no longer analysing the situation but instead faintly orbiting an empty mind with his hand pressed against his mouth as if he’s just received bad news. When he comes he is almost disappointed to be dragged back to reality, to a cold basement and a hot mouth leaving his cock in order to spit demurely into a handkerchief.
The handkerchief is a beautiful blue-and-gold pattern of paisley-like swirls, and Tarr thinks it may have been a present from Peter. There is after all no practical reason for Weston to have strip-cleaned Peter as aggressively from his life as Peter seems to have expunged Weston.
After a moment to catch his breath, Tarr kisses Weston - too abruptly, perhaps; Weston seems taken aback - and unhooks his fly for reciprocation.
He doesn’t attempt the finger trick. Some fastidious part of him is repelled by the idea, can’t quite shift the mental image of the man shitting in Peter’s bathroom with a copy of the bloody Mail held up and his nice, cheap black trousers pooled at his ankles -
Tarr composes himself. He can’t giggle and suck cock at the same time.
Weston’s pubic hair is coarse and auburn and so thick Tarr could lose a finger up to the second knuckle in it. His cock is almost red with the blood suffusing it; circumcised, oddly, and thick, out of proportion somewhat with the rest of him. There is an undercurrent, a taste of nylon.
He wants to ask Peter, now: what did you see in him? Is he kind? Clever? Funny? Did he make you feel like a better man, the way that Irina - did he just not ask questions, and fuck you the way you wanted?
Weston grips Tarr’s shoulders too tightly when he comes. Tarr makes a point of swallowing. He makes a point of trailing a languorous tongue the full length of Weston’s cock; he makes a point of looking the man in the eye and licking his lips slowly. It feels like a fuck you, but he’s no idea to whom.
The same evening he picks up a woman called Sheena, who has either a cold or some more esoteric affliction as she sniffs almost continually through their brief conversations, her nose red and her eyes bloodshot.
She wants to talk about music; Tarr mentions the Stones and she look at him as if he’s a dirty old man at a bus stop. She wants to talk politics, but beyond a facile agreement that all governments are inherently corrupt he has nothing to add to her ill-informed and passionate tirade. He’s sure they end up fucking to fill the gap in conversation.
Sheena lives in a squat in Haggerston. There are already two people of indeterminate sex screwing in the boarded-up living room as they go past the door, maybe more than two.
She asks him to hit her and he hesitates for so long that she shouts ‘fuck’s sake’ loudly enough to annoy the neighbours, and grabs his had, shoving it toward her crotch. She has a bruise like the map of the Indonesian islands across her outer thigh, and her accent wanders closer to Glasgow the wetter she gets.
She is loud, and Tarr tries to match up with her, but she pinches him and tells him to shut it.
He’s offered a spot on the floor of the squat, and told not to snore, but as Tarr can think of few places he’d rather sleep less, he takes his leave. It’s too late for Soho, too late to be respectable at the Savoy, and Wandsworth is too far.
He spends the night treading the perimeter of Regents Park, clockwise, his hands in the pockets of his jacket, listing Russian verbs to keep his mind quiet.
At a little after daw he knocks on Peter’s door.
Peter jerks the door open and shapes the ‘G’ of ‘go away’ with his lips - at least, Tarr is certain it’s not going to b ‘good to see you, Ricki’ - and closes his mouth again. “In,” he says, shoving Tarr inside while peering up and down the street. He is wearing a dressing gown that is as out-of-keeping with the character of the houses as his suits are. “Before someone sees you.”
In the hallway Peter takes him in in silence for a moment.
“Did you sleep?”
“I find it overrated,” Tarr says. He is slurring his words.
“I find it a medical necessity.”
“In which case, can I borrow your sofa?”
Peter squints at him. “Take the bed.” After a pause in which he is no doubt expecting Tarr to say something crude, he adds, “Have a bath first. You look like hell, Ricki.”
“Charming,” Tarr says, swaying. “Not coming with me?”
“I would rather fuck a corpse.” Peter’s gaze is even and unwavering. “Go to sleep.”
“Ah, so that’s what you’re into,” Tarr says, sagely. He tries for a smile but too many teeth escape from behind his lips. He wonders again if someone could possibly have slipped poison into his food, but he can’t quite put his finger on the last meal that he had.
Peter says, “The case for your return to work is becoming weaker, you know.”
“Don’t be an arse,” Tarr snaps. The floor is further away than he recalls.
Peter shakes his head and points to the stairs. “Look in the mirror while you’re about it, and tell me if you’d let yourself back out in the field. You couldn’t hail a cab looking the way you do now.”
Tarr strip-washes in the bathroom’s overstocked handbasin. There is a toothbrush cup with one toothbrush in it, and three bottles of the same aftershave stacked up behind each other on the windowsill.
He trims his hair with nail scissors, shaves with Peter’s straight-razor - an unexpected player in the ranks of his grooming apparatus - and leaves Peter’s aftershave unused. It smells vile.
Tarr goes through Peter’s underwear drawer on a whim, and is not entirely shocked to find, behind some pressed handkerchiefs, one which is screwed up in a ball as if forgotten, royal blue and gold in a pattern reminiscent of if not identical to paisley.
It is empty, and it smells just enough of the man he fellated yesterday afternoon for him to understand why it is still here.
He takes the ring from his pocket, from his jacket lying discarded on the bed, and wraps it in the handkerchief, shoves the cloth bundle back into the drawer. It is a cryptic message at best, but anything more definite would be out of his style.
The real trouble begins when Tarr forgets to sleep or dress himself. He tells himself he had every intention of scraping a few hours of rest, and that he had no desire to antagonise, but that alters nothing.
He half-walks and half-staggers into the living room, as naked as the day he was born, and damp, and cold; the soft carpet takes dents even from his bare feet.
“Put some bloody clothes on,” Peter shouts, trying to herd him back toward the stairs as if he is an errant goose. “For God’s sake, I can’t be seen with a naked bloody man stalking around the house like a ghost -”
Tarr remains where he stands, extends his arms out as if making an invitation. “Do I look enough like a corpse now?”
“What the fuck is the matter with you?” Peter barks. Tarr grins emptily.
“I suppose you could shoot me in the head,” he says surprised by the mania in his own delivery, “you must keep something about the house, maybe in your coat - you’re a good Circus man, you know anyone can just sneak up on you - you have to defend yourself-”
He recognises pleading in his voice, and can’t help laughing at Peter’s furious, aghast, equine face.
“Haha. You could say you aimed for a shoulder shot but I knocked you.” He taps his own chest, fails to feel the pressure of his own finger, and taps harder. “Just about here, here should do it. It’s the polite thing to do for your friends. When they stop being useful. Perhaps I was going to defect after all. Haha, ha. I was so bored that I sold everyone to Karla. Right?”
Something falls from his chin and splashes on his collarbones, and Peter lunges for him trying to get a hand hold on slippery naked flesh and a freshly-trimmed head.
Somehow Tom finds himself with an arm twisted up behind his back, tripping up the stairs with Peter breathing furious daggers onto his back with every step.
He’s shoved, almost thrown into the bedroom, and when he looks up Peter is shaking with rage, his hair dishevelled and shirt askew. He points a juddering finger at Tarr.
“Fucking sleep,” Peter snaps, “Sleep. Or I will tie you to a chair and have you dragged to a holding cell.”
The door slams, and the handle twists: scrape, bump. A chair under the handle, as if Tarr couldn’t simply climb back out of the window he came in by in the first place.
His face is wet. Tarr feels for injuries but his hands come away clean, clean and wet. He almost pokes himself in the eye before he realises he’s been crying, and that he has no idea when he began.
Tarr dreams of a boat.
It might be Istanbul, it might be Cairo, but in his dream he has the peculiar certainty that he is sailing down the Bristol Channel, in spite of the minarets and the light.
Irina is standing at the bows of the boat with her back to him. Her hair doesn’t move in the wind, and when he finally staggers to her - his usual sea-legs mysteriously deserting him - he can see it is a wig, or perhaps a hat, fashioned from one solid piece.
He asks her if she will leave her husband, come to the West; he tells her that he has arranged everything. He tries to give her the ring, but his jacket pocket is empty - no cigarettes, no knife, no money - and all he can find in his jeans are a handkerchief and a rose leaf.
He offers the handkerchief to her.
“It’s wet,” Irina says, not touching it.
“It’s been raining,” says Tarr. The skies are the empty vigorous blue of drought.
“I will have to ask my husband,” Irina says, and her face is hidden by the peculiarly solid wig.
“Your husband is dead,” says Tarr, leaning on the rail. Irina is still, somehow, six feet away, and his feet hurt. The deck is rough. If he sidesteps to her he will bleed. He has no idea where his shoes are.
“You are dead,” Irina says regretfully.
