Seize the Reckless Wind

CHAPTER 10

Now, this is how you fly a bloody great aeroplane. It’s simple really: a simple matter of life and death.

First, you’ve tanked up with twenty-five tons of fuel, which is the combined weight of five adult elephants, to blast your twenty-five tons of cargo (another five elephants) plus fifty tons of aeroplane (ten elephants) through thin air in defiance of gravity. You’ve filed your Flight Plan, telling the guys in control the route you’d like to fly. Now you’re waiting on the runway, engines whining, brakes on, waiting for them to tell you it’s safe to go, waiting for a gap in that black sky midst all those dozens of other aeroplanes screaming around on top of each other all wanting to come in, all of you blindly relying on that same little guy in his control room who’s looking at his radar set. And then he says Go, and, boy, off you go.

Blindly trusting in the blind faith everybody has in everybody else, galloping down the black runway, the lights flashing past, eighty miles an hour, ninety, a hundred, just praying you don’t burst a tyre. Then you reach V1, the speed at which you become committed to taking off, you cannot stop now without killing yourself and making everybody very cross. You reach VR, ease back the stick, up comes the nose, and, bingo, you’ve done it, you’re airborne! Lifting up into thin air, you and your twenty-odd elephants. Up up up you go into the blackness where the little guy told you to, aiming for that nice gap he’s found for you between all those friendly aeroplanes screaming around in circles up there; but it’s O.K. because he’s watching you all on his radar screen. Sometimes he screams over the radio, ‘Romeo Yankee, left, turn left’ and you holler, ‘O.K., left!’ – and some fucking great machine comes screaming out of the blackness, just missing you. But not often, hell no, those guys are good; anybody can make a mistake. And you’re on your way to sunny Africa or wherever, and he hands you over to the next control sector. You twiddle that up on your radio and in Paris some dolly-bird says, ‘Oui – oui, Romeo Yankee, I have you …’ And you tell her your compass heading and the slab of air the little guy allocated you and she says, ‘O.K., bon soir.’ Or she says something like, ‘Descend a thousand feet, somebody’s coming!’ And, boy, you do as you’re told. As simple as that. It gave Mahoney the screaming heebie-jeebies.

‘Hell, England’s easy,’ said Ed. ‘You should see some of the balls-up airports I’ve flown into, especially in Africa. Sometimes you have to fly low over the control tower to wake them up.’

‘Give me Africa every time,’ Mahoney said, ‘at least you’re the only plane in the sky there. It’s going for the gap between all the other guys that gives me the willies.’

‘You’ve got to learn to relax, or you don’t do this job.’

‘I’m only doing the job, Ed, until we can afford to keep me on the ground, believe me.’

‘Well, that may be some time, boss, so you better learn to quit passing me the buck everytime something tricky happens.’

‘You’re the fleet-captain. Of course I pass the buck; that’s what I pay you for.’

‘Not very much. You should fly more with the other guys, stop being so dependent on me. Fly as captain for a change.’

‘Fly as captain? Never,’ Mahoney said. ‘Never.’

‘Take responsibility. You’re quite a good pilot, really.’

‘I’m a lousy pilot, I’m only here to make up the numbers. You want to take over some of my responsibilities? You’re quite a good co-director, really.’

‘Hell, no. Never,’ Ed said. ‘O.K. – go and work, boss.’

And Mahoney got out of his seat and sat at the fold-away table that Pomeroy had made for him, and he worked on Redcoat business that Dolores had packed for him. She prepared the same lists of SDDs (Suggested Dos and Don’ts) as she had done with his legal briefs in the old days. Nowadays it was: ‘O.K., sign encls.’ ‘Study carefully.’ ‘Have arranged appt with Bank Mgr for …’ ‘F. says pineapple glut, bananas O.K. this week …’ ‘This is prick who gave us so much trouble over …’

