Piece of Cake

by Derek Robinson

  Meanwhile Stickwell did his best to ignore Cattermole. Whenever he could, he avoided him. On a gloomy afternoon, when flying had finished, Cattermole came into a room by one door and Stickwell went out by another. CH3 saw the smile on Cattermole’s face and got up.

  He found Stickwell sitting on a staircase, looking at an oil painting of a horse. “Ugly brute, isn’t it?” Stickwell said.

  CH3 sat beside him. “Why don’t you do something?”

  “What, for instance?”

  “You can’t just let him push you around. You can’t keep dodging him.”

  “Thanks very much. Now I know what I can’t do.”

  “Okay, stand up to him. Give as good as you get.”

  “You mean go and pick a fight with him? That’s bloody silly. That makes me as stupid as him.” Stickwell stood up. “I don’t hate him, you know. I don’t hate anyone.”

  “Perhaps it’s time to start.”

  “No.” He turned and climbed the stairs. “I tried hating people, once. Soon learned better.”

  Simon James Stickwell had never been much of a success until he astonished everyone by becoming a fighter pilot.

  For a start, he was an orphan. His parents died of fever in the Gold Coast, where they were missionaries. He was then one year old, and it would have been much less inconvenient for everyone if he had gone with them. Instead he had to be shipped to England. He was taken into the home of an aunt and uncle. When he was three, the uncle died; when he was six, the aunt followed. Young Simon got dumped on an obscure relation, a woman in her early thirties who was childless. Her husband treated the boy’s arrival as a deliberate insult and left her. She took care of Simon until he was ten, then sent him to a boarding school and emigrated to Australia.

  All his early memories were of people disappearing.

  School could have been worse. He got bullied a bit but he learned how to cope: if he couldn’t run away he gave in and let them do whatever they wanted. Usually they got bored and stopped. He paid a price for this passivity: he was considered weak and soft, a bad sport, a poor loser, a general waste of time. None of the staff bothered much with him, for which he was glad. He didn’t mind getting rotten results in everything; what he dreaded was having some keen young master try to buck him up, give him special tuition, prove he could do better if he really tried. Young Stickwell knew there was no chance of that. For as long as he could remember, people had always looked at him with a certain resignation. He knew what that look meant. He knew his place.

  The money for his school fees ran out when he was sixteen. Some relatives in Kent accepted him without enthusiasm, and that was where he got into trouble.

  They had a daughter, also sixteen but taller than he was, beautiful, talented and assured. Simon fell in love and inevitably it was abject love, the kind that was bound to fail even if she had found him the slightest bit attractive. He was undersized and apologetic. She was fluent in French and German, understood calculus, and had a tennis serve that left scorchmarks on the grass. The more he adored her the more she despised him, but she had been brought up to have good manners and he was thoroughly sick with unrequited love by the time she lost patience and snubbed him, good and hard.

  It was a sentence of death. Simon knew he couldn’t live without her; now she had made it clear he couldn’t live with her.

  That evening he was missing when the family sat down to dinner. A search began next morning. The police found him two days later, deep in the airless gloom of a plantation of fir trees.

  They took him home on a stretcher, but there was no question of his staying there. The girl’s father drove him rather a long way to a nursing home that was run by a man the father had known at university, and left him. It turned out to be a discreetly camouflaged asylum for kleptomaniacs and dipsomaniacs and miscellaneous misfits who were not yet eccentric enough to be certified.

  When he realized that he had been rescued only to be abandoned, Simon entered a state of resolute, self-destructive rage. He ate nothing and he threw all his food at the walls. He tore down the curtains and smashed the chairs and fouled his bed. The nursing staff let him live in the wreckage for a couple of days, but when he kept on throwing his food they began knocking him about. Simon did not resent this. He knew he deserved it. Indeed he wanted to be punished. If they rubbed his face in his filthy sheets he fought them because that was what they understood. If they held him and shoved food down his throat he did not fight them because he knew that he could make himself throw up when they had gone. He was wretched but he was not altogether unhappy. After sixteen years at the lower edge of mediocrity, it was curiously reassuring to hit bottom, even if hitting bottom was painful.

