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Waking up, still in a light haze from the afternoon nap, he lazily thinks about a sandwich. The realization of the absurdity of what was happening in his head a minute earlier slowly dawns on him—but then, it all seemed so real, so right. Any normal person, if they were in his place, would be ashamed of their subconscious, but John tries to remember more details, rewinding individual scenes like the best moment in a song on a cassette. Pictures of various kinds flash and fade like matches when you light a cigarette in a dark alley on a windy night. Finally, ungluing his eyes, he leaps out of bed—his head treacherously aches and spins—finds a pen and a more or less clean sheet of paper in the pile of junk that it’s already embarrassing to call a workspace, and writes down the dream. Then he starts to find rhymes, later makes sketches; when there’s no more blank space left on the poor scrap of paper, he remembers the sandwich and, without even bothering to find pants, goes down to the kitchen, where Mimi immediately catches him by the ear, rudely forcing him to get dressed.
Returning to the room, he flops onto the bed, rubs his ear, red from the witch’s grip, and, burying his face in the pillow, wonders how strict James McCartney must be, if Paulie walks the line for him so well. If Mimi is a despot and John is a “lame dog,” it’s hard to imagine what you have to be to raise such a diligent brown-noser. But Paul never complains, unlike John, who doesn’t miss an opportunity to mention his worthless family with an unkind word. McCartney rarely talks about his family at all, and if he does, it’s only positive or neutral: “Dad taught me this chord.” “Mike likes this song too!” About his mother, he never mentions her at all, only his eyes dim, something withers within him when someone talks about their mom, or about the hospital, or when someone says her name, and it seems to John that only he notices it, only he sees his pain, and even though his own mother is alive and well and lives just a few steps away from him—it seems that only he can understand at least half of what he feels. Uncle George was like a father to him, and he can’t even imagine where his real father is, and now he only has the prim Aunt Mimi and, from time to time, Julia, who sometimes doesn’t even bother to remember his existence.
“How does James punish Paul? Does he punish him at all?” he returns to his original thought. “Does he slap him when he brings home a grade that’s slightly below his standard? Does he get out the belt if Paulie comes home after midnight, when John keeps him at his place? Does daddy tug his ears like Mimi does?” He lingers on this thought - he thinks about Macca’s ears, how funny they are, how red they would be if they were thoroughly tweaked, and how red his cheeks would be in the same tone if John did it, and how strangely these ears, sticking out like Mickey Mouse’s, suit him - anyone else would be disfigured by such ears, but they make him… cuter, maybe; he couldn’t find another adjective. Combined with his childish, girlish features, those ears make him a straight-up character from a black and white comic in the morning newspaper! It only seems to John that Macca seems to be shy about them, carefully hiding them behind his hair, checking in every reflective surface to make sure they don’t peek out, especially if they’re about to meet the fair sex (John only cares about the fair Paul). Only when they’re alone in the room at the McCartney house, as cramped as a train compartment, or on John’s porch, or on that very bed from which Lennon is now musing - he doesn’t watch himself, allows himself to run his hand through his neatly styled curls, chew on a pencil, scratch himself, yawn without covering his round mouth, and finally - with a light hand movement, expose his charming ears. He suddenly wanted to touch them, to whisper something to them, some kind of secret. He abruptly remembers his dream, which is already beginning to fade from his memory under the pressure of the stream of other thoughts, so he finds the piece of paper and, with a satisfied smirk, rereads what he wrote.
Complete nonsense, if you think about it, but John doesn’t like to think - he likes everything unusual, incomprehensible, extraordinary, provocative, everything that people like his aunt would exclaim is “Vulgarity! Nonsense! Balderdash!”. He imagines Mimi reading his notes and how her eyes, forever narrowed in contempt, widen.
He finds a free space between the prose, poetry, and fine art and draws a cartoon McCartney - eternally surprised eyebrows, a nose made of two dots, eyelashes taking up half his face - the result resembles an eared Betty Boop. John laughs to himself and starts to draw another picture. From time to time, fragments of the numerous rockabilly tunes, slow ballads, symphonies, serenades, and catchy little songs that he listened to under cover of night from the receiver stretched into the room visit his head, so, while intently scribbling on the paper, he shakes his head in time with the music and repeats “pretty pretty pretty” in the manner of an imaginary Buddy Holly.
Just as he finally forgot about the sandwich - Mimi bursts into his room without knocking (speak of the devil, he thinks irritably), holding a tray. She scolds him for the mess, places his breakfast (or whatever meal this is supposed to be?) right on top of the drawing, and when John opens his mouth to thank her weakly, she tells him with disdain that his “little friend” called and asked about the meeting—she glances at the clock above the bed—in half an hour. And Her Majesty is leaving “on business”.
