Day (6 page)

‘
Dreamers tell us dreams come true, it's no mistake.
'

Then Molloy tearing past everybody and kicking at the wall. ‘Shut up with that fucking nonsense, will ya?' Kicking and then turning to the Bastard and plainly wanting to kick him, in a sweat for it, but going back for another lump of wall instead. ‘It never made anything so.'

‘Very clever, I'm shewer. Fuck you.'

‘You can fucking wish yourself . . . you can wish yourself . . .' and then Molloy was running off up the shine of the lane and over the rise and away from them.

‘
And wishes are the dreams we dream when we're awake
.'

Alfred had almost started after him, but the skipper had told him not.

‘Hanson, that isn't a song that we like. And don't try another, please, old man. Let's get some peace.'

The crew sticking to that after, silent, the Bastard behaving himself and their feet echoing somehow, the way they might if they'd wandered into some high, empty room.

Funny: the music had been hopeless since Alfred had come back to Germany. There were gramophones and some wirelesses, all right, but they never played anything he could like. Perhaps it was just as well, though – bring back the songs he'd been used to and he couldn't think what would be next.

You always were a soft git when it came to tunes.

He blames his ma and Wesley: Methodism – less of the preaching, give us a song. You couldn't take the sermons seriously, anyway, not when they were coming up out of some lay preacher you knew, someone who was only a person. Even the vicar seemed watery when you saw him. But the hymns, they'd roar clear through you, then pack you with faith.

‘My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.'

Just another way of saying that your wishing will make it so.

But it's still got a punch to it – imagine a touch of the melody and it drops you back. Young Alfred with his Sankey hymn book and the Sunday dust that smelled of aunts and tight, clean collars and happy ignorance.

Ma, she always kept faithful, no matter what. She loved it. I think she even loved that it was pointless, unrewarded. Singing in the chapel, she'd seem a girl, she would be lit. Except no one wants to be lit – it just draws attention.

The Fallingbostel fucker has tucked himself close beside Alfred and is breathing too loudly, managing to make his presence push in and nag, so Alfred faces him and, ‘The smell. That was the worst. Not the latrines, or the damp, things getting reasty, rotting – I mean the way we stank – human beings – us. When I got back, repatriated, they DDT'd me and then I don't know how many baths I took until the water stayed clean – they let you do that, were used to people needing it – but I didn't get rid of the stink for days. And sometimes it's here now, in my skin. Human beings, we're the worst stink in the world, like a disease. It's in us. Like a disease.' And this causes offence, which is what Alfred wanted.

The man stands up and you could almost be ashamed for him, because he is too clearly lonely and not mithered about who sees. Alfred keeps more orderly that, ‘I won't talk to you again.' Watching the back of him, how it's round-shouldered. ‘I don't know you. You don't know me.' Although this was too much, being purposely cruel, when Alfred hated cruelty.

Sod him, though. He should have expected it.

Because you can only meet so many people in one life and then you're not able, your welcome's worn out. Gunnery training at Jurby, the Initial Training Wing, the Operational Training Unit, all the training and training and people and people before you reach the station, your station. You get tired of new bods. For instance, maybe seven men are walking out at the end of a movie in Boston and they're a crew the way that you are and they've managed half a dozen ops and they have a bomb aimer who can sound like Tommy Hanley, or Lord Woolton giving Home Front tips – saying how
naice
his recipe for pie is – and then by the end of the week you don't have to meet them again and don't need to remember their names. After a while, you can't see the use of other people. You have enough with the skipper and Pluckrose, Miles and Molloy and Torrington and the Bastard. There's no need for anyone else.

Although you're not an idiot: you do realise that some night your crew will most probably get the chop. You don't brood, but the odds suggest strongly that they're done for. And this might depress you, what with all of the efforts you've made to know them well – it might seem that when you're together you're wasting your time. But naturally the mercy is that when they go you'll be there with them: dying too. You'll be together. Or, even better, the chances are that you'll go first. So it's OK, you can be fond of them, or have any other feelings you decide.

By that afternoon Alfred had firm orders to take things easy – they were having a rest from the crowd scenes, anyway – so he sat on a borrowed chair beside a few vegetable patches and started on his Sherlock Holmes stories,
His Last Bow.
This was a book (not paid for) that he'd brought with him from the shop, but he'd first read a copy in Germany, inside the wire.

At some point in '44 some WRVS women, perhaps from Epsom, had sent out a crate of reading matter, mainly crime fiction and adventures, which they must have supposed would please your average captured combatant – combining as they did both gunplay and imprisonment.

We couldn't fault their logic: derring-do and shooting, a pinch of death, and adventures mostly ended by a long spell in the bag. Why wouldn't we all adore that? So we thanked them for their kindness and their letters and did not in any way explain that holiday camps and prison camps were sometimes not quite alike – less, hiking, for example, and no tennis courts for us.

And ta very much, though I never said so, for the taste, when I opened your books, of thin gravy and old pruning shears and long, dry maidenly evenings, tucked up tight.

But the Kriegies had been genuinely grateful for the books. Even though the Epsom matrons had managed to omit anything racy: they wouldn't want to shock the boys, or lead them astray. So no
I'll Say She Does
and no
Miss Callaghan Comes to Grief.
The boys had looked very thoroughly to make sure, searched high and low, in fact. Still, Alfred – good lad and, by then, a keen reader – had worked his way through every book, enjoying the Conan Doyle most, because it was so long ago. He would try to have dreams of the Baker Street fireside: bustle down in the horse road beyond the windows, Holmes and Watson off defeating evil and nothing for him to do but be warm and slow and read papers chock-full of completely irrelevant news. Then Mrs Hudson might come up and lay out their tea: kedgeree, chops, bread and butter, a roast of beef. Some days the tea was all he'd picture – other times he couldn't stand it.

