Day

by A. L. Kennedy

  After encouraging mugs of tea but no toast or biscuits, they were carefully escorted to their next train by the porters – one a pale lad too young to be called up yet, and what could have been his grandfather behind him.

  Once the crew was safely underway again, ‘He was eighty if he was a day.’ Hanson was bucked by his brush with authority.

  But the skipper had decided to rein them all in, declare their leave over, ‘Which was why watching an Irishman burst into flames was something he found alarming.’ He gave them his commanding glare and this was a serious proposition. It made Alfred flush. ‘Never mind looking shamefaced, Boss. Or you, Miles . . . Bloody hell, we’re a total shower. No more beer.’

  Pluckrose almost agreed. ‘Well, nearly no more beer, Skip. There’s only four bottles between us – that’s all that’s left.’

  The skipper sighed. ‘Then get it inside you now and the rest of the journey’s tea and cake. That way we might have a chance of arriving sober. No more for me.’

  As it turned out, with other abstentions, Pluckrose and Molloy ended up drinking two bottles each, which everyone else agreed could do no harm, because they’d hardly notice, being already more drunk than even Hanson. And the whole crew started in on both cakes they’d been given – the one that was meant for the journey and the spare. They ate them to waste without being hungry, ate themselves sick.

  Alfred tried to sleep, but couldn’t. He hadn’t liked the way the porters treated them – slightly repelled and slightly craven, the way men had always been around his father.

  Ivor Sands, he wasn’t the aircrew type, not the pal type, either. Too much of a temper.

  ‘Get your fucking workman’s little face out of my shop.’

  The first time it happened, Ivor had leapt up and screamed at the end of a brooding morning. The couple who’d been flirting between History and Modern Verse shifted out of the door and the shop was cleared before Alfred could break off from shelving and know it was him Ivor wanted to insult.

  ‘Well! What are you waiting for, you shit?’

  ‘I . . .’ This wasn’t good, this shouting, you never knew where things would go from shouting.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Ivor’s scars seemed to limit his mouth, to make the effort of yelling painful so that he scratched at his cheek compulsively. ‘I didn’t ask for you to come and fucking hide in here. Run away to somewhere else, I’m sick of the bloody sight of you!’

  And Alfred had to think about this, calculate: should he hit Ivor and leave – should he hit him and stay – should he leave and not hit him – stay and find out what he meant? It wasn’t clear that Ivor knew what Ivor meant, so Alfred didn’t think that was important.

  Hit him or don’t, then – leave or stay.

  ‘Do I have to kick you? I’ll do it. I’ll kick you out into the street.’

  ‘No you won’t.’ Because when they threaten you matters become simple – because no one can do that. Not any more. So you’re standing in the smooth place now, the one where you’re sure. ‘You might try.’ You don’t shout. ‘But you shouldn’t.’ No one ought to shout, you could be quite vehement on that point.

  ‘What?’ Ivor blinking a lot and puzzled and he isn’t drunk, only maybe crazy in some way. But you’ve made him quieter. ‘You –’

  ‘Are you giving me the sack?’

  ‘Well, not –’

  ‘Because I won’t go. I like this job. It took me a long time to find somewhere I could be. This suits me.’

  ‘I –’ Ivor turns his back on you which you don’t like and is also stupid, opening up so many ways that you might kill him. It’s not that you normally think such things, but he’s made you annoyed.

  He walks a little figure of eight with his hands in his pockets, then sits on the edge of his desk. ‘I wasn’t about to dismiss you. I only . . .’ He watches his feet as they twitch a little in their grubby army surplus desert boots. ‘I should be very grateful if you could take a turn outside for a while. An hour or so.’

  ‘You want me to take my workman’s face out of your shop.’ Because you can’t let him hide this away again – it would make you both cowards. ‘My fucking little face.’ You have to push him. ‘One to talk, aren’t you – about faces.’ Shake the rest of the threat in him free.

