Wednesday 9th November

Mathilde – Sunday
Thinking of any of that famous quadruple (??) of big bombers – the Fokker Anvil and the Fokker Hammer, the de Veers Cyclone, or the Avro Delft – or even seeing a black and white picture of one of them in a book makes her feel sad now. It’s not just the memory of that fat, black bellied bomber in her eye line after dad shut the door that night, and the associated ache from the subsequent dissolution of her parents’ marriage: there’s something else, too – her sense of those aeroplanes’ night-centredness, and her knowledge (acquired after the years of innocent model building) of how they were used in the eastern war, the effect that they had on the civilians on the ground, and the post-war (and continuing) moral debates about whether their use in massive carpet bombing attacks against enemy civilians was justified [also hooked up with her perceptions of her relatives who served in the armed forces – particularly Uncle X]. Whereas she used to imagine that the crews of these planes were glamorous professionals, she knows now that most of them were barely trained, little more than boys in age, and she also knows that many of them were far from being heroic or dedicated fighters: some were conscripts, some rejects from the more physically demanding branches of the armed services. [Uncle X as a counterweight to that uncomfortable reality, which somehow detracts from the nobility and moral worth of the enterprise – there’s something here about how the idealised vision is ‘tainted’ by the subsequently modified view of reality (based on more accurate information…]

She used to think of the air war as a clean, technocratic affair, where young men jousted with metal war machines and died all-but-bloodless noble deaths, a view reinforced by the box-top artwork of the model aircraft kits she started building when she was about seven, which showed neatly painted fighter planes zooming towards you out of pale blue, washed out skies, with a smoking enemy aircraft falling away indistinctly into a bank of cloud in the distance. Her thinking is now more realistic and violence-centred: she sees the night bombing operations, for example, in a more ‘narrative reportage’ style, bereft of the romantic emotional connotations that they used to be imbued with. As a dedicated amateur historian of the period, she’s read enough books now to realise that much of the crews’ lives was prosaic and routine-led, and that each bombing trip was the result of an immense bureaucratic and logistical effort, weighed down with theory, long study and reconnaissance, and masses of paperwork, all processed by thousands of clerks and administrative officers; the crews were just the people in charge of the bits of machinery that actually delivered the bombs at the end of those massively complex production line. She finds the thought of the reality of all that system and process a little dispiriting, to tell the truth, and her interest only comes alive when, in her imagination, or in the book she’s currently reading, the bomber crews start to gather in the briefing room, smoking their cigarettes and joshing with each other, talking and laughing loudly and formulaically to disguise their nervousness.

Once the posh briefing officers step out in front of the big target/route map and start talking about weather and logistics, Mathilde’s imagination cuts to the bomber airfield in the dusk, and to the crews smoking their pre-takeoff cigarettes and executing their superstitious rituals in the dusk. In Mathilde’s mind, this scene usually takes place in late summer or early autumn, when the sun has gone down in a spectacular blaze that prefigures the night’s fires, leaving behind a graduated sky of blues and oranges, with a few early stars coming out, white and twinkling in the gathering night.

The squadron’s take off is a tension-filled sequence after the brief picturesque repose under the heartbreakingly beautiful dusk, as the fat bombers lurch and crab their way along the runway and – amazingly – drag themselves up into the evening, bound for distant [Russian] targets.

The journey out is usually uneventful until they reach the Russian lines: the Russian night fighters patrol inside their own territory, concentrated around the big cities that constitute the [Dutch/German] air force’s major targets. These cities are ringed with hundreds of searchlights and anti-aircraft guns, and Mathilde’s read about the bomber crews’ increasing sense of trepidation as they approach these conurbations and their protective cones of lights, guns and fighters – how the flyers’ mouths dried out, their voices became silent, and their watchfulness and alertness increased. But she can’t imagine – really imagine – what it must have been like for them, emotionally, so fresh out of school, and so inexperienced in the world, thrown into this nightly tumult, knowing that so many of their friends had died already, and that they themselves stood a high statistical chance of ending their lives in an exploding blaze of metal shards, human flesh, fuel and flame before their tour of operations was completed. She can’t make that leap, so inexperienced is she, never having known real, visceral fear, and never having been close to death, or the dead, or the dying. [linkage??] This inexperience, so close to the surface of her consciousness and sensitivity about her continuing virginity, makes her feel ashamed and stupid; she knows that her lack of experience of the world, and of its deep and profound experiences, disqualifies her from making any judgments of real weight or value. [Perhaps expand on this to emphasise/prefigure her lack of confidence, her sense that all her judgments are provisional, and that they rest on a shifting foundation, in which she can have no firm belief (or something…)?]

[…linkage?]

Her dad had finally left the family home when Mathilde was eleven. There had been more nights of shouted or hissed arguments, more reconciliations and peace makings, and uneasy, stilted silences at the table while they ate their dinners with cutlery whose clanking echoes seemed to deepen and harden the silence between them all, so that they became hyper-conscious of the slightest movement or sound of cutlery on food, plate, tongue or tooth; Mathilde remembers trying to chew her food in absolute silence, so certain was she that the sound of her chewing would draw her dad’s attention and – perhaps – trigger another disagreement or confrontation.

That summer, Mathilde retreated into her own world and room, spending all her free time – school day evenings, weekends and holidays – at her modelling desk, working her way through different phases of obsessive model making, and building up her knowledge of the events of the Eastern war period, and of both sides’ military technology.

[When she was younger, her model-building had been a joint enterprise with her dad – pictures of them in the family album, puzzling theatrically over an instruction sheet – but it now became a solitary affair…how she’d freeze, feeling her shoulders tense and her heart go cold if dad knocked on her door and came in; how she’d retreat into monosyllables, not looking at him and keeping her shoulders square to the modelling desk – her body completely closed to him…???]

[Linkage: feed this back to her memories of lying in the dark in her room (on the cusp of adolescence now), of remembering those days in that foreign hotel room, and to her experience of the NOW, in her room that Sunday night before the school trip….]

(c. 1230 words)

Tuesday 8th November

Mathilde – Sunday

Miss Phillips had been allocated a different class after her shouting fit, and Mathilde doesn’t remember seeing her much in the rest of her time at primary school. But she does remember that feeling of paused silence, when you can hear your heart beating and feel the electric tension of raw, expressed emotion in the air, and the pause between now and the next thing is an agony of not knowing. That was exactly how she’d felt the first time she’d heard mum and dad arguing in the night.

She’d been half asleep, drifting in and out of a fantasy of being a captive (male) soldier in a prison of war camp, with a gun hidden under her pillow. In this fantasy, she was adult and full of responsibility – the usual calm, unflustered fellow whom everyone respected and whose skills were manifold. She imagined – and dreamed – herself moving with slow, supple confidence, in control of her movements and her destiny despite the bald fact of her captivity, able to anticipate problems and deal with anything that came her way. Earlier in the year, dad had taken her to see her first war film at the cinema – though she’d seen stacks of them on the telly; she’d already expressed interest in soldiers and tanks, and had asked for a camouflaged sun hat for her birthday, and mum and dad had been indulging her tastes as a ‘tomboy phase’. She played with the boys in her street rather than the girls when she got the chance, and she looked as comfortable with a football or a roughly-carved wooden rifle as with a pink pony or a plastic tea pot and a set of plates: secretly, mum was pleased with the way that Mathilde bucked the conformist trends of ‘girly’ behaviour; she was a pretty little girl, and there was nothing boyish about her, even when her hair was cut short in the fashionable elfin look of the day. She moved elegantly and athletically, she smiled readily, and she was doing well academically at school, even though her teachers all commented that she was a little too quiet and shy in class.

The first thing that had struck her in the cinema was the amazing size of the screen and the vividness of the colours, the way the sound and the pictures seemed slightly out of sync, and the way that, even though there was darkness and floating dust all around, the screen seemed to be full of sunlight that beamed out onto the faces of the audience. In the film, a suave, laconic [German/Dutch? – still unresolved] spy/lieutenant had infiltrated a wartime Russian headquarters, and managed to dispatch dozens of thick, stereotypically straw-haired Russians via the judicious use of explosives, machine guns, and a nifty little silenced pistol that tucked invisibly under the left armpit of his tightly cut tunic. It was this figure (played by a famous American actor, despite the character’s nationality) that Mathilde identified with, and whose graceful movements, sardonic drawl and cool killing actions she tried to emulate in her solo, self-narrated games, and when playing war games with her boy friends in the street.

When she heard mum and dad shouting that night, she couldn’t at first recognise what she was hearing: there was this strange sound rumbling against the ceiling below, like shingle being tumbled and dragged by the waves; and then the high-pitched whine, like the start of feedback from a microphone too close to a speaker (?); an unusual, previously unheard dynamic of high and low tones, with none of the spaces that people usually left for other people to absorb and respond to what was being said to them. She lay there for a while, electrified with fright, with her heartbeat’s bass loud in her ears, and her ears straining to hear the sounds from downstairs above the sounds of her own body, and to fit them into some kind of framework of meaning [like when she first…??].

Gradually, as she differentiated between the sounds, separated them out from the distant traffic noise, the surrounding silence, and her body’s punctuation , the gravelly shingle sound resolved itself into the emotion-hoarse shouts of her father, defensive and desperate in tone; the feedback sound was revealed as mum’s shrill, tearful, sobbing accusations. After a while, the energy levels in the argument diminished, as if the tide was going out, leaving just a few last waves of emotion lapping in its aftermath; the speed of the exchanges slowed; the pauses got longer; and both of the grown-up’s voices settled down into a lower, more even register. Eventually Mathilde heard the downstairs lights click off, and then came the sound of adult feet on the stairs – first his mother’s light, quick tread, and the snit of the bathroom door’s lock; then dad’s slower, heavier ascent. She heard dad stop outside her bedroom door, and found herself rigid with fright as she heard dad turn the handle and open the door. In the silence, as dad stood there in the doorway, a shadow seen through her night-thickened eyelashes, Mathilde could hear the disturbing echoes of emotion-hoarse shouts, and she had no idea what to think, or what he could possibly say to her dad again, ever, without a rush of questions spilling out of her, craving explanation and expiation [for upsetting her mum and destroying the peaceful idyll of childhood trust in the parents – EXPAND!]: the memory of those sounds, and that unprecedented anger and betrayal of expectation would always sit there between them, a prism that could never be removed, and which would always distort their interaction. How could he shout at mum like that? What was the matter with him? What was going to happen next? It was shocking.

