Jasmine Nights (46 page)

He tried to work out how badly hurt he was this time. He wiggled his feet, he could feel them; he blinked, he could see. He mentally drew a line down his spine, no pain there, and he could feel earth beneath him – good, that was good – but then he smelled the strong stink of burning fuel, the taste of it in his mouth, and pulling back the parachute silk, he saw his aircraft on fire. And apart from one wing that had been flung clear, it was well on its way to a heap of pointless ash. He swore and would have gone on swearing but it hurt his ribcage. Crawling on hands and knees, too weak to disentangle himself from his parachute’s run lines, he dragged himself towards the wing and lay down underneath it.

It had happened again, a strange, disconnected, jaunty voice inside him observed – only this time worse: he was in the middle of what looked like endless fucking miles of desert, stretched out dreadfully all around him. He had no map – that had fried in the flames – no cheerful English ambulance staff arriving on the scene, no nurses waiting for him in hospital; he was completely and utterly alone, quite possibly behind enemy lines.

And joy! it had been raining here too, just as it had rained for the last two weeks at the base at LG39, almost without cease. The sand his face was pressed against was a gritty mash, and at this time of year, when night fell, the temperature would dip to near freezing.

The pain, when he tried to sit up, was excruciating. ‘Don’t! Don’t, don’t,’ he gasped, as if taking instruction from someone else. Maybe a couple of ribs smashed . . . maybe worse. He opened his eyes and lifted his head an inch or two; the desert, sodden and glistening after a recent shower, looked more like the sea. There was no chance, he estimated, that anyone would come and look for him tonight, if ever. Losing planes was a fact of life here, not an emergency; there were too many other things going on. Horrible to die in a place you didn’t even know the name of was his last despairing thought before he went to sleep; and without her.

A shower of rain woke him just before dawn. He opened his eyes and looked up in confusion at the parachute silk that had blown over his face like a caul. He tore it off quickly, roaring in pain. He must not do that again. The fingers of his right hand were blistered, but at least he could see now. Above him a few stars pricked through a dense black sky, and around him nothing but sand. There were wild animals in the desert, he knew that, foxes and hyenas, but here nothing but the faint rustling of wind and the sound of his own breath. He was completely and entirely alone.

He observed for a while the shape of his hands. When he lifted them to his nose they smelled of oil. He wished there was something practical he could do with them – open a map efficiently, wrap them around a gun, switch on a torch, something solid that would help get his brain working again.

He’d picked up the enemy plane at a landing ground close to Sidi Abd al-Rahman, about twenty-three miles east of Marsa Matruh – that much he remembered. If his map and compass hadn’t become kindling, he could work out exactly where he’d been shot down, but anyway, Marsa Matruh was one hundred and fourteen miles west of Alexandria. The desert between here and Alex was jam-packed with landmines, left from what had been German artillery outposts, and some POW camps. It was also an area the Allies had attacked almost continuously. If the Germans didn’t get him, his lot would.

He lay back. Enough . . . enough thinking . . . even this much had brought on a great urge to rest, to fall into a dream-like state where pleasant, nebulous thoughts and images drifted through his brain – thoughts of Saba and songs and Woodlees Farm, a barking dog in a meadow full of buttercups, the river at Brockweir. And while he slept, it rained, not heavily, and the parachute silk settled like a second skin on his ribs.

When he woke, hot and shivering, several hours later, he lay squinting at a sky whose dull grey made it impossible to work out the time. ‘Nothing has changed,’ he said out loud, surprised to hear how weak his voice was. A few moments later, he froze. He could hear the distant drone of planes in the sky somewhere far above the blank wall of cloud. They had come for him after all.

Chapter 39

‘Saba.’ Cleeve was there when she opened her eyes. ‘Thank God!’ he said. He began to cry.

His face was all nostrils and wide eyes, he was telling her the trees had broken her fall, telling her she was lucky, lucky, lucky, and she mustn’t be frightened now. She was safe, and sound. He’d come to pick her up when Felipe was so late.

‘Felipe!’ She started towards him in panic.

‘Later,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you later – let’s get you out of here first.’

