Authors: Raffaella Barker
‘What? I thought you said he went back to Newcastle?’
‘No,’ Dora whispered. ‘Not him, I mean the cake man. From the cafe. Look!’ she nodded towards a doorway just ahead.
‘Where? I can’t see,’ hissed Luisa. ‘God, that cake box is vast. He must be having a party.’
Her eyes travelled from the cake box held under one arm to his linen shirt, ink dark and crumpled, its sleeves rolled back. His forearms were tanned, he wore a plain watch and was reading the screen of his phone as he walked. Then he looked up. Luisa met his gaze. She was so close she could smell him, and the tang of lemons and hay was fresh and exciting. She walked on, the thin fabric of her skirt gentle as a breath on her skin.
Accidental or deliberate? Chance or choice? The questions thrummed with the rhythm as the train as thundered west on the Southampton to Exeter line. Michael smoked in the corridor with a couple of sergeants from the 14th and a lad not more than seventeen years old with bitten nails and a sharp Adam’s apple, who’d fired his first shot from a clean unused gun the day peace was declared.
‘Where’re you headed?’ The taller of the two sergeants tapped a cigarette on the pack, hunched himself around the flame, until the tip glowed and he breathed out a feather of smoke.
His friend returned the lighter to his breast pocket. ‘Back home to the folks in Liskeard. Gotta farm to run, the wife’s been doing it with a couple of land girls.’ The words burst out of him, loud across the roar of the train. His lips were wet and red, excitement shaping this first glimpse of his future. Repeatedly, he lifted his hand to his face and swept his palm from jaw to brow, like a magician wiping away all thought and knowledge.
He flipped the open window closed and the ensuing quiet was tangible, warmer and soft. ‘My dad’s arthritis took him hard just around when I was called up. Reckon Jenny’s well worn out by it now, with the little ’uns as well.’ He rubbed his fingers in his eyes. ‘Don’t suppose I’ll have as much as a day off before I’ll be back to the milking. But you know, I’m glad of it, glad to have something to come back to.’
The listening men nodded, the other sergeant spoke. ‘Yeh, it’s like that back home for me, I’ll be back on the round as soon as I’m outta this uniform. The missus has done it for me, been postmistress of four villages since I was away. I thought she’d like a rest, but she reckons she’s off to work in the draper’s shop in town. Wrote her she can have her feet up now I’m home, but she’s having none of it. Says she likes to be out of the house, so I’ll be cooking our tea most nights now.’
The men smiled and fell silent, aware of unease it would be disloyal to share.
‘How about you, sir?’ The soldiers turned to Michael, an easy camaraderie was established halfway down a burning cigarette, and they looked at him as if from one pair of eyes.
Michael held his breath for a long moment. ‘I don’t know yet,’ he said finally.
Beyond the carriage the world went by, fields, hedges, a river dotted with geese, a few more on the bank, scattered like white roses. Then the grey rooftops of a farm framed by pale trees. A cart laden with sacks moved slowly up a hill as the train flashed past with the sudden shriek of the whistle. Darkness, a tunnel. Sooty blackness jolted his nerves. Daylight, a cottage garden, laundry dancing on the line. None of it had any relevance to Michael. The momentum of the train was enough, staying on it was all he had to do for now. He set his shoulders, braced to fend off further questions. None came. The conversation shifted to a rumour that the German population was not so happy to receive its defeated heroes home again to the Fatherland.
‘So they’ll have to join the circus, or something, to keep themselves on the move,’ said the tall sergeant and spun a coin as if in illustration of a trick they might try.
‘Just let ’em try coming near my house asking for money,’ said the young lad, his swagger implicit in his tone. In the laughter surrounding his comment, Michael slipped back to his seat.
A plan, that was what he needed. It wasn’t enough to have got on the westbound train, no matter whether he had done so deliberately or not. He should have got off again at the first station. By now he would be on his way to Norfolk. Going home. It was the reality that had stopped him. There was too much of it. He was used to being part of a unit, marching. Marching into war. A number, a uniformed cog in a giant machine.
