Day by A. L Kennedy Page A

another, please, old man. Let’s get some peace.’
    The crew sticking to that after, silent, the Bastard behaving himself and their feet echoing somehow, the way they might if they’d wandered into some high, empty room.
    Funny: the music had been hopeless since Alfred had come back to Germany. There were gramophones and some wirelesses, all right, but they never played anything he could like. Perhaps it was just as well, though – bring back the songs he’d been used to and he couldn’t think what would be next.
    You always were a soft git when it came to tunes.
    He blames his ma and Wesley: Methodism – less of the preaching, give us a song. You couldn’t take the sermons seriously, anyway, not when they were coming up out of some lay preacher you knew, someone who was only a person. Even the vicar seemed watery when you saw him. But the hymns, they’d roar clear through you, then pack you with faith.
    â€˜My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.’
    Just another way of saying that your wishing will make it so.
    But it’s still got a punch to it – imagine a touch of the melody and it drops you back. Young Alfred with his Sankey hymn book and the Sunday dust that smelled of aunts and tight, clean collars and happy ignorance.
    Ma, she always kept faithful, no matter what. She loved it. I think she even loved that it was pointless, unrewarded. Singing in the chapel, she’d seem a girl, she would be lit. Except no one wants to be lit – it just draws attention.
    The Fallingbostel fucker has tucked himself close beside Alfred and is breathing too loudly, managing to make his presence push in and nag, so Alfred faces him and, ‘The smell. That was the worst. Not the latrines, or the damp, things getting reasty, rotting – I mean the way we stank – human beings – us. When I got back, repatriated, they DDT’d me and then I don’t know how many baths I took until the water stayed clean – they let you do that, were used to people needing it – but I didn’t get rid of the stink for days. And sometimes it’s here now, in my skin. Human beings, we’re the worst stink in the world, like a disease. It’s in us. Like a disease.’ And this causes offence, which is what Alfred wanted.
    The man stands up and you could almost be ashamed for him, because he is too clearly lonely and not mithered about who sees. Alfred keeps more orderly that, ‘I won’t talk to you again.’ Watching the back of him, how it’s round-shouldered. ‘I don’t know you. You don’t know me.’ Although this was too much, being purposely cruel, when Alfred hated cruelty.
    Sod him, though. He should have expected it.
    Because you can only meet so many people in one life and then you’re not able, your welcome’s worn out. Gunnery training at Jurby, the Initial Training Wing, the Operational Training Unit, all the training and training and people and people before you reach the station, your station. You get tired of new bods. For instance, maybe seven men are walking out at the end of a movie in Boston and they’re a crew the way that you are and they’ve managed half a dozen ops and they have a bomb aimer who can sound like Tommy Hanley, or Lord Woolton giving Home Front tips – saying how
naice
his recipe for pie is – and then by the end of the week you don’t have to meet them again and don’t need to remember their names. After a while, you can’t see the use of other people. You have enough with the skipper and Pluckrose, Miles and Molloy and Torrington and the Bastard. There’s no need for anyone else.
    Although you’re not an idiot: you do realise that some night your crew will most probably get the chop. You don’t brood, but the odds suggest strongly that they’re done for. And this might depress you, what with all of the efforts