Day (18 page)

Like her to promise and not deliver.

Only at the time, you didn't want the pictures, because that's to do with being back at the station and watching
The Lion Has Wings
again – it's all they bloody show you – or thinking of the fleapit back home and being someone else and Humphrey Bogart up there in
High Sierra
and hearing the couples at your back, believing you'll never have anyone like that – a girl to touch.

Not that you touched her. Not in a bad way.

No, you did worse.

‘I . . .' Over another pot of tea – this time in one of those old, square teapots – drips like buggery only you don't want to complain. ‘Joyce, you know . . .' Half of your cup spilled on the tabletop and no taste in it anyway – you suspect these are leaves they've been using for a while. ‘I . . .'

You were comfortable and happy and you told her, ‘I like seeing you.'

‘So do I. Like seeing you. I see
me
all the time. Well . . . in the morning in the mirror. Not all the time – that would be ghastly.'

And she's veering you off-course, so you have to correct. ‘And I like the letters, your letters. I like them a lot.' You like correcting.

‘You write good letters back.'

‘No, I don't.'

Then this bright, lifting pause that you're both inside and the scent of roses. There's the bombsite reek as well – charring and plaster open to the rain, woodsmoke, something distantly sickening underneath – but you have roses mainly, because you are here with Joyce.

‘I like knowing you, too, Alfie. I like it very much.'

Nothing simple about this and perhaps everything hopeless, but you don't mind that, because your doing the impossible is no more than what she deserves. Love requires the impossible, you understand.

Joyce looking out of the window at the street that's fading now, bustling into darkness and shuttered headlamps. You realise that you have made her sad.

drop

That bandage smell: he'd never liked it. You wanted them to smell clean, but they didn't, there was always a sourness about them, as if they'd been used before, were bringing you something to do with decay. They weren't healthy.

So why volunteer to wear them, cocker? Never volunteer, you know by now.

The film people had wanted injuries. A little crowd was organised to stand and be saddened by a few other chaps got up as casualties who'd totter in through the gates as if they were new to the camp and fresh from some unhappy time in the sky, or on the run. Alfred – as always, in favour of lying down – had said he'd like to be a stretcher case.

The bandages, they taste of fear and church.

Three women were doing the make-up. Odd to have a woman touch his face. A woman to choose what damage he'd have, how it would look.

This dry, disinfected perfume that you'd think would make things better, but only turns them strange.

Alfred had sat on the edge of a table, beside him a man with his hands swaddled up as if he'd been burned. There was nothing wrong with him, of course – in fact he was an irritating bleeder, knocking and clapping his big parcelled mitts together as if they were the funniest thing out, asking if anyone would light him a fag, scratch his nose, wipe his arse.

‘Be all right going home to the missus like this, wouldn't I? Wouldn't I?' Laughing his stupid head off. ‘I'd finally get a proper handful. Wouldn't I? Wouldn't I?' Peggy brown teeth that you'd rather not see – too deep and narrow a mouth.

Alfred with a gauze pad plastered over his left eye, three or four yards of binding round his head – like a kid's idea of someone wounded. The binding made him slightly deaf.

But not quite deaf enough.

‘Turn out the lights and I'd think she had a pair. Wouldn't know where to start. I should say so. Wotcha reckon, mate? Eh?'

What do I reckon? What do I reckon? I reckon septic articles like you never should have made it through the war. I reckon somebody should have bombed you, bombed you flat. I reckon if we'd known you earlier the crew and I would have happily volunteered. I reckon the wrong people die. I reckon that happens every fucking time.

Alfred remembering his mother, the burn on her leg where his father scalded it with tea. She'd dressed it herself, meticulous, and taken care, but there'd always been marks left after that. A woman, she wants her legs to look nice, they're something she's meant to be proud of. His father had made her ashamed.

‘I'm planning to keep this lot, mate – take it back home. Make meself think that I'm lucky for once. Might as well.'

Might as well.

Alfred remembering how they tended him in the German hospital. He'd worried about scarring to his lip: if Joyce would ever see it and be upset.

