Day (22 page)

‘I don't.'

‘It's near Chester. Quite near Chester.'

Without noticing, Alfred had edged up to stand beside the Good German and after a little silence they both seemed easier, able to study the haze of carrot leaves, sweet peas and real peas. Alfred thought aloud, ‘Will this all be ready before they make us go?'

‘Maybe not, I think.'

‘Seems a shame.'

‘Except the flowers.'

‘Yes. They won't need the flowers.'

‘They're for us.'

‘We can enjoy them.'

‘Yes.'

‘And somebody will have it after us. The DPs. Somebody. It's proper to leave something for strangers when we're gone. It's a good thing. As if we have children.'

An ache growing in Alfred's forehead. ‘Do you?' Must be the sun.

‘Do I?'

‘Have children.'

‘No. My father was . . . misleading. I could be the same.' The Good German wiped his mouth. ‘I have a garden.'

‘A garden helps.'

‘You have one?'

‘No.' This tightening Alfred's throat, his lips. Eyes letting him down and becoming awkward.

‘You should find one.'

Alfred's turn to clear his throat, doing it a couple of times to keep steady. ‘Maybe. But you should have a kid, a lot of kids. It would suit you.' Knowing that was probably untrue. ‘You'd be all right.' Knowing most hopes were misleading. And knowing that Day, Alfred F., would not be all right, that nothing suits him.

The Good German setting his hand on Alfred's shoulder. ‘Maybe.'

For some reason the contact shook him, as if it were a blow. ‘No.' Alfred put his hands up to his face and pulled them down again, sheened with the way he was losing himself. He felt the Good German watching. ‘I should really get back. Work.' But Alfred didn't move. He stared at the earth, at how poor it was and dry. A wonder that anything could live. A wonder that anything ever gets to live. ‘I should. I should ask your name.'

‘Does this matter?'

‘No.'

‘Because we know each other.'

‘Yes.'

‘
Ach, was man aus mir gemacht hat
. . . You understand? I think this often. And what I allowed. I allowed them to make me what allowed them to make me. You understand?'

‘We made a bloody mess of it.' The Good German saying nothing in reply, although maybe nodding – Alfred had the idea the man was nodding, but couldn't look because he was busy preparing himself to ask, ‘Where were you from? Before.'

‘Hamburg. In Borgfelde, that was the distict. I was from Hamburg. All of my people were. Do you know Hamburg?'

‘I don't. No. I don't.'

Alfred left after that.

drop

Two funerals in one week.

The whole way on the train getting through to Wednesbury it was in your head – that one grave was more than enough, that if God was upstairs and arranging matters then He'd found a bloody funny way to do the job. But you didn't think there was anybody upstairs, not any more – or not anybody but pilots and crews, crews and pilots, poor fucking bastards.

People smiling when they see you're aircrew, but you can't smile back. And they forgive you that. Because you're aircrew. They think they know about you. But they don't.

Heading down from the station towards the Patent Shaft where cousin Ray worked and there's nothing different here, no change that you see, and this puzzles you, rattles and clings around your legs and makes it difficult to walk.

The air tastes of metal, iron dust, steel – no wonder you're a gunner, it's in your breath.

Back at the house and the curtains are drawn against the street. That's the only way you'd tell. No sign in the front gate being not quite shut, or the hard shapes of the roses in the narrow beds behind the wall – one either side of the little path. Your father always pruned things to nothing, the only bit of gardening he liked. Not much growth back in them yet. And brick everywhere: an almost glossy blue, like when there's too much blood: the way it changes, passes beyond red and that same faint iridescence, if you look – and you can't help looking, it's already happened before you can know you don't want to.

Brick wall, brick path, brick set around the roses in their beds, brick house.

Iridescence
: shifting with colours as the observer moves – from the Latin for iris. Which is something you can't understand until you've seen the ruin of an eye, when it's out and split and the iris cut and wrong and shining by your boot. That's the trouble with education, it never stops. It is too much. Too much everything.

It makes you feel buried.

All that brick.

