by Jo Baker
He lifts his helmet and turns it over so that it’s domed on his lap. He blinks, rubs his face, still smiling.
“What’s that great shit-eating grin for now, boss?”
Billy shakes his head, still smiling, trying hard not to, and laughing now too, and shaking away the thoughts of Ruby for some other time, not now, for a moment of peace and solitude, though God only knows when that will come. And through a brief new alignment of gaps and spaces between backs and shoulders, packs and helmets, his sight catches on someone on the far side of the deck. He’s thin, dark-haired, a boy of maybe twenty; he’s chewing on the side of his finger, right by the fingernail. Really gnawing at it, tearing with his eye teeth at the flesh along the side of his nail.
“Thinking about his bird—” Gossum says, of Billy’s far-off look.
“That’s his wife you’re talking about,” Alfie says.
“Still a bird.”
The boy tears a strip of skin off his finger, then glances at the finger, registering the cut, while he chews the slip of skin. His face is all bone and shadows. Then he looks up. He looks at Billy. He just gazes a moment, then the gaze clicks into focus, and he stares. Frowns. Peers at him.
Billy doesn’t recognise him; he’s pretty sure he’s never seen him before. The narrow intensity of the stare makes him look away, and when he glances back, the sightline is cut off: a couple of squaddies come up to join their friends, standing between Billy and the staring man, and all Billy can now see is the green-grey of their uniforms.
He catches Alfie’s eye. Alfie squints at him through tobacco smoke, his brow creased.
“You all right, Boss?” Alfie asks.
Billy flashes him a smile.
“Peachy,” Billy says. “Just peachy.”
• • •
Wind blusters through the darkness, whips round the deck, whistles through the stowed bikes, snaps the tarp he’s slung from the rail to keep off the worst of the weather. Rain clatters onto it, just above his ear. There’s a steady drip somewhere nearby that’s driving him quietly mad. It’s supposed to be June. Billy rubs at his gritty eyes. The deck is hard beneath his groundsheet, and his pack makes an awkward, lumpy pillow. He’s afraid that his shoulder—still vulnerable with the old cycling injury—will be completely buggered up by morning.
He knows what the weather means. There is no way that they are setting off any time soon. They need calm seas if the smaller landing craft are not to be swamped. And they need high tide to clear the beach obstacles at the other end. And they need that high tide to happen early in the morning, so that for most of the crossing they are under cover of darkness. These are the necessary conditions; all three of them have to be in place at the same time.
It will be at least twenty-four hours before the next chance to land. That’s if the gales die down soon. Twenty-four more hours on ship, twenty-four hours in which the Germans might just happen to spot something, to notice what’s going on.
His hip creaks against the deck. He rolls onto his back. The tarp droops low over his face. He closes his eyes. He remembers, from the train journey to and from Paris, ten years ago, the way the countryside had spun past his gaze. A wide green landscape, with woods and spinneys, clustered villages, church spires pushing up towards the sky. He thinks, there is all this to come, on the other side: a whole continent, dim with woodland, green with flashes of silver water, patched with cities. Utterly unknown. It seems somehow comforting, strangely welcoming, to think of this, these distances.
After a while, he sleeps.
Time ticks by. Two hours, two and a half, three. He wakes to cold grey light and the shrieking of the gulls.
Denham Crescent, Mitcham
June 4, 1944, 1:27 p.m.
RUBY UNCLIPS HER HANDBAG, digs its contents out onto the kitchen table. A crack as her compact lands—damn. She tips the bag, shakes it: a slide of bus and Tube tickets; the soft tumble of her handkerchief, then a scattering of grit and dust and fluff. No lipstick.
She opens the compact, squints into the mirror; at least it’s not cracked—seven years’ bad luck would just be the marzipan on this. Her one day off, her chance to do something a bit special, and she’s lost her bloody lipstick. Yesterday was Saturday; early shift, tea and sawdust cake at a Lyons Corner House with Evelyn moaning about some man, then the flicks. Lipstick slicked on in the work lavs beforehand, reapplied after the tea and cake. Then she dropped it back in the bag: she can see herself doing it, clipping the bag shut. She hasn’t used the lipstick since. And now it’s gone. And it’s that feeling again, that her life is just a conveyor belt of days, stuff just keeps on coming for her to deal with, and she has no control, not even over the tiniest of things.
