Day (10 page)

Alfred lifted his arm and immediately felt he was inside the wrong shape. He pushed himself off from his left foot and landed flatly on his right. He was almost no further forward, which was odd. A small breeze shoved at him from across the running track, reminded him of his sweat.

‘Day! You are upsetting me.'

Alfred froze, wobbled.

‘Do you want to upset me? Don't you love me as I love you, Day, Alfred F.?'

Alfred supposed he shouldn't answer this, stood, panted against the hot weight of being stared at by the rest of the men and found it made him more unsteady. Close to his ear, Sergeant Hartnell sighed.

‘All right, Day. You defend and I will attack you. Defend yourself, Day – or you will be killed.'

Which did it, cleaned the day back to its bones and made everything so white that Alfred couldn't see and it let him lift, fade, disappear up into a beautiful burning. All he could ever recall of what happened directly after was his own, huge smile.

And then looking down at Sergeant Hartnell while standing with one boot stamped in his superior's armpit and twisting and also holding, folding back his sergeant's wrist. The breath packed high in Alfred's chest leapt out as a type of bark and he thought that he seemed decidedly well in himself, all of a sudden cheery. He waited, because he didn't know the form for when you have attacked a sergeant and made him let go of his favourite knife.

‘Not so bad, Day.' Sergeant Hartnell eyeing him from the ground, perhaps choosing when to move so there would be no unseemly struggle, perhaps deciding how he might need to injure Alfred and set the balance back to where it should be. That was all right with Alfred, he'd not mind. He opened his hands and made them soft.

Freed, Sergeant Hartnell paused and then sprang up neatly to his feet, making Alfred blink.

‘Not so bad at all. But I need that every time, mind. Every time. Harnessed aggression. Or you will be unable to save your life and I will not be there to save it for you.'

‘No, Sarnt.'

‘Because I do have other things to do.'

‘Yes, Sarnt.'

‘Spending all my bleedin' time running round looking after you great hopeless shower.' Sergeant Hartnell grinding clockwise on his heel, surveying his charges. His squad studied the grass, shifted their boots, tried to look savage.

‘Yes, Sarnt.'

And then the exercises continued: the heaving and the quiet blasphemies as they swung each other on to the grass, ran knowing they'd be tripped, struck knowing they'd be blocked, harmed each other enough, slightly more than enough.

At the end of their games, the other lads were always in good spirits, a brightness to them you didn't see when they'd been out square-bashing, or down on the firing range. Alfred, on the other hand, only lost his contentment, had to swallow more often, his mouth filling with the taste of coal and damp and his mother's kitchen and he had to spit and needed to wash himself, wanted to go off and stop fucking pretending, just run into a fight, disappear all of the way and be in proper pain and fucking kill somebody. The same every time: he'd want to fucking kill somebody, when there never was anyone spare that you could kill. Would have been frowned on, you could bet.

‘Your bloody mother' – you never should say that to anyone.

He'd much preferred the range. He had good dreams when he'd been shooting.

But that was long before the skipper and the crew.

Before all kinds of things.

The crew which didn't like to think of itself parted, wandering loose across so many other places in the times before they'd met. None of them, Alfred was certain, really believed in the schools that Pluckrose went moaning and binding on about. They refused to imagine Miles getting through an assault course, or indeed breaking into a run at any time. They wouldn't accept the skipper had ever been without his wings. They were the crew and nothing other than the crew and that would be for ever and they'd have their picture taken to prove it, the family of them together; but not until the thirty ops were over, not until they were complete.

Because you didn't want to jinx yourself, but also because of tradition and wanting to be traditional squadron men – traditions being excellent things – and even more because of what it said about their time. The crew was extremely particular whenever it dealt with time – it woke and was live and moving in its moment and in that moment only. It would not be concerned with its past and had no business thinking of its future: its cleverness was in drinking up its minutes, second by second, and making sure to drain each one. It looked at the bods outside it who did not grasp this, looked at the sleepy civilian types – the spivs and 4Fs – and saw how close they were to being dead: how the time streamed off other people like rain and ran away without them missing it. The crew didn't like that – they found it offensive.

