Day Read online

  ‘Isn’t worth two in Shepherd’s Bush.’

  They gave each other the sign for victory with some inaccuracy.

  As they did, Alfred stretched up to meet the idea of himself standing, which seemed a little slower than it had been at seven this evening. ‘I’ll get . . . the same.’

  The faces crammed at the table nodded to him and he wound off through the muddle of civilians, a couple of brown jobs over by themselves and blue and blue and blue. Old blue – men who’d finished with the preparation, who’d fired at drogues, who’d done their fighter affiliation, their cross-country exercises, who’d flown out with other crews, old hands, to learn the ropes, maybe had that childish fluster at the thought of separation – men who were on ops now, already working at the job – they were doing it, weren’t still waiting, weren’t unsure. Alfred and his crew were almost there, but almost there was nowhere.

  ‘Surprised meself.’

  ‘How d’you do that, then?’

  A pair of sergeants leaning into each other at the bar, hands slapping down slowly on a thin puddle of beer across the counter, palm over palm, as they spoke, peering close at each other’s faces.

  ‘Oxygen mask fell out of the hatch at twenty thousand feet.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Was wearing it at the time.’

  They didn’t laugh, only ground on, hands dipping and then rising off the bar top.

  ‘Fall won’t hurt you. Have my guarantee. Air’s the softiest, bounciest stuff you’ll meet. And it’s very thin that high.’

  ‘S’right.’

  The brown-haired sergeant rubbing at the black-haired sergeant’s neck, nodding and rubbing as if he couldn’t stop. ‘Just don’ land.’

  ‘S’right.’

  ‘Thass the only part that hurts. So don’t you try it.’

  ‘S’right.’

  ‘’Less you got a chute.’

  ‘’Course, got a chute. ’Less it doesn’t work.’

  ‘Take it back and complain.’

  ‘If it doesn’t open.’

  ‘Take it back to the girlie and complain.’

  ‘S’right.’

  Alfred had never asked, never gone to someone who was aircrew and actually tried to find out what they knew, what they really knew, and here it seemed there might be an opportunity. ‘Excuse me.’ If they thought he was a twerp, then at least they’d not remember in the morning. ‘Excuse me . . . if you wouldn’t mind.’ He’d sound soft, but that wouldn’t matter.

  They blinked at him, mouths pursed. ‘Wouldn’t mind?’

  ‘What wouldn’t we mind?’

  They were watching a movement he couldn’t see, something beyond him. ‘Did we mind?’ Hands still folding in across each other, wet with spilled beer.

  Alfred cleared his throat. ‘What’s it . . . If you wouldn’t mind.’ Only one shape for the question. ‘What’s it like?’

  Their eyes were pink, as if they’d been crying, or were sick – as if when they looked at anything it would be sore. They both had the rash from their oxygen masks, that mark.

  Alfred waited. ‘What’s it like.’ A soft kid’s question.

  ‘And who are you?’ The black-haired sergeant suddenly more sober. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Day. Alfie Day.’

  ‘Says he’s Alfie Day.’

  ‘Is he now. Is he.’

  ‘Wants to know what it’s like, Dusty.’

  ‘What is it like, then, Mogg.’

  Mogg and Dusty leaned their foreheads right in to touch, skin against skin, and rolled the contact back and forth. ‘It’s bloody awful.’

  ‘Wha’ did he think?’

  ‘Dunno, Dusty. Less find out.’

  They broke off and faced him again. Alfred answering before they could say any more, ‘I didn’t know. I don’t know. Why else would I ask?’

  This makes them twitch before Mogg begins gently, ‘Know about the breakfast, do you? Operational breakfast: real fresh eggs and bacon, maybe sausage. Traditional.’

  ‘Traditional.’

  ‘Home you come.’

  ‘Home from the sea.’

  ‘From the sky, Dusty.’

  ‘My mistake.’

  ‘From the sky.’

  ‘And you get your eggs and bacon hot. Treat. Know why you get the eggs, do you?’

