Graham Swift - Wish You Were Here

Had he even had the thought, even then, the letter between them, that this thing that he’d always feared, which was the worst of worst possibilities, was really, perhaps, the thing Ellie might have wished? Her best possibility.

‘Well, thank God, Jack, at least this has come in the off season.’

She should never have said that . And even from a practical point of view — surely Ellie saw this, she being the one who always saw things so sharply — that gap of almost two months ahead might not be so roomy after all. There was no date given in the letter. That is, the letter itself was dated and there was a date, very clearly, uncannily, given in it. Jack had tried to remember what he’d been doing on that date (it was a Saturday), whether at any point he’d felt anything turn over mysteriously inside him. But there was no future date. And there was thus a question, which he thought he’d quickly answered, of two flights. There was the flight about which the letter said he’d be kept closely informed. And there was the flight, which wasn’t going to happen, to St Lucia.

Though the letter hadn’t used the word flight. It had used a word which Jack had never encountered before but which would lie now in his head like some piece of mental territory: repatriation.

Once upon a time, and it would have been the same too for Tom, the notion of being anywhere other than England would have seemed totally crazy to Jack and quite beyond any circumstance that might include him. Though he knew that the world contained people who went, who flew, regularly, to other places. He knew that the world included other places. He’d done some geography at school. He’d once learnt, if he couldn’t remember them now, the capitals of Argentina and Peru. But, for all practical purposes, even England had meant only what the eye could see from Jebb Farmhouse — or what lay within a ten-mile journey in the Land Rover or pick-up.

There’d been a few day-trips to Exeter or Barnstaple. Two stays, once, in another county: Dorset. Even the Isle of Wight, once, would have seemed like going abroad.

If you’d have said to Jack that one day he’d find himself in St Lucia — and, before that, twice in Antigua and three times in Barbados — he’d have said you were barking. (And, anyway, where were those places?) It still seems to him, even now that he’s done it several times, like something impossible, a trick, even somehow wrong: that you could get into an aeroplane, then get out again a few hours later and there’d be — this completely different world.

It was Ellie who, a bit to his surprise, had been seriously up for it. Not just what she wanted, but, so she’d said, what they deserved, what they should definitely do. It was their world too. Everyone else did it.

‘So how about it, Jacko?’ She’d ruffled his hair. ‘Live a little.’

If he’d known, on those afternoons when he leant against the pick-up, rolling a cigarette, looking around him. If he’d only had an inkling.

And had Tom had any inkling? Or was it, in his case, even something that had pushed him? Up that track. The world. And he’d seen it, apparently. Lived a little. Basra. Palm trees there too.

Later, Jack would receive a thing called his Service Record.

*

On that grey morning Jack hadn’t just seen in his mind’s eye blue, hot, summer skies, he’d seen himself floating, flying in them.

It had been during their last time in St Lucia, in one of those periods of sweaty, anxious restlessness that could sometimes come over him. He’d wanted to shake off the mood. He’d wanted to say to himself, ‘Hey, lighten up, you’re on holiday.’ ‘Lighten up’ was a phrase of Ellie’s, often used by her in the days when they’d been about to move to the Isle of Wight, like a motto for their future—‘Lighten up, Jacko’—and now he’d use it, from time to time, like a reminder, on himself.

He’d wanted even to demonstrate to Ellie that he had indeed become a new, lighter, gladder, luckier man, and it was thanks not just to luck but to Ellie’s really rather amazing sticking by him. He’d anyway finally done something that Ellie had been urging him to do, daring him to do — as a joke, it seemed, because he was never really going to. On the other hand, she’d placed a bet on it, which she hadn’t withdrawn: a bottle of champagne at dinner, which in this place would cost a small fortune. And it was something that could be done at pretty well any time of the day. You spent a lot of time, in fact, watching other people do it.

He’d gone down to the beach and the little spindly jetty, where there were some grinning boys in caps and T-shirts, and a couple of motor boats in their charge — who’d strap you into this harness with a long rope running to the back of one of the boats and, attached to your shoulders, though it had yet to open, a big, curved, striped, oblong parachute. Like a giant version of one of Ellie’s plastic hairgrips. And they’d rev the motor and power off, and you couldn’t help but be lifted off and up, way up high, above the water.

He’d said, ‘Okay, Ell, moment’s come. Ready to stump up?’ And he’d just walked down there, in his shorts and shades. He’d had the sense not to wear his cap (and it was a Lookout cap too). He’d just walked down, trying to do it at the easiest saunter.

And then, moments later, to his surprise, he really was up there, just dangling — being pulled along, but somehow just floating too — with this great taut tugging thing above him, trying to drag him still higher, and the boat below and in front of him, with its white wake and the boys waving at him, like some little separate toy that had nothing, perhaps, to do with him. And all the people dotted on the beach and under the palms and sun umbrellas and round the blue-lagoon pools looking as if someone had just sprinkled them there. And Ellie somewhere among them, on her lounger, no doubt waving at him too, but it seemed silly, somehow, to try and spot her and wave back.

He hadn’t felt frightened and, strangely, he hadn’t even felt very excited — or triumphant, given that he’d won the bet now, he’d actually done it. When he walked up later from the beach, Ellie had said, ‘My hero.’ Had he felt like a hero? No. He’d just hung there, Jack Luxton, like some big baby being dandled, or rather — with that thing above — like some big baby being delivered by a stork. Thinking, if he was thinking anything: I’m Jack Luxton, but I can do this. Sixteen stone and six foot one, size-eleven feet, but light as a feather really, light as air.

As he’d been carried up he could see inland, beyond the resort’s perimeter. He could see that the resort, with its bright greens and blues, was like an island on the edge of an island. Somewhere in the distance there were slants of smoke. They were burning crop waste maybe.

And all the time he would have been floating up there and all the time he and Ellie would have been lying there in the hot sun at the Sapphire Bay, thinking of chilled champagne for heroes at dinner, Tom would have been in the hot sun, in Iraq.

She shouldn’t have said that thing about the off season. But suppose this had come in August. In full swing. What would they have done? Carried on? Carried on, but hung a flag at half-mast at the site? They didn’t have a flag. They didn’t have a flagpole. He was sometimes known as the commandant and the site office was sometimes known as the guardhouse, but they didn’t have a flagpole. Maybe they should have thought of it, as a feature, along with all the other stuff, a Lookout flag fluttering in the breeze, gold on black, like the baseball caps.

Carried on, but explained? Carried on and faced the questions, sympathy, puzzlement — when it became not just their private news but an item, with names and photos, in the papers? The papers available in the site shop. We never knew Jack had a brother, he never said. A brother in the army. Jesus.