Day (5 page)

drop

The following morning he fainted which was daft – if you have someone pointing a gun at your face, you'd expect to go down there and then, or maybe when the danger's over and you think you can relax – anything earlier being, on the whole, unsafe and not recommended. But passing out a whole day later, that was something you shouldn't do. What was more, you might want to avoid passing out altogether as injurious to your health and dignity. And you never could tell what you'd miss while you lay unconscious – the world, as you know, being full of such lovely surprises.

Although Alfred had to admit that fainting was not in itself any type of surprise. There'd been a time – mainly '46 – when he'd dropped off the twig with great regularity. He'd grown quite used to the seconds of grey sinking that would signal an episode and, glad of the warning, he'd then avoid sharp edges, dogs or kiddies and hope to aim himself away from roads. He'd taken it quite calmly, he thought, been philosophical, and the trouble had cleared eventually, almost stopped. More than a year must have passed since he'd last found himself unwittingly horizontal.

But at 10.56, down he'd gone. He'd been standing to attention in a mocked-up
Appell
: everyone out on parade for the fake Nazis and a camera grinding by on rails, peering at the ranks in one direction and then sneaking back like an untrusting sergeant, inspecting them again. Meanwhile, the actors had this or that to say and this or that to do – he was too far away to catch the details. Then along came 10.56 and the colour dropped out of his morning, while his head pulled him down and forward through the usual, opening hole and he tried to slacken out his limbs, to roll into the impact he wouldn't feel.

Should have been a parachutist.

Too late now.

Two chaps had broken ranks, lifted and carried him into the shade of an empty hut. The director had liked the look of the whole palaver, and wanted to work it in, so some poor bastard (formerly of the Pay Corps and perhaps with an eye to future acting work) then spent the next two hours being required to crumple up and hit the deck: with arms flung out, with arms tucked in, with head back, head dropped, head lolled sideways, left and right, with every variation you might think of and more besides and then just one last time for luck, please, thank you. It was a fine game, filming.

Alfred sat on the ground and watched, staying in the cool, leaning against a wooden wall that still reeked of sap. He sipped the water he'd been given, didn't think where his mind had gone while he was out. Vasyl and another Ukrainian were off near the perimeter in regulation get-up, pretending to be Hans and Helmut on patrol. They were highly convincing, reproduced that odd wary/lazy trudge you would find in guards – so much so that Alfred was almost nervous to see them, felt vaguely confined.

Naturally Vasyl had spotted him hitting the deck. First thing Alfred had been aware of when he'd come to: the Ukrainian watching, then smoothing down his expression, nodding for some reason.

Alfred, for no reason, had nodded back.

Funny old life, ay it, cocker?

He looked up again now, but the pair had scoured on, were disappearing behind the mess hall and someone new was in the way.

‘How are you feeling?' One of the men who'd helped him – lanky type of customer, overbearing. ‘Hm?' You had the idea there was something wrong about him, that he'd stick if you touched him, that he'd cling.

Alfred wasn't in the mood for company. ‘Not so bad. How's yourself?' but he did make the effort and was polite. ‘Thanks for . . . hauling me out of the way.' You never should make the effort – or be polite.

‘Couldn't have left you lying. Untidy.' The man squatted down beside him on the soft earth, this suggesting the start of a conversation. ‘You're not the first.' He seemed smug about this.

While Alfred thought he really didn't care. ‘Good. I suppose. Or bad.' He fancied a nap, as it happened, but that might involve him in dreaming, so he supposed he'd better leave it be for now.

‘Came a cropper myself on Monday. When they had us doing all of that running about and shouting.' The man's tone implied that running about and shouting both might kill you.

‘You don't say.' Alfred intending this as an instruction and studying the pine trees past the wire – a long while since he'd done this: tried to think himself fifty yards away. Not so very far, but fifty yards that mattered all the same. He brushed the knees of his trousers – getting filthier each day – and prepared to stand. The medic had recommended he should go on sick parade, said at least to call in at the medical tent if he started to feel a bit badly. Alfred pondered this and also the lanky man, the idea of another ten minutes with the bastard whining at him, fishing for misery. Alfred soon convinced himself he was growing dire new symptoms – could be he should cut along sharpish, his being a desperate case. It was either that or go and fetch the Luger, show the director something he couldn't repeat. Not that you can't repeat killing – you just always kill someone new.