  Alfred shook his head and so they gave him their catechism.

  ‘Penguins. Which is to say, all of the flying creatures –’

  ‘Which is airmen.’

  ‘Who do not, or cannot fly –’

  ‘Which is penguins.’

  ‘They sit at home while we go out and pay calls on the Hun and they lay us the eggs to be ready for when we come back.’

  They give Alfred time to nod, although he barely does.

  ‘Tell him about the bacon, Mogg.’

  ‘Ah, the bacon. Yes. Know why they feed us the bacon?’

  And Alfred wants never to be like these men and never to wear their grey sweat, their weariness. But he knows that he will – if he’s lucky, if he lives – and this makes him giddy and too loud when he tells them, ‘No.’

  ‘Shhh.’

  ‘Softly does it, sprog, or the Huns will hear. The snappers.’

  ‘Bacon, laddie. They feed us up on bacon, because bacon is our meat. Wait till you catch it, or some bugger lands with a burning boy on board, wait and you’ll understand. We’re all just pork.’

  ‘Cook us up and we all smell the same.’

  Alfred sat on his make-believe bed in his make-believe hut, a rolled shirt on his knees. He hadn’t opened it yet, but he could hear the gun inside it, breathing.

  They eat, they shit, they breathe – don’t ever mistake a gun for something dead.

  He wondered if there would be noise at dinner, which he wouldn’t like. He wondered if there would be ice cream. He wondered when the first change in him had come and when he had gone beyond where people lived: lost the God-bothering, his clean self, his redemption.

  I feel the life His wounds impart.

  He wondered why he’d ever thought that he could touch her.

  I feel the Saviour in my heart.

  He wondered where he could go now when the day came and he had to leave the camp.

  My chains fell off, my heart was free,

  He wondered about the gun there in his hands.

  I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.

  The gun that was watching, asking.

  All kinds of being free, our kid, all kinds of escaping.

  But what difference would it make. My heart’s not free.

  drop

  By the end of his time as a prisoner Alfred had been different, a new thing and surprising to himself. He lived in a way he couldn’t recognise: light and distant, as if his release had already come and unlocked somewhere underneath his skull, parted him from his dirt, his flesh. He didn’t need to feel any more, he didn’t need to eat.

  Convenient really, because there was no food. ’45 coming in cold enough to burn your lungs and all of the world crawling westward, driven, or folding up asleep in the snow, dropping out into one last drowse that seemed like drinking, or wading, or fighting if you happened to watch a man step off and catch it, if you were able to pay attention. Men who lay in the morning and never rose, men who forgot how to walk, men who slipped at the crack of a bullet, tumbled. Men who were things.

  There were roads and woods and railway trucks and there were driven things moving beside you – ahead and behind – and they might look at you, which you didn’t want, should be afraid of, their lost and dead and dangerous eyes – just like your own. And there was no food and no reason and no longer any pretending you’d find either.

  Your
chance to see the true world. Your chance to know you live where there is nothing for anyone.

  Sometime in that spring, he’d noticed his fingernails and seen they were still growing: his beard, his hair, they were still turning out more of themselves when the rest of him was reconciled to leaving and would have been impatient if he’d had the energy – there was only this final tiredness to get through, then he could be done. It seemed he’d become an argument now, a silly row over when he would let himself be peaceful, stop.

  Earlier, in the camp he’d still eaten, of course – and been hungry, of course.

  Clemmed.

  He’d grown up being clemmed, but hungry did just as well and then proved itself a more suitable word for the hard, deep, stalking thing that came to get them.

  Behind the wire they’d given each other lectures about the faraway and generous English countryside and collective farms and the early Christians and Plato and hygiene and modern art and he’d sat three examinations by correspondence and he’d taken extra time in the Straflager cells to study with no interruptions and he’d read whatever he could find – and Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, because he ought to and they were there – and he’d thoroughly improved his handwriting and had meanwhile learned, along with everyone, each of the ways you could be hungry.