And trying not to see her, not to act another chase out through your sleep, searching houses you don't know, bomb sites, running round a strange, deserted aerodrome, knowing that Joyce is there and hiding, that she doesn't want you.

Dreams: ninety-nine times out of the hundred, you could shove them up your arse. Bloody hopeless.

He started the first story and made himself highly interested in the urgent telegram of Mr John Scott Eccles, but the paragraphs still slipped and fell, not letting him in. He drifted into staring at a Ukrainian in ferret's overalls who was hoeing the earth between rows of young leaves, occasionally smiling in Alfred's direction, but mainly just smiling.

Of course, in the beginning the film people made the gardens. They'd bought up a load of cabbages and such, raked out squares of ground and then sat the vegetables on them to dry up and die in the heat. Which was bloody ridiculous. And anyone could have told them what would happen next.

Within days, everything had been stolen, sold, bartered, cooked and eaten in the DP camp, or elsewhere. How could it not be? Food left and going to waste like that: it
had
to be stolen – stealing was the only possible, moral response.

This made the film people unhappy, because they needed scenes showing prisoners working at cultivation and, in the process, concealing the soil they had sneaked up from their tunnels. These sections would suggest a sense of humour among Kriegies and bravery, too – but nothing that might be unpleasant, or disturb an audience. Without the dying cabbages and so forth, they'd be left with just a scruffy mob of lads prodding round in sterile squares of dust. The film people complained, called a parade and uttered threats, forgetting that senses of humour and bravery (even in tiny amounts) might make such efforts quite counterproductive. The atmosphere turned a trifle sour, until it became slowly, quietly clear that the miniature gardens were filling again, as mysteriously as they'd emptied. This time they held real seedlings, proper life.

The growing weather was good and everybody saved their washing water to pour on what they thought of now as their allotments. The film people said they were pleased and that everything was for the best, but they also started keeping to themselves, eating their meals in a team at one corner of the improvised canteen, not joining in with the cricket games, or the football.

Out in the rest of the camp the Ukrainians and their willing prisoners were rubbing along not too badly.

‘Lend a hand on the land, eh?' Alfred assumed that the gardener would not understand him, but grinned as you should in such circumstances and got a laugh in answer.

‘Winston.' The Ukrainian's turn to grin.

It was as good a greeting as any. ‘Winston. Yes.'

Next, with considerable concentration, ‘This is a splendid afternoon.'

‘This
is
a splendid afternoon.'

‘Monty.' This said with finality, the Ukrainian shouldering his hoe and waving as he tiptoed out between the brightness of the seedlings.

‘Monty.' Alfred waved back

He shifted his chair across into the shadow and dived down again to reach Holmes and Watson and John Scott Eccles of Popham House, Lee.

He's not the one with the severed thumb – he's got a disappeared governess and a murder, or the fictitious business in Birmingham, I'm not sure.

The cases had blended together, but that was fine, because being unsure of what ended up where meant the stories could stand a few readings, twisting into each other more closely each time, while you went to them increasingly for nothing but the chatter between Holmes and his best friend and the hours you could spend constructing how they lived when you weren't there to see. Maybe not the best use of your mental energy.

But stops you wondering if she ever constructed how you lived when she wasn't there to see.

Chop it.

The trouble was, after a while tucked up in the Luftwaffe bag, you had truly felt fictional and afterwards it didn't leave you. The idea there was somebody beyond you imagining, picturing, guessing – it could make you seem more solid, more likely to survive, and worrying – you were ashamed of this – but if they might worry about you, that could wish you almost human again. You were certain on some days that worries could be a great power.

How to calculate deflections, how to clear jams and keep firing, how to apply to the station commander for leave not exceeding seven days, how to think of her thinking of you, how to believe it – you'd ended up with all sorts of habits that didn't suit you once your war was gone.

While I was in the bag, though – there are things you can't help, you just need them.

That she would think of me.

That she would worry.

Should have stuck to studying. I had a chance at learning Greek: we did have a primer. And before that, the RAF would have taught me Persian, but I never asked. Probably they'd have preferred that I just kept shooting.
But I could have asked.

I could have done all kinds of things.

‘Little Boss, will you do her or not?'

Hoping you'll make the right choice when for you there won't be one. That's the way your world works, that's your regulations, the ones that will always apply – never mind any more that service dress should be worn in the sergeants' mess during working hours, no flying clothes, and never mind any more that your chaplain should be regarded by all ranks as their friend and adviser – only this is still the truth: Alfred Francis Day will be nothing but wrong.

You will always be wrong.

Alfred abandoned the Conan Doyle, shut it up and put it on the ground: carefully, because you should be kind to books.

He sighed. Then he sighed again. Because he could.

Lucky I've got a nice nature. Lucky I'm not easily annoyed.

He'd sat in a school where he wasn't intended to learn for eight senseless years. He'd said prayers which served no purpose and must have taken days from him: weeks, if you added them together. He'd read about Physical Culture and the Great Sandow and Charles Atlas and the Mighty Young Apollon who kept an eye out for weak fellows who were discouraged and then gave them muscles and tendons of tempered steel. Alfred had saved and sent away for a chest expander, propelled himself through more days and weeks of repetitions with it and he maybe had gained a little weight, but then he'd been growing anyway, he'd been young. And he'd worked in his father's fish shop at cold, foul, stupid jobs.

Lucky altogether, really, aren't you? Can't think why you don't back horses and be done with it – lose the last of yourself: both your suitcases, get rid of all your excess weight. A regular Jonah, you are.

But only to yourself.

You never have to jinx anyone else, that's not allowed. Better to keep away if you thought you might.