C

by Tom McCarthy

  “Poisonberry,” he says, barely audibly.

  The word hovers in a small gas-cloud of breath over Tania’s skin before spreading outwards, dissipating. The burning’s spreading outwards too, just like the wine; it’s spreading beyond his body, moving out to fill the hollow, and beyond that too, across the fire-break to the woods on either side. A scream, or the echo of a scream, erupts from neither him nor Tania but, it seems, the night itself; and with it comes a tearing sound, as though a fabric were being ripped. Serge opens his eyes now, and finds that the gauzy crêpe that’s furred his vision for so long is gone-completely gone, like a burst bubble or disintegrated membrane. The surfaces of ground and woods and clouds are gone too, fallen away like screens, encumbrances that blocked his vision, leaving the hollow-not of the indentation but of space itself: an endless space in which he can now see with piercing clarity. What he sees is darkness, but he sees it.

  Part Two – Chute

  7

  i

  Circumferenced by first brass and then mahogany, the steel minute hand of the large wall clock jumps forwards, its point lodging in the gap between the X and the first I of XII. The invigilator announces:

  “You may now begin.”

  Like so many extensions of spring, fusee and escapement, thirty-eight left forearms and two rights reach across desktops and turn back the covering page of the School of Military Aeronautics ’ General Knowledge Paper. Serge, seated four desks from the front of the row nearest the window, reads:

  1. What causes an eclipse of (a) the sun (b) the moon? What will be the state of the moon in the latter case?

  He smiles and, without hesitation, picks his pencil up and writes:

  Eclipses occur when two celestial bodies arrange themselves in linear formation with a star, such that one crosses the plane between

  He pauses, turns his pencil on its head and erases the last seven words, then resumes:

  such that the body closest to the star casts a shadow over the one furthest. This is also known as syzygy.

  He writes each letter of “syzygy” separately, relishing its vowel-less repetition.

  Thus,

  he continues scribbling,

  in a solar eclipse the moon casts a shadow on the earth; in a lunar eclipse, vice versa. This shadow can be divided into umbra (area of total occultation), penumbra (partial) and antumbra (in which the shadow nestles in the sun like a dark pupil in a bright eye).

  He sits back, sets his pencil down and looks out of the window. Turreted stone walls and wrought-iron weathercocks shape the Oxford skyline. Below them, out of view, a bicycle squeaks and tinkles over cobblestones. Serge turns back to his paper and re-reads the question’s second part. He closes his eyes, thinks for a while, then, leaving a space beneath his previous paragraph, writes:

  Dark.

  The next question requires him to draw arcs and tangents, and compute their lengths and angles. He slides open a pencil case, removes a compass and a ruler and does this. The third reads:

  3. What precautions are taken on railways to prevent the train from leaving the rails when rounding a curve? Do any extra precautions have to be taken in this respect in the case of a single-track railway which carries traffic in both directions?

  Once more Serge raises his left forearm, and holds it three inches above the desktop, the hand flat, palm down, fingers pressed together and extended. The wrist swivels to the right to form a curve, and from his elbow to his fingernails he runs an imaginary train, inclining the track inwards as the speeding engine rattles past the bump of his sleeve’s hem. Dismantling train and track to hold his paper down, he writes:

  The track should be banked, such that the inside of the curve is lower than the outside.

