Grow Light

The humidity alarm goes off during the pudding, which in the history of Fenwick Station has never once happened at a convenient time.

It is Midwinter’s Day, the twenty-first of June, and we are seventeen people at one long table in the galley at the bottom of the world. The sun went down in April and will not come up until August. Outside it is forty-one below with a wind that can take a man’s face off, and inside the cook has put out candles and a roast and a tablecloth that somebody ironed, and the whole base is wearing its one good shirt. Mine has a gravy stain on the cuff. I am sixty-two, a Penzance man, and in this my fourth winter as field operations manager I have been very careful for the last six months not to look across the table at the station doctor.

He is sitting opposite me, in a dark green shirt that fits him across the shoulders. I am not looking.

It has not been easy. There are seventeen of us on a ridge of ice with nowhere to go, and a man cannot help noticing who comes in from the cold with frost in his beard and stops to laugh at the cook’s jokes. I have noticed everything about Tunde Alabi since February. I know that he takes his tea with three sugars and denies it, and that he hums hymns under his breath when he sews up a cut hand. In May he treated a frostbitten finger of mine at two in the morning, bent over my hand under the surgery lamp with his glasses pushed up, and I said afterward that I’d a sudden headache and went and stood outside in the dark at forty below for twenty minutes to cool off.

The alarm on my belt gives three sharp chirps, and the base commander, who is halfway through a speech about camaraderie, raises one eyebrow at me.

“Grow room,” I say, getting up. “Probably a sensor. Carry on, Alan.”

“Take your pudding.”

“I’ll have it dreckly.”

I go out through the swing door with my napkin still in my hand. The corridor is bare and cold after the galley, lit by orange emergency strips, and the party noise follows me down it for twenty yards and then shuts off behind a fire door. I am on the second set of steps when I hear footsteps catch up behind me. They are slow and heavy and I know them by now, as I know the sound of the generator.

“Where are you going?” says Tunde Alabi.

“Grow room.”

“I’ll come. In case a tomato’s had a stroke.”

I do not turn round. “You’ll miss the toasts.”

“Jory,” he says. “I’d like to miss the toasts.”

---

The grow room is the warmest place on the continent. It was built into the old workshop at the east end of the station in the first winter, a long low space stacked with racks of trays, and over every rack hangs a bar of purple-pink LED light, so that when you open the door the polar night disappears and you step into a hot, humid, rose-coloured dusk that smells of basil and wet soil. We have tomatoes in there, and chard, and peppers, and a lemon tree that has produced one lemon in two years and been admired by everyone. The air is twenty-four degrees. The windows are blacked out against the dark. There is a droning hum from the pumps, and the leaves are shining with moisture, and I have spent more hours in it this winter than a man should who claims to have no reason to hide.

The sensor is fine. I read the panel twice and press the reset, and it stops chirping, and I stand with my back to the door and my hands in my pockets and listen to the doctor come in behind me and shut it.

“You taught me to read crevasses,” Tunde says.

“I did.”

“Fourteen years ago. On the Peninsula. I was thirty-three years old and I’d never been further south than Brighton. You made me stand on the edge of a snow bridge with a rope on, and you said, ‘Doc, the ice is telling you something, and you’re not listening, and one day it will stop being polite.'”

“I said that?”

“You said it with great dignity. And then I put my foot through, and you hauled me out by the harness and called me a daft emmet.” He is smiling. In that pink light the smile does something to his whole face. The close grey beard moves with it, and the shaved head shines under the LEDs, and he pushes his steel-framed glasses up his nose the way he does when he’s thinking. “I’ve wanted to tell you something for fourteen years, Jory. I haven’t, because for the first six I was your trainee and I’d have died of shame. And for the next eight we were on different bases and I told myself it was nostalgia.”

My mouth has gone dry. “Tunde.”