  After about a month of this, he woke up one morning feeling extremely tired. Breakfast was on a tray just inside the door, as usual. He lay and thought about chucking it at the walls. He looked at the walls and could not find a clean spot anywhere. He fell asleep again.

  He awoke at midday when they brought his lunch.

  Sausages. They smelled good. He looked at the stains on the ceiling and found them ugly. After a while he got up and ate a sausage. The walls were ugly, too. In fact the whole room was ugly. He took another sausage and looked out of the barred window at the sunshine and the waving trees while he ate.

  Next day they left the door open when they came to collect his lunch tray. He stood in the doorway and inspected the corridor. It was very long and very cool. Occasionally someone walked by and he watched them approach, pass, depart. An hour of this was enough to tire him out. He went to bed and slept until evening.

  At the end of a week he had reached the end of the corridor. A middleaged man had his office there. Simon watched him at work: writing notes, reading letters, making telephone calls, going away, coming back.

  It seemed silly to stand in the corridor, in his pajamas, so Simon sat on a chair just inside the office. The man didn’t seem to mind.

  On his third day inside the office the man offered him a small piece of chocolate. After that he got a small piece of chocolate every day, although not always at the same time. It became the most important moment of his day.

  Then, after a week, the man inexplicably failed to give him a piece. The day came to an end, he closed his notebooks, locked his desk, put away his fountain-pen, and stood up. Simon stood up too. His heart was racing. “Chocolate!” he said.

  The man shook his head. “Not today,” he said: not angry but not friendly. “Not while you smell so awful.”

  “All right,” Simon said defiantly. “I’ll have a bath.”

  “All right.”

  When he came back, clean and in clean pajamas, the man was listening to some music on a gramophone. They ate a little chocolate and listened together. The record ended, and they listened to the silence. Simon felt it coming, like a fast train approaching; he knew it was unstoppable; he dreaded it, but before he could get up and leave, it happened. He was in tears. He cried until his chest ached and his eyes throbbed, while the man held him. At the end, when there were no more tears to be cried, the man gave him a towel. Then he gave him a small glass of brandy and put him to bed.

  After that Simon talked to him every day. He asked for cleaning materials and he scrubbed out his room. He asked for paint and brushes and he redecorated it. The work was very tiring: he would paint a bit, take a nap, walk down the corridor for a chat, paint a bit more. He liked their chats because they were never serious. They usually just talked about his childhood.

  When the room was finished he asked for more work and the man found him some gardening to do. He felt stronger, he didn’t tire so quickly. Things began to go wrong again. He was sawing some logs one day, and making a very good job of it, when he saw the man talking to another patient. That startled and annoyed him. He finished the logs, getting angrier all the time, and didn’t even bother to stack them. He went inside, mud on his gumboots, barged into the office, and sat down, glowering. “Now I know,” he said. “You’re just like
all the rest.”

  “What do you mean?” He went on writing a letter.

  “You’ve chucked me, haven’t you? I’ve had the push. Goodbye, Simon, you’re on your own again. Isn’t that right?”

  “There are certainly other people here who need to be looked after, if that’s what you mean.”

  “And I can go to hell for all you care!” There were more tears, more chest-aching, lung-bursting sobs; but this time the man did not hold him. At the end he gave him a fresh towel, and waited until he was calm. “What do you think that was about?” he asked.

  Simon sat and thought, his face half-buried in the towel. “Dunno,” he mumbled. After a while he found a handkerchief and blew his nose. “I just felt so … so … so fed up.” There were bits of mud on the carpet. He collected them and dropped them in the wastebasket. “Everything’s so rotten,” he said.

  “How is it rotten?”

  Simon slumped in his chair and linked his hands on the top of his head. They looked at each other for quite a long moment. Suddenly Simon gave a little snort of laughter. “It’s no good,” he said. “I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it? I was jealous.”

  “You were jealous.”

  “You knew it all the time. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “What good would that have done?”

  “It might have saved a lot of …” Simon stopped and looked away. “No, I don’t suppose I’d’ve believed you. God Almighty … I’m not a very nice person, am I?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Jealous. Lazy. Greedy. Phony. Stupid.”

