The Lost Flying Boat Read Online Free Page A

wanted to reach space where noises multiplied, in the hope that they would provide me with an answer as to why I was alive. I would stave off death by listening for the last message from ship or aircraft, or even while sending one of my own, and forget that I did not know what life was all about.
    Anne, accurate in her knowledge, had seen no hope. I walked to one side of the pier and then the other, wearing two jerseys against the east wind. I would not try to make contact, even supposing I knew where she had gone, but hoped she considered me on the right side of forgiveness for whatever I might have done. For myself, I only forgive those I love, and she is still that person.
    Separation gave me energy. I made acquaintances, but those at the wireless college who also came from the Air Force knew when to leave me alone. Perhaps a similar madness infected us all. If I went for long walks instead of passing an evening with them in a pub, no remark was made.
    7
    Some time during my marriage I bought a morse key and, when Anne complained of silence, would take it from the drawer and send insulting messages which she couldn’t read, or repeat the SOS signal over and over after she had gone to bed. Another little mannerism which my dear wife pointed out, because she said it drove her mad, was my habit of whistling. I knew that I did it, because on catching myself I would break off in the mid flow of rhythmical notes which came out between a small gap in my upper front teeth. The sound, piercing though not loud, might have been a bird in its death agony under the paws of a cat, or the tentative beginnings of a kettle about to boil before emitting its usual scream. The sound could be picked up in a crowd by anyone with a sensitive ear, even from some distance away.
    The habit was harmless, but I tried to cure myself because any messages sent not only made me vulnerable to the world but enraged my wife. So I stopped in mid whistle, and the noise would cease until, forgetting my resolution (there was no pleasure in such mindless whistling, after all) I would catch myself once more, while at a dance or tea party with Anne or, even worse, standing behind the counter of the shop being overheard by the boss from behind.
    The habit ended with Anne leaving, or so I thought, but on finishing radio school, and after a spell at sea, and when getting another job seemed impossible, it came back. I walked into a pub in Albemarle Street and ordered a pint and a sandwich. Impatient at having to wait, the five letters of an aircraft callsign formed slowly on my lips, so that though not a wireless operator, Bennett, a mere stranger who stood nearby, was able to interpret the five letters of morse which I sent again and again.
    It was a near miracle, considering the noise, but he had ears that could detect the breath of a dying man across a hundred miles of Antarctic peaks. He also put together the co-sign of my moustache, as well as the forward jutting chin and glinting grey eyes that denoted a man who would pick up any signals that were going. There is also something unmistakable about ex-airmen until they lose their youth, and maybe I reminded him of an aircrew member he once knew, perhaps one of those poor-show bods who had his guts splashed across the TRII54/55 above Bremen and yet was brought back to burial on English soil. There was no knowing. We had been born to give no sign, show no emotion, admit to no foreknowledge. Pragmatical we were, and phlegmatic we would stay, no matter how much the inner cauldron boiled.
    He looked at me. ‘RAF?’
    â€˜How did you know?’
    â€˜I’m asking.’
    â€˜Yes.’
    Lunch came. ‘I can’t get the bloody mob out of my head.’
    â€˜Nor can a lot of us.’ He smiled. ‘What’s more, we don’t see why we should.’
    â€˜Funny,’ I said.
    â€˜It was a good mob.’
    â€˜Still is.’ I offered him a drink.
    â€˜No, you’ll have what