“Let me finish. I practised.” He takes his glasses off and cleans them on his shirt, which he does when he is nervous, and I know this about him because I have watched him do it across a table for six months. “I’m the station medical officer. You’re the field ops manager. We report to the same man, and neither of us outranks the other, and there’s no line between us. I looked it up. I’m not your student. I’m not anyone’s student. I’m a forty-seven-year-old man who has been in love with you for a very long time, and I thought I should say so on the one night of the year when everybody’s too drunk to remember it.”

The pumps hum. A drop of water falls from a tray onto the floor.

“In love,” I say.

“Yes.”

“With me. I’m sixty-two, my lover. I’ve a knee that clicks, and I’ve lost two toes on the left foot to the Weddell Sea, and I’ve snored through half the station’s wall. I’m a proper old wreck.”

“I’ve examined your toes. I thought they were rather brave.”

I laugh. It comes out cracked, and I put my hand over my mouth, and he comes across the room in three strides and takes my wrist and pulls it gently down.

“I’m asking,” he says. “I’m not guessing. I’d like to kiss you. If the answer’s no, I’ll go back to the pudding, and tomorrow we’ll go on as we are, and I’ll never bring it up again. If the answer’s yes, I’d like you to say it yourself, in your own voice, and not as my old instructor.”

I look up at him. Fourteen years. He has a face I have seen in every weather this world has to offer, in white-out and in the green light of the aurora, and in the early morning after a night shift when he was too tired to remember to be careful. I have never once got used to it.

Behind him, a tomato plant drips onto the tray below. Neither of us moves. The world shrinks to a stillness and a smell of green leaves, and I think, I am sixty-two years old, and I could say no, and be safe.

“Yes,” I say. “I’d like that very much. Come here, Tunde.”

---

He is a good kisser. I had suspected it. He kisses attentively, with a patience that unpicks me stitch by stitch, one big hand at my jaw and the other spread on my chest as though he is checking for a heartbeat. I have my own hands in the folds of that green shirt and I’m backing him toward the rack of tomatoes without meaning to, and he lets me, and the plants shiver around us, and the hot air stinks of basil, and for a minute I forget my age.

“Mind the peppers,” he murmurs against my mouth.

“Never mind the bloody peppers.”

“I did a year of botany. They are fragile and they matter.”

I laugh into his beard. He catches the back of my belt and hauls me against him, and I feel how hard he is already through two layers of trousers, a thick heavy line against my hip, and the wanting goes through me hard. I slide a hand down and cup him, and he groans in his chest.

“Oh, that’s lovely. Do it again, Jory, slower.”

“You’ve waited long enough,” I say. “So have I. I don’t intend to do this standing up among the tomatoes. I’m too old. My knees are older than your degree.”

“What do you suggest?”

“I’ve a chair in my cabin. And a bed. And a door that locks properly.” That last is not true, the lock has been broken since March, but I have a chair under the handle for the purpose. “It’s four minutes’ walk. Come on.”

We go out by the east door, not the galley one, and he follows me down the cold corridor with his hand in the pocket of my cardigan and his shoulder pressing mine, and when we pass the radio room we both walk very straight and very slowly, like two men carrying a tray of full glasses.

---

My cabin is nine feet by eleven, with a narrow bunk under the porthole and a shelf of paperbacks above the desk, and a photograph of the Longships lighthouse off Land’s End on the wall. The armchair is the only soft thing in the room, a deep tweed one rescued from a skip in Cambridge before the ship sailed. I wedge the desk chair under the door handle. When I turn around he is standing by the bunk, unbuttoning the green shirt with fingers that are visibly unsteady.

“Let me,” I say.

I do it slowly. I undo every button myself, and push the shirt back off his shoulders, and there he is, broad and dark, with soft salt-and-pepper fur running down his chest and belly to his waistband. I press my face into it. He smells of basil and clean sweat. His hand comes down on my head, heavy and warm.

“You’re a bear,” I say into his chest.

“I’m a doctor. It’s the same thing with better manners.”