“No smoking in the house, no breaking dishes, put on some pants, wash your face finally, and get out of bed already. It’s evening out, and you’re not even in a t-shirt!”
How dare he? How is he not ashamed? Blah, blah, blah.
As soon as he hears the gate creak - without any unnecessary movements, he finds cigarettes in the pocket of the jacket hanging on the within-reach chair, lights one, not even thinking about getting out of bed, getting dressed, or doing anything that woman says. The desire to break a plate awakens in him.
Macca will be here soon. This thought makes him rise, grab the sandwich, and, while chewing, look for the ill-fated trousers. Then, with a suffering groan, he tears his backside off the warm spot and parades to the bathroom to perform the act of personal hygiene.
Most likely, he’ll come to discuss some issues related to the Quarrymen. Pete’s sick - maybe he found someone for them who’s able to bang on empty cans, or maybe he wrote something, or maybe he just missed him! Yes, that will be the first thing he says upon meeting:
“Missed me, son?”
Lennon smiles, and his muscles ache, as always happens when you smile while brushing your teeth. He thinks about calling Cyn, just so he doesn’t have to think about it again for the rest of the day, but instead he returns to the room, pulls the sheet with the dream and lyrics for the supposed song from under the plate, and, after rummaging around for another minute in search of a clean page, rewrites it, slightly editing the rhymes, so that he and Paul can work out chords for this thing together.
When the doorbell rings, John, having decided a minute earlier to trim his toenails, flies down the stairs barefoot, throws the door open with a swing, and, as always, is stunned at the sight of Macca, because every time he doesn’t expect to see a young Elvis Presley in full regalia. For all the months of their acquaintance, he still can’t get used to his habit of always looking chic and at the same time putting on that angelic expression - eyebrows in a little house, fluttering eyelashes, as if he’s unaware that on the way here he drove crazy a couple of middle-aged women, a dozen ninth-grade students from a Baptist school, and one latent homosexual. “Ears covered,” Lennon notes to himself. “Like he’s going on a date! Or maybe he’s going straight from me to a date?” he thinks, looking over his friend from his polished boots to his equally polished crown. Everything he wanted to say had long flown out of his head through that very hole that Mimi is constantly going on about, although racing down the stairs he was thinking precisely about how his “son” missed him, and so he blurts out:
“You are looking gorgeous this day, Miss, as is ever your wont!!”
Fooling around, he takes his hand and kisses it, making a bow while sticking out his bare foot.
He laughs sweetly, covering his mouth with his hand, quickly getting into character, pretending to adjust a lady’s hairstyle.
"Oh, Sir John, you are too kind! But surely you wouldn’t have a lady linger on the threshold, like some bovine at the gate!"
Hands on hips, he frowns his thin eyebrows.
John is delighted; he is still amazed by their ability, which manifested itself from the first day of their acquaintance, to understand and pick up each other’s train of thought literally on the fly.
John breaks into a wide smile, and when he hears the last sentence, he bursts out laughing.
"Indeed, indeed, dearest princess of the northern English fields, I am most gratified that you have graced my humble abode with your presence. Pray, do come in and make yourself at home!"
With the silliest accent on the planet, making broad gestures with his hands, almost knocking over the contents of the nearest bedside table.
Paul rolls his eyes, threatens him with his little finger right at his nose, and, climbing the stairs while holding up an invisible dress, asks:
“And is your aunt reposing herself this fine afternoon??”
"Oh, have no concern, Your Excellency, milady Mimi has absented herself on “business”"- he makes quotation marks with his fingers, which makes Paulie giggle -"therefore, naught shall impede our merriment. We might even commence with the osculations right here and now!"
He pretends to start kissing, smacking his lips loudly, spreading his arms wide, and Paul holds his head at arm’s length:
“Villain! Guards! Guards!”
The sound of the guitar behind Princess Paulina, hitting the wall as it is moved, silences them for a second, but does not stop them from shaking with laughter.
They almost fell down the stairs, almost knocked over all the photos and paintings in the house, but finally sat down to work.
“When the cat’s away, the mice will play?” Paulie needles, as John lights them two cigarettes.
“One more word, and you, young lady, will be enjoying passive smoking.”
Instead of John putting on socks, Paul, climbing onto the bed, takes off his; he also took off the painfully cool leather jacket at the entrance, and now, smoking and wiggling his short toes, he’s almost on equal footing with the eternally disheveled Lennon.