  And somebody pushed will push back, including Ivor. ‘Oh, yes. What did you do in the war? Because I was on the ground, cleaning up after bastards like you, putting out the fires, lifting out the bodies and the bits of bodies.’ His hands shaking, which you recognise, but ignore. ‘You ever carry someone melting? – they’ll drip like a candle sometimes, runs all over you.’

  ‘You were cleaning up after Germans, not bastards like me.’

  ‘And your bombs were different, were they? When they landed? Opened up and rained down chocolate for the kiddies, did they? Nylons?’ Pulling one hand through his thickness of hair – always seemed odd, his having such a solid, dark head of hair, glossy, when the face was half wrong and no need to shave the scarring. ‘I didn’t want what happened. I was trying to change things, my mother –’

  ‘Yes.’ Your own hand going to the scar across your lip. ‘What about her? She in the fire brigade too, was she?’ Not that you’re making comparisons, it’s just a habit you have.

  ‘She had a heart attack in ’41. Couldn’t stand the bombing.’ Looking at you, blue eyes flecked with something like sparks of metal and you want to ask if that’s to do with the burning, too, or has he always had it, did his mother – the way things run in families. ‘Before then, she dragged me round every holiday, visiting people like you. The less fucking fortunate. Taught me how guilty I should be about what I’d got and you hadn’t and, in the end, there would be a turning point and everything would be more equal and no one would be wasted any more. It was going to be marvellous. Remember that? The balls everyone talked before the war?’

  ‘No, I don’t remember. I was too busy being working class.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘We were all supposed to be civilised together, we were all supposed to be elevated. Well, we’re not.’ He’s standing again, forgetting if he was frightened before, whatever pain there is in him rushing out at you. ‘I can only tolerate so much. We are not all the same, we should not all have to be together, we are not we. The whole fucking place is fucked!’

  He’s shouted again and it brings you in, craning up to face him, the way you’ve faced so many others in so many pubs and streets and lodging-house dining rooms, because there are so many places where stupid, stupid fuckers will say the wrong thing, will be the wrong thing, will be wrong. ‘Fuck you.’ Standing with your chin near his chest, Alfred Francis Day, the little angry man.

  He surprises you then, tucks his head low and whispers to you, ‘Last night I met a girl, a nice girl. And she didn’t mind my face. Only then I found out she didn’t mind it because she thought I’d been a fighter pilot and walking out with me on her arm was just the thing she needed to feel noble.’

  ‘Try telling them you flew in bombers. You won’t be so popular then, either.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  But Ivor almost smiling, squinting at one hand and shy like a kid. You patted his shoulder and you let him have his way, spun on your heel and wandered out, caught the bus into town and walked where you shouldn’t walk, because he’d made you raw already and some of your defence was missing, broken, so that you ended up tracking it: your love, pursuing the path of every impact, letting it group in around you, tight. The part of St Martin’s Lane that sang with her, the comfortable rooms where you’d taken tea – your time then so constricted, the edges of it ripping and flaking away while you sat, but the two of you held inside what you were and safe and firm – and you’re stupid, allow every detail to blaze in, penetrate, so that now when you
cross behind the Palace Theatre and face north you can hardly move – everything altered and everything the same, no sign or hope or chance of her, but the air expecting that she’ll come, that she’s trying to meet you, the drag of it enough to leave you swaying by the kerb. Crying. Grown man in the street, crying.

  This is what happens when you don’t hide, this is what happens when you go looking for your life. The one you never had.

  You take a beer somewhere quiet and low-ceilinged, leave when a man tries to sell you his watch and says he was at Anzio. There is a little rain when you go outside again, but the street was looking huddled before it started, and you a part of it too, trapped in a flinch out of habit, watching the pavement at your feet.

  Which means you find money sometimes, coins people drop.

  But you’re always too embarrassed to pick them up.

  In the end, it actually makes you want to go back and see Ivor. Because he’ll be there. Because he has nowhere else that he could go. Like you.

