Code Name Verity(18)

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People are complicated. There is so much more to everybody than you realise. You see someone in school every day, or at work, in the canteen, and you share a cigarette or a coffee with them, and you talk about the weather or last night’s air raid. But you don’t talk so much about what was the nastiest thing you ever said to your mother, or how you pretended to be David Balfour, the hero of Kidnapped, for the whole of the year when you were 13, or what you imagine yourself doing with the pilot who looks like Leslie Howard if you were alone in his bunk after a dance.

No one slept the night of that air raid, or the next day. We had pretty much to resurface the runway ourselves that morning. We weren’t equipped for it, we didn’t have the tools or the materials, and we weren’t a building crew, but without a runway RAF Maidsend was defenceless. And Britain too, in the bigger picture. We repaired the runway.

Everyone mucked in, including the captured German – I think he was rather apprehensive about his fate as a prisoner of war and was just as happy to spend the day stripped to the waist shovelling piles of earth with twenty other pilots than to be moved on to some unknown official internment awaiting him inland. I remember we all had to bow our heads in a moment of silence for his dead companions before we set to work. I don’t know what happened to him after that.

In the canteen, Queenie was asleep with her head on the table. She must have done up her hair first, before she came in from two hours’ stone-picking on the runway, but she’d fallen asleep before she’d even taken the spoon out of her tea. Maddie sat down across from her with two fresh cups of tea and one iced bun. I don’t know where the icing came from. Someone must have been hoarding sugar just in case there was a direct hit on the airfield and everybody needed cheering up. Maddie was quite relieved to see the unflappable wireless operator with her guard down. She pushed the Cup That Cheers close to Queenie’s face so that the warmth woke her.

They propped their heads on their elbows, facing each other.

‘Are you scared of anything?’ Maddie asked.

‘Lots of things!’

‘Name one.’

‘I can name ten.’

‘Go on then.’

Queenie looked at her hands. ‘Breaking my nails,’ she said critically. After two hours clearing the runway of rubble and twisted metal, her manicure was in need of repair.

‘I’m serious,’ said Maddie quietly.

‘All right then. Dark.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘It’s true,’ said Queenie. ‘Now your turn.’

‘Cold,’ Maddie answered.

Queenie sipped her tea. ‘Falling asleep while I’m working.’

‘Me too.’ Maddie laughed. ‘And bombs dropping.’

‘Too easy.’

‘All right.’ It was Maddie’s turn to be defensive. She shook tangled dark curls off her collar; her hair was barely short enough to count as regulation and too short to put up. ‘Bombs dropping on my gran and granddad.’

Queenie nodded in agreement. ‘Bombs dropping on my favourite brother. Jamie’s the youngest of ’em, the nearest me in age. He’s a pilot.’

‘Not having a useful skill,’ said Maddie. ‘I don’t want to have to marry right away just so I don’t have to work down Ladderal Mill.’

‘You are joking!’

‘When the war’s over, I still won’t have a skill. Bet there won’t be this desperate need for radio operators when the war ends.’

‘You think that’ll happen soon?’

‘The longer the war goes on,’ Maddie said, carefully cutting her iced bun in half with a tin butter knife, ‘the older I’ll get.’

Queenie let out a giddy, tickled laugh. ‘Getting old!’ she cried. ‘I’m horribly afraid of being old.’

Maddie smiled and handed her half the bun. ‘Me too. Bit like being afraid of dying though. Not much you can do about it.’

‘What am I up to?’

‘You’ve done four. Not counting the nails. Six to go.’

‘All right.’ Queenie deliberately tore her bun into six equal pieces and arranged them round the rim of her saucer. Then, one by one, she dunked each piece into her tea, named a fear and ate it.

‘Number 5, the Newbery College porter. Blimey, he’s a troll. I was a year younger than all the other first years and I’d have been scared of him even if he hadn’t hated me. It was because I was reading German and he was sure my tutor was a spy! Five down, right? Number 6, heights, I’m afraid of heights, that’s because my big brothers tied me to a drain spout on the roof of our castle when I was five and forgot about me all afternoon. All five of them got a good birching for it too. Seven, ghosts – I mean one ghost, not seven, one particular ghost. I don’t need to worry about that here. The ghost is probably why I’m scared of the dark too.’