A Month of Sundays

by John Owens

  “Dunno,” answered Duffy absently, his attention focused on the barmaid with the nose stud.

  Rocky, who had overheard this exchange on the way back from the bar, said, “No, I spoke to him a bit earlier and he said he’d meet us there. He called me on this,” he went on, holding up a great unwieldy mobile phone. “Surprised me, really, because I don’t know if you’ve noticed but whenever it rings, it nearly always turns out to be the office. Pisses me off sometimes, it does.” His companions carefully avoided meeting each other’s eyes as Rocky went on, “Anyway, he was in a right state, kept moaning about being starved to death.”

  “Sounds like they’ve finished dinner, then,” said O’Driscoll with a smile.

  “I wonder what they had tonight?” asked Duffy.

  “It was a dodgy line so I couldn’t hear what he was saying half the time,” went on Rocky, “but he kept on repeating the same thing. ‘Hummus - fucking hummus - fucking twatting hummus’. And there was something about three bean salad, that got him going again, ‘Salad - fucking salad - fucking twatting salad.’ He’s obviously got a right downer on salad. He said he hadn’t moved in with Maureen so they could eat like rabbits.”

  “Was that all he phoned up for, to have a moan about Maureen’s dinners?” asked Duffy.

  “No, he wants someone to get him something to eat from the Seven Eleven, and slip it to him at the do.”

  “Bloody hell, he must be desperate. There’s bound to be some kind of food there,” said O’Driscoll.

  “That’s what I told him,” answered Rocky, “but he said he couldn’t take the risk - a man’s life was at stake.”

  The others looked at each other. “We’d better get him something then,” said O’Driscoll. “After all, he’s begged us for help and you can’t let a friend down in his hour of need, can you?” His friends nodded their heads gravely and O’Driscoll asked, “So does anyone know where the nearest tofu shop is?”

  Upon arriving at the pub in Hanwell several rounds later, the first person they saw was Micky Quinn, but he was unrecognizable from the ebullient figure that usually met their eyes. He was attired in the elegant costume that Maureen’s accomplished eye had put together with the help of Paul Smith, but the clothes seemed to hang from his body with a forlorn, defeated air, and even the elaborate coiffure which Maureen had constructed with industrial quantities of styling mousse lay flat and lifeless on his head. As soon as he saw them, he hurried over, his face working silently but frantically.

  “Have you got it?” he muttered through clenched teeth. His face wore a hunted look and as he spoke, he glanced behind him.

  “Have I got what?” replied Duffy, who being closest to Quinn, was first in the firing line.

  “The food, you cunt!” replied Micky, and it was evident from the terseness of his reply that the intervening hours had not improved his temper. Of course, it transpired they had forgotten the food, and Duffy’s attempt to explain that the warmth and conviviality of The North Star had driven the matter from their minds was abruptly terminated as Quinn grabbed the lapels of his jacket and began to shake them violently. “Is anyone going to get me something to fucking eat!” he gibbered madly, his eyes rolling and his face and hands shaking and twitching.

  “Can’t you nip out yourself?” asked Rocky.

  “I can’t! She watches me! Look, she’s watching me now.” Quinn suddenly disengaged himself from the group and headed back towards Maureen, but not before turning on his friends the kind of look worn by a spaniel that hasn’t been down to the paper shop for a week.

  In the face of such suffering, it was impossible to do nothing, and Rocky was nominated to nip down to the adjoining convenience store and get some food. While this was going on, O’Driscoll’s eyes had begun a surreptitious search of the bar area and his stomach gave a familiar lurch as he spotted Karen in the middle of the room. He had spoken to her that afternoon and it was clear she had either not noticed or chosen to ignore his embarrassing performance on the dance floor the previous weekend, for there had been no constraint in her manner when they had chatted. He began the process of trying to edge closer to where she was standing, but by this time Rocky had returned from the Seven Eleven and O’Driscoll found himself dispatched on a mission to divert Maureen’s attention for a few minutes.

