Necessary Dark

By Robert Harlow

W.W.ll was not, for Pilot Officer Tate, one story. It was departing and arriving over and over again. It was leaving old friends, gaining new ones and living through their deaths. It was losing command of ones life and becoming the creature of a cause called great and necessary. It was being good at what one does, and hoping to be lucky.

It was a barrier to a past that could not be revisited, while being lured to think of a future despite the odds against having one. It was loving ones fellow warriors in ways that can never be repeated.

It was, in Tates case, growing up and becoming an adult knowing only how to bomb and destroy and fly back to base in whatever way possible.

And, in the end, it was feeling guilty for having survived.

Robert Harlows semi-autobiographical 8th novel makes this, and more, hugely accessible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 16, 2002
• ISBN: 9781465315687

Robert Harlow

SHORT BIO The author, most recently of Necessary Dark, a novel based largely on his experiences in WWll, Robert Harlow was born in Northern British Columbia in 1923, worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation from 1951 ro 1965, and was between 1965 and 1977 Head of the Department of Creative Writing at The University of British Columbia. He was short listed in 1972 for the Governor General's Award for Literature, and in 2001 he received the Terasen Lifetime Achievement Award for an outstanding literary career. Since 1990, he has lived with writer and artist Sally Ireland on one of the Gulf Islands that lie between B.C.'s Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island. When Tomorrow Dies

Book preview

NECESSARY DARK

Robert Harlow

Copyright © 2001 by Robert Harlow.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-7-XLIBRIS

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

Contents

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

For those who made it through

The author takes full responsibility for any errors herein.

Memory often fails. The flying is based on his logbook; the rest

may be, on occasion, even closer to the truth

Novels by Robert Harlow.

Royal Murdoch

A Gift of Echoes

Scann

Making Arrangements

Paul Nolan

FELICE: A Travelogue

The Saxophone Winter

PART ONE

ONE

Tate was nine, in 1932, when the Kirbys moved into a rental house two streets away. Like Tate, Donald Kirby, was never called by his Christian name. They were Tate and Kirby to everyone, including teachers at school, where they knew they were in trouble if their first names were used. One day, out in Tate’s backyard, a badminton net appeared across the lawn, tied to slim poles made solidly upright, one by the long narrow flower bed and the other across the lawn beside the equally long and narrow vegetable garden. When Tate’s mother finished setting it up, she issued badminton birds and racquets and tutored him in the game. Later on, Tate never thought of the net’s appearance without seeing Kirby suddenly there, something that might not be quite true, but it felt right that his friend had arrived with the net. So, maybe it was a week later or even the next month when Kirby and his family, his mother and father, his sister Cissie and little Paul arrived.

Tate was good competition when he and Kirby played badminton, basketball, marbles, but Kirby usually won. Hand-eye skills, Tate’s mother said. However, Tate could run faster, play soccer better. When they knew they were best friends, Cissie, and Paul who was four, came often with Kirby to play in Tate’s yard. It was a kind of babysitting that Kirby did when things were not quite right at home, and he was protective of them. No dirty tricks, no leaving them behind when they decided to go to the school to play on the roundabout and the swings, and he watched them when they were at the wading pool in the park at 33rd and Dunbar. Paul was tough and physically able beyond his years. He played at soccer wildly; snotty-nosed and red-faced, he rushed the ball and kicked it farther than any other kids his age.

Cissie, who was almost six, sometimes brought a doll in a tattered old buggy, but she wasn’t girlish. Even then there was something up front and in-your-face about her, especially when it came to like and dislike. She liked her brothers, and disliked immensely being bored. Tate thought she was a little jealous of him, because he was Kirby’s best friend, and also because he had many things to play with. Or maybe she wanted him to be her friend, exclusively.

So, tbere they were, Tate and the Kirbys. This moment began a stretch of time that included the next twelve years of his life, a long run of experiences that came to its own conclusion at an English airfield in the late fall of 1944. They were together the centre of each others’ centre. He didn’t know how else to think about it. Afterward, back, returned, he tried to think how and why, despite death and trauma, that prime nucleus held.

His yard was bigger, longer than some, because his parents’ small and neat house was set farther forward on its lot than usual. Its stucco was painted a relentless bone white and the eaves and windows were trimmed with black, a reflection of his mother’s view of the world. In the back yard there was, besides space to play, room for a garage, big enough to house a 1930 Chevrolet sedan, as well as to store garden tools and Tate’s bike, bats, balls, boxing gloves, badminton net and racquets.

One day he left Kirby in the garden playing soccer with little Paul and went into the garage to fetch out his bicycle. Cissie was there, squatting down over a discarded coffee can. She was not quite six, and so he said, an apprentice adult, My mum lets you use our bathroom.

Sometimes I like to do it outside. She nodded, agreeing with herself, stood up, her underpants at her feet and the skirt of her dress still held high. The cold feels good on my bottom.

It wasn’t her bottom she was talking about. Without being embarrassed or grinning with mischief, she stared down as if directing his gaze. He didn’t have a sister. Cunt was the second most powerful word after fuck, and he wasn’t glimpsing it by accident nor was she showing it off or offering it. She bent and pulled up her underpants.

