The Night Watch by Sarah Waters Read Free Book Online

The belt moved with a trundling sound and a regular squeak-not very noisily but, when combined with the hiss and clatter from the candle-making machines in the other half of the room, just noisily enough so that, if you wanted to speak to your neighbour, you had to raise your voice a little louder than was really comfortable. Duncan found it easier to smile and gesture. Often he'd go for hours without speaking at all.
    Len, on the other hand, could not be silent. Getting no fun out of Duncan now, he started to gather up spare bits of wax; Duncan watched him begin to press them all together, moulding and shaping them into what emerged, in another minute, as the figure of a woman. He worked quite cleverly-frowning in concentration, his brow coming down and his lower lip jutting. The figure grew smoother and rounder in his hands. He gave it over-sized breasts and hips, and waving hair. He showed it to Duncan first, saying, 'It's Mrs Alexander!' Then he changed his mind. He called down the bench to one of the girls: 'Winnie! This is you, look!' He held the figure out and made it walk and wiggle its hips.
    Winnie screamed. She was a girl with a deformity of the face, a squashed-in nose and a pinched-up mouth, and a pinched-up nasal voice to match. 'Look what he's done!' she said to her friends. The other girls saw and started laughing.
    Len added more wax to the figure, to its breasts and bottom. He made it move more mincingly. ' Oh, baby! Oh, baby! ' he said, in a silly feminine way. Then, 'That's how you go,' he called to Winnie, 'when you're with Mr Champion!' Mr Champion was the factory foreman, a mild-mannered man whom the girls rather terrorised. 'That's how you go. I heard you! And this is what Mr Champion does.' He held the figure in the crook of his arm and passionately kissed it; finally he put his fingernail to the fork of its legs and pretended to tickle it.
    Winnie screamed again. Len went on tickling the little figure, and laughing, until one of the older women told him sharply to stop. His laugh, then, became more of a snigger. He gave Duncan a wink. 'She wishes it was her, that's all,' he said, too low for the woman to catch. He pressed the wax figure back into formlessness and threw it into the scrap-cart.
    He was always boasting privately to Duncan about girls. It was all he ever talked about. 'I could have that Winnie Mason if I wanted to,' he'd said, more than once. 'What do you think it would be like, though, kissing her mouth? I think it'd be like kissing a dog's arse.' He claimed he often took girls into Holland Park and made love to them there at night. He described it all, with tremendous grimaces and winks. He always talked to Duncan as if he, Len, were the older of the two. He was only sixteen. He had a freckled brown gipsy face, and a pink, plump, satiny mouth. When he smiled, his teeth looked very white and even inside that mouth, against the tan and speckle of his cheek.
    Now he sat back with his hands behind his head, rocking on the two back legs of his stool. He looked lazily around the Candle Room, going from one thing to another in search of some kind of distraction. After a minute he moved forward as if excited. He called down the bench: 'Here's Mrs A, look, coming in. She's got two blokes with her!'
    Still working at the night lights, the women turned their heads to see. They were grateful for any sort of break in the day's routine. The week before, a pigeon had got into the building and they had gone round the room shrieking, for almost an hour-making the most of the excitement. Now a couple of them actually stood up, to get a better look at the men with Mrs Alexander.
    Duncan watched them peer until their curiosity became irresistible. He turned on his stool to look too. He saw Mrs Alexander heading for the biggest of the candle-making machines, leading a tall, fair-haired man, and one who was shorter and darker. The fair-haired man stood with his back to Duncan, nodding. Every so often he made