Might as well.

And then Alfred remembered nothing and reckoned nothing and had only a pink-grey light in the back of his head, a comfortable sense of warmth, before he realised his eyes were closed. There was a funny noise from somewhere near his feet – like a dog being sick. He glanced down.

It surprised him a little that the man with the bound hands was lying on the sand and that his nose was bleeding entirely convincing blood and then Alfred noticed an ache in the knuckles of his right hand and realised that he had punched the man, hit him very hard: wound the idea of it up from his waist and twisted it out with what might have been anger, or could have been joy – he seemed purely still at the moment and happily relaxed.

‘Jesus!' The man was upset. ‘What the bloody hell . . . ?' Browned off, but too nervous to get up yet. A shock would do that, a blow to the face. People cared about their faces.

‘Sorry, mate.' Alfred settling in behind his best Kriegie expression, the inoffensive blank. ‘Can't see a thing with this bloody eyepatch on. Didn't know I'd caught you. So sorry.'

‘Here though –'

Alfred stepping out. ‘Sorry, mate. Honest.' He could see a make-up woman staring at him, deciding whether she approved. ‘Don't worry, they'll patch you up. They've got all the kit for it. Handy.'

And he walked off for a turn or two, circled the nearest hut to keep from laughing, to keep from thinking.

It bothered me when I first saw it, that one scar. Half the length of my top lip – swollen and stitches in it – something most women wouldn't find too pleasant. But I'd thought Joyce wouldn't mind it, because we were ourselves and no alterations could bother us.

Otherwise, I'd have covered up, I'd have grown out a moustache for her back then.

So why grow it now, when she won't see you?

You do know she won't see you.

So why are you suddenly bothered about how you look?

You are sure she won't see you.

So why end up taking yourself down into London and living where she lives?

You are almost certain she won't see you.

How much of a fool are you planning to be?

‘I'm not a complete fool.' Pluckrose with the boys out strolling by the sea.

‘Oh, really – and what parts are missing? Do tell.' Miles with his milky, big face as placid as ever, just chipping in.

Pluckrose gave a delighted great howl of affront and barrelled himself into the wall, bouncing along it while staring at Miles. ‘Well, I'm bloody glad that you're on our side.'

Miles just sucked his pipe, the flicker of a grin escaping him before he could smooth it away.

Last evening of their leave and all of them out here, straggling into the wind along the dimming shore. The gusts punched at them and rubbed their mouths with salt, caught in their greatcoats and generally made them feel lively. Alfred thought that he would recognise the particular crack and drag and scuffle of his own crew's feet no matter what. Years could pass and make no difference: he would know them.

Eventually, the skipper halted, turned out to sea and they all gathered alongside him, watched the yellow-and-silver end to the day, the clean shine on the wave tops, the splitting and shaking of lights where water lay among the rocks. Alfred understood they were simply ignoring the rolls of wire staked out between them and the firth, defending the closed up houses and emptied hotels from a Nazi attack.

‘How's life, then?' The skipper nudged Alfred gently, murmured, ‘Ready for it all again, Boss?'

‘I suppose.'

‘You suppose?'

‘Well, the gunnery leader would miss me if I didn't go back. And the sergeant armourer – he told me that he'd cry.'

The skipper's hands, when Alfred looked at them, were cupping round his fag as usual. ‘And I'm sure he meant it.' The part of him that always showed the strain. ‘Always very sincere, your armourers.'

Alfred waited, because he knew that's what his skipper wanted.

‘You're a . . . you're a fighter, aren't you, Boss?'

This meaning that Pluckrose had told him about Alfred's father, which was fine. No secrets in the crew.

‘That is – if you wanted to talk about anything with your trusty skip, you would?'

‘Yes.' Hoping this can turn out to be a promise he needn't keep, because the skipper is a Sunday Best person, he's class, and shouldn't ever see Alfred's home, shouldn't know his family – even though he'd like Alfred's ma, because everyone did and because she had proper class herself and maybe after the war things would be so shaken up that she'd get to lead the life she ought to.