‘D'you know now, if you're quick, you can put your hand inside a second.' Molloy there with Alfred, the two of them leaning over the fence at the bottom of the station and having a look at the neighbouring farm, the fields, birds moving among the furrows, brown and small as stones. There were partridges in the woods, very dapper Alfred thought them, a nice sight – but none today. People tended to shoot them. It was a shame.

Sometimes the farmer would turn up to chat, pass the time while Alfred didn't think of the bowsers refuelling behind them, the bomb trains receiving their loads, the tail assemblies being fitted, tested, pins and clips reinserted for safety. The farmer would tell them about his crops and what had grown where they were standing, over on the war's side of the fence. Mostly, he said the same things in that dreaming flat Lincolnshire way, slower even than Torrington, repeated himself word for word, but they enjoyed that, let it comfort them.

We made him one half of a bargain. If he would keep being there, then so must we. It doesn't do to miss appointments.

That afternoon, though, they'd been alone, balanced in the while before Alfred would go and check his guns again. They'd been fine on the test flight and he trusted the armourers, of course, and he trusted himself. But he would check his guns again before they flew. He would clean his Perspex, polish away scratches that weren't there and he would practise seeing, scanning, quartering the sky and he would breathe in the smell of his one chosen home: the tight, exciting reek of working oil and skin and his never-to-be-washed flying suit and the good metal and the brassy sting in his throat from ammunition, the choke from hot firing, his trade, himself.

‘You can open your fingers and stretch it.'

‘Stretch what?'

‘A second.' Molloy would say these things as if they weren't strange. ‘Put your hand in it the way you would into a woman.' Talked about women as if they were a known, sad thing to him. ‘When the engines run up, the whole orchestra there – starboard inner, starboard outer, port inner, port outer, the swing of the torque and we're going, taxiing, we'll not be scrubbed now, we're going off – then I open my hands both together and I work inside them, those seconds, until I have them on me like another pair of gloves – the last free seconds there until we're back, you want to keep a hold of them.'

‘You're mad.'

‘Bomb-happy. Aren't we all, so?'

‘You're madder than the rest of us.'

‘Maybe that's the sensible thing.'

Alfred aware, as he taps the fencepost, that he can hear this wonderfully clearly, the meeting of his fingernail and the wood: that since he began flying, operational flying, he believes he has heard, seen, tasted more. He hopes this does not mean his life has been creased over on itself, thickened and made more of, in anticipation of its being short. He hopes that it means he is a gunner and gunners are watchful, hungry, awake.

‘Would you say, Little Boss, that you knew why it is we do this?'

‘Because it's such a lark.'

Molloy looks at him, sharp, disappointed.

Alfred tries to do better. ‘Well, if you want the only reason I know, it's because we're told to.'

‘That's what I thought.' Molloy tossing the end of his cigar-ette into the field as if it had upset him.

Alfred wanting to say something helpful. ‘It would be different for you, though.'

‘Why?' Still the sharpness.

‘I don't know . . . because Ireland isn't at war. You don't have to be here.'

At this, Molloy gives a laugh, lets it be single and sour, and some of the birds beyond them lift and circle away. ‘That's true. Yes, this would be me at war on my own behalf, my own decision, because why not. What would I be doing, otherwise? Leaning over another fence back in Ireland and out of my mind with looking at the same people for all of my life. Or pouring concrete for an airfield over here, I suppose. Could have done that. Stay at home and put yourself in pain, because you've nothing else, or come away and have other people put you in pain – that's a nice change for you there.' He lights another cigarette and holds Alfred's arm for a moment, frowns at him. ‘Two of my sisters, they got away from it – they're in a hostel near Nottingham, I think – making our bombs for us. They got away.' He swallowed down his smoke then growled it out again. ‘Yes, I have freely volunteered to wear the hated British King's uniform. Couldn't sink all the way to brown, but I could manage blue. And I do what I am told. And the boys over there,' he jerked a finger towards the East, the opposite coast, ‘they'll be doing what they're told.'

