Day (21 page)

All the tests were fine.

So you're set up and ready to fire off rifle bullets at armour plate, watch them bounce. Need a five-inch gun. Don't have one. Need a bloody cannon. Don't have one.

Like shooting peas at a nanny goat's arse.

Watch them bounce.

What larks.

Depression, elevation, rotation, nice and smooth.

Flying in Q for Queenie – a bit of a bucket, but you're too new to be trusted with anything else. You've had her once before and came home and perhaps you like her and besides you know a turret is a turret is a turret and that keeps you right. Leastways it's best to think so.

Not nervous, only packed: something strange, fierce, wound down into you and waiting. It feeds you, tires you, eats you, feeds you through the night. But you're not nervous. Miles is sick every time before he climbs aboard: fine once he's underway, just chucks up like a pup while he's still on the ground. You're good, though. The shaking is in everywhere but you – Q for Queenie trembling, rocking, shuddering and you trying to rest yourself against her, leaning back on her big breath – the ache, the shiver, the rattle, the ache, the shiver, the rattle.

Although you do want to shout sometimes, scream yourself free across the Channel, yell while you have the chance and there's nothing you can see that's come to hurt you.

Thinking that back on the ground Cheify has your wallet and your photograph of Joyce and the letter from your sister, from Dorothy, the one that said how falling slates had killed your mother, hurt her head, some ARP stranger finding her in the street. Your mother lying in the street and this makes you see her curled up on her side, as if she's resting for a while the way she did sometimes: sneaked a minute to herself and you sitting at the end of the bed and quiet as quiet to be a help and because then you know she'll let you stay. Always her eyes covered over by one hand.

Smelled of lavender and Cuticura, lily of the valley – no metal, no cordite, no fish guts, no fucking pain.

Judder through the second turn – France long gone, the goldish rim cast up from it far behind you, no blackout there – and a sick sweat hits you.

You haven't been paying attention.

No way to be totally sure of how long you were dreaming: scanning without scanning, betraying everyone.

Take another Benzedrine and breathe. Check your oxygen. Breathe.

Cover's too thick, visibility zero. Good to keep inside it, cosy – but you'll never see the target. Hit 'em with dead reckoning and guesswork – what a way to fight a war.

But it's not so bad.

The kick when the bombs are gone, the airframe jumping up in the love of it, the last spring in her lifting under you, flexing – bombs tumbling, diving to nothing, swallowed, a pale bloom spreading here and there, flushing the haze, but inconclusive.

‘That's another field of Nazi cows gone west, then.' Pluckrose – always sounds younger on the intercom and very far away.

Skipper swinging you round from the bomb run, the turn hauls and creaks behind your back and you are going home. First to take off, last to land, but you are going home.

Left foot getting chilly. The electric's gone US. Better remember to wriggle your toes. Wouldn't want to be without them.

And you're up in the dawn, in the start of it, the great, bright roll of tomorrow peeling wide. Should make you feel naked, but it cheers you – the day reaching out to find you, call you. You've been slow: headwind shoving at you, but you're almost there. It will still be dim when you're landing, everything layers of blue.

Unhook the oxygen mask, breathe some proper sweat- and Elsan-smelling air.

Funeral on Wednesday – get your Best Blue in order for that.

Except when she saw me in uniform she cried.

A quiet run. A milk run. Piece of cake.

Cover clearing slightly as you reach the Channel – typical, now it's no use – and you can see waves, the blades of them glinting.

Wrong.

A shine too high and then away again. Forty degrees.

Watch for him, watch for him, watch for him, the fucker.

Again. Not wave tops. Forty-five degrees.

‘Skip. Company. Eight hundred yards. In the cloud, but he's on us.'

‘Tell me when.'

Snapper, there's a fucking snapper trying his luck.

Don't want to go down in water. Fuck that.