‘I do know.' The man intending this to halt Alfred's departure.

Ar, but do you know that if I think you gone, then you might as well be, do you know that I can do that – had years of practice? Do you know that's your safest bet?

But on he comes, persistent fucker, keeps picking at his scabs. ‘You know? I do know.' A reproachful dip in that last sentence, as if he shouldn't have to add that everyone from the services is a comrade and a friend in need. Suffering, he'd like to tell you, has forged eternal bonds. As if they weren't the last things you would want.

Worst of it is, there
are
bonds and it would be bloody typical if they
were
eternal: it would be very much your kind of luck.

Your friend in need attempts a humble-but-heroic delivery – like a cheap Leslie Howard – it doesn't suit him. ‘Still, they didn't kill us.'

Yes, but pretty much everyone else did get the chop. One way or another. And what sort of shape did it leave you in, mate? And, as if it mattered, exactly how buggered am I?

You see him take some of the dusty soil and then let it creep out through his fingers. He does this again. And again. Your own hands are still shaking from your fall, will keep on until this evening at least, and you don't want him to notice and say he understands the way you feel. You've never seen the point of understanding, it can't change anything. You stuff your fists into your pockets like contraband while he talks.

‘I ended up in Fallingbostel. Over that way: across the heath? Came out three stone lighter.'

You ignore him, watch the parade ground where a tumbling faint is practised, then performed – it looks rather splendid – before two men run in and stoop to cart the body off. The pair seem alert and athletic, but also tender – and the director has picked them to match, they might be brothers and are both most presentable, much neater than the fellows who lifted you. You also find them more convincing – the one who's fainting, too. He is undoubtedly better than you are at being you.

‘I can't seem to keep the weight on now.'

You have a pressure in your neck. Which is as close as you should get to being sad. Or maybe angry – you might also be that.

‘The wife gives me potatoes and potatoes, piles 'em on, but it makes no odds.'

You haven't got a wife. You've got two cardboard suitcases you've had to leave in Ivor Sands' back room and some books he'll have sold, although he promised not to. You can't trust him when he says that he won't do something you've not even mentioned – always means that he's actually bearing it in mind. Dickie Molloy was just the same.

You hear your voice say, ‘I ended up in a field beside a corpse. I stole his coat.'

And you want to tell this Fallingbostel man about the corpse – that it had been a particular pal of yours. It broke your heart to take that coat, only you didn't especially feel it at the time.

Because you were being happy that your pal was much bigger than you, so glad he was taller, and eager to fit his shape down around yours, wrapping yourself up inside him and going to sleep beside a shattered hedge.

Your broken heart, it's still not right. You don't forget, because of the days when you turn too quickly, or you roll over in your bed and the pieces of heart are jolted in together, still sharp. Makes you cough.

And the thing is, as you watch the filming: the phoney German officers – real Germans: Good Germans, but still real – and the phoney guards and phoney ranks of blue and grey and khaki and the whispers, the taste of plans evolving and the phoney CO with the gleaming rented boots – as you watch it all you ask yourself why you came and you can't answer.

Ivor asked you first, ages ago – pounced on you in the bookshop while you were sorting out new stock – and you couldn't make your story straight enough to tell him. Always a stickler for explanations, Ivor.

‘Why, dear boy?'

‘Why not, Ivor?'

‘Inadequate response.' Ivor's face not too good that day – the burn on his cheek seeming vicious, keeping a tight, pale grip on the flush of his skin. ‘Come on. You know it'll send you round the bend.'

‘I am round the bend.' Alfred opening
The Mesolithic Settlement of Northern Europe
and finding the pages smelled of damp and lilacs and maybe lamb, he thought lamb. Books remembered their old houses, their old owners. ‘D'you think anybody would buy this?'

