The Lost Flying Boat

by Alan Silltoe

  On my way to the restaurant I had turned away from the seafront and passed several eating places, unable to make up my mind which to enter. They were too crowded, or too empty, or too dingy. I got back to the quay, then walked along the street of storage sheds, as if my body had yet to work up an appetite. I continued along the shore of the bay, and morse-read the licence plates of passing cars, calculating how many dots and dashes were in letters and numbers and whether there were more dots than dashes, so as to define a car as a dash or dot vehicle. If a dot, the car would go to heaven; if a dash, the thing would go to hell. And if the cypher came out in equal numbers, then its pagan status would keep it from either place.

  When there were neither houses nor pavement along the potholed road (and no more cars), I looked at the sunset reflection on the battle-plate grey of the harbour, and a glow of coalfire on the wall of mountain behind. The town was quiet with the peace that presages war and frightens children more than grown men, though they do not know what it means. I remembered being frightened as a child by the continual talk of war, until that fear was replaced by excitement at real war beginning.

  The satisfactory eating place of half an hour before now had people waiting, so I circled the tree-lined square twice and walked into the Plaza Restaurant which was nearly empty. I hung up my raincoat and sat down. A few solitary eaters had their backs to me. I hated having to sit with others. Even when I had a table to myself I fancied people looking at what was being knifed-and-forked into my mouth.

  The man at the slot machine played on. His teeth spiked a cheroot, and the only evidence of his agitation, or enjoyment, was when smoke swept back from the crown of his head as if the machine itself was on fire. He was determined, as coin after coin dropped into its demoniac conveyor system, on an all-or-nothing decision, being a man who, I thought, wanted chance firmly in his grip, so as to be protected from something even bigger which might callously injure him.

  After a long draw-down of the handle, bundles of coins cascaded out of the tin pocket level with his groin, and both hands, in no kind of hurry – he had been expecting to win and knew clearly what to do – moved to extract his reward. Money continued teeming out and was heaped on the table until his glass of glowing lager became a regal beacon on the high ground of an island set to keep ships away from its dangerous coast.

  Thin in face and body, he grinned, yellow teeth showing as he carried his winnings in troughed hands to his own table. He put on his ridiculously small nicky hat, perched as if to hold down the thatch of fair hair reaching almost to his collar. He sat, eyes glowing with exhaustion and triumph. After a quick reckoning, he laid part of his bonus aside, perhaps to put back into the machine, for he seemed nothing if not systematic. Noticing my interest, and realizing who I was, he said: ‘Hello, Sparks. Let’s have a bottle of steam to celebrate.’

  He was Wilcox, our newly-arrived flight engineer. When he came out of Bennett’s room that afternoon I knew who he was, and he knew who I was, but I did not feel like introducing myself, and neither did he seem eager, both of us perhaps preferring to let such a procedure occur in the normal course of events.

  ‘Be glad to.’ I got up to shake hands.

  ‘Looks like I’ve broken the bank, eh?’

  I went to his table, thinking it as good a time as any to get acquainted. Having watched him at his favourite pastime, I already knew something. His finely boned face took on a light shade of purple when he coughed, hands clenched and opened, as he fought to clear his throat without causing me to think that he put much effort into it. I considered him ill enough for bed, but he rallied and looked almost robust. He relit his cheroot, which calmed the coughing, and sat down.

  ‘After I left the mob I couldn’t settle at anything,’ he said. ‘I tried a few office jobs, but was as bored as hell. Then I worked in a garage, bodging cars together – some of which were nicked, I’d say. But one night I met some friends in a pub and they got me taken on by a firm which did jobs all over the country putting up scaffolding. I was never afraid of heights, or working long hours in wet and freezing weather, so with good wages we had a fine old time. Hell-raising wasn’t the half of it – plenty of booze and women when we weren’t working all hours God sent. Then I got married, and last winter I caught this bloody cough and had to knock off work.’

  He gave a vivid illustration of what he meant, during which I thought he would end by coming to pieces, so that I considered keeping my head to one side in case I should catch whatever he had. ‘I went down with a terrible dose of ’flu, and it hasn’t left me yet.’