And there was the telephone. It went ‘bing-bong’ on the flight-deck, and that meant trouble because Dolores did not waste money. Engine trouble, or cargo trouble, or crew trouble. ‘That engine on the Britannia has gone on the blink again, Pomeroy says he’s got to take the whole thing out, at least five days, do you want me to charter an aircraft or do a handwringing exercise?’ Oh, God, engines! ‘Meredith has just lost the number two engine on the Canadair and turned back to Naples, which means tomorrow’s Khartoum cargo …’ ‘Pomeroy has just heard of an excellent second-hand engine going cheap in Cyprus; he must go there immediately to inspect it and this means that …’ And goddamn cargoes. Tour homeward-bound cargo has fallen through, but Abdullah in Uganda has got one. Is it worth flying empty from Ghana to fetch it? …’

The other big trouble was crew. Hard-luck crews, that’s what Redcoat tended to get. Ed Hazeltine and Mahoney were the only pilots in Redcoat’s full-time employment. For the rest, Redcoat hired pilots, flight by flight. There were usually plenty, with so many airlines retrenching. The trouble with pilots is they tend to drink, to relax from the unnatural business of defying gravity for a living. Bing-bong. ‘That cargo of bulls for Johannesburg? Well, Captain Meredith’s gone on a bender, he caught a tailwind and got home early and found his wife in the bathtub with you-know-who …’

‘Then get Mason!’

‘Unfortunately, that’s who she was in the bathtub with. He’s suddenly got two very black eyes and no front teeth.’

‘Oh Jesus! Then get Cooper!’

‘Cooper’s flying for Starlux, Benny’s flying for Tradewinds, Renner’s flying the Canadair right now, Morley’s goofing-off on the Costa del Sol. I assure you there’s nobody …’

‘Johnson?’

‘Mother’s dying.’

‘Fullbright?’

‘Just got a full-time job with Ethiopia Air.’

‘Well, find somebody, Dolores! Even if you’ve got to drop your knickers and run bare-assed round Gatwick Airport! What are we going to do with thirty bulls around Redcoat House?’

‘That’s why I phoned, dammit! Sounds like a lot of bullshit to me …’

When he got to the hangar the next evening, there was his new captain awaiting him. ‘Good evening, name’s Sydney Benson.’

Mahoney was taken aback. ‘Are you Jamaican?’

‘As the ace of spades.’

Mahoney grinned. As he was signing on duty he muttered out of the corner of his mouth, ‘You sure he can fly aeroplanes?’

Dolores slapped the desk and burst into smothered giggles. ‘Your face – it’s a scream.’

As they walked together through the grey drizzle to the Canadair, Mahoney said: ‘Dolores tells me your last job was with Air Jamaica, Sydney. What brings you to England?’

Sydney broke into a little shuffle:

‘This is my island, in the sun

Built for me, by the English-mun

All my days, I will sing in praise

Of the National Assistance and the Labour Exchange …’

Mahoney threw back his head and laughed.

After they had settled down on the flight-deck, Mahoney said: ‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to do take-off.’

Sydney looked at him.

‘You don’t like spades taking off? Well, I’m not too wild about honkies, either.’

‘Not that,’ Mahoney smiled. ‘You see, I’m managing director and I’ve a lot of work—’

‘And I’m captain of this aircraft, sah, and what I say is law. You got that?’

Mahoney sighed. ‘Got it.’

‘And I also just got fired, right?’

‘No. Go on, take off, you’re the boss.’

Sydney sat back, with a brilliant smile. ‘O.K., you take off, then go’n work, I’ll hold the fort, pal.’

After that Sydney often flew for Redcoat, and Mahoney liked to fly with him. The man was an excellent pilot, and bloody funny. It was an asset, too, having a black captain to argue with black officials about dash and blackmail and blackmarket rates. ‘How you’ve stood these mothers,’ Sydney complained, ‘it makes me embarrassed about my pigmentation, and I’ve always thought nothing was worse than pinko-grey like you unfortunates.’ Sydney’s wife was a buxom American black lass with flashing eyes, called Muriel, who came to work for Redcoat. ‘Don’t think I’m going to shoulder the whole white man’s burden, I refuse to work more than eighteen hours a day for this pittance!’ Mahoney was rather intimidated by her, Pomeroy was terrified of her, Dolores was delighted with her. ‘Works like a black,’ Dolores enthused, ‘and so funny …’

