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

women grieving and sleepless, with good luck and bad luck teeming in the clouds and in the turning of the moon, we
loved and lived in a world that had shifted beyond the realms of normality. So of course I believed.
I can't give you lists and statistics. I can't say when I first heard the word, or caught the first really odd look. But being
the chop girl became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Empty wells of silence opened out when I entered the canteen. Chairs
were weirdly re-arranged in the NAAFI. I was the chop, and the chop was Flight Sergeant Ronnie Fitfield and Flight
Officer Jackie White and Pilot Officer Tim Reid, all of them in one bad late summer month, men I can barely
remember now except for their names and ranks and the look of loss in their eyes and the warm bristle touch of their
faces. Nights out at a pub; beating the locals at cribbage; a trip to the cinema at Lincoln, and the tight, cobbled streets
afterward shining with rain. But I couldn't settle on these men because already I could feel the darkness edging in
between us, and I knew even as I touched their shoulders and watched them turn away that they could feel it, too. At
the dances and the endless booze-ups and the card schools, I became more than a wallflower: I was the petaled heart
of death, its living embodiment. I was quivering with it like electricity. One touch, one kiss, one dance. Groundcrew
messages were hard to deliver when they saw who it was coming across the tarmac. It got to the point when I stopped
seeing out the planes, or watching them through the pane of my bunk window. And the other girls in the annex and the
spinster WAAF officers and even the red-faced women from the village who came in to empty the bins-all of them
knew I was the chop, all of them believed. The men who came up to me now were white-faced, already teetering. They
barely needed my touch. Once you'd lost it, the luck, the edge, the nerve, it was gone anyway, and the black bomber's
sky crunched you in its fists.
I can't tell you that it was terrible. I knew it wasn't just, but then, justice was something we'd long given up even
missing. Put within that picture, and of the falling bombs and the falling bombers, I understood that the chop girl was a
little thing, and I learned to step back into the cold and empty space that it provided. After all, I hadn't loved any of the
men-or only in a sweet, generalized and heady way that faded on the walk from the fence against which we'd been
leaning. And I reasoned-and this was probably the thing that kept me sane-that it wasn't me that was the chop. I
reasoned that death lay somewhere else and was already waiting, that I was just a signpost that some crewmen had
happened to pass on their way.
Me, I was the chop girl.
And I believed.
 Such were the terrors and the pains of the life we were leading.
With the harvest came the thunderflies, evicted from the fields in sooty clouds that speckled the windows and came
out like black dandruff when you combed your hair. And the moths and the craneflies were drawn for miles by the
sparks and lights flaring from the hangers. Spiders prowled the communal baths, filled with their woodland reek of bleach
and wet towels. The sun rippled small and gold like a dropped coin on the horizon, winking as if through fathoms of
ocean.
With harvest came Walt Williams. Chuttering up to the Strictly Reserved parking space outside the Squadron
Leader's office in a once-red MG and climbing out with a swing of his legs and a heave of his battered carpetbag. Smiling
with cold blue eyes as he looked around him at the expanse of hangars, as if he would never be surprised again. Walt had
done training. Walt had done Pathfinders. Walt had done three full tours, and most of another that had only ended when
his plane had been shot from under him and he'd been hauled out of the Channel by a passing MTB. We'd all heard of
Walt, or thought we had, or had certainly heard of people like him. Walt was one of the old-style pilots who'd been
flying before the War for sheer pleasure. Walt was an old man of thirty, with age creases on his sun-browned face to go
with those blue eyes. Walt had done it all and had finally exhausted every possibility of death that a bemused RAF could
throw at him. Walt was the living embodiment of lucky.
We gathered around, we sought to touch and admire and gain advice about how one achieved this impossible
feat-the we at the base that generally excluded me did, anyway. The other crew members who'd been selected to fly
with him wandered about with the bemused air of pools winners. Walt Williams stories suddenly abounded. Stuff about
taking a dead cow up in a Lancaster and dropping it bang into the middle of a particularly disliked Squadron Leader's
prized garden. Stuff about half a dozen top brass wives. Stuff about crash landing upside down on lakes. Stuff about flying
for hundreds of miles on two engines or just the one or no engines at all. Stuff about plucking women's washing on his
undercarriage and picking apples from passing trees. Amid all this excitement that fizzed around the airfield like the rain
on the concrete and the corrugated hangars as the autumn weather heaved in, we seemed to forget that we had told