The Gunner Girl (9 page)

There was a moment, on the brink of unconsciousness, when she was flying, then falling, and suddenly jerked awake at ground rush, eyes wide, blinking into the blackness, panic making her heart
thump. But all around was just the soft sighs of sleeping soldiers in the darkness. She slipped her head back under the covers and let sleep catch hold.

Images came and went. Dark shapes blurred and shoved, and her limbs were leaden: she was wading through fragments of terracotta, and earth, and a clump of pulverised flowers, dirty orange. There
was blood, and then flesh, like the slab at the butcher's: wet and exposed. And there was the hand: oval nails and a thin gold ring with sapphires. Plaster dust and ash fell like snow. She
reached down to touch the fingertips, and heard the sound of a woman screaming. She looked round to see who it could be, and she was awake, sitting up in bed with the sheets a mangled mess. The
sound wasn't a scream, it was a moan, and it was coming from the bunk above.

‘Nancy?' she whispered. The moan came again, louder. ‘Are you all right?'

‘Aye, stomach cramps,' came the eventual reply.

‘Need an aspirin?'

‘I've had one.' The moan again. The bunk moved and creaked, then there was silence for a while. Then the sound again, and the movement from the top bunk. She could see the
metal lattice of bed springs bulging down above her where Nancy's bulk quivered.

‘Are you sure you're okay?'

‘In-di-gestion,' the reply came out in a panted whisper. Nancy moaned again.

Joan pulled her torch from the bedside locker and pushed off the pile of sheets and blankets. The chill air snapped her into alertness. Even the wooden floorboards felt like ice. She climbed out
of bed and clambered up to the top bunk, holding the torch in her mouth. The beds wobbled like a tree house, and the torch beam played briefly over all the sleeping forms in the hut and then rested
on Nancy, lying on her side.

‘Nancy I'm worried about you.' Nancy just moaned, pulling her legs up higher. Joan could see a rictus of pain on the pale slice of her face visible in the torchlight. She put
the torch down and rubbed Nancy's back, underneath the bedclothes. The torch beam splayed out over the covers, making hills and valleys and caves out of the grey blankets.

‘Cold,' said Nancy; she was shivering, but her skin was slick with sweat, her pyjamas sticking to her back, the hair at the nape of her neck hot and damp.

‘You've had an aspirin?' said Joan.

‘Aye.'

‘Do you want me to find a medic?'

‘No!'

‘Okay, how about I get in, warm you up?'

Nancy groaned and Joan picked up her torch and pulled back the covers. She thought she could just give Nancy a hug, soothe her back to sleep. If she'd had an aspirin, and didn't want
a medic, then there didn't seem much else to do.

Joan lifted the heavy blankets but as she did so, her fingertips felt wetness. She angled the torch down. Horrified, she saw the sheets were drenched in blood. Nancy's arms were clenched
round her stomach, her striped pyjamas wetly clinging. The moan came again, long and loud, and Nancy's tight form quivered. Joan put the covers back.

‘I'm going for help.'

Running through the corridors, knocking and calling in the pitch-black. The duty sergeant wasn't in her room. Dark shapes blurred and shoved, and her limbs were leaden: she couldn't
run fast enough. There must be someone, some way to get help. Nobody in the ATS accommodation but sleeping trainees, fat lot of good they'd be. She needed a medic, or someone with a
telephone. There would be a telephone in the officers' mess, but that was forbidden. She was only a gunner. And she was a woman. And she was in her night-clothes. And it was the middle of the
night.

She pushed open the fire door and ran out into the blackness. The icy drill square stung her bare feet and she felt as if she'd just plunged into a frozen lake. The officers' mess
was a white rectangle in the distance, its front lawns chained like necklaces around an aristocratic neck. The windows were black. The stars were out, the moon a silver scythe above the horizon.
She ran along the path and up the steps to the door. There was a brass knocker. She grabbed it and rammed again and again and again, until at last she heard footfalls coming closer.

Joan got extra duties for being out inappropriately dressed and being in an unauthorised area, but the troop staffie told her later that the ambulance driver said she probably
saved Nancy's life. Acute appendicitis, that's what they said it was. Joan wondered about all that blood. Had her appendix actually burst? The troop staffie didn't answer.