Then you're uncovered, caved in a dirty white that he breaks through coming after, his yellow nose first and then his body while you sing it, sing out,
CorkscrewportGo
– thumbs firing and arse over tip into the corkscrew, thumbs firing and more noise than you can hear, thumbs firing and the gleam of tracer and churning at angles you don't understand, falling as if you will die and a bitterness filling your lungs and the belt cutting into your hip and doing no bloody good to hold you and the fit of the turret is close and you think of coffins and down Q for Queenie runs and surely you'll hit the water before you tear up, flat out, sick and staring.

But you talk, don't yell, you talk in among the other talking. ‘I don't see him.' Talking that might be thinking. ‘You see him?' As if you think your Lanc. ‘Astrodome caught it.' Understand how it is beyond yourself: blood and glycol feeling for you, knowing, telling you, ‘I don't see him.' As if you think each other,
are
each other, all one, stinging low above the water, then up and cloud gaping and slamming shut against you. ‘What caught it?' All one.

‘Shut up.' The skipper cracking in. ‘Now tell me. Any more sign of him.'

There was none.

‘And everyone OK?'

You call in, tell yourself you're all still there: Torrington, Hanson, Molloy.

‘Alfred here, Skipper. Fine.'

‘Rudder feels sluggish.'

And Miles sounds strange, confusing.

And you wait for Pluckrose and he doesn't say he's fine. And you ask yourselves if you heard, or if you saw anything, and Molloy is going back to take a look and you need Pluckrose, especially now you need him for a course to pancake quick, get down anywhere big enough, get help for him. You need him to help himself.

And Molloy, you hear him very clear, ‘Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.'

And Miles, ‘It wasn't a big noise. I wasn't sure.'

‘Jesus Christ.'

And then you know.

drop

What you remember is the smell of him, hot and something filthy about it.

Out of the turret before you're down, as soon as you see the runway rear up close, you clatter through your set of doors, slide back, slam your elbow into something and try to see – Molloy there on his knees and tugging something ragged across the wing spar – Miles with his back to you helping and this red mess with them. No face. Stumbling up towards you along the fuselage, dragging this mess. Trying to reach the first-aid kit, as if anything could be done with it. And then all of you by the door, all of you: Torrington, Miles and you are sitting, kneeling in the blood and doing nothing.

Recognise the trousers, the shoes. Pluckrose no longer Pluckrose.

You see without wanting to where they've hauled him and his pieces have come loose. Look at him once properly and, even then, you can't make out what's happened – a clotted hollow above his collar, a curve of bone and this glistening dark where he used to be, where he used to talk and look at you, and the one shoulder hangs and is ruined and big pale hands – his two hands but odd and messed with blood. He's all messed with blood.

He messes you, too.

Hard to let go when the door is opened and they try to take him, these strangers try to take him, take it, more pieces being lost – you don't like it, what he's turned into, but you don't want him to be with strangers.

Then they put you in a wagon – couple of sleepy corporals usher you up, keeping back. Miles, Molloy and you are all wrong with him on you and the others, even Skip, they don't want to see, they sit at the opposite side. You notice, though, the way Pluckrose is on them, too: their boots, their jacket hems, their trousers, because – swinging over the wing spar – they've rubbed through what he left, or they've walked in him down the fuselage – he's marked them. So you're together, the six of you messed.

The wagon starts to pull you somewhere else when you don't want to go, not anywhere else.

And Hanson, you're facing Hanson, who is now cleanest of the crew and he gives you this queer smile and a cigarette which you only hold, because you don't smoke and you don't want your hands near your mouth and then he leans his head back and lets himself sing.

You want to hurt him when he does, but then he stares at you again and you sing also and, by the time the wagon stops and the corporals come to get you, your whole crew is singing, what's left of your whole crew is singing – corny tune, a navy song.

‘All over the place'

Singing and laughing while the corporals swing down the back of the truck, singing and laughing and grinning and holding each other, grabbing at cloth, and covered in him and singing and singing while the corporals watch you: the crew that laughs.

‘He's there for a day and then he's away,

He's a-a-all over the place.'

drop

That afternoon the fake prisoners were being filmed picking the locks on their fake handcuffs. Back in the war, old Hitler had given the order to handcuff Kriegies, because some bloody fool had tied up a dinghy full of Luftwaffe types, or because there were nasty rumours to that effect. Penalty for non-compliance, one hour in the sun with hands up. They'd be filming that next: trembling British arms and British sweat, very dramatic – lots of sympathy you'd get with that – now that it wasn't happening any more, now that it was a story.

