The rest of the aircrew had reported a jolt and a huge inrush of air as they took the homeward flightpath, but what I saw up there, on that late and windy afternoon, told its own story. Most of the pilot’s bubble and the side of the fuselage beside it had been ripped out—struck by a flying piece of debris from another plane, or a flak shell that refused to explode. Walt had been torn out, too, in the sudden blast, launched into the skies so instantly that no one else had really seen exactly what had happened. They’d all hoped, as the co-pilot had nursed the plane back home through the darkness, that Walt might still have survived, and, Walt being Walt, might even make it back through France instead of ending up as a German prisoner. But the morning had revealed that Walt, either intentionally or through some freak of the way the wind had hit him, had undone all the straps from his seat and had fallen without his parachute. Even now, it was still there, unclaimed, nestled in its well. I was able to bend down and touch it as the wind whistled through that ruined aircraft, and feel the hard inner burden of all those reams of silk that might have borne him.
Then, I believed.
I was transferred to another base in the spring after when my section was re-organised in one of strange bureaucratic spasms that you get in the military. They’d had their own chop girl there who’d committed suicide by hanging herself a few months before, and they mostly ignored the rumours that came with me. It was as if that poor girl’s sacrifice had removed the burden from me. Her sacrifice—and that of Walt Williams.
Still, I was changed by what happened. There were other men with whom I had dates and longer term romances, and there were other occasions when I went all instead of just part of the way. But Walt’s ghost was always with me. That look of his. Those eyes. That lined, handsome face. I always found it hard to settle on someone else, to really believe that they might truly want to love me. And by the time the War had finally ended I was older, and, with my mother’s arthritis and my father’s stroke, I soon ended up having to cope with the demands of the tea-room almost single-handed. Time’s a funny thing. One moment you’re eighteen, lucky, lucky, lucky, and enlisting and leaving Manchester forever. The next you’re back there, your bones ache every morning, your face is red and puffy from the smoke and the heat of cooking and the people over the serving counter are calling you Mrs instead of Miss even though they probably know you aren’t—and never will get—married. Still, I made a success of the business, even if it ruined my back, seared my hands, veined and purpled my face. Kept it going until ten years ago, I did, and the advent down the street of a MacDonald’s. Now, my life’s my own, at least in the sense that it isn’t anybody else’s. And I keep active and make my way up the hill every week to collect my pension, although the climb seems to be getting steeper.
The dreams of the War still come, though, and thoughts about Walt Williams—in fact, they’re brighter than this present dull and dusty day. I sometimes think, for instance, that if everyone saw what Walt saw, if everyone knew what was truly happening in wars and suffered something like this visions, the world would become more a peaceable place and people would start to behave decently towards each other. But we have the telly now, don’t we? We can all see starving children and bits of bodies in the street. So perhaps you need to be someone special to begin with, to have special gifts for the tasks you’re given, and be in a strange and special time when you’re performing them. You have to be as lucky and unlucky as Walt Williams was.
And I can tell myself now, as I dared not quite tell myself then, that Walt’s life had become unbearable to him. Even though I treasure him for being the Walt who loved me for those few short hours, I know that he sought me out because of what I was.
Chop girl.
Death flower.
Witch.
And I sometimes wonder what it was that hit Walt’s Lancaster. Whether it really was some skyborne scrap of metal, or whether luck itself hadn’t finally becoming a cold wall, the iron hand of that dark bomber’s deity. And, in my darkest and brightest moments, when I can no longer tell if I’m feeling sad or desperately happy, I think of him walking across that foul puddle in the starlight as he came out of the NAAFI, and as I watched him in an old chapel after we’d made love, dancing across the choir above me on nothing but dust and sunlight. And I wonder if someone as lucky as Walt Williams could ever touch the ground without a parachute to save him, and if he isn’t still out there in the skies that he loved. Still falling.
