"Ian R. Macleod - The Chop Girl" - читать интересную книгу автора (Macleod Ian R)

beat me at cards.
It could have started with Flight Sergeant Martin Beezly, who just came into our smoky kitchen annex one hot
summer afternoon and sat down on the edge of my desk with his blond hair sticking up and told me he had a fancy to go
picnicking and had got hold of two bikes. Me, I just unrollered my carbons and stood up and the other girls watched with
the jaws of their typewriters dropped in astonishment as I walked out into the sunlight. Nothing much happened that
afternoon, other than what Flight Sergeant Beezly said would happen. We cycled along the little dikes and bumped
across the wooden bridges, and I sat on a rug eating custard creams as he told me about his home up in the northeast
and the business he was planning to set up after the war delivering lunchtime sandwiches to the factories. But all of that
seemed as distant as the open blue sky-as distant, given these clear and unsuitable weather conditions, as the possibility
of a raid taking place that evening. We were just two young people enjoying the solid certainty of that moment-which the
taste of custard creams still always brings back to me-and Flight Sergeant Beezly did no more than brush my cheek with
his fingers before we climbed back onto the bikes, and then glance anxiously east toward the heavy clouds that were
suddenly piling. It was fully overcast by the time we got back to the base, driven fast on our bikes by the cool and
unsummery wind that was rustling the ditches. Already, orders had been posted and briefings were being staged and the
groundcrews were working, their arclights flaring in the hangers. Another five minutes, a little less of that wind as we
cycled, and there'd have been all hell to pay for me and for Flight Sergeant Beezly, who, as a navigator and vital to the
task of getting one of those big machines across the dark sky, would have been shifted to standby and then probably
court-martialled.
But as it was, he just made it into the briefing room as the map was being unfolded and sat down, as I imagine him,
on the schoolroom desk nearest the door, still a little breathless, and with the same smears of bike oil on his fingers that
I later found on my cheek. That night, it was Amsterdam-a quick raid to make the most of this quick and filthy cloud that
the weather boffins said wouldn't last. Amsterdam. One of those raids that somehow never sounded right even though it
was enemy-occupied territory. That night, GZ 3401, with Flight Sergeant Beezly navigating, was last seen laboring over the
North Sea enemy coastal barrages with a full load of bombs, a slow and ugly butterfly pinioned on the needles of half a
dozen searchlights.
So maybe that was the first whisper-me walking out of the annex before I should have done with Flight Sergeant
Beezly, although God knows it had happened to enough of the other girls. That, and worse. Broken engagements.
Cancelled marriages. Visits to the burns unit, and up the stick for going all the way instead of just most of it. Wrecked,
unmendable lives that you can still see drifting at every branch Post Office if you know how and when to look.
But then, a week after, there was Pilot Officer Charlie Dyson, who had a reputation as one of the lads, one for the
lassies. All we did was dance and kiss at the Friday hall down in the village, although I suppose that particular night was
the first time I was really drawn to him because something had changed about his eyes. That, and the fact that he'd
shaved off the Clark Gable moustache that I'd always thought made him look vain and ridiculous. So we ended up kissing
as we danced, and then sharing beers and laughs with the rest of his crew in their special corner. And after the band had
gone and the village outside the hall stood stony dark, I let him lean me against the old oak that slipped its roots into the
river and let him nuzzle my throat and touch my breasts and mutter words against my skin that were lost in the hissing of
the water. I put my hand down between us then, touched him in the place I thought he wanted. But Pilot Officer Charlie
Dyson was soft as smoke down there, as cool and empty as the night. So I just held him and rocked him as he began to
weep, feeling faintly relieved that there wouldn't be the usual pressures for me to go the whole way. Looking up through
the oak leaves as the river whispered, I saw that the bright moon of the week before was thinning, and I knew from the
chill air on my flesh that tomorrow the planes would be thundering out again. You didn't need to be a spy or a boffin. And
not Amsterdam, but a long run. Hamburg. Dortmund. Essen. In fact, it turned out to be the longest of them all, Berlin. And
somewhere on that journey Pilot Officer Charlie Dyson and his whole crew and his Lancaster simply fell out of the sky.
Vanished into the darkness.
After that, the idea of my being bad luck seemed to settle around me, clinging like the smoke of the cookhouse.
Although I was young, although I'd never really gone steady with anyone and had still never ventured every last inch of
the way, and although no one dared to keep any proper score of these things, I was already well on my way to becoming
the chop girl. I learned afterward that most bases had one; that-in the same way that Kitty from stores was like a mum to
a lot of the crews, and Sally Morrison was the camp bicycle-it was a kind of necessity.
And I believed. With each day so blazingly bright and with the nights so dark and the crews wild-eyed and us few