The air around Bryan’s head rippled into corrugations of force that hooked into his shoulder, lifted him from the ground and spun him away like a gyroscope. Objects coursed by his head, tearing the fabric of the air like a rotted cotton sheet, and the clang and chime of impacting shrapnel rang from the front of the stone pedestal. Slammed into the ground under the rolling wave of blast, Bryan lay limp, dazed with shock at the sudden violence. He lifted his head, blinking against the grit in his eyes and the throb of concussion in his temples. Luċija stood transfixed against the stone, quaking with fear, but safe from the blast. On the other side, Jacobella lay prone, her hips jerking in an unnatural rhythm.
Bryan dragged himself to his feet, testing his bones as he hauled his weight upright. He stepped across the scene on unsteady legs, holding up his hand to Luċija. ‘Stay there.’ His voice sounded distant against the buzzing chimes that dogged his hearing. He dropped to his knees next to Jacobella and gently turned her now still body. Blood pooled on the ground.
‘You’ve been hit,’ he spoke directly into Jacobella’s dust-grimed face. ‘Where have you been hit?’
She opened her eyes, spilling tears onto her cheeks. ‘No.’ She sobbed, choking on her misery. ‘I haven’t been hit.’
Bryan lifted her gently to her feet and brushed the tears from her cheeks. ‘I don’t understand.’
Her eyes burned into his, boiling with her pain. ‘I haven’t been hit,’ she repeated.
Bryan looked down in confusion. In the blood that glistened on the hard ground, something moved, something small and pale flexed in the congealing puddle of red.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he breathed, pulling Jacobella’s face into his chest. ‘Oh, God.’
Her voice keened a sorrowful accompaniment to the agony that fractured her heart, broken by the wracking sobs that squeezed from her chest.
Bryan moved her away towards her door, beckoning Luċija to follow them. Behind the plinth, black smoke rolled out from the gardens, gathering in the air over the road like a shroud, and the booming drumbeat of anti-aircraft batteries entrenched around Sliema rolled across the water.
Bryan felt Jacobella taking more of her weight on strengthening legs as they pushed through the door and up the stairs. Bryan helped her onto a chair in the kitchen and crouched down in front of her, searching her eyes that brimmed with tears.
Jacobella avoided his gaze and blinked the tears onto her cheeks. She looked down and grabbed the folds of her skirt, pulling the cloth over the blood stains that marked the garment’s front. Only then did she look into Bryan’s eyes and nod gently over his shoulder.
Bryan swivelled his head to see Luċija standing behind him, her complexion whitened with dust through which her own tears streaked their path. Her body shivered; this slight movement amplified by quakes that cycled across her shoulders every few seconds.
Jacobella patted her lap. ‘Bring her to me.’ Her voice was quiet in the room’s stillness.
Bryan stood, took a single stride and gathered the child into his arms. He stood for a moment clutching the warm bundle, struggling to separate a sudden rush of love from his sorrow. He passed the girl gently to her mother. The contact unlocked a wellspring in Luċija and she buried her head into Jacobella’s breast. The quaking of her shoulders amplified into wracking sobs of fear and bewilderment.
Bryan stood back, aware of the moisture on his own cheeks. He yearned to embrace the fragile, damaged people clinging together on the chair in front of him. Yet he stood still, watching them through the hard-paned window of his alien presence in their lives. He turned, wiped away his tears and slipped out onto the balcony.
Across the harbour, fires belched out coils of smoke from Manoel Island and the ancient fortress that bestrode it. Some strikes bled backwards onto the southern shore of Sliema, several buildings there had crumpled into rubble. In Hastings Gardens, thirty yards north of the monument plinth, trees angled away from the fetid, steaming crater of a single bomb strike. It was so far away from its intended target that it had to be a hang-up; a fault in the mechanical system that clung onto that one bomb, finally allowing it to slide away from its couplings long moments after the release lever was pulled and the rest of the load plummeted down onto the other side of Marsamxett Harbour. Had it fallen away just one second earlier it would’ve struck the bastion, exploding without harm, wreaking only meaningless damage on the impassive face of the immutable curved stones.
