And Your Girl Can Sing

Chapter 74: I Must Go, Duty Calls Me

"No more drama."

    "Not more than I'd like, no," I laughed, biting into my usual sandwich. George frowned, looking uncertain, and then pushed his egg sandwich to the side. "Not sure I believe ye, love."

    "I—it's a long story," I struggled. How, how could I manage to explain what John and I had gone through? I bit my lip in thought.

    "But you're really really back to—okay. Okay," he repeated incredulously.

    "How can I explain it, George?" I said softly. Germany, under Koschmider at the Kaiserkeller where George gave me his advice about John: He is not sweet. He is dangerous. I shook my head. Bloody hell, what morbid advice! I had seen what caused John to be dangerous. I had begun to understand, and that meant telling him more about me. Relationships are based on trust. I began by tiptoeing slowly into the past, spurred on by the calming rays of light that made Strawberry Field calm and incapable of eliciting any sort of angry response. I was so determined to make it work because I loved him.

    "Okay," George said, turning back to his milkshake which he took a long sip of. "I love the two of ye, ye know that?"

    I chuffed him lightly on the shoulder and John came back from the washroom. "Budge over, you two."

    "You smell nice," I told him as he gave me a greeting kiss on the neck. I heard a complaint from George—something about how he was eating and could it wait—but ignored him. "Is it new?"

    "You don't recognize it?" he asked, his hand resting comfortably on my hip. "It's that aftershave the bloke at George Henry Lee tried to sell me. He was amusing, like."

    "He was," I recalled.

    "What happened?" Paul asked in interest, walking over with Pete from Mona's room; she had wanted to have a word with them after our lunchtime performance. "Budge over, George, I'm starving."

    "Why does everyone want me to move, ask the pair of them to," he nodded at us and gestured to his sandwich. "Leave me and my lovely bird alone."

    "Suppose the egg in that sandwich was some sort of bird," John said dryly. "Probably not the kind you'd want to mess about with though."

    "Leave the boy alone," I chided. "Come here." We dragged over some chairs and moved to the other side of the table. "Well John and I decided to go into George Henry Lee's, why I don't know—they usually sell fabrics and the like. And there's this bloke standing by the stairs with these bottles of aftershave stuff—"

    "Paul." We suddenly heard Mona calling him, standing by the door. "It's for you. Your da."

    I could see the outline of Paul's tongue, pushing at the side of his mouth and puffing his cheek giving it a little lump, looking unintentionally angelic as he briefly processed Mona's statement. "Okay. Thanks, Mona." He got up and exited the room to see what he wanted.

    "And then?" Pete prompted, walking over with his sandwich.

    "Well, he sort of called us over, he had a crowd around him. Strange looking man, very short and was wearing a suit, nothing like I'd ever seen before. And get this—he was German. German! We could tell because of his accent, remember we were in Hamburg and well of course we know Germans and accents and whatnot. He started talking about how great the smell of the aftershave was and the like," I recalled. "Anyways, John wanted to ask him what it smelled like so he held it out to him, but John said to put it on himself."

    John was shaking his head, smiling.

    "The bloke starts spraying the stuff on his wrist and then John leans forward, takes his hand, and gives a long sniff up his arm, and says—"