Page 26 of The Words Beneath the Noise

CONFESSIONS

ART

The village had a theatre.

I use the term loosely. It was really just the back room of The Crown and Anchor, a pub that had seen better days sometime around the reign of Queen Victoria. But on certain nights, when the blackout curtains were drawn tight and the right people gathered in the right configuration, that back room transformed into something else entirely.

Something dangerous. Something necessary. Something that felt, for a few stolen hours, like home.

I had heard about it from Julian, back before the war, when we had still been young enough to believe that being careful was the same as being safe. “There are places,” he had said, voice pitched low even though we were alone in his rooms at Cambridge, “if you know where to look. If you know the words.”

The words. Always the words.

I had learned them slowly, the way you learn any language. A phrase here, a gesture there, the particular way someone's eyes would meet yours across a crowded room. Polari was not taught in classrooms or written in dictionaries. It lived in thespaces between, passed from mouth to ear in whispers, a secret inheritance for those of us who needed secrets to survive.

Tonight, I needed to remember what survival felt like when it was not just about ciphers and convoys and the endless weight of other people's deaths.

I slipped out after my shift ended, when the estate had settled into its evening rhythms and no one would notice one more figure moving through the dark. The walk to the village took twenty minutes at a brisk pace, long enough for my thoughts to spiral into familiar patterns of anxiety and anticipation.

I knew Tom was following me.

Not obviously. He was too well-trained for that. But I had spent years learning to read the spaces around me, to notice the footstep that fell half a beat behind my own, the shadow that moved when I moved and stopped when I stopped. He was good, I would give him that. Anyone else would have missed him entirely.

But I was not anyone else. And some part of me, some reckless and desperate part, was glad he was there.

Let him see. Let him understand what I was, what I had always been. Maybe then he would stop looking at me with those winter eyes, stop making me want things I could not have. Maybe the truth would be enough to build a wall between us that I could not seem to construct on my own.

Or maybe I just wanted him to know. Wanted someone to know, after all these years of hiding.

The Crown and Anchor sat at the end of the high street, its windows dark, its door unmarked. You had to know to turn left past the bar, to knock twice on the door with the peeling paint, to say “Vera sent me” to the woman who answered even though there was no Vera and never had been.

The woman tonight was Margaret, though that was not her real name either. She was perhaps fifty, with steel-grey hairpinned severely back and eyes that had seen everything and forgiven most of it.

“Arthur, love.” She smiled, the expression transforming her stern face into something warm and conspiratorial. “Been an age. Thought you had forgotten us.”

“Never.” I pressed her hand, feeling the roughness of her skin, the strength in her grip. “Work has been...”

“I know. I know.” She patted my cheek like a fond aunt. “In you go. Madam Fortuna is just about to start, and there is a fantabulosa crowd tonight. All the bona omis and palones you could wish for.”

The back room was smaller than I remembered, or perhaps just more crowded. Bodies pressed close in the dim light, a haze of cigarette smoke softening the edges of everything. Someone had strung paper lanterns from the ceiling, casting pools of coloured light that made the space feel otherworldly, separate from the grey reality outside.

I found a spot near the back wall, close enough to see the makeshift stage but far enough to slip out if I needed to. Old habits. The kind that kept men like me alive.

The crowd was mixed in ways that would have scandalised polite society. Women in trousers, men in carefully applied rouge, couples whose configurations defied easy categorisation. Here, the rules that governed the daylight world held no power. Here, we could simply be.

A man beside me caught my eye and grinned, his lips painted a deep crimson that caught the lantern light. He was young, perhaps twenty-five, with dark curls and the kind of sharp cheekbones that made him look almost elfin.

“Vada the dolly dish who just trolled in,” he said to his companion, a broader man with kind eyes and a waistcoat that strained at its buttons. “Bona eek on that one.”

“Nanti that,” the companion replied, laughing. “He looks like trade, and you know trade is always barney.”

“A girl can dream, cant she?”

I felt myself smile despite everything. The familiar rhythm of Polari washing over me like warm water, the sense of being among my own people even if I did not know their names.

The first man noticed me listening and winked. “You speak the cant, love?”

“A bit.”