Day (20 page)

‘No, I don't remember. I was too busy being working class.'

‘Fuck you.'

‘Fuck you.'

‘We were all supposed to be civilised together, we were all supposed to be elevated. Well, we're not.' He's standing again, forgetting if he was frightened before, whatever pain there is in him rushing out at you. ‘I can only tolerate so much. We are not all the same, we should not all have to be together, we are not we. The whole fucking place is fucked!'

He's shouted again and it brings you in, craning up to face him, the way you've faced so many others in so many pubs and streets and lodging-house dining rooms, because there are so many places where stupid, stupid fuckers will say the wrong thing, will be the wrong thing, will be wrong. ‘Fuck you.' Standing with your chin near his chest, Alfred Francis Day, the little angry man.

He surprises you then, tucks his head low and whispers to you, ‘Last night I met a girl, a nice girl. And she didn't mind my face. Only then I found out she didn't mind it because she thought I'd been a fighter pilot and walking out with me on her arm was just the thing she needed to feel noble.'

‘Try telling them you flew in bombers. You won't be so popular then, either.'

‘Fuck you.'

‘Fuck you.'

But Ivor almost smiling, squinting at one hand and shy like a kid. You patted his shoulder and you let him have his way, spun on your heel and wandered out, caught the bus into town and walked where you shouldn't walk, because he'd made you raw already and some of your defence was missing, broken, so that you ended up tracking it: your love, pursuing the path of every impact, letting it group in around you, tight. The part of St Martin's Lane that sang with her, the comfortable rooms where you'd taken tea – your time then so constricted, the edges of it ripping and flaking away while you sat, but the two of you held inside what you were and safe and firm – and you're stupid, allow every detail to blaze in, penetrate, so that now when you cross behind the Palace Theatre and face north you can hardly move – everything altered and everything the same, no sign or hope or chance of her, but the air expecting that she'll come, that she's trying to meet you, the drag of it enough to leave you swaying by the kerb. Crying. Grown man in the street, crying.

This is what happens when you don't hide, this is what happens when you go looking for your life. The one you never had.

You take a beer somewhere quiet and low-ceilinged, leave when a man tries to sell you his watch and says he was at Anzio. There is a little rain when you go outside again, but the street was looking huddled before it started, and you a part of it too, trapped in a flinch out of habit, watching the pavement at your feet.

Which means you find money sometimes, coins people drop.

But you're always too embarrassed to pick them up.

In the end, it actually makes you want to go back and see Ivor. Because he'll be there. Because he has nowhere else that he could go. Like you.

And when you trip the bell on the door, it's past six and he's waiting inside a deserted shop. You suspect the place may have been empty all day – he does not look inviting.

And he fires off the line he's got ready for your return, ‘You have no moral high ground, not with me.' Sitting behind his desk as if he'll be your teacher, except his pullover is holed at the elbows, and his shirt, too.

‘And I have none with myself.' Which he didn't expect. Sometimes you give the person whatever it is they wanted to fight you about. Sometimes that defeats them more than you could.

Ivor leans his chair over on to its back legs. ‘All right then.'

And you wonder if this is the way a marriage goes, this delight in drawing blood, just a drop at a time. ‘And you have none with me.' Was this how you would have ended up with her? Was this how she would be with Antrobus? Were there happy marriages?

‘Fuck you.' He seems happy as he says so, in control of himself, except for his hands which cling to each other, clasp too hard.

You sit on his desk, claim his territory. ‘Let's not start that again. It's nothing to do with me that everything's buggered. Jerry didn't win the war and we didn't win the war. The spivs did. They were bound to. The spivs and the Whitehall Warriors.'

‘That little shit Attlee and his mob – worse than what we had before. They're all the bloody same. Promises, promises.'

‘And you were here at home and could have stopped it. I was busy.'

He lets the chair clump forward again – loves doing that, has dented the wood of the floor all about himself with years of doing that. ‘The shop's finished, you know.'

