Farrier spent that first evening in the pub. It was small and adorned with scuffed wooden tables and mismatched wooden chairs. Small lanterns sat at the center of each table beside an ash tray and glowed orange and faint off the warm wooden surrounds. The longer Farrier sat at the bar, the cozier the pub felt and the ringing in his ears dampened with each emptied glass.
He stumbled to his room just before midnight. Alcohol was hard to come by in captivity and the hospital and his tolerance had dipped. He flopped down on his bed as soon as it blurred into view. When he awoke the next morning, it was to a dry mouth and a dull headache. He groaned and cursed the world that had finally allowed him to sleep in exchange for waking in more pain. The ringing was back, and louder, making up for the few quiet drunken hours the night before. He sat up and the dull ache throbbed. The room spun and his stomach churned with it. The morning sun glistened in off the water like a knife to his cornea. He pulled the curtains closed but the room was still too bright. He stumbled back down to the dimly lit pub and sat down at the bar.
"Another scotch?" the bartender asked.
"Good man." Farrier said. "You know if they still have their blackout curtains?"
The bartender laughed and filled his glass.
Over the following days, this became his routine. Drink all day, stumble to his room, pass out, wake up, feel ill, and start drinking again to numb it all. This wasn't an escape. This was a hospice. At least in Hemsby, Farrier didn't know anyone. There would be no one to witness him wilt.
Sunday morning the pub was closed. Farrier blinked confused at the sign on the door. "Bloody Christians." He turned to walk back up to his room but the stairs warped and twisted. Even they were too much for his hungover state. With the aid of a steadying hand on the wall, Farrier turned and walked towards the front door of the hotel.
The morning air washed over him like a desperately needed shower. It was cool and gentle and reminded him of the nurses who pressed cold compresses to his head. He took a deep breath. And then another to settle the nausea and ease the throbbing. The sun was still too bright. It pierced him like the open and eager smiles of the young women who had tended to him. He returned their pleasantries while willing them away and wishing to crawl under his hospital bed and live out his life in the shadows with the other monsters. Because that's what he was. A monster. During the war he was a weapon until he was captured and caged like a beast. And now he was a drunk, berating the morning sun. He doubted he would ever be able to readjust to its light. Part of him had always been in the shadows. Those smiles from women had unnerved him long before the war. At least he had a suitable excuse now.
He raised a hand to his brow to shield his eyes and crossed the road to walk along the boardwalk on the opposite side. A few blocks on, a set of stairs lead down to the sand and Farrier limped down them. He walked towards the pier and took shelter from the sun beneath it. He leaned against one of the wood pillars and slid down it, stretching his legs out wide before him and resting him cane between them. The sand beneath him was cool and soothing like the ocean air. It was still damp from high tide, shielded here from the drying rays of the sun. It was more like mud, but Farrier didn't mind. His clothes were already grimy. Grease, Tabaco smoke, booze sloshed over the rims of glasses, and sprinkles of urine splashed back from urinals and brick ally walls were woven in between the worn threads. It was a grime born of pubs and the beings who were once men that lived in them.
Farrier looked onwards through the small window, framed by the pier above and its supporting pillars on the either side, into a world of sand and ocean and sky, of brown grit washed into clear, crisp blue.
The whisper of the ocean lulled him like his engine used to, constant, rhythmic, until he was so used to the drone that it became part of his stasis state, fading from his senses. He closed his eyes and let himself drift on the air currents coming in off the water. He could feel it almost, like he was flying again, in training, learning to glide and land without an engine. The wind was blowing south westerly, hitting him at ten o'clock. It was gentle and steady. The pillars of the pier stretched out before him, providing a flight path into that ideal world contained within the frame. He shifted his right hand in a gentle arc where it rested, open palm, atop his cane, angling it to the left. Lift the left aileron, dip the right, bank into the wind. But just slightly, just to hold the line. When he reached the end of the pier and the sky would open up around him and he would climb into the blue. His left hand curled into the sand and dragged it back, opening the throttle as he rocked his cane back towards his chest. The wind would be stronger at higher altitudes. It was deceptive that way. Stronger crosswinds required a steeper bank. More lift on the left aileron, more dip on the right. Once he reached his new cruising altitude, high, away from the seagulls and their cawing, where the airspace was his to rule, he would level the pitch. Ease both hands forward again and maintain the bank to continue tracking straight, dead out over the ocean.
