Part 27 (2/2)

During the day, his mother moves like a sleepwalker. She wanders the beaches and he follows her, trailing along behind, kicking sand and picking up sh.e.l.ls and broken gla.s.s. When he is hungry she buys him candyfloss: pink and green clouds of it, which make his teeth ache and his mouth water. Lovely sweetness dissolves on his tongue and he takes wild bites, the roughness of sugar on his cheek, gobs of it in his hair. If he eats it like that, his mother stops walking and watches him. Sometimes she even smiles for a moment. Then she drops her head, studies her feet and walks on again.

He doesn't ask her about the enemy, but every time he hears footsteps outside the house or sees a man walking on the beach alone, he wonders if it is him, his father, come to take them home again.

Tony comes back on Friday night, and early on Sat.u.r.day morning they drive to a forest of pine trees a half hour inland. It's wide and evenly s.p.a.ced with trees growing in pale soil. Tony drops them off, saying he has business to attend to in Felixstowe.

Aurek gathers the field mushrooms that grow in the gra.s.s at the edge of the forest. He can't remember learning how to hunt for mushrooms. It is something he has somehow always known how to do. He spots a cl.u.s.ter of smooth-skinned death caps and squats down beside them, pulling his knife from his pocket. With a steady hand, he cuts them, discarding the round puffy sac at their base that he knows poisonous mushrooms have. These cause death after a day or so. There's no cure. He lays them on the ground and looks at them. If Tony was dead, maybe they could go back home? He is already a bad child. It is his fault they are here.

'What are you doing with those?'

Aurek jumps. He hadn't heard his mother behind him. He avoids her eyes but is sure she can read his mind, and kicks at the mushrooms, stamps on them until they are a mush under his feet.

'Make sure you wipe your knife well. Those are dangerous.' Silvana smiles, puts her hand on his cheek. 'It's lovely here, isn't it? Just you and me. Like it used to be.'

He would prefer it if the enemy was there too, telling him how telephones work or what makes a motor car go. The enemy could build them a tree house. He could make them a proper home in the trees. Aurek reaches out and touches his mother's hair, twisting a curl through his fingers.

'Did I do something wrong?' he asks, and she laughs loudly, as if he has told her a very funny joke.

At twilight, when Tony comes back to get them, the biggest bats Aurek has ever seen have begun to swoop through the branches. He finds a dead one and his mother persuades Tony to let him keep it.

Aurek lays it out on the porch, where it dries hard like leather, but a few days later the wind s.n.a.t.c.hes it up and steals it away. Aurek spends days searching for it along the seafront, crawling under beach huts and fisherman's huts, in among green nets and wicker lobster pots, his fingers searching through damp newspapers, fish hooks and pink discarded fish guts.

'Is it good for him to run wild around town?' says Tony to Silvana when he arrives the following Friday evening and Aurek comes home stinking of fish.

'Perhaps Peter could come and play with him?'

'He's with his grandparents.'

Aurek sits on the front doorstep, his fingers in his ears, pretending not to hear them talking. He tries to imagine the sound fish make under water, wonders whether they sing to each other like birds.

'Maybe Aurek should go to school? You've been here a fortnight. We don't want the social services coming, asking questions.'

'He isn't ready for school.'

'What is that he's got in his hair?'

'Tar. He was down at the boatbuilders' again.'

'You shouldn't let him wander like he does. I could bring him a rabbit. Or a dog. He could have a pet. It might make him stay home.'

'No,' says Silvana. 'We should wait.'

'Wait for what?'

'For the right time,' she replies.

Aurek takes his fingers out of his ears. He knows he won't have a pet. His mother is not happy by the sea. The right time is never going to come.

Poland

Silvana

In the summer heat, Silvana threw off her clothes. She smeared pine sap on their bodies to keep the mosquitoes away and made circles of rowan branches around their camp to keep the soldiers out. The charm worked. There had been fewer of them since she'd been doing this.