There, she said, letting her shorty summer dress drop down and walked past him out into the garden again. The experience wasn’t entirely new; he’d slammed into rock-solid Cissie before. But the different thing here was how she’d taken away his control of his own body. His flesh congealed, and from his throat to the tip of his dink there was an insistent need. Although he’d just gone to the bathroom, it felt as if he had to go again. Something deep in behind his cock pushed to get out. He followed her about, did it sneakily, and not just for the rest of the day, but for all of that week until he knew for sure that she was special (but what kind of special?) and she had wanted him to know it.

The four of them, on another day, walked along a forest trail in the nearby University Endowment Lands toward the campus. It was Paul’s idea to come here, where they always felt on the edge of danger. They hooted and yelled and ran from the pathway into the bush and out again, fierce but wanting to be safe. Cissie giggled with fright when a large and swift Steller’s jay sailed between the trunks of old growth cedars toward them, flicked its wings and was gone. Tate and Cissie stood still, watching after the bird. Kirby and Paul took off along the trail and were gone in a mock race to somewhere up ahead. They had homemade guns and would declare war on Tate and Cissie as soon as they caught up. Tate carried their real Daisy air rifle; whoever won the toss and got to use it was the Allies and the others were the Germans. They had trenches in the vacant lot down the street from the Kirby’s house, but here was the Ardennes Forest.

Cissie was close to Tate, which was not a new thing; she often sat by him on the couch when he was at the Kirbys’ place, as if he were someone she must watch over to make sure he behaved the way Pamela, her mother, thought proper. Maybe now there was a chance to do tit for tat, see how she liked it. He handed her the airgun and his mind narrowed to where it was like looking through a keyhole at a picture of what he must do. It was a risk. But he had to pee anyway, and that helped him turn to the side of the trail, take out his cock and begin to make a strong, arching stream into the bush. Cissie had the Daisy over her shoulder, and didn’t bother to stare. She glanced, stood beside him and waited. That was a disappointment. But when he finished she did watch while he shook drops from the pink tip of his prick like a grown-up. In her usual, certain voice, she said, It’s okay for brothers to do it in front of sisters, promoting him from family friend to brother, and at the same time jumping them both over what was supposed to be itchy and secret and dirty, as if it had been a snake lying on the trail.

They became brother and sister, which allowed certain intimacies and forbade others, so it was a long time before she and Tate peed again in each other’s company. By then, she was no longer Cissie but was called by her real name, Catherine. The rest of the day that followed along after Tate stored his dinky-toy dink inside his short pants was not recalled, except perhaps as part of a general memory of playing allies and Germans. Here, it was a game for fun while they looked after four-year-old Paul. Back on the street where the Kirbys lived, Allies and Germans usually erupted during Run Sheep Run or Kick The Can, when the rules were broken by Stanley Morgan or Trina Cooper, both of them notorious for wanting to be Germans, and then the next year wanting to be called Nazis when Hitler came to power. Tate’s mother said Trina was no better than she should be, and Stanley Morgan would see the inside of a Reform School if he wasn’t reined in by his parents. But Mrs Tate didn’t need to be reminded that war was how things were settled.

Tate was an only child. All his early life he watched his father gradually fade away, because his lungs had been burned by the chlorine gas the Germans had used in his war. When Hitler became dictator and then began invading territories that had belonged to Germany before 1914, he looked west first, to lands along the Rhine River. Nobody stopped him. Tate’s father, and Kirby’s too, were hugely affected. Mr Kirby wanted Hitler stopped, war declared to be on again if necessary. Maxwell Tate sat very quietly in his leather recliner and said nothing. He appeared to be waiting.

The day the news came on the radio that the Germans had gone to reclaim the Sudeten, Tate heard his father in the bathroom coughing hard, and when he went to him his face was wet with real tears. He stared at Tate, who was soon to be fourteen, as if he might be in danger, but then with effort his face cleared and he put his arm across his son’s shoulders and smiled. Don’t worry, it’s nothing, he said. There was blood on his chin.

Tate came home from school the next day and was told his father had gone into hospital for tests. He died that night. His blistered lungs had finally stopped working. The Big Bad War, he had called it, as a kind of joke. He was a serious man.

Tate’s mother, a nurse here at home during his father’s war, nurtured bravery in herself as others might good health. After the funeral she said, We lived on borrowed time, the three of us, and now the loan’s been called. Your father would want us to get on with our lives. Maxwell Tate had been a good accountant and he’d worked hard to leave wife and son well fixed, because he knew he was going to die young. He also never got as close as he’d wanted to his son for fear the boy would miss him too much. Tate was sorry he’d been almost an invalid, and after he died his most indelible connections remained those times when he’d tried to make his father talk about the war so he could get the trenches and the barbed wire and the picture of fifty thousand killed in a day straight in his head.

His mother encouraged Tate to begin having a life of his own, so when Tate asked her for a clarinet (Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw were suddenly famous) she bought him one. She was used to deciding when it was time to give him things. She’d bought his first bike and had taught him to ride it. She’d taken him down to the shallow and benign water at Spanish Banks on the litoral of Vancouver’s English Bay to help him learn how to swim, and later had got him a tennis racquet. Before that, one day, when he was eight, she came home with boxing gloves. She went rounds with him when he got out of line so that he’d not be afraid of fighting when he had to.