The next morning the whole training camp could talk of nothing else but Scottish Nancy's appendicitis and Joan's late-night foray into the officers' mess. Edie said she'd
have plenty to put in her diary about the previous night's excitement, and Bea said it was good of her to give them all something to write home about. Joan was excused from training for a
couple of hours, to clean up and get some rest.

How different it was, in the barrack block, empty of the voices and bodies that usually filled it up. There were ranks of identical bunks, all except hers – she'd had to file a
report to the welfare officer first thing, there'd been no time to sort out her bed blocks – which was a mound of bedclothes and coats. As she looked at it she was reminded of
something, another pile of clothes and coats and a torn patchwork quilt, chill blackness and the sound of a yapping dog. She felt sick, suddenly. She shook her head, took a deep breath in. She was
just overtired, that was all.

Rain drummed on the roof and from outside there was a thin ribbon of singing away in the distance, as the rest of the squad began their route march: ‘She'll be wearing khaki bloomers
when she comes . . .' There was the vibrating thrum of a convoy of lorries driving into the fuel depot, and some intermittent shouts from the parade ground, but inside it was silent and
empty. Someone had already stripped Nancy's bunk and removed her tin trunk from under the bed. The mattress was gone, leaving just the wire netting of the top bunk. The floor around their
bunks had been mopped, leaving a dark patch on the floorboards and a smell of disinfectant.

Joan pulled off her shoes and slipped under the muddled covers, looking up at the metal links where Nancy's mattress had been. She could see the crack in the ceiling; the discoloured paint
like the face of the moon. Her bedclothes were in a lumpen pile, with her army greatcoat and civvie coat on top, for extra warmth. She fingered the civvie coat. She'd been wearing it the day
she joined up, with Edie, before they were selected for anti-aircraft training.

She remembered hot tea, and a cold station platform. She remembered the rickety old steam train, and Edie chatting, sharing sandwiches and seed cake from her shiny handbag. When she got to the
training camp in Devon, she'd showed her ID card and call-up papers. Joan Tucker, it said. She was Joan Tucker and she was just eighteen.

Joan looked up to where the metal cage bisected the cracked ceiling into little leaf shapes, the colour of skin. What about before the station, before the train ride? She closed her eyes in an
effort to remember. Vertigo. A sheer drop into blankness: the smell of chrysanthemums and something acrid, burnt, a voice shouting ‘get down, get down', and the feeling of falling. And
that was all. She opened her eyes again. There was a horrible taste in her mouth and her head throbbed. It was no good. She just felt that sick-dizzy-panic all over again. And she didn't want
to lie here on her own, with all those unwanted thoughts, like clothes spilling from a drawer that wouldn't shut. She'd go to the NAAFI for a smoke and a brew, until the others came
back. There was always someone to talk to there.

She got up and pulled the coats off the bed, smoothed and folded sheets and blankets, shook out pillows, tightened corners, until her bed looked the same as all the others. She hung up her army
greatcoat and shook out the folds of her civvie coat. Something fell out of the pocket, a piece of paper. She picked it up, unfolded it. There was scrunched-up handwriting, in pencil. An image
flashed into her mind: a man's face with round blue eyes, a bloodied cheek.

Flight Sergeant Robin Nelson
, said the strange handwriting. And there was an address, an RAF camp in Kent. A small memory floated like a bubble to the surface of her consciousness, the
musky smell of sweat and fabric and the feel of stubble against her cheek.

Robin was so tired he could barely speak, and ended up with soft-boiled eggs instead of hard. The mess felt loud and enclosed, as if he were stuck inside a brass bell that had
just been rung, reverberating. Quiet. He needed some quiet. His mind flipped and spun in the hubbub, back to the dark, the cold, the immense buzz of the engines, the tip and swerve and
Harper's lot ahead of them, suddenly ablaze, a roiling bonfire spiralling away. He breathed in sharply and forced himself to actively look at what was before him: the varnished table, the
steaming enamel mug of tea, the oozing, smashed up egg. He tried not to look any further, not to notice the empty chair opposite, where Harper usually sat.