Mrs. walks in, clocks the mess on the table, gives her a look, then heads straight for the sink: Ruby watches her narrow, neat, disapproving back.
“Lost something?” Mrs. asks over her shoulder, twisting open that little brass sprayer, which looks, to Ruby, more like a perfume bottle than anything else: it’s like she goes out there every day to spray the bloody flowers with scent.
“Doesn’t matter,” Ruby says, separating out the tickets, scooping the rest of the things into her bag.
“What was it?”
Mrs. twists on the tap, watches the water pummel into the brass container. Ruby brushes the tickets together and herds them to the edge of the table, easing them over the brink into the cup of her hand.
“Lipstick,” Ruby says.
“Oh no, what a shame.”
Mrs. turns round, but her gaze is on the flower-spray—she’s fitting it together, dipping the pump mechanism into the barrel, twisting the cap back into place. She can’t waste anything, can’t Mrs. Not even half a moment doing one thing when she could be doing two. Ruby can see what she’s thinking as clear as if it were scrolling in tickertape above her head: Better off without all that paint, ruins your skin, and it’s just to get the men’s attention, what she’s thinking, tarting herself up like that, with Billy away, asking for trouble.
“Still,” Mrs. says. “Count your blessings.”
“Mmm,” Ruby says. Count your blessings. I’m not dead. Billy’s not dead. I have a roof over my head.
Actually it helps.
She lets the tickets fall into the compost bucket—a subdued confetti of soft greens and blues, murky yellows and tired reds.
“You meeting that Evelyn?” Amelia asks.
“No, not today.”
“A concert would be a bit high class for her, I’d say. Bit cultured.”
This may well be true, but still it gets Ruby’s back up. No better than she should be, that Evelyn; be leading her astray. But the kind of straying Evelyn does just doesn’t appeal to Ruby. Fumbling in the park. Grass stains on your petticoat and your hair like a jackdaw’s nest. Can’t see the fun in it herself.
Ruby gives up on the lipstick, thumps up the stairs.
Standing at the bathroom sink, she turns her head from side to side, studying the angles of her bones. She presses her fingertips up under her jaw, touches the soft skin under her eyes. Her gold ring glints thinly. When she smiles, lines radiate from the corners of her eyes. Her hair is still good, its thick dark curls teased out into a glossy wave, but she needs a bit of colour nowadays, bit of lippy just to perk her up. She looks worn and tired and thin. But then, who doesn’t?
She opens her mascara pot, spits. She rubs at the blacking with the brush, opens her eyes wide to comb the blackness through her lashes. She bites at her lips, skims them over with Vaseline.
Count your blessings. She’s got three. That’s not so bad.
She gives herself a smile. ’Cause that helps too.
Bransbury Park, Portsmouth
June 4, 1944, 2:21 p.m.
IT IS GOOD TO BE on solid ground, Billy thinks. It’s a damn sight better than being on board. If they have to wait, then it’s better done here, in the canteen, with boards and cement and brick and deep chalky earth beneath his feet, and the except
ional pleasure of a proper Sunday lunch in front of him, for all it seems to mark a retreat before they’ve even started.
Above the hum of voices and clink of crockery, the rain clatters on the corrugated roof and the wind buffets the prefab walls, sneaks in through gaps, whines. Outside the window, the lilacs toss their heads like ponies. It is bloody awful weather for June, unseasonable. You could take it as a sign, if you were the kind of person to go looking for signs.
Behind the serving hatch, the catering corps boys are clearing up after the first course. Billy pushes his last scrap of meat around the plate, scooping up the gravy. The sauce boat is old and cracked and beautiful, with a gold seam that catches the light and Billy half considers filching it to bring back for his ma. She likes nice things.
“Good stuff that.” Gossum jerks his head at the plate.
“Oh yes.”
The potatoes were warm and firm and waxy, the skin peeling away from them in transparent curls. Briny French beans and carrots from a bottle. Across the table, Barker blinks up at them, pushes his mouthful into his cheek: “Never ate like this before I joined up.”
