Alan Sillitoe - The German Numbers Woman

Every wireless operator lived in Ionosphere Gardens, and Vanya was no exception. Maybe he didn’t have an airborne sweetheart, but he sure had one, if not several, in the place where he was born. He goes there every month or so. At the bus station, having not quite shaken the radio dust off his feet, he drums morse with his fingertips on the window pane, scorched with impatience. If he’s lucky he can stay a few days in the village, where he earns extra roubles repairing the peasants’ broken radios, being a dab hand at finding valves and even transistors from street markets in town. With Marconi fingers he is seen as a young man made good, and everyone loves him. The aerial blues don’t get at him in the countryside, a magic bucolic heaven compared to the grim buildings near Moscow surrounded by aerials.

When the bus lands him back there and he sits down, and tunes in, atmospherics make sounds as if someone is sobbing far away, the breaking of a heart in deepest misery. You need earphones to hear the fully nuanced music of the spheres, so he puts them firmly on, even living out a pestilential itch in his groin to keep them there in case he should miss something. No distraction of family, neighbours, traffic or sweethearts until Grushenka, the station slavey in headscarf and baggy clothes, brings him, halfway through his stint, a slice of black bread and a glass of lemon tea. Whenever she does he manages somehow to touch her bottom, and she slaps his hand before going huffily out – though Howard couldn’t spill this part of his fantasy to Laura, because even the blind must have their secrets.

It took Vanya some time to get sense out of a plane with a faulty transmitter, a dull and rusty note, albeit sharp enough for him, fitful mews morsing from the outer world. He pinned it down like a butterfly in the specimen box and, still on a lover’s wavelength, sent a position report to set it free.

Laura tapped the shoulder of someone on a comparable wavelength, so he stood for a hug-and-kiss, glad to be released from his peculiar bondage.

‘You were a long way out,’ she said.

‘Too far, maybe. I’ve got you to thank for bringing me back. I often wonder where I’d end up if you didn’t.’ He would sit without food or sleep for days until he died, except that he would have to come away from wherever he was to go out to the toilet, she reminded him, as he followed her into the kitchen for tea.

‘I had a puncture coming back from Bracebridge, and a very pleasant man changed the wheel for me.’

Even when she only went to the bottom of the hill he would hear about all that was seen and heard, every incident no matter how minor or irrelevant, she decided, to keep his mind alive with things other than radio listening. Sometimes by a slight downward movement of his lips, he showed impatience at such trivialities, maybe thinking she ought to invent a few occurrences to make her revelations more interesting. But that kind of talent would be too close to lying, and common sense hadn’t equipped her for it.

The lid made a satisfying clunk onto the big teapot, then the sound of the cake tin being opened. ‘He was a gentleman, then, to help you.’

‘He was. It was a muddy lay-by. I’d never have got the wheel off. When he’d done he asked me to have a drink in The Foxglove, though I suspect he only wanted to wash his hands. He was about forty’ – she made a picture for Howard to see, of more details than she remembered. ‘We chatted over the drinks – I had an orange juice – and do you know, he told me he’d been a radio officer in the Merchant Navy. When I mentioned your hobby he said he’d like to meet you one day. I didn’t know what to say, but couldn’t really rebuff him. He’d been so kind.’

Howard, on his second cup of tea, decided that listening was thirsty work. ‘You should have said yes. Anyone who is good to you is my friend for life.’

‘Oh, I didn’t put him off. Couldn’t really. He said you and he belonged to a fraternity. I liked that. We exchanged telephone numbers. I suppose he could have some fascinating things to say.’

He assembled crumbs from around his plate. ‘What’s his line of work now?’

‘He didn’t say exactly. We weren’t in the pub for long. But I gathered it was something to do with boats.’

‘Would be, I suppose. Did he tell you when he’d call?’

‘He didn’t promise. Seemed uncertain, because of his work. But I think he was quite keen on it, because he said he would as soon as he could.’

He had wondered why she was so long away, often did, though in this case the adventure was worth it if he could one day gab with an ex-Merchant Navy key-basher. He often had the dread that Laura would go out and never come back. Just like that. She would be spirited away forever. Hard to know why he should think so, though if you’d had one disaster another was always possible. Maybe that was it, no other reason at all. To make it unthinkable he told her about his fear, and they laughed at such an impossibility, an evening taken up with speculation as to what he would do if left alone in the house with no money. The fantasy enthralled them through twilight and into supper. He was inventive, as if he had heard the solution suggested by a message on the radio.

‘If I was alone, and had to get by, you know what I’d do?’

‘Can’t imagine,’ she said.

‘Nor me. But it’s just come to me. I’d take my morse key and oscillator, and a groundsheet, which I’d sit on outside the big supermarket. I would have a notice on a bit of cardboard beside me, having got Arthur the postman to write it, saying: “GOOD LUCK AND LONG LIFE TO YOU ALL.” I’d sit there, and send it in morse at maximum volume over and over again, my cap in front for passers by to drop money into. It’d be such an original way of begging that I’d be bound to make several pounds a day for my food, especially if I went into the supermarket at closing time to scoop up stuff that had passed its sell-by date.’

‘A brilliant idea,’ she laughed. ‘You wouldn’t be a beggar, though, you’d be a busker, an entertainer. Perhaps you’d be spotted, and you’d make a tape, and get into the top ten. You’d be interviewed on the radio. You might even go on television.’

‘Well, you never know, do you? Maybe I should do it anyway. It wouldn’t be a boring life, because I’d hear some very interesting remarks from people as I sat on the pavement. Children with pretty young mums would be the best givers. They’d be spellbound at the music from my morse machine, and have to be dragged away screaming because they wanted one to play with as well. Maybe an ex-service wireless op would be so intrigued he’d drop me a quid, and even stop for a chat. What a life it would be, as long as the police didn’t move me on.’

‘You could go somewhere else,’ Laura said, ‘couldn’t you? Outside the church, or the library. I’d certainly put something in your cap. In fact I might be so amazed by your act that I’d fall in love with you and carry you off.’

‘And we’d soon be back where we started,’ he said, ‘which is no bad place to be.’

‘I do hope that chap calls,’ she said.

A careless and wayward signal came like a fly into his web – VIP from Lux Australis . He asked Laura to look the call sign up in his manual. Sensitive fingers were for splitting kilocycle hairs so as to get aircraft captains giving their position crossing the North Atlantic, a constant coming and going.

The cannon shell that had swept through the Lancaster over Essen smashed the radio and blinded him. The smell of metal and burning wires in a cold darkness threw him to the deck, on hands and knees looking for his eyes, for a place to see and cool the heat of his flesh, to find a window to the outside and discover what happened. He wanted to know where he was, even to leap from the plane and find out on whatever part of the earth.