When Tarr wakes the dark outside is total and he is lying at the foot of a perfectly-made bed, naked. His clothes are strewn about the bed, and he has no idea where he is. It is too plain for the Savoy, and neither Wandsworth nor Soho have a double bed in them. For a short moment he panics, certain that he has been betrayed, but the presence of his knife, still safely tucked in his jacket, reassures him.
The effects of this reassurance are lessened somewhat when he tries to open the only door and finds that someone has pushed a chair under the handle.
Without hesitation or wasting his breath on a shout of ‘let me out’, Tarr throws himself shoulder-first at the door.
Almost instantly there are footsteps on the stairs, and Peter Guillam says, “Stop that,” testily from the other side of the bedroom door.
“Would you mind telling me why I’m locked in your bedroom, Guillam?” Tarr asks, pulling on his jeans. He puts his face to the door jam.
“Can I assume you don’t remember coming at me mother-naked and trying - poorly - to talk me into shooting you?” Peter asks in weary tones.
Tarr says, “A fair assumption.”
“Are you sane enough to come out of there yet?” Peter asks. Tarr pictures him leaning on the door, imparting a confidence to the panels.
“I’m not wholly sure,” he admits. “Maybe you should come in, instead.”
There is an excessive silence. Tarr wriggles into a shirt he could have sworn was a tighter fit when he bought it.
“I don’t think I will,” Peter says at last, apparently deliberating over the words. “There is a certain possibility that I will punch you in the face.”
“I’m quite attached to the rest of my teeth,” Tarr agrees. “I’d like to remain attached to them.”
“Don’t be such a baby,” Peter says, and if he didn’t so tired Tarr might swear the man is almost amused. “I didn’t knock any out last time.”
“Bloody felt like it.”
There is another long silence, and Tarr slides down the door, his back to the wood, until he is sitting with his forearms draped over his raised knees.
“Can I have something to eat?” he asks, when the silence has stretched on for so long that he suspects Peter of walking away.
“No.”
Tarr’s stomach gurgles piteously. “Can you hear that?”
Peter does not reply. Something flies past the window, and Tarr folds his hands around each other slowly, unfolds them, and folds them again.
“Peter?”
“Yes.” Peter sounds, even with the door in the way, as if he is forcing the word out through clenched teeth.
“I have this nasty idea that I may have gone mad.” Tarr cradles his left hand in his right, then his right hand in his left. They feel alien, heavy. Someone else’s hands.
“Seems that way.”
Tarr lays his head against the door and clears his throat. “Peter.”
“Yes.”
“How long do I have to stay in here?”
A car passes in the street outside - an old car, with a loud engine and inconsistent fuel feed, from the sound of it. He can also hear the breath Peter draws, even through the wooden door.
“Until I stop wanting to punch you in the head so very badly.”
“A long wait, then.” Tarr closes his eyes.
“Shut up, Ricki.”
The silence that follows is so profound that Tarr feels himself begin to doze off again.
“Did you have no one else to inflict yourself upon?” Peter sighs. “For God’s sake.”
“You mean in the Circus?” Tarr does not open his eyes. There is nothing left in Peter’s bedroom to look at.
“I mean in the world.”
“This isn’t exactly a job for making friends, Peter.” At least, not friends that lasted, lived, and didn’t abruptly turn their backs on you.
“In the Circus?”
Tarr shrugs to an audience of none. “I owed you for smacking me in the mouth.”
“Right,” Peter says, and there is a thump and a scrape, and the door handle rises half an inch. “Are you leaning on the door?”
“Are you going to punch me in the head? Can we get this over with?” Tarr heaves himself up onto his hands and knees and backs away from the door, into the darkened bedroom. The carpet tugs his jeans up his shins.
The door opens slowly, flooding the first few feet of the room with light from the landing, and Peter leans on the door frame in the narrow slice of light, blocking most of it again. He is wearing his waistcoat, but it is undone; his tie is missing, and he looks unfamiliar in the low light.
“Get up off the floor,” Peter sighs, pressing his forehead against the door frame. “Please.”
Tarr backs up against the foot of the bed, and gets to his feet. They're cold. He watches Peter, silhouetted against the landing light, take off his waistcoat and hang it on a coat hanger. When Peter starts to unbutton his shirt, a suspicion strikes him.
“What are you doing?”
He expects to be told that Peter is getting ready to go to bed, that it is Peter's damn room, and that Tarr is welcome to get out. Instead, Peter removes his cuff links and puts them into a small jewellery box on the dressing table, and looks Tarr in the eye over his shoulder.
“Calling your bluff.”
Tarr watches him remove his shirt the same way he might watch a man he suspects of being armed. “And if I'm not bluffing?”
Peter hangs up his shirt; he wears, now, a vest tucked into his trousers. He says, “Then I would appear to be fucking a lunatic.”
“I'm not a lunatic,” Tarr says, still watching Peter like a criminal eyeballing a distant policeman.
Peter pulls off his vest. His chest is strangely hairless - or perhaps just seems that way in the dim light - his nipples like two penny pieces, his head too big for his shoulders and his hands too large for his arms. Curiously, Tarr does not think he needs to now track down Weston and ask him what it was that he saw in Peter.
“So you're bluffing, then,” Peter says, undoing his trousers.
Tarr watches him remove the trousers, revealing stork-like legs and socks pulled up to mid-shin. He is almost expecting sock garters. He fiddles with the loose cuffs of his own shirt, barrel cuffs, linkless cuffs with their plastic buttons, but does not drag his wary gaze from Peter's slow disrobing.
He isn't sure, now, if he was bluffing or not.
Peter folds the trousers in half and hangs them. He stands apparently unselfconscious in underpants and pulled-up socks, a strangely-shaped man either unaware of or unfazed by his own strangeness.
“You'd really go through with it just to call my bluff?” Tarr asks, unbuttoning his shirt rather more self-consciously. He is nothing to be ashamed of, but the calculating look Peter gives him makes him wither as under an interrogation light.
“Perhaps I'm curious as to what good you think it would do,” Peter says, bending to remove one sock, and then the other. “Perhaps I haven't had any in a while.”
“With me, though,” Tarr blurts. His shirt is undone. His navel is already growing cold.
“Getting cold feet?” Peter asks, his hand on the waistband of his underpants. “Bluff sufficiently called?”
“No,” Tarr says, shrugging the shirt back off his shoulders. He drops it onto the floor.
“Then take your bloody clothes off,” Peter says, sliding his underpants down his legs and with an unexpected kick sending them sailing into the darkness down the side of the bed.
Tarr hesitates, and Peter extends an exasperated arm and, with the unexpected military precision of a drill sergeant, debags him.
He stands largely naked, his jeans around his ankles, and raises his eyebrows at Peter. “I was going to do that myself.”
“And now you don't have to. Please get onto the bed. This is becoming tiresome.”
Somewhere in the distance of the city night, a siren begins to wail, carried on the cold air like raindrops. Tarr steps out of his jeans, and is about to ... something ... when Peter makes an exasperated noise and shoves him in the sternum with the tips of his fingers. It's certainly not hard enough to throw Tarr off-balance, not even hungry and tired and (possibly) off his head, but he falls backward as if he's been shot.
He hits the bed as if falling into water and almost loses his grip on consciousness.
Peter regards him as if he is a stain on the mattress, but Tarr isn't insulted by it. His mind feels unusually calm, as quiet and uneventful as a graveyard.
He still kisses Tarr. Tarr is initially underwhelmed; this is not the kind of kiss that would move him to grab a girl by the ponytail and kiss her hard back, but he lies back and lets his muscles turn to jelly, and it gets better.
Peter is almost as still as he, his hand on Tarr's chest lying like a stone, his lips hardly moving, but somehow it is better, better than Emma, better than Sheena nearly biting his tongue, better than the nameless cloud of women (and one or two men) whose mouths he has invaded and occupied in the last fortnight. Tarr feels for the first time the texture of the sheets beneath his back, and Peter's long, bony fingers slip at glacial pace over his abdomen, his navel, his belly.
His hand on Tarr’s cock is soft and steady, a slow, rhythmic embrace on his skin. In the cold of the room Peter’s palm feels like a welcome furnace.
Tarr says, “Mn,” into Peter’s mouth without meaning to, and Peter’s fingertips brush the inside of his thigh.
He is loath to break the corpselike stillness he has sunk into, but there are unkind words for men who don’t pull their weight, whether in the field or in bed. Tarr raises his hand, groping along Peter’s body in the dark, his eyes squeezed shut and his mouth occupied, but Peter releases his cock and seizes his wrist.
“Stay still,” Peter says, pinning Tarr’s wrist to his chest, his mouth barely separated from the kiss. He uses a more compelling tone of command than he ever has in all the time he has been running Tarr through assignments.
“Do you not -?” Tarr begins, opening an eye.
“And shut up,” Peter says, leaving Tarr’s arm lying limp as a dead thing across his own chest. He returns neither to the kiss nor to his ministrations to Tarr’s cock, and though Tarr is disappointed he obeys the edict to shut up and lie still, his heart beating faster than expected.
