The Separation by Christopher Priest Read Free Book Online Page B

crew to take the rafts and life-jackets and jump. They refused, so I shouted at them that it was an order. I swore at them, yelled at them to get out. It was their only real hope. The intercom was silent after that. Were they still on the plane when we hit the sea, or did they in fact jump when I told them to? I had no time to check again: we were a few seconds away from hitting the sea. The shock, when it came, was an immense physical blow - we might as well have slammed into the ground. Somehow I managed to scramble into the inflatable dinghy, barely conscious, freezing to death. I saw that Sam Levy was there in the dinghy with me. No time had passed. I must have been in shock. I was confused then, I was confused when I tried to remember it later, I am still confused all these years on.
    ‘Where’s the kite?’ I said, finding that for some reason I could hardly speak aloud. When Sam gave no reaction I asked him again, this time doing my best to shout.
    I saw his shape there, across on the other side of the tiny inflatable. His head seemed to move as if he was speaking.
    ‘What?’ I cried.
    ‘She sank,’ I heard him say. ‘Back there somewhere.’
    ‘How the hell did we get out?’
    ‘The hatch came off in the crash. I was lying close to it and you must have crawled over. Don’t you remember?’
    I remembered only chaos inside the flooded cockpit of the Wellington. Total darkness, bitter cold, the drenching of icy water that was rising around me. In an instant the cockpit had been transformed into a place I no longer understood. All sense of direction had gone. Was the area behind me up or down?
    Was I lying or standing? Or still sitting at the controls? Was I face down? My leg hurt like hell. I couldn’t breathe because my face was under the water and I was choking. The oxygen mask of my flying helmet had become tangled around my throat. Then the plane lurched and the water drained dramatically away from around my head. A dim light from somewhere came glancing in. I saw two legs vanishing through the hatch. The plane lurched again.
    Darkness followed, then a violent struggle. Arms and legs flailing in the water. Somehow I was in the inflatable, on the yielding, water-logged rubber floor of the dinghy, trying to twist myself so that I was face up, my fur-lined flying jacket weighed down by the water it had soaked up, the oxygen mask flapping uselessly against my neck.
    ‘Have you any idea where we are?’ I shouted, after what felt like half an hour of painful struggling. I was still staring across in the darkness to where I thought Sam must be lying. There was a long silence, so long that I thought he had passed out or died, or that he had somehow slipped into the sea.
    ‘Haven’t the faintest,’ he said in the end.
    ‘But you’re the navigator. Didn’t you get a fix?’
    ‘Shut up, JL.’
    The night went on, apparently without end. But dawn came at last in the dinghy, the glint of the sun across a cold grey sea, waves punching up around us. The dinghy moved as if it was stuck to the sides of the waves, rising and falling with the swell, never threatening to tip over but constantly kicking us around. Sam and I sprawled on the slippery rubber floor, our wrists tangled up in the ratlines. We had nothing to say to each other - Sam seemed to be asleep much of the time, his hands and face white with the cold. We both had blood all over our clothes but it was gradually being leached away by the salt water that burst across us every few minutes. It was May, early summer. We were going to die of cold. Then, after many hours, an Air-Sea Rescue launch found us.
    That was all I had to go on, as I lay there in Warwickshire.
    I was in a fog of amnesia. What I have described is a worked-out version of many fitful images. Moments only of it, glimpsed in flashes that drifted maddeningly out of reach like fragments of a dream. I gradually emerged from the confusing half-memories, as what I saw around me started to make