Chris Cleave - Everyone Brave is Forgiven

After a while Alistair said, “How was the water?”

“Brisk,” said the RAF man. “How was France?”

“Crowded.”

Both men looked into the sun that was rising now through the mist.

Alistair got up from the bench, which he told himself was real, and walked to Soho. He had hours to kill before he could reasonably go to his hotel. Like the ball in a bagatelle he bounced from café to cabaret, while London continued to look him straight in the eye. As if it had battled the tanks itself, in its spiv hat and spats.

There was cold iron armor massing, just a few miles away across the Channel. Any other city would be chewing its knuckles and digging a hole to hide in. Alistair wanted to yell at people: The bullets actually work, you know! What they did not understand was that the city could be extinguished. That every eligible person could die with the same baffled expression that he had seen on the first dead of the war, in those earliest shocking days before the men had learned to expect it. I’m so sorry — I think I am actually hit.

Night came, and it was still hot. In the blacked-out streets Alistair mingled with the uniformed men. They sought each other out for the comfort of it but they did not speak. Some men, like him, walked aimlessly, while others prowled the midnight dances for the pale excitable girls who were out before their shift, or after it — the latter being considered the more waltzable proposition. With Mars and Saturn in the same heaven, the young women air-raid volunteers wore silk beneath their tunics, and hair spray under their tin hats. The uniformed girls winked at Alistair. Sick of himself, he found that all he could do was salute them.

He supposed he should go and see a show. But all the cinemas were showing patriotic movies and all the theaters were full of dislocated men like him, stretched too thin across time. There were musicals with Broadway stars and dancing troupes, set in Monte Carlo, Ceylon, and Siam. London was perfectly prepared to give him a night out anywhere on earth, and yet all he wanted from his city was the thing that didn’t seem to be on offer: the possibility of coming home.

At midnight, in the dark, in the silence that ought to have been filled with churches striking the hour, Alistair carried his duffel bag to Waterloo. He waited overnight on the platform and at dawn he caught the first train out to his parents’ home in Hampshire. It would be quiet out there. He would go for long walks. In the countryside, surrounded by the oaks and the marsh harriers and all the other singular things, he was sure he would feel himself again.

AT THE FIRST EVACUATION school things went bad, and they sent him to another village on his own. The new headmaster stood Zachary up in assembly and said there would be no detention for being a nigger but there would be a detention for bullying one.

It was a limestone village in a limestone valley, the people having traveled no farther than the stones of the houses they lived in. Beyond the last building but before the first quarry, the Back Acre buzzed with summer flies. Zachary was nervous because the field was overlooked from everywhere. There was a tractor, rusted down to engine block and axles. There were clumps of red valerian and tangles of rambling rose, but nothing you could really hide behind. It was the worst place for Simone Block to say she would meet him, but that wasn’t her fault. She didn’t know people.

Simone had said to meet her at eight and he had been waiting since eight in the morning, in case that was what she meant. It had seemed like the sort of thing he ought to understand, and he hadn’t wanted her to think him any more stupid than she already did. He had waited all day and now the sun was sinking over the western rim of the valley. Zachary narrowed his eyes. The slope was a wave and the yellowstone buildings of the village were fishing boats steaming up it, trawling with long black shadows. In the evening mist the church tower was a lighthouse, glowing red on its western parapet, guarding the fleet with its light. Everyone would be saved. He was a coastguard, looking out over a wild sea, and—

He made himself stop. This was how he always tripped up, seeing what wasn’t there and not what was: the foot outstretched to trip him, the spitball aimed at his head. Across the Back Acre the bees buzzed from bloom to bloom, smart in their striped jackets, heads in the game. The more he ought to concentrate, the more his thoughts wandered.

“What time does this say?” his class teacher would ask, pointing at the clock face on the blackboard. And Zachary would stare at the hands, trying to remember which way they spun, while tears began. And outside there would be a bull getting walked down the lane with its bell ringing, and Zachary would hear the brass edge of its chime softening as it dissolved in the summer air and made its tumbling ascent. The edge of the sound continually tucked under itself as it rose, a slow brass thunderhead, and he noticed it and noticed it and noticed it, and then suddenly everyone was staring at him, and the question was still: “Zachary, what time does this clock say?” and he had no idea — no idea at all — and the whole class was jeering him and he hung his head.

He had been alone since September, until a week ago when Simone had brushed past him. He had braced himself for the scratch or the slap, but instead she had turned and given him a quick half-smile right there in the classroom, where anyone might notice.

The next day she had touched his hand at morning break.

“Zachary? Don’t be sad.”

He was surprised three ways. One, to realize he was sad. Two, that someone had noticed it before he did. And three, that someone had talked to him. He had stood there, perfectly still, watching her walk away.

He thought about her now: her dirty brown hair and chipped teeth. Her skin, lighter than the other children’s. The villagers freckled and bronzed in the summer but she stayed white. The girls in the class left her out of jump rope and hide-and-seek. He let his thoughts go away with it for a while: imagining being so white that people teased him.

She was from far away, like him. He worried he should know. For others, probably, as simple as looking at the hands of a clock and saying “five to nine” would be to look at Simone Block and say “She is from France” or “She is from Holland.” He didn’t even know what he was supposed to know.

She was late. He worried she wouldn’t arrive. Also, he worried she would. He hid at the edge of the field, where foxgloves and wood anemones gave cover. The country children’s eyes were always ranging, spectacular with sight. In the schoolyard he had seen a boy stoop during football, pick up a stone and throw it into a hedge where Zachary had seen only shadows. A thickening of the silence, a closing in of children: a stunned and bloodied rabbit dragged out by the tail to have its neck cracked. Before the creature’s legs had finished twitching, the game had restarted from a throw-in.

Though the evening was warm, Zachary was cold from hunger. His host family gave him nothing, and it was hard to go around the farms looking for windfalls without bringing sight on himself. Better to be hungry and hidden. He watched where the rabbits and the deer went. He saw with the eyes of a prey animal, looking for gaps to slip through. He was better at it than the village children were. He had kept himself to himself until, in the schoolyard, Simone had let a scrap of paper fall beside him. He had put a foot over it until it was safe to pick up. He’d unrolled it, read it and eaten it in one smooth motion. I like you, the note had said. She didn’t know what they could do.

From his pocket he pulled stalks of green wheat and rolled onto his front to eat the soft parts at the base of the stems. The mist was thickening with the sunset. He rolled a rotten stump, caught wood lice as they fled, and ate them. They balled themselves up at the end — the fools, the half-men, the easily scattered tribes from the books near the start of the Bible— you could crunch them like silvery pills. He ate an octave of them, humming. They tasted of summer rain.