Alex Scarrow - A thousand suns

‘Yeah, okay.’

The line went silent. Chris looked out of the window again. The rain was easing off slightly but still coming down enough to drench him if he was going to have to walk back down the coast road to Port Lawrence. Mark had borrowed the Cherokee. He’d wanted to take the damaged helmet radio downtown to find a Tandy or a Radio Shack. He was convinced it would be a quick and easy fix, although when he was due back was anyone’s guess. ‘Downtown’ was twenty miles away.

There was a click, the call was being transferred.

‘Hello? I believe you were enquiring about a plane serving with the 381st called Medusa?’ A male voice.

Chris confirmed the name.

‘I’m sorry about the confusion,’ he sounded flustered. Like somebody unaccustomed to this kind of conversation. ‘The records show this plane went missing in a raid over Hamburg in 1944.’

‘Missing over Hamburg?’

‘Yes. Hamburg, Germany.’

Thanks for that.

‘The plane crashed?’ Chris asked, lowering his voice.

‘Probably, sir. Most MIAs were assumed to be crashes.’

‘So she wasn’t recovered?’

‘Well, no, of course she wasn’t. Like I say, the records simply list the plane as missing.’

‘What about her crew? Were there any survivors?’

‘The records show that all nine of them were also reported as MIA.’

‘None resurfaced after the war as POWs?’

‘I’m sorry, sir; all I can give you is what is printed here. We can send you a copy of the records we have for a nominal fee of ten dollars. Would you like to give me your name and address?’

‘Uh?… no don’t bother.’ All of a sudden he felt the urge to end the call very quickly.

‘Can I ask why you’re enquiring about this plane?’ the man on the end of the phone asked.

Chris hung up. Almost immediately he wished he’d attempted to slide out of that conversation in a casual, easy manner, rather than panicking as he had. Even more so, he wished he’d thought to withhold his number before dialling in. It left him feeling jumpy.

Coffee.

It’s one of those things that become increasingly insipid the more you have of it. The first mouthful of the first cup of coffee of the day was always sublime, after that it all goes downhill. Chris curled his lip at the bitter-sweetness of his fifth since lunchtime. It was black to boot, which didn’t help. He’d exhausted the supply of cream cartons from the guest room’s wicker basket of courtesy refreshments, but the coffee and the sachets of sweetener were still going strong.

He turned out the light on the bedside cabinet and carried his mug across the room in total darkness to the bathroom. He pulled open the bathroom door and entered the crimson twilight of yet another impromptu developing booth. The sink was an inch deep with developing fluid and on the floor in a shallow plastic tray was some fixative. Strung across the bathroom, dangling from a length of twine like an unlikely laundry line, hung photographs of the B-17. Chris ducked underneath it on the way to the sink, and placed his mug of coffee on a toiletry shelf above. He pulled out several sheets of photographic paper that had been exposed to the negatives he’d selected to print.

Chris was pretty sure that News Fortnite would pass on these prints of the co-pilot; they were too grim for their regular readers.

He slid the sheets of photographic paper into the sink and gently separated them in the fluid. Silently he counted to sixty as the sheets of paper slowly darkened and form and definition emerged from the white.

The first shapes to make sense were the symmetrical round black holes of the co-pilot’s eye sockets. Chris watched as the detail slowly emerged. A row of vertical lines that slowly became teeth, the lower jaw slightly askew where Chris had placed it last night.

The second sheet of paper revealed an image of the body taken from further away, showing off some of the cockpit, the steering yoke and the plexiglas canopy. It was a better composition in his opinion. It helped tell more of a story, placed the body within a context, grounded it within a simple visual narrative.

But it was the third sheet of photographic paper that really caught Chris’s eye.

Mark was sitting on the bed fiddling with a soldering iron and the guts of the damaged helmet radio housing when Chris entered his motel room unannounced.

‘Fancy going for a beer?’

Mark jerked, and a blob of solder missed its target. ‘Jeez, don’t you knock?’

Chris looked suitably apologetic. ‘Sorry. What are you up to?’

‘I’m just trying to work out where the loose connection is on this damn radio. It’s definitely a loose wire.’

Mark picked up the carbon-fibre casing for the radio and turned it towards Chris so he could clearly see the nasty gouge.

‘Are you sure you didn’t bang it on anything last night?’

‘All right, already, maybe I might have accidentally clumped it on the way inside the plane. Listen, I’ll pay for the damage, okay? It’s the least I can do. Come on, let’s go get a pint and I’ll buy some dinner too, since it’s getting on for supper time.’

‘A “pint” eh? Why not?’

‘And I want to show you something… I want a second opinion.’

Mark looked intrigued. ‘What is it?’

Chris smiled. ‘First, beer.’

It was actually a lot more pleasant inside than it promised to be from the outside. ‘Lenny’s’ was an old converted shutterboard boathouse, just down the street from the motel they were staying in. At some time in the past its timber walls had received a cheerful coating of sunflower-yellow, but the paint had flaked off in many places, exposing wood so old it could tell a story or two. A single flickering neon sign fizzed over the doorway asserting that the hut was a ‘Bar amp; Grill’.

Inside, Mark and Chris could have been in any sports bar, in any town, in any state. A juke box, a pool table and carved wooden Indian standing guard outside the toilets. Nothing changes, thought Chris. Hell, there were faux American sports bars in every new town, in every county in England. Which was even worse. Sports bars populated by spotty young Essex boys pretending to be American.

A TV in the corner above the bar was showing some football. Chris was no big NFL fan, but Mark was.

‘Good choice. You want to sit up at the bar?’

Chris shook his head. ‘Nah, not my sport.’

Mark laughed. ‘I forget, soccer’s your game, isn’t it?’

Chris shook his head wearily. ‘It’s known as “football” around the rest of the world. Anyway, listen, I want to show you something.’

‘You can show me up at the bar, can’t you?’

‘Discreetly, if you don’t mind.’

Mark nodded. ‘Oh, okay. I’ll go find us somewhere comfortable and you can buy me that beer and dinner, then.’

Chris went up to the bar and ordered a couple of Buds and two Steak Royales from a chalkboard menu that seemed to favour fish. The Royales were described as ‘grilled and seasoned with Lenny’s secret blend of herbs and spices and served with jumbo jacket fries’.

He looked round the bar as the barman pulled a couple of ice-cold bottles out of a fridge and shouted the order through a hatch into the kitchen.

It wasn’t particularly busy, perhaps no more than a dozen drinkers, mostly regulars by the look of them, all staring vacuously at the TV. There was no doubt that it was mid-week and out of vacation season.

Chris took the beers over to a little wood-panelled booth that Mark had found. He smiled when he realised Mark had still managed to keep the TV set in view.

‘Who’s winning, then?’ he said as he set the bottles of beer down.

‘The Dolphins,’ replied Mark, chugging a mouthful directly from the bottle, leaving some suds on his beard. ‘Ahhh, I needed that. Thanks.’