  And when you trip the bell on the door, it’s past six and he’s waiting inside a deserted shop. You suspect the place may have been empty all day – he does not look inviting.

  And he fires off the line he’s got ready for your return, ‘You have no moral high ground, not with me.’ Sitting behind his desk as if he’ll be your teacher, except his pullover is holed at the elbows, and his shirt, too.

  ‘And I have none with myself.’ Which he didn’t expect. Sometimes you give the person whatever it is they wanted to fight you about. Sometimes that defeats them more than you could.

  Ivor leans his chair over on to its back legs. ‘All right then.’

  And you wonder if this is the way a marriage goes, this delight in drawing blood, just a drop at a time. ‘And you have none with me.’ Was this how you would have ended up with her? Was this how she would be with Antrobus? Were there happy marriages?

  ‘Fuck you.’ He seems happy as he says so, in control of himself, except for his hands which cling to each other, clasp too hard.

  You sit on his desk, claim his territory. ‘Let’s not start that again. It’s nothing to do with me that everything’s buggered. Jerry didn’t win the war and we didn’t win the war. The spivs did. They were bound to. The spivs and the Whitehall Warriors.’

  ‘That little shit Attlee and his mob – worse than what we had before. They’re all the bloody same. Promises, promises.’

  ‘And you were here at home and could have stopped it. I was busy.’

  He lets the chair clump forward again – loves doing that, has dented the wood of the floor all about himself with years of doing that. ‘The shop’s finished, you know.’

  ‘I thought we did well this month.’

  ‘Oh, we’ll be fine for a while yet. But not the way it was.’ He sips his tea. That’ll be all he’s managed today – made a cup of tea. ‘People read in the war. More people than ever. They understood it, all the things it could give them, the way it lasted out anything else. They appreciated it. You – you’re the perfect example.’ He points at you – officer class, they’re always ones for pointing – as if they might buy you, or might want you taken away.

  You point back, the way a gunner does, wishing you had your hand full, felt a trigger. ‘Thanks ever so. I’m still reading. I always will, it’s mine.’

  ‘And it gives you somewhere nice to go at night. I know. We are not unalike. And I’m not saying they’ll all just jack it in next week. It’ll take years. And more years before they notice they never got their nice new world and their welfare state and by then people will be busy with the things that keep people busy, the unimportant things.’

  ‘Wives, lovers, families.’ You can say this, because you can’t hurt any more today and it’s worth the sting that it leaves in your teeth to see him twitch.

  ‘The unimportant things.’ He clears his throat and glances at you for a moment to find out if you’ll hurt him again, really argue, or just stay and be company for him and have him be the same for you. ‘You’ll see. After a while, they won’t want what’s here, then they’ll think they don’t need it and then they’ll forget what it is. You’ll see.’

  ‘I won’t forget.’

  ‘It won’t be up to you. Or me. We won’t be relevant.’

  ‘You’re a depressing bastard.’

  ‘You’re no sunbeam, yourself.’

  You stand, take off your coat and throw it into the back room. Something about the way it smells reminds you of Joyce. ‘You said I was hiding.’

  ‘I hope you’re going to hang that up.’

  ‘Earlier, you said I was hiding. What did you mean?’

  ‘You know what I meant. We’re both hiding. We’re the kind of people nobody needs any more and so we end up here. With the kind of things no one will need any more.’

  ‘I’m not hiding.’

  ‘The pot’s still warm.’ Smoothing his hair down with both hands. ‘Have a restorative cup of tea. Of course you’re hiding. Would you like to make toast? Why wouldn’t you hide.’

  You start to go through to the back, pick up your coat, because you are orderly, hanging it up on the peg by the door. ‘I’m all right for toast. I don’t have to hide.’

  He calls through after you, ‘Really? That’s a relief. Well, let me know your embarrassment of other options . . . colonial administrator? One of those lads with medals who open doors at the nicer hotels? Or a Chelsea Pensioner – they get those crimson uniforms, lovely – could you do that? Not too handy for me, having been a conchie and all that, but would they have you . . . ? Don’t take air force, do they? Bombers? Or what did you have in mind?’

