Day

by A. L. Kennedy

  ‘Yes.’ As close to a whisper as Pluckrose ever got. ‘Served in the trenches: ’14 to ’18: and while he was there, to stay sane he taught himself card tricks, magic. Turned professional in peacetime. I saw him once – amazing. Did remarkable things in all directions – while wearing gloves. Magic was how he stayed sane.’ He leaned his head over, blinked at Alfie, hesitant.

  ‘Well, go on, you big, soft article. What’s your plan?’

  ‘More of a theory. Yes. That would be more accurate.’ He paused again, but then grinned at Alfred and patted his arm. ‘You see, I stay sane imagining people like Cardini – or Rob Wilton, Tommy Trinder, Jasper Maskelyne, old Maxie, Max Miller – I run through a great, long music-hall bill: wonderful turns and plenty of dancing girls between, loads of leg. Keeps up the morale. D’you see?’

  Alfred didn’t want to disappoint the pink, affectionate face looming in at him. ‘Not . . . I don’t really . . . No.’

  Pluckrose sighed. You could see him wondering whether he should go on.

  Alfred elbowed him gently. ‘Because you’re no bloody use at explaining, you barm pot. Have another go.’

  ‘Suddenly, you suit those sergeant’s stripes.’

  ‘Get on with it.’

  ‘Precisely.’ Pluckrose beamed, buoyant again. ‘Any road up – I was reflecting on a bit of business I’d seen old Cardini do and then . . .’ He grinned with significance. ‘I got interrupted. Had to jump off the blood wagon and climb aboard D for Doris and drop HE on the widows and orphans –’

  ‘Don’t joke about that. I’ve told you.’

  ‘Only being realistic. But as you wish. The point is – I got interrupted. This is on Wednesday last, you may remember – our first little visit to Germany . . . So all the way out to Happy Valley and all the way back with the natives decidedly hostile, chucking pots and pans and fuck knows what – for the whole of the op, in the back of my mind, there’s this idea that I have to get home, because I wasn’t fucking finished with what I was doing. Cardini – I hadn’t thought through to the end of his turn. I wasn’t done.’

  ‘You’re not seriously –’

  ‘No. I’m not. I’m just saying it maybe could do us no harm if when we left on our next outing, we had something unfinished.’

  ‘You want us to learn card tricks?’

  ‘No. You dreadful little troll. I want . . .’ Pluckrose halted, drew in a large breath and hissed it out while he folded his hands behind his head, stretched the length of his back. ‘Tell you what, I’ll show you.’

  ‘Show me what?’

  ‘I’ll show you.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When the time is right. When the time is right.’ And he strolled back to the armchairs, sucking at his imaginary pipe. None of which made much sense to Alfred.

  But he did understand when Pluckrose set up the gramophone and started ‘I’ll See You in My Dreams’ playing when they’d already run out of time, when their third op was ready for them and the dark outside busy with trucks and flying boots and murmuring.

  ‘Tho’ the days are long, twilight sings a song,’

  Edgar Miles softly quizzical. ‘No point in doing that now, is there?’

  ‘Of the happiness that used to be,’

  Pluckrose staring straight at Alfred, wanting him to understand. ‘Oh, there’s every possible point, every possible point.’

  ‘Soon my eyes will close, soon I’ll find repose,’

  And he bolted right out of the room before the rest of the song could reach him. Alfred waited a breath and followed, wished for unfinished business, a key that would open the war, bring him back safely – bring him back for Joyce.

  It had worked. They had a genuine milk run down to Turin – the Alps turning and folding and glimmering under his heels, the furrowing and cupping of moonlight, and then flak that didn’t reach them, didn’t really try, and an uncomplicated target: docks and cranes and industry: things that you wanted to hit.

  ‘I told you.’

  It had worked. The easiest possible op, and the debriefing almost intoxicated: boisterous and short.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you?’

  It had worked.