Later, she heard mum go downstairs again, crying quietly after the steam roar of the boiling kettle had terminated in the mechanical clack of the automatic cut out.

Whenever she hears her dad on the stairs now, that night’s uncertainties and fears rush back into her mind and body, and she’s filled with panic, confusion, distrust, and a sense of betrayal.

(c. 1030 words)

Monday 7th November:

Sunday: Mathilde
The bomber is all silhouette in the gloom, a clumsy caricature of a bat-black shape, threatening in the dusk. Sometimes, looking up at the aeroplanes hanging from the ceiling and waiting for sleep to come, she’ll vocalise a whispered narrative about a stereotypical night bombing mission over the eastern territories, with her Uncle [skinhead bloke’s dad…] playing out his real-life role as a wireless operator in one of the planes, adding a personalised, intimate note to her story telling; Uncle X always performs this role quietly in the background, as if she’s reluctant to impose her own imagined experience or ersatz emotions on his much-respected, authentic [experience]. [Her own interpretation and recreation of the events cringing embarrassedly in front of the intimidating concreteness of what he really went through – and her reluctance to ask him about it to authenticate her own reading, lest she upset him or appear disrespectful in some way: that strange over-sensitivity and eggshell-treading fear of causing upset or embarrassment – of creating a scene or a fuss, or of opening the closed trunk of family emotions…(or something)].

In her imagination, a darkened landscape will be scrolling out across the bedroom floor while the slow-flying bomber, part of a broader stream of other bombers all flying their parallel but individual tracks, crabs across the sky towards its target. She’ll imagine himself as one of her uncle’s fellow crew members, projections of the archetypes she’s seen in a host of war films and which she’s internalised to such an extent that they are now unquestioned truths for her: the measured, laconic, authoritative skipper – all cool words and calm; the technically astute and competent navigator who saves the rest of the crew with his insight and wisdom; the salt of the earth working class rear gunner who saves the day by detecting an attacking night fighter and alerting the captain in the nick of time; sometimes she’ll even assume the persona of the colonial mid-upper gunner, whose highly-strung nature and inadequate courage unnerve the rest of the crew , and who usually has some kind of an emotional outburst/hysterical breakdown and has to be helped from his turret and sedated on the narrow rest bed behind the wireless operator’s position, before being treated with patronising and indulgent care and attention by the rest of the (native-born) crew. It’s in this persona that Mathilde feels most authentic – uncertain, frightened, liable to reach the end of her courage before any one else. She has days – at school especially – when she thinks that everyone is looking at her and laughing, finding her wanting in some way. On these days, she’ll be silent and withdrawn, and her eyes will be downcast. She won’t want anyone to talk to her, lest she be thrown into a state of tongue-tied confusion. And yet, at the same time, she’ll crave the friendly contact of a grown up or an older pupil, feeling that some warm words or a gentle touch on the shoulder will take away her anxiety and make her feel safe. On days like these, she wants someone to make everything all right by breaking the pattern and tedium of her suffering and securing for her a place of security, shut away from the demands of the everyday. [That liberating feeling of escaping from the routine, from duty, from the tyranny of ‘that which must be done – pre-figuring that same behaviour in her adult life…]

She remembers something similar from her days at primary school – from her very first day there, in fact. In the cloakroom, at the end of the morning playtime, with the drizzle steaming off the excited children’s woollen clothes, one of the older girls had pushed Mathilde back against the wall before grabbing hold of her pullover and bunching her fist against Mathilde’s narrow and vulnerable-feeling chest [she could feel the pressure on her individual ribs, springy and tender]. Mathilde can’t remember what the girl said or wanted, but she does remember feeling trapped, panic-stricken, deeply disappointed that this was what school turned out to be like after so much optimistic anticipation, and afraid that she might wet herself. But Miss Phillips, her class teacher, intervened, smacking the back of the older girl’s pale, bare legs and sending her to the head mistress’s office. Then she took Mathilde to the medical room and sat her down on the wire-sprung camp bed until she had stopped crying, and dried her tears.

When she was standing up, Miss Phillips seemed immensely tall and powerful to Mathilde – particularly in the calf-length skirts that were so fashionable in those days. But, when she sat down next to her on the camp bed and put her arm around her shoulders, she felt warm and safe and loved, and made her start crying again. That was when she fell half in love with Miss Phillips, who was tall and thin, with a pinched face, a large nose, and long dark hair. Her glasses were typical of the 197os: over-large, thick-rimmed black plastic – and scarcely flattering: they made Miss Phillips look kind of owlish.

It turned out that Miss Phillips wasn’t really tough enough for the classroom, and there came a day when the naughtiest boys’ behaviour drove her to an uncontrolled outburst of tearful shouting, at the end of which she ran out of the classroom. There was silence in the classroom for a few seconds, during which Mathilde could hear her heart beating in the shocked stillness. Then the naughty boys – and quite a few of the other children – started laughing and whooping.

Mathilde felt sorry for Miss Phillips, but not sorry enough that she would say anything to criticise the naughtiest boys, or draw attention to her own ‘soft’ sensitivity. She knew already that she had to keep that weakness hidden away: she’d seen other boys and girls picked on and bullied for their openness and weakness. She knew, already, how to stay on the fringes, how to laugh at the right moments when the tough girls were speaking, how to blend into the background with her pliability and inoffensiveness. How to look on with wide eyes while other people made the running and took the risks. How to be safe, anonymous and middling.

(c. 1040 words - bit of a token effort today as my eyes have been a bit wonky again, and I don't really want to be looking at a screen...)

Sunday 6th November:

Sunday: Mathilde
A delivery van pulls up in the nighttime street outside, its brakes squeaking and scraping through lack of maintenance: she visualises metal grinding on metal, the stop-lights coming on, and the exhaust fumes pulsing through those red lights. The van’s diesel engine goes on chug-chugging after the driver gets out and slams the door, and the sound of the driver’s shouting and the easy, early-morning laughter of the restaurant staff ring through the street. These people are at ease: they own the street while the night lasts.

Although she’s staying in the hotel ‘on business’, she feels the pleasurable relaxation and novelty of being on vacation creeping over her. It’s nice, as it seems ages since she last felt genuinely relaxed and unselfconscious. The amber wash of light on the ceiling comes and goes with the slow, sleepy blinking of her eyes, and she drifts through sleep and into her half-lost past: the past that only returns, unbidden, involuntarily evoked by the elusive echo of a forgotten sense memory brushing across the fringes of consciousness. In that foreign hotel room, with the light on the textured plaster ceiling and the night air breathing in and out through the flimsy curtains, she remembers her childhood bedroom, when she thought her parents were still in love with each other, and she was still a happy child.

Gloom. In Mathilde’s little bedroom, upstairs in her parents’ Corporation-owned house, she hears the floor boards creak beneath the thin carpet outside her door. The light shows there at the foot of the door, filtered by the fine carpet fibres. Her father’s distinctive tread, his poised weight held suspended there, a mass of shadow and light, ears straining to hear the sound of his daughter’s breathing. Mathilde tries extra hard to stay silent, immobilising her head on the pillow and breathing through her half-open mouth, dragging the breath slowly along the roof of her mouth (it sounds quieter that way inside her head…).

She’s lying on her left side, staring into the shadowed space between the bed and the chest of drawers, her eyes wide and dry against the dusty dark. She doesn’t want her dad to know that she’s awake; she doesn’t want dad to come in, to sit on the bed, to start talking to her. Or even just to stand there silently, looking at her.
A fan of orange-yellow light from the opened door will come in over Mathilde’s raised shoulder as the door purrs slowly open across the carpet fuzz. What light there already is in the room comes from the pebbled window set into the top of the doorframe, and that light brushes over the curved fuselages and engine nacelles of the model aeroplanes that hang from the ceiling on their cotton threads: the planes and the thread and the thumb tacks make balanced triangles of tension and weight.

As the door opens, the grit and lumps in the ceiling’s emulsion paint throw little shadows, and Mathilde can see, raising her eyes to the ceiling, her own dirty thumb prints around the heads of the tacks, and little crumbly-edged craters in the plaster where the tacks couldn’t find proper purchase.

A big black bomber starts to rotate slowly in the faint draft from the door, and Mathilde focuses on it as it swings round to the fullest extent that the thread will allow, and then starts to rotate back the other way; her dad is hanging on to the handle of the opened door all this time. Mathilde tries not to blink, as if dad is less likely to realise she’s awake if she just keeps everything completely still.. The bomber starts another rotation, and Mathilde listens to the breath passing heavily through dad’s nose. (Dad has got bushy hairs in his nostrils, and Mathilde imagines that this foliage makes it harder for the breath to weave its way through, and that dad has to make an extra effort to breathe; if she was asked, this would be one of her dad’s defining characteristics.

The door handle creaks with the weight of her father’s grip. Mathilde can smell the familiar ‘dad smells’ of oil, cleaning agent, sweat and cigarettes. Dad smells like chemicals and machinery. Mathilde’s nose, eyes and throat all feel dry and stretched with dust and tension.