The loud woosh of an engine, knocked Farrier out of his lull. His airspace had been intruded upon. His left thumb pushed down into the sand, pressing the radio control on the side of the throttle. "Fortis Two, we have company." A Spitfire zoomed across his narrow frame. Farrier leaned forward to try and follow its flight path but his sight line was restricted by pillars. Just like his cockpit. All you could see was your own nose and wings and that was only if the piss poor glass hadn't gone opaque in the sun glare. It was a wonder they managed to hit a target. "Lost'em. He was heading south along the coast. Low on the horizon. And fast. Aided by the tailwind." A second plane followed minutes later. Farrier closed his palm around his cane and moved his thumb down over the gun trigger. He concentrated on the hum of the engine, the change in pitch as it approached the pier. The planes crossed his line of fire for only a fraction of a second and the bullets had to travel over a kilometer out. He had to time it just right. Even with the wind working in his favour, Farrier doubted he could ever make the shot.
On the ninth pass, a pilot broke rank. The engine sound changed. Farrier leaned over and looked down the beach. The sand was dotted with young women huddled together in small groups, their heads tilted up, hands pointing to the sky. With a groan and an ache, Farrier stood and walked out from under the pier. The pilot was climbing. His plane, in stark relief in the otherwise clear sky, was almost vertical. His ascent was slowing, about to stall, gravity's short leash about to run out. Farrier counted him down. "Four, three, two…" The propeller stopped. The plane twisted in the air. Its right wing fell and its left wing rolled over so that the nose began to plummet towards the water. There were gasps and shrieks from down the beach. Farrier's stomach dipped and he smiled. Stalling out on a climb and falling back to earth was a feeling like no other. Even as a spectator he could feel the rush of it, amplified as the plane picked up speed, gravity's punishment for the attempted escape. The engine roared back to life and propellers spun back into a blur. The pilot was well past the standard point of recovery but still his nose pointed down. Speed, Farrier reckoned. He was trying to gain speed. A dangerous game to play. Gravity did not take well to being subjugated to grifts of others.
The pilot forfeited. Farrier watched the nose of the plane level off and pull up again. He overcorrected, losing his speed. He didn't continue his pass down the beach but instead made a wide circle out over the ocean and returned to the airfield.
The girls settled back into the sand and the beach was quiet again. The ringing in his ears picked up to compensate. He felt eyes on him. In the absence of the planes, his lop-sided form was the next best spectacle. He had never been the best dresser. The only suit he owned was his military dress blues. Youth and a smile had saved him before. But the war had aged him and his week-old beard hid what remained. It also itched.
He needed a shower.
Farrier walked back to the hotel. Despite its three-stories which towered over the shop fronts, the pale blue building almost blended into the sky. A large sign hung vertically from the front: Oceanview Promenade. The pub had re-opened, but Farrier continued up to his room. It was small. The double bed dressed in white linens took up most of the floor space. An end table sat on one side and a set of dresser drawers on the other. There was a writing desk under the large window and a narrow wardrobe opposite the foot of the bed. The walls were papered with a faint blue and white stripe and a painting of a marina hung beside the door. It was designed for a quaint beach holiday. Farrier could picture the young couple on their honeymoon, her in a sun dress, him in a short sleeve cotton button up. He felt out of place. He was the off-season guest.
He gathered his shaving kit and took it down the hall to the bathroom. He undressed and stood in-front of the mirror. He didn't recognize his reflection. Dark circles drooped below his bloodshot eyes. His shoulders hunched. His stomach protruded. His arms hung limp and his pale skin sagged off the bone. This was not the man who trained the first round of new recruits when the war broke out. This was not the man who turned arrogant, naïve boys into fighter pilots. This was not the man who carried on south across the Channel on his reserve tank knowing there was no fuel to get home. No, this man was not worthy of the His Majesty's Royal Air Force.
He stood under the shower spray until it ran cold and then stood longer. He didn't know what he was trying to wash off. The grime, the prison, the war? The scotch? He trimmed the scraggle from his beard but stopped short of shaving it off. His cheeks would look too hollow without it.
It wasn't until later that evening that he returned to the pub. He picked up a newspaper from the lobby and ordered a cup of tea when he took his seat at the bar. It was louder than usual, the smoke in the air denser, but his seat was still free.
"Taking the day off?" the barkeep asked.
"Something like that."
The barkeep picked the small copper kettle off the shelf behind him and disappeared through a swinging door. Farrier opened the paper. 'Iron Curtain Descends on Europe." Farrier hummed. It had descended directly on top of him and trapped him beneath its immense weight. He flipped to page five for the article and Churchill's full speech. The beginning read as a plea to the United States to pull Britain along on her rise to glory. The United States, after all, already had a special relationship with the Dominion of Canada so it seemed only fair to extend this relationship to big brother. The kettle whistled from the back and Farrier furrowed his brow. This was the man who had held strong against Nazi Germany from the beginning, when even King Edward wavered. This was the man shored up their island into the immovable object to rival Hitler's unstoppable force. Why step aside now?
The barkeep placed the cup and saucer before him and Farrier took a careful sip.
