Day

by A. L. Kennedy

  But it made her take your arm.

  But when she left you at the door of the little hotel she shook your hand, no more.

  But she leaned in and told you she’d kiss you if it weren’t for the way it would look.

  But you wanted to kiss her then and for her to not care how it looked.

  ‘I’m so . . . I was going to say sorry about your friend, but that would sound useless.’ She folded your hand in both of hers and you started to sweat, although it was a chill night, misty. ‘If you liked him, he must have been . . . he must have been fine.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thanks for asking me, for wanting me – that I should come and see you.’

  This as if she’d punched you, or torn away something you’d used to hide your face. ‘Couldn’t help it.’ You want to say about your ma. You want to cuddle her in. You want her to cuddle you in.

  ‘Well, thanks, anyway. Even if this is – I mean, it’s a shame you’re so busy. But lucky to see you at all.’ She pressed your hand. ‘I . . . appreciate you.’

  ‘I appreciate you.’

  But there was no more to be done, not beyond watching the door close with you on the wrong, cold side and then clattering down to catch the bus – the roaring bus, the press of lunatics, the rest of your crew swept away from you in the mob, and you’re sat at the back with a strange bomb aimer, just a sprog. The din was almost solid.

  Because sometimes there’s a chance to scream when other bods are there – don’t need them to listen, don’t expect it – you understand they’ll all be screaming, too.

  The bomb aimer beside you spoke about some girl at home when you’d rather he hadn’t – although he was talking to himself. And there was crying somewhere, sobbing, and a loud fellow laughing about it and maybe you recognised Molloy’s voice binding about watered beer, but you weren’t sure and then somebody kicked up singing.

  ‘I’ll shoot ’em down, sir, I’ll shoot ’em down, sir,

  I’ll shoot ’em down, if they don’t shoot at me,

  Then we’ll go to the ops room and shoot a fucking line, sir,

  And then we’ll all get the DFC.’

  Close air and damp running down the windows, couldn’t look out if there’d been anything to watch for and you needed visibility, it worried you to lose it, made you jump, and the thick smell of blue was on you, in you, and the blood under the blue, the meat, and this thing you all feel, this red, loud, hunting thing you have become.

  The bus clattered you back to the station and the kites, to the oil and metal places where you now belonged.

  Up by the palace it’s civil, civilian, civilised.

  From the Latin.

  You twitch out of a tiny doze, sit too fast and dizzy yourself, blink at her grin.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘I’m sorry, was I . . .’

  ‘Only for a minute or two . . . But now I know you don’t snore.’ After this she brushes her skirt and stands – as if talking about your sleeping was more than she ought to do – and you sit for another moment, stupid with the thought of her and a sour rag left behind from your dream, a kind of mist.

  Then you walk with her, lead Joyce on the milky paths and under the shade of chestnut trees, those broad-fingered leaves. A few other bods about, doing much the same – the month just tipping into summer and they’re out enjoying it, wanting their year to turn forward as if it had hope, wanting to forget the lousy spring and dirty weather are probably why they’re still alive, but now it’s clear and dry and fine for flying and will maybe stay that way.

  You don’t think of flying or death, you only stroll and attempt to be dapper, be RAF beside her. This is the only time you enjoy the uniform, the flight crew wing – people are used to flight crew around here, but they still notice, pause over you more than they might and you hope it makes Joyce think well of you, feel slightly proud. That’s what you catch in the watching eyes: in the other people who don’t know you, who just guess – that you’re something to be proud of. Or else you’re their anger, the way it will be expressed. You’re going to take revenge for them – because of some loss, or no loss, or nothing to do with the war, some personal hate. Or else you’re meant to be their son, or their sweetheart, or their fear, or their dead.

  Gets a bit much, after a while.

  But you miss it when it goes, cocker. Oh, you don’t half miss it when it’s gone.

  Back in the pale walled streets of Lincoln the afternoon is shaking with its heat and thickening, humidity pressing your skin.

  Without thinking, you’ve wandered with her to the front of her hotel and it seems only sensible to duck inside and have a drink, some shade – the thought of her bedroom burning up above you, the guesses you can’t begin to make.

  You sip half a pint of shandy and watch while she rocks a sherry, then looks at you for a breath, downs it like medicine – like something to do with you, an antidote you’ve made her need.

  ‘Alfie, this is . . . I so much like when we’re together, or you write to me, or . . . It’s all so nice.’

  A kind of horror in this, because she seems to have made a decision and doing that could hurt you in ways you might not be able to resist. Maybe she doesn’t love you and this is where she says so kindly.

  Or else she does love you, she truly does.

  And you’ve made her love a dead man, a problem, a disgrace.

  And you will believe her, trust her, love her first and love her back.

  Her eyes on you, asking something you don’t understand, so you take her hand and you face her.

  ‘Alfie. It’s –’

  A waitress passes with little sandwiches on a tray, she nods to you when she passes, assumes you understand what’s happening to you and can like it.