He undresses me with the same slow attention, and I let him. He stops at my left foot, at the two missing toes, and kneels there on the lino and kisses the scar, and I have to close my eyes. When he looks up, his glasses are crooked, and I take them off and put them on the desk.

“Sit,” he says. “In the chair.”

I sit. It is deep and old and it takes my weight with a sigh. Tunde stands before me, naked now and hard in the dim lamplight, and watches me take him in. Nobody has ever studied me the way he does. It is how I study a good piece of ground.

“Rubber,” I say. “And lube. Locker under the bunk, the water-based.”

“Agreed.” He fetches both and tears the packet open, and rolls the rubber onto me himself with a careful, clinical hand, and I let my head go back against the tweed. He slicks me with a palm full of lube, long slow strokes, until my breath is catching.

“One more thing,” I say. “If either of us says ‘crevasse’, everything stops and nobody asks why.”

“Crevasse,” Tunde says, as solemnly as a man taking an oath. “Stops everything. Same for you.”

“Good. Now come here, my lover. Sit on me.”

He puts a knee on either side of my hips and lowers himself onto my lap, facing me. I put my hands on his waist, broad and warm, covered in hair, and feel the weight of him settle over my thighs. His own cock stands hard between us. He reaches behind him, his fingers slick with lube, and I watch his face while he opens himself, the small furrow between his brows, his breathing deepening, and my hands tighten on his waist.

“Ready,” he says, breathless. “Hold still.”

He takes me in slowly, one hand braced on my shoulder, and the heat of him closes around me, and a sound comes out of me that I last made in the nineteen-eighties. He lets out a long shuddering breath and sinks the last of it, and then we are pressed chest to chest and belly to belly with the armchair creaking and me all the way inside him.

“Oh, God, Jory.”

“I’ve got you. Easy. Let it settle.”

“It’s so much.” He drops his face into my shoulder and laughs shakily. “Nobody warned me. Fourteen years I’ve been imagining and I got it wrong.”

“Too much?” I say. “Say the word and I stop.”

“Not at all. I’m fine. Just let me…” He rises, and drops. The chair groans. Both of us gasp. “Oh, yes. That.”

He begins to ride me.

It starts slow. He rolls his hips in a long, deliberate circle, grinding down on every stroke, and his hands grip my shoulders, and the lamp throws our shadow huge on the wall of the cabin. I hold his hips and I let him set the pace. Every time he comes down I feel him grip me all along my length, and I can’t hold back what comes out of my mouth.

“That’s it, Tunde. That’s the way. Take it. Ride me. Use my cock, I’m yours, I’ve been yours since the snow bridge.”

“Since the snow bridge?” He is panting. “Is that when you…”

“You came out of the crevasse with ice in your beard and said ‘Well, that was educational,’ and I knew I was finished.” I rock up into him, short and deep, and he cries out. “Fourteen years I’ve kept quiet. My God, the effort.”

“Don’t keep quiet now.”

“Then give me everything you’ve got, Doc. Let me hear what it feels like.”

“Like I’m going to split,” he says, “and I’d like you not to stop.”

“Then I won’t. Sit right down on me, Doc. I want your arse against my thighs.”

“Here? Like this?” He grinds down hard, so that I feel every bit of him seat. “Fuck, Jory. You’re right in the middle of me.”

He does. He lifts and drops with real power now, a big man’s weight coming down on my lap with a slap and a grunt, again and again, until the chair legs are skidding on the lino and the paperbacks are shaking on the shelf. His beard is wet with sweat. His chest heaves, and I bury my face in it, tasting salt, and his hands cup my head and hold me there.

“Jory. Jory, I’m close.”

“Not yet. Not like this.” I’m nowhere near my own edge, but I’m sixty-two and I know my limits and I want more. “I want your mouth. I want you on my tongue. Will you let me?”

“God, yes.”

He lifts off me with a gasp, and I peel the rubber away and drop it in the bin by the desk, and for a second we are both laughing at the state of us.

