The Lost Flying Boat Read Online Free

touch ground. ‘I can’t make plans.’
    â€˜Others do.’
    Her information was superfluous. I knew they did. But where did that get me? And where were they? Whenever she was right she reduced me to silence. Mostly she was right, so mostly there was silence. For some reason this silence annoyed her more than if she had been wrong and we had gone on talking. Reality was when I twiddled the tuning knob of the radiogram and heard morse chirping from the speaker. Whatever was said spoke only to me: news agency reports, ships’ telegrams, amateur chat, weather messages. The cryptic spheres washed me clean.
    â€˜You seem tense.’
    I nodded, and switched off.
    â€˜Put on some Mantovani?’ she asked.
    The music soothed her as the morse had calmed me.
    â€˜I’m tired of loving someone who just isn’t there,’ she said.
    â€˜I am here.’
    â€˜You think so, but you’re not. Not to me, anyway.’
    I held my hand under her nose. ‘This is me, isn’t it?’
    She laughed. ‘I do love you, I suppose.’
    I curled my hand into a fist. ‘And I love your nice long ginger hair, and your beautiful neat cunt.’
    â€˜I hate it when you talk like that.’
    â€˜Sorry,’ I said.
    â€˜You’re filthy.’
    â€˜I can’t help it.’
    â€˜You’re still not demobbed, to say such things.’
    â€˜I won’t say it again.’ I was as contrite as could be.
    She stood, and pushed my hand away. ‘Why don’t we go to the Feathers for a couple of hours?’
    I belonged nowhere and to no one, so how could I claim to be in love? But I was. Being a girl of wit and perspicacity, she sensed my trouble and decided there was no cure. She was wrong, but I couldn’t blame her for not waiting.
    She didn’t want to believe in a remedy because her own circuit was already shorting. One evening I found the flat stripped to the floorboards. The fireplace shelf in the living room held me up. Staring into a dusty cupboard I didn’t feel much of an ex-serviceman any more. I tried to dam the tears, but they found new routes down my cheeks. Four years in the mob, and I wasn’t even back where I started. I needed to get on and out and through and up and across and in any direction possible as long as I didn’t stay where I was. I had disappeared up my own arse and got lost.
    I clung to the mantelshelf as if it were a plank of wood in the middle of the Atlantic, until I remembered the revolver in my attaché case. I spun a coin, saying heads me, tails her. Heads came three times, so I slammed in six and sucked the steel lollipop. I would have dipped it in jam, but she hadn’t left any food.
    I had been drawn into the lobster pot of marriage, totally unprepared for such an investment. No need to apologize, Anne said. But there was, I insisted, wishing there hadn’t been. My face wore a twisted aspect as I looked in the mantelshelf mirror. After setting traps and perambulating the elephant grass to save my life, I had walked into one so obvious that I hadn’t even noticed. The same loaded gun was ready to stop me protesting about fate now that I was in a far less dangerous predicament.
    I took the gun from my mouth, feeling older than when the barrel had gone in – though not much. In the mirror, I preferred not to recognize myself. Love won hands down over war when it came to making people miserable. There was much to learn, but I wanted to hide so far inside myself that no one would find me and I would be safe for ever.
    I walked out with a suitcase and went to a radio school on the south coast, paying tuition fees from my savings so as to get my service qualifications converted to a certificate which would allow me to work on a ship or in aviation. Instead of being a shop assistant, I preferred listening to the traffic of the spheres. Marriage was for those whose emotional seesaw was properly centred. My spirit