19
SAM
After I’d delivered the kid to her mother, the party started to wind down. There was a lot of clearing up to do and by the time we’d finished, Ruby and her grandma had gone. Her parting words echoed through my head. Be careful. What had got her so worried? It was a training exercise, not the real thing. They probably wouldn’t even give us live ammo.
Davy gave me a nudge. ‘Hey, that was risky, wasn’t it, dancing with your girl in front of her grandmama like that?’ I’d told him and the other guys about Ruby’s situation, warning them not to acknowledge her if they saw her in town so she didn’t get into trouble.
I shrugged. ‘What was I supposed to do, ignore her all afternoon?’
‘She’s hot stuff.’ He winked at me, elbowing me in the ribs. ‘You two – you know – yet?’
It took me a minute or two to figure out what he meant. ‘Aw, that ain’t none of your business,’ I said, going red.
‘Lookit him,’ Davy crowed to Jimmy and Stanley. ‘I bet they’re at it like—’
Stanley shook his head good-naturedly. ‘Leave the kid alone, Davy. Just because you think with your balls, it doesn’t mean the rest of us do.’
I didn’t hear the rest; I was already on my way outside to have a smoke and let my face cool down. Leaning against the wall outside, I gazed out to sea, thinking about what Davy had said. In recent weeks Ruby and me had gotten close – real close – a few times, but she always pulled away, breathless and flushed, her hair in disarray, saying, ‘I’m sorry, Sam, but we mustn’t. Not yet.’ I had to admit, it was kinda frustrating, but I didn’t want her to think that was all I was after.
I blew smoke into the air, remembering the conversation we’d had in March about the houses we wanted to live in one day. It all still felt like an impossible dream.
After the party, Jimmy and I ended up in the hotel bar with the guys from the band: Walt, Arthur, Wilson and Godfrey. They set up their instruments around the piano and soon the locals were singing along and we were having ourselves a second party. Everyone kept offering to buy us drinks, but I stuck to water. ‘You professionals?’ I said to Godfrey after last orders had been called, and we were getting ready to leave at last.
Godfrey shook his head. ‘Not me. Walt, though, he was playing before he was even out of diapers.’
Walt, the saxophone player, didn’t look much older than me or Jimmy. He grinned bashfully.
The six of us walked down the steps at the front of the hotel together. ‘Hey, what are you boys doin’, leavin’ by the front entrance?’ a voice drawled. Shit. It was Freddie Gardner and another of his goons, a guy called Moran, both of them wearing their MP uniforms.
‘Oh, man,’ I heard Wilson mutter behind me.
Freddie stepped forward, holding his truncheon. ‘And what are you kids doin’?’ he asked me and Jimmy. His eyes were slightly glazed and his breath stank of whisky. Guess he’d been having himself a party somewhere too. My stomach twisted. That mean look on his face reminded me of Kirk. That old, familiar feeling of anger, mixed up with fear, began to simmer inside me. ‘There a problem?’ I said before I could stop myself.
Jimmy gave me a sharp nudge. ‘Shut up, Sam.’
‘There sure is.’ Gardner came even closer, pushing me and Jimmy out of the way. ‘But I’ll deal with you later. I want a word with these boys first.’ He narrowed his eyes at Walt, Arthur, Wilson and Godfrey.
‘Hey, what do you think you’re doing?’ someone said as Gardner and his pal backed Walter and the others against the side of the hotel. I looked round, and saw one of the old boys who’d been with us in the bar, a guy with a white moustache.
Gardner gave him a wide, shit-eating grin. ‘Nothin’ to worry about, sir. We’re just makin’ sure these boys ain’t been botherin’ anyone.’
‘What the bloody ’ell are you talking about?’ the man said in his thick Devon drawl. ‘Of course they bloody ’aven’t. You leave them alone!’
‘This is military police business, sir,’ Moran slurred. ‘Please step away.’
The man’s moustache bristled. ‘You bloody step away. Who the bloody ’ell d’you think you are, ordering me around like that?’
His friends had come out of the hotel behind him. They came down the steps and formed a ring around Walt, Arthur, Wilson, Godfrey, Gardner and Moran. White Moustache jabbed a finger into Gardner’s chest. ‘Those lads haven’t done nothin’ wrong. They’re as welcome ’ere as anyone else, aren’t they?’
He looked round at the other men, who nodded. ‘Course they are, Tom,’ one of them said.