Dad sniffs, sighs, and closes the door; the splayed rhombus of light on the ceiling starts to contract, and the shapes and perspectives of the aeroplanes shift as the cheap latch snats into place with dry echo. Mathilde relaxes again. Dad turns out the landing light and, in a sudden shift, the room is uniformly black for a moment. Gradually, though, the light from the streetlamp outside, previously unnoticed in the more powerful cast of the landing light, seeps into visibility.

She waits for a car to come past: she likes the mysterious way that the headlights’ glow seems to track slowly across the ceiling before reaching a tipping point where it halts, then ricochets back in the other direction, seems to fold back on itself. She can’t work out the angles and mechanics of how this hypnotic tracking process works: it’s a mesmeric, nightly mystery.

There sometimes seem to be great stretches of time before sleep will come: when she’s older, she’ll look back at those times and wish that she could reclaim them – all those hours spent thinking, wondering, with no sense of urgency about going to sleep, no sense that the next day was pressing, that life was hurrying by. Sometimes, in these dead times, she’ll lie there doubling up numbers in her head, and she’ll eventually fall asleep before she can get much further than 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024…

When she counts like this, she feels as if he’s in touch with something strange and distant, like the night sky or the space between the little balls of matter (red, blue and yellow in the models at school) that make up atoms. With her eyes closed to reveal the profound darkness of the back of her eyelids, she imagines that she’s rising up towards the vast, mysterious night sky that glitters with stars, like white sugar scattered on the dark tablecloth that’ s spread on the rough-topped old table in the chilly dining room every Sunday.

Now that she’s old enough to be left alone at home in the school holidays – mum goes out to work at the local packing factory – Mathilde has a secret that she has to keep: whenever she heats milk for his elevenses mug of coffee, he takes pinch after pinch of sugar and throws it onto the orange-glowing electric cooker ring, where she loves to see the coloured flashes of light as the sugar ignites in momentary flares of white, sapphire blue, and violet. In her mind, the stars and the gases in space are painted in these vivid colours, in the kind of crystal-clear images he’s seen in books and on film posters, but so rarely in real life. There’s something addictive about those brief cooker-top bursts of energy and clarity: as if the universe – from its local, familiar manifestations, all the way up to its vastest and most distant reaches – is more lively and interesting for a moment, vividly coloured and dynamic in a way that’s not sustained in the rest of her life; the circuits of grey and brown streets, the flat colours of the schoolroom and the uniform colours of school uniforms and the times’ fashions of brown and faded blue, the lumpy textures and flat colours of the food she gets at school.

At home, with the run of the house, these flashes of light in the kitchen have a conspiratorial aspect – her secret world of hidden naughtiness; she knows – even without any evidence – that she shouldn’t be burning sugar on the cooker top, and yet, at that age, she’s so insular and cut off from other people’s consciousness that she can’t imagine that her mother notices the burnt brown crust of sugar on the cooker ring, or that she doesn’t see the caramelised sugar remnants when she raises the cooker top to clean the space under the rings [which she obviously does – perhaps there’s something here about Mathilde’s inability to see beyond the world of her own imagination…slight Asperger’s thing, like a low-level inability to read emotions very well…? – this might prefigure her later emotional distance/ineptitude/closedness/anxiety?].

She’d like to go into space one day. She watches all of the television programmes that show rockets blasting off or returning space capsules parachuting towards the ocean, tracked by helicopters and big grey navy ships. She’d like to fly one of those space rockets, to sit at the top of the rocket and feel the attention of the world on her, and all those peoples’ admiration warming her; the spacemen all look handsome, clean-cut, and admirable – men who everyone likes and admires, and who are lucky enough to be able to work with wonderful machines in the beautiful world of space beyond the earth. And there are women too, sometimes, who somehow seem glamorous and attractive even when they aren’t very pretty.

When the rockets tremble on the launch pads, with the gases boiling out of them and the flames vibrating madly at their base, she feels that sense of hope and anxiety that all the world must be feeling: the sense that the brave, beautiful, noble astronauts in the rockets are carrying everyone’s hopes with them, while fearing that something will go wrong; a few years ago, one of the rockets caught fire on the launch pad, and the three astronauts were burned in the capsule. She sees a charred, twisted, collapsed metal space in her mind, with the three men in it seeming asleep – unburned and unspoiled by the fire. She can’t imagine what a burned person would look like, so she just sees White, Grissom and Chaffee in repose, eyes closed, chins on their chests.

She rolls onto her back in the gloom of her little bedroom, then lifts herself up on her elbows so that she can see the poster of the solar system on the wall at the foot of her bed. She sent off for this poster using a yellow form (with blue lettering) that she cut from the back of a cereal packet – she had to pester mum to buy three packets of the same cereal on the trot so that she could collect the necessary tokens, and she (secretly) got a bit fed up with eating the same breakfast for months on end. But the poster made it all worthwhile: it was the biggest thing that she’d ever owned – four feet by three feet, with a narrow metal bar stiffening the top edge. It had arrived rolled up in a cardboard tube, and as she’d unrolled the thick, glossily printed paper on the kitchen table, she knew already that the thick blue-black background colour, the hot orange of the sun, and the carefully chosen colours of each of the other planets would be a part of her world for ever. It all felt so right, that beautiful object, technically correct, unrolled on the kitchen table in the bright light of an early summer morning, with the long summer school holiday stretching away in front of her. Like something that she’d always known, but which she’d just seen and touched for the first time: the seeing and the touching had made it real to her.
The poster’s rather tattered now: three or four years on, the metal stiffening bar is buckled, but she can still recall that sense of rightness, the sense that this object signified something important, and encapsulated something that was both beautiful and true. It marked the change from the time when she saw space and space flight through the comic book images and the cartoon-like space vehicles on the special wallpaper that mum and dad had bought for her room; a change to a world where precision and technical correctness had become more significant. This was the point where she saw that her life – her style of being in the world – had diverged from the other girls that she used to be friends with.

The bomber is still rotating slowly. It’s a Fokker 192 ‘Anvil’: a big six-engined monster, first built in the thirties, when people thought that bombers could win wars on their own. It was cumbersome, heavy, and slow, but Mathilde always found something reassuring about its massively thick wing root and fixed landing gear: there was something almost childlike about it in its similarity to the clumsy plastic approximations of machines that toy manufacturers make for pre-schoolers. It’s one of her favourite models. She loves the way that the mould-makers (what a lovely job to have – making the masters of things that will be reproduced thousands of times, and then lovingly reconstructed by people all over the world; all in a form that breaks down the original into smaller modules that slot together to recreate the whole) – she loves the way that the mould-makers have captured the way the high, thick wing meets the fuselage, the fabric-covered control surfaces of the elevators and the twin rudders on the y-shaped split tail, and the delicacy of the depressed lines that mark the edges of the metal-skinned fuselage’s individual panels.

She can recall the feel of the Anvil’s raw plastic moulding against her fingertips when she was building it for the first time (slightly intimidated by the size of the box, by the number of parts, and by the extent of the folded instruction leaflet – in those days, the instructions combined pictures and words), and she recalls how her initial sensitivity to the matte textures of the plastic gradually faded as she handled the model’s parts for evening after evening; it had been winter, and she remembers how she’d had her bedroom window pegged open just a touch so as to ventilate the glue- and enamel paint-fumed atmosphere. By the time she’d finished building the model, painting its under surfaces black and its upper surfaces with a dark grey mottle pattern over a paler grey base, the feel of its individual pieces and surfaces had all been subsumed into the completed whole: it was now a finished piece, a coherent structure, and when he picked it up her hand automatically moved the plane through gentle arcing turns or simulated its slow, lumbering take off – all with the appropriate sound effects, of course – while recalling the rich smell of the black paint that she’d had to use so copiously. Looking back, she sometimes wonders if those paint and glue smells were a more important attraction than she realised at the time: a combination that nightly called her back to her bedroom to luxuriate in their rich, narcotic chemical blend.

(c. 2480 words)

Friday 4th November:

Sunday: Mathilde

There have been times recently when Mathilde has felt that all her emotional turmoil was going to overflow, and spill out of her ‘with complete inappropriateness’ (as she’d once heard the school’s counsellor say). Sometimes, during an emotion-laden discussion at work, when she’d been trying to suppress a personal dislike for somebody, she’d found herself thinking that she’d already unleashed an articulate – if expletive-laden – tirade that dissected the bogusness and ineptitude of the other party (chapter and verse, detail and example) and left the other meeting attendees (i) amazed at, and impressed by, her coruscating insight, and (ii) stunned and embarrassed by her outburst. At other times, when she’s just got herself into a crowded but secure corner of the train carriage, when people are pushing her, and jostling to get to the doors a split-second earlier than they otherwise would, she feels an enormous righteous anger boiling in her guts, and she can almost taste its poisonous churning in her throat, pressing against the back of her tongue, urging her to ‘say it, say it…’.

It’s as if something is brewing inside her, something she can’t name or describe, but which nevertheless terrifies her with its power, welling up and threatening to burst. Nameless as it is, she knows that if this thing ever escapes from inside her and is expressed, then everything will be lost, and the comfortable, predictable life she’s always known will collapse.

She looks at the glowing green splashes of carcinogenic, radioactive paint on the end of her alarm clock’s hands, and translates their spatial configuration in the darkened room into numbers and words – 2:47 in the morning. (There’s one part of her consciousness that starts reflecting on her fresh amazement that her brain can perform this act of translation in the dark, with no visible cues beyond the faint green light, but this positive thought is rapidly swamped by a swelling panic and exasperation that it’s nearly three o’clock, and that she’s barely slept all night, and that she’ll have to get up in three hours, when her second alarm (under her pillow, but piercingly loud) will go off. Some nights, she knows that she might as well just give up, get up, and turn on the lights and make herself a cup of tea and read a book or listen to the radio. She’s not sure yet if tonight is one of those nights – but it’s not far off it. As she lies there in the dark, with the faint ‘clack’ of the alarm clock’s hands becoming gradually more audible against the background silence, she recalls other nights when she’s lain awake and felt anxious: some of these nights have fixed themselves clearly in her memory, with greater clarity and insistence than their actual content can actually warrant; and, yet, there they are – memories which, for whatever reason, by whatever accident of emotional alertness or sensory receptivity, have fused themselves vividly in her memory.