  He hoped to have a few days’ rest before we set out, to get rid of whatever it was. I agreed that he should. ‘The climate’s right, anyway.’ He too was parted from his wife, but it was he who had walked out on her: ‘We were passionately in love, but one morning she said that if I coughed once more she’d go mad. I knew then there was no hope for our marriage. She had lost confidence in me, and once that happens life gets intolerable. I couldn’t see an end to my coughing, and didn’t want to be responsible for getting her into an asylum. I have this thing about being sensible, and about confidence. If people don’t have confidence in each other they’ve no right tormenting one another. The letter from the skipper saying he wanted me for this trip came just at the right time. In any case I was on sick pay, so I was glad it did.’

  12

  Why I should be followed around the streets of this obscure port of southern Africa I did not know, but one evening on my way to search out a place with a different menu I sensed a shadow some way behind. Though I heard nothing, the knowledge of being stalked was positive, as if my own shadow had pulled away in the shine of a street lamp and wanted to observe my intentions in an unfriendly manner.

  To follow one man and not lose sight of him takes three men. If the man to be kept in view is on the move sixteen hours a day, then six men are needed to work two shifts of eight hours. If it is necessary to keep him under observation during the night as well, nine men would be employed. I liked the situation no more than when sitting on watch in Malaya with hut doors open and lights glaring from the double pack of accumulators, and thinking that a terrorist had me in his sights from the cover of the trees. As I turned a corner at my usual pace I wondered, not how to outwit my pursuer, but how I could discover his identity. Common sense suggested I swing from the next bend and walk back into him; but cunning advised me not to show that I was aware of his intentions.

  Being a prey to speculation led me to query whether I was in fact being followed. Perhaps two weeks of boredom had deranged me. Idleness had been pleasant. The lodging, provision and lack of responsibility were so agreeable that I wanted to pass my life in this state, because nothing could make a wireless operator more content than a long break from tapping and log-filling. But the idleness went on too long and, like the painful stage of a disease, was beginning to eat into my soul. I was losing the ability to open and close my eyes at will. The calves of my legs ached, and my scalp itched as if, should I scratch, my hair would fall out in clutches. Too long from the disciplined stitch of morse code, the pit of my stomach started to solidify. Looking at my hand, I would see three fingers instead of four. The only cure was to be tucked into my operator’s position with earphones and intercom-jacks pushed decisively into their respective sockets, and hands twitching at the coloured clickstops of the transmitter whose façade looks like a child’s construction kit.

  Being away from England, and pitched into a situation whose outcome was from any point of view uncertain, I felt myself to be at least two different people, both of whom it was difficult to hold together in one physical spot. Could not that person, therefore, who followed me and never varied the distance, be a third entity that had split off from the two of me already in existence?

  I increased my pace from a surge of buoyancy rather than to outdistance my pursuer. If instead of one person tracking me there were in fact the necessary three – out of a conscientiousness to do the job properly – t
hen the three parts of me within my controllable orbit had a chance of outwitting them.

  Before deciding on the best means of doing this I wondered why anyone should so obviously track me, and hoped the reason would be revealed. Having discovered the fact early could only be explained by my lack of surprise at such a thing happening at all. Since meeting Bennett and reaching our rendezvous in Southern Africa, there had seemed something unreal about the purpose – if not the legality – of what he proposed to do. The only evidence for this uneasiness was that it poisoned my idleness.

  The clatter of footsteps was my own. I would walk instead of march, do 90 and not 120 paces to the minute, preferring to show concern rather than anxiety. It was chilling to be followed. Being tracked can turn into a pursuit, and become a chase. Physically aware of the follower, you may be manoeuvred into a trap.

  The streets darkened. I clenched my fists, and turned corners. The route must have shaped so many letter Ls they’d become like stairs on paper. I marched again, and at the left foot passing the right, as if on parade, the loud voice in me shouted: ‘Halt!’

  Both feet came noisily together. On a further command I did the ‘about turn’, drew back my left fist, and punched the body which came against me. He let out a cry, and fell into the road.