‘Onward, christian soldiers, marching as to war.’ It was the marching out again he couldn’t imagine. He was lucky. He kept being told this, he must be. The ticket collector on the train, a woman wiping the counter at the station cafe, a voice in his head, all shared one message: ‘You are alive, the rest are not.’
Being alive didn’t make him fit to become a husband. He tried to picture himself married to Janey, living in a little house somewhere, wearing a suit and kissing her on the top of her head as he went off to work each morning, returning in the evening, kissing her again. The thoughts pelted him. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t marry her and have lunch on Sundays with her mother and father. He wasn’t fit for it. He held up his hands in front of him. There could be no small talk, no fabric of domestic life when his palms and fingers were scarred with wounds caused by weapons, and his nights were drenched with sweat, his sleep interrupted by nightmares.
The woman opposite in his carriage was staring at him, a wobble of unease puckered her chin. He shoved his hands back in his pockets and crossed his legs. She averted her eyes, folding her handkerchief into smaller and smaller squares until it was a tiny cube of pale blue cotton. It looked to Michael like a sugar lump, he wondered if she might pop it in her mouth.
The train began to shunt slowly out of the station and Michael settled against the bristly carpet bag fabric and sighed. The only thing he knew was that he didn’t know what he was doing. That had not changed in the hours since. His companion had not eaten her handkerchief, instead she had taken out a ball of wool and some needles and begun to knit. Her wedding band moved along her finger as she drew in the wool, and the shadows under her eyes made Michael feel protective of her. She undid her coat, and only then did Michael notice that she was pregnant. He wondered if her husband was alive. A rush of heat stung the back of his eyes and he pressed his thumbs into the sockets to stop tears springing. Lulled by the rocking motion of the carriage, and the quiet click of knitting needles, he drifted into sleep.
At Liskeard Michael woke. The knitting woman had gone and his carriage was empty. He looked out at the platform, disorientated, and saw the tall sergeant jump off the train, dropping his kit bag next to the stiff bulk of his army greatcoat on the platform as he bent down, then cautiously opened his arms to receive the rapturous greeting of a small girl with pigtails. She had had hurtled down the platform towing a reluctant toffee-brown puppy on a lead.
‘Daddeeee! You’re back! Look at Pinkerton, she’s my very own puppy! Mummy let me bring her. Come on, I’ll show you how she shakes you by the hand!’
‘Let him be, Sally, come on now.’ A short, bulky woman bustled up behind the child, restraining her with a hand on her shoulder. A sob burst from the woman as the sergeant stood up. The train shunted off, shooting steam around them, wrapping the three of them in a cloud with the puppy and the future, the past and now all tangled up.
Michael should be teaching children like that now. He would have gone to university if things had been different. He had a place. He would have become a teacher, he had a career and a life planned for himself in Norfolk. It no longer seemed possible for that to happen. He could scarcely remember the person he was before the war, he still hardly knew the person he had become. He would not go to university now. His brother Johnnie had never seen the point of it anyway. ‘Too much learning can damage your brain, kid,’ he said. Michael squared his jaw. Johnnie only ever read adventure stories at school. He farmed with his father from the age of fifteen and he had a motorbike and fixed it himself. He never spent a moment indoors he didn’t have to, and Michael, two years younger, looked up to him.
Their mother heard Johnnie’s remark, and didn’t let it go. ‘You do things differently, you boys,’ she said. ‘Give Michael his head and he’ll find his way.’ Johnnie winked at Michael, stage whispering, ‘Mum’s softness is only skin deep.’ It became their shared joke, a fast route into familiar territory. Secure.
Michael pressed his knuckles to his eyes, his cheekbones a ridge beneath the sockets. He didn’t want to see home in his mind’s eye, or any familiar territory. The crush of his hands against his eyelids seeped purple and red blooms across the image of his mother in his thoughts. At Penzance, he hoisted his bag onto his shoulder and walked out of the station. No decision needed there, it was the end of the line. He was dazed, he’d never been to Cornwall, and that in itself was liberating. Striding across the road with a spring in his step, he caught the familiar tang of ozone cut with seaweed and smiled. He had no army timetable to dictate a structure to his day, but his wristwatch told him it was almost six o’clock. He needed somewhere to spend the night.