  ‘Alfie, it’s so difficult.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I was glad when you asked me to come, because I thought I could say all these brave and sensible things I rehearsed on the train, but I can’t now I’m here. I want to be with you.’

  ‘I want to be with you.’

  ‘I want to be with you.’

  Wincing because this is where she must tell you that it won’t be possible.

  ‘And I think I should be, Alfie, because . . . we don’t know what might be next.’

  You nodding while you corkscrew through the floor and the room pitches round you.

  ‘I want to be with you.’

  Tight in the base of your spine, pulling you like a stall turn. ‘I want to be with you.’ Trying not to crush her hand, because you need it, because it is holding you to the world.

  She leans back then, as if something has been decided and she’d thought it would be more troublesome and is relieved it’s turned out so well. ‘Shall we see the cathedral? I think I’d like to.’

  ‘I –’ and you kiss her hand, like an idiot out of a book, drop your head and do that, but only because you can’t think, don’t know if it’s decided that you’re pals now, or if you’ll be able to touch her, have her for yourself.

  Which I want.

  I fucking want.

  But what if I can’t do it? She’s married, she’s been married. She’ll expect things.

  What if I can’t do it right?

  Or what if she’s my pal, because we’m only pals and pals don’t fuck their pals?

  What if I haven’t understood?

  You keep your head down.

  ‘Silly.’ Her brushing your hair at the neck where you’re offering it to her – bad position for you, she could kill you with a stroke if she knew how. ‘Come on. Cathedral. We need to be elevated before the evening. And it’s meant to be very pretty.’

  You go with her because you have to.

  You had your own things to tell her that would have be
en troublesome to say. You will not say them.

  The rain runs you inside, leaves you breathing and smiling and flustered while the height of the cathedral shrugs above you, makes you feel giddy and naked.

  A church, but not a church, not the kind you’ve met before. Somewhere for larger people, for a larger idea of God. Gives you something even bigger to disbelieve in – Our Father who art Officer Class – while dull thunder closes in at you and the downpour rustles over the stone far above.

  ‘Gosh, it’s a good one, isn’t it?’ Joyce quite content to be here, to stroll. ‘The plain glass will be where they’ve put the proper stuff in storage, I suppose.’ She takes your hand and means it, would like it to be seen. ‘On we trot, then.’

  She is wearing her ring.

  Strange smell as the storm continues – nothing of damp about it, more a kind of green, a rush in the columns, as if the whole place is drinking, growing up.

  ‘Almost time.’ As she leads you towards a wall, a complication of dark, carved wood, stonework. ‘Evensong. Just what I could do with.’ Chap in a long blue shift nodding and waving you along to a side door and the church within the church, what she tells you is the choir.

  Inside you can recognise the pews, the shape, but not the black oak reaching above you in spires and spires, your sense of it like the moments before take-off when the engines ask to go, strain to be higher and free. Joyce sits in the way someone does when they know what to do and you sit beside her, in among the handful of other nice, officer-class people. And when she stands, you stand and watch the choir of old men and children parade in. It’s a drill you’ve never learned and so you’re slow as you follow the sitting and standing and kneeling and bowing to the east and you hear prayers for your leaders and commanders and local councilmen and find no more sense in them than in the creed. But Joyce is calm with it, soothed and so you stay and try not see Hell for yourself if you’re wrong and there is Something and Hell for yourself if there’s nothing beyond yourself and what you do.

  It’s only at the end you come towards peace, when the pantomime is over and the organ sings and threatens, shivers in the lowest notes, pushes up into the oak and makes it seem to climb. You close your eyes then and let yourself unstick, no words to offend you, just the ache you have to be out in the sky.

  Joyce pats your leg and you look at her, see she’s content, leave with her past the vicar whose hand you shake and who gives you the blessing kind of smile.

  Not my wife, cocker. Another man’s. Not what you’re thinking at all. And I’m not going back to my lodgings, not tonight – tell them I was drunk, slept under a hedge, whatever lie they’d like – even if I walk about all night, or sleep in the street outside, near to her room. I’m not going back. I want to be with her.

  No other wish left, no other prayer. I want to be with her.

  And he was.

  Alfred Francis Day was with Joyce Melanie Antrobus, née Collingwood.

  No truth beyond that one, the little stone he built himself around. The one she took away.

  Lying on a bunk so far from her, lost in 1949, awake underneath a short summer night and trying to be quiet while it all bursts through and hurts him – the thoughts you should never be able to find.

  Writing Antrobus down in the hotel register, taking his name before I take his wife, Joyce lying about a sudden chance at leave, a nice surprise so that I can join her, Joyce taking charge.

  I don’t think she’d done such a thing before. I don’t think it was a habit.

  Turning his head and turning his head while the heath beyond him dreams, his head pressing back in his pillow and eyes closed and no clear memory he can see, only the wonder that her heartbeat was everywhere in her skin.

  It had been such a confusion, being too scared of her and scared to hurt her and shaking and the dark being in his way and making him bewildered so that he had to stop and only hold her, cling on, until he could breathe and kiss her.