‘Who's a lucky boy, then?' A sudden voice, cockney, and a pile of post tossed next to his tea. A small, flat, brown-paper parcel, a gaudy postcard and a letter. The postcard
first, a picture of the Blackpool Tower with a beach empty but for a solitary donkey with a small child on its weary back, the message overleaf depressingly short:

The parcel, he could tell, was from his mother. He squished it. Another pair of socks, by the feel of it. And probably a long letter detailing her WVS and his father's Home Guard duties,
along with news of the shop and details of how many of his old classmates were now missing in action, or worse. It could wait.

But the letter. Beautiful thick notepaper and handwriting he didn't recognise. The postmark said Reading. He didn't know anyone in Reading. He turned it over. On the reverse was a
lipsticked kiss. Well, it wasn't from Pam, that much was certain. He looked at the return address. Gunner Tucker, it said. Gunner Tucker? He picked up his knife, slit open the envelope and
pulled out the single sheet of notepaper. Quickly, his eyes scanned down to the signature: Joan.

Joan?

His mind corkscrewed and dived, whirling back to late autumn, when he'd been up visiting RAF Hendon, coming through Finchley because of Uncle Len, and there'd been that sudden blast,
almost literally out of the blue, except it was already evening, and there was that poor girl, that very pretty girl: Joan.

Joan Tucker.

‘You put your whole self in, your whole self out . . .'

Everyone sang along and the army band tootled and crashed up on the dais, underneath the Union Jack and the picture of the King and Queen. It was just the weekly hop, nothing special: checked
cloths on the tables, painted rattan chairs, YMCA cream cakes and the dusty shuffle of army shoes on the polished floor. Edie and Bea were on either side of her, holding her hands.

‘
Whoa, the Hokey Cokey! Knees bend, arms stretch, ra-ra-ra!
' They burst out laughing as the Hokey Cokey came to a close, and slipped back to their table to grab a swig of
lemonade. Joan saw their Junior Commander, Joyce Montagu, being chatted up by Sergeant Taylor underneath a poster that displayed keep it under your hat and picture of a tin hat. With his square jaw
and her golden ringlets, they could have been a couple in a film. As the band struck up ‘In the Mood', he whirled her onto the dance floor, and other couples fell towards each other,
grasping, shifting and swaying, like khaki ripples in a rip tide.

Bea was pulled away by one of the portly old sentries, and Edie was whisked off by a young second lieutenant who kept manoeuvring her into the tables at the edges of the room. Corporal Jones,
the post orderly, appeared at Joan's side, and she couldn't very well refuse. He had sad, bulging eyes, that stayed turned down even when he smiled – which he didn't, much.
They joined the throng. His large hand was tight in the small of her back and her head rested against his breast pocket. He was a good dancer, for someone so tall, and it wasn't unpleasant to
let herself be propelled around in time to the music and smell the scent of talc and cloth and a tinge of fresh sweat.

‘That lipstick looks nice,' he said.

‘Thank you for lending me the bike to get to the village shop.'

‘You're welcome. Anytime. I mean it, just ask.'

‘Thank you.'

She was enjoying being gently pushed and turned, underneath the electric bulbs and the twinkle from the glitter ball.

‘I heard about that Scottish girl. They said what you did saved her life.'

‘It was nothing,' she replied. And she suddenly remembered that airman: Robin.

‘It was nothing,' he'd said, too. She could picture his face, the lips moving, the wash of stubble, the dark red cut on his cheek and how his blue eyes had screwed up, like he
was going to cry. She remembered him saying that, being next to him, seeing blackout curtains tight shut, and the smell of disinfectant. His name was Flight Sergeant Robin Nelson, and he was based
at RAF West Malling and she'd found his address in her pocket. So she must have been wearing that coat. But where were they? What were they doing there? She thought about the letter
she'd sent him – she'd borrowed some of Edie's Basildon Bond notepaper – a short letter, more a series of questions, really. She shifted and twirled with Corporal
Jones, remembering the feel of that airman's uniform against her cheek, trying to think beyond his shoulder and face, but it was just a blur. All she could see was the airman's lips,
saying ‘nothing' and that sad look in his eyes. She knew he was important; she just wished she knew why. Had he got her letter?