Afterword
This was one of those ideas which came as a result of a chance sentence in a book I was reading—in this case, about the infamous Dresden bombing raids. It mentioned that pilots were so superstitions that some girls on the air bases got a reputation as being bad luck to go out with if they were unfortunate enough to lose a boyfriend or two. These were called “chop girls.” I knew right away that there was a story there and it came about, by my standards, fairly easily—and fairly quickly, as well. There’s a personal connection of sorts, which might have helped. My mother “typed for her country”, as she used to put it, on the Lincolnshire coast during World War Two. Not in the Air Force, but the Army, but she had a friend who married a man who went up in those bombers. I also happen to know that strange, bleakly beautiful area of England fairly well. Like a lot of my stories, The Chop Girl is about love and alienation and superstition. That, and the fact that I can’t help finding those big, ungainly killing machines beautiful, for all the horror that they brought.
Past Magic
THE AIRPORT WAS A different world.
Claire grabbed a bag, then kissed my cheek. She smelt both fresh and autumnal, the way she always had. Nothing else had changed: I’d seen the whole Island as the jet turned to land. Brown hills in the photoflash sunlight, sea torn white at the headlands.
We hurried past camera eyes, racial imagers, HIV sensors, orientation sniffers, robot guns. Feeling crumpled and dirty in my best and only jacket, I followed Claire across the hot tarmac between the palm trees. She asked about the mainland as though it was somewhere distant. And then about the weather. Wanting to forget the closed-in heat of my flat and the kids with armalites who had stopped the bus twice on the way to the airport, I told her Liverpool was fine, just like here. She glanced over her shoulder and smiled. I couldn’t even begin to pretend.
It was good to see all those open top cars again, vintage Jags and Mercs that looked even better than when they left the showroom. And Claire as brown as ever, her hair like brass and cornfields, with not a worry about the ravenous sun. I’d read the adverts for lasers and scans in the in-flight magazine. And if you needed to ask the price, don’t.
Her buggy was all dust and dents. And the kid was sitting on the back seat, wearing a Mickey Mouse tee shirt, sucking carton juice through a straw. Seeing her was an instant shock, far bigger than anything I’d imagined.
Claire said, Well this is Tony, in the same easy voice she’d used for the weather as she tossed my bags into the boot.
“Howdy doody,” the little girl said. Her lips were purple from the blackcurrant juice she was drinking. “Are you really my Daddy?”
It was all too quick. I had expected some sort of preparation. To be led down corridors … fanfares and trumpets. Instead, I was standing in the pouring sunlight of the airport compound. Staring into the face of my dead daughter.
She looked just like Steph, precisely six years old and even sweeter, just like the little girl I used to hold in my arms and take fishing in the white boat on days without end. She glanced at me in that oblique way I remembered Steph always reserved for strangers. All those kiddie questions in one look. Who are you? Why are you here? Can we play?
Claire shouted “Let’s get going!” and jumped into the buggy as though she’d never seen thirty five.
“Yeah!” the kid said. She blew bubbles into the carton. “Let’s ride ’em, Mummeee!”
Off in cloud of summer dust…and back on the Isle of Man. The place where Claire and I had laughed and loved, then fought and wept. The pl
ace where Steph, the real Steph, had been born, lived, died. The swimming pools of the big houses winked all the way along the coast. Then we turned inland along the hot white road to Port Erin…the shapes of the hills…the loose stone walls. It was difficult for me to keep any distance from the past. Claire. Steph. Me. Why pretend? It might as well be ten years before when we were married and for a while everything was sweet and real.
Here’s the fairy bridge.
“Cren Ash Tou!” We all shouted without thinking. Hello to the fairies.
In the days when tourists were allowed to visit the Isle Of Man, this was part of the package. Fairy bridges, fairy postcards, stone circles, fat tomes about Manx folklore. Manannán was the original Lord of Man. He greeted King Arthur when the boat took him from the Last Battle. He strode the hills and bit out the cliffs at Cronk ny Irree Laa in anguish at his vanished son. He hid the hills in cloud.
