Read Online Staring at the Sun by Julian Barnes - Free Book Online Page B

does as well. Number three, you know what it’s making you do while you’re doing it.”
    “What does it make you do?”
    “Makes you do everything. Not very much at first. You look in your mirror a bit more. Fly a bit higher or a bit lower than’s necessary. Get the safety bug. Break off a scrap a bit earlier than you normally would. Shoot a line or two in the mess. Find a few more things going wrong with the aeroplane than you did before. Little things that make you turn back a bit earlier, or make you lose touch with your formation.
    “Then comes the bit when you start to notice it. Probably because you notice other people noticing it. You get back and the ground crew do what they always do—look to see if the guns have been fired before you’re out of the cockpit. And if they haven’t been fired a couple of times in a row, you imagine them muttering a bit. Always the same word, you imagine. Windy . Windy. So you think, I’m not having them calling me windy, so what you might start doing is drift off from your formation, get into a bit of cloud and fire your guns. If you fire them long enough you run out of ammo and have to make for home anyway. And you give your ground crew the thumb as you taxi in, and tell them you’re pretty sure about a Heinkel—it was smoking pretty badly and while you didn’t see it go down, you thought if they did get back to Germany itwould be on shanks’ pony—and they give a cheer and you half believe it yourself and wonder whether to mention it at debriefing, and you realize you have to because what if you were boasting about hits to your ground crew and not mentioning them to Intelligence, and someone found out? So you do, and before you know where you are you’ve knocked down the whole bloody Luftwaffe, who must have been flying through that load of cloud you fired your guns into.”
    “Is that what you did?”
    “That’s how it ended up the second time, when they posted me. The first time there were a few little signs, I wasn’t sure, they weren’t sure, so they took me off flying orders for a few days. But I knew when it happened the second time. Then I knew what the first time was.”
    “It was probably just nerves the first time.”
    “Yes, that’s just what it was. Nerves, being scared, windy, yellow, exactly. You know what they say, don’t you? A man burnt twice is finished.” Jean remembered that was the phrase he had used when she’d asked him about marrying Michael.
    “I’m sure that’s an old wives’ tale.”
    “Old wives know a thing or two.” He chuckled. “Ask mine.”
    “Tell me what it’s like, being scared.”
    “I’ve told you what it’s like. It’s running away. It’s being windy.”
    “But what’s it like inside?”
    Prosser pondered. He knew exactly what it felt like. He dreamed about what it felt like.
    “Well, some parts of it are like other things. Like trembling hands and a dry mouth and tense in the head—that’s all part of good healthy nerves before an op. Usually. Sometimes it isn’t. Normally you get these little signs in the dispersal hut, then when you’re off the ground they go away; then they might come back when there looks like being some action, but when you get closethey go away again. Except that sometimes they’re there all the time, even when you’re coming back safely, and that’s a bad sign. And then you start to get the fear.”
    He paused, and looked across at Jean. She held his gaze as he went on.
    “Imagine swallowing something sour, like vinegar. Imagine you don’t just taste it in your mouth, but all the way down. Imagine you can taste it in your mouth, in your gullet, in your chest, in your stomach. Then imagine that it’s all congealing very slowly between your chest and your throat. Slowly congealing. Porridge made of vinegar, tasting everywhere. Sour in your mouth. Wet and slack in your stomach. Congealing like porridge between your throat and your chest. That means you can’t trust your