  And if the direction were reversed? The forearm’s up again, and a second train run from nails to elbow. The banking should remain the same, it seems to him. “No further precautions need be taken”: he composes the words in his head but doesn’t write them yet because he’s still looking at his forearm. The new train’s hurtling up it, tilting as it runs into the wrist-curve-but the first train’s still there too, racing down to meet it. He moves his head back, hoping that the extra surface view created by this action will reveal a switch, branch-line or siding into which one of the trains could be diverted-or, if not, at least a signal further back to warn each of the other’s presence. Yet even as these things take shape in his imagination he realises that not only will they fail to prevent the collision, but it was they themselves, in their amalgam, who caused it in the first place: the catastrophe was hatched within the network, from among its nodes and relays, in its miles and miles of track, splitting and expanding as they run on beyond the scope of any one controlling vision; it was hatched by the network, at some distant point no longer capable of being pinned down but nonetheless decisive, so much so that ever since this point was passed-hours, days or even years ago-the collision’s been inevitable, just a matter of time. The exam hall and its rows of desks fade for a while, and Serge finds himself carried on the buffer of his mind into a storm of steel rods, axels, crankshafts and combustion chambers, all impacting: pistons plunging through sheet metal, ripping seats from gangways, gangways from their chassis; valves screaming ecstatically and flying loose; pure-molten brake shoes splashing streaks of light; track lifted and contorted beyond recognition, as though space itself were crumpling under the weight and force of the demands being made of it, the sheer insistence of machinery breaking its bonds as it comes into its own…

  Two days after sitting the examination, Serge takes a real train down to London. He travels through winter fog made luminescent by a sun that won’t reveal itself. When he emerges from St. Pancras the fog’s lifted but the air’s still hazy; taxicabs leave knee-high smoke-clouds that drift slowly over pavements as he makes his way by foot through Bloomsbury towards St. James’s. A thin mist sits above the park; the roofs of Whitehall Court, black pyramids that join with domes and cupolas as they mount upwards, fuzz and blur in this like spires and bell-towers of some legendary castle. The War Office building is bathed in pale sunlight, but its deep-sunk windows cut dark shadow-sockets in the alabaster façade. Serge tells the soldier at the main door that he has an appointment.

  “Who with?”

  “Lieutenant General Widsun.”

  The soldier looks him over for a second time, as though taken aback. He asks Serge’s name, then steps into a cabin and picks up a telephone, watching him through the glass while mouthing inaudible words. After half a minute he emerges and, pointing into a courtyard, says:

  “This way, sir: up the staircase to room 615A.”

  The building’s corridors have marble floors; Serge’s feet click as he moves across them. In one, twenty or so men his age fill forms out as they wait on benches; one of them shuffles over to make space for Serge-but he, shunning this gesture, clicks his way onwards, turns a corner, heads up a smaller staircase and enters a new corridor in which plush armchairs overhung by large plants offer themselves up to older men in clean-creased uniforms. The door of 615A leads to an inner waiting area; a secretary seats Serge here, beneath a portrait of a sly-looking Tudor or Elizabethan man holding a quill above a sheet of paper covered in black ciphers, slips through a second door, then slips back out again and tells him to go through.

  Widsun’s office is large; his desk alone could have a model battlefield laid out on it. Behind it, framed by the grid-squares of a double-sash window, Widsun’s face beams at him from atop stiff folds of khaki.

  “Serge, my boy!”

  “Hello, sir.”

  “Sir, nothing! Sit yourself down.”

  Serge sits across the desk from him.

  “My Kinetoscope enthusiast!” Widsun guffaws. “My feathered witness! Twice the size, at least! And handsome as a prince: the world’s fresh ornament, and only herald to the gaudy spring!”

  Serge looks down at the desktop, towards a blotting pad and ink set. Instinctively, his hand reaches for the sta
mp, before pausing and retreating.

  “You hungry?” Widsun asks.

  “I suppose so,” Serge says.

  On the way out, Widsun hands his secretary a sheet of paper and instructs her to CC it to three of his colleagues. While he slips on his jacket, Serge watches her line up three sheets of white paper with two black ones, alternating tones; the click and hammer of the keys against the five-deep stack starts up as they pass through the outer door and follows them along the corridor.

  They lunch at the Criterion in Piccadilly. Widsun orders beef Chateaubriand for the two of them, and a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

  “Your health’s fine now, I take it?” he enquires.

  “Oh yes,” answers Serge. “They tested us for everything at SOMA: measles, polio, consumption…”

  “SOMA: so you’ll be one of Boom Trenchard’s bird-men. Have they filled your head with sky and wind, then?”