‘You've gone quiet on me, Boss . . . You know I don't like that.' Another nudge. ‘Are you sure you understand that I would help – that we'd all help with whatever you needed?'

Alfred studying a patch of sand very hard now, his forehead hot and a great, precious kind of brightness in his spine. ‘It's . . . that's . . . I would ask.' But thinking of Sergeant Hartnell, of asking him how to fight and win.

Hartnell had agreed, given him a tight, sharp glance, a frown, and then agreed. And they'd met up for three or four evenings and done their work: the Japanese stranglehold, the hip throw, the waist throw, breaking and making grips, disarming attackers, the sentry hold, striking with boot and hand and knife: around them the empty gymnasium making their movements echo and grow.

But it did no good.

‘Look, son.' Hartnell taking Alfred's arm in a way that required no violent response. ‘You're not the first. Happens quite often in fact. Lads come along and they ask me for help . . . help with an argument they've got to settle back at home . . .'

Alfred didn't shake his head, didn't do anything beyond standing and feeling slightly sick.

‘Part of growing up – knowing how to handle things. How to stop the bastards messing you about. But you . . . you're a gunner, mate. That's the thing you're good at. I'm not saying you'd have to shoot someone to sort them out. I'm not saying you should show them a gun and that'd wake them up and bring them round to your way of thinking. I can't suggest that and I haven't.'

‘No, Sarnt.'

‘Forget that sergeant business, we're just talking here.'

Alfred glancing up at this and seeing Hartnell's face, having the chance to take it in fully and noticing how he was quite old and tired-looking: a fit man, but tired.

‘Day, if you have a problem with someone, you come up behind them when they aren't expecting it and you hit them with a bit of pipe, or a bloody big piece of timber, or a chair, or whatever you can find. In a fair fight, I wouldn't back you. You understand it with your head, but there's no conviction. Now maybe you'll get that. But I wouldn't risk it myself. I was you? – bloody big piece of pipe and hit 'em so they won't get up. All right?'

‘Yes, Sar— Yes.'

‘That's us finished with this then. Won't waste my time any further, nor yours. And no more to be said about it. That clear?'

‘Clear.'

And they shook hands in silence, Hartnell seeming fatherly, like a father should.

‘Thanks.'

‘We've all done it, son. We've all gone home and sorted them out, or tried to. We've all done it.' He smiled in a grey, small way. ‘Now bugger off out of it – I'm gasping for a fag and cup of tea.'

Trotting back across the grass to his barracks, Alfred had started shivering. He'd stayed cold the rest of the night and seemed too young to be where he was and clumsy.

So it wasn't true that he was a fighter, not the way the skipper thought.

‘Skip?'

‘Yes, Boss.'

‘I'm not . . . I . . .' But he was a gunner. That was true. ‘I'll always do the best I can.'

Pluckrose breaking in here. ‘Lord – you pair. You look as if you've both lost your way to the mothers' meeting.' He punched their kidneys lightly. ‘Cheer up. Mrs Mac has promised to bring us a real cake for our leaving, possibly two – with fruit and booze and God knows what impossible delights – a garter from Jane Mansfield, who can say?'

‘More like a garter from Doris Waters. And anyway it's too bleedin' dark to keep on strolling.' Hanson chipping in with a rattly cough. ‘Unless we're supposed to be waiting for local skirt.'

‘Military Objectives Already Attacked – seen any?' Torrington drawling this out while he tucked his arm in through Pluckrose's.

‘'Fraid not, old dear.' Pluckrose swinging about and beginning to lead them home. ‘Not a Self-Evident Military Objective within miles. Unless they've been keeping things from us.'

Hanson coughed again, then spat, then spat again.

‘Well, I can't imagine why.' Miles muttering round his pipe stem. ‘Us is lovely, us is. You can't beat us.'

drop

Once he'd calmed himself, the being a stretcher-case job was not half bad. Alfred was bumped about and clattered down here and there for the best part of the day – with tea breaks now and then and lunch. He lolled his head when he was told to and even groaned a little, although that wasn't actually required.