[eg] Waking up in a hotel room in a strange city whose language she scarcely knew, she’d found that sleep had dissipated the fear and speechless nervousness he’d experienced on arrival, when she had been terrified to repeat the native-language phrases she’d been rehearsing ever since she’d got off the train at the international railway terminal. She’d misjudged the walk from the station – it was far further than she’d anticipated from the map, and it had been punctuated with difficult road junctions, and milled with crowds, towards whom she felt fearful and apologetic, and of whom she was afraid, lest they detect her alienness and home in on her as a vulnerable victim.

When she entered the polished marble hotel lobby – pushing the glass door open with her shoulder while her hands gripped her bag handles like eagles’ talons, she’d had been sweating uncomfortably, conscious of her breasts against her woollen jumper, and of the chafing between her legs where her rather chubby thighs rubbed against each other. The concierge had given room details and navigation instructions in stilted English (the only language they shared) while Mathilde half-listened, feeling overly conscious of the droplets of sweat forming on her forehead and welling into larger drops that capilliaried their way down her fringe and eyelashes.

Now, with a blur of amber streetlight washing out the details of the hotel bedroom ceiling’s plaster-work, she feels calmer, disengaged from her normal existence by spatial distance, and made more alert by the experiential novelty of this new country: the distinctive architecture and yellow brickwork of the railway terminus roof; the gothic grey stone frontages and arched windows of the department stores and shop frontages, now undercut by the cheap shops that have replaced the ‘respectable’ businesses of the previous century; the metal post boxes with their weathervane caps; the way that people park their motorbikes and scooters on the pavement – so different from the clinically clear pavements of her own country; and here, abroad, she can’t help but notice how much more racially heterogeneous the demographic is – which finds this simultaneously troubling and invigorating.

There’s a faint slur of traffic over the roof tops from far away beyond the tight-packed buildings of the city, and when the net curtains blow in the breeze it reminds her of how a deep sigh feels, and of how her fear had felt earlier: hollow, expanding, palpitating and unsure. A last exhalation: that broad swelling and retreat of the curtains. It feels like loss, like life slipping away quietly, something essential and irretrievable expelled with every breath. In the dark, the sense of loss had slowly merged into sleep as she pressed her face and body to the cool, stretched surface of the cotton sheets.

The clatter of unfeasibly large aluminium pans being stacked in the kitchen of a nearby restaurant woke her again, startling her awake from a position where she had been lying – open-mouthed and snoring – on her belly. When she had registered where she was from the highlights on the wardrobe, door-jamb, dresser, smoke-detector and TV set, she listened to the comforting sounds of kitchen activity and the humour-filled voices of the night-time staff as they went about their cleaning and preparation routines. Their work made her feel somehow in touch with the world. Their voices carried quite plainly – though to her, unintelligibly – as if there were a blanket of fog at rooftop height that reflected the sound. It made her think of autumn at home, when the lowing of cows would carry across night-stilled, silent distances of field and water.

(c. 1090 words)

Wednesday 2nd November:

Marta:

And she remembers the dreams that the books inspired, too: especially the recurring one of being chased around the outside of a logs and candy canes Hansel and Gretl-like cabin by a razor-toothed bear while her feet gradually melted into the ground and she slowed and toppled over, the death-giving bear closing remorselessly on her. She would wake up in the darkness with her heart pounding, disoriented and wide-eyed, feeling the dusty itch of darkness on the glossy exposed surface of her eyes. She remembers this so clearly, even at age thirteen, and her consciousness of that past terror, and at how distant it now is, and yet so clear, makes her smile with self-ridicule/irony.

She thinks of that old fear (which was the deepest fright she knew as a child) when the Guides reach the end of their final hill climb and break out of the shadows and into the last of the afternoon sunshine, on the south shore of the high lake, with the grey water stretching away to the empty moorland beyond. The wind has dropped, and the sudden stillness and openness, the bare rocky land and the silver-grey water stretching away to the misty grey horizon and the pale blue sky above, make a chill run through her; a chill of exposure and sudden loneliness and vulnerability. The forest, compared to this barren emptiness above it, was comforting, somehow dense with structure and relatively secure familiarity; the forest, with its trees and undergrowth, the greens and the greys and oranges and browns, with its needles and lichens and fungi. Up here, there’s only the cold revelation of the wide open sky and the bare land, and the realisation – suddenly more concrete – that this is where they will be spending the night under canvas. It’s already cold, and the light will be fading soon.

All the while that they’re struggling to put the tents up (a mixture of incompetence, overpoliteness, and growing irritation and impatience) Marta is wondering what the other girls will talk about once they’re all secured in their tents after the light has gone. She’s never slept in a room with a group of girls before, and she knows from the conversations she’s overheard at school (especially in the toilets, or in the changing room before her gym class) that other girls talk about all sorts of things that she’s uncomfortable discussing: partly this is because she thinks that the other girls know much more about these adult/bodily/love-related subjects than she does, and that she’s thus embarrassed by her naivety and lack of informed opinions; partly it’s because she doesn’t want to reveal anything about herself that could reveal her as a subject of ridicule; and partly – and most faintly – it’s because she suspects, just a little, that some of the other girls are bluffing too when they talk with apparent authority about these things. Sometimes it will be a girl’s breezy confidence that gives her away, or the ring of inauthenticity when she repeats something she’s heard an adult say (Marta can just tell that it’s a received opinion that the girl doesn’t know in her heart). And she’s aware at these times that some of the other girls are probably thinking the same thing, especially when it’s Karin, the most dominant and vindictive of the girls, who’s speaking; no-one says anything, and none of them allow their eyes meet, but Marta just knows, from their body postures and the suddenly deep nature of the listening silence, that some of them share her belief in the emptiness of what Karin is saying; and so there’s that added layer of embarrassment – that implied shame that they’re all letting this go on, letting it pass uncommented, even though they know that it’s not true: their fear of Karin’s fists and pinching fingers, and their fear of humiliation and ridicule, freeze them into their conspiracy of denial and silence.

Marta sometimes still sleeps in the same bed as Ivan, when it’s very cold, or when he’s frightened, or when mama and papa are away for the evening. When they do share a bed, Marta loves to read Ivan his bedtime story, sitting next to him, both of them with a tick prop of pillows behind them, Ivan’s left shoulder tucked in against her ribs, her right arm encircling his other shoulder, holding the story book in front of him while he clasps his little hands in front of his chest. She can see his eyelashes blink against his cheek as she looks down past his fair hair and his downy forehead, and hear his breath lisping through his nostrils and his rosebud lips. It’s impossible not to love him at these times, and, as she reads, she can feel her arms tightening around him, wanting to pull him against her and make him safe, safe, safe – and loved. When he falls asleep, she gently rests her cheek against the top of his head, listening to his shallower breathing, feeling the drag and undertow of it resonating through his delicate skull, smelling his soap-bathed skin and his sweet night breath. She feels so close to him, and so protective of him. She wishes that she could keep him like this, and that they could be together like this, safe and static, for ever.

Her little group’s tent is pitched now, and all the girls’ fingers are chilled, raw and chafed from the unaccustomed contact with wooden tent poles, metal screw threads, and the stiff, rough canvas of the tents. The troop leaders have been building a fire and, as the dusk finally settles and the girls’ breath starts to smoke, the kindling takes light and makes flames. In the growing darkness, far away from their accustomed warmth and comfort, the girls gravitate towards the light and heat like a natural wave.

After a supper of stick-toasted bread, cold meat and cheese, and weak coffee, the girls are sent off to their ablutions at the campsite’s wooden utility block. There are no lights, so they only have their own inadequate torches to toilet and wash by: some of the girls take it in turns to hold their friends’ torches for them, while others play the weak lights into corners and into the dark spaces between the roof’s exposed eaves, exposing drifts of spider webs and the dry carapaces of long-ago devoured insects. Inevitably, there’s a spate of ghost noises and giggling, but one girl takes the joking badly and starts to cry, and is met with the usual split response of solicitous sympathy and sardonic amusement. Eventually one of the officers comes to fetch them all and hurries them back to their tents under a black sky that’s impossibly complex with stars and million mile swirls of gas.

(c. 1130 words)

Marta and Ivan: October 1940:

Marta’s Guide Troop has broken out onto the rocky plateau above the conifers that they’ve been trekking through since they left town six hours ago. Up here, the afternoon light is flat and cold, and the wind makes the bristly grass vibrate sporadically. Marta, like most of the girls, is feeling tired and fed up, but their habit-instilled stoicism blankets any expression they might make of mood or dissatisfaction. Up at the front of what has become an increasingly straggly column, their two female leaders are consulting a map and compass.

“Five minutes’ stop for water and one piece of fruit, girls. Then we’ve only another hour to camp. Almost there!”
At the start of this weekend trek, [Guide officer title]’s enthusiasm had actually been amusing and energising, but her bonhomie is very thinly stretched now, and barely wraps around the girls: here and there, sharp elbows or pouting lips push through its attenuated surface.

It’s about three-thirty now, Marta guesses from the angle of the sunlight, and the shadows on the shoulders of the horizon-rimming clouds. The blue autumn sky is taking on the flat, whitish look that presages the fading of the day’s heat, and the roof of the evergreen forest is already taking on the softer, hazier look that comes on as the light fades and the mist rises.

She knows the forest well, of course, from her childhood, when her nurse walked her in the fringes near the villa, and when, later, she would play there alone, or with Ivan. But it had been different walking up the tracks between the dark trees with her fellow Guides today: none of these girls were what she would call her friends, but she had felt herself being drawn into the edge of their shared feelings about the stillness, hush, and shadows of the close-ranked pines.