Although Alfred couldn't recall the cuffing lasted long. It hadn't turned out to be practical, what with the lock picks and complaints. And the camp was like anywhere else – it had its own patterns of cruelty and kindness, its own methods – the handcuffs had simply been superfluous.

Meanwhile, in the current scene, Alfred was required to sit still and look gloomy with a small eyepatch in place – suggesting his (as shown previously) head wound was getting better. He had no problem with sitting, or looking gloomy, and he liked to imagine the eyepatch would draw attention, seem dashing, mysterious.

And why would that matter, our kid? Think she'll go and watch the picture, do you? Think that'll do the trick – Joyce'll see you, way off in the background – eyepatch and a new moustache – and then she'll have to come and seek you out. When she never has before. When she wouldn't know where to start.

Which was probably rather more gloom than they'd asked for. But he couldn't help it, wasn't having a comfortable day, had the sensation of something burrowing in his chest.

Every break, he'd leave the hut and try to breathe, drag some life from the motionless, burning day. This time outside he saw a Good German working at one of the gardens. The chap had been hired to play a stern but ridiculous
Unteroffizier
. Right now he was in his shirtsleeves with a hoe. Roughly the same age as Alfred, something old about him, though, in the way he stood. ‘Hello. How are you.' English-looking, wearing good corduroys and giving a small, shy wave of his hand.

But Alfred didn't want to chat with a Good German.

The Good German kept at it, though, leaning on the hoe, over-friendly. ‘It's too hot honestly to stay out here, but I like to be with a garden.' A gentleness in his face that pressed for a reply, for some acknowledgement.

But Alfred didn't want to chat. Not with anyone.

The bloke had a funny accent for a German – a mix of Liverpool and something Northern. ‘A grand day for it, if we had a seaside we could go to.' Red on the bridge of his nose from the sun. ‘You caught me in Africa.' A panama kind of hat set far back on his head, so it gave him no shade. Silly bugger.

And then Alfred couldn't help it. ‘Caught you?'

The Good German straightened, eased out his back as if it were a little sore in a pleasing way. ‘Yes. Your Eighth Army. Near Mareth.' He grinned, maybe being pleased by something else: by having been a desert soldier and getting sunburned now, by Alfred giving him his answer, or maybe only nervous. ‘Then I was a prisoner in Yorkshire. Do you know it? Very pretty. But not always so warm as this.' He paused as if he thought Alfred might go away, might have heard enough. When Alfred didn't go, the Good German cleared his throat and then began. ‘After the war, we were kept for a while by your Mr Attlee and there was more farming to do, which I liked – always enjoyed plants – and some road mending and moving about a lot. We would make a garden for ourselves wherever we were sent.'

Alfred jerked up his chin once in agreement.

‘They help.'

‘A garden is nice.'

‘And keeping clean.'

‘If you can.'

‘We could. People were mainly very kind.' The Good German nodded. ‘I was classified as a grey – not white, not black – a grey person. You know what I mean by this?'

As soon as they could, they all had to confess. Everyone. If they wanted to be innocent, to never have gone wrong, then they'd have to tell you, talk it away. It made them happy.

You looked at him being happy, deep inside, how it glimmered in the colour of his eyes: him so chuffed that you were going to listen. ‘They showed me photographs and films – what had happened, what we'd done.' He made a point of facing you, hardly blinking, not breaking out in a glance to the side. ‘In March of 1948, they said I was allowed go back home, but there was nobody alive there.' He cleared his throat. ‘Excuse me. My aunt there, only gone mad. She recognised no one. And it wasn't my home.' He paused again. ‘
Aus der Traum
. Except we hadn't been dreaming. We had been awake. In all we did. Very important – not to confuse sleeping and being awake. When you are asleep you might do anything.' He paused to let Alfred understand this, in case he didn't already. ‘So I stayed with you. I live in Hawarden now. Do you know Hawarden?'