Aside from learning the clarinet, the life of his own consisted mostly of spending more time at Kirby’s place than he did at his own. The day he was told that his father had died, he excused himself as soon as he could from his dry-eyed mother and went to be with the Kirbys. He didn’t tell them about his father. He wanted this to be the place where everything would go on as it had since they met. Instead of shock and sadness and wanting sympathy, he felt angry that his father was forcing change.

They sat on the Kirby’s front porch steps and had water with chips of ice in it from the block in the cooler, and ate soda crackers with homemade blueberry jam on them. The Kirbys didn’t have a lot of extras and usually only ate at mealtimes. Tate still didn’t tell Kirby and he went with him down the block and got into a game of street hockey. That helped. He came back feeling assured, and when they were once more sitting on Kirby’s front steps cooling down, and Cissie was sitting beside him again, he told them what had happened. They didn’t know his father had gone to the hospital, and Kirby looked at him as if he thought he was just practicing for when it would be really true.

Jesus, Tate, what’re you saying?

But Cissie yelled and pinched his arm. Damn fucking liar. Her vocabulary had always been horrendous.

Pamela Kirby came out onto the porch, angry. All right, young lady, get into the house.

Cissie ignored her mother. Tate says his father is dead.

Pamela was a small, dark-haired, pale-skinned woman, with black eyes, always opened wide, like a china doll’s with stuck eyelids. She gazed at people. She stood with her hand on one of the pillars that propped up the roof of the porch. Poor Tate, she said, as if he weren’t there. I wonder when?

Last night, Tate said, interested to see how a grownup took the news, someone not his mother. Well, actually it was this morning. The doctor said 3:30.

cissie got up and went to her mother. Pamela looked at her and said, anxiously, I should send something to Mrs Tate. But there’s nothing, is there? She had come from a family that had had no money worries, and she’d never gotten used to having to do without because of the Depression and her husband’s drinking. cissie took her arm and they went into the house.

You shocked hell out her, Tate, Kirby said, forgetting what was happening here.

It was Cissie who said it, not me. Tate still didn’t feel bereaved, only that he’d done something wrong. cissie came back out and sat closer by him this time. She and Kirby didn’t say anything. They watched and waited for him to cry, but he didn’t, not until the funeral.

His mother decreed a closed casket service, and the polished brown box with its brass fittings made him feel claustrophobic. He shivered with fright for his father locked in there, and the tears finally came. He tried to hide them. It was embarrassing. But they wouldn’t stop. He was shamed, and rose up above himself and stared down at this ambushed boy, red all the way up to the tops of his ears and whose face was wet. He knew people were watching to see if he would lose control and sob. Half his home room class was there. More girls than boys. Cissie was at his right side holding his arm, and Kirby was next in the pew. He stayed aloft and flew away, and afterward only remembered the funeral from its early moments when he came in and sat down and saw the box that held his father’s rotten lungs, embalmed forever, and everything else preserved, too, along with the piece of shrapnel that had been too close to his spinal cord to remove.

At the cemetery later on he cried. It wasn’t about his father; it was the only way he knew to clear his own lungs and head of the congestion the days from the death to the funeral had caused. Then in the limousine going home he began to feel the loss.

I hate the bloody Germans.

His mother took his hand and held it firmly in her gloved one for a moment before she said, It’s hard not to.

Nine days after Maxwell Tate’s funeral, little Paul died. He was eight, a mouth-breather, because of swollen adenoids. In the cold and rain in winter, his tonsils gave him sore throats and ear infections. Mr Kirby said he’d grow out of it. Money for an operation was the problem. In the end, Pamela didn’t care that by the last days of the month they ate rolled oats, boiled pasta and day-old bread bought for pennies at the bakery down at 16th and Dunbar. Money must be found and if there was no money for the hospital, then she’d take Paul to the doctor’s office, which was above the bakery, and have his tonsils and adenoids removed on his examining table. The charge there would be fifteen dollars. It was a surprise that Mr Kirby said yes, why not, it was a simple operation, no need for the expense of a hospital. Paul died. The anesthetic. It happens unexpectedly sometimes.

Mr Kirby went, escaped, to the Legion at Tenth and Alma, where he worked as bartender, waiter, sometimes janitor and occasionally bookkeeper. He designed notices and announcements, where others might only have typed them, and he pinned them up in military fashion on a notice board he kept uncluttered of irrelevancies. Pamela watched him leave from the living room window and then she came back into the kitchen and collapsed on the floor. Cissie screamed at Kirby to go next door for help.

on the way to the hospital in the back of Mr Durrant’s car, Pamela stopped breathing. Kirby shook her, and Cissie, who already at almost ten years old knew for sure that grownups down deep were unreliable, slapped her face, back and forth, yelling, You can’t go to Paul, you can’t go to Paul, you can’t go, you can’t, we need you. Pamela breathed. When they got to the hospital at 12th and Oak, the doctor in Emergency gave her a shot of something in case she did it again. Mr Kirby came home, drunk and trying now not to be. He took leave of his job and looked after Cissie and Kirby, cooked, cleaned, visited Pamela in the hospital. After five days Pamela was strong enough to come home so Paul could have his funeral.