Alfred felt the slight, metallic resistance that always seemed to lean in against him when he turned and knew he was facing Europe, the edge of the night that rose up and waited for them, high as thinned air and ice. ‘Some Gestapo man would see to them if they didn't. Or they'll like the job and want to do it, I don't know. They seem . . . they do seem keen, Dick. Enthusiastic.' This the first time he's aware of having used the word –
enthusiastic, from the Greek
.

‘Aren't we all the obedient fuckers, Sergeant Day?'

‘Saves time.'

‘Saves thinking.'

‘Well, I'd rather not think, our kid.'

‘Bollocks to that, young Alfred. Thinking all the time, you are, and reading your books. Studious bastard, you are, and why should you not be? You think. We all think. But we do as we're told, no matter what. Grand life, isn't it? I come here to be away from the fucking Brothers and the Fathers and Little Fucking Sisters of Eternal Pains in Your Hole and all I do now is what I'm told.'

‘Nothing wrong with that.' A fear in Alfred, because this is part of his crew unhappy and shouldn't be. He is responsible for setting this right. ‘That last exercise when it was dirty as all buggery, when we couldn't see our own props and the pitot tube had frozen and the altimeter went US – we wouldn't have come home without you.'

‘What, were you thinking of dropping me out?'

‘You know what I mean.'

Being locked in the turret on their final training flight: a cross-country navigation exercise and the weather gone to hell: nothing beyond the Perspex but a din of sleet, moisture clawed away into the slipstream, a slicing dark. The crew voices blurred as ever, shaken and thinned in the wires before they ghosted back to him, but it had still been clear that they were lost: Pluckrose muted, the instruments failing, the storm kicking at them as if it knew, would split them out and have them now.

‘I'm supposed to mend things. So I mended the altimeter.'

Alfred had scanned for any landmark, any meaningful shape, until his mind was slipping mirages up to jolt him – very plain for a moment, something like a young girl's face, a staring, hating face.

‘If you hadn't mended it, we'd have been spread out across a cloud with a solid centre. You know that. They'd have been scooping us up off a hillside with egg spoons.'

‘I cut it open at the back and let the air in. That's all. Just physics. You do have physics in the wicked English Empire?'

The skipper had talked them through the night, keeping them aloft, Alfred needing those brief shudders of sound, the way they noted failures calmly, asked for fixes, held everything. Alfred had rattled over nowhere, watching the night swarm down behind them: his back to the skipper, his back to the crew, four Merlins hauling them forward and him with his back to it all. He had made sure to believe they wouldn't die.

He'd almost prayed, but there hadn't quite been time, or else he'd resisted, and then he'd heard his skipper tell them the altimeter was back.

‘That was down to you, Molloy.'

‘What was?'

‘That we made it.'

‘It was down to the skipper.'

‘And you.'

Molloy almost smiled, stretched instead. ‘Well, I'd be happy with a nice easy exercise like that tonight. At least there wasn't any flak. Except over Liverpool – they were very touchy, there. Almost as dangerous as the navy. Bet we won't be bombing Liverpool tonight. That, they wouldn't allow.'

Which meant he'd put an end to their rest and now they would have to admit there was an op set in motion already, Battle Orders showing their names. So they'd have to step round and face the station again, see it busy, preparing for them.

Alfred put his hands in his pockets, because that would seem slovenly and relaxed. ‘We could not bother going.'

‘That's right.'

The grass giving under feet as they walked in, closed the afternoon up after them.

‘But do you have anything else to do?'

‘That's pressing? No, Little Boss, I've nothing much to keep me out of mischief.'

‘Will we just go then?'

‘On the op? Oh, I should suppose we might as well. It would please them, wouldn't it – if we did.'

‘Yes, it would please them.'

‘And if someone has a notion of something, you shouldn't ever stand in their way.'