“Slap-up feed,” Gossum agrees.
Alfie nods. The skin moves over the cables of his thin wrist as he reaches out for the gravy boat. He pours the last thick clots onto his plate.
Billy never ate like this either, not when he was growing up. Since he joined up the food’s been sufficient, but not as good as this. And now, through the cluttered noisy air comes a faint whiff of something sweet and sharp. Stewed fruit, he reckons.
“Will there be custard, d’y’think?” Barker asks.
“You never know.”
Custard, not so long ago, was made from fresh eggs and milk and vanilla pods. Now it’s made from powdered milk, water, and custard powder. And Billy likes it. It doesn’t mean that he’s forgotten that there were ever fresh eggs and vanilla pods; it doesn’t mean that he’ll never want to have fresh eggs and vanilla pods again. It just means that right now, as far as he’s concerned, powdered custard is fine. It’s far superior, in fact, to no custard at all.
He looks at Alfie, and considers outlining his theory of custard, countering Alfie’s earlier notion about saccharin and parsnips and rhubarb cordial. Alfie’s crushing the last of the potato into his gravy, and then scraping it up to his mouth with the side of his fork, his jaw and throat working like a gannet’s.
Because maybe, by the theory of custard, the bikes will be fine. You might even find you develop a taste for them. They will be, at least, better than no bikes at all.
He leans back, tilting the chair onto its hind legs and looks idly down the length of table behind him, watching for the arrival of pudding. All along the line of chairs, men mop their plates with folded bread, chew on chop bones, or lean in and talk. But then he notices, sitting on the table top, three-four seats down from him, an untouched plateful of food. There are little beads of white fat on the surface of the cold gravy. The potatoes are crumbling and greyed. Billy looks up from the plate, and sees the lad sitting there. It’s the same young fellow he saw yesterday, on deck; the one who’d bit a strip of skin off his finger, who’d stared at Billy.
Billy watches as he shifts his cutlery, touches his cup. He doesn’t eat or drink. His lips are working, but if he’s talking he’s not talking to anyone Billy can see.
He’s in a bad way. Barely holding it together.
Billy turns back to his table, to his men, lands the front legs of his chair back on the ground. It’s not Billy’s problem. Let the lad’s own corporal deal with it.
But Gossum’s seen Billy looking; he’s twisted round in his seat, noticed the full plate.
“Don’t,” Billy says, just as Gossum leans over, taps the kid on the shoulder.
The kid swivels round. “What?”
“Don’t you want that?” Gossum asks.
The young man’s jaw is clamped tight. A muscle twitches. He shakes his head, like he’s shaking himself clear of cobwebs. “What?”
“ ’S good stuff that,” Gossum nods to the plate. “Put hairs on your teeth.”
“Leave him be,” Billy says, giving Gossum a warning look: you don’t want to go poking around there.
“Word to the wise,” Gossum says to the stranger. “Get it down you while you can.”
The frail men of the catering corps, with their limps and their thick glasses, their stoops, weak chests, flat feet and rickets, move between the tables, carrying bowls of something sweet.
“There’s pudding coming now,” Billy says. “We’ll get a cup of tea after too, I reckon.”
Billy knows the importance of pudding. He knows the importance of a decent cup of tea. All too soon there will only be field rations and whatever you can filch, and tea and sugar in a tin all together, and boiling up on a Tommy stove and before long there will be bleeding gums and boils and cracked skin and constipation or the runs. He knows that what’s coming will have its compensations; that there is something about being shot at that brings a new sharpness, a focus, a bright precise awareness of being alive; of still, for this one moment at least, being whole in your own skin; and that’s something you almost miss when it is over. But there is plenty about what’s coming—the hunger, the fatigue, squatting in a ditch shitting black water—that is entirely without redeeming features. So that when someone offers you a decent meal, you eat it, every last scrap of it, and then scrape the pattern off your plate. Gossum knows it too. Gossum is, in all fairness, trying to be kind. Considerably kinder than Billy, since Billy would rather just leave it well alone.