He spun around in front of the bathroom mirror for half an hour, or even an hour, maybe even longer—in short, an indecent amount of time for a guy—which drove Mike, who wanted to use the bathroom, to the point of white-hot rage, receiving “just 5 more minutes” in response to his requests to let him in ten times in a row. After that, he’s not going anywhere and can’t even explain to himself why he tried so hard. Anyway, without a trace of regret, he ruins the hairstyle that he slaved over for most of the time, studying the piece of paper handed over by Johnny, thoughtfully running his hand through his Brylcreemed hair, wrinkles his shirt and trousers, sprawled out on his bed, frowning, gnawing his perfectly manicured nails in an attempt to find the right chord, while his starched collar is soaked in cigarette smoke, which his father clearly won’t like this evening. His father doesn’t like John in principle, nor does Mimi like Paul, despite the fact that women her age are normally crazy about him (women of any age, as John suspects, are crazy about him).
They sit across from each other, as always. John sees Macca’s eyes, in them - his reflection, his long, calloused fingers pressing the strings to the fretboard, slightly uneven teeth clamping a cigarette between them, the full lower lip tucked under them, the delicate, still childish jawline, and the ears. Unexpectedly for both of them, John interrupts their sacred connection and, after rummaging through a pile of uncut diamonds, shoves the morning’s (or rather, the afternoon’s, but it was morning for John) scribbled-on and drawn-on paper under his neat upturned nose.
Pollee carefully studies the manuscript, while Lennon watches the jerky movement of his pupils under his eyelids, mesmerized.
“Is this… me?”
He asks sharply, like an arrow from a bow, like a knee to the gut.
“It’s a girl that I really like!”
He replies almost immediately, with complete confidence and impudence in his voice.
Paul raises a thin eyebrow.
“Doesn’t look like Cyn.”
“Who told you it was Cyn?”
A stupid, blissful smile, as always, is out of place.
“Not good, Mr. Lennon, very not good.”
He shakes his head, humming vaguely, lowering his eyes to the writing, as if in disappointment, and informs him that he had a similar dream recently.
He says this casually, just as an aside, but it has the effect of a bomb exploding in John’s stomach.
He almost drops the cigarette (Mimi would have killed him on the spot without trial or investigation if he had started a fire). It slips from his fingers, weakened under the onslaught of feelings, but at the last moment, he clumsily catches it and puts it out in the sandwich plate. Paul immediately mirrors his movements - his internal organs perform another somersault.
John finds it hard to breathe; he’s paralyzed because he’s experiencing an intense feeling that is difficult to describe. You could say he’s deeply struck, shaken; it’s like a surge of inspiration, like infatuation, but not infatuation with a girl—a dull, relaxing feeling similar to cotton candy and plasticine—but infatuation with an idol, with music, with who-knows-what else: wind in his hair, alcohol in his blood, adrenaline, testosterone, goosebumps, and adoration all at once. He feels a shadow of this sensation whenever Paul is around, but when he blurts out something like that - says that he had the same dream, guesses his thoughts, understands him literally from half a word, finds just the right sound, just the right word that John was thinking about without even knowing it - this sensation intensifies a million times and strikes an electrical charge into his brain, and he wants to kiss all over McCartney, starting with the charming little toes on his slender feet and ending with his beloved little ears.
It seems to him that if he doesn’t speak now, and Paul doesn’t stop looking at him like that, the way he always looks - with childish admiration - he will simply burst into tears, worse than Cyn with her constant whims, and just to stop it, he says the first thing that comes to mind:
“Macca, why are you wearing makeup?”
In fact, thoughts about this had occasionally flashed through his subconscious, especially at the sight of his lips or memories of them, but only now did they take the form of words. He could never tell if a girl was wearing makeup, but it always seemed to him that Paul’s lips were too red and his eyelashes almost unnaturally long.
The quiet melody that McCartney had been slowly picking while John was experiencing a personal crisis abruptly breaks off, merging into one solid, loud note.
“What the hell? Get lost, Lennon!”
He replies indignantly, sharply and in a bass voice, as a man should respond to such a question. It’s unclear - is he seriously offended, or is he just pretending? But after a few seconds, unable to withstand the persistent eye contact, his eyebrows and lips unclench, the “brutal macho” mask slips off, and he can no longer restrain the twitching, playful smile that’s about to break into laughter.
“Are you stealing lipstick from Dot Or do you have your own? Did you have to put on a skirt, or did you lie to the saleswoman and say you were buying it for a girlfriend?” Lennon continues, glad that he took the bait.