  Extra bash – always trying to wangle extra bash.

  He’d found potato peelings once: spilled, possibly on purpose, when someone had taken the rubbish away from the back of the kitchens. Potato peelings. Wonderful. He’d rushed to tell Ringer – rushed in the sly, compressed way that you must if no one else is meant to see – and he and his best friend: quiet, tall Ringer, his best friend: they’d scuttled back and liberated them. Cooked everything in the hut, shared with the boys in the hut, filled themselves with slimy ounces of green potato peelings – sick as dogs the following day and wasted their rations – my, hadn’t they laughed. And why wouldn’t they laugh: their bodies turning comical, shrinking until their uniforms were absurd, asking them for dinner and then chucking it away.

  He’d lie at night and try to fool his stomach into resting, letting him sleep. But it was clever and alert. He’d picture it under his skin like a little fist, twisting whenever he shifted, reminding him that it was changing and making him changed, too. It was eager to keep his panic, his fear – it just wasn’t quite predictable with eating. And somehow it had swallowed his lack of Joyce, his certainty they’d never meet again, and at any quiet time it would let him understand her as a hollowness beside his spine. When he took his bread and tea, he would be careful, shy, not wanting to disturb her.

  Then, of course, the war had come up to find them, had sung and howled and thumped beyond the trees and Alfred had assumed they would be shot soon, but was wrong. They were told to prepare for a journey and given Red Cross parcels – hadn’t seen even a hint of one in months – and the tins were so heavy to take with you, but you couldn’t leave them and maybe, anyway, the journey was a lie and you’d be dead this time tomorrow, earlier, and what was it best to do – you didn’t know.

  He’d sat with Ringer and they’d tenderly eaten tins of bully beef, fought it down – with doses of cocoa mashed into butter, the miracle in a tall can each of proper butter – and Ringer had stared at him with his too big eyes and seemed worried.

  ‘It’ll be all right, our kid.’

  But Ringer not answering and forcing in more meat with his head dropped – everywhere people eating, or vomiting and swearing, or trying to barter tins of cocoa with the guards in exchange for bread – pack the tin with brick dust and a layer of cocoa on top and hope they won’t take offence about it later.

  ‘Ringer. It’ll be all right. After this, we’ll sew our shirts up into packs and then we’ll sort through what to take.’ He’d got her letters ready. They had to come in his pocket. Not that he should bother, because it was over. ‘Stick with each other in the morning and off we’ll go. We’ll manage if there’s two of us. Get that fittle down yo now – a nice bit of bash – keep your strength up.’ But he was welcoming the tiny, sharp thought that he’d be found with them in the snow – her cards, her notes, the last of the photographs – and maybe somebody would tell her later, or maybe write to her address, or maybe he was deciding to die with something she’d touched, touching him.

  That was the one good thing about it, the starvation – you were light-headed already when you realised you didn’t need your pride, you could let it be. No more of that or anything like that. You weren’t bothered. Now you only needed what you needed and wouldn’t get. That made everything simple.

  ‘You think the Russians’ll catch us?’ Ringer interrupting. ‘You think?’

  ‘Good if they do, isn’t it?’ Alfred breathing in meat grease and thinking he can’t get another mouthful down and past his clack, not another bit, but mostly he is far off and somebody could execute him now and that would be fine, or he could even talk to Joyce, explain every detail, and be very calm. ‘I want to see that dixie emptied.’

  ‘All right, Boss.’

  His name from a hundred years ago that Ringer had given him over again.

  ‘I’m not your boss. Just somebody has to decide. And keep you right.’

  Only Ringer is sad now and holding his spoon as if he’s ashamed of it, setting it back in the tin. ‘I’ll go again later.’ He rubs at his hair and it ignores him, goes off at its own angles in the way it always does. But he smiles so that Alfred will smile. ‘Are we downhearted?’ So quiet it might have been a thought they’d had and never spoken.

  ‘No.’ Alfred’s stomach cramping and his mouth sour. ‘No.’