“That’s good lamb, that is,” Gossum insists.
The young man shunts the plate away.
Billy can feel the lad’s gaze catch on him again. He knows it’s the same puzzled, frowning, I-can’t-quite-place-you stare. But he won’t look round.
“That’s good food going to waste,” Gossum says.
“It’s none of your bloody business.”
Billy glares at Gossum, but Gossum’s attention’s fixed. And Billy suddenly wonders: is this kid right to turn his nose up here? The food is better, and there’s more of it, than usual—fresh meat, not tinned; two kinds of veg, potatoes and bread. They’ve really pushed the boat out here. This is, he thinks, the condemned man’s last meal. You have to feed a condemned man well: you have to feed him better than you feed the living. A bellyful of sacrificial lamb will keep him going all the way through death and out the other side. You can’t have him running out of steam before that, or he’ll drift back to haunt you.
Those of us who’ve eaten, Billy wonders, are we now obliged to die?
Despite himself, Billy glances round; the lad just stares, unblinking hazel eyes. Then his face breaks into a smile.
“It is you, isn’t it?”
He stretches out a knuckly raw hand towards Billy, not to shake but as if to keep him there.
Billy blinks. “Sorry?”
“Hastings? Billy Hastings?”
So it’s this. He hasn’t had this for a while.
“Yes. Billy Hastings! I thought it was you. I saw you yesterday. On the ship.”
Billy nods. He’s conscious of his men, the way they’re looking at him.
“I saw you ride at the Easter meet in ’thirty-five, Herne Hill, my dad took me,” the boy continues. “Jesus Christ, you gave that wop a thorough hiding!”
“Thanks.” Billy wants to go. Anywhere. Be anywhere but here.
“Ha! You shook his hand. I remember that. I remember my dad saying, look, there’s a sportsman for you. Shaking the ol’ fella’s hand.” He’s glittery with it, raggedly excited.
“Thank you.”
“So what the hell you doing here?” He leans in, an elbow on the back of his chair.
“Well,” Billy says. “There’s this war on—”
“I know, I know, I know, but I mean, you were really something. You were—” He shakes his head, sucks his teeth. “Brilliant.”
He starts on about other races now,
races that Billy has half forgotten, and some that he has tried to forget. Races that came after the Olympic trials, when things had continued to go wrong, when maybe his heart just wasn’t in it, or maybe it was broken. But the boy goes on and on. He elbows his neighbour and tries to bring him into the enthusiasm too, but then he has to explain who Billy Hastings is, and Billy nods to the blank, bemused newcomer, his skin crawling with embarrassment.
His own corner of the room has gone quiet. Billy knows Alfie, Gossum and Barker are exchanging glances, but he doesn’t look at them. They don’t know any of this. Apart from Alfie, who was there, and knew it all already, without being told.
“S’cuse me, Boss,” Gossum leans over to the stranger again. “You eating that or not?”
Billy sinks out of the way, straightens the cutlery on his plate, glad of the interruption.
“Eh? What—no.”
“All right then.”
Gossum lifts the plate, spirits it across the gap between the tables and lands it down in front of himself. He flashes Billy a look: eyebrows up, a grin. He ducks down to eat.
At the table behind him, Billy can hear the boy go on, pointing him out to someone else, listing races.
They should be in France by now. They should be storming along the French lanes, racing off ahead of the shambling columns, finding their crossroads, clearing out snipers, setting up their positions. But instead here he is, feeling queasy, listening to an account of his cycling career and watching Gossum shovel down a second plate of Sunday lunch.
“S’cuse me, s’cuse me, Mr. Hastings.”
Billy grits his teeth, turns back to him. There are sharp points of red on the boy’s white cheeks now, like he’s got a fever.
“I just wanted to tell you—”
“Yes?”
“You were great that day, back in ’thirty-five. You were really great.”
“Thanks,” Billy says.
“We used to say you were going to be someone.”
“Right.”
“Dad, God rest him, and my brothers—God rest them too—” The words start to gain momentum, stumble over themselves. Specks of spit fly out with them. “ ’Cause of course they’re gone too now, John and Alan; just me and my mum now.”