  “There’s nothing stupid about discovering what sort of person you really are.”

  “What if I don’t like being that sort of person?” He got up. “Don’t answer that,” he said as he went out. “Idiotic question.”

  That night the nightmares began.

  He tried to describe them but it was hopeless. “Everything goes wrong,” he said. “It’s all upside down and it keeps getting worse. I know something horrible’s going to happen because of me, and I can’t stop it, or … Damn, that’s not right … I mean it’s partly right but … Oh, Christ. It’s just … evil.”

  The evil visited him every night; sometimes twice a night. He awoke rigid and terrified, one pace from catastrophe. In the morning he felt bruised and exhausted. This went on for three weeks. “I dread going to sleep,” he said. “The bastards are waiting for me, they’re trying to destroy me.”

  “Why do they want to destroy you?”

  “God knows.” Simon felt intolerably wearied by the question. The bloody nightmares were bad enough; why did this bastard have to keep poking and prodding at them? He needed help, comfort, something to take the pain away, not this endless bloody questioning, why, why, why … “It’s all right for you,” he said heavily, “you just sit there, don’t you? Nothing ever hurts you, does it?” An urgent thudding in his head boomed into a frantic pounding and a great surge of hate raged across his senses. He covered his face with his hands. “Oh Christ,” he moaned. “This is what it’s like, I’m having one now.”

  After a few seconds the waking nightmare passed, and the room returned to normal.

  “I wanted to kill you,” Simon said.

  “Yes.”

  Even then it took him a long time to understand fully what he had said; and even when he understood, he was reluctant to admit it.

  “That’s what they’ve been about, haven’t they? Nobody was … Nothing was trying to destroy me. The nightmares were just trying to kill you.”

  “Yes.”

  “God in heaven … But why? It doesn’t make sense. I mean … I like you.”

  “Perhaps …” He shrugged, and gave the most cautious of smiles. “Perhaps you had to kill me because I knew too much.”

  Simon laughed, but only briefly.

  “I think,” the man said, “we both deserve a brandy.”

  Simon left the nursing home two months later. They had found him a job at a nearby civilian airfield, as office-boy in the flying club. The manager, who was also the instructor and barman, asked Simon if he’d like a couple of lessons in a Tiger Moth. “Great fun,” he told him. “Mind you, it helps if you’re a bit mad.” Simon accepted. The manager said he was the best pupil he’d ever had. A year later he was in the RAF.

  When CH3 left him, Stickwell wandered about the upper floors of the chateau until he came across the adjutant’s office. The door was open. “Hello, uncle,” he said.

  Kellaway grunted. He had a pencil between his teeth and he was searching through a thick bundle of dog-eared carbon copies. His desk was littered with files; more files were stacked on the floor. Micky Marriott sat opposite him, searching through another bundle of papers. “Do something for you?” Kellaway said around the pencil.

  “Is this where I join the Foreign Legion?” Stickwell asked.

  Marriott muttered: “It must be here somewhere.”

  Kellaway, still searching, shook his head and sighed.

  “All right then, how about the merchant navy?” Stickwell asked.

  “Hey, look at this.” Marriott pulled out a blank sheet of paper.

  “Or the cowboys?” Stickwell leaned against the doorframe. “Or the Texas Rangers, or the Salvation Army, or anything?”

  Kellaway and Marriott stared at the blank sheet. “I bet some twerp put the carbon paper in backward,” Marriott said.

  “Anybody need a good street-sweeper?” Stickwell asked.

  “Stop playing silly-buggers, Sticky,” the adjutant said stiffly. He took the blank sheet. “You mean this is the copy? Or what ought to be the copy? Hell’s bells …”

  Stickwell left them peering at nothing, and wandered on. Rex’s office was just around the corner. He tapped on the door and went in. There was nobody there. He walked over to the desk and saluted the empty chair. “Just came to tell you, sir,” he said. “I’m off to win the war.”

  Rex was, at that moment, showing Dumbo Dutton’s replacement, Pilot Officer Lloyd, around the château. “Gun room,” he said, rapping on the door as they walked by. “D’you shoot?”

