By Ben Sixsmith

One of few good things about living under the threat of death is that it adds excitement to every time you fuck. Lips press tighter when they fear they might not meet again. Skin feels warmer when it seems that it might soon be cold.

That night we screwed all the way from the door to the bed. Then we lay—a mess of limbs—and shared a cigarette.

“Are you going to stay?” she asked.

“I can.”

“I’d like you to.”

As she ground the butt onto a plate, I realised that I felt more post-coital unrest than satisfaction. I had the unpleasant sense that I was filling another man’s place. I could feel the imprint of his body underneath my own, and I could feel his presence in the air of the room.

“You’re married?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I wondered, morbidly, if a gigantic, blood-crazed husband would leap out of the cupboard and take an axe to my crotch.

“Well,” she said, carefully, “I think so.”

“You think?”

“He is a soldier. I haven’t heard from him in weeks.”

I took out another cigarette—my last—and lit it before taking three long, measured drags and passing it to her. Her eyes were neither red nor wet but seemed peculiarly colourless. Her cheeks were hollow even before she inhaled.

“What if he comes back?”

I had never been with a married woman.

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” I thought, “What if you get pregnant?”

“I won’t get pregnant,” she said, “I can promise you that.”

I stopped asking questions.

In the bar, her figure-clinging dress and tightly-pinned red hair had been suggestive of a vulnerable and innocent young women. In the bed, with pinched and pale limbs and tangled ginger curls, she seemed more strong. It felt as if it should have been the other way around.

I coughed and noticed a smear of blood across my palm. I wanted to wipe it off without her noticing, but this was hard as I was naked and resting on white bedsheets. I raised my hand to my head and dragged it through my hair.

“I don’t feel bad,” she said, “About my husband, I mean. He slept with prostitutes when he was in France. Sometimes all we have is the present.”

She rolled out of bed and walked out of the room. I wondered at the humanness of her round ass, sloping waist and floppy hair. She returned with two glasses and a bottle of schnapps.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “It isn’t his. It’s mine.”

She poured two glasses and we drank in silence. It was good schnapps. I wondered, in a nasty little thought, if she had any food.

“You’ve done this before,” she said, in what might have been a question.

“Yes.”

“I haven’t.”

She rolled over, resting her head on my chest.

“I went to the bar because I couldn’t face going home. I sat there, drinking coffee, listening to the radio and looking at the faces of the men and women in the room. Then I realised that the coffee wasn’t real. It was hot and it was black but it wasn’t real. It was all acorns or ink.”

She pulled on my chest hairs hard enough that I grimaced.

“You had a real face, and a real voice. God, I wanted something real, even for a moment. All that I had otherwise was boredom, hunger and fear.”

I wondered if it would be a good time to have sex again but when you have to ask yourself it very rarely is.

She looked up with a curious expression.

“Why are you not in the army?”

“I was,” I said, “Africa.”

Protecting the vital sand of western Egypt.

“Oh, yes? And they don’t need you anymore?”

“I’m ill.”

“Ill?”

“Ill.”

She looked up, startled.

“Is there nothing they can do?”

“They can’t do anything.” I shrugged.

The sirens began to wail. There was the sound of a great emptying-out of buildings as the planes approached Berlin. Already, one sensed the smell of petrol fumes, and flesh, and fear. Still, we lay, as idle as if on a quiet Sunday morning. We lay, as if a married couple in a sleepy town.

“Can we not go to the shelter?” she asked, stroking my chest. “We can stay here. We can stay here and be a real man and woman.”

I looked at her, in all of her strained enthusiasm, fragile hope and desperate vitality, and never before or since have I so wanted to live.