"Twice in our own lifetime we have seen the United States, against their wishes and their traditions, against arguments, the force of which it is impossible not to comprehend, drawn by irresistible forces, into these wars in time to secure the victory of the good cause, but only after frightful slaughter and devastation had occurred. Twice the United States has had to send several millions of its young men across the Atlantic to find the war; but now war can find any nation, wherever it may dwell between dusk and dawn."
That was why. Britain could not risk America retreating across the Atlantic again. War was brewing.
It was a sobering message. This time there would be no twenty-year armistice. Moscow had their pick of the spoils. It did not lie in ruins like Berlin at the end the Great War. Stalin did not need a recovery period. But Britain did, boke and hungry, it's Empire bleeding from open sores. The sea was Britain's greatest defence and though its waters had not fallen and its waves had not eased, those would not stop a plane carrying an atomic bomb.
Farrier finished his tea and set down his cup. The barkeeper promptly refilled it. "What do you make of all this?" he asked.
Farrier shrugged.
The barkeeper nodded towards the front corner of the pub. "They seem just as disinterested."
Farrier turned. The alcove of tables by the front window was taken up by a dozen men in uniform and a group of girls wearing bright red lipstick and low-cut tops. Half empty glasses covered the table, forgotten once the new round was bought. One of the men stood quickly and stumbled, knocking several glasses to the floor. Usually startling, the shattering glass seemed right at home amongst the shouts and cheers and the girls quick to giggle.
Farrier turned back to his tea. These were not the men who needed to be interested. These were the pawns to be hurled head first across Europe, their skulls cracked open against Churchill's iron wall, their limp bodies pilled in a heap at its base. It was the men in the halls of Westminster who needed the barkeep's ire for it was those men who aimed and fired.
"I'd kick'em out if they didn't spend so much money." The barkeeper mumbled shaking his head.
Blond hair appeared in Farrier's peripheral, shining bright through the smoke haze that hung in the air. "Sorry, mate."
"No worries, lad," the barkeeper said passing a stack of napkins across the bar.
"Aye." The Scottish accent cut clear through the rowdy crowd.
Blue eyes flashed in memory.
It played back to him like a jittery film reel, like one of those Hollywood pictures they put on in the mess hall in the evenings. The image of the pilot bounced and flickered in and out of focus and frame, black and white apart from the bright blue of his eyes. By the time the image steadied, and Farrier looked up from the paper, the pilot was half way back to his table. Still, there was no mistaking him. Collins.
Suddenly, Farrier wished he had stayed in his room or had sat in one of the dark booths in the corner or that the smoke in the pub was thicker, thick enough to obscure him from view. It was like flying in fog. Before take off, pilots prayed for clear skies but soon realized that if you could see the enemy, the enemy could see you.
What would he see? The cane. The awkward way Farrier's injured leg jutted out. The ill-fitting cardigan that did little to hide his withering frame.
And what would Farrier see if he truly looked? For the past five years Collins had lived only within his mind, chained within the dark alcoves carved forcefully. Collins wasn't a monster in those dungeons. He was the light. His blue eyes cut through the bleak stone and shone of the sea and the sky and home. And so Farrier had shackled him to his cell wall like a lantern to witness and suffer what the fates were to bring. A human shield. He was no better than his guard. This is what the strength of a soldier required. The pilot he trained was not the guardian he had created in his mind. What did Collins know? What conversations had been real? What glances had lingered? What contact had been made? Farrier had some idea but there were grey blurs, lines intentionally erased during the rougher moments, the cold winter nights, the days without food, when his body came out of shock and the pain began to siege. His excuse, Collins had gone down in the Channel, no shore in sight. He was dead. They would never come face to face again.
The ringing overtook the noise in the pub.
Farrier paid his tab and retreated quickly to his room. He lit a cigarette and took a long, slow drag to settle the twinge in his fingers and the spinning in his head. He sat on the desk in front of the open window and listened to the water rock the small beach town to sleep. The sun had set and pulled the blue from the sky and the ocean leaving behind a black void. To the south, at the tip of a rocky peninsula, a light house stood. A soft white light rotated in its tower, a silent warning, or perhaps a beacon, for ships at sea. Its glow was quickly swallowed by the night.
The door to the pub creaked and Farrier watched from above as Collins stepped out into the cool night air. He lit his own cigarette and Farrier smiled. That was real. Those quiet moments at the beginning of the war where he and Collins walked out to the low stone wall at the edge of the airfield and passed a cigarette back and forth. Sometimes they talked, base gossip, mission debrief. Other times they didn't.
Collins meandered across the street to the metal rail that ran along the boardwalk. The light house caught his blond hair with each pass, a low crescent moon in the moonless sky.
