Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year – Volume One

In his spare time in the barracks, Ray listened to jazz records on an old gramophone the base commander had picked up on a trip to the mainland. Milt Jackson and Thelonious Monk riffed until the needle was practically worn away. No one could say where the records had come from. Some nights he got out of his head on Kulmbacher lager they had flown over from Germany. It was dropped at night, illegally, in wooden crates that burst open on the beach, scattering the ghost crabs that rattled about on the foreshore. He drank steadily-sometimes with the other men, usually on his own-and spoke to none of his comrades about his reasons for joining the RAF.

When the conditions were right-and they usually were between June and March, outside the rainy season-and Squadron Leader William Dunstan was piloting the mission, they would take a small detour before heading for the airstrip. On returning from Mombasa or a tour of the island, Billy Dunstan would take the Hercules north to Uroa where he would swoop down over the beach and buzz the aircraftmen and flight lieutenants stationed there. Ray was soon organising his time around Dunstan's schedule, so that when the flamboyant squadron leader was in charge, Ray was invariably waiting at the airstrip to go up with the crew. Dunstan ran a pretty relaxed ship.

The men at Uroa station would hear the Hercules's grumbling approach rise above the constant susurration of the wind in the palms and run out on to the beach waving their arms. Dunstan would take the plane down as low as possible; on occasion he even lowered the landing gear and brushed the surface of the beach a few hundred yards before or after the line of men, raising huge ballooning clouds of fine white sand.

After his pass, the line of men on the beach applauding as they turned to watch, Dunstan would tilt to starboard over the ocean and climb to a few hundred feet before doubling back and flying down the coast to the base at Bwejuu. Every time, Ray would be standing hunched up in the cockpit behind Dunstan for the best view. The squadron leader enjoyed showing off; Ray's enjoyment lay in watching Dunstan's reaction as he risked going lower and lower each time, but there was more to it than that. There was another element to it for which Ray had yet to find expression.

The next day, during a break from duties, Ray saw a lone figure standing by the shoreline. He wandered over, clearing his throat once he was within earshot, and came to a halt only when he had drawn alongside. The two men looked out at the horizon. Some three hundred yards out, the reef attracted a flurry of seabirds. They hung in the air as if on elastic, a short distance above the water.

"I'm sorry I didn't get there sooner," Ray said. "In time to stop them, I mean."

Flynn shrugged. "They'd have got me another time," he said.

"Probably. No harm done, eh?"

"I was scrubbing away at my uniform for at least an hour this morning," the younger man said.

Ray felt the breeze loosen his clothes and dry the sweat on his body.

"I've heard stories," Flynn continued, "about beheadings in the Mau Mau Uprising. They used machetes. They'd cut someone's head off and the eyes would still be blinking, still watching them. What must that be like? Still being able to see."

They watched the horizon without speaking for a few moments. Ray broke the silence.

"I'm not sure you should be left alone with your thoughts."

They watched the rise and fall of the seabirds, at this distance like a cloud of midges.

"Do you leave the base much?" Ray asked.

"I go to Stone Town… "

Ray turned to look at the young airman. He was wearing fatigues and a white vest. His eyes, which didn't deviate from the view in front of him, were a startling blue. He didn't seem to want to elaborate on what he got up to in Stone Town. Ray bent down and picked up a shell. He turned it over and ran his thumb over the ridges and grooves.

"There you go," he said, handing it to Flynn. "Don't say I never give you anything."

Ray had joined the RAF as a way of getting out of Britain in the early 1960s. His wife had died giving birth to their only child and it would have broken him if he hadn't got out. Some say it did break him anyway. Others that it just changed him. The pinched-faced moralisers among his family said it had no effect on him: he'd always only ever been in it for himself. These are the people you might have expected to have got their heads together to decide who was best placed to offer the infant a home, until such time as his father tired of the tropics. But they didn't exactly fight among themselves for that right.

Ray himself had been born into a community so tightly knit it cut off the circulation. His own domineering mother and subjugated father, all his uncles and aunts, were regular church-goers. Some gritty, northern, unforgiving denomination, it would have been, where prayer cushions would have been considered a luxury.

It wouldn't have mattered who Ray brought back to the house in Hyde as his intended, they weren't going to like her. They'd have looked down on her whatever she was, princess or pauper. Not that they had any money of their own to speak of, they didn't. But pride they had.

Perhaps Ray bore all of this in mind when he took the Levenshulme bingo caller to the Kardomah in St Anne's Square.

Victoria. Vic, Ray called her-his queen. She may have been only a bingo caller to the family, but Ray worshipped her. She turned up in the Cross household one blustery night in a new mini-skirt. "Legs eleven," he blurted out, ill-advisedly. "Your father and I will be in here," his mother said, frowning in disapproval and pointing to the front room; Ray's father shuffled obediently. "You can sit in 't morning room," she said to Ray.

The morning room, an antechamber to the kitchen, was dim and soulless in the morning and didn't get any lighter or warmer as the day wore on. Somehow it failed to benefit from its proximity to the kitchen. No one used it, not even his mother, despite her being temperamentally suited to its ambience.

Ray and Victoria's options were few, if they had any at all, and sticking around wasn't one of them. Ray got a job with the Post Office in Glossop, so they packed what little they had and moved out along the A57. He worked hard and earned more than enough for two, so that when the first signs of pregnancy appeared, they didn't think twice. It didn't matter that the baby hadn't been planned; it was welcome.

After the birth, Ray held the tiny baby once, for no more than a few seconds. Victoria lost so much blood, the hospital ran out of supplies. She suffered terribly for the next twelve hours, during which time Ray stayed by her side. Twice the nurses asked him if they'd thought of a name for the baby. Each time he waved them away.

When the RAF asked Ray his reasons for wanting to join up, he said he liked the uniform and had no objection to travelling, the latter being an understatement. They sent him to the island of Zanzibar, thirty miles or so off the coast of Tanganyika in East Africa. A greater contrast with east Manchester must have been hard to imagine. The family declared him heartless and cruel, swanning off to a tropical island when he should have been mourning his wife and looking after his kid. Their hypocrisy galvanised him, and he brought his departure date forward. He needed to put some distance between himself and his family in order to mourn. Five thousand miles wasn't bad going.

Ray wasn't surprised when Billy Dunstan invited the two girls to join them on a flight around the island. Joan and Frankie were English nurses working in a clinic in Zanzibar Town. Dunstan and one of his fellow officers, Flight Lieutenant Campbell, had met the pair one evening on the terrace of the Africa House Hotel where all the island's expats went to enjoy a drink and to watch the sun go down in the Indian Ocean.