Day by A. L Kennedy Page B

them leaning over the fence at the bottom of the station and having a look at the neighbouring farm, the fields, birds moving among the furrows, brown and small as stones. There were partridges in the woods, very dapper Alfred thought them, a nice sight – but none today. People tended to shoot them. It was a shame.
    Sometimes the farmer would turn up to chat, pass the time while Alfred didn’t think of the bowsers refuelling behind them, the bomb trains receiving their loads, the tail assemblies being fitted, tested, pins and clips reinserted for safety. The farmer would tell them about his crops and what had grown where they were standing, over on the war’s side of the fence. Mostly, he said the same things in that dreaming flat Lincolnshire way, slower even than Torrington, repeated himself word for word, but they enjoyed that, let it comfort them.
    We made him one half of a bargain. If he would keep being there, then so must we. It doesn’t do to miss appointments.
    That afternoon, though, they’d been alone, balanced in the while before Alfred would go and check his guns again. They’d been fine on the test flight and he trusted the armourers, of course, and he trusted himself. But he would check his guns again before they flew. He would clean his Perspex, polish away scratches that weren’t there and he would practise seeing, scanning, quartering the sky and he would breathe in the smell of his one chosen home: the tight, exciting reek of working oil and skin and his never-to-be-washed flying suit and the good metal and the brassy sting in his throat from ammunition, the choke from hot firing, his trade, himself.
    â€˜You can open your fingers and stretch it.’
    â€˜Stretch what?’
    â€˜A second.’ Molloy would say these things as if they weren’t strange. ‘Put your hand in it the way you would into a woman.’ Talked about women as if they were a known, sad thing to him. ‘When the engines run up, the whole orchestra there – starboard inner, starboard outer, port inner, port outer, the swing of the torque and we’re going, taxiing, we’ll not be scrubbed now, we’re going off – then I open my hands both together and I work inside them, those seconds, until I have them on me like another pair of gloves – the last free seconds there until we’re back, you want to keep a hold of them.’
    â€˜You’re mad.’
    â€˜Bomb-happy. Aren’t we all, so?’
    â€˜You’re madder than the rest of us.’
    â€˜Maybe that’s the sensible thing.’
    Alfred aware, as he taps the fencepost, that he can hear this wonderfully clearly, the meeting of his fingernail and the wood: that since he began flying, operational flying, he believes he has heard, seen, tasted more. He hopes this does not mean his life has been creased over on itself, thickened and made more of, in anticipation of its being short. He hopes that it means he is a gunner and gunners are watchful, hungry, awake.
    â€˜Would you say, Little Boss, that you knew why it is we do this?’
    â€˜Because it’s such a lark.’
    Molloy looks at him, sharp, disappointed.
    Alfred tries to do better. ‘Well, if you want the only reason I know, it’s because we’re told to.’
    â€˜That’s what I thought.’ Molloy tossing the end of his cigar-ette into the field as if it had upset him.
    Alfred wanting to say something helpful. ‘It would be different for you, though.’
    â€˜Why?’ Still the sharpness.
    â€˜I don’t know . . . because Ireland isn’t at war. You don’t have to be here.’
    At this, Molloy gives a laugh, lets it be single and sour, and some of the birds beyond them lift and circle away. ‘That’s true. Yes, this would be me at war on my own behalf, my own decision, because why not. What would I be doing, otherwise? Leaning over another fence back in Ireland and out of my