  A little later, a close observer might have thought he had wandered into the pages of The Dandy for under a trestle table, devouring a family steak pie with scant regard for etiquette, crouched a figure that, except for its flaming red hair and a hint of Paco Rabanne, could have passed for Desperate Dan. Rocky had bought a hummus wrap to supplement the offer but his friend had rebuffed this offer in words that were, perhaps fortunately, rendered indistinct by pie.

  The next half hour passed in the desultory way of an event in its early stages, with people arriving and ordering drinks and finding their friends. Duffy relieved the monotony by slipping off to make a couple of phone calls to Rocky’s mobile, while O’Driscoll remained on hand so that he could subsequently report back on the reactions to the calls, a disappointing four followed by a spectacular ten. By nine o’clock, the venue was starting to fill up and the lads were ensconced comfortably in a corner, close to the bar to call for replenishments should the need arise (it would).

  At one point, Clive the supply teacher strolled in their direction, again walking with those almost imperceptible sideways motions of the head that screamed, “I am the dog’s bollocks,” and as he passed them, he nodded at Duffy, while ignoring the others. His journey took him past Tracey Reeves, who could be observed looking at him with red-rimmed eyes and a tear-stained countenance. Gracing her with a lop-sided smile, but otherwise paying her no attention, he passed languidly by, and into the area where the main body of revelers were gathered in the centre of the room.

  By this stage, the pie had revived Michael Quinn to the point where, if still somewhat terse, his mood was at least was an improvement on the famine-induced fury of half an hour before. The offer of the hummus wrap had been repeated and had been again declined, but without the curtness which had earlier been displayed.

  “So you’re not a fan of this hummus then, Mick?” asked Rocky. “What exactly is it anyway?”

  Quinn hitched his trousers up in a way that Sherlock Holmes, puzzling over a two-pipe problem, might have hoicked up his cavalry twills. His brow furrowed and he scratched his arse thoughtfully while his other hand began to wrestle with the undergarments at the front if his trousers.

  “Sludge!” he finally pronounced with the air of a difficult problem satisfactorily solved.

  “Sorry?” said Duffy.

  “Sludge!” repeated Quinn. “Hummus! Sludge! That’s the nearest I can get. It’s like a sort of grey sludge.” He paused and thought for a moment. “And it tastes like sludge as well.”

  “How are things with Maureen, then, Mick?” asked Duffy and the others suppressed smiles as Quinn looked at them with a face that wore an expression of almost comical melancholia. “I don’t mind her trying to improve my mind and I don’t mind her making me wear different clothes and I don’t mind her giving me poncey shampoo and hair mousse and all that stuff...” he paused for breath, “...if only she wouldn’t try and starve me!”

  In a hollow voice, he enumerated the gastronomic crimes which she had visited on him. “I’ve had hummus, I’ve had tofu, I’ve had couscous, I’ve had Mexican bean stew. Last week, she gave me something so bad I can’t even remember what it was called. I must have blanked it out. Bloody hell!” he went on as a new thought appeared to strike him. “Maybe I’m starting to have memory loss. They say that people who are starving start to experience memory loss and hallucinations.” His hand continued to work away to untangle whatever was amiss within his trousers and the resulting pelvic gyrations caused some of the people standing near him to wonder whether the dancing had started early.

 
By now, the group had moved towards the centre of the room and O’Driscoll noticed that Karen was only a few feet away, talking to June Taylor, the English coordinator, and a couple of others. He was working out how best to move closer to her when he noticed Clive had insinuated himself into the group and was making good headway, if the smiling faces around him were anything to go by. There seemed to be a lot of laughter and he noticed Clive directing a significant number of looks in Karen’s direction. To his consternation, amidst the babble of voices and the sounds of laughter coming from the group, she appeared to be reciprocating the eye contact. To his horror, he noticed Karen had started to play with the strands of hair on the side of her head, threading them through her fingers as she looked at Clive. “Don’t play with your hair! Don’t play with your bloody hair!” his inner voice silently screamed and, in desperation, he did what he always did in a crisis, which was to down three-quarters of his pint in one convulsive draught, and head off to the bar to get another round in. On his return he once more took up position where he could hear what was going on in the adjoining group and his ears picked up June Taylor’s voice extolling the virtues of George Eliot.