Lieutenant (ret’d) Kirby wore his Military Cross to the church and the graveside. He had never flaunted or talked about it, and had only worn it when everyone else wore their medals, on Armistice Day in the parade to the Cenotaph at Hastings and Beatty. After the service and the burial, Tate’s mother, wearing a firm smile, led the way back to the Kirby’s where she and some neighbours had brought cups and saucers and plates and sandwiches and cake. Pamela was done with the day. She remained conscious until they got her to her bed with two army blankets over her to keep her warm.

Friends, good acquaintances and comrades from the Legion, filled the house. Mr Kirby came back into the room and gazed at them with an angry look, like a schoolteacher silencing a class. Something that had tried to be strong in him had collapsed. He took a half ful mickey of rye out of his jacket pocket and downed the remaining six ounces in four long gulps. He got a chair, put it near to the wall and stood on it, hardly necessary, because he was taller than anyone in the room. Everyone knew he was going to make a speech and they waited. He waited, too, for the rye to hit him hard, because that was what he wanted, and when it did, he got lost inside himself. Tate could see that as well as anyone. Cissie stood close to him, and said through clenched teeth, No, please, no, Daddy. Kirby stood stiff by the door to the dining room, needing to be apart from them now.

Mr Kirby’s speech was not about Paul. The trenches. The stench of death. Being there was supposed to count. He fingered the cross on his lapel. What did it mean? What was there for a man to do to keep his family who was too young at the end of the war to know anything but how to kill Germans? A man who’d done his duty? Not enough. Not enough had been done. To be exact: nothing.

The Legion men nodded and some applauded, because they had always liked, even admired him. He was one of them, worked at their branch for just enough money to rent this old wreck of a house that was ready to be knocked down and replaced if times ever got better.

He swayed away from the wall, got his balance back and stared at the people watching him. Pamela went to the hospital, he said. But Paul didn’t.

Cissie had her face turned into Tate’s new jacket, bought to attend his father’s funeral.

Mr Kirby suddenly barked out the doctor’s name. Fifteen dollars to kill my precious son. He halted, shaking his head and looked at the empty mickey still in his hand, as if more rye might make him forgiving. Cissie moved, held onto Tate and forced her way past people. Behind them, as if he’d found his point, her father shouted, The Boche are on the march again. Mark my words, there will be war soon. At the bottom of the steps that led down from the front porch, they heard him cry out: War soon, by God. Mark my words. They will need me. And you. Make us somebody again.

Cissie pulled Tate around to the windowless side of the house. He tried to calm her, but she had changed, as something burned or hammered is changed. She yelled noises that didn’t sound like a child’s while she ripped out handfuls of knee-high, unmowed grass, pulled up dead daisies, and she would have attacked a holly bush if he hadn’t stopped her. Assholes, assholes, assholes. She slapped and punched and kicked him, and tried to drive her skinny knee up into his crotch, because he was adult enough to be punished. Tate grabbed her and held her, saying her name to try to calm her, and that was when Kirby arrived.

What’s going on? He sounded like his father. She’s ten asshole. Who do you think you are, Tate? She’s ten, ten, ten. He was six months younger, but he was bigger. Tate stood and took the punches. He’d never seen Kirby’s eyes with tears in them before.

Cissie’s voice was like her father’s, too. I made Tate bring me out here, Donald, and then she began to cry for the first time.

They stood in the lee of the shingled, weather-stained house that the neighbours complained about because it was lowering the value of their well-tended homes. His voice sounding strangled, Kirby said, You son of a bitch, Tate, I saw you in the cemetery after your dad’s funeral. Cried like a fucking baby, and you never cared if anyone saw you. He stood at attention, as if he were being correctly judged a sissy. With fists clenched, he wept, sucked in air and made noises in his throat that sounded like bones breaking.

The war took its time coming, but when it did, Mr Kirby went immediately to reclaim the commission he’d received on the battlefield when he was twenty years old. After Paul’s funeral, Cissie had stopped swearing, and for two years, until September, 1939, she wouldn’t say shit if she was drowning in it. But then when her father left for the war, she hollered obscenities at him for going away to die. He told her that she just didn’t understand, there was a job to finish, and because it made things tidier, easier, he was happy to think he had a daughter who was tough of voice but also sensitive by nature. Like he was.

He reappeared a month later in uniform, sober, an officer and a gentleman, with knife-sharp creases in his trousers, and his gold buttons and high red-brown boots had been shone by somebody else to a very high polish indeed. Kirby said the war must be a good thing.

It was important to be at war. Save the world from the Germans. Finish them off. Get it right this time. After ten years of being shoved around separately by Bad Times, to be invited to join as citizens of a sovereign nation and do something together to save your home and also Europe from Hitler made the huge conflict noble and worthy. And it was. The world was turned over by the war, and it needed to be. The war demolished the Great Depression.

