Day by A. L Kennedy

what. He was almost sure it had come adrift in Germany, in the real prison, in ’43, or thereabouts. So it could possibly make sense that he’d turn up here and at least work out what was missing, maybe even put it back.
    When the film people had driven them up to the gates in their rented Bedfords he’d felt – there was no other word – victorious. Perhaps a good few of them had, because they’d paraded in. There’d been a sense that the marching started as a joke, but then it fixed them, firmed, and their arms swung and their rhythm snapped and some Geordie-sounding bugger at the back shouted them round, halted them, stood them at ease, then allowed them to be dismissed.
    Alfred had noticed some of the technicians pausing and a couple of them making what he knew must be smart remarks, but they were worried, too: they were thinking they weren’t certain what they had here and that now it was caught inside the fence with them.
    The fence itself was quite accurate. The guard towers, too, and the blue-and-white-checked coverlets and the bare board floors and creaking bunks, they were as true to life as they could be and, in a few days, they’d bred what they were meant to: boredom and queues and a kind of anxiety that silted down and stayed.
    Which would really be why Alfred fainted, he supposed. Because the camp was winning, beating him again, and the edges of his dreams had dogs in them and they were running closer.
    Jesus Christ, it isn’t much to ask – the chance to recuperate undisturbed.
    The Fallingbostel man still wasn’t taking the hint: sitting with his eyes shut at this point, pretending to be contented because he was in the company of another bloody Kriegie and because bloody misery loves bloody company.
    Alfred did what he could under the circumstances, wishing himself out towards the pine trees and filling his skull with the deadened drum of footsteps over layered needles, the clean scent of resin, branches springing against his arms. The scraped earth he was staring at didn’t disappear, it only stopped meaning anything, while he made a ghost in the woods.
    Wishing will make it so.
    Not that it ever did. God, but he remembered the song – the Bastard loved every note of it. And he’d a sweet voice. Alfred found it eerie, watching the Bastard’s thin, little lips move in his usually unwashed face and this nearly girlish, choirboy sound emerging.
    â€˜Wishing will make it so, just keep on wishing and care will go.’
    The crew generally ignored him, that being the only way, but one night Molloy had broken out. They’d been walking home, missed the bus, and Hanson warbling on as if he was somebody, running the chorus round and round beneath a low, waning moon. She’d seemed so big that night – the scar of shadow on her, but her shape still clear, the curve into her bright half, and the cold look she gave back to you whenever you caught her eye. No wonder you shouldn’t fly when she was full – and not only because she’d light you up just as clearly as the target. You could tell you’d more to fear from her than that.
    â€˜
Dreamers tell us dreams come true, it’s no mistake.
’
    Then Molloy tearing past everybody and kicking at the wall. ‘Shut up with that fucking nonsense, will ya?’ Kicking and then turning to the Bastard and plainly wanting to kick him, in a sweat for it, but going back for another lump of wall instead. ‘It never made anything so.’
    â€˜Very clever, I’m shewer. Fuck you.’
    â€˜You can fucking wish yourself . . . you can wish yourself . . .’ and then Molloy was running off up the shine of the lane and over the rise and away from them.
    â€˜
And wishes are the dreams we dream when we’re awake
.’
    Alfred had almost started after him, but the skipper had told him not.
    â€˜Hanson, that isn’t a song that we like. And don’t try