Yet the crater was in the gardens. It hissed its fumes into the air and the baby was gone.
****
Bryan sat and watched Luċija play. The knitted pilot in her left hand spoke with the full-body movements unique to dolls. A dirt-grimed wooden figure in her right hand, an artist’s figurine bereft of its stand and missing a foot, listened to the cloth man’s words, the whole discourse silent outside of the child’s imagination, kept secret there from the confusions of the world. From the next room the soft splashes of water drifted in as Jacobella washed away the blood using cold water and rags.
A low rumble of explosions penetrated the air, an attack on Grand Harbour on the other side of the city. Luċija paused in her private pantomime and looked around, the seeds of panic lighting her eyes. Jacobella’s disembodied voice rose softly into a song, a Maltese lullaby lilting gentle defiance against the bombs. Luċija tilted her head to listen, her eyes softening as she was drawn to join in with her mother’s music as the first raindrops tapped against the window.
****
The hammering rain eased, relenting as abruptly as it had commenced. The storm front’s dark belt rolled north with blind malevolence towards Sicily, chasing the long-departed bombers across the sea. Bryan slipped from the blue doorway and paused, shivering in the newly-cooled air. Rivulets of rainwater ran past his feet to gurgle away down the slope of Windmill Street. He glanced across the road, but the patch of blood by the plinth was gone, deliquesced by the dispassionate deluge.
He hurried away, skirting the edge of the gardens and dropping back into the city. The evening closed in; the hour, the raids and the rain made finding any transport unlikely. His footsteps went unheard on the deserted streets. He passed bars closed for lack of liquor and shops boarded up through lack of stock. Bombed out buildings punctuated the streets with incongruous gaps in their vertiginous facades. He walked past one bombsite, its debris still impinging on the pavement. A buried miasma of putrescence, revived by the moisture permeating the rubble, reached up to invade his nostrils with its sickly breath. He hurried by under the suspicious gaze of an emaciated cat that perched atop the stones, its fur still spiky from the drenching rain, its green eyes sullen and flat, void of any expectation of pity.
He trudged on, alone with his hollowed heart, heading out from the broken city on the long walk back to Mdina.
Chapter 15
Saturday, 7 March 1942
The sun climbed into the eastern sky, wavering in the haze that laid a silver filter over the Mediterranean azure. A knot of pilots stood on the perimeter track; a pall of cigarette smoke reflected the tension in their hushed conversations. To one side of the nervous group, Bryan stood with the squadron leader.
‘Any idea when?’ he asked.
Copeland shook his head. ‘Strict radio silence. They’ll get here when they do.’
Bryan lit a cigarette and scanned the horizon, hoping the 109s would stay at home this morning.
Army fatigue parties, reinforced by Maltese workmen, laboured to repair blast-pens and build new ones. The grind of stone on stone and the clink of hammers drifted across the field accompanied by the dust kicked up by their labours.
The intelligence officer sauntered across and murmured something into Copeland’s ear. The squadron leader nodded and turned to Bryan. ‘RDF have picked up a trace. They’re coming,’ he muttered.
The minutes crawled by, then the ragged teeth of engines gnawed away at the edge of the silence. The noise swelled and its bringers appeared in the sky. They circled the airfield and dro
pped into land in five flights of three aircraft, their long sleek noses raised in haughty indignation as they fishtailed away from the landing strip and onto the perimeter amongst gales of prop-washed dust.
Bryan and the squadron leader walked to the blast-pens as the first of the new arrivals shut off its engine and the propeller windmilled to a halt. Copeland greeted the pilot as he clambered down from the port wing and the two men drifted away, talking. Bryan stood alone and gazed at the aircraft in front of him.
He stepped forward and placed his hand on the wingtip, his eyes tracing its curving ellipse like the hungry gaze of a lover follows the swell of a thigh. He walked around to the leading edge where two red patches covered the machine-gun ports and, inboard of them, the strident shape of a 20mm cannon jutted with phallic aggression from a wing that bulged to contain it. He ducked between the propeller blades and traced the line of the tropical dust filter set beneath the still-ticking engine cowling. It looked like a bemused mouth set below the fighter’s nose, giving the aircraft the demeanour of a cat that has smelled something unpleasant.