And two doors along – you keep your head low and don't check – there's the mess where number 7 and number 9 used to be. Where the Corleys and the Thomases used to be. Mr Thomas once scared you with a frog, held it out in his hand to show you and it had jumped. The Corleys you didn't know well, because they weren't fond of boys – wanted the house kept neat, always washing the net curtains. Made them seem silly now: wasting their time with frogs and curtains when they'd been going to die all along. Hit by a lone raider, no warning.

They can't have been a target, only a mistake: bad navigation, or maybe aiming for the works, a secondary target, or maybe a crew just jettisoned their bombload because they were lost, or in a funk, or lazy. One night, the orphanage went up – probably nobody meant that to happen, either. But it still did.

Slates from the roof at the end of number 7, from what was left standing, that's what fell and hurt your mother. But no reason for her to be up there. The shops were the other way – and what friends she was allowed. And she wouldn't have liked to go nearby the damage, it would have scared her.

Two funerals in one week.

You knock at the door where she won't answer and when it opens you can smell her, you can hear her step, but it's only Ruth standing there to bring you in and Nan stepping up at the back of her, seeming tired. Nan calls you
the babby – here's the babby back wumm
– and brushes your hand and the pair of them are leading you into the parlour where you don't want to be.

The coffin is closed. Your mother now something that no one should see. The box looks like furniture: polished, dark – looks like a mistake, looks so much like a coffin that it can't be, that it ought to be a joke.

And there aren't so many people at the house, should have been more, should have been the fucking town – sisters there and a couple of neighbours, woman from the bakery – nobody knows why she came – and not many flowers, what with the war on, and then carrying her, the box between you and your father, the two of you leading the rest, right shoulder, you won't forget the weight, staining into it, down.

And the chapel waiting full, and you're proud for her then, and words from the preacher, words that no longer apply, never did, pretending, and you can't sing, but you want to because it's like shouting and that would help you, but you can't and then you carry her again and then there's nothing that you can remember after: not the earth, not losing her into the earth, and your father in his suit, thinks a lot of himself in the suit, you can tell, and the woman from the bakery is crying, but no one else, no family, the family's crying done with years ago, your father saw to that.

And there aren't so many people at the house, should have been more, should have been the fucking town. Sisters fussing with what little food there was, knowing your father could have shown better respect, could have provided, God knows, shopkeepers will always help shopkeepers: keep in with each other, they do: know each other's secrets, they do, he would only have to ask: for a special occasion, for burying his wife.

And you wouldn't stay the night: rather sleep on the railway station, rather sleep in the street, rather be anywhere, because you won't sleep.

And you stood in the bedroom, her bedroom, just before you left and you sat on the bed and you reached to her pillow, but didn't touch it, and then you stole her hairbrush – it was still on the dresser, still in the place she gave it – and you put it in your pocket and walked out, strands of her hair in your pocket.

And you never spoke to him all day, you never met his eyes, until he was standing in the hallway, ready to open the door for you, see you gone. Then he fell still, something so sudden about it that you stared round at him and he'd got you, made you watch as he started to smile.

And you knew then. He did it.

No slates. No accident.

He did it.

You hadn't stopped him.

He did it.

While you were playing somewhere else.

He did it.

You'd pushed him and he did it. This was how he'd pushed back.

He did it.

And you'd run from your music and the crew, broken your luck and lost Pluckrose, angry with the Germans.

He did it.

Not even thinking of him.

He did it.

Made you lose them both. Made you to blame when you lost them both.

He did it.

Swinging the door open for you now, flick in his wrist at the end when he lets go the wood, and that suit a good fit, new, he must have fiddled extra coupons, it's braced around the size of him, the block of him, and still he's showing you his teeth while you sweat and you are not you and the walls are bending back behind, they are disturbed, and you have to do nothing, step away, move your foot and then step and then again and do nothing, because this is important, this is all you understand – that you promise when you kill him he will not expect it and he will not smile.

drop

Awkward to the last. Struan Macallum Pluckrose, never let it be said that he left them without complications.

Alfred sitting by the window in the sergeants' mess. ‘What?' Failing to understand while Miles explains again.