Penzance had shut up shop for the evening and although a few windows glowed on to the streets, more had the shuttered look of abandonment. Everywhere displayed some level of dereliction, whether a broken window, a collapsed roof, or a boarded-up doorway. The picture he’d held dear of England as a cosy haven, was a fantasy. The war may have been fought across the sea, but it had come home. Michael hugged his kitbag and hurried on as the light faded. Where could he stay? Rubble spewed out of a doorway and a girl, her head covered with a shawl, threaded her way though and clambered into the house behind. A little boy with fair curls stepped from the shadows and she let her hand rest on the top of his head as she bent to speak. Spinning round to shut the door behind her, she stopped short. There was no door, just a couple of planks propped beneath the lintel. The children moved away into the shadows of the house. Michael dropped his bag and stepped across broken bricks to the shadowy enterance. He found a panel of the old door and propped it in the gap, placing a chair in front of it. At least it gave an impression of a barrier. Whether it would protect the children, and anyone who might be in there with them, was another matter. A glance down the street suggested that this was not the only house without a front door.
Michael stepped off the rubble and back onto the road. His gaze was drawn to the sea. He would walk along the coast, following the sunset, and find somewhere to stay the night. The evening’s glow pricked through his uniform, and excitement stirred his tired limbs enough to get going. Cresting the first hill, he saw coves and undulating hills, villages tucked into folds falling to the sea, a few houses scattered further away, while to his left a vast grey battleship loomed drunkenly in the sea, small fishing boats floating like toys around it. Lopsided and redundant, it had gone aground on a bank of rocks some time ago, by the look of decay around the rusty portholes and ragged flag. Its colossal scale couldn’t stop it looking foolish and comical, like a set for a Buster Keaton movie.
Cheered, Michael strode along the road out of town. The departing sun spilled across the surface of the sea, and he was happy to be alone, striking the tarmac underfoot. He was uncertain how long it would take him to find a place to stop, and he quickened his pace, removing his jacket and rolling it up in a ball at the top of his bag.
The road twisted like a rope into Newlyn. Voices and the chink of glasses through an open door drew him into a pub, a room with a low ceiling, smoke-tinted walls. From out the back wafted a delicious aroma of fresh fish frying. He realised he had scarcely eaten a thing all day and sat down, glad to have got himself somewhere.
‘Why Britannia?’
‘What?’ Michael twisted his head, unsure if he was being addressed.
‘Britannia. She’s on your collar.’
A man had approached, sunburned, his speckled guernsey textured like chain mail. He stretched a hand in greeting. ‘Forgive me, I was just curious about the badge. It’s your regiment, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, the Norfolk’s 1st battalion.’ Michael was confused, taking in the gentle voice, grey eyes, and sweep of fair hair. He didn’t seem like a fisherman. ‘Britannia’s our talisman, if you like, though she’s landed us in trouble I can tell you.’
‘She has? Cigarette?’ His companion put down his beer to offer his pack.
Michael nodded, mock solemn. ‘We’re the only regiment to have a woman in our barracks.’ He held the match, laughter breaching the awkward gap. ‘Lance Corporal Michael Marker,’ he said. ‘That’s ex-Lance Corporal I suppose now, but I thought I’d keep the badge.’
‘Paul Spencer. I was in Italy. You?’
Michael nodded. ‘Pretty bad there, but then so was everywhere. France, the Middle East, and most recently a bloody great boat we sat on for months. It’s taken a while to get home. What about you?’
‘Air Force, but I was lucky, we flew straight back at the end of the war. Out of the planes, back to work.’
They both laughed. Michael noticed Spencer’s clothes were spattered with flecks of blue paint. ‘What’ve you been painting?’
‘Ha! You may well ask. And today I’m damned if I know.’
Spencer stared abstractedly at the floor. The pipe between his teeth looked as if it belonged to an older man, but everything else about him was packed with energy.
‘Not walls then?’
Spencer grinned wryly, ‘Not walls, no.’