Ground crew gathered around the aircraft and Bryan regarded the men, smiling.
‘Spitfires,’ he said, his voice bright with triumph. ‘Now they’ll be sorry.’
Sunday, 8 March 1942
Bryan watched Jacobella open the confessional door and step inside. A twinge of empathy ached across his chest, but loss also lodged in his heart. If a man can lose what he has never possessed, then surely, he had lost Jacobella. She would never have eyes that could recognise the fire she had lit, much less come to embrace it for the warmth that it offered. First, tied by the fidelity of marriage. Then, dismantled by grief at her husband’s death. Now, distraught with guilt for losing the life her man had left behind inside her.
Luċija jabbed his ribs with her elbow as she shifted her position on the pew next to him. He looked down into a face contorted with the agonies of boredom and smiled at her enforced discomfort.
‘Ommi,’ she whined.
‘Shush.’ Bryan put his finger to his lips. ‘Mummy’s saying sorry to God,’ he whispered into her uncomprehending visage. ‘Although I think it’s God who should be saying sorry to her.’
****
The trio trudged up Mint Street and took the right turn along the edge of the gardens. Bryan stopped, unwilling to revisit the scene of the trauma.
‘I can’t stay,’ he said. ‘I should be helping the ground crews get the new planes ready.’ He tried a smile, but he knew it failed to convey anything he was feeling. He let the smile fall away. ‘I just wanted to see you.’ It sounded just as lame as it always had, but it was the whole, indivisible truth.
Jacobella reached out and squeezed his arm. ‘Thank you.’ It was nothing. But there was nothing more.
Bryan reached into his pocket and pulled out two small bars of fruit and nut chocolate.
‘I brought these for you and Luċija,’ he said. ‘They’re full of weevils.’ He grimaced. ‘But if you melt them in hot water, you can skim the insects off the top and drink what’s left.’ He handed the bars to Luċija who eyed the wrappers hungrily. ‘It will still taste quite nice.’
Bryan said his goodbyes and walked back down the hill with frustration and failure perched on his shoulders.
Monday, 9 March 1942
Bryan’s ears popped as the altimeter ticked up. The narrow confines of the Spitfire’s cockpit held him with a tight and comforting familiarity. The Perspex bubble of his cockpit’s hood, polished to perfection by his grinning groundcrew, allowed him to freely sweep the space above him as the sky deepened to a crystalline clarity around the climbing aircraft. He glanced into the mirror at the seven Spitfires strung out behind him; Ben was tucked in over his starboard wing, with three further combat pairs stepped up to his rear.
The wireless crackled into life. ‘Fighter Control to Falcon Leader, we have an incoming raid approaching the coast north of Sliema at angels sixteen. Vector three-four-zero.’
A thrill of exhilaration ran over Bryan’s scalp; his intercepting fighters were above their intended target for the first time. ‘Falcon Leader here. Understood. Thank you.’
Bryan adjusted his course and watched his train of Spitfires follow the manoeuvre. Then he scanned the space ahead of his wings, looking for his enemy. A line of grey shapes revealed themselves against the darker sea, large aircraft in pulses of V formations, smaller escorting planes weaving a sinuous pattern above them.
‘Falcon Leader here, bandits at 10 o’clock low. JU88s with 109 escorts.’ A grin creased Bryan’s face. ‘Tally-ho, gentlemen, tally-ho.’
Bryan flipped his Spitfire onto its back and pulled it into a diving turn to intercept the raiders’ course. A ripple of uncertainty twitched through the bomber formation and aircraft on the edges slid away from his line of attack. Some of the escorting fighters turned towards his dive, some curved away, seeking space to get onto his tail.
Bryan gritted his teeth as three German fighters flashed over his head, their silhouettes decorated by sparkling gun flashes, then he jammed his own firing button. The diving Spitfire bucked with recoil as his twin cannons barked explosive shells across the void. Their smoky trails dipped and wobbled, passing either side of a bomber’s tail-plane as it flashed across his front.