‘I thought we did well this month.'

‘Oh, we'll be fine for a while yet. But not the way it was.' He sips his tea. That'll be all he's managed today – made a cup of tea. ‘People read in the war. More people than ever. They understood it, all the things it could give them, the way it lasted out anything else. They appreciated it. You – you're the perfect example.' He points at you – officer class, they're always ones for pointing – as if they might buy you, or might want you taken away.

You point back, the way a gunner does, wishing you had your hand full, felt a trigger. ‘Thanks ever so. I'm still reading. I always will, it's mine.'

‘And it gives you somewhere nice to go at night. I know. We are not unalike. And I'm not saying they'll all just jack it in next week. It'll take years. And more years before they notice they never got their nice new world and their welfare state and by then people will be busy with the things that keep people busy, the unimportant things.'

‘Wives, lovers, families.' You can say this, because you can't hurt any more today and it's worth the sting that it leaves in your teeth to see him twitch.

‘The unimportant things.' He clears his throat and glances at you for a moment to find out if you'll hurt him again, really argue, or just stay and be company for him and have him be the same for you. ‘You'll see. After a while, they won't want what's here, then they'll think they don't need it and then they'll forget what it is. You'll see.'

‘I won't forget.'

‘It won't be up to you. Or me. We won't be relevant.'

‘You're a depressing bastard.'

‘You're no sunbeam, yourself.'

You stand, take off your coat and throw it into the back room. Something about the way it smells reminds you of Joyce. ‘You said I was hiding.'

‘I hope you're going to hang that up.'

‘Earlier, you said I was hiding. What did you mean?'

‘You know what I meant. We're both hiding. We're the kind of people nobody needs any more and so we end up here. With the kind of things no one will need any more.'

‘I'm not hiding.'

‘The pot's still warm.' Smoothing his hair down with both hands. ‘Have a restorative cup of tea. Of course you're hiding. Would you like to make toast? Why wouldn't you hide.'

You start to go through to the back, pick up your coat, because you are orderly, hanging it up on the peg by the door. ‘I'm all right for toast. I don't have to hide.'

He calls through after you, ‘Really? That's a relief. Well, let me know your embarrassment of other options . . . colonial administrator? One of those lads with medals who open doors at the nicer hotels? Or a Chelsea Pensioner – they get those crimson uniforms, lovely – could you do that? Not too handy for
me
, having been a conchie and all that, but would they have
you
. . . ? Don't take air force, do they? Bombers? Or what did you have in mind?'

‘Tea. I was thinking of tea.' Tea and toast – the operational diet. Tea without end and toast. ‘Tea the drink. Not the meal. Tea's not really a meal you'd ever eat, is it? It would be dinner to you, or supper?' He's left the milk right by the stove and it's turned with the heat – only bloody place where there is any heat in the shop.

‘I'll have a refill while you're in there.'

‘You'll get your own. I'm not a bleedin' servant.'

‘I'll get my own.'

And he comes to lean in the doorway, watching you stir in your sugar. He looks scared, but not of you. You hold out your hand and he gives you his empty cup.

drop

When it finds you out: your bad news, your bad luck, your bad life, there's maybe a second before the pain starts when you realise all that hiding had no point. However skilled you are at tucking what you care about away, however low you lie, however trained and fine you make yourself, it doesn't matter – you are a small, soft thing and the world is full of fire and hardness and if you are scared, alert, distracted, bored with your job, the bullet hits you all the same. It doesn't mind.

Piling off the farm truck near the station gates, the pack of you roaring about something and then thinking you ought to be quiet, but not quite fast enough, because out comes Chiefy and a ginger sergeant and they're looking not wholly amused and there's the small deer's head peering out under Pluckrose's arm and you are a shower and the leave has made you worse and wounding remarks may be expected and Chiefy's hauling up that final breath he needs before his wrath descends, but then it doesn't. He nods the crew in and, as you pass him, says you should see the chaplain, have a word, and he treats you as if you are ill somehow, delicate. This puzzles you. Skip and Pluckrose, both of them glance round towards you, but you shake your head to show that nothing's wrong and you quietly pass Molloy your kitbag and walk off, too light without it, under-equipped, and you go and present yourself as requested to the vicar.