‘Students, yes. And it's in good condition. Don't change the subject. Why go back? And why to a camp? And what do I do for assistance while you're gone?' He glared at
The Allegory of Love
, but set it on the pile for shelving. ‘You've only just managed to make yourself irreplaceable.'

‘Don't talk balls.' The shop empty, or Alfred wouldn't say this – no call to shock the book-buying types – Alfred had a soft spot for their customers: they were mainly the comfortable kind of strangers, reflective and sparse. Even the demanding ones didn't scare him, only wanted books.

‘I'll talk balls if I want to – cock and balls if I want to. You shouldn't go.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because you won't come back.'

And Alfred had realised this might be true and wondered why he hadn't thought of it before and Ivor had slammed down
Tropic of Capricorn
and battered out of the back room, out of the shop, leaving its comfortable quiet behind him and Alfred had stopped the sorting and made a cup of tea and sat still with it in his hands, not drinking.

It had seemed very light, to imagine leaving, not having to carry on. Calling it a day – Pluckrose made a joke of that all the time, pointing at Alfred, across counters and dance halls and the briefing room: ‘Let us call it A. Day' – that afternoon, though, it had meant a new thing – soothing and final and mild.

But the film camp hadn't been as he'd expected. At first it was only gentle and he'd thought he was fine about it, more contented than he had been in years. It had seemed not unlikely that he could work out his own little pantomime inside the professional pretence and tunnel right through to the place where he'd lost himself, or rather the dark, the numb gap he could tell was asleep inside him. Something else had been there once, but he couldn't think what. He was almost sure it had come adrift in Germany, in the real prison, in '43, or thereabouts. So it could possibly make sense that he'd turn up here and at least work out what was missing, maybe even put it back.

When the film people had driven them up to the gates in their rented Bedfords he'd felt – there was no other word – victorious. Perhaps a good few of them had, because they'd paraded in. There'd been a sense that the marching started as a joke, but then it fixed them, firmed, and their arms swung and their rhythm snapped and some Geordie-sounding bugger at the back shouted them round, halted them, stood them at ease, then allowed them to be dismissed.

Alfred had noticed some of the technicians pausing and a couple of them making what he knew must be smart remarks, but they were worried, too: they were thinking they weren't certain what they had here and that now it was caught inside the fence with them.

The fence itself was quite accurate. The guard towers, too, and the blue-and-white-checked coverlets and the bare board floors and creaking bunks, they were as true to life as they could be and, in a few days, they'd bred what they were meant to: boredom and queues and a kind of anxiety that silted down and stayed.

Which would really be why Alfred fainted, he supposed. Because the camp was winning, beating him again, and the edges of his dreams had dogs in them and they were running closer.

Jesus Christ, it isn't much to ask – the chance to recuperate undisturbed.

The Fallingbostel man still wasn't taking the hint: sitting with his eyes shut at this point, pretending to be contented because he was in the company of another bloody Kriegie and because bloody misery loves bloody company.

Alfred did what he could under the circumstances, wishing himself out towards the pine trees and filling his skull with the deadened drum of footsteps over layered needles, the clean scent of resin, branches springing against his arms. The scraped earth he was staring at didn't disappear, it only stopped meaning anything, while he made a ghost in the woods.

Wishing will make it so.

Not that it ever did. God, but he remembered the song – the Bastard loved every note of it. And he'd a sweet voice. Alfred found it eerie, watching the Bastard's thin, little lips move in his usually unwashed face and this nearly girlish, choirboy sound emerging.

‘Wishing will make it so, just keep on wishing and care will go.'

The crew generally ignored him, that being the only way, but one night Molloy had broken out. They'd been walking home, missed the bus, and Hanson warbling on as if he was somebody, running the chorus round and round beneath a low, waning moon. She'd seemed so big that night – the scar of shadow on her, but her shape still clear, the curve into her bright half, and the cold look she gave back to you whenever you caught her eye. No wonder you shouldn't fly when she was full – and not only because she'd light you up just as clearly as the target. You could tell you'd more to fear from her than that.