[ficlet]: immune

immune

It did turn out to be a kind of inoculation, all that business with Dakin. After, in the three years of teaching before he got the first interview with ITV, he’d been faced with what seemed like an endless of succession of pretty boys and flirtatious boys and blazingly intelligent boys, all of them looking up at him and smiling, knowingly, hopefully, sir, sir, sir. He’d never felt even the flicker of a desire to touch one. And now he was on BBC2, no less, 8pm Tuesdays and Sundays. He watched himself take a sip of water, smile confidingly into camera.

“So do we, any of us, truly make history?” The portrait gallery began to roll. Elizabeth I, Churchill, Hitler, Gandhi, Thatcher. “Or are we all, even the greatest of us, at the mercy of larger events? Do we make history or merely endure it?” Rueful, narrower smile, tilt of the head. “Are you the master of your fate, the captain of your soul? Until next week,” he picked up the remote, switched himself off. The flat was blessedly quiet and he wondered, vaguely, whether whoever had written that last bit had even heard of Emerson. Festoon your answers with gobbets, Hector said in his head, and he didn’t flinch from that sarcastic voice. He’d grown to be good at that, not flinching.

*
 
“Your book’s been described by some academics as facile and sensationalist,” said one of those rolling Radio 4 voices, 7.30 am and a splitting head and he had to get into work, fuck, “almost,” apologetic laugh, and where did they find these fucking people at this hour on a Thursday morning, “a kind of journalism,”

“It is journalism,” Irwin said in that utterly familiar and your point is? voice, and Dakin’s eyes startled open, disbelieving. He blinked at his sleek black radio alarm, that had suddenly started talking in Irwin’s crisp classroom voice, circa 1983. Maybe he was still drunk. “I’ve never pretended it was anything else. The aim of the book is to entertain people, and to inform them, and that’s all.”

“Not to educate them?” said the Radio 4 voice. Irwin laughed, and that did sound different - deprecating, still, but more dry than nervous. Older. “That’s not my job.”

*

He  wasn’t wearing glasses in the glossy picture on the back of the hardback and his hair was thinning a bit, but otherwise he looked mostly the same. Still rake-thin and sharp-looking. A bit distant, though, even leaning casually against a desk with a smile and crossed arms, even in that smooth-looking open-collar black shirt.

At the book signing, he had the glasses, very sleek and black-rimmed, now, a wider smile, but there was still that same air of distance, of polite, professional detachment. All grown up, Dakin thought, and it was meant to be ironic, but it left a funny ache in his chest instead, a tired feeling.

“And who shall I -” Irwin said, smiling up at him at last, the same one he’d smiled at the twelve people in line before, and Dakin smiled his own professional smile back, stuck his hand out. He had a four o’clock to get to in less than an hour, anyway.

“Stuart,” he said, and Irwin smiled and nodded, unrecognising, ducking his head to write. Dakin stared at the bared nape of his neck. His handwriting hadn’t changed, even; but he had, they both had, and it would be so very stupid to think -

“Dakin,” he blurted before Irwin could hand him back the book, “Stuart Dakin,” and fuck, it was like a time machine, the blooming amazement in Irwin’s face, that punched-in-the-gut vulnerable look that made him ten years younger. Like puncturing a shield and letting all the colour filter back into the room.

“I,” he said, stammering, “hello,” and Dakin smiled, feeling suddenly reckless and stupid and seventeen, “I wondered if you might want to get that drink, later.”