He squints at Peter, whose face is closer to his than he can remember it ever having been, and watches him suck with deliberate care on one of his own forefingers. Tarr has an inkling of what is to come, and although he feels for the first time in a long time a faint tickle of discomfort, of trepidation in his stomach, he lies still, his bluff called.
His formless fears are unfounded; a month, two months ago he might have been ashamed of the sounds that are driven out of him when Peter fucks him. He might have been deeply disturbed once by his own reaction, by the way he draws his knees up Peter’s sides unbidden, by the involuntary raising and spreading of his arse, by the way he clutches and clings and tries to find Peter’s mouth without opening his eyes.
Even in this delirium of unexpected sexual ecstasy, he is horrified at himself; when Peter slaps him in the face and hisses, “Shut up, for God’s sake,” he traps in his throat a noise which, if released, would sound as if his balls had learned to speak.
When he comes he feels he is falling through the bed, through the house, into the bowels of the earth, dead and empty, as insubstantial as a ghost, but twenty minutes later he is pulling on his jeans and buttoning up his shirt.
“If you knock any more paint off my window sill,” says Peter, face-down in the pillows, “I will knock out the remainder of your teeth.”
Tarr walks purposefully (with slightly bandy legs) to the bedroom door, and Peter rolls over, pushing his hair off his forehead. “Get to my office before ten tomorrow,” he says, already slurred with sleep.
“For an official bollocking?” Tarr asks, leaning on the door frame.
“To discuss what you will be doing in Kiev,” Peter says. “Shut the door behind you.”
-----END-----
And this is what Ricki Tarr does in Kiev.
Notes
1. "Debagging" is the pulling down of trousers, it's military parlance which I suspect would easily leak into the Circus via a) its previous association with military intelligence and b) being populated by quite a lot of ex-public schoolboys.
2. I haven't read the original John LeCarre novel, everything in here in terms of characterisation comes from the 2011 film and half-remembered snippets of the radio play.
3. Blah blah blah unhealthy and irresponsiblecakes: this fic is not intended to portray rational behaviour, a healthy working relationship, or a responsible attitude toward feelings because MEN. THE 70S. HIGH-PRESSURE WORK. It annoys me hugely that I have to put this disclaimer in, but the Greek Chorus of the internet Utopian Fiction Police Squad won't shut up otherwise.
Fandom: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011)
Word Count: 10,200
Rating: Uh. R? Maybe. IDK.
Pairing: Peter/Ricki
Warnings: Uhm
Disclaimer: These characters etc are the intellectual property of John leCarre via that filmything, and I am not making money from this.
When Peter tells him he's almost expecting it; somewhere in his mind, he knew this choked up mess was going to end in loss, the news of Haydon's unexpected-expected execution trickling through to him the way Irina's didn't, but he was an idiot, an optimist, until now. He thought, perhaps, that he'd get lucky twice, the fate that spared him giving her a free pass too. Not to be.
“She's dead, Tarr,” Peter says without delicacy or discourtesy. Lunch in a cafe fogged with cigarette-and-pipe smoke, rain clawing at the London-grimed windows like the fingertips of a nosy child. “I'm sorry. K---er, our friend to the east had her ... terminated.”
Tarr nods his understanding for so long that the movement becomes a tic instead of an acknowledgement. “I see.” The nodding continues, a separate being jerking his head as his hands frisk about each other, crawl into his pockets and out again. “How long have you known about this, how long has Control--?”
“Ricki,” Peter says, trying that frequency of pure reasonableness that Control exudes, but falling short somewhere in what sounds to Ricki's slowly-constricting chest like the vicinity of condescension, “things have been very busy. Complicated. We didn't know for sure--”
“I see,” repeats Tarr, although with red-rimmed eyes and the casual blur of the foreground he does not, not so well. With a robotic twitch he gets to his feet, slopping hot, acrid tea all over his newspaper and new blue jeans, and he punches Peter in his hateful horselike face, there in Betty's Cafe.
The sound he can hear is like the whine of a mosquito, trapped inside his ear, as he walks away into the traffic in the winter drizzle.
When he clears his head enough to look at landmarks and see them again, Tarr's at Gray's, a tangle of posh relics dozing behind their antique stalls like emblems of continuity made dusty flesh, as they always have and always will. An as-yet unquashed romantic capsule in his mind, bitterer than cyanide, toys with the notion that, should Brezhnev's atomic threat be made good, and London incinerated and melted to radioactive glass, these old fossils will plod on. They probably wouldn't even notice the lack of custom.
He is on the verge of buying a woman's gold-and-sapphire ring, its paper label denoting it a little pitted fragment of Napoleonic history, when he remembers with a cold wash of unidentified emotion that he has no one to buy it for.
He buys it anyway.
Tarr is, for the time being, technically homeless. It is a state to which he is well-used, and he is also £30,000 of unearned Soviet blood money in credit. Uncharacteristically, Control had allowed him to keep the false bribe in what he now understands to be a placatory gesture: 'sorry about your woman, Tarr, here's thirty large'. And maybe he knows that's unfair, to think Smiley, Control, that callous; and maybe he doesn't give a damn if it's unfair. They shouldn't have let Irina die.
He rents a suite at the Savoy, and a poky room in a bed-and-breakfast in Wandsworth where he is the only white tenant - force of habit divides his addresses - and he deliberates, vacillates between them until he strikes out, belt-and-braces, for a spare room to let, on the Russell Square side of Soho.
On his first night his new landlady leaves him a pot of tea and a piece of shop-bought fruit cake on a tray outside his door, even though the ad said 'meals not included. There is a tea cosy on the pot and a plastic cover over the cake, to keep away the mice he has already spotted peeping furtively out of his wardrobe.
The taste of sugars on his tongue nauseates him, disorientates him until a surge of paranoia convinces him it is poisoned, and he purges the kindly-presented cake with a toothbrush handle and some muted retching.
No one is trying to kill him any more. It should be a relief, but, as he traces with cloudy eyes the lines of slowly unsticking wallpaper pattern with painted rabbits wearing green waistcoats, there is only the slow lap of iron-grey sea against his heart.
Tarr goes out.
“Do those legs go all the way up to heaven?” he asks, over the horn section of a song he doesn't recognise.
She's wearing white go-go boots without stockings, and the legs in question have an unmistakeable purple scar leading down from the hem of her matching, buttock-skimming mini. Her perfume is as cheap as the wine she's swilling; her eyes thick with a forest of mascara and false lashes, but not thick enough to obscure a kind of clutching sadness.
He's going through the motions, and it looks to Tarr like she is too. She says her name is Emma. Her hair is brassy, bleached blonde and set in hot chemical curls.
When she kisses him back, her lips are dry and her tongue still as a stunned fish, but she strokes his newly-shaven face like its upholstered in velvet, and she's nearly as tall as he is.
When they fuck, in the Savoy suite (well why not? Why not show the girl some luxury?), he reminds himself: gentle, be a gentleman, the lady must always come first. She scratches his chest with her fingernails (these are least are not fake additions), bites down on his deltoid with a startlingly feral hiss of ecstasy or anger, and as he is frozen somewhere between tears and climax, she reverts to to dead-eyed disinterest. With a kind of dreamlike gratitude for the escape, he brings himself off in the bathroom, alone.
The ring, the antique, he leaves prominently on the dresser. Tarr's not sure if he means it to be a test of her honesty - what does he care about that - or a kindness to her poverty and sense of pride. If she steals it, he's not paying her; if she steals it, she can reward herself without having to think of herself as a whore.
She doesn't steal it, and she doesn't stay, and she doesn't kiss him goodbye as she pulls on her go-go boots and settles her skirt back in place over her pubic hair. Emma doesn't even look at him, and he can see in her gait as she leaves the weary step of someone whose hearted is weighed down with loss.
He doesn't stay either; on his return to Soho he borrows his landlady's scissor's and tries to cut his hair.
His new landlady salvages the remains into a rather severe haircut and extracts from him a promise that next time he starts looking like a hippy, he will come to her instead.
When he gets back inside the Circus Peter doesn't comment on his absence - it has been four days since Tarr left him dripping nasal blood onto his egg sandwich - only on his haircut.
“Rather dramatic,” Peter remarks as Tarr slides into place next to one of the filing cabinets, his back to the wall. “It doesn't suit you, you know.”
Tarr runs his hand over the short bristles reflexively before luxuriously bestowing a raised middle finger upon his superior. “Any work?”
“Not unless you want to help Brigit with her filing,” Peter says with an unconvincing facsimile of a smile. Brigit, a faded redhead who has already succumbed once to Tarr's charms, had a propensity for peach-coloured slips under her woollen skirts and had once called Tarr a vile beast for suggesting with a wink and a smile that perhaps it being her Time of the Month shouldn't be such a great impediment to lovemaking after all.
Tarr eyeballs Peter's desk pointedly, the shifts and drifts of paper; just as pointedly, Peter shoves and shuffles them until every piece of information is safely sheltered by card-board folders of ochre and dusty pink.
