The Lost Flying Boat by Alan Silltoe Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    â€˜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 glazed, 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