Day by A. L Kennedy Page A

himself, all of a sudden cheery. He waited, because he didn’t know the form for when you have attacked a sergeant and made him let go of his favourite knife.
    â€˜Not so bad, Day.’ Sergeant Hartnell eyeing him from the ground, perhaps choosing when to move so there would be no unseemly struggle, perhaps deciding how he might need to injure Alfred and set the balance back to where it should be. That was all right with Alfred, he’d not mind. He opened his hands and made them soft.
    Freed, Sergeant Hartnell paused and then sprang up neatly to his feet, making Alfred blink.
    â€˜Not so bad at all. But I need that every time, mind. Every time. Harnessed aggression. Or you will be unable to save your life and I will not be there to save it for you.’
    â€˜No, Sarnt.’
    â€˜Because I do have other things to do.’
    â€˜Yes, Sarnt.’
    â€˜Spending all my bleedin’ time running round looking after you great hopeless shower.’ Sergeant Hartnell grinding clockwise on his heel, surveying his charges. His squad studied the grass, shifted their boots, tried to look savage.
    â€˜Yes, Sarnt.’
    And then the exercises continued: the heaving and the quiet blasphemies as they swung each other on to the grass, ran knowing they’d be tripped, struck knowing they’d be blocked, harmed each other enough, slightly more than enough.
    At the end of their games, the other lads were always in good spirits, a brightness to them you didn’t see when they’d been out square-bashing, or down on the firing range. Alfred, on the other hand, only lost his contentment, had to swallow more often, his mouth filling with the taste of coal and damp and his mother’s kitchen and he had to spit and needed to wash himself, wanted to go off and stop fucking pretending, just run into a fight, disappear all of the way and be in proper pain and fucking kill somebody. The same every time: he’d want to fucking kill somebody, when there never was anyone spare that you could kill. Would have been frowned on, you could bet.
    â€˜Your bloody mother’ – you never should say that to anyone.
    He’d much preferred the range. He had good dreams when he’d been shooting.
    But that was long before the skipper and the crew.
    Before all kinds of things.
    The crew which didn’t like to think of itself parted, wandering loose across so many other places in the times before they’d met. None of them, Alfred was certain, really believed in the schools that Pluckrose went moaning and binding on about. They refused to imagine Miles getting through an assault course, or indeed breaking into a run at any time. They wouldn’t accept the skipper had ever been without his wings. They were the crew and nothing other than the crew and that would be for ever and they’d have their picture taken to prove it, the family of them together; but not until the thirty ops were over, not until they were complete.
    Because you didn’t want to jinx yourself, but also because of tradition and wanting to be traditional squadron men – traditions being excellent things – and even more because of what it said about their time. The crew was extremely particular whenever it dealt with time – it woke and was live and moving in its moment and in that moment only. It would not be concerned with its past and had no business thinking of its future: its cleverness was in drinking up its minutes, second by second, and making sure to drain each one. It looked at the bods outside it who did not grasp this, looked at the sleepy civilian types – the spivs and 4Fs – and saw how close they were to being dead: how the time streamed off other people like rain and ran away without them missing it. The crew didn’t like that – they found it offensive.
    â€˜D’you know now, if you’re quick, you can put your hand inside a second.’ Molloy there with Alfred, the two of