  “Well, we haven’t actually flown yet. It was mainly theory. We did mapwork, and learnt how to use compasses, correctors, stuff like that. And we learnt principles of gunnery: line, elevation, aiming points and mean points, all those things.”

  “Ligne de foi: that’s all I remember. What you aim down, isn’t it? ‘Faith Line’: has a nice ring to it.”

  “They didn’t mention that,” Serge tells him. “We were led more down the artillery side of things. They’d give us distances and ranges, and we’d have to calculate the angle of sight from the horizontal; then we’d have to set this off against the error of the day, and work out the trajectory and angle of descent and-”

  “Error of the day?” asks Widsun.

  “Oh, you know: atmospherics, wind speed…”

  A pianist starts playing. The room is filling up. Waiters glide up and down the rows of tables as though slotted into grooves laid in the floor. Widsun holds Serge with his gaze and tells him, in a voice full of affection:

  “I never had you down as a mathematician.”

  “Oh, I don’t think of it as mathematics,” Serge replies. “I just see space: surfaces and lines… and the odd blind spot…”

  A waiter turns up with their wine. Widsun inspects the label and nods approval; the man sets about opening the bottle. Widsun turns to Serge again and asks:

  “What about wireless? I was informed some time ago that you were quite the little radio bug…”

  “I was,” Serge smiles. “But at the school it was different. They’d put eight or ten Morse buzzers in a room, and you’d have to learn the tone of each, and transcribe from first one and then another. It’s to train your ear. And we were told the principles of signalling from the air, like don’t send on a turn, or right over the ground station; or not to make the dots too short or dashes too long; or how you don’t need to send the number after the squadron letter-that kind of thing.”

  The cork’s pop rises above the piano music and room’s murmur. A mouthful of wine is poured into Widsun’s glass. He holds it up towards the large, arched windows.

  “How are your eyes?” he asks Serge while he’s doing this. “Still sharp as ever?”

  “Oh,” says Serge, “they gave us wool balls full of different-coloured strands to pick out and unravel.”

  “How’s your mother?” Widsun enquires, rolling the wine around the glass to check its legs.

  “She’s busy,” Serge replies. “There’s lots of demand for silk these days.”

  Widsun’s swilling the liquid round his mouth now, looking intrigued. Eventually the look goes; he swallows and nods at the waiter, who pours two glasses out and glides away again.

  “Lots of demand for silk,” says Widsun. “Yes, indeed there is. Well, here’s to the demand for silk, and your good health.”

  They clink glasses. Serge sits back again, but Widsun’s upper body stays above the table, leaning forward; it makes it look as though the arches and gilded ceiling of the room were being held up by his shoulders. Cigarette smoke curls round these as he murmurs:

  “Error of the day…”

  ii

  Serge is sent to Hythe. He’s lodged with five other cadets in the dormitory of a requisitioned school. From Romney Marsh, where they do four-mile runs along the Royal Military Canal, the rumble of the guns in Ypres can be picked up. He thought it was distant thunder the first time he heard it, but the sky was blue and cloudless.

  “Fifteen-inch howitzers, I’d say,” their instructor smiles at them as they scour the heavens. “Carries nicely, dissent it? Now pick thet pace ap!”

  The instructor’s name’s Lieutenant Langeveldt; he’s from Port Elizabeth, South Africa. One of his eyes, the right one, points slightly to the side, as though trained down a line of sight that, although different to that of his vision’s central axis, nonetheless complements it, like a corrector.

  On Serge’s third day in the school he takes the cadets to the airfield and introduces them to the machines.

  “A Maurice Farman Shorthorn,” he announces as mechanics wheel out from a hangar a large boxed kite made from odds and ends of wood bound together by bailing wire. Its two wings are held up, one above the other, by a flimsy set of vertical struts; in the space between them, a rectangular box five or six feet long seems to float unsupported as it protrudes forwards from the frame. Two makeshift chairs are lodged within the box which, like the wings, has canvas patches sewn around it; the rest of the fuselage is naked.