Everything was too fast. Having to sit up, having to try and walk up the muddy slope towards the road on legs that felt weak as pipe cleaners. Cleeve rolled up his trousers, his ankles white and skinny; his linen suit got covered in her blood as he pushed her up the hill, bundled her into the back of the car and drove her at top speed back to Istanbul. She sat behind him, forehead on the window, gazing slackly at treetops whizzing by. There was pain in her head and it spread through her body like an oil slick. She slept, and when she woke she was sitting with Cleeve in a bright white room, where an English doctor said she’d been a very lucky girl, and where she was sick. They shone a sharp light in her eye; this won’t hurt, the doctor said. He gave her an injection in the arm; she slept.

When she woke in the aircraft, it was like sloshing around in the guts of some large and noisy whale. The pain in her head felt worse. There was someone sitting beside her who had a white skirt on and who smelled of Dettol. When they wiped her head with a cool flannel it was nice.

A clunk, and then a softness as she was lifted into bed. Lovely, lovely sleep at last, and strange flickering underwater journeys inside her head that had music in them. She was not unhappy.

Oh skylark, I don’t know if you can find these things

But my heart is riding on your wings

So if you see them—

She was flying on a song when the nurse came.

‘Saba.’

‘No.’

‘Saba, Miss Tarcan. Come on now,
come on
.’

‘No, no, no, safe here.’ Someone patted her face, but she wanted to stay on the ocean bed swimming in a golden patch of water.

Squeaking sound. Shoes. No, no, no! I don’t want to come up. Nice here. Like driftwood, like bones.

Time . . . goes . . .
Ouch! Her head hit a big rock and she slept again. A flicker of white light, a spider in front of her, ouch, ouch, ouch, it hurts to open your eyes.

‘Saba.’
Go away, go away
. The patting continues. ‘Saba, Saba, it’s me . . . it’s me.’

When she opened her eyes, Arleta was sitting on the bed next to her. Saba was sick all over her and went back to sleep.

Arleta came again the next day. There was a bunch of wilted roses in her hand. She was crying.

‘Saba, thank God, thank God. What happened to you?’

Saba touched the swathe of crêpe bandages around her head; her hand felt wooden and separate.

‘Someone hit me on the head.’

‘Well that’s a statement of the bleeding obvious,’ Arleta said. They began to giggle weakly.

‘Where am I?’

‘You’re in hospital, darling – the Anglo-American. You’ve been sleeping like a champion.’

Arleta smelled beautiful; roses and lemons said the bells of St Clement’s. She was dressed in a brilliantly blue frock; her hair was so dazzling it hurt to look at it. It was like electric sparks coming out of her. When Saba put her hand out, Arleta’s kisses left bright red wings all over it.

‘Don’t talk. I’m not supposed to be here; they’ll kick me out.’ Arleta started blowing her nose. ‘Oh dear, this is so wonderful. I thought we’d . . . I was so worried . . . Oh I’m such a fool.’

Squeak of shoes on linoleum, a loud voice –
ow!
– said cross things that she was too tired to listen to, and then
visiting hours
in an explosion of sound that made her head shrink.
No, don’t go, help me
, but when she woke up she was alone again, and swimming through a long, shadowy stretch of water. Her heart felt waterlogged, her spine, her neck, her head ached in a dull, persistent way and the shadows frightened her. She kept swimming, trying to break through into the sunlit shallows where the bright fishes were, but the shadow got thicker and thicker, it was endless.

In the middle of the night, when most of Cairo was asleep, and everyone seemed to have gone, a moth rattling inside the shade of her bedside light woke her. She sat up, confused by the spartan room with its hard polished surfaces. In the corner of her room there was a child’s wooden wheelchair, with a knitted elephant inside it.

She looked around her.

‘Where’s Dom?’ she asked, her heart racing with fear.

She pulled a red cord above her bed.

‘Where’s Dom?’ she said to the nurse when she came in.

‘I don’t know who you mean, dear, I was
asleep
.’ The night nurse gave her a beady look. Her hair was on end, her apron untied. ‘It’s three o’clock in the flipping morning.’

The nurse, seeing her wild expression, got her a drink of water, and made her take two pink pills that she said would help her sleep. ‘You’ve had a very nasty bang on the head, dear.’ The nurse had recovered her professional self. ‘You’re bound to feel upset.’