“I'm not running you again yet,” Peter says, looking Tarr in the eye.
He may not have meant to, but that's when he reveals himself, Peter Guillam, with that look. Tarr spots it in the back of his eye, the same heaviness that dogged Emma's go-go booted footsteps in the Savoy, the same weight that he is half-sure drags at his own shoulders down. Someone he's lost, Peter. Someone he's lost.
“Why not?”
“Because there's nothing suitable, and your head isn't straight,” Peter says with admirable bluntness and an even gaze. It moves over the scabs on shaving cuts and the hollows Tarr knows are staking out their territory under his sleepless eyes. “Take some holiday. We'll be in touch.”
“I'll get bored,” Tarr says. He makes it sound very slightly like a threat, moving his weight forward on his feet until he looms over Peter. Standing, Peter is several inches taller than him, but he's the physique of a wading bird, even if he does punch surprisingly hard.
“Then read a bloody book!” Peter snaps, flushing briefly scarlet as his hair tangles in his eyebrows.
“Alright,” Tarr says, backing out of the room with his hands raised in front of him, placating him. “Alright.”
He pauses in the doorway, remembering that the last time he saw Peter's face he'd just put his fist in it and left it dribbling a swathe of bright red from nose to upper lip.
“Sorry about the--” Tarr raises his fist in a feeble mime of a punch, with a sheepish expression.
“Yes, well,” Peter sighs, “I suppose that leaves us even.” His smile - if it is a smile - is a poor hybrid of sheepish and wry, still weighed down with that invisible blanket of not-quite-concealed loss.
Tarr is bored.
Four women of varying hue and style have failed to steal the ring he bought. After Emma there was Mary, who had short dark hair and a stare that reached to some distant planet, her small tits marred by cigarette burns he refused to add to in spite of her entreaties; then there was Christine, whose flamboyant and gargantuan Afro proved ample distraction from her downturned mouth, who had an arse you could balance a pint on, and who cried in the hallway after fucking; the next failure-to-steal was Georgina, a mousy, plummy-accented beanpole with a hard face and a faint waft of junk sickness from her pores. He was surprised in her, but she'd made a point of telling him, for or five times, her father paid for everything. She'd told him, without apparent rancour, to check her pockets when she left if he didn't believe her.
“Most people don't.”
He didn't search her. Tarr has always had a good enough grasp of Kim's Game to know when something is missing. He'd have got nowhere as a strong boy if he didn't.
The last of the four was Nina, whose driver's license said her name was Gareth, and who was so appallingly shy that she more or less needed Tarr blindfolded before she would let him touch her. He almost offered her the ring himself, but she had left before he could make up his mind whether it would be interpreted as an insult or a kindness.
Tarr is bored.
He eavesdrops on Met officers - they are so careless, these civilian lawmen, just like the police in Istanbul, Jakarta, Prague ... he stands idly by and for all his flair and for all the gallstones of sadness that pepper his body like shot in an unlucky rabbit, he become invisible. They talk, quite openly, about things they shouldn't.
Tarr is bored, and because he is bored and there is no work and the walls of each of his three temporary homes is closing in on him like a coffin, because he can't face another woman and another closed-down pair of eyes drowning in whatever she uses to keep the world at bay... he trails the police, who are so plainly planning a raid that they might as well have taken out a full-page ad in the Sun.
The raid takes place on the Swiss Tavern, a short walk through Soho from his room, and along with a smattering of locals and a couple of confused-looking tourists from West Germany, Tarr watches this odd theatre unfold. Men of different shapes and sizes and fashions and ages are shoved out of the pub in the hands of the beat police, protesting and occasionally struggling. Some are silent and slumped, and everything about the parade says that this is far from the first time the pub has been raided.
His suspicion is confirmed when one of the men being lined up by the wall, a middling blond with an overbite and excellent shoes, raises his head to wearily ask one of the policemen, “What is it this time?”
He is shoved into the wall for his curiosity, which sets off a whole round of angry muttering and shouts from the pub's clientele, and Tarr glances up and down the road, suddenly more interested in the audience of the spectacle than the spectacle itself. He sees for a moment a man who looks a bit like Peter, if Peter had suddenly started wearing leather jackets instead of being a public-school heron in a flash fashionable suit, and then can't find him again; he's replaced by a shaven-headed man with a corduroy coat, a hard posture and soft eyes.
As the police jostle and harry and fail to actually arrest any of the customers of the Swiss Tavern, Tarr edges along the pavement opposite and closer to his acquired quarry. There's nothing in it, no reward for making contact, no information to be retrieved, he just wants to know if he's right, and the theatre opposite is nothing he hasn't seen before. Just bullies exercising their waning power.
Corduroy Coat is watching the raid with an almost unreadable expression, but his mouth betrays him, it won't settle into a grimly fascinated formation like the other spectators - the ones who aren't shouting 'Shame' or 'pigs' - and when Tarr very deliberately catches his eye, he jerks his head in an unmistakeable pantomime for 'let's go'. To Tarr's field-trained eye it is the equivalent of screaming to everyone in the vicinity 'WE ARE LEAVING TOGETHER', but if agents are watching they're watching the wrong man, and the plod are busy with their imposition of uniformed heterosexuality. There is no one to see this brazen gesture but him.
His name is Barry; Tarr gives his as Dave. He has an inkling that Barry is as much as nom de la rue as Dave is, though there is less fakery in “Barry”s casual anger at the police than there is in “Dave”s agreement; it's not, Tarr thinks, that he supports the mindless kicking of the city's queers. It's more that he doesn't bloody care. None of it matters.
Barry's quick, firm stride carries them in good time to a hotel room somewhere on the skirting board of Camden; they talk about football with the strained enthusiasm of two men who don't know or care about it.
The hotel is not respectable. It rents by the hour, and from the looks of the women they pass on the stairwell, so do some of the guests. A girl of about fourteen, fifteen is having a quiet fag on the stairs to their floor, her oddly clean and shiny hair falling over her face; it is not until they pass that Tarr realises it's a wig, and finds himself briefly remembering Nina.
The room resembles nothing so much as a holding cell with the bars missing, and the grey light that filters through the cobwebbed window is sluggish as a brutalised prisoner. Barry sniffs disapprovingly, and says, “No kissin'.”
Tarr nods his assent and is about to make some precautionary request regarding arses when Barry beats him to the punch, and after a too-long, spring-loaded gap in events pushes down gently on Tarr's shoulder with the palm of his hand.
Barry's cock is clean and pale and uncircumcised and unremarkable. His pubic hair confirms what his eyebrows suggested; he is, or would be if he hadn't nearly scalped himself, an icy Ayran blond.
Somewhere in the desolation of a back room with a stranger's hand on the top of his bobbing head and a stranger's cock filling his mouth, Tarr thinks, the things I've learnt on this fucking job, and almost laughs. Adapt and survive.
But there's no job, not right now, and once Tarr has his balance he uses his hand to help his mouth and the increased pressure on his short-shaven skull, the whispered non-word from above tells him he's done the right thing.
Barry's come is bitter as coffee grounds, but to Tarr's surprise he settles cross-legged at Tarr's feet as soon as he's on them, and undoes his fly.
The speed of his own reaction shames him momentarily. He is already hard, which Barry notes with what might be a smile, and Barry is good; it doesn't take long. Tarr suspects even in the immediate giddy aftermath that he could have been faster, that he is being toyed with a little, but he hasn't the oats for resentment.
Perhaps expecting coolness or a businesslike handshake and departure, Tarr is taken aback by an abrupt embrace that is a solid natural force, a tree trunk or a cliff face come alive and enfolding him. It is tempting to sag, to pretend gauche tiredness and take advantage of this unearned intimacy.
He goes 'home' instead.
Tarr is bored.
He begins to contemplate Haydon. The lure of money is no risk, but what if that fay fop just ... got bored? Do men defect through tedium? Do they sweep their allegiance from pillar to post simply to have a new set of puzzles, of enemies to occupy otherwise formless paranoia?
Walking Wandsworth Common with a toothpick rotating along his tongue, the winter closing over his head in a thick eiderdown of early sunset and biting winds, Tarr considers what the Soviets would want.
No harm in just thinking.
And God he's bored.
He ruminates on the problem, dodging buses in the rush hour like a man possessed by the spirit of some suicidal pigeon. He lets the buses come too close.
Would he do it? They shot Irina. They took her and they took her away.
Wild fantasies of recrimination ride roughshod over common sense; he wanders Hamstead Heath before dawn and eavesdrops on brief liaisons with a detachment he's never felt before, cataloguing the gulps and snorts and hushed exhalations like codes to be broken.
He settles on Peter because Peter is comparatively easier to crack than Smiley, than Control, who is a sheer cliff, and of more potential value than Alleline. Also, Tarr admits as he leans against the window of a newsagent opposite Peter's first stop on the way to an unidentified home, he would rather not have to learn anything about Alleline's rotten, twisted inner life, or Estherhaus's boring little world.