From September 1939 onward, those in grade twelve went down to the Recruiting Office as part of the celebration of their eighteenth birthdays. Tate and Kirby attended piss-up-going-away parties all that year, and the next, and the next, until Tate’s own party in January 1942, where the pep rally band he played with showed up, bringing his clarinet with them, and he spent most of the night playing tunes for others to dance to. He didn’t even get drunk. Since he’d been in grade ten, his and Kirby’s future was the war and their ambition had been narrowed to getting there before it was over. No one this time (as they’d done in 1914) thought victory could be achieved quickly. That was good, and even better was that it felt to everyone at school like a game, and no game ever starts with the idea that either the players or the contest will be lost. Anyone who could pass the physical and was born before 1921 could be on the team from the beginning; those younger had places on the bench until their time to play. Britain was in peril on land and at sea and in the air. Volunteer as soon as you could and choose which position you wanted to play.

Tate joined the air force, and his first wound of the war came when he had to leave his mother and the Kirbys behind. Cissie said she’d never forgive him, or Kirby when he was ready to go. By then she was almost fourteen; it was conveniently ignored by all that in fact she was going to be left alone with Pamela, who had not been quite well ever since Paul died.

Tate’s first name was Howard, which had been the name of an uncle on his mother’s side who had been killed while on patrol in No Man’s Land in 1916. As if to agree with him that the name didn’t suit, even when he was grown, hardly anyone ever called him Howard, only sometimes Howie. He left his home in Dunbar Heights, six feet tall, somewhat muscled so that at 160lbs he didn’t look skinny, with dark brown hair, ears close to his head, a mouth more sensuous than determined and eyes that were both watchful and eager.

The war was reported event by event, and its necessity connected one occurrence with the next to make up a kind of surreal meaning. Tate lived through it. He learned, after two years of training, to fly an aircraft that was 75 feet long, and two stories high, with a wing span of 102 feet. It had four engines that together produced 6,480 horsepower. It flew at a maximum speed of 272 miles per hour, and at sea level it climbed at 908 feet per minute, but as it gained altitude its ascent slowed almost to zero close to 24,698 feet, which was thought to be as high as it could go. Fully loaded it weighed 30 short tons, six-and-a-half of which was made up of 13 bombs, each weighing 1000 pounds.

During 30 operations Tate used up 53,280 gallons of petrol while crossing 25,850 miles of mostly enemy territory to drop some 346,400 pounds of high explosives on military targets. When he was done, the air force noted in his personnel file that he had attacked successfully such heavily defended targets as Sterkrade, Hamburg, Duisburg, Dortmund and Essen. It was noted that during all of his sorties he showed a fine offensive spirit, pressing home his attacks with keen determination, ignoring all defenses the enemy had to offer, and obtaining excellent photographs of the objective. He was cheerful, aggressive, a fine example, etc. Perhaps the military loved those who managed to live only second to those who fought and died.

Tate sailed to England on the Louis Pasteur, a once luxurious French liner. Dirty and decrepit and painted grey, because everything at sea was painted grey, it still managed twenty-seven knots. Among those aboard, the army, navy and air force women were quartered behind locked and guarded gates in First Class, on the uppermost deck. Officers had cabins on A and B decks, and below that bunked other ranks, of which Tate was one. He had not been commissioned when he received his pilot’s wings. The ship was eight days at sea. It headed out from Halifax, went south until the weather was sub-tropical, then north to very near Iceland. U-boats ruled the Atlantic. During the first hour of the seventh day the ship steered south again to Liverpool.

Tate was assigned to D-deck at the waterline, where the denizens slept in hammocks and ate at tables bolted to the floor. Among the crowd there, two other sergeant pilots named Cook and Young had been similarly sentenced, and they immediately became Tate’s good friends. It was no surprise, the war allowed for that. Young called Cook the Professor; he’d been half-way through university and was going to study more Latin and Greek after the war so he could teach them. Cook knew dozens of cowboy songs, and Young, who’d been a junior car salesman at Dueck’s on Broadway in Vancouver, played the guitar and mouth organ at the same time. Cook sang and Young strummed and blew on his Honer. The second day out they made up a song about the inedible slop that was brought down to them in laundry tubs at mealtimes.

The two Brit erks who ladeled out the mysterious stews from the galley heard it and shrugged. Fink this shite is bad? the taller one asked. Just you wyte. At the moment, the sea was rough and an impressively large wave heaved the ship’s stern high into the salted air and hauled the propellers out of the water. The hull shuddered. So did the erk. That is, if this wreck mykes it to bloody shore.

Tate missed playing along with Young and Cook on his clarinet. It had been pinched just before the train pulled out of Calgary for Halifax. He had left it with his kit bag, not ten feet away, while he said goodbye to a file clerk from a thieving insurance company (her words) he’d met at a Canadian imitation of an American Stage Door Canteen the night before. She had come to see him off as if they’d known each other all their lives and he’d be back for her after he’d made the world safe for young lovers. She’d been a gift, his first all-night marathon and second full-penetration sex. She was square, plump and she sparkled and was still in love with their long night together. In bed it had been like someone had dumped hundred dollar bills on them, and they’d been kids about it, grabby and hysterical, trying to pick every damned one of them up. Morning came too soon, even though he knew he was exhausted from kissing her, sucking at her large nipples, doing sixty-nine, which he’d only heard about, licking, being sucked off and fucking with her until at the end of the fifth time, indelibly memorable forever, they came together. He climbed up into the day coach, slept sitting up and didn’t think about how big the loss of his clarinet was until the train was past Medicine Hat and nearly at Moose Jaw.

