These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

Reg shrugs to the Yank under the Wimpy Bar overhang. “She’s upset with me,” he says, “we’ll sort it out tomorrow.”

“I’m the one she’s angry at,” Bob says.

Reg is surprised. “Why would she be angry at you?”

It’s becoming cold in the rain. Reg pulls his coat around him closer, but the other, barely noticing, says, “Evil has become a quaint word, hasn’t it?”

“Uh,” says Reg, “well. ‘Evil’? Don’t suppose I’ve heard it since Church, whenever the last time that was.”

Watching Jasmine disappear in the distance, Bob says, “How long have you been together?”

“Not that long,” says Reg. Now he doesn’t want to tell the other man they’re not really a couple. “Met her through the record company. She’s there to keep an eye on us in the studio, and soon I suppose I was keeping an eye on her.”

“What were you doing before you made records?”

“Laying bricks back home. Started the band with another bricklayer. Still me day job, construction.”

“Do you write your songs?”

“Sometimes. One we’re doing tomorrow is by a cat from your hometown, New York—”

“I don’t have a hometown. . ”

“—but sometimes I change a lyric or two. . ”

“. . anymore.”

“. . if I think we can get away with it. Make it a bit our own, you know?”

“No one gets angry at music.”

“Are you having me on? People get angry at music all the bleeding time.”

“No one will kill you for it, though.”

“Not yet.” In the shadow of the Wimpy Bar, the Brit sees the same blue glint of the Yank’s eyes that Jasmine saw. Bob says, “You, uh, don’t have to go the rest of the way.”

Doesn’t occur to him, thinks Reg, to spot me a few quid for a cab. “So what is it then,” he says, nodding at the large house through the park trees, “if not a hotel?”

“Ambassador’s residence.”

“You’re staying with the ambassador?”

“I lived there as a boy. Queer to be back.”

“You lived in the ambassador’s house as a boy?”

“The scene of. . ” says Bob, and stops. “Whatever can be redeemed, I suppose,” he finally finishes. “But then my religion would make me believe that even if I didn’t want to. My father, uh, his judgment in world affairs was something less than his judgment in showgirls.”