  After that the crew would rendezvous on the running boards of Pluckrose’s Austin 10, inside it on the driver’s seat, Pluckrose’s gramophone. He would wind her up, lower the needle, close the door and the pack of them would listen, the skipper always eye-rolling slightly. A few lines in, Pluckrose would nod his head and away they would trot to break the melody, collect themselves, dress – being sure to take it easy once they’d got layered up for the night, careful not to sweat: it lets the cold in later, leads to frostbite. Then they’d make their final prepar-ations, climb into the blood wagon, heavy with kit – Alfred thinking hard that when the day came, when his work was done, he’d do his best to still be living and whatever had been left unfinished would be there for him again.

  There was one other habit they developed. It was a night-time thing.

  ‘Ow.’

  This one, Alfred gave them – his baby.

  ‘Bleeder! ’

  Boots in the grass and breathing – everyone circled together at the back of the firing range – the crew not especially stealthy. Stealth being alien to its nature.

  ‘Ah – ah – buggerit.’

  In fact, the more they needed to be quiet, the noisier they got.

  Bastard Hanson, ‘Fucker.’ And a sweet little impact cracking just before he spoke. It sounded as if he’d been clipped square on the forehead. ‘Fuck.’

  Like each of them, he shouldn’t have been speaking. The point was, Alfie’s idea was, to wait until dark and then go by sight when there wasn’t any sight, to have no clues – why else be freezing their bollocks off out here?

  ‘Shit.’ The big shade that was Pluckrose complaining now, shifting, and after that the noise of his arm as it swung.

  Somewhere to port Alfred heard a thud, a stumble, had the sense of something crouching and then elongating when he stared towards it. His fingers were numbed already with the slicing Lincolnshire breeze and his head was starting to get that familiar, gun-turret sting from looking at nothing, reaching ahead into nothing, and looking again. A rind of moon, a glimmer of ice on the turf, but the rest only blanks and him raising his head, straining towards graded thicknesses of doubt.

  Another thump to starboard, and a round slap of skin along with it, too – someone had made the catch. Torrington, he thought.

  Then something like a swoop and an exhalation and a marvellous, slow moment when Alfred could see a dark tear apart from the dark, grow and find him.

  ‘Buggerit.’

  His hands had reached up, but didn’t quite stop the cricket ball neatly: he felt a jarring run through his thumb. ‘Bugger.’ He couldn’t afford to have a damaged thumb. And he’d meant to stay silent and set an example.

  He could hear a snigger over where the Bastard would be standing and so Alfred let himself cheat, looping his arm back, getting a whip into his wrist and aiming at the sound, the part of him that was gunnery making him glad.

  ‘Fucker! ’

  A sigh came and Alfred knew it was the skipper. ‘Look . . . if we’re going to do this at all, then everyone has to keep their bloody trap shut.’

  There were coughs in the gloom and other sighs, the crew ashamed now – they hadn’t been trying their best.

  ‘Sorry, Skip.’ Pluckrose smoothing, calming, the way he liked to sometimes. ‘It’s that bloody jam sponge they fed us this evening – don’t know about the others, but I can hardly stand.’ Always binding about something. ‘There was fucking whale oil in it, I swear, and fucking big collops of snoek tucked away in the custard . . . in a world where cream is made from pig fat, how is a man to survive?’

  ‘Well, even so. If we’re t
o do this, we have to do it properly.’

  ‘I was, Skip.’ The Bastard lying his head off when he’d been catching the ball with his face ever since they started. ‘Getting the hang of it, I was.’

  ‘And squealing like a Chelsea tart.’ Molloy blowing on his hands as he grumbled. ‘Are we going to get on there, or are we going to stop, or what are we doing?’

  ‘Another thirty minutes.’ Skipper with a laugh in his voice, but solid about this also, near to losing his temper.

  ‘What?’ Molloy squealing himself. ‘Then can we step back inside and get on our Irvin suits, or I’m going to lose extrem-ities to which I’m partial.’

  Skipper using his intercom voice to reply, the one you wouldn’t argue with. ‘Another thirty minutes and then the Duck’s Head.’