Mahoney hardly ever saw Pomeroy or Vulgar Olga these days. Vulgar Olga worked as a barmaid across town and Pomeroy was always inside some engine, covered in grease, going cuss cuss cuss. Sometimes they met at The Rabbit, to talk some business, but Pomeroy was no good at anything except engines, and booze and women, he wanted to leave all that mindblowing management crap to Mahoney. And Mahoney didn’t know anything about engines, he wanted to leave all that mindblowing crap to Pomeroy, anything Pomeroy decided to do with Redcoat Engineering Ltd was O.K. with Mahoney as long as it made money. He was very pleased with Pomeroy, and wished he saw more of him. Sometimes Pomeroy took a break and went on a flight as engineer. He amused Mahoney. Pomeroy was a cockney barrow-boy at heart, but now that he had made good he was getting awfully toffy. Pomeroy and Vulgar Olga lived in a chintzy mortgaged house, and when he wasn’t inside engines he was socializing with the gentry and he didn’t assault policemen anymore now he was respectable. ‘Cor-er, marvellous crumpet in the suburbs,’ Pomeroy confided. ‘Worth all the effort, even thinking of taking elocution lessons, like.’

‘And what does Olga think about all the crumpet?’

‘Loves it! Old Olga, y’know, she’s only here for the beer. I’m even thinkin’ of marrying her, we get along so famous. Wot I mean is, you really should come along to some of these toffy parties and get some of this marvellous married crumpet. Biggest club in the world!’

‘I’ve got to work,’ Mahoney smiled.

And when he was through with office work, there were the piles of Malcolm Todd’s airship material. The principles of lighter-than-air flight, the esoteric formulae he had to grasp, the significance of comparative graphs, Malcolm’s screeds of essays and promotional material, all the draftsman’s drawings, all the books. Mahoney had the gift of the gab rather than a mathematical turn of mind, so the science did not come easily to him, but being of above-average intelligence he could, with effort, understand it. It also helped to keep his mind off the empty cottage that was waiting for him. And he was fascinated. It simply did not make sense to be hurtling twenty elephants through the night sky in defiance of the laws of gravity when you could float them, riding the air like a ship rides on the sea.

CHAPTER 11

Work, booze, and adultery. And guilt.

Mahoney half-woke feeling terrible, thinking he was late for work, and he started scrambling up when Dolores mumbled: ‘Relax, it’s Sunday …’

He slumped back, his head thudding. He remembered where he was now. Pomeroy’s house. Oh God, with Dolores … As if reading his mind, she muttered, ‘Relax, we didn’t do anything.’

But, oh, why hadn’t he gone home? Why did he ever drink brandy? … Then he remembered: chocolate mousse. …

It came back, fragmented. The lunch was clear enough. Dolores was not there then. Wine flowing like water, dropping on to the gins and tonics. Why did he ever drink gin? Then the brandies. They all knew each other very well, except for Mahoney. Mahoney only knew Danish Erika and Pomeroy well, and he knew how his parties turned out. Then the whiskies, getting dark now. Sitting around Pomeroy’s fake mahogany bar with all its gear, its erotic curios, all the suggestive talk and laughter and double meanings. Memory began to blur. He remembered starting to feel very drunk. Remembered seeing it was nine o’clock. He remembered Vulgar Olga taking off her clothes for the sauna. Then Pomeroy, then the other women, then Fullbright and Mason. And all this was fine, the naked women were fine, but no way was he going to get undressed and sit in a hot sauna. He didn’t give a damn what they did. Once upon a time he’d have filled his boots and maybe one day he would again, but right now no way was he going to get involved, he just wanted to go home. He remembered them calling him a spoil sport, and too drunk to drive, and Erika stealing his car keys. He remembered bumping upstairs to look for a bed; then blank.

The rest was very confused. He remembered waking up, finding himself on the sofa in Pomeroy’s bedroom, clothes on. Olga shaking him, telling him to get his gear off and join the action. The next thing, Danish Erika shaking him saying it was four o’clock, time to go home, did he want any chocolate mousse? He sat up, holding his head and feeling like death, and there were the six of them – evidently Fullbright had gone – sitting on the floor stark naked and drunk and disorderly around this big bowl of chocolate mousse and bottles of champagne.