  Having hit someone who as likely as not hadn’t been following me at all, I thought it wise to run as far as my guilt would allow, especially since he might have been a policeman wanting only to check my passport. If he wasn’t alone in his work, assistants would be coming up to help. Perhaps Shottermill, who would leave no trick unturned, still wanted the flying boat to set off without me. Or maybe he didn’t want it to depart at all.

  Acting without consideration never did any good, and now reason must be elevated to a par with valour, whereby it seemed tactically right to flee. I turned to do so and – no great feat to vanish into the darkness – heard my name called as clearly as if a coil of rope had hissed around my neck:

  ‘Adcock!’ A burly figure came towards me, brushing gravel from jacket and trousers. ‘You bloody fool.’ He didn’t seem angry until: ‘You’re like a fucking wolf.’ My blow had been a mere push, and he had only gone over on losing his balance at the drop of the kerb. He spoke in a North of England accent which I didn’t trust an inch: ‘It is Adcock, isn’t it?’

  ‘You were following me.’

  His arm came close, and I dodged, but the gesture was to guide himself in the dark. ‘How could I catch you up if I didn’t follow?’ His hand was for me to shake. ‘But you walked as quick as if you’d just come off square-bashing. My name’s Bull, flight-sergeant air-gunner, as I once was. Came in this evening to join the crew.’ I shook the warm and meaty hand, which held on too long for my liking. ‘Bennett gave me some of that lovely coloured money, more than a monthly wage packet back home. Then I met Wilcox coughing his guts up in the lobby of that Flotsam Hotel and asked where I could eat pork pies and black puddings. So he says I’d better follow Adcock the Sparks who is just going out, because he knows the best places to get scoff. I tried to, but you walked bloody fast.’

  We went back towards the middle of town. I was unable to show instant comradeship for someone who had caused me to panic so ignominiously. ‘Sorry about the thump.’

  He laughed, and became more likeable. ‘Wasn’t much, was it? Like a kitten with mittens playing dobbie! I might have done the same in your place, only the poor sod I did it to wouldn’t have got up in a hurry. Still, as long as you make up for your tap at me by finding some nice grub.’

  ‘You won’t get pork pies and pints.’

  ‘Ah well!’ He held my arm, as if he might lose me again.

  ‘Wine gets you drunk quicker.’

  ‘That’s what I’ll have, then, if you recommend it.’

  I asked how many gunners we were taking on. There seemed no end to them.

  ‘Two, besides me and Nash. I came down with my old oppoes Armatage and Appleyard. You’ll be as safe as houses with us. We’ve shot coffins out of the sky many a time!’

  All we needed was a navigator. As things stood, Bennett would fly the plane, Nash and the gunners guard it, Wilcox maintain it, and I would be all ears cocked against the world. But without a navigator on a long flight over the ocean we would not reach our destination. Though Bennett had a First Class Navigator’s Licence, he couldn’t fly the crate and do that job properly, because while the navigator took star-sights in the astro dome a good pilot had to keep the plane level and steady.

  We faced each other, as well as chips and chops and chunks of bread and bottles of red plonk in between. It suited him fine. He poured a tumbler and drank it like cold tea. He was thirty years old but seemed middle-aged. Civvy life had been so dull he had joined the Merchant Navy, doing any work he was put to: ‘As well as being a gunner, I’m a rigger and a steward – a jack-knife of all trades, you might say. I happened to be at home to see my parents, because I’d just jumped ship. I thought I might settle down on shore for a while, but then Bennett’s telegram came and I knew I couldn’t let the skipper down. Well, could I? You know how it is. He’s got us all now, every manjack of the old crew except the wireless-op, and you’re standing in for him.’

  He was open and friendly, and the more we drank the more I wondered whether he had in fact been following me. No matter what he said, mistrust came and went. At the third bottle he took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. I glanced at his decorated skin. ‘That’s how it is if you’re a sailor,’ he said. ‘You aren’t much of a man if you haven’t got a bit of this stuff over your arms and tits.’

  From the bulge of white muscles down to the backs of his wrists were red and blue daggers, hearts, reptiles, union jacks, buxom women and, on his chest, he said, a portrait of King George. My sight was glazed from too much wine, but I was sure that, even though I hadn’t yet met Appleyard and Armatage, Bennett had gathered a very fine crew indeed – and, whatever I thought, I was certainly one of them.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Bull said, ‘and another thing I forgot to tell you. The navigator came in as well. You’re in for a treat when you see him.’