Everyone spent time at the Louis Pasteur’s rail as if they’d been posted there to watch for U-boats. Some game, this, Young said, like pinning the Devil on the fucking wall. But Cook didn’t think so. This is exercise one: how to manage fear of what must be expected. There were only, once or twice, porpoises to see. Or maybe they were dolphins. The Atlantic was an empty place. It was black and it rolled and made whitecaps beneath rain clouds that looked like dirty, wrung-out dishcloths. In the distance were huge nimbuses. They stood looking at the scene as if they’d paid admission to see it. Another of Mother Nature’s bad paintings, Cook said. On the evening of the eighth day the old liner came safely to Liverpool, where they entrained (Cook laughed at the word, A barbarism) for Bournemouth. Once there, Tate’s contingent was billeted in what had been a six-story apartment hotel. Obviously, it was once an expensive holiday retreat for well-off retirees before 1939, but its luxuries were gutted and the lifts didn’t work. There was no assignment of the army cots scattered about in the spacious flats. The quickest, Young and Cook among them, claimed beds in the apartments on the ground floor, the less swift the next and the next, until the first three floors were filled.

But none of that rush interested Tate. He wanted to see where he was and climbed higher. From the fourth floor window he could look down on Bounemouth’s central park and the city surrounding it. On the sixth floor he finally had a clear view to beyond the fold of land that separated the centre of the city from the English Channel. Across it he saw, or imagined, something hazy in the distance that he thought must be France. German territory.

Up here he was going to be by himself; no one else would expend the energy to join him. He wasn’t a loner; maybe he didn’t mind being by himself because he was an only child and had learned to have no demanding need for company. As if he were staking a claim, he explored the apartment. The walls of the living room and dining alcove were a pale yellow, the bedroom a dusty-rose, and the window there looked toward more blocks of flats and beyond them to treed streets where big stone houses faced a view of the sea. In the bathroom there was running water (cold) and a working toilet. He came again into the living room, knelt on the cot beneath the window overlooking the park and leaned his elbows on the sill. The evening out there was huge: green in the park, with the sun’s light a red-gold and the sky a wet blue, all of it familiar, as if he were back in Vancouver where even this late in summer it could manufacture similar sunsets. What kind of unreal joke was this? Where were the troops on the ground, fighter aircraft protecting the skies and the navy patrolling the Channel? Cook and Young appeared, searching for him. They stared too, and after a long moment Young said, Where the fuck are we?

I’ve put that question on hold for the duration, Cook said. The answer could turn out to be final. He backed away from the view. I have, however, asked about getting us a drink. This place is as civilized as it looks. Unlike puritan Canada, most kinds of beer and hard stuff are available in pubs, some of which are attached to hotels, others stand alone. And women here can attend these watering holes unescorted. While delivering a lecture, he often gestured hugely and did so now. War in paradise. I vow it, sir, a strange adventure.

Already he’s taken out fucking citizenship, Young said.

The public bar in the hotel just across the road was carpeted, the stools they sat on were teak and the fixtures brass. There was an upright piano on a small dais at one end of the room. The lighting was low but not dim. They paid a shilling for a pint of bitter. Then another shilling for a pint of mild. Cook said it was important to understand that what they were drinking now was what they must, willy-nilly, drink for the rest of the war, and critiquing flavour, temperature, body and bouquet were irrelevant. Learn the taste. Cheer it. Love it, he said, and soon concentrated drinking made them pissed; Young and Tate joined Cook in becoming British to the core. Young unpocketed his mouth organ. The barmaid didn’t object. Tate and Cook sang. It was allowed. A corporal on leave from his regiment went to the piano. Cook announced that the party had begun.

A week went by like holiday time, featuring piss-ups in different pubs every night. There was no apparent discipline, few parades, little was expected and no information, only rumours, offered about the future. There was the mild excitement of discovering that the British traitor Lord Haw-Haw kept an eye on them from his radio studio in Germany. Canadians, he often said, would either perish at the hands of the Luftwaffe, or die of syphilis. He reported, accurately, that the clock in the tower in the centre of town was three minutes slow. Which meant spies were among them. They heard the story of how one was caught by Flight Sergeant Allen, the NCO who had met their draft when it arrived. He liaised (a word too often used by the military and despised by Cook) with those who accounted for, billeted and eventually posted aircrew personnel to begin training for combat. F/S Allan had to be in his middle forties; his hair was white and his forage cap sat on his head at the correct angle. He was a muscular man, a solid oblong who walked straight-up-and-down. They were told that one night in a pub he suddenly collared a warrant officer, second class, who was standing beside him, shouted Spy! and frog marched him out the door. The masquerading German, a man in his fifties, had a row of first world war ribbons on his chest, but Allen saw that they were pinned there in the wrong order. The war was closer than it looked, which excited even Cook. F/S Allen was both friendly and profoundly certain that the Germans had to be forced to surrender unconditionally. He was the right man to usher drafts of airmen through their stay on Britain’s southern shore.