  “Also known as a Rumpitee,” Lieutenant Langeveldt continues. “A monosoupape pusher, twin-seater. This part is the nacelle: that’s where you sit. This part behind it is the engine, with propeller mounted on it; here’s where the explosive mixture enters, through the skirt.”

  “Is this one finished?” Serge asks.

  “Finished as it’ll ever be, Carrefix. You can be first ap with me.”

  He’s thrown a leather jacket, a soft helmet and some goggles. Tentatively, he grabs a vertical strut, climbs onto the lower wing and hoists himself up into the back seat.

  “Not there,” snaps Langeveldt. “Thet’s my seat!”

  “Why’s it called a Rumpitee?” Serge asks as he clambers over to the front.

  “You’ll soon find out,” says Langeveldt. “You others, stend beck.”

  The mechanic plants himself behind the nacelle and yanks at the propeller. Nothing happens. He pulls it down again, this time with both hands, and the engine catches. Black smoke fills the space between the wings. Serge coughs and turns to face the front. The engine noise increases, and the grass beneath the wheels starts rolling backwards as though a giant winch were pulling it away from under them. The faces of the other cadets are shaking-not just up and down with the bumping of the wheels over the grass’s surface, but also with the faster and more regular vibration of the engine, which shouts from behind Serge, in a mechanical voice amplified by the plane’s frame:

  Rumpiteerumpiteerumpiteerumpiteerumpitee…

  The shaking faces swing away, as do the hangars and the woods behind them, the whole disc of ground revolving till the field’s main expanse lies in front of him. The rumpitees heighten their speed and tone, growing hysterical; the grass races away beneath him, so fast that its bumps disappear. The rumpitees smooth out too, merging together in a constant high-pitched whine-and then he’s up, his face slicing the air in two, a slit right down the middle of its fabric as it rushes past him. He looks down: as the landscape falls away, it flattens, voids itself of depth. Hills lose their height; roads lose their camber, bounce, the texture of their paving, and turn into marks across a map. The greens and browns of field and wood seem artificial and provisional, as though they’d just now fallen from the sky. Now the land’s surface starts to tip, its horizontal line rotating round the Farman’s nose as though the vegetation, soil and brick that formed it were all one big front propeller. Buildings, ditches, hedgerows turn and re-align themselves like parts of a machine, then shift and re-align themselves again as the line rotates back the other way, cogs and arms swivelling around an axis at whose centre Serge’s
own head sits. He feels a tapping on his back, and turns round: Langeveldt, strangely outlandish now that his offset eyes have disappeared beneath goggles, is pointing to the right. Serge looks that way, and sees the town: the parallel rows of its terraces, the plan view of a St. Leonard robbed of elevation, steeple pushed down and compacted like a collapsed telescope. Beyond the town, the canal forms a dark line across the marsh; beyond that, the rim of shore is marked in white by waves that have become entirely static, as though no independent movement were permitted of the landscape anymore: all displacement and acceleration, all shifts and realignments must proceed from the machine…

  The coast peels away now and the land tilts towards him, swinging from a hinge running perpendicular to him and his box, along the same line as the Farman’s wheel axle. It lifts up to meet him: a flat earth-plane rising to join a wooden rectangle held in a wiry frame set in a huge white-and-blue circle of sky. As it does, depth starts returning. Detail too: he can pick out the airfield, the hangars, the cluster of cadets. Then these things are right on him as they land with a bump and rumpitee across the grass back to the group, who wave and cheer.

  “Your face is black!” they shout at him as he steps out of the nacelle and slides down off the lower wing.

  “Tar in the explosive mixture,” Langeveldt says as he peels his helmet off. “How did you like it?”

  “I liked it a lot,” Serge replies. “It was just right.”