The Lime Twig Read Online Free PDF Page A

coat. The snow was falling, still the sky was pink from the bombing of Highland Green. But no whistles, no wardens running: a single window smashed on the other side of the court and a woman began shriekingfor her husband. And again there was only silence and my belly trembling.
    I took one step, another. Then there were the high dark sides of the intact bomber and the snow was melting on the iron. I reached the first three-bladed propeller—the two bottom sweeps of steel were doubled beneath the cowling—and for a moment I leaned against it and it was like touching your red cheek to a stranded whale’s fluke when, in all your coastal graveyard, there was no witness, no one to see. I walked round the bubble of the nose—that small dome set on edge with a great crack down the middle—and stood beneath the artistry of Reggie’s Rose. Her leg was long, she sat on her parachute with one knee raised. In the knee cap was a half-moon hole for a man’s boot, above it another, and then a hand grip just under the pilot’s door. So I climbed up poor Rose, the airman’s dream and big as one of the cherubim, and snatched at the high door which, sealed in the flight’s vacuum, sucked against its fitting of rust and rubber and sprang open.
    I should have had a visored cap, leather coat, gauntlets. But, glancing once at the ground, poised in the snow over Rose’s hair, I tugged, entered head first the forward cabin.
    The cabin roof as well as the front gunner’s dome was cracked and a little snow fell steadily between the seats. In the dark I sat with my hands on the half wheel and slippers resting on the jammed pedals, my head turning to see the handles, rows of knobs, dials with needles all set at zero, boxes and buttons and toggle switches andloop of wire and insulated rings coming down from the roof. In this space I smelled resin and grease and lacquer and something fatty that made me groan.
    I tried to work the pedals, turn the wheel. I could not breathe. When suddenly from a hook between two cylinders next to my right hand I saw a palm-shaped cone of steel and took it up, held it before my face—a metal kidney trimmed round the edges with a strip of fur—I looked at it, then lowered my head and pressed my nose and mouth into its drawn cup. My breath came free. The inhalation was pure and deep and sweet. I smelled tobacco and a cheap wine, was breathing out of the pilot’s lungs.
    Cold up here. Cold up here. Give a kiss to Rose
.
    Surely it was Reggie’s breath—the tobacco he had got in an Egyptian NAAFI, his cheap wine—frozen on the slanting translucent glass of the forward cabin’s windows. Layer overlapping icy layer of Reggie’s breath. And I clapped the mask back on its hook, turned a wheel on the cylinder. Leaning far over, sweating, I thrust my hands down and pushed them back along the aluminum trough of floor and found the bottle. Then I found something else, something cool and round to the skin, something that had rested there behind my heels all this while. I set the bottle on top of the wireless box—I heard the sounds of some strange brass anthem coming from the earphones—and reached for that black round shape, carefully and painfully lifted it and cradled it in my lap.
    The top of the flying helmet was a perfect dome. Hard, black, slippery. And the flaps were large. On thesurface all the leather of that helmet was soft—if you rubbed it—and yet bone hard and firm beneath the hand’s polishing. There were holes for wire plugs, bands for the elastic of a pair of goggles, some sort of worn insignia on the front. A heavy wet leather helmet large enough for me. I ran my fingernail across the insignia, picked at a blemish, and suddenly I leaned forward, turned the helmet over, looked inside. Then I lifted the helmet, gripped it steadily at arm’s length—I was sitting upright now, upright and staring at the polished thing I held—and slowly raised it high and twisting it, hitching it down from side