He did not remember how it started because he was too busy feeling terrible; maybe Pomeroy did it because Vulgar Olga squirted champagne at him, or maybe Pomeroy slopped a spoonful of chocolate mousse on Vulgar Olga, but suddenly there were these squeals and there is Pomeroy with champagne all over his face and Olga with chocolate mousse on hers – then Janet Mason splatting chocolate mousse on Pomeroy midst screams of laughter, and then Erika letting Mason have it, and the real shambles began. Sitting pole-axed on the sofa, Mahoney stared in bludgeoned astonishment at the spectacle exploding before him, everybody fighting with chocolate mousse midst screaming and squealing – then champagne squirting everywhere; then Pomeroy screaming and clutching his chocolate-face and the door bursting open and there stood Fullbright, fully dressed and unchocolated, seething with righteous indignation. The battle stopped as suddenly as it had begun, everybody staring at Fullbright, except Pomeroy who was whimpering, clutching his chocolate face.

‘You!’ Fullbright jabbed his pristine finger at Mason – ‘And you!’ – at the dark, wailing Pomeroy – ‘And you!’ – at an astonished Mahoney – ‘stay away from my wife!’

‘I’ve got chocolate mousse in my eye—’ Pomeroy wailed, and Vulgar Olga wailed, ‘Oh darling!’

‘You all stay away from my wife!’ Fullbright was yelling.

‘Somebody stuck their finger in my eye—’ Pomeroy was wailing.

‘A doctor,’ Vulgar Olga was wailing. ‘Call Dolores—’ ‘Nine-nine-nine,’ Pomeroy was wailing at everybody – ‘tell ’em I got chocolate mousse in my eye—’ Then Fullbright bounding at his wife as Pomeroy was blindly scrambling for the door with Olga lumbering chocolate-arsed after him, and all four of them colliding in the doorway in a big chocolatey bottleneck. Fullbright was now getting pretty chocolatey himself, and Lavinia Fullbright was screaming at him, ‘You bastard—’ And Olga was screaming, ‘Get out of the bloody way,’ and then Fullbright went flying through the doorway with Pomeroy exploding after him in a sudden unbottlenecking. He crashed on top of Fullbright, and the whole chocolatey lot of them went crashing down the stairs, crash bang wallop to the bottom in a mad tangled bellowing mess, then Olga was scrambling for the telephone and Pomeroy was blundering around yelling, ‘Tell the Eye Bank I’ve got chocolate mousse in my eye—’

Something like that. All very confused. Mahoney remembered the front door slamming, Fullbright’s car roaring away with Lavinia: then the ambulance wailing, Pomeroy reeling out into the night with a blanket around him, wailing to everybody that he had chocolate mousse in his eye.

Then Dolores arriving, to sort this lot out.

Mahoney got out of bed carefully. He staggered into the bathroom, found a toothbrush, brushed his teeth, turned on the shower. He stood under it, suffering, then scrubbed himself and washed his hair. Then let cold water hammer on his head, trying to knock out the stunned feeling. Cold showers are like flying aeroplanes: they’re so nice when they stop.

He dressed, tiptoed down the stairs, feeling a little better. The stair walls were smeared with mousse, and it smelled as if Olga had tried to clean the stuff up with benzene. The living room looked like a battlefield, clothes everywhere. You expected to find bodies. He found his jacket.

He went to the kitchen, got a beer. He took a long swig, then sat at the table, suffering, waiting for it to steady him. But why should he feel remorse? It was their business. Their wives. He hadn’t even stuck his finger in Pomeroy’s eye. So why should he feel remorse?

It was sick. Marriage, the biggest club in the world … None of the desperate wining and dining of bachelorhood, the heavy-duty charm-treatment, impressing her with what a big wheel you are, the hopeful dancing cheek-to-cheek, the worrying, and finally the acid test when you get her home, the protests. But with adultery? All you’ve got to do is look for the signs. Why do married people talk about sex so much? Oh God, he just longed for his lovely wholesome wife and child …

He went to the fridge for another beer. He heard footsteps. Pomeroy tottered in, all hairy and horrible, a bandage around his head.

‘Are you in the Black and White Minstrel Show?’ Mahoney said.

‘Oh boy,’ Pomeroy said. He tottered to the fridge, got a beer blindly, slumped at the table.

‘Can you work tomorrow?’