Sometimes she lay down in a spot where the sun hit the forest floor and felt it moving across her. Ants crawled around her, big black lines of them, and she heard their legs clicking, jointed bodies rustling as they hurried. She could hear a beetle in leaf mould, its jaws crunching. Woodlice crawling under tree bark sounded like someone grinding their teeth against her cheek. The drone of a fly hurt her ears.

She was turning to wood. Her body hard as oak, skin as thin as the papery strips of silver-birch bark she and the boy ate in winter. Sometimes she imagined being an old woman, dying with only a tiny view of the sky through the branches. If someone found her, they'd knock on her arms and realize she was solid.

Maybe they'd make something out of her. A coffee table, a blanket box perhaps. She was certain that within her body were the rings of her life like a tree. The lean years, the healing growth circling her broken heart in fat bands.

She let her hand follow the sun's path across her ribs, her sunken stomach, her hollow thighs. She knew herself, understood herself. She had no need for any wider knowledge but the moment. She felt the heartwood of her oaken body like a lump in her throat.

Aurek danced in the sunbeams around her, leaping through dappled light, catching the dust that circled them. His head was getting too big for his body. His belly was a balloon of thin-skinned air. His arms and legs were branches, thin sticks. Her tree man. Forest sprite.

'Come here,' she said, sitting up. 'Come here.'

She settled him on her lap and lifted her breast to his lips. He closed his eyes and she rocked him. For hours she sat, letting him suckle. When her milk stopped flowing, he pulled on her nipple until she cried out with the sharp pain of it, but still she held him, his eyelashes fluttering against her skin. A faint tingling, deep within her, began to burn in her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and the milk flowed again. Aurek lay back in her arms and smiled, a slack-jawed, squinting kind of smile, as though the sun dazzled him. Silvana pressed his face to her breast again.

'You and me,' she whispered. 'We're not dead yet.'

Ja.n.u.sz

Ja.n.u.sz sat in a gloomy Nissen hut in north Wales listening to the rain on corrugated iron. Rows of barrel-shaped huts rose like burial mounds out of the earth. He and the other Poles called them beczki miechu beczki miechu, barrels of laughs. The huts had small windows punched into their frames, and the wind blew through the ill-fitting gla.s.s. Outside, in the wet mud, glistened the tyre patterns of bicycles leading out of the field onto the road beyond. Ja.n.u.sz sat. Waiting for Bruno.

Spring rain had soaked into muddy fields of emerald green and the hedgerows were white with blossom. If the rain didn't stop soon, it was going to flood the camp again. As it was, a thin layer of dirty water lay on the wooden floors. A drip of water splashed on his face, and then another. The roof was leaking again. He inhaled deeply on his cigarette and dropped the b.u.t.t onto the floor, where it sank with a fizzle into an inch of water.

All he was concerned about was the state of his chilblains and what b.l.o.o.d.y awful food the cook might be serving. He looked at his watch. Bruno would be back from duty that afternoon and Ja.n.u.sz wanted to go to the village pub with him.

'Not a chance,' Bruno had said when Ja.n.u.sz asked him if he wanted to stay on in the RAF. 'Sign on for another five years? Not a chance.'

'I don't know what else to do,' Ja.n.u.sz said. 'We can't go back to Poland. I might try France. Or Canada. Get a job there. I don't know...'

'You should think about it. I've already got it sorted out. The war's nearly over. I'm going up to Scotland. I'm marrying Ruby.'

Ja.n.u.sz frowned. 'But you're already married. What about your family? Your children?'

Bruno sighed. 'That's another life now. Another world. Jan, old man, you're so b.l.o.o.d.y decent. You must know there are plenty of married Poles here who have got themselves English girls. What are they to do? Live here like monks because they're married to women back in Poland that they'll never see again? I've been away from our country too long. Even if I could find my wife, I doubt my kids would recognize me. They're better off without me. I can't go back. I've got a life here with Ruby now. You've got to take what chances you have.' Bruno patted Ja.n.u.sz on the shoulder. 'You've had a tough time. Why not find yourself a nice girl here? Ruby's got lots of girlfriends. We'll find you a girl all right.'

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