At the start of their trek they had gathered at the Guides’ wood and tarpaper hut on a suburban street not far from Marta’s home. Most of the girls had arrived with their mother or father, who had usually carried their daughter’s rucksack for them. The parents were mostly well-dressed, in long overcoats and smart hats, as if they were dressing for church or for some formal gathering. Marta had made her own way there, alone, and stood at the periphery of the hands-shaking and cheek-kissing throng of parents and children. That apartness, that sense of being different and left out, was the hallmark of her relations with the other girls in the group; sometimes at one of the meetings, or on one of their regular hikes or coach trips, she’ll feel that she’s started to make a friendship – or a better understanding, at least – with one of the other girls but, next time they meet, she will find her smile ignored by the same girl, or be met with blank disdain when she approaches someone expecting to be recognised or greeted. She can’t understand the inconstancy and unpredictability of these other girls; at home, everyone – for good or ill – behaves in regular, predictable ways, and she can navigate her way through their moods, knowing how to seek out the comfort or coolness that she wants. Each Guide meeting, though, brings fresh bafflement, as she won’t know which people will be approachable, and which will be cold or hostile. She wished that each fresh rebuff didn’t hurt her, and it makes her feel stupid and inadequate to admit that the other girls’ harshness does hurt and confuse her – but it does, oh it does.

As they leave town, reach the forest track, and start their climb up into the hills, she finds herself wishing that someone would fall into step with her and show her that they wanted to walk with her, talk with her, ask her to sleep in their tent with their other friends. But she walks on her own, flanked by pairs and clusters of girls who chat excitedly at first, but who gradually quieten down as their tiredness increases and the extended nature of the trek settles onto them like an increasingly rain-sodden overcoat.

There is something mood-flattening about the pine forest, too: whether it’s the relentless regularity of the trunks stretching away into shadowed indistinctness, or the way that the heavy forest canopy and muffling bed of fallen needles deaden all sound, or the scarcity of light and birdsong; whatever it is, it’s noticeable that everyone’s mood gradually dips as they trdge on between the sandy trunks.

All the scary outdoor tales they’d been told as children centred on the forest, and on the things that would menace – and try to capture and kill – any child that ventured from the path: unkillable ghouls with iron talons and teeth, cruel woodsmen with gimlet eyes and sharp axes, held firmly, resolutely, in their hard hands; headless, rotting things that stalked you between the boughs; evil forest spirits and fairy tricksters who would lure you from the paths and into the shadier depths with promises of warmth, safety, shelter, and fairy food and drink. In most of these narratives, the story children ended up transformed, dead, eaten or disappeared. There weren’t many happy endings, and when the children did survive, they were missing a digit or a limb, and were often crippled, disfigured, or prematurely and spectacularly aged.

Marta could feel these Ur-tales of fear and dread stirring in her memory as she watched the girls ahead of her dragging their booted feet wearily up the slope. She had had a cherished story book when she was a child, and she remembered its thick pages and rounded corners as she walked, remembered the uncommonly rich colours of the illustrations: the black-green trees, the blue-black night sky with its haloed yellow stars and moon, the unnaturally red, round cheeks of a dumpling of a girl who ran away from home, out into the purple-shadowed snow, when her usually indulgent grandparents declined to let her have a fifth piece of gingerbread from their precious supply. Marta remembers falling asleep with the book open on her chest, her hand clutching the pages, and waking to find that the light was out and that the comforting square weight of book had been removed and put away.

(c. 1040 words)

Monday 31 October

Marta and Ivan: August 1938:
It’s the most perfect day of the summer. Marta and Ivan were up early, before mama and papa, when only the swarthy cook and the other servants were moving around the house. In the kitchen, where the two children waited uncomfortably, listening to cook’s cold monosyllables echoing in the big space while she oversaw the preparation of their breakfast, the smell of fresh bread and creamy milk combined to create an air of light and warmth. Early sunlight played on the window frames and cast yellow geometric patterns onto the warm, worn surface of the immense oak table, which is so massive that it had to be assembled in the room. On the stove, a bright blue pot contains the children’s boiling eggs: tendrils, planes and wisps of steam rise into the light, turning bright white where the sun catches them before they twist or fade off into the shadows.

After breakfast, Marta and Ivan tuck leftover eggs, apples and bread into their rucksack, and head off for the summerhouse at the top of the estate. It’s only eight o’clock, but the sun is already high and hot, and Marta feels the perspiration breaking out on her throat and forehead as soon as she steps into the light. (She’s noticed that she seems to sweat more easily these days, as she’s getting older, and Ivan has noticed that she’s starting too smell different – as if she doesn’t wash often enough. Sometimes, despite himself, he has to turn his face away as she grabs him for one of her frequent, clumsy hugs.)

The summerhouse is at least a mile from the house, up at the top of the estate, a place where the managed garden ends in a mixture of crumbling red brick walls and straggly hedges and fences, where the grass and weeds have gone wild and the foliage and the wooden posts and the old fence wires are all intertwined. Beyond the summerhouse is a dense, overgrown hawthorn hedge, then a public lane intensely green with overhanging foliage and dense with blackberries in autumn, and then the start of the forest: it’s an overgrown, organic boundary with a complex, rich variety of wild flowers, and small mammals rustling and scratching in the undergrowth.

Two summers ago, playing up at the summerhouse on her own, she had determined that she would catalogue the area immediately surrounding the summerhouse, describing and illustrating all the plants, insects, animals and birds that she could find. Wearing her favourite dress (white cotton with big printed blue flowers) and the straw hat that mama insisted she always wore in the hot months, she had crouched on the bottom-most step of the summerhouse’s porch and demarcated the first metre square search area with four corner stones. Then she settled down with her sketch book, watercolours and pencil and started to draw and annotate.

She only lasted about an hour before giving up in the face of the fractal levels of detail, her inability to capture even the simplest natural form, and the dazzling complexity of the details inside the details of every plant and leaf. The envisioned precision and order of her notebook gave way to a series of botched, scribbled out drawings and increasingly untidy lists, which started neatly and regularly before descending into impatient, hurried jottings. It was as if there was a part of her brain missing, she thought: a magical part that would give her the insight and focus she needed in order to focus on the important parts of the scene, and to see – and reproduce – the significant aspects with clarity. Her mama could do it, she knew: she’d seen her drawing delicate ladies’ faces and elegant gowns on writing paper while she talked on the telephone to the wives of papa’s business acquaintances. And she’d seen papa make his lists in his perfect handwriting, which seemed to speak of control and logic, the straight-line thinking skills of powerful adults that she so wanted to emulate. But put a pencil or a paintbrush in her hand and the inadequacy of her execution was almost instantly revealed: despite her enthusiasm for engaging with nature and her desire to capture it and understand it, to grasp it and dissect it; despite all that, she couldn’t simultaneously hold it in her hand, feel the textures, see the colours and structures and see it whole; she couldn’t seem to examine a thing – a leaf, or a flower, or the whitened skull of a shrew found in the leaf litter – without destroying it; to understand and own it you had to break it up into pieces or strip it slowly down to see how the fabric of the thing was knitted together, to see how the folded shapes merged into each other internally; whereupon the thing lost its mystery and beauty – ceased to be the very thing that had fascinated and enchanted you with its wholeness and beauty. When things are intact they are beautiful, but she can’t understand them. And when she can understand them after they’re deconstructed, they’re no longer beautiful or enchanting. [perhaps a concrete example??]

So now she just enjoys being up here, where the sun shines into the bowl of grass that drops away in front of the summerhouse, and the glittering air is scratchy and smeared with insects all through the long day. In the early morning, when the forest still casts its cool shadows on the summerhouse, the lit grass scintillates with dew, spiders’ tentative webs waver across the clearing, and the long grass is damp and cool against bare legs.

Ivan wearily sloughs the rucksack from his back and leans it against the shadowed porch wall. They brush the excess moisture from the wooden bench and pull it out to the front of the porch’s wooden decking. Then they sit for a while, cooling down after their uphill walk in the morning sunshine, feeling their sweaty skin dry, and hearing the sounds of the forest rise as their own breathing and movements fade out of conscious awareness.

Ivan bores quickly, and he soon gets up and wanders down to the bottom of the grass slope, where a planted honeysuckle has infiltrated a hedge of black-green leaves and stiff reddish thorns. Beyond that boundary there’s a grassy bank, then the stream trickling down between shaggy banks, then a steeper, wild and overgrown bank on the other side, then some boggy land, then the lower forest slopes.

Marta watches Ivan move amongst the tall grasses until only his blond head is visible. The grass shivers and jerks as he moves though it in the sun.

(c. 1110 words)

Sunday 30 October

Letter from Lieutenant Michael Fisher to Gabriella Weiss (his mistress), dated July 25, 1940:

My darling, darling Ella,
How I miss you! I wish you could be here with me to see France, as it is SO BEAUTIFUL. But, darling, I do not think it will be possible for us to arrange to meet as we did in PRAGUE (!) last year. Although the war goes well here, things are not so settled yet in the administration, and it will take some while yet, I think, until they are. Prague! Each time I write that name I must say it aloud also, and I smile at every recollection of the wonderful happiness we shared for that weekend we spent in the Hotel R. I remember how you wrapped yourself in the sheet and stood in the morning sunlight, and it made your hair like a white and yellow flame. But it also makes me so sad to be able to remember such beautiful memories of the time we shared so closely, because they have finished now, and I cannot say when we will be together again. Do you sometimes feel the same thing? You never write of such things in your letters, and sometimes I am filled with doubts. If only I could free myself from Beatrice, we could be married. But I must think of happier thoughts. This is a sad train of thought.