Never took to him: Anglican and soapy, yellow teeth and a way of talking as if his tongue was sticking in the cracks between words, as if he enjoyed himself licking at the cracks. Some kind of dirt always on his glasses, smears – you'd have no way of spotting anything through that.

‘I'm afraid I have to tell you.'

But he wasn't afraid, you could see that. He probably hadn't ever been afraid, not the way he lived: boxed up and peering out at ordinary people and telling them he understood and that there was a sense and the presence of God in everything.

‘I'm afraid I have to tell you.'

You knew what it would be. You knew from his face, maybe from Chiefy's face.

‘I'm afraid.'

You wanted to put him up against your sandbank, fire a few thousand rounds in close beside him. That would help him be afraid.

‘Your mother unfortunately.'

Didn't want him talking about her. Didn't want her name in that mouth.

‘I am most dreadfully sorry.'

Felt like his saying so made it his fault. Felt like he wanted this all to be his business.

‘You can see Wingco at any time about leave, the funeral is, I think.'

They read your letters – in and out, they read them – stood between you and Joyce, between you and your mother: they are always in the way. Burned-out cases do it: penguins: nobody wants the job – censoring correspondence, getting in the way.

‘I am most.'

Hating him after this, every time you see him, shutting your head when he gave you out a blessing or a prayer, wished you well before you bombed. Not his fault. But hating him, all the same.

And you shouldn't have been in Scotland, not when you could have been home with your ma. So that was someone else to hate – yourself.

‘A very unfortunate accident.'

You could have been there.

‘With so many houses so badly damaged, one can't be too careful.'

‘Are yo sayin she wasn't careful?'

‘No, I merely –'

‘Are yo sayin she was daft? That she day know?'

‘I think perhaps –'

‘It wor her fault. Are yo sayin it was? How could it be her fault?'

‘You'll need time for reflection.'

‘It wor her fault.'

And he slides out and leaves you to know it was your fault. Yours and the fucking Germans. You let the fucking bastards murder her.

drop

Duisburg.

Day after you got the news and you could have gone home, they said so, but that wouldn't have been right. Your crew fly a mission without you, then you're lost. If you all go on together and you make it, get right the way through, that means they'll have worked out their time when you haven't, so you'll fly your extra mission without them at the end. You wouldn't want to deal with that.

Or they could leave you, not come back. You wouldn't want to deal with that.

And there's nothing you can do at home now, because she's dead.

And you want to bomb, tonight you need to bomb.

Tonight you want to kill the fuckers very much.

You don't wait to hear your music, you don't speak to the lads, only layer yourself up for warmth – the soft hat from Joyce, you leave that off: you can't let it see you as you are tonight – collect your gear and then ride the wagon with them out into the dark and the engines waking, speaking all around you and the flares of light.

And it's not so bad.

Not so bad going, rattling on through numb banks of cloud into the climb, gathering and stacking before it's time and Pluckrose calls the course and you're in the stream, you are the stream.

You're trying a new American oil and 50 per cent paraffin – meant to be just the thing to stop you freezing. Talked a lot about it this afternoon with the armourer Bestwick. He knew about your mother and said nothing, which is just what you'd have asked. Talked about oil, talked so much about oil – more than really anybody could – he even went and got the can to show you – see what a Yank can looked like. Almost went for a walk after that with Molloy and then couldn't face it.

And it's not so bad.

Water in veins on the Perspex.

When you tested your guns they jumped for you, lit out your will in whipping arcs and you told the skipper everything was fine, listened while Hanson did the same, the faint din from Torrington.