‘If you don’t mind one-eyed engineers.’ He lifted the bandage. His eyelid was black and swollen and stitched, his slit of eyeball murderously bloodshot.

‘Who was it?’

‘I couldn’t see because somebody stuck their finger in my eye.’

Mahoney was grinning. ‘What did they sat at the hospital?’

‘Caused a bit of bovver at the hospital,’ Pomeroy admitted. ‘Old Olga, you know, you should have been there.’

‘What did Olga do?’

‘Naked as the day she was born under that blanket,’ Pomeroy said, ‘and chocolate mousse. Raised a bit of a bovver. She didn’t know the black doctor was a doctor, you should have been there. He said, “Medem, is this a case of the pot-i calling the kettle black?”’

Mahoney laughed and it hurt his head. Pomeroy sighed, ‘Isn’t that Fullbright a prick?’

‘You better leave the Fullbrights out of your chocolate mousse parties.’

I’m going to leave you out, an’ all,’ Pomeroy said. ‘Here I go to this enormous expense and pain to cheer you up …’ He glared with his good eye. ‘But no, you’re still brooding about her.’ He got up. ‘I’m goin’ to the loo,’ he said.

The rest is legend. Pomeroy goes to the lavatory, sits down, lights a cigarette, and drops the match into the lavatory bowl. And in that bowl unbeknown to him is the wad of cotton wool with which Vulgar Olga cleaned up the chocolate mousse, all soaked in benzene. And, sitting in the kitchen, all Mahoney heard was a mighty whooshing bang and then Pomeroy howls and comes bursting out of the toilet with his arse on fire. There’s Pomeroy running around hollering, ‘My arse is blown off,’ and Olga coming running stark naked screaming, ‘Oh darling, I forgot to flush it!’ – and Dolores yelling,’ What’s wrong now?’ – and Pomeroy hollering, ‘Call the ambulance – my arse is burnt off!’ And the women chasing him, yelling, cornering him, trying to inspect his arse while he hopped around hollering.

Then the wailing of the ambulance above Pomeroy’s wailing, and in burst the stretcher-bearers, and they’re the same guys who came for him earlier. And they load him on to the stretcher, and out the front door Pomeroy goes, red raw arse up and his bandage round his eye, still covered in dried chocolate mousse. And the ambulance boys were laughing so much that one trips down the front steps. All Mahoney saw was a sudden mass of crashing arms and legs and Pomeroy’s arse. Then Pomeroy was wailing ‘My shoulder!’, and his collar bone was broken.

Mahoney helped Dolores tidy up the house while Olga and Pomeroy were back at the hospital getting his arse and collar bone fixed; then he left. He drove slowly home, trying not to think about bloody Sunday. He was flying at midnight so he had to sleep off his hangover this afternoon. He could have a nice pub-lunch at The Rabbit, then get Danish Erika or Val or Beatrice to sleep it off with him, so what did he have to complain about? What’s so tough about being a bachelor? And tomorrow he’d be in Uganda, would you rather be in court tomorrow, worrying about all that Law you never learned? He took a deep breath, trying to stop thinking about Sunday and Cathy, and stopped to buy a newspaper.

He looked at the front page for news of Rhodesia.

SMITH ANNOUNCES ‘INTERNAL SETTLEMENT’

The Rhodesian Prime Minister announced in Salisbury today that his government was setting out to seek an ‘internal settlement’ with the country’s moderate African leaders, in terms of which a ‘Transitional Co-alition Government would be formed with them, pending a new one-man-one-vote constitution …

Mahoney read the piece with stumbling speed: and for a minute he felt confused elation. Then he slumped. He thought: Big Deal …

Big deal, Mr Smith … You should have done this years ago when I told you to! … You think a coalition government now will get you international recognition so economic sanctions and the war will end? Well you’re too bloody late, Mr Smith …

Mahoney took a deep, bitter breath. Because it was too bloody late for such a compromise, because now the Rhodesians were fighting with their backs to the wall, and no way were Moscow and Peking going to rejoice in a nice moderate settlement and let their boys in the bush lay down their arms – Moscow and Peking didn’t want a nice moderate black government in Rhodesia, they wanted a communist one. You did not have to be a clairvoyant to see that the war would go on.