---

We get down onto the floor, onto the thick foam pad I sleep on when the bunk is too hot, and arrange ourselves head to foot, with the lamp turned low. He lies on his side, then on his back, and I get on top of him the wrong way round, knees braced either side of his head. It is a clumsy, laughing business and the pad is not wide enough. But then I take him into my mouth, the whole thick hot length of him, and he does the same for me, and the laughing stops.

I have done this with a handful of men over the years, and none of them mattered to me like this one. He tastes of salt and his own sweetness, and his body arches up into my mouth, and I take him deep, deeper, until my nose is in the grey hair at his belly, and feel him gasp around me. His tongue is flat and wet and talented. His beard scrapes my thighs. He works one big hand up between my legs and grips my backside, and his mouth does something with a swirl and a suck that makes me see sparks.

I pull off for a breath. “Tunde.”

“Mm.”

“You’ve a mouth on you.”

He pulls off too, with a gasp. “Twenty years in medicine. The first thing they teach you is to use your tongue properly.” He licks the head of me, deliberately, and grins up. “Now shut up and keep going.”

I do. The room goes hot and small and loud with our noises, the groaning and the thump of a heel against the wall. He takes me down until his lips meet my belly. I feel his thighs begin to tremble on either side of my face, and the pulse in the thick heat of him climbing, and I move my tongue and hum around him and take him as far as I can.

“Jory,” he groans around me, and the word buzzes through my whole body. “I’m going to finish in your mouth, you old wreck. Say that’s what you want.”

I lift my head just far enough. “That’s exactly what I want. Do it. And you can have mine.”

He comes first. I feel it begin in his belly, a hard shudder, a stifled shout muffled around my cock, and the hot bitter flood hits the back of my throat, and I swallow every drop. The sound of him is rough and wrecked and wonderful. And with that mouth still tight around me, and the hum of his groan on my skin, I go too, with a roar I try and fail to swallow, pouring into him while he drinks me down with a deep, shaking hunger.

We lie there in a tangle on the floor, in the lamplight, and for a very long time nobody says anything.

“Well,” says Tunde at last, into my thigh. “That was educational.”

I start laughing, and cannot stop, and he laughs too, until the pad is shaking.

We get under the quilt eventually, in the narrow bunk, with the porthole frosted over and the whole station humming around us. He lies against my chest and I hold him there, a great warm weight of a man, and we talk in low voices about practical things, because that is what we are. We agree that the radio operator has probably noticed. We agree that the base commander, who has been married three times and is therefore a connoisseur, will say nothing and look pleased. We agree that there are nineteen weeks until the first flight out and that neither of us is in any hurry at all.

“And after the ice?” he says.

“Dreckly,” I say. “Penzance has a decent hospital. And a bed that doesn’t creak.”

“Is that an invitation?”

“It’s a fact. Take it how you like.”

He is quiet for a bit. Then he tucks his cold feet between my calves, which is how I know the answer.

---

At twenty to eight the next morning I go down to the grow room with a clipboard, a mug of tea and a head like a boiled egg. The place is empty and pink and quiet. The pumps hum. I walk the racks, reading the thermometer and the hygrometer and the nutrient meter, ticking the boxes on the log the way I have ticked them every day since March: twenty-four degrees, sixty-eight per cent humidity, basil bolting, chard good. Yesterday’s entry says fourteen ripe tomatoes. I count thirteen, and I count them twice. Then I find a clean stub of green stalk on the top rack where the biggest one used to be, and a small note on a page torn from a medical pad, tucked under the tray in a neat, slanting hand.

Borrowed one. Will explain at breakfast. Wear a hat, the wind’s up. T.

I stand there with the clipboard, grinning like a fool, in the rosy light of a hundred small purple suns. Then I take the pen, and under Remarks, in the capital letters we use for the log, I write: ONE TOMATO REMOVED BY DR ALABI. I do not write for what.