Gardner raised his truncheon. ‘Listen, you stupid old—’
‘Hey, don’t you bloody threaten my dad!’ a younger man cried. He gave Freddie a hard shove, sending him stumbling backwards. Freddie roared, and swung at him with his truncheon.
All hell broke loose. Before long, there was a pile of men brawling in the street, with Gardner and Moran at the bottom of it. Jimmy and I helped Walt and the others rescue their instruments, and they fled.
Jimmy and I glanced back at the fight, and scarpered too.
*
We left the camp for the south coast just over a week later, thousands of us packed into the back of chugging, canvas-covered lorries headed for Torbay. There, we were going to board destroyers, then sail round the coast to practise beach landings at a place called Slapton Sands.
Usually the guys would have been singing, laughing, cracking jokes, but the rumours that had been circulating round the camp for the past few days were on everyone’s minds, and the lorry was silent. Last week, another division had been practising beach landings in the same place when something had gone badly wrong – most of the men hadn’t come back. No one knew what had happened, exactly – some said there’d been an attack by the Germans, some said it was friendly fire – but the higher-ups had forbidden anyone from asking questions. It hadn’t stopped us talking about it amongst ourselves, though. The words Ruby had said to me at that party echoed round my head: You will be careful, won’t you?
‘Think Jerry’ll have a go at us too?’ Jimmy asked from the bench opposite as we bounced along the narrow Devon roads. It was a few minutes past dawn. I could only just make him out.
‘They said hundreds died. Hundreds. What a screw-up,’ Davy Manganello, next to me, said, dragging on a cigarette.
‘We don’t know anything,’ Stanley Novak said on my other side. ‘If so many guys died, what the hell would they have done with all the bodies? How would they have gotten rid of them without anyone finding out?’
You could tell Novak was a journalist; he sounded so calm and matter-of-fact, you’d think we were on our way to a church picnic. Taking a battered hip flask out of his pocket, he passed it across to me and Davy. ‘Here.’
The neat whisky burned a fiery trail from my throat to my stomach, warming me, although it didn’t do much for my anxiety. It had been a crappy week already, and I was exhausted. When news of the street brawl outside the hotel reached the top brass at the camp, Gardner had been hauled in front of them to explain himself. He didn’t get in too much trouble because of his daddy, but he got enough of a scolding that he’d been sour as hell about it afterwards, and he spent the rest of the week doing everything he could to make life miserable for me and Jimmy: stuff going missing from our hut, only to turn up again damaged or covered in mud; getting jostled in the queue at the canteen hard enough to make us drop our trays; shit like that. This morning, he was in another lorry, thank God.
After the long, jolting ride, we were marched on board our destroyer, joining a convoy of other ships travelling around the coast. I snatched a few hours of uneasy sleep, dreaming of Ruby. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, with Slapton Sands in sight, we were packed into shallow landing craft. Thank God the sea was calm, because I didn’t even wanna think what being on board a tin can like this would be like if it wasn’t. Even so, some of the guys got sick, leaning over the sides to lose their breakfast to the waves. I turned away, trying to close my ears to the sound of their retching, my own stomach clenched in sympathy.
Despite everyone’s nerves, the landings passed off without a hitch. We scrambled out of the landing crafts and splashed through the shallows onto the beach, sergeants barking orders and shells screaming over our heads. The smoke made my eyes and throat burn. Next time I do this it’ll be for real, I thought as we headed for a shingle bank guarded by units pretending to be German soldiers. I hope it’s this goddamn easy next time.
Men were stretched out on the sand, acting as casualties as medics wearing uniforms with crosses on the shoulders worked their way across to them, ducking at the sound of booming gunfire from the ships anchored out to sea. Another shell screamed over and I lay down too, keeping myself as low as I could.
As I crawled forwards with Jimmy, Stanley and Davy either side of me, my fingers caught something half buried in the churned-up sand. It was a watch, US army issue. As I dug down, I found more bits and pieces: a handful of spent bullet casings; a button; a shred of khaki cloth. Where the hell had all this come from? The face of the watch was smashed, and there was a brownish stain on the piece of fabric that looked like blood.
I remembered what Davy had said in the lorry yesterday, and a shudder wrenched up my spine. Maybe those rumours weren’t rumours after all.
‘Sam, come on!’ Jimmy yelled. The others were leaving me behind. I shoved the watch, bullets, button and cloth back down into the wet sand, burying them as deep as I could, and scrambled up the beach after the rest of my unit.