  But that was before the full change.

  On the march or in the sidings – it had happened there, he thought – being turned to a thing that crept and lost its voice and couldn’t shiver. His lips grew this layer on them, since he didn’t much need his mouth.

  He would still remember holding Ringer’s hand, or sleeping against his back to know he was breathing. But if he thought of Ringer, allowed that, then things would slip on to the day when it went wrong and Ringer was took bad and messed himself as he walked and couldn’t be contented after that, stooped over more and wouldn’t look at you. Alfred had brought him clean snow, no shit near it, no fucking dysentery near it, but he wouldn’t take it. You don’t last without water. They could have gone on without eating, but not without water.

  And Alfred had been happy to die. Almost keen – why not be? Who was there to want him alive? Only other dead men.

  Even back in Cosford where they built him up – those children in blue uniforms, faces as if they’d been packed in gamgee cotton for the duration, milky – they’d brought him all sorts to eat, nothing too complicated at the start, but then good stuff, and some of it he’d managed, acted grateful in the way they wanted and supped it up, but he’d never believed that it would work. He’d mainly lain and waited and hoped they’d forget about him so that he could, too.

  And then everything had gone comical again: whatever he was made of changing its course and lifting him, stinging. One afternoon, there’d been this rushing inside his arms and his heart doubling, racketing about – there was no way to misunderstand the terrible life that roared back in. He’d been caught again and no escaping. It all would come for him and hurt him and he wouldn’t die, he would only want to and not get his way. He would have to be there, be Alfie Day and feel.

  drop

  Alfred had never quite believed in him, not at the start.

  ‘Day! What are you doing, Day?’ Sergeant Hartnell just looked too much like a sergeant. ‘What is it that you are trying to do?’ He had a rectangular head. Four corners at the top, four corners at the bottom – he had a head with corners.

  ‘Don’t know, Sarnt.’

  ‘I know you don’t know.’ He looked like an actor, or like the instructor they’d seen in
their first training film, who might have been an actor. ‘Everybody here knows you don’t know. The baby Jesus and all of his angels knows you don’t know.’

  Except Sergeant Hartnell was real and sweating with the effort of shouting at Alfred. Shouting made him sweat more than exercise ever did. He seemed very sensitive that way. ‘I should expect your bloody mother sitting back home knows you don’t know. She’s had the whole of her bleedin’ life to get used to you. But you came as a norrible bleedin’ shock to me.’

  Your bloody mother.

  Alfred found that offensive, which it was meant to be. He also found it too large to breathe round and this started a throb in his head which was not convenient and he wasn’t far from losing his temper which was worse – then again, if he didn’t, it put his personal Moral Fibre into doubt. A chap with Moral Fibre wasn’t meant to tolerate offence. Then again, offence from a sergeant was something you had to enjoy, so maybe that left you right back where you’d started – standing still while the man called your mother a bad word.

  My bloody sergeant.

  But Sergeant Hartnell intended to see Alfred’s Moral Fibre, needed its proof.

  Because Sergeant Hartnell did not like him.

  The trouble was, they’d got along at the start of basic training. Alfred had been relatively fit and keen to do better – he’d enjoyed the exercises: swinging and pressing and marching and squatting and jumping alongside lads who’d sat in offices all day, bods who were not determined, who had never heard of the Great Sandow, or anyone else. There was a proper gymnasium here – barbells and clubs and beams and ropes, the things you would need to improve yourself, already set in place without a word – no more mucking about with chairs and door frames and what you could rig up from drawings and instructions – it was all on hand. Alfred had taken to Sergeant Hartnell’s training, had enjoyed himself in a way: so, although he’d tried not to, he’d stood out, which is never a thing you ought to do.

  And, having caught his eye, Alfred had raised Sergeant Hartnell’s expectations.

  ‘Day, you are spreading alarm and despondency. You’re supposed to save that for the bleedin’ Nazis. Or am I wrong? Day? Have I been mistaken?’