Tate woke close to noon on their first Sunday. He knelt on his bed and looked out. Bournemouth was still there, and after a week here he was beginning to see it more particularly: a seaside city, red brick, solidly British with an English love of gardens and green spaces. The park below him lay between two heights of land in the middle of the town, an accommodating stretch of grass with pathways, and shrubs and trees, ponds, and a roadway that ran along its far edge and linked one side of the city with the other. Even in wartime the park was somehow being kept green and tidy.

The weather was clear and warm. He leaned his left arm on the sill, and looked down at the people in the park, older married couples just come from church, small children romped, mothers with prams, soldiers, sailors, airmen in ones and twos or with an arm around an almost new acquaintance. There was a particularly large rhododendron on the north side of the park. Last night, after the pubs had closed, he’d lain on the grass in the shadow of that bush with a pretty woman. He, Young and Cook had bought drinks for her in the saloon bar of a pub on the other side of the High Street that ran along just above the park. She’d let him walk her there, and now he wanted her again. The blessing that came with the memory of her was an erection, and automatically his hand began to work it. Stella: she’d told him that was her name, and he’d believed her. He was maybe a dozen strokes away from spitting sperm against the plaster wall beneath the windowsill when he heard from his left, as if it were bouncing off the blinding twelve o’clock sun, the noise of aircraft. He quit in mid-stroke and stared seaward, listening.

The increasing sound became dark shapes. There were three of them, flying from France, enemy-held territory, twenty feet above the water, wing-tip to wing-tip. They came on fast over the Channel and grew, swelled to their actual size, blunt-nosed and German: three fighter aircraft, Focke-Wulfs. There was a 250 pound bomb under each wing.

He was seeing what was happening in takes now, as if he had become a still camera working at terrific shutter speed. The aircraft disappeared below the height of land that hid his view of Bournemouth’s mined and barb-wired beaches, then rose up and let their bombs go as if they were bowling balls.

The concussion and the noise arrived almost together, and the fajade of the hotel across the road and the building next to it caved in. Debris and dust exploded out onto the street. The three aircraft climbed into the blue early Fall day beyond the ruin they had made and each did a roll off the top as if the people watching in the park wanted entertainment as well as war. Then they dove down; the deep-throated shatter of their engines eased now to a thick rackety noise. In close formation again, they flew over the buildings they had bombed. The light flak guns on top of Tate’s billet began firing. Their quick noise was shaped and vicious and their tracers were incandescent even in the bright sunlight, but no harm appeared to be happening to the Focke-Wulfs whose pilots opened fire on the people in the park, who appeared to Tate as slow-motion figures in a horror dream, unable to reach safety.

This was an English Sunday. The park was a natural place to be. Cannon shells from the noses of the aircraft and thirty calibre bullets from the guns along the leading edges of their wings sprinted across pond water, and then the grass, churning both up. People jerked to a stop, fell, struggled, lay still. Tate watched a soldier grab a motionless young woman and fall on her. Her leg stuck out from under him and was blown away. The soldier staggered up and glanced high at the disappearing Germans, who were followed by ardent but now useless flak from the guns on the roof. The soldier fell, lay still, because he had been hit, too. The Focke-Wulfs were miniature now, their sound decreasing, and in the park there were bodies. People were statues, or they were running; the war was here. Tate looked toward France and saw that the Germans were dots on the horizon again. No commander could have ordered this. Airmen, even enemy airmen, had always been chivalrous. He remembered that. It was well-known.

He was shivering. There were sirens, bells; the Ambulance Service and firemen came, and rescue units from the army. They moved into the park and the ruined buildings above it. on the street in front of the hotel rescuers were running in and out of the rubble. In the park, the soldier was on his back now; stretcher bearers were coming for him. The young woman was dead, her face covered with a civilian’s suit coat. Tate shoved his cot back with his foot and stood by the window, naked and guilty, a peculiar feeling that here, now, he didn’t understand. Should he have been with those people in the park? He looked down again at the carnage and felt fear, the kind that comes after narrowly missing death.

He dressed away from the window, returning to it between underwear and socks, and between shirt and pants to stare at the rescue operation. He saw only the shocked milling of those who’d been left alive. With his battle dress jacket properly buttoned and his cap on his head, he went down the stairs to find Cook and Young and go with them out into the park.

Cook was on a stretcher in the middle of the roadway. Where was Young? He should be here. A woman, maybe a nurse, was crouched checking for a pulse, then she covered over Cook’s bloodied face, a sign that he was, Jesus Christ, gone. The breath went out of Tate’s lungs; he sucked air back in all the way down into his stomach. Just a body now. Fucking dead. Not something he could say no to. A true thing.

Something else was true: A German in France had ordered this, must also have timed the raid for when church was over and pubs were just opened. In the bar thirteen hours ago, without knowing it, he and Cook had lived their last moment together. This was his closest memory of him, but there were many other remembrances. They had a history going back a full two, almost three, weeks. Tate’s mind lurched forward. From now on this was the way it was sometimes going to be with new friends.

