Day Read Free

always said, ‘Doe talk soft.’ But he’d meant don’t talk as if you’re stupid, he’d meant Alfred was stupid. Now Alfred was talking hard.
    Still, he didn’t sound like Pluckrose, wouldn’t want to – Pluckrose had come from another England. Pluckrose could have been on the wireless: a police inspector, maybe, a friend of Paul Temple, or a gentleman with missing papers who seeks the help of Sexton Blake. A gentleman with lots to say and currently engaged in listing his complaints.
    â€˜Some of those big tins of jam, you know – they’re from the Great War. Plum and apple jam, rejected from the trenches. That can’t bode well.’
    Alfred wasn’t
going
to sound like Pluckrose, only like his altered self, his best guess at how a Sergeant Day would be.
    For Alfred’s other alterations there’d been drill, there was assistance, and he’d had taken to it all with a sort of delight: fitting his hands, winged into each other for standing at ease, getting the loop of the cocking toggle over the stud in one, checking the travel in the breech block, learning his movements, his new form – the man at the turret’s centre, the heart of a gun.
    And it had felt like choosing, like being free. Some mornings it lit in his breath: a permission to keep this fresh skin, to love the patterns and the habits of his airman’s life. Now, though, it might be different, this was somewhere operational and serious, too busy for you to get help. Parts of him, like his speaking, they weren’t quite right, they didn’t work well and perhaps this was an indication of other more serious faults he hadn’t found yet. He could see himself failing, washing out, disappeared up North to somewhere cold and pointless, erking away at potato peelings and latrines. And wouldn’t that be a sort of cowardice: a fear you don’t have to admit, because you just sneak yourself out of danger by making too many mistakes? And maybe you’ve hurt other people before that, because you were scared. That’s what they always told you – panic and you’ll damage valuable equipment, you’ll waste us trained men.
    Pluckrose was still talking, while glancing at the doorway, the ceiling, at Alfred and Alfred’s forehead – which was frowning – and at the single wing above Alfred’s breast pocket – AG embroidered at its root, the gunner’s brevet, the sign of his qualification. The first test that Alfred ever passed. The first he’d ever taken.
    Pluckrose winked. ‘Not out hunting for yourself, though? Under instructions? Go thou forth and gather up a crew?’
    â€˜I found you for the skipper.’ This a mumbled chain of Black Country noises –
I fownd yo fur the skippah
– but never mind, because here was the first time that he’d said it –
skipper
– and felt the sparking kick inside his chest, beneath the weight of that single wing. Alfred had a skipper, he was under instructions, he was all right. He was solid while the whole place was uneasy with confusions he couldn’t fathom: restless men and the rattle of wind against loose metal somewhere and the lot of them left here after the pep talks to sort themselves out and knowing they’d have to manage, get this done right, because you couldn’t end up with the spare bods and the runts, couldn’t be forced into a crew with nothing but wazzock-looking baskets, the types who’d kill you.
    He’d thought it very quickly, but very clear –
the types who’d kill you
– he’d allowed that, but it made no impact, perhaps because he’d hoped he was already a little lucky, being fixed up, crewed up, safe.
    Lucky and almost showing a grin. He had his skipper.
    He’d been able to tell Pluckrose, ‘So come on then. Skipper’s waiting.’
    But the skipper needs to be first. If you’ve got to go dragging it up