Manannán never quite went away. I used to read every word I could find and share it with Steph after she was tucked up at night from her bath. The Island still possessed magic, but now it was sharp as the sunlight, practised in the clinics by men and women in druidic white, discreetly advertised in-flight to those with the necessary clearances. Switching life off and on, changing this and that, making the most of the moneyed Manx air.
We turned up the juddering drive that led to Kellaugh and I saw that no one had ever got around to fixing the gate. Claire stopped the buggy in the courtyard under the shade of the cypress trees. Like the buggy, Kellaugh was a statement of I-don’t-care money, big and rambling with white walls peeling in the sun, old bits and new bits, views everywhere of the wonderful coastline like expensive pictures casually left to hang.
Steph jumped out of the buggy and shot inside through the bleached double doors.
I looked at Claire.
“She really is Steph,” she said, “but she can’t remember anything. She’s had lessons and deep therapy, but it’s still only been six months. You’re a stranger, Tony. Just give it time.”
Feeling as though I was walking over glass, I said, “She’s a sweet, pretty kid, Claire. But she can’t be Steph.”
“You’ll see.” She tried to make it sound happy, but there was power and darkness there, something that made me afraid. When she smiled, her eyes webbed with wrinkles even the money couldn’t hide.
Fergus came out grinning to help with the bags. We said Hi. Claire kissed him and he kissed her back inside his big arms. I watched for a moment in silence, wondering what was left between them.
Claire gave me the room that had once been my study. She could have offered me the annexe where I would have had some independence and a bathroom to myself, but she told me she wanted me here in the house with her and Fergus, close to Steph. There was a bed were my desk used to be, but still the ragged Persian carpet, the slate fireplace and the smell of the house that I loved…dark and sweet, like damp and biscuit tins.
Claire watched as I took my vox from the bag, the box into which I muttered my thoughts. Nowadays, it was hardly more than a private diary. I remembered how she had given it to me one Christmas here at Kellaugh when the fires were crackling and the foghorn moaned. A new tool to help me with my writing. It was still the best, even ten years on.
“Remember that old computer you had for your stories,” she said, touching my arm.
“I always was useless at typing.”
“I got it out again, for Steph. She loves old things, old toys. And I found those shoot-’em-up games we used to buy her at that funny shop in Castletown. She tries, but the old Steph still has all the highest scores.”
Old Steph, new Steph…
I was holding the vox, trailing the little wires that fitted to my throat. The red standby light was on. Waiting for the words.
Fergus was working in the new part of the house, all timber and glass; in the big room that hung over the rocks and the sea. He’d passed the test of time, had Fergus. Ten years with Claire now, and I had only managed eight. But then they had never got married or had kids, and maybe that was the secret.
He gave me a whisky and I sat and watched him paint. Fergus seemed the same, even if his pictures had lost their edge. The gravelly voice went with the Gauloise he smoked one after another. I hadn’t smelt cigarette smoke like that in years. He would probably have been dead on the mainland, but here they scanned and treated you inch by inch for tumours as regularly as you could pay.
Late afternoon, and the sky was starting to darken. The windows were open on complex steel latches that took the edge off the heat and let in the sound of the waves.
“It’s good you’re here,” he said, wiping his hands on a rag. “You don’t know how badly Claire needed to get Steph back. It wasn’t grief, not after ten years. It just…went on, into something else.”
“The grief never goes,” I said.
Fergus looked uncomfortable for a moment, then he asked, “Is it really as bad as they say on the mainland?”
I sipped my whisky and pondered that for a moment, wondering if he really wanted to know. I could remember what it used to be like when I was I kid, watching the news of Beirut. Part of you understood…you just tried not to imagine. Living in it, on the mainland, you got to sleep through the sniper fire and didn’t think twice about taking an umbrella to keep the sun off when you queued for the standpipes. I told him about my writing instead, an easier lie because I’d had more practise.