Peter's car is easy to keep track of. In this morass of idling engines and choking smoke, it is possible to follow on foot, which he doesn't appear to be expecting.
Sloppy, Tarr scolds, to himself. Sloppy, Peter.
He lives in the suburbs. It takes three days to track the entire route, and Tarr is quite spent with walking before he's traced Peter back to his unassuming bolt-hole in Finchley. But it keeps him busy.
Peter keeps a hair on his front and back doors, but leaves open an upstairs window; the route to it is concealed from the surrounding buildings by his neighbour's trellis.
Tarr tuts out loud.
He knocks a flake of paint off the window sill on his way in, a rose leaf stuck to the sole of his shoe, and mutters, “Now who's sloppy, Ricki?” as he puts the leaf in his coat pocket.
Peter is meticulously tidy, which is annoying on a practical front. The carpets are soft; Tarr removes his shoes and stuffs them into his jacket pockets with some difficulty.
The bedroom, into which he has broken, is devoid of personality: a double bed made with hospital corners (British public schools, Tarr acknowledges with a smile, taught a man to make his own bed damn well), a mirror, a dressing table that could be anyone's, and a wardrobe half-full of Peter's well-tailored, carefully-pressed clothes. Bugger all of use.
The flap of the letter slot is a gunshot in the empty house, and Tarr freezes in place until he is sure that only the letterbox and not the door is to blame for the bang.
He pads carefully down a beige-carpetted staircase, angling himself invisible to windows, and peers at the envelopes on the spotless welcome mat. There are bank statements and letters clearly from the man's mother, but a plain, unstuck envelope bearing no stamp or frank immediately draws Tarr's attention.
Rick Tarr cannot recall a time he did not read other people's mail; he can only just remember a life before constant vigilance and an ever-present knife on his person, if not a gun.
He bends back the hand-delivered note and sweeps it for some sign of a code. All there is for his eye are a few terse lines, no date or address, and only a single initial to attribute them to:
I am not going to wait for you.
At the very least you could have told me why.
M.
The ink is heavy and black, with the metallic sheen of a ballpoint; the final full stop pressed hard into the good quality paper. The envelope is addressed merely to 'Peter'.
M.
Tarr returns the letter to its sheath and the envelope to its place in the pile, and creeps into the living room with his shoes in his pockets like some sort of absurd antlers growing from his hips. Clearly a spurned lover - he didn't think Peter had it in him, quite the dark horse - but spurned over what?
Tarr surveys the living room, as barren as the bedroom: no photographs, almost painfully pedestrian art, no postcards, none of the unspent ordinance of home life.
M. for Mary?
With a snort Tarr thrusts his arm down the back of the sofa cushions, his fingers rooting blindly for the lost and forgotten, trace elements of a life. M. for Margaret, M. for Melissa, M. for Mandy, perhaps, although Peter hardly seems the sort to conduct an affair with the species of girl that calls herself Mandy. Matilda, maybe?
His groping fingertips brush paper in the neglected darkness of the sofa's innards, and with a triumphant 'ha' swallowed quickly back, Tarr scissors it into his palm and pulls his catch to the surface.
Merely an envelope, the kind he'd use as a bookmark and Peter probably wouldn't, and he's about to return it to the unfertile fishing grounds of the surburban sofa cushions when the first letter of the address catches his eye:
Mark Weston
M. for Mark, then.
“Well, well, well,” Tarr murmurs, pushing the envelope back into the sofa. “Well, well, Peter. Well.”
There is snow on the ground when he crosses the courtyard at the Circus. No one pays any attention to him, although he knows he cuts a bizarre figure in cropped hair and a new suit; the suit is an affectation for Peter's sake, and his feet itch for trainers.
“Give me some work,” he tells Peter, stepping into his office without knocking.
Peter sighs and doesn't look up. “We've been through this, Ricki. There's nothing suitable.”
“You misunderstand me,” Tarr says, closing the door and standing too close to the desk. “Give me a job, or lose yours.” His fingers splay on the edge of the desk.
“Blackmail threats now?” Peter says, still sorting through papers. “What will you have me suspended with, I wonder? I suppose I have been slow in turning over reports.”
“You know,” Tarr says, and the edge in his voice is unpleasant even to his own ears. “Bloke gets bored, he can get up to all sorts of mischief. You should shut your windows when you go out.”
“And you should be more careful about the paintwork on my windowsill,” Peter says, looking up at last. “I assume it was you?”
“Going to tell Control about Mark?” Tarr asks, walking his fingers along the desk. “Or am I?”
Peter is good. His voice is steady, and so is his gaze. His hands give him away, a fine tremor before they're laid on the papers. “It's not his business.”
“Everything is Control's business, that's why he's Control.”
“Well, not this.” Peter's face is almost still. If he's angry with Tarr for breaking into his home, he's doing a good job of keeping it out of his features. There is a knock on the office door, and Peter says, “Busy,” without breaking Tarr's gaze.
“It makes you a security risk,” Tarr says, leaning toward him. “You know what that means.”
“We are not having this discussion,” Peter says sharply, “and you are not going back into the field yet. Have a little patience.”
“I told you, I'm bored,” Tarr hisses.
“Then go and gawp at some more raids and shag some more rough,” Peter says in a low, polite voice which doesn't quite conceal the razorblade that he's slipping Tarr between the words. “And before you think of running to Control, remember: I know things about you, too.”
When Tarr arrives at Peter's house the following evening, the upstairs window is shut. He picks the lock on the back door, saunters into the kitchen as if it's his own house - an accolade nothing's had in decades - and finds a terse note sellotaped to a fridge that bears no magnets.
Piss off, Ricki
Tarr smiles to himself and settles down in the living room for a cigarette. It's six-thirty and completely dark outside, streetlights bouncing off miserly outcroppings of downtrodden snow. He watches the clock and examines the consumately dull prints: Turner, Constable, boredom and death; Peter does not possess a television and his bookshelf has been carefully engineered to make him look like a stockbroker with no imagination.
He will probably work late into the night: he has nothing to come back to.
Tarr helps himself to a lonely knob-end of nearly-stale battenberg from the tin. It seems more likely to be a vice of the last holder of the spare key than of Peter.
The sweet taste makes his gorge rise.
At nine, footsteps on the path jolt Tarr from a doze he didn't realise he was in, and he rubs his face, jerks his body alert before the door opens.
“Get out,” Peter says, shutting the door behind him. “I told you, there is no work and you're not helping your case by behaving this way.”
Tarr says nothing. He stretches, rubs his palm over the short bristles on his scalp, and watches Peter's choked down rage with detached interest. Having this hollow privacy punctured seems to upset him quite thoroughly, and Tarr, who has been living out of hotel rooms, dormitories, and other people's spare rooms for an incalculably long time, is intrigued by this solid domestication. The boys back at the Circus really are a different breed to the strong boys out in the field.
“What do I have to do, then?” Tarr says, eventually, eyeballing Peter very deliberately at crotch height.
“Stop behaving like a lunatic, for a start,” Peter growls. “And there has to be some work for you to do. You'll be even more bored manning a listening post downstairs.”
“M'not behaving like a lunatic,” mumbles Tarr, who spent an hour last night regarding his own reflection with bewilderment, sure he could pinpoint the man's name if given another minute.
“You broke into my house,” Peter says, his hands shaking hard enough to flutter the envelopes he is holding. “Twice.”
Tarr straightens his legs in front of him. “Why did you chuck him?”
Finally the angry red flush reaches Peter's face and turns him a revolting colour. “That's none of your business,” Peter says in a dangerous and uneven voice.
“Well, since I have no business of my own, I'm making it my business,” Tarr says, getting to his feet and standing too close to Peter, the threat implicit in his shoulders' set. “I am bored, Peter.”
“You're not bored,” Peter sighs, pushing him away with tips of his long, thin, fingers. “You're broken-hearted, and you're not working again until I'm sure you can act rationally.”
“Rationally like dropping your lover for expedience’s sake ?” Tarr needles, stabbing wildly in the dark. He is not heartbroken. Alright, he had never been in love before, but heart-broken people are sad. They cry, they mourn, they fondle photographs. They don’t fuck their way through the fringes of London and buy antique rings for no reason. They don’t feel nothing, this listless flatness that has occupied Tarr’s entire being since he popped Peter one in the face back in Betty’s.
“The service requires that we must put our country first,” Peter says distantly, “and not end up like Haydon.”
“He was bored too,” Tarr says, leaning forward into the defensive fence of Peter’s fingers.
“He was greedy,” Peter corrects.
“I’ll emulate him.”
“You don’t have the balls,” Peter snaps, “or the intelligence, or the subtlety, and you don’t want to.”
Tarr leans on Peter’s fingers again, almost relishing the anger building up behind his ridiculous horsey features. He isn’t sure what he wants from this counterproductive shit-stirring, but it beats walking like a vagrant round every borough in the city, waiting for the dog whistle of more work.