  13

  The water chopped itself about, objecting to the wind, but the flying boat was well-moored. When Bennett wasn’t on board overlooking stowage, or in his room cooking up hypothetical navigation schemes, he was pacing the quay in strides too big for his frame, cigar going like a haystack, hands behind his back and glancing up every few yards, as if to a time mechanism, at the lift and fall of the Aldebaran.

  His skin was the colour of milk from the tension of waiting. The bottle of whisky on his table was always half full, and of a different brand. For the captain of a flying boat his hands shook too much, but we all had aches and twitches of some sort that would not go away till flesh and blood felt relief at the great flying boat with stores and men on board lifting into the air, the rate of climb indicator, the rev counter and the altimeter doing their jobs, as lessening bumps under the hull told us we were almost airborne.

  All we could do was play cards, walk the town, fall asleep in the local picture house, and get drunk. Six months will pass before we depart, I thought when I woke up the morning after my encounter with Bull, so that we’ll have winter as one more enemy. None of the others seemed over-anxious, however, and Wilcox was positively glad of all the sleep he could get.

  After a shower and breakfast I went out for my usual walk. I watched cranes at their demolition work with the fascination of the idle at the spectacle of the energetically employed. I did not know whether to go left and walk by the harbour, or stroll right and up the hill behind the town.

  As I stood, work ceased for some kind of break. Blacks went to their dinner cans, and whites to a wooden hut, and I saw the wall that was left naked. Floors had been scraped away, and a purple mark remained as if it had been burned there. A groove was revealed, and with it a continuation that made a scar as if across a chin, and the blue wash of a wall crested an eye enclosed in tissues that gave the g
lazed, beacon-like stare of some prehistoric creature.

  Illuminated by the sun, the composition was like an enlarged reproduction of the side of our navigator’s face, turned from us when I met him in the breakfast room before coming out. The wound had been caused by a Very signal-rocket pistol. The stubby cartridge of brutal calibre had gored his cheek and burned there, a stray or accidental shot from the control tower window when he happened to have been strolling by. Plastic surgery had bettered the grisly enhancement, but not much. He later told me that he left the hospital after eighteen months because kindness was turning him clockwise into a lunatic. He hiked the by-ways for a year to get back health, and the only item of value in his rucksack was a bubble sextant which he would not relinquish. He did not know why, but while children ran from him he relished the extra weight. Sisyphus, he said, had nothing on me. At which Bull confessed that he’d had a dose of that, as well. Rose got a job, and went to live again with his mother, and stayed until receiving Bennett’s telegram which called him, he said, back to duty.

  As I stood across the road from the enormously enlarged picture of Rose’s hideous blemish high up the wall, I wondered how long it would be before we took our departure. The livid vision made me active where I had been apathetic. I walked away as quickly as I could, unable to look a moment more than I had to. When I passed in the evening the whole building was level with the ground.

  14

  The seven of us waited in the hotel lounge, which was closed off for our use. A chart of the ocean, and a large-scale map of the islands, were pinned to the wall. As if to accustom us gradually to the scarred side of his face, the navigator kept it turned whenever possible. Because his name was Rose, I thought of him as ‘Compass’, though when none of the others took the sobriquet as in any way witty I let the name go. Smoke from his pipe drifted over a fleshy landscape of red and purple, to screen the distortion from anyone tempted to gaze at it. The pipe angled jauntily out of the disfigured side of his mouth, so that a languid puff slid up the lunar scars. If anything this made the effect worse, which may have been his idea, though I think he no longer cared for anyone’s opinion. The glint in his eyes suggested that he was used to bearing the scar, and his nonchalant expression turned humorous when he considered what the world could do as far as he was concerned. But the lasting effect of the scar was to curb outright laughter from him. People in any case expected so little merriment because of his affliction that he eventually employed less than he had grown up with. The truth was that he had accustomed himself to his disfigurement, and it was up to us to get used to it.