‘He's entitled to one officer and twenty airmen. Escort – in attendance, that kind of idea. At least I think that's right.'

Alfred has only been gone for three days, but Miles looks thinner.

‘Of course, we'd be six of the twenty – so that's only really fourteen. Unless it's twenty and us. I don't know.' Miles rubs his forehead.

‘He's . . .' There was an op last night and Alfred missed it – only nine missions and everything spilling already, getting out of shape. It was impossible work, holding on to your crew.

Good scarf and driving cap to Pilot Officer Edgar Miles.

‘Except that it won't be a funeral. Bloody man, never could be simple about anything. Family tradition and all that – he has to go up North.' Miles stumbling under the weight of talking. ‘Has to go back . . . The ancestral plot. They want him . . .' He is grey.

‘Back where we were.' When he was out among ordinary people, Alfred forgot that shade of aircrew grey – particularly since he dodged most mirrors, most of the time.

‘Yes. Or thereabouts. Somewhere unpronounceable.' Miles folds his hands and gives a tiny shrug. ‘So we don't get to tell him goodbye, not really.'

‘Who does.'

‘Good job we pancaked where we did – let our own ground crew off the hook.'

‘Yes. Wouldn't have wanted them having to hose him out. Much better the way it happened.' And you don't think of flying back home in the afternoon with water still lying in the fuselage, pink water and the smell of bleach.

Two pounds to our ground crew – for beer and fleshpots.

And Miles nods and is quiet, because he understands you, is a man of your crew. ‘Didn't think much of the gunner they gave us last night.'

Alfred knowing they won't talk about the replacement navigator. ‘Well you didn't have to fall in love with him, did you – not just for one night.' The new navigator will stay – the gunner they probably won't see again. Unless maybe Alfred buys it, or Hanson. Then he might be back.

Clodhopping in, here's Hanson, ‘Less of that dirty talk from you.' He claps Alfred on the arm. ‘Bugger me, though – he was a fucking dud . . . didn't know what he was up to.' Fantastic pimple the Bastard's growing underneath his bottom lip. ‘Couldn't coordinate his scanning, then he's not scanning at all. Stripped the paper seals off the ejector openings – said he didn't approve.'

Alfred getting that lift back, that rush of his crew running near him, of being back inside the stream and the good, cold madness that lets you laugh when there's no laughter in you. ‘What – d'you think he didn't like the colour?'

‘I think 'is bloody guns froze is what I think and then he bloody lied about it after. I told him before we unstuck – you get thirty degrees of cosy out of that paper, I'd wrap my balls in it if I could.'

Miles chipping in softly, the way he does, ‘Then why don't you? Unless you'd rather not rustle when you walk.'

‘It isn't that.' Hanson making a big Stan Laurel grin. ‘It's just they're not so big, your sheets of cellophane paper.' He twiddles his fingers together across his chest, hamming it up. ‘Wouldn't want to crush anything vital. There's some things I care about.'

Which is enough of a reminder and the dark seeps up again. Alfred gets a sudden taste of that morning, the one Pluckrose didn't see. ‘Tell me again, will you?' The metal smell of blood.

Miles gives Hanson the nod and it's the Bastard who explains that you'll rendezvous at 1500 hours and there'll be a kind of service before they take the last of your Pluckrose away, boxed up like cod.

Five pounds to my crew, all to be spent at once on getting stinko.

He couldn't be an easy airman, follow the standard procedure: blow apart in the air, fly to earth in another country, stay out of sight. Had to come home and be our problem.

He'd upset people, that was the trouble – made himself noticed and liked which meant he'd be missed when no one could stand to miss him – the ladies came out of the NAAFI and got wet-eyed, when all that he'd ever done to them was bind about the food, and some ground crew were there, which you'd expect – only more than was necessary – and Bestwick and Cheify and Wingco and the squadron leader and the fucking padre and the guard of honour and too many bods, just standing about with nothing to do but feel, because Pluckrose was stupid and smiled at them, asked after their popsies and gave them lifts in the little blue Austin and was a visibly pleasant man. No one should be like that any more, it was only cruelty.