“Want to get punched in the eye?”
John stretches into a happy smile.
“Only by you, my dear!”
Paul raises his fist over John’s still blissfully idiotic mug, but stops an instant before impact and instead flicks him on the forehead. In the next second, John is already trying to flick Paul back in response.
A mock fight ensues - the creaking of the mattress echoes with the calls for help from the guitars, wheezing, huffing, shouts, and fragments of insults and threats.
Lennon performs a deadly move - he starts tickling Paul under the ribs, holding him down while he kicks. He laughs loudly, swears, and tries to break free:
“Jerk! Thug! Help! Help!”
He cries plaintively and theatrically, but he is choking with laughter, unaware that he had already uttered almost the same words today.
“No one will help you; we’re alone here, and no matter how much you scream, no one will hear you.”
Lennon whispers unexpectedly low and somehow too seriously. This time, he doesn’t offer “kisses,” as he understands that he is too close to carrying out the threat, or perhaps that is already clear from the context? He doesn’t know, but when Paul falls silent from surprise, stops wriggling, John, taking advantage of the moment, grabs him by the ears. The pleasure of fulfilling the desire that has long been lingering in him is comparable to an orgasm as he tweaks them, places them like in little boats, in both hands, sticks his fingers in their shells, strokes them, then approaches one of the ears with his mouth and begins to read a children’s tongue twister to pronounce sibilant sounds:
“The sssssixth sssick sssssheik’s...”
Paul bursts into laughter again and tries to break free from the death grip, all red from such attention to the cause of his complex.
“Sod off my ears, Lennon, you pervert!”
He shouts bravely, but weakens again when John, surrendering to some subconscious stream, begins to bite and lick his ear.
A strange, muffled sound escapes from Paul’s chest, something like an intermittent sigh.
Here, John laughs quietly, raising himself on his arm between Paul’s head and his shoulder, looking at his flushed face: his eternally surprised eyebrows now seem to be genuinely surprised.
“I like your ears. Why do you cover them with hair?”
Quietly and calmly, watching intently.
“Dot says that I should mask problem areas” - clearly her words, put in his mouth - “and Mike made fun of them since childhood…”
Barely moving his tongue, staring at the shiny, drool-covered mouth opposite him.
“Don’t listen to them.”
Firmly and confidently.
John moves to the second, unattended ear and buries his nose in the oil-like hair, then he kisses the ear, smacking audibly.
Macca knew that his best friend was an unusual young man, that he was capable of sharp, rash acts, that his thoughts flowed in absolutely unpredictable and clearly different from socially acceptable directions, but now he realized the degree of his strangeness, and Paul, to his surprise, was not at all against it. In fact, he, too, loves strangeness; he himself is strange, only, unlike John, he hides this strangeness behind a mask of decency, prudence, and politeness. What John puts on display is also in him, and vice versa: what John hides is visible in Paul at first glance.
Therefore, he did not push him away when he moved from the ear to the neck, and then returned to his face and began to kiss his eyebrows, quietly muttering that he liked everything about him.
It’s getting a bit much - flashes through Paul’s head when John kisses his nose with a sucking sound, after which, comically wrinkling his face and cursing, he spits as if he’d licked a lemon.
While his hands are still firmly holding his ears, the inquisitive mouth proceeds to study the rosy-red lips—when the gates of paradise open—he counts each white sentinel and begins a fight with the pink dragon.
He would have been glad to penetrate Paul entirely, to go through the mouth, down the throat to the lungs, to the stomach, to the heart—he vaguely remembers the structure of human organs on an old poster in the biology classroom, which he visited maybe five times—he would like to spill into his blood, to get into his brain through the neurons, to merge with him into a single whole, so that their souls would mix like milk with strong coffee, so that their bodies would stick together and never separate; he would like them to be born like that - Siamese twins Lennon-McCartney.
“You’ll never leave me, will you?”
Sonorously separating their mouths, breathing heavily, he finds his weakened hand, intertwined their fingers.
“Promise me,”
He croaks almost plaintively; it seems he’s about to cry, looking into the face opposite as if trying to see something more there than flesh.
Although John’s words reach him as if echoed from a fog, and he, no matter how hard he tries, cannot fully understand their meaning, Paul squeezes his hand in his own:
“Yes… yes, yes, of course, Johnny, I… I will never...I..”
It’s hard for him to speak, so, with hesitant, timid movements, he reaches back for the lips; they meet him with ardor, almost desperately.
They merge into one again.