Pulling hard on the stick he curved away from the bombers, following the course chosen by the circling escorts. Turning inside his expected target, with speed enhanced by his dive, he clamped his jaw against the grey shadows that invaded the periphery of his vision.
A blocky, squared-off tail appeared at the top of his canopy, its yellow paint failing to beautify its brutish outline. Bryan held the turn, drawing the 109 down the windscreen, inching it closer to his gun-sights. The dark shape reached the sights, travelled into them and edged out of the bottom. Bryan thumbed a short burst that curved down, flashing past the nose of his adversary. The other pilot grasped the danger of his predicament, reversed his turn and dived towards the ground.
Bryan wrenched his fighter around to follow, cursing as the engine mis-fired. A Spitfire roared over his canopy as he dived away; Ben had been thrown by the sudden change of direction, his propeller ripped the air dangerously close as he sped by.
Bryan focussed again on his target, now well ahead and diving inland, difficult to discern against the dun patchwork of bare fields. He pushed the throttle through the gate and ate away his opponent’s advantage. A glance in the mirror showed only Ben’s fighter circling to find him; no German aircraft sullied the sky behind his tail.
Flashing low over roads and houses, Bryan closed on the jinking 109 and squeezed out a short burst of cannon-fire. Hits peppered on the wing of his quarry, erupting with vicious orange flashes close to the fuselage. The wing snapped, folding upwards like a desperate gesture of surrender, sending the aircraft spinning along the axis of its engine, dipping ferociously downwards to plough a short furrow across the ochre earth before clattering into a low wall, cascading stones and dust through the air.
Bryan pulled up and banked away to port. The twin citadels of Mtarfa and Mdina swept past his windshield and he realised his kill had hit the ground less than two miles from Ta’Qali aerodrome.
****
Bryan and Ben trotted away from the blast-pens as ground crew moved back and forth with smooth resolution, manhandling four-gallon cans to refuel the fighters.
‘We’ve got about half-an-hour before anyone misses us,’ Bryan said. ‘Let’s see if we can get a trophy.’
Ben tapped him on the shoulder and pointed at a battered bicycle leaning against the stone rampart of one of the pens.
‘Perfect, let’s go.’
Moments later the two pilots wobbled along the perimeter track, Ben sitting astride the saddle and Bryan standing in the pedals, heading for the station gate and the open road to the valley that skirted Mtarfa. A thin coil of black smoke served as their course marker, and when Bryan judged the road had got them as near as it could, they abandoned
the bike and clambered over the walls of the intervening fields.
The acrid scent of burning aviation fuel drifted by on the breeze, stinging their nostrils like pepper as it passed. The faint crackle of flames was cut by a stranger sound; a high-pitched, whining snarl, laden with desperate aggression. They reached the last wall and looked over into the field.
The Messerschmitt had ploughed a hole through the perpendicular stone boundary. The impact had crushed its nose and peeled the yellow cowling from the engine which now lay bare, flames dancing gently around its blackened metal. One wing languished separate and broken amongst the shattered stones, the other, folded and torn, stuck vertically from the fuselage like a blue-grey headstone.
The pilot, ejected by the same force that crushed the engine, lay a few yards ahead of his machine. Around him, a pack of three feral dogs stood in a lurid Mexican standoff, intermittently lunging at the body, biting and tearing at his exposed flesh, all the time snarling with distrustful fury at their competitors, their eyes full of fear and hunger.
The larger of the animals pounced on the dead man’s head, ripping a chunk from his cheek and wolfing it down in one swallow. Emboldened by the taste of blood, it surged forward, barking at its retreating fellows, to stand over the body, hackles raised and teeth bared.
‘What do we do?’ Ben’s voiced trembled with disgust.
The grinding growl of an army truck stuttered to a standstill behind them. Bryan turned to see soldiers alight from the vehicle and begin their clambering journey across the walls towards the crash site.
The Bluebirds Trilogy Box Set Page 67