  So without being told they shuffled themselves softly, moved to new places, paused. Alfred with that small gleam behind his ribs, the one that indicated he belonged here, with his crew, while they drew one breath, angled themselves into one intention and started again.

  Because all of them had to learn a way to see where you couldn’t see. Because holding up silhouettes on sticks and shooting clay pigeons wouldn’t be enough, no matter what the squadron gunnery leader liked to say. And because they needn’t just rely on the gunners – anyone might catch a sight of something, if they knew how they should look. And because the more they were together, the more they would feel together and work and think and act together. And because if they kept on doing impossible things – even something as small as catching and throwing a cricket ball in the dark – then maybe they would last out thirty ops.

  drop

  It was cold and very light. Alfred sat on the damp of a little bench and watched his breath drag away from him slowly and sink in the grass. Back at the station, dawn would have been a while away yet, but up here, so much further north, the day had started and the tall hedge behind him was layered with birdsong and the rattle of last season’s leaves while a press of new green rushed out among the twigs, so hard and certain that it disturbed him, brought up a gladness he would rather not have.

  He’d come out for peace and stillness – Pluckrose’s shaggy garden stretching ahead of him like a park, like too much for anyone’s family to have all for themselves and with flower beds and lawns and vegetable plots to the sides – the plot dormant now: he was proud of the suitable use of dormant, enjoyed it – everything too generous, or too greedy, and the Pluckrose house leaning up against the sky, huge at Alfred’s back: three storeys and two staircases and plenty of doors and then more doors and then far too many doors and you had to keep from thinking of it sometimes, because it could seem alarming. Left to himself he could feel uneasy – as if he were a poacher or a thief.

  But he couldn’t be in company yet, either – not this morning, not inside with the crew and the chatter, the hours of tea and breakfast they’d cook up. In there they were building something like a family – the kind they’d have asked for, if they’d ever had a choice – and that meant they were also betraying their own. The guilty comfort of it wound him in and he knew he believed it, trusted, understood it wasn’t only a war thing, that it was permanent. They were his crew.

  This couple, the MacKenzies, would come by with loaves and rashers and eggs and butter and sausage and God knew where they got it – out of the country people and no questions asked, he supposed – this was the country – and you could tell there was some kind of rule that MacKenzies looked after Pluckroses, no matter what, and this was how things worked. He was in a place where people looked after people and never an order in sight, no orders needed, this other odd system in place, and where even Hanson smiled in passing and said, ‘How are you, mate?’ nothing but chummy and gleaming with gunnery brotherhood.

  Alfred couldn’t recall how long he’d been here, had stopped wearing his watch. The mooching about and grazing made him sleepy and too relaxed and then he’d try to annoy himself by wondering which people anywhere were supposed to look after the Days.

  Our bloody selves – that’s who.

  No, not any more. Not with a crew. You’re the first Day you know of who got himself a crew.

  And Alfred and his crew kept mainly to the kitchen and the stove where it was warm, the rest of the place really closed up for the war and the paintwork something shameful: a brokenness about things and the northern windows shuttered, the attic rooms with peeling paper and full of other people’s memories and the wreckage of gone children, maybe of their very own Pluckrose in earlier years, and soft, dark blooms of damp spreading in and down.

  But I can’t stick the kitchen. Not just yet.

  It wasn’t that Alfred wouldn’t be heading along there soon and eating to waste, stoking in the grub until his breath was tight. It wasn’t that he didn’t love it. But kitchens could seem so alike and you’d go there and you’d sit in the hard wooden chair and lean your elbows on the table and maybe a crumble’s set ready for the evening and Mrs MacKenzie moves past you with her soft, tidy look and the way she smells of Cuticura and there’s tea in the pot and then you think of your mother and your cup seems a bit unwieldy in a sad way and your toast should be nice, but the bread isn’t as it should be and you get this hopeless, childish want – this need for the wash of wireless music in your own house with your ma and no one else and listening while she does her mending and talks to the cat, makes up these great, long stories about him going Out West and fighting Indians and wearing little cat-sized moccasins – soft as shit, the nonsense she made up, but she’d always told Alfred adventures about the cats – even called one Mix, after Tom Mix.