The summer weather is unbelievable, and now that the fighting is finished we can enjoy the blue sky and the sun, and the plentiful good food and drink. There is champagne here, and brandy, and plentiful cheese, meat and eggs. And of course the good French wine. Yesterday, in celebration of our recent victory, the Army commander threw an evening drinks party for the officers of all the units stationed locally. This party was held in the commander’s headquarters – a fairytale chateau in pink stone, with blue-grey turrets and slate roofs. Really quite a sight, with the chandeliers lit and the waiters in their uniforms and the glittering cutlery and jugs and so on on the tables. But all I could think of was you, and how I wish that you could be here with me. I drank a lot of wine and champagne, and sat up late into the night with our C.O., drinking brandy and playing cards. (He likes to have people with him, and the officers take it in turns to stay up with him, as it is very tiring and makes the next day rather difficult.) I did not go to bed until 6:30 this morning. But the whole evening was miserable without you here. But I shall write about something else, darling.
I hope very soon that you will receive the parcel I have sent you. It is about 5kg, and well-packed to prevent breakages: there are two bottles of wine, some soap, some sugar and salt, two bars of chocolate, and some cheese and sausage (local produce). I hope that they will not be delayed too long.

Please write and tell me what you have been doing, Ella. I miss you so much and I wish that you could be here with me. Your letters mean so much to me. Being away from home and loved ones makes one realise how much those people mean to one. When I come home from the war I will never take such love for granted again. Please write soon, darling.
I love you,
M.

Jan remembers tracing the progress of the army as it advanced westward in the early summer of 1940, its lightning strikes and coordinated attacks taking the enemy by surprise and carrying all before it. The tanks only halted when they overstretched their supply lines, by which time the campaign was already won: the only doubt was about the extent of the disaster for the enemy. There were weekly newsreels flown in from home, and the Service officers would gather in a large, cool white tent to watch them on Friday evenings, after dinner. With the ventilation flaps open and the exotic smells of the middle eastern night mingling with the spicy odours of brandy and cigars, Jan watched the images on the rippling, flexible projection screen: grinning tank commanders braced in their turret hatches, racing past, wreathed in sunlit dust clouds; long lines of disconsolate, defeated enemy troops, faces grimy with dust and tears, marching unprofessionally away from the battle and into captivity; piles of captured helmets and weapons; the burning hulks of the enemy’s outdated armour; and roads strewn with dead horses, smashed carts, and the abandoned debris of the refugee columns. With the hysterical triumphalism of the commentator still shrill in his ears, Jan would mark up the latest conquests on the wall map in his office, using thumb tacks and red wool to demarcate his approximations of the new front line. The campaign started in May and, by the end of June, the stretched wool line had reached the enemy capital, and was only a matter of kilometres short of the channel coast. In the neutral country where Jan was posted, the Service officers watched the diplomats of the enemy nations grow increasingly tense and unsmiling as they saw the military situation at home stagger from crisis to crisis, and eventually into hopelessness. When the surrender came, the tension broke, and a period of resigned calm overtook everyone while the European autumn and winter put paid to any threat of further campaigns.

It was a strangely distant war, seen from the middle east, but the newsreels and the newspapers communicated something of the dynamism and excitement of the military’s westward drive, and Jan and his colleagues looked forward to their Friday evening movie shows, which invariably left them feeling elated and optimistic about the future: the fatherland’s forces were peerless and invincible, seemingly capable of carrying off any attack with flair and the guarantee of success.

And there were occasional letters from Mariette as well: she was now a relief worker in one of the light industrial jobs vacated by men drafted into military service. She insisted that she wouldn’t want to stay out at work after the war was over, but Jan could sense that she really enjoyed being engaged in something constructive and creative, and the opportunity to meet and socialise with different kinds of people was clearly intriguing for her. […]

(c. 1060 words)

Saturday 29 October

Administration. He thought that it had its own beauty and meaning. Making the system better and seeing it work predictably and efficiently was sufficient reward in itself for him, and, happily, the Service believed that all other benefits stemmed from [the art of effective administration].

But when, in the autumn of 1937, he’d found himself standing – amazed by the reality of actually being there – on the honey-coloured flagstones of the quay of that middle eastern port on the first morning of his first posting, he wasn’t thinking about administration.

He was thinking instead about the aeroplane flight that he’d made just the day before – his first time in an aeroplane. Passenger flight back then was a rarity, an experience reserved for the powerful and the famous, and yet he too had flown now. As the boat-bottomed seaplane had picked up speed, ploughing bumpily through the grey water and mist of the October Baltic, he had to remind himself that this was happening to him – Jan Martens – and not someone else whose life he was looking in on from outside. The success he’d had at university (starred first class degree), and at the Service Academy (top marks amongst his year’s intake), and the trappings of success (overseas posting, aeroplane travel) all felt strangely abstract to him, as if he wasn’t really experiencing them in a real, concrete way, but only getting fleeting, echoey impressions of them, which he couldn’t hang on to or recall as if they were real/as if he’d really been there. It all seems somehow fraudulent – as if he’s receiving benefits that he doesn’t deserve, and which will be taken away from him once someone in authority realises that a mistake has been made. Yesterday afternoon, when he and Mariette had lain in each others’ arms after making love in their hotel room overlooking the Baltic, he had felt tearful and frightened at the prospect of leaving her behind, and confused by his fear that she would see how upset and uncertain he was. So he had held her close to him, his chin on her shoulder so that she couldn’t see his face, and stroked her smooth skin with a desperate rhythmicness, as if he were petting a dog that needed placating. Later, after she had fallen asleep, he’d gently disentangled himself from her and laid her head gently down onto the pillow, smiling at the way her blonde hair and creamy skin contrasted with the garish rosy pink bedclothes. My god, she’s so delicate and beautiful. I am so lucky, so lucky. For a moment, he felt a tremor of panic – a sense that he couldn’t go, that he’d have to refuse the posting. He pulled the sheet over Mariette, climbed slowly off the bed so as not to disturb her, and scuffed his way across the pale grey linoleum to the room-height French windows, where he pulled aside the net [1930s??] curtains. The rain of the earlier afternoon had cleared and now, with dusk fast approaching, there was some whitish sky showing between the heavy grey clouds. The hotel was only separated from the sea by the two-lane highway and a narrow promenade edged with metal railings, beyond which the masts of small yachts were metronoming back and forth as the boats rocked in the swell. Further out, the water was cloud-shadowed deep grey, with metallic highlights where the hard light shone. On the far side of the channel, obscured by thin mist and early evening gloom, the lights of the towns and villages were starting to twinkle. There was something calming about the light and water, about the swish of the cars on the rain-wet road below the window, and about the distant lights across the water: with the world outside, established and solid and reliable, and Mariette sleeping behind him – his wife, whom he loved, and who had chosen to marry him – these things seemed to settle him, to help him see that everything was in the right place after all.

And now here he is, two days later, in the middle east, thinking about how he’d never seen such a blue sky, even though the sun was still low in the sky, and about how clear the air was, with the sunlight etching the shadows and contours of the warm brown hills far across the glittering water, all the shoulders, [ravines, run-offs] and stray boulders sharp-edged and distinct. The boatman’s boy was perched on the stern decking of the [punt-type boat], still dozy with recent sleep, and plainly bored. When the boat’s slight pitch and fall jerked him awake he looked up at the foreign travellers on the quay, near-silhouettes against the bright sky and the climbing sun behind them, and found nothing there of interest or novelty — just the reminder of the routine journey, and the routine days gone past and still to come; the dull interchangability of anonymous foreigners passing through. Jan sees the boy’s disdain, the way that he judges them and assigns them all the same category, and that irks him; he wants the boy to see that he, Jan, is different — someone who’s genuinely interested in the region and its inhabitants, and who is keen too absorb the culture and to engage with the native people in a profound way.

[some more stuff about his posting…burgeoning career, engagement with the ‘other’. And then the war comes, and he’s shipped back home…]

Which is how he ended up just behind the front line in the summer of ’41, attached to the 109th Police Battalion as a Logistics/Economic Administration Officer. [get him from the station to the unit HQ…]

“Economist…” says Colonel Mechelen, theatrically looking Jan’s papers up and down before laying them down on his leather-topped desk. “…have you been in battle?” (with another patronising peer at the papers, vainly seeking evidence of military service.)
“No. No. I’ve just been transferred – straight out of the Colonial Service to here. I haven’t even had any conversion training – which they said I would get. I haven’t even been home.” He stops, realising that he’s gabbling a bit, and that he’s probably sounding whiny and childish. These are soldiers. This is all different now.
“That’s fine,” says Mechelen, “we don’t expect you to have to do any fighting. In fact, the fighting is pretty much finished out here, probably as far as fity kilometres east of here. It’s all just mopping up here. That’s why we’re here – fucking moppers up.” He laughs a harsh, bitter laugh, and Jan wonders if he might be a little drunk, even though it’s not yet ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning.
“Anyway, fuck that,” says Mechelen, “come and meet the boys.”

(c. 1100 words)

Friday 28 October

(There are some things I cannot tell you, such as the names of the towns we have travelled through.) But! I will tell you everything else, my dearest, you and the children. So that you may remember these days, when your papa does his duty for the fatherland, and for you.

We arrived by train in the evening. It was still warm, and many people were still sitting at the café tables along the boulevards when we marched from the railway station. I noticed hundreds of swifts here, screeching along the streets. I could not help but raise my eyes to watch them as they screeched along. Very lovely to see.
The people here are very welcoming. We have all we want to eat and drink, and people make us welcome in their homes. The people here are enthusiastic about the Führer and about the fatherland.

My lodging is very comfortable. This evening we ate roast duck and dumplings with red cabbage. It was lovely, but I miss your cooking, my darling. Well, I must close now.
With a hug and a kiss for you and the children,
Your Lorrie.