“Come to bed with me,” he says, close enough that he can feel his own breath rebound from Peter’s face.
Peter laughs at him, and steps back. “Are you mad?”
“You seem to think I am.”
“I work with you,” Peter says, looking out of the window as if someone is watching, as if someone is listening to this damning discussion, “and I am not giving you further fuel for some misguided blackmail attempt.”
He does not, Tarr notices, mention that Tarr is not his type. Rain, needle-sharp winter rain of the lacklustre variety that only ever seems to fall in England, spots the windowpane, and Peter turns back to Tarr with a lock of hair falling loose over his forehead.
“You’re going to have to come to bed with me,” Tarr says sincerely, “because I am not leaving your house otherwise.”
“I could quite easily shoot you in the leg and telephone for an ambulance,” Peter says with a certain coolness.
“I thought you might just leave me for dead.”
“It takes a long time to train a man to your standard,” Peter says, “which is why I am eager for you to get back to normal so that I can find you some work.”
“Come to bed with me,” Tarr repeats, trying to smile, “or we can fuck on the sofa. I don’t care.”
“For fuck’s sake, Ricki,” Peter groans, pushing past him to the kitchen. “Get out of my bloody house.”
Tarr sleeps on the sofa, his hands between his thighs.
Peter wakes him in the middle of the night. “Take your shoes off.”
“No blanket?” Tarr mutters with sleepy peevishess.
“Blankets in your home. If you’re going to invade my house you get nothing. Take your shoes off my sofa,” Peter says, already heading for the stairs.
The third time Tarr breaks into Peter’ house, Peter is already there. It’s less breaking in and more visiting without knocking.
The snow has been shaken off London’s streets as if it never was, but the bite in the air remains. Tarr ambles into Peter’s kitchen with cheeks red from walking in the cold, and Peter says, “Why me? Why can’t you break into Control’s house again? Your know where he lives.”
He sits at the kitchen table, with an untouched mug of tea disgorging steam into the cool air. An electric kettle behind him mirrors it, and Tarr pulls out the opposite chair with a careless brutality that would have raised a scrape, had not Peter chosen to floor the kitchen with linoleum tile. “Thanks, I’d love a cup,” he says into the prevailing silence.
This time Peter doesn’t bother to tell him to get out. He stares past Tarr’s head as at a ghost, his tea steaming sedately between his palms, and without much conviction, says, “You aren’t sleeping here.”
“Can you cook?” Tarr asks, taking in the spotless kitchen. The relative absence of any ingredient from his previous ransacking had suggested not. “Or was that his thing?”
“That’s none of your business,” Peter says tartly.
“Are you going to ask me why I don’t go and ask Control if he can cook?”
Peter pushes the cup of tea over the table to Tarr, who ignores it, his hands clasped like a churchman’s. “I suppose this is preferable to you drinking yourself to death,” Peter acknowledges, without withdrawing his gaze from the middle distance, “but really not by much.”
Twiddling the mug handle back and forth between his thumb and forefinger, Tarr takes stock of how little he has drunk in the last week. It might be easy to plug the gaps in the soul with booze, but it feels more like fuelling a fire. His mind is empty of anything but how to get himself reassigned, until he drinks.
“Sorry, old boy, I’m not going to jump off a bridge,” Tarr says with a sickly smile that touches neither his eyes or his heart. “Might drool on your sofa cushions again, though.”
“Driving me to drink won’t get you posted any more quickly either,” Peter snorts, and he extends one of his long, bony fingers at the mug Tarr is playing with. “Did you want that?”
“No, but you didn’t either,” says Tarr, dipping his thumb in what is assuredly painfully hot, cheap tea and sucking the milky residue off before it can drip. It doesn’t hurt - the warmth barely registers - and Tarr begins to think that, perhaps, he has no idea what he wants any more.
“How many rooms did you rent?” Peter asks, when he comes down in the morning to find Tarr diligently incinerating toast.
Tarr shrugs and thrusts the grill tray back under the grill. The room smells of burning, and the air in the kitchen has the foggy blue hue of dispersing smoke.
“You’re not short on other places to stay, Ricki,” Peter begins, leaning around him. He is already dressed, waistcoat buttoned and tie knotted. “That’s … more than enough toast.”
Tarr spares a glance at the three plates filled with blackened bread slices and shrugs again, sniffs. “It keeps burning.”
When he meets Peter’s gaze he is dully surprised to find the look his superior gives him is pitying rather than angry or even exasperated.
Tarr flashes a wild and plastic smile. “No chance of a quickie before you slip off to church, I suppose -”
“Leave the toast alone,” Peter says, ignoring the come-on, “and go back to sleep.” He frowns, creasing his bizarre face into even more weird formations. “Did you sleep?”
“No, I spent the night tossing and turning on your sofa. Mostly tossing,” Tarr does not struggle or resist as Peter inserts himself between Tarr and the grill, turning off the gas, tipping all of the haphazardly-stacked charcoal squares onto one plate.
“Go to sleep,” Peter says with the same pitying look.
It isn’t hard to track down Mark Weston. He is a civilian, a plain and simple civilian, and he makes no effort to obscure his tracks as Tarr does as a matter of course. The man works in a shop, a women’s clothing department, his approachable and ugly smile, and spotless suit as unremarkable as waiting room furniture. The lineoleum and prints, the Battenberg, the very location of Peter’s house all make perfect sense.
Tarr engages him in futile banter about trying to buy an evening dress as a surprise for his fiancé, and he is careful to name the fictitious woman Emma, not Irina.
Weston plays well at the married man, but the smile he gives Tarr in exchange for direct, unwavering eye-contact is a little too genuine. As they debate colour and measurements, Tarr knows with a bland certainty that if he shows up this evening, if he casually ‘bumps into’ Weston on the way home, he can fuck him. He can fuck him.
He leaves the ring ‘accidentally’ on the counter beside the till when he pays for the ugly chiffon frock. The dress will fit his landlady, he thinks, and it will keep her from fretting about his regular absences.
As expected, Tarr is not out of the building before Weston catches up to him, a little out of breath and holding the ring in his outstretched palm: “You forgot this.”
Tarr cups Weston’s hands in his as he takes the gold-and-sapphire ring with his opposite pinky, and he makes a point of smiling right into the man’s face as he thanks him.
They fuck in a basement storage room; Weston is ugly, ugly, and his mouth is hard. He kisses Tarr once, on the mouth, but only once, before sucking him off with a messy tenderness and a digit in Tarr’s arse that he doesn’t think to protest.
Weston is less businesslike than Barry, perhaps - after a few minutes Tarr finds he is no longer analysing the situation but instead faintly orbiting an empty mind with his hand pressed against his mouth as if he’s just received bad news. When he comes he is almost disappointed to be dragged back to reality, to a cold basement and a hot mouth leaving his cock in order to spit demurely into a handkerchief.
The handkerchief is a beautiful blue-and-gold pattern of paisley-like swirls, and Tarr thinks it may have been a present from Peter. There is after all no practical reason for Weston to have strip-cleaned Peter as aggressively from his life as Peter seems to have expunged Weston.
After a moment to catch his breath, Tarr kisses Weston - too abruptly, perhaps; Weston seems taken aback - and unhooks his fly for reciprocation.
He doesn’t attempt the finger trick. Some fastidious part of him is repelled by the idea, can’t quite shift the mental image of the man shitting in Peter’s bathroom with a copy of the bloody Mail held up and his nice, cheap black trousers pooled at his ankles -
Tarr composes himself. He can’t giggle and suck cock at the same time.
Weston’s pubic hair is coarse and auburn and so thick Tarr could lose a finger up to the second knuckle in it. His cock is almost red with the blood suffusing it; circumcised, oddly, and thick, out of proportion somewhat with the rest of him. There is an undercurrent, a taste of nylon.
He wants to ask Peter, now: what did you see in him? Is he kind? Clever? Funny? Did he make you feel like a better man, the way that Irina - did he just not ask questions, and fuck you the way you wanted?
Weston grips Tarr’s shoulders too tightly when he comes. Tarr makes a point of swallowing. He makes a point of trailing a languorous tongue the full length of Weston’s cock; he makes a point of looking the man in the eye and licking his lips slowly. It feels like a fuck you, but he’s no idea to whom.
The same evening he picks up a woman called Sheena, who has either a cold or some more esoteric affliction as she sniffs almost continually through their brief conversations, her nose red and her eyes bloodshot.
She wants to talk about music; Tarr mentions the Stones and she look at him as if he’s a dirty old man at a bus stop. She wants to talk politics, but beyond a facile agreement that all governments are inherently corrupt he has nothing to add to her ill-informed and passionate tirade. He’s sure they end up fucking to fill the gap in conversation.
Sheena lives in a squat in Haggerston. There are already two people of indeterminate sex screwing in the boarded-up living room as they go past the door, maybe more than two.