  Your dad, the fucker, he used to hurt Mix, frighten him. Catching him at night – drunk and holding him so he would squeal and wake us up. As if we weren’t awake. Mixy, he got smart, though. He got fast and sharp and wary, which was good. But you couldn’t pet him after that: he’d only relax so far and then he wouldn’t let you.

  And here was Alfred, burning up a ten-day leave in the wilds of the North when he could have caught a train back home and seen his ma. Instead, he was here putting fat on and having fun, because he had to – this running away was the best he could do.

  Anyway, Wingco sent us off together: generous with the leave suddenly after the bad night over Essen. And he needed to wait for replacement crews, replacement planes.

  There was never a doubt about leaving as a crew – even before Pluckrose said we could pack up and bolt for the Moray Firth, see Family Seat Number Two.

  Pluckrose property in London, Pluckrose property in Cornwall, Pluckrose property up here – but you couldn’t dislike him for it. Or if you maybe did, he’d notice and talk about how it was old and pointless and needn’t be kept hold of and he’d tell you that he was the only son – the way Alfred was the only son – and that when he’d inherit, he’d give everything away. Or sell it. Do something. Live in the woods, like Thoreau. Alfred hadn’t asked him at the time who Thoreau was, but he might yet. Diogenes lived in a barrel and Simon Stylites sat up a pole: he knew that much. Perhaps it would be an idea to learn a list, memorise a few more places where historical types ended up – it seemed they weren’t predictable with housing.

  A herring gull landed behind last year’s raspberry canes, tipped up its head and cried about something. It paused while Alfred stood and rubbed his hands together and then, as he took his first step, it ran and unfolded up into the air, wide and white and silent. That was the way you’d want your take-offs, as if you were stretching your arms and then slipping back to life – simple.

  Which was the thought that he shouldn’t have started, because now when he blinked he could see his dream, the one with the gashes and spatters of fire – you don’t look at them, don’t blind yourself, but you know they’re spilling out beneath you, eating your mind and leaving it the colour of dirty flame as the flak comes up and tries to take revenge.

  I’ll
see you in my dreams.

  Going in with the third wave and this sense there’s something more there when the shells start kicking near – that something amused is winking at you: closing, spitting up hot metal while the lazy curves of tracer stitch round towards you and are suddenly fast, suddenly blurred with the race to find you and you’re ready to fire, sweating to fire, hiding for now, but you’ll get any fucker that comes to call, squirt off your own rounds when you have to, lay a path in light and bullets that leads clear back to you and to your skipper, but that only means you have to get them, you will, you must, you’re ready, you’re swinging your guns and swinging your guns and keeping them from freezing and your head caved in with roaring, and inside you’re keeping the song, you’re holding on to pieces of the song.

  ‘Lips that once were mine, tender eyes that shine,

  They will light my way tonight,

  They will light my way tonight,

  They will light my way tonight,

  They will light my way tonight,’

  The nearest you get to a prayer any more and far away you can hear Torrington, gentle and stupidly, madly slow – ‘Left, left . . . Steady . . . Steady . . .’ Never have a Cornish bomb aimer, he’ll take all bloody night. ‘Right . . . Steady . . .’ The skin under your hair, you can feel it creaking, and your shoulders locking up. ‘Steady . . . Left, left . . . Steady . . . Steady . . .’ And another scarecrow bursting low to port, like a door swinging open on somewhere that has no word for itself, the colour and leap of flame. You recognise every angle, detail of a ship just like your own, but you do want it to be a scarecrow that the Jerries have fired up and not a plane and you stare away from the shine, you concentrate, but you’re sure there was a shape against that first hard rip of light: the shadow of a man, his legs slightly bent, as if he was walking, but lying on his back in the air, in the very thin air, and that’s something you can’t think of – that so many planes have caught it and the route was a dud, too straight, and this is a mess, is a bloody mess, and the bombs not gone yet and the city and the Krupps works and the people hating you below and you’re swinging your guns and swinging your guns and let the fuckers come.