This was long before Jan had been attached to the unit in 1941. Lorenz Thomas was a captain by that stage of the war, the chest pocket of his tunic studded with campaign medals – Poland, Holland, France, Russia. There’s an early unit photograph, taken before they left the homeland, that shows Thomas in the group, seated in the middle of the front row; he had a soft-looking jaw then, and his round glasses perched on his rounded cheeks. When Jan first met him in 1941, he had lost considerable weight, and his black hair had thinned on the top of his skull: he was using a lot of hair oil to smooth it into a more even coverage of his pink scalp area. Thomas saluted, shook hands, and bade Jan ‘welcome to the unit’. Jan noticed that there was a distinct tremor in Thomas’s voice, like the trembling, uncertain pitch of a pre-adolescent boy. “One of my best officers,” said Mechelen, as he led Jan on to the next greeting.

Letter from First Sergeant Lorenz Thomas to his wife Maria, dated March xx, 1939:
Hello dearest – please accept my apology for the delay in replying to your letters. Yes, we have been away from the barracks, in special training. Of course, I cannot say anything more about it. But! You must trust that it is for the best, and that our leaders know the way that is best for us all. I will try and write more often in future, my darling – but it has been difficult for me also.

Tell me how Johann likes his new school? What stories does he tell you when he returns home? I would love to know some of them! Tell our son that he must study hard and learn both practical and mental skills, and then he too can be a soldier like his daddy. (If there are still wars when he is a grown man. If the Fuhrer is correct, then will have no more need of war when our next victory is complete.) And Lise is well, too, you tell me. Please kiss her for me and give papa’s baby a special long hug tonight.
Thank you for the parcel. We have shared the sausage this evening in the mess after dinner. Everyone says ‘thank you’. Please thank your mother also for me. Regards also to your father.
I will send more parcels soon. At present it is not so easy to gather things and visit the post office, but I think that will change soon. Soon there will be more gifts on their way. And then soon it will be Christmastime! I hope to be able to get leave this year and be with you, all four of us together again in our warm house against the snow.
With my love to you and the children,
Your,
Lorrie

In March 1939, when the fatherland’s newly confident armies had sat on more far-flung eastern borders than had existed for decades, Jan had only just started in the Service. He’d finished his degree (Economics, History) in the excitement-rich spring of 1938, and spent the summer with his fiancée Mariette boating and partying among the lakes, rivers, woods and private gardens that girdled the capital. In October, with the days shortening and his passion for Mariette reaching an unbearable intensity – he could only think about her, and couldn’t bear to have anyone else talk to her or make her laugh – he had gone up to the Service’s world-famous Academy.

Back before the war, and before austerity and bombing chipped away at its grandeur, the Academy was an echoing mausoleum in the heart of the capital’s ministerial district. You left the dank October pavement, climbed the broad, sooty steps to a classical portico [?], and attained a separate realm of white stone and chilled light, pillars and mouldings, vast walls of cold, chalky plaster, lofty ceilings, and a hushed stillness that took the sound of your footsteps, paused, judged them, and transmuted them into hollow, squeaking ghosts of themselves. Suspicious voices whispered in those echoes, [even though you belonged]: Who are you? How do have the temerity to pace these halls? Are you not crushed by our disdain?

From the very first class of the very first day of the Academy’s new intake, the tutors had tried to impress on them that the Imperial Service — they were allowed to use the ‘I’ word in those simpler days — was about administration. Not development, nor exoticism, nor policy, nor glamour, nor political intrigue, nor personal advancement. Administration, the thing that Jan was so good at: the details, the systems, the intricate coordination of papers, files and cross-references. All the dancing variables and unknowns that intimidated other people, but which Jan found he could juggle and control, always knowing the where the linkages were (or where they should be, in a better-managed world), always able to put his hand on the relevant folder or index card. It was intuitive. The longer he worked, the more effortless it became, and the less effort he made, the less conscious thinking he had to do. When you watched him at work, you thought of a delicate machine, all sweeping motions and smooth arcs: deliberate, interlocking movements, and balanced, trustworthy outcomes.
(c. 1070 words)

Weds 26 and Thurs 27 October

The thing you notice next about skinhead bloke – after his impressive physical presence and his fighter’s posture – is that he smells like all-day drinking: stale beer, scorched fat, and poverty wage cigarettes. This is the smell of imminent violence, Mathilde thinks. Punky must be stupendously innocent, insensitive, or drunk. Even though it’s her parents’ house, and her Uncle’s pseudo-wake, and even though she does feel vaguely responsible for people’s standards of behaviour in this environment – despite all that, she moves away from the threat of confrontation and violence as quickly as she can, finding her way upstairs to her room which, despite being dominated by the coats that the visitors have piled on the bed, offers her a few moments of the solitude that she craves after so much time spent in other people’s company today.

If she’d been in the living room a few minutes earlier she would have seen how the skinhead/punk face-off started. Some of Jan’s relatives had been talking about him, and about his post-war colonial service, and someone had mentioned how great the country had been when it still had its Empire: then, we were someone in the world – people had taken notice of what we said and did. Look at it now, though…a little country with a little voice, and all the old values gone.

Punky listens suspiciously to the fragments of conversation he can he can hear being muttered or hoarsely discussed – “Who could do such a thing to an old man? Not someone from round here” (with the usual racist undertones). “It’s terrible the way this country’s going – you’re not safe anywhere now, in your own city, in your own home, even…” – everyone’s got their own story to tell about crime, decline, and the increasing decadence of the modern, multicultural city, especially as compared to the simplicity, law-abidingness, community spirit and tolerance, the cultural homogeneity of the old, monoracial neighbourhoods. “Nothing against them, mind, but…”

This had been punky’s cue: his belligerence, teenaged contrariness, smattering of left-wing historical theory and beer-relaxed tongue were an irresistible combination. But maybe it’s actually a good thing that we’re not out there any more? Maybe those colonies are better off without us there, skimming off all the profits and the raw materials while the native people work for nothing? Nobody asked us to go there in the first place…

The consensus amongst the older people was that this young man was rude, ignorant and sadly misguided, but their generalised politeness and solicitude meant that they didn’t express their contradictory views: instead, they smiled indulgently and turned away from punky, seeking less inflammatory subject matter in smaller groups. Punky, though, wasn’t satisfied – he needed a deeper, sharper intellectual victory. So he had to push his argument on until someone took his bait, and so he’d taken up a position where he berated people (in general) who (in general) wouldn’t engage in discussions about things that they knew they’d lose the argument on. That’s the trouble with this country…nobody wants to talk about what really happened in the past. It’s all made up stories and myths from films. This rankled more deeply with the older folks, but this group was sober and mature enough to let punky have his say unchallenged.

But this blanket denunciation of the older – war-fighting – generation had been too much for skinhead: his own father – now housebound with arthritis – had been an air gunner in the bomber force during the Eastern war, and had seen many of his school friends killed or go missing. Punky’s generalised disrespect was an attack on his own father.

“Listen,” skinhead said, putting his latest empty beer bottle on the mantelshelf and stepping into the small space between punky and the old folks, rendering that space suddenly smaller and more claustrophobic, “you don’t know what you’re talking about. My dad was there, and these people were there, and they know more about it than you do. So don’t lecture them.”

Punky was tenacious, with a degree of moral and intellectual conviction that made him feel untouchable: he was fortunate to have been schooled and colleged in an educational environment where wit and cleverness were the only weapons that people used in debate – and in the playground and changing room, too. He’d grown used to the brain and the voice being the arbiter of discussion. He was unfortunately now in a different environment.

“I’m not lecturing anyone,” he said haughtily, “I’m just stating the facts. We went to these places as occupiers, and – ”
“We brought those people civilisation, mate. Civilisation – ” – he jabbed his finger at punky for the first time – “ – without us they wouldn’t have nothing. Nothing.” Punky’s judgement is good enough not to challenge the double negative, but he notices it, and it fuels his unstoppable sense of intellectual and moral superiority. He presses on with a few more pious judgements about history, and ‘ordinary people’s’ motivation in the past, and how it wasn’t really their fault (they were just powerless actors driven forward by impersonal historical forces) before skinhead steps forward, puts his massive arms around punky in a shoulder-height bearhug, and carries him through the living room, through the kitchen (which turns to watch him in silence), and out into the back yard.

Punky can’t see anything now: his face is hidden in skinhead’s t-shirted chest, and he can feel the coarse cotton crushed against his nose and cheeks. He can smell sweat, and beer, and – beneath all that – the sweet fruity smell of skinhead’s deodorant. Punky’s face feels red-brick hot, and he feels a bit sick all of a sudden. He can’t breathe.

Skinhead lets punky’s feet back down onto the dark-shadowed grass near the back fence, but holds him around the shoulders still.

“Listen,” he says, “listen, I mean it. You listening?”
Punky, instantly sobered, and instantly recognising how he has misjudged the reality of how this family’s intellectual dynamic works, and feeling his stomach loosen and yawn with the threat of impending violence, nods silently.
“Sure? You’re really listening?”
Nods, says “Yes. I am.”
“Right. Now listen: if you go back in there, I don’t want to hear you slagging off any old people, or the empire, or anything, OK? My dad fought in the war, my dad was in the air force, OK? So just don’t say anything, OK?” (His alcohol content is lapping at the base of his coherence and belligerence now, the arrow-straight logic of his argument and threat drooping impotently.)

But Punky gets the message. After skinhead releases him, punky waits a while, avoiding the eyes of the smirking lads by the back door, then steels himself to go back into the house, retrieve his bag, and go to the toilet before leaving with as much dignity as his reddened face, untucked shirt and unconditional surrender in the face of violence will allow him. This is one of those humiliating moments that will haunt him with incredible clarity and emotional recall for the rest of his life.

The older people pat skinhead on the back and bring him drinks for the rest of the evening. When he goes home, he’s puffed up with righteousness (and beer gas), and has a shouting argument with his mum and dad about the volume that he’s watching the TV at.