  In the real camp he’d lain and thought of this. Not often – only when he could stand it, when he could still be confident they’d meet again. And even then, he’d learned to be careful: some mem-ories, the ones you’d rather keep – the more you tried to look at them, the more they wore away.

  Rationing her out to a kiss. The planning of a kiss. Having faith there would be kisses to come. The life in that, it keeps you well. It feeds you.

  Only once a week, letting it be on a Saturday: when I’d lie with the warm of her kiss.

  Sometimes things would go further – I’d try to think of talking and romance and coming home, but it would spin down into fucking and being angry and sorry and shamed and just wanting to hide inside her. Wanting to sleep, wanting a true, deep, unlonely sleep.

  That’s not so unreasonable.

  The muscles in his neck cranking his head back further and his breathing too loud and his mind pays no attention, races on, can’t wait to uncover everything.

  ‘Alfie.’

  His own name touching his neck in the heat of her mouth and she’d told him nice things about how he looked and while he lay there, out of anybody’s sight, he had been handsome. He had smiled. He had let her feel him smile.

  It opens his mouth, this remembering, changes his shape – lets him picture himself as he really is – the twitching little man on the top bunk, bastard who sweats and blubs while everyone else has a kip, still playing their parts – being sleeping men, tired men: men who will stand at the edge of important pictures, men who will be in the background of significant events.

  That night with her, I didn’t want to sleep.

  But the resting was lovely. And the tiny sounds when she shifted a little, or opened her lips, or sighed – and then above us and heading for the Wash, the singing of Lancs, their kind of comfort.

  The evensong rubbish hadn’t seemed so bad then. I’d slung it back up to the boys – couldn’t do any harm.

  ‘Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord

  And by thy great mercy defend us

  From all perils and dangers of this night.’

  He’d searched between the sheets and found Joyce’s hand, squeezed it.

  But then he’d been too happy, too relaxed and he’d drifted, dropped past her into a doze where she couldn’t reach him. He’d dreamed of the Marl Hole. He’d dreamed what he couldn’t tell her, never would.

  Going into the Marl Hole. Father used to threaten us with it when we was babbies – said he’d chuck us in the Marl Hole, frit us with it, said horses fall in there and never get clear – they cor ketch hote on the steep of the clay to climb out, they just slip and get drownded, slither on the mustard-coloured sides and get the chop. The water a green that’s black, that’s terrible, such a depth: yo could tell it’d kill yo.

  He watched himself walk through the trees and creep to the edge, lean over in the grass and marigolds to where he could touch the bare marl, to where his weight could almost topple and rush with him down to that cold – he knew it would be cold – right down and into the way that it stares.

  I thought if I killed him, my father: then I could drag him through the blackout to the Marl Hole and push him in.

  I decided.

  Picking up his forty-eight-hour pass, he’d felt himself topple and rush.

  Hide him in the Marl Hole.

  The hiding had been very clear, the first thing he’d thought of. What came before – what came before was difficult. Not the want, the need to do it, but the planning – he’d read enough stories about crime to know he should have a plan. But he didn’t. Not quite.

  Lying in tight beside Joyce, he kept still, kept sealed around the night he’d spent in Wednesbury with his father and his plan.

  Waited outside the pub, the fucker’s pub – the Jolly Collier – no doubt he’d be in there, he never was anywhere else in the
evening. Maybe even heard his laugh from inside: him being happy and on his way to drunk, proper kaylied.

  Waiting was no good, though, because you’d be seen, you’d be recognised – and hanging about made him angry the wrong way: sick-feeling. So Alfred moved off, shifted up the street and on, started to comfort himself with the dark – because he knew it, spent so long in it at his work, practised seeing what he couldn’t see.

  His decision was still made, though. Leaving didn’t mean he’d changed his mind. In fact, his mind seemed to be fading, couldn’t be altered: the longer he walked, the less he heard from it until he was cloudy and numb – a dark in the dark.

  Couple making love somewhere – I heard them. Hadn’t ever done it myself then, but I’d heard it before. They’d be in a doorway somewhere, or against a wall – people get different in a war. They don’t care like they used to. Or else they all turn into who they are, let it show where someone else can feel it, but nobody sees.

  After a while, he stepped inside the shadow that had been his street, the rise and lean of its shape around him. Overhead, the stars very big, he noticed – almost a painful brightness. Not much of a moon, but so much other shine up there it could lead you astray, make you stumble.

  Ended up I did trip, skinned my hands in the horse road when I landed – trying to save the trousers. Trousers were the King’s. Then again, my hands were, too.

  The wreck of number 7 welcomed him, let him sit as quietly as he could among the shattered bricks, the clean little ring of them against each other when they shifted.

  Thought I heard a rat. Sure I did. Not close, but there.

  It seemed correct that he might pray, or ask forgiveness, or say something for his mother, prepare – but his head was all cleared, and the night a high roar of nothing: no judgement, no regulations, just air rising up and chilling to the point where it could kill and the sound of organ music from a wireless – end-of-the-pier stuff – and the bang of an outhouse door and a woman’s voice, quite distant, calling the way someone would for a pet.