She asks him to hit her and he hesitates for so long that she shouts ‘fuck’s sake’ loudly enough to annoy the neighbours, and grabs his had, shoving it toward her crotch. She has a bruise like the map of the Indonesian islands across her outer thigh, and her accent wanders closer to Glasgow the wetter she gets.
She is loud, and Tarr tries to match up with her, but she pinches him and tells him to shut it.
He’s offered a spot on the floor of the squat, and told not to snore, but as Tarr can think of few places he’d rather sleep less, he takes his leave. It’s too late for Soho, too late to be respectable at the Savoy, and Wandsworth is too far.
He spends the night treading the perimeter of Regents Park, clockwise, his hands in the pockets of his jacket, listing Russian verbs to keep his mind quiet.
At a little after daw he knocks on Peter’s door.
Peter jerks the door open and shapes the ‘G’ of ‘go away’ with his lips - at least, Tarr is certain it’s not going to b ‘good to see you, Ricki’ - and closes his mouth again. “In,” he says, shoving Tarr inside while peering up and down the street. He is wearing a dressing gown that is as out-of-keeping with the character of the houses as his suits are. “Before someone sees you.”
In the hallway Peter takes him in in silence for a moment.
“Did you sleep?”
“I find it overrated,” Tarr says. He is slurring his words.
“I find it a medical necessity.”
“In which case, can I borrow your sofa?”
Peter squints at him. “Take the bed.” After a pause in which he is no doubt expecting Tarr to say something crude, he adds, “Have a bath first. You look like hell, Ricki.”
“Charming,” Tarr says, swaying. “Not coming with me?”
“I would rather fuck a corpse.” Peter’s gaze is even and unwavering. “Go to sleep.”
“Ah, so that’s what you’re into,” Tarr says, sagely. He tries for a smile but too many teeth escape from behind his lips. He wonders again if someone could possibly have slipped poison into his food, but he can’t quite put his finger on the last meal that he had.
Peter says, “The case for your return to work is becoming weaker, you know.”
“Don’t be an arse,” Tarr snaps. The floor is further away than he recalls.
Peter shakes his head and points to the stairs. “Look in the mirror while you’re about it, and tell me if you’d let yourself back out in the field. You couldn’t hail a cab looking the way you do now.”
Tarr strip-washes in the bathroom’s overstocked handbasin. There is a toothbrush cup with one toothbrush in it, and three bottles of the same aftershave stacked up behind each other on the windowsill.
He trims his hair with nail scissors, shaves with Peter’s straight-razor - an unexpected player in the ranks of his grooming apparatus - and leaves Peter’s aftershave unused. It smells vile.
Tarr goes through Peter’s underwear drawer on a whim, and is not entirely shocked to find, behind some pressed handkerchiefs, one which is screwed up in a ball as if forgotten, royal blue and gold in a pattern reminiscent of if not identical to paisley.
It is empty, and it smells just enough of the man he fellated yesterday afternoon for him to understand why it is still here.
He takes the ring from his pocket, from his jacket lying discarded on the bed, and wraps it in the handkerchief, shoves the cloth bundle back into the drawer. It is a cryptic message at best, but anything more definite would be out of his style.
The real trouble begins when Tarr forgets to sleep or dress himself. He tells himself he had every intention of scraping a few hours of rest, and that he had no desire to antagonise, but that alters nothing.
He half-walks and half-staggers into the living room, as naked as the day he was born, and damp, and cold; the soft carpet takes dents even from his bare feet.
“Put some bloody clothes on,” Peter shouts, trying to herd him back toward the stairs as if he is an errant goose. “For God’s sake, I can’t be seen with a naked bloody man stalking around the house like a ghost -”
Tarr remains where he stands, extends his arms out as if making an invitation. “Do I look enough like a corpse now?”
“What the fuck is the matter with you?” Peter barks. Tarr grins emptily.
“I suppose you could shoot me in the head,” he says surprised by the mania in his own delivery, “you must keep something about the house, maybe in your coat - you’re a good Circus man, you know anyone can just sneak up on you - you have to defend yourself-”
He recognises pleading in his voice, and can’t help laughing at Peter’s furious, aghast, equine face.
“Haha. You could say you aimed for a shoulder shot but I knocked you.” He taps his own chest, fails to feel the pressure of his own finger, and taps harder. “Just about here, here should do it. It’s the polite thing to do for your friends. When they stop being useful. Perhaps I was going to defect after all. Haha, ha. I was so bored that I sold everyone to Karla. Right?”
Something falls from his chin and splashes on his collarbones, and Peter lunges for him trying to get a hand hold on slippery naked flesh and a freshly-trimmed head.
Somehow Tom finds himself with an arm twisted up behind his back, tripping up the stairs with Peter breathing furious daggers onto his back with every step.
He’s shoved, almost thrown into the bedroom, and when he looks up Peter is shaking with rage, his hair dishevelled and shirt askew. He points a juddering finger at Tarr.
“Fucking sleep,” Peter snaps, “Sleep. Or I will tie you to a chair and have you dragged to a holding cell.”
The door slams, and the handle twists: scrape, bump. A chair under the handle, as if Tarr couldn’t simply climb back out of the window he came in by in the first place.
His face is wet. Tarr feels for injuries but his hands come away clean, clean and wet. He almost pokes himself in the eye before he realises he’s been crying, and that he has no idea when he began.
Tarr dreams of a boat.
It might be Istanbul, it might be Cairo, but in his dream he has the peculiar certainty that he is sailing down the Bristol Channel, in spite of the minarets and the light.
Irina is standing at the bows of the boat with her back to him. Her hair doesn’t move in the wind, and when he finally staggers to her - his usual sea-legs mysteriously deserting him - he can see it is a wig, or perhaps a hat, fashioned from one solid piece.
He asks her if she will leave her husband, come to the West; he tells her that he has arranged everything. He tries to give her the ring, but his jacket pocket is empty - no cigarettes, no knife, no money - and all he can find in his jeans are a handkerchief and a rose leaf.
He offers the handkerchief to her.
“It’s wet,” Irina says, not touching it.
“It’s been raining,” says Tarr. The skies are the empty vigorous blue of drought.
“I will have to ask my husband,” Irina says, and her face is hidden by the peculiarly solid wig.
“Your husband is dead,” says Tarr, leaning on the rail. Irina is still, somehow, six feet away, and his feet hurt. The deck is rough. If he sidesteps to her he will bleed. He has no idea where his shoes are.
“You are dead,” Irina says regretfully.
When Tarr wakes the dark outside is total and he is lying at the foot of a perfectly-made bed, naked. His clothes are strewn about the bed, and he has no idea where he is. It is too plain for the Savoy, and neither Wandsworth nor Soho have a double bed in them. For a short moment he panics, certain that he has been betrayed, but the presence of his knife, still safely tucked in his jacket, reassures him.
The effects of this reassurance are lessened somewhat when he tries to open the only door and finds that someone has pushed a chair under the handle.
Without hesitation or wasting his breath on a shout of ‘let me out’, Tarr throws himself shoulder-first at the door.
Almost instantly there are footsteps on the stairs, and Peter Guillam says, “Stop that,” testily from the other side of the bedroom door.
“Would you mind telling me why I’m locked in your bedroom, Guillam?” Tarr asks, pulling on his jeans. He puts his face to the door jam.
“Can I assume you don’t remember coming at me mother-naked and trying - poorly - to talk me into shooting you?” Peter asks in weary tones.
Tarr says, “A fair assumption.”
“Are you sane enough to come out of there yet?” Peter asks. Tarr pictures him leaning on the door, imparting a confidence to the panels.
“I’m not wholly sure,” he admits. “Maybe you should come in, instead.”
There is an excessive silence. Tarr wriggles into a shirt he could have sworn was a tighter fit when he bought it.
“I don’t think I will,” Peter says at last, apparently deliberating over the words. “There is a certain possibility that I will punch you in the face.”
“I’m quite attached to the rest of my teeth,” Tarr agrees. “I’d like to remain attached to them.”
“Don’t be such a baby,” Peter says, and if he didn’t so tired Tarr might swear the man is almost amused. “I didn’t knock any out last time.”
“Bloody felt like it.”
There is another long silence, and Tarr slides down the door, his back to the wood, until he is sitting with his forearms draped over his raised knees.
“Can I have something to eat?” he asks, when the silence has stretched on for so long that he suspects Peter of walking away.
“No.”
Tarr’s stomach gurgles piteously. “Can you hear that?”
Peter does not reply. Something flies past the window, and Tarr folds his hands around each other slowly, unfolds them, and folds them again.
“Peter?”
“Yes.” Peter sounds, even with the door in the way, as if he is forcing the word out through clenched teeth.
“I have this nasty idea that I may have gone mad.” Tarr cradles his left hand in his right, then his right hand in his left. They feel alien, heavy. Someone else’s hands.
“Seems that way.”