“Haven’t seen much work from you lately,” he said. “Claire still keeps an eye out…” He lit a Gauloise and blew. “I can still manage to paint, but whispering into that vox, getting second-guessed, having half-shaped bits of syllable turned into something neat…it must be frightening. Like staring straight into silence.”
The evening deepened. Fergus poured himself a big whisky, then another, rapidly catching up on—and then overtaking—me. He was amiable, and we were soon talking easily. But I couldn’t help remembering the Fergus of old, the Fergus who would contradict anything and everything, the Fergus who would happily settle an intellectual argument with a fist fight. I’d known him even before I met Claire. Introduced them, in fact. And he had come over to the Isle of Man and stayed in the annexe for a while just as I had done and the pattern started to repeat itself. The new for the old and somehow no one ever blamed Claire for the way it happened.
“You left too soon after Steph died,” he said. “You thought it was Claire and Fergus you were leaving behind, but really it was Claire alone. She has the money, the power. The likes of you and I will always be strangers here. But Claire belongs.”
“Then why do you stay?”
He shrugged. “Where else is there to go?”
We stood at the window. The patio lay below and at the side of the house, steps winding down to the little quay. A good place to be. Steph was sitting on the old swing chair, gently rocking, trying to keep her feet off the slabs to stop the ants climbing over her toes. She must have sensed our movement. She looked up. Fathomless blue eyes in the fathomless blue twilight. She looked up and saw us. Her face didn’t flicker.
After the lobster and the wine on that first evening, after Fergus had ambled outside to smoke, Claire took my hand across the white linen and said she knew how difficult this was for me. But this was what she wanted, she wanted it because it was right. It was loosing Steph that had been wrong. I should have done this, oh, years ago. I never wanted another child, just Steph. You have to be here with us Tony because the real Steph is so much a part of you.
I could only nod. The fire was in Claire’s eyes. She looked marvellous with the candlelight and the wine. Fergus was right; Claire had the power of the Island. She was charming, beautiful…someone you could wake up with for a thousand mornings and still fear…and never understand. I realised that this was what had driven me to write had when I was with her, striving to put the unknown into words…and striving to be what she wanted. Striving, and ultimately failing, pushing myself into loneliness and silence.
Different images of Claire were flickering behind my eyes. The Claire I remembered, the Claire I thought I knew. How pink and pale she had been that first day in the hospital holding Steph wrapped in white. And then the Claire who called people in from the companies she owned, not that she really cared for business, but just to keep an eye on things. Claire making a suggestion here, insisting on a course of action pursued, disposals and mergers, compromises and aggressions, moving dots on a map of the world, changing lives in places I couldn’t even pronounce. And although it abrogated a great many things I couldn’t help remembering how it felt when we made love. Everything. Her nails across my back. Her scent. Her power. For her, she used to say it was like a fire. The fire that was in her eyes now, across the candlelight and the empty glasses.
I dreamed again that night that Steph and I were out fishing in the white boat again. The dream grew worse every time, knowing what would happen. The wind was picking up and Manannán had hidden the Island under cloud. The waves were big and cold and lazy, slopping over the gunnels. I looked at Steph. Her skin was white. She was already dead. But she opened her mouth on dream power alone and the whole Irish Sea flooded out.
Next day Claire took me around all the old places on the Island with Steph. The sun was blinding but she told me not to worry and promised to pay for a scan. Just as she had paid for everything else. With Island money, the money that kept all the old attractions going even though there were no tourists left to see them. The steam railway…he horse drawn tramcars along the front at Douglas…even the big water wheel up at Laxey. Everything was shimmering and clear, cupped in the inescapable heat. Dusty roads snaked up to fenced white clinics, Swiss names on the signboards. I did my best to chat to Steph and act like a friend, or at least be someone she might get to know. But it was hard to make contact through the walls of her sweet indifference. I was just another boring adult…and I couldn’t help wondering why I had come here, and what would have happened I had tried to say no.
Snodgrass and Other Illusions: The Best Short Stories of Ian R. MacLeod Page 4