Nano 2011 - Day 06

7.

The sketches grew a little day by day. When Ed was in the mess hall Cassie would not let him step forward to interfere with the composition of her scene, no matter that the scene was discomposed every day by the milling of the men and the cycling of those off duty and on. She would pat the wall beside where she stood and he would come and stand beside her, idly watching her pencil move, while the other men watched them with jealous and longing looks and kept their language clean and their actions restrained on pain of punishment from the C.O..

'I couldn't have your hair in there,' she would murmur. 'It would completely upset the whole scene. I've got – who is he – Rourke? – with his ginger hair, and I can't have that blond in there too. It just wouldn't work.'

He smiled at her thin excuses and accepted them without argument, and stood and watched as the men that he knew became first lines and angles, and then shades and depths, and then, finally, the beginnings of blocks of colour on the paper.

'I'll paint it at home,' she told him. 'Can't paint here – it'd drive me mad. But I can get the colours in with the caran-d'ache,' she said, tapping her fingers on the slim tin of coloured pencils on the table beside her.

'Will you be painting it soon?' he asked her, and she nodded, intent on blocking colour into a half-abstract head. 'Oh,' he said softly, and she looked at him, suddenly registering his mood.

'Will you miss me?' she asked archly.

He let himself look sideways at her. His hands were pushed into his pockets, and he was glad that they weren't visible so that she could not see the nervous movements of his fingers. She was so perfect that he missed her every time she walked off the base and the scent of her lingered behind in the air. She was so perfect that he dreamt of her and woke up in the night flushed and aroused and fleetingly ashamed of his own mind and body.

He needed a cigarette. He needed a scotch. He itched to go over and find himself a drink so that he could spend some of the energy that was pulsing through his body and could hide the flush of blood that was rising to his cheeks.

'I guess I will,' he said eventually, keeping his back hard against the wall.

'And are you ever allowed off the base?' she asked him in the same arch tone as before.

'Oh, sure,' he nodded, balling up his hands in his pockets. She was real and warm and so close to him, and she smelt faintly of perfume and the soap she used, and of the warm wool knit of her clothes. There was a fluttering feeling in his chest and throat and migrating down to the pit of his stomach in a more insistent surge.

'And will you ever come off the base?' she prompted him. 'There's a dance in the village hall next Saturday. I think a few of the other lads are going.'

'Oh, I heard,' he nodded, his lips dry, his mind disconcerted.

This was not the way it was supposed to be. She was supposed to be coy and he was supposed to unleash all his persuasion on her. This way was better. This way was like the sudden whoosh in your stomach on plunging down a slide. This was like running in hurdles and coming in first, or going to the state fair and winning at the rifle range.

******

He thought of that feeling as he walked through the fall-damp lanes in those days after the crash. He thought of that feeling of jumping off a cliff and leaving your stomach behind, and how it wasn't always good things that made you feel that way. There was the way he'd felt the first time he'd stood in the waist of the B-24 and fired his gun in anger at the sleek shark side of a Messerschmitt. There was the way, worse perhaps, that he'd felt the first time a bullet had streaked through the cowling of the fragile eggshell machine he was flying in and had missed him by inches and struck Henson instead in a mercifully shallow slash across his upper arm. There was the way he had felt the first time they had dropped a bomb on a target and he knew that somewhere down there children's fathers and women's husbands were dying because of him, and he had closed his eyes and prayed that none of those women or children had strayed into the path of that bomb.

Praying didn't always seem to help any more. It didn't help with the thought of Al, so completely obliterated that no one could find his body, or of Frankie, crushed and trapped in the nose of the machine with the cool damp of England so close outside and the fire streaming closer to his living flesh. Little by little the truth of God was being eroded from his mind. Little by little he ceased to believe in the words of the hymns he had sung and the joyous sharing of spirit he had felt when he stood in church on a Sunday back home and everyone there had spoken the same words and thought the same thoughts. The world was fragmented and torn apart. No one believed the same things any more.

He looked up, and saw a cross before him. He stared at it stupidly for a moment, wondering what heaven-sent apparition had come to him in this time of doubt. And then he realised that his wandering had taken him almost to the village, and the church was there over the hedge, and the cross he saw was a Victorian gravestone, made of dirty white stone and embraced in tendrils of carved white ivy that were themselves being subsumed with real, living strands of the same plant.

Eternity. The thought of eternity struck him. Was eternity nothing more than a grave marker that crumbled over the years but lay there still in the clotting earth? Perhaps eternity was what happened when you died in fire and violence and your blood and your flesh were scattered so wide that it was never found, and it slowly became part of the ground. Al, perhaps, had found eternity in that way, so messed up with the destroyed airplane and the torn up ground that he could never be recovered.

He opened the wrought iron gate into the churchyard and walked toward the church. There was a memorial there, splitting the path, dedicated to all those lost in the Great War. He stared at it for a while, seeing surnames repeated and ages of men no older than he was. The heart had been sucked out of the village in those years. And there, on the other side, they had started to carve the names of men lost in this ongoing war. There was space below for more. There was no sense to the world. No sense at all.

He didn't go into the church then. He had been going to push open the ancient wood door and go inside and kneel down and pray, or think, or something. But he could not make himself walk past that tall spire of names that was hungry for more. He wanted to take a stub of a pencil from his pocket and write on that bare stone, Francis Tedeschi, 1922-1944. Albert Barker, 1924-1944. Stuart Carragher, 1924-1944. There were others too, names he could not fully remember, dates he was not sure of. There had been Bert Wilson, a little younger than he was, hauled out of the machine one day, shot and bled out like a veal calf by a single stray bullet. Roy Adams and all his crew lost somewhere near Bremen. Old Walt – old because he was above thirty and had a wife and kids back home – who managed to fly back and set the machine down gently as a falling leaf but died later that night in a hospital bed. It didn't bear thinking of. None of it did. He didn't have a pencil in his pocket, and he was glad, because suddenly he did not want to consign those names to that kind of eternity.

He turned around and walked out of the churchyard and latched the gate behind him. Other people could go and pray there. Other people could sit there on a Sunday in the upright pews and could take the Eucharist and give the responses in droning, thoughtless voices. He got closer to heaven than any of them every time his plane took off from that concrete runway. He got closer to losing his life, and closer to the death of others, and he made that death. Oh God, he made it… He took away what God had given, with his own hands, with his own heart.

Every step on the damp road felt a strange, resonant thing. His feet were cold. His face was cold. He was a long way from the plane dissolving in flames and the steaming of the grass and earth around. He was a long way from everything, a long way from home with its straight grid streets and its square-windowed houses with white sidings or smooth painted walls. A long way from easy days of walking to school with his books and his clarinet case slung over his shoulder and dawdling on the way home to watch the girls or kick stones into the gutter. This was another world.

He would go see Cassie. She would be painting, maybe, in the little back room that her mother had let her turn into a studio, with the afternoon light glancing in through the window and a electric bulb swinging from the ceiling, bare to give the most light. There would be a fire lit in there, and a little smoke in the air, and coal giving out steady heat that drove out the damp. He would sit and drink tea, and she would paint. He hadn't spoken to her since the crash, and she would settle his mind. She would be his balm.