Tarr lays his head against the door and clears his throat. “Peter.”
“Yes.”
“How long do I have to stay in here?”
A car passes in the street outside - an old car, with a loud engine and inconsistent fuel feed, from the sound of it. He can also hear the breath Peter draws, even through the wooden door.
“Until I stop wanting to punch you in the head so very badly.”
“A long wait, then.” Tarr closes his eyes.
“Shut up, Ricki.”
The silence that follows is so profound that Tarr feels himself begin to doze off again.
“Did you have no one else to inflict yourself upon?” Peter sighs. “For God’s sake.”
“You mean in the Circus?” Tarr does not open his eyes. There is nothing left in Peter’s bedroom to look at.
“I mean in the world.”
“This isn’t exactly a job for making friends, Peter.” At least, not friends that lasted, lived, and didn’t abruptly turn their backs on you.
“In the Circus?”
Tarr shrugs to an audience of none. “I owed you for smacking me in the mouth.”
“Right,” Peter says, and there is a thump and a scrape, and the door handle rises half an inch. “Are you leaning on the door?”
“Are you going to punch me in the head? Can we get this over with?” Tarr heaves himself up onto his hands and knees and backs away from the door, into the darkened bedroom. The carpet tugs his jeans up his shins.
The door opens slowly, flooding the first few feet of the room with light from the landing, and Peter leans on the door frame in the narrow slice of light, blocking most of it again. He is wearing his waistcoat, but it is undone; his tie is missing, and he looks unfamiliar in the low light.
“Get up off the floor,” Peter sighs, pressing his forehead against the door frame. “Please.”
Tarr backs up against the foot of the bed, and gets to his feet. They're cold. He watches Peter, silhouetted against the landing light, take off his waistcoat and hang it on a coat hanger. When Peter starts to unbutton his shirt, a suspicion strikes him.
“What are you doing?”
He expects to be told that Peter is getting ready to go to bed, that it is Peter's damn room, and that Tarr is welcome to get out. Instead, Peter removes his cuff links and puts them into a small jewellery box on the dressing table, and looks Tarr in the eye over his shoulder.
“Calling your bluff.”
Tarr watches him remove his shirt the same way he might watch a man he suspects of being armed. “And if I'm not bluffing?”
Peter hangs up his shirt; he wears, now, a vest tucked into his trousers. He says, “Then I would appear to be fucking a lunatic.”
“I'm not a lunatic,” Tarr says, still watching Peter like a criminal eyeballing a distant policeman.
Peter pulls off his vest. His chest is strangely hairless - or perhaps just seems that way in the dim light - his nipples like two penny pieces, his head too big for his shoulders and his hands too large for his arms. Curiously, Tarr does not think he needs to now track down Weston and ask him what it was that he saw in Peter.
“So you're bluffing, then,” Peter says, undoing his trousers.
Tarr watches him remove the trousers, revealing stork-like legs and socks pulled up to mid-shin. He is almost expecting sock garters. He fiddles with the loose cuffs of his own shirt, barrel cuffs, linkless cuffs with their plastic buttons, but does not drag his wary gaze from Peter's slow disrobing.
He isn't sure, now, if he was bluffing or not.
Peter folds the trousers in half and hangs them. He stands apparently unselfconscious in underpants and pulled-up socks, a strangely-shaped man either unaware of or unfazed by his own strangeness.
“You'd really go through with it just to call my bluff?” Tarr asks, unbuttoning his shirt rather more self-consciously. He is nothing to be ashamed of, but the calculating look Peter gives him makes him wither as under an interrogation light.
“Perhaps I'm curious as to what good you think it would do,” Peter says, bending to remove one sock, and then the other. “Perhaps I haven't had any in a while.”
“With me, though,” Tarr blurts. His shirt is undone. His navel is already growing cold.
“Getting cold feet?” Peter asks, his hand on the waistband of his underpants. “Bluff sufficiently called?”
“No,” Tarr says, shrugging the shirt back off his shoulders. He drops it onto the floor.
“Then take your bloody clothes off,” Peter says, sliding his underpants down his legs and with an unexpected kick sending them sailing into the darkness down the side of the bed.
Tarr hesitates, and Peter extends an exasperated arm and, with the unexpected military precision of a drill sergeant, debags him.
He stands largely naked, his jeans around his ankles, and raises his eyebrows at Peter. “I was going to do that myself.”
“And now you don't have to. Please get onto the bed. This is becoming tiresome.”
Somewhere in the distance of the city night, a siren begins to wail, carried on the cold air like raindrops. Tarr steps out of his jeans, and is about to ... something ... when Peter makes an exasperated noise and shoves him in the sternum with the tips of his fingers. It's certainly not hard enough to throw Tarr off-balance, not even hungry and tired and (possibly) off his head, but he falls backward as if he's been shot.
He hits the bed as if falling into water and almost loses his grip on consciousness.
Peter regards him as if he is a stain on the mattress, but Tarr isn't insulted by it. His mind feels unusually calm, as quiet and uneventful as a graveyard.
He still kisses Tarr. Tarr is initially underwhelmed; this is not the kind of kiss that would move him to grab a girl by the ponytail and kiss her hard back, but he lies back and lets his muscles turn to jelly, and it gets better.
Peter is almost as still as he, his hand on Tarr's chest lying like a stone, his lips hardly moving, but somehow it is better, better than Emma, better than Sheena nearly biting his tongue, better than the nameless cloud of women (and one or two men) whose mouths he has invaded and occupied in the last fortnight. Tarr feels for the first time the texture of the sheets beneath his back, and Peter's long, bony fingers slip at glacial pace over his abdomen, his navel, his belly.
His hand on Tarr’s cock is soft and steady, a slow, rhythmic embrace on his skin. In the cold of the room Peter’s palm feels like a welcome furnace.
Tarr says, “Mn,” into Peter’s mouth without meaning to, and Peter’s fingertips brush the inside of his thigh.
He is loath to break the corpselike stillness he has sunk into, but there are unkind words for men who don’t pull their weight, whether in the field or in bed. Tarr raises his hand, groping along Peter’s body in the dark, his eyes squeezed shut and his mouth occupied, but Peter releases his cock and seizes his wrist.
“Stay still,” Peter says, pinning Tarr’s wrist to his chest, his mouth barely separated from the kiss. He uses a more compelling tone of command than he ever has in all the time he has been running Tarr through assignments.
“Do you not -?” Tarr begins, opening an eye.
“And shut up,” Peter says, leaving Tarr’s arm lying limp as a dead thing across his own chest. He returns neither to the kiss nor to his ministrations to Tarr’s cock, and though Tarr is disappointed he obeys the edict to shut up and lie still, his heart beating faster than expected.
He squints at Peter, whose face is closer to his than he can remember it ever having been, and watches him suck with deliberate care on one of his own forefingers. Tarr has an inkling of what is to come, and although he feels for the first time in a long time a faint tickle of discomfort, of trepidation in his stomach, he lies still, his bluff called.
His formless fears are unfounded; a month, two months ago he might have been ashamed of the sounds that are driven out of him when Peter fucks him. He might have been deeply disturbed once by his own reaction, by the way he draws his knees up Peter’s sides unbidden, by the involuntary raising and spreading of his arse, by the way he clutches and clings and tries to find Peter’s mouth without opening his eyes.
Even in this delirium of unexpected sexual ecstasy, he is horrified at himself; when Peter slaps him in the face and hisses, “Shut up, for God’s sake,” he traps in his throat a noise which, if released, would sound as if his balls had learned to speak.
When he comes he feels he is falling through the bed, through the house, into the bowels of the earth, dead and empty, as insubstantial as a ghost, but twenty minutes later he is pulling on his jeans and buttoning up his shirt.
“If you knock any more paint off my window sill,” says Peter, face-down in the pillows, “I will knock out the remainder of your teeth.”
Tarr walks purposefully (with slightly bandy legs) to the bedroom door, and Peter rolls over, pushing his hair off his forehead. “Get to my office before ten tomorrow,” he says, already slurred with sleep.
“For an official bollocking?” Tarr asks, leaning on the door frame.
“To discuss what you will be doing in Kiev,” Peter says. “Shut the door behind you.”
-----END-----
And this is what Ricki Tarr does in Kiev.
Notes
1. "Debagging" is the pulling down of trousers, it's military parlance which I suspect would easily leak into the Circus via a) its previous association with military intelligence and b) being populated by quite a lot of ex-public schoolboys.
2. I haven't read the original John LeCarre novel, everything in here in terms of characterisation comes from the 2011 film and half-remembered snippets of the radio play.
3. Blah blah blah unhealthy and irresponsiblecakes: this fic is not intended to portray rational behaviour, a healthy working relationship, or a responsible attitude toward feelings because MEN. THE 70S. HIGH-PRESSURE WORK. It annoys me hugely that I have to put this disclaimer in, but the Greek Chorus of the internet Utopian Fiction Police Squad won't shut up otherwise.