Free Day by A. L Kennedy

to shield her head and he went around the table and held her, the twitch and flicker of pain in her, and he touched her hair.
    Didn’t pray for her, though, did you? Only for yourself. You asked if God could make you strong.
    Because he’d heard what Chamberlain said about Mr Hitler and the way he was
using force to gain his will
. Alfred understood about that. And before it was mentioned, he knew anybody who did that
can only be stopped by force
– it seemed daft that Chamberlain bothered to say so when it was just obvious. Unless he was trying to let people see he was like them and had problems they’d recognise, even if he owned a Cabinet room and no one else did – as if he was trying to say this Hitler was nothing special. That might be the kind of message a prime minister would pick: hoping you’d think him a pal and meaning you all to keep cheerful and ready for fighting the war.
    Alfred hadn’t cared. He’d smelled breakfast and roses and his mother’s skin and his heart had stammered.
    And the sirens – they set off the air-raid sirens, just for a practice – although we didn’t know it wasn’t real, not then – and the howl of that, I could feel it in her arms, I could feel the noise scare her.
    She’d almost begun to stand: thinking of hiding maybe, of the shelter she’d never been to and didn’t know: but he’d held her, rocked her, where she was to make her safe, to be her safety – he’d made her stay just where she was with him – and he’d closed his eyes and prayed again to be a strong, strong man.
    Another waste of mental energy.
    He stretched out his legs, leaned back and let the sounds, the rhythms of the camp, coddle in around him: a game of kick-about scuffling off beside the nearest huts, a curse as someone fell, distant sawing, the film people’s bad piano limping out with a bounce of jazz, the player trying to be smarter than his fingers. Strolling feet approaching and a murmur of gossip to his left – odd how fast there was gossip when nothing here mattered and hardly any time would pass before all this was gone.
    It came for him then, the true press of his mother’s scent returning, speeding in at him and when he’d seen her fall and the little start of blood that time above her eye and being able to do nothing.
    You see too much and have no words for what you see and see and see until it doesn’t reach, is nonsense, there without you.
    The woman in the forest when they were marching, when the Germans were pushing them west; she had a man with her and wanted his help, there on her knees and blood on her and shouting because he should help her and make this less terrible and let her be not alone and the man doing nothing, of course, being dead already and her screaming in German at a German soldier and him raising his gun to make her stop. And walking into the house with the blue window frames, neatly done, the place were the Russians had called and got drunk: Alfred hadn’t known what to expect before he saw: broken things in the good front room, the foreign kind of parlour, and where they’d lit a fire on the rug and the hair, meat and hair, hidden under the kitchen table, or maybe just there by accident, maybe no hiding involved. Her breasts, she’d been cut on her breasts. The child cut, too. Beyond recognising.
    Too much.
    And having to keep all you love in your head, saving it all from the rest of the world and yourself: your nature, your training: and holding it, hiding it away – intentional hiding – crossing your arms now where you sit on a wooden chair which is not your own, in the dusty sun of a game you are playing with all of these other madmen, because as soon as you saw the advertisement, you knew you’d have to come here and it all just thins and fades until you can only feel her, where her head would rest at your right shoulder and her breathing, her