  “Just woodpigeons, sir.” Lloyd had a melodic Welsh accent. “On the farm, you know.”

  “Yes. Well, there’s deer around here somewhere. I’d like to get in a spot of stalking once these have come off.” He raised his right hand, still bandaged: a relic of Dutton’s crash. “Billiard room over there. Library. Ballroom up at the end. Not a bad little billet, is it?”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “I pinched it off some frog plutocrat … Have you met our unspeakable Yank?” he asked as CH3 came in sight. “Lloyd, Hart. Hart, Lloyd.” They shook hands.

  “Hart is so unspeakable that everyone refers to him by some sort of chemical code which I don’t pretend to understand: Co2 or V8 or 4711 or something.”

  “Have you been pissed on yet?” CH3 asked. “Rex has a dog called Reilly who pisses on people.”

  “Reilly’s not very discriminating, I’m afraid,” Rex said. “He’ll splash anything lower than a squadron leader.”

  “I didn’t know there was anything lower than a squadron leader,” CH3 said.

  “Actually, you and Reilly have a lot in common,” Rex said to him. “Since neither of you can catch a damn thing. How are your reconnaissance liaison flights going, by the way? WC2 is our Reconnaissance Liaison expert,” he told Lloyd. “He’s quite invaluable. Wherever he goes, Jerry is never there.”

  “Good heavens,” Lloyd said.

  “So we always know that Jerry must be somewhere else.” Rex smiled proudly at CH3. “It’s not a vast amount of information, I agree, but it’s utterly reliable.”

  “This is a truly wonderful squadron,” CH3 told Lloyd, “provided you like being pissed on.”

  Rex was already walking away. “Billiard room,” he said. “Library. Squash court around the back …” Lloyd hurried after him.

  “Don’t forget to tip the guide,” CH3 called out. “Sixpence is enough.”

&
nbsp; Five minutes after takeoff, Stickwell’s Hurricane jumped a wood, left a line of treetops swaying in its wake, dropped to ten feet over a meadow, and went through the French flak belt before they could catch it. He noticed guncrews running, a flicker of fire from a machine-gun, and out of the corner of his eye he saw tracer, like a string of party lights, drifting behind him. Then he was easing the fighter up and over the Maginot Line—someone in a pillbox had a shot at him—and a sprint across no-man’s-land took him into the German flak, which was wicked and got rapidly wickeder.

  The Maginot was a thin line: a concrete tunnel made bombproof with earth. The Siegfried Line was three miles deep, laced with wire, spattered with pillboxes, striped with concrete barriers. The ground swelled and dipped and every hilltop held a battery. Stickwell saw the gun-muzzles flash and then the sudden blots of flak appeared, ahead and above and around, dirty-brown and feeble-looking until one of them burst nearby and exposed its ferocious little red-and-yellow heart with an angry grunt that cut through the roar of the Merlin.

  He was too high. He ducked down to the valley floor and zigzagged strenuously. His stumpy legs ran out of strength to work the rudder-pedals just as the valley ended. He blinked at the wrong time, nearly hit the hillside, yanked the stick back and bounced like a sports car hitting a hump-backed bridge. “Watch it, dopey!” he shouted, and then, more quietly: “Oh, no!”

  It was like flying into a lavish New Year’s binge where the air was thick with colored streamers. The next valley was alight with tracer: curling lines of red, of green, of orange, climbing, slanting, crossing. The first guns had warned them he was coming. Too tired to zigzag, he tried to dodge by leapfrogging but that felt stupid so he heaved the stick into his stomach, shut his eyes, and climbed. Something hit the machine and made it shudder. “Go away!” he shouted, and kept his eyes shut. He was small and he made himself smaller. He pictured the Hurricane shrinking to a dot. When he was sure he was at three thousand feet he looked. The altimeter was creeping up to two thousand and there were more flak-bursts than he could count. A hole the size of a plate showed in the starboard wing near the red-and-blue roundel. There was cloud as thick as fleece only a few hundred feet above. “Come on, come on, come on,” he said, over and over, until he barged into its clammy sanctuary and gave everything a rest: body, mind and airplane.