Mathilde – back at Jan’s house later in the week
It doesn’t take her long to work out Jan’s naming conventions, storage patterns and labelling; it’s a bit like assembling the materials for a term’s lessons.

She sorts out the personal and unit diaries and lines them up – as far as she can – in chronological order on the workbench. She’s also found the strips of map that Uncle Jan has cut from atlases, and she pins those up just below the first shelf above the workbench, where a small wall-mounted strip light will illuminate them. She noticed that there were lots of pin holes in the maps, usually clustered around towns, and she’s planning to reconstruct the path of the army’s advance in the same way that she presumes Jan has already done. (As she lays out all these materials, feeling their rough, age-desiccated surfaces against her soft fingertips, she gets the strong feeling that she’s merely following in Jan’s footsteps, and that all these materials have passed through his parched, wrinkled hands in the same way that they’re now passing through hers.) The musty smells and textures of the War Office boxes make her think of her Uncle’s dryish skin, parched hair and tweed jackets.

The workbench is getting crowded now, but she lays out as many of the framed photographs and plastic models as she can as well. She doesn’t know that much about military hardware, but she hazards guesses about which trucks and tanks saw service first, and arranges them, nose to tail, in the best chronological sequence she can.

The first unit diary is dated 1938, and they run through (in different handwriting, and occasionally with typed pages pasted in) all the way to 1947, when the War dribbled the last of its blood into the exhausted Slavic soils of the East.

Reading the diaries is a peculiar experience: she’s so used to the familiar archive footage and talking heads (mainly politicians and senior officers) from the classic documentaries that the voices of the ordinary serving soldiers seem strangely banal and narrow-focused; they don’t speak of strategy or tactics, or about philosophy and nationalism (at least, not much), but they do speak of the concrete, the everyday, and the deeply personal. It’s a new and intriguing perspective for her.

Jan had put out his ‘call for documents’ at the last of the reunion dinners he’d attended, about five years ago. Mariette had been complaining that he didn’t have any hobbies any more, and that all he ever seemed to do was sit with his eyes closed, ‘listening’ (her inverted commas) to music on the radio (she acidly commented that, whenever she asked him what he was listening to, he was rarely able to name it or describe it). Eventually, he got so fed up with her repeated complaints about his ‘laziness’ and ‘vegetation’ that he agreed to do something ‘constructive and creative’. He couldn’t think of anything that he specifically wanted to do, and it had been Mariette who suggested the idea of writing a pamphlet history of the unit that he’d been attached to in the East as an economist/logistician. Once the idea was in place, however, he had embraced it with an enthusiasm and creative gusto that he’d barely known since his teens, when he had been a keen draughtsman. In his mind, it became purely his project – he erased Mariette’s moral rights to any ownership.

So he’d stood up at the start of the reunion dinner (before the drink had really started to kibosh the old boys’ memories) and asked them all to loan him any diaries, memoirs, papers, photographs or mementoes that they still had. He would photograph the artefacts and transcribe anything interesting into a composite unit history that he would have printed at his own expense, and which he would distribute at a subsequent dinner, or by post if people were willing to pay the postage. He’d had a stack of cards made at the printers’ already, with his address and telephone number on, and he distributed this so that the old fellows could contact him and send him their things.

People had been very enthusiastic about his project at the dinner, and he’d had many promises of materials made. When only one letter and a small packet of photographs had arrived a month later, though, he began to suspect that the old soldiers’ enthusiasm was not going to be matched by concrete action. Mariette feared that this would mean another retreat into indolence and sleepiness. Just before Christmas, however, there was a sudden deluge of materials, and thereafter a steady flow of packets, parcels and letters came. He reorganised his workroom and put up some extra shelves to cater for the volume and logistical challenge of organising the materials in a usable, intuitive way. Mariette’s pleasure at his revivified interest in doing something was slightly tempered by the fact that she now seemed to have the downstairs of the house all to herself, while Jan spent most of the day and evening in his workroom.

Letter from Lorenz Thomas to his wife Maria, dated August 17th, 1938: Dearest Marie, I send you my love from the town of L.

(c. 2100 words)

Why I'm Crap

I've been a rubbish human being most of today: there's this bloody great boulder sitting in the heart of my emotional life. I know that I have to get rid of it, but it's so bloody hard to do. It's very heavy, and it's kind of beautiful - hell, it is beautiful - and it's been there for so long that I can't imagine what life will be like without it.

So I went through the day feeling woefully miserable about the boulder's intractable strength, presence and power, and was generally moody and irritable and useless (which obviously endeared me to my colleagues). This filled me with greater self-disgust. Ho hum.

In the evening I went to see the Wallace and Gromit "Curse of the Were-Rabbit" movie. This is an undiluted joy. You should really go and see it if you haven't already.

Missed my 1000 words today as I was out at the flicks. Tomoorrow I will do 2000. See if I don't.

At the hospital, Mathilde is reminded once again of her pitiful deference to authority: when she’s feeling good about herself, and retaining her ironic sense of good-humoured irony, she refers to this as her “the big man’s going to shout at me” syndrome; at these times she reflects that, ever since she was a child, she’s been anxious – mostly unconsciously – about being told off, or being found wanting, or having people laugh at her (especially people who don’t know her, and whose shallow judgements of her would be based on inadequate knowledge: if those people truly knew her, they would see that her authenticity, honesty, integrity and depth offset these momentary lapses of behaviour).

The first memory she has of this syndrome comes from an early school nativity play – she’d have been about six. She was playing the inn-keeper’s wife. (For this particular school production, performed on imaginatively multiply-reused [hollow wooden cubes] in the chilly, blank interior of the cavernous new concrete church, their Religious Instruction teacher had decided that the traditional gender roles should be reversed: thus Mary knocked at the inn door, and Mathilde’s inn keeper’s wife answered her knock while her husband provided ludic relief with a tea towel and a cup that never quite dried.) Once the holy family were installed in the inn’s straw-strewn outbuilding, Mathilde had to wait for another cue that called her back onto the stage to announce that “your supper is within”. At the first performance, already sweating with nervous relief at having delivered her earlier lines successfully, and without stammering or forgetting anything before the gaze of the terrifyingly large audience of parents and older siblings (probably sixty in total), she pre-empted her second cue and found herself standing on top of a wooden block in the bright light, but with nothing to say and nothing to do, and intensely conscious that it was obvious to everyone that she shouldn’t be there. She stood, blinking, for a few seconds, then stepped back out of the light and into the shadow of the flat. She felt the sweat trickling cold down her back, under the woollen jumper she was wearing under her flimsy cotton costume.

The next thing she knew, she was back in the choir’s storage room, which the school was using as a changing room. There, amidst the smell of incense and musty cassocks, she pushed her way to the back of the costume rail and sat down against the cold exterior wall, pressing her skinny back against the rough textured breeze blocks. That was where the teachers eventually found her an hour after everyone else (except her parents) had departed into the frosty December night.

Since then, anxiety and fear of ridicule or exposure have been a constant motif in her behaviour. She knows it’s irrational, and that as she learned it so young it’s not something she should be ashamed of, but it’s still painfully embarrassing to her, and it seems impossible to kick the habit.

At the hospital, the desk nurse makes it very clear – almost brusquely – that Jan [Martens?] is too ill to be seen. They will take his clothes and hygiene equipment for her, but there is no point in her waiting. She should go home. Even before the nurse has finished speaking, Mathilde is moving apologetically towards the rotating doors, feeling guilty for even having come, and having had the temerity to take up any of the hospital staff’s time. As she walks down the concrete ramp to the street and the latest of this evening’s bus stops, she rehearses ways in which she could have made herself less of an imposition on the nurses.

When she gets home, she can hear the noise from the pseudo-wake from the street: there’s no music, but the clatter of plates, chink of glasses, and drunken shouts of laughter carry plainly through the autumn air. She goes round to the rear gate, noting the bright yellow strips of light between the vertical fence slats, and the fast-moving shadows that accompany the running, laughing young men inside.

It is mostly young blokes in the back yard, milling around a growing pile of beer bottles stacked on top of empty crates by the back door. There are some younger boys playing in the yard too, and some others who stand in the shadows near the drinkers, watching their faces and body movements, stashing away memories of the approved adult drinking behaviours for implementation in a couple of years’ time.

Mathilde eases her way through the haze of beer fumes and testosterone and into the kitchen, where her mother kisses her cheek and squeezes her arm, and her father nods and smiles at her over the shoulder of Aunt Iris, who is in the middle of a finger-jabbing bout of needless over-emphasis. Mathilde grabs herself a bottle of beer and sidles off into the dining room, hoping to see her cousin Trudi: Trudi is one of those relatives whom she only seems to see at family gatherings like this, and with whom she has always shared an unspoken sense of understanding and goodwill, despite the rarity of their meetings. Mathilde wishes that she could meet a romantic partner with whom she could share the same kind of innate sympathy and wordless mutual regard.

But Trudi isn’t there. Instead, Mathilde finds herself watching a disagreement escalating into something more physical: two people she doesn’t recognise – a well-built thirty-five year old with a shaven head, and a late teenager with dyed black hair and black-ringed eyes – are facing each other, framed in the doorway that leads to the hall and stairway. As the punky kid’s head waves backwards and forwards, Mathilde can see the white painted balustrades {what are those vertical things at the side of the stairs called?} flickering in and out of vision. The punky kid must be drunk, otherwise he wouldn’t be arguing with the other guy, who has inverted vee-shaped torso of a fireman, and the massive upper arms of someone who lifts weights regularly. Mathilde can see, from the way that the bald guy is staring and nodding at the punk, and shifting his weight from foot to foot, that the first punch or head butt is not too far away. If only the punky guy could see the other guy with sober eyes, he would shut up NOW.

(c. 1050 words)