  “Have you read her, Clive?” asked someone.

  “George Eliot? Yeah, I’ve read her stuff,” said Clive.

  “And what did you think of it?”

  “Early chicklit,” he replied laconically and there was a burst of laughter. . Someone could be heard saying, “Ooh, Clive, you are a one,” and O’Driscoll noted with mounting horror that Karen’s mouth was half-open in laughter and her eyes appeared to be dancing with delight. Grinding his teeth in impotent fury, he resolved that he was not going to be outdone by that sleazy bastard Clive. If it was witty literary banter they wanted, he would bloody well give them witty literary banter!

  He heard Duffy’s voice asking him if he wanted another beer, and he drained the glass in his hand and called for whiskeys to be added to the next round. Right, his inner voice said as he squared his metaphorical shoulders, he would show them there was more than one person in the room who could talk about English literary classics in a witty and erudite way. A few moments later the drinks arrived and he grabbed two glasses from the tray and, beer in one hand and whiskey in the other, prepared to go into battle.

  Thursday

  Flight Lieutenant John “Dizzy” O’Driscoll leaned negligently against the sleek, sinister-looking fuselage of the Mosquito fighter bomber that was his pride and joy. It was 1943 and the scene was an RAF airfield somewhere on the East Anglian coast of wartime England. As he looked across the flat airfield, and as dusk began to fall, he could see lights beginning to appear here and there among the rows of Nissen huts. Two figures could be observed standing together, their silhouettes sharply defined by the rows of lamps behind them. As they moved into the gloom, their outlines became less distinct, the backlighting effect of the lamps enveloping them in an ethereal, romantic glow. One of the figures was Group Captain Clive “Corky” Corcoran, and even at a distance, his peaked hat could be observed making those minute lateral motions that proclaim to the world, “I am an awfully accomplished pilot.”

  As the other figure, slim and lithe in form, detached itself from him and made its way towards O’Driscoll, it revealed itself to be Karen Black, senior WAAF officer attached to the planning corps at the station. She was not in uniform, but the printed floral dress she wore accentuated the graceful curves of her body, and her hair, tied up behind in the prevailing fashion, provided a fitting frame for her lovely face. She slowed down as she neared the aircraft, and there was an air of hesitation about her, unusual in one normally so confident.

  “John. I just wanted to... wish you luck before you took off,” she ventured and there was a tremor in her voice as she spoke.

  O’Driscoll looked back at her, a crooked half-smile playing on his lips, but the smile did not extend beyond his mouth and if one looked into his eyes they had a dead quality to them that was frightening. They were the eyes of a man who has looked too often into the face of death, (a bit like that bloke played by Richard Attenborough in The Great Escape, to be exact) and seemed out of place on the face of one so young. Other than repeating the half-smile, O’Driscoll said nothing, and it was Karen who was finally forced to break the silence.

  “Which mission are you going on?” she asked in the clipped tones of the 1940s. “I know you’re not supposed to share that kind of information,” she went on with a wan smile and with the same hesitant, imploring look she had worn before, “‘careless talk costs lives’ and all that, but if I knew which one you were going on, I could perhaps... think of you.”

  There were three top secret missions leaving the base in the next few hours, one to attack the German heavy water plant near Stavanger in Norway, the second to drop a group of partisans into an impenetrable mountainous region in central Yugoslavia, and the third to carry out a perilous reconnaissance mission on the heavily fortified dam system of the Rhur Valley in northern Germany. O’Driscoll tapped a Players Number One on the back of his hand and prepared to light it, the same half-smile playing around the corner of his eyes. “I thought I’d have a crack at all three,” he said casually.

  Karen’s hand shot up in front of her face. “All three,” she repeated in a dazed tone. “But the Wing Co said that each one alone is as hazardous a mission as we’ve ever undertaken. John, you can’t go on all three, it would be... suicide.” O’Driscoll gave a microscopic shrug which appeared to signal his indifference to the danger that lay ahead.