  ‘Tea. I was thinking of tea.’ Tea and toast – the operational diet. Tea without end and toast. ‘Tea the drink. Not the meal. Tea’s not really a meal you’d ever eat, is it? It would be dinner to you, or supper?’ He’s left the milk right by the stove and it’s turned with the heat – only bloody place where there is any heat in the shop.

  ‘I’ll have a refill while you’re in there.’

  ‘You’ll get your own. I’m not a bleedin’ servant.’

  ‘I’ll get my own.’

  And he comes to lean in the doorway, watching you stir in your sugar. He looks scared, but not of you. You hold out your hand and he gives you his empty cup.

  drop

  When it finds you out: your bad news, your bad luck, your bad life, there’s maybe a second before the pain starts when you realise all that hiding had no point. However skilled you are at tucking what you care about away, however low you lie, however trained and fine you make yourself, it doesn’t matter – you are a small, soft thing and the world is full of fire and hardness and if you are scared, alert, distracted, bored with your job, the bullet hits you all the same. It doesn’t mind.

  Piling off the farm truck near the station gates, the pack of you roaring about something and then thinking you ought to be quiet, but not quite fast enough, because out comes Chiefy and a ginger sergeant and they’re looking not wholly amused and there’s the small deer’s head peering out under Pluckrose’s arm and you are a shower and the leave has made you worse and wounding remarks may be expected and Chiefy’s hauling up that final breath he needs before his wrath descends, but then it doesn’t. He nods the crew in and, as you pass him, says you should see the chaplain, have a word, and he treats you as if you are ill somehow, delicate. This puzzles you. Skip and Pluckrose, both of them glance round towards you, but you shake your head to show that nothing’s wrong and you quietly pass Molloy your kitbag and walk off, too light without it, under-equipped, and you go and present yourself as requested to the vicar.

  Never took to him: Anglican and soapy, yellow teeth and a way of talking as if his tongue was sticking in the cracks between words, as if he enjoyed himself licking at the cracks. Some kind of dirt always on his glasses,
smears – you’d have no way of spotting anything through that.

  ‘I’m afraid I have to tell you.’

  But he wasn’t afraid, you could see that. He probably hadn’t ever been afraid, not the way he lived: boxed up and peering out at ordinary people and telling them he understood and that there was a sense and the presence of God in everything.

  ‘I’m afraid I have to tell you.’

  You knew what it would be. You knew from his face, maybe from Chiefy’s face.

  ‘I’m afraid.’

  You wanted to put him up against your sandbank, fire a few thousand rounds in close beside him. That would help him be afraid.

  ‘Your mother unfortunately.’

  Didn’t want him talking about her. Didn’t want her name in that mouth.

  ‘I am most dreadfully sorry.’

  Felt like his saying so made it his fault. Felt like he wanted this all to be his business.

  ‘You can see Wingco at any time about leave, the funeral is, I think.’

  They read your letters – in and out, they read them – stood between you and Joyce, between you and your mother: they are always in the way. Burned-out cases do it: penguins: nobody wants the job – censoring correspondence, getting in the way.

  ‘I am most.’

  Hating him after this, every time you see him, shutting your head when he gave you out a blessing or a prayer, wished you well before you bombed. Not his fault. But hating him, all the same.

  And you shouldn’t have been in Scotland, not when you could have been home with your ma. So that was someone else to hate – yourself.

  ‘A very unfortunate accident.’

  You could have been there.

  ‘With so many houses so badly damaged, one can’t be too careful.’

  ‘Are yo sayin she wasn’t careful?’

  ‘No, I merely –’

  ‘Are yo sayin she was daft? That she day know?’

  ‘I think perhaps –’

  ‘It wor her fault. Are yo sayin it was? How could it be her fault?’

  ‘You’ll need time for reflection.’