The final scene was clear and simple. The three of them had been at the bar with Stella, and Cook had slipped him a condom when he’d seen who Stella was favouring, and she must have watched him do it. Out in the park, he had found there was a sudden hunger in her strong enough so that when he began to touch and kiss her she was already nodding, and she’d said, Use your friend’s rubber, will you? He took it out, showed it to her, uncensorable, the result of a generous move by a friend in a game he and Cook didn’t know was going to be called because of final darkness.

The stretcher was signaled away. Tate walked mesmerized by it to where some of the rubble had been shoved aside and a twenty hundred weight lorry was receiving bodies. Unseeing, he bumped against Young standing in the street. Politely, as if this were a social occasion, Tate said he was sorry. Young stood quite still. His face and uniform were white with plaster dust. He wouldn’t speak.

Tate stared at him, knowing what was happening but not understanding. Jesus, he almost shouted, shocked at how Young looked, is it that bad? The words made no sense to him; he only wanted to wake Young up. He punched him on the shoulder, but not hard, needing his attention. Young fell to his knees, and began to sob. No tears, just quick noises. He shook, maybe with fear, and he looked up as if he were pleading.

What had happened was no different for Tate than it was for Young; it occupied the cells of his body. He hauled Cook’s best friend back onto his feet, stood almost nose-to-nose with him, and suddenly Young began to talk. I was writing a letter home. I should of been with him, but no, not me, I got to write a fucking letter. I told my folks I’d write every Sunday. A stupid stupid promise. He veered away from Tate and faced the wrecked pub. Go ahead, I said to him, I’ll catch up. Sonofabitch, I knew Cook was in there, but the fuckers wouldn’t let me get to him. Young moved then, toward the lorry, stiff and wooden.

Tate didn’t want to see what might happen now. Cook’s bloody face was there in front of his eyes. He looked through it up into the sky over the Channel and began to host an anger that wasn’t ever going to die of forgiveness. Cook had to be identified, but no one had asked Tate to confirm whose body that was. Young would do it. Young: it would be hard to be with him again. Tate was certain this would be true for Young, too; they would avoid contact, each wanting to keep Cook for himself. He had lived as if he were larger than the air force, undigested by it. He’d made them exclusive. The thought came to Tate that Cook was their last civilian friend. From here on in, everything was going to be different.

He escaped from in front of the ruined hotel and went down into the park, looking to force a distance from what had happened there, and which had also killed Cook. Already the park was shrugging off the Focke Wulff attack; it flowered and burgeoned, unaware that this was a place of slaughter. Tate decided that it looked sane, normal enough that Stella might come by on her way to look for a safe pub where they could have a Sunday afternoon drink. He stood waiting. She didn’t appear.

Cook’s bloody face hadn’t gone away from in front of his eyes; he was as usual The Professor, the teacher, whose Lesson One, which had been about how to manage fear of what must be expected, was not as hard as Lesson Two: How to handle the expected when it unexpectedly happened. Tate sat down on the grass, needing to. He felt cold now. The sun was still high. He leaned back on his elbows and waited. The muscles in his arms trembled and he lay down and might have slept. He couldn’t be sure if it was sleep or something beyond it. Then Flight Sergeant Allen was looking down at him. You okay?

Tate sat up. He was only a little disbelieving now about what had happened; Cook’s image was faintly in front of his eyes, his mind was calmer and the edges of the emotions he’d brought here were dulling. He looked up at F/S Allen who was obviously sane. Tate thought himself sane, too, and because sanity was what concerned him, he said, This looks like a sane place now.

The flight sergeant’s chin was tucked down near his collar bone and he looked as if he might be standing, head bowed, before a war memorial. Tate stood up. It feels like some kind of accident.

F/S Allan looked as if he’d heard a joke he couldn’t understand. Tate could see that he’d been wrong; it wasn’t an accident. More like an earthquake.

You might think that. F/S Allen moved a little, about to leave. But life’s important in an earthquake. Here winning costs lives. So be it. Keep your pecker up. He grinned and moved on toward the roadway at the end of the park.

Tate thought he saw Stella. He ran toward her, veered off the footpath and went along the walkway on the park’s north side. It was Stella. She’d been dressed in civilian clothes last night, a skirt and blouse, black pumps and no stockings, but now she wore her army uniform and had a gas mask and a small bag slung over her shoulders. Her visored hat was straight on her head and it almost hid her brown curls. He caught up with her and said her name. She turned to face him, and as if she’d been thinking about him, even waiting for him to catch up, she said, Hello Tate. He took her by the shoulders and turned her. She dodged his kiss and shoved him away. I think it’d be better if you apologized.

What?

You took advantage last night.

Was she kidding? He backed off. I think it was your idea too.

I was muddled with drink. Say you’re sorry.

He wasn’t Are you going away now?

Yes.

Give me your address.

It’s a military secret.

That’s something I can be sorry about.

She didn’t even smile. I’ve a train to catch. She turned to go. He walked with her and took her arm. She didn’t object. Maybe whatever was wrong with last night had been dealt with.

Where were you when they came? Something in her voice still wanted to accuse him.

In my room. It overlooks the park.

I was there.

In the park? Jesus.

I was looking where we’d been last night, but I didn’t find it. She held up her left hand.

Married.