  “John...” she began again and then hesitated. “I wish things could have been different, but...” she faltered again and neither of them needed to voice their unspoken thoughts or refer to the silhouetted figure that was framed against the evening sky, its peaked cap performing tiny self-satisfied oscillations. Suddenly, Karen gave a convulsive gulp and broke down in tears.

  “It’s this awful war,” she said between sobs. “It’s turned everything on its head and I somehow feel that things will never be the same again.”

  O’Driscoll moved towards her and there was a new tenderness in his voice as he said, “Come on, old thing, chin up, can’t have beautiful WAAF’s blubbing while on duty, bad for morale.” She gave him a tentative smile through her tears as he went on, “Don’t worry, we’ll all be back tomorrow morning for beer and bacon and eggs in the mess, with old Squiffy tinkling the ivories in the corner.”

  Karen looked at him for a moment. “Didn’t you hear?” she asked, and there was a quaver in her voice as she said, “Squiffy bought it, copped one over Cologne yesterday.”

  There was a pause while O’Driscoll digested this news and then, with a perceptible stiffening of the upper lip, he took two more cigarettes from his case, lit them with the same match, and handed one to Karen.

  “What about Blister?” he asked.

  “Flew into a barrage balloon over Berlin. It took a wing off his Spitfire and he went straight into a spin. They say he was still giving the thumbs-up through his canopy as he went down, but I’m afraid there’s no hope.”

  O’Driscoll sighed heavily. “And The Caterpillar?”

  “I’m afraid The Caterpillar bought it as well, ditched his kite in the channel on the way back from the Hamburg run.”

  “There’s no hope he might have survived?”

  “They sent a rescue boat to try and reach him, but it was too late. All they found was his pipe.”

  As the wind sent eddies scurrying across the flat East Anglian landscape, the two figures regarded each other for a moment, and the vanished hopes and dreams of a generation were implicit in that exchanged look. Then, slowly, the female figure retreated into the half-light, leaving O’Driscoll standing alone, his tall figure etched starkly against the bleak fenland skyline. At that moment, the figure of Wing Commander Barnet came into view, accompanied as he was everywhere by his jet black Labrador, Nig..., er... Blackie. Know
n to everyone as the Old Man, the Wing Co. and was a familiar figure on the base and led his team with a relaxed affability that was said to conceal a formidable intellect.

  “Well, well,” he began breezily, twirling his moustache. “Young O’Driscoll. Capital! Capital! Looking forward to the big show, young John? Looking forward to giving Fritz a bloody nose?” He paused to apply a large spotted handkerchief to his own nose, and a moment later there was a trumpeting noise and his whiskers shook. “Love to be going with you, old chap,” he went on, carefully avoiding O’Driscoll’s eye. “Nothing I’d like better as I’m sure you know, but someone’s got be a ground wallah, I’m afraid. Someone’s got to stay behind and deal with all the bumf and the boring old red tape.”

  He gave his right moustache a flourish and, drawing O’Driscoll away so they could not be overheard, went on in a more confidential voice, “Glad I’ve caught you, young John, I’ve been meaning to have a quiet word with you. Fact is, there’s this young WAAF, who’s a kind of friend of the family and she’s coming to the base next week. Won’t bore you with the details, but she needs someone to take her under their wing and I was wondering if you could...”

  At this point, O’Driscoll woke up drenched in sweat and screaming for mercy and as he reacquainted himself with the real world, he took comfort from the fact that at least it didn’t contain a 1940s version of Prudence Pugh. She would probably have wanted to christen the planes with the names of characters from Winnie the Pooh, and send the pilots aloft garlanded with rings of posies.

  As he shaved, he cast his mind back and recalled the gathering of friends in The North Star the previous evening and the subsequent errand of mercy that provided Micky with his pies. He also recalled having a sinking feeling that Karen was going to cop off with Clive the supply teacher, but after that, try as he might, he couldn’t remember a thing. Realizing that it might have been a mistake to commence proceedings so early, he dragged himself wearily out to his car and made his way to work.