She held the pills in her mouth, and spat them out when the nurse was gone. She had to wake up, to pay attention now. Where was Dom? A sudden premonition that she would not see him again made sweat prickle all over her. He’d died without her, or at least the certainty of her. She’d thrown away the most precious gift of her life, and she was dirty now too, thanks to her greedy determination to do and have everything. She understood her father’s look of utter revulsion for her. She deserved to die.

Crying made the blood pound in her temples like a sledgehammer; the migraine that followed brought a kind of perverse comfort – she was being punished, and rightly so. Now she remembered that while she was unconscious, a conversation had turned on and off in her head like a faulty light, a question needing an answer. She was lying in water, somewhere beautifully calm and comfortable, waiting for waves to settle over her, but something else – she’d experienced it as a sharp jab, as if she was pond life being stirred by a bullying boy – kept trying to rouse her, to call her back.
I was a fool
, she thought before she went to sleep.
I should have let myself die
.

The next day, Pam – the nice nurse – put her sensible English head round the door.

‘A nice fresh eggie for breakfast? We got them from the market yesterday. Eggie and soldiers. You haven’t had anything to eat for a long time.’

‘How long have I been here?’

‘A week – no, hang on.’ She consulted a chart at the end of the bed. ‘Goodness! Ten days already – you
have
been poorly.’

Pam put a cool hand on Saba’s head. ‘I’ll take your temperature later.’ She straightened the sheet with a snap. ‘And I’ll do you a blanket bath, love. You’ve got a visitor today.’ She plumped one of the pillows which had fallen on the floor.

‘Dom?’ she said softly, but the nurse didn’t hear. Felipe, she’d remembered, was dead. Cleeve had told her that, and she couldn’t stop thinking about the gurgling sounds he’d made just after they’d shot him, the sound of water stuck in a drain, his eyes so gentle, so surprised. She remembered the tall German, the clunk of his belt, his breath smelling of sausages, his fingers. She’d sung for him like a wind-up doll, let him hug her. How could she?
How could she?
It made her want to vomit just to think of him.

‘Yes, your ENSA friend has come every single day since you were admitted.’ Pam removed the dead moth from inside the lampshade. ‘Isn’t she gorgeous! Not like you, disgusting thing.’ She dropped the moth in the waste-paper basket. ‘And so nice with it – she gave us all your choccies and flowers and she was so upset about you. The acrobats came too, and Captain Furness. It was quite good fun really, although you weren’t the best company, if I may say so.’

‘Arleta,’ she said weakly. ‘When can I see her?’

‘You’ve seen her! Silly billy. You spoke to her yesterday and the day before that.’

‘How long have I been here?’

‘Ten days, you’ve just asked me that. Oh, we are a dozy girl today.’

When Pam closed the doors on the shiny world outside, Saba slept again. She and Mum were at home, it was summer and her legs were bare; a warm breeze came through the kitchen window. Tan was cooking up something spicy in the kitchen, and they were laughing because Mum was playing the chicken song on the piano, and Baba was there too, warbling the chorus, vibrating his throat with his fingers: ‘
keep that chickie a peck peck innnnnnnnchick chock chicken I do
’. And his laugh was so deep and happy, and she was happy too. ‘
Akşam yemeğiniz hazir
,’ Tan called from the kitchen. ‘Get it while it’s hot.’

When she woke up, Arleta was sitting at the end of her bed, not blurred around the edges, but real time and in focus. She’d brought a tiny paper fan, and a packet of humbugs from the NAAFI.

‘Hooray.’ She put her hands gently around Saba’s face. ‘You’re back. You’ve had a rotten time.’ When they embraced, Saba could hear the grinding sound inside Arleta’s jaw as she fought to control herself.

When Arleta released her, Saba said: ‘Dom. Have you seen him?’

Arleta glanced at her, and then towards the window.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t really know him.’ She sounded genuinely surprised.

Saba watched her with fierce concentration. Arleta was never a very good actress, but she seemed to be telling the truth.

‘Do you want me to try and find him?’

‘Yes.’ Saba grabbed Arleta’s hand so hard the whites of her knuckles showed. ‘Flight Lieutenant Dominic Benson, Desert Air Force. Wadi Natrun is where the transit camp is . . . he might be anywhere.’